If somebody asks you why, there are often two markedly different kinds of explanations you could give.
Their differences are psychological & social in addition to being semantic.
“everything is the way it is because it got that way”
— D’Arcy Thompson
I run a software company, and sometimes users will email me asking, “Why is feature X like this? It should be like that.”
My response, which I don’t necessarily write out: if you want to know “why feature X is like this”, well… I could tell you the long history of how Complice mutated its way to being what it is today, which would contain a causal explanation for why the feature is the way it is.
…however, if you’re looking for not a causal explanation, but rather a normative explanation, or justification of “why it makes sense for feature X to be like this”, then I don’t really have one. I basically agree with you. All I have to offer is that it would be work to change it. And that I probably will at some point but it hasn’t been a priority yet.
We might say that causal explanations explain “why [proposition] is true” whereas normative explanations explain “why [[proposition] is true] is ‘reasonable,’ or ‘acceptable.'”
I think we want to be a little wary of the second kind of explanatory process. » read the rest of this entry »
A photo of a different creature, by Laura Pashkevich
A few months ago, I was sitting in my friend’s backyard, eating breakfast. His family had made a glorious garden with all sorts of tiled mosiacs and flowers and trees and so on. Chewing on some omelette, I was enjoying the view when I saw… a lizard.
It was maybe 15cm long… initially moving and then suddenly motionless. I got up to have a better look.
I found myself wanting to attach various narratives to its motionlessness. “What’s the purpose of this lizard?” I wondered. “What is it trying to do right now?”
I had been recently reading The Simple Math of Evolution, a sequence of posts intended to convey how evolution works in a really straightforward, graspable way. One thing I took away from the post was that evolution is purposeless, and totally nonstrategic. It is simply an optimization process.
This lizard, I realized, had no purpose. » read the rest of this entry »
At burning man this year, I spent a day exploring that question, from the inside and from the outside.
“What’s it like to be you?” I asked someone sitting at the Tea House at my camp. They said something like, “It’s awesome. My life is really great. I have all of these really good friends…” and I said “Sure, sure, but what’s it like?”
I was trying to understand, I guess, what the texture of his qualia was like. (Qualia = “an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us”(wikipedia)) I was having this feeling that other people were just figures in my dream, or just characters in my story, and I think this was in part an attempt to break out of that.
I spent a few hours at the Tea House, talking with friends and strangers, trying to get glimpses into what the plots of their stories looked like, and sampling my own experiences as well. I ran into Brayden, one of my campmates, around the start of this, who told me that he was heading out. I ran into him again, hours later, just before I was heading out, and he said he was going to go sleep.
I spent a moment being present to the reality that he had had his own story happen in the space between those two tiny interactions, and that our plots had just intersected momentarily.
After I left camp, I found myself reflecting that the “What is it like to be you?” question, while pointed and interesting, wasn’t the only way to get clues about the texture of others’ experience. “How are you doing?” when asked with the right kind of tone, could actually generate some windows into the other person as well. Also, of course, off-hand remarks that people make, if you’re paying attention.
Part of my mission for that day was » read the rest of this entry »
When you think of “ultimatums”, what comes to mind?
Manipulativeness, maybe? Ultimatums are typically considered a negotiation tactic, and not a very pleasant one.
But there’s a different thing that can happen, where an ultimatum is made, but where articulating it isn’t a speech act but rather an observation. As in, the ultimatum wasn’t created by the act of stating it, but rather, it already existed in some sense.
I had a tense relationship conversation a few years ago. We’d planned to spend the day together in the park, and I was clearly angsty, so my partner asked me what was going on. I didn’t have a good handle on it, but I tried to explain what was uncomfortable for me about the relationship, and how I was confused about what I wanted. After maybe 10 minutes of this, she said, “Look, we’ve had this conversation before. I don’t want to have it again. If we’re going to do this relationship, I need you to promise we won’t have this conversation again.”
I thought about it. I spent a few moments simulating the next months of our relationship. I realized that I totally expected this to come up again, and again. Earlier on, when we’d had the conversation the first time, I hadn’t been sure. But it was now pretty clear that I’d have to suppress important parts of myself if I was to keep from having this conversation.
“…yeah, I can’t promise that,” I said.
“I guess that’s it then.”
“I guess so.”
I think a more self-aware version of me could have recognized, without her prompting, that my discomfort represented an unreconcilable part of the relationship, and that I basically already wanted to break up.
The rest of the day was a bit weird, but it was at least nice that we had resolved this. We’d realized that it was a fact about the world that there wasn’t a serious relationship that we could have that we both wanted.
I sensed that when she posed the ultimatum, she wasn’t doing it to manipulate me. She was just » read the rest of this entry »
I once caught myself whistling.
I had done something to someone, that I really regretted, and I felt sick about it. I kept replaying the scene, wishing I’d done something different. Over, and over.
Then I was working on math homework, and just kind of distracted myself from being a person interacting with other people altogether. It was just me, and the symbols, the logic.
After the math homework, I was on my way to meet up with people to go for a run, and I caught myself whistling some sort of cheery tune. I was shocked: “Malcolm, you can’t be whistling..! You’re supposed to be all upset about this thing you did!”
I came so close. To believing what I told myself. I very nearly threw myself back down into that pit of despair and angst and regret and nausea. But then I realized I didn’t have to. That me stewing over what I’d done wasn’t helping anyone at all.
So I kept whistling.
My parents had told me, since I was quite young, that I could choose what emotions I felt in response to a situation.
What’s the difference between these two phrases? How do you imagine you’d feel, if someone said one of them to you? Is it different?
Personally, I would feel a lot more comfortable with the first one. I think this is true for lots of people, particularly people who like NVC-like communication.
But, I was at one point surprised to learn, it’s not true for everyone. Some people find statements like #1 above to be annoying. I don’t have a really deep model of why, but I think it triggers a sense of beating-around-the-bush or otherwise not being frank.
I want to share the value I see in using phrases more like #1 than #2, and to place them on a spectrum rather than just having them be binary. To do that, I’m going to tell a brief story here, which is based on a true story that inspired this post.
Friends of mine, whose names aren’t Mitch and Lia, asked me to help them have a tough conversation at a conference we were all attending. They’d been in a romantic relationship for several months, and things were kind of shaky at that point. An incident happened where, due to some ambiguous communication and differing assumptions, Mitch basically felt like Lia had totally ditched him when they’d agreed they would have lunch together that day. Lia had seen him in a conversation with someone else and thought he looked engrossed so she didn’t want to interrupt and figured they’d reconnect in the cafeteria or whatever.
Bystander Effect is a phenomenon where…
…individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present. The probability of help is inversely related to the number of bystanders. In other words, the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help. (source: Wikipedia)
This sounds kind of nuts, but welcome to being human. The reasons it happens are diffusion of responsibility (if others are around, maybe they’ll help… so maybe you don’t have to) and cohesiveness (if nobody else is jumping to action, maybe that’s the appropriate response…). Public Service Announcement: now that you know about the bystander effect, realize that in many emergency situations, nobody else will help. So you might as well be alone.
Anyway, I think that the bystander effect can be used as a fun metaphor or mental model to talk about some other common experiences people have, in CoZE (comfort-zone expansion) and with procrastination.
Most of my experience with this sort of thing comes from doing social CoZE and Rejection Therapy exercises, but I think it shows up elsewhere too. So say I’m in an airport, and my challenge is to get a stranger to give me a hug. I look around, and there are a lot of strangers. Which means that my thoughts, by default, go something like this:
I wrote this song over 2 years ago, shortly after I first became connected with the Center for Applied Rationality. It was an eye-opening experience, and I found myself wondering how I fit into everything… the Bay Area rationality communities, my intentional community in Waterloo (which I was also fairly new to at the time). I was also in the process of re-understanding my own identity and how to communicate Malcolmness to people. For reasons, it took me awhile to get around to recording it. But it still resonates with me a lot.
I got lost, and found
that I could no longer hear my favorite sounds
and so I wandered around… singing aloudtrying to capture all these thoughts
trying to master all these abilities
learning to connect all the dots
and cultivating possibilitiesI got lost, and found
that all my bright colors had turned to greys and browns
as I wandered around, downtown
It can be tempting, when engaging in mindset-shifting, to dream of the day when your old mindset goes away forever. I think that that’s not the best target to aim for. It may happen eventually, but there’s often a long phase where both streams of thought coexist. Sometimes it’s even helpful to still have access to that old mindset, but in a kind of isolated way, where you can query it for its opinion but it doesn’t actually run your decisions. Knowing this is important, because otherwise you can think of old-mindset thoughts as failures.
What does this feel like on the inside? One model that my intentional community developed is the idea of there being multiple channels to your thought. So if you have a model of human experience that has steps something like this…
Stimulus → Perception → Interpretation → Feeling / Thought → Intention → Action
…then the channels model suggests that your brain generates multiple interpretations of a given perception in parallel, each of which can in turn generate distinct thoughts and feelings, which might tend you towards different kinds of action. Unless you’ve trained in this particular kind of mindfulness or phenomenological awareness, any particular experience will usually be primarily interpreted through one channel, yielding a dominant thought/feeling/intention/action that comes out of how that channel makes sense of things. I think the skill of pulling these apart is valuable.
…though it would sure look passive-aggressive to many. Here it is:
Now, granted, if I hadn’t seen this sticky note in context, I might have assumed it was passive-aggressive too. So the purpose of this post, essentially, is to communicate the context within which I saw that sticky note and assumed it wasn’t passive-aggressive.
This feels surprisingly hard to do, probably because much of the context and the reasoning was an embodied sense, rather than a deliberate process. But I’ll start by sharing a bit more detail of what I experienced in the second or two after I saw the note:
I read: “This was with the clean utensils.”
I imagined the dirty spatula in with the clean ones.
I mentally simulated some earlier person (the note-writer) encountering such a thing. I noted mild feelings of disgust and confusion, along with curiosity around how it came to be there. » read the rest of this entry »
