"Taking your environment as object" vs "Being subject to your environment"

So far I have said there are three ways of getting perspective on your environment: leaving it, imagining yourself into someone outside of it, and assuming that it's hostile.

What are some other ways of getting a better perspective on your environment?

Imagining myself explaining the environment to someone else, or literally doing that. That's also a very useful technique for checking understanding, and I think it uses the same mechanism: when you read a paper, you feel a sense of familiarity and obviousness that makes you think you understand. But if you have to actually explain it, completely, then you can't really do that anymore.

I tend to do that a lot, be it for "getting outside of my head/environnment" or for learning.

I think you may mean taking your environment as object? The typical idea behind a subject-object shift is that first you are subject to a lens, then you can take it as an object to look at.

Seems like the first step is to notice that your environment is X, as opposed to some other hypothetical Y. Then you can ask "why is it X instead of Y?"

Without the alternatives, even imaginary, the question about the environment sounds like "why X is X?", which invites the answer "tautologically, duh". The world is what it is, because that's kinda what "reality" means, right?

With alternatives, the world is a mechanism. We can ask what forces are moving its state towards X, instead of Y or Z. Is it a consequence of some natural forces, so even if we could magically switch the world to Y or Z, it would gradually chance back to X? If this is the case, then we have some interesting natural forces to study. Maybe we can use them to overcome them, like the knowledge of gravity allows us to construct an airplane. Or maybe it is a Schelling point, so if we could magically switch the world to Y (and brainwash everyone into believing it was always Y), it would remain Y. Then, who knows, maybe we could artificially establish Y as a Schelling point of some smaller environment, and see if we can make it expand from there.

Sometimes the environment is adversarial, in the sense that it was shaped by people following their selfish incentives, willing to make trade-offs whenever less utility for you means more utility for them. It can help to remind yourself that them following their incentives is a choice [LW · GW], not a law of nature.

For example, whenever you deal with a helpful employee of a corporation or a bureaucracy telling you "I am really sorry, I wish I could help you, but what you want is not allowed by our rules" (framing the situation as: people are friendly, but what you want is simply impossible), you might want to remember that those rules were also set up by some humans... and if they end up hurting you and helping the corporation/bureaucracy, who knows, maybe that was exactly the intention (reframing the situation as: the friendly humans are just a facade for the unfriendly humans). Like, maybe there is a good reason for the rule, maybe it prevents some abuse; but maybe the rule is actually there to abuse you. Or it can be somewhere in the middle, like some abuse is probably unavoidable, and someone with the power decided that it should be you who pays the cost.

Excellent post.

I could easily spin either a narrative where I'm totally missing this or totally good at it. I'm a bit confused at that.

I have a very strong identity and continuity over time. I recently re-read the SSC review of House of God -- that's the post where Scott talks about how he recalls high school fondly despite knowing he felt differently about it at the time (and mentions that as a teen he was surrounded by adults who recalled their own high school experiences fondly). I don't seem to have any delusions about high school: I remember that at the time, I wanted to write a manifesto about why it sucks so much (modeled after the communist manifesto). My recollection remains consistent with that.

My opinion about living in cities remains the same over time; no difference of opinion upon leaving.

One possibility is that I never break out of my narrative. This is consistent with how consistent my identity tends to be over time. 

The other possibility is that I "pre-break-out" of my narrative. This is consistent with the feeling of unease I have about following some social scripts, especially ones which "balance cons with pros" like you mention. It's also more consistent with the fact that I occasionally do explicit thought experiments about leaving places.

But I think my thought experiments are "abstract" rather than "concrete" in some sense, like taking the outside view, what a person hearing the story might say. Reading your post made me try the inside view version, which felt much different.  

It's plausible that a lot of my thinking about cities, high school, etc, was and remains "outside-view" in this way, and my resistance to participate in narratives such as high-school-was-great is actually based on outside-view thinking ("that sounds like something someone might say regardless of whether it was true").

So, yeah, my new narrative is that I have a really hardcore outside-view version of this thing, which I execute kind of constantly, but was lacking the inside-view version of the thing, which your post somehow prompted me to try.

I feel like the easiest way to begin is by noticing someone's faux pa. "We don't do it here" means "we here" have collectively agreed on something else, but one can assume a role to develop some attitude to the agreed-upon thing. Be a lord and view it as yours to govern; be a word and build it through a multitude of connections; be a crook and parasitize on it; be a cook and enrich it; be a trader and "just deal with it" etc.

The trick is to remember what role it was, why you chose it, and what this says about your environment.

This post points at a core of why I like to talk about the subject-object relationship with respect to developmental psychology [? · GW]: the shifting of things from one side of the lens of intentionality to the other seems to be the key driver of development.

I think this post mostly intends to focus on the "imagine you're a space alien; see the world with fresh eyes" type thing, which Feynman talks about. I see this as a tool for transitioning from cook mindset to to chef mindset.

But I already do that all the time. The valuable thing I got out of the post was the more local version, where you think about your city/job/diet/etc.