Software developer and mindhacking instructor. Interested in intelligent feedback (especially of the empirical testing variety) on my new (temporarily free) ebook, A Minute To Unlimit You.
pjeby
Karma: 10,864
OMG.
″ You see, children, your brain is an arrogant and lazy lump of gray matter. It thinks it can handle anything, so it doesn’t bother telling you what’s going on unless it thinks you might actually care. That is why, children, you must be careful to inform your brains of everything they should be listening for.”
And:
“Do you know what this monster is?”
In the abrupt silence, Harry spoke. “You, teacher?”
“No,” said Professor Quirrell. His lips twisted. “The plot.”
There was a baffled silence.
Then, the Hufflepuff girl called out, “The story is making sense, I feel a great sense of foreboding.”
The girl sitting next to her, her hand raised, was Hermione Granger. “Um, that’s because there’s a story in this chapter.”
It’s amazing how good these riffs are at getting Quirrell’s lecturing voice right, not to mention occasionally making a scary amount of sense.
If I were to guess at the source of your intuition, I would say you were taught a value system that denigrates people for not putting enough effort into things, or being focused on one’s own pleasure rather than doing more “important” things.
The musician and video game player have to at least work for their pleasure, and their reward is a place on a status ladder of some kind. The stim user isn’t climbing any ladders or putting in any effort, and thus should be denigrated/disapproved of.
This isn’t an acultural moral intuition, though: it’s based on your specific schooling, family, or other cultural upbringing. A person brought up in an environment where personal ambition is denigrated would likely see the musician as a try-hard, the video game player as acceptable as long as they’re not too serious about it, and the stim user as someone to get together and have a stim party with!
Further:
we must do our best to optimize what little time we have as effectively as possible
Healthy humans are usually more satisficing than optimizing. (Slack is healthy, Moloch not so much.)
In general, my observation has been that the more somebody talks up some form of utility maximization, not as a simple consequence of math or a useful tool, but as a moral imperative and a personal ideal, the more likely the interest arises from a compulsion to virtue-signal in opposition to something one has been taught should be denigrated. The virtue signaling impulse then happens whenever one is exposed to examples of the denigrated thing (e.g. thinking about somebody using a stim machine).
Cultural indoctrination like this can be altered or deleted fairly simply using memory reconsolidation techniques, after which one ceases to have the urge to denigrate or virtue-signal in response to a pattern-match, replaced with something like, “well, it depends”—i.e., specific-case reasoning rather than a compulsive heuristic.
One relevant factor here is that the conscious mind is largely driven by subconscious beliefs in the first place, so the direction in which the conscious mind attempts to edit beliefs is often dysfunctional; see e.g. the part of your previous article that said:
People know intuitively where leverage points are.… Everyone is trying very hard to push it IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!
The desires we have to edit our inner leverage points are no different: a person who is a perfectionist will rarely work on editing themselves to be less perfectionistic, vs. trying to edit themselves to be better at not making mistakes.
Even in the case of trying to edit one’s self to be “less perfectionistic”, one is likely to approach it as something like, “How can I stop being upset over these stupid mistakes (so that I can get closer to being perfect sooner)?”, not “How can I stop thinking mistakes mean I’m a shitty person?”
Conscious editing without first looking for background assumptions (like “mistakes = shitty person”) will just be rearranging the furniture instead of actually moving house. But we don’t consciously notice these background assumptions by default, because our brain doesn’t attribute the problems we experience as a result of them, as having anything to do with them. We see surface symptoms and try to fix those symptoms, not question the underpinnings of our model of the world!
ISTM that’s a result of worshipping Ra, rather than Ra-worship itself. Perhaps I am biased by my mother’s example, but she was not a part of any mysterious organizations or their status incentives. She merely believed that Church, State, Schools, Companies, or other such Capitalized Entities had mystical powers to which mere human individuals could not aspire, unless they were assimilated into those institutions and thereby earned the blessing of said mystical powers.
AFAICT, this did not come from the type of organizational evolution and incentives that you’re talking about; rather, this was simply a widely-held belief of hers that was largely independent of what competencies or institutions were being discussed. In her mind, ordinary humans couldn’t do jack squat; anything an ordinary human did without an appropriate institutional blessing was merely an exception that didn’t count the same as doing the thing “for real”—it was in her mind the same as an actor pretending to be a priest not being able to actually forgive your sins or perform a marriage ceremony… just extended to everything that institutions or some sort of orthordoxy existed for.
So ISTM that the primary dynamic is that deification of the abstract offers a superstimulus that can’t be matched by real, concrete, imperfect individuals, leading to worship of the abstraction in place of critical thinking or analysis. In effect, my mother was just doing the organizational/societal equivalent of people preferring their anime waifus or surgically-altered pornstars over real-life people. (IOW, removing details that imply imperfection or excess complexity is already a standard route to superstimulus in humans.)
I thought the article provided a pretty clear definition: i.e., a preference for Mysterious, Prestigious, collective Authority over known, functional, individual capability.
Thank you for posting this, btw, because I hadn’t actually heard of it before, and reading the article allowed me to finally make sense of a way that my mother treated me as a child, that I couldn’t get my head around before. (Because it just seemed like she was demeaning me and my abilities personally, rather than simply having a semi-religious belief that no mere individual imperfect human could ever do something meaningful through their own actions, rather than through the divine authority of proper institutions.)
Oddly enough, I was actually trying to change a belief I’d picked up from her (that I can’t do anything meaningful or important “for real”) when I had the impulse to go look at LW and spotted your question, then read the article. It was just what I needed to wrap my head around the belief and remove it so that I don’t get nervous when I get close to doing something meaningful “for real”.
Indeed, what I found was that while I hadn’t fully internalized her belief in Ra, I effectively picked up as a background assumption the idea that only certain blessed people are allowed to market themselves successfully or succeed in business in a big way, or write Proper Books… and that I’m not one of them.
So even though I am about as anti-Ra in philosophy as they get, I still had a Ra-like alief that made me feel inadequate compared to the Mysterious Authorities when I tried writing books or promoting my work too effectively. (Versus the very ineffective methods of doing both that I’ve been doing for the past 14 years.) I’m very much looking forward to see what I can do when I don’t have Ra-induced feelings of inadequacy dogging my steps.
Eh. Sorta? I’ve been busy with clients the last few days, not a lot of time for experimenting. I have occasionally found myself, or rather, found not-myself, several times, almost entirely accidentally or incidentally. A little like a perspective shift changing between two possible interpretations of an image; or more literally, like a shift between first-person, and third-person-over-the-shoulder in a video game.
In the third person perspective, I can observe limbs moving, feel the keys under my fingers as they type, and yet I am not the one who’s doing it. (Which, I suppose, I never really was anyway.)
TBH, I’m not sure if it’s that I haven’t found any unpleasant experiences to try this on, or if it’s more that because I’ve been spontaneously shifting to this state, I haven’t found anything to be an unpleasant experience. :-)
Since you can only nitpick a movie after you’ve already paid to see it, where is the economic incentive for anyone to do this?
The actual problem is even more complicated than that, though. The movie business is run by producers—the people who put up the money. They may have experience in the film business, but since there is no universally agreed criteria as to what constitutes a good investment, it is subject to bias, nepotism, superstition, etc. Favors are owed to people, the star or director has a pet issue that must be addressed to get them on board, etc.
This means that to a great extent the artistic direction of a film is determined by committee, many members of which have only the most superficial understanding of what is going on or what the film is about or anything else, and have no real desire to understand more deeply because such an understanding would not do anything useful for their own interests.
IOW, it’s a values alignment problem of the same type that produces other forms of civilizational inadequacy, and the mere existence of better writing tools can’t help it, for the same reason that the vast storehouse of existing wisdom and literature of telling effective stories on film doesn’t help it that much either. The screenplays have to be effectively written to get bought, but once they’re bought the connection between what was first written and what actually gets filmed can be quite tenuous indeed.
No, that’s a good point, as far as it goes. There does seem to be some sort of meta-process that you can use to decouple from craving regarding these things, though in my experience it seems to require continuous attention, like an actively inhibitory process. In contrast, the model description you gave made it sound like craving was an active process that one could simply refrain from, and I don’t think that’s predictively accurate.
Your points regarding what’s possible with meditation also make some sense… it’s just that I have trouble reconciling the obvious evolutionary model with “WTF is meditation doing?” in a way that doesn’t produce things that shouldn’t be there.
Consciously, I know it’s possible to become willing to experience things that you previously were unwilling to experience, and that this can eliminate aversion. I model this largely under the second major motivational mechanic, that of risk/reward, effort/payoff.
That is, that system can decide that some negative thing is “worth it” and drop conflict about it. And meditation could theoretically reset the threshold for that, since to some extent meditation is just sitting there, despite the lack of payoff and the considerable payoffs offered to respond to current urges. If this recalibrates the payoff system, it would make sense within my own model, and resolve the part where I don’t see how what you describe could be a truly conscious process, in the way that you made it sound.
IOW, I might more say that part of our motivational system is a module for determining what urges should be acted upon and which are not worth it, or perhaps that translates mind/body/external states into urges or lack thereof, and that you can retrain this system to have different baselines for what constitutes “urge”-ency. ;-) (And thus, a non-conscious version of “valence” in your model.)
That doesn’t quite work either, because ISTM that meditation changes the threshold for all urges, not just the specific ones trained. Also, the part about identification isn’t covered here either. It might be yet another system being trained, perhaps the elusive “executive function” system?
On the other hand, I find that the Investor (my name for the risk/reward, effort/payoff module) is easily tricked into dropping urges for reasons other than self-identification. For example, the Investor can be tricked into letting you get out of a warm bed into a cold night if you imagine you have already done so. By imagining that you are already cold, there is nothing to be gained by refraining from getting up, and this shifts the “valence”, as you call it, in favor of getting up, because the Investor fundamentally works on comparing projections against an “expected status quo”. So if you convince it that some other status quo is “expected”, it can be made to go along with almost anything.
And so I suppose if you imagine that it is not you who is the one who is going to be cold, then that might work just as well. Or perhaps making it “not me” somehow convinces the Investor that the changes in state are not salient to its evaluations?
Hm. Now that my attention has been drawn to this, it’s like an itch I need to scratch. :) I am wondering now, “Wait, why is the Investor so easily tricked?” And for that matter, given that it is so easily tricked, could the feats attributed to long-term meditation be accomplished in general using such tricks? Can I imagine my way to no-self and get the benefits without meditating, even if only temporarily?
Also, I wonder if I have been overlooking the possibility to use Investor mind-tricks to deal with task-switching inertia, which is very similar to having to get out of a warm bed. What if I imagine I have already changed tasks? Hm. Also, if I am imagining no-self, will starting unpleasant tasks be less aversive?
Okay, I’m off to experiment now. This is exciting!
This is all very interesting, but I can’t help but notice that this idea of valence doesn’t seem to be paying rent in predictions that are different from what I’d predict without it. And to the extent it does make different predictions, I don’t think they’re accurate, as they predict suffering or unsatisfactoriness where I don’t consciously experience it, and I don’t see what benefit there is to having an invisible dragon in that context.
I mean, sure, you can say there is a conflict between “I want that food” and “I don’t have it”, but this conflict can only arise (in my experience) if there is a different thought behind “I want”, like “I should”. If “I want” but “don’t have”, this state is readily resolved by either a plan to get it, or a momentary sense of loss in letting go of it and moving on to a different food.
In contrast, if “I should” but “don’t have”, then this actually creates suffering, in the form of a mental loop arguing that it should be there, but it isn’t, but it was there, but someone ate it, and they shouldn’t have eaten it, and so on, and so forth, in an undending loop of hard-to-resolve suffering and “unsatisfactoriness”.
In my model, I distinguish between these two kinds of conflict—trivially resolved and virtually irreconcilable—because only one of them is the type that people come to me for help with. ;-) More notably, only one can reasonably be called “suffering”, and it’s also the only one where meditation of some sort might be helpful, since the other will be over before you can start meditating on it. ;-)
If you want to try to reduce this idea further, one way of distinguishing these types of conflict is that “I want” means “I am thinking of myself with this thing in the future”, whereas “I should” means “I am thinking of myself with this thing in the past/present”.
Notice that only one of these thoughts is compatible with the reality of not having the thing in the present. I can not-have food now, and then have-food later. But I can’t not-have food now, and also have-food now, nor can I have-food in the past if I didn’t already. (No time travel allowed!)
Similarly, in clinging to positive things, we are imagining a future negative state, then rejecting it, insisting the positive thing should last forever. It’s not quite as obvious a causality violation as time travel, but it’s close. ;-)
I guess what I’m saying here is that ISTM we experience suffering when our “how things (morally or rightly) ought to be” model conflicts with our “how things actually are” model, by insisting that the past, present, or likely future are “wrong”. This model seems to me to be a lot simpler than all these hypotheses about valence and projections and self-reference and whatnot.
You say that :
You witness someone being wrong on the internet
The moral judgment system creates an urge to argue with them
Your mind notices this urge and forms the prediction that resisting it would feel unpleasant, and even though giving into it isn’t necessarily pleasant either, it’s at least less unpleasant than trying to resist the urge
There’s a craving to give in to the urge, consisting of the hypothesis that “I need to give in to this urge and prove the person on the internet wrong, or I will experience greater discomfort than otherwise”
The craving causes you to give in to the urge
But this seems like adding unnecessary epicycles. The idea of an “urge” does not require the extra steps of “predicting that resisting the urge would be unpleasant” or “having a craving to give in to the urge”, etc., because that’s what “having an urge” means. The other parts of this sequence are redundant; it suffices to say, “I have an urge to argue with that person”, because the urge itself combines both the itch and the desire to scratch it.
Notably, hypothesizing the other parts doesn’t seem to make sense from an evolutionary POV, as it is reasonable to assume that the ability to have “urges” must logically precede the ability to make predictions about the urges, vs. the urges themselves encoding predictions about the outside world. If we have evolved an urge to do something, it is because evolution already “thinks” it’s probably a good idea to do the thing, and/or a bad idea not to, so another mechanism that merely recapitulates this logic would be kind of redundant.
(Not that redundancy can’t happen! After all, our brain is full of it. But such redundancy as described here isn’t necessary to a logical model of craving or suffering, AFAICT.)
Interesting model. I’m not 100% certain that mere identification+valence is sufficient (or necessary) to create craving, though. In my experience, the kind of identification that seems to create craving and suffering and mental conflict is the kind that has to do with self-image, in the sense of “what kind of person this would make me”, not merely “what kind of sensory experience would I be having”.
For example, I can imagine delicious food and go “mmmm” and experience that “mmm” myself, without necessarily creating attachment (vs. merely desire, and the non-self-involved flow state of seeking out food).
But perhaps I’m misinterpreting your model, since perhaps what you’re saying is that I would have to also think “it would make me happy to eat that, so I should do that in order to be happy.”
Though I think that I’m trying to clarify that it is not merely valence or sensation being located in the self, but that another level of indirection is required, as in your “walk to relax” example… Except that “walk to relax” is really an attempt to escape non-relaxedness, which is already a level of indirection. If I am stressed, and think of taking a walk, however, I could still feel attracted to the calming of walking, without it being an attempt to escape the stress per se.
Yeah. So ISTM that indirection and self-image are more the culprits for creating dysfunctional loops, than mere self-identified experience. Seeking escape from a negative state, or trying to manipulate how the “self” is seen, seem to me to be prerequisites for creating dysfunctional desire.
In contrast, ISTM that many things that induce suffering (e.g. wanting/not wanting to get up) are not about this indirection or self-image manipulation, but rather about wanting conflicting things.
IOW, reducing to just self-identified valence seems like a big oversimplification to me, with devils very much in the details, unless I’m misunderstanding something. Human motivation is rather complex, with a lot of different systems involved, that I roughly break down as:
pleasure->planning (the system that goes into flow to create a future state, whose state need not include a term for the self)
effort/reward (the system that makes us bored/frustrated on the one hand, or go sunk-cost on the other)
moral judgment and righteousness (which can include ideas about the “right” way to do things or the “right” way of being, ideals of perfection or happiness, etc.)
self-image/esteem (how we see ourselves, as a proxy for “what people will think”)
simple behavioral conditioning and traumatic conditioning
...and those are just what I’ve found it useful to break it down into. I’m sure it’s a lot more complicated than just that. My own observation is that only the first subsystem produces useful motivation for personal goals without creating drama, addiction, self-sabotage, or other side effects… and then only when run in “approach” mode, rather than “avoid” mode.
So for example, the self-image/esteem module is absolutely in line with your model, in the sense that a term for “self” is in the equation, and that using the module tends to produce craving/compulsion loops. But the moral judgment system can produce craving/compulsion loops around other people’s behavior, without self-reference! You can go around thinking that other people are doing the wrong thing or should be doing something else, and this creates suffering despite there not being any “self” designated in the thought process. (e.g. “Someone is wrong on the internet!” is not a thought that includes a self whose state is to be manipulated, but rather a judgment that the state of the world is wrong and must be fixed.)
What I feel is different is that the Way provide a mean for systematically findind this underlying should and explaining it from the inside.
I notice that I am confused, because I’m not at all clear how Nate’s conceptual model would have helped me find the body-memory of my mother screaming at me about some deadline as a child. In contrast, using the Work to surface my objection to not doing something led me to that memory in a few minutes without me needing to do any particular analysis, consequentialist or otherwise.
This isn’t to say that his approach is wrong, just that it’s incomplete. Notably, it doesn’t provide any guards against confabulating your “explanations” of what your thought process is. When you use analytical reasoning to understand yourself, the answers are often wrong because the thing that is actually causing your response is rarely based on any sort of analysis, rather than simple pattern matching. (In the specific example above, my brain was pattern matching “important thing I’m supposed to do → stress about it, don’t allow yourself to do anything else, and call it taking things seriously, or else you’re a bad person”.)
Finding patterns like this requires observation of what your body and mind are doing, while disengaging from attempts to logically “explain” things, since patterns like these trivially hijack your analytical reasoning (e.g. by tricking you into defining what you’re doing as “taking things seriously” rather than “freaking out”).
On the other hand, I see this post as more about examining the exact mechanism underlying this error we make.
Yes, though an important part of it is also tackling the means by which the algorithm can be swiftly undone from the inside. Nate’s tools are oriented more to the object level of a specific “should”, whereas I focus more on exposing the assumptions and social imprints that cause us to develop shoulds in the first place.
For example, with Nate’s tools I could have deconstructed the idea that “I should be doing something right now”, but they would likely not have led me to discovering the underlying idea of “I should be taking things seriously”, and the underlying imprinted-by-example meaning of “taking things seriously = freaking the fork out about them”.
To be fair, I’m sure there’s context to Nate’s tools I’m leaving out, and I occasionally do use things somewhat like them with clients, not as an ongoing approach but more as a preparatory stage in learning the Work, to show them the illogicality of a “should” they might be clinging to. (e.g. to demonstrate why “I should have done X yesterday” is based strictly on imaginary hypotheticals)
But in the long run, I consider logical disputation to mostly be useful as a tool for identifying experiential counterpoints to the emotion-backed aliefs that drive the process. You can’t (directly) reason yourself out of what you were never (directly) reasoned into.
The punishment response is beneficial for attacking others with; that it can also be self-directed could be viewed as a bug, but it’s also a feature: self-punishment lowers the motivation for others to punish us. The counterfactual part exists because you have to be able to compare behavior against what a social standard is, in order to know what to punish. And being able to consider counterfactuals at all is evolutionarily-useful for learning.
In general, I view the way modern societies treat their children as an unintended exploit of the machinery. If you’re more concerned with your children’s compliance than growth, social punishment is an extremely easy stick to reach for that creates high compliance, at the cost of stunting personal growth in adulthood. If you compare to how hunter-gatherer tribes raise their children, “modern” childraising appears shockingly abusive, invasive, and neglectful, all at the same time. So it probably wasn’t so problematic in the ancestral environment.
In modern societies, children’s public (and to some extent private) behavior is considered to reflect on the parents, which provides immense pressure for parents to make their children pretend to be more mature than they actually are, and social punishment allows you to make children act more mature, while silently depriving them of the experiences they need to actually become mature.
The actual research can be found here, and it makes for much more interesting reading.
Notably, the researchers were surprised to discover that students taught to use the Work procrastinated less no matter their level of test anxiety post-intervention. They concluded that this was likely due to the fact that since they taught the students how to apply the technique to relieve anxiety, the students may have taken it upon themselves to keep using the technique after the intervention to reduce anxiety, and thus procrastination:
Therefore, when confronted with the unpleasant state of test anxiety after the IBSR intervention, IBSR participants might have no longer felt the need to withdraw from the situation through procrastination. Rather, they might have applied the IBSR method as an alternative coping strategy to deal with unpleasant physical arousal and worry thoughts. Nevertheless, additional data is needed to confirm this assumption.
While I’m happy to see the Work getting more attention, I find it mildly distressing that virtually nothing in the paper (or the article you linked to) mentions Byron Katie at all, unless you dig into the citations a bit. (To further confuse matters, the “IBSR” acronym also stands for some other technique created by a completely different person that I don’t think is at all related.)
I’m also a bit worried that once this becomes a “thing” endorsed by science, that people are going to be exposed to a degraded version of it, as it’s altogether too easy for someone who doesn’t understand the technique to turn it into a weapon, even if entirely unintentionally (let alone deliberately).
Actually, you don’t even need another person to do it: I’ve seen so many different ways for people to distort the process themselves that all it requires is a lack of sufficient instruction for somebody to hurt themselves with the tool.
OTOH, the actual paper indicates that students were given six full hours of training on both identifying thoughts and applying the technique, including some individual instructor attention, which, if the instructors were good, should be sufficient to both keep most people from shooting themselves in the foot and get a significant percentage of the students to be reasonably proficient. I imagine that framing it specifically in matters of test anxiety probably also helped; it’s easier to give Work instruction in a specific problem area than to teach it generically.
It’s really interesting to see how many bits of what’s in this handbook match important skills I either use with my clients or teach them to do. Focusing and Inner Simulation, obviously. But also bits of Socratic Ducking and Polaris. (On the other hand, I have reservations with some parts of IDC and “Understanding Shoulds”, in that most of the time, the problems I help people overcome are rooted in utterly useless shoulds that they are taking far too seriously, not in the desires they’re failing to take seriously enough.)
Quick question though: what is the copyright and/or licensing status of this document? (It also appears to be using copyrighted artwork from various outside sources, such as xkcd, without even crediting those creators, let alone affirming their copyrights.)
I’m not sure I understand your question. In order to think that there’s a problem with how much love he’s providing, you have to have a counterfactual in which he’s supposed to be providing more. For the amount of love to be insufficient, there has to be something to compare it to. If you aren’t (implicitly) comparing, then there is nothing to draw it to your attention in the first place.
In other words, you wouldn’t keep saying “I guess he didn’t”, because if you’re not comparing, then there’s not an issue any more—it’s just history, not an unresolved problem.
It sounds to me like the experience you’re talking about is incomplete grief, like maybe a description of a situation where someone is accepting (at least intellectually) that they aren’t going to get the love they want in the future, but has yet to accept that they didn’t get it in the past. Because as long as they think they should have gotten it, the grieving is still incomplete.
As for deadening, letting go of things generally makes us more alive, not less, because we stop obsessing over the things we can’t change, and move on to enjoying what we have (or can actually get). But before one actually lets go of something, the idea of letting go feels like it would be a loss.
As I suggested in the article, our brains treat unacknowledged losses like they are still assets on our inner books of utility. So the idea of writing off a loss feels like it is a loss. But once the write-off is actually done, then it no longer feels like a loss, because it’s now the status quo, and therefore it doesn’t keep coming back to conscious attention the way a perceived threat of loss does.
That just means you’ve not seen that many wikis. ;-) For example, the ConnectedText personal wiki software includes backlinks, date-specific pages, and graph visualization of link structures, much like Roam. It also has the ability to include pages in others, and some of Roam’s other features could likely be emulated using CT’s scripting and templating systems, though it’d be a pain.
I actually own a copy of an older version of CT but stopped using it many years ago because it’s not terribly interoperable with anything else.
This presupposes that you know what the difficulty level is for the person in question. It also ignores a ton of stuff that can get between “easy thing” and “actual doing”, like what their priorities, interests, and abilities are.
Let’s say Bob has a really important project he needs to work on. He’s stuck and obsessed with it. Meanwhile, his room goes uncleaned and his dishwasher unloaded. He’s not accomplishing anything, but he’s not doing those simple things because he’s pouring energy into something else.
Now let’s consider Alice. Alice is a blind paraplegic computer programmer, who runs rings around her peers when it comes to coding. Programming for her is super easy, barely an inconvenience. But cleaning up the room or loading the dishwasher are not exactly her strengths.
And then there’s Carl. He spends hours playing video games at insanely high difficulty levels that nobody else can match. But putting away dishes is boring, and doesn’t get him that sweet sweet cred… or endorsement deals and advertising revenue. He’ll do it tomorrow, for sure. Maybe. Or maybe his mom will.
None of these people’s rooms are getting cleaned or dishwashers loaded, but that fact by itself tells you very little about what that person can accomplish. (After all, Bob could easily be a successful best-selling author who lets his place go to hell when he gets stuck in the middle of a book project.)
Hey Kaj. I was actually looking for feedback in email, but this is good too. :) (I’ll update the article to clarify on that point.) Thanks for the info about your friend’s experience: the answer to their question is that the act of visualizing requires them to access implicit information from their memory from direct (if remembered) experience, vs. simply verbalizing cached facts. It is structurally similar to scanning one’s memory for past experiences, looking for something that matches a pattern of feeling or behavior. I’m only using the term “felt sense” because there’s no sense (no pun intended) in creating yet another name for something that is already described in other places. (Also, some people actually do access the turn information kinesthetically, i.e., by feeling their way through the recalled day.)
As to your transcript, I see you transitioned from the Quick Questions right to the Work, which is a good move in the event one objects to one’s desires. But I think perhaps you’ve missed something (two somethings, actually) about how the Work works.
So, when you got to: “what happens, when you believe that thought?”, you took the response you got as an objection from a part (mixing IFS in), rather than simply taking the response at face value. In other words, “What happens when I believe this thought? I feel like the reins are pulling me to my death”. You actually got the answer to your question! When you believe the thought that it’s impossible to do anything meaningful because you’ll get pulled, the consequence is just that: feeling like you’re being pulled to death.
The next question, “who would I be without that thought?” would then be helpful in targeting the specific belief, because objections to letting go of the belief directly imply the state of the world (or yourself) that your beliefs predict would result from you not believing it.
This might’ve avoided a lot of the going in circles you did from this point on in the transcript, and led you directly to the target schema with less… well, thrashing between ideas, for lack of a better word.
The reason I’ve moved towards using the Work as a prime investigative tool is that it lets you walk the belief network really fast compared to other methods. Getting your brain to object to getting rid of a belief forces it to reveal what the next belief up the branch is with far less wasted movement.
And as you can see, starting from a place where you already have a concrete objection (e.g. using a tool like the Quick Questions), you can move really rapidly to the real “meat” of an issue.
That being said, the Quick Questions are designed to solve logistical problems, more than emotional ones—aside from the emotional issue of focusing on the problems instead of on solutions. A Minute To Unlimit You is just a mental jujitsu move to disengage your brain’s planning system from “There’s a Problem” mode and put it back into “Seeking Solutions” mode.
Of course, that’s only one module of your brain’s motivation system, as the ebook mentions. There are four other modules (like the two that handle punishment and virtue-signalling) that can be involved in a motivation problem, but it’s usually easiest to begin with the Quick Questions to rule out a mode 1 mismatch first, even if the problems being predicted turn out to be coming from one of the other modules.
I don’t think the word is the critical part. The critical part is the underlying sense of “supposed to (have) happen(ed), and if anyone disagrees, then they’re wrong”. There are a lot of different words that can be used to describe that state, including should, have to, ought to, supposed to, must, required, etc.
This type of “should” is effectively a statement of moral rectitude or righteousness, coupled with condemnation. It’s not the same as e.g.
I would be better off if I did this
It would be a good idea if I did this
I wish something else had happened
etc. These are also expansions of “should”, but lack the implication “and it’s a violation of propriety if not implemented” or “you’re a less righteous person if you don’t”.