"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #8: Noticing

 

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  On January 8, on to Training Regime Day 8: Noticing. The idea once more seems to be to bring some of your unconscious mechanisms up towards conscious detection (so you can then adapt to them, and perhaps control them.) In particular, try to practice a TAP where the trigger is a feeling -- in Xu's case, a feeling of defensiveness -- and the corresponding action is just something that's easy to notice -- in Xu's case, rubbing the fingers of a hand together. By doing that, he turns his defensiveness into something he can work with or work against. 

  So, I'll try to ask a story-spider to help me literally bite my tongue, gently, any time I'm starting to treat something serious as a joke.  I do that so often that it may be realistic to practice as a TAP, and I don't intend to try to stop altogether but I know that sometimes I do it annoyingly. 

   It has just been pointed out to me, in connection with Mark Xu's account, that treating something serious as a joke  could even be a form of defensiveness... I'm not sure that's quite right, and I suspect that it's most annoying when I really do think that the Creator is showing Her sense of humor. "Man plans, and God laughs." Still, it is a defense mechanism of a sort: humor creates distance.

   Anyway, I want this to work, so I bring to bear any associations I can to strengthen the TAP. I have  named this particular story-spider Marian, after the "intelligent and resourceful" secret-uncoverer Marian Halcombe of Wilkie Collins' 1859 mystery novel Woman in White, After all, it's his birthday. And she's not just any old cartoon spider, the way most of them are: she's a very striking-looking Friula Wallacei, of which only one specimen is known, collected by Alfred Russel Wallace in the 1850s. It's his birthday too. And she's a very mysteriously bright lady, because it's also the birthday of Stephen Hawking.  (And the birthday -- the second birthday -- of my great-niece.) Is this kind of linkage useful? I think it may be. I will keep trying, and I'll keep asking Marian to react to possibly-inappropriate humor.  Meanwhile, happy birthday to all of them, and Soupy Sales too.