This is fascinating and I'd love to hear more depth on whatever you'd be willing to share.

Regarding the suggestion to start with something small, I think in hindsight it was kind of a manipulation on my part to make the tool seem safer and to try to get more people to try it. In my limited experience, internal conflicts that seem small rarely turn out to be. 

When I first tried IDC at CFAR, the initial "small starting point" of "Should I floss?" dredged up a whole complex about distrust of doctors in particular and authority in general. A typical experience with watching myself and others IDC is that regardless of the starting point, one ends up in a grand dramatic battle of angels and demons over one's soul.

For me at least, the multiple agents framework isn't the natural, obvious one, but rather a really useful theoretical frame that helps me solve problems that used to seem insoluble. Something like how it becomes much easier to precisely deal with change over time once you learn calculus. (As I use it more, it becomes more intuitive, again like calculus, but it's still not my default frame.)

Before I did my first CFAR workshop, I had a lot of issues that felt like, "I'm really confused about this thing" or "I'm overwhelmed when I try to think about this thing" or "I know the right thing to do but I mysteriously don't actually do it". The CFAR IDC class recommended I model these situations as "I have precise and detailed beliefs and desires, I just happen to have many of them and they sometimes contradict each other." When I tried out this framework, I found that a lot of previously unsolvable problems became surprisingly easy to solve. For example, "I'm really torn about my job" became, "I am really excited about precisely this aspect of my job, and really unhappy about precisely this aspect". Then it's possible to adjudicate between those two perspectives, find compromises or collaborations, etc.

It would be rude of me to assume that your mind works the same as mine, so take the following strictly as a hypothesis. But I would guess that what's going on for you is that you identify really strongly with one set of preferences/desires/beliefs in your mind, and experience other preferences/desires/beliefs as "pain, pleasure, stupidity, and ignorance". The experiment this suggests is to try spending a few minutes pretending those things are the "real you", and the "agenty" part is the annoying external interloper caused by corrupted hardware. If I'm right, the sign would be that you find there is some detail and coherence to the "identity" of those things that feel like flaws, even if you're not sure it's an identity you approve of.

Note that I don't think the multiple agents thing is the one true ontology. I find that as I learn to integrate the parts better, they start feeling more like a single working system. But it's a really helpful theoretical tool for me.

Wherever this discussion is to take place, I’d like to strongly second a desire to have it.

I, too, have found this—inexplicably (to me) popular on LW these days—idea, of the self as multiple agents, to be entirely unhelpful. I am not, nor do I contain, an elephant, a monkey, a lizard, a paperclipper, or any of the other animal, vegetable, or mineral entities that folks here seem to almost reflexively hypothesize as part of any explanation of any mental phenomena whatsoever. Nor has it ever seemed to me to be remotely accurate to describe myself as being composed of separate entities under any labels like “System 1” and “System 2”, etc. None of the frameworks that depend on any such mental ontology have ever resonated with me in the slightest.

So, clearly, there is some disconnect here. It would certainly be very nice if we could explore it. As steven0461 says, something’s going on; let’s figure out what. (Though I would add, to his list of possibilities, this additional one: that it is not he and I who are atypical, but rather that the people postulating the multiplicity of internal agents who are atypical… of course, the question of “who is more normal” is academic, with questionable normative significance, but it should affect how we talk about these things, insofar as what we say depends on assumptions about how universal or how common the things we’re describing are.)

As a separate comment since it feels like a pretty different thread:

I do have a vague hypothesis that the very first part of the Looking skill might be a prerequisite for IDC and frankly a lot of CFAR techniques. I don't think you need a lot of it, but there feels like there's a first insight that makes further conversations about things downstream from it a million times easier. (For programmers: it feels similar to whatever the insight is that separates people who just can't get the concept of a function from people who can.) It annoys me a lot that I don't yet have a consistent tool for helping people quickly get the first skillpoint in Looking, and fixing that is one of my top pedagogical priorities at the moment.

second, my voices often wanted to do things other than say words, often scream, but sometimes emitting pictures or poetry, etc.

I haven't explicitly tried doing something like the full CFAR IDC procedure, but I've done something vaguely inspired by it and which seems to sometimes work. It's a little intuitive so I'm not sure if a verbal description accurately catches what I'm doing, but translating stuff said by the parts into some kind of mental imagery, rather than having it be just words, seems like a core component in making it work.

The basic procedure seems to be something like... "listen to the part that wants to do something, and translate its desired action and expectation of the likely consequences into a form that you can run through your inner simulator. While doing so, listen to any sense of objection or disagreement coming from your other parts; try to translate that objection into a language that the first part can understand, or which could be used to modify the inner sim simulation".

(This also automatically incorporates your first tweak, since you never need to decide in advance how many voices you're listening to - you just keep doing it for as long as you get a sense of an objection, and it doesn't matter whether the objection comes from a voice you've already found or a new one. Kind of like doing Murphyjitsu.)

I'm not sure whether "translate the objection into a language that the first part can understand" and "see if you could use the objection to modify the inner sim" are two different things or the same thing expressed in different words - that is, whether the inner sim is the common language of the parts into which it's enough to translate everything, or whether different parts have more unique languages into which things need to be tailored for. But the fact that mental contrasting works to reduce anxiety in at least some cases, seems to suggest that the inner sim is the common language - again, at least in some cases. E.g. I've used the technique described in the below excerpt, and found it to at least occasionally be very useful:

Think about a fear you have about the future that is vexing you quite a bit and that you know is unjustified. Summarize your fear in three to four words. For instance, suppose you’re a father who has gotten divorced and you share custody with your ex-wife, who has gotten remarried. For the sake of your daughter’s happiness, you want to become friendly with her stepfather, but you find yourself stymied by your own emotions. Your fear might be “My daughter will become less attached to me and more attached to her stepfather.” Now go on to imagine the worst possible outcome. In this case, it might be “I feel distanced from my daughter. When I see her she ignores me, but she eagerly spends time with her stepfather.” Okay, now think of the positive reality that stands in the way of this fear coming true. What in your actual life suggests that your fear won’t really come to pass? What’s the single key element? In this case, it might be “The fact that my daughter is extremely attached to me and loves me, and it’s obvious to anyone around us.” Close your eyes and elaborate on this reality.

Now take a step back. Did the exercise help? I think you’ll find that by being reminded of the positive reality standing in the way, you will be less transfixed by the anxious fantasy. When I conducted this kind of mental contrasting with people in Germany, they reported that the experience was soothing, akin to taking a warm bath or getting a massage. “It just made me feel so much calmer and more secure,” one woman told me. “I sense that I am more grounded and focused.”

Mental contrasting can produce results with both unjustified fears as well as overblown fears rooted in a kernel of truth. If as a child you suffered through a couple of painful visits to the dentist, you might today fear going to get a filling replaced, and this fear might become so terrorizing that you put off taking care of your dental needs until you just cannot avoid it. Mental contrasting will help you in this case to approach the task of going to the dentist. But if your fear is justified, then mental contrasting will confirm this, since there is nothing preventing your fear from coming true. The exercise will then help you to take preventive measures or avoid the impending danger altogether.

One caveat: mental contrasting is most appropriate for unjustified fears that are strong and debilitating. A great deal of research has shown that a total lack of anxiety detracts from performance, just as extreme anxiety does (especially when the task in question is complex). If you’re a student who experiences debilitating anxiety around taking tests, mental contrasting can help you approach the object of your fears so that you can perform better. But if you experience only mild to moderate anxiety, you may benefit from feeling a bit of anxiety, and mentally contrasting your fears may leave you feeling too relaxed and not sufficiently motivated to prepare. When trying mental contrasting to approach your own fears, I advise that you first make sure to honestly evaluate whether your fears are unjustified, or whether they might not spur you on to more effort and better performance.

(from Gabriele Oettingen: Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. Penguin Group US.)

Note also that this application of the technique could by itself be considered a kind of mini-IDC by itself: you look for a source of anxiety, run its prediction in your inner sim, then look for a reason for why it wouldn't go this way and run that counter-prediction in the sim. This will either cause your anxious part to update, or it will let you know that the anxiety is founded and that you should tackle it in some other way.

I also confess that I really really liked it at CFAR and then mysteriously didn't do any of it afterwards ... as I type this comment my mind is coming up with ways to weasel out of making a commitment to do it more ...

I've had a similar experience. IDC was by far my favorite technique at CFAR, and I've maybe done it twice since then? I think some of it is that the formal technique fell away pretty quickly for me: once I learned to pay attention to other internal voices, I found it pretty natural to do that all the time in the flow of my normal thinking, and setting aside structured time for it felt less necessary. (And when I do set aside larger chunks of time, I usually end up just inhabiting the part that gets less "airtime" for a while, rather than having an explicit dialogue between it and another part.)