I was somewhat disappointed to find a lack of Magic: the Gathering players on LessWrong when I asked about it in the off-topic thread. You see, competitive Magic is one of the best, most demanding rationality battlefields that I know about. Furthermore, Magic is discussed extensively on the Internet, and many articles in which people try to explain how to become a better Magic player are, essentially, describing how to become more rational: how to better learn from experience, make judgments from noisy data, and (yes) overcome biases that interfere with one's ability to make better decisions.
Because people here don't play Magic, I can't simply link to those articles and say, "Here. Go read." I have to put everything into context, because Magic jargon has become its own language, distinct from English. Think I'm kidding? I was able to follow match coverage written in French using nothing but my knowledge of Magic-ese and what I remembered from my high school Spanish classes. Instead of simply linking, in order to give you the full effect, I'd have to undertake a project equivalent to translating a work in a foreign language.
So it is with great trepidation that I give you, untranslated, one of the "classics" of Magic literature.
Stuck In The Middle With Bruce by John F. Rizzo.
Now, John "Friggin'" Rizzo isn't one of the great Magic players. Far from it. He is, however, one of the great Magic writers, to the extent that the adjective "great" can be applied to someone who writes about Magic. His bizarre stream-of-consciousness writing style, personal stories, and strongly held opinions have made him a legend in the Magic community. "Stuck in the Middle with Bruce" is his most famous work, as incomprehensible as it may be to those who don't speak our language (and even to those that do).
So, why am I choosing to direct you to this particular piece of writing? Well, although Rizzo doesn't know much about winning, he knows an awful lot about what causes people to lose, and that's the topic of this particular piece - people's need to lose.
Does Bruce whisper into your ear, too?
Enjoyment isn't the right word, I don't think. My wife and I both described the "Bruce effect" sensation as being more like a sense of recognition or rightness -- like confirmation of something that you expected, something that's just the way the world works. That, upon successfully losing, it's like, "yep, this is where I'm supposed to be". Not enjoyment... more like satisfaction... though that's still too strong. Closure, maybe? Relief? It's a brief and subtle reward, not a conscious pleasure.
Anosognosia. Don't speculate, investigate -- observe the automatic thoughts in action, rather than adding voluntary thoughts on top of them.
Be careful of how you do that... dispassionate separation is okay, rejection is not. When people actively reject parts of themselves ("that's not me; I would never do that"), they make it more difficult to observe or change the actual motivation involved. ("After all, I would never do that... therefore it's irrational/bad/whatever.")
The way to remove something like this is to imagine what it's like when that part of you gets its wish, so you can get a glimpse of what the reward is. Then you imagine having that reward, and find out what, if any, reward is behind that... and so on, all the way to the root reward emotion, fully experienced in your body, and chain backwards through the same path by which you came, re-experiencing as though you already have the root reward... noticing the difference in available choices, i.e., "If I already have this feeling, do I really need to do X? Is it easier to get X?"
Once you've fully worked back to the starting point, you'll have changed the response options for the original behavior context -- i.e., the original response will no longer be compulsive.
This is a very short sketch of the technique; my shortest training on it takes over an hour and assumes at least a little prior mindhacking experience. (The technique itself can be applied in about 10-20 minutes after some practice, or with the assistance of an instructor/guide.)
There are a few subtleties, not the least of which is that you need to be able to actually pay attention to your autonomous responses without injecting conscious interpretation, speculation, or critique (e.g., "that's stupid, why would I want that?" etc.).
Heh. Reminds me of Big Mind Technique a little bit. Acknowledging and integrating all your voices, including the self-destructive ones.