I expect that The Work of Byron Katie will be particularly useful for your type 3 classification, as it’s specifically intended for getting system 1 to update on “X should/shouldn’t be/do Y” beliefs. (e.g. “that person shouldn’t be making munching sounds”)
Hmm… I actually read “The Work” a year or two ago, and mostly intentionally avoid recommending it to people: it seems to me that it contains powerful techniques for helping with the Type 3 classification above (as you say), but that it tends to draw people into classifying nearly all problems as Type 3, and into removing many drives that would have been better used as rocket fuel toward action.
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.
removing many drives that would have been better used as rocket fuel toward action.
I think this is a recipe for getting burned. Most of the time, working smarter is better than working harder, which leads us back to:
it tends to draw people into classifying nearly all problems as Type 3
So, I have not noticed this in my application of it, but I have noticed this in how she presents it. (In particular, one chapter of the work deals with death, and I remember reading thinking “hmm, I probably can’t recommend this book to any rationalists without minimizing that claim somehow.”) I found watching Youtube videos of her doing work with people as more effective than reading the book, I think, because there was a clear sense of “I now know the right way to go about this problem” whereas the book had more of a feeling of “I have now accepted the inevitable.” (Sometimes the latter is the right way to go about the problem, of course.)
I think the two tools she presents—the “is it true?” question and the reversal—both mostly solve this problem.
First, “is it true?” separates the is from the should, which helps in classifying something as type 3 or type 5. If I say something like “my lawyer shouldn’t have told the other side’s lawyer fact X,” and I ask myself “Is that true?” and the answer comes back “well, it’s a violation of his professional code of conduct, and I can sue him for that breach,” then I’m in a more useful place than I was before. If I say something like “Bob shouldn’t have told Joe fact X,” and I ask myself “Is that true?” and the answer comes back “well, I never actually made it clear to Bob that I wanted fact X private, and Bob never gave me the impression of being someone who was willing to keep secrets,” then I’m in a more useful place than I was before.
Second, the reversal points out the many ways in which it’s possible to minimize or avoid harm, which helps determine whether or not a problem actually is one you can do something about. I think pjeby’s point with regards to the munching noises works well here; when you reverse “he shouldn’t be making munching noises” to get “I shouldn’t be making munching noises,” the desired end goal is realizing that it takes one entity to make a sound and another entity to hear it. There are a vast number of unpleasant noises generated throughout the world, and you can’t hear most of them, because of distance or muffling or so on. You could leave, or plug in earplugs, or ask them to stop, all of which might be better than suffering to prove how much you don’t suffer!
You could leave, or plug in earplugs, or ask them to stop, all of which might be better than suffering to prove how much you don’t suffer!
Yep. This is one area where I differ in application from Byron Katie; I tend to focus heavily on self-applied judgments -- i.e. “I should(n’t) X”—rather than other-applied ones. So in AnnaSalomon’s story it seemed to me the real problem was the thought “I shouldn’t be petty”, since there didn’t seem to be any moral judgment being levied against the muncher, vs. against herself.
That being said, Byron Katie is correct that it’s a lot easier to work on other-applied judgments and that it’s better to learn the method using those first.
(I also sometimes find, oddly enough, that when I get to “who would I be without this thought?” on a self-applied judgment, my mind will sometimes object that if I didn’t have this thought, then I’d have to stop being mad at other people for doing the same thing that I’m upset with myself about! I then have to reflect on whether on balance it actually benefits me to be upset at those other people, considering that it rarely motivates them and that the self-judgment is impairing me.)
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.
Hmm… I actually read “The Work” a year or two ago, and mostly intentionally avoid recommending it to people: it seems to me that it contains powerful techniques for helping with the Type 3 classification above (as you say), but that it tends to draw people into classifying nearly all problems as Type 3, and into removing many drives that would have been better used as rocket fuel toward action.
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 think this is a recipe for getting burned. Most of the time, working smarter is better than working harder, which leads us back to:
So, I have not noticed this in my application of it, but I have noticed this in how she presents it. (In particular, one chapter of the work deals with death, and I remember reading thinking “hmm, I probably can’t recommend this book to any rationalists without minimizing that claim somehow.”) I found watching Youtube videos of her doing work with people as more effective than reading the book, I think, because there was a clear sense of “I now know the right way to go about this problem” whereas the book had more of a feeling of “I have now accepted the inevitable.” (Sometimes the latter is the right way to go about the problem, of course.)
I think the two tools she presents—the “is it true?” question and the reversal—both mostly solve this problem.
First, “is it true?” separates the is from the should, which helps in classifying something as type 3 or type 5. If I say something like “my lawyer shouldn’t have told the other side’s lawyer fact X,” and I ask myself “Is that true?” and the answer comes back “well, it’s a violation of his professional code of conduct, and I can sue him for that breach,” then I’m in a more useful place than I was before. If I say something like “Bob shouldn’t have told Joe fact X,” and I ask myself “Is that true?” and the answer comes back “well, I never actually made it clear to Bob that I wanted fact X private, and Bob never gave me the impression of being someone who was willing to keep secrets,” then I’m in a more useful place than I was before.
Second, the reversal points out the many ways in which it’s possible to minimize or avoid harm, which helps determine whether or not a problem actually is one you can do something about. I think pjeby’s point with regards to the munching noises works well here; when you reverse “he shouldn’t be making munching noises” to get “I shouldn’t be making munching noises,” the desired end goal is realizing that it takes one entity to make a sound and another entity to hear it. There are a vast number of unpleasant noises generated throughout the world, and you can’t hear most of them, because of distance or muffling or so on. You could leave, or plug in earplugs, or ask them to stop, all of which might be better than suffering to prove how much you don’t suffer!
Yep. This is one area where I differ in application from Byron Katie; I tend to focus heavily on self-applied judgments -- i.e. “I should(n’t) X”—rather than other-applied ones. So in AnnaSalomon’s story it seemed to me the real problem was the thought “I shouldn’t be petty”, since there didn’t seem to be any moral judgment being levied against the muncher, vs. against herself.
That being said, Byron Katie is correct that it’s a lot easier to work on other-applied judgments and that it’s better to learn the method using those first.
(I also sometimes find, oddly enough, that when I get to “who would I be without this thought?” on a self-applied judgment, my mind will sometimes object that if I didn’t have this thought, then I’d have to stop being mad at other people for doing the same thing that I’m upset with myself about! I then have to reflect on whether on balance it actually benefits me to be upset at those other people, considering that it rarely motivates them and that the self-judgment is impairing me.)
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.