Guardian column on ugh fields, mentions LW

Kaj_Sotala

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/08/change-your-life-ugh-fields

In 1920, in a jaw-droppingly unethical experiment that's mainly remembered today as an example of how not to conduct a psychological study, John B Watson set out to prove a point about fear – using, as his guinea pig, an eight-month-old boy in a Baltimore hospital. Little Albert, as he became known, was taught to associate a white rat with a terrifying sound – a steel bar was struck with a hammer behind his back whenever he reached towards the animal – until, the story goes, he was terrified of anything white and furry: dogs, a coat, Watson in a Santa Claus costume. (Watson, apparently, intended to reverse the effect, but Albert was removed from the hospital before he could do so.) It would be entertaining to propose something similar to a university ethics committee today: they'd spring from their seats in horror, like Little Albert seeing a sheepskin rug.

In fact, most of the details of Little Albert's "conditioning" have since been thrown into doubt. But something not too dissimilar afflicts many of us. When an experience gets associated with acute bad feelings, especially in childhood – being around dogs, say, or swimming pools, or moving house or money troubles – that category of thing can become fearsome for ever. But there's an additional twist I hadn't considered until I encountered it recently on the rationality blog lesswrong.com, where it's termed an "ugh field": what if one effect of finding some area of life particularly stress-inducing is that we get conditioned into not even thinking about it at all?

"A problem with the human mind is it's a horrific kludge that will fail when you most need it not to," writes one Less Wrong blogger, who argues that ugh fields are a case in point: "If a person receives constant negative conditioning via unhappy thoughts whenever their mind goes into a certain zone of thought, they will develop a psychological flinch mechanism around the thought."

Suppose, in early adulthood, you have a few bad experiences with missed credit card bills and penalty fees. A rational person might resolve to think more about bills in future, to avoid repeat problems. But a fear-conditioned mind, erecting an ugh field around the subject, might become more forgetful with money, to avoid experiencing the emotions associated with the thought, thus making matters worse. (Another example: many people fail to take medicines they've been prescribed for life-threatening conditions. Could it be because they'd rather avoid thinking about having a life-threatening condition – even if that puts their lives at risk?) Worse, if the ugh field hypothesis is correct, the "flinch" occurs, by definition, before the thought enters your conscious mind. So even someone sincerely dedicated to confronting (say) their issues with money won't have the opportunity: the ugh field will have screened it out pre-emptively.

This is all highly dispiriting, except in so far as it highlights a broader truth about fear: we're not really afraid of events, but of experiencing the emotions associated with them. ("I'm only ever afraid of a feeling, never a task," is how the blogger David Cain applies this to procrastination at raptitude.com – see is.gd/t3cRPZ.) Which is actually liberating, since the prospect of experiencing an unpleasant emotion is almost always more palatable than the prospect of Something Really Bad happening. If you can tolerate the feeling of "ugh", there's not much you can't tolerate in life.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/08/change-your-life-ugh-fields

In 1920, in a jaw-droppingly unethical experiment that's mainly remembered today as an example of how not to conduct a psychological study, John B Watson set out to prove a point about fear – using, as his guinea pig, an eight-month-old boy in a Baltimore hospital. Little Albert, as he became known, was taught to associate a white rat with a terrifying sound – a steel bar was struck with a hammer behind his back whenever he reached towards the animal – until, the story goes, he was terrified of anything white and furry: dogs, a coat, Watson in a Santa Claus costume. (Watson, apparently, intended to reverse the effect, but Albert was removed from the hospital before he could do so.) It would be entertaining to propose something similar to a university ethics committee today: they'd spring from their seats in horror, like Little Albert seeing a sheepskin rug.

In fact, most of the details of Little Albert's "conditioning" have since been thrown into doubt. But something not too dissimilar afflicts many of us. When an experience gets associated with acute bad feelings, especially in childhood – being around dogs, say, or swimming pools, or moving house or money troubles – that category of thing can become fearsome for ever. But there's an additional twist I hadn't considered until I encountered it recently on the rationality blog lesswrong.com, where it's termed an "ugh field": what if one effect of finding some area of life particularly stress-inducing is that we get conditioned into not even thinking about it at all?

"A problem with the human mind is it's a horrific kludge that will fail when you most need it not to," writes one Less Wrong blogger, who argues that ugh fields are a case in point: "If a person receives constant negative conditioning via unhappy thoughts whenever their mind goes into a certain zone of thought, they will develop a psychological flinch mechanism around the thought."

Suppose, in early adulthood, you have a few bad experiences with missed credit card bills and penalty fees. A rational person might resolve to think more about bills in future, to avoid repeat problems. But a fear-conditioned mind, erecting an ugh field around the subject, might become more forgetful with money, to avoid experiencing the emotions associated with the thought, thus making matters worse. (Another example: many people fail to take medicines they've been prescribed for life-threatening conditions. Could it be because they'd rather avoid thinking about having a life-threatening condition – even if that puts their lives at risk?) Worse, if the ugh field hypothesis is correct, the "flinch" occurs, by definition, before the thought enters your conscious mind. So even someone sincerely dedicated to confronting (say) their issues with money won't have the opportunity: the ugh field will have screened it out pre-emptively.

This is all highly dispiriting, except in so far as it highlights a broader truth about fear: we're not really afraid of events, but of experiencing the emotions associated with them. ("I'm only ever afraid of a feeling, never a task," is how the blogger David Cain applies this to procrastination at raptitude.com – see is.gd/t3cRPZ.) Which is actually liberating, since the prospect of experiencing an unpleasant emotion is almost always more palatable than the prospect of Something Really Bad happening. If you can tolerate the feeling of "ugh", there's not much you can't tolerate in life.

You're using a Roko algorithm! Well, you might be, anyway. Specifically, trying to resolve troubling internal tension by drumming up social drama in the hopes that some decisive external event will knock you into stability.

I am really really impressed. That is basically exactly right.

However you don't seem to be going out of your way to appear discreditable like he did...

Well, I managed to get out of Jehovah's Witnesses on my own. People who care strongly about their reputation within a community often fail that hurdle. Not that I want to draw any comparisons, I just want to highlight my personality. I never cared much about my social reputation, as long as it isn't obviously instrumental.

...maybe because you don't yet identify with the "x-rationalist" memeplex to as great an extent as Roko.

I especially don't identify with the utility monsters (i.e. people who call everything a bias and want to act like fictitious superintelligences). But I am generally interested to learn.

...the message you might be trying to send after it's made explicit and reflected upon for a bit might be something like the following...

I endorse everything you wrote there. I don't know how to deal with a certain topic I can't talk about. I can't ask anybody outside of this community either. Those who I asked just said its complete craziness.

On one side there is LW and then there is everyone else. Both sides call each other idiots. Those outside of LW just don't seem knowledgeable or smart enough to tell me what to do, those insight of LW seem too crazy and are hold captive by a reputation system. I could try to figure it all out on my own, but the topic and the whole existential risk business is too distracting to allow me to devote my time to educate myself sufficiently.

Sure, I could just trust Eliezer based on his reputation. Maybe a perfect Bayesian agent would do that, I have no idea. But I don't have enough trust in, and knowledge of the very methods that allow you to conclude that assertions by Eliezer are very likely to be true. Should I really not be reading a book like 'Good and Real' because it talks about something that I shouldn't even think about? I can't swallow that pill. Where do I draw the line? And how do I even avoid a topic that I am unable to pinpoint? I could "just" calculate the expected utility of thinking about the topic in and of itself and the utility of the consequences according to Eliezer. But as I wrote, I don't trust those methods. The utility of some logical implications of someones vague assertions seem overly insufficient to take into account at all. Such thinking leads to Pascal's Mugging scenarios and I am not willing to take that route yet. But at the same time all this is sufficiently distracting and disturbing that I can't just ignore it either.

You people drive me crazy. A year of worries, do you think a few downvotes can make me shut up about that?

...without any tools to point out how insane everyone in the world is being...

I don't really think anyone here is insane, just overcredulous. The problem is that your memes are too damn efficient at making one distrust one's own intuition.

See, back when I was a Jehovah's Witness I was told that I have to do everything to make people aware of "the Truth" to save as many people as possible and in order to join the paradise myself. I was told that the current time doesn't count, there will be infinitely more fun in future. I was also told not to read and think about certain topics because they will make me lose the paradise.

I thought I left all that behind, just to learn that there are atheists who believe exactly the same just using different labels. Even the "you have to believe" part is back in the form of "making decisions under uncertainty", "uncertainty" that is as close to a "belief" that it doesn't make much of a difference...

Maybe I'm partially projecting. I'm pretty sure I'm ranting at least.

No, I am generally impressed by the level of insight regarding my personal motives. For how long have you thought about this? Or is it that obvious?

Good rationalists shouldn't read Good and Real? Why not? Where is this argued?

11Will_Newsome15y

I think more people should be real superintelligences. By that I mean, be perfect. I would say "try to be like a superintelligence" but that's just not right at all. But thinking about what perfection would look like, what wu wei would look like, moving elegantly, smiling peacefully, thinking clear flowing thoughts that cut away all delusions with their infinite sharpness, not chained by past selves, not pretending to be Atlas. Johan Liebert, except, ya know, not an insane serial killer with no seriously attainable goal. A Friendly Johan Liebert. Maybe that's what I should aim for, seeing as Eliezer's a wannabe Light Yagami apparently. My surname was once Liebert. [...] They both get Bayes points! [...] This statement prompted me to finally non-jokingly admit to myself that I'm a theist. I still don't know if God is a point, ring, cyclic, or chaotic attractor, though, even metaphorically speaking... improper uniformish priors over universal prior languages, the set theoretic multiverse, category theory, analogy and equivalence, bleh. I should go to a Less Wrong meetup some time, it'll be effing hilarious. Bwa ha ha. I should write a book, called "Neomonadology", coauthor it with Mitchell Porter, edited by Steve Rayhawk, have it further edited and commented on by my philosopher colleagues. He could talk about extreme low-level physics, I could talk about extreme high-level cosmology, trade off chapters, meet in the middle contentwise (and end pagewise) at decision theory, talk about ontology of agency, preferences as knowledge-processes embedded in time, reversible computation, some quantum thought problems for reflective decision theory, some acausal thought problems for reflective decision theory, go back in time and rewrite it using Hofstadter magicks, bam, published, most interesting book ever, acausal fame and recognition. [...] More unasked for advice: Τώ ξιφεί τόν δεσμό λελύσθαι By that I mean, you are stressed because you are a faced with an intractabl

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Guardian column on ugh fields, mentions LW

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Guardian column on ugh fields, mentions LW

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