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: 11,762
I’ve never been to a professional. It’s literally “press and hold”. I have a few items I use (a Knobble and a BodyBackBuddy), but anything hard with a rounded end (like the size/shape of the rounded tip on a broom handle) will do in a pinch. I read in one trigger point book the best ways to use your hands to reduce giving yourself hand pain, but tools are even better. For some trigger points, a hard rubber ball, a flat surface, and your weight are the easiest way to do it.
Finding the points isn’t terribly hard either—you know when you’ve found one because they’re tender. (If it doesn’t “twinge” or “twang” when you press on it, it’s probably not a trigger point.) And you know if it’s relevant if pressure affects your sensations. Tons of online charts show the spots where they’re most likely to be and the regions they’re most likely to affect—and you need a chart because a lot of them are really not very intuitively located.
So you can literally figure out in maybe 30 minutes (including googling trigger point guides/charts and finding something to press with) whether there’s any chance your problems are being caused by this, then decide whether you need a pro or just some tools.
The harder part is figuring out what lifestyle changes you might need to make (like drinking more water in my case, or posture, etc.) to reduce the odds of the points being created or set off in the first place. That’s something you’ll have to experiment with.
To be fair, there probably are better ways to deal with trigger points than just (almost literally) poking them with a stick, but poking them has the advantage of being fast and effective. If you have trouble pressing hard enough to squish the fluid out of them, or find yourself bruising due to bad angles or moving around too much, you might want to see a pro in order to learn better methods. Just be aware that “myofascial release” is not necessarily the same thing as trigger point treatment.
Have you considered myofascial trigger points? For me, it’s always myofascial trigger points.
Tooth sensitivity? Trigger points in jaw or neck. Headache? Probably neck. Finger tingly or numb? Trigger point in the chest, neck, or armpit. Ringing in the ears? Trigger point on the jaw or side of the face.
Every. Single. Freaking. Thing.
(Heck, the other day I had heartburn that turned out to be not directly related to a trigger point, but there were some trigger points involved.)
A trigger point is basically a “knot” in a muscle, that usually refers pain somewhere else because it’s pinching nerves or blood vessels. (This is my layperson’s understanding, I’m sure there are better/more correct explanations.)
Trigger points do not respond terribly well to standard massage or stretches. If you’re not going “ow ow ow” from what you’re doing to it, you’re probably not doing anything to it. Direct, hard, and continuous pressure (i.e. invariant and unceasing) for around 60 seconds, using a tool specific to the purpose, or something like the rounded point of a broom handle generally works best for me, though I’ll use my knuckles or thumbtip if I have to. (Mostly, though, I use one of the specialized tools I own for the purpose now.) You may have to do it more than once in a day, depending.
Anyway my point (no pun intended) is that if I had any weird sensations in my feet or legs, I would start by running my hands up my legs from the affected area looking for tender spots or knots, and apply pressure, trying to see which ones affect the sensation (either toning it down or making it worse).
I would also drink water, because my points are more likely to act up more when I’m dehydrated or hungry. I might also move and stretch.
Dunno if any of this will help you specifically. Also, if you haven’t dealt with these things enough to know where they are, look for trigger point charts on the internet. Typically they’ll show points and the general area where the pain (or other weird sensations) will be. (Rarely will the trigger point be inside the pain area!)
The key indicators for whether your problem is being caused by a trigger point are that you 1) have a tender spot in one of the places identified on a chart, and 2) pressing deeply on the tender spot makes a difference to the problem (either better or worse). (If it makes it worse while you’re pressing, though, it’ll usually get better when the knot releases—which can take a minute or more.)
AFAIK, not a lot is known about how/why trigger points form, though in my case they seem to stem from being in a certain posture for an extended period. For a long time I kept thinking my dentist was doing horrible things to my mouth every time I went because I’d have all sorts of pains afterwards, and it turned out that holding my jaw open for a long time usually sets off some trigger points that then refer pain back into my teeth! Now I start working the points when I get home and don’t have that issue any more.
While it might seem that “knot in jaw” and “weird feelings in legs” are unrelated, I personally find that if I am generally in poor health for whatever reason (incl. dehydrated, hungry, tired, etc.), I will often have trigger points going off all over the place. That is, global bad conditions like illness will make me more susceptible to trigger point-generated pains.
Anyway, hope you figure it out, and hope this is also helpful for anybody else who may be dealing with weird unexplained pains or sensations.
Yes. I’m also saying it’s common for human beings to use absolutes as a means to disclaim responsibility for their own choices or motives while emotionally blackmailing others to do what they want. This has less to do with the absoluteness of the proposition, and more to do with the concealed message that “you deserve to feel bad about yourself if you don’t comply with my (concealed/disclaimed) wishes”.
I call this an “FBI message”, i.e. “feel bad if”. People tend to focus on the seemingly factual/reasonable part of a communication or idea like, “you failed at X”, and then feel bad about themselves because, well, that sounds like a fact. But the implicit, unspoken part of the communication was “You deserve to Feel Bad If you fail at X.”
In the case of absolutes, they’re a red flag because they usually conceal an unquestioned FBI message: the absolute part is like a stealth wrapper for the toxic payload. So ironically, the more reasonable, obvious, and factual-sounding the wrapper is, the worse it is for you, because it keeps you from questioning the toxic payload: feeling bad about yourself.
There are lots of justifications our minds use to rationalize feeling bad about ourselves, but these justifications are smoke screens to keep us from being aware that the only real reason to feel bad about ourselves is to send costly signals to other people in order to influence their behavior. Feeling bad about ourselves doesn’t perform any directly useful function for the individual at all!
In an abusive environment, sincerely feeling bad about yourself communicates to the abuser that their goal has been achieved of crushing your spirit, so they will hopefully be satisfied and don’t keep escalating. But once you’re out of that environment, feeling bad about yourself no longer serves any useful purpose whatsoever, as it’s costly by design and can be thought of as a button for “Quick! Turn down the volume on all of my individuality and its expression!”
Anyway, it’s definitely possible to communicate something as an absolute or universal without tacking an FBI message on it. But the kind of people who conceal their motives using absolutes are nearly always sending FBI messages along with them, so in that context ANY absolute is likely a carrier for one and should be detained and investigated. ;-)
I am not willing to say most people in human history across cultures were abused or damaged by this.
Neither am I, as I explained at great length in my previous reply. Not sure what that has to do with anything, though.
In the context I mentioned—i.e. the context of a person who has motivation and decision-making problems, absolutes in one’s upbringing remain a red flag that require investigation, since they’re most likely a problem.
Perhaps the context isn’t sufficiently clear? I’m saying here that if I’m working with somebody and they mention an absolute, I’m going to want to investigate it. I’m not saying random people need to scour their childhood for random mentions of absolutes. I’m saying if an absolute or universal comes up in the context of fixing a specific problem, it’s extremely likely to be one of, if not the source of the issue(s) at hand. (And so should always be investigated, if not expunged.)
The way you’re saying this just doesn’t parse to me. I don’t understand how you can believe that a therapy aimed at imagining better parenting isn’t implying something about what parenting is bad.
The same parenting can be perceived by people in different ways. One person perceives, “my parent is an asshole” and isn’t bothered, while the other perceives, “I am the asshole” and becomes neurotic. (Extreme over-simplifcation here.)
The other complication is that it’s not outward overt behavior that matters, it’s what the adult seems to be implying about the child that has the most emotional impact. So no matter what the supposed philosophy of parenting is, one can probably find both loving and abusive ways to implement that philosophy. That’s why I mostly try to avoid promoting a particular philosophy, or make any claims that damaging parenting is universally damaging, even if it seems so within the population whose problems I hear about.
They’re the way all social mores are understood in most cultures
And that’s precisely why they’re so easily (and commonly) abused for deception and manipulation.
But the real issue is their being absolute, rather than things you can weigh and trade off (see e.g. your earlier mention of your mother’s attitudes). Absolutes are thought-stoppers and give you no room to make your own judgments.
So in the context of being a functional, emotionally-free-to-choose adult, universals and absolutes are always a red flag worth checking. Anything that can be claimed as a universal can also be derived (as an adult) from one’s desires, values, reasoning, etc., and is a term to be weighted in your utility function, not a true absolute driving utility to zero or infinity.
(And if there is any emotional objection to questioning the absoluteness of a principle, that’s a double-extra sign of manipulation to be investigated, since a truly universal value would still make sense even when deeply questioned.)
people don’t all have terrible childhoods in traditional cultures
I wouldn’t know; my bias is that I work with people who have problems now, and some of those problems can be linked to their upbringing. I literally can’t even say for sure that bad parenting causes problems, all I know is that fixing mental models of bad parenting fixes problems for the people that have them. And in that context, absolutes and universals are always a big red flag.
People who are taught everything that way have a lot of trouble figuring out what they want, because they’ve never really thought about it… or if they tried, they couldn’t get very far because it kept getting shut down by critical voices.
Again, I can’t say that’s a cause of problems with people in general, since If I tried to do that kind of reasoning from the people I see, I would also have to conclude that bad parenting makes children more intelligent, talented, and sensitive!
(In reality, the causation probably goes the other way: intelligent and sensitive kids are perhaps more likely to be damaged by shit parenting because they take in more, think more deeply about it, and more acutely feel the effects of it. Maybe create broader associations and generalizations, for that matter.)
Anyway, within the context I’m speaking of, healing this kind of damage requires practice hearing one’s own feelings, wants, desires, values, all that kind of thing—and thinking in terms of universals, absolutes, and other abstractions is the exact opposite of listening to one’s own self. That’s why it’s a red flag to me.
Knowing this doesn’t help me resolve all the infinite variety of individual cases,
Man I wish it did. My life and work would be soooo much easier. But yeah, it definitely does not.
but it’s very interesting to see that to a great extent it’s about her failure to provide me with any kind of clarity and certainty about what was important, what was not, and how I ought to behave about important things.
Sort of? The only caveat here is that this phrasing implies there are absolutes, and IME whenever families deal in absolutes, it’s as a form of deceptive manipulation.
Clean communication doesn’t include appeal to absolute values or priorities, but to the parent’s desires or goals. “I want you to do X”, not “It’s important you do X. Or, “I think you should X because Y”, not “You should X” (or even “You should X because Y”!).
When adults deny their “I”, they also deny the significance of the child’s “I” and the relationship between those I’s. The implicit message is: “individual goals or priorities don’t matter” / “I don’t care what your priorities are”. And “if you need to get people to do something, appeal to universal correctness instead of asking, negotiating, or otherwise communicating”.
(Again, for anyone reading this as a parent—I’m not promoting a theory of parenting here, just saying what thought process usually works for adults to fix the entanglements that create their insecurities, self-consciousness, procrastination, indecision, etc., etc.)
As I said, I can’t really comment on the parenting aspect. My own perspective is strictly “use the behavior as a model to envision alternatives to fix fucked-up parenting” in the minds of people (like me) who had certain kinds of fucked up parenting.
(That this seems to produce good results does not really prove that doing those things would be good parenting, though, especially since human beings can fuck anything up if they really want to, and turn the most wonderful things into weapons of abuse with even just a little effort.)
I came across the CC at a point where I was researching developmental psych in order to find out what could be done to fix the kind of crap I had in my head and came across in others’. Mostly books tended to give advice like “love yourself” or to “love”, “protect”, “care for” etc. one’s inner child. The best ones talked about re-living past scenarios with good parenting.
But none of those books ever explained what any of that was, so if you didn’t experience love or protection or good parenting, they were kind of useless.
CC and Cycles of Power (by Pamela Levin) were the only books I found that made a significant effort to show just what functional parenting might look or sound like. (Though Weiss & Weiss’s “Recovery from Co-Dependency” deserves an honorable mention, but I get the impression a lot of its inspiration actually came from Levin’s work.)
I now have a mostly-good-enough model of what functional parenting looks like that is based on more general principles of responsibility, trust, and clean communication, but in difficult cases I still reach for Levin or Leidloff on rare occasion.
(Again, “functional parenting” not meaning actual parenting, but “what kinds of parenting experiences do people need to imagine as alternatives in order to repair their own functioning by realizing what they were missing and why they don’t need to keep running coping mechanisms to work around their dysfunctional parent.”)
There is another model, wherein the problem is trigger points. Trigger points crop up when a muscle is under strain, and then they tend to stay that way. Trigger points, once created, constrict blood flow or impinge on nerves, creating all sorts of problems. (My dentist referred me to an oral surgeon twice for things that later turned out to be trigger points: my teeth had gotten sensitive after dental work, but it turned out that I developed trigger points from having my mouth open for hours during the procedure. Now I know where to massage my neck and jaw to prevent tooth sensitivity from arising in certain areas of my mouth after dental work.)
I used to have wrist pain a lot, and tried a ridiculous number of things to deal with it until I discovered the trigger point concept. Over time I’ve learned to identify which trigger points produce what symptoms for me, and what postures or behaviors set off the trigger points.
Before that, I considered Sarno but didn’t get much benefit from it. I have nonetheless noticed that you don’t need a “sneaky” subconscious for Sarno to be meaningful, however: if you go around constantly suppressing rage, you can easily put some muscles under chronic strain. This isn’t really “subconscious” except in the same way that we “subconsciously” drive a car or perform any other habit. Most people tense their muscles when trying to “suppress an emotion”, or rather, trying to inhibit their expression of that emotion.
And before Sarno, I did Egoscue work—a bunch of exercises to improve posture, which did help with wrist pain, but they required an hour or more of exercise per day during which I couldn’t do anything else and the improvement was very gradual. I think the exercises were good in general and I still do some of the ones that produce fast pain relief in certain areas when a trigger point flares up and I’m still getting it to un-knot.
Anyway, my prior now for “mysterious chronic pain” is “check for trigger points creating referred pain”. Most often this consists of following the nearest muscles, nerves, or blood vessels in the direction of the spine or brain, checking for tenderness. A sharply sensitive spot is likely a trigger point, so I press deeply on it for a minute (as in 60 seconds) and see if the original pain is made worse or better. If nothing happens to it, it’s probably not the trigger point. (Pressing on a trigger point can make the pain temporarily worse, but the pain will reduce again when the trigger point releases or un-knots.)
This simple search algorithm is far from perfect, especially once you get up into tricky areas like shoulders, underarms, neck and head. Some trigger points are in muscles underneath other muscles, or otherwise difficult to get to, and others are in counterintuitive locations for what they do. (Like the spots on my chest that I need to massage if the tip of my index finger feels numb or tingling.) It’s generally a good idea to consult a proper reference chart of trigger points, but since “look for tenderness along the obvious-to-me paths” works well for a lot of limb stuff, and I’ve mostly looked up the weird ones most relevant to me, it saves me some time.
would I be right in guessing that it’s you who have been downvoting all my comments in this thread
I did not downvote all your comments in this thread—a fact that should already have been known to you before you wrote this one, if you had examined the vote counts. (I downvoted only two of them in an effort to end discussion of a topic I find offensive and upsetting, but that effort proved pointless by the time of your third reply, so I gave up.)
you did imply that there was no reasonable way to interpret you as having said X
I did not imply that, you inferred it (incorrectly). I stated the obvious-to-me fact that I did not know how you’d come to misunderstand me (the truth at that time), and the fact that I didn’t want to know (although I later found out, as much as I would have preferred not to).
and you did make it clear that you would be displeased if I explained what I interpreted you as having said X
I would be, and am displeased. I’m displeased the entire conversation has taken place and wish I’d never said anything in the first place, so if that was your aim, you can consider your efforts successful.
I think your original choice of words makes it pretty clear what your intentions were at the time when you wrote them.
At this point it’s pretty clear that you are not going to change your incorrect belief about my intentions, so there isn’t any point to me extending this conversation further. Similarly, it’s a practical impossibility for you to convince me I’m mistaken about my intentions, since I’m the only person who actually knows what I was thinking at the time.
I have considered trying to explain in more detail, to resolve the rather obvious (to me, now) point of confusion you have that leads to your incorrect conclusion, but that would require me to explicitly discuss a subject I vehemently do not wish to discuss, and based on your conduct thus far, I can only guess that it would encourage you to further discuss it.
If I were the sort of person to lightly throw accusations around, or attribute motives to people, there are plenty of things you have done in this thread that I could have made accusations about, or attributed motives to.
Instead, I’ve bent way over backwards trying to be polite in the face of what is, from my POV unwarranted belaboring of a subject that I’ve virtually begged you to stop replying to me about, because I find it distasteful at best and traumatic at worst.
(Which is how I know with 100% certainty that I never intentionally brought it up in the first place—I’m literally using “Word B” as a double-indirection to avoid mentioning the actual subject, and even the word referred to by “Word B” isn’t a word I’ve used myself in this thread, ever, even before my edits—you’re the only person who’s actually used word B. That’s how much I don’t want to talk about it.)
But it appears I can’t resolve your confusion around that without discussing the very things I don’t want to discuss, and you don’t appear willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. (Notice how that previous sentence at least says you don’t appear willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. That’s an example of me still giving you some benefit of the doubt, by saying what appears to me to be the case, rather than me asserting I know what’s going on in your head.)
So, I’m done with this conversation, other than to note that perhaps, in future, rather than making accusations and attributing motives to other people when you see a problem with their communication, you could instead simply suggest alternative wordings to avoid confusion.
For example, if you thought that my edited comment still gave the wrong impression, you could have just said so, rather than insisting you know what must be happening in my head. (For that matter, you could’ve avoided attacking altogether and simply phrased your original comment as a helpful suggestion to avoid confusion.)
Anyway, I’m done with this thread, and am unsubscribing from notifications for it, since neither my polite requests nor my downvotes have worked to stop the replies from coming.
I am, in fact, considering whether I should request the site moderators delete this entire comment thread, though I don’t know if that’s possible for me to do without having to talk about the subject I find upsetting. But if you were to report the thread yourself (and cite this consent from me to remove it), I would certainly not object, and would consider it strong evidence against the hypothesis that you’re now intentionally setting out to harass me by waving a sensitive subject in my face after repeated statements that I would prefer you stop doing so, beginning with literally my first reply to you, and repeated in my every reply since.
So, I wrote a post using word A, you took that to mean word B and said so (or rather, implied it).
Since I did not intend to imply B, I edited the post to reduce usage of word A.
You are now presenting this as evidence that I must therefore have meant to use word B all along.
[insert Picard facepalm and/or Jackie Chan WTF face meme here]
This seems utterly nonsensical to me, especially since if I had used or even meant word B, an important argument in my original comment would make no sense. (The one about 50% of the population—which would obviously not apply if I meant word B!)
From the moment you claimed I was implying B, I made haste to avoid the misunderstanding and (hopefully) close the discussion. That’s all I’ve been trying to do since, because I don’t want to talk about B, and never did.
If you re-read my original comment, you will see that I never accused anyone of anything, nor even attributed any motivations to anyone. I only explained how various things could be misinterpreted.
In your replies, however, you’ve directly accused me of various things and attributed various motivations to me as well.
May I suggest you re-read this thread starting from an assumption that you are actually mistaken as to my motivations? Because if you do, you’ll see everything I have said and done is 100% consistent with the model “For personal reasons, I don’t want to talk about B and never did, so for god’s sake please stop replying to me about it.”
Please consider the possibility you may be mistaken.
In particular please note that all of your accusations and attributions are accompanied by pseudo-quotations in which you say things that are not at all what I said. For example, I wrote:
I never suggested such a thing, and am kind of confused as to why you think I did. But TBH I don’t really want to have that conversation so please don’t enlighten me. ;-)
But you reframed this as:
I think “how could you possibly think I was saying X? by the way, please don’t answer” is an extremely rude rhetorical move
Do you see how what I wrote and you wrote are different? I can see how you could reach the interpretation you did. But can you see how it’s different from what I intended to convey?
It was always 100% clear to me what you meant. I said I was confused as to why you thought it was what I meant, since, you know, it wasn’t. (And I even removed two instances of a relevant word from my comment in response to yours, to make it clear that wasn’t what I meant.)
And when I said “don’t enlighten me” (with a winky emoticon no less) it was a joke to lighten the part where I basically said, “please stop this line of discussion: I don’t want to participate in it, not least because it has nothing to do with what I was talking about.”
IOW, from my perspective you were the one who brought that subject into the conversation and I would much prefer you hadn’t, or at least took the hint to drop it once the interpretation was addressed by my edit.
I guess you wrote that not so much because you seriously think Matt is signalling a preference for the underage, or that others will think so, as because you hope that giving him a bit of a shock might help him avoid saying such creepy-sounding things. If so, then I think making that suggestion three times is really a bit much.
I grew up in a time where it was a frequent feminist talking point that adult women are not “girls”, and thus “girls” were—by implication—not adults.
I have edited my comment, however, to use “immature” rather than hammering the point over and over.
suggesting that he’s aiming to commit what in our society is one of the most viscerally hated of all crimes
I never suggested such a thing, and am kind of confused as to why you think I did. But TBH I don’t really want to have that conversation so please don’t enlighten me. ;-)
I felt that the only lesson I learned was that people I interact with are more politically correct than I realized. And they’ll look for ways to misinterpret a statement I meant literally.
Most people intuitively interpret statements non-literally, through a frame of “why is this person saying this?” If you make a statement like “hot girls excite me”, a statement which most people by default would assume applies to any heterosexual male (not to mention a lot of women), then the default assumption is going to be that you mean something specific by it, because otherwise this could have been assumed from context without you needing to state it.
(In addition, the statement as literally written appears tautological, if you assume the word “hot” means “exciting”—i.e. it is just saying, “I’m excited by people who excite me”, and so is apparently semantically void.)
So from an information-theoretic standpoint, the phrase stands out as being intended to signal something, causing people to look for non-literal interpretations.
One way that people look for non-literal interpretations is to assume emphasis on some point, as a contrast. For example, reading the statement’s implication as “non-hot non-girls don’t excite me”, implying you prefer physically attractive immature or underage women, or that appearance is especially important to you.
Another way of non-literal interpretation is to take a statement like this in terms of “who says things like this?” (In my own mind the two stereotypes that immediately come to mind are the socially inept perv characters in anime, and the chads / jocks / frat dudes who say things like “no fat chicks” or, well, Donald Trump.)
I expect from your comments that you intended none of these communications, but that’s the sort of thing people will infer from a communication like that, since interpreting it literally makes zero sense as a social communication, because it provides no actual information about you as a person that couldn’t be inferred from gender and orientation.
I don’t think it’s fair to describe this as “looking for ways to misinterpret a statement you meant literally”. From where I’m sitting, this is 100% bad communication on your end. If you didn’t intend to communicate membership in a certain social group and/or preference for conventionally attractive immature females, you used the wrong phrasing. And it’ll continue to be the wrong phrasing, in the sense of getting you results you disprefer—i.e. people thinking you’re in one of those groups or otherwise oddly obsessed with said females.
If instead you wanted to convey something about yourself as a human being, it would be a good idea to communicate instead something unusual about yourself, rather than something that would likely be literally true for >50% of all human beings. (Taking the time to call out something that’d otherwise be assumable from context implies that you put unusual weight on it, from an information-theoretic standpoint.)
one of the important elements of what I’m calling “orientation” is locating-the-thing-that-needs-admitting, in the space of all the possible things you might need to admit
True! Perhaps orientation should be that part in an orient-admit-grieve trifecta. It’s certainly the longer part, anyway.
I mostly do orientation by asking what it is I least want to admit, most wish were not true, and/or am most afraid is true. Then admitting those things are true or at least that they might be or that I’m afraid they are or wish they weren’t.
Also, per Curse of the Counterfactual, anything I think is a “should” is a good candidate for admitting the opposite, and the Work of Byron Katie (aka MBSR in current psych research lingo I think?) a good tool for doing so.
Upvoted: deliberate grieving is a critical self-improvement skill. I personally mostly frame it in terms of admitting, rather than letting go or accepting; in terms of your two steps, I’ve been calling the orientation part “admitting”, and the catharsis part “grieving”.
A lot of critical motivation drivers are hung up on trying to get positive things from people that we didn’t get as kids, and that we created a bunch of coping mechanisms (e.g. most kinds of perfectionism) to work around.
Admitting that we were hurt by not getting those things and that our coping mechanisms will in fact not magically fix anything is a prerequisite to moving past them and actually living life. (Because otherwise our brains will keep insisting that if we try hard enough we can retroactively make everyone love and respect us.)
Also, some LWers are neither young nor healthy, and/or have family responsibilities that would become problematic or impossible at some levels of lasting lung or organ damage, whether you call it “long covid” or not. So I’m definitely waiting for more understanding of long-term effects before I change my risk profile.
Downvoted due to lacking a story to provide an intuition pump to readers as to why the following the proposal would be useful.
I would question the framing of mental subagents as “mesa optimizers” here. This sneaks in an important assumption: namely that they are optimizing anything. I think the general view of “humans are made of a bunch of different subsystems which use common symbols to talk to one another” has some merit, but I think this post ascribes a lot more agency to these subsystems than I would. I view most of the subagents of human minds as mechanistically relatively simple.
I actually like mesa-optimizer because it implies less agency than “subagent”. A mesa-optimizer in AI or evolution is a thing created to implement a value of its meta-optimizer, and the alignment problem is precisely the part where a mesa-optimizer isn’t necessarily smart enough to actually optimize anything, and especially not the thing that it was created for. It’s an adaptation-executor rather than a fitness-maximizer, whereas subagent implies (at least to me) that it’s a thing that has some sort of “agency” or goals that it seeks.
So it’s kinda like a hobby, from my perspective.
Sure. I have not seriously taken up meditation again since that time, because although the centered-and-confident stuff was really nice, it took a long time to get to that point, and it wasn’t a superpower level of centered or confident.
So if you already can relax, stop your internal monologue, and generate some pleasant feelings, does it make sense to stop because you already got most of what you can get, or does it make sense to continue because it shows that you are already on 10% of the way towards the actually awesome things
Actually, my experience has been that dropping meditation is like dropping exercise: the benefits go away after a while. (It might not be 100% true as I think there might be some lasting benefit to having learned how much nonsense my brain generates from an experience perspective vs. just knowing it in the abstract. But I’d be hard-pressed to tell if that’s true, as I don’t have a control group for myself. ;-) )
Then I tried the kind of meditation when you count the breath and try to not-do the internal monologue. And I learned how to turn off the internal monologue. An interesting thing, to learn a new mental move, but that’s it.
How odd. I never learned to reliably turn off internal monologue during meditation, let alone everyday life. How long did that take you?
To be clear, I often experienced cessation of internal speech during meditation, but not because of any ability to do so on purpose. It just happened sometimes, in the same way my centeredness just started happening and hung around until a while after I stopped meditating regularly.
My own metaphor for meditation is that it’s like the mental equivalent of physical exercise: I get general mental health benefits from a regular practice, but motivation for it is often difficult because the benefits take time to show up and are subtle at first. And dropping out of the habit is easy because the benefits linger a while after you stop.
if you already can relax, stop your internal monologue, and generate some pleasant feelings, does it make sense to stop because you already got most of what you can get
Yeah, that’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me since I didn’t get any of those things as independent skills from meditating. Rather, I got them in the same way that physical exercise helps people relax or have pleasant feelings if they do enough of it. Nowadays I mix my meditation and physical exercise by doing Tai Chi so I can be more time-efficient. ;-)
(Well, not really, tai chi moves are often meditative in feel, but I haven’t been doing actual on-purpose meditation during it. But that might actually be an effect booster, so now I’m tempted to actually try it.)
From Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial:
Read it and weep. (Or laugh, whichever helps you sleep better.)