removing many drives that would have been better used as rocket fuel toward action.
That’s just it, though: a “should” is not “rocket fuel towards action”, unless the most useful action to take is instinctual social punishment fueled by moral indignation.
For example, the only action that’s motivated by the thought, “I shouldn’t be petty”, is self-directed judgment and feelings of guilt, and a futile effort to suppress a feeling of annoyance that you in fact already have.
Our brains seem to have a certain class of counterfactuals whose “intended” evolutionary function is to support the maintenance of social rules through moral indignation. When we think of things in this type of “should” or “shouldn’t” mode, it makes us want to punish the entity perceived to be responsible, while at the same time rejecting any personal course of action that doesn’t revolve around “setting things right” or “setting people straight”.
It’s this machinery that drives us to pursue “irrational” levels of revenge, and to expend lots of energy arguing for “the principle of the thing”… but not one bit of energy on actually solving the problem.
And it’s deactivating this indignation machinery that the Work is actually all about. That’s why all of the worksheets begin with “Judging Your Neighbor”—specifically directing the intended user to blame some individual for the perceived problem, to amplify the judgmental aspect of the problem to make it easier to spot the implicit (moral) “should” at work
Type 5 problems generally lack such a party, or even if there is one (e.g. blaming somebody for the state of your relationship), getting that blame out of the way then clears a space for working on the actual problem and what you can do about it. (Note again the turnarounds, which highlight what things you actually control.)
I’d be interested in your thoughts on how Byron Katie interacts with Type 5 (worthy uses of shower thoughts and of persistent drive/energy) , or whether you think there are Type 5 cases of persistent wishing/drive that are worth keeping.
I can wish for something without insisting that I should already have it. In fact, I have personally found these two states to be mutually incompatible: if I am insisting I should have done something already, all my energy is tied up in mentally punishing myself for not doing it, rather than being directed towards doing it. Once the “should” is dropped, I can pay attention to whether or not I actually want to do it now, whether it would be a good idea, etc.
In System 2 thinking, there is no difference in types of “should” and “want”, and there is symmetry as well. If you don’t want something bad, you must want something good, etc.
In System 1, however, there are many different types of toward and away-from motivations, each with different biases for behavior. “Should” thinking biases towards punishment and away from solving the problem, because evolutionarily speaking System 1 doesn’t want to clean up somebody else’s mess: they should be punished for violating group norms and made to clean up the mess themselves. This makes “should”-motivation the opposite of a “rocket fuel towards action”.
Luckily, because there is not only one kind of motivational drive, using a technique that shuts down only one of them does not have any negative impact on your motivation. In practical terms, it actually increases your motivation, as long as there is some consequentialist reason for you to do the thing, not just a programmed injunction regarding what’s moral behavior in your tribe.
The tl;dr version: there’s no moral “should” in a type 5 problem, and if there were one, then you wouldn’t be thinking effectively about it anyway. You’d be stewing over how bad the problem is and why isn’t it solved and does nobody recognize the importance, blah blah blah. Get rid of the “should”, and as long as there’s still a consequentialist reason for you to pursue the matter, you’ll actually be able to think effectively about it. Getting rid of “people shouldn’t die” doesn’t affect “I don’t like that people die” or ” it would be much better if they didn’t, and I’d like to do something about that”.
(As a practical matter, asking “is that true?” about many shoulds leads to the insight that no, it isn’t true, what’s true is that I wish things were different. “I wish I were less petty” is actually more actionable than “I shouldn’t be petty”, and the same is true for quite a lot of things we have should-feelings about.)
it tends to draw people into classifying nearly all problems as Type 3
Is that true? How do you know? ;-)
It does seem a bit odd for a rationalist to avoid recommending a technique whose first three questions are:
Is that true?
Can you absolutely know that that’s true?
How do you act/react when you think that thought?
On the basis that people might conclude too many things they previously believed are false. ;-)
The rest of the technique consists of considering counterfactuals, e.g. “who would I be without that thought?” as a simulation, and finding reasons why contrary/alternate positions could be true… pretty much textbook countering for confirmation bias, cached thoughts, and the like.
“Should”-beliefs can’t survive this gauntlet of questions, but factual ones can and do. So ISTM that the Work is a basic form of (perhaps the most basic form) of a Procedure For Changing One’s Mind.
That’s just it, though: a “should” is not “rocket fuel towards action”, unless the most useful action to take is instinctual social punishment fueled by moral indignation.
For example, the only action that’s motivated by the thought, “I shouldn’t be petty”, is self-directed judgment and feelings of guilt, and a futile effort to suppress a feeling of annoyance that you in fact already have.
Our brains seem to have a certain class of counterfactuals whose “intended” evolutionary function is to support the maintenance of social rules through moral indignation. When we think of things in this type of “should” or “shouldn’t” mode, it makes us want to punish the entity perceived to be responsible, while at the same time rejecting any personal course of action that doesn’t revolve around “setting things right” or “setting people straight”.
It’s this machinery that drives us to pursue “irrational” levels of revenge, and to expend lots of energy arguing for “the principle of the thing”… but not one bit of energy on actually solving the problem.
And it’s deactivating this indignation machinery that the Work is actually all about. That’s why all of the worksheets begin with “Judging Your Neighbor”—specifically directing the intended user to blame some individual for the perceived problem, to amplify the judgmental aspect of the problem to make it easier to spot the implicit (moral) “should” at work
Type 5 problems generally lack such a party, or even if there is one (e.g. blaming somebody for the state of your relationship), getting that blame out of the way then clears a space for working on the actual problem and what you can do about it. (Note again the turnarounds, which highlight what things you actually control.)
I can wish for something without insisting that I should already have it. In fact, I have personally found these two states to be mutually incompatible: if I am insisting I should have done something already, all my energy is tied up in mentally punishing myself for not doing it, rather than being directed towards doing it. Once the “should” is dropped, I can pay attention to whether or not I actually want to do it now, whether it would be a good idea, etc.
In System 2 thinking, there is no difference in types of “should” and “want”, and there is symmetry as well. If you don’t want something bad, you must want something good, etc.
In System 1, however, there are many different types of toward and away-from motivations, each with different biases for behavior. “Should” thinking biases towards punishment and away from solving the problem, because evolutionarily speaking System 1 doesn’t want to clean up somebody else’s mess: they should be punished for violating group norms and made to clean up the mess themselves. This makes “should”-motivation the opposite of a “rocket fuel towards action”.
Luckily, because there is not only one kind of motivational drive, using a technique that shuts down only one of them does not have any negative impact on your motivation. In practical terms, it actually increases your motivation, as long as there is some consequentialist reason for you to do the thing, not just a programmed injunction regarding what’s moral behavior in your tribe.
The tl;dr version: there’s no moral “should” in a type 5 problem, and if there were one, then you wouldn’t be thinking effectively about it anyway. You’d be stewing over how bad the problem is and why isn’t it solved and does nobody recognize the importance, blah blah blah. Get rid of the “should”, and as long as there’s still a consequentialist reason for you to pursue the matter, you’ll actually be able to think effectively about it. Getting rid of “people shouldn’t die” doesn’t affect “I don’t like that people die” or ” it would be much better if they didn’t, and I’d like to do something about that”.
(As a practical matter, asking “is that true?” about many shoulds leads to the insight that no, it isn’t true, what’s true is that I wish things were different. “I wish I were less petty” is actually more actionable than “I shouldn’t be petty”, and the same is true for quite a lot of things we have should-feelings about.)
Is that true? How do you know? ;-)
It does seem a bit odd for a rationalist to avoid recommending a technique whose first three questions are:
Is that true?
Can you absolutely know that that’s true?
How do you act/react when you think that thought?
On the basis that people might conclude too many things they previously believed are false. ;-)
The rest of the technique consists of considering counterfactuals, e.g. “who would I be without that thought?” as a simulation, and finding reasons why contrary/alternate positions could be true… pretty much textbook countering for confirmation bias, cached thoughts, and the like.
“Should”-beliefs can’t survive this gauntlet of questions, but factual ones can and do. So ISTM that the Work is a basic form of (perhaps the most basic form) of a Procedure For Changing One’s Mind.