Humans Don't Lack Operating Instructions. They Lack a Way to See Which Instructions They're Actually Running
People aren't short on advice, principles, or stated values to guide their behavior — most have a reasonably clear sense of the instructions they intend to be operating under. What's actually missing is a reliable way to see which instructions are governing their behavior in practice, as distinct from the ones they'd state if asked directly.
The stated instructions and the operating instructions diverge more often than people expect, and the divergence is invisible from the inside precisely because self-report and actual behavior are assessed through different mechanisms — one is a conscious articulation, the other is a pattern extractable only by watching what actually gets repeated across real situations.
This reframes a lot of behavior that looks like a lack of self-knowledge as something more specific: not an absence of principles to live by, but an absence of visibility into which principles are actually running the show, moment to moment, regardless of which ones would be cited in conversation.
What's missing isn't operating instructions. It's an accurate readout of the instructions already in effect — which requires observing behavior across enough instances to extract the actual rule, rather than asking the person to introspect their way to an answer their own behavior is the only reliable source for.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai