It didn’t occur to me to take the picture until after I cleaned up the broken glass.
This post isn’t about gardens or bodums. It’s about thinking and mindset.
Last July (~15 months ago) I had an interaction in my house’s laundry room, where I moved something on a shelf, which knocked off a bodum (aka french coffee press) which fell to the ground and shattered. I mentioned this to Jean (the likely purchaser/user of the bodum) that it had broken. But… the shelf was in a corner, with a chest freezer making it even more secluded, so the broken glass wasn’t a threat to anyone. So I decided I’d clean it up later.
Of course, as we know, later never comes.
So when it came time in August to leave for a four-month internship at Twitter in San Francisco, it still wasn’t done. I swore to Jean “I need to finish packing, but I’ll do it tomorrow morning before I go.” Not too surprisingly, I was packing basically all night. So morning came and I was running around and she said to me in my stress and frenzy, “Don’t worry; I’ll clean it up.” I was hugely relieved because I had felt an obligation to clean it.
Interlude: Malcolm in San Francisco / Berkeley, then home for Christmas
When I returned to the house in January of this year, I went downstairs to do laundry, and glanced in the corner. Lo and behold, a broken bodum remained. “Huh,” I thought.
» read the rest of this entry »
This post is a lightly-edited transcript of part of the recording of the Monday evening gathering of culture-nudgers. I’m sharing it because a lot of people are curious about the workings of the intentional community that I’m involved with, and I think this exploration of my own thought patterns provides an excellent window into our context. I also think that it can stand on its own as a powerful example of mental control… being able to step back and look at my thoughts as they arise. In some ways, this is Mindfulness Field Training 3. Read one and two.
Things you may need/want to know, for context:
Malcolm, with a grin: I’m noticing a lot of shit come up around this.
Jean: Cool! As you would say—cool!
Heather: I like…that you can smile about that.
Jean: Ohhh, he’s been practicing! » read the rest of this entry »
This is a followup to my two previous posts on what I’ve been calling mindfulness field training. Essentially, the underlying idea is to practice noticing your thoughts and not getting caught up in them. This post is also, in some ways, a followup to my post from last summer on a technique from CFAR called Propagating Urges.
When talking about behaviour change, we find ourselves asking: what kinds of feedback loops are most effective? One strong possibility is operant conditioning, which researcher B. F. Skinner developed to the extent that he could teach pigeons how to perform very complex tasks (like playing a tune on the piano) in a matter of minutes. Where Pavlovian “classical conditioning” would just associate one preexisting behaviour to a new trigger by creating an association with a natural trigger (eg dogs trained to salivate when bells ring because they’re taught the bells signify food) operant condition allows the trainer to create totally new behaviours. The way it works is that when any behaviour that at all resembles the target behaviour is exhibited, a reward is given, and that reward causes the subject to seek more reward by taking the behaviour further.
CFAR’s Propagating Urges class, last time I saw it, was based around this principle, with the additional aspect of it being a human influencing their own behaviour, which allows for the reward to be a lot more nuanced. The general approach of P.U. was to think of your long term goal and why you want to achieve it, and to connect that feeling to a kind of gesture that you can do (eg pumping your fist and saying “yesss!”) at the moment you notice a thought that’s related to your goal. Depending on how aversive the goal is, that could even include thoughts about how much you don’t want to work on it. So if your goal is filing your taxes on time, then even the thought “Gah, I still haven’t printed out the tax forms!” is still a really helpful thought because you’re at least thinking about your taxes, and you definitely aren’t going to be able to do them without thinking about them.
In my YES! I noticed! post from last summer, I tried exploring using this on myself to get rid of a number of personal habits like going to get a snack when I’m already full, or in general fleeing from aversive thoughts. It had limited effect, for a few reasons, the main two being:
1. I was trying to do a lot all at once and this lack of focus made it hard to stay motivated (I addressed that with this habit-a-week project)
2. I didn’t have very good feedback loops connecting my noticing with any reward
In theory, the focus and reward can be created, but it’s hard.
It’s especially hard because a lot of the highest leverage change comes from shifting mental patterns around fear, shame, judgment, and so on, where it’s hard to get yourself excited about them and where the long-term reward for overcoming them isn’t very tangible, making it hard to try to connect a “yes! I noticed!” with your sense of long-term goal.
So typically it’s pretty hard to get excited about noticing frustrating mental loops. What has changed that for me is continued interaction with someone who wants to hear about them (my friend/mentor/project-partner, Jean). » read the rest of this entry »
I’m excited.
I’m excited, because it’s working.
I’ve been trying for years to develop my sense of mindfulness and mental control, and I’m starting now to get a very direct taste of what that feels like.
And it’s thrilling.
So here’s what happened: last night, I was having a conversation with Jean (my friend, housemate, mentor and project partner) and the subject of epistemological arguments came up. I’ve had some conflict with some of my other housemates in this area, and while part of it is theoretical there is also a practical concern, because ultimately we base our decisions on what we (think we) know, and so has felt threatening to the relationships to be unable to use certain ways of communicating information. Threatening, I think, for both sides.
I want to note that this conflict isn’t a shallow one. I wrote last year about how I overcame some of my stress around the subject of astrology. It had been a hot topic for me for several years due to heated arguments with girlfriends-at-the-time-of-the-arguments. At my first CFAR workshop, I brought up some of this stress, in a controlled environment and then worked to calm myself down, and it gave me a strong sense of what this concept of againstness feels like. (The relevant post contains a video, if you want to see it in action.)
Have you ever been talking with someone, and the two of you essentially agree about the topic at hand, but you still find yourself arguing your point violently? You know what that feels like? That feeling is againstness. And it takes mental skill to extricate yourself from the mode of vehemently asserting the thing you believe so strongly, and to instead have a productive conversation about it. And that’s the skill I’m learning. » read the rest of this entry »
To wash or not to wash? That’s not the question. The question is how to even decide.
(If this is your first or second time on my blog, this background info might be helpful for context.)
Last summer, after living at Zendo56 for maybe a month, I was in the kitchen, getting ready to head to class. I had just finished using a glass jar, and I gave it a brief rinse in the sink then found myself wondering what to do with it at that point. (It’s worth noting that our dishing system includes, by design, an ample waiting area for dirty dishes.)
So the decision I found myself with was: do I put it back in the drawer, as I probably would if I were living on my own, or do I leave it to be thoroughly washed later?
Conveniently Jean was in the kitchen, drinking tea at the table. I turned to her and (with some deliberation so as to avoid merely asking her what I “should” do) asked her for help in deciding.
She posed two questions for me:
- If you leave the jar out to be washed, what will be the experience of the next person to interact with it?
and
- If you put the jar back in the drawer, what will be the experience of the next person to interact with it?
Whoa. That style of thinking was very new to me, and very appealing.
Fast-forward half a year and I use reasoning like in the jar story on a fairly regular basis. I’ve done a lot more thinking about what it means to take others’ perspectives; reading, talking, and thinking about words like “empathy”.
Perspective-taking is related to empathy but is more conscious. You might say that it involves active and intentional use of the same brain circuits that run the empathy networks, to really model other peoples’ experiences. Where the Golden Rule says “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” perspective-taking as a mindset suggests “understand your own impacts by modelling how others experience your behaviours, from their perspective“. It’s not just walking a mile in another shoes, but walking with their gait and posture.
I’ve come to realize that while I do a decent amount of perspective-taking for basic decision-making contexts, I don’t actually do it much in other situations. This can sometimes lead to confusion around others’ behavior, and can lead to them feeling hurt or otherwise negatively affected by me. At the same time, this very pattern is part of what allows me to avoid having self-consciousness that might restrict my behaviour in ways I don’t want. A large part of what has allowed me to become so delightfully quirky is that I’m not constantly worried about what other people think. And ultimately other people do enjoy this. They’ve told me so, quite emphatically. So I don’t necessarily want to become immensely concerned about others’ perspectives either.
I attended a student leadership conference at uWaterloo yesterday, and one of the sessions was on personal branding and how to create the traits that you want other people to experience of you, in order to achieve your goals. I noted there that perspective-taking would be a valuable skill for any teamwork-related goals, of which I have many. Last night, I found myself asking, out loud, to Jean: what might happen if I were to adopt perspective taking as an intense, deliberate practice for a week. Could I build new affordances for modelling other people and their experiences?
(I’m using the secondary meaning of “affordance”, which refers to an agent having properties such that certain actions feel available to perform.)
Jean said “yes, and not just what’s going on for people, but what’s going on for…” and turned slightly to look roughly towards the kitchen table. “…the system!” I thought, and began considering the perspective of the cutting board, the knife. “The system,” she said. I began to talk about the knife and she said, “Not so much just the knife itself but the experience of everyone using the knife.”
Which, of course, brings us back to the jar story.
I decided to do it. To make that a primary focus of mine for this week, both here at the house and with friends and classmates. This is actually part of a larger behaviour-design experiment I’ve created for 2014. My reasoning is that rather than trying to change 50 habits all at once as a New Year’s Resolution, I’ll change 50 habits… in series, one per week.
My first of these was the lowering of the lavatory lid, so chosen because I share a bathroom with a housemate who experiences a raised lid with rather intense anxiety. Also to test-drive this. My second of these was to fix the out-toeing in my gait. Up until about 2 weeks ago, my feet usually had a ~90° angle between them while walking and often while standing.
Each of these has been a fairly solid success. They’re not fully unconscious habits yet, but it no longer takes additional energy to pay attention to them enough to maintain the change (while it becomes an ingrained habit). My third habit (which was to briefly mutter my intention every time I open a new browser tab) didn’t go so well, in large part because I was doing some work early in the week where I totally got into flow and (a) didn’t think of this and (b) would have experienced a net-negative effect from doing it. So I didn’t practice.
Week #4 is going to be perspective-taking. Unlike the first two, I’m not intending for this to produce a “complete” change in my behaviour, but rather to nudge my behaviour some noticeable distance from where it is now. To give me more affordances for taking others’ perspectives, until it starts happening regularly and naturally as part of basic relating with people.
I’ve set up a new page on these habits here.
PS: In case you were curious: I put the jar away.
Last weekend, I had a goodbye conversation. It followed this 6-step form, created by Steve Bearman of Interchange Counseling Institute. It was a really powerful framing for this communication that needed to happen.
Steps 2 and 3 of that process are apologizing and forgiving, which was interesting for me. As part of learning to embody the new culture we’re building with the Living Room Context (LRC; learn more here and here) I’ve been trying to live by a series of commitments and assumptions. One of these is:
I commit to offering no praise, no blame, and no apologies; and to reveal, acknowledge, and appreciate instead.
My friend Sean (who was actually spending the entire rest of the weekend at an Interchange workshop) was filling a counselor role and helping to hold the context for us. He and I have talked at length about the LRC and how I’m exploring communicating without apologies, so when we got to those steps, we agreed that it would make sense to take a moment to unpack those terms and figure out (a) what value was in each step and (b) what aspect of them felt incongruous with my mindset.
An apology, we teased out, has three parts:
Part 1 is the heavy part, where you say “I hurt you, and I own that.” Impact is important, despite it being undervalued in many contexts: consider “It’s the thought that counts”. Even though you didn’t intend to step on someone’s toe (literally or figuratively) it still hurts, and it’ll only hurt more if you try to minimize that. Intent isn’t magic.
Part 2 is saying you care. It’s where you communicate that it matters to you that you had a negative impact, and that you therefore want to fix that aspect of your patterns or whatever caused it. This part is what makes repeat apologies for the same thing feel awkward and insincere.
Part 3… well, that’s what the next section is about.
I want to tell a brief story. It takes place at the Household as Ecology, the LRC-focused intentional community house I lived in this summer. Jean is the owner of the house and one of the key people behind starting the LRC originally. This experience was a huge learning moment for me.
I was in the kitchen, and Jean had pointed out some way in which I’d left the system of the kitchen in relative chaos. I think I left a dirty utensil on the counter or something. I became defensive and started justifying my behaviour. She listened patiently, but I found myself feeling unsatisfied with her response. Finally, I cried out, in mock-agony, “FORGIVE ME!”
“No!” she responded with equal energy.
We both burst out laughing.
I want to pause and recognize that that story might be really confusing if you don’t have an appreciation for the context we’re operating in. Taken, quite literally, out of context, I can appreciate that that exchange might sound unpleasant, and confusing that it would end in laughter. (I’m curious, actually, if this is the case, and would love to hear from you in the comments how you understood it.)
I’m going to try to help make sense of it. What happened here was that even though Jean wasn’t judging me, I felt judged, and was trying to earn her approval again. I wanted to be absolved. Exculpated. Forgiven. But she couldn’t do that. To absolve someone is “to make them free from guilt, responsibility, etc.”… but to the extent that there was guilt, it was entirely inside me. And the responsibility? That’s there whether Jean notices what I’ve done or not. I remain responsible for what I’d done, and response-able to fix the current problem and change my future behaviour.
There was also a sense in which the dynamic of “if I forgive you, you’ll just do it again” applies. When this statement is said with resent, it’s painful, but Jean communicated this (implicitly, as I recall) with care and compassion and a sense of wanting the system to become better for everyone, and of wanting me to grow. Done in this way, it felt like a firmly communicated boundary, and the refusal to “forgive” felt like a commitment to continue giving me the feedback that I need. That I crave, even when it hurts.
From my experience, it’s possible to create a collaborative culture where forgiveness is superfluous. Where you have the impact that you have, and the other person may reasonably trust you less as a result, but they aren’t judging you or harboring any resentments in the first place, so this becomes meaningless.
During the conversation last weekend, what I tried doing instead of forgiveness (although I did try on that language, just for fun) was to communicate that I wasn’t holding any resentment or grudge: that I was not going to carry anger or judgement into the future. This is my default way of operating, and it felt really good to bring up the specific instances that hurt and to offer my understanding and compassion there.
The article linked at the top, that was providing the framework for our discussion, remarks the following:
Forgiveness comes from having compassion toward them and being able to imagine how, when everything is taken into account, their behavior was somehow constrained to be what it was.
When you take a systems-oriented perspective on things (rather than being caught up in a sense of entitlement for things being a certain way) this becomes the default model for everything. And so everything is already forgiven, to the extent that that’s possible.
All in all, this form facilitated us connecting and reaching a place of mutual understanding in a way that otherwise probably would simply not have happened. We had, in fact, tried to fix things before. What allowed us to get through this time was:
There was something about it being the end, that made it so we weren’t even trying to fix things. This helped give us the space to be honest and open, which in turn brought way more reconciliation than we thought was possible at that point.
I’m really grateful that I had the opportunity to do this, and that the others—both the facilitator and the person I was saying goodbye to—are adept, open communicators. This is what enabled us to go so deep and ask questions like “what are we intending to get out of this apologizing step?” and “what does it mean to forgive someone?”
Of course, my interpretation isn’t the only one. If you understand apologies or forgiveness in some other way, I’d be grateful to hear from you in the comments.
So there’s a thing called Crocker’s Rules which is rather popular in my network. At any time, one can declare to be operating by these rules, a declaration that constitutes a commitment to being fully open to feedback that isn’t couched in social niceties etc. The idea is it’s supposed to be a much more efficient/optimal way to communicate things. To me, Crocker’s Rules seem like a high ROI hack for getting certain things that I like about deep trust.
From the canonical article:
Declaring yourself to be operating by “Crocker’s Rules” means that other people are allowed to optimize their messages for information, not for being nice to you. Crocker’s Rules means that you have accepted full responsibility for the operation of your own mind – if you’re offended, it’s your fault. Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor.
First we need to ask ourselves what we mean by being “offended”. One of my all-time favorite articles is titled Why I’m Not Offended By Rape Jokes, and its opening paragraph reads:
I am not offended by rape jokes. Offended is how my grandmother feels if I accidentally swear during a conversation with her; the word describes a reaction to something you think is impolite or inappropriate. It is a profoundly inadequate descriptor for the sudden pinching in my chest and the swelling of fear and sadness that I feel when someone makes a rape joke in my presence.
So sure, I think declaring Crocker’s Rules includes relinquishing the right to claim someone said something impolite or inappropriate. It also means giving someone the benefit of the doubt around them being inconsiderate. However, there are lots of potentially cruel things they could say, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect those not to hurt.
People sometimes talk about Radical Honesty, a policy which is easy to confuse for Crocker’s Rules (though they’re kind of the opposite) and which can sometimes just come off as Not-that-radical Being-a-dick. There is a lot to be said for direct and open communication, but somebody who just says “you’re a moron” isn’t usually being helpful. Tact can be valuable: saying everything that’s on your mind might not actually help you or the other person achieve your goals. The brain secretes thoughts! Some of them happen to be totally useless or even harmful! [EDIT 2021: I would no longer say this so categorically. Read Dream Mashups for a better sense of how I’d talk about this now.] And, just like you don’t want to identify with unduly-negative self-judgements, not all thoughts about someone else are worth granting speech.
On a related note, I know someone whose contact page used to say something to the effect of “I operate by Crocker’s Rules, but I’m also an ape, so I’m likely to be more receptive to criticism if it is friendly.”
I want to touch on the question of efficiency. Are Crocker’s Rules optimally efficient as a communication paradigm? On an information level, theoretically yes, as it tautologically eschews adding extra information. On a meta-information level it is very efficient as well, as the act of declaring Crocker’s Rules is a very succinct way to communicate to someone else that you want to be efficient in this way.
However, there’s more to communication than information, especially when it comes to interpersonal dynamics. I talked about this in my post on feedback a few months ago. Sometimes the feedback you most need isn’t efficient. Sometimes it’s vague and hard to express clearly in just a few words, and would become garbled in the process. Sometimes the feedback is a feeling. It’s saying “when I experience you doing X, it makes me feel Y.” And this requires vulnerability on the part of the person giving the feedback, which can’t be caused by any amount of you self-declaring Crocker’s Rules. For that, you need trust.
In the short-term, trust-based communication can be incredibly slow. I thought of using an adverb like “excruciatingly” there, but I actually find it very pleasurable. It’s just frustrating if you’re in a rush. In the long-term, however, building trust allows for even more efficient/optimal interactions than Crocker’s Rules, because you have a higher-bandwidth channel.
I believe that the primary useful function of Crocker’s Rules is in acute usage, such as soliciting honest general feedback or soliciting any kind of feedback really. Mentioning Crocker’s Rules in such a context is very effective shorthand for indicating that you want all of the grittiest, most brutal feedback the person is willing to offer, not just surface stuff or “grinfucking“. The article doesn’t have a quotable definition for that term, but it’s essentially giving someone bland positive feedback when your honest feedback would be strongly negative. You’re grinning at them but in the long-run the lack of honest feedback is fucking them over.
To me, Crocker’s Rules seem like a high ROI hack for getting certain things that I like about deep trust. I think its ultimate form would in fact be a kind of trust: a trust that the other person fundamentally has your best interest in mind. However, we often can’t reasonably have that trust yet in many contexts in which we’d like honest feedback. Hence approximations like Crocker’s Rules.
A mentioned in previous posts, I spent this summer living at a very interesting household—one dedicated to communication. One topic that came up at several points was that of the ideal position for the toilet seat. I’m male-bodied and grew up in a house where nobody cared, so my default was naturally to not move the seat after using it. However, one of my housemates found this extremely frustrating.
I was unable to quite grasp the nature of her feelings therein until another friend who was visiting described a raised seat as “triggering”. Oh. I had been modelling it as a preference or inconvenience, not as something that was acting on that level. There were a few possibilities here, feedback-wise. Initially I had no feedback. The first bit of feedback I got was my housemate asking if I was aware that I left the seat up. I replied something to the effect of “No, I’m well-aware” and the conversation became quite tense. I felt very defensive. What I was not aware of was the impact of leaving the seat up. This is the real channel for powerful feedback.
The most valuable feedback, naturally, is that which we cannot know on our own. I knew I was leaving the seat up. I know that my vocal chords tend to produce higher amplitude vibrations in the air than most people’s. What I can’t know, without feedback, is how it affects you. I could guess, and I do guess when necessary. But that’s not nearly as powerful. Besides, I want to know how you feel.
Feedback in relationships is essentially the opposite of bottled feelings. Bottled feelings, for the person they’re bottled inside, foments resent and frustration. But it’s not only the person who’s bottled that gets frustrated: to be interacting regularly with someone who’s not expressing themselves to you is confusing and unpleasant.
I was reading the first few chapters of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) earlier today, and was quite naturally struck by the profound transformations people undergo when they feel that they’ve spoken and been heard. This is the power of feedback.
One of my friends, Sandy, has written about how he used a form taken from software development to improve communication within his relationship.
The advantages he points out of using agile in any context:
- Potential problems are mentioned before they turn into actual problems, and the entire team can brainstorm on ways of fixing them.
- The entire team gets a better understanding of the project scope, not just those domains they’re directly involved with.
- Furthermore, everyone gets an idea of what their coworkers’ day-to-day job is like.
- Feedback becomes frequent, reliable and near-instant.
The point about feedback becoming frequent is key, as without a clear picture of when you’ll get to be heard by your partner it can be easy to become anxious trying to decide if, when, and how to speak your mind.
Sandy recommends Crocker’s Rules as a way to facilitate frankness. While that’s certainly an option, I’d encourage people to be gentle, both with themselves and their partners. There’s nothing “wrong” with you if you get offended when someone calls you an idiot. Furthermore, that particular word is unlikely to be the actual most efficient way of communicating what you’re trying to communicate (which is what Crocker’s rules are about).
On the contrary, it is mostly a judgement and is not very addressable. How does one simply reduce one’s idiocy? My understanding of communication (from LRC and NVC) is that it would be much more effective to talk about what you’re experiencing, how that’s making you feel, and what you need in order to deal with that.
It’s of paramount importance, regardless of how you say it, that people don’t feel like things have been left unsaid. This is easiest when both people are giving each other the benefit of the doubt on what they’re saying. If you need to institute Crocker’s Rules for that to happen, then do it. (EDIT: I’ve since written an article on trust and Crocker’s Rules)
I have a tendency to avoid classes whose professors or styles of teaching I dislike, and it looked at first like my 3A Math course would be the opposite of this. Turns out that there was a substitute prof for the first week. He was entertaining, engaging, and pedagogically sound. The instructor for the rest of the term was basically reading out of the textbook and getting confused whenever we’d get confused.
The worst part, however, was that our homework assignments (which were not for marks!) had no solutions given. Following the thread on feedback, this is clearly ridiculous as the best way to learn is to to try and fail—provided that you immediately realize that you have in fact not performed in the desired manner, and you proceed to practice something slightly simpler until you’re ready for the exercise you messed up on.
The reason he avoided giving us solutions is that he wanted to assign us the exact same questions on the tests and didn’t want us to have solutions for them. I don’t really have any words to describe how I feel about that. None fit to publish, anyway.
What I would like to do is lay out a spectrum of feedback loops and show that tighter loops are better.
Option 1: Homework with no solutions given (as above).
This is not even a feedback loop. It’s not a loop at all. You’ll quite probably never find out how you did on any of the practice problems.
Option 2: Teachers assigning homework and then solutions/answers show up within a week or two.
Slightly better but not really. A two-week feedback loop is still way too long. By that time, you’ve either already done it right and didn’t need the feedback
Option 3: Do a question, check your answer.
This is great. If you can do this, you’ll probably be just fine. It’s better to have solutions than just answers, but at least answers will tell you if you (probably) got it or if you messed something up.
Option 4: The first time(s) working through a problem, check your progress at each step.
This is optimal. See if your textbook has worked examples, and try guessing at each stage what the next step will be before you read it. You might need to read through at least one of the examples first.
The shift here is essentially from wild stabbing in the dark to deliberate practice.
If you find yourself as a student with a teacher assigning question with no answers, try finding similar (often adjacent) questions in your textbook, to ensure that you’re practising the relevant skills. EDIT: or check out Wolfram Problem Generator. I purchased it and tried it out, and while I think the technology is great, unfortunately they don’t cover any of the material I’m actually learning at this point. Would be great for highschool or early university though.
The day after I decided to write this post, a friend sent me a copy of some fanfiction she’d written about her favourite band. I really have nothing to do with them, so I thought I’d read the first few chapters to indulge her, because she was my friend, and also because I was curious what the story would be like, as it’s not something I normally read.
She went offline shortly after I started, and when she signed on the next day she was greeted with a deluge of feedback on various lines I’d found hilarious or bits that confused me or felt “off”. When introducing the story, she’d remarked “yeah I haven’t written in months…I need to do itttt I want to but I’ve been working so much” …after reading my feedback, she exclaimed: “Okay now I am 100freaking% writing the next chapter so you can read it haha I like your feedback… it’s going to be amazing.”
This is the power of feedback.
Have a project you’re working on? Something creative? A startup / app? I love giving feedback. Get in touch! malcolm@malcolmocean.com
The Living Room Context holds that the subjective is all we have. This is true in the sense that we only have our own perceptions of things and our own models. However, barring solipsism, it appears to be valuable to talk about things as having a sense of objectivity.
I had long thought of objectivity as “reality” or “the way things are”. This sort of definition makes sense with the phrase “objective truth”. In learning about subjective truth—the known truth of our own experience—I’ve come to understand that while it can make sense to model the existence of some kind of external reality, everything we know about that objective reality is itself… a subjective model, contained in each of us, the subjects.
I tried to understand the objective by simply modelling it as inhuman, except no, nonhumans experience subjective perception as well, though they may not have thoughts about it. Or what about aliens? This works on the level of “if a tree falls in a forest, it makes air vibrations but sound only happens when a creature with ears experiences those vibrations”.
Then I thought about it from a scientific perspective: objective truth, I thought, is when you’re saying some model is presently as close as possible (given available data and modes of thinking) to the model you would anticipate having given infinite investigation. At the very least, even if not as close as possible, you’re asserting that it’s better than the prevailing model. Importantly, that it’s better than the prevailing model for everyone, not just you.
Your perspective and mine. Visually, at least. I also have a strong emotional experience, since that CD is my first album.
So maybe the objective is describing something independent of perspective? As in, devoid of subjectivity? Sort of, but that’s not quite it either. If I hold up a CD, facing you, then your subjective description is the cover art, and mine is just a shiny disc, but what is the objective description? In what sense can such a description exist?
I propose that the objective can be best modelled not as being independent of perspective but rather dependent on it. Like a function. The objective description is a way of answering the question, “if I perform some known kind of measurement on this object/phenomenon, what do I expect the result to be, given the perspective from which I perform the measurement?” Note that there remains the subjective component of there being a certain subject who holds the expectation that the results of said measurements would be well-mapped by said function.
I think that a common source of conflict is when we attempt to make objective descriptions without accounting for certain dimensions by which the subjective perspectives can vary. It’s easy to ask “what photons would enter my eyes if I were standing in a different location?” but much harder to ask “how would I perceive this interaction if I had been born and raised a in X circumstances?” where X could be a different period of history, or a different country, or even a different social class. This is what makes objective descriptions dangerous—we usually don’t know how to define the function across the full breadth of human perspectives, and so what we say is likely to be misinterpreted.
From the LRC list of commitments and assumptions:
I commit to speaking only out of and about my own personal experience and understanding. When I speak of others experience or ideas, it is my experience of them I speak of.
I'm Malcolm Ocean.
I'm developing scalable solutions to fractal coordination challenges (between parts of people as well as between people) based on non-naive trust and intentionality. More about me.
