Great comment, and I will have to think more about this. Your examples do seem to support the utility of self-identity-based motivation.
I think maybe my statement "you can’t lie to yourself if you know it’s a lie" is forcing a frame where self-talk is either a genuine attempt at truth, or a lie. But with "this is easy for me because I’m a fighter" and similar statements, it seems they can be received by the mind in a different way - more like as self-fulfilling prophecy.
I guess it's an open question for me then, where to use that kind of self-talk. On one end is the danger of becoming miserable in pursuit of an identity that was actually kind of arbitrary, and on the other end you miss out on maybe the most powerful kind of motivation.
This method is interesting to me and I'd like to get into it someday. Personally I keep finding that whenever I decline to write something down, that one thing will come back to bite me a few days later (because I'd forgotten it). Do you find that you're able to mentally keep track of things better than before, even if they're just vaguely in the back of your mind?
Why pay mind to what's correlated with being right, when you have the option of just seeing who's right?
I'm arguing that being right is the same as "holding greater predictive power", so any conversation that's not geared toward "what's the difference in our predictions?" is not about being right, but rather about something else, like "Do I fit the profile of someone who would be right" / "Am I generally intelligent" / "Am I arguing in good faith" etc.
These things are indeed correlated with being right, but aren't you risking Goodharting? What does it really mean to "be right" about things? If you're native to LessWrong you'll probably answer something like, "to accurately anticipate future sensory experiences". Isn't that all you need? Find an opportunity for you and your friend to predict measurably different futures, then see who wins. All the rest is distraction.
And if you predict all the same things, then you have no real disagreement, just semantic differences
Fun to do with names. Patrick - English version of a Latin name, Patricius, which means "noble", referring to the Roman nobility, which was originally composed of the paterfamiliae, the heads of large families. From pater (father), which is Latin but goes back to proto-indo-european. From proto-indo-european pah which means "to protect/shepherd"
You're right, I'm assuming the reader belongs to a "real" tribe ie red or blue . I should've tweaked it for the LW crosspost