@EY
This advice won’t be for everyone, but: anytime you’re tempted to say “I was traumatized by X”, try reframing this in your internal dialogue as “After X, my brain incorrectly learned that Y”.
I have to admit, for a brief moment i thought he was correctly expressing displeasure at twitter.
@EY
This is of course a dangerous sort of tweet, but I predict that including variables into it will keep out the worst of the online riff-raff - the would-be bullies will correctly predict that their audiences’ eyes would glaze over on reading a QT with variables.
Fool! This bully (is it weird to speak in the third person ?) thinks using variables here makes it MORE sneer worthy, especially since this appear to be a general advice, but i would struggle to think of a single instance in my life where it’s been applicable.
Whenever I see some new pearl of wisdom from Mr Yudkowsky, I think, “Surely it can’t be that plainly, baldly wrong. Surely he can’t have it that twisted, but still speak with so much authority…” I’m no expert, but I know slightly more about trauma than I do about computer science, maths or formal logic and this seems so incorrect.
Surely trauma is defined as something that you learn from in your body, not your mind; from your subconscious, not your conscious. By their nature, people cannot understand the meaning of a traumatic experience the same way they can understand an abstract idea.
Does Yudkowsky think traumatic memories aren’t different from other memories - but psychiatrists are just too self interested to expose this? That people could get over their traumatic memories - but they’re just too dopey to do so without a helpful tweet from Eliezer Y? And while it’s fairly trivial really, does he actually think that the general public are impressed and intimidated by X and Y variables, a concept most of us were introduced to when we were 12 or 13?
The False Memory Foundation did a lot of damage by convincing people that you can’t forget and then remember traumatic events. Yes, some people were coerced by memory regression therapists into recalling increasingly unlikely and spurious memories. But many people avoid thinking about traumatic events because it’s painful, or use distractions to avoid remembering them. Traumatic memories from childhood can be particularly difficult to understand and deal with because the trauma occurred at an early stage of psychological development.