Training Regime Day 15: CoZE

post by Mark Xu (mark-xu) · 2020-02-29T17:13:42.685Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

Contents

  Introduction
  Finding your comfort zone
  Find tests for your beliefs
  Exercise
None
3 comments

Note: this is going to be short because I spent some time doing COVID-19 preparations [LW · GW], which I encourage you do to also. I think that it is better for my commitment to post at least one thing a day, even if it's bad. I anticipate heavily revising this later, when I have more time.

Introduction

CoZE stands for Comfort Zone Expansion. The model is that people have a lot of beliefs about themselves and due to things like positive bias [LW · GW], some non-trivial chunk of these beliefs haven't ever been tested.

The goal of CoZE is to take beliefs about yourself and test them experimentally, both making your identity smaller and discovering new things about yourself. Remember to try things [LW · GW].

Finding your comfort zone

The first step is to find your comfort zone. You should take 10 minutes and write down all of the beliefs that you have about yourself. You should include "obvious" things to avoid stopping idea generation.

My list included:

  1. I don't like dancing
  2. I'm slightly more attractive than average, but not that attractive
  3. I'm only slightly socially awkward
  4. I'm bad at singing
  5. I'm OK at writing

Find tests for your beliefs

An idea test for one of your beliefs should make you say "ugh fine." A test is too weak if you don't react emotionally to it. A test is too strong if it makes you go "ahhhhhhh".

For example, if I wanted to test "I'm not good at dancing", I might take a single beginner's dance class. I wouldn't want to go to a party and start dancing in front of everyone I knew. I also wouldn't want to take an advanced dance class.

It is important that you're fair to your belief. If I wanted to test "I'm bad at singing", then I should pick an easy song that I enjoy to try singing, I shouldn't pick a really hard song to sing. The test should actually behave differently depending on whether or not the belief is true. I might sing a hard song badly even if I'm good at singing.

Exercise

Find one of the beliefs that you found above, devise a test for it, and do the test.

3 comments

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comment by Xanoxis (xanoxis) · 2024-12-07T17:47:18.524Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Very off-topic, but, dancing doesn’t even require going to any classes. One can learn it by listening to music, learning rhythm from it, and moving body, snapping fingers. 

Kinda similar to the idea of babbling and pruning. Snapping fingers (multiple ones from different fingers in row if needed) and moving body is kind of babbling, while music and felt sense how ‘off’ you are to the rhythm, are pruning.

Songs are often also connected to certain way of feeling. There are sad songs, angry songs, feeling joyful songs… etc. That can guide the way of movement during dancing as well, or even help connect to the emotions better in general.

It takes quite a bit of time to get good at this, though. But once muscles and body connects the wires, the fingers can kind of ‘translate’ the rhythm, and what needs to move to each part, shoulders, legs, etc. For me it’s one huge felt sense in general, but I could swear I can sense different parts of the songs and where they fit into body parts, like bass being usually suited rhythm for feet movements. The beauty of dancing is though, that you don’t even need to put it anywhere specific. Each song can be danced in any way you want anyways, and only you decide how to do it in the end. 

comment by Robert Lasch · 2024-12-17T19:53:13.236Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for writing this Sequence! It is immensely helpful to have actionable advice like this for putting rationality to practice.

I am confused about the purpose of this technique though:

The goal of CoZE is to take beliefs about yourself and test them experimentally, both making your identity smaller and discovering new things about yourself. Remember to try things.

Making one‘s identity smaller and discovering new things seem somewhat contradictory. Wouldn‘t discovering new things make one‘s identify larger? Reading the name of the technique, I initially thought that it would be about getting rid of negative and self-limiting beliefs about yourself (and this also matches with the given examples), but the paragraph quoted above does not quite seem to match with this.

Am I missing something here?

Replies from: mark-xu
↑ comment by Mark Xu (mark-xu) · 2024-12-18T22:02:26.865Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yeah I didn’t really use good words. I mean something more like “make your identity fit yourself better” which often involves making it smaller by removing false beliefs about constraints, but also involves making it larger in some ways, eg uncovering new passions.