Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

I am still considering the benefits and possibility of upfront structuring of information, knowledge, certainty and errors but information- and complexity overload is a real pain. Which also means i am keeping a bit of a distance to committing to how the end result should look. Especially as this is one of these projects that needs to be effortlessly integrated into an individuals existing process to be usable. At which point you might as well improve that process while you are at it.

Your approach on the other hand sounds quite practical, lets say combined with some hypertext structure like project xanadu or the hover boxes of lesswrong. The question would be how good the results get. Anyway, good luck, i think this could be quite beneficial.

Projects/Concepts you might (not) find interesting:

* Taiwan has a process called gov0 (gov zero), a communication channel aimed at re-framing proposed laws in a way that allow for reaching consensus. Currently done manually but consensus finding seems to be a key part of communication.

* Cognitive sciences / biases / warfare / behavior therapy. As well as processes aimed at capturing the human error, like crew resource management for pilots. All concerned with errors in our own perception and thinking * Juliane Gallinas TED talks

* Ontology vs epistemology, quite important for people with a CS background in my experience. I like to think of it in terms of complexity reduction in the context of information theory similar to an analog digital converter.

* The 5 level explanation series from WIRED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raHM3k-uR0E

Especially the last one is a great example that communication is likely not a matter of finding THE description, but one of connecting your perspective to a topic/concept. Here it works through iterative reduction/increase of complexity, but working from related concepts should also be possible. Lets say one explanation for an engineer and one for a psychologist.

The post itself is also a good example for the the difficulty of communicating (after identifying and isolating) what is relevant and the necessity to cut what isnt. Which will differ depending on ones perspective and goals. I suspect the same effect does occur if you ask people to define the vocabulary they use themselves. Thus the focus on agreeing on the meaningful difference/overlap instead.

At least their Jungian archetype and the 'animus anima' are 50% less sexists that they used to be and are now marketable for 'self help' expert, so I guess they are now able to make money by scamming without endangering people.

For example, depression is often characterized by black and white thinking and getting tunnel vision. You become so focused on the worst things you can come up with being true that you loose sight of your perspective being incomplete and the stress makes it harder and harder to snap out. Which results in either incomplete or erroneous conclusions you still hold with conviction. After all, you know X to be true and as a result that you are doomed to experience Y. So unless you are the only human not functioning this way, you have good chances of changing your experience without resorting to supression.

I think the difference in dealing with these patterns manifesting comes from insight. You can try to suppress that initial bad insight temporarily or you can come to terms what is happening to you and how much you should care about what at which time. A lot easier said then done sure, but going full suppression seems like really bad advice. Be it through distraction or a bottle, you sooner or later will be confronted with a distorted self image again.

At that point you are getting countermeasures for distortions and unrealistic expectations. You might get used to them, but they were just distortions. Getting used to them might have not been a good idea. Even if you reduce suffering, you are establishing a new higher normal.

I get that this sounds a lot like Freud, but i am looking at this more from a human error perspective. Its not much different from cognitive biases, its part of how the mind comes to erroneous / incomplete conclusions and how these can create negative feedback loops. Making the first step suppression instead of introspection seems really counterproductive. You are kind of stuck with your brain and might as well optimize some. Some agency is achievable and it often doesnt need to be hard. No sense in being sad about your brain being buggy. Brains just are.