Pumping Iron, epistemically speaking

Increasing your power of reasoning tends to feel like pain.

But to the extent you learn to trust that the pain is worth it, it becomes less of a burden and more of a pleasure.

In Pumping Iron, Arnold famously said weightlifting felt as good as sex.

And like Arnold, you can exercise your willingness to be changed by new ideas, like a muscle.

Exercise

What group of people bothers you the most?

Conspiracy theorists? Leftists? Gold bugs?

• Imagine you agree with them, and then practice feeling the pain that arises.

Think of Twitter, your family, and your enemies as exposure therapy. You face the pain of potentially changing your mind, and you can decide truth is more important than avoiding that humiliation. But don’t worry too much:

1. Becoming willing to change your mind doesn’t mean you will. You might still think you’re right, after giving yourself the chance to be wrong.

2. If you do change your mind, you can always change it back if you don’t like it for some reason.

This experiment seems pretty low-risk — it just feels terrible. 😂

With that said, be smart — don’t hurt or traumatize yourself, or repress pain instead of feeling it. (Here’s more detail on how to safely and effectively feel emotions.)

Think of it like yoga. Stretch your mind until it hurts a little bit, lean into it a bit, breathe into it a bit, and then relax and repeat. The goal is to increase willingness, not to choke yourself on redpills.