10 Apr 2020 - Graham
previously: what i've learned about learning
It has been two years since I asked you to join me in making this semi-collaborative newsletter. Thanks for being here. I hope you’re staying safe in these difficult times.
As always, if you missed any old issues, they’re available here.
Today’s art is from Salvador Dali’s Alchimie des Philosophes via the Hallie Ford Museum of Art.
(archivists note: the Hallie Ford Museum of Art’s website was down as of 29 Sept 2023)
The Fixed mindset prevents us from thinking change possible. According to our Fixed mind, we are who we are and will always be. The Fixed mind focuses on outcomes; it then transmutes those results into identities (I failed = I am a failure), which makes us desperate to avoid/ignore mistakes, which makes us fragile.
The Growth mindset is meant to be an antidote to the Fixed mindset. It is not. It fails to describe how change actually happens. Growth mindset proponents urge us to believe in ourselves and stick with it, but this blind optimism provides no real roadmap for change. Instead of leading to growth, this effort-only version of the Growth mindset leads us back to the Fixed mindset.
Let’s call this effort-only version the Effort mindset. Here’s a typical Effort process:
Will S. points out that Carol Dweck, author of the seminal text Mindset, acknowledged my criticisms. And Rachael M. sent this meta-analysis which found that Growth mindset interventions make no difference in student performance. See, also, David Epstein’s Range.
Perhaps the Growth mindset could be more robust than Effort, more than just telling people “you can improve if you want it enough.” Perhaps a more useful version of the Growth mindset would look like what Daniel Goleman describes in Focus. Based on case studies of top performers, Goleman identifies a method:
Let’s call Goleman’s version the Iterative mindset. The Iterative mindset strikes me as the correct way to grow, a more useful path across the plateaux. I’ve been evangelizing it to my LSAT students for the last six months.
But I wonder: Have I ever practiced what I preach? Have I ever really escaped the vicious cycle of the Fixed and Effort mindsets? If I did Iterate, did I do it properly and did it help? To answer these questions, let’s investigate one aspect of myself that I’ve tried and sometimes failed to change. Let’s investigate my attempts to become a good man.
1: The personal history below describes some of my worst moments—times when I did harm to women. You may not want to read this right now or at all.
2: You may find my mistakes predictable and my lessons obvious, particularly if you are a woman.
3: This is a long issue, maybe 30 minutes of reading.
4: Some of you (Rachel T., etc) have rightly questioned this choice of topic. Why mix ethics with gender? Why not ask “Am I a good person?” The short answer is: because the gendered question is what I have asked of myself. I haven’t tended to ask “am I a good person?” but rather “am I a good man?” Even today, I tend to think in gendered terms, and I suspect other men do too. My attempts to be ethical and my attempts to be male have become tightly knotted.
5: This has been difficult to write. Drafts have oscillated between pious sermonizing, self-indulgent self-flagellation, and presuming forgiveness from mere disclosure. I’ve tried to avoid those traps. I hope you will let me know if I haven’t.
Reflecting back, I’ve actually asked the question in four distinct ways:
These questions provide a useful (if oversimplified) framework for thinking about how I have thought about myself:
Middle-school-Graham was vexed by this question. Of course, that’s because it doesn’t have a clear or consistent answer. Even the limited range of maleness made available in the movies was too varied. Should I be like John Wayne or Pierce Brosnan or Groucho Marx!? They’re so different, but I knew there must be some constant that linked them all as ideal men (Fixed). If I could uncover this shared trait then I would have something to aim for (Effort).
After much “research”—including my first exposures to porn—I noticed that manly men were distinguished by their confidence. At first women resisted them, but ultimately the hero’s persistence would win out. A pattern emerged from both Hollywood and pornography: confidence = persistence = romance = confidence.
But this pattern was a closed loop. How could I gain confidence if I didn’t already have it?! I couldn’t even bring myself to kiss my first several girlfriends.
The Effort mindset suggested a way out of this trap: I could believe in myself, push past my discomfort, ignore my nerves, and take a giant leap towards manhood. I would fake confidence until I had it.
This was a very bad intention. Like most bad intentions, it was overly dramatic and based on a misdiagnosis of what I was doing wrong. Any good coach could have seen these problems. Had I bothered to check with any of the many actual good humans in my life, they might have stopped me from making a big mistake.
I went to a party in high school having resolved to finally follow through on this intention. At that party, I groped several women. I should have gone home, but instead I drunkenly passed out. The next morning, waking up alone, I wandered downstairs and got in a different bed with two other women. To make it worse, I then asked them if I could take my pants off, at which point they fled and I finally went home.
The next Monday, when I tried to sit at lunch with the same group, M took me aside. She explained that what I had done was unacceptable and that I needed to apologize. Although M was compassionate and the women were quick to accept my apology, I was devastated.
I had become one of the bad guys. I couldn’t accept that. I was supposed to be a good guy (notice the Fixed mindset). So after many tears of self-pity and many inadequate excuses, I resolved to never again repeat this mistake. Even today, I still feel a deep, sharp, gut-level pain just writing about this.
I realized then that my intentions had been not only gross but also misguided. Confidence wasn’t gained by grabbing women. Hadn’t I known that Hollywood and porn were obviously chauvinistic fantasies? The men I most respected didn’t hurt people; they didn’t just take what they wanted from women. The men I respected were morally good men. Their confidence sprang from their righteousness; it was earned only by being a good guy. So, henceforth, I would focus not on being good at being a man, but on being a good man.
Knotting together ethics and gender goes at least as far back as 400BCE. In the foundational texts of western ethics the main characters are men and boys. This is not an accident. Aristotle and his peers assumed that only men had the capacity to be moral subjects. In other words, only men had agency and freedom and the corresponding ethical burdens. Women, as mere objects, were consigned to supporting roles; their moral duty was only to help and obey.
Surprisingly, this meant the Old Greeks didn’t worry much about the threat of female sexuality; rather, they worried about men’s relationship with boys. Women, supposed to lack agency and rationality, couldn’t offer meaningful consent or resistance. Boys, in contrast, were thought capable of choice, which meant they could say no and mean it. The Old Greeks assumed that only this resistance, by young boys, could inspire a passion that risked corrupting men.
When Aristotle taught that ethics was the practice of moderation, he wasn’t suggesting that men stop raping women or children. Rather, his ethic systematized and justified that rape. By pretending that women had no subjectivity, his ethics erased men’s rape of women (except, in as much as it trespassed on another mans’ right). And by pretending that boys could consent, his ethics made pedophilia seem a pillar of the education system.
Furthermore, Aristotle’s ethic of moderation gave men the right, nay, obligation to write their own rule book. In these man codes the men in charge glorified their chosen burdens, while belittling the remainder they imposed on others. Men choose, for example, the burden of work outside the home (which is then honored), consigning women to the work of the home (which is then dishonored).
What was the point of all that gross history? Well, as the classicist Mary Beard says:
I would love to think there were bits of ancient history which gave you some kind of role model. If you were to press me I’d say they’re all horrible. [But] looking at them hard, working out how we have to frame them now, thinking about how differently they’ve been framed… that is always hugely revealing.
This history remains with us. We say that women are equal to men, but men remain the main characters in our moral stories. We know that children are not capable of consent, but we continue to imagine romance as an economy of resistance. And wokeness is often just another man code: a set of self-imposed sacrifices that justify doing what we want.
In college and my early twenties, I tried to follow a more enlightened code. This intention helped me avoid repeating the harm I had done at that party, but it also put an upper limit on my growth. I used this man code to confirm that I was a good man, and that Fixed frame helped me rationalize a subtler set of harms.
For example, I knew that only “yes” means “yes,” but I retained the idea that it was my job to create that “yes.” I still subscribed to Aristotle/Hollywood/porn’s romantic ideal: men persist and women resist.
Like, after a typical college party, when we’d gone back to her place, I noticed that N didn’t really want to hookup. My response was to try harder to convince her. She was supposed to resist to prove her purity, I thought, while my persistence would prove that I was worth hooking-up with
Of course, we were both drunk. All of my early hookups happened while I was drunk. I rationalized: alcohol lowered everyone’s inhibitions, it helped me pretend at the confidence I still lacked, and it gave her an excuse to give in to a pleasure her sober self resisted.
I never crossed the lines N set; still I knew something was off. The next day, my suspicion was confirmed when she hurried to leave the dining hall as I arrived. But, we had only done what she had said “yes” to; I thought I had followed the rules. Wasn’t I technically blameless? Wasn’t it kinda unfair for her to make me feel crappy?
This was not, I’m ashamed to say, an isolated incident. Rather than wondering why hooking up so frequently felt so bad, I rationalized my discomfort. My Fixed mind couldn’t acknowledge that I was doing wrong. Instead, I told myself an Aristotelian story: this discomfort was a necessary—even valorous—sacrifice I made for romance’s sake.
This fragile system of bad justifications persisted for far too long. It finally fell apart in a decidedly unromantic context: a work meeting.
I thought the meeting went excellently. I eloquently described all our problems to the people in charge. I was heard and a plan was made. But in the days after the meeting, work felt unusually tense. A seemed to be avoiding me. After a week of guessing about what was wrong, I finally got up the nerve to ask her.
As you may have guessed, A experienced our meeting very differently. As she related her version, I saw myself through her eyes and was, again, devastated. I had dominated the conversation. I had frequently interrupted A in order to speak for her. I had done all of this in an attempt to be a good guy, to protect and help her.
Here, unlike the high school party, I had done wrong as a result of trying to do right. Despite all my efforts to be good, I had still ended up as just another medium/bad guy. This shock forced me to re-evaluate what it meant to be a good man.
At first, I just added a new rule to my Good Man Code: listen more.
To start, “listen more” was a good enough intention. With my dramatic failure still fresh in my mind, I was able to shut up a little bit. But I had some deeply-ingrained conversational habits that weren’t conducive to listening. And I had wrapped up a whole lot of self-worth in proving I was smart by saying clever things. These patterns proved sticky, resistant to my efforts to be a good listener.
It was rough going: picture me sitting in a law school classroom, fidgeting terribly because I have another Very Important Thing to Say, but have already been called on twice. And, then, despite all my willpower, still raising my hand.
By trial and error, I found little practices for listening better. My first semester notes include abstract principles like: “the less you speak the more you’re heard.” By second semester the heuristics were getting more specific: “speak half as much as you want to.” The principles were inspiring, but the concrete guidelines were easier to apply and thus led to more improvement.
And so, I happened into an Iterative process to improve my listening. But I hadn’t done it on purpose, or really even recognized that I’d done it. When I thought about myself as a listener, I still tended to oscillate (without noticing the contradiction) between Fixed terms (I am a good listener) or Effort terms (I try really hard to listen). So I did not immediately start applying this more Iterative process to hooking-up.
As I got better at listening, however, it became increasingly clear that many of my assumptions about gender and sex and romance were no good. A friend would complain about yet another date doing something like ghosting, or not asking any questions, or putting her in a situation where she felt uncomfortable saying “no.” And I couldn’t help but notice that I had just done something similar.
At first, as these new errors were revealed, I simply amended my Good Man Code, as I had done with “listen more.” But as more rules accumulated, the Code became increasingly complicated. The more rules I added, the less useful they were. The Code became hard to follow, often ambiguous or even contradictory. It was no longer enough to follow rules like “no means no.” Sure, violating that rule would make me bad, but following it couldn’t guarantee that I was good.
As a result, I could no longer use rules as an excuse to avoid reflecting on my behavior; I couldn’t think myself safely good just because she said “yes.” Now, I had to confront the bad feelings my empathy had been pointing out the whole time.
The discomfort of hookups, I began to realize, was not primarily my own. I felt consistently uncomfortable because I was consistently making women uncomfortable. I had justified these discomforts as an inevitable part of romance, as chivalrous sacrifices, or at least, as pain I was willing to risk to get laid. I had managed to paint myself as the victim, when in fact I was the aggressor. These had been selfish excuses for bad behavior.
Thoroughly shamed, I despaired of the possibility of any man being good. Hadn’t I tried so hard and still failed? Hadn’t trying hard to be good even caused my failures. It must be impossible.
If being good was impossible, however, wouldn’t it be relatively easy—and even urgently needed—to be better than most other guys?
As you might imagine, this ignoble intention was limiting. But it was useful, too. Competition is motivating. And thinking in terms of “better than” set me on the track of Iterating. Still, it was a fairly bad version of Iteration.
You may recall, the Iterative process involves:
Here, then, is how NOT to Iterate…
Bad Intentions:
Evil intentions are not the only kind of bad intention; and good intentions are not always useful.
I’ve already mentioned some of my less-than-helpful intentions. Consider my goal after the terrible high school party: do nothing non-consensual. Setting this intention felt productive. It was painful to admit that I had hurt people and it was important to never repeat this mistake. But had I intended to do anything non-consensual when I went to that party? No, I had not. This intention wasn’t actually new.
My LSAT students love to set these painful-but-not-actually-changing-anything-type-intentions. Their favorite take-away is: “I will read more carefully next time.” But had they intended to read recklessly before? No, they had not. Still, it’s hard to admit to reading carelessly; and it is easy to mistake pain for growth.
Meaningful change does not come about by doing the same thing with more awareness. Such dramatic but illusory intentions throw us back into the same situations with the same tools, hoping we will magically do something differently. This self-improvement by self-purification is an ouroboros—the snake of our mind endlessly, painfully eating itself.
Which is not to say that dramatic intentions can’t lead to improvement. They sometimes do, but mostly to the degree that they accidentally change specific behaviors. More likely, without something specific to change, we will revert to our defaults. When we reach the crucial moment without a plan, we are likely to repeat our mistake.
But setting a specific intention is hard work. My students usually get a little mad when I tell them to dig deeper than “read better.” In part, that’s because it seems like I’m ignoring the pain of their admission. And, in part, because they don’t want to think about their practice that hard—in a sense, it’s easier to grind. But they also rightly point out: it’s my job to help them figure out what to do differently. So we should now turn to coaching.
Bad Coaching:
There are, of course, bad coaches. Hollywood, porn, and Aristotle were certainly bad role-models that I should not have relied on. Yet my problem was less that I was misguided (which I was), and more that I failed to seek guidance.
In part I didn’t think I needed a coach because neither the Fixed nor Effort mindsets require coaches. In the Effort view, coaches are mere cheerleaders, helping up keep at it. But our will is what matters. While in the Fixed view, coaches can’t change who we are, but they might see our faults more clearly than we do. That’s a scary prospect, without much upside, so better to avoid them.
Even after I began to adopt a more Iterative mindset, even after I started listening more, I failed to seek out coaches. I avoided coaches because I was still embarrassed of my failures, and even more embarrassed about sex stuff. I still thought I could do it on my own.
As a result, my coaches tended to be women like M and A who experienced my fuck-ups and cared enough about me to tell me about it. When women like N didn’t want anything more to do with me, and understandably so, I tended to learn nothing, or even take-away the exactly wrong idea. Thus, because I didn’t seek out coaches, I learned too slowly and at womens’ expense.
Bad Iteration:
When we Iterate, our failures inform our next practice. Now, you might wonder: “Isn’t that just another word for experimentation? Aren’t you talking about experimenting with women?” The unavoidable answer is: yes. And therefore we should be extremely skeptical of this approach. Experimenting on dates is NOT OK.
When I was trying to be good at being a man, I experimented on women: trying to learn confidence by grabbing them. This is obviously wrong. But my attempts to be a good man were not much better. When I was trying to be good I was not, in hindsight, trying to improve but rather trying to figure out the minimum. Because I was trying to find the lower limit of good, failure meant doing harm.
Trying to be better than did nothing to raise the bar. With this goal, I just had to be better than some imaginary caricature of “most men.” Which brings up another great risk of the Iterative process: by replacing the absolute good with the relative better, we risk excusing bad behavior. Improvement is not enough.
For more on this, Aneliese P. highly recommends the Awards for Good Boys instagram.
I’m not exactly sure when I let go of the idea of better than. I suppose it became apparent, as with trying to be good, that trying to be better than wasn’t stopping me from doing harm. Or perhaps the Iterative process, even if I was doing it poorly, slowly led me to Iterate better.
In any case, I’m still no expert at Iterating. The greater part of my learning has been about what not to do. But I’m hopeful about the promise of the Iterative mindset. When I’ve done it properly, it has led to substantial growth.
For example, you may recall, as a young man I had a great deal of trouble managing the first kiss. This trouble returned in full when I gave up drinking three years ago.
Without booze, dates felt awkward. Dates at bars had a reliable cadence: one drink was polite, a willingness to see if there was a spark; two drinks showed real interest, likely a smooch and a second date; three drinks meant we were going home together. Without these known signals, without the usual patterns, I was a bit lost.
I realized that I had been relying on the stupidity of drink to blunder past the trickiness of first-kiss consent. Without the liquid courage, I couldn’t bring myself to just go for it. So I needed a new way to initiate the first kiss.
Specific Intention:
The obvious solution (that took me 15 years to find) was asking whether my date wanted to smooch. This was a useful intention because it was concrete. I hadn’t set out to create such a useful intention; really I just needed something to do to manage my awkwardness.
I was very nervous about doing the wrong thing, but I could feel OK about practicing asking because failure did not risk hurting my dates. Worst case, they would say “no thanks” which would involve mild awkwardness for everyone, but nothing so bad as an unwanted kiss.
Still, just because it was a good intention, doesn’t mean it was easy to practice. Asking felt too awkward and my first tries went rather poorly. I mumbled, or asked at the wrong time, or misread signals, and otherwise ruined several romantic moments.
Frequent Iteration:
But I didn’t give up, nor did I just keep doing the same thing. Instead, thankfully, I Iterated. That is, I used my failures as information to inform my next attempts.
After I ruined the moment by mumbling awkwardly, I resolved to speak up. Yet even going into dates with this specific goal, I kept mumbling. This kind of failure is, however, to be expected when we Iterate. It can be hard to change an error directly (another reason the Effort mindset fails us). Often, a more basic or indirect approach is required.
Reflecting on my mumbles, I realized the problem wasn’t volume itself, but that I didn’t know what to say. So I practiced with the mirror and developed some smooth phrases. As you might guess, these phrases turned out worse than the mumbling, but at least I said them clearly.
Now, I was on the right track, I just had to figure out what to actually say. “Would it be OK if I kissed you?” was fine, but after talking with friend-coaches about this approach, they pointed out that “is that OK” wasn’t the enthusiastic consent I was going for. In the end, a simple and honest, “I’d like to kiss you. Would you like to kiss me?” has been the most pleasant option.
Of course, there are all sorts of higher levels to Iterate to from here. Can I apply this beyond the first kiss? When is asking inappropriate? When should I expect her to ask? When done well, Iteration constantly raises the bar. We meet ourselves where we are and continuously expect more.
Expert Coaching:
This Iterative process is difficult, and there’s no reason to do it alone. We could all use the insight and inspiration of a good coach. A coach’s outside perspective helps us see errors we would have never seen ourselves. And coaches can observe us while we practice, because it is often impossible to do a thing excellently and watch ourselves doing it. Excellent coaches help us make better intentions and they hold us accountable to those goals.
I have been extraordinarily lucky to be lovingly coached by many thoughtful and generous humans, probably including you.
I surely still need your help. Perhaps, you’d also like help? If so, let’s help each other.
Here’s two albums I’ve been enjoying:
King Krule, Man Alive!
Andy Shauf, The Neon Skyline
next post: in defense of othering