Math/Physics at Columbia.
Luke Cheng
Karma: 7
On a more meta-level what if you just applied the same trick but to deciding to not make the bad decision? It’s a double negative on purpose because perhaps you would gain information on why you are not comfortable not eating the donut or snoozing the alarm, but only if you are go through the machinations of the double negative in your head. This is a trick I’ve been using more and more.
Something like: Tasty donut feeling → awareness of want → awareness of diet goals that contradict this want → awareness that you have a choice to make → deciding not to make the wrong choice to see what would happen → experience of not eating the donut → (experiential data: feeling hungry, feeling tired, feeling grumpy, etc. and positing reasons for why those things occurred) → next time you get the tasty donut feeling, you actually have more data than if you just ate the donut.
My understanding of this is that you are turning off the fear/ick response to doing the thing in order to rationally judge the situation, but the method you’ve devised to turn the fear/ick is to submit to it momentarily.
It would seem good to just be able to do that without having to submit every time. I can imagine there are a myriad of ways to do this. Experience seems to allow you to do this more automatically given enough of a causal awareness or just habit.
This entire process seems eerily similar to a Hegelian dialectic, especially the last step of “Seek Fusion, Not Compromise”. In the Hegelian sense, we start with a Thesis, Antithesis, and then move to an Overcoming which is an argument that can contain the contradiction between the Thesis and Antithesis, without losing the contradiction in a typical Synthesis (for a Platonic Dialectic).
A simple example is on the topic the status of our life, introduced to me by a former professor.
Thesis: We are living beings.
Anti-thesis: We are all dying beings.
Synthesis (that loses the contradiction): Living/Dying is marked by cellular regeneration. When we start to lose more cells than we regenerate, we are dying. Before that, we are living.
Becoming/Overcoming: Living and Dying are at the same time the same and different. We know that they can be the same, but feel distinctly different.This may seem like a weird example but the point is that most people are used to Synthesis type of resolutions vs. Becoming/Overcoming in a Hegelian sense, but resolutions that hold any abstract weight to move forward must contain the contradiction before it, instead of losing it. There’s other examples that seem to be Hegelian even if denied by their author (Nietzsche’s moral genealogy of good/bad → good/evil → Ubermensch).
This may be too specific into one area of philosophy but I think there’s merit to characterizing these sorts of rationality exercises in ways that are historically important as well. Perhaps why some people in the comments have a hard time using this process in practice is because finding an overcoming/becoming argument is typically hard.
Do you have any real world feedback for this? I think the idea is provisionally great, but the article would be 10x better at conveying the loop of learning to others if you gave many concrete examples where this actually helped and was worth the effort. My guess is that it is really exponential over time.
I have some examples in my feedback loop documents where I do do this and it has really helped.
I also have 2 extra versions where I try 1) using system 1 thinking explicitly for system 2, 2) I skip forward in time and just think about the entire next conversation that would unfold after the one in my present head.