I’m really enjoying your posts, and I think they’re largely correct. But there’s a strong focus on positives, and it seems to me that the brain is mainly geared for survival, so that it’s in “Prevent bad things from happen”-mode rather than “Make good things happen”-mode. The strength of this bias is probably given by the neuroticism trait.
Whenever I imagine something, my brain always brainstorms things which could go wrong, and it’s extremely good at doing this. This is the self-protection of the ego, and I think it’s quite strong not only in me who is neurotic, but even in people with average health. I believe that you need to be on the healthy side (believe in your ability to deal with things, so that it’s above the threshold for minor problems to be considered as dangerous) in order for positive thinking to be your main focus.
Like you seem to say, creating positives and preventing negatives are different to the brain. The brain has some quirks around negations. You can exploit this inequality by “visualizing” the future you want rather than looking towards problems trying to prevent them. The “law of attraction” is very real, it’s just thought of as myserious or spiritual by people who don’t realize that this is due to a quirk in the brain.
Imagine that you’re walking (navigating somewhere), either physically or with a mental navigation through actions leading to a positive future. Now imagine looking at the solution vs looking at the problem, you will have widely different outcomes. It’s like looking for every wrong path in a maze trying to avoid them rather than looking for the correct path. The difference in information to keep track of (and which can overwhelm you) is staggering. “Wrong” is a much bigger set than “Correct”. In computer systems, a hacker needs to find one way in while the defender has to defend against all attack vectors. This inequality is a fundemental law with ties to entropy, so it’s bound to be related in some way.
When you’re walking, you should look at where you want to go. If you look at the people you might run into, you will find that you’re prone to walk into people. We seem to walk towards what we look at, so if you “look into the abyss, the abyss will look back at you”. If you engage with politics and echo-chambers and try to change people for the better, it’s more likely that they will change you for the worse. The training data simply makes you see the world as they see it, poisoning it with their words and concepts, which often fit reality poorly.
A last effect I want to mention is how thing-clusters seem to grow into amalgamations in people who fight against things. Christians fighting against “evil” or “satan” might add more and more things to this category. Metal music tend to have skull symbolism and such in it, but they still seem far apart to me. Why would Christians fear metal music and videogames? i.e. why such a range of association? Political echo-chambers also seem to do this. Why would “Against mass-immigration” envoke “Nazi” or “Pro Russia”? These seem like they should be 3 or 4 steps apart. But extremists seem to deem everything within 4 or so associations from what they hate to be “red flags”, leading to many false positives when assessing whenever I’m “with or against” them.
So while I mainly agree with you, some parts feel a little incomplete (the section about ruminations is treated like a small exception, but I think it’s actually a core part of the model since we’re so survival-oriented). I’ve communicated some of my world-model here, which I hope is either useful or serves as inspiration.
By the way, the “linear combination” idea is really powerful. I’m sure I’ve seen other people reach that conclusion before. I don’t remember the first place I saw it, but the second one was in A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation (search for Threshold)
I’m really enjoying your posts, and I think they’re largely correct. But there’s a strong focus on positives, and it seems to me that the brain is mainly geared for survival, so that it’s in “Prevent bad things from happen”-mode rather than “Make good things happen”-mode. The strength of this bias is probably given by the neuroticism trait.
Whenever I imagine something, my brain always brainstorms things which could go wrong, and it’s extremely good at doing this. This is the self-protection of the ego, and I think it’s quite strong not only in me who is neurotic, but even in people with average health. I believe that you need to be on the healthy side (believe in your ability to deal with things, so that it’s above the threshold for minor problems to be considered as dangerous) in order for positive thinking to be your main focus.
Like you seem to say, creating positives and preventing negatives are different to the brain. The brain has some quirks around negations. You can exploit this inequality by “visualizing” the future you want rather than looking towards problems trying to prevent them. The “law of attraction” is very real, it’s just thought of as myserious or spiritual by people who don’t realize that this is due to a quirk in the brain.
Imagine that you’re walking (navigating somewhere), either physically or with a mental navigation through actions leading to a positive future. Now imagine looking at the solution vs looking at the problem, you will have widely different outcomes. It’s like looking for every wrong path in a maze trying to avoid them rather than looking for the correct path. The difference in information to keep track of (and which can overwhelm you) is staggering. “Wrong” is a much bigger set than “Correct”. In computer systems, a hacker needs to find one way in while the defender has to defend against all attack vectors. This inequality is a fundemental law with ties to entropy, so it’s bound to be related in some way.
When you’re walking, you should look at where you want to go. If you look at the people you might run into, you will find that you’re prone to walk into people. We seem to walk towards what we look at, so if you “look into the abyss, the abyss will look back at you”. If you engage with politics and echo-chambers and try to change people for the better, it’s more likely that they will change you for the worse. The training data simply makes you see the world as they see it, poisoning it with their words and concepts, which often fit reality poorly.
A last effect I want to mention is how thing-clusters seem to grow into amalgamations in people who fight against things. Christians fighting against “evil” or “satan” might add more and more things to this category. Metal music tend to have skull symbolism and such in it, but they still seem far apart to me. Why would Christians fear metal music and videogames? i.e. why such a range of association? Political echo-chambers also seem to do this. Why would “Against mass-immigration” envoke “Nazi” or “Pro Russia”? These seem like they should be 3 or 4 steps apart. But extremists seem to deem everything within 4 or so associations from what they hate to be “red flags”, leading to many false positives when assessing whenever I’m “with or against” them.
So while I mainly agree with you, some parts feel a little incomplete (the section about ruminations is treated like a small exception, but I think it’s actually a core part of the model since we’re so survival-oriented). I’ve communicated some of my world-model here, which I hope is either useful or serves as inspiration.
By the way, the “linear combination” idea is really powerful. I’m sure I’ve seen other people reach that conclusion before. I don’t remember the first place I saw it, but the second one was in A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation (search for Threshold)