The Martial Art of Rationality has always stuck with me — the notion that a mind can be trained like a body, drilled in stances and forms. And using your mental capabilities effectively often comes down to adopting the right stance for the occasion.
Asking yourself, in this context, do I need to be ready to run, jump, catch, throw, duck, dive, dodge or something else entirely?
Two dimensions important to your stance are forward-back lean, and left-right width.
The setup
I've wanted to contribute to LW for some time.
Recently, I decided to get more serious about actually doing it. (Such an amazing strategy getting serious, isn't it?)
I kept having self-doubting thoughts about how anything I produced would lack rigour, originality, or wit. It wouldn't even be interesting, let alone useful.
They were stupid thoughts.
Once I accepted their stupidity, I levelled-up and gained the ability to operationalise my task. I could write a post that was a response to someone else's. Genius! I've solved blogging.
This was important for me: I could piggyback off another post's originality and interestingness; all I had to do was provide a perspective, which would be the originality factor.
I grabbed everything I needed, threw it in a bindle, and set out... to read blog posts. So that I could find something to have an opinion on.
... and it would not come.
Mental block?
I'd read something and think "Cool, what a great insight."
Hmm. I've updated my beliefs, but no opinion. No matter, I'll get it on the next one.
After the next piece was finished, same conclusion. That's alright, wasn't a good fit for me — probably why it was such an interesting post to read.
"Wow, amazing reasoning. I'd have never picked that conclusion."
"Not my forte, but I liked that paragraph at the end."
"Yep, that makes sense."
But then, I realised, that does not make sense.
Not the article. The result of the process. How was I reading post-after-post, looking at comments, and not discovering an opinion within the boundary of my mind?
The realisation: You cannot have an opinion when you believe someone else is the arbiter of truth.
It smacked me right between the eyes; I was being overly deferential to all the authors I was reading. Unconsciously assigning them the position of authority; the alpha and omega. What they said was — to my mind — the full story.
I realised there was a thread here when I flipped the perspective. How opinionated are people when they feel they are the authority on a topic?
The answer, if my experience is anything to go by, is very. And I've been guilty of this countless times — though, I'm not suggesting having opinions is bad.
Once I realised it was a perception of status that was causing me to defer to someone, the illusion fell away immediately.
But why?
Although my ability to generate potentially useful responses was being stifled by my brain labelling me as entrée for apex predators of the intellectual variety, the fix was not to convince myself I was a sabre tooth tiger or a Scott Alexander. Perceived-status was not exactly my issue. Flipping that bit would have solved nothing.
Well, maybe it would have been a way to generate an opinion — if I could, independently, convince myself I was the authority on something without anything else changing, which I don't believe is possible — but it would be a bad opinion. And a bad opinion was never the goal.
It also didn't close the loop for me. Why did deference lead me to not have an opinion? What was happening to my internal configuration that made the generate-opinion action less likely?
Rational readiness
One of the meta-skills of mastery is recognition of which skill needs to be executed. For intellectual skills, I contend, their effective execution is largely dependent upon the stance you take. In this basic conception, there are two binary dimensions, resulting in four basic stances.
As stated above, the dimensions are:
Forward/backward lean
Base width
Here, the mind takes the martial artist's stance.
Stance basics are important because they shift the probability mass of skills. Not just the successful execution of those skills, but whether you attempt them to begin with at all.
More forward lean promotes active engagement, backwards receptiveness. A wider stance is readiness to branch, narrower promotes sequential processing.
The result is the following broad categories:
Forward and wide
Forward and narrow
Backward and wide
Backward and narrow
Subject vs object
I think the way this presents itself within my own mind is as follows.
Forward lean (active engagement) becomes object-focused — the material is the concern. Backward lean, conversely, is subject-focused — involving self-monitoring. Questions each stance promotes could be How faulty is that information? and Am I responding appropriately?
The external, object-focused feels like epistemic defence in the sense of "a good offence is the best defence". It is proactively trying to ferret out gaps or falsehoods before the object-in-question enters the castle walls.
The internal, subject-focused feels more akin to "given this, what is the implication" — it is more concerned with accommodating and integrating the object-in-question.
The two, clearly, work in concert. In the Tarskian sense of if a webble is a flobble, then I want to believe a webble is a flobble, a forward lean is useful for determining whether a webble is a flobble really is true. Whereas a backward lean concerns itself with ensuring we believe a webble is a flobble.
We can see how deference promotes a shift backwards in stance. The king has already pre-approved this visitor to the kingdom, we must accommodate them sufficiently.
Linear vs branching
Upon further examination of my mental stance, I realised lean was only one axis of it. The other I named at the outset: stance width.
How stance width feels is related to whether you're dealing with a set of instructions (or a story) or a dialogue — though these are imperfect descriptions. In a sense, open-ended or closed.
A set of instructions suits a narrower stance. The information is being presented linearly, and you would be best served to receive it as such. A dialogue can branch and have many open threads, better suiting a wide stance which facilitates lateral movement across the threads.
But suiting is not dictating — you can still ask questions about instructions, or have a linear dialogue. The width is yours to choose. It is more about your processing model of the information and the degree to which you're willing to explore tangential aspects, which can be illuminating or distracting.
The failure is mismatching the two. Stance choice potentiates skills.
The strength of the stances
Given all this, we can now attach some labels to the basic stances which hint at what they might be most effective for:
Forward and wide (probing)
Forward and narrow (tracking)
Backward and wide (connecting)
Backward and narrow (receiving)
These are simplistic, but gesture at the right areas.
Changing my stance
When I was struggling to generate an opinion on other posts, it was because my stance was too backwards leaning (and too narrow, to a lesser degree).
By adopting a more forward leaning stance, I stopped the internal monitoring (self-consciousness is a known drag on performance) and was able to focus more on bringing my beliefs — my little prejudices — to what I was observing. They let me notice the delta between where I was, and where the other person was coming from. But, for that to occur, there had to be an I there to begin with.
The width of my stance had also been a hindrance by being too narrow. It was taking paragraphs, passages, and posts whole. This positioned me to only be able to respond in the sense of an agreement or a rebuttal. But by widening my stance, and accepting some tangential dissection of the components of what I was reading, I gave myself the ability to question or explore things.
Under and over belief are both miscalibrations. This we are clear on. But these are erroneous outcomes; we must also be wary of erroneous processes. Virtues are in tension. Many a brain has splattered on the floor for lack of a sufficiently closed mind.
Adopting the correct stance, based on your goals and assessment of the context, will assist you. It will help position your mind for desired outcomes.
I'm sure there are many, many more dimensions than just the two I have discussed here. The martial artist can adjust their stance in several more ways, and then their overall readiness in a multitude more ways than just those permitted by their stance. And we know the mind to be orders of magnitude more complex than the body.
I hope this helps you in noticing the stance you are adopting at times, and provides some (rudimentary) labels for those dispositions. Maybe it leads to more confusion. Maybe I've made the map of the territory worse. In which case, you can write a response to me — for I've already achieved my goal.
The Martial Art of Rationality has always stuck with me — the notion that a mind can be trained like a body, drilled in stances and forms. And using your mental capabilities effectively often comes down to adopting the right stance for the occasion.
Asking yourself, in this context, do I need to be ready to run, jump, catch, throw, duck, dive, dodge or something else entirely?
Two dimensions important to your stance are forward-back lean, and left-right width.
The setup
I've wanted to contribute to LW for some time.
Recently, I decided to get more serious about actually doing it. (Such an amazing strategy getting serious, isn't it?)
I kept having self-doubting thoughts about how anything I produced would lack rigour, originality, or wit. It wouldn't even be interesting, let alone useful.
They were stupid thoughts.
Once I accepted their stupidity, I levelled-up and gained the ability to operationalise my task. I could write a post that was a response to someone else's. Genius! I've solved blogging.
This was important for me: I could piggyback off another post's originality and interestingness; all I had to do was provide a perspective, which would be the originality factor.
I grabbed everything I needed, threw it in a bindle, and set out... to read blog posts. So that I could find something to have an opinion on.
... and it would not come.
Mental block?
I'd read something and think "Cool, what a great insight."
Hmm. I've updated my beliefs, but no opinion. No matter, I'll get it on the next one.
After the next piece was finished, same conclusion. That's alright, wasn't a good fit for me — probably why it was such an interesting post to read.
"Wow, amazing reasoning. I'd have never picked that conclusion."
"Not my forte, but I liked that paragraph at the end."
"Yep, that makes sense."
But then, I realised, that does not make sense.
Not the article. The result of the process. How was I reading post-after-post, looking at comments, and not discovering an opinion within the boundary of my mind?
The realisation: You cannot have an opinion when you believe someone else is the arbiter of truth.
It smacked me right between the eyes; I was being overly deferential to all the authors I was reading. Unconsciously assigning them the position of authority; the alpha and omega. What they said was — to my mind — the full story.
I realised there was a thread here when I flipped the perspective. How opinionated are people when they feel they are the authority on a topic?
The answer, if my experience is anything to go by, is very. And I've been guilty of this countless times — though, I'm not suggesting having opinions is bad.
Once I realised it was a perception of status that was causing me to defer to someone, the illusion fell away immediately.
But why?
Although my ability to generate potentially useful responses was being stifled by my brain labelling me as entrée for apex predators of the intellectual variety, the fix was not to convince myself I was a sabre tooth tiger or a Scott Alexander. Perceived-status was not exactly my issue. Flipping that bit would have solved nothing.
Well, maybe it would have been a way to generate an opinion — if I could, independently, convince myself I was the authority on something without anything else changing, which I don't believe is possible — but it would be a bad opinion. And a bad opinion was never the goal.
It also didn't close the loop for me. Why did deference lead me to not have an opinion? What was happening to my internal configuration that made the generate-opinion action less likely?
Rational readiness
One of the meta-skills of mastery is recognition of which skill needs to be executed. For intellectual skills, I contend, their effective execution is largely dependent upon the stance you take. In this basic conception, there are two binary dimensions, resulting in four basic stances.
As stated above, the dimensions are:
Here, the mind takes the martial artist's stance.
Stance basics are important because they shift the probability mass of skills. Not just the successful execution of those skills, but whether you attempt them to begin with at all.
More forward lean promotes active engagement, backwards receptiveness. A wider stance is readiness to branch, narrower promotes sequential processing.
The result is the following broad categories:
Subject vs object
I think the way this presents itself within my own mind is as follows.
Forward lean (active engagement) becomes object-focused — the material is the concern. Backward lean, conversely, is subject-focused — involving self-monitoring. Questions each stance promotes could be How faulty is that information? and Am I responding appropriately?
The external, object-focused feels like epistemic defence in the sense of "a good offence is the best defence". It is proactively trying to ferret out gaps or falsehoods before the object-in-question enters the castle walls.
The internal, subject-focused feels more akin to "given this, what is the implication" — it is more concerned with accommodating and integrating the object-in-question.
The two, clearly, work in concert. In the Tarskian sense of if a webble is a flobble, then I want to believe a webble is a flobble, a forward lean is useful for determining whether a webble is a flobble really is true. Whereas a backward lean concerns itself with ensuring we believe a webble is a flobble.
We can see how deference promotes a shift backwards in stance. The king has already pre-approved this visitor to the kingdom, we must accommodate them sufficiently.
Linear vs branching
Upon further examination of my mental stance, I realised lean was only one axis of it. The other I named at the outset: stance width.
How stance width feels is related to whether you're dealing with a set of instructions (or a story) or a dialogue — though these are imperfect descriptions. In a sense, open-ended or closed.
A set of instructions suits a narrower stance. The information is being presented linearly, and you would be best served to receive it as such. A dialogue can branch and have many open threads, better suiting a wide stance which facilitates lateral movement across the threads.
But suiting is not dictating — you can still ask questions about instructions, or have a linear dialogue. The width is yours to choose. It is more about your processing model of the information and the degree to which you're willing to explore tangential aspects, which can be illuminating or distracting.
The failure is mismatching the two. Stance choice potentiates skills.
The strength of the stances
Given all this, we can now attach some labels to the basic stances which hint at what they might be most effective for:
These are simplistic, but gesture at the right areas.
Changing my stance
When I was struggling to generate an opinion on other posts, it was because my stance was too backwards leaning (and too narrow, to a lesser degree).
By adopting a more forward leaning stance, I stopped the internal monitoring (self-consciousness is a known drag on performance) and was able to focus more on bringing my beliefs — my little prejudices — to what I was observing. They let me notice the delta between where I was, and where the other person was coming from. But, for that to occur, there had to be an I there to begin with.
The width of my stance had also been a hindrance by being too narrow. It was taking paragraphs, passages, and posts whole. This positioned me to only be able to respond in the sense of an agreement or a rebuttal. But by widening my stance, and accepting some tangential dissection of the components of what I was reading, I gave myself the ability to question or explore things.
Under and over belief are both miscalibrations. This we are clear on. But these are erroneous outcomes; we must also be wary of erroneous processes. Virtues are in tension. Many a brain has splattered on the floor for lack of a sufficiently closed mind.
Adopting the correct stance, based on your goals and assessment of the context, will assist you. It will help position your mind for desired outcomes.
I'm sure there are many, many more dimensions than just the two I have discussed here. The martial artist can adjust their stance in several more ways, and then their overall readiness in a multitude more ways than just those permitted by their stance. And we know the mind to be orders of magnitude more complex than the body.
I hope this helps you in noticing the stance you are adopting at times, and provides some (rudimentary) labels for those dispositions. Maybe it leads to more confusion. Maybe I've made the map of the territory worse. In which case, you can write a response to me — for I've already achieved my goal.