Scott Alexander wrote a solid follow up to this piece last year.
TLDR; the brain obviously wishes to avoid pain, but not at the cost of like, avoiding thinking about painful things at all costs.
Like, you don’t want to be eaten by a lion, so you avoid doing things that lead to you being eaten by lions.
But this pain avoidance shouldn’t compromise on your epistemics; you shouldn’t go so far to avoid pain as to avoid thinking about lions at all. this doesn’t work.
This is potentially also what’s going on with ugh fields. avoiding thinking about painful thoughts, as an overextension of pain-avoiding mechanisms of the brain.
Thinking about ugh fields in this way helps me actually confront them far more reliably.
This post is really really good, and will likely be the starting point for my plans henceforth
I was just starting to write up some high level thoughts to evaluate what my next steps should be. The thoughts would’ve been a subset of this post
I haven’t yet had time to process the substance of this post, just commenting that you’ve done a better job of putting words to what my feelings were getting at, than I expect I myself would have at this stage