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comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2017-10-08T21:57:08.993Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

So, this is a topic I've thought a lot about and struggled with quite a bit.

For my psychological health and well-being, having an internal locus of control is hugely positive. But I've found that the biggest cost to restoring an internal locus of control in a given domain is often social punishment. I.e. there are many situations where I am interacting with an institution or an individual that will try to make me feel like they are in charge, and when I display a lack of submissiveness or appear to have an internal locus of control, that institution/individual will punish me.

I think the traffic cop example is a good one. Some police officers will be happy to just go by the book and give you a traffic ticket, even if you seem totally unshaken by being pulled over. Other officers however might react very negatively to you displaying no remorse or shame and might increase their punishment, or at least implicitly socially threaten you, if you display an internal locus of control.

Another environment I have experienced this a lot in is university. My strategy while being at university has historically always been one of putting in minimal effort to hit the target grade that I want. This has often meant that when a problem set was assigned that required large amounts of grunt-work but only mattered comparatively little for the final grade, I would simply not complete it. In my experience, most university professors and TA's do not react well if you tell them in a calm and matter-of-fact way that you didn't do your homework because it didn't matter enough for your grade. And so I ended up being conditioned to feel large amounts of remorse and guilt when I didn't do my homework (while still not doing the homework), so that the TAs and professors would punish me less and give me more lenience.

I think those social situations are the environments in which I most commonly don't have an internal locus of control, and which have the biggest psychological tax on me. And I honestly don't know what to do about them. My strategy has mostly been to avoid those social environments as much as possible, but that does constrain the environments in which I work and the projects I can take on quite a bit, so often I end up in those environments anyways.

Replies from: Conor Moreton, weft, Zvi
comment by Conor Moreton · 2017-10-08T22:47:52.479Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't mean to pooh-pooh your objection by having a knee-jerk suggestion—I take as given that you have high odds of having already thought of this, and that even implementing it doesn't necessarily empty your point of all of its strength, but:

Here, what I think I do is view the traffic officer and the university professor as additional pieces of the environment that I need to take as given, and treat them as input/output devices from which I can get more-or-less optimal responses. So I may signal remorse to the traffic cop that doesn't actually equate to suffering in my soul, because I understand that's part of the toll system.

Ditto with the professor—it's hard to do this without outright lying, and I strongly approve of a norm of "always say true things," but I would try to say words that indicated awareness of a large cost, apology for the damage to the flow of the curriculum, acceptance of the standard penalty of a lower grade, and intentions to continue to improve my ability to prioritize and juggle multiple responsibility (along with acknowledgement of their sense that my priorities ought be different relative to their class). For me, some mix of all of that tends to produce a mollification of their response, because it doesn't leave them feeling (given their sense that this should be a blow to me) that I haven't heard and understood how serious this is.

Put another way, I try to acknowledge the absolute seriousness of the effects of my actions and their consequences, without broadcasting that I find them to be relatively unserious because my priorities are arranged differently. Usually, acknowledging absolute costs seems to be enough for me to dodge the punishment you're referencing, and I don't have to make any reference at all to the fact that I refuse to suffer on a relative level.

Replies from: habryka4
comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2017-10-08T23:06:43.359Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think this is a reasonable suggestion that will help many people with the same problem. I also think it helped me when I adopted a somewhat similar algorithm, though it didn't solve the bulk of the problem for me (it turns out to be very hard to acknowledge the absolute seriousness in a way that does threaten my internal locus of control and still satisfies the counterparts need to feel in control of the situation).

I might write a whole post about this at some point, since I think this specific problem has been the cause of at least 10-20% (and possibly more like 40%) of the emotional stress I've experienced over the last few years, and so I've put a lot of optimization power and thought into this.

comment by weft · 2017-10-08T22:53:00.981Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It seems like the usual solution to this is to ACT appropriately contrite to the police officer/ teacher / boss, while maintaining whichever internal narrative you prefer.

Replies from: habryka4, lahwran
comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2017-10-08T23:01:03.647Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think the costs of lying/deceiving in this way are very high, even in circumstances like the one mentioned above. In addition to that, the abundance of method-acting in modern actor communities also makes me think that the way people usually "act" things like this, is to make themselves actually believe the thing they are trying to signal, at least temporarily, which still comes with much of the same emotional costs.

comment by the gears to ascension (lahwran) · 2017-10-08T23:04:00.894Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't think humans are able to act in a way that can fully and reliably convince others of lies of this type unless they are either willing to sacrifice important parts of themselves or are willing to half ass the lying such that it doesn't really look like what the true emotion of submissiveness would. Humans are mindreaders because Humans are mindwriters - they express their emotions on their faces, in the patterns of small twitches, etc - and taking an internal locus of control of your mindwriting that decouples it from your actual emotions seems incredibly dangerous to me.

(I upvoted you because I felt that you were making a good point that I had considered making. This objection was why I decided not to.)

comment by Zvi · 2017-10-09T23:22:19.332Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You could think of this as Authority Figure trying to convince you that they are in charge. Another narrative is that they are reacting to you showing that your cost model is out of whack and trying to fix your incentives, rather than being about authority. I agree it's not the whole story, but it's also not not the story.

When the cop pulls you over and notices you don't feel bad about speeding, that means you're deciding when to speed purely based on expected fines. Most people decide when to speed based on a combination of expected fines, respect for norms and authority figures, fear and habit and so forth. A system that got you to speed the right amount would get them to speed far less than the right amount, so the system should punish you more to restore your incentives.

The homework case is similar. You're 'supposed' to do your homework because it will help your education, not solely because of your grade, so when you're observed (incorrectly, they feel, or they wouldn't have assigned the work) zero intrinsic value on the work and not enough value on the grade incentive, they notice that your incentives aren't strong enough to get you to do what they think you should do, which means they again should punish you more.

I mention this in the hopes that this might help you make more compromises in terms of how you present yourself, while making less of a sacrifice of your feeling of locus of control.

comment by Elo · 2017-10-20T01:22:32.668Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

As was pointed out to me the last time I posted about locus of control. Playing with your locus of control is in itself an internal locus of control move. If you were in external locus of control you would not be able to play with your locus of control.

comment by Slimepriestess (Hivewired) · 2017-10-08T22:55:36.556Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

There have been a bunch of different potential names thrown around for this phenomena, and narrativemancy always seemed like the weakest contender out of them. The Thing definitely involves narratives, don't get me wrong, but narrativemancy is just...unaesthetic, and I feel like it misses something?

I generally refer to this idea as metamancy. I do also feel as if your approach, while solid, tends to overgeneralize, and there are times where it is instrumentally useful to temporarily believe in things that don't cleave to reality at all.

Replies from: habryka4, Conor Moreton
comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2017-10-08T23:02:22.856Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

While I agree with narrativemancy not being a great word for it, I think I dislike metamancy even more. Just a datapoint in the search for the best word for this.

comment by Conor Moreton · 2017-10-09T02:30:01.473Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I have a friend who recently complained to me about systemic misuse of the stem "meta-" and so now I'm unable to determine whether I would have been neutral or positive toward your suggestion. :/

Replies from: lahwran
comment by the gears to ascension (lahwran) · 2017-10-09T02:35:37.586Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm curious what examples you'd give of misuse. I certainly agree with overuse, but I only know of "metarationality" as an example of actual misuse.

edit: wait no it's not, also I just updated hard towards approving of metarationality

comment by Neuroff · 2017-10-20T01:05:09.373Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

In my experience, I have a pretty strong and consistently internal locus of control and also am able to feel compelled to change systems that are wrong / suboptimal. (I.e. it feels like I avoid the caveat you describe.)

There's a blurring between (having an internal locus of control) ~ (accepting things the way they are and just changing your attitude). This feels like Bucket Error territory.

I might try going a meta level up and realizing that I can prioritize which suboptimal / unfair systems are, in fact, worth trying to fix and choosing to (at least for now) accept the ones that I don't have the resources to fix. (This includes a Growth Mindset into the Internal Locus of Control narrative.)

For each encounter of a suboptimal system, I can then think:

Gah, this is horrible... am I in a privileged position to fix this? Do I want to spend resources to fix this?

If yes, I make attempts to fix.
If no, I realize this is a battle for others to fight (in which case I feel like I have personally delegated this task away from myself) or that I can fight the battle another day (in which case I have delegated this to my future self).
And delegation counts as keeping an internal locus of control, at least for me. Maybe this isn't true for others.

If delegation feels like losing your locus of control, I think this is a problem that can also be fixed too! Mostly by putting oneself in situations where trust+cooperation is the optimal move.

comment by Neuroff · 2017-10-20T00:36:38.342Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I like the phrase "having an internal locus of control." I'm wanting more propagation of this concept of "locus of control," and I'd probably read any future posts with "Locus of Control" in its title.

(OTOH, I'm not a fan of "narrativemancy," which to me connotes magic hand-waving which further connotes trickster magic, lying, and wool-over-eyes-pulling.)