Mostly, I’m confused as to why this is a post at all (especially frontpage); it reads as an attempt to defend IFS against my criticisms of it, without actually disagreeing with or refuting any of those criticisms. In which case, why post it at all?
You seemed to have criticisms about IFS which looked to me like they were based on misunderstandings of IFS, so I tried to correct them; and you seemed confused about why people found IFS valuable, so I tried to share my perspective on why people do.
I’m still trying to find out where you think I have misunderstood IFS. Your explanation of what you found valuable was useful, though, in that I can see the specific insights or experiences you are crediting to IFS that I was blind to because I consider them minimum requirements for a functional system, rather than bonus features of IFS in particular.
But that was largely answered in the comments of the previous thread, so as I said, I’m kind of confused by a frontpage post that seems to be positioning itself as a refutation of my criticisms, but isn’t.
I feel like I came to this conversation mostly in a gears-oriented frame, where I don’t have any very strong agenda
Me too… to the original conversation. This post seems like an odd escalation on your part, to move from comments to a frontpage post specifically naming me and making it less a quiet conversation between you and I to a public dispute worthy of frontpage attention. It’s particularly puzzling because the post spends a huge amount of time vehemently.… not quite disagreeing, but disagreeing enough that a casual observer might think, “Oh, Kaj really gave PJ’s ideas a smackdown”, and interpret the situation through a dominance frame, even though in actuality you’ve barely disagreed at all. (In which case again, why post it? What new information does it actually add?)
So a lot of what you’re seeing from me is puzzlement. If you were actually trying to inform me of a misunderstanding, this doesn’t seem like a good way to go about it. But on the other hand, you haven’t actually informed me of any misunderstandings in this post, and instead presented what looks like a weak promotion of IFS and some fully-general counterarguments. In which case, why bring me into it in particular?
I honestly can’t make heads or tails of why this is on the front page and not either continued comments on the other thread, or a private conversation, as it doesn’t seem to make sense to me no matter how I look at it, based on the intentions you’ve stated. Instead, it looks like an unnecessary (and possibly hostile) escalation. Rather than impute such intentions to you, my comments have been more trying to figure out what it is you were thinking, using my best guess for the apparent intention of the post (i.e. promote IFS/defend it against my criticism).
The idea that this post was to further mutual understanding is kind of beyond my comprehension, since if that were the case I would’ve expected you to ask questions in the post rather than simply stating your case. (Or in some parts, just assuming your case rather than even stating it!)
In case you’re not aware of the way that posts get to the frontpage on LW 2.0, when users make a post, it first becomes a personal blogpost, and then the mods make a decision about whether or not to move it to the frontpage. This is a question of whether the post is on-topic for LW (which is defined fairly loosely but mostly just avoids politics and things about in-person rationality communities) and whether it is violating any important internet norms (e.g. doxing). I wrote a post about 2 years ago explaining the basics, though it’s fairly long and at some point I should write a shorter version. The way you write about the frontpage sounds to me like you believe the current frontpage/personal distinction mirrors the old Main/Discussion distinction, where users themselves choose to submit things to Main when they think the posts are especially worthwhile to be read. We decided to change that, in large part due to the way posting on Main slide into having higher and higher expectations and caused people to stop writing as much, and even with all the new energy that’s risen out of LW 2.0 I expected that eventually the same forces would cause the site to follow that trajectory again.
Specifically for this post, I have not read most of it yet, but before reading your comment I did not at all consider the hypothesis that the post was attempting to escalate a dominance conflict, mostly because I don’t think I’ve ever seen Kaj do something like that in a decade of writing on LessWrong. When I initially saw the OP, I put it in the reference class of many other posts that reply to individuals (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4) which have generally been received positively or at least neutrally, and frontpaged it.
As an aside, I’ve been very excited reading your LW comments lately PJEby, I remember reading your comments and posts as they were written back when I was 14-15. I’m sorry you had a jarring experience being named a bunch in the OP.
Edit: Cut some unnecessary stuff i.e. things not about the decision to frontpage this post.
I’m sorry you had a jarring experience being named in the OP.
Thank you. It is at least good to know that it was not his decision to put this on the front page, though the number of times I’m named still makes it feel a bit like it’s a calling out, especially since he refers to “pjebyan” practices as if they were what we discussed, rather than the material from UtEB that he himself previously posted.
A lot of what we talked about in the original comments was actually what UtEB describes as reconsolidation, not what I do, because I specifically did not want to get into that here.
Rather, my direct discussion with Kaj was strictly focused on the reductionism issue with parts-oriented models, and the difference between deliberate reconsolidation (ala UtEB) and accidental reconsolidation (ala IFS). It was never supposed to be a referendum on my approach to working with clients or comparing my approach with IFS, outside of me mentioning some reasons why I don’t like to use parts-oriented approaches (like IFS or any of its many predecessors), and how my experiences relate to what’s said in UtEB.
Indeed, the only reason I felt safe to discuss what I did in that previous thread was because I could use UtEB as an example of a reconsolidation-oriented approach other than mine, because I did not wish to create an impression of using LW as a pulpit from which to preach my own gospel. The unexpected combination of “suddently frontpage” and “naming names/ascribing positions” was quite unpleasant, as it made it feel like I was being shoved into a frame of doing that in direct opposition to my attempts to keep the previous discussion focused on general schools of thought (e.g. behaviorism vs. “parts”, deliberate vs. accidental reconsoldiation, etc.) rather than being about “my way is better than yours”.
After all, as the guidelines say, “aim to explain, not persuade”.
(That being said, I can also see how the frame shift probably seems way more visible and salient to me than it does to anybody else, and on a re-read of the article, even I can see that the parts that got me upset are really very tiny in comparison to the whole. It’s also pretty understandable in retrospect why Kaj could easily have thought I was arguing for a model of my own, rather than speaking generically, without him having any intention to distort my views or attribute his own views to me… even as it’s also understandable why the situation inclined me to give more weight to the reverse hypothesis.)
Oh. I’m sorry that turning this into a post made you feel uncomfortable and like I was singling you out for public criticism. It wasn’t intended as either, but now that you pointed it out, it’s kinda obvious that I should have realized that you might and that I should have asked you first.
This post was intended as a compliment in spirit: that I thought your points were important enough that I wanted to highlight them in a more public manner.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever told you, but I have both high respect for your work in general, and gratitude for your contributions personally. First, you’ve been talking in a lot of detail about mind hacking theory which has only become obvious to me many years later; probably a lot of what I’m currently slowly puzzling together is stuff that’s already obvious to you.
Second, because you mentioned Core Transformation on LW a long time ago, I bought the book at the time; then I didn’t get around reading it for a really long time, until I happened to have hit a personal bottom. At that point I finally read it and got a lot of help from it. That then started a chain of events which caused me to find more of the Andreases work, which in turn helped me finally fix the cause of a decades-old depression. None of that might have happened without those old comments of yours, so I’m very grateful for them.
So a part of the motivation for making this post was that I felt that you’d made a lot of good comments and criticisms, and you certainly know what you are talking about, so I wanted to highlight some of those points.
To try to trace back the exact chain of thought that led me to make this post:
I started writing a response, and noticed it was getting pretty long, an article’s worth on its own
I thought something like “pjeby has made several good points on reductionism here; I agree with them, but from the fact that he seems to think I don’t, I guess that’s not obvious. In case it’s just illusion of transparency speaking, I should take these criticisms and more publicly indicate where I agree with them, so that it won’t just be buried in the comments of an old post.”
and “the part about the pragmatic benefits of IFS seems to be getting into a lot of detail about what I think is going on with IFS, as well as new details about how it connects with e.g. the UtEB model; those new details might be interesting to share more widely as well”.
“and since I just included my summary of what I think to be his core points, and he mostly endorsed them, this would be an easy opportunity to create a distillation of our conversation.”
So I made this into its own article (which, as the others noted, I did feel a little uncertain about frontpaging), since that seemed like a nice opportunity to 1) continue our discussion 2) signal-boost and indicate agreement with the points of yours that I thought were important and correct 3) communicate some of my updated thoughts on IFS to a broader audience 4) generally indicate respect for you, in that I’d found your responses important enough to distill and promote.
But I realize now that you found this uncomfortable, and I’m again sorry for not having asked you about it first.
I also didn’t realize that you had been trying to explicitly avoid ascribing positions. You had previously discussed your own methods on several occasions, and I assumed that you were contrasting the IFS approach with whatever system you thought was best—and that this would be your own system, since why would you use a system which you didn’t think was the best. :-) I’m sorry for misreading and mischaracterizing you; I’ve now edited the post remove terms such as “pjebyan”. If you want me to edit something else in the post, or even take it down entirely, please just let me know.
Thank you for the consideration, and I appreciate the edits. This was just an unfortunate confluence of events and I’m not holding any grudges.
I have to admit that one of my faults is a healthy dose of the illusion of transparency. I tend to assume that other people can reach the same conclusions I have when they have access to the same information my conclusions are based on… even though there’s a distinction between say, reading UtEB and grokking what it means about “legacy” approaches to therapy.
So some of the things you said in this article seemed to me like excessively belaboring points I thought were already made quite explicitly in the text of UtEB, so I interpreted it as you trying to argue in favor of IFS, not that you were just now realizing how IFS fit within UtEB’s model.
The fact you posted an article about UtEB before made me assume that you understood it at least as well as I did (since in effect, you introduced me to it!), so I didn’t see why you would only be now discovering those points… especially since I thought they’d been covered by our previous discussion and your restatement of my position.
Regarding Core Transformation, I’m glad you found it useful. Back at the time I mentioned it, it was one of the better techniques available to me, despite the tendency to sometimes get bogged down in “is that really a part or am I imagining things” or parts getting in circular arguments about things. But I later found that there were simpler ways to address the same things, because what CT calls “core states” are also accessible by simply not activating the parts of the brain that shut off those states. (e.g. by telling us we don’t deserve love)
So if, for example, we don’t see ourselves as worthless, then experiencing ourselves as “being” or love or okayness is a natural, automatic consequence. Thus I ended up pursing methods that let us switch off the negatives and deal directly with what CT and IFS represent as objecting parts, since these objections are the constraint on us accessing CT’s “core states” or IFS’s self-leadership and self-compassion.
In effect, you could think of the approaches I’ve been pursuing since then as shortcutting the process of CT by jumping as directly as possible to our objections to experiencing ourselves as lovable, okay, etc., and working backwards from there.
To put it in context of your changes using Transforming The Self, the shadow qualities (or “negative qualities” as TTS calls them), are the things I target first, since around 2012 or so.
That’s because practical experience had shown by then that almost anything I tried to change in myself or others using other methods would often return in a few weeks, unless said negative qualities were somehow addressed. So, strategically, going hunting for them first makes things a lot more efficient, as you then don’t have to worry about all the tactical-level behaviors and beliefs being regenerated from the persistent, strategic-level, negative self-image.
Interestingly, now that you’ve mentioned TTS (indirectly, by linking to your posts referencing it), it reminds me that TTS actually includes something rather like a reconsolidation-oriented approach to quality changes. It might be interesting now to go back and re-read it with our newer knowledge of reconsolidation in mind, to see if I can either improve on his technique, or use something from it to improve on mine.
Thank you, I’m happy to hear that there are no more bad feelings. :)
So if, for example, we don’t see ourselves as worthless, then experiencing ourselves as “being” or love or okayness is a natural, automatic consequence.
Cool, I’ve been having basically the same model for a while. (Related: my hypothesis is that all the talk about people having difficulty “finding meaning” these days seems somewhat misplaced; if things seem meaningless, it’s because someone is suffering from objections to their sense of meaning. If those objections would be dealt with, then they would pretty quickly naturally gravitate towards things that felt naturally meaningful.)
Interestingly, now that you’ve mentioned TTS (indirectly, by linking to your posts referencing it), it reminds me that TTS actually includes something rather like a reconsolidation-oriented approach to quality changes.
Yeah, I don’t remember TTS in detail either, but upon reading UtEB it felt like “oh, TTS was a special case of explicitly targeted reconsolidation”.
Quick note: Kaj had expressed some uncertainty about whether it made sense as a frontpage post, and a few members of the LW Team had specifically encouraged him to post it as such. So, first, just noting that it probably makes more sense to direct confusions or frustration at us.
I can’t speak for the other team members but some of my own thoughts included:
the post/comment was long enough that it felt a bit more natural as a post
I currently think one of the main bottlenecks on LessWrong is distillation – much of the time, there’s a lot of good back and forth in the comments, but it takes a lot of effort for future-people to learn the most important takeaways. The longer the conversation goes, the harder it can be to compress into something digestible. So I think there’s something useful to having distillation posts such as this one by Wei_Dai (mostly re: Paul Christiano), and this one by me (re a conversation with Benquo, Jessicata and Zack Davis).
But, I can definitely see how it would come across as weird and escalatory if you weren’t expecting it. (I think it is probably a better cultural norm to touch base with conversation partners and give them a chance to give feedback, esp. when you’re summarizing their position).
I really appreciate that this post was on the front page, because I wouldn’t have seen it otherwise and it was interesting. From an external viewer perspective on the “status games” aspect of it, I think the front page post didn’t seem like a dominance attempt, but read as an attempt at truth seeking. I also don’t think that it put your arguments in a negative light. Your comments here, on the other hand, definitely feel to an outside observer to be more status-oriented. My visceral reaction upon reading your comment above this one, for example, was that you were trying to demote IFS because it sounds like you make a living promoting this other non-IFS approach.
That said, I remember reading many of your posts on the old LessWrong and I have occasionally wondered what you had gotten up to, since you had stopped posting.
My visceral reaction upon reading your comment above this one, for example, was that you were trying to demote IFS because it sounds like you make a living promoting this other non-IFS approach.
That framing is actually part of what upset me about this article: it presents some of my arguments in a context that makes them seem as though they were made in support of my own approach vs IFS, rather than comparing and contrasting the material discussed by two of Kaj’s own posts.
In one post, he presented reconsolidation-oriented therapy as described in Unlocking the Emotional Brain (UtEB for short), and in the other he discussed IFS. My comments in the previous thread were about how UtEB’s arguments regarding reconsolidation showcase why IFS is an “accidental reconsolidation” model, and how a deliberate model is more efficient. (Using occasional examples from my experiences with both types of approach.)
This post seems (to me at least) to frame that prior discussion as if I was instead arguing for my methodology vs. IFS, when I was almost exclusively arguing “deliberate vs. accidental reconsolidation”, with UtEB from Kaj’s own post as an example of the former variety.
So taken out of context, this post makes it sound as if I were doing just what you say: demoting IFS to promote my own approach. But the original conversation was actually comparing two schools of thought that Kaj had written articles about, and by extension, other schools that divide along the same lines.
(But then, my view might be more than a little biased by the unexpected appearance on the frontpage, while thinking that said appearance was Kaj’s choice rather than a moderator’s, making me look extra-close for why he made a choice that he didn’t actually make.)
Mostly, I’m confused as to why this is a post at all (especially frontpage); it reads as an attempt to defend IFS against my criticisms of it, without actually disagreeing with or refuting any of those criticisms. In which case, why post it at all?
I’m still trying to find out where you think I have misunderstood IFS. Your explanation of what you found valuable was useful, though, in that I can see the specific insights or experiences you are crediting to IFS that I was blind to because I consider them minimum requirements for a functional system, rather than bonus features of IFS in particular.
But that was largely answered in the comments of the previous thread, so as I said, I’m kind of confused by a frontpage post that seems to be positioning itself as a refutation of my criticisms, but isn’t.
Me too… to the original conversation. This post seems like an odd escalation on your part, to move from comments to a frontpage post specifically naming me and making it less a quiet conversation between you and I to a public dispute worthy of frontpage attention. It’s particularly puzzling because the post spends a huge amount of time vehemently.… not quite disagreeing, but disagreeing enough that a casual observer might think, “Oh, Kaj really gave PJ’s ideas a smackdown”, and interpret the situation through a dominance frame, even though in actuality you’ve barely disagreed at all. (In which case again, why post it? What new information does it actually add?)
So a lot of what you’re seeing from me is puzzlement. If you were actually trying to inform me of a misunderstanding, this doesn’t seem like a good way to go about it. But on the other hand, you haven’t actually informed me of any misunderstandings in this post, and instead presented what looks like a weak promotion of IFS and some fully-general counterarguments. In which case, why bring me into it in particular?
I honestly can’t make heads or tails of why this is on the front page and not either continued comments on the other thread, or a private conversation, as it doesn’t seem to make sense to me no matter how I look at it, based on the intentions you’ve stated. Instead, it looks like an unnecessary (and possibly hostile) escalation. Rather than impute such intentions to you, my comments have been more trying to figure out what it is you were thinking, using my best guess for the apparent intention of the post (i.e. promote IFS/defend it against my criticism).
The idea that this post was to further mutual understanding is kind of beyond my comprehension, since if that were the case I would’ve expected you to ask questions in the post rather than simply stating your case. (Or in some parts, just assuming your case rather than even stating it!)
If I recall correctly, I frontpaged the OP.
In case you’re not aware of the way that posts get to the frontpage on LW 2.0, when users make a post, it first becomes a personal blogpost, and then the mods make a decision about whether or not to move it to the frontpage. This is a question of whether the post is on-topic for LW (which is defined fairly loosely but mostly just avoids politics and things about in-person rationality communities) and whether it is violating any important internet norms (e.g. doxing). I wrote a post about 2 years ago explaining the basics, though it’s fairly long and at some point I should write a shorter version. The way you write about the frontpage sounds to me like you believe the current frontpage/personal distinction mirrors the old Main/Discussion distinction, where users themselves choose to submit things to Main when they think the posts are especially worthwhile to be read. We decided to change that, in large part due to the way posting on Main slide into having higher and higher expectations and caused people to stop writing as much, and even with all the new energy that’s risen out of LW 2.0 I expected that eventually the same forces would cause the site to follow that trajectory again.
Specifically for this post, I have not read most of it yet, but before reading your comment I did not at all consider the hypothesis that the post was attempting to escalate a dominance conflict, mostly because I don’t think I’ve ever seen Kaj do something like that in a decade of writing on LessWrong. When I initially saw the OP, I put it in the reference class of many other posts that reply to individuals (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4) which have generally been received positively or at least neutrally, and frontpaged it.
As an aside, I’ve been very excited reading your LW comments lately PJEby, I remember reading your comments and posts as they were written back when I was 14-15. I’m sorry you had a jarring experience being named a bunch in the OP.
Edit: Cut some unnecessary stuff i.e. things not about the decision to frontpage this post.
Thank you. It is at least good to know that it was not his decision to put this on the front page, though the number of times I’m named still makes it feel a bit like it’s a calling out, especially since he refers to “pjebyan” practices as if they were what we discussed, rather than the material from UtEB that he himself previously posted.
A lot of what we talked about in the original comments was actually what UtEB describes as reconsolidation, not what I do, because I specifically did not want to get into that here.
Rather, my direct discussion with Kaj was strictly focused on the reductionism issue with parts-oriented models, and the difference between deliberate reconsolidation (ala UtEB) and accidental reconsolidation (ala IFS). It was never supposed to be a referendum on my approach to working with clients or comparing my approach with IFS, outside of me mentioning some reasons why I don’t like to use parts-oriented approaches (like IFS or any of its many predecessors), and how my experiences relate to what’s said in UtEB.
Indeed, the only reason I felt safe to discuss what I did in that previous thread was because I could use UtEB as an example of a reconsolidation-oriented approach other than mine, because I did not wish to create an impression of using LW as a pulpit from which to preach my own gospel. The unexpected combination of “suddently frontpage” and “naming names/ascribing positions” was quite unpleasant, as it made it feel like I was being shoved into a frame of doing that in direct opposition to my attempts to keep the previous discussion focused on general schools of thought (e.g. behaviorism vs. “parts”, deliberate vs. accidental reconsoldiation, etc.) rather than being about “my way is better than yours”.
After all, as the guidelines say, “aim to explain, not persuade”.
(That being said, I can also see how the frame shift probably seems way more visible and salient to me than it does to anybody else, and on a re-read of the article, even I can see that the parts that got me upset are really very tiny in comparison to the whole. It’s also pretty understandable in retrospect why Kaj could easily have thought I was arguing for a model of my own, rather than speaking generically, without him having any intention to distort my views or attribute his own views to me… even as it’s also understandable why the situation inclined me to give more weight to the reverse hypothesis.)
Recently clarified guidelines: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5conQhfa4rgb4SaWx/site-guide-personal-blogposts-vs-frontpage-posts
Oh. I’m sorry that turning this into a post made you feel uncomfortable and like I was singling you out for public criticism. It wasn’t intended as either, but now that you pointed it out, it’s kinda obvious that I should have realized that you might and that I should have asked you first.
This post was intended as a compliment in spirit: that I thought your points were important enough that I wanted to highlight them in a more public manner.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever told you, but I have both high respect for your work in general, and gratitude for your contributions personally. First, you’ve been talking in a lot of detail about mind hacking theory which has only become obvious to me many years later; probably a lot of what I’m currently slowly puzzling together is stuff that’s already obvious to you.
Second, because you mentioned Core Transformation on LW a long time ago, I bought the book at the time; then I didn’t get around reading it for a really long time, until I happened to have hit a personal bottom. At that point I finally read it and got a lot of help from it. That then started a chain of events which caused me to find more of the Andreases work, which in turn helped me finally fix the cause of a decades-old depression. None of that might have happened without those old comments of yours, so I’m very grateful for them.
So a part of the motivation for making this post was that I felt that you’d made a lot of good comments and criticisms, and you certainly know what you are talking about, so I wanted to highlight some of those points.
To try to trace back the exact chain of thought that led me to make this post:
I started writing a response, and noticed it was getting pretty long, an article’s worth on its own
I thought something like “pjeby has made several good points on reductionism here; I agree with them, but from the fact that he seems to think I don’t, I guess that’s not obvious. In case it’s just illusion of transparency speaking, I should take these criticisms and more publicly indicate where I agree with them, so that it won’t just be buried in the comments of an old post.”
and “the part about the pragmatic benefits of IFS seems to be getting into a lot of detail about what I think is going on with IFS, as well as new details about how it connects with e.g. the UtEB model; those new details might be interesting to share more widely as well”.
“and since I just included my summary of what I think to be his core points, and he mostly endorsed them, this would be an easy opportunity to create a distillation of our conversation.”
So I made this into its own article (which, as the others noted, I did feel a little uncertain about frontpaging), since that seemed like a nice opportunity to 1) continue our discussion 2) signal-boost and indicate agreement with the points of yours that I thought were important and correct 3) communicate some of my updated thoughts on IFS to a broader audience 4) generally indicate respect for you, in that I’d found your responses important enough to distill and promote.
But I realize now that you found this uncomfortable, and I’m again sorry for not having asked you about it first.
I also didn’t realize that you had been trying to explicitly avoid ascribing positions. You had previously discussed your own methods on several occasions, and I assumed that you were contrasting the IFS approach with whatever system you thought was best—and that this would be your own system, since why would you use a system which you didn’t think was the best. :-) I’m sorry for misreading and mischaracterizing you; I’ve now edited the post remove terms such as “pjebyan”. If you want me to edit something else in the post, or even take it down entirely, please just let me know.
Thank you for the consideration, and I appreciate the edits. This was just an unfortunate confluence of events and I’m not holding any grudges.
I have to admit that one of my faults is a healthy dose of the illusion of transparency. I tend to assume that other people can reach the same conclusions I have when they have access to the same information my conclusions are based on… even though there’s a distinction between say, reading UtEB and grokking what it means about “legacy” approaches to therapy.
So some of the things you said in this article seemed to me like excessively belaboring points I thought were already made quite explicitly in the text of UtEB, so I interpreted it as you trying to argue in favor of IFS, not that you were just now realizing how IFS fit within UtEB’s model.
The fact you posted an article about UtEB before made me assume that you understood it at least as well as I did (since in effect, you introduced me to it!), so I didn’t see why you would only be now discovering those points… especially since I thought they’d been covered by our previous discussion and your restatement of my position.
Regarding Core Transformation, I’m glad you found it useful. Back at the time I mentioned it, it was one of the better techniques available to me, despite the tendency to sometimes get bogged down in “is that really a part or am I imagining things” or parts getting in circular arguments about things. But I later found that there were simpler ways to address the same things, because what CT calls “core states” are also accessible by simply not activating the parts of the brain that shut off those states. (e.g. by telling us we don’t deserve love)
So if, for example, we don’t see ourselves as worthless, then experiencing ourselves as “being” or love or okayness is a natural, automatic consequence. Thus I ended up pursing methods that let us switch off the negatives and deal directly with what CT and IFS represent as objecting parts, since these objections are the constraint on us accessing CT’s “core states” or IFS’s self-leadership and self-compassion.
In effect, you could think of the approaches I’ve been pursuing since then as shortcutting the process of CT by jumping as directly as possible to our objections to experiencing ourselves as lovable, okay, etc., and working backwards from there.
To put it in context of your changes using Transforming The Self, the shadow qualities (or “negative qualities” as TTS calls them), are the things I target first, since around 2012 or so.
That’s because practical experience had shown by then that almost anything I tried to change in myself or others using other methods would often return in a few weeks, unless said negative qualities were somehow addressed. So, strategically, going hunting for them first makes things a lot more efficient, as you then don’t have to worry about all the tactical-level behaviors and beliefs being regenerated from the persistent, strategic-level, negative self-image.
Interestingly, now that you’ve mentioned TTS (indirectly, by linking to your posts referencing it), it reminds me that TTS actually includes something rather like a reconsolidation-oriented approach to quality changes. It might be interesting now to go back and re-read it with our newer knowledge of reconsolidation in mind, to see if I can either improve on his technique, or use something from it to improve on mine.
Thank you, I’m happy to hear that there are no more bad feelings. :)
Cool, I’ve been having basically the same model for a while. (Related: my hypothesis is that all the talk about people having difficulty “finding meaning” these days seems somewhat misplaced; if things seem meaningless, it’s because someone is suffering from objections to their sense of meaning. If those objections would be dealt with, then they would pretty quickly naturally gravitate towards things that felt naturally meaningful.)
Yeah, I don’t remember TTS in detail either, but upon reading UtEB it felt like “oh, TTS was a special case of explicitly targeted reconsolidation”.
Quick note: Kaj had expressed some uncertainty about whether it made sense as a frontpage post, and a few members of the LW Team had specifically encouraged him to post it as such. So, first, just noting that it probably makes more sense to direct confusions or frustration at us.
I can’t speak for the other team members but some of my own thoughts included:
the post/comment was long enough that it felt a bit more natural as a post
I currently think one of the main bottlenecks on LessWrong is distillation – much of the time, there’s a lot of good back and forth in the comments, but it takes a lot of effort for future-people to learn the most important takeaways. The longer the conversation goes, the harder it can be to compress into something digestible. So I think there’s something useful to having distillation posts such as this one by Wei_Dai (mostly re: Paul Christiano), and this one by me (re a conversation with Benquo, Jessicata and Zack Davis).
But, I can definitely see how it would come across as weird and escalatory if you weren’t expecting it. (I think it is probably a better cultural norm to touch base with conversation partners and give them a chance to give feedback, esp. when you’re summarizing their position).
I really appreciate that this post was on the front page, because I wouldn’t have seen it otherwise and it was interesting. From an external viewer perspective on the “status games” aspect of it, I think the front page post didn’t seem like a dominance attempt, but read as an attempt at truth seeking. I also don’t think that it put your arguments in a negative light. Your comments here, on the other hand, definitely feel to an outside observer to be more status-oriented. My visceral reaction upon reading your comment above this one, for example, was that you were trying to demote IFS because it sounds like you make a living promoting this other non-IFS approach.
That said, I remember reading many of your posts on the old LessWrong and I have occasionally wondered what you had gotten up to, since you had stopped posting.
That framing is actually part of what upset me about this article: it presents some of my arguments in a context that makes them seem as though they were made in support of my own approach vs IFS, rather than comparing and contrasting the material discussed by two of Kaj’s own posts.
In one post, he presented reconsolidation-oriented therapy as described in Unlocking the Emotional Brain (UtEB for short), and in the other he discussed IFS. My comments in the previous thread were about how UtEB’s arguments regarding reconsolidation showcase why IFS is an “accidental reconsolidation” model, and how a deliberate model is more efficient. (Using occasional examples from my experiences with both types of approach.)
This post seems (to me at least) to frame that prior discussion as if I was instead arguing for my methodology vs. IFS, when I was almost exclusively arguing “deliberate vs. accidental reconsolidation”, with UtEB from Kaj’s own post as an example of the former variety.
So taken out of context, this post makes it sound as if I were doing just what you say: demoting IFS to promote my own approach. But the original conversation was actually comparing two schools of thought that Kaj had written articles about, and by extension, other schools that divide along the same lines.
(But then, my view might be more than a little biased by the unexpected appearance on the frontpage, while thinking that said appearance was Kaj’s choice rather than a moderator’s, making me look extra-close for why he made a choice that he didn’t actually make.)
Yes, that seems like a reasonable perspective. I can see why that would be annoying.