“You can’t rely on your perspective / Everything is up for grabs.” All of your mental content—ideas, concepts, motions, etc.--are potentially good (and should be leaned more heavily on, overriding others) / bad (and should be ignored / downvoted / routed around / destroyed / pushed against), and more openness to change is better, and there’s no solid place from which you can stand and see things. Of course, this is in many ways true and useful; but leaning into this creates much more room for others to selectively up/downvote stuff in you to avoid you reaching conclusions they don’t want you to reach; or more likely, up/downvote conclusions, and have you rearrange yourself to harmonize with those judgements.
Trolling Hope placed in the project / leadership. Like: I care deeply that things go well in the world; the only way I concretely see that might happen, is through this project; so if this project is doomed, then there’s no Hope; so I may as well bet everything on worlds where the project isn’t doomed; so worlds where the project is doomed are irrelevant; so I don’t see / consider / admit X if X implies that the project is doomed, since X is entirely about irrelevant worlds.
Emotional reward conditioning. (This one is simple or obvious, but I think it’s probably actually a significant portion of many of these sorts of situations.) When you start to say information I don’t like, I’m angry at you, annoyed, frustrated, dismissive, scornful, derisive, insulting, blank-faced, uninterested, condescending, disgusted, creeped out, pained, hurt, etc. When you start to hide information I don’t like, or expound the opposite, I’m pleasant, endeared, happy, admiring, excited, etc. etc. Conditioning shades into + overlaps other tactics like stonewalling (blank-faced, aiming at learned helplessness), shaming, and running intereference (changing the subject), but conditioning has a particular systematic effect of making you “walk on eggshells” about certain things and feeling relief / safety when you stick to appropriate narratives. And this systematic effect can be very strong and persist even when you’re away from the people who put it there, if you didn’t perfectly compartmentalize how-to-please-them from everything else in your mind.
“You can’t rely on your perspective / Everything is up for grabs.” All of your mental content—ideas, concepts, motions, etc.--are potentially good (and should be leaned more heavily on, overriding others) / bad (and should be ignored / downvoted / routed around / destroyed / pushed against), and more openness to change is better, and there’s no solid place from which you can stand and see things. Of course, this is in many ways true and useful; but leaning into this creates much more room for others to selectively up/downvote stuff in you to avoid you reaching conclusions they don’t want you to reach; or more likely, up/downvote conclusions, and have you rearrange yourself to harmonize with those judgements.
Trolling Hope placed in the project / leadership. Like: I care deeply that things go well in the world; the only way I concretely see that might happen, is through this project; so if this project is doomed, then there’s no Hope; so I may as well bet everything on worlds where the project isn’t doomed; so worlds where the project is doomed are irrelevant; so I don’t see / consider / admit X if X implies that the project is doomed, since X is entirely about irrelevant worlds.
Emotional reward conditioning. (This one is simple or obvious, but I think it’s probably actually a significant portion of many of these sorts of situations.) When you start to say information I don’t like, I’m angry at you, annoyed, frustrated, dismissive, scornful, derisive, insulting, blank-faced, uninterested, condescending, disgusted, creeped out, pained, hurt, etc. When you start to hide information I don’t like, or expound the opposite, I’m pleasant, endeared, happy, admiring, excited, etc. etc. Conditioning shades into + overlaps other tactics like stonewalling (blank-faced, aiming at learned helplessness), shaming, and running intereference (changing the subject), but conditioning has a particular systematic effect of making you “walk on eggshells” about certain things and feeling relief / safety when you stick to appropriate narratives. And this systematic effect can be very strong and persist even when you’re away from the people who put it there, if you didn’t perfectly compartmentalize how-to-please-them from everything else in your mind.