Yes. Activation is the key. The synapses that code the learned emotional responses have a period after which they have been activated during which they can be changed. If no disconfirming or contradictory experience takes place they will be re-consolidated. But if a disconfirm experience takes place in that window they will not. That is the theory and there is some good animal research to support it.
ILikeLogic
Karma: 53
Does that look right? There is no font selection in the editor. I just had to remove it completely and paste it in again from my text editor. The editor is not exactly commercial word-processor level.
No problem. I have to figure it out 1st though. Give me a few minutes.
Hoping to start a discussion about overcoming insecurity
I agree it is an interesting result but it isn’t really the way the study has been portrayed. The takeaway, before hearing about this, was that anyone with power will start to abuse it, on their own, if just left to their own devices. But this is not, it now seems, what really happened in the Zimbardo prison guard experiments. So just like with the Milgram shock experiments, important information was missing causing the results to imply a more negative picture of human nature.
I think that conveying more information, such as with the statement “Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement” subtly suggests a greater familiarity with or knowledge of the subject (in this case Linda) and so seems more authoritative. I believe that is what is happening here. If you included even more information it would create that impression even more strongly. For example “Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement and she is dating Fred and lives near the train station and her phone number is 555-3213″ sounds like its her best friend talking and who knows more about Linda? Her best friend or someone who only knows that she is a bank teller? I think the extra information pulls on an intuition that someone who knows a lot about something is very familiar with it and likely to be correct.
In an episode of the Freakonomics podcast they talked about similar skepticism about Phillip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison guard experiments. The ‘guards’ felt subtly encouraged to become abusive to the ‘prisoners’.
Pratchett and Gaiman co-authored a book called ‘Good Omens’. I highly recommend it.
I follow sabermetrics and its children. I was really into Bill James back in the day and still had a subscription to BaseballProspectus.com (this post is half-drunk so excuse typos please). My 2 favorie sports are hockey and baseball. Baseball analytics made its biggest advances years ago—now it seems like they are just refining but hockey is in the initial stages. I’ve been into possession stats for hockey more than any baseball stats for the past couple of years although I still wander on to baseballprospectus and fangraphs and read some of the posts every 2 or 3 weeks.. I’m not a big hoops fan but I really like the advanced stats they have and footballoutsiders is great too although I havent really gone into depth there. I’m also interested in the performance stuff. I .listen to superhumanradio regularly. He has really good interviews with scientists on a regular basis.
That’s an interesting thought. Maybe I do think that it is better to make everyone a little bit worse off materially to make the distribution more equal. I don’t think this is pathological. In somewhat of a paradox what matters most to absolute well-being is our relative material wealth not our absolute wealth. Now, of course, when looked at as a ranking nothing can be done about the fact that some will have more wealth than others. Nothing short of trying to make everyone equal (and no one wants that). But the ranking is not the only thing that matters. There has always been a distribution of wealth but the those at the top have not always had so much more than the median. Making everyone a little worse off materially to make the distribution a bit narrower may make the absolute well-being greater.
Also I wonder if right wingers would support a distributionist policy to help the poor and oppressed even if such a policy were certain to be effective. My hunch is that they would not because they are opposed, in principle, to any redistribution.
I was just about to say almost the same thing but I decided I’d check the other replies to see if anyone else had already said it. Just to emphasize and agree with you—I think most people imagine the 1st scenario when they are answering these questions. Its just too hard for people to imagine 40yr olds that are like 30yr olds, 60yr olds that are like 45yr olds, 80yr olds that are like 60yr olds etc… That is not what I think they are imagining when they are answering.
Hi. I’m a 42yr old male, from the US and I’ve been aware of LessWrong for a few years now, stumbling across links to posts on LessWrong here and there in my web surfing travels. I’ve always been more or less a rationalist. I’ve been a self-identified atheist since high school. I’ve been a fan of Daniel Dennett for many years. I read ‘Consciousness Explained’ when it first came out many years ago and I’ve kept up reading interesting philosophy and science books since then. I’ve always enjoyed books that made sense out of previously mysterious phenomena. My feedly list has hundreds of blogs mostly in nutrition/psychology/economics and some sports (I’m a big sports fan, but prefer an analytical approach to that as well). In essence I’m the type of guy who likes this stuff.
I remember reading on here a few years ago some posts about a rationalist approach to self-help. I’m especially interested in that. I’ve always been an anxious and insecure person and if I can solve that problem the quality of my life will skyrocket. Having spent a fair amount of time reading the comment threads at LessWrong I’m pretty optimistic that I can find some folks here who are interested in discussing these things in the same way that I am. Frankly I take a much more reductionist approach to personal problems than most others and this seems like a place where I may find some people who may think similarly. Barring that I think I’ll just enjoy reading and commenting here every so often.
This post reminds me of ADHD. Here is a quote from a 2009 Washington Post article :
According to the theory, the trouble is a lack of motivation as well as a deficit of attention: People with the disorder can’t generate the same degree of enthusiasm as other people for activities they don’t automatically find appealing.
ADHD has long been assumed to have something to do with low dopamine. So perhaps something to raise dopamine levels would be helpful. Some people claim that taking L-tyrosine, a dopamine precursor, can raise dopamine levels and help people pay attention to things that would otherwise not hold their attention.
I’ve never attempted a commitment contract but I don’t really care for them in principle. I don’t really want to find a way to force myself to do things that I don’t want to do. What I really want much more than that is to figure out how to become comfortable doing the things that I’m not comfortable doing.
To take your example, if you are uncomfortable socially it is because you have an underlying belief that these social situations could be very harmful or painful for you. That belief is most likely due to stuff that really did happen to you. You probably were rejected in your past and it was painful. I think the answer is not to find a way to force yourself to interact despite the fear but rather to find a way to reassure yourself so that you can interact without forcing yourself through fear. To add one more thing, I don’t think it should be anyone’s goal to be impervious to the pain of rejection. Rather I think its better to aspire to be someone who is confident that they can bear rejection and bounce back from it and learn from it. It is supposed to be painful but it should not be so painful that you become paralyzed with fear forever more. I have much more to say about it but this is a pretty good summary of my feelings on the matter.
I’m a proponent of introspection. That’s how you figure out what is really going on with yourself. Psychotherapy may be helpful in your case as you may need someone to call your attention to self-deception. We are all guilty of it so dont take that as a criticism. I’m not sure exactly why your introspection is not bearing any fruit. If you are brave and honest with yourself but also forgiving and understanding with yourself your introspection should lead to greater self-understanding and a clear picture of where you are and how you got there. I hope that helps.
I think maybe I’d prefer to maximize my personal satisfaction in my charitable efforts. The knowledge that I may do more good some other way won’t substitute for the charitable action that will leave me feeling most satisfied based on my normal human emotions, irrational though they may be.
I agree, I think a good writer has a sense when a particular part of his argument is tricky or more difficult to grasp so he may add additional explanations or examples even though he has already made the point.
Personally I usually prefer your style, mostly, I think, because I am impatient. I want to know what the writer’s point is right away and then I like to get right into his supporting arguments so I can determine whether he’s made the case well enough to convince me. There are other times, when I’m more more relaxed and have more time when I may enjoy his style but they are the exception.
I’m not a fan of congitive therapy. I tried it for a while and it worked ok at times but I believe that it is impractical in the long run. Its using your cognitive mind to ‘fight’ against conditioned emotional responses. It can work as long as you spend a lot of cognitive effort on the cause. Eventually I grew tired of the effort and it wasn’t really all that effective. My goal is to discover how to decondition the learned emotional responses.