I share your worry, but there’s just no substitute for judging on the merits; there’s no way any number of meta-handles for wrong behavior can force us to behave rightly.
The best incentive I think is that behaving wrongly, being dead to others when there’s any reasonable prospect of doing otherwise, generally leads to bad outcomes. I try to remember how much better I feel at the end of a minute or hour or day in which I face up to fear, pleasure, pain, confusion, etc, instead of dissociating from them, but I need plenty of reminding!
I’m not sure if it actually helps, but, when I’m writing posts about cognitive failures, I often try to open with examples of where I fell in the failure mode, so the thing I’m modeling is focused on more “look at where this applies to you” than “look at how it applies to other people.”
I share your worry, but there’s just no substitute for judging on the merits; there’s no way any number of meta-handles for wrong behavior can force us to behave rightly.
The best incentive I think is that behaving wrongly, being dead to others when there’s any reasonable prospect of doing otherwise, generally leads to bad outcomes. I try to remember how much better I feel at the end of a minute or hour or day in which I face up to fear, pleasure, pain, confusion, etc, instead of dissociating from them, but I need plenty of reminding!
I’m not sure if it actually helps, but, when I’m writing posts about cognitive failures, I often try to open with examples of where I fell in the failure mode, so the thing I’m modeling is focused on more “look at where this applies to you” than “look at how it applies to other people.”
For the record, I think this is helpful and will be stealing it for any future advice posts I might write!