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I really enjoyed this essay (and have made a note in my little Moleskin I carry everywhere to pay more attention to Escaping Flatland). It’s full of observatio

I really enjoyed this essay (and have made a note in my little Moleskin I carry everywhere to pay more attention to Escaping Flatland). It’s full of observations and insights I’ll be chewing on for days at least but what strikes me immediately is the exhilaration of the love story: certainly I’ve known for a long time that I wanted something like that even if I wouldn’t have used those words. And I applied a crude heuristic: I only got seriously involved with partners who were in some important sense smarter than I am, but I think this essay has given me words for something I intuited long ago but never quite got by the scruff, which is that only once or twice if that did that represent a person who made me better at becoming better, and it was long enough ago I didn’t realize the gravity of that in time to make the necessary choices. The exhilaration derives from remembering what a game changer that represents when you encounter it, and for me at least how all the brighter colors and incandescent bliss and endless possibility and so many other unpronounceable intangibles that falling truly in love represented. There’s something magical here and the authors have succeeded in setting at least one pen to paper (and physical paper at that) trying to pull on a thread long neglected.

w10-1 3y ago
> a person who made me better at becoming better True that. The article has its own blindspot, which is to understand the problem as a blindspot - as a lack of information due to some (remediable) deficiency. But the story showed it was instead a matter of will, or agency. His girlfriend obviously knew she could learn; she just needed to decide that it was her job to learn instead of depending on others to teach. Indeed, nearly every story on point (like the comment about Bridgewater practices) purports to be about information (delivering unwanted news), but is in fact about the will to change. This is important because there's a ton of advice out there, and people who feel that giving advice is how they can help. But often that makes things worse: the person already feels disabled, and advice not taken basically conveys that they're faulty - disabled. Greek philosophers argued about the phenomenon of akrasia (weakness of will), generally falling into the same trap that we do, thinking knowledge will somehow solve it. But there's actually plenty of evidence that more knowledge constrains your sense of possibility. Mechanistic psychologists might argue for impedance-matching: challenging people without breaking them, so they achieve a rate of change above their expectations - but then expectations change. (Successful and powerful people are notoriously unhappy that their trajectories are not increasing.) Conversely, buddhists say to expect nothing and accept everything; then people become happy but low-achieving. Sometimes what really helps is to show someone that they can change. As the story suggests, love itself, and bringing someone out of a small town, helps. As the Bridgewater comment and the 2010's workplace suggests, joining some group where peers are humble and activated can be inspiring. Therapy suggests realizing that all your fears are self-generated delusions that disappear when you stop pumping energy into them. (Nietzsche's spirit of gravity is a monkey on the shoulder, that eventually hops off.) So perhaps the best of all is the advice above, to notice whether you're more yourself when with certain people. Those people Aristotle would call your friends; in the Nichomachean ethics friendship is the highest form of happiness because we're most actualized among those who get/demand/expect/elicit the most from us.

w10-1 3y ago

> a person who made me better at becoming better True that. The article has its own blindspot, which is to understand the problem as a blindspot - as a lack of information due to some (remediable) deficiency. But the story showed it was instead a matter of will, or agency. His girlfriend obviously knew she could learn; she just needed to decide that it was her job to learn instead of depending on others to teach. Indeed, nearly every story on point (like the comment about Bridgewater practices) purports to be about information (delivering unwanted news), but is in fact about the will to change. This is important because there's a ton of advice out there, and people who feel that giving advice is how they can help. But often that makes things worse: the person already feels disabled, and advice not taken basically conveys that they're faulty - disabled. Greek philosophers argued about the phenomenon of akrasia (weakness of will), generally falling into the same trap that we do, thinking knowledge will somehow solve it. But there's actually plenty of evidence that more knowledge constrains your sense of possibility. Mechanistic psychologists might argue for impedance-matching: challenging people without breaking them, so they achieve a rate of change above their expectations - but then expectations change. (Successful and powerful people are notoriously unhappy that their trajectories are not increasing.) Conversely, buddhists say to expect nothing and accept everything; then people become happy but low-achieving. Sometimes what really helps is to show someone that they can change. As the story suggests, love itself, and bringing someone out of a small town, helps. As the Bridgewater comment and the 2010's workplace suggests, joining some group where peers are humble and activated can be inspiring. Therapy suggests realizing that all your fears are self-generated delusions that disappear when you stop pumping energy into them. (Nietzsche's spirit of gravity is a monkey on the shoulder, that eventually hops off.) So perhaps the best of all is the advice above, to notice whether you're more yourself when with certain people. Those people Aristotle would call your friends; in the Nichomachean ethics friendship is the highest form of happiness because we're most actualized among those who get/demand/expect/elicit the most from us.