I went to my first CFAR workshop the other week, and it was quite intense/a lot. The biggest change by far has that I came face to face with some huge blindspots and can see more clearly many of the ways I've been fooling myself, not allowing myself to care about things, and pushing people away. Since blindspots are a proto-typical, "How the fuck are you supposed to find a thing that you aren't capable of finding?" I wanted to share what I think are things that helped me spot some of mine.
This is rough draft mode, and I think I'm going to just settle for bullet points in this pass-through.
To quote Draco from HPMOR:
To figure out a strange plot, look at what happens, then ask who benefits
i.e. look at all of the first impression I make of people, and get suspicious that they all add up to "People aren't worth talking to" and be suspicious.
One of the first things I got into my head when journeying into rationality was "If it hurts to think about, or feels like a cherished belief that doesn't want to be touched, GO AFTER IT!" This had the effect of most of my problems disguising themselves as things I wasn't interested in. Instead of feeling scared of parties, I would just feel disinterested and bored by the idea of parties.
In Val's Design class, being reminded that most of your built/learned mental machinery came into being to try and protect you for something or get something for you. Also being reminded about how you can't just steamroll over your previous machinery. There is a need or want hiding there which unless you address it, the machinery in place that was trying to server that want will fight back.
A mental shift from, "Is this plausible/reasonable?" to "Is this true?" when asking examining my rejections of different ideas.
This might be trivial, but in the most basic sense noticing where one has blind spots can be done by first noticing where one's behavior differs from how he predicted he would behave, or what the people around him behave. If you thought some task was going to be easy and its not, or that you would get mixed results in predicting something and you don't (even if you think you might be more accurate than average, what's important here is the difference) you might be neglecting something important.
Its kind of similar to the way some expert AI systems try to notice blind spots: they "view" either demonstrations of proper behavior or just recordings of plenty of other agents (probably humans) performing the relevant tasks, and if there's some difference from what they would do, it raises the probability of a blind spot in the model.
Once you find something like that, if you seem to rouse a strong emotional response in yourself when you ask yourself "why am I doing this differently?" that's a non-negligible red flag for a blind spot, IMO.
I went to my first CFAR workshop the other week, and it was quite intense/a lot. The biggest change by far has that I came face to face with some huge blindspots and can see more clearly many of the ways I've been fooling myself, not allowing myself to care about things, and pushing people away. Since blindspots are a proto-typical, "How the fuck are you supposed to find a thing that you aren't capable of finding?" I wanted to share what I think are things that helped me spot some of mine.
This is rough draft mode, and I think I'm going to just settle for bullet points in this pass-through.
i.e. look at all of the first impression I make of people, and get suspicious that they all add up to "People aren't worth talking to" and be suspicious.