#prediction trees

Prediction trees was the biggest broadening my empathy and compassion, because asking "what prediction trees would make this make sense?" is (in principle) a purely deterministic process which is guaranteed to eventually reach at least one sympathetic angle on why someone is a certain way or did something.

Ever struggle to see how a behavior or reaction could be rational? Prediction trees. If it's not obviously rational, and it's not obviously naturally selected rational game theory (either at the individual level or only for the benefit of a cooperating collective), prediction trees always makes this tractable and generates at least one possible answer ("if you had such and such life experience, this and this would be predictive of that, and if you have enough probability of that, it's rational to react that way").

Ever struggle to understand why you feel a certain way? Prediction trees, probably. Again, always yields at least one possible answer. The only problem is that sometimes the actual causes are "you have an untreated medical/physical issue", so merely generating a possible answer isn't enough. But prediction trees lets you prune and weigh possible answers - where before you might've needed to just directionlessly shrug, you now can just use actual logical inference to compare the likelihood of forming a given prediction tree, how you could get a given prediction tree from lossy optimization of a better prediction tree, the feasibility/complexity of a given tree, and so on.

Calm down Freud, it's not that simple.

If a person is upset at your statement, all that tells you is that you hurt them, or merely reminded them of hurt, or pattern-matched in their brain as predictive or threatening of hurt. And if they care about anyone or anything other than themselves, "hurt" can mean empathy for others, grief for the greater good, and so on - even if what you said was just about them.

Confronting someone with a cutting or inconvenient truth which has no easy rebuttal is only one way of causing purely self-centered hurt.

But truths aren't the only things hard to rebut - after all, falsehoods and errors only thrive if it's too hard to show people, on the spot, in the attention span they have, where the mistake is.

And there are countless ways for falsehoods or errors to lead to hurtful behaviors and consequences.

When someone is "projecting" that you have some judgement of them, or is "defensive" about a judgement you expressed, that does not mean they themselves believe that judgement!

They might, yes. That's one of the possible reasons.

Or they might just fear that you believe it, or that anyone might believe it. Judgements are dangerous unless you have relevant power, safety, luck, unattachment, freedom, and toolkit of coping skills.

...well, for one thing, it adds up to make me capable of losing relationships by not feeling any urgency to maintain them and attend to them. I'm in a constant state of "it'll be fine if I'll get to it eventually" and "well if this relationship fails because I don't attend to this now, that'll suck but I'll be fine soon enough, and things will work out in the end well enough one way or another".

In fact one of my partners broke up with me in the last couple of weeks, and I think a fair summary is that it happened because I neglected reaching out to them and communicating so much that it basically really hurtfully made them feel unwanted, unloved, and unconnected. Which... was not true on my end at all, but I certainly wasn't showing it, because I had other stuff like thinking and work and my usual mental focus on puzzling out certain things going on, and I am no longer compelled enough to break out of those days or weeks of intense focus by concern and insecurities about losing people or letting people develop the wrong idea about me or whatever.

And like, partly that is a very strong preemptive resilience which is pretty good and healthy, but it did lose me a relationship with someone really exceptional and worthwhile, who I genuinely loved and felt unusually safe and compatible with, so, you know, serious downside!

In other news, another partner is recently seriously considering suicide, and I am dangerously okay with that happening too. No loved one's death can hurt me enough to compel the normal reactions anymore. I pre-grieved it all. I got uncannily good at predicting what thoughts would cause attachments to outcomes that are too specific and not sufficiently within my control and not digging myself into those pain potentials with my cognition.

In my experience, being non-judgemental is a skill, and a particularly training-requiring one.

To the extent that I am less judgmental than others, it is because I put a lot of different work since childhood into it.

It took a lot of having judgmental reactions, noticing them, and "rejecting" them by way of thinking thoughts which made me relate to the judged for the thing being judged, or empathize with the judged's experience of being judged, until the judgement felt asinine or cruel.

At some point I decided this was a good and right thing to do, so I started doing it intentionally sometimes. And this meant I was now at least sometimes deciding whether or not I thought something ought to be judged, and if not, doing the above to edit myself to not feel judgmental about it.

Much later in life, the process and result of figuring out prediction trees really helped me discover the source and workings of judgments which did not yield to this process. Around the same time, giving room to and integrating with my less goody-goody cognition again let me recognize and admit more judgments within me. This simultaneously let me control even more judgments, but it also made me more accepting of some ways in which I am judgmental - selfish cognition does not care if its judgements are unfair or mean to others.

Anyway, I remain pretty judgmental in other ways, and to the extent that I am still judgmental, I can mostly see how I could be less judgmental, but it would involve non-trivial effort.