Matthew Pierce on models of cooperative epistemics

Matthew Pierce, @MattPiercello on Twitter, comes on the podcast to talk about his model of how to have productive conversations.

Transcript:

Divia (00:02)

Hey, I'm here today with Matthew Pierce, who is my Twitter mutual. He is a professional cellist, systems thinker, interested in what makes people tick and how we can solve problems together. He's MJ Piercello on Twitter. That's where Pierce and cello, but they overlap. And we hadn't planned on talking today, but then I was going talk to another Twitter friend of mine about the Shakespeare thing again, which I discussed in my previous podcast, but he got sick.

So instead I asked if anyone was free and Matthew was. so here we are, welcome to the podcast.

Matt (00:36)

So we're making this up as we go along. It's fantastic. Hi everybody. Nice to meet you.

Divia (00:42)

Yeah, so do you wanna, I don't know, do you wanna tell us a little bit, it seems like your top thing these days, which I read a little bit about, but not as much as I probably would have if I had it longer, is a way that you help people understand each other when they disagree. Does that seem like a fair starting point?

Matt (01:00)

think so, yeah. mean, one of the things you can see when you look around, especially on Twitter, right, which tends to attract these sort of things, is these massive, powerful disagreements that seem completely unsolvable, right? And I'm not convinced they're unsolvable. I think they're just a bit maybe misunderstood. And so I've been playing the cello for a really long time now, almost 40 years, but I've been playing it professionally on the order of 30 years.

lots of different places, lots of different circumstances. And one of the things cello playing does is that it puts you in a position of using your body and your mind together, right?

Divia (01:42)

Yeah, for the record for the podcast listeners, I also play the cello not as well, not professionally, but I do have some context there.

Matt (01:46)

Yeah, yes, I only just discovered this. Yeah, so this is a serendipity point for me. I only just found this out myself. But yeah, so cello playing, you're not just drawing up formal equations on the chalkboard and you're not just building a brick wall that'll last for generations. It's kind of a mix of both that you've got these...

incredibly abstract things you're doing with the music in an orchestra and you're sort of manipulating the emotions of the audience and of each other in real time in a performance, but you're doing it using extremely abstract structures that music itself is built out of that define the sounds while using your body to make them. Yeah, yeah, like, like, okay, harmony, melody, harmonic progression.

Divia (02:28)

But abstract structures, you mean like harmony and that sort of thing? Melody.

Matt (02:36)

form and analysis. So this song has a refrain and then it has an intro, you know, all these different bits and you can, you can categorize things, things like this as abstractly as you would like to, but you have to do them with your own body in real time performance, even if you're really nervous. So it's a very interesting window into a more complete aspect of what I think of as decision-making.

And that's really where a lot of the disagreements live. They're not just rational, are they? They're sort of instinctive and habitual and emotional all at once.

Divia (03:11)

So for the record, I would call myself a rationalist, that's in my Twitter bio, and I'm out of the less wrong rationality tradition, and I would say, I don't know, people, I don't know how well any of us lives it, but I think I use rational, like in my ontology, it doesn't mean just conscious thought or just the things that people are aware of or anything like that.

Just for the record, you should continue to use it however you want to use it, but know that in my own lexicon it means something a little different.

Matt (03:42)

Sure.

I'll tell you how I came to use it because the problem with this stuff is exactly the problem we have in talking about music, right? I used to do this all the time when I was coaching groups of high school students. I would take the cello section of the high school and we'd go off and we'd have a sectional, right? Or I work with just them and we'd say, all right, so play these eight difficult bars for me as a group and they would play it. And then I'd say, okay, so now change.

these two specific things, a little more power on your left hand, for example, or a little faster bow on this one note and play it again. And they would play it again. And I would say this, okay, did that sound better? And they would say, yeah. And then I would say, describe it. And they would all just give me funny looks, you know, cause it kind of nervous laugh because there aren't words that really say exactly what happened.

And this is the whole problem, right?

Divia (04:40)

Or, I would say, or at least, like you didn't have words at that time. don't know, I'm also, maybe that's one of my other positions in life, is I'm pretty, I'm pretty bullish on what people can eventually describe in words.

Matt (04:45)

Yeah.

Yeah, but you have to negotiate a shared meeting before you can do that. That's the fun of it. And if you set up a sort of a dictionary, that's great. But if you encounter someone who's running off of a different dictionary, then that's a bit of a problem because what happens so often in these situations is that anything you have to do precisely is going to develop its own professional vocabulary.

with strict limits and like coding versus talking, that kind of thing. And what tends to happen is that a lot of familiarity with that language causes a sort of a habit to form and become second nature so much so that we forget that other people don't have it. when you, yeah, right? And that's where my entry into decision-making came through the physical and mental.

Divia (05:18)

Yeah, for sure.

Sometimes, yeah.

Matt (05:47)

habit building that goes with playing an instrument.

Divia (05:50)

Yeah, I think that was before we started recording. You were telling me about some of your life history and how you guys, you want to repeat that now for the podcast?

Matt (05:53)

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, sure. So I've gotten fascinated by decision-making and what I mean by decision-making is very, very broad. I define decision-making as the entire mind space between inputs and actions. It's just insanely broad. Anything you can think of that might go in there, throw it in. I don't care, you know, because we want broad for this kind of thing. And yeah, I've been playing professionally. When I was out in Boston, I wasn't working with a teacher at the time, but I was still

bettering myself as a player. And one of things you realize very quickly when you try to do that is you just cannot pay attention to all of the micro details that matter at the same time. Like say, and I happen to have a cello here, so I'll pull it out and kind of see if I can demonstrate what I mean through sound. So, you know, if you play a cello, you want the bow to go a certain speed and make a nice noise.

Divia (06:37)

I agree with that.

Matt (06:52)

And if your bow is too slow, it'll make that noise. And if it's too fast, it'll make that noise. So you have an audio clue, okay, am I too fast or too slow? But still, you're trying to get to that good sound for what you're trying to do. And the sort of hilarious part about it is that every note you play on a cello, for various reasons, has a different right bow speed and pressure combination. So you can't...

get there by just always keeping the same pressure and speed. That won't work. You have to develop rules that tell you how to get from one pressure to another and when and why so you can anticipate it in time to do it even in the fast stuff. So there's all this really complicated physical stuff and that's just one side. know, that's just your bow hand. Your left hand has its own habits of getting from this pitch to that pitch and up the string or down the string and

and all these things, but then there's strategies of when and why, again, layers of habits. And then you've got reading music, which is a written language, but then you have to make it into sound. So you have to read correctly fast enough that you can get the sound out and then play with an orchestra. So you've got all of these different windows into habit that are active at the same time. Yeah. Yeah.

Divia (08:11)

Yeah, they really need to be fluent because you have to do them in real time and while your conscious attention is often elsewhere. I would agree with all that.

Matt (08:17)

Yeah, because you can do this stuff slow if you have the time, but in performance you don't have the time. And so you have had to have it already so well ingrained that if you just start, it finishes. And you can kind of sit there back about three levels of abstraction and say, it's going pretty smoothly here, or there's some gravel on the road I need to slow down, you know, and kind of focus on my left hand a bit more, that kind of thing.

So it's this business of looking at the very, very broad definition of decision making, the entire mind space between inputs and actions, as a sort of a composite, but one that's integrated and unified so that you can get to the really big patterns that are in fact causing the problems that we run into on the internet with people talking past one another and just having entirely different habits sets.

Divia (09:16)

Yeah. So, so it seems like some of what you're saying is as you're trying to improve at the cello, it makes you sort of aware how for basically everything in life, there, there are many things going on at the same time. Most of them is not where conscious attention will be at any time. And you can see the connection between this and various other things. And one of your, one of the top issues that seems important to you is the business of people. Disagreeing with each other in unproductive ways about things that matter. Does that seem right?

Matt (09:43)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think so. So, you know, one of the things that is really wonderful about playing games with sort of rational type puzzles, and I should give you my definition of rational that I evolved from my own musical doings too, that I look at it, if a thing is logical, that's just simply it has internally consistent structure. You know, that's like a logic board on your computer or...

whatever logic there is that runs things, whether you know what it is or not, but you can say, okay, that's internally consistent. And if it's externally verifiable, that's what I refer to as rational. So you can like poke at it and measure it. Yeah, basically so. That sounds like what I would mean. Right?

Divia (10:23)

So like legible.

Yeah, it's definitely, it's interesting. It's definitely not how I, I use it. But again, it makes sense you would use it that way.

Matt (10:32)

Yeah, so this is again, if you're really trying to work with somebody, one of the first things you have got to do is get sort of on the same vocabulary.

Divia (10:42)

least like in yeah I mean because certainly I've thought a lot about people in disagreements too and and have my own frameworks and I tend to think of it in terms of of people's ontologies like we can I do sometimes approach conversations from within an ontology but I do think it tends to limit the scope and there are whole things that we won't be able to get to if we try to stay within a shared ontology instead of instead of addressing the fact that we probably see things quite differently in those ways too.

Matt (10:46)

Mm-hmm.

Sure.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And the funny thing, so as I was poking around it and trying to understand habits, right, I found a book about intelligence. And it's, you know, it's called On Intelligence. This was, I don't know, almost 20 years ago. The book is by Jeff Hawkins. And, you know, he was the inventor of the original Palm Pilot, if you go back that far and remember those sorts of things. So he's...

kind of had a foot in neuroscience and a foot in technology and he's still doing things that way. But this book was talking about how he thought of intelligence in terms of how it incorporated the idea of habit. And it made so much sense to what I was poking around in with cello that I said, this is great. And it just kind of fit seamlessly with what I had. But then it also triggered an insight which launched me in this general direction I'm going in now. So.

I'll sort of talk you through a little bit it. From the neurobiology side, the whole issue is that neurons are slow. You know, if you get a stimulus in to the mind and it has to go through a chain of, I don't know, five or 10 different neurons, the lag is going to be so great by the time the thing gets into your sort of processing, your central processing, that...

Divia (12:30)

Do you know how long it would be?

Matt (12:33)

I can't remember, it was way too many milliseconds to be useful though. I don't remember the number, but... And the way I internalized it is that it's obviously too slow, so it doesn't matter what the number is. And the way I describe it to people is a bit like this. If you imagined that you were just gonna run up a flight of stairs, but you did so by micro-controlling consciously every single muscle in your body at exactly the right time.

Divia (13:03)

Yeah, of course you can.

Matt (13:04)

You can't possibly do that. And yet people do this sort of thing all the time. You can run up the stairs while thinking about what to have for lunch, right? It's, it's invisible. So there's, there's a lot of hidden processing going on, but it has to have some kind of an architecture that lets it work. And that's where the habits come in. So habits aren't just invisible. They're a particular architecture. And the idea of habit, according to Jeff Hawkins, which matches my experience behind the cello.

Divia (13:06)

for sure.

Matt (13:34)

is that if you have a stored pattern, a stored habit if you will, and you give it a partial match, what it'll do is automatically fill out the rest of it. So if I were to say to you, one, two,

Divia (13:50)

You want me to say three? Yeah.

Matt (13:51)

Yeah, exactly. And your mind already did it, even though your mouth didn't catch it, right?

Divia (13:55)

Well, okay, I I don't know. I mean, I think I was expecting you to say it. in that moment, I wasn't, I would disagree with the characterization, but sure.

Matt (14:01)

Right, yeah. You were expecting it to be said. So what, and that's what I mean, your mind had filled in that it was already gonna be said. But you just didn't know I was expecting you to say it. But then you did once you saw it, and see, that's the lag. That's a great example of the lag, is that you expected one thing and it didn't happen, but then you sorted it out and said, okay, then you, you know.

Divia (14:07)

I was expecting you to say three, yes.

than I did.

Matt (14:29)

But in the mind, it's like, it's already done, so we're on to the next thing. And so this idea is that if you store a habit, what it does is if you give it enough of a match, it just spits out the whole thing.

Divia (14:43)

Yeah, I I tend to also think of it in terms of like cues and then behaviors that happen in response to the cue, yeah.

Matt (14:46)

Yeah, right? And so what that does from a functional perspective is it acts as a prediction about what will happen next in the world. And if the world continues on and does its thing and matches the habit that you expected, you just don't notice. And it worked. And it stays down there in the merc, in the subconscious, or below the waterline of consciousness, whatever words you want to use.

and you go on with your life like nothing ever happened.

Divia (15:16)

Yeah, usually people wouldn't have any reason to pay attention to it.

Matt (15:18)

Yeah, and so that's the general notion of how a habit works. And so the nice thing is you've already done the work to build the habit, so you're not really expending conscious cognitive effort. It's already done. And it's really, really, really fast, so you don't even notice how fast it is. And it just solves the problem, and away you go. And habits stack like skill trees.

Divia (15:41)

Yeah, I was actually talking about this on a previous episode with a friend, where we were, because people use the word habits, I think, to mean a bunch of different things. And, you know, like, well, is brushing your teeth a habit? And I was like, well, look, that's the sort of thing where I kind of know, like, I think about it every time. And I'm like, yeah, I should probably do that. Whereas for me, and I think it depends on the person. My impression is that some people more like do it without thinking about it. Whereas I have other things that that's what I do. Like, I...

Matt (15:51)

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Divia (16:10)

I could think of different examples, like the way that I would turn the faucet off when I was done, like I don't ever register it. For me, like I have some places that I put my phone down and then I'm like, yeah, where are my phone? Like, and I just, don't even think about it. And so it didn't form a memory when I did it. Whereas some of the things that people often refer to as habits and I think they mean something coherent about it or in a different category. And I think this can cause some confusion, but anyway, yeah, those are.

Matt (16:13)

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's fun because that's the basic mechanism, but what's also fun is you can stack habits arbitrarily deep. Habits of habits of habits of habits. And so that's how you run up the stairs, right?

Divia (16:50)

Yeah, I think most people have a lot of gross motor fluency built up that in almost none of it is operating consciously and, you know, assuming they don't get any major injuries, usually it continues that way.

Matt (16:54)

Yeah. Yeah.

Right, and so that's a great way of just kind of seeing it, that my gosh, it built up is exactly the right word. Because you don't start with that stuff, but as you figure it out over time, it develops. And you see this particularly when you're trying to learn a specific complex thing, whether it's playing a cello or doing calculus or something. Because the fun part is the brain stuff is all the same. There's no...

necessary difference between the architecture of a habit of action and a habit of thought.

Divia (17:34)

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Matt (17:35)

It's just the same, just wants to attach to the motors. And so when you study an instrument, what you're doing is you're giving yourself an unexpectedly broad window into the architecture of habit, because you can physically see it.

Divia (17:53)

Yeah, no, it does add certain ability to observe it if it's something that's more externally facing, physical.

Matt (17:54)

Hmm.

Yeah.

Now the key thing, and all this leads again, as I say, into a model of decision-making I use. And my approach is sort of through habit, through music. And the way I talk about decision-making, I call it, I dubbed it the higher model, H-I-R-E, because those are the four main components. And so you've got H is for habit and I is for instinct and R is for reason. That's your rational side. And E is for emotion.

And all four of those are always active in the background. And the reason you can't see most of it is because the habits work so well that you can't see how well they work.

Divia (18:41)

I think, sorry, I think I'm, for whatever reason, I'm in a mood to push back more against some of the you statements. I feel like I can see it if I decide to. Like, I think I can step through it with almost any of this stuff. I think I don't normally because I don't have any reason to, but I disagree that I can't see it.

Matt (18:46)

it's great. It's fantastic.

Yeah. Sure.

Yeah. Well, you can't see all of it at once. You can zoom down the tree and you can focus in on any point. And you're familiar with this as a cellist. If you're trying to upgrade your playing, you go down there and you look at exactly when your first finger is leaving the string when you do this certain pattern. You can focus in at any given point in the constellation. But you don't have enough processing power to see the whole thing at once. That's the point of habit. Yeah.

Divia (19:00)

Sure. Yeah, I can't.

Sure, yeah, for sure. I wouldn't see it all at once.

Matt (19:25)

So that's what I mean, is that you can know that there's an insane amount of habit layering and you can follow any individual thread, but you can't get a global perspective on all of them at once. There's just no space large enough to hold it. That's visible to conscious attention. And here's the really odd bit about it. Habits form over repetition, right? If you keep doing the thing and it keeps working, it becomes a habit.

Divia (19:54)

Yeah, well, think you're rep, see, sorry, I'm really going to argue. I'm like, okay, repetition, but this is one of those things people say, so I also am a bit of a student of behaviorism. I would say over-reinforced repetition because I think it's, I think there is a popular idea out there that if people keep doing things over and over again, then they'll, it'll just feel natural to keep doing them. And that's very much not been my experience about a lot of things in life. Some things I keep doing them and I keep doing them and they get worse and harder and less.

Matt (19:57)

That was great.

Hmm?

Divia (20:24)

look more frictiony every time because I'm not getting one.

Matt (20:28)

But that, I would argue, is not because this isn't how habit works, it's because there are other mechanisms on top of habit that are complicating the thing.

Divia (20:36)

No, so I think it's when if we repeat it and it gets us some sort of payoff. I think, I don't know, that's how I would think of it with habits because mere repetition, just don't think, I don't know, I don't agree with that. It's not been my experience and it's not the theories that I trust. I don't know.

Matt (20:43)

Yeah.

Well, I think where we could probably resolve that would be in what we mean by repetition. know, it's like when you're practicing a cello, for example, you very quickly learn, if your teacher is on you about it, that what you thought was an accurate repetition wasn't precise enough.

Divia (21:14)

Yeah, but I do mean aside from the precision. I mean, if there are plenty of things that I could do it a bunch of times, and in my experience, it would not necessarily feel natural, more natural over each repetition because of what happened when I did it. Whereas if I hear it and I'm like, and I get that feeling of like, yes, that, I want that, and it feels right, then I do expect it to feel more and more natural every time. But if I don't get that, then...

Matt (21:26)

Mm-hmm.

huh.

Divia (21:43)

Like I do think there's some, I don't know. I think there's evidence either, I think there are examples where even if it isn't what people say they want, then they will keep doing what they've practiced, but I don't think that's universal.

Matt (21:56)

Well, I think, again, this is undoubtedly a case where we're talking past each other, right? This is the whole problem of decision-making being a thing. It's so vast and jungly as a process that when we actually talk to each other, it doesn't tend to make sense. And I think that actually, by the way, is another thing I haven't got to yet. But back in the days when everyone had very much a shared constrained culture and we would all be, you know,

Divia (22:00)

Sure. Yeah.

Matt (22:25)

talking one at a time and reading the same books and having learned the same grammar and terminology, it all seems to make a lot of shared sense because there's just a lot of constraint on the shared environment. But what the internet does is it puts it more like a jungle, that suddenly you're talking to people with vastly different backgrounds and language usage and et cetera, et cetera. And actually that's more of a window in how the mind actually works without the constraints, which is very unsettling when you're expecting it to be constrained.

So it's, you know.

Divia (22:55)

Yeah, no, I definitely think that people tend to have more varied perspectives than they used to. It seems right.

Matt (23:01)

Well, you know, if you take, if you take cello playing as an example again, you know, if you're trying to learn to do a certain thing and you really want to get it to come out right and it keeps exploding every time you play it, but differently, then I would say that's not a problem with the habit architecture. That's a problem with you're trying to learn a particular habit and you happen to have left out a factor. don't know what it is yet. that you're, there's a thing you're not accounting for.

And that's what's causing the problem. you know, that of course is what got me into reading this book that was about habits in the first place. I had that feeling.

Divia (23:37)

Yeah.

Yeah, would you be able to describe some specifics of your cello playing that changed after you read that book?

Matt (23:44)

Yes. Yeah. So here's, let me give you a habit piece that I solved years after reading the book, but it's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. When you're playing a cello, I'll pick the silly thing up again here, because I set it down. There we go. Get myself untangled from the headphones as well. Once you know your way around, it's like walking around. You can just kind of...

Do sort of predictable things, but if you start going too fast It starts to get muddy and messy and things start to go wrong that it doesn't just scale up infinitely you run into physiological problems of hey this mass in my arm is moving that way and now I needed to move this way and suddenly my whole body locked up and I can't play anything and And so this is this is the kind of thing where that matters

If you imagine me playing my cello, I'm gonna play a long note again. And what I did was I started with my bow arm in close to my body and I pulled the bow across the strings and my bow arm ended out pretty far away from my body. Okay? Now what that did in terms of playing the cello is it just vibrated the string and made the note. Great, wonderful. But mechanically,

That's not the only thing that's happening. Also, and you can try this at home, if you start with your right arm very close to your body and then you sort of stick it, you know, three quarters of the way out, pretty straight, straight ish to your right, you will feel it pulling your body to the right. Just because you stuck a bunch of mass out there and you changed the location of your center of mass. And in order to compensate that, if you're sitting,

and you want to stay sitting well balanced, what you would need to do as you stuck your arm out to your right is shift your weight ever so slightly in your core to your left and counterbalance that thing. So what happens when you are playing fast is that your body is changing center of mass location very, very rapidly. And if you don't have a system

Divia (26:07)

Yeah.

Matt (26:11)

a habit system that counteracts that in your core body positioning, you will lock up and you won't be able to play. It's that kind of thing.

Divia (26:18)

So is this an example of the sort of thing where you changed how you were thinking about your standard of mass?

Matt (26:23)

Yeah, and what you want to do is teach it to your body so that it works. And I said earlier, yeah.

Divia (26:28)

Yeah, so can you say how it was before and then how like then how it was for you once you changed your mindset?

Matt (26:31)

Yeah.

So the way this would go is that when it was in the before lands, what the mind tries to do with any complex concept is simplify it to the point you can manage it. And when you're managing body motions that are complex, very often what the mind wants to do is say, all right, we're going to knock this down to two variables and lock the rest and call it good. So that you can say, all right, I'm going to move my arm to the right and then to the left really quickly.

and I'll be able to control where it goes because everything else is locked down. In practice, that doesn't work.

Divia (27:08)

And so is that more like how you used to think of moving your bow hand is that you were thinking about moving just your arm back and forth and you were sort of trying to ignore the effects it had on the rest of your body.

Matt (27:10)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, you just, you'd want to simplify it down to the mind because your mind is trying to execute this, you know, complicated, some kind of a passage that has you hopping all over the cello physically and you don't have time to think about what the rest of your body is doing. So you're just, all right, let's lock that up and just do this. But it doesn't work. And so until you find a way of doing two things, one of them is understanding the problem. And second is

teaching your body a solution to that problem, then you won't be able to do it quickly and by habit.

Divia (27:56)

Yes, sorry. I think I still want to understand this. can you walk me through like, okay, that makes sense. You read the book and you had been thinking of your bow arm in terms of just the bow arm. And then you were like, okay, now my mind is more expanded on this topic. Can you walk me through like how your perspective changed and then what you personally started doing differently?

Matt (28:02)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, the limit here is not what the body can do, because you can go online and see lots of great players of all shapes and sizes playing the same passage, but really well, right? So you know, it's not a body limit. It's an interpretation or mind limit, and it's amount of mind space. So what you're looking to do is find a way of offloading the processing

from direct conscious control, which is quite limited, into something that actually works. So we don't know what that is yet. And the pattern basically is that, well, if this is how habits work, that stuff that gets repeated and has predictable results, that gives you the same result when it's repeated, tends to become habituated. Then what you're trying to do is...

Broadly with the mind, conceive of a kind of an architecture that should probably do it, and then tell your body to go find it, and let it go exploring until it finds it.

Divia (29:19)

So that's sort of what you did. Before you were thinking of your go-ah more narrowly, you read this book and then you're like, okay, I got to conceive of some way and then can you fill in the...

Matt (29:28)

Yeah. Yeah. So, so the way it looks like this, and as I said before, what the mind wants to do is simplify the process down to nice sharp edged concepts, you know, arm moves, bow moves, cello plays, that kind of thing. But the body is this vast network of joints and sensors, and they're not just, you know, motion places, they're positional sensors. Like if you stick your arm out to the side, like before,

and close your eyes, you can feel where your arm is in space because gravity is pulling on the joints and bits of biology are squishing differently and the sensors are picking that up. So the insight there was that if you use your mind to try to generate two or three really sharp edge concepts, the body will respond by locking everything else down, shutting off the sensory input. And that's why you can't play it because you can't react fast enough with enough data.

Divia (30:26)

That was your experience. That when you were thinking of your go arm that way, your other muscles would tense up.

Matt (30:27)

Yeah, and instead...

Yeah, and instead what you want to do for the way the body processes, which is much more parallel, is you want to open it up so that you have as many joints available to the action as possible and then ask them to coordinate around one thing. In this case, stable center of gravity. So if I stick my arm out to the right, my body just says, hey, and it turns a little to the left, and then my center of gravity stays stable.

Divia (30:59)

So you changed your intention from, or at least for a while, the focus of your conscious attention was not moving your bow arm back and forth, but was maintaining a center of gravity. Does that seem accurate?

Matt (31:09)

Yeah, and you can only do that once you've learned how to move your bow arm. Right? Yeah. And the exact analogy is skill trees in gaming. That you'd start out and you you've learned to use a sword and now you can use a level three and you build up skill trees and you're stacking habits like that too. So your habit architecture now knows how to move a bow arm and how to hold a bow and...

Divia (31:14)

Sure, because otherwise you can't have your attention in two places, but you've been doing that for years, so that was not an issue for you.

Matt (31:36)

how to keep the bow straight and kind of generally have control of how fast it's going and how high it is and all that. But then...

Divia (31:43)

Yeah, no, my sense as you talk about it is there's something that you, that's very important to you here that you really wish other people would get more, is that right?

Matt (31:52)

yeah, I'm just not sure how to put in words as you can see.

Divia (31:55)

Yeah, no, I think I want to understand it better. So I want to keep trying to ask you about it. Yeah, like if there's one thing that, and you know, I don't expect any given prompt to necessarily work, but like if people could understand just how foundational you think this is, maybe with that as a prompt, what could you say about it?

Matt (31:58)

Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah.

Sure.

But I think it's tremendously important that, that again, if we use the physiology of habit as a window into the general notion of habit in terms of learning abstract concepts as well, I mean, it's the same stuff. If I say calculus to you and you have knowledge of calculus, it automatically spits out a whole bunch of ideas related to calculus, but not necessarily within calculus. You know, you might be thinking about how you had that one really terrible teacher in certain year or, you know,

that hilarious thing that happened in calculus class. it's a very broad, yeah, right. It's just sort of a lightning chain spreading out through the networks. And that is how knowledge is actually stored, I think.

Divia (32:49)

People have associative thought for sure. Yeah.

Yeah, I think people can often see it most directly. Some people, I think, know how to have an experience of free associating in that way while awake. But I think it's probably extremely common for people who have memories of it to notice that sort of thing happening as we fall asleep also.

Matt (33:11)

Mm-hmm.

And the easiest way to see it is just to watch other people talk on the internet, right? Because you're saying something that seems perfectly clear and then they go and they say something nonsensical and you're like, how did you get there? Right? And it's the whole thing about habit being what it is, is because it's compensating for the limits on conscious attention, which is kind of slow and narrow. And the habit is so much the large part of the iceberg.

that people are generally off by several orders of magnitude on just how important habit actually is.

Divia (33:56)

Because your impression is that people, even if they know about it, might not understand the scope of the relevance.

Matt (34:02)

Yeah, absolutely. You could also put it this way. You know a lot of stuff by now. You've been living and having experiences and studying and all these things. There is no possible way you can list everything you know. Right? Because it's all s-

Divia (34:19)

And so that you're saying that that relates to it because to try to address the scope of the issue, you want to draw attention to the difference between what people could sort of consciously list and how much embodied knowledge there is.

Matt (34:29)

Yeah. Yeah, and not just body knowledge, like random knowledge about Tunisia or something. Yeah, it is. In whatever form it's stored, the point is you can't consciously list very much of it at all. And so it is.

Divia (34:38)

I guess I think that stuff is embodied too. That's my worldview, but sure.

Again, I'm like, I don't know. I'm giving it enough time. I think probably people could. I think people don't usually.

Matt (34:54)

Yeah. Yeah. But I would say I would counter with, we don't have time. Like you're never going to have the time to sit down and list everything, you know. You could pursue a lot of it, but you would never get it all. Because for one thing, more stuff is always coming in and sorting, you know. So that's the first big insight into the habit world that the body shows you. It's it's vast beyond reckoning. It's really, really big. But then there's another interesting

Divia (35:11)

For sure, yeah, in a little bit I would.

Matt (35:24)

bit, which is that this familiarity thing comes from two directions at once in the system. It comes from top-down learning. Like you study something till you know it. That's a very good way of building habits, but it also comes naturally from the bottom up. And that's, that's the point where, you know, you're driving your commute in the new city and you can't tell when it became a habit. just did. And suddenly you realize, I did that one automatically. Didn't I?

Divia (35:36)

show.

Matt (35:54)

You know? Yeah, and because it's just a simple twist of the architecture. That's how it goes. So you're building habits. And again, what makes a habit work is reliable results. If you do it, if you see the same thing and it you see it seven times at each time it leads to this next other thing. Well, that extra thing gets incorporated into the habit with the little piece of habit. And so it's that familiarity building just piling up. Here's

Divia (35:55)

Yeah, I think that's a common experience for sure.

Matt (36:24)

The really interesting part of it though, this is now the next insight. Hey, I'm sure as a musician you had this experience of going into a lesson.

and saying to the teacher, I swear I could play that at home. Right?

Divia (36:41)

Well, I wasn't very good at practicing, but yeah, sure, I'll go with it.

Matt (36:44)

Right, well, most of it aren't, but as a teacher, you know, I have at least 100 different cello students, they all say that. I said it when I was a student, because when you're at home, you're in a familiar environment, and yeah, right, you learned how to do it in such a way where you're practicing and no one's particularly bothering you, and you know, the chair is this height and the light is that height. Yeah.

Divia (36:57)

Yeah, some of it's context dependent.

I do think that's a very common experience. think this is, I understand that some of this is pretty universal and neurological. I do think in particular, my experience has not been as much like that as a lot of people.

Matt (37:16)

Yeah, well, here's where I'm going with it, because I'm trying to get to a broader point through a specific example. When you play the lesson, suddenly half of your attention that at home used to be on what you were doing is now focused on what the teacher thinks you're doing. And there's no longer enough conscious energy to power the system, and it breaks in unpredictable ways. That's the typical way it goes. Yeah, right? So that one, it's...

Divia (37:39)

Yeah, I do think this is a common experience.

Matt (37:45)

What you find out, and here's the insight, is that the habit that worked locally at home and gave good results doesn't necessarily work globally because in a larger app... Yeah. gosh, yes. Uh-huh. Yes.

Divia (37:57)

Sure. Yeah, the way this happens a lot in my life. So I do a lot of dog training. I don't know that I'm that good at it, but I do it a lot. my version of this is I'm always like, look what we can do. And then I call my husband over and it never works. I didn't, I'm eager to show him. So I haven't, I don't wait until it's actually fluent. It's not fluent yet. And then, and then I call him over and it's different enough that the dog is now doing something else, which yes.

Matt (38:10)

Yeah, right.

Yeah,

Exactly, right? And this is the hilarious bit, is that the nature of habit formation is that basically you're training the nervous system to say, this happened a bunch of times in the network. So great. But then you take that and you set it in a new environment with new clues and new parameters and new weirdnesses. And it doesn't necessarily give you the same result. Yeah, right? So the business of becoming a professional in anything is learning the system well enough that you

Divia (38:43)

Yeah, it depends, for sure.

Matt (38:52)

you iron out the bugs and when you take it out in public it doesn't crash. You play on stage in front of people or in an audition or whatever, it always comes out the same way. But it's not necessarily the case. The key here is that all habits are formed locally because nobody has omniscient intelligence.

And it doesn't matter who you are, what you learn doesn't guarantee that it will work in other environments. And yeah. So what you suddenly find you have a collection of is this vast iceberg of habits that were all locally generated in different local contexts that may or may not work in global contexts, but they're all invisible and you can't see them unless you go looking for them. And that...

Divia (39:22)

Yeah, I think that definitely depends.

Matt (39:42)

has very interesting implications for sort of, you know, quote unquote rationality in general.

Divia (39:49)

Wish again, I have a thing I mean by that that's pretty different from what you mean by that.

Matt (39:52)

Exactly, right? And that's where we were one end of the words problem. So, so my contention is that this architecture is universal in a broad, broad sense. The content is unique to each person, but the way the interactions work is universal. And so that's, that's just one leg. Well, you could say fairly, I think it's about half of the decision-making model. If we're talking

habit, instinct, reason, emotion. This is kind of like habit plus reason. You know, that if you're reasoning things out with a limited amount of attention and you've got these oceans of habit that are not, not only aren't fully coherent, but can't be made fully coherent even in principle, because you don't have the horsepower to go in and pull everything out at once and make sure it all fits everywhere. And that's that half of the decision making.

and that looks like a bad place to be, but it turns out it's maybe not. And that's where I went next.

Divia (40:59)

Yeah, so why don't you walk us through, this is, you have a framework for people when they disagree in ways that aren't necessarily on track to be a productive disagreement. Would you be up for giving an example of a time that you have used it and like how it went? So like for each stage, what concretely happened to you that day when you used it?

Matt (41:07)

Yeah.

Yeah.

sure.

Yeah, so, and I'm one of those people who's not good at concrete examples, but I'll do my best. But, you know, if, example, and this is bearing in mind, I haven't talked about what I think instinct and emotion are in relation to decision making, so we'll just leave that off for a minute. If you run into, some random terrifying comment on the internet that somebody says, you know, I don't know.

Divia (41:27)

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Matt (41:49)

But aren't either purple dinosaur is a terrible president or something? You know, it doesn't really matter what it's about, but it's, it's like.

Divia (41:55)

Something that I would have a strong reaction to is what you're talking about.

Matt (41:58)

Right, or something that you look at and you say, don't even know how to begin to reason with this. You know, because it's just...

Divia (42:04)

Well, I don't know that I would personally say that, but someone, sure.

Matt (42:07)

Yeah, right? Yeah, right? mean, it is a common experience on the internet that people run across things that just seem insane to them.

Divia (42:16)

Yes, I would say I do not tend to have that experience, but sure.

Matt (42:19)

Yeah, right. And so the way I look at it is, all right, well, if you want to reason with somebody, you've got to look at the, what I call the higher model of it, and I say, of the four components there, reason is the slowest one. Habits can be instant, instinct and emotion can be instant, reason takes a little time. So if you would like to reason with the person, and I generally hold that that's a good thing to want to do, but...

I don't have to get into the reasons for the moment.

Divia (42:49)

And when you say reason with, you mean like exchange reasons in a that people are.

Matt (42:53)

I guess by my lights I would say, well again let me just throw a couple of definitions in here. I break the general experience of dealing with classical rationality into three layers, interactively speaking. And one of them, would say reason is solo rationality. That's where I did the research, know, and I worked it out for myself.

And debate is combat rationality. So my reasoning destroyer is your reasoning. And argument is shared rationality. Let's work this one out together. So what I'm interested in ultimately is getting to argument. And so if I want to draw someone into an argument by engaging their sense of reason, the first thing I need to do is assess what they said and try to defuse.

at need the instinct part and the emotion part and the habit part. So, right.

Divia (43:54)

Right? So how would you do it in this example of, you know, the person who said something about Barney?

Matt (44:01)

Well, in that one, if I look at it and I say, if I think this person feels existentially threatened by Barney, then I'll say, it's all right, I'll help you out. How can I help? All right, so defuse. If it's just strong emotion, well, that's a little different game. Maybe I would say something like, that's funny. I just heard somebody say the same thing about the Easter Bunny.

What an odd coincidence, you know, it's like try to try to draw a pattern in, you know, again, without without going in and say, that's stupid. Don't feel that, which isn't likely to work. And if it's habit, well, you know, habit is mostly people say things that people around them say a lot. So so I hadn't heard it quite that way before. What do you mean by that? You know, so it's it's I'm going to look for a way in that.

Divia (44:56)

Yeah, and in those cases, you're saying the first one is more like they have a specific concern that like maybe on reflection, they're like, yes, I do worry about that. And the second one would be more like they have a strong emotion, but it's not really in the format of a specific concern. And then in the third one, it's sort of neither. They're saying it, but they didn't really, there's not too much behind it.

Matt (45:14)

Yeah, it's not like an existential threat. Yeah, right? And that's where the value of breaking decision making into four parts helps because between habit and reason and emotion and instinct, I feel like I've got a pretty comprehensive breakdown of the sources of whatever made them decide to say just that, just that.

And so that's step one. But now if I want to reason with them, well, the next thing we have to do is figure out a way of building a shared environment despite coming from really different places potentially with really different vocabularies. And so that's, I guess you could say, it's not the right word, but personified or embodied by

what I call the law of radical consensus. And that's a tool. And the law of radical consensus just simply says, consensus is easy to