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gregconen comments on Pain and gain motivation - Less Wrong
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Interesting. In fact, it seems to mesh with the process I've successfully used to do things like cleaning my desk.
Unfortunately, many of the tasks I have to do don't lend themselves to the visualization in step 1. How does one visualize having studied for an exam, or completed an exercise routine?
In the middle of writing this comment, I realized that I have no experience with IIM, so I'm not qualified to speak from experience. Therefore, please believe what I'm saying only because logic requires that it be true.
For the exam, visualize yourself knowing the material, or getting a good grade, or finishing school, or getting a good job. The technique requires you to feel the desire to achieve in your body, so keep moving forward until you hit something that gives a physical reaction. Boom, you've completed the first two steps, so now you can do the third step: compare your current situation to that, while still feeling good about "that". According to what Eby says, your brain should then start planning how to achieve "that", working down from whatever goal you discovered until it hits what you need to do next--which may or may not be actually studying for the exam.
For the exercise routine, same thing. Visualize yourself at the gym, or exercising, or having finished your routine, or being in good (or better) shape, or looking attractive, or living longer.
I thank you for placing this qualification on your statement. As it happens, you are entirely correct, but that's very often not the case when you try to apply far-brain logic to near-brain emotions. I have to teach people to distrust logical answers, because emotional logic isn't based on understanding things. Your emotional brain is more of an outside-view frequentist than an inside-view Bayesian, you might say. ;-)
At any rate, it's subject to a different set of biases than the "far" brain, so far-brain reasoning tends to use a very wrong "theory of mind" when guessing at one's own emotional motivations.
You can trust logic; you can't trust that your brain is logical. I did the former.
Not from flawed premises, you can't. And most of the premises people typically assume about their own motivations are seriously flawed. Thus, people can use perfectly valid logic to construct reasonable, elegant theories about their behavior that are nonetheless 100% irrelevant to how they're actually generating those behaviors.
Actually, your brain is logical, in the sense that a computer is - it does what it's programmed to do, even if what it's programmed to do is stupid. ;-)
I should probably clarify what I mean by "distrust logical answers". I should've said, "distrust logical answers to emotional or experiential questions", or "distrust 'far' answers to 'near' questions". The question of one's motivation for doing a thing is "near", so generating an answer from the "far" side of the brain is pure confabulation. Thus, a logical, abstract, sophisticated answer to that question is not actually an answer to that question.
You don't; you visualize whatever it is you're going to get by having done those things.
As you'll notice in the video, one of the major functions of the visualization is to engage the feeling of desire - that's why the questions are "what's good about that? what do you like about it?"
Since you probably don't actually desire (in the emotional, feeling sense) having studied for an exam or completing an exercise routine, it wouldn't work for that even if you could visualize those things.
So, visualize something you DO desire about those things. (Yes, his is still tricky, precisely because you're probably trying to set up these actions in order to avoid bad consequences like failing the exam. As long as this is the outer frame in which your thinking is taking place, the technique won't work very well -- the pain brain usually wins over the gain brain.
The way that I fix this with clients is to teach them to identify the specific emotional SASS threat (i.e. Status, Affiliation, Safety, or Stimulation), and disconnect it. Once the threat is gone, positive motivation operates naturally.
I am confused as to how this is possible, and how the second follows from the first. If I only work to put food on the table, and I stop worrying about putting food on the table, how does that help me to get my work done, instead of spending all day playing World of Warcraft until I starve to death?
Stop right there -- the first error is in the word "only".
If you are operating under negative motivation, it tends to appear as though that negative motivation is the only thing keeping you going, because negative motivation suppresses awareness of positive motivation. There are actually dozens of possible positive motivations you could have for working.
Which brings me to the second error -- that the motivation is really to "put food on the table", vs. say, "not starve". Note, however, that you could also be putting food on the table because you like eating better than not-eating. ;-)
IOW, for every possible negative motivation there is generally a plethora of alternative positive motivations available, all of which will bring anticipated pleasure, in place of the anticipated absence of pain that's all a negative motivation can provide you with.
And last, but not least, this also means that you are probably not working only to "put food on the table". Unless you have personal experience of starvation being linked to not working, you're unlikely to have a Safety link to working (other than one instilled by your parents scaring you as a kid). Most people's choice to work is actually Status or Affiliation driven, whether or not they're aware of it.
[Important note: I am not saying people work because they get status or affiliation from it -- though that's possible -- but rather, that most people have been taught that a person who doesn't work is low-class (Status) or unworthy/inadequate (Affiliation).]
Yeah... I think I get it, at least somewhat. But what if you think that you have stronger positive motivations to do something else, say, World of Warcraft?
Well, I was using "put food on the table" in the usual metaphorical sense. (And if I could deal with the whole "not being hungry" thing without actually eating, I would; I don't get all that much pleasure from food.)
In terms of my own situation, though, I'm not working...
You say you have clients. How do I sign up?
Motivation is measured in feeling, not thinking. Thinking about what feelings you might or might not have is like dancing about architecture -- it might be entertaining, but it's not very informative. ;-)
You're only assuming that it's a positive motivation, and in your shoes (if I understand your situation correctly) it's not a great assumption, even if the vast majority of Warcraft players are primarily positively-motivated.
Myself, I got bored with WoW after a couple of months, so I can't speak for the WoW players out there.
(More relevant comments will come later, after I think of some.)
I wasn't talking about myself in particular there. I was trying to be more abstract.
Okay, here's something.
When I was in college, I often had something that I wanted to be doing, but I had all that damn homework to do. When I sat down to do my homework, all I could think about was how awful it was and how much I'd rather be doing something else. But if I went and did something else, I had to deal with having a lot of homework to do and not doing it. I eventually found what turned out to be a satisfactory way to resolve the dilemma.
I dropped the course, and felt very relieved afterward.
As I've mentioned before, I can honestly say that I only graduated because of my parents' pressure. If I dropped out of college after my second or third year, I think I could have avoided a lot of unnecessary suffering; so far, the only real benefit I've gotten from my college degree has been that my parents are satisfied with the amount of education I have.
So, I'm not entirely clear, but I get the impression you're presenting this as an example of something that you wouldn't do if you dropped the negative motivation for it.... and implying that this is somehow bad.
If so, then I'd point out that if indeed the only positive result you got from your degree is your relief with your parents' satisfaction, then you could've gotten that result a lot easier and quicker by deleting your brain's evaluation of their dissatisfaction as a SASS threat.
FWIW, both I and my clients have passed through periods that I've tongue-in-cheekly called, "the dark night of the soul" -- a period where you've removed one or more major negative motivations, and then realize you have no idea WTF you're doing with your life or want to do with it in the future.
However, a period like this is not the result of having no negative motivation - it's the result of having removed only one level of negative motivation, without reaching your fundamental values or criteria yet. (That is, you no longer have negative motivation, but you're still judging your life by negative criteria.)
Once you get the criteria as well as the motivation, things start to turn around, and you begin (re)discovering all the things you actually like about life and the world. One of the key issues for me was realizing that I cannot "figure out" or "solve" what I want. (As I said, thinking about feelings is like dancing about architecture.)
What I've realized is that I have to actually ask myself what I already want, and that when I ask that question, there are answers, so long as I do NOT engage in trying to figure out what I should want, or what would "make me happy", or any other sort of goal-oriented process.
Fundamentally, positive motivation is not something that you use in order to get something else. As long as you treat it as a tool to get yourself to do something, you're still stuck in the same box -- your real motivation at that point is whatever problem you're trying to solve by adding positive motivation.
Having your parents tell you "If we are sufficiently dissatisfied, you'll be homeless" is kind of scary. :(
Getting a college degree is supposed to be of great benefit - and if I had gone on to have a career as an engineer or programmer or something, it would have been. And at least I have the social status associated with "college graduate" instead of "college dropout".
That sounds like me right now.
I feel like I ought to do something impressive with my life. Many of the other students in my high school thought I was some kind of super-genius who was going to end up as the next Bill Gates or something, and I feel that, by not living up to my potential, as it were, it would be like I'm letting them down. I have a fantasy that I go to sleep one day, spend the next ten to fifteen years as a philosophical zombie, and become consciousness after having done something impressive enough that I can retire and not worry about having to do anything else. (Like in those mediocre movies "13 Going on 30" and "Click".) I'm embarrassed whenever someone asks me what I do for a living, and ashamed that I'm . I want to be respected, but I'm not willing to do what it takes to earn that respect in either the most common manner (become an employee) or the next most common manner (become an entrepreneur). And I'm worried about what will happen when my parents get too old to support me. (I'm 27, and they're both 61.) I've tried my best to deal with this by simply not caring about what happens to me in the future, but that's hard, and eventually the future happens anyway.
I think there should have been a paragraph break in there somewhere. :(
What pushes you forward, holds you back. That is, it is precisely this feeling of "ought" that is the problem.
When you have an ought or a should, it is generally shorthand for "something bad will happen if I don't". The something bad is not expressed, because then whenever you comply with your "should" you appear more "moral" to your compatriots, than if you are "merely" complying out of duress.
It's essential to identify the precise nature of the unconsciously-represented threat (which is where SASS comes in), and to flip it around to the positive form of that need.
And are you afraid they won't like you, or won't respect you?
Don't analyze - just feel what it's like to let them down... is it more like being lonely and rejected, or ashamed and humiliated? Are you a less-good person for doing this, a less-important person, or something else?
Okay, a Status threat is a threat to your status, a Safety threat is a threat to your safety. I can sort of guess what an Affiliation threat is--something like "people like me don't do this, so I had better not". A Stimulation threat, I have no plausible guess for. "If I don't do this, I'm going to be bored"?
Not that sophisticated, actually. Affiliation is a catch-all for being loved, liked, accepted, supported, understood, empathized with, etc. Bonding.
Yep. Stimulation isn't usually all that important, most of the time. I see Status and Affiliation threats involved in maybe 60-80% of cases, while Stimulation is more like 2 or 3%. But it does show up from time to time, and it makes for a nice acronym. ;-)
A rough chart of the (negative) emotions involved:
Status - anger, humiliation, hurt pride, indignation, embarassment
Affiliation - loneliness, rejection, unworthiness, inadequacy
Safety - fear, anxiety, uncertainty, stress
Stimulation - boredom, apathy, hopelessness
There are, of course, corresponding positive emotions for when you get each of the four values. (Like excitement and fun and joy, in the case of Stimulation.)
Anyway, whether positive or negative, these four kinds of things seem to essentially be the brain's terminal values - if you control a person's self-perceived levels of these things, you can pretty much imprint them however you like.
We spend our childhoods doing just that, actually -- learning associations between our built-in triggers, and either our environment, our actions, or other social constructs.
So for example, I learned over a good chunk of my childhood not to do almost anything exciting because my mother yelled at me until I matched her fear for my Safety, until I indeed loathed any sort of surprise or unexpectedness / unpredictability. I used to hate being around crowds and strangers because who knew what they might say or do?
(I only recently became aware of this link and removed it.... damn I've been missing out!)
I think I've discovered the source of my Internet addiction. I hate the feeling of not knowing! Oddly, I used to pride myself on my ignorance of current events. It's just that the more I learn the more it feels like I need to know. Classic addiction pattern.
Probably not. First off, that's entirely too logical. ;-) Second, the aspect of behavior you describe is more parsimoniously explained by simple dopamine-driven behavior modification.
The reason you're surfing the internet instead of some more interesting source of dopamine, however, might well be something to do with a SASS threat, but you won't know what, specifically, unless you investigate.
Information that comes from outside you and sounds logical is generally the least likely source of good information about why you're doing what you're doing.
You mean RMI?
Yes.
All right, I asked myself what it would be like if I hardly ever used the Internet. I got a feeling of "missing out." Perhaps that points to loneliness, which is ironic because my net use hampers my offline social life, but it could be case nonetheless.
Emotional-brain answers don't "point to" things. They just are what they are. Ask what, specifically, you're "missing out" on, as the "pointing to" bit is just a logical-brain speculation.
At the moment, the evidence still supports a most-parsimonious hypothesis of dopamine addiction as an avoidance strategy for getting away from something else... that you haven't actually asked yourself about. What is it that you want (or think you want) to be doing instead of being internet addicted? That's the thing you should be asking questions about.
90% of the time, our initial ideas about what problem we need to solve are overly-narrow, because the unconscious mind almost always hands the conscious mind a problem specification that doesn't involve questioning any of your basic assumptions. ;-)
I'm not sure where intermittent reinforcement fits with your theories, but I think part of the hook of surfing the internet is that you never know when you'll run into something really cool. The fact that you don't even know what sort of really cool you might find adds to the hook.
Also known as "dopamine-driven behavior modification", as I said above.
That being said, novelty addiction seems (at least in my experience) to be something that's only really satisfying/compelling when you don't have anything better to do, or you're trying to avoid something else. When I'm being positively motivated, I'll sometimes go for days without reading my usual blogs, webcomics, etc. and be surprised when I have a lot to catch up on.
That's why I'd always check for a negative motivation explanation long before I'd consider the novelty-seeking to be particularly important in and of itself.
Hmm, I said I had no plausible guess, and then my guess turned out to be correct. I should have expressed myself in a manner that doesn't require bending the laws of reality to my will.
I think I would have gotten the idea immediately if you had said "Friendship", "Companionship", or something similar. Likewise, Stimulation could be called "Excitement". Does "Status, Excitement, Companionship, Safety" make a good acronym? :)
Do bear in mind that my goal in communication is not always for people to get things immediately, if, in the process, it causes them to also bring along a ton of baggage, poor analogies, misconceptions, etc. In this case, one function of using very technical terms for the acronym is to encourage you to create a new bucket in your head for sorting these, rather than using existing (but incorrect) buckets.
Not all stimulation is excitement, and not all affiliation is companionship. One kind of affiliation is the sense of belonging or being a part of something, for example.
(It would actually be nice to have a similarly precise-yet-vague way of saying "Safety", since it's really more like "maintaining control and/or predictability of the circumstances surrounding my health and physical safety".)
Definitely, the 'safety' part was the one that didn't quite seem to fit. It also seems to be much more about the 'maintaining control and/or predictability of the circumstances' part than it is about limiting to 'surrounding my health and physical safety'.
Sure, it may not make the categories quite so neat to acknowledge it but the 'safety' feelings apply to more than the physical. We get those feelings in response to 'status' threats too. At least, I do and I do not believe I am unique. Fortunately your list was described as 'rough' so it seems about right.
One reason for that is that, for the uses I have for that list, it doesn't require you to be able to objectively categorize your response or concern. It's more like how we teach people the basic color names, and then people can argue about whether a particular color is teal or aqua. ;-)
All the list does is provide a convenient, memorable framework for thinking and talking about the terminal values human brains use to organize learning and behavior... and a way of pointing people to the aspects of their own experience that will show them how they're programmed and what they need to do to reprogram themselves.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, if somebody wants to add "magenta" or "puce" to the list of colors, it doesn't harm the idea of a spectrum, just as different musical scales can cover the same range of frequencies. The advantage of SASS as a particular "scale" or "color scheme" is that it's simple and memorable: it's easier to answer "which of these four things do I feel I'm missing/needing in this situation" than "why am I doing this?"
(In particular, the second question calls for a far-brain answer, and a big part of the social far brain's function is to obfuscate your SASS-seeking motives from other people, by making up socially-acceptable reasons why you do things.)
"Security"?
Nice. Keeps the acronym, and matches the scope a bit better. I wonder if people will interpret that as meaning their "insecurity" is related, though. (Insecurities are generally affiliation or status-related.) On the other hand, people can have misconceptions about all of them, so that's not necessarily a problem.
Another possible "S" candidate would be Stability.
That would be misleading. For the purposes of this kind of investigation it seems more useful to carve reality at 'affiliation'. The associted negative emotions just seem to be more directly associated with maintaining affiliation than companionship. This is one of those things where we may say that we want companionship but act like we want affiliation.
I think it's a bit distracting.
That is indeed challenging; I've had difficulty with it myself. You could try to visualize getting your results and seeing that you've gotten a good grade, or imagine the feeling after a exhausting exercise routine.
If you've exercised before, you can probably remember the feeling in your body when you're finished--the 'afterglow' of muscle fatigue, endorphins, and heightened metabolism--and you can visualize that. If you haven't, or can't remember, you can imagine feelings in your mind like confidence and self-satisfaction that you'll have at the end of the exercise.
As for studying, the goal isn't to study, per se; it's to do well on the test. Visualizing the emotional rewards of success on the test itself can motivate you to study, as well as get enough sleep the night before, eat appropriately the day of, take performance enhancing drugs, etc.
Imagination is a funny thing. You can imagine things that could physically never happen--but if you try to imagine something that's emotionally implausible to you, you'll likely fail. Just now I imagined moving objects with my mind, with no trouble at all; then I tried to imagine smacking my mother in the face and failed utterly. If you actually try to imagine having something--not just think about trying--and fail, it's probably because deep down you don't believe you could ever have it.
I couldn't help but laugh at this.
Ouch.
How do you mean that? I often find myself imagining things that are totally implausible emotionally, but quite possible physically, for instance, once in a while I imagine throwing myself off a bridge that I'm crossing, and I can feel my guts churning. (When I say "imagine" here, I mean I actually visualize myself falling, it's a stronger thing to me than idly considering the notion of falling.)
Emotionally implausible isn't really the right phrase here - see this other comment for why.
As a tentative rephrasing, something that's "emotionally implausible" is something that "I would never do" or that "could never happen to me." Like you, I can visualize myself falling with a high degree of accuracy; but I can't imagine throwing myself off the bridge in the first place. Suicide? I would never do that.
It occurs to me that "can't imagine" implies a binary division when ability to imagine is more of a continuum: the quality of imagination drops steadily between trying to imagine brushing my teeth (everyday), calling 911 (very rare, but I've done it before), punching through a wall (never done it, but maybe if I was mad enough), and jumping off a bridge (I would never do that).
For all four, I can imagine the physical events as bare facts; but for the first two I can easily place myself in the simulation, complete with cognitive and emotional states. That's much harder in the third case; in the fourth, I'm about as confident in my imagination as I am in trying to imagine a world where 1+1=3.
Allow me to rephrase more precisely for you. It's not plausibility that's at issue, it's whether you have a thought that causes you to stop visualizing.
If, as you mentioned in your previous comment, you imagine slapping your mother and "fail utterly", it's not because you can't imagine it, it's because your (early) evaluation of what you imagine causes you to stop before you can really put yourself in the situation.
Knowing that, you can ignore the reaction that tells you it's bad, and proceed. IOW, it's not that you can't imagine slapping your mother, it's that you prefer to stop before you actually experience what it would be like. In other words, it's not "can't", it's won't.
I really do mean I imagine committing suicide. It really does feel to me as if it's not outlandish that I might just, as it were, blow a fuse and jump off the bridge on an impulse. I can project how I'd feel the instant after the "decision" - scared out of my mind, gut-wrenchingly regretful, but also inappropriately exhilarated.
Conversely, I'm not sure I can imagine brushing my teeth in great detail - it's too boring. But I do occasionally imagine things that I would describe as emotionally implausible with some degree of precision.
It's possible that I'm just weird, but anyway I mean my observations as cautions against generalizing from a sample of one.
Come on Morendil, you're supposed to link to these things.
ETA: OMG, that post got Yvain over a thousand karma.
This makes me kind of wish we had WikiStyleLinks, where if you simply put a phrase in CamelCase, it automatically generates a link to the page whose name is that phrase. You could simply speak of GeneralizingFromOneExample, and boom, a link to Yvain's post.
The thing is, though, reading text with WikiStyleLinks can get PrettyAnnoying after a while.
TV Tropes has an interesting variation of this: it supports WikiStyleLinks as well as MediaWiki-style bracketed links, but the Wiki Style Links automatically get spaces inserted (like that) in the name as displayed, so the appearance is merely capitals.
Yes, that's largely the reason I avoid CamelCase in source code.
Beyond that, it's the improvements or fixes to Status, Affiliation, Safety, or Stimulation that you expect to get as a result of whatever outcome you expect doing well on the test to produce. So, the "mmm" test is a way of verifying that you actually engaged the anticipation of one of those things.