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.
This post seems highly relevant.
It describes <a solution to this dilemma> that also is <a mental mechanism humans use natively>.
“Pretend the emotion is a person or cute animal who can talk” is a pretty great trick.
Huh. Tried this on my social media cravings.
Couldn't visualize them as an animal, but managed <a stream of energy between me and my laptop screen>. Managed to make the stream talk in my mind.
This behaved like a "talking lens" laid over my perception. As if the craving itself was live-reacting to objects on my screen while I clicked and scrolled.
Informative via making the involved needs concrete.
1Improved my intuitions, ty.
Keeps baffling me how much easier having a concept for something makes thinking about it.
What about this one:
"Hivemind" is best characterized as a state of zero adversarial behavior.
Illustrative post. The downvotes confuse me.
(I at least suspect this is my comparative advantage. But I'm not good at communicating [insights], a skill that comes neither with <analytical rigor> nor with <high-res introspective access>.
It also seems like the <after controlling for situational factors, status psychology explains more than half of variance in human behavior> camp is essentially right, which colors most genuine discussion less pretty than most people would prefer, especially those with less introspective insight.
I (somewhat predictably, given my status incentives) hold that this is an important, central problem civilization has, bc mutual information is the fundament of cooperation, or expressed more concretely the better we model each other the easier it is to avoid common deception & adversity attractors.)