Holding both the positive aspects of a problem and reality of there being a problem

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[Probably obvious to many (most?) of my readers, but the obvious often bears saying aloud.]

This morning, as part of my rest day, I did the first exercise of Claudia Altucher’s book, Become an Idea Machine, which is mostly a series of prompts for generating 10 (or more) new ideas, one prompt a day.

The first prompt is to take 10 complaints that you have, and for each one, turn it into a positive expression of gratitude. She gives the example of hating being stuck in traffic every day, and generating from that, “I am grateful that I live in a city that has so much traffic because that means there [are] plenty of opportunities here, and I can meet lots of interesting people.” You’re supposed to do this ten times, on your own problems.

I think that this is a great exercise. I imagine that I tend to be too rigid in my assessment of circumstances, and there are in fact a lot of good things resulting from a “problem”, which I fail to apprehend, because I’m stuck in my existing mindset. Done well, I think this mental motion shouldn’t feel like a self-trick, whereby you convince yourself that “the grapes were probably sour anyway.” Instead it feels like uncovering actual value, henceforth unnoticed, all around you.

As an example, my fourth most pressing problem is the lack of satisfying romantic partnership. And it is natural to focus on the pain or longing of that situation. But also, not having a partner means that I have a lot of solitary time, to think and work and do what I want, which I really value. By default, I think I wouldn’t notice how much I value that alone-time unless I did have a partner, at which point I might start to feel stifled. Hedonically, it seems like a bug if I only pay attention to the aspects of a situation that I dislike.

So I think appreciating what’s good about things that we might reflexively label as bad.

However, I think that it is crucial, if we want to be balanced and sane, that we not lose track of the problem being bad in this process.

It is right and good for the paraplegic to savor the way his disability forces him to slow down and be reflective, and “stop and smell the roses.” But that doesn’t mean that he can’t assess the situation, the pros and cons, and determine that on net, it would be better to be able to walk (and climb and run).

Likewise, it is extremely appropriate to look around at the way the recent pandemic has brought communities together, and the way that it has brought out heroism in many, and feel pleased and proud. But that doesn’t mean that we have to say that the pandemic is good, or that we shouldn’t wish that it hadn’t happened.

The claim “there is often unrecognized good in what seems to be bad” does not entail that “everything that seems bad is actually good”, (or the related “everything happens for a reason”). When we conflate the first with the second(s) them we’re  setting ourselves up for a kind of Stockholm syndrome of the present, a massive status quo bias.

There is more good in the world than we often appreciate by default. And the world is complex, and it is often hard to tell what the ultimate consequence of something will be. But that does not mean that we abdicate our sacred right to weigh up the pros and cons,  make the best assessment we can of whether a thing is good or bad, and then try to steer the world towards the good. When we do otherwise the consequences can be literally catastrophic.

(Of course this is not to say that everything that we reflexively consider bad is in fact bad on net. We might take something that we hate, consider all the benefits that it gives us and all the costs, and conclude that actually, our initial impression was wrong, and we on reflection, prefer the world with the supposed-to-be-bad thing. Just as we might reconsider our reflexive attitude to something that is supposed to be good, and conclude that on-net, we dis prefer it. [For instance, Brienne’s comment in this thread has had me reevaluating my attitude towards romantic love, lately.])

 

 

Engineering vs. Valence

~ elityre ~ 2 Comments

Despite often being maligned, the contemporary “spiritual” worldview has some things going for it. I emphasizes love, compassion, and gratitude, which are probably close to the most important thing to focus on for individual and community eudaimonia. (Though emphatically not for safely or sanely steering civilization.). New-agey types, despite their woo, do have a number of very effective tools, frameworks, and insights, like NVC, Focusing, and circling. The metaphysics is very confused, but metaphysics is really hard to get right (and if anything like panpsychism is true (which my inside view currently puts a lot more mass on than most of my peers), then they will turn out to have been not that far of the mark).

But, I suggest that the thing that is most wrong in the “spiritual” worldview is the general propensity to posit “things with intrinsic valence”. In my caricature of the spiritual worldview (which I more-or-less believed  from the ages of 15 to 20), many things (actions, energies, materials) are seen as fundamentally “good” and others as fundamentally “bad”, and that “good” things have good effects and “bad” things have bad effects.

  • For instance, according to David Hawkins, meditation, prayer, optimistic thoughts, and positive emotions,  “raise your vibration“, attract good things into your life, and provokes peace locally, and across the world. (Negative thoughts, negative emotions, artificial supplements, etc.  lower your vibration.)
  • Or, orgonite, which is a substance which is supposed to transmute “negative energy” into “positive energy.” Cellphone towers supposedly emit “negative orgon energy” (which “promote drought, negativity, fear, and so on”),
  • “Toxins” is a sort of generic term for “bad things that are in your body”. You want to get rid of them.
  • The phrases “good karma” and “bad karma” speak for themselves.

The list goes on and on. All of these invoke a sense of a thing that is good and safe vs. a thing that is bad and harmful. Obviously, you want more of the good, and less of the bad.

The problem is that almost nothing in the world seems to work like this. Things aren’t intrinsically bad or good. They just have effects. And whether those effects are good or bad depend on mechanistic details of the systems involved.

For example there is no substance that is fundamentally “healthy” or “unhealthy” for humans. The effects depend on the dosage, and location.

Air is obviously good for people, but an air bubble in the the blood stream can be fatal. Potassium is critical to the functioning of our neurons, but too much potassium disrupts that functioning, so we use potassium solutions as a lethal injection . Water is prototypically “good for you”, but drinking too much causes health problems and, of course, having water in your lungs is a good way to drown.

These substances aren’t fundamentally “bad.” The harm comes from too much of them in the wrong place.

I claim that (almost) everything works like this.

Facebook, or the internet, isn’t good or evil, it just has effects, some of which are positive and some of which are negative.

Smoking  will kill you, but its stimulant effects can boost your effective intelligence very slightly.

Even compassion and Christly forgiveness, are harmful in some systems.

The world is a bunch of complicated systems, and in order to get good effects, we don’t just mash the “good” button. Rather, we mostly need to figure out which precises elements go in exactly the right places.

 

 

I have a new Blog

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More than a month ago, I started a new blog at https://efficacyengineering.wordpress.com/ .

I’m using it to document my personal development projects, as I build up complete, robust, systems for maintaining effective psychological states. That entails designing experiments, semi-rigorous analysis of results, phenomenological feature extraction, and brainstorming and debugging on the places where I’m stuck. Eventually, I might write up more permanent articles on that site, outlining the general psychological principles and mechanisms that underlie optimal learning and efficiency.

It is probably best thought of as a “productivity blog”, though for me, it is an research project in applied psychology.

I’m going to keep posting my thoughts on other topics to this blog, but from now on anything having to do with productivity or learning will go over there.

Leading indicators are crucial for control systems

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[This is probably obvious to some of you.]

Control systems

I’ve been thinking about building self contained systems lately, specifically (mostly) in the context of personal productivity. If you want a self contained system that is robust to disruption, you want it to incorporate control systems.

My approach to building a self contained system for my own effort-less efficiency has been to identify the inputs and intermediate states to the psychological states that I’m aiming for, and then build control systems around those inputs and intermediaries.

For instance, if you know that subjective mental energy is one important input to flow, and when you don’t have mental energy, you become draggy, and concentration is elusive, then you want to set up an automatic system so that whenever your mental energy is low, you automatically take actions to recover it.

The problem of systems that depend on the inputs they control

However, this has a problem. If you have control systems that depend on the relevant input themselves, then they can’t really function as control systems.

For instance, speaking of mental energy again, suppose you know that if you go to the gym and physically exert yourself, you’ll experience a gain in subjective mental energy. But, unfortunately, going to the gym itself has some activation energy, and so if you are low on mental energy, you’re unlikely to do it. In this situation, you’re stuck in a less than optimal attractor, where  feeling draggy prevents you from doing things that would help you not feel draggy.

(There’s also an attractor on the other side of the hill, where having energy makes it easy to do the things that help you maintain energy. But that attractor is less stable, because if anything disrupts any part of the virtuous cycle, the whole thing grinds to a stop.)

My solution to this, in practice, in most cases, is to find workarounds that have minimal activation energy, so that falling into the preferred attractor is easy. But, I’ve also assumed that there are some places where I would just have to bite the bullet and be satisfied with non-responsive systems. That is, you just rigidly make sure to exercise every day, because you know that it supports everything else.

This solution is maybe fine, but it is also pretty fragile.

Leading indicators save the day

Actually though, this is already a solved problem. Living organisms are (or are made of) homeostatic control systems that regulate their own inputs.

An animal needs calories in order to function and it spends calories to control the level of calories it has stored.

And the key thing is that there is a long lag in the system. An animal doesn’t wait until its cells are starved to go hunt. It goes to hunt, or at least goes to the refrigerator, on the basis of a much much earlier indicator, when it is hungry. It gets hungry much earlier than when it is starting to literally run out of calories.

Or thinking somewhat more abstractly: Suppose you have a control system that regulates the input of gasoline, but the control system itself depends on gasoline to function?

If such a system was constructed with very little lag, it would fail with the first sizeable shock. But if the system had look-ahead (perhaps because gas flows through a reservoir that fuels the regulator, even when there is 0 gas flowing through the regulator at the moment).

Conclusion

So it seems that I should be looking out for very early leading indicators of unwanted phenomenological states, and hooking up control systems to those, as opposed to building systems that track the phenomenological states of some input starting to fall apart. I may find that more things can be control systems than I had previously thought.

Some sleep thoughts very roughly

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

My current model: falling asleep depend on three things happening. If these three things happen, then you will be asleep:

  1. Relaxed body
  2. Lowered pulse (around 50 bpm)
  3. Mind clear of thoughts (or leaning into visual imagery)

But actually, most of the action is in the prerequisite 0th step: disengaging from whatever is interesting, so that your attention can actually be to relax and fall asleep.

How to do that?

Some ideas:

  • IDC with the thoughts
  • Physically remove the felt senses from the body
  • Meditate?
  • Distract yourself
    • By drawing
    • By reading fiction
    • By trying to get absorbed in some thoughts?
  • “Leaning out” from the thoughts?
  • By jotting down everything that you’re excited about?
  • By scheduling specific time in the morning to try and boot up those motivating considerations / making reminders of everything important.
    • The main thing, might be the sense of time scarcity or urgency which is salient at the time.

 

 

Modes, not traits, and decoupling cognitive energy from intentionality

~ elityre ~ 3 Comments

[Epistemic status: speculation from single n of 1 experiences that I’m excited about]

I had a really effective second half of my day today, and right now I’m going to speculate about some of the mechanics of that.

Modes, not traits

Some relevant background to this is a thought that I had two weeks ago:

“I shouldn’t think of terms in terms of ways that I should be or things that I should do, but rather __modes__ that I could get into that are useful sometimes. Even if I want to be in those modes most days, I should still think of them as separate modes and not as default states.”

This is important because a lot of ways that I want to be consume some resource, so I can’t actually maintain them perpetually. I might want to be habitually hyper-productive, but since I probably can’t be hyper-productive for literally all of my waking hours (I need rest and stuff), if I try to always be hyper productive, I’ll fail, and never really build the habit. Instead, I should have a hyper-productive mode and build the habit of  getting into that mode regularly.

This is maybe obvious to a lot of you, but it seems like a useful insight to me. (I wonder if I’m on the verge of reinventng “work/life balance” in the same way that I reinvented “its good to have a room.”)

I think this goes pretty deep, and there are a number of different not-necessarily mutually exclusive modes at various levels of subtlety. (For one thing, I have a mode for syncing with Anna: our natures tend to clash by default, but these days she either meets me in something like my way of being, or I meet her at something like her way of being.)

But here are three high level, high granularity modes / ways of being / high-level intentions that it seems like I would want to operate from on a regular basis.

  • Rest
  • Executing intentions mindset / committed engagement [manager time]
  • Slow thinking / deep work / mono-focus [maker time]

The rest of this post will be about holding the Executing intentions mindset.

Maintaining taughtness

My current sense of how to do the Executing Intentions mode well, involves maintaining “taughtness” / “tension” across the whole period that you’re in that mode. That’s a phenomenological description: it feels like there’s a sort of tension that I can let go slack. It has something to do with remembering the executing intentions meta-intention? Or having the context of the tasks that I’m doing loaded up and available?

One reason why this worked well today, I think, was that I decided that I was going to stop listening to audio-books for the time being. I might usually listen to an audiobook as I walk somewhere, but this tends to take me out of the EI mindset, what was taught becomes slack.

Other ways that I can fall out of it:

  • Looking at my phone in the bathroom.
  • Making food and eating, and especially listening to audio while making food.

Each of these have a character of “I’m doing this mundane thing right now, I might as well occupy my mind with something entertaining or informative.” It might be that that engagement with that material kicks out the EI meta-intention, because my mind is filled with other content. But it feels more like all of those behaviors have a kind of lackadaisical attitude, like “its fine to slow down and spend time here”, instead of the momentum of one thing after another.

I did take breaks today, but they had a different character than most breaks I take. They were more intentional: more circumscribed, less distracted. I intentionally decided how long each one was going to be, and set a timer, but more importantly than the timer, there was a part of me that didn’t turn off during the break, I was still geared up to take the next thing coming at me. I’m confident this is less restful than other kinds of breaks, and thus it is crucial that this is only a mode and that one also have a rest mode, when you release all the tension and taughtness.

Decoupling energy levels from intentionality

Another thing that happened today is that at the end of my session, I was feeling cognitively drained. I think that usually, that would cause me to disengage from the EI mindset and release my conscious hold on my intentionality. But this time, I was more like “I notice that I am cognitively drained. My job in this time-slice is to recover cognitive energy.” and I went to go strength train.

I think there’s something important here: I was decoupling how tried I felt from how intentional I was going to be.

This seems important on a number of counts

  • For one thing it caused me to strength train during my work day, which sometimes gets skipped.
  • Additionally, this sort of rolling with the punches enabled me to maintain the taughtness, instead of abandoning the attitude whenever I loose cognitive resources.

Remember, this really depends on having high quality rest.

Coordinating Conversation I: micro-coordination of intention

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[This is a draft, mostly written in 2018, with very minimal editing. See the caveats here.]

Follow up to: Something simple to try in conversations

In this essay, I want to describe a simple, but important abstraction for how to think about what’s happening in a conversation, and how to make use of that abstraction for helping a conversation go more smoothly. This idea applies at multiple time-scales: in this post, I’ll describe how the simpler case of second-to-second interactions, and then in the next, I’ll explain the broader minute-to-minute case.

Let’s consider some two-person epistemic conversation, say two people attempting to converge on some topic they disagree about.

There are two roles (moves/ strategies) that one can play in a two-person epistemic conversation.  One can either be listening [/ be the listener], and trying to understand their partner’s point. Or one can be explaining [/ be the explainer], trying to convey a point to their partner.

Both participants will almost certainly do both over the course of the conversation, and each may switch very rapidly between explaining and listening, but for any discrete time-slice of the conversation, each person will be holding an intention either to convey, or to come to understand.

It’s useful to track conversations in terms of which participant is implementing which role, second to second. Thinking about conversations this way, and being conscious of what intention you are implementing, as a participant, is useful because it enables conversational coordination.

At any given time, no more than one person should be explaining, and at least one person should be trying to understand what is being said. Specifically, this means that it should never be the case that both participants are in the explaining mode at the same time.

At any given moment, one person should be explaining, and the other person should be listening and trying to understand.

This may seem like an obvious point, but conversations frequently fail to meet this standard. This is a common failure mode: both parties are excited about the point they have to make, and have a visceral compulsion to make that point clear to the other person. And so both people are explaining at each other. When both people are in the explaining role at the same time, communication usually fails.

(The way Double Crux has been traditionally described aggravates this issue. The concept of a Double Crux can leave one with the impression that one is supposed to try and do both roles at once, both making their point and attempting to understand the point of their partner in one swoop. I, at least, don’t hold that Double Crux conversations should be conducted this way. [Instead, I think they should usually look like this.])

From the inside, this situation often feels like seeing that your partner is just missing this one point, and if you just convey it to them, they’ll realize that you’re right. It feels so easy to tell them that reason why they’re wrong. Or feeling that what they’re saying is so absurd that there’s almost a compulsion to point out exactly how absurd it is.

When I notice this happening in a conversation I’m participating in, I step back to the listening role and try and understand the point that my interlocutor is making. Only after I’ve paraphrased and they feel like I’ve understood them, do I return to making my point. [1]

TAP: notice that I’m pushing to make a point over my interlocutor -> mentally step back and paraphrase

This is super simple, but it is also important for making conversations go well.

[1] If it’s still relevant. Often, once I’ve understood what they were trying to tell me, my objection is obviated.

 

 

Intro to some draft posts on Double Crux, Epistemic Mediation, and Conversational Facilitation

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

This is the intro page to a short series of posts on topics relating to Double Crux, Epistemic Mediation, and Conversational Facilitation.

I’ve spent a lot of time developing methods for resolving tricky disagreements, and trying to teach those methods, via running test sessions, facilitating conversations, etc.

For the most part, I haven’t prioritized writing things up. However, I do have a series of incomplete drafts, most of which I wrote in 2018.

They’ve been sitting in my drafts folder since then (with some occasional additions every few month). But they don’t do any good sitting in my drafts folder, and this blog is specifically for posting rough drafts. So I’m posting them here, where other people can take a look at them.

All the caveats:

  • They are really, actually drafts. I’ve made minimal changes for readability. I’m sorry if these are not comprehensible, but the alternative was not posting anything, at least for a while.
  • I don’t expect these to convey skills, only point at skills.
    • Part of the reason why I have had such high standards for these and similar posts is that, in running test sessions, I did a lot of iteration to develop units that would cause people to actually implement the mental motions described, instead of simply verbally agreeing that those moves are sensible, and then going back to using their default conversational habits. I want to do the same via writing, but I don’t know how to do that yet.
  • My thinking in this area has evolved since I wrote these. While I still think that all of these are at least pointed in the right direction, some of my descriptions no longer seem to me to be the most natural way to conceptualize the relevant mechanisms.
  • I don’t claim originality for any of this content. Just like everything in the space of rationality, I’m sure that most of this has been discovered and rediscovered before, and many people are already doing something like this.
  • This is definitely not a complete catalogue of everything that I think is important in this of disagreement resolution or conversational facilitation.

In future, I’m going to post more of my iterative, semi-rambling incomplete and maybe-incomprehensible content here, instead of

Posts

Coordinating Conversation / micro-coordination (listening and explaining)

Paraphrasing

The Problem of “Agreeing to Agree”

Action-Oriented Operationalization

Other posts on these topics that I’ve already published:

Shallow Cruxes

The Crux-checking move (Using your partner to find your own Cruxes)

Agree first

Some other relevant posts

Some things I think about Double Crux and related topics

The Basic Double Crux Pattern

Basic Double Crux pattern example

Using the facilitator to make sure that each person’s point is held

Consideration Factoring: a relative of Double Crux

Emotional misattribution? Mental structures you can access from states

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

In my recent post on possible interventions on physiological arousal, there’s something interesting about two of the approaches that felt most promising to me.

Both singing and exercising involve going with the flow, or moving in the same “direction” as the arousal. In both cases, you lean into the activation, but you apply a new meaning to it, or reinterpret it, or repurpose it, or something.

In the case of singing: I feel agitated about something and my physiology is activated. I sing some folk songs, really feeling into the emotions and the meaning they embody. After doing that for a bit the arousal exhausts itself, and I’m calmer or more settled.

It similar in the case of exercising: I’m agitated, I pour that excess energy into working out, and I expend that energy.

In fact, while we’re at it, in the past, I’ve noted before that masturbation / ejaculation seems to have a similar impact.

The last two are less confusing / surprising, because they seem like they involve hormonal shifts / the literal expending of chemical energy. But what’s happening in the case of singing? There’s some, goal structure / meaning, some reason why I’m aroused / agitated / activated, I take that activation and “apply” it to a totally separate goal structure / meaning, I “resolve” this new goal structure, and my system calms down as if it just forgets what caused it to be agitated in the first place.

That seems kind of weird. You’d think that if my body thought that there was some reason to be energized, and I added a second reason to be energized, but then resolve that second reason, I should still be energized, because nothing has changed about reason #1.

But I guess it doesn’t work that way.

It seems more like there’s a two way information flow between mental content and physiological state, and each one informs the other. (I think “informs” is exactly the right word. Each one is updating on the outputs of the other, my body responding to my thoughts, and my thoughts responding to my body.) So if I’m agitated, and I try to shift my thoughts to something non-agitating, this force-against-force, my mind is resisting, on the basis of my bodily activation. But I can easily swap out a different agitating / activating thought structure, without any resistance at all. And apparently, the whole system doesn’t have enough “working memory” to track two meanings at once, and so the original gets dropped.

I suspect that this phenomenon might be pretty general, that it applies to a bunch of different emotional/physiological states, not just arousal. I was in a circle once, when I was really sad about one thing, and then I found myself crying about (and feeling some catharsis around) some other sad thing.

In fact, I think in general, when I’m feeling sad, I tend to associate it with my romantic loneliness, out of something like habit, even if my romantic situation didn’t have much to do with why I was feeling down.

I postulate that when you’re in a given physiological state, you have ready access to all (?) of the meaning-structures (whatever that means), that are “attuned to” (whatever that means), that state. So when you’re sad, you can access all of the reasons / narratives to be sad (although maybe only one at a time?), and when you’re excited you can access all of the reasons / narratives to be happy.

[I wonder if this has anything to do with why depression is resilient. Maybe people slip into a depressed state, and they access / slide into a meaning structure that they’re used to remunerating on, which unfortunately, is very robust, and so they get stuck in their depressed state.  That is, when a person is depressed they are accidentally doing the opposite of the trick I described above, instead of switching to a meaning that they can resolve, thereby exiting the state, they switch to a meaning that is particularly hard to resolve.]

This is in some sense just a restatement of the concept of “emotional misattribution”, but it seem importantly different in framing somehow.

 

 

 

Physiological arousal / activation / agitation

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Separately from aversions, there is excess physiological arousal. [1]

Sometimes, even when I’ve pretty successfully processed some felt sense, and am riding it out, there’s still stress involved. For instance, when I’m drafting an important email, to a potential employer or potential romantic partner.

This kind of arousal isn’t always bad. Often the energy of this kind of heightened state is positively useful. But high arousal usually correlates with less stable attention. And, often, this high level of arousal causes me to bounce off my work.

Oftentimes this happens just after I finish something stressful. In this case, it will often feel hard to transition to the next thing, instead opting to go for a walk around the neighborhood (for 40 minutes to an hour, usually). The high levels of activation is “left over” after sending the email, and it accordingly feels effortful to put direct my attention toward something else.

This doesn’t seem bad, calming down and returning to a baseline (and maybe doing psychological processing at the same time?) seems like a natural thing to do. But also, that bouncing off is one of the main ways that I loose time in my day, and it seems like there ought to be way to do drop that arousal much more efficiently.

Some thoughts:

  • I could maybe just take this as my trigger to go exercise for the day, and turn the excess energy to a productive purpose, while also stabilizing my physiological arousal level.
    • Having a quick, intense exercise routine seems helpful for this. I was jumping rope for a while, but that apparently didn’t stick.
  • I could just set a ten minute timer and slow down my heart rate, by breathing slowly?
  • Remember my feet?
  • I could do a physical relaxation routine. [This feels wrong in that it’s like setting up a counterforce against the agitation, and having them conflict. It seems like a better thing would not feel like that.]
  • I could try removing the felt sense from my chest. [That feels bad and clugy.]
  • I have some idea that regular meditation is supposed to improve this stability of this variable. So that if I was meditating more regularly, I would return to baseline more rapidly and easily? I don’t know if that’s true.
  • Meditators do a thing sometime, where they break a thing down into its component sensations. Do that?
  • Maybe I should do Focusing to this as well? That seems hard. “This” is slippery.
  • Ok. Well another theory is that this is just the same thing exactly as the felt sense / unhandled concern situation, and not “left over” at all. Like I’m feeling agitated because I don’t know what the response will be, and its important, even if it is out of my hands. This suggests that I should dialogue with the thing about whether it is actually out of my hands?
  • Singing

 

[1] Just to note, you can have high arousal due to some aversion or concern that has not been processed. In fact, that is probably even more common. But in this section, I’m only discussing high-levels of activation that are not associated with an aversion or unprocessed yank.