iām noticing that when i read writing, on twitter or elsewhere, that is visibly trying to change the people reading it in some way, i try to guess its ātheory of changeā; the authorās working model of how writing changes peopleās behavior. a rough provisional taxonomy:
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1. ācommandā - tell people to do the right thing and theyāll do the right thing. this might work on impressionable young people, or people who are desperate, but i am pessimistic about it overall. if commands were enough weād be done by now
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2. āshameā - shame people for doing the wrong thing and theyāll do the right thing. sort of a variant of command. iām pessimistic. i think shame has mostly broken as a mechanism for changing peopleās behavior, and frequently backfires. i try not to use it myself
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3. ālectureā - tell people the right facts and theyāll do the right thing. i am mostly pessimistic about this one, with some exceptions. i think it is a holdover from school and often accomplishes no behavioral change. āfactsā often do not automatically turn into motivation
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4. ātheorizeā - explain to people a theory / model of how some domain works and theyāll do better things wrt that domain. this is a sort of upgraded ālectureā and i like it better. good theories can be very useful and have helped me. not by themselves, tho. motivation again
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i switched to the word ābetterā over ārightā here because for me, implicitly part of the point of sharing a theory / model rather than just its conclusions is to collaborate on constructing better theories / models in public. āall models are wrong, some are usefulā etc.
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5. āinspireā - show people what the right thing looks like and theyāll do the right thing. i like āinspireā a lot. it trusts the reader more than ācommandā or āshame,ā and i think compared to ālectureā or ātheorizeā itās tied more closely to motivation
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fortunately i think there's a better option: instead of trying to enforce norms, you can try to *inspire people*, by *showing* them what better behavior is like and how good it is
twitter.com/visakanv/statu
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6. āalter perceptionā - show people how to perceive something differently and theyāll do something different. iām not aware of a single word for this. this is the theory of change i am increasingly leaning towards, even more than āinspireā. i described a prototype of it here:
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writing is not about communicating facts, it is about redirecting and reorganizing attention
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the limitation of āinspireā is that you can show people a good thing and thatās helpful, but it doesnāt explain what habits of perception you developed that caused you to do the good thing, or how you developed them
it can motivate but what it motivates may be a cargo cult
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- building skill in a domain mostly involves learning what to track, e.g. ontology-building
- teaching is mostly the art of setting up experiences that cause a student to track the appropriate things relevant to a skill
- skill in a domain is gated by ontology
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iāve previously described what i try to do in my writing as āarticulate things people already know but donāt know how to articulateā and i think now iād fold that into āalter perceptionā; āalter perceptionā is broader since it allows for new stuff
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this is mostly the target i try to hit with my writing - articulate things people already know but don't know how to articulate, so i don't have to convince anyone of anything. distributed Gendlin focusing twitter.com/DRMacIver/statā¦
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āalter perceptionā, the way iām using it, includes things like preaching a worldview. any self-respecting worldview includes notions of what is worth paying attention to and what concepts one ought to use to understand what happens when you do; these can drive real change
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āalter perceptionā also includes some kinds of insight porn, as well as conspiracy theories, and arguably narrativizing / storytelling in a broad sense. it is really a very inclusive genre, and i think most of the most interesting writing operates somewhere around here
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(this is all, btw, coming from reading a little about perceptual control theory. one of its foundational ideas is that ābehavior is the control of perceptionā; it follows that, in some sense, altering perception is the fundamental mechanism behind altering behavior)
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