In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye — I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled.

-Donald Trump

Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make.

-Donald Trump

"Why live alone on a mountain if you love conversation?"
"There are many hungers it is better to deny than to feed. Discipline against the lesser aids in denial of the greater."

-- Paarthurnax (Skyrim)

(I edited out the bits of gratuitous dragon language.)

If you want to think of it as a direction, the direction is outside. I don't think you can do loops.

Sure, you can go meta again and again. I don't think in terms of meta as a direction, but I think of it as relative to the current level. So you go meta and step out of the current context, but this means you find yourself in a new context, and you can repeat: go meta and step out of this context. You find yourself in a new context and you can repeat: go meta and step out of this context. You find yourself in a new context... :-)

I would call what you are describing "putting into context" or "inserting new information into an existing framework", but yes, to do that you need some meta awareness.

However if you're reading academic research, what I would consider fully "going meta" is not just looking at other authors or connecting with related concepts, but rather considering the authors' incentives and, say, trying to correct for the publication bias.

The main point of the context is that it's one of four models he presents.

It's perfectly fine to model every cow as being spherical. There's nothing irrational about saying that you have a model where every cow is spherical. It's also not bad writing.

Different models have different usefulness.

I'm not particularly convinced that dentist anxiety would be any better in a world where yelling at your dentist for hurting you were considered socially acceptable, though.

In that issue anxiety is produced when your system I considers going to the dentist bad because he will hurt you but your system II drags you to the dentist. Simply yelling at the dentist doesn't resolve the dilenma.

To actually release the anxiety you need to reconcile your system I and system II. Depending on how good you can do that, your system I can also shut down the pain response so that the dentist doesn't have to give you anesthesia.

Surely in many cases, anxiety is a direct result of perceived danger, or of anticipating or being confronted with scary things.

The standard word for the emotion that people usually fear as result of direct perceived danger is fear.

Apart from that you miss the deeper point. If you look at a person getting afraid in an elevator there something that distinguishes them from other people who don't get afraid in an elevator. People don't randomly develop claustrophibia out of nothing.

A person who constantly suppresses his emotions is more likely to develop claustrophibia. Therapeutically it's useful to work on the topic of expressing one's emotions instead of being nice to overcome the issue. There are more direct and faster ways to cure claustrophibia but that doesn't mean that the hidden emotion model isn't applicable. That's why it's in David Burns book.

There we are at: "Scientists who write a claim that a lay person disagrees with are bad writers because they obviously don't mean what they claim."

for some reason people think that meta-things are higher status than things. Does anybody know why?

Going meta typically requires the ability to step out of the usual context (not a terribly common skill), a degree of reflexivity, and some intellectual power. Basically, idiots never go meta because they can't.

(Just nitpicking bad writing here, but it has to be said.)

It's not bad writting, it's you judging writing based on not having the context. Likely you misunderstand the word model.

But as far as the dentist example goes, a large part of the anxiety of going to the dentist is about you not wanting to feel pain but allowing someone else to do something painful to you without you being allowed to be angry at them. That's what niceness is about in that model.

Most people who feel anxiety before exams have a history of surpressing anger at their teachers but our school system doesn't consider it okay to express that anger.

Both of those situations are possible to be modeled in that model.

Humans are not adapted for the task of scientific research. Humans are adapted to chase deer across the savanna, throw spears into them, cook them, and then—this is probably the part that takes most of the brains—cleverly argue that they deserve to receive a larger share of the meat.

It's amazing that Albert Einstein managed to repurpose a brain like that for the task of doing physics.

• Eliezer Yudkowsky, My Childhood Role Model

Not a very advanced idea, and most people here probably already realised it -- I did too -- but this essay uniquely managed to strike me with the full weight of just how massive the gap really is.

I used to think "human brains aren't natively made for this stuff, so just take your biases into account and then you're good to go". I did not think "my god, we are so ridiculously underequipped for this."