When it comes to deliberate self-deception, you must believe in your own inability!
Tell yourself the effort is doomed - and it will be!
Is that the power of positive thinking, or the power of negative thinking? Either way, it seems like a wise precaution.
The positive power of negative thinking. There is a book waiting to happen. Scratch that, google tells me the title is already taken. Either way, the idea is fascinating.
Just what is the difference between deceiving yourself and 'positive thinking'? It is clear that Eleizer advocates telling yourself things that may not actually be true. You may tell yourself "I cannot believe what I know is not true". In some cases you may know yourself well enought to estimate that there is only a 40% chance that the claim could ever reasonably qualify as true no matter how dilligent your pep-talking may be, yet it may still be worth a try. On first glance that seems like it is 60% self deception. Yet there is some sort of difference.
When we go about affirming to ourself that "I am charming, assertive, have an overwhelming instinct to maintain reflective consistency and am irresistible to the opposite sex" we are not so much lieing as we are using the mechanics of our brains to alter our computational hardware to an improved state. But then, a believer could plausibly use the same defence.
Is it the potential for self fullfillment that makes our not-quite-truths 'ok'? We know that by telling ourselves we are assertive or that we can't stand to bullshit ourselves we probably do influence these traits somewhat. Yet again, the more we know ourselves the more we are able to know just to what extent we will be able to modify our cognitive behaviors. If we know that we'll never have the desired trait to a respectable degree then we have less scope to affirm ourselves without blatant lies. Having more self awareness would limit our options for self improvement. Now, there may be something to that connection, but it isn't something I would want to formalise into my understanding of what constitutes 'self deception'.
Could it be that these affirmative non-truths are different because they are self referential? When Eleizer delved into subjectivity he etched into my mind the quote from Robert Dick, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". We could almost argue that because we are talking about things that change based on what we believe, we are outside the scope of reality so have free reign. Almost. It still seems to me that as a statement of the state of the universe, "I can't fool myself!" may objectively be nonsense both as a current observation and as a prediction of the future and yet still be worth saying to yourself. That's right. "I can't fool myself and even though I can you'll probably believe me anyway, which helps, so knock 5% off the probability that I'll be able to believe something really idiotic. Thanks, bye."
Maybe the central difference is just that it's a "white lie". If the goal is to create the most accurate map of reality it is quite possibly the case that the optimal strategy is to believe certain false things. Try limitting yourself to only ideally rational behaviors and you may well end up less rational than if you'd taken a few liberties and made allowances for your weaknesses.
It is clear that Eleizer advocates telling yourself things that may not actually be true.
I don't think so. He is advocating telling yourself something on the condition that telling it to yourself causes it to be true.
It's not equivalent to telling yourself "I'm attractive to the opposite sex." Say that you doubted this prior to uttering it. Then, yes, after uttering it, you might have reason to think that it is marginally more likely to be true. But you almost certainly wouldn't be justified in believing it with high confidence. That is, ...
I don't mean to seem like I'm picking on Kurige, but I think you have to expect a certain amount of questioning if you show up on Less Wrong and say:
"If you know it's double-think...
...how can you still believe it?" I helplessly want to say.
Or:
If you know your belief isn't correlated to reality, how can you still believe it?
Shouldn't the gut-level realization, "Oh, wait, the sky really isn't green" follow from the realization "My map that says 'the sky is green' has no reason to be correlated with the territory"?
Well... apparently not.
One part of this puzzle may be my explanation of Moore's Paradox ("It's raining, but I don't believe it is")—that people introspectively mistake positive affect attached to a quoted belief, for actual credulity.
But another part of it may just be that—contrary to the indignation I initially wanted to put forward—it's actually quite easy not to make the jump from "The map that reflects the territory would say 'X'" to actually believing "X". It takes some work to explain the ideas of minds as map-territory correspondence builders, and even then, it may take more work to get the implications on a gut level.
I realize now that when I wrote "You cannot make yourself believe the sky is green by an act of will", I wasn't just a dispassionate reporter of the existing facts. I was also trying to instill a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It may be wise to go around deliberately repeating "I can't get away with double-thinking! Deep down, I'll know it's not true! If I know my map has no reason to be correlated with the territory, that means I don't believe it!"
Because that way—if you're ever tempted to try—the thoughts "But I know this isn't really true!" and "I can't fool myself!" will always rise readily to mind; and that way, you will indeed be less likely to fool yourself successfully. You're more likely to get, on a gut level, that telling yourself X doesn't make X true: and therefore, really truly not-X.
If you keep telling yourself that you can't just deliberately choose to believe the sky is green—then you're less likely to succeed in fooling yourself on one level or another; either in the sense of really believing it, or of falling into Moore's Paradox, belief in belief, or belief in self-deception.
If you keep telling yourself that deep down you'll know—
If you keep telling yourself that you'd just look at your elaborately constructed false map, and just know that it was a false map without any expected correlation to the territory, and therefore, despite all its elaborate construction, you wouldn't be able to invest any credulity in it—
If you keep telling yourself that reflective consistency will take over and make you stop believing on the object level, once you come to the meta-level realization that the map is not reflecting—
Then when push comes to shove—you may, indeed, fail.
When it comes to deliberate self-deception, you must believe in your own inability!
Tell yourself the effort is doomed—and it will be!
Is that the power of positive thinking, or the power of negative thinking? Either way, it seems like a wise precaution.