Alicorn comments on Open Thread: December 2009 - Less Wrong
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Does anyone here think they're particularly good at introspection or modeling themselves, or have a method for training up these skills? It seems like it would be really useful to understand more about the true causes of my behavior, so I can figure out what conditions lead to me being good and what conditions lead to me behaving poorly, and then deliberately set up good conditions. But whenever I try to analyze my behavior, I just hit a brick wall---it all just feels like I chose to do what I did out of my magical free will. Which doesn't explain anything.
If you know what you want, and then you choose actions that will help you get it, then that's simple enough to analyze: you're just rational, that's all. But when you would swear with all your heart that you want some simple thing, but are continually breaking down and acting dysfunctionally---well, clearly something has gone horribly wrong with your brain, and you should figure out the problem and fix it. But if you can't tell what's wrong because your decision algorithm is utterly opaque, then what do you do?
People who watch me talking about myself sometimes say I'm good at introspection, but I think about half of what I do is making up superstitions so I have something doable to trick myself into making some other thing, previously undoable, doable. ("Clearly, the only reason I haven't written my paper is that I haven't had a glass of hot chocolate, when I'm cold and thirsty and want refined sugar." Then I go get a cup of cocoa. Then I write my paper. I have to wrap up the need for cocoa in a fair amount of pseudoscience for this to work.) This is very effective at mood maintenance for me - I was on antidepressants and in therapy for a decade as a child, and quit both cold turkey in favor of methods like this and am fine - but I don't know which (if, heck, any) of my conclusions that I come to this way are "really true" (that is, if the hot chocolate is a placebo or not). They're just things that pop into my head when I think about what my brain might need from me before it will give back in the form of behaving itself.
You have to take care of you brain for it to be able to take care of you. If it won't tell you what it wants, you have to guess. (Or have your iron levels checked :P)