Well, she has had depression issues and was going through a pretty rough period—our relationship was stressed (largely on account of it being long-distance at the time, with her in Colorado and me in Utah); she was under a lot of stress (finals in the senior year of her bachelor’s degree, which is the reason for the previous long-distance); medical problems that, being an uninsured student, she really had no way to pay for; and we were scrambling to find an apartment and get everything ready for her imminent move to live with me. I had just recently read the Luminosity sequence, and the techniques in it seemed like something that anyone who wanted to be happier could at least give a shot and put to good use.
I linked her to http://lesswrong.com/lw/20l/ureshiku_naritai/, hoping that she could use it, and was told that she felt insulted by it, that it’s against the way she operates, that sometimes she just wants to be miserable and that “fooling yourself into feeling ‘more than a 2’” is just kidding yourself. She said she’d try not to outright ridicule the method but after reading it twice, she felt an intense sense of derision, and noted that she sometimes hates “the analytical approach”.
I’ve also gone through pretty intense depressive episodes, and I know what it’s like to feel helpless. What I don’t understand is accepting that helpless feeling and just trying to deal with it. When I’m feeling that way I can’t always muster the energy and initiative to actually do something about it, but I desperately want to feel different. It’s certainly possible that she was not actually clinically depressed at the time, though she seemed like it to me. But even so, she was not happy, and I was trying to offer her a possible way to become happier.
I linked her to http://lesswrong.com/lw/20l/ureshiku_naritai/, hoping that she could use it, and was told that she felt insulted by it, that it’s against the way she operates, that sometimes she just wants to be miserable and that “fooling yourself into feeling ‘more than a 2’” is just kidding yourself. She said she’d try not to outright ridicule the method but after reading it twice, she felt an intense sense of derision, and noted that she sometimes hates “the analytical approach”.
It’s hard to know what to do with an aversion to “the analytical approach” itself.
You say that sometimes she just wanted to be miserable. Were there other times when she didn’t want to be miserable? How would she react if you said, “Oh, those methods are just for when you don’t want to be miserable.”?
“Oh, those methods are just for when you don’t want to be miserable.”
This is exactly right anyway. I would prefer to be miserable if my entire family were to catch the plague and die. I would not use things like this to “fix” that kind of contextually appropriate misery.
I would prefer to be the sort of person who would mourn her family, in a way vaguely similar to the way that I prefer to be the sort of person who one-boxes on Newcomb’s problem. I would actually carry out this disposition in either case as part of being that kind of person.
Interesting perspective, though I don’t agree with it.
I would ideally prefer to be the sort of person who will do everything in his power to prevent bad things from happening, but who, if they happen anyway, will not further decrease utility by feeling miserable (apart from being a terminal disutility, grief tends to result in additional bad things happening both to oneself and the surviving people one cares about).
The Newcomb analogy basically suggests “what if you can’t have both?”. In that case, granted, I would rather have the former. And that is the trade-off evolution found: it’s as if it can’t trust us to protect people we care about, without holding over our heads a credible threat of harm to them being reflected in harm to ourselves.
But unlike Newcomb, I don’t think the trade-off here is logically necessary. Just because evolution wasn’t able to create minds that have it both ways, does not, it seems to me, preclude the possibility of such minds coming into existence in the future by other means.
(Whether and to what extent we could by means available today modify our existing minds to have it both ways is, granted, another question, to which I don’t currently have a definite answer.)
(Whether and to what extent we could by means available today modify our existing minds to have it both ways is, granted, another question, to which I don’t currently have a definite answer.)
Cognitive behavioral therapy tries to do this (and Alicorn’s luminosity techniques are similar in some ways).
My answer is that in that situation, it’s not about you. For many people, being miserable in response to a situation that ordinarily triggers feelings of intense sadness is a human value; to give up being sad when very sad things happen would be to lose a part of what makes me me. I can understand that you would want me to be happy anyway, but it’s more than a little intrusive of you to insist on dictating my emotional state in that way.
Fair point. I should say, rather, “make sure not to expect your loved ones to ‘help you or anyone else’” with their emotions; sometimes emotions are legitimately self-serving.
As long as they know I wouldn’t want them to be sad.
I don’t really see how that form of grief is self-serving; if you need to grieve to get over my death, fine, but isn’t it more self-serving to be happy?
Well, she has had depression issues and was going through a pretty rough period—our relationship was stressed (largely on account of it being long-distance at the time, with her in Colorado and me in Utah); she was under a lot of stress (finals in the senior year of her bachelor’s degree, which is the reason for the previous long-distance); medical problems that, being an uninsured student, she really had no way to pay for; and we were scrambling to find an apartment and get everything ready for her imminent move to live with me. I had just recently read the Luminosity sequence, and the techniques in it seemed like something that anyone who wanted to be happier could at least give a shot and put to good use.
I linked her to http://lesswrong.com/lw/20l/ureshiku_naritai/, hoping that she could use it, and was told that she felt insulted by it, that it’s against the way she operates, that sometimes she just wants to be miserable and that “fooling yourself into feeling ‘more than a 2’” is just kidding yourself. She said she’d try not to outright ridicule the method but after reading it twice, she felt an intense sense of derision, and noted that she sometimes hates “the analytical approach”.
I’ve also gone through pretty intense depressive episodes, and I know what it’s like to feel helpless. What I don’t understand is accepting that helpless feeling and just trying to deal with it. When I’m feeling that way I can’t always muster the energy and initiative to actually do something about it, but I desperately want to feel different. It’s certainly possible that she was not actually clinically depressed at the time, though she seemed like it to me. But even so, she was not happy, and I was trying to offer her a possible way to become happier.
Thank you for the details. That sounds rough.
It’s hard to know what to do with an aversion to “the analytical approach” itself.
You say that sometimes she just wanted to be miserable. Were there other times when she didn’t want to be miserable? How would she react if you said, “Oh, those methods are just for when you don’t want to be miserable.”?
This is exactly right anyway. I would prefer to be miserable if my entire family were to catch the plague and die. I would not use things like this to “fix” that kind of contextually appropriate misery.
Why? How would that misery help you or anyone else in any way? If I caught the plague and died I would not want my loved ones to be miserable.
I would prefer to be the sort of person who would mourn her family, in a way vaguely similar to the way that I prefer to be the sort of person who one-boxes on Newcomb’s problem. I would actually carry out this disposition in either case as part of being that kind of person.
Interesting perspective, though I don’t agree with it.
I would ideally prefer to be the sort of person who will do everything in his power to prevent bad things from happening, but who, if they happen anyway, will not further decrease utility by feeling miserable (apart from being a terminal disutility, grief tends to result in additional bad things happening both to oneself and the surviving people one cares about).
The Newcomb analogy basically suggests “what if you can’t have both?”. In that case, granted, I would rather have the former. And that is the trade-off evolution found: it’s as if it can’t trust us to protect people we care about, without holding over our heads a credible threat of harm to them being reflected in harm to ourselves.
But unlike Newcomb, I don’t think the trade-off here is logically necessary. Just because evolution wasn’t able to create minds that have it both ways, does not, it seems to me, preclude the possibility of such minds coming into existence in the future by other means.
(Whether and to what extent we could by means available today modify our existing minds to have it both ways is, granted, another question, to which I don’t currently have a definite answer.)
Cognitive behavioral therapy tries to do this (and Alicorn’s luminosity techniques are similar in some ways).
My answer is that in that situation, it’s not about you. For many people, being miserable in response to a situation that ordinarily triggers feelings of intense sadness is a human value; to give up being sad when very sad things happen would be to lose a part of what makes me me. I can understand that you would want me to be happy anyway, but it’s more than a little intrusive of you to insist on dictating my emotional state in that way.
I don’t think he was trying to dictate anyone’s emotional state.
Fair point. I should say, rather, “make sure not to expect your loved ones to ‘help you or anyone else’” with their emotions; sometimes emotions are legitimately self-serving.
As long as they know I wouldn’t want them to be sad.
I don’t really see how that form of grief is self-serving; if you need to grieve to get over my death, fine, but isn’t it more self-serving to be happy?