DaystarEld

Philos­o­phy of Therapy

• DaystarEld 25 Jan 2023 20:39 UTC

  59 points

  48

  on: My Model Of EA Burnout

  This all seems broadly correct, to me.

  But I think it’s worth noting that there’s an additional piece of the puzzle that I believe this one is largely codependent on: namely, that burnout often comes from a mismatch between responsibility and power.

  This can be seen in not just high-stress jobs like medicine or crisis work, but also regular “office jobs” and interpersonal relationships. The more someone feels responsible for an outcome, whether internally or due to external pressure/​expectations, the more power to actually affect change they will need to not feel that their efforts are pointless.

  EAs tend to be the sort of people who, in addition to taking large scale problems seriously, internalize the idea of Heroic Responsibility. This can work out well if they manage to find some form of work that helps them feel like they are making meaningful change, but if they do not, it can make the large, difficult, and often heartbreaking challenges the world faces all the more difficult to engage with. And for many, narratives of personal inadequacy start to creep in, unless they have proper CBT training, robust self-care norms, or a clear sense of boundaries and distinctions between what is in their power and what isn’t.
  
  Most people in society tend to do work that progresses causes and institutions with not-perfectly-aligned values to their own. The two main ways I’ve seen this not cause burnout is either 1) when they don’t really pay attention to the issues at all, or 2) when they feel like they’re still making a meaningful difference to progress their values in some way, shape or form. Lacking that, the mismatch of values will indeed tend to erode many aspects of their mental and emotional wellbeing until they grow numb to the value dissonance or burnout.

An­nounc­ing the AI Fables Writ­ing Con­test!

Re­la­tion­ship Orientations

Pro­ce­du­ral Ex­ec­u­tive Func­tion, Part 1

• DaystarEld 14 Dec 2023 17:36 UTC

  30 points

  26

  in reply to: TracingWoodgrains’s comment on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  I also want to add that I think the community in general has shown a mild failure in treating the legal action threat as evidence of wrongdoing even if the lawsuit would ultimately fail.

  It is really bad to treat a libel suit threat as some horrible thing that no one “innocent” would ever do. It’s a form of demonizing anyone who has ever used or thought to use the legal system defensively.

  Which if intended, seems to be fundentally missing what the point of a legal system should be. It is no doubt a problem that people with lots of power, whether it’s fame or money or whatever, are more likely to win legal battles.

  But it’s also a way more truth oriented process than the court of public opinion. And many people who would have stood 0 chance of getting justice without it have gotten some through it.

  Do such threats have a chilling effect on criticism? Of course, and that’s a problem, particularly if they’re used too often or too quickly.

  But the solution cannot be “no one makes such threats no matter what.” Because then there’s no recourse but the court of public opinion, which is not something anyone should feel comfortable ceding their life and wellbeing to.

  I think someone outside the community seeing this sort of reaction of people inside it being shunned, demonized, etc for threatening to use a very core right that they’re entitled to would likely find it… pretty sketchy.

  Because it can easily be construed as “we resolve these things ‘in house,’ via our own methods. No need to get Outsiders involved.”

  And man, it sure would be great if we had that sort of high trust effective investigation capability in the community.

  But we really have not shown that capability yet, and even if we do, no one should feel like they’re giving up their basic rights to be a member of good standing in the community.

  I think many if not most people in Emerson’s position, feeling like they were about to be lied about in a life-destroying way, had facts to rebut the lies, and were being essentially ignored in requests to clarify the truth, would think of legal action.

  Whether they would be wrong in how easy it would be to win is a different issue entirely from that very (from base society perspective) normal view.

  What links here?

  • Effec­tive Asper­sions: How the Non­lin­ear In­ves­ti­ga­tion Went Wrong by TracingWoodgrains (EA Forum; 19 Dec 2023 12:00 UTC; 337 points)
  • Effec­tive Asper­sions: How the Non­lin­ear In­ves­ti­ga­tion Went Wrong by TracingWoodgrains (19 Dec 2023 12:00 UTC; 168 points)
  • TracingWoodgrains's comment on Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear by Ben Pace (EA Forum; 14 Dec 2023 22:42 UTC; 1 point)

• DaystarEld 16 Nov 2023 23:23 UTC

  25 points

  13

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: So­cial Dark Matter

  I definitely read all examples as “both at the same time.”
  
  1) Whatever X publicly condemned thing you can think of, it exists on a spectrum.
  
  2) There is a lot more of all instances of it happening than you think there are.
  
  3) A lot of it does not look like the kind you are most likely to notice and condemn.

Click­bait Soapboxing

• DaystarEld 25 Sep 2019 4:12 UTC

  23 points

  0

  on: Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selec­tive Re­port­ing and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists

  Great post. Something that’s worth noting is that this is true *even if reality is not 1:1:1.*
  

  Let’s say the joke “reality has a well known Green bias” is actually true, and add an extra Green side to that impossible die and make it a true four sided pyramid, easy to picture and shake in your hands. It’s now 2:1:1 Green:Blue:Grey
  

  Reality says “Roll 10d4,” and you let all the little pointy shapes in your palms spill out to reveal… *rolls actual dice* ~4 Green, ~4 Grey, and ~2 Blue.
  

  “Oh snap,” you, a Green, might say. “Evidence that my philosophy/​political views are correct!… Er, I mean, more correct than the local alternative competing one! And really, that’s what matters, isn’t it? No one’s PERFECT, but at least we can feel justified in fighting the good fight!”
  

  You still have two glaring problems.
  

  1) You’re still, in the majority of cases, wrong, on this particular subject/​roll. This is an unpopular thing to say among Greens. “We’re actually wrong on most things, but we’re more right than the opposition!” is only ever going to be a rallying cry for those who intrinsically dislike tribalism and grok lesser-of-two-evils and advocate for slow and steady progress, not those trying to Win The Battle for the Soul/​Future/​Rights of the Whatever.
  

  2) Your opponents are actually still right on half the things they’re fighting for compared to the things you’re right about. Even hinting at this will make you EVEN MORE UNPOPULAR among your fellow Greens. Especially if any of the things they’re right about are particularly hot-button issues at the point in spacetime that you find yourself in.
  

  So, being a Green (or a Grey who knows that Greys have no chance and so hesitantly puts on a Green uniform) who now wants to actually go into politics and push for positive change, you will by necessity feel a lot more inclined to focus on those 4 things that you have strong evidence your side is right about, ignore those 2 things that your opponent is right about (unless you’re behind closed doors with similarly reasonable Greens, Blues, or Greys), and maybe once in awhile try to push at a couple of the 4 things that both sides are wrong about, assuming you have any political capital to spare (you probably don’t, hell you probably don’t even have enough to focus on all of the 4 dice-backed Green topics).
  

  Well guess what: now to an “objective observer,” you, an intelligent and competent politician, look like a biased ideologue who’s blinded by his partisanship and just appealing to his rank-and-file.
  

  Change this from 10 separate issues to 10 pieces of evidence that make up the nuance of a single issue, and a similar thing happens as nuance gets left at the wayside. Now imagine that not everyone is actually researching all those dice rolls and instead just randomly looking at the subsection of them that happen across their newsfeed, or which appeal to their particular interests, or are the least complicated to take in.
  

  It’s disheartening, but it can help to note that those who are trying to actually make changes in any social sphere are not working under the same rules/​toward the same goals as those trying to just seek truth. This is not a defense of lying, by omission or otherwise, but it is a defense of people who have good reasons to do or say things that we, observing them from the outside, may think are evidence of them being mindkilled.

• DaystarEld 27 Jan 2023 6:35 UTC

  22 points

  14

  in reply to: LoganStrohl’s comment on: My Model Of EA Burnout

  Ah, thanks for saying that. It does feel worth noting that I am a huge proponent of Heroic Responsibility, so let me see if I can try in bullet point form at least, for now...

  1) People have much more capacity for agency than society tends to instill in them.

  2) The largest problems in the world are such that some people pretty much have to take it upon themselves to dedicate large chunks of their life to solving them, or else no one will.

  3) This in fact describes most of the widely admired people in history: those who saw a major problem in the world, decided to make it their life mission to solve it, and often sacrificed much to do so.

  4) For these reasons and more, I would never tell someone not to take Heroic Responsibility for things they care about. It would be hypocritical of me to do so. But...

  4a) I do caution people against taking Heroic Responsibility for things they feel pressured to value, as you note in this post, and

  4b) I do caution people to remember that most heroes historically do not in fact have happy endings.

  5) Furthermore and separately, for every hero who visibly took a major problem in the world upon their shoulders and was recognized for doing so, many more are invisible to us because they never managed to accomplish anything.

  6) Heroic Responsibility is not just a lens, it also provides power. It is a frame for motivating action, heightening agency, and expanding solution-space.

  7) Like most powers, it comes with a cost to those who try to wield it unprepared. Someone who has not internalized and accepted “failure” as a part of life, as an intrinsic part of the process for learning and growth, is more likely to let the power of Heroic Responsibility break them in pursuit of their cherished values.

  ...I think that’s it for now, though I can say more and expand on each of these. Thoughts so far?

Pro­ce­du­ral Ex­ec­u­tive Func­tion, Part 2

• DaystarEld 20 Mar 2023 4:20 UTC

  15 points

  9

  on: Ta­boo­ing “Frame Con­trol”

  Meanwhile the guru might be supplementing this with non-frame-control techniques. When they argue with you, they imply (maybe in a kind but firm voice, maybe with an undertone of social threat) that you’re kinda stupid for disagreeing for them

  This exact implication isn’t frame control, but the common thing I’ve seen gurus do that is more subtle is assert why you disagree with them in a way that reinforces their frame.

  “Kinda stupid” is overly crude, and might be spotted and feel off even among those who believe in them, but implying you just don’t “get” what they’re saying because you’re unenlightened or not ready for it is very effective at quieting dissent and maintaining their control.
  
  In general this is why I dislike any attempts to assert with confidence what someone thinks or feels, as well as why. I may be one of the only therapists who hates psychoanalysis, but I maintain that it’s almost always a bad thing to to anyone who isn’t inviting it, and sometimes even then.

• DaystarEld 8 Sep 2018 20:02 UTC

  15 points

  on: An On­tol­ogy of Sys­temic Failures: Dragons, Bul­lshit Moun­tain, and the Cloud of Doom

  I don’t know how well the things I’ve been thinking about lately fit into this model, so I’m going to attempt to apply these to my own field (Youth Emergency Services for suicide/​homicide/​psychosis):

  1) Bug is when a clinician gets a call about a crisis and fails to triage whether it’s an issue of sufficient severity. Mom calling because she took her kid’s phone away and now they’re yelling and won’t go to bed can probably be de-escalated over the phone, even if they said the magic words of “I’m going to kill myself,” as long as they don’t have a history of depression or suicidal ideation or self-harm. Simple fix is to train people to better triage and how to respond/​deescalate remotely.

  2) Dragon is kind of what the job was designed to deal with. Before mobile response teams existed for mental health workers, and in counties that don’t have them, people just call the police. The police will either sit the person down to give them a stern talking to, or arrest them, or take them to the nearest hospital’s psych ward, depending on what’s happening. Someone decided “Hey what if we sent therapists instead, who could de-escalate the problem instead and reserve the involuntary commitment for the cases that really warrant it?” Problem is it’s not really a “solvable” problem, which means...

  3) Bullshit Mountain is sort of the job itself? There’s no Win Condition, it’s just an ongoing series of getting crisis calls and helping those involved as best we can, whether that’s teaching coping skills, creating safety plans, connecting them to services, or sometimes initiating a Baker Act (Florida protocol for involuntary 1-3 day stay at psych ward). Some people only call us once and everything’s fine in follow-up calls. Others call multiple times per month, sometimes even per week, and have been Baker Acted by us or police over a dozen times. But stats say the county is overall doing better for youth suicides/​homicides and hospital psych wards have fewer kids being brought in, all this even with things like the Parkland shooting, so we keep plugging at it.

  4) Cloud of Doom seems like it could be at least a couple things. The first that no one wants to be left holding the Liability Hot Potato for a suicide, let alone the next mass school shooter, so we have police departments and schools calling us if any kid says anything even remotely like “I want to kill my geometry teacher,” even if it was two weeks ago in a text message to their girlfriend, and then getting mad at us when we won’t Baker Act them.

  Which leads to some Molochian bullshit, where organizations start to *set protocols* to call us for anything that seems remotely worrisome, and then *our protocols* say that we can’t be the ones to define a crisis for the caller, and so we get the occasional hilariously-frustrating call where a juvenile probation officer or school administrator calls us and says “They did/​said X Y and Z, so do you need to make an assessment?” to which we have to reply “Well, if you say you want an assessment we’ll be right over,” to which they reply “Well they did X Y and Z,” to which we will reply “Yes, I understand, does that mean you want us to come assess?” to which they reply “Do you feel they need an assessment?” Either we decide what’s worth a crisis and liability falls on us, or the caller decides and liability falls on them.

  You know where this is going: we’re getting a steadily increasing amount of calls, and our ability to triage them is being slowly but surely hemmed in by expectations from on-high.

  The result being a second Cloud of Doom, where the YES team (and I imagine other mobile crisis teams in other counties) have tons of communal responsibility but no actual institutional power. Which is often demoralizing and makes it hard to retain staff. Which means we’re more often in situations where all our clinicians are busy out on calls, some of which we didn’t really need to go on, but more keep coming in and we have to tell them to either take their kids to the hospital themselves or call the police if they believe it’s an immediate crisis. Which was kind of what the job was originally designed to prevent from happening.

  Does this seem to fit, or am I missing the essence of some of these?

• DaystarEld 11 Oct 2020 20:18 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: remizidae’s comment on: Philos­o­phy of Therapy

  Let me start by saying that I definitely don’t recommend people go to therapy anymore unless I can also offer them guidance (like with this post) in what to expect or how to spot a good therapist or what kinds of modalities are effective. There are just too many bad therapists out there. But I think your comment may be too confident in the wrong direction.
  
  >I think people should know that when it’s been studied, there’s little evidence that talk therapy works better than getting support from a friend, family member, or other trusted person.
  
  Would love to read a source for this, if you could point me to which study you’re referring to. To me the most interesting studies on therapeutic effectiveness focus on a particular modality, like the one I linked to in the post, whereas “therapy” as a whole is such a mixed grab-bag of different philosophies and ideas that as a generic practice, I’m definitely willing to believe that most people’s experience with it has not been particularly effective. But that doesn’t mean an “informed shopper” with a good guide can’t beat the odds.
  
  >But anytime a person invests substantial time and money into a given strategy, there is a risk that their assessment of the results of that strategy will be affected by confirmation bias, sunk cost bias, and cognitive dissonance.

  Interestingly, my experience is the opposite; people are very quick to point out when therapy didn’t work for them, particularly if they feel like they wasted a lot of time and money at it. I don’t generally see a lot of people singing the praise of therapy unless they had an outstandingly good experience with it.
  
  >Experiment for yourself, by all means, but my experience has been that a very brief conversation, coming at the right moment, can be incredibly therapeutic. Or an in-depth conversation every few months. Or support from a friend along with all the other self-help strategies that commonly work for mental/​emotional problems.
  
  Absolutely true, for the majority of situations people are troubled by. As I said in the post, I think therapy is best meant for when nothing else seems to work, including talking to friends and family.

  >If you tried therapy, you would see how great it is. Therefore, you must not have tried it, so I will dismiss your opinion.
  
  This is indeed a dumb argument, and I’m sorry that you’ve been told that. Like I said, I’ve often heard the opposite; people with bad experiences with therapy are more likely to speak out about their bad experiences, in general, and most get sympathy for expressing how therapy didn’t work for them. I can imagine people trying to suggest that THEIR experience with therapy was particularly good and so if you just tried the modality they experienced maybe you’d change your mind, but practitioner skill also makes a huge difference, and the relationship with the practitioner is always a wildcard, so people should generally be a lot less confident when recommending therapy to others.
  
  That’s a large part of why I made this post; to help people get some benefit from therapeutic philosophies without having to necessarily go to a therapist themelves.

• DaystarEld 24 Feb 2024 23:55 UTC

  11 points

  0

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Re­search Re­port: Towards 10x OODA Loop­ing?

  I’m running a small rationality dojo to try to approach this issue from the rat-for-rat-sake direction in a few weeks, trying to incorporate the things I learned from my Seasons of Growth, my Executive Function research, and stuff like Logan’s Naturalism sequence (not to mention years of teaching at rat camps and workshops). I plan to do a writeup after, but would also love to chat sometime about this, either before or after.

• DaystarEld 9 Sep 2023 13:29 UTC

  10 points

  14

  on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  Thanks for this writeup, still undergoing various updates based on the info above and responses from Nonlinear.

  One thing I do want to comment on is this:
  

  (Personal aside: Regarding the texts from Kat Woods shown above — I have to say, if you want to be allies with me, you must not write texts like these. A lot of bad behavior can be learned from, fixed, and forgiven, but if you take actions to prevent me from being able to learn that the bad behavior is even going on, then I have to always be worried that something far worse is happening that I’m not aware of, and indeed I have been quite shocked to discover how bad people’s experiences were working for Nonlinear.)

  I agree that it was a bad message to send. I agree that people shouldn’t make it hard for others who have a stake in something to learn about bad behavior from others involved.

  But I think it’s actually a bit more complex if you consider the 0 privacy norms that might naturally follow from that, and I can kind of understand where Kat is (potentially) coming from in that message. This doesn’t really apply if Nonlinear was actually being abusive, of course, only if they did things that most people would consider reasonable but which felt unfair to the recipient.
  
  What I mean is basically that it can be tough to know how to act around people who might start shit-talking your organization when them doing so would be defecting on a peace treaty at best, and abusing good-will at worst. And it’s actually generally hard to know if they’re cognizant of that, in my experience.
  
  This is totally independent of who’s “right” or “wrong,” and I have 0 personal knowledge of the Nonlinear stuff. But there are some people who have been to summer camps that we’ve had the opportunity to put on blast about antisocial things they’ve done that got them removed from the ecosystem, but we try to be careful to only do that when it’s *really* egregious, and so often chose not to because it would have felt like too much of an escalation for something that was contained and private...

  ...but if they were to shit-talk the camps or how they were treated, that would feel pretty bad from my end in the “Well, fuck, I guess this is what we get for being compassionate” sense.

  Many people may think it would be a better world if they imagine everyone’s antisocial acts being immediately widely publicized, but in reality what I think would result is a default stance of “All organizations try to ruin people’s reputations if they believe they did something even slightly antisocial so that they can’t harm their reputation by telling biased stories about them first,” and I think most people would actually find themselves unhappy with that world. (I’m not actually sure about that, though it seems safer to err on the side of caution.)

  It can sound sinister or be a bad power dynamic from an organization to an individual, but if an individual genuinely doesn’t seem to realize that the thing holding the org back isn’t primarily a mutual worry of negative reputation harm but something like compassion and general decency norms, it might feel necessary to make that explicit… though of course making it explicit comes off as a threat, which is worse in many ways even if it could have been implicitly understood that the threat of reputation harm existed just from the fact that the organization no longer wants you to work with them.
  
  There are good reasons historically why public bias is in the favor of individuals speaking out against organizations, but I think most people who have worked in organizations know what a headache it can be to deal with the occasional incredibly unreasonable person (again, not saying that’s the case here, just speaking in general), and how hard it is to determine how much to communicate to the outside world when you do encounter someone you think is worse than just a “bad fit.” I think it’s hard to set a policy for that which is fair to everyone, and am generally unsure about what the best thing to do in such cases is.

• DaystarEld 8 Oct 2021 2:28 UTC

  9 points

  on: Per­cep­tual dex­ter­ity: a case study

  This is the sort of insight that, in my rough understanding of therapy, therapists hope people will make, but which people are often “too loud” in their own heads to ever notice.

  Absolutely. In the brief conversation I had with Logan in person a few years ago I remarked how much I enjoyed their writing, not-only-but-additionally-because it’s fascinating seeing them “rediscover/​recreate” so much of what I was taught to do professionally from their own unique angle. Since then they have continued to do so and also have in many ways gone beyond the standard.

  Excellent read, thanks for annotating it and to Logan for writing it :)

• DaystarEld 14 Dec 2023 20:45 UTC

  8 points

  3

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  FWIW I think my main takeaway here is that if you update at all on any point of untrustworthiness of the original sources, that update should propagate toward the rest of the points.
  
  I think most brains are bad at this, naturally, and it’s just a hard thing to do without effort, which is why things like Gish gallops and character assassinations work even when debunked.
  
  My secondary takeaway is that people should not update as hard as they do on people threatening to “retaliate” against social harm done to them unless the claims are very obviously true or the “retaliation” is very obviously false. If we don’t know if they’re true or not, then what the accuser feels is “retribution” will be felt by the accused as “justice,” and I think that both are natural feelings most people would have, but most people have not been publicly pilloried and so cannot connect as easily with the empathy for that position.

• DaystarEld 27 Dec 2021 21:16 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: In Defense of At­tempt­ing Hard Things, and my story of the Lev­er­age ecosystem

  Thanks for writing this up, I had similar thoughts.
  
  Overall I’m glad Cathleen wrote this post, as it gave me a lot more insight into what life in Leverage was like and why, and more empathy for what people there have been going through. I really hope she and everyone else manages to carry on, be successful, not be stigmatized, and keep working on things that are important to them.

  But also, I have not updated in the direction of “Leverage was actually working on important or meaningful things that are valuable to other people outside its ecosystem.” I’m still waiting for that, and interested in seeing things that might indicate it. It would be fantastic to learn of new psychology research or insights that could help me and my friends and clients.

  This also seems central to why the question of whether Leverage is being treated unfairly now or not feels very different than whether they were treated unfairly before.

• DaystarEld 11 Oct 2021 14:32 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: LoganStrohl’s comment on: Per­cep­tual dex­ter­ity: a case study

  From what I’ve seen over the past few years, your honed skill in focusing your attention and noticing what’s happening and putting what you notice into words allows you to discover what works or is healthy for you from “first principles,” for lack of a better phrase. This is different from most therapy, which circles inward from the outside of each problem. Learning from previous situations can shortcut the process, but therapy rarely has the time to actually teach people to do the thing you’ve learned, which seems to give you a much more gears-level understanding of what’s happening and whether you want to change it and how to go about that.
  
  That’s how it looks from the outside at least. Does it match your experience?