"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #18: Negative Visualization

  <  |  ^  |  >

January 18, "Training Regime Day 18: Negative Visualization" and this one is all about Murphy without the jitsu; visualize that things are uncertain, so things go wrong, and then we go on from there. If we still can, says a story-spider in the back of my head as it points a leg at "Unfriendly AI Takes Over!" and then "Tiny Black Hole Falls Into Earth's Core!" and finally at "Heat-Death of the Universe!" But no, this  Training Regime item is about smaller failures; the failures we can in fact go on from.

  So, Mark Xu describes two TAP-arcs. The first is from consciousness of uncertainty, that things might go badly, to a pre-imagined consciousness of things going badly; failure. The second goes directly from that imagined failure as trigger, on to imagining whatever comes next. We go on.

And what good is this? It's an exercise in self-control, a response-override. Without it, your reaction to failure will probably be dominated by negative emotions even if the situation doesn't prompt the traditional "When in danger or in doubt, Run in circles, scream and shout". Those emotions would make it difficult to choose a good path, or even a least-bad path, going on from failure; better to override them. But even if there were no practical value in overriding negative emotions, they're still negative, not fun, and best replaced. So... I ask my Murphyjitsu team if they can deal with this for me, and Sarah Som (Sense-O-Meter) can certainly imagine things going badly in any case where they might do so, but Jim says he'd rather stay specialized on pre-hindsight. His cousin Peter, however, knows the same model situation and says that yes, it's pretty depressing, but he'll project it forwards and just accept the outcome, making lists of all kinds of stuff to manage his feelings. (It's Roget's birthday.) Okay; that does sound like a use of stoicism, sort of the way Spinoza did in saying "Do not weep. Do not wax indignant. Understand." 

  If things go well, we go on from there. If things go badly, we go on from there. Yes, I can imagine that, and have practiced. So it goes. (And among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.)