TheOtherDave comments on The Anti-Placebo Effect - Less Wrong

38 Post author: ShannonFriedman 28 September 2013 05:44AM

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Comment author: TheOtherDave 29 September 2013 04:01:46PM 7 points [-]

Oh, and re: motivating... that's a much more difficult question to answer.

The charting techniques were "motivating" only in a prophylactic sense... they helped me resist a certain kind of "I'm not getting any better" despair that was otherwise very compelling and very demotivating.

Positive motivation to progress was much harder to come by, and I had a much less concrete grasp on it. I was often in a not quite apathetic, but highly disengaged state with respect to my recovery. Mostly I dealt with this by accepting it as just another intermittent deficit where I had to ride out the bad periods and take advantage of the good ones.

I think the closest I can come to describing it accurately is to say that motivation-to-progress was highly correlated with focus; when what I was doing was recovery, I was very motivated to make progress. What direction causality ran, though, I have no idea.