#something that you almost irrationally will defend because it’s connected with you on a level you can’t quite explain

[uselessnocturnal]

there’s some media that i just ADORE and even though i know objectively there are flaws i love it so subjectively that i cannot be bothered to argue my case because it is something that i connect with on such an emotional level that if didn’t click with the other person, i know there’s not much i can say to give them that connection. and trying to prove why i like it so much will only make me more upset in the end

[spiritmoony]

The Loyalists, Enneagram Type Six 

Positives: committed, security-oriented, engaging, responsible, reliable, hard-working, responsible, trustworthy, excellent "troubleshooters," foresee problems, foster cooperation, internally stable, self-reliant, courageously championing themselves and others, dutiful

Negatives: anxious, suspicious, defensive, evasive, complaining while stressed, cautious, indecisive, reactive, defiant, rebellious, problems with self-doubt and suspicion, fearful, pessimistic

Basic Fear: being without support and guidance

Basic Desire: security and support

Enneagram Six with a Five-Wing: "The Defender"

Enneagram Six with a Seven-Wing: "The Buddy" 

Key Motivations: security, support by others, certitude, reassurance, test attitudes of others toward them, fight against anxiety and insecurity 

Direction of Disintegration (stress): suddenly competitive and arrogant at Three 

Direction of Integration (growth): more relaxed and optimistic, like healthy Nine 

Of all the personality types, Sixes are the most loyal to their friends and to their beliefs. They will “go down with the ship” and hang on to relationships of all kinds far longer than most. Sixes are also loyal to ideas, systems, and beliefs—even to the belief that all ideas or authorities should be questioned or defied. Their beliefs may be rebellious and anti-authoritarian, even revolutionary. In any case, they will typically fight for their beliefs more fiercely than they will fight for themselves, and they will defend their community or family more tenaciously than they will defend themselves.

They are so loyal because they do not want to be abandoned and left without support—their Basic Fear. Thus, the central issue for type Six is a failure of self-confidence. Sixes come to believe that they do not possess the internal resources to handle life’s challenges and vagaries alone, and so increasingly rely on structures, allies, beliefs, and supports outside themselves for guidance to survive. If suitable structures do not exist, they will help create and maintain them. 

Sixes have the most trouble contacting their own inner guidance. As a result, they do not have confidence in their own minds and judgments. 

This does not mean that they do not think. On the contrary, they think—and worry—a lot! They also tend to fear making important decisions, although at the same time, they resist having anyone else make decisions for them. They want to avoid being controlled, but are also afraid of taking responsibility in a way that might put them “in the line of fire.” (The old Japanese adage that says, “The blade of grass that grows too high gets chopped off” relates to this idea.) 

If Sixes feel that they have sufficient back up, they can move forward with some degree of confidence. But if that crumbles, they become anxious and self-doubting, reawakening their Basic Fear. (“I’m on my own! What am I going to do now?”) A good question for Sixes might therefore be: “When will I know that I have enough security?” Or, to get right to the heart of it, “What is security?” Without Essential inner guidance and the deep sense of support that it brings, Sixes are constantly struggling to find firm ground. 

Sixes attempt to build a network of trust over a background of unsteadiness and fear. They are often filled with a nameless anxiety and then try to find or create reasons why. Wanting to feel that there is something solid and clear-cut in their lives, they can become attached to explanations or positions that seem to explain their situation. Because “belief” (trust, faith, convictions, positions) is difficult for Sixes to achieve, and because it is so important to their sense of stability, once they establish a trustworthy belief, they do not easily question it, nor do they want others to do so. The same is true for individuals in a Six’s life: once Sixes feel they can trust someone, they go to great lengths to maintain connections with the person who acts as a sounding board, a mentor, or a regulator for the Six’s emotional reactions and behavior. They therefore do everything in their power to keep their affiliations going. (“If I don’t trust myself, then I have to find something in this world I can trust.”) 

"About nearly every decision would involve a council of my friends. Please make up my mind for me! Recently, I’ve narrowed my authorities to just one or two trusted friends, and on occasion, I’ve actually made up my own mind!"

Until they can get in touch with their own inner guidance, Sixes are like a ping-pong ball that is constantly shuttling back and forth between whatever influence is hitting the hardest in any given moment. Because of this reactivity, no matter what we say about Sixes, the opposite is often also as true. They are both strong and weak, fearful and courageous, trusting and distrusting, defenders and provokers, sweet and sour, aggressive and passive, bullies and weaklings, on the defensive and on the offensive, thinkers and doers, group people and soloists, believers and doubters, cooperative and obstructionistic, tender and mean, generous and petty—and on and on. It is the contradictory picture that is the characteristic “fingerprint” of Sixes, the fact that they are a bundle of opposites. 

The biggest problem for Sixes is that they try to build safety in the environment without resolving their own emotional insecurities. When they learn to face their anxieties, however, Sixes understand that although the world is always changing and is, by nature uncertain, they can be serene and courageous in any circumstance. And they can attain the greatest gift of all, a sense of peace with themselves despite the uncertainties of life. 

Levels of Development

Healthy:

Level 1 (At Their Best): self-affirming, trusting of self and others, independent yet symbiotically interdependent, cooperative, belief in self, courage, positive thinking, leadership, rich self-expression

Level 2: able to elicit strong emotional responses from others, very appealing, endearing, lovable, affectionate, trust, bonding with others, forming permanent relationships and alliances

Level 3: dedicated to individuals and movements they deeply believe in, community builder, responsible, reliable, trustworthy, hard-working, persevering, sacrificing for others, create stability and security in their world, bring a cooperative spirit

Average:

Level 4: investing their time/energy into whatever they believe will be safe/stable, organizing, structuring, look to alliances and authorities for security and continuity, constantly vigilant, anticipating problems

Level 5: resist having more demands made on them, react against others passive-aggressively, evasive, indecisive, cautious, procrastinating, ambivalent, highly reactive, anxious, negative, giving contradictory "mixed signals," internal confusion, react unpredictably

Level 6: compensate for insecurities by being sarcastic and belligerent, blaming others for their problems, taking a tough stance toward "outsiders," highly reactive and defensive, dividing people into friends and enemies, looking for threats to their own security, authoritarian while fearful of authority, highly suspicious, conspiratorial, fear-instilling to silence their own fears

Unhealthy:

Level 7: fearing they ruined their security, panicky, volatile, self-disparaging, acute inferiority feelings, see themselves as defenseless, seek out a stronger authority or belief to resolve all problems, highly divisive, disparaging, berating others

Level 8: feeling persecuted, others are "out to get them," lash-out, act irrationally, fanaticism, violence

Level 9: hysterical, seeking to escape punishment, self-destructive, suicidal, alcoholism, drug overdoses, self-abasing behavior, corresponds to the Passive-Aggressive and Paranoid personality disorders

Addictions: rigidity in diet causes nutritional imbalances, working excessively, caffeine and amphetamines for stamina, alcohol and depressants to deaden anxiety, higher susceptibility to alcoholism than many types

Personal Growth Recommendations

Be more present to your anxiety, explore it, and come to terms with it. Work creatively with your tensions without turning to excessive amounts of alcohol (or other drugs) to allay them. In fact, if you are present and breathing fully, anxiety can be energizing, a kind of tonic that can help make you more productive and aware of what you are doing. 

You tend to get edgy and testy when you are upset or angry, and can even turn on others and blame them for things you have done or brought on yourself. Be aware of your pessimism: it causes you dark moods and negative thought patterns that you tend to project on reality. When you succumb to this self-doubt, you can become your own worst enemy and may harm yourself more than anyone else does. 

Tend to overreact when they are under stress and feeling anxious. Identify what makes you overreact. Realize that almost none of the things you have feared so much has actually come true. Even if things are as bad as you think, your fearful thoughts weaken you and your ability to change things for the better. You cannot always manage external events, but you can manage your own thoughts. 

Become more trusting. There are doubtless several people in your life you can turn to who care about you and who are trustworthy. If not, go out of your way to find someone trustworthy, and allow yourself to get close to that person. This will mean risking rejection and stirring up some of your deepest fears, but the risk is worth taking. You have a gift for getting people to like you, but you are unsure of yourself and may be afraid of making a commitment to them. Therefore, come down clearly on one side or the other of the fence in your relationships. Let people know how you feel about them. 

Others probably think better of you than you realize, and few people are really out to get you. In fact, your fears tell you more about your attitudes toward others than they indicate about others' attitudes toward you.

[silver-and-ivory]

I’m not sure I like this article, “Project Hufflepuff: Planting the Flag”, very much.

I think that it seems like a well-intentioned and even potentially a good idea. But I also am really ambivalent towards what it appears to be arguing for.

I assume that the conference will be for dealing with some of the concerns expressed below, but I won’t be at the conference, so I want to explain them now.

I think it is a little bit alarming simply due to how vague it is. For example, take “Hufflepuff attitudes”. This could mean anything from “what if we tried being a bit less mean to each other” to “we need to spend ALL OUR TIME catering to other people’s needs”. Or, in an even worse scenario, it could mean both, and policies aimed at creating the latter might be defended in terms of the former, perhaps not even consciously.

Furthermore, I get the sense that - and I’m not quite sure how to phrase this - the people who feel alienated by the rationalist community are very different people from me, and that to an extent I have competing access needs in comparison to them. A rationalist community where these suggestions are put into place is a rationalist community where I (perhaps irrationally) worry that I would not be welcome.

I think that a lot of these criticisms are formulated such that they are vague, and yet extremely expansive. I feel that this article is directed at certain things that I value, but I can’t tell if it actually is discussing those things or different things completely. I will make note of where I’m making assumptions about what is at hand.

I also think that it’s possible that everyone is discussing a different community than the other people in the conversation. So there’s that, too; I mostly only know enough to discuss *my* community, and not e.g. the Seattle rat community, or whatever.

So, disclaimers past, let’s look at where this article errs.

Take these three assertions:

Some newcomers often find the culture impenetrable and unwelcoming.

Many people communicate in a way that feels disdainful and dismissive (to many people), which makes both social cohesion as well as intellectual understanding harder.

We have a strong culture of “make sure your own needs are met”, that specifically pushes back against broader societal norms that pressure people to conform. This is a good, but I think we’ve pushed too far in the opposite direction. People often make choices that are valuable to them in the immediate term, but which have negative externalities on the people around them. 

My initial reaction here is to feel really, immensely threatened.

With regard to the first and second ones, I’m not exactly sure what it’s trying to get at. I’d take a guess and say that it’s probably referring to the lw-type jargon (”failure mode”, “leveling up x”, etc.) or to norms of argument whereby people say things like “I think this is completely wrong”.

I think that this objection fails to recognize that some people derive strength and feel welcome when there is stilted jargon or weird phrasings. This is certainly my experience; the way the rationalist community used language in a weird jargony way made me feel at home and also interested in learning more when I first came upon it, for example.

It also fails to recognize that sometimes people have different communication needs. I think that what sounds dismissive and disdainful to some people might be the way that other people argue when they are being respectful but also trying to get to the point (or so on), and I don’t think the onus should be on those communicating to change.

This first point seems vague to the point that it could mean almost anything. I think that it might be referring to behavior and social norms which are off-putting, but not actually harmful, to some people, which are common to autistic or otherwise neurodivergent people; and which I feel should be better dealt with as competing access needs rather than as problems.

(Look at the sentence I just wrote! Look how weird and oddly-phrased and jargon-filled it is! It has the type of sentence structure which is common among rationalists but not too common elsewhere! I doubtless expect that someone would find it elitist or overwrought! That someone should not try to change the way I structure my sentences or to change my community so that this is noncentral behavior!)

Of course I could be completely off-base, but the vagueness of the article makes it extremely ambiguous while also still being alarming and expansive.

As for the second part, I felt really alarmed at this too. This part is really unclear and alarming:

People often make choices that are valuable to them in the immediate term, but which have negative externalities on the people around them.

Okay, but then why haven’t people raised this as an issue before? Shouldn’t this be dealt with on a case by case basis?

It’s not my responsibility to take care of everyone and to project what externalities my actions might create, at least not beyond the obvious! It’s other people’s jobs to inform me of how my actions negatively impact them, not my job to mind-read their hints!

Do I need to walk on eggshells again? Do I need to obsessively query everyone before I do anything? No, because that’s ridiculous.

The obvious thing to do here would be to conclude it’s not about me, it’s about someone else! But I can’t conclude that because it’s so goddamn vague and it’s purportedly about The Rationalist Community which I am part of.

Let me say this: this norm of taking care of yourself and putting your needs first, and trusting other people to tell you their needs, has been beneficial to me; and a community where this specific norm is not common, is not a community where I am safe.

Maybe some parts of the rationalist community say things like “Don’t bother about other people! If they tell you they’re upset, they don’t matter at all! Lol! Go and dox some more innocents.” If so, then these people need to care more about others, and this is a fair criticism to make. But this article makes a massive blunder when it specifies direction, but not goal (as mentioned in SSC’s Bravery Debates post).

On another tack, I think that I disagree with the article when it says that “Ravenclaw and Slytherin skills come more naturally to many people in the community, and it doesn’t even occur to people that emotional and operational skills are something they should cultivate”.

This is completely contra to my experience with reading Ozy’s blog and in general talking with rationalists. I am well aware that emotional and operational skills are useful. I am still bad at them. I am trying to get better. The rationalist community is absolutely key to my improvement at recognizing and then managing my executive dysfunction, anxiety, and scrupulosity.

This feels like an attack on me for not working hard enough on emotional and operational skills, even though I know it’s not.

Finally, I want to disagree with this article about whether ”the emotional vibe of the community is preventing people from feeling happy and and connected”.

No, no it is not. Did you know that I like this community and I feel happy and connected due to its weird emotionlessness and the way it encourages people to put their own needs first and the difficult jargon. Did you know that it makes me feel threatened when you automatically attribute this Lack of Connectedness to vague Badthings which resemble closely norms which are precious to me.

I don’t want a rationalist community that isn’t mine anymore. I wish that the writer of this article had been much, much more specific, and that they had limited the scope of their project and critique to parts of the rationalist community. I think that this article is inaccurate in characterizing The Rationalist Community as a whole as not cultivating emotional and operational skills and as not connecting people enough, and I feel extremely suspicious of the vagueness of its criticisms.

The concerns that the article brings up might be better dealt with by creating sub-communities or wholly new sections of rationalist community, so that everyone can have access to what they need and prefer.