Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Understanding it and applying it are two different things, in the same way that knowing about a bias doesn't stop you from exhibiting it.
People tend to obsess over things that "shouldn't have" happened -- a mistake they made, an embarrassing situation, something infuriating that somebody else did, or some impending but inevitable life change. They fret and scheme and worry and just can't seem to get it out of their mind, even if they want to.
This behavior is generally caused by the alief that the thing "should not" have happened that way, or that the upcoming thing should not happen, or that they "should have done better", or some other "should" belief. Byron Katie's book is about a method of surfacing and questioning these aliefs, so as to stop fretting over what can't be changed, thus to focus on what can. As Quirrelmort put it:
While Byron Katie and Quirrelmort would disagree on quite a few things, this is one thing they have in common.
(Interestingly, her book "I need your love; is that true?" is very Quirrelmortish in the sense of highlighting how much people's seeming goodness or altruism is driven by self-centeredness -- but it's a book about how to stop doing that yourself, not using other people's actions as a way to justify doing more of it. Indeed, it's about being able to have compassion for the misguided or self-centered actions of others, not contempt ala Quirrelmort. Hm. Actually, the more I think about it, the more she seems like a true opposite to Quirrelmort, in a way that neither Harry nor Dumbledore are. If she were in-world, she'd be sort of like a non-naive McGonagall crossed with a Dumbledore who could not be made to despair or blinded by grief or regret or vengeance.)