Self Awareness #

Fundamentally, i think self awareness is all about the realization that people can be different from you and that your perspective exists as a unique one among millions. as a result, self-awareness is all about how people talk in a way that reflects that perspective. common mistakes in conversation reflecting some lack of self awareness include:

• assuming that someone knows a reference, expecting others to have a particular emotional response to something they say or do,
• not anticipating when people have emotional responses to things differently then they do,
• not checking to make sure that you’re on the same page with others and moving forward.

let’s break this down to some levels or tiers. there’s two axis’ that interest me: knowledge and incorporation. I kind of like these axis’ as a way to measure all mental skills, but we’ll see.

knowledge refers to specific bits of information. Three bits of knowledge that we can talk about here are:

• the knowledge that other people have different perspectives
• knowledge on how to figure out and understand those different perspectives
• the knowledge of what those different perspectives might be
  • There are many different perspectives, so this knowledge isn’t singular
• the knowledge of how those different perspectives manifest

incorporation refers to the extent to which knowledge is incorporated into a person’s habits or behavior. it’s entirely possible for someone to know something and have that knowledge exist completely independently of their behavior. some types of incorporation include:

• recognition, which is when people connect something happening in the real world to a piece of knowledge in their brains
  • “i’m getting drunk because this drink has alcohol in it”
• reaction, where people are able to recognize that something happening is connected to a piece of knowledge they have and take action based on that knowledge
  • “I shouldn’t drive for a few hours cause I should wait for the alcohol to get out of my system
• anticipation, where awareness that something will happen will affect choices
  • “I shouldn’t drive to the bar cause i’m going to get drunk and i know i’ll be tempted to drive home”
• manipulation, where understanding of the knowledge is so deep that it can be caused in order to affect the future
  • “i’m going to get drunk so i don’t have to drive tonight”
  • I think it’s tempting to say as an example here “I’m going to get drunk to have fun”, but that other example seems more interesting to me for some reason.

imple english self awareness test - ask someone to write or tell a story involving multiple people and see many ambiguous pronouns they leave.