Posts
Comments
More diplomatically: people are terrified of disapproval and will do anything to avoid feeling they deserve it, so if you must point out that something isn't working, try to do so in such a way that the easiest way for them to resolve their cognitive dissonance isn't "blow you off" or "get mad at you". i.e., find a way for them to "save face".
(As a lot of people associate being incorrect with being deserving of disapproval.)
More specifically, the issue is that the img srcset attribute contains unescaped commas, causing the URLs to be broken. Deleting the srcset attributes fixes the image, or replacing all the f_auto, q_auto bits in the srcset with f_auto%2cq_auto fixes it.
It looks like maybe this is a bug in LW's support for uploaded images?
I expect business and sales people would mostly not feel similarly, though to be fair it's uncommon for business friendships/acquaintances to reach "best friend" or better status. The vibe of somebody putting you in a CRM to stay in touch without any direct/immediate monetary benefit is like, "oh, how thoughtful of you / props for being organized / I should really be doing that".
Anyway, the important question isn't how most people would feel, it's how one's desired friends in particular would feel. And many people might feel things like "honored this busy person with lots of friends wants to upgrade our friendship and is taking action to make sure it happens -- how awesome".
One of the reasons your question is challenging is that "fear of failure" is a phrase our brains use to stop thinking about the horrible thing they don't want to think about. "Failure" is an abstract label, but the specific thing you fear isn't the literal failure to accomplish your goal. It's some concrete circumstance the situation will resemble, along with some defined meaning of the failure.
This is easier to see if you consider how many things you do every day that involve failure to accomplish a goal and yet do not provoke the same kind of emotion. Lots of things are "no big deal" and thus no big deal to fail at.
Things that are a "big deal" are a big deal because of some meaning we assign to them, either positively or negatively.
Mostly negatively.
More specifically: negatively, masquerading as positively. The "tell" for this is when your goals are suspiciously abstract or unclear. It's a strong sign that the real motivation for the goals is signaling, specifically signaling that you aren't something.
These days I call it GUPI Syndrome, for "Guilty Until Proven Innocent". Common patterns I see in my practice:
- Businessperson is obsessed with "taking their business to the next level" without any specific goals in mind... because what they really want is their family to finally acknowledge they're capable of taking care of themselves and worthy of respect. (aka "Not a Disappointment")
- Guy is obsessed with learning PUA in order to talk to women... not because he wants to talk to any women in particular, but because he believes being uncomfortable talking to women means he's "less of a man" than the other guys he grew up with
- Entrepreneur is obsessed with improving their productivity, getting more done and building habits and whatever productivity buzzword is of the day. Turns out, their family doesn't believe a person is good unless they are busy to the point of being stressed, so any time the entrepreneur starts improving their productivity enough to have free time, they start backsliding until they reach an appropriate level of stress.
- Gifted kid grows up knowing they're meant to change the world, quickly discovers that they should have been more specific. Upset they're not "reaching their potential", flounders between different goals but finds themselves unable to commit to anything for long. Complains of lack of motivation. Usually has issues with family not believing in their dreams or taking them seriously, feels need to do something big to justify their existence to the universe, if not themselves and their family.
So quite often, the phrase "fear of failure" actually unpacks to "fear I will fail at my lifelong mission to prove I'm not {lazy, a loser, incompetent, stupid, not a man, irresponsible, etc...}".
And this can't be addressed by advice that's aimed at motivation or discipline or what-have-you, because the underlying emotional goal will never be satisfied. Ever.
You can never win enough to "prove" you're not a loser.
You can't prove a negative, and that is fundamentally what this syndrome is about: proving you're not something that you're afraid other people may see you as.
(To be clear here, this is the generic "you" of anyone who is experiencing this, which I'm not saying is "you", the author of this question!)
Anyway, the solution to this problem is to stop trying to prove you're not whatever bad thing you fear you already are (or that people do/might believe you are). This may involve several sub-steps such as:
- Stop looking down on people who match the label you fear (e.g. stop thinking of people as irresponsible or lazy or whatever), or stop believing it's a morally bad thing that justifies treating another human badly. (Because if you hate/fear/pity other people being it, you will also hate/fear/pity yourself.)
- Realize that the interactions you learned this idea from were things done and said by other people, who have sole responsibility for their own actions, which you didn't control. That their assessment of your character was not necessarily correct, or even if it was, it didn't entitle them to treat you in the way that they did. (And even if it did, it would not require you to go along quietly with it, certainly not if this happened years ago and those people aren't even around!)
- Resolve the feelings of shame or guilt from not having anyone on your side when your family or whoever called you the things you did. Get support to realize, deep down, that people exist who would've stood up for you if they could, called out the insinuations, defended you, encouraged you, etc.
Is this a lot? Yes it is. But the payoff is that once you're no longer trying to prove a negative to your emotional brain, you have a lot more mental energy available to spend on goals that no longer seem like such a "big deal", and whose path to achievement feels much clearer.
(Also, it's hard to overstate how big a deal it is to not be feeling every day like someone is going to uncover your horrible secrets or everyone will see you fall on your face, or whatever the thing is that's going on.)
Benevolence towards others flows out of shared values; unconditional regard others-in-general is unnatural.
Now there's a nice quotable quote. I don't think it's entirely accurate, unless people with certain kinds of lobe damage or meditation history count as "unnatural". (Which I suppose they could.) On the other hand, those people arguably have brains that define others as themselves, and thus having shared values with said ohters as a matter of course. (Or alternately, I suppose they have a very expansive definition of "shared values".)
But as a truism or proverb, this makes a lot of sense, and should be helpful to people who suffer from feeling like they should care more about others-in-general. Knowing that caring spreads by way of shared values makes it possible to find the caring one already has, before trying to extend it further. (Rather than constantly going to a well you're told should be full, and always finding it dry.)
we don’t think that shutdown-seeking avoids every possible problem involved with reward misspecification
Seems like this is basically the alignment problem all over again, with the complexity just moved to "what does it mean to 'shut down' in the AI's inner model".
For example, if the inner-aligned goal is to prevent its own future operation, it might choose to say, start a nuclear war so nobody is around to start it back up, repair it, provide power, etc.
it doesn't have the kind of insight into its motives that we do
Wait, human beings have insight into their own motives that's better than GPTs have into theirs? When was the update released, and will it run on my brain? ;-)
Joking aside, though, I'd say the average person's insight into their own motives is most of the time not much better than that of a GPT, because it's usually generated in the same way: i.e. making up plausible stories.
What I was pointing out is that the barrier is asymmetrical: it's biased towards AIs with more-easily-aligned utility functions. A paperclipper is more likely to be able to create an improved paperclipper that it's certain enough will massively increase its utility, while a more human-aligned AI would have to be more conservative.
In other words, this paper seems to say, "if we can create human-aligned AI, it will be cautious about self-improvement, but dangerously unaligned AIs will probably have no issues."
The first and most obvious issue here is that an AI that "solves alignment" sufficiently well to not fear self-improvement is not the same as an AI that's actually aligned with humans. So there's actually no protection there at all.
In fact, the phenomenon described here seems to make it more likely that an unaligned AI will be fine with self-improving, because the simpler the utility function the easier time it has guaranteeing the alignment of the improved version!
Last, but far from least, self-improvement of the form "get faster and run on more processors" is hardly challenging from an alignment perspective. And it's far from unlikely an AI could find straightforward algorithmic improvements that it could mathematically prove safe relative to its own utility function.
In short, the overall approach seems like wishful thinking of the form, "maybe if it's smart enough it won't want to kill us."
Nope - expression of feelings of friendship isn't part of the explicit structure of friendship either. Lots of people are friends without saying anything about it.
All I've really said here is that the difference between VCFWB and a "romantic" relationship is difficult to discern, especially from the outside, and given that the nature of "romance" is both internal and optional to the relationship. If a pair of VCFWB's stop having sex or hanging out or cuddling, it's hard to say they're still in a VCFWB relationship. But if people in a "romantic" relationship stop acting romantic with one another, they can still be said to be in a "romantic" relationship.
The overall point here is that describing "romantic" as if it is a property of a relationship rather than a property of people's feelings is not a good carving of reality at the joints. People can have romantic feelings (or expression thereof) without having any relationship at all, let alone one with reciprocal romantic feelings.
(Indeed, romantic feelings are quite orthogonal to the type and nature of the relationship itself: the term "friend zone" highlights this point.)
So, from an epistemic view, my take is that it's not only useless but confusing to describe a relationship as being romantic, since it's not meaningfully a property of the relationship, but rather a set of feelings that come and go for (and about) parties in the relationship. How many feelings must happen? How often? Must they be reciprocal? Is it still romantic if neither party feels that way any more? What if they didn't start out that way but are now?
I think that the bundle of things called "romantic relationship" are much better described structurally in terms of behavior, in order to avoid cultural projections and mismatched expectations between partners. One person might use it to mean "marriage for life", while another might mean "passionate weekend affair", after all! These more structurally-defined relationships can both be labeled a "romantic relationship" but this does not do a good job of defining a shared vision and expectations for the parties in said relationship.
IOW, I believe that everyone is better off taboo-ing the phrase "romantic relationship" in any serious discussion about relationships -- especially a relationship they'll personally be involved in!
I'm assuming "relationship" here means something like "the explicit structure and boundaries of behavior as agreed upon by the parties" - friends, friends with benefits, marriage, polycule etc. People's romantic feelings and expressions are rarely something that's part of a relationship's explicit structure, even if people often have a lot of implicit expectations about them. (And any of those named structures can include romantic feelings, or a lack thereof.)
Direct quotes:
Which seems to give me just as much control[4] over the past as I have over the future.
And the footnote:
whatever I can do to make my world the one with FA in it, I can do to make my world the one with HA in it.
This is only trivially true in the sense of saying "whatever I can do to arrive at McDonalds, I can do to make my world the one where I walked in the direction of McDonalds". This is ordinary reality and nothing to be "bothered" by -- which obviates the original question's apparent presupposition that something weird is going on.
If there's something incoherent or contradictory about "either the propositions 'HA happened, A is the current state, I will choose CA, FA will happen' are all true, or the propositions 'HB happened, B is the current state, I will choose CB, FB will happen' are all true; the ones that aren't all true are all false", can you be specific about what it is?
It's fine so long as HA/A and HB/B are understood to be the events and states during the actual decision-making process, and not referencing anything before that point, i.e.:
- H -> S -> (HA ->A) -> CA -> FA
- H -> S -> (HB ->B) -> CB -> FB
Think of H as events happening in the world, then written onto a read-only SD card labeled "S". At this moment, the contents of S are already fixed. S is then fed into a device which will then operate upon the data and reveal its interpretation of the data by outputting the text "A" or "B". The history of events occurring inside the device will be different according to whatever the content of the SD card was, but the content of the card isn't "revealed" or "chosen" or "controlled" by this process.
How is 'revealing something about the past' retrocausal?
It isn't; but neither is it actually revealing anything about the past that couldn't have been ascertained prior to executing the decision procedure or in parallel with it. The decision procedure can only "reveal" the process and results of the decision procedure itself, since that process and result were not present in the history and state of the world before the procedure began.
I don't know how to clarify this, because I don't understand why you think I am. I do think we can narrow down a 'moment of decision' if we want to, meaning e.g. the point in time where the agent becomes conscious of which action they will take, or when something that looks to us like a point of no return is reached. But obviously the decision process is a process, and I don't get why you think I don't understand or have failed to account for this.
Here is the relevant text from your original post:
State A: Past events HA have happened, current state of the world is A, I will choose CA, future FA will happen.
State B: Past events HB have happened, current state of the world is B, I will choose CB, future FB will happen.
These definitions clearly state "I will choose" -- i.e., the decision process has not yet begun. But if the decision process hasn't yet begun, then there is only one world-state, and thus it is meaningless to give that single state two names (HA/A and HB/B).
Before you choose, you can literally examine any aspect of the current world-state that you like and confirm it to your heart's content. You already know which events have happened and what the state of the world is, so there can't be two such states, and your choice does not "reveal" anything about the world-state that existed prior to the start of the decision process.
This is why I'm describing HA/A and HB/B in your post as incoherent, and assuming that this description must be based on an instantaneous, outside-reality concept of "choice", which seems to be the only way the stated model can make any sense (even in its own terms).
In contrast, if you label every point of the timeline as to what is happening, the only logically coherent timeline is H -> S -> ( H[A/B] -> A/B ) -> C[A/B] -> F[A/B] -- where it's obvious that this is just reality as normal, where the decision procedure neither "chooses" nor "reveals" anything about the history of the world prior to its beginning execution. (IOW, it can only "reveal" or "choose" or "control" the present and future, not the past.)
But if you were using that interpretation, then your original question appears to have no meaning: what would it mean to be bothered that the restaurant you eat at today will "reveal" which way you flipped the coin you used to decide?
I'm not sure how much that rephrasing would change the rest of your answer
Well, it makes the confusion more obvious, because now it's clearer that HA/A and HB/B are complete balderdash. This will be apparent if you try to unpack exactly what the difference between them is, other than your choice. (Specifically, the algorithm used to compute your choice.)
Let's say I give you a read-only SD card containing some data. You will insert this card into a device that will run some algorithm and output "A" or "B". The data on the card will not change as a result of the device's output, nor will the device's output retroactively cause different data to have been entered on the card! All that will be revealed is the device's interpretation of that data. To the extent there is any uncertainty about the entire process, it's simply that the device is a black box - we don't know what algorithm it uses to make the decision.
So, tl;dr: the choice you make does not reveal anything about the state or history of the world (SD card), except for the part that is your decision algorithm's implementation. If we draw a box around "the parts of your brain that are involved in this decision", then you could say that the output choice tells you something about the state and history of those parts of your brain. But even there, there's no backward causality -- it's again simply resolving your uncertainty about the box, not doing anything to the actual contents, except to the extent that running the decision procedure makes changes to the device's state.
broadly I'm not sure whether you are defending compatibilism or hard determinism
As other people have mentioned, rationalists don't typically think in those terms. There isn't actually any difference between those two ideas, and there's really nothing to "defend". As with a myriad other philosophical questions, the question itself is just map-territory confusion or a problem with word definitions.
Human brains have lots of places where it's easy to slip on logical levels and end up with things that feel like questions or paradoxes when in fact what's going on is really simple once you put back in the missing terms or expand the definitions properly. (This is often because brains don't tend to include themselves as part of reality, so this is where the missing definitions can usually be found!)
In the particular case you've presented, that tendency manifests in the part where no part of your problem specification explicitly calls out the brain or its decision procedures as components of the process. Once you include those missing pieces, it's straightforward to see that the only place where hypothetical alternative choices exist is in the decider's brain, and that no retrocausality is involved.
In the parts of reality that do not include your brain, they are already in some state and already have some history. When you make a decision, you already know what state and history exist for those parts of reality, at least to the extent that state and history is decision-relevant. What you don't know is which choice you will make.
You then can imagine CA and CB -- i.e., picture them in your brain -- as part of running your decision algorithm. Running this algorithm then makes changes to the history and state of your brain -- but not to any of the inputs that your brain took in.
Suppose I follow the following decision procedure:
- Make a list of alternatives
- Give them a score from 1-10 and sort the list
- Flip a coin
- If it comes up heads, choose the first item
- If it comes up tails, cross off that item and go back to step 3
None of these steps is retrocausal, in the sense of "revealing" or "choosing" anything about the past. As I perform these steps, I am altering H and S of my brain (and workspace) until a decision is arrived at. At no point is there an "A" or "B" here, except in the contents of the list.
Since there is a random element I don't even know what choice I will make, but the only thing that was "revealed" is my scoring and which way the coin flips went -- all of which happened as I went through the process. When I get to the "choice" part, it's the result of the steps that went before, not something that determines the steps.
This is just an example, of course, but it literally doesn't matter what your decision procedure is, because it's still not changing the original inputs of the process. Nothing is retroactively chosen or revealed. Instead, the world-state is being changed by the process of making the decision, in normal forward causality.
As soon as you fully expand your terms to any specific decision procedure, and include your brain as part of the definition of "history" and "state", the illusion of retrocausality vanishes.
A pair of timelines, showing two possible outcomes, with the decision procedure parenthesized:
- H -> S -> (HA -> SA) -> CA
- H -> S -> (HB -> SB) -> CB
The decision procedure operates on history H, state S as its initial input. During the process it will produce a new history and final state, following some path that will result in CA or CB. But CA and CB do not reveal or "choose" anything about the H or S that existed prior to beginning the decision procedure. Instead, the steps go forward in time creating HA or HB as they go along.
It's as if you said, "isn't it weird, how if I flip a coin and then go down street A or B accordingly, coming to whichever restaurant is on that street, that the cuisine of the restaurant I arrive at reveals which way my coin flip went?"
No. No. It's not weird at all! That's what you should expect to happen! The restaurant you arrived at does not determine the coin flip, the coin flip determines the restaurant.
As soon as you make the decision procedure a concrete procedure -- be it flipping a coin or otherwise -- it should hopefully become clear that the choice is the output of the steps taken; the steps taken are not retroactively caused by the output of the process.
The confusion in your original post is that you're not treating "choice" as a process with steps that produce an output, but rather as something mysterious that happens instantaneously while somehow being outside of reality. If you properly place "choice" as a series of events in normal spacetime, there is no paradox or retrocausality to be had. It's just normal things happening in the normal order.
LW compatibilism isn't believing that choice magically happens outside of spacetime while everything else happens deterministically, but rather including your decision procedure as part of "things happening deterministically".
The confusion is resolved if you realize that both A and B here are mental simulations. When you observe the ball moving, it allows you to discard some of your simulations, but this doesn't affect the past or future, which already were whatever they were.
To view the ball as affecting the past is to confuse the territory (which already was in some definite state) with your map (which was in a state of uncertainty re: the territory).
It seems to me that your confusion is contending there are two past/present states (HA+A / HB+B) when in fact reality is simply H -> S -> C. There is one history, one state, and one choice that you will end up making. The idea that there is a HA and HB and so on is wrong, since that history H has already happened and produced state S.
Further, C is simply the output of your decision algorithm, which result we don't know until the algorithm is run. Your choice could perhaps be said to reveal something previously not known about H and S, but it doesn't distinguish between two histories or states, only your state of information about the single history/state that already existed. (It also doesn't determine anything about H and S that isn't "this decision algorithm outputs C under condition S".)
Indeed, even presenting it as if there is actually a CA and CB from which you will choose is itself inaccurate: you're already going to choose whatever you're going to choose, and that output is already determined even if you have yet to run the algorithm that will let you find out what that choice is. The future states CA and CB never actually exist either -- they are simulations you create in your mind as part of the decision algorithm.
Or to put it another way, since the future state C is a complex mix of your choice and other events taking place in the world, it will not actually match whatever simulated option you thought about. So the entire A/B disjunction throughout is about distinctions that only exist in your mental map, not in the territory outside your head.
So, the real world is H->S->C, and in your mind, you consider simulated or hypothetical A's and B's. Your decision process resolves which of A and B you feel accurately reflects H/S/C, but cannot affect anything but C. (And even there, the output was already determinable-in-principle before you started -- you just didn't know what the output was going to be.)
I've been married just under 27 years now, and ooey gooeyness has been on a long slow uptrend, so I don't think that irrationality, drama, or short-livedness have anything to do with it. We were together for five years before that, and I asked her to marry me because at some point it became obvious that I couldn't see spending the rest of my life without her.
Granted, the first year or two of knowing each other was rather turbulent, but during that time I mostly didn't see her as The One or really even very Significant. That was something that took time, moving from FWBs to VCFWBs to romantic feels.
I think that drama is what we see portrayed in media as romantic, but that's because the genre of said media is drama (or comedy). And just generally, things in media have to be made more dramatic in order to be entertaining. It's usually not considered entertainment to see two people who are sweet on each other break into smiles every time they see each other and practically moan at any form of physical contact with one another -- unless the genre of the piece is "slice of life" or "fluff", and most popular media is not that.
I'm not aro and I 100% agree with the suggestion to taboo the concept of "romantic" (as attached to the word "relationship", other than as a shorthand for "relationship where both parties experience romantic feelings"). Properly reduced, the things described as love and romance are experiences internal to individuals rather than a property of relationships. (Otherwise unrequited love would not be a thing.)
AFAICT, the thing that distinguishes very-close-friends-with-benefits is the ooey gooey feeling that one's Other is very Significant, and that one would like to express that significance in sweet, silly, earnest, or otherwise excessive ways. But outside these feelings and the expression thereof, the relationship itself is not necessarily different from VCFWB in any practical respect!
Of course, some people have trouble with the concept that you can be VCFWB and not have romantic feelings about it, or believe you shouldn't be FWB at all without it, or don't know how you can even be VCF unless it's a romantic relationship, etc. (I believe that is the confusion the post is pointing at, generally: that it's common for the socialization of men in particular to license vulnerability or intimacy with VCFs only in a "romantic" context.)
But for people who are inclined to having VCF (with or without the B), talking about the relationship as being romantic makes little sense, since romantic feelings and expression are individual, non-obligatory, and indeed personally idiosyncratic (or else "love languages" would not be a thing).
Thiseems a bit overkill when there are such things as bookmarks and pinning sites to your home page. Also if you have a bookmark manager app you can just make that your home page.
"many people believe that they can control others when they can't"
It seems like you read a very different article than what I wrote. Per the abstract:
The Curse of the Counterfactual is a side-effect of the way our brains process is-ought distinctions. It causes our brains to compare our past, present, and future to various counterfactual imaginings, and then blame and punish ourselves for the difference between reality, and whatever we just made up to replace it.
I do not understand how you got from this abstract to your summary - they seem utterly unrelated to me.
For example, if one is thinking "I should have done this sooner", how is that about controlling others?
Likewise, this isn't about conscious "belief": even when these things are directed at other people, we usually don't even realize we're trying to control anyone and would likely not say we believe we can control anyone. The way it feels from the inside is that something is wrong, in the sense of "someone is wrong on the internet" -- i.e. that there is some moral outrage occurring which must be stopped or at least punished or protested.
(And also the belief "you can't make yourself like anything", in the case of the person feeling guilty about unproductiveness.)
What does liking have to do with anything? I'm seriously confused here. Ingvar's scenario doesn't say anything about liking anything?
The issue being presented there is that the moral outrage feeling blocks us from thinking strategically, because actually useful or practical actions don't feel enough like they're punishing the perpetrator of our feeling of moral outrage. Once the outrage feeling was shut off, "Ingvar" (not anything like their real name) immediately began to think of practical solutions, solutions they could not think of just a few moments before, and that they admitted they would've rejected as irrelevant, useless, or even insulting had anyone proposed them prior to removing the feeling.
the "Nice Guy" bits do seem not derivable from the above?
The nice guy concept is presented as an instance of a class of counterfactuals: one in which we should live up to an unrealistic standard so then people should respond differently. Therefore (our brains assume), if people are not responding correctly, then we must have done something wrong... and so need to be punished. (Or alternately, if we believe we are performing correctly, then others must be punished for not being sufficiently nice in return.)
i.e., once again illustrating how:
(from the abstract): our brains compare our past, present, and future to various counterfactual imaginings, and then blame and punish ourselves for the difference between reality, and whatever we just made up to replace it.
This is the central theme of the article, and is merely illustrated by various examples to show some of the variety of ways this happens, and contrasting before-and-after thought processes to illustrate how our thinking is derailed and misdirected by the generated desire to blame and punish.
This is important to me because it's central to some rationality research I'm doing currently.
I'm not sure what "this" refers to here -- the entire article, or one or more of the specific subtopics you raised. In general, though, if you are going to relate this to rationality-adjacent subjects, the relevant topics would be how feelings of moral judgment or outrage hijack our reasoning and motivation in various ways -- that is literally all the article is about, aside from providing a lot of tips on how to switch the damn thing off.
On further reflection, I'm wondering if your confusion is actually related to this bit from the disclaimer:
To avoid confusion between object-level advice, and the meta-level issue of “how our moral judgment frames interfere with rational thinking”, I have intentionally omitted any description of how the fictionalized or composite clients actually solved the real-life problems implied by their stories. The examples in this article do not promote or recommend any specific object-level solutions for even those clients’ actual specific problems, let alone universal advice for people in similar situations.
That is, the things that you seem to be pulling from this sound like they could be projections of object-level advice or generic approaches to problems presented in the scenarios. But the scenarios don't actually contain any object-level approaches or advice, which would explain why your comment is so confusing to me. They sound like perhaps you read the scenarios, drew your own conclusions about the situation(s), and then projected those conclusions back onto the article as summaries, while entirely ignoring the explicitly-stated themes and conclusions.
In my mind the difference is that "for signalling purposes" contains an aspect of a voluntary decision (and thus blame-worthiness for the consequences),
I was attributing the purpose to our brain/genes, not our selves. i.e., the ability to have such moods is a hardwired adaptation to support (sincere-and-not-consciously-planned) social signaling.
It's not entirely divorced from consciousness, though, since you can realize you're doing it and convince the machinery that it's no longer of any benefit to keep doing it in response to a given trigger.
So it's not 100% involuntary, it's just a bit indirect, like the way we can't consciously control blood pressure but can change our breathing or meditate or whatever and affect it that way.
alternate version "most long-lasting negative emotions and moods are caused by our social cognition"
That phrasing seems to prompt a response of "So?" or "Yes, and?" It certainly wouldn't qualify as a fact most people aren't ready to accept. ;-)
That's not really therapeutic, except maybe insofar as it produces a more rewarding high than doing it by yourself. (Which is not really a benefit in terms of the overall system.)
To the extent it's useful, it's the part where evidence is provided that other people can know them and not be disgusted by whatever their perceived flaws are. But as per the problem of trapped priors, this doesn't always cause people to update, so individual results are not guaranteed.
The thing that actually fixes it is updates on one's rules regarding what forms, evidence, or conditions that currently lead to self-hatred should lead to being worthy of self-approval instead. Some people can do this themselves with lightweight support from another person, but quite a lot will never even get close to working on the actual thing that needs changing, without more-targeted support than just empathic listening or Rogerian reflection.
(As they are Instead working on how to make themselves perfect enough to avoid even the theoretical possibility of future self-hatred -- an impossible quest. It's not made any easier by the fact that our brains tend to take every opportunity they can to turn intentions like "work on changing my rules for approving of myself" into actions more suited for "work on better conforming to my existing rules and/or proving to others I have so conformed".)
Most long-lasting negative emotions and moods exist solely for social signaling purposes, without any direct benefit to the one experiencing them. (Even when it's in private with nobody else around.)
Feeling these emotions is reinforcing (in the learning sense), such that it can be vastly more immediately rewarding (in the dopamine/motivation sense) to stew in a funk criticizing one's self, than ever actually doing anything.
And an awful lot of chronic akrasia is just the above: huffing self-signaling fumes that say "I can't" or "I have to" or "I suck".
This lets us pretend we are in the process of virtuously overcoming our problems through willpower or cleverness, such that we don't have to pay any real attention to the parts of ourselves that we think "can't" or "have to" or "suck"... because those are the parts we disapprove of and are trying to signal ourselves "better than" in the first place.
In other words, fighting one's self is not a way out of this loop, it's the energy source that powers the loop.
(Disclaimer: this is not an argument that no other kinds of akrasia exist, btw -- this is just about the kind that manifests as lots of struggling with mood spirals or self-judgment and attempts at self-coercion. Also, bad moods can exist for purely "hardware" reasons, like S.A.D., poor nutrition, sleep, etc. etc.; this is about the ones that aren't that.)
- I want to get in shape
- we decided to make the event cooler
- it doesn’t yet seem good enough
Notice that all of these goals are either socially focused, or at least sufficiently abstract as to allow for that interpretation. And this is almost certainly where the trouble begins.
For example, if the desire to "get in shape" is fundamentally about signaling (far thinking), rather than specific, concrete benefits we'll get from it (near thinking), then we'll be primed to think about the options in far-mode signaling terms.
And in signaling terms, "work out at home" wins if it means we're being "smart" or "frugal" as well as virtuously intending to "get in shape". So the apparently-irrational decision is actually a rational decision when our real motivation in the moment is to make ourselves feel virtuous right away. The "decision" to work out at home requires zero actual action, so it's the fastest way to feel virtuous -- which was our brain's primary intention all along!
(Notice, too, how in the other examples, the option chosen is the one that allows the most short-term virtuous feeling.)
Anyway, in order for the near-mode question of "will I actually do it" come into play, one has to be thinking in oncrete construal about the personal specifics of the goal, and what concrete benefits one will obtain that one actually cares about in near mode.
So e.g. "being healthier" is meaningless, but "having more energy" or "able to play tennis" or something else of that sort would work better. (Assuming one legitimately wants energy or to be able to play tennis, and those aren't just signifiers for another kind of social signaling!)
Anyway, as a general rule, the more abstract the original goal (in the sense of not being grounded by some specifiable + desirable future state of reality), the more likely our plans are to be hijacked by signaling considerations and largely divorced from the practicalities.
The rule of thumb I use with clients is the "mmm test" - if you can't picture it and feel good about it in the same way you'd feel good about a meal or sex or coming in from the cold (or heat) or plunking down in a comfy chair after hard work, the goal is one or more of:
- too abstract,
- focused on something you're only "supposed to" want (rather than what you actually want),
- something you thnk will get you what you actually want,
- a socially-acceptable cover for what you want,
- the best you think you can get, etc. etc.
Has he tried over-the-counter stimulant supplements like tyrosine, PEA, or for that matter caffeine? The book The Mood Cure contains useful dosing and experimental guidelines for a very wide variety of easily available, non-prescription, mostly non-"drug" nutrients or herbal supplements that can have positive effects on concentration, productivity, creativity, and both physical and mental energy levels -- mostly with fewer and milder side-effects than prescription medications or controlled substances. The right supplementation can be life-changing on its own.
Other feature transfers:
- If you like outlining, you probably also want the Outliner plugin, maybe the Zoom plugin, and to assign hotkeys for their various commands.
- If you want to link/embed blocks, Copy Block Link, Block Reference Count, and others may be of interest
In general, searching the community plugins list for things related to blocks, outlines, and roam will find you potentially useful things.
You can fry eggs in the microwave. I use a disposable paper bowl, pour in a bit of oil (I use coconut), swirl it to coat the bottom and a bit of the sides (or use a cooking spray). Crack two eggs in, break yolks and puncture surface of the whites, then cover with folded paper towel, pop it in the microwave and hit "1". (Cooking time will vary by microwave, bowl size, etc. so you'll need to experiment.) Toss the bowl when you're done, and that's it for cleanup.
(Note: technically, the eggs are more being poached than fried, but the oil makes the taste and texture closer to fried eggs. There just won't be any browining.)
How can you read 2-3x faster than a person speaks (1x)?
From Wikipedia:
Subvocalization readers (Mental readers) generally read at approximately 250 words per minute, auditory readers at approximately 450 words per minute and visual readers at approximately 700 words per minute. Proficient readers are able to read 280–350 wpm without compromising comprehension.
Conversational speech is generally 100 to 180wpm, so even subvocalizing readers already have a leg up. "Proficient" readers by Wikipedia's definition are easily in the 2-3x range over this, and visual readers even more so.
Wait, what?
"Opponents of evidence-based medicine have frequently argued that no one would perform a randomized trial of parachute use. We have shown this argument to be flawed, having conclusively shown that it is possible to randomize participants to jumping from an aircraft with versus without parachutes (albeit under limited and specific scenarios)."
Read it and weep. (Or laugh, whichever helps you sleep better.)
I've never been to a professional. It's literally "press and hold". I have a few items I use (a Knobble and a BodyBackBuddy), but anything hard with a rounded end (like the size/shape of the rounded tip on a broom handle) will do in a pinch. I read in one trigger point book the best ways to use your hands to reduce giving yourself hand pain, but tools are even better. For some trigger points, a hard rubber ball, a flat surface, and your weight are the easiest way to do it.
Finding the points isn't terribly hard either -- you know when you've found one because they're tender. (If it doesn't "twinge" or "twang" when you press on it, it's probably not a trigger point.) And you know if it's relevant if pressure affects your sensations. Tons of online charts show the spots where they're most likely to be and the regions they're most likely to affect -- and you need a chart because a lot of them are really not very intuitively located.
So you can literally figure out in maybe 30 minutes (including googling trigger point guides/charts and finding something to press with) whether there's any chance your problems are being caused by this, then decide whether you need a pro or just some tools.
The harder part is figuring out what lifestyle changes you might need to make (like drinking more water in my case, or posture, etc.) to reduce the odds of the points being created or set off in the first place. That's something you'll have to experiment with.
To be fair, there probably are better ways to deal with trigger points than just (almost literally) poking them with a stick, but poking them has the advantage of being fast and effective. If you have trouble pressing hard enough to squish the fluid out of them, or find yourself bruising due to bad angles or moving around too much, you might want to see a pro in order to learn better methods. Just be aware that "myofascial release" is not necessarily the same thing as trigger point treatment.
Have you considered myofascial trigger points? For me, it's always myofascial trigger points.
Tooth sensitivity? Trigger points in jaw or neck. Headache? Probably neck. Finger tingly or numb? Trigger point in the chest, neck, or armpit. Ringing in the ears? Trigger point on the jaw or side of the face.
Every. Single. Freaking. Thing.
(Heck, the other day I had heartburn that turned out to be not directly related to a trigger point, but there were some trigger points involved.)
A trigger point is basically a "knot" in a muscle, that usually refers pain somewhere else because it's pinching nerves or blood vessels. (This is my layperson's understanding, I'm sure there are better/more correct explanations.)
Trigger points do not respond terribly well to standard massage or stretches. If you're not going "ow ow ow" from what you're doing to it, you're probably not doing anything to it. Direct, hard, and continuous pressure (i.e. invariant and unceasing) for around 60 seconds, using a tool specific to the purpose, or something like the rounded point of a broom handle generally works best for me, though I'll use my knuckles or thumbtip if I have to. (Mostly, though, I use one of the specialized tools I own for the purpose now.) You may have to do it more than once in a day, depending.
Anyway my point (no pun intended) is that if I had any weird sensations in my feet or legs, I would start by running my hands up my legs from the affected area looking for tender spots or knots, and apply pressure, trying to see which ones affect the sensation (either toning it down or making it worse).
I would also drink water, because my points are more likely to act up more when I'm dehydrated or hungry. I might also move and stretch.
Dunno if any of this will help you specifically. Also, if you haven't dealt with these things enough to know where they are, look for trigger point charts on the internet. Typically they'll show points and the general area where the pain (or other weird sensations) will be. (Rarely will the trigger point be inside the pain area!)
The key indicators for whether your problem is being caused by a trigger point are that you 1) have a tender spot in one of the places identified on a chart, and 2) pressing deeply on the tender spot makes a difference to the problem (either better or worse). (If it makes it worse while you're pressing, though, it'll usually get better when the knot releases -- which can take a minute or more.)
AFAIK, not a lot is known about how/why trigger points form, though in my case they seem to stem from being in a certain posture for an extended period. For a long time I kept thinking my dentist was doing horrible things to my mouth every time I went because I'd have all sorts of pains afterwards, and it turned out that holding my jaw open for a long time usually sets off some trigger points that then refer pain back into my teeth! Now I start working the points when I get home and don't have that issue any more.
While it might seem that "knot in jaw" and "weird feelings in legs" are unrelated, I personally find that if I am generally in poor health for whatever reason (incl. dehydrated, hungry, tired, etc.), I will often have trigger points going off all over the place. That is, global bad conditions like illness will make me more susceptible to trigger point-generated pains.
Anyway, hope you figure it out, and hope this is also helpful for anybody else who may be dealing with weird unexplained pains or sensations.
Yes. I'm also saying it's common for human beings to use absolutes as a means to disclaim responsibility for their own choices or motives while emotionally blackmailing others to do what they want. This has less to do with the absoluteness of the proposition, and more to do with the concealed message that "you deserve to feel bad about yourself if you don't comply with my (concealed/disclaimed) wishes".
I call this an "FBI message", i.e. "feel bad if". People tend to focus on the seemingly factual/reasonable part of a communication or idea like, "you failed at X", and then feel bad about themselves because, well, that sounds like a fact. But the implicit, unspoken part of the communication was "You deserve to Feel Bad If you fail at X."
In the case of absolutes, they're a red flag because they usually conceal an unquestioned FBI message: the absolute part is like a stealth wrapper for the toxic payload. So ironically, the more reasonable, obvious, and factual-sounding the wrapper is, the worse it is for you, because it keeps you from questioning the toxic payload: feeling bad about yourself.
There are lots of justifications our minds use to rationalize feeling bad about ourselves, but these justifications are smoke screens to keep us from being aware that the only real reason to feel bad about ourselves is to send costly signals to other people in order to influence their behavior. Feeling bad about ourselves doesn't perform any directly useful function for the individual at all!
In an abusive environment, sincerely feeling bad about yourself communicates to the abuser that their goal has been achieved of crushing your spirit, so they will hopefully be satisfied and don't keep escalating. But once you're out of that environment, feeling bad about yourself no longer serves any useful purpose whatsoever, as it's costly by design and can be thought of as a button for "Quick! Turn down the volume on all of my individuality and its expression!"
Anyway, it's definitely possible to communicate something as an absolute or universal without tacking an FBI message on it. But the kind of people who conceal their motives using absolutes are nearly always sending FBI messages along with them, so in that context ANY absolute is likely a carrier for one and should be detained and investigated. ;-)
I am not willing to say most people in human history across cultures were abused or damaged by this.
Neither am I, as I explained at great length in my previous reply. Not sure what that has to do with anything, though.
In the context I mentioned -- i.e. the context of a person who has motivation and decision-making problems, absolutes in one's upbringing remain a red flag that require investigation, since they're most likely a problem.
Perhaps the context isn't sufficiently clear? I'm saying here that if I'm working with somebody and they mention an absolute, I'm going to want to investigate it. I'm not saying random people need to scour their childhood for random mentions of absolutes. I'm saying if an absolute or universal comes up in the context of fixing a specific problem, it's extremely likely to be one of, if not the source of the issue(s) at hand. (And so should always be investigated, if not expunged.)
The way you're saying this just doesn't parse to me. I don't understand how you can believe that a therapy aimed at imagining better parenting isn't implying something about what parenting is bad.
The same parenting can be perceived by people in different ways. One person perceives, "my parent is an asshole" and isn't bothered, while the other perceives, "I am the asshole" and becomes neurotic. (Extreme over-simplifcation here.)
The other complication is that it's not outward overt behavior that matters, it's what the adult seems to be implying about the child that has the most emotional impact. So no matter what the supposed philosophy of parenting is, one can probably find both loving and abusive ways to implement that philosophy. That's why I mostly try to avoid promoting a particular philosophy, or make any claims that damaging parenting is universally damaging, even if it seems so within the population whose problems I hear about.
They're the way all social mores are understood in most cultures
And that's precisely why they're so easily (and commonly) abused for deception and manipulation.
But the real issue is their being absolute, rather than things you can weigh and trade off (see e.g. your earlier mention of your mother's attitudes). Absolutes are thought-stoppers and give you no room to make your own judgments.
So in the context of being a functional, emotionally-free-to-choose adult, universals and absolutes are always a red flag worth checking. Anything that can be claimed as a universal can also be derived (as an adult) from one's desires, values, reasoning, etc., and is a term to be weighted in your utility function, not a true absolute driving utility to zero or infinity.
(And if there is any emotional objection to questioning the absoluteness of a principle, that's a double-extra sign of manipulation to be investigated, since a truly universal value would still make sense even when deeply questioned.)
people don't all have terrible childhoods in traditional cultures
I wouldn't know; my bias is that I work with people who have problems now, and some of those problems can be linked to their upbringing. I literally can't even say for sure that bad parenting causes problems, all I know is that fixing mental models of bad parenting fixes problems for the people that have them. And in that context, absolutes and universals are always a big red flag.
People who are taught everything that way have a lot of trouble figuring out what they want, because they've never really thought about it... or if they tried, they couldn't get very far because it kept getting shut down by critical voices.
Again, I can't say that's a cause of problems with people in general, since If I tried to do that kind of reasoning from the people I see, I would also have to conclude that bad parenting makes children more intelligent, talented, and sensitive!
(In reality, the causation probably goes the other way: intelligent and sensitive kids are perhaps more likely to be damaged by shit parenting because they take in more, think more deeply about it, and more acutely feel the effects of it. Maybe create broader associations and generalizations, for that matter.)
Anyway, within the context I'm speaking of, healing this kind of damage requires practice hearing one's own feelings, wants, desires, values, all that kind of thing -- and thinking in terms of universals, absolutes, and other abstractions is the exact opposite of listening to one's own self. That's why it's a red flag to me.
Knowing this doesn't help me resolve all the infinite variety of individual cases,
Man I wish it did. My life and work would be soooo much easier. But yeah, it definitely does not.
but it's very interesting to see that to a great extent it's about her failure to provide me with any kind of clarity and certainty about what was important, what was not, and how I ought to behave about important things.
Sort of? The only caveat here is that this phrasing implies there are absolutes, and IME whenever families deal in absolutes, it's as a form of deceptive manipulation.
Clean communication doesn't include appeal to absolute values or priorities, but to the parent's desires or goals. "I want you to do X", not "It's important you do X. Or, "I think you should X because Y", not "You should X" (or even "You should X because Y"!).
When adults deny their "I", they also deny the significance of the child's "I" and the relationship between those I's. The implicit message is: "individual goals or priorities don't matter" / "I don't care what your priorities are". And "if you need to get people to do something, appeal to universal correctness instead of asking, negotiating, or otherwise communicating".
(Again, for anyone reading this as a parent -- I'm not promoting a theory of parenting here, just saying what thought process usually works for adults to fix the entanglements that create their insecurities, self-consciousness, procrastination, indecision, etc., etc.)
As I said, I can't really comment on the parenting aspect. My own perspective is strictly "use the behavior as a model to envision alternatives to fix fucked-up parenting" in the minds of people (like me) who had certain kinds of fucked up parenting.
(That this seems to produce good results does not really prove that doing those things would be good parenting, though, especially since human beings can fuck anything up if they really want to, and turn the most wonderful things into weapons of abuse with even just a little effort.)
I came across the CC at a point where I was researching developmental psych in order to find out what could be done to fix the kind of crap I had in my head and came across in others'. Mostly books tended to give advice like "love yourself" or to "love", "protect", "care for" etc. one's inner child. The best ones talked about re-living past scenarios with good parenting.
But none of those books ever explained what any of that was, so if you didn't experience love or protection or good parenting, they were kind of useless.
CC and Cycles of Power (by Pamela Levin) were the only books I found that made a significant effort to show just what functional parenting might look or sound like. (Though Weiss & Weiss's "Recovery from Co-Dependency" deserves an honorable mention, but I get the impression a lot of its inspiration actually came from Levin's work.)
I now have a mostly-good-enough model of what functional parenting looks like that is based on more general principles of responsibility, trust, and clean communication, but in difficult cases I still reach for Levin or Leidloff on rare occasion.
(Again, "functional parenting" not meaning actual parenting, but "what kinds of parenting experiences do people need to imagine as alternatives in order to repair their own functioning by realizing what they were missing and why they don't need to keep running coping mechanisms to work around their dysfunctional parent.")
There is another model, wherein the problem is trigger points. Trigger points crop up when a muscle is under strain, and then they tend to stay that way. Trigger points, once created, constrict blood flow or impinge on nerves, creating all sorts of problems. (My dentist referred me to an oral surgeon twice for things that later turned out to be trigger points: my teeth had gotten sensitive after dental work, but it turned out that I developed trigger points from having my mouth open for hours during the procedure. Now I know where to massage my neck and jaw to prevent tooth sensitivity from arising in certain areas of my mouth after dental work.)
I used to have wrist pain a lot, and tried a ridiculous number of things to deal with it until I discovered the trigger point concept. Over time I've learned to identify which trigger points produce what symptoms for me, and what postures or behaviors set off the trigger points.
Before that, I considered Sarno but didn't get much benefit from it. I have nonetheless noticed that you don't need a "sneaky" subconscious for Sarno to be meaningful, however: if you go around constantly suppressing rage, you can easily put some muscles under chronic strain. This isn't really "subconscious" except in the same way that we "subconsciously" drive a car or perform any other habit. Most people tense their muscles when trying to "suppress an emotion", or rather, trying to inhibit their expression of that emotion.
And before Sarno, I did Egoscue work -- a bunch of exercises to improve posture, which did help with wrist pain, but they required an hour or more of exercise per day during which I couldn't do anything else and the improvement was very gradual. I think the exercises were good in general and I still do some of the ones that produce fast pain relief in certain areas when a trigger point flares up and I'm still getting it to un-knot.
Anyway, my prior now for "mysterious chronic pain" is "check for trigger points creating referred pain". Most often this consists of following the nearest muscles, nerves, or blood vessels in the direction of the spine or brain, checking for tenderness. A sharply sensitive spot is likely a trigger point, so I press deeply on it for a minute (as in 60 seconds) and see if the original pain is made worse or better. If nothing happens to it, it's probably not the trigger point. (Pressing on a trigger point can make the pain temporarily worse, but the pain will reduce again when the trigger point releases or un-knots.)
This simple search algorithm is far from perfect, especially once you get up into tricky areas like shoulders, underarms, neck and head. Some trigger points are in muscles underneath other muscles, or otherwise difficult to get to, and others are in counterintuitive locations for what they do. (Like the spots on my chest that I need to massage if the tip of my index finger feels numb or tingling.) It's generally a good idea to consult a proper reference chart of trigger points, but since "look for tenderness along the obvious-to-me paths" works well for a lot of limb stuff, and I've mostly looked up the weird ones most relevant to me, it saves me some time.
would I be right in guessing that it's you who have been downvoting all my comments in this thread
I did not downvote all your comments in this thread -- a fact that should already have been known to you before you wrote this one, if you had examined the vote counts. (I downvoted only two of them in an effort to end discussion of a topic I find offensive and upsetting, but that effort proved pointless by the time of your third reply, so I gave up.)
you did imply that there was no reasonable way to interpret you as having said X
I did not imply that, you inferred it (incorrectly). I stated the obvious-to-me fact that I did not know how you'd come to misunderstand me (the truth at that time), and the fact that I didn't want to know (although I later found out, as much as I would have preferred not to).
and you did make it clear that you would be displeased if I explained what I interpreted you as having said X
I would be, and am displeased. I'm displeased the entire conversation has taken place and wish I'd never said anything in the first place, so if that was your aim, you can consider your efforts successful.
I think your original choice of words makes it pretty clear what your intentions were at the time when you wrote them.
At this point it's pretty clear that you are not going to change your incorrect belief about my intentions, so there isn't any point to me extending this conversation further. Similarly, it's a practical impossibility for you to convince me I'm mistaken about my intentions, since I'm the only person who actually knows what I was thinking at the time.
I have considered trying to explain in more detail, to resolve the rather obvious (to me, now) point of confusion you have that leads to your incorrect conclusion, but that would require me to explicitly discuss a subject I vehemently do not wish to discuss, and based on your conduct thus far, I can only guess that it would encourage you to further discuss it.
If I were the sort of person to lightly throw accusations around, or attribute motives to people, there are plenty of things you have done in this thread that I could have made accusations about, or attributed motives to.
Instead, I've bent way over backwards trying to be polite in the face of what is, from my POV unwarranted belaboring of a subject that I've virtually begged you to stop replying to me about, because I find it distasteful at best and traumatic at worst.
(Which is how I know with 100% certainty that I never intentionally brought it up in the first place -- I'm literally using "Word B" as a double-indirection to avoid mentioning the actual subject, and even the word referred to by "Word B" isn't a word I've used myself in this thread, ever, even before my edits -- you're the only person who's actually used word B. That's how much I don't want to talk about it.)
But it appears I can't resolve your confusion around that without discussing the very things I don't want to discuss, and you don't appear willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. (Notice how that previous sentence at least says you don't appear willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. That's an example of me still giving you some benefit of the doubt, by saying what appears to me to be the case, rather than me asserting I know what's going on in your head.)
So, I'm done with this conversation, other than to note that perhaps, in future, rather than making accusations and attributing motives to other people when you see a problem with their communication, you could instead simply suggest alternative wordings to avoid confusion.
For example, if you thought that my edited comment still gave the wrong impression, you could have just said so, rather than insisting you know what must be happening in my head. (For that matter, you could've avoided attacking altogether and simply phrased your original comment as a helpful suggestion to avoid confusion.)
Anyway, I'm done with this thread, and am unsubscribing from notifications for it, since neither my polite requests nor my downvotes have worked to stop the replies from coming.
I am, in fact, considering whether I should request the site moderators delete this entire comment thread, though I don't know if that's possible for me to do without having to talk about the subject I find upsetting. But if you were to report the thread yourself (and cite this consent from me to remove it), I would certainly not object, and would consider it strong evidence against the hypothesis that you're now intentionally setting out to harass me by waving a sensitive subject in my face after repeated statements that I would prefer you stop doing so, beginning with literally my first reply to you, and repeated in my every reply since.
So, I wrote a post using word A, you took that to mean word B and said so (or rather, implied it).
Since I did not intend to imply B, I edited the post to reduce usage of word A.
You are now presenting this as evidence that I must therefore have meant to use word B all along.
[insert Picard facepalm and/or Jackie Chan WTF face meme here]
This seems utterly nonsensical to me, especially since if I had used or even meant word B, an important argument in my original comment would make no sense. (The one about 50% of the population -- which would obviously not apply if I meant word B!)
From the moment you claimed I was implying B, I made haste to avoid the misunderstanding and (hopefully) close the discussion. That's all I've been trying to do since, because I don't want to talk about B, and never did.
If you re-read my original comment, you will see that I never accused anyone of anything, nor even attributed any motivations to anyone. I only explained how various things could be misinterpreted.
In your replies, however, you've directly accused me of various things and attributed various motivations to me as well.
May I suggest you re-read this thread starting from an assumption that you are actually mistaken as to my motivations? Because if you do, you'll see everything I have said and done is 100% consistent with the model "For personal reasons, I don't want to talk about B and never did, so for god's sake please stop replying to me about it."
Please consider the possibility you may be mistaken.
In particular please note that all of your accusations and attributions are accompanied by pseudo-quotations in which you say things that are not at all what I said. For example, I wrote:
I never suggested such a thing, and am kind of confused as to why you think I did. But TBH I don't really want to have that conversation so please don't enlighten me. ;-)
But you reframed this as:
I think "how could you possibly think I was saying X? by the way, please don't answer" is an extremely rude rhetorical move
Do you see how what I wrote and you wrote are different? I can see how you could reach the interpretation you did. But can you see how it's different from what I intended to convey?
It was always 100% clear to me what you meant. I said I was confused as to why you thought it was what I meant, since, you know, it wasn't. (And I even removed two instances of a relevant word from my comment in response to yours, to make it clear that wasn't what I meant.)
And when I said "don't enlighten me" (with a winky emoticon no less) it was a joke to lighten the part where I basically said, "please stop this line of discussion: I don't want to participate in it, not least because it has nothing to do with what I was talking about."
IOW, from my perspective you were the one who brought that subject into the conversation and I would much prefer you hadn't, or at least took the hint to drop it once the interpretation was addressed by my edit.
I guess you wrote that not so much because you seriously think Matt is signalling a preference for the underage, or that others will think so, as because you hope that giving him a bit of a shock might help him avoid saying such creepy-sounding things. If so, then I think making that suggestion three times is really a bit much.
I grew up in a time where it was a frequent feminist talking point that adult women are not "girls", and thus "girls" were -- by implication -- not adults.
I have edited my comment, however, to use "immature" rather than hammering the point over and over.
suggesting that he's aiming to commit what in our society is one of the most viscerally hated of all crimes
I never suggested such a thing, and am kind of confused as to why you think I did. But TBH I don't really want to have that conversation so please don't enlighten me. ;-)
I felt that the only lesson I learned was that people I interact with are more politically correct than I realized. And they’ll look for ways to misinterpret a statement I meant literally.
Most people intuitively interpret statements non-literally, through a frame of "why is this person saying this?" If you make a statement like "hot girls excite me", a statement which most people by default would assume applies to any heterosexual male (not to mention a lot of women), then the default assumption is going to be that you mean something specific by it, because otherwise this could have been assumed from context without you needing to state it.
(In addition, the statement as literally written appears tautological, if you assume the word "hot" means "exciting" -- i.e. it is just saying, "I'm excited by people who excite me", and so is apparently semantically void.)
So from an information-theoretic standpoint, the phrase stands out as being intended to signal something, causing people to look for non-literal interpretations.
One way that people look for non-literal interpretations is to assume emphasis on some point, as a contrast. For example, reading the statement's implication as "non-hot non-girls don't excite me", implying you prefer physically attractive immature or underage women, or that appearance is especially important to you.
Another way of non-literal interpretation is to take a statement like this in terms of "who says things like this?" (In my own mind the two stereotypes that immediately come to mind are the socially inept perv characters in anime, and the chads / jocks / frat dudes who say things like "no fat chicks" or, well, Donald Trump.)
I expect from your comments that you intended none of these communications, but that's the sort of thing people will infer from a communication like that, since interpreting it literally makes zero sense as a social communication, because it provides no actual information about you as a person that couldn't be inferred from gender and orientation.
I don't think it's fair to describe this as "looking for ways to misinterpret a statement you meant literally". From where I'm sitting, this is 100% bad communication on your end. If you didn't intend to communicate membership in a certain social group and/or preference for conventionally attractive immature females, you used the wrong phrasing. And it'll continue to be the wrong phrasing, in the sense of getting you results you disprefer -- i.e. people thinking you're in one of those groups or otherwise oddly obsessed with said females.
If instead you wanted to convey something about yourself as a human being, it would be a good idea to communicate instead something unusual about yourself, rather than something that would likely be literally true for >50% of all human beings. (Taking the time to call out something that'd otherwise be assumable from context implies that you put unusual weight on it, from an information-theoretic standpoint.)
one of the important elements of what I'm calling "orientation" is locating-the-thing-that-needs-admitting, in the space of all the possible things you might need to admit
True! Perhaps orientation should be that part in an orient-admit-grieve trifecta. It's certainly the longer part, anyway.
I mostly do orientation by asking what it is I least want to admit, most wish were not true, and/or am most afraid is true. Then admitting those things are true or at least that they might be or that I'm afraid they are or wish they weren't.
Also, per Curse of the Counterfactual, anything I think is a "should" is a good candidate for admitting the opposite, and the Work of Byron Katie (aka MBSR in current psych research lingo I think?) a good tool for doing so.
Upvoted: deliberate grieving is a critical self-improvement skill. I personally mostly frame it in terms of admitting, rather than letting go or accepting; in terms of your two steps, I've been calling the orientation part "admitting", and the catharsis part "grieving".
A lot of critical motivation drivers are hung up on trying to get positive things from people that we didn't get as kids, and that we created a bunch of coping mechanisms (e.g. most kinds of perfectionism) to work around.
Admitting that we were hurt by not getting those things and that our coping mechanisms will in fact not magically fix anything is a prerequisite to moving past them and actually living life. (Because otherwise our brains will keep insisting that if we try hard enough we can retroactively make everyone love and respect us.)
Also, some LWers are neither young nor healthy, and/or have family responsibilities that would become problematic or impossible at some levels of lasting lung or organ damage, whether you call it "long covid" or not. So I'm definitely waiting for more understanding of long-term effects before I change my risk profile.
Downvoted due to lacking a story to provide an intuition pump to readers as to why the following the proposal would be useful.
I would question the framing of mental subagents as "mesa optimizers" here. This sneaks in an important assumption: namely that they are optimizing anything. I think the general view of "humans are made of a bunch of different subsystems which use common symbols to talk to one another" has some merit, but I think this post ascribes a lot more agency to these subsystems than I would. I view most of the subagents of human minds as mechanistically relatively simple.
I actually like mesa-optimizer because it implies less agency than "subagent". A mesa-optimizer in AI or evolution is a thing created to implement a value of its meta-optimizer, and the alignment problem is precisely the part where a mesa-optimizer isn't necessarily smart enough to actually optimize anything, and especially not the thing that it was created for. It's an adaptation-executor rather than a fitness-maximizer, whereas subagent implies (at least to me) that it's a thing that has some sort of "agency" or goals that it seeks.
So it's kinda like a hobby, from my perspective.
Sure. I have not seriously taken up meditation again since that time, because although the centered-and-confident stuff was really nice, it took a long time to get to that point, and it wasn't a superpower level of centered or confident.
So if you already can relax, stop your internal monologue, and generate some pleasant feelings, does it make sense to stop because you already got most of what you can get, or does it make sense to continue because it shows that you are already on 10% of the way towards the actually awesome things
Actually, my experience has been that dropping meditation is like dropping exercise: the benefits go away after a while. (It might not be 100% true as I think there might be some lasting benefit to having learned how much nonsense my brain generates from an experience perspective vs. just knowing it in the abstract. But I'd be hard-pressed to tell if that's true, as I don't have a control group for myself. ;-) )
Then I tried the kind of meditation when you count the breath and try to not-do the internal monologue. And I learned how to turn off the internal monologue. An interesting thing, to learn a new mental move, but that's it.
How odd. I never learned to reliably turn off internal monologue during meditation, let alone everyday life. How long did that take you?
To be clear, I often experienced cessation of internal speech during meditation, but not because of any ability to do so on purpose. It just happened sometimes, in the same way my centeredness just started happening and hung around until a while after I stopped meditating regularly.
My own metaphor for meditation is that it's like the mental equivalent of physical exercise: I get general mental health benefits from a regular practice, but motivation for it is often difficult because the benefits take time to show up and are subtle at first. And dropping out of the habit is easy because the benefits linger a while after you stop.
if you already can relax, stop your internal monologue, and generate some pleasant feelings, does it make sense to stop because you already got most of what you can get
Yeah, that's the part that doesn't make sense to me since I didn't get any of those things as independent skills from meditating. Rather, I got them in the same way that physical exercise helps people relax or have pleasant feelings if they do enough of it. Nowadays I mix my meditation and physical exercise by doing Tai Chi so I can be more time-efficient. ;-)
(Well, not really, tai chi moves are often meditative in feel, but I haven't been doing actual on-purpose meditation during it. But that might actually be an effect booster, so now I'm tempted to actually try it.)
"Would you like to talk for a bit? Please say no if you'd actually prefer doing something else, and I'm cool with that. I only wish to hang out if it's mutually beneficial. :)"
I would say that a non-socially-anxious person would never say all of that, maybe not even the "Would you like to talk for a bit?" part. And that many people would respond with suspicion to the doth-protest-too-much-methinks length of your communication. (And other socially anxious or neurotic people may respond by internal agonizing over whether they are correctly evaluating the mutual beneficialness of a conversation, or the specifics of their own preferences!)
Just from an information coding perspective, the length of this utterance communicates, "I consider this to be a complicated circumstance requiring extra care in order not to go badly" -- let alone any other nonverbal communication that might be coming along with it. This will put a lot of people on edge, even if they're not sure why at first.
...I'm somehow stating a self-deception out loud?
The self-deception would be something along the lines of, "If I state things in the right way, I won't be a bad person or deserve to be rejected if they don't want to talk with me." (Or be a bad person who forced someone to explicitly reject me.)
Part of the self-deception here is that introducing yourself by giving other people rules to follow is more than a little rude and entitled, especially as you are asking them to expose their true inner state to you. (I mean, if they're from a Guess culture you're metaphorically asking them to show you their underwear... and by asking I mean demanding, because in Guess culture explicit asking equals demanding.)
So, the external part of the self-deception is, "I am making a demand for you to follow my rules for interaction, but you are not allowed to disagree or protest it, because my earnest disclaimer will make it seem like you're the one who's being rude or mean if you object or express upset in any way."
That is, "I am going to act like I'm being generous and magnanimous in catering to whatever your object-level desires may be, while completely ignoring any issues you might have about communicating them to me, because how I appear to myself/others is more important to me than how you'd like to appear to yourself/others in this interaction." (And so I might also be setting you up for some sort of no-win social framing attack, no matter what you answer.)
I'm not sure if this is clearly communicating what I mean. The part I am tagging "self-deception" in the outward expression is the part where you are creating a social frame where you can be the offended party/in the right, even though what you are doing is actually pretty demanding and potentially quite offensive in the very act of stating such a "disclaimer".
If you were intentionally doing it as a social attack, then it wouldn't be self-deceptive. It's self-deceptive in the part where you're sincerely believing you're being polite or considerate or whatever, despite the whole thing being about protecting you from having negative opinions of yourself, and not really about consideration for the other person at all, except insofar as the appearance of doing so lets you feel better.
(Because if you really cared what they thought, vs. how it would reflect on you, you might consider the part where you're imposing rules and demanding legibility from someone who might not like doing either of those things, or that even if they normally do prefer being legible or having clear rules for an interaction, it doesn't necessarily mean they want to be suddenly pressured into it by a relative stranger without getting any say of their own about what they're willing to be legible about, or which rules they're willing to follow.)
Seems to describe "meditation" as a single thing with exact predictions in the books.
This is precisely what I find weird about this. When I first studied Zen, the book I read listed four different basic techniques, and that's just Zen! (A lot of early meditation studies were also on TM, which is mantra-based. I think modern studies of meditation, however, are now more focused on "mindfulness" rather than meditation per se, and that mindfulness may in fact be more precisely defined than "meditation" in its full generality, since there are meditation practices aimed at other things -- such as compassion, for example.)
A long time ago I read about an EEG study of the effects of different meditation on the meditator's response to unexpected stimuli, and remember how one type of meditation made people's EEG not show any response, and another had them appear to briefly notice the sound and then return to the meditative state, vs. how an non-experienced meditator's brain would stay active and have difficulty settling back down after an interrupting sound.
That seems to suggest that different meditative practices have differing long-term effects, but since I don't recall any details of the study I can't really say more on that point. (In particular I'm wondering about sample sizes - I don't think they were large.)
FWIW, Zen masters also generally suggest different meditation techniques depending on whether you just want to improve your concentration (or other secular/individual benefits) vs. doing it for religious reasons or to attain enlightenment.
That being said, I did the secular-recommended kind (counting breaths) for a while when I was younger and nonetheless experienced some altered states, as well as some increased confidence or centeredness or... not really sure how to describe it. One of the altered states was a weird sense of compassion for everything in my apartment, such that I felt sorry for the dirty dishes and so I cleaned them. That only happened once, though. The other kind of altered state was the sense that everything was alright in the world and that I was a part of it. That happened a couple of times.
Anyway, I think it's hard to argue that meditation of almost any sort can't induce altered states. The question is more which states and whether they're good or bad for you. Zen literature basically says to ignore them either way, even if they make you feel like you could fly or have psychic superpowers, or conversely if they make you think you're being attacked by demons. This seems to imply there's a pretty good chance of unpleasant altered states if you stick with it long enough, and it's also implied in a lot of meditation literature that if you keep going then the positive and negative hallucinations will stop and things get better generally, but I never meditated long enough to get either kind of hallucination, unless you count feeling part of everything or compassionate for everything as a hallucination rather than an attitude adjustment. ;-)
To be clearer, I'm not saying to use any of the things I said as strategies or tactics. I'm more saying that if one is not trying to get anything from people and doesn't feel themselves unworthy of receiving, then it feels more natural to interact in ways that don't invite rejection and don't put other people on the spot.
Statements are often veiled invitations or requests
Exactly my point: IME social anxiety is correlated with a craving for acceptance or interaction that makes the statement a veiled invitation or request, and no amount of verbal disclaimers will fix that. Verbal disclaimers are just stating out loud the self-deception attempts taking place in the speaker's mind, and the dissonance will be felt by the listener.
If it seems like I'm basically saying, "don't bother trying to create norms to help social anxiety because nothing will help until you fix the (underlying cause of the) social anxiety", then yeah, that's pretty much what I'm saying.