= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
pjeby comments on Attempted Telekinesis - 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 (28)
I expect that The Work of Byron Katie will be particularly useful for your type 3 classification, as it's specifically intended for getting system 1 to update on "X should/shouldn't be/do Y" beliefs. (e.g. "that person shouldn't be making munching sounds")
Per note 6, The Work actually involves a process of asking "Is that true?" about your beliefs, along with some other questions, and some pattern reversals... eg. "I shouldn't be making munching sounds", which helps in realizing that you actually have options.
For example, options that were not obvious before because system 1 was so stuck on the idea that things just shouldn't be that way. (For example, you might suddenly realize that you can wear earplugs, leave the room, politely ask someone to stop, etc.)
Of course, it might be even more helpful to question the belief "I shouldn't be petty", as it would have an even broader positive impact. ;-)
I say that because I've noticed in general that the impulses which propel people to self-improve are precisely the impulses that need to be negated in order for them to actually improve. That, e.g. a desire to "not be petty" leads precisely to a continued experience of one's self as being petty... in much the same way that the desire to not be an inadequate writer leads to a continued experience of feeling inadequate as a writer.
The thing that distinguishes these desires from healthy ones is that they're about you (the generic "you", not you, Anna Salomon specifically), rather than about the world, and that they are trying to avoid a perceived negative about the self, rather than being a desire to improve who you already are. (Even if the surface phrasing of the desire is positive, it's the emotional "tone" (as you called it) that matters.)
"Not being petty" or "being a good enough writer" are self-descriptions, not goals. A goal is, "have a good relationship with person X" or "have a good ad written". These are 1) not about one's self, and 2) can be reduced to positively-stated sensory descriptions of outside-world phenomena, without reference to your internal state.
Conversely, self-directed improvement goals (what Heidi Grant Halvorson calls "be good" goals) are negative descriptions of internal state, and lead to lots of back-and-forth and frustration because there isn't actually anything for you to optimize or move towards. All you can do is continually run headfirst into whatever you are trying to prohibit yourself from experiencing: i.e., the awareness of yourself as being "petty" or an "inadequate writer". Awareness of these self-descriptions triggers a negative self-judgment, which is painful. So your brain tries to avoid awareness, but this only perpetuates whatever outside situation is triggering the awareness (munching, needing to have a finished ad), because you're not doing anything to actually resolve the situation.
So, the solution is to question the belief that one ought not to be petty (or ought to be a good writer, or whatever), so as to discover that it is not necessary to achieve some state of perfect internal grace in order to accomplish one's true, external goals. Systems 1 and 2 will usually object, of course, because System 1 thinks that if you give up on not being petty, something awful is going to happen, and System 2 will back System 1 up with perfectly logical reasons why giving up the injunction to not be petty will in due course lead to the fall of civilization as we know it. ;-)
One of the peculiar side-effects of the way our brains render these personal injunctions is that they act like an override on both System 1 and System 2. We can't actually think about solutions to the problem of a munching noise, if the injunction is triggered by the mere thought of our not liking the noise. (Because in our mind, "not liking a noise" equates to "being petty".) So we don't even get so far as considering solutions, because we're barely even allowed to admit there's a problem.
Which is why just admitting to problems is often a helpful first step. Admitting to one's self that, "yes, actually, I am petty, if petty means disliking munching noises. And yes, I am an inadequate writer, if I define that as "not having written this ad yet"." In each case, the problem isn't the (accurate!) self-definitions, but rather, the belief that the self-definition is horrible and ought to be avoided at all costs. (And/or, the belief that the pejorative labels "petty" and "inadequate" are truly relevant or applicable to the neutral facts of the situation.)
Anyway, an awful lot of stuff is like this. Enough so that I've chosen to primarily specialize in the field of just problems that work like this. Tons of addictive and self-sabotaging behaviors build on things just like this, so I'm not going to run out of people to help any time soon. ;-)
Hmm... I actually read "The Work" a year or two ago, and mostly intentionally avoid recommending it to people: it seems to me that it contains powerful techniques for helping with the Type 3 classification above (as you say), but that it tends to draw people into classifying nearly all problems as Type 3, and into removing many drives that would have been better used as rocket fuel toward action.
I'd be interested in your thoughts on how Byron Katie interacts with Type 5 (worthy uses of shower thoughts and of persistent drive/energy) , or whether you think there are Type 5 cases of persistent wishing/drive that are worth keeping.
I think this is a recipe for getting burned. Most of the time, working smarter is better than working harder, which leads us back to:
So, I have not noticed this in my application of it, but I have noticed this in how she presents it. (In particular, one chapter of the work deals with death, and I remember reading thinking "hmm, I probably can't recommend this book to any rationalists without minimizing that claim somehow.") I found watching Youtube videos of her doing work with people as more effective than reading the book, I think, because there was a clear sense of "I now know the right way to go about this problem" whereas the book had more of a feeling of "I have now accepted the inevitable." (Sometimes the latter is the right way to go about the problem, of course.)
I think the two tools she presents--the "is it true?" question and the reversal--both mostly solve this problem.
First, "is it true?" separates the is from the should, which helps in classifying something as type 3 or type 5. If I say something like "my lawyer shouldn't have told the other side's lawyer fact X," and I ask myself "Is that true?" and the answer comes back "well, it's a violation of his professional code of conduct, and I can sue him for that breach," then I'm in a more useful place than I was before. If I say something like "Bob shouldn't have told Joe fact X," and I ask myself "Is that true?" and the answer comes back "well, I never actually made it clear to Bob that I wanted fact X private, and Bob never gave me the impression of being someone who was willing to keep secrets," then I'm in a more useful place than I was before.
Second, the reversal points out the many ways in which it's possible to minimize or avoid harm, which helps determine whether or not a problem actually is one you can do something about. I think pjeby's point with regards to the munching noises works well here; when you reverse "he shouldn't be making munching noises" to get "I shouldn't be making munching noises," the desired end goal is realizing that it takes one entity to make a sound and another entity to hear it. There are a vast number of unpleasant noises generated throughout the world, and you can't hear most of them, because of distance or muffling or so on. You could leave, or plug in earplugs, or ask them to stop, all of which might be better than suffering to prove how much you don't suffer!
Yep. This is one area where I differ in application from Byron Katie; I tend to focus heavily on self-applied judgments -- i.e. "I should(n't) X" -- rather than other-applied ones. So in AnnaSalomon's story it seemed to me the real problem was the thought "I shouldn't be petty", since there didn't seem to be any moral judgment being levied against the muncher, vs. against herself.
That being said, Byron Katie is correct that it's a lot easier to work on other-applied judgments and that it's better to learn the method using those first.
(I also sometimes find, oddly enough, that when I get to "who would I be without this thought?" on a self-applied judgment, my mind will sometimes object that if I didn't have this thought, then I'd have to stop being mad at other people for doing the same thing that I'm upset with myself about! I then have to reflect on whether on balance it actually benefits me to be upset at those other people, considering that it rarely motivates them and that the self-judgment is impairing me.)
That's just it, though: a "should" is not "rocket fuel towards action", unless the most useful action to take is instinctual social punishment fueled by moral indignation.
For example, the only action that's motivated by the thought, "I shouldn't be petty", is self-directed judgment and feelings of guilt, and a futile effort to suppress a feeling of annoyance that you in fact already have.
Our brains seem to have a certain class of counterfactuals whose "intended" evolutionary function is to support the maintenance of social rules through moral indignation. When we think of things in this type of "should" or "shouldn't" mode, it makes us want to punish the entity perceived to be responsible, while at the same time rejecting any personal course of action that doesn't revolve around "setting things right" or "setting people straight".
It's this machinery that drives us to pursue "irrational" levels of revenge, and to expend lots of energy arguing for "the principle of the thing"... but not one bit of energy on actually solving the problem.
And it's deactivating this indignation machinery that the Work is actually all about. That's why all of the worksheets begin with "Judging Your Neighbor" -- specifically directing the intended user to blame some individual for the perceived problem, to amplify the judgmental aspect of the problem to make it easier to spot the implicit (moral) "should" at work
Type 5 problems generally lack such a party, or even if there is one (e.g. blaming somebody for the state of your relationship), getting that blame out of the way then clears a space for working on the actual problem and what you can do about it. (Note again the turnarounds, which highlight what things you actually control.)
I can wish for something without insisting that I should already have it. In fact, I have personally found these two states to be mutually incompatible: if I am insisting I should have done something already, all my energy is tied up in mentally punishing myself for not doing it, rather than being directed towards doing it. Once the "should" is dropped, I can pay attention to whether or not I actually want to do it now, whether it would be a good idea, etc.
In System 2 thinking, there is no difference in types of "should" and "want", and there is symmetry as well. If you don't want something bad, you must want something good, etc.
In System 1, however, there are many different types of toward and away-from motivations, each with different biases for behavior. "Should" thinking biases towards punishment and away from solving the problem, because evolutionarily speaking System 1 doesn't want to clean up somebody else's mess: they should be punished for violating group norms and made to clean up the mess themselves. This makes "should"-motivation the opposite of a "rocket fuel towards action".
Luckily, because there is not only one kind of motivational drive, using a technique that shuts down only one of them does not have any negative impact on your motivation. In practical terms, it actually increases your motivation, as long as there is some consequentialist reason for you to do the thing, not just a programmed injunction regarding what's moral behavior in your tribe.
The tl;dr version: there's no moral "should" in a type 5 problem, and if there were one, then you wouldn't be thinking effectively about it anyway. You'd be stewing over how bad the problem is and why isn't it solved and does nobody recognize the importance, blah blah blah. Get rid of the "should", and as long as there's still a consequentialist reason for you to pursue the matter, you'll actually be able to think effectively about it. Getting rid of "people shouldn't die" doesn't affect "I don't like that people die" or " it would be much better if they didn't, and I'd like to do something about that".
(As a practical matter, asking "is that true?" about many shoulds leads to the insight that no, it isn't true, what's true is that I wish things were different. "I wish I were less petty" is actually more actionable than "I shouldn't be petty", and the same is true for quite a lot of things we have should-feelings about.)
Is that true? How do you know? ;-)
It does seem a bit odd for a rationalist to avoid recommending a technique whose first three questions are:
On the basis that people might conclude too many things they previously believed are false. ;-)
The rest of the technique consists of considering counterfactuals, e.g. "who would I be without that thought?" as a simulation, and finding reasons why contrary/alternate positions could be true... pretty much textbook countering for confirmation bias, cached thoughts, and the like.
"Should"-beliefs can't survive this gauntlet of questions, but factual ones can and do. So ISTM that the Work is a basic form of (perhaps the most basic form) of a Procedure For Changing One's Mind.