What comes before rationality

I am alarmed and dismayed that no-one has raised the issue of privacy in this thread. Swimmer963, just from glancing through your comments, you're [rot13'd description of Swimmer963 deleted].

I didn't whizz through those to be creepy (actually I was impressed at how you seem to be consistently sensible), but if you're going to share incredibly personal details about "a friend" who was raped, we need to know if this information has been posted with her consent. The above is very easily enough to personally identify you.

On whether or not this will be important or not: [blanked].

EDIT: Deleted precis of Swimmer963's situation; it had served its purpose. EDIT: Deleted some personal information.

If she had the sort of childhood you describe, her problems are not with her apparatus of rational thinking, but with her emotional brain. If the problem is not with her cognitive apparatus, it cannot be solved there.

It is very common for people who had toxic childhoods to become very interested in psychology. See for example Alice Miller's book "The Drama of the Gifted Child" which explains that children who grow up in toxic environments often become psychologically "gifted" out of necessity, and end up as psychologists.

Unfortunately while they may gain knowledge, it usually does not help. It does not help any more than knowing that you are frightened of dogs because several dogs bit you as a child. This insight does not solve the problem.

What to do?

Psychotherapy has a very poor track record. There are some good therapists and many poor ones. A lot of therapists are themselves the walking wounded. Irvin Yalom seems to be one of the good ones - see for example "The Gift of Therapy" for how it can work.

Time is a slow and ineffective healer. Many people go to their graves still terribly wounded.

One reason people with traumatic childhood seem to end up in bad relationships is that they feel compelled to replay the experiences until they solve them.

Successful therapy seems to involve replaying the experiences and reprogramming the emotional mind with new ways of processing the experience.

The problem is that often the person cannot actually go back to the original experiences in their full intensity because they were too traumatic. If the person can go back and reprocess the original experiences emotionally, they are likely to have a moment of realization and restructure their emotional reactions. The rational work follows this and is usually relatively simple.

EMDR is one technique that can help in this regard. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing . The eye movement technique mutes the overwhelming intensity of the experience, allowing the adult brain to reprocess the traumatic events and deal with them with the full resources of the adult brain.

A technique is in some ways quite similar is Ed Seykota's Trading Tribe process. This was developed to help traders deal with the intense psychological challenges of trading, such as 60% drawdowns, and losing 10% of your net worth in 15 minutes. I personally have had a few major breakthroughs with this process. As with EMDR the focus is on providing a means for the person to fully experience the original traumatic events and reprocess them.

Anecdotally, most people reading the Sequences will be neither harmed nor helped in the short term, for the same reason that your friend can clinically list off her problems (and probably their most successful interventions) without feeling able to change her reactions - there's a huge leap from absorbing knowledge to working out how to apply it. In the longer term, being exposed to a large volume of persuasive writing about how to own your beliefs and attitudes is helpful (in that it will help people make the shift away from a fixed mindset, which is absolutely essential for real progress), but I have no idea how much.

Personally, I do feel like I've gained benefit from my time here, but I'd be hard-pressed to point to any specific article or technique that caused the change, other than the general atmosphere of challenging one's beliefs.

Professional MDMA psychotherapy seems to work really well for these kinds of things, though it is quite hard to come by in legal form. Just taking MDMA and then having an intimate/therapeutic conversation with a close friend might work just as well.

Really. MDMA is way more effective than anything else for this kind of thing.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100719082927.htm http://www.maps.org/research/mdma/

(Should be about 10 years before MDMA makes it through the FDA approval process)

A much less effective recommendation is compassion/lovingkindness meditation.

I deleted this post. I will write another post later about why I deleted it.

I have personally had some significant issues getting myself to deal with problems in a constructive way--I was diagnosed with depression several months ago.

I put off seeking treatment, and especially medication, for essentially irrational reasons.

More recently I have started taking Lexapro, and I am MUCH happier. A large part of being able to make that decision came from Less Wrong--the ideas of "happiness set points," beating procrastination, and the idea that using technology to help improve myself is natural and necessary, helped me close the gap between not doing anything and doing something effective.

There are plenty of stories going around about people using decision theory to lose weight.

I would say there are several examples of people who have used the methods of rationality (or at least have used Less Wrong) to help with uncommon problems.

Unless your friend is intensely theist or overly sensitive to contrarianism I can't think of what downside there is to this experiment.

Honestly, I've found the single hardest part of overcoming my damage is simply finding something that actually motivates me: For the majority of my life, even now, irrationality is sufficiently successful that I have no reason to "correct" it. I happen to have a strong investment in the identity of "rational", which gave me enough of a push to start reading this site, but I could still easily make excuses as to why I wasn't applying it. It wasn't until I found Something To Protect in my life that I started really taking this stuff seriously and began making an effort to "win" instead of merely being "right".

Once I had that motivation, I found this site to be incredibly helpful: a number of LW posts have explicitly helped me bridge gaps between "a strong analytical mind" and "a very damaged map of reality". There's still a LOT I'm working on, and I've been reading here for at least half a year, so it's hardly an instant fix. It requires a lot of effort - and that's why a good motivation is essential. I've found some posts instantly shift a huge chunk of my map in to a better alignment, and other posts suddenly pop up 3 months later and make me realize I've been doing things wrong my entire life.

"I have zero examples of people who have used the methods of rationality ... to help with the problems they have that most people don’t have..."

I have. Extremely much so. Although I REALLY don't want to discus my problems publicly like this, I can't find any other way to communicate the necessary information: I used to be extremely irrational with a large number of mental-illness-calibre delusions, and now I am, despite the occasionall bizarre failure mode and despite still being mentally ill in non epistemological ways, I'm catching up with LW in terms of sanity.

I'm not clear on the goal of your post -- it doesn't seem to make a statement or ask a specific question, either -- but if you are asking for practical advice for your friend, I would highly recommend the book "Recovering From Co-Dependency: It's Never Too Late To Have A Happy Childhood," by Weiss and Weiss. I've personally found it to be an invaluable resource, and IME it's just the thing for an analytical person interested in psychology to get an initial grip on actually doing something about their issues.

The book is written primarily as a bridge between theory and practice for therapists doing individual and group therapy for those issues; for a practical follow-up, I would suggest the two books by Pamela Levin that are cited by Weiss & Weiss: Becoming Who We Are, and Cycles of Power. Both of these latter books have things that one can do as an individual, without a therapist, but I personally found them more understandable and useful after seeing the larger framework in the first book I mentioned.

If you would personally like to help your friend, I would suggest reading the books yourself, but not necessarily before she does. One downside to studying these books at length, is that it may become incredibly obvious when interacting with people what developmental defects are likely the cause of their present problems... but much more obvious to you than to them. ;-)

In my own life, the thing that seems to help most is paying attention to what I'm doing.

Not so much in terms of analyzing patterns, though there's nothing wrong with that, but in terms of attending to the individual events and being aware of how I am reacting and what I am reacting to, and doing so insofar as possible without imposing my expectations or my judgments on what I perceive.

Mostly, what seems to be going on is that when I don't really pay attention, my brain happily fills in the resulting gaps in my awareness with all kinds of cached/default assumptions, which are then reinforced by their association with my representations of stuff that's really there.

Put differently: I seem to be equipped with a buggy inference engine that, at least by default, infers the presence of X in the absence of compelling new evidence, based on my prior probability for X, and then turns around and uses the (inferred) presence of X as though it were new evidence, raising the posterior probability of X.

It's a self-reinforcing loop: I end up seeing what I want to see. (Or what I fear seeing, or what I am otherwise predisposed to see.)

Whereas when I do pay attention, my brain isn't quite so prone to "fill in the gaps" with X, or at least not so prone to confuse inferred X with perceived X, and my estimate of the probability of X in any given situation is therefore not artificially sustained. (And for the obviously wrong Xes, that's often sufficient -- once I eliminate the artificial support, natural inconsistencies will take care of the rest.)

Not sure how much use this community is for that, though.

I would encourage your friend to experiment with a meditation practice that works for her... just some way of establishing the habit of being present with what is actually happening right now and paying attention to it.

Different things work for different people in this space -- a good friend of mine has a practice of putting everything he touches back exactly where he found it, for example, which he does not think of as a meditative practice but seems to me to achieve the same goal.

It's a slow process, though.

Some of the even more drastic failures are described in the book The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz.

There's no way I'm reading that book. Knowing about and thinking about the bizarre ways people abuse children is the worst thing about reality for me. It's why I don't read online local news anymore -- the media thinks such stuff is fascinating but I guess they don't expect people to actually think about what the story is about? But still these sad little stories (sometimes only 8 words long) make their way into whatever I'm reading and ruin my day.

Does anyone else share my sensitivity? Does anyone have any advice?

I don’t know how the LessWrong community would treat people like my friend, or whether introducing her to the Sequences would help. It’s not an experiment I want to try unless I have some concrete evidence that it will help.

I don't see much of a need for evidence before introducing someone to the sequences. I teach private test prep and will routinely refer my students to the sequences for reading practice. I sincerely believe it helps, but I'm highly confident I will never be able to obtain reliable evidence to that effect. I am quite confident, however, it does little or no harm.

So unless it'd be costly to get her to read the sequences, how could they hurt?

Reading the sequences inspired me to test my beliefs, including my negative beliefs about humans that mostly stem from my relationship with my parents. Sometimes I discovered that my pessimism did not go away or got worse, but on average it receded, since I was so far below the LW norm already.

I don't know how this would specifically apply to someone who has been sexually abused. But If humans really are better than her cached beliefs, applying the methods of rationality to them should make her happier. There is very little concrete evidence when it comes to predicting human minds, but rationality should always lead you to a more logical conclusion based off of your priors.

Every boyfriend is narcissistic or has borderline personality disorder.

This could be a result of privileging the hypothesis, considering these possibilities without enough evidence to properly suggest them, possibly because studying psychology makes them salient. An approach to getting this point across might be to show her An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, and really work through the examples of interpreting medical tests. Then apply that concept to diagnosing narcissism. Find out how frequent it is in the population, and how likely a narcissistic/normal person is to exhibit a given behavior. Explicitly tracking the evidence for (and against!) narcissism may help your roommate see that her boyfriends, like everyone else, occasionally display narcissistic behavior, but that does not make them narcissists.

It’s not an experiment I want to try unless I have some concrete evidence that it will help.

Status quo bias.

I understand that you care about her, but there's no way recommending that she read about biases will harm her. It sounds like she already knows all that stuff, though, from how you describe her.

Still. A lot of things are hard. A lot of things are hard but possible. So far, I have zero examples of people who have used the methods of rationality, as separate from just knowledge, to help with the problems they have that most people don’t have...

LW has helped me articulate my intuitions and given me more confidence in them. These intuitions are usually about why an argument is wrong.

It's about how not to be stupid, how not to fail in certain ways. I don't have examples of things it has helped me do because it is never a necessary or sufficient condition for success.

In the rough equation luckskillperseverance=success, I think rationality is added to luck, making it (luck+rationality)skillperseverance=success. With luck one could avoid all pitfalls otherwise avoidable with rationality.