I miss the trigger of my attempts at most TAPs too often, especially if these are triggers that naturally occur in emotionally heated situations. Even after mentally rehearsing them ten times initially and snapping my fingers when I notice the trigger in the moment.
What works better for me is a spaced repetition TAP: I have an Anki deck with Fibonacci spaced (re-)learning steps (2 days, 3, 5, 8). A sample card might be "Behavior: When did I last get triggered and forgot to take a deep breath and remind myself to not get triggered?" I answer "hard" if this behavior has occurred since the card was last shown and then take time to visualize the situation, add it to the back of the card with timestamp, and mentally rehearse my desired, corrected response to the triggering situation.
I limit this deck to one new card per day, and rehearse the card as part of my daily anki routine. So far I've fixed a variety of behaviors to the point that my partner and friends have commented on the changes they observed.
1
Once, I went to talk about "curiosity" with @LoganStrohl. They noted "it seems like you have a good handle on 'active curiosity', but you don't really do much diffuse 'open curiosity.'" The convo went on for awhile, and felt very insightful.
(I may not be remembering details of this convo right. Apologies to Logan)
Towards the end of the conversation, I was moving to wrap up and move on. And Logan said "Wait. For this to feel complete to me, I'd like it if we translated this into more explicit TAPs. TAPs or it didn't happen."
You can get a new insight. But, if the insight doesn't translate into some kind of action you're going to do sometimes, there is a sense in which it didn't matter. And people mostly fail to gain new habits. If you're going to have a shot in hell of translating this into action, it's helpful to have some kind of plan.
Recap on TAPs
"TAP" stands for "Trigger Action Pattern", and also "Trigger Action Plan." A TA-Pattern is whatever you currently do by default when faced with a particular trigger. A TA-Plan is an attempt to install a TA-Pattern on purpose.
To turn an insight into a TAP, you need some idea of what it'd mean to translate the insight into a useful action. (I'll touch on this later but mostly it's beyond the scope of this post). But, after that, you will need a...
But, pretty crucial to this going well is:
Example: Sometimes, you talk to your colleague and end up getting in a triggered argument, where you both get kinda aggro at each other and talk past each other.
Maybe you have the insight "oh, maybe I'm the problem", along with "I should maybe try to de-escalate somehow" or "I should do better at listening."
Naive attempt at a TAP:
Mysteriously, you find yourself not remembering to do this in the heat-of-the-moment.
Slightly more sophisticated attempt (after a round of doing some Noticing and curious investigation, which is also beyond scope for this post)
Okay, but then in the heat of the moment, idk you're just so mad, it doesn't feel fair that you have to be the one to de-escalate.
...and then you might find that taking a deep breath doesn't actually help as much as you hoped, or is insufficient. Figuring out how to handle arbitrary problems is, you know, the complete body of rationality tools, including those not-yet discovered.
Turning Takeaways into TAPs
I think "TAPs or didn't happen" is a bit too strong. Conversations can be useful for reasons other than turning into new habits. But, I recommend thinking of "Turning takeaways into actions" as a thing you might want to do.
While the skill here is basically "fully general rationality", here's a few suggested prompts to get started.
First, you might want a stage of asking:
"What even were the takeaways from this conversation?". You might have had a fun meandering convo. What do you want to remember?
"Why does this takeaway feel important or useful to me?". At first, you might have only a vague inkling of "this feels exciting." Why does it feel exciting?
"When, or in what domains, do I specifically want to remember this takeaway?"
"What would I do differently, in the world where I was taking the takeaway seriously?"
...
I have a horrible confession to make.
I do not remember what TAPs I ended up coming up with.
I do think I ended up incorporating the concepts into my life, and this routed at least somewhat through the TAPs. Here is my attempted reconstruction of what happened at the time:
In the conversation about curiosity, some things that came up were that I feel like "open curiosity" takes too long (compared to directly tackling questions in an active, goal-driven way". I feel like I'd have to boot up in a whole new mode of being to make it work, and... idk I just imagine this taking years to pay off.
I nonetheless have some sense that there's a kind of intellectual work that openly curious people do, that's actually harder to do with active curiosity.
A thing that came up is the move off... just noticing that some things are more interesting than other things. Even if something doesn't immediately feel actively fascinating, there's a move you can make, to notice when there's a diff between how interesting one thing feels, vs another thing. And, pay extra attention to the more interesting thing, and what's interesting about it. Overtime this can cultivate curiosity as a kind of muscle.
The TAP version of this is:
And, relatedly:
...
May your good conversations live on in your actions.