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shminux comments on Rationality, Transhumanism, and Mental Health - Less Wrong Discussion
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I will use this very post to illustrate!
You just asked, "give three concrete examples from your life."
My first instinct is that this is a challenge, an attempt to set me up as unreliable and "whiny" in front of the pack.
According to this instinct, if I fail to respond to you, you will have "called me out" - and by failing to respond, I will lose face.
Also according to this instinct, if I DO respond to you, no matter how I do so, you will manage to turn it around in such a way that I will appear to be lying or deliberately miscommunicating my experience for the sake of sympathy - and will again lose face.
My natural response to this instinct is to attempt to describe these examples in the most self-deprecatory way possible, but I know that any attempt to do so will cause me to seem contemptuously weak - and I will again lose face.
As I continue to process this dilemma, I attempt to work out the actual probabilities that any given decision I make will lead to a given outcome. However, as I do so, something internally pegs my "lose face" utility to +ERR.OVERFLOW, and the error cascades all the way through my multiplications and completely poisons the [utility*probability] sort.
Eventually, I just say "fuck it" and come clean to you that I'm having trouble answering your question due to an error. My instinct tells me that, in so doing, you will turn this around on me and I will again lose face. I start processing how I can explain to you that I'm having trouble answering your question, building different strategies for explanation and weighing their probable utility payoffs, but then the bug pops up again (or another, similar one) and pegs one or two of the outcome utilities to +ERR.OVERFLOW or -ERR.OVERFLOW (or sometimes even ERR.DIV0), and the whole [utility*probability] sort gets poisoned again.
Am I making any sense?
I guess what I'm trying to say is, your question scares me, and I'm not sure if it's a legitimate query for information or an attempt to "trip me up" socially, and THAT RIGHT THERE is the problem itself.
So here's to honesty, or something.
Not sure why you consider it a challenge. Well, this is between you and your therapist. Anyway, I asked for examples because your post was extremely vague and an example is a standard way to clarify things. If you are not comfortable detailing your experience without platitudes, you are unlikely to get meaningful help here. It's up to you. And no, this comment is not meant as another challenge or has anything with you losing your metaphorical face.
It looked like a challenge to me-- my first interpretation was "you're probably overgeneralizing and don't have anything specific in mind".
Then I'd probably calm down, and see if I could come up with three examples, being as this is Less Wrong.
I'd take something like "I'm interested in the details. Would you be willing to post about some specific incidents?" a good bit better.
Thanks, this makes sense. I tend to not mince words on this forum, and I can see how it might come across as a challenge at times.
The other thing that's interesting is that he didn't have specific examples.
I'm not sure how much of that is discarding the specifics once one has a satisfying generalization, a motivation which makes some sense if one is satisfied by good generalizations.
Another possibility (from poking around in my head for my issues) is feeling as though being more specific increases the risk of being attacked, and (from the same source) being unsure of one's more sensory memories. (That last went in and out of memory as I was writing.)
And, of course, there's always the chance of something going on that I haven't thought of.
You're welcome.
I was wondering if you were going to say something that would add up to "people should appreciate my wonderful bluntness", but this is Less Wrong and has some virtues not often found elsewhere.
Because my hardware is buggy. That's... what I was trying to get at.
I think you made that clear.