Ugh fields

I experienced physical pain when reading about those bills and threatening letters, and I thus reading this took some hours in three parts. Still feeling uneasy just by having this tab open.

I wonder if this sort of reaction was what you were talking about?

It is a head trip to see a pet term for a quirk of behavior reflected back at me on the internet as an official name for a phenomenon. More interesting, this is the first I've ever heard of temporal difference learning or displacement activity being related to that idea... although both are interesting angles.

Personally, I think one of the areas where the term really shines is helping you get a handle on issues as a matter of dealing with "daily life" long before you become a "rationalist super being" or whatever. The framing of "ugh fields" lets you talk about issues in a way (1) that does not attribute any kind of essential badness to anyone, (2) that helps you adopt a scientifically curious orientation to the phenomenon, and (3) that has various reasonably helpful implications for management. Part of the term's value also came from being "helpfully ridiculous", because its not like a theory of "ugh fields" could even really be deeply true or anything, because as a model it is obviously too simple... so it was safe to use for a while and be very comfortable throwing away if a better theory comes along :-)

For example, the idea of an ugh field pretty blatantly runs afoul of the mind projection fallacy because the term functions as if there was a literal "field" around things due to a magical internal quality that gave these things the ability to trigger mental "effects" at a distance (according to an inverse square law?) - that somehow becomes negligible when you get far enough away but are able to tear you in half with tidal forces if the field is very large and you are very close.

The mind projection fallacy is a nice way to play with the ideas suggested by the term. For example, to what degree are ugh fields unworkable because of the mind projection fallacy? What would you expect to see based on "in the mind" versus "in the world" hypotheses? Pondering like this, it wouldn't be totally surprising if some things tended to systematically acquire ugh fields very for many people in a way that makes the mind projection fallacy a little bit less fallacious than naively expected. If there are stable patterns, then management tricks within specific domains, for specific kinds of objects, are likely to have a smaller number of more dramatic causes. Their management (or some kind of "cure"?) is more likely to be cross applicable... it opens up a potential area for the accumulation of domain specific inter-subjective wisdom. Like I bet dentists acquire ugh fields a lot, and I bet there exist useful tricks for staying positive specifically about your dentist.

I had issues with ugh fields in college (which is when I coined the term) but at this point, I sometimes use the "ugh feelings" as a sign of an opportunity to practice being conscientious, because they seem to commonly form where the value of information is really high if you can bring yourself to push through the field in one go... like scheduling a dentist appointment can be a really great deal if the value of information is high and the cost of the appointment is relatively low - especially taking into account the increased life expectancy via the cardiovascular health connection with oral health.

The more tricks I build up for managing or outwitting ugh fields, even in limited domains, the more I find them to be less of a problem. Skills for recognizing and managing them can help generate justifiable confidence based on having faced them squarely in the past with positive results. Confidence of this sort helps make it easier to face other ugh fields. For this reason I suspect its better to find and deal with some small ones before facing larger ones.

For example, with bills, many college kids fail to make payments in a timely fashion simply because they lack of stamps and envelopes "at hand". That can seed an ugh field... and then it snowballs. Bills are an area where I've never had serious ugh fields but I think that may be because I did things like buying a two year supply of stamps and envelopes before leaving for college (because my parents told me about this particular failure envelope/stamp mode in advance). This general class of problem (small and fixable with simple environmental modifications) would probably be a relatively easy win if people were looking for a "wamp rat" on which to start "leveling up" :-)

I suffer from this severely and pervasively, and was already aware of that before reading this post. So I just wanted to comment that your post fits spot-on with my experience. I tend to develop ugh fields around projects at work when I get stuck on them for awhile, and get emails from people asking when they will be done, and start to fear getting email about them at all, and then about thinking about them, and so on.

I have also gone through periods of 'ugh'ness centered on my voicemail box and my email inbox, each time when I knew or suspected they contained items likely to make me feel shittier about myself for whatever reason (e.g. reminding me about some thing I was in the process of failing to get done.)

I observed an ugh field today: making sandwiches.

Around lunch time, I announced I was going out to pick up some lunch.

'Why don't you just make a sandwich?'

I thought about touching slices of deli meat (are they fresh enough? how would I know?) and placing them on the bread (how many slices? how to arrange them?), a quick flurry of negative associations all jostled together, and the definite outcome of the decision was, "No, I'll just go pick something up."

"How about if I make the sandwiches?".

A roast beef sandwich toasted in the oven with melted cheese? Delicious! "Yes, please."

"You are so lazy!"

Lazy? I was willing to get in the car and drive somewhere and pick up food. Certainly making sandwiches would be less effort. But for whatever reasons, I've conditioned myself through rather irrational negative associations to avoid even thinking about making them.

This phenomenon you call Ugh Fields sounds like a less serious form of PTSD. While most people think PTSD is about constantly reliving the traumatic event, one of the most important symptoms is that the patient tries to avoid thinking through their trauma when it does come up.^[1] Something will trigger memory of their trauma, but then they'll force themselves to stop thinking about it while their mood suffers. One of the methods for treating PTSD ^[2] involves getting the patient to actually think seriously about the trauma that happened to them, talk it through out loud with somebody, and that confrontation with what they've constantly avoided helps them get over the negative conditioning.

I'm fairly certain both Ugh Fields and PTSD describe the same mental process just at different levels of severity

I have ugh fields about people.

That fact makes me really sad. I was aware of having formed some negative associations, and of shying away from certain social situations, but what you're describing pretty well matches what's going on: I've had unpleasant experiences with a given person in the past, leading to some evasion, which kept us a little bit distant, probably leading to more awkwardness ... and at this point, I almost literally flinch at the person's name. When it comes up in conversation with someone else, I feel unhappy, regardless of the context.

And we don't even dislike each other! We're actually pretty similar, we have good friends in common, and I think we'd get along pretty well if it weren't for the above. We've had some good times together.

I've tried to address this directly by making a point of spending time with the person and noticing that it's usually fine. But every once in a while it isn't, and then I retreat again. This suggests to me that it won't work until I address what causes the occasional discomfort, which I've also tried to do, so far without success. I wonder what to do next.

Here's my own little example.

I use a web-based newswire service for sending out press releases, and the process of submitting a release through them used to be a pain -- it required writing stupid confirmation emails with compulsory quotes from long, badly designed web pages, making choices from unexplained options I still don't understand, phone calls in the middle of the night due to Russia / US time zone difference and other annoyances.

Recently they have completely redesigned the submission process, and now it's a breeze -- easy, quick, even pleasant. I already submitted several releases via the new pipeline, but I still remain negatively conditioned by the previous experience -- I still flinch every time I prepare a release.

The 'flinch' seems to have faded a bit, perhaps thanks to my constant self-reminding that the new process is actually pleasant, but it's still there.

Key to this is framing the "take control" action as a "positive" outcome enabler will facilitate action, as Kaj and PJ have already told us.

Actually, positive framing doesn't help -- it just intensifies the conflict and the need for willpower.

What does help is fully engaging with the flinch in order to locate the center of the "ugh field". When training people, I look for the flinch and then immediately steer them towards it.. Avoiding the feeling, OTOH, ensures that you can't access any of the information that creates the feeling in the first place.

(If you've looked at the seventh chapter I sent you, you'll have seen both my advice to "lean into the pain" to "find the fence", as well as one method for dealing with the most overwhelming types of "ugh".)

I love this post.

The really depressing thing about my "ugh fields" is how they stop me from doing things that really aren't even difficult or time-consuming, like filling out a one-page form and putting it in the mail. On the other hand, this is just as likely to come up with things that may be difficult or time-consuming, but are in some sense 'fun' for me: for instance, I've found it steadily harder to buckle down and study as I've progressed through school, in a topic (mathematics) that I started in because it was fun for me.

I hope maybe having the phrase "ugh field" to associate to this, will remind me to do something about it. I'd like to say it will improve my life, but I'll have to go live some of my life for a while and see how improved it is.

I guess what I should do is make some sort of rule: When I encounter an Ugh Field, I should immediately do whatever thing it is I'm feeling the 'ugh' about.

I have to say, this and the previous post have significantly improved my life. I am really looking forward to any more posts along these lines.

I flinch every time I think about Ugh Fields. ;).

BTW, wondering why you chose to be so specific about TDL, rather than just saying 'reinforcement', which is a term both appropriate (IMHO) and easier to understand for broader group of people.

I'm surprised that nobody's pointed out the dual phenomenon of "yay fields", whereby a pleasurable stimulus's affect is transferred to its antecedents.

The field of behavior modification calls this "conditioning", and "higher-order conditioning" if the chain has more than two stimuli.

I'm presently trying to overcome ugh fields by giving myself chocolate every time I do something stressful. Will see how it goes.

The "usually involves comfort" link doesn't go anywhere.

Otherwise a good article; I like the name ugh field.

Reading this post triggered one. I'm going to stop thinking about it now.

I wish this were written in a way that would be more accessible to non-Less Wrong readers!

I believe the idiomatic use would be "TD learning" rather than "TDL". The only concrete evidence I can point to is that Wikipedia uses the former, and never the latter.

This is very similar to a basic phenomena described by Internal Family Systems (a psychotherapy model), i.e. 'parts' of our minds seek to protect us by 'generating ugh fields' when we think about certain things.

The first time I read this, a few things came to mind as possible ugh fields in my own mind, such as "borrowing/lending" or "making conversation", but on reflection my behavior isn't consistently ugh on these subjects.

A powerful ugh field I do seem to have, based on observations of my own past behavior, is one of imposition. Courses of action which involve imposing on another person are slow to even occur to me as options, which to my intuition seems more like what an Ugh Field would feel like from the inside, rather than a mere conscious reluctance. Even deliberately contemplating such courses of action seems to trip something in my brain that labels them "hypothetical-only" as if my brain has impose on another filed in the same category as teleport across the country or turn invisible.

I've been aware of various special cases of this Ugh Field in myself in a vague way for a while, but I'm now sure the general thing has been with me as far back as the single-digits even If I can't remember its cause(s). I don't know how to even begin to get rid of this one--my self-hacking skills have proven inadequate. The best I've managed is bending what my brain registers as imposition since I know my filter is set way to high, but have made only small progress. I still find it impossibly difficult to speak to a person who's attention is not already on me, and often catch myself going to ridiculous lengths to avoid making trivial requests. Why does my brain register intentionally drawing a person's attention as imposing on them?

I agree with your basic analysis of how the "ugh field" works, but I wouldn't be so quick to categorically label it as a problem - cultivating an "ugh field" could also be an effective anti-akrasia technique if honed properly. What if you manage to train your usual (wasteful) displacement activities to trigger the "ugh field", so that your new "displacement" activities become what you originally intended to do to begin with?

I'd like to think that I've encountered some success by basically doing this myself - I probably avoid seductive time-wasters just by having a visceral reaction of disgust for even considering them. It's not perfect, but it's a habit I think can be cultivated in the right direction.

Scott Alexander wrote a solid follow up to this piece last year. 

TLDR; the brain obviously wishes to avoid pain, but not at the cost of like, avoiding thinking about painful things at all costs. 

Like, you don't want to be eaten by a lion, so you avoid doing things that lead to you being eaten by lions. 

But this pain avoidance shouldn't compromise on your epistemics; you shouldn't go so far to avoid pain as to avoid thinking about lions at all. this doesn't work. 

This is potentially also what's going on with ugh fields. avoiding thinking about painful thoughts, as an overextension of pain-avoiding mechanisms of the brain. 

Thinking about ugh fields in this way helps me actually confront them far more reliably.

Most readers will agree the term "ugh fields" describes the avoidance part of basic procrastination. Finding an brand level scientific term for it with an emotional storytelling soundbite with only three letters is the part that needs to be acknowlegded here – kudos ... but flattery, ugh, read next article.

FYI, small typo I think:

and your lizard brain has fully cut you out out

This resonates slightly with the idea that Robert Pirsig put forward in either ZMM or Lila. I don't remember where, but I think it was ZMM.

His hypothesis out there was of course that there is a driving force of quality, which I guess would be rejected by most LW-ers. To be honest, I used to kind of believe in that thing and did identify with being spiritual, till I read the MAMQ sequence.

Nonetheless, I highly recommend both of these books. Pirsig beautifully demonstrates how the feeling , happens before the process of active cognition. If rationality is indeed aided by noticing things, then I think that Pirsig's work can be a big stepping stone in that direction.

The subtlety with the Ugh Field is that the flinch occurs before you start to consciously think about how to deal with the Unhappy Thing, meaning that you never deal with it, and you don't even have the option of dealing with it in the normal run of things. I find it frightening that my lizard brain could implicitly be making life decisions for me, without even asking my permission!

Relational frame theory is a theory of language cognition that attempts to explain this. The basic idea is that we form associations between thoughts, and when we think of an element in a relational network with another element that causes a painful emotional reaction (shaped as you describe), we have that flinch, even if the element we think we are reacting to is benign. And as you describe, this can lead to behavioral avoidance.

I'm currently in acceptance and commitment therapy which teaches you how to distance yourself from those thoughts and see them as language (and not the proverbial "tiger in the bush"). I'm not proselytizing (one of the more distasteful inclinations of a therapy patient), nor describing it in enough detail to be therapeutic, but I've found it much more helpful than straight cognitive or positive therapy.

Thanks for sharing the new name and/or new idea about this Ugh Field.

At first I skimmed your paper, but I soon decided to read it word-for-word.

As I read it, I scanned my memories (primarily of my life, but also of the lives of people I had known) looking through a filter for where the putative Ugh Field concept could increase my understanding of life.

What I have to report for now is I think I shall keep the idea in my head and wait until I see the Ugh (Barrier) "happening" to myself or someone else in real life. I like doing field experiments in the field of rationality.

My solution to ugh fields is to develop an ugh field around ugh fields...when I'm about to flinch away from something now, I feel a strong aversion towards that feeling and throw myself headlong into whatever it was I was trying to avoid.

I think these ugh fields are typicall called "repressed memories". You are providing an explanation for them, saying that they are caused by conditioning (classical or operant? I am not sure.)

if the soil of the "ugh field" is stress, which produces the classic (and sometimes irrational) neuroendrocrine cascade within seconds, then this lecture may prove helpful ~ 'Stress, Neurodegeneration and Individual Differences' by Robert Sapolsky http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1877467554618436978#

from the The Grass Traveling Scientist Program ~ Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky, Stanford University's Dept. of Biological Sciences in a seminar sponsored by the Dept. of VCAPP and the Northern Rocky Mtn. Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience.

There are things one should not just accept and absorb and they are those things that harm others or are incompatible withe the other person having the same freedoms as you

I think these ugh fields are typically called "repressed memories". You are providing an explanation for them, saying that they are caused by conditioning (classical or operant? I am not sure.)