One thing I’m interested in more info on, not quite related to the OP, is whether SquirrelInHell/Pasek’s other mental techniques listed on bewelltuned.com are basically good, or are hazardous in some way. If there are people in this thread who’ve dug into the details here, or tried their Motor Cortex techniques, I’d like to hear about that.
Their Tuning Your Cognitive Strategies post is one of the most impactful techniques I’ve tried, that I highly recommend. When I recommend it, people periodically ask “wait, isn’t this the person who committed suicide after interacting with Ziz? How do you know their techniques are safe?”
Their Cognitive Strategies and Emotional Processing posts seem extremely straightforwardly useful, and pretty straightforwardly not-harmful to me. I haven’t tried their muscle cortex stuff because it seemed both more effortful and less obviously useful. I could imagine it turning out to also be straightforwardly good, or I could imagine in veering into weirder territories.
They stated that bewelltuned.com was where they put stuff that they were confident was safe/good, but, idk how much stock to put in that.
I’ve read everything from Pasek’s site, have copies of it saved for reference, and i use it extensively. I don’t think any of the big essays are bad advice, (barring the one about suicide) and like, the thing about noticing deltas for example, was extremely helpful to me. I also read through her big notes glossary document in chronological order (so bottom to top) to get a general feel for the order she took in the LW diaspora corpus. My general view though is that while all the techniques listed are good that doesn’t stop you from using them to repress the fact that you’re constantly beating down your emotions, and getting extremely good at doing that by using advanced mental hacking techniques just made the problem that much worse. Interestingly, early Ziz warns about this exact thing. bewelltuned in particular, while being decent content in the abstract, does seem particularly suited to being used to adversarially bully your inner child.
Note 1: all the top-level skills have very, very strong effects. If you learn them, you will have no trace of doubt about whether they work, and about whether they have really improved your life.
Are we to understand from this that the author of this document learned the skills, was consequently certain that the skills worked and improved their life, and then… committed suicide?
It seems clear that an epistemic error was made somewhere in that progression.
Sure, but, like, people can discover things like “exercise is good for you” or “eating healthy is good for you”, and nonetheless have unrelated problems that cause them to commit suicide (they can even end up committing suicide due eating-disorder-related reasons), so, sure an error happened somewhere, but that’s not very strong evidence that the error is related to having discovered and got excited about exercise being good for you and eating healthy being good for you.
(Tuning your cognitive strategies paid off for me immediately, in a straightforward way that made sense)
I think there’s a thing where people with a lot of mental problems tend to get very enthusiastic about various therapy-type techniques and genuinely get a lot of benefit out of them. But then they still have massive problems because their original problems were so humongous to begin with, even if they improve a lot they’re still worse on mental health than the median person. (This has historically also described me, even though I have also been getting better over the long term.)
Even if they are genuinely making steady progress, that progress might not be fast enough to ensure that an unexpected shock or a set of adverse consequences won’t bring them down.
One thing I’m interested in more info on, not quite related to the OP, is whether SquirrelInHell/Pasek’s other mental techniques listed on bewelltuned.com are basically good, or are hazardous in some way. If there are people in this thread who’ve dug into the details here, or tried their Motor Cortex techniques, I’d like to hear about that.
Their Tuning Your Cognitive Strategies post is one of the most impactful techniques I’ve tried, that I highly recommend. When I recommend it, people periodically ask “wait, isn’t this the person who committed suicide after interacting with Ziz? How do you know their techniques are safe?”
Their Cognitive Strategies and Emotional Processing posts seem extremely straightforwardly useful, and pretty straightforwardly not-harmful to me. I haven’t tried their muscle cortex stuff because it seemed both more effortful and less obviously useful. I could imagine it turning out to also be straightforwardly good, or I could imagine in veering into weirder territories.
They stated that bewelltuned.com was where they put stuff that they were confident was safe/good, but, idk how much stock to put in that.
I’ve read everything from Pasek’s site, have copies of it saved for reference, and i use it extensively. I don’t think any of the big essays are bad advice, (barring the one about suicide) and like, the thing about noticing deltas for example, was extremely helpful to me. I also read through her big notes glossary document in chronological order (so bottom to top) to get a general feel for the order she took in the LW diaspora corpus. My general view though is that while all the techniques listed are good that doesn’t stop you from using them to repress the fact that you’re constantly beating down your emotions, and getting extremely good at doing that by using advanced mental hacking techniques just made the problem that much worse. Interestingly, early Ziz warns about this exact thing. bewelltuned in particular, while being decent content in the abstract, does seem particularly suited to being used to adversarially bully your inner child.
That website says:
Are we to understand from this that the author of this document learned the skills, was consequently certain that the skills worked and improved their life, and then… committed suicide?
It seems clear that an epistemic error was made somewhere in that progression.
Sure, but, like, people can discover things like “exercise is good for you” or “eating healthy is good for you”, and nonetheless have unrelated problems that cause them to commit suicide (they can even end up committing suicide due eating-disorder-related reasons), so, sure an error happened somewhere, but that’s not very strong evidence that the error is related to having discovered and got excited about exercise being good for you and eating healthy being good for you.
(Tuning your cognitive strategies paid off for me immediately, in a straightforward way that made sense)
I think there’s a thing where people with a lot of mental problems tend to get very enthusiastic about various therapy-type techniques and genuinely get a lot of benefit out of them. But then they still have massive problems because their original problems were so humongous to begin with, even if they improve a lot they’re still worse on mental health than the median person. (This has historically also described me, even though I have also been getting better over the long term.)
Even if they are genuinely making steady progress, that progress might not be fast enough to ensure that an unexpected shock or a set of adverse consequences won’t bring them down.
Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization is related.