Category Archives: Skills

Yell at Mars to call swans

Calling swans

Recently a dear friend invited me to join them as they took their wedding photos, at the Palace of Fine Arts. There's a pond next to the structure, and across the pond we saw one of the swans who reside there. Someone observed that it would have been nice to take a picture with the swan. So I called out, in a loud and clear voice, "Excuse me! Would you come over here?" and beckoned. Repeatedly.

I was pretty sure that it wouldn't work. Swans don't understand spoken language. Even if they did, as far as I could tell they have no plausible motive to respond.

The swan turned towards us and swam halfway across the pond. As it slowed down, my companions thought of more ways to get its attention, ways that seemed more likely to work on a swan, like tossing things into the water. But my plan did more than nothing.

It's an important skill, to be able to come up with plans like that. Sometimes you need to notice when things are impossible, and give up. But other times, it's worth at least trying the plan "yell at the swan."

What heuristic was I using? I'm not sure, but I think it has to do with noticing that my model of the world is incomplete. Continue reading →

Why have my parents gotten wiser as I have gotten older?

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“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” - Attributed (probably spuriously) to Mark Twain

The usual explanation for this is that teenagers are too foolish to understand the advice of their elders. But there’s another obvious explanation: their parents accumulate life experience that makes them wiser over those seven years.

Not all experience is created equal, and the rearing of a child all the way to adulthood is likely a substantial source of new wisdom and experience that are difficult to acquire in other ways beforehand.

When I was a child, I felt like my grandfather had a lot more perspective to offer than my father had. Some of this might just have been a different context for our interactions; most of my interactions with my dad were about day-to-day stuff. But some of this might have been that my grandfather actually had more experience.

As I talk with my dad now, it seems more and more clear that he has some sorts of wisdom and perspective I wasn’t aware of earlier. For instance, it seems like he’s more aware than before that when you have a child, you’re not buying into some set lifestyle, but instead you’re buying a chance at a highly uncertain set of outcomes. This makes me more relaxed about talking with him, because it feels more like if I do things he doesn’t agree with, he knew this was part of the deal in advance.

My mom has also talked about acquiring wisdom that she didn’t have before, in ways that have made conversations with her go better. For instance, I think we’ve both recently learned a lot about setting boundaries.

If this hypothesis is true, then the natural thing to do is to tell kids, not to listen to their parents more, but to listen to people of their grandparents’ generation more, to the extent that they’re available. It also seems like I should prioritize making more friends who are at least a few decades older than I am.

To the extent that this hypothesis is true, we should expect the last child in a long series to report this effect less than firstborns. So, my questions for you are:

How many years between your parents’ firstborn and your birth? (0 if you were a firstborn.)
How true does Twain’s observation seem for you, that parents seem to get wiser over time?

Solve your problems by fantasizing

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The problem with most goal-driven plans is that most goals are fake, and so are most plans. One way to fix this is to fantasize. Continue reading →

Reading, writing, and thinking, with your brain

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In a recent blog post I pointed to the idea that your brain has a sort of implied query language, and there are more and less efficient ways to ask it questions:

I think an important abstraction here is that when you ask your brain a question, it’s often not enough to ask it something that specifies logically what you want – you also have to give it some clues as to where to look for the answer. I call this shaping the query.

This is a roundup of principles I’ve found helpful for using my brain effectively - committing things to memory, finding ideas, and thinking about things. Continue reading →

Review: Vipassana Center silent meditation retreat

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On my pleasure practice nature walk, I formed the hypothesis that excessive attachment was preventing me from noticing my preferences, desires, and feelings, and that meditation might help with this. I signed up for a free 10-day Vipassana center meditation retreat.

When I decided to go on the retreat, I had two main benefits in mind:

Learn to perceive my desires, preferences, and emotions more reliably, by means of being more aware of bodily sensations.
Learn to be able to look at these and fully perceive them without feeling compelled to act on them.

I got these, and more. Continue reading →

Fixin' my fiction addiction

The first bargain

Back in 2014, when I was living in DC, I got sick - probably a cold - and used the time I was home doing nothing to binge-read novels. The entire extant Game of Thrones series, some Valdemar books, some other stuff. I noticed I was staying up very late to keep reading - it seemed counterproductive if I was resting to get better. It turned out that this was the only time I permitted myself to read as much as I wanted, and do nothing else. So of course I wanted to use the time as best I could to read.

At the same time, I was not taking much in the way of painkillers or other symptom management medication, on the tacit hypothesis that if I didn’t experience symptoms, I wouldn’t take good care of myself while sick, and would be sick longer.

So I made my first bargain with myself: to make sure I got enough sleep while sick. In exchange I promised to manage symptoms as indulgently as I knew how, and to take some weekend afternoons when I was well to go to coffee shops and read. It no longer felt like an unmanageable compulsion - but it still felt like a chronic deficiency. Continue reading →

Shape the query

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Recently I was talking with Brienne face-to-face, and she noted that a question I’d asked her would be much easier for her to answer if we were talking remotely over a text channel:

Neat thing I learned from Ben Hoffman today: If I imagine that I'm typing at a computer while I'm actually talking to someone in person, I can use my brain better than I usually can in face-to-face conversation. I think the two key thoughts here were, "How would I think about this if I were at a computer with an Internet connection?" and "Imagining seeing the question I'm trying to think about written out in text form.” -Brienne

When I found out that this worked, I thought about what heuristics I was using to generate that suggestion. Here are the ones I initially came up with: Continue reading →

Authenticity and instant readouts

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"You don't know who someone is until you see them under pressure."

Why do people say that?

There’s this idea of authenticity: you know who someone truly is by seeing them in their unguarded moments, seeing uncensored emotions, that’s when you can have a real interaction with them, that’s when you can see their true self.

This is counterintuitive to me. When I let down my guard and am my completely unfiltered self, people often find me incomprehensible. What’s more, they think I am being less authentic. When I let my social guard down and say things as soon as I think them, people say that they find it hard to relate to me and encourage me to just be myself. When I carefully filter and reframe things, and shape my behavior to get the interaction I want, I hear people say, “I can tell that you’re really being genuine with me.”

But more importantly, even when my immediate reaction to a thing does get read as authentic, it may not use all my knowledge, may not be my endorsed judgment, and may not be the most true thing I know how to say. If I think things through and filter them, I can be more truthful than if I just react without thinking about whether what I’m saying is true.

Interactions seem to be described as authentic when information transmitted has two qualities:

The information is a direct measurement of the sender's internal state, and has not passed through deliberative social filters first.
The information is of a kind that the receiver can automatically and unconsciously verify as meeting the first criterion.

Continue reading →

Lego my Ego

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"if our brains get too smart they will become self aware and take over our bodys"

-Ken M

Ego games

At a party, some friends and I played games around modeling other people. One game we played was ranking superego, ego, and id, in order of most to least prominent, for each person present. This schema is interesting in games because because it’s not a perfectly obvious classification, so it requires original seeing to do anything with.

I’d self-labeled as ego > superego > id, but I was persuaded that I’m likely superego > ego > id. I had thought my ego was the strongest of the three because my self-regulation is fairly flexible and I don’t feel compelled by external rules, but it this is likely attributable to the fact that my superego has achieved self-awareness and taken over my brain. Or more precisely, that my superego is well developed in the sense of having expelled or disendorsed my dissonant, unhelpful, and untrue beliefs and inhibitions, and believes in behaving like an ego. And my ego, in turn, decided to identify with my superego.

I was sleepy 15 minutes ago and successfully managed to get ready for bed, when I was tempted to lie on the couch and “read” or “nap” to "gather my strength” because getting ready for bed seemed like too much work. I climbed out of this hole by asking myself whether the best action would be to go upstairs and get ready for bed. Once I acknowledged that it was the best action, it was easy to muster the willpower.Now I’m in my room, with the LEDs set to red, editing this post as one last task before going to sleep. In hindsight it’s ridiculously obvious that my superego is exceptionally strong.

I have a few friends who I’d describe as having a superego > id > ego arrangement. That’s an unstable relationship where superego and id fight each other directly for control. Superego is usually in charge, but id can seize control for a moment when it’s especially strong. Ego-on-the-bottom is volatile because ego’s special power is mediating among parts, constructing stable narratives that justify and encode trades and compromises between the other parts. If the narrative-spinning ego is weak, id and superego mostly just know how to fight - or, really, how to try to grab control directly. So you see superego, with the occasional flash of id, but no coherent narrative to hold things in place.

What drives the superego > id > ego arrangement? In the case of one of my friends, it looks like what happened was that their id and superego both separately have reasons to distrust their ego. Their superego distrusts the ego for epistemic reasons; the ego is all about spinning a plausible narrative, and that feels like believing things because they’re convenient rather than because they’re true. Their id, on the other hand, distrusts the ego because it believes that it’s dangerous to be seen, that the world is malevolent, that it’s important to hide, that if one can just not exist, one can’t be hurt by anything - and presenting a self, having a strong ego, feels like very noticeably existing. Since neither id nor superego is willing to invest any trust in the ego, this makes it difficult for the ego to smooth out conflicts. It doesn’t have credibility. Continue reading →

A still small voice: a method for integrity

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This is the story of how playing around with different voices let me give voice to my unconscious, and perhaps my conscience as well.

Playing with voices

A lover once told me that, during sex, I spoke with a different voice, which sounded fake. I reflected on this for a while, and realized that I sounded fake because, for once, I was speaking directly from an authentic sense of caring as I experience it.

Mostly, when I try to show caring for my friends, it’s not a direct spontaneous expression of my inner state. I don’t expect that the mode of caring I feel will be understood. Warm feelings are the kind of caring people mostly expect, but they come and go, and they don’t feel fundamental to me. The kind of caring that feels most real to me doesn’t feel like warmth. It feels hard, like there are steel cables linking my solid core to their well-being, so if they’re tugged off-center it affects me directly. It feels like my well-being is permanently tied to theirs. It feels like a sense of determination. But that’s not the emotional affect people expect from their friends, so instead I’ve learned to throw warmth at them, put on a gentle friendly mask that projects a feeling of, this is safe, I am not judging you, I want to hear how you feel and help you. It’s honest - but it’s not, in some sense, authentic. Because when I actually give people uncensored access to my internal state, they read me as fake. Continue reading →

Compass Rose

The territory is a map of the map.