Thank you! I’m not sure if the first paragraph questions are intended for you to answer, for me to answer, or as purely rhetorical. The only one I feel like I have an answer for is what my criteria for winning are: Broadly, I mean achieving my goals. Specifically for relationships, my goals are: be comfortable and good at meeting new people and forming relationships, have a close group of friends that I spend a significant amount of time with and share a significant portion of my thoughts and feelings with, feel generally connected to other people, have a romantic relationship that is good enough that I don’t wonder if I could do better with someone else or that question doesn’t seem important, and have positive relationships with my family. The goals are all necessarily subjective, so its always a possibility that I just have too high expectations, but that would also seem to me to be a form of not winning. Of the goals I listed, I have succeeded at “good at meeting new people” (but not comfortable, which matters since I don’t do it often as a result), and “have positive relationships with family”.
I agree with you about improving system 1. I get better at pickleball by hitting a pickleball a lot with a goal of where the ball should go and noticing immediately if it did or didn’t go there. I believe there are 3 reasons I haven’t found that for relationships: 1. Moral restrictions—People don’t like to be experimented on and the bounds of monogamy prevent me from practicing with other people. It feels wrong to “play games” with my significant other and do/say things just to see how they will react. Perhaps there’s a way around this with some meta-permission and boundaries. 2. Complex goals—in pickleball I know exactly what the goal and can instantly tell whether it was or was not achieved with a lot of objectivity. In relationships, there are multiple competing goals, many poorly defined, and almost none are objective. 3. Slow feedback. Certain behaviors get immediate feedback—I give a gift and I see gratitude. I give criticism and I see defensiveness. Others don’t come for a while or have complex patterns. I give a true answer instead of the desired answer—I see unhappiness. Later, after repeatedly doing this, I may get increased happiness when giving the desired answer relative to the other world where I always gave the desired answer regardless of truth, but this is difficult to detect. I display anger or disappointment—the offensive behavior immediately stops. However, in the long term, there may be some invisible threshold where if I display anger or disappointment too frequently, they lose their effectiveness, and a separate threshold where the other persons desire to be around me decreases. Add to this that the context matters and the exact same actions on my part may get very different results at a different time, and it becomes quite difficult to construct good system 1 practice.
Thank you! I’m not sure if the first paragraph questions are intended for you to answer, for me to answer, or as purely rhetorical. The only one I feel like I have an answer for is what my criteria for winning are: Broadly, I mean achieving my goals. Specifically for relationships, my goals are: be comfortable and good at meeting new people and forming relationships, have a close group of friends that I spend a significant amount of time with and share a significant portion of my thoughts and feelings with, feel generally connected to other people, have a romantic relationship that is good enough that I don’t wonder if I could do better with someone else or that question doesn’t seem important, and have positive relationships with my family. The goals are all necessarily subjective, so its always a possibility that I just have too high expectations, but that would also seem to me to be a form of not winning. Of the goals I listed, I have succeeded at “good at meeting new people” (but not comfortable, which matters since I don’t do it often as a result), and “have positive relationships with family”.
I agree with you about improving system 1. I get better at pickleball by hitting a pickleball a lot with a goal of where the ball should go and noticing immediately if it did or didn’t go there. I believe there are 3 reasons I haven’t found that for relationships:
1. Moral restrictions—People don’t like to be experimented on and the bounds of monogamy prevent me from practicing with other people. It feels wrong to “play games” with my significant other and do/say things just to see how they will react. Perhaps there’s a way around this with some meta-permission and boundaries.
2. Complex goals—in pickleball I know exactly what the goal and can instantly tell whether it was or was not achieved with a lot of objectivity. In relationships, there are multiple competing goals, many poorly defined, and almost none are objective.
3. Slow feedback. Certain behaviors get immediate feedback—I give a gift and I see gratitude. I give criticism and I see defensiveness. Others don’t come for a while or have complex patterns. I give a true answer instead of the desired answer—I see unhappiness. Later, after repeatedly doing this, I may get increased happiness when giving the desired answer relative to the other world where I always gave the desired answer regardless of truth, but this is difficult to detect. I display anger or disappointment—the offensive behavior immediately stops. However, in the long term, there may be some invisible threshold where if I display anger or disappointment too frequently, they lose their effectiveness, and a separate threshold where the other persons desire to be around me decreases. Add to this that the context matters and the exact same actions on my part may get very different results at a different time, and it becomes quite difficult to construct good system 1 practice.