Intuition pump: Wanting a baby to improve.
I don’t want to “improve” my child; I want to help my child discover what he or she is interested in.
Ideas are improved. People are not their ideas.
“Let our theories die in our stead.”
— Karl Popper
The reason it often gets called “self-improvement” is based on a few misconceptions — on what the ‘self’ is, and on how epistemology works:
1. Identifying explicit thinking (the voice in the head) with the self, instead of considering “me” more like ‘the space over here where awareness is / where creativity comes from’.
This thing cannot be improved, because it’s already universal.
It’s attacking the very thing that generates improvements!
This sets up a separate ‘you’ inside your head. You’re no longer the creative space, you’re your thoughts, somehow.
But the chatty voice was never you.
That’s just content you produced.
That’s like saying this post is me.
12/— Lulie (@reasonisfun) April 27, 2024
2. People only want to ‘self-improve’ because they think they aren’t good enough, they aren’t happy with themselves, they want to be better.
Even if this lacked the misconception about what the ‘self’ is, it’s coercive education.
It’s not accepting where you, the problem-solver, are.
It’s attempting to cut ahead: you don’t really know what the problem is (i.e. you don’t know exactly what it is you don’t know) until after you solve it.
This is why school doesn’t work well as an education format.
It’s epistemologically authoritarian: it imposes a preconceived idea of what the ‘right’ answer is, and what the ‘right’ problem is – instead of helping the student to discover answers that solve *their* problems, which is an inherently creative act.
“Self-improvement” nudges people into the assumption that they already know what’s wrong with them.
This moves the focus away from novel solutions and towards existing solutions.
It does this because the “self” is a different type of object than an idea: The self is where new ideas come from. Existing knowledge is great, but if you identify with it then it’s notoriously harder to change your mind.
3. Aside from it being coercive education, and having a confusion about new vs existing knowledge, “self-improvement” doesn’t make sense epistemologically in another way:
Epistemology works by having problems you’re interested in (i.e. conflicts between theories), creating possible solutions, trying stuff out and coming across problems in those proposed solutions, and so creating new variations to try out, etc.
‘Improving the self’ is not a problem.
You might want to improve your strategy for dealing with a stressful situation with your parent.
Really, this is improving your ideas about what the world is like:
You thought you needed to be aggressive to hold a boundary, say, but in fact now you’re an adult your parents won’t stop you like they used to, and you have more power to leave.
That’s not you improving (you’re already great), that’s updating a guess you have about how the world works and what’s in it.
Identifying with your ideas is making yourself a martyr to them.
4. There is also a real problem that people are pointing towards when they use the phrase “self-improvement”.
Perhaps it could be described as “the sense that there’s something not okay, or painful, about your interface with the world”. Something like: what your ideas about yourself are.
(It’s improving your ideas of your self, not improving your ‘self’.)
“Self-discovery” is closer to the money.
What you call a ‘self’ depends on the problem you are solving.
I was asked on X, “How might you differentiate 2 people other than by their ideas?”
It depends why you’re differentiating them.
When meditators (for example) have a ‘oneness’ experience, it’s the recognition that 2 people are meaningfully not different in some way, leading to having more compassion and equanimity, and more accurate perception.
People who don’t experience this ‘oneness’ are carrying a misconception like the one I describe in my thread.
If you want to differentiate two people to know who to invite to a party, you may well use their existing ideas—or more accurately: their behaviours. Or how much other people enjoy being around each of them.
In Popperian epistemology, we only make differentiations when it solves a problem.
You might differentiate two people by what they want, if you’re trying to help your friend set boundaries — knowing that either person might change what they want, and if they want something compatible then there may be no more reason for the distinction.
What I’m trying to do in this thread is untangle an equivocation.
One that antirational memes use to keep you stuck.
In ordinary language, if we want to talk about who a voice 𝘪𝘴, we mean whose it is. If someone sees this tweet they might ask who is it, and you point to this tweet and say, “That’s Lulie.” But really you mean “Lulie wrote that.”
We then conflate our products or interests or ideas with ourselves.
This allows anti-rational processes to sneak in:
If we are inadequate, faulty, wrong, then we cannot trust the thing doing the improving. And therefore we look to external authority for answers and self-coercion for implementation.
All this is unnecessary.
You don’t deserve attack, and you’re only being attacked because there’s a meme that’s making an equivocation to 🦆 with you. To make you more obedient.
(Which was originally to keep you safe, to survive childhood. So it’s understandable. But not needed now you can be disobedient and still be safe.)
“Self-improvement” is a category error, in the same way that good/bad person is a category error.
A “self” isn’t the kind of object that can be improved.
It’s mistaking ideas for the people who hold them.
Changing this view of self makes it easier to be a fallibilist/rational.