identity constructs and meta-metacognition

So analyzing the filters through which I have been thinking about how I think my thoughts and all of the Sea of Doubt stuff is churning up my waters, and revealing some interesting landscape at the bottom of this particular stretch of my personal ocean. It's wild. It has been a few years since I have done anything truly outside the realm of rational understanding because of my issues, or had a disagreement with someone that goes beyond the norms of misunderstanding. And for the sake of accuracy, I like to keep my view of myself updated to prevent huge gaps in seeing myself not as others see me. I want to think of myself as not being crazy, and as being reasonably good with people, but it feels wrong.

So I have conflicting impulses. I was crazy and bad with people for the parts of my adolescence that I still remember as well as I remember five years ago, and those memories don't ever seem to recede, so I have identified with "crazy" all these years. Twenty feels so much longer ago than thirteen, and I can't describe why or how. So I can explain why it feels wrong to think of myself as this new thing even though the old identity still feels true, even though I am not desperate anymore, but I also feel like I need to be accurate and valid and rational to upkeep this tradition I now have of getting better. I used to do it because if I didn't someone was going to get dead and chances were only about 50/50 that it would be me. Now I have continued doing it because I like it and it makes the world better and it makes me feel strong. So I want to change, and this sort of identity matrix reassignment used to be a lot easier, but now it's been getting harder the last few times. Is this what getting set in your ways feels like? This barrier to plastic change? I know that it is setting in much later for me than for other people, and that this kind of change is still as easy as it is in other ways is possibly only because I am on the autism spectrum and we get a neuroplasticity bonus. But still. Bleh.

Normally I would think about what kind of thoughts I would have if I were that new person, and model the new behavior, and see if it took off organically just by jump starting the formation of neural pathways. This time I don't know if that will be enough, so if you have any ideas, things you have tried (even if they didn't work), or things you have heard of working for other people, hit me in comments?

[EDIT TO ADD: I asked my friendslist over on Facebook and among the many suggestions, one of my programmer friends helpfully pointed out that I am trying to batch process what would probably yield better results being broken down into discrete problems and processed serially. Which is amazingly accurate, and demonstrates two of my better problem solving skills: keep a diverse group of friends and ask for help when you are confused. Maintaining relationships with more than one type of person might be a lot of work, but it keeps you grounded and human. And people tell you to ask for help when you need it, but they never tell you when you'll need it, so just ask whenever there is a problem that might yield to different perspectives than yours.]

Planning, Decision-Making, and the Sea of Doubt

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.