I really like the A B U model, but I have some issues with it
Overly generic/not self-describing
If you’re talking to someone who has grokked the model, then it’s super efficient. “Oh, that’s an A”. They’re all a single syllable innit, very clean
At the Effective Altruism hotel, I did 2 presentations about the model, so I could kind of say “oh nice, that’s an A” in conversation to a few people, but it was very much a tongue-in-cheek thing that became more “oh haha Alex still likes the A/B/U model” - the model didn’t click for most people (one person got super excited about it which was super cool, a neuroscience PhD so much higher p(is very excited about metacognition) - as such, you could say that the model was a “U” for most people
I guess this is just a complaint of “wah, brand-new-model uses terminology that most people don’t know”. But idk, A & B & U are absolutely not self-describing by design, and that has tradeoffs
What if it was like “Update” vs “Empirical Truth” vs “Unknown”, idk, spitballing. This does point to how nice and clean A/B/U are. “That’s a B”
Really it’s like, “A” = update, that’s clean, but B = like, “something-that-is-true-in-my-model”, or “provisional truth” or “Popperian truth” or something, which is of course too word. And U is like, “unable-to-verify-either-way”
Depends on the telos, basically
Do you want a specialised, clean, efficient language for your tiny group of people who get it?
Do you want the language to be self-describing such that it spreads?
Annoying to type
Slashes
I write it as “the A/B/U model” and often say it out loud as “the A slash B slash U model” (which tbf I’m realising I could totally just say “A B U model”)
The use of / is annoying, and doesn’t work in e.g. Obsidian file names
ABU (ab-oo?)
Maybe I should just call it the ABU model from now on. Problem there is that it can cause people to read/pronounce it as the “Ab-oo” model”, and I like how A/B/U makes it very clear that these 3 things are uhh… ontologically distinct entities, am I using that term right?
Pluralisation
It also doesn’t pluralise well: As and Us can of course be read as As as in as (lol), and Us as in the two of us who are confused about if A/B/U model should be improved or not
Appendix: On the model landing as a “U”
This isn’t a fault of the model of course, it’s totally natural for things to land as “U”s, and the model explains this
“Oh, isn’t this just super obvious stuff? This isn’t new information”
My retort is that yes of course A and B and U are not at all pointing at novel mechanisms, but it’s novel to have clean labels for each thing, to treat the act of not-getting (for example) as an interesting and point-to-able event that can then be acted on/investigated
Got this retort from the Executive Director at the hotel who was very not-impressed by the model (“they’re acting as if they’re describing something new, this is so basic”)
(As such, the “yes I know these aren’t novel ideas but isn’t it exciting that this gives clean language to point to these ~mental phenomena???” lands as a U to them, or like, they don’t have that thought. Vs me and the neuroscientist did, when we read the model. We had a sense of “ooh I wanna grok this” so paid attention and connected the dots with stuff already in our model, etc)
Ok uh… who cares?
A “U” is often the case because the thing just isn’t salient to the person. “I don’t care about this”. Could be because they’ve already hella-grokked it (e.g. I described Gendlin’s Focusing to a friend recently who is so skilled at somatic experienced that Focusing appeared as a move to basic that it wasn’t notable, and I had to tell them that this was once cutting edge information for me)
Or, it could be a “U” because this whole line-of-inquiry is just not at all interesting to the person. Like, me and the neuroscientist are very excited about learning and meta-cognition so this is super compelling, but if you’re e.g. an interior designer you’ll be like “why tf would I care about this”, in the same way that if you told me something you’ve just realised 5 years into being an interior designer I’d be like “dude what on earth”
This is also described by the model, it’s the thing of not having the A floor necessary to evaluate the new information