Bruce-like behaviour is best understood as pursuit of suffering. People undermine themselves or set themselves up to lose. They may do it so that they have a comfortable excuse, or because they are used to failing and afraid of being happy, or for many other reasons.
if you think “reasons”, you’ll get the wrong ideas about how to deal with this. Reasons are what we use to explain behavior, not to generate it!
We do not do things for reasons, we do the things we get wired to do… i.e. reinforced for doing. If losing brings things that reinforce you, then behaviors that lead to losing get reinforced—i.e., a mental process evolves to produce that result.
So what you want to know is, what’s the process by which the person makes the decision? What do they hear/see/feel in the moment of transition?
Most of us do this to some degree, however slight, and it’s something we want to avoid.
No, it’s something we want to remove, not avoid. Avoiding doesn’t work, because by the time you know there’s something to avoid, you’ve already done the thing you’re trying to avoid, or at least already made up your mind (and body) to go in that direction. Arguing yourself back the other way at that point takes too much time and willpower, vs. simply removing the source of the reinforcement in advance.
A reason in this case would simply mean a cause, and I don’t think I said anything to indicate otherwise. “People undermine themselves because they have experienced reinforcement as a result of similar behaviour in the past” would clearly count as a reason.
“Remove” would not be grammatical, if you look at what “it’s” stands in for. All I’m saying is that we want to avoid self defeating behaviour; I’m not saying anything about how we should go about doing it, which seems to be your objection.
On a more general note, I seem to have confused the whole issue due to language problems, which was ironically my point. If you genuinely like losing, there’s no reason to fight off Bruce, and your behaviour is masochistic and not necessarily improvable. If you prefer winning, but are undermining your own efforts, that is an entirely separate deal. That was most of my point.
A reason in this case would simply mean a cause, and I don’t think I said anything to indicate otherwise. “People undermine themselves because they have experienced reinforcement as a result of similar behaviour in the past” would clearly count as a reason.
No, people do things because they have a structure in their brain that responds in a certain way. What you are describing is the reason that they have that structure in their brain—and that is not the same thing, just as a picture of a pipe is not a pipe.
This might seem like nitpicking, but it’s not. We can’t change the reason we have a particular structure in our head, but we can change the structure itself. Focusing on how the structure got there is a losing game, while focusing on the structure itself is a winning one.
If you think about the structure, you can study the structure, test it, and experiment with ways to modify or remove it. If you think about causes or reasons, you are either stuck, or at best you will conclude that you need to introduce a bunch of new causes in order to change things.
Worse, you’ll have no way to know whether you’ve changed yet, whether your methods of change are working, or even whether your original hypotheses about the causes were accurate!
“Remove” would not be grammatical, if you look at what “it’s” stands in for. All I’m saying is that we want to avoid self defeating behaviour; I’m not saying anything about how we should go about doing it, which seems to be your objection.
I’m referring to removing the structure that generates the behavior, so that the behavior does not exist in the first place—and thus there is no longer anything to “avoid”.
Again, this might sound like trivial semantics from a epistemic POV, but it makes a huge difference instrumentally. Human brains are not value-free computation mechanisms: if you model something as fixed, you will act as if it’s fixed, and vice versa if you model it as something controllable.
If you prefer winning, but are undermining your own efforts, that is an entirely separate deal. That was most of my point.
I don’t at all disagree with that point. i.e. IAWYC, I just wanted to add another point, about the mindset that generates the kind of things that you said, and keeps people from being able to change. Specifically, the ideas that:
History equals causation, and
Avoidance is a useful strategy for change
These two ideas are deeply embedded (and linked) in popular consciousness—if history equals causation, then one’s existing urges towards a particular behavior must not be eliminatable… therefore they must be avoided.
But this entirely ignores the thing that sits in between the history and the behavior: that is, the current contents of your brain, at the “other-than-conscious” level.
if you think “reasons”, you’ll get the wrong ideas about how to deal with this. Reasons are what we use to explain behavior, not to generate it!
We do not do things for reasons, we do the things we get wired to do… i.e. reinforced for doing. If losing brings things that reinforce you, then behaviors that lead to losing get reinforced—i.e., a mental process evolves to produce that result.
So what you want to know is, what’s the process by which the person makes the decision? What do they hear/see/feel in the moment of transition?
No, it’s something we want to remove, not avoid. Avoiding doesn’t work, because by the time you know there’s something to avoid, you’ve already done the thing you’re trying to avoid, or at least already made up your mind (and body) to go in that direction. Arguing yourself back the other way at that point takes too much time and willpower, vs. simply removing the source of the reinforcement in advance.
A reason in this case would simply mean a cause, and I don’t think I said anything to indicate otherwise. “People undermine themselves because they have experienced reinforcement as a result of similar behaviour in the past” would clearly count as a reason.
“Remove” would not be grammatical, if you look at what “it’s” stands in for. All I’m saying is that we want to avoid self defeating behaviour; I’m not saying anything about how we should go about doing it, which seems to be your objection.
On a more general note, I seem to have confused the whole issue due to language problems, which was ironically my point. If you genuinely like losing, there’s no reason to fight off Bruce, and your behaviour is masochistic and not necessarily improvable. If you prefer winning, but are undermining your own efforts, that is an entirely separate deal. That was most of my point.
No, people do things because they have a structure in their brain that responds in a certain way. What you are describing is the reason that they have that structure in their brain—and that is not the same thing, just as a picture of a pipe is not a pipe.
This might seem like nitpicking, but it’s not. We can’t change the reason we have a particular structure in our head, but we can change the structure itself. Focusing on how the structure got there is a losing game, while focusing on the structure itself is a winning one.
If you think about the structure, you can study the structure, test it, and experiment with ways to modify or remove it. If you think about causes or reasons, you are either stuck, or at best you will conclude that you need to introduce a bunch of new causes in order to change things.
Worse, you’ll have no way to know whether you’ve changed yet, whether your methods of change are working, or even whether your original hypotheses about the causes were accurate!
I’m referring to removing the structure that generates the behavior, so that the behavior does not exist in the first place—and thus there is no longer anything to “avoid”.
Again, this might sound like trivial semantics from a epistemic POV, but it makes a huge difference instrumentally. Human brains are not value-free computation mechanisms: if you model something as fixed, you will act as if it’s fixed, and vice versa if you model it as something controllable.
I don’t at all disagree with that point. i.e. IAWYC, I just wanted to add another point, about the mindset that generates the kind of things that you said, and keeps people from being able to change. Specifically, the ideas that:
History equals causation, and
Avoidance is a useful strategy for change
These two ideas are deeply embedded (and linked) in popular consciousness—if history equals causation, then one’s existing urges towards a particular behavior must not be eliminatable… therefore they must be avoided.
But this entirely ignores the thing that sits in between the history and the behavior: that is, the current contents of your brain, at the “other-than-conscious” level.