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Chipmonk
Karma: 1,005
(not the rest of your body).
How do we know?
When you say vitamin A, do you literally mean vitamin A, or the similar potential-precursor compound found in plants that is often mistaken as vitamin A? See my other comment.
Hi, thanks for responding. You say:
Dietary vitamin A (beta carotene) is not the active form of vitamin A (retinoic acid), it needs to be converted into the active form by the body’s enzymes.
It is possible to eat the active form of vitamin A, for example through animal sources like liver.
When I said vitamin A, I meant vitamin A (not the compound in plants that can be lossily converted into vitamin A).
So this doesn’t answer the question IMO
thanks! There’s a lot I don’t post on LessWrong because I don’t think it matches the vibe. Even this post has gotten some substantial downvotes
haha i didn’t think
what becoming secure does to a mfer
would resonate on lesswrong
empiric claims for which they have neither empirical evidence from their own life experience
what
I have a confusion about retinoids that I haven’t been able to find an answer to:
If retinoids are approximately vitamin A, does this just mean that the average person is very vitamin A deficient? Should they just be eating vitamin A instead? (The best source is probably animal liver.) Surely this would have not just the beneficial skin effects but also lots of other positive effects on the body (surely facial skin is not the only part of the body bottlenecked by vitamin A).
I wonder if people who eat/absorb lots of vitamin A don’t get any marginal benefit from retinoids.
Btw I’ll pay $30 for a satisfying answer to this
Clarification: By vitamin A, I literally mean vitamin A. The compound that can be used without conversion. For example, the compound that is consumed through animal sources like liver.
This may sound tautological, but how do you know you that 1) you had the extreme fears; 2) it was exposure (as opposed to anything else or stochasticity) that fixed it?
That seems more avoidant to me than what I said haha.
Also, I fully expected this person to ask questions for more detail if I had said what you suggest.
I should also add that I’m fortunate to be “sheltered” from the literature by mentors (one is a therapist, one Coherence Therapy, also others). They will just call me out if I say something wrong. I did not discuss this exact point with them in specific though but I think they would vaguely agree, I wouldn’t be surprised if they helped me qualify my statement slightly more, but that’s also why I’m posting this here to get feedback
I care about truth and substance and not about debating.
The trouble is that I don’t know what you’ll be receptive to. I don’t want to talk randomly in your direction and have it not address your cruxes.
“Why don’t you put more effort into finding out that the thesis on which you wrote a post is true?”
Thanks!
Though, you haven’t specified which thesis, so I’ll assume you meant the title:
Exposure therapy can’t rule out disasters
First, I’ll explain what I said in the post, which I originally thought would’ve been sufficient.
Afterward, I’ll explain related context which I’m operating from which I did not include in the post.
First:
As I say in the post,
In my experience,
There is something like I say in the post that definitely seems to be the case in my experience helping myself and others grow. I have seen many people vaguely try more exposure therapy and make little progress.
You can consider this for yourself:
Is there anything you avoid that exposure still hasn’t fixed?
Do any examples come to mind in your life? Please let me know if yes or no.
Frankly I thought this would be self-evident for each reader to find things like this in themselves. I expected the evidence to come from you. (But I’m happy to explain this now that you’ve asked.)
Note that nowhere in the post do I say that exposure can’t work or never works. Obviously it works sometimes. But not always. Again:
I suspect that people who are afraid of something, even after ample exposure, are afraid of the rare, worst case scenarios. The (subjective) disasters.
Maybe that could’ve been avoided if instead I added one word: “Exposure therapy can’t rule out all disasters”?
But the reason I was okay with the title as-is was this:
Because exposure cannot disprove that something terrible might, at some point, happen.
This seems obvious so I’m not going to explain why this is true. Same reason that math proofs require actual proofs, rather than trying lots of numbers.
But I will clarify one thing:
My model of exposure is that if it updates unconscious predictions, it can only update predictions relating to stuff that actually happened. If average-case exposures made you unlearn your fears, then surely you weren’t afraid of any worse case scenarios. (Maybe you happened to unlearn the fears simultaneously through other means, but that would be mere correlation.)
To unlearn fears to scenario X, you must be exposed to scenario X. However sometimes scenario X is so rare/bad that exposure is not workable.
(If that wasn’t the case, then this seems like accepting the argument that “living” is exposure therapy for fear, and so simply by living you will unlearn all of your fears.)
Also:
I’ll let you in on some context to my state writing this post. I didn’t include this before but it seems helpful to say now.
I have helped people—people who have tried intentional exposure for months and sometimes years before talking to me—overcome much or all their aversions in just a couple of hours, no exposure necessary. (I will be sharing one of these case studies in another post soon.)
In general, I’ve learned much more about minds—real results both for myself and others—simply by iterating on my own, just like the post above.
I recently had the chance to counsel a cofounder of Coherence Therapy and he said he was surprisingly impressed and made progress on an issue he wasn’t able to make on his own.
The first person I counseled with my new method told me that our one conversation was “significantly more productive than my last 6 months of CBT and talk therapy I did”.
If mainstream growth theory was good, surely there would not be $100 bills lying on the ground like this?
I’ve also vaguely had the experience of trying to read mainstream academic material (with the exception of memory reconsolidation) and simply not understanding it because I disagree too hard with the assumptions.
This has led me to somewhat avoid “the academic literature” out of fear of thought-contamination.
Does that make sense? Please let me know if you have any specific questions.
basically memory reconsolidation. i write a lot more about this in the other posts on my blog
What pinged is that these don’t register to me as probing questions at all! These seem like normal attempts to learn about someone by asking about what is, for most people, a very large part of their life: work.
Partially I began to agree after the shift, partially I guess there’s more context that I haven’t been able to communicate through text.
To me these still read like defensive, insecure answers
What might say if you felt like that in that situation?
Thanks for commenting, I’m not concerned
Sorry, I’m still trying to figure out what you’re asking. I would love to respond to your comment but I need specific questions to respond to. What specific questions do you have for me?
Oh ok, I mistakenly thought that you wanted me to respond to what you said
Hi Christian, you seem frustrated. I would like to respond to your comment, but you haven’t asked any specific questions I can respond to. Is there anything in specific you would like me to address?
I’m also just confused. What type of argument are you expecting for the claim “exposure cannot disprove that something terrible might, at some point, happen”?
Context: I ran 8 days of workshops on AI safety boundaries earlier this year.
Thanks for mentioning boundaries! I agree with everything you’ve said here.
I’d like to point readers to these related links:
I do feel a bit awkward about it as I’m very much involved in both projects, but these two otherwise?
I don’t see this as a reason for awkwardness
The Collective Intelligence Company: https://thecollectiveintelligence.company/company
The link worked yesterday but it’s not working now?
could be, figuring this out