#gated truth

[mentalisttraceur]

Forgiveness

Another angle on "forgiveness". On the gated truth at the heart of "forgiveness is something you do for yourself, not for the person you are forgiving". On what that emotionally healthy piece can look like, freed from the other meanings of "forgiveness".

Your negative emotions about how they wronged you should be proportional to your ability to impose consequences or engender change per your ethics.

Can't/won't do anything to them that you want to do? Zero fucks given. Unbothered. Living your best life. No spite. No anger. Calm. If you are amused at them or looking down on them, it is a purely positive addition to your life, not emotionally needy, not cope, not a soothing balm for a negative experience.

If there's nothing left to do? If they are a better person already, and you and everyone else have had just recompense? Same. The past wrong simply no longer matters to you.

But the moment an opportunity presents itself to enact any still-needed mitigating or correcting measures, to right those wrongs, or to have some restorative satisfaction - the best emotions for getting you to act on it flare as much as needed.

In other words, you're no longer impotently bothered by the thought, presence, success, existence, or memory of someone who wronged you. You are not hurting yourself by stewing in unactionable negative emotions. It is not detracting from your greater goals.

But there is no contradiction in hurting them, if it's still ethically necessary. And there is no contradiction in feeling whatever emotions would motivate the necessary hurt - even enjoyment of that hurt, provided the enjoyment is contained.

Forgiveness, or at least this part or it, is a matter of emotional accuracy. Some people choose to forgive to get these benefits. But you can also just do this part, without taking on the other baggage of "forgiveness" - without writing checks for unpaid debts.

[mentalisttraceur]

One of the valuable but annoying things with thinking in probabilities is like ....

Sometimes you say something to a person, and you're actually consciously, deliberately saying words that have different meanings in the different possibilities... words that would mean different possible things or invoke different associations or feelings, depending on which of the different possibilities is true of who they are, where they're at, what mood they're in.

Because sometimes that's better than just flinging the same intended meaning at all possibilities of who they are in that moment. In fact sometimes meaning one thing is impossible. Sometimes within the possibilities you see, you can't see any statement you could make that would get taken the same way in all possibilities and which also fits all your relevant values.

But like, some people don't get that - they don't think like that, so they can't really put themselves in those shoes, or maybe they have never even consciously conceived of the experience, or of it being practically doable by humans in the real world.

So then if one of those people asks you "what did you mean by that?", it's like... (very tired sigh).

[mentalisttraceur]

Everyday language and common experience will always be inevitably insufficient for expressing truth, logic, and wisdom which takes more than average effort or knowledge to attain.

If you want to have conversations above that level, not quite the lowest common denominator but close, you need to define new words and phrases and meanings. If you think you don't, you are either not actually operating above that level, or don't have enough conversations or sensitivity to problems to notice.

After you've pulled people up, plain language for those ideas can survive among them - among just those people, not newcomers and newborns. You will never be able to just leave plain language out unattended and have uninitiated people understand what you meant.

If you make the language more accessible than the idea, you do not make the idea more accessible, you just make it easier for people to learn or speak a worse idea. That worse idea often looks just enough like the original to cloud things worse than inaccessible language does.

You will never get away from something like academic institutions which feel to some like too much inaccessible language, gatekeeping, and credentialing, because those are emergent properties of designing what you need to reliably train human brains en masse past a certain level.

[mentalisttraceur]

I guess I am taking the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, now that I understand it was just a gated truth for a very deep understanding of the limits of what we can know, with possibility collapse being a necessary consequence.

No wonder we have so many rejections of it. People learn physics like "this is how the world works (objectively)", not "this is the best approximation of the world we have so far, and we can never have true certain knowledge of how all aspects of the external world actually are".

Thing is, you can "understand" those words and nod along and still not get it, not internalize it deeply enough, not update all your cognition related to how you understand and think about the world.

I tentatively suspect that the other interpretations are usually the results of under-prepared minds used to thinking that it is possible to know for sure how the world is grasping for purchase when confronted for the first time with the hard limitations to that.

To be clear I do not reject the other interpretations as definitely wrong, I just assert that they are unnecessary, and "meaningless" (in the logical positivist sense) unless they predict something empirically distinguishable.

Copenhagen is not an "interpretation" the same way that the others are. Copenhagen is the lack of any extra interpretation, just the normal inescapable interpretation that applies to all knowledge of how the world works, applied to quantum mechanics.

[mentalisttraceur]

The Decay of Nuance

Nuanced ideas and terminology consistently degrade over time.

This is part of the insufficient language problem: If people don’t fully understand a new thing as it spreads, it will lose the nuance that made it distinctly useful or meaningful in the first place.

Relevant selective pressures:

Simpler and easier cognition takes less mental energy than complex or difficult cognition.

Long and nuanced explanations take more attention and time than short and intuitive ones.

People want to talk about common and obvious things more than uncommon or obscure things.

It is easier to co-opt an existing, related, nuanced word than it is to popularize a new one.

Gated truths cannot be taught by any form short enough to be usable in conversation.

Meaning is learned by context, but nuance that is not yet understood is invisible context.

Thus nuance-bearing things require upkeep: we must either reassert the nuance often enough, in our speech and thoughts, or the nuance is lost.

[mentalisttraceur]

Before you embark on a genuine pursuit of mental growth, make sure you are ready (as much as one can be ready for such a thing) to deal with new suffering that you have not yet encountered.

Seriously. You might think being smart and capable is all that, with achievements and recognition. It does have advantages, and helps protect and heal and strengthen self-esteem. But beyond a certain point...

Beyond a certain point, growing as a mind means entering a personal hell. It is growing too big for the cage that is this life. The cage doesn't loosen. The cage can't loosen. The mental growth that I have experienced has had these fun results:

My thoughts are too "wide", too many angles and associations active at once, to the point that speech linearity is a constant problem.

I have such large chains of inferences and bodies of evidence and knowledge forming my conclusions that now trying to convince or explain my ideas causes me to experience working gridlock most of the time.

My understanding exceeds my thinking limits to the point that I often can't make progress because I'm aware that I'm not able to hold all of my relevant ideas, knowledge, and heuristics at once: like trying to carry too many things in my hands, in the dark. I know I am not holding something important, but reaching for it usually causes another thing to "slip" out of it. The brain gets better and the grasp widens just a little bit if I constantly push, but it's exhausting, but to do anything less is to know I'm wrong.

A lot of the conclusions of my reasoning that I could once readily explain have been wired into automatic and often not-quite-as-conscious thinking, so sometimes I have a cognitive habit or intuition that I remember was hard-earned through much evidence and thought, but I have to basically re-discover, re-prove, and re-articulate from scratch the justifications for things that I've been building on top of for years.

I have grown the skills for reshaping my own mind so much that my entire perspective on that is basically alien to the average person, impossible to word without several gated truths most are still "outside the gate" on; I can so often clearly see, once I know a person well enough, what cognition they could train and how, the way they could benefit themselves and the world by habituating certain ways of thinking, but it is inaccessible to many, in ways that make trying to convey it directly counter-productive.

As it concerns empathy and compassion - actually caring about the world and other people/minds, I have only exposed myself to ever greater levels of profound distress over the predicaments that we all find ourselves in.

Existential crisis. Already had one? That's okay, there are many different, unique ways to reach existential dread and despair, and in my experience exploring one rarely prepared me for the others, except in so far as it forced me into opportunities to train deeper coping skills.

Insufficient language.

The horizon of what I know I can't or don't know, or can't think, has for a few years now grown faster than my knowledge and thinking limits. I think they're intrinsically connected, such that any growth of the latter grows the former more.

I've had to start learning to be certain on-demand as a psychological tool, because in most issues that involve accounting for people, from my vantage point certainly as a genuine intellectual position is indefensible to the point of being unethical.

Understand, this is my unique experience. I don't know if yours will be the same. Maybe the problem isn't even mental growth, but my psychology which just wasn't prepared for growth that normal people handle just fine. I don't know. I probably can't know, not ever really with certainty, per point 10.

Don't get me wrong, it's fulfilling, and I think given the choice I would eventually push further. But I cannot stress this enough:

Were it not for my growing skills at not being emotionally distressed over genuinely bad things, at maintaining positive cognition in the face of genuinely real and immediate problems, I would be rendered non-functional by what I've built my mind up to do. As is I seem to experience nearly daily frustrations and distress that most people don't ever seem to, if I don't steer my mind correctly.

But who knows, maybe everything I experience is common and normal. Then again, if you can idea-fit anything sensical and relatable to you onto my words, that's the conclusion you'd be tempted to draw.

Doesn't matter. See, I don't actually care if I'm special or unique in mental growth. Or rather, I'd really like to believe that I'm not above average at all. If you really get it, then I think you'll understand this the most. Because the alternative, the possibility of really, genuinely being somehow qualitatively better that most other people, is not a pleasant thing. It is terrifying, lonely, and dreadful.

TL;DR: If one day you magically have the option to wish for profoundly increased intelligence, don't forget to wish for profoundly increased coping skills first.

[mentalisttraceur]

Now I have to deliberate if I want to be coining a term for a new “razor”. At least not without further refinement/thought.

Occam’s Razor is a gated truth that is routinely misused and misunderstood, but once grasped it is a powerful and elegant heuristic for cutting off from consideration huge swaths of possibility space.

The joking “Macco’s Razor” we just discussed is similar, and in particular the remark that they were mirror opposites was on point in a way I did not even initially realize, because I was focused on “complexity” in a more narrow sense.

Occam’s razor is what we call the realization that it tends to produce more consistently correct logic and understanding to slice away all assumptions for which there is no evidence.

“Macco’s” razor is what we’re currently calling the realization I was expressing that it tends to produce more consistently correct logic and understanding to slice away all assumptions that there cannot be further complexity that we haven't noticed yet.

So maybe I do want to fight for this as a razor. Because you know what? It is absolutely more universally applicable. It is on the level of "we must always try to prove ourselves wrong".

Macco's Razor: when faced with competing hypotheses, pick the one that does not assume you've understood the problem fully.

Though phrased this way, an even more notable thing arises:

Macco's Razor is Occam's Razor, once we realize that the "this is simple"/"this isn't complex" attitude I have in mind is an assumption that there no more complexity.

It's fine to conclude that there is currently no evidence for further complexity. It is not fine to assert that there cannot be.

[mentalisttraceur]

When I was younger (mid-to-late teens), and still thinking the simplified and misleading "jealousy is a symptom of unresolved insecurities", I formed a conclusion that went something like this:

> "I don't seem to feel jealousy. Also it seems primitive and I can see how it motivates wrong behavior often. Also I have the cognition steering and training skills to resolve every insecurity I might have. Therefore, I don't feel jealousy, as both a practical and ethical matter."

Just a couple "small" problems with that:

1. I couldn't actually see, or admit to myself, let alone to others, that I was insecure about anything.

In my mind back then "insecurity" was a specific but abstract type of flaw, kinda like "cowardice". "Insecure" is a gated truth, and I was outside the gate on what it really referred to until a couple of years ago, when I finally started to realize that it was useful to analyze my own cognition in terms of it.

2. "I don't feel jealousy" is supposed to be moment to moment observation, but "jealousy bad" is a lingering value judgment.

As a result, I internalized "I don't feel jealousy" as a part of my self-identity that gave me greater ethical worth.

I sabotaged my own introspection. All because I had internalized "I am a person not prone to jealousy" the exact way that we're not supposed to use labels: as a lens through which I understood myself.

Before my struggles to admit or reveal my jealousy could even begin, I spent years expertly interpreting my internal experience with the axiomatic premise that it wasn't jealousy.

When we wear a label, we should use it to describe ourselves, not define ourselves.