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But from what little bit of BJJ rolling I've done, my impression is yes, folk who don't know the unbendable arm trick end up struggling sometimes in ways they don't have to.
I should clarify what would actually surprise me.
Most people at a jiu jitsu gym don't really get jiu jitsu, and struggle in ways that they don't have to if they were to just learn jiu jitsu. This is unavoidable, as learning to jiu jitsu takes time, but it also means that even if BJJ has an equivalent concept of this Unbending Arm thing you should expect these results. I don't doubt that there's something there.
What I'm skeptical of is the idea that it's a blind spot in jiu jitsu, to the point where cross training in Aikido for concepts like this has demonstrable merit. I'm skeptical that the field of jiu jitsu lacks an equivalent concept and therefore systematically misleads its practitioners in a way that is relevant to BJJ/MMA/street altercations/etc.
These blind spots do exist, but they're impressive and cognitive dissonance inducing when demonstrated. My favorite example is Derrick Lewis "just standing up". The announcers recognize that Derrick Lewis isn't demonstrating skill at "jiu jitsu", and don't recognize the unforced errors that his opponents are making which allow him to just stand up, so they're shocked. "This isn't supposed to work, and it is!".
I don't know about "dumb". Maybe "ignorant", the way an infant is ignorant of how to stand, or someone unpracticed will fall over if standing on one leg with their eyes closed.
If someone tries to stand on one foot with their eyes closed and falls over due to the fact that they haven't practiced it, then that's kinda unavoidable. It takes practice.
If someone tries to stand on one foot with their eyes closed and falls over due to the fact that they tried to stand on one foot with their eyes closed... instead of just opening their eyes and putting their foot down when there's no reason to not open their eyes and put their foot down... then that's entirely avoidable. All you have to do is think through what you're actually trying to achieve.
By using the word "dumb" I'm saying that if it turns out I'm missing something here it's not because I haven't spent ten years practicing Aikido visualizations in the mountains of Japan. It's because I was doing something drastically wrong that can apparently be fixed in a 30 second demonstration, which I've had ample time to notice, and have apparently been blind to for whatever reason.
The distinction is important because if it happens, it calls for some more self reflection on how I ended up not knowing how to use my arms despite using them for decades. In the same way that if you think you're about to submit someone and they "just stand up", its in your best interest to humble yourself a bit and go back to the drawing board.
I'm not sure what you're asking
I trust your honesty about where the goal posts are, but I still have to locate them in order to know what you're saying, exactly. I'm trying to find out where you're drawing the line between "the thing" and "not the thing" so that I can understand what you're saying and make sense of why the Aikido demonstrations look so much like they're trying to hide what's actually going on.
I tried it this morning at the jiu jitsu gym, with a fairly skilled training partner that likes to play with challenges like this. Specifically, what I did is say "I want to play an Aikido game with you. See if you can bend my arm", and then placed the back of my wrist on his shoulder, and let him do as much as I thought I could without letting my arm bend.
He started off gently pushing and pulling to feel me out, and I had to move my feet to stay standing because it doesn't take much if you're in a regular upright stance. Eventually he pulled pretty hard and I had to half collapse in order to keep my arm straight. A bit after that I had to collapse fully, and he spent a couple minutes trying to figure out how to pin my arm in a way that allows him good biomechanics for bending my arm. The game ended when I had to tap to an arm bar... which I guess is fair since I didn't specify that he had to bend it forward and he certainly would have been able to bend it backwards from there.
When we switched roles, I immediately did the thing that he eventually did to bring me down, and bent his arm. I reminded him that he was not obligated to stay standing, and that the lose condition is just the arm being bent. The next time I couldn't bend his arm with him standing, but I could force him off his feet so long as I took a step back and used good biomechanics to pull his elbow down and into me.
The thing is, none of this looks anything like an Aikido demonstration. It looks like a grappling match.
Why don't Aikido demonstrations look like grappling matches, if not for implicit rules about what you're not supposed to do? Why does the guy demonstrating the technique never get to the point of having to say "Okay, but no pinning my upper arm"? Why is he never forced to collapse to the ground in order to keep his arm straight? Why doesn't the offensive player ever take a step back and pull them down in the way that generates significant bending moment -- the way my training partner did to me?
I like the idea, but looking at your examples I'm skeptical that it actually works out that way much in practice. Let's look at your examples, in order.
Hearing pitch isn't scaffolding you remove once you learn to sing, which is why skilled vocalists still have ear pieces so that they can hear themselves when they perform. I'm sure they could still sing better than you even with earplugs in, but not to their potential -- and their performance would likely degrade with time if you cut that feedback loop.
"Rolling" is absolutely a big part of fighting. It's not a huge part of striking, but it's a huge part the grappling aspect of fighting which doesn't go away, and the rolling only becomes more prevalent at the higher levels of grappling. Heck, Jiu Jitsu is one of the main components of modern MMA, and their term for sparring is literally "rolling".
If getting into a fencing jacket isn't a scaffolding skill, then I don't see how getting into donning helmets and gloves can be -- for the exact same reasons. Same with training wheels, which you typically have your parents do for you.
Training wheels have an additional problem in that they actually rob you of the feedback you need in order to learn to ride a bike, making it harder. You could argue that catching yourself with your feet on a balance bike becomes the scaffolding skill, and this is indeed not an integral part of high performance bike riding... but every time you dismount a bike you use this skill. And it's never a limiting skill in the first place.
Skimming through the rest of your examples, it looks like my objections break down into 3 categories.
- That skill is an integral part of high performance, even though once you reach high performance you can perform at low levels okay without it.
- There are other ways to do that, in the same way that a fencer could hire an assistant to help him get into his jacket.
- That doesn't actually help develop the skill. You're better off skipping the metaphorical training wheels and working on the thing itself.
If we get rid of the second criterion, then there are a lot of things that would fit the requirements. That also seems fair, since there are a lot of times you can't reasonably hire an assistant to get you into your jacket, or to make good pitches for your games. But then again, those would be better described as "supporting skills", because fencers don't stop putting on their fencing jackets once they learn to fence.
I'm struggling to come up with an example of a skill you could really remove to no significant detriment once you get good at the thing. Skilled rock climbers by and large would be pretty pissed if you took their ropes, for example. You might be fine forgetting how to navigate Duolingo's interface once you're fluent, but that skill seems hardly necessary or limiting in the first place.
It just seems too often that the skills that enable a thing either continue to enable the thing or else enable other things. For example, even if rolling was no longer helpful in fighting it's also a skill I've applied to bike riding, for when I've gone over the handlebars -- long after I'd learned to ride a bike.
I'm very, very confident it doesn't work via moving goalposts.
I think we may be talking past each other a bit here.
I think we're in agreement that it works through force vector diagrams, not through magic that defies the physics of force vector diagrams. Similarly, I think we're in agreement that we get to force vector diagrams by patterns of muscular activation and limb positioning. It's not that the visualization is a required component for doing or explaining, it's that it allows you to do something that you don't know how to explain (or do?) otherwise.
My skepticism about The Unbendable Arm is like my skepticism about The Unbendable Tibia. I don't doubt that there are very good structural reasons the arm/tibia doesn't bend, but I am skeptical of the implicit idea that in order to do it you need to learn how to visualize from an Aikido practitioner. Not "Will it work even when an MMA guy tries to bend you arm/tibia?", but "Is the MMA guy actually getting his arm/tibia bent in fights in ways that they wouldn't if he mixed in some Aikido?".
If an Aikido practitioner tries to do the demo on me, there's a few ways it can go.
One is for him to fail to bend my arm, and notice right away "Ah! You already know The Unbendable Arm!". Points for honesty there, but not for teaching me anything.
A second is for him to implicitly or explicitly tell me to do things that make my arm bendable, and then show me that my arm is stronger when I don't do them. Points for honesty if he admits "Yeah, all I'm showing is that you're stronger if you don't literally help me bend your arm", but again, no points for teaching anything useful if you have to tell or imply that I should do things wrong in order to demonstrate your technique.
The third is that he gives clear objective rules, I do a bad job on positioning/activation on my own accord, and then he shows me how to not do that. This is the only case where The Unbendable Arm is worth anything, and it's not because the technique itself is so great but because I was so dumb to start with.
You can say that you're pointing at something that is physically real in the same that my "Unbendable Tibia" technique (of having an intact tibia) is physically real, and I don't doubt that. But the relevance is up to the demonstration subject being dumb enough to need it. So when you say "it doesn't work via moving goalposts" I kinda feel like "Yeah... but it might not seem so relevant once the goal posts are specified properly. And that's an empirical question about the failures that people walk into rather than a statement about the things you can test on your own with weights and a table".
I'm not saying this from a perspective of "Woo has no value, you're crazy woo guy, only things that I personally understand are real". I'm saying this from a perspective of "The implicit beliefs about what we're allowed to do shape everything".
I could tell you about when I performed The Unbendable Wrist in jiu jitsu, for example. I was able to let my friend set up her best submission, and through the power of The Unbendable Wrist I didn't have to tap to her wristlock. In contrast, a similarly big and strong guy was forced to tap before she could even get her second hand on to assist in the pull. She was annoyed with him for pretending she was able to submit him instead of actually resisting, and he sincerely reassured her that he really was resisting and really wasn't strong enough to stop it. So she taught him the power of my Unbendable Wrist and he was able to resist as well as I did after that. Can you guess what it took?
It didn't take visualizations of firehoses, or any technical tips. All it took was "Jimmy was able to resist when I had both arms pulling, so unless he's a lot stronger than you, then no, you absolutely can resist". The problem was that he was unknowingly bound by a belief that resistance was futile, didn't really give it his all as a result, and failed to notice the reason for his failure.
So is "The Unbendable Wrist" real? Or is it just that the illusion of The Bendable Wrist just more compelling and common than one might expect? I find the latter way of thinking much more useful.
Sadly I can't draw a force diagram because I honestly don't know how it works.
[...] within some sensible limits I'm very happy to demo this technique in person.
I assume you're still up in the bay area? I'm not likely to be up there anytime soon, but if you're ever back down in socal and want to play with this stuff let me know. It sounds fun.
I bet we'd come out of it with a force vector diagram and a good way to clearly demonstrate what's going on.
I obviously wouldn't try anything that wouldn't fly at a jiu jitsu gym between friends, but anything on top of that I might make you say explicitly :p
But if you're concerned about any hidden rules here, feel free to ask me about them
So in jiu jitsu a large part of what we do is try to bend arms and not have our arms bent -- the other way. You mentioned that getting your upper arm pinned defeats the effect, and unsurprisingly this is known as one of the requirements for doing an armbar against anyone who isn't completely clueless. In general, if you don't control the joints on either side of the one you're trying to attack, the person can just move their body to relieve bending pressure.
In these "Unbendable Arm" demonstrations it gets a bit weird because their shoulder is free and the only way to control it is to put them on the ground. "This is supposed to stay standing" seems to be implied, and in any normal demonstration context I'd feel uncomfortable pulling some Aikido sensei off his feet. I'd expect that to get a response like "Dude, chill, this isn't wrestling. Just try to bend my arm" -- while missing the point that "try to bend the arm, without applying enough pressure to force him to bend the arm if he wants to stay standing" isn't is kinda like saying "Try to bend my tibia -- but don't break it you brute!". I'd expect that most people can sense this implicit rule and that the effective methods would violate it, without being aware that they're holding themselves back.
So who is responsible for keeping the defender on his feet, assuming he's supposed to stay standing? If he falls over with a straight arm, how is that judged?
Similarly, what are the rules on footwork? I think one of the key points is "You don't have to treat it as an isolated joint, so you can work to lift your elbow up as well as working to push your wrist down" (which contributes to the similarity with "reaching", btw), but if you're allowed to step in closer as well then you can get better leverage so there might be even more going on.
I'm guessing that either (a) you're not much stronger than your wife or (b) she didn't click into the thing the visualization is meant to help people click into.
Oh, no. I'm so much stronger than my wife that there's no way she's keeping her arm straight if I'm serious about bending her arm. The test was 1) is she tensing her bicep when I don't subtly suggest she should and 2) is she able to put up more resistance when visualizing instead.
Seriously, the thing I mean when I point at this technique isn't a vague "energy" trick that fails upon encountering an MMA fighter or whatever. And it definitely doesn't rely on subtly deceiving people into tensing the wrong muscles. Unbendable arm is immensely demonstrable
Do you have a preferred video demonstration? Or can you draw the force vector diagrams? I don't doubt that you're observing something real here, but from looking through YouTube I'm not seeing what you're describing.
"I want you to hold your right arm out straight, really tight"
"I want him to tense up as physically hard as possible" -- and then he has to admonish his volunteer for "losing focus" when his unbendable arm bends
"the only purpose of this is for me to experience relaxation completely on this muscle" -- with emphasis that the arm is gonna bend at least a little bit and maybe more.
This guy is flat out falling over unnecessarily.
This one shows something closer to what you're talking about, but it's pretty clear that he's cheating the starting position by giving himself a more advantageous position the second time and having the other guy start in a less advantageous position. Which I guess kinda raises the question of what exactly is it supposed to demonstrate? Is that "cheating" or is that the entire thing being conveyed?
My wife's first reaction to "don't let me bend your arm" was actually to swat my hand away from her wrist, which playfully points out that we're implicitly holding back in unspecified ways for sake of the demonstration, and if we were actually trying to not let someone bend our arm we would be doing something quite different. So what are the rules, anyway? As long as the rules are kept hidden it's really easy to move the goalposts around without anyone noticing.
No, I read your vignette as describing a process of things snowballing all on their own, rather than by any such skilful response on either side. Hence my sceptical reply to it.
This is a very strange read, for two reasons.
First, "happens on its own" is a bizarre way to frame things that are entirely composed of human behavior. If a ball is placed on an incline, it will roll down hill on its own with no further human input. If a woman smiles at you, nothing happens unless you do something. If you're smiling and talking to a woman, it seems really strange to say "Yeah, but I am not the one doing it. It's happening on its own!". I obviously see the temptation to define away that which you're not aware of as "not really me" so that you can say "I am fully self aware of everything I do" and mumble the "I don't take responsibility for anything my body does on its own" part, but at some point when this linguistic trick is sufficiently exposed, you'd think you'd say "Shit. I guess 'self awareness' isn't that great if we define the term so as to not include awareness of what's driving my actual behavior'". And it seems obvious enough for that, by now? I apologize if I'm misestimating what's obvious.
Second, I would have thought "Forming mutually fulfilling relationships by navigating ambiguous social cues" was just obviously something that took actual social skills. Like, you can't do it if you're raised by wolves -- or otherwise failing to accurately track and appropriately respond to thing after thing after thing in the ways needed to coordinate a relationship with another human. If nothing else, I would have thought "guys who feel frustrated with their perceived inability to read women's cues" would be obviously suffering from a lack of specific social skills relative to the guys who find themselves effortlessly interpreting and eliciting those signals with the cute girl at the checkout counter -- at least, if we're holding constant other factors like good looks. What even is your model here? That human interaction is fake, and really once you account for height/looks/etc the outcome is predetermined regardless of what the people do or say, so long as someone asks the question?
No.
Speaking of awareness, are you aware of how it comes off this way?
No, that strikes me as so far fetched a scenario as to only occur in the fiction of another era.
Then I guess we're on the same page that "I've never been frog boiled like that" isn't a demonstration of high self awareness? I'm not sure what purpose you had in sharing that if not to use it as an example of the rewards from your deliberate work on attention.
I'm having a bit of trouble reading you. I was originally reading you as "Not understanding what I was saying, but interested to learn if it turns out I'm pointing at something real", so I tried to explain more clearly. Your last comment struck me much more of a "I already AM skilled at this, thank you very much" sort of "I don't have anything to learn from you, I'm just trying to point out where you're wrong", so I poked some fun at it. But you seem to be disclaiming that now.
Can you help me understand where you're coming from? Specifically, to what extent are you convinced that you're succeeding in self awareness and don't have anything big to learn here, and to what extent are you trying to grasp what I'm conveying because you can sense that there might be something big hiding beneath your conceptual floorboards? I'm fairly generous with my time if it's the latter, but if it's the former then I'm happy to just agree to disagree.
FWIW though, that "accidentally intentionally attracting women" problem does happen.
But people vary widely in somatic skills and how they interpret verbal instructions;
Yeah, that's why I actually ran the test. It's also why I used my wife as a test subject rather than one of the guys at jiu jitsu for example. My wife is definitely on the "less aware of how to use her body" side, so the fact that she got it right is more meaningful.
I definitely interpreted it as 'tense your arm really hard' and that's probably why the beam / firehose visualization helped.
I wasn't there so I can't say, but it's worth noting that the cues on how to interpret things can be subtle, and the fact that they're being led in a certain way can really easily slide under people's radar even while they simultaneously notice the cues and respond to them.
For example, if I wanted to tell my wife to tense her arm without telling her to tense her arm, I could have said "You're going to hold your arm out like this and not let me bend it" -- showing her a tense arm. Or I could have been more subtle and just kept a sub-noteworthy amount of tension throughout my body, and when I went to grab her wrist, grabbed it in a rigid fashion. This all suggests "this is how we resist things" without ever having to say it.
I'm not saying that Akido practitioners are deliberately misleading, just that people tend to nonverbally communicate in ways that convey their perspective, whatever that perspective may be. This tends to happen whether they realize it or not, and indeed whether they want it or not. For example, when my daughter was.. I think three, she watched a show explicitly intended to help kids not be afraid to get their shots. The thing is, she was already not afraid to get her shots and had actually thrown a tantrum because she could only get one flu shot the previous year. But as a result of watching that show, she picked up the creators' actual beliefs of "Shots are scary, but they shouldn't be so we're supposed to insist they're fine" -- and the show had the exact opposite effect from intended. It turns out, insisting "You shouldn't be afraid" isn't very compelling when you simultaneously demonstrate that you're coming from a place of fear -- even if you never admit to the latter out loud.
The way I held myself when telling my wife to not let me bend her arm was relaxed, only contracting the muscles that had a specific purpose. I don't recall if I demonstrated with my own arm, but if I did it was loose. When I held her wrist, I'm sure it was loose, etc. I don't mean to suggest that people don't unintentionally get confused into ineffective responses -- that definitely happens a lot. I just mean that IME a lot of the time all it takes is not buying into it oneself, and that the confusions persist in large part because they're actively upheld by the people giving instructions.
"Frog boiling" is standing in for "responding skillfully to women expressing subtle interest, and managing to turn it into clear cut interest so that asking her out is no longer a leap of faith"... right?
Am I reading this correctly that you're patting yourself on the back for successfully avoiding this experience? Is accidentally intentionally getting women too obviously interested in them the problem that you think most men have in dating?
Don't get me wrong, I know that's a real problem that can be had. It just seems like a weird flex, since most men would be more interested in knowing how to cultivate those experiences intentionally than how to avoid them. The latter is fairly self evident.
>>This representation of your mental construct is as different from the mental construct it represents as the your mental construct of a basketball is different from the basketball it represents. They’re fundamentally different things, regardless of how good you are at recognizing when you’ve noticed a thing.
>On the contrary: these are not fundamentally different things, but rather, the same kind of thing—namely, they are both mental representations. (We might say that they are different instances, but not different classes.)
"No, your car and my car aren't different things! The fact that yours is an actual car and mine is a cardboard cutout shaped to represent one is irrelevant because they're both physical objects so they're the same kind of thing! Which is all that really matters, since distinctions don't exist as long as similarities do, and they can be used interchangeably! Don't mind if I swap you, like for like..."
Okay, I see how you manage to not get it. This is really blatant. I guess I'm just going to have to curse you as a rat bastard and remember what standards you hold for yourself.
Let me know if they change.
It turns out that for most people, the default intention of “holding your arm straight” by tensing your muscles and resisting your partner is not very effective.
Notice the presupposition that "tensing your muscles" is the default way most that most people hold their arm straight? Notice how in the video you linked he explicitly specified "really tight" and didn't just say "don't let me bend your arm", letting people do what actually comes by default? They seem to always specify to make the arm tense, which is unsurprising because if you're not told to resist wrong, you might not resist wrong and then their trick won't work.
I tried it with my wife, only instead of saying "Hold your arm really tight" I just said "Don't let me bend your arm". As a result, she didn't foolishly contract her bicep to help me, and was able to resist just as well as when I told her to visualize stuff. It's not that visualizing firehoses is unusually effective, it's that you're getting bamboozled into doing it unusually ineffectively to start with.
That all sounds right to me.
Yes, if you're considering asking for a phone number based on what seem like unreliable clues, you've likely noticed that you're considering asking for a phone number based on what seem like unreliable clues. That's something where you're quite likely to be wrong in a way that stings, so you're likely to notice what you're doing and rethink things.
When the cashier smiles at you 1% more than usual, you probably don't stop and wonder whether it's a sign or not. You won't think anything of it because it's well within the noise -- but you might smile 1% more in return without noticing that you do. She might smile an additional 1% the next time, and you might respond in kind. Before you know it people might be saying "Get a room, you two!".
Even if she then asks you out -- or you ask her out -- it was the subtle iterated things that built the mutual attraction and recognition of attraction that enabled the question to be asked and received well. In that same situation, if you would have responded to that first 1% extra smile with "WILL YOU DATE ME", she probably would have said no because she probably didn't actually like you yet.
If you do ask her out, and she says "Yes", do you credit the fact that you explicitly asked, or the fact that she smiled that little bit more? Or the fact that you smiled back that little bit more and played into the game?
Yes, there are obviously many instances where men feel like their only chance is a leap of faith, and men tend to notice when they're contemplating it. In absence of opportunity to iterate, they might even be right.
At the same time, much of the work -- especially when done well -- is in responding to things too subtle to be overthinking like that, and iterating until the leap takes much less faith. I'm not taking any hard stance of when you should take a leap of faith or not, but I am pointing out that with enough iteration, the gap can be closed to the point where no one ever has to ask anyone anything.
I don't see your response to my other comment as responsive to my questions so I'm bailing there. I'll likely bail here soon too, but you've managed to draw me back in and get me curious.
First:
No, it's actually by definition. I see why you say that, you're misreading what I'm saying, whatever. Not worth hashing out.
Second:
I'm genuinely confused. Are you aware of the ways in which your restatement is still completely absurd? Doesn't matter I guess. Whatever.
As far as I can tell, there is no distinction between noticing a thing and noticing when I’ve noticed a thing. (Unless you mean something banal
This is the part that's interesting to me. I have a response I want to try out, and I'm curious to find out how you're going to respond.
One possibility is that you're going to ignore what I actually say, and try to dismiss it with "But in the context of women sending signals.."/"But that much is already obvious to me, so I'm pretending it doesn't exist". That is, you might use the fact that you don't yet see how to make sense of the entire previous conversation based on these initial steps as an excuse to stop following the steps which are all making sense and (in fact, if not apparent to you) leading towards a resolution. If you do this, I will have no choice but to curse you as a rat bastard, and note that you can't be trusted to notice and stick to a path that is leading somewhere :P
Another option is that you'll say something like "I understand what you're saying. I don't see how it connects", or "Now everything makes sense, why didn't you say it clearly like this in the first place you dummy?", and I would consider anywhere on that spectrum to be a success.
The last option is that you follow along and still don't see a difference between the two... which... I can't imagine how it could happen. But I sense that it might happen anyway, so I'm curious to find out if it does. If this happens, it won't have been a successful explanation but it'll still have been a successful exploration and that's enough for me.
Anyway..
What does it mean to "notice" something? How would you test that? Let's pick "a basketball" for the thing.
1. A blind guy (Bill) on a moonless night walks by a basketball, wanting to play basketball. He keeps walking, doesn't pick up the basketball, thinks "Shucks, if only I could find a basketball I could shoot some hoops!". There was never any mental representation of the basketball, as evidenced by the fact that he didn't pick it up. If the basketball were to interact with his senses in a way that led to a mental representation of "basketball", we somehow know that he would have. This is not noticing the basketball.
2. A sighted person (Bob) walks by the same basketball the next day, picks it up, and starts shooting some hoops. Unlike in the situation with the first guy, the basketball interacted with his sensory organs and brain in such a way that led to the mental representation of "basketball", which he acted on the way he acts with basketballs. This is noticing the basketball.
Noticing a basketball is forming an accurate mental representation of the basketball. This mental representation is not the basketball. The map is not the territory, the quotation is not the referent. They're fundamentally different things, no matter how good you are at recognizing basketballs.
Noticing that you've noticed the basketball is noticing this mental representation -- which again is not the basketball. Noticing that you've noticed the basketball is when you form a mental representation of the fact that you've formed a mental representation of the basketball. This representation of your mental construct is as different from the mental construct it represents as the your mental construct of a basketball is different from the basketball it represents. They're fundamentally different things, regardless of how good you are at recognizing when you've noticed a thing.
The test for whether someone has noticed the basketball is whether, when they have something to do with a basketball, they do that thing with the basketball. You know they notice the basketball when they pick it up and shoot some hoops.
The test for whether someone has noticed that they noticed the basketball is whether, when they have something to do with their mental representation of the basketball, they do that thing with the mental representation of the basketball. Okay, so what might this look like?
Say Bob leaves the basketball on the court and on his way home runs into a kid who asks if Bob has seen his basketball. To answer this, Bob doesn't have to look for a basketball, he has to look for a mental representation of a basketball. He's not being asked "is there a basketball right in front of you". He's being asked "Is there a mental representation of a basketball in your memory?". This is an easy one, so Bob will probably say "Yeah, I left it in the court", but it's important to notice that Bob doesn't say yes because he found a basketball in that moment -- he says yes because he found his mental representation of that basketball in memory. Bob didn't just shoot hoops, Bob noticed that he had been shooting hoops.
But what if Bob wasn't interested in shooting hoops? Then when he notices the basketball, what's there to do with that representation? Perhaps walk around it so as to not step on it and fall. Is this a noteworthy event? Maybe, maybe not. So when the kid asks "Have you seen my basketball?" he might say "Yeah, I had to step around it". But especially if Bob were preoccupied he might not have taken note of his obstacle avoidance, might fail to find in his memory a mental representation of this object he did indeed represent at the time, and say -- incorrectly -- "No, I didn't notice it". The fact that he stepped around the basketball is proof that he noticed it. The fact that he said "I didn't notice it", doesn't negate the fact that he noticed it, it shows that he didn't notice that he noticed the basketball. This is reminiscent of the famous hypnosis experiment where people were hypnotized and told that a chair placed in their path was invisible. The people instructed to fool the researchers into believing they had been hypnotized all walked into the chair, as one would. The people who were genuinely hypnotized walked around the chair, and when asked why they took the path they did, showed that they had no idea why they did what they did. They had noticed the chair, and not that they had noticed it.
If you pick up the basketball, and tell the kid you left it on the court, you've shown that you've both noticed the basketball and also the fact that you noticed the basketball.
If you walk around the basketball, and tell the kid you haven't seen it, you've shown that you've noticed the basketball but not the fact that you've noticed the basketball.
If you walk right past the basketball wishing you had one to play with, you've shown that you didn't notice the basketball -- and so you can't have noticed that you noticed
The weird part about this is that it can be hard to imagine not noticing. It's hard to miss a big orange ball on black asphalt, so it's hard to imagine there being a basketball there and not noticing it. It can seem like the distinction between the ball being there and noticing the ball being there isn't worth tracking because you'll never fail to notice it -- except in the obvious cases like if it's a moonless night and you're blind but that doesn't count, right?
But what happens the moment you try to find something that isn't so easy to find? Animals don't cease to exist when their camouflage works. Waldo doesn't draw himself onto the page the moment you notice him. When you start looking for things that are harder to find, and find them, then it gets a lot more obvious that there are many many many things in that external reality which you have not yet found and represented. Way too many to ever represent them all, in fact. So yes, you might not miss the basketball, but you haven't noticed everything that is there.
Similarly, if the only time you're looking at your own mental representations, they're metaphorically big and bright orange against a black background, it's going to be hard to imagine not noticing them -- except for the things that are "unconscious" and therefore "impossible to notice" but you can insist that those "don't count" either. And similarly, once you start looking for representations that are hard to find, and start finding them where you hadn't seen them immediately, it gets a lot more obvious that there's a lot of things represented in your mind which you haven't yet noticed. And that there's simply too much external reality represented in your head for you to represent all of the object level representations you have.
Noticing the basketball and noticing that you have noticed the basketball are fundamentally different things, because basketballs and noticing basketballs are fundamentally different things. The person who can't grasp the idea of external reality they can't represent didn't get there by too perfectly mapping the entire outside world for there ever to be a difference to notice. They got there by failing to ever look closely enough to notice all the things they've failed to represent, and the magnitude of what lies beneath their perception. The same applies to anyone who thinks they see everything their mind is representing and responding to.
Again, this doesn't explain how it becomes important in dating contexts, or in general. I'm simply starting with the fact that they are indeed different -- "walking into a chair" vs "confabulating why you've walked a weird path" different -- and that "I'm so good at it that the two always go together" demonstrates an inability to bring the two together, not success at it.
The distinction always exists. The quotation is never its referent. Whether they can be collapsed into one concept without loss is another question --- and the answer to that question is still "No".
The answer could only be yes in the second extreme, and that second extreme doesn't exist.
I'll illustrate with an analogy.
"Has eyes open" is a different concept than "can see". Regardless of how well they correlate, we can test the former by looking at a person and seeing that they have eyes which aren't blocked by eyelids. We can test the latter by presenting things in their visual field and watching for a response that proves recognition. These are different tests, because we're testing for different things.
The first extreme is akin to a blind person who has eyes but no eyelids. The distinction between these concepts is maximally important in explaining this guy, because that answer to "Has eyes open?" and "Can see?" are always different. Regardless of whether people with such extreme lack of self awareness exist, they don't do anything to demonstrate a case where the distinction is unnecessary.
In the second extreme, you have someone whose eyes always work so asking the two questions always yields the same answer. In this case, you could indeed collapse the two concepts into one bucket because there's never any split cases... except for the fact that no one has physics defying eyes that see without light.
Similarly, there's far too much subconscious processing to be aware of every single bit of it, simultaneously, always. Are you aware of your breathing? Of the sensation of your butt in your seat? The sensation of your tongue in your mouth? Probably now, sure, but not before I asked. You had better things to do. And you most likely aren't aware of your state of vasoconstriction/vasodilation even now that I point it out -- though you could be, and sometimes this awareness becomes important.
The best you can aspire to is to become aware of the things that need awareness, as they need awareness. So that you can say "Okay, yeah, I'm aware of my breathing. What about it?". Or so that you notice when you stop breathing for bad reasons, for example, so that you can correct your own behavior before you pass out doing squats or something -- and even that is shooting for a goal you will never ever reach.
The thing is, when you look at the people who best approximate this ideal, they're by definition the ones that are very skilled in self awareness. These are most definitely not the people who aren't aware of the distinction between when they notice a thing and when they've noticed that they've noticed a thing. These are the people who saw the difference, saw how important that difference is in practice, and actively put in the work to make the distinction less obvious.
"Different minds may operate differently" is definitely true in a sense, but the distinction I'm drawing is fundamental, and the minds that are the least aware of it are those for whom it is most important -- because there's fruit there, and you can't start picking it until you see it. "I'm just so skilled in self awareness that I literally have never noticed myself making this mistake -- and have never noticed all the other people making it either" is a self disproving statement.
Remember, we’re talking about the following situation:
If that's what you think we're talking about then I have a couple questions for you:
1) I told you that I addressed this failure mode in another comment. Why did you ignore when I told you this instead of reading that comment and responding to what I said over there instead? Isn't that the only thing that makes sense, if that's all you want to talk about?
2) Why are you talking whether men pick up on these things in general? It feels like you're saying "We're talking about the people who died during heart surgery. In this context, where's the evidence that heart surgery works!?". The evidence for the effectiveness of heart surgery obviously isn't in the corpses... but you're smart enough to know this, so wtf?
Even though it's normally rude to point out so bluntly like this, I certainly prefer the respect of "What you're saying sounds obviously dumb. What am I missing?" than the polite fictions that condescend and presuppose that you're not only in error but also too emotionally immature to admit it.
I'm placing my bet that you also both want and deserve this kind of honesty -- and will either say "Oops, good catch", or else point out something I'm missing that makes it seem less like you're flinching from admitting what you sense.
We'll see if it pays off. If not, I'll probably bow out.
EDIT: By the way, this is false in my experience:
You're still misunderstanding what I'm saying though. Again, you can't judge truth of a statement until you know what the statement means.
I think perhaps you have missed the point I was making, which is that what you call “being aware that you have sensed a cue” is just what everyone else calls “sensing the cue” (perhaps “perceiving the cue” might be a better phrase
I haven't. It's just something you're going to struggle to understand until you recognize the difference -- and the importance of the difference -- between the quotation and its referent. So that's where we have to start.
It is true that many people will call the thing I refer to as "being aware that you have sensed the cue" "sensing the cue", yes. But it is also true that people will call what I refer to as "sensing the cue" "sensing the cue".
It's not that people who refer to “being aware that you have sensed a cue” as “sensing the cue” simply have a different definition of terms, it's that they're failing to track a critical distinction.
It's not possible to understand "female signals" -- or male signals, or your own signals, even -- until you understand the importance of the things people perceive and understand which they aren't aware that they perceive and understand. It all hinges on the fact that your assumption that you have to be aware of things for them to matter is unjustified -- and, it turns out, very very false.
I'm happy to explain where your billboard analogy goes wrong, but we really gotta nail this down first.
What is the distinction between “sensing the cue” and “being aware that you have sensed a cue”?
There is a meta level jump between noticing "She's smiling" and noticing "I have noticed that she's smiling". "She's smiling" is a very different thing than "I have noticed she's smiling".
If you're lacking awareness of the latter but not the former, that doesn't mean that you won't smile back at someone who smiles at you. It just means that you either won't notice that you're doing it, or you won't know why you are.
Failure to grasp this distinction gets people all sorts of confused and ineffective. Until you grasp the importance of this distinction, you won't be able to understand the rest.
The problem with your argument is that it doesn’t at all explain all the cases where
I understand that I hadn't made this part very clear in the comments I made prior to this comment of yours. I have since addressed it in my latest response to johnswentworth.
But of course this is an absurd requirement. If she knows he’s going to be interested, of course that makes it vastly easier!
It's also not the real requirement, as I was cutting corners for sake of brevity at the cost of precision. The actual requirement is trickier to nail down both concretely and concisely, but it's closer to "she has to know he respects her" to be still a little inaccurate or "it has to be worth it, in expectation" to be tautological but vague.
It's completely possible for a woman to not know if a man is interested or not, and be absolutely terrified of how he might respond, and find the courage to find out anyway. It's also something that can be deliberately facilitated by the man, if he understands why she hasn't made herself more open to him as of yet.
… and yet, according to your own account, women still won’t say anything in that situation, despite having a guarantee of a positive response. What does that tell you?
Oh, no. Women will absolutely ask you out if you put them in a position where you guarantee a positive response and won't give one until they ask you out.
In the situations where they don't, it tells you that they don't have to. If a beautiful woman physically takes the distraction out of your hands, drags you to her bedroom, and undresses herself... does she really have to ask? Or does it maybe go without saying?
In fact there is no such as “forcing the man to contend with” anything. People (not just men) are, as it turns out, perfectly capable of totally ignoring a cue like this, and indeed of not even noticing it in the first place. A woman who thinks that leaning in and waiting to be kissed is somehow a guarantee that a man will correctly perceive the cue, is sadly, sadly mistaken.
You're not thinking of the situation I'm describing.
I'm referring to the situation I outlined in my first comment:
But if she holds unbroken eye contact, flat out doesn't respond to anything he says in attempt to distract her or test her resolve, and leans all the way in until her lips are mere millimeters from his, waiting for minutes until he responds.... that's yin, but not something that can be missed, you know?
It's not just "leaning in waiting to be kissed". It's actively taking steps to ensure that it cannot be missed. It's flat out refusing to engage with anything else -- and when that's not enough, holding her face close enough to his that her nose is touching his cheeks until he addresses it.
If this were to ever happen to you, you might not be able to make sense of it. You might not know what to do with it. You might rationalize that she's not interested just weird. You might choose to run away, rather than engage with it. You might even deny noticing anything strange has happened.
But what you can't do is fail to notice.
Hey, why don't you talk to Carla anymore? "Dude, she got weird. She won't respond to anything I say and always tries to press her face up against mine. I dunno, I guess we just drifted apart? Nothing out of the ordinary happened."
I'm not buying it.
Sorry, but this is empirically false.
With all due respect, I don't think you're in a position of being able to judge the veracity of claims like this. Before you can judge a claim true or false, you have to understand what the claim is -- and it doesn't look like you do.
Specifically, I assume you're objecting to the first part "approximately everybody senses women’s cues whether they recognize it or not", but you don't seem to be noticing the distinction between "sensing the cue" and "being aware that you have sensed a cue, and having concluded that it counts as an a cue". These are easy to conflate, but they're wildly different things.
There's essentially no limit to how far a man can explain away a woman's cues. Heck, in high school a girl told my mom that she wanted to have my baby, and I was still telling my friends "You're wrong, she's not into me". I get that.
At the same time, I couldn't help but respond to what she was actually doing. When she'd jump in front of me to try to stop me and get my attention, I could change direction and walk around her, but I had to sense her presence in order to do that. Sure, I had alternate explanations for why she was doing what she was doing, but that shows recognition of the thing to be explained.
Even on subtle things where it's like "The woman at the front desk smiles and says 'Hi'", I might not know that she's smiling a little more (or a little less) than her normal or what the exact significance is, but the woman I'm going to be responding to is the woman smiling as much as she's smiling -- and people respond differently to people who are warmer towards them than than those who are slightly less warm. She will still be able to steer my behavior on the margin by how inviting she is towards me, even if I don't have a moment of "Oh, THIS IS A CUE!".
People sense, with some noise, the degree to which people smile at them, touch them, laugh at their jokes, bend over in front of them, etc. People respond to what they sense, because it is the only thing to respond to. If they were presented with something different they would be responding to something different. This is all that subtle clues are intended to do. Whether these cues overcome priors, and whether the person in question allows themselves to admit when it does, is an entirely separate question.
That's the main thing, yeah. The next bit is even what look like exceptions are actually the same thing in a less obvious way.
When a woman knows she's attracted to a guy and is bummed out that he's not picking up on her subtle signals, that's a lot like a man knowing he's attracted to a woman and being bummed out that she's not giving him super clear signals to ask her out. He could ask her out anyway, if he's willing to face rejection, and that would greatly increase his chances of getting a date with this woman. It'd also greatly increase his chances of making salient information like "Desirable women don't desire you". Even assuming there are no external reputational costs of doing this, that kind of information erodes his ability to see himself as desirable, and that's important to be able to justify asking in the first place -- because "Hi. I'm a loser, will you date me?" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
So maybe he could ask -- or maybe she could be obvious enough that he does notice her signals -- but that comes with the risk of learning "(S)he's just not that into you" and collapsing the would be asker from a state of hope and fear to a singular state free of both fear and hope. There's a real puzzle in how to best deal with unpleasant information so that we can separate the wheat ("This particular person isn't interested in me at this time") without inadvertently accepting in too much chaff ("I'm a loser and no one wants me") -- because sometimes the latter is true, in part, and we not only have to figure out how much truth there is there but also what to do about it. More skillful behavior will often be more bold, but there's also generally a grounded security there that enables such boldness. Rather than advise people to make their interest harder or easier to miss, I'd invite them to notice why it is they're not being bolder, and help them make sense of whether that's appropriate and if there's anything they can do to mitigate the costs of failure.
Once you actually get to "Yes, I want to maximize my chances with this person and I'm willing to face the consequences of that", rather than wanting to balance p(success) with saving face, then bold moves become natural -- whether yin or yang, implicit or explicit. And those bold moves do indeed work better at the thing they're aimed at, than the moves that don't commit to this target.
Inversely, once you are squared away on "No, I don't actually want a date with person if that's the case -- and it might be", you get more skilled and subtle flirtation instead of a clumsy "DO YOU ALREADY WANT TO DATE ME? NO? OKAY!". And these subtler moves are also more effective at what they're aimed at, than moves that go all in at the wrong thing.
but man it sure sounds like "not noticing womens' subtle cues" is the near-universal experience, even among other women when people actually try to test that.
Yeah, I get where you're coming from. That's definitely a near universal experience. I've been there. As have my friends.
One story that stands out is when my friend was tutoring an attractive woman during college. She kept doing things like leaning over exposing her cleavage to him. At one point she conspicuously announced that she had to take her birth control and then took it in front of him. At the time he didn't think "Ooh, she wants to do me" because "What? She just needs to take her birth control." seemed like a better explanation.
But he sure noticed -- or else he wouldn't have remembered and told me the story. He just wasn't confident enough to risk asking and hearing "Ew, no! You creep!" -- and she probably wasn't confident enough to make things more obvious for him and risk hearing "Ew! Control yourself, you ugly slut!".
I wasn't there and I'm only guessing, but I'd guess that she really did want something that she didn't get, and that her "not clear enough" was... well, protective, still, but not effective at getting what she wanted in a safe way.
I would guess that this is approximately 100% of the time in practice,
The problem here is how you define the denominator. Something like "cases where a woman 1) definitely wants a date and 2) sends subtle cues instead of asking"? Because if so, then sure. But that's missing the point.
The vast majority of subtle cues are sent when desire for a date is up in the air. While "not noticing women's subtle cues" may be near-universal, it's not nearly as universal as interacting with women at all. There are far more moments of eye contact, smiles, questions asked, etc. There's noise in the data and the baselines aren't always obvious, but every interaction is an analog indicator of the level of interest. Far more often than "Girl definitely wanted a date, you didn't notice that she definitely wanted a date, and therefore didn't ask her out" are things like "Girl thought you were kinda cute, held eye contact and smiled a fraction of a second longer than is her normal. You felt a bit more comfortable prolonging the interaction to talk to her than you would have with less eye contact and smiles, and eventually you both go on your way". It's not that if you would have asked her point blank she'd have agreed to a date. It's that if you wanted stay for a moment and have a bit more idle chit chat, she'd have been happy to do that. And if that went well, then she might have wanted more -- now that she has more evidence that she at least likes talking to you.
The cues here have to be ambiguous, because her desire itself is ambiguous. Because what a relationship with you would be like is ambiguous. If you try to cram it into a binary box of "Wants the date or wants not the date", then you're going to be rounding down a lot of real interest because of a flinch from seeing a maybe as a maybe.
The other issue with your choice of denominator is that if the woman definitely wants the date she likely won't be subtle. Or "definitely won't be subtle", depending on how you operationalize "definitely wants". She might definitely want the date conditional on him being interested, but he might not be definitely interested -- and who wants to be on a date with someone who doesn't want to be there? That woman who seemed to want something with my friend probably wouldn't want it anymore if he were to respond with "Eh, I suppose you'll do", for example, so she's not trying to maximize her odds of getting with him.
When you have a situation where the woman knows the man is going to be interested in her, and she knows that he's worth seducing, that's when you get really really obvious clues like leaning in and forcing the man to contend with the fact that she's there waiting to be kissed.
In short, approximately everybody senses women's cues whether they recognize it or not, whether they know what to do with it or not, and they're only subtle and ambiguous to the extent that their purpose is served by being subtle and ambiguous.
Now, one could reasonably counter-argue that the yin strategy delivers value somewhere else, besides just e.g. "probability of a date".
Yeah, probability of a date isn't something you want to Goodhart on.
That said, the post conspicuously avoids asking: how well will this yin strategy actually work? How much will the yin strategy improve this girl's chance of a date with the guy, compared to (a) doing nothing and acting normally, or (b) directly asking him out? It seems very obvious that the yin stuff will result in a date-probability only marginally higher than doing nothing (I'd say 1-10 percentage points higher at most, if I had to Put A Number On It), and far far lower than if she asks him (I'd say tens of percentage points).
You're greatly underestimating the power of the "yin strategy" both to create desire where there was none and also to be very very obvious when it needs to be.
The normal pattern is for woman to give some subtle cues, and if the man doesn't respond to them, the woman doesn't do more and doesn't get the date. Sometimes this is due to the woman in question not recognizing how subtle she's being, and losing out on a date with a man she's still interested in. Much of the time though, the woman isn't attached to "obtain date" as the goal, and is better described as probing than "trying to manipulate him into asking her out". I've had women explicitly tell me that they know they would be more likely to get a date with the guy if they were to make themselves more available (whether by explicitly asking him out or otherwise), and that they don't actually want the date unless the guy demonstrates sufficient interest/courage/perceptiveness/etc.
That doesn't mean that the yin is weak, or stalls out if the guy doesn't get the hint. In situations where the man is demonstrating sufficient perceptiveness/interest/courage and still is holding out for whatever reason, women can make these "subtle cues" very very very obvious. Like, way more obvious than explicitly asking (which could conceivably be insincere). For example, a woman who wants to be kissed might hold eye contact a bit longer, lean a bit closer, and might speak a bit less, as if to appreciate the silence -- which is subtle and could be missed.
But if she holds unbroken eye contact, flat out doesn't respond to anything he says in attempt to distract her or test her resolve, and leans all the way in until her lips are mere millimeters from his, waiting for minutes until he responds.... that's yin, but not something that can be missed, you know? And it's not a joke and it's not a whim.
"Do you want to kiss me?" is something that could be decoupled from, but if she embodies the invitation full force, he'll feel it if he wants to kiss her -- even if he might not have wanted to before.
I am not exactly sure why this difference - a total inversion! -
The boxing and corporate situations don't seem that different to me. In both cases, the higher ups are providing direction and the people lower down are allowed to ask questions -- but might get in trouble for trying to challenge those higher up.
In the situation where you describe talking to a senior statistician, "Why'd you use the mean instead of the median?" sounds a whole lot like "Why don't we stand like this instead?" in a boxing gym. Those are both "Hey expert who is deservedly above me, please enlighten me", and both work. If you say to your coach "You're wrong, this stance is better", that sounds more like "Really, you should be taking direction from me because I know better than you". If instead, you were to tell the senior statistician "You're wrong, in this case the mean is better" in that same tone, I could see him being shocked and annoyed with your arrogance. Especially if you try to condescendingly explain stats 101 considerations that he obviously has taken into account.
I asked the speaker - a mathematics professor I didn’t know - a direct question. He took it poorly, and rejected my question with a cutting remark [...] Part of the problem is that it’s just too easy for the senior. Imagine an undergrad, giving a math talk, trying to do the same thing to a mathematics professor in the audience who asked a question. Be as cutting as you want - nobody is going to laugh at the mathematics professor!
Okay, I think I see where the confusion is coming from now. You seem to be assuming that status markers like position as a professor accurately track actual ability/knowledge that supposedly justifies this position. If you have an bright undergrad and a math professor who doesn't know enough math to be respected as a math professor, then the undergrad's position doesn't stop him from being able to expose the professor as a fraud. Imagine that situation again, where the undergraduate's criticisms are spot on and the professor can't address the question without exposing the fact that they don't actually know math.
This stands out to me pretty strongly because as an undergrad I never shied away from pointing out where my professors made mistakes, and I've had it go both ways. My physics professors actually knew physics, and as a results were always secure. On the other hand, my philosophy of science professor didn't actually know philosophy of science, so when tried to roll me over by posturing I could just keep poking holes until he was visibly fighting back tears and he explicitly asked me to stop correcting him.
Questions of “who is better” in Boxing can be resolved by spending three minutes in the ring with each other (and Go is the same, except it takes an hour). Skill differences in programming, or god forbid project management, are much harder to measure.
Philosophy is even less concretely resolvable than programming yet that was resolved so I don't think it's a huge deal, but I do think having a three minute definitive test available does help make these dynamics more clear.
In jiu jitsu, for example, you're supposed to be nice to the lower belts but you can never offend them as an upper belt beating them up. Nor do you have anything to worry about when rolling with an upper belt that can mop the mat with you at any time they want.
But when a lower belt can demonstrate superiority over an upper belt, that's when things get tense. That's why jiu jitsu people can sometimes be weird about strength/quickness/wrestlers/leg locks. Any time a white belt can beat a brown belt, the brown belt has to find a way to square that with their social position -- and sometimes that's tough.
I think the bigger difference is who pays for poor performance. If you're my boxing student, then your poor performance just means you get punched in the face. So if I'm criticizing your actions I'm just trying to help you achieve your goals of not getting punched in the face. If you're my employee then your performance hurts my bottom line, and you don't feel it unless I take action to make you. So if I'm criticizing your actions it's because if affects me, and I'm probably going to do something to make sure it affects you -- so you know there's pressure to do better or else risk getting fired.
2) If I manage to create a strong object-level want, I will boost my attention without needing to coerce myself
[...]
I was more curious about how the difference between a third-person and a first-person perspective affects my meditation.
This is what I'm talking about. Defaulting to the third person perspective and forgetting about the first person perspective causes a lot of trouble. It's not just "here's an unrelated hack for making it easier to do meditation", it's that it completely changes your meditation.
You notice that your third person "I should focus on the breath" is missing the point, and redirect to the first person perspective of "Sensations of breath are arising", but in doing so you no longer even have a claim to the relevance of the breath. So now you have an experience of attending to sensation of breath for no reason, because of fairly handwavy third person reasons.
I'm pointing out that you can use meditation as practice for bringing more conscious awareness to your everyday life by bringing more conscious awareness to your practice of meditation itself. It's a very different experience when you know in first person why what you're attending to is the most interesting thing at the moment, and in third person knowing that you're right to think this is what's worth attending to.
That doesn't mean you "give in" to first person perspectives and give up awareness of your third person perspective, just that you don't give in to third person ideas either and give up or attempt to disconnect your first person perspective. It's practicing being aware of both, and noticing when your behaviors don't make sense according to your own perspectives.
Untrained people (and semi-trained people like me) can't sustain focus for extended amounts of time—even if I set my mind to the breath, it will slip away.
What I would say is that untrained people don't sustain focus on their breath for extended amounts of time. When you introduce the word "can" you're claiming more than just what is observed and making claims about what they would do in other counterfactuals too. If we're careful with those counterfactual choices, I think the claim that they "can't" turns out to be false.
The difference between "trying to try" and "trying on the object level" can be the difference between struggling for months and succeeding in seconds.
I do not understand what you mean with "There can be though, if that's what you want". Do you mean "It's possible to will/train yourself to have a coherent self"?
Something like that, yeah.
Like, you might want to go get Chinese food but not spend your money. Your desires for Chinese food and money are tugging you in different directions rather than in one coherent direction. But it's possible to make up your mind and coherently want to pay for the Chinese food or else not want to eat it. You have to recognize that you can't have the food without paying the money, and figure out which of your new options you prefer.
Do this enough, and you become relatively more coherent.
When I practice focus meditation, I train myself to sustain a focus on my breath, for unusual amounts of time, to unusual degrees.
Right, and to what end? What drives you to want to do this unusual thing? Why isn't that already connecting to a desire that pulls your focus to your breath?
The answer to these questions is what allows you to resolve the conflict between "I want to focus on my breath" and "I am not focusing on my breath".
Your model of things seem to assume that this level of focus is possible to sustain through "really wanting to" [...] I am reading your reply as supporting a model of cognition akin to homo economicus.
Sorta. Yes, I think that you're probably physiologically capable of far more focus than you're currently demonstrating in your meditative practices. And yes, I'm looking at revealed preferences and not buying into people's claims of desiring things that the evidence shows they don't actually desire.
There's no magical law preventing you from being wrong about what you want. How might you notice if you were? What would that look like?
One way to test this would to take a non-meditator and give them a lot of money if they managed to sustain attention for an hour. (In this hypothetical, let's say we have a way to measure this). The way I model this, no amount of money would be sufficient to accomplish an hour of focused attention for a non-practitioner.
Not necessarily. There are a couple assumptions you're making here.
One is that they'd be physiologically capable of doing it, in my view. If we replace "focus on the breath" with "lift 500kg", the answer to "Why aren't you already lifting it, if that's what you want?" is partly that you just can't. Even if you were to try your genuine hardest, it would not lift -- but there'd be real signs that you were attempting to lift it, and it wouldn't at all look like "just not interested in lifting this weight". I do think you're physiologically capable of focusing on your breath to a greater extent, but it's worth noting this requirement because failing because "can't" is different than failing because "don't wanna, so not really trying".
Another is that "offering a lot of money" is enough to make them really want to do it. There's no magical law saying that people will always be motivated by things that you think "should" motivate them. Indeed, people are usually not very good at drawing these connections. Replace offers of money with a gun to the head, and you'll get stronger results -- the reality of the consequences there are a lot more obvious, so it takes a much dumber person to fail to make the connections.
Eddie Hall's 500kg lift is a dramatic example of this. You can watch it and think "Yeah yeah, he's just really big and strong, no need for the overly dramatic music" -- until you notice blood spontaneously dripping from his nose. And apparently his eyes, and ears -- and brain. He says that the most he could do in the gym was 457kg, and that what it took to get that extra 10% was putting himself in the mindset that he was "lifting a car off of [his] kids". It's not that he "couldn't" lift 500kg in the gym, it's that it wasn't worth the risk and he knew it, so he was only motivated to give 90% effort. Give people the motivation to actually try, and they don't get magic powers but they do produce significantly more force because they'll actually try.
Heck, it often takes much much less than that. My favorite example is when my friend was able to tap a big strong guy with a wristlock, and she had to argue with him about whether he was strong enough to resist. He insisted that he was genuinely unable to muscle through it, until she said "Jimmy muscled through when I had both hands on it, so unless he's a lot stronger than you, you can definitely resist when I have one hand on it". Surprise surprise, he was able to after that.
How?
Well, you weigh your options, and figure out what you want.
Instead of "I should do this, but I'm struggling to get myself to do it", you notice that you don't want it, and reflect on the consequences and whether you continue to want them once you realize what you're asking for.
What happens if you don't lift 500kg? You don't get people saying "he broke a record"? Yeah, I guess that's okay. Your kids will die? On second thought, maybe I can try harder. That latter one feels different, you know?
What happens if you don't sit there for an hour focusing on nothing but your breath? Why is that bad? What happens if you do? And what is so appealing about that? Not "come up with rationalizations that sound plausible", but moves you?
It's easy to get very disconnected from what we actually care about, and what we can do. It takes some work to get back in touch and sort out the contradictions, but the path is absolutely there.
Some time ago, I realized that the perspective "I want to focus on the breath" is self-defeating. [...] The problem with "I should focus on the breath" is that it assumes a self who is monitoring, evaluating, striving.
It often makes sense to talk about "I". "I" makes sense. I am writing this, for one. You know exactly what that means, it is clearly true, and there is nothing that noticing this requires you to flinch away from.
"Should", on the other hand, falls apart very quickly and is usually functioning to preserve a disconnect from reality. Valentine talks about it here, and So8res talks about it here.
You say you should focus on your breath. Why? Why aren't you already drawn to your breath, if that's what you want to focus on?
Sensations of the breath are arising, yes. And so are many other things. If those sensations are interesting and worth attending to (according to you), then simply noticing that they're there is enough. If it's not, then "I want to focus on the breath" is empirically shown to be false -- so now you have a question of why you're trying to force yourself to do a thing you don't want to do.
The lack of "self language" when talking to oneself comes straight from maintaining connection to reality instead of BSing yourself. I might tell my wife I want to eat lunch, if that helps coordinate with her. But if I'm telling myself that I want to eat lunch, then with whom am I attempting to coordinate? I'll just eat or not eat. It's not that there's never any such thing as a "self" that has enough coherence to become a useful model, it's that when you're saying "I want to focus on my breath" and then choosing not to, there's clearly no coherent self wanting to focus on those sensations.
There can be though, if that's what you want.
Instead, skeptics often gesture to hallucinations, errors. [...] However, such arguments reliably rule out human "understanding" as well!
"Can do some impressive things, but struggles with basic arithmetic and likes to make stuff up" is such a fitting description of humans that I was quite surprised when it turned out to be true of LLMs too.
Whenever I see a someone claim that it means LLM can't "understand" something, I find it quite amusing that they're almost demonstrating their own point; just not in the way they think they are.
My "c'mon guys" here is not "c'mon the empirical evidence here is overwhelming." It's more like "look, which world do you actually expect to result in you making better decisions faster: the one where you spend >0 days on testing and reflecting on your thinking in areas where there is real feedback, or the one where you just spend all your time on 'object level work' that doesn't really have the ability to tell you you were wrong?".
(and, a host of similar questions, with the meta question is "do you really expect the optimal thing here to be zero effort on metacognition practice of some kind?")
I mostly agree in general and I feel ya on the "c'mon guys" thing, yet I don't do my own separate "rationality practice".
For me, it's basically the same reason why I don't spend much time in a weight room anymore; I prefer to keep my strength by doing things that require and use strength. I'm not against weight lifting in principle, and I've done a decent amount of it. It's just that when I have a choice between "exercise muscles for the sake of exercising muscles" and "exercise muscles in the process of doing something else I want to do anyway", the latter is a pure win if the exercise is anywhere near equivalent. Not only is it "two birds with one stone", it also streamlines the process of making sure you're training the right muscles for the uses you actually have, and streamlines the process of maintaining motivation with proof that it is concretely useful.
The option isn't always available, obviously. If your object level work doesn't have good feedback, or you're not strong enough to do your job, then specific training absolutely makes sense. Personally though, I find more than enough opportunities to work on meta cognition as applied to actual things I am doing for object level reasons.
The thing that seems more important to me isn't whether you're doing a separate practice for the sake of learning, but whether you're reflecting on your thinking in areas where there's real feedback, and you're noticing that feedback. I do think there's a place for working on artificial problems, but I also think there's an under recognized place for picking the right real world problems for your current ability level with an expectation of learning to level up. And an underappreciated skill in finding feedback on less legible problems.
1) Yes and no, depending on what you mean by "real thing".
The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis is a giant tome of scientific knowledge on "hypnosis"; none of which suggests that it's not real. Hypnotists really can do seemingly wild shit that most people cannot do. Most hypnotherapists like to say "It's not mind control like Hollywood depicts", but even that is only partially true. The lawyer Michael Fine used hypnosis to sexually assault his clients and give them amnesia for it, and he is in prison now only because he was dumb enough about it that his victims were able to notice that they were missing memory and that things didn't add up. I've talked to victims of more clever hypnotists who haven't gotten caught.
At the same time, there's a reason hypnotists tend to write book with subtitles like "there's no such thing as hypnosis". I'd argue that it's more accurate to say "there's no such thing as not-hypnosis", but neither really conveys an accurate understanding. The bottom line is that hypnosis isn't what it appears to be, because "not hypnosis" isn't what it appears to be, and once you get familiar with how to do hypnosis and see all the gray area between the black and white, the term kinda loses meaning. Competent hypnotists have a strong tendency to drop all the formalisms, and the most competent have a tendency to stop seeing what they do as "hypnosis" -- at least, in my judge of competence as someone who also doesn't see what I do as "hypnosis".
2) Yes and no. I've gotten some interesting results using "self hypnosis". One that stands out is using self hypnosis to "be comfortable" when I was seasick on a rocking boat one night. It worked, and I got comfortable -- only to feel myself about to vomit anyway. Careful what you wish for.
The hard part isn't "Can hypnosis be used to get my brain to believe X", it's what's true? What's worth doing? Are things going well, relative to the relevant expectations? The more you try to bullshit yourself, the more you'll a) have unintended effects if you succeed, or b) foresee this and find it hard to get yourself to do self hypnosis. The more you see clearly what the right answer is, the less you'll need hypnosis in the first place. The real value in learning hypnosis is as a proof of concept that allows you to see when you're BSing yourself so you can stop that.
Due to the counter-intuitiveness and subtleties here, it's hard to give a less cryptic short answer. I'm actually finishing up a ~20 post 65k word sequence on essentially this exact question. It's about what I've learned about psychology and rationality as a result of picking up hypnosis in 2010. It will give concrete and actionable answers to what you're looking for here, as well as the underlying justification. I have a draft done and basically waiting for a proof reader to make it through, then I'll start posting.
There are several complications in the example you give, and I'm not sure which are intentional.
Let's start with a simpler example. You somehow end up needing to take a 400 meter shot down a tunnel with an experimental rifle/ammo you've been working on. You know the rifle/ammo inside and out due to your work and there is no wind, but the rifle/ammo combination has very high normal dispersion, and all that is exposed is a headshot.
In this case, where you center your probability distribution depends on the value of the kids life. If the terrorist is about to nuke the whole earth, you center it on the bad guy and ignore the kid. If the terrorist will at most kill that one kid if you don't kill him now, then you maximize expected value by biasing your distribution so that hitting the kid requires you to be further down the tail, and the ratio of terrorist/hostage hit goes up as the chance of a hit goes down. If the kid certainly dies if you miss, also dies if you hit him, and is only spared if you hit the terrorist, then you're back to ignoring the kid and centering the distribution on the terrorist -- even if you're more likely to hit the kid than the terrorist.
In the scenario you describe, you don't actually have the situation so well characterized. You'd be forced to lob bullets at a twenty degree inclination, without being able to use sights or see your target -- among many other large uncertainties. In that case it's not that you have a well known distribution and unknown result of the next draw. You don't know what the distribution is. You don't know what the meta distribution the distribution is being drawn from.
Statements like "more likely" are all relative to a model which you presuppose has some validity in context. What's the model, and where do you think you're getting the validity to say it? Even if the simulation God paused the game and spoke to you saying "I'll run the experiment a billion times, and we'll see if the kid gets hit more often", you'd have no idea how to set up that experiment because you don't know what you're controlling for.
I'd guess that you're asking about something in between, but I'm not sure which unknowns are intentional.
No, that does not sound like a fair characterization. My claims are cover a lot more than "it doesn't always happen" and yours sure don't seem limited to "it doesn't never happen".
Here's the motivating question for this whole essay:
You asked why people who "believe in" avoiding nonmarital sex so frequently engage in and report badly regretting it
and here's part of your conclusion
At this point the behavior you describe should no longer be perplexing.
You're talking about this as if it needs falsification of preferences to explain and my stance is that no, this is default. Any time people have to face anything as complex as sexuality, even if people are doing their best to pro-socially guide people this is necessarily what's going to happen. Perversions can sneak in too, and I don't deny that they exist, but postulating perversions is absolutely not needed in order to explain the data you're seeking to explain.
To narrow things down a bit, we can return to the original comment:
Sometimes people profess or try to reveal a preference for X, as a response to coercive pressures that are specifically motivated by prior underlying preferences for anti-X. This is what I'm calling preference inversion.
I don't disagree with this.
My intuition is that generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others' preferences as calculated prior to such influences. I don't know whether there are other sorts of analogous distorting factors nearly all reasonable people would not like to satisfy upon reflection, but in general, I'm using the term "intrinsic preferences" to refer to whatever's left over after all such generally appealing adjustments.
It's this second part I was taking issue with.
Here, you're talking about what generally happens, not what "sometimes" happens, and I don't think "intrinsic preferences" is defined well enough to do what you want it to do here. I don't think it can be, unless you introduce more concepts, because I don't think "external vs intrinsic" can do justice to this multidimensional space no matter how you cleave it.
Part of this is because what counts as "external" cannot be well defined. If daddy yells at me to not drink, that sounds external, and my revealed preferences are likely to revert when he's not looking. But maybe being a reasonable person, upon reflection I'd agree with him. Does that make it "not a preference inversion"? If my boss threatens to fire me if I show up drunk, that sounds external too. But that's not very different than my boss reminding me that he can only afford to hire productive people -- and that's starting to sound like "just reality". Certainly if a doctor tells me that my liver is failing, that sounds like "just reality" and "internal". But it's external to my brain, and maybe if someone offers me an artificial liver I'd revert to my "intrinsic preferences"?
Our preferences necessarily depend on the reality we find ourselves embedded in, and cannot exist in isolation except perhaps in the highest abstraction (e.g. "I prefer to continue existing" or something), so the concept of "intrinsic preferences" for concrete things necessarily falls apart. What doesn't fall apart is the structure of incoherence in our own preferences.
We're constantly trying to shape and reshape the reality that others live in such that their revealed preferences given this reality satisfy our own. Part of this is making laws forbidding theft, how we indoctrinate in church, our hiring and firing decisions, how we inform our friends, etc. Some of these actions are purely cooperative, others are pure defections, and many are somewhere in between. Often we have fairly superficial pressure applied which results in fairly superficial changes in revealed preferences which easily revert, but that superficiality is fundamentally a property of the person containing the preferences not the person applying the pressures. There is indeed skill in facilitating deeper shifts in preferences to better match reality, and this is indeed a good thing to pursue, but the "intrinsic vs external" binary obscures the interplay between shifting reality, shifting perceptions of reality, and shifting preferences -- and therefore most of what is going on.
To use your example, the positive value of marital intimacy is inherently intertwined with the power of sexuality, the importance of getting sexuality right, and therefore the badness of sexuality done inappropriately. There is all sorts of room for this guidance to be given skillfully or clumsily, purely or corruptly, for it to be received coherently or superficially, in concordance with reality or not, and everywhere in between. Like you've noticed, there isn't always a legible distinction between the conventional conservative Christians who pull this off well and those that do more poorly.
My own perception, is that almost none of our preferences can be cleanly described as "intrinsic" or "externally pressured", or as "valid" or "invalid". There's just differing degrees of coherence and differing degrees of fit to reality. The average case of conventional conservative Christians pushing against non-marital sex, and the average case of the person "believing in" and regretting not living by their "beliefs", is in between the picture Christianity portrays, and the one you portray of falsified preferences. Because the ground truth is in between "nonmarital sex is always bad" and "nonmarital sex is always as good as it seems".
Generally, when I interact with people on the topic of sexuality, I see people who don't know what their preferences resolve to with regards to non-marital sex -- and whose genuine preferences would resolve in different ways depending on the culture they're embedded within and the opportunities they have. I could sell either picture, and make it look "intrinsic", if I'm willing to sweep the right things under the rug in order to do so. Most people's belief structures surrounding sex (and most things) are shoddily built. I could argue for their destruction, and destroy them. I could argue for their utility, and preserve them. The optimal solution necessarily involves seeing both the utility and imperfections, both a degree of destruction and of reconstruction.
Like you said, this isn't just theoretical. This is a thing I've actually done when it has come up. I can give examples if it'd help
The problem there isn't the Econ-101, it's the fool in the arm chair.
You can't just say "I have a simple armchair argument that no one could ever demand sexual favors", because that's not even a valid prediction of Econ-101. Maybe the person does want to provide sexual favors. Maybe they even want to provide sexual favors and then also claim purity and victimhood status to gullible people. That's entirely consistent with Econ-101.
Or maybe they aren't productive enough to earn their wage otherwise, and their job is better conceptualized as half prostitute. That's also entirely consistent with Econ-101.
If we have situations that look like "This person didn't want it"+"this person is productive enough to earn their wage", then if we also have Econ-101 we notice a contradiction. We can't just assume the bottom line that Econ-101 is somehow wrong without finding an identifiable error and be justified in our assumptions. Neither can we assume people will necessarily do what's in their best interest and assume "This person wanted it, actually", without finding an identifiable error in the perception that they didn't.
There's an actual puzzle to be solved here, and we can't write the bottom line first and also get to the right answer on anything but chance.
I agree that there is a meaningful difference, but I disagree that they're so cleanly separable that we can say that it is one or the other.
I don't teach my kid that sugar is evil and I give her the chance to learn how much sugar she wants for herself. I try to minimize coercion because it impairs learning, and I want my kid to actually integrate the information so that she can make coherent rather than fractured decisions.
At the same time, I want to protect her from things that are beyond her capability to handle and learn from. We don't want our children to grow up with sexual shame that continues into marriage, but if the kindergarten teacher starts teaching kids about how great sex is and offering to show them, then do you take a stance of "well, I don't want my five year old to think sex is bad..." or do you say "Absolutely not."?
Information sharing and force are both useful tools, and while it's better to lean on the former as much as possible it is important to be able to fall back on the latter. People just don't have a good idea of how to do the former (and are kinda 'sinful' themselves) so they over-rely on the latter.
Using force (including social shame) is a symmetric weapon so it is more easily (even unintentionally) corrupted into serving less pure motivations, but it also serves pure motivations when necessary.
The question of "Does the pressure help people better achieve their other goals, or create persistent internal conflicts?" is important, but messy.
Which people? Which pressure? If I know two people who grew up in Christian households, and one of them grew up in a strict household, married a virgin and is happy and without sexual shame, and another grew up in a less strict household and had premarital sex but felt bad about it, then how do we judge Christianities "anti sex" norms here?
I'd say we can notice which are more effective at bringing about good outcomes, and which have more pure intent and are heavier on the information to pressure ratio. But we cannot separate them. I know some people who absolutely reject the pressure -- and then come to learn on their own the value it was pointing at -- and other people who are handled delicately with pure information and then shame themselves for not learning to like sweets in the optimal way instantly.
It's kinda a mess.
You're arguing that attempts to decrease candy consumption are coercive rather than informative, and are in ways counterproductive. I agree with this. You take this to mean it's not a "good faith attempt", but as a general rule people don't know how to do any better than this.
It's true that people can appeal to "sinfully delicious" to sell you their dessert, but why don't broccoli salesmen do the same? Why not toothbrush salesmen? If "Sinful" means "good", actually, and it originates with salesmen, then why isn't everything "sinful"?
The answer is that it didn't originate with salesmen. Dessert salesmen are leaning on the preexisting "Anything that feels this good must be a sin", so the question is where that came from. One obvious explanation is that things that feel that good tend to be pursued a lot, and there are contexts in which those pursuits are less desirable than it may seem.
I do withhold sweets (and television) when I have the intuition that he's asking for them for the wrong reasons, in a confused way, and won't either get what he wants from them or learn efficiently from the experience.
Even you notice that he will ask for sweets for the wrong reasons and that you don't always expect him to learn efficiently from experience. That's where the pressure to coerce your kid into eating less sweets comes from.
You're smarter and wiser than most, and so you're able to teach your kid these things more effectively and with transmission of neuroses, and that's great. I try at that as well, and have noticed some of the same things (though not all; I'll have to play with the 'appetizer' bit).
I'm not arguing that the things you're pointing at don't exist, just pointing at the fact that people don't know how to do any better. We can flip the sign on this and look at how people handle teaching their kids about getting their shots at the doctor. People want their kids to be okay with it because it's an "anti-sin" in that it in reality it is better than it feels. That's why they try to tell kids "It's okay! It just feels like a little pinch!"
And these attempts are equally counterproductive, because as a general rule people don't know how to avoid teaching their own neuroses. I told my two year old that shots are bad and scary and that I was too scared so she needed to go first. She had fun showing me how to be brave, and only cried when she couldn't get a second shot.
The next year, she watched some cartoon made by incompetent but well meaning people that was aimed at showing kids that shots are okay, and relearned a fear of needles. Because all these people know how to teach is their own perspective, and that perspective is "Needles are terrifying but we mustn't admit it because we need to get our shots". So I had to start over.
As a society we notice things. We just suck at teaching them, and even our most good faith attempts are still counterproductively coercive and lacking in actionable information.
Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both "not be ill e.g. with diabetes" and "eat tasty things".
That sounds basically right to me, which is why I put effort into learning (and teaching) to enjoy the right things. I'm pretty proud of the fact that both my little girls like "liver treats".
Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average.
I think that's right, but also "more distance to failure" doesn't help so much if you use your newfangled automobile to cover that distance more quickly. It's easier to avoid failure, but also easier to fail. A gun makes it easier to defend yourself, and also requires you to grow up until you can make those calls correctly one hundred percent of the time. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.
I'll take the car, and the gun, and the society that trusts people with cars and guns and other technologically enabled freedoms. But only because I think we can aspire to such responsibilities, and notice when they're not met. All the enabling with none of the sobering fear of recklessness isn't a combination I'm a fan of.
With respect to the "why do you believe this" question on my previous comment about promiscuity being statistically linked with marital dissatisfaction, I'm not very good at keeping citations on hand so I can't tell you which studies I've seen, but here's what chatgpt found for me when I asked for studies on the correlation.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600089
https://unews.utah.edu/u-researcher-more-sex-partners-before-marriage-doesnt-necessarily-lead-to-divorce/
https://ifstudies.org/blog/testing-common-theories-on-the-relationship-between-premarital-sex-and-marital-stability
https://www.proquest.com/openview/46b66af73b830380aca0e6fbc3b597e3/1
I don't actually lean that hard on the empirical regularity though, because such things are complicated and messy (e.g. the example I gave of a man with a relatively high partner count succeeding because he took an anti-promiscuous stance). The main reason I believe that pills don't remove all the costs of promiscuity is that I can see some of the causal factors at work and have experience actually working with them to help women land happy stable relationships.
I object to the framing of society being all-wise,
Society certainly is not all-wise, and I did not frame it as such. But it is wiser than the person who thinks "Trying heroin seems like a good idea", and then proceeds to treat heroin as if it's the most important thing in the universe.
Is it wiser than you, in some limited way in some limited context that you are unaware of? Is it less wise, in other ways? I'd bet on "both" before either.
Consequently, I'd prefer "bunch of candy and no diabetes still" outcome, and there are some lines of research/ideas into how this can be done.
This isn't the eating your cake and having it too that you think it is.
Yes, computers allow us to do things we couldn't do before, and that's great. Before, you might have to choose between meeting with Bob in the north or Richard in the south, and technology enables you to have both. Great!
The thing is, neither meeting Bob nor Richard is a "sin". It's not a "thing you will be tempted to do due to shallow preferences" where society recognizes that those preferences are shallow and predictably lead to bad outcomes. Society wasn't all up in your business decisions telling you who to meet because it didn't trust you to make the obviously right one; that was on you.
Candy gluttony, like heroin use, is a sin. It's something that society knows is bad news, but will feel like good news to individuals, because individuals are myopic and lack the bigger picture. If you had lived a million lifetimes, and thrown away your life to heroin thousands of times, heroin wouldn't be so tempting because you'd know from experience that heroin ain't great. But you haven't, so you don't, and society has some wisdom to offer individuals here.
Candy consumption is the same thing, scaled down a little bit. You're not after the calories, the micronutrients, or anything real in the candy itself. You're after how it makes you feel. You're after the feeling of getting what you want, without thought about whether you want the right thing. In other words, you're wire-heading.
Pills that reduce the consequences for "sins" -- whether candy consumption, or heroin consumption, or nonmarital sex -- can be good. If you're going to die from syphilis because you were too dumb to listen to society, having some forgiveness can certainly be a good thing, and maybe you'll learn your lesson instead of just dying.
But if you think "Syphilis is treatable!" justifies all nonmarital sex, then you're gonna need a new type of pill soon.
And if you think that once you have BC then now all nonmarital sex is justified, then you're on track for a statistically less happy marriage.
It's not that options aren't often good, or even that options which reduce consequence of sin aren't good. I'm also not arguing that antibiotics and birth control don't open up options for good nonmarital sex, or that no one is with it enough to be able to reliably find them. Some people are; maybe you're one of them.
But technology is not a good alternative to good decision making and informed values. Waiting around for technology that doesn't exist yet instead of learning more about what is good now is a mistake. You get better results by learning what is good than by relying on technological crutches, and the way that this happens will often be difficult to foresee.
As an amusing anecdote relating to this, one of the more sexually successful men I know decided that he was no longer going to have sex with anyone but his future wife -- whom he had not yet met. I called bullshit, and bet him $100. Not long after he made that bet, I saw his disinterest in non-future-wife sex turn a "I like you and would have sex with you" level of attraction into a "I will do whatever it takes to marry you" level of attraction. It's hard to even conceptualize such moves from a shallow pleasure seeking mindset, and impossible to enact them. And yet, I'm quite confident that he wouldn't have been able to marry her otherwise, and that his alternative sex life would have been much worse even from a superficial pleasure seeking perspective. It's hard to do justice to so briefly, but that was a very strong move that led to a great marriage which wouldn't have worked otherwise, and no amount of technological crutches would have gotten him to where he is today.
that seems already solved with the concept of "commitment"?
You mean like... marriage? :p
In all seriousness, I'm not taking a "in marriage only!" stance here.
The success story I give above involved sex outside marriage as an active ingredient in more than one way, and could be used to argue against a strict "in marriage only!" stance. At the same time, it demonstrates value of "in marriage only" which has been lost in what the norm has become.
He was able to thread that needle and get unusually good results because he had both respect for and an understanding of traditional "in marriage only", and a strong enough rebellious streak to not let himself be bound by forces he didn't agree with. You can't get those results without respect for traditional wisdom, and neither can you get it by becoming slave to some pastor's clumsy interpretation of them.
The part of OP you quoted only covers part of what I'm saying. It's not just that we can be pressured into doing good things, it's also that we have no idea what our intrinsic desires will become as we learn more about they interact with each other and the world, and there is a lot of legitimate change in intrinsic preferences which are more reflectively stable upon sufficiently good reflection, but which nevertheless revert to the shallower preferences upon typical reflection because reflection is hard and people are bad at it.
"Reflectively stable in absence of coercive pressure" is very difficult to actually measure, so it's more of a hypothetical construct which is easy to get wrong -- especially since "absence of coercive pressure" can't actually exist, so we have to figure out which kinds of coercive pressure we're going to include in our hypothetical.
I don't think it's so simple at all.
If you start with the conclusion that sex is great, and anti-premarital sex campaigns are really just anti-you-procreating campaigns and therefore oppressive and bad, then sure. I don't think that's a fair assumption across the board (e.g. Amish as an existence proof of "something more"), but it certainly doesn't work for all preferences and it's generally not so clear.
Let's look at preference for eating lots of sweets, for example. Society tries to teach us not to eat too much sweets because it's unhealthy, and from the perspective of someone who likes eating sweets, this often feels coercive. Your explanation applied here would be that upon reflection, people will decide "Actually, eating a bunch of candy every day is great" -- and no doubt, to a degree that is true, at least with the level of reflection that people actually do.
However when I decided to eat as much sweet as I wanted, I ended up deciding that sweets were gross, except in very small amounts or as a part of extended exercise where my body actually needs the sugar. What's happening here is that society has a bit more wisdom than the candy loving kid, tries clumsily to teach the foolish kid that their ways are wrong and they'll regret it, and often ends up succeeding more in constraining behavior than integrating the values in a way that the kid can make sense of upon reflection.
So which preferences are "real"? The preference for candy or the preference for no candy and no diabetes? What you are calling "intrinsic preferences" is often just shallow preferences, which haven't yet been trained to reflect nuances of reality like "more of a good thing isn't always better" and "here's where it's good and here's where it's not good". There's preferences declared, preferences acted on, and preferences that will be regressed to in absence of guiding pressure. The declared preferences are generally going to align better with the coercive forces than the preferences that will be regressed to in absence of said pressure, but the preferences acted on can easily be more reflectively stable than those regressed to -- because all that takes is for the culture to be wiser than the individual, and the individual to not have caught up yet.
Returning to the case of nonmarital sex, of course it feels good -- just like candy feels good. There is something there that we need (namely "sex", and "calories"), but the question is over whether naïve indulgence across all contexts will result in blowing past Goodhart's warnings into more harm than good, and whether the "oppressive society" is actually forming you into a closer approximation of the reflectively sensible thing to do.
Societies pressures can end up perverted, but individual's intrinsic preferences start out perverted. Who is closer to reflectively stable, society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets, or the kid who wants to eat all the sweets? Society who aggressively shames nonmarital sex, or the teenager who wants to bone everyone?
As we mature, our desires change, and the degree to which reversion in absence of external pressures brings us closer to something truly reflectively stable depends on how much we've learned to separate overconsumption of sweets from appropriate consumption of sweets, and overconsumption of nonmarital sex to appropriate consumption. I think the answer depends too much on the specific (sub)culture and the specific individual at a specific time in their life to make any sweeping generalizations.
What are the failure rates? So, I would love to share data on the cases I haven’t (yet) been able to help… but I don’t know how?
1) How many cumulative hours have you spent on things where there has been no success and you guys aren't working together anymore on the issue? How does this compare to the number of hours which have resulted in success, and the number where the result is tbd? How many hours have resulted in partial or incremental success, without meeting agreed upon win criteria?
2) Of those where someone bailed how many times did they bail and how many times did you bail? There's some ambiguity here, but probably manageable. If you don't expect to hear back (e.g. because it's been two months), then count it as a bail. If you suggest that their problem isn't in your wheel house and they say "okay" rather than asking to try anyway, I'd count that one as on you.
3) To what extent have you "failed" because the initial goal turned out to be meaningfully mis-specified? E.g. someone wants to be more socially active in a certain group, only to realize their aversion to socializing in that group is actually well grounded, and they no longer want to achieve their initial goal?
4) To what extent have you caused problems by being too successful for the specified goal? E.g. The person actually ends up active in that social circle before realizing that they've been wasting their time doing so. Or maybe you help someone be more secure and they're happy for it, but it did lead to them losing a relationship when they spoke a little too freely.
I think there's not much to update. "Exploitation" is a shortcut for a particular, negative feeling we humans tend to naturally get from certain type of situation, and as I tried to explain, it is a rather simple thing. [...] *Before you red-flag 'unfair' as well: Again, I'm simply referring to the way people tend to perceive things, on average or so.
This is where I disagree. I don't think it is simple, partly because I don't think "unfair" is simple. People's perceptions of what is "unfair", like people's perceptions of anything else that means anything at all, can be wrong. If you better inform people and notice that their perceptions of what is "fair" changes, then you have to start keeping track of the distinction between "people's econ101 illiterate conceptions of fairness" and "the actual underlying thing that doesn't dissolve upon clear seeing".
For example, if we have a pie and we ask someone to judge if it's fair to split it two ways and give the third person no pie, then that person might say it's an unfair distribution because the fair distribution is 1/3,1/3,1/3. But then if we inform the judge that the third person was invited to help make the pie and declined to do so while the other people did all the work, then all of a sudden that 1/3,1/3,1/3 distribution starts to look less fair and more like a naïve person's view of what fairness is. The aversion isn't defined away, it dissolves once you realize that it was predicated on nonsense.
Another reason I don't think it's simple is because I don't think "exploitation" is just something people are just "unhappy about". It's a blaming thing. If I say you're exploiting me, that's an accusation of wrongdoing, and a threat of getting you lynched if people side with me strongly enough and you don't cave to the threats. I claim that if you say "exploitation is happening, but it's no one's fault and the employers aren't doing anything morally wrong" then you're doing something very different than what other people are doing when they talk about exploitation.
If there's a situation where a bunch of poor orphans are employed for 50c per grueling 16 hour work day plus room and board, then the fact that it might be better than starving to death on the street doesn't mean it's as great as we might wish for them. We might be sad about that, and wish they weren't forced to take such a deal. Does that make it "exploitation?" in the mind of a lot of people, yeah. Because a lot of people never make it further than "I want them to have a better deal, so you have to give it to them" -- even if it turns out they're only creating 50.01c/day worth of value, the employer got into the business out of the goodness of his heart, and not one of the people crying "exploitation!" cares enough about the orphans to give them a better deal or even make they're not voting them out of a living. I'd argue that this just isn't exploitation, and anyone thinking it is just hasn't thought things through.
On the other hand, if an employer demands sexual favors from his poor young woman employees, that rubs us the wrong way morally in a way that is easier to square with Econ 101. For one, if he's not demanding sexual favors from his male or ugly female employees, it suggests that maybe the work they do is enough to pay them for, and if we collectively say "Hey knock it off. You can't demand sexual favors from your employees" he might keep employing them and giving them a better deal. Maybe "this guy is doing something wrong by demanding sexual favors" actually holds up in a way that "this guy is doing something morally wrong by paying market wages" does not.
I think "what validity is left in our concept of 'exploitation' once we realize that people can't be obligated to pay whatever wage we'd like to close our eyes and believe is fair?" is a nontrivial question.
that the elephant in the room is that the rich should help the poor independently of the question of the labor exchange itself, i.e. that the overwhelming moral point is that, if we care, we should simply donate some of our resources.
"Should" is a red flag word, which serves to hide the facets of reality that generate sense of obligation. It helps to taboo it, and find out what's left.
If a rich person wants to help the poor, it will be more effective so simply help the poor -- i.e. with some of their own resources. Trying to distort the market leads to smaller gains from trade which could be used to help the poor. So far so good.
If someone else want's the rich person to help the poor with the rich person's resources, then with what will this rich person be motivated? If the goodness of their own hearts is enough, then this "someone else" is irrelevant, and not in the picture. If the rich person is to be motivated by gains from trade with someone else, then great. However, this is equivalent to the trade partners demanding more of the surplus and then donating it themselves, so again we're out of luck.
If we're talking about obligating the rich person to spend their resources on poor people, then they're de facto not the rich person's resources anymore, and we're distorting the market by force in order to get there. Now we have to deal with unfree trade and the lack of gains from trade that we could have had.
We can't just say "they coexist, no problem!", because to the extent that they're different frameworks we can't have both. You can have free trade and acknowledge exploitation only if you accept that exploitation is totally fine and fair -- at which point you're redefining the word "exploitation". The moment you try to stop someone from a kind of exploitation that can coexist with free trade, you're trying to stop free trade, with all the consequences of that.
That's not to say we have to give up on caring about all exploitation and just do free trade, but it does mean that if we want to have both we have to figure out how to update our understanding of exploitation/economics until the two fit.
Just as explicit games have rules, normal conversation has all kinds of implicit expectations.
If someone asks me a question, I should answer.
No rules = no rule saying that you have to answer.
In fact, if someone says that they are curious about my reaction to something, it’s totally fine for me to just say “okay” and then change the topic to something else that feels more interesting to me.
That said, it is also okay for the other to get annoyed by that and say it, which they might or might not.
So then is circling just the voicing of the ever-present fact that you're free to violate social expectations if you're willing to annoy people?
I understand and agree with the stuff about "when you don't take social expectations as binding that's simultaneously freeing and difficult", but that's already the choice you have. If circling doesn't include any rules against trying to enforce social expectations in the usual way, then it seems like circling can't change anything. Is it just the effects of making this fact common knowledge?
Here the two definitions of rationality diverge: believing the truth is now at odds with doing what works. It will obviously work better to believe what your friends and neighbors believe, so you won't be in arguments with them and they'll support you more when you need it.
This is only true if you can't figure out how to handle disagreements.
It will often be better to have wrong beliefs if it keeps you from acting on the even wronger belief that you must argue with everyone who disagrees. It's better yet to believe the truth on both fronts, and simply prioritize getting along when it is more important to get along.
If we had infinite cognitive capacity, we could just believe the truth while claiming to believe whatever works. And we could keep track of all of the evidence instead of picking and choosing which to attend to.
It's more fundamental than that. The way you pick up a glass of water is by predicting that you will pick up a glass of water, and acting so as to minimize that prediction error. Motivated cognition is how we make things true, and we can't get rid of it except by ceasing to act on the environment -- and therefore ceasing to exist.
Motivated cognition causes no epistemic problem so long as we can realize our predictions. The tricky part comes when we struggle to fit the world to our beliefs. In these cases, there's an apparent tension between "believing the truth" and "working towards what we want". This is where all that sports stuff of "you have to believe you can win!" comes from, and the tendency to lose motivation once we realize we're not going to succeed.
If we try to predict that we will win the contest despite being down 6-0 and clearly less competent, we will either have to engage in the willful delusion of pretending we're not less competent and/or other things (which makes it harder to navigate reality, because we're using a false map and can't act so as to minimize the consequences of our flaws) or else we will just fail to predict success altogether and be unable to even try.
If instead, we don't predict anything about whether we will win or lose, and instead predict that we will play to the absolute best of our abilities, then we can find out whether we win or lose, and give ourselves room to be pleasantly surprised.
The solution isn't to "believe the truth" because the truth has not been set yet. The solution is to pay attention to our anticipated prediction errors, and shift to finer grain modeling when the expected error justifies the cost of thinking harder.
The only remedy I know of is to cultivate enjoying being wrong. This involves giving up a good bit of one's self-concept as a highly intelligent individual. This gets easier if you remember that everyone else is also doing their thinking with a monkey brain that can barely chin itself on rationality.
If you stop predicting "I am a highly intelligent individual, so I'm not wrong!", then you get to find out if you're a highly intelligent individual, as well as all of the things that may provide evidence in that direction (i.e. being wrong about things). This much is a subset of the solution I offer.
The next part is a bit trickier because of the question of what "cultivate enjoying being wrong" means, and how exactly you go about making sure you enjoy a fundamentally bad and unpleasant thing (not saying this is impossible, my two little girls are excited to get their flu shots today).
One way to attempt this is to predict "I am the kind of person who enjoys being wrong, because that means I get to learn [which puts me above the monkeys that can't even do this]", which is an improvement. If you do that, then you get to learn more things you're wrong about.... except when you're wrong about how much you enjoy being wrong -- which is certainly going to become a thing, when it matters to you most.
On top of that, the fact that it feels like "giving up" something and that it gets easier when you remember the grading curve suggests more vulnerabilities to motivated thinking, because there's still a potential truth being avoided ("I'm dumb on the scale that matters") and because switching to a model which yields strictly better results feels like losing something.
So far as I can tell, the common line that bear spray is more effective than firearms is based on an atrociously bad reading of the (limited) science, which is disavowed by the author of the studies. In short, successfully spraying a bear is more effective at driving off curious bears than simply having a firearm is are at stopping charging bears, but when you're comparing apples to apples then firearms are much more effective.
Here's a pretty good overview: https://www.outsideonline.com/2401248/does-bear-spray-work. I haven't put a ton of work into verifying what he's claiming here, but it does match with the other data I've seen and I haven't seen anyone be nearly as careful and reach the opposite conclusion.
I'm the person JenniferRM mentioned. I'm also a physics guy, and got into studying/practicing hypnosis in ~2010/2011. I kinda moved on from "hypnosis" and drifted up the abstraction ladder, but still working on similar things and working on tying them together.
Anyway, here are my thoughts.
Suppose I really want her to be spinning clockwise in my mind. What might I do?
What worked for me is to focus on the foot alone and ignore the broader context so that I had a "clean slate" without "confirmatory experience" blocking my desired conclusion. When looking at the foot alone I experience it as oscillating rather than rotating (which I guess it technically is), and from there I can "release" it into whichever spin I intend by just kinda imagining that this is what's going on.
On the one hand, shifting intuitive models is surprisingly hard! You can’t necessarily just want to have a particular intuitive model, and voluntarily make that happen.
I actually disagree with this. It certainly seems hard, but the difficulty is largely illusory and pretty much disappears once you stop trying to walk through the wall and notice the front door.
The problem is that "wanting to have a particular model" isn't the thing that matters. You can want to have a particular model all you want, and you can even think the model is true all you want, but you're still talking about the statement itself not about the reality to which the statement refers. Even if you convince someone that their fear is irrational and they'd be better off not being scared, you've still only convinced them that their fear is irrational and they'd be better off not being scared. If you want to convince them that they are safe -- and therefore change their fear response itself -- then you need to convince them that they're safe. It's the difference between looking at yourself from the third person and judging whether your beliefs are correct or not, vs looking at the world from the first person and seeing what is there. If you want to change the third person perspective, then you can look at which models are desirable and why. If you want to change the first person models themselves, you have to look to the world and see what's there.
This doesn't really work with the spinning dancer because "Which way is the dancer spinning?" doesn't have an answer, but this is an artificial issue which doesn't exist in the real world. You still have to figure out "Is this safe enough to be worth doing?" and that's not always trivial, but the problem of "How do I change this irrational fear?" (for example) is. The answer is "By attending to the question of whether it is actually safe".
I don't deny that there's "skill" to it, but most of the skill IME is a meta skill of knowing what to even aim for rather than aiming well. Once you start attending to "Is it safe enough?", then when the answer is actually obvious the intuitive models just change. I can give a whole bunch of examples of this if you want, where people were stuck unable to change their responses and the problem just melts away with this redirection. Even stuff that you'd think would be resistant to change like physical pain can change essentially instantly. I've had it take as little as a single word.
Again we see that the subject is made to feel that his body is out of control, and becomes subject to a high-status person. Some hypnotists sit you down, ask you to stare upwards into their eyes and suggest that your eyelids are wanting to close—which works because looking upwards is tiring, and because staring up into a high-status person’s eyes makes you feel inferior.
This isn't exactly wrong, but I want to push back on the implication that this is the central or most important thing here.
The central thing, IMO, is a willingness to try on another person's worldview even though it clashes with your own. It doesn't require "inferiority"/"high status"/"control" except in the extremely minimal sense that they might know something important that you don't, and that seeing it for yourself might change your behavior. That alone will get you inhibition of all the normal stuff and an automatic (albeit tentative) acceptance of worldview-dissonant perspectives (e.g. name amnesia). It helps if the person has reason to respect and trust you which is kinda like "high status", but not really because it can just as easily happen with people on equal social standing in neutral contexts.
Similarly, hypnosis has very little to do with sleep and eye fatigue/closure is not the important part of eye contact. The important part of eye contact is that it's incredibly communicative. You can convey with eye contact things which you can't convey with words. "I see you". "Seeing you doesn't cause conflict in me". "I see you seeing me see you" and so on, to name a few. All the things you need to communicate to show someone that your perspective is safe and worthy of experiencing are best communicated with the eyes. And perhaps equally important it is a bid for attention, by holding your own.
So far, this isn’t a trance; I’m just describing a common social dynamic. Specifically, if I’m not in a hypnotic trance, the sequence of thoughts in the above might look like a three-step process:
[...]
i.e., in my intuitive model, first, the hypnotist exercises his free will with the intention of me standing; second, I (my homunculus) exercise my own free will with the intention of standing; and third, I actually stand. In this conceptualization, it’s my own free will / vitalistic force / wanting (§3.3.4) that causes me to stand. So this is not a trance.
It's important to note that while this self reflective narrative is indeed different in the way you describe, the underlying truth often is not. In the hypnosis literature this is known as "cold control theory", because it's the same control without the usual Higher Order Thoughts (HOT).
In "common social dynamics" we explain it as "I chose to", but what is actually happening a lot of the time is the speaker is exercising their free will through your body, and you're not objecting because it matches your narrative. The steps aren't actually in series, and you didn't choose to do it so much as you chose to not decline to do it.
These "higher order thoughts" do change some things, but turn out to be relatively unimportant and the better hypnotists usually don't bother too much with them and instead just address the object level. This is also why you get hypnotists writing books subtitled "there's no such thing as hypnosis" and stuff like that.
The short version is: If I have a tune in my head, then I’m very unlikely to simultaneously recall a memory of a different tune. Likewise, if I’m angry right now, then I’m less likely to recall past memories where I felt happy and forgiving, and vice-versa.
As far as I can tell, there are several different things going on with amnesia. I agree that this is one of them, and I'm not sure if I've seen anyone else notice this, so it's cool to see someone point it out.
The "null hypothesis", though, any time it comes to hypnosis is that it's all just response to suggestion. You "know" that being hypnotized involves amnesia, and you believe you're hypnotized, so you experience what you expect. There's an academic hypnosis researcher I talk to sometimes who doesn't even believe "hypnotic trance" is real in any fundamental sense and thinks that all the signs of trance are the result of suggestion.
I don't believe suggestion is all that's going on, but it really is sufficient for amnesia. The answer to Yudkowsky's old question of "Do we believe everything we're told?" is indeed "Yes" -- if we don't preemptively push it away or actively remember to unbelieve later. Back when I was working this stuff out I did a fun experiment where I'd come up with an excuse to get people to not pre-emptively reject what I was about to say, then I'd suggest amnesia for this conversation and that they'd laugh when I scratch my nose, and then I'd distract them so that the suggestion could take effect before they had a chance to unbelieve it. The excuse was something like "I know this is ridiculous so I don't expect you to believe it, but hear me out and let me know if you understand" -- which is tricky because they think the fact that we "agreed" that they won't believe it means they actually aren't believing it when they say "I understand", even though the full statement is "I understand [that I will laugh when you scratch your nose and have no idea why"]. They still had awareness that this belief is wrong and would therefore act to stop themselves from acting on it, which is why the unexpected distraction was necessary in order to get their mind off of it long enough for it to work.
If someone's only option for dealing with a hostile telepath is self-deception, and then you come in and punish them for using it, thou art a dick.
Like, do you think it helps the abused mothers I named if you punish them somehow for not acknowledging their partners' abuse? Does it even help the social circle around them?
If that's their only option, and the hostility in your telepathy is antisocial, then yes. In some cases though, people do have other options and their self-deception is offensive, so hostile telepathy is pro-social.
For example, it would probably help those mothers if the men knew to anticipate punishment for not acknowledging their abuse of their partners. I bet at least one of those abusive husbands/boyfriends will give his side of the story that's a bit more favorable than "I'm a bad guy, lol", and that it will start to fall apart when pressed. In those cases, he'll have to choose between admitting wrongdoing or playing dumb, and people often do their best to play really dumb. The self-deception there is a ploy to steal someone else's second box, so fuck that guy.
I think the right response is to ignore the "self" part of the deception and treat it like any other deception. If it's okay to lie to the Nazis about hiding Jews, then it's okay to deceive yourself into believing it too. If we're going to make it against the law to lie under oath, then making it legal so long as they lie to themselves too is only going to increase the antisocial deception.
The reason I trust research in physics in general is that it doesn't end with publishing a paper. It often ends with building machines that depend on that research being right.
We don't just "trust the science" that light is a wave; we use microwave ovens at home.
Well said. I'm gonna have to steal that.
Therefore, in a world where we all do power poses all the time, and if you forget to do them, you will predictably fail the exam...
...well, actually that could just be a placebo effect.
Yeah, "Can I fail my exam" is a bad test, because when the test is "can I fail" then it's easy for the theory to be "wrong in the right way". GPS is a good test of GR because you just can't do it without a better understanding of spacetime so it has to at least get something right even if it's not the full picture. When you actually use the resulting technology in your day to day life and get results you couldn't have gotten before, then it almost doesn't matter what the scientific literature says, because "I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct.".
There are psychological equivalents of this, which rest on doing things that are simply beyond the abilities of people who lack this understanding. The "NLP fast phobia cure" is a perfect example of this, and I can provide citations if anyone is interested. I really get a kick out of the predictable arguments between those who "trust the science" but don't understand it, and those who actually do it on a regular basis.
(Something like seeing a black cat on your way to exam, freaking out about it, and failing to pay full attention to the exam.) Damn!
This reminds me of an amusing anecdote.
I had a weird experience once where I got my ankle sprained pretty bad and found myself simultaneously indignantly deciding that my ankle wasn't going to swell and also thinking I was crazy for feeling like swelling was a thing I could control -- and it didn't swell. I told my friend about this experience, and while she was skeptical and thought it sounded crazy, she tried it anyway and her next several injuries didn't swell.
Eventually she casually mentioned to someone "Nah, my broken thumb isn't going to swell because I decided not to", and the person she was talking to responded as if she had said something else because his brain just couldn't register what she actually said as a real possibility. She then got all self conscious about it and was kinda unintentionally gaslighted into feeling like she was crazy for thinking she could do that, and her thumb swelled up.
I had to call her and remind her "No, you don't give up and expect it to swell because it 'sounds crazy', you intend for it to not swell anyway and find out whether it is something you can control or not". The swelling went back down most of the way after that, though not to the same degree as in the previous cases where the injury never swelled in the first place.
Can you come up with a better way of doing Psychology research?
Yes. More emphasis on concrete useful results, less emphasis on trying to find simple correlations in complex situations.
For example, "Do power poses work?". They did studies like this one where they tell people to hold a pose for five minutes while preparing for a fake job interview, and then found that the pretend employers pretended to hire them more often in the "power pose" condition. Even assuming there's a real effect where those students from that university actually impress those judges more when they pose powerfully ahead of time... does that really imply that power posing will help other people get real jobs and keep them past the first day?
That's like studying "Are car brakes really necessary?" by setting up a short track and seeing if the people who run the "red light" progress towards their destination quicker. Contrast that with studying the cars and driving behaviors that win races, coming up with your theories, and testing them by trying to actually win races. You'll find out very quickly if your "brakes aren't needed" hypothesis is a scientific breakthrough or foolishly naive.
Instead of studying "Does CBT work?", study the results of individual therapists, see if you can figure out what the more successful ones are doing differently than the less successful ones, and see if you can use what you learn to increase the effectiveness of your own therapy or the therapy of your students. If the answer turns out to be "The successful therapists all power pose pre-session, then perform textbook CBT" and that allows you to make better therapists, great. If it's something else, then you get to focus on the things that actually show up in the data.
The results should speak for themselves. If they don't, and you aren't keeping in very close contact with real world results, then it's super easy to go astray with internal feedback loops because the loop that matters isn't closed.
Claim: memeticity in a scientific field is mostly determined, not by the most competent researchers in the field, but instead by roughly-median researchers. [...] Sure, the most competent people in the field may recognize the problems, but the median researchers don’t, and in aggregate it’s mostly the median researchers who spread the memes.
This assumes the median researchers can't recognize who the competent researchers are, or otherwise don't look to them as thought leaders.
I'm not arguing that this isn't often the case, just that it isn't always the case. In engineering, if you're more competent than everyone else, you can make cooler shit. If you're a median engineer trying to figure out which memes to take on and spread, you're going to be drawn to the work of the more competent engineers because it is visibly and obviously better.
In fields where distinguishing between bad research and good research has to be done by knowing how to do good research, rather than "does it fly or does it crash", then the problem you describe is much more difficult to avoid. I argue that the difference between the fields which replicate and those which don't is as much about the legibility of the end product as it is about the quality of the median researcher.
There's no norm saying you can't be ignorant of stats and read, or even post about things not requiring an understanding of stats, but there's still a critical mass of people who do understand the topic well enough to enforce norms against actively contributing with that illiteracy. (E.g. how do you expect it to go over if someone makes a post claiming that p=0.05 means that there's a 95% change that the hypothesis is true?)
Taking it a step further, I'd say my household "has norms which basically require everyone to speak English", but that doesn't mean the little one is quite there yet or that we're gonna boot her for not already meeting the bar. It just means that she has to work hard to learn how to talk if she wants to be part of what's going on.
Lesswrong feels like that to me in that I would feel comfortable posting about things which require statistical literacy to understand, knowing that engagement which fails to meet that bar will be downvoted rather than getting downvoted for expecting to find a statistically literate audience here.
I think this is correct as a conditional statement, but I don't think one can deduce the unconditional implication that attempting to price some externalities in domains where many externalities are difficult to price is generally bad.
It's not "attempting to price some externalities where many are difficult to price is generally bad", it's "attempting to price some externalities where the difficult to price externalities on the other side is bad". Sometimes the difficulty of pricing them means it's hard to know which side they primarily lie on, but not necessarily.
The direction of legible/illegible externalities might be uncorrelated on average, but that doesn't mean that ignoring the bigger piece of the pie isn't costly. If I offer "I'll pay you twenty dollars, and then make up some rumors about you which may or may not be true and may greatly help or greatly harm your social standing", you don't think "Well, the difficult part to price is a wash, but twenty dollars is twenty dollars"
you can just directly pay the person who stops the shooting,
You still need a body.
Sure, you can give people like Elisjsha Dicken a bunch of money, but that's because he actually blasted someone. If we want to pay him $1M per life he saved though, how much do we pay him? We can't simply go to the morgue and count how many people aren't there. We have to start making assumptions, modeling the system, and paying out based on our best guesses of what might have happened in what we think to be the relevant hypothetical. Which could totally work here, to be clear, but it's still a potentially imperfect attempt to price the illegible and it's not a coincidence that this was left out of the initial analysis that I'm responding.
But what about the guy who stopped a shooting before it began, simply by walking around looking like the kind of guy that would stop an a spree killer before he accomplished much? What about the good role models in the potential shooters life that lead him onto the right track and stopped a shooting before it was ever planned? This could be ten times as important and you wouldn't even know without a lot of very careful analysis. And even then you could be mistaken, and good luck creating enough of a consensus on your program to pay out what you believe to be the appropriate amount to the right people who have no concrete evidence to stand on. It's just not gonna work.
I don't agree that most of the benefits of AI are likely to be illegible. I expect plenty of them to take the form of new consumer products that were not available before, for example.
Sure, they'll be a lot of new consumer products and other legible stuff, but how are you estimating the amount of illegible stuff and determining it to be smaller? That's the stuff that by definition is going to be harder to recognize so you can't just say "all of the stuff I recognize is legible, therefore legible>>illegible".
For example, what's the probability that AI changes the outcome of future elections and political trajectory, is it a good or bad change, and what is the dollar value of that compared to the dollar value of ChatGPT?