= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
David_Gerard comments on Branches of rationality - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (64)
It seems that one useful distinction that isn't made often enough is between "knowing how one ought to think" and "implementing the necessary changes".
"knowing how one ought to think" is covered in depth here, while "implementing the necessary changes" is glossed over for the most part.
To some extent, the fixing part happens on its own. If you call the grocery store and they're closed, you're not going to want to go there anymore to pick up food- even without doing anything explicitly to propagate that belief.
However, not everything happens automatically for all people. It looks like some aspects of religion refuse to leave even seven years after becoming atheist. These are also the types of things that most people wouldn't notice at all, let alone the connection to their former religion.
I think more effort is due on this front, but I don't know of any easy to steal from source. There are a lot of related areas (CBT,NLP, salesmanship,self help,etc.), but they tend to be low signal to noise and serve more as a pointer towards ideas to explore rather than a definitive source.
We are probably inadvertently selecting for people who have some self taught/innate ability to self modify, since people who aren't good at this don't get as much out of the sequences. I'm currently working with a couple people that are bad at this to see if its something simple and easily fixed, and will report back with lessons learned.
Yeah. I've been thinking a bit about this. For some people, realising that they can think about thinking is revelatory, and the notion that they can change how they think is filled with fearful trepidation.
What other extremely basic things like this are there?
Do you have anecdotes about this? If you do I would be interested to hear them.
This sprang to mind with a particularly scary one - when I was out trolling the Scientologists in my dissolute youth.
This is what you can get from just getting someone to notice their mind for the first time, and taking the credit for such.
I'd be interested in hearing more about this. Are there a lot of people like this? Are there polite ways to introduce people to this notion (I imagine some people would be somewhat insulted if you assumed they didn't have this notion)?
That's the thing - I don't know! But it's such a HUGE WIN technique.
And a serious susceptibility, if you're introduced to it by the Renfields of a parasitic meme. And even if you already have it, if they get in through your awareness of the power of the idea of self-improvement.
I'm also wondering at other techniques - such as how to teach the notion of rationality by starting with small-scale instrumental rationality and expanding from there. I have no idea if that would work, but it sounds plausible. Of course, that can lead to the Litany of the Politician: "If believing this will get me what I want, then I want to believe this." I expect I'd need to come up with a pile of this stuff then actually test it on actual people.