Something that I haven't seen really discussed is what kind of emotional tools would be good for beginner rationalists. I'm especially interested in this topic since as part of my broader project of spreading rationality to a wide audience and thus raising the sanity waterline, I come across a lot of people who are interested in becoming more rational, but have difficulty facing the challenges of the Valley of Bad Rationality. In other words, they have trouble acknowledging their own biases and faults, facing the illusions within their moral systems and values, letting go of cached patterns, updating their beliefs, etc. Many thus abandon their aspiration toward rationality before they get very far. I think this is a systematic failure mode of many beginner aspiring rationalists, and so I wanted to start a discussion about what we can do about it as a community.
Note that this emotional danger does not feel intuitive to me or likely to many of you. In a Facebook discussion with Viliam Bur, he pointed out how he did not experience the Valley. I personally did not experience it that much either. However, based on the evidence of the Intentional Insights outreach efforts, this is a typical mind fallacy particular to many but far from all aspiring rationalists. So we should make an effort to address it in order to raise the sanity waterline effectively.
I'll start by sharing what I found effective in my own outreach efforts. First, I found it helpful to frame the aspiration toward rationality not as a search for a perfect and unreachable ideal, but as a way of constant improvement from the baseline where all humans are to something better. I highlight the benefits people get from this improved mode of thinking, to prime people to focus on their current self and detach themselves from their past selves. I highlight the value of self-empathy and self-forgiveness toward oneself for holding mistaken views, and encourage people to think of themselves as becoming more right, rather than less wrong :-)
Another thing that I found helpful was to provide new aspiring rationalists with a sense of community and social belonging. Joining a community of aspiring rationalists who are sensitive toward a newcomers' emotions, and help that newcomer deal with the challenges s/he experiences, is invaluable for overcoming the emotional strains of the Valley. Something especially useful is having people who are trained in coaching/counseling and serve as mentors for new members, who can help be guides for their intellectual and emotional development alike. I'd suggest that every LW meetup group consider instituting a system of mentors who can provide emotional and intellectual support alike for new members.
Now I'd like to hear about your experiences traveling the Valley, and what tools you and others you know used to manage it. Also, what are your ideas about useful tools for that purpose in general? Look forward to hearing your thoughts!
On emotional tools in general -
there are actually a number of schools of thought that teach what might be called a rationalist approach to your emotions, i.e. seeing that your emotions are a map that's good to distinguish from the territory, and giving you tools for both seeing the distinction and evaluating the map-territory correspondence better.
1) In cognitive behavioral therapy, there is the "ABC model": Activating Event, Belief, Consequence. Idea being that when you experience something happening, you will always interpret that experience through some (subconscious) belief, leading to an emotional consequence. E.g. if someone smiles at me, I might either believe that they like me, or that they are secretly mocking me; two interpretations that would lead to very different emotional responses. Once you know this, you can start asking yourself the question of "okay, what belief is causing me to have this emotional reaction in response to this observation, and does that belief seem accurate?".
2) In addition to seeing your emotional reactions as something that tell you about your beliefs, you can also see them as something that tells you about your needs. This is the approach taken in Non-Violent Communication, which has the four-step process of Observation, Feeling, Need, Request. The four-step process is most typically discussed as something that's a tool for dealing with interpersonal conflict, as in "when I see you eating the foods I put in the fridge, I feel anxious, because I need the safety of being able to know whether I have food in stock or not; could you please ask before eating my food in the future?". However, it's also useful for dealing with personal emotional turmoil and figuring out what exactly is upsetting you in general, or for dealing with internal conflict.
3) In both CBT and NVC, an important core idea is that they teach you to distinguish between an observation and interpretation, and that it's the interpretations are what cause your emotional reactions. (For anyone curious, the more academic version of this is appraisal theory; the paper "When are emotions rational?" is relevant.) However, the NVC book, while being an excellent practical manual, does not do a very good job of explaining the theoretical reasons for why it works, which sometimes causes people to arrive at interpretations of NVC which cause them to behave in socially maladapted ways. For this reason, it might be a good idea to first read Crucial Conversations, which covers a lot of similar ground but goes into more theory about the "separating observations and interpretations" thing. Then you can read NVC after you've gotten the theory from CC. (CC doesn't talk as much about needs, however, so I do still recommend reading both.)
4) It's fine to say that "okay, if you're having an emotional reaction you're having difficulties dealing with, try to figure out the beliefs and needs behind it and see what they're telling you and whether you're having any incorrect beliefs"! But it's a lot harder to actually be able to apply that if you're in an emotionally charged situation. That's where the various courses teaching mindfulness come in - mindfulness is basically the ability to step a little back from your emotions and thoughts, observe them as they are without getting swept up in them, and then being able to evaluate them critically if needed. You'll probably need a lot of practice in various mindfulness exercises in order to get the techniques from CBT, NVC, and CC to live up to their full potential.
5-6) An important idea that's been implied in the previous points, but not entirely spelled out, is that your emotions are your friends. They communicate to you information about your subconscious assessments of the world, as well as of your various needs. A lot of people tend to have somewhat of a hostile approach to their emotions, trying to at least control and get rid of their negative emotions. But this is bound to lead to internal conflict; and various studies indicate that a willingness to accept negative emotions and pain will actually make them much less serious. In my personal experience, once you take to the habit of asking your emotions what they're telling you and then processing that information in an even-handed way, then those negative emotions will often tend to go away after you've processed the thing they were trying to tell you. By "even-handed" I mean that if you're feeling anxious because you're worried of some unpleasant thing X being true, then you actually look at the information suggesting that X might be true and consider whether it's the case, rather than trying to rationalize a conclusion for why X wouldn't be true. Your subconscious will know, and keep pestering you. Some of CFAR's material, such as aversion factoring points this way; also Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as elaborated on in Get out of your mind and into your life seems to be largely about this, though I've only read about the first 30% so far.
Some of my earlier posts on these themes: suffering as attention-allocational conflict, avoid misinterpreting your emotions.
Thanks for these suggestions, I will try to adopt some of these in my rationality outreach. The idea about emotions being your friends, and the CBT techniques, are going to be especially useful to beginner rationalists. I'll also check out your earlier posts as well, thanks for including them.