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jimrandomh comments on Beware of Other-Optimizing - Less Wrong
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I tried reading your blog posts and couldn't (allergic to your style), but I'm sorry to inform you that you haven't reached the level of universal generalizations as yet. The stories you make up to explain why your tricks work are not the deep answers which constrain both the rule and the exception; from other sciences I have learned what true general models of the human mind look like, and your explanations, I'm afraid, are not in that class. The fully general art of combating human akrasia has not been invented by you. Your clients are only the ones for whom your techniques happen to work.
I hope that having discovered some tricks that work for some people is enough honor for you; and that you do not need to claim that your tricks work universally in order to value them. And that it does not wound you too deeply, if there are some people for whom your advice does not yet work, and who you do not yet understand. This is not the counsel of despair: study the exception and the rule, and you may find the deeper law.
Of course you could decide that I'm just being lazy. (Laughs.)
My generalizations aren't, for the most part, in my blog posts, nor in most of my for-pay material, actually. Abstractions don't help most people take action. The only really important "theory" on my blog is The Multiple Self, which was where I first realized that I was being stupid to assume that my conscious mind had ANY direct control over my actions, given how late consciousness appeared from an evolutionary perspective.
Most of the other generalizations my work sits on top of can be found in General Semantics and NLP, anyway... they just don't help much in their raw form.
But here is a useful generalization: if you test autonomous responses, you can create techniques that work. If you're not testing, or not making use of your autonomous, involuntary responses (both mental and physical), you're utterly wasting your time.
More than half of my early blog posts are wastes of time, in precisely that sense. They were written long before I learned how to shut up and test, as it were.
Heck no. I've really only specialized in chronic procrastination and personality sculpting. Fighting akrasia was a label that people here applied to my work. I don't really believe in akrasia, anyway -- a better description would be anosognosia of the will. (That is, we explain our behavior as akrasia or failure of will, because we don't understand that our will isn't singular. And we do it for the same reason we see gods in the forest -- our built-in projections of mind and intention. When applied to self, they produce prediction errors.)
I've discovered very little, actually. Most of what I've done has also been invented by other people (as I've sometimes discovered when somebody says, "hey, your stuff is kind of like author X"). All I've really done is systematize some things so that they're more teachable and repeatable, and try to replace mystical explanations with mechanical ones.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that all I've really done is take a very narrow subset of NLP and CBT that can be self-applied (by most people) with self-testing and don't require physical presence to be taught, and throw in a few heuristics about what to look for and what to apply them to.
For you to test something basic, like a submodalities of motivation exercise from an NLP book, would take you maybe 15 minutes... only slightly longer than it took you to squirt ice water in your ear. ;-)
Now, personally, I'm not sure if such an exercise would work for you. I've never been really good at doing submodality work on myself, though I'm okay at guiding others through it. But you need to understand that having trouble accessing something like your submodalities on your own, doesn't mean they aren't there.
What I'm getting at is that individual idiosyncracies only affect what techniques you'll be able to usefully self-apply; not what techniques will actually work. There are NLP techniques I still can't currently self-apply, and have to have someone else walk me through in order to do them, because I can't think about the technique and do the steps at the same time. That doesn't mean the technique "only works for some people" -- clearly I have the hardware the technique operates on, I just have limited fluency in accessing that particular hardware.
Similarly, there are techniques in my repertoire that some of my clients can't self-apply; I have to walk them through, or they have to use a recording or some sort of external aid. Some of these issues go away with practice, some don't.
The major insights I've had regarding self-help material is not that "some things work for some people and others don't" -- it's that:
Some people can learn a particular technique from a particular book, and others can't,
Some people can do a particular technique on their own, and others can't (although they may be able to learn to), and
Self-help books usually barely whisper some of the critical mental and physical distinctions needed to make a particular technique workable, while most people have too many existing preconceptions shouting in their head, for any of those whispers to be heard.
The #1 most important thing in doing virtually any self-help technique worthy of the name is being able to pay attention to your unconscious, automatic responses, without adding voluntary thought or anosognosiac explanations on top of them. And in my experience, it's the hardest thing to learn to do on your own; and as far as I can tell, nobody (not even me) has made a systematic attempt to teach it. (So far, I just point it out to people when they're doing the wrong kind of thinking.)
But if you can pay attention to your responses, and you are disciplined about testing those responses, you can invent your own techniques. That's what I did, for a while, and then I started going back and re-reading self-help books, using the idea of testing my autonomous responses to validate which ones worked, and the skill of paying attention to autonomous responses in order to apply them in the first place.
And what I've found, for the most part, is that virtually all self-help techniques work for something, if used correctly. It's the "used correctly" that varies immensely from person to person.
Even some techniques that I thought were utterly stupid (e.g. EFT and Sedona) can be made to work, and I learned some interesting things from them. Mostly what I've noticed, though, is that the people teaching them have a tendency to leave out (or say only in a whisper), certain things that you need to make them work, or they fail to explain the common failure modes.
(The common failure modes are very similar, btw, across a wide variety of techniques; mostly they amount to trying to do things by willpower or conscious analysis that can only be accomplished by waiting for an autonomous un-willed response.)
Anywho... if you want to find universal models, I recommend you skip my blog and go straight to the source: your own brain. Start observing the responses you don't control -- the almost-subliminal flashes of memory and sensation that occur in response to pondered questions or the thought of taking a particular action. Experiment for yourself, and find out whether these responses are repeatable in response to the same stimuli, and what techniques actually produce changes in those responses, and your resulting behavior.
Actually, I think people have made systematic attempts to teach it. Those attempts were named 'Zen', and promptly drowned in a sea of mysticism and bullshit that also called itself Zen. A few years back, I was in a group where we did the 'sitting' meditation that you often see given to novices: sit still, focus on your breathing, and blank your mind for awhile. I observed that it was comfortable and calming, and thought that was the point. Then I read Crowley on Religious Experience, linked from Less Wrong, which said that you're supposed to maintain a posture so rigidly that it becomes progressively more uncomfortable until you break. Then I read something you wrote, about observing your own reactions, and I was enlightened: the purpose is to put your mind in a baseline state so that you can observe all the things which pull you away from it, and learn how to deal with them. (First acknowledge, then suppress them.)
Today, I made another connection and found a way to test whether you have this ability: songs stuck in your head. Sometimes songs that we hear repeatedly stay in our mind, and intrude on our thoughts. Suppose you recognize that you have a song stuck in your head, and consciously decide that you don't want it there. Does that decision have any effect? How long does it take before you stop thinking of that song, and if it resurfaces, how long does it last? Songs have built-in timing (you can count notes), so these things are relatively easy to measure. Now suppose you consciously decide that Politics is the Mind Killer, so you won't think about politics except in particular circumstances. If you later find yourself thinking about abortion or gun control, and your conscious mind declares "politics is the mind killer, I will stop thinking about this", does it work? I believe that these are the same skill, and that meditation, if done properly, builds that skill.
Ah, right. I should've said, in the self-help field, or more precisely, in the subset of the self-help field that doesn't appear to descend into irrational madness. Silly of me to forget Zen, since I've actually studied it -- and not just in the "read books and practiced at home" sense. I'm just reluctant to strongly recommend other people study it, because it sounds too mystical or "irrational". Perhaps I should change that. (My reluctance, I mean.)
Almost right. You don't suppress them, you let them go. Suppressing them would strengthen them, for the same reason that "not thinking of a pink elephant" doesn't work. And it's not so much a baseline state, as having a task upon which to concentrate. It doesn't matter what the task is; it's just easier to learn if the task doesn't involve any activity for you to get caught up in thinking about. Once you learn to get into the state, it's possible to keep it while doing other things. For example, the Zen center I attended in Dallas did walking meditation in between sessions of sitting. It would've been very hard to start with walking meditation, but it was relatively easy to stay in state during it.
In my experience, none whatsoever. They last for days, and I've never found anything that gets rid of them, except replacing them with something else... which usually requires an external input, rather than any mental activity.
Nope. Doesn't work that way. You can't decide not to have thoughts. All you get to choose is to refocus your thoughts on what you intended to focus on. Refocusing and detachment are the skills you get from meditation. (Detachment is also useful for mind-hacking, because it lets you separate observation of your response from engaging in the response.)
Think of it this way. Your mind is a table-driven state machine, constantly responding to the environment and to its own fed-back outputs. Normally, when thoughts come up, they loop back into the state machine as input, driving feed-forward behavior. You think, "this sucks" or "I'm bored", and that then feeds back into the machine and makes you think MORE about how much it sucks or what you could be doing instead of this boring task.
The skill of detachment is being able to notice that thought as a thought, and NOT feed it back into the machine. You refrain from "following the thought", and simply continue on your task. You're training a general response to all thoughts as "ah, that's an interesting thought, and now I'll continue with what I've already chosen to do."
What you have to understand is that fighting or trying to suppress the thought is just as bad as becoming immersed in it, because you're still creating a feedback loop, despite it being in opposition to the thought. You're still enmeshed in action-reaction, instead of remaining focused.
The skill you develop is also similar to something pickup artists call "cutting the thread" -- when an unpleasant topic of conversation arises, or somebody says something that leads away from where they want to go, they simply acknowledge the statement in a way that makes the person feel heard, and then continue leading the conversation where they want it to go. They don't feel obligated to either follow the thread, OR argue with it. (They also use the term "non-reactive", which is a good general term for this idea, I think.)
Non-reactivity is useful in that it strengthens willpower. In my work, though, I don't emphasize it as a way of developing willpower, but as a way of applying techniques that reduce the need for using willpower in the first place. That way, it has more leverage. You only need to be non-reactive enough to apply a technique, rather than striving for 24/7 nonreactivity.
I disagree, because I have a method for doing so which I believe is effective. I stumbled upon it accidentally, while doing a mental exercise. The point of the exercise was gaze control. Normally we look around automatically and unconsciously, so I went for a walk (on a familiar path with nothing to run into or trip over) and made an effort not to, to always keep my eyes in one particular position, and never divert my gaze. First, I went around looking only forward; then, looking almost straight up, navigating by peripheral vision and using treetops as landmarks. The key was, whenever I caught myself looking down, I would immediately close my eyes, reset, and resume. This both stopped me from continuing to look down and, more importantly, stopped me from thinking about the fact that I had done so.
You can do the same thing to unwanted thoughts, such as songs stuck in your head, as long as you have the right response prepared. First, identify the unwanted thought, and which parts of the brain it uses. In the case of a song, that's your audio short-term memory, and if it has lyrics, your language processing centers. Next, prepare a thought which uses the same parts of the brain. I'll call this a "reset thought". In this case, a short meaningless phrase will work. Test it by trying to think both the reset thought and the unwanted thought at the same time, to make sure you can't (alternating is okay though.) Next, reinforce the reset thought, by focusing on it exclusively for an hour or so. Finally, turn the unwanted thought into a trigger for the reset thought, so that both the unwanted thought and any meta-thought about the unwanted thought are forced out quickly. Repeat the reset thought until something else is ready to take its place.
Zen teaches students to use a short mantra as a reset thought. The important things are that it must be able to repeat in a loop, it must have a natural stopping point in which to let in the thought which follows after, and it must be simple enough for the area which is being reset to remember, without needing other parts of the brain to assist in recall.
YMMV, of course. I'm very interested in what you think of this, since you have data sources (students) which I don't.
I was more-or-less with you up to this point. Perhaps you are confusing mantras and koans?
Also, it doesn't sound like you've understood my point about "can't decide not to have thoughts". Your technique simply replaces one thought with another. I meant that we can't choose not to have thoughts at all, only train ourselves to not follow them, or to replace them with other things.
Such training also does not constitute deciding not to have a thought, although you can certainly decide to apply the training or a technique to a particular thought or range of thoughts.
No, I am not. A mantra is a prepared thought that is used as a successor to unwanted thoughts, in order to force them out. It is not the only thing which can serve this purpose, but it is optimized for it. In fact, any thought will do, provided it is readily accessible; but a thought which takes awhile to generate won't work, because the unwanted thought will continue and take hold in the mean time. This is usually either explained badly, under-emphasized, or not mentioned at all, but Crowley, at least, addresses it when he says "any intruding thoughts are thrown off by the mantra, just as pieces of putty would be from a fly-wheel" (in chapter 2).
We seem to be talking past eachother here. By "not have a thought", I mean that we can prevent a specific thought (such as a song or a political topic) from manifesting, not that we can stop thinking about all things entirely. I have noticed that if you consistently replace a thought quickly enough after it first manifests, then it will stop manifesting in the first place. Of course, if you replace the thought "X" with thought "it is bad to think X", then X is still active in your mind, hence the need for something completely unrelated but which uses the same part of the brain to displace it with.
Here, it seems we disagree only on the number of levels of indirection. If you decide to apply a technique to cause yourself to not have a thought, then that is the same as deciding to not have that thought. The technique is an implementation detail which is necessary after you make the decision, but not does not factor into the decision itself.
Um, no. That's a koan.
A mantra is a sequence of sounds that is considered capable of causing transformation - it's often a meaningful expression relating to spirituality.
A koan is intended to be inaccessible to rational thought - meditating upon a koan sufficiently should cause you to stop thinking and instead 'become one with the koan', arriving at its meaning entirely through intuition.
Some schools regard koans as actually containing teachings, while others regard them as meaningless statements to be repeated over and over to remove thoughts from the mind.
I'm not sure whether my use of the word 'mantra' is correct, but I am reasonably certain that koans are not suitable for the purpose I described.
That's very interesting, and makes lots of sense. Reminds me of the technique of kicking the wall to stop the headache.
How to know which substitutions are the most suitable? For instance, what would you use to substitute for bad memories of the past? Fears of the future? Boredom with the task at hand?
I happen not yet to be a great specialist in brain anatomy...
I don't think it's the content of the thought you're trying to displace that matters, but the type - ie, whether it's verbal or visual, generated or played back from memory, etc. Details like subject and tense aren't likely to matter.
Note that boredom is an issue for which this technique will not work, because boredom is not a separate thought, but a tag applied to other thoughts which you don't want to get rid of. Also, traumatic memories are a likely special case and, thankfully, I don't have any to experiment with, so I don't know what will work there.
In my experience it's typically repeating fragments of songs that get stuck in my head, and I can often clear them by consciously remembering the song and allowing it to finish.
Failing that, listening to the song repeatedly (for up to half an hour) typically gets it out of my head, as well as immunizing me against it recurring for at least a week or two.
I'm not sure if this has any relevance.
Focusing is a self-help method which is based on noticing "felt sense" (involuntary reactions) and putting them into words.
Focusing is another system which teaches the ability to pay useful attention to internal states.
The central premise is that people who are good at therapy are able to notice confusing non-verbal mental states and stay with the states long enough to put them into words.