pjeby comments on How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious - Less Wrong

113 Post author: Swimmer963 23 January 2012 11:50PM

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Comment author: pjeby 27 January 2012 03:13:57AM *  2 points [-]

The pattern of a learned moral disapproval applied to a behavioral stereotype, subsequently interfering with individual goals...

...his translation to English said, as if that were one short word in his own language :-) ... Is there a name for this?

I just call them "disapprovals", although my browser's spellchecker always seems to chide me for turning an adjective into a noun in such a fashion. ;-) I used to call them judgments, but after I read Love Yourself and Let The Other Person Have It Your Way, it seemed to me that "disapproval" was a better term, as it is a more direct description. One may disapprove because of judgment, or perhaps judge because of disapproval, but the actual relevant behavior that needs changing is the disapproving part.

Can you recommend a good book or essay on the subject?

The one linked above is the only one I know of, outside of Guild materials. You have to wade through a lot of new age to get to the meat, which mainly consists of two things:

  1. Showing how approval and disapproval are a major, if not the major driving force not only in human relationships and interactions between different people, but also within individuals, and

  2. A simple method, for letting go of such disapprovals, repeatedly demonstrated until it becomes a hypnotic chant, one which the reader is encouraged to also practice.

Once practiced to a skill, it's rarely necessary to actually use the incremental approach given in the book; once you know what it feels like to let go of a disapproval it's relatively straightforward to just do so directly, rather than letting go of it gradually as described.

(Things not in the book: the symmetry methods, imagining and surfacing objections. Those are general Guild mindhacking patterns, adapted from other sources and from practice.)

It sounds a little bit like the thing Leadership And Self Deception is about preventing from forming in the first place and handling when contributing factors arise in specific interpersonal relations

Perhaps? I haven't read the book; the Guild's application of this concept is strictly for personal growth, in that disapprovals create a certain type of systematic bias in thinking. It is hard to conceive of -- let alone take -- courses of action that conflict with what we disapprove of.

That is, our disapprovals of other people are a major source of "ugh" fields, because our brains self-apply the same labels we attach to others. Our system 2/"far" brains spin-doctor the labels away at the conscious level, even as our system 1 brains match the pattern and make us feel uneasy... resulting in the infamous "protest too much, methinks" pattern.