This is one of my favorite sequences on this site and I’m quite glad to see a new entry. I do have a question regarding the last section:
Rather, I would suggest opening up to feelings. Becoming familiar with them, understanding where they come from and what they are trying to do, and allowing them to become updated with new evidence and feedback.
How does one gain confidence that the read on their own emotions is an accurate description of the message they’re trying to communicate? That is, how can one be more sure that they’re actually listening to their emotions and not just assuming?
For example, many of us might be familiar with the type that listens to half of your description of an issue, assumes they immediately understand it perfectly, then gives you advice that doesn’t match your problem at all. (“I’ve been feeling sad late-” “oh yeah I know, man. Just get some more sleep, you’ll perk right up!”) How do I know I’m not doing that to my own emotions?
It seems like the Rationalist approach to psychology has reached some incredibly important yet very subtle places where the valuable signals we want to pay attention to (i.e. true intent of emotion) are incredibly weak. People wander the metaphorical wilderness for decades without truly seeing what’s going on in their heads, many who regularly go to therapy. I’m afraid of ascribing the completely wrong message to what my emotions are trying to tell me and getting stuck examining the wrong model for large parts of my life.
Anyway, an excellent post in an excellent sequence. Your work and Valentine’s work, more than many others here, have made things make sense to me. Thank you!
This is one of my favorite sequences on this site and I’m quite glad to see a new entry.
Thank you!
How does one gain confidence that the read on their own emotions is an accurate description of the message they’re trying to communicate? That is, how can one be more sure that they’re actually listening to their emotions and not just assuming?
It can be difficult! Some thoughts:
1) There’s a certain difference in what it feels like to intellectualize or guess what your emotions are saying, as opposed to actually listening to them. @pjeby had a nice exercise about this in “A Minute to Unlimit You”, which is to ask yourself how many left turns you need to make to get from your home to your school or place of work.
That’s something you don’t have a cached intellectual answer for, so you have to actually reach into your subconscious and fetch details and count the turns. Whereas if I were to just ask you “where do you work/study”, you could just recite an answer at me with a minimum of thought. If you’re genuinely listening to your emotions, it should feel more like the former than the latter.
2) If you have a guess of what an emotion might be about but aren’t quite sure, there’s a certain mental move that you can use to test it. It’s kind of like taking your guess and “holding it up against” the emotion to see if it resonates. You might get a sense of “This doesn’t resonate at all”, “This is right”, or “This is partially right, but...”. If you get the third one, you can try staying with that and examining it to see if further details emerge.
“The population of the UK is 10,000 people” ″The population of the UK is one billion people”
Both of these are obviously wrong, right? Don’t think about it too hard, you just look at them and your immediate reaction is “That seems fake. This is obviously low/high”
Now lets go roughly halfway in between.
“The population of the UK is half a billion people”
This is still obviously too high, right? You don’t need to think about it, you just look at it and go “I’m sure that’s wrong”
The point here is not to get an accurate estimation of the population of the UK, it’s to draw your attention to the thing you’re doing. There is a feeling of wrongness and too high/too low associated with the statement.
You can continue to do this binary search to get low and high estimates. Say you did it for a while you might get down to:
“The population of the UK is 100 million” (too high, I think?) ”The population of the UK is 50 million” (that sounds a bit low)
“The population of the UK is 75 million” (hmm. Highish I think?) ”The population of the UK is 62.5 million” (IDK, sounds plausible I guess?) - stop here.
So the population of the UK is somewhere between 50 million and 75 million. That’s a pretty decent estimate starting from our original ludicrous one.
The population of the UK is 66.65 million, but that’s not important right now.
The point is that you are doing a thing that lets you intuitively judge the rightness/wrongness of these statements, and by paying attention to that you can learn things.
IME, if you try a statement like “the thing that this emotion is trying to accomplish is X”, you don’t necessarily get a clear sense of wrongness that’s as clear as the one you get with “the population of the UK is 10,000 people”. There can be one, but it’s more subtle and not necessarily one that you’ll have when you’re starting out. At first, it can be more like a lack of resonance/rightness than an active “no”. So it can be more useful to pay attention to whether you are getting a sense of rightness, instead.
3) You’re still going to get it wrong sometimes, especially in situations where you want your emotions to be saying something in particular. Then it’s worth just keeping your eyes open to see what happens when you act on the basis of the assumption that an emotion is telling you something in particular. E.g. you feel vaguely bad and think that it’s because you haven’t seen any friends in a while, so you go see some friends, but then afterward you notice that you still feel vaguely bad. So your guess was probably not right, or at least not the full story.
A lot of good stuff here, especially about the part on being wrong about the emotions having a subtle noticeability. I feel like this supports somewhat tighter cycle times and checking in with subagents more often so one doesn’t spend years chasing the wrong ideas.
This is one of my favorite sequences on this site and I’m quite glad to see a new entry. I do have a question regarding the last section:
How does one gain confidence that the read on their own emotions is an accurate description of the message they’re trying to communicate? That is, how can one be more sure that they’re actually listening to their emotions and not just assuming?
For example, many of us might be familiar with the type that listens to half of your description of an issue, assumes they immediately understand it perfectly, then gives you advice that doesn’t match your problem at all. (“I’ve been feeling sad late-” “oh yeah I know, man. Just get some more sleep, you’ll perk right up!”) How do I know I’m not doing that to my own emotions?
It seems like the Rationalist approach to psychology has reached some incredibly important yet very subtle places where the valuable signals we want to pay attention to (i.e. true intent of emotion) are incredibly weak. People wander the metaphorical wilderness for decades without truly seeing what’s going on in their heads, many who regularly go to therapy. I’m afraid of ascribing the completely wrong message to what my emotions are trying to tell me and getting stuck examining the wrong model for large parts of my life.
Anyway, an excellent post in an excellent sequence. Your work and Valentine’s work, more than many others here, have made things make sense to me. Thank you!
Thank you!
It can be difficult! Some thoughts:
1) There’s a certain difference in what it feels like to intellectualize or guess what your emotions are saying, as opposed to actually listening to them. @pjeby had a nice exercise about this in “A Minute to Unlimit You”, which is to ask yourself how many left turns you need to make to get from your home to your school or place of work.
That’s something you don’t have a cached intellectual answer for, so you have to actually reach into your subconscious and fetch details and count the turns. Whereas if I were to just ask you “where do you work/study”, you could just recite an answer at me with a minimum of thought. If you’re genuinely listening to your emotions, it should feel more like the former than the latter.
2) If you have a guess of what an emotion might be about but aren’t quite sure, there’s a certain mental move that you can use to test it. It’s kind of like taking your guess and “holding it up against” the emotion to see if it resonates. You might get a sense of “This doesn’t resonate at all”, “This is right”, or “This is partially right, but...”. If you get the third one, you can try staying with that and examining it to see if further details emerge.
This Twitter thread is talking about something related:
IME, if you try a statement like “the thing that this emotion is trying to accomplish is X”, you don’t necessarily get a clear sense of wrongness that’s as clear as the one you get with “the population of the UK is 10,000 people”. There can be one, but it’s more subtle and not necessarily one that you’ll have when you’re starting out. At first, it can be more like a lack of resonance/rightness than an active “no”. So it can be more useful to pay attention to whether you are getting a sense of rightness, instead.
3) You’re still going to get it wrong sometimes, especially in situations where you want your emotions to be saying something in particular. Then it’s worth just keeping your eyes open to see what happens when you act on the basis of the assumption that an emotion is telling you something in particular. E.g. you feel vaguely bad and think that it’s because you haven’t seen any friends in a while, so you go see some friends, but then afterward you notice that you still feel vaguely bad. So your guess was probably not right, or at least not the full story.
A lot of good stuff here, especially about the part on being wrong about the emotions having a subtle noticeability. I feel like this supports somewhat tighter cycle times and checking in with subagents more often so one doesn’t spend years chasing the wrong ideas.
Thanks for the reply!