I kept forgetting things and rediscovering them later! Is there a way that I can keep my insights around permanently?

Outsourcing my long term memory

Do you ever have one of those insights that seems to profoundly and permanently change the way you see the world? You learn about some pattern and then it keeps appearing in different areas of your life over and over again and transforms your view of all of them, permanently? In mid 2019 I had such an insight, which was that everything (people activities, etcetera) can be decomposed into discreet dimensions which can be reasoned about explicitly. I was walking through life thinking about this new insight every second of every day, when I wandered into a discord chat that I’d been a part of since 2017 and started reading through some of my old messages.

What I saw made my blood run cold. The same insight that I thought of as so new and transformative was repeated, more or less verbatim, by my past self from 2 years earlier. I had had this insight before, allowed it to “transform” my life and integrated it into my being (so I thought) and then forgotten about it and repeated this process again with the same insight, without noticing. I realized that this pattern had probably repeated, over and over again, with that insight and others, many many times. Worst of all, some insights I probably didn’t reach a second time, and those thoughts were lost to the ether even though I’d thought them fair and square.

I decided to put a stop to this once and for all, so I made a document where I could easily and permanently write down insights. I made the standards for what was worth writing down very low (so that I would never hesitate to write things down because of laziness), and every month or two I read the document over and try and remember all of the insights in their original mental form. This practice has improved my life a great deal, and I recommend it to anyone who thinks deeply, forgets, and then thinks deeply again (you don’t know who you are).

Here are five insights that I thought were good enough to share. All of these insights are from 2019 or earlier so they’ve stood the test of time. I can’t promise they’re mine originally, since I get a lot of insights from either talking to people or reading.

White Chocolate Effect

This comes from my friend Brian who describes a strategy he used to convince himself to stop eating chocolate. Brian used to love chocolate and eat it all the time, but this was unhealthy. Brian especially liked high quality dark chocolate which is a chocolate lover’s chocolate.

Then, Brian got a bunch of low quality white chocolate chips and put them out on his desk. Whenever he’d get hungry for chocolate, he’d eat the white chocolate chips. Soon, Brian was sick of them. He hated them. And because whenever he thought of chocolate, he thought of the white chocolate, he no longer had the urge to eat chocolate.

The moral here is that exposing yourself to a bad version of something, or even a subpar version of something, will reduce the amount you like the total category. Brian used chocolate, but I used this in my own life (unintentionally) with video games. I used to play good video games and always wanted to play more, and then I started playing bad video games, and then I stopped liking video games. So you can use the white chocolate effect to restructure your own preferences.

Of course, you can also use it to restructure other people’s preferences. I had a friend in college who I always loved hanging out with and that’s because she would only hang out with me when she was at her most outgoing and funny. In truth she actually was rather stoic and introverted but she intentionally avoided people when she was like that. Interestingly, I probably still would’ve enjoyed interacting with her when she was more subdued, but my opinion of her as one of the most fun people ever probably wouldn’t have remained intact. So if you want people to be really impressed with you, maybe it makes sense to cut down on the low end interactions you have with them, even if those interactions are on net enjoyable.

Virtue is Alignment

I think one of my worst interpersonal habits is that I take the things that people say literally. Whenever someone says a fact seriously, I just assume that it’s their best attempt at factually explaining the world. For example, I was talking recently with a friend of mine who claimed that she used LSD once every two weeks (this is a very high amount). I updated my opinion of her really drastically after hearing that. A few weeks later I was talking with her again and she revealed she hadn’t used it in a long while. I should have kept to my prior that people don’t use that drug that much rather than instantly updating to the literal truth of her statement. People are always saying things that are either exaggerated or couched in their own feelings, motivations, or needs rather than things that are literally true.

The moment that this insight really popped off is when I realized that it applied to me as well. When I do things I like to have really clear reasons, such as when I ask for advice I tell myself that what I want is to get knowledge from people so that I can improve my own outcomes at the thing I’m asking advice about. I found that I was never getting any good advice, though. When I stopped taking myself literally and looked for the underlying motivations behind my advice asking, everything changed. I noticed that actually the responses to my advice asking that I liked were the ones that reassured me emotionally, and the ones that I disliked were the ones that criticized me or contended with some belief about reality that I held really core. I wasn’t asking for advice to get advice (as I had told myself), I was asking for it to get reassurance and support!

I determined that the most virtuous way to live your life is to bring your actual motivations, as well as your actions and speech, completely in alignment. You should really try to assess your motivation for saying and doing things (by looking at the outcomes you want, rather than just the outcomes you say you want), because you’ll always surprise yourself. Then once you understand yourself that well, you can maneuver more effectively than ever before because your beliefs about yourself and your needs will be informed by your actions, rather than being created based on what you like to think about yourself. Once everything is in alignment, you’ll be completely virtuous.

Reification

Reification is one of the less original ideas on the list. It means that concepts with names get taken more seriously than those without names. Just by tossing a name on something it gets more memorable and seems to appear in more places. Better names are better for this. “Reification” is a good example of an insight that seems obvious, but now that it has a name, it will be taken more seriously.

Happiness Equilibrium

I noticed that a lot of things I did socially were in order to seek out short term pleasure or reassurance from others. But the happier my life was outside of the social situation, the less I’d feel the need to do these things. For example, if I had just failed a test I’d be constantly hamming it up around my friends in order to get their attention (imposing costs on them and lowering their opinion of me, by the way). But when I had just gone on a date with a cute girl, my interactions with my friends would be more friendly and less narcissistic.

Not only that, I noticed this pattern in other areas too. If I had just eaten a delicious meal, I’d be more able to focus on my homework without resorting to easy distractions like browsing social media. If I was looking forward to playing board games that weekend, it was much easier for me to buckle down and study for a test, knowing that I’d be able to be happy afterwards. When I had nothing fun in my life during winter break of my senior year of college, I found myself constantly procrastinating on my grad school applications in a way that I wouldn’t have if I’d also been having fun.

The mechanism I use to explain this is called the “happiness equilibrium” which basically says that the short term joy/fun/stimulation that I get is constant, and I’ll automatically change my actions to bring my happiness to that level, delaying gratification if I have already been blessed with a lot at present, or burning my future if I’m feeling sad or bored. The implication of this is that if I want to be effective at my various goals that involve delaying gratification, I need to mix in a lot of short term fun and excitement into my life so I don’t just sacrifice my goals to get more of that.

Fear of Futile Sacrifices

More than anything else, people demotivate themselves when they think they’re being taken advantage of or tricked. This is important for the prisoner’s dilemma. Almost all of people’s motivation to defect in the prisoner’s dilemma comes from their fear that their adversary will defect too. If the adversary cooperated, most people would have no problem playing cooperate in return. It’s only the belief in the potential for defection that lets defection exist at all.

Traditional Chinese parenting strategies (as outlined in Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”) try to quell a child’s fear of futile sacrifices in a similar way. That’s the reasoning behind e.g. forcing your kid to get super good at the Cello. If they practice an insane amount but then they actualy wind up getting good at the instrument (and everyone knows it, and they know everyone knows it), you’ve proven to the child that their sacrifices will be rewarded (and rewarded greatly) in the end, even if it takes a lot out of them. This can give them the confidence to sacrifice the present for the future at other times in their life, such as when they study hard for tests or go to medical school instead of getting a job instantly.

You can leverage this in your own life by explicitly thinking about what would happen if a sacrifice you’re making didn’t pay off. This will disarm the instinctive fear reaction that surrounds this possibility normally. As Nietzsche said “those who have a ‘why’ can bear any ‘how’”, so simply by convincing yourself or others that your actions will lead to the ‘why’ they’re looking for, you can unearth a lot of motivation.

Outro

I hope you enjoyed this! If you liked it maybe I’ll write up five insights from 2020 next.