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.

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.

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.

On one side there is LW and then there is everyone else. Both sides call each other idiots.

They both get Bayes points!

I thought I left all that behind, just to learn that there are atheists who believe exactly the same just using different labels.

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.

But at the same time all this is sufficiently distracting and disturbing that I can't just ignore it either.

More unasked for advice: Τώ ξιφεί τόν δεσμό λελύσθαι

By that I mean, you are stressed because you are a faced with an intractable knot, so what you really need to do is optimize your knot-undoing procedure. That is, study epistemic rationality, and ignore all that instrumental rationality bullshit. There are but six basic rules of instrumental rationality, and all require nigh-infinitely strong epistemic rationality: figure out who or what you are, figure out who or what you affect/effect, figure out who or what you and the things you affect value or are affected by or what they 'should' value or be affected by, meta-optimize, meta-optimize, meta-optimize. Those are all extremely hard and all much more important than any object-level policy decision. You are in infinite contexts controlling infinite things, think big. Get closer to God. Optimize your strategy, never your choice. That insight coincidentally doubles in a different context as being the heart of TDT.

For how long have you thought about this? Or is it that obvious?

Someone suggested a few weeks ago that you were exhibiting Roko-like tension-resolution behaviors. I didn't really think about it much at the time. But the context came up a few comments above where you were talking about Roko and that primed me, and from there it's pretty easy to fill in a lot of details.

The longer version ends the same way but starts with: About a month ago there was a phase transition from a fluid jumble of ideas to a crystalline semi-coherent vocabulary for thinking and talking about social psychology, though of course the inchoate intuitions had been there for many years. Recently I've adopted Steve Rayhawk's style of social analysis: making everything explicit, always going meta and going meta about going meta, distinguishing between wants/virtues and double-negative wants/virtues, emphasizing the importance of concessions and demands of concessions, et cetera. I think I focus on contempt qua contempt somewhat more than he does, he probably has much finer language for that than I do since it's incredibly important to model correctly if one is reasoning about social epistemology, which is itself an incredibly important thing to reason about correctly. Anyway I've learned a lot from Steve.

I remember being tempted to reply to your original comment RE Roko with just "/facepalm" and take the -4 karma hit for the lulz but I figured it was a decent opportunity to, ya know, not troll for once. But there's something twistedly satisfying about saying something you know will be dismissed for reasons that it would be easy for you to demonstrate are unvirtuous, unreflective, and unsophisticated. Steven Kaas (User:steven0461, Black Belt Bayesian) IMed me a few days ago:

Steven: I don't like when people downvote my lesswrong comments without commenting, because then I never get to learn what's wrong with them
Steven: the people that is

I'm not sure how to interpret that quote by Steven Kaas, given that he is downvoted extremely rarely. I count 3 LW comments with negative points (-1, -1, -2) from User:steven0461 out of more than 700. (I also wanted to comment because people reading your quote might form the impression that Steven is someone who is often downvoted and usually interprets those downvotes as evidence of other people being wrong.)

7XiXiDu15y

I made a decision. I am going to log out and come back in 5 years. Until then I am going to devote all my time to my personal education. If you think that any of my submissions might have strong negative effects you can edit or delete them. I will not react to any editing or deletion.

1XiXiDu15y

Agree, I hate that too. When that happens to me I just repeat it in different places until someone finally explains how I am wrong and just accept the karma hit. I have no idea what people are thinking who just downvote. If I knew that I was wrong, or how I was wrong, I wouldn't have written the comment/post after all.

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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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