That’s a very scary headspace to be in; trying to describe it makes it sound like it’s a very severe mental illness; but it’s actually common among so-called “healthy” people. Heidegger got this.
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But neither is just accommodating people’s insecurities indefinitely going to make them any less insecure. Insecurity is not merely an “unmet need” that goes away once you meet it.
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What conditions promote being more reflective and generative rather than reactive? What gets you away from “judginess” or “being insecure about being judged”?
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1. Truly asocial contemplation. Getting alone and into a nonverbal, feral state; or writing or drawing where definitely nobody will see. Calling it “meditation” is too virtue-signal-y. Just try to do something that doesn’t have social pressure.
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2. Focus attention on something super concrete (like making a physical object) or super impersonal (like math/science); something that prompts you to think about the thing itself, not your image.
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3. Don’t underestimate “merely intellectual” understanding; the literal words and their dictionary meanings and parsing the logical structure. This level of understanding is “shallow” or “mere” because you don’t feel compelled to act on it.
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That “mereness” is bad from the perspective that desires obedience (“you merely comprehend what I say, you don’t *do* it!”) but it’s good if you want to understand what’s going on before acting.
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Getting other people to reflect is hard, but I think it helps to keep the topic on things that lend themselves to “merely abstract geeking out”, because people will naturally have more reflective attitudes about that stuff.
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A certain type of high-integrity person is super resistant to talking about “politics and society” because they correctly note that people including themselves are more enactive/reactive about those topics. They’d rather talk science because those conversations are healthier.
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(Or talk about birdwatching or cooking or woodworking or whatever. “Real” things.)
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If we could get people to think about politics/psychology/society in the same way they think about parts of the physical world they’re curious about, it would be super powerful.
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“Judgment” that is “merely intellectual” — just an assessment or a prediction — is a *good* thing once you get away from all the performative/validating/invalidating baggage.
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Why? If an assessment of a person conveys useful information, you can use it to accomplish goals. Same as all knowledge.
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Of course, when you think about it that way, it’s obvious that often you don’t have enough info to assess people, or your true assessment is kind of boring and moderate.
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True judgments of people allow for relative magnitudes, not just adjectives. Once I was arguing with a friend that I was “not very good at math.” He disagreed. Once we pinned it down we both agreed that there are probably 5000-10,000 living Americans better at math than me.
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True judgments of people allow you to say “this person is better than average in such-and-such a respect, but still not good enough to achieve such-and-such a goal.” Not everything has to be a dichotomy.
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Actually evaluating people — such that you can accurately predict their future behavior — is hard and I’m not unusually good at it.
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What I do think I’m decent at is discerning *when I don’t care* what the truth about the person is. When I’m thinking about the cartoon of them in my head, rather the imperfectly known real person outside it. (Because
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You’re gonna have things you don’t care about! Or that you only talk about as a pretext to talk about your own feelings and agendas. Or that you only talk about as a joke or for social bonding fodder.
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But for every topic that you only talk about as a way of talking about something else, there will be people who literally care about the thing itself.
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Celebrities and news events are the obvious example; for some people they’re a conversational hook or meme; to a much smaller number of people they’re real life.
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A lot of gossipy “judgments” people make are just *not real* in this way. They’re designed to make a good story or hyperbolic one-upping move. You can’t use them to navigate reality; and translating the subtext into text is fiendishly hard.
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Insecurity and shame makes it hard to talk about “hey, you shouldn’t have done that thing” without getting derailed by whether the criticism is “insulting” or “judgmental”.
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In particular, conveying “it is especially important that you change” sounds exactly like “you are especially bad as a person” or “you should be especially harshly punished.”
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This sucks because often the biggest, highest priority positive impact on the world would come from a change in the behavior of a person who’s *already doing a lot of good*.
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Let’s say it’s the 19th century and you’re trying to convince doctors to wash their hands. These are people who have dedicated their lives to healing the sick! They’re cleaner than most people! How dare you accuse them of killing patients! Are you saying they should be hanged?
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How do you convey *urgency* (you really have to wash your hands! People are dying!) without cruelty (I really don’t want to make you feel bad about yourself or make anyone hate you; just wash your hands!)
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Even harder mode: what if the issue isn’t so much present harms as the *absence* of potential benefits? How can you hold people accountable for missed opportunities— the houses not built, the cures not discovered, the technologies not invented?
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Any way you try to express this, you’ll often be “blaming” the people who are already *doing the most to contribute* for not doing even more.
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You don’t have to be an unusually bad person to miss an unusually important opportunity.
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In fact, you don’t have to be an unusually bad person to commit an atrocity either. Genocides are committed by *normal* people who would never do a socially deviant thing like rob a bank.
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