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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never assume that i have studied anything except math lol