On Expected Success Rates

I just learned that when professional, world-record-breaking paper airplane people throw a paper airplane that they just made for the first time, like 90% of the time it doesn't fly how they want, intend, or expect.

And this is a pretty great example of how much time, effort, mental energy, and coping spoons we can end up wasting if we have the wrong expectation of what the base rate of something is.

No one says that the act of making a paper airplane has a 90% "failure" rate simply due to small imperfections in the paper, hard-to-measure asymmetries in the paper and the folding, and so on.

Which is kinda important! That changes everything about how we should interpret all available information and empirical feedback that we get from throwing freshly made paper planes!

All my life, I thought that following the instructions is supposed to reliably produce a working paper plane, that basically flies as well as the design allows. So when it flies badly, that's either a flawed airplane design, or it's my fault - if the design is basically good then I must've folded it badly or I threw it badly.

But now I know that's just totally off-base. Even if you fold and throw with great skill, even world-class skill, we should still expect each new plane to fly "badly" a big majority of the time.

So the reality is that we're supposed to view the first few throws as measurements of what's wrong with the plane, and make small adjustments - little extra bends, adding curves or creases here or there to change how it flies.

When we think the base rate of paper airplanes flying as designed is pretty high, it's natural to think that the best way to get better results is to improve our skills of designing, making, and throwing. Once you know that base rate is only 10%, suddenly it's clear that you get far bigger results by slightly fiddling with the tips/edges of the plane you already made.

And that can be the difference between giving up and sticking with it; between frustratingly giving it your all but getting nowhere and just casually getting better; between confidently believing that the activity requires "talent" and knowing that you too could get better at it if you knew the right things.

Looking Worse on Purpose

The most emotionally difficult technique I've been using for a few years now to work on discomfort with embarrassment, shame, and so on, is making myself look worse. Of course the majority of my flaws and mistakes are real, so I don't need much help there.

But sometimes.... I'll play things up. I'll put something out there because it's a bad look. I'll see how a thing I'm going to say or do can come off as cringe, stupid, morally bad, emotionally immature, or socially unintelligent - and I'll press on anyway, or even lean into it.

Why? One: when done right, it's elegantly impossible to take back - any hint of "I meant to do that" would just look worse. By reducing my options for feeling like I've saved face or fixed my image, I trap myself in those feelings long enough to learn better ways to work with them. Two: I can't always cope with how I've made myself look bad on accident. When I do it on purpose I can pick things I'm ready to face.

For better or for worse, I think I will be a case study in whether or not a collapsed narcissist can recover and re-grow a healthy self-esteem core.

Because after I've spend years deconstructing all of my narcissistic cope and self-image, it turns out that just like all other narcissists, I uhmm... I needed that. Oops.

Like, surprise, a narcissist's narcissism is actually load-bearing and necessary for their mental health to not be much worse. I knew this. Did I think I was an exception? Did I really think merely seeing the unhealthy would grow the healthy? Did I really overlook the need for the latter? Apparently yes.

It's not entirely clear to me why I failed to apply my own advice to this problem space: "destruction without ability to build does not leave you with a better building - it leaves you with no building".

Increasingly suspecting that I'm either heading for, or already in, narcissistic collapse, and it seems like it's the traditional version - irreversible, permanent.

Not like I can unsee it. I cannot unlearn noticing all the ways in which I am not worthy of, nor even able to attain, the exceptionally high standing I need to have to feel good about myself. I took down those walls and gazed upon the uncomfortable, embarrassing aspects of what I might be and what I often look like to others.

The only way out is through.

It's good to remember that you don't owe your past self the completion or continuation of anything you no longer feel like doing.

Your past self deserves more compassion than a manipulative advertisement, but the attachments they left you with don't.

If you wouldn't choose it now, and you haven't made any promises, stop letting your past decisions or wants steal your time and efforts.

Honestly, most people without multiplicity would probably benefit a lot from naming distinct aspects and mental states in themselves, and just in general could learn a thing or two from how people with multiplicity do things in-system.

I am fairly certain that the most kind, compassionate, and effective social coordination humans could achieve would require people to have more granularity and precision than "I" when introspecting and discussing what's going on and what's wanted or needed.

Sadly, I don't think humanity is "ready" for that second part. In a game-theoretic and natural-selection sense it's too exploitable by people who want easy excuses for their shitty behaviors, and in an education and understanding sense, we'd need what's currently fairly above-average fluency and understanding of mind stuff to be the norm.

But it warms my heart when I catch glimpses of how good it might be.

In the meantime, you could probably get more efficient self-narratives and clearer conflicted deliberation from it, and more mutual understanding among mature trustworthy adults with healthy boundaries and a good-enough sense of psychology.

Empathy as a Fear

That one famous quote about fear:

Of course, the useful meaning of "fear" here is something like: being so overwhelmed by your negative excitement response to perceived risks that you become less able to act or make decisions.

But the same ideal applies to all sorts of emotions.

And in particular, I want to focus on empathy. Empathy, if you feel it enough, is another mind-killer.

I think empathy might have damaged my life just as much as fear. Unlike fear, I saw no reason to mitigate empathy. I learned to cope with and push though fear much earlier in life, in large part because it's well-established in almost every culture that fear is a weakness to be overcome, while empathy is great virtue to be cultivated. I hitched a lot of my self-esteem to how empathetic I was. I sided with empathy in myself, over and over, until it was basically a lifestyle choice and self-identity to respond to every pang of empathy, because "lack of empathy caused this" was one of the only lenses I learned for processing hurt.

Being so overwhelmed by our empathy that we lose sight of ourselves is also a little-death. It too brings total obliteration - or a wasting away in self-sacrifice which we keep just short of intolerable.

I used to think that a typical problem among people is a callous or inconsiderate lack of empathy. That's probably true, but maybe it's less commonly true than I thought, because here are two competing problems:

We must keep enough space in our mind to take care of ourselves, and everyone else that we're not currently empathizing with. And we cannot do that if we allow our empathy to sweep us along.

I will face my empathy. I will permit it to pass through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the empathy has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I am very grateful for every run-in with worse versions of me.

Few self-improvement opportunities are as big for me as a similar person acting out a more severe or less mitigated version of one or more of my flaws.

If I run into someone who's just different or doesn't have my issues, it's easy for me to see them as just lacking something crucial for being thoroughly correct, ethical, or compassionate.

If I run into someone who has my issues and merits at approximately my level, it's easy for me to think "yes! exactly! you're one of the rare few who gets it". It can even become a strong, close, and very echo-chamber-y friendship.

But if they're similar but sufficiently worse, it's a relatively rare opportunity to see how I sometimes make others feel or come across, and a reminder that my struggles to be better are worth it.

Of course, we can get a lot of value from looking up at people instead, but I think people underestimate just how hard it is to be self-aware about our own flaws - it really helps to see them magnified.

"If it wasn't true, you'd have a rebuttal / wouldn't be so upset."

Calm down Freud, it's not that simple.

If a person is upset at your statement, all that tells you is that you hurt them, or merely reminded them of hurt, or pattern-matched in their brain as predictive or threatening of hurt. And if they care about anyone or anything other than themselves, "hurt" can mean empathy for others, grief for the greater good, and so on - even if what you said was just about them.

Confronting someone with a cutting or inconvenient truth which has no easy rebuttal is only one way of causing purely self-centered hurt.

But truths aren't the only things hard to rebut - after all, falsehoods and errors only thrive if it's too hard to show almost everyone, on the spot, in the attention span they have, where the mistake is.

And there are countless ways for falsehoods or errors to lead to hurtful behaviors and consequences.

A lot of the time, if someone is upset by what you've said and doesn't have a rebuttal, the wrongness is very clear in their mind, but they can't turn it into words which will work in the situation.

Pro-tip: "y'all" is very useful when talking to a person with multiplicity to efficiently and fluently refer to the whole system in a way that's not ambiguous with the singular "you".

Mainstream Arrogance Hypocrisy

One of the most infuriating hypocrisies to me as a child was that it's very socially acceptable to laugh at stupidity, to overtly look down on stupidity, to cruelly mock and invalidate people being stupid - but only if it's stupider than you - stupider than the in-group average.

When the stupid kid says something that the whole class finds stupid and everyone laughs at them, with that little judgy edge or scoff in their voice, exchanging those glances with each other, that's fiiiine somehow. Everyone thinks they're better and enjoys basking in it a little. Even most teachers won't so much as bat an eye.

But when you say or silently agree with something stupid and just one kid laughs like that, oh suddenly that's arrogant, suddenly that's being an asshole. You get the luxury of uncritically remaining a chimp because you have the majority stupid. You're not the problem, you're not stupider than you could be in any way that really matters, you're not habitually the cruel asshole, no no, that kid is uniquely a cruel asshole, and no smarter than you of course.

A decent amount of people carry this into adulthood, they just get more polite and nuanced about it.

Shouting Stupidity, Whispering Wisdom

There's this style of speech, and I've only ever seen one attempt to name it, in a video that I can't find anymore:

Like shouting something stupid, then whispering the crucial wisdom that should go with it. At worst, you get the full impact of saying a really harmful thing and your audience has stopped listening by the time you say the mitigating thing, but then you can shield yourself when called out on it.

Smart manipulators will abuse this intentionally. Less obviously but just as importantly, it's possible to do this on accident.

Another stab at wording why I hate modern political usage of "liberal" and "conservative".

Something like opposing homosexuality is "being liberal" just as much as it is "being conservative". It is being conservative about what sexual behaviors you allow to be normal and accepted. It is being liberal with imposing your morality through social policing, regulation, coercion, and so on.

Good uses "liberal" and "conservative" in a political context flow naturally from these meanings, when you apply "liberal" and "conservative" to whatever (political) thing you are being liberal or conservative with, just as when you apply "liberal" or "conservative" in any other context.

If your usage of liberal and conservative in political contexts is compatible with the above, if I can start with the above and derive what you mean, then great.

If not, you are damaging everyone's ability to think as well as possible. Language which is not composable literally does logic-bending mind damage, in that reasoning which can cover the most correct and valuable thoughts with the fewest concepts and effort is more powerful and efficient, but language that isn't composable is actively hostile to developing such thinking.

I think if you have an experience that feels good, you shouldn't feel bad about that. You felt good at the time, and that was a good thing.

This is a radical or controversial concept for way too many people. Especially when it comes to highly moralized areas of life like sex.

If someone was hurt or harmed, in ways that were not ethically justified, feel bad about that - but only if it helps. If it feeling good worsens your decision-making or motivations, work on that.

But don't just attach badness to stuff. Don't have labels like "no one should ever feel or enjoy this" or "this was sinful" or whatever unless you can soundly answer why.

Every good experience is an ethically good thing, until proven that it can only be experienced in ways that are too hurtful or harmful.

I think a big mistake in my approach to posting is the wishful thinking that my ideas could ever have quickly consumable popular appeal, especially among people who haven't already put in a lot of effort to think.

For a few years now, I've been chasing the ideal of a Concise Post for each building-block idea in my mind that I don't see spoken/named or properly abstracted in popular conversation/thinking.

But the truth is, I don't think this really works. Or rather, I don't think that hope is fully reachable. I think I've done a decent job within those constraints, and it really helped me become a better writer, but so often I look back at these short posts and feel like they're too reduced - husks of what they could be.

One of the ideas was to write a second, fully elaborated post for each idea, and put it on @mentalisttraceur-long. I do think that would help, and that's still a goal, but I have yet to get around to it.

But that's precisely the problem: the ideas I am most equipped to contribute are often ideas that demand a larger entry fee than these tiny posts could contain, and trying to appeal to the people who need it to fit on a single screen might just be sacrificing what I'm trying to say for the sake of the wrong audience.

Symbiotic Disorders

We know this idea as a joke: "I'm not healthy, I just have a system of perfectly balanced disorders". But I think this is a useful model to try out, especially for mental stuff. What would happen if at least two disorders can coexist and mask each other?

It could hide or stop dysfunction or the differentiating features so much that the person doesn't fit either diagnosis - but internally there is still all the pain and struggle of the disorder. It's worth remembering that when trying to understand others, and ourselves.

It might help you be more durable, willing, or able in certain roles, in the face of certain pressures and risks - maybe sometimes that's even worth the personal cost?

It would be harder to heal, improve, or even acknowledge problems, because each disorder is now load-bearing. You try to give some advice a fair shake, you work on being healthier, and yet you get worse outcomes which you know your old ways reliably prevent.