Really great post! The concept I have in my head looks broadly-applicable though slippery
The section below sounded a lot to me like “you form a model from a set of words, and then later on you Directly Observe the Territory™, and this shifts the mental model associated with the words in an important way”.
Running on this model, I think a lot of the sequences was like this for me—it wasn’t until 1-2 years after reading them that I noticed concrete, major changes in my behaviour. Possibly this time was spent observing the part of the territory I call my brain.
But in fact, there really is a kind of deeper, fuller, contextualized understanding, a kind of getting-it-in-your-bones, that often doesn’t show up until later. Because when you first hear the wisdom, it doesn’t really matter to you. You’re usually not in the sort of situation where the wisdom applies, so it’s just this random fact floating around in your brain.
Often, it’ll be years later, and you’ll be in the middle of a big, stressful situation yourself, and that little snippet of wisdom will float back up into your thoughts, and you’ll go “ohhhhhhhh, so that’s what that means!”
You already knew what it meant in a sort of perfunctory, surface-level, explicit sense, but you didn’t really get it, on a deep level, until there was some raw experiential data for it to hook up to.
Really great post! The concept I have in my head looks broadly-applicable though slippery
The section below sounded a lot to me like “you form a model from a set of words, and then later on you Directly Observe the Territory™, and this shifts the mental model associated with the words in an important way”.
Running on this model, I think a lot of the sequences was like this for me—it wasn’t until 1-2 years after reading them that I noticed concrete, major changes in my behaviour. Possibly this time was spent observing the part of the territory I call my brain.
But in fact, there really is a kind of deeper, fuller, contextualized understanding, a kind of getting-it-in-your-bones, that often doesn’t show up until later. Because when you first hear the wisdom, it doesn’t really matter to you. You’re usually not in the sort of situation where the wisdom applies, so it’s just this random fact floating around in your brain.
Often, it’ll be years later, and you’ll be in the middle of a big, stressful situation yourself, and that little snippet of wisdom will float back up into your thoughts, and you’ll go “ohhhhhhhh, so that’s what that means!”
You already knew what it meant in a sort of perfunctory, surface-level, explicit sense, but you didn’t really get it, on a deep level, until there was some raw experiential data for it to hook up to.