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.
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.