If the details are available within you, I’d love to hear more about what the experience of noticing these fake values was like. Say for getting A’s, I’d hazard a guess that at some point pre-this-revelation you did something like “thinking about why A’s matter”. What was that like? What was different about that reflection from more recent reflection? Has it been mostly a matter of learning to pay attention and then it’s all easy, or have you had to learn what different sorts of motivation/fake-real values feel like, or other?
Does it feel like there were any “pre-requisites” for being able to notice the difference?
Maybe! One framing is: I expected “great accomplishments that people I admire say is good” to make me very happy or very liked, but reality was not as great, even negative sometimes. This pattern was hidden because:
I wasn’t explicit with my expectations—if I was clear with how happy all A’s would make me and paid attention when I did get an A, I would realize the disconnect sooner.
Related: making explicit the goals that all A’s helps me with (seriously considering why it matters in fine-grained details) would’ve been much more aligned with my goals than the proxy “get all A’s”. This serious analysis is not something I really did, but rationality skills of thinking an idea through while noticing confusions helped (I include focusing here)
I was in love with the ideaof e.g. running a marathon and didn’t pay attention to how accomplishing it actually made me feel in physical sensations, or how the process I went about achieving that goal made me feel in physical sensations. This even happened with food! I used to eat a box of Zebra cakes (processed pastry cakes) on my drive home, but one time I decided to actually taste it instead of eating while distracted (inspired by mindful eating meditation). It was actually kind of gross and waxy and weirdly sweet, and I haven’t eaten more than a few of them these past several years.
I liked that you provided a lot of examples!
Thanks! Real life examples keep me honest. I was even thinking of your post, specifically the image of you scrambling to maintain and improve 10+ skills. How would you answer your own question?
Sometimes when I’m writing an email to someone at work, I noticing I’m making various faces, as if to convey the emotion in the sentence I’m writing. It’s like… I’m composing a sentence, I’m imagining what I’m trying to express, and I’m imagining that expression, and along with that comes the physical faces and mental stances of the thing I’m expressing. It’s like I’m trying to fill in and inhabit some imagined state.
Over the past year I’ve noticed a similar sort of feeling when I’m thinking about something I could potentially do, and I’m being motivated by appearing impressive. The idea/thought is there, and then I try to “fill it up” and momentarily live into that world. There’s normally a slight tension in my forehead that starts to form. There’s also a sort of “zooming in” feeling in my head. It likely sounds drastic me typing it out, but this is all pretty subtle and I didn’t notice it for a while.
Anywho, mostly if I find myself pleasurably stewing in the imagined state of the thing, it’s a sign for me that it’s about impressiveness. I seem to not sit in the idea when there’s other motivations? I can’t think of any reason why that would be the case, but it seems to be for me.
I’m currently interested in the idea of “the physical sensation correlation of different mental states”, like becoming intimately aware of the visceral, physical felt sense of being stressed or triggered, or relaxed and open, or having a strong sense of self or a small sense of identity, or a strong emotion in physical sensations only or a strong emotion with a story and sense of self attached or...
Specifically practicing this would look like paying attention to your body’s felt sense while doing [thing] in different ways (like interacting with your emotions using different system’s techniques). Building this skill will create higher quality feedback from your body’s felt-sense, allowing a greater ability to identify different states in the wild. This post’s idea of hijacked values and your comment point to a specific feeling attached to hijacked values.
This better bodily intuition may be a more natural, long term solution to these types of problems than what I would naively come up with (like TAPs or denying the part of me that actually wants the “bad” thing)
I liked that you provided a lot of examples!
If the details are available within you, I’d love to hear more about what the experience of noticing these fake values was like. Say for getting A’s, I’d hazard a guess that at some point pre-this-revelation you did something like “thinking about why A’s matter”. What was that like? What was different about that reflection from more recent reflection? Has it been mostly a matter of learning to pay attention and then it’s all easy, or have you had to learn what different sorts of motivation/fake-real values feel like, or other?
Does it feel like there were any “pre-requisites” for being able to notice the difference?
Maybe! One framing is: I expected “great accomplishments that people I admire say is good” to make me very happy or very liked, but reality was not as great, even negative sometimes. This pattern was hidden because:
I wasn’t explicit with my expectations—if I was clear with how happy all A’s would make me and paid attention when I did get an A, I would realize the disconnect sooner.
Related: making explicit the goals that all A’s helps me with (seriously considering why it matters in fine-grained details) would’ve been much more aligned with my goals than the proxy “get all A’s”. This serious analysis is not something I really did, but rationality skills of thinking an idea through while noticing confusions helped (I include focusing here)
I was in love with the idea of e.g. running a marathon and didn’t pay attention to how accomplishing it actually made me feel in physical sensations, or how the process I went about achieving that goal made me feel in physical sensations. This even happened with food! I used to eat a box of Zebra cakes (processed pastry cakes) on my drive home, but one time I decided to actually taste it instead of eating while distracted (inspired by mindful eating meditation). It was actually kind of gross and waxy and weirdly sweet, and I haven’t eaten more than a few of them these past several years.
Thanks! Real life examples keep me honest. I was even thinking of your post, specifically the image of you scrambling to maintain and improve 10+ skills. How would you answer your own question?
Sometimes when I’m writing an email to someone at work, I noticing I’m making various faces, as if to convey the emotion in the sentence I’m writing. It’s like… I’m composing a sentence, I’m imagining what I’m trying to express, and I’m imagining that expression, and along with that comes the physical faces and mental stances of the thing I’m expressing. It’s like I’m trying to fill in and inhabit some imagined state.
Over the past year I’ve noticed a similar sort of feeling when I’m thinking about something I could potentially do, and I’m being motivated by appearing impressive. The idea/thought is there, and then I try to “fill it up” and momentarily live into that world. There’s normally a slight tension in my forehead that starts to form. There’s also a sort of “zooming in” feeling in my head. It likely sounds drastic me typing it out, but this is all pretty subtle and I didn’t notice it for a while.
Anywho, mostly if I find myself pleasurably stewing in the imagined state of the thing, it’s a sign for me that it’s about impressiveness. I seem to not sit in the idea when there’s other motivations? I can’t think of any reason why that would be the case, but it seems to be for me.
I’m currently interested in the idea of “the physical sensation correlation of different mental states”, like becoming intimately aware of the visceral, physical felt sense of being stressed or triggered, or relaxed and open, or having a strong sense of self or a small sense of identity, or a strong emotion in physical sensations only or a strong emotion with a story and sense of self attached or...
Specifically practicing this would look like paying attention to your body’s felt sense while doing [thing] in different ways (like interacting with your emotions using different system’s techniques). Building this skill will create higher quality feedback from your body’s felt-sense, allowing a greater ability to identify different states in the wild. This post’s idea of hijacked values and your comment point to a specific feeling attached to hijacked values.
This better bodily intuition may be a more natural, long term solution to these types of problems than what I would naively come up with (like TAPs or denying the part of me that actually wants the “bad” thing)