Curated. I have been using the content in this post a fair bit since it was posted. In particular, I’ve gotten value out of the following pieces of theoretical discussion:
The notion that once the moral judgment kicks in, it only cares about punishing wrongdoers, even if this blocks thinking about the actual object-level issue; and that the punishment machinery does not actually motivate us to do anything.
The Nice Guy Paradigm, especially the “backwards chaining” component of it; “if I don’t get what I want, then it’s my fault”.
These have helped explain several behaviors in people (both myself and others) which I would have found puzzling before. I’ve probably mentally referenced these concepts dozens of times since reading them.
Additionally, as I noted in the comments, the specific technique of The Work was very useful to me for all kinds of mindhacking. Among other things, it allowed me to figure out what exactly was going with one particular issue which I had failed to understand despite several years of working on it. I’ve since applied it as a general tool for investigating issues which might be in need of reconsolidation, and found it very effective.
A large part of the value that I got with regard to the work came not from the post itself, but from one of pjeby’s comments below; in particular, I thought that this paragraph summarized a lot of the value of using The Work, and I’ve found myself generally agreeing with it:
The reason I’ve moved towards using the Work as a prime investigative tool is that it lets you walk the belief network really fast compared to other methods. Getting your brain to object to getting rid of a belief forces it to reveal what the next belief up the branch is with far less wasted movement.
Recently ran into this post on HN, which among other things, pointed me to the fact that The Work has made it into clinical psychotherapy under the term “Inquiry Based Stress Reduction”, and has at least one study one its’ efficacy.
The actual research can be found here, and it makes for much more interesting reading.
Notably, the researchers were surprised to discover that students taught to use the Work procrastinated less no matter their level of test anxiety post-intervention. They concluded that this was likely due to the fact that since they taught the students how to apply the technique to relieve anxiety, the students may have taken it upon themselves to keep using the technique after the intervention to reduce anxiety, and thus procrastination:
Therefore, when confronted with the unpleasant state of test anxiety after the IBSR intervention, IBSR participants might have no longer felt the need to withdraw from the situation through procrastination. Rather, they might have applied the IBSR method as an alternative coping strategy to deal with unpleasant physical arousal and worry thoughts. Nevertheless, additional data is needed to confirm this assumption.
While I’m happy to see the Work getting more attention, I find it mildly distressing that virtually nothing in the paper (or the article you linked to) mentions Byron Katie at all, unless you dig into the citations a bit. (To further confuse matters, the “IBSR” acronym also stands for some other technique created by a completely different person that I don’t think is at all related.)
I’m also a bit worried that once this becomes a “thing” endorsed by science, that people are going to be exposed to a degraded version of it, as it’s altogether too easy for someone who doesn’t understand the technique to turn it into a weapon, even if entirely unintentionally (let alone deliberately).
Actually, you don’t even need another person to do it: I’ve seen so many different ways for people to distort the process themselves that all it requires is a lack of sufficient instruction for somebody to hurt themselves with the tool.
OTOH, the actual paper indicates that students were given six full hours of training on both identifying thoughts and applying the technique, including some individual instructor attention, which, if the instructors were good, should be sufficient to both keep most people from shooting themselves in the foot and get a significant percentage of the students to be reasonably proficient. I imagine that framing it specifically in matters of test anxiety probably also helped; it’s easier to give Work instruction in a specific problem area than to teach it generically.
There are a few other papers that mention IBSR and mention Byron Katie more explicitly.. however it seems like kind of a standard practice to take “Woo smelling” interventions, rename them to a scientific sounding acronym, and erase their lineage in order to get more acceptance. See also MBSR (mindfulness based stress reduction) which was a (mostly successful) attempt to get mindfulness meditation accepted into mainstream psychotherapy, and RTM( Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories) which is an attempt to get the NLP fast phobia cure accepted as a standard treatment for PTSD.
My prior is that Byron Katie is in fact pretty involved in trying to get her work mainstream and the IBSR rebranding.
Curated. I have been using the content in this post a fair bit since it was posted. In particular, I’ve gotten value out of the following pieces of theoretical discussion:
The notion that once the moral judgment kicks in, it only cares about punishing wrongdoers, even if this blocks thinking about the actual object-level issue; and that the punishment machinery does not actually motivate us to do anything.
The Nice Guy Paradigm, especially the “backwards chaining” component of it; “if I don’t get what I want, then it’s my fault”.
These have helped explain several behaviors in people (both myself and others) which I would have found puzzling before. I’ve probably mentally referenced these concepts dozens of times since reading them.
Additionally, as I noted in the comments, the specific technique of The Work was very useful to me for all kinds of mindhacking. Among other things, it allowed me to figure out what exactly was going with one particular issue which I had failed to understand despite several years of working on it. I’ve since applied it as a general tool for investigating issues which might be in need of reconsolidation, and found it very effective.
A large part of the value that I got with regard to the work came not from the post itself, but from one of pjeby’s comments below; in particular, I thought that this paragraph summarized a lot of the value of using The Work, and I’ve found myself generally agreeing with it:
Recently ran into this post on HN, which among other things, pointed me to the fact that The Work has made it into clinical psychotherapy under the term “Inquiry Based Stress Reduction”, and has at least one study one its’ efficacy.
https://solvingprocrastination.com/study-inquiry-based-stress-reduction/
The actual research can be found here, and it makes for much more interesting reading.
Notably, the researchers were surprised to discover that students taught to use the Work procrastinated less no matter their level of test anxiety post-intervention. They concluded that this was likely due to the fact that since they taught the students how to apply the technique to relieve anxiety, the students may have taken it upon themselves to keep using the technique after the intervention to reduce anxiety, and thus procrastination:
While I’m happy to see the Work getting more attention, I find it mildly distressing that virtually nothing in the paper (or the article you linked to) mentions Byron Katie at all, unless you dig into the citations a bit. (To further confuse matters, the “IBSR” acronym also stands for some other technique created by a completely different person that I don’t think is at all related.)
I’m also a bit worried that once this becomes a “thing” endorsed by science, that people are going to be exposed to a degraded version of it, as it’s altogether too easy for someone who doesn’t understand the technique to turn it into a weapon, even if entirely unintentionally (let alone deliberately).
Actually, you don’t even need another person to do it: I’ve seen so many different ways for people to distort the process themselves that all it requires is a lack of sufficient instruction for somebody to hurt themselves with the tool.
OTOH, the actual paper indicates that students were given six full hours of training on both identifying thoughts and applying the technique, including some individual instructor attention, which, if the instructors were good, should be sufficient to both keep most people from shooting themselves in the foot and get a significant percentage of the students to be reasonably proficient. I imagine that framing it specifically in matters of test anxiety probably also helped; it’s easier to give Work instruction in a specific problem area than to teach it generically.
There are a few other papers that mention IBSR and mention Byron Katie more explicitly.. however it seems like kind of a standard practice to take “Woo smelling” interventions, rename them to a scientific sounding acronym, and erase their lineage in order to get more acceptance. See also MBSR (mindfulness based stress reduction) which was a (mostly successful) attempt to get mindfulness meditation accepted into mainstream psychotherapy, and RTM( Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories) which is an attempt to get the NLP fast phobia cure accepted as a standard treatment for PTSD.
My prior is that Byron Katie is in fact pretty involved in trying to get her work mainstream and the IBSR rebranding.