Editorial note: The introduction before the quote was quite confusing to me. I would prefer the article starting with the quote about alcoholics, so I know what is the main topic. Also, perhaps a summary at the end?
This is how I understood the article:
Research suggests that alcoholics use alcohol as a tool for regulating their emotions. This could be of interesting to LW users, because it is a part of metacognition, which we consider important, but probably wouldn’t look at it from this specific angle. Could we also be somehow victims of our metacognitive strategies, successful (rewarded) in short term, but harmful in long term? We may be addicted to “going meta”, which results in procrastination, because we habitually escape from the object level to the meta level, just like the alcoholics escape from their daily problems to alcohol. The solution for the alcoholics (easier said than done) is to find a better way to regulate their emotions. Those of us who are addicted to “going meta”, i.e. those of us who procrastinate a lot, probably need something similar.
It reminds me of a friend (a LW lurker) who said: After you have gained all the necessary insights and formulated the best strategy, the remaining component is the ability to shut up and suffer. You can (and should) reduce the unpleasant work, but you often cannot reduce it to zero, and you have to accept it and endure the necessary suffering, otherwise you never get things done.
This is mostly an excellent description of the article as I meant to convey it. But I also believe that I’ve failed to make myself entirely clear.
Consider these particular sentences:
The logistic regression analysis indicated that beliefs about cognitive confidence and beliefs about the need to control thoughts were independent predictors of a classification as a problem drinker over and above negative emotions. Finally, hierarchical regression analyses on the combined samples showed that beliefs about cognitive confidence, and beliefs about the need to control thoughts, independently predicted both alcohol use and problem drinking scores.
Alcohol can certainly affect your emotions directly, but I’m saying that it does not look like this is primarily the reason that problems drinkers become problem drinkers. A failure to regulate one’s beliefs about one’s own beliefs is the proximate issue, and it is merely by consequence that this results in alleviation of anxiety. The idea is that the causal graph may not look like ‘Drink alcohol --> Be less anxious’; but rather more like ‘Drink alcohol --> By some currently unknown mechanism, get better at controlling thoughts --> Become less anxious’. And it may be that there is something of a feedback mechanism, such the anxiety makes one less able to control thoughts, and thus more anxious, and thus less able to control thoughts, etc.
Editorial note: The introduction before the quote was quite confusing to me. I would prefer the article starting with the quote about alcoholics, so I know what is the main topic. Also, perhaps a summary at the end?
This is how I understood the article:
It reminds me of a friend (a LW lurker) who said: After you have gained all the necessary insights and formulated the best strategy, the remaining component is the ability to shut up and suffer. You can (and should) reduce the unpleasant work, but you often cannot reduce it to zero, and you have to accept it and endure the necessary suffering, otherwise you never get things done.
This is mostly an excellent description of the article as I meant to convey it. But I also believe that I’ve failed to make myself entirely clear.
Consider these particular sentences:
Alcohol can certainly affect your emotions directly, but I’m saying that it does not look like this is primarily the reason that problems drinkers become problem drinkers. A failure to regulate one’s beliefs about one’s own beliefs is the proximate issue, and it is merely by consequence that this results in alleviation of anxiety. The idea is that the causal graph may not look like ‘Drink alcohol --> Be less anxious’; but rather more like ‘Drink alcohol --> By some currently unknown mechanism, get better at controlling thoughts --> Become less anxious’. And it may be that there is something of a feedback mechanism, such the anxiety makes one less able to control thoughts, and thus more anxious, and thus less able to control thoughts, etc.