And now that you have the menu in front of you, your (fast, intuitive, maybe-dopaminergic) reward-seeking mechanism *is drawn to one of these options*, which enables you to take them.
-
-
This is why people can sometimes see criticism/feedback as an attack. Literally *all* criticism, if untranslated, is a commandment to do the literally impossible.
Show this thread -
But why would you ever fail to translate feedback? Most people, if they ask you to take out the garbage, don’t mean to say “do it literally instantaneously in a physically impossible fashion.” So why get defensive as *if* they meant that?
Show this thread -
One hypothesis: we have bad memories of people who expected obedience faster than we literally could obey at the time, or of demands that were literally impossible to fulfill even *after* simulating them.
Show this thread -
I usually use religious commandments as what feel like clear cut examples of instructions that are definitely impossible to obey and yet intended to be obeyed; but other people claim that’s not true, so I’m not sure.
Show this thread -
I’m very confident that the Talmud (which i’m trying to learn cover to cover) describes behaviors as admirable which would be impossible or unwise to attempt (like sleeping 0 hours per night)
Show this thread -
Anyhow, I’m inclined to believe that there are, or have been, *any* people who demand the impossible, and actually meant that, not something more reasonable.
Show this thread -
But okay, if there *are* people who ask the impossible or unreasonable, why should that cause suffering? Why not just reject all impossible demands?
Show this thread -
To explain this, I have to posit some inherent limitation in what thoughts are possible, and that makes my model more complicated & so less credible, for occam’s razor reasons. Hmm. I’m stuck.
Show this thread -
“Some people demand the impossible” should lead to the update “demanding the impossible is a thing people sometimes do”, but I don’t see why it overcorrects to “all feedback should be interpreted as a demand to do the impossible.”
Show this thread -
Hypothesis 1: there is an incredibly prevalent, all-pervading meme, that instantaneous obedience is possible, and even that the function of language is literally to *cause* (with no intervening thought) behavior in another person. This is literally what B.F. Skinner said.
Show this thread -
Likewise there are things like Bernays’ Propaganda that claim that we can literally be manipulated directly by outside forces. There are popular Evangelical parenting books that say “delayed obedience is disobedience.”
Show this thread -
Perhaps, lots and lots of people believe (erroneously) that instantaneous obedience is possible, and tell you this SO MUCH that it outweighs the evidence of your own experience that it’s impossible.
Show this thread -
This causes you to be another person who believes instantaneous obedience is possible, so you perpetuate the meme yourself, and the cycle continues.
Show this thread -
(Here I’m using the assumption that you assume “someone said X” is weak evidence for X.)
Show this thread -
Hypothesis 2: as in 1, perhaps you’re getting an overwhelming number of signals starting from birth that teach you that instantaneous obedience is possible, but it’s *not* because lots of people hold that (false) belief.
Show this thread -
Rather, you’re seeing signals all the time that are like the conductor’s baton: they’re meant to be obeyed instantaneously based on a cached, pre-trained “ghost motion” or “implementation intention.”
Show this thread -
The people sending these signals are not mostly deluded; they correctly anticipate that their intended audience knows how to obey. Actual conductors aren’t *wrong* to use batons.
Show this thread -
The problem is that you see tons of signals for which you are not the intended audience! So *from your perspective*, the world is full of people making incomprehensible demands of the world at large, which necessarily includes you.
Show this thread -
(This is made worse when you can eavesdrop on conversations you weren’t invited to; so, eg, social media, print media, and agoras/public physical spaces as well as travel and diverse cities.)
Show this thread -
So, if you see enough signals not aimed at you, you may come to believe that instantaneous obedience *without training* is possible, when what’s actually going on is that instantaneous obedience is possible *with training*.
Show this thread -
In this model, belief in instantaneous obedience doesn’t have to be overwhelmingly widespread in order to propagate itself; it can ride on the coattails of tons of “innocent” (=not based on falsehood) baton-signals.
Show this thread -
(These aren’t all the possibilities, to be clear; just generating a few plausible ideas.)
Show this thread -
it's also possible, as
@selentelechia suggested, that people get trained on *clumsy* signals; e.g. if people get mad every time you don't instantaneously do something you don't know how to do, you might infer that this means "instantaneous obedience is obligatory"...Show this thread -
even though the people who got mad at you *didn't* believe that instantaneous obedience is obligatory. Maybe you need a *few* sources of authoritarian ideology to promote the hypothesis to your attention, but *mostly* you're being trained on people's unintentional signals.
Show this thread -
Anyhow. Instantaneous obedience is *impossible.* Not "evil" or "tyrannical"; it literally doesn't exist. You *can't* do what you're told directly. You *have* to map it to how you would do it *first*, and then your reward function has to be drawn to it.
Show this thread -
Other people can't "make you do things." What other people can do is *make you suffer*. They can promote hypotheses to your attention, and the right stimuli in the right order *can* tie you in a knot of trying to believe two contradictory things at once.
Show this thread -
There's a (false, IMO) belief you might call "descriptive authoritarianism" -- the theory that people *can* make other people do things, that instantaneous obedience or direct manipulation is possible.
Show this thread -
There's also a (probably false?) belief you might call "descriptive individualism" -- the theory that other people, or external circumstances, can't have *any* effect on your mind that you can't undo, in one motion, "at will".
Show this thread -
What external circumstances can do is *insert a thing in your awareness*. "I am hearing the phrase 'You should do X.'" You don't get to choose this, I think; it's thrust upon you. Which means that contradictions can be inserted into your "workspace" of awareness.
Show this thread -
You can *resolve* contradictions; if you successfully explain away, make sense of, resolve, the temporary contradiction, you can stop suffering. But you may or may not actually do this. Other people can cause you suffering; you may or may not know how to remove it.
Show this thread - 8 more replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.