One possible issue that comes to mind is that if you start paying more attention to the low-level movements of your thoughts, you might start noticing thoughts that parts of you get triggered by, e.g. if they feel like particular kinds of thoughts are shameful to have. One concrete failure mode that I think many rationalists would be susceptible to, would be to notice something like
blank mind → noticing having a blank mind → verbal thought “my mind is blank” → feeling of despair → blank mind → …
and then feeling additional despair and shame over your mind being stuck in an unproductive cycle and feeling that you should be able to do better. That may then create another layer of shame and despair on top of the original one. Although the original instructions say that you shouldn’t use this to police your mind, getting triggered in this way may create a compulsion to do so anyway.
Another could be mysterious feelings of dread and feeling bad, if you started noticing various thoughts/emotions that parts of you had been trying to block. Though I would expect that the most natural consequence of that would be you just losing the motivation to use the technique pretty rapidly, with it becoming another of those “that felt really useful but for some reason I don’t feel any interest in doing it anymore, shrug” things.
I think the main risk there would be if you had used this technique extensively enough to build up an increased introspective awareness that was harmless at first but then started catching more of whatever blocked trauma you had and had by that point been built up sufficiently that just stopping the practice wasn’t enough to bring it down anymore. That kind of a scenario would be similar to the cases where people start getting trauma symptoms from doing mindfulness practices; if one has already tried that kind of a thing before and hasn’t felt bad, then it might be an indication (on top of the base rate, which I think is reasonably low) that it’s low-risk.
There’s also the fact that the thought processes themselves may be protecting you from various traumas or doing other subconscious things for you. Since this tuning process isn’t based on introspection but on conscious judging of your subconscious processes, you could accidentally tune yourself away from emotionally load-bearing coping strategies.
One possible issue that comes to mind is that if you start paying more attention to the low-level movements of your thoughts, you might start noticing thoughts that parts of you get triggered by, e.g. if they feel like particular kinds of thoughts are shameful to have. One concrete failure mode that I think many rationalists would be susceptible to, would be to notice something like
and then feeling additional despair and shame over your mind being stuck in an unproductive cycle and feeling that you should be able to do better. That may then create another layer of shame and despair on top of the original one. Although the original instructions say that you shouldn’t use this to police your mind, getting triggered in this way may create a compulsion to do so anyway.
Another could be mysterious feelings of dread and feeling bad, if you started noticing various thoughts/emotions that parts of you had been trying to block. Though I would expect that the most natural consequence of that would be you just losing the motivation to use the technique pretty rapidly, with it becoming another of those “that felt really useful but for some reason I don’t feel any interest in doing it anymore, shrug” things.
I think the main risk there would be if you had used this technique extensively enough to build up an increased introspective awareness that was harmless at first but then started catching more of whatever blocked trauma you had and had by that point been built up sufficiently that just stopping the practice wasn’t enough to bring it down anymore. That kind of a scenario would be similar to the cases where people start getting trauma symptoms from doing mindfulness practices; if one has already tried that kind of a thing before and hasn’t felt bad, then it might be an indication (on top of the base rate, which I think is reasonably low) that it’s low-risk.
There’s also the fact that the thought processes themselves may be protecting you from various traumas or doing other subconscious things for you. Since this tuning process isn’t based on introspection but on conscious judging of your subconscious processes, you could accidentally tune yourself away from emotionally load-bearing coping strategies.
Compulsive deconstructors shouldn’t be handed a full toolbox is one way I have thought of it.