Skill: cognitive black box flight recorder

Table of Contents

Very short summary: It’s especially valuable to Notice while in mental states that make Noticing especially difficult, so it’s valuable to learn that skill.

Short summary: If you’re going to enter, or are currently in, a cognitive state that is very irrational / overwhelmed / degraded / constrained / poisoned / tribalistic / unendorsed / etc., then you may as well also keep a little part of yourself paying at least a bit of attention to what it’s like and what’s going on and recording that information, so that you get that sweet sweet juicy valuable data that’s hard to get.

1 The flight recorder

As legend has it, a black box (aka a flight recorder) is a device placed in an aircraft to record data from the flight (from measurement instruments or from voice recordings). If the aircraft crashes, most of the aircraft’s contents are vulnerable to being damaged or destroyed; but the black box is made of sturdier material, so it’s more likely to survive the crash. That way, information about the flight and what caused the crash is more likely to be preserved.

C’est une boîte noire.

When I’m able to, I practice something similar. If I’m in some sort of altered cognitive state, I try to “leave the black box recorder on”. That way, even if a lot of information gets destroyed or lost, I’ve at least gained a bit more information.

2 Altered states and lost information

Some examples of the “altered cognitive states” that I mean:

  • In some sort of heated political situation, where people are doing hostile actions and you have an instinct to join sides in a conflict.
  • In a debate with someone you don’t like, and they maybe kinda have a point, but you also don’t want to admit it for some reason.
  • In a fight with someone you care about, and you’re vulnerable and defensive and upset and feeling pressured.
  • In a really weird mood and having a weird conversation that doesn’t seem like your normal way of talking.

Similarly to a plane crash, often, after leaving a state like this, a bunch of information is lost. Examples of reasons that info is lost:

  • You were distorting your cognition by strategically blinding yourself. Examples:
  • You were just overwhelmed and didn’t have the spare attention to remember what was happening.
  • You were altered in a way that changed how you would encode memories.
    • E.g. you were viewing things through an adversarial lens, which changed your first-blush interpretation of events.
    • E.g. you had unusual access to some desire or perception.
    • In general, you had a different cognitive context than usual.

3 The black box recorder skill

To partially counter this loss of info, there’s this mental motion of “turning on the black box recorder”. This is a subspecies of the general skill of Noticing, and shares many properties. Some notes specifically on how to do the black box recorder skill:

  • TAP: notice that you’re entering an altered state where you might have especially distorted perceptions / memories → turn on the black box recorder (somehow).
  • TAP: notice that you’re already in an altered state → turn on the black box (somehow).
  • Remind yourself of the special, non-obvious value of having black box data. For me, that’s a kind of cooperativeness or generosity: Even if the data feels useless or a distraction in the moment and doesn’t help me with my current situation, saving the data is something I can do to benefit others (my future self, or other people) in future similar situations.
  • Because you’re in an altered state, usually with less attentional resources to spare, you may have to ask less of your Noticing skill. For example:
    • Sometimes just go for more episodic and concrete memories, rather than high abstraction and narrativizing. More “I said X and he said Y and I said Z and then I walked across the room.”, and less “He was trying to get me to believe A but I saw through him.”.
    • If you’re also doing abstract narrativizing, don’t try to fight that. Just, if you can, add an extra metacognitive tag on those things, like “At this point [[I had an interpretation that]] he was trying to get me to believe A…”.
    • Offload interpretation to later, and just try to save the data. E.g. generating alternative hypotheses is always good, but can be difficult in the moment; you may have to do it later.
  • You may need to make more space for remembering accurately and objectively, by neglecting certain duties you might usually attach to the pursuit of truth. Examples:
    • You don’t have to be fully fair, accurate, or complete in your memories. The idea is to get more info than the default. If you have some sense of nagging doubts or curiosities—the sort of thing you’d normally want to pause and follow up on, but that you can’t investigate in the moment—just record that fact.
    • You will not have to later capitulate due to this information. You can gain more clarity about what’s actually happening, what is going on in your mind, how your perceptions are distorted, how the other might be more sympathetic, and so on, while still firmly standing your ground.
    • You don’t have to share or act on this information; it’s private by default.
    • Some normal ethical rules apply less strongly / more ambiguously to this information. For example, you might record “Here I was not admitting that she was right about X, even though at this point I knew she was, because I didn’t like the implication.”, without also saying that out loud, even though normally you’d always say that out loud. It’s better to do something to improve your behavior, but also it’s better to notice and do nothing than to not notice and also do nothing.
    • (That said, this can be morally fraught. A black box recorder is not an excuse to do bad things or shirk duties. The black box is just for improving over what is sometimes the default of losing the info altogether. The types of information that you’re only getting because you have a black box recorder might change over time; it’s still a moral duty to wrap your consciousness around yourself more and more, it’s just that this moral duty applies to slower behavior / longer timescales.)

4 Why black box info matters

For the most part, black box records matter for all the same reasons as Noticing matters in general. There are some important differences:

  • Flight recorder info is especially useful because it comes from cognitive states that occur during important events, where you’re likely to make consequential mistakes or have opportunities for consequential improvement.
  • Flight recorder info is especially difficult to get, basically by definition, because it comes from cognitive states where the default is to get sparse / degraded / distorted information.
  • Flight recorder info is exceptionally rare to be recorded, because the skill itself is rare; there’s a correlated failure among different people, where people en masse neglect the skill.

For these reasons, the black box flight recorder skill is potentially especially useful to develop. It could help surprisingly much for things like debugging, symmetrization, empathy, integrating with yourself, and understanding others’s strange / faulty behavior.

As an example, you might turn on your flight recorder while engaging with politics. You could then notice a kind of path dependence, like this:

[I saw current event X → my initial exposure to X made it seem like quite a hostile event → I took a particular stance to the event and people involved, in response to my initial interpretation → later I found out that X was still bad but not quite as bad and coming from a more specific sector than I initially realized → I then believed I ought to have a narrower, more targeted response, and yet I still had a strong intuitive inclination toward the broader response] → (later) from all of that, I’ve learned a general pattern; maybe this is what it’s like for other people, on any political side (which doesn’t make it right or acceptable, but at least I have a better map, and can see how it might happen differently for people with different information contexts, social contexts, personality traits, etc.).

5 Conclusion

Memory is cool.

Curious if other people do this.