I have been rethinking, my thinking.
When tracing back some of my thoughts, I find I have been making choices and decisions in a semiautomatic fashion (no surprise) but the assumptions I used to make the decision were inaccurate. But the decision had been made, and success achieved, and repeated, until it was nearly automatic. The repeat of the same pattern, leading to the same success makes each following decision more likely to follow the same paths, until it doesn’t require thought at all. I call this hardwiring.
Sometimes, that hardwiring leads to an emotional reward. A sense of satisfaction. Solve a problem, get the dopamine (juice), reinforce the learned behavior. This leads to what I call hooks. Feedback loops that lead to emotional rewards.
Going back to find those assumptions, vastly increases the number of options, and has a cascading effect. Each inaccurate assumption leads to other assumptions to question. It’s been a fun year.
And this has helped me model other people better.
I have always been very confused by people’s contradictory behavior. How does one not want tyranny or fascism, and yet make choices that lead toward tyranny/fascism? How does one want good things for minorities, and choose things that so clearly have such negative effects on the most vulnerable members of that minority? How does one want equality, yet choose options that will decrease equality?
Somewhat like designing plumbing or HVAC systems, I can somewhat predict what a mass will do, but at an individual level, many actions seem nearly random. The contradictions above were just throwing a wrench in the works. So, not knowing how that worked, I just classified it as contradictory behavior I didn’t understand, and left it aside to be worked on later.
But what if everyone else has those same semiautomatic decisions going on, based on faulty assumptions? Could that explain the contradictions? And if so, why are my assumptions different from theirs?
I have gone into my past, and some of the less pleasant aspects elsewhere, no need to repeat here. But the relevant part is that I grew up as outgroup. Geeky. Poor. Teacher’s pet. Moving around, a lot. Drugs. Lots of stupid, self destructive decisions, everywhere. My friends described me as feral. Not in a “half wild, you better look out” way, but in a “skittish, distrusting, poorly socialized” way. So, all my hooks were formed in my self image as independent, and smart. None were tied to social acceptance. (Looking back, that doesn’t seem smart.)
And a lot of my assumptions about people were made in school, in the popularity contest Paul Graham describes in his essays. That’s not a good environment to get accurate profiles of how people behave. So, I know where I have work to do, and I’m slowly doing it.
But the side effect is I have had a chance to improve my model for other people.
I needed a neutral term for the 90% of people who think in more normalized ways. I chose N type (normal type), because calling them emotional morons in my head was interfering with modeling.
And really, I don’t think this has much, if anything to do with intelligence, but rather our chemical feedback loops, and where we get our juice.
Most folks went to the same schools, all their lives. So the girl who saw you let the tarantula go free in second grade is the one you asked to the prom. This kind of consistency in childhood is a bit mind blowing to me, but also very restrictive. Most kids never get a clean slate, where they get to reinvent themselves. Some get a chance as they go off to college, since nobody knows who they were in HS. But most never do.
I am wondering if this is a contributing factor to agency, or lack thereof.
So what do you think? Did you get a chance to reinvent yourself? When, and how often? Do you think this was a contributing factor in your ability to choose your own path?