Writing that Changes

is writing that clears the path to doing

It may seem strange to kick off a publication with 6,000 words about what it isn’t. Not a list of dating instructions, not a compilation of Science™ factoids, not a reassurance that you’re okay as you are. What I am aiming for is writing that changes you: how you see dating and relationships, how you approach them, how you understand yourself and others. For this change to happen in you, you should have the right expectations and the right mindset.

Instructions, Science™, and validation aren’t terrible in themselves. But they put you in a mindset of dependence on authority. They create the expectation that gurus will instruct your personal life, that experts will inform it, that prestigious arbiters will put a societal stamp of approval on it. This pushes against self-directed change.

The core tenet of Second Person is that meaningful change in your romantic life must be self-directed. In large part, because lack of self-direction is the main impediment to most people’s dating. The goal of this first chapter, which concludes with this post, is to give you different expectations and a different mindset.

Changing people with words is very hard. I don’t presume I would do so with all but a minority of my readers, and that’s ok. I read stuff to be entertained and informed, and Second Person will be as entertaining and informative as I can make it.

But I have also read a handful of texts that transformed me. Some that hit me like a lightning bolt and some that nudged me to an ever-so-slightly diverging path so that I only noticed the impact years later. I know that it can be done.

I will sketch out my theory of how writing can change people. You may find it unconvincing or incomplete, but at least you’ll know what my intentions are for this journey I invite you on. If you signed up to Second Person for the long haul hoping for more than edutainment, this will be your guide.

Learning in Reverse

Here’s a common model of human learning:

1. We accumulate bits of data by making observations in the world and learning facts. We notice patterns.

2. We learn a general principle that these facts fit into, usually by being explicitly taught it by someone else. This allows us to compress the information and to generalize the pattern.

3. We look for evidence to disconfirm the principles we know and revise them as needed.

4. As we notice patterns among principles at a certain level of abstraction, we can be taught an even more general rule that explains even more data.

For example, a process of learning physics may look like this:

1. Notice that apples fall down to the ground and learn that planets orbit the sun.

2. Get taught Newton’s law of universal gravitation in school.

3. Also learn that the speed of light is invariant and that Newton’s gravity doesn’t fully explain how we see objects move in outer space.

4. Learn the theory of general relativity that explains all previous observations about gravity and light.

In this model, knowledge accumulates by building on previous knowledge. It also becomes more general: we start with fragmented observations and build towards unifying theories. If we are stuck, it is because we don’t have or can’t comprehend the next step up in abstraction.

It’s common to think of self-improvement in the same way:

1. You notice yourself procrastinating on chores and tasks, leaving them undone or rushed at the deadline.

2. You read a book about time discounting, how your brain values immediate rewards much more than distant ones. You start using timers, schedulers, and chocolate rewards to get chores done.

3. You’ve eaten a lot of chocolate but still often find yourself with a pile of procrastinated-upon tasks.

4. You learn about the planning fallacy, itself a special case of optimism bias, itself just a manifestation of dual process theory. You set out to conquer your capricious System 1 through the power of cold reason. You read Thinking, Fast and Slow which leads you to LessWrong and you realize that dual process is just a small part of human irrationality. 47 posts deep into The Sequences, you feel that soon you will become a perfect Bayesian agent and…

5. You haven’t finished a chore in months.

The Sequences changed my life. For real. But it wasn’t the review of biases or dual process that changed me. I had already studied behavioral economics beforehand, including all the parts of it that didn’t replicate.

The Sequences are an exploration of just how stupid people can get by trying to seem like the smartest person in the room, written by someone who absolutely needs you to know he’s the smartest person in the room. Before, I had studied other people’s irrationality. The double punch of The Sequences finally drove home that it’s about me.

I could no longer ignore the fact that for the previous decade I was driven by the insatiable need to prove myself the smartest person in the room. I would interrupt to point out flaws in people’s arguments. I would steer conversations not to the topics I was curious about, but ones where I could flaunt my knowledge. I jargoned and name-dropped and wore a giant “debate me” sign at all times.

Some time in my teens, I must have absorbed the lesson that having my intelligence appreciated is the key to success. Was it my dad? School? A dozen books about the misunderstood genius protagonist who ends up vindicated? I don’t know. I just kept doing it. I realized that I was paying a social price for this attitude, but some part of me believed that it would be worth it: that I would find smart friends who appreciate my objectively correct opinions.

When Eliezer rubbed this same attitude in my face while explaining that it’s his opinions which were objectively correct, I simply agreed. With a sigh of relief, I passed on the responsibility of smartest person in the room to Eliezer. Over the next few years, I happily watched the intelligence-validation-seeking part of me shrink and wither away. I got much better at applying reason to solve problems and also at making friends without being insufferable.

At the time, it felt like reading The Sequences was teaching me new things. In retrospect, it was a reformulation of concepts I had heard before but didn’t actually apply to how I reasoned. There was a barrier that prevented this knowledge from becoming my active worldview. The Sequences washed that barrier away.

Here’s my model of how transformative learning happens:

1. You start with a simplistic worldview that you absorbed from other people. A large part of it is your identity story, which mixes the positive and normative. What you are and what you should. “I’m unattractive and uncared for, making money will earn me respect” or “the world is ruled by oppressors, my tribe must win for us to find peace” or “only hard work leads to success, neediness is laziness”.

2. You experience the world through this lens, looking to confirm it in what you see and in how you act.

3. Inevitably, some observations contradict your worldview. You often can’t fully perceive them, experiencing them instead as aversion or anxiety. You quarantine them away from the conscious worldview.

4. Something shatters a part of your worldview, whether a powerful experience or simply reading a better explanation for all you’ve observed. The quarantined bits that didn’t fit come flooding out at once and form a new, more accurate picture.

5. Over time, your worldview becomes more detailed and accurate, comprising different frames appropriate for different contexts that don’t necessarily reconcile or fit into a unified theory. Your identity becomes more complex, dynamic, and nebulous.

This model itself is a result of breaking a core belief I got from The Sequences, that rationality lies in the pursuit of an explicit world-model that can spit out an answer to any question or a well-calibrated probabilities for any event. I followed that pursuit for a few years, making some initial progress before hitting a wall. Reading about predictive processing, bottom-up consciousness, and meta-rationality offered me an alternative that allowed me to relinquish that pursuit. This immediately made life better, allowing me to intuitively solve many problems I had previously tried to brute-force with reason.

I went from:

I know the truth of everything; once people realize that, they will respect me as an authority.

to:

I don’t know the truth of everything, but I can approach it by overcoming bias and learning from people farther on that path.

to:

I have plenty of good enough local answers to apply where needed. I can learn a bit or a piece from anybody, no matter how limited their view. The truth of everything is 42.

This is as much a change of attitude — how I react when I face a question or hear an argument — as a change of explicit belief. Its success is measured in the outcomes of my actions. I don’t have one grand truth about dating but I have an attitude that is working well. Roughly: everything that happens is good, because it offers me an opportunity to act. My hope is that this attitude rubs off on you, and that you start fleshing out the particulars without worrying about grand narratives.

Second Person User’s Manual

I have evidence for this model not just in my own experience. Many readers have reached out to say my writing on dating in the last decade has helped them. Almost none of them mentioned some new fact or trick they learned. Instead, they write me things like:

I had basically given up on dating because I felt girls were just out to humiliate me. After reading your stuff I started looking more closely at how they actually react to me. I’m trying to be more playful around girls like you seem to be…

Or:

I knew that men must chase me to prove themselves. If I go after a guy, he wouldn’t like it unless he’s a loser. Now I’m not sure why this was so important to me…

This is the approach I recommend: read Second Person with a mood of curiosity about what people could be like, how what you thought they must be like isn’t always so. Remember that you are also “people”. Feel for what resonates with your own experiences, especially those that you didn’t think about much before.

Note that “not resonating” feels neutral, indifferent. “Resonating” can feel exhilarating or it can feel uncomfortable. A habit of not flinching from discomfort will serve you well in reading Second Person, and even better in your pursuit of romance. No one is here to judge or reprimand you. If you carry a reprimanding voice in your own head — maybe that’s what is your dating life back?

If I have helped readers so far, it was by helping them discard some story that was holding them back. It’s almost always a story about themselves, even if it pretends to be about everyone else or about dating at large.

Let’s get back to the two quotes above. I would guess that the actual story for both of them is something like:

I must hide my attraction to protect myself. If I make it known, I would get hurt socially.

Behind this story probably lies fear of rejection. And behind that fear lies some fundamental misconception of themselves and their place in society that makes rejection loom 1000x larger than its actual consequences. This distortion has little to do with whether girls are truly out to humiliate him or whether great guys truly hate assertive women.

But it doesn’t matter if the reader gets to that depth, or if, getting there, they agree with my diagnosis. If reading my stuff nudges them to start playfully complimenting attractive acquaintances, the resulting interactions will update them in the right direction. I won’t say that revealing your attraction always works out, only that you can’t find out if it works out until you try.

You learn, and you change, by doing. What I can do is unburden you of your doing-nothing stories.