Make your bad habits the villains

AshwinV

An often effective learning technique is the memory palace. The reason it works is because humans are simply better at remembering long routes than they are at memorizing long lists of abstract words, numbers etc. We have evolved in this fashion.

Apparently, humans are just inherently better at some things than at others.

In[this link](http://lesswrong.com/lw/31i/have_no_heroes_and_no_villains/), PhilGoetz argues that making heroes and villains out of people is a natural tendency. He views it as one of the habits that can be de-programmed, but requires effort - "a conscious effort to shatter the good guy, bad guy narrative".

But can we do better than simply de-program this tendency? Can we put it to use the way, the memory palace has been subverted to our own end?

[Anthropomorphism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism) to the rescue.

Make that short-tempered habit of yours, the alcoholic wife-beater that you loath. Make your habit of procrastination, the lazy employee in the office who never gets things done and gets his whole team into trouble. Make your deepest insecurities, the most despicable version of Peter Pettigrew that you have come across.

See if it works. Let me know in the comments section.

Apparently, humans are just inherently better at some things than at others.

But can we do better than simply de-program this tendency? Can we put it to use the way, the memory palace has been subverted to our own end?

[Anthropomorphism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism) to the rescue.

See if it works. Let me know in the comments section.

First, your markup is broken. I can see the link-syntax, instead of the links. Also, the firs link is to an article by Phil Goetz, not Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Now about the actual content. I'm all for trying to use one's natural tendencies, instead of just trying to compensate for them. But I'm critical of the concrete examples you gave. What you are trying to do seems to be to motivate yourself through shame and guilt. And no one seems to be in favour of that. Some reasons why I think it's a bad idea:

I believe you train yourself to be judgemental, not just about yourself but about others. I see no reason why the behaviour of judging your own actions wouldn't generalize to judging other people's behaviour.
Punishing yourself is unlikely to be effective, because you are unlikely to do it every single time you transgress. AFAIK punishment works best when it's a reliable consequence of the behaviour you want to control ('continuous punishment' in behavioural psychlology). It works very poorly otherwise, because every other time, the behaviour still gets reinforced. E.g. every time you take a cookie out of the cookie jar (a habit you want to minimize because you are on a diet) and you forget to conjure up a mental image of Dudley Dursly (a fat character from Harry Potter), you still get rewarded by a delicious cookie.
You start associate related concepts with the punishment. Essentially, you are building an ugh-field. Suppose you associate procrastination with laziness. What do you associate procrastination with? With the very tasks that you are putting off. Now event thinking about doing the dishes makes you feel worse than you felt before you conjured up the image of a disgusting messy dying of food poisoning in their never-clean house.
It simply doesn't feel good.

See also: a summary of what /u/pjeby says about the topic, many posts on http://mindingourway.com/

If you never apply the negative image (the "enemy") to yourself, that might be a slightly different matter. Maybe the image of an alcoholic can help keep you sober if you never drink alcohol in the first place. But even then, you learn to be judgemental of people and, should you start drinking, you will have the before mentioned problems with punishment.

EDIT: corrected "disgress" to "transgress"

I think you're actually imagining this technique differently than I am. In my view, this actually removes pain and guilt. Instead of saying "oh, I was lazy". You say "oh no, the mustachioed villain Mr Lazy pants is trying to attack again" and don't internalize that guilt to you.

Likewise, you can imagine mr Lazy Pants attacking other people as well, which would cause you to be less judgemental of them, as they have to deal with the same evil villians that you do.

1Bobertron11y

following up to my own post: I was sceptical because the examples AshwinV provided were examples that lend themselves to punishing oneself and using guilt, shame etc. But by flipping the title of the post to "Make good habits the heroes" all that criticism becomes irrelevant and AshwinV's idea remains the same. I think that is very related to the idea of identity, which has been discussed previously here on lesswrong. Use Your Identity Carefully is a good an relevant example.

0AshwinV11y

Thanks for the input! I'm not able to correct the hyperlink part, but I did change the name to Phil Goetz as was due.