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: 11,406
So how do you get it in the US? Searching for Taffix on amazon (.com) brings up various unrelated nasal sanitizer products that are basically just alcohol, and amazon (.co.uk) says they can’t ship to the US.
Info on the package (at amazon (.co.uk)) indicates the ingredients are:
Hypromellose (HPMC powder) (89.9%)
Citric Acid (6%)
Sodium Citrate (4%)
Benzalkonium Chloride (0.1%)
Menthol (<0.1%)
But it’s not clear how you might make your own from that, nor which ingredients are most critical. Benzalkonium Chloride is described by Wikipedia as a biocide, so that might be important.
Yes, apparently death is the right answer, either way. ;-)
It assumes a level of charity and sophistication in the people you’re appealing to.
And that statement assumes you’re trying to do PR instead of acting with honor. Having integrity isn’t about whether you’re appealing to people, but whether you’re willing to stick to your principles even when they’re not appealing to people.
I think the point of this article was that, the very moment you’ve chosen “always appealing to people” as your goal, you’ve already lost. (And it rather seems to point towards a reason for the current moral bankruptcy of corporations and political parties, these days.)
you can just stop focusing on the whole thing, without pushing yourself into some forced “forgiving”
“just stop focusing on the whole thing” is like “just stop being depressed”. If you’re in the mode described here, it doesn’t work. Any reminder of the thing will return you to stewing, for years or decades. It doesn’t stop until your brain stops thinking of it as an offense that needs to be punished.
As I said above, taboo “forgiving”. The word is noise and distraction, it refers to too many things. The one tiny useful slice of what it more or less means is the part where you let go of being “in the right” about the matter, stop believing on the emotional level that the other party deserves to be hurt for what they did.
The Work of Byron Katie is a tool specifically aimed at clinging of the counterfactual or moral judgment varieties. (For more interpersonal stuff, there’s also her book, “I need your love… is that true?” which is about clinging to needs for love, approval, praise, etc.)
The huge difference between the Work and most other approaches to mental attachments is that it’s procedural, testable, and fast—i.e. minutes rather than “just keep trying”. Learning to use the technique takes time, despite its essential simplicity, but that is more than made up for by the number of things you can use it on once you have it down.
That being said, understanding what’s in this post (not to mention the Litanies) is very helpful for entering the Work with the right mindset. (i.e. willingness to discover what the actual truth of a thought is)
My take: “forgiveness” is a big confused word that applies to lots of things and isn’t terribly useful.
The thing that is useful that sometimes gets called “forgiveness” (or thought of as part of it) is the part where you stop thinking someone shouldn’t have done something, or that they should have done something else.
Most concepts of forgiveness (and related concepts in this article) assume that ceasing to churn over a counterfactual also means that you don’t take action against the “guilty” party. But this is not necessarily true.
If it’s strategically wise to punish someone for defecting, then it will continue to be wise whether you experience the emotion of a grudge or not. But instead of feeling compelled to action, one can consider the decision with less bias in a particular direction.
Another assumption often made is that keeping a grudge has benefits. As summarized in this article, one view holds that keeping a grudge allows you to remember something, treat it as important, and be more aware of our values.
And all three of these ideas are complete rubbish.
First, removing a grudge does not change your ability to remember what happened, or act on pattern recognition. Quite the opposite in fact, since we can think more resourcefully and consider a broader range of options when not under the influence of a grudge.
Second, saying that grudges help you treat something as important is a circular argument, as it presupposes that treating the thing as important is important, no matter how unimportant it might actually be if you didn’t have the grudge. As the story goes of the woman who didn’t like peas: “I’m glad I don’t like peas, because if I liked them, I might eat them, and I don’t want to eat them, because I don’t like them!”
In truth, the only thing that grudges support the importance of, is themselves… and they do so distinct from whatever actual grievance or problem might need addressing. A grudge is an insistence that reality should have been different than it was, while a grievance or problem represents a desire to change something in the present and future. Dropping the grudge merely acknowledges the truth about the current state of affairs, rather than continuing to “rehearse” the past. It doesn’t magically make any existent problem disappear or become unimportant, it merely removes a perceptual bias from your thinking about the current state of things.
Third, and finally, grudges do not help you become more aware of your values or avoid doing bad things. They might affect which bad things you do, though: holding a grudge inclines you to moral license regarding the subject of your grudge, or to increase your sense of entitledness generally.
In short, all three ideas are confusion and rationalization—and grudges are the king of rationalization generators. A grudge will do almost anything to sustain itself, and rationalizing reasons why grudges are good is only the beginning.
Map-Territory Confusion
Of course, these ideas also reflect confusion: people routinely equate their grudges (maps) with their grievances (territory). A grievance is “this thing happened, and I need to do something about it.” A grudge is, “this thing never should have happened, and somebody must be punished”. The two are actually mutually exclusive, in the sense of mental experiences, but in the grudge state we tend to assume that giving up the grudge equals giving up on taking action: that if the grudge did not exist, it would be bad because someone is going to get away without being punished for their badness.
This is why instructions on forgiveness are so convoluted and complicated. People think “forgive” means to forego corrective action, but this is not necessary in order to gain the emotional and health benefits. Instead, all that is required is to stop being in the “denial, anger and bargaining” stage that one is surrounding the loss.
Our grievances are losses. They are things that actually happened and had an impact. But our grudges are actually a kind of angry, bargaining denial: we feel that if only we can punish somebody enough, then somehow our original loss will be canceled out, and balance restored to the universe.
In effect, a grudge is a stuck form of grief. We have not yet acknowledged the loss, and are trying to make it “not count”. This is a significant distraction from actually moving forward with one’s life (including addressing or redressing the loss), because it is focused on punishment instead of practicalities.
In the modern environment, more often than not there is almost no benefit to punishing people as an individual. Most of the entities that inspire our grudges are large corporations we have no real ability to punish, or else they are people being Wrong On The Internet. In neither case will our instinct to punish someone actually serve us well. Yelling at the rep or flaming the trolls might make us feel momentarily better, but it won’t improve our actual circumstances, which would be better served by strategic action, rather than instinctual action.
(And, better yet, when you let go of the instinct to punish, you more often than not find that it was not actually something very important in the grand scheme of things, or that at least you have better things you could be doing with your time.)
Better Ways To Forgive
Early on in my self-help research and experimentation, I discovered that forgiving myself for things that happened to me when I was younger often had a profound impact on my self-esteem and subsequent behavior. (I released some of those early results in a workshop dubbed “Instant Self-Esteem”.)
After some experiments with other people, though, I came to realize that my definition of “forgiveness” was vague, and I often had to use descriptions like, “just let it go, like you’re literally dropping the baggage”.
Since then, I found the Work of Byron Katie, which is a much more precisely targeted process with much higher repeatability than my vague instructions or those of the nine-step process mentioned in this article. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it’s teachable. (It’s also being studied by psychologists under the name MBSR: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, even though IMO the mindfulness part seems more like fashionable branding than anything else; you do have to be mindful to do it, but you have to be mindful to do almost anything else that changes things, so it’s not a very useful name.)
Beyond that, the Work is a generally useful Ritual For Actually Changing One’s Mind. As its creator describes, it’s not about letting go of your thoughts, but getting your thoughts to let go of you. For LWers, I suggest also reviewing my notes on doing the Work as they provide a more reductionistic view of certain steps in the process that may be more comprehensible than the sometimes vague or woo-ish sounding descriptions in other sources.
I would also encourage LWers to entirely taboo the concept of “forgiveness” and instead simply consider whether they are rehashing the same experiences over and over while experiencing anger, suffering, or the desire to see some kind of “justice” (i.e. punishment) done. If this is the case, you can probably benefit from a bit of mental surgery to remove the grudge, as it will restore a state where you can consider your options and weigh your values without the giant finger-on-the-scale that is the grudge monster screaming “Bad! Shouldn’t happen! Must Punish!” in your ear 24⁄7.
(Especially since for many people, the #1 person the grudge monster wants to punish is themselves.)
Grudges As Moral Wireheading
In the years since my first experiments with forgiveness, I belive I’ve tabooed the idea for long enough that I can define the essential concept in a more reductionist way.
Specifically, a grudge is rooted in the idea of “things you believe mean someone deserves to be treated badly for”.
Or, to reduce it further: the source of a grudge is a belief that an act grants moral righteousness to those who treat the actor badly.
It’s not enough that the bad treatment might be useful as a deterrent, or balance the scales of fairness, or serve as an example to others.
Rather, the thing that makes a grudge is the sense of vindication and moral elevation attached to the idea of treating someone badly!
What the Work helps people do, is stop believing that a particular rule or idea they’ve learned about how people “should” behave, is actually a blessing of righteousness on the idea of treating people badly.
And that’s why it generates self-justifying circular reasoning: the brain wants the “high” to continue, and correctly predicts that giving up the grudge will lead to a state with fewer righteousness-hedons in play… and then since that seems to be a self-evidently worse state, it then searches for reasons to explain why it would be bad to give up the grudge. (While avoiding admitting that it has anything to do with the sweet, sweet virtue-signalling that’s going on.)
So this is something that (IMO) every rationalist needs to understand. If you are operating on a grudge, you are in a state of moral wireheading. Your brain is high on being, not just right, but also in the right, and downright righteous.
And this will distort and twist your reasoning like nobody’s business. Power corrupts, and this is one of the ways it does so: a grudge feels like it’s granting you power and authority.
And in a way, it is.
Where This Instinct Comes From
In the ancestral environment, enforcing a tribal standard would be virtue signalling of the highest order: you’re taking a risk, or forgoing the rewards you could get by not doing so (so it’s a costly signal), and so you’re showing that you’re both fit enough to get away with it, and you’re loyal to the tribe’s values. Win win!
So our instincts have evolved to treat such situations as an opportunity: our brain makes us feel good, and powerful/status-ful at the same time.
(It’s probably a big reason why people have more and more outrage these days over ever-smaller things: we have few other opportunities in modern life to feel righteous, vindicated, and powerful!)
But this feeling, like our desire for sugar, is not terribly helpful to follow in the modern era. As modern life becomes ever more complex with ever-more-stringent standards for behavior, it becomes ever easier to reach for the outrage drug, while the health side effects of being stressed all the time slowly add up.
More important for the rationalist, being high on righteousness is an absolutely lousy mental state for actually considering the possibility that, you know...
You might be wrong.
And that’s a rationalist “sin” of the highest order.
(Just don’t think that that means you “deserve” to be punished… or if you do, then forgive yourself, and move on.)
On a personal level, this means that will not be able to accept something as true until you have a basic idea of what you would do if that was true.
The fourth question of The Work is: “Who would you be without that thought?”, intended to provoke a near-mode, concrete prediction of what your life would be like if you were not thinking/believing the thought in question.
Which is to say that it is also hard to accept something is not true until you have a basic idea of what you would do if it were false. ;-)
Also, the energy model presented in this article is, I think, a very good one. The idea that we reject new models unless they’re comprehensively better, yet continue using old ones until they can be comprehensively disproven, is an apt description of the core difficulties in Actually Changing One’s Mind at the level of emotional “knowledge” and assumptions.
I also like the hierarchical processing part—it’ll give me another tool to explain why changing general beliefs and patterns of behavior requires digging into details of experience, and provides a good intuition pump for seeing why you can’t just “decide” to think differently and have it work, if the belief in question is a predictive or evaluative alief, rather than just a verbal profession to others.
Yeah, it seems that the desire to write is tied is often tied to a desire to explain things, it’s just that our past self is usually the first person we want to explain things to. ;-) We could think of it as being like a pressure differential of knowledge, where you need a lower-pressure area for your knowledge to overflow into. Having a mental model of a person who needs to know, but doesn’t, then feels like an opportunity to relieve the sudden pressure differential. ;-)
In principle, I suppose imagining that person might also work if you can model such a person well enough in your mind.
This isn’t a direct answer to your question, but what I’ve personally found is that if I want to get re-excited about a topic that has already passed that critical period, the best thing to do is find people either asking questions about it or Being Wrong On The Internet about it, so that then I want to explain or rant about it again. ;-)
In my experience, the number one obstacle to strategic thinking is that people tend to confuse their impulses to virtue signaling with their actual goals. People tend to be very strategic about actual terminal goals: that is, things they genuinely desire, in the same way as one might desire ice cream when hungry, or air while drowning.
So my go-to tactic for helping someone to be more strategic is to test their desire: can they actually experience the in-the-torso feelings that are strongly correlated with desire and pleasure, when thinking about the goal?
If not, they probably do not have a terminal outcome that is actually desired, and instead are being confused by their brain’s attempt to signal virtue, solve a perceived problem, or reduce cognitive dissonance.
(By “signal virtue”, btw, I don’t just mean conspicuous displays of morality, but also things like following in parents’ footsteps or trying to live up to the expectations of others, trying to justify one’s existence or purpose, and rather a wide variety of other weird things brains do to promote or maintain perceived self-worth and/or social standing.)
Anyway, when humans appear (in my biased sample of experiences) to not be being consciously strategic, it is generally because they are being unconsciously strategic about achieving an entirely different goal than the one they believe they’re trying to achieve. And the goal they consciously believe they’re seeking is in fact the result of their brain’s strategic planning, rather than the input to another round of such planning.
The ultimate goal of such things is usually “to be a good, worthy, lovable person who visibly cares about the right things according to the value system(s) I have internalized”.
Such goals, however, seem to run on different hardware than practical, desire-based goals. And if the non-desire-based goal is based on an idea that one “should” be a particular way, then it becomes virtually impossible to trigger the desire-based machinery at all.
(Because it is very hard to feel desire for something you believe you’re already supposed to have done, had, or been.)
So.… if you want to be practically strategic, the very first step is to make sure you know what you want and why you want it. If the real goal cannot be defined in terms of a concrete observable outcome in external reality, that you can actually physically feel some form of pleasure at the idea of attaining (vs. merely feeling an anxious need to have), there is little point in going forward with any strategic planning, because strategic planning and social signalling tend to be mutually incompatible.
(Because our “desire to signal” wants to make our signalling-driven desires appear “honest”, i.e. that they’re not being done in order to signal.)
This makes it difficult to notice at first glance when we’re doing so, so the desire test (aka the “mmmm” test”, as in, “can you think about this in a way that makes you sound like you’re enjoying yourself?”) is a hack to work around this potential for self-deception. Our signaling desires seem to be injected on a different subsystem of the brain (maybe by rewarding certain directions of thought directly?) than the one that is used to pursue tangible desires like food or mates.
Food and mates make our mouths water or bellies rumble. Rest and safety make us go “ahhh” and relax. All of these pleasurable feelings arise from tangible goals, and motivate us to actually pursue them.
This one insight is, in my experience, worth a thousand abstract treatises on planning or decision-making. If you try to apply such ideas while actually pursuing a goal to virtue-signal, resolve cognitive dissonance, or fight something that seems “wrong”, you’re virtually guaranteed to use them in ways that will subtly sabotage any real action. (See, for example, all the vaccine distribution issues stemming from virtue signaling—we are not immune to doing this sort of thing just because we label ourselves rationalists.)
isn’t personality not very mutable past the age of around 7? At least without psychedelics or brain damage or something?
Only if you define “personality” as “whatever doesn’t change past the age of around 7″. ;-)
The complexity comes from the fact that we can’t really measure “personality”, only observed behavior (from the outside) or feelings/perceptions/preferences (from the inside).
Given that there are lots of things that can influence all of those things on a day to day basis, it’s kind of hard to make a distinction between what might be considered “innate”.
This is further complicated by the fact that human beings are innately disposed to think of people as having innate personality characteristics, when in fact there is little reason to assume that human beings’ behavior is so simply defined, or so independent of social/environmental cues, incentives, whether someone’s eaten recently, etc.
I got an email from Jacob L. suggesting I review my own post, to add anything that might offer a more current perspective, so here goes...
One thing I’ve learned since writing this is that counterfactualizing, while it doesn’t always cause akrasia, it is definitely an important part of how we maintain akrasia: what some people have dubbed “meta-akrasia”.
When we counterfactualize that we “should have done” something, we create moral license for our past behavior. But also, when we encounter a problem and think, “I should [future action]”, we are often licensing ourselves to not do something now.
In both cases, the real purpose of the “should” in our thoughts is to avoid thinking about something unpleasant in the current moment. Whether we punish our past self or promote our future self, both moves will feel better than thinking about the actual problem… if the problem conflicts with our desired self-image.
But neither one actually results in any positive change, because our subconscious intent is to virtue-signal away the cognitive dissonance arising from an ego threat… not to actually do anything about the problem from which the ego threat arose.
In the year since I wrote this article, I’ve stopped viewing the odd things people have to be talked out of (in order to change) as weird, individual, one-off phenomena, and begun viewing them in terms of “flinch defenses”… which is to say, “how people keep themselves stuck by rationalizing away ego threats instead of addressing them directly.”
There are other rationalizations besides counterfactual ones, of course, but the concepts in this article (and the subsequent discussion in comments) helped to point me in the right direction to refine the flinch-defense pattern as a specific pattern and category, rather than as an ad hoc collection of similar-but-different behavior patterns.
When I say “closed loop within the organism” I mean “having within the organism all the error detection and machinery for reducing the error”, not that the subject of perception is also within the organism.
Note, too, that It’s possible for people to display apparently-homeostatic processes where no such process is actually occurring.
For example, outside observation might appear to create the impression that say, a person is afraid of success and downregulating their ambitions or skill in order to maintain a lower level of success.
However, upon closer observation, it might instead be the case that the person is responding in a stimulus-response based way to something that is perceived as a threat related to success.
While you could reframe that in terms of homeostasis away from anxiety or threat perception, this framing doesn’t give you anything new in terms of solving the problem—especially if the required solution is to remove the conditioned threat perception. If anything, trying to view that problem as homeostatic in nature is a red herring, despite the fact that homeostasis is the result of the process.
This is a practical example of how using PCT as an explanatory theory—rather than simply a modeling paradigm—can interfere with actually solving problems.
In my early learning of PCT, I was overly excited by its apparent explanatory power, but later ended up dialing it back significantly as I realized it was mainly a useful tool for communicating certain ideas; the number of high-level psychological phenomena that actually involve homeostasis loops in the brain appear to be both quite few and relatively short-term in nature.
Indeed, to some extent, looking at things through the PCT lens was a step backwards, as it encouraged me to view things in terms of such higher-order homeostasis loops when those loops were merely emergent properties, rather than reified primitives. (And this especially applies when we’re talking about unwanted behavior.)
To put it another way, some people may indeed regulate their perception of “success” in some abstract high-level fashion. But most of the things that one might try to model in such a way, for most people, most of the time, actually involve much tinier, half-open controls like “reduce my anxiety in response to thinking about this problem, in whatever way possible as soon as possible”, and not some hypothetical long-term perception of success or status or whatnot.
PCT does that too. Except that sometimes, body and brain processes are open-ended, with an important part of the loop existing in the outside world.
The problem with a model that can explain anything, is that you can’t notice when you’re being confused by a fake explanation.
A useful explanatory model needs to be able to rule things out, as well as “in”.
I think we are talking about different meanings of “modeling” here. There are plenty of uses for which PCT and TOTEs are apt. But if you’re trying to discover something about the physical nature of things involved, being able to explain anything equally well is not actually a benefit. That is, it doesn’t provide us with any information we don’t already know, absent the model.
So e.g. in your thermostat example, the TOTE model doesn’t provide you with any predictions you didn’t have without it: a person who lacks understanding of how thermostats work internally can trivially make the prediction that something is wrong with it, since it’s supposed to produce the reqested temperature.
Conversely, if you know the thermostat contains a sensor, then the idea that “it might be broken if the room temperature is wrong” is trivially derivable from that mere fact, without a detailed control systems model.
IOW, the TOTE model adds nothing to your existing predictions; it doesn’t constitute evidence of anything you didn’t already know.
This doesn’t take away from the many valuable uses of paradigms like PCT or TOTE: it’s just that they’re one of those things that seems super-valuable because it seems to be a more efficient mental data compressor than whatever you had before. But being a good compressor for whatever data you have is not the same as having any new data!
So paradigmatic models are more about being able to more efficiently think or reason about something, or focus your attention in useful ways, without necessarily changing much about how much one actually knows, from an evidentiary perspective.
As you’ve no doubt noticed, our anxieties don’t often respond to mere reasoning.
Two of the most common sources for this type of anxiety related to behavior are:
A judgment about the “kind of people who X” (e.g. ask for help, bother other people, etc.)
A self-concept about what one does or doesn’t deserve or have the right to
Narrowing it down begins with checking how you feel about other people doing whatever X is. For example, if you picture someone else bothering a person of high status by asking them for help, how do you feel?
If the response is a negative judgment, empathetic embarrassment, anxiety, etc., then it’s very likely you have a learned “behavior X = bad person” type of rule in your brain.
Direct negative judgments are usually fairly straightforward to get rid of: in the simplest case, by just letting go of the rule if you no longer endorse it on any level. More complex methods for more stubborn cases include those of Crane (“releasing” technique) or Byron Katie (The Work).
If the judgment is more indirect or only applies to yourself, the techniques involved are more complex, and typically involve investigation into the specific circumstances that created the anxiety. The good news, though, is that usually some information about that will surface during the failure of the Work or releasing, which is why I try to start there first.
Successful intervention would mean that you no longer feel that particular anxiety when imagining the need to ask someone for help.
This is a different approach than the traditional one, in which one is told to fake it until you make it, i.e. keep doing the thing and maybe the anxiety will go away… eventually. Given my experience of dealing with various sorts of anxieties for years or decades with no change, I am not particularly satisfied by that sort of advice. It is definitely possible to do better: to change our minds in at least some areas, instead of just having to live with them.
It’s possible for a smart adult to pretty reliably make a good living in any job as long as they’re willing to put in about 65 hours a week for about 5 years building their skills/credentials/business. Making more money in less time typically requires tradeoffs in terms of intrinsic talent/assuming risk/doing unpleasant work. The idea that the average person can do more with less is less plausible the more extreme the edge is supposed to be.
I think this paragraph is contradicting itself. It begins with “possible for a smart adult” and then concludes with “the average person”. The average person is not a smart adult.
The point of 1000 True Fans is not about averages, but about comparative advantage. Focusing on a niche audience that values what you produce to the point that they’ll spend 1000 times or more what the average person would. (i.e. $100 year vs. a few cents for a non-fan for the same music).
Catering to a niche is not a violation of the EMH (which for some reason I always initially read as “the Emergency Medical Hologram”). Effective marketing is also not a violation of the EMH. Both are ways to increase demand, or at least shift it to a different target, for a subset of the market. (They also scale up: you can have 100 superfans who spend $1000, or 10 super-super-fans who spend $10,000 -- though probably not if what you sell is music. But for other types of product this is certainly possible.)
If someone reads this article and interprets it to mean that they should just take whatever random job making roughly the same amount of money, it could be a disaster for their utility (and maybe that of the world), depending on what they value. It is not easy to make lots of money, but there are many ways and circumstances under which “make money on the internet doing something you love” is both more easy and more rewarding than working a job would be.
I quit my last corporate gig in part because I couldn’t bear sitting in another meeting arguing the same things over and over and never getting any conclusion to them… when over the weekend prior I’d made five figures by talking for around ten minutes.
I am, of course, leaving out the years of work that previously went into being able to give that talk, what I spent to be in the context where I gave the talk, etc., but all of those things were still rewarding in ways that a corporate job wasn’t. In particular, a sense of personal meaning in overcoming challenges to do things I wanted done, vs. the oppressive sense of having to shovel shit to get things done for one company or another.
Can the “average” person do that sort of thing? No. Absolutely not! I have attended internet marketing courses and observed how little the “average” person comprehends or is able to reproduce what they are taught with regard to marketing. (And I’m not claiming to be particularly good at it—I’ve always considered myself awful at it, only to recently realize that the vast majority of people are even worse!)
Are LWers “average” in general? Maybe. But ISTM that a lot of very non-average people congregate here. I would guess that the main ingredient a typical LWer would lack at being able to take advantage of existing market inefficiencies and civilizational inadequacies is either the ability to think like a marketer, and/or the willingness to act like one.
I’m pretty sure that trying not to have an identity just means that your brain will identify as the sort of superior person who is above having identities, in much the same way that claims to not care about status are basically claiming to have status higher than everyone who cares about status.
I imagine that there might be meditative or other practices to shut off or disconnect the brain bits that care about identity and status, but mere conscious avoidance of anything related to identity or status is just defining another kind of identity and status, with the same detrimental effects on reasoning… while also foregoing any practical benefits that otherwise could have been obtained. A bit like going into a restaurant, paying for the food, and then not eating it because it was too expensive. If you’re going to foot the bill either way, you might as well get some nutrients out of it.
(Also, the Dark Lord comment kinda sounds like an appeal to identity, i.e. “don’t be the kind of foolish person who bargains with dark lords”, and an implied humblebrag that you can achieve your goals without needing to do this sort of thing, and thus are higher status than the post author or anyone who might find the post helpful. Even if those things weren’t your intent, even if your brain didn’t include them in the message on purpose behind your back, some, if not most of the recipients of your message have brains that will take it that way, because that’s just how ubiquitously insidious the status-and-identity hardware is.)
A framework that can predict anything is not really a predictive framework; it’s just a modeling convention.
In the specific case of PCT, the model treats everything as closed-loop homeostasis occurring within the organism being modeled. However, there are plenty of situations where a significant part of the loop control occurs outside the organism, or where organism behavior is only homeostatic if certain EEA assumptions apply. (e.g. the body’s tendencies to hoard certain nutrients and flush others, based on historic availability rather than actual availability)
While this doesn’t harm PCT’s use as a conceptual model of organism behavior, it limits its use as a predictive framework with regard to what 1) we will find happening in the hardware, and 2) we will find happening in actual behavior.
The extension of this problem to TOTE loops is straightforward, since a TOTE loop is just a description of one possible implementation strategy for a PCT control loops and linkage, and one that similarly doesn’t always map to the hardware or the location where the tests and operations are taking place (i.e., in-organism or outside-organism).
Interesting perspective. I never learned TOTE loops as an intervention strategy but as a modeling one: i.e., the observation that people behave as if their internal operations are TOTE loops—a parallel framework to the higher-order control systems in Perceptual Control Theory.
But in retrospect, looking at it from this point of view my Collect-Connect-Correct framework for self-improvement is literally a TOTE loop (because part of Collect is identifying a test, and part of Correct is seeing if the test result has changed so you can loop back or exit). I mean, it’s kind of a meta-TOTE loop because you’re choosing a test, first… I suppose there’s the outer TOTE where you decide to use CCC in the first place, and then there’s the TOTE where you identify the test to be used in the CCC—because you may have to try a few different things to identify a suitable test for the Connect/Correct TOTE loop.
On the other hand, TOTEs share the weakness of PCT that they can be used to basically model anything.
But on the other other hand, I can’t count how many places where explicitly adding tests and gating around existing self-help processes has made them more repeatable, reliable, and teachable. I wasn’t thinking specifically in terms of TOTEs when I did those things, but it makes good sense.
TBH, I looked at it more as an application of testing in general, plus outcome frames and well-formedness conditions… the latter two of which I learned from NLP.
The idea that things in the brain have syntax, a sequence of steps required to unlock them if one is applying certain techniques, allows you to use TOTEs as part of a training process.
Concrete example: my “desk cleaning trick” video describes the “mmm” test, without which the trick will not do anything. Having an explicit test condition for exiting a “step” of a mental process makes it vastly more useful than merely having a list of mental steps.
IOW, explicit tests between steps of a mental process, as well-formedness conditions for proceeding to the next step greatly enhance communicability and reproducability of a technique, which helps to bypass the Interdict of Merlin with regard to self-help.
Overall, I found this difficult to read for layout reasons, mostly. The paragraphs and sections are huge, combining multiple ideas and making it hard to identify key points. Your definition of productivity, for example, appears in only one sentence, buried in a short paragraph in the middle of a large section that at first glance appears to be about what productivity isn’t. More subheadings might be helpful, a lot more paragraph breaks definitely would.
...if you already understand and agree with them, sure.
The goal of those books is to make an emotional, “near”/concrete-construal argument for their readers to actually implement the ideas proposed, or at the very least come to believe it desirable to implement the ideas. Simply listing off the ideas doesn’t have the same effect, because it doesn’t create an emotional experience or have any of the repetition. Most people remember stories and analogies much more easily, so it’s a better way to prime intuition pumps than simple factual presentation.
(This is why the Sequences are so bloody long, too. In principle, Bayes can be explained with an equation and a few paragraphs. But getting people to do something with it, or even to want to do something with it, is much harder.)
Take, for example, this post. In reading it over I get an impression of myself as skimming through someone’s notes from a semester-long course on productivity, that I might or might not want to take. But my emotional experience of reading it was a feeling of overwhelm at so many things to learn and do, and a desire to put off detailed reading for some imagined future when I have more time to read it and flesh out all the ideas that were not fully fleshed out.
My intellectual reflection on that says, “Bruce Lee something something thousand kicks something something one kick a thousand times”, and that I would rather read a book that spends 100 pages dealing with just one of the many, many ideas you presented here, rather than spend the time to do the mental heavy lifting needed to decompress those ideas back into something that would make them applicable for me. (Most of the implementation-related ideas here could do with a Sequence of their own, even if only a few posts worth.)
For non speed-readers, a book serves the same function as daily Sequence posts: to space out repetitions of the same idea, in different ways, so the idea becomes familiar and can be absorbed as an intuition pump, with a chance of influencing future behavior with immersion. The only way to do that with highly-condensed info, is for the reader to set up, say, an Incremental Reading process.
(People who don’t speed-read, or who listen to audiobooks, have built-in incremental reading by virtue of not reading more than a chapter or two at a sitting, and then the spacing between sittings plus the repetitions in the book supply the “poor man’s”/low-tech version of spaced repetition.)