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knb comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 4 - Less Wrong
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Some random thoughts about thinking, based mostly on my own experience.
I've been playing minesweeper lately (and I've never played before). For the uninitiated, minesweeper is a game that involves using deductive reasoning (and rarely, guessing) to locate the "mines" in a grid of identical boxes. For such an abstract puzzle, it really does a good job of working the nerves, since one bad click can spoil several minutes' effort.
I was surprised to find that even when I could be logically certain about the state of a box, I felt afraid that I was incorrect (before I clicked), and (mildly) amazed when I turned out to be correct. It felt like some kind of low level psychic power or something. So it seems that our brains don't exactly "trust" deductive reasoning. Maybe because problems in the ancestral environment didn't have clean, logical solutions?
I also find that when I'm stymied by a puzzle, if I turn my attention to something else for a while, when I come back, I can easily find some way forward. The effect is stunning, an unsolvable problem becomes trivial five minutes later. I'm pretty sure there is a name for this phenomenon, but I don't know what it is. In any case, it's jarring.
Another random thought. When I'm sad about something in my life, I usually can make myself feel much better by simply saying, in a sentence, why I'm sad. I don't know why this works, but it seems to make the emotion abstract, as though it happened to somebody else.
Explicitly acknowledging emotions as things with causes is a huge chunk of managing them deliberately. (I have a post in the works on this, but I'm not sure when I'll pull it together.)
Lots of references to the CBT literature would be nice... no need to reinvent the wheel; CBT has a lot of useful things to say about NATs, and strategies to take care of them. (Then again this applies mostly to negative emotions, and deliberately managing positive emotions seems like a cool thing to do too.) That said, more instrumental rationality posts would be great.
What does NAT stand for?
I don't think that works for me. I often can't identify a specific cause of my sad feeling, and when I can, thinking about it often makes me feel worse rather than better.
Same here. I also found that often there's not any cause in the sense of something specific upsetting me; it's just an automatic reaction to not getting enough social interaction.
Well I don't mean ruminating about the cause of the sad feeling. That is probably one of the worst things you can do. Rather I meant just identifying it.
For example, when a girlfriend and I broke up (this was a couple years ago) I spent maybe two days feeling really depressed. Eventually, I thought to myself, "You're sad because you broke up with your girlfriend."
That really put it in perspective for me. It made me think of all the cheesy teen movies where kids breakup with their sweethearts and act like it's the end of the world, when in the viewer sees it as a normal, even banal rite of passage to adulthood. I had always thought people who reacted like that were ridiculous. In other words, it feels like that thought put the issue in "far mode" for me.
That works if there is a specific cause, but like some other people have said, my sad feelings aren't caused by external events.
Arguably, problems in the modern environment don't have clean, logical solutions either! Note also that people get good at games like minesweeper and chess through learning. If the brain was primarily a big deductive logic machine, it would become good at these games immediately upon understanding the rules; no learning would be necessary.
I'm nitpicking, but maybe it was simple pleasure at getting the game?