hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

Dislocated my collarbone last night while picking up a cutting board that literally weighs like 3 pounds. I am moithered to death with my body today, and will be sitting at my desk with my arm propped up today doing research instead of knitting a sweater, like I wanted to be doing. Yes, I have taken all of the anti-inflammatories, and I took a muscle relaxer yesterday to keep from stiffening up so much that I hurt myself worse in my sleep. Today is a lot better, but still tender and a bit grindy? Someone plz tell me I don't have arthritis in my AC joint.

Things I am ( researching: )
If anyone has any places to start with that research, or questions about it that would help me narrow down the research fields, comments and DMs are always welcome.

The world is big and confusing, and you know what? That's probably for the best. If the world were small enough for one human mind to experience and understand everything, well, it wouldn't be the vast, diverse playground that it is, would it? I don't believe in making things ideologically simpler for people to understand if I am sacrificing their ability to actually understand that thing. Especially if that "thing" is me. I don't believe that boiling my nature down to just a couple of elements is going to be useful to their ability to predict my behaviour or plan ahead for me. So if I just let people jump into the deep end of constructing gender: so? (And if people want to attack me or my community for their inability to understand us? Well I have a baseball bat and a bone to pick with them.)

Which brings us to reality testing.

It is healthy to know when your beliefs about the world are steering you wrong so that you can change them, ( yes? )

Now that you’re doing the work of figuring out what your assumptions are, and they’re becoming more visible, what should we do about them? Well, there are some options! You can look at the context of the assumption and see what else you know about the facts surrounding it, looking for inconsistencies that lead you to suspect that you might not have the whole story. A lot of the time, especially at first, you will have to look up information about your subject on the internet and you will have to do science to your expectations, because your brain will have disregarded information that disagreed with your view (darn you, confirmation bias!). When doing science to things, remember that science is good at giving us facts and enumerating relationships, but that the context of those relationships is sensitive to our previously held biases and assumptions. So it’s vital to take each thing and look at its assumptions and turn each of the assumptions upside down to see if there are unexplained variances that a different perspective on the contents of the science explains.

Alternately, you could look at the disagreement that you had and decide that your view was not enough of a nuanced approach to be the truth (applying Occam’s Razor to humans is a hazard; we are complexodynamic creatures). If you put some thought to questioning your view and know that there’s not enough data available to make a solid judgement call, perhaps you can figure out what the most likely answers are and apply a probability to them. An average distribution curve runs something like answer A= 50-70%; B=10-30%; C= 5-10%; Z= ~2% or less. Why do we think about option Z? Because even if we’ve never seen it happen, if something is likely to happen 2% of the time, and that situation comes up 20 times a year then statistically Z’s number is going to come up every two and a half years, and being completely unprepared is going to make you feel really failsome when it happens. When trying to populate your ratios, be aware that any situation you’ve only seen happen a few times is subject to the Law of Large Numbers, where your values tend to skew back and forth a lot until you build up a large enough statistical base from which to accurately make that judgement. This will make your daily plans and your disaster preparedness a lot simpler.

When you are looking at the possibility space and about to start planning, there is going to be a hurdle to get over. At first, you will want to do nothing. There are going to be some conflicting impulses between doing anything you can think of and being paralyzed for fear of making it worse. But fear is not a plan. Being afraid, of itself, accomplishes nothing, and furthers no plan. Neither does living in the hope that the situation will change on its own, so being able to label these states of inaction as plans and weigh their risk-benefit ratio will help you dismiss them or use them constructively. Figure out the thought space available, the possibilities for the problem, and the risk-benefit assessment for each plan to solve the problem - even though it's hard. It takes a lot of will-power to make yourself stick with doing something like this, so don't be afraid to write things down, leave and come back to it, ask for help, and use all of your creative skills to solve it.

Now there’s a plan in place for making the judgement call, you’ll get faster at making them and won’t have to agonize over them as much. It has the anti-anxiety benefit built into the system, which is helpful, since you don’t have all the energy in the world to wade through fallacies every time you try to do something. Once the assessment phase of the decision making process is not so fraught, you can make plans and decide between them using a risk benefit analysis. Make plans that are sensitive to the conditions of your ABCZ distribution curve. Is there a way to make one plan and it’s backups work for all scenarios? Congratulations, you have achieved a Xanatos Gambit!

"BUT WAIT!!!", you say, "How does this relate to the Sea of Doubt?"

Fair question. Sometimes you have a probability A, and a probability Z, but the rest of your theoretical possibility space is one big ??? and you're not sure what to do about that. How are you supposed to act when you can only account for what seems* like 52% of the possibilities? (*and is realistically even less, since we have to assume we are not omniscient) Well, there are so many types of problems, and so many strategies for solutions that we invented an internet to help deal with them. That we will get into next post.

So I had not realized how many of my skillsets geared into the :probability nexus: :how to behave in situations full of variables that can only be calculated based on facts not in evidence: :deduce when you are working from faulty assumptions: :deal emotionally with never being certain of three quarters of your operating assumptions: paradigm that I have internally labelled the Sea of Doubt. And now that I have a reason to write about it coherently, I'm beginning to get a much bigger picture of how all of these interconnections correlate. The Sea of Doubt is the basis for my rationality, and how I use that rationality to navigate the world without feeling like an awkward jerk who is wrong all the time.

We "know" a lot of things that are wrong, and from these failsome assumptions comes much of the suffering of our lives. For instance, every young person knows that they are the protagonist of this story they are living in, and they are, as ot_atma says, not even wrong. By the age of twenty five we are expected to get over our "I AM THE PROTAGONIST" delusions and move toward an understanding of "everyone is just trying to do the best they can in variably bad circumstances", but how far people get along this path is highly dependent on personality and disadvantages. It kind of makes me question why we tell kids stories that only have one protagonist; how that's supposed to reflect their journey in life and teach them how to person while filling their head with nonsense?

We punish people socially for acting like they are the protagonist in their own life story when we have obviously cast them in a supporting role in ourlife. Why aren't they more grateful? Aren't we friends? And it would be easier to be upset if they were not trained to do this by every children's story that says that the Chosen One is special and that the normal rules won't apply to them. Because we all feel different, and our cognitive biases latch onto this evidence for our delusion and any piece of luck we encounter "proves" our merit and reinforces our ability to treat other people like they don't matter to our story. And even stories that are about seemingly moral protagonists do this. I'm looking at you, Harry Potter.

So part of beginning to look at the Sea of Doubt is looking at how we think we are special and how we think others aren't, and realizing that we have been trained to be delusional about how probability works. That we are no luckier or less lucky than others except by systems of privilege which exist embedded within the minds of the people we interact with. Once we start looking at what biases there are we can start looking at how we are trained to be irrational about them and stop telling ourselves stories to justify how "the world might work that way for other people but we are special". Because the problem with some biases is that they work on you even when you know what they are and that they're working on you. Including the Protagonist delusion.

If you're going to dig that one out of your head, set yourself a goal of about two years if you are new to rewiring your headspace. That's at least somewhat realistic? Because you will find yourself reverting back to your old neural pathways in times of stress, and it will get you pissed at yourself for being new at something, which you can't help. That's no way to make progress. And get ready for the host of terrible things that making your biases visible does to how you think of yourself and the people around you. Because once you can't hide behind thinking that you are special? You may have a whole lot of problematic behaviors that you probably weren't aware of which you could ignore because the people to whom you were doing them mattered less.

Becoming a better person is hella awkward.