Having addressed the reductionist side (where you basically agree with me, yet still think “agency” is useful), let’s now look at the practicalities.
As far as I can tell, your practical argument in favor of IFS has three main parts:
Meta-schema (e.g. of seeking to exterminate bad parts/rules) are a thing that exists
IFS can arrive at the same place as other models by different steps
IFS’ frame of positive intention is useful, and isn’t available in other models
But none of these arguments actually favor IFS over other systems, or even distinguish it at all!
For the first argument, the thing I previously described as “The Interdict of Merlin for Self-Help” prevents people with meta-issues from resolving them without either 1) banging their head on a wall till they notice there’s a wall there, or 2) having another living mind say, “hey, did you know that’s a wall you’re banging your head against?”. In short, meta-issues are a Fully General Counterargument because they apply to any method of change for human brains. So they don’t distinguish IFS from other systems.
Second, of course IFS can arrive at the same place as other models; my argument is that it lacks both rigor and simplicity in how it arrives at those places compared to models based on passive schema, that use an understanding of reconsolidation to explicitly focus on contradicting explicitly-selected memory targets.
And the authors of UtEB specifically note that therapies such as IFS work—to the extent that they do—because they are doing things that unintentionally or indirectly result in reconsolidation. So this second argument doesn’t actually distinguish IFS from any other therapy that accidentally (i.e., without explicit intention/targeting) produces reconsolidation.
Finally, the third argument is, I think, where the real thrust of this entire article lies. I get the impression in fact, that this third argument is the reason you’re defending IFS so strongly in the first place: that this frame has had personal meaning and utility to you.
But that “positive intention” frame isn’t new, and definitely isn’t unique to IFS. Other therapy modalities had it long before IFS was developed, and you can use a reductionist modality without losing the benefits.
For example, I might say to someone that something they learned to was the best thing they could do in the situation they were in, and back that up by helping them experience how and why that was the best thing, leading to the same sort of subjective experience as you describe, of realizing that your brain is not, in fact, out to get you.
And this framing doesn’t require me to postulate a part that has your well-being in mind, yet for some reason keeps doing the same thing over and over! “You learned to do this because it was good then, and it’s not so good now” is IMO a simpler theoretical frame than “you have parts that are well-intentioned, but also kind of dumb”.
(Of course, the way I do this, there’s an even more basic experience, of one’s rules being “think X, feel Y automatically”. By the time we’re talking about anything like the positive intention frame, it’s already been established by simple repetition that the troubling thing acts like a rule that wires a button directly to a feeling. So the question raised is not, “why is this part doing this to me?” but “how did I learn that rule?”)
So the third argument doesn’t distinguish IFS from other methods, and the subjective experience of unblending via positive intention can be arrived at by other means, that IMO are more efficient as well as more epistemically correct, and allow for greater rigor and speed.
IOW, on none of these three dimensions is IFS substantially different from any “average therapy brand X”, with the possible exception of its metaphor having intuitive appeal for a self-helping user. Nor do any of the claimed benefits of a “parts”-focused model not apply equally to approaches based on rules and learning.
I’d like to go a bit meta before I respond to the object-level content in this comment, because I feel like we’re talking past each other somehow.
Could you say what exactly is the position that you are arguing for, in this conversation?
For my own behalf, I’m not trying to say that IFS is necessarily the best system, a totally unique system, or even the only system that one should use. I do think that, of the mind hacking systems that I have encountered, it is a pretty good one; and I count it as among one of the most life-changing ones that I have found.
But this is certainly not a claim that it would be impossible to do even better. In fact I’m quite certain that there are some issues for which IFS does not work very well, and for which there must be something better.
So when you say things like, for example,
But none of these arguments actually favor IFS over other systems, or even distinguish it at all! [...] But that “positive intention” frame isn’t new, and definitely isn’t unique to IFS. Other therapy modalities had it long before IFS was developed, and you can use a reductionist modality without losing the benefits.
then I’m left a little confused as to why you are saying them. I don’t think I’ve said that the “positive intention” frame would be new, or unique to IFS. Certainly there are other therapy modalities that have it too. And these arguments might not favor IFS over other systems, but then I never said that IFS would be the best possible system. I just said that it seems to be a pretty good system that has worked pretty well for me, and for several other people I know.
In terms of conversational frames, I feel like I came to this conversation mostly in a gears-oriented frame, where I don’t have any very strong agenda. 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. Where we disagree, I’m mostly interested in fleshing out the details of why and how, so as to better combine our models.
And maybe I’m just totally misreading you, but I get the vibe that you are (or at least perceive me to be) in some kind of a dominance frame, and want to establish that IFS isn’t a very good system? Or shoot down my claim that IFS is a uniquely good system? Or something?
Could you say what exactly is the position that you are arguing for, in this conversation?
My inner pjeby is arguing for something like this:
“IFS is a specific model that has some similarities and connections to the best available view, but also clear failures that the best available view doesn’t have. But giving IFS this much airtime only makes sense to the reader if you think IFS is the best available view! So you should either justify the implicit respect you’re giving to IFS, or explicitly acknowledge the source of that respect (like by pointing out that IFS isn’t the best available view, but you like it).”
Consider also my comment elsewhere; my sense is that the post is ambiguating between “IFS is of historical interest” and “IFS is how someone should begin to understand this topic” in a way that misses pjeby’s meta-level criticisms of the message sent by giving IFS so much attention / not directly agreeing with criticisms. I came away thinking that you think pjeby is right but some part of IFS is worth salvaging, and when I put my pjeby hat on, I can’t figure out which part you think is worth salvaging. There are some hypotheses, like that you have gratitude towards IFS, or you think enough rationalists are familiar with IFS that presenting new models like UtEB as diffs from IFS can help them understand both better, or the label for ‘theory of modeling psychology’ in your mind is ‘IFS’ instead of something broader, but the actual motivation is unclear from the post.
I came away thinking that you think pjeby is right but some part of IFS is worth salvaging, and when I put my pjeby hat on, I can’t figure out which part you think is worth salvaging.
Thank you, yes. That is basically my position as well, though it is also wrapped in a shell of “WTF am I being named in the title and throughout the body of this post when it’s actually about Kaj’s position and appears only tangentially related to what we talked about before, because although I did answer some questions people asked about what I do, when I was speaking to Kaj I was mainly talking about the distinctions available between IFS and UtEB, not distinctions between IFS and what I, personally, do with clients.” So this not only feels like a weird and confusing post on the level you explain, it also feels like an attack on a strawman version of what I do, because Kaj appears in some places to have confused my generic discussion of “deliberate vs. accidental reconsolidation” with me saying something about my own, personal methodology.
Thank you to you and Vaniver for clarifying. I’m sorry for misunderstanding and -representing your position (and for everything else); from now on, I will explicitly interpret all of your UtEB-flavored statements as referencing a generic UtEB-style system, rather than any personal system of yours.
So to answer this. I wouldn’t say that any any of the three points in your earlier characterization of my position (meta-schema existing, IFS being able to arrive at the same place as other models, or IFS’ frame of positive intention) quite capture the reason why I’m arguing in favor of IFS.
Rather, I do think that IFS provides the best package of applications… of the ones that I personally have encountered so far. I’m not claiming that it would be impossible for a system to be better or that there would be any in principle reason that would make IFS (or parts-based systems in general) intrinsically superior than any others. I’m sure that for every thing that IFS does, there’s a way to do it some other way.
Still, of the ones that I have tried, I have found IFS to have the best combination of flexibility, power, and ease-of-learning so far. Maybe I’m just totally ignorant about this, and you tell me of a better one, and then I look into that and start promoting it instead. (I would be very grateful if you did!)
But to compare it with other systems that I’ve tried / looked into:
More mainstream therapies, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Read a few books on these and definitely found them valuable, but they felt mostly counteractive so limited in their usefulness.
Focusing. Useful, but it was often unclear what exactly I should do with the results that came up, and I didn’t always get clear answers. Felt relatively laborious.
Core Transformation. The first mindhacking technique that I thought *really* worked, and I kept using it for a long time, but some serious issues it seemed to just completely fail with. Also felt like I had to keep repeating uses of it, or the results would fade.
Steve Andreas’s self-concept editing. Very transformative on a specific set of issues that made me feel like there was something fundamentally wrong with me. However, didn’t seem to work on other kinds of issues, such as putting excessive probability on other people thinking bad things of me and deciding to shun me as a result.
Internal Double Crux. Found this very useful for dealing with internal conflicts, but it couldn’t seem to deal with conflicts involving what IFS would call extreme parts; trying to deal with them produced odd stuff which IDC didn’t tell me how to address. This made me look into IFS, which did.
Meditation. Seems useful at spontaneously bringing up and healing some issues, but not good for targeted investigation and healing of any particular one.
Coherence Therapy. So far I’ve only read UtEB, which was more focused on giving examples of it than really documenting the system. I’ve ordered an actual manual, but what I mostly got from UtEB (besides an improved theoretical understanding) was a few extra tools, which generally didn’t enable me to do that much new. Coherence Therapy also seems harder to apply, because it requires figuring out what would count as counterevidence for a particular schema, whereas IFS seems to reliably achieve reconsolidation without needing to understand this on an equally explicit level.
So for each of these systems, either they have relatively narrow applicability, or require a lot of experience to use effectively.
In comparison, IFS feel has felt like it has broad applicability and like it is relatively easy to learn. Of course, I had the benefit of having worked with several similar systems before, which no doubt made it faster and quicker for me to figure it out. But a lot of people do seem to take to IFS intuitively. And it feels like IFS is unusually versatile in at least two respects.
First, it’s broad in what kinds of situations it can be used for. It gives you a set of skills that lets you
1) Dig into the core of schemas which are based on an incorrect generalization from the original evidence (solving a “problem” which isn’t actually a problem in the first place), the way that e.g. Coherence Therapy does
2) Take schemas which are responding to a correct problem with a counterproductive strategy, and update their strategy on the fly (either before going to a situation that would trigger them, or right after they’ve triggered)
3) Take schemas whose information may or may not be correct, and unblend from them enough that any new information in the situation allows their information to reconsolidate.
4) Mediate internal conflicts arising from schemas which are both correct but contradictory until you reconcile them, the way Internal Double Crux does
Having a collection of four entirely different contexts in which essentially the same skills can be used, seems to make it a lot more flexible than the other, more specialized systems.
Second, my experience is that if you manage to access the original memories behind a schema and do it from a place of Self (two criteria which can admittedly be frequently tricky to get right), then reconsolidation will basically always happen. Like I suggested in the OP, my model is that IFS does this by essentially hacking how extreme reactions are neurally encoded and exploiting the fact that the problem in any schema bottoms out at “and then I would feel so horrible as for it to be totally unbearable”, allowing you to reconsolidate that by witnessing it from Self.
This means that IFS works on pretty much any issue where you manage to get that far. IME, something like (say) self-concept editing works on things that make you feel like a horrible person, but not on (say) things where you are afraid of being left alone through no intrinsic fault of your own. But if you have an extreme fear of either one, it’s because your brain has a schema which predicts that one of them happening or being the case will cause unbearable suffering. IFS lets you reconsolidate that prediction regardless of what the exact flavor of the problem is. This also seems to be in contrast to say Coherence Therapy, which AFAICT targets the belief one step earlier in the chain. That is, it targets “being a horrible” person or “being left alone”, rather than the “and that would cause unbearable suffering” which follows from that. As a result, Coherence Therapy requires figuring out the exact nature of the counterevidence needed, whereas in IFS just witnessing the schema’s prediction from Self acts as a universal counterevidence to the prediction of unbearable suffering.
(Probably obvious to you, but just to make it explicit for the other readers; this is not the same as wireheading. You can heal the extreme fear of being left alone, while still strongly preferring not to be left alone and working towards preventing that. What does get fixed is having such a strong fear that you can’t reason about it rationally, and extreme reaction patterns which at worst contribute to the very problem they are trying to prevent.)
Of course, none of this means that IFS would be perfect or that I would have managed to fix all of my issues with it alone… but even granting the weaknesses which we’ve discussed so far, the combination of it being versatile, powerful, and relatively easy to learn makes it the best overall system that I’ve found. It’s also the one which seems to deliver the most “bang for the buck”, in case I was forced to choose just one system to teach to other people.
But again, if there’s some even better system out there, I’d be happy to be pointed to it! I just haven’t found one yet.
Also, I don’t know whether this intrinsically requires thinking in terms of parts. Probably you could do all of the same things with a more UtEB-style approach as well. For example, I’m guessing that the reason why the NLP phobia cure procedure works, is that it has that same element of “realizing that you can recall/re-experience this without it being unbearable” as witnessing something from Self does; and there you work on the level of memories rather than parts.
But at least my feeling has been that the “parts interface” gives you the kind of a natural UI from which all of these things flow relatively naturally; if you successfully teach someone the basic set of IFS skills for doing one thing, then it’s just a short step towards learning the other things as well. Whereas if you were thinking in more mechanistic terms, you would need more explicit figuring out how to implement each piece. E.g. UtEB only talked about the kind of stuff you do in conventional therapy sessions, and didn’t say anything about on-the-fly updating or using the system for decision-making, suggesting that their framework didn’t lend itself to those applications being easily invented.
But then again, maybe this is discussed in some CT manual which I haven’t read yet. And in honesty’s sake, one close friend of mine who has been using IFS for as long as I have, seems to recently have been finding the UtEB approach more effective. So it’s certainly possible that I’m wrong about all of this. And again, I would certainly like to be shown a system which was even better than IFS is. :-)
See, now this comment would have made a great article. ;-) I think it says more clearly what you mean than the article you actually wrote, and makes a much better case for your position.
Thanks! Though in all honesty, now that a few days have passed since I wrote the comment… I’ve been paying more attention to what I actually do currently, and it feels more UtEB-ish in style, so it might not have been correct to say that UtEB didn’t enable me to do that much new.
… maybe. It might also be the case that since I never experienced my parts as particularly anthropomorphic, a large part of my IFS has actually always been working directly on the level of memories. And the reason why I thought that UtEB wasn’t telling me that many new things in terms of concrete practice, was that my “IFS” had actually been more Coherence Therapy all along.
I’m just confused about what exactly I have been doing, now. :-)
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.)
Having addressed the reductionist side (where you basically agree with me, yet still think “agency” is useful), let’s now look at the practicalities.
As far as I can tell, your practical argument in favor of IFS has three main parts:
Meta-schema (e.g. of seeking to exterminate bad parts/rules) are a thing that exists
IFS can arrive at the same place as other models by different steps
IFS’ frame of positive intention is useful, and isn’t available in other models
But none of these arguments actually favor IFS over other systems, or even distinguish it at all!
For the first argument, the thing I previously described as “The Interdict of Merlin for Self-Help” prevents people with meta-issues from resolving them without either 1) banging their head on a wall till they notice there’s a wall there, or 2) having another living mind say, “hey, did you know that’s a wall you’re banging your head against?”. In short, meta-issues are a Fully General Counterargument because they apply to any method of change for human brains. So they don’t distinguish IFS from other systems.
Second, of course IFS can arrive at the same place as other models; my argument is that it lacks both rigor and simplicity in how it arrives at those places compared to models based on passive schema, that use an understanding of reconsolidation to explicitly focus on contradicting explicitly-selected memory targets.
And the authors of UtEB specifically note that therapies such as IFS work—to the extent that they do—because they are doing things that unintentionally or indirectly result in reconsolidation. So this second argument doesn’t actually distinguish IFS from any other therapy that accidentally (i.e., without explicit intention/targeting) produces reconsolidation.
Finally, the third argument is, I think, where the real thrust of this entire article lies. I get the impression in fact, that this third argument is the reason you’re defending IFS so strongly in the first place: that this frame has had personal meaning and utility to you.
But that “positive intention” frame isn’t new, and definitely isn’t unique to IFS. Other therapy modalities had it long before IFS was developed, and you can use a reductionist modality without losing the benefits.
For example, I might say to someone that something they learned to was the best thing they could do in the situation they were in, and back that up by helping them experience how and why that was the best thing, leading to the same sort of subjective experience as you describe, of realizing that your brain is not, in fact, out to get you.
And this framing doesn’t require me to postulate a part that has your well-being in mind, yet for some reason keeps doing the same thing over and over! “You learned to do this because it was good then, and it’s not so good now” is IMO a simpler theoretical frame than “you have parts that are well-intentioned, but also kind of dumb”.
(Of course, the way I do this, there’s an even more basic experience, of one’s rules being “think X, feel Y automatically”. By the time we’re talking about anything like the positive intention frame, it’s already been established by simple repetition that the troubling thing acts like a rule that wires a button directly to a feeling. So the question raised is not, “why is this part doing this to me?” but “how did I learn that rule?”)
So the third argument doesn’t distinguish IFS from other methods, and the subjective experience of unblending via positive intention can be arrived at by other means, that IMO are more efficient as well as more epistemically correct, and allow for greater rigor and speed.
IOW, on none of these three dimensions is IFS substantially different from any “average therapy brand X”, with the possible exception of its metaphor having intuitive appeal for a self-helping user. Nor do any of the claimed benefits of a “parts”-focused model not apply equally to approaches based on rules and learning.
I’d like to go a bit meta before I respond to the object-level content in this comment, because I feel like we’re talking past each other somehow.
Could you say what exactly is the position that you are arguing for, in this conversation?
For my own behalf, I’m not trying to say that IFS is necessarily the best system, a totally unique system, or even the only system that one should use. I do think that, of the mind hacking systems that I have encountered, it is a pretty good one; and I count it as among one of the most life-changing ones that I have found.
But this is certainly not a claim that it would be impossible to do even better. In fact I’m quite certain that there are some issues for which IFS does not work very well, and for which there must be something better.
So when you say things like, for example,
then I’m left a little confused as to why you are saying them. I don’t think I’ve said that the “positive intention” frame would be new, or unique to IFS. Certainly there are other therapy modalities that have it too. And these arguments might not favor IFS over other systems, but then I never said that IFS would be the best possible system. I just said that it seems to be a pretty good system that has worked pretty well for me, and for several other people I know.
In terms of conversational frames, I feel like I came to this conversation mostly in a gears-oriented frame, where I don’t have any very strong agenda. 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. Where we disagree, I’m mostly interested in fleshing out the details of why and how, so as to better combine our models.
And maybe I’m just totally misreading you, but I get the vibe that you are (or at least perceive me to be) in some kind of a dominance frame, and want to establish that IFS isn’t a very good system? Or shoot down my claim that IFS is a uniquely good system? Or something?
My inner pjeby is arguing for something like this:
“IFS is a specific model that has some similarities and connections to the best available view, but also clear failures that the best available view doesn’t have. But giving IFS this much airtime only makes sense to the reader if you think IFS is the best available view! So you should either justify the implicit respect you’re giving to IFS, or explicitly acknowledge the source of that respect (like by pointing out that IFS isn’t the best available view, but you like it).”
Consider also my comment elsewhere; my sense is that the post is ambiguating between “IFS is of historical interest” and “IFS is how someone should begin to understand this topic” in a way that misses pjeby’s meta-level criticisms of the message sent by giving IFS so much attention / not directly agreeing with criticisms. I came away thinking that you think pjeby is right but some part of IFS is worth salvaging, and when I put my pjeby hat on, I can’t figure out which part you think is worth salvaging. There are some hypotheses, like that you have gratitude towards IFS, or you think enough rationalists are familiar with IFS that presenting new models like UtEB as diffs from IFS can help them understand both better, or the label for ‘theory of modeling psychology’ in your mind is ‘IFS’ instead of something broader, but the actual motivation is unclear from the post.
Thank you, yes. That is basically my position as well, though it is also wrapped in a shell of “WTF am I being named in the title and throughout the body of this post when it’s actually about Kaj’s position and appears only tangentially related to what we talked about before, because although I did answer some questions people asked about what I do, when I was speaking to Kaj I was mainly talking about the distinctions available between IFS and UtEB, not distinctions between IFS and what I, personally, do with clients.” So this not only feels like a weird and confusing post on the level you explain, it also feels like an attack on a strawman version of what I do, because Kaj appears in some places to have confused my generic discussion of “deliberate vs. accidental reconsolidation” with me saying something about my own, personal methodology.
Thank you to you and Vaniver for clarifying. I’m sorry for misunderstanding and -representing your position (and for everything else); from now on, I will explicitly interpret all of your UtEB-flavored statements as referencing a generic UtEB-style system, rather than any personal system of yours.
So to answer this. I wouldn’t say that any any of the three points in your earlier characterization of my position (meta-schema existing, IFS being able to arrive at the same place as other models, or IFS’ frame of positive intention) quite capture the reason why I’m arguing in favor of IFS.
Rather, I do think that IFS provides the best package of applications… of the ones that I personally have encountered so far. I’m not claiming that it would be impossible for a system to be better or that there would be any in principle reason that would make IFS (or parts-based systems in general) intrinsically superior than any others. I’m sure that for every thing that IFS does, there’s a way to do it some other way.
Still, of the ones that I have tried, I have found IFS to have the best combination of flexibility, power, and ease-of-learning so far. Maybe I’m just totally ignorant about this, and you tell me of a better one, and then I look into that and start promoting it instead. (I would be very grateful if you did!)
But to compare it with other systems that I’ve tried / looked into:
More mainstream therapies, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Read a few books on these and definitely found them valuable, but they felt mostly counteractive so limited in their usefulness.
Focusing. Useful, but it was often unclear what exactly I should do with the results that came up, and I didn’t always get clear answers. Felt relatively laborious.
Core Transformation. The first mindhacking technique that I thought *really* worked, and I kept using it for a long time, but some serious issues it seemed to just completely fail with. Also felt like I had to keep repeating uses of it, or the results would fade.
Steve Andreas’s self-concept editing. Very transformative on a specific set of issues that made me feel like there was something fundamentally wrong with me. However, didn’t seem to work on other kinds of issues, such as putting excessive probability on other people thinking bad things of me and deciding to shun me as a result.
Internal Double Crux. Found this very useful for dealing with internal conflicts, but it couldn’t seem to deal with conflicts involving what IFS would call extreme parts; trying to deal with them produced odd stuff which IDC didn’t tell me how to address. This made me look into IFS, which did.
Meditation. Seems useful at spontaneously bringing up and healing some issues, but not good for targeted investigation and healing of any particular one.
Coherence Therapy. So far I’ve only read UtEB, which was more focused on giving examples of it than really documenting the system. I’ve ordered an actual manual, but what I mostly got from UtEB (besides an improved theoretical understanding) was a few extra tools, which generally didn’t enable me to do that much new. Coherence Therapy also seems harder to apply, because it requires figuring out what would count as counterevidence for a particular schema, whereas IFS seems to reliably achieve reconsolidation without needing to understand this on an equally explicit level.
So for each of these systems, either they have relatively narrow applicability, or require a lot of experience to use effectively.
In comparison, IFS feel has felt like it has broad applicability and like it is relatively easy to learn. Of course, I had the benefit of having worked with several similar systems before, which no doubt made it faster and quicker for me to figure it out. But a lot of people do seem to take to IFS intuitively. And it feels like IFS is unusually versatile in at least two respects.
First, it’s broad in what kinds of situations it can be used for. It gives you a set of skills that lets you
1) Dig into the core of schemas which are based on an incorrect generalization from the original evidence (solving a “problem” which isn’t actually a problem in the first place), the way that e.g. Coherence Therapy does
2) Take schemas which are responding to a correct problem with a counterproductive strategy, and update their strategy on the fly (either before going to a situation that would trigger them, or right after they’ve triggered)
3) Take schemas whose information may or may not be correct, and unblend from them enough that any new information in the situation allows their information to reconsolidate.
4) Mediate internal conflicts arising from schemas which are both correct but contradictory until you reconcile them, the way Internal Double Crux does
Having a collection of four entirely different contexts in which essentially the same skills can be used, seems to make it a lot more flexible than the other, more specialized systems.
Second, my experience is that if you manage to access the original memories behind a schema and do it from a place of Self (two criteria which can admittedly be frequently tricky to get right), then reconsolidation will basically always happen. Like I suggested in the OP, my model is that IFS does this by essentially hacking how extreme reactions are neurally encoded and exploiting the fact that the problem in any schema bottoms out at “and then I would feel so horrible as for it to be totally unbearable”, allowing you to reconsolidate that by witnessing it from Self.
This means that IFS works on pretty much any issue where you manage to get that far. IME, something like (say) self-concept editing works on things that make you feel like a horrible person, but not on (say) things where you are afraid of being left alone through no intrinsic fault of your own. But if you have an extreme fear of either one, it’s because your brain has a schema which predicts that one of them happening or being the case will cause unbearable suffering. IFS lets you reconsolidate that prediction regardless of what the exact flavor of the problem is. This also seems to be in contrast to say Coherence Therapy, which AFAICT targets the belief one step earlier in the chain. That is, it targets “being a horrible” person or “being left alone”, rather than the “and that would cause unbearable suffering” which follows from that. As a result, Coherence Therapy requires figuring out the exact nature of the counterevidence needed, whereas in IFS just witnessing the schema’s prediction from Self acts as a universal counterevidence to the prediction of unbearable suffering.
(Probably obvious to you, but just to make it explicit for the other readers; this is not the same as wireheading. You can heal the extreme fear of being left alone, while still strongly preferring not to be left alone and working towards preventing that. What does get fixed is having such a strong fear that you can’t reason about it rationally, and extreme reaction patterns which at worst contribute to the very problem they are trying to prevent.)
Of course, none of this means that IFS would be perfect or that I would have managed to fix all of my issues with it alone… but even granting the weaknesses which we’ve discussed so far, the combination of it being versatile, powerful, and relatively easy to learn makes it the best overall system that I’ve found. It’s also the one which seems to deliver the most “bang for the buck”, in case I was forced to choose just one system to teach to other people.
But again, if there’s some even better system out there, I’d be happy to be pointed to it! I just haven’t found one yet.
Also, I don’t know whether this intrinsically requires thinking in terms of parts. Probably you could do all of the same things with a more UtEB-style approach as well. For example, I’m guessing that the reason why the NLP phobia cure procedure works, is that it has that same element of “realizing that you can recall/re-experience this without it being unbearable” as witnessing something from Self does; and there you work on the level of memories rather than parts.
But at least my feeling has been that the “parts interface” gives you the kind of a natural UI from which all of these things flow relatively naturally; if you successfully teach someone the basic set of IFS skills for doing one thing, then it’s just a short step towards learning the other things as well. Whereas if you were thinking in more mechanistic terms, you would need more explicit figuring out how to implement each piece. E.g. UtEB only talked about the kind of stuff you do in conventional therapy sessions, and didn’t say anything about on-the-fly updating or using the system for decision-making, suggesting that their framework didn’t lend itself to those applications being easily invented.
But then again, maybe this is discussed in some CT manual which I haven’t read yet. And in honesty’s sake, one close friend of mine who has been using IFS for as long as I have, seems to recently have been finding the UtEB approach more effective. So it’s certainly possible that I’m wrong about all of this. And again, I would certainly like to be shown a system which was even better than IFS is. :-)
See, now this comment would have made a great article. ;-) I think it says more clearly what you mean than the article you actually wrote, and makes a much better case for your position.
Thanks! Though in all honesty, now that a few days have passed since I wrote the comment… I’ve been paying more attention to what I actually do currently, and it feels more UtEB-ish in style, so it might not have been correct to say that UtEB didn’t enable me to do that much new.
… maybe. It might also be the case that since I never experienced my parts as particularly anthropomorphic, a large part of my IFS has actually always been working directly on the level of memories. And the reason why I thought that UtEB wasn’t telling me that many new things in terms of concrete practice, was that my “IFS” had actually been more Coherence Therapy all along.
I’m just confused about what exactly I have been doing, now. :-)
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.