I've always noticed that when I'm giving advice to someone or trying to help out, it always feels their problem is easier than whatever problem I have. As someone with some anxiety around things like calling some company to get something done or asking a random stranger for some help in a store, I would gladly do it if it was to help someone else (family member or friend). But when it's for me I find it harder.
I wonder how much psychologically we can be more confident and less anxious when we're doing something for others vs ourselves..
People in the ADHD community are outspoken about a tangential concept: cleaning. Cleaning your friends place is a fun, novel, non-emotional activity. Cleaning your own space is a mental slog, boring and often painful due to having to rid yourself of mementos.
In that case, my theory is that you get to shed your learned helplessness about how things look. I suspect it’s similar with giving advice.
> Cleaning your friends place is a fun, novel, non-emotional activity. Cleaning your own space is a mental slog, boring and often painful
“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” - Mark Twain
This is ozempic territory: a technical solution to your own shortcomings is most effective.
I have solved all my issues with doing house chores with wireless headphones, tablet, and youtube @ 2x speed. Sure, it means that I can't load my dishwasher until I find something half-decent to listen/watch but once I do find it, I have 10-50 minutes of just pure closing. Dishwasher loaded, countertops empty, new load of laundry, dry clothes in the closet, gym bag packed, trash taken out. Frankly, kinda enjoy it now.
This is me. Finally buying some bluetooth headphones 15 years ago changed my life. I finally became a person who cooks every meal, cleans everything, does chores, and exercises daily, even pushes around the house.
I like listening to debates since they are the most stimulating. So long as I can find a good one, I’m about to make dinner and unload the dishwasher.
An audiobook that’s good enough can be so captivating that I run out of things to do while listening to it.
I have pretty extreme adhd which might be related. But I’m just glad I bought those headphones back then.
What are the sources of stimulating debates you've found?
"other people's same problem easier" i see, but have never seen messiness as example at least in communities w adhd comorbid with depression. personally the concept of other people cleaning my private mess, even/especially if they are close family/friends is terrifying and already overloads my head and i can only project the same sentiment (and some extrapolation of my own experience helping friends/family with cleaning... it is super hard, we are talking about intruding on what the person values as trash or not trash, and that itself can be a source of great shame i.e. my mother who lived to much worse abject poverty than the children she helped raise with a better life. sorry for being dramatic about an otherwise straightforward point but yes in my experience that "cold" reduction of the problem into something actionable would be key, though people arrive there differently i noticed, e.g. me and my "armchair courage" that any unseen sideeffect is not my problem, for my mom (okay sometimes for me as well) it is about being able to forget that she has problems just by the appearance of having the luxury to give advice
A line I always remember (from Babylon 5) is: "When I clean my place, all I've done is clean my place. But when I help you clean your place, I'm _helping you_."
tl;dr you should ask your badass partner for strategic help when the entire galaxy is under threat, even if she seems busy.
Nice, what was the context of that line in B5? I don't remember it.
S03E20 "And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place"
Reverend Will Dexter: "You know before I got married Emily he used to come by sometime to help me clean out my apartment well I asked her how come here so he could help clean up my place when your place is just as bad she said because cleaning up your place helps me to forget what a mess I made a mind and when I sweep my floor all I've done is sweep my floor but when I help you clean up your place I am helping you."
Thank you, great episode!
Helper, help thyself...?
I have ADHD and I 100% feel like what OP describes. I’m always motivated when helping others, not so much for myself.
It’s true.
My girlfriend and I both have ADHD and are medicated. I will run laps around her tidying up her place, but struggle at my own place.. its so hard to understand
What's the opposite? Where solving your problems is easy and but solving your friend's problems are very difficult because your advice are never relevant?
This is something I've noticed as well. I've talked about this with my psychiatrist and she calls this brave, reassured version of ourself the "me-mentor" (jag-mentor in Swedish). Similar to our inner child, this is a core part of our who we are.
The idea, if I understood correctly, is to build this me-mentor more and let it help us feel more safe. Let it support our insecure parts/personas.
(I hope my English isn't too bad)
Somewhat related, a psychologist I talked to in the 2000s said she really liked the Patronus concept in the Harry Potter books. You imagine an entity that's fueled by your positive memories and emotions, and that protects you from certain anxieties and other stressors.
Things like that seem to be used in at least some schools of psychology.
That does sounds similar, yes! I like that idea.
It reminds me on something my psychologist told me, when trying to find this me-mentor, it can help to take inspiration from someone I find really safe with and trust a lot. Aka someone I have good memories with / of.
Your English is perfect. I wouldn't have known you are not a native speaker if you hadn't mentioned it.
Your English is great, by the way.
When trying to examine someone else's problems, you can see the problem itself. But what you aren't seeing is a pile of all the little habits, beliefs, behaviors, impulses and assorted mind defects that prevented them from solving it in the first place.
It takes intimate familiarity to know all of those things about someone.
If you were in their shoes, the problem might genuinely be trivial, for you. Because you're not that person, and that problem isn't your own failure mode - you would instead fail at a different "trivial" problem and in an entirely different way.
Or maybe you are flawed in the same way, but don't know it yet. You never quite know. Humans aren't any good at that whole "self-awareness" thing.
> When trying to examine someone else's problems, you can see the problem itself. But what you aren't seeing is a pile of all the little habits, beliefs, behaviors, impulses and assorted mind defects that prevented them from solving it in the first place.
This is accurate. The roadblocks to solving their problem are often several small things completely unrelated to the problem itself.
The opposite conclusion is that you are more risk-taking when it comes to dictating the actions of others, because neither their gains nor their losses directly accrue to you. But human beings feel loss aversion more keenly than they desire gain, so this biases the advice you would give others (but not yourself) riskier in general.
I think this is exactly it. It's easy to see that there's a chance to improve things while ignoring the ways it could make things worse when they won't affect you. Should you quit the job you don't like? "Of course" the friend will say. But then you might just end up with a job you hate more that pays less, or even no job. Whether the outside perspective is helpful probably depends on how much your own perception deviates from reality. Though people do have a tendency to prefer the status quo until things change, so maybe you should always prefer the "change" option when you aren't sure.
This phenomenon is called "Solomon’s Paradox" - People think more clearly about other people’s problems than their own. When facing their own issues, they reason less rationally.
Yet, a study from 2014 showed that seeing your own problem from an outsider view removes the gap between how wisely you think about yourself and how wisely you think about others.
I imagine it has to do with vulnerability. When you are asking for something or sharing something, being turned down feels personal. When doing it for someone else, it's no big deal if they say no.
> I've always noticed that when I'm giving advice to someone or trying to help out, it always feels their problem is easier than whatever problem I have.
One mundane reason is that you've probably already solved that problem for yourself.
Almost by definition, the big problems we have are in areas where we're less competent than others.
This effect is very real and part of what makes people social creatures -- and why the golden rule is essential to a functioning society.
Like coyotes and wolves, we're wired for life in relatively small tribes where we're caring for one another and pursuing a common purpose.
> noticed that when I'm giving advice
When someone asks for advice, I often find if I pay deep attention, that advice is aimed at myself as well. Listen to the advice you give, because often times, the advice giver should follow it as well.
Two things are at play:
The problem with your problem is you have a desired outcome. And the other is you are not required to do the heavy lifting.
One method is to find a way to bless "future me". Future me will thank current me sometime in the future and while current me won't enjoy future me's rewards directly, he will think kindly, instead of with contempt.
Probably because our desire to help and not let down a person we care about gives us courage. That courage serves as motivation to go outside our comfort zone.
It's something I've been wondering about for a long long time. Thanks for bringing up the question. Sometimes my problem-of-the-day is not even that hard but I have near zero drive to finish it, but if anybody comes with an issue, I then feel motivated (up until I realize his/her issue was hard I guess).
I see three dimensions:
- natural pleasure of helping someone
- ignorance about the problem, making it seems easier
- a saturation aspect: my problem has probably something i've been dealing with for days, my brain is full of unanswered questions about it and has no more "space" for it
>I wonder how much psychologically we can be more confident and less anxious when we're doing something for others vs ourselves
Thank you for taking the time to type this up. I would be extremely interested in any sort of research around this and may add( maybe others face the same ) that's incredibly difficult to introspect yourself and solve problems for yourself as easily as you can for others.
This is a fascinating phenomenon, isn't it? I've heard it invoked as "it's always easier to clean someone else's room." And anxiety does seem to be the key. Very often the actual blocker isn't the difficulty of a task, but how we relate to it.
That's why it's good to have close friends so that we don't have to be perfect ourselves in all respects in our private lives... humans are a political animal after all
I find the same thing between doing something entrepreneurial vs. doing it for work. If my boss tells me to call a customer, I will have no problem doing it. Calling for my side hustle......way more anxiety.
I'm sure there's a proper name for what you described, but I call it Rip van Winkle syndrome. He helps everyone in the town with their needs, while allowing his own property to fall to ruin.
Golden rule - treat others as you would like to be treated. Applies externally and internally - IMO. ie. "Treat yourself as you would treat others"
Yeah, definitely, to the point that I think we should get together to fix each other’s problems as long as the problems fit.
That sounds like role-reversal. Securely attached people are more flexible (than avoidant or helpless) in both receiving and giving.
I'm exactly the same, down to the specific examples you chose.
So, what is to be done?
I was hoping someone points it out for us.
Since you asked me, you are using the same concept and now I need to help you solve your problem (which seem to be the one I also have..)
I think the solution must be we're primarily responsible for ourselves, and that unless we ask others for help all the time we need to figure things out. I also lately have been thinking from the perspective of the person I'm anxious to interact with, and feel that they may actually be happy to interact with me, receive some warm greeting and help out by answering my question or doing my task.
If you could do something for others but feel anxious doing it for yourself, it must be "in our head" and logically we should be able to get over that and choose to be brave. I think in really it's often missed how we can be brave doing the action if it was for someone else, and that the bravery may actually already be inside us.
This at least is how I think of it now.
One thing is also ability to have clearer start and end and boundaries, or some sort of mental boxing for the case at hand.
If you're visiting someone else, you arrive, and you leave. The helping them clean part has at least some sort of boundaries. Even if you don't finish, you have helped them along.
When you're at home, even if you start, if you leave it halfway, it will be your problem after you stop. And tomorrow still and so on. So it feels more daunting.
Apparently, it's a common symptom of ADHD. Probably of other sources of anxiety, too.
This is an idea that philosophers have played with in countless varieties, perhaps the one closest to the author's wording is Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of bad faith. Faced with anxiety, guilt or overwhelming weight of responsibility, it's often easier to subconsciously sidestep the problem and pretend you don't have a choice, even if you do. This is not even a conscious decision, it's hard to be aware of our own quirks and biases.
This resonates with my experiences.
I once broke an ankle badly and were on crutches + stabilizer boot for three months. I could mostly only use one hand if standing (other was holding crutches).
It took me weeks to notice all the things I didn’t do any longer because it was painful and/or difficult. Like just making a cup of coffee in the morning (and I LOVE coffee!).
Activities were aborted before making any conscious decision to not do them. I recognized the same pattern in my father some years later when he was temporarily in a wheelchair.
That's almost concerning. I wonder if it'd be realistic to
1. put up a whiteboard somewhere
2. observe with some regularity what your routines are right now (non-judgmentally)
3. write them down (descriptively, not prescriptively)
4. update over time
Then you'd get the chance to notice your routines changing.
When it’s adaptive (stepping around or over a pothole that you have neither the power nor incentive to fix), it’s what we do with 95%+ of all our input.
When it’s maladaptive (ignoring a serious red flag in a relationship, or not fixing that pinhole in the roof before it causes major damage in the house!), it leads to other serious problems and long term costs.
The biggest challenge in life is having the capacity to understand when it is going too far in the bad direction, and doing something about it before it tips over into overwhelm/overload.
I think it makes sense in the same way we blot out our awareness of 90% of the external stimuli -- There is just too much of it.
We have to choose what to 'deal with' and our capacity for that and awareness of it can change over time.
I also think this goes along with the author's concept of you're not trying since you can kind of snap into awareness and then just do those things sometimes.
Sounds to me like this "bad faith" mechanism has been weaponized, and is literally how the public is controlled in the United States, maintained in a state of apathy towards the violation of everything the nation claims as a core value.
That word is having a moment, it seems.
It's a word people use now to attack things that are supposed to be core values, like free speech. The way I use it is the way it ought to be used, the way you use it is "weaponized."
Paradoxically some things with human bodies work like that: Back pain? One of the best ways of usually getting rid of it is using your back more and building muscle.
I once worked with a guy who was a grandmaster at finding rational explainations of why they needed to do the thing that clearly was bad for them. He was overweight, but every time he ate both extremely unhealthy and much next to us he would explain how his body needs that because he would get a bad mood etc. His excuse not to make sports was some sports accident he had 30 years ago as a 18 years old (a medical condition I happened to knew very well because my marathon-running brother had it as well). For every other sport he also had some excuse, be it cost, traffic, weather, other people doing it being douchebags or whatever. This went all the way to making up a medical condition that gave him a excuse why he cannot visit his estranged child.
This guy had an absolutely phenomenal skill level when it came to self deception. And it only became better when his overweight led to a medical condition and his doctor hammered home that he is going to die if he continues on at this path.
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Yes, because I don't like to lay bare all the details of my friends online. Contrary to what my post may have sounded like to you this person is my friend and I stayed with them for more than a decade always in support to help them get better.
And spoiler: they did get better, took up a sport and look healthier than at any point since I have known them.
As someone who grew up with multiple disabled people I am very aware of the pitfalls here, but you were the one who assumed knowledge of details I did not mention.
I have some qualm with "agency is important" type thinking because when I was in a good situation in life with "moderate" difficulty which I overcame I called it me being agentic. However, when I was in situations in life which were bad and totally out of my control and to the best of my ability I couldn't come out of them, I realized it's pretty much all just luck and circumstance.
Just because you're not emotionally ready to do something doesn't mean you're not trying enough. I feel like we tend to downplay the role of luck in emotions and mind. Like "of course you could be more confident, agentic, assertive, etc. YOU are not doing enough of that". But if you physiologically or materialistically go through a bad patch with respect to health or resources people "get it". If you are not physically gifted to play a certain sport people "get it". But if you're not mentally gifted to be "agentic" it's YOUR responsibility. Don't know why this expectation was set. Same way how mental health has been a stigma and still somewhat is, but if you have a physiological disease it's OK, not your fault.
We all just write advice looking backwards. People who are lucky enough to have the perfect combination of circumstance and mindset to think that agency is all you need write that way.
> However, when I was in situations in life which were bad and totally out of my control and to the best of my ability I couldn't come out of them, I realized it's pretty much all just luck and circumstance.
The failure mode is when someone starts seeing almost everything as totally out of their control, even when it’s not.
When I was doing volunteer mentoring it was a common scenario for people to request help for their hopeless situation at work, then to resolve it through the simplest suggestions like “Have you tried talking to them?” Gentle questions like “What did they say when you asked them about it?” would reveal that most of the hopeless situations were only assumed to be hopeless or out of their control.
That’s not to say that every situation is in your control. However I’ve talked to enough people who erroneously underestimate their agency or control over situations to always question it on a situation by situation basis.
Some times it takes external encouragement to realize that a situation is not actually out of control or hopeless.
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> Just because you're not emotionally ready to do something doesn't mean you're not trying enough
The author specifically addressed this.
> My approach [...] was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem became fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurred to me to revisit it as my capacity for action increased.
They acknowledged that one's capacity to Actually Try is sometimes limited. The article is about getting stuck in that mindset and assuming you're still limited, even when you do later have the emotional resources to bear against the problem.
There are agentic ways to submit to the journey even if it’s going to suck for a while and there’s no apparent end in sight. Gratitude. God. Whatever. Lots of people submit by withering away and letting their emotions take them down a path of steady erosion. That is not high agency.
Great post!
I find that this happens when I want to do something The Right Way, but don’t have a clear path, nor the energy to figure one out.
For example I want a nice winter wardrobe, but first I have to figure out what I like, what is trendy, where to buy it, what will suit the weather. I am wholly unprepared for it. Suddenly it’s a whole ordeal, so I just wait.
In another category - art - I had to learn to be okay with suboptimal outcomes. Each attempt teaches you something, so to make good art, you have to make a lot of bad art first. Paper is cheap and making bad art is fun once you move past perfectionism.
Socialising is the same. You get better at it through practice. Practice is fun, it makes you do fun things and meet fun people.
With “shopping problems”, you are stuck with your bad purchases, your suboptimal wardrobe. Each iteration is expensive in time and money. So you try to get it right the first time. Cue weeks of research for something that is ultimately not that important. The worst is shopping problems that have an element of taste.
If someone knows a way to deal with this, I am listening.
With clothes, make it cheap so if you make the wrong decision it's not a big deal.
Also recognize you're engaging in the sunk cost fallacy by keeping clothes you don't actually want, and you're making the world better by allowing it to go to an owner who would better appreciate it.
Some more concrete ideas:
1. thrift stores
2. clothes rentals
3. clothing swaps
4. Buy the cheap version of what you think you might like (if it exists) first before buying the expensive version
5. Don't make your entire wardrobe trendy clothes. Make most of it relatively classic / basic and limit "trendy" to a subset of items.
I've found that thinking about complex problems as finding a way to enable iteration helps a lot. First off, anxiety-wise, it's much easier to think about the iteration rather than the bigger problem. And while working your way towards iteration, you also begin to tackle the bigger problem from different angles. That itself is valuable, but you also get a bit of much needed desensitization as well as some small victories which yield the mental resources to ultimately help you get yourself together.
I recently had a similar issue with the wardrobe. I've been bedridden for an extended period of time and lost a lot of weight in the process. As a result, I had to replace every basic piece of clothing, both indoors and outdoors - things either didn't fit or were too worn. I still didn't feel too good to go shopping around town so I had to order online. On top of that, I was short on money. With little room for error, the task felt daunting, to say the least. Couldn't get around it for a while.
Long story short, I solved the shopping problem by figuring out how to sell the old things first. That helped me with both getting the old pile of crap off my mind as well as moving forward with the new purchases without the fear of unrecoverable losses. Now purchasing clothes feels less like gambling and more like something I can be in control of. The stars don’t have to align the first time, but eventually, they will.
> Socialising is the same. You get better at it through practice. Practice is fun, it makes you do fun things and meet fun people.
Not for all of us, though. For some, socializing is considerable pressure.
It is for me too, but in the end, practice made it so much easier. It took years and some guidance from a therapist, but it worked. “I want to meet more people” was one of those problems that took me year to properly work on.
I think that the core problem was similar: I was willing to make an effort, but did not have a clear idea of how to do it.
Well, happy it worked for you.
For me, I've taught myself to socialize, but it takes lots of masking to do so, which means lots of energy, and failures are pretty hard on me.
One thing that helped me a lot was practicing in low-stakes situations. I started chatting up Uber drivers pretty consistently and learned a lot about just letting go in the moment. I was using rideshare for all my travel at the time, before the pan made me realize how vulnerable I was without a car. I don't get that practice anymore because taking Uber is much less frequent and I let the habit ossify.
I had unexpected amounts of fun at long multi-day raves. You get into altered mental states (even without substances) and don't have to talk to people but also you can.
Right, trying and failing at socializing is not fun at all.
Assuming you earn enough, throw money at your problems. Many problems can be solved, or made significantly easier by money.
Don't do the research yourself, pay a specialist instead. Missing a winter wardrobe? Find a personal stylist (okay, requires some research to find, but much less than finding fitting wardrobe yourself). They will guide the shopping process, the outcome is most likely better than what you can come up with even with weeks of research. Costs a pretty penny, might feel funny, but it's effective.
Not happy with your art? Get a personal tutor for drawing. Learning a language, but struggling with it? Tutor it is. Learning is so much faster with personalized feedback and accountability, a good tutor provides both.
But then don't I need to find the specialist?
> Each attempt teaches you something, so to make good art, you have to make a lot of bad art first. Paper is cheap and making bad art is fun once you move past perfectionism.
For the same reason, if it weren't for digital cameras, I never would have taken enough pictures to become competent enough to enjoy photography.
I am also all ears about anyone chiming in with an effective way to deal with shopping problems. Sometimes, I've found that what it takes is Gemini to restate what I already knew to be the conclusion but without my mental processing of trying to falsify it (Gemini, unlike real humans, doesn’t get overloaded and shut down when I ask rapid-fire advice questions).
Writing that comment got me to try Zalando, instead of slowly mapping out and visiting every store in my city. Maybe I wasn’t trying correctly.
My friend also taught me to slowly gather an inspiration folder with things I like. I have one for clothing, home decor and art. It made my job much easier.
I have filled a shopping cart with clothes I have seen on others in the last few months. It wasn’t that hard. I was just set in my ways.
What is Zalando, besides an island in Denmark?
Isn't there a website that picks your clothes out for you and you send back what you don't like? If you're not actively paying attention to fashion maybe outsource this one.
I think the "maybe you're not actually trying" framing is not very constructive. The author did try, making decisions and taking actions that seemed appropriate for her situation at the time. The problem was that because her attempts to solve the problem failed -- again and again and again -- she stopped trying. Which is a not-entirely-unreasonable thing to do.
I would frame it more like: just because you have tried and failed doesn't mean you can't succeed, even if you have failed again and again and again. Circumstances change. New solutions become available. New resources or new insights present themselves. Sometimes just doing nothing and letting time pass actually produces progress. But the only thing that guarantees failure is to give up altogether.
That’s a great point, and was how I felt about it, after reading the article.
She did ask for help (more accurately, she accepted help from a trusted source). That was what made the difference. Someone came in with a new approach vector.
She sounds like a fairly remarkable person, so failure isn’t necessarily an indication of incompetence. Rather, it can be an issue of approach. We can get fixated on a particular workflow.
Humans are a social animal. We’re not built to “go it alone,” and that’s really our “secret sauce.” The whole can be greater than the sum of the parts.
Also see
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.” Jean-Luc Picard
Also, not everything is a competition that needs to be won.
I am not competitive. That's a deliberate stance, and one that I've held for decades.
It does contribute to the fact that I haven't achieved greatness, but I have no regrets, and haven't done badly, despite that. It's not weakness, as some folks have found out, over the years.
When I "win," then someone else "loses." I have a problem with that.
> When I “win”, the someone else “loses.”
Why do you say that? What kinds of “greatness” are you thinking about? Does that mean money, or fame? Why does someone have to lose?
I’m also a bit allergic to competition, but I want to respectfully disagree with this idea that greatness is somehow zero-sum. There’s an enormous number of ways you can “win” without someone else losing anything, so much so that non-competitive “wins” are a regular part of speech. WinArmy on YouTube comes to mind as a stupid example. :P “Win” in that case can mean skilled or lucky.
Making a lot of friends is a win, one where everyone wins. Being a great artist or philosopher or anthropologist is a form of greatness that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Discovering the cure for a disease is greatness.
Even making money, if that’s considered greatness, doesn’t necessarily come at the cost of someone else. If you’re the person in a company who helps make a better product, better marketing, more sales, or any decisions that result in more money in the door, you can make more money for yourself and make more money for everyone around you too. It doesn’t need to come at a loss for the customers either, your product can be positive value for them after paying for it, and in some cases can earn them money. Even the economy isn’t zero-sum.
Yeah, I agree.
I guess that I term it in the value system represented by a majority of folks, hereabouts.
In my own universe, I drew the golden ticket.
If you allow yourself to redefine “achieving greatness” you may be surprised by what is on the other side :)
Great point.
You’ve achieved greatness in your view of the world, and in your empathy for others.
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If you want to stay the same and not become better at something, you are correct.
Competition is many times about challening yourself, failing, learning from that failure, and eventually succeeding.
You do not have to compete with yourself, or anyone, to get better.
Getting better comes from collaborating:
- Being attentive to your practice (i.e. recording, going over your work, etc.)
- Asking, and taking the advice of other people in your field (i.e. find places where there are people older than you who have done the same tasks, and consult with them)
- Being exposed to diversity of thought (i.e. teams more diverse in culture, race, and gender, consistently come up with a better array of solutions — this directly benefits you, helps you think along alternative dimensions and perspectives, exposes errors you may have encoded)
- With art, taking on voluntary restrictions to inspire you — art prompts, game jams, etc.
Sure, some of these can be framed as competition — maybe you might frame being attentive to your practice as competing with your past self, and taking voluntary restrictions as competing with the others in the game jam or whatever — but I very, very much prefer to frame them as collaborating — in a solo practice session, you're collaborating with yourself to find the flaws and fix them, in a game jam session, you're collaborating with those around you to produce lots of interesting and good art.
In many cases, you literally cannot improve without depending on the advice of those around you — another perspective, a second pair of eyes, the well-worn advice of the 40yro burned out techies. Framing those as competition will actively just burn you out, in the end (or otherwise people will pick up on it and be less likely to help you, lol).
"Being attentive to your practice (i.e. recording, going over your work, etc.)"
If you practice the same thing over and over, you won't get better. If you fail, figure out what you did wrong, and improve, that's competition.
"Asking, and taking the advice of other people in your field"
I will agree with you here.
"teams more diverse in culture, race, and gender,
'diversity of thought' has nothing to do with race, gender, or culture. I've found that many companies will use inferior ideas just to say that they are 'diverse'.
You also have to be careful, because when you take too many ideas from people that lack experience/expertise, you have to tune out the noise.
I do agree you need to get a wide array of ideas, though, regardless of race, culture, or gender.
"in a game jam session, you're collaborating with those around you to produce lots of interesting and good art."
This isn't competition, and there is a place for it..but this isn't really what we are discussing.
"another perspective, a second pair of eyes, the well-worn advice of the 40yro burned out techies"
Most learning like this happens if you get stuck on something and don't want to spend lots of time on it (although failing until you succeed will allow you to learn 5X more).
However, to take what you learned and actually improve, takes competition.
> If you fail, figure out what you did wrong, and improve, that's competition.
I very much disagree, it's a collaboration between yourself now, yourself in the past, and yourself in the future. You aren't competing with your older self, you can only improve by setting up recording and measurements, and doing analysis — all of that requires cooperation and is fundamentally collaborative.
> 'diversity of thought' has nothing to do with race, gender, or culture.
It absolutely does. Each of those represent social and psychological constraints on what solutions you are able to find and broach based on your identification of each. Each of those represent how you are treated differently within society, which limits or defines your experiences, which is a part of shaping how you think, which in turn limits the solutions visible to you. There's nothing wrong with this, and it's perfectly normal, but it is important to get a broader sampling across these points in order to arrive at the best decision. If your circle consists of entirely cis, white men, then you're making the same sampling bias that has led to thousands of small university studies being rejected.
A very real example of this is the way we look at deer. For decades, it was assumed by the men that studied in the field, that deer groups have a leader that decides where they go, because when the "leader" sets off to a new location, they all look towards the leader and follow them. It took a woman entering the field as a scientist and doing more observations to realise that actually that leader was more or less just a deer chosen to tally the vote — they all look in the direction they want to go, but one deer is nominated by the group to tally the votes and acts on the consensus of the group. The hundred-odd men, probably more, that had done studies of deer before that point had been so hierarchically minded that they hadn't considered an alternative explanation, which made them blind to the actual behaviour of the deer.
It's a quaint example, but there are millions of examples just like this one, where taking a statistical sampling of people within one race, gender, or culture ultimately skews the possible result space. And that's important for keeping an open mind and being able to explore the total result space.
> This isn't competition, and there is a place for it..
Many people treat game jams as competitions! Ludum Dare (the OG game jam) was explicitly called a "competition" and had winners, and runner ups, and such; however, by approaching a game jam in that way you lose a lot of what makes them fun and worthwhile experiences — namely, collaboration!
> Most learning like this happens if you get stuck on something and don't want to spend lots of time on it (although failing until you succeed will allow you to learn 5X more).
I disagree with both of these points. Back when I was employed in tech in my mid-20s, I would regularly run ideas I'd had past a group of 30 - 60yro people who were (racially-diverse, gender-diverse) tech leads, programmers, etc. It was a huge, huge boon to my abilities, and allowed me to hone a sense of what was worthwhile to pursue, what was a dead-end, etc. along with honing my skills for being able to look at things from a new angle. That, along with pouring over the c2wiki as a teenager (and thus reading the OG discussions about technologies that are commonplace today, from the people who were major players in the invention and adoption of those technologies) were amazing for expanding and refining my perspective and "approach to problems" toolbox. I cannot recommend this enough, and at no point did it involve competition :)
My therapist calls this "touching the hot stove". When you put a lot of effort into a problem and fail over and over, your mind "gives up" as a protective measure. You can drive yourself crazy trying to push forward and find a solution in a straight line.
It is sometimes useful to get outside input or take a break and wait for new circumstances.
Not going to lie, it is also very possible a husband going to law enforcement gets taken more seriously than a woman reporting stalking.
The other side of that is that sometimes you just can't win, no matter what. You may end up wasting your life trying and trying anyway. Recognizing when to stop trying is just as important, I think.
That is an excellent point. Recognizing and accepting things you can't control is a critical life skill. But either way, "Maybe you're not trying" is not a helpful framing.
> You may end up wasting your life trying and trying anyway.
It's like the fly who keeps buzzing at the window pane instead of giving up to fall six inches to the open windowsill.
My life got infinitely easier when I realized the normal way of doing things will never work for me. Even with medication, my brain is too broken to have discipline. I can’t form new habits by repeatedly doing something. Flat out doesn’t work.
What has worked for me is getting ahead of my brain and setting myself up for success before it gets there.
I’ve also completely given up on the idea of thinking before speaking. My solution for this is anticipating mistakes before I get into a conversation and not making the same mistake twice.
> anticipating mistakes before I get into a conversation
How is that not thinking before speaking?
I’ve should’ve been a little more clear. This anticipation can be years before an actual conversation.
It’s mental training done days or weeks before an event, not hours.
During conversations my short-term memory is frequently overloaded to the point I miss words people are saying. There is no room to actively remember what not to say.
It seems that the author balked at a rather specific level of action: getting government agencies involved. I feel there might be more the author could say about this aspect of the event, though she is not, of course, under any obligation to do so.
I found this helpful in the context of the author’s other work. “Maybe you can try a different way” feels less useful than “if you really, really wanted to do this, what would you do that you’re not doing right now”? Even though they’re effectively the same thing, I can usually think of an answer to the second question quickly. It reminds me of Mr Krabs having to let go of the dime.
Agreed. Its a hair from victim blaming even though the victim is herself.
Hm.
Its an easy trap to fall into to say that people are in hard situations because They Arent Trying Hard Enough.
Your manager might think so.
Your company probably thinks youre not trying hard enough.
…but, there is a also reality, which is overloading people with impossible expectations and then watching them fail isnt helpful.
Its not a learning experience.
Its just mean, and selfish… even when those expectations are, perhaps, self imposed.
If youre in one of these situations, you should ask for help.
If you see someone in them, you should offer to help.
Its well documented that gifted children struggle as adults because they struggle under the weigh of expectations.
The soltuion to this is extremely rarey self reflection about not trying hard enough.
Geez. Talk about setting people up for failure.
The OP literally succeeded by asking for help, yet somehow, walked away with no appreciation of it.
This was sort of my takeaway too. The OP got help from someone else and thought to herself “if only I’d tried harder I could’ve done this on my own”. That doesn’t seem like a healthy takeaway.
I didn’t take it that way at all. I took it as “I was blinded from the actual solution because my vision was artificially narrow due to my past experiences with this person.” They didn’t ask for help, their partner intervened for them with a completely different and more direct approach.
I have a kid going thru this right now. It’s very disheartening and frustrating to see, because even with coaching and help, they don’t see the help and suggestions as solutions because they simply can’t see it. And as a parent you don’t want to have to intervene, you want them to learn how to dig their way out of it. But it’s tough to get them to dig when they don’t believe in shovels.
I guess I really don’t like this message because I am a disabled person. In the exercise that she describes where an instructor tells people to stand up from a position that they think they can’t stand up from, what if I actually can’t stand up? It might lead me to believe that perhaps I’m simply not trying enough.
You might think this contrived, but when people tell you over and over that you’re not trying hard enough because of things you can’t control, you internalize it.
To me — someone who has to ask for help — it seems like that she didn’t really notice that help was the thing that helped.
What if the cops, the friend, and the consulate all said, "we do not care about a random mentally ill stranger, on a different continent, sending threats. You said he's been doing this for years and has done nothing yet? Sounds like you're safe. We have real crimes to solve. We have real murders to figure out. Call back if he shows up at your house, but he most certainly never will." Or maybe the FBI is like "oh, okay. Thanks. We'll keep an eye out but now this guy's part of an investigation so we can't talk about him to you." and then they do nothing, the friend doesn't reply, and the consulate is like "we're not obligated to reply." Those seem like super likely conclusions to the husband helping, too. So then would that have no longer been the "actual solution?" It seems that the "actual solution" is only determined after the fact once there is a success, and that's used as a proxy for whether or not the actions were really trying. If she had never replied and then the guy stopped texting after a year, would that have also been Actually Trying? Maybe it would've, because one could come up with a post-hoc explanation as to why that was an Actual Try. It feels sloppy to not distinguish what makes something a form of an Actual Try vs a successful try, because Actually Trying should be able to count failures as part of sincere attempts. Otherwise, Actually Trying collapses into being a synonym for success.
> It seems like, by default, you are stuck with whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem the first time you encountered it and failed to fix it.
Brilliant.
Reminded me of Einstein:
> We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them
Since I assume you would be interested to know, this quote seems almost certainly misattributed to Einstein and seems to have been made up by Ram Dass [1]. Though I would be happy to be proved wrong if you have a source
[1] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/7751/did-einstein-sa...
Interesting! Yeah, there appears to be a lot of discussion on the topic. My source indicating Einstein was no better. However, happy to attribute it to Ram Dass and/or Einstein, both were brilliant.
I think this is partially restating "try smarter, not harder" with a lot more words.
I also think it's unkind not to recognize that we have limited time and energy and it's simply not possible to address everything all at once.
IMO the better takeaway is to learn to admit when we're doing that (deprioritizing a problem we don't have the resources to address,) rather than pretending there is no choice, so it occurs to us to revisit the problem if and when there are the resources to do so. My personal approach to this would be to add it a todo list with no assigned due date.
Also, I don't know who the author is talking about, but when I read:
"These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps."
I hear someone who maybe isn't valuing romantic relationships but also views admitting that as socially taboo, so they come up with an excuse for why they're not in a relationship. I don't necessarily perceive someone who isn't applying agency to all areas of their life.
This sounds a lot like Learned helplessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
> Most of the Group 3 dogs—which had previously learned that nothing they did had any effect on shocks—simply lay down passively and whined when they were shocked
What a cruel time for experimenting on animals the 1960s were...
Animal cruelty is alive and well in the factory farming industry, at a yearly scale orders of magnitude higher than the sum of all research experimentation in science during the 1960s.
If you, the reader, are having "productivity problems" please get assessed for ADHD.
A lot of productivity writing has the frame "trust me, I was incorrigible and this system worked for me. If it worked for me it will work for you."
None of those systems ever worked for me. I worried about learned helplessness. I worried that imposter syndrome was actually just me being an imposter. I worried I wasn't trying hard enough, and spent enormous effort trying every idea I could: meditation, delegation, therapy, coaching, exercise, diet, sleep, prayer, etc., etc., on and on.
After DECADES of stress and pain it turned out to be a dopamine deficiency. Contemporary medication addressed this for me, quickly and effectively.
For clarity, prayed worked and was unfortunately one of the last things I tried.
How long have you been on your medication?
Unfortunately I must decline to answer for legal reasons, but I am aware that some people report a short term “cure” that falls off after a longer period.
I am currently on the lowest commercially available dose of a time release methylphenidate, with a dosage pattern that mitigates this long term falloff in most people.
What has been most meaningful to me is the sense of hope both the diagnosis itself and the medication bring.
Sometimes one is trying, and is working hard enough, but is climbing higher mountains than other people while wondering why none of the online mountaineering advice makes sense.
Sometimes one needs an oxygen tank.
> with a dosage pattern that mitigates this long term falloff in most people.
And what is such a pattern, if you could be so kind?
One of the best players I've met in a certain game gave me an article and it's stuck with me ever since: https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/stuck-in-the-mid...
The gist of it is that the person who wins is often not the one who wants to win the most, it's the person who wanted to lose the least.
This stood out to me because I have been involved in a small claims court case over a small amount of money (less than $2k). No one will give me advice other than "take them to small claims", because the take is too small for them to take interest and often small claims issues are really stupid disagreements between two parties where one party is not taking responsibility for some finances.
Depending on where you live, small claims can have many routes (this is good), the default is to have your case heard by a judge while you are unrepresented by a lawyer (most likely). However due to the large amount of cases and the fact that your case has very low value, the courts may push you to other routes. One route is mediation, I have been to two-forced mediation sessions and each time the opposing side states at the top they have no intent of make a deal. The second mediation the lawyer was still hostile from the start and threatened to have me pay their legal fees. This rattled me and made me reconsider my actual case. I needed clarification. I found a lawyer referral service provided by the state with a 30 minute consultation, that was affordable ($35) and even though I wasn't looking for representation it offered me a chance to have someone give me advice on the latest updates. A lawyer helped me out but not before immediately rejecting me after seeing the small amount and the small claims case information. I had to reach out again and explain that I didn't really need their representation but to weigh the threat of legal fee retaliation (though honestly what judge would allow that to happen?).
I ultimately think if we had better civics education people wouldn't feel so helpless. This entire small claims process has revealed how difficult it can be to find legal advice and how often that uphill battle can be once you're up against an opponent. It is always easier to walk away than make arguments legally you don't really know or have to get assistance. We need to start teaching civics in schools at a young age or people will feel more and more trapped by the technology they use and less empowered by the rights they have.
It seems to me that frequently, to realize that your resources in a domain has improved, you need to heavily risk the very few resources that you know you have.
In the example the author gives, her husband did not have that inaccurate, yet reasonable perception, and only in hindsight does the author realize her own inaccurate perception.
I cannot recommend that readers take the author's advice to heart as carelessly as she presents it. There is some merit to it, but there are sometimes real consequences when you try when your perception was accurate that you shouldn't have, and you have carelessly misread your increase in capacity, especially if you are desperate for it.
she's a little hard on herself. She claimed the ideas her husband came up with were not particularly inventive and the same she'd come up with had she been helping a friend
Yet, when she told her friends, they did NOT suggest such actions. They too felt like there was nothing that could be done.
Rather I'd posit that the actions the husband did seemed obvious to the author in hindsight, and that not everyone would easily identify those kinds of actions. We are used to hearing narratives that people in other countries are relatively untouchable (eg scams), so there's already a kind of learned helplessness there.
The author has somewhat of a history in the professional poker world of being a less than reliable narrator. I’d take the details of the story with a grain of salt and focus on the ideas instead.
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Kind of agree, as I was reading it I basically thought that sucks idk what you could do. Let alone get in touch with the fbi. In my mind they're an organization that will get in touch with you, but you don't really call in. Til I guess
A good post. OP is a famous poker player. I think I’ve seen her on Twitter. I don’t think it’s doxxing to mention that her husband Sasha Chapin is a self help type famous fellow on Twitter. They’re both public figures and publicly married (or at least I recall seeing a post publicly).
Given that context especially, I was surprised she didn’t hand over the problem to her husband earlier. Any time some kind of bureaucratic process is required my wife and I usually involve the other person. But neither of us are public like that and she’s not been stalked like this so who can tell.
But after the brother extortion at least you have to tell your husband imho. It means that there’s a bigger blast radius now.
Unsurprisingly, these things are hard to handle solo. I would struggle too. But I think most married people would lean on their partners to solve it for them.
Perhaps as public figures this kind of stuff happens to them often and so the escalation point is never obvious like it is to private people like me.
This essay has loads of subtance to it and it illumines my primary issue with stoicism things that we don't have control over are basically not that obvious.
On another note, this is a bit hard to believe:
"extorted money from my brother by spoofing my phone number and pretending to have kidnapped me."
Having studied jung some time and having extensive meditative practice from this essay I'd conclude with 95% certainty that she permitted this to happen for personal reasons. Stalking is horrible but you know what's worse than being stalked? Loneliness. Individuated attention is incredibly rare to come by in today's world so when someone receives it, the feeling of being special is hard to push away.
Big kudos btw to both her and her husband. I read their writing from time to time and I've never read anything from either that wasn't brutally honest and packed with deep insights.
Definitely resonating with some of this right now, continuing on a journey of discovery of my self and my past. Thank you for sharing
Sounds a lot like the Baby Elephant Syndrome. Worth reading into if you're interested in the above.
Comprehensive agency is best achieved via meditation (specifically, "choiceless awareness"). In my experience.
It's basically a physical approach to applying agency rather than a rational one. Agency becomes a paint sprayer and you spray it everywhere. Your agency expands in all directions. It's pretty great.
I’ve been watching a lot of interviews with David Lynch lately (RIP), and apparently he was a longtime practitioner of meditation, and he even wrote a book about it. Your words, especially the “paint sprayer for agency” resonated with me and reminded me of the way he would describe expanding consciousness through meditation.
I appreciate your insight.
Here’s an interview where he describes a bit about his meditation practice. The entire video is worth a watch, but for the sake of brevity, I have linked directly to the timestamp referenced.
I wonder if the inverse rule for this is “how to know when quitting is more effective than trying” - because I think that often times, and especially for folks who can be incredibly persistent when they put their mind to something, it’s helpful to have a cost benefit analysis of your efforts and it might just be that in more cases than not, just not trying actually resolves the core problem your trying to solve.
I really enjoyed this article and it really resonated with me, which made me wonder if it is actually an evolutionarily selected solution in a way - like that ignoring something turns out to be a surprisingly effective form of triage for many situations? Obviously the cases where this doesn’t hold are what the article is addressing but I found it fascinating to think about why that approach might be so common.
An interesting side-note about this post: the use of "agentic" in the context of human behavior. It is an interesting shift in how we view ourselves. This happened with the advent of computers, viewing everything we do in the context of information processing and retrieval; with the advent of social media, viewing our social interactions as signals with pass/fail results.
It is reductive, but also a new perspective from which to see ourselves.
Good points. Thanks for sharing. The main point I glean from this read is: don’t let productivity at work mask other aspects of your life.
There are irreducible dimensions of life where one shouldn’t accumulate debt, otherwise they come bite you when you’re vulnerable or they could make you vulnerable, which will end up affecting your productivity at work to say the least.
I think, maybe the part of the problem is that it is sometimes easier to accept the situations as they are, even if we suffer from some, than trying to resolve them. Not better, but easier. Or, at least seems easier.
Imagine trying to be conscious about every life situation and to "actually try" to do what's best every single time. How much effort this would take? So, we develop habits instead. Maybe the question is how to place the cursor between relying on habits and consciously trying. How to develop the internal mechanism to detect the condition when "actually trying" is better in long term than falling back to a habit? How to even define this condition?
This is a really well written article. Everyone does ignore some aspects of their lives.
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>Instead of doing those things, you just put up with it. Or, worse, you fight through your anxiety using an earlier solution that required willpower, and the exertion of willpower makes you feel like you’re trying. But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.
The peak level of this is when you deliberately don't put in the effort to change aspects of how you approach a problem, because making the problem easier to solve would make it feel like you're cheating at solving the problem. And that somehow the effort of solving something in the fundamentally wrong/high effort way makes you more valuable as a person than the people who find an approach that isn't beating your head against a wall
Even though, weirdly, simultaneously you hold the cognitive dissonance of the fact that you don't actually judge people who do attempt to solve their problems more healthily, and actively give the advice of doing that to friends
Trying on every single thing you do is exhausting. I certainly don't have the energy any more to try hard at some personal life things when my work is stressful. I think it's good to do some introspection from time to time to find out what things might be draining you and preventing you from trying on something that you should be trying hard at.
I've been kind of hoping that one thing to come out of AI is a way to get it to ... tell me what to do.
"What is the best thing to work on?"
"What is the next thing I should do?"
It seems ridiculous and sort of passive.
It's like "a goal without a plan is just a wish"... Well I have wishes, and I need a plan.
> But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.
That's why I go out of my way to dunk on people who treat “try things” and “hard work” as useful advice. What you work hard on matters. If they wanted respect, they ought to have had the honesty to admit they do not have specific advice for you (or lack the time to help).
But “try things” and “hard work” are excellent advice. Someone who’s working really hard to solve a problem one way when it’s not working is not in fact “trying things”. Someone who’s trying many things but putting no effort into it is not “working hard”.
People willing to both try things and work hard are much more likely to discover a good solution.
Yes, they're both necessary, but they're not useful to someone who is stuck. They're both vague blow-off statements. If someone isn't working hard, suggest they spend more time on the issue; if they're stuck suggesting somewhere in the process to try something else.
Faulty sensory appreciation is so real and gives a distorted view of the reality. You keep ignoring body signals about small pain or discomfort, have imbalanced priorities and math and estimations go for a toss. Your actions become irrational, you try hard to fix small things and in the process cause big issues.
> But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.
For me, this is the standout line right there. It just so happens that for some reason we determine these limits for ourselves and operate within them. So you have a feeling of doing all you can, but you are still operating within the self-imposed limits.
> I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help
Does anybody else find this strange? There's this person whose name you don't even know, but somehow you know who his old friends are? This is not a situation I'm familiar with.
> > I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help
You left out the adverbial phrase. The whole sentence is
> When he reached out to my company six months later to apply for a job, I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help — but the friend told me he was afraid to intervene because he didn’t want to become a target himself.
When the stalker applied for a job, additional details may have become available to the OP, potentially including personal references (i.e. "old friend".)
I think the old friend is _her_ old friend, not the stalker's.
The sentence is a bit ambiguous but that's what seems to make the most sense to me.
It clearly says "an old friend of his"
"old friend of HIS" is not ambiguous.
It doesn't sound that far-fetched. The stalker probably told her that he was planning to join her company and meet her, which gave her enough information to find his name. Once she had his name, she could find his profile on social media and see who his friends were.
There's probably more to the story than the author is willing to let us know, but that wouldn't have made for a nice Silicon Valley "you can do it if you really want it for real!"-success story.
Scaling this to organizational psychology, I think this can partly explain why consultants exists and why consulting is a viable business.
If there has anything I have learned in my life it is this: "the world is just. solutions are easy. and if people are suffering, then they deserve it. if they would just try to solve their problems then their problems would be solved." Is deep in the thoughts of most people, and it leaks out in all kinds of ways.
you DESERVE misery. If you are suffering, then you are the cause.
I feel I should hate this line of thinking... But it's too common. I can't hate all of humanity. Instead, I know to fear others. I know to never ask for help. This belief is so common that to do otherwise is self destructive.
If you had gone to the police they would have blamed you.
Your husband resolved it because it wasn't "his" problem. He didn't "cause" it so could not be blamed. Because as far as everyone else is concerned, the reason you had that problem was because "you weren't trying"
it's not true.
I know, the takeaway is so funny, because it's not actually up to the author whether or not the solution she took would've worked. To her, "Actually Trying" and "not trying" both hinged on the success of other people helping her out. To a more hard hearted individual, the only thing that would've qualified as "Actually Trying" would've been flying out to India in person and then finding the guy first when he'd least expect it. "Actually Trying" was only determined after the fact when the result was that there was a success. If the husband coordinating with a friend hadn't worked, what then? Did he "Actually Try" if the FBI, the Consulate, and the friend were all like "we don't give a shit about this random little troll sending death threats. Did you know everyone gets death threats all the time on the Internet? Log off." What then? Is that still Actually Trying, or do we only determine that after a success? Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, friends.
The husband was the social proof that this random junkie woman who's complaining about a guy on the opposite side of the planet was worth taking seriously. She might not have wanted to go to the cops because she didn't want to go to them, have them laugh it off and then feel both powerless and humiliated, and the conclusion is that another person who then manages the difficulty isn't even trying? Maybe not, but that's a different think from deciding that they aren't doing it because they're stuck in some old mindset.
The other example she gives is this: "These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps." Like, girl, it's not up to you whether or not there are any cool people on dating apps. There's a selection bias of who gets on dating apps going on here. You can do everything within your power and Actually Try all you want to have it be another way, but you can't really force cool people to socialize in the way that you want them to. It could be the case that there really is no one cool on those dating apps, because social climate being the way that it is means that no one feels comfortable showing their whole, unvarnished, "cool" selves and the coolest people are hidden.
At what point is someone "Actually Trying"? Is it once they've succeeded? This feels like the self help, "The Secret", "Girl, Wash Your Face" of previous eras but dressed up in the language of people who use terms like "non-zero probability", "priors", and "local optimum". The takeaway should not be that someone shouldn't try, but that the serenity prayer's most difficult part is the "wisdom to know the difference". She had the power to change this, but the wisdom to know the difference here was not guaranteed. It would be a kinder message to everyone who is in a tough spot to at least acknowledge that having a husband to vouch for her, with connections, free time, and a motivated reason to help out kind of changes to what extent she personally could be responsible for Actually Trying.
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"I can't do this"
"Are you sure you aren't just having trouble?"
Similar concept imo.
Great read and definitely something I can resonate with in my own life.
I think about this a lot.
nice!
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> Also, people are made up of particles that behave deterministically. Agency is an illusion.
I like to slap people talking this to my face. Why? I was predetermined to slap them, the universe was set up that way. But I had only one occasion to really do this. The guy was thinking about this for two days. And when I say about this every proponent of "Agency is an illusion" then has some cop-out about responsibility, because in truth they use "no agency" as an excuse to explain their bad behavior.
Most people will accept a brain tumor as an excuse for bad behavior, but not low blood sugar.
I have successfully convinced people that hungry judges have less agency than full ones, though. (google hungry judge effect if you're curious).
The original study was flawed I’m afraid https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41091803
Someone always brings that up. I guess you couldn't help it?
As a person who would like to excuse my overeating on confirmed problems with blood sugar, I agree with you fully. We have different amount of willpower in different situations and in the same situation between different times of day. But we still have some agency, it's not fully predetermined. And like being overweight, training can help. I would even say that combating fat needs willpower and increases your available willpower too.
That's not my position at all. Obviously you had no agency in your genetics. I assume you don't believe you had agency in pre-natal nutrition or the circumstance of your upbringing.
The rest of your life is just reacting to things downstream from that with an algorithm based on your nature and your nurture.
If it weren't for quantum effects you could model the outcome and it would be the same every time.
> That's not my position at all.
I would like to understand your position more. Most people believe that they have choice. They could for example do more work or lie on a couch. You mean they have no choice and whichever decision they took is not from their will, but only from their circumstances? I agree that a lot of the weights in such decision is a result of previous happenstances, but "no agency" model suggests to me that we can't make any serious changes in our life, because whatever happens, happens and maybe we were not destined to change our life. This further suggests: "why even try".
I believe OP's original implied position was "the universe is deterministic, so why even try", but I was able to convince them that trying is worth it regardless. In fact, the universe being deterministic would mean that it's always worth it to believe that you can accomplish something (if you want to increase the probability of accomplishing that thing).
> You mean they have no choice and whichever decision they took is not from their will, but only from their circumstances?
It is from their will, but a person's will is either completely or partially derived from circumstances. If you believe that the universe is deterministic, then a person's will (brain and body state) is completely derived from their circumstances (prior interactions with the rest of the world).
From what we know, universe is not deterministic. For example even trying to calculate motion of two massive objects with gravity with good precision runs up against heisenberg limit. For massively complicated systems like out bodies, there is just too much uncertainty. Also from neurobiology we see that our brains operate at the limit of noise in neurons. We are as close to total noise on our neuronal links as possible, while still operating properly. And thanks to better neurons than animals, we can operate with lower signal-to-noise ratio. It's not like we use some special quantum effects as a base of our consciousness, we just use quantum noise as a base and amplify it so that we actually respond properly to stimuli.
As for being only shaped by circumstances - IIRC there were experiments with cloned fish, where all of them were kept in conditions as similar as possible and those fish still had behavioral differences. Having deterministic universe is meaningless for agency.
Oh this is interesting, so you're saying the cloned fish "free-willed" themselves into having different personalities? Like one of them woke up one day and said "From now one I will be the sassy one."
I mean, it's a silly idea on it's face but let's say it's true: where did that thought come from? It came from a long sequence of effects that followed prior causes (starting with the Big Bang), plenty of quantum noise, I have no objection to that (superpositions collapsing / parallel universes forking) and ends with tiny neurons firing in a fish brain, do you not agree?
So where's the free will?
Are you guys even talking about the same thing? Because it doesn't seem like you are. You should try to define "free will" first and know exactly what you mean by it. Otherwise you're just arguing over the definition.
I think that free will ends up in that randomness of neurons firing. That can't be really predicted and steered. Free will is essentially freedom from manipulation/overriding external to the entity having free will. Theoretically that doesn't even need randomness.
And I don't think those fish free willed themselves. They just grew more random due to randomness inherent in our universe, despite us trying to force them into being exact. This was example of randomness of complicated biological processes, not of free will.
Wait, no, there's no "increasing the probability" if you really had faith in determinism. That was my lack of faith leaking through while trying to emulate the thought process of a person that has faith in determinism.
Instead it's more like, "if you're reading this already, your brain state is destined to change this way." Whatever I say is just a necessary process to get you to that brain state. Be glad that you're there now because you're no longer doomed to an undesirable future, or at least you can't tell anymore even if you are.
Sounds fun - I'd slap back!
"No agency" doesn't mean "no consequences". If there's an asteroid flying towards earth, we may blow it up, instead of going "well it's not the poor rocks' fault it's gonna wipe out humanity, so we should just let it."
"No agency" for me means pretty much that. What does "no agency" mean for you?
Difficult to accurately give expression to "the absence of this particular illusion".
In the asteroid metaphor: It means that if you can very clearly see the asteroid coming towards you, instead of going "no, the asteroid is going to do the right thing", you make preparations knowing that there is no do-er inside the asteroid.
And after getting hit by it, you do not go "if only the asteroid had had more willpower it would not have hit us. The next time for sure I'll convince it!"
So by agency, in this context, I mean the ability to change the way reality is into what one thinks it ought to be. (But reality is only ever one way, disregarding quantum mechanical magic for a minute)
> And after getting hit by it, you do not go "if only the asteroid had had more willpower it would not have hit us.
I don't understand this. You tell me that not having agency is not applicable to asteroids?
> (But reality is only ever one way, disregarding quantum mechanical magic for a minute)
I think we can't really disregard quantum mechanics when talking about very complicated systems operating on the edge of being too noisy for any recognisable transmission in our neurons.
The opposite: Having agency is not applicable to non-asteroids, any more than to asteroids. The asteroid was a metaphor for humans. I recognize I am not at my best at explaining right now.You tell me that not having agency is not applicable to asteroids?
Then we can allow that there is a magical being outside our observable reality that is influencing the result of random-seeming quantum processes, itself unbound by deterministic physics. You may call this being "your self" and this being would indeed have agency that transcends "chain-of-dominoes" causality. I cannot disprove such a theory. But is that an interesting conversation to have?I think we can't really disregard quantum mechanics
Upvoted because many people genuinely believe that agency is an illusion and therefore there's no point in trying.
But the "therefore" part is not true.
The state of believing that you can do it is a state that precedes actually doing it. This is true regardless of whether the universe is deterministic.
Sure and what precedes that is brain activity. You're not "willing" neurons into firing in such a way that will result in a thought to try harder.
Even if agency is an illusion, there's still a point in trying. Assuming determinism, whether or not those neurons fire in such a way depends on whether you believe "agency is an illusion, therefore there's no point in trying".
And whether you believe that might depend on whether you read this, so consider yourself lucky.
> And whether you believe that might depend on whether you read this, so consider yourself lucky.
See right there you're saying trying depends on something I don't control which is making my point for me.
I never refuted your hypothesis, I just pointed out the fact that the universe being deterministic has nothing to do with whether it's worth it for you to believe that you can achieve things and therefore try. Nor did I say that whether you believe it depends on something you can control. Assuming determinism, it's always worth it to believe that you can achieve things and try, even if it's as a result of me saying this.
Believing -> trying -> accomplishing
The arrows are causal links. Whether the state of believing is achieved through chance or choice is irrelevant.
It sounds like you're saying that a being with no free will should strive to overcome that somehow, and you can't understand how ridiculous that is.
No, that's not what I'm saying. And I never said that you're a being with no free will. In fact, you have free will. It's just that your idea of free will refers to a deterministic process if we're in a deterministic universe.
It's not possible to know what a non-deterministic process is in a deterministic universe. If you have faith that the universe is deterministic, then your definition of "non-deterministic" is equivalent to "deterministic" because you've never observed anything other than deterministic processes.
The only reason we're even able to talk about this in a meaningful way is because we both know your assumption is just an assumption rather than the truth, and we abstractly distinguished some phenomena as different from others, and say that one group defines determinism, while the other group defines non-determinism.
But since you're assuming that the universe is deterministic, then according to you, free will means the capacity for deterministic decision-making, which you have. The process of decision-making still happens in your brain, it's just a deterministic process.
I've merely pointed out that accomplishing something is a state of reality that can only come after trying to do that thing. If you don't try, you won't accomplish. And if you don't believe you should try, you won't try. So if you don't believe you should try, you won't accomplish. All of these statements are true in a deterministic universe.
If you don't believe you should try, then there can only be one outcome: you won't accomplish. If you believe you should try, then there can also only be one outcome (according to your assumption), but you don't know what it will be. The universe may have predestined you to accomplish something, but it can only begin with you believing you can do it. Why not start believing you can do it? Believing is a necessary precondition to accomplishment, even if that belief is predetermined. Just do it.
> particles that behave deterministically
I'm not a physicist I'll admit, but this seems like a controversial statement.
Not unless you're talking about quantum indeterminacy, do you think that's where OP's agency comes from?
Or what about the Indian stalker's agency, should they "try harder" to reverse the genetics, pre-natal nutrition, toxin exposure, and gut biome that led them down the path of mental illness?
Also not a physicist, but yeah -- seems equivalent to saying, "entropy does not exist."
Freeze peach is an illusion.
Jesus - lotta free time