Psychologists someone’s hand out a worksheet with the names of cognitive distortions. Ie: mentalising. It is usually encumbrance upon psychiatric patients to pick up on trends for these distortions themselves from what their psychologists tells them.
For instance, my psychologists might intuit that something is paranoid while I don’t. That certainly kills that one belief after a bit of reflection, but my mind remains generally predisposed to paranoid thinking in the next moments of conscious ideation too. They will never catch up with me that way.
I went to library bathroom a few minutes ago. It’s night, and someone just happened to be there. A fairly Innocuous thought persisted in my imagination that the person who happened to already be there might think I was there to trouble him, since it seemed unlikely that two people should be in the bathroom at the same time at this time of night. A psychologist would usually point out that that’s not strictly the case, and challenging assumptions is the best way of addressing these beliefs as far as they and we’ve known since Socrates at least.
But the thought only become apparent as aberrant when I considered, upon privellaging the hypothesis that my thoughts are biased towards paranoia from past experience, after considering the opposite of my thought. If I had entered the bathroom before him, it would seem like he was falling me, in my mind, or that I was planning for his arrival. Only this last thought, that someone might actually wait for someone stood out as aberrant and odd at the time. But it is very similar in notion to the others and they have since till now gradually becoming notions I consider highly unlikely.
I reckon there’s a rationality technique I could generalise from this. Or I hope.
Identifying cognitive distortions
Psychologists someone’s hand out a worksheet with the names of cognitive distortions. Ie: mentalising. It is usually encumbrance upon psychiatric patients to pick up on trends for these distortions themselves from what their psychologists tells them.
For instance, my psychologists might intuit that something is paranoid while I don’t. That certainly kills that one belief after a bit of reflection, but my mind remains generally predisposed to paranoid thinking in the next moments of conscious ideation too. They will never catch up with me that way.
I went to library bathroom a few minutes ago. It’s night, and someone just happened to be there. A fairly Innocuous thought persisted in my imagination that the person who happened to already be there might think I was there to trouble him, since it seemed unlikely that two people should be in the bathroom at the same time at this time of night. A psychologist would usually point out that that’s not strictly the case, and challenging assumptions is the best way of addressing these beliefs as far as they and we’ve known since Socrates at least.
But the thought only become apparent as aberrant when I considered, upon privellaging the hypothesis that my thoughts are biased towards paranoia from past experience, after considering the opposite of my thought. If I had entered the bathroom before him, it would seem like he was falling me, in my mind, or that I was planning for his arrival. Only this last thought, that someone might actually wait for someone stood out as aberrant and odd at the time. But it is very similar in notion to the others and they have since till now gradually becoming notions I consider highly unlikely.
I reckon there’s a rationality technique I could generalise from this. Or I hope.