I once ran as fast as I could to catch a train, despite knowing that I was already too late.
I arrived on the platform a few minutes after the departure time. This was my expectation, but not my intention. My intention was to catch the train.
I got on the train with seconds to spare, because, unknown to me, it had been delayed a few minutes in leaving.
I had an intention to catch the train, no expectation of doing so, and succeeded in catching the train. How does this fit your conflation of intention and expectation?
If two variables are made to take the same values, that does not make them the same variable. If they were the same variable, it would be unnecessary to do anything to cause them to have the same value.
This is where it gets confusing, so we have to be careful. Let's start from the beginning and get our terms clear.
Your expectations are your predictions of what will happen, which you use to prepare for the reality you expect to find yourself in. If your wife says "It's not going to rain" and you say "I believe you sweetie, you could never be wrong about anything", whether you pack your umbrella and rain jacket says a lot more about what you're predicting than your words do. If you say "I know you'd never hit me" and then flinch when she gets close, your actions show your true expectations.
Similarly, your intentions are what you're aiming towards. If your performance suffers every time you're about to pull ahead in the board game and picks up again when you're at no risk of winning, it starts to look like you're trying to do something other than win. If the person you're playing with is the type to get upset about losing, then a more likely explanation is that you're intending to avoid upsetting the person and that any words of "I'm trying I promise!" aren't actually representative of what you're actually optimizing for.
So what's going on when you "know" that you're too late and "expect" to arrive a few minutes after departure time while simultaneously "intending" to catch the train?
The first thing to notice is that you describe your expectation as "arriving after the departure time" and intending "to catch the train". You didn't specify, but if you mean that you expected to arrive after the scheduled departure time, that actually doesn't contradict having an intention/expectation of catching the train. You did arrive after the scheduled time and also catch the train. It just implies an expectation that the train would be late, which is obviously not impossible either because it was.
There are all sorts of ways to configure the details and get the same description of events. Maybe you expected that the train might be late, and correspondingly intended to catch the train if it was. Maybe you intended to catch the train no matter what, and did not care to expect anything about how that happens because the details don't matter and you were willing to expect incorrectly.
If I'm speaking loosely, the match I describe wasn't the first one where I "intended to win" while simultaneously "expecting to lose". It wasn't even the first one of these that I had won. It's only when we look closely and examine what was actually happening that we can notice the difference between things like "Expecting to win, and expecting that this expectation probably won't be realized" and "Expecting to do my best, and not bothering to expect much in the moment about where this leads". Both of these look like "Intending to win while expecting to lose", but technically neither are. They describe different situations and make different predictions. To give one example, in matches where you're doing only the former you don't get that loss of motivation and you also don't get that surprise when you score enough that you're not losing anymore.
When you look closely enough, the apparent contradiction always dissolves.
Because your intention is the potential reality you are aiming towards, and your expectation is the potential reality you're preparing for. The only difference, which makes it so that we can say we can expect things that we don't necessarily intend, is that sometimes our preparations really can't do much of anything to change the reality we're preparing for.
I really like this post! (I have liked most of your posts of the last decade and a bit. They also inspired me to learn hypnosis, which led to rather cataclysmic changes in my life.) I think therapists call this "somatization", which can be both positive and negative, in the same sense the hypnotic (or psychotic) illusions are. You seem to mainly focus on the negative somatization (no swelling) and a bit on positive ones, though I suspect that positive somatization (both beneficial and detrimental) is just as controllable with the intent/expectation fusion. Maybe visualizing making the hoop really helps to steady your hand.
which led to rather cataclysmic changes in my life.
Well that sounds... scary, at best. I hope you've come out of it okay.
I'm not really sure how to take this, but it's humbling regardless. Thank you for sharing.
You seem to mainly focus on the negative somatization (no swelling) and a bit on positive ones, though I suspect that positive somatization (both beneficial and detrimental) is just as controllable with the intent/expectation fusion.
Yeah, for sure.
Though these distinctions are kinda confusing for me.
For example, I don't really draw too much distinction between "negative" and "positive" because I don't see a good way to pick a "privileged default". For example, "deciding not to swell" seems like the weird thing so it seems like a "negative somatization", but once you get used to that, all that unnecessary swelling seems like positive somatization. So when that guy didn't understand and she got self conscious, was that removal of a negative somatization, or a positive somatization? When I helped her get her swelling down again, is that another negative somatization or removal of a positive one? Kinda depends on your frame of reference, so it can't really work for the negative without also working for the positive. I just look at it as changing the response from one thing to another.
Similarly, I don't really see a distinction between a "somatization" and any other behavior we choose to do. "Raising your right hand" feels a lot more "conscious" and "like a decision" than stuff like swelling, but that's just because we tend to have better self-understanding in the former case, not because of an inherent difference in the two phenomena. If you try to explain how you raise your right hand, even if you know which muscles you're contracting it's unlikely that you're conceptualizing the action that way when you do it. You just kinda... do it. You know you can, so you expect to raise your right hand in the circumstances that seem to call for it, and then you take credit for that behavior because it's in line with your self-narrative. Once you get familiar with things like swelling, it's kinda the same thing though. You just kinda do it when it seems to make sense, and might even take credit for it.
When hiking our honeymoon for example, my wife mentioned that her hands were really cold despite her core being warm. I said "So send more blood to them?" and she said "Okay :)" -- and a few minutes later, her hands were really warm. Is that still a "somatization", or "just another conscious decision"?
Sorry for the delayed reply... I don't get notifications of replies, and the LW RSS has been broken for me for years now, so I only poke my head here occasionally.
Well that sounds... scary, at best. I hope you've come out of it okay.
50/100. But that rather exciting story is best not told in a public forum.
Though these distinctions are kinda confusing for me.
Well, lack of appearance of something otherwise expected would be negative, and appearance of something otherwise unexpected would be positive?
For example, a false pregnancy is a "positive somatization". Or stigmata. Having trouble coming up with intentionally "good" examples, other than the visualizations helping you shoot a hoop better or something. Not sure if the new-agey "think yourself better" is actually a thing. Hence my question. "Send more blood to your hands" seems like a good example, actually. Not something one would normally think possible except by physical labor.
50/100. But that rather exciting story is best not told in a public forum.
Heh, okay. If you want to tell it in private, you definitely have my attention.
Well, lack of appearance of something otherwise expected would be negative, and appearance of something otherwise unexpected would be positive?
Right, so now the question is which expectations we're measuring relative to. Which gets kinda weird, because the way we're getting changes is through changing expectations, specifically by noticing that the original expectations were wrong.
Measured relative to the best expectations, every improvement is removal of a deviation from the default. It's hard to think of things that are 1) physiologically possible, 2) desirable, and 3) completely unexpected. Even the things that most closely fit become expected by the time you achieve them, because that's how you achieve them. Notice how the examples you gave of "false pregnancy" and "stigmata" don't work as examples of how looking more closely at reality can give better outcomes by evoking positive somatizations? Stigmata isn't exactly desirable, and "false pregnancy" almost by definition doesn't fit reality.
So for example with my kid cousin and the fire poker, most people came at it from a perspective of "It's expected that this kid suffers! He burned his hand!", and from this POV my intervention looks like a "negative somatization" because we're taking away suffering which would otherwise be expected. Whereas I came at it from a perspective of "It's weird that this kid is suffering, wtf is this about?" and then realized "Oh! These MFers gaslit him into suffering when he otherwise wouldn't have suffered!". From my perspective, which I'd argue better represents reality and that's why it got better results, all I did was help him see through the unnecessary positive somatization that had been created before I got there.
Because we're not actually adding any "superpowers" and are just noticing when existing abilities fit the context, it ends up very invisible unless we get caught up enough in confused expectations to have a bad baseline to compare to. When the woman who showed up with me caught the tail end and just saw a kid not suffering, nothing seemed weird about it to her because "What? It's not a big deal, why would he suffer over it?". My wife's warm hands only sounds like a positive somatization because she stopped and commented on them being cold. "I went on a hike, and stayed warm, and my hands stayed warm too" is just business as usual, and expectations being met.
Another good example of this is when I met my friend's ex-boyfriend. It was a completely unnoteworthy introduction, with absolutely nothing out of the norm so far as I could tell. And then my friend came up to me afterwards saying that she wished she could have been there to witness whatever magic I pulled, because she's literally never seen him respect anyone like that. I tried to explain to her that I literally did nothing and that if he respected me more than normal she gets the credit for that. She didn't buy it, and it took me at least weeks before I noticed what it is about him that causes most people to not have normal boring introductions with him. From her perspective, "respect" appeared unexpectedly, but from my perspective it just never occurred to me to give him reasons to not respect me.
So if most people do things mostly right most of the time, then when someone struggles due to their misfit expectations, we say "Hey look, that person has a problem", and in those cases updating to better expectations looks like "removing a problem". Even if most people struggle with a certain thing and expect that the ideal won't be achieved, the ideal is still "things not being broken" so even "superhuman" abilities look like "removing the problem that most people have" -- like removing suffering from getting burned or whatever.
In order for it to look like a positive somatization and also be good, it has to be something where proper functioning is so rare that people don't even recognize that it's worth wanting for. Things like this do exist sometimes, but they're usually in odd little corners that most people don't frequent in the first place -- because otherwise enough people would find the right expectations that it would stop seeming weird and start seeming worth wanting for. My wife's vasodilation can look like a "positive somatization" because having cold hands when hiking out in the cold is normal enough that doesn't seem like a "problem", even if warmer hands is better. If her cold hands were unexpected, then it'd be seen as "inappropriate vasoconstriction", and then it'd be "removing a positive somatization" again.
Can you think of any "positive somatizations" that you would want? Any that don't just happen automatically upon realizing that they're context appropriate?
One way to do better is to deliberately trade correctness of expectation for effort without letting delusion spread to infect the rest of your thinking. "Yeah, I'm probably going to lose. I don't care. I intend to win anyway". Or, in other words "Do or do not. There is no 'try'".
Usually, "Do or do not. There is no 'try'" means the opposite. It's about how optimizing for effort is not the same thing as optimizing for outcomes. If you use hypnosis to make a hand stuck to a table, a person could spent a lot of effort to lift the hand from the table and still fail.
In control systems (or cybernetics) the choice of a good set point is pretty important. In the example of the game, focusing on scoring points was the best way forward.
If you want to get promoted at your job, actually understanding the criteria that your company uses to decide who to promote and using that, is probably more likely to lead to success than either having a general "I will be promoted" outcome or a "I will engage in maximum effort" outcome.
If you want to get promoted at your job, actually understanding the criteria that your company uses to decide who to promote and using that, is probably more likely to lead to success than either having a general "I will be promoted" outcome
Understanding the promotion criteria is indeed helpful for getting promoted. If someone points out that you don't even know the promotion criteria and you maintain your expectation of "I will be promoted" by responding "Doesn't matter! Positive thinking! The Secret!", then yeah, that's a recipe for not getting promoted
But I imagine that if you told me that you wanted to get promoted, and that you thought it'd actually happen, you wouldn't respond this way. More likely, if I asked you if you know the promotion criteria, you'd have an answer like "Yes". If you hadn't thought of it, I'd expect you to say something like "Oh. That's a good point, I should look into that". When things like knowing the criteria help you achieve the goal, then it gets tied into your web of expectations when you notice. Maybe it causes your expectation of success to falter, or maybe your will to succeed drives you to look it up.
The moment someone presents you with evidence that you're on a track to failure, we can see whether you're aiming for the thing out in reality or the thing in your head. If you're aiming towards the island and get notice that your compass says you're erring to the north, you will correct to the south. Descriptively speaking, if you're looking away from evidence that you're not achieving your stated goal, you're demonstrating that you're optimizing for something else. Something like "holding the idea that I'm trying"/"holding the idea that I will succeed"/"succeeding without having to face difficult challenges"/etc.
If you use hypnosis to make a hand stuck to a table, a person could spent a lot of effort to lift the hand from the table and still fail.
Both "in hypnosis" and otherwise, people frequently do stuff that looks like "I will engage in maximum effort", and it's generally not very effective because the direction of "effort" isn't specified and the presuppositions about where it's actually aimed are hidden.
In the case of a stuck hand, there's an implicit understanding that you can do everything but what would actually lift the hand. And lifting your hand really isn't that hard. It just takes a small amount of unopposed muscular exertion, which you do all the time. If you, as the full system, aren't lifting that hand it's because you're not optimizing for it. I had a hard time "getting hypnotized" when I first started looking into it, precisely because I'd keep actually checking whether I could actually lift my hand and finding that I could -- which fundamentally breaks the effect.
I'll talk about this more in the "attention" posts, but the thing that makes the illusion of stuck hands work is that the person loses track of the fact that they're not actually trying, and end up "trying to try" at best. I explicitly designed my hypnotic "scripts" with this in mind, and could often get name amnesia in forty seconds of text chat from completely cold. Specifically, I'd build off the "Automatic Imagination Model" and have them "just imagine" that they couldn't remember, and from there pull some sleight of mouth intended to help them lose track of the fact that they are just imagining it and can "stop imagining whenever they'd like" (as mentioned in footnote 2). Once you lose track of the fact that you're voluntarily imagining something, and imagining that it's real, then by definition you're experiencing it as if it's real -- even though it is not.
I did end up experiencing it myself at one point, which was pretty neat. The distinction between "I can't remember my name" and "I can't try to remember my name" is pretty subtle and easy to lose track of, especially in weird and novel situations. But because I knew the difference I was able to find my way back to trying and successfully remembering my name -- it just took a few seconds longer than it normally would. When you don't know the difference, and "I didn't remember" gets interpreted as evidence that "I can't remember", people get a lot more stuck.
Usually, "Do or do not. There is no 'try'" means the opposite. It's about how optimizing for effort is not the same thing as optimizing for outcomes
A central point of this sequence is that "I will [lift this x-fighter/get this promotion/dilate the blood vessels in my hand" thing is the thing that matters. Whatever rain dance you do, whatever justifications you have, if it doesn't end in an expectation of that outcome happening out in reality then you aren't steering towards that outcome. It's setting the intention/expectation of "I will lift this fighter" that actually aligns your actions in service of realizing this outcome, and motivates the behaviors which point in this direction -- both the legible like "rent a forklift" and the illegible like "just do it".
Everything else is in service of this direction of attention, and when the prerequisites are in place we don't need things like "hypnosis" because we can literally just say things even if they're as seemingly absurd as "You can just decide to not swell your injuries" or "Send more blood to your hands" -- and if it's physiologically possible that's enough.
I have done Automatic Imagination Model based text hypnosis before and do know that it works quite well.
If we take the "get this promotion" example, I do think that expecting the promotion results in doing the things that your mental model says are likely to get you the promotion. Depending on the quality of your mental model, this might or might not be the most optimal actions to getting the promotion. There are a lot of cultural stereotypes about what should get you a promotion that might not apply in a certain situation. It might be that playing a round of golf with your boss is the key to getting the promotion but if you don't have this in your mental model you might spend more effort by spending more time at the office which is not actually what gets you the promotion.
If you have sensor motor amnesia that prevents you from using muscles to make a certain movement, I don't think a movement intention and expectation is enough to get the muscles involved. I'm right now writing a longer book that will include a discussion of this. All those cybernetic somatic processes operate based on the existing somatic map of the body.
Everything else is in service of this direction of attention, and when the prerequisites are in place we don't need things like "hypnosis" because we can literally just say things even if they're as seemingly absurd as "You can just decide to not swell your injuries" or "Send more blood to your hands" -- and if it's physiologically possible that's enough.
If it would be that easy and you could get anything that's physiologically possible that way, in general hypnosis interventions to change the body would be practiced by a lot more hypnotists. A lot of things people actually care about when it comes to their body that they want to change is more complex than your swelling of injuries example.
Let's take male pattern baldness. There shouldn't be something that makes it physiologically impossible to end it. Yet, we don't see hypnotists advertising that they have the cure to male pattern baldness as it's not as easy as setting the expectation via hypnosis.
Depending on the quality of your mental model, this might or might not be the most optimal actions to getting the promotion
In the same sense that the optimal action in the Monty Hall problem is to choose the door which has the car behind it, sure. From the perspective of the player though, "do the thing that turns out to work" isn't an available action. All we can do is act based on what we know, even if some of those actions are aimed at improving the accuracy of our models.
Let's take male pattern baldness. There shouldn't be something that makes it physiologically impossible to end it.
What makes you think that the default is that it's physiologically possible to end it? Why do you think it happens, and what do you think it'd take to stop and/or reverse it?
I don't rule it out, but it's certainly not obvious to me that it's doable with psychological interventions.
Yet, we don't see hypnotists advertising that they have the cure to male pattern baldness as it's not as easy as setting the expectation via hypnosis.
I don't think that follows at all. Certainly swelling is as simple as swelling, and despite knowing how to do hypnosis it took me years to try it and I only ever did because of some weird fluke I can't explain. Just recently I had a hypnotherapist ask if I could help his kid with allergies because he didn't feel confident in doing it himself. Then, when I couldn't get to it for a while, he gave it a shot himself just trying something simple which even after the fact he didn't think was gonna work. Sure enough, the kid stopped having allergic symptoms.
Hypnotic breast growth is another example. I've never heard of anyone trying and failing. Anecdotally, some hypnotherapists offer this service and claim success. The limited science that exists is all very supportive, and suggests that it really is as trivial as visualizing in the vast majority of cases. Yet there aren't enough people trying it to get any new studies, or to get any hypnotists trying it and saying "Yeah, it didn't work", or women saying "I went to a hypnotist and it didn't work". Either it works and people still don't do it much, or it doesn't work but no one ever tried it enough for there to be any publicly available evidence of that. Either way, it doesn't really fit with "if it were easy, people would do it".
If you have sensor motor amnesia that prevents you from using muscles to make a certain movement, I don't think a movement intention and expectation is enough to get the muscles involved.
I think I know what you're talking about here, and if I'm thinking of the same thing then I agree that it's a real complication. I don't agree that it is "intention and expectation isn't enough", but rather "there's an additional difficulty in getting intention and expectation".
Remember that "intending" is the act of actually aiming at a thing, and it isn't always trivial to figure out how to do that. For example, if you were to stick some wires in my head to give me a brain computer interface, it'd take me a while to figure out wtf these new sensations even mean, and until I figure that out I'll have no ability to intend anything to do with that interface.
This can be a real issue even with the "native hardware" if we're sufficiently unpracticed with it. The final post of this sequence is about me goofing up in this way, how that came about, and what I learned which seems to have resolved the issue (so far?). Is this the kind of thing you're referring to when you say that you don't think expectation/intention is enough in cases of sensor motor amnesia?
Assuming that's the case, my answer is basically "That's a real issue, it still works through expectation/intent, and the same tools for managing expectation/intent turn out to work surprisingly well even though there is this additional complication".
In the same sense that the optimal action in the Monty Hall problem is to choose the door which has the car behind it, sure. From the perspective of the player though, "do the thing that turns out to work" isn't an available action. All we can do is act based on what we know, even if some of those actions are aimed at improving the accuracy of our models.
I don't think that a "get a promotion expectation" is going to cause a process of someone working to improve their models on their own. For most people, I think that requires conscious effort. If you have someone who's in Venkatesh Rao's clueless category and that leads blocks them from advancing in their career, the intention of getting a promotion is going to get them to use the strategies that makes sense from the clueless perspective. Moving past that perspective needs building "consciousness" of what's the issue. Consciousness might be a bad word, because once it's consciously integrated it helps guide unconscious action as well.
What makes you think that the default is that it's physiologically possible to end it? Why do you think it happens, and what do you think it'd take to stop and/or reverse it?
Red light therapy has an effect on male pattern baldness. One effect of red light therapy is that it increases relaxation in the tissue and increases blood flow. Actual mechanism might be complicated but let's go with one thesis. Male pattern baldness happens when the scalp fascia gets tight an inhibits proper blood flow to the hair follicles.
If you just set the expectation "There will be more hair in a year" the body does not know how to accomplish that. If you on the other hand set the expectation "The scalp fascia gets softer, less tense, warmer and has more blood flow", that's something that your body might actually be able to work with that might actually result in more hair.
One example of sensor motor amnesia from myself is that my right subscapularis was chronically very tense and that resulted in less flexibility of my right shoulder. If I would use intention to guide my shoulder movement, the body would try to accomplish that by using all the muscles it knows how to use but not the subscapularis. Resolving it actually needed becoming conscious of the subscapularis being the problem and relaxing it.
While I have only a week of Alexander Technique exposure it might be a good general principle. Actually using intentions to guide movement is a key aspect of it. Yet, when a teacher points out the ways in which you unnecessarily tense muscles while doing a movement that updates the somatic map of the body and that then allows the intentions to do the work with less muscle tension.
I think we have basically three layers, one is the purely material, then there's the somatic layer and the enactive layer where these kinds of intentions live.
I don't think that a "get a promotion expectation" is going to cause a process of someone working to improve their models on their own.
I mean, it depends, but I agree that people are fallible in this way. I'm not arguing that people's models are good (at recognizing when/how to update, or otherwise), just that you can only go on what you got. If I can see that the car is behind door one, and you switch from door one to door two because the host shows you the goat behind door three, that's only a bad move from an irrelevant reference frame. Unless we're mixing up game shows and you can "phone a friend", but at that point we're no longer discussing the same problem.
The scope of what I'm trying to convey here is "how to dissolve 'psychological' problems where some stupid brain is doing something you know it shouldn't", which is a different kind of problem than "Will my boss be more likely to promote me if I go golfing or to the office" or "Do I turn right or left to get to my local Walmart?". Once you can say "Turn left to get to Walmart, go golfing to get promoted" and get a response of "Okay, will do. Thanks!", then you're already free of any so called "psychological" difficulties -- and you will succeed or fail, based on the accuracy of the joint model you guys act on.
But you're already going to do that, so I don't need to tell you to tell him how to get to Walmart. Unless I happen to know that you're wrong, but then I'm not helping you avoid knowably dumb decisions I'm injecting more information into the system by including myself in it.
One example of sensor motor amnesia from myself is that my right subscapularis was chronically very tense and that resulted in less flexibility of my right shoulder. If I would use intention to guide my shoulder movement, the body would try to accomplish that by using all the muscles it knows how to use but not the subscapularis. Resolving it actually needed becoming conscious of the subscapularis being the problem and relaxing it.
Okay, I misunderstood what you were saying here. Rereading your original comment I see what I missed and that little note of discord that I didn't sufficiently attend to. Oops.
I thought you were saying that intention to relax the muscle isn't enough, but now it seems you're saying that it's not enough to intend to move your shoulder you have to actually intend to relax your subscapularis -- so you gotta find that tension and address it explicitly.
I agree that generally adding intention to "reach over and grab this thing" isn't as effective at relaxing the subscapularis as adding intention to relax the subscapularis. And that becoming conscious of it is generally the best and most direct approach. At the same time, "The best way to relax the subscapularis is to intend to relax the subscapularis" isn't really in opposition to my thesis here. You can often reach things without relaxing the subscapularis, so these two intentions aren't even in that much tension (no pun intended).
This reminds me of the problem of flinching when shooting handguns, which I use as an example in the post after this one. People will practice for weeks or months trying to "overcome a flinch" because their models of how to do this are indeed bad. The solution I offer in that post mirrors your subscapularis fix, because in the context of helping someone who has noticed the problem and is trying to fix it, that is indeed generally the more appropriate solution. Simply saying "Just focus on hitting the target!" generally isn't as helpful.
At the same time, just focusing on hitting the target is sufficient. "Bracing for recoil" and "hitting the target" are indeed in tension, so intent for one crowds out intent for the other. As a kid I used to struggle with a flinch when target shooting with handguns, but I didn't have that problem at all when small game hunting. I was just focused on hitting what I was aiming for, and that preempted the flinch.
It's not that "You don't have to know how to use the sights" or "You don't have to accept the recoil", it's that once your intention is properly set you will do that automatically to the best you know how -- including asking for expert advice, if that seems available and worthwhile. And if your best isn't good enough, that's a whole 'nother problem.
Once you set your intentions properly, motivation will flow downhill even to things you didn't have any awareness that you could do, which makes proper intention setting look like magic sometimes. And if you don't set your intentions properly, motivation won't flow to where it's needed, and you can end up stuck for months in what only takes seconds to fix.
I'm right now writing a longer book that will include a discussion of this.
I forgot to respond to this earlier, but if you want test readers I'd be happy to read what you got and give whatever kind of feedback you're interested in.
Interesting point of view about the occasional intense overlap between the 2 concepts, I could probably safely explore more of my agency over the world than what is my comfort zone 🤔
Nevertheless, I will keep to my expectation of a train delay originating from a departures table and not from my own intent.
1Yeah, that's why I say "To the extent you can be said to have any intention whatsoever". You can't really intend to change things that you perceive yourself to have no control over.
And yeah, "comfort zone" is always a limiting thing. Finding the safe limits can be scary, but also fun sometimes :)
When I was first learning about hypnosis, one of the things that was very confusing to me is how "expectations" relate to "intent". Some hypnotists would say "All suggestion is about expectation; if they expect to have an experience they will", and frame their inductions in terms of expectation (e.g. "Your eyelids will become heavy"). The problem with this is that "I don't think it's gonna work". Other hypnotists would avoid this issue entirely by saying "I don't care if you think it will work. Follow my instructions, and you will get the results regardless of what you believe" and then say things like "Make your eyelids heavy". The problem with this is that "I don't know to do that!", which would be avoided by saying "You don't have to 'do' anything; I'm telling you what is going to happen, and your job is simply to notice when it does" -- back to square one. This dual path thing always confused me, because "Sure, we can equivocate and play sleight of mouth in order to trick people into getting the results[1], but which is it really?".
It's both.
They're the same thing.
In the same way that "running away from a tiger" and "running to catch a bus" are both the same object level behavior being used for a somewhat different purpose.
Initially, it seemed weird to me that humans are designed so that expectation and intent are implemented in the same way. Strange design choice, given that it creates massive vulnerabilities, where if we can be tricked into expecting we won't be able to remember something, it becomes self fulfilling.[2]
Turns out, it has to be this way - not just for humans, but for any system that tries to control anything. To see why, let's start with something simpler than a human mind.
Consider a thermostat.
When anthropomorphizing a thermostat, you might be tempted to model this controller as having "beliefs" and "desires". The output of the thermometer is the "belief" the system has about the temperature of the room, and the set point we dial to is the "desire" of the system, to which it attempts to regulate external reality. Under this model, it kinda seems like intentions are different kinds of things from expectations, because expectations are like beliefs which are about what reality is while intentions are like desires which are about what we want it to be, but isn't. But a thermometer reading isn't really an expectation, so where's that come in? What does a thermostat "expect"?
Let's model with a bit more detail, including some necessary facts of reality that we skipped over at first. This is a little weird and confusing, so bear with me here.
Say we want to do better than a thermostat on the wall that either flicks the heater on or off depending on the most recent reading of the thermometer. That works "well enough", for simple systems and lax standards, but say we want to get it right. Say we want to put out the exact amount of heat to get the temperature exactly right, to the best it is possible to do.
Now, all of a sudden, we have a lot of complications to think about. To simplify it we'll still ignore most of them, but the following two are important.
Thermometer data are noisy. One of the better ways to measure temperature is with a thermistor, which is essentially a resistor whose resistance changes with temperature. But now we have thermal noise of electrons polluting our signal. How much noise is there relative to the signal? Well here's the equation for thermal noise:
If you try to calculate the noise for a single instant in time, that annoying little "delta f" term becomes infinite. There is no such thing as an instantaneous measure of temperature (or anything), because we need to accumulate signal over a finite window before it can stand out above the noise. The more time, the more accurately we can measure. Thermometer readings aren't belief. They're data, and can only approach belief in absence of disturbance.
When setting the AC thermostat, or checking the internal temperature of the turkey in the oven, these things don't really matter. The thermometer responds on the order of seconds, the turkey responds on the order of hours, so the predictable error here is "small enough" and we can ignore it. The moment you try to make an optimal controller of anything (maybe temperature control for a more sensitive chemical process in the face of external disturbance), this becomes a real issue.
For example, imagine we're trying to do optimal temperature control, and we get to cycle the relay on and off once every ten seconds. This means that every ten seconds we have to decide for how long we want to keep the heater on, and for how long to keep it off. At each time step, we have ten seconds of new thermometer data to update on. What do we do?
Bayes' Law, right? The most probable temperature is the one you get by starting with your priors -- i.e. your last temperature estimate, based on the previous estimate, new thermometer data, etc -- and update that with the latest thermometer data and whatever else you might know.
But now we have to decide how much to trust priors and how much to trust new measurements. "Look at the [new] data! Don't bias your results!" is one way of going about it, but to the extent that the new data is noisy it makes sense to look back at your priors built on old data, and average over more data. If we do that for long enough, and have no unpredictable disturbance, we can get perfect measurements! If there's a disturbance though (maybe the wind is blowing), then we're back to the issue of the actual temperature changing faster than we can measure it -- so who cares what temperature it was yesterday, we need to look at what the thermometer is saying now. If we have any disturbance at all, and any noise at all -- which we always do -- then we can never know the actual temperature perfectly; we can only calculate what it will be in expectation.
Once we have our temperature estimate, we can decide how much heat to add, and that messes with the temperature estimate again. We might expect, based on previous thermometer data and the latest batch, that the thermometer reading at the next timestep will be 60.0F. But if we turn the heater on full blast, it might increase the temperature 10 degrees, so do we expect 60.0F, or 70.0F, or somewhere in between? We can predict 60F and be right, or 70F and be right, or anywhere in between. It's underspecified, whatever shall we predict?
So long as you desire it to be somewhere between 60F and 70F, you predict it to be exactly what you want it to be. If you want to get to 65F, no more no less, then you add exactly 50% heat. This brings the temperature up 5 degrees from where it would have been, and shifts the expected temperature up 5 degrees. Not only do you expect that the temperature will be approximately 65F eventually in the future sometime, 65F becomes your exact proximal expectation. For if you expected any less at your next measurement, you would output more heat, and if you expected any higher you would output less.
You don't know what the exact temperature is at any moment in time, and the exact temperature depends on what you're putting out. If you last got to read the thermometer five seconds ago and it said 64.5F, do you think you're a half degree low? No! Because you put out enough heat that you expect that to be compensated for, so you have no idea whether you're still below 65F or not. The act of optimally controlling to a set point -- which could usefully be termed "actually trying to reach the setpoint" -- sets the expectation of what external reality is to be equal to your setpoint. To the extent you can be said to have any intention whatsoever, your expectation is necessarily the same thing as your intention, or else it's not a real intention. Because you aren't doing what you need to do in order to realize that desire, even in expectation.[4]
And this is why expectation is equivalent to intent.
You have a variety of output behaviors you can choose from, and with them the corresponding set of expectations you can have. Choosing what you expect to happen goes hand in hand with choosing to act so as to realize the corresponding expectation, and this is what intent is; deliberately acting as to expect that result. We can expect without deliberate intention, but we can't intend without expectation, and regardless of how deliberate we are about setting our intentions, we will always behave in ways that realize our expectations -- in expectation, by definition.
Returning to our simpler thermostat model (or our turkey model), where the thermometer really does read out a good estimate of the system temperature which is predictably below the desired set point for minutes at end, this is the result of limited control. Here, we can't expect the temperature to be equal to the set point -- without closing our eyes to the data and refusing to take it into account. We can expect it to become equal, but no turn of the dial will cook a turkey as fast as we can orient to incoming data.
If I blast full power to my homemade heat treat oven, the heating elements will melt in seconds. As a result, I programmed it to limit the output power to what I expect to be safe (even temperature controllers have insecurity issues), and it is better modeled as having an intention to control the temperature to as close to desired as is safely possible -- because that's what determines the heat output. It controls to a trajectory, which is the optimal trajectory given the limitations. But when I first turn it on, and it's 2000F too cold, it has no expectation of being at that temperature, no intention of being at that temperature -- only an intention of getting there, if it's safe.
My heat treat oven cannot, and we cannot, intend to do anything which we cannot expect. What we can do instead, is expect and intend to be on a trajectory that leads to the desired set point. This distinction between "where we want to end up" and "where we intend and expect to be right now, and at our next time step", is where the confusion comes from.
So what's this look like, as applied to humans? How does this expectation/intention equivalency and "end state vs trajectory" thing confuse people in practice?
Sleep talking, on purpose
For a slightly weird example, one time I tested this by asking my wife to remind me to turn the oven off when I got in bed, knowing she'd be asleep. Her initial response, quite understandably, was to object "I'm going to be asleep!"
I told her that I understood that, and that I wouldn't be upset if she failed, but I wanted her to promise me anyway. Go through the motions, make the promise, and if you don't do it I will forgive you. She said okay, she'll remind me, and went to sleep.
When I got into bed, she reminded me to turn the oven off, and in the morning she had no idea she did so. She had been asleep.
I could have dressed this up as a "hypnotic induction" and rambled about how "it's not her, but her unconscious mind" which would enact the suggestion -- using that to try to trick her into not refusing my request. But I could also just tell her that if she fails it's fine and let's find out if she can do it. It's still her, no need to "wooo wooo!" about it, and no need to deny reality in order to find the truth. Even if she was literally unconscious at the time of fulfilling that expectation.[5]
You can just... decide that?
For an even weirder example, imagine trying to "decide to not swell" an injury you have. It's so bizarre it feels like "Where would I even start!?", because it's not clear where those levers are and that makes it hard to expect it to work. Which necessarily makes it hard to intend for it to.
I met a hypnotist once who told me about how his friend had hypnotized him to help him with his elbow swelling, and I was super skeptical. I didn't write it off completely, but I sure didn't feel like that's something I could expect to work. As a result, I never intentionally tried, because I don't like telling people to expect things I couldn't expect myself, and I certainly couldn't expect it to work. That seems crazy.
And then one day at Jiu Jitsu, someone ankle locked me before I could tap, spraining my ankle pretty pretty badly. I was quite frustrated, and I really didn't want to have to deal with a swollen ankle keeping me from doing even things that wouldn't overstress a healing ankle. I found myself indignantly refusing to swell the injury. I have no idea where that came from. I did not felt like "I chose to do that", I felt like "You can't just decide these things you crazy person!!!"[6]. At the same time, I didn't care. "Don't care, doing it anyway. It's not going to swell. I'm not gonna do it. I just won't take advantage of it, I'll take care of my injury, and it doesn't need to swell". Okay, I thought. We'll see what happens, I guess.
It didn't swell. Took a whole month to heal, but never swelled up like my previous ankle sprains had.
The next time I expected an injury to swell came when I dropped a small boat on my finger, smashing it between the boat and the concrete at the water's edge. I knew from experience that it was definitely going to swell. It wasn't a borderline case. Even knowing "Hey, so, these things are apparently decidable" didn't make it feel any more decidable than you'd expect. It's like telling someone "Oh, you don't have to keep an irrational fear around. You can just decide not to fear". Yeah, sure, buddy.
But I knew it was likely true, since my previous experience was compelling, so I put some work into it. Yes, it certainly feels like it's definitely going to swell up. That's certainly a reasonable expectation to have and it's backed by a lot of... confirmation bias, at least. I had a lot of experience confirming that jammed fingers would swell when I expected them to, but not a lot of experience with things swelling when I expected them not to. What if it didn't have to go this way? What would it be like, if somehow, it were to not swell? Could I imagine that? Could I imagine that being real?
With some effort... actually, yeah. I could imagine what that would be like, and given my previous experience I could imagine that actually being true. So I went with that, and sure enough it didn't swell; I could still bend my fingers just fine. Which was kinda a surreal experience too, given how smashed my finger got. Since then, it hasn't even felt like something I shouldn't have significant control over. I just think about what I want to do, and expect that.
I told my friend about this "Apparently you can just decide to not swell injuries" thing shortly after my first experience with it, and she was understandably skeptical. At the same time, she knew from experience that when I say something that sounds hard to believe it's because I have better reason to believe it's true than she does to think it's false -- and that these things tend to prove to be true. So she knew she couldn't actually rule it out, and so next time she got injured, she tried to expect it to not swell. And did expect it to not swell. And it didn't swell. All it took to give her this same ability to decide when to swell things was to casually mention that she already can, and tell her about the one experience I had.[7]
You [don't] have to believe!
You know how high school sports coaches like to go on about how "You have to believe you will win!"? And how the standard rationalist response is "Nonsense, of course you don't. Beliefs are supposed to track reality, not be wishful thinking. Believe what looks to be true, try your best, and find out if you win"?
The coach does have a point though, and there's a reason he's so adamant about what he's saying. If you expect to lose -- if you're directing attention towards the experience of your upcoming loss -- then you are intending to lose, and good luck winning if you aren't gonna even try. The problem is that he's expecting on the level of "Will we win this game?", which, according to the data, isn't looking like it's something we can control. He doesn't know what else to do, and he doesn't want to just give up, so of course he's going to engage in motivated thinking. Fudging the data until he can expect success is the only way he can hope to succeed. It's a load bearing delusion.[8][9]
One way to do better is to deliberately trade correctness of expectation for effort without letting delusion spread to infect the rest of your thinking. "Yeah, I'm probably going to lose. I don't care. I intend to win anyway". Or, in other words "Do or do not. There is no 'try'". That means setting yourself up for failure, expecting success knowing that you aren't likely to have that expectation realized. It's not pleasant, and that gap between your expectations and the data coming from reality is what suffering is. But with suffering comes hope, and sometimes the tradeoff is worthwhile.
The other option, which tends to be preferable when you have time to compute it, is to shift from trying to predict instant success to predicting that you will stay on an optimal trajectory. Instead of coding your temperature controller to try so hard that it melts down if there's ever a large gap between the belief and desire, limit the output power. Code it such that when too cold, it will heat as fast as it safely can, and predict that the temperature will therefore rise as quickly as is safely possible -- which may or may not reach the desired set point.
In other words, "Believe what looks to be true, try your best, and find out if you can win".
To give a concrete example, in the finals of the most important tournament of my high school sports career, I went in knowing it'd be a tough match and very quickly realized that I definitely wasn't going to win. Not "Wah wahh, boohoo, I'm not gonna win!", dramatizing a fear that I might not win, just a sober recognition that I got second place. Which hey, could be worse.
It's one thing to talk the talk of "Just try your best and find out what happens", but a true 100% effort is hard, and risky[10], and what's the point if not to maybe succeed? Normally, I fought with an intent to win. My motivation that justified all the the effort was in expectation of potentially securing a win, even if somewhat unlikely. This match started so badly that I quickly recognized that it wasn't gonna happen. I couldn't even imagine a scenario where I could win, and as a result I had no ability to control towards a success. Without that hopeful expectation of success I couldn't motivate a real effort. I couldn't try.
I grieved my loss for a moment, pondered for a bit, and ended up deciding that five more minutes of maximal effort was worthwhile just out of principle. I decided that that I would intend to do as well as I possibly could, giving up absolutely nothing that wasn't taken completely against my will. With this alternate intention, it didn't matter that I was definitely going to lose. I knew it was true, and so there was nothing there to see. No reason to look at "Might I win?", and therefore no reason to expect "No". And nothing keeping me from denying my opponent every point I possibly could while scoring every point on him that he let me. With about thirty seconds left I realized "Oh shit, I might actually win", which was scary because that meant I might lose (which, amusingly enough, isn't a fear so long as you know it's reality).
Surprisingly enough I didn't. Turns out, "Denying every point possible" was all of them, and "Scoring every point I could" was more than he had scored already.[11]
If I had expected on the level of "Will I win?", even attempting to fudge the scales in effort to predict and therefore aim towards "Yes", I would have predicted failure, behaved in line with that prediction, and never figured out that it didn't have to be true. Even my coach admitted after the match that he didn't have that optimism in him.
Motivated thinking often does this. We try to believe what we want to happen, and struggle against reality telling us we're failing, only to miss the chance to do something better. Give in completely, take your thumb off the scale, submit to the reality of what you cannot expect to change, and you get to notice the question of "What next? Given that I'm [probably] going to lose, what do I want?". While likely not enough to achieve everything you ever wanted (by your own estimation), more nuanced models that predict optimal trajectories tend to map reality better than those which predict immediate and unconditional success, and work better as a result.
Pay attention
To what you expect, because that is what you intend, and that is the world towards which you are aiming. Not to what you would expect, if you were to attend to a particular question -- to what you are actively expecting in each moment.
To the difficulty with which you can expect to succeed, for that is the warning sign that even trying is going to require submitting more to reality, and finding something you can expect less ham-fistedly -- something that is as good as you can possibly achieve, and therefore you might actually achieve.
I sat in on the last class of a hypnotherapy training course once, and the instructor (whom I respect) was saying that we are essentially con men, conning people into getting better.
It's not quite self fulfilling, technically. No one is ever unable to remember their names in hypnosis. People are unable to try because they've been convinced they can't succeed -- generally without recognizing that they've been convinced and that the apparent inability stems from the lack of intent. The end result is functionally the same, until you figure out that you can stop imagining that any time you like -- at which point the vulnerability is patched.
Goodhart's law is a bitch
This isn't a "No True Scotsman" because it literally wouldn't fit the definition of "intention" otherwise.
in·ten·tion: a thing intended; an aim or plan.
If we're actively updating our behavior to maintain expectation of something else, that something else is the thing we're aiming at. If we're updating our expectations and not changing our behavior in response, we're not aiming at anything.
This is the opposite of hypnotic "challenge suggestions" like name amnesia or sticking hands to tables.
Having ones inner monolog replaced with a legit dialog involving accusations of insanity does not help one feel sane.
It did take a little more work to help her keep it, several injuries down the line.
Eventually, someone offered her ibuprofen when she broke her thumb, and she casually said that she didn't need it because she just decided it wouldn't swell. This was such an unlikely thing to him that his brain autocorrected over it, as if he had seen "the the" and reasoned that it couldn't possibly be what was said/meant. She felt self conscious about it, started doubting herself, and her injury swelled up. I had to talk to her that night about "Who cares if it sounds crazy? Find out if it's true", and the swelling was most of the way back down in the morning.
It also applies to the to the makeup washing off example. Her friends wanted her to get into the pool, but couldn't look at reality and expect her to go swimming, so they didn't. In order to preserve their expectation that she goes swimming, they dissociated from her feedback and cut off any chance of anyone learning anything that could change their minds -- and because this is visible, it means their beliefs don't track reality and can't be used to Aumann update.
This is where the apparent "other sense" of the word "expect" comes from -- people can and do choose to expect things (direct attention and attempt control towards outcomes) while simultaneously expecting to fail at realizing those expectations, leaving a sense of social pressure without necessarily expecting that you will yield to it -- just that you "should". As strange as it sounds, her friends were genuinely expecting her to get in the pool, while simultaneously expecting her to not do as they expected her to.
Yes, this is fundamentally irrational, and it's for a reason; they had no idea how to even try if they were to be rational, and it's better to choose a slim chance at success than it is to choose no chance of success -- what is rationality for if not for winning?
My thesis here is that no, full rationality really is better. Of course you don't know what to do with the discouraging facts right away; you have to figure that out!
Another important corollary is that not only is motivated cognition fundamental, so is confirmation bias. When we teach kids that the scientific method is "come up with a hypothesis, and then test it", that's simply wrong, and a recipe for confirmation bias -- because by focusing on one predetermined outcome you are programming your brain to confirm it. This is fine as an engineering hypothesis where you test "I can make a cool thing work", but good science is going to come when you don't know what will happen when you do a certain thing, and run tests to find out. The "hypothesis", in good science, is "This experiment is going to teach me something useful!".
Because of this match some of my ribs pop out further than they're supposed to, to this day. Oops.
More dramatically, Eddie Hall's record breaking 500kg lift had some scary effects on him, and to get himself to output that level of effort he had to feed his brain false data to get himself to treat it like a life or death issue.
I didn't have an explicit understanding of how expectations shape intentions, or how to consciously navigate from using my attention in an ineffective way to one which was more effective. But I did have a stubborn rejection of thumbing the scale, and a stubborn rejection of the idea of not trying.
The reason this works as an example despite preceding explicit my explicit understanding is that it's not explicit understanding that is doing the work. We already make these decisions when we notice them, and our results follow our decisions.