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Viliam_Bur comments on The Centre for Applied Rationality: a year later from a (somewhat) outside perspective - Less Wrong
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Comments (102)
If it does not feel easy, you are probably doing it wrong.
Often the hard way is the only way we know, and it is better than nothing. But I believe there is nothing intrinsically hard about personal development or anything. It's just that the easy ways are a very small subset of all ways to do something.
If you look at the discourse about deliberate practice it nearly always describe as hard and challenging.
On an emotional level, people have ugh fields to protect them from dealing with hard issues in their life. If you do lead people past their ugh fields they have to deal with the hard emotional issue from which the ugh field protected them.
If you break through enough ugh fields the emotional processing needs energy. If you try to do as much in a short time frame people will feel overloaded.
There are different kinds of "hard" -- for example hard and fun (beating the final Super Mario level), or hard and painful (finishing the last meters of a marathon run with a broken leg). The former kind of "hard" is great for deliberate practice, but I suppose the introvert socially overloaded during rationality lessons feels like the latter kind of "hard".
If the goal of the lesson is dealing with the ugh fields, bringing people to their ugh fields may be useful. (But seems to me that CBT shows that this is better done slowly.) If the goal of the lesson is learning bayesian statistics or similar stuff, bringing people to their unrelated ugh fields is harmful. Challenging the introverted behavior has its place during the "comfort zone expansion" exercises, but is not essential for the remaining lessons.
That depends on what you mean with "better". People who practice CBT are generally paid by the hour and don't have a real issue to spend more time with an issue. That different than someone who wants to produce as much personal change as possible in 3 days.
To me that seems like a strange way of doing things. Exercises should reinforce each other instead of being completely distinct.
Sure. But the "we must make big changes in three days" model is itself a choice, which may turn out to be suboptimal for making long-term life changes.
As I understand it, it's generally true of skills training that if there are multiple independent aspects to a skill (say, precision and power in a golf swing), the skill improves faster if I train those aspects separately.
Could you expand on what you've found out about making what is usually considered hard to be not hard?
Example of "hard": Not eating chocolate, when you have chocolate at home.
Example of "easy": Not eating chocolate, when you have no chocolate at home.
Switching from "hard" to "easy" is much easier than using your willpower to win at the "hard" mode. For some reasons many people don't realize that, and instead spend a lot of time talking about it, motivating themselves, inventing various punishment schemes, attending motivation seminars, etc.
I suspect that something similar can be used in many situations. The first aspect is: don't work harder, work smarter. The second aspect is: if it involves some kind of brain power (willpower, memory, creativity), feeling stressed (because you really try to do it the hard way) only makes it more difficult... but for some reason a lot of popular advice recommends increasing the stress (by using rewards and punishments of many kinds). -- I suspect this is the corrupted hardware in action (rewarding and punishing people brings higher status to one who does it).
Some people are afraid that doing things the "easy" way is somehow inferior, probably because it is not mysterious enough. That somehow if you stop eating chocolate by not buying it, you will be unable to resist it when someone brings you a piece of chocolate to your home. I suspect the experiments would show the other way round, because even resisting eating chocolate by not buying it creates a success spiral and changes your habits.
The difficult part is that sometimes you just can't find the "easy" way. For example, sometimes you are not sufficiently in control of your environment. But many people don't even try.
If I were reading that somewhere else, I would be going to post it in the latest Rationality Quotes thread.
Thanks.
I think the problem is at least as much bad software as bad hardware, though. I believe the reason people don't try to figure out easy ways to do things is that they've absorbed an idea that it's more important to prove their virtue by doing hard things than to succeed, and I suspect that idea gets taught by people in authority who'd rather that subordinates not have initiative.
Excellent advice. Cheating is just another way of winning.
Not cheating is often a lost purpose.
Do you have an easy way to ensure housework is maintained to an acceptable level?
One possible approach is: If you don't need something, throw it away; then you have an "easy" solution for given thing not cluttering your home anymore.
A similar but less extreme approach could be to buy a lot of stackable boxes and put everything there, and only take out things that you really need at some moment. After some time the things you didn't need would naturally stay in the boxes.
This could solve some of my problems; I don't know if your problems are of this type. Now that I think about it, I would have to do some research about a good system of boxes (big boxes for large items, small boxes for smaller items, and a system to put them all in one place), but the impact on my home could be great. I had a suspicion for a long time that the storage system has a strong impact on how the rest of the house looks, but I didn't spend time researching a good storage system.