We’re all going around making sense of everything. We have different kinds of models that we use without even realizing it. A non-exhaustive loose sketch:
The first we mostly learn from direct experience.
The second we mostly learn from studying and reasoning, plus confirming that it doesn’t contradict our experience or our other related models.
The third type we largely get from seeing how other people think about things. These models have too many details for us to properly verify them for ourselves. They may also have reflexive effects where believing them causes you to acquire more evidence in their favour. We may be very influenced by the popularity of the ideas, or the status afforded to those who hold them.
But just because we can’t directly verify these models, doesn’t mean that our personal experiences don’t play a critical role in model adoption. It’s just that instead of it being directly obvious or based on conscious checking, instead it happens more out of our awareness, as more a kind of sudden click-match or a gradual subtle seduction.
Suppose that someone is living their life, and they keep being told what a man is and what a woman is, and finds themselves thinking “uhhh I keep being told that I’m a man/woman, but I resonate more with the description of woman/man”. There’s an experience they’re having, that they don’t know how to make sense of, and they feel like they can’t talk about this with anybody. Then they come across some writing or a podcast from someone about their experience of being transgender, and they go “OH!” and something clicks. The world makes more sense.
Meanwhile, suppose that someone is is living their life, and they keep being told that gender is completely a social construct and that they shouldn’t notice or care about differences between transwomen and ciswomen, but they find themselves thinking “but I really do feel differently in relation to them” whether it’s about safety or attraction or whatever else… There’s an experience they’re having, that they don’t know how to make sense of, and they feel like they can’t talk about this with anybody. Then they come across some writing or a podcast where people are talking about evolutionary biology and how these differences are real and matter, and they go “OH!” and something clicks. The world makes more sense.
How do people end up with crazy worldviews?
» read the rest of this entry »The “Non-Naive Trust Dance” is, at present, the main topic of this site, malcolmocean.com, albeit obliquely (only some of the relevant posts use “NNTD” or even the word “trust”, but even many of the ones that don’t are still pointing at it or generated by it). It’s a bit of an overloaded term, ie a term that means a slightly different thing depending on context. These usages below are non-exclusive—often it means several at once!
Usually, it is: my bespoke personal insight, framework, a generally-available insight, a perspective, a practice, or a deep law. Sometimes it’s a game or a process.
So I figured it might be helpful to investigate these and make them a bit more explicit.
Generally, on my blog, I mostly refer to NNTD, because it’s not in the commonground space between us—I’m forever explaining it again. But in general we don’t actually usually learn words by reading explanations or definitions. We learn them by seeing them used.
So for this post, I’ve done an archaeological dig to include quotes where I’ve just used the phrase “NNTD” as part of my thinking/journalling or communicating with someone else who already gets it well enough for that to work (often my friend and collaborator Michael Smith, whose NNTD intro you can read here.)
It’s a funny time to write this: I’ve been seriously thinking about renaming the framework. I’m confident that “trust” and “trust-dancing” continue to be central to my thinking, but the core of what I’m trying to say isn’t that well-captured by “non-naive trust”. Better would be “non-fake trust” or “non-pretend trust” or “non-bullshit trust”, perhaps. If I do rename things, this blog post will help archaeologically translate earlier ones; if not, it’ll help disambiguate when people keep asking “wait what exactly does NNTD mean?”
Sometimes NNTD means “a particular insight Malcolm Ocean had in 2020”. Unverified personal gnosis.
I’ve found it helpful, for understanding the nature of insights, to reference a frame John Vervaeke uses (tho he probably got it elsewhere—Piaget?) of insight being what happens when you go from systematically making a certain class of error or mistake, to systematically NOT making it. This very much fits that quality, although also it hasn’t propagated fully into my system, so while I’m always capable of identifying the error, I still do sometimes make it.
I’ve found references in my notes/messages to “before NNTD” or “since NNTD”, and these all refer to that insight. I often treat it as if it happened in a distinct moment in July—and it’s true there was a particular internal coup and new worldview order established then, but the first clues showed up in March, and the seeds were sown the previous year with BioEmotive and Unlocking the Emotional Brain.
Sometimes NNTD means “the whole framework Malcolm developed based on that insight”, including theories, practices, phrases, etc. Put a different way, NNTD feels kind of like a body of work. I certainly speak of “my NNTD writing”.
Sometimes, I would say somewhat accidentally, I’ve lumped under NNTD “all of the subsequent ways in which Malcolm came to have his own perspective on culture stuff, following that insight”. I wrote about the feeling of an iron curtain falling away in my mind such that I could now develop my own views about what’s going on with culture, group flow, etc. And that framework/worldview is personal and particular, and is not the core insight.
About a year ago I texted Michael and wrote:
shared this convo recording of me & Jess with you. the first chunk involves us exploring some of the tradeoffs I made in developing NNTD in the context of what I needed it to do while I was trying to relate to Jean/LSA. and directions for it to mature more.
it feels like a cool moment in my development to be able to differentiate “NNTD as I’ve constructed it” and “my best sense of things”
That’s definitely taking it as a framework with limitations, not simply a self-evident deep law. I don’t expect the law to be violated, but I do expect to realize ways in which I was confused about its limitations.
» read the rest of this entry »(adapted from this twitter thread)
One thing most people don’t realize about starting a small business, particularly in the context of something with low overhead and low fixed costs, like software or media: not-enough revenue is still money!
Say you have $16k and need $2k/mo to live on. That’s 8 months of runway.
Say that after 3 months, your business makes $1k/mo. Not sustainable yet, but now you have 10 months runway! ((16-2*3)/(2-1)=10)
Not-enough revenue is still real money! 🤑
Huh. “runway” is actually backwards metaphor for this thing, at least in a personal context (may be different with “moon or bust” startups, that aren’t making any money while burning up runway).
Real runway is fixed distance, & certain speed needed for takeoff, but faster you go the sooner you run out of runway! 🛫 All-or-nothing. It’s dangerous to be going very fast but not fast enough, because it means that
By contrast, as you get momentum going with a personal business, that actually buys you more time.
» read the rest of this entry »Some years ago, I invented a new system for doing stuff, called Complice. I used to call it a “productivity app” before I realized that Complice is coming from a new paradigm that goes beyond “productivity”. Complice is about intentionality.
Complice is a new approach to goal achievement, in the form of both a philosophy and a software system. Its aim is to create consistent, coherent, processes, for people to realize their goals, in two senses:
Virtually all to-do list software on the internet, whether it knows it or not, is based on the workflow and philosophy called GTD (David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”). Complice is different. It wasn’t created as a critique of GTD, but it’s easiest to describe it by contrasting it with this implicit default so many people are used to.
First, a one-sentence primer on the basic workflow in Complice:
There’s a lot more to it, but this is the basic structure. Perhaps less obvious is what’s not part of the workflow. We’ll talk about some of that below, but that’s still all on the level of behavior though—the focus of this post is the paradigmatic differences of Complice, compared to GTD-based systems. These are:
Keep reading and we’ll explore each of them…
» read the rest of this entry »If this blog post contains only this paragraph and bullet list, it’s because it was showtime and this was all I’d written. The post is about distinguishing different kinds of things that are often all called “deadlines”. I really like showtime, and I liked the idea of writing being like a kind of showtime, although in practice this is quite hard to do for anything except an exam. I may schedule a time to write this post in full, but for now (Oct 4th) I’m simply writing this and scheduling a time when it’ll be published: noon on Wednesday, October 7th. If you’re reading this text (and only this text) before then, there was a bug with my schedule publish feature 😂
(Written the following day, in my personal journal, and added, at the time: Man, I’m excited for the blogging showtime! Fascinating that it took me this long. This is just making it true that something of mine will get published every so often, but not with any sense of commitment or whatever. The consequences are just the quality of whatever’s published. And I guess in that sense it really is a showtime. Hm… yeah, feeling that.)
Okay, here I am, 3h 11mins before the publish date. This is my performance over the next 3h. I’m not going to do this every time, but in this case I think there’s a beauty to simply leaving the above paragraphs there and continuing from them, as they function as a kind of teaser for the topic of the post.
This is a model that has been percolating in my system for years, and it was animated by 2 main questions, that didn’t obviously have any thing to do with each other:
The model, like posts I’ve written about habits, expectations, commitments & accountability, distractions, and explanations, is a model that takes a word and says “you thought this was one thing? this is actually 2 things, and it’s worth knowing the difference.” In this case, there are at least 4, maybe more things. But let’s start with the difference between tests & homework.
» read the rest of this entry »I don’t often pick fights, but when I do, I pick them on Twitter, apparently.
The Law of Viral Inaccuracy says that the most popular version of a meme is likely to be optimized for shareability, not accuracy to reality nor the intent of the original person saying it. On Twitter, this takes the form of people parroting short phrases as if everybody knows what words mean. One of the phrases I felt a need to critique is Dilbert creator Scott Adams’ “systems, not goals”.
This blog post is adapted from a tweetstorm I wrote.
The term “pre-success failure” from Scott Adams’ book is a gem. His related idea that you should have systems and not have goals is absurd. (have both!) Scott cites Olympic athletes as examples. 🤨
Take 3 guesses what goal an Olympic athlete has… 🥇🥈🥉
Systems don’t work without goals.
You need a goal in mind in order to choose or design what system to follow, and it’s literally impossible to evaluate whether a system is effective without something to compare it with. Implicitly, that’s a goal. (Scott Adams uses a somewhat narrower definition, but of course people just seeing his tiny quote don’t know that!)
We know certain Olympic athletes had good systems because they got the medals. They designed those systems to optimize for their athletic performance.
Lots of other Olympic athletes also had training systems, but their systems didn’t work as well—as measured by their goals.
I’m part of a team that runs a goal-setting workshop each year called the Goal-Crafting Intensive (where part of the craft is setting up systems) and the definition of goal that we use in that context is:
I feel so incredibly much better when I don’t procrastinate, and yet I still procrastinate regularly. Why am I so resistant to classical conditioning in this context? What further questions should I ask myself / demands should I make of myself, to attack this problem?
I suspect that this is a paradox that almost everyone has encountered on some level. People want to be productive. It feels good to have a really fruitful day.
This is something we often forget, when we frame our self-improvement efforts as a fight between what we should do and what we want to do.
And note that it’s not just that people want-to-have-been-productive. It generally feels pretty good while you’re doing it too. There are exceptions, of course—some work is a grind—but in general it’s at least satisfying, if not fulfilling, to be doing good work. And even with relatively aversive work, it usually feels better to be actually making progress than to just be stewing in the feeling that you should be working but aren’t.
So here’s the million-dollar question: if it feels good to be productive, why aren’t people productive more? » read the rest of this entry »
Another personal learning update, this time flavored around Complice and collaboration. I wasn’t expecting this when I set out to write the post, but what’s below ended up being very much a thematic continuation on the previous learning update post (which got a lot of positive response) so if you’re digging this post you may want to jump over to that one. It’s not a prerequisite though, so you’re also free to just keep reading.
I started out working on Complice nearly four years ago, in part because I didn’t want to have to get a job and work for someone else when I graduated from university. But I’ve since learned that there’s an extent to which it wasn’t just working for people but merely working with people long-term that I found aversive. One of my growth areas over the course of the past year or so has been developing a way-of-being in working relationships that is enjoyable and effective.
I wrote last week about changing my relationship to internal conflict, which involved defusing some propensity for being self-critical. Structurally connected with that is getting better at not experiencing or expressing blame towards others either. In last week’s post I talked about how I knew I was yelling at myself but had somehow totally dissociated from the fact that that meant that I was being yelled at.
A lot of things that we usually model as events or states can be thought of as processes. Depending on the context, this process lens can
I’m going to go through them in that order because it’s also perhaps in increasing levels of complexity.
When was the last time you looked at the stars at night?
I was hanging out with my friend a few weeks ago, staring at the stars while we talked about the nature of the universe.
It occurred to me that in some ways it’s less accurate to say that the stars “are bright”, and more accurate to say that they’re continually emitting light. I mean, obviously, but really stop and think about it: say you’re looking at the “North Star” (Polaris). It’s about 400 light years away, which means that the fact that you’re seeing light from that direction right now is because of a bunch of nuclear reactions in the star, like 400 years ago. A few seconds later, you’re seeing new light, made from some more nuclear reactions. And on and on.
And that light is being continually sent out in all directions. There’s a giant sphere radiating out from Polaris of light-from-400-years-ago. There’s another sphere of light-from-500-years-ago, which is a thousand light-years across (Earth is inside this sphere) and still expanding. The sphere of light-from-300-years-ago is also gigantic, but won’t reach Earth until the 22nd century. (If you’re reading this in the 22nd century or later, then OMG HI. Please forgive this claim which is now false.)
So the light you’re seeing isn’t just the state of things. It’s a process that is continuously happening.
“It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.” ― Walter de la Mare, The Return
You’re probably more predictable than you think. This can be scary to realize, since the perspective of not having as much control as you might feel like you do, but it can also be a relief: feeling like you have control over something you don’t have control over can lead to self-blame, frustration and confusion.
One way to play with this idea is to assume that future-you’s behaviour is entirely predictable, in much the same way that if you have a tilted surface, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy which way water will flow across it: downhill. Dig a trench, and the water will stay in it. Put up a wall, and the water will be stopped by it. Steepen the hill, and the water will flow faster.
So what’s downhill for you? What sorts of predictable future motions will you make?
