Striving to Accept

Actually, as you noticed -- but didn't notice that you noticed -- no "striving" is actually required. What happened was simply that you had to translate abstract knowledge into concrete knowledge.

In each of the examples you gave, you created a metaphor or context reframe, based on imagining some specific sensory reality.

Because the emotional, "action", or "near" brain doesn't directly "get" conceptual abstractions. They have to be translated back into some kind of sensory representation first, and linked to the specific context where you want to change your (emotional/automatic) expectations.

A great example of one of the methods for doing this, is Byron Katie's book, "Loving What Is" -- which is all about getting people to emotionally accept the facts of a situation, and giving up their "shoulds". Her approach uses four questions that postulate alternative realities, combined with a method of generating counterexamples ("turnarounds", she calls them), which, if done in the same sort of "what if?" way that you imagined your friendly ghosts and probabilistic knife killers, produce emotional acceptance of a given reality -- i.e., "loving what is".

Hers is far from the only such method, though. There's another approach, described by Morty Lefkoe in "Recreate Your Life", which uses a different set of questions designed to elicit and re-interpret your evidence for an existing emotional belief. Robert Fritz's books on the creative process demonstrate yet another set of questioning patterns, although not a formalized one.

And rational-emotive therapy, "learned optimism", and cognitive-behavior therapy all have various questions and challenges of their own. (And I freely borrow from all of them in my client work.)

Of course, it's easy to confuse these questioning patterns with logical arguments, and trying to convince yourself (or others) of something. But that not only misses the point, it doesn't work. The purpose of questions like these is to get you to imagine other possibilities -- other evidential interpretations and predictions -- in a sensory way, in a specific sensory context, to update your emotional brain's sensory prediction database.

In other words, to take abstractions from the "far" brain, and apply them to generate new sensory data for the "near" brain to process.

Viewed in this way, there's no need to "struggle" -- you simply need to know what the hell you're doing. That is, have an "inside view" of the relationship between the "near" and "far" brains.

In other words, something that every rationalist should have. A rationalism that can't fix (or at least efficiently work around) the bugs in its own platform isn't very useful for Winning.

Struggle and striving is a sign of confusion, not virtue. We need to understand the human platform, and program it effectively, instead of using up our extremely limited concentration and willpower by constantly fighting with it.

This "trying to believe" tactic is much more explicitly used in areas where there is randomness or unpredictability.

My business is finance. As a financial advisor, I am constantly "trying to believe" in things like regression to the mean, long term performance of the market vs. short term volatility, the efficacy of asset allocation.

But each day I am faced with evidence that causes me to doubt my rationally held beliefs about investing.

I think baseball players may have similar issues with batting. They may rationally know that it's only practice and talent that improve their performance, but they still notice that when they where the red underwear they hit better. So they may be "trying to believe" that the red underwear doesn't really affect their batting behavior.

As with many of the issues we raise, this all boils down to having a brain that's made of multiple systems each trying to do something a little different. We have a pattern matching part of our brain and we have our prefrontal cortex, theorizing about the world.

Sometimes these systems can be in conflict.

Hope this contributes to the discussion.

David

This is one of my favorite topics, more so than the usual topics of rationalism perhaps, and I've thought about it a lot. How can we best believe things we accept? The other day I was out running and the moon was large and visible in the daylight. I was looking up at it and thinking to myself, "If people really understood what the moon was, what the stars are, what Earth is, could they go on living the way they do? If I really, genuinely knew these were other places, could I go on living the way I do?" This is, perhaps, too romantic a view of things. But it illustrates my point: we really do accept very profound things without ever truly making them part of our person. It's not just the absence of ghosts and other supernatural entities we have difficulty with but the presence of many phenomena outside our usual experience.

Paul Churchland's early work, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, has a great illustration of this. Churchland's mentor was the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars who developed a distinction between the "scientific image" of the world and its common sense "manifest image." Churchland's approach is to give the scientific image preeminence. He wants science to replace common sense. This larger project was the background to his more familiar eliminative materialism (which seeks to replace folk psychology with a peculiar connectionist account of the brain). While most of the work is quite technical there are some excellent passages on how we could achieve this replacement. He discusses the way we still talk of the sun rising and setting, for example, and uses a particular diagram to show how one can reorient oneself to really appreciate the fact that we're a planet orbiting a star.

I've tried to post the diagram here:

http://s5.tinypic.com/zinh38.jpg (before we reorient ourselves)

http://s5.tinypic.com/2akfoll.jpg (after we reorient ourselves)

I don't have the descriptive text at hand but for me what the diagrams illustrate is a particular approach to science that I think Eliezer shares, more or less, which is that we should try to incorporate science deeply into the way we inhabit the world. I suppose that, to me, is a major part of what rationality is or should be: How can we best live that which we have until now merely accepted as fact?

I think this post and the related ones are really hitting home why it is hard for our minds to function fully rationally at all times. Like Jon Haidt's metaphor that our conscious awareness is akin to a person riding on top of an elephant, our conscious attempt at rational behavior is trying to tame this bundle of evolved mechanisms lying below 'us'. Just think of the preposterous notion of 'telling yourself' to believe or not believe in something. Who are you telling this to? How is cognitive dissonance even possible?

I remember the point when I finally abandoned my religious beliefs as a kid. I had 'known' that belief in a personal god and the religious teachings were incompatible with rational thinking yet I still maintained my irrational behavior. What did the trick was to actually practice and live strictly for a set period of time only appropriately to what my rational beliefs allowed. After some number of days, I was finally completely changed and could not revert back to my state of contradiction.

In relation to this, think about why you can't just read a math book and suddenly just get it (at least for us non math geniuses). You may read an equation and superficially understand that it is true, but you can still convince yourself otherwise or hold conflicted beliefs about it. But then, after doing examples yourself and practicing, you come to 'know' the material deeply and you can hardly imagine what it is like not to know it.

For people like the girl Eliezer was talking to, I wonder what would happen if you told her, as an experiment, to force herself to totally abandon her belief in god for a week, only adhering to reason, and see how she feels.

I hadn't thought about a normative aspect to the skeptics' fear of ghosts, but after reading this post I acknowledge that there is one. I commit to fighting irrational fears from now on.

I read with interest all of the specific techniques proposed on this thread and welcome more. I'd be particularly interested if anyone had theories of or techniques against akrasia, the general inability of the mind to follow through on what it knows to be right.

I just earlier today used the same quantum viewpoint. I was thinking "I really wish I had a lot of money, I ought to play the lottery, there is some chance." I factually know this is nonsense. I was able to make that intuitive by transforming "a chance of winning" into "a huge spread of worlds with a few rare winners". I will both win and not-win, but most of me doesn't win - that's just not a good result.

The desire to play the lottery went away.

One drawback of using the word 'accept' in this context is that it brings to mind (at least for me) phrases like "accept Jesus into your heart."

The hurdle here (and it seems like a common hurdle of rationality in general) is that our rational, conscious brain doesn't control our behavior, but seems to act as more of a 'guide' for the other, deeper structures of our brain, and makes sure they're running smoothly. It can take over in a pinch and temporarily override the output of another structure, but it can't run things constantly; the costs are just too high.

The best it can do is try to 'push' behavior down into the lower structures. But this is hard to do; you can't tell yourself 'don't be afraid of ghosts' anymore than you can tell yourself 'send more dopamine to my pleasure center'. We don't control these parts of our brain, we can only offer 'suggestions' to them.

Strive to accept. I like the phrase. I prefer to reserve 'believe' for 'that which I would draw on a map were I getting paid for every right answer' while acceptance tends to take a whole lot more time

How related is this to the skill of "biting bullets", of accepting the unintuitive consequences of one's theories? (Robin Hanson is good at this; most memorably when he came out in support of a height tax as a consequence of optimal taxation theory) I had thought that a good rationalist should eat bullets for breakfast, but it seems to me now that this phenomenon is closer to what we should seek out. It occurs to me that sometimes your intuition is telling you important things.

We really need to distinguish between a belief, and an idea that creates a strong emotional reaction in us.

Plenty of people know and believe that smoking is incredibly harmful, but that doesn't motivate them to stop smoking. Plenty of people know and believe that there are no ghosts, but that doesn't stop them from being scared when they walk past a graveyard.

What people here are discussing seems overwhelmingly to be methods for retraining your emotions, not altering beliefs.

What I don't see mentioned is the fact that roots of the fear of 'bump-in-the-dark' is an instinctive reaction that is programmed deep in our genes from a time when it was a survival trait. Ghosts, spirits and other supernatural explanations are only a cultural veneer.

While one can use reason to dismiss those explanations, it's not necessarily going to convince one's limbic system that there is nothing to worry about.

In my childhood, I cured myself of the fear of the dark by thinking:

There are a lot of people who consider fear of the dark to be irrational. IMHO it's simply an adaptation to the primivitve environment where nightly predators abounded. The fact is, our vision is not that good in the dark so personally I think having that fear is still a useful adaptation that I want to keep in place.

Btw, I once heard one police officer commenting that at the night, robbers and muggers consistently choose dark, lone areas to prey on their victims, so there you have it.

I have difficulty accepting that certain theorems of calculus are true, when I recall them, I'm always uncertain and check to make sure they're right, wasting valuable time.

Eliezer, have you ever seen a hypnosis show, or been hypnotized yourself? Hypnosis is very much related to self-deception and "doublethink"; it seems to me as though it is, at least in part, a way of using one's higher level functions to tell one's perceptual systems to shut up and do what they're told, to shut off various levels of fact-checking.

Why would a rationalist want to overrule one's senses and critical facilities? Well, for one, turning off pain is frequently desirable, and it could be something fun to do in the bedroom... in general, it might be useful in any situation in which your brain isn't doing what you want it to do.

being afraid to enter a graveyard is rational from the ancestral perspective. dead bodies attract disease. before our ancestors understood what disease was they probably attributed it to the ghosts of the dead haunting the living.