#ugh field

[irradiate-space]

@exprimis' next issue will be on Critical Race Theory, because that's what Imprimis' most-recent issue was about, and I already have developed an ugh field about the whole @exprimis project

[heyitsrina]

Ugh Fields

A problem with the human mind, Your Brain.

Tl;Dr version: Pavlovian conditioning can cause humans to unconsciously flinch from even thinking about a serious personal problem they have, we call it an "Ugh Field". The Ugh Field forms a self-shadowing blind spot covering an area desperately in need of optimization, imposing huge costs.

.       The Ugh Field failure mode is one of those really annoying failures. 

The idea is simple: If a person receives constant negative conditioning via unhappy thoughts whenever their mind goes into a certain zone of thought, they will begin to develop a psychological flinch mechanism around the thought. 

The "Unhappy Thing" — the source of negative thoughts — is typically some part of your model of the world that relates to bad things being likely to happen to you.

A key part of the Ugh Field phenomenon is :

to start with, there is no flinch, only negative real consequences resulting from real physical actions in the problem area. 

Gradually, you begin to feel the emotional hit when you are planning to take physical actions in the problem area.

Eventually, the emotional hit comes when you even begin to think about the problem. The reason for this may be that your brain operates a temporal difference learning (TDL) algorithm. 

Your brain propagates the psychological pain "back to the earliest reliable stimulus for the punishment".

If you fail or are punished sufficiently many times in some problem area, and acting in that area is always preceeded by thinking about it, your brain will propagate the psychological pain right back to the moment you first begin to entertain a thought about the problem, and hence cut your conscious optimizing ability right out of the loop.

Related to this is engaging in a displacement activity: this is some activity that usually involves comfort, done instead of confronting the problem. 

Perhaps (though this is speculative) the comforting displacement activity is there to counterbalance the psychological pain that you experienced just because you thought about the problem.

The subtlety with the Ugh Field is that the flinch occurs before you start to consciously think about how to deal with the Unhappy Thing, meaning that you never deal with it, and you don't even have the option of dealing with it in the normal run of things. This might be frightening that Your brain could implicitly be making life decisions for you, without even asking your permission!

Possible antidotes to Ugh Field problem:

Actively look out for the flinch, preferably when you are in a motivationally "high" state. Better still, do this when you are both motivationally high, not under time pressure, and when you are undertaking an overview of your life. This overview exercise will tend to make your mind range over all of the relevant parts of your life, and hopefully "throw up" some "Ugh!" reactions. 

Concretely visualize how your life could be much better if you control of it from your brain. Imagine, in near-mode, how much better your future life could be if you can find and "pick off" your Ugh Fields and  optimize the relevant part of your life. If you haven't yet identified these areas of your life, imagine that some concrete good thing (such as eating ice-cream, laughing with friends, etc) will happen to you in the future if you can honestly face these areas.

Identifying these reactions, writing them down in a list, and affirming that you want to take control of them will help you to distance yourself from them. Once your conscious mind has a positive desire to take control, the offending stimulus will hopefully activate this "take-control" reaction, rather than the "flinch" reaction. Key to this is framing the "take control" action as a  "positive" outcome enabler will facilitate action, as Kaj and PJ have already told us.

Source : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EFQ3F6kmt4WHXRqik/ugh-fields

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After I read this article, I began to think about what experiences I can use as  example and then I can analyze.

1. Biology

When I was in High School, I didn't like biology lessons, even now. I avoided this lesson and my grades were always bad so I chose math over biology. Now I realize why I can't and don't like biology. I prefer counting rather than memorizing, and when I was in high school biology was so full of memorization and actually my memorizing ability was not too bad but I didn't know why I couldn't memorize the summary of biology lessons.

Then what about the song? At that time I really liked Justin Bieber's song and memorized all the lyrics of his songs. Don't I keep memorizing but on a different topic? 

Maybe because at that time I couldn't understand every biology lesson well and quickly like my other friends, besides that because the boring and uninteresting learning atmosphere made Biology Lessons unpleasant and resulted in my bad grades. Music is fun rather than biology.

“ Okay I know I’m not good in Biology “

I tried to change my learning pattern towards biology, and my teacher knew it well because she saw my notes which were very very long but even 1 sheet... I can not understand it. And finally I failed again, bad grades became punishment. And it repeated itself until I graduated from school.

Compared to mathematics, I feel that I get positive energy every time I study it. I am always the first person to collect the math exam answer sheets with 30 minutes left. And get a satisfactory grade. I understand math very quickly even with just one explanation.

I lost my confidence in Biology and I gained high Motivation, high Expectancy and high Value in mathematics. 

2. Fry Food

 I had never fried because I felt it was terrible and dangerous if the hot oil got on my skin. So that I always avoid frying activities and prefer to prepare ingredients to be cooked or... boiled, yes at least I can boil vegetables. Preparing the ingredients and boiling are my comfort zone. I often see my mom fry easily without fear at all, even though I want to try, but my mind has given me the stimulus that it is dangerous and it is better not to do it.

And one time I tried frying because at that time my mom was busy talking to our guests and they hadn't had breakfast yet, I was in an emergency situation and encouraged me to make a quick decision. At that time I just said

 "OK, I can do this".

With full courage I did it. And I successfully fried the fish well! And our guests praise our cooking. I feel I get reward for my decisions and actions.

So now I have started to be able to fry food without feeling afraid. What I need to do is do it with a lot of trick & solutions so that the fear that can come at any time, I can overcome properly.

I became ever better and more confident.

[the-herbarium-blog]

This pretty much explains my problems with life.