I was trying to reference a line from the sequences which I couldn’t remember well enough to search. I am my mind and body, but it’s also rhetorically useful to seat the ego somewhere else for a moment sometimes. If I was being more precise, I might try to indicate the part of the brain that does a lot of the calculations and jusgements as distinct from the part that wants things, but I am not enough of a psychology expert to know if that’s actually a thing. For most biases it feels like something in how I think is set up wrong, like a misaligned sight on a gun.
See footnote 1. Please consider yourself invited to replace the homework situation with one where you notice part of your mind attempting to write the bottom line first, or argue with uneven and unwarrented zeal for one side over the other. I eventually resolved the homework case historically to my own satisfaction.
Yeah, it sounds like you and I are not communicating clearly on which bit we mean when we say “our brain.” On a gears level, I think we agree, the ego lives mostly in that squishy gray matter between our ears, with perhaps a bit of chemical wash and nerve endings from the rest of the meat suit. (Checking explicitly- do we seem to agree there?) Sometimes I observe I systematically come up with flawed thoughts that are flawed in the same direction. Call those cognitive biases. One of the sneakier biases is that when I try and judge which idea has some positive trait like being a good budget decision, it gets a heavy thumb on the scale for having some other positive trait like being socially approved of. I want some kind of language to distinguish the truth seeking part from the biased part for the purpose of talking about them in a short semi-fictional conversation. Got any suggestions?
I get that “humans are screwed up” is a sequences take, that you’re not really sure how to carve up the different parts of your mind, etc. What I’m pointing at here is substantive, not merely semantic.
The dissociation of saying “humans are messed up”/”my brain is messed up” feels different than saying “I am messed up”. The latter is speaking from a perspective that is associated with the problem and has the responsibility to fix it from the first person. This perspective shift is absolutely crucial, and trying to solve your problems “from the outside” gets people very very caught up in additional meta level problems and unable to touch the object level problem. This is a huge topic.
I had as a strong an aversion to homework as anyone, including homework which I knew to be important. It’s not a matter of “finding a situation where you notice part of your mind attempting to write the bottom line first”, but of noticing why that part of your mind will try to write the bottom line first, and relating to yourself in a way that eliminates the motivation to do so in the first place. I don’t have situations where part of my mind attempts to write the bottom line first… that I’m aware of, at least. There are things that I’m attached to, which is what causes the “bottom line first” issues and which is still an obstacle to be overcome in itself, but the motivation to write the bottom line first can be completely obsoleted by stopping and giving more attention to the possibility that you’ve been trying to undervalue something that you can sense is critically important. This mental move shifts all of your “my brain is being irrational” problems into “I don’t know what to do on the object level”/”I don’t know why this is so important to me” problems, which are still problems but they are much nicer because they highlight rather than obscure the path to solution.
“I want some kind of language to distinguish the truth seeking part from the biased part”. I don’t think such a distinction exists in any meaningful sense.
In my model, there’s a part of your brain that recognizes that something is important (e.g. social time), and a part of your brain that recognizes that something else is important (e.g. doing homework), and that neither are “truth seeking” or “biased”, but simply tugging you towards a particular goal. Then there’s a part of your brain which feels tugged in both directions and has to mediate and try to form this incoherent mess into something resembling useful behavior.
This latter part wants to get out of the conflict, and there are many strategies to do this. This is another big topic, but one way to get out of the conflict is to simply give in to the more salient side and shut out the less salient side. This strategy has obvious and serious problems, so making an explicit decision to use this strategy itself can cause conflict between the desire “I want to not deal with this discomfort” and “I want to not drive my life into the ground by ignoring things that might be important”.
One way to attempt to resolve that conflict is to decide “Okay, I’ll ‘be rational’, ‘use logic and evidence and reason’, and then satisfy the side which is more logical and shut out the side that is ‘irrational and wrong’”. This has clear advantages over the “be a slave to impulses” strategy, but it has it’s own serious issues. One is that the side that you judge to be “irrational” isn’t always the side that’s easier to shut out, so attempting to do so can be unsuccessful at the actual goal of “get out of this uncomfortable conflict”.
A more successful strategy to resolving like these is to shut out the easy to shut out side, and then use “logic and reason” to justify it if possible, so that the “I don’t want to run my life into the ground by making bad decisions” part is satisfied too. The issue with this one comes up when part of you notices that the bottom line is getting written first and that the pull isn’t towards truth—but so long as you fail to notice, this strategy actually does quite well, so every time your algorithm that you describe as “logical and reasoned” drifts in this direction it gets rewarded and you end up sliding down this path. That’s why you get this repeating pattern of “Dammit, my brain was writing the bottom line again. I shall keep myself from doing that next time!”.
It’s simply not the case that you have a “truth seeking part” and a “biased part”. You contain a multitude of desires, and strategies for achieving these desires and mediating conflicts between these desires. The strategies you employ, which call for shutting out desires which retain power over you unless they can come up with sufficient justification, requires you to come up with justifications and find them sufficient in order to get what you want. So that’s what you’re motivated to do, and that’s what you tend to do.
Then you notice that this strategy has problems, but so long as you’re working within this strategy, adding the extra desires of “but don’t fool myself here!” becomes simply another desire that can be rationalized away if you succeed in coming up with a justification that you’re willing to deem sufficient (“Nah, I’m not fooling myself this time! These reasons are sound!”, “Shit, I did it again didn’t I. Wow, these biases sure can be sneaky!”).
The framing itself is what creates the problems. By the time you are labeling one part “truth seeking” and one part “biased, and therefore important to not listen to”, you are writing the bottom line . And if your bottom line includes “there is a problem with how my brain is working”, then that’s gonna be in your bottom line.
The alternative is to not purport to know which side is “truth seeking” and which side is “biased”, and simply look, until you see the resolution.
I was trying to reference a line from the sequences which I couldn’t remember well enough to search. I am my mind and body, but it’s also rhetorically useful to seat the ego somewhere else for a moment sometimes. If I was being more precise, I might try to indicate the part of the brain that does a lot of the calculations and jusgements as distinct from the part that wants things, but I am not enough of a psychology expert to know if that’s actually a thing. For most biases it feels like something in how I think is set up wrong, like a misaligned sight on a gun.
See footnote 1. Please consider yourself invited to replace the homework situation with one where you notice part of your mind attempting to write the bottom line first, or argue with uneven and unwarrented zeal for one side over the other. I eventually resolved the homework case historically to my own satisfaction.
Yeah, it sounds like you and I are not communicating clearly on which bit we mean when we say “our brain.” On a gears level, I think we agree, the ego lives mostly in that squishy gray matter between our ears, with perhaps a bit of chemical wash and nerve endings from the rest of the meat suit. (Checking explicitly- do we seem to agree there?) Sometimes I observe I systematically come up with flawed thoughts that are flawed in the same direction. Call those cognitive biases. One of the sneakier biases is that when I try and judge which idea has some positive trait like being a good budget decision, it gets a heavy thumb on the scale for having some other positive trait like being socially approved of. I want some kind of language to distinguish the truth seeking part from the biased part for the purpose of talking about them in a short semi-fictional conversation. Got any suggestions?
I get that “humans are screwed up” is a sequences take, that you’re not really sure how to carve up the different parts of your mind, etc. What I’m pointing at here is substantive, not merely semantic.
The dissociation of saying “humans are messed up”/”my brain is messed up” feels different than saying “I am messed up”. The latter is speaking from a perspective that is associated with the problem and has the responsibility to fix it from the first person. This perspective shift is absolutely crucial, and trying to solve your problems “from the outside” gets people very very caught up in additional meta level problems and unable to touch the object level problem. This is a huge topic.
I had as a strong an aversion to homework as anyone, including homework which I knew to be important. It’s not a matter of “finding a situation where you notice part of your mind attempting to write the bottom line first”, but of noticing why that part of your mind will try to write the bottom line first, and relating to yourself in a way that eliminates the motivation to do so in the first place. I don’t have situations where part of my mind attempts to write the bottom line first… that I’m aware of, at least. There are things that I’m attached to, which is what causes the “bottom line first” issues and which is still an obstacle to be overcome in itself, but the motivation to write the bottom line first can be completely obsoleted by stopping and giving more attention to the possibility that you’ve been trying to undervalue something that you can sense is critically important. This mental move shifts all of your “my brain is being irrational” problems into “I don’t know what to do on the object level”/”I don’t know why this is so important to me” problems, which are still problems but they are much nicer because they highlight rather than obscure the path to solution.
“I want some kind of language to distinguish the truth seeking part from the biased part”. I don’t think such a distinction exists in any meaningful sense.
In my model, there’s a part of your brain that recognizes that something is important (e.g. social time), and a part of your brain that recognizes that something else is important (e.g. doing homework), and that neither are “truth seeking” or “biased”, but simply tugging you towards a particular goal. Then there’s a part of your brain which feels tugged in both directions and has to mediate and try to form this incoherent mess into something resembling useful behavior.
This latter part wants to get out of the conflict, and there are many strategies to do this. This is another big topic, but one way to get out of the conflict is to simply give in to the more salient side and shut out the less salient side. This strategy has obvious and serious problems, so making an explicit decision to use this strategy itself can cause conflict between the desire “I want to not deal with this discomfort” and “I want to not drive my life into the ground by ignoring things that might be important”.
One way to attempt to resolve that conflict is to decide “Okay, I’ll ‘be rational’, ‘use logic and evidence and reason’, and then satisfy the side which is more logical and shut out the side that is ‘irrational and wrong’”. This has clear advantages over the “be a slave to impulses” strategy, but it has it’s own serious issues. One is that the side that you judge to be “irrational” isn’t always the side that’s easier to shut out, so attempting to do so can be unsuccessful at the actual goal of “get out of this uncomfortable conflict”.
A more successful strategy to resolving like these is to shut out the easy to shut out side, and then use “logic and reason” to justify it if possible, so that the “I don’t want to run my life into the ground by making bad decisions” part is satisfied too. The issue with this one comes up when part of you notices that the bottom line is getting written first and that the pull isn’t towards truth—but so long as you fail to notice, this strategy actually does quite well, so every time your algorithm that you describe as “logical and reasoned” drifts in this direction it gets rewarded and you end up sliding down this path. That’s why you get this repeating pattern of “Dammit, my brain was writing the bottom line again. I shall keep myself from doing that next time!”.
It’s simply not the case that you have a “truth seeking part” and a “biased part”. You contain a multitude of desires, and strategies for achieving these desires and mediating conflicts between these desires. The strategies you employ, which call for shutting out desires which retain power over you unless they can come up with sufficient justification, requires you to come up with justifications and find them sufficient in order to get what you want. So that’s what you’re motivated to do, and that’s what you tend to do.
Then you notice that this strategy has problems, but so long as you’re working within this strategy, adding the extra desires of “but don’t fool myself here!” becomes simply another desire that can be rationalized away if you succeed in coming up with a justification that you’re willing to deem sufficient (“Nah, I’m not fooling myself this time! These reasons are sound!”, “Shit, I did it again didn’t I. Wow, these biases sure can be sneaky!”).
The framing itself is what creates the problems. By the time you are labeling one part “truth seeking” and one part “biased, and therefore important to not listen to”, you are writing the bottom line . And if your bottom line includes “there is a problem with how my brain is working”, then that’s gonna be in your bottom line.
The alternative is to not purport to know which side is “truth seeking” and which side is “biased”, and simply look, until you see the resolution.