“many people believe that they can control others when they can’t”
It seems like you read a very different article than what I wrote. Per the abstract:
The Curse of the Counterfactual is a side-effect of the way our brains process is-ought distinctions. It causes our brains to compare our past, present, and future to various counterfactual imaginings, and then blame and punish ourselves for the difference between reality, and whatever we just made up to replace it.
I do not understand how you got from this abstract to your summary—they seem utterly unrelated to me.
For example, if one is thinking “I should have done this sooner”, how is that about controlling others?
Likewise, this isn’t about conscious “belief”: even when these things are directed at other people, we usually don’t even realize we’re trying to control anyone and would likely not say we believe we can control anyone. The way it feels from the inside is that something is wrong, in the sense of “someone is wrong on the internet”—i.e. that there is some moral outrage occurring which must be stopped or at least punished or protested.
(And also the belief “you can’t make yourself like anything”, in the case of the person feeling guilty about unproductiveness.)
What does liking have to do with anything? I’m seriously confused here. Ingvar’s scenario doesn’t say anything about liking anything?
The issue being presented there is that the moral outrage feeling blocks us from thinking strategically, because actually useful or practical actions don’t feel enough like they’re punishing the perpetrator of our feeling of moral outrage. Once the outrage feeling was shut off, “Ingvar” (not anything like their real name) immediately began to think of practical solutions, solutions they could not think of just a few moments before, and that they admitted they would’ve rejected as irrelevant, useless, or even insulting had anyone proposed them prior to removing the feeling.
the “Nice Guy” bits do seem not derivable from the above?
The nice guy concept is presented as an instance of a class of counterfactuals: one in which we should live up to an unrealistic standard so then people should respond differently. Therefore (our brains assume), if people are not responding correctly, then we must have done something wrong… and so need to be punished. (Or alternately, if we believe we are performing correctly, then others must be punished for not being sufficiently nice in return.)
i.e., once again illustrating how:
(from the abstract): our brains compare our past, present, and future to various counterfactual imaginings, and then blame and punish ourselves for the difference between reality, and whatever we just made up to replace it.
This is the central theme of the article, and is merely illustrated by various examples to show some of the variety of ways this happens, and contrasting before-and-after thought processes to illustrate how our thinking is derailed and misdirected by the generated desire to blame and punish.
This is important to me because it’s central to some rationality research I’m doing currently.
I’m not sure what “this” refers to here—the entire article, or one or more of the specific subtopics you raised. In general, though, if you are going to relate this to rationality-adjacent subjects, the relevant topics would be how feelings of moral judgment or outrage hijack our reasoning and motivation in various ways—that is literally all the article is about, aside from providing a lot of tips on how to switch the damn thing off.
On further reflection, I’m wondering if your confusion is actually related to this bit from the disclaimer:
To avoid confusion between object-level advice, and the meta-level issue of “how our moral judgment frames interfere with rational thinking”, I have intentionally omitted any description of how the fictionalized or composite clients actually solved the real-life problems implied by their stories. The examples in this article do not promote or recommend any specific object-level solutions for even those clients’ actual specific problems, let alone universal advice for people in similar situations.
That is, the things that you seem to be pulling from this sound like they could be projections of object-level advice or generic approaches to problems presented in the scenarios. But the scenarios don’t actually contain any object-level approaches or advice, which would explain why your comment is so confusing to me. They sound like perhaps you read the scenarios, drew your own conclusions about the situation(s), and then projected those conclusions back onto the article as summaries, while entirely ignoring the explicitly-stated themes and conclusions.
It seems like you read a very different article than what I wrote. Per the abstract:
I do not understand how you got from this abstract to your summary—they seem utterly unrelated to me.
For example, if one is thinking “I should have done this sooner”, how is that about controlling others?
Likewise, this isn’t about conscious “belief”: even when these things are directed at other people, we usually don’t even realize we’re trying to control anyone and would likely not say we believe we can control anyone. The way it feels from the inside is that something is wrong, in the sense of “someone is wrong on the internet”—i.e. that there is some moral outrage occurring which must be stopped or at least punished or protested.
What does liking have to do with anything? I’m seriously confused here. Ingvar’s scenario doesn’t say anything about liking anything?
The issue being presented there is that the moral outrage feeling blocks us from thinking strategically, because actually useful or practical actions don’t feel enough like they’re punishing the perpetrator of our feeling of moral outrage. Once the outrage feeling was shut off, “Ingvar” (not anything like their real name) immediately began to think of practical solutions, solutions they could not think of just a few moments before, and that they admitted they would’ve rejected as irrelevant, useless, or even insulting had anyone proposed them prior to removing the feeling.
The nice guy concept is presented as an instance of a class of counterfactuals: one in which we should live up to an unrealistic standard so then people should respond differently. Therefore (our brains assume), if people are not responding correctly, then we must have done something wrong… and so need to be punished. (Or alternately, if we believe we are performing correctly, then others must be punished for not being sufficiently nice in return.)
i.e., once again illustrating how:
This is the central theme of the article, and is merely illustrated by various examples to show some of the variety of ways this happens, and contrasting before-and-after thought processes to illustrate how our thinking is derailed and misdirected by the generated desire to blame and punish.
I’m not sure what “this” refers to here—the entire article, or one or more of the specific subtopics you raised. In general, though, if you are going to relate this to rationality-adjacent subjects, the relevant topics would be how feelings of moral judgment or outrage hijack our reasoning and motivation in various ways—that is literally all the article is about, aside from providing a lot of tips on how to switch the damn thing off.
On further reflection, I’m wondering if your confusion is actually related to this bit from the disclaimer:
That is, the things that you seem to be pulling from this sound like they could be projections of object-level advice or generic approaches to problems presented in the scenarios. But the scenarios don’t actually contain any object-level approaches or advice, which would explain why your comment is so confusing to me. They sound like perhaps you read the scenarios, drew your own conclusions about the situation(s), and then projected those conclusions back onto the article as summaries, while entirely ignoring the explicitly-stated themes and conclusions.