Alternative title: groundedness/not squishing bugs
Things to look out for:
- Status pressures.
- Perhaps everyone conveying some idea is “instructor” shaped. This doesn’t mean the idea is good, or that you should implement it immediately
- FOMO/anxiety.
- Though this is hard. I tend to think that the rationality community overstates e.g. “you can’t do proper rationality if you’re depressed/emotionally turbulent/in a bad way”, and make the same mistake as well-meaning people who say, “you should fix your depression and then do XYZ”. You can do rationality, it’s just (perhaps) harder, and (almost certainly, I think) more delicate and easy to go wrong. Similarly I think you can make good updates coming from a place of anxiety, or being very driven. But it’s a yellow flag.
- Senses of urgency, despair.
- Wanting to be able to go fast/make all the changes because this would prove you were unmuddled and therefore Good.
Things to aim for:
- Groundedness.
- Some pointers: being a person in the world and not just a disembodied brain piloting (and hovering above) some set of limbs and organs. Being able to notice things around you and inside of you. Having some skill you do with your hands. Being able to talk to, and relate to, people of different stripes (maybe at least e.g. your grandma and a friend from school long ago). Being on your own side (as in, not being on some other side against yourself).
- Maybe also (though I’m not claiming these are constituent virtues and they may just be good ways to cultivate this sense): having other worldviews/interests/intellectual scenes which you actually belong to. (Tourism probably isn’t enough?) Aesthetic sensibilities. Doing things outside yourself, in the world, having concrete tangible projects. (Ideally some of these projects are not intellectual, or not wholly intellectual). Being nice and not just good. Being (roughly) consistent and predictable, in at least some very zoomed-out ways? (Unsure.)
- Slowness.
- Sometimes people discuss slowness as a virtue but in an instrumental way: if you go too fast the rest of you (including gut/intuitions/S1) might not be able to catch up; going slow to some extent controls for influences on your decision-making like “personal charisma” or “environment” or “social pressure” which you might want to set aside; it’s easier to notice the effect of small changes and roll them back, when compared to making grand sweeping changes in quick succession; etc.
- I think that’s all true, and separately, I claim going slowly here, in this context, is also good in its own right. I’m not that confident in this claim, but it’s my current guess.
- Gesturing at why: because it’s important to internalise that slowness is fine (though this is an instrumental reason too); because slowness is a neighbour to, and I think importantly part of, whole-heartedness/unifiedness; because it’s some way of cooperating with illegible parts of you.
- Not trampling parts of your mind/Chesterton’s fence/letting the illegible be illegible.
- There’s a failure mode of highly analytical and emotionally insensitive people (perhaps you know some? :)) where they’ve just heard some cool new idea or claim, they want to implement it in their mind somehow, they feel some vague resistance or inchoate weirdness, and that feeling cannot be made into something crisp or even put into words, so they run over it. Don’t let legibility be the price of admission.
- Separately, it can be hard to even notice sometimes if you have this twinge. I’m more uncertain how to resolve this, and I think I need to get better at it myself to give good advice. Still, some quick ideas: giving yourself permission to think the thing (lines of retreat, etc); seeing what other parts or people say; doing real thinking; normal kinds of groundedness, going outside, playing a sport or exercising and noticing that (in this case I think long walks or slow runs are best); getting enough sleep/waiting a little; some people recommend meditating or circling but I haven’t tried these much; blurting all your feelings; reading mystical poetry; taking a long shower.
- Let there be subcolonies in your brain. (A healthy exchange of ideas/don’t take prisoners/the necessary steps for democracy.)
- Compassion towards smaller-you.
- I think there’s a way of getting excited about all these new ideas and techniques and orientations which is unwholesome, and feeds a kind of disdain or contempt for smaller-you: that you were so stupid not to know them, how could you be so slow, and by extension how can you trust the thoughts that mind came up with if they conflict with the new thoughts and dreams and aspirations of bigger-you. Please try to notice if you’re doing that, and then don’t do that.
- Usually, I think this disdain is more subtle, and less overt/explicit/propositional, and can show up in vague feelings of frustration, or condemnation, or just lots of eagerness to distance yourself from smaller-you/unwillingness to be associated with that person. This is probably the better tell to watch out for.
But what if I’m excited about all these ideas and they seem true and robustly good though
(To do.)