Committed Engagement and the Critical Importance of Ambiguity

~ elityre ~ 3 Comments

[epistemic status: the basic idea has been validated by at least my experience, and it seems to resonate with others. But I’m not confident that I have the right framing or am using the right concepts.]

[Part of my Psychological Principles of Productivity drafts.]

In this essay, I want to point out a fact about human psychology, and some interventions  based on that fact.

First, an example. There’s a rule that my mom taught me for cleaning my room, when I was growing up: never pick up an object more than once. Once you have an item in your hand, you must put it where it goes, never put it back down where you found it. The reason for this is that you otherwise tend to get stuck in a loop: where you pick up a thing, are not quite sure where it goes, and so pick up another thing. Finding yourself in the same situation, you pick up the first thing again.

In my adult life, I sometimes find myself in a similar situation when processing email. I’m going through my inbox, and I get to an email that I’m not quite sure how to respond to, and I notice myself flicking back to my inbox without having made a decision about how to reply.

There’s an important truth about human psychology in this phenomenon: ambiguity, that is unclarity about specific next actions, is micro-hedonically aversive, and the human mind tends to flinch away from it.

Productivity

In fact, I think that ambiguity is the primary cause of ugh fields that can curtail my (your?) productivity.

Committed engagement

That’s because resolving ambiguity, clarifying what your options are, and choosing which one to commit to, is hard work. It requires conscious, System-2 style, effort. For most of us, being so called “knowledge workers”, resolving ambiguity is the bulk of our work. The hard part is figuring out what to do. Doing it is often comparatively easy.

Often, when Aversion Factoring, I find that the only reason why I don’t feel like doing something, is the effort of chunking out what exactly the next actions are. After I’ve done that I have no aversion at all.

Accordingly, I now think of processing my various inboxes (and particularly the inbox of reminders that I leave for myself), not as a low-energy, time-limited [as opposed to energy-limited] task, but as a key component of the work that I do.

And when I’m processing inboxes, I step into a mode that I call committed engagement: I make it my intention to plow through and empty the inbox. Given that I’m going to get to and deal with every item, there’s no incentive to look at a thing and put it back. In Committed engagement, the natural thing to do with an item is figure out what needs to be done with it. (Committed engagement is an energized state, with some pressure to get through the task rapidly.)

This is contrast to a sort of “shallow engagement” in which I skim over the inbox, clicking on things that seem quick or interesting, and then marking them as unread again, if they require even a little bit of thought.

Simulation for resolving ambiguity

I have a variety of useful TAPs based on this principle that my mind avoids ambiguity. When I feel averse to a thing in a way that has the flavor of ambiguity (which I do have specific phenomenology for), I visualize the very first smallest steps of the action in my Inner Simulator, which often lowers the activation energy so substantially that it becomes basically easy to take the action.

For instance, Trigger: “I should start writing, but I don’t feel like it” -> Action: “Visualize opening up my laptop” tends to automatically lead to opening up my laptop and begin writing. 

If know that I should strength train, but I don’t feel like it, I’ll simulate concretely standing up, walking to the elevator, and pushing the button. Which in most cases, is sufficient to cause me to get up, walk over, and push the button. And once I’m in the elevator, I’m on my way to the gym.

I think of this as taking advantage of “the smallest atomic action” principle of setting good TAPs. But instead of setting a plan for the future, you’re “setting a plan” for the very next moment. It’s almost humorous how much motivation cascades from merely imagining a simple atomic action.

Similarly, if I’m lost in working on a problem, I might write down the first step, or the main blocker, just to make it clear to me what that is. From there, the next actions are often clear and I can make progress.

Epistemology

This psychological fact is extremely important for productivity, but it is also relevant to epistemology. Your mind is averse to ambiguity. when considering a problem, you have a tendency to deflect away from the parts that are non-concrete: which are often where the important thinking is to be done.

This is at least a part of the reason why “rubber ducking” or talking with a friend is often helpful: stating your problem out loud forces you to clarify the points where you have ambiguity, which you might otherwise skim over.

A shout out

I think my mom probably learned that rule from David Allen (who she met in person), or at least his excellent book, Getting Things Done. He says:

You may find you have a tendency, while processing your in-basket, to pick something up, not know exactly what you want to do about, and then let your eyes wander onto another item farther down the stack and get engaged with it. That item may be more attractive to your psyche because you know right away what to do with it – and you don’t feel like thinking about what’s in your hand. This is dangerous territory. What’s in your hand is likely to land on a “hmppphhh” stack on the side of your desk because you become distracted by something easier, more important, or more interesting below it.

Furthermore, this idea that clarifying your work, and resolving your “stuff” into next actions is the bulk of one’s intellectual labor, is an important theme of the book.

. . .

Keep this in mind: Your mind flinches away from ambiguity. But you can learn to notice, and counter-flinch.

 

Related: Microhedonics, Attention, Visualization

References: Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress Free Productivity

Notes on interventions for falling asleep

~ elityre ~ 3 Comments

[Epistemic status: not even a claim, really. This is still mostly stream of thought. Barely edited.]

One major result of my initial meditation experiment was driving home to me, on a more visceral level, the importance of sleep. Given that sleep is so critical, having a robust system for falling asleep, regardless of how I’m feeling seems high priority.

I can usually fall asleep pretty well, though I occasionally have bouts of restlessness, when I’m awake with my mind churning hours after I’ve gone to bed. I want to prevent that, permanently and robustly.

Today, I outlined some perspectives on what’s preventing me from falling asleep in that situation, and the interventions each might imply:

  1. My mind is holding on to some open loops that it thinks are important
    1. Jot down my thoughts in my metacognition notebook.
  2. My thoughts are racing, and I just need to stably direct my attention to something else for a bit.
    1. Meditation (though this might be hard to pull off in such a situation)
    2. Drawing
    3. Reading
    4. Masturbating
  3. I’m physiologically aroused, and I need to cool off
    1. Serenity ritual / protocol
    2. This breathing technique?
    3. Progressive relaxation
    4. Againstness-like activation modulation
    5. Clearing a space-like motions?
    6. [added 2019-03-016: EFT (which seems to work pretty well for reducing anxiety and the like. I don’t know why.)]
  4. My thoughts are racing and I’m physiologically activated, because there’s some important goal that a subsystem of mine is tracking.
    1. IDC with it

When I started listing these, I was think that I was noting different theories about what’s blocking falling asleep. But actually, these perspectives aren’t mutually exclusive. They’re more like different intervention points of a potentially contiguous model.

That is:

I’m awake because my body is physiologically aroused.

…Which is caused by attention being absorbed by something that’s in some way energizing or exciting.

…Which is probably because a goal directed process in me is trying to get something (by ruminating or planning or whatever).

And I can intervene on any of these levels.

Impact of mindfulness meditation on wellbeing and productivity: preliminary results

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

[epistemic status: semi-formal lab report.

This is all about me. Probably of interest only to the people that want to observe some of my process. This is also not all that well organized. It’s partly stream of conciseness.]

Intro:

Over that past few months (and the past 2 years, before that), I’ve been conflicted about the importance of having a regular meditation practice. There are good arguments for the high importance of concentration and metacognition, and meditation supposedly boosts those skills. Furthermore, I’ve directly observed some effects on my cognition that seems to be the result of having meditated that morning: being more apt to notice my thoughts as they’re happening, feeling more settled, being less reactive [I still need to write about “reactivity”], etc.

However, there’s clear and plausible confound. My life is often hectic, and maybe I only get around to meditating on days and weeks when I’m generally on top of everything. That is maybe the causality is reversed: instead of meditation making my life better, it that when my life is already going pretty well, I sit down to meditate.

So, I’m doing a randomized trial.

Two Mondays ago I flipped a (digital) coin. If it came up “1” then I would make a diligent effort to meditate every day for 20 minutes each day for the next 14 days, regardless of what else happening in my life. If it came up “0” I would meditate only when I felt like it.

It came up “1”, and for the past week and a half I’ve been meditating every day. (On one of the days, I meditated for only 18 minutes instead fo 20, but I don’t think that invalidates the experiment.)

I haven’t even finished my two weeks of meditation yet, but these are my preliminary results.

(Note that this experiment is just for observing the effects on my overall wellbeing and productivity. I may do other experiments with more explicit measurements for the psychological axes that I expect meditation to improve, but this isn’t that.)

Results:

This is going to be kind of informal. I don’t have rigorous proof for any of these conclusions. I’m partially sharing my “this is what it seems like to me”. Obviously, I’ll do further followup on all of these.

Briefly, meditation is definitely less important for my overall wellbeing than 1) Good sleep 2) getting regular intense exercise 3) being oriented on my goals and having my tasks “loaded up” and maybe 4) regularly taking a rest day.

Last week, the first part of my week was especially (95th percentile) good and productive, and then the later part of my my week (Wednesday on) was kind draggy and low-motivation (Being gentle on myself, I fell back to doing only one major task each day).

I’m chocking this up to 1) having a good rest day on Sunday, and 2) outlining my day in detail the night before for each of the days of the week (something I sometimes do). My subjective impression is that doing that self-organization in a deep (vs. a cursory or superficial way) makes a big difference for my productivity.

(My current hypotheses are that this is due to “loading up” my goals in my peripheral attention (or something) / making me (peripherally) aware of the full context of my goals and therefore the real tradeoffs and costs, and/or future-pacing providing some sort of sub-verbal nudge at decision point junctures throughout the day. [I should theorize about this].)

In the later part of the week, I had some major shoulder tension (a first for me), that persisted for days. After about 5 days, I spend an hour doing Focusing, and hanging with it, and “going inside of it”. It dissolved.

I think there was also an issue of not exercising (I was going on long walks, but I didn’t do anything intense, like strength training) making it harder for me to get to sleep. At least, I wasn’t strength training and I was getting less than 8 hours of sleep. (Around 7. Always more than 5.)

All of these seem like bigger factors than my meditation practice. Though I’ll also note that my meditation sessions weren’t particularly good. I sometimes am on-point, returning to my breath with high frequency, and getting into a sort aggressive flow with meditation. That didn’t happen this week. When the other factors are taken care of, I might meditate better, and meditation might then provide a boost over and above.

 

My current model of Anxiety

~ elityre ~ 5 Comments

[epistemic status: untested first draft model

Part of my Psychological Principles of Productivity series]

This is a brief post on my current working model of what “anxiety” is. (More specifically, this is my current model of what’s going on when I experience a state characterized by high energy, distraction, and a kind of “jittery-ness”/ agitation. I think other people may use the handle “anxiety” for other different states.)

I came up with this a few weeks ago, durring that period of anxiety and procrastination. (It was at least partial inspired by my reading a draft of Kaj’s recent post on IFS. I don’t usually have “pain” as an element of my psychological theorizing.)

The model

Basically, the state that I’m calling anxiety is characterized by two responses moving “perpendicular” to each other: increased physiological arousal, mobilizing for action, and a flinch response redirecting attention to decrease pain.

Here’s the causal diagram:

 

IMG_2554.JPG

The parts of the model

It starts with some fear or belief about the state of the world. Specially, this fear is an alief about an outcome that 1) would be bad and 2) is uncertain.

For instance:

  • Maybe I’ve waited too late to start, and I won’t be able to get the paper in by the deadline.
  • Maybe this workshop won’t be good and I’m going to make a fool of myself.
  • Maybe this post doesn’t make as much sense as I thought.

(I’m not sure about this, but I think that the uncertainty is crucial. At least in my experience, at least some of the time, if there’s certainty about the bad outcome, my resources are mobilized to deal with it. This “mobilization and action” has an intensity to it, but it isn’t anxiety.)

This fear is painful, insofar as it represents the possibility of something bad happening to you or your goals.

The fear triggers physiological arousal, or SNS activation. You become “energized”. This is part of your mind getting you ready to act, activating the fight-or-flight response, to deal with the possible bad-thing.

(Note: I originally drew the diagram with the pain causing the arousal. My current guess is that it makes more sense to talk about the fear causing the arousal directly. Pain doesn’t trigger fight-or-flight responses (think about being stabbed, or having a stomach ache). It’s when their’s danger, but not certain harm, that we get ready to move.)

However, because the fear includes pain, there are other parts of the mind that have a flinch response. There’s a sub-verbal reflex away from the painful fear-thought.

In particular, there’s often an urge towards distraction. Distractions like…

  • Flipping to facebook
  • Flipping to LessWrong
  • Flipping to Youtube
  • Flipping to [webcomic of your choice]
  • Flipping over to look at your finances
  • Going to get something to eat
  • Going to the bathroom
  • Walking around “thinking about something”

This is often accompanied by rationalization thought, that is justifying the distraction behavior to yourself.

So we end up with the fear causing both high levels of physiological SNS activation, and distraction behaviors.

Consequences

The distraction-seeking is what gives rise to the “reactivity” (I should write about this sometime) of anxiety, and the heightened SNS gives rise to the jittery “high energy” of anxiety.

Of course, these responses work at cross purposes: the SNS energy is mobilizing for action, (and will be released when action has been taken and the situation is improved) and and the flinch is trying not to think the bad possibility.

I think the heightened physiological arousal might be part of why  anxiety is hard to dialogue with. Doing focusing requires (? Is helped by?) calm and relaxation.

I think this might also explain a phenomenon that I’ve observed in myself: both watching TV and masturbating defuse anxiety. (That is, I can be highly anxious and unproductive, but if if I watch youtube clips for and hour and a half, or masturbate, I’ll feel more settled and able to focus afterwards).

This might be because both of these activities can grab my attention so that I loose track of the originating fear thought, but I don’t think that’s right. I think that these activities just defuse the heightened SNS, which clears space so that I can orient on making progress.

This suggests that any activity that reduces my SNS activation will be similarly effective. That matches my experience (exercise, for instance, is a standard excellent response to anxiety), but I’ll want to play with modulating my physiological arousal a bit and see.

Note for application

In case this isn’t obvious from the post, this model suggests that you want to learn to notice your flinches and (the easier one) your distraction behaviors, so that they can be triggers for self-dialogue. If you’re looking to increase your productivity, this is one of the huge improvements that is on the table for many people. (I’ll maybe say more about this sometime.)

Some ways to “clear space”

~ elityre ~ 3 Comments

[Epistemic status: pursuing ideas, no clear conclusion]

Part of the thinking of my Psychology and Phenomenology of Productivity

Followup to: What to do with should/flinches: TDT-stable internal incentives

So there’s a problem.  When I’m agitated, the thing that most helps is doing Focusing on the agitation, to dialogue with it and get clarity about which goals are threatened. But when I’m most agitated, my mind tends to glance off of my agitation. I can’t stabilize my intention on the agitation enough to start doing Focusing.

So I have a circular dependency. I want to do Focusing, to help the agitation. I can’t do Focusing, because I’m agitated.

I think resolving this is what is meant by the “clearing a space” step in Gendlin’s 6 steps, and may be isomorphic to “unblending”.

Personally, I really want to have a systematic solution to this problem.

These are somethings that I know help boost me out of the circular dependency.

  • Grab another person to be my focusing companion. This one helps hugely, for reasons that are unknown to me. (Extra working memory? I don’t think that’s it. Maybe, having another person looking at me creates a slight pressure towards coherent trains of thought, instead of my mind/attention jumping around from stimulus to stimulus? That seems closer.
  • Start writing. This seems like it also anchors my attention, so that it’s easier to be in contact with the anxiety/agitation, without slipping off.

These are some things that might help, but I haven’t tried in depth yet.

  • Some explicit practice with the unblending step of Focusing? (It’s my understanding that some Focusing teachers train this explicitly
  • Top down regulating my SNS activity using something like Val’s old Againstness, or my suggestion serenity routine from 2014?

 

Note that I need my solution that itself avoids the problem of the circular dependency. Whatever the technique I use to to make space to do Focusing on the agitation has to be easy to do when agitated, or what’s the point?

But ideally, I could have a TAP sequence that looked like…

[Notice the agitation] -> [Snap my fingers (or something, to reify and time-condence the noticing] -> [Clear space somehow] -> [Do Focusing on the root of my agitation]

What to do with should/flinches: TDT-stable internal incentives

~ elityre ~ 5 Comments

[epistemic status: current hypothesis, backed by some simple theory, and virtually no empirical evidence yet]

{Part of the thinking going into my Psychology and Phenomenology of Productivity sequence}

The situation

I’ve been having an anxious and unproductive week. There’s a project that I intend to be working on, but I’ve been watching myself procrastinate (fairly rare for me these days), and work inefficiently.

More specifically this situation occurs:

I’m sitting down to start working. Or I am working, and I encounter a point of ambiguity, and my attention flinches away. Or I’m taking a break and am intended to start working again.

At that moment, I feel the pressure of the “should”, the knowing that I’m supposed to/I reflectively want to be making progress, and also feel the inclination to flinch away, to distract myself with something, to flick to LessWrong (it used to be youtube, or SMBC, but I blocked those) or to get something to eat. This comes along with a clench in my belly.

The Opportunity and Obligation

This is a moment of awareness. At that moment, I am conscious of my state, I’m conscious of my desire to make progress on the project. If I do flick to LessWrong, or otherwise distract myself, I will loose that conscious awareness. I’ll still feel bad, still have the clench in my belly, but I won’t be consciously aware of the thing I’m avoiding (at least until the next moment like this one). At that moment, I’m at choice about what to do (or at least more at choice). In the next moment, if the default trajectory is followed, I won’t be.

Realizing this put’s a different flavor on procrastination. Typically, if I’m procrastinating, I have a vague “just one more” justification. It’s ok to watch just one more youtube clip, I can quit after that one. I can stay in bed for another five minutes, and then get up. But if my level of consciousness of my situation fluctuates, that justification is flatly not true.

I have the opportunity right now, to choose something different. I, in actual fact, will not have that opportunity in five minutes.

That me, right then, in that timeslice, has a specific obligation to the world. [I should maybe write a post about how my morality cashes out to different timeslices having different highly-specific obligations to serve the Good.] In that moment, I, the me that is conscious of the should, have the obligation to seize the opportunity of that increased consciousness and use it to put myself on a trajectory such that the next timeslice can effectively pursue a project that will be a tick of the world iterating to a good, safe, future.

The problem

The naive way to seize on that opportunity is to force myself do the task.

There’s a problem with that solution, aside even from the fact that it doesn’t seem like it will work (it’s typically a red flag when one’s plan is “I’ll just use will power”). Even if I could reliably seize on my moment of awareness to force myself to overcome the aversion of my flinch response, doing so would disincentivize me from noticing in the first place.

Doing that would be to install a TAP: whenever I notice myself with a should/flinch, I’ll immediately grit my teeth and preform an effortful and painful mental action. This is conditioning my brain to NOT notice such experiences.

Which is to say, the “just do it” policy is not stable. If I successfully implemented it, I would end up strictly worse off, because I’d still be procrastinating, but I would be much less likely to notice my procrastination.

A guess at a solution

After having noticed this dynamic this week, this is the approach that I’m trying: when I notice the experience of an entangled “should” and the flinch away from it, I orient to hold both of them. More specifically, I move into facilitation mode, where my goal is to make sure that the concerns of both parts are heard and taken into account. Not to force any action, but to mediate between the two conflicting threads.

(Taking advantage of fleeting moments of increased consciousness to hold the concerns of two inchoate and conflicting things at once, is a bit tricky, but I bet I’ll aquire skill with practice.)

If I were to generalize this goal it is something like: when I have a moment of unusual awareness of a conflict, I move to in the direction of increased awareness.

I’ve only been doing this for a few days, so my n is super small, and full of confounds, but this seems to have lead to more time spent dialoguing parts, and days this week have been increasingly focused and productive.

 

Culture vs. Mental Habits

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[epistemic status: personal view of the rationality community.]

In this “post”, I’m going to outline two dimensions on which one could assess the rationality community and the success of the rationality project. This is hardly the only possible break-down, but it is one that underlies a lot of my thinking about rationality community building, and what I would do, if I decided rationality community building were a strong priority.

I’m going to call those two dimensions Culture and Mental Habits. As we’ll see these are not cleanly distinct categories, and they tend to bleed into each other. But they have separate enough focuses that one can meaningfully talk about the differences between them.

Culture

By “culture” I mean something like…

  • Which good things are prioritized?
  • Which actions and behaviors are socially rewarded?
  • Which concepts and ideas are in common parlance?

Culture is about groups of people, what those groups share and what they value.

My perception is that on this dimension, the Bay area rationality community has done extraordinarily well.

Truth-seeking is seen as paramount: individuals are socially rewarded for admitting ignorance and changing their minds. Good faith and curiosity about other people’s beliefs is common.

Analytical and quantitative reasoning is highly respected, and increasingly, so is embodied intuition.

People get status for doing good scholarship (e.g. Sarah Constantin), for insightful analysis of complicated situations (e.g. Scott Alexander, for instance), or for otherwise producing good or interesting intellectual content (e.g. Eliezer).

Betting (putting your money where your mouth is) is socially-encouraged. Concepts like “crux” and “rationalist taboo” are well known enough to be frequently invoked in conversation.

Compared to the backdrop of mainline American culture, where admitting that you were wrong means losing face, and trying to figure out what’s true is secondary (if not outright suspicious, since it suggests political non-allegiance), the rationalist bubble’s culture of truth seeking is an impressive accomplishment.

Mental habits

For lack of a better term, I’m going to call this second dimension “mental habits” (or perhaps to borrow Leverage’s term “IPs”).

The thing that I care about in this category is “does a given individual reliably execute some specific cognitive move, when the situation calls for it?” or “does a given individual systematically avoid a given cognitive error?”

Some examples, to gesture at what I mean

  • Never falling prey to the planning fallacy
  • Never falling prey to sunk costs
  • Systematically noticing defensiveness and deflinching or a similar move
  • Systematically noticing and responding to rationalization phenomenology
  • Implementing the “say oops” skill, when new evidence comes to light that overthrows an important position of yours
  • Systematic avoidance of the sorts of errors I outline my Cold War Cognitive Errors investigation (this is the only version that is available at this time).

The element of reliability is crucial. There’s a way that culture is about “counting up” (some people know concept X, and use it sometimes) and mental habits is about “counting down” (each person rarely fails to execute relevant mental process Y).

The reliability of mental habits (in contrast with some mental motion that you know how to do and have done once or twice), is crucial, because it puts one in a relevantly different paradigm.

For one thing, there’s a frame under which rationality is about avoiding failure modes: how to succeed in a given domain depends on the domain, but rationality is about how not to fail, generally. Under that frame, executing the correct mental motion 10% of the time is much less interesting and impressive than executing it everytime (or even 90% of the time).

If the goal is to avoid the sorts of errors in my cold war post, then it is not even remotely sufficient for individuals to be familiar with the patches: they have to reliably notice the moments of intervention and execute the patches, almost every time, in order to avoid the error in the crucial moment.

Furthermore, systematic execution of a mental TAP allows for more complicated cognitive machines. Lots of complex skills depend on all of the pieces of the skills working.

It seems to me, that along this dimension, the rationality community has done dismally.

Eliezer wrote about Mental Habits of this sort in the sequences and in his other writing, but when I consider even very advanced members of my community, I think very few of them systematically notice rationalization, or will reliably avoid sunk costs, or consistently respond to their own defensiveness.

I see very few people around me who explicitly attempt to train 5-second or smaller rationality skills. (Anna and Matt Fallshaw are exceptions who come to mind).

Anna gave a talk at the CFAR alumni reunion this year, in which she presented two low-level cognitive skills of that sort. There were about 40 people in the room watching the lecture, but I would be mildly surprised if even 2 of those people reliably execute the skills described, in the relevant-trigger situation, 6 months from that talk.

But I can imagine a nearby world, where the rationality community was more clearly a community of practice, and most of the the people in that room, would watch that talk and then train the cognitive habit to that level of reliability.

This is not to say that fast cognitive skills of this sort are what we should be focusing on. I can see arguments that culture really is the core thing. But nevertheless, it seems to me that the rationality community is not excelling on the dimension of training it’s members in mental TAPs.

[Added note: Brienne’s Tortoise skills is nearly archetypal of what I mean by “mental habits”.]

Using the facilitator to make sure that each person’s point is held

~ elityre ~ 3 Comments

[Epistemic status: This is a strategy that I know works well from my own experience, but also depends on some prereqs.

I guess this is a draft for my Double Crux Facilitation sequence.]

Followup to: Something simple to try in conversations

Related to: Politics is the Mind Killer, Against Disclaimers

Here’s a simple model that is extremely important to making difficult conversations go well:

Sometimes, when a person is participating in a conversation, or an argument, he or she will be holding onto a “point”, that he/she wants to convey.

For instance…

  • A group is deciding which kind of air conditioner to get, and you understand that one brand is much more efficient than the others, for the same price.
  • You’re listening to a discussion between two intellectuals who you can tell are talking past eachother, and you have the perfect metaphor that will clarify things for both of them.
  • Your startup is deciding how to respond to an embarrassing product failure, one of the cofounders wants to release a statement that you think will be off-putting to many of your customers.

As a rule, when a person is “holding onto” a point that they want to make, they are unable to listen well.

The point that a person wants to make relates to something that’s important to them. If it seems that their conversational-partners are not going to understand or incorporate that point, that important value is likely going to be lost. Reasonably, this entails a kind of anxiety.

So, to the extent that it seems to you that your point won’t be heard or incorporated, you’ll agitatedly push for airtime, at the expense of good listening. Which, unfortunately, results in a coordination problem of each person pushing to get their point heard and no one listening. Which, of course, makes it more likely that any given point won’t be heard, triggering a positive feedback loop.

In general, this means that conversations are harder to the degree that…

  1. The topic matters to the participants.
  2. The participant’s visceral expectation is that they won’t be heard.

(Which is a large part of the reason why difficult conversations get harder as the number of participants increases. More people means more points competing to be heard, which exacerbates the death spiral.)

Digression

I think this goes a long way towards explicating why politics is a mind killer. Political discourse is a domain which…

  1. Matters personally to many participants, and
  2. Includes a vast number of “conversational participants”,
  3. Who might take unilateral action, on the basis of whatever arguments they hear, good or bad.

Given that setup, it is quite reasonable to treat arguments as soldiers. When one sees someone supporting, or even appearing to support a policy or ideology that you consider abhorrent or dangerous, there is a natural and reasonable anxiety that the value you’re protecting will be lost. And there is a natural (if usually poorly executed) desire to correct the misconception in the common knowledge before it gets away from you. Or failing that, to tear down the offending argument / discredit the person making it.

(To see an example of the thing that one is viscerally fearing, see the history of Eric Drexler’s promotion of nanotechnology. Drexler made arguments about Nanotech, which he hoped would direct resources in such a way that the future could be made much better. His opponents attacked strawmen of those arguments. The conversation “got away” from Drexler, and the whole audience discounted the ideas he supported, thus preventing any progress towards the potential future that Drexler was hoping to help bring into being.

I think the visceral fear of something like this happening to you is what motivates “treating arguments as soldiers“)

End digression

Given this, one of the main thing that needs to happen to make a conversation go well, is for each participant to (epistemically!) aleive that their point will be gotten to and heard. Otherwise, they can’t be expected to put it aside (even for a moment) in order to listen carefully to their interlocutor (because doing so would increase the risk of their point in fact not being heard).

When I’m mediating conversations, one strategy that I employ to facilitate this is to use my role as the facilitator to “hold” the points of both sides. That is (sometimes before the participants even start talking to each-other), I’ll first have each one (one at a time) convey their point to me. And I don’t go on until I can pass the ITT of that person’s point, to their (and my) satisfaction.

Usually, when I’m able to pass the ITT, there’s a sense of relief from that participant. They now know that I understand their point, so whatever happens in the conversation, it won’t get lost or neglected. Now, they can relax and focus on understanding what the other person has to say.

Of course, with sufficient skill, one of the participants can put aside their point (before it’s been heard by anyone) in order to listen. But that is often asking too much of your interlocutors, because doing the “putting aside” motion, even for a moment is hard, especially when what’s at stake is important. (I can’t always do it.)

Outsourcing the this step to the facilitator, is much easier, because the facilitator has less that is viscerally at stake for them (and has more metacognition to track the meta-level of the conversation).

I’m curious if this is new to folks or not. Give me feedback.

 

Some possible radical changes to the world

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

Strong AI displaces humans as the dominant force on the planet.

A breakthrough is made the objective study of meditation, which makes triggering enlightenment much easier. Millions of people become enlightened.

Narrow AI solves protein folding, Atomically Precise Manufacturing (nanotech) becomes possible and affordable. (Post scarcity?)

The existing political order collapses.

The global economy collapses, supply chains break down. (Is this a thing that could happen?)

Civilization abruptly collapses.

Nuclear war between two or more nuclear powers.

A major terrorist attack pushes the US into heretofore unprecedented levels of surveillance and law-enforcement.

Sufficient progress in made on human health extension that many powerful people anticipate being within range of longevity escape velocity.

Genetic engineering (of one type or another) gives rise to a generation that includes a large number of people who are much smarter than the historical human distribution.

Advanced VR?

Significant rapid global climate change.

 

Some varieties of feeling “out of it”

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

[Epistemic status: phenomenology. I don’t know if this is true for anyone other than me. Some of my “responses” are wrong, but I don’t know which ones yet.

Part of some post on the phenomenology and psychology of productivity. There are a lot of stubs, places for me to write more.

This is badly organized. A draft.]

One important skill of maintaining productivity through phenomenology is distinguishing between the different kinds of low energy states. I think that people typically conflate a large number of mental states under the label of “tired” or that of “don’t feel like working.” The problem with this is, that the phenomenology of these different states points to different underlying mechanisms, and each one should be responded to differently.

If you can distinguish between these flavors of experience, then each one can be the trigger for a TAP, to bring you back to a more optimal state.

I don’t think I’ve learned to make all relevant state-distinctions here, but these are some that I can recognize.

Sleep deprivation: Feels like like a kind of buzzy feeling in my head that goes with “low energy”.

The best response is a nap. If that doesn’t work, then maybe try a stimulant. You can also just wait: after a while your circadian system will be strongly countering your sleep pressure, and you’ll feel more alert.

Fuzzy-headed: Often from overeating, or not having gotten enough physical activity in the past few days.

The best response is exercise. (Maybe sufficiently intense exercise, that you have an endorphin response?)

Hungry: You probably know what this is. I think maybe the best response is to ignore it?

Running out of thinking-steam due to need to eat: This feels distinctly different from the one above. Sort of like my thoughts running out, due to something like an empty head?

Usually, eating entails some drop in energy level, but if you time it right, both not eating and eating can be energizing. Though I’ve never done this for long periods and I don’t know if it sustainable.

Cognitive exhaustion: This is the one I understand the least. I don’t know what it is. Maybe needing to process, or consolidate info, or do subconscious processing? I don’t know if emotional exhaustion is the meaningfully different (my guess is no?).

The default thing to do here is to take a break, but I’m not sure if that’s the best thing to do. I think maybe you can just switch tasks and get the same effect?

Aversions

I’ll write about aversions more sometime, because they are the ones that are most critical to productivity. Aversions come in two different types: Anxiety/Fear/Stress aversions and “glancing off” aversions.

Anxiety/Fear/Stress/Belief Aversion: This sort of aversion is almost always accompanied by a tension-feeling in the gut and stems from some flavor-of-fear about the thing I’m averse to. A common template for the fear is “I’ve already failed / I’ve already fucked up.” Another is a fear of being judged.

The response to this one is to use Focusing to bring the concern that your body is holding on to into conscious attention, and to figure out a way to handle it.

“Glancing off” Aversions: This is closer to the feeling of slipping off a task, or “just not feeling like doing it”, or finding your attention going elsewhere. This is often due to a task that is aversive not do to it’s goal relevant qualities, but due to it’s ambiguity, or it being to big to hold in mind.

The response, as I’ll write about later, is to chunk out the smallest concrete next action and to visualize doing it.

Ego deletion: Feels sort of like my brain is tired? This feels kind of like cognitive exhaustion, and they might be the same thing. I think this is due to other subsystems in me wanting something other than work.

The correct response, I think, is to take a break and do whatever I feel like doing in that moment, though I don’t have a good understanding of mental energy, and it maybe that I’m supposed to do something that has clear and satisfying reward signals? (I don’t think that’s right, though. Feels a bit too mechanical.)

Urgy-ness: Also have to write more about this another time. This is a feeling compulsion for short term gratification, often of several verities in sequence, without satisfaction. This is often a second order response to an anxiety or fear aversions, and can also be about some goal that’s un handled or an unmet need. See also: the reactiveness scaler (which I also haven’t written about yet.)

Response: exercise, then Focusing

I wrote this fast. Questions are welcome.