Continuing the conversation here from March 15 and March 16, 2021.
Comments & Events
Anne B
PS Your claims that I'm pressuring (on purpose!) are pressuring me to respond to your accusations.
I thought I was pretty careful here not to claim that you were pressuring me, only to say that it feels like pressuring to me. I wanted to know if that was your intent.
I meant this
I often think Elliot is trying to pressure FI people to do certain projects or follow his advice or learn in certain ways.
in the same way. I'm aware that my thinking on this is mostly instinctive and could easily be wrong.
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Anne B
I've often invited criticism and concerns be shared. If you thought there was a problem, e.g. pressuring, you could have first considered it could be a good faith misunderstanding or a minor mistake (by either party) or something and brought up the issue so it could be discussed and resolved. What you did instead was remember a negative interpretation that you didn't allow any rebuttal to or clarifications about. You did this multiple times and built up a significant group of unsolved, unaddressed problems and negativity which has now grown large, complex and severe enough to be difficult to address.
I agree.
I wonder if, going forward, it would help to bring up incidents as they happen and only focus on those. Would that be pressuring you to respond and be bad for that reason?
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Anne B
If you thought there was a problem, e.g. pressuring, you could have first considered it could be a good faith misunderstanding or a minor mistake (by either party) or something and brought up the issue so it could be discussed and resolved. What you did instead was remember a negative interpretation that you didn't allow any rebuttal to or clarifications about. You did this multiple times and built up a significant group of unsolved, unaddressed problems and negativity which has now grown large, complex and severe enough to be difficult to address.
Wow, I just realized something. When I first joined the FI list, I lurked for almost a year. This “significant group of unsolved, unaddressed problems and negativity which has now grown large, complex and severe enough to be difficult to address” started then, before I posted anything. No surprise that it’s large and difficult to address.
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Anne B
Justin wrote:
One question I would ask you is whether, given Elliot's ideas and writing, it makes sense to trust your culturally normal "social instincts" as reliable indicators in the FI context. Cuz as of now, it sounds like once you have a "social instinct" reaction, you're sort of going with that unless you can rebut it. But those "social instincts" may not make sense in all contexts. If you disagree, you may think that all people must necessarily act a certain way (as in, the ways your "social instincts" are calibrated to) which is itself an idea you can think about intellectually and criticize.
I don't fully trust my social instincts to be reliable in an FI context. But I don't have a good handle on what I should go by instead. I think the answer should be "reason", but how?
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Justin Mallone
Elliot said:
PS Your claims that I'm pressuring (on purpose!) are pressuring me to respond to your accusations.
AnneB said:
I thought I was pretty careful here not to claim that you were pressuring me, only to say that it feels like pressuring to me. I wanted to know if that was your intent.
I meant this
I often think Elliot is trying to pressure FI people to do certain projects or follow his advice or learn in certain ways.
Right after this you said "I would love to find out I'm wrong." That indicates that in your mind, Elliot pressuring people is the best explanation. You are treating "Elliot tries to pressure people" as the true state of affairs - as a fact. You are tentative in this treatment and hope you are wrong, but it is still what you currently think is true - your best explanation, and the one that guides your actions and reactions. It's having an effect on things like how you engage with FI, by your own admission. And you brought this belief up. Random House Webster's says that a "claim" is "an assertion of something as a fact". If some idea is your best explanation of something and active in your mind, even if you frame it as "I think" or "it seems like" or "it feels like", that doesn't make you bringing it up not a claim.
Another angle is that in taking seriously the possibility that Elliot is trying to pressure people, you're saying that Elliot is not beyond reproach as far as being a manipulative second-hander who tries to pressure people is concerned. You think him being a manipulative, pressuring second-hander is one of the possibilities worth taking seriously. That is a claim.
If on some relationship forum some wife said "I think my husband is cheating on me. It often feels like he's emotionally unavailable. I would love to find out I'm wrong. That would make my marriage way more pleasant for me." then clearly that woman would not be treating the husband as being beyond reproach as far as fidelity is concerned. That is a claim about the state of the world and specifically about the ethics and behavior of the husband.
Another way to think about it is that the *set* of explanations you consider credible or likely reflects a claim about the state of the world and the likely explanations and causes for various things.
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Justin Mallone
I wonder if, going forward, it would help to bring up incidents as they happen and only focus on those. Would that be pressuring you to respond and be bad for that reason?
I think it'd be good to bring stuff up as it happens. But I think it also matters how you frame and approach things.
E.g. if you take some statement you found problematic and then approach it with a scientific mindset, dictionary in hand, and analyze different possible objective meanings and social meanings, and basically take a scientific mindset to the project, then that seems fine.
OTOH if you throw down the fact that some statement upset you as a moral indictment and demand to be proven wrong lest you judge someone badly, that would not be good and would be pressuring.
Basically, it's fine to bring stuff up if it's part of an honest effort to seek the truth into which you're willing to put a lot of your own effort.
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Justin Mallone
I don't fully trust my social instincts to be reliable in an FI context. But I don't have a good handle on what I should go by instead. I think the answer should be "reason", but how?
Systematic, good faith rational inquiry, criticism and discussion conducted over time 😀
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Anne B
So, an example of what not to do:
Joe says something and Bill has negative feelings about what Joe said. Bill says “Did you mean to be an asshole there, Joe?” This implies that most people would interpret what Joe said as Joe being an asshole, but maybe there’s a chance Joe didn’t realize that and meant it in some other way.
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Anne B
Actually, that last post brings up something else.
You should judge whether something is right or wrong objectively. But I think you should also take social convention into account.
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Anne B
Here's an improved example of what not to do:
Joe says something and Bill has negative feelings about what Joe said. Bill says “Did you mean to be an asshole there, Joe?” This implies that Joe was being an asshole but maybe didn't see it that way.
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Anne B
E.g. if you take some statement you found problematic and then approach it with a scientific mindset, dictionary in hand, and analyze different possible objective meanings and social meanings, and basically take a scientific mindset to the project, then that seems fine.
This sounds difficult!
Maybe I'll try to write up an example of it.
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deroj
Joe says something and Bill has negative feelings about what Joe said. Bill says “Did you mean to be an asshole there, Joe?” This implies that Joe was being an asshole but maybe didn't see it that way.
Bill could be mistaken. Maybe Joe wasn’t an asshole at all to begin with. Or in Rand’s words: “Emotions are not tools of cognition . . .”
E.g. if you take some statement you found problematic and then approach it with a scientific mindset, dictionary in hand, and analyze different possible objective meanings and social meanings, and basically take a scientific mindset to the project, then that seems fine.
This sounds difficult!
I'm telling myself that because it sounds difficult, I should break it into smaller pieces, not give up.
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Justin Mallone
FWIW I think you have done things of similar or greater intellectual difficulty when doing programming or grammar analysis or close-reading some bit of culture or whatever. So to the extent you find taking the scientific mindset hard re: statements you find problematic from Elliot, I think the difficulty there is not intellectual but instead results from some emotional issue.
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heroLFG (Gavin Palmer)
I am thinking the accused is judged to be an asshole by a judge when the judge would be thinking about others while the accused failed to think about others in the context of a situation.
It is possible to go through regular school and pass all your classes without having a strong conceptual understanding of the ideas, and go on to have a successful life and do work that contributes to society.
FI is trying to aim for something more than that though. It is trying to help people learn to build up a real understanding of things, and to be able to differentiate between things they don't understand and things they do understand. I think some people end up finding that difficult because they start to see all the things they don't understand, and then they feel bad about how little they know.
This is helpful. I tend to feel like there's no way I can succeed at life because I see by being here how many things I don't understand. But maybe I already succeed at life and and now I can use FI ideas to help me succeed even more than I would have otherwise.
But the point of the types of activities that are recommended (like the mini projects and the idea trees) is to start with something small and simple and build up a real understanding of the knowledge. And then you can do that with some more things, and you can make connections between the knowledge you have, and you can use it to add and build new knowledge.
So the point of these activities is to find something simple enough that you can succeed at it and fully understand what you are doing. If you can do that with a bunch of simple things, then you can build them up to more complex things, and you can have understanding at each new layer/step. And that way you can end up learning more complicated things with a real conceptual understanding (instead of just memorizing keywords and formulas well enough to pass the tests).
It's especially discouraging for me to not understand the activities that Elliot recommends and to be told I'm doing them wrong. They're supposed to be extra simple and we're supposed to be able to succeed at them and fully understand them. I often don't succeed at them or understand them. Then I feel extra stupid and frustrated because the exercises are designed to be extra simple.
I find the coding exercises I do to be simpler. It's easier for me to know whether I've done them right and to know when I do or don't understand something. There are exercises that are easy enough for me to feel confident and easily do right and know that I've done right. There are harder ones too, but I can tell which are hard and which are easy.
My attempt at re-thinking a bit:
Maybe the recommended activities are not supposed to be super easy. Maybe they’re more like ideas for helping us find things that are super easy for us.
Maybe the recommended activities are not supposed to be super easy at first, but only after we’ve worked at them some.
Maybe I succeed more than I think, but the recommended activities are the kind of thing where it’s hard for me to tell if I’ve succeeded.
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Elliot
Anne
, your post is dishonest. You are bad at knowing when you do or don't understand coding exercises, how hard or easy they are for you, or whether you understand them. You got an illustration of this in the FI Google Group thread "[FI] [SICP] Exercise 2.3" from Aug 2020.
I know you don't want criticism and won't appreciate this reply, but you're attacking me and FI by dishonestly, falsely comparing some of my recommendations with coding exercises (you also falsely present the coding exercises as a separate category from my recommendations, when in fact I recommended SICP). I've let a lot of your other attacks slide, but you can't expect to make an unlimited number of attacks here with no response.
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Anne B
Yes, my comparison was an attack. I kind of knew it was an attack at the time but I also kind of tried to hide that from myself.
👍
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Anne B
I know you don't want criticism ...
In the past year, I’ve often wished for more criticism. That doesn’t mean I’d like it if I got it, though.
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ingracke
In the past year, I’ve often wished for more criticism. That doesn’t mean I’d like it if I got it, though.
You don't respond positively to criticism. You generally seem to get defensive and say things that seem to engage with the criticism, without actually engaging with it.
This makes it difficult to respond back to you. Trying to actually engage with what you say just ends up going down rabbit holes that miss the point, and then later you will insist that you have been having an FI discussion and trying to do FI, when from my POV you have been resisting doing FI and insisting on talking about other things instead. You will then count that as an FI failure, instead of seeing it as you derailing the conversation & refusing to do FI activities.
Another way to respond is with meta that you won't like and that seems aggressive and harsh to people (e.g., pointing out that you aren't actually engaging and have changed the topic or are responding to a straw man, pointing out that you aren't actually doing FI activities, etc). You don't respond positively to that kind of thing either.
There are times when I have something that I could say, but I don't think you will like it or want to engage with it, so I don't say it. I actually think that if I responded with more criticisms, you would feel bullied or singled out. And a lot of it would be repetitive. I often have the same criticism: you aren't actually doing the activities that were recommended to you, and instead are doing a different activity while pretending you are trying to do what was recommended.
I'm not actually sure how to deal with this. I don't want to do things to people that they will interpret as me being mean. I don't want to chase them around and keep telling them the same criticisms on every thread, over and over again, when they don't actually want to hear it. I want to give people criticisms that they value and will try to learn from. I want to be helpful.
But I also don't want to try to engage with your posts as if you *were* doing the recommended activities when you aren't actually doing them. That is misleading about what the activities are, and could be confusing to other people who *do* want to do the activities.
I am writing this right now to try to be helpful. I think this is a solvable problem for you. I think you have a history of doing the same type of thing repeatedly, but I don't think that means you have to be stuck in that pattern – it is possible to change the pattern. But it will only work if you want it to work, and if you put effort into understanding and solving the problem. I can't drag you along and "teach" you things you don't want to be taught.
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ingracke
Oh, also, I want to note – I wrote that reply now partly because of this part of what you said:
That doesn’t mean I’d like it if I got it, though.
That does show you have some self-awareness of the issue. So I took that as a positive sign.
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Anne B
The tone of your post seems helpful to me. It felt helpful to me even before I got to the part where you wrote “I am writing this right now to try to be helpful.” Thank you.
I am happy that you think this is a solvable problem. I too think it is solvable even though I don’t currently see how and even though I often *feel* that it’s hopeless.
I wrote a lot of other stuff but I want to think about it some more before I post any of it.
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Anne B
You generally seem to get defensive and say things that seem to engage with the criticism, without actually engaging with it.
At first I didn’t understand what you meant by this. But when I look back at this Project Steps thread I think I see it there.
After Elliot wrote “It was the first one organized in a way that made sense.”, I felt upset. I asked questions and made comments several times about the criticism, about why a short list could be better and about ways lists could be more organized. I was seemingly engaging with the criticism. But I was feeling and acting defensive. I wasn’t really concerned with the lists then; I was concerned with feeling insulted by the criticism and by your (plural) refusal to answer me.
(Maybe you didn’t answer me for the reasons you gave in your post yesterday here: you weren’t sure how to deal with the situation.)
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Anne B
I noticed something else when I looked back at my Project Steps thread. Near the end, I wrote about deciding to stop the project because of this post. I used the part about “Do not outsource goals to me.” as an excuse to stop my project. It was a legitimate excuse; I really didn’t have a clear idea of my goal for the project. But it was an excuse. I just wanted to quit the project because I was mad.
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Anne B
You will then count that as an FI failure, instead of seeing it as you derailing the conversation & refusing to do FI activities.
By “count that as an FI failure,” do you mean I count it as me failing at FI when I should be counting it as me not even trying to do FI? Or do you mean I count it as FI failing rather than me failing? Both of those might be true of me.
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Anne B
This surprised me:
I don't want to chase them around and keep telling them the same criticisms on every thread, over and over again, when they don't actually want to hear it.
I don’t think you’ve ever told me these criticisms before, let alone over and over. Maybe you have and I conveniently forgot because I didn’t want to hear them. Or maybe you have anonymously and I didn’t know it was you.
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Anne B
I often have the same criticism: you aren't actually doing the activities that were recommended to you, and instead are doing a different activity while pretending you are trying to do what was recommended.
Another example is this karate project. I thought I was doing what was suggested in this Steps to do a project post. But I was ignoring the part about “Do some small (tiny! easy!) projects using organized, conscious, intentional steps.” and starting with a project that was not at all tiny.
Do you think I was doing it at the beginning of my Project Steps project? In the first three posts, and also the lists I made before I started that thread, I think, even now, that I was doing the activity as it was presented here, which is what I said I was doing. But maybe you see something that I don’t.
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Anne B
Do you think the stuff I posted today is engaging with your criticism and not getting defensive? I think so, but I want to know how it looks to someone besides me.
I predict that if you disagree with me, I’ll have some negative feelings. I won’t know what to do about the negative feelings, but it’ll be a chance for me to at least practice noticing them and identifying them.
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Elliot
Anne
, you've used "you" and "your" a bunch, and it seems like it sometimes means me and sometimes ingracke, so it's confusing.
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Elliot
Wait I think I'm just wrong and it's all ingracke.
I don't want to chase them around and keep telling them the same criticisms on every thread, over and over again, when they don't actually want to hear it.
That sounds enough like me that I didn't realize ingracke wrote it until I searched.
I don’t think you’ve ever told me these criticisms before, let alone over and over.
I think part of what's going on is if someone else tells you – e.g. me – then that can also create a repetition issue. Not all the criticisms have to be from the same person for it to be repetitive for the receiver. "The same criticisms" could refer to the same ones the person was already told rather than the same ones ingracke specifically already said.
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Anne B
Yes, my posts this morning were all addressed to ingracke, except that where I wrote "your (plural)", I meant ingracke and you (Elliot).
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ingracke
I was concerned with feeling insulted by the criticism and by your (plural) refusal to answer me.
Just to be clear, I don't answer or am slow to answer for lots of reasons. I am busy and have other things going on in my life. I don't always keep up on everything either.
I am more likely to answer things that seem easy to me or to answer things where I think what I have to say will be appreciated. But if I don't answer, that doesn't necessarily mean it's because I thought the discussion would be difficult or the person wouldn't appreciate it: I have other reasons for not writing too.
I try to help people when I can, and say something when I think I have something to say. But I am not committing to providing ongoing help for free when I do that. And if I stop helping, it's not always a criticism of the thread or the person.
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ingracke
By “count that as an FI failure,” do you mean I count it as me failing at FI when I should be counting it as me not even trying to do FI? Or do you mean I count it as FI failing rather than me failing?
When I wrote that, I meant that you count it as FI advice failing. But it would be similar if you counted it as you trying FI advice and failing, rather than not really trying the advice.
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ingracke
I don’t think you’ve ever told me these criticisms before, let alone over and over. Maybe you have and I conveniently forgot because I didn’t want to hear them. Or maybe you have anonymously and I didn’t know it was you.
I don't know if I have directly told you these criticisms before. I have talked anonymously before, and I have followed (and written some) in other threads on FI list and I think curi blog where I saw you receive criticism defensively. I have also seen other instances where you didn't actually take the FI advice that was given, and instead did something else, and that was pointed out to you and you were upset by it and defensive in response. But I don't know offhand if it was me who pointed it out or someone else.
So I have noticed it was a pattern before. And when I noticed you doing something that looked similar again, and doing it in multiple different threads, I didn't think you really wanted to hear that. And I especially didn't think you would interpret it as helpful or nice if I went and told you the same type of criticism in multiple different threads. I thought it would probably feel unfair or like bullying to you. And that's not what I want – that's really not what I want to do.
And, honestly, I really don't know what to do about that. Because it's not just you who feels that way – I think other people have felt that way and left FI and some of them have gotten bitter and angry about it. And they are really negative about FI and think Elliot is just too pedantic, he always wants to point out people's flaws, no one is good enough for him, he expects perfection, etc.
People seem to think FI is "mean" in a way, and should try to be nicer. But the way most people are isn't really nicer: most people won't give honest criticism, even if you ask for it. There are simple things, like everyone knows "does this make me look fat?" is a trap question, and of course you are supposed to say "no"! But if you want a real answer to even a simple question like if an outfit makes you look fat, it is hard to find that. Some people will have a particularly honest friend who will give them a real opinion on that sort of thing, and they find that valuable – it can be valuable to have a friend who will actually honestly tell you simple things like which clothes you look good in.
So FI basically tries to do that, but with ideas. It tries to give people honest feedback on their learning process and ideas. And I understand that not everyone feels it is "nice", but I think it is valuable for a place like that to exist at all: to have somewhere where you can get honest and critical feedback that is actually good and detail-oriented.
Of course, you can always just post something to youtube and you get get a bunch of people to tell you that you are ugly and stupid and your videos are bad. But you can't actually get good, detailed feedback from them about what is actually bad and how to change it and what would be better. And the don't give good criticism of your ideas, they can't point out where you are wrong in accurate or detailed ways.
It actually seems weird to me that that is the general state of the internet and everyone knows it: if you post on youtube or reddit or tiktok you get called out by mean trolls who will call you an idiot, laugh at your appearance, laugh at any disabilities or differences you have, sometimes even threaten you or your family. This happens constantly, all the time. But for some reason, Elliot is perceived as being especially mean. FI is perceived as somehow being worse and more scary than other parts of the internet where people get trolled for any content they post.
I think the issue is that the FI criticism hurts people in a different way because it is accurate and it is about things that matter to them. You aren't just being called stupid, you are being told in detailed, hard to refute ways very specific things that are wrong with your ideas or your learning process. So people perceive it as meaner. But the person who is just calling others "stupid" is the one who is much meaner: he isn't trying to help. There is no positive value there. Giving people criticism that you believe to be accurate is a way to try to help them improve.
That last part was a bit of a tangent, and not just meant as a response to you. It applies generally to all of FI. It is related to you though: it's related to why it is hard to reply when someone is doing something that I am critical of. It is misleading to respond as if they aren't making a mistake, but it gets perceived as "mean" to point out the error.
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ingracke
Do you think the stuff I posted today is engaging with your criticism and not getting defensive? I think so, but I want to know how it looks to someone besides me.
Yes, I think you engaged with the criticism, and your posts didn't seem defensive :) You made some effort to find your own mistakes in your examples, and found some, which is good. And your questions made sense and addressed things I said (instead of changing the topic in some new direction).
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ingracke
Do you think I was doing it at the beginning of my Project Steps project? In the first three posts, and also the lists I made before I started that thread, I think, even now, that I was doing the activity as it was presented here, which is what I said I was doing. But maybe you see something that I don’t.
I just want to let you know that I do plan to reply to this part, but that requires me actually going & reviewing it & thinking about it, and I don't have the time to do that right now. It is higher effort and I already wrote a lot before I got to that question, so I am out of free time now.
👍
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ingracke
Do you think I was doing it at the beginning of my Project Steps project? In the first three posts, and also the lists I made before I started that thread, I think, even now, that I was doing the activity as it was presented here, which is what I said I was doing. But maybe you see something that I don’t.
So for the first three posts in that thread, the third one is the most like Elliot's example. It is a short, simple activity with a simple list of steps. I commented at the time that I thought it was the best one.
I also thought it was the one that was closest to the instructions and the point of the activity. I think he point was to start with very simple projects and write the steps for those, and then you could work your way up to harder ones.
I suggested you do more like that, which I thought would be helpful - you knew enough to do those well, and doing more could be a good next step. But most of the ones that followed weren't the same type of simple, common activity with short steps.
I think your other ones before that weren't quite following the original instructions or Elliot's example.
Which I don't think is the kind of thing Elliot meant for people to be doing. There are plenty of things that you do on a regular basis which would be better to use and fit more with the instructions. And I found you instructions a bit odd, but wasn't sure if it was because you actually *do* change your lightbulbs like that or because your memory of how you change your lightbulbs was flawed.
I think the one that I pointed out as good was the one that best fit the instructions, and was your best one. And I think it would have been good to do a bunch more like that. I think maybe if you'd done that, you also would have had an easier time figuring out one minute projects.
But, from my perspective, you seemed to not actually like that advice, and you didn't seem really open to discussing it or trying to understand it. You seemed to be dealing with it in a defensive way. And I really wasn't sure the best way to discuss it with you, given that. As I said before, I really wasn't trying to argue with you in ways you didn't like.
I could give criticisms of the other project steps you did, but I didn't think that would actually be helpful or what you wanted. It is one of those things that would just seem mean & overly critical to people, including you.
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Anne B
Thank you, ingracke. That helps me understand better how you saw what I was doing and what you meant.
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Anne B
(The below is not addressed to anyone in particular.)
Here’s an example from that same thread that I’m wondering about now. Was this a time where I was seeming to engage with criticism but not actually doing so? I was feeling defensive. And I was feeling frustrated that I couldn’t make sense of Elliot’s criticism. So it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that I wasn’t actually engaging with it, but it’s hard for me to see whether I was or wasn’t.
deroj wrote:
Why do you think that the water one is Anne B’s best so far?
Elliot wrote:
It was the first one organized in a way that made sense.
I wrote:
I thought the others were organized in a way that made sense. They were in the order I'd do them.
I don't see what's different about the drink of water one other than that it's shorter.
How could I change the others so they made sense?
Is it something to do with having the steps be at the same level of detail?
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ingracke
Was this a time where I was seeming to engage with criticism but not actually doing so?
This one is a bit difficult because Elliot's comment wasn't even meant as criticism for you to engage with – he was answering deroj's question, not trying to give you specific criticism.
But your response wasn't very good at engaging. You didn't put much effort into looking at the different projects and come up with your own ideas of what was better or worse about them. (You did come up with one idea though, about levels of detail.)
You asked a kind of helpless question, which is difficult to answer (how you could change the others). Like, those kinds of questions are asking for a full explanation. That kind of thing is difficult, and can be done with tutoring, but is a lot of effort to put in for free, for someone who doesn't appear to be trying.
One thing to remember with the activities given here is that they aren't meant to be personal, individualized help. You aren't getting tutoring. It isn't even a "class". You are being offered free ideas, and some free help, pointers, etc. But you have to do most of the work yourself.
I was feeling defensive. And I was feeling frustrated that I couldn’t make sense of Elliot’s criticism.
That makes sense. I think it would be good to take a step back when you are feeling defensive and frustrated. You should learn to recognize that feeling when you feel it. You can learn some mindfulness meditation techniques for thinking about the feeling, identifying it, identifying the physical sensations and thoughts that you interpret as "frustrated" (or whatever), and sort of "stepping outside" of your thoughts and just viewing them, instead of being carried away by them.
You should also not be writing on here when you are upset. People's writing quality goes down when they are upset. They make mistakes they otherwise wouldn't make. And they are often hostile & mean. That is part of what makes it difficult to help them.
I know it can be difficult because people can calm themselves down, but then when they go back to the same topic they just get upset again. But I think mindfulness is one of the things that can help them with this – it can help them see their thoughts and emotions more objectively.
(Really, you probably shouldn't be arguing with people at all when you are upset, and should be careful talking to anyone when upset. This can be difficult though because sometimes people don't know how to have certain discussions at all without getting upset. But if it's possible to wait and have the discussion calmly, you should usually do that.)
There are a lot of different apps that can help you get started with meditation, with guided meditations. They are of varying quality – some aren't actually very good. One that I have liked is Waking Up.
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Anne B
ingracke wrote:
There are times when I have something that I could say, but I don't think you will like it or want to engage with it, so I don't say it.
At first I thought, “Oh, I’ll improve how I react to criticism and then ingracke won’t hold back and I’ll get to hear what she wants to say to me.”
But really it should be more like, “Oh, I’ll improve how I react to criticism so that I can benefit more from the criticism I get.” As a consequence, ingracke might say more to me. But really, I wouldn’t want her saying more if I just feel bad about what she says and don’t engage with it.
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ingracke
Reacting better to criticism has a lot of benefits. You will make it easier for other people to talk to you – not just here, but also in your normal life, with your family and friends. You will also be able to use criticism better: you will be able to judge it better, learn more from it, act on it, etc, if you can feel good about receiving it instead of getting upset and defensive.
Another major benefit is that you will be able to do self-criticism better too. If you currently react poorly to criticism and feel upset or defensive by it, that's also going to apply when you have self-criticism. One thing that happens is that you will just censor your self-criticism to try to protect yourself from it: you just won't even allow yourself to think it consciously. (This is related to when Rand talks about people blocking things out, slamming their mind shut.)
But that doesn't make the criticism go away: you still have the self-criticism, even if you aren't consciously aware of it. So then what happens is you end up experiencing things like anxiety or uneasiness or being upset about things without really understanding what is going on or why you are feeling that way. You experience TCS-coercion, and you aren't even able to clearly think about the issue, so you can't resolve it. You are blocking out any self-criticisms because you hate criticism so much.
I think this is what ~most people are doing most of the time. They have things they are sensitive about or bad at or don't like doing. And they just avoid those things, procrastinate on them, feel bad about them. There are a lot of things that contribute to the problem, but one issue is their dislike of criticism. They get so upset by criticism that they aren't even able to openly give & handle their own self-criticisms.
Working own your own general emotional issues (which is part of what I recommend mindfulness meditation for) can also help with your emotional reactions to criticism. I don't think it is reasonable for most people to solve their negative feelings towards criticism without working on their emotions in a more general way. They won't be able to just talk themselves out of disliking criticism and solve it as a single issue. I think there are some other emotional reactions that people can do an OK job of solving without working on emotions in general, if they are able to convince themselves that their interpretation is wrong. But I don't think that will work well for most people for their reactions to criticism.
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Notified 18 people
Anne B
ingracke wrote:
Another major benefit is that you will be able to do self-criticism better too. If you currently react poorly to criticism and feel upset or defensive by it, that's also going to apply when you have self-criticism. One thing that happens is that you will just censor your self-criticism to try to protect yourself from it: you just won't even allow yourself to think it consciously. (This is related to when Rand talks about people blocking things out, slamming their mind shut.)
But that doesn't make the criticism go away: you still have the self-criticism, even if you aren't consciously aware of it. So then what happens is you end up experiencing things like anxiety or uneasiness or being upset about things without really understanding what is going on or why you are feeling that way. You experience TCS-coercion, and you aren't even able to clearly think about the issue, so you can't resolve it. You are blocking out any self-criticisms because you hate criticism so much.
I think this is what ~most people are doing most of the time. They have things they are sensitive about or bad at or don't like doing. And they just avoid those things, procrastinate on them, feel bad about them. There are a lot of things that contribute to the problem, but one issue is their dislike of criticism. They get so upset by criticism that they aren't even able to openly give & handle their own self-criticisms.
I thought I was pretty careful here not to claim that you were pressuring me, only to say that it feels like pressuring to me. I wanted to know if that was your intent.
I meant this
in the same way. I'm aware that my thinking on this is mostly instinctive and could easily be wrong.
I agree.
I wonder if, going forward, it would help to bring up incidents as they happen and only focus on those. Would that be pressuring you to respond and be bad for that reason?
I don't fully trust my social instincts to be reliable in an FI context. But I don't have a good handle on what I should go by instead. I think the answer should be "reason", but how?
Right after this you said "I would love to find out I'm wrong." That indicates that in your mind, Elliot pressuring people is the best explanation. You are treating "Elliot tries to pressure people" as the true state of affairs - as a fact. You are tentative in this treatment and hope you are wrong, but it is still what you currently think is true - your best explanation, and the one that guides your actions and reactions. It's having an effect on things like how you engage with FI, by your own admission. And you brought this belief up. Random House Webster's says that a "claim" is "an assertion of something as a fact". If some idea is your best explanation of something and active in your mind, even if you frame it as "I think" or "it seems like" or "it feels like", that doesn't make you bringing it up not a claim.
Another angle is that in taking seriously the possibility that Elliot is trying to pressure people, you're saying that Elliot is not beyond reproach as far as being a manipulative second-hander who tries to pressure people is concerned. You think him being a manipulative, pressuring second-hander is one of the possibilities worth taking seriously. That is a claim.
If on some relationship forum some wife said "I think my husband is cheating on me. It often feels like he's emotionally unavailable. I would love to find out I'm wrong. That would make my marriage way more pleasant for me." then clearly that woman would not be treating the husband as being beyond reproach as far as fidelity is concerned. That is a claim about the state of the world and specifically about the ethics and behavior of the husband.
Another way to think about it is that the *set* of explanations you consider credible or likely reflects a claim about the state of the world and the likely explanations and causes for various things.
I think it'd be good to bring stuff up as it happens. But I think it also matters how you frame and approach things.
E.g. if you take some statement you found problematic and then approach it with a scientific mindset, dictionary in hand, and analyze different possible objective meanings and social meanings, and basically take a scientific mindset to the project, then that seems fine.
OTOH if you throw down the fact that some statement upset you as a moral indictment and demand to be proven wrong lest you judge someone badly, that would not be good and would be pressuring.
Basically, it's fine to bring stuff up if it's part of an honest effort to seek the truth into which you're willing to put a lot of your own effort.
Systematic, good faith rational inquiry, criticism and discussion conducted over time 😀
You should judge whether something is right or wrong objectively. But I think you should also take social convention into account.
Joe says something and Bill has negative feelings about what Joe said. Bill says “Did you mean to be an asshole there, Joe?” This implies that Joe was being an asshole but maybe didn't see it that way.
This sounds difficult!
Maybe I'll try to write up an example of it.
Bill could be mistaken. Maybe Joe wasn’t an asshole at all to begin with.
Or in Rand’s words: “Emotions are not tools of cognition . . .”
Maybe this link is of interest to you:
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/emotions.html
I'm telling myself that because it sounds difficult, I should break it into smaller pieces, not give up.
My attempt at re-thinking a bit:
I know you don't want criticism and won't appreciate this reply, but you're attacking me and FI by dishonestly, falsely comparing some of my recommendations with coding exercises (you also falsely present the coding exercises as a separate category from my recommendations, when in fact I recommended SICP). I've let a lot of your other attacks slide, but you can't expect to make an unlimited number of attacks here with no response.
In the past year, I’ve often wished for more criticism. That doesn’t mean I’d like it if I got it, though.
You don't respond positively to criticism. You generally seem to get defensive and say things that seem to engage with the criticism, without actually engaging with it.
This makes it difficult to respond back to you. Trying to actually engage with what you say just ends up going down rabbit holes that miss the point, and then later you will insist that you have been having an FI discussion and trying to do FI, when from my POV you have been resisting doing FI and insisting on talking about other things instead. You will then count that as an FI failure, instead of seeing it as you derailing the conversation & refusing to do FI activities.
Another way to respond is with meta that you won't like and that seems aggressive and harsh to people (e.g., pointing out that you aren't actually engaging and have changed the topic or are responding to a straw man, pointing out that you aren't actually doing FI activities, etc). You don't respond positively to that kind of thing either.
There are times when I have something that I could say, but I don't think you will like it or want to engage with it, so I don't say it. I actually think that if I responded with more criticisms, you would feel bullied or singled out. And a lot of it would be repetitive. I often have the same criticism: you aren't actually doing the activities that were recommended to you, and instead are doing a different activity while pretending you are trying to do what was recommended.
I'm not actually sure how to deal with this. I don't want to do things to people that they will interpret as me being mean. I don't want to chase them around and keep telling them the same criticisms on every thread, over and over again, when they don't actually want to hear it. I want to give people criticisms that they value and will try to learn from. I want to be helpful.
But I also don't want to try to engage with your posts as if you *were* doing the recommended activities when you aren't actually doing them. That is misleading about what the activities are, and could be confusing to other people who *do* want to do the activities.
I am writing this right now to try to be helpful. I think this is a solvable problem for you. I think you have a history of doing the same type of thing repeatedly, but I don't think that means you have to be stuck in that pattern – it is possible to change the pattern. But it will only work if you want it to work, and if you put effort into understanding and solving the problem. I can't drag you along and "teach" you things you don't want to be taught.
That does show you have some self-awareness of the issue. So I took that as a positive sign.
That sounds enough like me that I didn't realize ingracke wrote it until I searched.
I think part of what's going on is if someone else tells you – e.g. me – then that can also create a repetition issue. Not all the criticisms have to be from the same person for it to be repetitive for the receiver. "The same criticisms" could refer to the same ones the person was already told rather than the same ones ingracke specifically already said.
Just to be clear, I don't answer or am slow to answer for lots of reasons. I am busy and have other things going on in my life. I don't always keep up on everything either.
I am more likely to answer things that seem easy to me or to answer things where I think what I have to say will be appreciated. But if I don't answer, that doesn't necessarily mean it's because I thought the discussion would be difficult or the person wouldn't appreciate it: I have other reasons for not writing too.
I try to help people when I can, and say something when I think I have something to say. But I am not committing to providing ongoing help for free when I do that. And if I stop helping, it's not always a criticism of the thread or the person.
When I wrote that, I meant that you count it as FI advice failing. But it would be similar if you counted it as you trying FI advice and failing, rather than not really trying the advice.
I don't know if I have directly told you these criticisms before. I have talked anonymously before, and I have followed (and written some) in other threads on FI list and I think curi blog where I saw you receive criticism defensively. I have also seen other instances where you didn't actually take the FI advice that was given, and instead did something else, and that was pointed out to you and you were upset by it and defensive in response. But I don't know offhand if it was me who pointed it out or someone else.
So I have noticed it was a pattern before. And when I noticed you doing something that looked similar again, and doing it in multiple different threads, I didn't think you really wanted to hear that. And I especially didn't think you would interpret it as helpful or nice if I went and told you the same type of criticism in multiple different threads. I thought it would probably feel unfair or like bullying to you. And that's not what I want – that's really not what I want to do.
And, honestly, I really don't know what to do about that. Because it's not just you who feels that way – I think other people have felt that way and left FI and some of them have gotten bitter and angry about it. And they are really negative about FI and think Elliot is just too pedantic, he always wants to point out people's flaws, no one is good enough for him, he expects perfection, etc.
People seem to think FI is "mean" in a way, and should try to be nicer. But the way most people are isn't really nicer: most people won't give honest criticism, even if you ask for it. There are simple things, like everyone knows "does this make me look fat?" is a trap question, and of course you are supposed to say "no"! But if you want a real answer to even a simple question like if an outfit makes you look fat, it is hard to find that. Some people will have a particularly honest friend who will give them a real opinion on that sort of thing, and they find that valuable – it can be valuable to have a friend who will actually honestly tell you simple things like which clothes you look good in.
So FI basically tries to do that, but with ideas. It tries to give people honest feedback on their learning process and ideas. And I understand that not everyone feels it is "nice", but I think it is valuable for a place like that to exist at all: to have somewhere where you can get honest and critical feedback that is actually good and detail-oriented.
Of course, you can always just post something to youtube and you get get a bunch of people to tell you that you are ugly and stupid and your videos are bad. But you can't actually get good, detailed feedback from them about what is actually bad and how to change it and what would be better. And the don't give good criticism of your ideas, they can't point out where you are wrong in accurate or detailed ways.
It actually seems weird to me that that is the general state of the internet and everyone knows it: if you post on youtube or reddit or tiktok you get called out by mean trolls who will call you an idiot, laugh at your appearance, laugh at any disabilities or differences you have, sometimes even threaten you or your family. This happens constantly, all the time. But for some reason, Elliot is perceived as being especially mean. FI is perceived as somehow being worse and more scary than other parts of the internet where people get trolled for any content they post.
I think the issue is that the FI criticism hurts people in a different way because it is accurate and it is about things that matter to them. You aren't just being called stupid, you are being told in detailed, hard to refute ways very specific things that are wrong with your ideas or your learning process. So people perceive it as meaner. But the person who is just calling others "stupid" is the one who is much meaner: he isn't trying to help. There is no positive value there. Giving people criticism that you believe to be accurate is a way to try to help them improve.
That last part was a bit of a tangent, and not just meant as a response to you. It applies generally to all of FI. It is related to you though: it's related to why it is hard to reply when someone is doing something that I am critical of. It is misleading to respond as if they aren't making a mistake, but it gets perceived as "mean" to point out the error.
Yes, I think you engaged with the criticism, and your posts didn't seem defensive :) You made some effort to find your own mistakes in your examples, and found some, which is good. And your questions made sense and addressed things I said (instead of changing the topic in some new direction).
I just want to let you know that I do plan to reply to this part, but that requires me actually going & reviewing it & thinking about it, and I don't have the time to do that right now. It is higher effort and I already wrote a lot before I got to that question, so I am out of free time now.
So for the first three posts in that thread, the third one is the most like Elliot's example. It is a short, simple activity with a simple list of steps. I commented at the time that I thought it was the best one.
I also thought it was the one that was closest to the instructions and the point of the activity. I think he point was to start with very simple projects and write the steps for those, and then you could work your way up to harder ones.
I suggested you do more like that, which I thought would be helpful - you knew enough to do those well, and doing more could be a good next step. But most of the ones that followed weren't the same type of simple, common activity with short steps.
I think your other ones before that weren't quite following the original instructions or Elliot's example.
The actual original instructions said:
But, for example, one of your projects was changing a light bulb, where you said:
Which I don't think is the kind of thing Elliot meant for people to be doing. There are plenty of things that you do on a regular basis which would be better to use and fit more with the instructions. And I found you instructions a bit odd, but wasn't sure if it was because you actually *do* change your lightbulbs like that or because your memory of how you change your lightbulbs was flawed.
I think the one that I pointed out as good was the one that best fit the instructions, and was your best one. And I think it would have been good to do a bunch more like that. I think maybe if you'd done that, you also would have had an easier time figuring out one minute projects.
But, from my perspective, you seemed to not actually like that advice, and you didn't seem really open to discussing it or trying to understand it. You seemed to be dealing with it in a defensive way. And I really wasn't sure the best way to discuss it with you, given that. As I said before, I really wasn't trying to argue with you in ways you didn't like.
I could give criticisms of the other project steps you did, but I didn't think that would actually be helpful or what you wanted. It is one of those things that would just seem mean & overly critical to people, including you.
This one is a bit difficult because Elliot's comment wasn't even meant as criticism for you to engage with – he was answering deroj's question, not trying to give you specific criticism.
But your response wasn't very good at engaging. You didn't put much effort into looking at the different projects and come up with your own ideas of what was better or worse about them. (You did come up with one idea though, about levels of detail.)
You asked a kind of helpless question, which is difficult to answer (how you could change the others). Like, those kinds of questions are asking for a full explanation. That kind of thing is difficult, and can be done with tutoring, but is a lot of effort to put in for free, for someone who doesn't appear to be trying.
One thing to remember with the activities given here is that they aren't meant to be personal, individualized help. You aren't getting tutoring. It isn't even a "class". You are being offered free ideas, and some free help, pointers, etc. But you have to do most of the work yourself.
That makes sense. I think it would be good to take a step back when you are feeling defensive and frustrated. You should learn to recognize that feeling when you feel it. You can learn some mindfulness meditation techniques for thinking about the feeling, identifying it, identifying the physical sensations and thoughts that you interpret as "frustrated" (or whatever), and sort of "stepping outside" of your thoughts and just viewing them, instead of being carried away by them.
You should also not be writing on here when you are upset. People's writing quality goes down when they are upset. They make mistakes they otherwise wouldn't make. And they are often hostile & mean. That is part of what makes it difficult to help them.
I know it can be difficult because people can calm themselves down, but then when they go back to the same topic they just get upset again. But I think mindfulness is one of the things that can help them with this – it can help them see their thoughts and emotions more objectively.
(Really, you probably shouldn't be arguing with people at all when you are upset, and should be careful talking to anyone when upset. This can be difficult though because sometimes people don't know how to have certain discussions at all without getting upset. But if it's possible to wait and have the discussion calmly, you should usually do that.)
There are a lot of different apps that can help you get started with meditation, with guided meditations. They are of varying quality – some aren't actually very good. One that I have liked is Waking Up.
Another major benefit is that you will be able to do self-criticism better too. If you currently react poorly to criticism and feel upset or defensive by it, that's also going to apply when you have self-criticism. One thing that happens is that you will just censor your self-criticism to try to protect yourself from it: you just won't even allow yourself to think it consciously. (This is related to when Rand talks about people blocking things out, slamming their mind shut.)
But that doesn't make the criticism go away: you still have the self-criticism, even if you aren't consciously aware of it. So then what happens is you end up experiencing things like anxiety or uneasiness or being upset about things without really understanding what is going on or why you are feeling that way. You experience TCS-coercion, and you aren't even able to clearly think about the issue, so you can't resolve it. You are blocking out any self-criticisms because you hate criticism so much.
I think this is what ~most people are doing most of the time. They have things they are sensitive about or bad at or don't like doing. And they just avoid those things, procrastinate on them, feel bad about them. There are a lot of things that contribute to the problem, but one issue is their dislike of criticism. They get so upset by criticism that they aren't even able to openly give & handle their own self-criticisms.
Working own your own general emotional issues (which is part of what I recommend mindfulness meditation for) can also help with your emotional reactions to criticism. I don't think it is reasonable for most people to solve their negative feelings towards criticism without working on their emotions in a more general way. They won't be able to just talk themselves out of disliking criticism and solve it as a single issue. I think there are some other emotional reactions that people can do an OK job of solving without working on emotions in general, if they are able to convince themselves that their interpretation is wrong. But I don't think that will work well for most people for their reactions to criticism.
Ahh. This seems like something I could be doing.