I will now continue interrogating the concept of the "ugh field" (following on from close-miss_phenomena_explanations.txt and incorporating some of it as well).

  People use this term to mean the "field" of *"ugh!"* emotion you get when pondering some task, which maybe causes you to stop doing it, but the guy who coined it (as far as I can tell — I think it's from https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EFQ3F6kmt4WHXRqik/ugh-fields) has an additional conclusion about it that it creates a subconscious failure mode where you ignore the task entirely (which actually is the opposite of consciously feeling *"ugh!"* about it, funnily enough). I'm not really sure whether this phenomenon he posits is the "ugh fields" per se or a related-but-possibly-distinct "Ugh Field failure mode", which is a term he also uses in that post. However, from the following paragraph I deduce he thinks the Ugh Field is subconscious, like a SEP Field (Somebody Else's Problem Field, a joke from the _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_, which is basically like an invisibility field by making people regard you in the way from its name):

  > The subtlety with the Ugh Field is that the flinch occurs ***before you start to consciously think*** about how to deal with the Unhappy Thing, meaning that you never deal with it, and you don't even have the option of dealing with it in the normal run of things. I find it frightening that my lizard brain could implicitly be making life decisions for me, without even asking my permission!

  I don't think this subconscious aversion field is true for most of us, frankly. I mean, I don't really know. It's going to be hard for me to know if you're doing this or if you're just naturally lackadaisical or something. But for me the process is pretty conscious: I don't like doing some things; they cause me "ugh!" to think about; I endeavor to interact with them and think about them as little as possible. Noticeably, I still fail sometimes, and I think about the unpleasant things I have to do later, and I feel "ugh!" again. There could be some secret chore that is so ugh-ly to me that my brain has destroyed it without a trace, but if so I guess I wouldn't know what that was, huh? I know about all the regular things like doing paperwork and chores.

  You could even charge the post with inconsistency about this point, at certain junctures, but my usual interpretive strategy is more along the lines of "language is inaccurate so figure out what the guy probably meant if he said things that vaguely (but not precisely) seem contradictory, e.g. he probably meant 'most of the time' to be read into some clause, or things to be true at one point in the process but not another." So, the fact that the point of the field is going "ugh!" but by the end you've repressed it so thoroughly that you no longer go "ugh!" is not enough to sink the post for me, so to speak.

  Furthermore, while we're talking about *me*, this sentence doesn't apply to me at all: "For example, suppose that you started off in life with a wandering mind and were punished a few times for failing to respond to official letters." This never happened to me. Maybe I just vividly assumed it would happen and that was enough, idk. But I've basically never been punished in any way that matters for not doing official things earlier, and I still don't like them. (Possibility: if I had been punished, would I thus be subconsciously completely hiding my discomfortable thoughts from myself as described in the post?)

  (btw, I'm led to believe that "subconsciously completely hiding my discomfortable thoughts from myself" is the psychoänalytic definition of the technical term "repression". I don't really believe in psychoänalysis but we don't have to get into that. I also don't believe that everything psychoänalysts believe is automatically false — although I guess I do doubt a lot of their stuff for the same reasons I doubt Roko's pavlovian thesis, plus some ideas about how scientific verification actually went. It's very tempting to say that psychoänalysis is bad because it's "unfalsifiable" (they sometimes talk in ways that seem like they would make it so), but actually my main objection is that I'm good at understanding my psyche and those of the people around me and I don't see any of the stuff they're talking about; thus, I *have* falsified it. People who still believe in it just believe in different contents of the psyche than me. (YMMV MAY NOT APPLY TO ALL PSYCHES.))

  As a side note, it's amusing that this LessWrong user Roko made the two posts — of which this is one — on LessWrong that seem to have ever "breached containment" into the wider internet, both of which posts I perceive to be deeply flawed.

  I think the advice given in this post is fairly ok advice at dealing with ugh-based procrastination. In particular, I think the part where you dwell on the benefits of getting something done, vividly, comports with https://wyattscarpenter.github.io/blog/on_the_power_of_the_understanding_with_regards_to_motivation.txt. A friend of mine points out that you know what really makes ugh fields go away is amphetamines, which is probably quite true. Anyway, I think you should become a perfect being with no weaknesses; ez. If you can't do this then you should probably fix your idiopathic character flaws to be able to do that (gl;hf).

  Anyway, this poast of mine is leading up to the following question: can I call ‘the "field" of *"ugh!"* emotion you get when pondering some task, which maybe causes you to stop doing it’, an "ugh field" without this baggage, this extra theory, and should I, and will people understand what I'm talking about?

  I will resolve this question once and for all so you can put me in the history books.
  
  Take it for granted that I do not believe in the "pavlovian repression" theory, and don't want to invoke or suggest it.

  Having mulled over this question for a bit, I think it's fine to use "ugh field" in a way that doesn't entail a completely subconscious mechanism. My main reason here is that I have seen people use the term "ugh field" in the wild (on the internet) multiple times, and they always used it to mean the field of ugh emotion, not the subconscious mechanism. Also, I think "ugh field" is a good term for that and a bad term for the subconscious mechanism, as it is self-explanatory for the first one and not for the second. (Even "Ugh Field failure mode" is probably a bad term for the latter, because it sounds too much like the common ‘ "Ugh Field failure mode" ’ you might immediately think of, where the ugh fields make you put something off to your detriment but you are consciously aware of that. I think "subconscious pavlovian ugh field avoidance failure mode" would probably be the most clear way to talk about the other thesis.)

  Another tentative piece of evidence is that footnote 1 of the post says "(Credit for this idea goes to Anna Salamon and Jennifer Rodriguez-Müller. Upvotes go to me, as I wrote the darn article)". This introduces the possibility that when Anna Salamon and Jennifer Rodriguez-Müller came up with(?) the idea of "ugh fields", they may have meant something different than the "subconscious pavlovian ugh field avoidance failure mode", perhaps something more like the intuitive meaning of the term "ugh fields". Perhaps many mechanisms and elaborations were entertained, of which the pavlovian thesis was only one. I haven't looked into this further.

  Edit: while procrastinating my taxes on April 15 by doing something else, it occurred to me that the subconscious aversion thesis does apply to me *in the very narrow window when I am successfully avoiding thinking about the task using my consciously-chosen surrogate activity.* So, that is a partial point in its favor.