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..."
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"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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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ESYudkowsky
That seems unfair. "Motivated cognition" can be motivated by lots of things, no? Plus rationality might benefit from someone being in an emotionally deactivated state, which is hard when you're in pain.
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Replying to @ChanaMessinger @ESYudkowsky
You're saying that "rationality" already adequately incorporates the idea that people become biased because they're in emotional pain?
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ESYudkowsky
I had certainly thought so! But don't have an explicit model and it's possible my implicit one explains too much
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If the baseline, untrained, uneducated person is *about as irrational as it gets*, and most people are at "baseline", then you'd see a few people overcoming this baseline state, and most people staying there.
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If the "baseline state" is more rational than the "traumatized state", and everybody is born at baseline but many are traumatized, especially in childhood but sometimes later, then you'd see some never-traumatized people who are pretty rational without any training,
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ESYudkowsky
I feel like I definitely know deeply untraumatized people who handle situations well and without stress, and don't get sidelined by emotional considerations, and have those advantages in rationality skill but aren't better at thinking through difficult empirical questions.
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