[I wrote this something like 6 months ago]

• I basically always side with my psych bugs. If I object to something in a psychy way, my attitude is generally, “I don’t understand you, or what you’re about, little psych bug, but I’m with you. I’m not going to let anyone or anything force us to do anything that you don’t want to do.”
• Sometimes this is only one half of a stance, where the other half is a kind of clear-sighted sense of “but this isn’t actually the optimal behavior set, right? I could be doing better by my goals and values by doing something else?” But even in that case, my allyship of my psych bugs comes first.
• I don’t throw myself under the bus just because I don’t understand the root of my own behavior patterns. And I don’t force myself to change just because I think I’ve understood. Deep changes to my psychology are almost always to be done from the inside out. The psychy part of me is the part that gets to choose if it wants to change. I might do CoZEs, but the psychy part of me gets to decide if it wants to do CoZEs and which ones to do.
• Admittedly, there’s a bit of an art here. There are cases where it’s not a psychy objection, but simple fear of discomfort that is holding me back. Sometimes I’m shying away from doing another rep at the gym, or doing another problem on the problem set, not because I have a deep objection, but because it’s hard. And sometimes I don’t want to change some of my social behavior patterns because that would mean being outside my comfort zone, and so I’m avoiding it or rationalizing why not to change.
• And for those I should just summon courage and take action anyway. (Though in that last example there, in particular, I want to summon compassion along with courage.)
• There’s a tricky problem here of how to deal with psychy internal conflicts of various stripes. I don’t claim that this is the
• I want to explain a bit of why I have this stance. There are basically 3 things that can go wrong if I do a simple override of a psych bug. These are kind of overlapping. I don’t think they’re really one thing or another.

1. I’m disintegrated and I take ineffective action.

• If something feels really bad to do, in a psychy way, and I try to do it anyway, then I’m fighting myself. My behavior is in practice going to be spastic as I alternate between trying to do X and trying to do not X, or worse, try and do X and not X at the same time.
• Recent example: I was interested in helping my friends with their CFAR workshops, but also thought that what they were doing was bad in an important way and incremental improvements to what they were doing would make things worse because I didn’t really trust the group. Even now, I’m struggling to put to paper exactly what the conflict was here.
• So I ended up 1) not helping very much, because I was not full-heartedly committed to the project and 2) metaphorically stabbing myself in the foot as I repeatedly did things that seemed terrible to me in hard-to-explain ways.
• And the way that I get integration is I own all my values, not giving up on any of them, and I work to get to the root of what each one is protecting, and to figure out how to satisfy all of them. It

2. I harm some part of my values.

• My psych bugs are sort of like allergies to something, which are keeping me mored to the things that I care about. They flare up when it seems like the world is encroaching on something deeply important to me that I won’t be able to argue for or defend against.
• Examples:
• I was often triggered around some things with romance, and most people’s suggestions around romance. I sometimes expressed that it felt like other people were trying to gaslight me about what I want. There was something deep and important to me in this domain, and also it was fragile. I could loose track of it.
• I have a deep aversion to doing drugs. (I once fainted from listening to some benign drug experiences, and have left academic lectures on LSD, because I felt like I was going to throw up). I haven’t explored this in detail, but something in me sees something about (some) drugs, and is like “nope. nope. nope. Critically bad. Unacceptable.” Probably something about maintaining my integrity as an agent and a thinking thing.
• It is really not ok, in either of these cases to just overwrite myself here. Both of these “aversions” are keeping me mored to something that is deeply important to me, and that I do not want to loose, but which the world is exerting pressure against.
• (The seed of a theory of triggeredness)

3. The territory strikes back.

• Most importantly, sometimes the psychy part of me is smarter than me, or at least is managing to track some facet of reality that I’m not tracking, and if I just do an override, even if this worked in the sense of not putting me in a position where I’m fighting myself, reality will smack me in the face.

• Some examples:
• Most people hurt themselves / impair themselves in learning “social skills”, and the first commitment when learning “social skills” is to not damage yourself.

• Note that that doesn’t mean that you should just do nothing. You still want to get stronger. But you want to do it in a way that doesn’t violate more important commitments.
• One class of psych bug in me seems to be pointing at the Geeks, Mops, Sociopaths dynamic. I have miscalibrated (?) counter-reactions to anything that looks like letting in MOPs or Sociopaths into things that I care about.
• Those are real risks! Bad things happen when you do that! Shutting my eyes to my sense of “something bad is happening here” doesn’t help me avoid the problem.

• In practice, it’s usually more of blend of all three of these failure modes, and I don’t get to know from the outset how much of it is each. And also usually, there’s some overreaction or miscalibration mixed in. But, likewise, I don’t know from the outset what is miscalibration and what isn’t.
• So, by default, when I have a psychy objection to something, I side with it, and defend it, while doing a dialog process, and trying to move closer to the pareto frontier of my values.