Perhaps half-ass what you need to do to get a good grade, and whole-ass what you need to do to actually learn the material.
mr-hire(Matt Goldenberg)
Karma: 2,926
Can you give examples of things you think would fit under this? It seems that there are lots of instances of being resistant to the truth, but I can think of very few that I would categorize as fear of truth. It’s often fear of something else (e.g. fear of changing your identity) or biases (e.g. the halo effect or consistency bias) that cause people to resist. I can think of very few cases where people have a general fear of truth.
Interested.
Another thing you can do when you get to that top level: “Is this the best way to get that? (living with close friends at the center of a vibrant community), if not, what is?”
Are the text in the Experimental Array image a template for inputing these tools/”putting the pieces in place”? Could you point me to the source where the Array was formulated so as to better understand specifically how to fill in the text with my particular internal vocabulary/idiosyncrasies?
Yes, essentially was taking the different tools and slotting them into multiple arrays, allowing me to break up each “ability” related to overcoming procrastination into it’s component parts.
The 90′s looking website that hosts the two books on the experiential array is here: http://expandyourworld.net/Lastly, the YouTube link leads to a “video unavailable” page. Does it have to do with the Virtual Habit Coach? It certainly looks like a complex and nuanced model that has potential huge upside if implemented correctly.
Yes, that was just the tutorial for the Virtual Habit Coach.
You might also enjoy the channel “charisma on command” which has a similar format of finding youtube videos of charismatic and non-charismatic people, and seeing what they do and don’t do well.
One of the things I’ve been working on in the background over the past ~year is changing my relationship to money. This has allowed me to make more of it while feeling great about it.
Here are the 2 biggest shifts I made:
1. I had a deep-rooted sub-conscious belief that if I got money, it would corrupt me, amplify the worst parts of me. Then, I realized that having money will allow me to hire coaches and advisors who’s sole purpose is to help me reach my deepest values. I spent lots of time consciously visualizing this, and recognizing on a deep level that I could consciously direct my money to amplify the best parts of me.
2. I used to view money as a transaction, a fair trade between giving money, and getting something back of equal or greater value. But, that caused me to miss out on the human component of money—it caused me to focus on the money and the product, rather than the people behind them.
Another parallel perspective I’ve adopted is that money is a gift. A gift of trust in the person being bought from, a gift of freedom in the sense of what the money means. When someone gifts me money, I’ve gotten in the habit of consciously “receiving” that money, with gratitude and love. This has changed how I approach my products, and how I approach my “customers”.
These two shifts have allowed me to be more comfortable with money, even develop a powerful, mutually beneficial relationship with it :).
I’ve made significant progress on this by working on self-love and self-trust.
P.S. Was thinking about writing this up more coherently as a top level post. Is there any interest in that?
THE THREE TYPES OF RATIONALITY AND EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP
The Instrumental/Epistemic split is awful. If rationality is systematized winning, all rationality is instrumental.
So then, what are three types of Instrumental Rationality?
Generative Rationality
What mental models will best help me/my organization/my culture generate ideas that will allow us to systematically win?
Evaluative Rationality
What mental models will best help me/my organization/my culture evaluate ideas, and predict which ones will allow us to systematically win?
Effectuative Rationality
What mental models will best help me/my organization/my culture implement those ideas in an effective way that will help us to systematically win?
Evaluation typically gets lumped under “Epistemics” , Effectuation typically gets lumped under “Instrumentals” and Generation is typically given the shaft—certainly creativity is undervalued as an explicit goal in the rationality community (although it’s implicitly valued in that people who create good ideas are given high status).
Great leaders can switch between these 3 modes at will.
If you look at Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field, it’s him being able to switch between the 3 modes at will, only using evaluative reality when choosing a direction—other times he’s operating on Generative and Effectuative Rationality principles. This allows him to eventually shape reality to the vision he generated using his effectuative principles. By using the proper types of rationality at the right time, he’s actually able to shape reality instead of merely predicting it.
If you look at Walt Disney, he used to frequently say a phrase that indicates he knew how to switch between these 3 modes: He used to talk about he was “actually 3 different Walts: The Dreamer, The Realist, and the Spoiler”. Access to these 3 modes allowed Walt to do things that other’s would have looked at with their Evaluative Rationality and viewed as impossible.”
You can see with Elon Musk too. Look at that the difference between how he acts with budgeting and how he acts with deadlines. When he’s budgeting, he uses his evaluative rationality—when he’s making deadlines, he’s using his effectuative rationality—he knows large visions and hard to reach goals actually help people take better action. You shouldn’t view his deadlines as predictions, but as motivation tools.
Are great leaders then liars? No, great leaders are Kegan 5 players who don’t just say things, but are actually operating through these 3 frameworks (to a first approximation) at any given time. When a great leader is generating, their not worried about evaluating their ideas. When they’re evaluating, theyre not worried about effectuating those ideas. When they’re effectuating, they’re not generating.
They’re using whatever framework can make the most MEANING out of the current situation, both now in the long term. They’re skillfully cycling through these frames in themselves—and outputting the truth of whatever ontology they’re operating through at the given moment.
One of my worries with the talk about Simulacra Levels and how it relates to Moral Mazes is that it’s not distinguishing between Kegan 2 players (who are lying and manipulating the system for their own gain), with Kegan 4.5 players (who are lying and manipulating the system because they actually have no ontology to operate through except revenge and power), with Kegan 5 players (who are viewing truth and social dynamics as objects to be manipulated because there is no truth of which tribe their a part of or what they believe about a specific thing—it’s all dependent on what will generate the most meaning for them/their organization/their culture).
It’s absolutely imperative that you create systems to filter out Sociopathic Kegan 4.5 lizard people if you want your organization to avoid being captured by self-interest.
At the same time, it’s absolutely imperative that you have systems that can find, develop and promote Kegan 5 leaders that can create new systems and operate through all 3 types of rationality. Otherwise your organizations/cultures values won’t be able to evolve with changing situation.
I worry framing things as Simulacra levels don’t distinguish between these two types of players.
I’m not sure if the perfectionism case (being perfect to please others) fits the identity pattern. Although admittedly, in some people the shadow/acknowledged value is flipped—some people will acknowledge being perfect to please others, but won’t acknowledge the part of themselves that want to do it for themselves.
It sounds like you’re fed up with how the world is.
One way of getting better strategies for dealing with that is to talk to a professional. It’s something I’d highly recommend if you’re having suicidal thoughts. If you’re in the US, the national suicide prevention line can connect you immediately with a counselor: 1-800-273-8255.
If you’re in a different country, there are likely free resources for that country as well.
I assume times are Pacific?
I’ve been thinking a bit about the relationship between Perfectionism, Fear-of-Failure, and Fear-of-Success, as I’ve been teaching them this week in my course.
They all have a very similar structure, where each has a component of a “shadow value”—something that’s important to us that we tend not to acknowledge, as well as a “acknowledged value”—something that we allow ourselves to acknowledge as important.The solution for all 3 is similar—separate the shadow value from the known value, then figure out if each value (both shadow and known) actually applies to the situation, and how best to apply it.
For Perfectionism, the Shadow Value is pleasing/being loved by/being accepted by others. The acknowledged value is having high standards for ourselves and our work.
For Fear-of-Failure, the Shadow Value is protecting our identity. The acknowledged value is dealing with the negative external consequences of failure.For Fear-of-Success, the Shadow Value is being deserving of what we receive. The acknowledged value is dealing with the negative external consequences of success.
What bugs me is… I don’t know why all 3 of these happen to develop this very similar structure. It could just be a coincidence, but my gut tells me there is something unifying all 3 of these items together that I’m not seeing, and that understanding what it is would give me a more complete understanding of Procrastination.
They all seem to somehow be related to “Standards”—but I’m still not seeing the underlying system.
Hmm, this is cool!
it seems sort of like a group version of consideration factoring.
Since this is a symmetric weapon, do you think that it’s best to spread it globally (because someone using the symmetric weapons to point at truth will outcompete those using them to point at falsehoods) to try to keep the spread to champions of the truth, something else?
Trying to figure out how people are orienting to the idea of symmetric strategies.
While I had bursts of insight and behavioral changes at first, these changes were more often than not short-lived, and I find that introspective techniques tend to have diminishing benefits, because there are no ‘tangible’ results I can point to mark progress.
This was my experience for the last ~10 years trying to overcome my procrastination as well. I tried lots of different techniques, they would work for a short period of time, and then I would return to baseline. I tried NLP techniques, I tried changing my biochemistry, I tried various checklist and todo systems, and everything was short lived.
It’s only in the last 1.5 years or so that I’ve come to a place where this stuff sticks, and I’m just getting more and more focused/motivated/productive every day. Here’s what I found work for actually internalizing these things:
The initial breakthrough was discovering the Experiential Array. This gave me a template for “the changes I need to string together to internalize things.” I took all of the tools that had been effective for overcoming procrastination, put them into the array, and then went to interview people to find the parts of the array that I was missing:
This was great because instead of just blindly trying to use the tool during the initial burst of “this is working!” I could instead use that initial burst to instead make sure that all of the pieces of the Experiential Array were in place. I created a number of tools to ensure that I made the necessary belief, emotion, strategy, and behavior changes, such as the Virtual Habit Coach:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d901U693dThe next big breakthrough was using Thinking at the Edge to try to understand the deeper structure of procrastination. This was when I started doing things like incorporating resistance into my vision, figuring out the relationships between techniques, and changing the parts of techniques that were unsustainable.
For instance, NLP state change techniques and sports psychology techniques didn’t take into account your current state, which is fine for a short burst of energy during a sports match, but is fundamentally unsustainable. This led me to developing the “Nearest Meaningful State” and “Nearest Playful State” techniques to make sure I could continue to use them forever.
The final piece was using the Experiential Array to map out 5-second strategies for identity-level change, and taking the time to internalze those strategies. This way as I was taking on new strategies, I was changing my identity in tiny little increments along with my behavior, which avoided the “Identity Snapback Effect” that I’d sometimes experienced with previous changes.
Hope that helps!
By dealing with trauma and taking shame and guilt as object.
By incorporating the need for belonging into my systemic understanding.
I had this for a long time but it’s pretty rare now.
I’ve done a bit of work on this. I’ll try to map out my understanding, and you’ll have to figure out which parts apply to your situation.
First, you’ve got to ask yourself, why do you have the oscillating motivation in the first place? What’s going on there?
One answer, on a macro level, is that you’re oscillating between being driven by your vision/mission/purpose, and being driven by your resistance—the thing that fears for your safety, or wants you to get rest, or whatever.
Macro Motivation Oscillations To stop these oscillations, the first thing to do is recognize what your resistance values, and incorporate that into your motivation system.
Sustainable Macro-Motivation On a micro-level, it may be that you’ve learned to motivate yourself through shame/guilt and other negative emotions. So the longer you go without doing your task, the bigger your shame/guilt gets, until it finally causes you to act… then your shame and guilt goes away. Again, this creates oscillations:
Micro Motivation Oscillations To deal with this, you have to again deal with both sides of the equation. First, you have to learn how to process and remove all the negative emotions you have about a task. Then, you have to learn how to motivate yourself using positive rather than negative emotions
Sustainable Micro-Motivation Once you’ve switched to a sustainable motivation system, the question becomes: How to connect with that motivation.
There are two parts to this:
How do you get motivation and resolve for your tasks?
How do you get into a creative, playful state that allows you to get into flow and work well on your tasks?
Again, we can split these into macro and micro.
On a macro level, we connect with our motivation and resolve by creating “creative tension” for our vision using a tool called Vision Contrasting. By letting ourselves see the tension between our vision and current state, it gives us resolve to achieve our vision. I recommend doing this every morning.
Vision Contrasting On a micro-level, we get into the proper state by asking ourselves “What’s the nearest state to what I’m feeling right now that would allow me to feel meaning?,” Then, “What value could I focus on to most quickly get into that state.” This is called the “Meaning Maker.”
Meaning Maker On a Micro-Level, we can do a similar thing as vision contrasting, but instead contrast the end state of our task to the state of our task as it is now. This is called Motivational Contrasting.
Motivational Contrasting Then, we need to figure out how we can get into that playful, creative flow. To do that, we have to ask ourselves “What’s the nearest state to the one I’m feeling right now that would allow me to enjoy the task?”, then “What single aspect of the task could I focus on or change to get me to that state?” This is called the Play Maker.
Play Maker So, at this point:
You’ve stopped your vision and motivation from oscillating.
You’ve learned how to reconnect with motivation in the morning.
You’ve learned how to reconnect with the creative state that allows you to work best on your task.
Obviously, there’s a bunch here I left out, but hopefully this helps a bit. I do teach this stuff for a living, so feel free to reach out if you want to take any of this further.
One way to deal with this is to always start with re-consolidating the more cognitively fused schema.
If you’re trying to use a technique to be more perfect, first, use that same technique to question whether you should be more perfect.
FWIW I think the content doesn’t deliver on the title. Perhaps “How to Survive the Immoral Maze of College”