Using your brain--for a change

What Hacker News says

1. joe_the_userFeb 2019
   Society Of The Spectacle, Guy Debord

   One can't really summarize the argument. It essentially describes the structure of modern society as it's existed since, say 1960 or early. The text may seem opaque but if you read it closely, you actually need any explanatory texts, though they exist.

   Honorable mention: Game Theory Evolving, Herb Ginitus Biochemical Individuality, Roger J. William The Working Brain, Luria Using Your Brain For A Change, Bandler The User Illusion, Norretrander How The Beattles Destroyed Rock And Roll, Elijah Wald Mathematical Logic, Manin The Ascent Of Man, Bronowski The Book Of Secrets, Osho

   [1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.ht...

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2. EstragonMar 2012
   Yes, I read Bandler and Grinder extensively and experimented with their techniques in the 80s, starting with happening across The Structure of Magic in the local university library, and ending, IIRC, with Using Your Brain For a Change, which includes transcripts from one or more of Bandler's workshops, and convinced me that he was a bullying fraud.

   By then it was already clear that NLP concepts had no solid empirical or theoretical foundation and in any case did not improve my life in any way, but I was young and desperate enough for relief from the problems in my life that I held on to their promises way past any rational limit.

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3. gyro_roboApr 2007
   A great question. I was watching a Charlie Rose interview with Peter Jackson from after ROTK came out, before he won the various Oscars for it. He said his big motivating factor was fear -- fear that he'd wasted hundreds of millions of other people's money producing the most dreadful movie(s) ever made.

   Being a big fan of the LOTR books myself, and feeling that the films' screenplays and direction were both utter schlock, it occurred to me that this particular motivation may not be conducive to doing your best work! I was a fan of his previous films, which seemed to be done for the love of it.

   We all try to gain pleasure and avoid pain. Most of us will work harder to avoid pain, though, making it probably the more powerful motivator. However, letting it take too large of a role in your life means your quality of life is negatively affected because of living in constant fear. It becomes a habit, which helpfully probably keeps you alive, but it does this by making you extremely risk-averse which also precludes future success! You may not want to do anything new.

   One example of how letting pain-aversion become dominant affects you is that you may become extremely lazy. Let's say you've already got enough money that you don't have to do anything. Well, work requires effort, and effort requires energy expenditure, and that may involve some pain!

   Of course previously you may have been excited to do the same kind of work, when doing it was about gaining pleasure. We tend to behave according to habits, and I would suggest it's not good to let yourself accidentally become habituated to using fear as a motivating factor, because it will creep into all facets of your life.

   So, very recently, I have consciously been trying to not react with fear and panic in situations where I normally would. There are so many situations that are really no big deal, except for the mental model we use which we have trained ourselves to freak out over.

   I'm getting to think that the majority of our large-scale behavior is due to unconscious decisions, and that we decide very little of importance consciously. So, in order to effect change, we may need to train and condition our unconscious via emotional responses. Almost like Pavlov-dogging yourself, do multiple things you already like in conjunction with some other behavior and you reinforce it: E.g. playing music and drinking Coke while hanging out with friends at the same time you're coding will reinforce your love of coding. Constantly think of negatives while coding and pretty soon you won't want to code on that project anymore, and maybe at all for a while!

   I know this sounds cheap and gimmicky but I think it's very likely to be the case that our strings are pulled by our unconscious. See the Precognitive Carousel: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1422464

   Also see this book on NLP (some of the formatting seems off from OCRing): http://www.scribd.com/doc/1984/Neuro-Linguistic-Programming-Using-Your-Brain-for-a-Change-Richard-Bandler-NLP

   If you don't have a plan for your unconscious/subconscious drives, you can bet others do -- advertisers, religious and political leaders, and random authority figures will try to use pain (mostly) and pleasure to get you to feel like behaving the way they want you to.

   I'm aghast when I realize how much of my childhood was actually a job as a field sales representative for Mattel. They recruited me via television cartoons (ads) to direct my parents' income to their revenue stream, in exchange for various "goods" now seen only on Robot Chicken.

   (World of Warcraft is the new Mattel, and they are Skinner-boxing away years of people's lives.)

   By the same token, when you as a founder are rich enough to never have to work again to maintain your previous standard of living, you'll find all sorts of expensive toys pushed on you, playing on the same ingrained habits from your childhood. You've been trained to be fearful so that someone can sell you a temporary band-aid. (There are evolutionary reasons why it's easier to push people toward fearfulness and pessimism -- ice age conditions were harsh! The constant worriers didn't have much fun, but they stayed alive. We're the descendants of people who got up and checked that the cave door was locked 57 times a night so sabretooth tigers didn't eat them.)

   TV advertising now has two main themes: 1. "Look at these hot chicks -- now buy our product!" And 2. "You're not buying our product? No wonder hot chicks don't want you, fatass." Survival is a given in our society so the next most monumental drive is reproduction. Watch how many people who want money from you try to play on this. Don't be manipulated into fearfulness and insecurity.

   If you're still young, try to be aware of when something is having an effect on how you feel about something. If you can see how your feelings are starting to change on something, you may be able to counteract it before a pattern sets in. If you're older, you probably have to un-do a lot of stuff that's conditioned you without you even realizing it.

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