Outrospection: Don’t Be A Rock
Introspection is when you think really deeply about how your mind is organized, what kinds of thoughts you’ve got bopping around your little brainbox, and how it all comes together to explain your behaviour. It has its uses, but also its downsides. It generally always seems to be possible to come up with an ever-more-complex story of your life, to the point where some people have said that the brain is like a minecraft world: the more you explore, the more stuff gets procedurally generated. This is very time consuming and can also lead to self-absorption.
Instead of introspection, I recommend outrospection. Take an entirely outside-view attitude towards your behaviours. Ask not “what’s the complicated reason for me doing this?” but “what’s the simplest model which explains my behaviour.”
The aim of outrospection is to notice when you’re becoming a rock with “Do X” painted on it.
Examples
We all know someone like this. They make a minor screwup (like showing up a little late to an event, mildly burning a cake they cooked) and turn it into a ten-minute apology, bawling about how sorry they are and how useless they’re feeling. You tell them to please stop apologising (because the apology has become far more of an imposition than the problem!) and they tearfully start apologising for apologising.
The person has a brain state (shame) which is causing a specific output (apologising) automatically. The person needs to stop that output, but the reason to stop doing it (it’s annoying) just further triggers the brain state (shame). There is no way out from inside.
There are other cases like this. Belief polarisation is one: you’re in a state of trusting group A and distrusting group B. You make an aggressive stand for group A takes everywhere you can find group B members, and they keep getting annoyed. That makes them seem even meaner and less trustworthy!
Also, cult members’ friends and family can often tell something is up long before the actual cultist can, just by observing their behaviour. How can that be? The cultist has access to all of the same information they do, yet they can’t figure it out. The inside-view model of their own behaviour is leading them astray.
Pull Yourself Together, Man!
What you want to say to these people is “Pull yourself together!” which roughly means “Get yourself out of that stuck emotional state.” People tend to be quite bad at this. There’s a very specific mental motion which makes it possible, and it depends on outrospection.
First step: notice that your behaviour is predicted by an extremely simple heuristic.
Second step: do literally anything else other than what the heuristic predicts.
The annoying apologiser might notice that their behaviour is entirely predicted by a rock labelled “apologise”. Then they can simply do the one thing the rock doesn’t predict: stop apologising.
Likewise, a politically polarised person might notice that their behaviour is well-predicted by a rock that says “Say the yellow tribe position on this issue”.
Sometimes, being well-modelled by a rock is fine. Some of the best pieces of advice can be solved with a rock. I have a rock on my desk which says “Do the right thing.”[1] The question is, if you knew what was on your rock, would you be happy with it? If not, you must spite the rock.
How to Spite the Rock
“But Bostock!” I hear you ask. “From where do I draw the mental strength to go against the rock which models my behaviour? How can I beat all petrifying forces within me?”
And I say to you: “Being a rock is cringe and lame.”
It’s not very cool to have opinions which are well-predicted by a rock. It’s boring. Your friends will give you a mean-spirited nickname based on what your rock says. Op-eds will refer to you as “local rock”.
Take a moment to think about what your rock says. Is that what you want your rock to say?
This post was written as part of Doublehaven
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I really actually do have this!
This feels like one of those “draw the rest of the owl” situations—the hard part isn’t recognizing one is stuck in a bar emotional-state to behaviour loop. The hard part is identifying a different action to take.
I think saying “do something else” is unhelpful, especially if someone is tunnelvisioned by a emotional state. Telling them what that something is specifically, ideally using some kind of manneristic verb. It is much easier to replace a behavior that stop it in its tracks. With what though? Even now writing this, I don’t know what is a helpful verb to replace “apologize” with. “Laugh”—well sure, at best you someone with social anxiety nervously laughing who was over-apologizing seconds ago, at worst, you look like you’re having a psychotic break. “Stare”—depends what you stare at—falling silent and focusing your vision on some singular object on your vision to quiet the shame response may stop you from being compelled to apologize.
This seems even less likely to work in a real life situation where a person is already blinkered by their emotional state. Without the opportunity for premeditation for alternatives.
Or perhaps I’m just particularly bad at imagining useful alternatives.
Good post. As a solution to the problem, it helps to model LW as already being aware of a given tribal position, and aiming instead to provide meta advice on the relations between the tribes’ positions that is useful to the reader.
The first step, of course, is having an accurate enough model of both tribes that one can right useful meta advice that involves modeling their future behavior. Most people who can thoroughly dismiss the impulse to call the other tribe “stupid” will reach this point pretty quickly, and the rest follows naturally so long as one always remembers that the goal of writing on contentious issues here is not to persuade, but to make the reader more informed such that they will be more successful in all of their endeavors, whatever they may be[1].
This is broadly beneficial because positive-sum outcomes are often low-hanging fruit once tribalism intensifies enough that the average partisan can’t model his opponent’s goals well enough to see them.