My API - you can use this to help us engage with each other

This is my API. You can use it to help us engage with each other. You can get a picture of my perspective on how discussion works. You can also give me tips for improvements.

Table of Contents

1. Some background on my perspective on discussion

2. People go too fast, act like communication is easy

3. If I'm wrong, and you know it, please...

1. Some background on my perspective on discussion:

People have trouble engaging with each other, coming to agreement, understanding each other's statements, understanding each others expectations and preferences, like regarding discussion, etc. Simultaneously, people try not to bug each other for fear of annoying each other, which exacerbates the problem. It results in people asking each other *less* questions instead of more. It results in people making fewer requests of each other, concerned that the other person will feel pressured. It results in less discussion than would occur if this bottleneck didn't exist or was reduced. It's a huge problem in our culture. What can be done about it?

Well what's causing it? Part of it is: Lack of APIs.

Imagine if you could engage with somebody in a way where that person posted his API, and you get to use that API to engage with that person. His API would give info about his expectations, preferences, discussion policies, interests, etc etc, which you could then use to make much better guesses about how to engage with that person in ways that would be successful.

In a person's API, he might ask other people to point out areas of potential improvement in his API. In this way, people could be helping each other improve their APIs. So if you find areas of potential improvement in this document, please tell me.

Better APIs = more effective engagement between people.

Note that since people are black boxes, people's APIs won't work exactly as described. The person won't exactly do what his API says he would do. This is an unavoidable fact but it's also something that can be made to improve without limit.

And the more work somebody puts into this, the more consistent is the connection between him (the block box) and his API. Note also that people could be helping each other improve their block-box <-> API connections.

Note that without having your own API, basically you're expecting people to use the standard API in your culture in order to engage with you -- standard cultural policies that we all kinda know. But this API kinda sucks. It's a one-size-fits-none API. It's definitely better than nothing, so I'm not hating on it -- it's partly what built our civilization. But we could do soooooo much better.

One example of something that is part of our standard cultural one-size-fits-none API is the policy of avoiding rudeness. Avoiding rudeness can often mean avoiding truth-seeking. But it's often the case that one person didn't think he was being rude but another person did. So there's a mismatch in expectations/preferences/understanding on basic issues. Having individual APIs (as against a lowest common denominator collective API) would help fix this.

Expecting our civilization to function on a collective API means treating all people as though they are fungible. We're not fungible. We're not like atoms. Atoms are interchangeable. People are not. No two people have the exact same set of ideas, expectations, preferences, emotions, intuitions, etc etc.

We should respect the fact that we're not fungible and incorporate it into our lives. Creating individual APIs is one way to respect this fact.

Note that this would have the effect of reducing verbal fights and violence. So it's something that would serve the pursuit of eradicating violence in the world.

In other words, anything that facilitates mutual win-win engagement between people will serve the goal of eradicating violence in the world, and this individual API idea is one such thing.

2. People go too fast, act like communication is easy

In a lot of discussions, people go too fast. They make only intuitional interpretations of the sentences they read. They don't do things like consciously trying to guess and criticize their way to their best interpretation of what somebody said. They just go with their first interpretation, which came to them instantly (as an intuition).

I think people feel pressured to go fast. And I'm not sure that they consciously think about the fact that they feel pressured to go fast.

It would be better if people slowed down a lot when they notice that they're having a hard time understanding each other. Fast discussion is ok when you and your discussion partner are understanding each other well, but when either of you recognize that you're not understanding each other, you should address that bottleneck by doing things like going slower, spending more time trying to work out the best interpretation of what somebody said, circling back to earlier statements to reinterpret them, stuff like that.

People act like communication is easy. They treat communication as if you say something, and they understand it, like automatically. This is true in some sense. Your intuition works automatically and pretty fast. But there's always error. You can avoid that fact but you can't avoid the consequences of that fact. We should be focussed on error-correction.

So the situation is this. You have a mindcode and I have a mindcode. They are not the same. They are not even written in the same programming language. When I say something to you, that means I'm translating my mindcode to english and you're translating my english to your mindcode. There is error in those processes.

You can't avoid error all together but you can do your best to reduce error. So it's good to do things like asking your discussion partner, "can I explain your view to see if I understand it? And you tell me if you find it satisfactory?"

It's good to clarify what a position is by checking your interpretation for error before you try to criticize the position. What people usually do is skip the error-correction step that could catch misunderstandings, and just jump straight to saying what they think is wrong with the other guy's position.

3. If I'm wrong and you know it, please...

• If I'm wrong about something you believe is important, please tell me. 

  • Why am I doing this? This is my attempt to avoid the situation where I'm wrong about something important, someone knows why I'm wrong and is willing to explain, but I don't find out, and I lose the opportunity to change and get on the right side of the truth. In other words, it's my attempt to make a bridge between us. 

A family is a system

A family is a system, which means that families follow some basic rules of cause and effect which all systems follow.

So what are the basic rules of cause and effect which all systems follow? 

If you consider all the phenomena for any given system, a small number of those phenomena are the causes and the rest are the effects of those causes. If you pull one lever, that single event could have cascading effects.

But of course some causes do not have much effect. So how do we know which causes have huge cascading effects and which ones have negligible consequence? 

More importantly, regarding human relationships, what are those few causes with huge cascading effects and which ones have negligible consequence? 

I’ll tell you what I understood as a child. I did not like liars. And I did not like mean people. And today it’s the same. I believe the most important things in relationships are honesty and kindness.

Do you want your children to seek your help when they need it? Your children will only do that if they believe you won’t lie and won’t be mean.

If you instead lie and be mean to your child (for his best interest, according to you, but not him), he will not trust you. And he’ll likely resort to the same tactics, lying to you and being mean to you. 

In other words, if you initiate coercion on your child, you’re teaching him that the right response to not getting what you want is to initiate coercion. And then he’ll use that new-found knowledge anytime he doesn’t get what he wants.  

How to make yourself into the person you want to be?

 “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” - Albert Einstein

Now let me bring this to your situation.

You, or rather, your mind, and specifically, your emotional makeup, your intuitions, your parenting skills, were created by a process of your thinking. It cannot be changed without changing your thinking.

So, to change ourselves, we must change our thinking.

How can we do that?

My general advice is that you expand your world far beyond what your parents and your society showed you.

As you expand your world, you will replace your old thinking patterns with new thinking patterns. With enough of this kind of work, you will have replaced ALL of your unwanted thinking patterns created in childhood with new thinking patterns created in adulthood.

If you don't do this, then you will be ruled by the ideas that you adopted as a child. That means you'll be ruled by the ideas of your parents and society, rather than your own ideas. 

THE GOLDEN RULE; What can we learn from it?

The golden rule says to treat others as you want to be treated. This principle is about teaching people to have integrity when interacting with others. It's trying to get us to imagine ourselves in someone else's shoes in an attempt to better understand their perspective. If you wouldn't like to be yelled at, then you shouldn't do that to others.

But the golden rule on it's own isn't enough. It's just a rule of thumb, and like all rules of thumb there are exceptions to the rule. The point is that you shouldn't try to follow this rule by the letter and instead you should follow it in spirit. The spirit of the rule is about avoiding being a hypocrite and learning how to think about things from other people's perspectives. More generally, what's needed in relationships is to find mutually-beneficial ways of interacting with each other - to treat others in ways that are compatible with your preferences and their preferences.

In many cases our preferences are in harmony. But sometimes there's a conflict of preferences. So what should be done in these cases? One option is to leave each other alone, and as long as all parties are ok with that, then the conflict is resolved and everybody is in harmony. The goal there is to avoid hurting each other. It’s a good option to always keep in mind as a last resort. Another option we have is to change our preferences so that we’re still interacting with each other but our preferences are in harmony instead of in conflict. These two options mean that we should maintain a degree of flexibility with our preferences. And this makes sense because we're not perfect; sometimes our preferences deserve improvement.

Our preferences are ideas, and like all ideas, we should apply the principles and methods of reason to them. That means recognizing that whatever our current preferences are now, we should always be aware that they might not be good enough. There’s some conflict that needs to be resolved. And that means there's opportunity to find better preferences to replace our current ones with the goal of finding preferences that result in harmony.

To properly understand reason we must properly understand freedom. They are inherently connected. People need the freedom to think and to act on their thinking, which of course means that one's actions must not infringe on the freedom of others to do the same. If someone forces or coerces you to act on their ideas which conflict with your own, that takes away from your opportunity to change your ideas. So force and coercion has two effects; firstly they deter people from applying the principles and methods of reason to their ideas, and secondly they impair people's ability to pursue happiness for themselves.

So many people get this wrong. Some atheists have discussions with theists where they mock and shame the theists for their beliefs. That's coercion. It’s hostile. And it doesn’t create an atmosphere that fosters critical thinking. So if the atheist's goal is to help the theist to change their mind, then their actions are counterproductive to their own goal. Further, why would a theist want to adopt the atheist’s views when the atheist is clearly being a jerk? They wouldn’t. Most people who believe in God do so because they care about morality, about living a good life, about being a good person, about treating others and ourselves well. 

Many people will misunderstand what I've said here in two ways. First they'll think I'm saying that I shouldn't say truthful things if somebody might get offended by my words. This is a mistake. If they get offended it could be due to their own bad ideas about the topic. It's not necessarily my fault that they get offended. If they don't want to get offended then they can stop reading my words. I should have the freedom to speak my ideas and I should give them the freedom to ignore me. 

The second way that people will misunderstand what I’ve said here is that they’ll think I'm saying that mocking and shaming is always wrong. That's a mistake too. Shame is like a gun, and sometimes using a gun is the right choice. Guns are good for defense. But like guns, shame should not be the main way that you engage with people. Your main method of engagement should be persuasion; in other words, non-coercive discussion.

Forgive often

Forgive often. And better yet, don't even begrudge in the first place. You don't know what people are going through. You don't know why they made the decisions they made. You don't know how hard it is to live the life they live. And even if they made mistakes before, that doesn't mean they would make the same mistakes again. People can change. So don't treat people like they can't.

Happy with some parts of your life but not others?

It’s common for people to be happy with some parts of their lives but not others. Imagine a scientist who is happy with his science work but unhappy with some interpersonal problems he has in his family. Why does this happen? Why is he succeeding in one part of his life while failing in another? And what should he do about it?

Below I provide answers that are not standard knowledge in our culture. And below that I explain some standard knowledge in our culture and some flaws with it.

For most people, their mind is very compartmentalized. It takes work to integrate one’s mind and they haven’t done much of that work.

Imagine the scientist does very good work in his profession. He approaches problems in his profession in a calm and rational way. He studies the work of the experts in his field resulting in learning the best practices in the field. He implements those best practices in his professional life, resulting in doing pretty well at discovering the truth of whatever science problems he’s working on.

Consider that that scientist, like everyone else, built up parts of his mind much earlier in his life. He created policies (habits) during childhood that he still uses today, which are not compatible with the newer policies that he applies in his professional life. For example, sometimes he gets angry upon learning about an interpersonal problem that happened at home, but he never gets angry about problems in his science work.

If the scientist figured out how to apply his rational thinking methods that he learned in his profession to all parts of his life, he’d do much better. He’d be integrating his mind so that he applies his best thinking methods in all parts of his life, instead of using his best thinking methods for only some parts of his life and his bad thinking methods in the rest of his life. If he integrated his mind enough, he’d no longer be using his bad thinking methods.

So how does one integrate his mind so that he uses his best thinking methods in all parts of his life instead of just in some parts?

One thing you can do is this. Make a concerted effort to: (1) Identify your best thinking methods and why they are useful. (2) Identify which parts of your life that you don’t use those best thinking methods in. (3) Identify why your bad thinking methods don’t work well as compared to your good thinking methods. (4) Keep a written log of these things and review them often. Note that writing down one’s thoughts is a tool that is included as part of expert scientists’ best thinking methods. Einstein said, “My pencil and I are more clever than I.”

Another thing you could do to integrate your mind is to study the field directly by learning the best ideas that experts in the field already figured out — similar to how you (the scientist) do that in your field. The field goes by the name “philosophy”. Note that most stuff labeled as philosophy is not good. Note also that it’s much harder to figure out what’s good in the field of philosophy than compared to the field of science. In science, it’s relatively easy to objectively know when you’re wrong because you can check your theories against empirical evidence. But with philosophy, you can’t check your theories against empirical evidence. This is because it’s not possible for a philosophical theory to be contradicted by empirical evidence. Only scientific theories can be contradicted by empirical evidence. In philosophy, the only way to contradict a theory is by philosophical criticism.

In our current culture, a standard way of dealing with personal and interpersonal problems that one wants help with is to seek help from a psychologist. While that could be helpful, psychologists are not very good at what they do. The standard psychologist does not learn from philosophers, despite the fact that the work they do is philosophy work — psychology is a subfield of philosophy. Psychologists primarily only learn from other psychologists. This prevents them from learning from philosophy experts who are not labeled as “psychologists”.

Most scientists do a similar thing. They try to learn from other scientists but they don’t try to learn from philosophers, despite the fact that science is a subfield of philosophy. There is good work in the field of philosophy that applies to scientific thinking. If a scientist learned that stuff, he’d be a more effective scientist.

Sucking up to people is a who should rule mistake

Recently I was thinking about the who should rule mistake and sucking up and noticed a connection between them.

Sucking up to people is for the purpose of get approval/engagement from the target people being sucked up to.

I think sucking up to people is a “who should rule” mistake. The “who should rule” mistake lacks focus on ideas (methods for selecting people) and instead focusses on people.

The mindset that results in personA sucking up to personB is one that treats the choice of personB as an infallible choice. Like even if the choice to select personB was bad, sucking up to personB is a way to ignore that choice and just treat it as automatically true.

If instead personA prioritized using good methods, he wouldn’t suck up to personB and instead he’d do good actions with the hope that those good actions will result in a good outcome from the exchange with personB. What good outcomes? (1) productive engagement with personB because personB is worthy, or (2) no engagement with personB because personB is not worthy.

So like the suckup method is bad because it doesn’t factor in the possibility that personB is not worthy of personA’s attention.

Psych techniques for love

In this video a girl talks about psychology techniques for love. (She does other videos on psych techniques other than for love.) Here's some notes:

• complement people you like. e.g. "hey I really like how you wear your hair down like that. it looks really good." (this gets them to like you back)
• hmm. I don't notice people's hair. often times I'll see someone I know and be like, "you've changed something but I don't know what." and I'll find out (from them) that the thing they did is change their hair color or style. 
• I also don't notice clothing.
• I do notice things people do with their eyes. 
• where they look (at my eyes, somewhere else on me, or not at me at all). 
• when they look away (at what points in the discussion). 
• these are loose indicators of their thinking
• e.g. I often look away and not say anything in reply to someone cuz I'm thinking about what they said and thinking to form a reply.
• the thing where people like you back just because you did something that showed that you like them first is weird as fuck. like why should I like someone just cuz they like me? that's stupid as hell. I don't want to be controlled like that.
• make eye contact and smile (to the person you like, have a crush on) (this gets them to like you back)
• eye contact without smiling (or any facial expression at all) is weird to people. I've noticed this. I've noticed that if I had a tiny smile then they don't feel weird. 
• ask them questions so they can talk about themselves (cuz, she says, everybody likes talking about themselves)

Then she gives tips on how to tell if someone likes you.

• they'll copy your mannerisms. like if you fold your arms they'll fold their arms.
• this is not a fool proof tip though. conmen (including lots of sales people) do this as a way to trick people.
• I wonder if PUA talks about the idea of copying someone's mannerisms. anybody know?
• they'll look at you a lot.
• they'll laugh at everything you say.
• a lot of those laughs are things people do cuz they feel uncomfortable and laughing is their way to feel more comfortable.
• they'll try to be around you a lot.
• open body language (e.g. feet facing you)
• that's fucking weird
• in Arab culture (maybe just Syria, dunno), if you're sitting and have your leg propped up on your other leg, and if your foot is facing a person, that's seen as disrespectful. I think it has to do with the bottom of the foot being dirty and facing your foot to someone is like saying "you're dirty" or something like that. also in Islam, the idea of facing your foot to god is seen as bad. I think these things are related.

she admits that all of this is manipulation. 

she says that people think a person is attractive if other people think that person is attractive. 

the last thing she says in the video is to be yourself instead of trying to be someone else. that's weird given that earlier in the video she advocated doing things like acting one way (not obsessed with someone) even though it's feel another way (you're obsessed with that person). 

Social dynamics and friendliness

I've been blogging about a discussion on curi blog about the task of welcoming people to FI. Here's my latest post in the series. 

I've been reviewing this discussion a lot (lots of rereading). I keep noticing new things, so many that when I wrote about them I end up forgetting to talk about all of the things. So here's one of the things:

Anonymous wrote:

2) I understand more now about the distinction between objective reality and social reality. I think you (curi) want FI to be a place where people focus on objective reality and not on social reality. Welcoming and friendliness and trying to help people feel comfortable are social reality things, so I think you don’t want them to happen at FI, or if you do want them to happen, your vision of what they’d be like is different from mine. This seems like a complicated topic. (I’m not super sure about anything I said in this paragraph.)

This treats all friendliness as social dynamics. I don't agree with that. Here's Elliot talking about friendliness as an intellectual trait.

Elliot wrote on FI email list:

So you want to learn philosophy? Here are four key traits that help: 

1. integrity 

2. friendliness (including answering questions, trying suggestions, and being curious about stuff people bring up even if you don’t immediately see the point) 

3. smarts, logic, knowledge 

4. effort, patience, perseverance (for this trait, you should have a lot of time and/or money to support your effort. it’s not a purely intellectual trait about work ethic, it’s also about your life circumstances to enable the intellectual trait.) 

I’ve ordered them by a *very rough* estimate of their importance. 

All of these are learnable skills. They’re all things you can get better at. But you gotta start somewhere and work with what you have now. 

To make much progress with philosophy, it really helps if you’re really good at at least *one* of the traits. It gives you – and people you discuss with – something to work with, a tool to use. 

I note that the friendliness that Elliot describes is equivalent to friendliness to IDEAS. And I don't think that can be said about social-dynamics-friendliness. 

Social dynamics and aiming for certain feelings

Anonymous replied to me about the task of welcoming people to FI. 

For context, what I had said was:

you should care about any incompatibilities. you seem to be thinking that all welcoming is social dynamics. i don't see why that would be the case. i think some welcoming is just plain truth telling. just like some praise is truth telling.

Anonymous said #17914:

If you’re saying/doing something with the purpose of welcoming someone, you’re doing a social thing. The thing you’re saying might be objectively true. But there are lots of objectively true things you could say. If you’re picking that thing to say with the purpose of showing someone that there’s a comfortable place for them in the FI social world, you’re doing it for a social reality reason.

I’m not sure if you mean the same thing by “social dynamics” that I do by “social reality”. I'm also not sure if I mean the same thing by "social reality" that anyone else does. If not, that's something I might like to discuss more.

Who introduced the idea that the purpose of welcoming people is for "showing someone that there’s a comfortable place for them in the FI social world"? I don't think it was Elliot. Elliot used the word "welcoming" but he didn't say anything about making people feel comfortable.

I see welcoming people as a way to tell them what they need to know so they can get benefit from FI. Or to instigate a discussion purposed for helping people decide whether or not they should stay. Like if the discussion reveals that the person doesn't want to learn philosophy and that FI is a place for people who want to learn philosophy, that revelation could help someone decide to leave or help someone engage with FI better (than compared to not having been welcomed).

Here's a welcoming statement I'm imagining:

Hello [person's name]. FI is a place for people who are interested in philosophy. What brought you to FI?

I don't see any social dynamics happening here. I don't think I'm manipulating people's emotions (trying to get them to feel comfortable in FI). I think my question asking them why they came to FI is something that is not designed to make people feel comfortable. I chose it regardless of how it might make people feel. I chose it because I think it helps us converge on the truth (which may be that he should leave). 

Btw, if someone is bad for FI, I don't think they should feel comfortable at FI. We shouldn't want them to feel comfortable. We should want them to feel uncomfortable, and for them to leave.

Measuring success by feelings

https://curi.us/2020-is-fi-discussion-mean#17905

Anonymous wrote:

3) I myself don’t feel as welcome at FI or as much a part of the FI community as I used to. I can’t help new people succeed at something I can’t succeed at. If someone takes on the project of welcoming new people, maybe I’d benefit from it.

This reads like the author measures success by his feelings. I don't think people should do that. Success should be measured objectively with clear pass/fail criteria.

What does it mean to be a part of the FI community? One way to think of it is this: if you do tasks like welcoming people to FI, then you're part of the FI community. But Anonymous said that he quit that and wonders why he "feels" less welcome at FI. If Anonymous would have continued welcoming new people to FI (while engaging with elliot about his feedback on the process), then he'd **actually be** a part of the FI community.

So Anonymous got feedback from elliot that he didn't understand, and decided to quit the task instead of doing things that would help him understand elliot's feedback.

Heritability of "mental illness"

There's an interesting thing people say/think about the prospect of having kids in a family where someone was known to have a serious "mental illness". They say, "Aren't you worried that your kids will be [insert mental illness name here]"?

People think that "mental illness" runs in families and that it's the genes that are doing the carrying. They think that some people have genes that make them more likely to get some "mental illnesses" and some people don't have those problematic genes.

I do think that genes allow for this stuff, but instead of it being a scenario where some humans have it and some humans don't, I think it's a scenario where some species have it and some species don't. The human species has it and the rest don't.

So regarding heritability, it's memes doing the carrying, not genes.

How to interact with an irrational coworker - #1: Fake Deals

A friend of mine asked me for advice on how to deal with a situation he's involved in as an employee interacting with his coworker who is acting irrationally.

This is a scenario where there are 2 job roles, where one of them is the money-maker and the other one supports him/her. My friend is the money-maker and his coworker is filling his support role. Each money-maker is assigned one support person.

There was a series of previous cases of irrationality which led to my friend discussing it with his manager and making a request to reassign his support person. (IIRC there was no clear answer from management about the request.)

In the latest case, the coworker acted as if a deal was made between them when there was no such deal. The interaction happened in a chat group which included the managers. The coworker said something like, "hey we had a deal!" in response to my friend not agreeing to something. My friend said, "what deal?" And then the coworker quoted herself from a day earlier. 

I initially gave a recommendation to say something like this:

i think we may have a misunderstanding. can you show me where i said that i agree with your proposal deal?

My friend didn't like it. he said that it was/is clear that no deal was made. so i gave the following recommendation instead:

a deal is a mutually-agreed upon thing. that means at least 2 people involved. why did you only quote you talking?

I clarified that talking like this might get him fired if the company is bad -- which I argued is a good outcome (which factors in what I know about my friend's particular context) -- or promoted if the company is good.

The coworker didn't address the question and instead said that they want a meeting to discuss these issues. 

My friend thought he might get fired and wanted to avoid a meeting if the firing decision had already been made. So I wrote another reply saying something like: 

Dear Staff/Management, 

If you've already decided to fire me, please do it now to save us time, else I'm happy to have an honest and rational discussion about how to move forward.

The coworker replied with something like this:

I only care about the issues I raised, I don't know about all that other stuff you said.

So I wrote another reply for my friend like this: 

I understand that you have issues you want addressed during the meeting. I also have issues I want addressed. So management must be present and involved in the meeting or else I don't want the meeting. 

The coworker replied in a very interesting way. She completely changed her tone. She went from bossy to polite.

And immediately after her reply a manager chimed in saying he will be at the meeting.

Question designed to expose irrationality

I was reading a curi blog comment about a situation and recalled a similar situation. Here's the blog comment:

> And then, because he couldn't refer me to a person or literature that'd be adequate, he kept talking. Because if he says "i won't explain it and also there are no other people and there's no literature" then he looks irrational and is basically saying there is no way to learn SENS stuff, no way to get questions and criticisms answered, etc. So he didn't want to do that.

The similar situation is this:

A sales person partially paid by commissions sold something and didn't get the commission he was expecting. He complained to his boss and got a response like "you did it wrong and don't deserve the commission as a result". The sales person then asked, "I thought I did it right, so what should I have done instead?" The boss didn't really reply to this. So the sales person clarified, "I need to know what I should have done instead so that I avoid this problem going forward." At this point the boss didn't reply and paid the commission to the sales person instead. 

I think this is similar to the quoted situation above in the sense that the boss didn't want to reply with an irrational answer, and he didn't have a rational reply to give, so he was left only with the option of paying the commission.

The mind is a court

I thought of the mind as a court.

I'm going to brainstorm about it:

• People don't judge themselves enough.
• They'll judge some of their ideas but not others.
• They'll judge some of their ideas by their strictest standards, but won't judge some other ideas by those same standards.
• And they won't have any good reasoning (or any reasoning at all) for why some ideas should be judged and others not.
• A person's mind should be thought of as a court.
• There's a judge. A jury. Lawyers. Witnesses. Bystanders.
• They are all you -- different parts of you.
• These parts of your are approximately autonomous.[1]
• People routinely act in ways where some part of them refuses to go to court.
• And the other people (the other parts of the person) refuse to call them out on it.
• Those parts of you that are refusing to go to court are doing things like rioting and destroying property. (This is a metaphor for mental suffering.)

[1] http://fallibleideas.com/ideas

Charisma/Charm

I've always heard the words "charisma" and "charming" used in ways that I thought was seen (by the people saying these words) as a good characteristic of a person.

I was talking with my kid about somebody being "charismatic". She wasn't sure what it meant so I used a dictionary. That led me to the word "charm". So I looked that up too. Merriam Webster has for "charm":

1a: to affect by or as if by magic : COMPEL

b: to please, soothe, or delight by compelling attraction 

charms customers with his suave manner

I was surprised to see that it's about magic. 

But I guess I shouldn't be surprised. People often say things like "love is magical".

I see liking magic as a bad thing. Magic is fake. So if someone wants magical things, I think that means he dislikes real things that compete with it. So saying "love is magical" is like saying "love is unreasonable".

All life is problem-solving

All life is problem-solving.

All problems are solvable.

• What about hard problems? 
• Any hard problem can be converted into a series of smaller/easier problems such that solving the smaller/easier problems solves the original problem.
• What if a problem can't be converted into a series of problems?
• Not possible. There's no limit. We can always break down a problem into smaller/easier problems.

Maybe a better way to say this is this:

A hard problem is a problem that the person in question does not know how to convert into a series of smaller/easier problems. This means that there are no problems that are inherently hard. So the hardness quality of a problem is a function of the knowledge of the person trying to solve the problem rather than a function of the problem itself.

Acknowledgments: I learned these ideas via Fallible Ideas.

Why do people experience fear?

Why do people experience fear?

There's the obvious stuff like you're in the wild and a lion is running at you.

But there are also situations in civilized society where people experience fear but there's no immediate physical danger like the lion in the wild situation. Often times people fear that they will have an emotion in the future. Consider what people mean by "stage fright". Somebody is having an emotion about something that hasn't happened yet. They imagine the future where they do something on the stage that the audience will respond negatively to, like laughing at the person on stage or shaming him or whatever. So the person on stage recognizes that they might feel bad if they get laughed at or shamed and they are having an emotion (fear) about that potential future emotion.

One way to think of fear is this: You have a problem and you don't believe that you'll solve it. 

Often times people feel fear when they encounter a problem while having done no problem-solving work on it, problem-solving work that they already know how to do. They don't try to recall previous solutions to similar problems that could potentially work for this problem. They don't try to brainstorm and criticize their way to a solution. They don't try to enlist other interested parties to help solve their problem. They don't keep a journal about their thoughts/emotions.

This is weird because people routinely do this stuff already for some problems but not others. For example, parents of babies do a basic thing where they try everything they know of until the baby responds well. They check everything: hungry? thirsty? sleepy? full diaper? etc etc until the baby is happy. Dog owners do the same thing.

Life is like being on a train

# Initial exploration

I thought of a metaphor for life: Life is like being on a train.

Sometimes people are going 95 miles/hr on a train that's designed for 80 miles/hr. They are in danger of derailing.

A friend of mine mentioned something about super powers, and I said that the super power we can have is stopping the train and getting off to investigate, then getting back in the train and continuing when ready.

Imagine two categories of actions: internal and external. Internal actions are thoughts and emotions. External actions are saying words, making facial expressions, body language, etc. 

A person does more internal actions than external actions.

The default situation is that people don't organize their internal actions and external actions. What would be a good organization strategy? Example: do some internal actions designed to decide what external action you'll do, such that you're fully happy with your decision, and then do that external action.

Sometimes we really can't stop the train. For example, when you're playing a part of Super Mario Odyssey  where the floor is rotating. You can't be still and think or you'll fall. You have to act right away to avoid falling into the abyss. But most of life is not like this.

I recall Elliot Temple saying that during a live discussion he sometimes takes a 30 second pause before talking. He's planning what he's going to say. He stopped the train and is investigating. What most people do during live discussion is feel pressure to hurry. They fill dead silence with nonsensical noises like "umm" and "uhh". They are anxious. They are going fast on a train and not realizing that they can stop. It's as if they think there are other trains coming behind them and if they slow down they'll be hit from behind.

"Why do you love to argue?"

# Initial exploration:

Why do people say things like "why do you love to argue?" I vividly recall a couple of interactions with people where that was said to me.

In the first case I replied with, "I argue as a way to seek the truth. How do you seek the truth?" The person didn't reply but also didn't leave the discussion. He seemed to understand my point. He continued "arguing" with me after that. Also he never said the "why do you love to argue?" question to me again.

In the second case, the person said something like "please don't argue with me." It was weird because the person called me for advice. And I was trying to do that partly by asking questions to figure out their goal and plan that could achieve the goal. Later in the discussion I noticed that the person asked me the same question 2 times. The question was "did you send me the phone number?" Each time they asked the factual question, I gave a factual answer: "No I didn't send it." After the 2nd time, I asked, "do you want me to send it now?" The person said, "yes". So I started doing that, and told them that I was doing it. And as I was doing it I said, "It seems to me that each of your questions 'did you send me the phone number?' was actually intended as an order statement like 'send me the phone number now'. If you wanted to give me an order, you should give me an order instead of veiling it as a question." The person seemed annoyed that I was criticizing their approach of giving vague hints about what they want.

Should I have known that they wanted me to send the phone number now, even though they never said it? The best they did was ask me to send them the phone number, which I agreed to. They didn't say to send it during the phone call or right away.

I think I have a trigger about this. I think I was annoyed because of how I interpreted the "please don't argue with me" statement. And I think that my emotional state continued through to the end of the discussion. I think the person's bad reactions towards the end of the discussion (I mentioned one of them above) were partly as a result of my bad reaction from earlier in the discussion (my being annoyed).