Note: I am deleting this post because it contained personal information about a friend whose permission I did not expressly obtain.
Note: I am deleting this post because it contained personal information about a friend whose permission I did not expressly obtain.
I am alarmed and dismayed that no-one has raised the issue of privacy in this thread. Swimmer963, just from glancing through your comments, you're [rot13'd description of Swimmer963 deleted].
I didn't whizz through those to be creepy (actually I was impressed at how you seem to be consistently sensible), but if you're going to share incredibly personal details about "a friend" who was raped, we need to know if this information has been posted with her consent. The above is very easily enough to personally identify you.
On whether or not this will be important or not: [blanked].
EDIT: Deleted precis of Swimmer963's situation; it had served its purpose. EDIT: Deleted some personal information.
If she had the sort of childhood you describe, her problems are not with her apparatus of rational thinking, but with her emotional brain. If the problem is not with her cognitive apparatus, it cannot be solved there.
It is very common for people who had toxic childhoods to become very interested in psychology. See for example Alice Miller's book "The Drama of the Gifted Child" which explains that children who grow up in toxic environments often become psychologically "gifted" out of necessity, and end up as psychologists.
Unfortunately while they may gain knowledge, it usually does not help. It does not help any more than knowing that you are frightened of dogs because several dogs bit you as a child. This insight does not solve the problem.
What to do?
Psychotherapy has a very poor track record. There are some good therapists and many poor ones. A lot of therapists are themselves the walking wounded. Irvin Yalom seems to be one of the good ones - see for example "The Gift of Therapy" for how it can work.
Time is a slow and ineffective healer. Many people go to their graves still terribly wounded.
One reason people with traumatic childhood seem to end up i...
Anecdotally, most people reading the Sequences will be neither harmed nor helped in the short term, for the same reason that your friend can clinically list off her problems (and probably their most successful interventions) without feeling able to change her reactions - there's a huge leap from absorbing knowledge to working out how to apply it. In the longer term, being exposed to a large volume of persuasive writing about how to own your beliefs and attitudes is helpful (in that it will help people make the shift away from a fixed mindset, which is absolutely essential for real progress), but I have no idea how much.
Personally, I do feel like I've gained benefit from my time here, but I'd be hard-pressed to point to any specific article or technique that caused the change, other than the general atmosphere of challenging one's beliefs.
Professional MDMA psychotherapy seems to work really well for these kinds of things, though it is quite hard to come by in legal form. Just taking MDMA and then having an intimate/therapeutic conversation with a close friend might work just as well.
Really. MDMA is way more effective than anything else for this kind of thing.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100719082927.htm http://www.maps.org/research/mdma/
(Should be about 10 years before MDMA makes it through the FDA approval process)
A much less effective recommendation is compassion/lovingkindness meditation.
I have personally had some significant issues getting myself to deal with problems in a constructive way--I was diagnosed with depression several months ago.
I put off seeking treatment, and especially medication, for essentially irrational reasons.
More recently I have started taking Lexapro, and I am MUCH happier. A large part of being able to make that decision came from Less Wrong--the ideas of "happiness set points," beating procrastination, and the idea that using technology to help improve myself is natural and necessary, helped me close th...
Honestly, I've found the single hardest part of overcoming my damage is simply finding something that actually motivates me: For the majority of my life, even now, irrationality is sufficiently successful that I have no reason to "correct" it. I happen to have a strong investment in the identity of "rational", which gave me enough of a push to start reading this site, but I could still easily make excuses as to why I wasn't applying it. It wasn't until I found Something To Protect in my life that I started really taking this stuff serio...
"I have zero examples of people who have used the methods of rationality ... to help with the problems they have that most people don’t have..."
I have. Extremely much so. Although I REALLY don't want to discus my problems publicly like this, I can't find any other way to communicate the necessary information: I used to be extremely irrational with a large number of mental-illness-calibre delusions, and now I am, despite the occasionall bizarre failure mode and despite still being mentally ill in non epistemological ways, I'm catching up with LW in terms of sanity.
I'm not clear on the goal of your post -- it doesn't seem to make a statement or ask a specific question, either -- but if you are asking for practical advice for your friend, I would highly recommend the book "Recovering From Co-Dependency: It's Never Too Late To Have A Happy Childhood," by Weiss and Weiss. I've personally found it to be an invaluable resource, and IME it's just the thing for an analytical person interested in psychology to get an initial grip on actually doing something about their issues.
The book is written primarily as a bri...
In my own life, the thing that seems to help most is paying attention to what I'm doing.
Not so much in terms of analyzing patterns, though there's nothing wrong with that, but in terms of attending to the individual events and being aware of how I am reacting and what I am reacting to, and doing so insofar as possible without imposing my expectations or my judgments on what I perceive.
Mostly, what seems to be going on is that when I don't really pay attention, my brain happily fills in the resulting gaps in my awareness with all kinds of cached/default a...
Some of the even more drastic failures are described in the book The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz.
There's no way I'm reading that book. Knowing about and thinking about the bizarre ways people abuse children is the worst thing about reality for me. It's why I don't read online local news anymore -- the media thinks such stuff is fascinating but I guess they don't expect people to actually think about what the story is about? But still these sad little stories (sometimes only 8 words long) make their way into whatever I'm reading and ruin my day.
Does anyone else share my sensitivity? Does anyone have any advice?
My technique for keeping from being depressed by news: remember that, if it's newsworthy, it's rare.
"In sports, half the teams won their games today. All of the players are millionaires, most of whom have no major drug problems." - Dogbert
I don’t know how the LessWrong community would treat people like my friend, or whether introducing her to the Sequences would help. It’s not an experiment I want to try unless I have some concrete evidence that it will help.
I don't see much of a need for evidence before introducing someone to the sequences. I teach private test prep and will routinely refer my students to the sequences for reading practice. I sincerely believe it helps, but I'm highly confident I will never be able to obtain reliable evidence to that effect. I am quite confident, however, it does little or no harm.
So unless it'd be costly to get her to read the sequences, how could they hurt?
Reading the sequences inspired me to test my beliefs, including my negative beliefs about humans that mostly stem from my relationship with my parents. Sometimes I discovered that my pessimism did not go away or got worse, but on average it receded, since I was so far below the LW norm already.
I don't know how this would specifically apply to someone who has been sexually abused. But If humans really are better than her cached beliefs, applying the methods of rationality to them should make her happier. There is very little concrete evidence when it comes to predicting human minds, but rationality should always lead you to a more logical conclusion based off of your priors.
Every boyfriend is narcissistic or has borderline personality disorder.
This could be a result of privileging the hypothesis, considering these possibilities without enough evidence to properly suggest them, possibly because studying psychology makes them salient. An approach to getting this point across might be to show her An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, and really work through the examples of interpreting medical tests. Then apply that concept to diagnosing narcissism. Find out how frequent it is in the population, and how likely a narciss...
It’s not an experiment I want to try unless I have some concrete evidence that it will help.
Status quo bias.
I understand that you care about her, but there's no way recommending that she read about biases will harm her. It sounds like she already knows all that stuff, though, from how you describe her.
Still. A lot of things are hard. A lot of things are hard but possible. So far, I have zero examples of people who have used the methods of rationality, as separate from just knowledge, to help with the problems they have that most people don’t have...
LW has helped me articulate my intuitions and given me more confidence in them. These intuitions are usually about why an argument is wrong.
It's about how not to be stupid, how not to fail in certain ways. I don't have examples of things it has helped me do because it is never a necessary or sufficient con...
Yeah, I think maybe part of where the tendency to flinch comes from is the implicit recognition that "fixing W" will sometimes take a huge amount of work, and recognizing the scale of the effort versus how much you care... it might lead you to internalize that you don't actually care about W that much :-(
To be clear with oneself about your priorities (including "necessary selfishness" that no one will prioritize if you don't) can be unflattering or diverge from other people's public statements about good and bad. I suspect there are better or worse ways to deal with this, so that you don't emphasize a cached self of the wrong sort? Maybe its better to cache that you're the sort of person who clarifies their evolving priorities in response to improved understanding of a changing world and who currently values X, Y, and Z the most, rather than focusing too much on the fact that "I don't value W enough to do anything substantive about it".
I tend to think instead "The cost of W is more than I can afford" / "I can buy the even-cooler Q for that price!"
It's a lot like a financial budget: I can save up for a new computer if it's important to me. If I'm especially rich, I can just buy one. If I change income brackets or values, it's important to refactor that budget - if I lose my job, I probably can't afford a new computer until I get a new job. If my existing computer breaks, I might put aside some no... (read more)