Winning at Arguments by Enlarging your PNS

Here’s a video of me. It might be helpful to read the text below before watching the video. Actually, on second thought, this post was adapted from an email to a friend who said “I am grinning ear to ear from watching the video on your wall. I’d love to hear more about it!” so maybe watch it first. Your call.

The Autonomic Brain & Againstness

So, in late January I was at a 4 day Applied Rationality workshop, which was absolutely amazing. The first 3 days were classes, and the 4th was to practise what we’d learned already. That’s when this video happened. The relevant class is called Againstness, and the practice session is fondly referred to as “Torture Court.” The againstness class is about the two halves of the Autonomic Nervous System (the part of your brain you don’t consciously control directly) which are the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous Systems.

• SNS = fight & flight & freeze (+ stress/againstness)
• PNS = rest & digestion (+ empathy)

The idea is that while againstness (or SNS dominance) was effective back when stress = wild animal or armed opponent, it isn’t when stress = fight-with-your-partner or performance anxiety. As mentioned, you don’t have a sense of empathy when you’re in that state, so it’s basically impossible to consider that the other person might be right, or to even think of how the situation might be resolved peacefully. We were taught several techniques to release from againstness and shift to PNS dominance… basically:

1. Be grateful for the chance to practise this skill (gratitude is incompatible with SNS)
2. Relax your body and open it up to expose your organs (body gestures like crossed arms are both symptomatic of againstness and reinforce SNS-dominance)
3. Actively try to feel the situation from the other perspective, or feel a sense of connection to the other person.
4. (repeat as necessary. if gratitude for the chance doesn’t work, be grateful that the chance is so tough that it’s beyond your ability to be grateful for it!)

Astrology & Arguments

Then. We come to the question of how exactly I came to be standing up there freaking out about astrology. I’ve historically not really liked astrology, but I was mostly indifferent. Sometime (I’m not sure where) in the past few years I developed a deep frustration with it. It really hit a peak this past summer when I had a very heated argument about it with my partner at the time. This had come up with past partners as well, although not so intense. Anyway, in another class at the workshop, called Winning at Arguments, we were asked to think of a heated argument, so I thought of that one. We looked into the word “winning” and how it can mean a variety of things, but that the most useful definition is that both (all) people involved achieve their goals. The next step there was to pause and think “what is my goal? what is their goal?” and I realized that ultimately she was trying to understand me and I was trying to be understood. Pretty compatible, eh? And yet it was one of the most intense arguments I’ve ever had.

However, despite having that understanding on Sunday, there was still a lot of pent-up negativity surrounding the subject of astrology. Very silly. Like, no matter how much I ultimately dislike it, there is nothing to be gained by being angry or stressed about it. Hence, the torture court exercise. I was one of the last people to go from our group, and a lot of the other people had been doing pretty tame things like singing I’m a Little Teapot—the main source of stress there was uncertainty surrounding the lyrics, not fear of performing. Another participant had to sidestep a punch from Val (the male instructor you can hear) but do so without flinching—just moving relaxedly. A lot of this is actually related to Aikido, but that’s another topic.

Torture and Laughter

The other instructor running the Torture Court was Cat, who was also the one who did the arguments class, so when I finally went up I had this anticipation (a scary but hopeful one) that it would be astrology-related. If it had come up as something else that was boring, actually, I would have suggested it be revised as such. Anyway, I had given my phone to a friend to film me, and so then Cat proposed what she did and man it was overwhelming! One of the profound realizations I had was that I use laughter as a stress response. Like, I sort of knew this, but I didn’t realize how obvious and dramatic it was. Where others became frozen or defensive, I became, well, as you see in the video.

Immediately following the session I was walking around in a very intense physical, emotional, and mental state. My body felt… kind of tingly. I was feeling totally drained but simultaneously full of life. It was kind of like being dizzy but I wasn’t off-balance. This lasted maybe 10-15 minutes. It has, however, substantially reduced my aversion to astrology. Again, I still don’t care for it, but it doesn’t get me worked up anymore. At least, it hasn’t yet.

Malcolm, the Aries

What if you do everything perfectly, and you still fail?

I was talking with a friend about his project, and he commented that he hadn’t launched yet because first he’s “gotta be perfect”.

My initial response to this was the maxim I know from the Facebook posters:

“Done is better than perfect” – The Hacker Way

Then, I thought about this idea a bit more, and realized that there’s something much more profound at work that has to do with failure. I’ve recently been realizing that a lot of popular business and personal advice can be summarized as “learn from your failures”—the natural conclusion being that the more failures you have the more you can learn. (There’s an issue here in that you can’t just try to fail, but that’s a topic for a future post.)

The first obvious problem with waiting for perfection before launch is that perfection never comes. Ultimately there’s always one last revision that could be made.

The second, more subtle issue, is that if you wait until you feel you’ve reached perfection before you give your project a chance to fail, then failure is so much worse, because:

1. You have no idea how you can fix the problem since it’s already supposed to be perfect, and
2. You feel as though your best is not enough.

Perfectionism and procrastination

I recently read The Now Habit, by Neil Fiore, and one of the useful concepts I took away from it was that procrastination is often caused by two fears: that your failure at an endeavour indicates your failure as a person, and that if you succeed you’ll just be given harder tasks.

“With procrastination, though, you’ve covered yourself both ways: there’s always an excuse, in case you don’t perform as well as you’d hoped; and there’s also some reserve left, if you still do succeed.” – Dr. Derald Sue, as quoted in The Now Habit, p34.

The cool part is, there’s another solution that is much less stressful than procrastination:

Iteration

To counter perfectionism, try iteration: instead of trying to be perfect from the beginning, you try to do as little as possible to still be acceptable. From there, you improve. I was once chatting with another friend, Alec, while recording a video of a song for YouTube. I returned to the chat after a take, and said “This one wasn’t perfect, but it’s acceptable.” He remarked “Don’t strive for ‘acceptable'” but then after a moment’s reflection, reconsidered:

“On second thought, acceptable is… acceptable”

Acceptable is faster than perfect, but also in many cases you have a chance to improve on it anyway. In the case of the video, I didn’t have hours to practice at the time. In the case of my first friend’s project, he would be much better off getting something out than just sitting at the drawing board all day. The world can’t give you feedback if it can’t see what you’ve done.

Also, if you did everything perfectly in the first place, how could you possibly listen to any feedback?

A Real Man

The following is not a list of traits required for manhood. There are enough of those already.

This post is a response to a comment posted on this article by Jeff Perera which is itself a response to the article Toronto, City of Sissies by Christie Blatchford. The following will make more sense if you read at least Jeff Perera’s article, but it’s not entirely necessary.

Here’s the comment I’m responding to:

Very well written.
Ms. Blatchord seems to forget that there is more to being a whole person than outward appearances.
To me, a man is someone who is aware and in touch with his emotions, all of them.
A man hugs his children and kisses his wife (or partner.)
A man defends those who can’t defend themselves.
A man cries at sad, sappy movies, laughs at funny ones, and cheers at UFC.
A man hugs his friends because that’s what friends do.
Lastly, a real man isn’t concerned with the opinions of those who would confine them to little boxes. They just aren’t worth the time.

Here is the response I wrote as a comment:

Thank you for this. While reading it, it occurred to me to wonder about what we say about women or “real women”.

I first considered the phrase “A man defends those who can’t defend themselves” and mentally constructed “A woman defends those who can’t defend themselves”. I promptly concluded that while a woman would probably be praised for standing up for someone weaker, society doesn’t explicitly expect her to do so, in the same way.

I then looked at all of the other phrases, and concluded that (in general) we don’t state expectations like this about women. We may have them (eg. we expect women to hug their kids and kiss their partners) but we never state them in lists like this.

I have read countless lists of things men must do or not do, and feel or not feel. I recognize that your list is personal, and it is certainly more reasonable than most, yet it is still such a list. Your list does not confine men to a “little box”, but it does confine us to a big box, and that’s still a problem.

If we’re going to work towards achieving gender equality and freedom of personal expression, we have to take away all of the boxes and all of the lists, and accept that manhood isn’t defined by any characteristics at all. I realize that it’s scary to do this, but I feel it has to be done.

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While writing this, I made some interesting discoveries via Google searches that I wanted to share here.

1

The first is the results of searching a real man versus searching a real woman. Nine of the top ten results for men are sites describing traits men must have to be “real men”. The results for women are mostly unrelated to this idea, except for this article that declares “A Real Woman Wants A Real Man” and proceeds to tell us (again) what a real man is like. Two of the real woman results are lists like the man ones, but both are from fundamentalist Christian groups, and the lists include such remarks as “A Real Woman… Wants to do God’s will.” and “A Real Woman… Knows her body is a temple of the Holy Spirit”. These definitely do not follow any widely accepted definition of what a “Real Woman” is, and according to traffic ranks Alexa.com, the first manliness site (askmen.com, which has several articles on the subject) has 22,000 times the number of pageviews as the fundamentalist site (chastitycall.org). At any rate, it’s clear that the cultural pressure of character is much higher for men than for women.

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The second discovery I made is more surprising and less relevant: Google treats “man” and “person” as synonyms. This is not true for “woman” and “person”, which is a relief—then man and woman would be synonyms, and we’d have to retire the gender binary forever! What a shame…

I presume this has something to do with conversions such as chairman and chairperson, or mailman and mailperson, but the fact remains that it’s an inaccurate synonym.

I’d like to conclude by returning to the idea of better rules: at least one of the top “Real Man” articles espouses “modern manhood” rather than the “rugged” ideals of the past, these are still lists of expectations and rules. I’m willing to acknowledge that the better rules might be a necessary step on the way to full openness to all possibilities of unique manhood. Personally, I don’t think so. I think we need to stop putting such demands on people altogether. On that note, “man” and “person” can’t be synonyms, because you couldn’t possibly make such a list of traits necessary for personhood: “To be a real person, you have to acknowledge all of your emotions.” That just sounds silly.