Our experience, attention and functioning is affected by endless prameters (examples: expectations, framing, level of experiencing various aspects of a situation, etc.)
There are even more ways to manipulate experience and attention. Many of them quite effective when taken to the extreme. And various manipulations seem to lead into desirable ends.
Why not use all these tricks? (we already use some without thinking of with. But it sounds an open vault to improve life)
1) Management costs. Nothing happens on its own. It takes attention and actions (at least mental actions). We are not always rich in these. Sometimes attention is needed to more stressing needs.
2) Complexities. Every approach in life and the like is related and involved in a wide variety of activities and cognitions. It is not so obvious what other effects and shortages is created by every change of approach.
Showing posts with label interventions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interventions. Show all posts
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Tricks to improve life in context
There are tricks that have the power to seriously improve one's life.
Certainly one got to check first about seriousness etc. but we speak with smart people who talk about practically relevant tricks.
Two mistakes are common and must be corrected.
1) Not maximizing the effect. Do not be "realistic" or conservative. Some new things you learn have the power to transform life for good.
Take it to the max (with prudence, for sure).
Many times there is way more potential than we think. We just have to be naive kids and take it to the most power possible.
2) Do not forget other things because of the new trick.
We collect through life lots of experience, decision rules, understandings etc.
It sounds tempting to think, that if for example we have a new trick to reduce stress, we can afford stress freely, or ignore other things to do to relax.
We must leave in place the good things we know etc.
Only after time and experience, we may use the new tricks to dispense of things that are no longer relevant.
Post Script
If you change, it has effects all over the board.
There is a lot of dependency in life.
Much of our rules, understanding etc. are based on our experiences expectations about our behavior, expectations about experience and so on.
Once we change, we may take a quick look at our whole inventory and look whether everything is still relevant. Some things may no longer be useful, or are harmful now.
Certainly one got to check first about seriousness etc. but we speak with smart people who talk about practically relevant tricks.
Two mistakes are common and must be corrected.
1) Not maximizing the effect. Do not be "realistic" or conservative. Some new things you learn have the power to transform life for good.
Take it to the max (with prudence, for sure).
Many times there is way more potential than we think. We just have to be naive kids and take it to the most power possible.
2) Do not forget other things because of the new trick.
We collect through life lots of experience, decision rules, understandings etc.
It sounds tempting to think, that if for example we have a new trick to reduce stress, we can afford stress freely, or ignore other things to do to relax.
We must leave in place the good things we know etc.
Only after time and experience, we may use the new tricks to dispense of things that are no longer relevant.
Post Script
If you change, it has effects all over the board.
There is a lot of dependency in life.
Much of our rules, understanding etc. are based on our experiences expectations about our behavior, expectations about experience and so on.
Once we change, we may take a quick look at our whole inventory and look whether everything is still relevant. Some things may no longer be useful, or are harmful now.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Why does not everybody practice meditation?
Fact 1: Everybody I know who tried meditation has only praise for it. "It is good" "Great" "The best thing I did in my life" and so on.
My experience has been the same. It was so much calming and energizing that I wonder why I ever stopped after I started a few years ago.
Fact 2: Scientific experiments have shown one after the other that meditation improves mood. Decreases anxiety and depression and various other good outcomes.
There were significant effects from meditation.
Puzzle: why only 1% of the population (in Israel) practices meditation?
It sounds one of the greatest irrationalities in life management. There is almost no better deal I know of.
Yet people ignore it largely. Probably showing that humans management of life is far from what reason would expect.
My experience has been the same. It was so much calming and energizing that I wonder why I ever stopped after I started a few years ago.
Fact 2: Scientific experiments have shown one after the other that meditation improves mood. Decreases anxiety and depression and various other good outcomes.
There were significant effects from meditation.
Puzzle: why only 1% of the population (in Israel) practices meditation?
It sounds one of the greatest irrationalities in life management. There is almost no better deal I know of.
Yet people ignore it largely. Probably showing that humans management of life is far from what reason would expect.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Jump to achieve/change
Our options are limited. We try to choose the best one (assume).
But we can create new interesting options.
For me, driving involves so much effort, that having a car is useless. But if I engage in driving for a long time, driving will become automatic. Then having a car may improve my life.
There are endless ways we can have better options by engaging a certain amount of negative/effortful experience.
Those endless possibilities do not occur naturally. They occur only when you forget everything you know about your own
life and experience. Questioning even the smallest basic assumption about how you feel, function, mind working, wants, etc.
Beware, that even with much effort, you will see only a minority of hidden options in your life. The scope of potential
possibilities is never seen fully.
Consider:
1) Over optimism. We expect life to get better after the change becoming natural. We are usually overestimating the
expected improvement. We may not learn the skill/get used to the situation. The very usefulness of the learned stuff can be illusory. Adaptation, that is human's tendency to get used to everything, cancels out various supposedly improvements of life.
2) Gamble. Skewed bets (like lottery, but with maybe positive expectation). Sometimes, the cost is relatively low, but the possible progress is enormous. No big loss if useless. But the change in life can be forever. Other changes to life are long investment, but small improvement for a little while only.
Life is short!
A change starts negatively, where we lose immediately from it. The trick is that sometimes, the later value is large. The farther the positive value, the larger the effort invested, the less worth it seems to be.
Hidden options are endless. It is a complex territory, sometimes worth the trouble.
But we can create new interesting options.
For me, driving involves so much effort, that having a car is useless. But if I engage in driving for a long time, driving will become automatic. Then having a car may improve my life.
There are endless ways we can have better options by engaging a certain amount of negative/effortful experience.
Those endless possibilities do not occur naturally. They occur only when you forget everything you know about your own
life and experience. Questioning even the smallest basic assumption about how you feel, function, mind working, wants, etc.
Beware, that even with much effort, you will see only a minority of hidden options in your life. The scope of potential
possibilities is never seen fully.
Consider:
1) Over optimism. We expect life to get better after the change becoming natural. We are usually overestimating the
expected improvement. We may not learn the skill/get used to the situation. The very usefulness of the learned stuff can be illusory. Adaptation, that is human's tendency to get used to everything, cancels out various supposedly improvements of life.
2) Gamble. Skewed bets (like lottery, but with maybe positive expectation). Sometimes, the cost is relatively low, but the possible progress is enormous. No big loss if useless. But the change in life can be forever. Other changes to life are long investment, but small improvement for a little while only.
Life is short!
A change starts negatively, where we lose immediately from it. The trick is that sometimes, the later value is large. The farther the positive value, the larger the effort invested, the less worth it seems to be.
Hidden options are endless. It is a complex territory, sometimes worth the trouble.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Extreme and special cases and causes
Static vs. dynamic causes of phenomenons
Latent possible effects may always be there
Inference form extreme/artificial cases is problematic
Looking for relationships between a resulting phenomenon and various causes is very common nowadays. Part of the following is very confusing. So, turn off your logical powers, you will need them here.
Static = the "default" case. What causes things in the "usual" case: No special treatment was applied AND not for a very special group/case you have selected.
Dynamic = special cases. Extreme behaviors of one of the parameters. duefully applied intervention. Some effect was introduced that is never there in the "normal" case.
Potential = a latent effect that can be used to cause a huge (or small) effect. But when not applied it has zero effect.
An example for a latent "potential": Heart disease has various causes and surgeon knife is not one of them. But miracousely, a bypass operation can have near 100% effect on the heart state once applied. Hence, bypass surgery is a "potential" cause, that is totally absent from the causes of the static case, and strictly there in the dynamic/interevention case.
A big difference exists between what causes things in the static case, and the dynamic case.things that have zero or negligible effect in the static case may have a main effect when done on purpose to have an effect. This (1) gives hope to find - for example - effective intervention to improve happiness, but it also implies that (2) the inference form extreme cases to the average is limited. I will start with (2)
(2) The inference problem.
You cannot always infer from extreme cases to the normal case. Extreme cases may practically be different things.
Example 1. Are reshus monkeys violent (relatively) because of their genes, or because of culture? Frans de Waals has two pieces of evidence that culture plays a role. young reshus monkeys that grow up for six months mixed up with other non-violent monkeys, got used to live much less violent. Similarly, a group whose big aggresive males died, started to live peacefully for a decade, even after all males in the group were totally new (males change troops as adolescenes). This can be explained in two ways. The favorite way is that culture palys a big role in the violent behavior. I feel the more correct definition is that extreme cultural effects may change the behjavior, but I would guess that it is mainly genetic. It is only in very special cases
Example 2. The great psychologist Roy Baumeister in his book "meanings of life", says that people need their life to have value. One of the evidence is mothers that killed their babies. They show strong signs of distress for the anti-value acts they did etc.
Does it show that peolle need value in life? not at all. It only shows that extremely unjustified action carry a strong negative feeling. But it is quite possible that in the average case value does have to be there.
("need for value" may have other evidence. It is hardly the point here)
This problem is rampant with experimental and other kinds of scientific inquiry. Elegant and logicaly strong conclusions are many times exactly the kind I am condemning here. An extreme case can show minute details on how things actually work. You can iron out alternative hypotheses, and be clear of various biases and protocol problems etc.
That we have reason to choose a line of inquiry, does not eliminate its build-in problems. Truth does not work in our service. Reality never apologizes for being sonfusing and hard to decipher. Saying "that is the way to know" when you do not really know is stupid and pathetic.
(1) There may always be strong unknown potential cause.
The analisys of the static/default case does not tell us what potential causes are not being applied.
Example: Happiness research may give a gloomy feeling that we cannot improve happiness much, as half is genetic, 40% unknows, and the rest 10% are correlates we have little control of.
This is the static picture. Are there effective interventions? maybe. these shold be things not seen in the static case, but very powerful once discovered and applied in practice.
To sum up:
Static vs. dynamic causes. in default cases have one set of causes, while intervention may actually change part of the very structure of waht causes things.
Inference form extreme cases is problematic, as extreme/artificial cases may be very different in waht causes what.
Looking at static causes alone, one cannot conclude that there are no potential other causes.
Latent possible effects may always be there
Inference form extreme/artificial cases is problematic
Looking for relationships between a resulting phenomenon and various causes is very common nowadays. Part of the following is very confusing. So, turn off your logical powers, you will need them here.
Static = the "default" case. What causes things in the "usual" case: No special treatment was applied AND not for a very special group/case you have selected.
Dynamic = special cases. Extreme behaviors of one of the parameters. duefully applied intervention. Some effect was introduced that is never there in the "normal" case.
Potential = a latent effect that can be used to cause a huge (or small) effect. But when not applied it has zero effect.
An example for a latent "potential": Heart disease has various causes and surgeon knife is not one of them. But miracousely, a bypass operation can have near 100% effect on the heart state once applied. Hence, bypass surgery is a "potential" cause, that is totally absent from the causes of the static case, and strictly there in the dynamic/interevention case.
A big difference exists between what causes things in the static case, and the dynamic case.things that have zero or negligible effect in the static case may have a main effect when done on purpose to have an effect. This (1) gives hope to find - for example - effective intervention to improve happiness, but it also implies that (2) the inference form extreme cases to the average is limited. I will start with (2)
(2) The inference problem.
You cannot always infer from extreme cases to the normal case. Extreme cases may practically be different things.
Example 1. Are reshus monkeys violent (relatively) because of their genes, or because of culture? Frans de Waals has two pieces of evidence that culture plays a role. young reshus monkeys that grow up for six months mixed up with other non-violent monkeys, got used to live much less violent. Similarly, a group whose big aggresive males died, started to live peacefully for a decade, even after all males in the group were totally new (males change troops as adolescenes). This can be explained in two ways. The favorite way is that culture palys a big role in the violent behavior. I feel the more correct definition is that extreme cultural effects may change the behjavior, but I would guess that it is mainly genetic. It is only in very special cases
Example 2. The great psychologist Roy Baumeister in his book "meanings of life", says that people need their life to have value. One of the evidence is mothers that killed their babies. They show strong signs of distress for the anti-value acts they did etc.
Does it show that peolle need value in life? not at all. It only shows that extremely unjustified action carry a strong negative feeling. But it is quite possible that in the average case value does have to be there.
("need for value" may have other evidence. It is hardly the point here)
This problem is rampant with experimental and other kinds of scientific inquiry. Elegant and logicaly strong conclusions are many times exactly the kind I am condemning here. An extreme case can show minute details on how things actually work. You can iron out alternative hypotheses, and be clear of various biases and protocol problems etc.
That we have reason to choose a line of inquiry, does not eliminate its build-in problems. Truth does not work in our service. Reality never apologizes for being sonfusing and hard to decipher. Saying "that is the way to know" when you do not really know is stupid and pathetic.
(1) There may always be strong unknown potential cause.
The analisys of the static/default case does not tell us what potential causes are not being applied.
Example: Happiness research may give a gloomy feeling that we cannot improve happiness much, as half is genetic, 40% unknows, and the rest 10% are correlates we have little control of.
This is the static picture. Are there effective interventions? maybe. these shold be things not seen in the static case, but very powerful once discovered and applied in practice.
To sum up:
Static vs. dynamic causes. in default cases have one set of causes, while intervention may actually change part of the very structure of waht causes things.
Inference form extreme cases is problematic, as extreme/artificial cases may be very different in waht causes what.
Looking at static causes alone, one cannot conclude that there are no potential other causes.
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