Qiaochu
- Qiaochu Yuan
- friend of mine since 2013
16 linked references
August 30th, 2021
- dialogue with Qiaochu re Internal Trust-Dancing and many related topics
- background context of what QC is working with:
- Q > like, there's a young(ish) part that takes over and wants to do dissociate-y stuff like go on youtube or whatever, like "fuck you, no more responsibility and productivity, no more 'meditation', time to fuck around forever, you're not my dad"
- which moreover i have not had much success dialoguing with, parts like this (possibly this specific part) seem to want to hide their motivations from me b/c they think if i know their motivations i'll try to deconstruct them or sth
- which... is not totally implausible
- mark: "the thing i try to do is to fully drain my volition out of the resisting or angry part"
- "ways in which i'll try to subtly control that part"
- "treat it as pure interface"
- anyway this is why i stayed up until 4am last night
- "maintaining the intention to meditate" or even to be "responsible" or "productive" broadly consistently produces like increasing amounts of resistance from this part that breaks through eventually
- this ADHD counterwill thing
- part of it feels like it ties back to rationality productivity stuff and part of it feels like it ties back to grad school productivity stuff and part of it feels like it goes way further back to parental and maybe school stuff
- that was too many words
- this thing is pretty central
- if i could make any progress on this thing that would be amazing
- if "i" could make any "progress" on this "thing"
- M > "if you and the part could make progress on dialoguing/perspective-taking" ?
- in my recent internal trust-dancing case study I was literally like "the 'symptom', in the sense of the therapeutic reconsolidation process, is not the client's behavior that he wants to change. it's the fact that he's of two minds about it and can't seem to talk about it within himself"
- Q > the word "productivity" by itself already has charge to it
- Q > starting to hit diminishing returns on lying in bed but wow was it useful for draining out tension from a bunch of parts of my body and maybe mind
- the more tension drains out the more i have access to emotions so that seems good
- Q > i had a sort of terrible thought about like... sort of arms race dynamics between layering and delayering, personally and interpersonally
- like "every part of the bodymind that can be made even somewhat legible can become a target for layering / force / coercion"
- like i have a sort of fantasy that in The Past coercion was mostly being done at the level of actions
- like "you must farm this field for me, you peasant" kind of thing
- but once psychology exists as a field and the interiority of human experience becomes a reified thing in the zeitgeist you can start doing coercion at the psychological level
- not only "you must act this way" but "you must feel and think this way about it"
- and that gets people fucked up on a whole nother level than sort of mere action-level coercion
- mostly thinking about this for myself although it has applications elsewhere
- the mistrust my rebellious part has for my... "fixing" part... has to do with this sort of thing
- needing to continue to hide large parts of myself from myself so they can't become targets for coercion
- that makes sense!
- that's a really great thing to do like damn
- aw i softened a bit
- alright so clearly there is a part of me that thinks coercion is great, actually, or at least is desperate enough to use coercion to try to get what it wants
- Q > @Malcolm i am also reading the date scheduling / canceling post and it is also being helpful for me [blockquotes in this section are largely from that post]
- i really like foregrounding distrust
- this has been like blocking me from doing IFS-y stuff, i am in retrospect very surprised it's not more of an explicit IFS step
- like damn there do be a lot of distrust going on here
- i'm remembering how liberating it felt every single time i expressed distrust in a circle
- like people would say they were feeling a certain way or whatever and i loved responding with like "i don't buy it"
- that was a very aggro phrasing but like
- still
- sometimes it went extremely well!
- there was a guy at an AMP where i was volunteering who v much struck me as sort of using sadness as a distraction from anger and like 3 other people in the circle bought it (the sadness) but the facilitator didn't seem convinced and he sort of called me and i was like "i don't buy it" (edited)
- and that turned out to unlock a whole thing for him
- i'm proud of that read
- i said something slightly nicer i was like "you look like you're trying to be vulnerable but i still feel really tense and unsettled"
- "like i'm waiting for something else to come up that you're still hiding" something like that
- > C: [slowly and with wonder] Wow. It’s even difficult to talk about that. It really feels like… an agreement, that doesn’t make logical sense. But it feels like, yeah: when you respect that, we are together. [Perhaps the basic juxtaposition here has something to do with separateness and togetherness!]
- "It wasn’t a compromise, it was a real agreement." oh i love this
- i hate "compromises" so much
- compromises are compromising ! 😡
- (like compromising integrity)
- M > "this system is compromised" = exactly
- Q > okay, so there's something i-rebel-part don't trust about i-fixing-part
- i-rebel-part don't even want to articulate what it is because that's part of the mistrust
- M > that makes sense - quite common
- i-rebel-part am going to be very angry at i-fixing-part if i-fixing-part says "i respect that you don't trust me in this way" and doesn't mean it
- which is part of the mistrust
- wow this is great
- and Here We Are
- i-fixing-part is sort of desperately flailing for something to say that they would be able to mean
- M > hm, maybe "I would like to be able to say something to you you would trust and I'm not sure what that is"
- Q > i think no suggestions for now
- M > legit. you're doing great
- and I'm here if you want me
- i-fixing-part is like "the sort of part that makes suggestions that are a bit forced and not quite right"
- it is The Facilitator
- and i-rebel-part is like "no the way you facilitate is gross and dumb stop doing it"
- so even the act of suggesting labels / schemas is being interpreted by me-rebel-part as a kind of implicit siding with me-fixing-part
- > C: Haha sure, yeah. You know, it’s like, “you just care care about scheduling these things, but how we’re going to feel after you know, afterwards, like after the date?” The date-canceller is not even worried about that, it just wants to the other part to take that into account—like “when you schedule that, consider that. How are we going to feel after the date? Are going to enjoy it? Or?” Yeah, yeah. But that was completely like, invisible before. It’s not bad, like, it’s not afraid of that. It just wants to take that into account. Yeah, that’s it.
- wow this is object-level relevant to my life
- i frequently schedule things without even considering how it's going to feel to actually attend them
- going to OAK was like a huge huge version of this
- aside re frame dialogue
- > M: Yeah. People have no idea the extent to which so much of human conversation is conducted in a way that is saying: “No, you don’t get to have your reality.” Internally and interpersonally, it is near constant and it’s such a basic thing, that it doesn’t even occur to us usually, how important it is to say: “You can have your reality. It’s different than mine, and you can have it.” And that’s in part because we don’t trust that others are gonna let us have our reality, but then, one of the most self-grounding moves can actually be saying: “I’ve got a different reality, but also I respect that you’ve got yours.”
- Q > this is really good. i think about this in relation to twitter constantly
- like i sort of grit my teeth through the decision of going to OAK. i kind of impulsively committed to it while holding my nose so i wouldn't have to consider everything it meant to do that. and that's a common way i make decisions and commit to things generally
- because the alternative feels like getting mired in a thick tangle of objections i don't feel like i have time to sort through
- at least one part of me, probably several, is really afraid of getting "really really stuck, even meta-stuck" like we were in grad school
- but getting unstuck with this kind of grit-my-teeth decision-making is producing karma / technical debt / distrust
- and that's why my left shoulder started tensing up at OAK
- it feels good to hang out somewhere around here
- Q > @Malcolm i think the trust-dancing stuff is plausibly a route to making a pretty general case for why therapeutic techniques stop working over time
- like when they're freshly made clients don't have a concept of what's happening yet so there's nothing to distrust
- M > that's been my model for months, but for the same reason I couldn't point it out 😅
- over time as people keep slightly misusing the technique it accumulates distrust, that the technique doesn't give enough room to surface
- this is like the same thought as the thought i had about CFAR techniques ages ago in some sense but it feels configured differently or attached to different concepts this time
- man. foregrounding distrust. good shit
- M > the therapeutic techniques are all in principle oriented towards welcoming resistance
- but they don't take as an assumption that any particular approach will tend to have a blindspot that leaves some parts hanging
- and they have trouble listening to "no, this whole thing isn't working. I can't tell you what I need, because you don't know how to listen. you need to learn a new way to listen."
- something like that
- of course, my whole trust-dancing thing almost certainly (kinda by definition) has a similar blindspot, but it's probably smaller and it at least is proactively aware that it has one (edited)
- Q > metatherapyyyyyy
- oh man it's happening
- truly the metatherapy that can be techniquified is not the eternal metatherapy
- > Yeah, and then there’s a whole meta piece that would need to come in if one of the parts started to have distrust in this process itself.
- Q > yesss
- M > that meta piece would basically commence trust-dancing between that part and whatever was facilitating the process
- see these tweets, particularly this one which seems super relevant to what you're looking at twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1325314299200483328
- Q > super relevant
- Q > some neurons are connecting around like "going off in a direction that hasn't been error-checked" (from the protocol), layering, suppressed distrust (edited)
- > M: Right, but the simpler solution to avoiding punishment is almost always to avoid the system that’s punishing you. which means you will systematically undermine your systems and commitments.
- (from this other case study)
- this other post is great too lol various rebellious parts of me are like "YES"
- laughing out loud
- this control theory oscillation piece is v nice too
- reminds me of borderline black-white stuff but much more general
- it's nice to have a clean and relatively neutral handle for it
- "oscillations"
- great stuff
- story of my life
- Q > i'm probably gonna try to tweet about it after the retreat
- after i maybe actually attempt some stuff in this direction first
- the note you made about difficulty self-facilitating resonates with me also tho
- M > yeah, I'm not sure what's going on there — would love to model it together with you
- Q > like i'd have to facilitate it in a way that doesn't feel like siding with me-fixer-part
- M > right, which might be tough
- Q > i think the IFS books do basically say this, about like how IFS doesn't work if you don't do it "from Self"
- M > totally
- and I was initially like "maybe you don't need Self to do this"
- Q > it is basically that thing but it helps for me to be able to foreground "okay but what specifically do my parts distrust about each other"
- M > but I'm second-guessing that, a little. like maybe if you want to self-facilitate, you need Self
- yeah, or like, insofar as one part is claiming to be Self and facilitating IFS, and other parts don't trust that part... what specifically don't they trust?
- and like "oh yeah? you're Self? well, prove it by respecting that I don't trust that you are, and finding a way to earn my trust. if you were really Self, you'd be able to do that"
- Q > i wish [friend] were here so she could see this
- M > (that frame is probably bad but there's something adjacent)
- we can share it all with her after
- Q > this feels really relevant to stuff i've seen come up for her
- nice
- like i think she specifically mentioned something like parts pretending to be Self at one point, or something in that direction anyway
- M > ahhh, yeah
- I've never had that in those terms, because I never IFS'd seriously
- Q > aah jeez like in some sense this feels like real conceptual progress but part of the progress involves a clearer understanding of this arms-race dynamic i mentioned earlier
- it feels daunting
- M > but part of why I never IFS'd seriously is that by the time I got seriously curious about it I was already distrustful of some other more nebulous Upstarty type concept that was basically equivalent to a part pretending to be self
- Q > like oh man more things get reified more things can become targets for coercion that's still there
- oh dear
- M > on these notes—I did spend a couple moments seriously thinking about whether publishing this annotated case study was a good idea
- decided on net it probably was, even if it ends up weaponized sooner or later
- Q > yeah i appreciate that
- M > this dialogue with you feels like a huge win on several fronts that is basically worth it in and of itself—there's a lot to figure out here and {I want/need your help}
- (the {} part feels a little off)
- (one piece I could add is that I want/need help from all of your parts..!?) (edited)
- Q > including the parts that don't trust parts of you eh :sweat_smile:
- M > exactly.
- including any parts that don't trust that they're included in your utterance above or this one I'm making now, although I'm not gonna ask them to believe me on that front unless they have what they need for that to be believable
- Q > aw this is nice. i think i've felt like i couldn't talk to you while being honest about my various levels of distrust and now i feel less like that
- M > glad to hear it
- and that makes a lot of sense
- D > Hot take: any part that is claiming to be the self is pretending because the self is not a part
- M > right, but like, any "voice"
- but yes, this is why ITD demotes the whole concept of Self and is just like "but do other parts trust you? and if not, how would you earn their trust?" (edited)
- (am reminding myself that this is #journal-qc and we may want to go elsewhere if we get into a longer convo about stuff)
- M > like the "Self" might not be a part, but it's also not automagically all of me, and it still doesn't get to monopolize the "I" pronoun :P
July 29th, 2021
- > And part of the way you get to this thing involves like, practices, like there are times when you do like awareness kind of meditation, there are times when you do other weirder practices I don't know about, there was like martial arts practices and stuff like that. But you're not doing practices literally all the time. You're like doing practices, and also just living your life. And I think there's something good about that distinction.
- from Mark Lippmann (as paraphrased by Qiaochu, I think)
- (search "feels wrong" on meditationbook.page for elaborations)
July 12th, 2021
- Qiaochu used the phrase financial authentic relating
- and I commented
- some friends of mine were working on an iteration of Dominic Barter's Money Pile that's a lot like one version of what that phrase could mean
- you have a conversation with people, you talk about the resources you have and the needs you have, including both financial stuff and resources/needs that can't be solved in those ways
- and you try to figure out how to solve peoples' needs
- using the resources you have
- it also kinda solves the "money is way too fungible" thing
- and the "am I allowed to buy a nice thing to make my life better?" thing
- since people have weird blocks around actually solving their own problems with their own names
March 15th, 2021
- Qiaochu played with some rap bits
- i thought love meant obsession
jonesin for a blessin
waitin for a savior's behavior to find rest in
prayin' every day for redemption
wasn't payin' attention
to the pain inside, denied, i never learned how to mention - "i thought love meant addiction"
March 1st, 2021
- Qiaochu > agh what i really want is to be able to sample exactly one pill of each of these options without committing to buying a whole bottle
- (in relation to different variations on magnesium supplements)
February 22nd, 2021
- Qiaochu sent me
February 18th, 2021
- > A funny thing happens with powerful self-help techniques: people learn them, and then they don’t use them.
- relates to the full-fractal buy-in puzzle
- Q > ugh, "goals" feel bad, but "intentions" feel good, and so do "visions"
- "goals" are things that I forced myself to have and it was bad
- you can't have goals by... hm. there's a higher-level thing here
- for me, it's like "goals are obligations/promises, and if I don't accomplish them then I've broken my own self-trust"
- someone on twitter was like "goals are options"
- M >
- M > intention
- Q > and context
- Q > something feels bad to be made out of thermostats!
- M > what did you think you were made out of before?
- Q > idk, undifferentiated personhood
- M > what bad would happen if you thought you were made out of thermostats?
- Q > uhghhhhh... I'm imagining my body made out of thermostats? but that's not it
- it feels poorly integrated with my other models of stuff
- M > yeah, blows my mind that all these models seem good
- QRI's connectome-specific harmonic waves thing
- neurotransmitters
- Q > this is why I'm interested in statistical mechanics
- how microscopic/nanoscopic interactions give rise to macroscopic stuff
- M > it's the general thing of what thermodynamics is
- Q > this is a model of the thing that Inner Game of Tennis is about
- how to git gud using regulators
- Q > "regulators" is a very good word
- ...."willpower depletion" model... running out of energy... some kind of regulatory network that is actively preventing me from taking action
- and I think I was basically right
- M > yeah, "willpower depletion" is essentially the same fallacy as someone being like "yeah, I wanted to rob the bank but I got tired" and their friend being like "dude, you got arrested!"
- energy is error
- oooooh.... hm.
- good: relationship to motion
- bad: implies conservation
- bad for both physicists and people who take spoon theory seriously
- M > I want a word that means precisely "PCT Error" PCT Error (one unlinked reference so when I finally find/coin a term for this it shows what I originally called it)
- > But think about this for a second. If I try to talk you (or myself) into
doing something, what am I actually doing?
Am I using subtraction, or action?
Because, by the very process of telling you that you ought to use this
technique, I am going against your basic nature.
I am asking you to perform an action, without doing any subtraction.
And our brains flat out don’t work that way.- relates to "behave" as a command to layer
- M > if PJ Eby really gets this, why has he not achieved huge things yet?
- maybe lacking full-fractal buy-in, on one level
- M > I think he doesn't get scenius
- Q > maybe doesn't trust people?
- > Because, unlike your lowest-level regulators (that just manage a
simple positioning of the arm), your high-level regulators are predictive.
That is, they don’t just respond to things as they are, they respond to
how they expect things to become. - > But that’s not the case, is it? I know this now, because in the last
month or so, I’ve been struggling to identify my “top-level” master
control circuits.
And you know what I found they were regulating? Things like:- Being “good”
- Doing the “right” thing
- “Fairness”
- > But don’t be fooled by how harmless or even “good” these phrases
sound. - Q > Mark Lippmann talks about "honoring lost purposes"
- (relates to starting & stopping)
- Q > "mind-hacking" is just such a bad aesthetic. I really hope he stops doing it
- hacking metaphor
- as a computer metaphor, either
- hostile (as in hacking a server)
- kludgy & fragile (as in hacking together a solution)
- as a physical metaphor
- violent/destructive (hacking with a knife, axe, or machete)
- but TOTALLY HACK AT THE MAP
- (I think? this seems right. relates to critique ideas, not people, etc)
- > What if you could really do everything effortlessly? Get your robot
brain to do whatever you want, on command, just like I promised in the
first chapter of the first version of Thinking Things Done?- in a command hierarchy, higher-ups tell lower-downs "what to do"
- in a control hierarchy, the higher levels tell lower levels "what to achieve" and the lower levels can reorganize however they want to achieve that
- "get your robot brain" to do "whatever you want"
- like he's completely reified his sense of self
- Q > there isn't a thing here about ontology remodeling, which is a part of perception!
- sense of separateness
- treating his brain like a computer program
- >
(Desire + Awareness) - Conflict = Results (Effortlessly!)- this is a fucking godawful equation
- D+A isn't great but it's... it's okay
- but you can't fucking subtract conflict
- Like yes, conflict is in the way, but an actually good formula would actually show the two conflicting desires and how they tug in opposite directions! and how you need to find something to reconcile them in order to release the energy that's conflicted fighting
- M > I feel a desire to create a version of this that is actually good
- Q > yes! I perceive a gap between this pdf and what I would want
- but also, feels hard to write up... very complex
- Q > with feelings, I had this basic question of like "whence feelings?"
- now it seems like a new question, "whence desires?"
- M > not about getting rid of conflict but resolving it
- Q > "resolve" feels (to me) like it's still too specific of an image of the outcome
- M > sure, I'd like to
- Q > Mark Lippmann says "things can be dissolved, or they can be solved"
- M > yeah, I like "solved", because it points at like, there being a puzzle, of how to satisfy both sets of needs
- Q > more vibe critique - treating most of himself as an enemy
- > And it’s not because you have some sort of inner demon or inner child or a malevolent “unconscious mind” or some other crap like that. Regulators are not people, nor are they minds. They’re just circuits.
- M > he's treating it not as an enemy with agency
- Q > but as a robot enemy
- M > but the dumb kind of robot, not the cybernetic control-systems-based one that he literally introduces at the start of this document
- Q suggested we annotate+critique this together in a gdoc, and we're doing that now! Contact us if you want the link.
- somehow relevant to this experience
February 11th, 2021
intentionality is seeming increasingly important to me › Mark Lippmann has stuff in his protocol about starting & …
- Qiaochu > so, the protocol has this notion of willing the “start” of something and willing the “stopping” of something, and a thought that occurred to me is that some of the stuff i do might be “starting” things without ever “stopping” them and wondering if anyone has generic things to say about “stopping” (hmm is this alexander technique?)
tuning
- Qiaochu > I want my computer/browser to know where I'm at emotionally
- 2 metaphors
- tuning a radio
- nice little analog metaphor
- and lets
- emotional attunement
- Malcolm > this is you living in the future
- not with respect to ML / whether or not it's possible, per se
- but like, you know what it feels like to interact with a system that's attuned to you
- and you think it's reasonable to expect that of a computer
- (I think Nick Winter had an old piece of software that did webcam mood analysis)
- this
February 7th, 2021
- > blank piece of paper
- similar vibe to the daily notes in Roam
- haha the collapse thing is kinda like workflowy/roam - I guess there were other collapsible trees early, but not for text editors?
- grocery list demo
- the basic puzzle of re-sorting a list
- huh, the 2A, 2B thing has a zettelkasten vibe
- maybe literally inspired by zettelkasten? "2B1" seems like it
- yeah, lots of blockreffy stuff here
- this basic structured list hasn't been adequately appreciated, maybe until Roam, maybe even still in some senses
- (eg Roam doesn't have easy custom variables for blocks)
- there are concepts that Doug is clearly employing in what he's doing that are just part of his frame, and he's not really explaining those concepts, just boldly using them
- would probably take too long if he were trying to explain, tbh
- helps that he's using data whose structure people can readily understand
- right, and the integrated linkedness of the grocery list & map of stores, still basically doesn't exist
- and barely needs to, in some ways, especially in the era of the original presentation, when people didn't have a computer in their pocket
- "constructing a view that best suits our need at the time"
- paused at 18:30
- What if federated DMs that can be embedded inside any app that maintains user identity & relationships?
- (Federated like email)
- = an email-like standard for chat, that can route through any site's identity to whatever preferred chat manager each person likes to use
- So the main thing that is good about Twitter DMs is that they let you message anyone(ish) that you find on Twitter. The medium itself is kinda shit, but why should Twitter invest in reinventing that wheel? What if embedded in Twitter was somehow like a button that's just like "I want to message twitter.com/QiaochuYuan" and that button is like a mailto: and Twitter routes that message to whatever server Qiaochu uses and then he gets to organize those messages how he wants"
- opens up competition for designing chat systems
- I think XMPP basically wanted to be this :(
- goddamn incentives
- MO > Like what if I could send you a message that would only show up the next time you're thinking about topic X
- in relation to MK's Glue, what I want is something like being able to comment
Relationship Panarchy
— outdated draft — › If you dig this ↑ check out these ↓ › "Oh. Maybe attachment bonds were never meant for just you…
- Beautiful essay by Qiaochu, who wrote the above tweet about human relations