Noticing the Taste of Lotus

I really don't relate to the externalization people use about "lotus-eating", like, "Facebook is making me addicted, even though I want to be productive." Implicitly that means the "real" me is into "good" meaningful stuff. And that's not how it feels. It feels like I have very strong drives towards the bad stuff (like "contacting exes to annoy them") and Facebook is just a tool that enables me to do what I want, which is why I deleted my account a year ago, because some of my wants harm other people. But the wanting is mine.

In fact, sometimes I feel like "I want to do something cravey but I don't have anything cravey to do!" That comes up pretty often, tbh: food is only cravey when I'm hungry, videogames and shopping do nothing for me, I quit social media, etc.

I thought I'd add a few quick notes as the author.

As I reread this, a few things jump out for me:

• I enjoy its writing style. Its clarity is probably part of why it was nominated.
• I'd now say this post is making a couple of distinct claims:
• External forces can shape what we want to do. (I.e., there are lotuses.)
• It's possible to notice this in real time. (I.e., you can notice the taste of lotuses.)
• It's good to do so. Otherwise we find our wanting aligned with others' goals regardless of how they relate to our own.
• If you notice this, you'll find yourself wanting to spit out lotuses that you can tell pull you away from your goals.
• I still basically agree with the content.
• I think the emotional undertone is a little confused, says the version of me about 19 months later.

That last point is probably the most interesting to meta-reviewers, so I'll say a little about that here.

The basic emotional backdrop I brought in writing this was something like, "Look out, you could get hijacked! Better watch out!" And then luckily there's this thing you can be aware of, to defend yourself against one more form of psychic/emotional attack. Right?

I think this is kind of nuts. It's a popular form of nuts, but it's still nuts.

Looking at the Duolingo example I gave, it doesn't address the question of why those achievements counted as a lotus structure for me. There are tons of things others find have lotus nature that I don't (e.g., gambling). And vice versa: my mother (who's an avid Duolingo user) couldn't care less about those achievements.

So what gives?

I have a guess, but I think that's outside the purview of the purpose of these reviews. I'll just note that "We're in a worldwide memetic war zone where everyone is out to get us by hijacking our minds!" is (a) not the hypothesis to default to and (b) if true is itself a questionable meme that seems engineered to stimulate fight-or-flight type reactions that do, indeed, hijack clarity of mind.

With all that said, I still think there's a ton of value in "noticing the taste of lotus" as the title suggests. It's pointing out where we're more likely to believe our motivations are getting diverted from our goals if we were to notice.

It's just that, about a year and a half later, I now reflect on this being a very basic entry point to a much more interesting question.

In particular, this "hijacking" is basically how culture works from what I can tell. Is culture wicked? Or is it benevolent? Or is it a mix? How can we tell whether the reasoning faculties we're using to work out these puzzles are themselves "hijacked" by having been immersed in a culture of lotus-eaters?

From what I've been able to see for myself and reason about, I think you can't answer those questions from within the framework that's asking them. It's too fear-based. "Fear-based" isn't inherently bad, but when the fear isn't acknowledged as the base then you can basically guarantee that the thinking isn't clear. (As Carl Jung said: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it 'fate'.")

A few relatively minor notes that I imagine y'all would find relevant:

• I went back to Duolingo a few months ago. I'm even using the achievements a bit. I just worked out a way to have the "lotus nature" work toward my goals with French.
• I made a minor edit to the article, changing a single letter to correct the grammar ("build" to "built").

I was surprised that this post ever seemed surprising, which either means it wasn't revolutionary, or was *very* revolutionary. Since it has 229 karma, seems like it was the latter. I feel like the same post today would have been written with more explicit references to reinforcement learning, reward, addiction, and dopamine. The overall thesis seems to be that you can get a felt sense for these things, which would be surprising - isn't it the same kind of reward-seeking all the way down, including on things that are genuinely valuable? Not sure how to model this.

I'd been watching an improv comedy show on YouTube for some time. A family member walked past, and feeling somewhat embarrassed, I switched to an entertaining maths video. Pretty much immediately a wave of tiredness hit me, so much so I had to rest my head on my arms.

The lotus nature of the videos meant I had been ignoring my need for sleep for at least an hour.

I think lotus eating requires a lack of awareness. You feel that quiet tension, as if something's a little off. But once you're in, game over.

This is a good post.

One thing I would add is that susceptibility to “lotuses” (a.k.a. Skinner boxes, in the context of games) seems to vary interpersonally quite a bit.

For example, I:

• don’t have a Facebook account
• don’t own a smartphone
• don’t play Zynga-esque games
• don’t browse Youtube
• am actively turned off by “collectible” games, and never play them

The increasingly complete conversion of World of Warcraft from a glorified IRC server with pretty pictures into a series of elaborate Skinner boxes is what made me stop playing.

Now, I could claim that this is because I’m very good at noticing these things, and also have a heroic amount of willpower, but that ain’t so; I just find these things naturally repellent (a website having “achievements” or any other sort of “gamification” is one of the best ways to ensure that I will close the window within moments).

I don’t know to what extent this is “innate”. Part of it may be my field of study / work (knowing “how the sausage is made”, so to speak). Whether that’s causal, or downstream, I can’t say.

But, clearly, there’s considerable variation.

Update, five years later: I’ve been asked whether I still endorse the recommendations in comment, whether I still don’t do any of these things, etc.

The answer is yes. Nothing has changed. I still don’t have a Facebook (or Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram…) account, still don’t own a smartphone, still don’t browse YouTube, etc., etc. (I’ve felt no temptation to alter this state of affairs, and find all of the above-described things just as repellent now as I did then.)

Scott wonders how anyone could ever find this surprising. I think it's like many things - the underlying concept is obviously there once you point it out, but it's easier not to think about or notice it, and easier not to have a model of what's going on beyond a vague sense that it is there and that this counts as the virtuous level of noticing.

My sense over time of how important this is gets bigger, not smaller, and I see almost no one properly noticing the taste of the Lotus. So this seems like one of the most important posts.

This reminds me a bit of my technique [LW · GW] for becoming aware of intentions. Lotus-nature, or want-grabbiness, feels like a thing once you learn to notice it. Learning to notice it gives you powers you didn't have before you crystalized the concept and paid attention to it. The same goes for being aware of inner intentions, and, perhaps more importantly, their absence. (For example, if you find yourself vaguely disgusted with yourself for having browsed Facebook for an hour, but you cultivate a sense of your intentions, then you start automatically noticing that the primary reason you're still doing it is that you haven't bothered to formulate an intention to do anything else, so inertia wins by default.) I think there are a number of mental phenomena that we feel controlled by because we never actually notice them in detail. It's a bit like training peripheral vision. You can't train it until you notice it's a thing to be trained.

There's an awesome fictional metaphor of this that's really off-color. The online sex humor comic Oglaf has a two-page bit where the poor teased apprentice ends up so very much wanting a pinecone that he does some NSFW things he clearly would rather not have to do. I'll make you do a bit of work to find it though so you can only blame yourself if you don't like what you see there: oglaf dot com slash pinecone

I find this gets easier if you give yourself permission to eat lotuses if you want to. Then I don’t have to lie to myself about whether I am or not. I can just play Alto’s Adventure, or clear out my email, or whatever, and it’s fine. I just pay attention to the actual consequences — including the impact on what I later find myself wanting to do.

I examined this sentence for awhile, because it confused me. Then I noticed the difference in our experience:

It gets easier for you when you give yourself permission to do it when you want to, because you're in a world where, for the most part, you expect the world to also give you that permission.

Most of my orientation to the world has taught me that even if I WANTED to eat lotuses, the world would do its damnedest to stop me - which means that my brain has only received intermittent rewards from lotus-eating.

This means that something deep in my brain treats every opportunity to eat lotuses as a dice roll that may or may not actually provide hedons, and decides that the only way I'll ever get hedons is if I TAKE EVERY OPPORTUNITY GIVEN ON THE CHANCE THAT MAYBE THIS ONE WILL WORK.

I didn't design this system, but that seems to be its current configuration.

Anyway, this is just to point out that this strategy is only going to work in certain circumstances (high abundance and low existential stress), and is unlikely to work from an externally-reinforced scarcity mindset.

Curated this post for:

• Pointing to an effect which can easily cause one to get sidetracked from their goals, while simultaneously feeling that they are on track to their goals.
• Being very readable and having good structure with lots of additional examples.

Is delicious food also a lotus? Clearly, it doesn't make your life better after you've eaten it, and that seem to be the criteria you use. But on the other hand, nobody says "I'm quitting delicious food", the same way they often say "I'm quitting facebook".

My point is that there is nothing inherently wrong with arbitrary pleasures that don't improve your life. The problem is when you develop compulsions. There seems to be a difference between simple desire and compulsive desire.

Promoted to frontpage.

In the past, I've run into a problem where if I start giving up on lotuses in general, I start losing motivation to do anything at all.

Also, mediocre video games suddenly become a lot more appealing when I have work to avoid. :)

This post, and the subsequent comment by Sarah Constantin, really juxtaposed the concept of people who view themselves at war, with good and bad desires, and people who view themselves as at peace, with multiple desires which have different effects on their lives.

If I could nominate the post and comment together, I would.

I get this IRL with people's faces. I want to keep looking at someone to see whether or not they *approve*.

There's a flip side to this, where I notice that if I play a video game, or watch a tv show, I have the sense that I am going to be punished for *getting up and leaving the game*. That exiting the approval system of the game will draw the game's ire.

When I notice lotus-taste, I also look for an expected punishment. I also find that that is helpful, because the expected punishment is somehow easier to source as coming from within me.

In fact, I can feel this right now --- it seems like by typing more words I'm pressing a button on a video game console, and I know that when I go away from this post I'll feel fear.

I think an important point here and with noticing a lot of things in general, is that the taste of lotus is somatically present - you can feel it in your body. I think that if one practices becoming attuned to the physical sensations in your body then a lot of things become available to Noticing. There is just *so much* that goes on in the body when you do things. This is a generalization of a key insight of Focusing - it's not just beliefs that you can get a handle on through your body. Action and decision are present there too (initiate the action of touching a hot stove or the soup in someone else's bowl and see what happens; compare "reach for that pen" with "stand up and do a backflip"; the Alexander Technique deals with objects in this layer too). In particular, the pull of the social web can be felt here, as well as a lot of social stuff in the moment like status (see Impro).

This post provides a useful conceptual handle for zooming on what's actually happening when I get distracted, or procrastinate. Noticing this feeling has been a helpful step in preventing it.

I liked this post, because it reminded me of how virtuous I am for breaking free of the useless distractions I've broken free of!

I agree that this is something you can learn to notice and avoid. I find myself a little allergic to these things such that gamification actually feels repulsive. I tried out Pokemon Go recently, and it was terrifying how the game was set up, such that all your actions gave you little boosts, and the tapping led to bubbles, which burst and gave you colored points, etc.

There's something very much about being "in the thrall" of one of these traps, where you can get sucked in. I think the "one more X" mentality also captures a good part of this (where X is food, porn, videos, games, etc.)

I am in Duolingo learning French, and the one thing I am trying to keep is the "streak", i.e. the long uninterrupted chain of attendance days.

In fact, I am allowed to skip a day or two, if I pay by gems I earned before. (I also regularly earn more gems by constantly renewing the bet, that my streak will not be interrupted, which has a circular self reinforcing effect.)

I basically ignore the incentives other than the "streak", and it works well for me. I am at unit 21 after a year and most people I know did not get this far in any duolingo language.

Edit: The creators of Duolingo are apparently learning on the go, how to gamify the learning best. Since I started, the layout has changed at least twice. But, to my satisfaction, the "streak" thing is still there.

This resonates with me especially for having purchased a manual transmission vehicle specifically so that I would not succumb to the temptation to hurl my tons-heavy machine at everything that isn't an iPhone Retina display and is thus goes unseen.

I think I managed to avoid the Inbox Zero thing by not reading my emails, if the little bit of text that Gmail displays is enough for be to be confident that I don't need to read or respond to the mail. This means that I have a huge, constantly growing number of unread mails in my inbox, so the idea of getting it down to zero isn't really attractive.

I still check my email unnecessarily often, but I don't feel a compulsion to read any new mails immediately.

On a meta note, this LW-specific habit of introducing new names/labels for things that already have clear, well-established terminology is particularly bothering. Especially when the name is completely unrelated to the concept (i.e. lotus leaves). (OTOH, the social forces that drive this habit are easy to intuit).

(On topic, like most if not all of us have dealt with the intricacies of the dopaminergic system, perhaps I will at one point write my experiences on my blog).

What does it look like to be genre savvy about insights becoming cheaper/more numerous over time?