my guess in hindsight is that the “internal double crux” technique often led, in practice, to people confusing/overpowering less verbal parts of their mind with more-verbal reasoning, even in cases where the more-verbal reasoning was mistaken. For example, I once used the “internal double crux” technique with a person I will here call “Bob”, who had been badly burnt out by his past attempts to do direct work on AI safety. After our internal double crux session, Bob happily reported that he was no longer very worried about this, proceeded to go into direct AI safety work again, and… got badly burnt out by the work a year or so later. I have a number of other stories a bit like this one (though with different people and different topics of internal disagreement) that, as a cluster, lead me to believe that “internal double crux” in practice often worked as a tool for a person to convince themselves of things they had some ulterior motive for wanting to convince themselves of.
This version of IDC has not resulted in people reporting that problem (or at least not to me) in some dozen-or-so instances of teaching it to a room of 30 people.
(What’s presented above is actually an older version of IDC; my story is that Anna sort of forked away from it and kept developing and I stubbornly held with the simple straightforward thing that a middle schooler could understand and use.)
FWIW I think there’s also something to the thing Anna mentions about IDC being biased towards parts that are more verbal. You can get around this with sufficient skill at focusing and introspection, but my sense is that there is indeed some number of people who use it without that sufficient skill, and therefore end up in a state where they’ve integrated all of the concerns of verbal part A, and only 30% of the concerns of less-verbal part B. And because they themselves aren’t in touch with other channels such as kinesthetic, they think they are 100% integrated and often act from that place
Just my opinion but I trust Internal Family Systems as a technique over IDC in general. Of course both have their downsides and can be taught poorly / wrongly, but the inclusion of the compassionate, curious, open Self in IFS seems critical for this sort of process to go in a positive direction, rather than an arbitrary or distorted one.
… which seems to be pointing in a similar direction. There’s some convergent evolution here, in that I found that teaching “Understanding Shoulds” (which gives participants a sense of fondness and receptivity to all of their impulses and urges, even the ones they’re angry at or feel are counterproductive) was a strong prereq for IDC.
If you set out to beat one of your parts into submission, or to confuse and manipulate it, you’re probably gonna (locally) succeed. The solution to that problem isn’t “don’t use one of these techniques,” because if you have the predecided mindset to begin with, it’ll corrupt anything that you try to do.
Er. It feels important to note that you don’t use IDC to do things.
Like, you don’t use it to persuade yourself into a predecided target option.
You use it when you feel torn, and a decision emerges from the interaction of your two possible courses of action.
That being said, I have both used IDC and seen others use IDC in a fashion that resulted in an embrace of the “less virtuous” option, multiple times. That resulted in a recognition that the less virtuous seeming option was in fact more likely to be the right move/the best tradeoff.
What’s your view on Anna’s concerns here?
This version of IDC has not resulted in people reporting that problem (or at least not to me) in some dozen-or-so instances of teaching it to a room of 30 people.
(What’s presented above is actually an older version of IDC; my story is that Anna sort of forked away from it and kept developing and I stubbornly held with the simple straightforward thing that a middle schooler could understand and use.)
FWIW I think there’s also something to the thing Anna mentions about IDC being biased towards parts that are more verbal. You can get around this with sufficient skill at focusing and introspection, but my sense is that there is indeed some number of people who use it without that sufficient skill, and therefore end up in a state where they’ve integrated all of the concerns of verbal part A, and only 30% of the concerns of less-verbal part B. And because they themselves aren’t in touch with other channels such as kinesthetic, they think they are 100% integrated and often act from that place
(Focusing is also an IDC prereq in my own tech tree, which helps with this correct point.)
A FB friend writes, in response to this post:
… which seems to be pointing in a similar direction. There’s some convergent evolution here, in that I found that teaching “Understanding Shoulds” (which gives participants a sense of fondness and receptivity to all of their impulses and urges, even the ones they’re angry at or feel are counterproductive) was a strong prereq for IDC.
If you set out to beat one of your parts into submission, or to confuse and manipulate it, you’re probably gonna (locally) succeed. The solution to that problem isn’t “don’t use one of these techniques,” because if you have the predecided mindset to begin with, it’ll corrupt anything that you try to do.
Er. It feels important to note that you don’t use IDC to do things.
Like, you don’t use it to persuade yourself into a predecided target option.
You use it when you feel torn, and a decision emerges from the interaction of your two possible courses of action.
That being said, I have both used IDC and seen others use IDC in a fashion that resulted in an embrace of the “less virtuous” option, multiple times. That resulted in a recognition that the less virtuous seeming option was in fact more likely to be the right move/the best tradeoff.