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You can't become successful with affirmations, and that's not at all what I've been talking about. What I proposed is that some beliefs are holding you back and you can neutralise them with affirmations and other similar tools.

Chanting "I'm going to be rich" in front of a mirror is not going to make you rich, but constantly, internally repeating to yourself "I'm not going to be rich" will most likely make you poor.

I agree that the negative thoughts may hold you back -- and this is an important self-awareness step -- but the affirmations don't do any good for you, either. You are wasting time that could be better spent doing something that may give you a better chance to become successful, like starting a company or learning to sell effectively.

Come on mate, identifying your pain points and spending a few minutes in front of the mirror reminding yourself isn't going to wear you out for the rest of the day!

It is not a matter of effort, but of creating false expectations. If you use affirmations, you are creating a positive statement of something that doesn't exist. For example, to combat the idea of "I am a loser", you create an affirmative statement "I am a winner".

The problem, however, is that neither of these statements are true. You are not a loser neither a winner a priori. All you can do is to improve your chances of being successful, since you cannot really control the results.

This is an awfully bold statement. It's difficult to overstate the impact of an individual's psychology. Self-awareness is not a simple binary switch you flip and then you have perspective. Every moment of our experience in the world is created by our brains in fractal recursion. If it's 10000 layers of abstraction down to the neurons, we can only hope to be consciously aware of the top 4 or 5. I'm not sure why you would jump to the conclusion that affirmations can't do anything beneficial for anyone.

On the topic of Free Will, a new book that I would like to read:

> His absolutist position, I should add, because, as he puts it near the beginning of the book: "Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control." We assume that we could have made other choices in the past, Harris continues, and we also assume that we consciously originate "our thoughts and actions in the present. . . . Both of these assumptions are false."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/books/review/free-will-by-...

I take the Steiner view on this Free Will thing. Yes, if you're looking at other people, you can't know whether they have free will. But when you examine yourself, you do have some level of insight into your own thought processes. How much freedom you have does largely depend on how much insight you have, but the point is, the difference between a mechanical process happening without your awareness, and our will, is that in the latter case, we can observe it, think about it, and change it.

That's Free Will. The fact that there are subconscious influences is almost irrelevant. The important aspect is that it is self-reflective, able to understand and change itself.

Harris would argue that even that capacity for self-reflection is just part of a very long causal chain. Every thought you have emerges from somewhere, but it's very hard to find the cause of that thought. You might be able to pin down that "I was thinking X because I was reminded by Y," but that just begs the question, why were you reminded by Y? There are an infinite number of thoughts you could have been having at that moment, but for some inscrutable reason Y bubbled to the surface.

All that said, though I think free will is an illusion, in terms of day to day life it's more practical to act as if you have free will. I believe Sam Harris agrees. He is more concerned about the public policy implications, such as incarceration and rehabilitation.

I've often experienced what I like to call 'déjà-vous at scale'. Many times while re-watching a film or re-reading a book, I recognise that my mind, triggered by some apparently inconsequential detail, has spawned a series of thoughts identical to those I had first time around at that very point in the narrative. This has happened months, sometimes years apart. I'd be interested to know if this effect has been studied and what the conventional term for it is. Occam's razor would posit that I am simply experiencing déjà-vous from a moment ago, but the qualitive feeling is very different from the déjà-vous I am obviously familiar with.

Well this took a left turn, but I can't resist commenting any time I see a claim that free will is an illusion.

I'm not very enamored with the viewpoint, and especially in this quote the matter-of-factness with which it is presented. I believe it comes out of the hubris that a particular variety of rationalist has about the nature of knowledge. Some people only want truth to be the things which are tractable by science and are in a hurry to reduce the possibilities to materialism and determinism in pursuit of this goal. They trot out all manner of superficial evidence (such as this brain-activity-before-awareness study) that is nothing more than affirming the conclusion in the face of such overarching philosophical questions. When confronted with the possibilities borne of dualism or other philosophies they invoke Occam's razor and denounce such arguments as irrational appeals to the "supernatural".

In my opinion, these people are just bad philosophers. It's no different than a theologian coming in and trying to hamfistedly do science with a preexisting agenda. You can't do good philosophy if you worship at the altar of science—you need to be a bit more comfortable with the unknown and indeed unknowability.

For me personally, the reason I can't dismiss free will is simply because of consciousness itself. The fact that I am aware of my thoughts is to me more valid evidence of free will than all the logical machinations that someone can contrive to support the opposite. Even if the universe is deterministic and free will is an illusion, it doesn't mean we can predict anyone's actions, and if we can't do that then what does it mean to say free will isn't real? Maybe chaos and entropy also don't exist, but if we can't compute them then they are a perfectly secure "illusion".

Ugh, I'm sorry to waste my time and yours, but it really really bothers me when people demonstrate so much smug hubris about such a wonderfully large philosophical question.

Your note is not a waste of time at all, but a concise summary of why materialist determinism (really, 17th century physics wannabes) needs challenging.

As someone wise once said, If free will is an illusion, to whom is it so?

Wow, I wish I could have posted that as concisely.

Since you seem to be interested in philosophy, Gotthard Günther gives a very profound criticism of materialist determinism and dualism. His works are somewhat hard to access, since he wrote both in german and english and developed his thoughts over the course of several books. I've only read a summary so far (in german: "Technologische Zivilisation und Transklassische Logik" by "Kurt Klagenfurt", a pseudonym for a collective of authors). His main angle seems to be that even reasoning about consciousness and the notion of "you" in dualistic terms leads to infinite regressions or paradoxes, as Hegel has demonstrated.

I'll readily agree that this whole subject is quite a bit beyond the scope of hacker news and popular "science reporting".

I like the example of Mother Theresa. Whatever you think of her work, she was tremendously devoted and dedicated to her religion. And yet, when her letters and diaries were published following her death, they revealed an immense uncertainty about her faith.

Confidence as a prerequisite to success is a chimera. Though persevering in the face of doubt may matter. False confidence is highly dangerous to yourself and others (and very common, particularly in management).

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1655720,00....

> I like the example of Mother Theresa. Whatever you think of her work, she was tremendously devoted and dedicated to her religion. And yet, when her letters and diaries were published following her death, they revealed an immense uncertainty about her faith.

This is a really bad example, as she believed that those in suffering should be denied access to medication, particularly pain relieving medication. It could be argued that she should have felt bad and uncertain in making active decisions to allow others to suffer.

As I said: regardless of your view of her work, and I've got similar issues to yours, she was tremendously religious. And yet, profoundly troubled by doubts about her faith. Which is to say, confidence in her faith had little to do with her ability to become a religious exemplar, directly contradicting a major tenet of the article. Anectdata and all that.

Not so far as I've read, troubled by her actions. If you've got any documentation that she was, that might be relevant.

A lot of pop psychology latches onto these ideas, but they are fairly closely related to the Seligman's concept of optimism, which is pretty well documented with controlled studies. Having an optimistic mindset definitely increases your chance of success in most business related things.

I don't think the author actually said self-affirmations will lead you to success. If anything, they'll help improve your self-image and confidence, and put you in a better position to seek out opportunities.

Your convertible analogy doesn't accurately represent the issue here. What I think is a convertible could very well be objectively not. Others can look at it and tell you that what you're driving is not a convertible. With feelings of failure, they are most of the time not reality, but rather gross misinterpretations of what we've experienced. And these misinterpretations, like I mentioned below, are a product of a behavior that we've developed to fit a self-narrative. Self-affirmations with real, objective analysis can help you unlearn those destructive behaviors. I don't think swombat is advocating you stand in front of the mirror every morning to tell yourself how amazing, special, and talented you are, but rather to keep yourself grounded in reality while staying optimistic. So instead of saying "I'm the best and I'll fail at nothing", you'd be better off saying "Today is a new day, let's make the most out of it and weather the obstacles."

You're saying people will fool themselves into believing they're better than they really are, but that's not the point here. The point is to bring people, who have fooled themselves into believing the complete opposite, back up to a normal and healthy level of confidence, which could very well improve their chances of finding success.

Affirmations alone are ineffective. But affirmations along with taking action can be affective. When you take action to do something you've never done before, self-doubt creeps in, usually in the form of negative self-talk. Instead of trying to "get rid" of that negative self-talk, affirmations can serve as a reminder that, yes, it is possible.