It’s interesting to compare and contrast this with Ayn Rand’s take on the same issue. She *gets* that insecurity/motivated cognition/social validation-seeking is an incredibly destructive force, and that it’s really common but *not* a necessary part of the human condition.
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I often ask myself the question “was that person doing a dumb thing just there, or was it actually the optimal move in a game of N-dimensional chess I don’t understand?” Well, if they have the speech patterns and body language of a triggered person, it’s probably a dumb thing.
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(obviously, it’s much harder to tell if you haven’t observed the person yourself, which is why speculating about the motives of people you only know from the news is so unreliable.)
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The model in the CPTSD book also neatly explains how you can get so many "life-changing epiphanies" that don't stick. Going to a self-improvement workshop, or reading a good book or having a good conversation, can *put you in a non-triggered, well-resourced mental state.*
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Inside that mental state, you feel like "Gosh, I was so insecure before! I don't feel *any* need to do those dumb things any more, now that I realize that I'm a basically good person and I can actually look at the problems in my life as solvable! I'm cured!"
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But then if you get triggered again, you're back to being the person you were before, so you'll conclude the epiphany was "fake." It wasn't -- you really were in a better, saner state temporarily. But it wasn't a "cure" either.
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Actual progress, says the book, means *gradually* getting triggered *less often*, and catching your triggered states earlier so they don't escalate as high or knock you out for as long.
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The book's model is an alternative to the traditional "rationalist" model a la
@ESYudkowsky's Sequences. The theory of cognitive bias is "people are full of motivated cognition by default; evolution didn't build our brains to think clearly and accurately..."Show this thread -
"so we are *by nature* prone to flinch from harsh truths and otherwise avoid reality. But maybe if you're extremely motivated and work very hard to resist cognitive temptations, you can overcome them."
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The trauma model of motivated cognition is more like "There is a "default healthy state" which is at least MUCH MORE reasonable and reality-oriented than the way most people are when they're driven by motivated cognition. This state doesn't necessarily take effort to reach;
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"you may have had it naturally as a child, or you may fall into it now and then by sheer luck. Most if not all motivated cognition is the effect of a specific mental motion that you might call "self-punishment" or "flinching", which you learn to do from being bullied.
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"unlearning motivated cognition, as in the rationalist model, is really hard but potentially attainable; however, the kind of work involved is not limited to self-discipline, but also involves a lot of self-compassion, as well as curiosity/experimentation."
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Under the trauma model, it's still possible that the "untriggered state" has a bunch of systematic biases; but if your goal is to be more reality-oriented, and you're currently in a "triggered state" a lot, your first job is to fix *that*.
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If the trauma hypothesis is true, we'd expect to see people *becoming less rational and more biased* frequently, especially after being treated badly by other people. If the cognitive bias hypothesis is true, we'd rarely see this.
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End of conversation
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