I have. I have no evidence that either pain killers or placebos work in any sort of medical sense; I have clear evidence that swallowing a pill causes me to relax, resulting in a immediate reduction in pain. This is stupid, and I am working on eliminating the pill, but still, if this is what works, I will continue to use it frequently until I find something better.

I think one of the major reasons that people dislike the idea of placebos is because they think that they are being medicine. This has not been my experience. Placebos are better than medicine, because they work directly on your mind, and your mind (my mind, anyway) is sometimes too stupid to pay attention to medicine. I would have been better off, and a bit wealthier, if a doctor had realized this before trying the medical route.

The big reason? Construal theory, or as I like to call it, action is not an abstraction. Abstract construal doesn't prime action; concrete construal does.

Second big reason: the affect (yes, I do mean affect) of being precise, is very much negative. Focusing your attention on flaws and potential problems leads to pessimism, not optimism. But optimism is correlated with success, pessimism is not.

Sure, pessimism has some benefits in a technical career, in terms of being good at what you do. But it's in conflict with other things you need for a successful career. TV's Dr. House is an extreme example, but most real people are not as good at the technical part of their job as House nor are the quality of their results usually as important.

Both of these things combine to create the next major problem: a disposition to non-co-operative behavior, aka the "why can't our kind get along?" problem.

Yes, not everyone has these issues, diverse community, etc. But, as a stereotypical and somewhat flippant summary, the issue is that simply by the nature of valuing truth -- precise truth, rather then the mere idea of truth -- one is treating it as being more important than other goals. That means it's rather unlikely that a person interested in it will be sufficiently interested in other goals to make progress there. I would expect it more likely that a person who is not naturally inclined towards rationalism would be able to put it to good use, than someone who's just intellectually interested in rationalism as a conversation topic or as an ideal to aspire to.

To put it another way, if you already have "something to protect", such that rationality is a means towards that end, then rationality can be of some value. If you value rationality for its own sake, well, then that is your goal, and so you can perhaps be called "successful" in relation to it, but it's not likely that anyone who doesn't value rationality for its own sake will consider your accomplishments impressive.

So, the truth value of "rationalists don't win" depends on your definition of "win". Is it "win at achieving their own, perhaps less-than-socially-valued goals? Or "win at things that are impressive to non-rationalists"? I think the latter category is far less likely to occur for those whose terminal values are aimed somewhere near rationality or truth for its own sake.

For such outcomes, I suggest the methods used by Allen Carr: essentially they work by systematically eliminating all the perceived benefits of the activity you wish to cease.

I have read Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Drinking Alcohol. I got the impression he is playing on the reader's pride basically. He did not deny alcohol numbs in the brain whatever bothers you, he said the price is that it numbs everything else to. So basically he was playing a "you don't value the everything else in you?" game and maybe it is just a quirk of mine, I don't know, but whenever people try to play my pride I charge head-in, such as "Yes, I am absolutely worthless.Now what? Your move." I don't really know why I do this. Partially sometimes really feeling like this but partially really not liking the pride play as a method... I just think building anything on people's self-worth is really fragile, right?

The trick to this kind of issue is realizing that your brain is using the wrong baseline for measurement of gain/loss. The correct baseline to use in such a scenario is not how things are now, but how they would be if you didn't have the job.

Is this related to the old saying "learn to desire what you have" or "count your blessings" or the Stoic technique of negative visualization i.e. how much it would suck to lose what you have? Visualize not having it, then having it, pass a mmm-test, that sort of thing?

The optimum use seems to be for situations that trigger an immediate and visceral conditioned response that interferes with your ability to think clearly.

I see - this is why the examples are like foods one dislikes or social anxiety for speaking or I assume approach anxiety at dating etc. I will try it with physical challenges, I remember feeling inferior when I was a child when I was clumsy at things like climbing up ropes and it is possible it is keeping me away from trying such sports.

In contrast to the feeling elimination technique, most everything I teach these days can be considered -- in one way or another -- a Ritual For Changing One's Mind.

Do you write about this i.e. new websites as TTD or DS are not maintained much lately?

Yes :) But you wrote this comment and chapters 6-7 5 years ago, are there any new developments since then?

I tried them and would like to have the following comments:

• instant motivation does not seem to work for me for the goals where you really, truly, are running away from something bad and there is no positive goal to pursue. Example: stopping smoking: the best possible outcome of not smoking is staying as healthy as today, the worst outcome of smoking is early painful death. Example: the kind of jobs one does only to pay bills. In both cases there are no possible positive outcomes to imagine: the best case outcome is things staying as they are now.

• I tried chapter 7 on tomatoes, as I hated them since childhood. When I go back to 3 or 4 years old I simply don't remember how I felt hence I have no feeling to overwrite the current body feeling (gag reflex, sour face).

Hi Eby,

I think with this refinement process you went from something clear, simple and easy to understand to something difficult and technical.

Nevertheless I think your 2008 theory is correct and probably you did not make it worse, it is just harder to understand now.

I should also like to add this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/21r/pain_and_gain_motivation/cipw

It might help to taboo "creativity". I know of three major schools of thought on the subject, all of whose definitions I agree with, despite certain of the group(s) claiming that other group(s) are "wrong. ;-)

One group defines creativity in terms of being able to systematically generate novel alternatives for a design problem, or within some target space.

Another defines it in terms of creating... that is, being able to formulate a desired objective in the first place, and pursue a process of bringing it into being by continually comparing and contrasting the desired state with the current state of reality.

A third defines it in terms of fluency - that the mere practice of generating different sequences of output in some medium causes one to develop an intuitive sense of what sequences are likely to be "good" or "bad". (I don't know a ton about this group, but I heard someone give a talk once on this, demonstrating how teaching children to generate sequences of the form 1-2-3, 1-3-2, 2-3-1, 2-1-3, 3-1-2, 3-2-1 would allow them to learn interesting things about music and mathematics in a very short period, by changing e.g. pitch and duration of notes.)

All three of these characteristics -- the ability to hold a vision, generate alternatives to solve specific problems, and be fluent in the low-level expression of your subject area -- seem to be important to any good definition of "creativity". But quite a lot of materials tend to take on only one of these areas, and then usually some relatively small subset thereof.

Reading this reply, I was immediately reminded of a situation described by Jen Peeples, I think in an episode of The Atheist Experience, about her co-pilot's reaction of prayer during a life-threatening helicopter incident. ( This Comment is all I could find as reference. )

Unless your particular prayer technique is useful for quickly addressing emergency situations, you probably don't want to be in the habit of relying on it as a general practice. I think the "rubber duck" Socratic approach could still be useful, so this isn't a disagreement with your entire comment, just a warning about possible failure modes.

This comment resonates with me. I am also a Christian-turned-Atheist.

When something bad happens, or I feel in danger, or I don't know what to do, usually I want to send up a prayer. Then I have to catch myself and remember that yeah, that's not going to help.

People will tell you that humans always and only ever do what brings them pleasure.

Actually, Paul Dolan's book "Happiness by Design" offers a better theory: that humans are motivated by two broad classes of feelings that we can dub "pleasure" and "purpose", and that both are required for happiness. In practice, of course, each of these broad classes contains many, many, sub-categories of emotion.

In general, human beings are easier to understand if you don't try to treat them as utility maximizers. We don't have only one stamp counter. (Or rather, we don't have only one future-stamp-count-predictor, which is a good and correct point in your article. That is, that humans try to steer towards desirable states. I'm just pointing out that "desirable" includes a variety of metrics, many of which are better described as "purposeful" rather than pleasurable.)

More generally, a gun can be used to disable Harry in all sorts of not-necessarily-fatal ways, something Voldemort cannot do using magic.

With that said, Voldemort is also surrounded by the bodies of Harry's unconscious friends, so it's not like he urgently needs extra leverage.