Onboarding pathways from fear and anger into connection

Still feeling kinda sad about a guy who wandered into strangely earnest twitter and got triggered and scared and angry. Wondering what's got me hooked there. :thinking_heart: emoji

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Jan 7, 2020

@alifeofmovement @utotranslucence I think you're looking for :thinking-heart: (I'm planning to submit an official proposal to add this to the canonical emoji, lmk if you have appetite to help (even just by RTing me later in the process))

Apr 18, 2020

On the immediate content level, there's like, a sadness of the limitations of this medium. A feeling that if he'd been able to get in the same room with me & @jack_meditates & @visakanv & @selentelechia & so on... ...he'd be able to feel we're not trying to hurt him.

Then there's a part of me that knows that it's not nearly that easy. Feeling safe & being safe are just totally different things, and it's very easy to project your fear onto the situation and it continues to feel scary.

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Dec 23, 2019

@QiaochuYuan @visakanv My latest frame for this: everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation and their old emotional meanings. Like dreaming you're at school but it's also on a boat somehow. & as in dreams, somehow the weirdness of this mashup goes unnoticed

I notice I keep having this urge to try to reach out & try to connect with the guy, but he's been quite vocal in a leave-me-alone way so I guess I'm very transparently subtweeting the situation instead.

Does it help to remind myself that he's just the guy who happened to encounter my corner of the internet today and that there are a lot of such people? ...idk, I feel sad for all of them. How do we create onboarding pathways from people being sad/scared/lonely into connection?

I think that this onboarding pathways thing is really key. People stuck in shitty attractors need gradual steps, where the pathway starts with something that makes sense to them in terms of what they already know & understand. Best people to create = people who've been there?

One does not jump instantly from angry TLA* to spacious metamodern memetic mediator. There's many pieces, not all of which can be streamlined: usually involves making some connection with real ppl outside *TLA = three-letter acronym; replace with SJW or MRA or NRX or whatever

this thread collects a bunch of stories along the lines of conspiracy deconversions and other shifts from extreme ideologies of various kinds to greater openness and uncertainty, and has some principles around that

Stephanie Lepp @stephlepp · Feb 28, 2022

Humans are capable of extraordinary transformation. I spent five years interviewing people who did just that, like a former neo-Nazi and a paid climate skeptic who flipped. Here are 15 insights about HOW PEOPLE CHANGE👇

Jul 28, 2022