Why was it just assumed that "emotional blocks" are bad though? I would expect this to be more effective if you were... more inclined to unpack that assumption and explain it.
But of course, if you unpack the assumption, it might turn out that it was wrong.
Here are some bad things that often happen to people who over-connect: They become tribalized. They come to feel that they need the approval of an incoherent set of philosophies. They develop a news addiction, as well as substance addictions. They have difficulty sustaining interest in specialties and devoting themselves to original work, they find it lonely and they can't separate their own sense of what is important from the already exhausted common sense of what is important. They're unable to condemn mundane evils. They file down any of their burs and eccentricities that would make it challenging for another person to face them and to see into them.
You think you can overconnect without these sorts of things happening to you, but if that's true, I'm not sure what kind of connection you're even engaging in. Most of these things seem to me a fairly direct effect of love, of those systems that cultivate trust by verifiably tearing down protective psychosocial barriers.
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1How about this? Edited the post:
Story time! I wanted to run a fun party: "Make 100% eye contact or get sent to jail!" But I didn’t want to force people to make eye contact… I wanted everyone to be genuinely comfortable! How?
Consider: Eye contact is effortless without emotional blocks. If you have trouble making eye contact, you’re probably held back by emotional blocks. And these blocks are probably to help you stay safe… so forcing eye contact could even be harmful!
So what if I helped attendees notice and integrate their blocks?
This is something that in my opinion would deserve a longer focused debate, because I believe that you are pointing roughly in a direction of something that definitely exists, but I also think that your conclusions are exaggerated and wrong.
Like: look in the eyes - release oxytocin - get stronger ingroup feelings, yes, there is definitely a mechanism for that. But I think if we made a survey of people that would measure how much they look each other in the eyes and how tribalistic they are, it would be mostly noise. Or maybe I'm wrong, dunno.
This is something that in my opinion would deserve a longer focused debate
I'm not sure I have much more to say (I could explain the ways those things are somewhat inevitable, but I don't believe it's really necessary, just like, look at humans.), since I don't really know what to do about this, other than what I'm already doing, which is building social environments where people will no longer find it necessary to overconnect/where being intentional about how we structure the network is possible, and I would guess that once it is real and I can show it to people, there will be no disagreements about whether it's better.
But in the meantime, we do not have such social environments, so I can't really tell anyone to stop going to bars and connecting at random. You must love, and that is the love that there is to be had today.
Why was it just assumed that "emotional blocks" are bad though
Sorry, where in the post did I imply this? I tried to emphasize how they're locally optimal
I think people will generally assume that when you're doing a thing, that you think the thing is usually good to do, unless you say otherwise. Especially if it's the premise of a party.
all I needed to do was help everyone safely untangle their blocks
The assumption that you could do this implies that you thought the blocks were usually unwarranted. I doubt this. I think in most cases you didn't understand why the fence was there before tearing through it.
So, again, you did guess that you'd be able to do that for everyone, and I disagree with that.
I think most of the people who have difficulty making eye contact and want to overcome themselves on it are not in a good place to judge whether they should.
2So all I needed to do was help everyone safely untangle their blocks ;)
bring those parts into dialogue with their blocks/resistance to eye contact, and watch what happens.
So, in a way, his avoiding eye contact was completely rational. (Or rather: locally optimal.) If he had crudely forced himself to make eye contact, it’s quite possible that he could’ve actually gotten hurt.
Next I asked him, “How would you like to manage those risks?”
I'm aware that you have a nuanced perspective on this which is part of the reason I'm raising this.
[I only skimmed the post so you might have addressed this, but…]
I once met a sometime who made super intense eye contact all the time, and it gave me weird vibes. Sort of uncanny valley vibes, if I try to put words to it? It was like they were staring at me in normal conversation. One hypothesis I had as to why is that maybe he did one of these type of activities that you outline here (iirc, I was introduced to the idea being a thing through an old LW post on scientology doing it?).
Epistemic status: I don’t know if an event like this was the cause of this person’s intense eye contact. I don’t know if anyone at your events has this result. But just thought I would mention it in the off chance that “getting in the habit of giving super intense eye contact” is a possible failure mode of doing activities like this.
Why do you feel so strongly about using so much eye contact in normal conversations? I sometimes make eye contact and sometimes don't and that seems fine.
I agree with your sentiment that being very uncomfortable with eye contact is probably an indication of some other psychological thing you could work on, but it sounds like you maybe feel more strongly about it than that.
I don't make eye contact while speaking but fix people while in silence. Were there people like me? Did they managed to reverse this? The way I feel inside is more like I can't think both about the face of someone and what I am saying at once, too many things to keep track of.
Yeah for many people it was hard to both make eye contact and think at the same time. Some of them told me that this changed what they spoke about.
Personally I have a very hard time recalling the past or thinking very logically while making eye contact
This can be quite a bad thing, since a person's face often tells you whether what you're saying is landing for them or whether you need to elaborate on certain points (unless they have a people pleaser complex, in which case they'll just nod and smile always even when they're confused and offended on the inside lmao). The worst I've seen it was this discussion with Avi Loeb where he was lecturing someone who he had a disagreement with and he actually closed his eyes while he was talking and although I'm sure it wasn't fully self-aware about it, it was very arrogant. He was not talking to that person; he must waste a lot of time, in reckonings, retreading old ground without making progress towards reconciliation.
Have you read Byrnes on how we should expect certain emotional reactions to seemingly prohibitively complex stimuli, to be basically hardcoded?
I think I have learned a certain amount of my eye-contact-aversion, but I also suspect it is hardcodedly unusually difficult for me. When I was younger, my parents and teachers constantly harangued me to "get better at eye contact", and I really tried [I hated their haranguing!] but the eye contact itself was just too emotionally painful.
When I first went on Ritalin in November of 2020, I immediately noticed that it became much more possible to voluntarily choose to sustain eye contact with most people for ~3-10-second periods; I was excited and thought maybe I could make the whole aversion go away. But that didn't work either. It stayed effortful, although easier.
I still don't make much eye contact, and at this point in my life nobody ever remarks on it, and it causes no problem at all. I regularly meet people who are worse at it than I am, and some of them seem to have less of a general social handicap than I do!
One practice we have done at times at my Zen center during sesshins is eye gazing practice. In it, you sit across from someone and just look into their eyes silently for several minutes while they do the same. That's it. Simple, but really effective way to feel into the nonseparate, embeddedness of living.
[Lesswrong doesn't allow video embeds, but you can see a the clips on my blog here.]
fyi just posting in the youtube link should work (transform into embed), I wish the UX was more obvious tho
Story time! I wanted to run a fun party: "Make 100% eye contact or get sent to jail!" But I didn’t want to force people to make eye contact… I wanted everyone to be genuinely comfortable! How?
Consider: Eye contact is effortless without emotional blocks. If you have trouble making eye contact, you’re probably held back by emotional blocks. And these blocks are probably to help you stay safe… so forcing eye contact could even be harmful!
So what if I helped attendees notice and integrate their blocks?
I started with a small experiment
Here’s how I remember improvising the first activity:
My strategy was to have each person notice the parts of them that liked eye contact, bring those parts into dialogue with their blocks/resistance to eye contact, and watch what happens.
For some attendees, this one activity was enough. Here’s what one attendee said:
After a few similar activities, most attendees had achieved comfort.
But a few needed individual help
For example, there was this one guy who was still having trouble. So I instructed him 1-on-1 using not-dissimilar methods. At some point, I asked him what his resistance said, and to his own surprise, it said I’m afraid of heartbreak.
So it seemed like, in his mind, sometimes when you make eye contact with others, you fall in love with them… and sometimes that’s followed by heartbreak. (Which he would like to avoid.)
So, in a way, his avoiding eye contact was completely rational. (Or rather: locally optimal.) If he had crudely forced himself to make eye contact, it’s quite possible that he could’ve actually gotten hurt.
Next I asked him, “How would you like to manage those risks?”
He thought about it for a moment, said something about making eye contact with a different mindset. It seemed reasonable to me so I didn’t question it.
My final instruction: “How does what you want to be doing/feeling feel in your body? … Allow that feeling as much as you can.”
He had no trouble making infinite eye contact after that.
Facilitating rapid growth
Part of my motivation for running this event was to practice facilitating rapid personal growth for a whole group of people at the same time.
Usually, I only do this one-on-one. For example, the techniques I led the group through were very similar to the techniques I led this man who claims to have resolved his lifelong anxiety after talking to me once through. (Yes, wack, I know.)
Within an hour, all fifteen attendees were enjoying present, continuous eye contact!
We stress-tested this with one-on-one conversational eye contact, silent eye contact, group conversational eye contact, and everything else we could think of… and went undefeated.
Everyone clapped!
What attendees said
The 100% eye contact party
The party needed an eye contact enforcement mechanism. (Without one, attendees would forget about the eye contact and it would devolve into — god forbid— a normal SF party.)
So I designed a dictatorless dystopia:
Now all I had to do was craft a catchy thumbnail:
and title:
and invite people.
40 showed
I began the event by facilitating activities like those from before. It was definitely harder with more than twice as many pairs of eyes, but for the most part, it worked.
For the people who needed extra help, I offered 1-on-1 assistance.
What it looked like [videos]
[Lesswrong doesn't allow video embeds, but you can see a the clips on my blog here.]
(Group eye contact was so goofy!)
What attendees said
The design made it easier to access a range from flirty and fun to deep and serious. The event was higher intensity by default.
It was super super intense. I remember desperately wanting it to be over, but it was still a lot of fun. My first 1-on-1 conversation was very fun and lasted over an hour.
The jail was a hilarious idea and added excellent vibes.
Eye contact was kinda hard and I went to jail a lot… but I had a lot of good conversations, and the party felt very intimate.
I liked experimenting with eye contact from different heights. I made eye contact while looking down for almost the first time and felt stronger.
I felt very connected to everyone afterwards and felt very open, present and happy.
Overall, I think it really worked! I'm excited to run more events like this.