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How do you turn someone around from this thinking though to realize that they can attract what they want?

abathur 7y ago
Ooof. Man. Not any stripe of psych or therapist, but I'm not sure you can. I've never found directly trying to change someone's mind all that productive. I think the big precondition is some combination of curiosity+humility. If they don't already have it, I wouldn't worry about much other than trying to create it. At first I wanted to compare this to opening a door that someone else has to walk through, but I guess what you really want is to teach them how to see doors. I'm not really into street epistemology, but I read Peter Boghossian's book on the topic a few years back; IIRC he frames this in terms of creating moments of "doxastic openness" where people are willing to re-evaluate what they know. I'm probably torturing the text a little, but I think it roughly boils down to using the Socratic method to help people find things they think they know but don't. It's a way of unsettling the equilibria or feedback loops they're in. A thought that may help... A bit over a decade ago I had a spell of depression that I sought counseling for, and for a few weeks at one point I crossed a little line into "suicidal ideation", and it was a very unnerving experience. My brain saw opportunities for death everywhere I went. I was morbidly amused with its ideas. I (thankfully) never felt any real impulse to take action on those thoughts, but the unnerving part was how rational it (and I) actually felt. I'll avoid details, but my mind was hard at work on very pragmatic details--solving a problem like any other. I realized my thinking was working fine--but my perception was all askew--and it sort of snowballed into part of my worldview. I grew to find it more fruitful to see other people as roughly rational with varying degrees of disordered perception, and to imagine that we would probably make very similar decisions and think similar thoughts if our input streams were swapped. (FWIW: I'm not calling this an accurate model of reality, just a fruitful one.) I wasn't really aware of it at first, but it's turned out to be an empathy-cultivating framework. It leads me to imagine the preconditions that might cause me to think/behave as someone I'm finding surprising.

Ooof. Man. Not any stripe of psych or therapist, but I'm not sure you can. I've never found directly trying to change someone's mind all that productive. I think the big precondition is some combination of curiosity+humility. If they don't already have it, I wouldn't worry about much other than trying to create it. At first I wanted to compare this to opening a door that someone else has to walk through, but I guess what you really want is to teach them how to see doors. I'm not really into street epistemology, but I read Peter Boghossian's book on the topic a few years back; IIRC he frames this in terms of creating moments of "doxastic openness" where people are willing to re-evaluate what they know. I'm probably torturing the text a little, but I think it roughly boils down to using the Socratic method to help people find things they think they know but don't. It's a way of unsettling the equilibria or feedback loops they're in. A thought that may help... A bit over a decade ago I had a spell of depression that I sought counseling for, and for a few weeks at one point I crossed a little line into "suicidal ideation", and it was a very unnerving experience. My brain saw opportunities for death everywhere I went. I was morbidly amused with its ideas. I (thankfully) never felt any real impulse to take action on those thoughts, but the unnerving part was how rational it (and I) actually felt. I'll avoid details, but my mind was hard at work on very pragmatic details--solving a problem like any other. I realized my thinking was working fine--but my perception was all askew--and it sort of snowballed into part of my worldview. I grew to find it more fruitful to see other people as roughly rational with varying degrees of disordered perception, and to imagine that we would probably make very similar decisions and think similar thoughts if our input streams were swapped. (FWIW: I'm not calling this an accurate model of reality, just a fruitful one.) I wasn't really aware of it at first, but it's turned out to be an empathy-cultivating framework. It leads me to imagine the preconditions that might cause me to think/behave as someone I'm finding surprising.