Article request: how to find, identify, and remove those conflicts.
the unfortunate fact that this is also what you have to do, if your ultimate goal is to help people
Are you saying that self-help books are but advertisement for workshops and that it’s impossible to be any other way? That is, that an akrasia technique cannot be encoded as a string of symbols?
It doesn’t deserve a top-level post, but I do have a method for locating conflicts that works for me—a written self-interview. I open an empty Word document, and imagine that I’m being interviewed by someone (or something?) smarter, more confident or higher-status than me.
I won’t quote my existing interview documents—they’re too context-dependent, and sometimes too personal—but here’s an example of how it usually looks like:
Alpha: You look depleted. What’s bothering you? Me: I feel that the work I’m doing isn’t leading me anywhere. Alpha: What do you mean by ‘anywhere’? Money? Fame? Personal satisfaction? Me: Money. Alpha: So, you think that the work you’re doing isn’t going to make you rich, right? Me: Right. Alpha: Then why are you doing it? ... …
The interview continues until I find the source of the conflict and decide how to resolve it. If I can’t locate it on the first session, I get back to the saved document later to continue the interview. I included the names ‘Alpha’ and ‘Me’ for readability—I don’t type any names when recording the interview.
I have at least three occasions when this technique helped me pinpoint conflicts that paralyzed me (one of them was a cause of a 6-month procrastination streak.)
Some programmers do something like this when they’re stuck on a problem—they call it Rubber Ducking. Googling it I just found 4 separate stories about students having to explain their programming problems out loud to teddy bears before they get to ask a teacher.
Interesting technique, I’ll need to remember that.
Reminds me of the several times I’ve thought I’ve disagreed with Eliezer on various issues here, spent a while understanding my objections so I could detail it in a reply, and ended up convincing myself of his orignal position by the time I finished writing.
Would be better if you didn’t say whom you ended up agreeing with. Most people here have either a halo or horns on Eliezer, and discounting that is distracting.
Yes, I confirm that this works—because I myself serve as a Rubber Duck / Teddy Bear. I lead a team of programmers, and they come to me to talk about their current problems. I always welcome this, and I often initiate these rubber-ducking sessions myself.
However, I didn’t realize that I’m essentially rubber-ducking myself (heh!) during my self-interviews. Interesting.
This is a definitely a tool that I use, and teach other people to use. Self-inquiry doesn’t have to be written, but it does have to be done, and it’s generally best to do it in a way that involves an external sense—hearing yourself say it, or seeing it written. I don’t know why exactly it’s helpful, but it definitely is.
The biggest challenges most people have to conducting self-inquiry, though, are that:
They don’t know how to separate the two “voices”, and stay stuck in only one side of the conversation,
They engage in self-defeating behaviors, like criticizing the other voice instead of being relatively helpful/inquisitive/nurturing as you are in the dialog example you gave, and
They have trouble staying focused and knowing how to take the inquiry somewhere without either letting their emotional side run on, or trying to overwhelm it with logic.
It has taken me a long time to learn how to teach around these points, some more so than others.
I don’t know why exactly it’s helpful, but it definitely is.
When you keep it in your head, you don’t have to form words; you can just think about what’s bothering you as a vague concept. When you verbalize it externally, it forces you to clarify those ideas and pinpoint exactly what you’re thinking; as far as I can tell, that’s where the utility of the technique comes from.
I recently rediscovered this as a means, not of solving technical problems, but of overcoming strong negative emotions. Even when I already understood the facts and causes, “talking it out” on the page helped me vent the stress and calm down.
Perhaps in situations where your emotions are inhibiting your thinking, writing the useful parts (what you think, want, and can do) but not the useless parts (“oh god oh god everything is terrible”) gives the former more weight.
Are you saying that self-help books are but advertisement for workshops and that it’s impossible to be any other way? That is, that an akrasia technique cannot be encoded as a string of symbols?
You can encode them as strings of symbols all you want -- the authors do encode them, and many try hard to do it well.
What you can’t do is guarantee that the coding will be interpreted correctly by the recipient, precisely because you’re telling them to do something that they can’t currently do.
Let’s say your problem is that you motivate yourself negatively—by worrying about what you can’t do, or haven’t done yet. So you read a book that tries to teach you how to motivate yourself positively.
Well, the entire time you’re reading that, you’re probably going to be negatively motivating yourself, by noticing how everything in the book is something you don’t do, even though you know you should. Now, by the time you’re done, you feel even worse than when you started, and you haven’t learned anything, either!
Alicorn’s “Mental Crystallography” post is thematically relevant here, although I know for a fact that one’s personal architecture is not quite so immutable as the crystal metaphor implies; it just seems that way, if you haven’t had the experience of changing it.
So, I prefer a metaphor of mental muscles, where some have more developed strength through use, and others need development. And you have to be able to relax your overused muscles, to “allow” others to come into play, because you can only pay attention to so much at once. (I view meditation, for example, as being the exercise of watching your mental muscles flex, and then practicing noticing and relaxing each one as it does so.)
So, the catch is that in order to make changes, you have to be able to “go meta”—not in the abstraction (“about”) dimension, but in the sensing direction. Going not from near to far, but from far to near. Observing what your brain is doing in the moment that it’s doing so, rather than verbally overshadowing and creating confabulated explanations that don’t relate to what you’re really doing.
Only, most people basically respond to that instruction by verbally telling themselves not to verbally overshadow themselves! Paradox is the order of the day.
So you have to be able to see that, for example, if you’re constantly asking, “Why can’t I figure out what I want?” that the problem is that wanting is not something you can “figure out”—you’re trying to lift the weight with the wrong muscle, and it not only doesn’t work, it hurts.
I use that example, because I recently realized I was using the “figure out the right answer” muscle for everything, and I’ve had to learn to relax it in order to learn new things.
But the reader of anything that I write, or that anyone else writes, is at a handicap of not yet noticing which mental muscles they’re using to create their own problems with, and the author cannot point it out to them, if he or she is not there.
Speaking to someone on the phone for a few minutes or reading what they write in a post on the Mind Hackers’ Guild forum, it’s pretty easy to see what “muscle” someone is using to think with in relation to a problem, and to say, “ah, here’s what it is, go fix that,” using the language and terms provided by my books or other training materials.
But I at least have not found a way to do that in any static piece of training material, that doesn’t consist of a workshop recordiing or transcript in which somebody else had the same problem/belief/”muscle” causing them a problem. So, people end up having to listen or watch a ton of stuff, in order to stumble on a “patient like me”, unless they are willing to engage in a live (or even forum-mediated) interaction.
Which, by the way, is why stage work is so important in most gurus’ workshops, relative to the amount of instruction done. Instruction isn’t insight, and it’s a separate process.
Now, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to learn these things without direct training. I just mean that, below a certain threshold level of skill and understanding, no book or workshop is going to help you, if your issue is that you’re always applying the wrong mental muscles. Any book or program will probably help some people—the subset for whom that particular communication includes a missing link in their insight or understanding.
However, once you get above your personal “self-inquiry waterline”, so to speak, then you can take almost any halfway decent self-help book and go, “Ah, now I see!”
(Funny story: one of my students told me about going to some other guru’s class and trying to make sense of the new-agey mumbo jumbo the lady was talking about, and then at one point, he went, “Ah! She’s talking about RMI...” and then he was able to get some value out of the rest of what she said, even though the woman’s theories were completely woo.)
Anyway, until you get to the point of “clicking” on how to do “near” self-reflection, you’ll sort of be where I’ve been in relation to Bayes—thinking you get the general idea, but not understanding what all the fuss is about and wondering if it’s some sort of cult. ;-)
(Of course, if it just so happens that the only piece you’re missing is which mental muscle to use, and not having a problem with needing to know which one(s) to relax, then you will already learn easily and effortlessly from self-help books and won’t see what all the fuss is about. I refer to such people as “naturally successful” or “naturally motivated”… the “epistemically lucky”, in Alicorn’s terms I suppose, although I mean it only in relation to their ability to self-manage and self-motivate. )
Funny story: one of my students told me about going to some other guru’s class and trying to make sense of the new-agey mumbo jumbo the lady was talking about, and then at one point, he went, “Ah! She’s talking about RMI...” and then he was able to get some value out of the rest of what she said, even though the woman’s theories were completely woo.
RMI. Now that would be a fascinating follow up post! Either that or a direct description of another one of your mind hacking techniques in this same lesswrong-targetted style. (Your writing style was spot on by the way.)
RMI. Now that would be a fascinating follow up post!
The irony is that RMI is absolutely the simplest, most natural thing in the world, and it’s utterly fucking insane that it needs a three-letter acronym at all.
In fact, I only gave it a name in order to be able to tell people that they’re doing it wrong.
Or more precisely, that they’re not doing it at all. Until I recently got to the improved metaphor of “mental muscles”, I didn’t know how to say, “you’re using the analysis muscle, you need to use the curiosity muscle instead”. So I coined RMI—relaxed mental inquiry—as a name for the state of mind of genuine curiosity.
You know, that same kind of genuine curiosity that Eliezer likes to rant about, where you need to genuinely not know the answer, and instead sincerely ask the question.
Except that Eliezer would also have more luck at teaching it if he gave it a funny technical name, too. You call it “curiosity”, and everybody thinks they already know what it means.
And then they don’t learn.
To learn, you have to be ignorant. To discover something new, you have to be surprised.
I could continue going on in pseudo-Zen about it, but the point is that knowing things doesn’t help you change, only doing things does. And you have to be able to “do” curiosity in order to get your brain to go “near”.
The bare minimum requirement for any form of mindhacking is to be able to attend to the present moment. With most gurus and coaching (and even therapy), this usually happens when the teacher asks a question and the student has to think about it.
RMI is my attempt to teach people to be both the teacher asking the question, and the student answering it… without becoming a show-off student or a hectoring teacher.
Heck, often people don’t manage it with a teacher asking them things, if they’re too busy confabulating. But at least if they’re in front of a teacher, the teacher can stop them, and re-ask the question.
Except that Eliezer would also have more luck at teaching it if he gave it a funny > technical name, too. You call it “curiosity”, and everybody thinks they already know what it means.
That is, that an akrasia technique cannot be encoded as a string of symbols?
Think of it like learning to play an instrument. Sure, you can describe good technique in writing, but it’s hard to correct someone’s technique in writing. Odds are the next part of the book they’re going to read won’t have the piece of information that would prove most useful in improving their technique. That’s why people take music lessons.
Think of it like learning to play an instrument. Sure, you can describe good technique in writing, but it’s hard to correct someone’s technique in writing. Odds are the next part of the book they’re going to read won’t have the piece of information that would prove most useful in improving their technique. That’s why people take music lessons.
This. Exactly this. Awesomely this. I am totally going to steal this metaphor. ;-)
I’ve talked about feedback and riding bicycles and such before, but this is a much better way of explaining what the exact problem is.
In fact, on a related note (no pun intended), the specific problem people usually have is that their “pitch” is off - they can’t “hear” when their thinking is going astray, and so don’t even know there’s anything to correct in the first place… a bit like the really bad singers on American Idol, who think that if they just sing the same way some more, or the same way but louder, it’s going to make a difference.
The most important piece of learning to mindhack without assistance is being able to listen to your own thinking and “hear” what “key” it’s in, or perhaps what “instrument” you’re playing your current thought with at that moment. If you can’t do that basic bit of metacognition, you won’t know whether you’re actually doing RMI or just confabulating at any given moment, and your ability to apply any specific questioning technique will be sporadic at best.
Thus, as a general rule, the more chronic your akrasia, the less likely you will be helped by any kind of method that is not aimed at a “one time pays for all” elimination of your conflict source(s).
Akrasia has various strengths; so too would a meta-akrasia. An akrasia strong enough to defeat GTD or Pomodoro techniques may not be strong enough to defeat a guy you’ve paid a lot staring at you and waiting for you to do the next easy step. The people who would feel the need to go to such workshops are a self-selected group.
An akrasia strong enough to defeat GTD or Pomodoro techniques may not be strong enough to defeat a guy you’ve paid a lot staring at you and waiting for you to do the next easy step. The people who would feel the need to go to such workshops are a self-selected group.
This is very true, but the simpler explanation for GTD/Pomodoro failure (or any other technique failure) is simply that it isn’t addressing the right part of the problem. If you don’t want to be focused (as opposed to “wanting to want to”), a focusing technique simply isn’t going to help.
IOW, although self-selection occurs, postulating strengths of akrasia or meta-akrasia is an unnecessary hypothesis.
In particular, it emphasizes the idea that akrasia is a thing, when in fact it is a conflict between things. Conceptualizing akrasia as a real thing is both an epistemic error and an instrumental inefficiency. You will treat it as a thing to be fought or cured, rather than as an emergent property of conflict.
Heck, even the name, meaning “failure of will” is wrong. It directs one’s attention to willpower-based solutions, instead of focusing on that which causes you to need “will” in the first place.
Article request: how to find, identify, and remove those conflicts.
Are you saying that self-help books are but advertisement for workshops and that it’s impossible to be any other way? That is, that an akrasia technique cannot be encoded as a string of symbols?
It doesn’t deserve a top-level post, but I do have a method for locating conflicts that works for me—a written self-interview. I open an empty Word document, and imagine that I’m being interviewed by someone (or something?) smarter, more confident or higher-status than me.
I won’t quote my existing interview documents—they’re too context-dependent, and sometimes too personal—but here’s an example of how it usually looks like:
The interview continues until I find the source of the conflict and decide how to resolve it. If I can’t locate it on the first session, I get back to the saved document later to continue the interview. I included the names ‘Alpha’ and ‘Me’ for readability—I don’t type any names when recording the interview.
I have at least three occasions when this technique helped me pinpoint conflicts that paralyzed me (one of them was a cause of a 6-month procrastination streak.)
Some programmers do something like this when they’re stuck on a problem—they call it Rubber Ducking. Googling it I just found 4 separate stories about students having to explain their programming problems out loud to teddy bears before they get to ask a teacher.
I prefer the teddy bear, because then you can refer to it as the “bug bear”.
Interesting technique, I’ll need to remember that.
Reminds me of the several times I’ve thought I’ve disagreed with Eliezer on various issues here, spent a while understanding my objections so I could detail it in a reply, and ended up convincing myself of his orignal position by the time I finished writing.
Would be better if you didn’t say whom you ended up agreeing with. Most people here have either a halo or horns on Eliezer, and discounting that is distracting.
+1 mind change
Yes, I confirm that this works—because I myself serve as a Rubber Duck / Teddy Bear. I lead a team of programmers, and they come to me to talk about their current problems. I always welcome this, and I often initiate these rubber-ducking sessions myself.
However, I didn’t realize that I’m essentially rubber-ducking myself (heh!) during my self-interviews. Interesting.
This is a definitely a tool that I use, and teach other people to use. Self-inquiry doesn’t have to be written, but it does have to be done, and it’s generally best to do it in a way that involves an external sense—hearing yourself say it, or seeing it written. I don’t know why exactly it’s helpful, but it definitely is.
The biggest challenges most people have to conducting self-inquiry, though, are that:
They don’t know how to separate the two “voices”, and stay stuck in only one side of the conversation,
They engage in self-defeating behaviors, like criticizing the other voice instead of being relatively helpful/inquisitive/nurturing as you are in the dialog example you gave, and
They have trouble staying focused and knowing how to take the inquiry somewhere without either letting their emotional side run on, or trying to overwhelm it with logic.
It has taken me a long time to learn how to teach around these points, some more so than others.
When you keep it in your head, you don’t have to form words; you can just think about what’s bothering you as a vague concept. When you verbalize it externally, it forces you to clarify those ideas and pinpoint exactly what you’re thinking; as far as I can tell, that’s where the utility of the technique comes from.
I recently rediscovered this as a means, not of solving technical problems, but of overcoming strong negative emotions. Even when I already understood the facts and causes, “talking it out” on the page helped me vent the stress and calm down.
Perhaps in situations where your emotions are inhibiting your thinking, writing the useful parts (what you think, want, and can do) but not the useless parts (“oh god oh god everything is terrible”) gives the former more weight.
You can encode them as strings of symbols all you want -- the authors do encode them, and many try hard to do it well.
What you can’t do is guarantee that the coding will be interpreted correctly by the recipient, precisely because you’re telling them to do something that they can’t currently do.
Let’s say your problem is that you motivate yourself negatively—by worrying about what you can’t do, or haven’t done yet. So you read a book that tries to teach you how to motivate yourself positively.
Well, the entire time you’re reading that, you’re probably going to be negatively motivating yourself, by noticing how everything in the book is something you don’t do, even though you know you should. Now, by the time you’re done, you feel even worse than when you started, and you haven’t learned anything, either!
Alicorn’s “Mental Crystallography” post is thematically relevant here, although I know for a fact that one’s personal architecture is not quite so immutable as the crystal metaphor implies; it just seems that way, if you haven’t had the experience of changing it.
So, I prefer a metaphor of mental muscles, where some have more developed strength through use, and others need development. And you have to be able to relax your overused muscles, to “allow” others to come into play, because you can only pay attention to so much at once. (I view meditation, for example, as being the exercise of watching your mental muscles flex, and then practicing noticing and relaxing each one as it does so.)
So, the catch is that in order to make changes, you have to be able to “go meta”—not in the abstraction (“about”) dimension, but in the sensing direction. Going not from near to far, but from far to near. Observing what your brain is doing in the moment that it’s doing so, rather than verbally overshadowing and creating confabulated explanations that don’t relate to what you’re really doing.
Only, most people basically respond to that instruction by verbally telling themselves not to verbally overshadow themselves! Paradox is the order of the day.
So you have to be able to see that, for example, if you’re constantly asking, “Why can’t I figure out what I want?” that the problem is that wanting is not something you can “figure out”—you’re trying to lift the weight with the wrong muscle, and it not only doesn’t work, it hurts.
I use that example, because I recently realized I was using the “figure out the right answer” muscle for everything, and I’ve had to learn to relax it in order to learn new things.
But the reader of anything that I write, or that anyone else writes, is at a handicap of not yet noticing which mental muscles they’re using to create their own problems with, and the author cannot point it out to them, if he or she is not there.
Speaking to someone on the phone for a few minutes or reading what they write in a post on the Mind Hackers’ Guild forum, it’s pretty easy to see what “muscle” someone is using to think with in relation to a problem, and to say, “ah, here’s what it is, go fix that,” using the language and terms provided by my books or other training materials.
But I at least have not found a way to do that in any static piece of training material, that doesn’t consist of a workshop recordiing or transcript in which somebody else had the same problem/belief/”muscle” causing them a problem. So, people end up having to listen or watch a ton of stuff, in order to stumble on a “patient like me”, unless they are willing to engage in a live (or even forum-mediated) interaction.
Which, by the way, is why stage work is so important in most gurus’ workshops, relative to the amount of instruction done. Instruction isn’t insight, and it’s a separate process.
Now, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to learn these things without direct training. I just mean that, below a certain threshold level of skill and understanding, no book or workshop is going to help you, if your issue is that you’re always applying the wrong mental muscles. Any book or program will probably help some people—the subset for whom that particular communication includes a missing link in their insight or understanding.
However, once you get above your personal “self-inquiry waterline”, so to speak, then you can take almost any halfway decent self-help book and go, “Ah, now I see!”
(Funny story: one of my students told me about going to some other guru’s class and trying to make sense of the new-agey mumbo jumbo the lady was talking about, and then at one point, he went, “Ah! She’s talking about RMI...” and then he was able to get some value out of the rest of what she said, even though the woman’s theories were completely woo.)
Anyway, until you get to the point of “clicking” on how to do “near” self-reflection, you’ll sort of be where I’ve been in relation to Bayes—thinking you get the general idea, but not understanding what all the fuss is about and wondering if it’s some sort of cult. ;-)
(Of course, if it just so happens that the only piece you’re missing is which mental muscle to use, and not having a problem with needing to know which one(s) to relax, then you will already learn easily and effortlessly from self-help books and won’t see what all the fuss is about. I refer to such people as “naturally successful” or “naturally motivated”… the “epistemically lucky”, in Alicorn’s terms I suppose, although I mean it only in relation to their ability to self-manage and self-motivate. )
RMI. Now that would be a fascinating follow up post! Either that or a direct description of another one of your mind hacking techniques in this same lesswrong-targetted style. (Your writing style was spot on by the way.)
The irony is that RMI is absolutely the simplest, most natural thing in the world, and it’s utterly fucking insane that it needs a three-letter acronym at all.
In fact, I only gave it a name in order to be able to tell people that they’re doing it wrong.
Or more precisely, that they’re not doing it at all. Until I recently got to the improved metaphor of “mental muscles”, I didn’t know how to say, “you’re using the analysis muscle, you need to use the curiosity muscle instead”. So I coined RMI—relaxed mental inquiry—as a name for the state of mind of genuine curiosity.
You know, that same kind of genuine curiosity that Eliezer likes to rant about, where you need to genuinely not know the answer, and instead sincerely ask the question.
Except that Eliezer would also have more luck at teaching it if he gave it a funny technical name, too. You call it “curiosity”, and everybody thinks they already know what it means.
And then they don’t learn.
To learn, you have to be ignorant. To discover something new, you have to be surprised.
I could continue going on in pseudo-Zen about it, but the point is that knowing things doesn’t help you change, only doing things does. And you have to be able to “do” curiosity in order to get your brain to go “near”.
The bare minimum requirement for any form of mindhacking is to be able to attend to the present moment. With most gurus and coaching (and even therapy), this usually happens when the teacher asks a question and the student has to think about it.
RMI is my attempt to teach people to be both the teacher asking the question, and the student answering it… without becoming a show-off student or a hectoring teacher.
Heck, often people don’t manage it with a teacher asking them things, if they’re too busy confabulating. But at least if they’re in front of a teacher, the teacher can stop them, and re-ask the question.
Brilliant Point. Sad, but true, for most humans.
FTFY. ;-)
I wish I could vote this entire thread up more than once.
Think of it like learning to play an instrument. Sure, you can describe good technique in writing, but it’s hard to correct someone’s technique in writing. Odds are the next part of the book they’re going to read won’t have the piece of information that would prove most useful in improving their technique. That’s why people take music lessons.
This. Exactly this. Awesomely this. I am totally going to steal this metaphor. ;-)
I’ve talked about feedback and riding bicycles and such before, but this is a much better way of explaining what the exact problem is.
In fact, on a related note (no pun intended), the specific problem people usually have is that their “pitch” is off - they can’t “hear” when their thinking is going astray, and so don’t even know there’s anything to correct in the first place… a bit like the really bad singers on American Idol, who think that if they just sing the same way some more, or the same way but louder, it’s going to make a difference.
The most important piece of learning to mindhack without assistance is being able to listen to your own thinking and “hear” what “key” it’s in, or perhaps what “instrument” you’re playing your current thought with at that moment. If you can’t do that basic bit of metacognition, you won’t know whether you’re actually doing RMI or just confabulating at any given moment, and your ability to apply any specific questioning technique will be sporadic at best.
Akrasia has various strengths; so too would a meta-akrasia. An akrasia strong enough to defeat GTD or Pomodoro techniques may not be strong enough to defeat a guy you’ve paid a lot staring at you and waiting for you to do the next easy step. The people who would feel the need to go to such workshops are a self-selected group.
This is very true, but the simpler explanation for GTD/Pomodoro failure (or any other technique failure) is simply that it isn’t addressing the right part of the problem. If you don’t want to be focused (as opposed to “wanting to want to”), a focusing technique simply isn’t going to help.
IOW, although self-selection occurs, postulating strengths of akrasia or meta-akrasia is an unnecessary hypothesis.
In particular, it emphasizes the idea that akrasia is a thing, when in fact it is a conflict between things. Conceptualizing akrasia as a real thing is both an epistemic error and an instrumental inefficiency. You will treat it as a thing to be fought or cured, rather than as an emergent property of conflict.
Heck, even the name, meaning “failure of will” is wrong. It directs one’s attention to willpower-based solutions, instead of focusing on that which causes you to need “will” in the first place.
IIRC, GTD specifically says it’s not for people who have a problem with procrastination.