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.
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.