Another excellent post. This particular post has clarified the framework for me enough that I could imagine it impacting my interactions with people.
It seems like this is formalising things that people tend to gain a partial intuition for through social interaction.
How much of this is perscriptive vs descriptive? I could use music theory to explain why a song sounds good, but in most cases music theory works better as a post-facto explanation than an instruction for how to write good music. Do you think this framework is useful for learning how to change people’s expectations/beliefs/attention/etc. or is it a description of something that could be learnt just as well without the framework?
This particular post has clarified the framework for me enough that I could imagine it impacting my interactions with people.
I debated for a while between whether to start “from the ground up” or from the top down. I ended up going with the former, which means there’s a lot of background before it starts connecting.
This is about where I’d expect it to start connecting, and more with the posts on “navigating security” and “putting it all together”
It seems like this is formalising things that people tend to gain a partial intuition for through social interaction.
That’s the aim.
How much of this is perscriptive vs descriptive?
One of the things that I couldn’t help but learn in practice, is that prescription invites failure. Any time you commit to one path you make it hard to respond appropriately if other person chooses a different one. And the motivation to push people to only one path is usually a result of insecurity anyway—which is a hint to both of you that the path you want is maybe not the right one.
My aim is to make things descriptively clear enough that it motivates the appropriate actions “automatically”. As it applies to this post, instead of “You should respect me because I’m not missing anything!” it’s making sure that when you ask “Do you think I might be missing something?” they’re left with the undeniable reality that you’re not.
With the jacuzzi situation, for example, there are all sorts of things one might say in a similar situation that might make sense in context, and I’m not trying to argue that one option is superior to another in general. In the capstone post tying it all together, I hope to demonstrate that my words were nearly uniquely specified by my epistemic state, and that saying anything else would either require knowing/not-knowing things I didn’t/did know, or else acting incoherently. Once you understand what my epistemic state was, and grok the implications, the solution I came up with should be obvious, and it should be equally obvious it was the only reasonable thing to say, given the entirety of the situation.
I could use music theory to explain why a song sounds good, but in most cases music theory works better as a post-facto explanation than an instruction for how to write good music. Do you think this framework is useful for learning how to change people’s expectations/beliefs/attention/etc. or is it a description of something that could be learnt just as well without the framework?
Excellent question. “Both”, kinda.
My underlying thesis here is that optimal behavior requires justified embodied recognition that you can handle reality (i.e. clarity and security), and nothing else. If you’re raised in a community which effectively fosters security, you won’t need to think about any of this. You’ll ask the kid “Hurts?” when he burns his hand, because you care, and are more curious what the problem is than you are afraid he can’t handle the pain. You’ll playfully tease the girl who is overly concerned about her makeup, because she’s being a bit silly and obviously it’s safe for her to play around with you in this way—it’s unthinkable that you’d be saying such things maliciously! You just don’t end up with “psychological problems”, because if you ever catch yourself jumping in fear from a butterfly, you laugh at how silly you were before it becomes a “phobia”.
At the same time, insecurities are ubiquitous, and can be really really really subtle. None of us are free from insecurities driving our behavior, and “not be insecure” isn’t a primitive option. Insecurities themselves are rational responses to the data, and the act shutting them out itself would be an act of insecurity with its own undesirable consequences. What we can do, given the insecurities we have, is notice, and then do what makes sense given the entirety of the situation including our insecurities. The goal of conveying this framework is to make it easier to see through our rationalizations to our actual options, and therefore allow us to use metacognition to deal with the reality of insecurities and train better object level cognition.
Many of the examples I give are examples where this understanding served as “scaffolding” to help guide recognition of flinches as flinches and promising options as promising options. I only spoke up in the jacuzzi example because my explicit understanding highlighted the key questions to ask myself, and without that I would have rationalized it away as “Feelings are irrational, nothing to do here”. “Hurts?” came from a recognition that pain can’t actually be a problem so his seemingly-pain-caused suffering became an anomaly to ask about. The previous time I had seen it as a “problem to fix”, and used “conversational hypnosis” instead of ice to try to “make it go away”. Eventually though, the insecurities become obsolete so you can find yourself doing the right thing without thinking about it, at which point it’s just “post-facto explanation” of what you implicitly recognize.
Do you think this framework is useful for learning how to change people’s expectations/beliefs/attention/etc. or is it a description of something that could be learnt just as well without the framework?
Returning to your final question here, there are two options. I’ll use the example of teaching my friend how to teach her daughter to be comfortable with eye drops.
Bottom line, kid’s attention needs to be on “Eyedrops okay” to the exclusion of “Eyedrops not okay”. If she’s secure and is forced to take eyedrops, she’ll notice—but she’s not, so she’s not. If mom was solidly secure, this would automatically flow down hill to the kid, the kid would take the eye drops, and learn that they’re fine. But she’s not, so that’s not happening either. Mom asks me for help. What can I do?
One option is to provide security myself. I know that her kid won’t be/stay traumatized so long as the eyedrops don’t actually hurt her, and that they won’t hurt her. So I can say “I know it can be scary doing things that freak our kids out, but she’ll be fine. You’re not going to irrecoverably traumatize your kid, and you’re not going to lose her trust. I promise. If you just do it, she’ll learn that it’s fine”. I then demonstrate the security needed to enable her to act on her respect for my words and direct her own attention towards the idea that she’s going to make her kid take eyedrops and it’s fine, which leads to her doing the same while directing her kids attention.
That can work, and there’s no need to “explain framework” in order to help her learn how to change her daughters mind, but she won’t know why it works. That leads to things like “I don’t know why, but things are just different with you”, which can make you feel special and all that, but also leaves her unnecessarily dependent on you as a source of knowing. Eventually, she may get familiar enough with operating from a place of security that she starts to flinch less herself, but she won’t be doing it intentionally, just automatically.
What I actually did, was lean less on my knowledge of how things would work out, and instead pointed out the implication of her own beliefs as well as the pattern that allowed me to call in advance what her conclusion would be. Rather than just fostering security so that she could better do her job as a parent, I did that and also highlighted what was going on so that she could have more awareness of what she was doing—and therefore learn to notice her insecurities and foster security in herself as well. Now she has the pattern to notice “If I’m uncomfortable making my kid do a thing, and the idea feels more like “violence” than “play”, I’m being a little bitch and have some introspection to do”. It was particularly amusing in this case, because both mom and daughter do jiu jitsu and are obviously well acquainted with the idea of play violence being okay. She just didn’t recognize what “This doesn’t feel like play” implies about her own sloppy thinking, and therefore didn’t know where to look to find more sensible responses.
I guess the short version is that fostering the underlying resources is necessary and sufficient, but that understanding flinches for what they are might be a necessary component of efficiently fostering those underlying resources and opposing their decay? I don’t have a solid model of long term group dynamics yet, but it seems like even a group of high security individuals is at risk of degenerating to insecurity if no one can map the degeneration.
Another excellent post. This particular post has clarified the framework for me enough that I could imagine it impacting my interactions with people.
It seems like this is formalising things that people tend to gain a partial intuition for through social interaction.
How much of this is perscriptive vs descriptive? I could use music theory to explain why a song sounds good, but in most cases music theory works better as a post-facto explanation than an instruction for how to write good music. Do you think this framework is useful for learning how to change people’s expectations/beliefs/attention/etc. or is it a description of something that could be learnt just as well without the framework?
I debated for a while between whether to start “from the ground up” or from the top down. I ended up going with the former, which means there’s a lot of background before it starts connecting.
This is about where I’d expect it to start connecting, and more with the posts on “navigating security” and “putting it all together”
That’s the aim.
One of the things that I couldn’t help but learn in practice, is that prescription invites failure. Any time you commit to one path you make it hard to respond appropriately if other person chooses a different one. And the motivation to push people to only one path is usually a result of insecurity anyway—which is a hint to both of you that the path you want is maybe not the right one.
My aim is to make things descriptively clear enough that it motivates the appropriate actions “automatically”. As it applies to this post, instead of “You should respect me because I’m not missing anything!” it’s making sure that when you ask “Do you think I might be missing something?” they’re left with the undeniable reality that you’re not.
With the jacuzzi situation, for example, there are all sorts of things one might say in a similar situation that might make sense in context, and I’m not trying to argue that one option is superior to another in general. In the capstone post tying it all together, I hope to demonstrate that my words were nearly uniquely specified by my epistemic state, and that saying anything else would either require knowing/not-knowing things I didn’t/did know, or else acting incoherently. Once you understand what my epistemic state was, and grok the implications, the solution I came up with should be obvious, and it should be equally obvious it was the only reasonable thing to say, given the entirety of the situation.
Excellent question. “Both”, kinda.
My underlying thesis here is that optimal behavior requires justified embodied recognition that you can handle reality (i.e. clarity and security), and nothing else. If you’re raised in a community which effectively fosters security, you won’t need to think about any of this. You’ll ask the kid “Hurts?” when he burns his hand, because you care, and are more curious what the problem is than you are afraid he can’t handle the pain. You’ll playfully tease the girl who is overly concerned about her makeup, because she’s being a bit silly and obviously it’s safe for her to play around with you in this way—it’s unthinkable that you’d be saying such things maliciously! You just don’t end up with “psychological problems”, because if you ever catch yourself jumping in fear from a butterfly, you laugh at how silly you were before it becomes a “phobia”.
At the same time, insecurities are ubiquitous, and can be really really really subtle. None of us are free from insecurities driving our behavior, and “not be insecure” isn’t a primitive option. Insecurities themselves are rational responses to the data, and the act shutting them out itself would be an act of insecurity with its own undesirable consequences. What we can do, given the insecurities we have, is notice, and then do what makes sense given the entirety of the situation including our insecurities. The goal of conveying this framework is to make it easier to see through our rationalizations to our actual options, and therefore allow us to use metacognition to deal with the reality of insecurities and train better object level cognition.
Many of the examples I give are examples where this understanding served as “scaffolding” to help guide recognition of flinches as flinches and promising options as promising options. I only spoke up in the jacuzzi example because my explicit understanding highlighted the key questions to ask myself, and without that I would have rationalized it away as “Feelings are irrational, nothing to do here”. “Hurts?” came from a recognition that pain can’t actually be a problem so his seemingly-pain-caused suffering became an anomaly to ask about. The previous time I had seen it as a “problem to fix”, and used “conversational hypnosis” instead of ice to try to “make it go away”. Eventually though, the insecurities become obsolete so you can find yourself doing the right thing without thinking about it, at which point it’s just “post-facto explanation” of what you implicitly recognize.
Returning to your final question here, there are two options. I’ll use the example of teaching my friend how to teach her daughter to be comfortable with eye drops.
Bottom line, kid’s attention needs to be on “Eyedrops okay” to the exclusion of “Eyedrops not okay”. If she’s secure and is forced to take eyedrops, she’ll notice—but she’s not, so she’s not. If mom was solidly secure, this would automatically flow down hill to the kid, the kid would take the eye drops, and learn that they’re fine. But she’s not, so that’s not happening either. Mom asks me for help. What can I do?
One option is to provide security myself. I know that her kid won’t be/stay traumatized so long as the eyedrops don’t actually hurt her, and that they won’t hurt her. So I can say “I know it can be scary doing things that freak our kids out, but she’ll be fine. You’re not going to irrecoverably traumatize your kid, and you’re not going to lose her trust. I promise. If you just do it, she’ll learn that it’s fine”. I then demonstrate the security needed to enable her to act on her respect for my words and direct her own attention towards the idea that she’s going to make her kid take eyedrops and it’s fine, which leads to her doing the same while directing her kids attention.
That can work, and there’s no need to “explain framework” in order to help her learn how to change her daughters mind, but she won’t know why it works. That leads to things like “I don’t know why, but things are just different with you”, which can make you feel special and all that, but also leaves her unnecessarily dependent on you as a source of knowing. Eventually, she may get familiar enough with operating from a place of security that she starts to flinch less herself, but she won’t be doing it intentionally, just automatically.
What I actually did, was lean less on my knowledge of how things would work out, and instead pointed out the implication of her own beliefs as well as the pattern that allowed me to call in advance what her conclusion would be. Rather than just fostering security so that she could better do her job as a parent, I did that and also highlighted what was going on so that she could have more awareness of what she was doing—and therefore learn to notice her insecurities and foster security in herself as well. Now she has the pattern to notice “If I’m uncomfortable making my kid do a thing, and the idea feels more like “violence” than “play”, I’m being a little bitch and have some introspection to do”. It was particularly amusing in this case, because both mom and daughter do jiu jitsu and are obviously well acquainted with the idea of play violence being okay. She just didn’t recognize what “This doesn’t feel like play” implies about her own sloppy thinking, and therefore didn’t know where to look to find more sensible responses.
I guess the short version is that fostering the underlying resources is necessary and sufficient, but that understanding flinches for what they are might be a necessary component of efficiently fostering those underlying resources and opposing their decay? I don’t have a solid model of long term group dynamics yet, but it seems like even a group of high security individuals is at risk of degenerating to insecurity if no one can map the degeneration.