I tried asking myself “What [skills / character traits / etc] might reduce risk of psychosis, or might indicate a lack of vulnerability to psychosis, while also being good?”
(The “while also being good” criterion is meant to rule out things such as “almost never changing one’s mind about anything major” that for all I know might be a protective factor, but that I don’t want for myself or for other people I care about.)
I restricted myself to longer-term traits. (That is: I’m imagining “psychosis” as a thing that happens when *both* (a) a person has weak structures in some way; and (b) a person has high short-term stress on those structures, eg from having had a major life change recently or having taken a psychedelic or something. I’m trying to brainstorm traits that would help with (a), controlling for (b).)
It actually hadn’t occurred to me to ask myself this question before, so thank you Adele. (By contrast, I had put effort into reducing (b) in cases where someone is already in a more mildly psychosis-like direction, eg the first aid stuff I mentioned earlier. )
—
My current brainstorm:
(1) The thing Nathaniel Brandon calls “self-esteem,” and gives exercises for developing in Six Pillars of Self-esteem. (Note that this is a much cooler than than what my elementary school teachers seemed to mean by the word.)
(2) The ability to work on long-term projects successfully for a long time. (Whatever that’s made of.)
(3) The ability to maintain long-term friendships and collaborations. (Whatever that’s made of.)
(4) The ability to notice / tune into and respect other peoples’ boundaries (or organizations’ boundaries, or etc). Where by a “boundary” I mean: (a) stuff the person doesn’t consent to, that common practice or natural law says they’re the authority about (e.g. “I’m not okay with you touching my hand”; “I’m not willing to participate in conversations where I’m interrupted a lot”) OR (b) stuff that’ll disable the person’s usual modes/safeguards/protections/conscious-choosing-powers (?except in unusually wholesome cases of enthusiastic consent).
(4) Anything good that allows people to have a check of some sort on local illusions or local impulses. Eg:
(a) Submission to to patterns of ethical conduct or religious practice held by a community or long-standing tradition; (okay sometimes this one seems bad to me, but not always or not purely-bad, and I think this legit confers mental stability sometimes)
(b) Having good long-term friends or family whose views you take seriously;
(c) Regularly practicing and valuing any trade/craft/hobby/skill that is full of feedback loops from the physical world
(d) Having a personal code or a set of personal principles that one doesn’t lightly change (Ray Dalio talks about this)
(e) Somehow regularly contacting a “sense of perspective.” (Eg I think long walks in nature give this to some people)
(5) Tempo stuff: Getting regular sleep, regular exercise, having deep predictable rhythms to one’s life (eg times of day for eating vs for not-eating; times of week for working vs for not-working; times of year for seeing extended family and times for reflecting). Having a long memory, and caring about thoughts and purposes that extend across time.
(6) Embeddedness in a larger world, eg
(a) Having much contact with the weather, eg from working outdoors;
(b) Being needed in a concrete, daily way for something that obviously matters, eg having a dog who needs you to feed and walk them, or having a job where people obviously need you.
In other words, you push on it, and you feel something solid. And you’re like “ah, there is a thingy there”. But sometimes what actually happened is that by pushing on it, you made it solid. (...Ah I was probably thinking of plex’s comment.)
This is also related to perception and predictive processing. You can go looking for something X in yourself, and everything you encounter in yourself you’re like ”… so, you’re X, right?”; and this expectation is also sort of a command. (Or there could be other things with a similar coarse phenomenology to that story. For example: I expect there’s X in me; so I do Y, which is appropriate to do if X is in me; now I’m doing Y, which would synergize with X; so now X is incentivized; so now I’ve made it more likely that my brain will start doing X as a suitable solution.) (Cf. “Are you triggered yet??” https://x.com/tsvibt/status/1953650163962241079 )
If you have too much of an attitude of “just looking is always fine / good”, you might not distinguish between actually just looking (insofar as that’s coherent) vs. going in and randomly reprogramming yourself.
So, I’m not really a fan of predictive processing theories of mind. BUT, an interesting implication/suggestion from that perspective is like this:
Suppose you have never before doubted X.
Now you proceed to doubt X.
When you doubt X, it is as if you are going from a 100% belief in X to a noticeably less than 100% belief in X.
We are created in motion, with {values, stances, actions, plans, beliefs, propositions} never yet having been separated out from each other.
Here, X is both a belief and an action-stance.
Therefore when you doubt X, it is as if you are going from a 100% action-stance of X, to a noticeably less than 100% action-stance of X.
In other words, doubting whether something is true, is equivalent to partly deciding to not act in accordance with believing it is true. (Or some even fuzzier version of this.)
Ok, so that’s the explanation. Now an answer blob to
“What [skills / character traits / etc] might reduce risk of psychosis, or might indicate a lack of vulnerability to psychosis, while also being good?”
Basically the idea is: A reverence / awe / fear of doubt. Which isn’t to say “don’t doubt”, but more to say “consider doubting to be a journey; the stronger, newer, and more foundational the doubt, the longer and more difficult the journey”. Or something.
A more general thing in this answer-blob is a respect for cognitive labor; and an attitude of not “biting off more than you can chew”. Like, I think normies pretty often will, in response to some challenge on some ideational point, just say something to the effect of “huh, interesting, yeah IDK, that’s not the sort of thing I would try to think through, but sounds cool”. A LW-coded person doesn’t say that nearly as much / nearly as naturally. I’m not sure what the suggestion should be because it can’t be “don’t think things through in uncommon detail / depth” or “don’t take ideas seriously” or “don’t believe in your ability to think through difficult stuff”, but it would be like “thought is difficult, some thoughts are really big and difficult and would take a long time, sometimes code refactors get bogged down and whole projects die in development hell; be light and nimble with your cognitive investments”.
(Speaking of development hell, that might be a nice metaphier for some manic mental states.)
Cf. the passage from Descartes’s Discourse on Method, part three:
And finally, just as it is not enough, before beginning to rebuild the house where one is living, simply to pull it down, and to make provision for materials and architects or to train oneself in architecture, and also to have carefully drawn up the building plans for it; but it is also necessary to be provided with someplace else where one can live comfortably while working on it; so too, in order not to remain irresolute in my actions while reason required me to be so in my judgments, and in order not to cease to live as happily as possible during this time, I formulated a provisional code of morals, which consisted of but three or four maxims, which I very much want to share with you.
Riffing off of your ideas (unfortunately I read them before I thought to do the exercise myself)
- Ability to notice and respect self boundaries feels particularly important to me. - Maybe this is included in the self-esteem book (haven’t read it), but also a sense of feeling that one’s self is precious to oneself. Some people think of themselves as infinitely malleable, or under some obligation to put themselves into the “optimal” shape for saving the world or whatever, and that seems like a bad sign. - I generally think of this as a personal weakness, but reflecting it seems like there has been something protective about my not feeling motivated to do something until I have a model of what it does, how it works, etc… I guess it’s a sort of Chesterton’s fence instinct in a way.
I tried asking myself “What [skills / character traits / etc] might reduce risk of psychosis, or might indicate a lack of vulnerability to psychosis, while also being good?”
(The “while also being good” criterion is meant to rule out things such as “almost never changing one’s mind about anything major” that for all I know might be a protective factor, but that I don’t want for myself or for other people I care about.)
I restricted myself to longer-term traits. (That is: I’m imagining “psychosis” as a thing that happens when *both* (a) a person has weak structures in some way; and (b) a person has high short-term stress on those structures, eg from having had a major life change recently or having taken a psychedelic or something. I’m trying to brainstorm traits that would help with (a), controlling for (b).)
It actually hadn’t occurred to me to ask myself this question before, so thank you Adele. (By contrast, I had put effort into reducing (b) in cases where someone is already in a more mildly psychosis-like direction, eg the first aid stuff I mentioned earlier. )
—
My current brainstorm:
(1) The thing Nathaniel Brandon calls “self-esteem,” and gives exercises for developing in Six Pillars of Self-esteem. (Note that this is a much cooler than than what my elementary school teachers seemed to mean by the word.)
(2) The ability to work on long-term projects successfully for a long time. (Whatever that’s made of.)
(3) The ability to maintain long-term friendships and collaborations. (Whatever that’s made of.)
(4) The ability to notice / tune into and respect other peoples’ boundaries (or organizations’ boundaries, or etc). Where by a “boundary” I mean: (a) stuff the person doesn’t consent to, that common practice or natural law says they’re the authority about (e.g. “I’m not okay with you touching my hand”; “I’m not willing to participate in conversations where I’m interrupted a lot”) OR (b) stuff that’ll disable the person’s usual modes/safeguards/protections/conscious-choosing-powers (?except in unusually wholesome cases of enthusiastic consent).
(4) Anything good that allows people to have a check of some sort on local illusions or local impulses. Eg:
(a) Submission to to patterns of ethical conduct or religious practice held by a community or long-standing tradition; (okay sometimes this one seems bad to me, but not always or not purely-bad, and I think this legit confers mental stability sometimes)
(b) Having good long-term friends or family whose views you take seriously;
(c) Regularly practicing and valuing any trade/craft/hobby/skill that is full of feedback loops from the physical world
(d) Having a personal code or a set of personal principles that one doesn’t lightly change (Ray Dalio talks about this)
(e) Somehow regularly contacting a “sense of perspective.” (Eg I think long walks in nature give this to some people)
(5) Tempo stuff: Getting regular sleep, regular exercise, having deep predictable rhythms to one’s life (eg times of day for eating vs for not-eating; times of week for working vs for not-working; times of year for seeing extended family and times for reflecting). Having a long memory, and caring about thoughts and purposes that extend across time.
(6) Embeddedness in a larger world, eg
(a) Having much contact with the weather, eg from working outdoors;
(b) Being needed in a concrete, daily way for something that obviously matters, eg having a dog who needs you to feed and walk them, or having a job where people obviously need you.
Hm. I thought I saw somewhere else in this comment thread that mentions this, but now I can’t find it, so I’ll put this here.
Sometimes mind is like oobleck ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7RFC74otGcZifXpec/the-possible-shared-craft-of-deliberate-lexicogenesis?commentId=BHkcKpdmX5qzoZ76q ).
In other words, you push on it, and you feel something solid. And you’re like “ah, there is a thingy there”. But sometimes what actually happened is that by pushing on it, you made it solid. (...Ah I was probably thinking of plex’s comment.)
This is also related to perception and predictive processing. You can go looking for something X in yourself, and everything you encounter in yourself you’re like ”… so, you’re X, right?”; and this expectation is also sort of a command. (Or there could be other things with a similar coarse phenomenology to that story. For example: I expect there’s X in me; so I do Y, which is appropriate to do if X is in me; now I’m doing Y, which would synergize with X; so now X is incentivized; so now I’ve made it more likely that my brain will start doing X as a suitable solution.) (Cf. “Are you triggered yet??” https://x.com/tsvibt/status/1953650163962241079 )
If you have too much of an attitude of “just looking is always fine / good”, you might not distinguish between actually just looking (insofar as that’s coherent) vs. going in and randomly reprogramming yourself.
I’ll add a cluster of these, but first I’ll preface with an explanation. (Cf. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n299hFwqBxqwJfZyN/adele-lopez-s-shortform?commentId=99bPbajjHiXinvDCx )
So, I’m not really a fan of predictive processing theories of mind. BUT, an interesting implication/suggestion from that perspective is like this:
Suppose you have never before doubted X.
Now you proceed to doubt X.
When you doubt X, it is as if you are going from a 100% belief in X to a noticeably less than 100% belief in X.
We are created in motion, with {values, stances, actions, plans, beliefs, propositions} never yet having been separated out from each other.
Here, X is both a belief and an action-stance.
Therefore when you doubt X, it is as if you are going from a 100% action-stance of X, to a noticeably less than 100% action-stance of X.
In other words, doubting whether something is true, is equivalent to partly deciding to not act in accordance with believing it is true. (Or some even fuzzier version of this.)
(See also the “Nihilism, existentialism, absurdism” bullet point here https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/11/do-humans-derive-values-from-fictitious.html )
Ok, so that’s the explanation. Now an answer blob to
Basically the idea is: A reverence / awe / fear of doubt. Which isn’t to say “don’t doubt”, but more to say “consider doubting to be a journey; the stronger, newer, and more foundational the doubt, the longer and more difficult the journey”. Or something.
A more general thing in this answer-blob is a respect for cognitive labor; and an attitude of not “biting off more than you can chew”. Like, I think normies pretty often will, in response to some challenge on some ideational point, just say something to the effect of “huh, interesting, yeah IDK, that’s not the sort of thing I would try to think through, but sounds cool”. A LW-coded person doesn’t say that nearly as much / nearly as naturally. I’m not sure what the suggestion should be because it can’t be “don’t think things through in uncommon detail / depth” or “don’t take ideas seriously” or “don’t believe in your ability to think through difficult stuff”, but it would be like “thought is difficult, some thoughts are really big and difficult and would take a long time, sometimes code refactors get bogged down and whole projects die in development hell; be light and nimble with your cognitive investments”.
(Speaking of development hell, that might be a nice metaphier for some manic mental states.)
Cf. the passage from Descartes’s Discourse on Method, part three:
( https://grattoncourses.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/rene-descartes-discourse-on-method-and-meditations-on-first-philosophy-4th-ed-hackett-pub-co-1998.pdf )
Awesome!
Riffing off of your ideas (unfortunately I read them before I thought to do the exercise myself)
- Ability to notice and respect self boundaries feels particularly important to me.
- Maybe this is included in the self-esteem book (haven’t read it), but also a sense of feeling that one’s self is precious to oneself. Some people think of themselves as infinitely malleable, or under some obligation to put themselves into the “optimal” shape for saving the world or whatever, and that seems like a bad sign.
- I generally think of this as a personal weakness, but reflecting it seems like there has been something protective about my not feeling motivated to do something until I have a model of what it does, how it works, etc… I guess it’s a sort of Chesterton’s fence instinct in a way.
That seems right.
I wish I had a clearer notion of what “self” means, here.