Today and yesterday I tried it essentially as Eliezer described: put a glass of water with ice cubes in the freezer to cool, prepared my syringe (bought to feed a dying ferret), laid on my side, and set up my camera across from my face. I turned it on, inserted the syringe, and injected 10ml of ice-water.
The result both times? Substantial vertigo within 5-10s, lasting ~5m. (No feelings of vomiting, although I ride rollercoasters for fun and have gone skydiving, so this may not generalize.) During the first minute, I reviewed my beliefs on the usefulness of modafinil, whether I should accept an O’Reilly ebook offer, and then my general beliefs of atheism/materialism/determinism/utilitarianism/left-libertarianism. I did not find anything to object to that I was not already well aware of (eg. my cost-benefit analysis for modafinil may be off by 3 hours).
I reviewed the recordings 2 hours after the second try; the recordings matched my memories, with nothing worth noting.
Have you had anyone else review the tapes to make sure that you simply denying the differences. They wouldn’t necessarily be able to convince you, but it would provide good data for the rest of us.
No; I value my privacy and didn’t want to forward the videos to any third party. (I knew someone would say, ‘but what if you self-censored even a day later your response to the video?!’ and decided the credibility sacrifice was worth making.)
If this seems really important to anyone I can do it again with cameras—I don’t have much sense of privacy, but I do have one of moderate inconvenience.
In case you do it, I would advocate that you spend the time after the water in a Skype conversation to let someone else help you to find your own blindspots.
I have a large public ‘weird’ commitment to modafinil; simply liking privacy is pretty normal. (And my own personal experience seems to have justified my preference.)
I myself don’t have much problem to rationally access public commitments to ideas while I’m in private. It doesn’t raise much cognitive dissonance inside myself.
It doesn’t take much emotional work to deal with the topics. Dealing with akrasia and social relations to other people seems to raise a lot more emotions.
simply liking privacy is pretty normal.
Liking privacy to the extend that there isn’t a single person that you would trust to analyse the video is not normal.
I’m not saying “You are wrong to value privacy”. I’m just saying that it’s a topic that’s more likely to bring you towards emotional barriers.
5 years ago I used a nickname and no image on the internet. I had some irrational fears of sharing my identity.
Liking privacy to the extend that there isn’t a single person that you would trust to analyse the video is not normal.
There’s no one on LW who I both trust and wish to waste their time analyzing on a lame video. It’s just not that important. If you have a little camera, you can replicate the whole experiment in a few minutes and confirm what one would have expected from the weird patient group, and which was also confirmed by previous LWers trying the procedure out. There’s no need to spend a lot of time debating a report, because any problem you have with it can easily be fixed in a few minutes by doing a better demonstration yourself: you can do it tonight and email off the video to, I dunno, Yvain or something, if my laziness and wish for privacy seems that bizarrely strong.
1) Not verifying the video.
2) Asking questions where there are probably no enough strong emotional effects.
As far as doing the experiment myself, at the moment getting rid of core rationalisation about my worldview isn’t my main goal. At the moment stability is more important for myself then destablizing my belief system by kicking out stuff.
But I suppose you (like most long-time LWers) had already very few rationalizations to start with. Maybe if a person with a median-or-larger amount of beliefs-in-belief and doublethink tried that, they’d be more likely to have a “Whom am I kidding? I know there’s no dragon in my garage actually” moment.
My understanding is that this only works for specific type of focal brain damage. I.e. if you had gross denial that you have a paralysed limb. I never heard that it e.g. relieves delusions in mental disorders, and i’d think everyday self deception is less similar to focal brain damage than to mental disorder.
Yeah, it’d be shocking on multiple levels if it did anything but induce vertigo. But it was fun trying, and the videotape criticism gave me a reason to do it.
Today and yesterday I tried it essentially as Eliezer described: put a glass of water with ice cubes in the freezer to cool, prepared my syringe (bought to feed a dying ferret), laid on my side, and set up my camera across from my face. I turned it on, inserted the syringe, and injected 10ml of ice-water.
The result both times? Substantial vertigo within 5-10s, lasting ~5m. (No feelings of vomiting, although I ride rollercoasters for fun and have gone skydiving, so this may not generalize.) During the first minute, I reviewed my beliefs on the usefulness of modafinil, whether I should accept an O’Reilly ebook offer, and then my general beliefs of atheism/materialism/determinism/utilitarianism/left-libertarianism. I did not find anything to object to that I was not already well aware of (eg. my cost-benefit analysis for modafinil may be off by 3 hours).
I reviewed the recordings 2 hours after the second try; the recordings matched my memories, with nothing worth noting.
Have you had anyone else review the tapes to make sure that you simply denying the differences. They wouldn’t necessarily be able to convince you, but it would provide good data for the rest of us.
No; I value my privacy and didn’t want to forward the videos to any third party. (I knew someone would say, ‘but what if you self-censored even a day later your response to the video?!’ and decided the credibility sacrifice was worth making.)
Reasonable, now we need to find someone with no sense of privacy to do it.
Alicorn: Mike, you’re being summoned
Me: But I did that—the water didn’t do anything.
If this seems really important to anyone I can do it again with cameras—I don’t have much sense of privacy, but I do have one of moderate inconvenience.
In case you do it, I would advocate that you spend the time after the water in a Skype conversation to let someone else help you to find your own blindspots.
I wouldn’t say really important, interesting, but not crucial.
Have you asked yourself while you were under the effect cold water whether your believe in the importance of your privacy is warranted?
To me that seems like a question that’s more likely to involve some form of Ugh-field than the question of whether Modafinil is effective.
I have a large public ‘weird’ commitment to modafinil; simply liking privacy is pretty normal. (And my own personal experience seems to have justified my preference.)
I myself don’t have much problem to rationally access public commitments to ideas while I’m in private. It doesn’t raise much cognitive dissonance inside myself. It doesn’t take much emotional work to deal with the topics. Dealing with akrasia and social relations to other people seems to raise a lot more emotions.
Liking privacy to the extend that there isn’t a single person that you would trust to analyse the video is not normal.
I’m not saying “You are wrong to value privacy”. I’m just saying that it’s a topic that’s more likely to bring you towards emotional barriers.
5 years ago I used a nickname and no image on the internet. I had some irrational fears of sharing my identity.
There’s no one on LW who I both trust and wish to waste their time analyzing on a lame video. It’s just not that important. If you have a little camera, you can replicate the whole experiment in a few minutes and confirm what one would have expected from the weird patient group, and which was also confirmed by previous LWers trying the procedure out. There’s no need to spend a lot of time debating a report, because any problem you have with it can easily be fixed in a few minutes by doing a better demonstration yourself: you can do it tonight and email off the video to, I dunno, Yvain or something, if my laziness and wish for privacy seems that bizarrely strong.
There are two different issues:
1) Not verifying the video. 2) Asking questions where there are probably no enough strong emotional effects.
As far as doing the experiment myself, at the moment getting rid of core rationalisation about my worldview isn’t my main goal. At the moment stability is more important for myself then destablizing my belief system by kicking out stuff.
But I suppose you (like most long-time LWers) had already very few rationalizations to start with. Maybe if a person with a median-or-larger amount of beliefs-in-belief and doublethink tried that, they’d be more likely to have a “Whom am I kidding? I know there’s no dragon in my garage actually” moment.
It’s hard to believe I would have none. It probably just doesn’t work if you don’t have that very specific type of brain damage.
My understanding is that this only works for specific type of focal brain damage. I.e. if you had gross denial that you have a paralysed limb. I never heard that it e.g. relieves delusions in mental disorders, and i’d think everyday self deception is less similar to focal brain damage than to mental disorder.
Yeah, it’d be shocking on multiple levels if it did anything but induce vertigo. But it was fun trying, and the videotape criticism gave me a reason to do it.