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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago

One of the weirdest parts of our psychology is our ability to forget about big problems we haven't solved.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

I don't know how to think about this, so let me just brainstorm some angles.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

1. After we try shit for a while, and it doesn't seem to work, eventually we stop trying. This could be seen in a positive light as learning from failure, or conserving resources. Or in a negative light as giving up.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

2. We need to handle other day-to-day things in the meantime, and so eventually we turn our attention to those, and when it turns out our other life-strategies still work, we sort of shrug:"maybe Big Problem wasn't so big after all, if I can still work around it."

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

3. Related to the 'muddling through' frame: some problems don't get solved, they just get muddled through.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

4. Even the word "problem" might itself be a problem, but I'm kinda okay with using it for now (a perfect microcosm).

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

Not everything we work on should be seen as a problem, but this class of things probably should, because they're all … big, bad, maybe vague, maybe intractable … sources of future harm that we avoid thinking about.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

5. Ashcroft heads see forgetting problems as contracted awareness.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

6. Venkat had a good line I can’t track down about first-world moralism re: order-of-operations in problem solving, something like:“A recipient of charity should not spend any money on fun until he's solved the basic boring problems."

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

7. You could call it a recentness bias: we focus on what's changed recently, not what's been around for a while.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

8. You could file it under mankind's infinite capacity to take things for granted.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

9. Anyone have any sources about what the actual time horizons on this are? Like those habit-book guys, but for how long it takes us to get used to (stop resisting) various types of environmental changes?

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

one that I can think of is how injury-related compensatory movement patterns take about two weeks to get establishedafter that, even once healed your nervous system has no reason to ever stop limping. it takes some fancy physical therapy or a lot of conscious awareness to fix

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

10. Related: that phenomenon of people living right under a dam being the least concerned about it, and people living at the edge of the danger the most worried.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

11. Broad class of wicked problems: "How to diagnose maladies where causality takes decades plus?"I wrote a little poem about it once

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

To understand cause and effectseparated in timeis the hardest thing.Is that why we live so long?To live to see effectsso many years removed from their causesthat we alone remember them?

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

Anyway I was thinking about this class of problems because one that frequently nags me is something like:

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

*taps mic* we live in a surveillance society.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

And, we know from history that surveillance societies don't thrive. They choke themselves out and die, slowly, painfully, while limping down a miserable road of shame, guilt, and backstabbing. This is the most obvious thing in the world.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

But we can't seem to stop, especially because ours is not a surveillance state, it's a seemingly voluntary surveillance market. There's no dictator to overthrow. Except the dictator of our own preferences for convenience.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

*taps mic* we live in a surveillance society, and most of it happened in our lifetimes.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

*taps mic* we live in a surveillance society, and we participated in its construction.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

Now, this brings us to one of the major life alignment pitfalls that lead people to madness: deciding to Take A Stand Against Evil.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

Okay, okay, I get it, focus on what you want to see more of in the world.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

Fixate on your opponents and you only give them power.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

You win a struggle by formulating an ideal as precisely and vividly as possible while completely ignoring the other guy.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

But like, really?? At what point does that become complicity? At what point does that become willful blindness?Don't problems need to be seen and recognized before they can be solved?

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

I have a natural sympathy for cranks, and an instinctive distrust for authority, so this is a dilemma I've been pondering my whole life:"How can cranks get taken seriously, if they're right?"

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

I used to think the answer was "they need to become more articulate and persuasive", but I'm coming to believe more and more that this is a dead end. Or at least, not adequate on its own.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

All this to say: on the one path you end up a raving madman, on the other you censor yourself in order to preserve your credibility, which you can never spend on the one thing you actually care about using it for.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

a lot of public craziness is driven by an inner logic of:"Why won't they *listen* to me? It must be because I'm not emoting hard enough."

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

... everyone continues ignoring them, as they gradually dial up the intensity of emotion, until it finally crosses the 'crazy' threshold ...

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

... at which point the inconvenient objector can be dismissed for being crazy, instead of being dismissed for being unimportant, or non-urgent, as they were previously.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

Putting it this way highlights how essentially infantile this pattern is.Which, again, maddeningly, only reinforces the dismissal of the problem. A restatement of the Cassandra Complex I suppose.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

To wrap this up with some glimmer of hope, the *taps mic* gesture is one of the best public postures I've seen towards this class of huge, slow moving clusterfuck.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

Live your life as a respectable, upstanding person, and then every once in a while, like every six months or two years or something, just gently remind people that the problem *is a problem* without ranting too hard.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

ideally at a time when some of the acute short-term symptoms of the problem are already being discussed.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

This isn't likely to win you a lot of friends, because speaking up about problems without proposing solutions is not a good look.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• about 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

But it will have the beneficial effect of showing others that reasonable people don't need to remain silent about the situation. Which, for the time being, might be the best you can do.

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11/15/2023
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Rusty@Rusty_Swarf• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @Rusty_Swarf

This angle makes more apparent why ignoring problems is an important ability. Also hints that expanding your RANGE of "willingness to be irritated by this problem, or ignore it" is key to long-term success.https://t.co/WPMMfNTYUT

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• almost 2 years ago

at any given moment people are typically dealing with problems that they didn't know how to avoid or solve because if they knew how to avoid or solve it, it wouldn't be a problem they were dealing with

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