I'm more annoyed by the usual phrasing of these things as life changing and revelatory.
Maybe it's time to unstick yourself from these patterns. Life changing and revelatory can be as much evolutionary as revolutionary. There's no need to narrow them down to their extremes.
Personally for navel-gazy articles like this I think it's more useful to focus on telling one's own story instead of making broad edicts and sprinkling in some science in an effort to lend legitimacy to them. What works for one person won't work for everyone, but "I was in X situation and did Y and it helped me" is far more likely to be helpful for someone else than simply "Do Y", especially when you're writing for a wide audience.
But when they work for someone, they can and do lead to important revelations and/or life changes.
I'm a firm believer in one's ability to "reprogram" themselves, having done it to varying degrees across the span of my life. Perhaps it doesn't work for everyone. It doesn't always work for myself, especially when life makes the required self-discipline hard to maintain.
I'm biased by my own success, obviously.
Helplessness isn't learned, it's a result of not knowing how to deal with the situation. So, try new things, search for the solutions and don't give up — that's the recipe.
From a practical standpoint, this is critical to note because if someone is trying to address their stuck-ness, this book is still an excellent resource that is not affected by this detail and is focused on learning new skills to move forward.
I think this also underscores the importance of taking active steps to retrain our brains when necessary.
“The illusion of being stuck” also sounds a lot like “Learned Helplessness”, which is a maladaptive conditioning of the brain to strongly believe that not doing something is the best option because doing something won’t make a difference anyway, despite this not being true at all. Like drowning in two feet of water because it didn’t occur to the person to just stand up.
The reason I’m pointing at trauma is that we all come from a wide spectrum of experiences, which result in a wide spectrum of stuckness (or lack thereof).
The book “Learned Optimism” (written by Martin Seligman, one of the original researchers who discovered the learned helplessness phenomenon) first describes how animals (not just humans) arrive in these maladaptive states, and then provides worksheets to help people who are currently deeply biased towards a pessimistic world view learn techniques to reframe and ultimately rewire these biases, and I can attest to the life changing improvements this kind of work can bring without my brain falling out.
More broadly, it’s worth considering the fact that we’re all running firmware that evolved during a very different era of human existence, and is often poorly tuned for modern reality.
Using what we know about the brain and how it is conditioned to adapt ourselves to modern situations seems pretty critical.
> I'm not convinced that this is generally a good idea. It makes a person unmoored and open to anything ("so open minded that your brains fall out"). It's also often amoral. The only metric that's maximised is utility regardless of other more subtle consequences.
This seems like a pretty major jump to a conclusion that would require far more to back it up.
I don’t think this is about mucking with firmware as much as it is about correcting model weights. Our firmware seems to be what it is. Our environment and conditioning is what embeds certain biases and resulting behaviors.
Human experience is certainly more complex than just a few hacks, but I don’t think that discounts the value that certain kinds of exercises can bring.
We’re continually working against our default modes of operation when we adhere to principles of rational thought and logic. Emotional responses like anger discard these higher modes of thinking. I see these “hacks” as something similar: methods of helping us move beyond the less adaptive parts of our brains based on a growing understanding of the world around us.