Cold Hands Fallacy/Fake Momentum/Null-Affective Death Stall
Although Hot Hands has been the subject of enoughcontroversy to perhaps no longer be termed a fallacy, there is a sense in which I’ve fooled myself before with a fake momentum. I mean when you change your strategy using a faulty bottomline: incorrectly updating on your current dynamic.
As a somewhat extreme but actual example from my own life: when filling out answersheets to multiple-choice questions (with negative marks for incorrect responses) as a kid, I’d sometimes get excited about having marked almost all of the questions near the end, and then completely, obviously, irrationally decide to mark them all. This was out of some completion urge, and the positive affect around having filled in most of them. This involved a fair bit of self-deception to carry out, since I was aware at some level that I left some of them previously unanswered because I was in fact unsure, and to mark them I had to feel sure.
Now, for sure you could make the case that maybe there are times when you’re thinking clearer and when you know the subject or whatever, where you can additionally infer this about yourself correctly and then rationally ramp up the confidence (even if slight) in yourself. But this wasn’t one of those cases, it was the simple fact that I felt great about myself.
Anyway the real point of this post is that there’s a flipside (or straightforward generalization) of this: we can talk about this fake inertia for subjects at rest or at motion. What I mean is there’s this similar tendency to not feel like doing something because you don’t have that dynamic right now, hence all the clichés of the form “first blow is half the battle”. In a sense, that’s all I’m communicating here, but seeing it as a simple irrational mistake (as in the example above) really helped me get over this without drama: just remind yourself of the bottomline and start moving in the correct flow, ignoring the uncalibrated halo (or lack thereof) of emotion.
Ideally, I’d make another ninja-edit that would retain the content in my post and the joke in your comment in a reflexive manner, but I am crap at strange loops.
Cold Hands Fallacy/Fake Momentum/Null-Affective Death Stall
Although Hot Hands has been the subject of enough controversy to perhaps no longer be termed a fallacy, there is a sense in which I’ve fooled myself before with a fake momentum. I mean when you change your strategy using a faulty bottomline: incorrectly updating on your current dynamic.
As a somewhat extreme but actual example from my own life: when filling out answersheets to multiple-choice questions (with negative marks for incorrect responses) as a kid, I’d sometimes get excited about having marked almost all of the questions near the end, and then completely, obviously, irrationally decide to mark them all. This was out of some completion urge, and the positive affect around having filled in most of them. This involved a fair bit of self-deception to carry out, since I was aware at some level that I left some of them previously unanswered because I was in fact unsure, and to mark them I had to feel sure.
Now, for sure you could make the case that maybe there are times when you’re thinking clearer and when you know the subject or whatever, where you can additionally infer this about yourself correctly and then rationally ramp up the confidence (even if slight) in yourself. But this wasn’t one of those cases, it was the simple fact that I felt great about myself.
Anyway the real point of this post is that there’s a flipside (or straightforward generalization) of this: we can talk about this fake inertia for subjects at rest or at motion. What I mean is there’s this similar tendency to not feel like doing something because you don’t have that dynamic right now, hence all the clichés of the form “first blow is half the battle”. In a sense, that’s all I’m communicating here, but seeing it as a simple irrational mistake (as in the example above) really helped me get over this without drama: just remind yourself of the bottomline and start moving in the correct flow, ignoring the uncalibrated halo (or lack thereof) of emotion.
Above, a visual depiction of strangepoop.
Ideally, I’d make another ninja-edit that would retain the content in my post and the joke in your comment in a reflexive manner, but I am crap at strange loops.