#idea fitting insecurity

[mentalisttraceur]

In the meantime, my progress on "healing" from that stage in my life where I started to really care about follower count and losing followers on here is still progressing, but is still annoyingly not quite resolved.

The good news is, I seem to have completely resolved the insecurity about being unsuccessful at idea spread. It used to really bother me to see other posts spreading much more and the ones I thought were most important of my ideas spreading much less. Nowadays I just don't care as much. I think a big part of it was just unfollowing almost everyone, which successfully prevented me from seeing almost all posts that would make me feel this. I also decided that idea spread would come in time. And I made some peace with the possibility of my ideas either not spreading at all or spreading in a way that I will never observe.

But that mix of my root insecurity and idea fitting insecurity at the heart of "what causes people to unfollow?" is still not completely resolved. It's so much better than it used to be, orders of magnitude better, but there are still lingering traces of it. The good news is I'm pretty sure I can see all the cognition I need to fully resolve this, like:

There's a very good chance it's not about me.

Sometimes people are just incompatible at their current moments in life.

If it is about me and they are right, I will figure out what I'm doing wrong even without their feedback soon enough.

If it is about me and they are wrong then oh well, their wrongness will probably never hurt me (even through my empathy by hurting potentially anyone in the world) in a way that I can't cope with.

I gain more followers than I lose, much more as of late (relatively speaking, I mean the absolute rate of both gain and loss is very small). (This one is actually pretty dangerous because if I were to depend on this one, then if it ever stopped being true I would be in a bad spot again mentally. So you kind of have to really walk the tightrope with this one, where you cultivate the ability to either treat it as relevant evidence or dismiss it as irrelevant depending on what's psychologically useful.)

I am succeeding and improving in all ways that actually matter to me at a pace that I am comfortable with, and if I take the time to consciously review the evidence and experience of that, this Tumblr follower shit really doesn't matter.

If I am dissatisfied with something about my success, self-improvement, or pace thereof, and if I think about what I can actually do to improve that, then it's pretty clear to see that giving any amount of damns about who unfollowed me or why on which of my blogs is just really counterproductive.

I have like 10 or 15 side blogs now, and I don't ever notice anyone unfollowing me on those, so clearly there's some hard empirical evidence that it literally does not actually affect me in any observable way unless Tumblr puts that information in front of me and I think about it.

I just have to finish habitualizing all of that deeply enough that it wins out over the relevant insecure cognition from my childhood.

[mentalisttraceur]

I know I could be more effective with people if I proactively tried to be and really put in the effort, but sometimes it's just way too draining and I can already see from before the interaction starts that the odds of it being worthwhile to put in that effort are too low.

This is in large part self-fulfilling of course: if I thought from a more charitable set of default assumptions and interpretations, and if I acted as if I was more confident that the interaction would be worthwhile, it actually would go better, it would drain me less, and I would gather more experience to do it even better again in the future.

It is also a self-worsening feedback loop not only because it deprives me of further experience that I might be able to learn how to do better from, but also because it actively encourages me to act in ways that make others feel the same way towards me as I just described, and encourages behavior from them that makes me feel even more of the same.

But until I have sufficient steering control over the relevant motivations and reactions in my mind, this recent trend will keep going: as I have made progress on my insecurities, I have been liberated from some of the unhealthy motivations that would have kept me compelled to engage in the past. As that compulsion weakens, the dominant factor is becoming how much it bothers me to notice or engage with cognition I consider too flawed.

[mentalisttraceur]

Any time I reblog something without any comment at all I feel this unpleasant mix of:

There are nuances here worth countering!Someone may miss those nuances and agree with that flawed version! Someone may think I missed those nuances and agreed with that flawed version!

In so far as I consider it right, I mostly or entirely thought it knew this before this post. Someone may think I did not think or know this already! Someone may think me the kind of mind that needed to have another mind say it!

Of course when I comment, I tend to cover all of these bases, if only subtly. But that includes the unfavorable directions like "I had not thought of this" or "this gave words to something I had not worded".

But it's notable how this is a kinda neurotic idea-fitting insecurity, and even more notable that I am pretty sure six years ago or whenever I first got Tumblr, I did not have this problem.

[mentalisttraceur]

I used to feel vaguely wrong for using the word "collapse" and "superposition" how I do, because I originally borrowed the terms from quantum mechanics.

Part of it was idea-fitting insecurity: people might think I was trying to look clever by using terms from quantum mechanics, or that I was intellectually incompetent enough to take a vague layperson impression of quantum mechanics and just free-form associate my way to ideas from there.

Part of it was that I didn't want to add to the nuance decay of those words - I knew quantum mechanics is this complex subtle thing that I didn't fully understand and that many people misinterpret, and I wanted to not muddle the precise meanings, which I did not yet trust myself to fully understand.

So even though as a general rule I believe that words like "collapse" and "superposition", which are usable in general and composable ways, should never be reserved for narrow uses like that, I mostly kept these uses to myself, and even in my head there was some reservations about then.

Until I realized that the original meaning of quantum wave-function "collapse" (except they originally called it "reduction") is possibility collapse - they are the exact same concept.

"Superposition of states" was just an attempt to give a name to "all the possibilities not yet ruled out", or perhaps even just a translation of such an attempt.

Remember that the original quantum mechanics work from which these terms came were mainly concerned with the correct mathematical models - not interpretations of what reality is "really" like.

[mentalisttraceur]

In general it really lastingly offends me when people are overconfident in the rightness of their cognition. (See also: my last post, my root insecurity, idea-fitting insecurity, maladaptive disagreement.)

I mean now that I have put in so much focused mind work on healing my insecurities down to that root, it no longer feels like a viscerally urgent threat, so I can sorta easily "move off" the unpleasantness in my mind.

But it still feels like the kind of wrong that I only tolerate because I usually have no practical cognition funnel for getting the person committing it to understand what they did wrong.

Any expression of disapproval I can think of that captures the problem is too long to finish getting into the person's mind before they start emotionally reacting to having disapproval aimed at them.

But worse, this almost always has to go hand-in-hand with disagreeing with the actual results of that cognition, not just the overconfidence in it (see also: mistaken disagreement assumption, disagreement latches).

And in the contexts where this matters the most, there is seems to be a very strong likelihood that such people will also overconfidently assume that the criticism of their overconfidence is itself a defensiveness about the conclusion they overconfidently reached.

[mentalisttraceur]

Recent interactions reminded me how vulnerable I still am to being bothered by people misperceiving me - who I am, my nature, personality, how my mind works, etc.

Especially if the person is so overconfident that they know me well enough that they will dismiss my assertions otherwise.

Being thoroughly understood by people, to the point of being able to trust that the person can actually understand my wants and needs and things I might want to communicate, is one of the things I deeply crave.

Mind work is ongoing to make me not mind the lack of such understanding, but the want for it runs deep.

Because not being understood is a pretty reliable predictor of being hurt.

Because having someone assume they know you so well that they become likely to dismiss your self-reports is a terrifying liability if they ever have serious power over what happens to you.

Of course this traces back to my root insecurity, and is closely related to my idea-fitting insecurity.

[mentalisttraceur]

Idea-Fitting Insecurity

One thing that I don't see recognized or talked about is feeling insecure about people doing correct and good-faith idea-fitting on what we say or do.

Of course, for me the reason why this feels like it matters is rooted in my deeper insecurity about "bad" cognition, although my embarrassment sensitivity doesn't help.

I don't trust people to act favorably enough towards me if they interpret what I say or do or feel unfavorably or wrongly. There are so many ways, both conscious and subconscious, both malicious and well-meaning, by which people might judge me.

I don't trust people to use new evidence to notice and correct misconceptions caused by their previous bad idea-fitting. Most people don't do the perpetual self-review needed to re-fit interpretations to the evidence instead of the evidence to existing interpretations.

I imagine people who experience it don't have the words to express it, so it usually presents as comments like "what will people think?" and as more nebulous and irrational insecurities.

[mentalisttraceur]

The funny thing is, there are only three broad reasons I've ever had to not block people:

Altruism, kindness, empathy, and so on. I feel goodwill towards people no matter how shitty they are. I want to leave the door open for eventual growth and any good-faith beneficial communication. I imagine situations that might be terrible for the blocked person, that I might have actually been able and wanted to help with, or may have been uniquely suited to help with. I have a hard time writing off someone so thoroughly to preemptively reject anything else they might say ever into the future.

Fear, insecurity, neediness. Stuff that I should obviously overcome, but in the real world the problem is not so much overcoming it as separating it. I can push through fear easily enough. But often first you have to reverse engineer how some reaction is actually due to a large prediction tree which leads to fear or even to another reaction which was learned as a more adaptive alternative to fear. And you have to figure out if there is actually bad enough harm or risk that sound reasoning without any fear or insecurity would still justify avoiding it.

Unhealthy self-control and endurance standards: the idea that I shouldn't block anyone because I shouldn't need to - because I "should" always be able to just perfectly not care and move on without engaging.

But like... I kinda have rebuttals for all of these now.

You gotta balance things. Even if I still want to be a good and kind person, if I want to practice altruism a decent amount of the time, and that's in question but let's say that I still do - then if you have my temperament and emotions and so on, you have to do it sustainably, in a way that can't be weaponized against you, in a triage sort of way - you don't help the people who operate in ways you find unacceptably bad obligate you by existing... good must not chronically give evil an asymmetric advantage unless good is winning so hard that it can afford to. Am I winning that hard? No. Ethics of altruism and anything near it recognizes that you must only help up to your carrying capacity, and ideally you are making at least some effort at being as effective as possible. Is not blocking people who displease me hard enough making me more effective? No. (Also my selfish cognition layer produces thoughts like "this whole altruism thing is a bullshit motivation that I wish the rest of me stopped dragging me down with", and this is such a perfect example of something where being selfish and ethically unfettered would make this entire point a frictionless non-issue.)

I've written about the fear and insecurity stuff indepth already. Wahhh allowing bad cognition to go uncorrected or failing that unsuppressed scares and hurts me through my root insecurity. Wahhh ditto for wrong or bad impressions of me through my idea-fitting insecurity and narcissistic emotional features. Wahhh what if someone I block doesn't one day read a post of mine which makes them realize that they were wrong and I was right all along? Wahhh what if I block someone who was mostly good and thereby lose an actual good connections or friendship or relationship? Wahhh what if I block someone and that leads to them turning and acting against me one day? Shaking my head at myself.

By now I know better: a big part of how you grow that self-control and endurance is by not emotionally injuring yourself by too much exposure beyond what you can currently handle, once you do grow that self-control and endurance it is still not an infinite resource but rather something that gets spent and needs to recharge and you have better things to use it on, and also even if you have perfect self-control your time isn't free and some people are likely enough to say things that are negative value to even see.

So... I guess this is one more mental snapshot on a path which seems trending towards me being real hair-trigger with blocking.

(You'll notice that I don't list echo chambers as a concern. This is because I already for years have had a great practice of going out to learn from communities and perspectives I see no value in, or reject, dislike, or even hate. I know that rabid spray-and-pray blocking on my Tumblr blog would not significantly reduce the variety of my mental input, and that it would enable me to instead save my coping spoons for intentional deliberate consumption of non-echo-chamber input.)