Teaching Introspection

The problem with teaching introspection is that you may only be teaching the subject to experience what you expect them to experience. Psychologists in the late 1800's and early 1900's tried to develop protocols where experimental subjects were taught how to report the contents of their consciousness, but this was not very successful. The results of a lab using a specific introspection protocol could not be easily replicated in a lab using another protocol, IIRC. Even having the subjects simply report their experience with no interpretation at all is difficult:

It was never wholly true that introspection was photographic and not elaborated by inferences or meanings. Reference to typical introspective researches from Titchener's laboratory establishes this point (28, 58, 25, 64, 59, 16, 31). There was too much dependence upon retrospection. It could take twenty minutes to describe the conscious content of a second and a half and at the end of that period the observer was cudgeling his brain to recall what had actually happened more than a thousand seconds ago, relying, of course, on inference. At the Yale meeting of the APA in 1913, J. W. Baird with great enthusiasm arranged for a public demonstration of introspection with the trained observers from his laboratory at Clark, but the performance was not impressive. Introspection with inference and meaning left out as much as possible becomes a dull taxonomic account of sensory events which, since they suggest almost no functional value for the organism, are peculiarly uninteresting to the American scientific temper.

Classical introspection, it seems to me, went out of style after Titchener's death (1927) because it had demonstrated no functional use and therefore seemed dull, and also because it was unreliable. Laboratory atmosphere crept into the descriptions, and it was not possible to verify, from one laboratory to another, the introspective accounts of the consciousnesses of action, feeling, choice, and judgment. It is not surprising, therefore, that Killpe, Watson and Wertheimer, all within a decade (1904-1913), reacted vigorously against the constraints of this idealistic but rigid pedantry.

On the other hand, modified introspective methods have been making somewhat of a comeback recently:

In no period, however, were introspective methods entirely abandoned by psychologists, and in the last few decades, they have begun to make something of a comeback, especially with the rise of the interdisciplinary field of “consciousness studies” (see, e.g., Jack and Roepstorff, eds., 2003, 2004). Ericsson and Simon (1984/1993; to be discussed further in Section 4.2.3 below) have advocated the use of “think-aloud protocols” and immediately retrospective reports in the study of problem solving. Other researchers have emphasized introspective methods in the study of imagery (Marks 1985; Kosslyn, Reisbert, and Behrmann 2006) and emotion (Lambie and Marcel 2002; Barrett et al. 2007).

Beeper methodologies have been developed to facilitate immediate retrospection, especially by Hurlburt (1990; Hurlburt and Heavey 2006; Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel 2007) and Csikszentmihalyi (Larson and Csikszentmihalyi 1983; Hektner, Schmidt, and Csikszentmihalyi 2007). Traditional immediately retrospective methods required the introspective observer in the laboratory somehow to intentionally refrain from introspecting the target experience as it occurs, arguably a difficult task. Hurlburt and Csikszentmihalyi, in contrast, give participants beepers to wear during ordinary, everyday activity. The beepers are timed to sound only at long intervals, surprising participants and triggering an immediately retrospective assessment of their “inner experience”, emotion, or thoughts in the moment before the beep.

Introspective or subjective reports of conscious experience have also played an important role in the search for the “neural correlates of consciousness”; (as reviewed in Rees and Frith 2007; see also Varela 1996). One paradigm is for researchers to present ambiguous sensory stimuli, holding them constant over an extended period, noting what neural changes correlate with changes in subjective reports of experience. For example, in “binocular rivalry” methods, two different images (e.g., a face and a house) are presented, one to each eye. Participants typically say that only one image is visible at a time, with the visible image switching every few seconds. In “early” visual areas—that is, brain areas relatively early in the flow of visual processing (such as V1)—researchers tend to find evidence that both images are being processed and changes in neural activity tend not to be temporally coupled with reported changes in visual experience. In contrast, in areas further downstream—such as frontal and parietal areas—changes in neural activity do appear to be temporally associated with reported changes in conscious experience (Lumer, Friston, and Rees 1998; Tong et al. 1998; Kreiman, Fried, and Koch 2002 Moutoussis and Zeki 2002; Tong, Meng, and Blake 2006; though see Polonsky et al. 2000), and so also, perhaps, are large-scale changes in neural synchronization or oscillation (Tononi et al. 1998; though see Kamphuisen, Bauer, and van Ee 2008). Another version of the ambiguous sensory stimuli paradigm involves presenting the subject with an ambiguous figure such as the Rubin faces-vase figure. Using this paradigm, researchers have found neuronal changes both in early visual areas and in later areas, as well as changes in widespread neuronal synchrony, that correspond temporally with subjective reports of flipping between one way and another of seeing the ambiguous figure (Kleinschmidt et al. 1998; Rodriguez et al. 1999; Ilg et al. 2008; Parkkonen et al. 2008). In masking paradigms, stimuli are briefly presented then followed by a “mask”. On some trials, subjects report seeing the stimuli, while on others they don't. In trials in which the subject reports that stimulus was visually experienced, researchers have tended to find higher levels of activity through at least some of the downstream visual pathways as well as spontaneous electrical oscillations near 40 Hz (Dehaene et al. 2001; Summerfield, Jack, and Burgess 2002; Del Cul, Baillet, and Dehaene 2007; Quiroga et al. 2008). However, the proper interpretation of these results remains contentious (Noë and Thompson 2004; Overgaard, Sandberg, and Jensen 2008; Tononi and Koch 2008).

Introspection considered questionable, reflection considered absolutely mandatory.

Sometimes you can elicit the difference by first asking yourself why you believe/do something, then asking yourself how you came to believe/do something. "Why didn't I upvote this article? Well because it doesn't have qualities X, Y, Z and J. Oh, how did I come to not upvote this article? Well I never really actually considered that course of action, so it's not like I ever had the option to, now that I think about it." Notice the difference between moral justification/reasons and explanatory justification/reasons. Everything has reasons, but many reasons pretend to be the "true" reasons when they're not. When you downvote a LW comment or post ask what caused you to downvote it and try to answer honestly, rather than introspecting on why you downvoted it. They can be the same question but it's surprising how often they're not. Likewise for all negative social judgments: ask the self-reflective question, How did I come to be so contemptuous of this person/idea/group?, not the other-focused Why is this person/idea/group so contemptible? It's really important that you frame such questions the right way if you want your reflection to not accidentally spit out pleasant-sounding "introspection". Doing this regularly makes rationalization or cloaked signalling look obvious, both from yourself and others, and serves as a basis for still further reflection.

And the easiest way to learn perfect front crawl isn’t to do it over and over again with tiny changes, but to practice exaggerated and simplified “drills” that teach particular fragments of muscle memory.

This reminds me of something that happened in my early years of teaching mind hacking: I noticed that some people were way better at applying the techniques than others, and then began discovering that it was a function of lower-level introspection skills I didn't yet know how to teach. (For example, some people were just better at "shutting up and listening" or not adding interpretations onto their experiences.)

Faced with a given stroke problem, I can look over a list of about eight different front crawl drills to find the one best suited for fixing it. To place some objective measure on the improvements, I can time my swimmers or count their strokes per length.

I certainly wish I had technology that specific: what I have now are mostly mnemonics, rules of thumb, and individual coaching feedback. Objective measures are particularly hard to come by, though I suppose I have a couple of them.

Meditation seemed useful to me. Other forms of "introspection" (cognitive biases, direct querying of "what would I do in situation X" in my brain, psychology) were more like "extrospection"--I'd infer my thoughts by my behavior. Meditation seemed to have a shorter inferential distance. I don't have a good non-introspective reason to believe this, although it did seem to get me over procrastination for the first time in weeks, and helped me graduate. I'll find out whether this continues to hold true as I resume meditation.

Hmmm, oddly, I mostly taught myself DDR. I had a friend who taught me the basics when she introduced me, and I've watched someone better than me two or three times (but mostly just gone "wow, that was impressive"). I've noticed I can often improve by just practicing, but sometimes I realize something specific is tripping me up. I'll go through a song that evokes that a few times, study it, and eventually identify my mistake. Then I'll do some easier songs to practice the corrected muscle memory, and finally test myself on the song that was tripping me up. I wouldn't claim to be amazing at DDR, and it might just be that it's somehow a different skill set, but I actually seem to do pretty well at learning it.

The only trained physical exercise I've done before DDR is swimming, which I was taught at a young enough age to have almost no memories, so I wouldn't assume I have a "generalized Learn Sports" module. (I remember exactly how the instructor described the side stroke, because it immediately clicked with me and I never had any trouble with it once it was explained)

While I really like this post, I down-voted it because it doesn't seem to offer any conclusions. It's really wonderfully written, but I don't think LessWrong needs more wonderfully written descriptions of the problem :)

“I didn’t mean it, I just did it because I was angry!”

One illustrative example of cause and effect within an environment is the relationship between genotype and phenotype within an environment. To say an aspect of an animal is "just because" of an individual feature of its genotype or environment (or the absence of a feature), is either untrue or assumes for the counterfactual that an endless list of other features and absences is held constant.

"I did it partially because I was angry, were I not angry, I wouldn't have done it," doesn't have the same ring to it though, does it?

If ever it feels like something is just because of something else, that is the first sign that introspection has failed!

I think you miss the point of the linked article, which is not that we are "not very good" at introspection, but that introspection is literally impossible. We don't have any better access to our own brain processes than we do to a random persons. We don't have little instruments hooked up to our internal mental mechanisms telling us what's going on. I fear that people who think they do are somewhat fooling themselves.

That doesn't mean we can't have models of ourselves, or think about how the brain works, or notice patterns of mental behavior and make up better explanations for them, and get better at that. But I think calling it introspection is misleading and begs the question, as it conjures up images of a magic eye that can be turned inward. We don't have those.

In swimming, you can point to Michael Phelps and say "try to imitate him as closely as possible". There is a "right" way to swim. However, rationality isn't this way. There is no zero-sum rationality game. It is constantly improving. And the only way it can improve is by self-experimentation in rationality. Ultimately, I think that Schopenhauer said it best:

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.

Ultimately, if the field of rationality is to advance, then people must be doing self-experimentation (introspection) to advance it.

I do think that you can learn from other people who are "further along the path" than you. For example: I've learned on my own that when I'm depressed, I think the same irrational thoughts. However, it wasn't until I memorized the appropriate responses (as opposed to synthesizing them again each time the thought came up) that my irrational thought patterns were immediately recognized as irrational. I could have learned this from somebody else, but considering how much self-help is tailored to a non-rational audience, I think it's just better to develop your own methods. However, I think the rationality boot camps sound interesting (as the advice is tailored to people like us).