To some extent, people seem to be underconfident in what they’re willing to say they saw (though I couldn’t find a gambling study for inattentional blindness to identify whether people asked to bet on their confidence level can accurately gauge “how much” they’re perceiving.)
And overconfident in what they're willing to say they didn't perceive, usually.
I bet people would learn pretty quickly if they had some iterations of being paid for accuracy, but most people are running on faulty self models where "noticing the gorilla" and "noticing that they have noticed the gorilla" are the same thing, so the strength of the latter gets conflated as evidence and you get "I definitely didn't notice the gorilla, because by definition if I did I'd have noticed that I did!".
In order to start approaching accurate calibration you have to start looking for signs of your own processing similar to how those researchers did. It's not enough to notice that "gorilla" seems more salient than normal, since you also have to realize that something so "random" actually has a quite high likelihood of being caused by something rather than being truly random, even though you have very weak awareness at best of having seen it.
Arguments are a pretty easy way to induce this sort of "generalized blind sight". People often don't like admitting that they were wrong, so there's motivation to not notice what they've noticed.
But I feel like the phrase "wisdom generating process operating on a level above yours" has to refer to a deeper difference than just "they have some knowledge you don't"
For sure. And sometimes morons work in mysterious ways too, so a mysterious appearance doesn't necessarily mean that they have any serious wisdom or even knowledge that you don't -- just that you have no idea how they're generating their beliefs.
Maybe. I think it's common for someone smarter than you to come up with ideas or solutions that you don't think you could or would have come up with yourself (in any reasonable time, at least), but which, once you've seen the answer, its merits are clear to you.
For small enough steps, yes. Verifying solutions is generally easier than generating them.
But easy verification strikes me as the exception rather than the rule, with sufficiently large gaps in understanding. For example, you could verify whether the chemical recipe produces food safe almond flavoring or cyanide gas by just following the recipe, but finding out that way requires a bit of a leap of faith. And finding out ahead of time requires understanding some chemistry.
When someone gets sufficiently far ahead of you in any given domain, it's likely that they not only know things you don't know, but also know things where you think you know and are wrong. Relativity violates our idea that simultaneity means anything except locally. QM violates our idea that things have to be in one place at a time. At levels above ours, we can no longer "just verify", because the beliefs have have to verify against are less reliable than the source of the thing we're trying to verify -- and waiting until the results are unambiguous requires acting on the belief that it will probably work out even though we don't understand how.
The less we're bound to immediate, easy, and safe verification, the more we can convey and the more we can learn. I aimed to make the vasoconstriction example something that people could start to verify themselves by asking themselves how they would respond in a series of situations sharing similarities, but figuring out how to even attempt a verifiable explanation was a lot harder than figuring out how to help my wife constrict her blood vessels in the first place. When I told my friend she could choose to not swell her injuries, she was able to verify that, but not until after she expected her injuries to not swell just because I said so. If I had to make it verifiable to her ahead of time, I wouldn't have been able to convey a solution.
Or, putting myself in the dummy shoes, it took me years to learn some things that Feynman learned in minutes, because he was willing to temporarily take silly things like "You can't open your eyes" and "You won't feel this burn" on faith and verify only after the fact. In contrast, I insisted on building a framework that allowed me to make sense of things before I dared believe them, which is why it took me so much longer. There's obviously value in building an understanding, but that's better done after updating on the fact that your current understanding is completely untrustworthy and the "mysterious" answer is probably true. Sometimes it's important to be right faster, and keeping known-wrong beliefs around just because we don't know how to navigate with the correct ones can cause us to lose hard.
50/100. But that rather exciting story is best not told in a public forum.
Heh, okay. If you want to tell it in private, you definitely have my attention.
Well, lack of appearance of something otherwise expected would be negative, and appearance of something otherwise unexpected would be positive?
Right, so now the question is which expectations we're measuring relative to. Which gets kinda weird, because the way we're getting changes is through changing expectations, specifically by noticing that the original expectations were wrong.
Measured relative to the best expectations, every improvement is removal of a deviation from the default. It's hard to think of things that are 1) physiologically possible, 2) desirable, and 3) completely unexpected. Even the things that most closely fit become expected by the time you achieve them, because that's how you achieve them. Notice how the examples you gave of "false pregnancy" and "stigmata" don't work as examples of how looking more closely at reality can give better outcomes by evoking positive somatizations? Stigmata isn't exactly desirable, and "false pregnancy" almost by definition doesn't fit reality.
So for example with my kid cousin and the fire poker, most people came at it from a perspective of "It's expected that this kid suffers! He burned his hand!", and from this POV my intervention looks like a "negative somatization" because we're taking away suffering which would otherwise be expected. Whereas I came at it from a perspective of "It's weird that this kid is suffering, wtf is this about?" and then realized "Oh! These MFers gaslit him into suffering when he otherwise wouldn't have suffered!". From my perspective, which I'd argue better represents reality and that's why it got better results, all I did was help him see through the unnecessary positive somatization that had been created before I got there.
Because we're not actually adding any "superpowers" and are just noticing when existing abilities fit the context, it ends up very invisible unless we get caught up enough in confused expectations to have a bad baseline to compare to. When the woman who showed up with me caught the tail end and just saw a kid not suffering, nothing seemed weird about it to her because "What? It's not a big deal, why would he suffer over it?". My wife's warm hands only sounds like a positive somatization because she stopped and commented on them being cold. "I went on a hike, and stayed warm, and my hands stayed warm too" is just business as usual, and expectations being met.
Another good example of this is when I met my friend's ex-boyfriend. It was a completely unnoteworthy introduction, with absolutely nothing out of the norm so far as I could tell. And then my friend came up to me afterwards saying that she wished she could have been there to witness whatever magic I pulled, because she's literally never seen him respect anyone like that. I tried to explain to her that I literally did nothing and that if he respected me more than normal she gets the credit for that. She didn't buy it, and it took me at least weeks before I noticed what it is about him that causes most people to not have normal boring introductions with him. From her perspective, "respect" appeared unexpectedly, but from my perspective it just never occurred to me to give him reasons to not respect me.
So if most people do things mostly right most of the time, then when someone struggles due to their misfit expectations, we say "Hey look, that person has a problem", and in those cases updating to better expectations looks like "removing a problem". Even if most people struggle with a certain thing and expect that the ideal won't be achieved, the ideal is still "things not being broken" so even "superhuman" abilities look like "removing the problem that most people have" -- like removing suffering from getting burned or whatever.
In order for it to look like a positive somatization and also be good, it has to be something where proper functioning is so rare that people don't even recognize that it's worth wanting for. Things like this do exist sometimes, but they're usually in odd little corners that most people don't frequent in the first place -- because otherwise enough people would find the right expectations that it would stop seeming weird and start seeming worth wanting for. My wife's vasodilation can look like a "positive somatization" because having cold hands when hiking out in the cold is normal enough that doesn't seem like a "problem", even if warmer hands is better. If her cold hands were unexpected, then it'd be seen as "inappropriate vasoconstriction", and then it'd be "removing a positive somatization" again.
Can you think of any "positive somatizations" that you would want? Any that don't just happen automatically upon realizing that they're context appropriate?
I don't think that a "get a promotion expectation" is going to cause a process of someone working to improve their models on their own.
I mean, it depends, but I agree that people are fallible in this way. I'm not arguing that people's models are good (at recognizing when/how to update, or otherwise), just that you can only go on what you got. If I can see that the car is behind door one, and you switch from door one to door two because the host shows you the goat behind door three, that's only a bad move from an irrelevant reference frame. Unless we're mixing up game shows and you can "phone a friend", but at that point we're no longer discussing the same problem.
The scope of what I'm trying to convey here is "how to dissolve 'psychological' problems where some stupid brain is doing something you know it shouldn't", which is a different kind of problem than "Will my boss be more likely to promote me if I go golfing or to the office" or "Do I turn right or left to get to my local Walmart?". Once you can say "Turn left to get to Walmart, go golfing to get promoted" and get a response of "Okay, will do. Thanks!", then you're already free of any so called "psychological" difficulties -- and you will succeed or fail, based on the accuracy of the joint model you guys act on.
But you're already going to do that, so I don't need to tell you to tell him how to get to Walmart. Unless I happen to know that you're wrong, but then I'm not helping you avoid knowably dumb decisions I'm injecting more information into the system by including myself in it.
One example of sensor motor amnesia from myself is that my right subscapularis was chronically very tense and that resulted in less flexibility of my right shoulder. If I would use intention to guide my shoulder movement, the body would try to accomplish that by using all the muscles it knows how to use but not the subscapularis. Resolving it actually needed becoming conscious of the subscapularis being the problem and relaxing it.
Okay, I misunderstood what you were saying here. Rereading your original comment I see what I missed and that little note of discord that I didn't sufficiently attend to. Oops.
I thought you were saying that intention to relax the muscle isn't enough, but now it seems you're saying that it's not enough to intend to move your shoulder you have to actually intend to relax your subscapularis -- so you gotta find that tension and address it explicitly.
I agree that generally adding intention to "reach over and grab this thing" isn't as effective at relaxing the subscapularis as adding intention to relax the subscapularis. And that becoming conscious of it is generally the best and most direct approach. At the same time, "The best way to relax the subscapularis is to intend to relax the subscapularis" isn't really in opposition to my thesis here. You can often reach things without relaxing the subscapularis, so these two intentions aren't even in that much tension (no pun intended).
This reminds me of the problem of flinching when shooting handguns, which I use as an example in the post after this one. People will practice for weeks or months trying to "overcome a flinch" because their models of how to do this are indeed bad. The solution I offer in that post mirrors your subscapularis fix, because in the context of helping someone who has noticed the problem and is trying to fix it, that is indeed generally the more appropriate solution. Simply saying "Just focus on hitting the target!" generally isn't as helpful.
At the same time, just focusing on hitting the target is sufficient. "Bracing for recoil" and "hitting the target" are indeed in tension, so intent for one crowds out intent for the other. As a kid I used to struggle with a flinch when target shooting with handguns, but I didn't have that problem at all when small game hunting. I was just focused on hitting what I was aiming for, and that preempted the flinch.
It's not that "You don't have to know how to use the sights" or "You don't have to accept the recoil", it's that once your intention is properly set you will do that automatically to the best you know how -- including asking for expert advice, if that seems available and worthwhile. And if your best isn't good enough, that's a whole 'nother problem.
Once you set your intentions properly, motivation will flow downhill even to things you didn't have any awareness that you could do, which makes proper intention setting look like magic sometimes. And if you don't set your intentions properly, motivation won't flow to where it's needed, and you can end up stuck for months in what only takes seconds to fix.
I'm right now writing a longer book that will include a discussion of this.
I forgot to respond to this earlier, but if you want test readers I'd be happy to read what you got and give whatever kind of feedback you're interested in.
Depending on the quality of your mental model, this might or might not be the most optimal actions to getting the promotion
In the same sense that the optimal action in the Monty Hall problem is to choose the door which has the car behind it, sure. From the perspective of the player though, "do the thing that turns out to work" isn't an available action. All we can do is act based on what we know, even if some of those actions are aimed at improving the accuracy of our models.
Let's take male pattern baldness. There shouldn't be something that makes it physiologically impossible to end it.
What makes you think that the default is that it's physiologically possible to end it? Why do you think it happens, and what do you think it'd take to stop and/or reverse it?
I don't rule it out, but it's certainly not obvious to me that it's doable with psychological interventions.
Yet, we don't see hypnotists advertising that they have the cure to male pattern baldness as it's not as easy as setting the expectation via hypnosis.
I don't think that follows at all. Certainly swelling is as simple as swelling, and despite knowing how to do hypnosis it took me years to try it and I only ever did because of some weird fluke I can't explain. Just recently I had a hypnotherapist ask if I could help his kid with allergies because he didn't feel confident in doing it himself. Then, when I couldn't get to it for a while, he gave it a shot himself just trying something simple which even after the fact he didn't think was gonna work. Sure enough, the kid stopped having allergic symptoms.
Hypnotic breast growth is another example. I've never heard of anyone trying and failing. Anecdotally, some hypnotherapists offer this service and claim success. The limited science that exists is all very supportive, and suggests that it really is as trivial as visualizing in the vast majority of cases. Yet there aren't enough people trying it to get any new studies, or to get any hypnotists trying it and saying "Yeah, it didn't work", or women saying "I went to a hypnotist and it didn't work". Either it works and people still don't do it much, or it doesn't work but no one ever tried it enough for there to be any publicly available evidence of that. Either way, it doesn't really fit with "if it were easy, people would do it".
If you have sensor motor amnesia that prevents you from using muscles to make a certain movement, I don't think a movement intention and expectation is enough to get the muscles involved.
I think I know what you're talking about here, and if I'm thinking of the same thing then I agree that it's a real complication. I don't agree that it is "intention and expectation isn't enough", but rather "there's an additional difficulty in getting intention and expectation".
Remember that "intending" is the act of actually aiming at a thing, and it isn't always trivial to figure out how to do that. For example, if you were to stick some wires in my head to give me a brain computer interface, it'd take me a while to figure out wtf these new sensations even mean, and until I figure that out I'll have no ability to intend anything to do with that interface.
This can be a real issue even with the "native hardware" if we're sufficiently unpracticed with it. The final post of this sequence is about me goofing up in this way, how that came about, and what I learned which seems to have resolved the issue (so far?). Is this the kind of thing you're referring to when you say that you don't think expectation/intention is enough in cases of sensor motor amnesia?
Assuming that's the case, my answer is basically "That's a real issue, it still works through expectation/intent, and the same tools for managing expectation/intent turn out to work surprisingly well even though there is this additional complication".
If you want to get promoted at your job, actually understanding the criteria that your company uses to decide who to promote and using that, is probably more likely to lead to success than either having a general "I will be promoted" outcome
Understanding the promotion criteria is indeed helpful for getting promoted. If someone points out that you don't even know the promotion criteria and you maintain your expectation of "I will be promoted" by responding "Doesn't matter! Positive thinking! The Secret!", then yeah, that's a recipe for not getting promoted
But I imagine that if you told me that you wanted to get promoted, and that you thought it'd actually happen, you wouldn't respond this way. More likely, if I asked you if you know the promotion criteria, you'd have an answer like "Yes". If you hadn't thought of it, I'd expect you to say something like "Oh. That's a good point, I should look into that". When things like knowing the criteria help you achieve the goal, then it gets tied into your web of expectations when you notice. Maybe it causes your expectation of success to falter, or maybe your will to succeed drives you to look it up.
The moment someone presents you with evidence that you're on a track to failure, we can see whether you're aiming for the thing out in reality or the thing in your head. If you're aiming towards the island and get notice that your compass says you're erring to the north, you will correct to the south. Descriptively speaking, if you're looking away from evidence that you're not achieving your stated goal, you're demonstrating that you're optimizing for something else. Something like "holding the idea that I'm trying"/"holding the idea that I will succeed"/"succeeding without having to face difficult challenges"/etc.
If you use hypnosis to make a hand stuck to a table, a person could spent a lot of effort to lift the hand from the table and still fail.
Both "in hypnosis" and otherwise, people frequently do stuff that looks like "I will engage in maximum effort", and it's generally not very effective because the direction of "effort" isn't specified and the presuppositions about where it's actually aimed are hidden.
In the case of a stuck hand, there's an implicit understanding that you can do everything but what would actually lift the hand. And lifting your hand really isn't that hard. It just takes a small amount of unopposed muscular exertion, which you do all the time. If you, as the full system, aren't lifting that hand it's because you're not optimizing for it. I had a hard time "getting hypnotized" when I first started looking into it, precisely because I'd keep actually checking whether I could actually lift my hand and finding that I could -- which fundamentally breaks the effect.
I'll talk about this more in the "attention" posts, but the thing that makes the illusion of stuck hands work is that the person loses track of the fact that they're not actually trying, and end up "trying to try" at best. I explicitly designed my hypnotic "scripts" with this in mind, and could often get name amnesia in forty seconds of text chat from completely cold. Specifically, I'd build off the "Automatic Imagination Model" and have them "just imagine" that they couldn't remember, and from there pull some sleight of mouth intended to help them lose track of the fact that they are just imagining it and can "stop imagining whenever they'd like" (as mentioned in footnote 2). Once you lose track of the fact that you're voluntarily imagining something, and imagining that it's real, then by definition you're experiencing it as if it's real -- even though it is not.
I did end up experiencing it myself at one point, which was pretty neat. The distinction between "I can't remember my name" and "I can't try to remember my name" is pretty subtle and easy to lose track of, especially in weird and novel situations. But because I knew the difference I was able to find my way back to trying and successfully remembering my name -- it just took a few seconds longer than it normally would. When you don't know the difference, and "I didn't remember" gets interpreted as evidence that "I can't remember", people get a lot more stuck.
Usually, "Do or do not. There is no 'try'" means the opposite. It's about how optimizing for effort is not the same thing as optimizing for outcomes
A central point of this sequence is that "I will [lift this x-fighter/get this promotion/dilate the blood vessels in my hand" thing is the thing that matters. Whatever rain dance you do, whatever justifications you have, if it doesn't end in an expectation of that outcome happening out in reality then you aren't steering towards that outcome. It's setting the intention/expectation of "I will lift this fighter" that actually aligns your actions in service of realizing this outcome, and motivates the behaviors which point in this direction -- both the legible like "rent a forklift" and the illegible like "just do it".
Everything else is in service of this direction of attention, and when the prerequisites are in place we don't need things like "hypnosis" because we can literally just say things even if they're as seemingly absurd as "You can just decide to not swell your injuries" or "Send more blood to your hands" -- and if it's physiologically possible that's enough.
This is where it gets confusing, so we have to be careful. Let's start from the beginning and get our terms clear.
Your expectations are your predictions of what will happen, which you use to prepare for the reality you expect to find yourself in. If your wife says "It's not going to rain" and you say "I believe you sweetie, you could never be wrong about anything", whether you pack your umbrella and rain jacket says a lot more about what you're predicting than your words do. If you say "I know you'd never hit me" and then flinch when she gets close, your actions show your true expectations.
Similarly, your intentions are what you're aiming towards. If your performance suffers every time you're about to pull ahead in the board game and picks up again when you're at no risk of winning, it starts to look like you're trying to do something other than win. If the person you're playing with is the type to get upset about losing, then a more likely explanation is that you're intending to avoid upsetting the person and that any words of "I'm trying I promise!" aren't actually representative of what you're actually optimizing for.
So what's going on when you "know" that you're too late and "expect" to arrive a few minutes after departure time while simultaneously "intending" to catch the train?
The first thing to notice is that you describe your expectation as "arriving after the departure time" and intending "to catch the train". You didn't specify, but if you mean that you expected to arrive after the scheduled departure time, that actually doesn't contradict having an intention/expectation of catching the train. You did arrive after the scheduled time and also catch the train. It just implies an expectation that the train would be late, which is obviously not impossible either because it was.
There are all sorts of ways to configure the details and get the same description of events. Maybe you expected that the train might be late, and correspondingly intended to catch the train if it was. Maybe you intended to catch the train no matter what, and did not care to expect anything about how that happens because the details don't matter and you were willing to expect incorrectly.
If I'm speaking loosely, the match I describe wasn't the first one where I "intended to win" while simultaneously "expecting to lose". It wasn't even the first one of these that I had won. It's only when we look closely and examine what was actually happening that we can notice the difference between things like "Expecting to win, and expecting that this expectation probably won't be realized" and "Expecting to do my best, and not bothering to expect much in the moment about where this leads". Both of these look like "Intending to win while expecting to lose", but technically neither are. They describe different situations and make different predictions. To give one example, in matches where you're doing only the former you don't get that loss of motivation and you also don't get that surprise when you score enough that you're not losing anymore.
When you look closely enough, the apparent contradiction always dissolves.
Because your intention is the potential reality you are aiming towards, and your expectation is the potential reality you're preparing for. The only difference, which makes it so that we can say we can expect things that we don't necessarily intend, is that sometimes our preparations really can't do much of anything to change the reality we're preparing for.
Yeah, that's why I say "To the extent you can be said to have any intention whatsoever". You can't really intend to change things that you perceive yourself to have no control over.
And yeah, "comfort zone" is always a limiting thing. Finding the safe limits can be scary, but also fun sometimes :)
which led to rather cataclysmic changes in my life.
Well that sounds... scary, at best. I hope you've come out of it okay.
I'm not really sure how to take this, but it's humbling regardless. Thank you for sharing.
You seem to mainly focus on the negative somatization (no swelling) and a bit on positive ones, though I suspect that positive somatization (both beneficial and detrimental) is just as controllable with the intent/expectation fusion.
Yeah, for sure.
Though these distinctions are kinda confusing for me.
For example, I don't really draw too much distinction between "negative" and "positive" because I don't see a good way to pick a "privileged default". For example, "deciding not to swell" seems like the weird thing so it seems like a "negative somatization", but once you get used to that, all that unnecessary swelling seems like positive somatization. So when that guy didn't understand and she got self conscious, was that removal of a negative somatization, or a positive somatization? When I helped her get her swelling down again, is that another negative somatization or removal of a positive one? Kinda depends on your frame of reference, so it can't really work for the negative without also working for the positive. I just look at it as changing the response from one thing to another.
Similarly, I don't really see a distinction between a "somatization" and any other behavior we choose to do. "Raising your right hand" feels a lot more "conscious" and "like a decision" than stuff like swelling, but that's just because we tend to have better self-understanding in the former case, not because of an inherent difference in the two phenomena. If you try to explain how you raise your right hand, even if you know which muscles you're contracting it's unlikely that you're conceptualizing the action that way when you do it. You just kinda... do it. You know you can, so you expect to raise your right hand in the circumstances that seem to call for it, and then you take credit for that behavior because it's in line with your self-narrative. Once you get familiar with things like swelling, it's kinda the same thing though. You just kinda do it when it seems to make sense, and might even take credit for it.
When hiking our honeymoon for example, my wife mentioned that her hands were really cold despite her core being warm. I said "So send more blood to them?" and she said "Okay :)" -- and a few minutes later, her hands were really warm. Is that still a "somatization", or "just another conscious decision"?
Good writing should convey experience, so I can't use that as an excuse :p
It's a little weird trying to come up with examples, because when things are working well there's rarely strong evidence on both sides, and as a result things are rarely that surprising. For example, when I mention "Jumping off this cliff is safe" I'm thinking of a real situation... but there's not much to say because she never didn't believe me, so she was never afraid and I never had to "change her mind". It wouldn't even stand out in memory, except that I made a point of showing her that it said about her fear response.
But I'll try not to use that as an excuse either. Questions like below do make it easier.
Say you've thought things through and you've realized that you're not just telling yourself that you're "definitely totally right", but that you actually anticipate turning out to be right, and that turning out to be wrong would be so surprising that you're willing to eat that cost. At this point, you're free to make strong bids for attention without reservation.
What do you anticipate happening if you do?
For example, let's imagine what might happen in the jacuzzi situation if I had just opened with "It's okay if your makeup washes off", in a very sincere and not at all offhand sort of way. My anticipation is that if I had opened with that, she'd have said something like "Okay [whatever]" and turned to talk to her friend, basically blowing off my input because "Who tf is this guy?". The reaction I'm anticipating there isn't "Hm, I disagree. I think we should look at the danger more", it's "I don't care what you think, and the fact that you'd expect me to makes me think you're closing your eyes to negative social feedback and I hope you go away". If I tried to ignore that feedback and continue with "Shhhhhh...", that'd confirm what I'd expect to be her beliefs, and she'd probably get creeped out and leave. In this case it's not just that I don't have her attention, but that I don't have the resources needed to even continue that negotiation.
In contrast, when I told my wife to remind me to turn off the off the oven she didn't "Okay, whatever idiot" at me, she took me seriously enough to explain why she didn't think that expectation would work. It wasn't persuasive to me, so I still expected her to try. In that case it was easiest to bring her into the loop a bit and explain that I was trying something and it's fine if she didn't end up doing what she said, but the part I'm pointing at here is the "continued embodiment of that direction of attention, in the face of counter-bids for attending to something else". Sometimes that leads to explicit explanations, but other times it's entirely nonverbal. For example, when I tell my dog to sit and she doesn't sit right away, I don't rationalize at her why she should sit, I just continue to look at her expectantly for a few seconds until she does.
It's partly "a matter of experience" in that it takes experience to accurately anticipate how people (or dogs) will respond to various inputs. It takes a bit of experience to anticipate how jacuzzi girl might respond if you open with "It's okay if your makeup washes off". If you actually anticipate her saying "Wow, thanks for informing me!" without irony, then you're in for some surprises until you get some more experience and learn what kind of worldviews are common.
A lot of times though, it's not so hard to correctly anticipate that if you say "Yeah, you wouldn't want people to see what you really look like", she's likely to respond with something like "Are you calling me ugly!?". The harder thing to recognize there is that it's fine if she responds that way, because the answer is actually "no" and she's going to believe me. Because it's actually true, and that means I can hold that frame without flinching, which conveys unmistakable evidence that I'm really not calling her ugly.
Before opening my mouth I thought things through and made sure I was ready to face things if I were to be wrong, which meant that when my brain was looking for responses to the perceived reality I was in, it wasn't looking for things that make sense conditional on the perception that I might be doing something offensive and wrong, but rather conditional on the perception that I wasn't. So my bids for attention on "no" weren't polluted by things pulling in the opposite direction.