My perspective on this is one of a person who underwent years of complex trauma in childhood and my stuck-ness was a series of overly sensitive protective mechanisms that had been built up by the experience.
“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.