But, that would be bad
Emotions as Tools
I am trying to work through how I missed my brother being a Neo-Nazi. I know I didn't apply the toolkits because I had an emotional attachment to my brother. In my first post about my brother I blamed my emotions.
But I think I got it wrong. I mean, he is a neo-Nazi, but blaming emotions for missing that is a bit of a cop-out — I need to just blame myself. Ford was warning me about my brother for years, just from little things I said. I kept defaulting to the status-quo. Why didn't I listen? Why didn't I see things clearly?
The hypothesis I would like to explore is that our true enemy is our sub-conscious. Emotions are our only way to consciously peek into our sub-conscious, so they are needed tools.
In short, I was using the guardrail toolkit, unlike my brother. But I was not using the advanced toolkit, just like my brother. I didn't fall for any of his conspiracy theories, but I did trick myself into believing my brother was someone he wasn't. Think of this post as an early preview of what the full toolkit aims to help people with: their emotions.
Emotions make us feel like we are thinking rationally. In order to use emotions as tools, we should not always take them at face value. To be effective, we must observe our emotions and see what they are telling us about ourselves. This is the premise of the advanced toolkits (not yet published).
So I would like to go back to how I failed with my brother. In one instance he said a remark that is most easily interpreted as racist. He stated it like a fact. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something along the lines that black people have a lower IQ. But I couldn't square that with what I knew of him: I had never seen him treat anyone of any race differently. Before this comment we had several conversations about how the world is rigged in favor of those who are born into fortunate circumstances. So I put these two thoughts together. He must have meant, this race of people have been historically persecuted and denied education. The racist interpretation also didn’t track with how everyone in the family thought of my brother. I concluded "he doesn't really believe what he says”. I then felt relief. Not just from this instance, but many others over the last several years. I kept rationalizing until I got to 'relief'.
Observing my relief, I would have seen the contradiction: relief from what? What am I being relieved from? Relieved that he is good? That doesn't make sense. I should have felt proud or happy if I thought he was a good person.
I might feel relief because...
I don't need to change my behavior
I don't need to put in additional effort
I don't need to look at the other half of the superposition
I don't need to confront my brother
I don't need to jeopardize the relationship
That is me trying to preserve the status quo. Relief, in my situation, is clearly self preservation. The emotion is a hint, a shortcut, to help me consider alternative 'selves'. It is a direct line to my status quo bias.
First of all, that was a really quick way to identify my potential problems. I have never gone to therapy, but this sure feels like what you are suppose to gain from it — clarity. I can see the outline of the other superposition in this observation.
But how do I have the outline of something I haven't consciously observed yet? This is the position I was denying existed for so many years. Yet somehow, I knew the upshot of what it would entail.
I might need to:
change my behavior
put in additional effort
look at the other half of the superposition
confront my brother
jeopardize the relationship
The emotion of relief can only stem from my subconscious. I don't have any other explanation. If I consciously would have dealt with the ramifications... well I would have seen things clearly. But I didn't. My subconscious threw me some 'relief' to keep the status quo. It told me what I wanted to hear: "You're right, no need to change, no need to expend any more effort".
I am literally my own worst enemy.
Observing my emotions I can clearly see my self-sabotage.
Why does my subconscious do this to me?
The human brain has evolved powerful mechanisms to maintain stability and avoid unnecessary risks. This manifests as status quo bias — the tendency to prefer current states over change.
We have 'models' of the world in our head. These help us predict what we think might happen, and thus affect how we make decisions. These models balance what psychologists call the explore-exploit tradeoff: when to stick with proven strategies versus trying new ones. Our status quo bias is just trying to 'play it safe'. We have a bias to use models that seem to be working instead of crafting new and uncertain models. To some degree I rationally knew all this. But that knowledge didn't help me.
... Models that seem to be working. This is where rationalization comes in. We can keep a model working much longer if we just throw out or 'adjust' some evidence. Smooth over the rough edges. Our subconscious prefers existing models so much, that it makes reality malleable.
Our perception of reality can be messy. Rationalizations are a sort of shortcut to get to a 'working model'. A basic theory of how something works. The problem is that we continue to use rationalizations after we have a 'basic model'. Rationalizations at this stage prevent refinement of a basic theory. In other words, there is an anchoring effect to our initial model.
Our subconscious wants to minimize uncertainty. Rationalizations just shift any 'potential' uncertainty to the future. An error in observation, may be just that, an error. But when it isn't an error, we are throwing out evidence.
For my brother, I shifted all the uncertainty down the road. Being close to my brother made my rationalizations really strong. When he finally said something that I couldn't rationalize, I was hit with all the 'ignored' evidence at once. Uncertainty tried to collapse. I still kept trying to rationalize it. I wanted to ignore it. I was in denial. Now that I have confronted him, I have been able to adjust my model.
If rationalizations are fueled by emotions and an anchoring effect, we really only need to look at our emotions.
So what are emotions, in their entirety? Uncertainty can be part of it, but I think emotions can stem from many subconscious causes.
Prediction errors (uncertainty)
Reward/punishment signals
Social context
Physiological state
Past experiences
I think the inclusion of past experiences is particularly interesting (in a dangerous way). That is the mechanism that builds one-way bridges. If we start accepting 'answers' that are false, they become part of our past experiences. We start trying to predict off of these 'answers', and if our predictions fail, we will start to rationalize. We can then use these rationalized 'answers' to keep our model alive. Add in some reinforcing social interactions and it is actually pretty easy to see how someone like my brother, or anyone with good intentions as their guide, can end up getting stuck believing wrong things. For my brother, Jews were the 'answer'. Twitter was (at least part of) his social interactions.
For me, I used my past experiences with my brother to rationalize the words he was saying, to rationalize all the red flags that now seem so obvious. With the exception of two people, all of our mutual acquaintances described him as 'having a good heart'. Those two people were right about my brother. But I looked for consensus instead of truth. Those two people must be wrong, otherwise... everyone else would be. And — that would be bad.
My emotions were a tool I had, but chose to ignore. It is the loose thread I could have pulled on to unravel my delusions about my brother.
I don't think my experience is that different from others’. I have no direct evidence to support this — I can't inhabit other peoples experiences directly. But if I'm wrong, and this doesn't apply to you, you can stop reading here.
If we assume most people don't really analyze most of their decisions and instead use the literal interpretation of their emotions, then this also sheds light on why our current information hellscape is so effective at tearing society apart. Social media algorithms ratchet up the social context of those who will reinforce any 'answers' we already have. We also anchor to new 'answers' from the same spheres that we agreed with in the past. At the same time we hear so many conflicting 'answers' from other bubbles of the media ecosystem. We rationalize those away, driving us harder to 'what we already know'. When we interact with people from these other spheres we use any flaws in their arguments to rationalize why we shouldn't listen to anything they have to say in future. This is what Ford calls 'a runaway bad information environment' (we will do a post on this shortly). At no point does 'truth' enter into this. We just have 'answers'.
Let me use my new clarity, and my position as an apprentice to Ford, to offer advice to anyone who really cares about the truth and thinking clearly: If you've read our guardrail toolkit, you probably thought "this makes sense", "I already know this", "I already do this". But you probably don't. The simplicity of the toolkit disguises how hard it is to categorically follow. Our biggest obstacle is ourselves. I thought I knew my brother, so I could skip using the toolkit with him. But isn't that the point of the toolkit? "Don't get stuck believing wrong things". This was exactly what I did with my brother. He is stuck believing the Jews are the problem, and until now I was stuck believing that he wasn't a person who wants violent solutions.
Ford has a favorite fallacy, and we use it almost like a meme now:
But, that would be bad.
If you ever think about something like this — if your only reason to deny a possibility is "but that would be bad" — it should be a 5-alarm fire that makes you stop in your tracks. The amount of uncertainty behind that statement is immense. LOOK AT IT. Every fiber in your being will be trying to make you ignore it, to seriously entertain only the rationalized possibility. It is so immense that it is starting to bleed into your conscious thoughts. The truth is hiding in plain sight. Denial is your response, maybe 'confusion' is your only emotion.
If either of these thoughts ever cross your mind in response to something you know could be significant:
I don't need to change my behavior
I don't need to put in additional effort
Please stop. Look at your emotions. Write down what you are feeling. Read it back to yourself. How can you interpret them? Try to list as many interpretations as you can, then negate them (or remove the negation). What are you telling yourself? What do you already know about yourself and the situation?
Of course, everyone is different, and maybe Ford and I are unique but..
