On LessWrong, or on blogs by LWers, advice has been given on how to become bisexual, or polyamorous.
However, there is no advice on LessWrong for how to stop liking something. Yet there are many stories of people having great difficulty giving up such things as video games and internet distractions. It seems to be easier to acquire a taste than to relinquish it.
All the advice on resisting video games and the like (internet blockers, social support) has been on using tricks of one sort or another to restrict the act, not the desire. Even when experimenting with specific deeds, it is easier to try something in spite of aversion than to forego it in spite of attraction.
Are there effective methods of ceasing to enjoy some activity, or of refraining from enjoyable things? What presently enjoyable activities would you use them on?
All the advice on resisting video games and the like (internet blockers, social support) has been on using tricks of one sort or another to restrict the act, not the desire.
Some advice is about substitution, i.e. you identify the emotional need driving a stubborn behavior, and find a more approved behavior than satisfies the same need.
Interesting concept. I read about something similar in the book Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing The New Domesticity—the author recounts that when working at a dead-end job with no challenge her impulse for creativity got shunted into “DIY” projects of questionable value like stenciling pictures of frogs onto her microwave, and that once she got into a job that stretched her abilities the desire for “DIY” evaporated.
For me, becoming able to like a new thing seems like a much more positive change than stopping liking an old thing. The latter—even if it would be beneficial overall—feels like an impairment, a harm.
If others feel the same way—I don’t know whether they do—then they would be less inclined to offer advice on how to impair yourself than on how to enlarge your range of pleasures. And if others are expected to feel the same way, advice-givers might refrain from offering advice that would be perceived as “how to impair yourself”.
(A perfectly rational agent would scarcely ever want to lose the ability to like something, since that would always lower their utility. The exceptions would be game-theory-ish ones where being known not to like something would help others not fear that they’d seize it. Of course, we are very far from being perfectly rational agents and for many of us it might well be beneficial overall to lose the ability to enjoy clickbait articles or sugary desserts or riding a motorcycle at 100mph.)
A perfectly rational agent would scarcely ever want to lose the ability to like something, since that would always lower their utility.
What is a perfectly rational self-modifying agent? I don’t think anyone has an answer to that, although surely it is something that MIRI studies. The same argument that proves that it is never rational to cease liking something, proves that it must always be rational to acquire a liking for anything. You end up with wireheading.
This comment made me wonder if trigger warnings might have a place on Less Wrong. Probably not, because I suspect that the utility gains would not be worth the controversy of trying to change norms in that direction.
This seems if anything like an argument against it: it isn’t considered a commonly triggering issue. This shows one of the fundamental problems with trigger warnings: it is unclear and often highly subjective what should get such a warning.
I agree that “unclear and often highly subjective” are downsides to categories of content that warrant trigger warnings, but this exchange (below) would pretty clearly warrant a trigger warning for eating disorders if it was on a site that used trigger warnings.
Are there effective methods of ceasing to enjoy some activity, or of refraining from enjoyable things?
For food items you can create distaste by mixing the food item with something that makes you throw up.
But if anything that actually shows how subjective this is and how much of an issue it is. It is one thing to say that trigger warnings should apply to issues that may involve PTSD. It is quite another thing to suggest that they should involve mentions of every possible mental health issue.
Content warnings/notes for threads might be worth it (and not that hard to do, seeing as threads already support tags), but doing so for individual comments would be mostly annoying.
On LessWrong, or on blogs by LWers, advice has been given on how to become bisexual, or polyamorous.
That seems like bad advice. Your preferences are what they are. “Giving advice on how to become bisexual, or polyamorous” seems just as bad as “giving advice on how to become heterosexual, or monogamous.”
However, there is no advice on LessWrong for how to stop liking something… Are there effective methods of ceasing to enjoy some activity, or of refraining from enjoyable things? What presently enjoyable activities would you use them on?
This does seem like an issue that needs discussion however. I took the hard route myself, but maybe my story is interested. Perhaps later when I have time I can be proded to give an overview of how I transformed my preferences over the last 15 years.
Eh, it’s not that it has a 100% failure rate, the main issue is that it very frequently has utterly catastrophic mental health consequences.
Trying to change your sexuality is dangerous. As in “has a significant chance of killing you”.
There are reasons the lbgt community is so down on attempts at curing the gay—“suicides and mental breakdowns”.
I’m not aware of any statistics on the results of people trying to become gay, but a: I would be surprised if enough people have tried this to make a valid sample. and b: I do not recommend the experiment for obvious reasons of safety.
There are safe..ish. ways to turn sexuality off entirely, but just being gay is not generally enough for people to want to volunteer for those.
I’ve met enough people who reported their sexuality changing over time that I wouldn’t be shocked if tommorow a pharma announced an novel sideeffect / off-label use for the latest anti-depressant of resetting your sexuality to “Healthy adult humans” but the history of attempts at deliberate intervention in this field is horrifying.
There are reasons the lbgt community is so down on attempts at curing the gay—“suicides and mental breakdowns”.
As opposed to, you know, ordinary tribal feelings against defection. There are elements in the deaf community that oppose attempts to cure deafness as well.
Those too, but the negative impact and severe paucity of efficiency are quite real enough. About the only people still trying this today are religiously motivated quacks, with predictably depressing results, but even the historical attempts by people honestly trying to help as opposed to following the mandates of their imaginary friends in the sky had very bad results.
Sometimes sexuality shifts over time. We have nothing even resembling a clue why, or how to do that deliberately.
If you tell me you know people conversion therapy worked for, I will not doubt you. People given chalk tablets for treatment routinely get better from very fatal diseases in double blind studies Not often, but it happens.
This does not mean chalk tablets are a panacea. Or, you know, medicine at all.
People have been trying to “cure” homosexuality since times when attitudes to homosexuality were very different from what they are now. If it’s curable then there should (at least) be credible studies from earlier years saying so. Are there?
(Robert Spitzer published a study as recently as 2001 claiming to find evidence that some homosexual people can become heterosexual, so evidently it was possible to dare to do that then. He has since publicly changed his mind, which of course can be interpreted in different ways.)
That seems like bad advice. Your preferences are what they are. “Giving advice on how to become bisexual, or polyamorous” seems just as bad as “giving advice on how to become heterosexual, or monogamous.”
Why? That might make sense if a preference is part of a terminal value. But if it isn’t this may not be that different than advice on say how to enjoy eating healthy foods (in my own case the answer for spinach was eat it frequently with tasty cheese). For that matter, there might well be circumstances where it would make sense to try to adjust one’s preferences to becoming closer to monogamous (say one is dating someone who is strongly monogamous).
Preferences change: sexual development is an obvious example. Preferences can be changed: “cultivating a taste” is a thing. Although in line with my original question, the only stock phrase I can think of that comes close to the opposite of “cultivating a taste” is “overcoming temptation”. A taste, once acquired, is seen as something that can only be suppressed by a continuing effort, never removed.
An alternative approach might be described as “enlightening one’s self-interest”: learning to perceive the harm of something clearly enough that one is no longer inclined to indulge it.
That seems like bad advice. Your preferences are what they are. “Giving advice on how to become bisexual, or polyamorous” seems just as bad as “giving advice on how to become heterosexual, or monogamous.”
Preferences can be quite complex.
Most people do like the idea of having sex with multiple people but might dislike the idea that there partner has sex with multiple people at the start.
Being polyarmous needs specific skills such as dealing with jealousy that aren’t needed to the same extend by people who aren’t poly.
Some people are in love with a person who”s poly a person might want to become poly themselves to be in that relationship.
This post seems like a horny teen trying to stop watching porn. Why stop watching porn? Remember to include the middle. Why is the solution that you try new things and play the occasional video game sounds so, uh, what’d-you-call-it, Not-a-solution?
Just write a bunch of stuff that comes into your head and you’ll sooner than later have way too much stuff.
On LessWrong, or on blogs by LWers, advice has been given on how to become bisexual, or polyamorous.
However, there is no advice on LessWrong for how to stop liking something. Yet there are many stories of people having great difficulty giving up such things as video games and internet distractions. It seems to be easier to acquire a taste than to relinquish it.
All the advice on resisting video games and the like (internet blockers, social support) has been on using tricks of one sort or another to restrict the act, not the desire. Even when experimenting with specific deeds, it is easier to try something in spite of aversion than to forego it in spite of attraction.
Are there effective methods of ceasing to enjoy some activity, or of refraining from enjoyable things? What presently enjoyable activities would you use them on?
Some advice is about substitution, i.e. you identify the emotional need driving a stubborn behavior, and find a more approved behavior than satisfies the same need.
Interesting concept. I read about something similar in the book Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing The New Domesticity—the author recounts that when working at a dead-end job with no challenge her impulse for creativity got shunted into “DIY” projects of questionable value like stenciling pictures of frogs onto her microwave, and that once she got into a job that stretched her abilities the desire for “DIY” evaporated.
For me, becoming able to like a new thing seems like a much more positive change than stopping liking an old thing. The latter—even if it would be beneficial overall—feels like an impairment, a harm.
If others feel the same way—I don’t know whether they do—then they would be less inclined to offer advice on how to impair yourself than on how to enlarge your range of pleasures. And if others are expected to feel the same way, advice-givers might refrain from offering advice that would be perceived as “how to impair yourself”.
(A perfectly rational agent would scarcely ever want to lose the ability to like something, since that would always lower their utility. The exceptions would be game-theory-ish ones where being known not to like something would help others not fear that they’d seize it. Of course, we are very far from being perfectly rational agents and for many of us it might well be beneficial overall to lose the ability to enjoy clickbait articles or sugary desserts or riding a motorcycle at 100mph.)
I concur with gjm.
The difference between “I like X” and “I am addicted to X” might be relevant here.
What is a perfectly rational self-modifying agent? I don’t think anyone has an answer to that, although surely it is something that MIRI studies. The same argument that proves that it is never rational to cease liking something, proves that it must always be rational to acquire a liking for anything. You end up with wireheading.
For food items you can create distaste by mixing the food item with something that makes you throw up.
Or just start eating Soylent all day long. And have no other food at home. For a month.
It is easier to avoid eating something, if you simply do not have it at home. And if you live on Soylent, you don’t even go to food shops.
This may be generalizing from one example, but it works for me. When I am on Soylent, my cravings for other food just somehow disappear.
This comment made me wonder if trigger warnings might have a place on Less Wrong. Probably not, because I suspect that the utility gains would not be worth the controversy of trying to change norms in that direction.
This seems if anything like an argument against it: it isn’t considered a commonly triggering issue. This shows one of the fundamental problems with trigger warnings: it is unclear and often highly subjective what should get such a warning.
I agree that “unclear and often highly subjective” are downsides to categories of content that warrant trigger warnings, but this exchange (below) would pretty clearly warrant a trigger warning for eating disorders if it was on a site that used trigger warnings.
But if anything that actually shows how subjective this is and how much of an issue it is. It is one thing to say that trigger warnings should apply to issues that may involve PTSD. It is quite another thing to suggest that they should involve mentions of every possible mental health issue.
Did the comment trigger you in a bad way?
No, my eating disorder hasn’t been an active problem for ~8 years. Thank you for your concern.
Content warnings/notes for threads might be worth it (and not that hard to do, seeing as threads already support tags), but doing so for individual comments would be mostly annoying.
Cue Extinction
http://www.asitrainingonline.com/cue-extinction/
That seems like bad advice. Your preferences are what they are. “Giving advice on how to become bisexual, or polyamorous” seems just as bad as “giving advice on how to become heterosexual, or monogamous.”
This does seem like an issue that needs discussion however. I took the hard route myself, but maybe my story is interested. Perhaps later when I have time I can be proded to give an overview of how I transformed my preferences over the last 15 years.
What’s wrong with “giving advice on how to become heterosexual, or monogamous” to someone who wants to become heterosexual or monogamous?
Nothing if the advice worked, but it doesn’t.
It may not always work, or even usually, but it worked for someone I know.
Eh, it’s not that it has a 100% failure rate, the main issue is that it very frequently has utterly catastrophic mental health consequences. Trying to change your sexuality is dangerous. As in “has a significant chance of killing you”.
There are reasons the lbgt community is so down on attempts at curing the gay—“suicides and mental breakdowns”.
I’m not aware of any statistics on the results of people trying to become gay, but a: I would be surprised if enough people have tried this to make a valid sample. and b: I do not recommend the experiment for obvious reasons of safety.
There are safe..ish. ways to turn sexuality off entirely, but just being gay is not generally enough for people to want to volunteer for those.
I’ve met enough people who reported their sexuality changing over time that I wouldn’t be shocked if tommorow a pharma announced an novel sideeffect / off-label use for the latest anti-depressant of resetting your sexuality to “Healthy adult humans” but the history of attempts at deliberate intervention in this field is horrifying.
As opposed to, you know, ordinary tribal feelings against defection. There are elements in the deaf community that oppose attempts to cure deafness as well.
Those too, but the negative impact and severe paucity of efficiency are quite real enough. About the only people still trying this today are religiously motivated quacks, with predictably depressing results, but even the historical attempts by people honestly trying to help as opposed to following the mandates of their imaginary friends in the sky had very bad results. Sometimes sexuality shifts over time. We have nothing even resembling a clue why, or how to do that deliberately.
If you tell me you know people conversion therapy worked for, I will not doubt you. People given chalk tablets for treatment routinely get better from very fatal diseases in double blind studies Not often, but it happens.
This does not mean chalk tablets are a panacea. Or, you know, medicine at all.
Details? What exactly did they do, and how large was the change? How long ago was it?
Or rather anyone who claims it does is branded an “evil homophobe” thus no one would dare publish a stady claiming it does.
People have been trying to “cure” homosexuality since times when attitudes to homosexuality were very different from what they are now. If it’s curable then there should (at least) be credible studies from earlier years saying so. Are there?
(Robert Spitzer published a study as recently as 2001 claiming to find evidence that some homosexual people can become heterosexual, so evidently it was possible to dare to do that then. He has since publicly changed his mind, which of course can be interpreted in different ways.)
Why? That might make sense if a preference is part of a terminal value. But if it isn’t this may not be that different than advice on say how to enjoy eating healthy foods (in my own case the answer for spinach was eat it frequently with tasty cheese). For that matter, there might well be circumstances where it would make sense to try to adjust one’s preferences to becoming closer to monogamous (say one is dating someone who is strongly monogamous).
Preferences change: sexual development is an obvious example. Preferences can be changed: “cultivating a taste” is a thing. Although in line with my original question, the only stock phrase I can think of that comes close to the opposite of “cultivating a taste” is “overcoming temptation”. A taste, once acquired, is seen as something that can only be suppressed by a continuing effort, never removed.
An alternative approach might be described as “enlightening one’s self-interest”: learning to perceive the harm of something clearly enough that one is no longer inclined to indulge it.
Preferences can be quite complex.
Most people do like the idea of having sex with multiple people but might dislike the idea that there partner has sex with multiple people at the start. Being polyarmous needs specific skills such as dealing with jealousy that aren’t needed to the same extend by people who aren’t poly.
Some people are in love with a person who”s poly a person might want to become poly themselves to be in that relationship.
This post seems like a horny teen trying to stop watching porn. Why stop watching porn? Remember to include the middle. Why is the solution that you try new things and play the occasional video game sounds so, uh, what’d-you-call-it, Not-a-solution?
Just write a bunch of stuff that comes into your head and you’ll sooner than later have way too much stuff.