When people make big and persistent mistakes, the usual cause (in my experience) is not something that comes labeled with giant mental “THIS IS A MISTAKE” warning signs when you reflect on it.
Instead, tracing mistakes back to their upstream causes, I think that the cause tends to look like a tiny note of discord that got repeatedly ignored—nothing that mentally feels important or action-relevant, just a nagging feeling that pops up sometimes.
To do better, then, I want to take stock of those subtler upstream causes, and think about the flinch reactions I exhibited on the five-second level and whether I should have responded to them differently.
I don’t see anything in the lessons on the question of whether or not your stance on drama has changed, which feels like the most important bit?
That is, suppose I have enough evidence to not-be-surprised-in-retrospect if one of my friends is abusing their partner, and also I have a deliberate stance of leaving other people’s home lives alone. The former means that if I thought carefully about all of my friends, I would raise that hypothesis to attention; the latter means that even if I had the hypothesis, I would probably not do anything about it. In this hypothetical, I only become a force against abuse if I decide to become a meddler (which introduces other costs and considerations).
Good point! Currently, I think the “pry more” lesson is supposed to account for a bunch of this.
Since making this update, I have in fact pried more into friends’ lives. In at least one instance I found some stuff that worried me, at which point I was naturally like “hey, this worries me; it pattern-matches to some bad situations I’ve seen; I feel wary and protective; I request an opportunity to share and/or put you in touch with people who’ve been through putatively-analogous situations (though I can also stfu if you’re sick of hearing people’s triggered takes about your life situation.)” And, as far as I can tell, that was a useful/helpful thing to have done in that situation (and didn’t involve any changes to my drama policy).
That said, that situation wasn’t one where the right move involved causing ripples in the community (e.g. by publicly airing concerns about what went down at Alameda). If we fight the last war again, my hope is that I’d be doing stuff more like “prod others to action”, or perhaps “plainly state aloud what I think” (as I’m doing now with this post).
There is something about this post that feels very “neutral tone” to me, and that makes it feel at home within my “don’t give drama the attention it needs to breathe” policy. I think my ability to have good effects by prying more & prodding more & having more backbone doesn’t require changes to my drama policy. (And perhaps the policy has shifted around somewhat, without me noticing it? Doesn’t feel like it, though.)
I am of course open to arguments that I’m failing to learn a lesson about my drama policy.
I don’t see anything in the lessons on the question of whether or not your stance on drama has changed, which feels like the most important bit?
That is, suppose I have enough evidence to not-be-surprised-in-retrospect if one of my friends is abusing their partner, and also I have a deliberate stance of leaving other people’s home lives alone. The former means that if I thought carefully about all of my friends, I would raise that hypothesis to attention; the latter means that even if I had the hypothesis, I would probably not do anything about it. In this hypothetical, I only become a force against abuse if I decide to become a meddler (which introduces other costs and considerations).
Good point! Currently, I think the “pry more” lesson is supposed to account for a bunch of this.
Since making this update, I have in fact pried more into friends’ lives. In at least one instance I found some stuff that worried me, at which point I was naturally like “hey, this worries me; it pattern-matches to some bad situations I’ve seen; I feel wary and protective; I request an opportunity to share and/or put you in touch with people who’ve been through putatively-analogous situations (though I can also stfu if you’re sick of hearing people’s triggered takes about your life situation.)” And, as far as I can tell, that was a useful/helpful thing to have done in that situation (and didn’t involve any changes to my drama policy).
That said, that situation wasn’t one where the right move involved causing ripples in the community (e.g. by publicly airing concerns about what went down at Alameda). If we fight the last war again, my hope is that I’d be doing stuff more like “prod others to action”, or perhaps “plainly state aloud what I think” (as I’m doing now with this post).
There is something about this post that feels very “neutral tone” to me, and that makes it feel at home within my “don’t give drama the attention it needs to breathe” policy. I think my ability to have good effects by prying more & prodding more & having more backbone doesn’t require changes to my drama policy. (And perhaps the policy has shifted around somewhat, without me noticing it? Doesn’t feel like it, though.)
I am of course open to arguments that I’m failing to learn a lesson about my drama policy.