Table of Contents

Or, 78 sazen to kick off the new year

I’m currently writing a nonfiction book, wherein each chapter is a (relatively) important or transformative concept (according to me). Think stuff like “the way supply and demand interact to influence prices and the flow of goods,” or “how differential rates of survival drive evolution,” or “many interpersonal conflicts arise from an unrecognized mismatch between ask culture and guess culture.” Stuff that alters your understanding of the world around you, lets you see the Matrix.

In particular, the book is trying to lean toward lessons and ideas that are somewhat absent or undervalued in our culture—stuff that your average high schooler would benefit from knowing, but is unlikely to be told growing up in America in the 21st century. Many of the insights are ones that I’ve pieced together myself, which I am constantly dribbling into my essays and workshops and social interactions—elements of my P-culture, models and concepts that I find myself returning to over and over and over again.

What follows is something like the table of contents for that book. I’ve tried to boil each chapter down into a brief or abstract—100-or-so words that match the concept as it lives, in my mind. It’s sort of a cheat sheet to all the collected wisdom of Homo Sabiens.

However, like a cheat sheet, none of the descriptions below are complete. In this extremely abbreviated form, they’re more like koans or sazen—rounded-off and oversimplified, vulnerable to misinterpretation, at risk of sliding toward nearby conceptual attractors, probably nowhere near enough to communicate the idea to a beginner.

(Another way to say this is, I’m confident that each of these is pointing at a true thing, but the thing you come to understand, as a result of reading my words may not be true, and may not immediately make sense. Caveat lector.)

But some of you out there might be struggling with a problem, or teetering on the cusp of epiphany, and might find among these seventy-eight abstracts something like a seed crystal that can trigger a phase change. Some of you might store these words away in some dusty corner at the back of your mind, only to have them pop into usefulness years from now.

(And some of you might simply like very condensed lists of blunt assertions with no subsequent justification or elaboration. No kink shaming.)

If I were you, I would get a bowl of grapes or almonds or something, and after each sazen, I would pause, and eat one, chewing and swallowing and taking a sip from my drink and letting things settle before moving on to the next. These tiny snippets are already at risk of not sinking in; if you gulp them down all in a row they will almost certainly do you zero good. Linger. Sip. Savor. Muse.

(Or not. I’m not a cop. But there really is reason to believe that a slow and languid reading will be more valuable to most people than a zippy skippy gulping-down.)

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1.

People say words for reasons; almost any time that a person is saying words at you (or writing them down for you to read) it’s because they expect or hope that those words will change you in some way. Draw your attention somewhere, convince you of something, shift you away from what you would have said or thought or done by default. Words are an attempt at causing something to happen to and in the listener. It’s worth keeping this in mind, especially if someone seems particularly eager to fill you with their words—what might they be trying to accomplish, and do you want to cooperate with that, or not?

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2.

The words and concepts that you use shape the way you think (and are shaped by the way you think, in turn). Distinctions that you track in your head will make their way into your speech; distinctions that you make in your speech (because you’re supposed to or because the people around you insist on it or because you’re learning the jargon of a new subculture) can teach you new concepts and new ways of seeing the world. Be willing to adopt new ways of talking that improve your ability to think; be willing to invent new ways of talking that reflect epiphanies that you’ve had. Don’t shy away from terminology just because it’s nonstandard or because the other monkeys look at you funny for it. (More on this here.)

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3.

Pithy insights that people offer you will often not click right away, and that’s okay, actually. Wisdom of the sort that gets repeated in catchy phrases doesn’t usually manage to sink in just from the catchy phrase. Instead, what happens is, that catchy phrase lays the groundwork for you to click into the epiphany more easily, later. It makes it easier for you to pick up on a pattern after just one or two rounds, rather than having to do all of the discovery yourself. (This chapter is where the word “sazen” came from/is introduced.)

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4.

From the inside, being wrong feels the same as being right. Absent some additional skills and some serious practice, how sure you feel about something is actually pretty weak evidence of how likely that thing is to be true. Or, to put it another way: if you’d feel confident in the world where some of your assumptions and reasoning were flawed, and you’d also feel confident in the world where your assumptions and reasoning were sound, then you need something besides the feeling of confidence to tell you which world you’re in.

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5.

No one can make you do anything; they can only manipulate the costs and consequences to try to get you to take the option they want you to take. Sometimes, the best option available to you is terrible—there’s no rule that says you have to be offered good choices. But even if every possible action is awful, you’re still free to choose the least awful from among them.

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6.

There’s a big difference between how it feels to count down from perfect, noticing every little flaw or mistake and just how far you have to go, and how it feels to count up from zero, celebrating every little bit of progress and comparing backwards to how things would have been if you hadn’t tried at all. Often, people who don’t know the difference will ask for one and receive the other and then everything feels weird and bad and wrong somehow (though they can’t quite put their finger on why). Counting down and counting up are different tools, and they’re each appropriate in different situations.

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7.

Bets are not beliefs. If a bag contains 51% red marbles and 49% green ones, you should bet that the next marble out of the bag will be red, even though you don’t exactly believe or expect that it is. People often get their bets and their beliefs mixed up—they won’t make a move or take an action until they’re certain, or they’ll take an action and then trick themselves into really believing that it was definitely the right move and things will definitely work out. The truth is, you need to be able to act, even when you’re uncertain, and you need to be able to maintain uncertainty, even while you act.

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8.

Relatedly: the truth is usually not halfway between the two sides. If one person says a thing happened and the other person says the thing didn’t happen, it’s usually not the case that it kind of happened. People often treat a person who’s 50% likely to be guilty and 50% likely to be completely innocent as if there’s a 100% chance that they’re sort of sketchy, and this is largely a mistake.

Most of the time people only think of one hypothesis, one explanation, one plan. You should always have at least two—if things are how they seem to me in this moment, I’ll do X, but if things aren’t how they seem, then what’s the next best explanation, and what would I do then?

If you only have one model, you’re likely to fall prey to confirmation bias and miss lots of clues and opportunities. If you keep at least two theories running at all times, you’re much less likely to get tripped up and do something you end up regretting. (The essay on this one is here.)

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9.

Falsification is vastly more powerful than confirmation. If a rule says that X can happen, then seeing X is a bit of evidence in favor of the rule. If the rule says that X can’t happen, then seeing X demolishes the rule entirely. Similarly, seeing someone do something that pretty much fits with their character and your previous experiences of them doesn’t mean much; seeing someone do something you were really confident they would never do is a large update about that person.

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10.

If you believe that X is true because you see A, B, and C out in the world, and you would expect to see A, B, and C if X were true…

But also, if you go back and start over from the beginning and assume that X is false, and after thinking it through you realize that you would still expect to see A, B, and C…

Red alert! A, B, and C are not, in this case, evidence for X. They’re not reasons to believe X, over not-believing it. Every bit of evidence you come across is evidence for multiple theories—your friend telling you your hair looks good is evidence that your hair looks good, but it’s also evidence that your friend is a liar, and it’s also evidence that your friend is just a poor judge of hair, and it’s also evidence that there’s a prank being played, etc.

The question to ask is, which hypothesis is your evidence most strongly supportive of.

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11.

In a very real sense, what your brain is is a turbocharged jump-to-conclusions machine. Primates evolved in an environment where being an overactive pattern-matcher was heavily rewarded, and so now you are left with a brain that sees all sorts of patterns that aren’t there, and makes all sorts of intuitive leaps without sufficient justification. Your brain is optimized for telling stories—especially stories that involve agents taking action and things happening on purpose. Many of those happen to be right, but many of them are wrong, too (and you can’t tell which is which from the inside).

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12.

A lot of the time, when people are shocked or angry or confused, what’s happening is that their mental picture of the world is being challenged or broken. One of those stories their brain was telling them turned out to be false, and they forgot that it was only a story, only an approximation, not the actual real thing that was going on. When our stories get contradicted, it often feels like reality is shifting out from under you—like the rules are getting broken, like somebody betrayed you. It can feel disastrous or disorienting or even violating, when something you really thought was true, really thought you could depend upon, turns out to be false. But it’s important (and helpful) in such cases to recognize that the only thing that’s changing is you’re swapping out a false story for a true (or at least less false) one. Disillusionment can be deeply uncomfortable, but it’s generally better than continuing to be wrong.

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13.

A surprisingly large amount of both [your own psychological health] and [your ability to work smoothly with others] is expectation management. If you can figure out what to expect—

(I mean really figure out what you should actually expect, not just tell pleasant stories that will lead to later disillusionment.)

—and communicate that to others, you can handle all sorts of projects and endeavors without losing your footing mentally and emotionally. People will endure all sorts of unpleasantness (and smile during it) if they know what it’s for and how bad it will be, and go into it with their eyes open. Setbacks and defeats, in particular, hurt much less if they’re anticipated, and can be folded into a larger overall plan that still feels like it has a chance of working.

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14.

A lot of other people are really, truly, genuinely different from you, such that if you try to understand [the inner contents of their mind and soul and emotions] by figuring out how you’d have to feel in order to output [their actions and reactions and words and tone and body language], you will be completely wrong. You simply cannot know the inner shape of someone else’s thoughts and feelings by working backwards from their actions (even though that kind of working backwards is a great way to generate hypotheses about those thoughts and feelings).

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15.

The future will resemble the past, unless there’s a specific reason for it not to. Yes, things change, and people can change, but usually they don’t. If you’re in a situation where you’re trying to make guesses about what will happen, in the future, assume that things will work the way they always have, and that people will behave the way they always have, unless you have some kind of evidence that you should expect something different.

Conversely: if things are already in flux, then predicting that the future will resemble the past is just about the most wrong you can be. If the whole game is shifting and changing underneath you, then “next year will look just like last year” is an extremely specific and extremely unlikely prediction.

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16.

Emerging from the combination of the previous two: you can’t actually ever truly 100% know the inner contents of someone else’s soul, and you shouldn’t bother to try. There are just too many ways for people’s outsides to disresemble their insides. Instead, what you should do is keep track of how they respond to various situations, and notice the patterns in their observable behavior, and model them as if they are the kind of person who would do the kind of stuff you’ve already seen them do. But it’s important to keep in mind that this will always be an imperfect, incomplete picture, and you can always be surprised—just because you’ve never seen them do X doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t. It’s just that, every time you see them pass up an opportunity to X, it’s less likely that they’ll do X in the future. It’s uncomfortable to admit that this is the best we can do, but it is the best we can do.

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17.

You have something like an autopilot—the vast majority of your actions aren’t deeply considered but are knee-jerk reflexes, if-then patterns completing themselves. Which means that if you want to have a different outcome than what’s happened in the past, you (somehow) need to do one of three things: change the “ifs” so that you end up with different “thens,” change the “thens” that result from a given “if,” or build into your autopilot something that will turn the autopilot off, at the right moment, so that you can assume conscious, manual control. (The essay for this one is here.)

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18.

You can (at least somewhat) control your emotions. You can learn the triggers and preconditions that shift your mind into various states (like happy, or focused, or energized, or curious, or empathetic, or rigorous/precise) and then cause yourself to shift into those states, and this is a skill that you can absolutely get better at with practice, even if you’re not good at it right away.

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19.

You can have feelings about your feelings (e.g. feeling embarrassed about feeling mad), and you can have feelings about your feelings about your feelings, and you can have feelings about those feelings, too. Another way to say this is that your feelings about something can be wrong—not in the sense that it’s productive to feel guilty about them or yell at yourself, but in the sense that it’s possible to have the wrong reaction to what’s happening around you, according to your own values. A wrong feeling doesn’t go away just because you’ve decided it’s not the right response to be having, but you can notice that something odd is happening, and intervene.

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20.

“Repair or replace this broken system” and “figure out how to survive and get what you want out of this broken system” are two very different goals/modes, and most of the time you should consciously decide which orientation to adopt. It’s very, very rare that you can effectively pursue both of them at once, and a lot of people burn a lot of value by sort of flopping back and between them. At any given time, you should either be the principled rebel taking on the bad guys or the pragmatic realist who’s keeping their head down—not both.

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21.

Don’t put your win condition inside someone else’s head. If what it takes for you to feel settled or okay in a situation is for another person to think something, or feel something, or do something, then that person can deny you your health and happiness and satisfaction just by being themselves. They don’t even have to be mean or antagonistic. And if they are mean or antagonistic, they can just willfully withhold the thing you’re seeking forever.

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22.

A good bet doesn’t become a bad one just because you lost; a bad bet doesn’t become a good one just because you got lucky. What matters is what you knew at the time, and whether you made good decisions given that. It’s possible to make no mistakes and still lose; it’s possible to do everything wrong and still win. And it’s possible to learn from surprising failures and random victories, and make your future plans even better. But it’s not the case that every failure means you did something wrong, and it’s not the case that every victory means you did something right.

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23.

Lots of things exist behind an event horizon—there’s no way to know what they’re like, unless you take an irreversible step, and go to a place that you can’t necessarily get back from. “Hard drugs” is the obvious example of this—there are certain drugs where the only way to know what they feel like is to expose yourself to the possibility of a life-destroying addiction. But many other things are similar. If someone warns you that you’re about to cross an event horizon, take them seriously, and think it through.

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24.

When people (especially groups of people, like a company or a whole society) set out to solve a problem, they almost always create new problems, with their solution. With any luck, the total amount of problem is smaller—the new problem is less of a problem than the original one was. But usually something new goes wrong, and then when people set out to fix that, they create another new problem, and so on. Be wary of claims that X will solve Y completely, with zero side effects; instead, try to be strategic about which problems you will trade for which other (hopefully lesser) problems.

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25.

The personal boundaries that society sets and enforces tend to be cautious/conservative, relative to most people’s needs. That means that, for most people (though definitely not all people) there’s space between the standard social boundary and their own personal boundaries. Playing around in that space is deeply nourishing for a lot of people—it’s important to feel alive and seen and touched and interacted-with in the space outside of your personal boundaries, and not feel like there’s a ten-foot bubble separating you from everyone else.

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26.

There is an amount of boundary violation (of your real, actual, personal boundaries, not of the socially mandated boundary) that is healthy, and that amount is greater than zero. If you have too much boundary violation in your life, you take real damage and become traumatized, but if you have too little, you atrophy and get the socio-emotional equivalent of wild autoimmune disorders. You want just a smidge of damage and bruises and unpleasant surprises, not literally none of those things.

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27.

Emerging from the combination of the previous two: if someone treats you in a way that is appropriate to treat an average/unremarkable member of your society, and thereby accidentally and unknowingly violates some unstated boundary that you have, or triggers some unusual sensitivity, this person has done nothing wrong and is not morally culpable (the first time). Expecting others to pre-guess and preemptively conform to unusual sensitivities is unsustainable and paralyzing, on the societal level, and punishing people for failing to cringe-in-advance is almost as bad as knowingly transgressing an explicit boundary.

Another way to say this is “we should make society safe and livable for people with glass bones, but we shouldn’t cancel all sports because sports aren’t safe for people with glass bones. Most people don’t have glass bones, and what’s good and healthy for them should count, too.” This is a metaphor in addition to being literally true.

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28.

Sometimes, people will insist that everyone is flawed or terrible in a particular way, and it’s because they would be deeply embarrassed or ashamed or otherwise upset if they had to face up to the fact that nope, actually, it’s just them; they’re unusually bad in this particular way and most people don’t have this flaw.

Similarly, sometimes people will be blind to a particular flaw or mistake for years, and then finally see it and start to fix it, and they will immediately assume that everyone else also has this flaw and also just isn’t aware of it.

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29.

People will often interpret every action around them as if the social impacts of that action were the intended effects of that action. Some people are so stuck in the social lens that they cannot even conceive that you e.g. were not trying to make them feel bad, you simply weren’t actively trying not to make them feel bad, while you did something else entirely.

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30.

There’s a lot of emotional power in the default, or the apparent zero point. Going from $7 to -$3 feels quite different than going from $27 to $17, or from -$3 to -$13, even though all three changes are the same amount of money. Context matters, and what you’re comparing things to matters, and what you assume or take for granted can color a lot of things pretty heavily. Just noticing that you had an expectation, or believed that you knew what the default state of affairs should be, can go a long way toward moderating big emotional shifts, and when you find yourself in disagreement with others, clarifying what each of you thought was the default (and why) is often a good place to start.

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31.

Intermittent reinforcement is stronger than consistent/reliable reinforcement, because if a brain sees a pattern of Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y N, it’s easy to simply conclude that the good times are over, but if a brain sees Y N N Y Y N Y N N N, then it keeps hoping. In similar fashion, dynamics which have never had a downturn (relationships that have never had a disagreement, businesses which have never had a loss) tend to both feel more fragile and actually be more fragile than those which have practice and experience with course-correction.

It is absolutely critical that you be able to lose points; you have to lose points to learn, deep in your bones, that 1) it's okay, you won't die and the world doesn't end, and 2) there are ways to earn them back! If you never stumble and fall, you will become inordinately afraid of stumbling and falling, to the point that it will prevent you from taking amazing opportunities that come with risk, and from pushing the limits of your capabilities rather than hanging out in the boring safe zone.

And if you never practice correcting mistakes, making it up to people, apologizing, doing extra credit, admitting you were wrong, going the extra mile, etc., then when things blow up for reasons entirely beyond your control (which they undoubtedly will, at some point), you will not have the skill that you need to recover.

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32.

The way canyons get carved is, water washes along a flat plain, and sort of by happenstance it will dig a little bit deeper in a few places. Maybe because the flow was a little stronger there, or because the sand was a little less dense, whatever. Then the next rainfall tends to flow into that existing crack, carving it deeper, and the process feeds on itself.

A similar thing happens with thoughts and behaviors—thinking a thought, or doing an action, makes it more likely that you’ll think that thought or do that thing again, in the future. Neurons firing in a pattern increases the chances of those same neurons firing in that same pattern again. Thus, you should be careful to practice the motions that you actually care about learning, the way that e.g. some schools of meditation recommend letting your thoughts drift and then returning your attention back to your body and your breath. By practicing always the motion of returning, they’re making it easier for the mind to settle into the groove of meditation, whereas if you practiced fighting your own thoughts, or chastising yourself for having gotten distracted, those mental muscles would get stronger.

Another way to put this is, your brain doesn’t know what you “meant” to be practicing. It just learns what you actually practice. Plan accordingly.

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33.

Just because you like something doesn’t make it good, in some fundamental or universal sense; just because you dislike something doesn’t make it bad. There’s a difference between how things seem or feel, to you, and how they actually are. There’s also a difference between how things seem to you and how they seem to everybody, or most people, or the person sitting at the table across from you. Similarly, something seeming good to you doesn’t necessarily mean you need to promote it everywhere or force it on others, and something seeming bad to you doesn’t necessarily mean you need to ban it or root it out or make sure nobody else engages with it. You can just … like things, or dislike them, and leave the rest of the world out of it.

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34.

There’s a difference between the kind of change that comes from iterating toward a goal, and the kind of change that comes from changing the goal. In the pursuit of a given ideal, you might try and discard any number of things, but in a very real sense “nothing has changed,” at least not on a deep level—it’s the same plan, you’re just trying out different strategies as new information comes in. That’s different from actually changing the plan, and aiming for an entirely different target, but unfortunately most people just use the one word, “change,” to refer to both of these, without realizing that they are two different things.

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35.

Most of the time, your first thoughts or responses to a given thing aren’t “you” in the sense of being reflective of your deep character. Your first reactions are often those which were drummed into you by your environment or your upbringing or your biology. What is reflective of your deep character is how you respond to those knee-jerk thoughts and impulses—what your second and third thoughts are, and what you ultimately choose to do. People sometimes get very tangled-up and anxious and guilty about the stuff their brain serves up to them, but this is a mistake. Your brain is laying things out for you, buffet-style. You are the one who picks from among those options.

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36.

It’s possible to be subject to, or influenced by something, without even really being consciously aware of it, such that it colors all of your thoughts and experiences. It’s also possible to eventually become aware of it, and take it as object, i.e. be able to roll it around and think explicitly about it and maybe do things differently, if you feel like it. For example, growing up, people are often subject to their local culture’s way of doing things—what their parents and teachers say, how the other kids behave. The local rules and norms limit what you do and sometimes what you’re even capable of considering, and it’s not until later that you can take a broader perspective and judge whether those norms were good and sensible or not. In general, it’s good to be able to make such a subject-object shift—if something has control of you, it’s good to try to find a way to step outside of that dynamic, and make space for yourself to breathe and think.

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37.

Anyone who can answer literally anything you throw at them, without missing a beat, isn’t really listening. If you can answer literally anything they throw at you without missing a beat, you aren’t really listening. You should be suspicious any time one person in a back-and-forth offers up what they genuinely believe to be a heavy-hitting counterpoint, and the other person instantly and effortlessly rebuts it without even having to stop and think. The set of dismissals that someone can come up with in a split second contains way more [generalized all-purpose weapons] than it does [custom responses that genuinely took the incoming information into account].

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38.

Most of the time that people dig in their heels, or seem weirdly resistant to taking an action that seems obviously right and good, it’s because they’re attending to some broader, more global concern. For instance, when someone refuses to do something just because they were told to do it, that’s because they’re not just focusing on [that thing], they’re wanting to avoid making it seem like [whoever told them] is in a position to give orders and tell them what to do. Or maybe they’re being pressured to admit [true fact A], but they know that most people think that [A] implies [false thing B], and so they’re hesitant to acknowledge [A] because people will take it as evidence that [B] is true, when it isn’t.

Usually, the person digging in their heels is mostly in favor of the thing they’re being pressured to do, but there’s some piece of it that would set a bad precedent, or shouldn’t be tangled up with the rest, or similar. If you notice someone (including yourself) digging in their heels, a good thing to check is “okay, if you did go ahead and do [the thing], what would be bad about that?”

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39.

“Shoulds,” whether they come from inside your own head or from other people, are data. A should provides information, and you can pause and mentally double-click on a should to learn things about the-shape-of-the-world-according-to-the-person-generating-the-should. If someone tells you that you should do X, then what you’re secretly hearing is that they believe that things will be better if you do X than if you don’t, and you can ask yourself whether they might know things that you don’t, or whether you and they agree on what constitutes “better,” etc.

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40.

Your society is definitely, absolutely, seriously crazy. Your society believes multiple things that are flat-out insane, and is doing lots and lots of things wrong. This is true no matter where you are and no matter when you live—a hundred years from now, a bunch of the stuff that everyone around you takes for granted will be acknowledged as horrible and misguided and deeply confused. You can’t always tell which parts of your society’s beliefs are crazy, but knowing that some of them definitely are is an important thing to keep in mind. For any given pillar of your culture, try to stay open to questions like “what if this is wrong?” and “how would I be able to tell?”

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41.

All of the best interactions are consensual; the way to approach relationships (whether they’re romantic relationships or friendships or being on a team or working at a job) is to look at the things you want/need, and look at the things they want/need, and see if there is an overlap. Often, people will discover that they thought there was an overlap, but one or both of them was wrong about their needs, and then people do a really silly thing where they try to force the relationship to work anyway. In fact, the thing to do in such situations is just to pause, reassess, and look for the overlap again. If it’s there, great. If it’s not there, then one or both of you might change to create some new overlap. If change isn’t a good idea, then there’s your answer.

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42.

Relatedly, if you have to lie, or pretend, or hide some facet of yourself, in order to maintain a relationship—

(Because if they saw the real you, they would leave/fire you/break up with you/whatever)

—then you already do not have that relationship. Your mask has that relationship, and this is probably bad for both of you. It’s bad for you because you’re not getting to be your true, authentic self (and that wears away at a person), and it’s bad for them because you are, in essence, tricking them into having a relationship with you, when they otherwise wouldn’t.

If you want to change for the sake of someone else, that’s fine. But simply hiding or pretending or faking it is fundamentally corrosive, and you shouldn’t do it if you have any other choice at all.

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43.

People are almost always right when they detect a problem—if you’re hurting, or upset, or you think something is wrong, then something is wrong. But people are usually pretty bad at identifying where the problem actually is, and they’re usually even worse at proposing solutions that will actually fix it. Approach problems with humility, and approach potential solutions with healthy skepticism.

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44.

When someone says “just trust me,” you don’t actually have to. When someone says “you can’t do X,” they’re often simply wrong. Humans in general have a strong knee-jerk cooperative reflex, and often completely fail to flag other people’s assertions as possibly bullshit. Sometimes people will try to make you love them, or try to make you feel guilty, or try to make you think that your only choices are A or B when really your options are A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. It’s worth practicing not immediately believing people and not immediately complying, so that you can break the reflex and ensure that your future goings-along are because you actually agree.

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45.

You have more control than you might think over how other people see and relate to you. For instance, if you allow people to interrogate you, and answer their questions as if they had the right to demand answers from you, pretty soon they and everyone else will believe that they have that right, and that you’re accountable to them, and they’ll keep grilling you forever, whenever they feel like it. If, on the other hand, you respond to that first attempt at subjugation by laughing it off and refusing to let them boss you around, they will often stop trying, and other people won’t start.

This is a fairly coarse example, and it’s not the sort of thing you can get away with in every context (e.g. work), but it’s surprising how often and to what extent people will cooperate with the role and status that you tell them you have (both verbally/explicitly and implicitly/through your tone and other signals). The more you perform the role you want to have, relative to others, the more often that will cause you to have that role.

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46.

Many interpersonal conflicts come about because one person will offer a specific experience, and the other person will have misheard and believes they’ve been offered a positive experience. Then, if the thing turns out to be bad or painful, the second person feels betrayed and lied-to, and then the first person feels unfairly attacked. Notice that every new experience is, in essence, a gamble; no one can promise that you’ll have a good time trying something completely new, and if they say that they can, you should roll to disbelieve.

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47.

Most of the time, when you discover an apparent contradiction, what’s actually going on is that there are two different rough/imperfect stories being told, and it’s the stories that disagree with one another. If one story says X cannot happen, and the other story says X must happen, then what you actually need to do is figure out a newer (probably more complicated or nuanced) story that accounts for both of the previous predictions, and (hopefully) tells you when to expect X and when not to expect X.

Another angle on this dynamic: people often end up in situations where they can’t admit or acknowledge Y because if Y were true, that would interfere with their ability to do Z (which is important). In this situation, it’s depressingly common for people to either throw out Y to protect Z, or force Y through even though it destroys Z, when the thing they should actually do is target the “because it will interfere with,” and fix the broken causal arrow.

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48.

People often get really distracted fighting over whether something is X or Y, or whether such-and-such is really an instance of Z, or what it means to be a true W. This is silly, and a distraction, because the words and labels we make up to refer to things aren’t real in the first place; they’re just arrows pointing at the real stuff out there in the world. Instead of asking yourself “but is this really X, or not?” just go ahead and ask yourself “okay, I’ve noticed some Xness here … what does that get me? What new threads does that let me pull on, what new questions does it make me think of, how can I use X to focus my attention?” (The essay for this one is here.)

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49.

Sometimes, people try to manipulate you (whether consciously/intentionally or just instinctively) by making it seem like your options are:

• Do the thing that I want you to do
• Do the thing a bad person would do

In these cases, it’s beneficial to question whether those really are the only two options, and whether not doing what they want actually means that you’re a bad person in some meaningful sense. (The essay for this one isn’t written yet but the phrase I use for this in my own head is “Hufflepuff trap.”)

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50.

Often, when faced with tough choices and difficult tradeoffs, people compare and contrast their real options with totally made-up things that aren’t even possible. As a result, the best real option looks kind of bleak or unpleasant or seems worse than it really is, and people turn away from it toward wishful thinking. And often, by the time it becomes clear that the fabricated option wasn’t real and won’t work, the situation is much worse, and the original option either can’t be had anymore or is much harder and more expensive than it would have been if they’d just bitten the bullet in the first place. (The essay for this one is here.)

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51.

It’s possible to hurt yourself simply by imagining yourself to be hurt. You can do yourself real, genuine harm by telling yourself stories in which you are harmed. You can reinforce and empower things that would have hurt you a little until they hurt you a lot, and even invent whole sources of pain and suffering from nothing, and the damage will be real even though the problem was entirely made-up. This is bad, and you should try not to do it, and you should try not to validate and reinforce it when other people are doing it. (The essay for this one is here.)

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52.

Sometimes, people will have struggled with a problem for so long, and spent so much effort trying to fix it or deal with it, that when a solution appears that is simple and obvious and works immediately, they’ll flinch away from it, because letting the problem be solved that easily means facing up to a tremendous amount of waste and loss and suffering that didn’t have to happen.

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53.

When you explain something in the way that makes sense to you, using words that fit with your own understanding, you will often utterly fail to communicate the thing to other people. Your knowledge is like a branching tree in your thoughts, reaching out and connecting to all sorts of different things, grown to fit the mental environment in your brain. If you want someone else to grow a similar tree, you can’t just … hand them your fully-grown tree. You have to plant a seed, and water it, and help shape it inside their thoughts, which is a much more difficult task.

To put it another way: your job isn’t done when you’ve said all the words that feel necessary to you. Your job is done when they’ve actually heard, however many words that takes.

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54.

The reason people follow rules and norms is because they’re getting something out of it. It might be easier for any one person to get away with cheating or lying or stealing, but most people can see that if everyone did that, things would collapse and there wouldn’t be anybody to steal from, because it would all be chaos. So norm violations and rule-breaking stays at a pretty low level, around the edges, because it’s better for most people, in the long run, to live in a rule-following world. But if the things they really really need can’t be gotten within the rules, they’ll simply stop following them, and people should keep that fact in mind when they are trying to close off various paths to various possibilities. It’s not the case that making a new rule just straightforwardly shuts down behavior—sometimes, what that new rule does is convince people to stop following the rules entirely. (Oops.)

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55.

People talk about “blind spots,” but usually a blind spot isn’t actually just in one place. Usually, it’s more like being color-blind—you’re missing some distinction everywhere. From the inside, being color-blind feels like everyone else is crazy—they’re acting like these two shirts are totally different when they’re identical in every way. That’s because there’s some crucial quality that you don’t perceive at all.

(e.g. two different phrases that sound exactly the same to you, that’s just two different ways to say the same thing, why is everybody making such a big deal about whether we say it this way or that way?)

If you notice that other people are making mountains out of molehills and blowing very tiny differences way out of proportion: you may be color-blind to something that everyone else can see.

If you notice that someone else is eroding important distinctions, and pretending that there’s no difference between these two things that feel very, very different: they may be color-blind to something that you can see. (More on this here.)

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56.

It’s okay to want things. It’s okay to have preferences. You should build the skill of being able to tell what you want, and being able to notice your preferences, especially if you’ve spent a lot of time in environments where everyone was telling you what you should like, what you should want, what you should think, how you should feel. Your actual preferences matter, and it’s good to be able to hear them inside yourself.

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57.

Sometimes people have preferences that just … are. Other times, people have preferences that depend on the preferences of others around them, like if you said “I’d love to get pizza, but only if everybody else is cool with that.” That’s different from someone who wants pizza, period, and would be sad if you went anywhere else. Often, when talking about what we want, people fail to distinguish between these two kinds of preferences, and there’s a lot of miscommunication and strife, as a result. When you express your wants, try to be clear about whether you want something, end of story, or whether you want it if-and-only-insofar-as it’s good for others, too. (More on this here.)

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58.

We don’t get to decide each other’s dealbreakers. We don’t get to pick other people’s preferences and priorities. People often unthinkingly act as if their judgment of other people’s boundaries matters in some fundamental way, and it does not. For instance, if you are polyamorous, and you think someone else is being silly or inconsistent or wrong to prefer monogamy, that’s … largely irrelevant. It’s great if there’s a channel of communication for each of you to try to educate the other, but ultimately, your belief that their dealbreaker is nonsensical doesn’t matter. You can ask them to switch to your culture, but if they don’t want to, then that’s that. Others’ beliefs aren’t contingent on your approval. They simply exist.

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59.

A lot of arguments secretly hinge on the burden of proof. One side thinks that we should believe X by default, unless proven otherwise, and the other side thinks that we should believe not-X by default, in the same way. And so neither side really mounts a particularly convincing argument, since each side thinks it’s the other side’s job to present an overwhelming, compelling case. And so each side, hearing the other’s halfhearted and unconvincing argument, concludes that obviously the other side has failed to be convincing, and so the default remains true. In such cases, things might go better if one or the other side noticed, and mentioned, that there’s a disagreement about who bears the burden of proof. (Related, although not exactly the same.)

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60.

You usually have more chances than you think—perhaps not with a specific person, or a specific company, or whatever, but it’s easy to slide into the trap of thinking “if I don’t achieve X, then it will all have been for nothing and it’ll all be over for me and I’ll never accomplish anything.”

(People don’t usually think this in those exact words, but they’ll behave as if that’s what they secretly believe.)

And in point of fact, this is usually false. In most things, you have many, many more chances to do something cool or meet someone nice or what-have-you.

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61.

The kinds of activities which persist, and which become a major part of the fabric of your life, are those which chain into one another. If the end of one round of an activity naturally lends itself to the beginning of the next, you will keep going. If the end of an activity is just the end, and it takes active attention or effort to cause the next round of it to happen, it will fizzle. Not always, but most of the time. The concrete advice here: end every [date, dance session, long walk, bout of basket weaving] with a check-in about when the next one will happen, or at least about when you will decide when the next one will happen.

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62.

There are two different ways to be good at knowing what will happen in the future:

1. Be a “prophet,” who actually understands the shape of things, and can see what is likely to happen later, based on what’s already happening now.

2. Be a “king,” who can make decisions about how the future should look, and then do what it takes to make things turn out the way you want to.

If you keep being surprised because the future keeps turning out differently than you expected, check and see whether you’re doing too much of one and might benefit from practicing the other.

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63.

People in general take many actions that aren’t actually effective interventions on a problem, but are actually much more about ameliorating anxiety. Indeed, often there isn’t a real problem, but people have gotten caught up in a compelling story and they feel like they’re in danger, or feel like they’re going to be held accountable, or generically feel like Something Should Be Done, and they take whatever action reduces their feeling of being out of control and vulnerable, regardless of whether it’s actually a good idea.

(Indeed, often these actions straightforwardly make the problem worse, which often makes people assume that they need to do even more of the thing that already isn’t helping.)

Whenever you see people advocating for drastic action while in a state of anxiety or anger or fear, it’s worth pausing to check whether the proposal is about actually solving real problems, or more about Feeling Like Something Is Being Done.

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64.

When people are uncertain about the precise location of a threat, they often slow down and become much more cautious. If you want people to have the freedom to move quickly and not creep and cringe, you don’t necessarily have to remove all of the hazards from the environment; it’s often enough to just make it clear where they are, so they can be avoided.

Relatedly, it’s easier to be confident and expansive around people who know, and can clearly communicate, their own boundaries. If someone doesn’t even know, themselves, where their own line is, such that it’s possible for a friend or colleague or romantic partner to accidentally hurt them and only find out later, then it’s very hard not to creep and cringe. If you want people to feel free around you, it helps a lot to be able to say “everything up to this point is okay; everything past it is not.” (More on this here.)

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65.

Death is really, really bad. There is no actual reason to believe that there’s an afterlife; the stories people offer about heaven and hell and reincarnation are exactly the sorts of stories you would expect people to make up if they were scared and looking for comfort and not wanting to think about sad things. Death is the end of everything that makes you you—it’s the end of every hope, every dream, every experience, every opportunity. That’s very bad, and it’s worth feeling scared about, and it’s worth trying to avoid, and it’s something we should try to fix, as a species. (More here.)

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66.

There is a part of your brain that has been low-key paying attention to everything, as long as you have been alive, and building up an inner copy of the world inside your brain. It doesn’t store specific memories, but rather a generic, aggregated how things work. It’s the part of your brain that tells you how objects fall, and what something will feel like when you touch it, and what it will sound like if you rap it with your knuckles. And this inner simulated world can be a useful tool to you, but only if you learn how to access it and what sorts of questions it can answer. (More here.)

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67.

People think that performance curves tend to be smooth—open this valve more, and the engine will perform better and better, until eventually the valve is too wide and then the engine starts performing worse. In fact, performance curves are jagged and chaotic and unpredictable—opening the valve a little makes things better, then opening it a little more makes it even better, then a smidge more makes it worse, then better, then worse, then much worse, then much better, etc. This is an important metaphor to keep in mind, because often people try to change things about their own lives and will give up prematurely, or keep going in the wrong direction, because they misinterpret the initial change as being robustly predictive of what will happen if they keep going.

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68.

When trouble comes, do not be there.

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69.

Most people have some kind of mental motion that they do so habitually and effortlessly that they aren’t even aware is thinking or is processing. The gap between stimulus and response has shrunk from thousands of repetitions, and their brain leaps from A to Z in a flash, where other people would have to effortfully think for long seconds or minutes, going through B and C and D and E and so on, all in distinct steps.

This kind of mental motion often has control of you, rather than you having control of it. It’s a kind of leaping that people often don’t notice themselves doing, and can’t make themselves stop doing without some careful practice. (More here.)

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70.

Most of the time that people apply force (both literal and metaphorical) they fail to do so at the optimal time (or even close to the optimal time). Many tasks are 1000x more achievable, or take 1000x less effort, if you concentrate that effort in the right place at the right time. Someone who is better at knowing when and where can accomplish things that someone else with ten times the available power cannot. In your own endeavors, you are probably wasting a lot of energy by pushing in the wrong places, and you could almost certainly accomplish much more while burning much less fuel. (More here.)

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71.

Lots of people, if they know they can’t act on a particular belief, respond to the cognitive dissonance by abandoning that belief. A spouse who has already decided they aren’t going to leave their partner, for instance, might refuse to acknowledge bad behavior on the part of that partner. The loop goes something like “if I acknowledge that the behavior was bad, I’ll feel pressure to leave or say something, and I know I’m not going to leave or say something, so I’m not going to acknowledge the badness or even look at it or think about it.” Another instance of this is people refusing to acknowledge that some atrocity or injustice is happening, because if they looked straight at it they would feel compelled to do something about it (or feel bad for not doing anything).

But you can in fact have thoughts and feelings even while knowing that on net those thoughts and feelings aren’t enough to move you. You can acknowledge the badness without acting on it, because time and energy are finite and you can’t solve every problem all at once. Build a list, and put everything on the list, and let yourself see and notice all of it, even as you focus mostly on just the top few items.

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72.

It’s valuable to think in terms of classes and policies. When a new question or problem pops up, don’t just try to answer it for yourself—try to answer it in a way that would be good for all people who are sufficiently similar to you (which includes your past and future selves, by the way). And don’t just try to answer the question for the specific situation—instead, try to come up with a way of answering all future such questions that is consistent and principled. It takes more time up-front that first time, but the end result is surer, more confident, and more consistent action in the future. (More here.)

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73.

Relatedly, it’s valuable to practice taking a higher perspective and following chains of consequence. For instance, you’ll make different (and probably more effective) moves in trying to resolve conflicts once you recognize that both sides systematically disagree on what constitutes [a fair reprisal] versus [an escalation]. Understanding what each smaller perspective feels like on the inside, and how that myopic perspective drives things toward disaster, allows you to avoid disaster (at least sometimes).

For instance, if you always have to get what you do in fact deserve, you’ll find yourself struggling more or less constantly. If you always have to have the last word and can’t let things end on a wrong note, you’ll never be able to escape conflict. A major part of being able to find peace (for yourself) and create peace (between yourself and others) is being able to lose, being able to absorb blows, being able to accept losses and make sacrifices. (Which you can’t do if you’re caught in the local perspective of winning the conflict that’s right in front of you, and can’t see that a small loss now can save you from having to fight many battles later.)

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74.

A moral rule isn’t really established, in a culture, until bystanders are willing to step up to defend it. If bystanders walking by feel that they themselves have something at stake, then you can rely on everybody joining in to stop infractions wherever they show up. But if bystanders feel like X is not their problem, and they can just turn their heads and mind their own business, then it doesn’t matter how many police and lawyers and judges claim that the rule is in effect—they won’t be present at the moment that matters, and thus the rule lacks concentration of force.

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75.

There will likely be times in your life that people want things from you that you shouldn’t give, and there will likely be times in your life that people want things from you that you cannot give (but you could try and it would be disastrous), and there will likely be times in your life that you will, in fact, have what it would take to save someone, but only at the cost of destroying or sacrificing yourself. Times when it is actually true that you are the only person who can help them, and you will have to decide whether it is you or them who walks away whole.

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76.

There are lots and lots and lots of people, groups, and individual endeavors out there that are threatened by the truth, and those people, groups, and endeavors fight back not just with lies and falsehoods but with whole philosophical edifices that are systematically anti-truth. For nearly every true fact out there, there’s someone who is profiting off of it being ignored or doubted or de-emphasized or disbelieved, and needs things to continue being that way. If you are trying to believe true things, and trying to cause others to believe true things, you need to be prepared for active resistance, not just passive obstacles.

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77.

Don’t punish the behavior that you want to see. Especially don’t punish the first tentative steps toward the behavior you want to see, because that sends the message “trying in this domain will not get you anything.” It’s quite common for people to be more harsh and critical of their imperfect allies than of people who haven’t bothered to put forth any effort at all, and this is a huge mistake. Count up in such cases. Don’t count down.

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78.

Don’t assume that people have to practice what they advocate for, or else they’re hypocrites. For instance, it’s entirely valid to advocate for everyone to pay higher taxes, but not to preemptively donate extra money to the government all by yourself. Sometimes what people are trying to do is cause everyone to shift to a new equilibrium all at once. Sometimes people are saying that X would be easier for them to do if they weren’t alone. Sometimes people won’t ever do X, but they still want to stay clear on the fact that X would be better. Sometimes they’re not in a position to do X themselves, but they’re correct that other people are, and should.

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Oh, hey, you made it!

As it turns out, this isn’t actually exactly the table of contents. This is nowhere near the final order in which these concepts will be presented, and the overall list continues to shift. But I did, in the process of writing this “essay,” manage to boil things down from 250+ to the 78 you’ve just read, which feels like pretty necessary progress. Most of the above will go into the final product, and most of what will be in the final product can be found above.

By the way, if you can think of Impactful Lessons that seem like they’re missing, please let me know. I’d rather hear a hundred proposals that ultimately don’t make it past the filter than miss one that really should’ve gone in.

Also: not included above are those concepts which are already taught, in our culture, and which have preexisting names and labels (even though some of those are relatively obscure, and your average high school kid who would benefit from hearing about them typically doesn’t). Many of these will also need to be in the book, in order for all of the claims to be well-grounded and hold together; they’re listed below in an appendix (though absent even a sazen-level expansion).

Slowly, the work continues.

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Appendix

• 80/20ing

• Adaptive vs. technical problems

• Aliefs vs. beliefs

• Anthropics

• Area under the curve

• Ask culture vs. guess culture

• The average person does not exist

• Bell curves

• Bucket errors

• Chesterton’s Fence

• Common knowledge

• Double illusion of transparency

• The fallacy of the gray

• Forgive, don’t forget

• Idea inoculation

• The Litany of Gendlin

• The Lizardman constant

• Goodhart’s Law/cargo culting

• A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two is never sure

• Moloch/the tragedy of the commons

• Motte and bailey

• Natural selection

• OODA loops

• A peace treaty is not a suicide pact

• Pica

• Playing to your outs

• Privileging the Hypothesis

• Reality distortion fields

• Red queen races

• Status

• Supply and demand

• Survivorship bias