analyze it the way you would if someone else had written it
Personal experience suggests this is freakishly hard without a lot of practice, which can mostly be obtained by writing up your introspection for public consumption and getting good, honest feedback. This typically results in improved writing skill. (I can’t say for sure it directly results in introspective skill if you’re not doing it primarily with that purpose in mind.)
I’d be genuinely curious to know, did that come easy for you before you started writing for an audience?
I’ll hazard one reason why the later posts in your sequence are maybe not having as much success as you were expecting: as I see it, you’re failing to follow through on an implicit promise made by the introductory post, which stated “I’ve made it a project to increase my luminosity as much as possible”, implying that you would be recounting personal experience with these various tools.
The Grue post had some personal insights, such as that you hate surprises. Let There Be Light had some tips from personal experience. The ABCs had none, and used mostly the “you” form for introducing examples. It’s something of a paradox for a sequence on luminosity to disclose so little about yourself.
I have actually not included any insights about myself that came as a result of my luminosity project. My hatred of surprises, for instance, was manifestly obvious; only the exact mental background, which I did not publicly disclose in the post, was dug up when I started introspecting seriously. The trouble with including personal disclosure is that it would feel uncomfortably like bragging to advertise things I like about myself; meanwhile, things I don’t like about myself tend to be obsolete by the time I’ve properly understood them because I can fix them, and the ones I can’t or haven’t fixed yet wouldn’t be very good advertising (“I discovered I have the following nasty trait which is still there, and you can too!”).
In the interest of disclosure, I will brag some:
I have raised my happiness set point. This requires some maintenance work, but at a “neutral” time now I am happier than I was at a “neutral” time five years ago.
When I identify a mood as being non-endorsed, decidedly useless, and unpleasant, I can often simply get rid of it. This takes a few moments now, although if I leave them to fester too long it can require a night’s sleep.
I can, with some concerted effort, enforce my desire to like certain people (whether this be for comfort reasons, i.e. I’ll have to be around them a lot, or for practical reasons, i.e. it would be instrumental to befriend them). This is more difficult with some people than others but I have yet to try very hard to like someone without being able to sincerely do it.
So, this comment looks kinda popular. What do people think of my writing a sequence followup with a more detailed look at the above “success stories” from my own project? I’m skeptical of it being very instrumentally useful, since I think lots of it is idiosyncratic, but if it’d be useful to present myself as a toy example for people to anchor the ideas to, I’m willing.
I think it would be interesting, regardless of whether it’s useful. I’d also like to hear about some non-success stories. It’s good to know what to avoid or the limits of one’s tools as well.
In re posting about your process of gaining and using luminosity: I think it would be useful and/or interesting to see how you work on a problem while it’s still a problem. There may be details of what you were thinking which get smoothed out when a problem is solved.
And as for appearing to be boasting, I should hope that in this crowd, the truth is its own defense.
That didn’t strike me as bragging at all! I responded to it emotionally as if it were an assurance that I, too, can improve myself in these ways.
I can’t guarantee that I’d respond the same way if your top-level posts contained such advertisements. Perhaps reading it in a comment makes it automatically okay.
I can, with some concerted effort, enforce my desire to like certain people (whether this be for comfort reasons, i.e. I’ll have to be around them a lot, or for practical reasons, i.e. it would be instrumental to befriend them). This is more difficult with some people than others but I have yet to try very hard to like someone without being able to sincerely do it.
I have been able to do this for a number of years. Most people don’t seem to realize how useful it is to be in control of who you like/dislike. Disliking someone is uncomfortable and it generally doesn’t help. Congratulations on teaching yourself to do this; I expect it’s difficult when it doesn’t already come naturally.
I went and tracked down the link after I made this comment. I’m not sure if I use the same strategy as you...a lot of the time, I don’t really need to. I’m not easily annoyed, and my annoyance set-point is pretty malleable if I want it to be. Generally the way I go about liking someone is by having at least one in-depth conversation with them, whether about science or politics or their romantic life or drama at work. Once I convince myself that they’re not a shallow, robotic automaton after all, once I can convince myself that they’re like me, it feels natural to empathize rather than judge when they do something annoying… But like I said, this has come fairly easily to me. (Not to say that I don’t ever feel annoyed at people, or complain about them to friends and family. I do, more than I should. But when I’m actually in the room with them, I can almost always get along civilly and even enjoy myself.)
Personal experience suggests this is freakishly hard without a lot of practice, which can mostly be obtained by writing up your introspection for public consumption and getting good, honest feedback. This typically results in improved writing skill. (I can’t say for sure it directly results in introspective skill if you’re not doing it primarily with that purpose in mind.)
I’d be genuinely curious to know, did that come easy for you before you started writing for an audience?
I’ll hazard one reason why the later posts in your sequence are maybe not having as much success as you were expecting: as I see it, you’re failing to follow through on an implicit promise made by the introductory post, which stated “I’ve made it a project to increase my luminosity as much as possible”, implying that you would be recounting personal experience with these various tools.
The Grue post had some personal insights, such as that you hate surprises. Let There Be Light had some tips from personal experience. The ABCs had none, and used mostly the “you” form for introducing examples. It’s something of a paradox for a sequence on luminosity to disclose so little about yourself.
I have actually not included any insights about myself that came as a result of my luminosity project. My hatred of surprises, for instance, was manifestly obvious; only the exact mental background, which I did not publicly disclose in the post, was dug up when I started introspecting seriously. The trouble with including personal disclosure is that it would feel uncomfortably like bragging to advertise things I like about myself; meanwhile, things I don’t like about myself tend to be obsolete by the time I’ve properly understood them because I can fix them, and the ones I can’t or haven’t fixed yet wouldn’t be very good advertising (“I discovered I have the following nasty trait which is still there, and you can too!”).
In the interest of disclosure, I will brag some:
I have raised my happiness set point. This requires some maintenance work, but at a “neutral” time now I am happier than I was at a “neutral” time five years ago.
When I identify a mood as being non-endorsed, decidedly useless, and unpleasant, I can often simply get rid of it. This takes a few moments now, although if I leave them to fester too long it can require a night’s sleep.
I can, with some concerted effort, enforce my desire to like certain people (whether this be for comfort reasons, i.e. I’ll have to be around them a lot, or for practical reasons, i.e. it would be instrumental to befriend them). This is more difficult with some people than others but I have yet to try very hard to like someone without being able to sincerely do it.
So, this comment looks kinda popular. What do people think of my writing a sequence followup with a more detailed look at the above “success stories” from my own project? I’m skeptical of it being very instrumentally useful, since I think lots of it is idiosyncratic, but if it’d be useful to present myself as a toy example for people to anchor the ideas to, I’m willing.
I think it would be interesting, regardless of whether it’s useful. I’d also like to hear about some non-success stories. It’s good to know what to avoid or the limits of one’s tools as well.
In re posting about your process of gaining and using luminosity: I think it would be useful and/or interesting to see how you work on a problem while it’s still a problem. There may be details of what you were thinking which get smoothed out when a problem is solved.
And as for appearing to be boasting, I should hope that in this crowd, the truth is its own defense.
That didn’t strike me as bragging at all! I responded to it emotionally as if it were an assurance that I, too, can improve myself in these ways.
I can’t guarantee that I’d respond the same way if your top-level posts contained such advertisements. Perhaps reading it in a comment makes it automatically okay.
I have been able to do this for a number of years. Most people don’t seem to realize how useful it is to be in control of who you like/dislike. Disliking someone is uncomfortable and it generally doesn’t help. Congratulations on teaching yourself to do this; I expect it’s difficult when it doesn’t already come naturally.
If you didn’t see it already, I wrote a whole post about that.
I went and tracked down the link after I made this comment. I’m not sure if I use the same strategy as you...a lot of the time, I don’t really need to. I’m not easily annoyed, and my annoyance set-point is pretty malleable if I want it to be. Generally the way I go about liking someone is by having at least one in-depth conversation with them, whether about science or politics or their romantic life or drama at work. Once I convince myself that they’re not a shallow, robotic automaton after all, once I can convince myself that they’re like me, it feels natural to empathize rather than judge when they do something annoying… But like I said, this has come fairly easily to me. (Not to say that I don’t ever feel annoyed at people, or complain about them to friends and family. I do, more than I should. But when I’m actually in the room with them, I can almost always get along civilly and even enjoy myself.)
A few weeks’ delay usually helps.