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roystgnr comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 12 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Suppose I offer to give you a dollar unless you think of how many letters are in the word "cat".
Could you do it?
Now replace "give you a dollar" with "not kill you horribly" and replace "how many letters..." with "your own inevitable mortality". The stakes are even higher and it's effectively the same task, but the problem sounds even harder...
(of course, that may just be my own mind projection fallacy at work. Did anyone make it to the end of this comment without thinking of the number "three"?)
I thought about the word ‘cat’ and thought about the individual letters but didn't consciously count them before I forced my attention away. On the other hand, I rarely consciously count numbers that low, so arguably I was thinking of the number as soon as I thought about the triplet of letters. I'm confident that I didn't subvocalise the word ‘three’ (or otherwise imagine any symbolic representation of the number) until I began reading your last paragraph and your quotation of that word came into my consciousness.
I'm pretty sure I could; I've never tried it with actual money on the line before, but I can not think about elephants when challenged to. Some people are better at exerting control over the direction of their conscious thoughts than others.