Expectation is often used to refer to two totally distinct things: entitlement and anticipation. My basic opinion is that entitlement is a rather counterproductive mental stance to have, while anticipations are really helpful for improving your model of the world.
Here are some quick examples to whet your appetite…
1. Consider a parent who says to their teenager: “I expect you to be home by midnight.” The parent may or may not anticipate the teen being home on time (even after this remark). Instead, they’re staking out a right to be annoyed if they aren’t back on time.
Contrast this with someone telling the person they’re meeting for lunch “I expect I’ll be there by 12:10” as a way to let them know that they’re running a little late, so that the recipient of the message knows not to worry that maybe they’re not in the correct meeting spot, or that the other person has forgotten.
2. A slightly more involved example: I have a particular kind of chocolate bar that I buy every week at the grocery store. Or at least I used to, until a few weeks ago when they stopped stocking it. They still stock the Dark version, but not the Extra Dark version I’ve been buying for 3 years. So the last few weeks I’ve been disappointed when I go to look. (Eventually I’ll conclude that it’s gone forever, but for now I remain hopeful.)
There’s a temptation to feel indignant at the absence of this chocolate bar. I had an expectation that it would be there, and it wasn’t! How dare they not stock it? I’m a loyal customer, who shops there every week, and who even tells others about their points card program! I deserve to have my favorite chocolate bar in stock!
…says this voice. This is the voice of entitlement.
Alternate title: “Use unique, non-obvious terms for nuanced concepts”
Naming things! Naming things is hard. It’s been claimed that it’s one of the hardest parts of computer science. Now, this might sound surprising, but one of my favoritely named concepts is Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2.
I want you to pause for a few seconds and consider what comes to mind when you read just the bolded phrase above.
Got it?
If you’re familiar with the concepts of S1 and S2, then you probably have a pretty rich sense of what I’m talking about. Or perhaps you have a partial notion: “I think it was about…” or something. If you’ve never been exposed to the concept, then you probably have no idea.
Now, Kahneman could have reasonably named these systems lots of other things, like “emotional cognition” & “rational cognition”… or “fast, automatic thinking” & “slow, deliberate thinking”. But now imagine that it had been “emotional and rational cognition” that Kahneman had written about, and the effect on the earlier paragraph.
It would be about the same for those who had studied it in depth, but now those who had heard about it briefly (or maybe at one point knew about the concepts) would be reminded of that one particular contrast between S1 and S2 (emotion/reason) and be primed to think that was the main one, forgetting about all of the other parameters that that distinction seeks to describe. Those who had never heard of Kahneman’s research might assume that they basically knew what the terms were about, because they already have a sense of what emotion and reason are.
Update: I have revised my opinion on S1/S2 in particular. There may or may not be meaningful clusters being pointed at by Kahneman and others, but in this case the terms S1 & S2 were vague enough that a bunch of other things got projected onto them instead. See this LW post and my comment on it for more on this.
The more general point I’m trying to make in this point still stands though.
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 »
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.
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.
I have things to say about the Ask/Guess/Tell Cultures model, and an addition/amendment to propose: Reveal Culture. Shifting cultures is hard, so what you’re about to read is not going to have a quality of “let’s all go do this!” I do think it’s worth talking about a lot more, and working on gradually and creatively with others who are game to experiment with culture-crafting.
This post is going to assume that you’re familiar with the Ask/Guess Culture model at the very least. I don’t want to have to explain the whole concept from scratch. The post is written with a Tell Culture familiar audience in mind, although I think it would be worth reading without it. I will talk about each in turn and my understanding of how they work, so you understanding them well is not a prerequisite for this post.
I do want to note that I think it makes more sense to talk about “ask cultures” or even “Guess-based cultures” though, rather than in the singular. This is helpful for keeping salient the fact that there are many very different cultures built upon the platform of Ask or of Guess.
So I’m going to use Majuscule Singular to talk about the platforms and lowercase plurals to talk about the cultures themselves.
I want to talk about a new cultural platform: Reveal Culture.
It has similarities to Tell Culture, but I’m choosing a new name for three reasons:
I’ll talk later about why I’ve chosen the name “Reveal”. Right now I want to talk about the structure of the models.
In internet discussions, there have been proposals to refer to Ask/Guess/Tell as (variably) styles, strategies, skills, techniques, habits or something else (rather than “cultures”). In some cases, I think that this suggestion arises out of an oversimplification of how they actually work, although Brienne pointed out to me that there’s at least one good reason to avoid the term ‘culture’: “because ‘culture’ is way too close to ‘tribe’, and it makes people focus on cheering or defense.”
Unfortunately, those other terms aren’t sufficiently complex to model the dynamics. » read the rest of this entry »
Nate Soares just published the first article to The Mind’s UI, a group blog that I’ve set up with him and Brienne Yudkowsky. It’s called Enjoying the feeling of agency, and in it Nate said that one thing that helps with that enjoyment is
Context and framing: it’s much easier to draw satisfaction from a clean room if your mother didn’t make you clean it.
I wanted to elaborate on that, drawing on very recent (even ongoing) experiences of being home for the holidays.
I’ve spent the last year living in an intentional learning community (let’s call it LRC) that has a number of interesting features. One of these, as I’ve described before, is that nobody ever has to do the dishes. We have some agreements about how we want to keep the kitchen space and the cooking utensils available for use; even here, nobody ever yells or guilt trips people for not following them. At our best, we approach the act of giving that kind of feedback with openness and curiosity. Sometimes it produces experiences of frustration which are processed in a different way.
But the point is, for the most part, we all get to navigate the kitchen based on our own desires and needs, and our abilities to discern what makes sense. This is really relaxing. But that’s not the only reason we do it.
When I got back to Nova Scotia to see my family a couple weeks ago, I was amused to experience surprise when I saw a bunch of dirty dishes in the sink. I had become very accustomed to the fact that part of our dishing system in the LRC house where I live is that we stack dirty dishes next to the sink rather than in them, which makes for much better flow in various ways. I looked at the pile of dishes in the sink and figured that it would look a lot nicer if they were washed or put in the dishwasher. So I did that.
There’s an obscure concept (from an obscure field called semantics) that I find really fun to think with: Dot Objects. This post is an attempt to pull it out of that technical field and into, well, the community of people who read my blog. I think that semantics tools are fundamental for rationality and quality thinking in general—Alfred Korzybski, coiner of the phrase “the map is not the territory” and founder of the field general semantics, would probably agree with me. Note that I extrapolate a ton here, so (disclaimer!) don’t take anything I say as being true to the technical study of the subject.
So. Consider the sentence: “The university needed renovations, so it emailed its alumni to raise funds.” The university that has the alumni isn’t the one that needs the repairs. One is an organization, the other is a physical structure.
Dot objects are
entities that subsist simultaneously in multiple semantic domains.[1]
The name “dot objects” (also sometimes “dot types”) comes from the notation used in academic papers on the subject, which is X • Y where X and Y are the two domains. So the above example might be Org • Phy.
What makes the difference in what someone says in response to criticism? Or even what they think in response to imagined criticism?
Talking about personal growth is easier when you have better language for it. One component of this is using words and phrases that are more conducive to growth mindset. Another aspect is having more nuanced terminology to refer to concepts, to allow us to talk about (and think about!) growth more effectively.
This post is also designed to serve as a standalone introduction to the subject-object distinction which is central to Constructive Developmental Theory, developed by Robert Kegan and others. I’m going to elaborate on that model in future posts and connect it to other models, but this sub-component is helpful on its own. I’ll start with the in-depth example, and then talk about the more abstract model behind it.
First: what do I mean by defensiveness? I mean a reactive quality that creates a feeling of unsafety or instability and responds out of a place of feeling threatened. It’s often associated with a sympathetic nervous system (stress) response, or a feeling of againstness. This is not a response that’s useful for much of anything. Maybe survival 50,000 years ago. It interferes with learning, because it makes you irrationally averse to integrating others’ perspectives, both casual and in the form of directed feedback, instead preferring to assert personal rightness. It can wreck relationships by causing disagreements to escalate into conflicts then into fights.
Under this definition, we might ask what kind of quality of response you might prefer? What’s the opposite of defensiveness? Hint: it’s not offensiveness. That’s… I’m not even going to go there. Instead, I propose it’s curiosity. Unlike defensiveness, where your mind is closed to new information and insists on proving itself right, in a state of curiosity your mind is open to updating itself and is ready to reexamine its own assumptions. Curiosity also has another specific property we’re looking for here, which is that it’s a broader outlook than defensiveness. This is necessary for what we’re about to do.
Okay. With this distinction highlighted, let’s talk about the qualitatively different experiences between the two ends of the spectrum. The story we’re going to use as an example:
Jamie is on a bus, travelling home for Thanksgiving, when she realizes that she left a bunch of stuff out in the kitchen. Her roommates are likely going to be annoyed.
Defensive. When you hear feedback or even imagine someone else being critical of you, you immediately start thinking (and perhaps speaking) reasons why that’s invalid and you’re still essentially right. It doesn’t even occur to you that this might not actually get you what you want in the long or short term. Or get you anywhere.
Jamie, thinking to herself: “I mean, I was in a huge rush today… it’s not like I could take the later bus… these tickets are only good for a specific one, not all day… and anyway, Cristina called me when I was about to head out… so it’s not my fault. Besides, she always leaves stuff out.”
» read the rest of this entry »
Growth mindset is a thing. You can read lots more about it elsewhere, including Mindset by Carol Dweck, which has a 4.5 star rating with >500 reviews. I’m not here to explain in-depth what it is or why it matters. Enough people have done that. I’m here to show you how to do it—applied growth mindset. Importantly, this will include examples of fixed mindset that you can practice reframing to be more growthy.
But in case you’re unfamiliar, let’s start with one-sentence definitions, adapted from Dweck:
In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities are simply fixed traits, and use their performance to document those traits.
In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed, and improved upon, which creates a love of learning and a resilience.
But it’s one thing to know how to answer all of Test Your Mindset questions so that you get “Growth” as a result. It’s another to actually operate out of growth mindset consistently.
First I want to note that both growth mindset and fixed mindset have the delightful property of being self-reinforcing. People who have growth mindset will tend to improve, which will reinforce the idea that ability is learnable. People who have fixed mindset will tend to stagnate, which will reinforce the idea that they’re stuck with whatever ability level they currently have.
This is exciting, because it means that to some extent, you can get out of this just by deciding to have the other mindset, in part by recognizing that all of the evidence you currently have is determined by the mindset you have and is thus untrustworthy as evidence of “how things actually, fundamentally work”. That there’s an explanation for the-experiences-that-come-with-fixed-mindset that makes sense in growth mindset too. So you can reinterpret everything and switch mindsets.
And, it takes practice to actually operate from a growth mindset, rather than just conceptually understanding that it’s a good idea to do so. In my experience, a lot of this practice can happen on the level of reframing verbal expression, where you can shift your language from fixed to growth mindset. This in turn will shift your thoughts. That’s what this post is about. The practice of thinking growthily. » read the rest of this entry »
