Open Questions

stuff I'm trying to figure out answers for

Here are some questions I keep coming back to where I don’t yet have satisfactory answers.

When people attempt the Abandon Hope protocol (STAR) and it fails for them, what has happened and why?

Right now I’m vending this material out through a blog. I think having the blog as primary transmission medium is important because 1:1 coaching can’t ever scale beyond a single practitioner; but I’ve started doing 1:1 coaching anyway (hit me up, I’ve got ~3 people so far) and frankly most of the reason I’m doing so is because my async feedback channels via writing mostly suck.

Like: there’s going to be a ton of people who read my writing and some proportion will bounce off my homegrown protocol and some proportion (in absolute numbers, more than I expected!) will claim it one-shotted them in some important and beneficial and lasting way. I have no real way of calculating the ratio because “people who write in to say it worked for them” doesn’t include the denominator of those for whom my stuff failed. 1:1 coaching is a feedback channel that lacks these specific selection effects, though sadly it does have the selection effect of “this is a person for whom reading the protocol was inadequate to allow for solo execution.” Nothing’s perfect.

And yeah blog comments are fine, but I don’t love them as a conversational medium and there’s a lot of important context that I’d be getting in a 1:1 coaching relationship which will simply be absent in a blog comment.

Anyway, with 1:1 coaching I can get a better idea of what exactly the problems are that people run into, and see what framings do and don’t work in trying to teach people the very specific metacognitive skill that I think is important here. I intend to propagate everything I learn from 1:1s back into the Abandon Hope post (or other blog posts, depending.) The failures, in particular, are critical information for improving the framework.

The point is to make myself entirely unnecessary in this process. Which is probably unachievable in full generality but I bet I can get most of the way there.

Some More General Open Theory Questions

Why are some impossible-to-control outcomes stressful to engineer and others aren’t?

The goal of “make this person feel welcome at my meetup” is a goal about someone else’s internal state, the same as “make this person like me.” Clearly the difference between those is that one of them invokes self-focused attention (or more specifically, attention on oneself as a social object); but why self-focused attention anxiety-generating in general? I don’t stress about one in the same way that I stress about the other, even though the same core issues appear in each (the inability to read minds, the inability to reliably engineer internal states in others, the potential for failure to reflect poorly on me as a person.)

Why do League of Legends games become ~90% less stressful if you’re playing on a team against an AI rather than against other humans?

The temporary Doombots League of Legends variant (RIP) featured teams of players against extremely formidable AI opponents. I notice that people were wildly less stressed out when we started losing against these AI opponents, who had a bunch of complicated bespoke advantages that made them entertaining to play against. The same people who would lash out at teammates when losing regular matches would, in Doombots Mode, just happily be like “aw shucks them’s the breaks.”

You can see this in other games also: PvE is just generally less stressful than PvP even when players can’t speak across teams. Why would this be the case?

What is the maximally anxiolytic attentional focus for introductions to groups and new people?

There’s still always a twinge of nervousness when I introduce myself to a new person ex nihilo, or try to join a group conversation already-in-progress. Which implies I still have impression-management goals I default to in these situations. Intolerable!

The anxiolytic goals I have noticed are

• Experimentalist: “what will happen if I say this thing?”

• Beneficence-oriented: “I can probably make this person’s day better by introducing myself.”

Damn it, probably I do need to start cold-approaching in bars again; can’t make headway on a theory without experiments, and I’m my own best subject. So it goes.