#interpretation caching

[mentalisttraceur]

What you have to remember is that any wise idea out there has probably been explained or argued or defended to you before. Just by people who didn't get it, who wrongly rationalized why it was right, who were tribal and uncritical in their support of it.

[mentalisttraceur]

I almost want to use "train" instead of "habituate", because that's the other word I used to routinely reach for back when the terminology was last in flux for me.

But there is an obvious difference in feel between training and habituation, and it really doesn't seem to satisfactorily match the shape of how I use "habituation" around the edges.

A prominent example I have in mind right now is that when I think about saying "you can train your cognition", I get the impression that a lot of people will hear that and think "no there is all this cognition in my mind that I can't control so how do I train it", while "habituation" kinda feels like it bypasses that knee-jerk disbelief, by bypassing what I suspect is currently common interpretation caching.

It seems like "train" has this proactive or intentional connotation which is likely to make it read in a way that makes people less likely to remember that it can apply to indirect things like "your emotional reaction to this is trained and can be untrained indirectly if you keep practicing thoughts in response to its trigger that jam or avoid that emotional reaction".

And to some extent "train" feels less... like when I say "habituate" I am to some extent taking advantage of people feeling "that sounds like a thing", maybe even "like a smart psychology people thing".

Also for example instead of just using "habituation depth" as a term I'd probably want to qualify it as "cognition training depth" if I switched to "training".

Anyway in many ways I like the word "train" more than habituate anyway and I'm not eager to rethink my wording choices, which were shaped by many times when I did try words like "train" and found them less fitting in some situation or other.

However, on the other hand, I need to remember that "terminology words" and "topic name words" are different than "speaking words".

If I want to title a definition post a certain way that's different than how I tag a post or refer to it with people who already get it and both of those are different from the individually calibrated way I might try to explain it to someone in each new conversation.

A lot of those arguments for "habituate" over "train" are in the domain of speaking words, rather than in the domain of the best terms to use for say a tag or a term.

[mentalisttraceur]

(continued, same disclaimer)

One important relevant thing is that part of the problem is that while abstract concepts bereft of examples are the best definition posts (because they are least likely to trigger a disagreement latch), the lack of examples tends to keep things too abstract.

But examples almost always have to be calibrated to the individual - if the example is too disagreeable, you might just lose the person, and their receptivity to the concept.

To a lesser extent, a similar problem exists for all explanations, even those kept totally free of examples.

So there is almost no way around contextualized, calibrated explanation. The goal is just to distill what can be made context free, what can be pulled out and made reusable and what can't be, and how to make the reusable part a good foundation or anchor for the case-by-case part.

[mentalisttraceur]

Even more stemming from my root insecurity: I hate when events coincide in any way that makes it possible for people to misinterpret my motives, especially in any less favorable way than the truth.

Because I absolutely do not trust most people to do good idea-fitting or mind interferometry, and I especially don't trust most people to properly update or invalidate any judgments they form based on their misinterpretations.

[mentalisttraceur]

I just realized that my Communication Problems post notably overlaps with the Interpretation Caching post.

Incidentally, I have been wanting to re-phrase Interpretation Caching to be generally about all interpretations, instead of just about interpretations of statements.

So this is good. So long as I remember to link to Communication Problems in the future as well as to Interpretation Caching where the two are intersecting.

Edit: Although I don’t currently have satisfactory rewordings in mind for tweaking either post. I like some of the current statement-related wording in Interpretation Caching more than anything in Communication Problems, and I’m not sure what the best way to articulate Interpretation Caching in a way that isn’t as statement-interpretation-centric.

[mentalisttraceur]

One issue I've seen with gated truths is that they can make giving advice not just unhelpful but actually counterproductive.

People get frustrated when they feel like you don't understand their issues and situation, and the presence of a gated truth within advice can make the advice come off as coming from a place of not understanding rather than a place of additional and beneficial understanding.

So people can end up turned away from ideas because their first interpretation of them is "this sounds like bullshit" (wrong/nonsensical/pretend-deep) and then due to the interpretation caching problem they're less receptive to the ideas and advice from that person and other people who say similar advice, even once they are otherwise in a better position to understand it.

[mentalisttraceur]

Interpretation Caching

Often once we interpret a statement a certain way, the next time we encounter any similar statement, we assume it means the same thing.

Our brain automatically pulls up a cached meaning of the statement, because that's less work and gets us "close enough" to the right meaning most of the time.

The problem is that when we talk to a different person, or are in a sufficiently different context, the same statement often does not have the same meaning, even when the words are verbatim the same. And sometimes these unnoticed differences are critical.

Worse, our brain doesn't just interpret a statement and stop there - the meaning we perceive automatically causes a bunch of ripples of associations starting from that meaning.

So pulling up a cached interpretation can also mean pulling up cached emotional reactions and ethical value judgments, which can be a grave error if the cached interpretation was wrong.

We should make a conscious effort to always interpret every expression as a unique thing, interpolate its meaning with the modifying meaning of everything around it.