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TheBertinator3000 t1_jch6iul wrote

Reply to comment by Trips-Over-Tail in [Image] Don't we all like to fix things? by dreamingonastar1

When I was figuring out my life, it helped me to read into these concepts, and try to understand them better.

Almost by definition, you won't be aware when you're doing most of these, at the start. But learning to understand how they work, coupled with a general mindfulness practice, can help you get better at recognizing when you're falling victim to them.

This post isn't a good "how to get started" guide, but it's a nice list of concepts that are worth your time to read up on.

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GeneSpecialist3284 t1_jchhy0b wrote

It's also helpful to recognize these behaviors in others.

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TheBertinator3000 t1_jchitec wrote

Sure, but that's trickier.

You can't see what's going on in their head, so it's really difficult to know whether you're actually correct or if you're missing something.

And, even if you are right, it's really tricky to know what you should do with that information. It's probably inadvisable to use it negatively against someone. And, even if you're trying to help, knowing what's wrong is very different than knowing how to effectively help someone fix the problem. Helping is an entirely different skillset than figuring out what's wrong.

So yes, it can be helpful, but analyze/diagnose other people with great caution and at your own peril.

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SpiritStriver90 t1_jcntsa7 wrote

So how do you deal with those, then, when they seem like they are so damn true to you, e.g. I remember having had an online convo where I wore someone out with questions because I really, really felt I needed all those answers they were giving as the questions seemed so reasonable, but what if this was some of that "intellectualizing" error or similar? How can you deal with that? What do you do with the places where information is missing?

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TheBertinator3000 t1_jcrn08s wrote

It's tricky. It's really, really, tricky.

Probably the biggest thing to accept is that you can't successfully do it for everything. You just can't. You can learn to avoid the traps of logical fallacies, but cognitive biases are an entirely different story.

I've eventually become convinced that you can't avoid cognitive biases. They're a fundamental feature of how the brain processes information. You can get better at recognizing when a cognitive bias influenced you past or present perspective, but there's no total fix.

What you can do, though, is learn from past mistakes by reflecting on them. If you set aside some time to think about what went wrong, or learn how to seriously entertain the idea that some of your firmly held beliefs/values might not be quite correct, you can slowly discover places where you made mistakes in the past. That can help slowly change your perspective on, and approach to, life. Your perspective is a giant barge of a ship, though. It doesn't like to turn on a dime. Mindfulness, and maybe meditation, can help you to slowly turn that barge onto a new trajectory, but you often won't see results right away. And you won't know what trajectory its putting you on.

It's a bit of a leap of faith. You really just have to experiment, for at least a few weeks/months, and see if you like whatever results you get. One thing I'll ask you to take on faith for now (experiment and see if I was right or wrong), is that sometimes better awareness of the problem is actually enough to fix it. Not always! Not by a long shot. But more often than you'd expect.

There's a lot of trial and error in this. It's a soft science, not a hard one. You'll rarely get concrete or consistent answers.

Be careful not to give yourself too much new anxiety, in the process XD

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SpiritStriver90 t1_jcrnfd2 wrote

Sure, but how do you avoid making dangerous mistakes or errors and how do you avoid wasting too much valuable time? Or are those concerns themselves part of the problem and blitheness might actually be better?

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TheBertinator3000 t1_jcrq0xs wrote

Define dangerous.

Define wasting valuable time. Define too much.

Answers to these questions are situation specific, unfortunately, not generalized.

As to your last question, it unfortunately also depends on the situation, and got much you're over thinking it.

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SpiritStriver90 t1_jcrri9f wrote

"Dangerous mistake" in this context would be something that, say, harms another in a real way, or that puts you at a risk of serious (possibly physical) harm, and that you could have avoided with more careful, informed, and rational thought.

"Wasting valuable time" / "too much time": yeah, that's much more grey, but basically you only have so much time in a lifetime so if you spend the whole thing until you're dead and failed that's the extreme, but even before that we have the inevitabilities of things like aging, changes to the world, and so forth that may cause the goal's achievability to recede from you or become less relevant if you dally too long in getting there.

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TheBertinator3000 t1_jcrsskv wrote

Unfortunately, even in your "dangerous mistake" question, you're still asking for too general an answer. I haven't currently found any, that I think would work as a general rule of thumb. The closest might be to remember that how you think you're impacting other people, and how you're actually impacting them, are not always the same thing.

>but basically you only have so much time in a lifetime so if you spend the whole thing until you're dead and failed that's the extreme

Who cares what you did, at that point? You won't even be around to define success and failure, anymore. So defining success and failure, at that point, doesn't really seem to be a meaningful thing to do, if that makes any sense. I'd maybe set my goals more short/intermediate term.

What is success? What is failure? What is wasting time?

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