Can someone tell me if I understand this correctly : He is saying that we must be clear before hand what constitutes evidence for and what constitutes evidence against and what doesn't constitute evidence either way?
Because in his examples it seems that what is being changed is what counts as evidence. It seems that no matter what transpires (in the witch trials for example) it is counted as evidence for. This is not the same as changing the hypothesis to fit the facts. The hypothesis was always 'she's a witch'. Then the evidence is interpreted as supportive of the hypothesis no matter what.
He's a jaded cynic. He's also the most insightful and intelligent PUA writing in the blogosphere. But don't forget how cynical he is.
I find it can be really irritating to try to make any kind of point about anything with certain people. To some there is no point in talking other than to yuk it up. I guess you just have to know your audience.
SBNation.com blogs are like that. The main people write the main blog posts but anyone can post 'fanshots' (really short posts) or 'fanposts' (longer posts) and if the blog bosses think a fanpost is really good they can move it to the main section.
I like this :
A hostile environment can increase the pain, which makes the fear reaction stronger. You get 1 unit of pain from the rejection, and perhaps 10 units of pain from people who keep mocking you for weeks. So your memory associates the event with 11 units of pain, instead of 1. This alone is enough to explain why the situation is worse.
I am suggesting that it may work a lot like this but a little bit differently. The main difference is that I'm suggesting that there is something uniquely painful and harmful about, not the mocking that follows...
Have you tried it yet?
I agree. But what is causing the fear? By that I mean precisely how does this fear work? I'm not sure habit is the correct word. I think it's a learned emotional response that has become automatic. So can it be unlearned? My supposition is that expressing the pain from the original rejection in an environment where the full expression of that pain can run it's natural course, will extinguish the fear. The problem would be solved. This is a big difference from a habit. Its being driven by an automatic emotional response that was acquired by a pai...
It just occurred to me in the other thread that he may have meant it more in the photographic sense of focusing a lens on an image until it becomes clear rather than in the conventional sense of concentrating.
The purpose is to elucidate the feeling in more detail. Our feelings become automatic and don't require conscious appraisal. Often, a clear conscious appreciation of exactly what our feelings are, doesn't exist. The feeling can be there but there may not be a conscious understanding of exactly what it is and what it is for.
There is an assumption implied by this whole post that, at least sometimes, our feelings are not appropriate to the situation. Why would I want to get rid of an emotional reaction that is entirely appropriate? If it is serving...
No, that's it too. You keep looking for words to decribe it and check whether they fit. In another book you are supposed to ask the feeling (which to me is goofy) what its about and see what comes. The release of tension happens when you get the description to match the feeling.
I've done a very little bit of insight meditation and a fair amount of focusing and they are very similar. I'd say the biggest differences are 1) focusing is not as wide open. You are trying to 'work on' some troublesome feeling and 2) while you do stay detached somewhat from the feeling and are an observer, you don't just let if float away. You have an interest in it and you stay with it. You are supposed to ask it ( I hate that anthropomorphizing of it but that's what they say) what it wants and stuff like that until you get a 'shift' where you have a sort of epiphany which is marked by an unmistakable release of tension. It really does feel an awful lot like mindfulness meditation.
I'm considering therapy. I was in therapy for several years many years ago. Not primal therapy. I tried doing that on my own, with some transient success as I said in the post. The more conventional therapy had its moments too but ultimately it was a disappointment. I was still insecure after several years. But these new feeling-centered experiential therapies have become more and more popular the last few years. They've actually only come onto my radar in the last four months. I had pretty much given up on the project but was encouraged again when...
I agree. I am 'mis-calibrated' to put it one way. I'm sure these reactions were, at one time, adaptive. Considering your examples the interesting phenomenon is that they can persist long after they have ceased to be adaptive. But it seems that a particular type of experience can eradicate them. A logical argument that they are no longer adaptive, convincing as it may be doesn't seem sufficient to accomplish the feat. I agree that the learned emotional reactions that are sapping the joy from life were most likely adaptive at one point. But they don't...
There may be some descriptions on Art Janov's blog:
http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/
I just want to reiterate that I don't find his theory very coherent or well stated. Its just that, again, I have a strong intuitive sense that we have an evolutionarily derived capacity to heal from the types of experiences or 'primals' that he tries to elicit.So please don't come back and tell me how goofy his theory is - I know it already. I think you have to read him generously.
By insecurity I just mean it in the everyday sense of someone worrying a lot about how other people feel towards them and being afraid of being rejected, excluded, ostracized etc.. I suppose it was not quite correct to say that inhibition of feelings of disappointment/loss is what insecurity is. I think its more that's what causes someone to be insecure. My thinking on this is that if someone is not afraid to feel disappointment or loss they won't be insecure. Let me distinguish between loss itself and the feelings that result from it. Loss is alwa...
I like those techniques and I've used variations of them myself in the past. They can definitely make the worry vanish if you hit the right note. I'm really after something more though. I've got this idea that the worries in the first place are the result of learned automatic emotional responses that can be unlearned. I'm not trying to force this idea on anyone but the desire to discuss this possibility is what motivated this post. If a particular worry is the result of a learned automatic emotional response and that response can be unlearned then they won't have to do any of those things. Not that those aren't good techniqes - they are.
I think the question is why someone is a perfectionist in the first place. I think the answer is that the perfectionist is afraid to be less than perfect because he is already afraid that he won't be accepted. And I think that he is afraid that he won't be accepted because he has been rejected in the past and never really 'got over it'. What exactly it means to 'get over it' needs to be expanded but I do think we have an innate process for 'getting over it'.
I'm actually not a big fan of the positive psychology movement which takes the emphasis off of mental illness and pathology and places it on psychological health and flourishing. I think they mostly had it right in the first place. I think that feeling good is mostly about not feeling bad.
I suspect the difference between security and insecurity is basically expected value of acting-
I suppose some calculation like this is going on unconsciously but I think a large part of figuring the expected value is quick comparisons of the current situation to pas...
When one's insecurity centers around self-esteem / self-image, the defense mechanism is to try to avoid admitting certain things about yourself to yourself which might contradict a proud self-image. It's a form of self-deception, similar to belief in belief
This may be correct. However my supposition is that it keeps one from resolving the problem. It keeps one from potentially unlearning the emotional response. It may be, and I'm hypothesizing here, that it takes a fully uninhibited experience of the fear to unlearn it. That is what I'm suggesting. ...
I'm not a fan of congitive therapy. I tried it for a while and it worked ok at times but I believe that it is impractical in the long run. Its using your cognitive mind to 'fight' against conditioned emotional responses. It can work as long as you spend a lot of cognitive effort on the cause. Eventually I grew tired of the effort and it wasn't really all that effective. My goal is to discover how to decondition the learned emotional responses.
Yes. Activation is the key. The synapses that code the learned emotional responses have a period after which they have been activated during which they can be changed. If no disconfirming or contradictory experience takes place they will be re-consolidated. But if a disconfirm experience takes place in that window they will not. That is the theory and there is some good animal research to support it.
Does that look right? There is no font selection in the editor. I just had to remove it completely and paste it in again from my text editor. The editor is not exactly commercial word-processor level.
No problem. I have to figure it out 1st though. Give me a few minutes.
I agree it is an interesting result but it isn't really the way the study has been portrayed. The takeaway, before hearing about this, was that anyone with power will start to abuse it, on their own, if just left to their own devices. But this is not, it now seems, what really happened in the Zimbardo prison guard experiments. So just like with the Milgram shock experiments, important information was missing causing the results to imply a more negative picture of human nature.
I think that conveying more information, such as with the statement "Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement" subtly suggests a greater familiarity with or knowledge of the subject (in this case Linda) and so seems more authoritative. I believe that is what is happening here. If you included even more information it would create that impression even more strongly. For example "Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement and she is dating Fred and lives near the train station and her phone number is ...
In an episode of the Freakonomics podcast they talked about similar skepticism about Phillip Zimbardo's Stanford prison guard experiments. The 'guards' felt subtly encouraged to become abusive to the 'prisoners'.
Pratchett and Gaiman co-authored a book called 'Good Omens'. I highly recommend it.
I follow sabermetrics and its children. I was really into Bill James back in the day and still had a subscription to BaseballProspectus.com (this post is half-drunk so excuse typos please). My 2 favorie sports are hockey and baseball. Baseball analytics made its biggest advances years ago - now it seems like they are just refining but hockey is in the initial stages. I've been into possession stats for hockey more than any baseball stats for the past couple of years although I still wander on to baseballprospectus and fangraphs and read some of the pos...
That's an interesting thought. Maybe I do think that it is better to make everyone a little bit worse off materially to make the distribution more equal. I don't think this is pathological. In somewhat of a paradox what matters most to absolute well-being is our relative material wealth not our absolute wealth. Now, of course, when looked at as a ranking nothing can be done about the fact that some will have more wealth than others. Nothing short of trying to make everyone equal (and no one wants that). But the ranking is not the only thing that matt...
I was just about to say almost the same thing but I decided I'd check the other replies to see if anyone else had already said it. Just to emphasize and agree with you - I think most people imagine the 1st scenario when they are answering these questions. Its just too hard for people to imagine 40yr olds that are like 30yr olds, 60yr olds that are like 45yr olds, 80yr olds that are like 60yr olds etc... That is not what I think they are imagining when they are answering.
Hi. I'm a 42yr old male, from the US and I've been aware of LessWrong for a few years now, stumbling across links to posts on LessWrong here and there in my web surfing travels. I've always been more or less a rationalist. I've been a self-identified atheist since high school. I've been a fan of Daniel Dennett for many years. I read 'Consciousness Explained' when it first came out many years ago and I've kept up reading interesting philosophy and science books since then. I've always enjoyed books that made sense out of previously mysterious phenom...
This post reminds me of ADHD. Here is a quote from a 2009 Washington Post article :
According to the theory, the trouble is a lack of motivation as well as a deficit of attention: People with the disorder can't generate the same degree of enthusiasm as other people for activities they don't automatically find appealing.
ADHD has long been assumed to have something to do with low dopamine. So perhaps something to raise dopamine levels would be helpful. Some people claim that taking L-tyrosine, a dopamine precursor, can raise dopamine levels and help people pay attention to things that would otherwise not hold their attention.
I've never attempted a commitment contract but I don't really care for them in principle. I don't really want to find a way to force myself to do things that I don't want to do. What I really want much more than that is to figure out how to become comfortable doing the things that I'm not comfortable doing.
To take your example, if you are uncomfortable socially it is because you have an underlying belief that these social situations could be very harmful or painful for you. That belief is most likely due to stuff that really did happen to you. You pro...
I'm a proponent of introspection. That's how you figure out what is really going on with yourself. Psychotherapy may be helpful in your case as you may need someone to call your attention to self-deception. We are all guilty of it so dont take that as a criticism. I'm not sure exactly why your introspection is not bearing any fruit. If you are brave and honest with yourself but also forgiving and understanding with yourself your introspection should lead to greater self-understanding and a clear picture of where you are and how you got there. I hope that helps.
I think maybe I'd prefer to maximize my personal satisfaction in my charitable efforts. The knowledge that I may do more good some other way won't substitute for the charitable action that will leave me feeling most satisfied based on my normal human emotions, irrational though they may be.
I agree, I think a good writer has a sense when a particular part of his argument is tricky or more difficult to grasp so he may add additional explanations or examples even though he has already made the point.
Personally I usually prefer your style, mostly, I think, because I am impatient. I want to know what the writer's point is right away and then I like to get right into his supporting arguments so I can determine whether he's made the case well enough to convince me. There are other times, when I'm more more relaxed and have more time when I may enjoy his style but they are the exception.
Often in psychotherapy a person's goal is to resolve a conflict between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind in favor of the conscious mind. You may hear it called an irrational unconscious belief. Someone may unconsciously feel unworthy of respect and acceptance but they consciously believe that this is irrational. What is interesting is that psychotherapy can work exactly as desired if the logic of the unconscious belief can be made fully conscious. It will not happen through mere deduction however. It has to be done by consciously accepting... (read more)