Rational feelings: a crucial disambiguation

That is, can we employ learned optimism techniques to improve our chances of winning, while still working to improve our rationality?

If you expand "rationality" to mean "improving our chances of winning", you'll notice that you just asked "can we improve our chances of winning while working to improve our improving our chances of winning?"

To which I would say, "I should certainly hope so." ;-)

That having been said, I've in the last few months decided that the direct concept of learned optimism is bunk. Or more precisely, it's based on an error in reasoning.

Specifically, reversed stupidity is not necessarily intelligence, and reversed learned helplessness is not necessarily healthy confidence. Also, just because confident people produce certain patterns in the output of their thinking, it does not necessarily mean that mimicking those outputs will produce the same internal states.

Yes, Seligman has some research on those points. However, his training methods call for essentially rote repetition of thought disputation until something "clicks" for you; AFAICT, there is no way to predict just how much disputation you will have to do in order to actually change your inner experience. In effect, there is a faith-based exhortation that sufficient repetition will bring about changes.

In contrast, I've found that by focusing on removing learned helplessness instead, the click to positivity is natural. I (and others) automatically begin seeing the positives in an area of action that was previously restricted. And instead of having to continually have the negative thoughts arise in order to be disputed, getting rid of the helplessness simply switches off the negative thoughts in that context, from that point forward.

I contend, therefore, that "learned optimism" is a nonentity, as optimism and confidence are the natural state. Helplessness can be learned and unlearned, and must be unlearned in order to experience actual optimism or confidence. Practicing optimism skills may eventually lead you to stumble on an unlearning of some bits of your helplessness, or not. But directing your attention to identifying and removing the specific bits of helplessness pays off in a much more predictable and permanent fashion.

(tl;dr: optimism good, learned optimism conceptually flawed, eliminate learned helplessness ftw.)

My "good future prospects" definitely covers your "anticipation of a result".

Good point; I just was using a slightly different meaning of "anticipation" than the one implied by the context of, "grounded in reality - caused by perceiving ... good future prospects".

In that sense of "anticipation", the mental activity is passive -- perceiving that something good is already going to happen, by projecting from current circumstances.

In the sense I meant, the activity is active -- you intentionally create a sense of anticipation for something that has no "grounding in reality" and is not "caused by perceiving". (Indeed, in the ideal case, it is entirely ungrounded in current perceptual reality, so as to be based solely upon one's intentions.)

If times are tough, perhaps a negative enough feeling about them will encourage me to pursue drastic change or effort.

As soon as you've felt bad long enough to notice there's a problem, the emotion ceases to provide you with any new information.

And the more complex or stressful the course of action required to change the circumstances, the more counterproductive a continuing negative emotion will likely be.

Essentially, our negative emotion systems were evolved to handle short-term emergencies (e.g. being stalked or chased by a predator) and seasonal-or-longer resource pressures like food shortages. These kinds of situations either require immediate but short term action, or else a passive strategy of energy conservation, resource hoarding, and risk-avoidance.

So, if the thing you're feeling bad about isn't an immediate emergency, or won't be helped by passive inaction, a negative emotion will hurt more than it helps. (And most people's goals, most of the time, aren't helped by passive inaction!)

The "but maybe negative feelings will motivate me" idea is just plain wrong, in precisely the same way that "but death is a natural part of life" is wrong. It's socially-cached sour grapes.

People think negative emotion makes sense because a person who holds power over you can get you to do things with it. But there's still a high cost to your effectiveness in that case (narrowed focus, lower creativity, greater stress, etc.), and if you try to apply it to yourself, it has some rather nasty failure modes.

(Worse, sometimes, these negative motivations can be stealthy; i.e., you don't really realize that the "carrot" you're dangling for yourself is just a stick in disguise. Hence my saying that "what pushes you forward, holds you back" -- i.e. anything you use to try to get yourself to do something, is a disguised "stick". Positive motivation doesn't feel like you're trying to motivate yourself at all - you just are motivated.)

" The negative consequences if I turn out to be wrong seem insignificant - oh no, I tried to deceive myself about my ability to feel differently than I do!"

Repression anyone? I think directly telling yourself, "I don't feel that way, I feel this way!" can be extremely harmful, since you are ignoring important information in the original feeling. You are likely to express your original feelings in some less direct, more destructive, and of course less rational way if you do this. A stereotypical example is that of a man deciding that he should not feel angry that he did not get a promotion at work and then blowing up at his wife for not doing the dishes properly. Maybe there is nothing to actually be angry about, and screaming at his boss certainly wouldn't accomplish anything, but ignoring the feeling as invalid is almost certain to end badly.

I think Alicorn is suggesting that if you attempt to understand why you have the feelings you do, and if these reasons don't make sense, your feelings will likely change naturally without the need to artificially apply different ones.

As for making up stories about how my dumb emotional self arrived at an irrational belief, that sounds like fun, but I'm not sure how much I'd be confident that I had the right story. I've heard pjeby promote the idea (and even claim that he can deduce what's going on in his clients' heads). But I suppose if these stories work (get you to change your feelings) then there's also little harm.

Actually, you point up a big issue in what I have to teach people: how not to make up stories, but rather to simply observe the sounds and images that flash through their heads in response to a mental inquiry. Invariably, these bits of information are not particularly logical or verbally sophsticated, unlike the information that comes from the "making up stories" bit of your brain.

Instead, the truthful information is usually childish, paradoxical, or downright ridiculous. A common reaction upon seeing these things is to go, "Are you kidding me? That's what this is about? I've spent how many years doing/feeling this stupid thing because of that?"

(Ideally, that's all there is to it - the feeling stops there. But sometimes, you realize that you still believe the stupid thing anyway, even though you know how stupid it is. That then requires a bit more work to construct alternatives, the way Eliezer eliminated his fear of the lurking serial killer.)

Anyway, as I tell people, if you're not at least a little surprised, confused, or ashamed by what you discover when you do RMI, you're almost certainly making it up yourself - using the apologist instead of the revolutionary, so to speak. Shut up and ask the question again, then watch, wait, and listen for the answer.