Actually, as you noticed—but didn’t notice that you noticed—no “striving” is actually required. What happened was simply that you had to translate abstract knowledge into concrete knowledge.
In each of the examples you gave, you created a metaphor or context reframe, based on imagining some specific sensory reality.
Because the emotional, “action”, or “near” brain doesn’t directly “get” conceptual abstractions. They have to be translated back into some kind of sensory representation first, and linked to the specific context where you want to change your (emotional/automatic) expectations.
A great example of one of the methods for doing this, is Byron Katie’s book, “Loving What Is”—which is all about getting people to emotionally accept the facts of a situation, and giving up their “shoulds”. Her approach uses four questions that postulate alternative realities, combined with a method of generating counterexamples (“turnarounds”, she calls them), which, if done in the same sort of “what if?” way that you imagined your friendly ghosts and probabilistic knife killers, produce emotional acceptance of a given reality—i.e., “loving what is”.
Hers is far from the only such method, though. There’s another approach, described by Morty Lefkoe in “Recreate Your Life”, which uses a different set of questions designed to elicit and re-interpret your evidence for an existing emotional belief. Robert Fritz’s books on the creative process demonstrate yet another set of questioning patterns, although not a formalized one.
And rational-emotive therapy, “learned optimism”, and cognitive-behavior therapy all have various questions and challenges of their own. (And I freely borrow from all of them in my client work.)
Of course, it’s easy to confuse these questioning patterns with logical arguments, and trying to convince yourself (or others) of something. But that not only misses the point, it doesn’t work. The purpose of questions like these is to get you to imagine other possibilities—other evidential interpretations and predictions—in a sensory way, in a specific sensory context, to update your emotional brain’s sensory prediction database.
In other words, to take abstractions from the “far” brain, and apply them to generate new sensory data for the “near” brain to process.
Viewed in this way, there’s no need to “struggle”—you simply need to know what the hell you’re doing. That is, have an “inside view” of the relationship between the “near” and “far” brains.
In other words, something that every rationalist should have. A rationalism that can’t fix (or at least efficiently work around) the bugs in its own platform isn’t very useful for Winning.
Struggle and striving is a sign of confusion, not virtue. We need to understand the human platform, and program it effectively, instead of using up our extremely limited concentration and willpower by constantly fighting with it.
Struggle and striving is a sign of confusion, not virtue. We need to understand the human platform, and program it effectively, instead of using up our extremely limited concentration and willpower by constantly fighting with it.
Viewed in this way, there’s no need to “struggle”—you simply need to know what the hell you’re doing. That is, have an “inside view” of the relationship between the “near” and “far” brains.
Once you know what the hell you’re doing you’ve got to bother to go ahead and actually do it. That’s hardly trivial.
With all due respect to the effective methods you describe, I suggest that ‘struggle’ remains a relevant description. It is certianly true that struggle and striving are no virtues in themselves. Yet programming our brains and using them effectively are hard work.
With practice, we can take weaknesses in the human platform and train them such that we don’t need to exert our limited concentration and willpower to constantly prop up our thinking. This is the same as with any expert skill.
Struggle and strive till you need struggle no more. Then pick a slightly more difficult thinking skill that relies upon the first and struggle and strive some more.
If you insist on believing it’s hard work, you can certainly make it such. But notice that Eliezer’s account indicates that once he chose suitable representations, the changes were immediate, or at least very quick. And that’s my experience with these methods also.
The difficult part of change isn’t changing your beliefs—it’s determining which beliefs you have that aren’t useful to you… and that therefore need changing.
That’s the bit that’s incredibly difficult, unless you have the advantage of a successful model in a given area. (Not unlike the difference between applying a programming pattern, and inventing a programming pattern.)
For example, I’d say that the utility of a belief in struggle being a requirement for rationality is very low. Such a belief only seemed attractive to me in the past, because it was associated with an idea of being noble. Dropping it enabled me to make more useful changes, a lot faster.
On a more general level, when someone is successfully doing something that I consider a struggle, and that person says that doing the thing is easy, the rational response is for me to want to learn more about their mental models and belief structure, in order to update my own.
Not to argue (however indirectly) that struggle—like death—is a good thing because it’s part of the natural order!
(This is also ignoring the part where “struggle” itself is a confusion: in reality, there is never anything to “strive for” OR “struggle against”; these are only emotional labels we attach to the map, that don’t actually exist in the territory. In reality, there are no problems or enemies, only facts. Time-consuming tasks exist, but this does not make them a struggle.)
Thank you for writing this. I think I’ve just realised what I’ve been doing wrong for the last year and a half, and how to start believing positive things about myself that I know rationally to be true.
Thank you for writing this. I think I’ve just realised what I’ve been doing wrong for the last year and a half, and how to start believing positive things about myself that I know rationally to be true.
Do let us know how that turns out—perhaps you can write a post about it.
Actually, as you noticed—but didn’t notice that you noticed—no “striving” is actually required. What happened was simply that you had to translate abstract knowledge into concrete knowledge.
In each of the examples you gave, you created a metaphor or context reframe, based on imagining some specific sensory reality.
Because the emotional, “action”, or “near” brain doesn’t directly “get” conceptual abstractions. They have to be translated back into some kind of sensory representation first, and linked to the specific context where you want to change your (emotional/automatic) expectations.
A great example of one of the methods for doing this, is Byron Katie’s book, “Loving What Is”—which is all about getting people to emotionally accept the facts of a situation, and giving up their “shoulds”. Her approach uses four questions that postulate alternative realities, combined with a method of generating counterexamples (“turnarounds”, she calls them), which, if done in the same sort of “what if?” way that you imagined your friendly ghosts and probabilistic knife killers, produce emotional acceptance of a given reality—i.e., “loving what is”.
Hers is far from the only such method, though. There’s another approach, described by Morty Lefkoe in “Recreate Your Life”, which uses a different set of questions designed to elicit and re-interpret your evidence for an existing emotional belief. Robert Fritz’s books on the creative process demonstrate yet another set of questioning patterns, although not a formalized one.
And rational-emotive therapy, “learned optimism”, and cognitive-behavior therapy all have various questions and challenges of their own. (And I freely borrow from all of them in my client work.)
Of course, it’s easy to confuse these questioning patterns with logical arguments, and trying to convince yourself (or others) of something. But that not only misses the point, it doesn’t work. The purpose of questions like these is to get you to imagine other possibilities—other evidential interpretations and predictions—in a sensory way, in a specific sensory context, to update your emotional brain’s sensory prediction database.
In other words, to take abstractions from the “far” brain, and apply them to generate new sensory data for the “near” brain to process.
Viewed in this way, there’s no need to “struggle”—you simply need to know what the hell you’re doing. That is, have an “inside view” of the relationship between the “near” and “far” brains.
In other words, something that every rationalist should have. A rationalism that can’t fix (or at least efficiently work around) the bugs in its own platform isn’t very useful for Winning.
Struggle and striving is a sign of confusion, not virtue. We need to understand the human platform, and program it effectively, instead of using up our extremely limited concentration and willpower by constantly fighting with it.
Once you know what the hell you’re doing you’ve got to bother to go ahead and actually do it. That’s hardly trivial.
With all due respect to the effective methods you describe, I suggest that ‘struggle’ remains a relevant description. It is certianly true that struggle and striving are no virtues in themselves. Yet programming our brains and using them effectively are hard work.
With practice, we can take weaknesses in the human platform and train them such that we don’t need to exert our limited concentration and willpower to constantly prop up our thinking. This is the same as with any expert skill.
Struggle and strive till you need struggle no more. Then pick a slightly more difficult thinking skill that relies upon the first and struggle and strive some more.
If you insist on believing it’s hard work, you can certainly make it such. But notice that Eliezer’s account indicates that once he chose suitable representations, the changes were immediate, or at least very quick. And that’s my experience with these methods also.
The difficult part of change isn’t changing your beliefs—it’s determining which beliefs you have that aren’t useful to you… and that therefore need changing.
That’s the bit that’s incredibly difficult, unless you have the advantage of a successful model in a given area. (Not unlike the difference between applying a programming pattern, and inventing a programming pattern.)
For example, I’d say that the utility of a belief in struggle being a requirement for rationality is very low. Such a belief only seemed attractive to me in the past, because it was associated with an idea of being noble. Dropping it enabled me to make more useful changes, a lot faster.
On a more general level, when someone is successfully doing something that I consider a struggle, and that person says that doing the thing is easy, the rational response is for me to want to learn more about their mental models and belief structure, in order to update my own.
Not to argue (however indirectly) that struggle—like death—is a good thing because it’s part of the natural order!
(This is also ignoring the part where “struggle” itself is a confusion: in reality, there is never anything to “strive for” OR “struggle against”; these are only emotional labels we attach to the map, that don’t actually exist in the territory. In reality, there are no problems or enemies, only facts. Time-consuming tasks exist, but this does not make them a struggle.)
Thank you for writing this. I think I’ve just realised what I’ve been doing wrong for the last year and a half, and how to start believing positive things about myself that I know rationally to be true.
Do let us know how that turns out—perhaps you can write a post about it.