This sequence, "Beneath Psychology: Truth-Seeking as the Engine of Change", explores how to understand and navigate psychological change from a first principles perspective. The title "Beneath Psychology" references the fact that the constraints of clear thinking lie beneath and give rise to our human-specific quirks and biases - and methods of navigating them - in the same way that in Economics, the species-agnostic constraints of supply and demand curves underlie the human-specific behavioral economics.

It turns out that setting aside worries of human-specific concerns, and addressing first the fundamental limitations, illuminates paths to resolution that otherwise remain unseen. The subset of problems we view as "psychological" are those where someone's brain isn't doing what it should. We can therefore view all of these "psychological problems" as disagreements. In particular, disagreements between "our" perspective and the perspective revealed by the brain (which may be our own, or someone else's) we see as "getting the wrong answer". This is a very broad sense of the term "disagreement" which covers not only disagreements over where to get dinner but also things like pain-induced suffering which can be usefully modeled as a disagreement over whether the pain is important to attend to.

Despite being long and surprisingly difficult to understand, the result of this sequence is remarkably simple. Rather than adding "techniques" and "methods" to keep track of, I will dissolve the apparent puzzles of "psychological difficulty" until it will be hard to understand how the puzzles were ever puzzling^[1], and your method for "solving" these "puzzles" becomes "I just look for what is true. When I think I see it, I point". This is an extremely counterintuitive result, and therefore difficult to grasp let alone believe.^[2]

It is for this reason we will begin with a demonstration in the form of a challenge:

One summer day I was sitting with my wife in the jacuzzi in our complex's pool yard, when a few kids from the local community college hop the fence for a swim. The girl of the group gets in the jacuzzi, but refuses to go swimming with her friends because she's worried that her makeup would wash off. Her friends plead with her: "Come on!", "Who cares!?", "You're fine!", but to no avail. She complains "But my makeup might wash off!", they tell her "Come on!", and it repeats.

Objectively, it doesn't matter if her makeup washes off. There's no one there that would judge her, and even if someone did judge her it'd just make them a jerk, which would be their problem. She doesn't see it this way, obviously.

The challenge is this: What do you say, and do, such that by the end of it she sees the truth here and is able to enjoy swimming with her friends?

How can you do it without cheating? No tricks^[3], no lying or otherwise manipulating^[4], just showing her the truth in a way that she will recognize what you say to be true because you've justified it. It's okay if it doesn't look like "cold facts and logic" so long as the focus is on finding what's true.

Keep in mind the difference between theory and reality. A lot of things that "should" work or "could" work in theory end up deflating when we soberly ask whether it would work, in reality. For example, you could ask her "What would happen if your makeup washed off?", but there's no guarantee she's going to want to get into an impromptu therapy session with some random guy, in front of her friends, because this random guy asked her a question that would work in the therapy room with a willing participant.

Before posting your solution, check whether you had to turn away from some aspect of reality in order to imagine it working^[5]. If you were to find yourself in this situation, would you actually attempt your proposed solution? If she were to respond in the way she did in your head, would you feel like "Honestly, I'm kinda surprised that actually worked"? Or would you feel like “Well, I didn't see that coming!" if she were to not? Include your answers here alongside your solution.

The solution will come in next week's post which finishes introducing this sequence. The full explanation of where it came from and how it fits the requirements has to wait for a sequence worth of background. 

For best results, put your solutions in the comments, with spoiler tags, and don't read anyone else's solution before commenting your own.
 

1. ^{^}

    That doesn't mean that all puzzles disappear. After you get it, you won't struggle with irrational fears. You will still have to figure out which risks are worth taking, and that can be arbitrarily difficult.

2. ^{^}

   The person who served in part as a mentor for me when I was first learning this stuff, and whose insights started me down this path, now teaches therapists. He has found that even after he explains and teaches better methods resulting from the insight that much of what is sought after in therapy (e.g. relief from irrational fears) is inherently contradictory, most of his students stick to the less effective methods. They don't push back, or seem to struggle with the concept logically, but they don't connect it with "Oh this changes everything" and invest the cognitive work to restructure their understanding accordingly.

   At the same time, despite kinda calling BS on him when he first told me about his revelations, I needed zero empirical evidence to be convinced. Once we role played I couldn't even imagine a way to hold onto the problem. Once laid out, his solution fit so perfectly with my preexisting intuitions about how people/I would respond to the actual situation. I was so surprised that my meta level intuitions failed to predict this, that I knew his method was valid and that I needed to get to work recalibrating my meta-intuitions. It was still possible for it to empirically fail, but given what I already knew, that would be the surprise requiring evidence to believe.

   This sequence follows the same pattern, and will be counter to meta intuitions while fitting object level intuitions; by design.

3. ^{^}

   "No tricks" meaning "Can't offer to pay her to get in the pool", "Can't flick salsa on her face so she has to wash it off anyway", or anything else that dodges the point of the exercise.

4. ^{^}

   "No manipulating" in that your focus must be genuinely on collaborative truth seeking.  E.g. No "I hypnotized her, lol", and no "I distracted her from that idea and told some jokes so she was in a better mood and less focused on her makeup". If her explanation of why she went swimming is anything other than "It's okay if my makeup washes off", or if your honest explanation is any different, then it doesn't count.

5. ^{^}

   This distinction can be easy to miss, so I'll give an example to illustrate the difference.

   The other day my 6 year old daughter was playing The Secret of Monkey Island and needed to find some meat in the game. The hint I gave her was to think about where she would go to find meat - because that's where it was in the game. "Hunting!". Something easier. "The store!".

   These are both understandable responses, but they're both wrong. I know that's not where she would go to find meat because when I told her "Scavenger hunt time! Go find meat and bring it to me" she didn't start gearing up to hunt the squirrel in our backyard, and she didn't ask me how to get to the store. She immediately decided to go the kitchen and check the fridge.

   This failure to distinguish between where "a person" can go to obtain meat and where you can go to find meat, is the exact failure I'm attempting to warn against here. The point of the challenge isn't to infer my hidden assumptions and come up with a password that works within a fictional simplification I have in my head. Nor is it to find an authoritative simplification from Psychology so that you can lean on that authority to justify your chosen solution for what "a person" can do - regardless of whether it fits reality or not. The point is not to find something that sounds good from the chair you currently sit in.

   It's to find something that sounds good from the jacuzzi, when your eyes are open, and in contact with hers. 

   Because if you ever find yourself in a situation like this, that's where you'll be sitting when you're saying it.