I used to have immense trouble with flirting, saying ‘No’, and “self-acceptance”—and now I don’t. That risk-aversion evaporated. I didn’t “learn how to flirt”, I didn’t “expose myself to more conflict”, and I didn’t “practice self-acceptance”. Instead, I unlearned the bottleneck.
There are two ways of managing unwanted feelings and behavior: The first is learning a bunch of techniques to subdue the symptoms every time they arise; The second is figuring out how to unlearn them so they trigger vanishingly less often.
They’re the two ways to grow: Learning and Unlearning. adding and subtracting:
Learning is acquiring new skills: “learn” to flirt, “learn” to say ‘No’, “learn” to self-accept, “learn” to suppress your addictions… It’s adding code to your mind.
Unlearning is removing harmful skills: deleting romantic anxiety, removing conflict-aversion, stopping self-rejection, dropping addictions… It’s deleting code from your mind.
We need both.
When I first started trying to intentionally improve how I felt and behaved, I learned too much. For example, I hyper-focused on pickup advice that ultimately made social interactions cloudier, not more clear.
Instead, eventually, with courage, 1:1 help, and effort, what made me want this got unlearned.
So what I wanted wasn’t bottlenecked on doing more learning, but on strategic forgetting.
For example, a researcher I worked with didn’t “learn” how to finally ask women out—I helped him remove the incentives of his avoidance:
About | Twitter | Finding bottlenecks for people making superintelligence go well