What TAPs can we implement in light of these things?
I have one of these.
Find yourself in a thing which is frightening, humiliating, or painful.
White-knuckle it.
[TRIGGER] The thing ends, meaning you are no longer actively presented with the fear, humiliation, or pain.
[ACTION] Do a literal, physical health check:
Run your hands over your face and through your hair, as though checking for blood.
Pat down your torso and legs, as though checking for entry wounds.
Examine your (mostly) bloodless hands.
Take a deep breath, and strongly assert you are fine.
Note that here fine includes any injury from which you can expect to fully recover. This has a raft of benefits in my experience. The big payoff is that it directly reduces future suffering in the same situations because I know—through experience—that I will be fine. In terms of broader benefits, once I have done it a few times on a particular event, it starts to have an impact on similar situations I haven’t encountered before. Deploying it across multiple domains has helped me separate uncertainty about how to succeed from uncertainty about risks.
Eventually there is a kind of feedback loop, the mechanisms of which I am not certain, which further reduces suffering and can convert it into pleasure/pride/satisfaction. It feels to me like it turns on the question of hesitation, in kind of a combined beware trivial inconveniences and signalling sort of way. The short version is that the less anxiety I have about it the less I hesitate; the less I hesitate the better I perform; better performance further reduces anxiety and fear/pain/humiliation. I may be putting too much weight on this, because I feel about man of action approximately the same way the rest of the community feels about 1000 year old vampire.
I note that Alkjash’s post
had a structured model with gears
told me something about why the world is the way it is
provided mental techniques to counter a problem
I don’t think this post did any of these things. At least I didn’t extract them if they were there.
I’m not saying the message here is wrong or that a post like this couldn’t provide those three things. I just think this post didn’t achieve that.
In what way is pain the unit of effort?
What are people missing about the world when they don’t see this?
What TAPs can we implement in light of these things?
I have one of these.
Find yourself in a thing which is frightening, humiliating, or painful.
White-knuckle it.
[TRIGGER] The thing ends, meaning you are no longer actively presented with the fear, humiliation, or pain.
[ACTION] Do a literal, physical health check:
Run your hands over your face and through your hair, as though checking for blood.
Pat down your torso and legs, as though checking for entry wounds.
Examine your (mostly) bloodless hands.
Take a deep breath, and strongly assert you are fine.
Note that here fine includes any injury from which you can expect to fully recover. This has a raft of benefits in my experience. The big payoff is that it directly reduces future suffering in the same situations because I know—through experience—that I will be fine. In terms of broader benefits, once I have done it a few times on a particular event, it starts to have an impact on similar situations I haven’t encountered before. Deploying it across multiple domains has helped me separate uncertainty about how to succeed from uncertainty about risks.
Eventually there is a kind of feedback loop, the mechanisms of which I am not certain, which further reduces suffering and can convert it into pleasure/pride/satisfaction. It feels to me like it turns on the question of hesitation, in kind of a combined beware trivial inconveniences and signalling sort of way. The short version is that the less anxiety I have about it the less I hesitate; the less I hesitate the better I perform; better performance further reduces anxiety and fear/pain/humiliation. I may be putting too much weight on this, because I feel about man of action approximately the same way the rest of the community feels about 1000 year old vampire.