Well, it is good that you have some discretion about what issues you use this technique on, but the document you referenced quite clearly states "The first step in The Work is to write down your judgments about any stressful situation in your life"
It says to write down your judgments... and goes on to define the language in which such judgments are to be expressed, i.e., judgmentally. i.e., emotionally and irrationally.
IOW, the premise is that if you were actually rational about a situation, you would not be stressed.
If your face is being approached by a red-hot poker, and you are being rational, you will move, or do whatever else is necessary to stop it, but you will not be experiencing the same type of "stress" as a person who is worrying that somebody might stick them with a red-hot poker at some point in the future, and that there's nothing they can do about it.
So yes, you can apply the technique to "any stressful situation", because it is not rational to remain stressed, instead of either 1) taking action, or 2) deciding it's not worth taking action. Stress arises from not doing either of those two things, and is thus prima facie evidence of irrationality.
In the question and answer section, it goes so far as to say, "No one has ever hurt anyone. No one has ever done anything terrible."
Her point is that those ideas exist in maps, not territory, and that the assumed consequences of having "something terrible" happen are a consequence of how the information is coded in your map, not whatever actually happened in the territory. Continuing to experience suffering about an event that is already over is not rational.
This criteria of applying it only on beliefs that are actually irrational seems to be something you added,
Not at all - even that brief introductory document stresses the importance of getting statements that are from the "heart" -- i.e. emotional judgments from System 1, and gives very specific instructions as to how to accomplish that. (You should know, as you quoted some of them and argued that they were bad precisely because they would elicit System 1 irrationality!)
However, as far as I can tell, you didn't actually follow those instructions. Instead, it appears to me that you imagined following the instructions with a hypothetical situation. It is not at all the same thing, as this will engage System 2 predictive models rather than the System 1 models, and they generate different answers.
and only communicated when pressed. Referencing this method without the caveat seems likely to teach people to be half a mind hacker, subject to the problems I described.
Actually, I gave the caveat that you MUST shut your verbal mind up and pay attention to your "inner" responses, so that you would get information from System 1, not System 2. She also gives it, but does not IMO emphasize it enough. That's why I pointed it out in advance.
Being able to silence System 2, pay attention to System 1, and distinguish System 2 "thoughts" from System 1 "responses" are the three most important skills a mind hacker can have. Without them, you aren't doing mind-hacking, you're confabulating.
So, it seems, before one can use this method effectively, one must perform a rational analysis of which beliefs about which perceptions of problems are truly irrational
Not at all. All you need to know is that you feel bad about something, as that is sufficient to know that you have an irrational perception. Otherwise, you'd be doing something about the problem instead of feeling bad about it.
The Work (and most other block-removal mind hacks) clears away the emotion so you can actually think. While an emotion may be useful for signaling that a situation is important to you, most of our evolved emotions are not tuned to optimize rational thought; they're there for signaling, learning, and preparing for simple actions (like fight/flight).
So even though Eliezer's "Way" says that you should feel emotions when it's rational to do so, mind hackers have a somewhat different view about which emotions it's rational to have. Negative emotions are mostly not useful in our modern environment. They serve a useful purpose in preventing courses of action that might lead to them, but once something bad has already happened, they cease to be useful.
I usually find that once I complete this analysis, I am done; I have concluded the perception is irrational and that is enough to dismiss it. If other people need some trick to get some numbered system in their brains to accept the rational conclusion, so be it.
Actually, the Work gets rid of the need to perform such an analysis; it simply drops the irrational stuff, making a rational solution easier to see. In fact, a rational and/or creative solution will often pop spontaneously to mind immediately following.
And since it does not rely on any advanced reasoning skills, or the ability to apply them under stress conditions, I suspect that the Work alone could do far more for raising the "sanity waterline" of humanity than extreme rationality skills ever will.
A person who has the Work doesn't need a religion to comfort them, although it's unlikely to cause anyone to consciously abandon their religion, vs. simply drifting away from it.
(Of course, some people who identify as "rationalist" will probably have a problem with that, since their tribal standard insists that people must not merely do rational things due to not being irrationally-motivated, but must do them because Reason said so, in spite of their irrational motivations. Which, of course, is an irrational "should" of precisely the type that the Work removes, and that we'd all be better off without... rationalists and non-rationalists alike.)
It says to write down your judgments... and goes on to define the language in which such judgments are to be expressed, i.e., judgmentally. i.e., emotionally and irrationally.
The problem is that people can perceive many reasons why a situation is stressful, some of those might be rational (or rationally supportable), and some might be irrational. A method of deceptively filtering out the good reasons, and addressing the bad reason in a way that feels like addressing all the reasons (because it is not acknowledged that the good reasons are filtered) goes...
The following started as a reply to a request for relationship advice (http://lesswrong.com/lw/zj/open_thread_june_2009/rxy) but is expected to be of enough general interest to justify a top-level post. Sometimes it is beneficial to have older men in the conversation, and this might be one of those times. (I am in my late 40s.)
I am pretty sure that most straight men strong in rationality are better off learning how the typical woman thinks than holding out for a long-term relationship with a women as strong in rationality as he is. If you hold out for a strong female rationalist, you drastically shrink the pool of women you have to choose from -- and people with a lot of experience with dating and relationships tend to consider that a bad move. A useful data point here is the fact (http://lesswrong.com/lw/fk/survey_results/cee) that 95%-97% of Less Wrongers are male. If on the other hand, women currently (*currently* -- not in some extrapolated future after you've sold your company and bought a big house in Woodside) find you extremely attractive or extremely desirable long-term-relationship material, well, then maybe you should hold out for a strong female rationalist if you are a strong male rationalist.
Here is some personal experience in support of the advice above to help you decide whether to follow the advice above.
My information is incomplete because I have never been in a long-term relationship with a really strong rationalist -- or even a scientist, programmer or engineer -- but I have been with a woman who has years of formal education in science (majored in anthropology, later took chem and bio for a nursing credential) and her knowledge of science did not contribute to the relationship in any way that I could tell. Moreover, that relationship was not any better than the one I am in now, with a woman with no college-level science classes at all.
The woman I have been with for the last 5 years is not particularly knowledgeable about science and is not particularly skilled in the art of rationality. Although she is curious about most areas of science, she tends to give up and to stop paying attention if a scientific explanation fails to satisfy her curiosity within 2 or 3 minutes. If there is a strong emotion driving her inquiry, though, she will focus longer. E.g., she sat still for at least 15 or 20 minutes on the evolutionary biology of zoonoses during the height of the public concern over swine flu about a month ago -- and was glad she did. (I know she was glad she did because she thanked me for the explanation, and it is not like her to make an insincere expression of gratitude out of, e.g., politeness.) (The strong emotion driving her inquiry was her fear of swine flu combined with her suspicion that perhaps the authorities were minimizing the severity of the situation to avoid panicking the public.)
Despite her having so much less knowledge of science and the art of rationality than I have, I consider my current relationship a resounding success: it is no exaggeration to say that I am more likely than not vastly better off than I would have been if I had chosen 5 years ago not to pursue this woman to hold out for someone more rational. She is rational enough to take care of herself and to be the most caring and the most helpful girlfriend I have ever had. (Moreover, nothing in my ordinary conversations and interactions with her draw my attention to her relative lack of scientific knowledge or her relative lack of advanced rationalist skills in a way that evokes any regret or sadness in me. Of course, if I had experienced a long-term relationship with a very strong female rationalist in the past, maybe I *would* experience episodes of regret or sadness towards the woman I am with now.)
Here are two more tips on mate selection for the straight men around here.
I have found that it is a very good sign if the woman either (1) assigns high social status to scientific ability or scientific achievement or finds scientific ability appealing in a man or (2) sees science as a positive force in the world. The woman I am with now clearly and decisively meets criterion (1) but does not meet criterion (2). Moreover, one of my most successful relationships was with a woman who finds science fiction very inspiring. (I do not BTW.) The salient thing about that was that she never revealed it to me, nor the fact that she definitely sees science as a positive force in the world. (I pieced those two facts together after we broke up.) The probable reason she never revealed them to me is that she thought they would clue me in to the fact that she found scientific ability appealing in a man, which in turn would have increased the probability that I would try to snow her by pretending to be better at science or more interested in science than I really was. (She'd probably been snowed that way by a man before she met me: male snowing of prospective female sexual partners is common.)
By posting on a topic of such direct consequence to normal straight adult male self-esteem, I am making myself more vulnerable than I would be if I were posting on, e.g., regulatory policy. Awareness of my vulnerability might cause someone to refrain from publicly contradicting what I just wrote. Do not refrain from publicly contradicting what I just wrote! The successful application of rationality and scientific knowledge to this domain has high expected global utility, and after considering the emotional and reputational risks to myself of having posted on this topic, I have concluded that I do not require any special consideration over and above what I would get if I had posted on regulatory policy.
And of course if you have advice to give about mate selection for the straight men around here, here is your chance.
(EDITED to avoid implying that all men are heterosexual.)