Depending on the quality of your mental model, this might or might not be the most optimal actions to getting the promotion
In the same sense that the optimal action in the Monty Hall problem is to choose the door which has the car behind it, sure. From the perspective of the player though, “do the thing that turns out to work” isn’t an available action. All we can do is act based on what we know, even if some of those actions are aimed at improving the accuracy of our models.
Let’s take male pattern baldness. There shouldn’t be something that makes it physiologically impossible to end it.
What makes you think that the default is that it’s physiologically possible to end it? Why do you think it happens, and what do you think it’d take to stop and/or reverse it?
I don’t rule it out, but it’s certainly not obvious to me that it’s doable with psychological interventions.
Yet, we don’t see hypnotists advertising that they have the cure to male pattern baldness as it’s not as easy as setting the expectation via hypnosis.
I don’t think that follows at all. Certainly swelling is as simple as swelling, and despite knowing how to do hypnosis it took me years to try it and I only ever did because of some weird fluke I can’t explain. Just recently I had a hypnotherapist ask if I could help his kid with allergies because he didn’t feel confident in doing it himself. Then, when I couldn’t get to it for a while, he gave it a shot himself just trying something simple which even after the fact he didn’t think was gonna work. Sure enough, the kid stopped having allergic symptoms.
Hypnotic breast growth is another example. I’ve never heard of anyone trying and failing. Anecdotally, some hypnotherapists offer this service and claim success. The limited science that exists is all very supportive, and suggests that it really is as trivial as visualizing in the vast majority of cases. Yet there aren’t enough people trying it to get any new studies, or to get any hypnotists trying it and saying “Yeah, it didn’t work”, or women saying “I went to a hypnotist and it didn’t work”. Either it works and people still don’t do it much, or it doesn’t work but no one ever tried it enough for there to be any publicly available evidence of that. Either way, it doesn’t really fit with “if it were easy, people would do it”.
If you have sensor motor amnesia that prevents you from using muscles to make a certain movement, I don’t think a movement intention and expectation is enough to get the muscles involved.
I think I know what you’re talking about here, and if I’m thinking of the same thing then I agree that it’s a real complication. I don’t agree that it is “intention and expectation isn’t enough”, but rather “there’s an additional difficulty in getting intention and expectation”.
Remember that “intending” is the act of actually aiming at a thing, and it isn’t always trivial to figure out how to do that. For example, if you were to stick some wires in my head to give me a brain computer interface, it’d take me a while to figure out wtf these new sensations even mean, and until I figure that out I’ll have no ability to intend anything to do with that interface.
This can be a real issue even with the “native hardware” if we’re sufficiently unpracticed with it. The final post of this sequence is about me goofing up in this way, how that came about, and what I learned which seems to have resolved the issue (so far?). Is this the kind of thing you’re referring to when you say that you don’t think expectation/intention is enough in cases of sensor motor amnesia?
Assuming that’s the case, my answer is basically “That’s a real issue, it still works through expectation/intent, and the same tools for managing expectation/intent turn out to work surprisingly well even though there is this additional complication”.
In the same sense that the optimal action in the Monty Hall problem is to choose the door which has the car behind it, sure. From the perspective of the player though, “do the thing that turns out to work” isn’t an available action. All we can do is act based on what we know, even if some of those actions are aimed at improving the accuracy of our models.
I don’t think that a “get a promotion expectation” is going to cause a process of someone working to improve their models on their own. For most people, I think that requires conscious effort. If you have someone who’s in Venkatesh Rao’s clueless category and that leads blocks them from advancing in their career, the intention of getting a promotion is going to get them to use the strategies that makes sense from the clueless perspective. Moving past that perspective needs building “consciousness” of what’s the issue. Consciousness might be a bad word, because once it’s consciously integrated it helps guide unconscious action as well.
What makes you think that the default is that it’s physiologically possible to end it? Why do you think it happens, and what do you think it’d take to stop and/or reverse it?
Red light therapy has an effect on male pattern baldness. One effect of red light therapy is that it increases relaxation in the tissue and increases blood flow. Actual mechanism might be complicated but let’s go with one thesis. Male pattern baldness happens when the scalp fascia gets tight an inhibits proper blood flow to the hair follicles.
If you just set the expectation “There will be more hair in a year” the body does not know how to accomplish that. If you on the other hand set the expectation “The scalp fascia gets softer, less tense, warmer and has more blood flow”, that’s something that your body might actually be able to work with that might actually result in more hair.
One example of sensor motor amnesia from myself is that my right subscapularis was chronically very tense and that resulted in less flexibility of my right shoulder. If I would use intention to guide my shoulder movement, the body would try to accomplish that by using all the muscles it knows how to use but not the subscapularis. Resolving it actually needed becoming conscious of the subscapularis being the problem and relaxing it.
While I have only a week of Alexander Technique exposure it might be a good general principle. Actually using intentions to guide movement is a key aspect of it. Yet, when a teacher points out the ways in which you unnecessarily tense muscles while doing a movement that updates the somatic map of the body and that then allows the intentions to do the work with less muscle tension.
I think we have basically three layers, one is the purely material, then there’s the somatic layer and the enactive layer where these kinds of intentions live.
I don’t think that a “get a promotion expectation” is going to cause a process of someone working to improve their models on their own.
I mean, it depends, but I agree that people are fallible in this way. I’m not arguing that people’s models are good (at recognizing when/how to update, or otherwise), just that you can only go on what you got. If I can see that the car is behind door one, and you switch from door one to door two because the host shows you the goat behind door three, that’s only a bad move from an irrelevant reference frame. Unless we’re mixing up game shows and you can “phone a friend”, but at that point we’re no longer discussing the same problem.
The scope of what I’m trying to convey here is “how to dissolve ‘psychological’ problems where some stupid brain is doing something you know it shouldn’t”, which is a different kind of problem than “Will my boss be more likely to promote me if I go golfing or to the office” or “Do I turn right or left to get to my local Walmart?”. Once you can say “Turn left to get to Walmart, go golfing to get promoted” and get a response of “Okay, will do. Thanks!”, then you’re already free of any so called “psychological” difficulties—and you will succeed or fail, based on the accuracy of the joint model you guys act on.
But you’re already going to do that, so I don’t need to tell you to tell him how to get to Walmart. Unless I happen to know that you’re wrong, but then I’m not helping you avoid knowably dumb decisions I’m injecting more information into the system by including myself in it.
One example of sensor motor amnesia from myself is that my right subscapularis was chronically very tense and that resulted in less flexibility of my right shoulder. If I would use intention to guide my shoulder movement, the body would try to accomplish that by using all the muscles it knows how to use but not the subscapularis. Resolving it actually needed becoming conscious of the subscapularis being the problem and relaxing it.
Okay, I misunderstood what you were saying here. Rereading your original comment I see what I missed and that little note of discord that I didn’t sufficiently attend to. Oops.
I thought you were saying that intention to relax the muscle isn’t enough, but now it seems you’re saying that it’s not enough to intend to move your shoulder you have to actually intend to relax your subscapularis—so you gotta find that tension and address it explicitly.
I agree that generally adding intention to “reach over and grab this thing” isn’t as effective at relaxing the subscapularis as adding intention to relax the subscapularis. And that becoming conscious of it is generally the best and most direct approach. At the same time, “The best way to relax the subscapularis is to intend to relax the subscapularis” isn’t really in opposition to my thesis here. You can often reach things without relaxing the subscapularis, so these two intentions aren’t even in that much tension (no pun intended).
This reminds me of the problem of flinching when shooting handguns, which I use as an example in the post after this one. People will practice for weeks or months trying to “overcome a flinch” because their models of how to do this are indeed bad. The solution I offer in that post mirrors your subscapularis fix, because in the context of helping someone who has noticed the problem and is trying to fix it, that is indeed generally the more appropriate solution. Simply saying “Just focus on hitting the target!” generally isn’t as helpful.
At the same time, just focusing on hitting the target is sufficient. “Bracing for recoil” and “hitting the target” are indeed in tension, so intent for one crowds out intent for the other. As a kid I used to struggle with a flinch when target shooting with handguns, but I didn’t have that problem at all when small game hunting. I was just focused on hitting what I was aiming for, and that preempted the flinch.
It’s not that “You don’t have to know how to use the sights” or “You don’t have to accept the recoil”, it’s that once your intention is properly set you will do that automatically to the best you know how—including asking for expert advice, if that seems available and worthwhile. And if your best isn’t good enough, that’s a whole ’nother problem.
Once you set your intentions properly, motivation will flow downhill even to things you didn’t have any awareness that you could do, which makes proper intention setting look like magic sometimes. And if you don’t set your intentions properly, motivation won’t flow to where it’s needed, and you can end up stuck for months in what only takes seconds to fix.
I’m right now writing a longer book that will include a discussion of this.
I forgot to respond to this earlier, but if you want test readers I’d be happy to read what you got and give whatever kind of feedback you’re interested in.
In the same sense that the optimal action in the Monty Hall problem is to choose the door which has the car behind it, sure. From the perspective of the player though, “do the thing that turns out to work” isn’t an available action. All we can do is act based on what we know, even if some of those actions are aimed at improving the accuracy of our models.
What makes you think that the default is that it’s physiologically possible to end it? Why do you think it happens, and what do you think it’d take to stop and/or reverse it?
I don’t rule it out, but it’s certainly not obvious to me that it’s doable with psychological interventions.
I don’t think that follows at all. Certainly swelling is as simple as swelling, and despite knowing how to do hypnosis it took me years to try it and I only ever did because of some weird fluke I can’t explain. Just recently I had a hypnotherapist ask if I could help his kid with allergies because he didn’t feel confident in doing it himself. Then, when I couldn’t get to it for a while, he gave it a shot himself just trying something simple which even after the fact he didn’t think was gonna work. Sure enough, the kid stopped having allergic symptoms.
Hypnotic breast growth is another example. I’ve never heard of anyone trying and failing. Anecdotally, some hypnotherapists offer this service and claim success. The limited science that exists is all very supportive, and suggests that it really is as trivial as visualizing in the vast majority of cases. Yet there aren’t enough people trying it to get any new studies, or to get any hypnotists trying it and saying “Yeah, it didn’t work”, or women saying “I went to a hypnotist and it didn’t work”. Either it works and people still don’t do it much, or it doesn’t work but no one ever tried it enough for there to be any publicly available evidence of that. Either way, it doesn’t really fit with “if it were easy, people would do it”.
I think I know what you’re talking about here, and if I’m thinking of the same thing then I agree that it’s a real complication. I don’t agree that it is “intention and expectation isn’t enough”, but rather “there’s an additional difficulty in getting intention and expectation”.
Remember that “intending” is the act of actually aiming at a thing, and it isn’t always trivial to figure out how to do that. For example, if you were to stick some wires in my head to give me a brain computer interface, it’d take me a while to figure out wtf these new sensations even mean, and until I figure that out I’ll have no ability to intend anything to do with that interface.
This can be a real issue even with the “native hardware” if we’re sufficiently unpracticed with it. The final post of this sequence is about me goofing up in this way, how that came about, and what I learned which seems to have resolved the issue (so far?). Is this the kind of thing you’re referring to when you say that you don’t think expectation/intention is enough in cases of sensor motor amnesia?
Assuming that’s the case, my answer is basically “That’s a real issue, it still works through expectation/intent, and the same tools for managing expectation/intent turn out to work surprisingly well even though there is this additional complication”.
I don’t think that a “get a promotion expectation” is going to cause a process of someone working to improve their models on their own. For most people, I think that requires conscious effort. If you have someone who’s in Venkatesh Rao’s clueless category and that leads blocks them from advancing in their career, the intention of getting a promotion is going to get them to use the strategies that makes sense from the clueless perspective. Moving past that perspective needs building “consciousness” of what’s the issue. Consciousness might be a bad word, because once it’s consciously integrated it helps guide unconscious action as well.
Red light therapy has an effect on male pattern baldness. One effect of red light therapy is that it increases relaxation in the tissue and increases blood flow. Actual mechanism might be complicated but let’s go with one thesis. Male pattern baldness happens when the scalp fascia gets tight an inhibits proper blood flow to the hair follicles.
If you just set the expectation “There will be more hair in a year” the body does not know how to accomplish that. If you on the other hand set the expectation “The scalp fascia gets softer, less tense, warmer and has more blood flow”, that’s something that your body might actually be able to work with that might actually result in more hair.
One example of sensor motor amnesia from myself is that my right subscapularis was chronically very tense and that resulted in less flexibility of my right shoulder. If I would use intention to guide my shoulder movement, the body would try to accomplish that by using all the muscles it knows how to use but not the subscapularis. Resolving it actually needed becoming conscious of the subscapularis being the problem and relaxing it.
While I have only a week of Alexander Technique exposure it might be a good general principle. Actually using intentions to guide movement is a key aspect of it. Yet, when a teacher points out the ways in which you unnecessarily tense muscles while doing a movement that updates the somatic map of the body and that then allows the intentions to do the work with less muscle tension.
I think we have basically three layers, one is the purely material, then there’s the somatic layer and the enactive layer where these kinds of intentions live.
I mean, it depends, but I agree that people are fallible in this way. I’m not arguing that people’s models are good (at recognizing when/how to update, or otherwise), just that you can only go on what you got. If I can see that the car is behind door one, and you switch from door one to door two because the host shows you the goat behind door three, that’s only a bad move from an irrelevant reference frame. Unless we’re mixing up game shows and you can “phone a friend”, but at that point we’re no longer discussing the same problem.
The scope of what I’m trying to convey here is “how to dissolve ‘psychological’ problems where some stupid brain is doing something you know it shouldn’t”, which is a different kind of problem than “Will my boss be more likely to promote me if I go golfing or to the office” or “Do I turn right or left to get to my local Walmart?”. Once you can say “Turn left to get to Walmart, go golfing to get promoted” and get a response of “Okay, will do. Thanks!”, then you’re already free of any so called “psychological” difficulties—and you will succeed or fail, based on the accuracy of the joint model you guys act on.
But you’re already going to do that, so I don’t need to tell you to tell him how to get to Walmart. Unless I happen to know that you’re wrong, but then I’m not helping you avoid knowably dumb decisions I’m injecting more information into the system by including myself in it.
Okay, I misunderstood what you were saying here. Rereading your original comment I see what I missed and that little note of discord that I didn’t sufficiently attend to. Oops.
I thought you were saying that intention to relax the muscle isn’t enough, but now it seems you’re saying that it’s not enough to intend to move your shoulder you have to actually intend to relax your subscapularis—so you gotta find that tension and address it explicitly.
I agree that generally adding intention to “reach over and grab this thing” isn’t as effective at relaxing the subscapularis as adding intention to relax the subscapularis. And that becoming conscious of it is generally the best and most direct approach. At the same time, “The best way to relax the subscapularis is to intend to relax the subscapularis” isn’t really in opposition to my thesis here. You can often reach things without relaxing the subscapularis, so these two intentions aren’t even in that much tension (no pun intended).
This reminds me of the problem of flinching when shooting handguns, which I use as an example in the post after this one. People will practice for weeks or months trying to “overcome a flinch” because their models of how to do this are indeed bad. The solution I offer in that post mirrors your subscapularis fix, because in the context of helping someone who has noticed the problem and is trying to fix it, that is indeed generally the more appropriate solution. Simply saying “Just focus on hitting the target!” generally isn’t as helpful.
At the same time, just focusing on hitting the target is sufficient. “Bracing for recoil” and “hitting the target” are indeed in tension, so intent for one crowds out intent for the other. As a kid I used to struggle with a flinch when target shooting with handguns, but I didn’t have that problem at all when small game hunting. I was just focused on hitting what I was aiming for, and that preempted the flinch.
It’s not that “You don’t have to know how to use the sights” or “You don’t have to accept the recoil”, it’s that once your intention is properly set you will do that automatically to the best you know how—including asking for expert advice, if that seems available and worthwhile. And if your best isn’t good enough, that’s a whole ’nother problem.
Once you set your intentions properly, motivation will flow downhill even to things you didn’t have any awareness that you could do, which makes proper intention setting look like magic sometimes. And if you don’t set your intentions properly, motivation won’t flow to where it’s needed, and you can end up stuck for months in what only takes seconds to fix.
I forgot to respond to this earlier, but if you want test readers I’d be happy to read what you got and give whatever kind of feedback you’re interested in.