Secondary Stressors and Tactile Ambition

I'm going to come out and say that LW has terrible taste in words. It's been bothering me for ages. "Secondary stressors" and "tactile ambition", like much of our jargon, are exactly the kind of thing Orwell made fun of in Politics and the English Language and the kind of thing Churchill was trying to discourage with "Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all." I'm always on the lookout for older, shorter words for any new idea, and usually find that they do the job better than big new words.

For example, take your description of "secondary stressors":

Their thoughts seem to go to places like, “Can I really do this forever? What about next time I go to a party? Are my friends not going to want to hang out with me any more? I’ve failed when I’ve tried to quit in the past, what if I fail again? That’d feel so terrible, I don’t want to fail, and...”

That's just worrying. You're describing the same set of things that "worrying" is describing, and your advice at the end of the section is literally to stop worrying. That's fine advice, and using big new words for it might make some people more receptive, but to me it feels like inventing words for no reason.

Or about "tactile ambition":

Now consider a teenager who really wants to make some pocket money, so they aggressively look to arbitrage buying stuff at local auctions that are underpriced and putting it on Ebay. Every day they scout around for stuff to buy and sell, and try to dress up all their sales listings to sound great and sell well.

Did you just come up with a new way to say "motivation"? It's true that some people might get a quick boost from that. But the problem is that the boost fades away, while the layers of unnecessary jargon keep building up in your mind.

I always feel slightly surreal when meeting LW folks who talk like that in real life. So I try to distract myself by rephrasing what they say into older, shorter words in my mind, and it works better than you'd think. For a quick master class in that, see enye-word's comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] on one of Eliezer's posts. To me, reading that comment feels like seeing a needle puncture a water balloon.

This isn't an attack on all of Eliezer's writing - his skill is off the charts and I've learned a lot from him. But this particular habit, where you can't say "wishful thinking" because "motivated cognition" springs to mind so easily, is something I wish we didn't learn.

(Also, LW uses italics way too much.)

The thing about primary and secondary stressors sounds similar to what's sometimes called clean and dirty pain in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Here's one explanation:

Clean pain happens when you cut your hand slicing a bagel or when you stub your toe. Clean pain also happens when you lose a loved one or a job. It’s the pain we feel when we experience something hurtful. We have a natural stress response to the happening and it gradually subsides.

Dirty pain is pain that’s caused by the thoughts we have about a situation or event. I can take the clean pain of cutting my hand and create dirty pain by telling myself, “How am I going to cook dinner now? I’m going to need stitches and the rest of my day is ruined. I’ll never get it all done.”

And here's another:

“Clean pain” is what we feel when something hurtful happens to us. It is inherent in life itself – we will get hurt, the things we love will be broken or lost, the people we love will die, and our own bodies will grow old (if we're lucky) and die. Clean pain generates what Sue Johnson, Emotionally Focused therapist, calls primary emotions. Primary emotions are here-and-now direct responses to situations.

"Dirty" pain is the result of our thoughts about how wrong this is, how it shouldn’t have happened, how we shouldn’t have done it, how it proves we -- and life -- are bad. It is self-generated and self-maintained. It is the suffering we create for ourselves in the privacy of our own mind, spinning stories about what it all means and why our pain is "different" or “worse” or “unbearable”. Johnson calls these emotions secondary emotions, the reactions to and attempts to cope with these direct responses. Secondary emotions often obscure awareness of the primary emotion. In Buddhist teaching this is called Samsara, the world of pain which we ourselves create.

Dirty pain is the hundreds of daily assaults we put ourselves through in our thoughts. Dirty pain is the anger we feel at our partner for hurting us, or the self-criticism, selfflagellation or perceived attacks. Our hurt is the clean pain.

The vast majority of our unhappiness comes from this secondary response -- not from painful reality, but from painful thoughts about reality. "Dirty pain" is so painful in part because we are not biologically designed to combat it. All the adrenaline in the world won't help you fight an imaginary dragon.

However, simply recognizing the difference between the essential pain of being human and the self-generated suffering of your thoughts is the beginning of the end of that suffering.

Recently, Marlene experienced this first hand. She was with a group of friends. One of the friends did something which hurt Marlene. She withdrew. For the rest of the day, she was caught in a cycle of “I should have...” Eventually when she realized that she was stuck in dirty pain, she was able to feel the clean pain of the hurt and move forward.

One definition is that dirty pain is what occurs when you try to control, avoid, or limit the amount of clean pain, as opposed to actually acting according to your values and doing whatever furthers those the most. E.g. thinking about "this painful thing shouldn't have happened" can be an attempt to avoid the original clean pain by shifting your focus to a story of how you didn't deserve it - rather than facing the painful thing directly.

Part of the phrase "dirty pain" comes from the way that these behaviors may expand, "making the things they touch dirty as well". So suppose that you've broken up with someone and don't want to see them anymore. So you start avoiding social events where they might be; this behavior is restricting your life and preventing you from living in accordance to your values.

You feel a little embarrassed over that, so when a friend asks why you haven't been at parties recently, you avoid the question... and then you start avoiding that friend, and for that matter anyone else who might ask the same question and make you similarly embarrassed. This means that there are now even more events you need to avoid. Which means that there are now even more people who might wonder why they haven't seen around, so now you need to avoid them too... until finally you are covered up in a corner of your room, afraid to move lest you have to talk with someone.

This is obviously an exaggerated example, but many things in life do have this pattern: you want to avoid something that is causing you clean pain, so you start avoiding circumstance A which could trigger the clean pain (circumstance A "gets dirty"), but then in order to avoid circumstance A you also have to avoid circumstance B from which you might end up in A (B also gets dirty from touching A), and so on.

The answer is to just accept that you are going to have some amount of clean pain and stop avoiding it, committing to living according to your values instead of living your life in the service of pain-minimization (as pain-minimization will actually end up increasing your pain, so will fail on its own terms).

This site has a few more examples:

Types of Clean Pain:

Grief, sorrow, sadness: Loss of a friend or loved one (death, divorce, separation, friendship ends)

Sadness, sorrow: Someone you care about is ill or has been in an accident (causing short or long term pain)

Natural disasters or terrorist events.

Sad, upset: Someone does or says something to you that is intentionally hurtful

Regret: You did some sort of wrong against another

Hurt or sadness over an experience (present or past) that you haven’t grieved or worked through

Types of Dirty Pain:

Ruminating and worrying above and beyond normal emotional sensations (tears, sadness) of a loss.

Blaming yourself or others for a painful experience that was out of your/their control.

“Should-ing” about a painful experience (i.e. it shouldn’t have happened at all; it shouldn’t have happened this way; it should be this way or that; he, she, or I should have…)

Thinking, spinning thoughts, or worrying endlessly about a past experience or about what could happen in the future (i.e. stuck in fear about future tragedies or things that “could” happen)

Blaming a victim for what they were wearing, doing.

Blaming an entire group for the actions of one or a few.

From spending time in the mental space of Quantified Self the term "second-order cybernetic effects" entered my vocabulary for what you call "secondary stressors". I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't other fields as well that already have a technical term. I also learned the clean/dirty pain distinction a while ago from Kay (and taught it once locally).

When attempting to introduce new technical terms I consider it very valuable to engage in some scholarship before writing a post that attempts to introduce the new term to LessWrong.

It's valuable to think through the different ways you can conceptualize a given problem and argue why you believe that your new conception is the best way to think about the problem.

I'm currently working on introducing a new term and reading an old book to get a better understanding of the prior art and that's valuable even if it's effort.

Both are useful concepts and hence not new ones. They must have some standard names. Your secondary stressors are a lot like worrying about worrying https://psychcentral.com/blog/how-to-stop-worrying-about-worrying/ and your tactile ambition are somewhat like "think globally, act locally" and near-term vs long-term goals, or instrumental goals vs values. I suspect that CFAR must have a module on that.