#my root insecurity

[mentalisttraceur]

Did feeling embarrassment come before my root insecurity?

Did I actually feel embarrassment pain before my first prediction tree from people laughing at me or judging me to something more directly negative?

I think there's a good chance that the answer is no. I think it's entirely possible, in fact logically necessary, that the reality is something like this:

Our genes cause our bodies to form brains that have certain neurological predispositions to detect certain patterns and react to them with greater activation - arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, readiness for action, maybe greater openness to forming more-trauma-like memories, etc.

This might include, for example, the pattern of multiple voices laughing in unison, or the pattern of multiple faces looking at us, or whatever.

But this activation is not inherently negative, at least not for everyone. It can be intense. Maybe for some brains it does contain an inherently negative component - sensations which are unpleasant or painful in some way - but probably not for all of us.

And I think it takes those early experiences, especially if they are intense enough to get saved the way trauma memories do, to create one or more prediction trees which cinch that into something more coherently like embarrassment or shame. Something more qualitatively negative and unpleasant and connected to other minds.

It might be notable here that when I was a child, I could often find myself feeling embarrassed when I was alone. My mind could try on the "what if this is observed?" cognition to set off the reaction, but hadn't yet trained up the "but there is no observer right now, so it's fine" and "if there is an observer, it's fine anyway" dismissals of that reaction.

To the best of my ability to find scraps of early childhood memory, I don't really know which came first. To the best of my ability to reverse engineer it with logic, based on everything I know about brains and minds, it only makes sense if some prediction trees towards negative experiences, and some mind interferometry and theory of mind, are grown first. Only then can "embarrassment" or "shame" be distinguished from similar physiological activations paired with uncertain or negative experience forecasts, like fear, startling, anxiety, and so on.

So then I think about how my root insecurity works, and like... my root insecurity, at its core, is a really thorough prediction tree/forest, made up of one or more prediction trees which start from various "bad cognition" patterns being matched strongly enough, and feed into more or less the same thick trunk of a myriad of bad possible outcomes.

So I say embarrassment was a big part of the emotional motivation/reaction/pain behind my root insecurity, but I don't think that the emotion of embarrassment is a raw negative experience in itself, independent of my root insecurity.

I think it's more that... embarrassment itself entails a (fairly simple, trivial, small) prediction tree, and this prediction tree was probably a very early part of my root insecurity, and a sizeable chunk of other prediction trees within that root insecurity probably grew on top of and fed into the embarrassment one.

[mentalisttraceur]

I'm starting to realize that a lot of my root insecurity must've been powered by my intense discomfort with... embarrassment? shame? some variant of that social monkey brain pain of social standing damage.

In childhood, if you say something too smart or too knowledgeable or "deep"/insightful, unless you are sufficiently skilled in being well-liked and believed, you get ridiculed, ostracized, and disliked.

Some basic examples, either from my experiences or those of people I've talked to:

The Sun will blow up one day.

Numbers can be negative.

How do you know two plus two is four?

In general, little kids respond to anything from an age-peer that is out of their inferential reach, experiences, or preconceived notions with overt ridicule and other monkey politics hostility like character assassinations.

So if a little kid expresses any conclusion, joke, question, or value judgment which was reached by sufficiently above-average mental merit for their age, they're liable to have a really shit time.

But whereas many who go through similar experiences seem to just get hurt and sad and withdrawn, or try to put on more socially likeable masks, or really kinda deeply internalize motivation and personality changes until it's out of conscious sight, I always had a strong predisposition towards punitive retaliation against wrongdoers, and that kept me clinging, in my core, to the angry diagnosis that they were in the wrong, because they had unsound thoughts, wrong ideas, or evil emotional inclinations or enjoyments or priorities/balances/weights relative to good ones.

So all that emotional negativity of every negative interaction I had as a child would ultimately get connected as part of this general abstract pattern - people being wrong, bad cognition in any form.

All of my emotions against any negative experiences, all the anger and retaliatory/punitive desire and everything else, all ultimately hooked into that, formed part of one big prediction tree where all "bad cognition" patterns flower into a prediction of any and all of those negative experiences. This I've known for a while.

But what's new is really acknowledging that specifically embarrassment, shame, or whatever it should be called, was clearly one particularly bad, intense, and fairly common experience among all those negative experiences.

[mentalisttraceur]

I feel like implementing the opinion card thing as an actual app/website for myself, and growing how many people actually check it and use it to make decisions would be a really pleasant coping strategy for the whole "I get triggered by bad cognition" thing. It won't do anything to fix my root insecurity, but it would help me feel like there is an appropriate level of consequences for bad cognition. It would feel like leveling the playing field of good cognition against bad.

I think for me the minimal satisfactory implementation is very narcissistic - just enough functionality to track, search, and see my own recorded judgements of others. And some way to link identities and judgments together, so that I can see things like "[account A] and [account B] seem to belong to the same person" and "[person A] seems to regularly agree with [person B]". But this only scales linearly with how much effort and time I put in, and is basically just a memory aid.

So the next improvement is some sort of private sharing of the judgments. For my needs, just some sort of invite-only way for others to make accounts, and view some or all of my judgments. Eventually I'd like to get around to supporting other trusted-by-me people entering judgments and links into the system. Still invite-only to start with. I might want to expand the invite-giving capability to trusted others. I'd probably also end up wanting to implement some way for me to rank/filter/weigh the judgments of others.

But since we're talking about just what I would find most pleasing and satisfying? That's it. I don't personally feel any eagerness to try to make it a big public thing. My personal wants will be satisfied once there is something like a substantial "industry badlist" mercilessly tracking minds for their badness, except instead of an "industry" it is all minds that I have some confidence are "good enough" at making such judgments.

Making it more open is tempting for the network effect benefits. However, I have this concern that if it is actually done well and if it catches on, it will just empower the bad cognition just as much as the good. Bad cognition already has profound asymmetrical advantages, so anything that empowers it equally just helps it win. And it would make me feel worse to see bad minds getting to affirm each others' negative judgments of better minds. So the benefit of a more public opening has to very vividly outweigh the downsides to motivate me to work towards that.

[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]

Natural selection is not just "correct" or "true". The absence of natural selection is an impossibility.

Natural selection not happening is a nonsensical notion - it can only make sense when you fail to think certain things through.

It is one of those rare ideas that are inevitable consequences of logic building solely on empirical evidence much more fundamental, indisputable, and obvious than the idea itself.

So I get exceptionally frustrated, acutely jabbed in my root insecurity, whenever I see people rejecting it as if it even could coherently be false or wrong or unproven in the typical sense.

[mentalisttraceur]

The more secure, successful, and socially competent I become, the more I realize just how much of my negativity and anger about things being wrong and bad are just the result of my insecurities.

To be clear, most of those things are still actually wrong and bad - but I no longer get so mad and bothered by them when I am feeling secure that I can handle, fix, mitigate, or cope with them.

[mentalisttraceur]

You know the best part about having my root insecurity?

Getting triggered by people's takes on anything, literally anything, if they diverge badly enough from what I think is the correct take in understanding, reasoning, conclusion, or factors considered.

In today's episode, I get triggered by some takes on the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics.