A Catalog of Confusions
tl;dr—can we categorise confusing events by skills required to deal with them? What are those skills?
I am sometimes haunted by things I read online. It’s probably a couple of years since I first read Your Strength as a Rationalist, but over the past month or two I’ve been reminded of it a surprising number of times in different circumstances. It’s led me to wonder whether the idea of being “confused by fiction” can be helpfully broken down into categories, with each of those categories having certain skills that can be worked on to help notice them.
I’m going to describe two such categories I think I’ve identified, and invite your criticism, or suggestions of other similar categories. In both cases, I believe there to be some instinct, acquired skill, or some combination thereof that draws it to my attention. I could just be making this up, though, so criticism is also welcome on this front.
Absence of Salient Information
I believe tech support is like a magic trick in reverse. With a magic trick, the magician hides a crucial fact which he then distracts you from. He provides a false narrative of what’s going on while confusing the sequence of events, culminating in the impossible, and relies on your own fear of appearing foolish to make you falsely report the conditions of the trick to both yourself and other spectators.
In tech support, you are often presented with an impossible sequence of events; the customer’s fear of appearing foolish makes them falsely report the conditions of the fault to both themselves and you, concealing a crucial fact which the rest of the narrative distracts you from. You then have to figure out how it was done.
I recently asked a girl from my dance class out for a drink, and proceeded to receive the most shocking litany of mixed signals I could ever imagine receiving, drink not forthcoming. I boiled it down to three possibilities: either she was interested but incredibly shy, uninterested but just really friendly; or she had a completely different set of standards when it came to signaling romantic interest or lack thereof. I remember thinking how none of these possibilities made sense in context, and was reminded quite specifically of the idea of being more confused by fiction than by reality. It was driving my problem-solving faculties to distraction, and I have never been so relieved to discover a woman I was interested in already had a boyfriend.
The phenomenon wasn’t unlike a film with a massive plot-integral spoiler. There’s this nagging feeling that the whole thing doesn’t quite make sense, until the spoiler is revealed, at which point you suddenly see the whole of the preceeding sequence of events in a new revelatory light. I’ve often noticed with such films that when people know there’s a big spoiler, they’re more likely to spot it early on because they start groping around for plausible plot twists. I’m not sure if this is the best way to go about fishing for information you know is absent, though.
Having One’s Head Messed With
I’ve read a few books on hypnosis, NLP and persuasion techniques, and I’m at least as well-versed on cognitive biases as most LW readers, but a couple of weeks ago someone fucked with my head.
I was in East London (never a good start), fairly late at night with food in my hand. Beggars always seem to approach me when I have food in my hand. I don’t think this is coincidence. This particular beggar, a woman in her twenties, spun a very quick story which I can’t even begin to remember all the details of. Something about desperately needing bus fare to escape her abusive boyfriend and having just been released from hospital. Just thinking about it, two weeks later, makes me confused and disorientated.
In retrospect, the story made no sense whatsoever, she was far too aggressive to be a downtrodden out-patient abuse victim, and far too good at making me feel like the only way I could possibly get out of this horrible distressing situation was to give her my small change, which I did. Afterwards I felt violated.
The experience itself has probably armed me against it happening again to a certain degree, but I’m now worried about what I’m not armed against. There is a feeling of having your head messed with, but I only ever seem to experience it retrospectively. Can I train myself to spot it as it’s happening? Is it related to the feeling I get when I recognise I’m being manipulated by advertising? Is there a how-to body of knowledge that can be assembled to defend against manipulation in general?
This probably could have been more coherent, but it was surprisingly cathartic to write.
Uninterested but feeling guilty about it, and therefore being as nice as possible without actually accepting?
Could we maybe keep the language a little nicer? This sort of thing might turn off people interested in rationality who have an aversion to profanity.
The existing norm seems to be that profanity is okay as long as it’s not gratuitous, and this doesn’t seem gratuitous to me.
I’m a little skeptical that there are many people who have gotten as far as being interested in rationality, and are inclined to investigate a gently moderated community blog on the subject… who will be turned away because someone swore on said blog. It seems to me that noticing that swear words are not worth worry is an early, basic, and common step in becoming more rational (or contrarian, or identified with being smarter than Those Sheep, or levelheaded, or open-minded, or most of the other avenues via which rationality may begin to seem attractive).
Valid points. I withdraw my remark.
I don’t worry about them but I do find them grating and distracting.
same here. Also, viewing or hearing profanity causes a huge brain hijack, due to the fact that they are taboo (I plan to edit in more detail here in 8-10 hours time when I look at the relevant book). I consider that sufficient reason to keep swearing to a minimum.
I’m not saying that LW is the place to work on it, but might it be worth your while to at least partially desensitize yourself to profanity?
I already do, somewhat. The place where I work is full of casual profanity, and I’m neither particularly distracted nor morally offended by it. But the mechanism my brain is using appears to involve flagging each context separately in terms of profanity use rather than deciding that profanities in general are more or less acceptable. As such, LW is a low-profanity environment and any use of profanity is an instant attention-hijack.
Is profanity still considered taboo? I would consider it impolite, and not to be used in a formal context. I’d be surprised at a politician or official figure swearing publicly. However, I can’t think of an informal area of my life where someone swearing won’t occasionally crop up.
This not being a formal essay or article, but a series of musings (or so I read it), minor swearing doesn’t seem out of place, especially in the form of a fairly common phrase.
I think that if someone wouldn’t say it in front of their parents, in class, or on TV (on purpose—what slips out is a separate matter entirely), then it’s fair to say it’s still taboo. I’m not saying that people don’t or shouldn’t swear, only that it’s still suppressed in most contexts and only crops up under conditions of high emotion.
I disagree only slightly. I have somewhat of an aversion to this instance of swearing in as much as it weakens the impact of the expletive. I want that word to retain its power, not be wasted on idiomatic usages. It may not be gratuitous but it is casual.
Profanity is a valuable commodity—usage of it can even be considered somewhat of a commons problem!
To justify my choice a little, I felt the term “fucked with my head” was both a widespread enough idiom, and an accurate description of the subjective experience. I’ve never seen profanity remarked upon before, and didn’t imagine any objection to it.
The only aversion I would have with this instance of swearing is that it slightly weakens the impact of the expletive. It is too common. I want that word to retain its power, not be wasted on idiomatic usages.