I’m confused. Eliezer, you seem to be saying that reflectivity leads to distance from one’s emotions, but this completely contradicts my experience: I’m constantly introspecting and analyzing myself, and yet I am also extremely emotional, not infrequently to the point of hysterical crying fits. Maybe I’m introspective but not reflective in the sense meant here? I will have to think about this for a while.
Maybe I’m introspective but not reflective in the sense meant here?
That’s right. Reflection here refers to the skill of reasoning about your own reasoning mechanisms using the same methods you that use to reason about anything else. “Solving your own psychological problems” is then a trivial special case of “solving problems,” but with the bonus that solving the problem of making yourself better at solving problems, makes you better at solving future problems. Surprisingly, it turns out that this is actually pretty useful, but you probably won’t understand what I’m talking about for another four years and three months.
By the way, I found your last sentence inscrutable (even after reading its parent) and gave up trying to decipher it, telling myself, “Zack’s writing is almost always unambiguous and decipherable; today is an exception.” It was only by accident that I read it again and realized that you are replying to yourself, which cleared things up for me.
(This confirms my belief in the utility of a habit I adopted 5 years ago, of always explicitly pointing it out whenever I am replying to myself.)
I’m confused. Eliezer, you seem to be saying that reflectivity leads to distance from one’s emotions, but this completely contradicts my experience: I’m constantly introspecting and analyzing myself, and yet I am also extremely emotional, not infrequently to the point of hysterical crying fits. Maybe I’m introspective but not reflective in the sense meant here? I will have to think about this for a while.
That’s right. Reflection here refers to the skill of reasoning about your own reasoning mechanisms using the same methods you that use to reason about anything else. “Solving your own psychological problems” is then a trivial special case of “solving problems,” but with the bonus that solving the problem of making yourself better at solving problems, makes you better at solving future problems. Surprisingly, it turns out that this is actually pretty useful, but you probably won’t understand what I’m talking about for another four years and three months.
Congrats on “leveling up”.
By the way, I found your last sentence inscrutable (even after reading its parent) and gave up trying to decipher it, telling myself, “Zack’s writing is almost always unambiguous and decipherable; today is an exception.” It was only by accident that I read it again and realized that you are replying to yourself, which cleared things up for me.
(This confirms my belief in the utility of a habit I adopted 5 years ago, of always explicitly pointing it out whenever I am replying to myself.)