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the rationalists used "techniquifying" to refer to trying to turn people's weird little self-improvement things they did into repeatable techniques that could be taught to other people and i've mostly decided it's bad actually. very easy to drain the life out of things this way
at some point overburdening your way of being with like, a breath technique, and a technique for starting conversations at a party, and a technique for calming your emotions, and a technique for resolving disagreements, or whatever, just gets unbelievably tedious
hell yeah https://t.co/wybgzT2igz
@QiaochuYuan I think the issue was a bit deeper, where we all essentially forced ourselves into positions of greater and greater internal coercion in pursuit of effectiveness, and all those techniques just became ways to beat up your inner child https://t.co/dra1G2mlqp
@QiaochuYuan You can others become the sort of person who collects interesting techniques and offers them to parts if those parts are interested. But it looks very little like teaching individual techniques. This is why meditation instructions aren't usually pointing to specific insights.
@QiaochuYuan I think of it as the bell curve meme: you start off with fuzzy little things. And it's useful to formalise it as a technique, it's really useful for yourself and others, there's quite a few of them I like. But you shouldn't hold onto that but integrate it into your life...
@QiaochuYuan I think the bell curve meme is only applicable when it's a progression: it's better to be a midwit than a lowwit, and to be a topwit you have to pass through the midwit phase. If not it becomes a screeching "at least I'm not midwit lol"
@RichDecibels @QiaochuYuan also because one sub-group within Alexander's first teacher trainees seemed to feel like he was a bad teacher and not teaching the thing properly so they set out to get it for themselves by looking closely at what he was doing and doing that guess how that went
@RichDecibels @QiaochuYuan for anyone who is interested you can read the story in this incredibly niche book (biography of one of said group) https://t.co/4zhLgOQaS0
@m_ashcroft @RichDecibels Reminds me of how the eye processes visual information: it has great edge-detection, but it’s terrible at detecting change of shade if there’s a gradient. But this means when painting, you still have to paint this invisible gradient! Otherwise you’re double-processing the image.