When a person changes their way of thinking radically, it is normal for them to want to tell everybody about them. This happens even if the change is what people here might consider irrational- think becoming religious. There’s even a Wikitionary phrase for it, “passion of a convert”.
So, the first thing I would say to your anger phase is, “Don’t worry, you’ll get over it.”
If you want to speed up getting over it, it might be useful to practice two things. The first is to really focus on personal improvement and realize you’re still a newb. The second is to deeply empathize with why other people do and believe the things they do, and realize that you were that way even a few weeks, months, years ago.
A sophomore in engineering can’t feel angry that an undecided freshmen doesn’t know calculus. A senior in aerospace engineering can’t feel angry that a senior in mechanical engineering doesn’t know anything about wing design. Who are you to get angry that a person hasn’t memorized yourbias.is when you can’t even differentiate the Many Worlds interpretation from the Copenhagen interpretation?
Everybody is still building out their map, and just because you’ve luckily found yourself on a part of elevated territory and you’re able to make a better map, doesn’t mean those with a lesser view are worse.
Secondly, it would help to read about how people come to their world views, and also specifically read about how people came to the rat-community. Basically, read people’s personal “testimonies” and you’ll find that a lot of it is driven by a mixture of personal and cultural facts. Also read testimonies of people that converted into different religions, or even the testimonies of people who didn’t convert at all.
For example, I have a Jehovah’s Witness friend. She got very close to deconversion 10 years ago to the point of listing out reasons that the JWs were wrong. Yet, last I saw on Instagram she was going to the JW headquarters and performing missionary work. Her family, her extended family, and most of her friends were all religious. Can I really be angry that her brain said, “Yeah, I’m going to believe what gives me massive amounts of comfort or am I going to believe something that could literally cause my death?”
As far as books, I would encourage reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. The book attempts to look at the evolutionary background for humans’ moral systems, and is very good at injecting a large dose of empathy into its readers.
So, the first thing I would say to your anger phase is, “Don’t worry, you’ll get over it.”
That’s a relief.
A sophomore in engineering can’t feel angry that an undecided freshmen doesn’t know calculus.
Yeah, I usually try to think like that, what I felt lately was more like… finding out that your calculus professor doesn’t actually know how to do calculus in one case, and finding that the freshmen in a scientific faculty can’t actually manage to understand simple Aristotelian logic…
Usually I get most of my annoyance from listening to supposed experts who are making evident mistakes, or from listening to people who are particularly stupid.
Everybody is still building out their map, and just because you’ve luckily found yourself on a part of elevated territory and you’re able to make a better map, doesn’t mean those with a lesser view are worse.
A really… sobering way to look at it, thank you.
I had been trying to be as smart as I could for years even before finding rationality, but finding something that good, which jumpstarted my accuracy and intelligence a lot, was sheer luck.
Also I didn’t really do anything to be born with an above average intelligence, I didn’t do anything to be grown in a home where education was highly valued, so I guess that even trying to be smarter isn’t such of an obvious idea to have.
I guess we could call it the self-made man fallacy, if you saw hard work working for you you feel like everyone else ought to just try and it would work as well for them too, but you don’t notice the strokes of luck you had or that you still had an advantage to start with.
And I knew all this stuff already, but… I don’t know, I guess I still felt as if certain things were so obvious than anyone not figuring those out wouldn’t have any excuses, since those things I always knew, so I’ve allowed my emotional response to be shaped by how this feels from the inside.
Can I really be angry that her brain said, “Yeah, I’m going to believe what gives me massive amounts of comfort or am I going to believe something that could literally cause my death?”
Your friend isn’t the kind of people I’d have got mad at, at least if I knew what you know about the things that trapped her into staying… which I just realised it’s the correspondence bias word for word.
If I can’t see why people are missing the obvious truth (though I don’t consider dropping religion as obvious, I know it can be pretty hard) I might just not know enough about how they learned to think or what harmful meme got their cognition before I met them or what do they think it would happen if they didn’t believed what they believe… Even pure cognitive laziness has to be caused by something, I shouldn’t just have written dumb on my model of their cognitive processes, as if dumbness was a simple mystical essence with no moving parts, I should have know better.
I’ve read about this exact mistake so many times that it’s not even funny, I had to force myself to spell it out here even if I knew it’s really a good thing that I’ve noticed and that I’m admitting it, because getting the basics wrong feels just so embarrassing.
Asking this question was extremely useful to me, it seems. I’ll check out the book, seems pretty much what I was looking for.
When a person changes their way of thinking radically, it is normal for them to want to tell everybody about them. This happens even if the change is what people here might consider irrational- think becoming religious. There’s even a Wikitionary phrase for it, “passion of a convert”.
So, the first thing I would say to your anger phase is, “Don’t worry, you’ll get over it.”
If you want to speed up getting over it, it might be useful to practice two things. The first is to really focus on personal improvement and realize you’re still a newb. The second is to deeply empathize with why other people do and believe the things they do, and realize that you were that way even a few weeks, months, years ago.
A sophomore in engineering can’t feel angry that an undecided freshmen doesn’t know calculus. A senior in aerospace engineering can’t feel angry that a senior in mechanical engineering doesn’t know anything about wing design. Who are you to get angry that a person hasn’t memorized yourbias.is when you can’t even differentiate the Many Worlds interpretation from the Copenhagen interpretation?
Everybody is still building out their map, and just because you’ve luckily found yourself on a part of elevated territory and you’re able to make a better map, doesn’t mean those with a lesser view are worse.
Secondly, it would help to read about how people come to their world views, and also specifically read about how people came to the rat-community. Basically, read people’s personal “testimonies” and you’ll find that a lot of it is driven by a mixture of personal and cultural facts. Also read testimonies of people that converted into different religions, or even the testimonies of people who didn’t convert at all.
For example, I have a Jehovah’s Witness friend. She got very close to deconversion 10 years ago to the point of listing out reasons that the JWs were wrong. Yet, last I saw on Instagram she was going to the JW headquarters and performing missionary work. Her family, her extended family, and most of her friends were all religious. Can I really be angry that her brain said, “Yeah, I’m going to believe what gives me massive amounts of comfort or am I going to believe something that could literally cause my death?”
As far as books, I would encourage reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. The book attempts to look at the evolutionary background for humans’ moral systems, and is very good at injecting a large dose of empathy into its readers.
That’s a relief.
Yeah, I usually try to think like that, what I felt lately was more like… finding out that your calculus professor doesn’t actually know how to do calculus in one case, and finding that the freshmen in a scientific faculty can’t actually manage to understand simple Aristotelian logic…
Usually I get most of my annoyance from listening to supposed experts who are making evident mistakes, or from listening to people who are particularly stupid.
A really… sobering way to look at it, thank you.
I had been trying to be as smart as I could for years even before finding rationality, but finding something that good, which jumpstarted my accuracy and intelligence a lot, was sheer luck.
Also I didn’t really do anything to be born with an above average intelligence, I didn’t do anything to be grown in a home where education was highly valued, so I guess that even trying to be smarter isn’t such of an obvious idea to have.
I guess we could call it the self-made man fallacy, if you saw hard work working for you you feel like everyone else ought to just try and it would work as well for them too, but you don’t notice the strokes of luck you had or that you still had an advantage to start with.
And I knew all this stuff already, but… I don’t know, I guess I still felt as if certain things were so obvious than anyone not figuring those out wouldn’t have any excuses, since those things I always knew, so I’ve allowed my emotional response to be shaped by how this feels from the inside.
Your friend isn’t the kind of people I’d have got mad at, at least if I knew what you know about the things that trapped her into staying… which I just realised it’s the correspondence bias word for word.
If I can’t see why people are missing the obvious truth (though I don’t consider dropping religion as obvious, I know it can be pretty hard) I might just not know enough about how they learned to think or what harmful meme got their cognition before I met them or what do they think it would happen if they didn’t believed what they believe… Even pure cognitive laziness has to be caused by something, I shouldn’t just have written dumb on my model of their cognitive processes, as if dumbness was a simple mystical essence with no moving parts, I should have know better.
I’ve read about this exact mistake so many times that it’s not even funny, I had to force myself to spell it out here even if I knew it’s really a good thing that I’ve noticed and that I’m admitting it, because getting the basics wrong feels just so embarrassing.
Asking this question was extremely useful to me, it seems. I’ll check out the book, seems pretty much what I was looking for.