= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Kawoomba comments on Heuristic: How does it sound in a movie? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (15)
You're discounting the case where precisely because it fits the narrative, it is effective.
Getting coffee and building the narrative of "I'm a Hard Worker who will now do his Hard Work with Focus and Determination, look at me getting ready with coffee" is priming yourself for that hard work, the narrative is part of your motivational structure and embellishes your Focus and Determination.
Being too aware of "it's only plain old me, whether in a uniform, or in an office, or at Starbucks" is needlessly sabotaging an often effective placebo-like effect that relies on your internal narrative.
Epistemologically useful, possibly, but contraindicated as an instrumentally useful habit.
As with most (?all) biases, the key seems to be to notice the bounds of its usefulness.
Having a normal human amount of faith in narratives is useful for making conversation and probably for motivating oneself, but not for (?most) planning.
A stranger comes to town... Most planning is about motivating yourself to do the right thing.
Let's say I want to work on an big project. Then I check facebook. If I ask myself: "If this would be a movie, would the actor check facebook?" I get a pretty clear answer: "No." The actor would do something meaninful. The times in my life where I was the most productive were the time where I was clearly in touch with a narrative.
The more strongly you develop a narrative the more likely you are to get other people to want to participate. If you want to get big things done you need other people to help you.
Yep. I've always liked the adage about trying to make one's own life an artwork (variously attributed IIRC to Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche, Pope John Paul II and possibly someone else too).
Indeed, it's good to be aware of the narrative-bias on some level, just not too aware. More like an exception handling routine that's just checking for out-of-bounds errors.
Welcome to LW, glad that my little comment sparked you to make your first comment. :)
Oh God. I love this place.
You're right. I was discounting that.
Timothy Wilson's Redirect is basically about editing your narratives to overcome psychological issues. I haven't read it yet, but seems very useful and relevant.
And this is why I love LessWrong, folks--sometimes. In other rationality communities--ones that conceived of rationality as something other than "accomplishing goals well"--this kind of post would be hurrah'd.
(This LW post goes into more detail about that.)