Mastering Intuition Pumps: Essential Terms | A Comprehensive Guide

Intro

Welcome to my latest blog post, where I dive deep into the world of innovative terminology and intuitive thinking. In this post, I introduce you to a collection of useful terms coined by me that will help you navigate complex concepts easily. Along with the terminology, I've also included intuition pumps and mental frameworks to help you understand things holistically and intuitively. These tools will aid your understanding of the subject matter and your ability to communicate and share your understanding with others. Let's dive in and expand our minds together!

Terms

Dinkers ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ

A perfect combination of simplicity, ingenuity, and pragmatism. Heavy use of Occam’s Razor.

Stinkers

Needlessly unclear, complicated. Intangible and/or unactionable. 💩

Webbing

Using the intuitive knowledge shared by the greater culture. Plays off the idea of Social Schema. 🕸

Define and Describe vs Praise and dis-praise

DnD is a way of evaluating something by revealing more truth about it. PnD is attaching webs to something without actually revealing anything new about it.

Collaboration Principle

An emergent phenomenon in which people unconciously/conciously collaborate in a conversation. The shared goal is in maintaining eachother's positive 👫 and negative face. When following the Collaboration Principle, you are probably also following Grices Maxiums

Imposition Equation

YES!: "A positive response to what you are saying/requesting" L: Love, How much this person Loves you T: Trust, How much they trust you I: Imposition, How much are you asking for? YES! = L + T - I

Informing intuition

Telling someone something to inform their intuitive knowledge about something.💡

Pudding

A play off the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If someone has ‘pudding’ they have shown themselves to have good fruit Matt 7:17-20. 🥧

Future timers/sowing/reaping

Doing things for future benefit (often hard in the moment). Galatians 6:8 and Ecclesiastes 11:6 🌾

Bad balancing

• “I can do this bad thing because you do a bad thing”.
• “I can do this bad thing because I also do a good thing”
• “I’ve already done this bad thing, so I might as well do more bad things”

Gift Boxing

Making something that’s bad look good by wrapping it up nicely. Like when Satan deceived Eve in the garden. Genesis 3:4-5. 🎁 🥊

Clean cocaine

‘Protecting’ someone by exposing them to something less bad. 💉 Requires Gift Boxing

Sharpening a turd

Honing something bad into something dangerous and bad. 💩

“I’m just kidding” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A sign that your intention has not aligned with your impact

Cold Shower effect

Something that feels dreadful feels good afterwards. 🥶🚿

Orgasm effect

Something that feels desirable feels dreadful afterwards. 💥 😞

Ashdening

Being contrarian just to be in control of the conversation. 😈

Dark Spidy

Someone who misues the web. Often seen employing the dark triad to accomplish evil.

Naive Spidy

Someone who blindly follows someone else's web. No critical thinking. Only kneejerk reactions and borrowed logic.

Side carting 🏍

Trying to bolt on things to an existing implementation…when you should have started from scratch.

Cob Webs

when you haven’t seen someone for awhile and there are bad webs in their head from the past. 🕸

In the brain

Lack of ❤, too much 🧠

In the heart

Too much ❤️, not enough 🧠

In the 🕸

Not thinking or feeling, but borrowing from someone/somewhere else. See Naive Spidy

Kissing in Line Effect

Originates from when Holiday got upset that John didn’t want to kiss while they were standing in line. John didn’t want PDA…she wanted affection. End result was that the REAL problem was lack of affection in general. Not whether we should/should not kiss in line. Similar to bike shedding where an insignificant obvious problem is focused on at the expense of a more important, but less understood topic. You might also choose to not work on hard things (exercising and eating less) and spend all your time/money on ‘quick fixes’ that are easier, but not as effective. 😚

That's Not the REAL X

When people just claim that something is good if it's applied properly. While this is often true, it's also a way for someone to giftbox something really bad and harmful.

John Maxwell Effect

Anyone who quotes John Maxwell isn't someone you should get advice from. John Maxwell said that.

Hitler's favorite color

The aversion to webbing you didn't don't want spun about something near and dear to you. Happens often when people try to put bad webs on something you feel personally vested in (like you sharing a favorite color with Hitler).

Role-Reversal

Take on someone else’s perspective to gain a bigger perspective! V similar to Poc 🔁

The Solly Index

• Waking up early
• Making food at home
• No Debt
• No substance use
• Listening more than talking
• Reading every day

Facts, Story, Ask

When you are upset with someone. Give them the facts, tell a story, and then ask them what their story and facts are.    
“What are your thoughts?”    
“How do you see it?”    
“What’s your perspective?”    
“Do you see it differently?”    
“What’s going on?”    
“That’s how it appeared to me. Am I wrong somehow?”    
“Do you feel like I’m not considering your viewpoints when I make my decisions?”

S.M.A.R.T Goals

Specific

• What is in scope?
• What is NOT in scope?

Measurable and Achievable 🎯

• What is the definition of ‘done’?
• What would be a ‘best case’ outcome? A worst case?

Relevant and Time Bound

• Does this align with your core values and vision?
• Is this the right time?
• Am I the right person to reach this goal?
• What are the (measurable) milestones we can do to gauge progress?

Shark Tank Goal Questions

1. How will you uphold the three pillars of agile development (Inspection, Adaption, Transparency)?
2. What obstacles are there? Can these be mitigated, transferred or eliminated?
3. What other things are you sacrificing in order to accomplish this goal?

Evaluating Advice

1. What’s in it for you?
2. What’s the catch?
3. What is your source of info? 🔬
4. Follow the 💰
5. 10-10-10 rule (what are the consequences in 10 mins, 10 months, 10 years)

Signs someone is Gaslighting you

• They approach the conversation as someone who 'has all the answers'
• Explaining something you should already know about yourself (Ex: your feelings, your words, your beliefs, your relationships, your own past)
• Possible contridictions and good questions are downplayed, brushed over, or stressed as not important or irrelavent instead of using PoC to improve clarity and ground both conversants.
• Often utilizes “states of potentiality,” in which the statement could “collapse” to different realities depending on the context. Called a 'forked toungue' by Landen Bigham.

Intellectual Standards

1. Clarity
   • Understandable. The meaning can be grasped easily.
2. Accuracy
   • Free from errors or distortions.
3. Percision
   • Correct and applicable scale or granularity.
4. Depth
   • Can explain many questions and complexities.
5. Bredth
   • Encompasses multiple viewpoints/perspectives.
6. Logic
   • Internal validity with itself, and external validity with other truths. Well integrated.
7. Signifigance
   • Focuses on the important. It matters.

Making a short term decision

Chaotic Environment - Use your gut and just do something.    
Goal -> Regain stability. Stop the bleeding.

Complex Environment - Take a moment to look at things and make a decision. Don’t spend too much time analyzing.    
Goal -> Establish consistency

Complicated Environment - Start organizing things and apply good practices where possible. Add structure where it seems right.    
Goal -> Break everything into simple things.

Simple Environment - Apply best practices and move on. (If you are struggling with two good options, just choose one)

See the Cynefin framework for more info

7 Tools for critical thinking

1. Use Your Mistakes

Dennett’s first tool recommends rigorous intellectual honesty, self-scrutiny, and trial and error. In typical fashion, he puts it this way: “when you make a mistake, you should learn to take a deep breath, grit your teeth and then examine your own recollections of the mistake as ruthlessly and as dispassionately as you can manage.” This tool is a close relative of the scientific method, in which every error offers an opportunity to learn, rather than a chance to mope and grumble.

2. Respect Your Opponent

Often known as reading in “good faith” or “being charitable,” this second point is as much a rhetorical as a logical tool, since the essence of persuasion involves getting people to actually listen to you. And they won’t if you’re overly nitpicky, pedantic, mean-spirited, hasty, or unfair. As Dennett puts it, “your targets will be a receptive audience for your criticism: you have already shown that you understand their positions as well as they do, and have demonstrated good judgment.”

3. The “Surely” Klaxon

A “Klaxon” is a loud, electric horn—such as a car horn—an urgent warning. In this point, Dennett asks us to treat the word “surely” as a rhetorical warning sign that an author of an argumentative essay has stated an “ill-examined ‘truism’” without offering sufficient reason or evidence, hoping the reader will quickly agree and move on. While this is not always the case, writes Dennett, such verbiage often signals a weak point in an argument, since these words would not be necessary if the author, and reader, really could be “sure.”

4. Answer Rhetorical Questions

Like the use of “surely,” a rhetorical question can be a substitute for thinking. While rhetorical questions depend on the sense that “the answer is so obvious that you’d be embarrassed to answer it,” Dennett recommends doing so anyway. He illustrates the point with a Peanuts cartoon: “Charlie Brown had just asked, rhetorically: ‘Who’s to say what is right and wrong here?’ and Lucy responded, in the next panel: ‘I will.’” Lucy’s answer “surely” caught Charlie Brown off-guard. And if he were engaged in genuine philosophical debate, it would force him to re-examine his assumptions.

5. Employ Occam’s Razor

The 14th-century English philosopher William of Occam lent his name to this principle, which previously went by the name of lex parsimonious, or the law of parsimony. Dennett summarizes it this way: “The idea is straightforward: don’t concoct a complicated, extravagant theory if you’ve got a simpler one (containing fewer ingredients, fewer entities) that handles the phenomenon just as well.”

6. Don’t Waste Your Time on Rubbish

Displaying characteristic gruffness in his summary, Dennett’s sixth point expounds “Sturgeon’s law,” which states that roughly “90% of everything is crap.” While he concedes this may be an exaggeration, the point is that there’s no point in wasting your time on arguments that simply aren’t any good, even, or especially, for the sake of ideological axe-grinding.

7. Beware of Deepities

Dennett saves for last one of his favorite boogeymen, the “deepity,” a term he takes from computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. A deepity is “a proposition that seems both important and true—and profound—but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous.” Here is where Dennett’s devotion to clarity at all costs tends to split his readers into two camps. Some think his drive for precision is an admirable analytic ethic; some think he manifests an unfair bias against the language of metaphysicians, mystics, theologians, continental and post-modern philosophers, and maybe even poets. Who am I to decide? (Don’t answer that).

What is emotional intelligence?

1. Emotional Contagion is the ability to feel and share other people’s emotions.
2. Empathic Accuracy is the ability to identify and understand inner mental states like emotions thoughts and intentions in yourself and other people.
3. Emotional Regulation is the ability to control and regulate your own emotions so as not to be controlled by or carried away by them.
4. Perspective Taking is the ability to understand other people’s points of view, to see the world through their eyes, to take their perspective.
5. Concern for Others is the capacity to care about others, to have compassion, to act altruistically.
6. Perceptive Engagement is the ability to take effective action based on all the other empathic skills. The ability to meet others needs and respond effectively.

Things That help with EQ

1. Humility and selflessness. Empathy is about focusing attention on another person’s wants and needs. It’s not about you. You must be able to allow the focus to be on another person for an extended period of time. You can’t talk too much. You can’t be the center of attention.
2. Patience. Feelings have their own timetable. People may not know how they feel at first. They may need to tell you the same story over and over again. They may not respond the way you want them to.
3. Equanimity. This is related to McLaren’s idea of emotional regulation. Equanimity refers to a calm, composed, peaceful detachment from your own feelings and from circumstances in life. This composure is especially important in the face of other people’s intense emotions.
4. Vulnerability. Empathy requires you to be in touch with your own emotions. You cannot connect to another person’s sorrow unless you can be in touch with your own sorrow (anger, fear, etc.).
5. Honesty. This is very much related to vulnerability. You need to be honest with yourself and other people about how you have reacted to circumstances, how you feel, and how you’ve succeeded and failed at coping with life’s difficulties.
6. Sincerity. The techniques above will only work when used sincerely and when they come from a place of authentic concern for another human being. If you are using them to get someone to like you, or to sleep with you, or to buy something from you, most people will be able to sense your insincerity. Whenever I use these techniques, I am worried that someone will hear them as a gimmick, but when I use them sincerely, when I’m genuinely present and trying to help, no one ever hears them as gimmicks or techniques. Instead, people just open up and keep talking.

Things to get started

1. Create a supportive conversational environment.
   • Create an atmosphere of trust, affection, availability and concern
   • Foster the expression of emotions by acknowledging, legitimizing, and elaborating people’s feelings.
   • Manage the person’s level of emotional arousal (e.g., by stopping the conversation if things get too heated, by encouraging sleep, nutrition and exercise, by changing the subject) d. Maintain a secure conversational setting (e.g., put away your phone, turn off the TV, close the door, eliminate other distractions)
2. Foster discussion of emotions
   • Ask about the troubling situation
   • Ask about their interpretations and hypotheses about what the feelings are about and where they come from and how they might be best dealt with
   • Reassure that talk of feelings is welcome, desired, safe, and appropriate.
3. Facilitate elaboration
   • Ask open-ended questions
   • Ask for the whole story (e.g., “Tell me more. I really want to hear all about it.”)
   • Avoid giving strong advice or offering too much judgment

Things NOT to do

1. Offer advice, distraction or reassurance (e.g., “Let me tell you what to do.”)
2. Offer condemnation or criticism
   • Saying the person’s feelings are wrong or bad or that they are embarrassing or immature for feeling how they feel (e.g., “Grow up.” “You’re being a big baby.”)
   • Saying that the person’s behavior is bad (e.g., “You’re being a jerk.” “You are so self-centered.”)
   • Telling the person to relax, calm down, chill out, etc.
3. Imply that the person’s feelings are not legitimate
   • Minimize their feelings (e.g., “It’s no big deal.”)
   • Denigrate or put down the source of their feelings (e.g., “That guy was a loser anyway.”)
   • Blame the person (e.g., “You brought a lot of this on yourself.”)
   • Imply that the person is incompetent (e.g., “You still haven’t dealt with that?”)
   • Say that expressing feelings is dysfunctional (e.g., “You are going to make yourself sick by dwelling on all that anger.”)
   • Say that the situation that caused the feelings is irrelevant, unimportant, or easily solved. (e.g., “There are lots of other fish in the sea.” “Who cares about the score you got on some test. Get over it.”)
4. Tell the person how to feel (e.g., You should be grateful that you were able to say goodbye.”)
5. Tell the person to forget about the situation (e.g., “It’s better not to think about it. Just put it out of your mind.)
6. Focus on your own feelings or experiences extensively (e.g., “Let me tell you about a similar thing that happened to me. It was much worse.”)
7. Get over-involved in the person’s life or feelings, to the point of being suffocating or overbearing (e.g., “I’m coming over now and we are going to call him.” “Give me your Facebook password. I am going to edit your posts for you.” “I want you to call me three times a day and tell me how you’re doing.”)

Things to DO

1. Express a desire to help (e.g., “I really want to help you get through this.”)
2. Express positive regard (e.g., “You are such a good and kind person.”)
3. Express concern, care, and interest (e.g., “I care so much about you)
4. Express availability (e.g., (“I’m here for you whenever you want to talk.)
5. Express alliance, togetherness, and solidarity (e.g., “You are not going to have to go through this alone. I’m with you all the way.”)
6. Express acknowledgment, comprehension, understanding, sympathy, sorrow, and condolence (e.g., “I am so sorry. I know how much this meant to you”)
7. Legitimize the other person’s feelings
   • Say that the other person’s feelings are reasonable, normal, and appropriate (e.g., “Of course you are frightened. Anyone would be. This is a really scary situation.”)
   • Acknowledge the other person’s plight or circumstances (e.g., “It totally sucks to work so hard for so long towards a goal and then not achieve it.”)
   • Absolve the person of blame or guilt (e.g., “You certainly didn’t do anything to deserve this, and there’s no reason to feel bad about how you are reacting.”)
   • Reassure the person that it’s okay to express any feelings, that none are off- limits or bad (e.g., “There are no right or wrong feelings. We can’t control how we feel. So no matter what you’re feeling, it’s okay with me.”)
   • Encourage elaboration of feelings and the story behind the feelings
   • Encourage the expression of feelings (e.g., “Can you tell me how you’ve been feeling?)
   • Ask open-ended questions about feelings (e.g., “How have those anxious feelings been lately?)
   • Reflect and restate the thoughts and feelings that you hear (e.g., “From what I can tell, you are still really sad about the end of that relationship, and you’re not sure how you are ever going to get over it.”)
   • Offer hypotheses about how the person might be feeling (e.g., Could it be that you feel guilty that you didn’t do more to help your friend when she was sick?)
   • Use back channel cues (e.g., yeah, and uh huh, and ahh)
8. Ask open-ended questions about the problem, but do not interrogate (e.g., “What happened next? How did that make you feel? “What has been the hardest part?”)

Things that make people not like you

1. Too much or too little eye contact
2. Not enough or too much physical space between individuals
3. Body hygiene (breath, smell, hair)
4. No commitment to the collaboration Princible. Including any violation of Grice's Maxiums
5. Entering and leaving an interaction without grace or tact.
6. Wrong amount of mmhmms and oh yeahs?
7. Lacking empathy/connection (Not vibin')
8. Imbalance of linear vs diffusive thinking (taking things too literally or webbing too much)
9. Interpreting ambiguous situations as negative

Things that make people like you

1. Smile big and often!
2. Relaxed body language
3. Move freely around
4. Always bring the energy up one level
5. Eye contact, touching
6. Remember names, memories, and associations
7. Don't fidget, be over-reactive
8. Use pauses instead of stumbling over your words
9. Start a conversation with a compliment or in a fun, positve way.
10. Turn informational questions into 'why' questions. e.g. Where you do you live? Why do you live there?
11. If someone reacts negatively to a question, respond with a hypothetical. eg Do you like your work? No If you had 100 million dollars, what would you do instead?
12. Take risks, successfully
13. Care about people for themselves
14. Have a mission bigger than yourself
15. Intro well "Hi, I don't think I've met you yet. My name is John"
16. Speak positively of other people
17. Take any 'boring conversation' and move it toward feelings, motivations, and values Why did you do that, how did that make you feel. What is important about that?
18. Introduce taboo conversations non-chalantly
19. Use 'playful misinterpretation'
20. Be playfully absurd
21. Use pauses and eye contact when you or the other person share something signifigant
22. Be honest and non-judgmental
23. create connections between your interests and theirs
24. Share two very different hobbies/interests so they can't just put you in a box.
25. You can get closer to someone on the side than in front of them.
26. Men connect by helping you with a problem, women connect by sharing emotional experiences
27. Smartly share vulnerabilities
28. Give people a reputation for them to live up to.

Emotions

1. Intention based behavior (I want to do __)
2. Ability to predict things
3. Sensitivity to surroundings and internal emotions, Noticing patterns and peculiarities
4. Feeling God’s presence

Ways to increase Awareness:

• Keep a journal
• Write down goals and priorities
• Meditate/pray
• Read (especially the Bible)
• Practice predicting things

Ask for feedback from friends and from coworkers/managers

When compared with other people, what does John struggle with?

In what ways is John hippacritical?

Compared to other people, John is very __

Places where self-awareness drops

• High emotion, arousal, fear, anger

Self Actualization

Characteristics of self-actualizers:

They perceive reality efficiently and can tolerate uncertainty;

Accept themselves and others for what they are;

Spontaneous in thought and action;

Problem-centered (not self-centered);

Unusual sense of humor;

Able to look at life objectively;

Highly creative;

Resistant to enculturation, but not purposely unconventional;

Concerned for the welfare of humanity;

Capable of deep appreciation of basic life-experience;

Establish deep satisfying interpersonal relationships with a few people;

Peak experiences;

Need for privacy;

Democratic attitudes;

Strong moral/ethical standards.

Behavior leading to self-actualization:

Experiencing life like a child, with full absorption and concentration;

Trying new things instead of sticking to safe paths;

Listening to your own feelings in evaluating experiences instead of the voice of tradition, authority or the majority;

Avoiding pretense ('game playing') and being honest;

Being prepared to be unpopular if your views do not coincide with those of the majority;

Taking responsibility and working hard;

Trying to identify your defenses and having the courage to give them up.

Vocab reference

Politeness Theory

An idea put forth by sociologists Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson that proposes that human politeness centers around maintaining positive and negative face of all conversation participants.

Positive face

The individual desire of a person that his personality is appreciated by others. Furthermore, this includes the way a person wants to be perceived by his social group. One example for positive face is the appreciation of individual achievements. According to this definition, a painter would, for instance, desire other people's appreciation of his paintings.

Negative face

Negative face describes the basic personal rights of an individual, including his personal freedom as well as freedom of action. One's negative face is a neglection of all factors which represent a threat towards individual rights. One popular example is the freedom of speech, which includes one's need not to be interrupted by others while speaking.

Grice's Maxiums

The fundamental building blocks of the Collaboration Principle

Maxium of Quality

• Try to make your contribution as True as possible.

Maxium of Quantity

• Make your contribution as informative as possible, but no more.

1. Maximum of Relation
   • Be relevant
2. Maxium of manner
   • Avoid being obscure
   • Avoid ambiguity
   • Be brief
   • Be orderly

Social Currency

People accept criticism based on how much you have invested in them. Wiki 💴

Skin in the Game

Explained deeply in Taleb’s Antifragile, it is the idea that you should involve yourself in systems where you have something to lose if it doesn’t turn out well. If someone has no skin in the game, you can’t trust them because they have nothing to lose. Investopedia definition. 🖐 🎲

Antifragility

Things that benefit from disorder (randomness). Wiki 💪🏻

Principle of charity

Adopt the best possible interpretation of what someone is saying. Abbreviated PoC. Wiki 🙏

Huh, Really, And, So

• Huh? (Doesn’t make sense) 🤔
• Really? (Doesn’t line up with existing knowledge) 🧐
• And? (Something is missing)
• So? (What does it matter?) 🤷‍️

Source

Useful Images

Logical Fallacies

Cognitive Biases