I'm in agreement with a lot of this. I more or less agree with your model of the problem as well as your solution of stress testing combined with setting expectations that there might be more work to do.

I'll expand on where I diverge a bit.

How do they know whether they’re facilitating lasting growth or flaky breakthroughs?

Even if there are a hundred more blocks you've achieved one percent. You say the same thing from a "glass is half empty" perspective, but I think the glass is half one percent full perspective is the more useful one here. It may be only one percent, but you don't actually lose that progress or end up worse off so long as you recognize it for what it is. You figured something out. You just didn't figure everything out, yet.

It's like climbing a mountain when you can't see the top. For some questions you need to know how much mountain there is left, but if you're committed to climbing it and want to make sure you're doing it efficiently, it's enough to track your local altitude gain -- and make sure you're approaching the upper bound set by available power/m*g.

I still think follow up data is good (And I did follow up a few months later with the person I helped in my chronic pain post. The improvement lasted), but I think it's going too far to suggest that without long term data you can't know if you're helping people grow.

So partly I diverge in thinking that this data taking isn't fully necessary, but I also diverge a bit in thinking that it's not fully sufficient either. It's like testing whether your cholesterol lowering drug still works 3 months down the line... but not measuring all cause mortality. And good luck measuring the equivalent of that and getting good data (as I say this, I'm reminded of an NLP "Core Transformation" study that did try to measure "global well-being" 8 weeks after a single session, and got positive results).

I'll give an example of how this can be hard to track. Once upon a time I tried to help an online friend with her fear of needles. There may have been some marginal improvement, but I mostly just considered it to be a failure -- which was surprising, since it seemed to have gone well enough that I would have expected it to help. So what data are you going to take in a case like this? "Hey, it's been three months. Did our lack of progress hold up, or can I take credit for a flakey lack-of-breakthrough?"?

About three months later, an online friend visited and we didn't sit down to "solve psychological problems" at all. I showed her around, took her to a rock in the ocean to jump off, just fun stuff. Then, shortly after this visit she had to get blood drawn and wasn't afraid.

It was the same friend, so that hypothetical 3 month checkup would have actually been positive. I'm not sure whether that work we had done earlier was a necessary precondition or whether the visit alone would have been sufficient, but either 1) it was a necessary precondition, and the right interpretation of that hypothetical 3 month follow up really is "Yeah, your explicit intervention resolved my fear issue with a 3 month delay", or else 2) the intervention that did it had nothing to do with needles whatsoever. So again, what kind of data are you going to take? "Any seemingly unrelated improvements in your life in the last three months that I can take credit for?"?

If you tunnel vision on concrete goals it gets easier to take data, but you end up missing any value that's not captured in your explicit metric. From my experience, I think this less legible value swamps the legible value, which is... inconvenient for clean analyses. To give an example, one friend has explicitly given me credit for "a large part of [her] current happiness", and another seems to be on the same path for the same reasons. In neither case did I sit down with them and say "Let's solve this unhappiness thing", and I would not have been able to get these results if I did. They both know I'm available to help them with "psychological issues" whenever they want and that I'm generally successful with that, but the concrete goals of those are much more limited and the sum of a few things like "Help me get my daughter to take her eye drops"/"help me stop overthinking jiu jitsu" pale in comparison.

The main thing I did that actually mattered was tease and talk shit, criticize, and comfort as needed. This is illegible to the point of looking like "just normal friend stuff" -- and it is -- but it was also guided by psychological principles aimed at the big picture. The jump rock experience wasn't just fun, it was intentionally a reference experience for how to handle novel and scary situations with a person you know you can trust (that's why it was fun).

The result that was life changing is that it allowed them to form relationships with their husband/fiancé that are really good, and which they would not have been able to even begin before my collection of illegible "interventions". I can think of a third case where I intervened directly and successfully got a couple back together, now happily married four children later -- but that one has the opposite problem because without a control group I have no idea if I can actually take credit. It's really quite likely that they'd have figured out that breaking up was stupid on their own, if I hadn't intervened to shake some sense into them.

So with the equivalent of "all cause mortality" I think I understand the default trajectory enough to make pretty good guesses in a couple cases, but that's relying a lot on my understanding (and their understanding) of the trajectories they were on rather than hard data. Who tf knows in the other case. And without really big samples, one death does a lot to change how the "all cause mortality" looks -- so better have a damn good reason to believe we're not trading more legible benefits for less legible but larger risks.

So yes, I agree. Take the data. Check in down the line, and all that.

At the same time, know that the data you're not taking might contain the bulk of the story, and that if you're aiming at what you can easily measure you might be missing high leverage points for what really matters.
 

Thanks for the heads up. I'll give it a read and probably respond with my thoughts later.

No, I get it. It's definitely way easier said than done. While that story sure sounds frustrating/disappointing (especially the part where the community accepts and respects this person, despite that), it's actually not surprising.

Let me climb into what I think this person's shoes might be, from hearing your side of the story...

- Tell Person X what things I was upset about, because Person X started off the meeting by saying "I think my job here is to listen, first."

Okay, Person X wanted to hear why I was upset with them. Good. He's been shitty enough that this is certainly called for. At least he has *this* much decency in him.

- Listen to, accept, and thank Person X, explicitly, for their subsequent apology,

Look, I'm trying to do my part. I accepted his apology in good faith and gave him the benefit of the doubt even though he really only apologized because he knows how bad it'd look if he didn't.

Also, it's not like I had a choice. Other people aren't going to see this pseudo-apology for what it is, and he's just going to make me look bad if I don't. He's really manipulative like that, and good at it because I think on some level he's actually doing his best and doesn't know how manipulative he can be.

Still, screw this guy, man. His best just isn't enough, and I'm done trying to pretend it is.

which they offered without asking for any sort of symmetrical concession from me

Lol, I didn't do anything wrong. What would he even ask me to apologize for? Getting quite reasonably upset when he objectively wronged me by his own admission?

- Outright lie in that dogpile, and claim that Person X had insisted that I jump through hoops that they never asked me to jump through

Maybe he didn't explicitly ask, but we both know what he meant. What kind of fool hears "I think it'd be better if you did X" and doesn't recognize it to be a request for you to to do X? Or like, equate things that aren't literally "insisting" with insisting when the pressure is there. This just sounds like a disingenuous complaint made by someone who is trying to make me look bad.

- Give no sign of any of this ongoing resentment in private communication initiated by Person X on that very same day

I mean, I'm trying to move on with my life. What am I to do, frown all day, to no good end? Again, Person X literally isn't capable of better. He doesn't even know he's closed minded, and you can't tell him because he just tries to explain why "you're wrong".

There's literally nothing I could say to get this person to see that he's being a jerk. Some people are just stuck in dark worlds, where no matter how hard I try to let go of what he did and move on, he's still going to hold it against me. There's no way to run the test, but I bet you a hundred to one that he'll still be bitching about this in 2025.

Okay, that was fun. Climbing back out of those shoes now, I can totally see where that person might be coming from. I have no idea what you did to upset this person and obviously can't comment on how (un)reasonable it was/is for them to be upset about it, but I don't think it's important.

I spent a few years talking to the most unreasonable person I've ever met, explicitly for the purpose of getting practice dealing with unreasonable people. It was this kind of thing on steroids.

To give an idea of what kind of person she was, she complained to me about her boyfriend not hitting her when she asked him to, saying that he objected "You're just going to get upset and say you didn't think I'd actually do it!". She then went on to treat him like shit, up to pouring her drink on his head in clear attempt to provoke him into hitting her -- and then she complained to me when he finally did. I asked how she squares that with the fact that she literally asked him to not too long before, and her response was "I didn't think he'd actually do it!".  

She was very difficult to get along with. Even when I would try my honest best and not complain at all about how she was shitty towards me, and she'd still get upset with me. And you know I'm not secretly or "unconsciously" trying to get away with something else, since figuring out how to get along with her was literally the only reason I had for talking to her in the first place. It's not the kind of mental/emotional work I'd want to be required to do on a day to day basis, but I did eventually figure it out. I basically had to get very good at showing her that I understood and cared about her perspective -- even if I wasn't also going to be swayed by it. By the time she got her boyfriend to hit her, she was able to laugh at herself when I pointed out how ridiculous she was being, despite how close that is to "It's kinda your fault your boyfriend hit you" which is a pretty triggering statement in general, let alone for people who are extremely sensitive and live in the darkest of worlds.

By any normal/reasonable standards, my initial attempts to get along with her were "clearly unpressured, sincere, caring, and genuine". At the same time, the solution involved getting better at rooting out even the tiniest slivers of unintentional pressure and unintentional rounding of her perspective to something it wasn't (quite) -- even if the differences were quite insignificant (at least, in my perspective, which is totally always right. Almost.)

This problem of "says one thing in the moment, then reverts to previous behavior later on" closely mirrors a common problem in naively implemented hypnotherapy. Basically, hypnotists almost by definition are good at getting contradicting thoughts out of peoples minds so that they can't block change. "In the office" you can get "miraculous" results and have people can learn to be disgusted by cigarettes in a literal snap of the fingers, only to pick up the habit again later down the line when they get fired or whatever. The problem is that if you don't deal with all the underlying drivers of behavior, then when a situation comes up that reminds them, it'll still be there.

In the hypnotists office, this might look like "Fast forward three months and you get laid off at work and you're feeling stressed. What do you do?" -- and noticing if the urge to smoke comes up then. In the context of offering an apology, it might look like "So in three months from now, if you're telling people I didn't really mean it when I apologized, why is that?". If they don't spontaneously start laughing then the situation isn't absurd for them and there's a reason they might. Okay great, you have more work to do. Do I not look sincere enough? Are there more things I have yet to apologize for? What is it?

I get that it's all very hard and not necessarily fair and all that. I put a lot of effort into developing the skills to do this, and I still don't get it right all the time. Especially not in the short term. And the most difficult people aren't always who you'd think.

What I'm pointing at is that the cause of this difficulty looks an awful lot like difficulty in making the world truly and knowably light. With that difficult woman, for example, the skill was in taking into account her perspective as she sees it -- which is surprisingly hard. It's also necessary though, because if I can't pass her "Ideological Turing Test" and prove that I get it according to her perspective, maybe I don't? And if I don't, then maybe I'm missing something important.

For the "light world" interpretation to be true, and knowably so, it seems like "your friends actually care where you're coming from, and aren't dismissive of your perspective -- at least, until they have sufficiently strong evidence that it overwhelms the differences in your preconceptions" is kinda necessary.

Does that not match with what you mean when you talk about a "light world"?
 

When you live in The Dark World, it’s just really really hard to escape. If you have a strong prior on (e.g.) self-serving Machiavellian manipulation as the motivating instinct behind someone else’s behavior, there isn’t much that person can do to convince you that they’re not doing stuff for self-serving, Machiavellian, manipulative reasons.

(Setting out to convince you is already sort of self-defeating, at that point.)

[...]

it’s not enough to merely make it safe, in truth. You have to go much, much farther than that—provide the person with data that loudly and inarguably contradicts the dark hypotheses, is visibly inconsistent with their anticipations of Doom.

I don't think the situation is quite so... dark.

Setting out to convince (aka "manipulate the beliefs of") someone who is already primed to see you as manipulative is indeed self defeating. At the same time though, as you say, you can still provide people with data that loudly and inarguably contradicts the dark hypothesis.

If I were try try to come up with that data for Mitchell (granted, Monday morning quarterbacking is always much easier), here's what I'd say:

"Yeah, I'm sorry it came off that way. Can you help me understand what I'm missing?"

Pulling it off and coming off as sincere is greatly helped by genuinely being sorry that it came off that way, and genuinely caring to understand what you're missing -- even if it might only be an understanding of how exactly he came to his mistaken conclusions.

I think that's kinda part of making sure to operate in a light way though, no? After all, how are we to know that we're not merely blinded by our own preconceptions, if not for loud inarguable data that will move even people starting with inaccurate preconceptions?

I think you're onto something really important here, and I'm glad you came back to share this essay. Navigating from an imperfectly light world to a lighter one is indeed tricky. One rule I try to hold myself to, is to hold mutual agreement (or at least anticipated mutual agreement) above my own perspective as "best arbiter of truth". In other words, I try to keep my own perspective tagged as "my perspective" no matter how seemingly-solid, and keep my confidence-that-I'm-right bound to my confidence that they'll come to see it my way too, once I finish sharing why I believe what I believe (and why I don't believe what they believe). That's not to say I never stray, or that I don't think I can ever find the truth when others (perhaps rationally) refuse to engage with it, but when I live up to this ideal I find that it really helps.

Some of this seems unlike anything I've heard before (like the Attention-Respect-Security model) and I'm curious to see how this works in practice.

It's this synthesis that I think is most novel. Part of the reason that I chose the jacuzzi example to lead with is that most psychological frameworks assume some degree of pre-existing respect and security which is not afforded by this context -- so solving it requires thinking outside those boxes.

This isn't totally unique though. "Provocative therapy" is about earning security and respect, and unsurprisingly was developed while working with patients who didn't choose to be there. PUA stuff is also related in that it's mostly about earning respect, though security is relatively underemphasized (hence the bad reputation). 

What I haven't seen elsewhere is an explicit framework highlighting when "provocative therapy" is called for vs other things one could conceivably do. In a sense, what I'm aiming to convey is meta to most psychological frameworks.

"Emotions *are* logical you're just bad at logic"

Yep! 

I'm gonna quote you on this one from now on, so that all offense can be directed at you :p

The devil is in the details here. The 14 year old wants to date their crush. Maybe even to know if they should move on. The 14 year old wants to avoid a situation where their crush laughs in their face, loudly announcing to the school that they thought they had a chance. If you can guarantee that they get laughed at, and ask them if they want to ask their crush out still, it's going to be an easy "No thanks".

But it's hard to know, in general. Asking means maybe getting what you want, and maybe getting what you don't want. And therefore you'll feel drawn towards asking, but also hesitate in fear of what could go wrong. It's not that you simultaneously "want to ask" and "want to not ask", or "want to ask" and "fear asking". It's that you want to ask [and have it go well] and want to not ask [and have it go poorly]. When you fill in the missing details, the picture gets clearer.

The difficulty in making these decisions is in knowing whether it's worth the risk -- and knowing that it's not worth learning more about the risk before committing. Once you can say "I want to ask and maybe get laughed at" -- which again, is the reality of what "asking" means -- then you've actually decided whether you want the uncertain outcome of asking. It's at that point that you can accurately say that you want to ask out your crush, without the hidden "[and have it go well]" qualification.

"Wanting to maybe get laughed at" is a bizarre feeling, because we're so used to trying to get the good without risking the bad (and for good reason!), but it's a completely real experience, and a valuable one when the uncertainty is irreducible. The "fear" starts to feel more like "excitement", and all of a sudden you're more prepared to smile while being laughed at, because it no longer means you shouldn't have asked.

I don't think "do more default" alone is enough to get people there very often, but "don't try so much to force yourself to do things you're afraid of" does threaten to take those things that you want, and that does increase the pressure to want the scary things. And doing things that scare you is a lot more fun when you actually want the scary too.

While it's true in general that a girl might have other reasons for not going swimming, or that people may judge her in ways that are significant to her decision whether it's worth swimming, this is not one of them. I'm specifically asking if you can figure out how to do it conditional on "No one will judge her, if they did it'd be their problem" turning out to be true.

And while it makes sense to question the realism of hypotheticals, and the knowability of "the right answer", this actually happened. We know a solution exists because after I talked to her she agreed with me, and went swimming. We know that no one judged her because it was just obvious to everyone there -- including the girl herself, who did not feel judged. Furthermore, this was predictable. While I couldn't be 100% sure she'd respond in the way I expected, she did.

It is indeed significantly harder in real life, where you might not know anything she doesn't, and where you could conceivably be wrong about how it looks. I'm giving you the benefit of hindsight in telling you how it turned out.

Knowing the right answer in advance, can you figure out how to convey it to her so that she predictably sees it? Remember, you've just seen her friends tell her that she doesn't have anything to worry about and that didn't work.

But from what little bit of BJJ rolling I've done, my impression is yes, folk who don't know the unbendable arm trick end up struggling sometimes in ways they don't have to.

I should clarify what would actually surprise me.

Most people at a jiu jitsu gym don't really get jiu jitsu, and struggle in ways that they don't have to if they were to just learn jiu jitsu. This is unavoidable, as learning to jiu jitsu takes time, but it also means that even if BJJ has an equivalent concept of this Unbending Arm thing you should expect these results. I don't doubt that there's something there.

What I'm skeptical of is the idea that it's a blind spot in jiu jitsu, to the point where cross training in Aikido for concepts like this has demonstrable merit. I'm skeptical that the field of jiu jitsu lacks an equivalent concept and therefore systematically misleads its practitioners in a way that is relevant to BJJ/MMA/street altercations/etc.

These blind spots do exist, but they're impressive and cognitive dissonance inducing when demonstrated. My favorite example is Derrick Lewis "just standing up". The announcers recognize that Derrick Lewis isn't demonstrating skill at "jiu jitsu", and don't recognize the unforced errors that his opponents are making which allow him to just stand up, so they're shocked. "This isn't supposed to work, and it is!".

I don't know about "dumb". Maybe "ignorant", the way an infant is ignorant of how to stand, or someone unpracticed will fall over if standing on one leg with their eyes closed.

If someone tries to stand on one foot with their eyes closed and falls over due to the fact that they haven't practiced it, then that's kinda unavoidable. It takes practice.

If someone tries to stand on one foot with their eyes closed and falls over due to the fact that they tried to stand on one foot with their eyes closed... instead of just opening their eyes and putting their foot down when there's no reason to not open their eyes and put their foot down... then that's entirely avoidable. All you have to do is think through what you're actually trying to achieve.

By using the word "dumb" I'm saying that if it turns out I'm missing something here it's not because I haven't spent ten years practicing Aikido visualizations in the mountains of Japan. It's because I was doing something drastically wrong that can apparently be fixed in a 30 second demonstration, which I've had ample time to notice, and have apparently been blind to for whatever reason.

The distinction is important because if it happens, it calls for some more self reflection on how I ended up not knowing how to use my arms despite using them for decades. In the same way that if you think you're about to submit someone and they "just stand up", its in your best interest to humble yourself a bit and go back to the drawing board.

I'm not sure what you're asking

I trust your honesty about where the goal posts are, but I still have to locate them in order to know what you're saying, exactly. I'm trying to find out where you're drawing the line between "the thing" and "not the thing" so that I can understand what you're saying and make sense of why the Aikido demonstrations look so much like they're trying to hide what's actually going on.

I tried it this morning at the jiu jitsu gym, with a fairly skilled training partner that likes to play with challenges like this. Specifically, what I did is say "I want to play an Aikido game with you. See if you can bend my arm", and then placed the back of my wrist on his shoulder, and let him do as much as I thought I could without letting my arm bend.

He started off gently pushing and pulling to feel me out, and I had to move my feet to stay standing because it doesn't take much if you're in a regular upright stance. Eventually he pulled pretty hard and I had to half collapse in order to keep my arm straight. A bit after that I had to collapse fully, and he spent a couple minutes trying to figure out how to pin my arm in a way that allows him good biomechanics for bending my arm. The game ended when I had to tap to an arm bar... which I guess is fair since I didn't specify that he had to bend it forward and he certainly would have been able to bend it backwards from there.

When we switched roles, I immediately did the thing that he eventually did to bring me down, and bent his arm. I reminded him that he was not obligated to stay standing, and that the lose condition is just the arm being bent. The next time I couldn't bend his arm with him standing, but I could force him off his feet so long as I took a step back and used good biomechanics to pull his elbow down and into me.

The thing is, none of this looks anything like an Aikido demonstration. It looks like a grappling match.

Why don't Aikido demonstrations look like grappling matches, if not for implicit rules about what you're not supposed to do? Why does the guy demonstrating the technique never get to the point of having to say "Okay, but no pinning my upper arm"? Why is he never forced to collapse to the ground in order to keep his arm straight? Why doesn't the offensive player ever take a step back and pull them down in the way that generates significant bending moment -- the way my training partner did to me?
 

I like the idea, but looking at your examples I'm skeptical that it actually works out that way much in practice. Let's look at your examples, in order.

Hearing pitch isn't scaffolding you remove once you learn to sing, which is why skilled vocalists still have ear pieces so that they can hear themselves when they perform. I'm sure they could still sing better than you even with earplugs in, but not to their potential -- and their performance would likely degrade with time if you cut that feedback loop.

"Rolling" is absolutely a big part of fighting. It's not a huge part of striking, but it's a huge part the grappling aspect of fighting which doesn't go away, and the rolling only becomes more prevalent at the higher levels of grappling. Heck, Jiu Jitsu is one of the main components of modern MMA, and their term for sparring is literally "rolling". 

If getting into a fencing jacket isn't a scaffolding skill, then I don't see how getting into donning helmets and gloves can be -- for the exact same reasons. Same with training wheels, which you typically have your parents do for you.

Training wheels have an additional problem in that they actually rob you of the feedback you need in order to learn to ride a bike, making it harder. You could argue that catching yourself with your feet on a balance bike becomes the scaffolding skill, and this is indeed not an integral part of high performance bike riding... but every time you dismount a bike you use this skill. And it's never a limiting skill in the first place.

Skimming through the rest of your examples, it looks like my objections break down into 3 categories. 

1. That skill is an integral part of high performance, even though once you reach high performance you can perform at low levels okay without it.
2. There are other ways to do that, in the same way that a fencer could hire an assistant to help him get into his jacket.
3. That doesn't actually help develop the skill. You're better off skipping the metaphorical training wheels and working on the thing itself.

If we get rid of the second criterion, then there are a lot of things that would fit the requirements. That also seems fair, since there are a lot of times you can't reasonably hire an assistant to get you into your jacket, or to make good pitches for your games. But then again, those would be better described as "supporting skills", because fencers don't stop putting on their fencing jackets once they learn to fence.

I'm struggling to come up with an example of a skill you could really remove to no significant detriment once you get good at the thing. Skilled rock climbers by and large would be pretty pissed if you took their ropes, for example. You might be fine forgetting how to navigate Duolingo's interface once you're fluent, but that skill seems hardly necessary or limiting in the first place.

It just seems too often that the skills that enable a thing either continue to enable the thing or else enable other things. For example, even if rolling was no longer helpful in fighting it's also a skill I've applied to bike riding, for when I've gone over the handlebars -- long after I'd learned to ride a bike.