pjeby comments on It's okay to be (at least a little) irrational - Less Wrong
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There are many, many things for which we need a constant rolling sense of "OK for all moments before now, but not OK for all moments from now into the future". So I forgive myself for all past instances of irrationality, which permits me to admit them to myself without shame and so avoid the cognitive dissonance trap; but I don't give myself permission to be irrational in the future. This of course is a very poor fit for the way we are used to thinking about ourselves, and that's one of the biggest challenges in aspiring to rationality.
This is the "growth" mindset, actually. There's very little that it can't be usefully applied to.
Where does that terminology come from?
The work of Carol Dweck, see the book "Mindsets". I also recently wrote a blog post that ties her work together with Seligman's 3Ps/optimism model, and my own "pain/gain" and "successful/struggling" models, at: http://dirtsimple.org/2009/03/stumbling-on-success.html
I expect to be writing more on this soon, as this weekend I found a connection between the "fixed" mindset and "all-or-nothing" thinking in several areas I hadn't previously considered candidates for such.