"terminally different" does not mean "it's hard enough to come to agreement that at least one party resorts to violence".

Though I guess there's a point hiding in there. If two random people are stranded in the desert with enough water for one to survive, their value systems will both say "I want the water", but they point at different "I"s. Even if they manage to cooperate and draw straws, there's still room for the stronger to just take it because of "incompatable value systems" - even if the value systems have the same fundamental structure after abstracting away specific beliefs and positions.

However this definitely doesn't apply in modern day relationships and I very much doubt that it applies to terrorists either.

The wife is. The husband wants to be, but his girlfriend (who he was with for the last bit of the marriage) isn't okay with it.

But I do honestly believe that with a bit of reason you can solve EVERYTHING.

Not strongly incompatible value systems.

Yeah, that takes a shit ton of reason.

For real though, in my experience "incompatable value systems" often turn out to be less terminally different than they appear, and are just (perhaps vastly) different strategies with based on different positions/beliefs.

For example, I have a friend who was closed to the idea of monogamy in principle - even to the idea of being with someone who wanted monogamy with her. After much talking about how to be flexible/how to convey your needs/frame well, she's now with a guy who apparently started as into monogamy as she was non-monogamy.

(The NLP and hypnosis folks tend to call similar processes "trans-derivational search", but I wouldn't wish that term on anybody who's not a specialist.)

I think the "focusing" thing is a bit more than just a transderivational search - or rather a specific application of the same thing. "focusing" contains a lot of instructions on where to point your curiosity and what you can get out of it.

I'm curious how you'd apply it. I mean, removing blocks to interest in a subject... boredom, disgust, etc. predicated on bad experiences or subliminally-absorbed stereotypes, I can see that. But building an interest? I guess I haven't done much research into more generative techniques.

Well, removing blocks is definitely a big part of it. With no blocks there it's just a conversation with system 1 about what's important - and that part can often just happen on its own.

I think your "organize your desk" video is a good example on the small scale. People aren't motivated to do it not just because they are blocking themselves with aversive associations but also because they're not associating the good of the clean desk with the act of organizing it. Applied to interest in a subject is just a larger scale application of the same stuff. Instead of one picture of a clean desk, it's a whole series of possible futures and possible payoffs and the like.

My strongest example - perhaps because I was most conscious of it having not yet integrated the skills - actually predates my departure on this mind hacking journey and in fact applies to the motivation I had to do it.

When I first realized that there's big low hanging fruit it wasn't a complete automatic takeover. I was still sorta interested in other hobbies which (according to system2) didn't really pay off the same. And like, do you realize how important it is if half the stuff it seems like hypnosis might be able to do is actually possible?

So I had to deliberately spend some time thinking about the alternate ways I wanted to spend my time and actually visualizing where they'd go and what I'd get out of it. And doing the same for the much more uncertain future where I dive into this with more than mild curiosity. And then having deflated alternatives and connected it more strongly with the potential rewards, it had earned my fascination big time (since then it has been a fairly automatically self reinforcing thing). And the motivating images have changed, of course, as I get a more realistic/detailed idea of whats doable/desirable.

Sillier still that I haven't organized all my notes yet. (Granted, I'm coming up on ten years' worth now.) And yes, yes I am still working on all that stuff. I just haven't been seriously promoting anything for sale for some years now, as I've been focused on finding methods for dealing with my worst blocks. That work is getting really close to done now, though... I hope. ;-)

Nah, that part is hard. I'm in a similar place myself, though not 10 years worth. I've been trying to organize them into blog posts as an easy to get down form of thoughts, but then I kinda got stuck tying the last pieces together and I'm backlogged 30 or so posts. But I'm "close" :). It tends to help when I have an interested person to bounce ideas off of and serve as a foil for organizing my thoughts (which I do have, and need to make more use of!).

Anyway, even if not as done as it "should" be for a vaguely meaningful sense of "should", I wouldn't call it silly the way it's silly to not have said "yo, you wanna chat sometime and compare notes?"

Yo, you wanna chat sometime and compare - er, I mean organize notes?

Mhmm.

The concept is totally legit, but I do think more than just the name that comes off "new agey". I certainly got that impression when reading the book and so did a few people I recommended it to. So now I add that to the disclaimer so people will know to anticipate that and not take it as evidence that its not awesome.

The name didn't sit right with me for a while too since "focusing" as applied to mental processes usually makes you think of honing in on one particular thing while shutting things out. I think what he had in mind was more like looking at your mind through a microscope where you start seeing everything as a blurry mess that resolves into focus through this process - and that actually seems to fit to me, if not well spelled out by the word "focusing". If I had to pick a name off the top of my head, I might go with "mental grain refinement".

Agreed that it the payload is roughly equivalent to Actually Being Curious, but I think it's important to not let the book get rounded down to that. Not only does it paint a pretty clear picture on how to actually do it as well as giving you a frame work to work under, it applies to far more things than one might think (including, for example, "lotteries of fascinations"), so it would be a shame to get it pigeon holed.

By the way, you still working on all the mind hacking stuff? I have been for a few years and I think it's silly that I haven't yet approached you to chat and compare notes.

That being said, it seems a little defeatist. Perhaps there's some way to really choose your fascinations...

Choosing fascinations is very much a system 1 game.

Ever notice how smart people are more likely to get into math and athletic people are more likely to get into sports? Heck, you can watch someone go from "sensitive artist" to "bodybuilder" about as fast as it takes to realize that their body would do well at the latter.

I've been fairly successful choosing my fascinations, both in the sense of system 2 successfully influencing system 1 and in the sense of being happy with what holds my interest. The trick is to get close to system 1 so you can understand what it's trying to say and so that you know how to talk so that it'll listen.

"Focusing" by Gendlin is probably a good place to start, even if it sounds a bit "new agey".

I've had experience with what I think is the same thing that Eliezer called "lack of status regulation emotions", and I do think it's more than "narcissisticly big ego" and more than "unmotivated and unfortunate status blindness".

It's not that I couldn't see the normal status levels. It's just that I thought they were stupid and irrelevant (hah!) so I just went off my own internal status values. If you could back up your arguments, you had my respect. If you couldn't and got defensive instead, you didn't. And I wasn't gonna pretend to respect someone just because everyone else thought I was out of line. Because.... well, they're wrong. And I was totally unaware of this at the time because it was just baked into the background of how I saw things.

Good things did come of it, but I definitely stepped on toes, and in those cases it definitely came off like "big ego".

And in a sense it was, just not in the straightforwardly narcissistic "I'm smarter than you so I don't have to treat you with respect" way. Just in the "I'm smarter at the 'not acting smarter than I am' game, and that is why I don't have to treat you with respect" way, which, although better, isn't all that laudable either.

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