I think when I was growing up I did something importantly different from either tracking or avoiding. Broadly, tracking is model-based reinforcement learning and what I did was model-free reinforcement learning: I wasn’t modeling the minds of the people around me in very much detail, but I did try on different social strategies and looked at relatively simple reward signals to determine if they were working, e.g. how much people around me were laughing. Eventually I learned I could get people to laugh mostly by not censoring myself, so that’s what I did for most of high school and college.
In general I get the overall sense that this post is moderately typical minding, but I’m okay with that.
I did a lot of this too, and ended up constructing a simulation of myself as a social layer. I recently switched to a more integrated approach, and my current development edges are around figuring out when being open and honest is the wrong choice.
Good point. In hindsight, I somewhat wish I had described a more broad version of the hyper-attentive strategy (rather than saying what people do is directly try to model the minds of other people).
Now that you mention it, I think hyper-attentive people usually use the model-free reinforcement learning version of it. Or the model they use is some kind of ‘average person’ or ‘what the culture says the model should be’.
And if they did stop to model the real individual (rather than an average or cultural version of them), they’d deal much better. (I’ve noticed this in myself: I’ll be modelling the social version of a person, but if I stop to think what that individual is like, it’s much less scary and easier to think about.)
Nice post!
I think when I was growing up I did something importantly different from either tracking or avoiding. Broadly, tracking is model-based reinforcement learning and what I did was model-free reinforcement learning: I wasn’t modeling the minds of the people around me in very much detail, but I did try on different social strategies and looked at relatively simple reward signals to determine if they were working, e.g. how much people around me were laughing. Eventually I learned I could get people to laugh mostly by not censoring myself, so that’s what I did for most of high school and college.
In general I get the overall sense that this post is moderately typical minding, but I’m okay with that.
I did a lot of this too, and ended up constructing a simulation of myself as a social layer. I recently switched to a more integrated approach, and my current development edges are around figuring out when being open and honest is the wrong choice.
Good point. In hindsight, I somewhat wish I had described a more broad version of the hyper-attentive strategy (rather than saying what people do is directly try to model the minds of other people).
Now that you mention it, I think hyper-attentive people usually use the model-free reinforcement learning version of it. Or the model they use is some kind of ‘average person’ or ‘what the culture says the model should be’.
And if they did stop to model the real individual (rather than an average or cultural version of them), they’d deal much better. (I’ve noticed this in myself: I’ll be modelling the social version of a person, but if I stop to think what that individual is like, it’s much less scary and easier to think about.)