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No, that does not sound like a fair characterization. My claims are cover a lot more than "it doesn't always happen" and yours sure don't seem limited to "it doesn't never happen".
Here's the motivating question for this whole essay:
You asked why people who "believe in" avoiding nonmarital sex so frequently engage in and report badly regretting it
and here's part of your conclusion
At this point the behavior you describe should no longer be perplexing.
You're talking about this as if it needs falsification of preferences to explain and my stance is that no, this is default. Any time people have to face anything as complex as sexuality, even if people are doing their best to pro-socially guide people this is necessarily what's going to happen. Perversions can sneak in too, and I don't deny that they exist, but postulating perversions is absolutely not needed in order to explain the data you're seeking to explain.
To narrow things down a bit, we can return to the original comment:
Sometimes people profess or try to reveal a preference for X, as a response to coercive pressures that are specifically motivated by prior underlying preferences for anti-X. This is what I'm calling preference inversion.
I don't disagree with this.
My intuition is that generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others' preferences as calculated prior to such influences. I don't know whether there are other sorts of analogous distorting factors nearly all reasonable people would not like to satisfy upon reflection, but in general, I'm using the term "intrinsic preferences" to refer to whatever's left over after all such generally appealing adjustments.
It's this second part I was taking issue with.
Here, you're talking about what generally happens, not what "sometimes" happens, and I don't think "intrinsic preferences" is defined well enough to do what you want it to do here. I don't think it can be, unless you introduce more concepts, because I don't think "external vs intrinsic" can do justice to this multidimensional space no matter how you cleave it.
Part of this is because what counts as "external" cannot be well defined. If daddy yells at me to not drink, that sounds external, and my revealed preferences are likely to revert when he's not looking. But maybe being a reasonable person, upon reflection I'd agree with him. Does that make it "not a preference inversion"? If my boss threatens to fire me if I show up drunk, that sounds external too. But that's not very different than my boss reminding me that he can only afford to hire productive people -- and that's starting to sound like "just reality". Certainly if a doctor tells me that my liver is failing, that sounds like "just reality" and "internal". But it's external to my brain, and maybe if someone offers me an artificial liver I'd revert to my "intrinsic preferences"?
Our preferences necessarily depend on the reality we find ourselves embedded in, and cannot exist in isolation except perhaps in the highest abstraction (e.g. "I prefer to continue existing" or something), so the concept of "intrinsic preferences" for concrete things necessarily falls apart. What doesn't fall apart is the structure of incoherence in our own preferences.
We're constantly trying to shape and reshape the reality that others live in such that their revealed preferences given this reality satisfy our own. Part of this is making laws forbidding theft, how we indoctrinate in church, our hiring and firing decisions, how we inform our friends, etc. Some of these actions are purely cooperative, others are pure defections, and many are somewhere in between. Often we have fairly superficial pressure applied which results in fairly superficial changes in revealed preferences which easily revert, but that superficiality is fundamentally a property of the person containing the preferences not the person applying the pressures. There is indeed skill in facilitating deeper shifts in preferences to better match reality, and this is indeed a good thing to pursue, but the "intrinsic vs external" binary obscures the interplay between shifting reality, shifting perceptions of reality, and shifting preferences -- and therefore most of what is going on.
To use your example, the positive value of marital intimacy is inherently intertwined with the power of sexuality, the importance of getting sexuality right, and therefore the badness of sexuality done inappropriately. There is all sorts of room for this guidance to be given skillfully or clumsily, purely or corruptly, for it to be received coherently or superficially, in concordance with reality or not, and everywhere in between. Like you've noticed, there isn't always a legible distinction between the conventional conservative Christians who pull this off well and those that do more poorly.
My own perception, is that almost none of our preferences can be cleanly described as "intrinsic" or "externally pressured", or as "valid" or "invalid". There's just differing degrees of coherence and differing degrees of fit to reality. The average case of conventional conservative Christians pushing against non-marital sex, and the average case of the person "believing in" and regretting not living by their "beliefs", is in between the picture Christianity portrays, and the one you portray of falsified preferences. Because the ground truth is in between "nonmarital sex is always bad" and "nonmarital sex is always as good as it seems".
Generally, when I interact with people on the topic of sexuality, I see people who don't know what their preferences resolve to with regards to non-marital sex -- and whose genuine preferences would resolve in different ways depending on the culture they're embedded within and the opportunities they have. I could sell either picture, and make it look "intrinsic", if I'm willing to sweep the right things under the rug in order to do so. Most people's belief structures surrounding sex (and most things) are shoddily built. I could argue for their destruction, and destroy them. I could argue for their utility, and preserve them. The optimal solution necessarily involves seeing both the utility and imperfections, both a degree of destruction and of reconstruction.
Like you said, this isn't just theoretical. This is a thing I've actually done when it has come up. I can give examples if it'd help
The problem there isn't the Econ-101, it's the fool in the arm chair.
You can't just say "I have a simple armchair argument that no one could ever demand sexual favors", because that's not even a valid prediction of Econ-101. Maybe the person does want to provide sexual favors. Maybe they even want to provide sexual favors and then also claim purity and victimhood status to gullible people. That's entirely consistent with Econ-101.
Or maybe they aren't productive enough to earn their wage otherwise, and their job is better conceptualized as half prostitute. That's also entirely consistent with Econ-101.
If we have situations that look like "This person didn't want it"+"this person is productive enough to earn their wage", then if we also have Econ-101 we notice a contradiction. We can't just assume the bottom line that Econ-101 is somehow wrong without finding an identifiable error and be justified in our assumptions. Neither can we assume people will necessarily do what's in their best interest and assume "This person wanted it, actually", without finding an identifiable error in the perception that they didn't.
There's an actual puzzle to be solved here, and we can't write the bottom line first and also get to the right answer on anything but chance.
I agree that there is a meaningful difference, but I disagree that they're so cleanly separable that we can say that it is one or the other.
I don't teach my kid that sugar is evil and I give her the chance to learn how much sugar she wants for herself. I try to minimize coercion because it impairs learning, and I want my kid to actually integrate the information so that she can make coherent rather than fractured decisions.
At the same time, I want to protect her from things that are beyond her capability to handle and learn from. We don't want our children to grow up with sexual shame that continues into marriage, but if the kindergarten teacher starts teaching kids about how great sex is and offering to show them, then do you take a stance of "well, I don't want my five year old to think sex is bad..." or do you say "Absolutely not."?
Information sharing and force are both useful tools, and while it's better to lean on the former as much as possible it is important to be able to fall back on the latter. People just don't have a good idea of how to do the former (and are kinda 'sinful' themselves) so they over-rely on the latter.
Using force (including social shame) is a symmetric weapon so it is more easily (even unintentionally) corrupted into serving less pure motivations, but it also serves pure motivations when necessary.
The question of "Does the pressure help people better achieve their other goals, or create persistent internal conflicts?" is important, but messy.
Which people? Which pressure? If I know two people who grew up in Christian households, and one of them grew up in a strict household, married a virgin and is happy and without sexual shame, and another grew up in a less strict household and had premarital sex but felt bad about it, then how do we judge Christianities "anti sex" norms here?
I'd say we can notice which are more effective at bringing about good outcomes, and which have more pure intent and are heavier on the information to pressure ratio. But we cannot separate them. I know some people who absolutely reject the pressure -- and then come to learn on their own the value it was pointing at -- and other people who are handled delicately with pure information and then shame themselves for not learning to like sweets in the optimal way instantly.
It's kinda a mess.
You're arguing that attempts to decrease candy consumption are coercive rather than informative, and are in ways counterproductive. I agree with this. You take this to mean it's not a "good faith attempt", but as a general rule people don't know how to do any better than this.
It's true that people can appeal to "sinfully delicious" to sell you their dessert, but why don't broccoli salesmen do the same? Why not toothbrush salesmen? If "Sinful" means "good", actually, and it originates with salesmen, then why isn't everything "sinful"?
The answer is that it didn't originate with salesmen. Dessert salesmen are leaning on the preexisting "Anything that feels this good must be a sin", so the question is where that came from. One obvious explanation is that things that feel that good tend to be pursued a lot, and there are contexts in which those pursuits are less desirable than it may seem.
I do withhold sweets (and television) when I have the intuition that he's asking for them for the wrong reasons, in a confused way, and won't either get what he wants from them or learn efficiently from the experience.
Even you notice that he will ask for sweets for the wrong reasons and that you don't always expect him to learn efficiently from experience. That's where the pressure to coerce your kid into eating less sweets comes from.
You're smarter and wiser than most, and so you're able to teach your kid these things more effectively and with transmission of neuroses, and that's great. I try at that as well, and have noticed some of the same things (though not all; I'll have to play with the 'appetizer' bit).
I'm not arguing that the things you're pointing at don't exist, just pointing at the fact that people don't know how to do any better. We can flip the sign on this and look at how people handle teaching their kids about getting their shots at the doctor. People want their kids to be okay with it because it's an "anti-sin" in that it in reality it is better than it feels. That's why they try to tell kids "It's okay! It just feels like a little pinch!"
And these attempts are equally counterproductive, because as a general rule people don't know how to avoid teaching their own neuroses. I told my two year old that shots are bad and scary and that I was too scared so she needed to go first. She had fun showing me how to be brave, and only cried when she couldn't get a second shot.
The next year, she watched some cartoon made by incompetent but well meaning people that was aimed at showing kids that shots are okay, and relearned a fear of needles. Because all these people know how to teach is their own perspective, and that perspective is "Needles are terrifying but we mustn't admit it because we need to get our shots". So I had to start over.
As a society we notice things. We just suck at teaching them, and even our most good faith attempts are still counterproductively coercive and lacking in actionable information.
Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both "not be ill e.g. with diabetes" and "eat tasty things".
That sounds basically right to me, which is why I put effort into learning (and teaching) to enjoy the right things. I'm pretty proud of the fact that both my little girls like "liver treats".
Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average.
I think that's right, but also "more distance to failure" doesn't help so much if you use your newfangled automobile to cover that distance more quickly. It's easier to avoid failure, but also easier to fail. A gun makes it easier to defend yourself, and also requires you to grow up until you can make those calls correctly one hundred percent of the time. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.
I'll take the car, and the gun, and the society that trusts people with cars and guns and other technologically enabled freedoms. But only because I think we can aspire to such responsibilities, and notice when they're not met. All the enabling with none of the sobering fear of recklessness isn't a combination I'm a fan of.
With respect to the "why do you believe this" question on my previous comment about promiscuity being statistically linked with marital dissatisfaction, I'm not very good at keeping citations on hand so I can't tell you which studies I've seen, but here's what chatgpt found for me when I asked for studies on the correlation.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600089
https://unews.utah.edu/u-researcher-more-sex-partners-before-marriage-doesnt-necessarily-lead-to-divorce/
https://ifstudies.org/blog/testing-common-theories-on-the-relationship-between-premarital-sex-and-marital-stability
https://www.proquest.com/openview/46b66af73b830380aca0e6fbc3b597e3/1
I don't actually lean that hard on the empirical regularity though, because such things are complicated and messy (e.g. the example I gave of a man with a relatively high partner count succeeding because he took an anti-promiscuous stance). The main reason I believe that pills don't remove all the costs of promiscuity is that I can see some of the causal factors at work and have experience actually working with them to help women land happy stable relationships.
I object to the framing of society being all-wise,
Society certainly is not all-wise, and I did not frame it as such. But it is wiser than the person who thinks "Trying heroin seems like a good idea", and then proceeds to treat heroin as if it's the most important thing in the universe.
Is it wiser than you, in some limited way in some limited context that you are unaware of? Is it less wise, in other ways? I'd bet on "both" before either.
Consequently, I'd prefer "bunch of candy and no diabetes still" outcome, and there are some lines of research/ideas into how this can be done.
This isn't the eating your cake and having it too that you think it is.
Yes, computers allow us to do things we couldn't do before, and that's great. Before, you might have to choose between meeting with Bob in the north or Richard in the south, and technology enables you to have both. Great!
The thing is, neither meeting Bob nor Richard is a "sin". It's not a "thing you will be tempted to do due to shallow preferences" where society recognizes that those preferences are shallow and predictably lead to bad outcomes. Society wasn't all up in your business decisions telling you who to meet because it didn't trust you to make the obviously right one; that was on you.
Candy gluttony, like heroin use, is a sin. It's something that society knows is bad news, but will feel like good news to individuals, because individuals are myopic and lack the bigger picture. If you had lived a million lifetimes, and thrown away your life to heroin thousands of times, heroin wouldn't be so tempting because you'd know from experience that heroin ain't great. But you haven't, so you don't, and society has some wisdom to offer individuals here.
Candy consumption is the same thing, scaled down a little bit. You're not after the calories, the micronutrients, or anything real in the candy itself. You're after how it makes you feel. You're after the feeling of getting what you want, without thought about whether you want the right thing. In other words, you're wire-heading.
Pills that reduce the consequences for "sins" -- whether candy consumption, or heroin consumption, or nonmarital sex -- can be good. If you're going to die from syphilis because you were too dumb to listen to society, having some forgiveness can certainly be a good thing, and maybe you'll learn your lesson instead of just dying.
But if you think "Syphilis is treatable!" justifies all nonmarital sex, then you're gonna need a new type of pill soon.
And if you think that once you have BC then now all nonmarital sex is justified, then you're on track for a statistically less happy marriage.
It's not that options aren't often good, or even that options which reduce consequence of sin aren't good. I'm also not arguing that antibiotics and birth control don't open up options for good nonmarital sex, or that no one is with it enough to be able to reliably find them. Some people are; maybe you're one of them.
But technology is not a good alternative to good decision making and informed values. Waiting around for technology that doesn't exist yet instead of learning more about what is good now is a mistake. You get better results by learning what is good than by relying on technological crutches, and the way that this happens will often be difficult to foresee.
As an amusing anecdote relating to this, one of the more sexually successful men I know decided that he was no longer going to have sex with anyone but his future wife -- whom he had not yet met. I called bullshit, and bet him $100. Not long after he made that bet, I saw his disinterest in non-future-wife sex turn a "I like you and would have sex with you" level of attraction into a "I will do whatever it takes to marry you" level of attraction. It's hard to even conceptualize such moves from a shallow pleasure seeking mindset, and impossible to enact them. And yet, I'm quite confident that he wouldn't have been able to marry her otherwise, and that his alternative sex life would have been much worse even from a superficial pleasure seeking perspective. It's hard to do justice to so briefly, but that was a very strong move that led to a great marriage which wouldn't have worked otherwise, and no amount of technological crutches would have gotten him to where he is today.
that seems already solved with the concept of "commitment"?
You mean like... marriage? :p
In all seriousness, I'm not taking a "in marriage only!" stance here.
The success story I give above involved sex outside marriage as an active ingredient in more than one way, and could be used to argue against a strict "in marriage only!" stance. At the same time, it demonstrates value of "in marriage only" which has been lost in what the norm has become.
He was able to thread that needle and get unusually good results because he had both respect for and an understanding of traditional "in marriage only", and a strong enough rebellious streak to not let himself be bound by forces he didn't agree with. You can't get those results without respect for traditional wisdom, and neither can you get it by becoming slave to some pastor's clumsy interpretation of them.
The part of OP you quoted only covers part of what I'm saying. It's not just that we can be pressured into doing good things, it's also that we have no idea what our intrinsic desires will become as we learn more about they interact with each other and the world, and there is a lot of legitimate change in intrinsic preferences which are more reflectively stable upon sufficiently good reflection, but which nevertheless revert to the shallower preferences upon typical reflection because reflection is hard and people are bad at it.
"Reflectively stable in absence of coercive pressure" is very difficult to actually measure, so it's more of a hypothetical construct which is easy to get wrong -- especially since "absence of coercive pressure" can't actually exist, so we have to figure out which kinds of coercive pressure we're going to include in our hypothetical.
I don't think it's so simple at all.
If you start with the conclusion that sex is great, and anti-premarital sex campaigns are really just anti-you-procreating campaigns and therefore oppressive and bad, then sure. I don't think that's a fair assumption across the board (e.g. Amish as an existence proof of "something more"), but it certainly doesn't work for all preferences and it's generally not so clear.
Let's look at preference for eating lots of sweets, for example. Society tries to teach us not to eat too much sweets because it's unhealthy, and from the perspective of someone who likes eating sweets, this often feels coercive. Your explanation applied here would be that upon reflection, people will decide "Actually, eating a bunch of candy every day is great" -- and no doubt, to a degree that is true, at least with the level of reflection that people actually do.
However when I decided to eat as much sweet as I wanted, I ended up deciding that sweets were gross, except in very small amounts or as a part of extended exercise where my body actually needs the sugar. What's happening here is that society has a bit more wisdom than the candy loving kid, tries clumsily to teach the foolish kid that their ways are wrong and they'll regret it, and often ends up succeeding more in constraining behavior than integrating the values in a way that the kid can make sense of upon reflection.
So which preferences are "real"? The preference for candy or the preference for no candy and no diabetes? What you are calling "intrinsic preferences" is often just shallow preferences, which haven't yet been trained to reflect nuances of reality like "more of a good thing isn't always better" and "here's where it's good and here's where it's not good". There's preferences declared, preferences acted on, and preferences that will be regressed to in absence of guiding pressure. The declared preferences are generally going to align better with the coercive forces than the preferences that will be regressed to in absence of said pressure, but the preferences acted on can easily be more reflectively stable than those regressed to -- because all that takes is for the culture to be wiser than the individual, and the individual to not have caught up yet.
Returning to the case of nonmarital sex, of course it feels good -- just like candy feels good. There is something there that we need (namely "sex", and "calories"), but the question is over whether naïve indulgence across all contexts will result in blowing past Goodhart's warnings into more harm than good, and whether the "oppressive society" is actually forming you into a closer approximation of the reflectively sensible thing to do.
Societies pressures can end up perverted, but individual's intrinsic preferences start out perverted. Who is closer to reflectively stable, society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets, or the kid who wants to eat all the sweets? Society who aggressively shames nonmarital sex, or the teenager who wants to bone everyone?
As we mature, our desires change, and the degree to which reversion in absence of external pressures brings us closer to something truly reflectively stable depends on how much we've learned to separate overconsumption of sweets from appropriate consumption of sweets, and overconsumption of nonmarital sex to appropriate consumption. I think the answer depends too much on the specific (sub)culture and the specific individual at a specific time in their life to make any sweeping generalizations.
What are the failure rates? So, I would love to share data on the cases I haven’t (yet) been able to help… but I don’t know how?
1) How many cumulative hours have you spent on things where there has been no success and you guys aren't working together anymore on the issue? How does this compare to the number of hours which have resulted in success, and the number where the result is tbd? How many hours have resulted in partial or incremental success, without meeting agreed upon win criteria?
2) Of those where someone bailed how many times did they bail and how many times did you bail? There's some ambiguity here, but probably manageable. If you don't expect to hear back (e.g. because it's been two months), then count it as a bail. If you suggest that their problem isn't in your wheel house and they say "okay" rather than asking to try anyway, I'd count that one as on you.
3) To what extent have you "failed" because the initial goal turned out to be meaningfully mis-specified? E.g. someone wants to be more socially active in a certain group, only to realize their aversion to socializing in that group is actually well grounded, and they no longer want to achieve their initial goal?
4) To what extent have you caused problems by being too successful for the specified goal? E.g. The person actually ends up active in that social circle before realizing that they've been wasting their time doing so. Or maybe you help someone be more secure and they're happy for it, but it did lead to them losing a relationship when they spoke a little too freely.
I think there's not much to update. "Exploitation" is a shortcut for a particular, negative feeling we humans tend to naturally get from certain type of situation, and as I tried to explain, it is a rather simple thing. [...] *Before you red-flag 'unfair' as well: Again, I'm simply referring to the way people tend to perceive things, on average or so.
This is where I disagree. I don't think it is simple, partly because I don't think "unfair" is simple. People's perceptions of what is "unfair", like people's perceptions of anything else that means anything at all, can be wrong. If you better inform people and notice that their perceptions of what is "fair" changes, then you have to start keeping track of the distinction between "people's econ101 illiterate conceptions of fairness" and "the actual underlying thing that doesn't dissolve upon clear seeing".
For example, if we have a pie and we ask someone to judge if it's fair to split it two ways and give the third person no pie, then that person might say it's an unfair distribution because the fair distribution is 1/3,1/3,1/3. But then if we inform the judge that the third person was invited to help make the pie and declined to do so while the other people did all the work, then all of a sudden that 1/3,1/3,1/3 distribution starts to look less fair and more like a naïve person's view of what fairness is. The aversion isn't defined away, it dissolves once you realize that it was predicated on nonsense.
Another reason I don't think it's simple is because I don't think "exploitation" is just something people are just "unhappy about". It's a blaming thing. If I say you're exploiting me, that's an accusation of wrongdoing, and a threat of getting you lynched if people side with me strongly enough and you don't cave to the threats. I claim that if you say "exploitation is happening, but it's no one's fault and the employers aren't doing anything morally wrong" then you're doing something very different than what other people are doing when they talk about exploitation.
If there's a situation where a bunch of poor orphans are employed for 50c per grueling 16 hour work day plus room and board, then the fact that it might be better than starving to death on the street doesn't mean it's as great as we might wish for them. We might be sad about that, and wish they weren't forced to take such a deal. Does that make it "exploitation?" in the mind of a lot of people, yeah. Because a lot of people never make it further than "I want them to have a better deal, so you have to give it to them" -- even if it turns out they're only creating 50.01c/day worth of value, the employer got into the business out of the goodness of his heart, and not one of the people crying "exploitation!" cares enough about the orphans to give them a better deal or even make they're not voting them out of a living. I'd argue that this just isn't exploitation, and anyone thinking it is just hasn't thought things through.
On the other hand, if an employer demands sexual favors from his poor young woman employees, that rubs us the wrong way morally in a way that is easier to square with Econ 101. For one, if he's not demanding sexual favors from his male or ugly female employees, it suggests that maybe the work they do is enough to pay them for, and if we collectively say "Hey knock it off. You can't demand sexual favors from your employees" he might keep employing them and giving them a better deal. Maybe "this guy is doing something wrong by demanding sexual favors" actually holds up in a way that "this guy is doing something morally wrong by paying market wages" does not.
I think "what validity is left in our concept of 'exploitation' once we realize that people can't be obligated to pay whatever wage we'd like to close our eyes and believe is fair?" is a nontrivial question.
that the elephant in the room is that the rich should help the poor independently of the question of the labor exchange itself, i.e. that the overwhelming moral point is that, if we care, we should simply donate some of our resources.
"Should" is a red flag word, which serves to hide the facets of reality that generate sense of obligation. It helps to taboo it, and find out what's left.
If a rich person wants to help the poor, it will be more effective so simply help the poor -- i.e. with some of their own resources. Trying to distort the market leads to smaller gains from trade which could be used to help the poor. So far so good.
If someone else want's the rich person to help the poor with the rich person's resources, then with what will this rich person be motivated? If the goodness of their own hearts is enough, then this "someone else" is irrelevant, and not in the picture. If the rich person is to be motivated by gains from trade with someone else, then great. However, this is equivalent to the trade partners demanding more of the surplus and then donating it themselves, so again we're out of luck.
If we're talking about obligating the rich person to spend their resources on poor people, then they're de facto not the rich person's resources anymore, and we're distorting the market by force in order to get there. Now we have to deal with unfree trade and the lack of gains from trade that we could have had.
We can't just say "they coexist, no problem!", because to the extent that they're different frameworks we can't have both. You can have free trade and acknowledge exploitation only if you accept that exploitation is totally fine and fair -- at which point you're redefining the word "exploitation". The moment you try to stop someone from a kind of exploitation that can coexist with free trade, you're trying to stop free trade, with all the consequences of that.
That's not to say we have to give up on caring about all exploitation and just do free trade, but it does mean that if we want to have both we have to figure out how to update our understanding of exploitation/economics until the two fit.
Just as explicit games have rules, normal conversation has all kinds of implicit expectations.
If someone asks me a question, I should answer.
No rules = no rule saying that you have to answer.
In fact, if someone says that they are curious about my reaction to something, it’s totally fine for me to just say “okay” and then change the topic to something else that feels more interesting to me.
That said, it is also okay for the other to get annoyed by that and say it, which they might or might not.
So then is circling just the voicing of the ever-present fact that you're free to violate social expectations if you're willing to annoy people?
I understand and agree with the stuff about "when you don't take social expectations as binding that's simultaneously freeing and difficult", but that's already the choice you have. If circling doesn't include any rules against trying to enforce social expectations in the usual way, then it seems like circling can't change anything. Is it just the effects of making this fact common knowledge?
Here the two definitions of rationality diverge: believing the truth is now at odds with doing what works. It will obviously work better to believe what your friends and neighbors believe, so you won't be in arguments with them and they'll support you more when you need it.
This is only true if you can't figure out how to handle disagreements.
It will often be better to have wrong beliefs if it keeps you from acting on the even wronger belief that you must argue with everyone who disagrees. It's better yet to believe the truth on both fronts, and simply prioritize getting along when it is more important to get along.
If we had infinite cognitive capacity, we could just believe the truth while claiming to believe whatever works. And we could keep track of all of the evidence instead of picking and choosing which to attend to.
It's more fundamental than that. The way you pick up a glass of water is by predicting that you will pick up a glass of water, and acting so as to minimize that prediction error. Motivated cognition is how we make things true, and we can't get rid of it except by ceasing to act on the environment -- and therefore ceasing to exist.
Motivated cognition causes no epistemic problem so long as we can realize our predictions. The tricky part comes when we struggle to fit the world to our beliefs. In these cases, there's an apparent tension between "believing the truth" and "working towards what we want". This is where all that sports stuff of "you have to believe you can win!" comes from, and the tendency to lose motivation once we realize we're not going to succeed.
If we try to predict that we will win the contest despite being down 6-0 and clearly less competent, we will either have to engage in the willful delusion of pretending we're not less competent and/or other things (which makes it harder to navigate reality, because we're using a false map and can't act so as to minimize the consequences of our flaws) or else we will just fail to predict success altogether and be unable to even try.
If instead, we don't predict anything about whether we will win or lose, and instead predict that we will play to the absolute best of our abilities, then we can find out whether we win or lose, and give ourselves room to be pleasantly surprised.
The solution isn't to "believe the truth" because the truth has not been set yet. The solution is to pay attention to our anticipated prediction errors, and shift to finer grain modeling when the expected error justifies the cost of thinking harder.
The only remedy I know of is to cultivate enjoying being wrong. This involves giving up a good bit of one's self-concept as a highly intelligent individual. This gets easier if you remember that everyone else is also doing their thinking with a monkey brain that can barely chin itself on rationality.
If you stop predicting "I am a highly intelligent individual, so I'm not wrong!", then you get to find out if you're a highly intelligent individual, as well as all of the things that may provide evidence in that direction (i.e. being wrong about things). This much is a subset of the solution I offer.
The next part is a bit trickier because of the question of what "cultivate enjoying being wrong" means, and how exactly you go about making sure you enjoy a fundamentally bad and unpleasant thing (not saying this is impossible, my two little girls are excited to get their flu shots today).
One way to attempt this is to predict "I am the kind of person who enjoys being wrong, because that means I get to learn [which puts me above the monkeys that can't even do this]", which is an improvement. If you do that, then you get to learn more things you're wrong about.... except when you're wrong about how much you enjoy being wrong -- which is certainly going to become a thing, when it matters to you most.
On top of that, the fact that it feels like "giving up" something and that it gets easier when you remember the grading curve suggests more vulnerabilities to motivated thinking, because there's still a potential truth being avoided ("I'm dumb on the scale that matters") and because switching to a model which yields strictly better results feels like losing something.
So far as I can tell, the common line that bear spray is more effective than firearms is based on an atrociously bad reading of the (limited) science, which is disavowed by the author of the studies. In short, successfully spraying a bear is more effective at driving off curious bears than simply having a firearm is are at stopping charging bears, but when you're comparing apples to apples then firearms are much more effective.
Here's a pretty good overview: https://www.outsideonline.com/2401248/does-bear-spray-work. I haven't put a ton of work into verifying what he's claiming here, but it does match with the other data I've seen and I haven't seen anyone be nearly as careful and reach the opposite conclusion.
I'm the person JenniferRM mentioned. I'm also a physics guy, and got into studying/practicing hypnosis in ~2010/2011. I kinda moved on from "hypnosis" and drifted up the abstraction ladder, but still working on similar things and working on tying them together.
Anyway, here are my thoughts.
Suppose I really want her to be spinning clockwise in my mind. What might I do?
What worked for me is to focus on the foot alone and ignore the broader context so that I had a "clean slate" without "confirmatory experience" blocking my desired conclusion. When looking at the foot alone I experience it as oscillating rather than rotating (which I guess it technically is), and from there I can "release" it into whichever spin I intend by just kinda imagining that this is what's going on.
On the one hand, shifting intuitive models is surprisingly hard! You can’t necessarily just want to have a particular intuitive model, and voluntarily make that happen.
I actually disagree with this. It certainly seems hard, but the difficulty is largely illusory and pretty much disappears once you stop trying to walk through the wall and notice the front door.
The problem is that "wanting to have a particular model" isn't the thing that matters. You can want to have a particular model all you want, and you can even think the model is true all you want, but you're still talking about the statement itself not about the reality to which the statement refers. Even if you convince someone that their fear is irrational and they'd be better off not being scared, you've still only convinced them that their fear is irrational and they'd be better off not being scared. If you want to convince them that they are safe -- and therefore change their fear response itself -- then you need to convince them that they're safe. It's the difference between looking at yourself from the third person and judging whether your beliefs are correct or not, vs looking at the world from the first person and seeing what is there. If you want to change the third person perspective, then you can look at which models are desirable and why. If you want to change the first person models themselves, you have to look to the world and see what's there.
This doesn't really work with the spinning dancer because "Which way is the dancer spinning?" doesn't have an answer, but this is an artificial issue which doesn't exist in the real world. You still have to figure out "Is this safe enough to be worth doing?" and that's not always trivial, but the problem of "How do I change this irrational fear?" (for example) is. The answer is "By attending to the question of whether it is actually safe".
I don't deny that there's "skill" to it, but most of the skill IME is a meta skill of knowing what to even aim for rather than aiming well. Once you start attending to "Is it safe enough?", then when the answer is actually obvious the intuitive models just change. I can give a whole bunch of examples of this if you want, where people were stuck unable to change their responses and the problem just melts away with this redirection. Even stuff that you'd think would be resistant to change like physical pain can change essentially instantly. I've had it take as little as a single word.
Again we see that the subject is made to feel that his body is out of control, and becomes subject to a high-status person. Some hypnotists sit you down, ask you to stare upwards into their eyes and suggest that your eyelids are wanting to close—which works because looking upwards is tiring, and because staring up into a high-status person’s eyes makes you feel inferior.
This isn't exactly wrong, but I want to push back on the implication that this is the central or most important thing here.
The central thing, IMO, is a willingness to try on another person's worldview even though it clashes with your own. It doesn't require "inferiority"/"high status"/"control" except in the extremely minimal sense that they might know something important that you don't, and that seeing it for yourself might change your behavior. That alone will get you inhibition of all the normal stuff and an automatic (albeit tentative) acceptance of worldview-dissonant perspectives (e.g. name amnesia). It helps if the person has reason to respect and trust you which is kinda like "high status", but not really because it can just as easily happen with people on equal social standing in neutral contexts.
Similarly, hypnosis has very little to do with sleep and eye fatigue/closure is not the important part of eye contact. The important part of eye contact is that it's incredibly communicative. You can convey with eye contact things which you can't convey with words. "I see you". "Seeing you doesn't cause conflict in me". "I see you seeing me see you" and so on, to name a few. All the things you need to communicate to show someone that your perspective is safe and worthy of experiencing are best communicated with the eyes. And perhaps equally important it is a bid for attention, by holding your own.
So far, this isn’t a trance; I’m just describing a common social dynamic. Specifically, if I’m not in a hypnotic trance, the sequence of thoughts in the above might look like a three-step process:
[...]
i.e., in my intuitive model, first, the hypnotist exercises his free will with the intention of me standing; second, I (my homunculus) exercise my own free will with the intention of standing; and third, I actually stand. In this conceptualization, it’s my own free will / vitalistic force / wanting (§3.3.4) that causes me to stand. So this is not a trance.
It's important to note that while this self reflective narrative is indeed different in the way you describe, the underlying truth often is not. In the hypnosis literature this is known as "cold control theory", because it's the same control without the usual Higher Order Thoughts (HOT).
In "common social dynamics" we explain it as "I chose to", but what is actually happening a lot of the time is the speaker is exercising their free will through your body, and you're not objecting because it matches your narrative. The steps aren't actually in series, and you didn't choose to do it so much as you chose to not decline to do it.
These "higher order thoughts" do change some things, but turn out to be relatively unimportant and the better hypnotists usually don't bother too much with them and instead just address the object level. This is also why you get hypnotists writing books subtitled "there's no such thing as hypnosis" and stuff like that.
The short version is: If I have a tune in my head, then I’m very unlikely to simultaneously recall a memory of a different tune. Likewise, if I’m angry right now, then I’m less likely to recall past memories where I felt happy and forgiving, and vice-versa.
As far as I can tell, there are several different things going on with amnesia. I agree that this is one of them, and I'm not sure if I've seen anyone else notice this, so it's cool to see someone point it out.
The "null hypothesis", though, any time it comes to hypnosis is that it's all just response to suggestion. You "know" that being hypnotized involves amnesia, and you believe you're hypnotized, so you experience what you expect. There's an academic hypnosis researcher I talk to sometimes who doesn't even believe "hypnotic trance" is real in any fundamental sense and thinks that all the signs of trance are the result of suggestion.
I don't believe suggestion is all that's going on, but it really is sufficient for amnesia. The answer to Yudkowsky's old question of "Do we believe everything we're told?" is indeed "Yes" -- if we don't preemptively push it away or actively remember to unbelieve later. Back when I was working this stuff out I did a fun experiment where I'd come up with an excuse to get people to not pre-emptively reject what I was about to say, then I'd suggest amnesia for this conversation and that they'd laugh when I scratch my nose, and then I'd distract them so that the suggestion could take effect before they had a chance to unbelieve it. The excuse was something like "I know this is ridiculous so I don't expect you to believe it, but hear me out and let me know if you understand" -- which is tricky because they think the fact that we "agreed" that they won't believe it means they actually aren't believing it when they say "I understand", even though the full statement is "I understand [that I will laugh when you scratch your nose and have no idea why"]. They still had awareness that this belief is wrong and would therefore act to stop themselves from acting on it, which is why the unexpected distraction was necessary in order to get their mind off of it long enough for it to work.
If someone's only option for dealing with a hostile telepath is self-deception, and then you come in and punish them for using it, thou art a dick.
Like, do you think it helps the abused mothers I named if you punish them somehow for not acknowledging their partners' abuse? Does it even help the social circle around them?
If that's their only option, and the hostility in your telepathy is antisocial, then yes. In some cases though, people do have other options and their self-deception is offensive, so hostile telepathy is pro-social.
For example, it would probably help those mothers if the men knew to anticipate punishment for not acknowledging their abuse of their partners. I bet at least one of those abusive husbands/boyfriends will give his side of the story that's a bit more favorable than "I'm a bad guy, lol", and that it will start to fall apart when pressed. In those cases, he'll have to choose between admitting wrongdoing or playing dumb, and people often do their best to play really dumb. The self-deception there is a ploy to steal someone else's second box, so fuck that guy.
I think the right response is to ignore the "self" part of the deception and treat it like any other deception. If it's okay to lie to the Nazis about hiding Jews, then it's okay to deceive yourself into believing it too. If we're going to make it against the law to lie under oath, then making it legal so long as they lie to themselves too is only going to increase the antisocial deception.
The reason I trust research in physics in general is that it doesn't end with publishing a paper. It often ends with building machines that depend on that research being right.
We don't just "trust the science" that light is a wave; we use microwave ovens at home.
Well said. I'm gonna have to steal that.
Therefore, in a world where we all do power poses all the time, and if you forget to do them, you will predictably fail the exam...
...well, actually that could just be a placebo effect.
Yeah, "Can I fail my exam" is a bad test, because when the test is "can I fail" then it's easy for the theory to be "wrong in the right way". GPS is a good test of GR because you just can't do it without a better understanding of spacetime so it has to at least get something right even if it's not the full picture. When you actually use the resulting technology in your day to day life and get results you couldn't have gotten before, then it almost doesn't matter what the scientific literature says, because "I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct.".
There are psychological equivalents of this, which rest on doing things that are simply beyond the abilities of people who lack this understanding. The "NLP fast phobia cure" is a perfect example of this, and I can provide citations if anyone is interested. I really get a kick out of the predictable arguments between those who "trust the science" but don't understand it, and those who actually do it on a regular basis.
(Something like seeing a black cat on your way to exam, freaking out about it, and failing to pay full attention to the exam.) Damn!
This reminds me of an amusing anecdote.
I had a weird experience once where I got my ankle sprained pretty bad and found myself simultaneously indignantly deciding that my ankle wasn't going to swell and also thinking I was crazy for feeling like swelling was a thing I could control -- and it didn't swell. I told my friend about this experience, and while she was skeptical and thought it sounded crazy, she tried it anyway and her next several injuries didn't swell.
Eventually she casually mentioned to someone "Nah, my broken thumb isn't going to swell because I decided not to", and the person she was talking to responded as if she had said something else because his brain just couldn't register what she actually said as a real possibility. She then got all self conscious about it and was kinda unintentionally gaslighted into feeling like she was crazy for thinking she could do that, and her thumb swelled up.
I had to call her and remind her "No, you don't give up and expect it to swell because it 'sounds crazy', you intend for it to not swell anyway and find out whether it is something you can control or not". The swelling went back down most of the way after that, though not to the same degree as in the previous cases where the injury never swelled in the first place.
Can you come up with a better way of doing Psychology research?
Yes. More emphasis on concrete useful results, less emphasis on trying to find simple correlations in complex situations.
For example, "Do power poses work?". They did studies like this one where they tell people to hold a pose for five minutes while preparing for a fake job interview, and then found that the pretend employers pretended to hire them more often in the "power pose" condition. Even assuming there's a real effect where those students from that university actually impress those judges more when they pose powerfully ahead of time... does that really imply that power posing will help other people get real jobs and keep them past the first day?
That's like studying "Are car brakes really necessary?" by setting up a short track and seeing if the people who run the "red light" progress towards their destination quicker. Contrast that with studying the cars and driving behaviors that win races, coming up with your theories, and testing them by trying to actually win races. You'll find out very quickly if your "brakes aren't needed" hypothesis is a scientific breakthrough or foolishly naive.
Instead of studying "Does CBT work?", study the results of individual therapists, see if you can figure out what the more successful ones are doing differently than the less successful ones, and see if you can use what you learn to increase the effectiveness of your own therapy or the therapy of your students. If the answer turns out to be "The successful therapists all power pose pre-session, then perform textbook CBT" and that allows you to make better therapists, great. If it's something else, then you get to focus on the things that actually show up in the data.
The results should speak for themselves. If they don't, and you aren't keeping in very close contact with real world results, then it's super easy to go astray with internal feedback loops because the loop that matters isn't closed.
Claim: memeticity in a scientific field is mostly determined, not by the most competent researchers in the field, but instead by roughly-median researchers. [...] Sure, the most competent people in the field may recognize the problems, but the median researchers don’t, and in aggregate it’s mostly the median researchers who spread the memes.
This assumes the median researchers can't recognize who the competent researchers are, or otherwise don't look to them as thought leaders.
I'm not arguing that this isn't often the case, just that it isn't always the case. In engineering, if you're more competent than everyone else, you can make cooler shit. If you're a median engineer trying to figure out which memes to take on and spread, you're going to be drawn to the work of the more competent engineers because it is visibly and obviously better.
In fields where distinguishing between bad research and good research has to be done by knowing how to do good research, rather than "does it fly or does it crash", then the problem you describe is much more difficult to avoid. I argue that the difference between the fields which replicate and those which don't is as much about the legibility of the end product as it is about the quality of the median researcher.
There's no norm saying you can't be ignorant of stats and read, or even post about things not requiring an understanding of stats, but there's still a critical mass of people who do understand the topic well enough to enforce norms against actively contributing with that illiteracy. (E.g. how do you expect it to go over if someone makes a post claiming that p=0.05 means that there's a 95% change that the hypothesis is true?)
Taking it a step further, I'd say my household "has norms which basically require everyone to speak English", but that doesn't mean the little one is quite there yet or that we're gonna boot her for not already meeting the bar. It just means that she has to work hard to learn how to talk if she wants to be part of what's going on.
Lesswrong feels like that to me in that I would feel comfortable posting about things which require statistical literacy to understand, knowing that engagement which fails to meet that bar will be downvoted rather than getting downvoted for expecting to find a statistically literate audience here.
I think this is correct as a conditional statement, but I don't think one can deduce the unconditional implication that attempting to price some externalities in domains where many externalities are difficult to price is generally bad.
It's not "attempting to price some externalities where many are difficult to price is generally bad", it's "attempting to price some externalities where the difficult to price externalities on the other side is bad". Sometimes the difficulty of pricing them means it's hard to know which side they primarily lie on, but not necessarily.
The direction of legible/illegible externalities might be uncorrelated on average, but that doesn't mean that ignoring the bigger piece of the pie isn't costly. If I offer "I'll pay you twenty dollars, and then make up some rumors about you which may or may not be true and may greatly help or greatly harm your social standing", you don't think "Well, the difficult part to price is a wash, but twenty dollars is twenty dollars"
you can just directly pay the person who stops the shooting,
You still need a body.
Sure, you can give people like Elisjsha Dicken a bunch of money, but that's because he actually blasted someone. If we want to pay him $1M per life he saved though, how much do we pay him? We can't simply go to the morgue and count how many people aren't there. We have to start making assumptions, modeling the system, and paying out based on our best guesses of what might have happened in what we think to be the relevant hypothetical. Which could totally work here, to be clear, but it's still a potentially imperfect attempt to price the illegible and it's not a coincidence that this was left out of the initial analysis that I'm responding.
But what about the guy who stopped a shooting before it began, simply by walking around looking like the kind of guy that would stop an a spree killer before he accomplished much? What about the good role models in the potential shooters life that lead him onto the right track and stopped a shooting before it was ever planned? This could be ten times as important and you wouldn't even know without a lot of very careful analysis. And even then you could be mistaken, and good luck creating enough of a consensus on your program to pay out what you believe to be the appropriate amount to the right people who have no concrete evidence to stand on. It's just not gonna work.
I don't agree that most of the benefits of AI are likely to be illegible. I expect plenty of them to take the form of new consumer products that were not available before, for example.
Sure, they'll be a lot of new consumer products and other legible stuff, but how are you estimating the amount of illegible stuff and determining it to be smaller? That's the stuff that by definition is going to be harder to recognize so you can't just say "all of the stuff I recognize is legible, therefore legible>>illegible".
For example, what's the probability that AI changes the outcome of future elections and political trajectory, is it a good or bad change, and what is the dollar value of that compared to the dollar value of ChatGPT?
I think my main point would be that Coase's theorem is great for profitable actions with externalities, but doesn't really work for punishment/elimination of non-monetary-incented actions where the cost is very hard to calculate.
This brings up another important point which is that a lot of externalities are impossible to calculate, and therefore such approaches end up fixating on the part that seems calculable without even accounting for (or even noticing) the incalculable part. If the calculable externalities happen to be opposed to larger incalculable externalities, then you can end up worse off than if you had never tried.
As applied to the gun externality question, you could theoretically offer a huge payday to the gun shop that sold the firearm used to stop a spree shooting in progress, but you still need a body to count before paying out. It's really hard to measure the number of murders which didn't happen because the guns you sold deterred the attacks. And if we accept the pro 2A arguments that the real advantage of an armed populace is that it prevents tyranny, that's even harder to put a real number on.
I think this applies well to AI, because absent a scenario where gray goo rearranges everyone into paperclips (in which case everyone pays with their life anyway), a lot of the benefits and harms are likely to be illegible. If AI chatbots end up swaying the next election, what is the dollar value we need to stick on someone? How do we know if it's even positive or negative, or if it even happened? If we latch onto the one measurable thing, that might not help.
The frustrating thing about the discussion about the origins is that people seldom show recognition of the priorities here, and all get lost in the weeds.
You can get n layers deep into the details, and if the bottom is at n+1 you're fucked. To give an example I see people talking about with this debate, "The lab was working on doing gain of function to coronaviruses just like this!" sounds pretty damning but "actually the grant was denied, do you think they'd be working on it in secret after they were denied funding?" completely reverses it. Then after the debate, "Actually, labs frequently write grant proposals for work they've already done, and frequently are years behind in publishing" reverses it again. Even if there's an odd number of remaining counters, the debate doesn't demonstrate it. If you're not really really careful about this stuff, it's very easy to get lost and not realize where you've overextended on shaky ground.
Scott talks about how Saar is much more careful about these "out of model" possibilities and feels ripped off because his opponent wasn't, but at least judging from Scott's summary it doesn't appear he really hammered on what the issue is here and how to address it.
Elsewhere in the comments here Saar is criticized for failing to fact check the dead cat thing, and I think that's a good example of the issue here. It's not that any individual thing is too difficult to fact check, it's that when all the evidence is pointing in one direction (so far as you can tell) then you don't really have a reason to fact check every little thing that makes total sense so of course you're likely to not do it. If someone argues that clay bricks weigh less than an ounce, you're going to weigh the first brick you see to prove them wrong, and you're not going to break it open to confirm that it's not secretly filled with something other than clay. And if it turns out it is, that doesn't actually matter because your belief didn't hinge on this particular brick being clay in the first place.
If it turns out that a lot of your predictions turn out to be based on false presuppositions, this might be an issue. If it turns out the trend you based your perspective on just isn't there, then yeah that's a problem. But if that's not actually the evidence that formed your beliefs, and they're just tentative predictions that aren't required by your belief under question, then it means much less. Doubly so if we're at "there exists a seemingly compelling counterargument" and not "we've gotten to the bottom of this, and there are no more seemingly compelling counter-counterarguments".
So Saar didn't check if the grant was actually approved. And Peter didn't check if labs sometimes do the work before writing grant proposals. Or they did, and it didn't come through in the debate. And Saar missed the cat thing. Peter did better on this game of "whack-a-mole" of arguments than Saar did, and more than I expected, but what is it worth? Truth certainly makes this easier, but so does preparation and debate skill, so I'm not really sure how much to update here.
What I want to see more than "who can paint an excessively detailed story that doesn't really matter and have it stand up to surface level scrutiny better", is people focusing on the actual cruxes underlying their views. Forget the myriad of implications n steps down the road which we don't have the ability to fully map out and verify, what are the first few things we can actually know, and what can we learn from this by itself? If we're talking about a controversial "relationship guru", postpone discussions of whether clips were "taken out of context" and what context might be necessary until we settle whether this person is on their first marriage or fifth. If we're wondering if a suspect is guilty of murder, don't even bother looking into the credibility of the witness until you've settled the question of does the DNA match.
If there appears to be a novel coronavirus outbreak right outside a lab studying novel coronaviruses, is that actually the case? Do we even need to look at anything else, and can looking at anything else even change the answer?
To exaggerate the point to highlight the issue, if there were unambiguously a million wet markets that are all equivalent, and one lab, and the outbreak were to happen right between the lab and the nearest wet market, you're done. It doesn't matter how much you think the virus "doesn't look engineered" because you can't get to a million to one that way. Even if you somehow manage to make what you think is a 1000:1 case, a) even if your analysis is sound it still came from the lab, b) either your analysis there or the million to one starting premise is flawed. And if we're looking for a flaw in our analyses, it's going to be a lot easier to find flaws in something relatively concrete like "there are a million wet markets just like this one" than whatever is going into arguing that it "looks natural".
So I really wish they'd sit down and hammer out the most significant and easiest to verify bits first. How many equally risky wet markets are there? How many labs? What is the quantitative strength of the 30,000 foot view "It looks like an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in Hershey Pennsylvania"? What does it actually take to have arguments that contain leaks to this degree, and can we realistically demonstrate that here?
The difference between what I strive for (and would advocate) and "epistemic learned helplessness" is that it's not helpless. I do trust myself to figure out the answers to these kinds of things when I need to -- or at least, to be able to come to a perspective that is worth contending with.
The solution I'm pointing at is simply humility. If you pretend that you know things you don't know, you're setting yourself up for failure. If you don't wanna say "I dunno, maybe" and can't say "Definitely not, and here's why" (or "That's irrelevant and here's why" or "Probably not, and here's why I suspect this despite not having dived into the details"), then you were committing arrogance by getting into a "debate" in the first place.
Easier said than done, of course.
I think "subject specific knowledge is helpful in distinguishing between bullshit and non-bullshit claims." is pretty clear on its own, and if you want to add an example it'd be sufficient to do something simple and vague like "If someone cites scientific studies you haven't had time to read, it can sound like they've actually done their research. Except sometimes when you do this you'll find that the study doesn't actually support their claim".
"How to formulate a rebuttal" sounds like a very different thing, depending on what your social goals are with the rebuttal.
I think I'm starting to realize the dilemma I'm in.
Yeah, you're kinda stuck between "That's too obvious of a problem for me to fall into!" and "I don't see a problem here! I don't believe you!". I'd personally err on the side of the obvious, while highlighting why the examples I'm picking are so obvious.
I could bring out the factual evidence and analyze it if you like, but I don't think that was your intention
Yeah, I think that'd require a pretty big conversation and I already agree with the point you're trying to use it to make.
I did get feedback warning that the Ramaswamy example was quite distracting (my beta reader reccomended flat eartherism or anti-vaxxing instead). In hindsight it may have been a better choice, but I'm not too familiar with geology or medicine, so I didn't think I could do the proper rebuttal justice.
My response to your Ramaswamy example was to skip ahead without reading it to see if you would conclude with "My counterarguments were bullshit, did you catch it?".
After going back and skimming a bit, it's still not clear to me that they're not.
The uninformed judge cannot tell him from someone with a genuine understanding of geopolitics.
The thing is, this applies to you as well. Looking at this bit, for example:
What about Ukraine? Ukrainians have died in the hundreds of thousands to defend their country. Civil society has mobilized for a total war. Zelensky retains overwhelming popular support, and by and large the populace is committed to a long war.
Is this the picture of a people about to give up? I think not.
This sure sounds like something a bullshit debater would say. Hundreds of thousands of people dying doesn't really mean a country isn't about to give up. Maybe it's the reason they are about to give up; there's always a line, and whos to say it isn't in the hundreds of thousands? Zelensky having popular support does seem to support your point, and I could go check primary sources on that, but even if I did your point about "selecting the right facts and omitting others" still stands, and there's no easy way to find out if you're full of shit here or not.
So it's kinda weird to see it presented as if we're supposed to take your arguments at face value... in a piece purportedly teaching us to defend against the dark art of bullshit. It's not clear to me how this section even helps even if we do take it at face value. Okay, so Ramaswamy said something you disagree with, and you might even be right and maybe his thoughts don't hold up to scrutiny? But even if so, that doesn't mean he's "using dark arts" any more than he just doesn't think things through well enough to get to the right answer, and I don't see what that teaches us about how to avoid BS besides "Don't trust Ramaswamy".
To be clear, this isn't at all "your post sucks, feel bad". It's partly genuine curiosity about where you were trying to go with that part, and mostly that you seem to genuinely appreciate feedback.
My own answer to "how to defend against bullshit" is to notice when I don't know enough on the object level to be able to know for sure when arguments are misleading, and in those cases refrain from pretending that I know more than I do. In order to determine who to take how seriously, I track how much people are able to engage with other worldviews, and which worldviews hold up and don't require avoidance techniques in order to preserve the worldview.
The frequency explanation doesn't really work, because men do sometimes get excess compliments and it doesn't actually become annoying; it's just background. Also, when women give men the kind of compliments that men tend to give women, it can be quite unwanted even when infrequent.
The common thing, which you both gesture at, is whether it's genuinely a compliment or simply a bid for sexual attention, borne out of neediness. The validation given by a compliment is of questionable legitimacy when paired with some sort of tug for reciprocation, and it's simply much easier to have this kind of social interaction when sexual desire is off the table the way it is between same sex groups of presumably straight individuals.
For example, say you're a man who has gotten into working out and you're visiting your friend whom you haven't seen in a while. If your friend goes wide eyed, saying "Wow, you look good. Have you been working out?" and starts feeling your muscles, that's a compliment because it's not too hard for your friend to pull off "no homo". He's not trying to get in your pants. If that friend's new girlfriend were to do the exact same thing, she'd have to pull off "no hetero" for it to not get awkward, and while that's doable it's definitely significantly harder. If she's been wanting an open relationship and he hasn't, it gets that much harder to take it as "just a compliment" and this doesn't have to be a recurring issue in order for it to be quite uncomfortable to receive that compliment. As a result, unless their relationship is unusually secure she's less likely to compliment you than he is -- and when she does she's going to be a lot more restrained than he can be.
The question, to me, is to what extent people are trying to "be sexy for their homies" because society has a semi-intentional way of doing division of labor to allow formation of social hierarchies without having to go directly through the mess of sexual desires, and to what extent people are simply using their homies as a proxy for what the opposite sex is into and getting things wrong because they're projecting a bit. The latter seems sufficient and a priori expected, but maybe it leads into the former.
I want there to be a way to trade action for knowledge- to credibly claim I won't get upset or tell anyone if a lizardman admits their secret to me- but obviously the lizardman wouldn't know that I could be trusted to keep to that,
The thing people are generally trying to avoid, when hiding their socially disapproved of traits, isn't so much "People are going to see me for what I am", but that they won't.
Imagine you and your wife are into BDSM, and it's a completely healthy and consensual thing -- at least, so far as you see. Then imagine your aunt says "You can tell me if you're one of those BDSM perverts. I won't tell anybody, nor will I get upset if you're that degenerate". You're still probably not going to be inclined to tell her, because even if she's telling the truth about what she won't do, she's still telling you that she's already written the bottom line that BDSM folks are "degenerate perverts". She's still going to see you differently, and she's still shown that her stance gives her no room for understanding what you do or why, so her input -- hostile or not -- cannot be of use.
In contrast, imagine your other aunt tells you about how her friends relationship benefitted a lot from BDSM dynamics which match your own quite well, and then mentions that they stopped doing it because of a more subtle issue that was causing problems they hadn't recognized. Imagine your aunt goes on to say "This is why I've always been opposed to BDSM. It can be so much fun, and healthy and massively beneficial in the short term, but the longer term hidden risks just aren't worth it". That aunt sounds worth talking to, even if she might give pushback that the other aunt promised not to. It would be empathetic pushback, coming from a place of actually understanding what you do and why you do it. Instead of feeling written off and misunderstood, you feel seen and heard -- warts and all. And that kind of "I got your back, and I care who you are even if you're not perfect" response is the kind of response you want to get from someone you open up to.
So for lizardmen, you'd probably want to start by understanding why they wouldn't be so inclined to show their true faces to most people. You'd want to be someone who can say "Oh yeah, I get that. If I were you I'd be doing the same thing" for whatever you think their motivation might be, even if you are going to push back on their plans to exterminate humanity or whatever. And you might want to consider whether "lizardmen" really captures what's going on or if it's functioning in the way "pervert" does for your hypothetical aunt.
I get that "humans are screwed up" is a sequences take, that you're not really sure how to carve up the different parts of your mind, etc. What I'm pointing at here is substantive, not merely semantic.
- The dissociation of saying "humans are messed up"/"my brain is messed up" feels different than saying "I am messed up". The latter is speaking from a perspective that is associated with the problem and has the responsibility to fix it from the first person. This perspective shift is absolutely crucial, and trying to solve your problems "from the outside" gets people very very caught up in additional meta level problems and unable to touch the object level problem. This is a huge topic.
- I had as a strong an aversion to homework as anyone, including homework which I knew to be important. It's not a matter of "finding a situation where you notice part of your mind attempting to write the bottom line first", but of noticing why that part of your mind will try to write the bottom line first, and relating to yourself in a way that eliminates the motivation to do so in the first place. I don't have situations where part of my mind attempts to write the bottom line first... that I'm aware of, at least. There are things that I'm attached to, which is what causes the "bottom line first" issues and which is still an obstacle to be overcome in itself, but the motivation to write the bottom line first can be completely obsoleted by stopping and giving more attention to the possibility that you've been trying to undervalue something that you can sense is critically important. This mental move shifts all of your "my brain is being irrational" problems into "I don't know what to do on the object level"/"I don't know why this is so important to me" problems, which are still problems but they are much nicer because they highlight rather than obscure the path to solution.
- "I want some kind of language to distinguish the truth seeking part from the biased part". I don't think such a distinction exists in any meaningful sense.
In my model, there's a part of your brain that recognizes that something is important (e.g. social time), and a part of your brain that recognizes that something else is important (e.g. doing homework), and that neither are "truth seeking" or "biased", but simply tugging you towards a particular goal. Then there's a part of your brain which feels tugged in both directions and has to mediate and try to form this incoherent mess into something resembling useful behavior.
This latter part wants to get out of the conflict, and there are many strategies to do this. This is another big topic, but one way to get out of the conflict is to simply give in to the more salient side and shut out the less salient side. This strategy has obvious and serious problems, so making an explicit decision to use this strategy itself can cause conflict between the desire "I want to not deal with this discomfort" and "I want to not drive my life into the ground by ignoring things that might be important".
One way to attempt to resolve that conflict is to decide "Okay, I'll 'be rational', 'use logic and evidence and reason', and then satisfy the side which is more logical and shut out the side that is 'irrational and wrong'". This has clear advantages over the "be a slave to impulses" strategy, but it has it's own serious issues. One is that the side that you judge to be "irrational" isn't always the side that's easier to shut out, so attempting to do so can be unsuccessful at the actual goal of "get out of this uncomfortable conflict".
A more successful strategy to resolving like these is to shut out the easy to shut out side, and then use "logic and reason" to justify it if possible, so that the "I don't want to run my life into the ground by making bad decisions" part is satisfied too. The issue with this one comes up when part of you notices that the bottom line is getting written first and that the pull isn't towards truth -- but so long as you fail to notice, this strategy actually does quite well, so every time your algorithm that you describe as "logical and reasoned" drifts in this direction it gets rewarded and you end up sliding down this path. That's why you get this repeating pattern of "Dammit, my brain was writing the bottom line again. I shall keep myself from doing that next time!".
It's simply not the case that you have a "truth seeking part" and a "biased part". You contain a multitude of desires, and strategies for achieving these desires and mediating conflicts between these desires. The strategies you employ, which call for shutting out desires which retain power over you unless they can come up with sufficient justification, requires you to come up with justifications and find them sufficient in order to get what you want. So that's what you're motivated to do, and that's what you tend to do.
Then you notice that this strategy has problems, but so long as you're working within this strategy, adding the extra desires of "but don't fool myself here!" becomes simply another desire that can be rationalized away if you succeed in coming up with a justification that you're willing to deem sufficient ("Nah, I'm not fooling myself this time! These reasons are sound!", "Shit, I did it again didn't I. Wow, these biases sure can be sneaky!").
The framing itself is what creates the problems. By the time you are labeling one part "truth seeking" and one part "biased, and therefore important to not listen to", you are writing the bottom line . And if your bottom line includes "there is a problem with how my brain is working", then that's gonna be in your bottom line.
The alternative is to not purport to know which side is "truth seeking" and which side is "biased", and simply look, until you see the resolution.
1) You keep saying "My brain", which distances you from it. You say "Human minds are screwed up", but what are you if not a human mind? Why not say "I am screwed up"? Notice how that one feels different and weightier? Almost like there's something you could do about it, and a motivation to do it?
2) Why does homework seem so unfun to you? Why do you feel tempted to put off homework and socialize? Have you put much thought into figuring out if "your brain" might be right about something here?
In my experience, most homework is indeed a waste of time, some homework very much is not, and even that very worthwhile homework can be put off until the last minute with zero downside. I decided to stop putting it off to the last minute once it actually became a problem, and that day just never came. In hindsight, I think "my brain" was just right about things.
How sure are you that you'd have noticed if this applies to you as well?
3) "If your brain was likely to succeed in deceiving you".
You say this as if you are an innocent victim, yet I don't think you'd fall for any of these arguments if you didn't want to be deceived. And who can blame you? Some asshole won't let you have fun unless you believe that homework isn't worthwhile, so of course you want to believe it's not worth doing.
Your "trick" works because it takes off the pressure to believe the lies. You don't need to dissociate from the rest of your mental processes to do this, and you don't have to make known bad decisions in order to do this. You simply need to give yourself permission to do what you want, even when you aren't yet convinced that it's right.
Give yourself that permission, and there's no distortionary pressure so you can be upfront about how important you think doing your homework tonight really is. And if you decide that you'd rather not put it off, you're allowed to choose that too. As a general rule, rationality is improved by removing blocks to looking at reality, not adding more blocks to compensate for other blocks.
It's not that "human minds are messed up" in some sort of fundamental architectural way and there's nothing you can do about it, it's that human minds take work to organize, people don't fully recognize this or how to do it, and until that work you're going to be full of contradictions.
As an update, the 3rd thing I tried also failed. Now I ran out of things to try.
I wouldn't be discouraged. There are a lot of ways to do "the same thing" differently, and I wouldn't expect a first try success. In particular, I'd expect you to need a lot more time letting yourself "run free" -- at least "in sim" -- and using that to figure out what exactly it is that you want and how to actually get it without screwing anything else up. Like, "Okay, if I get that, then what?"/"What's so great about that" and drilling down on that felt sense until something shifts.
Sure took me a while, at least. And I wouldn't claim to be "finished"
The problem is that anything that is non-sexual love seems to be corrupted by sexual love, in a way that makes the non-sexual part worse. E.g. imagine you have a female friend that you like to talk to because she is a good interlocutor. [...] I expect that if you would now start to have sex with that female friend your mind would get corrupted by sexual desire. E.g. instead of thinking about what to discuss in the next meeting, a sexual fantasy would pop into your head.
How sure are you that this is actually a problem? Is it the hypothetical female friend that has an issue with just focusing on sex as much as you'd be tempted to, or is it a you thing? The former can definitely complicate things, but if it's the latter I'd be inclined to just run with it and see what happens. It's a lot harder to get distracted by the possibility of having sex immediately after having it.
My current strategy is to just not think anything sexual anymore, and be sensitive to any negative emotions that arise. I then plan to use my version of IDC on them to figure out what the subagents that generate the emotions want. So far it seems that to some extent realizing this corruption dynamic has cooled down the sexual part of my mind a bit. But attempt 3 only failed yesterday so this cooling effect might only be temporary.
Yeah, that's the inhibitory side of the equation. Kinda like fasting for a while and realizing that it's not necessary/helpful/appropriate to panic about being hungry, and chilling out for a bit.
But if you don't eat sooner or later or make an earnest effort to obtain sufficient food, it might not stay so easy to continue to set the hunger aside.
I feel like I have figured out a lot of stuff about this general topic in the last month. Probably more than in the rest of my life so far.
:) good.
I also realize now that this just solves the problem that I have had with romance all along. That is the reason why I did not like how my mind behaved. My mind normally just starts to love somebody immediately, overwriting all of the other aspects of the relationship. This is exactly not what I want love to be.
This does sound like premature/overattachment. I bet watching what happens to the other aspects of the relationship puts a damper on that impulse.
The ideal version of this is getting maximally close in a relationship via some context, and only once you get maximally close in that context do you extend the context. And then again you optimize for getting as close as possible in the new extended context, before extending the context again. And you add things to the context sorted such that you add the less impactful stuff first. Adding the component of love to the context should be very late in this chain. [...] I want love to be the thing that follows after everything else is maximally good. And I want the same to be true for other attributes. E.g. before feeling friendly with somebody, you should like them as much as possible, and get as close to them as possible, without that friendliness feeling there.
This sounds pretty idealized. "Should" is a red flag word here, as it covers over what "is", the reasons things are the way they are, and why you want things to be another way instead. In context, "maximally" is too because "maximally" on any dimension rarely matches "optimally" -- so whence this motivation, and what is being avoided?
That's not to say that it's wrong or misguided as ideals often have important value, but the real world tends to be messy and bring surprises.
Good, I'm glad my comments had the effect I was aiming for.
It's an interesting and fun project for sure. A few notes...
* I wouldn't expect to get it all figured out quickly, but rather for things to change shape over the course of years. Pieces can change quickly of course, but there's a lot to figure out and sometimes you need to find yourself in the right experience to have the perspective to see what comes next.
* I'd also caution against putting the cart too far ahead of the horse, even if you have pretty good justification. "Extension of non-sexual love" sounds right, but also just so much weird and unexpected stuff that it's hard to foresee in sufficient detail that it's likely that your perspective on what this entails isn't complete.
* Freedom to explore is freedom to learn, but also freedom to fail -- like removing training wheels from a bike so that you can engage with the process of balancing, but also risk falling. Managing this tradeoff can be tricky, especially when the cost of failure gets high.
* "Allocating specific periods of time to run free" reminds me of how I've been approaching my daughters developing appetite. Monday through Saturday she has to eat what we make her so that she gets good nutrition and builds familiarity with good foods, and on Sunday's she's free to learn exactly how much ice cream is *too* much and otherwise eat whatever she wants. I'm not entirely sure what to think yet and the arbitrariness of it bothers my sense of aesthetics a bit, but I'm relatively happy with how it's going so far and I'm not really sure how to do it any less arbitrarily in context.
I feel like had the technique been "Imagine ice cream tastes like pure turmeric powder", it would basically be the same technique.
It would.
In that case, I predict people would not have had these (from my perspective) very weird reactions.
We would. I would, at least, and I predict that others would too because the fundamental reason remains.
I haven't tried this, but maybe this would work for somebody who is fantasizing about eating ice cream, which causes them to eat too much ice cream.
If you think that you've been eating "too much" ice cream, presumably you have reason to believe some undesirable consequences will follow from eating this much ice cream. In this case, you can just imagine this will be the result of eating ice cream. There is no need to live in fantasy land in order to not eat things that reality supports not eating -- you just have to exit the fantasy you're in that is driving you to eat it.
I don't mean theoretically. While it does get more nuanced, this is the basis of how I relate to my tastes for food, and as a result I don't have any temptation to eat too much ice cream or anything else I recognize to be unhealthy. I used to, but it no longer appeals to me. Writing this reminds me how delicious liver is, and that I need to eat some more.
I am not reflectively stable.
Right. And these are your opportunities to work towards fixing that :)
I have the problem of having random sexual thoughts. It's not about imagining having sex with some person you love or anything like that.
I'm not making any assumptions about what kind of sexual thoughts must have prompted this, nor any stance about what kind of sexual thoughts would be appropriate for you. That's for you to decide with yourself. If you say it's not working the way you want it to, I believe you. It's not uncommon.
What I'm pointing out is that you don't actually need to feed yourself false training data in order to do this, and doing so actively impedes the process of cohering into something resembling reflective stability. Whatever the valid reasons to not do the problem behavior, those can be used to motivate change, and when you do that you get far more interesting and better results.
It's not as simple as "Here's something I'm convinced is a valid reason, now will it go away?", but it is not theoretical either. Integrating one's sexual drives does change their shape, and this can have quite pronounced effects in ways that you wouldn't know to anticipate in advance.
Reality is that you have junk between your legs. You engage in this thought experiment "What if I didn't?". You realize that if reality were different than it is, it would call for a different response than it seems to call for when you are looking at reality. So far so good, no darkness in noticing this.
You then go on to apply the response to the imagined falsehood to reality, knowing that you only reached this response because you were imagining a falsehood. This is fundamentally "dark" and "irrational" because it is building and acting upon known delusion.
The fact that you are still aware that you have primary sexual organs and expect the result to get instantly reversed when it stops doesn't mean it's not dark, it's just an argument that you will be able to contain the darkness, but it's really really hard to actually do that.
If nothing else, having a technique like that which "works" removes the motivation to figure it out without deluding yourself. This process of "imagine a different premise, get a different felt result" works just as well when the imagined premise isn't false or known to be false, so you can just as easily imagine a different accurate premise and reach your desired conclusion -- if you can actually justify your desired conclusion, that is.
The "hard part" isn't in "changing desires to match what they should be", its figuring out what they "should be" in the first place. If sex feels more meaningful than rubbing flat skin on flat skin, maybe it is. And maybe you should grapple with that until you know what to do with it. If you think you know why it isn't, then maybe you should picture that, and see if you actually feel compelled by your own argument.
It's not that flat earth arguments sound equally persuasive to people (they don't). It's that the reason they don't sound persuasive is that "this group they like" says not to take the arguments seriously enough to risk being persuaded by them, and they recognize that they don't actually understand things well enough for it to matter. The response to a flat earth argument is "Haha! What a silly argument!", but when you press them on it, they can't actually tell you what's wrong with it. They might think they can, but if pressed it falls apart.
This is more subtle than the "guessing the teachers password" problem, because it's not like the words have no meaning to them. People grasp what a ball is, and how it differs from a flat disk. People recognize bas things like "If you keep going long enough in the same direction, you'll end up back where you started instead of falling off". It's just that the reasoning required to figure out which is true isn't something they really understand. In order to reason about what it implies when things disappear over the horizon, you have to contend with atmospheric lensing effects, for example.
In a case like that, you actually have to lean on social networks. Reasoning well in such circumstances has to do with how well and how honestly you're tracking what is convincing you and why.
Setting aside the object level question here, trying to redefine words in order to avoid challenging connotations is a way to go crazy.
If someone is theorizing about a conspiracy, that's a conspiracy theory by plain meaning of the words. If it's also true, then the connotation about conspiracy theories being false is itself at least partly false.
The point is to recognize that it does belong in the same class, and how accurate/strong those connotations are for this particular example of that reference class, and letting connotations shift to match as you defy the connotations where appropriate.
If you try to act like a conspiracy theory "isn't a conspiracy theory" when it's true, then you have to write your bottom line before figuring out whether it's true or not, and that doesn't actually work for coming to correct beliefs.
There's an important and underappreciated point here, but it's not quite right.
Conspiracy theorists come up with crazy theories, but they usually aren't so crazy that average people can see for themselves where the errors are. You can have flat earthers debate round earthers and actually make better points, because your average round earther doesn't know how to deduce the roundness themselves and is essentially just taking people's word for it. For the round earther to say "Hm. I can't see any problem with your argument" and then to be convinced would be an error. Their bias towards conformity is an active piece of how they avoid reaching false conclusions here.
However I don't think any of the round earthers in those debates would say that the flat earthers were convincing, because they were never charitable enough to those arguments for it to sound reasonable to them and the opposing arguments never felt strong relative to the force of conformity. "Don't change your beliefs" doesn't just protect against being persuaded by flat earthers as a round earther, it protects from being persuaded by round earthers as a flat earther, and being persuaded that you don't have a boyfriend anymore after he dumped you. If something *actually* seems convincing to you, that's worth paying attention to.
The defense here isn't to ignore evidence, it's to recognize that it isn't evidence. When you've fallen for three or four scams, and you pay attention to the fact that these kinds of things haven't been panning out, they actually get less convincing. Like how most people just don't find flat earth arguments convincing even if they can't find the flaw themselves ("Yeah, but you could make up arguments of that quality about anything").
And if you try critical thinking, you’ll either agree with the expert consensus (having wasted your time thinking), disagree with the experts (in which case you’re still more likely than not to be incorrect), or suspend judgment (in which case you’ve both wasted your time and are still likely to be incorrect). Exceptions only exist when the expert class is biased or otherwise unsuitable for deference. It’s better in most cases to avoid thinking for yourself.
This presupposes that you are not giving the experts the respect they deserve. It's certainly possible to err on this side, but people err on the other side all the time too. "Expert class is biased or otherwise unsuitable for deference" isn't a small exception, and your later point "most of the views you hear aren’t independent at all" further supports this.
The goal is to take expert opinion, and your own ability to reason on the object level, for what they're worth. No more, no less.
Any advice to simply trust one or the other is going to be wrong in many important cases.
Don’t take ideas seriously. Disagree with them even without any arguments in your favor.
Don't take ideas any more seriously than you can take your own ability to reason, and don't ignore your own inability to reason. If you can't trust your own ability to reason, don't take seriously the idea that any given idea is wrong either. Humility is important.
A Spanish windlass works (in part) on the same principle.
I'd say "Don't be that guy who injects themselves into the middle of a conversation about something else, and cause everyone to oppose you by trying to coopt the conversation to make it about your pet cause".
And "Instead, introduce your influence into the things people are already fighting for and not looking at, so that they get the most progress on the issue they're fighting by building on your input (rather than choosing to pick an additional battle with you)."
For example, I certainly wouldn't position myself by saying "Regardless of where we draw the line on abortion (i.e. how much we murder babies/attempt to control women by regulating their bodies), what matters more is..."
On the other hand, I would argue for gun rights by emphasizing that the purpose of the second amendment is to protect minorities from oppression by giving them "veto power", since it shifts the direction gun rights advocates would be pulling from, and the response is that gun rights advocates will pull along that line too instead of fighting it. Importantly, this isn't just a "rhetorical trick", but the actual better foundation in the first place, which is more widely recognizable as a solid justification and is in fact what many/most gun rights advocates are trying to pull towards in the first place even though they don't know how to and can't verbalize it well enough to pull accurately. "Shifting the direction of pull to one that is more true" is a good idea, as a rule of thumb.
It's a little more complicated of a maneuver since it also positions the debate in a way that it connects with another line the opposition tends to try to pull in an opposing direction, and in which the directions people think they're pulling and are actually pulling are very confused, but I think it demonstrates the "pull from behind" concept regardless.
Here's a thought experiment to illuminate what I expect you're seeing:
You're pulling a rope south against a group of people pulling the rope north. The group in front of you now starts pulling towards the rope north north west. What do you do? Do you A) begin to side step west so that you can continue to pull due south, attempting to rotate the rope from it's current direction, or B) shift your weight so that you don't get pulled sideways, and continue to pull against the rope which now means pulling somewhat easterly?
Now imagine you're pulling a rope south against a group of people pulling the rope north. Only this time, the group behind you begins pulling the rope south south west. Do you A) shift your weight as as to retain your position on the ground and pull the rope against both groups of people, attempting to kink the rope, or do you B) side step to maintain your position along the line, and continue to pull along the rope which now means pulling somewhat westerly?
I'm guessing that people are going to choose B and B, which means that the middle is the worst position to pull from, since you cause everyone to automatically and unthinkingly oppose you. If you pull from the rear instead, and have people on the back of each team pulling to the same side, I bet you'll get different results.
He was essentially gaslighted into thinking he had to sit there and suffer about it, rather than saying "oops" and laughing it off.
He already knew how to relate to pain pretty well from his older brothers playfully "beating him up" in what is essentially a rough game of "tickling" that teaches comfort with mild/non-harmful pain. In fact, when I stopped to ask him if it was the pain that he was distressed about, his response -- after briefly saying "Yeah!" and then realizing that it didn't fit -- was that when he feels pain his brain interprets it as "ticklish", and that it therefore it didn't actually hurt and instead "just tickles".
Everyone else was uncomfortable for him though, and while he was prepared to laugh off a burn that was relatively minor all things considered, he wasn't prepared to laugh off a strong consensus of adults acting like something definitely not okay happened to him, so as a result he was pressured into feeling not-okay about it all.
I disagree with the notion that we should come up with different words for things which share underlying structure but which don't conform to our expectations about what "trauma" looks like, or that we should treat "meditators who have Seen The Matrix" as weird edge cases that don't count and should be ignored when coming up with language.
The alternate perspective I offer is to view the successful meditators as people who simply have a more clear view of reality and therefore a better idea of how to define terms which cleave reality at the joints. The reasons it's important to cleave reality at it's joints are obvious in an abstract sense, but less obvious is that by doing this you actually change how pain is experienced and it doesn't require years of meditation.
My favorite example of this is when my kid cousin burned his hand pretty bad, and I found him fighting back tears as everyone tried to console him and offer ice. No one had any idea that their understanding of pain/suffering was meaningfully flawed here because the kid was clearly a central case of their concept of "hurt" and not some "meditator who has Seen The Matrix". No one saw their own responses to the situation as "trauma responses" because "it's not overwhelming" and "just trying to help, because I feel bad for him", but their actions were all in attempt to avoid their own discomfort at seeing him uncomfortable, and that failure to address the uncomfortable reality is the exact same thing and led to the exact same problems.
It's worth noting that they were doing it because they didn't know better and not that they didn't have the mental strength to resist even if they did, but it's exactly that "Well, it doesn't count as trauma because it's not that intense" thinking that allowed them to keep not knowing better instead of noticing "Wow, I'm uncomfortable seeing this kid injured and distressed like this", and proceeding as makes sense. In that case, simply asking if it the pain that was distressing him is all it took for him to not be distressed and not even perceive the sensations as "painful" anymore, but you can't get there if you are content with normal conflations between pain/suffering/meta-suffering/etc.
When people don't see themselves as "trauma limited" it's sometimes true, but it's also often that they don't recognize the ways in which the same dynamics are at play because they don't have a good reference experience for how it could be different or a good framework to lead them there. Discarding "intuitive" language and working only with precise language that lays bare the conflations is an important part of getting there.
If any onlookers (possibly aligned with Bob, possibly not) say, "Hey, um, you might not want to say that, it carries some risk of escalating to violence", I want the culture to provide a strong answer of "No, Bob will not do that—or if he does, it proves to everyone that he's monstrous and we'll throw him in jail faster than you can say 'uncivilized'. Civilians should act like there's no risk to speaking up, and we will do our best to make this a correct decision."
I see where you're coming from, but it doesn't actually work except for in the egregious cases and NVC highlights a more complete picture that includes the non-egregious cases. If you can't say "I think maybe we should get pizza" without Bob explicitly threatening to punch you in the face, then yes, that is a serious problem and it is crucial that Bob gets shut down.
However, there are two important points here.
One is that even if people respond in the way you prescribe, the person being threatened probably doesn't want to be punched in the face before you haul Bob off, and will likely be swayed by the threat anyway. If you try to pretend this doesn't exist, and say "Oh no, Bob isn't threatening because if he did that would be bad and we'd respond then", then Bob gets to say "Oh yeah, totally not threatening. Would be a shame if someone punched you in the face for suggesting we get pizza. Wink wink." and carry out his coercion while getting off scot free. This isn't good. In order to stop this, you have to make sure Bob feels punished for communicating the threat, even though the threat was "just words".
The second one, which gets at the heart of the issue, is that your prescribed response to Bob threatening violence is to threaten counterviolence (and in the spirit of this conversation, I'll explicitly disclaim here that I'm not saying this is "bad"). It's important that people feel free to express their values and beliefs without fearing violence for contributing to the cooperative endeavor, but "No risk to threatening violence" can't work and is the opposite of what you are trying to do with Bob "speaking up" about what he will do to anyone who suggests getting pizza.
Most real world conflicts aren't so egregious as "I will punch anyone who suggests getting pizza". Usually it's something like Adam lightly bumps into Bob, and Bob says "Watch where you're going, jerk", Adam says "Don't call me a jerk, asshole", Bob says "Call me an asshole again and see what happens", Adam says "If you touch me I'll kill you" and then eventually someone throws the first punch. Literally everything said here is said from a place of "I'm only threatening violence to suppress that guy's unjustified violence", and the "initial aggression" -- if there was any -- was simply not being careful enough not to bump into someone else. And "How careful is "careful enough?" isn't the kind of question we can agree on with enough fidelity and reliability to keep these unstable systems from flying off the rails.
The idea that "Unprovoked violence should be suppressed with zero tolerance [backed by willingness to use violence]" immediately explodes if "microaggressions" are counted as "violence", and so given that policy there's reason to push back applying the term "violent" to smaller infractions. However, that's just because it's a bad policy. Smaller levels of aggression still exist, and if you have to pretend to not see them then you de facto have infinite tolerance for anti-social behavior just below threshold, and clever Bobs will exploit this and provoke their victims into crossing the line while playing innocent. It's a pattern that comes up a lot.
The idea of NVC is to respond to threats of violence with less threat of violence, so that violent tension can fizzle out rather than going super-critial. That doesn't mean you let Bob threaten to punch people who express a liking for pizza, but it does mean that you recognize "Watch where you're going, jerk" as the first step of escalation and recognize that if you do that -- or if you respond to a line like that with "Don't call me a jerk, asshole" -- you may get punched and you will have contributed (avoidably) to that outcome.
but to call non-careful speech violent (either implicitly, or biting the bullet and making it explicit as you do) seems to imply it's your fault for making Bob punch you. Which is kind of true in a causal sense, but not in a "blame" sense.[1]
Seems to, yes. But that "seems" is coming from preexisting ideas about "who to blame", and NVC's whole idea is that maybe we should just do less of that in the first place.
The question is "How much do we want to avoid speaking truth so as to avoid people jumping to wrong conclusions when they combine the new truth with other false beliefs of theirs?". Sometimes we're kinda stuck choosing which falsehood for people to believe, but a lot of times we can just speak the truth, and then when people jump to the wrong conclusions, speak more truth.
Yes, there's something "violent" about a lot of incautious communication. No, that does not call for further aggression, physical or otherwise. Quite the opposite.
Calling it provoking—"non-provoking communication"—would be somewhat better, though I'm not entirely happy with it.
Provocation isn't a bad thing in general though, and doesn't necessarily contain threat of violence. Provocation can be done playfully and cooperatively even when not playful, and is critically important whenever the truth happens to be uncomfortable to anyone involved. Heck, NVC can be quite provocative at times.
"Nonthreatening communication" would be a better fit, IMO. Or "Nonadversarial". "Collaborative communication" works too, but kinda hides what makes it different so I do like the "define by saying what it isn't" kind of name in this case.
"How To Communicate With Uncivilized People Who Are Dangerously Prone To Violence" would be ideal in this sense.
That is a great use case, heh. But that undersells the utility among people who aren't uncivilized or dangerously prone to violence, and obscures why it works with those who are.
But, for abovementioned reasons, I don't want the terminology to have any shred of implication that escalating from speech to violence is justifiable.
I guess I'm less worried about that. I'd prefer those misunderstandings have a chance to surface and be dealt with, because without that it's hard to actually convey the important insights behind NVC.
Do you mean that saying "my method of communication is non-violent communication" implies that everyone else is communicating violently? [...] To be clear, I don't mean to imply that, and I don't subscribe to the interpretation that people who don't use NVC are being violent in any sense. I also think that attempts to police other people's language by saying things like "you must always use NVC" are going against the spirit of the original.
I'll bite that bullet. People who aren't communicating in the spirit of NVC are "communicating violently". Not in the sense of "Words are literal violence!" because "sticks and stones", but in the sense that "If you don't give me what I want I will use sticks and stones to break your bones" is "communicating violently".
NVC points at the important insight that much of what passes for "normal communication" is actually subtle and implicit threats, which can and do escalate to real physical harm and literal violence. "Why are you being so mean?" doesn't pass for NVC, and that's not unrelated to the fact that it can be used to recruit someone to do violence on your behalf against the person who you accuse of doing you wrong. It doesn't usually get that far, in the same way that parking tickets aren't usually enforced with guns drawn, but there's a reason that libertarians like to point out that all laws are ultimately enforced at gunpoint and the same thing applies here.
That doesn't mean that we should "must" at people who aren't communicating in the spirit of NVC, because as you point out, that would be violating the spirit of NVC. But I do think the term fits, and the way to get around the hubris of saying "my method of communication is nonviolent communication!" is to 1) point out how the term "violence" is actually legit and doesn't just mean "offensive", 2) don't run around claiming that you actually succeed at doing it more than you do, and 3) point out how "nonviolent" isn't even the goal to aspire to 100% of the time and definitely not synonymous with "good".
Good question, and good observation. My answer, in short, is that NVC is about credibly removing (or diminishing) threat of conflict.
If you step on my toes it very well might be an accident. If it's an accident, and I know it's an accident, there's no reason for me to attack you for it because as soon as you see that I don't like what you're doing you'll stop on your own. In that case, "Hey man, you're on my toes" isn't an attack, and there's no reason to treat it like it must be an attack just because I didn't like my toes getting stepped on.
However, if you start adding additional pieces to the picture, then the story changes. If I'm "stating an observation" through clenched teeth and with clenched fists, it's starting to seem a lot more likely that I'm adding a layer of interpretation that is calling for conflict -- even if I don't verbalize the interpretation explicitly.
In the latter case, "nonviolent language" isn't gonna work because people are generally smart enough to see the incongruence and prefer to trust the body language over the words which are easier to fake. But it's also not easy to simultaneously hold onto that sense of righteous anger while saying the words that point out the facts which show the anger to not fit.
So if you were to hold yourself to saying "I know you don't mean to hurt me and aren't doing it on purpose, but it is very physically painful when you step on my toes, and I worry that bearing so much concentrated weight might even damage them. Can you please gently step back?", and you know that "you don't mean to hurt me and aren't doing it on purpose" is true, then it's a lot harder to keep doing anger at that person, and even if you're a bit clenched it's going to come off more like "this person is overwhelmed and trying to keep it together because they recognize we're on the same side" than "this person is threatening me".
No matter what harm this emotion may cause, it may also cause a lot of good, like getting up, being friendly to coworkers or being productive. Basically, every emotion is a motivation towards something, the outcome may be predictable, it will vary for the individual and it will affect peers or groups.
Fear isn't a motivation towards something, it's a motivation away from something. It's not that it's impossible to use fear productively, and Richard even touches on that.
It's that constraining your response to fear to be only productive is fighting against entropy in the same way that pushing rope is fighting against entropy. Speaking of "fear of getting fired", a friend of mine was in that boat recently, and while her fear did keep her from doing some things which would have gotten her fired, it also motivated her to refuse to look at the reality of the situation she was in -- because that is an equally effective way of getting away from the experience of fear!
As a result, she wasn't able to update her perspectives in the ways that would have been needed in order to keep the job, and so she lost that job. All of the things you list as potential good things that can come from fear are things that can come more fluidly from excitement. People who are friendly because they are afraid of what will happen if they aren't friendly tend to come off more stilted and insecure than people who are just genuinely looking forward to seeing what they can create with you.
Adding onto this, an important difference between "anxiety" and "heightened attentiveness" is that anxiety has a lot to do with not knowing what to do. If you have a lot of experience driving cars and losing traction, and life or death scenarios, then when it happens you know what to do and just focus on doing it. If you're full of anxiety, it's likely that you don't actually have any good responses ready if the tires do lose traction, and beyond not having a good response to enact you can't even focus on performing the best response you do have because your attention is also being tugged towards "I don't have a good way to respond and this is a problem!".
It's not that it's "necessarily good and something you should act on" just because that's what you feel, it's that it's not "necessarily bad and something you shouldn't feel" just because that's what you think. Maybe, and maybe, but you're always going to be fallible on both fronts so it makes sense to check.
And that is actually how you can make sure to "not feel" this kind of inappropriate feeling, by the way. The mental move of "I don't want to feel this. I shouldn't feel this" is the very mental move that leads people to be stuck with feelings which don't make sense, since it is an avoidance of bringing them into contact with reality.
If you find yourself stuck with an "irrational" fear, and go to a therapist saying "I shouldn't feel afraid of dogs", they're likely to suggest "exposure therapy" which is basically a nice way of saying "Lol at your idea that you shouldn't feel this, how about we do the exact opposite, make you feel it more, and refrain from trying not to?". In order to do exposure therapy, you have to set aside your preconceived ideas about whether the fear is appropriate and actually find out. When the dog visibly isn't threatening you, and you're actually looking at the fact that there's nothing scary, then you tend to start feeling less afraid. That's really all there is to it, and so if you can maintain a response to fear of "Oh wow, this is scary. I wonder if it's actually dangerous?" even as you feel fear, then you never develop a divergence between your feelings and what you feel is appropriate to feel, and therefore no problem that calls for a therapist or "shoulding" at yourself.
It's easier said than done, of course, but the point is that "I shouldn't feel this" doesn't actually work either instrumentally or epistemically.
- Yes, Jimmy was either projecting (filling in unspecified details with dysfunction, where function would also fit) or making an unjustified claim (that any gym matching your description must be dysfunctional). I think projection is more likely. Neither of these options is great.
FWIW, that is a claim I'm fully willing and able to justify. It's hard to disclaim all the possible misinterpretations in a brief comment (e.g. "deeply" != "very"), but I do stand by a pretty strong interpretation of what I said as being true, justifiable, important, and relevant.