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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there should be a single word for this
this is how anything significant gets done, ever
this is what JBP does, or Alan Watts, or Eckart Tolle, or, idk, Tim Ferriss
everyone in the general "life lessons" category, really
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Reframe?
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ofc we can slice this up different ways but i'd call reframes a somewhat specific special case. i guess i see them as sort of... narrow in the "levels" at which they operate, and usually explicit? "alter perception" can be much broader and implicit. i like "reorient"