Sunday, July 21, 2024

Learning Isn't Enough, Practice Believing

 Step 1: "If I believe this, how would I behave?"
 Step 2: deliberately seek out situations where you can act out that behaviour, so it can replace whatever habit you had previously. 

 It's not enough to learn a thing. Only in extreme edge cases will it automatically change behaviour. It's necessary to deliberately enumerate the habits that it should change, and then deliberately do reps of doing the habits differently.

 Moreover, if you try the behaviour and it's not effective, if it lowers the value you gather, then that's a quick and cheap way to disprove the idea. Catches mistakes. There's some caveats about long-term vs. short-term, but you already know them.
 This is so important that without some special excuse, believing things that don't change your behaviour is a waste of time. There's no point in spending time listening to it or spending energy trying to understand it.
 You can push it further. When someone tries to convince you of something, rather than listening to the evidence or logic or anything, simply ask how they want your behaviour to differ. Then ignore the logic and evidence and mindlessly try it. If it works, maybe consider asking more to understand the underlying foundation of it. The only real reason to ask about evidence and shit beforehand is to ensure you're trying what you think you're trying.

 "Metroid NES is fun if play carefully."
 To you, playing carefully means a) taking on an emotional posture of [care] and b) killing every enemy you see, so they can't damage you.
 What they actually meant was not falling in that one inescapable lava pit in deep Norfair. (The one with the tall single-tile eye columns, with the multiviola positioned to spawn mid-air and knock you into it.) They meant, you should do the chess thing, in advance keep in mind things you're already aware can kill you, and not try to react to them when they appear on-screen because that's too late.

 "I tried playing Metroid carefully and it sucked." Yeah, uh, no you didn't. You proved you're illiterate...
 "You give bad advice." Well, it's true that you shouldn't listen to advice, since you won't hear what's being said, and will try something different, at random.*

 Likewise, the only reason to ask about the underlying foundation after the fact is to help ensure you don't accidentally misapply the behaviour. It has a valid domain and it's important to avoid invalid regions. 


 * I find this generalizes. If I ask someone what they think I'll do, they'll say something completely batshit insane, for reasons that are wildly delusional. Then I ask what their response to this is, and it will make perfect sense assuming they have a pretty good idea what I'm actually going to do. They came up with a rational response, from somewhere, then very poorly rationalized the pre-existing decision. The rationalization doesn't matter, because it's not causal.
 However, rationalizing like this makes it impossible to learn verbally. They can't work out what habits the beliefs should change, nor can they change their behaviours based on these beliefs. In the short-term it's not necessary to rationalize rationally, saving superfluous effort, but in the long term the rationalization must be perfectly quarantined, since it's never exercised properly and atrophies to pure derangement.

 

 Here's some behaviour-changing advice: don't give advice.
 Good advice is not, in fact, rare or expensive. Revenge is Sour. They've already heard it, or already thought of it themselves. E.g. you already know unsolicited advice is rude at best. If they're not already taking the advice, they are either cripples who can't, or the advice is bad because they don't want its results. Usually due to self-hatred driven masochism.
 Do all the idiots offering advice on twitter not realize advice is rude? Of course they realize. It's not advice, it's a dominance play. "I'm smarter than you," or whatever. Maybe it doesn't work 99.99% of the time, but they're desperate enough that 0.01% is the best they can hope for. That's the true form of [unsolicited advice is rude]: unsolicited advice is 100% a dominance play, not advice. It's only not phrased that way becauase social status dare not speak its own name. 

 Hence, mindfulness trigger: "Next time I'm about to give advice, I will notice. I will not give the advice." Try it. See if it works for you.
 Unsolicited advice is [selfless], i.e, horrifically evil. Be selfish instead: think about what you can buy from them for less than it costs. You probably don't need to painstakingly convince them to take value from you in the trade. Odds are. 


 I look forward to the total lack of comments pointing out my hypocrisy when, such as now, I'm genuinely being hypocritical.

 

 Bonus: it's all but impossible for a manipulator to hide the fact that they want you to serve their interests in place of yours. They will desperately avoid being specific about your actions. A cheap and efficient litmus test.
 Double bonus: if you falsely conclude someone is a manipulator but ask them about specifics, the innocent can prove their innocence. "Oh. Huh. I hadn't thought of that, good idea."

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