Swimmer963 comments on Teaching Introspection - Less Wrong
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This reminds me of something that happened in my early years of teaching mind hacking: I noticed that some people were way better at applying the techniques than others, and then began discovering that it was a function of lower-level introspection skills I didn't yet know how to teach. (For example, some people were just better at "shutting up and listening" or not adding interpretations onto their experiences.)
I certainly wish I had technology that specific: what I have now are mostly mnemonics, rules of thumb, and individual coaching feedback. Objective measures are particularly hard to come by, though I suppose I have a couple of them.
Have you experimented or played around with ways of teaching these lower-level skills?
Yes. As a practical matter, it's more like teaching people what to stop doing than what to do - i.e. to stop talking over their experience and speculating about it. Some people are worse about doing that than others; you have to stop them a lot before they "get it".
More recently, I've been teaching people my SEED mnemonic, and it seems to help them realize what they're supposed to be paying attention to, but I don't have any real empirical data on that. I'd have to get a bunch of untrained people and test how quickly they were able to stop abstracting experiences, having split them into a control and experimental group... and then I'd still have no way to blind myself, unless somebody else taught them about SEEDs.