i’m 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 “theory of change”; the author’s working model of how writing changes people’s behavior. a rough provisional taxonomy:
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1. “command” - tell people to do the right thing and they’ll 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 we’d be done by now
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2. “shame” - shame people for doing the wrong thing and they’ll do the right thing. sort of a variant of command. i’m pessimistic. i think shame has mostly broken as a mechanism for changing people’s behavior, and frequently backfires. i try not to use it myself
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3. “lecture” - tell people the right facts and they’ll 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. “facts” often do not automatically turn into motivation
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4. “theorize” - explain to people a theory / model of how some domain works and they’ll do better things wrt that domain. this is a sort of upgraded “lecture” 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 “better” over “right” 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. “all models are wrong, some are useful” etc.
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5. “inspire” - show people what the right thing looks like and they’ll do the right thing. i like “inspire” a lot. it trusts the reader more than “command” or “shame,” and i think compared to “lecture” or “theorize” it’s 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. “alter perception” - show people how to perceive something differently and they’ll do something different. i’m not aware of a single word for this. this is the theory of change i am increasingly leaning towards, even more than “inspire”. 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 “inspire” is that you can show people a good thing and that’s helpful, but it doesn’t 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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i’ve previously described what i try to do in my writing as “articulate things people already know but don’t know how to articulate” and i think now i’d fold that into “alter perception”; “alter perception” 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/stat…
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“alter perception”, the way i’m 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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“alter perception” 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 “behavior is the control of perception”; it follows that, in some sense, altering perception is the fundamental mechanism behind altering behavior)
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Wow ... Yes and an enact and embody vibe... and a reverence for the deeper, bigger thing that is lightings us up and evolving and unfolding around us ...and a sense of wonder and deep remembering and listening and savoring around the home fire 🔥 🌳 ❤️
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