Common limiting beliefs can be seen as particularly strong attractors along certain dimensions of mindspace that coping mechanisms use to winnow the affordance space down to something manageable without too much cognitive overhead. Regularities in behaviors that don’t serve a direct purpose could also be seen as spandrels from our training data clustering things that don’t necessarily map directly to causality. Ie you can get animals to do all sorts of wacky things with clicker training which then persist even if you start only rewarding a subset of the actions if the animal has no obvious way of unbundling the actions.
That’s interesting. I was pegging Attractors as physical actions, but I think the analogy can be loosely applied to mental concepts too (as I think you’re doing here.)
I think that regularities can be strategically used as you suggest to create additional “anchors” to helpful habits in the real world. (EX: Having a running timer probably shouldn’t actually affect my running habits in the normative sense, yet having a timer when running really makes it feel more official / Formal.)
Common limiting beliefs can be seen as particularly strong attractors along certain dimensions of mindspace that coping mechanisms use to winnow the affordance space down to something manageable without too much cognitive overhead. Regularities in behaviors that don’t serve a direct purpose could also be seen as spandrels from our training data clustering things that don’t necessarily map directly to causality. Ie you can get animals to do all sorts of wacky things with clicker training which then persist even if you start only rewarding a subset of the actions if the animal has no obvious way of unbundling the actions.
That’s interesting. I was pegging Attractors as physical actions, but I think the analogy can be loosely applied to mental concepts too (as I think you’re doing here.)
I think that regularities can be strategically used as you suggest to create additional “anchors” to helpful habits in the real world. (EX: Having a running timer probably shouldn’t actually affect my running habits in the normative sense, yet having a timer when running really makes it feel more official / Formal.)