Guardian column on ugh fields, mentions LW

Kaj_Sotala

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/08/change-your-life-ugh-fields

In 1920, in a jaw-droppingly unethical experiment that's mainly remembered today as an example of how not to conduct a psychological study, John B Watson set out to prove a point about fear – using, as his guinea pig, an eight-month-old boy in a Baltimore hospital. Little Albert, as he became known, was taught to associate a white rat with a terrifying sound – a steel bar was struck with a hammer behind his back whenever he reached towards the animal – until, the story goes, he was terrified of anything white and furry: dogs, a coat, Watson in a Santa Claus costume. (Watson, apparently, intended to reverse the effect, but Albert was removed from the hospital before he could do so.) It would be entertaining to propose something similar to a university ethics committee today: they'd spring from their seats in horror, like Little Albert seeing a sheepskin rug.

In fact, most of the details of Little Albert's "conditioning" have since been thrown into doubt. But something not too dissimilar afflicts many of us. When an experience gets associated with acute bad feelings, especially in childhood – being around dogs, say, or swimming pools, or moving house or money troubles – that category of thing can become fearsome for ever. But there's an additional twist I hadn't considered until I encountered it recently on the rationality blog lesswrong.com, where it's termed an "ugh field": what if one effect of finding some area of life particularly stress-inducing is that we get conditioned into not even thinking about it at all?

"A problem with the human mind is it's a horrific kludge that will fail when you most need it not to," writes one Less Wrong blogger, who argues that ugh fields are a case in point: "If a person receives constant negative conditioning via unhappy thoughts whenever their mind goes into a certain zone of thought, they will develop a psychological flinch mechanism around the thought."

Suppose, in early adulthood, you have a few bad experiences with missed credit card bills and penalty fees. A rational person might resolve to think more about bills in future, to avoid repeat problems. But a fear-conditioned mind, erecting an ugh field around the subject, might become more forgetful with money, to avoid experiencing the emotions associated with the thought, thus making matters worse. (Another example: many people fail to take medicines they've been prescribed for life-threatening conditions. Could it be because they'd rather avoid thinking about having a life-threatening condition – even if that puts their lives at risk?) Worse, if the ugh field hypothesis is correct, the "flinch" occurs, by definition, before the thought enters your conscious mind. So even someone sincerely dedicated to confronting (say) their issues with money won't have the opportunity: the ugh field will have screened it out pre-emptively.

This is all highly dispiriting, except in so far as it highlights a broader truth about fear: we're not really afraid of events, but of experiencing the emotions associated with them. ("I'm only ever afraid of a feeling, never a task," is how the blogger David Cain applies this to procrastination at raptitude.com – see is.gd/t3cRPZ.) Which is actually liberating, since the prospect of experiencing an unpleasant emotion is almost always more palatable than the prospect of Something Really Bad happening. If you can tolerate the feeling of "ugh", there's not much you can't tolerate in life.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/08/change-your-life-ugh-fields

In 1920, in a jaw-droppingly unethical experiment that's mainly remembered today as an example of how not to conduct a psychological study, John B Watson set out to prove a point about fear – using, as his guinea pig, an eight-month-old boy in a Baltimore hospital. Little Albert, as he became known, was taught to associate a white rat with a terrifying sound – a steel bar was struck with a hammer behind his back whenever he reached towards the animal – until, the story goes, he was terrified of anything white and furry: dogs, a coat, Watson in a Santa Claus costume. (Watson, apparently, intended to reverse the effect, but Albert was removed from the hospital before he could do so.) It would be entertaining to propose something similar to a university ethics committee today: they'd spring from their seats in horror, like Little Albert seeing a sheepskin rug.

In fact, most of the details of Little Albert's "conditioning" have since been thrown into doubt. But something not too dissimilar afflicts many of us. When an experience gets associated with acute bad feelings, especially in childhood – being around dogs, say, or swimming pools, or moving house or money troubles – that category of thing can become fearsome for ever. But there's an additional twist I hadn't considered until I encountered it recently on the rationality blog lesswrong.com, where it's termed an "ugh field": what if one effect of finding some area of life particularly stress-inducing is that we get conditioned into not even thinking about it at all?

"A problem with the human mind is it's a horrific kludge that will fail when you most need it not to," writes one Less Wrong blogger, who argues that ugh fields are a case in point: "If a person receives constant negative conditioning via unhappy thoughts whenever their mind goes into a certain zone of thought, they will develop a psychological flinch mechanism around the thought."

Suppose, in early adulthood, you have a few bad experiences with missed credit card bills and penalty fees. A rational person might resolve to think more about bills in future, to avoid repeat problems. But a fear-conditioned mind, erecting an ugh field around the subject, might become more forgetful with money, to avoid experiencing the emotions associated with the thought, thus making matters worse. (Another example: many people fail to take medicines they've been prescribed for life-threatening conditions. Could it be because they'd rather avoid thinking about having a life-threatening condition – even if that puts their lives at risk?) Worse, if the ugh field hypothesis is correct, the "flinch" occurs, by definition, before the thought enters your conscious mind. So even someone sincerely dedicated to confronting (say) their issues with money won't have the opportunity: the ugh field will have screened it out pre-emptively.

This is all highly dispiriting, except in so far as it highlights a broader truth about fear: we're not really afraid of events, but of experiencing the emotions associated with them. ("I'm only ever afraid of a feeling, never a task," is how the blogger David Cain applies this to procrastination at raptitude.com – see is.gd/t3cRPZ.) Which is actually liberating, since the prospect of experiencing an unpleasant emotion is almost always more palatable than the prospect of Something Really Bad happening. If you can tolerate the feeling of "ugh", there's not much you can't tolerate in life.

You're using a Roko algorithm! Well, you might be, anyway. Specifically, trying to resolve troubling internal tension by drumming up social drama in the hopes that some decisive external event will knock you into stability. However you don't seem to be going out of your way to appear discreditable like he did, maybe because you don't yet identify with the "x-rationalist" memeplex to as great an extent as Roko.

Similarly, the message you might be trying to send after it's made explicit and reflected upon for a bit might be something like the following:

"A large number of people on this site (Less Wrong) could be held in contempt by a reasonably objective outside observer, e.g. a semi-prestigious academic or a smart Democratic senator or an exemplary member of a less contemptible fraction of Less Wrong. I would like to point this out because it is a very bad sign both epistemically and pragmatically. I want to make sure that people keep this in mind instead of shrugging it off or letting it become an ugh field. However the social pragmatics of the community have made it such that I cannot directly talk about the most representative plausibly-contemptible local beliefs, and furthermore I am discouraged from even talking about how it is plausibly-contemptible that I can't even talk about the plausibly-contemptible beliefs. I am thus forced to make what appear to be snide side-remarks about the absurdity of the situation in order to have a chance at refocusing the attention of the plausibly-contemptible fraction of Less Wrong---of which I am worried I might be a member---on this obviously important and distractingly disturbing meta-level epistemic question/conflict.

(Potentially ascending the reflective meta-level ladder to the moral high-ground:) Unfortunately I still cannot go meta here by pointing out the absurdity of my only being able to communicate distress with what appear to be snide side-remarks, because Less Wrong members---like all humans---only really respond to the tone of sentences and what that tone implies about the moral virtue of the writer. That is, they don't respond to the reasonableness of the actual sentences, and definitely not to the reasonableness of the cognitive algorithms that would make the strategy of writing such sentences feel appealing. And they definitely definitely definitely do not reason about the complex social pragmatics that would cause those cognitive algorithms to deem that strategy a reasonable one, or that would differentially cause a mind or mind-mode or mind-parts-coalition to differentially emphasize those cognitive algorithms as a reasonable adaptation to the local environment. And they definitely don't reflect on any of that, because there's no affordance. Sometimes they will somewhat usefully (often uselessly) taboo a word, or at the very most they'll dissolve it; but never will a sentence be deconstructed such that it can be understood and thoughtfully analyzed, nor will a sentence-generator. Thus I am left with no options and will only become more distressed over time, without any tools to point out how insane everyone in the world is being, and am forced to use low-variance small-negative-reward strategies in the hopes that somehow they will catalyze something."

Maybe I'm partially projecting. I'm pretty sure I'm ranting at least.

Edit: Here's a simplified concrete example of this (insightfully reported by Yvain so you know you want to click the link, it's a comment with 74 karma, for seriously), but it's everywhere, implicitly, constantly, without any reflection or any sense that something is terrifyingly disgustingly insanely wrongly completely barking mad. Or a subtler example from Less Wrong.

You're using a Roko algorithm! Well, you might be, anyway. Specifically, trying to resolve troubling internal tension by drumming up social drama in the hopes that some decisive external event will knock you into stability.

I am really really impressed. That is basically exactly right.

However you don't seem to be going out of your way to appear discreditable like he did...

Well, I managed to get out of Jehovah's Witnesses on my own. People who care strongly about their reputation within a community often fail that hurdle. Not that I want to draw any c... (read more)

35

Guardian column on ugh fields, mentions LW

35

35

35

Guardian column on ugh fields, mentions LW

35

35