Virtue garnish: A mental hack to short-circuit bad habits | Hacker News Reader

Virtue garnish: A mental hack to short-circuit bad habits

ledgeroflife.blog

85 pointsblitzpoet37 comments

This is just repackaged cognitive or dialectical behavioral therapy, with cutesy names like "whisper" and "virtue garnish" to make it seem novel. But if it speaks to people, I see no harm in that.

If you're genuinely interested in changing your habits, I recommend investigating these therapies, as they're backed by decades of research and results.

And if you want to tune in to these "whispers" in the first place, there's really no substitute for meditation and mindfulness practice.

This says you can't fix what you don't notice. This is obviously true. But then it jumps to the moment where you jot the impulse down. There's a gap here - to write something down you gotta notice it first too.

Anyone working with awareness and attention will probably tell you the missing components: intention and positive reinforcement. You can't directly make your awareness notice things. You can do two things which work indirectly. The first is cultivating intention. Remind yourself to notice your mental states whenever your conscious mind happens to remember to. Consciously check in on your mental state - again, whenever your conscious mind remembers to. This primes awareness - it tends to notice things that you previously consciously focused on.

The second component is positive reinforcement. Whenever your awareness works by drawing your attention to the trigger ("whisper"), pat yourself mentally on the back. This trains your awareness to notice this more often.

Creator here. You made some good points. Ledger of Life actually does try to address intention and positive reinforcement, though it's not explicit. The journal encourages keeping it on you and logging whispers in real time, which requires consciously priming yourself to notice (that's the intention part). The weekly review also helps set clear intentions for what to watch for the next week.

As for positive reinforcement, I agree, it’s not just about knowing when to decompress or apply a virtue garnish, but also about rewarding yourself for noticing at all. That’s something that could be highlighted more: just catching a whisper is a success worth a mental pat on the back!

That "gap between stimulus and response" is in some circles known as "mindfulness". And meditation is an effective exercise for building and strengthening that gap.

That seems to fly over a lot of heads. Anyone who actually meditated will tell you the process of fixing yourself through meditation is painstakingly slow, you mostly become aware of how your mind does not do what it is supposed to, and if you stop meditating you quickly lose all progress.

What the post describes is essentially some form of micro journaling to build a cached hashmap of the thought patterns you want your mind to have.

Interesting to hear meditation described this way—gap. I’ve followed (as a neophyte) the works of Thich Nhat Hanh, and if asked I would say he describes meditation as a practice of focus. Not that I see any incompatibility with the idea of gap in meditation. I quite like it.

Also interesting is the notion of gap as I hear it used in psychology to describe post-traumatic stress.

In the first case the gap is too quick. In the last, it’s too long.

Also, in literature, another definition describes irony as having a “gap”.

“Gap” is obviously polysemous in these applications, but contain the same notion of spacing (which is also critical in music and art!).

It’s pretty good advice

But the title is misleading. Sure, once you’ve built the habit of breaking bad habits, it will take 3 seconds each time. However, it will take quite a bit to build that habit

The article references Dale Carnegie. Related to that, and with much better exercises to build habits, I’d recommend the book The Charisma Myth. It addresses the type of situations mentioned in the article and a lot more, all with great step by step, habit-building exercises on each chapter

The technique seems valid, but I'm not really a fan of the rehashed "wait to cool down and reconsider" advice, to me it just seems like a form of emotional suppression. Of course you're going to feel differently in six hours or the next day as you return to homeostatis - that doesn't mean the flash of emotions you felt before was invalid.

I'm not suggesting you treat your colleagues like shit or get snappy over some feedback. But you also shouldn't be a suppressed, inoffensive doormat all the time. Emotions happen for a reason, the tricky part is knowing when they should be expressed and how.

What I like about this approach is that it goes back to looking at what your problems actually are. A lot of self help and social media sells you virtues in the form of solutions looking for a problem. It makes people go around with hammers of virtue seeing everything as a viceful nail they can hammer down. And of course they see the nail in other people first.

It's a cute idea and well told! I think the general idea is that you have a "watching" self and a "deciding" self. Perhaps like different AI agents that check each other's work.

My favorite version of this is the guy who imagines a village of dwarves in his head. When he feels annoyed or angry or whatever, he imagines the "angry dwarf" making his case in front of the dwarf counsel. "We should strike back!" Then he imagines how the rest of the dwarven counsel would respond. "Ah, but this could be chance for us to practice compassion," says the compassionate dwarf. And so on. According to him he finds this very helpful.

I see my mind as a village. I owe a lot to my meditation self. He’s somewhat of a monk. Oh, and my inner dating coach. Then we have the strategist.

There are quite a few but a lot of power has gone to the strategist who developed the dating coach and meditation self back in the day.

That's really neat! I like how it's layered like that. It sounds helpful.

It is! It helps to explain my inner world. Internally I experience it all in one fluid thing as me. Personifying it like this makes certain things really apparent. It may also create some systemic biases when it comes to my self-narrative but so far I haven't seen that and/or that it'd work against me.

> Perhaps like different AI agents that check each other's work.

Or like I agents?

> This is where Virtue Garnishes come in: pre-loaded, micro-sized pieces of content

dear god not everything is content...

I find the military saying "pain is weakness leaving the body" effective for workouts. The slogan is short and sticky, and I tend to exercise harder when I think of it.

Sometimes its cartilage leaving the body.

Hah yes or broken down muscle tissue in the case of rhabdomyolysis.

As I've gotten older I've had to discard this kind of maximalist thinking with exercise and think of every workout as just a smidge more than the last, after an appropriate period of rest and recovery.

That's the kind of toxic masculinity platitude that causes men to not seek medical help when they are in pain, which causes worse outcomes for things that are preventable.

I don't work out as much as I should. I'm generally a creaky guy, so any exercise for me is borderline painful.

Is there a word for the good kind of pain that comes from healthy exertion?

In what sense is the platitude you’re supposed to think of in crucial moments a garnish? “Garnish” has two meanings: Firstly a decoration or embellishment, especially for food. Secondly it can mean to deduct something (eg garnish someone’s wages to pay child maintenance or a fine of some kind). So is the dumbass saying supposed to be a decoration for your virtue or is it supposed to be reducing your virtue?

I certainly feel that the overall quality of hackernews has been garnished by having this drivel on the front page. Unfortunately in the second sense of the word, not the first.

Another day, another LLM-generated blog post on the front page about a deeply human topic. Do others not detect the tells, or do you not care?

(And, no, there is no "respond to content rather than style" issue here. There is no meaningful content here. That would be the prompt, but of course the author doesn't want to just post that.)

Immediately noticed from the style of writing and the clearly AI illustrations. The blog is brand new and no links go to anywhere, the Github, LinkedIn and Twitter links are circular. Plus the content is just rehashed behavioural therapy concepts with different wording.

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Gemini suggested some: "Seek first to understand, then to be understood", "Let go of judgment", "My goal is progress, not perfection or judgment" and so on. Sounds fine as virtue garnishes for your whisper.

You're presupposing that this blogvertisement ought not be considered profoundly stupid.

What would my virtue garnish be if I wanted to think of this blatant attempt at shilling a book as a waste of digital space?

Oh, I didn't realize your OP was actually a satire. I intentionally ignored that part because well, you can always take whatever meaningful informations out of anything including stupidly apparent ads. As the other comment said, the whisper part is a well-known strategy as well.

You genuinely read this ad and think there's something to be learned?

If I take this concept seriously for a few seconds, it's one massive exercise in begging the question. The argument boils down to "notice when you do something wrong" while simultaneously admitting that people don't do that. And the ad's advice for doing it? Do it. What?!

That's profoundly stupid as a concept, where "profoundly stupid" here is defined specifically as an argument with a clear reasoning issue.

You know one great way to stop smoking? By stopping. OP is stealing Bob Newhart's bit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcSAQyzPcl0

g: That's just, like, your opinion, man.

g: Criticism is the price for success?

Sorry to be clear: I want to reinforce my belief that this ad you've posted is profoundly stupid.

What would my virtue garnish be for that?

If you want to reinforce your current beliefs do the opposite. Write nothing down. Do what comes to your mind first. You do you.

If I had a garnish that turned anything objectively stupid into something that has objective value it would probably revolutionize chain-of-thought reasoning.

Sorry, but these tricks cannot work on aphantasic people (I'm one of them), since they cannot visualize.

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This seems like a chat GPT authored blog post that's trying to sell what I can only assume is a chat GPT authored self-help ebook.

It annoys me when people are not upfront about wanting to sell me stuff and just waste my time.

The article itself is not that bad, but it is surprising that it received nearly 50 upvotes in two hours.

Anyway, instead of buying yet another journal, `w:` could be made into a handy keyboard shortcut to open a certain file in your favorite editor so that you can write your "whisper" with current datetime. One could also LLM it to automatically provide the "garnish". And BOOM a new AI start-up! The first 10 garnishes a month are free. Above that you have choice of slow garnishes and premium garnishes (36c per garnish). Email me directly for BYOK and enterprise deployments. YC, yes, I am looking for investors. This could be big. Let's do this!

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