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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3196 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 15, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Korzybski. Haven't made much progress.

Nothing at all currently. Changed my sleep schedule, spent no more time in waiting rooms, and so generally had no real opportunity for prolonged reading. Not even listening to audiobooks.

Which is a boring state to post about, but here's my point: I miss it. I miss reading. Just not badly enough to alter my schedule for it right now.

Alternating between Democracy In America and Prometheus Bound

A History of Ancient Philosophy vol. II (Plato and Aristotle) by Giovanni Reale. Been working on it for a while, it's remarkably rich in its understanding of the material, but unfortunately the style/translation make it a bit of a slog.

Finally, after much prodding, getting around to reading the Discworld books. Doing the Vimes ones first.

Nice airplane reading. So far enjoyed "Guards! Guards!" a good deal more than "Men at Arms".

How are you finding Korzybski?

When I read some of his stuff, I found it mainly interesting from a historical point of view. Something like prehistoric cybernetics, which in itself seems like something of a pre-industrial age to our current information age.

Myself, I'm reading through some books on rhetoric.

I'm fascinated by the ways it lays out how to communicate with others. Even the simple ethos/pathos/logos framework has changed how I approach reading and writing. I'm confused why it's not being taught as part of the school curriculum. English classes seem to be subordinate to literature, to reading and analyzing, whereas rhetoric puts emphasis on producing and synthesizing. I think any country would be better of if its citizens went through a year or two of rhetoric training.

He's a little arrogant, and way too confident. There's a strong feeling that I'm missing the implications, much like how one feels when he studies mathematics above his level of understanding. But I feel a lot of sympathy for the broad outlines of his project, minus the materialist assumptions.

The old dictum that we 'are' animals leaves us hopeless, but if we merely copy animals in our nervous responses, we can stop it, and the hopeless becomes very hopeful, provided we can discover a physiological difference in these reactions. Thus we are provided with a definite and promising program for an investigation.

If I had to summarize what I've personally gained so far from ideas in the General Semantics sphere, it is the idea that the ability to say too much in too few words may explain many psychological problems of self-regulation. I have started saying more often things like "I don't know" instead of "I'm not sure," "I should" instead of "I must" ("I must" implies that if one fails, he is broken with no possibility of redemption. After all, it wasn't a question of whether I wanted to do it or not- it had to be done, no mitigating factors existed, and therefore no investigation of such factors is warranted. "I should" constantly raises the question of why "I didn't," and impels the search for answers.) and "the likely outcome" rather than "it will happen."

I spent the weekend reading A.J. Cronin's Keys of the Kingdom.

"Spanning six decades, it tells the story of Father Francis Chisholm, an unconventional Scottish Catholic priest who struggles to establish a mission in China."

Cronin is an unabashed sentimentalist who uses the same characters in every book. His primary objective seems to be to make them all suffer as much as possible. As the Pixies established the quiet-loud-quiet-loud dynamic in rock music in the 1980s, Cronin hews unswervingly to the structure: happy-crushed-happy-crushed.

Nevertheless, I couldn't put it down. He's the writer who practiced one kick 10,000 times. Even though you know how he's doing it, he makes you feel for the people in his stories.

I Am You by Daniel Kolak. A long, detailed book positing Open Individualism, the idea there’s only one subject of experience in the universe

I feel like this idea has become quite popular since the egg video of in a nutshell.

The unification of qualia experiences by having no physical delineation is the most epistemologically sound metaphysical belief since it avoid many paradoxes.

What is the formal name of this belief and who postulated it first?

“Open Individualism” is the most formal name I’ve seen, mostly because it contrasts nicely with Closed Individualism and Empty Individualism, and it was coined by Kolak. It was first postulated in The Upanishads (Atman, The Self, is the same for all conscious beings, and is identical to Brahman which is the Ultimate Reality). Averroes also independently discovered it.

I think The Egg story is cool but doesn’t exactly get at the same concept since there’s a soteriology to it and it’s anthropocentric.

Counsels and Maxims by Arthur Schopenhauer. It starts off with one of the most pessimistic statements about the impossibility of happiness I have read (will add an excerpt to this later) but quickly proceeds into some genuinely good sounding Stoic/Epicurean practical advice on how to avoid misery.

Unrelated but his book the art of being right is a great one for learning logical fallacies.

Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. Probably the first actual self-help book I've read. Parts of it feel eerily accurate.

Could you TL;DR your learnings?

Summer in 500 Days of Summer was an emotionally neglectful bitch and Tom did nothing wrong.*

Joking aside:

  • There are three main attachment styles: secure, anxious and avoidant

  • Secure people feel comfortable in platonic and romantic relationships, expect their partner to meet their emotional needs and are more than happy to meet their partner's needs

  • Anxious people often suffer from low self-esteem, require regular reassurance from their partners that their partner still likes them, and tend to act out and engage in "protest behaviour" if their needs aren't being met. This is the classic "needy" or "clingy" woman who complains that her boyfriend doesn't pay enough attention to her.

  • Avoidant people are put off by emotional intimacy and use detachment strategies to distance themselves from their partner. They often have unrealistic ideas about love and romance, fantasize about an "ideal" partner with whom they will feel no qualms about becoming intimate with, and idealize past romantic partners as a means of maintaining distance between themselves and their current partner. When women complain about men being "commitment-phobic" or "emotionally unavailable", this is who they're complaining about.

  • (Since the book's publication, a fourth attachment style has been proposed, variously called "fearful-avoidant", "anxious-avoidant" or "disorganized attachment". It's basically the worst parts of anxious and avoidant combined. However, Levine and Heller don't touch on this style in the book at all.)

  • Levine and Heller acknowledge that, in the anonymized examples they use, they tend to portray women as anxious and men as avoidant, but also point out that they've met plenty of anxious men and avoidant women.

  • There's a very small amount of evo-psych hypothesizing about how the different attachment styles came about, but Levine and Heller don't pretend it's their area of expertise and don't dwell on it

  • If an insecure (anxious or avoidant) person is in a relationship with a secure person, the secure person's attachment style can "rub off" on the insecure person's to a limited extent (but conversely, the secure person may be too accommodating of the insecure person, putting up with their protest behaviour to the point that it becomes actively abusive)

  • Secure people are underrepresented in the dating pool, because they tend to pair off early on and form happy, functional, mutually satisfying relationships

  • Avoidant people are overrepresented in the dating pool

  • The underrepresentation of secure people and overrepresentation of avoidant people in the dating pool leads to the "anxious-avoidant trap", wherein an anxious person ends up in a relationship with an avoidant person, which is toxic, unfulfilling and unsatisfying for both parties. Anxious-avoidant relationships are disproportionately likely to escalate into abuse.

  • In a surprisingly pessimistic moment for a self-help book, Levine and Heller acknowledge that if an anxious and an avoidant person are already in a committed relationship (with children and a mortgage etc.), the differences between the two partners may be effectively insurmountable and the "best" outcome short of divorce may simply be for the anxious person to revise down their definition of love and intimacy, rather than expecting their avoidant partner to meet a standard they never will

  • The book discusses a bunch of techniques that insecure people can use to stop sabotaging themselves, then a bunch of techniques that single people can use to find a partner who meets their needs, then a bunch of techniques that people in relationships can use to improve their relationships (a lot of which are generic couples-therapy things, like "communicate effectively" and "don't bottle things up")

Do I find the theory convincing and persuasive? On the one hand, it suffers from the same problem as every pop-psychology book** published in the last twenty years: making sweeping generalisations about the entire human species based on a single WEIRD study with a small sample size and a weak effect size. There's a great deal of "avoidants believe X as demonstrated by this implicit-association test". I can only assume most of the evidentiary basis for the book's hypothesis has run afoul of the replication crisis since publication.

On the other hand, it makes a great deal of intuitive sense, reading the description of who avoidants are and why they do the things they do was like looking into a mirror, and it casts my past relationships with romantic/sexual partners in a new light. On the other other hand, practically any psychological theory, from Freud to Myers-Briggs on down, makes "intuitive sense": the real test is whether it has predictive power. I want to give the suggested techniques a try and see if I notice any improvement before reporting back.

*In the conclusion, Levine and Heller do explicitly diagnose Summer as avoidant and Tom as anxious, defend Tom's behaviour, and predict that Summer will eventually grow distant from her husband and end up idealising Tom.

** Looking at you, Malcolm Gladwell.

Homicide, A Year in the Killing Streets by David Simon. Best book I’ve read in some time.

I've had this on my reading list for ages, but feel like I really need to be in the right mindset for it. I'm concerned it might be a little too dark to be enjoyable.

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