“A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality”
Of course people will be drawn to this site: Who does not want to be rational? Skimming around the topics we see that people are concerned with how to make more money, calculating probabilities correctly and to formalise decision making processes in general.
Though there is one thing that bothers me. All skills that are discussed are related to abstract concepts, formal systems, math. Or in general things that are done more easily by people scoring high on g-heavy IQ tests. But there is a whole other area of intelligence: Emotional intelligence.
I seldom see discussions relating to emotional intelligence, be it techniques of CBT, empathy or social skills. Sure, there is some, but far less than there is of the other topic. How do I develop empathy? How do I measure EQ? Questions that are not answered by me reading LessWrong.
Off the top of my head, some good top-level posts touching on this area: How to understand people better (plus isaacschlueter’s particularly good comment) and Alicorn’s Luminosity sequence. Searching gives maybe a partial match for How to Be Happy, which cites some studies on training empathy and concludes that little is scientifically known about it—still, I think a top-level post on what is known would be welcome. Swimmer963′s post on emotional-regulation research is nice.
CFAR also places more explicit emphasis on emotional awareness, and that sometimes comes up in the group rationality diaries.
I think one reason that these topics are relatively neglected is that people seem to develop social skills and emotional awareness in pretty idiosyncratic ways. Still, LW seems to accept more personal accounts, like this post on a variation on the CBT technique of labeling. So it seems worthwhile to post things along those lines.
I agree, there is alot of talk about mathematics and formal systems. There is big love for Epistemic Rationality, and this is shown in the topics below. Some exceptions exist of course, a thread about what type of chair to buy stands out.
But I agree, Emotional Intelligence is a large set of skills underappreciated here, and I admit though I have some knowledge to share on the subject, I do not feel particularly qualified to write a post on it.
But I agree, Emotional Intelligence is a large set of skills underappreciated here, and I admit though I have some knowledge to share on the subject, I do not feel particularly qualified to write a post on it.
I wonder how many people we have that are knowledgeable on that subject. Maybe those who feel qualified to write such a post feel intimidated to do so. In that spirit I encourage you to start the tide and write about what you think is important.
I got a lot better at empathy from actively trying to understand people in contexts that 1) I wasn’t emotionally tied up in, 2) were challenging, and 3) had concrete success/failure criteria. It is a fun game for me.
The way I did this was to gather up a group of online contacts and when they’d have issues like “I want to be more confident with women” or “I want to not be afraid of speaking in class” I’d try to understand it well enough that I could say things that would dissolve the problem. If the problem went away I won. If it didn’t then I failed. No excuses.
I’ve gotten a lot better and it has been a pretty perspective changing thing. I’m quite glad I did it.
I don’t really see the point. On the first page of Discussion there currently “On Straw Vulcan Rationality” with is about the relation of rationality to emotions which has a lot to do with emotional intelligence.
There also “Applying reinforcement learning theory to reduce felt temporal distance”, “Beware Trivial Fears”, “How can I spend money to improve my life?” and “How to become a PC?”.
I think “On Straw Vulcan Rationality” illustrates the issue well. Here on Lesswrong there are people who actually think that Vulcans do things quite alright. In an environment where it’s not clear that one shouldn’t be a Vulcan it’s difficult to communicate about some aspects of emotional intelligence.
Recently asked for ways to find a career for himself but it it all in the third person instead of the first. My post suggesting that he should change to first person was voted down because it was to far out of LW culture.
If I’m around people who do a lot of coaching changing someone who speaks in third person about his own life to first person to increase his agentship is straightforward advice. It’s a basic.
I had experience where encouraging a person to make that change produced bodylanguage changes that are visible to me because the person is more associated with themselves. On the other hand I’m hardpressed if you ask me for peer reviewed research to back up my claim that it’s highly useful to use the first person when speaking about what one wants to do with his life.
Not being able to rely on basics makes it hard to talk when on Lesswrong we usually do talk about advanced stuff.
I see your comments are downvoted quite often. They sometimes contain some element of emotion or empathy. If it was possible to view down- and upvotes seperately you’d see that my post garnered quite some downvotes, meaning that there actually are quite a few people who either think that the topic is well covered by LW or it does not have a place on LW. I obviously disagree with both positions.
You say you don’t see the point of doing this here on LW, can you then point me to a site where they ‘start at the basics’? I refuse to give in to the meme “being a Vulcan is perfectly fine”.
You say you don’t see the point of doing this here on LW
No, in that case I wouldn’t write the comments that are downvoted. I do have a bunch of concepts in my mind that I can use to do stuff in daily life. But my understanding is not high enough at the moment to reach academic levels of scrutiny.
I do have a bunch of mental frameworks from different context that I use. My main framework at the moment is somato-psychosomatic. From that framework there nothing published in English. But even if you could read German or French and read the introductory book I doubt it would help you. The general experience is that people who don’t have in person experience with the method don’t get the book.
Books are usually limited in teaching emotional intelligence. I have heared that there are good self study books for cognitive behavior therapy but I don’t have personal experience with them.
Next I do recommend mediation. It builds awareness of your own state of mind.
I would recommend a teacher but if you just want to do it on your own I would recommend a meditation where you focus on something within your own body like your breath.
If you are a beginner I would recommend against meditating by focusing on an object that’s external to your body. As far as sitting position goes, sitting still in a chair does it’s job. For beginners I would recommend against laying down.
Taking different positions does have effects but if you think that meditation is about sitting in lotus position, you focus on the wrong thing.
Emotions are something that happens in your own body. People usually feel emotions as something that moves within their own body.
But you also need some cognitive categorization to have an emotions. Fear and anticipation are pretty similar on a physical level but have other attached meaning. The meaning makes us enjoy anticipation and not enjoy fear.
Both the meaning as well as the physical level are points of intervention where one create change.
If I personally have an emotion I don’t want to have I strip it of meaning and resolve it on the physical level. I think I do that through using qualia that I learned to be aware of while doing meditation.
When talking in person it’s possible to see body language changes to verify whether someone switching to being aware of his emotion. It’s on the other hand nearly impossible through this medium to get an idea of what qualia other people on lesswrong have at a particular moment in time.
“A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality”
Of course people will be drawn to this site: Who does not want to be rational? Skimming around the topics we see that people are concerned with how to make more money, calculating probabilities correctly and to formalise decision making processes in general.
Though there is one thing that bothers me. All skills that are discussed are related to abstract concepts, formal systems, math. Or in general things that are done more easily by people scoring high on g-heavy IQ tests. But there is a whole other area of intelligence: Emotional intelligence.
I seldom see discussions relating to emotional intelligence, be it techniques of CBT, empathy or social skills. Sure, there is some, but far less than there is of the other topic. How do I develop empathy? How do I measure EQ? Questions that are not answered by me reading LessWrong.
Off the top of my head, some good top-level posts touching on this area: How to understand people better (plus isaacschlueter’s particularly good comment) and Alicorn’s Luminosity sequence. Searching gives maybe a partial match for How to Be Happy, which cites some studies on training empathy and concludes that little is scientifically known about it—still, I think a top-level post on what is known would be welcome. Swimmer963′s post on emotional-regulation research is nice.
Mindfulness is something else that comes up pretty regularly. Meditation trains metacognition and Overcoming suffering are pretty good examples.
CFAR also places more explicit emphasis on emotional awareness, and that sometimes comes up in the group rationality diaries.
I think one reason that these topics are relatively neglected is that people seem to develop social skills and emotional awareness in pretty idiosyncratic ways. Still, LW seems to accept more personal accounts, like this post on a variation on the CBT technique of labeling. So it seems worthwhile to post things along those lines.
People for whom rationality is an applause light or a club with which to bash enemies, but who balk at actually applying it to themselves.
People who have been taught that rationality is evil.
Emotional Intelligence has no predictive value beyond IQ and the Big Five, so that’s a dead end. (citations 42-44 here).
But that whole topic is what Living Luminously is about, and tends to be a theme in most of Alicorn’s other posts.
I’m guessing you meant to link refs. 45-47; they look more relevant.
Those are also relevant, but I definitely meant 42-44, the sources cited for this chunk
I agree, there is alot of talk about mathematics and formal systems. There is big love for Epistemic Rationality, and this is shown in the topics below. Some exceptions exist of course, a thread about what type of chair to buy stands out.
But I agree, Emotional Intelligence is a large set of skills underappreciated here, and I admit though I have some knowledge to share on the subject, I do not feel particularly qualified to write a post on it.
I wonder how many people we have that are knowledgeable on that subject. Maybe those who feel qualified to write such a post feel intimidated to do so. In that spirit I encourage you to start the tide and write about what you think is important.
I got a lot better at empathy from actively trying to understand people in contexts that 1) I wasn’t emotionally tied up in, 2) were challenging, and 3) had concrete success/failure criteria. It is a fun game for me.
The way I did this was to gather up a group of online contacts and when they’d have issues like “I want to be more confident with women” or “I want to not be afraid of speaking in class” I’d try to understand it well enough that I could say things that would dissolve the problem. If the problem went away I won. If it didn’t then I failed. No excuses.
I’ve gotten a lot better and it has been a pretty perspective changing thing. I’m quite glad I did it.
I don’t really see the point. On the first page of Discussion there currently “On Straw Vulcan Rationality” with is about the relation of rationality to emotions which has a lot to do with emotional intelligence.
There also “Applying reinforcement learning theory to reduce felt temporal distance”, “Beware Trivial Fears”, “How can I spend money to improve my life?” and “How to become a PC?”.
I think “On Straw Vulcan Rationality” illustrates the issue well. Here on Lesswrong there are people who actually think that Vulcans do things quite alright. In an environment where it’s not clear that one shouldn’t be a Vulcan it’s difficult to communicate about some aspects of emotional intelligence.
Recently asked for ways to find a career for himself but it it all in the third person instead of the first. My post suggesting that he should change to first person was voted down because it was to far out of LW culture. If I’m around people who do a lot of coaching changing someone who speaks in third person about his own life to first person to increase his agentship is straightforward advice. It’s a basic.
I had experience where encouraging a person to make that change produced bodylanguage changes that are visible to me because the person is more associated with themselves. On the other hand I’m hardpressed if you ask me for peer reviewed research to back up my claim that it’s highly useful to use the first person when speaking about what one wants to do with his life.
Not being able to rely on basics makes it hard to talk when on Lesswrong we usually do talk about advanced stuff.
I see your comments are downvoted quite often. They sometimes contain some element of emotion or empathy. If it was possible to view down- and upvotes seperately you’d see that my post garnered quite some downvotes, meaning that there actually are quite a few people who either think that the topic is well covered by LW or it does not have a place on LW. I obviously disagree with both positions.
You say you don’t see the point of doing this here on LW, can you then point me to a site where they ‘start at the basics’? I refuse to give in to the meme “being a Vulcan is perfectly fine”.
No, in that case I wouldn’t write the comments that are downvoted. I do have a bunch of concepts in my mind that I can use to do stuff in daily life. But my understanding is not high enough at the moment to reach academic levels of scrutiny.
I do have a bunch of mental frameworks from different context that I use. My main framework at the moment is somato-psychosomatic. From that framework there nothing published in English. But even if you could read German or French and read the introductory book I doubt it would help you. The general experience is that people who don’t have in person experience with the method don’t get the book.
Books are usually limited in teaching emotional intelligence. I have heared that there are good self study books for cognitive behavior therapy but I don’t have personal experience with them.
Nonviolent Communication is a fairly widely known framework. I can recommend http://www.wikihow.com/Practice-Nonviolent-Communication as an article that looks to me straightforward to understand.
To understand what other people are saying Schulz von Thun provides a model that’s quite popular in German (we learned it even in school): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-sides_model
Next I do recommend mediation. It builds awareness of your own state of mind. I would recommend a teacher but if you just want to do it on your own I would recommend a meditation where you focus on something within your own body like your breath. If you are a beginner I would recommend against meditating by focusing on an object that’s external to your body. As far as sitting position goes, sitting still in a chair does it’s job. For beginners I would recommend against laying down.
Taking different positions does have effects but if you think that meditation is about sitting in lotus position, you focus on the wrong thing.
Emotions are something that happens in your own body. People usually feel emotions as something that moves within their own body.
But you also need some cognitive categorization to have an emotions. Fear and anticipation are pretty similar on a physical level but have other attached meaning. The meaning makes us enjoy anticipation and not enjoy fear. Both the meaning as well as the physical level are points of intervention where one create change.
If I personally have an emotion I don’t want to have I strip it of meaning and resolve it on the physical level. I think I do that through using qualia that I learned to be aware of while doing meditation. When talking in person it’s possible to see body language changes to verify whether someone switching to being aware of his emotion. It’s on the other hand nearly impossible through this medium to get an idea of what qualia other people on lesswrong have at a particular moment in time.
Girlfriends :-P