= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Vilx- comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014) - 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 (635)
Hmm... I've given it some thought (more to come later, for sure), but there's already one thing I've found this theory useful for. There have been times when I've caught myself doing/desiring things that I should not do/desire. I then asked myself the question - so why do I do/desire this thing? What pleasure/pain motivates me here? Answers to these questions were not immediately available, but after some time doing introspection, I've come up with them. After that it was a simple matter of changing these motivators to rid myself of the unwanted behavior.
So... yes, I think it can be used for predicting stuff (like, "if I change X, then behavior Y will also change"). Now, the information needed for these predictions is hard to come by (but not impossible!). Essentially you need to know/guess what a person is thinking/feeling. But once you have that, you can predict what they will do and how to influence them.
What's your opinion on this?
What you describe as "simple" here, is extremely difficult for me. (There are many possible explanations for why it is so, and I am not sure which one of them is the correct one.) Generally what you described seems like a part of the correct explanation... but there are other parts, such as biology, environment, etc.
For example, if my goal is to exercise regularly, I should a) think about my goals, imagine the consequences, think about the costs, and solve the internal conflicts... but also b) do some strategic activities, such as find where the nearest gym is, or maybe buy some exercise equipment to home, and c) check my health to see there is no biological problem such as e.g. anemia making me chronically tired.
An alternative explanation I can think of is the placebo effect. It's possible that your behaviour Y changed after changing X, because you believed behaviour Y would change. Especially as you wanted to change those behaviours in the first place.
Also, even if this was not due to placebo effect, it's only evidence on how your mind works. Other people's minds might work differently. (And I suspect it's also quite weak as evidence goes, though I can't seem to articulate why I think so. At the very least I think you'd need a very big sample size of behaviour changes, without forgetting to consider also the failed attempts at changing your behaviour.)