Polling Thread January 2017
One next installment of the Polling Thread.
The Polling thread seems to have fallen out of regular use but I will use it shamelessly to post one of few polls. To make it a bit more useful and in line with the current use of LW I suggest that you post links to interesting polls outside of LW.
This is your chance to ask your multiple choice question you always wanted to throw in. Get qualified numeric feedback to your comments. Post fun polls.
These use to be the rules:
Each poll (or link to a poll) goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
You must should at least vote all polls that were posted earlier than your own. This ensures participation in all polls and also limits the total number of polls. You may of course vote without posting a poll.
Your poll should include a ‘don’t know’ option (to avoid conflict with 2). I don’t know whether we need to add a troll catch option here but we will see.
If you don’t know how to make a poll in a comment look at the Poll Markup Help.
This is a somewhat regular thread. If it is successful I may post again. Or you may. In that case do the following :
Use “Polling Thread” in the title.
Copy the rules.
Add the tag “poll”.
Link to this Thread or a previous Thread.
Create a top-level comment saying ‘Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be polls or similar’
Add a second top-level comment with an initial poll to start participation.
How frequently do you talk to yourself? (As opposed to Gunnar’s talk to others question) [pollid:1184]
How good do you think you are at introspection? (i.e. debugging internal “ugh”s, figuring out where your feelings are coming from, etc.) (1-10 scale.
1 = “I’m never really sure what’s happening inside me. I just do things.”
5 = “I can tell where some feelings come from.” or “I can sorta understand how I operate.”
10 = “I can solve internal problems really effectively” or “I have really good explicit mental models of how my own mind works.”
[pollid:1185]
Let’s find out how contentious a few claims about status are.
Lowering your status can be simultaneously cooperative and self-beneficial. [pollid:1186]
Conditional on status games being zero-sum in terms of status, it’s possible/common for the people participating in or affected by a status game to end up much happier or much worse off, on average, than they were before the status game. [pollid:1187]
Instinctive trust of high status people regularly obstructs epistemic cleanliness outside of the EA and rationalist communities. [pollid:1188]
Instinctive trust of high status people regularly obstructs epistemic cleanliness within the EA and rationalist communities. [pollid:1189]
Does talking help?
It is said that talking helps.
Whether it does is an often posed question e.g. here or here—except when it doesn’t.
When therapists do it, it’s called talk therapy.
Personally I have noticed that the chance of problems going away or otherwise being solved after talking about it seems to increase. This perception could due to any number of biases of course. Anyway I’d like to ask for your opinion on when and whether it helps.
What do you think?
Talking does help most people [pollid:1180]
Talking does help me [pollid:1181]
Talking helps more with small everyday problems than with big/traumatic/existential problems [pollid:1182]
How often do you talk about your problems? [pollid:1183]
Vote help:
On the before last question: If you think that it doesn’t depend on the size you should choose the middle option.
For the graded questions: If you just want to see the results please choose the middle option.
Comments go here
What about talking to yourself?
Does that count here too?
I’ve found that doing silly things like opening a text document and asking myself questions and then replying to them has been therapeutic for small things on multiple occasions.
I would think that for the purposes of the poll that doesn’t count, because it’s more a “guided thinking” thing—you’re helping yourself to organize your thoughts by framing your problem as an imaginary dialogue. I do it too, with mixed results (I sometimes just end up scolding myself which I don’t think is particularly constructive). But I would think it’s qualitatively different to an actual dialogue with another mind which has at least the potential to introduce solutions or perspectives that you would not have come up with on your own. Maybe you should create a similar poll to see how many people talk to themselves and whether it helps!
Hm, I think that might actually just be good for seeing how prevalent this is, esp. around here.
I suspect that a high frequency of talking to yourself or high quality of internal conversations is strongly associated with good introspection or focusing (in the Gendlin sense).
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