Often times, when people make decisions, they don’t explicitly model how they themselves will respnd to the outcomes; they instead use simplified models of themselves to quickly make guesses about the things that they like. These guesses can often act as placebos which turn the expected benefits of a given decision into actual benefits solely by virtue of the expectation. In short if you have the psychological architecture that makes it physically feasible to experience a benefit, you can hack your simplified models of yourself to make yourself get that benefit.
This isn’t quite a dark art of rationality since it does not need to actually hurt your epistemology but it does leverage the possibility of changing who you are (or more explicitly, changing who you are by changing who you think you are). I’m currently using this as a way to make myself into the kind of person who is a writer.
One thing I’m thinking about these days:
Often times, when people make decisions, they don’t explicitly model how they themselves will respnd to the outcomes; they instead use simplified models of themselves to quickly make guesses about the things that they like. These guesses can often act as placebos which turn the expected benefits of a given decision into actual benefits solely by virtue of the expectation. In short if you have the psychological architecture that makes it physically feasible to experience a benefit, you can hack your simplified models of yourself to make yourself get that benefit.
This isn’t quite a dark art of rationality since it does not need to actually hurt your epistemology but it does leverage the possibility of changing who you are (or more explicitly, changing who you are by changing who you think you are). I’m currently using this as a way to make myself into the kind of person who is a writer.