psych speculation

people have been asking why i’m learning psychology, so here is an overview of some ideas i’ve been thinking about. all of this is extremely speculative and i’m mostly just looking for feedback of any kind (critiques, comments, references, collaboration requests, etc). the general theme is that we have lots of undesirable thought patterns, and the goal is to create tools which progress towards curing them. people have been trying this for decades but modern tech opens up a lot of possibilities, which is what i’ll be focusing on

I. short-term stuff

i think the low-hanging (relatively speaking, but still sort of high up) fruit here is targeting specific behaviors. examples include: you’re trying to quit smoking, or you want to exercise more but are never able to commit to a schedule, or you’re in debt but still overspend every time you go shopping. there are fairly specific and well-defined actions, and for now we’ll just focus on trying to minimize them without worrying about any underlying causes. we don’t actually know how to eliminate undesirable behaviors yet and possibly never will, so the goal here is to do as good of a job as possible. some ideas here include:

• nudges, which are essentially very simple reminders or environmental changes, the most famous one is that we’ve found when you put stickers in urinals people will naturally aim their pee near the sticker, drastically reducing spillage and the need for cleanup if the sticker is positioned appropriately. a more relevant example is that if you remind low-income people about overspending or financial goals at the right time (specifically, a few hours before they go grocery shopping) they noticeably reduce excess spending, see here; different nudges can be implemented through mobile apps, email/calendar reminders, and so on
• gamification, which is sort of self-explanatory. there are lots of gamification apps for building new habits, such as habitica. i’m personally not a big fan of them because i generally prefer for objects to be minimalist so i don’t appreciate having an avatar that gets points and items and quests when i work towards good habits, but some people are a big fan of this sort of thing and insist it works well for them. if having a personal flower garden tied to progress on goals helps you then go ahead i guess
• social reinforcement, which is when close friends or family have direct access to data about your progress eg. the number of chocolates you eat each day. also fairly self-explanatory; social pressure is pretty powerful in creating accountability and motivation. i’ve been thinking of making a platform whose sole purpose is to facilitate sharing progress towards goals but am currently too busy to do it entirely by myself  
• there are a ton of other ways to do conditioning and/or reinforcement, ranging from fairly vanilla to very insidious. most of them revolve around finding and creating the right rewards or punishments system. i haven’t thought about them much because they likely don’t generalize well to different problems, eg. i’m sure we can find a way to condition you to be afraid of cigarettes, but i’m not convinced a similar procedure would help with alcoholism

II. long-term stuff

in the distant future i think we can move on from targeting specific behaviors to targeting general thought patterns. by patterns i mean motifs like racism or recency bias or a general lack of self-control. at this level simple mechanisms including the ones from the previous section are probably not enough; instead you need solutions that are highly personalizable and interactive. this is a lot harder than the problem from the previous section, so again, partial solutions are the goal. racism is a good example:

• how would you go about curing racism in an individual? i actually think you can’t; if someone actively wants to hold on to racist beliefs it’ll probably take highly unethical measures such as brainwashing, mind hacking, inhumane punishment, etc. to change how they think, none of which i’m interested in pursuing. (the way you’d actually do it is by restructuring society so that it’s in each person’s self-interest to be genuinely unprejudiced, but i think that is fairly orthogonal to what i’m trying to communicate here; i’ve mostly been thinking about individual behavior and not systemic design) the problems which might actually be solvable here are unconscious behaviors eg. you talk more harshly to hispanics without realizing it because of stuff your mom told you when you were a kid, and conscious behaviors that you want to let go of but haven’t been able to. i think scoping out the problem boundaries here is pretty important
• my current guess is a solution here involves
  • some form of teaching / education, like, if you think chinese people are repulsive because they speak chinese loudly and have a creepy obsession with pale skin tones, learning the cultural context for these things would probably help
  • simulated and real experiences, such as conversations with an ai about your feelings and experiences or positive interactions with people of different backgrounds than you. ideally all experiences would be real and not simulated, but the issue here is scale- it’ll probably take many hours of experiences for you to really start thinking differently, and the easiest way to provide enough hours for everyone is to have ai programs or humanoid personal assistants or such
  • i don’t think anyone really knows how to tackle problems of this difficulty yet, so the right way forward is probably to try a bunch of smaller-scope ideas like the ones from the previous section until we have a good idea of how to approach larger-scope problems

III. other stuff

there are definitely many topics in this space which i haven’t mentioned. some people think we’ll integrate with machines and upload ourselves into digital spaces and then be able to modify our minds at will or experience each others’ thoughts but i haven’t bothered thinking about this because it seems too distant to be productive; i think most ideas about brain-computer interfaces (see the waitbutwhy post) fall under this category. there are also a lot of ideas that i think fall into the gap between the short-term and long-term categories, like having your own therapist program or debugging assistant

the ability to do what i’ve described above is somewhat scary in that it can be abused, but i think technology is inevitably progressing towards these capabilities and the main choice we have is deciding whether to put it to good use or not. the obvious example is that facebook and tiktok have already demonstrated they can thoroughly hack our psyches and are willing to do so to further whatever their goals are, and other groups will follow suit, so if you give people the option to employ these same principles towards living more healthily then i don’t think there’s much of an issue here. emphasis on the word option; even if we had the perfect cure to drug addiction i wouldn’t feel comfortable giving it to addicts against their will, mostly because i think we disagree about a lot of opinions that they are probably more correct than me on. hopefully opaque governments stop existing before they figure out how to effectively control psychology at a mass level

a week ago someone asked what i thought the probability that we solve human thinking is, and i said something along the lines of i don’t know, but i think every utopian scenario involves solving it first. one of the resolutions to the fermi paradox is something along the lines of: achieving planetary supremacy involves evolving patterns like selfish behavior and tribalism, but avoiding extinction from planetary problems such as climate change requires learning an entirely new set of patterns like widespread altruism and cooperation, and remnants from our evolutionary past inhibit this

i don’t have much else to say here. all this has been stuck in my head for too long and i need to get it out if anything is going to come of it, so thanks for bearing with me 😛