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: 11,562
Proportional Pausing. Or at a 4:1 ratio, Pareto Pausing. :) (80% work 20% rest)
Rest Ratio. Recovery Ratio (i.e., “Are you working to your recovery ratio?”) Flex recovery.
Break Budget, or perhaps a Balanced Break Budget. :) Flexible Break Account. Flexbreaking? Ugh.
WRR = Work/Recovery Ratio. Recovery Rhythm.
(In my group I’d call it Compass Breaking (vs. Clock Breaking), but that’d only work because of a pre-existing metaphor about these as referencing intuition/impulse/intrinsic motivation vs. rule-following/extrinsic motivation.)
“The Human Condition”? ;-)
More seriously, though, do you have any examples that aren’t based on the instinct-to-punish(reality, facts, people,...) that I ranted about in Curse of the Counterfactual? If they all fall in this category, one could call it an Argument With Reality, which is Byron Katie’s term for it. (You could also call it, “The Principle of the Thing”, an older and more colloquial term for people privileging the idea of a thing over the substance of the thing, usually to an irrational extent.)
When people are having an Argument With Reality, they:
Go for approaches that impose costs on some target(s), in preference to ones that are of benefit to anyone
Refuse to acknowledge other points of view except for how it proves those holding them to be the Bad Wrong Enemies
Double down as long as reality refuses to conform or insufficient Punishment has occurred (defined as the Bad Wrong Enemies surrendering and submitting or at least showing sufficiently-costly signals to that effect)
A lot of public policy is driven this way; Wars on Abstract Nouns are always more popular than rehabiliation, prevention, and other benefit-oriented policies, which will be denigrated as being too Soft On Abstract Nouns. (This also applies of course to non-governmental public policies, with much the same incentives for anybody in the public view to avoid becoming considered one of the Bad Wrong Enemies.)
I don’t know about the rest of your article, but the first paragraph is more or less the premise of Break Them All. The main character is an accidental dimensional traveler who receives tutoring in the ways of higher sorcery, so that as he wanders the worlds looking for a way home, he will still be able to do his own magic, rather than relying on each dimension’s conceptual frameworks for their local magic.
He then later discovers that the more-or-less scientific approach to magic makes him pretty OP in most dimensions, and in one his kind of sorcery makes him a “kill on sight” type of threat precisely because people who work directly with raw magic and physics are the most dangerous possible kind of wizard.
(The author claims that Break Them All won’t be interesting to people who aren’t reading the Worm fanfic it’s a prequel to, but I disagree: unlike its sequel, Break Them All hasn’t become bogged down by a cast of literally hundreds of sapient spiders who have different superpowers and varying sizes but barely distinguishable personalities.)
I believe the reason the author mentioned their credentials was not to establish themselves as an authority, but to indicate that it’s possible to see the subscribe button as a trap even if one is tech savvy and knows it has nothing to do with e.g. subscription billing. (In contrast to where the article implied people avoided the subscribe button due to not understanding it.)
Lots of other folks have commented on things like conflict framing, but I haven’t seen anyone mention this, so I’ll throw it in there.
In the past decade or so that I’ve been teaching people how to use memory reconsolidation processes (and using them myself), the number one obstacle that comes up (after identifying a suitable memory to use), is something I call “false belief change”, and it may have some overlap with what you’re describing here.
A false belief change is what happens when we imagine what happens in a memory to be different, without imagining our assumptions to be different first. It comes about from trying to script an alternative experience instead of either reinterpreting the experience or presupposing an alternative causal model and then simulating the result of that model.
And scripting usually reinforces the existing belief instead of changing it.
A common example: somebody is trying to change a belief they got from something they got yelled at over as a kid, or were treated in some obviously neglectful or abusive way, but in a frame where this was “for their own good”. Typically, someone’s first attempt at reconsoldiation is to imagine the parents acting lovingly and supportively. Good idea, right?
Nope. Invariably, this first attempt makes things worse, because on careful reflection, what they’re usually imagining is the parents’ behavior being changed on the outside, but leaving their internal model of the parent alone… which results in an interpretation like the imagined parent thinking, “I need to treat this evil/incompetent/idiot child in a loving and supporting way so they can stop being such an annoying little shit.”
As you can probably imagine, this does nothing to improve the person’s self-esteem. ;-)
Re-premising and Reinterpretation
The trick to making a reconsolidation of this type work is that you either have to reinterpret the situation, or re-premise it.
An example of re-premising might be to imagine the parent if they didn’t think you were annoying, evil, incompetent, whatever, and then see what your mental simulation generates as how they would have acted with this new premise.
An example of re-interpretation might be to realize that the parent was acting selfishly to get rid of something that was annoying/upsetting to them rather than acting in your best interest, or that they were mistaken about the best way to motivate you, or that in fact they didn’t really give a shit about you at all and there is no particular reason for you to give their opinion any weight to begin with. (I sometimes call this the Bigger Asshole Theory.) As with re-premising, the idea is to allow your mental simulation to play out with the new premise, but in this case you are playing it out with the premise that your attitude is different, rather than theirs.
In neither case is “scripting” the reconsolidation target a good idea. It can be helpful to have examples of helpful behaviors or unflappable attitudes or compassion or whatever, but this is more as a vehicle for one to find their way back to the modeled internal schema that people with those behaviors have, that can then be used to premise a new mental simulation to be run “forwards”.
When done this way, the necessary contradiction that plays out comes as a natural result of simulating different inner models of people, and naturally leads to an actual change. It also forms a natural checkpoint for iteration, in that if you can’t get a simulation to play out by itself and feel natural, then you know you haven’t gotten a solid enough model of the schema you’re trying to change to yet!
Even if it is “just a synonym”, it does not imply that we should shift terminology. Terminology is not just about definition (denotation), it is also about implication (connotation).
As others have pointed out, “mechanistic” and “reductionist” have unwanted connotations, while “gears-level” has only the connotations the community gives it… along with the intuitive implication that it’s a model that is specific enough that you could build it, that you would need to know what gears exist and how they connect. (In contrast, it’s much easier to say that a model is mechanistic or reductionist, without it actually being, well, gears-level!)
Between the lack of pre-existing negative connotations and the intuition pump, there seems to me to be more than enough value to use the term in preference over the other words, even if it were an exact synonym!
Why is The Elephant in The Brain conflict theory? IME the elephant is terribly mistaken about lots of things. I mean, you could frame it as a conflict between our selves and our genes, but that doesn’t seem like a very helpful way of doing it, vs. correcting the elephant’s mistakes.
That’s odd. When I googled “frame control” (prior to my comment) the first result was about programming, the second was this post, and the third was a 14-point article in which most of the illustrative examples were about ways of responding to social bullying, dominance displays, or manipulation of various sorts. That is, frame control as reaction to social maneuvering by others.
That’s also fairly consistent with things I’ve previously read, that establish the very first rule of frame control as not letting others trick, trap, or threaten you out of your intended frame for an interaction. And while some works do treat frame control as a zero sum game, the core message of most things I’ve read have been about internal frame defense and non-zero sum games.
For example, one book (literally entitled “Frame Control”) notes many times that “basing the strength of your frame on the weakness of others is not a good strategy” and provides quite a lot of exercises that are aimed at changing one’s internal beliefs and interpretation of situations, with frequent examples roughly of the form, “don’t try to argue, fight, trick, persuade, etc. people—instead just accept what people say and hold to your opinion, instead of being emotionally dependent on others agreeing with you”.
The type of “frame control” described in this post seems rather the opposite of that!
If I punch you and say “I am only doing this for your own good; someone needs to punish your sins to make you stronger; you will thank me later”, that is frame control.
If I punch you and five minutes later say “no, I have never punched you; what made you make this horrible accusation”, that is gaslighting.
They sound the same to me. In both cases, the intent is to undermine the target’s perception of events in a way that supports continuing exploitation—i.e. gaslighting.
So perhaps “gaslighting” is a special case of “frame control”, but the main difference seems to be whether unambiguous sensory perceptions are denied (as oppposed to e.g. denying motivation).
Frame control is a general term that actually mostly refers to refusing to allow other people’s frames to be treated as common knowledge. You need frame control in order to gaslight, but frame control is also a defense against gaslighting, in the sense that one is vulnerable to gaslighting to the extent one is unable to control one’s own frame in response to provocative or manipulative communication.
Pretty much. The relevance for NLP is that if you’re trying to help someone out of say, a self-defeating mindset or victim state, then you need to be able to (at minimum) control your own frame so as not to get pulled into whatever role the person’s problems try to assign you (e.g. rescuer or persecutor).
The main thing I dislike about this post’s framing of frame control is that the original meaning of “frame control” is maintaining your own frame—i.e. the antidote to the abusive and manipulative behaviors described in this post. Not allowing yourself to be sucked in or trapped by the frames that other people attempt to establish, intentionally or not.
The hard part of making something like this work is that if your parents were messed up enough for you need to do this, your concept of an “ideal” parent is probably pretty broken, though perhaps in subtle ways. There were a lot of counterintuitive things I had to realize about parenting that aren’t well-understood in popular culture, to get this kind of thing right.
(Also, if you do get it right, then a lot of the time you can just use memory reconsolidation on the events where things didn’t work out the right way, and then you don’t need the shoulder advising on that topic any more, because the new response is embedded in the schema for responding to situations like that.)
Consider that GPT doesn’t have any of that fancy stuff and yet can generate dialogues of semi-consistent characters. Shoulder advisors can be slightly-fancier text bots just by adding audio tone and facial expressions to what is being prompted and predicted.
a term that has many, conflicting definitions in popular use
Can you point to a modern popular use of your definition? As far as I’m aware, the current popular (late 20th/21st century) usage is much closer to my definition than the one you’re using. I’ve also not seen any dictionary definitions that reference one’s own standards (vs. implied social standards such as “impropriety” or “foolishness”).
It just seems to me that referencing one’s own standards is a very odd carve-out in the definition, as is calling it merely “unpleasant” (vs. dictionary terms saying things like “painful” and “humiliating”).
Something that is unpleasant and one’s own standards sounds much more like the emotion of “regret” (wishing you’d done something different), rather than the emotion of shame (public disregard and low worth).
Your usage seems to me like saying that “rage is a virtue because to rage is to act against things that are unjust”, while ignoring the fact that the popular understanding of the word “rage” is more like “anger to the point of irrational, destructive or counterproductive action”. You can redefine the term in an excessively narrow way, but it doesn’t help anybody understand what you’re getting at.
Notice, too, that if you simply called it regret, much of the article would be dissolved: you wouldn’t need to address toxic shame or virtue signaling, since these aren’t terribly relevant to regret. The article could be considerably shorter, which suggests that choosing a better term would be an empirical benefit. I also can’t help but notice that all of the other top-level comments are about this terminology confusion and would have been obviated by choosing regret or another term for a less problematic emotion.
I’m going to use “shame” to mean an unpleasant sense that one has failed to live up to one’s own standards in some way.
That’s regret. Shame is an unpleasant sense that one is not worthy of good treatment from others, based on an external socially-defined standard.
This would probably be why you think shame would be a useful thing or a virtue. Regret is, shame isn’t.
Can’t you assume LCPW as hypothetical?
The question isn’t can’t I, but why should I? The LCPW is a tool for strengthening an argument against something, it’s not something that requires a person to accept or answer arbitrary hypotheticals.
As noted at the end of the article, the recommendation is to separate rejecting the entire argument vs accepting the argument contingent on an inconvenient fact. In this particular case, I categorically reject the argument that trolley problems should be answered in a utilitarian way, because I am not a utilitarian.
Doesn’t “sufficiently close relation” also apply with some strength to any being of the same species? Consider a species A is splitting into two subspecies A1 and A2. This could be due to members of A1 preferring to save other members of A1. Once A2 dies, A1 retains the trait of wanting to save other members of A1.
Only after the gene is already essentially universal in the general population. When a gene with altruistic inclinations first appears, it will only increase its propagation by favoring others with the same gene. Otherwise, self-sacrifice will more likely extinguish the gene than spread it.
I would be interested in knowing the Least Convenient World stipulations, and what this phrase means.
See The Least Convenient Possible World for where the term was introduced.
Precedents and perverse incentives can be ruled out by assuming none exist, right? Assume in the hypothetical that nobody will ever get to know what choice you made after you made it.
But answering the question means that somebody will know: whoever is asking the question and anyone present to hear the answer. And since it’s a hypothetical, the most relevant incentives and consequences are those for the social situation.
I didn’t get how a hypothetical with two clear choices could be a false dichotomy. Assume that refusing to choose results in something far worse than either choice.
Far worse for whom? In what way? Consequentialism isn’t utilitarianism. If you’re taking a utilitarian position of greatest good for greatest number, then the choice is obvious. But consequentialism isn’t utilitarianism: you can choose what’s best for you, personally, and what’s best for me depends heavily on the details.
I agree but that in my mind seems like a lot like—their feelings and values are wired deontologically, their rational brain (incorrectly) thinks they are consequentialists, and they’re finding justifications for their thoughts. Unless ofcourse they find a really good justification. (And even if they did find one, I’d be suspicious of whether the justifcation came after the feeling or action, …. or before.)
But that’s you projecting your own experience onto somebody else, aka the Typical Mind Fallacy.
My experience of being asked a utilitarian hypothetical is, “what am I going to get out of answering this stupid hypothetical?” And mostly the answer is, “nothing good”. So I’m going to attack the premise right away. It’s got zero to do with killing or not killing: my answer to the generalized question of “is it ever a good thing to kill somebody to save somebody else” is sure, of course, and that can be true even at 1:1 trade of lives.
Hell, it can be a good thing to kill somebody even if it’s not saving any lives. The more important ethical question in my mind is consent, because it’s a hell of a lot harder to construct a justification to kill somebody without their consent, and my priors suggest that any situation that seems to be generating such a justification is more likely to be an illusion or false dichotomy, that needs more time spent on figuring out what’s actually going on.
And even then, that’s not the same as saying that I would personally ever consent to killing someone, whatever the justification. But that’s not because I have a deontological rule saying “never do that”, but because I’m reasonably certain that no real good can ever come of that, without some personal benefit, like saving my own life or that of my spouse. For example, if the two people I’m saving are myself and my wife and the person being killed is somebody attacking us, then I’m much less likely to have an issue with using lethal force.
Based on a glance at the paper you referenced, though, I’m going to say that the authors incorrectly conflated consequentialism and utilitarianism. You can be a consequentialist without being a utilitarian, and even there I’m not 100% sure you can’t have a consistent utilitarian position based on utility as seen by you, as opposed to an impartial interpretation of utility.
At the very least, what the paper is specifically saying is that people don’t like impartial beneficence. That is, we want to be friends with people who will treat their friends better than everybody else. This is natural and also pretty darn obvious… and has zero to do with consequentialism as discussed on LW, where consequentialism refers to an individual agent’s utility function, and it’s perfectly valid for an individual’s utility function to privilege friends and family.
re: second quote, I mean that evolution selects for those traits that ensure collective survival
It really, really doesn’t. It selects for the proliferation of genes that proliferate, which is very, very different.
A trait where “one person is willing to kill 10 others to ensure their own survival” will be less selected for compared to one where “one person is willing to die to save someone else”.
No, it selects for “one person is willing to die to save someone who is a sufficiently close relation, especially of the next generation”. If there were no correlation between the trait and relatedness, the trait would be extinguished.
(And the being willing to kill 10 others isn’t deselected for either, so long as the others are strangers or rivals for resources, mates, etc.)
Selection works on relative frequency of genes, not on groups or individuals. To the extent that we have any sort of group feeling or behaviors at all, this is due to commonality of genes. A gene won’t be universal in a population unless it provides its carriers with some sort of advantage over non-carriers. If there’s no individual advantage (or at least gene-specific advantage), it won’t become universal.
Suppose your friend asks you a situation, purely as hypothetical, as to whether you would murder someone to save two others. You simply answering this question indicating you’re willing to murder reduces trust with your friend.
This sounds less like “consequentialism reduces trust” than “willingness to murder reduces trust” or perhaps “utilitarianism reduces trust”.
Now maybe LessWrong-style consequentialism requires you to lie to your friend, that hasn’t been studied.
I would expect a LW-style consequentialist to reject such a simple framework as “kill one person to save two” without first requiring an awful lot of Least Convenient World stipulations to rule out alternatives, and/or to prefer to let two people die in the short run rather than establish certain horrible precedents or perverse incentives in the long run, reject the whole thing as a false dichotomy, etc. etc.
Really, I find it hard to imagine a rational consequentialist simply taking the scenario at face value and agreeing to straight-up murder even in a fairly hypothetical discussion.
As an individual defecting from a societal norm, consequentialism may increase the chances of the individual surviving. But if consequentalism becomes a societal norm, it may reduce the chances of the collective surviving.
Wait, what? You’re saying that all the individuals survived, but the collective didn’t? That seems to be saying that a particular organizational configuration ceased to exist, but not that everybody died. The phrasing here is ambiguous
If this is true, then societies composed of consequentalists will die faster than societies composed of deontologists. And evolution as a force typically acts on collectives, not individuals.
This just seems confused. Evolution acts on individuals, unless you’re talking about the force of evolution operating (again) on organizational configuration rather than genetics. But societies in such cases often “evolve” by changing rules and structures, not always by collapsing and being replaced.
Section 1 of the paper has a lot of good examples on how consequentalists are more likely to break laws, violate others’ rights and so on—when the consequences justify it. It also talks about and references a number of older papers on how such agents find it harder to form both social and business relationships, to generate trust to solve any coordination problems.
This sounds like naive consequentialism, not LessWrong-style consequentialism. A proper consequentialist decision theory takes into account long-term effects of making certain types of choices, not just the short-term effects of individual choices.
(That is, a proper consequentialist foresees that being the kind of person who breaks agreements for short-term benefits has long-term negative consequences, and so they don’t do that.)
Sorry, I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with the comment you originally replied to (which is about the behavior of individual brains), or even the post in general.
Perhaps you could explain what you mean more precisely, as “improving communication” is really under-specified in what you wrote. Communication to achieve what purpose, exactly?
I think you may be correct that I don’t value some goal as much as you do, but I expect most of the difference lies in how we each define the phrase “improving communication”.
I would argue that my approach is very much treating “improving communication to outsiders” as a very important thing—so there must be some difference in what you are assuming the goal of such communications is.