That looks consistent with a rifle to me, though there are are really only a few moments as he’s transitioning from the roof to the ground that it’s easy to see he has something long in there.
The more interesting mismatch to me is with the terminal performance of that bullet. The lack of an exit is definitely not consistent with a 30-06 at 140yd striking his neck from that angle. I think I know how to explain it, but I’m curious if anyone else has tried to figure out how that could happen.
One thing I find helpful, is to outsource this to my mental model of other people, or actual other people. If you come at them with “This is definitely true”, what kind of objections do they come up with? Not just explicit objections that they say, but also implicit objections that they don’t know how to articulate. Once you’ve explored that space and know that all roads lead to them being fully on board—again, not just in explicit claims but in revealed belief as well—then you know that at least they can’t come up with a reason you might be wrong.
It’s still only as good as your other people, but if no one you know can find fault in your reasoning that’s not a bad start.
This point seems very valuable and a bit hidden in the footnote. I think while the example in this post is good at illustration, it’s not good at getting people to actually apply the concept.
Thanks for the feedback. After mulling over it for a while, I think I agree. Though my thoughts on whether that’s appropriate are more complicated, and I’m not 100% I understand what you mean exactly.
Can you expand more on where you’re coming from, and what you think it’d look like to be better at the latter (either with or without sacrificing the former)?
Also, is your akrasia progress an example that came from reading this post, or something you picked up on elsewhere which happens to mirror this post? If the former, what made it click, exactly?
A contemporary example of inadequate ethical heuristics: Public discussion of group differences
I think the word “public” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I can think sanely about group differences on my own, and it would be easy to have that conversation with you. I’d also expect to be able to handle it with individuals who are strongly attached to one heuristic or the other, and perhaps even in small groups. I wouldn’t tweet about it. Nor would I strike up that conversation in a crowded room of strangers.
The problem isn’t that I can’t think sanely about such topics, but that they can’t—and because descriptively speaking “they” and “I” is a better descriptor than “we” in those cases. In smaller scales, thinking as “we” is easier. If I say something that my close friend would have disagreed with, they know me well enough to appropriately weight the fact that I’m saying it, and that immediately changes the joint perception as “we” in ways that tweeting does not. And when the friend doesn’t buy it, the amount of “Hm, maybe I’m wrong” is very manageable, so engaging with the kind of humility that makes it “shared exploration towards truth” rather than “an attempt to manipulate” is easy. Even “bold” statements like “You’re doing it all wrong [and I know this because there’s nothing you’ve thought of that I haven’t considered which could justify a change of mind]” are fairly achievable in this context because you do know your friend fairly well, and they know you know them fairly well, etc.
Try to step up in scale though, and it gets tougher. Either you have to back off a bit because maybe the larger group knows more things you don’t, or you have to know more things including how more distant strangers (incorrectly) model things. As the group you’re trying to move becomes larger and more powerful, the push back you invite becomes louder and more meaningful. Have you found the courage to pick a fight that big, and still humble yourself appropriately, if necessary? Because if not then you’re setting yourself up to fold prematurely, before standing strong enough to evoke the kind of evidence that would genuinely change your mind.
An analogy that comes to mind is “injection locking”, as demonstrated by groups of metronomes synching up. Couple yourself too tightly to a large coordinated mass, and you’re likely to find your heart compelled to the same wavelength, even as you recognize that it’s wrong (whoops, there goes your sanity). Decouple too much, and even if you’re not missing anything from the larger group, you’re not helping the group either. The trick is to regulate your coupling such that you can both influence and be influenced in ways that are tracking truth, without losing track of genuinely valuable wavelengths you’ve entrained to.
And if you try to try to “cheat” and preserve your frequency by pushing on the group without opening yourself to push back, that’s a good definition of manipulation, and when the group notices it will backfire.
I think it’s important that “we” think carefully about what group we can really “we” with, without losing lock on reality, and updating in ways that shut out information rather than incorporating more information. And now that I think of it, the problem of how to scale up seems to be missing an ethical design pattern itself. There’s not a lot of good guidance at how quickly to try to integrate with larger groups of metronomes.
Jordan Peterson took a crack at it with “Clean your room”/”Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world”, but that’s more of a counter heuristic than a bridge. And overly moralistic and unachievable. In totally unrelated news, “Jordan Peterson” has become a scissor statement.
In short form, I’d probably phrase it like “Be careful to match your ambition with humility and courage, and scale only as fast as you dare”
and yet there’s hordes red in the face arguing the definition of “woman” not realizing semantics are used to disguise contested premises.
Notice how a straightforward request for a definition of the term in question is now a clear tribal indicator? The body language on both sides when that question is asked shows that no one is missing the implication that people are trying to disguise contested premises.
Hordes argue until they’re red in the face because everyone knows that they’re fighting a battle over smuggled premises. Compare to the lack of interest in how to categorize intersex people (at least, prior to this trans stuff becoming a big deal).
When it comes to commenting and deciding whether to intentionally try to preempt an obligation to respond, this “value investing” approach is to just explain your perspective without trying to thumb the scale in either direction. Rather than leaning on “And if you don’t respond, it’s because you know I’m right and can’t admit it” or “It couldn’t possibly be that, and surely your post is correct despite my criticisms”, you can just make your comment trust the best estimate of the truth to win once things settle out. I think some of what looks like disingenuous “What? Just don’t respond?” comes from this.
For example, if Alice is one of those you describe as “Innocent, but naive”, she might comment on Bob’s post without thinking much about what it might imply if Bob doesn’t reply. “We’ll get there when/if we get there”. Because whether her comment is upvoted or downvoted changes the answer. Whether there are other comments along the same lines or in response to hers matters, as does what stance these comments take. Alice just trusts the audience and herself to make reasonable inferences, once the cards are on the table.
If Bob doesn’t feel like “I don’t have to respond, the audience will see that my point stands”, then that points to Bob not having finished crossing that inferential distance and justifying his stance in the eyes of his audience. So long as Alice’s object level counterargument is sincere, then avoiding making it to spare Bob the effort of explaining things isn’t a good thing—because now people still don’t get it, and if they turn out to be correct it’s because they’re lucky that the holes they don’t see don’t turn out to matter. But Alice can’t know whether they will or not until she see’s Bob’s response. Unless she happens to have special knowledge that the audience is likely to underestimate Bob’s post relative to her comment, urging the audience to refrain from updating won’t actually point towards truth—because she doesn’t actually know anything they don’t about this.
I do actually agree that these responses are often disingenuous, because of a particular social dynamic where one can subtly and plausibly deniably posture as being above the author and win points when their arguments pan out, while being simultaneously shielded from the consequences when they turn out to be wrong (as an author, how comfortable do you feel calling people out for such posturing? How much do you trust the audience to do it for you?). In such cultures, the norms incentivize this sort of posturing so long as it can be kept below the audience’s ability to recognize it or feel confident in diagnosing it. And if the audience doesn’t see and grok this dynamic, then they’re going to update on the information conveyed in the “confident” posture. And in such cultures the general audience doesn’t grok this dynamic, or else they wouldn’t enable it to persist.
Authors can sense this, and the situation where both the commenter and author know that the commenter is taking advantage of this hole in the collective epistemology but the commenter won’t admit it, is disappointingly common. Less common on LW than elsewhere, but not absent.
At the end of the day, there are both situations where the author rationally and correctly sees “What? Just don’t comment!” as disingenuous or naive, and also situations where it’s just a fact of life that if you want your audience to understand you, you’re going to have to respond to comments that convincingly-but-incorrectly argue against your post[1]. It’s just a question of whether that comment putting pressure on the author to respond is (intentionally or unintentionally) relying on getting shielded from the consequences of coming at the author overconfidently, or whether they’re making the comment holding themselves accountable.
(To be clear, I don’t see this as a criticism that requires a response, as it doesn’t negate the main thesis. I expect the audience to recognize this though, so I wouldn’t ordinarily make a point of saying this)
Unless you happen to nail it on the first go, I guess, but doing that consistently is even harder
I like the “echo” metaphor. Generally, awareness of impact further down the road is a good thing, but there’s a rather unpleasant phenomenon that happens when you turn up the gain so high that the echoes created in response to picking up echoes become louder than the initial echoes that created them. You get “feedback” and that loud high pitch squeal. This is a good reason to be mindful not to place too much gain on echoes, as well as to be mindful of whether your response to them is damping them back to the first order message or exciting them further.
Another analogy for this is stock market trading. You can speculate on how other investors will react to the news to some number of echoes, or you can just try to figure out what the true value is and hold on long enough for the echoes to dissipate. To make this work though, you have to be able to eat short term losses and think on longer horizons. And if the investor response is predictable enough, and worth the effort to predict, value investing will be leaving money on the table.
Am I missing some context here?
I think we’re talking past each other a bit.
I agree that the thing you’re arguing against has the challenges that you’re pointing at, in contexts like those. I’m suggesting something different.
What is the “secure response”? One where you try outwardly to retain a certain kind of dignity?
One where you’re not doing the whole “Oh no! Don’t look at the evidence, because if you do you might think I’m bad!” thing—or, more realistically, not doing the “Don’t listen to him he’s lying!”/”No, you’re wrong, I’m innocent!” type thing. Not flinching from the evidence, but rather being present with it and doing something without pushing it away.
There are a lot of different things one could do securely, but here I’m pointing at one in particular which is relevant when people think you’re actually guilty—even if they’re not being particularly fair when accusing you of stealing cookies or whatever.
Let’s go through your hypothetical line by line, giving names for easy reference:
Bob: Wait, you thought that was a rule, not a request to be less messy?
This line as stated is a bit ambiguous. Is the speaker here purely confused and curious, or are they also kinda conveying “Because if so, that’s kinda stupid, right?”?
If it’s the latter, or looks like it might be the latter, then it makes sense that your next line might follow.
Frank: What the hell kind of nitpick is that? Stop arguing stupid semantics! Since when should I even have to ask Your Highness for basic decency?
Frank has clearly communicated that he sees Bob as making an unfair argument, rather than being genuinely curious, and that he feels condescended to and unfairly treated by Bob.
If Bob isn’t driven to defensiveness out of insecurity, and he actually cares about Frank’s point of view here, he might say something like:
Bob: I’m sorry it came off like I was arguing. I don’t mean it that way, and I’m not even disagreeing necessarily. I’m just genuinely confused because the distinction seems really important here, and I would have expected you to agree. Do you not think the distinction matters here? What am I missing?
This response helps to disambiguate the first response, and to show that it really was a sincere attempt to understand Frank’s perspective here.
In contrast, if Bob had said the other line, it would also have helped disambiguate, albeit in a different direction:
Bob: “Do you actually think that messiness is correlated with thievery, even after conditioning on honesty?
In this context, where this line is coming instead of actually addressing Franks concerns, it shows pretty compellingly that Bob doesn’t find Franks perspective worthy of addressing. It also shows that even when Bob knows that Frank is going to take it as an insult to his intelligence, he wants to do more of that. So, confirming that “You realize how dumb that is, right?” interpretation.
Neither are insecure responses, but one is much more respectful and the other is much more provocative.
In the inconvenient world that I’m currently imagining from which I generated the above dialogue, screwing around with things like ‘evidence’, or even acting calm (thus implying that the rules (which every non-evil person can infer from their heart, right?) are not a threat to you or that you think you’re above them—see also, some uses of “god-fearing” as a prerequisite for “acceptable” in religious contexts), is breaking the social script.
So let’s look at what makes these situations so difficult. These people are clearly very sensitive to implication that you might be “above them”, and simultaneously can’t handle concepts like ‘evidence’. But like… are you not above people who can’t handle concepts like ‘evidence’, in some important way? In your mind are you really on equal footing, if we’re being completely honest here? I certainly couldn’t blame you for having that view of things, if you do. At the same time, can you see why maybe it’s reasonable for them to feel talked down to if you do what you’d describe as “Calmly explain that we should look at the evidence”?
It can be extremely difficult to navigate these situations without pissing people off when the people in question are simultaneously very sensitive to hints of condescension and also seemingly unable to grasp the basics. So when you say things like “Wait, you thought that was a rule?” they’re going to hear that as “Wait, you’re that dumb!?” and respond with hostility like “What the hell kind of nitpick is that?”. And honestly, they might not even be entirely wrong to read it that way.
One way to respond to this is to double down on “Well, their rules are stupid, and I am above them, so I can be secure in the fact that they can’t hurt me”. And if you’re right, then that’s probably better than subjecting yourself to their stupid rules in the first place. But if you aren’t, then they’re going to be quite motivated to hold you accountable for your hubris—as they should!
So I totally agree that this kind of secure response invites these kinds of problems. And that’s why I was suggesting the other direction, for cases like this.
As in, actually respect their judgement. Even if they don’t use the same language as you, there are going to be reasons they believe things. Even if you think you know that they’re wrong and why they go wrong, you can choose to find out instead. To ask what they think because you want to understand where they’re coming from, rather than as a ploy to highlight how stupid they are. If they take it that way, you can listen, take them seriously enough to check for any legitimacy that their interpretation might have, whether maybe you were actually a little more judgy than you meant to be, and get back on track telling them honestly that you don’t see them as dumb, you just don’t understand their perspective yet.
This is the opposite direction of “using big words to distract”, and the only time you’re trying to get on trial for something else is when you honestly believe that’s their real gripe with you. So it’s not an attempt to distract but an offering to submit to their judgement more than they were even asking for. And if that doesn’t come across at first pass, you can clarify that too: “Okay, so it is the cookie you’re most mad at me for? I know you’re mad for legitimate reason, I just want to make sure I’m addressing what’s most important to you first”. Rather than the security coming from “Lol, I’m so above you I’m untouchable (try me!)”, it’s coming from “You wouldn’t stay mad at me unless I’m doing something wrong, so I don’t have to defend myself. I trust you”.
When doing this, you’re not pleading guilty to anything you’re not guilty of, nor are you pushing away their perspectives to focus on promoting the idea that you’re innocent. Because you’re genuinely interested in their perspective, and you’re actually respecting them, they’re going to tend to feel more respected than when you tell they’re wrong/dishonest/whatever without even considering and acknowledging their perspective first.
It’s going to be difficult to pull off if you’re secretly thinking “Man, these are the lies I have to tell to get along with these dummies”, but when it’s genuine it shines through. Not immediately, necessarily, for the same reason that an abused dog doesn’t instantly trust its new owner. It takes a significant amount of evidence to overcome rationally formed priors of abuse/condescension/etc, so if you judge things after the second back and forth it won’t look great. In this one, the dog is kinda biting her, and the woman was expecting to get bit for real. If you only watch the first few back and forths, it’s easy to walk away judging it as “Man, that lady wouldn’t leave the dog alone”/”The dog didn’t like that”/”That wasn’t working”. Watch a bit longer though, and you’ll see that the evidence was being tracked all along. Certainly to better outcomes than if she defensively scolded the dog for snapping at her unfairly.
It’s true that this tends to break the social scripts regardless, but in a good way that side steps rather than engages in conflict. For example, one time my wife accidentally cut in a drive through line, and the guy she cut in front of got super pissed and started yelling at her. When her response was just “Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t see you. Want me to back out so you can have your spot in line back?”, he immediately had his foot in his mouth in recognition of “Fuck, I’m the asshole here, for not considering the possibility of an innocent mistake”—which I think is pretty safe to say wasn’t part of the script he was running in his head. Technically that one is kinda admitting guilt, but only admitting what was true, which was only an innocent mistake not “deserving to get yelled at” (hence the foot in mouth), and iirc not even one he thought was worth backing out to correct after she acknowledged it.
Does that make more sense, or do you have more pushback?
I think this is assuming that the people looking at the evidence can be trusted to make a fair and impartial assessment of it and not jump to any unjustified conclusions?
Not so much “assuming” as “working to make sure”.
For example, imagine some cookies go missing from the cookie jar, and you immediately jump to the unjustified conclusion that it’s *me* that took the cookies. Maybe because you already dislike me for being too messy of a roommate or something. This doesn’t force me to respond defensively, and I still have the option of responding with genuine curiosity “Wait, what? What leads you to think it was me?”.
What’s your response? Not “I have security camera footage proving it”. Maybe “It’s just the kind of thing you’d do. You’re the one here who doesn’t respect rules”. But I can keep chasing this down, so long as I’m curious: “I don’t follow. Why is this something you think I’d do? What rules?”. Maybe from there to “Wait, you thought that was a *rule*, not a *request* to be less messy?”, which gets quite a bit harder for you to hold onto if indeed there never was any rule. Maybe “Do you actually think that messiness is correlated with thievery, even after conditioning on honesty? Do you think you have reason to believe I’m dishonest?”.
So long as I’m genuinely trying to understand your perspective and not trying to make you look stupid and not credible, it’s hard to avoid getting into why you believe what you believe, and learning whether your initial conclusions were fair, impartial, and justified. Basically, by maintaining strict openness to the evidence, it takes away any motivation and justification you might have had for being unfair to me.
But it’s very often the case that people don’t have reason to feel that secure, and have cause to believe that at least part of their audience will jump to conclusions, have all kinds of hostile motives, be inclined to treat one party’s word as intrinsically more trustworthy than the other’s, not have the time or interest to really think it through, etc..
Yes, this is often the case, and it does make navigating these things securely quite difficult at times. This complicates things, but I don’t think it changes the conclusion at all.
I think the first thing to note here is that the bar isn’t “Is there zero chance of secure response failing to exonerate me?” but “Is the secure response less likely to exonerate me?”. Because you can’t ever guarantee zero chance of anything, and the question you actually have to decide on is “Which is my better option here?”.
And when you judge by that bar, defensive insecurity doesn’t come out looking too hot. Because none of those additional difficulties go away just because you flinch defensively. If you proclaim “I didn’t do it! Don’t believe him!” to a hostile audience, for example, that’s not going to automatically cause your audience’s hostile motives to melt away and think “Ah, he didn’t do it!”. In addition to all their other ammunition, now they have “See, he’s getting defensive about it. Guilty conscience!”.
Beyond that, we’d have to get into what’s driving this hostility and these unfair jumps to conclusions—because it’s something. Returning to the cookie jar hypothetical, maybe if I would have been more clearly open to your upset about the mess, it never would have gotten to where you were accusing me of taking cookies from the cookie jar in the first place.
It just depends on the extent to which you can expect the person to have noticed the problems with their own belief structure and have brought them back into coherence, if innocent.
Quoting my previous conclusion here, I don’t think you can actually expect people to notice and fully cohere their belief structures, in general. It’s really hard, and a lot of work, so the default expectation is that there will be quite a lot of ultimately unfounded insecurity driving defensiveness over true innocence.
At the same time, the end of the road of reflection is still security and openness about the evidence when truly innocent and well intentioned. And that matters both because it’s the trail sign to follow when we find ourselves innocent and insecure, and because it’s the trail to help others down when we suspect they are.
Defensiveness isn’t proof that someone isn’t confidence in their innocence, because as you say, “it’s enough for them to be afraid that others might believe them guilty”. At the same time, what justifies that fear?
Say you bump into someone in public and they act like you’re a jerk for it. You could react defensively and say “I’m not a jerk, YOU are a jerk you jerk!”. Or you could just say “I’m sorry about that. Are you okay? I screwed up by looking the other way because I heard someone call my name, and I hadn’t seen you there. I guess I need to stop before looking in the future, even if the path looks clear.”
The latter isn’t “defensive” and also does nothing to defend against the accusations directly. But by owning up to everything you can find that you did wrong, you’re demonstrating that you’re not a jerk. And in the process of doing that, it necessarily comes out that “everything you did wrong” isn’t much, and that the other fool walked in front of you without looking himself. So now he looks like a jerk, and you look innocent. Which obviously was what was going to happen, since we knew from the start that you’re not a jerk so of course that’s what the evidence is going to point to. The difference is between “Don’t listen to that! The evidence will mislead you!” and “The totality evidence can’t make me look bad unless I am bad, so lets look at the evidence”.
When someone is showing you a fear that looking at the evidence will leave you thinking they’re bad, this implies a belief that they are indeed bad—at least by your interpretation, which is obviously the one that matters to you.
This belief isn’t necessarily reflectively coherent, and people often flinch out of insecurity even when their beliefs would predictably cohere to “innocent”, but it’s also not crazy to see someone implying that you might think they’re guilty if you were to look at the evidence, and take this as (imperfect) evidence of guilt. Because the only way that fear can be reflectively stable is if they are guilty. It just depends on the extent to which you can expect the person to have noticed the problems with their own belief structure and have brought them back into coherence, if innocent.
I suspect that The Art really does contain solutions that aren’t super distant or high-tech.
I notice that you’re reaching for it too.
It’s promising that despite Said’s criticisms of NVC, and that you’re doing exactly what you described as the thing “something like” NVC, it’s going quite well so far. That’s a harder test, but when you get the principles right, things work regardless. It doesn’t matter if Said’s stance is “NVC is about status plays” because you aren’t doing status plays, and it shows.
Respect.
I’ve done this. I was kinda sorta trying out polyphasic sleeping, but the real driver was that I wanted to learn how to fall asleep because I was pretty bad at it. It turned out to be very very interesting and useful.
The single biggest thing I learned from that experience is what it feels like to be “asleep”. My thoughts would slow to a stop during the 20 minute naps, but I’d often retain awareness the whole time. I’d lose my sense of time because there was just nothing happening to count as the tick of a clock. At first I thought “I didn’t fall asleep” because there was no gap in consciousness, but after a couple days doing quite well on “no sleep” I realized that my model of sleep wasn’t adding up. At a LW meetup one time I had heard an experienced meditator describe having the same experience while asleep and I couldn’t imagine it at the time, so it was neat to experience it first hand.
The interesting thing about this is that having the thought “Ugh, I’m still not asleep” isn’t actually proof that the thought is correct. If you take “I’m aware of my surroundings” to be proof of being awake, then you can actually wake yourself up by falsely concluding that you’re awake. This cuts through a lot of self-fulfilling insomnia, because instead of stressing about not being asleep yet, it’s “I don’t really know if I’m asleep, and there isn’t really a hard line anyway” and “Worrying about this is actually the action of waking up, so that’d be dumb, lol”. So you can just lie there without generating additional thoughts about how you’re not asleep yet, and that can be a big help.
The other thing that it gave me is an explicit understanding of what falling asleep is. I’m just letting my thoughts spool down. Instead of opening 1.2 new tabs per tab on your mental browser and dealing with a tab explosion, open 0.8. That doesn’t mean it’s easy if you’re excited and have much to think about, but also, sometimes there are things worth getting excited about and thinking about instead of sleeping. Facing this question directly at least gives you a handle on the problem and a way to pull on the lever towards sleep, when there’s reason to motivate it.
If you have difficulties falling asleep and the slack to burn a week doing this, it might be a good investment. But I don’t think it’s necessary in order to put in deliberate practice falling asleep. You do it every night anyway, so every night you can track what’s keeping your mind racing. You can notice if it’s driven by anxieties that turn out to be false, or by not making an explicit decision about what’s worth thinking about when, or what. You can notice which emotions, if any, start to bubble up once you stop distracting yourself, and whether that might be a driver for these incessant thoughts.
And when things are sorted out, just practice lying down noticing that you don’t have to think anymore. No need to worry about not sleeping. The exciting projects can wait for tomorrow. For now, you can just rest. You don’t have to do anything. And notice how nice that can feel :P
Also, melatonin. I’m not sure how much credit to give to melatonin vs learning better how to sleep, but my sleep latency used to be close to an hour or more and now my Oura ring says I average ten minutes and there’s basically zero struggle anymore.
We can be, if you want. And I certainly wouldn’t blame you for wanting to bail after the way I teased you in the last comment.
I do want to emphasize that I am sincere in telling you that I hope it doesn’t eat at you too much, and that I hoped for the conversation to get somewhere interesting.
If you turn out to be a remarkably good sport about the teasing, and want to show me that you can represent how you were coming off to me, I’m still open to that conversation. And it would be a lot more respectful, because it would mean addressing the reason I couldn’t take your previous comment seriously.
No expectations, of course. Sincere best wishes either way, and I hope you forgive me for the tease.
Okay, cool.
What would that look like, to you? Last comment it sounded like you were saying “More emphasis on the concrete take home lessons rather than burying in footnotes”, but in this comment it sounds like you’re pointing more at the motivation aspect which seems quite different—and more in line with my focus. I definitely can’t pass your ITT yet.
I’ll share a little more about how I’m trying to do that, and maybe you can help me figure out how to do it better.
It comes back to our earlier discussion on expectation=intention=setpoint. Summarizing, you were pointing at the value of providing directions in helping people get from point A to point B, while I’m focused more on getting their intent set in the first place. I don’t disagree about the importance of knowing how to get from A to B, but I find that like you’re saying this time, a lot of the time motivation is limiting. If people aren’t actually aiming at point B then they won’t follow directions. If they are, then they’re likely to ask for directions as needed. The opening example of the girl in the jacuzzi illustrates this well, as my object level advice wasn’t anything her friends couldn’t have told her, but the difference is that she asked for my input and dismissed theirs.
It’s the same thing, on the meta level. Part of what I’m trying to do is motivate readers by demonstrating how solvable these things are and making more concrete and tangible that sense that more is possible (amusingly enough, the top comment chain there is about how nice it’d be to have akrasia solved), and part of what I’m trying to do is provide the compass and sextant needed to start navigating towards a solution. When you say “reading it motivated me to look at my procrastination more as a puzzle to be solved than something that’s given”, and “The sequence suggest that if I do procrastinate, then there’s likely a reason why I’m procrastinating so applying the sequence to the problem was about looking for that reason”, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m going for.
But it’s not just that. When I hurt my foot and needed the prodding to try that technique, I had some faulty presuppositions that kept me from doing that stuff by default, which is why I needed the prodding and even the “technique”. By the time I helped the kid in the fire poker situation, I had some insights which deflated some of these presuppositions, but I still had no idea how to apply any of the insights I’d learned to help this kid. Yet this lack of understanding of how to apply the insights did not stop me from behaving in accordance with my new perspective, and this new perspective brought about different results. Object level application of these insights can actually lead meta level understanding of what is being applied and why it works.
I’m aiming to directly undermine those presuppositions and begin dissolving the connective tissue that gets people stuck in the first place, by showing how things that look like “psychological problems” even in difficult or “impossible” situations turn out over and over to be disagreements propped up by unseen flinches. Like, “Maybe this problem isn’t a given”. “Maybe things ain’t as they seem. What would that be like?”. Trying to cast doubt on the pretense of certainty with which these disconnects are held together, so that when it gets to the footnote of “Maybe listen to yourself?” it doesn’t take suspending people up in the air to get through. Or having a crush on someone, or whatever.
The idea isn’t just that you turn towards existing problems as puzzles, it’s also that next time there’s something that would have gone over threshold, the idea that there are things you “can’t get yourself to do” feels less credible and less enticing, and is less likely to ensnare you. So next time it comes out as “Ugh. I hate working on patents”, naturally evokes “What’s so bad about working on patents?”, and applies the same active ingredient of “turn towards the objection” without ever needing to understand how to apply these insights to akrasia—because nothing will stick long enough to earn the diagnosis. Noticing what’s happening differently is important too because that can help us be intentional about the direction we choose to move, but it doesn’t have to lead application.
I’m not sure how to give more emphasis to things like “Actually think through whether the objections your mind comes up might have merit after all” without detracting from the emphasis on “These things which we’re so sure are intractable actually melt away when we aim true”. And for my friend, if I were to try to convey the former before the latter has sunk in, and without suspending her above concrete, she’d have concluded “Tried that, didn’t work”, and left with nothing more than immunization against the solution. If things aren’t going to come across 100% clearly, I’d rather people like her leave correct in thinking “Okay but I don’t know how to put this to use” than incorrect in thinking “I do”. Because at least the former at least leaves room for the desire to ask for directions.
Separately from how well it’s working out, does that help make more sense of the choices I’ve made in presentation?
How would you do it, from the writer’s side? What would you like to see/what would make you more likely to put things to practice, from the reader’s side? I’ve tried to write in the way that I would have liked to see as a reader, but that doesn’t necessarily match well to the actual readers.