In the opening post we introduced a challenge in which you're sitting in a jacuzzi and you have the opportunity to convince a stranger that she doesn't have to worry about her makeup washing off, so she can go swimming with her friends. It was framed as a rationality problem, where the goal is to convince her by justifying that the idea that she doesn't have to worry is true.

The solution here, as with the solution to any other "psychological problem" that is really a disagreement, relies on not only having the correct answer (e.g. "It doesn't matter what other people think"), but also the justification that allows you to know it to be true -- and that the person will be better rather than worse off for daring to engage with your perspective.

Knowing something to be true, in the face of disagreement, requires understanding your counterparty's perspective well enough to know that your own holds up in face of theirs. Empathy is critical, for the same reason that maps are critical when traveling; if you can't see the territory, you're SOL. I had to correctly infer what her actual concerns were, and show her that the union of my perspective and her perspective was indeed my perspective. If I can't do that, my options are to a) say stuff that predictably won't get her in the pool ("C'mon!"/"You're fine!"), and show myself to be unable to face reality, or b) humble myself, recognize that I actually don't know better than she does, and don't try to change her mind because I don't actually know the right answer.

If I do know what it's like to be an insecure girl, well enough to recognize what her reasons are for her beliefs and where her perspective falls short, then I can demonstrate that. I can show her that I'm not interested in giving advice that fails to take into account her perspective, that I do understand her perspective, and that I have a perspective worth considering. In other words I can earn her security, her respect, and her attention.

Here's how I did it, in this case:

The first thing I did, was to interject with "Yeah, don't do it. Your makeup might wash off, and then people would see what you really look like."

Take a moment to notice how you would anticipate her responding to this. Measure your own anticipation of what kind of response is likely against what actually happened, and notice whether her response is actually surprising, or expected.

She was taken aback, and not sure how to take my comment. She challenged me with "Are you calling me ugly!?"

Can you predict how I will respond to this? Confirm intent to offend by saying "Yes"? Back pedal with "No"? Something else?

I responded "No, of course not -- I have no idea what you look like under that mask. I just think if you're worried, it's probably for a good reason... right?"

Do you think she said "Yes, of course I have a good reason. I am ugly. That's why I took offense instead of saying "I feel seen""?

Do you think she said "No, of course I don't have a good reason for my feelings. Where would you get such a silly idea? You can tell I don't take my feelings seriously, right?"

Neither fit, right? Can you sense how she would respond to such a question? Does it seem like maybe even she doesn't know?

What do you think happened next?

At this point, she was in full "WTF!??" mode. But she was smiling ear to ear. I had just shown her that she didn't need to be insecure, and that it was okay to play, and to lighten up a little. She asked who I was, I introduced myself, and after taking a moment to process the situation, and laughing at it all, she wanted my actual input. "I think it doesn't matter what you look like. If someone wants to be a judgy jerk about it, that's their problem".

You might struggle to articulate why that worked, how I knew those responses would go well, and how I came up with them in the first place. But you can probably sense that this works. You can probably tell that her responses fit what I said to her, and you can probably intuit that she got in the pool after that. Furthermore, you can probably tell that the reason it works has something to do with the fact that when her friends say "It doesn't matter what people will think!", it wasn't credible. Yet after some friendly trolling it somehow was. For whatever reason, the latter is a lot harder to fake than the former^[1].

And that matters.

This demonstration makes for a quick and striking example of the full complexity of navigating disagreements, and has most of the elements that will be described in this sequence. I wanted to start with a demonstration that you can evaluate for yourself, because without evidence that this isn't just theoretical, a lot of what I say might have provoked too much disbelief ^[2]. But explaining what is going on here and how I was able to find that solution in real time will require a lot of background. Before we dive deeper into these principles, let me share how I came to this perspective.

My degrees are in physics and electrical engineering, not psychology. My day job (and hobby since high school) is as an R&D engineer where every project I work on involves a first principles big picture approach, which shows everyone to be missing the important piece of the puzzle. Often this results in stupid obvious ideas like "There is an optimal number of switches. What if we used that amount", which yields an order of magnitude lower loss than people expect for "high efficiency aircraft inverters"^[3][4].

(In all seriousness, I did put a lot of work into this over a decade or so, so the flippancy doesn't really fit)

My interest in the "psychological" started back in 2010 when I realized that my belief of "hypnosis is obviously BS" was actually unfounded, and that there was no good reason for a strong prior that our brains aren't incredibly "hackable". I poured over all of the science^[5], immersed myself in forums of likeminded explorers, absorbed everything I could from what was currently known... and then with the help of one of my physics friends, made a chatbot which hypnotized thousands of people^[6] to allow me to perform double blind tests of specific fine-grained techniques.

Perhaps surprisingly, or perhaps not, what ended up being far more useful than the hypnobot was doing it myself, with deliberate attention on not only "what worked" on some sort of zoomed out perspective, but what worked at each step of each interaction, and what it felt like from the inside, from the perspective of the person on the other side. I applied methods of thinking I had learned in physics, engineering, and the sequences to the "soft science" of psychology with an expectation of concrete results and short feedback loops. Over time, though accumulation of perspective shifting experiences, the underlying structure started to become clear.

As it did, I became less reliant on the 'falsework' of hypnotic techniques. It became less and less necessary to micromanage the lower levels of abstraction, until I no longer bothered with the trappings like "spirals and hypnotist's cloak" (alright, actually like "inductions" and "convincers"), and just focused on the structure of belief itself. Rather than coming up with anything new, I ended up returning to methods we all use for most things most of the time. Normally when we're afraid of things its because we think they're dangerous, and seeing that they aren't alleviates the fear. Sometimes, when our thinking becomes clouded, we think the normal rules have failed and invent epicycles to explain the failure instead of recognizing the failure to be ours ("this fear is 'irrational', because it didn't listen to me and there's no way that is rational!"/"It's 'subconscious' or something, because I can't be wrong about what I believe!"). 

I don't offer a "new method", just a more explicit explanation of what we're already doing when things work, why "solving epicycles" is necessarily worse, and how we can get all the results we can hope for by being less wrong.

What kind of thing is this framework

As alluded to earlier, the framework I present in this sequence is a different kind of thing than the "methods" or "techniques" you might think to compare it to. In contrast to things like CBT/double crux/etc, the goal is to avoid making claims about what is causing these "disagreements" or otherwise placing requirements about what must be causing them in order for a suggested response to be effective. Instead, the goal is to lay out the space of possibilities for what can cause disagreements, the potential paths through which one can move, and transfer much of the empirical prediction from the framework itself to the individual using the framework to navigate a particular disagreement. Rather than "My new technique didn't work, now what?", it's "I was wrong about what this situation is. In what way was I wrong?" What I aim to convey is more akin to a coordinate system and equations of motion than a solution to any particular set of initial conditions. The scope of applicability is far larger, but computing the solution is on you.^[7]

The really peculiar thing is just how much this simplified things, and how much more effective it is than even hypnosis at its best. 

For example, when I was first learning hypnosis my kid cousin got hit in the face with a basketball and was crying. I decided to try my hand at conversational hypnosis, to see if I could make this stuff actually work.

You know what it's like when you go to the dentist to get a filling... and they give you shots in your mouth so that it gets all numb and you can't feel anything? You're starting to feel that a little now, aren't you? That's right, now just let that feeling get stronger, and let that numbness spread up your face to your nose...

In thirty seconds I was able to numb away the pain, leaving him happy and eager to get back out to play. I thought that was super cool, super exciting, and if you would have told me that 1) I had no idea what I was doing, and that 2) that intervention was an order of magnitude too slow, I wouldn't have been able to understand how that could possibly be true.

Yet a few years later, after I had learned more, when that same kid had picked up the wrong end of a fire poker and was sitting there fighting back tears, I realized that I actually had no idea how to deal with situations like this. I viewed my previous "solution" as not right, and I had no idea what to do. Not knowing what to do, I turned to face that uncertainty.

And resolved the suffering in a single word.

It took one single word to transform his experience from "trying to hold back tears because it hurts" to smiling because it "Doesn't hurt, just tickles".

What was the word, how was it delivered, and why did it work? What has to be done such that this kind of thing can work more often?

(just space in case you want to try to solve it before seeing the solution)

The word was "Hurts?", as in "[What's wrong? Is the problem that it] Hurts?".

And the reason that it worked was that there quite literally was no problem, except for the fact that no one had noticed that there was no problem. His answer was "Yeah!" as if someone finally understood, only to immediately cut himself off with "Actually, no. When my brain feels pain it just interprets it as tickles". We'll go over this a bit more later because this definitely isn't a common reaction, but think about what this looks like from the perspective of the woman who showed up with me. She saw the kid in pain, she saw me squat down to his level, look him in the eye, and ask if it hurts -- and the kid said "Actually, no". 

It's not even that what I did was "obvious in hindsight", in the sense of "I should have thought of that!" It's that it's so natural that anyone could have done it. It didn't require any weird "imagination games", just checking in with the kid. And so naturally, the woman who showed up with me didn't notice that I did anything unusual. Until I pointed out that even though anyone could have done it, no one else did. There were about a dozen people there trying to help the kid feel better, and despite^[8] their best efforts the kid was suffering until we showed up and I asked.

The reason I thought to ask, is that studying and practicing these things had taught me that pain literally can't be a problem^[9]. Pain feels like it's more than "just information" because it's information that matters -- at least, so far as we can tell -- but it's still just information. And information itself can't be a problem, yet he seemed to be responding to it as if it were. Which is weird. So it occurred to me to ask.

And it didn't occur to anyone else there, because no one else saw anything weird about him suffering given the obvious source of pain.

What this sequence will give you

To the extent I succeed in conveying these ideas, you'll experience a shift in how you categorize challenges. You'll no longer struggle with "irrationality", and your obviously irrational beliefs and behaviors will melt away. "I have an irrational fear" becomes "Is it actually dangerous?" -- and when the answer is "No" you won't be afraid. You'll be left with the fears that aren't obviously irrational, and it will be a disappointingly large fraction of the ones you were sure were irrational. This reframing is generally humbling like that; it becomes harder to believe we're definitely right once we see the paths from "definitely right" to successful interventions, and can't always take them. But hey, it gives us paths to successful interventions to the extent that we're actually justified, so it's a good trade. It's really nice knowing how to reason with the "unreasonable", should it become worth the effort. And how to invest the effort pre-emptively, so repeated interactions just get easy.

You'll also learn how to try on purpose -- something that few people know how to do, and few people realize that they don't know how to do. This, combined with a widened view of behaviors potentially under your control, can lead to ability to exert control over "unconscious physiological stuff" like vasoconstriction, edema, immune system response^[10]. It will also lead to the ability to deliberately recontextualize pain to where it doesn't cause suffering, and suffering to where it can be something you choose.

"To the extent to which I succeed" is an important caveat here. This stuff is really difficult to teach for like.... a bunch of reasons^{[11][12][13][14][15][16]}. I’ll put most of them in footnotes to make a linear read through more bearable, but they’re all important points.

The one that I won't relegate to a footnote is that the things I'm describing tend to feel impossible until they feel obvious, with little in between; mundane solutions to magical problems. This isn't just a prediction, this is repeated observation^[17][18][19]. The "one word pain cure" is set up to highlight this so that you notice the pattern and don't fall into this trap. There will generally not be moments of "Oh that's clever. I never would have thought of that" -- just "Oh that's impossible" to "That's not even impressive"; the solutions don't get better, the problems just seem easier.

A realistic expectation, and my hope in writing this, is that this sequence will convey enough understanding to make significant improvement consciously navigating some clear inefficiencies, and serve as a pointer that will help those motivated to discover a fuller understanding for themselves. In a previous attempt to convey these ideas, I have managed some degree of direct translation from understanding to results without conscious effort, similar to the effects people report with "The Easy Way to Stop Smoking" by Alan Carr and "Healing Back Pain" by Dr. John E. Sarno. Specifically, my friend noticed herself behaving differently after reading the "respect" section in the aforementioned previous attempt to convey these ideas, and believes that change directly contributed to her getting tenure^[20]. However, if it ends up coming across that well here it will have exceeded my expectations.

Brief overview of the framework

As explained in the first post, psychological issues can be modeled as disagreements. These "disagreements" can then be navigated to resolution by negotiations on three layers, which will be discussed in depth later. Briefly,

• Attention is the driver of all change. Results follow iff attention is directed in the necessary place, screening off everything else.
• Respect is necessary in order to bid for attention. Attention must be negotiated, and respect determines what you can ask without being laughed off.
• Security is necessary in order to bid for respect. Respect must also be negotiated, and security determines how boldly you can bid for respect without triggering fight or flight

Clarity forms the foundation that makes security, respect, and attention sustainable. You can fake it, but without a clear grounding it's only a matter of time before your credit runs out and you're left to pay your debts.

Outline

To develop this framework from the ground up, I plan for this sequence to include about nineteen posts (totaling approximately 70k words), published nominally every two weeks to give time for discussion and questions between posts.

First, we will start with another challenge, and a demonstration in all the messy details it takes to deal with something like debilitating chronic pain. (Two posts)

Then, we'll lay out the foundations (three posts):

• Expectation is equivalent to intent, and functions as the set point to which we control.
• Our set point is the experiences we attend to.
• Optimality looks like focusing on uncertainty about what we want to achieve, and then on the answers we want to realize.

Next, we'll explore the core framework layer by layer (six posts):

• Attention on the spectrum from empathy to hypnosis, and how to choose what's appropriate.
• Respect as the credit that allows us to communicate across non-trivial inferential distance.
• Security as a prerequisite to play, and play as necessary for growth.

Then we will explore some ways in which lack of clarity systematically misleads us into poor effectiveness -- or worse, misaligned effectiveness (three posts).

Then we will tie it all together, and show the fundamental questions holding the uncertainty which lets us negotiate on each layer, and find the appropriate paths towards resolution (1 post)

Finally, we will close with thoughts on physiological and epistemic limitations (two posts), followed by an open thread with some open ended exercises for the reader, and a space for people to ask about how to apply this thinking to the scenarios they're interested in. 

1. ^{^}

   Not impossible, as we will see later. But certainly much harder and more costly.

2. ^{^}

   Disbelief becomes "too much" when it goes beyond mere lack-of-belief into dismissing the evidence and rationalizing not having to track it. Initial disbelief is expected, and healthy skepticism encouraged. So long as you notice what the actual claims are and when little bits of evidence are beginning to add up, that's enough.

3. ^{^}

   I think they were expecting 97-99%, if I remember correctly. We were getting 99.8-99.9% depending on conditions. The "optimum amount" changes with technology/application/etc, and these problems don't stay unsolved forever.

4. ^{^}

   Or in the case of my high school project "our power factor is on the order of 10%. Why not double up on the resonance trick and bring it to one?", leading to the drive topology used in those tesla coils that make music with large lightning bolts (like the ones you might have seen depicted in The Sorcerer's Apprentice and done for realsies with David Blaine's performance).

5. ^{^}

   The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis is a good place to start.

6. ^{^}

   The final number was around 10k, with about three times that many total conversations.

7. ^{^}

   Expanding on this a bit, by removing all predictions that can be false and making sure we can "explain everything", we work simultaneously towards "unfalsifiable" and "tautologically true". The risk with such frameworks isn't that they might be false -- because again, they don't say anything that might be wrong -- but that they might be useless because they don't make predictions at all and therefore offer no object level guidance. 

   The usefulness comes to the extent it helps us make object level decisions that aren't predictably wrong according to our own beliefs, and and gives us a way to notice when we have beliefs pointing us in opposing directions. This turns out to be extremely common.

8. ^{^}

   And because of.

   They were saying things like "Oh man, that must hurt!", "Let me get you some ice!", and "When I burned myself like that, I was suffering all through the night and couldn’t sleep."

   They were essentially unwittingly gaslighting the poor kid into suffering.

9. ^{^}

   Specifically, it was following this 'acknowledgement' protocol when I injured my foot that gave me this realization. The technique worked very well and completely resolved my suffering. It was really bizarre trying to figure out exactly when the pain stopped being a problem, because you'd think you'd notice when something like that happens. Turns out, that's a trick question.
   
   More on this experience in the chronic pain post.

10. ^{^}

    This one in particular turned out surprisingly simple for me, and didn't require any special insight. I just visualized my body attacking the wart with tiny little soldiers, and within two to three days I was in disbelief because it sure looked smaller. After a few weeks, it was gone.

11. ^{^}

    There is much to say, and I can't say it all here. This sequence will err on the side of including concepts with unclear connections and justifications, as an alternative to omission when full elaboration would be prohibitive. When I wrote my "maximally terse" version for my own understanding it ended up at 34k words and the feedback I got from the one other person I expected to understand (who shares a lot of the background and helped shape my thinking on these things) was that it's way too terse and that he was going to need a second read to make sense of what I was saying.

12. ^{^}

    I think one of the big difficulties with understanding the ideas I convey in this framework is that it's legitimately subtle, and therefore easy to miss. When you're doing things 99% right, and only 1% wrong, it can easily feel like you're doing "good enough". It can be very tempting to cut yourself some slack, let yourself off the hook, and round up to one. The problem is that when you build on these results and iterate hundreds of times, the difference between 1^200 and 0.99^200 is the difference between night and day. The difference between "no obvious insecurity" and "no insecurity" can be really shocking, and hard to notice until you actually have an example of the latter to compare to -- and notice the reason for the difference.

13. ^{^}

    Big shifts in framework are hard to grapple with. As mentioned in the opening post, therapists in training tend to blankface when presented with better methods that involve seeing desire for (some) therapy as inherently paradoxical. I got largely the same response to my Tesla coil idea, and it only became popular after my Tesla coiler friend stumbled upon the same idea and made it easy to replicate by providing schematics of his version to copy.

14. ^{^}

    The meaning of a belief is in what experiences it leads you to anticipate, and it often takes quite a few iterations of trying to apply these ideas before it's clear what to anticipate as a result. 

15. ^{^}

    Insecurity is a bitch. We often get sensitive about our failures and in particular our "irrationalities", which we are full of. The idea that the solution was stupid simple all along can make us feel dumb, and so can the idea that our failures were actually our fault all along. That can cause us to flinch from finding out if we're not careful (i.e. security failure); so if this sequence is useful to you, it might also evoke negative emotions at some point. Rest assured, if this makes you dumb it makes me dumb too -- I fell for all the same mistakes everyone else does, and it took me a long time and a lot of work to figure all this out. I don't expect this to hit everyone, but some.

16. ^{^}

    The second and last reason compound. It doesn't take much to derail things, when you don't recognize it to be important.

17. ^{^}

    One of my proofreaders had this to say: Well I do like the paragraphs where you explicitly call out that it feels impossible then easy and no in between. Because that's all very very true. I noticed that in the book iteration a couple times where I thought why was he belaboring this point that's fucking obvious. Then remembered the many pages of Google doc of me being all "wtf that doesn't make sense". I don't remember specifically what that was on but it wasn't a singular occurrence.

18. ^{^}

    I've had someone get obviously upset claiming that I'm making ridiculous and untrue statements and then pivot without shred of irony into saying that my claims weren't novel or impressive. This person isn't exactly a shining example of a skilled rationalist, and people here do tend to be more epistemically cautious than that, but he wasn't dumb either and the content is definitely confusing in this way.

19. ^{^}

    You can play with this yourself, after I post the chronic pain transcript. If you ask an LLM how surprising the results are, and to what degree the pain was "physical" vs "emotional", you'll get different answers depending on whether you've shared the solution or just the setup.

20. ^{^}

    This is a good example of the kind of change that can be easy to miss. She noticed "from the outside" that her behavior was changing and she was getting different results, but from the inside, the way she generated behavior still felt like "just responding with what feels appropriate". The change was just a better grounding for her sense of how much tension is okay and appropriate. Because this isn't something that's normally consciously thought through, she never would have noticed from the inside alone.