There is a trade-off, of course: your reaction is fixed by training and it’s not necessarily appropriate to the specific situation.
Another point is that I am not sure you’re speaking of the same thing when you talk about the training of instinctual response in martial arts and about taking on particular roles. Taking on a role is basically an exercise in self-perception, it is sometimes expressed in terms of wearing a particular hat. It’s not that you need to react so fast that you conscious mind doesn’t have time to get involved, it’s more like you pre-select a viewpoint from which your conscious mind will evaluate the situation and choose what to do.
While true most of the time this doesn’t always seem to apply. Every now and then I find myself in a discussion with my close friends defending some viewpoint which doesn’t quite make as much sense as I would have liked it to make, and the times I noticed this in time and tried to figure out why I was taking those viewpoints I noticed that they were the natural viewpoints for my role at that moment, which would explain a lot.
In other words: switching roles can be hard, sometimes while ‘playing a role’ the conscious mind need not be involved too much. This is, of course, precisely the reason to adapt roles.
Yes. On thing that happens a lot for me is that I fall into the role of Defense Counsel—the role, not the profession, i.e. defending those absent or otherwise unable to defend themselves. Say somebody attacks a person or viewpoint. It’s quite quite likely that I will fall into the role of the defender of that person or viewpoint—even though I don’t agree with that viewpoint at all!
You might want to work on using role that “notices when argues for a side instead of evaluating for which side to argue”. From rationality habits this might be one relatively simple to implement.
Of course I have to work on it as well
I now notice when I do argue for the absent side and make this clear. Before I just assumed that other people would take arguments as elucidations of facts as I do—and then it doesn’t matter who takes whose ‘side’.
There is a trade-off, of course: your reaction is fixed by training and it’s not necessarily appropriate to the specific situation.
Another point is that I am not sure you’re speaking of the same thing when you talk about the training of instinctual response in martial arts and about taking on particular roles. Taking on a role is basically an exercise in self-perception, it is sometimes expressed in terms of wearing a particular hat. It’s not that you need to react so fast that you conscious mind doesn’t have time to get involved, it’s more like you pre-select a viewpoint from which your conscious mind will evaluate the situation and choose what to do.
While true most of the time this doesn’t always seem to apply. Every now and then I find myself in a discussion with my close friends defending some viewpoint which doesn’t quite make as much sense as I would have liked it to make, and the times I noticed this in time and tried to figure out why I was taking those viewpoints I noticed that they were the natural viewpoints for my role at that moment, which would explain a lot.
In other words: switching roles can be hard, sometimes while ‘playing a role’ the conscious mind need not be involved too much. This is, of course, precisely the reason to adapt roles.
Yes. On thing that happens a lot for me is that I fall into the role of Defense Counsel—the role, not the profession, i.e. defending those absent or otherwise unable to defend themselves. Say somebody attacks a person or viewpoint. It’s quite quite likely that I will fall into the role of the defender of that person or viewpoint—even though I don’t agree with that viewpoint at all!
You might want to work on using role that “notices when argues for a side instead of evaluating for which side to argue”. From rationality habits this might be one relatively simple to implement. Of course I have to work on it as well
I now notice when I do argue for the absent side and make this clear. Before I just assumed that other people would take arguments as elucidations of facts as I do—and then it doesn’t matter who takes whose ‘side’.