I think this is a very serious issue and part of the reason I wrote that Derive and Reverse is a short-term strategy. I consider the Derive method as a mental game of make-believe which allows you to recognize unproductive vanity at work. Originally I intended the exercise of rebranding primarily as a mechanism to notice self-inflationary behavior as you described, and secondarily as a mechanism to hack vanity for motivation. On reflection I think the second purpose is not worth the cost of serious self-deception.
In this light, I would weaken Derive to something like this: when a perfectly good piece of advice like “keep a Gratitude journal” falls into your lap but you have an instinctive immunoreaction to it, one way to notice and dispel the part of that aversion that comes from vanity is to walk through Derive in your head and notice changes in your gut reaction to a trivial rebranding. It is important to be remain honest about the quality of your contribution—the point of the exercise is to notice pieces of your System 1 rejecting other people’s ideas.
I think this is a very serious issue and part of the reason I wrote that Derive and Reverse is a short-term strategy. I consider the Derive method as a mental game of make-believe which allows you to recognize unproductive vanity at work. Originally I intended the exercise of rebranding primarily as a mechanism to notice self-inflationary behavior as you described, and secondarily as a mechanism to hack vanity for motivation. On reflection I think the second purpose is not worth the cost of serious self-deception.
In this light, I would weaken Derive to something like this: when a perfectly good piece of advice like “keep a Gratitude journal” falls into your lap but you have an instinctive immunoreaction to it, one way to notice and dispel the part of that aversion that comes from vanity is to walk through Derive in your head and notice changes in your gut reaction to a trivial rebranding. It is important to be remain honest about the quality of your contribution—the point of the exercise is to notice pieces of your System 1 rejecting other people’s ideas.
Does this help?