The lead article on everydayfeminism.com on March 25:

3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism

The scenario is always the same: I say we should  abolish prisons,  police, and the  American settler state— someone tells me I’m irrational. I say we need  decolonization of the land — someone tells me I’m not being realistic.... When those who are the loudest, the most disruptive — the ones who want to destroy America and all of the oppression it has brought into the world — are being silenced even by others in social justice groups, that is unacceptable.

(The link from "decolonization" is to "Decolonization is not a metaphor", to make it clear s/he means actually giving the land back to the Native Americans.)

I regularly see people who describe how social justice activists act accused of setting up a straw man.  This article show that the bias of some SJWs against reason is impossible to strawman.  The author argues at length that rationality is bad, and that justice arguments shouldn't be rational or be defended rationally.  Ze is, or was, confused about what "rationality" means, but clearly now means it to include reason-based argumentation.

This isn't just some wacko's blog; it was chosen as the headline article for the website.  I had to click around to a few other articles to make sure it wasn't a parody site.

But it isn't just a sign of how irrational the social justice movement is—it has clues to how it got that way.

tl;dr There's some disagreement over whether setting goals is a good idea. Anecdotally, enjoyment in setting goals and success at accomplishing them varies between people, for various possible reasons. Publicly setting goals may reduce motivation by providing a status gain before the goal is actually accomplished. Creative work may be better accomplished without setting goals about it. 'Process goals', 'systems' or 'habits' are probably better for motivation than 'outcome' goals. Specific goals are probably easier on motivation than unspecified goals. Having explicit set goals can cause problems in organizations, and maybe for individuals. 

 

Introduction 

I experimented by letting go of goals for a while and just going with the flow, but that produced even worse results. I know some people are fans of that style, but it hasn’t worked well for me. I make much better progress — and I’m generally happier and more fulfilled — when I wield greater conscious control over the direction of my life.

Steve Pavlina 

The inherent problem with goal setting is related to how the brain works. Recent neuroscience research shows the brain works in a protective way, resistant to change. Therefore, any goals that require substantial behavioural change or thinking-pattern change will automatically be resisted. The brain is wired to seek rewards and avoid pain or discomfort, including fear. When fear of failure creeps into the mind of the goal setter it commences a de-motivator with a desire to return to known, comfortable behaviour and thought patterns.

Ray Williams 

I can’t read these two quotes side by side and not be confused.

There’s been quite a bit of discussion within Less Wrong and CFAR about goals and goal setting. On the whole, CFAR seems to go with it being a good idea. There are some posts that recognize the possible dangers: see patrissimo’s post on the problems with receiving status by publicly committing to goals. Basically, if you can achieve the status boost of actually accomplishing a goal by just talking about it in public, why do the hard work? This discussion came up fairly recently with the Ottawa Less Wrong group; specifically, whether introducing group goal setting was a good idea.

I’ve always set goals–by ‘always’ I mean ‘as far back as I can identify myself as some vaguely continuous version of my current self.’ At age twelve, some of my goals were concrete and immediate–“get a time under 1 minute 12 seconds for a hundred freestyle and make the regional swim meet cut.” Some were ambitious and unlikely–“go to the Olympics for swimming,” and “be the youngest person to swim across Lake Ontario.” Some were vague, like “be beautiful” or “be a famous novelist.” Some were chosen for bad reasons, like “lose 10 pounds.” My 12-year-old self wanted plenty of things that were unrealistic, or unhealthy, or incoherent, but I wanted them, and it seemed to make perfect sense to do something about getting them. I took the bus to swim practice at six am. I skipped breakfast and threw out the lunch my mom packed. Et cetera. I didn't write these goals down in a list format, but I certainly kept track of them, in diary entries among other things. I sympathize with the first quote, and the second quote confuses and kind of irritates me–seriously, Ray Williams, you have that little faith in people's abilities to change?

For me personally, I'm not sure what the alternative to having goals would be. Do things at random? Do whatever you have an immediate urge to do? Actually, I do know people like this. I know people whose stated desires aren’t a good predictor of their actions at all, and I’ve had a friend say to me “wow, you really do plan everything. I just realized I don’t plan anything at all.” Some of these people get a lot of interesting stuff done. So this may just be an individual variation thing; my comfort with goal setting, and discomfort with making life up as I go, might be a result of my slightly-Aspergers need for control. It certainly comes at a cost–the cost of basing self-worth on an external criterion, and the resulting anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. I have an enormous amount of difficulty with the Buddhist virtue of ‘non-striving.’

Why the individual variation?

The concepts of the motivation equation and success spirals give another hint at why goal-driven behaviour might vary between people. Nick Winter talks about this in his book The Motivation Hacker; he shows the difference between his past self, who had very low expectancy of success and set few goals, and his present self, with high expectancy of success and with goal-directed behaviour filling most of his time.

I actually remember a shift like this in my own life, although it was back in seventh grade and I’ve probably editorialized the memories to make a good narrative. My sixth grade self didn’t really have a concept of wanting something and thus doing something about it. At some point, over a period of a year or two, I experienced some minor successes. I was swimming faster, and for the first time ever, a coach made comments about my ‘natural talent.’ My friends wanted to get on the honour roll with an 80% average, and in first semester, both of them did and I didn’t; I was upset and decided to work harder, a concept I’d never applied to school, and saw results the next semester when my average was on par with theirs. It only took a few events like that, inconsequential in themselves, before my self-image was of someone who could reliably accomplish things through hard work. My parents helpfully reinforced this self-stereotype by making proud comments about my willpower and determination.

In hindsight I'm not sure whether this was a defining year; whether it actually made the difference, in the long run, or whether it was inevitable that some cluster of minor successes would have set off the same cascade later. It may be that some innate personality trait distinguishes the people who take those types of experiences and interpret them as success spirals from those who remained disengaged.

 

The More Important Question

Apart from the question of personal individual variation, though, there’s a more relevant question. Given that you’re already at a particular place on the continuum from planning-everything to doing-everything-as-you-feel-like-it, how much should you want to set goals, versus following urges? More importantly, what actions are helped versus harmed by explicit goal-setting.

Creative Goals

As Paul Graham points out, a lot of the cool things that have been accomplished in the past weren’t done through self-discipline:

One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.

Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.

I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.

Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good.

This seems to imply that creative goals aren’t a good place to apply goal setting. But I’m not sure how much this is a fundamental truth. I recently made a Beeminder goal for writing fiction, and I’ve written fifty pages since then. I actually don’t have the writer’s virtue of just sitting down and writing; in the past, I’ve written most of my fiction by staying up late in a flow state. I can’t turn this on and off, though, and more importantly, I have a life to schedule my writing around, and if the only way I can get a novel done is to stay up all night before a 12-hour shift at the hospital, I probably won’t write that novel. I rarely want to do the hard work of writing; it’s a lot easier to lie in bed thinking about that one awesome scene five chapters down the road and lamenting that I don’t have time to write tonight because work in the morning.

Even if Shakespeare didn’t write using discipline, I bet that he used habits. That he sat down every day with a pen and parchment and fully expected himself to write. That he had some kind of sacred writing time, not to be interrupted by urgent-but-unimportant demands. That he’d built up some kind of success spiral around his ability to write plays that people would enjoy. 

Outcome versus process goals

Goal setting sets up an either-or polarity of success. The only true measure can either be 100% attainment or perfection, or 99% and less, which is failure. We can then excessively focus on the missing or incomplete part of our efforts, ignoring the successful parts. Fourthly, goal setting doesn't take into account random forces of chance. You can't control all the environmental variables to guarantee 100% success.

Ray Williams

This quote talks about a type of goal that I don't actually set very often. Most of the ‘bad’ goals that I had as a 12-year-old were unrealistic outcome goals, and I failed to accomplish plenty of them; I didn’t go to the Olympics, I didn’t swim across Lake Ontario, and I never got down to 110 pounds. But I still have the self-concept of someone who’s good at accomplishing goals, and this is because I accomplished almost all of my more implicit ‘process’ goals. I made it to swim practice seven times a week, waking up at four-thirty am year after year. This didn’t automatically lead to Olympic success, obviously, but it was hard, and it impressed people. And yeah, I missed a few mornings, but in my mind 99% success or even 90% success at a goal is still pretty awesome.

In fact, I can’t think of any examples of outcome goals that I’ve set recently. Even “become a really awesome nurse” feels like more of a process goal, because it's something I'll keep doing on a day-to-day basis, requiring a constant input of effort. 

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, refers to this dichotomy as ‘systems’ versus ‘goals’:

Just after college, I took my first airplane trip, destination California, in search of a job. I was seated next to a businessman who was probably in his early 60s. I suppose I looked like an odd duck with my serious demeanor, bad haircut and cheap suit, clearly out of my element. I asked what he did for a living, and he told me he was the CEO of a company that made screws. He offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was a continuing process... This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.

Throughout my career I've had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as opposed to goals. In most cases, as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways.

...To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That's literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose 10 pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.

If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize that you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or to set new goals and re-enter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.

I guess I agree with him–if you feel miserable when you've lost 9 pounds because you haven't accomplished your goal yet, and empty after you've lost 10 pounds because you no longer have a goal, then whatever you're calling 'goal setting' is a terrible idea. But that's not what 'goal setting' feels like to me. I feel increasingly awesome as I get closer towards a goal, and once it's done, I keep feeling awesome when I think about how I did it. Not awesome enough to never set another goal again, but awesome enough that I want to set lots more goals to get that feeling again.  

SMART goals

When I work with people as their coach and mentor, they often tell me they've set goals such as "I want to be wealthy," or "I want to be more beautiful/popular," "I want a better relationship/ideal partner." They don't realize they've just described the symptoms or outcomes of the problems in their life. The cause of the problem, that many resist facing, is themselves. They don't realize that for a change to occur, if one is desirable, they must change themselves. Once they make the personal changes, everything around them can alter, which may make the goal irrelevant.

Ray Williams

And? Someone has to change themselves to fix the underlying problem? Are they going to do that more successfully by going with the flow? 

I think the more important dichotomy here is between vague goals and specific goals. I was exposed to the concept of SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound), at an early age, and though the concept has a lot of problems, the ability to Be Specific seems quite important. You can break down “I want to be beautiful” into subgoals like “I’ll learn to apply makeup properly”, “I’ll eat healthy and exercise”, “I’ll go clothing shopping with a friend who knows about fashion,” etc. All of these feel more attainable than the original goal, and it’s clear when they’re accomplished.

That being said, I have a hard time setting any goal that isn’t specific, attainable, and small. I’ve become more ambitious since meeting lots of LW and CFAR people, but I still don’t like large, long-term goals unless I can easily break them down into intermediate parts. This makes the idea of working on an unsolved problem, or in a startup where the events of the next year aren’t clear, deeply frightening. And these are obviously important problems that someone needs to motivate themselves to work on.

Problematic Goal-Driven Behaviour

We argue that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behaviour, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation. Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for motivation, managers and scholars need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision.

Goals Gone Wild 

This is a fairly compelling argument against goal-setting; that by setting an explicit goal and then optimizing towards that goal, you may be losing out on elements that were being accomplished better before, and maybe even rewarding actual negative behaviour. Members of an organization presumably already have assigned tasks and responsibilities, and aren’t just doing whatever they feel like doing, but they might have done better with more freedom to prioritize their own work–the best environment is one with some structure and goals, but not too many. The phenomenon of “teaching to the test” for standardized testing is another example.

Given that humans aren’t best described as unitary selves, this metaphor extends to individuals. If one aspect of myself sets a personal goal to write two pages per day, another aspect of myself might respond by writing two pages on the easiest project I can think of, like a journal entry that no one will ever see. This violates the spirit of the goal it technically accomplishes.

A more problematic consideration is the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Studies show that rewarding or punishing children for tasks results in less intrinsic motivation, as measured by stated interest or by freely choosing to engage in the task. I’ve noticed this tendency in myself; faced with a nursing instructor who was constantly quizzing me on the pathophysiology of my patients’ conditions, I responded by refusing to be curious about any of it or look up the answers to questions in any more detail than what she demanded, even though my previous self loved to spend hours on Google making sense of confusing diseases. If this is a problem that affects individuals setting goals for themselves–i.e. if setting a daily writing goal makes writing less fun–then I can easily see how goal-setting could be damaging.

I also notice that I’m confused about the relationship between Beeminder’s extrinsic motivation, in the form of punishment for derailing, and its effects on intrinsic motivation. Maybe the power of success spirals to increase intrinsic motivation offsets the negative effect of outside reward/punishment; or maybe the fact that users deliberately choose to use Beeminder means that it doesn’t count as “extrinsic.” I’m not sure.

 

Conclusion

There seems to be variation between individuals, in terms of both generally purposeful behaviour, and comfort level with calling it ‘setting goals’. This might be related to success spirals in the past, or it might be a factor of personality and general comfort with order versus chaos. I’m not sure if it’s been studied.

In the past, a lot of creative behaviour wasn’t the result of deliberate goals. This may be a fundamental fact about creativity, or it may be a result of people’s beliefs about creativity (à la ego depletion only happens if you belief in ego depletion) or it may be a historical coincidence that isn’t fundamental at all. In any case, if you aren’t currently getting creative work done, and want to do more, I’m not sure what the alternative is to purposefully trying to do more. Manipulating the environment to make flow easier to attain, maybe. (For example, if I quit my day job and moved to a writers' commune, I might write more without needing to try on a day-to-day basis). 

Process goals, or systems, are probably better than outcome goals. Specific and realistic goals are probably better than vague and ambitious ones. A lot of this may be because it’s easier to form habits and/or success spirals around well-specified behaviours that you can just do every day.

Setting goals within an organization has a lot of potential problems, because workers can game the system and accomplish the letter of the goal in the easiest possible way. This likely happens within individuals too. Research shows that extrinsic motivation reduces intrinsic motivation, which is important to consider, but I'm not sure how it relates to individuals setting goals, as opposed to organizations.

This is a post about something I noticed myself doing this year, although I expect I’ve been doing it all along. It’s unlikely to be something that everyone does, so don’t be surprised if you don’t find this applies to you. It's also an exercise in introspection, i.e. likely to be inaccurate. 

Intro

If I add up all the years that I’ve been in school, it amounts to about 75% of my life so far–and at any one time, school has probably been the single activity that I spend the most hours on. I would still guess that 50% or less of my general academic knowledge was actually acquired in a school setting, but school has tests, and grades at the end of the year, and so has provided most of the positive/negative reinforcement related to learning. The ‘attitudes to learning’ that I’m talking about apply in a school setting, not when I’m learning stuff for fun.

Role #1: Overachiever

Up until seventh grade, I didn’t really socialize at school–but once I started talking to people, it felt like I needed a persona, so that I could just act ‘in character’ instead of having to think of things to say from scratch. Being a stereotypical overachiever provided me with easy material for small talk–I could talk about schoolwork to other people who were also overachievers.

Years later, after acquiring actual social skills in the less stereotyped environments of part-time work and university, I play the overachiever more as a way of reducing my anxiety in class. (School was easy for me up until my second year of nursing school, when we started having to do scary things like clinical placements and practical exams, instead of nice safe things like written exams.) If I can talk myself into always being curious and finding everything exciting and interesting and cool I want to do that!!!, I can’t find everything scary–or, at the very least, to other people it looks like I’m not scared.

 

Role #2: Too Cool for School

This isn’t one I’ve played too much, aside from my tendency to put studying for exams as maybe my fourth priority–after work, exercise, and sleep–and still having an A average. (I will still skip class to work a shift at the ER any day, but that doesn’t count–working there is almost more educational than class, in my mind.) As one of my LW Ottawa friends pointed out, there’s a sort of counter-signalling involved in being a ‘lazy’ student–if you can still pull off good grades without doing any work, you must be smart, so people notice this and respect it.

My brother is the prime example of this. He spent grades 9 through 11 alternately sleeping and playing on his iPhone in class, and maintained an average well over 80%. In grade 12 he started paying attention in class and occasionally doing homework, and graduated with, I believe, an average over 95%. He had a reputation throughout the whole school–as someone who was very smart, but also cool.

 
Role #3: Just Don’t Fail Me!

Weirdly enough, it wasn’t at school that I originally learned this role. As a teenager, I did competitive swimming. The combination of not having outstanding talent for athletics, plus the anxiety that came from my own performance depending on how fast the other swimmers were, made this about 100 times more terrifying than school. At some point I developed a weird sort of underconfidence, the opposite of using ‘Overachiever’ to deal with anxiety. My mind has now created, and made automatic, the following subroutine: “when an adult takes you aside to talk to you about anything related to ‘living up to your potential’, start crying.” I’m not sure what the original logic behind this was: get the adult to stop and pay attention to me? Get them to take me more seriously? Get them to take me less seriously? Or just the fact that I couldn’t stomach the fact of being ordinarily below average at something–I had to be in some way differently below average. Who knows if there was much logic behind it at all?  

Having this learned role comes back to bite me now, sometimes–the subroutine gets triggered in any situation that feels too much like my swim coach’s one-on-one pre-competition pep talks. Taekwondo triggers it once in a while. Weirdly enough, being evaluated in clinicals triggers it too–this didn’t originally make much sense, since it’s not competitive in the sense of ‘she wins, I lose.’ I think the associative chain there is through lifeguarding courses–the hands-on evaluation aspect used to be fairly terrifying for my younger self, and my monkey brain puts clinicals and lab evaluations into that category, as opposed to the nice safe category of written exams, where I can safely be Too Cool for School and still get good grades.  

The inconvenience of thinking about school this way really jumped out at me this fall. I started my semester of clinicals with a prof who was a) spectacularly non-intimidating compared to some others I’ve had, and b) who liked me from the very start, basically because I raised my hand a lot and answered questions intelligently during our more classroom-y initial orientation. I was all set up for a semester of playing ‘Overachiever’, until, quite near the beginning of the semester, I was suddenly expected to do something that I found scary, and I was tired and scared of looking confident but being wrong, and I fell back on ‘Just Don’t Fail Me!’ My prof was, understandably, shocked and confused as to why I was suddenly reacting to her as ‘the scary adult who has the power to pass or fail me and will definitely fail me unless I’m absolutely perfect, so I had better grovel.’ I think she actually felt guilty about whatever she had done to intimidate me–which was nothing.

Since then I’ve been doing fine, progressing at the same rate as all the other students (maybe it says something about me that this isn’t very satisfying, and even kind of feels like failure in itself...I would like to be progressing faster). That is, until I’m alone with my prof and she tries to give me a pep talk about how I’m obviously very smart and doing fine, so I just need to improve my confidence. Then I start crying. At this point, I’m pretty sure she thinks I should be on anti-depressants–which is problematic in itself, but could be more problematic if she was the kind of prof who might fail me in my clinical for a lack of confidence. There’s no objective reason why I can’t hop back into Overachiever mode, since I managed both my clinicals last spring entirely in that mode. But part of my brain protests: ‘she’s seen you being insecure! She wouldn’t believe you as an overachiever, it would be too out of character!’ It starts to make sense once I stop seeing this behaviour as 'my learning style' and recognize it as a social role that I, at some point, probably subconsciously, decided I ought to play.

 

Conclusion

The main problem seems to be that my original mental models for social interaction–with adults, mostly–are overly simplistic and don’t cut reality at the joints. That’s not a huge problem in itself–I have better models now and most people I meet now say I have good communication skills, although I sometimes still come across as ‘odd’. The problem is that every once in a while, a situation happens, pattern recognition jumps into play, and whoa, I’m playing ‘Just Don’t Fail Me’. (It’s happened with the other two roles too, but they’re is less problematic.) Then I can’t get out of that role easily, because my social monkey brain is telling me it would be out of character and the other person would think it was weird. This is despite the fact that I no longer consciously care if I come across as weird, as long as people think I’m competent and trustworthy and nice, etc.

Just noticing this has helped a little–I catch my monkey brain and remind it ‘hey, this situation looks similar to Situation X that you created a stereotyped response for, but it’s not Situation X, so how about we just behave like a human being as usual’. Reminding myself that the world doesn’t break down into ‘adults’ and ‘children’–or, if it did once, I’m now on the other side of the divide–also helps. Failing that, I can consciously try to make sure I get into the 'right’ role–Overachiever or Too Cool For School, depending on the situation–and make that my default. 

Has anyone else noticed themselves doing something similar? I’m wondering if there are other roles that I play, maybe more subtly, at work or with friends. 

 

Related to: Humans are not automatically strategic, Rationalists should win

Fashion isn't prioritized in many hyper-analytical circles. Many in these communities write it off as frill and unnecessary. They say they "just dress comfortably" and leave it at that.

To me, that seems like a huge blind spot. It misses a fundamental point -

A piece of clothing is fundamentally a tool.

Definitions are important so everyone is on the same page. I feel like Wikipedia's first sentence on "tool" accurately describes it -

A tool is a device that can be used to produce an item or achieve a task, but that is not consumed in the process.

Clothing clearly fits that definition of a tool.

Appropriately chosen clothing can keep you from freezing in the winter, from getting sunburnt in the summer, and can keep you dry in a rainstorm.

It can also help you achieve things involving other people. I think it's fair to draw a distinction between "clothing" and "fashion" based on whether your objectives involve interpersonal skills. If you're wearing clothing in relation to the environment and without other people, that's using clothing as a tool.

But clothing clearly can affect other people's opinions of you, willingness to accept your arguments, willing to hire or contract you, even their desire to associate with you. All of that is changed by clothing - or more specifically, your "fashion."

While most rationalists would happily and quickly plan out the best hiking boots to wear to not get blisters on a hike, or research the best shoes for bicycling or swimsuit for swimming, anecdotally many seem hesitant or even hostile to the idea of using fashion as a tool to achieve their objectives.

That's possibly a mistake.

The thing fashion can do best and most fundamentally is affect a person's initial first impression of you. Fashion is less important if you're in a context where you're guaranteed to get to know someone over a longer period of time, and is more important if you're going to get filtered quickly.

I propose that the most rational usage of fashion is this -

1. Ask yourself what your goals are in the situation you're about to go into.

2. Ask yourself what first impression would help you reach your goals.

3. Pick out and wear clothing that helps communicate that first impression.

The process is important. In isolation, there's no "good fashion" - it depends on your objectives.

In some circles, people more or less won't care how you're dressed. But even then, there's likely some clothing that will perform better than others. If you can afford the time or money to find clothing to fit your objectives, then there's no reason not to utilize this advantage.

I say "time or money" because you can deploy either - if money isn't an issue, there's stores where the majority of things look good, and the people there are professionals who will spend time giving you good feedback. Any high end department store like Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdales, or a high end tailor fits this category.

Alternatively, you can deploy time. To do that, survey the people that most effectively communicate the first impression you want to convey. Take actual notes and look for common trends. Then, go find pieces that look similar. You won't be perfect right away, but like any other skill, with practice you'll rapidly improve. Incidentally, the marginal cost to produce clothing is incredibly cheap, so most fashion lines over-produce clothing and have to liquidate it at super-discount sale prices periodically. There tends to be a major "Summer Sale" and "Winter Sale" once per year that have high end clothing that 70% to 90% off, making the cost comprable to the mid-tier.

There's also "Sample Sales" where over-produced items are liquidated or when a designer wants to see the buying public's reaction to their new pieces. Again, ultra-high-end clothing can be purchased at discount rates at these environments. You can get basically any semi-standard piece of high end clothing for not very much money if you put in the time. My strategy in the past has been to wait until finding a great opportunity like that, and then buying 1-2 years worth of clothing in one swoop. It doesn't take much supplementing after that.

It takes very little cognitive energy to begin this process. Next time you see someone who strikes a very good impression, stop and analyze a little bit. Note what they're wearing. If you want to strike that same first impression, go get something comprable. Your fashion will be working for you at that point, and your interpersonal dealings will become easier.

[warning: this is another gooey self-disclosure in the spirit of Alicorn and lukeprog’s recent posts, except more so.]

According to my submissions summary, my first top-level post dates back to February 18^th, 2011. (I don’t know exactly when I started commenting, but I don’t feel like clicking through dozens of pages of old comments to find out.) By then, it had already been a month since I embarked on the most deliberate and probably the most difficult act of self-modification that I’ve ever attempted, and definitely the one I’m proudest of. At this point, I think I can say confidently that I’ve fixed one of the most irrational facets of my behaviour. A few people here know quite a bit about this, namely molybdenumblue.

[Aside: some people might find this article very personal. I’ve never had a strong privacy instinct, and since in this case it’s all my personal information*, and I talk openly about most of it with my friends and family, I have no qualms about publishing it. If it makes you uncomfortable, please feel free to stop reading.]

My New Year’s resolution for 2011, which I clearly remember making in my parents’ kitchen, was to experiment more with relationships. I had been in 2 relationships by my 19^th birthday: one at age 14 with a much older recent immigrant to Canada who went to my high school, and one at age 17 with a boy who I worshipped when I was 12. Neither of them led anywhere interesting, in either an emotional or a physical sense. After breaking up with my second boyfriend, I was about ready to give up and start calling myself asexual. But since I had very little data to go on, an experiment seemed like a good idea.

I chose my experimental subject carefully: Billy, a boy I met through competitive lifeguarding, who was my age and seemed to share some of my values; he was in good shape, anyway; and whom I found moderately attractive. (I’ve been attracted to girls in the past, but that seemed like a more complicated experiment to set up.) I found him interesting without being too intimidating.

I had had some success in the past with getting boys’ initial attention, and I felt like I knew what I was doing. I started a conversation one evening when I came to swim at the campus pool and he was the lifeguard on duty, and I made an effort to be my friendliest and chattiest self. The next day I added him on Facebook, and suggested via the chat function that maybe we could hang out after guard team practice…The message must have gone though, because less than a week later, after he made me dinner at his apartment, he walked me home and kissed me outside the shared house where I was living. I went inside, shaking all over and not really sure whether I’d enjoyed it, but triumphant: success!

The only problem was that now that I had my result, I couldn’t end the experiment as easily as I’d started it. Some making out ensued, at my place and at his place. I found all of it vaguely embarrassing and a bit freaky, too; my only previous experience was with my first boyfriend, and at fourteen it had seriously grossed me out. By the end of the week, we ended up back at his apartment after some alcohol consumption, and clothes came off. I tried really hard to be okay with it. After all, it was part of my experiment, and I’d thought it was something I wanted. But irrational fears aren’t turned off that easily. When he told me that I drove him crazy, I wasn’t flattered: I was completely terrified.

I spent the next week or so putting on my game face and pretending everything was awesome, while crying on the phone with my younger sister every other night. (I can honestly say that although she’s five years younger, her social skills are much better than mine.)

I thought over and rejected various solutions because, ultimately, I liked Billy okay and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Open communication hadn’t existed in my previous relationships, so I didn’t know what to do. I was also more and more sleep deprived; my schedule had already been busy before, juggling school with two part-time jobs, and now it was unsustainable. The emotions built up, and I ended up handling it in what was probably the worst possible way: walking home from guard team practice, I started crying when he asked me if I was okay. (Bursting into tears when I don’t want to talk about something or do something and someone pushes me is a bad habit I picked up during my days of swim team performance anxiety.) It took at least an hour to get everything out: that I didn’t know what my feelings were, that it freaked me out when he touched me, and that if I had to sacrifice another night’s sleep to hang out I would probably go insane. And also the part I’d been too embarrassed to tell him earlier: I had a condition called vaginismus, and I wouldn’t be able to have sex even if I wanted to and felt ready. He walked me back to my house, carefully not touching, and I went upstairs to bed, feeling like a terrible person but also relieved. At least that was over.

I can’t really take the credit for this next part; if I hadn’t heard from him again, I think I would have walked away from it, not happily exactly, but determined never to get myself into a mess like that again. But I woke up at 6:30 to a text: Check your email. He had written me a long, fairly incoherent message, full of grammatical mistakes, but probably the sweetest thing that anyone had ever written to me, ever, in my whole life. Ending with: “With all that said, I realize that I am not just about ready to give up on us. [...] For now, I see what we have together is worth fighting for.”

I cried, felt trapped, felt miserable, and finally made myself a cup of tea, sat in my living room, decided that I’d gotten myself into this situation in the first place and I would have to cope with it. I phrased my reply carefully.

“I wanted to be everything you wanted me to be, and as soon as I knew for sure that I couldn't be that, I was terrified that you would find out and you wouldn't want me anymore. [...] I'm scared that as soon as I open myself to you, you'll reject me for being such a freak and then I'll lose you AND be hurt. [...] I kinda wish we could just start over, and go more slowly, and I wouldn't get scared and I'd be able to act maturely and not like a 13-year-old in over her head.” The problem wasn’t that I didn’t like him. I liked him as much as I’d liked any other boy. That was the scary part. 

A few weeks later we went out for his birthday. I baked a cake and he blew out the candles. Later he told me that he had made a wish; that our relationship would work out. It was a lot of pressure, and I tried to hide the fact that it still freaked me out when he said things like that. But part of me found it romantic, and that was the part I tried hard to focus on.

I don’t remember the timeline as clearly for the next few months. We hung out regularly, swam together and worked out together, and spent an entire guard team competition getting in trouble with the coach (“no touching!”). I brought him Tupperwares of food when he worked Saturday afternoon shifts at the pool. We did our homework together (him doing economics math problems, me making a colorful cardboard poster for my nursing placement in a daycare, probably the first time in my life I felt like the non-nerd in the room). We both said, “I love you.”

We fought about a lot of things, too, mainly the fact that he always wanted to see me more and I always wanted more time to read, write, swim, and sleep. But we talked everything through and usually came to some kind of compromise. I started sleeping over at his apartment once or twice a week, which I resented because sharing a single bed meant that I didn’t so much sleep as lie awkwardly awake for almost the whole night. We did our grocery shopping together. Gradually we started touching again, and I habituated to it, although some things still freaked me out. I only felt comfortable making out if the lights were on. I didn’t want to do anything at my place, because I was afraid my roommates would judge me. (They probably did.) In short, those months weren’t exactly the happiest of my life: I was stressed, exhausted, and under pressure all the time.      

At some point during the spring, I can’t remember the month exactly, I had my first orgasm when he was touching me. It was a huge surprise: “my body can do that?” Molybdenumblue and my mother both recommended that I practice, so I started masturbating for the first time in my life. But sex was still the main thing we fought about. Eventually we worked out a routine where I could at least satisfy his needs without too much time or effort. The semester was nearly over by now, and at some point we had decided that we wanted to try living together in the summer. We had been dating for less than four months. All of my roommates and many of my friends thought it was a terrible idea. My mother approved wholeheartedly, though, and I trusted her judgment. We moved into a subletted apartment on campus at the beginning of May.

It could have gone badly, but it went incredibly well. We had a double bed and I was actually able to sleep well nearly every night. I was working a lot, usually more than 45 hours a week, and juggling my mandatory exercise routines, but seeing each other at night was the default, rather than another commitment to slot into my schedule. Sex still wasn’t happening, so I went to see my family doctor and she recommended a physiotherapy routine that I could practice at home, and we were having sex maybe three weeks later. About the only thing I liked was that it was over quickly, but it still felt like an incredible accomplishment. My mother bought me chocolate as a reward for my hard work.

It seemed to be the end of the last snag in our relationship, the last obstacle that would have kept us from staying together long-term. We talk about everything, from the possibility of having kids someday (though definitely not soon, even though kids are uber-cute and I have to work with them every day at the pool and I want one too) to my crush on a girl at work. (When I was planning to go for a swim with her at the campus pool: “Aww, have fun on your lesbian date!”)

Conclusion: Billy left for a four-month exchange in France at the end of September, just before I went back to school for another semester of madly juggling school, work, and exercise, hoping that I would be able to cut back on my workaholic-ism; it’s irrational to think I’ll actually go bankrupt if I only work one shift a week. I was optimistic.

...And that was when I realized that I don’t feel like a scared thirteen-year-old girl anymore. I don’t feel like a freak and I don’t feel inadequate. I don’t find the day-to-day of a relationship stressful. I’ve made a ton of compromises, smoothed off some of the stubbornly contrarian aspects of my personality, and I don’t resent it; I feel good about it. My feelings are no longer as unpredictable as the weather, and when something does upset me, I almost always understand why and know how to fix it.

I couldn’t have achieved this on my own. I’ve relied on my mother, my sister, my best friend, and molybdenumblue. Not to mention one of the most incredibly patient, open-minded, and persistent people I’ve met in my life: Billy himself. But it’s a success story for me, even so. I wanted to be stronger, so I tried to change myself, and it was harder than anything I had ever done before, and I could have given up and walked away, but I decided to keep trying. And that's what makes it my greatest achievement.

*Billy has read this and ok'd everything I wrote, too.

As I've probably mentioned elsewhere, I am currently studying nursing. My third year started off with a bang today: a six-hour workshop on communication skills to prepare us for our month-long psychiatric/mental health placement, scheduled for October.

The workshop would have been a lot more useful if we’d, for example, done role-playing scenarios instead of watching a series of PowerPoint presentations. Like most of the skills involved in nursing, and like many of the skills involved in rationality, communication skills aren't well transmitted by book learning. The specific techniques we are supposed to learn are for "therapeutic communication", as opposed to "non-therapeutic communication". However, my first impression, as someone who has always found social skills a little bit challenging, was "wow! This is something I can use "all the time!"

 

Good Communication Techniques

One of the major skills that we've talked about in class, and tried to practice in our hospital placements, is active listening: trying to really listen to what a person is saying and, maybe more importantly, appearing as though you're really listening. I'm sure that to some people, the non-verbal, body-language half of this is as automatic as breathing. It wasn't obvious to me. However, here is a helpful acronym from this site.  

• Sit squarely facing the client.
• Observe an open posture. 
• Lean forward toward the client.
• Establish eye contact.
• Relax.

The verbal half of this is: don't interpret and don't interrupt. Nod and use filler words like "uh-huh" and "yeah" to show that you're still paying attention. If they seem stuck or blocked, repeat their last sentence with "and then?" or encourage them with "go on..." or "I'm listening" The goal is to accept what they are saying and listen without criticizing or judging, whether or not you agree. Pretty much everyone likes to be listened to, and prefers it if their listener is attentive. I've been practicing this with my friends and family. Not quite to the point that it's automatic, but I have a reputation as a good listener.

There are a few other techniques that I've tried to work on and that seem to improve the quality of my general communication. If a person's train of thought doesn't make sense to you, or if their explanation seems muddled and overly complicated, use clarification: try to explain what you think they mean in your own words, and see if they agree. Focusing is another technique: if you would really like to understand one particular point that they’ve passed over, then bring the conversation back to that point. (“Can you tell me more about X…?”). Exploring is similar, but encourages someone to broaden rather than narrowing the scope of their argument. At the end of the conversation, you can restate their points and yours. This is a good way to make sure that every thread of the conversation was followed up and that the meaning they took from your arguments is the same meaning that you intended.

 

Bad Communication Techniques

There is a time and a place for approving or disapproving. There are plenty of times and places when doing will only hold up the conversation and distract from the actual topic. As a rule, I try not to openly disapprove of anything a casual friend or acquaintance tells me in conversation. Even if I really want to. It doesn’t help. Casual acquaintances don’t care enough about my opinion to stop doing something that I disapprove of, and most people have an instant “dislike” reaction towards anyone who criticizes them, even if they try to compensate for it. Some of my closer friends will actually listen to my disapproval and update on it, but when it comes to my best friend, I’ve learned that she will almost always respond defensively.

Yes, it's annoying. Yes, it’s irrational that people respond this way. It’s the way things are. In my best friend’s case, I really do wish she would exercise more and eat a healthier diet, but I put a higher value on being friends with her than on making her change her lifestyle. And there are gentler, more positive ways to point this out to her. Most people know about their problems, and likely spend their time trying to avoid thinking about them. Passing judgement really, really doesn’t help.

This surprised me, but “why?”  is generally not a good question to ask, at least not when the topic is someone’s emotions or personal life. I think it’s because, to a lot of people, emotions just are. They feel less like part of the mind and more like part of the environment. Asking one of these people “why are you upset about Bob and Sue’s divorce?”, especially in a demanding-an-answer sort of  voice, is less likely to produce a calmly reasoned explanation, and more likely a defensive “I just am!” and a strong feeling of not being listened to. Again, this is kind of annoying, especially because I always found why to be a neutral word. But there are more neutral ways to fulfill your curiosity: “Obviously this is important to you. Do you think you can tell me more about it?” No way to take offense from that.

The other examples of bad techniques in our textbook that I’ve found applicable in real life are: changing the subject, false reassurance, and using stereotyped or clichéd comments to steer a conversation away from whatever it is you want to avoid. Yeah, sometimes my friends talk about things that make me uncomfortable, that scare me, or that I just don’t care that much about, but they care. I owe it to them to listen attentively, whether or not I have anything useful to add. I try to extend that courtesy to acquaintances, too, since in some ways it benefits me: anything that makes me uncomfortable is probably a topic I can learn more about.

 

Application to Rationality and Winning

I’ve found it much easier to help people change their minds (as opposed to making them change their minds) since I started following these simple rules. Almost everyone will learn more by focusing on their own arguments and finding the flaws than from having those flaws pointed out in a disapproving manner. And the level of enjoyment I get from day-to-day conversation and small talk has definitely risen. I might be able to say whatever I think to my parents or my brother and expect a reasoned and interesting response, but most people aren’t as obliging, and if I’m going to be sitting in the pool office at work anyway, I might as well hone my social skills and not be bored.

As I said before, I expect these skills come naturally to a lot of people, at least when they’re talking to someone who they like. I try to communicate in the same way with people I like and people I dislike, since learning more about someone’s life generally means I will stop disliking them (and if they disliked me, they will like me more when I am trying to be my nicest possible self). Since enemies aren’t something I like to cultivate, this is always a good thing.

In short: being a good conversation partner is useful, whether you want to change people's minds or just have fun, and being a better listener will help with that goal.