Annoyance comments on Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great - Less Wrong

140 Post author: Yvain 09 April 2009 02:44AM

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Comment author: pjeby 09 April 2009 08:20:47PM 1 point [-]

Influencing your subconscious in rational ways is not easy or simple.

How about influencing your subconscious in irrational ways? I find that much easier, myself. The subconscious isn't logical, and it doesn't "think", it's just a giant lookup table. If you store the right entries under the right keys, it does useful things. The hardest part of hacking it is that there's no "view source" button or way to get a listing of what's already in there: you have to follow associative links or try keys that have worked for other people.

Well, I say hardest, but it's not so much hard as being sometimes tedious or time-consuming. The actually changing things part is usually quite quick. If it's not, you're almost certainly doing something wrong.

Comment author: Annoyance 10 April 2009 02:41:48PM -2 points [-]

"The subconscious isn't logical, and it doesn't "think", it's just a giant lookup table."

Of all your errors thus far, those two are your most damaging.

Comment author: Steve_Rayhawk 10 April 2009 04:48:43PM *  3 points [-]

I agree that the subconscious isn't just a giant lookup table, and that many people who make this error use it to justify practices which destroy other people's minds. But there are some important techniques of making the subconscious work better that are hard to invent unless you imagine that the subconscious is mostly a giant lookup table. pjeby uses these techniques in his practice. Do you deny pjeby's data that these techniques work? Do you even know which data made pjeby want to write "it's just a giant lookup table"? If you do know which data made pjeby want to write that, do you mean that it was wrong for him to write "the subconscious is just a giant lookup table" and not "the subconscious is mostly like just a giant lookup table"?

I feel like you don't think through the real details of what other people are thinking and how those details would have to actually interact with the high standards you have for the thoughts of those people. All you do is tell them that you think something they did means they broke a rule.

Comment author: gjm 10 April 2009 08:12:42PM 2 points [-]

pjeby has provided very little data. He's claimed that his techniques work. He's described them in terms that (1) are supremely vague about what he actually does, and (2) seem to imply that he has gained the ability to change all sorts of things about the behaviour of the unconscious bits of his brain more or less at will.

There have been other people and groups that have made similar claims about their techniques. For instance, the Scientologists (though their claims about what they can do are more outlandish than pjeby's).

None of this means that pjeby is wrong, still less that he's not being honest with us: but it means that an appeal to "pjeby's data" is a bit naive. All we have so far -- unless there are gems hidden in threads I haven't read, which of course there might be -- are his claims.

Comment author: MendelSchmiedekamp 10 April 2009 04:18:03PM 2 points [-]

Annoyance has a point here. A look-up table is a very limiting model for a subconscious.

What is the benefit you gain by assuming that there is no organizing structure, whether or not it is known to you, within your subconscious?

Personally, I prefer a continually evolving model, updating with experience and observations. With periodic sanity checks of varying scales of severity. Not unlike how I model people.

Of course this lends a resulting bias that I treat my subconscious a bit like a person, with encouragement, care, and deals. This can also lend positive outcomes like running subconscious mental operations for long term problem solving (a more active and volitional version of waiting for inspiration to strike) and encouraging those operations to have appropriate tracebacks to make it easier for me to consciously verify them.

Not sure if that would work for other folks though, cognitive infrastructure may vary.