Hey Jonah, great post, but I suspect you might be hiding something from yourself here. Verbal communication is much harder for people than written, and has it's own slew of failure modes (verbal speech has a lot to do with body language). I highly recommend treating them as separate issues, particularly since verbal communication is so socially significant.
Examples of growth mindset or practice in fiction
As people who care about rationality and winning, it's pretty important to care about training. Repeated practice is how humans acquire skills, and skills are what we use for winning.
Unfortunately, it's sometimes hard to get System 1 fully on board with the fact that repeated, difficult, sometimes tedious practice is how we become awesome. I find fiction to be one of the most useful ways of communicating things like this to my S1. It would be great to have a repository of fiction that shows characters practicing skills, mastering them, and becoming awesome, to help this really sink in.
However, in fiction the following tropes are a lot more common:
- hero is born to greatness and only needs to discover that greatness to win [I don't think I actually need to give examples of this?]
- like (1), only the author talks about the skill development or the work in passing… but in a way that leaves the reader's attention (and system 1 reinforcement?) on the "already be awesome" part, rather that the "practice to become awesome" part [HPMOR; the Dresden Files, where most of the implied practice takes place between books.]
- training montage, where again the reader's attention isn't on the training long enough to reinforce the "practice to become awesome" part, but skips to the "wouldn't it be great to already be awesome" part [TVtropes examples].
- The hero starts out ineffectual and becomes great over the course of the book, but this comes from personal revelations and insights, rather than sitting down and practicing [Nice Dragons Finish Last is an example of this].
Example of exactly the wrong thing:
The Hunger Games - Katniss is explicitly up against the Pledges who have trained their whole lives for this one thing, but she has … something special that causes her to win. Also archery is her greatest skill, and she's already awesome at it from the beginning of the story and never spends time practicing.
Close-but-not-perfect examples of the right thing:
The Pillars of the Earth - Jack pretty explicitly has to travel around Europe to acquire the skills he needs to become great. Much of the practice is off-screen, but it's at least a pretty significant part of the journey.
The Honor Harrington series: the books depict Honor, as well as the people around her, rising through the ranks of the military and gradually levelling up, with emphasis on dedication to training, and that training is often depicted onscreen – but the skills she's training in herself and her subordinates aren't nearly as relevant as the "tactical genius" that she seems to have been born with.
I'd like to put out a request for fiction that has this quality. I'll also take examples of fiction that fails badly at this quality, to add to the list of examples, or of TVTropes keywords that would be useful to mine. Internet hivemind, help?
Verbal communication is much harder for people than written.
Um, this is really not universally true at all. In fact, it's possible more than 50% of people find verbal communication easier. (Although this community may contain an overrepresentation of people who find written easier.)
I don't have an intuitive understanding of why I'm coming across as arrogant.
Think in monkey-terms. Humans are just hairless bipedal apes and status matters, a lot.
Statements of what you perceive as (fairly obvious) facts have implications, in particular social/status implications. Human conversations are simultaneously an exchange of information and an exchange of signals. Most people automatically process these signals on the slightly subconscious level and respond with signals of their own without necessarily being aware of it. Women, in particular, are quite adept at this.
People in whom the signal-processing mechanism is inefficient, miscalibrated, or just plain broken have trouble with navigating social interactions. The interaction flows on (at least) two levels but the invisible layer is malfunctioning and if you don't even know it exists you are confused why the overt information-exchange layer is doing so badly.
I suspect that if the subconscious mechanisms are not doing their job, you have to bring the signal-exchange layer into the territory of the conscious and explicitly manage it.
Accept that every conversation has two layers even if you don't see one of them. Evaluate all statements (verbal + body language, etc.) on two levels: (1) what does it say; (2) what kind of signal it sends, what does it imply.
To return to your original question, on the overt information-exchange layer you see your statement "I am smarter than almost everyone here" as a neutral fact about the world which you believe is true. Now, analyze that statement on the signal-exchange level. What does it imply to hairless bipedal apes?
Women, in particular, are quite adept at this.
Citation?
I have several medical problems, yes. Changing my narrative is a good idea, thanks. Now, what will I change it to...
Have you read many of the "gritty crime novel" or other "gritty realism" genres? I think I have a felt sense for what that narrative is, but it's hard to explain, because it comes from having read several hundred books in the genre.
Hmm. Before you were exposed to the LW idea of heroism, how did you feel, motivation-wise? What did you spend your time doing?
Reading books, mostly. I had goals, but not ambitions, if that makes sense. I basically thought good things would just happen to me if I was a good/intelligent person. I've since learned that good things won't come to me, I need to go out searching for them and pounce on them if I want them. But doing that is just exhausting.
This sounds fine? Like, definitely underspecified as an actual plan, and maybe focusing too much on one path and neglecting all the equally valuable alternatives (I think that happens a lot with long term plans). But it doesn't reek too badly of "I must make desperate efforts to be heroic constantly!"
It's the intensity of the negative emotion which is a problem, more than the goals I'm aiming for. I'd like to be able to fail to achieve my best-case goals without hating myself.
This seems incompatible with "I do not, intellectually, believe that striving for this sort of heroism will be likely to have negative consequences, because I don't believe making the effort will significantly affect my actions." If aiming to be a hero doesn't effect your actions, it also shouldn't make the difference between being a "selfish couch potato" and not? But I feel like there's a lot of vagueness here, too. Can you taboo "selfish couch potato" and describe what you fear you would actually do? And compare it to what you're actually doing now? Versus what ideal you would do? Like, actual actions–"I get up in the morning, I go walk to the store..." Etc.
Current me spends almost no time on productive things when not at his job as a menial worker. Couch potato me would quit his job and try to get on government welfare, eating lots of food. Ideal me would quit the job and get a better one, while going back to school to complete and starting to exercise regularly.
My intellectual belief that heroism is important has served mainly only to emotionally torment me for failing, since I'm not even moderately successful in life by basically any standard you could name.
Hmm. I'm going to suggest something that I just thought of and that may or may not be helpful, but here goes:
The trouble with narratives is that once you have one, it's really hard to go back to not having a narrative. Heroism is a narrative. It's going to be really hard to go back to just doing whatever you were doing without interpreting it in some kind of narrative sense – but you can change your narrative. To something like "there are no heroes." Heroism is a construct, a concept, but it doesn't cut reality at the joints. The real world is more like one of those gritty crime novels, where morality isn't a real thing and there are just humans, with drives both noble and corrupt, trying to survive.
This is a narrative I've had, but it wasn't to solve the same problem. I have my couch-potato urges, like anyone, but I've never had to resort to much mental violence to suppress them. I think because I'm able to notice that when I follow the urges, and read sci-fi for ten hours instead of cooking and exercising and cleaning, then I feel physically bad (stiff, achy, etc), and mentally bad (foggy head, being bored but unable to think of a thing to do about it, etc). This is visceral enough feedback for my System 1 to get it and respond to an urge to stay in bed and read my book all day with "do you really want to do that?" (The prerequisite for this may be having good enough energy and mood overall that doing non-couch-potato things is pleasant or at least bearable. I've experienced times when this wasn't the case – when I was so exhausted that trying to do anything other than read fanfic was painful. If trying to do work is always aversive for you, that may well be a medical issue – it'd be consistent with depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, etc.)
There was strong interest in the first two posts in my sequence, and I apologize for the long delay. The reason for it is that I've accumulated hundreds of pages of relevant material in draft form, and have struggled with how to organize such a large body of material. I still don't know what's best, but since people have been asking, I decided to continue posting on the subject, even if I don't have my thoughts as organized as I'd like. I'd greatly welcome and appreciate any comments, but I won't have time to respond to them individually, because I already have my hands full with putting my hundreds of pages of writing in public form.
Thanks a lot for continuing your work on this sequence; it’s been really interesting and seems potentially quite valuable given the mathematical nature of many problems in AI safety.
This post of yours reminds me of http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html When I read that essay of PG’s years ago, my reaction was something like: “This is highfalutin BS. At best, taste is when your intuition for what seems good/interesting happens to correlate highly with what actually is good/interesting according to some metric.” But when I think about this now, I realize that if this is indeed what taste is, it’s tremendously valuable, since it gives you the ability to find stuff quicker in large search spaces.
I took a few math classes in college with a great teacher who taught using the Socratic method, by asking questions. I answered a lot of his questions, and one of my classmates (who I had a lot of respect for) referred to me as a “genius”. However, I didn’t do very well on the tests my teacher administered, and ended up with a score around 79% both times I took classes he taught.
This blog post discusses a study using a construct called “clerical intelligence”; I wonder if low clerical intelligence is the sort of thing that would cause someone to be good at math “conceptually” but keep making frustrating mistakes in practice. (That’s the only reference I can find to clerical intelligence though, so perhaps it should be taken with a grain of salt.) I felt like as I’ve grown older, I’ve gotten better at thinking like a bulldozer, keeping track of my working memory, and making fewer mistakes.
Someone on Metafilter writes:
it was by reading Misteaks... and How to Find Them Before the Teacher Does that I began to grow competent at Math.
I’d be interested to know whether Scott Alexander felt like he was weaker in identifying strategies to solve calculus problems or doing the actual execution. If the latter, it seems like that might work with your hypothesis that he has high mathematical ability but low clerical intelligence. (This might be hard for him to know because if your answer is wrong, without a tutor you don't immediately know whether you chose the wrong strategy or made a small stupid mistake.)
This blog post discusses a study using a construct called “clerical intelligence”; I wonder if low clerical intelligence is the sort of thing that would cause someone to be good at math “conceptually” but keep making frustrating mistakes in practice.
Ooh! I think 'clerical intelligence' is the thing that my husband and I have taken to calling 'attention to detail' amongst ourselves. It's also been at least occasionally studied under that name – when applying for an admin job, they gave me a test of 'attention to detail' that consisted of several hundred timed questions comparing a block of six numbers to another block, having to answer whether they were the same or not, with around 5-10 seconds to spend per question. I don't think I'm outright bad at this, but it's not effortless for me. (Luckily, I had math teachers who gave points for the work getting to the solution, not just the solution, so I could get 7/8 points on a complicated problem even if I substituted a + for a - somewhere and got the wrong answer).
My husband tends to use 'attentional to detail' to some degree also to mean what Paul Graham would call 'taste' or what Jonah would call 'aesthetic discernment'. I think the causal relationship is probably that in order to develop 'taste'–intuitions for what's good that correspond to what's generally agreed to be good – you need to be paying close attention to its details for a few years. Thus I have 'taste' for music, writing, and to some degree math, but not for fashion, since I never looked at what people were wearing.
Open source projects, especially (or maybe just most saliently for me) software projects, desperately need sidekicks. I write 'desperately' because most such projects die from 'over-forking', i.e. everyone wanting to be the leader (hero) of their own project (adventure).
What I've learned most recently is that being even a moderately competent sidekick is really hard. It takes a lot of work to even be able to contribute without creating lots of extra work for the heroes and their more-devoted sidekicks.
That's really interesting! Are you able to break down the relevant skills at all?
I have signed up with Alcor. When I suggest to other people that they should sign up the common response has been that they wouldn't want to be brought back to life after they died.
I don't understand this response. I'm almost certain that if most of these people found out they had cancer and would die unless they got a treatment and (1) with the treatment they would have only a 20% chance of survival, (2) the treatment would be very painful, (3) the treatment would be very expensive, and (4) if the treatment worked they would be unhealthy for the rest of their lives; then almost all of these cryonics rejectors would take the treatment.
One of the primary cost of cryonics is the "you seem insane tax" one has to pay if people find out you have signed up. Posts like this will hopefully reduce the cryonics insanity tax.
I actually had a nightmare recently where I was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and would have preferred not to go through treatment, but felt pressured by other, more aggressively anti-death members of the rationality community. Was afraid people would think I didn't care about them if I didn't try to stay alive longer to be with them, etc. (I'm an ICU nurse; I have a pretty good S1 handle on how horrific a lot of life saving treatments are, and how much quality of life it's possible to lose.)
I've thought about cryonics, but haven't made a decision either way; right now, my feeling is that I don't have anything against the principle, but that it doesn't seem likely enough to work for the cost-benefit analysis to come out positive.
You might want to look at the recent thread on being a hero, http://lesswrong.com/lw/l6d/a_discussion_of_heroic_responsibility/ , in particular the comments which question the idea. A lot of the reasons why thinking of yourself as a hero are questionable apply to thinking another person is a hero as well.
...I wrote that post, so yes, I've already read most of the comments.
It worries me a bit that several young LWers appear to be leaving paid employment to do (presumably?) unpaid work for their partners. What happens if these relationships break down? Are they going to be able to find paid work after a long break from the job market?
Clarification: I'm not actually planning to do unpaid work for Ruby, at least not immediately. I'm going to be retraining as an executive assistant, because they're useful, and keeping my nursing license valid (possibly finding a part time nursing job if that turns out to be at all feasible, because I really love working as a nurse.)
What are rationalist heroes supposed to do? And what can “sidekicks” do to help them?
(I ask these questions as someone who’s not that familiar with the rationalist community. I asked them on the Effective Altruism Forum and there was some discussion of them there.)
I'm looking for specific examples, particular ones which aren't already being done and so are available for new heroes to take on.
Ryan Carey said "A hero means roughly what you'd expect - someone who takes personal responsibility for solving world problems. Kind of like an effective altruist." He quoted this passage from HPMOR:
You could call it heroic responsibility, maybe,” Harry Potter said. “Not like the usual sort. It means that whatever happens, no matter what, it’s always your fault. Even if you tell Professor McGonagall, she’s not responsible for what happens, you are. Following the school rules isn’t an excuse, someone else being in charge isn’t an excuse, even trying your best isn’t an excuse. There just aren’t any excuses, you’ve got to get the job done no matter what.” Harry’s face tightened. “That’s why I say you’re not thinking responsibly, Hermione. Thinking that your job is done when you tell Professor McGonagall—that isn’t heroine thinking. Like Hannah being beat up is okay then, because it isn’t your fault anymore. Being a heroine means your job isn’t finished until you’ve done whatever it takes to protect the other girls, permanently.” In Harry’s voice was a touch of the steel he had acquired since the day Fawkes had been on his shoulder. “You can’t think as if just following the rules means you’ve done your duty. –HPMOR, chapter 75.
But in that case doesn't the sort of "sidekick" that Miranda describes count as a hero, because being a sidekick is plausibly one of the best ways that they can contribute to solving the world's problems?
What are rationalist heroes supposed to do? And what can “sidekicks” do to help them?
I think founding CFAR was an example; there are both leader and sidekick roles there.
But in that case doesn't the sort of "sidekick" that Miranda describes count as a hero, because being a sidekick is plausibly one of the best ways that they can contribute to solving the world's problems?
Maybe.
Hmmm, thank you for the posting, it sheds a light on something that I had not seen before. I like a lot of things about the posting, including the standing up part if the hero fucks up. And Samwise is an interesting "sidekick". I think he differs in at least two other aspects from the typical "sidekick" that deserve special emphasis:
First, Samwise is self-sufficient ("competent"). It's not the typical Robin character that needs to get rescued by Batman as a stupid plot ploy. He has his own skills and carries his own weight. The hero/ine might save/rescue the world, but s/he does not save/rescue this sidekick.
Second, Samwise is not a little green wo/man working in the background where no-one can see him/her so that it appears as if the hero/ine did everything on his/her own. Same with the other characters that were mentioned (Witch-king, Black, Vader). They are noticed and they do play a visible role. Not only are they a noticeable character, they have a distinct character.
I think both aspects are underdeveloped in the public perception and unfortunately, there are some "heroes/heroines" who prefer to make their sidekicks appear in need of support, or put them in the background altogether. Hmm, and I also wonder whether you could regard the hero/ine as a sidekick to the overall goal. I mean, it's one thing to see the hero/ine as this great person, but this person is not exactly free either. They have found a cause they devote their life to. So perhaps it's less a different category but more different levels.
One other thing ... I disagree with the comments about the "strong gender overtones" though and was surprised they were mentioned. I get the impression that gender perspectives are way overused and are actually hampering free expression and discussions. It's this pervasive confusion of "what do I think" and "what does it say about gender if I say it". I don't think that "If a man wrote this post, the message would be different.". I mean, it might be for whose who see everything gender related (ideology has this effect), but not for those who think it shouldn't matter. The arguments count, not the (gender of the) person who wrote a text.
Perhaps there are differences where the majority of men vs. the majority of women want to go, but that's only a problem if it's generalized to all men and/or all women. It's the person and his/her character, attributes and skills that count, not the gender. And don't get me started on "patriarchy". There might be many men in leadership positions, but many other men fail at achieving them. And a lot of men are at the bottom (homeless, suicides, etc.). And personally, I think it's a tragedy if ideologies/world views try to pressure anyone into anything they do not want -- whether it's men or women, and whether it's leadership or support.
First, Samwise is self-sufficient ("competent"). It's not the typical Robin character that needs to get rescued by Batman as a stupid plot ploy. He has his own skills and carries his own weight. The hero/ine might save/rescue the world, but s/he does not save/rescue this sidekick.
I certainly hope to be at least that competent. I'm an adult; I've lived on my own and been financially independent of my parents since I was 17. If anything, it feels like "okay, I've got this taking care of myself thing down, can I have a harder challenge?" I'm a freaking ICU nurse, responsible for other people's lives 12 hours a day.
Second, Samwise is not a little green wo/man working in the background where no-one can see him/her so that it appears as if the hero/ine did everything on his/her own... They are noticed and they do play a visible role.
It doesn't feel like I would strongly prefer being visible to being in the background. Both have an appeal. There's skill and satisfaction in knowing that you're making it look like the hero did everything on their own, too.
I mean, it might be for whose who see everything gender related (ideology has this effect), but not for those who think it shouldn't matter. The arguments count, not the (gender of the) person who wrote a text.
I think people engage with things they read on multiple levels, not just the explicit arguments, and that includes picking up implicit social norms from context/subtext like "all the pro-hero writers are male, all the pro-sidekick writers are female." And that's not even taking into account the fact that my article is apparently fairly in line with Christian writing on the topic of service, and so might end up shared among Christian bloggers–and the various Christian's sects' attitudes to gender roles are often not ones I endorse.
When did this sense of despair start? (Was it after exposure to the LW idea of heroism, or before that?)
After.
When you ask yourself "what's the bad thing that happens if I am for Goal X, which doesn't include being a hero", do you get an answer?
As I mentioned, I am incapable of being a "hero" in the sense I use the word. I do not, intellectually, believe that striving for this sort of heroism will be likely to have negative consequences, because I don't believe making the effort will significantly affect my actions. But I have difficulty relaxing my emotional standards despite this understanding.
I think the root problem is that there are no Schelling points within my motivational neighborhood. I can't help but feel as though I face the choice of either striving for heroism continually throughout every area in my life, or giving up on my ambitions entirely and becoming a selfish couch potato.
Have you tried tabooing the word "hero" and describing the actual plans and actions that your brain think would be acceptable, versus the ones that it thinks would be unacceptable?
My brain says that I need to work for a couple hours a day learning until I get my degree, then get a good job and make money while studying politics and economics, and then eventually start some kind of charity to help in the 3rd world. Anything less than this makes me feel guilty and ashamed for not being a competent enough person, even a bit disgusted with myself.
I can't help but feel as though I face the choice of either striving for heroism continually throughout every area in my life, or giving up on my ambitions entirely and becoming a selfish couch potato.
Hmm. Before you were exposed to the LW idea of heroism, how did you feel, motivation-wise? What did you spend your time doing?
I can't help but feel as though I face the choice of either striving for heroism continually throughout every area in my life, or giving up on my ambitions entirely and becoming a selfish couch potato.
This seems incompatible with "I do not, intellectually, believe that striving for this sort of heroism will be likely to have negative consequences, because I don't believe making the effort will significantly affect my actions." If aiming to be a hero doesn't effect your actions, it also shouldn't make the difference between being a "selfish couch potato" and not? But I feel like there's a lot of vagueness here, too. Can you taboo "selfish couch potato" and describe what you fear you would actually do? And compare it to what you're actually doing now? Versus what ideal you would do? Like, actual actions–"I get up in the morning, I go walk to the store..." Etc.
My brain says that I need to work for a couple hours a day learning until I get my degree, then get a good job and make money while studying politics and economics, and then eventually start some kind of charity to help in the 3rd world.
This sounds fine? Like, definitely underspecified as an actual plan, and maybe focusing too much on one path and neglecting all the equally valuable alternatives (I think that happens a lot with long term plans). But it doesn't reek too badly of "I must make desperate efforts to be heroic constantly!"
I also had a weird reaction to your post, like emr and someonewrongonthenet. Personally, I feel that it's healthy to work as an assistant to someone (and stop thinking about work when you leave the office at 6pm), but it's unhealthy to be the assistant of someone (and treat them as a fantasy hero 24/7 and possibly sleep with them). Yay professionalism and work/life balance, boo medieval loyalties and imagined life narratives!
That's also the advice I often give to programmers, to think of themselves as working for a company (in exchange for money) rather than at a company (as part of a common cause). That advice makes some stressful situations and conflicts just magically disappear.
You could say that a world of inherently equal professionals exchanging services, without PCs or NPCs, is too barren to many people. Some people actually want to feel like heroes, and others want to feel like sidekicks. Who am I to deny them that roleplay? Well, some people also want to fit in the "warrior" role, being fiercely loyal to their group and attacking outsiders. We have all kinds of ancient tribal instincts, which are amplified by reading fantasy and bad (hero-based) sci-fi. I feel that such instincts are usually harmful in the long run, although they seem to make sense in the moment.
Personally, I feel that it's healthy to work as an assistant to someone (and stop thinking about work when you leave the office at 6pm), but it's unhealthy to be the assistant of someone (and treat them as a fantasy hero 24/7 and possibly sleep with them).
I think this is exactly what Brienne is talking about when she points out that society doesn't look kindly on people who want to serve others. And... I think maybe you're pointing at something real. It does seem possible that when "being" an assistant breaks, it breaks harder than when "working as" an assistant breaks. So it's a higher-stakes situation to put yourself in. (Both for the leader and for their assistant).
I don't think that negates any of what I said in the post though. Half of my point is basically just "some people are the kind of people who want to be nurses, no, really." Like, it seems to be really hard for people who aren't those kind of people to understand that for me, roles that aren't especially high-status but involve being really useful to other people hit all of my happiness buttons. That people are actually different and that their dream job might be one I'd hate, and vice versa.
The other part probably only makes sense when aimed at people who have taken the concept of "heroes" on board...which large portions of this community have. And that point is mainly: if you're going to accept that heroes and people who want to be heroes are a thing, you've got to have the concept of sidekicks too, otherwise you have a broken unhealthy community. It sounds like you're arguing that it's best not to take either concept on board. Maybe. You can argue that point.
That's also the advice I often give to programmers, to think of themselves as working for a company (in exchange for money) rather than at a company (as part of a common cause).
I'm not sure I have that switch? I've developed strong feelings of loyalty towards every job I've had. As a nurse, this loyalty is felt only a little bit towards the hospital where I work; I feel more of it for my immediate colleagues, and the rest of it towards some abstract "Profession of Nursing." I'm not sure how to stop feeling that way, or honestly why I'd want to stop.
We have all kinds of ancient tribal instincts, which are amplified by reading fantasy and bad (hero-based) sci-fi. I feel that such instincts are usually harmful in the long run, although they seem to make sense in the moment.
This comes across a little bit as saying "hey, don't have emotions!" Which...yeah, maybe emotions cause a lot of problems, but not having them isn't an option. And I'm not sure that not having narratives is an option either. It seems to me that I'm going to think of my life as a narrative in any case; I might as well try to understand and analyze and shape it. (Just as I shape my emotions, trying to lean away from the emotions that seem net-negative...but the way to do that is to guide yourself towards different emotions.)
I self-identify with the role of the hero. But I do so not because I think it's wonderful to struggle for righteousness, but rather because I feel a deep sense of despair when I consider pursuing other options. I'm crushing myself with the weight of heroic responsibility. This is extremely unpleasant, and naturally, makes me a much less effective person.
How can I rewrite my motivations and self-concept to be less distressing for me? How can I convince myself, emotionally and psychologically, to stop trying to be a hero? At this point, it's rather obvious that I'm not actually capable of being one. I would prefer to change my goals than to continue suffering like this.
When did this sense of despair start? (Was it after exposure to the LW idea of heroism, or before that?) When you ask yourself "what's the bad thing that happens if I am for Goal X, which doesn't include being a hero", do you get an answer? Have you tried tabooing the word "hero" and describing the actual plans and actions that your brain think would be acceptable, versus the ones that it thinks would be unacceptable?
I'm trying to understand why I have a strong aversive reaction to this sort of discussion. If I'm honest, I feel worried that people who identity as "sidekicks" risk being exploited by those who identity as "heroes". A healthy community will tend to discourage this sort of taxonomy in various ways in order to avoid the risk of abuse, but the core members of the rationality movement seem to not recognize the social necessity of doing this.
And yet the response is not "maybe invoking the hero archetype at every possible opportunity is a bad idea", but rather doubling down on the idea that the leading figures of our movements should be modeled as genuine Lord-of-the-rings heroes. And since not everyone can bring themselves to believe that they are Frodo, we decide that invoking another high-fantasy archetype is the right solution?!
I'm curious as to why you so strongly think that sidekicks risk being abused, and that "healthy" communities will discourage this dynamic hard. I– I don't want to say that I want to be exploited, but I crave being useful, and being used to my full usefulness. I don't think this desire is unhealthy. Yes, this means that it's always tempting to throw too much of myself at a project, but that's the same problem as learning not to say yes to all the overtime shifts at the hospital and end up working 70 hours a week. I guess you could say that someone I was working for could "abuse" me by forcing me, or coercing or sweet-talking me, into the equivalent of "taking all the overtime shifts." But (in my limited experience of this) the leader's more common motivation seems to be in the opposite direction–of being afraid of pushing their sidekick too far.
I'm wondering whether you have some different experience of this, and would be interested in your elaboration if you have one.
Is your claim that...
- in theory, there are cases where being the sidekick is the way for you to have the biggest impact?
- in todays world, there are some cases where being the sidekick is the way for you to have the biggest impact?
- in todays world, there are many cases where being the sidekick is the way for you to have the biggest impact?
- while being a sidekick might not be the way for you to have the biggest impact on the world, it is still a way to have a notable impact on the world, and that having a notable impact on the world is still an admirable thing to do?
For the record, I agree with each bullet point except 3.
I think my main point is "it's not true that your only options are Be a Hero or Be Insignificant, there's a third option." Because if it's presented as a dichotomy, I think many sidekick-oriented people would go for being insignificant–so the impact they could theoretically have as a hero is moot.
I suspect this is a consequence of the situation that rationalists often feel alone. Not necessarily alone as people (although that also happens), but alone as rationalists. Before I found LW, I was in a situation where I had a few friends, but probably none of them would be interested in the kind of debates we have on LW.
If there is only one person in the whole Shire who cares about destroying the ring, would we want that person to be Frodo or Samwise? Frodo would probably try the mission alone, even if less efficiently. Samwise would probably settle for the second best mission, for a mission where he could find a hero to follow.
In different situations different traits are required. In a situation where the individuals are isolated, we would probably want every individual to be a hero, because heroes can act in isolation. On the other hand, in a functional community, having a few highly efficient heroes is probably better than having too many heroes with low efficiency.
So maybe we could use the presence of integrated sidekicks as a measure of health of the community.
This reminds me of some unhealthy behavior I have seen in Mensa: people who have spent so much time in their lives trying to prove their intelligence, that when they finally find a group of their peers, all they can do is continue signalling their intelligence by solving yet another meaningless puzzle, over and over again. Similarly, I guess many wannable rationalists have spent too much time in their lives trying to be the only sane person facing the crazy world, that we may have a problem updating to cooperation with other people who share similar values. It is difficult to cooperate optimally with other rationalists, if we never had an opportunity to learn this behavior in the past.
Hmm. I grew up with a different experience. Don't remember feeling especially alone-as-a-rationalist. Some parts of my childhood were unusual; my parents are pretty exceptionally sane, my brother is as interested in rationality as I am. And I think to a large degree it's just a personality difference. From the outside, it sometimes looks like other rationalists are trying to conclude that other people are dumb or unstrategic. (Including Eliezer). This makes no sense to me.
I sometimes wish I could drag various rationalists to my job at the ICU for a while, make them see the kind of teamwork and cooperation that happens in a place where cooperation is a default and a necessity. Nurses, for the most part, just cooperate. Even when there are conflicts. Even when they don't like each other. (Although the degree of "agency" that the team as a whole has does vary with how much the individuals like each other and get along.) I don't know how to make this magic happen on demand, aside from applying selection bias to get the kinds of people who want to be nurses, and then giving them hard-but-manageable problems to solve. And I think I did learn a lot about cooperation at work.
Now I'm curious about the other implications of a society where individuals are isolated. What does that even look like? What do people spend their time doing? What causes the isolation? ...Sci-fi plot brewing.
I think there is such a thing as a hero-in-training. My work with FLI has mostly been in a supporting role so far, but I view myself as an apprentice rather than a sidekick, and I would generally like to be a hero.
Yeah. This is definitely a thing. It seems good to have the vocabulary to differentiate the two, so that someone can know whether their current apprentice is aiming to be a hero or a sidekick.
Two different types of sidekicks need to be distinguished: second in command, and assistant.
A second in command is someone who can at need temporarily take charge when the leader is absent or incapacitated, and at other times be engaged with the leader doing the same work, but leaving most of the initiative to the leader. Samwise is a second in command.
An assistant is not in the chain of command. Nick Bostrom is looking for an assistant, not a second in command.
Hmm. That's true. I'm not sure how much this is actually a dichotomy in practice, as opposed to a gradient where some sidekicks are more assistant-like, some are in the middle, and some are more second-in-command like. I'm also not sure to what degree the same people are attracted to both second-in-command and assistant roles, and whether it's for the same reasons. That would affect whether it makes sense to classify them together for this purpose. I can come up with imaginary characters who would only be interested in second-in-command, or only in assistant roles, but they both appeal to me for many of the same reasons.
I kind of feel like it has to do with the sidekick's competence and also the scale of the project. If the project is of a scale where it's possible for the hero to make most of the decisions, and the sidekick is new to it and finds assistant-work hard enough, it'll tend towards that role. If the sidekick and hero keep working together, as they both learn and grow, the hero will want to move on to larger-scale projects, and at some point there will be too many high-level decisions for the hero to make all of them, and at this point the sidekick will have been working with them for a long time and learned a lot, and it seems like it might naturally turn into a second-in-command role. But this would only happen in a situation where roles are fluid; if it were a standard case of a CEO and their executive assistant, the role would be unlikely to change that much. (Although EAs do have quite a lot of decision-making power.)
The link to the post on your personal blog is broken, it should be: http://swimmer963.com/?p=383
The Importance of Sidekicks
[Reposted from my personal blog.]
Mindspace is wide and deep. “People are different” is a truism, but even knowing this, it’s still easy to underestimate.
I spent much of my initial engagement with the rationality community feeling weird and different. I appreciated the principle and project of rationality as things that were deeply important to me; I was pretty pro-self improvement, and kept tsuyoku naritai as my motto for several years. But the rationality community, the people who shared this interest of mine, often seemed baffled by my values and desires. I wasn’t ambitious, and had a hard time wanting to be. I had a hard time wanting to be anything other than a nurse.
It wasn’t until this August that I convinced myself that this wasn’t a failure in my rationality, but rather a difference in my basic drives. It’s around then, in the aftermath of the 2014 CFAR alumni reunion, that I wrote the following post.
I don’t believe in life-changing insights (that happen to me), but I think I’ve had one–it’s been two weeks and I’m still thinking about it, thus it seems fairly safe to say I did.
At a CFAR Monday test session, Anna was talking about the idea of having an “aura of destiny”–it’s hard to fully convey what she meant and I’m not sure I get it fully, but something like seeing yourself as you’ll be in 25 years once you’ve saved the world and accomplished a ton of awesome things. She added that your aura of destiny had to be in line with your sense of personal aesthetic, to feel “you.”
I mentioned to Kenzi that I felt stuck on this because I was pretty sure that the combination of ambition and being the locus of control that “aura of destiny” conveyed to me was against my sense of personal aesthetic.
Kenzi said, approximately [I don't remember her exact words]: “What if your aura of destiny didn’t have to be those things? What if you could be like…Samwise, from Lord of the Rings? You’re competent, but most importantly, you’re *loyal* to Frodo. You’re the reason that the hero succeeds.”
I guess this isn’t true for most people–Kenzi said she didn’t want to keep thinking of other characters who were like this because she would get so insulted if someone kept comparing her to people’s sidekicks–but it feels like now I know what I am.
So. I’m Samwise. If you earn my loyalty, by convincing me that what you’re working on is valuable and that you’re the person who should be doing it, I’ll stick by you whatever it takes, and I’ll *make sure* you succeed. I don’t have a Frodo right now. But I’m looking for one.
It then turned out that quite a lot of other people recognized this, so I shifted from “this is a weird thing about me” to “this is one basic personality type, out of many.” Notably, Brienne wrote the following comment:
Sidekick” doesn’t *quite* fit my aesthetic, but it’s extremely close, and I feel it in certain moods. Most of the time, I think of myself more as what TV tropes would call a “dragon”. Like the Witch-king of Angmar, if we’re sticking of LOTR. Or Bellatrix Black. Or Darth Vader. (It’s not my fault people aren’t willing to give the good guys dragons in literature.)
For me, finding someone who shared my values, who was smart and rational enough for me to trust him, and who was in a much better position to actually accomplish what I most cared about than I imagined myself ever being, was the best thing that could have happened to me.
She also gave me what’s maybe one of the best and most moving compliments I’ve ever received.
In Australia, something about the way you interacted with people suggested to me that you help people in a completely free way, joyfully, because it fulfills you to serve those you care about, and not because you want something from them… I was able to relax around you, and ask for your support when I needed it while I worked on my classes. It was really lovely… The other surprising thing was that you seemed to act that way with everyone. You weren’t “on” all the time, but when you were, everybody around you got the benefit. I’d never recognized in anyone I’d met a more diffuse service impulse, like the whole human race might be your master. So I suddenly felt like I understood nurses and other people in similar service roles for the first time.
Sarah Constantin, who according to a mutual friend is one of the most loyal people who exists, chimed in with some nuance to the Frodo/Samwise dynamic: “Sam isn’t blindly loyal to Frodo. He makes sure the mission succeeds even when Frodo is fucking it up. He stands up to Frodo. And that’s important too.”
Kate Donovan, who also seems to share this basic psychological makeup, added “I have a strong preference for making the lives of the lead heroes better, and very little interest in ever being one.”
Meanwhile, there were doubts from others who didn’t feel this way. The “we need heroes, the world needs heroes” narrative is especially strong in the rationalist community. And typical mind fallacy abounds. It seems easy to assume that if someone wants to be a support character, it’s because they’re insecure–that really, if they believed in themselves, they would aim for protagonist.
I don’t think this is true. As Kenzi pointed out: “The other thing I felt like was important about Samwise is that his self-efficacy around his particular mission wasn’t a detriment to his aura of destiny – he did have insecurities around his ability to do this thing – to stand by Frodo – but even if he’d somehow not had them, he still would have been Samwise – like that kind of self-efficacy would have made his essence *more* distilled, not less.”
Brienne added: “Becoming the hero would be a personal tragedy, even though it would be a triumph for the world if it happened because I surpassed him, or discovered he was fundamentally wrong.”
Why write this post?
Usually, “this is a true and interesting thing about humans” is enough of a reason for me to write something. But I’ve got a lot of other reasons, this time.
I suspect that the rationality community, with its “hero” focus, drives away many people who are like me in this sense. I’ve thought about walking away from it, for basically that reason. I could stay in Ottawa and be a nurse for forty years; it would fulfil all my most basic emotional needs, and no one would try to change me. Because oh boy, have people tried to do that. It’s really hard to be someone who just wants to please others, and to be told, basically, that you’re not good enough–and that you owe it to the world to turn yourself ambitious, strategic, Slytherin.
Firstly, this is mean regardless. Secondly, it’s not true.
Samwise was important. So was Frodo, of course. But Frodo needed Samwise. Heroes need sidekicks. They can function without them, but function a lot better with them. Maybe it’s true that there aren’t enough heroes trying to save the world. But there sure as hell aren’t enough sidekicks trying to help them. And there especially aren’t enough talented, competent, awesome sidekicks.
If you’re reading this post, and it resonates with you… Especially if you’re someone who has felt unappreciated and alienated for being different… I have something to tell you. You count. You. Fucking. Count. You’re needed, even if the heroes don’t realize it yet. (Seriously, heroes, you should be more strategic about looking for awesome sidekicks. AFAIK only Nick Bostrom is doing it.) This community could use more of you. Pretty much every community could use more of you.
I’d like, someday, to live in a culture that doesn’t shame this way of being. As Brienne points out, “Society likes *selfless* people, who help everybody equally, sure. It’s socially acceptable to be a nurse, for example. Complete loyalty and devotion to “the hero”, though, makes people think of brainwashing, and I’m not sure what else exactly but bad things.” (And not all subsets of society even accept nursing as a Valid Life Choice.) I’d like to live in a world where an aspiring Samwise can find role models; where he sees awesome, successful people and can say, “yes, I want to grow up to be that.”
Maybe I can’t have that world right away. But at least I know what I’m reaching for. I have a name for it. And I have a Frodo–Ruby and I are going to be working together from here on out. I have a reason not to walk away.
I think there are strong gender overtones here.
You're not the first person to remark on that. What do you think that we ought to do about it?
Another thought about the sidekick status. I recall this comment by Eliezer, where he says, in part:
If you know yourself for an NPC and that you cannot start such a project yourself, you ought to throw money at anyone launching a new project whose probability of saving the world is not known to be this small.
I could be misreading it, but if you replace "money" with "effort", he basically describes the sideckick role as "NPC". Which rubbed me the wrong way even then. I certainly would not describe you or Brienne as NPCs, no way. I wonder if it's just an unfortunate choice of words.
I think that, if Eliezer felt that way in the past, he no longer feels that way; he has told me that he thinks the sidekick role is valuable and regrets possibly having made sidekick-identified people feel otherwise.
If you're at all familiar with the SCA, one of the three peerage orders is that of the Pelican: http://www.sca.org.au/pelicans/ it awards people for outstanding service (seriously, to get one, you have to have run many events over a decade, and worked damn hard making people happy to get it). You are unlikely to get one unless you consistently, and sustainedly want to serve the needs of others for long period of time.
You strike me as potential Pelican material...
Note: The fact that this community (the SCA) consistently gives accolades for service is, I think, one of the reasons why it is so successful at being a Community.
By contrast, the other two peerages: Chivalry (for sword fighting) and Laurels (for making cool stuff) are both "Look what I did/made" orders... full of heroes (the former more than the latter, in my mind). Which is great and necessary and really cool... but without the Pelicans, the Society as a whole wouldn't exist.
My suggestion: adopt and help sustain a community of rationalists near you.
Neat! I didn't know that was a thing. Society consistently surprises me by being cooler and bigger than I expect.
Edit: I'm trying to find out what 'SCA' stands for and the first google result was "Sudden Cardiac Arrest." Google knows me way too freaking well.
Great post, as usual! Every time I see your post I anticipate reading it in delight, and am never disappointed. Hope you and Ruby will accomplish great things.
I cannot help but notice that all non-fictional sidekicks you mentioned are female. I tried to think of famous real-life examples of a dependable and trusted companion who makes the hero what he or she is, and had trouble finding more than one or two males. I wonder if this is more or female trait, whether by nature or nurture, or the result of the infamous patriarchy, or maybe I just don't know of many.
I've also had this thought. A few people I've showed this too are explicitly bothered about the what-if-it's-a-result-of-the-patriarchy; one person is tempted to identify as a Samwise character, but reluctant to because Sexist Overtones. I...don't think this is the right response. It's a bit like saying "no, I'm going to be a doctor instead of a nurse because women are pushed into nursing by The Patriarchy." Maybe it's true, but it's orthogonal to whether an individual will like nursing or medicine more (although, honestly, they're not that different).
Other thoughts: everyone who wrote publicly about this was female, but most of the people who have emailed me privately to thank me for the post are male. So... Men feel more shamed about wanting to be sidekicks than women do?
I've already had the thought that the message I'm sending might be bad if it spread to society as a whole, because women may be pushed harder away from being CEOs than from being their executive assistants (or whatever the dichotomy), and even a well-written and nuanced pro-sidekick message is going to get parsed as "smart lady says your place is as an assistant." (If a man wrote this post, the message would be different, but I'm not a man.) I still this this message is pretty positive for the LW/CFAR/rationality community to hear; its biases run in different directions.
I think that there can be a difference between being Frodo's Sam, and being a real-life hero's personal assistant/sidekick/support. In the former case, Sam is fighting orcs, hiking through treacherous mountain passes, dealing with Sméagol, etc., which is quite similar to what Frodo is doing; in the latter case, the job of the secretary/personal assistant would be much different from the job of the real-life hero. I would be happy to be Frodo's Sam, but lukewarm about being, say, Bostrom's personal assistant.
I would much rather make phone calls and schedule events than fight Orcs. The latter sounds scary.
...That being said, I do like the aspects of my current job where I get to defibrillate people once in a while. I'm going to miss that.
So. I’m Samwise. If you earn my loyalty, by convincing me that what you’re working on is valuable and that you’re the person who should be doing it, I’ll stick by you whatever it takes, and I’ll make sure you succeed. I don’t have a Frodo right now. But I’m looking for one.
...
For me, finding someone who shared my values, who was smart and rational enough for me to trust him, and who was in a much better position to actually accomplish what I most cared about than I imagined myself ever being, was the best thing that could have happened to me.
Just out of curiousity - is Frodo person implicitly intended to be a romantic partner here? Or can Frodo just be anyone you work closely with? The wording certainly makes it seems seem like a romantic partner. And it could be a spurious trend but I also couldn't help but notice the female skew of all the Samwise's you mentioned, which, given the low grade dominance/submission dynamics often at play between the genders, makes me suspect this even more.
I think nursing is a valid life choice, and I think being a Samwise is a valid choice, and I think wanting to find a romantic partner and take care of them and make their ambitious dreams come true is a valid choice, and I think in general just being a person who isn't actively trying to save the world is a valid life choice. (Mostly because I'm not certain that people who have a burning ambition to save the world are actually contributing that much more than the rest of the population.)
I feel like things get kind of... weird... if these perfectly good traits are recombined into "I want to be in a super-intense relationship with someone who is successfully saving the world". I'm not sure how to describe this - I'd like to try and "save the world" myself with my own little contribution, but I don't want that contribution to be the major reason my partner is drawn to and stays by me. I don't want it to be because my work is "valuable".
If Frodo utterly fails in his ambitions, Samwise-who-wants-to-save-the-world-via-auxiliary-roles aught will hop to a new, better Frodo to support. Can a bond which is essentially based off of someone's propensity to succeed at what they are doing in life really grow to be unconditional? What if Frodo suddenly gets a debilitating disease and can't be a Frodo anymore?
I'm well aware that I might be completely misreading/projecting the intended relationship between Frodo/Samwise here, and feel free to put me in my place if that is the case. But If I presumed rightly, I would say: It's okay, you don't need to conceptualize yourself as a sidekick, - by doing so you're still implicitly buying into the whole comic-book heroism meme, in which you must behave dramatically and drastically in order to be relevant.
It's perfectly alright to just say that you would like to live a simple life of devotion to your partner, patients, friends, family, and community, and that abstract ideas of "saving the world" have nothing to do with it. People like that are the fabric of the society the comic-book types want to protect and enrich in the first place!
All of the above is true. And this post is explicitly written for the people who have bought into "the world needs saving" and are angsty about it because they don't want to perform a "hero" role but feel like they should. I'm sure there are thousands of people all around me living simple lives of devotion to their families, partners, and communities. (This includes many of my fellow nurses.) They don't need telling that this is okay. In fact, I think that in larger society, this might be an overall bad message for me personally to send, because it's possible that in society at large women are dissuaded harder from being CEOs than from being executive assistants (or whatever dichotomy) and sending that message an extra time, even if it's well-written and nuanced, would just sum up to "see, honey, another smart-sounding lady says your place in the world is as the CEO's assistant!" (The message would have a different impact if I were male, but I'm not and I can't do that hypothetical.)
But I'm posting this on Less Wrong, where the worldview of "the world is broken and my ethics dictate I try to fix it" is a pretty common mindset. It's something I've bought into, to a degree. I'm talking to the people who already believe that heroes exist. (Maybe they ought not to.) I'd like those people not to have to feel distressed about this.
Can a bond which is essentially based off of someone's propensity to succeed at what they are doing in life really grow to be unconditional? What if Frodo suddenly gets a debilitating disease and can't be a Frodo anymore?
No. If I were helping someone accomplish an important project, and they became debilitated, I'd find another Frodo. (After I'd made sure my first Frodo was going to at least be comfortable and not miserable.) It'd be hard. Loyalty runs deep in me. I don't know if this is a necessary fact about a Samwise character, or if it's just happened to be true of all the people I've talked to so far. But the ethics I have now that dictate that being a nurse for forty years is not the thing I can do with the largest positive expected impact on the world, would also dictate the same thing about being my former Frodo's home-care nurse. Brienne has been pretty explicit that if she's working with a hero, and finds out that they're wrong about a fundamental thing and thus that she could make more impact on her own, she would do it, even though it would be a personal tragedy.
In terms of the romance aspect... I have no idea. It doesn't feel necessary. It feels like there are lots of real-life examples of a dynamic that would be satisfying and feel right to me and aren't romantic–a CEO's executive assistant isn't normally their romantic partner. Nursing has many of the same aspects, and makes me deeply happy, and there's nothing to do with romance there. Maybe if you're going to be working with a single person, romance is convenient; time spent with your partner is also time spent on your important project, you don't have to budget them separately. (This sounds potentially unhealthy/hard on the relationship aspect, so I don't know.)
But how can you take issue with our insistence [Edit: more like strong encouragement!] that people use hand sanitizer at a 4-day retreat with 40 people sharing food and close quarters?
So, I have noticed that I am overhygienic relative to the general population (when it comes to health; not necessarily when it comes to appearance), and I think that's standard for LWers. I think this is related to taking numbers and risk seriously; to use dubious leftovers as an example, my father's approach to food poisoning is "eh, you can eat that, it's probably okay" and my approach to food poisoning is "that's only 99.999% likely to be okay, no way is eating that worth 10 micromorts!"
Interestingly, I think that when I'm not at work, I'm probably less hygienic than the average population–the implicit thought process is kind of like "oh my god, I have washed my hands every 5 minutes for 12 hours straight, I can't stand the thought of washing my hands again until I next have to go to work." I do make some effort at CFAR workshops but it's ughy.
Third time starting the survey, first time finishing it!
But no automated system can be perfectly reliable
You are using the wrong yardstick. Ain't no thing is perfectly reliable. What matters is whether an automated system will be more reliable than the alternative -- human doctors.
Commercial aviation has a pretty good safety record while relying on autopilots. Are you quite sure that without the autopilot the safety record would be better?
whenever the system spits out, "No diagnosis found".
And why do you think a doctor will do better in this case?
I was going to say "doctor's don't have the option of not picking the diagnosis", but that's actually not true; they just don't have the option of not picking a treatment. I've had plenty of patients who were "symptom X not yet diagnosed" and the treatment is basically supportive, "don't let them die and try to notice if they get worse, while we figure this out." I suspect that often it never gets figured out; the patient gets better and they go home. (Less so in the ICU, because it's higher stakes and there's more of an attitude of "do ALL the tests!")
I find that the signaling aspect maybe accounts for 20-30% of the phenomenon.
I think that about 20-30% of the time (off the top of my head), my good conversations happen late at night because we stay up late because we're in a good conversation. But more often, we stay up late because we just don't want to go to sleep, and then it is like 3 in the morning, and something about it being 3 in the morning triggers good conversation.
It would be interesting to test what actually about "it being late" triggers the good conversation. For example, you could test to see if it is tiredness, or time of the day, or how many hours it's been since you woke up.
I think reduced inhibitions that come with tiredness might help here.
Whereas I'm pretty much always underconfident
That's a bit of self contradictory statement, isn't it? (People can be unassertive but internally very overconfident, by the way).
So you have that patient, and you have your idea on the procedures that should have been done, and there's doctor's, and you in retrospect think you were under-confident that your treatment plan was superior? What if magically you were in the position where you'd actually have to take charge? Where ordering a wrong procedure hurts the patient? It's my understanding that there's a very strong initial bias to order unnecessary procedures, that takes years of experience to overcome.
I suspect it's one of things that look very different from the inside and from the outside... None of those arrogant newbies would have seen themselves in my description (up until they wisen up). Also, your prototype here is the heroic responsibility for saving the human race, taken upon by someone who neither completed formal education in relevant subjects, nor (which would actually be better to see) produced actual working software products of relevance, nor other things of such nature evaluated to be correct in a way that's somewhat immune to rationalization. And a straightforwardly responsible thing to do is to try to do more of rationalization-immune things to practice, because the idea is that screwing up here has very bad consequences.
Other issue is that you are essentially thinking meat, and if the activation of the neurons used for responsibility is outside a specific range, things don't work right, performance is impaired, responsibility too is impaired, etc, whether the activation is too low or too high.
edit: to summarize with an analogy, say, driving a car without having passed a driving test is irresponsible, right? No matter how much you feel that you can drive the bus better than the person who's legally driving it, the responsible thing to do is to pass a driving test first. Now, the heroes, they don't need no stinking tests. They jump into the airplane cockpit and they land it just fine, without once asking if there's a certified pilot on board. In most fiction, heroes are incredibly irresponsible, and the way they take responsibility for things is very irresponsible, but it all works out fine because it's fiction.
So you have that patient, and you have your idea on the procedures that should have been done, and there's doctor's, and you in retrospect think you were under-confident that your treatment plan was superior?
I'm not sure that the doctor and I disagreed on that much. So we had this patient, who weighed 600 pounds and had all the chronic diseases that come with it, and he was having more and more trouble breathing–he was in heart failure, with water backing up into his lungs, basically. Which we were treating with diuretics, but he was already slowly going into kidney failure, and giving someone big doses of diuretics can push them into complete kidney failure, and also can make you deaf–so the doses we were giving him weren't doing anything, and we couldn't give him more. Normally it would have been an easy decision to intubate him and put him on a ventilator around Day 3, but at 600 pounds, with all that medical history, if we did that he'd end up in the hospital for six months, with a tracheotomy, all that. So the doctor had a good reason for wanting to delay the inevitable as long as possible. We were also both expecting that he would need dialysis sooner or later...but we couldn't put him on dialysis to take water off his lungs and avoid having to intubate him, because he was completely confused and delirious and I had enough trouble getting him to keep his oxygen mask on. Dialysis really requires a patient who stays still. We couldn't give him too many medications to calm him down, because anything with a sedative effect would decrease his respiratory effort, and then he'd end up needed to be intubated.
Basically, it was a problem with so many constraints that there was no good solution. I think that my disagreement with the doctor was over values–specifically, the doctor thought of the scenario where we intubate him and put him on dialysis on Monday as basically equivalent to the scenario where we delay it as long as possible and then end up intubating him on Thursday. Whereas to me, latter, where my patient got to spend four extra days writhing around, confused and in pain and struggling to breathe, was a lot worse. I think nurses are trained to have more empathy and care more about a patient being in pain, and also I was seeing him for twelve hours a day whereas the doctor was seeing him for five minutes. And I was really hoping that there was a course of action no one had thought of that was better...but there wasn't, at least not one I was able to think of. So the guy suffered for five days, ended up intubated, and is probably still in the hospital.
What if magically you were in the position where you'd actually have to take charge? Where ordering a wrong procedure hurts the patient?
I would be terrified all the time of doing the wrong thing. Maybe even more than I already am. I think as a nurse, I basically have causal power a lot of the time anyway–I point a problem out to the doctor, I suggest "do you want to do X", he says, "Yeah, X is a good idea." That's scary, despite the presence of a back-up filter that will let me know if X is a terrible idea. [And doctors also have a lot of back-up filters: the pharmacy will call them to clarify a medication order that they think is a bad idea, and nurses can and will speak their opinion, and have the right to refuse to administer treatment if they think that it's unsafe for the patient.]
There may be Dunning-Kruger effect though...
I don't know about the medical context but in the software context, the "heroically responsible" developer is the new guy who is waxing poetic about switching to another programming language (for no reason and entirely unaware of all the bindings that would need to be implemented), who wants others to do unit tests in the situation where they're inapplicable or do some sort of agile development where more formal process with tests is necessary, and fails to recognize unit testing already in place, etc.
He puts himself and his need to be the hero of the project's story ahead of the needs of the project, which is irresponsible, he doesn't actually take time to critically evaluate his own proposals before making them (not fun), which is again irresponsible. His need to heroically save the project is more important than the success of the team. People like him are the starters of those 90%+ start-ups that fail, wasting other people's money and time.
But in his own mind he's the only responsible person on the whole team. The tech lead spents his near-deadline weekend going over thousands lines of other people's code and fixing up other people's bugs? Doesn't register to that new guy, it's still just him.
Eventually most people grow out of that mindset. (I'd dare say most people exhibit some of such behaviours for at least a short period of time. )
This may indeed be a failure mode that new people on teams are prone to, and maybe even something that new people on teams are especially prone to if they've read HPMOR, but I don't think it's the same as the thing I'm talking about–and in particular this doesn't sound like me, as a new nurse who's read HPMOR. I think the analog in nursing would be the new grad who's carrying journal articles around everywhere, overconfident in their fresh-out-of-school knowledge, citing the new Best Practice Guidelines and nagging all the experienced nurses about not following them. Whereas I'm pretty much always underconfident, trying to watch how the experienced nurses do things and learn for them, asking for help lots, and offering my help to everyone all the time. Which is probably annoying sometimes, but not in the same way.
I think that there is a spirit of heroic responsibility that makes people genuinely stronger, which Eliezer is doing his best to describe in HPMOR, and what you described is very much not in the spirit of heroic responsibility.
A discussion of heroic responsibility
[Originally posted to my personal blog, reposted here with edits.]
Introduction
You could call it heroic responsibility, maybe,” Harry Potter said. “Not like the usual sort. It means that whatever happens, no matter what, it’s always your fault. Even if you tell Professor McGonagall, she’s not responsible for what happens, you are. Following the school rules isn’t an excuse, someone else being in charge isn’t an excuse, even trying your best isn’t an excuse. There just aren’t any excuses, you’ve got to get the job done no matter what.” Harry’s face tightened. “That’s why I say you’re not thinking responsibly, Hermione. Thinking that your job is done when you tell Professor McGonagall—that isn’t heroine thinking. Like Hannah being beat up is okay then, because it isn’t your fault anymore. Being a heroine means your job isn’t finished until you’ve done whatever it takes to protect the other girls, permanently.” In Harry’s voice was a touch of the steel he had acquired since the day Fawkes had been on his shoulder. “You can’t think as if just following the rules means you’ve done your duty. –HPMOR, chapter 75.
Something Impossible
Bold attempts aren't enough, roads can't be paved with intentions...You probably don’t even got what it takes,But you better try anyway, for everyone's sakeAnd you won’t find the answer until you escape from theLabyrinth of your conventions.Its time to just shut up, and do the impossible.Can’t walk away...Gotta break off those shackles, and shake off those chainsGotta make something impossible happen today...
The Well-Functioning Gear
I feel like maybe the hospital is an emergent system that has the property of patient-healing, but I’d be surprised if any one part of it does.Suppose I see an unusual result on my patient. I don’t know what it means, so I mention it to a specialist. The specialist, who doesn’t know anything about the patient beyond what I’ve told him, says to order a technetium scan. He has no idea what a technetium scan is or how it is performed, except that it’s the proper thing to do in this situation. A nurse is called to bring the patient to the scanner, but has no idea why. The scanning technician, who has only a vague idea why the scan is being done, does the scan and spits out a number, which ends up with me. I bring it to the specialist, who gives me a diagnosis and tells me to ask another specialist what the right medicine for that is. I ask the other specialist – who has only the sketchiest idea of the events leading up to the diagnosis – about the correct medicine, and she gives me a name and tells me to ask the pharmacist how to dose it. The pharmacist – who has only the vague outline of an idea who the patient is, what test he got, or what the diagnosis is – doses the medication. Then a nurse, who has no idea about any of this, gives the medication to the patient. Somehow, the system works and the patient improves.Part of being an intern is adjusting to all of this, losing some of your delusions of heroism, getting used to the fact that you’re not going to be Dr. House, that you are at best going to be a very well-functioning gear in a vast machine that does often tedious but always valuable work. –Scott Alexander
Recursive Heroic Responsibility
Heroic responsibility for average humans under average conditions
I can predict at least one thing that people will say in the comments, because I've heard it hundreds of times–that Swimmer963 is a clear example of someone who should leave nursing, take the meta-level responsibility, and do something higher impact for the usual. Because she's smart. Because she's rational. Whatever.
Fine. This post isn't about me. Whether I like it or not, the concept of heroic responsibility is now a part of my value system, and I probably am going to leave nursing.
But what about the other nurses on my unit, the ones who are competent and motivated and curious and really care? Would familiarity with the concept of heroic responsibility help or hinder them in their work? Honestly, I predict that they would feel alienated, that they would assume I held a low opinion of them (which I don't, and I really don't want them to think that I do), and that they would flinch away and go back to the things that they were doing anyway, the role where they were comfortable–or that, if they did accept it, it would cause them to burn out. So as a consequentialist, I'm not going to tell them.
And yeah, that bothers me. Because I'm not a special snowflake. Because I want to live in a world where rationality helps everyone. Because I feel like the reason they would react that was isn't because of anything about them as people, or because heroic responsibility is a bad thing, but because I'm not able to communicate to them what I mean. Maybe stupid reasons. Still bothers me.
Anecdotally, it doesn't feel like I get overall improved functioning from caffeine, but I can use it to gain control of when my high-alertness and low-alertness periods will happen. This is 100% a must for the kind of shift work schedule I'm doing right now, which definitely was not intended for humans. I usually consume caffeine at work only and minimize it on my days off; ideally this adds up to consuming it on 4/9 days, in practice more because I take overtime. I take longer breaks whenever possible. Caffeine is pretty much what allows me to function during 12 hour night shifts.
I think that maybe if I could completely remove the effects of current caffeine dependence, I might be able to handle 12 hour day shifts (7 am-7 pm) caffeine free, but I'm not sure about that. Caffeine helps smooth out dips and slumps in my circadian rhythms, and I need all of the alertness I can muster to take care of humans on ventilators.
Wow this post is pretty much exactly what I've been thinking about lately.
Saving a person's life feels great.
Yup. Been there. Still finding a way to use that ICU-nursing high as motivation for something more generalized than "omg take all the overtime shifts."
Also, I think that my brain already runs on something like virtue ethics, but that the particular thing I think is virtuous changes based on my beliefs about the world, and this is probably a decent way to do things for reasons other than visceral caring. (I mean, I do viscerally care about being virtuous...)
Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptangya Zoooooooom Boing Ni!
I'll be going by Regex. I stumbled upon this site due to a side story from the MLP:FIM fanfiction Friendship is Optimal: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal which is a bit weird, but I guess I'm weird. Yes, I like small candy colored equines. Ponies are my lifeblood.
My life history in a nutshell: Highschool was spent mostly figuring out how terrible middleschool was and realizing my ability to control my environment. Learned basic coding, drawing, and organization skills. Found a path in life due to the launch of the Curiosity rover. Robots were cool. Installed Linux.
I am currently a college sophomore pursing mechanical engineering: I've been inspired to create robots. Despite going for a ME degree I have more computer knowledge. My preferred OS is Linux, but I'm not skilled enough with it yet to do much beyond what I can do with Windows.
I am quite interested in personal development, hence why I am here. A lot of the thought processes here seem to mirror my own far more than I've seen elsewhere, so there was kind of a "these are my people" moment. I have been lightly reading the site, but there is just so much I've been doing it in bits and pieces and digesting it as I read.
I am also an artist of sorts, but I can't do much beyond basic line art and sketching. Drawing from my imagination is much more difficult than copying something in front of me. I've had better luck with using programming to make patterns, but I like the ability to produce an arbitrary image by hand. Getting there.
I am very good at organizing information (depending on the need), but I often fail to actually progress beyond that point and do anything with the knowledge gained. This is paralleled with the fact that I have a habit of hording media rather than watching it.
I sing aloud to myself as I walk down the street. Whatever comes to mind. Very fun. I probably am a little inconsiderate of those around me when doing so, but I like to think I am adding a bit of mystery to their day. They'll ask "what was all that singing about?" and never know. I also like smashing piano keys in whatever order sounds pleasing at that moment. More fun.
I am interested in polyphasic sleep, and can currently fall asleep for a short nap basically whenever I please and reduce "core sleep" (aka the long 8 hour sleep block becomes a 4 hour block if I take 2-3 twenty to thirty minute naps during the day), but I didn't go all the way to remove the core sleep.
I consider myself "smarter than average," but now try very very hard not to judge people based on their intellect. I recall once uttering the statement "better to be intelligent than a skateboarder" (I was convinced one cannot be both) in middle school to someone who later became a friend of sorts. This was because I had (still have?) a bit of a superiority complex, but also because I failed to understand where he was coming from and I had (have?) a tendency to misrepresent others in my mind to a significant degree. I have no doubt that those tendencies still lurk out of view.
Regardless of how high or low I might compare to others I want to become better than I am.
I'll be around.
Ensure that you have trained enough for the next challenge, because it is the training that will see you through it, not your agenty conscious thinking.
Spent the last 5+ years of my life trying to do this, specifically for the role of Nurse (and Lifeguard before that). It's been fairly successful, and even generalizes a little–I am frequently the Person who Gets Shit Done in non-nursing contexts.
I'm not sure that the competence/learned skill routines/martial arts for rationality aspect is the same thing as "Being Responsible For This Shit." The former is something that takes years of doing hard things over and over, training the right mental motion the same way you'd train the physical motion. Almost all the things that actually make me a competent ICU nurse fall into this category.
The latter is something that can change in a day, with the right mental reframe. (Example: I usually basically never volunteer to drive places, although I've learned how–I'm not super comfortable and I don't have to. Then I was The Person In Charge of logistics for a large event, and hardly anyone else could drive, and I was responsible–so rather than spend a ton of energy convincing other people to drive places for me, I just got in the car.)
The two skills are probably related and probably correlated–for example, I suspect that many people have trouble taking on the role of "Person In Charge" because they have low confidence in their ability to actually take the right action and make things better rather than worse. (Given that in plenty of situations, taking the wrong action confidently is worse than doing nothing, that may be justified). Acquiring competence in one area, like nursing, brings confidence, and I think that's the thing that generalizes to the rest of my life, rather than any of the specific routines and skills and dealing-with-emergency templates that I've spent years training. It feels like I have a good understanding of which situations actually require very little skill, where the main thing is having the necessary confidence to speak. (Then again, I'm not sure I could distinguish this from "having ingrained a skill to the point that it doesn't even feel like a skill anymore.)
Thanks for the response, that was an interesting read.
As for perfectionism - In retrospect I think it was a huge drag on my own well-being and social relationships but helpful in getting things done. I am much less of a perfectionist nowadays and that has improved my life in many ways at the cost of making me somewhat less effective when it comes to work. Perfectionism for me wasn't just about my work but also about myself and others - seeing the imperfections and trying to iron them out. A pattern of perception if you will that didn't see the good things about myself and others and predominantly focused on optimizing the negatives. I feel much better now after changing that pattern of perception, so I was interested in how you thought of it - also outside of work.
Interesting. I don't have that kind of perfectionist view about other people. At all. I guess I have high expectations for myself (including my work) but I'm also okay with being human and doing things to take care of myself.
Yup. And then I flew to SF and was really busy and didn't fix it until now. Thanks!
Yes but the question is why do they want to? :)
I've worked in elderly care myself a long time ago when I was around 15 years old, which I imagine is quite comparable to being a nurse but I've found the work to be very hard both physically and emotionally (a lot of suffering and occasionally death to deal with). In fact it inspired me to do better in school just to not have to do work this hard for what back then I envisioned being "the rest of my life".
In Germany you either finish school with after 9, 10 or 12 (back then 13) years and you could only study at a University (without jumping through hoops) after attaining your 12/13 year school diploma. I was in the 10-year school type and working in elderly care was pretty much the type of work I might have to do if I left school after 10 years. My grades improved and I switched schools after 10 years and did another 3 just to "escape" hard work like that.
I like work that's hard. The difference between us might be as simple as that. I even like work that's physically hard. There's something really satisfying about getting home from work and how good it feels to sit down and rest your feet, and how you know that the tiredness means you were especially useful that day.
I feel almost ashamed for asking that question, partly because it's quite impolite and inappropriate to ask a question like that (at least outside of LW) and maybe also because it might betray some kind of deeply rooted egghead-elitism on my part that I still can't quite manage shake off, but I simply can't resist this attempt to satisfy my raging curiosity: What's the reason why someone as smart as you chooses to become a nurse?
Also: Do you think of your perfectionism as largely useful, largely a hindrance, or kind-of-a-mixed-bag?
Lots of reasons. The reasons why I originally chose it at age 15 aren't all the same reasons why I keep doing it now.
At age 15: -I wanted to get better at social skills, and nursing seemed like good practice for that. -I wanted a steady guaranteed well-paying job after 4 years of university. Not many things promise that. Nursing does. (My hospital guaranteed me a job, in the unit that I wanted, a year before I even graduated.) -I read number of books by Tilda Shalof about working as an ICU nurse, and my response to them was a powerful "yes, that, I want to do that."
Now: -It's exciting and varied, and challenges and rewards many different parts of me. On a good day at work, I'm curious. I'm admitting a patient and we don't quite know what's going on yet and I stay after the end of my shift to look up their lab results because I fought to get that bloodwork (it's really hard to do blood draws on someone who's in severe shock) and I want to know. On a good day at work, I care. I have the same sweet old lady for a week and she's telling me her life story and keeping me laughing as I coax and cajole her to get up in the chair an extra time, walk an extra lap around the unit, eat one more bite of hospital chicken puree. On a good day, I'm a well-oiled part in a machine much bigger than myself, a necessary and essential member of a great team, and it feels awesome. On a good day, I'm proud: of the IV I put in, the infected central line site that I noticed first, of the antibiotics I reminded the doctor to change, of the help I gave the other nurses. There are some bad days, and lots of meh days, but the work that I'm doing is always important...and in a way that my System 1 can really grasp. No productivity hacks required; I don't need urging to work my butt off. -I'm 22 years old and I have $50K in savings. And job security forever. That's pretty rare. -I have skills that are unusual within the rationality community. Nursing, like engineering, takes in random first-year undergrads and trains them to have a specified set of skills–and, in the process, to see the world in a particular way. I think like a nurse. It makes me inexplicably good at some things, like running logistics for CFAR workshops. It's brought me up to average or above average in a lot of areas, like reacting under pressure and most types of social skills. It's made me generically useful. And I don't think it's done making me more useful. I'm not even a particularly good nurse yet; you aren't expected to be until ~5 years in.
(Perfectionism: useful overall. It might make my learning curve flatter at first, but I think I'll keep improving for longer.)
I probably won't do nursing forever. It's pretty varied, but it's not infinitely varied. Currently I'm having too much fun at work to want to leave; if I'm bored in five years, and I can find a way to legally work in the US in any capacity other than nursing, there are a bunch of interesting things I could do.
“And that’s okay": accepting and owning reality
The Context
I was having a conversation with Ruby a while back–the gist of it was that I was upset because of a nightmare I’d had the night before, and mad at myself for being upset about something that hadn’t even really happened, and trying to figure out how to stop feeling terrible. He said a thing that turned out to be surprisingly helpful.
Life involves feeling bad, often with good reason, often, not. A lot of the time the best response is to say 'Yes, I'm feeling shitty today, no, I'm not going to able to focus, and that's crap, but that’s today.’
It's different from tolerance or resignation, it's more 'this is reality, this is my starting point and I've got to accept this is what it is'.
Then if you can find a way to make it go away, great, if not, most things pass soon enough, and even if didn't, you could accept that too.”
I’m not good at this. I’m frequently using System 2 to fight System 1: for example, when I’m feeling introverted and really don’t want to be at work having face-to-face conversations with patients and co-workers, I basically tell that part of my brain to suck it up and stop being a baby. I get mad at myself for wanting things that I can’t reasonably ask for, like praise from random other nurses I work with. I get mad at myself for wanting things for what I think are the wrong reasons: for example, wanting to move to San Francisco because I’m friends with lots of people there, and reluctantly accepting that I would need to leave my current job to do that, is one thing, but wanting to leave my job because it’s stressful–not okay! And then I mistrust my brain’s motivations to move to San Francisco at all–heaven forbid I should behave “like a groupie.” I ignore my desires for food that isn’t the same bean salad I’ve been eating for four days, for an extra evenings of sleep, or to cancel on plans with a friend because I just want an afternoon alone at home.
And even though I’m pretty good at overriding all of my desires, the sub-agents that represent those desires don’t go away. They just sit there, metaphorically, fuming at being ignoring and plotting revenge, which they usually achieve by making the desires ten times stronger...and then I go out and buy hot dogs at midnight, or stay in bed for thirteen hours, or spend an entire stretch of days off hiding in my apartment reading fanfiction. Or I just end up confused and conflicted and not capable of wanting anything. In other words, I’m a society of mind that’s frequently in a civil war with itself.
I hadn’t thought of trying to accept the civil war. Of saying “tonight, during this hospital shift, I will not be able to solve the civil war. Rather than adding to the negative affect by getting mad at myself, I will accept that today will simply suck and I will feel shitty. Going into the future I will work on peace talks, but today I must endure.”
"And that’s okay."
There’s one area where I’ve successfully taken a thing that I was confused and conflicted and frustrated about, and turned it into a thing that’s okay, even though the original conflict hasn’t been solved. That thing is relationships. At some point, around the time that I started applying the term asexual to myself and first read about tactile defensiveness and suddenly had words for the things that were ‘wrong’ with me, I stopped being frustrated about them. I haven’t solved all the problems. I’m still confused about relationships, I still get super anxious and avoidant in the face of being wanted too much, and that’s okay. Maybe it’ll change. I haven’t given up, and I’m trying things on purpose. It turned out that most of the suffering from this problem was meta-suffering and now it’s gone.
Somehow, when it wasn’t okay, it was a lot harder to try things on purpose.
I hypothesized that adding the mental phrase “and that’s okay” onto all your problems would be a good general-purpose strategy.
Non-complacency
Ruby disagreed with me: “One of my strongest virtues, but I pay a cost for it, is how not-complacent I am. I'm not good enough, the world's not good enough. And I just see it. It's there. And I'm not okay with it.”
The problem is, even though I don’t have the virtue of acceptance, I don’t have the virtue of non-complacency either–in the sense that seeing the things that aren’t good enough, and not being okay with them, rarely causes me to do something to make the things better. It causes me to not think about them, unless it’s something as object-level as “my patient is in pain and the doctor refuses to give me an order for more pain meds.” And sometimes even then, I’ll retreat into it no longer being my problem.
I think that I, and probably others, need a certain amount of acceptance, a certain amount of “and that’s okay”, to let the wrong things into the circle of our awareness–to admit that yes, they really do suck. It’s a bit like the Litany of Gendlin. What’s true is already true, and even though thinking about it being true makes me feel like I must be a bad person, it can’t cause me to be more of a bad person than I already am.
"You need to own it."
Once, I had a fairly awful nursing school placement at a very large, stressful ICU. I made mistakes, despite the fact that ‘I knew better’ in theory. (I’ve since learned that nursing is something that takes place under average conditions, not optimal conditions, meaning that you will have good days and bad days and that on your bad days, you will make dumb mistakes.)
As a perfectionist, I found this really hard, even though I knew enough cogsci to recognize that my brain was behaving predictably and understandably. My mentor said a lot of things that weren’t helpful, but one of the things that she said is “you need to own your mistakes.” At that time, those words left her mouth and reached my ears and then got processed and turned into “you should admit that you’re hopelessly incompetent and a failure.” The only obvious conclusion to draw was that I ought to quit nursing school right then. I didn’t want to quit, and the only other option was to not think about the stupid mistakes–or, rather, try not to, and then end up thinking about them anyway and being anxious all the time.
Nowadays, when I process those words from a much better emotional place, they come through as “you need to let your mistakes into your self-concept, so that you can learn not to make them again even if you’re put under those same awful conditions again.” The fact that being distracted by an interruption and then trying to put an un-primed, full-of-air IV tubing in the pump is understandable and predictable doesn’t make it less likely to kill someone. The correct response is to develop habits and routines that cause you to predictably not make that mistake. But if thinking about it means automatically bringing up the possibility that you should just quit nursing school now before you actually kill someone, it’s hard to think of good routines or focus on training your brain to do them.
In this case, what eventually helped was letting my past mistakes be just okay enough that I could admit them into my mental autobiography, think about them, strategize, and learn from them–in short, own them.
On Having Priorities
When I brought this up to my friend Ben Hoffman, he had another point to add.
The obvious-to-me alternative here is the trick of putting EVERYTHING on a list, prioritizing, and optimizing for working on the "most important thing" instead of for getting all the "important things" done. (Or solving the most important problem, however you want to word it.) This is the strategy I've started using, and when I'm disciplined about it I feel nearly no badness above the baseline level from having some problems unresolved.
This rings true with a part of my nursing clinical experience, and a thing I found especially frustrating about my interactions with my mentor. Once, I accidentally gave my patient an extra dose of digoxin because I misread the medication sheet. Which ended up doing basically nothing, but the general class of “medication error” contains a lot of harmful options. (The most embarrassing and potentially serious med error that I’ve made so far at my current job involved accidentally running my patient’s fentanyl infusion an order of magnitude too high.) There was also the IV-tubing-full-of-air incident.
Then, there was the thing where I would leave plastic syringe caps and bits of paper from wrappers in patients’ beds. This incurred approximately equal wrath to the med errors–in practice, a lot more, because she would catch me doing it around once a shift. I agreed with her on the possible bad consequences. Patients might get bedsores, and that was bad. But there were other problems I hadn’t solved, and they had worse consequences. I had, correctly I think, decided to focus on those first.
That being said, I wasn’t actually able to stop feeling bad about it enough to actually free up mental space for anti-med-error strategizing. This is partly because an adult in a position of authority was constantly mad at me, and I wasn’t able to make that stop feeling bad. But it’s partly because I genuinely felt like a failure every time I caught myself doing something wrong, whether it mattered a lot or not.
Making lists and prioritizing is a useful thing to do, but the physical motion of writing down a list isn’t all that’s involved. There’s the “being disciplined about it”, the ability to actually take all the problems seriously and then only work on the first and most important. I think that's non-trivial, and doesn't automatically happen when you make a list of Important Problems 1 through 5.
Conclusion
There are two closely related concepts here. One is the idea that you can let go of struggling against unpleasant feelings–you can just have the unpleasant feelings and accept them, forgoing the meta-suffering and the useless burning of mental energy that comes with fighting them. If you apply this mental habit of not struggling against suffering, the result is that you have less overall suffering.
The second concept is related to owning mistakes you've made, or personal flaws, or atrocities in the world. By default, it seems like most people either obsess over these or don't think about them–I expect that this happens because the things are too awful. If you apply the mental habit of admitting that you made that mistake and it really was dumb, or that poverty really is bad, but that that's okay, the result is that you can think about it sanely, set priorities, and maybe actually fix it.
However, when I go through these mental motions, they feel like the same operation, applied to a different substrate. It's an habit that I would like to cultivate more.
Appendix
Ruby sourced much of his original thoughts on this from Acceptance and Commitment Theory, and from Russ Harris’ book The Happiness Trap.
In stark contrast to most Western psychotherapy, ACT does not have symptom reduction as a goal. This is based on the view that the ongoing attempt to get rid of ‘symptoms’ actually creates a clinical disorder in the first place. As soon as a private experience is labeled a ‘symptom’, it immediately sets up a struggle with it because a ‘symptom’ is by definition something ‘pathological’; something we should try to get rid of. In ACT, the aim is to transform our relationship with our difficult thoughts and feelings, so that we no longer perceive them as ‘symptoms’. Instead, we learn to perceive them as harmless, even if uncomfortable, transient psychological events. Ironically, it is through this process that ACT actually achieves symptom reduction—but as a by-product and not the goal.
Question: Daenarys rarely posts now and by her description part of that was due to the systematic downvoting. Has someone contacted her ourside LW to let her know this has happened?
I believe that she is aware of it thanks to someone sharing the link to this post on Facebook.
This seems to describe the exact kind of expertise that I'm developing as a critical care nurse. Cool! Someone's studying that!
Meetup : Upper Canada LW Megameetup: Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo, London
Discussion article for the meetup : Upper Canada LW Megameetup: Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo, London
Hi all LWers and CFAR alumni in the eastern Canada region! We'll be hosting a megameetup in Ottawa, Canada, running from 7:00 pm on Friday, July 18th, until early afternoon on Sunday, July 20th. We have a house available and enough space for everyone to sleep on site for the duration. We'll be eating communally, and there will be lots of snacks stocked up at the house, but please plan on contributing some money to cover food costs.
Friday night will be a fun social. Saturday will have a schedule of talks, activities, and CFAR-style classes. Sunday, we will most likely have an outing to a park or beach, depending on weather.
If you would like to come to this meetup, please fill out the following Google Form for logistics purposes: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1zAFz-2nFUfQ31aVW6nFl61gsmnsER7PVCSvlJjwU__E/viewform?usp=send_form
If you have any questions, you can message Swimmer963 and I will try to answer them.
Discussion article for the meetup : Upper Canada LW Megameetup: Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo, London
Ever notice sci-fi/fantasy books written by young people have not just little humor, but absolutely zero humor (eg, Divergent, Eragon)?
I actually haven't read either Divergent or Eragon. I've been told that the fantasy book I wrote recently is funny, and I'm pretty sure I qualify as "young person."
On Terminal Goals and Virtue Ethics
Introduction
A few months ago, my friend said the following thing to me: “After seeing Divergent, I finally understand virtue ethics. The main character is a cross between Aristotle and you.”
That was an impossible-to-resist pitch, and I saw the movie. The thing that resonated most with me–also the thing that my friend thought I had in common with the main character–was the idea that you could make a particular decision, and set yourself down a particular course of action, in order to make yourself become a particular kind of person. Tris didn’t join the Dauntless cast because she thought they were doing the most good in society, or because she thought her comparative advantage to do good lay there–she chose it because they were brave, and she wasn’t, yet, and she wanted to be. Bravery was a virtue that she thought she ought to have. If the graph of her motivations even went any deeper, the only node beyond ‘become brave’ was ‘become good.’
(Tris did have a concept of some future world-outcomes being better than others, and wanting to have an effect on the world. But that wasn't the causal reason why she chose Dauntless; as far as I can tell, it was unrelated.)
My twelve-year-old self had a similar attitude. I read a lot of fiction, and stories had heroes, and I wanted to be like them–and that meant acquiring the right skills and the right traits. I knew I was terrible at reacting under pressure–that in the case of an earthquake or other natural disaster, I would freeze up and not be useful at all. Being good at reacting under pressure was an important trait for a hero to have. I could be sad that I didn’t have it, or I could decide to acquire it by doing the things that scared me over and over and over again. So that someday, when the world tried to throw bad things at my friends and family, I’d be ready.
You could call that an awfully passive way to look at things. It reveals a deep-seated belief that I’m not in control, that the world is big and complicated and beyond my ability to understand and predict, much less steer–that I am not the locus of control. But this way of thinking is an algorithm. It will almost always spit out an answer, when otherwise I might get stuck in the complexity and unpredictability of trying to make a particular outcome happen.
Virtue Ethics
I find the different houses of the HPMOR universe to be a very compelling metaphor. It’s not because they suggest actions to take; instead, they suggest virtues to focus on, so that when a particular situation comes up, you can act ‘in character.’ Courage and bravery for Gryffindor, for example. It also suggests the idea that different people can focus on different virtues–diversity is a useful thing to have in the world. (I'm probably mangling the concept of virtue ethics here, not having any background in philosophy, but it's the closest term for the thing I mean.)
I’ve thought a lot about the virtue of loyalty. In the past, loyalty has kept me with jobs and friends that, from an objective perspective, might not seem like the optimal things to spend my time on. But the costs of quitting and finding a new job, or cutting off friendships, wouldn’t just have been about direct consequences in the world, like needing to spend a bunch of time handing out resumes or having an unpleasant conversation. There would also be a shift within myself, a weakening in the drive towards loyalty. It wasn’t that I thought everyone ought to be extremely loyal–it’s a virtue with obvious downsides and failure modes. But it was a virtue that I wanted, partly because it seemed undervalued.
By calling myself a ‘loyal person’, I can aim myself in a particular direction without having to understand all the subcomponents of the world. More importantly, I can make decisions even when I’m rushed, or tired, or under cognitive strain that makes it hard to calculate through all of the consequences of a particular action.
Terminal Goals
The Less Wrong/CFAR/rationalist community puts a lot of emphasis on a different way of trying to be a hero–where you start from a terminal goal, like “saving the world”, and break it into subgoals, and do whatever it takes to accomplish it. In the past I’ve thought of myself as being mostly consequentialist, in terms of morality, and this is a very consequentialist way to think about being a good person. And it doesn't feel like it would work.
There are some bad reasons why it might feel wrong–i.e. that it feels arrogant to think you can accomplish something that big–but I think the main reason is that it feels fake. There is strong social pressure in the CFAR/Less Wrong community to claim that you have terminal goals, that you’re working towards something big. My System 2 understands terminal goals and consequentialism, as a thing that other people do–I could talk about my terminal goals, and get the points, and fit in, but I’d be lying about my thoughts. My model of my mind would be incorrect, and that would have consequences on, for example, whether my plans actually worked.
Practicing the art of rationality
Recently, Anna Salamon brought up a question with the other CFAR staff: “What is the thing that’s wrong with your own practice of the art of rationality?” The terminal goals thing was what I thought of immediately–namely, the conversations I've had over the past two years, where other rationalists have asked me "so what are your terminal goals/values?" and I've stammered something and then gone to hide in a corner and try to come up with some.
In Alicorn’s Luminosity, Bella says about her thoughts that “they were liable to morph into versions of themselves that were more idealized, more consistent - and not what they were originally, and therefore false. Or they'd be forgotten altogether, which was even worse (those thoughts were mine, and I wanted them).”
I want to know true things about myself. I also want to impress my friends by having the traits that they think are cool, but not at the price of faking it–my brain screams that pretending to be something other than what you are isn’t virtuous. When my immediate response to someone asking me about my terminal goals is “but brains don’t work that way!” it may not be a true statement about all brains, but it’s a true statement about my brain. My motivational system is wired in a certain way. I could think it was broken; I could let my friends convince me that I needed to change, and try to shoehorn my brain into a different shape; or I could accept that it works, that I get things done and people find me useful to have around and this is how I am. For now. I'm not going to rule out future attempts to hack my brain, because Growth Mindset, and maybe some other reasons will convince me that it's important enough, but if I do it, it'll be on my terms. Other people are welcome to have their terminal goals and existential struggles. I’m okay the way I am–I have an algorithm to follow.
Why write this post?
It would be an awfully surprising coincidence if mine was the only brain that worked this way. I’m not a special snowflake. And other people who interact with the Less Wrong community might not deal with it the way I do. They might try to twist their brains into the ‘right’ shape, and break their motivational system. Or they might decide that rationality is stupid and walk away.
+1! I too am skeptical about whether I or most of the people I know really have terminal goals (or, even if they really have them, whether they're right about what they are). One of the many virtues (!) of a virtue ethics-based approach is that you can cultivate "convergent instrumental virtues" even in the face of a lot of uncertainty about what you'll end up doing, if anything, with them.
I'm not sure I'm prepared to make the stronger claim that I don't believe other people have terminal goals. Maybe they do. They know more about their brains than I do. I'm definitely willing to make the claim that people trying to help me rewrite my brain is not going to prove to be useful.
Awesome awesome awesome! This sounds super cool and I am noticing myself being actually sad that I wasn't there.
“Given your intelligence, I am surprised by your career choice. Can you tell me about that?”
It amuses me that someone who wasn't me was asked this question, and now I'm super curious as to who.
I understand the difference. Perhaps I wasn't clear. You can't just call feelings "pointless" because they don't change anything.
You could argue that some feelings do change things and have an effect on actions; sometimes in a negative direction (i.e. anger leading to vengeance and war) sometimes in a positive direction (i.e. Gratitude resulting in kindness and help.) Anger in this example can be considered "pointless" not because it has no effect upon the world, but because it's effect is negative and not endorsed intellectually. I think that's the sense in which despair is pointless in the original example. It does have an effect on the world; it results in people NOT taking actions to make things better.
You could argue with the use of the word "pointless", I suppose.
Thoughts on this:
Obviously it's possible to want multiple things and believe multiple things. My mind, at least, is best approximately as a society of sub-agents than as a single unified self. I think "System 1 vs System 2" is already too much of an approximation–my System 1 definitely isn't unified, and even my System 2 doesn't agree on a single set of beliefs.
Can you simultaneously want sex and not want it?
Yes, and even large amounts of luminosity haven't made this divide go away. I used to not want sex because it was unpleasant, but want to want it because it was a way to profess love and, damn it, I wanted to do that. The not-wanting-sex happened on a more basic, less endorsed level, leading to weird mental resistance and frustration whenever I overrode it and had sex anyway because it was a thing I ought to do. I now do almost the opposite–I listen to my System 1 instincts and don't have sex, but I'm not totally happy with this state of affairs. There's good evidence that humans can't change their sexual orientations, so I've accepted it for now, but if that status quo changed, I would have some rethinking to do, and might press a button to make it different. These are different 'file formats' of belief–System 2 verbal beliefs don't automatically propagate into System 1 visceral urges–but they're nevertheless contradictory, and years of thinking about and paying a lot of attention to the issue hasn't allowed me to resolve that.
Another example: I want kids. By that, I mean that seeing a baby makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside; that I daydream about it; that the first thought that comes when I see or learn many things is "I'm going to teach this to my kids!" I'm also fairly sure that having kids now is not the correct thing to do. It may not be the correct thing to do for a few years. In this case, System 2 rules win out, while System 1 whispers quietly in the background that why don't I have a baby already, and hey, you could put up with some unpleasantness and have a baby in nine months. I'm sure as hell not going to change my System 1, but there is or is not an instrumentally rational thing to do, and what my System 1 wants is only a small part of the calculation. So, if all the other variables push me in the other direction, I might end up not having kids for a long time–and having a mental contradiction for the same length of time.
Is this inevitable? Maybe, maybe not. But it certainly seems to be the default, even for people who spend a lot of time thinking about their beliefs.
Ottawa meetup: Applied Rationality Series, Value of Information
The sixth talk in the Ottawa Applied Rationality series will take place on Tuesday, May 20th at 7:00 pm, at the Canal Royal Oak in Ottawa, Canada. These events are run through the Ottawa Skeptics meetup group. See link here: http://www.meetup.com/Ottawa-Skeptics/events/181263842/
The usual format consists of an approximately 15 minute talk on the topic of the day, followed by semi-structured exercises, followed by beers and unstructured discussion. Previous topics have included "Rational Debating", "Bayes", "Calibration", "Rationality Dojo" (a review session), and "Goal Factoring."
If you are not from Ottawa, but are interested in running meetups in your area, send me a PM and I can give you the PowerPoints that I use for these talks.
No, but for my next informal jacket purchase I will favor zippered pockets.
I slightly favour this; in practice I favour deeper pockets, too. Deep pockets and stretchy material (plus a habit of paying attention to possessions) equals almost a 0% chance of losing keys. I did leave my keys on the ground outside a bar once, when biking home–I had reached into my pocket to get my bike lights, and it was the same pocket as my keys, and I must have forgotten to do the quick-pat-keys-still-there, maybe because I'd had a few drinks.
I'm not sure whether the difference is actually deep stretchy pockets, though, or the habit of patting my key and phone pockets frequently.
I also recommend How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, by Scott Adams. From Amazon's book description:
• Goals are for losers. Systems are for winners.
• “Passion” is bull. What you need is personal energy.
• A combination of mediocre skills can make you surprisingly valuable.
• You can manage your odds in a way that makes you look lucky to others.
...I seem to automatically feel a wave of dislike towards any book that contains a sentence using the word "losers."
However, I will still check that book out.
Book Review: So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport
Very brief summary of main themes
1) “Follow your passion” is terrible advice for most people. Don’t try to find your “true calling” because it’s a false concept.
2) The craftsman’s mindset: build skills through deliberate practice.
3) The importance of control: use your career capital to ask for and obtain autonomy, and other things that make jobs pleasant.
4) Have a mission: once you have skills, use them to explore options and find something that can be your life’s work and driving motivation.
Introduction
This book came to me highly recommended, and didn’t quite live up to its reputation. It’s not that I disagree with anything, but Newport seems to be trying to claim that his point is more new and exciting than I think it actually is. The style reeks of self-help manual. (This isn’t a thing wrong with the book itself, just a fact about my personal taste). Still. It has some points that would be new to me if not for LW/CFAR, and it frames them all together in a tidy package, which may not have happened before. I would definitely recommend it to the average smart high school student.
Favourable Points
1) Promoting Hufflepuff. The world needs more people making hard work and conscientiousness look shiny.
2) The concept of deliberate practice, associated with a career. Deliberate practice doesn’t seem to be an obvious concept, and I’ll get behind any popular book that explains it.
3) Pointing out that mastery can create its own enjoyment; that it’s possible to grow to love an arbitrary activity, if it’s challenging and you can take pride in your skill. Example: the author quoted a study1 that asked people whether they considered their work to be a job (just a way to pay the bills), a career (a path towards better work), or a calling (a vital part of your life and identity.) Looking at a single occupation, college administrative assistants, the study found that the employees were roughly evenly split between calling it a job, career, or calling, and that the strongest predictive factor was time spent in the position. Although there’s a possible sample bias here (employees whose needs aren’t satisfied will keep looking for other opportunities and leave if they find them), it’s still an important point.
4) The fungibility of this thing called “career capital.” You don’t have to find the perfect dream job in order to be happy; you can find a job that provides value to society and is bearable, build up enough skill that you’re indispensable, and then bargain for the things that actually make jobs good over the long term.
5) Specific examples of people exploring opportunities and using their career capital in creative ways. For example, the book mentions a marketing executive, Joe Duffy, who wanted to work creativity into his working life–but instead of quitting and trying to make a living as an artist, he build skills and a reputation in brand icons and logos, until he was offered a job at a company that gave him the creative freedom he wanted. The anecdotes still aren’t that specific, but they feed the availability heuristic with examples.
Downvotes
The author disparagingly discusses the popular literature on career choice. I think that the “don’t follow your passion” point is less novel than he’s making it out to be. I read a lot of self-help career books as a young teenager, like ‘What Color is your Parachute’, and I wasn’t left with a belief that I ought to follow my passion. If I had been, I’d have gone into music or physics, not nursing. I don’t think that “do what you love, and the money will follow” is by any means the common sense advice peddled by life coaches.
I’m more prepared to believe that pop culture says there’s a tradeoff between doing a poorly paying job that you can love, or a well-paid job that will be boring; that you may have to make a choice about which one you want. There are solid economic reasons for this to be true.
I’m not sure to what degree the author cherry-picked his examples, but it would have been very easy to do, even without realizing. The examples break down into ‘naive, idealistic people who daydreamed about being famous and quit their jobs to pursue fantasies’, and ‘driven hard-working people who pursued ambitious careers and were lucky enough to succeed big.’
If he’s trying to make the point that drive and hard work matter more than idealism, I am the easiest person to make that point to...and I still don’t like the way he makes it. Where are the ambitious people who burned out and quit? The unambitious people who found steady jobs and raised families and had gardens in their backyards and lived happily ever after? The rest of the people in the world who don’t fit clearly into one category or another?
I guess maybe my true rejection is that none of the people profiled were nurses, or anything in that reference class. The book, however it claims not to, seems to implicitly reinforce the idea that there are “good” jobs–shiny high status jobs that anyone would find impressive–and then there are jobs like community centre manager and social worker and librarian and nurse, which aren’t even worth mentioning.
Thoughts on learning coefficients, economic demand, and how the book applies to my life
This isn’t mentioned in the book explicitly, but it’s a thought that came to me afterwards and feels related.
The “career capital”, or bargaining power, that you have in your job depends on how valuable you are to your employer. This, in turns, depends on several things: one of them is your skill relative to the other people they could be employing, but another factor is the supply/demand balance of people with your qualifications.
I’m pretty good at writing, and I suspect I could get a lot better if I spent the time. But I’m by no means an above-average nurse, even for my reference class of nurses with just under a year of experience.
I still have a ton of bargaining power, probably much more than I’d have in any job that involved my writing skills. Being a writer is cool, and lots of people want to do it, but there’s not that much need in the world for writers...and so it’s hard to make a living, even if you’re a very good writer. Nursing, on the other hand, is unglamorous and hard, and the supply/demand mismatch is in the opposite direction. As a result, less than a year out of university, I have a lot of something like career capital. I’ve managed to bargain for a flexible part-time position that lets me work basically as many or as few hours as I want to (at the cost of a weird schedule), with arbitrary flexibility to take time off and travel. I could move to approximately anywhere in the world and have a job on a few months’ notice. And I happen to like my job a lot, so I win all around. The author doesn’t mention this type of career capital at all.
Still, I guess the thing that I’m doing with my career capital–getting a flex schedule so that I can do shiny exciting things like volunteering for CFAR, without having to give up income and stability–is probably something that Newport would approve of would approve of.
References
1. Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin, et al. “Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People’s Relations to Their Work,” Journal of Research in Personality 31 (1997): 21?33.
OK, guilty. Most of my successes in life so far are explained by the fact that it's easy for me to work hard for long periods of time without burning out, and that my internal reward system is set up to make delayed gratification easy.
...Amusingly, I used to think I had inherited an awful metabolism that made it impossible for me to lose weight, because it is really hard for me to lose weight by dieting, even though I was swimming competitively and very fit. A couple of years ago, when I finally decided that my actual weight was just fine and what the hell, I concluded that I was fortunate to have a fast metabolism and be able to eat whatever I wanted without gaining weight. Unsure what to conclude from this.
Thanks! I still agree with what I think is the main message of "keep your identity small": not allowing things to automatically be part of your identity for historical or political reasons.
Which identities did you cultivate? I'm curious how you dealt with your stingy person identity.
I'm curious how you dealt with your stingy person identity.
Mainly by being able to point out that its purpose has expired. It was really useful being a stingy person in first-year university–I had a lot of time, and limited ability to turn it into money. Being stingy allowed me to not go into debt, at the cost of maybe a bit of happiness–I always felt a bit guilty about i.e. going out to dinner with friends. Once I graduated, the default was to stay stingy, but I can convince my brain to relax on specific items like "go out to dinner with friends" or "travel to lots of places" because, hey, the whole point of being stingy in the first place was to get me through school and to the point when I had a career and savings and could do fun things.
Awesome post! I've definitely spent a long time vaguely thinking that "keep your identity small" was a good idea, while cultivating various identities anyway.
"The aversion to wasting money and material things predictably led to wasting time and attention instead. I found it useful to try "thinking like a trader" to counteract this "stingy person" identity, and get comfortable with the idea of trading money for time. Now I no longer obsess about recycling or buy the cheapest version of everything."
This resonates so hard for me.
Posting this before reading the comments to give a summary/response based on my own internal experiences. Quick note: I'm extremely good at internalizing/manipulating information, and about proficient at "reacting". It might also be worth noting sex (I'm male), since I could definitely see these kinds of thought processes being different on the two standard systems.
This analysis is definitely subject to the "generalizing from one example" problem, considering some large differences between the thought mechanisms you mention and my own. One telling example is the programming/reacting analogy: when programming(and writing, after the first stage of composition) I have this tendency to "hold the whole program in my head" as I've heard it called, and in doing so I don't use an internal monologue at all. In fact, when I'm solving most problems(math, spatial manipulations, logic puzzles) in my mind, my internal monologue is silent, and rather I'm working silently in my headspace- my reasoning methods feel spatial, rather than verbal. When working in a group (cooking is the closest example of "reacting" that I can relate to in terms of necessitated efficiency/urgency) the monologue is still silent and I'm solving problems through psuedospatial manipulation; the significantly smaller amount of problem solving necessary does tend to allow the problem/solution to just remain static in my head for most of the time though while I engage in physical tasks, rather than actively solving it. This for me, leads to a sense that very little focus is used while reacting; some tasks (mincing garlic, dicing onions(crying makes it harder), &c.) however may require close attention, if physically complicated, and this might be the other kind of focus you mention. I can, overall, add another confirming data point to the "silencing your internal monologue is helpful/necessary for reacting properly" hypothesis though.
I also have some possible suggestions, though mileage will likely vary very extremely:
silencing ones internal monologue can be aided by meditation- in fact, they are practically equivalent- so the initial meditation exercises, to "clear ones mind" may prove useful in getting used to doing this, and possibly make it easier.
there's no need to practice silencing your internal monologue only while "reacting"-try doing it during everyday tasks where intense thought isn't necessary(eg brushing your teeth), and it might become that much easier.
if your brain works like mine, you may be able to delegate certain tasks to parts of your mind not directly linked to what you consider "you" (one notably common example is how sometimes you realize the solution to a problem you were working on a while ago but not actively thinking about), and if you can get good at this, it works better(for me) than memorizing responses- just let yourself respond on automatic.
...Several years later, I finally got up the willpower and time to start meditating, and it did help. But not as much as other things, like just getting a lot of practice.
I can see how a reputation for lying would be a bad thing to have, but I can also see why a reputation for not being capable of lying would be a bad thing (mainly in social contexts). From one of my other comments:
For almost a year my best friend was dating a man without telling her ex-husband, and I was seeing her ex-husband every time I went to play with my godson, and I had to remember to lie about a whole bunch of random things like "what did you and my ex-wife do on Saturday?"
This was hard for me. There've been other times where I've slipped up and forgotten. Usually not in the context of friends explicitly telling me to lie about something, but in the context of Person X them telling me something which, to them, is obviously something that they want to conceal from Person Y because of conflicts it would cause. However, I don't model this–I model Person X and Person Y both as friends who I trust with details about my life, and assume that's commutative. I don't even think about it on a conscious level–it's not "I want to tell this person the truth about the thing this other person did because lying is complicated"–they just ask me a question and I answer it. I try to avoid having enemies because it makes things complicated, but that's not something I could force my friends to do, and it's not even something I would think was right to force them to do...I just don't get around to noticing potential conflicts.
Among certain groups of my friends, I've definitely earned the reputation for being a bit socially inept because of things like this.
"This doesn't bother me. I've got plenty of time. I just want you to be comfortable, that's my job."
Just saying "this is part of my job and I love my job" is not good enough?
I was seeing her ex-husband every time I went to play with my godson, and I had to remember to lie about a whole bunch of random things
I wonder if there is a better way of handling this, other than telling your best friend that you are not going to be a part of this game and risking a backlash... In a similar situation I ended up curtailing my interactions with the party I'd have to lie habitually to, which is rather suboptimal.
Just saying "this is part of my job and I love my job" is not good enough?
It sounds evasive and not like the natural response, and I'm not all that worried about my patients yelling "no, you're a liar!" and getting mad if I tell them I don't mind at all, and I don't have any particular reason to want to not lie in this situation.
But is that literally as good for a patient in an ICU who really, really needs to not shut up about these things? i mean, in that situation, it would probably occur to me that the nurse might still be lying... but telling a lie like that is still a kind of permission to bother her which "Don't worry about it" isn't.
Agreed. One of the things I think is wrong with lying in general is that it can mess up the incentives for behaviours you want to see more of (i.e. a white lie to your friend, claiming to like her awful haircut, doesn't do anything to help your friend improve her future haircuts.) In my example, I'm lying with respect to my first-order desires, but telling the truth according to my second-order desires. I may first-order want a few more minutes to drink tea and socialize with the other nurses, but I don't endorse myself wanting that, and I certainly don't want to encourage my patients to not call me because they're worried I'm too busy or tired or cranky. I second-order want to encourage the behaviour where my patients call me for all the little things and 90% of the time it's annoying and stupid but 10% of the time it's super important.
If I ever had a patient with a rationalist background, maybe I could explain all of that, but maybe not even then; most people aren't at their best for following complex logic when they're loopy on drugs or having trouble breathing or whatnot. So I go for the emotional reassurance, because that gets through. Still working on different phrasings, and I don't always succeed; I was helping out another nurse with her patient who had diarrhea, putting her on the bedpan every half hour, and at one point she fell asleep and pooped in the bed while asleep and then cried with frustration the whole time I changed her, and I wasn't able to reassure her.
I'm curious about how you, being a nurse, would prefer that the patient behave in situations like this? There don't seem to be great options - is there a least-bad attitude?
...I feel like a lot of that boils down to stuff out of patients' control, like "don't be confused or delirious." Assuming that my patient is totally with it and can reasonably be expected to try to behave politely, I prefer that patients tell me right away when they need something, listen to my explanation of what I'm going to do about it and when I'll be able to do it, or why I can't do anything about it, and then accept that and not keep bringing up the same complaint repeatedly unless it gets worse. I have had patients who rang the call bell every 5 minutes for hours to tell me that they were thirsty, when I'd already explained that I couldn't give them anything by mouth, or that their biggest concern was being thirsty but I was more concerned that their heart rate was 180 and I really really needed to deal with that first.
I obviously prefer it when patient's aren't embarrassed and I can joke around with them and chat about their grandkids while cleaning their poop. But emotional reactions aren't under most people's control either, so it's not a reasonable thing to ask.
There are certain lies that I tell over and over again, where I'm 99% sure lying is the morally correct answer. Stereotypical example: my patient is lying in a lake of poop, or is ringing the call bell for the third time in 15 minutes to tell me that they're thirsty or in pain or need a kleenex, and they're embarrassed and upset because they're sure I must be frustrated and mad that they're making me do so much work. "Of course I don't mind," I've said over and over again. "This doesn't bother me. I've got plenty of time. I just want you to be comfortable, that's my job." When it's 4 am and I desperately want to go on break and eat something, none of these things are true. But it's my job, and I want to want to do it, so the fact that sometimes I desperately don't want to do it is kind of moot. But the last thing a patient in the ICU needs to hear from their nurse is "yes, I'm pissed that you shat in the bed again because I was about to go on break and now I can't and I'm hungry and cranky." I keep that to myself.
...Other than that, I generally don't lie to friends, although I do lie by omission, especially when it comes to my irrational feelings of frustration or irritation with things they do. I'm generally not bothered by being very open with people about i.e. my relationships or other personal things, so I'm confused when other people want to lie or conceal information about these sorts of things. I actually have a really hard time keeping up with other people's systems of lying; when you're friends with two people who both have specific lists of things they don't want you to ever tell the other person, it gets complicated. (For almost a year my best friend was dating a man without telling her ex-husband, and I was seeing her ex-husband every time I went to play with my godson, and I had to remember to lie about a whole bunch of random things like "what did you and my ex-wife do on Saturday?" I respected that it was her choice whether or not to tell him, but I still found this really, really irritating.)
I just ran into an intriguing blog post where the author seems to essentially bring stability and predictability into his life by deliberately pursuing an impossible goal, and remembering this comment, got curious about what you'd think about it:
Fear of success. At its root this is a fear of change. If I succeed in the thing I am setting out to do, what then? What if I actually become the person I wish to become, who am I? My solution to this was to set up my school and my training in such a way that success was impossible. There is no end goal or end result. There is only process. My mission in life is deliberately unattainable: to restore our European martial heritage to its rightful place at the heart of European culture. Of course that cannot be achieved alone, and there is no reasonable expectation of it being accomplished in my lifetime. There is no question that European martial arts have come a long way in the last decade or so, and my work has been a part of that, but another excellent aspect to this goal is even if we could say it was accomplished in my lifetime, nobody would ever suggest that I did it. So fear of success is not a problem, as success is impossible.
I saw that on your Facebook before I saw it here, so already had thoughts on it.
1) I can see how it's less scary to think about, as a goal.
2) Picturing it in my head, I can't imagine myself using this and actually feeling motivated to work really hard because of this goal. But that may be less because it's impossible, and more because it's big and vague–my brain has an established problem with big vague goals.
If everybody was cowed by the simple fact that they can't succeed, then that one-in-a-million person who can succeed would never take their shot. So I was sure as hell going to take mine. But if the chance that one person can save the world is one in a million, then there had better be a million people trying.
I want to upvote about twenty times for this phrase alone. I suspect that your psychology was very different than mine; I think I crave stability and predictability a lot more. One of the reasons that "saving the world" always seemed like an impossible thing to do, like something that didn't even count as a coherent goal, was that I didn't know where to start or even what the ending would look like. That becomes a lot more tractable if you're one of a million people trying to solve a problem, and a lot less scary.
However, idealism still scares me. I remember being a kid and reading about communism and thinking that it really ought to work. I remember thinking that if I'd been a young adult back before communism, I would have bet my time and effort on it working. And...it turned out not to work. Since I probably wasn't any smarter than the people who tried to make communism work, how could I have any better of a chance at coming up with something valuable? Better to focus on small things, one at a time, and rely on the fact that however convoluted and mess-up society is, it muddles along and hasn't self-destructed yet. And not risk ending up doing something really awful that would result in lots of people dying.
Of course, that relies on a belief that society, which has muddled along so far, will continue to do so. There've been enough changes in the past few decades and centuries that you can make a good case for this not being true.
Congratulations, Berlin LessWrongers! This sounds like it will be very neat. And its existence required lots of work, which deserves yays. Yay!
The math seems much clearer to you than I, so let me ask: Is it possible that immortality as an option would dilute life's value when compared to a more tradtional human existence (75 years, dies of natural causes)?
I can imagine a 150-year lifespan being preferable to 75; 300 to 150; 1000 to 300; etc. And even when the numbers get very large and I cannot imagine the longer lifespan being better, I chalk it up to my weak imagination.
But what about infinite life? does the math break down if you could live -- preserve "your" consciousness, memories, etc. -- forever?
I can imagine a 150-year lifespan being preferable to 75; 300 to 150; 1000 to 300; etc. And even when the numbers get very large and I cannot imagine the longer lifespan being better, I chalk it up to my weak imagination.
Very large but non-infinite numbers are more likely to be what's on the table, I think. Given that something is likely to catch up with a future human society, even one capable of reviving frozen people–even if it's just the heat death of the universe.
For me, there's another factor: I have children.
I do value my own life. But I also value the lives of my children (and, by extension, their descendants).
So the calculation I look at is that I have $X, which I can spend either to obtain a particular chance of extending/improving my own life OR I can spend it to obtain a improvements in the lives of my children (by spending it on their education, passing it to them in my will, etc).
Excellent point. This isn't a consideration for me right now, but I expect there will be in the future.
As someone who steelmans and interprets other people charitably a lot, I hadn't thought of the problems this could cause. I've managed to change my mind about a lot of things in the past few years; I wonder how much of this is because I didn't have any beliefs I held very strongly before, and don't hold many of my current beliefs all that strongly either.
I wouldn't risk my life for a paycheck.
Do you drive to work?
I bike, which might be worse but also might be better; depends how much the added lifespan from physical fitness trades off against the risk of an accident. And the risk is very likely less than 1/1000 given the years that I've been biking accident-free, so there's a multiplication there.
Cryonics has a more serious problem which I seldom see addressed. I've noticed a weird cognitive dissonance among cryonicists where they talk a good game about how much they believe in scientific progress, technological acceleration and so forth - yet they seem totally unconcerned about the fact that we just don't see this alleged trend happening in cryonics technology, despite its numerous inadequacies. In fact, Mike Darwin argues that the quality of cryopreservations has probably regressed since the 1980's.
In other words, attempting the cryogenic preservation of the human brain in a way which makes sense to neuroscientists, which should become the real focus of the cryonics movement, has a set of solvable, or at least describable, problems which current techniques could go a long way towards solving without having to invoke speculative future technologies or friendly AI's. Yet these problems have gone unsolved for decades, and not for the lack of financial resources. Just look at some wealthy cryonicists' plans to waste $100 million or more building that ridiculous Timeship (a.k.a. the Saulsoleum) in Comfort Texas.
What brought about this situation? I've made myself unpopular by suggesting that we can blame cryonics' association with transhumanism, and especially with the now discredited capital-N Nanotechnology cultism Eric Drexler created in the 1980's. Transhumanists and their precursors have a history of publishing nonsensical predictions about how we'll "become immortal" by arbitrary dates within the life expectancies of the transhumanists who make these forecasts. (James D. Miller does this in his Singularity Rising book. I leave articulating the logical problem with this claim as an exercise to the reader). Then one morning we read in our email that one of these transhumanists has died according to actuarial expectations, and possibly went into cryo, like FM-2030; or simply died in the ordinary way, like the Extropian Robert Bradbury.
In other words, transhumanism promotes a way of thinking which tends to make transhumanists spectators of, instead of active participants in, creating the sort of future they want to see. And cryonics has become a casualty of this screwed up world view, when it didn't have to turn out that way. Why exert yourself to improve cryonics' scientific credibility - again, in ways which neuroscientists would have to take seriously - when you believe that friendly AI's, Drexler's genie-like nanomachines and the technological singularity will solve your problems in the next 20-30 years? And as a bonus, this wonderful world in 2045 or so will also revive almost all the cryonauts, no matter how badly damaged their brains.
Well, I don't consider this a feasible "business plan" for my survival by cryotransport. And I know some other cryonicists who feel similarly. Cryonics needs some serious rebooting, and I've started to give some thought about regarding how I can get involved in the effort once I can find the people who look like they can make a go of it.
I've noticed a weird cognitive dissonance among cryonicists where they talk a good game about how much they believe in scientific progress, technological acceleration and so forth - yet they seem totally unconcerned about the fact that we just don't see this alleged trend happening in cryonics technology, despite its numerous inadequacies.
The problem of people compartmentalizing between what they think is valuable and what they ought to be working on is pretty universal. That being said, it does make cryonics less likely to succeed, and thus worth less; it's just a failure mode that might be hard to solve.
Some context googled together from earlier LW posts about this topic:
From the recent ChrisHallquists $500 thread a comment that takes the outside view and comes to a devasting conclusion: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jgu/i_will_pay_500_to_anyone_who_can_convince_me_to/acd5
In the discussion of a relevant blog post we have this critical comment: http://lesswrong.com/user/V_V/overview/
In the Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics post a real Neuroscientist gave his very negative input: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8f4/neil_degrasse_tyson_on_cryonics/6krm
As a general note I'd urge you to question the probabilities you took from Will Cryonics Work as those numbers seem to
lack references (to me the look made up esp. because the are not qualified by e.g. a time until revive) and
they are from a pro-cryonics site.
As a general note I'd urge you to question the probabilities you took from Will Cryonics Work as those numbers seem to lack references (to me the look made up esp. because the are not qualified by e.g. a time until revive) and they are from a pro-cryonics site.
Yes. My calculations are lazy. I cobbled together the ideas of this post in a conversation that took place when I was supposed to be sleeping, and when I wrote it a few days later, it was by carving 2 hours out after my bedtime. Which won't be happening again tonight because I can only work so many 12 hour shifts on five hours of sleep a night. The alternative wasn't doing better calculations; it was not doing any calculations at all and sticking with my bottom line that cryonics doesn't feel like something I want to do, just because.
Also: the reason I posted this publically almost as soon as I had the thought of writing it at all was to get feedback. So thank you. I will hopefully read through all the feedback and take it into account the next time I would rather do that than sleeping.
It feels to me like the general pro-cryo advocacy here would be a bit of a double standard, at least when compared to general memes of effective altruism, shutting up and multiplying, and saving the world. If I value my life equally to the lives of others, it seems pretty obvious that there's no way by which the money spent on cryonics would be a better investment than spending it on general do-gooding.
Of course, this is not a new argument, and there are a few standard responses to it. The first one is that I don't actually value my life equally to that of everyone else's life, and that it's inconsistent to appeal to that when I don't appeal to it in my life in general. And it's certainly true that I do actually value my own life more than I value the life of a random stranger, but I do that because I'm human and can't avoid it, not because my values would endorse that as a maximally broad rule. If I get a chance to actually act in accordance to my preferred values and behave more altruistically than normal, I'll take it.
The other standard argument is that cryonics doesn't need to come out of my world-saving budget, it can come out of my leisure budget. Which is also true, but it requires that I'm interested enough in cryonics that I get enough fuzzy points from buying cryonics to make up whatever I lose in exchange. And it feels like once you take the leisure budget route, you're implicitly admitting that this is about purchasing fuzzies, not utilons, which makes it a little odd to apply to all those elaborate calculations which are often made with a strong tone of moral obligation. If one is going to be a utilitarian and use the strong tone of moral obligation, one doesn't get to use it to make the argument that one should invest a lot of money on saving just a single person, and with highly uncertain odds at that.
By going with the leisure budget argument, one is essentially admitting that cryonics isn't about altruism, it's about yourself. And of course, there is nothing wrong with that, since none of us is a 100% complete altruist who cares nothing about themselves, nor should we even try to idealize that kind of a person. And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with signing up for cryonics - everyone gets to use their fuzzies budget the way they prefer, and if cryonices gives you the most fuzzies, cool. But if one doesn't get major fuzzies out of cryo, then that ought to be considered just as reasonable as well.
It feels to me like the general pro-cryo advocacy here would be a bit of a double standard, at least when compared to general memes of effective altruism, shutting up and multiplying, and saving the world.
I think this is why it feels squicky trying to assign a monetary value to my life; part of me thinks it's selfish to assign any more value to my life than Givewell's stated cost to save a stranger's life ($1700-ish??) But I know I value it more than that. I wouldn't risk my life for a paycheck.
Why I haven't signed up for cryonics
(OR)
How I'm now on the fence about whether to sign up for cryonics
I'm not currently signed up for cryonics. In my social circle, that makes me a bit of an oddity. I disagree with Eliezer Yudkowsky; heaven forbid.
My true rejection is that I don't feel a visceral urge to sign up. When I query my brain on why, what I get is that I don't feel that upset about me personally dying. It would suck, sure. It would suck a lot. But it wouldn't suck infinitely. I've seen a lot of people die. It's sad and wasteful and upsetting, but not like a civilization collapsing. It's neutral from a point of pleasure vs suffering for the dead person, and negative for the family, but they cope with it and find a bit of meaning and move on.
(I'm desensitized. I have to be, to stay sane in a job where I watch people die on a day to day basis. This is a bias; I'm just not convinced that it's a bias in a negative direction.)
I think the deeper cause behind my rejection may be that I don't have enough to protect. Individuals may be unique, but as an individual, I'm fairly replaceable. All the things I'm currently doing can and are being done by other people. I'm not the sole support person in anyone's life, and if I were, I would be trying really, really hard to fix the situation. Part of me is convinced that wanting to personally survive and thinking that I deserve to is selfish and un-virtuous or something. (EDIT: or that it's non-altruistic to value my life above the amount Givewell thinks is reasonable to save a life–about $5,000. My revealed preference is that I obviously value my life more than this.)
However, I don't think cryonics is wrong, or bad. It has obvious upsides, like being the only chance an average citizen has right now to do something that might lead to them not permanently dying. I say "average citizen" because people working on biological life extension and immortality research are arguably doing something about not dying.
When queried, my brain tells me that it's doing an expected-value calculation and the expected value of cryonics to me is is too low to justify the costs; it's unlikely to succeed and the only reason some people have positive expected value for it is that they're multiplying that tiny number by the huge, huge number that they place on the value of my life. And my number doesn't feel big enough to outweigh those odds at that price.
Putting some numbers in that
If my brain thinks this is a matter of expected-value calculations, I ought to do one. With actual numbers, even if they're made-up, and actual multiplication.
So: my death feels bad, but not infinitely bad. Obvious thing to do: assign a monetary value. Through a variety of helpful thought experiments (how much would I pay to cure a fatal illness if I were the only person in the world with it and research wouldn't help anyone but me and I could otherwise donate the money to EA charities; does the awesomeness of 3 million dewormings outway the suckiness of my death; is my death more or less sucky than the destruction of a high-end MRI machine), I've converged on a subjective value for my life of about $1 million. Like, give or take a lot.
Cryonics feels unlikely to work for me. I think the basic principle is sound, but if someone were to tell me that cryonics had been shown to work for a human, I would be surprised. That's not a number, though, so I took the final result of Steve Harris' calculations here (inspired by the Sagan-Drake equation). His optimistic number is a 0.15 chance of success, or 1 in 7; his pessimistic number is 0.0023, or less than 1/400. My brain thinks 15% is too high and 0.23% sounds reasonable, but I'll use his numbers for upper and lower bounds.
I started out trying to calculate the expected cost by some convoluted method where I was going to estimate my expected chance of dying each year and repeatedly subtract it from one and multiply by the amount I'd pay each year to calculate how much I could expect pay in total. Benquo pointed out to me that calculation like this are usually done using perpetuities, or PV calculations, so I made one in Excel and plugged in some numbers, approximating the Alcor annual membership fee as $600. Assuming my own discount rate is somewhere between 2% and 5%, I ran two calculations with those numbers. For 2%, the total expected, time-discounted cost would be $30,000; for a 5% discount rate, $12,000.
Excel also lets you do calculations on perpetuities that aren't perpetual, so I plugged in 62 years, the time by which I'll have a 50% chance of dying according to this actuarial table. It didn't change the final results much; $11,417 for a 5% discount rate and $21,000 for the 2% discount rate.
That's not including the life insurance payout you need to pay for the actual freezing. So, life insurance premiums. Benquo's plan is five years of $2200 a year and then nothing from then on, which apparently isn't uncommon among plans for young healthy people. I could probably get something as good or better; I'm younger. So, $11,00 for total life insurance premiums. If I went with permanent annual payment, I could do a perpetuity calculation instead.
In short: around $40,000 total, rounding up.
What's my final number?
There are two numbers I can output. When I started this article, one of them seemed like the obvious end product, so I calculated that. When I went back to finish this article days later, I walked through all the calculations again while writing the actual paragraphs, did what seemed obvious, ended up with a different number, and realized I'd calculated a different thing. So I'm not sure which one is right, although I suspect they're symmetrical.
If I multiply the value of my life by the success chance of cryonics, I get a number that represents (I think) the monetary value of cryonics to me, given my factual beliefs and values. It would go up if the value of my life to me went up, or if the chances of cryonics succeeding went up. I can compare it directly to the actual cost of cryonics.
I take $1 million and plug in either 0.15 or 0.00023, and I get $150,000 as an upper bound and $2300 as a lower bound, to compare to a total cost somewhere in the ballpark of $40,000.
If I take the price of cryonics and divide it by the chance of success (because if I sign up, I'm optimistically paying for 100 worlds of which I survive in 15, or pessimistically paying for 10,000 worlds in which I survive in 23), I get the total expected cost per my life being saved, which I can compare to the figure I place on the value of my life. It goes down if the cost of cryonics goes down or the chances of success go up.
I plug in my numbers and get a lower bound of $267,000 and an upper bound of 17 million.
In both those cases, the optimistic success estimates make it seem worthwhile and the pessimistic success estimates don't, and my personal estimate of cryonics succeeding falls closer to pessimism. But it's close. It's a lot closer than I thought it would be.
Updating somewhat in favour that I'll end up signed up for cryonics.
Fine-tuning and next steps
I could get better numbers for the value of my life to me. It's kind of squicky to think about, but that's a bad reason. I could ask other people about their numbers and compare what they're accomplishing in their lives to my own life. I could do more thought experiments to better acquaint my brain with how much value $1 million actually is, because scope insensitivity. I could do upper and lower bounds.
I could include the cost of organizations cheaper than Alcor as a lower bound; the info is all here and the calculation wouldn't be too nasty but I have work in 7 hours and need to get to bed.
I could do my own version of the cryonics success equation, plugging in my own estimates. (Although I suspect this data is less informed and less valuable than what's already there).
I could ask what other people think. Thus, write this post.
You deserve and have earned many yays for this! I am looking forwards to future posts with a more specific breakdown of how you accomplished it.
A decade ago, I decided to save the world. I was fourteen, and the world certainly wasn't going to save itself.
It's interesting how different this is from my 14-year-old mindset. I remember reading a lot about peak oil and climate change and other mundane civilizational (not necessarily existential) risks, and concluding that the world had a good chance of getting a lot worse (or a lot better; I was also reading Ray Kurzweil's writing on the Singularity at around the same time) and that, realistically speaking, I wasn't going to be able to do anything about it. I didn't exactly lie down in despair; I decided to learn as many generally useful skills as possible, so that I'd have a place and be ale to survive in either future. This is a big reason why I chose nursing as a career.
To a large extent, my monkey brain still believes that the world is too big and the forces are too strong and I don't have the power to affect the future or save the world. Of course, after absorbing some of the LW hero memes, my monkey brain also thinks that I ought to want to save the world.
I'm leery of developing increased physical awareness. At any given moment, if I care to notice it, I start feeling mild pain in random parts of my body. As long as I'm not paying attention to the pain, it's not there, but when I start to think about how, say, my legs are feeling, I notice that there's a bit of pain there that wasn't there before because I wasn't thinking about it. So I often try to suppress physical awareness by focusing on absorbing activities such as reading, etc. Am I wrong in expecting that increasing my physical awareness would also mean increasing my awareness of annoying (mild) pains that I'd prefer to just shut out completely?
There are a number of meditation exercises that have components where you try to focus on a painful sensation and stop experiencing it as aversive. I don't know if this would counteract the negative affect of noticing pain. Of course, there might be actual reasons why you're in pain; posture, not exercising enough, not stretching, exercising too much, etc etc. My brain wants to say that it's worth being aware of pain because then you can try to find the cause and fix it, but this is optimizing for my brain and not yours.
...There are definitely days when I ignore physical states because I'm busy at work. This doesn't help in the long run; it ends with me being really cranky and not knowing why and it being obvious from outside view that it's because I forgot to drink water. It's more efficient to be paying attention to thirst the whole time, even though then I have to suffer and be thirsty a bit when I'm stuck in my patient's room.
Hard as in effortful, requiring willpower, &c.? Or just hard as in you were trying to do something & weren't good at it yet?
Because the "click" moment for me was realizing that meditation could be in the second category but not the first.
Both. I think we're different in that way.
After reading Swimmer's article, I was thinking about starting to meditate; but you're making it feel very hard, complicated and dangerous now.
There are a lot of people who think widely divergent things about meditation. The people who are looking in in terms of "enlightenment", in my experience, make it sound harder and scarier. The people who are doing studies on meditation as a nice way to relax or be less anxious. Googling just "meditation" turns up scary enlightenment blog posts; googling "meditation and anxiety" or "studies on meditation" or any variation seems to turn up the less scary variants. Also, I promise, none of the recordings in my Dropbox folder are scary.
Speaking form personal experience, the breathing meditation you did is what spawned the ability to be mindful of your physical state. This is because in order to successfully breathe into various areas of your body, you have to be mindful of that area. It is directly practicing physical awareness.
The fact that you have become aware of subtleties of flight-or-flight responses is extremely good. That's stage 2 of what it is possible to be mindful of.
Stage 3 is emotions. Try purposefully creating emotions. Try listening to music, and enhancing the emotions you feel from the music one at a time, and slowly. Try changing your emotions the same way you breathe into different parts of your body. Try creating an emotion when you breathe in, and letting it dissipate when you breathe out.
Stage 4 is thoughts. Stage 5 is intuition. Stage 6 is deep subconscious data grouping and relationships. Stage 7 and 8 are a lot more complicated. Stage 8 is what Taoists call "the Tao".
At stage 4, you should also begin practicing what is called "dissolving" in Taoist meditation. That's the ability to be aware of a stuck thought/feeling/whatever, and allow it to dissipate. Methods of doing this involve breathing into the very precise spot you feel is tense when you become aware of the stuck feeling, or slowly stretching and contracting that spot to get the tissues and fluids moving; and may also include image training to imagine that spot liquefying, then gassifying, then becoming a part of your breath so that you can breathe it out. The trick is to become as aware of the stuck feeling as you possibly can, and then relax it slowly. It's necessary to realize that your thoughts and feelings are connected to your fibrous body tissues in order to accomplish this (for example: thought control is connected to nerve tissue control).
Be careful of image meditation. If you choose to go beyond halfway through the path of meditation, you will have to remove all of the images you accidentally lock into your body.
PS. "stages" overlap. "stage" is a loose term I came up with to describe it just now. The Taoists call it "the 8 bodies". They're just a reference so that you can know what is possible, and approximately how much effort is required in order to accomplish it. Half way through, the game changes. All of the way through, the game changes again.
Stage 3 is emotions. Try purposefully creating emotions. Try listening to music, and enhancing the emotions you feel from the music one at a time, and slowly. Try changing your emotions the same way you breathe into different parts of your body. Try creating an emotion when you breathe in, and letting it dissipate when you breathe out.
CFAR actually has a class on this–well, not as specific as creating an emotion when you breathe in and letting it dissipate when you breathe out, but on purposely creating emotions in general. This is something I've been doing for years, because emotions are interesting to explore.
Be careful of image meditation. If you choose to go beyond halfway through the path of meditation, you will have to remove all of the images you accidentally lock into your body.
I'm not at all sure that my current goals involve going "more than halfway" along a path that's described in such abstract terms that I have no idea how it actually maps onto my real-life experiences. I'm happy to, y'know, keep meditating and reap whatever benefits may come.
This post is helpful because it is very specific about some types of meditation, use cases, and benefits, in a fairly short space. Thanks for putting this together!
I used to find meditation frustrating and boring, and didn't feel like I was getting anything out of it, because it didn't feel like practicing hard at something. One thing that had to "click" for me before I could put up with any meditation at all is that you're practicing a behavior you want to be able to do at other times. (That may seem obvious, but it wasn't to me.) In particular, one skill almost all kinds of meditation seem to train is the skill of redirecting your own attention without getting upset, or distracted by the thought of redirection. (I should mention that I had this click moment during a conversation with you.) So the "easiness" of the experience is the whole point - you're practicing redirecting your attention without expending effort.
In other words, meditation teaches you a viable strategy for "don't think of an elephant." This can be very useful in real life if the "elephant" is something you're worried about but can't do anything about (or aren't thinking productively about), like if you're waiting for the outcome of a medical test and want to get on with your work in the meantime. Or if you're mad at your friend because of something they said but also need to do your math homework. Getting your brain to think about "don't think about that" is a skill most people have already, but getting your brain to think about the thing you actually want to think about is hard. Meditation can help you do that.
I used to find meditation frustrating and boring, and didn't feel like I was getting anything out of it, because it didn't feel like practicing hard at something.
Interesting, meditation does feel to me like practicing hard at something, and did from the very beginning. Even if that something is just sitting still and doing nothing and not getting up to do all the things that I'm constantly remembering I should do. It was hard.
I'm so happy that this thing is actually happening! Congratulations on both of you for doing a hard scary thing.
Breakdown of different meditation exercises
If I further compress your summary of the exercises to train
- Compassion to your body and objective evaluation of your constituion.
- Ability to consciously relax with a focus on breath.
- Ability to feel kindness toward everyone.
- Ability to stay calm and conscious at all times.
Would you agree with this summary? Would you say that it was successful to achieve this? Could you imagine that there are different approaches to achieve these?
Excellent summary. Of course there are other approaches to achieve these goals...however, I can't name three.
Meditation: a self-experiment
Introduction
The LW/CFAR community has a fair amount of interest in meditation. This isn't surprising; many of the people who practiced and wrote about meditation in the past were trying to train a skill similar to rationality. Schools of meditation seem to be the closest already-existing thing to rationality dojos–this doesn't mean that they're very similar, only that I can't think of anything else that's more similar.
People are Doing Science on meditation; there are studies on the effects of meditation on attention, depression, anxiety, stress and pain reduction. [Insert usual disclaimer that many of these studies either won't be replicated or aren't measuring what they think they're measuring]. Meditation is apparently considered a form of alternative medicine; this is quite annoying, actually, since it's a thing that might help a lot of people being lumped in with other things that almost certainly don't work.
[There's the spiritual enlightenment element of meditation, too. I won't touch on that, since my own experience isn't related to that aspect.]
Brienne Strohl has posted about meditation and metacognition; DavidM has posted on meditation and insight. Valentine, of CFAR, talked about mindfulness meditation helping to dispel the illusion of being hurried and never having enough time.
In short, lots of hype–enough that I found it worthwhile to give it a try myself. The main benefit I hoped to attain from practicing meditation was better control of attention–to be able to aim my attention more reliably at a particular target, and notice more quickly when it drifted. The secondary benefit would be better understanding and control of emotions, which I had already tried to accomplish through techniques other than meditation. However, I’d had the experience for several years of thinking that meditation was a valuable thing to try, and not trying it–evidence that I needed more than good intentions.
The experiment
Sometime in early September, I saw a poster on the wall at the hospital where I work, advertising a study on mindfulness meditation for people with social anxiety. I called the number on the poster and got myself enrolled because it was a good pre-commitment strategy. The benefits were deadlines, social pressure, and structure, with a steady supply of exercises, audio recordings, and readings. This came at the cost of two hours a week for twelve weeks, not all of which was spent on the specific skills that I wanted to learn. Another possible cost could be thinking of myself more as someone who has social anxiety, which might become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I don’t think this actually happened. If anything, sitting down in a group once a week with people whose anxiety significantly affected their functioning had the effect of making my own anxiety seem pretty insignificant. (I was able to convincingly make the case that I suffer from social anxiety during my interview; I've cried in front of my teachers a lot, including during my last year of nursing school, which caused some adults to think that I wasn't cut out for nursing).
I didn't quite do all of the homework for the study, which would have amounted to almost an hour a day. The social pressure of having to hand in a sheet had me doing most of it, though. I Beemindered twenty minutes a day of meditation; according to Beeminder, this has amounted to about 25 hours since mid-September despite the several occasions on which I derailed.
The Dropbox folder with the audio files for most of the meditation exercises I've done regularly is here.
Breakdown of different meditation exercises
Compassionate Body Scan: a 25-minute tape with a man talking soporifically about exploring your feet like you would the feet of a beloved child and being curious about the experience of your ankles–and, eventually, the rest of your body. I've often done this one in bed when I hadn't gotten around to meditating earlier that day, and I often fall asleep around the pelvis area. I wish I could do this on demand; without the tape, it generally takes me 45 minutes to an hour to fall asleep.
10 and 20 minute sitting meditation: A walkthrough of focusing on the breath in various places; the nostrils, the throat, the chest and abdomen; and later focusing on the whole body. I like this one because sometimes near the end I feel like I'm floating in a void. I also do it in a particular position–kneeling and supporting my bum on a low stool–which I've conditioned myself to associate with meditation to the point that the posture is calming in and of itself.
Loving-Kindness meditation: Walks through feeling kindness towards someone you love, someone you're indifferent to, and someone you dislike. I don't usually feel very different after this one, but this is partly because I've been training myself to like people in general for years, and because nursing school in and of itself is an exercise in empathy-building. I have noticed that I can't do it as effectively anymore because there's no one I experience a strong emotion of dislike towards–I used a particular nurse on my unit for a month or so, and now, although I have the same thoughts about her, I don't have the actual emotional experience of dislike. So I guess it worked.
Mountain Meditation: a complex visualization/metaphor of yourself as a mountain. I would say that your mileage may vary the most on this one, because of variations in mental imagery. I have very vivid mental imagery, so I like it a lot. I've got some salient mental images cached now to draw on the metaphor of "I am a mountain and I will endure seasons, storms, winter, every single alarm in my patient's room going off at once, and WHATEVER ELSE THE UNIVERSE WANTS TO THROW AT ME!"
The Results
Initial positive; I like meditation enough to want to keep doing it. It feels good, overall. That doesn't mean that I want to do it all the time, or that I effortlessly accomplish my Beeminder goal; it does require willpower to put away the computer/book/food/music and focus on doing nothing for 20 minutes, and I do moan and groan and put it off. But it's generally pleasant while I'm actually doing it, and there are times when I feel a lot better afterwards.
There are several reasons why, a priori, I would expect meditation to be especially helpful for me. My natural state is to daydream. I'm good at remembering complex sequences of things, but not at noticing details, because I'm too busy thinking about all those complex interesting things that happened earlier. This is all very well, but as a nurse, it's important for me to be paying attention to what I'm doing.
The single most helpful time for me to meditate is when I'm feeling very frazzled. This usually happens when I've had an extremely busy day at work, running around all day trying to save someone's life, and I feel very motivated, but at some point I get overwhelmed by all the object-level tasks that keep flying at my face, and I lose track of the "big picture" and with it the ability to prioritize or plan anything, and end up dealing with tasks in the order of which thing beeps the loudest. Even once I get home after a day like this, the frazzled state persists and I can't actually settle onto any tasks that need to get done at home. A friend of mine once described his experience of having tried cocaine as "I felt very alert, but it was an illusion because I was also really scattered." I haven't tried cocaine, but those words describe the me-after-a-busy-shift very accurately.
I don't always get myself to meditate as soon as I get home (or on break during the busy shift); it takes willpower, and this is a willpower-reduced state. It would be an excellent habit to train, though. To clarify: I find meditation really difficult in this state. My thoughts are racing and the last thing I want to focus on is my breath, because I did exciting things today and I should think about all of them really fast. But at least meditation forces me to focus on the fact that my thoughts are racing, and notice that from a calm perspective, instead of completely identifying with and being caught up in the flow. Twenty minutes later, I'm generally reset and able to do something else, although that thing is most often sleep.
The biggest overall change I've noticed after I started meditating regularly is more awareness of my physical and emotional states; physical especially. It's easy for me not to get around to drinking any water at work, for example, and then ten hours later noticing that I "don't feel well" in some vague way, but experiencing this mostly as the phrase "I don't feel well" in my head, as opposed to focusing on any physical sensation that might clue me in to the source of my discomfort. (Of course, outside view puts drinking water on the list of things I should try if I mysteriously don't feel well, but it's nice to have an actual physical sensation, too). Several of the meditation exercises had aspects of focusing on the body, focusing on sensations of discomfort without trying to apply words to them or interpret them, etc. This is a 5-second-level skill that I've improved hugely at.
A specific instance is when I suddenly clue in that something very urgent and serious is happening, and I go from my general at-work state of mild anxiety to a full-blown SNS fight-or-flight adrenaline response. If I pay attention to my thoughts, they generally aren't going anywhere useful. But meanwhile, my body is doing all these interesting things; racing heart, shaky hands, that weird sinking crampy feeling in my stomach, etc. Meditation has trained me to automatically notice and pay attention to the physical sensations, which gives me a couple of seconds to get my thoughts calmed down. I also have a much easier time getting rid of the annoying physical effects like shaking hands, which make it hard to do fiddly things like draw medications up into syringes–and heaven forbid I ever have to try to put an IV in on a patient in cardiac arrest.
I identify less with my moods. I was already generally good at recognizing that moods were temporary coloured glasses on the world and not just the way the world actually was, but I'm better now. I can sometimes notice a negative mood and also notice the thing I actually have to do to fix it; this might be as simple as eating something, or might involve observing my thoughts and realizing that the bad mood started unnoticed because of an interaction with someone else which I interpreted negatively. This is a skill that was discussed a great deal in my meditation class, and it's actually not where I've improved the most; the biggest change has been in the level of physical awareness.
The skills of body scanning and focusing on breathing have been helpful for forms of exercise that I find aversive, such as running. I can notice the cramps in my shins and explore them, rather than getting caught up in the mental verbal loop of "I have cramps in my shins and this is awful and I want it to stop!" Surprisingly, this helps. By focusing on my breathing in a meditation-y way while running; by this, I mean literally focusing on the cold feeling of the air going into my nostrils and throat and the feel of my clothes stretching over my stomach as it expands; I somehow clued in that my diaphragm actually could move independently of my legs and I could breathe at a normal rhythm and depth.
One of the homework exercises was executing certain activities "mindfully". I quickly learned which things I could do mindfully without changing my schedule much, and I noticed that various things just felt better. Swimming, for example, is really sensual when you are actually paying attention to the sensation of water flowing over your skin and the sound of it in your ears through a swim cap and the patterns of reflected light through foggy goggles. I have memories of my 11-year-old self experiencing this; at some point, I stopped. I spend a lot of my life on automatic. This isn't always a problem, but when I notice a negative mood, I can turn on more sensory experience and often get rid of it that way.
I've gotten somewhat better at actually experiencing myself as a modular mind, with various voices that want different things for different reasons. I don't have to endorse or identify with or experience myself as one of the voices; they're all me, and none of them are the "real" me. This helps with mental clarity, and being able to think about difficult decisions without actually experiencing the agonizing and aversiveness and confusion; yes, the different parts of me disagree with each other, that's just a fact about the state of the world and it's okay and doesn't mean I have to be angsty.
Conclusion
The science on it predicts that meditation has positive expected value as a thing to try. My personal experience showed it to be an overall positive for me in particular; not life-changing, but worth spending 20 minutes a day on. Your mileage may vary, and anecdotally there's a lot of variation in how much people value get from it, but it doesn't take a lot of effort to try. I pre-committed to a twelve-week experiment, but it's likely possible to get an idea of whether meditation helps or not in a much shorter time span.
Speaking from my personal experience, meditation is likely to be helpful if you tend to daydream and are in a position where you need to daydream less. Science also says that meditation will probably help if you suffer a lot of distress from rumination or mulling over unpleasant thoughts.
If I were to repeat the experiment, I would do it with actual mood tracking, so that the data I got was more accurate than "In hindsight and upon reflection, I think I feel this way." I still haven't found a good method of mood tracking that does all the things I want it to.
Meditation is a clearly defined activity; there are groups of people who do it together, books about how to do it, and guided-meditation recordings that you can download from the Internet. If having structure helps you to actually do things, there are plenty of ways to obtain structure.
I am happy to discuss meditation further with anyone who is interested.
I don't remember ever actually believing in the tooth fairy (or Santa Clause). I also don't remember ever having a problem with the world in which parents told their kids that fictional beings existed and would give them money or presents; it seemed so obvious, and harmless. I was happy to put my tooth under the pillow and get money–it was a soothing ritual. I remember thinking it was freaking obvious that Santa Clause was my parents, but putting out cookies for "Santa Clause" was sort of a fun family ritual anyway.
I wonder what makes the difference between a child who has my outlook, and a child who is disturbed by the fact that either magical beings exist or their parents are lying.
Excellent article. Another example of how the skill of arguing, whether it involves verbal eloquence or math/stats literacy, doesn't help and often actually harms the skill of changing your mind.
Aside: I can no longer read about cancer and cell phones without thinking of this and bursting out laughing.
I'm Katy, I'm 26, I have a 7 month old baby (I feel that's important because it heavily affects my current ability to think/sleep/eat/do anything) and a husband and ... well, I never really thought about rationality until I came across Less Wrong.
I grew up always ... wanting more. I believed in god, for a while, until I realised I was just talking to myself. I suffered from bipolar disorder (mainly depressive) from my early teens until ... well, until I became pregnant, actually, when it mysteriously disappeared. I wanted to meet people who understood, who thought deeper, who questioned, who wondered. I came across Terry Pratchett, and I found his ideas within stories to be so wonderful, but met few people who had read (or enjoyed) his writing, and even fewer who ever found the concepts of "how" and "why" as intensely interesting as I did.
I studied a lot of different things at university - English, history, Antarctic Studies (I live in Australia so there was a course down in Tasmania), maths, physics, business ... but most of my learning has been alone, through books or the internet or waking up at 2am and thinking "I wonder why that happens" and then going on an hours-long adventure through the internet.
When I got married, I got two lovely step-daughters in the package, aged 6 and 10, and introducing them to science and maths has really reignited my interest in learning again. Unfortunately this is slightly challenge by their mother who is a bit of an unpleasant dullard (when the girls learnt the entire periodic table from a song I showed them on youtube, her response was "science is boring" ). My husband and I also hope to home-school our daughter, and I want to be able to give her as much support as possible in whatever areas interest her, and ignite the love of knowledge that her father and I have.
I came across LW a few days ago and just instantly got drawn in - the form of the posts, the replies, the flow of logic and reason ... it's not only very educational, but inspires me to do better in my daily life. Sure, you don't have to be particularly rational to change a nappy or feed a baby, but (for example) I was considering getting contents insurance and, after reading a thread here I thought "maybe I should approach this rationally, instead of just thinking that it seems like a good idea", and went on to do some rough calculations and probabilities and approach it that way.
I don't think I'll be posting on any other threads any time soon - I'd rather read and learn and learn and get a feel for the community rather than post a half-decent comment that doesn't contribute much - but I figured it would be worth posting here to start with.
Welcome! You can probably contribute more than you realize.
Natural selection is a tinkerer, not an idiot!
SMBC comics on the relative proximity of excretory and reproductive outlets in humans.
Natural selection also led us to breathe and eat through the same hole. Seriously???? This causes so many problems. Well, not enough problems for natural selection to change it, I guess.
If humans are bad at mental arithmetic, but good at, say, not dying - doesn't that suggest that, as a practical matter, humans should try to rephrase mathematical questions into questions about danger?
E.g. Imagine stepping into a field crisscrossed by dangerous laser beams in a prime-numbers manner to get something valuable. I think someone who had a realistic fear of the laser beams, and a realistic understanding of the benefit of that valuable thing would slow down and/or stop stepping out into suspicious spots.
Quantifying is ONE technique, and it's been used very effectively in recent centuries - but those successes were inside a laboratory / factory / automation structure, not in an individual-rationality context.
If humans are bad at mental arithmetic, but good at, say, not dying - doesn't that suggest that, as a practical matter, humans should try to rephrase mathematical questions into questions about danger?
I don't think this would help at all. Humans have some built-in systems to respond to danger that is shaped like a tiger or a snake or other learned stimuli, like when I see a patient go into a lethal arrhythmia on the heart monitor. This programmed response to danger pumps you full of adrenaline and makes you very motivated to run very fast, or work very hard at some skill that you've practiced over and over. Elite athletes perform better under the pressure of competition; beginners perform worse.
An elite mathematician might do math faster if they felt they were in danger, but an elite mathematician is probably motivated to do mental arithmetic in the first place. I place around 95% confidence that generic bad-at-mental-arithmetic human would perform worse if they felt they were in danger than if they were in a safe classroom environment. If a patient is in cardiac arrest, I'm incredibly motivated to do something about it, but I don't trust my brain with even the simplest mental arithmetic. (Which is irritating, actually).
This doesn't address the reward part of your situation, the "something valuable" at the end of the road. Without the danger, or with some mild thrill-adding danger, this might be a workable idea.
Sure, I should have been more specific.
Here are two questions:
1) How do I model the minds of other people?
2) What are the minds of other people like?
My objection is that answers to (1) are being confused with answers to (2). In particular, a reductive (non-agenty) answer to (1) will tend to drift towards a reductive answer to (2).
The "arrogance" I see stems from the bias towards using non-reductive models when dealing with behaviors we approve of, and reductive models when dealing with behaviors we don't approve of.
For example, consider a devout Mormon, who spends two years traveling in a foreign country on a religious mission. Is this person an agent? Those already sympathetic to Mormon beliefs will be more likely to advance an agent-like explanation of this behavior than someone who doesn't believe in Mormon claims.
As another example, is Eliezer an agent? If you share his beliefs about UFAI, you probably think so. But if you think the whole AI/Singularity thing is nonsense, you're more likely to think of Eliezer as just another time-wasting blogger best known for fan-fiction. Why doesn't he get a real job? :P
Can a smoker be an agent? We tend to assume any unhealthy behavior has a non-agenty explanation, while healthy behaviors are agenty. We can't imagine the mind of an agent who really doesn't believe or care that smoking is unhealthy.
Your roommate doesn't wash the dishes. Have you tried imagining a model of her as an agent, in which she acts in accordance with her own values and decides not to wash the dishes? If she places very little internal value on clean dishes, she may not be able to relate to the mind of an agent who places any value on washed dishes. She may even be modeling you as a non-agent with a quirky response to the stimulus "dirty-dishes". (Did your parents never mistake a value they didn't understand for non-agenty behavior on your part?)
People of one political ideology utterly fail to model those with other political ideologies as agents, even while considering themselves to be agents.
Are athletes agents? Becoming an athlete requires as much goal-directed behavior as becoming a mathematician. But mathematicians often have terribly condescending opinions of the agenty-ness of athletes.
In all these examples, value judgments precede the models we make of agency-ness, which will slide towards evaluations of actual agency-ness.
It's very hard to create a non-reductive model of an agent with sufficiently alien values. Even defining agency in terms of "executive function" still relies on a comparison to your own mind (to decide what counts as goal-directed and how much it should count). Since a failure to build a model suggests that no model is possible, we will be biased towards only considering minds similar to our own as agents. The result in an strong in-group bias.
I hope this is a bit clearer. I don't mean to criticize you for reporting patterns in your own thought, and I understand that's not meant to make any normative claims. To report some patterns of my own, the "red flags" my brain noted reading the comments were the phrase "Heroic responsibility drive" and a bunch of really math-y types claiming they had everyone else figured out.
Agreed that you have to be very careful about letting your answers to (1) slide into your answers to (2). But I don't think you c an do th
If she places very little internal value on clean dishes, she may not be able to relate to the mind of an agent who places any value on washed dishes. She may even be modeling you as a non-agent with a quirky response to the stimulus "dirty-dishes".
Oh, she likes clean dishes all right. She nagged me about them plenty. It was just that her usual response to dirty dishes was "it's too ughy to go in the kitchen so I just won't cook either." She actually verbalized this to me at some point. She also said (not in so many words) that she would prefer to be the sort of person who just washed dishes and got on with life. So there was more to "what she said" than saying to me that she would wash the dishes (which someone who didn't care about dishes might say anyway for social reasons).
Obviously all people are agents to some degree, and can be agents to different degrees on different days depending on, say, tiredness or whether they're around their parents. (I become noticeably less agenty around mine). But these distinctions aren't actually what my brain perceives; my brain latches onto some information that in retrospect is probably relevant, like my roommate saying she wants to be the sort of person who just washes dishes but not washing any dishes, and things that aren't relevant to agentiness, like impressiveness.
There's no natural grouping to your examples. Some of them are just people who care about you. Others are people who do things you find impressive.
Frankly, this whole discussion comes across as arrogant and callous. I know we're ostensibly talking about "degree of models" or whatever, but there are clear implicit descriptive claims being made, based on value judgments.
I'm aware that my brain may group things in ways that aren't related to useful criteria or criteria I would endorse. My brain was doing this anyway before I wrote the post. Discussing it is an essential part of noticing it and self-modifying or compensating in some way.
How, specifically, do you think that having this discussion is arrogant and callous? What would have to be different about it for it not to be arrogant and callous?
Awesome post! Well written and well organized.
I actually got myself enrolled in a mindfulness meditation study for precisely this reason. I'm 7 weeks into the 12-week study, and plan to post about it once it's finished. Ostensibly it's a study for people with social anxiety, which I have to a mild degree, but not to the point that it really affects my life at all–I enrolled in the study mainly because having homework logs to hand in increases my motivation to meditate half an hour a day. Beeminder is also helpful.
I certainly think a lot about other people's judgements, desperately want them to like and respect me, spend way too much time worrying about what people think, need constant positive feedback to feel good about my skills, occasionally cry when I get too much constructive criticism at work, etc. But those feelings don't seem to propagate back into my goals
As long as you believe you are an okay and worthwhile person regardless of whether the goal is achieved, then there's no risk of motivational backfiring, at least not of the kind I'm talking about.
You can want people to like and respect you, want to feel better about your skills, etc., without it being the same as feeling worthless unless those things turn out the way you want. If your basic self-worth is not rooted in your skills or what other people think of you, then you probably won't have much of this kind of trouble.
I have a couple of tests I suggest to people to verify the truth or falsehood of their goals; one is to ask if you'd still want it to happen even if it had to be a complete secret from anybody but you, and you couldn't get any personal credit or recognition for it. Another is whether imagining the end result makes you feel physically good in your torso and inclines you to make an "mmm" or "ahhh" sound with a relaxed breath (true goal), or whether it makes you feel tense or at most, relieved (both an indication of negative motivation, usually -- but not always -- a false goal.
I have a couple of tests I suggest to people to verify the truth or falsehood of their goals; one is to ask if you'd still want it to happen even if it had to be a complete secret from anybody but you, and you couldn't get any personal credit or recognition for it. Another is whether imagining the end result makes you feel physically good in your torso and inclines you to make an "mmm" or "ahhh" sound with a relaxed breath (true goal), or whether it makes you feel tense or at most, relieved (both an indication of negative motivation, usually -- but not always -- a false goal.
There are some goals that I'd feel a lot less motivated to accomplish if they had to be secrets forever. Finishing a novel, for example–20% of the fun is in writing and inhabiting that world, but 80% of the fun is in sharing it with other people. It would make less of a motivation difference for, say, healthy eating or exercise.
I think pretty much all my goals make me feel physically good. I also feel a bit anxious for goals that have no obvious next action and aren't entirely dependent on my hard work–for example, having a novel become a bestseller. That would feel freaking amazing, having lots of people reading and talking about a story I wrote, but it's also hard and scary and improbable. I think the "improbable" and the "no next action", as well as the "no external deadline", make it so that I don't do as much as I could to try to get my work published.
One thing that might reduce the confusion between the two apparent types of "goal setting", is that all of the Ray Williams quotes appear to be describing a phenomenon I discovered a while back that I dubbed "false goals".
Essentially, a false goal is a goal that's "not about what it's about". It's a surface goal of "lose 10 pounds" whose actual intent is, say, "stop being such an ugly loser". It's this hidden, self-centered goal (a "be good" goal in Halvorson's terms) that causes all the secondary phenomena Williams describes. Such an underlying goal cannot be achieved through losing the weight, so even if he/she succeeds, he/she fails! And certainly, throughout the whole process he/she is feeling like a failure, because this is true by assumption in the underlying goal.
In contrast, a person whose underlying intention for "lose 10 pounds" is, say, "improve my health, move a little faster, and fit into my sexier clothes", will feel good about every ounce lost, because it is perceived as bringing him/her closer to their underlying desire.
People like you and Steve -- who genuinely desire a change in the state of the world -- don't experience the backfiring effects of false goals. They only clobber people like those of Ray's clients (and mine) who are actually seeking a change in the state of themselves (rather than the world), and are specifically trying to change their own self-judgment or the imagined judgment of others.
The biggest side-effect, of course, is that a false goal is negatively reinforcing in a way that extinguishes action taken to attain it. Every moment you spend working towards a false goal is a moment where you're brought into fresh awareness of your perceived inadequacy, and the fastest way to make this stop is to stop taking action.
In short: if the real purpose of a goal is not to change the state of the world, but rather to change your self-esteem or perceived esteem in the eyes of others, don't bother. While achieving a goal may improve your self-esteem as a side effect, it doesn't work when the purpose of the goal itself is to make you esteemable, or more precisely, to alleviate your perceived lack of esteemability.
People like you and Steve -- who genuinely desire a change in the state of the world -- don't experience the backfiring effects of false goals. They only clobber people like those of Ray's clients (and mine) who are actually seeking a change in the state of themselves (rather than the world), and are specifically trying to change their own self-judgment or the imagined judgment of others.
This is a really interesting way of looking at it.
I certainly think a lot about other people's judgements, desperately want them to like and respect me, spend way too much time worrying about what people think, need constant positive feedback to feel good about my skills, occasionally cry when I get too much constructive criticism at work, etc. But those feelings don't seem to propagate back into my goals. I guess, when I think about it, I don't even implicitly think that I exercise or eat healthy to please or impress others. (Back when I was 12 and the main reason I wanted to lose weight was so people would think I was pretty, I had a lot of negative feelings about this goal, compared to my other goals that were less about wanting other people to respect me). And being criticized in an nursing context has occasionally led to a demotivational spiral–it's just never lasted long enough to make a serious dent in my overall motivation, which pops back up as soon as I'm away from that context.
Too big! Seriously, this post contains too many elements to readily reply to in a coherent way.
Is that a problem? I tried to address it with the tl;dr and the conclusion.
I didn't find it too big. I just found it too bundled up, but that's probably because the topic is naturally like that. By 'bundled up' I mean, I found the article felt as if it interleaves too many concepts without first trying to make them all explicit. That said, am working on an article along lines of (introverts/intrinsic motivation vs extroverts/extrinsic motivation) so i understand the complexity involved.
Too big! Seriously, this post contains too many elements to readily reply to in a coherent way.
So I'll just address this:
I can’t read these two quotes side by side and not be confused.
To me, those two quotes are both fair, and the combination of them indicates the reason why you need to acquire a habit of thinking in a way that is both definite and positive: to keep fear in its right place, which is mostly NOT putting on the brakes.
and this:
But that's not what 'goal setting' feels like to me. I feel increasingly awesome as I get closer towards a goal, and once it's done, I keep feeling awesome when I think about how I did it.
Me too. But we need to acknowledge the many, many people for whom this is not the case; People who believe that there's something basically wrong with themselves and use any failure as an opportunity to punish themselves. These people need to, as Bradbury says, change who they are, before they can experience goal setting / achievement as 'awesome'; As long as they think of themselves as bad or inadequate, their evaluation of their achievements will continue to conform to that.
Process goals, or systems, are probably better than outcome goals. Specific and realistic goals are probably better than vague and ambitious ones. A lot of this may be because it’s easier to form habits and/or success spirals around well-specified behaviours that you can just do every day.
Not only do I agree with this wholeheartedly, I want to mention that most of my major creative progress is directly attributable to goal-setting behaviour.
One thing that's implied, but not directly stated in your post is that it's best to set goals that you will occasionally fail at (cf. Decius' reply to cousin_it re: inconsistent reinforcement)
Too big! Seriously, this post contains too many elements to readily reply to in a coherent way.
Is that a problem? I tried to address it with the tl;dr and the conclusion.
One thing that's implied, but not directly stated in your post is that it's best to set goals that you will occasionally fail at (cf. Decius' reply to cousin_it re: inconsistent reinforcement).
I actually hadn't thought about that specifically. It seems to run contrary to success spirals, but I do think it's better to have a difficulty level where you know that you'll fail occasionally, and where that isn't catastrophic and you just keep plugging away.
How to set a goals in one step. Pick the biggest/grandest thing you can expect to actually accomplish. Don't try to engineer a reward dispenser, extrinsic or intrinsic. Don't get high on motivation and then come crashing down. Just pick what you already want and expect you can do, and do it. This applies to both daily, weekly, yearly, etc. timespans.
This is basically the next best alternative to BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits. Rather than setting the easiest possible goal "Plug in the treadmill after breakfast" you pick one you're sure you can do anyway "Run for five minutes in the morning". Whatever you think you can do. Then once you can do five minutes, you'll probably believe you can push farther.
(Disclaimer: I have recently started using this. It might not be the super be-all-end-all goal setting method.)
This is basically how I set goals, with the caveat that there aren't that many entirely new goals for me. For example, I know I can exercise, so there isn't really a fear of failure there, just laziness). There've been periods when I've finished a novel in months despite being in classes all day and swim team seven days a week, so I know I can write ten pages in a week–I just have to choose doing it over watching stupid videos on the Internet. I started meditating, which was an entirely new activity where I felt no confidence of success, by joining a study to provide extrinsic social motivation.
I'm confused about why extrinsic motivation reduces intrinsic motivation. If I reward someone for doing something, I'd expect them to develop an urge to do that thing. That was described in a recent post about habit formation. How did the teachers manage to kill motivation by giving rewards? Maybe there was some other effect, like "anything adults tell us to do is uncool"?
I think the theory theory is that if actions are extrinsically rewarded, the narrative that gets formed is "I did X because the teacher gave me candy", not "I did X because I really like and value doing it." Thus later, when there is no reward (or punishment) offered, the person doesn't have a narrative for why they would want to do X anyway.
Agreed, though–it confuses my intuition, that rewarding a behaviour would reduce intrinsic motivation.
Does Goal Setting Work?
tl;dr There's some disagreement over whether setting goals is a good idea. Anecdotally, enjoyment in setting goals and success at accomplishing them varies between people, for various possible reasons. Publicly setting goals may reduce motivation by providing a status gain before the goal is actually accomplished. Creative work may be better accomplished without setting goals about it. 'Process goals', 'systems' or 'habits' are probably better for motivation than 'outcome' goals. Specific goals are probably easier on motivation than unspecified goals. Having explicit set goals can cause problems in organizations, and maybe for individuals.
Introduction
I experimented by letting go of goals for a while and just going with the flow, but that produced even worse results. I know some people are fans of that style, but it hasn’t worked well for me. I make much better progress — and I’m generally happier and more fulfilled — when I wield greater conscious control over the direction of my life.
The inherent problem with goal setting is related to how the brain works. Recent neuroscience research shows the brain works in a protective way, resistant to change. Therefore, any goals that require substantial behavioural change or thinking-pattern change will automatically be resisted. The brain is wired to seek rewards and avoid pain or discomfort, including fear. When fear of failure creeps into the mind of the goal setter it commences a de-motivator with a desire to return to known, comfortable behaviour and thought patterns.
I can’t read these two quotes side by side and not be confused.
There’s been quite a bit of discussion within Less Wrong and CFAR about goals and goal setting. On the whole, CFAR seems to go with it being a good idea. There are some posts that recognize the possible dangers: see patrissimo’s post on the problems with receiving status by publicly committing to goals. Basically, if you can achieve the status boost of actually accomplishing a goal by just talking about it in public, why do the hard work? This discussion came up fairly recently with the Ottawa Less Wrong group; specifically, whether introducing group goal setting was a good idea.
I’ve always set goals–by ‘always’ I mean ‘as far back as I can identify myself as some vaguely continuous version of my current self.’ At age twelve, some of my goals were concrete and immediate–“get a time under 1 minute 12 seconds for a hundred freestyle and make the regional swim meet cut.” Some were ambitious and unlikely–“go to the Olympics for swimming,” and “be the youngest person to swim across Lake Ontario.” Some were vague, like “be beautiful” or “be a famous novelist.” Some were chosen for bad reasons, like “lose 10 pounds.” My 12-year-old self wanted plenty of things that were unrealistic, or unhealthy, or incoherent, but I wanted them, and it seemed to make perfect sense to do something about getting them. I took the bus to swim practice at six am. I skipped breakfast and threw out the lunch my mom packed. Et cetera. I didn't write these goals down in a list format, but I certainly kept track of them, in diary entries among other things. I sympathize with the first quote, and the second quote confuses and kind of irritates me–seriously, Ray Williams, you have that little faith in people's abilities to change?
For me personally, I'm not sure what the alternative to having goals would be. Do things at random? Do whatever you have an immediate urge to do? Actually, I do know people like this. I know people whose stated desires aren’t a good predictor of their actions at all, and I’ve had a friend say to me “wow, you really do plan everything. I just realized I don’t plan anything at all.” Some of these people get a lot of interesting stuff done. So this may just be an individual variation thing; my comfort with goal setting, and discomfort with making life up as I go, might be a result of my slightly-Aspergers need for control. It certainly comes at a cost–the cost of basing self-worth on an external criterion, and the resulting anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. I have an enormous amount of difficulty with the Buddhist virtue of ‘non-striving.’
Why the individual variation?
The concepts of the motivation equation and success spirals give another hint at why goal-driven behaviour might vary between people. Nick Winter talks about this in his book The Motivation Hacker; he shows the difference between his past self, who had very low expectancy of success and set few goals, and his present self, with high expectancy of success and with goal-directed behaviour filling most of his time.
I actually remember a shift like this in my own life, although it was back in seventh grade and I’ve probably editorialized the memories to make a good narrative. My sixth grade self didn’t really have a concept of wanting something and thus doing something about it. At some point, over a period of a year or two, I experienced some minor successes. I was swimming faster, and for the first time ever, a coach made comments about my ‘natural talent.’ My friends wanted to get on the honour roll with an 80% average, and in first semester, both of them did and I didn’t; I was upset and decided to work harder, a concept I’d never applied to school, and saw results the next semester when my average was on par with theirs. It only took a few events like that, inconsequential in themselves, before my self-image was of someone who could reliably accomplish things through hard work. My parents helpfully reinforced this self-stereotype by making proud comments about my willpower and determination.
In hindsight I'm not sure whether this was a defining year; whether it actually made the difference, in the long run, or whether it was inevitable that some cluster of minor successes would have set off the same cascade later. It may be that some innate personality trait distinguishes the people who take those types of experiences and interpret them as success spirals from those who remained disengaged.
The More Important Question
Apart from the question of personal individual variation, though, there’s a more relevant question. Given that you’re already at a particular place on the continuum from planning-everything to doing-everything-as-you-feel-like-it, how much should you want to set goals, versus following urges? More importantly, what actions are helped versus harmed by explicit goal-setting.
Creative Goals
As Paul Graham points out, a lot of the cool things that have been accomplished in the past weren’t done through self-discipline:
One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.
Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.
I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good.
This seems to imply that creative goals aren’t a good place to apply goal setting. But I’m not sure how much this is a fundamental truth. I recently made a Beeminder goal for writing fiction, and I’ve written fifty pages since then. I actually don’t have the writer’s virtue of just sitting down and writing; in the past, I’ve written most of my fiction by staying up late in a flow state. I can’t turn this on and off, though, and more importantly, I have a life to schedule my writing around, and if the only way I can get a novel done is to stay up all night before a 12-hour shift at the hospital, I probably won’t write that novel. I rarely want to do the hard work of writing; it’s a lot easier to lie in bed thinking about that one awesome scene five chapters down the road and lamenting that I don’t have time to write tonight because work in the morning.
Even if Shakespeare didn’t write using discipline, I bet that he used habits. That he sat down every day with a pen and parchment and fully expected himself to write. That he had some kind of sacred writing time, not to be interrupted by urgent-but-unimportant demands. That he’d built up some kind of success spiral around his ability to write plays that people would enjoy.
Outcome versus process goals
Goal setting sets up an either-or polarity of success. The only true measure can either be 100% attainment or perfection, or 99% and less, which is failure. We can then excessively focus on the missing or incomplete part of our efforts, ignoring the successful parts. Fourthly, goal setting doesn't take into account random forces of chance. You can't control all the environmental variables to guarantee 100% success.
This quote talks about a type of goal that I don't actually set very often. Most of the ‘bad’ goals that I had as a 12-year-old were unrealistic outcome goals, and I failed to accomplish plenty of them; I didn’t go to the Olympics, I didn’t swim across Lake Ontario, and I never got down to 110 pounds. But I still have the self-concept of someone who’s good at accomplishing goals, and this is because I accomplished almost all of my more implicit ‘process’ goals. I made it to swim practice seven times a week, waking up at four-thirty am year after year. This didn’t automatically lead to Olympic success, obviously, but it was hard, and it impressed people. And yeah, I missed a few mornings, but in my mind 99% success or even 90% success at a goal is still pretty awesome.
In fact, I can’t think of any examples of outcome goals that I’ve set recently. Even “become a really awesome nurse” feels like more of a process goal, because it's something I'll keep doing on a day-to-day basis, requiring a constant input of effort.
Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, refers to this dichotomy as ‘systems’ versus ‘goals’:
Just after college, I took my first airplane trip, destination California, in search of a job. I was seated next to a businessman who was probably in his early 60s. I suppose I looked like an odd duck with my serious demeanor, bad haircut and cheap suit, clearly out of my element. I asked what he did for a living, and he told me he was the CEO of a company that made screws. He offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was a continuing process... This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.
Throughout my career I've had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as opposed to goals. In most cases, as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways.
...To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That's literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose 10 pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.
If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize that you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or to set new goals and re-enter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.
I guess I agree with him–if you feel miserable when you've lost 9 pounds because you haven't accomplished your goal yet, and empty after you've lost 10 pounds because you no longer have a goal, then whatever you're calling 'goal setting' is a terrible idea. But that's not what 'goal setting' feels like to me. I feel increasingly awesome as I get closer towards a goal, and once it's done, I keep feeling awesome when I think about how I did it. Not awesome enough to never set another goal again, but awesome enough that I want to set lots more goals to get that feeling again.
SMART goals
When I work with people as their coach and mentor, they often tell me they've set goals such as "I want to be wealthy," or "I want to be more beautiful/popular," "I want a better relationship/ideal partner." They don't realize they've just described the symptoms or outcomes of the problems in their life. The cause of the problem, that many resist facing, is themselves. They don't realize that for a change to occur, if one is desirable, they must change themselves. Once they make the personal changes, everything around them can alter, which may make the goal irrelevant.
Ray Williams
And? Someone has to change themselves to fix the underlying problem? Are they going to do that more successfully by going with the flow?
I think the more important dichotomy here is between vague goals and specific goals. I was exposed to the concept of SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound), at an early age, and though the concept has a lot of problems, the ability to Be Specific seems quite important. You can break down “I want to be beautiful” into subgoals like “I’ll learn to apply makeup properly”, “I’ll eat healthy and exercise”, “I’ll go clothing shopping with a friend who knows about fashion,” etc. All of these feel more attainable than the original goal, and it’s clear when they’re accomplished.
That being said, I have a hard time setting any goal that isn’t specific, attainable, and small. I’ve become more ambitious since meeting lots of LW and CFAR people, but I still don’t like large, long-term goals unless I can easily break them down into intermediate parts. This makes the idea of working on an unsolved problem, or in a startup where the events of the next year aren’t clear, deeply frightening. And these are obviously important problems that someone needs to motivate themselves to work on.
Problematic Goal-Driven Behaviour
We argue that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behaviour, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation. Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for motivation, managers and scholars need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision.
This is a fairly compelling argument against goal-setting; that by setting an explicit goal and then optimizing towards that goal, you may be losing out on elements that were being accomplished better before, and maybe even rewarding actual negative behaviour. Members of an organization presumably already have assigned tasks and responsibilities, and aren’t just doing whatever they feel like doing, but they might have done better with more freedom to prioritize their own work–the best environment is one with some structure and goals, but not too many. The phenomenon of “teaching to the test” for standardized testing is another example.
Given that humans aren’t best described as unitary selves, this metaphor extends to individuals. If one aspect of myself sets a personal goal to write two pages per day, another aspect of myself might respond by writing two pages on the easiest project I can think of, like a journal entry that no one will ever see. This violates the spirit of the goal it technically accomplishes.
A more problematic consideration is the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Studies show that rewarding or punishing children for tasks results in less intrinsic motivation, as measured by stated interest or by freely choosing to engage in the task. I’ve noticed this tendency in myself; faced with a nursing instructor who was constantly quizzing me on the pathophysiology of my patients’ conditions, I responded by refusing to be curious about any of it or look up the answers to questions in any more detail than what she demanded, even though my previous self loved to spend hours on Google making sense of confusing diseases. If this is a problem that affects individuals setting goals for themselves–i.e. if setting a daily writing goal makes writing less fun–then I can easily see how goal-setting could be damaging.
I also notice that I’m confused about the relationship between Beeminder’s extrinsic motivation, in the form of punishment for derailing, and its effects on intrinsic motivation. Maybe the power of success spirals to increase intrinsic motivation offsets the negative effect of outside reward/punishment; or maybe the fact that users deliberately choose to use Beeminder means that it doesn’t count as “extrinsic.” I’m not sure.
Conclusion
There seems to be variation between individuals, in terms of both generally purposeful behaviour, and comfort level with calling it ‘setting goals’. This might be related to success spirals in the past, or it might be a factor of personality and general comfort with order versus chaos. I’m not sure if it’s been studied.
In the past, a lot of creative behaviour wasn’t the result of deliberate goals. This may be a fundamental fact about creativity, or it may be a result of people’s beliefs about creativity (à la ego depletion only happens if you belief in ego depletion) or it may be a historical coincidence that isn’t fundamental at all. In any case, if you aren’t currently getting creative work done, and want to do more, I’m not sure what the alternative is to purposefully trying to do more. Manipulating the environment to make flow easier to attain, maybe. (For example, if I quit my day job and moved to a writers' commune, I might write more without needing to try on a day-to-day basis).
Process goals, or systems, are probably better than outcome goals. Specific and realistic goals are probably better than vague and ambitious ones. A lot of this may be because it’s easier to form habits and/or success spirals around well-specified behaviours that you can just do every day.
Setting goals within an organization has a lot of potential problems, because workers can game the system and accomplish the letter of the goal in the easiest possible way. This likely happens within individuals too. Research shows that extrinsic motivation reduces intrinsic motivation, which is important to consider, but I'm not sure how it relates to individuals setting goals, as opposed to organizations.
It is, in fact, from comics. Another nonstandard habit is the frequent use of italics I've picked up from Eliezer Yudkowsky, along with other writing habits that would be qualified as "passionate" by some and "histrionic" by others. I myself find it quite practical in properly conveying emotional intensity.
I've actually just broken an italics-using habit when writing fiction. I used to use italics all the time for emphasis and making it clearer how the text would sound if read out loud (it felt clearer to me, at least.) A reader commented that the software I used to convert my MS Word draft to an epub converted all italics to bold, and that he found it disruptive, and had tried mentally reading the lines with and without the bold and having the emphasis didn't seem to make anything clearer. I used select-all on my MS Word document and removed all the italics in order to make him a new epub. Rereading scenes later, it turned out that my friend was right, and the lack of italics hardly seemed to make a difference. Now I don't use them period. (Once I stopped using italics constantly, it felt odd to use them occasionally.)
...I keep forgetting that for normal people, sleeping in is actually lazy, and not a survival tactic to recover from the sleep deprivation of doing 12 hour rotating day-night shifts in time to do more shifts.
I've had this attitude of "do hard things" for a while, although the hard things I've done (mainly jumping into critical care nursing as a new grad) aren't super typical for LW. I guess technically I work a wage job, but it's also incredibly meaningful work that pushes me to my limits every single day and is gradually transforming me into the kind of person I want to be; y'know, calm under pressure, smiling in the face of adversity, organized, good at teamwork, good at empathy and reading people's emotions, etc.
I've considered joining the army for a similar reason of pushing myself to become stronger. Unsure if I will still do this, as moving to the Bay Area is probably higher value.
Meetup : Applied Rationality Talks: Thinking in Bayes
Discussion article for the meetup : Applied Rationality Talks: Thinking in Bayes
This is the second in a series of talks on CFAR and Less Wrong rationality topics offered to the Ottawa Skeptics meetup group. The format will be a fifteen-minute talk followed by drinks and structured discussion.
Discussion article for the meetup : Applied Rationality Talks: Thinking in Bayes
Students who don't really know what they want to do still won't know in 10 years even if they went to a prestigious college.
I'm really not sure that's the case. It seems to me that people who attend prestigious colleges are likely to be exposed to a broader range of interests and opportunities than they otherwise would, giving them more of a chance of finding something that they want to do.
I guess I don't have a big enough example set to know. Anyone know of studies done on this that try to separate variables like conscientiousness/work ethic and ambition from actual college attendance? (Given that there's an expectation, in the US anyway, that smart, hardworking, ambitious kids will go to prestigious colleges and the rest won't.)
My impression is that in Canada, your place of undergrad matters less, although high grades are a minimum threshold and volunteer/community environment helps filter the kids who meet that threshold... Maybe because there just isn't a divide in between "state schools" and "private/Ivy League" schools in the same way. There are some schools that are more competitive to get into, and I wouldn't be surprised if med schools judge somewhat based on that as well as just on university GPA, but it's not something that I've ever heard brought up. I'm about 70% sure that I could get into a Canadian med school if I applied now, and 90% sure that I could if I applied in 5 years with some more "life experience" under my belt.
One thing that's unambiguous is that many ambitious high schoolers believe that where they go to college matters a great deal. My post is intended to address this audience.
It's possible that I misread, but I interpreted Swimmer963's point as saying exactly this - it really doesn't matter what you do in high school, as long as you get into the college you're aiming to get into. If this is what she meant, I probably agree - I don't think there is any one-semester high school course which can't be entirely learnt by a reasonably bright student in about 1 week of dedicated personal study.
it really doesn't matter what you do in high school, as long as you get into the college you're aiming to get into.
That's a bit my point, but not entirely. I think that 10 or 20 years later, the specifics of what high schoolers did will almost never matter. (General high school work ethic and direction/ambition in life likely does matter, if only because it will correlate, in most people, with adult work ethic and ambition). To a lesser degree, 10 or 20 years down the road, it probably doesn't matter whether a student got into their top choice or second-or-third choice college. College admissions depend on a lot of random factors, like whether you were sick on the day of a high school exam worth 40% of your grade, and more time passing flattens out this randomness. Students with good work ethic and a strong direction in life will probably end up where they want to be anyway, once 10-20 years have passed. Students who don't really know what they want to do still won't know in 10 years even if they went to a prestigious college. Good work ethic and ambition is correlated with getting into prestigious colleges, but I would argue that there's less causation there than this article seems to imply.
This is just my impression, though, and I'm generally not that ambitious. It might be different for people at higher level of driven-ness and/or with different, more academic-based goals.
Vaniver: I said "it surprises me how much..." because I expect to agree with most LW posts, and I'm slightly surprised every time I don't agree. It's a good surprise.
It surprises me how much my attitude to this post is "15 years from now, is it really going to matter that much what you did in high school to get into college?" AFAICT, academics are not that strongly related to long term career success, and that in the longer term, traits like conscientiousness and skills like working with others end up being more important. I wouldn't recommend to my child that they try to signal their worthiness to colleges and universities at the expense of actually acquiring skills.
Then again, I speak as someone in a field (nursing) where it really doesn't matter where you did your schooling; nobody cares. I get the impression that there are fields where it matters a bit more (like engineering) and fields where it might matter a lot more (like business, where most of the value of a prestigious college is in networking and building human capital anyway).
I can reliably reach this state in between the two sleep periods of a biphasic sleep cycle (several hours of sleep, a couple hours wakefulness, several more hours sleep). Unfortunately I'm not usually on this cycle.
If this works for other people, too, that's potentially a really interesting lifehack. Out of interest, when you are biphasic sleep, what time do you go to bed, what time do you have your wakefulness period, what time do you end up waking up, etc? Does it stay constant from night to night, or does your sleep cycle shift forwards? What sorts of lifestyles/schedules make biphasic sleep possible?
#1 grates for me. If a friend goes to me in tears more than a couple of times demanding that I fix their bicycle/grades/relationship/emotional problems, I will no longer consider them a friend. If you ask politely I'll try to get you on the right track (here's the tool you need and here's how to use it/this is how to sign up for tutoring/whatever), but doing much more than that is treating the asker as less than an agent themself. Going to your friend in tears before even trying to come up with a solution yourself is not a good behavior to encourage (I've been on both sides of this, and it's not good for anyone).
Don't confuse reliability and responsibility with being a sucker.
1 grates for me. If a friend goes to me in tears more than a couple of times demanding that I fix their bicycle/grades/relationship/emotional problems, I will no longer consider them a friend.
I guess being a PC in that sense sucks.
Going to your friend in tears before even trying to come up with a solution yourself is not a good behavior to encourage (I've been on both sides of this, and it's not good for anyone).
I try not to do this. When I go to my parents in tears, it's because I've tried all the usual solutions and they aren't working and I don't know why, and/or because everything else possible is going wrong at the same time and I don't have the mental energy to deal with my broken bike on top of disasters at work and my best friend having a meltdown.
Likewise, being the one who takes heroic responsibility for someone isn't necessarily a healthy role to take, as I've realized.
PCs are also systems; they're just systems with a stronger heroic responsibility drive. On the other hand, when you successfully do things and I couldn't predict exactly how you would do them, I have no choice but to model you as an 'intelligence'. But that's, well... really rare.
I guess for me it's not incredibly rare that people successfully do things and I can't predict exactly how they would do them. It doesn't seem to be the main distinction that my brain uses to model PC-ness versus NPC-ness, though.
To what degree do you model people as agents?
The idea for this post came out of a conversation during one of the Less Wrong Ottawa events. A joke about being solipsist turned into a genuine question–if you wanted to assume that people were figments of your imagination, how much of a problem would this be? (Being told "you would be problematic if I were a solipsist" is a surprising compliment.)
You can rephrase the question as "do you model people as agents versus complex systems?" or "do you model people as PCs versus NPCs?" (To me these seem like a reframing of the same question, with a different connotation/focus; to other people they might seem like different questions entirely). Almost everyone at the table immediately recognized what we were talking about and agreed that modelling some people as agents and some people as complex systems was a thing they did. However, pretty much everything else varied–how much they modelled people as agents overall, how much it varied in between different people they knew, and how much this impacted the moral value that they assigned to other people. I suspect that another variable is "how much you model yourself as an agent"; this probably varies between people and impacts how they model others.
What does it mean to model someone as an agent?
The conversation didn't go here in huge amounts of detail, but I expect that due to typical mind fallacy, it's a fascinating discussion to have–that the distinctions that seem clear and self-evident to me probably aren't what other people use at all. I'll explain mine here.
1. Reliability and responsibility. Agenty people are people I feel I can rely on, who I trust to take heroic responsibility. If I have an unsolved problem and no idea what to do, I can go to them in tears and say "fix this please!" And they will do it. They'll pull out a solution that surprises me and that works. If the first solution doesn't work, they will keep trying.
In this sense, I model my parents strongly as agents–I have close to 100% confidence that they will do whatever it takes to solve a problem for me. There are other people who I trust to execute a pre-defined solution for me, once I've thought of it, like "could you do me a huge favour and drive me to the bike shop tomorrow at noon?" but whom I wouldn't go to with "AAAAH my bike is broken, help!" There are other people who I wouldn't ask for help, period. Some of them are people I get along with well and like a lot, but they aren't reliable, and they're further down the mental gradient towards NPC.
The end result of this is that I'm more likely to model people as agents if I know them well and have some kind of relationship where I would expect them to want to help me. Of course, this is incomplete, because there are brilliant, original people who I respect hugely, but who I don't know well, and I wouldn't ask or expect them to solve a problem in my day-to-day life. So this isn't the only factor.
2. Intellectual formidability. To what extent someone comes up with ideas that surprise me and seem like things I would never have thought of on my own. This also includes people who have accomplished things that I can't imagine myself succeeding at, like startups. In this sense, there are a lot of bloggers, LW posters, and people on the CFAR mailing list who are major PCs in my mental classification system, but who I may not know personally at all.
3. Conventional "agentiness". The degree to which a person's behaviour can be described by "they wanted X, so they took action Y and got what they wanted", as opposed to "they did X kind of at random, and Y happened." When people seem highly agenty to me, I model their mental processes like this–my brother is one of them. I take the inside view, imagining that I wanted the thing they want and had their characteristics, i.e. relative intelligence, domain-specific expertise, social support, etc, and this gives better predictions than past behaviour. There are other people whose behaviour I predict based on how they've behaved in the past, using the outside view, while barely taking into account what they say they want in the future, and this is what gives useful predictions.
This category also includes the degree to which people have a growth mindset, which approximates how much they expect themselves to behave in an agenty way. My parents are a good example of people who are totally 100% reliable, but don't expect or want to change their attitudes or beliefs much in the next twenty years.
These three categories probably don't include all the subconscious criteria I use, but they're the main ones I can think of.
How does this affect relationships with people?
With people who I model as agents, I'm more likely to invoke phrases like "it was your fault that X happened" or "you said you would do Y, why didn't you?" The degree to which I feel blame or judgement towards people for not doing things they said they would do is almost directly proportional to how much I model them as agents. For people who I consider less agenty, whom I model more as complex systems, I'm more likely to skip the blaming step and jump right to "what are the things that made it hard for you to do Y? Can we fix them?"
On reflection, it seems like the latter is a healthier way to treat myself, and I know this (and consistently fail at doing this). However, I want to be treated like an agent by other people, not a complex system; I want people to give me the benefit of the doubt and assume that I know what I want and am capable of planning to get it. I'm not sure what this means for how I should treat other people.
How does this affect moral value judgements?
For me, not at all. My default, probably hammered in by years of nursing school, is to treat every human as worthy of dignity and respect. (On a gut level, it doesn't include animals, although it probably should. On an intellectual level, I don't think animals should be mistreated, but animal suffering doesn't upset me on the same visceral level that human suffering does. I think that on a gut level, my "circle of empathy" includes human dead bodies more than it includes animals).
One of my friends asked me recently if I got frustrated at work, taking care of people who had "brought their illness on themselves", i.e. by smoking, alcohol, drug use, eating junk food for 50 years, or whatever else people usually put in the category of "lifestyle choices." Honestly, I don't; it's not a distinction my brain makes. Some of my patients will recover, go home, and make heroic efforts to stay healthy; others won't, and will turn up back in the ICU at regular intervals. It doesn't affect how I feel about treating them; it feels meaningful either way. The one time I'm liable to get frustrated is when I have to spend hours of hard work on patients who are severely neurologically damaged and are, in a sense, dead already, or at least not people anymore. I hate this. But my default is still to talk to them, keep them looking tidy and comfortable, et cetera...
In that sense, I don't know if modelling different people differently is, for me, a morally a right or a wrong thing to do. However, I spoke to someone whose default is not to assign people moral value, unless he models them as agents. I can see this being problematic, since it's a high standard.
Conclusion
As usual for when I notice something new about my thinking, I expect to pay a lot of attention to this over the next few weeks, and probably notice some interesting things, and quite possibly change the way I think and behave. I think I've already succeeded in finding the source of some mysterious frustration with my roommate; I want to model her as an agent because of #1–she's my best friend and we've been through a lot together–but in the sense of #3, she's one of the least agenty people I know. So I consistently, predictably get mad at her for things like saying she'll do the dishes and then not doing them, and getting mad doesn't help either of us at all.
I'm curious to hear what other people think of this idea.
One of my habits while driving is to attempt to model the minds of many of the drivers around me (in situations of light traffic). One result is that when someone does something unexpected, my first reaction is typically "what does he know that I don't?" rather than "what is that idiot doing?". From talking to other drivers, this part of my driving seem abnormal.
In this sense, I model my parents strongly as agents–I have close to 100% confidence that they will do whatever it takes to solve a problem for me.
One of the frequent complaints about the 'agent' concept space, and the "heroic responsibility" concept in particular, is that it rarely seems to take into account people's spheres of responsibility. Are your parents the sort of people who would be able to solve anyone's problem, or are they especially responsible for you? Are other people that seem to be NPCs to you just people that don't care enough about you to spend limited cognitive (and other) resources on you and your problems?
With people who I model as agents, I'm more likely to invoke phrases like "it was your fault that X happened" or "you said you would do Y, why didn't you?" The degree to which I feel blame or judgement towards people for not doing things they said they would do is almost directly proportional to how much I model them as agents. For people who I consider less agenty, whom I model more as complex systems, I'm more likely to skip the blaming step and jump right to "what are the things that made it hard for you to do Y? Can we fix them?"
Do you get more of what you want by blaming people or assigning fault?
One of the frequent complaints about the 'agent' concept space, and the "heroic responsibility" concept in particular, is that it rarely seems to take into account people's spheres of responsibility. Are your parents the sort of people who would be able to solve anyone's problem, or are they especially responsible for you? Are other people that seem to be NPCs to you just people that don't care enough about you to spend limited cognitive (and other) resources on you and your problems?
My younger self didn't get this. I remember being surprised and upset that my parents, who would always help me with anything I needed, wouldn't automatically also help me help other people when I asked them. For example, my best friend needed somewhere to stay with her one-year-old, and I was living with my then-boyfriend, who didn't want to share an apartment with a toddler. I was baffled and hurt that my parents didn't want her staying in my old bedroom, even if she paid rent! I'd taken responsibility for helping her, and they had responsibility for helping me, so why not?
Now I know that that's not how most people behave, and that if it was, it might actually be quite dysfunctional.
Do you get more of what you want by blaming people or assigning fault?
I don't think so.
One of the frequent complaints about the 'agent' concept space, and the "heroic responsibility" concept in particular, is that it rarely seems to take into account people's spheres of responsibility. Are your parents the sort of people who would be able to solve anyone's problem, or are they especially responsible for you? Are other people that seem to be NPCs to you just people that don't care enough about you to spend limited cognitive (and other) resources on you and your problems?
I agree with this. I keep being a little puzzled over the frequent use of the "agenty" term at LW, since I haven't really seen any arguments establishing why this would be a useful distinction to make in the first place. At least some of the explanations of the concept seem mostly like cases of correspondence bias (I was going to link an example here, but can't seem to find it anymore).
I don't know if it's a useful way to think, but it's the way I do think in practice, and not necessarily because of reading Less Wrong; I think that's just where I found words for it. And based on the conversation I mentioned, other people also think like this, but using different criteria than mine. Which is really interesting. And after reflecting on this a bit and trying to taboo the term "agenty" and figure out what characteristics my brain is looking at when it assigns that label, I probably will use it less to describe other people.
In terms of describing myself, I think it's a good shorthand for several characteristics that I want to have, including being proactive, which is the word I substitute in if I'm talking to someone outside Less Wrong about my efforts at self-improvement.
In the past year or two, I've spent a lot of time explicitly trying to taboo "agenty" modelling of people from my thoughts. I didn't have a word for it before, and I'm still not sure agenty is the right word, but it's the right idea. One interesting consequence is that I very rarely get angry any more. It just doesn't make sense to be angry when you think of everyone (including yourself) mechanically. Frustration still happens, but it lacks the sense of blame that comes with anger, and it's much easier to control. In fact, I often find others' anger confusing now.
At this point, my efforts to taboo agenty thinking have been successful enough that I misinterpreted the first two paragraphs of this post. I thought it was about the distinction between people I model as full game-theoretic agents (I account for them accounting for my actions) versus people who will execute a fixed script without any reflective reasoning. To me, that's the difference between PCs and NPCs.
More recently, following this same trajectory, I've experimented with tabooing moral value assignments from my thoughts. Whenever I catch myself thinking of what one "should" do, I taboo "should" and replace it with something else. Originally, this amorality-via-taboo was just an experiment, but I was so pleased with it that I kept it around. It really helps you notice what you actually want, and things like "ugh" reactions become more obvious. I highly recommend it, at least as an experiment for a week or two.
At this point, my efforts to taboo agenty thinking have been successful enough that I misinterpreted the first two paragraphs of this post. I thought it was about the distinction between people I model as full game-theoretic agents (I account for them accounting for my actions) versus people who will execute a fixed script without any reflective reasoning. To me, that's the difference between PCs and NPCs.
This is exactly the kind of other-people-thinking-differently-than-I-do interestingness that caused me to write this post!
The thing that was most interesting to me, on reflection, is that I do get angry less since I've started modelling most people "mechanically". It's jus that my brain doesn't automatically extend that to people whom I respect a lot for whatever reason. For them, I will get angry. Which isn't helpful, but it is informative. I think it might just show that I'm more surprised when people who I think of as PCs let me down, and that when I get angry, it's because I was relying on them and hadn't made fallback plans, so the anger is more just my anxiety about my plans no longer working.
I'm not totally convinced - there may be other factors that make such qualitative distinctions important. Such as exceeding the threshold to boiling. Or putting enough bricks in a sack to burst the bottom. Or allowing someone to go long enough without air that they cannot be resuscitated. It probably doesn't do any good to pose /arbitrary/ boundaries, for sure, but not all such qualitative distinctions are arbitrary...
Or allowing someone to go long enough without air that they cannot be resuscitated.
This is less of a single qualitative distinction than you would think, given the various degrees of neurological damage that can make a person more or less the same person that they were before.
Dredging this from a deeply buried comment:
If this [the detailed planning and execution that goes into beating a raid boss in WoW] is an intuition-based approach, then I don't know what "intuition" means.
Come to think of it, I don't know what "intuition" means. Is it anything but a label stuck on processes inaccessible to consciousness that produce thoughts? Like "free will" is a label stuck on processes inacccessible to consciousness that produce decisions?
Probably. I don't think "intuition" is one process–for example, for neurotypical people apparently reading faces is innate and unlearned, and there isn't and never was conscious processing that later became unconscious habit. I'm pretty sure that other intuitions start out as conscious reasoning and simply become overlearned to the point that the reasoning happens really, really fast and doesn't feel like "thinking about" anymore–either that, or the "intuitions" were originally a separate process that was useless, and studying X fed them with information to the point that they became useful. Either way, not innate.
I do think it's a useful word to have, even if it's not rigorous. At the very least it's shorter than "processes inaccessible to consciousness that produce thoughts."
As I said, I understand the point. To demonstrate my problem, replace goblins with tigers. I don't think the fact that I haven't seen a tiger in my trashcan is evidence against the existence of tigers.
In a world where tigers didn't exist, I wouldn't expect to see one in my trashcan. In a world where tigers did exist, I also wouldn't expect to see a tiger in my trashcan, but I wouldn't be quite as surprised if I did see one. My prior probability that tigers exist is very high, since I have lots of independent reasons to believe that they do exist. The conditional probability of observing no tiger in my trashcan is skewed very slightly towards the world where tigers do not exist, but not enough to affect a prior probability that is very close to 100% already. You could say the same for the goblin example, etc–my prior probability is close to zero, and although I'm more likely not to observe a goblin in my trashcan in the world where goblins don't exist, I'm also not likely to see one in the world where goblins do exist. The prior probability is far more skewed than the conditional probability, so the evidence of not observing a goblin doesn't affect my belief much.
Very interesting about the training of gut feelings. A bit from my own experience:
I worked for a number of years in tech support positions, where I was often called upon to do PC maintenance/repairs/troubleshooting. After a while, I definitely developed an intuition about what might be wrong with a computer, given some set of symptoms, and often put that intuition to good use in the diagnosis/repair process.
However, one critical advanced skill I learned was not to trust that intuition too much. That is: a machine is brought in for repairs; symptoms are provided; I think "aha, it sounds like a motherboard problem". Certainly, when going through diagnostic procedures, I should then be on the lookout for confirming evidence. But one of the most serious errors a technician might make in this situation is not being sufficiently thorough in checking the other possibilities for what might be wrong. Other problems might (perhaps more rarely) lead to the same symptoms; furthermore and even more insidiously, the provided symptoms might give no indication whatever about some other, largely unrelated problem.
Astute readers of Less Wrong may recognize such a failure as, in large part, good old confirmation bias.
Edit: And note that the bulwark against making such errors is to have a rigorous diagnostic procedure, follow it, and get into the habit of reasoning about the situation explicitly (bouncing ideas off another person helps with this). In other words: a logic-based approach.
Intuition is good at noticing confusion.
It might (for some people?) be more useful to think of the "noticing confusion" feeling as a distinct thing, rather than simply calling it "intuition". Certainly I, for one, experience it as a specific mental sensation, so to speak.
I take by this that you don't have the experience of it feeling like your brain's being hijacked into having an emotion that you don't want?
I'm not sure... that is to say, I'm not sure what you mean, exactly, so I'll attempt to describe something I experience, and maybe you can tell me if it's the same as what you're talking about.
Sometimes (though more rarely, these days) I will have a certain sort of negative emotional response, which I would describe as anxiety; it generally comes with restlessness and inability to concentrate. Naturally, this is not an emotion I ever want to be having. I have identified several specific sorts of situations that trigger this.
I don't know that I'd describe it as feeling like my brain's being hijacked, but only because it seems logically questionable; "hijacked" implies there's some agent that is the hijacker. I usually have a limited ability to suppress this feeling by analyzing what I think is causing it (usually it's worry about certain specific sorts of outcomes/events), and attempting to reason about the likelihood of such an outcome, and what I can do to prevent it. So such an emotion is annoying, but not really mysterious (except insofar as I don't actually know all the details of my own psychology, but then, all my emotions are mysterious in that broader sense).
I don't know that I've ever had any other sort of emotion that I would say I didn't want to be having. For example, usually when I feel anger, it's in situations when I think that it is appropriate to feel anger. In the case of frustration, though, you might be right; frustration might be one emotion that's dispensable once it's served its role as a signal.
Even when I'm in the right, I can fix the situation more effectively from a standpoint of not being angry. My angry self might say things that my later non-angry self would regret, and I've gotten pretty good at not doing that.
I have, on occasion, said things in anger that led to escalation of conflict, but I don't think I've regretted saying them, since I was in the right, and felt that I was both correct and morally entitled to my comments.
When I said that we seemed to have some different values, I meant that I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with being angry, if the anger is justified.
However, one critical advanced skill I learned was not to trust that intuition too much. That is: a machine is brought in for repairs; symptoms are provided; I think "aha, it sounds like a motherboard problem". Certainly, when going through diagnostic procedures, I should then be on the lookout for confirming evidence. But one of the most serious errors a technician might make in this situation is not being sufficiently thorough in checking the other possibilities for what might be wrong.
Very true. Confirmation bias and not looking hard enough for a diagnosis is a big issue in medicine, too. I'm not sure if there's a difference between health care practitioners who were originally logic-dominant thinkers or originally intuition-dominant thinkers, or whether both struggle and have to learn the other skill anyway.
A difference is that when you're working, you have time to be as slow, thoughtful, and deliberate as you want when figuring out a problem. Obviously it's better to reason things through as well as noticing intuitions, but System 2 (roughly, explicit reasoning) is slow and effortful and puts a heavy load on working memory, and System 1 (roughly, intuitions) is fast and doesn't fill up working memory. My younger self wanted to reason though everything logically–and as a result, because nursing is a profession where you're always working under time constraints, I was always a step behind everyone else, always took longer to get started at the beginning of the day, always stayed an hour past the end of a shift to finish charting. I don't think this is because I'm a "slow" thinker–I finish written exams in half the time that it takes most of the other nursing students. Also, in my experience having a load on working memory increases confirmation bias–I don't know if this has been studied, although it wouldn't be a hard study to do. I'm more curious about things that don't make sense now.
And note that the bulwark against making such errors is to have a rigorous diagnostic procedure, follow it, and get into the habit of reasoning about the situation explicitly (bouncing ideas off another person helps with this). In other words: a logic-based approach.
Modern medicine makes use of checklists a lot. I think this is awesome. I don't need any urging to use them; I was making personal checklists on my work sheet way before I knew this was already a thing. And "if in doubt, ask someone else to come have a look" is pretty universal too. Also not something I need urging to do.
I don't know that I'd describe it as feeling like my brain's being hijacked, but only because it seems logically questionable; "hijacked" implies there's some agent that is the hijacker.
I don't literally mean that. It's just what it feels like.
I have, on occasion, said things in anger that led to escalation of conflict, but I don't think I've regretted saying them, since I was in the right, and felt that I was both correct and morally entitled to my comments.
Even when this is the case, I don't find that anger helps me get what I want. Then again, being agreeable, a lot of what I want is "not to be in conflict anymore." Also, I think some people kind of enjoy the powerful feeling that anger gives them. Whereas I find the feeling of anger aversive.
Just curious, did you have any explicit beliefs that made you ignore your intuition?
I may have had an explicit belief that my own intuitions were wrong most of the time. I don't think I had a belief that following intuitions period was bad; I always admired people who seemed to be able to do so and get good results.
Hm. Thank you for taking the time to explain; I definitely appreciate it. Your experience and values seem to differ from mine in a number of ways; that does seem to be what's behind the OP's advice being of different utility to us.
As for the bit about accuracy of gut feelings: I take your point about them being a good signal to investigate further. I do remain quite dubious about the use of the gut feelings directly, in place of explicit reasoning. I would very much like to see some data about this.
More on gut feelings:
When I was 13 years old, I was a heavily logic-dominant thinker, and I was terrible at reacting under pressure–I found this out when I started taking the required classes to become a lifeguard. I think this is mainly because, even though I could reason through what I was supposed to do, I was misinterpreting the nervousness of social pressure and people watching me perform as uncertainty about what to do. I also tended to be so occupied by thinking things through that I would have "tunnel vision"–my method wasn't fast enough to flexibly adapt when I thought a situation was one thing and it turned out to be something different.
In first year nursing school, I had gut feelings, and they were screaming at me all the time. I ignored them–justifiably, because they were pretty useless. I didn't yet have what they call "clinical judgement", which AFAICT consists of your intuition knowing what details to work from. Four years ago I didn't really know what it looked like when someone was having trouble breathing–now I could list probably 10 little details to look for. But the mental process isn't a checklist down those ten items with yes or no for each and making an aggregate score–it's "this person looks okay" or "crap, this person doesn't look okay." And this happens even if I'm not asking myself the question–I look at a patient and my brain pings me that something is wrong. I think the main limitation that my 13-year-old self had to work under was that I ignored my gut feelings, so I frequently didn't notice new information that didn't make sense–if it didn't fit into the mental model I'd made of what was going on, it got filtered out. Intuition is good at noticing confusion. Logical thinking tries to suppress confusion by fitting details into a model even if they don't fit very well, and it doesn't answer questions that aren't asked, either.
Moral of the story: it takes time and effort to train gut feelings. They don't come from nowhere.
Your experience and values seem to differ from mine in a number of ways; that does seem to be what's behind the OP's advice being of different utility to us.
I take by this that you don't have the experience of it feeling like your brain's being hijacked into having an emotion that you don't want?
I guess something that's atypical about me for a LWer is that I'm very agreeable and somewhat of a conformist. I don't like to bother other people. Acting on frustration or anger would often make me a bother to other people. Even when I'm in the right, I can fix the situation more effectively from a standpoint of not being angry. My angry self might say things that my later non-angry self would regret, and I've gotten pretty good at not doing that.
I didn't get a lot out of Bayes at the first CFAR workshop, when the class involved mentally calculating odds ratios. It's hard for me to abstractly move numbers around in my head. But the second workshop I volunteered at used a Bayes-in-everyday-life method where you drew (or visualized) a square, and drew a vertical line to divide it according to the base rates of X versus not-X, and then drew a horizontal line to divide each of the slices according to how likely you were to see evidence H in the world where X was true, and the world where not-X was true. Then you could basically see whether the evidence had a big impact on your belief, just by looking at the relative size of the various rectangles. I have a strong ability to visualize, so this is helpful.
I visualize this square with some frequency when I notice an empirical claim about thing X presented with evidence H. Other than that, I query myself "what's the base rate of this?" a lot, or ask myself the question "is H actually more likely in the world where X is true versus false? Not really? Okay, it's not strong evidence."
Example: the movie "The Heat" was hilarious but left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and I was able to track down that it was because one of the main characters, a female cop who was characterized as very smart and capable but nerdy and socially unaware, was poked fun at a lot and eventually changed by becoming less nerdy and more like the other main character, a female cop who broke all the rules with a "git 'er done" attitude (who AFAICT didn't change at all.) I felt more similar to the nerdy character, and part of me felt that the movie was making fun of nerds in general. I was able to convince myself that this wasn't a reason to be cranky.
This seems like a great reason to be cranky at the movie... this sort of thing would definitely make me angry at a movie, and I would absolutely endorse that response. Why would you not?
Re: having a "mysterious annoying emotion that [you] don't endorse": I'm not sure I understand this experience. Could you elaborate a bit?
Re: your comments on "reacting fast", and the OP's comments on "gut feelings": Do we have any evidence that these "flash-intuitions", these "gut" judgments, are actually accurate? How accurate are they?
This seems like a great reason to be cranky at the movie... this sort of thing would definitely make me angry at a movie, and I would absolutely endorse that response. Why would you not?
Because almost every book or movie out there has something in it, somewhere, that would annoy me, and I like enjoying books and movies. Because the movie's content is there anyway and me being cranky about it does absolutely nothing about the underlying culture that makes it normal for nerds to be made fun of in an action movie. Once I notice that I'm cranky and realize why, if I want to do something productive about it I can mention to my friends that I don't think nerds should be characterized that way, or I can write a blog post about it...without being cranky. Emotions are a signal. Once I've decoded that signal, I don't need the negative emotion anymore, unless it makes me more effective at doing something, which is rarely the case.
Re: having a "mysterious annoying emotion that [you] don't endorse": I'm not sure I understand this experience. Could you elaborate a bit?
We live in a world that's practically designed to play on our emotions. TV ads basically designed to make me insecure about my appearance/coolness/etc so I'll want to buy their product? I don't need to walk around with lingering insecurities; I thought I looked fine and was cool enough two minutes ago, and an ad by people whose job is to manipulate me shouldn't change that. Lots more people, in more complicated social relationships, than the ancestral environment? Sometimes people do things that annoy me, but I know that the thing they did was harmless and I don't think it should annoy me, and whereas if they were a family member I'd ask them not to do it for my sake, they're actually just an acquaintance, and I don't want to go around feeling annoyed. Or sometimes I make a faux pas and I apologize and take all the necessary steps to fix it–I don't want to keep feeling guilty after this, but I often do. Sometimes I have to make a choice between two different things I want to do, and I pick the one I want more, but then I'm sad about the one I didn't pick–I don't want to keep feeling sad and enjoy the thing that I did pick less.
Do we have any evidence that these "flash-intuitions", these "gut" judgments, are actually accurate? How accurate are they?
They're based off data that I could in theory notice and analyze logically–the way someone's skin feels, the way someone looks when they're breathing, etc. It just doesn't feel like logical analysis anymore, it feels like "oh crap, X." I think that a lot of intuition could be logical reasoning, it's just learned to the point that it happens fast at a subconscious level by pattern-recognition. And they don't have to be anywhere close to 100% accurate to be helpful. Usually the first thing I do with a gut feeling is get more data. "This patient seems worse...okay, I'll check all their vital signs again." Sometimes I'm right and something has changed. Sometimes I'm wrong. I'd still rather have the gut feelings than not. I don't know how much data there is on this.
At a first read, several comments:
Your description of the biases of intuition-dominant thinkers neatly crystallizes several massive failure modes I've seen people fall into, many, many times, failure modes that have always made me incredibly frustrated and almost irrationally angry. (I am certainly what you would call a logic-dominant thinker.) I've almost always mostly perceived such people's failures as just "oh god, this person is being horrifyingly stupid"; sometimes I've had an inkling of what precisely caused the stupidity ("not recognizing precise language" is a conclusion I've almost reached myself). Your explanation may enable me to better communicate with intuition-dominant thinkers in the future; thank you.
I am not convinced that it's easy, or even really possible, to change from one thinking style to the other. Everything else I've read suggests this sort of cognitive leaning is largely innate. Do you have anything other than your own experience to suggest otherwise?
I am having some difficulty understand the "Ignoring your emotions" section, much less seeing the use of "fixing" this "failing". (I may expand on this later, when I've had some sleep and reread it a couple of times.)
I am not convinced that it's easy, or even really possible, to change from one thinking style to the other.
After four years of nursing school, I changed from an INTJ to an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs. The medical field is somewhere where you're constantly getting bombarded with data, some of it very relevant and some of it not, and you have to react fast. There's value in being able to think logically and systematically through a patient's symptoms to make sure you're not missing something–but it's too slow much of the time, and I've learned to at least notice my quick flash-intuitions. The feeling that "something is wrong even if I don't know why" can be an incredibly valuable indication that you have to check something again, ask someone else to have a look for you, etc. Also, dealing with human beings in the most vulnerable moments of their lives is a great way to develop empathy.
I am having some difficulty understand the "Ignoring your emotions" section, much less seeing the use of "fixing" this "failing".
It's helped me a lot. Anna Salamon recently shared her technique of "when I have a mysterious annoying emotion that I don't endorse, I ask it what it wants." I may not endorse the emotion, but I feel it, and even if I try to ignore it, it'll probably still impact my behaviour, i.e. by making me act less nicely towards a person who irritates me. But I frequently can figure out "what the emotion wants"–for example, it turns out that a large percentage of the time, when quotes from an article annoy me, it's because I implicitly feel like they're attacking me because they criticize or point fun at someone who I identify with.
Example: the movie "The Heat" was hilarious but left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and I was able to track down that it was because one of the main characters, a female cop who was characterized as very smart and capable but nerdy and socially unaware, was poked fun at a lot and eventually changed by becoming less nerdy and more like the other main character, a female cop who broke all the rules with a "git 'er done" attitude (who AFAICT didn't change at all.) I felt more similar to the nerdy character, and part of me felt that the movie was making fun of nerds in general. I was able to convince myself that this wasn't a reason to be cranky.
Yes - but whose average?
Presumably the people who write the IQ test, based on whatever population sample they use to calibrate it. Is the point that the average IQ in India is 70-80, as opposed to the average in the US? (This could be technically true on an IQ test written in the US, without being meaningful, or it could be actually true because of nutrition or whatever). What data does the number 70-80 actually come from?
I chose Ramanujan as my example because mathematics is extremely meritocratic, as proven by how he went from poor/middle-class Indian on the verge of starving to England on the strength of his correspondence & papers. If there really were countless such people, we would see many many examples of starving farmers banging out some impressive proofs and achieving levels of fame somewhat comparable to Einstein; hence the reference class of peasant-Einsteins must be very small since we see so few people using sheer brainpower to become famous like Ramanujan.
(Or we could simply point out that with average IQs in the 70s and 80s, average mathematician IQs closer to 140s - or 4 standard deviations away, even in a population of billions we still would only expect a small handful of Ramanujans - consistent with the evidence. Gould, of course, being a Marxist who denies any intelligence, would not agree.)
Or we could simply point out that with average IQs in the 70s and 80s, average mathematician IQs closer to 140s - or 4 standard deviations away.
Isn't the average IQ 100 by definition?
"Life is about creating yourself" still might be problematic because the emphasis is still on what sort of person you are.
As opposed to what? I would guess maybe a better concept is what you're able to get done...
http://cfed.org/assets/scorecard/2013/rg_AssetLimits_2013.pdf
Short version: it varies quite a bit by state, but some major benefits in a fair number of states have a personal asset limit of two or three thousand dollars.
Thanks! So it looks like there's a limit but at least someone thinks it's a bad idea and some states are changing it...
According to this, the asset limit to qualify for Ontario Works (welfare) is $572 for a single adult and $1,550 for a lone parent. So, worse than is the US... (But it was $2500 for a single adult in 1981...) The 50% earning exemption is new from 2003 though.
Wow I have learned things today!
Jurgen Streeck's book Gesturecraft: The manu-facture of meaning is a good summary of Streeck's cross-linguistic research on the interaction of gesture and speech in meaning creation. The book is pre-theoretical, for the most part, but Streeck does make an important claim that the biological covariation in a speaker or hearer across the somatosensory modes of gesture, vision, audition, and speech do the work of abstraction -- which is an unsolved problem in my book.
Streeck's claim happens to converge with Eric Kandel's hypothesis that abstraction happens when neurological activity covaries across different somatosensory modes. After all, the only things that CAN covary across, say, musical tone changes in the ear and dance moves in the arms, legs, trunk, and head, are abstract relations. Temporal synchronicity and sequence, say.
Another interesting book is Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins. Hutchins goes rather too far in the direction of externalizing cognition from the participants in the act of knowing, but he does make it clear that cultures build tools into the environment that offload thinking function and effort, to the general benefit of all concerned. Those tools get included by their users in the manufacture of online meaning, to the point that the online meaning can't be reconstructed from the words alone.
The whole field of conversation analysis goes into the micro-organization of interactive utterances from a linguistic point of view rather than a cognitive perspective. The focus is on the social and communicative functions of empirically attested language structures as demonstrated by the speakers themselves to one another. Anything written by John Heritage in that vein is worth reading, IMO.
EDIT: Revised, consolidated, and expanded bibliography on interactive construction of meaning:
LINGUISTICS
Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, by George Lakoff
The Singing Neaderthals, by Steven Mithen
CONVERSATION ANALYSIS & GESTURE RESEARCH
Handbook of Conversation Analysis, by Jack Sidnell & Tanya Stivers
Gesturecraft: The Manu-facture of Meaning, by Jurgen Streeck
Pointing: Where Language, Culture, and Cognition Meet, by Sotaro Kita
Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance, by Adam Kendon
Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think, by Susan Goldin-Meadow
Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought, by David McNeill
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Symbols and Embodiment, edited by Manuel de Vega, Arthur M Glenberg, & Arthur C Graesser
Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchins
That's about income, not savings.
I don't know what the policy was on savings-i.e. to what degree, if at all, they would reduce her monthly amount if she submitted her budget each month and was spending less. I get the impression that it's kind of a basic fixed rate for, i.e., adult not in school with one child...and that it's realistically not enough to save, even if you spend nothing on discretionary purchases or fun. She got around $900 a month, of which $550 alone went towards her part of our rent.
If she'd, for example, made $500 per paycheck (25 hours a week at Canadian mininum wage), that would make $1000 a month, so they'd take $500 off her welfare payment, for a monthly total income of $1400...which is enough to save at least a small amount per month, given our shared living expenses. In the US welfare system, would they cancel your welfare if you were able to save $200 a month of this total?
They did keep cancelling the welfare for unrelated reasons. (Example: her parents had had an education fund for her of about $10,000, but they'd spent it all on her wedding, and they sent her a letter saying her welfare was cancelled until she could submit documents proving this. Not a warning-cancelled. She missed a month or two before submitting the documents, and eventually gave up and just worked more hours.)
At least in the US, saving money can disqualify you from welfare.
When my best friend was on welfare, they would take what she had earned at her part-time job the last month and subtract half that amount from her welfare. So there was still an incentive to work, albeit less. I don't know to what degree she had to submit her budget or expenses to them (i.e. that they would actually know if she was saving money), but in general they seemed to make it as hard as possible to actually stay on Welfare.
I can't parse your post, but that may be partly because I don't understand how subsidizing status markers would produce character traits to begin with.
I think the point is that it wouldn't. You can have character traits, i.e. conscientiousness, that result in status markers, i.e. having saved a lot of money. If you make it easier for people to get the specific status marker, i.e. welfare, the causal arrow doesn't go in reverse and increase conscientiousness. You could expect it to have no effect, i.e. if conscientiousness and other traits are innate and entirely determined by age 4. (That's kind of my default). Or, in a slightly more complicated world where conscientiousness can vary depending on environment , i.e. there are a bunch of causal arrows bouncing around in confusing ways, "diluting" the status marker by making it easier to acquire might reduce the incentive to have the underlying trait, and make people less conscientious over time. I've heard the argument that this happens to people on welfare, although I'm tempted to say "correlation not causation"–>who ends up on welfare in the first place already depends on conscientiousness.
Hi, everyone. My name is Teresa, and I came to Less Wrong by way of HPMOR.
I read the first dozen chapters of HPMOR without having read or seen the Harry Potter canon, but once I was hooked on the former, it became necessary to see all the movies and then read all the books in order to get the HPMOR jokes. JK Rowling actually earned royalties she would never have received otherwise thanks to HPMOR.
I don't actually identify as a pure rationalist, although I started out that way many, many years ago. What I am committed to today is SANITY. I learned the hard way that, in my case at least, it is the body that keeps the mind sane. Without embodiment to ground meaning, you get into problems of unsearchable infinite regress, and you can easily hypothesize internally consistent worlds that are nevertheless not the real world the body lives in. This can lead to religions and other serious delusions.
That said, however, I find a lot of utility in thinking through the material on this site. I discovered Bayesian decision theory in high school, but the texts I read at the time either didn't explain the whole theory or else I didn't catch it all at age 14. Either way, it was just a cute trick for calculating compound utility scores based on guesses of likelihood for various contingencies. The greatest service the Less Wrong site has done for me is to connect the utility calculation method to EMPIRICAL prior probabilities! Like, duh! A hugely useful tool, that is.
As a professional writer in my day job and student of applied linguistics research otherwise, I have some reservations about those of the Sequences that reference the philosophy of language. I completely agree that Searle believes in magic (aka "intentionality"), which is not useful. But this does not mean the Chinese Room problem isn't real.
When you study human language use empirically in natural contexts (through frame-by-frame analysis of video recordings), it turns out that what we think we do with language and what we actually do are rather divergent. The body and places in the world and other agents in the interaction all play a much bigger role in the real-time construction of meaning than you would expect from introspection. Egocentric bias has a HUGE impact on what we imagine about our own utterances. I've come to the conclusion that Stevan Harnad is absolutely correct, and that machine language understanding will require an AI ROBOT, not a disembodied algorithmic system.
As for HPMOR, I hereby predict that Harrymort is going to go back in time to the primal event in Godric's Hollow and change the entire universe to canon in his quest to, er, spoilers, can't say.
Cheers.
Welcome!
Without embodiment to ground meaning, you get into problems of unsearchable infinite regress, and you can easily hypothesize internally consistent worlds that are nevertheless not the real world the body lives in. This can lead to religions and other serious delusions.
Yeah. This, and the "existential angst" thing, seem to be common problems on LW, and I've never been sure why. I think that keeping yourself busy doing practical stuff prevents it from becoming an issue.
When you study human language use empirically in natural contexts (through frame-by-frame analysis of video recordings), it turns out that what we think we do with language and what we actually do are rather divergent. The body and places in the world and other agents in the interaction all play a much bigger role in the real-time construction of meaning than you would expect from introspection.
That's fascinating! What research has been done on this! I would totally be interested in reading more about it.
For a while I satisfied my idea-spreading urges by teaching math to talented kids on a volunteer basis. If you're very good at something (e.g. swimming), you could try teaching that, it's a lot of fun.
Or you could spend some effort on figuring out how to measure rationality and check if someone is making progress. That's much harder though, once you get past the obvious wrong answers like "give them a multiple choice test about rationality". Eliezer and Anna have written a lot about this problem.
I do teach swimming; I did for many years as a job, and now I do it for fun (and for free) to the kids of my friends (and several of the CFAR staff when I was in San Francisco). It's something I'm very good at (I may be more at teaching swimming to others than swimming myself), and it fulfills an urge, but not the idea-spreading one.
If CFAR is looking for help trying to make a rationality test, I would be happy to help, too...
Kids definitely have more time, but otherwise they don't necessarily learn languages easier. Or at least, secondary languages.
Wow. This article managed to surprise me. Not the fact that kids aren't any better than adults at learning things deliberately, class-room style–I suppose I thought they would be worse at this, but better at unstructured learning-from-stuff-happening-around-them. (I suppose I thought this because the way that young children learn to speak a first language isn't related to, or helped by, classroom instruction). But the fact that kids who started French Immersion in 7th grade are just as good as those who started in kindergarten surprised me a lot. This is a program that deliberately tries to teach less in a structured classroom way, and more the way you would learn a first language. (It doesn't do it incredibly well, though–I went through French immersion, could read and write competently and speak stiltedly by the end of eighth grade, backslid a bit during high school due to limited class hours in French, and only became fluently bilingual in university when "immersed" among actual Quebecois Francophones.) I had massively more trouble trying to learn a third language, but this is probably mostly because a) it was Chinese (more linguistically unrelated), and b) the time thing–I thought an hour a day was a ridiculous and unrealistic amount of time to spend, and what I actually spent was more like fifteen minutes.
Thank you for new information!
On the other hand, you are probably have more raw intelligence now.
Yes. But I probably had close to my current raw intelligence at age 15-16, and I was definitely reading hard books at age 8-9.
Trying to learn rationality skills in my 20s, when a bunch of thought patterns are already overlearned, is even more frustrating.
I may be reading a non-existent connotation into this line, but to me it pattern matches with the belief that the human mind is a blank slate, as though you would have been rational if you hadn't been corrupted by society.
Humans are, at bottom, animals, and structured around uncritical stimulus-response type behavior. It's mysterious that humans are capable of transcending these things to achieve some sort of global rationality altogether. I think that learning to do so is inevitably going to be a lot of hard work, regardless of the stage of life at which one attempts it.
No no no. Not at all. I was obviously less rational as a baby than I am now. But childhood neuroplasticity is a thing; it's easier to learn languages before age 10, and preferably before age 5. And kids have time. As a kid, when I did competitive swimming,I used to be in the pool >10 hours a week. Now, as an adult, I do taekwondo, and although there are 10 hours of class a week available, I only make 2-3.
I did learn some maladaptive thought patterns: i.e. my social anxiety spiral around "you just don't have enough natural talent to do X", and the kicker, "you aren't good enough." I know this is a pretty meaningless phrase, but it has emotional power because it's been around so long.
Is it just me, or does your comment sound like a retreat from "we need to spread rationality because it's a good idea" to "we need to spread rationality to figure out if it's a good idea"?
If yes, then note that LW has existed for years and has thousands of users. Yvain was among the first contributors to LW and his early posts were already excellent. Many other good contributors, like Wei Dai (invented UDT, independently invented cryptocurrency) or Paul Christiano (IMO participant), were also good before they joined... As Yvain's post said, it seems hard to find people who benefited a lot from LW-rationality.
I'm not sure we need more information about the usefulness of LW-rationality before we can make a conclusion. We already have a lot of evidence pointing one way, look at all the LWers who didn't benefit. Besides, what makes you think that a study with more participants and longer duration would give different results? If anything, it's probably going to be closer to the mean, because LW folks are self-selected, not randomly selected from the population.
I would say that rationality is worth trying to spread because it may be a good idea, and because it's something I know about and can think and plan about. Do you know of another community that has a similar level of development to LW (i.e. fairly cohesive but still quite obscure) that I should also investigate? (AFAIK, CFAR is looking for such organizations for new ideas anyway.)
Also, I'm going to update from your comment in the direction of rationality outreach turning out not being the best use of my time.
If such evidence is enough, then rationality would probably recommend you to spread religion instead of rationality :-) Religious people also often talk about how religion gave them wonderful feelings and improved their lives, and there are actual studies showing religious people are happier and healthier.
I feel that you haven't mentioned an important factor, which is that LW-rationality sounds very attractive in some sense. If that's correct, then you're not alone in this, it took me years to learn to honestly subtract that factor.
I feel that you haven't mentioned an important factor, which is that LW-rationality sounds very attractive in some sense.
Noted. However, before I subtract that factor, I would like to learn whether LW-style rationality seems so attractive for a good reason: long-term, averaged over many people, does it make a difference? It has for a few people. I don't think you can conclusively say, yet, whether it's worthwhile teaching to to everyone. In 5-10 years, when CFAR longer-term data starts coming in, then I'll know. In the meantime, trying to spread it to other people provides data, too.
If it turns out it doesn't help most people, I won't keep trying to show it to other people, although I'll probably try to stick with the community. I would still want to keep looking for something else to try to teach the other people who keep doing stupid things. Call me an idealist...
Religion, AFAICT, does not teach clarity of mind. In many cases it teaches people to follow their intuitions and gut feelings because "God is looking out for them." This sometimes turns out well for the individual, and sometimes badly (which you'd expect; intuitions are valuable data but can be wrong if the heuristics are applied out of context). Overall I think it's bad for society, and better if people notice that their hunches are in fact hunches and try to fact-check them. (This isn't always possible; sometimes you have no outside-view data and you have to go with your gut feeling. But rationality would teach that, too.)
And yeah, I'm picking rationality as a thing to try to spread without having looked at all the possible alternatives. I think that's okay. There are other people in society who are trying to spread other things for similar reasons. If there are 10 people like me, all with different agendas but for the same reasons, and we're all paying attention to the data of the next 5 years, and it turns out that one of our methods is actually effective, I would consider that a success. I just don't know which one of the 10 people I am yet. (If I meet one of the others, and they convince me their agenda has a higher chance of success, I would think about it and then probably agree to help them.)
I thought you doubted it more than a little bit, because you linked to Yvain's post that says there's not much evidence. If "a little bit" means, say, 10%, then can you describe the arguments that made you 90% confident?
Yvain said that clarity of mind was one benefit he'd had. I think clarity of mind is awesome and rare, and makes it less likely that people will do stupid things for bad reasons.
I've met Yvain and I think he's fairly awesome. Likewise, of the other LW people I've met in real life, they seem disproportionately awesome–they have clarity of mind, yes, but it seems to lead into other things, like doing things differently because you're actually able to recognize the reason why you were doing non-useful things in the first place. Correlation not causation, of course, and I didn't know these people 5 years ago, and even if I had, people progress in awesomeness anyway. But still. Correlation = data in a direction, and it's not the direction of rationality being useless.
In his post Yvain distinguishes between regular rationality, which he thinks a lot of people have, and "x-rationality" that you get from long study of the Sequences' concepts. I think a lot fewer people have even regular rationality, that it's a continuum not a divide, and that strategically placed and worded LW concepts could push almost anymore further towards the 'rationality' side.
I've changed a lot because of my exposure to the rationality community, and in ways that I don't think I could have attained otherwise. A lot of this is due to clarity of mind–in particular my allowing myself to think thoughts that are embarrassing or otherwise painful. Some of it's due to specific ideas, like "notice that you're confused" or "taboo word X". Some of it's due to just hanging out with a social group who think differently than my parents. See this post a year and a half ago, and this post from lately.
Right. I'm making a point about the definition of 'rationality', not about the best way to become rational, which might very well be heavily reflective and intellectualizing. The distinction is important because the things we intuitively associate with 'rationality' (e.g., explicit reasoning) might empirically turn out not to always be useful, whereas (instrumental) rationality itself is, stipulatively, maximally useful. We want to insulate ourselves against regrets of rationality.
If having accurate beliefs about yourself reliably makes you lose, then those beliefs are (instrumentally) irrational to hold. If deliberating over what to do reliably makes you lose, then such deliberation is (instrumentally) irrational. If reflecting on your preferences and coming to understand your goals better reliably makes you lose, then such practices are (instrumentally) irrational.
Agreed that it's a good distinction to make.
Short: epistemic=believing things on purpose, instrumental=doing things on purpose for thought-out reasons.
It's worth noting that this is different from how CFAR and the Sequences tend to think about rationality. They would say that someone whose beliefs are relatively unreflective and unexamined but more reliably true is more epistemically rational than someone who less reliably true beliefs who has examined and evaluated those beliefs much more carefully. I believe they'd also say that someone who acts with less deliberation and has fewer explicit reasons, but reliably gets better results, is more rational than a more reflective but ineffective individual.
Agreed. And that makes sense as a way to compare a number of individuals at a single point in time. However, if you are starting at rationality level x, and you want to progress to rationality level y over time z, I'm not sure of a better way to do it than to think deliberately about your beliefs and actions. (This may include 'copying people who appear to do better in life'; that constitutes 'thinking about your beliefs/goals'). Although there may well be better ways.
Let's make a more specific bet: I anticipate that any attempts by CFAR in the next 10 years to broaden the demographic that attends its workshops to include people with IQ within a standard deviation of mean (say in the United States) will fail by their standards. Agree or disagree?
Agree. But "workshops" includes any future instructor-led activities they might do, including shorter formats i.e. 3-hour or 1-day, larger groups, etc.
I think 'can we make everyone rational?' is probably the wrong question. Better questions:
How much more rational could we make 2013 average-IQ people, by modifying their cultural environment and education? (That is, without relying on things like surgical or genetic modification.) What's the realistic limit of improvement, and when would diminishing returns make investing in further education a waste?
How do specific rationality skills vary in teachability? Are there some skills that are especially easy to culturally transmit (i.e., 'make cool' in a behavior-modifying way) or to instill in ordinary people?
How hard would the above approaches be? How costly is the required research and execution?
In addition to the obvious direct benefits of being more rational (which by definition means 'people make decisions that get them more of what they want' and 'people's beliefs are better maps'), how big are indirect benefits like Qiaochu's 'smart people see rationality as more valuable', or 'governments and individuals fund altruism (including rationality training) more effectively', or 'purchasing and voting habits are more globally beneficial'?
Suppose we were having this discussion 200 or 500 or 1000 years ago instead, and the topic was not 'Can we make everyone rational?' but 'Can we make everyone literate?' or 'Can we make everyone a non-racist?' or 'Can we make everyone irreligious?'. I think it's clear in retrospect that those aren't quite the right questions to be asking, and it's also clear in retrospect that appeals to intelligence levels, as grounds for cynical skepticism, would have been very naïve.
At this point I don't think we have nearly enough data to know all the rationality skills IQ sets a hard limit on, or whether people at a given IQ level are anywhere near those limits. Given that uncertainty, we should think seriously about the virtues and dangers of a world where LW-level rationality is as common as, today, literacy or religious disengagement is.
Given that uncertainty, we should think seriously about the virtues and dangers of a world where LW-level rationality is as common as, today, literacy or religious disengagement is.
Yes, this is exactly what I'm trying to think about. You can't know long-term historical trends in advance...but you have to make informed-ish decisions about what to try doing, and how to try doing it, anyway.
I have an intuition that a better future would be one where the concept of rationality (maybe called something different, but the same idea) is normal.
I am highly skeptical of this happening with human psychology kept constant, basically because I think rationality is de facto impossible for humans who are not at least ~2 standard deviations smarter than the mean. (I also suspect that most LWers have bad priors about what mean intelligence looks like, including me.)
I think a more achievable goal is to make the concept of rationality cool. Being a movie star, for example, is cool but not normal. Rationality not being cool prevents otherwise sufficiently smart people from exploring it. My model of what raising the sanity waterline looks like in the short- to medium-term is to start from the smartest people (these are simultaneously the easiest and the highest-value people to make more rational) and work down the intelligence ladder from there.
Making rationality cool = an excellent starting point. I still disagree on the rationality-intelligence thing, though; I think you could teach skills that could still meaningfully be called epistemic/instrumental rationality to people with IQ 100 and below. Not everyone, anymore than it's possible to persuade everyone from childhood that it's a good idea to spend money sensibly. (Gaah this is a pet peeve for me). But enough to make the world more awesome.
I'm going to register that disagreement as a bet, and if in 10 years LW is still around and enough has happened that we know who's right, I will find this comment and collect/lose a Bayes point.
The jargon thing.
I'm not sure this is avoidable, because precise concepts need precise terms. One of my favorite passages from Three Worlds Collide is:
But the Lady 3rd was shaking her head. "You confuse a high conditional likelihood from your hypothesis to the evidence with a high posterior probability of the hypothesis given the evidence," she said, as if that were all one short phrase in her own language.
That is the sort of concept which should be one short phrase in a language used by people who evaluate hypotheses by Bayesian thinking. Inaccessibility of jargon is oftentimes a sign of real inferential distance- someone needs to know what those two concepts are mathematically for that sentence-long explanation of a single phrase to make any sense, and explaining what those concepts are mathematically is a lecture or two by itself.
(That said, I agree that in areas where a professional community has a technical term for a concept and LW has a different technical term for that concept, replacing LW's term with the professional community's term is probably a good move.)
But intelligence and rationality are, in theory, orthogonal, or at least not the same thing.
It seems to me that while intelligence is not sufficient for rationality, it might be necessary for rationality. (As rationality testing becomes more common, we'll be able to investigate that empirical claim.) I often describe rationality as "living deliberately," and that seems like the sort of thing that appeals much more to people with more intellectual horsepower because it's much easier for them to be deliberate.
I agree with you on the jargon thing; it's so much easier to have a conversation about rationality-cluster with LW people because of it. (It's also fun and ingroupy). But I do think it's a problem overall, and partly avoidable.
How does a doubt about the usefulness of rationality coexist with a desire to spread rationality? I see that many people can reconcile these two feelings just fine, but my mind just doesn't seem to work that way...
Well, there aren't many things that I don't doubt a little bit. I don't think this a bad thing. However, in order to get anything done in life, instead of sitting in my room thinking about how much I don't know, I have to act on a lot of things that I'm a bit doubtful about.
First, it sounds arrogant.
First, actually, comes credibility. You want to teach me how the world really works? Prove to me that your views are correct and not mistaken.You want to teach me how to win? Show me a million bucks in your bank account.
Even if offering to teach people those things in the abstract were the easiest sell in the world
Keep in mind that in non-LW terms you're basically trying to teach people logic and science. The idea that by teaching common people logic and science the world can be made a better place is a very old idea, probably dating back to Enlightenment. It wasn't an overwhelming success. It is probably an interesting and relevant question why not.
It is probably an interesting and relevant question why not.
I agree; this is an idea I would like to hear someone else's opinion on. My intuition is that teaching people logic and science has nothing to do with making them better people; it makes them more effective at whatever they want to do, max. Trying to teach "being a better person" has been attempted (for thousands of years in religious organizations), but maybe not enough in the same places/times as teaching science.
Also, the study of cognitive biases and how intuitions can be wrong is much more recent than the Enlightenment. Thinking that you know science and all your thoughts that feel right are right is dangerous.
Some notes/reactions in random order.
First, how do you understand rationality? Can you explain it in a couple of sentences without using links and/or references to lengthier texts?
Second, there are generally reasons for why things happen the way they happen. I don't want to make an absolute out of that, but if a person's behavior is seemingly irrational to you, there's still some reason, maybe understood, maybe not understood, maybe misunderstood why the person behaves that way. Rationality will not necessarily fix that reason.
Third, consider domains like finance or trading. There is immediate, obvious feedback on how successful your decisions/actions were. Moreover, people who are consistently unsuccessful are washed out (because they don't have any more money to trade/invest). If you define rationality as the way to win, finance and trading should be populated by high-performance rationalists. Does it look like that in real life?
Fourth, on LW at least there is much confounding between rationality and utilitarianism. The idea is that if you're truly rational you must be a utilitarian. I don't think so. And I suspect that making rationality popular is going to be much easier without the utilitarian baggage (in particular, that "Spock thing").
intelligence and rationality are, in theory, orthogonal, or at least not the same thing.
They are not the same thing, but I don't think they're orthogonal. I would probably say that your intelligence puts a cap on how rational you can be. People won't necessarily reach their cap, but it's very hard to go beyond it. I have strong doubts about stupid people's capabilities to be rational.
My weak definition of rationality: thinking about your own knowledge and beliefs from an outside perspective and updating/changing them if they are not helpful and don't make sense (epistemic); noticing your goals, thinking a bit about how to achieve them, and then doing that on purpose to see if works, while paying attention if it's not working so you can try something else; thinking about and trying to notice the actual consequences of your actions (instrumental).
Short: epistemic=believing things on purpose, instrumental=doing things on purpose for thought-out reasons.
I say weak because this isn't a superpower; you can do it without being amazingly good at that (i.e. if you have an IQ of 90). But you can exercise without being amazingly good at any sport, and you still benefit from it. I think that also stands for basic rationality.
if a person's behavior is seemingly irrational to you, there's still some reason, maybe understood, maybe not understood, maybe misunderstood why the person behaves that way.
In a general sense, yeah. People operate inside causality. But people do things for a reason that they haven't noticed, haven't thought about, and might not agree with if they did think about. For example, Bob might find himself well on the path to alcoholism without realizing that his original, harmless-and-normal-seeming craving for a drink in the evening happened because it helped with his insomnia; a problem that could more healthily be addressed by booking a doctor's appointment. (I pick this example because I recently caught myself in the early stages of this process). But from the inside, it doesn't feel like the brain is fallible, and so even people who've come across research to the contrary feel like their introspection is always correct–let alone people who've never seen those ideas. I don't think the IQ ceiling on understanding and benefiting from "I might be wrong about why I do this" is very high.
Making Rationality General-Interest
Introduction
Less Wrong currently represents a tiny, tiny, tiny segment of the population. In its current form, it might only appeal to a tiny, tiny segment of the population. Basically, the people who have a strong need for cognition, who are INTx on the Myers-Briggs (65% of us as per 2012 survey data), etc.
Raising the sanity waterline seems like a generally good idea. Smart people who believe stupid things, and go on to invest resources in stupid ways because of it, are frustrating. Trying to learn rationality skills in my 20s, when a bunch of thought patterns are already overlearned, is even more frustrating.
I have an intuition that a better future would be one where the concept of rationality (maybe called something different, but the same idea) is normal. Where it's as obvious as the idea that you shouldn't spend more money than you earn, or that you should live a healthy lifestyle, etc. The point isn't that everyone currently lives debt-free, eats decently well and exercises; that isn't the case; but they are normal things to do if you're a minimally proactive person who cares a bit about your future. No one has ever told me that doing taekwondo to stay fit is weird and culty, or that keeping a budget will make me unhappy because I'm overthinking thing.
I think the questions of "whether we should try to do this" and "if so, how do we do it in practice?" are both valuable to discuss, and interesting.
Is making rationality general-interest a good goal?
My intuitions are far from 100% reliable. I can think of a few reasons why this might be a bad idea:
1. A little bit of rationality can be damaging; it might push people in the direction of too much contrarianism, or something else I haven't thought of. Since introspection is imperfect, knowing a bit about cognitive biases and the mistakes that other people make might make people actually less likely to change their mind–they see other people making those well-known mistakes, but not themselves. Likewise, rationality taught only as a tool or skill, without any kind of underlying philosophy of why you should want to believe true things, might cause problems of a similar nature to martial art skills taught without the traditional, often non-violent philosophies–it could result in people abusing the skill to win fights/debates, making the larger community worse off overall. (Credit to Yan Zhang for martial arts metaphor).
2. Making the concepts general-interest, or just growing too fast, might involve watering them down or changing them in some way that the value of the LW microcommunity is lost. This could be worse for the people who currently enjoy LW even if it isn't worse overall. I don't know how easy it would be to avoid, or whether
3. It turns out that rationalists don't actually win, and x-rationality, as Yvain terms it, just isn't that amazing over-and-above already being proactive and doing stuff like keeping a budget. Yeah, you can say stuff like "the definition of rationality is that it helps you win", but if in real life, all the people who deliberately try to increase their rationality do worse off overall, by their own standards (or even equally well, but with less time left over for other fun pursuits) than the people who aim for their life goals directly, I want to know that.
4. Making rationality general-interest is a good idea, but not the best thing to be spending time and energy on right now because of Mysterious Reasons X, Y, Z. Maybe I only think it is because of my personal bias towards liking community stuff (and wishing all of my friends were also friends with each other and liked the same activities, which would simplify my social life, but probably shouldn't happen for good reasons).
Obviously, if any of these are the case, I want to know about it. I also want to know about it if there are other reasons, off my radar, why this is a terrible idea.
What has to change for this to happen?
I don't really know, or I would be doing those things already (maybe, akrasia allowing). I have some ideas, though.
1. The jargon thing. I'm currently trying to compile a list of LW/CFAR jargon as a project for CFAR, and there are lots of terms I don't know. There are terms that I've realized in retrospect that I was using incorrectly all along. This presents both a large initial effort for someone interested in learning about rationality via the LW route, and also might contribute to the looking-like-a-cult thing.
2. The gender ratio thing. This has been discussed before, and it's a controversial thing to discuss, and I don't know how much arguing about it in comments will present any solutions. It seems pretty clear that if you want to appeal to the whole population, and a group that represents 50% of the general population only represents 10% of your participants (also as per 2012 survey data, see link above), there's going to be a problem somewhere down the road.
My data point: as a female on LW, I haven't experienced any discrimination, and I'm a bit baffled as to why the gender ratio is so skewed in the first place. Then again, I've already been through the filter of not caring if I'm the only girl at a meetup group. And I do hang out in female-dominated groups (i.e. the entire field of nursing), and fit in okay, but I'm probably not all that good as a typical example to generalize from.
3. LW currently appeals to intelligent people, or at least people who self-identify as intelligent; according to the 2012 survey data, the self-reported IQ median is 138. This wouldn't be surprising, and isn't a problem until you want to appeal to more than 1% of the population. But intelligence and rationality are, in theory, orthogonal, or at least not the same thing. If I suffered a brain injury that reduced my IQ significantly but didn't otherwise affects my likes and dislikes, I expect I would still be interested in improving my rationality and think it was important, perhaps even more so, but I also think I would find it frustrating. And I might feel horribly out of place.
4. Rationality in general has a bad rap; specifically, the Spock thing. And this isn't just affecting whether or not people thing Less Wrong the site is weird; it's affecting whether they want to think about their own decision-making.
This is only what I can think of in 5 minutes...
What's already happening?
Meetup groups are happening. CFAR is happening. And there are groups out there practicing skills similar or related to rationality, whether or not they call it the same thing.
Conclusion
Rationality, Less Wrong and CFAR have, gradually over the last 2-3 years, become a big part of my life. It's been fun, and I think it's made me stronger, and I would prefer a world where as many other people as possible have that. I'd like to know if people think that's a) a good idea, b) feasible, and c) how to do it practically.
I didn't say that if I was living in factory farm, I would prefer to be killed.
To quote you to you, "I would prefer to not exist than to live my life in a factory farm."
That's a pretty unambiguous statement. Maybe you want to modify it?
EDIT: Ah, I see you modified it. But that's not really a choice: the past is fixed. It's only an expression of a wish that the past were different. And, of course, it it were realized there would be no you to make the choice...
I went back and edited it. I personally thought it was ambiguous tending in the direction of not exist=never have existed in the first place, as opposed to 'stop existing'. Illusion of transparency, etc.
As an individual who can suffer, I would prefer to not exist than to live my life in a factory farm.
Are you willing to make that choice for others?
If you see a creature living in a factory farm and have an opportunity to save it from the rest of its existence, will you kill it?
will you kill it?
Whoa. I didn't say that if I was living in factory farm, I would prefer to be killed. I might, and I might seek suicide, but that's a hard choice, because the will-to-live-above-all-else exists and is quite strong (for good evolutionary reasons). Also, approaching death is scary = suffering. So no, I wouldn't make that choice for another person, if I couldn't communicate with them and ask. If I could ask them, I'm not sure.
(This is a situation I've imagined myself in, i.e. if I have a patient someday who is able to convince me that they have made a rational decision that they want to commit assisted suicide. I can't model myself well enough to know what I'd do in that situation either.)
An individual that doesn't exist in the first place, i.e. because of better birth control or because fewer animals are farmed for food, doesn't exist to have to make a choice; at least that's how I see it. I could conceive of people thinking they're philosophically the same situation, but I strongly think that they aren't.
Thus, by being vegetarian, you are saving 26 land animals a year
I don't quite understand in which meaning is the word "save" used here.
It seems to me that an equivalent statement would be "After a short period of adjustment, you being a vegetarian would result in 26 land animals not existing any more (as in, not being born)".
In the ultimate case of everyone becoming a full vegetarian, domestic animals raised for meat would become endangered species in danger of extinction. I don't think it counts as "saving".
I agree with you on the technicality-it's a weird use of the word "save". Philosophically I agree with the original poster. As an individual who can suffer, I would prefer to not exist (edit: not have existed in the first place) than to live my life in a factory farm.
For two weeks I've been writing out a schedule for what I want to accomplish the next day before I go to bed, noting the time at which I intend to do something.
I'd give the technique a +9 so far as it has actually worked incredibly well for me in helping with my motivation problems, in fact in a couple days I felt more motivated to work than I can ever remember being before. I'm trying to change up my schedule and leave time for spontaneity to avoid having the plan become monotonous and it doesn't feel that way so far. And the results I'm getting are great: I find I get about 95% of what I plan done when I have a specific time written down for when I'm supposed to do it as opposed to what I'd roughly estimate at 60% completion when I just have some general idea in my head of what to work on over the course of the day.
My theory for why this is working is that when I have a specific time to do something I feel as though I have to do it now or I've failed some test of willpower. If I just have general work to be done, it's far too easy for me to defer to later, so that a lot of what was planned for doesn't get done. I also feel like if I expect to brace my mind for dense technical learning I have a much easier time finishing the material instead of giving up and procrastinating on it halfway through.
I feel like this solution will work mainly for people who have more flexible schedules (as I do at the moment) but could still serve a purpose for anyone with a more rigid schedule who wants to be more productive in their free time.
but could still serve a purpose for anyone with a more rigid schedule who wants to be more productive in their free time.
I had quite a bad experience with this, but I think I'm permanently overcommitted, and often just don't have time to do everything that I want/feel an obligation to do–and often I can't tell the difference between "want to do X" and "feel obligated to do X". Also, I have the lucky trait that I can usually get work done on demand, even if I'm exhausted, but I tend to abuse this and think it means I can get work done nonstop all the time. Which I can't.
I don't this this is a knockdown argument that this technique doesn't work for me. It might well work in a different form. I'm still trying various things for personal free-time productivity.
Just a caution: using the Notes program on iphone (the default program that the iphone and ipad come with, with the little yellow and brown icon) can be dangerous. Mine seems to randomly delete notes for no known reason. I stopped using this program entirely after it happened to me once. (In my case, it may have been due to taking too many large-ish videos that were sent to my 'photostream' and overloaded it, but I'm not certain of that.)
Obviously if that's not the program you're using then disregard.
Yes, that's the program I use. It's never deleted anything for me. I've been using it for about a year.
On this hypothesis, male writers end up with mostly male readers for much the same reason that Japanese writers end up with mostly Japanese readers.
Because they can speak japanese?
Or because they share basic cultural assumptions: how parents ought to treat their children, how children out to treat their parents, how teenagers ought to decide what to do as adults, how strangers ought to behave towards other strangers, etc. Japan and the USA have definite cultural differences, the most basic of which, massively simplified, is individualism versus collectivism as a society. This makes fiction written by Japanese authors and set in Japan seem alien to readers from the USA; in an appealing, artsy, interesting way maybe, but still alien.
I can easily see such a mechanism operating with the cultural differences between males and females who both live the USA (or in Japan) could have a similar effect, making male-oriented fiction feel a bit odd and alien to girls who read a lot of chick lit because it's what their mothers and sisters and friends recommend all the time. I can see this transferring over, more subtly, to differences in styles of non-fiction writing and blogging. I don't know if it actually does, but it might.
The only way to lose weight is to spend more energy than you consume.
Liposuction.
The laws of thermodynamics don't require a fat cell to release lipids because you're hungry or exercising; the fat cells can just physically not react until your muscles run out of glucose or your brain overrules your attempt to starve yourself to death. Similarly, there's no rule that fat cells can't die or shrink and the waste be dumped out through urine.
Thermodynamics is not any more useful than quantum mechanics in understanding obesity. It is moralizing disguised as an invocation of natural law.
Thermodynamics is not any more useful than quantum mechanics in understanding obesity. It is moralizing disguised as an invocation of natural law.
Obesity rates used to be low. They're now higher. The most obvious changes are higher food availability (and different food availability, read refined sugar/high fructose corn syrup/superstimuli fast food deliciousness), and more sedentary lifestyles. There may be other subtler changes, like the permanent psychological effects of being exposed to food advertising from a young age, and a million things that we don't know yet, but there's something out there, in the physical world, that has changed. And it's not liposuction–that, and gastic bypass surgery, etc, didn't exist a hundred years ago–their invention apparently hasn't reduced obesity rates.
In summary, people moralizing about how obesity is just "calories in calories out" aren't doing anything to solve the problem. But saying that thermodynamics is "moralizing disguised as an invocation of natural law" is just pointing out how not to solve the problem–it's not helpful either unless you suggest an alternate solution. Or a list of 20 different things to try, at least 1 of which should work for >99.9% of the population. Or a drug that can target some mysterious fat cell receptor to make them cooperatively release energy during exercise/dieting. Or a special diet that empirically does the same thing, even if no one knows how or why. Or a way to raise children so that they have the same obesity risk as children 200 years ago. Or a way to at least treat the negative cardiovascular health benefits of obesity and make it harmless. Or liposuction. Etc etc etc. I don't think people will get so mad about "moralizing" when this problem has a better solution.
...Oh, and a society that doesn't massively penalize people for being chubby as long as their cardiovascular health is good would be a massive step in the right direction. As a normal weight girl who used to train in the pool every day, but still spent most of high school thinking I was fat and unattractive because of media images of models, I have a particular pet peeve with this.
This comment is being downvoted. ... it would help me immensely if someone could explain why my reasoning is wrong...
Comments which mention the importance of calories are reflexively downvoted around here.
I think many people are confused between what CICO actually says (your energy balance determines your weight loss or gain) and what their image of CICO -- conveniently made out of straw -- says (there is a magic fixed number of calories, if you eat less than that magic number you'll lose weight).
I had noticed this. Personally, I'm very confused about the causes-of-obesity issue. To me it's obvious that if you eat less or burn more, you will lose weight. It's complicated by regulatory mechanisms; eating less causes your body to conserve energy by slowing the metabolism, and physical exercise increases appetite. And I think it's likely there are genetic set points that affect both body type (weight) and appetite. Then there's the fidgeting thing. Then there are the low/high carb theories and studies where weight is modulated by changes in regulatory pathways, and the "fructose poisoning causes fatty liver causes metabolic dysfunction" theory. And stuff like "metabolic syndrome" and Type 2 diabetes. Then there are people who are fat and eat half what I do. In the end, I have no idea how the human body regulates weight and calorie intake, but my body seems to do it fine.
Classical GTD systems -2: High overhead, I don't do a lot of work in front of a desk/computer, when I do it's for fun, and I've frequently done more than 40 hours a week of the kind of work that GTD systems (as usually described) don't help with at all. In nursing, you show up on time, tasks appear, and you do them. Organization is extremely important, and a far from solved problem for me, but by necessity you plan things and do them in the short term, and procrastination isn't a factor. (Also, plans almost never actually end up being executed because shit goes down, so flexibility is more important.) I would come home exhausted from work and start doing projects for fun off a written to-do list, and it made them un-fun.
I think classical GTD systems are likely a good thing in general, and I was applying them to the wrong problem.
Written to-do lists of long term goals +5: Don't have the high overhead, avoid most of the fun-sucking aspects, and keep me accountable/remind me when there's something I actually want to do but haven't booked time for in a while. Probably the most effective change I've made in the past year.
My giant iPhone Note document of random information capture +3: I don't think this is actually a good system, but it's easy, and fairly low-overhead–I just have to read through the list once in a while and delete stuff I've dealt with/has become irrelevant. I recently split my giant Note into about 10 appropriately titled Notes for capturing thoughts when I'm out and about.
RTM +4: It's a clever program, but slightly less flexible than I'd like, and I probably don't use it properly. I have a few large multi-step tasks, like "Apply for California Board of Nursing registration", which will take forever, and thus sit forever in my inbox, as well as quick self-reminders like "renew library books" or "email person X". I literally just figured out how to make separate lists. The list "Home/Computer" is the most helpful, because I frequently have minor tasks, like emailing someone or finding a particular object in my house, that I remember when I'm not at a computer/not at home, and then forget by the time I get home. RTM works excellently for these. It's probably inappropriate for large multi-step goals, but I'm still looking for another iPhone-portable software option. RTM doesn't particularly make me feel like doing things unless they're really easy things like "go to the bank", in which case the little dopamine hit of marking the task as 'done' compensates for the annoyance of getting home 10 minutes later.
Social commitment +2: It works when I do it. It's time-consuming, and you have to have a community of people around you who'll actually hold you accountable and care, and I don't end up getting around to making social commitments a lot of the time.
Rescuetime (site) +1: Keeps track of how much time you spend on different programs or sites, and then gives productivity ratings. It doesn't make a huge difference, and I don't look at it often, but it provides a bit of an incentive to "win" and get good productivity scores.
Physical activity +4: Doesn't fit into any of the categories, but I use it like some people use modafinil. It's not just for productivity–I will literally get depressed if I don't get enough cardio, and it feels like a physiological/neurotransmitter balance thing. But it's also productivity. I can always justify taking an hour or two off working on something to go work out, because I will get much more done in the same period of time, even accounting for the hours I take off.
This is factually false. I know the subculture of Americans who are most-passionate about going back to nature, and they do it. The unrealism in their attitude derives not from ignorance of nature, but from being able to go back to nature while under the protection of American law and mores, so that they don't have to band together in tribes for pretection, compete with other tribes for land, and do the whole tribal bickering and conformity thing.
It's all about population density. Primitive life is pretty great if you have low population density--one person per square mile is about right in much of North America. But the population always grows until you have conflict.
Spending 9 hours a day 5 days a week sitting in a cubicle staring at a monitor and typing in numbers is horrible in its own ways, which the author prefers to accomodate and ignore.
(There are no poisonous thorns in North America. And when you see two snakes in "writhing, heaving masses", they're probably mating.)
Spending 9 hours a day 5 days a week sitting in a cubicle staring at a monitor and typing in numbers is horrible in its own ways, which the author prefers to accomodate and ignore.
I 100% agree with this. As a kid, I used to daydream about going and living by myself in the wilderness, partly because sitting in a classroom all day was so awful. (The other aspect is that I didn't like people much when I was 10). I've compromised by finding a job where I don't have to sit down and type numbers into a computer...at least, not much. Also I like people a lot more now.
I hate to focus on the negative, but a couple of things in your post made me go "ugh". The first is talking about taking over the world: It's funny when Harry Potter says it, grating when people on Less Wrong do it. Don't talk about conquering the world unless you actually have realistic plans to conquer at least a small part of it, otherwise it just comes off to me as trying to look cool in an awkward way.
The second is your overuse and misuse of jargon. The concept of comparative advantage for instance describes how it may be efficient for you to do X even though you may be worse at X than others, yet you call "looking better than average" a comparative advantage, when it really is just an advantage. "I suppose I can leverage it into a comparative advantage for getting high-status men to pay attention to me long enough for me to explain the merits of an idea I have." This should be: "I can use this to my advantage".
Your post isn't bad but things like this make it harder for me to draw use from it.
Don't talk about conquering the world unless you actually have realistic plans to conquer at least a small part of it, otherwise it just comes off to me as trying to look cool in an awkward way.
I specifically said I don't want to, which is true. I'm not even sure "take over the world" is a clear concept. Yes, I was trying to be funny. At least one person thought it was funny. I think it's funny when anyone says it tongue-in-cheek.
I don't want to come across as wanting to take over the world because there's a certain kind of focus/drivenness (on other goals) that, in my experience, comes across as really intimidating to people who aren't in the Less Wrong circle, especially if you're a girl and they're a boy. It's mixed up with other impressions I want to avoid giving, too, like the impression that Less Wrong is a cult.
This should be: "I can use this to my advantage".
Thanks, fixed. I honestly think that I misuse it because an ex-boyfriend, who was studying economics as a degree, used to use it all the time and probably overuse it in the same way.
This discussion made me realize that if I were male, but otherwise unchanged, I might not be able to get dates easily.
What do you mean “otherwise unchanged”, same level of attractiveness broadly construed (to the extent that this makes sense), or same percentile of attractiveness broadly construed within your gender and age group?
Same percentile, I guess?
And I can get dates pretty easily.
I think "getting dates" isn't the goal for most people. The question is whether you get into relationships with guys that fulfill your criteria of being good mates.
(They usually aren't very fun for me, though).
I would guess that they would be more fun for you if you overcome your anxieties around physical contact.
I think that you do can overcome some of it by taking dancing classes.
I'm curious as to what you think the difference is in the male-female dynamic.
If you are a pretty girl than many man are willing to chase you and wait some time till you are ready. At the same time a guy that's empathic is less likely to ask you for another date if you don't enjoy the first date.
I think "getting dates" isn't the goal for most people. The question is whether you get into relationships with guys that fulfill your criteria of being good mates.
You're right, this is a different problem. Which is still unsolved for me.
If you are a pretty girl than many man are willing to chase you and wait some time till you are ready.
I have had a guy go to fairly epic lengths to do this. We had what I think most people would call an awesome relationship afterwards, and lived together for some time...but a year and a half later, when we broke up, I basically wasn't upset at all and actually got a happiness boost from having my own space and better sleep again. If I was upset, it was because "what, I put all those months of effort in, and I don't even get a partner to have kids with?"
So yeah, unsolved.
more than 50% of people in my demographic are even worse than me at that skill, but this doesn't mean they'll never get a relationship, because they can compensate by e.g. being insanely rich.
I'm not arguing that feeling no anxiety to physical contact and having the self confidence to lead woman in general is sufficient to be good at partner dancing.
I'm rather arguing that being good at partner dancing usually leads to feeling no anxiety to physical contact and having the self confidence to lead woman.
I mean, if Alice doesn't get horny when around Bob because he comes across as tense, I wouldn't expect her to lose interest after a couple dates or so: I would expect her to never ask him out in the first place.
In PUA literature there the idea that making a girl horny while at a club, asking her for her phone number and then calling a day later to make a date is not the way to go. Having the girl in a state of being attracted, comfortable and connected is supposed to be more conductive to getting a date than the girl feeling horny.
I think the problem is that you model being attracted and being horny as the same thing when the two are different categories for myself. You don't have a mental model in this domain with a lot of categories and therefore it's hard to follow the points I'm making. (Just for the record, I don't think having a mental model with a lot of categories is necessary to have success with woman)
Also, you appeared to suspect that I might have Asperger's (something which FWIW none of my meatspace friends, who include several psychology graduates and a neurology resident, appears to have noticed lately) based on my reluctance to wear a “free-hugs” sign.
I don't think you have full Aspergers. I think you are 'in your head', but that's not a label that I would expect to be well understood on LessWrong. When on LessWrong I rather try to use categories that are popular on LessWrong.
You are probably the kind of person who thinks that they have a body instead of who thinks that they are their body. You probably think that you are your brain and the rest is just there to serve your brain.
On the other hand I do think that your reluctance to wear a free-hug sign is purely based on a irrational fear of physical contact. Wearing the sign is the rational thing to do.
FYI diagnosing people with mental disorders based on so little information is likely to make actual mental health specialists take you very unseriously
I choose the kind of language I use depending on my audience. I would use different lanague when discussing with a mental health specialist. A mental health specialist probably also wouldn't take you seriously when you talk about giving money to Pascal's mugger.
Came across this discussion accidentally, but it fascinates me because I'm "in my head", have some Asperger's-like characteristics, have a lot of anxiety around physical contact, particularly dislike dancing and have in fact made my date leave a dancing event early because I couldn't make myself do it any longer, etc...but I'm a girl. And I can get dates pretty easily. (They usually aren't very fun for me, though).
This discussion made me realize that if I were male, but otherwise unchanged, I might not be able to get dates easily. This confuses me. I'm curious as to what you think the difference is in the male-female dynamic.
Cool post. I feel like I solved most of the problems you describe in this post a while ago myself. Here's my problem, if anyone wants to give me feedback: A few years ago, I was substantially more driven/ambitious, but I developed a really serious case of RSI/tendinitis that forced me to use a voice recognition system to control my computer for about a year. That's pretty much gone now, but it caused me to lose a bunch of habits (like frequently ask myself what the optimal thing to do at this instant is, and then go and do that thing, my own feelings be damned). Before, if I was feeling miserable and unmotivated, I would push on and keep studying/working; now I try to cheer myself up first (generally unsuccessfully). And I don't even care very much about solving this problem, either--I've just become more laid-back in general.
I now have an explicit goal of being well-known for non-fiction writing, probably in a blog form, in the next five years.
This is an interesting goal. I have an intuition that most people who became well-known for writing started with the goal of communicating some great ideas, not the goal of being well-known for writing itself. (Indeed, when I think of prominent non-fiction writers, I seem to think of them more as domain experts in the area they write about than writers for their own sake, except maybe Isaac Asimov.) So maybe your goal should be "read a bunch, think a bunch, experiment a bunch, and look for opportunities to expand the frontier of human knowledge"--but of course, this is more abstract and probably less motivating than "achieve high status through writing". (BTW, who's to say expanding the frontier of human knowledge is even higher-value than spreading little-known but important ideas that have already been discovered? You could do this through writing, but you could also do it through submitting links to reddit (I've spent a pretty decent amount of time trying to spread important ideas by submitting links to reddit, actually).)
And I don't even care very much about solving this problem, either--I've just become more laid-back in general.
Maybe that's a good, adaptive thing for you! Although maybe not if you haven't figured out reliable methods for actually cheering yourself up. (Just getting work done is a very reliable mood-booster for me, when I'm up to it...the second best is usually proxy work, like doing dishes, cooking, baking, exercising, which feels productive and gives me the dopamine hit but is usually lower-threshold to start doing.)
Have you tried happiness-tracking software like forget.io? I think this is an awesome strategy to learn what actually works to cheer you up. (I was doing it, but the company has a US phone number and so as a Canadian, I was paying exorbitant text-message rates.)
ETA: sorry for the rather rambling comment, and sorry for making it all about me!
This post is really interesting, thank you. When I was 22 I did quite badly in my exams at university, mostly because I had mental health problems around exam time. I had been ambitious up until then, but after that, my ambition somehow deserted me, since I became convinced that if I tried to do too much I would get too stressed and fall apart. I dropped the economics part of my degree, since it was harder, and graduated with a philosophy degree. In my final year, I put in the minimum amount of work needed to get a 2.1 (which was what the average student on my course got).
Since I graduated, I've done jobs that are far less challenging than I'm capable of, and spent large amounts of time being totally convinced that I'm on the verge of getting fired (I haven't been fired :)). I've just been convinced that if I try to achieve more than "having a job" I'll fail at everything and there will be doom.
Recently, however (after 7 years), my ambition is returning. My mental health has vastly improved, in part due to mindfulness and CBT techniques, and I'm taking on something challenging at work. I've decided to take more risks even though I might fail.
I've found HPMOR (I read it all at once in the last week) really useful too. I think I mostly want to develop my Griffindor side. I just don't do many brave things. I'm not out to my family about polyamory, bisexuality or kink. I'm not out to most of my friends as a less wrong reader and aspiring rationalist because I'm worried that they'll think that I've joined a phyg! I don't ask guys out, and I'm even too scared to go to the local less wrong meetup because I'll be older than people and I worry they won't think I'm smart enough. I'd like to try to do more scary things.
ETA: sorry for the rather rambling comment, and sorry for making it all about me!
I think every post I've ever written has been mostly about me! This is not something that LW will usually punish, if the content is useful to others in some sense.
When I was 22 I did quite badly in my exams at university, mostly because I had mental health problems around exam time. I had been ambitious up until then, but after that, my ambition somehow deserted me, since I became convinced that if I tried to do too much I would get too stressed and fall apart.
Yeah, I've had enough experience of this brand of self-doubt. My worry is less that I'll have a major nervous breakdown; I've always been pretty resilient in that sense; but I'm definitely terrified, all the time, that an emergency will happen and I'll freeze up or react too slowly and be completely useless. I've had this fear since at least the age of twelve, when I started taking lifesaving classes at the pool and realized that it was really freaking hard for me to stay calm under pressure. I think my most Gryffindor trait is that I've faced this fear down, repeatedly, covering it up with enthusiasm or helpfulness or whatever. I think I've been useless quite at lot. But this is no longer a major fear of mine.
I don't know if the same solution will work for you. I can rely on myself to go home, exercise, write a story, bake some cookies, and bounce back to my normal emotional state even if I've had a day where I felt totally useless. I've also always been good at doing a lot of things at once and having a ridiculously full schedule; this isn't the kind of stress that gets to me or makes me depressed or anxious, which I know it does for some people. I guess maybe it's mindfulness techniques that help :) I've done counselling and tried mindfulness/CBT techniques for my work-related anxiety, but so far it's been less effective than my base strategy of reminding myself that my anxiety is internal to me and not a part of the situation itself, and focusing on just getting particular, measurable tasks done.
Anyway, I wish you luck with the Gryffindor endeavour!
I read and identified with and commented on your post a year and a half ago. I just wanted to say I'm glad to know that you're feeling more ambitious now. And thanks for sharing. I haven't solved these same problems for myself nearly to the same extent, so learning about your recent experiences is extremely valuable for me.
Went back and read your comment-I remember that! It sounded like you weren't doing too badly at the time, externally at least. Then again, I've never dealt with depression as a side effect of aiming for goals that were too hard. Massive anxiety, crying in the washroom at work, not sleeping, yes, but never the ongoing invades-your-whole-life apathy of clinical depression.
I can always tell myself "if you keep banging your head on this seemingly insurmountable problem, sooner or later you'll get past it" because it always has in the past, probably because I can bang my head on something for quite a long time when most people might otherwise give up. Example: despite plenty of anxiety and feelings-of-inadequacy, I have stuck with taekwondo longer than everyone else who started at the same time as me, and will probably get my black belt next summer. The one example is swimming, where I stopped banging my head on the specific problem of getting faster, and then a large part of me took this as evidence that I was a failure with no willpower, while the rest of me went off and became a local expert on teaching swimming to kids. I still think it's a useful skill to be able to work on a problem out of habit, repeatedly, without necessarily spending much time thinking about it once the initial exploration-and-decision is done. Helps with the frustration and inadequacy part.
I found spaced repetition systems easier to use on a regular basis than visualised-association systems such as the peg system and mnemonic major system, which were interesting to learn, but a bit cumbersome to practice regularly. Possibly I could become more fluent with practice of the latter but it's been procrastination-inducing so far.
Related: I used a mnemonic system for a good part of my pharmacology studying, mostly by using silly phrases to match generic and commercial names. This has stuck in some surprising ways; for example, whenever I think of the drug spironolactone, a diuretic with the side effect of gynecomasty (breast development in men), I have a vivid mental image of a man in Viking war armor with large, milk-oozing breasts (the "lactone"), holding a trident (unsure what this was a mnemonic for.)
I used spaced repetition (Anki decks) to study for the RN certification exam, and probably overshot-it was quite easy.
Of the factors you put, it seems like peer group is the main one you can influence (which is a large portion of what I've done), and you might be able to affect education, meta-cognition, and humility/lack thereof through deliberate effort. Thus, these are what I care about for the purposes of thinking about my own plans, as opposed to having interesting conversations about people who do cool things, or being in a job where you try to predict who will do cool things so you can hire them. In that case, the value of noticing and understanding factors beyond the individual's control is helpful.
But learning about the factors that drive success in general is a sort of education, and one that I've found to have been helpful for my own personal development (though I recognize that my introspection may be faulty, and that my own situation may not generalize).
In particular, it's relevant to understanding one's comparative advantage. For example, I recently learned that my fluid intelligence lower than that of the average person in my peer groups, and that my ability to develop crystalized intelligence is probably higher than that of the average person in my peer groups. This suggests that I should work in a field where crystalized intelligence is more important to success than fluid intelligence is.
I value a world that contains interesting conversations, beautiful things, a society with helpful traditions and rituals, and people who do useful things for sane reasons. All else being equal, I value fewer people dying. I value less total pain. I value a society with mechanisms that allow it to change and progress in useful ways.
Would you describe yourself as basically utilitarian in philosophical outlook? The degree to which you're cause agnostic makes a difference in what's optimal.
On a personal level, I want to do something important and relevant. I think this is a basic human need.
"I think that's partly what interests me in people, that we don't just wish to feed and sleep and reproduce then die like cows or sheep. Even if they're gangsters, they seem to want to tell themselves they're good gangsters and they're loyal gangsters, they've fulfilled their 'gangstership' well. We do seem to have this moral sense, however it's applied, whatever we think. We don't seem satisfied, unless we can tell ourselves by some criteria that we have done it well and we haven't wasted it and we've contributed well. So that is one of the things, I think, that distinguishes human beings, as far as I can see." — Kazuo Ishiguro
I think a big part of "having ambitions" (as opposed to "being ambitious") is the HMPOR concept of "responsability." You look at a situation and think "this needs to change, and to make it change, this needs to be done." And you go out and try things until the change happens. I didn't used to think like this at all. Now I do a bit more, even if I don't always act accordingly.
To clarify where I'm coming from, in the past, I placed too much emphasis on far mode thinking about how to make the world a better place in the abstract, as opposed to focusing on locally optimizing for personal growth, which would help me make the world a better place in the long run. I think that a good heuristic is to focus on what one can do best in the short-run, rather than focusing on what seems most important in the abstract. It's often the case that the way in which one ends up having the most impact is different from what one would have imagined at the outset.
I recognize that my prior failure mode may not be relevant to your situation – just raising it as a point for consideration.
Oh! That's what he's talking about! I totally know that feeling. I've even had it with respect to math and science. Is this actually what romantic passion feels like to most people?
His analogy with romantic passion is imperfect — I would guess that more than anything else, he was trying to highlight the intensity of the emotion involved (in order to contrast it with popular conceptions of mathematical activity). Religious experience may be as close or closer. But religious experience probably doesn't come with the same obsessive "drive" that romantic passion does.
Here is another quotation of his that might clarify what he was trying to say:
The year 1955 marked a critical departure in my work in mathematics: that of my passage from "analysis" to "geometry". I well recall the power of my emotional response ( very subjective naturally); it was as if I'd fled the harsh arid steppes to find myself suddenly transported to a kind of "promised land" of superabundant richness, multiplying out to infinity wherever I placed my hand in it, either to search or to gather... This impression, of overwhelming riches has continued to be confirmed and grow in substance and depth down to the present day. The phrase "superabundant richness" has this nuance: it refers to the situation in which the impressions and sensations raised in us through encounter with something whose splendor, grandeur or beauty are out of the ordinary, are so great as to totally submerge us, to the point that the urge to express whatever we are feeling is obliterated.
To clarify where I'm coming from, in the past, I placed too much emphasis on far mode thinking about how to make the world a better place in the abstract, as opposed to focusing on locally optimizing for personal growth, which would help me make the world a better place in the long run. I think that a good heuristic is to focus on what one can do best in the short-run, rather than focusing on what seems most important in the abstract. It's often the case that the way in which one ends up having the most impact is different from what one would have imagined at the outset.
The fact that this has been your main flawed-heuristic-to-overcome is probably the source of almost all of our disagreement. My flawed heuristic was very close to the opposite; I was exposed to career-self-help books like "What Color is your Parachute" in my early teens, to the concepts of SMART goals, et cetera. I wouldn't have called it 'comparative advantage', but this was basically my reasoning for not going into physics–I didn't think I was good enough at math to be more than mediocre. I trained my brain to reject goals that weren't specific, measurable, clearly attainable, etc–it wasn't even that I thought about them and chose not to pursue them, but I didn't think they were goals at all. Daydreams, maybe, but goals were things where you could see every step of the way and then walk out and achieve it, without too much uncertainty introduced by the behaviour of other people.
This model helped me–I am quite good at "taskifying" goals, making them specific and measurable and all the rest, and maybe as a consequence, I'm good at doing them. But it limits the goals I can work on, and I've started to notice that people in real life can (sometimes) accomplish goals that start out big and vague and impossible-seeming...even if they only accomplish 1/10th of the goals they attempt, that might still be more total accomplishments than the person who started with easy achievable goals. Thus I should try it.
I think the words you want are "intrinsic" vs "extrinsic" motivation.
"Intrinsic motivation" is when you do something for it's own sake, when the action is the goal.
"Extrinsic motivation" is when you do something in service of another goal.
It's complicated, right? A conscientious person might actually enjoy the process of cleaning their room...they might get a little reward buzz out of doing that little task, because they know it's one more thing off the checklist. To oversimplify neuroscience (but this actually isn't as oversimplified as you might think), the nice thing about the dopaminergic system is that it can be trained to make extrinsically rewarding activities become intrinsically rewarding. I think much of what we perceive as "driven, motivated" is the ability to make extrinsic rewarding activity intrinsically rewarding.
Ambition sets the height of the intrinsically rewarding goals, whatever they may be. Would you enjoy lots of money? Would you enjoy power? Would you enjoy helping people?
Motivation helps you to assign intrinsic reward to the activities which are in service of your goals. Perhaps yet another trait (Willpower? Grit? Perseverance?) enables you to power through it anyway, even if you are unable to find anything intrinsically rewarding about it.
Curiosity and Creative impulses are different from both of these things in that they are themselves forms of intrinsic motivation, and neither set nor serve any higher goal. We do those things because it feels good to satisfy, and it hurts to not satisfy it. It's fun - the same way that drinking with friends is fun. It's an impulse - the rewards are intrinsic, immediate, and it would actually require willpower not to do it.
So I've got impulses which are creative and curious - I spend my time learning because it is fun and I'd keep doing it even if nothing would ever come of it. I can visualize a world where those impulses are satisfied to a greater extent than they currently are, and want to bring about that world - that's an ambition. There are many college courses I don't enjoy, but I try to grit my teeth and work through them in the service of my ambition. That is willpower - it's in short supply, but it is present. I unfortunately don't have any motivation, but I imagine it would consist of a feeling of satisfaction in response to good grades, a feeling of contentment when my work is done, and things of that nature.
You said you wanted to be a nurse, so I'm assuming (correct me otherwise?) that "helping people" is your thing. Is helping people your ambition or your impulse or both?
Impulse form: Helping people feels good and knowing pain exists feels bad, so you are intrinsically motivated to do help.
Ambition form: You envision a world where people are helped and feel a desire to manipulate your environment such as to bring about that world.
EDIT: Or, I guess "neither" is an option too - the entire thing could be a means to some yet more abstract end.
I've known a few people who choose professions because of social obligation, or some abstract sense that they "should" be doing the thing in question. People who manage to be successful with this set of priorities generally have a lot of either motivation or gritty willpower.
For the "social pressure' variety, the ambition or impulse is to please some other set of people.
The "self acceptance" variety can often be very hard on themselves when they fail - for them, the ambition or impulse is the achievement of self-respect and self-worth. The whole thing is a quest to be the sort of person they would admire.
Awesome breakdown! Thank you!
On being a nurse: helping people is more an impulse than an ambition now. Bedside nursing is soooo instantly-gratifying, and fulfills the needs of some deep, primitive, social-grooming-craving part of my emotional system, I don't know if it was different four years ago; I don't trust myself to perfectly remember my past motivations. I think that for a long time "ambitions" had very little power to move me, because of the part of my brain that was convinced they were immoral and/or led to doom.
I do have ambitions to help people in strategic ways (nursing might be a strategic way, but it might not be), and hopefully they will gain more power to affect my actions in the future.
This evidently didn't bother me a few years ago when I wrote this post, but I want to say that if all of your interactions with women are like this, you are doing something wrong. It may be that the society around you is the main culprit for doing stereotypes wrong, but as a woman I still find this attitude frustrating.
I'm tempted to inject a 'speak for yourself!' here, or at least a caveat that the (subjectively asserted) mistake must include "or you are choosing to interact with the wrong women" in it somewhere.
Some people of a certain kind of social disposition (yes, more female than male from what I can tell) do mostly have interactions that would be classified as emotional rather than informational according to the inferred intent of the labels. Having that preference and style works well for them and others declaring that they are doing it 'wrong' is invasive and irrelevant. Similarly, when interacting with someone in the style that works best for interacting with that person and someone else declaring that you are doing it wrong is out of place.
I also note that much of what is labelled (and sometimes dismissed) as 'emotional' is itself information. Just information in a different, insufficiently nerdy, format.
Noted. I was not being very specific/using sufficient disclaimers in this discussion.
Disclaimer: if you are interacting this way with women on LW or interested in rationality, I am >90% sure that you are missing out on some valuable interesting/intellectual conversations.
Hypothesis: if you are interacting this way with women who aren't interested in rationality (who you don't think are interested), it may be contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy that women aren't interested in rationality. (Disclaimer: I'm probably guilty of this for both genders, in that I don't introduce enough of my potentially interested friends to LW ideas, period.)
Ahem. I took calculus as a freshman. In highschool. I only had to retake the second half because I was so horribly sleep deprived during the final, and so lazy about homework. I then got a 5 on the AP test (score maxes out at a 5).
Now I'm not typical, but I suspect that a school system that cannot teach calculus to the top ~10% or so of its math-inclined students when they're in high school is failing somewhere along the way.
How I Became More Ambitious
Follow-up to How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious
Living with yourself is a bit like having a preteen and watching them get taller; the changes happen so slowly that it's almost impossible to notice them, until you stumble across an old point of comparison and it becomes blindingly obvious. I hit that point a few days ago, while planning what I might want to talk about during an OkCupid date. My brain produced the following thought: "well, if this topic comes up, it might sound like I'm trying to take over the world, and that's intimidating- Wait. What?"
I'm not trying to take over the world. It sounds like a lot of work, and not my comparative advantage. If it seemed necessary, I would point out the problems that needed solving and delegate them to CFAR alumni with more domain-specific expertise than me.
However, I went back and reread the post linked at the beginning, and I no longer feel much kinship with that person. This is a change that happened maybe 25-50% deliberately, and the rest by drift, but I still changed my mind, so I will try to detail the particular changes, and what I think led to them. Introspection is unreliable, so I'll probably be at least 50% wrong, but what can you do?
1. Idealism versus practicality
I would still call myself practical, but I no longer think that this comes at the expense of idealism. Idealism is absolutely essential, if you want to have a world that changes because someone wanted it to, as opposed to just by drift. Lately in the rationalist/CFAR/LW community, there's been a lot of emphasis on agency and agentiness, which basically mean the ability to change the world and/or yourself deliberately, on purpose, through planned actions. This is hard. The first step is idealism-being able to imagine a state of affairs that is different and better. Then comes practicality, the part where you sit down and work hard and actually get something done.
It's still true that idealism without practicality doesn't get much done, and practicality without idealism can get a lot done, but it matters what problems you're working on, too. Are you being strategic? Are you even thinking, at all, about whether your actions are helping to accomplish your goals? One of the big things I've learned, a year and a half and two CFAR workshops later, is how automatic and easy this lack of strategy really is.
I had a limited sort of idealism in high school; I wanted to do work that was important and relevant; but I was lazy about it. I wanted someone to tell me what was important to be doing right now. Nursing seemed like an awesome solution. It still seems like a solution, but recently I've admitted to myself, with a painful twinge, that it might not be the best way for me, personally, to help the greatest number of people using my current and potential skill set. It's worth spending a few minutes or hours looking for interesting and important problems to work on.
I don't think I had the mental vocabulary to think that thought a year and a half ago. Some of the change comes from having dated an economics student. Come to think of it, I expect some of his general ambition rubbed off on me, too. The rest of the change comes from hanging out with the effective altruism and similar communities.
I'm still practical. I exercise, eat well, go to bed on time, work lots of hours, spend my money wisely, and maintain my social circle mostly on autopilot; it requires effort but not deliberate effort. I'm lucky to have this skill. But I no longer think it's a virtue over and above idealism. Practical idealists make the biggest difference, and they're pretty cool to hang out with. I want to be one when I grow up.
2. Fear of failure
Don't get me wrong. If there's one deep, gripping, soul-crushing terror in my life, one thing that gives me literal nightmares, it's failure. Making mistakes. Not being good enough. Et cetera.
In the past few years, the main change has been admitting to myself that this terror doesn't make a lot of sense. First of all, it's completely miscalibrated. As Eliezer pointed out during a conversation on this, I don't fail at things very often. Far from being a success, this is likely a sign that the things I'm trying aren't nearly challenging enough.
My threshold for what constitutes failure is also fairly low. I made a couple of embarrassing mistakes during my spring clinical. Some part of my brain is convinced that this equals permanent failure; I wasn't perfect during the placement, and I can't go back and change the past, thus I have failed. Forever.
I passed the clinical, wrote the provincial exam (results aren't in but I'm >99% confident I passed) (EDIT: Passed! YEAAHHH!!!), and I'm currently working in the intensive care unit, which has been my dream since I was about fifteen. The part of my brain that keeps telling me I failed permanently obviously isn't saying anything useful.
I think 'embarrassing' is a keyword here. The first thing I thought, on the several occasions that I made mistakes, was "oh my god did I just kill someone... Phew, no, no harm done." The second thought was "oh my god, my preceptor will think I'm stupid forever and she'll never respect me and no one wants me around, I'm not good enough..." This line of thought never goes anywhere good. It says something about me, though, that "I'm not good enough" is very directly connected to people wanting me around, to belonging somewhere. For several personality-formative years of my life, people didn't want me around. Probably for good reason; my ten-year-old self was prickly and socially inept and miserable. I think a lot of my determination not to seek status comes from the "uncool kids trying to be cool are pathetic" meme that was so rampant when I was in sixth grade.
Oh, and then there's the traumatic swim team experience. Somewhere, in a part of my brain where I don't go very often nowadays, there a bottomless whirlpool of powerless rage and despair around the phrase "no matter how hard I try, I'll never be good enough." So when I make an embarrassing mistake, my ten-year-old self is screaming at me "no wonder everyone hates you!" and my fourteen-year-old self is sadly muttering that "you know, maybe you just don't have enough natural talent," and none of it is at all useful.
The thing about those phrases is that they refer to complex and value-laden concepts, in a way that makes them seem like innate attributes, à la Fundamental Attribution Error. "Not good enough" isn't a yes-or-no attribute of a person; it's a magical category that only sounds simple because it's a three-word phrase. I've gotten somewhat better at propagating this to my emotional self. Slightly. It's a work in progress.
During a conversation about this with Anna Salamon, she noted that she likes to approach her own emotions and ask them what they want. It sounds weird, but it's helpful. "Dear crushing sense of despair and unworthiness, what do you want? ...Oh, you're worried that you're going to end up an outcast from your tribe and starve to death in the wilderness because you accidentally gave an extra dose of digoxin? You want to signal remorse and regret and make sure everyone knows you're taking your failure seriously so that maybe they'll forgive you? Thank you for trying to protect me. But really, you don't need to worry about the starving-outcast thing. No one was harmed and no one is mad at you personally. Your friends and family couldn't care less. This mistake is data, but it's just as much data about the environment as it is about your attributes. These hand-copied medication records are the perfect medium for human error. Instead of signalling remorse, let's put some mental energy into getting rid of the environmental conditions that led to this mistake."
Rejection therapy and having a general CoZE [Comfort Zone Expansion] mindset helped remove some of the sting of "but I'll look stupid if I try something too hard and fail at it!" I still worry about the pain of future embarrassment, but I'm more likely to point out to myself that it's not a valid objection and I should do X anyway. Making "I want to become stronger" an explicit motto is new to the last year and a half, too, and helps by giving me ammunition for why potential embarrassment isn't a reason not to do something.
In conclusion: failure still sucks. I'm a perfectionist. But I failed in a lot of small ways during my spring clinical, and passed/got a job anyway, which seems to have helped me propagate to my emotional self that it's okay to try hard things, where I'm almost certain to make mistakes, because mistakes don't equal instant damnation and hatred from all of my friends.
3. The morality of ambition
While I was in San Francisco a month ago, volunteering at the CFAR workshop and generally spending my time surrounded by smart, passionate, and ambitious people (thus convincing my emotional system that this is normal and okay), I had a conversation with Eliezer. He asked me to list ten areas in which I was above average.
This was a lot more painful than it had any reason to be. After bouncing off various poorly-formed objections in my mind, I said to myself "you know, having trouble admitting what you're good at doesn't make you virtuous." This was painful; losing a source of feeling-virtuous always is. But it was helpful. Yeah, talking all the time about how awesome you are at X, Y, Z makes you a bit of a bore. People might even avoid you (oh! the horror!). However, this doesn't mean that blocking even the thought of being above average makes you a good person. In fact, it's counterproductive. How are you supposed to know what problems you're capable of solving in the world if you can't be honest with yourself about your capabilities?
This conversation helped. (Even if some of the effect was "high status person says X -> I believe X," who cares? I endorsed myself changing my mind about this a year and a half ago. It's about time.)
HPMOR helped, too; specifically, the idea that there are four houses which have different positive qualities. Slytherins are demonized in canon, but in HPMOR their skills are recognized as essential. I can easily recognize the Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff and even the Gryffindor in myself, but not much of Slytherin. Having a word for the ambition-cunning-strategic concept cluster is helpful. I can ask myself "now what would a Slytherin do with this information:?" I can think thoughts that feel very un-virtuous. "I'm young and prettier than average. What's a Slytherin way to use this... Oh, I suppose I can leverage it to get high-status men to pay attention to me long enough for me to explain the merits of an idea I have." This thought feels yuck, but the universe doesn't explode.
Probably the biggest factor was going to the CFAR workshops in the first place. Not from any of the curriculum, particularly, although the mindset of goal factoring helped me to realize that the mental action of "feeling unvirtuous for thinking in ambitious or calculating ways" wasn't accomplishing anything I wanted. Mostly the change came from social normalization, from hanging out with people who talked openly about their strengths and weaknesses, and no one got shunned.
[Silly plan for taking over the world: Arrange to meet high status-people and offer to give their children swimming lessons. Gain their trust. Proceed from there.]
4. Laziness
Nope. Still lazy. If anything, akrasia and procrastination are more of a problem now that I'm trying to do harder things more deliberately.
I've been keeping written goals for about a year now. This means I actually notice when I don't accomplish them.
I use Remember the Milk as a GTD system, and some other productivity/organization software (rescuetime, Mint.com, etc). I finally switched to Gmail, where I can use Boomerang and other useful tools. My current openness to trying new organization methods is high.
My general interest in trying things is higher, mainly because I have lots of community-endorsed-warm-fuzzies positive affect around that phrase. I want to be someone who's open to new experiences; I've had enough new experiences to realize how exhilarating they can be.
Conclusion
I now have a wider range of potentially high-value personal projects ongoing. I now have an explicit goal of being well-known for non-fiction writing, probably in a blog form, in the next five years. (Do I have enough interesting things to say to make this a reality? We'll see. Is this goal vague? Yes. Working on it. I used to reject goals if they weren't utterly concrete, but even vague goals are something to build on).
I'm more explicit with myself about what I want from CFAR curriculum skills. (The general problem of critical thinking in nursing? Solvable! Why not?)
I think I've finally admitted to myself that "well, I'll just live in a cozy little house near my parents and work in the ICU and raise kids for the next forty years" might not be particularly virtuous or fun. There are things I would prefer to be different in the world, even if I can only completely specify a few of them. There are exciting scary opportunities happening all the time. I'm lucky enough to belong to a community of people that can help me find them.
I don't have plans for much beyond the next year. But here's to the next decade being interesting!
This evidently didn't bother me a few years ago when I wrote this post, but I want to say that if all of your interactions with women are like this, you are doing something wrong.
I say this with no small amount of cynicism and bitterness: according to the appropriate roles and goals spelled out by our current society, he is doing it exactly right.
And remember that rejecting those roles and goals takes a LOT of effort, which means it takes a lot of motivation. Some people can find that motivation internally (they see a better way for their lives to be), others find it externally (they just aren't equipped to fit into the roles their culture wants to assign them), but most people don't find it at all.
It may be unpleasant to realize that most people don't particularly care about your thoughts or feelings capability or even your well-being except instrumentally, but it is true. And even with all the strides that feminism and gender equality have made against the stereotype you quoted, it's still entrenched enough that merely saying "you are doing something wrong" is inadequate. You have to explain to people why they should see you as a human being, and what seeing you as a human being actually looks like, or they will simultaneously fail to understand why they should, and fail to understand how they are not doing so already.
As a "young female with higher-then-average physical attractiveness" (if I remember your self-description accurately), you may be used to not having to spell that out in face-to-face interactions. Susceptible men will likely tend to implicitly understand "you are doing something wrong" as "you will not unlock the puzzle-box that has ownership of me as the prize". But here, you have the advantage of not being able to rely on that misunderstanding; I would strongly recommend that you practice using it.
It may be unpleasant to realize that most people don't particularly care about your thoughts or feelings capability or even your well-being except instrumentally, but it is true.
Do you mean that this is true of how people interact with other people in general, or specifically how men interact with women?
You have to explain to people why they should see you as a human being, and what seeing you as a human being actually looks like, or they will simultaneously fail to understand why they should, and fail to understand how they are not doing so already.
They should because it's self-evident that I am a human being? To me, at least. I spend a lot of time in a male-dominant community (atheists/skeptics/rationalists cluster), and even more time in a female-dominated domain (nursing), and my conversations among females are no more dominated by emotion than those among males. We have conversations to share useful information and ask for practical advice, to tell morbid anecdotes that we all find hilarious, to share personal goals, to point out new discoveries in medicine that we think are fascinating and exciting, etc etc etc. It's so freaking obvious to me that this whole gender thing just Does. Not. Matter.
Most people in my immediate social circle already do this right, including the local Less Wrong group. It's all the more jarring when I'm reminded that right, this whole feminism thing isn't a moot point yet after all.
you will not unlock the puzzle-box that has ownership of me as the prize.
If that is someone's goal in talking to women in general, they are doing it wrong, no matter the content and tone of their discussion.
I get that some women's revealed preferences seem to indicate that they expect and want to be treated this way. This is deeply confusing to me. Anyone who wants ownership of me as a prize for their interesting conversation is going to be disappointed, because that prize is not on the table.
I didn't catch your comment for a long time, because it wasn't in response to my own and thus didn't light up the red message symbol. Just stumbled over it by accident, so here's my response a mere 1,5 months later:
I feel next to no conflict or friction between my rational and my emotional self, whether I'm on my own or with company. I radically adhere and submit to the guiding principle that "if it is true, I want to believe it and if it is false, I want to reject it". So if I happen to have some kind of innate feeling or intuition about some objective topic, I immediately catch it and just kill it off as best I can (usually pretty good) in favor of a rational analysis. But these days I usually don't have many of these "emotional preconceptions" left anyway. Over the years I buried so many of my favorite emotional preconceptions about every imaginable topic in favor of what appears to be "the truth", that the act of giving up some idiotic emotion about a serious topic in favor of a better model hardly stings at all anymore. It feels quite good to let go actually, it's a kind of progress I thoroughly welcome. Often I really don't have any discernible emotion one way or another, even towards highly contentious and controversial topics.
Now if I am in the company of other non-Bayesian people (especially women, with whom the whole point of interaction usually isn't information-related but purely emotional anyway), I put my rational machinery to rest and just let my instincts flow without paying too much attention to how rational everything I (or they) say is. That's because enjoying human company is first and foremost about exchanging emotion, not information or rational argument. (Although I have to admit that it always feels like a shocking slap in the face, if suddenly it turns out that she believes in astrology et al. I have to admit that a brain failure of that magnitude kills my libido faster than the kick of a horse). So yes, my red "light bulb" that says "irrational/unproven belief" still gets triggered a lot in typical conversations with the average Joe and Joy, but not every instance justifies the break of rapport in favor of starting an argument. Actually I realize that I tend to argue much more often with guys (maybe because arguing can be a way to establish social status) than with girls, where I often just skip the logical loopholes and inconsistencies in favor of maintaining rapport.
Come to think of it, that is actually a rather rational strategy, given my heterosexual utility-function ;)
If I am interested in improving or expanding my mental model of reality on the other hand, I crank up my "bias & rationality" machinery and have a careful in-depth conversation with someone who is up to the task.
If I'm doing something irrational like procrastinating or playing a game instead of furthering my goals, then often the rationality module kicks in and says I'm a bum wasting my precious (though hopefully unlimited) life-time. Often I can't (or raher don't want to) stop having fun however, so I just gently smother the rational voice in my head with a pillow and score a new record time in Dirt 3 instead. I suppose that's roughly the highest peak of conflict between my emotional needs and rational goals - but unfortunately, especially when it comes to hedonistic procrastination, the rational component doesn't put up much of a fight, which is certainly less than optimal.
Actually, I'm procrastinating right now instead of studying Psychology, so farewell.
In conclusion: It seems we aren't all that different, except that for some reason you seem to have some kind of problem with the "conflict" between your rationality and your emotions, which is something I don't really care about. The important thing is that I can use my rationality when I actually need it, not that I constantly use my rationality to smother every single possibly irrational emotion at every given opportunity. So where is your particular problem and why is any of this important again?
(especially women, with whom the whole point of interaction usually isn't information-related but purely emotional anyway)
This evidently didn't bother me a few years ago when I wrote this post, but I want to say that if all of your interactions with women are like this, you are doing something wrong. It may be that the society around you is the main culprit for doing stereotypes wrong, but as a woman I still find this attitude frustrating.
EDIT: This comment was unclearly and unhelpfully worded; I was having fun being indignant at the expense of being specific. Will add more specificity when I'm not trying to run out the door to work.
I hope I haven't alienated you — it wasn't my intention.
I would have said that it accounts for maybe 10-25%, and random chance/luck accounts for the rest. I expect I was wrong, and that there are other important predictive factors.
It depends how broad you're defining random chance / luck, but some predictive factors (which can be positive or negative depending how pronounced they are, and on the context, and which have effect sizes that depend on the context) are
- IQ
- Big Five personality traits.
- Early childhood environment
- Educational background
- Peer group
- Susceptibility to herd mentality or lack thereof
- Meta-cognition
- Genuine humility or lack thereof
It's possible to change on some of these dimensions, or change their significance in one's life.
However, the mindset of "some people are creative and curious and obsessed with what they do, and do it by instinct even when the going gets tough, and they're the ones who will change the world" doesn't seem helpful if you're not one of those people.
I need to be more careful about how I frame these points. I recognize that my original framing may have come across as elitist and/or having in-group/out-group connotations.
My reason for focusing on outliers is that I think that the factors relevant to success emerge in their most vivid forms in these cases. This is similar to how John Oldham and Lois Morris categorize personality types according to personality disorders. By examining people who vividly exemplify some of one's characteristics, one can understand oneself better.
Which I'm pretty sure I'm not. (Maybe a little bit for writing fiction).
These things aren't necessarily immutable.
What are you supposed to do if you don't feel an obsessive need to do anything? How do you decide what to fill your time with?
It depends on what you value. What do you value? :-)
I don't know what this feeling is. I'm quite possibly some degree of asexual. Being told that "curiosity/obsession is supposed to feel like being passionately in love" is really unhelpful.
I didn't know this before.
I think that there's also overlap with spiritual experiences, which you've described yourself as having had. When I first understood class field theory and complex multiplication it induced a several week long state of altered consciousness. I felt a sense of great inner peace, and even the most mundane objects around me seemed to me very beautiful.
I didn't feel alienated, don't worry.
Of the factors you put, it seems like peer group is the main one you can influence (which is a large portion of what I've done), and you might be able to affect education, meta-cognition, and humility/lack thereof through deliberate effort. Thus, these are what I care about for the purposes of thinking about my own plans, as opposed to having interesting conversations about people who do cool things, or being in a job where you try to predict who will do cool things so you can hire them. In that case, the value of noticing and understanding factors beyond the individual's control is helpful.
It depends on what you value. What do you value? :-)
I value a world that contains interesting conversations, beautiful things, a society with helpful traditions and rituals, and people who do useful things for sane reasons. All else being equal, I value fewer people dying. I value less total pain. I value a society with mechanisms that allow it to change and progress in useful ways. On a personal level, I want to do something important and relevant. I think this is a basic human need.
I think a big part of "having ambitions" (as opposed to "being ambitious") is the HMPOR concept of "responsability." You look at a situation and think "this needs to change, and to make it change, this needs to be done." And you go out and try things until the change happens. I didn't used to think like this at all. Now I do a bit more, even if I don't always act accordingly.
I think that there's also overlap with spiritual experiences
Oh! That's what he's talking about! I totally know that feeling. I've even had it with respect to math and science. Is this actually what romantic passion feels like to most people?
I still worry about the pain of future embarrassment, but I'm more likely to point out to myself that it's not a valid objection and I should do X anyway.
I HATE when it happens to me, it's the most stupid heritage of our undercortical brain. I argue with my brain all the time because of this...
Anyway:
Silly plan for taking over the world: Arrange to meet high status-people and offer to give their children swimming lessons. Gain their trust. Proceed from there.
A possibly even better plan is to start an image consulting business.
Recently a book came out here in Italy, it was titled "The powerful men whisperer" (yeah, I know, even translated it's that bad) and retold the story of the head of a PR consulting organization, and how through that business he became the trusted friend of basically every top manager, prime minister or other powerful person in the last twenty years, while at the same time being able to remain thoroughly anonymous.
A possibly even better plan is to start an image consulting business.
It's a better plan in the abstract, but not something where I have a talent or comparative advantage.
If you're having difficulty with Akrasia and procrastination and you are still looking for solutions, might I suggest the Less Wrong Study Hall? We do constant pomodoros of 25 minutes work, 5 minutes rest, and many of us have found it tremendously effective.
(This is a result of the Co-Working Collaboration to Combat Akrasia post)
It's on my list of "things to try as part of my San Francisco trip followup." Thanks!
I have a cluster of intuitions on this point that are difficult to articulate, but I'll try:
I agree that in order to achieve things, one has to keep working through the non-fun parts.
My impressions of the best mathematicians is that the situation is not so much that they force themselves to work through the non-fun parts as much as that they're so obsessed by what they're working on that they don't have a choice not to do it. This may be the primary quality that differentiates them from other mathematicians of comparable IQ, education, etc. The physiology here may be similar to that of drug addiction.
Maybe it's helpful to consider the following analogy. A parent will tend to his or her newborn even when it's unpleasant. But this doesn't come from ambition as much as instinct.
It's important to note that much of scientific and other progress has been unexpected. Isaac Newton spend the industrial revolution by many years, but he didn't set out to do so: he set out to understand the world. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was probably motivated by a desire to understand the world rather than by a desire to cure disease.
I think that one can have a significantly bigger impact (10x-100x on average?) on the world by being goal-driven in a reflective way than one can by following one's instincts without reflections. But I don't think that the quality of being goal-driven accounts for most of the variance in people's social impact.
But I don't think that the quality of being goal-driven accounts for most of the variance in people's social impact.
I would have said that it accounts for maybe 10-25%, and random chance/luck accounts for the rest. I expect I was wrong, and that there are other important predictive factors.
However, the mindset of "some people are creative and curious and obsessed with what they do, and do it by instinct even when the going gets tough, and they're the ones who will change the world" doesn't seem helpful if you're not one of those people. Which I'm pretty sure I'm not. (Maybe a little bit for writing fiction). What are you supposed to do if you don't feel an obsessive need to do anything? How do you decide what to fill your time with?
To take an example in the other direction, passionate love is, also, driven by the quest for discovery. It provides us with a certain kind of understanding known as 'carnal' which also restores itself, blossoms forth and grows in depth.
I don't know what this feeling is. I'm quite possibly some degree of asexual. Being told that "curiosity/obsession is supposed to feel like being passionately in love" is really unhelpful.
Thanks for the post.
Curiosity may play a greater role in people's capacity to achieve things than ambition does. Quoting Alexender Grothendieck's Recoltes et Semailles:
In the Promenade, and here and there in Récoltes et Semailles I will be speaking of the nature of mathematical work. It is work that I understand very well from first hand experience. Most of what I say will apply equally well, I think, to all creative labor, and all activities of discovery. It will apply at least for what is known as 'intellectual' work, which is done mostly 'in one's head', and to writing. Work of this sort is distinguished by the hatching out and by the blossoming of our understanding of certain things which we are interrogating.
To take an example in the other direction, passionate love is, also, driven by the quest for discovery. It provides us with a certain kind of understanding known as 'carnal' which also restores itself, blossoms forth and grows in depth. These two impulses -that which animates the mathematician at his desk ( let's say), and that which impels the lover towards the loved one - are much more closely linked than is commonly believed, or, let us say, people are inclined to want to believe. It is my wish that these pages of Récoltes et Semailles will make its reader aware of this connection, in his own work and in his daily life.
Most of the time in the course of this excursion we will be concerned with mathematics itself, properly speaking. I will be saying almost nothing about the context in which this work takes place, or of the motivations of individuals which lie outside the work itself. This runs the risk of giving me, or the mathematician or scientist in general, a somewhat flattering image, and for that reason distorted- the sort of thing one sees in speaking of the "grand passion" of the scientist, without restrictions. That is to say, something along the lines of the grandiose "Myth of Science" ( with a capital S if you please!); the heroic "myth of Prometheus" which writers have so often indulged in ( and continue to do so) , for better or worse. Only the historians, and then not always, have been able to resist the seductions of this myth. The truth of the matter is that it is universally the case that, in the real motives of the scientist, of which he himself is often unaware in his work, vanity and ambition will play as large a role as they do in all other professions. The forms that these assume can be in turn subtle or grotesque, depending on the individual. Nor do I exempt myself. Anyone who reads this testimonial will have to agree with me.
It is also the case that the most totally consuming ambition is powerless to make or to demonstrate the simplest mathematical discovery - even as it is powerless ( for example) to "score" ( in the vulgar sense) . Whether one is male or female, that which allows one to 'score' is not ambition, the desire to shine, to exhibit one's prowess, sexual in this case. Quite the contrary!
What brings success in this case is the acute perception of the presence of something strong, very real and at the same time very delicate. Perhaps one can call it "beauty", in its thousand-fold aspects. That someone is ambitious doesn't mean that one cannot also feel the presence of beauty in them; but it is not the attribute of ambition which evokes this feeling....
The first man to discover and master fire was just like you and me. He was neither a hero nor a demi-god. Once again like you and me he had experienced the sting of anguish, and applied the poultice of vanity to anaesthetize that sting. But, at the moment at which he first "knew" fire he had neither fear nor vanity. That is the truth at the heart of all heroic myth. The myth itself becomes insipid, nothing but a drug, when it is used to conceal the true nature of things.
I feel like this text presents a straw man of ambition. You need curiosity too; ambition without it is boring; but I think there is a quality that keeps people on track through the non-fun parts of exploring their art. It's not ambition itself that leads to mathematical discovery, but it's something like ambition that might lead someone to sit down, day after day, with books of math and paper and a pencil, and work hard learning new concepts...some days it might be the height of fun, some days they might rather go drinking with their friends, but at the end, any discoveries born of curiosity also depended on those many hours spent learning basic concepts.
Of course, that quality might not be what most people call ambition. It could be called "drive" or even "conscientiousness". It's possible to work hard for many years just out of habit, because you think it's virtuous to work hard for its own sake (I used to be more this type)...but the strategic application of hard work to problems you think are both important and solvable by you is something I don't think is covered by "curiosity" or "conscientiousness."
I really enjoyed reading your post. I actually felt that you implied that you indeed had ambition. I wonder then, what made you decide on the title of the post?
I came upon your article because I was trying to figure out why I was lazy. I wanted to understand if it was because I had no or little ambition. When I read the part where you were explaining what you meant by ambition, I realized I never really defined what it meant to be "lazy". After coming up with a concrete definition of laziness, I was finally able to reason about why I was lazy. I have saved it as a draft in LW. All thanks to you.
It wasn't the original title of the post. Eliezer changed it from something like "Why Less Wrong hasn't changed my life yet." This is a better title than that was, at least.
This post actually makes it a lot clearer to me how people can decide to make their life's work solving a problem that they have no idea how to solve, and then not go crazy doing it. This has always been a mystery to me–my brain tends to immediately reject goals if I can't visualize a direct and plausible path to accomplishing them. Thank you for an illuminating idea!
My claim was that I don't care about fish pain, not that fish pain is too different from human pain to matter. Rather, fish are too different from humans to matter.
Fair enough. I think "too X to matter" is a complex concept, though.
What point are you trying to make with that link?
Probably that fish don't seem to be hugely different from amphibians/reptiles, birds, and mammals in terms of the six substitute-indicators-for-feeling-pain, and so it's hard to say whether their pain experience is different.
I would agree that fish pain is less relevant than human pain (they have a central nervous system, yes, but less of one, and a huge part of what makes human pain bad is the psychological suffering associated with it).
1) I am okay with humanely raised farm meat (I found a local butcher shop that sources from farms I consider ethical)
2) If I didn't have access to civilization, I would probably end up hunting to survive, although I'd try to do so as rarely and humanely as was possible given my circumstances. (I'm only like 5% altruist, I just try to direct that altruism as effectively as possible and if push comes to shove I'm a primal animal that needs to eat. I'm skeptical of people who claim otherwise)
3) I'm currently okay with eating insects, mussels, and similar simplish animals, where I can make pretty good guesses about the lack of sentience of. (If insects do turn out to have sentience, that's a pretty inconvenient world to have to live in, morally.)
4) I'm approximately average-preference-utilitarian. I value there being more creatures with more complex and interesting capacities for preference satisfaction (this is arbitrary and I'm fine with that). If I had to choose between humans and animals, I'd choose humans. But that's not the choice offered to humans RE vegetarianism - what's at stake is not humanity and complex relationships/art/intellectual-endeavors - it's pretty straightforward pleasure (of a sort that I'm expect large swaths of the animal kingdom to be capable of experiencing - visceral enjoyment of food almost certainly evolved fairly early. You are not exercising any special human-ness to experience it)
Most people don't need meat (or much of it) to be productive (the amount most people think they need is pretty grossly wrong), and the amount of hedonic satisfaction you're getting from eating meat is vastly dwarfed by the anti-hedons that enabled it.
5) Ultimately, what I actually advocate is making the best decisions you can, given your circumstances. This includes trading off the willpower and energy you spend on Vegetarianism vs other ways you might be reducing suffering or increasing pleasure/joy/complex-beauty. I wouldn't push too hard for an effective altruist to be Vegetarian. If you argue that devoting your "give a shit" energy is better spent on fighting poverty or injustice or preventing the destruction of the world by unfriendly AI, I won't argue with you.
But I'd like people to at least have animal suffering on the radar of "things I'd like to give a shit about, if I had the energy, and that if it became much more convenient to care about, I'd make small modifications to my lifestyle." So that when in-vitro meat becomes cheap and tasty, I think people should make the initial effort to switch over. (Possibly even while it's still a bit more expensive). Meanwhile, humanely-raised meat tends to be tastier (it's overall higher quality) so if you have leftover budget for nicer food in the first place, I'd consider that.
I don't know how to resolve things like "the ecosystem is full of terribleness". It is possible than plans that include "destroy all natural ecosystems" will turn out to be correct, but my prior on any given person deciding correctly to do that and execute on it without making lots of things worse is low.
But I'd like people to at least have animal suffering on the radar of "things I'd like to give a shit about, if I had the energy, and that if it became much more convenient to care about, I'd make small modifications to my lifestyle." So that when in-vitro meat becomes cheap and tasty, I think people should make the initial effort to switch over. (Possibly even while it's still a bit more expensive).
This is pretty much the case for me. I was vegetarian for a while in high school–oddly enough, less for reducing-suffering ethical reasons than for "it costs fewer resources to produce enough plants to feed the world population than to produce enough meat, as animals have to be fed plants and are a low-efficiency conversion of plant calories, so in order to better use the planet's resources, everyone should eat more plants and less meat." I consistently ended up with low iron and B12. It's possible to get enough iron, B12, and protein as a vegetarian, but you do have to plan your meals a bit more carefully (i.e. always have beans with rice so you get complete protein) and possibly eat foods that you don't like as much. Right now I cook about one dish with meat in it per week, and I haven't had any iron or B12 deficiency problems since graduating high school 4 years ago.
In general, I optimize food for low cost as well as health value and ethics, but if in-vitro meat became available, I think this is valuable enough in the long run that I would be willing to "subsidize" its production and commercialization by paying higher prices.
Not as such, no, but animal products are used in its manufacture: bone char is used in the sugar refining process (by some manufacturers, though not all), making it not ok for vegans.
Wow. I learned something that I did not know before :)
Are you suggesting that one simply advertise the existence of good vegetarian recipes without mentioning surrounding reasons for reducing meat?
I agree with Viliam_Bur that this may be effective, and here's why.
I bake as a hobby (desserts — cakes, pies, etc.). I am not a vegetarian; I find moral arguments for vegetarianism utterly unconvincing and am not interesting in reducing the suffering of animals and so forth.
However, I often like to try new recipes, to expand my repertoire, hone my baking skills, try new things, etc. Sometimes I try out vegan dessert recipes, for the novelty and the challenge of making something that is delicious without containing eggs or dairy or white sugar or any of the usual things that go into making desserts taste good.[1]
More, and more readily available, high-quality vegan dessert recipes would mean that I substitute more vegan dessert dishes for non-vegan ones. This effect would be quite negated if the recipes came bundled with admonitions to become vegan, pro-vegan propaganda, comments about how many animals this recipe saves, etc.; I don't want to be preached to, which I think is a common attitude.
[1] My other (less salient) motivation for learning to make vegan baked goods is to be prepared if I ever have vegan/vegetarian friends who can't eat my usual stuff (hasn't ever been the case so far, but it could happen).
White sugar has animal products in it?
Don't be afraid to do low-cost experiments. Tighten your feedback loops.
In general this is good advice. However, I disrecommend it in this specific case.
And as much as you (generic you, not you specifically) like to believe you are playing around with edgy, dangerous ideas, you are unlikely to cause serious harm to people by teaching a self-help workshop badly.
I'm not (that) worried about untrained but enthusiastic amateurs causing harm to other people, though I think this is more of a risk than you imply. I'm worried about untrained but enthusiastic amateurs causing harm to the public image of rationality, to potential future efforts along these lines, etc.
There are two failure modes here. There's failure mode #1, where enthusiastic amateurs teach awful classes and cause some people to think less of 'rationality', and there's failure mode #2 where CFAR graduates want to do cool things and don't do them because they're scared of failure, and a community never materializes. I think #2 is the default, and more likely, and thus worth taking more effort to avoid.
Assessing your level is extremely hard in this case (it includes instrumental rationality, epistemic rationality, teaching ability, marketing ability, etc. etc.) and I really suggest that nobody do this without thinking about it very seriously beforehand.
Oh please no.
Overestimating the value of information, and allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good are both common failure modes among Less Wrongers. You do not need to "assess your level" down to 16 sig figs (erm, pretend there is a unit of measurement here) along 7 different axes to put yourself on one or the other side of a binary measurement. You just need to ask: "Will listening to me talk about rationality be more likely to help someone, or hurt them?"
And as much as you (generic you, not you specifically) like to believe you are playing around with edgy, dangerous ideas, you are unlikely to cause serious harm to people by teaching a self-help workshop badly. (the people who WOULD be harmed by a badly taught self-help workshop have much worse things to worry about). The cost of failure is not that high. You do not have to have an extremely high level of confidence in your success for an attempt to be your best course of action.
There is probably an optimal amount of serious thinking that should be done before embarking on this sort of endeavor, but the vast majority of Less Wrongers are going to be on the OVER-thinking side of that plot, not the UNDER-analyzing side. Anecdotally, the very first meetup I hosted, about a dozen people came, all of whom had "been intending to post a meetup" and had been waiting until they were better rationalists, or had more information, etc. It is not surprising that this strategy did not accomplish much for them up to that point.
For that reason, at least here on LW I am going to give the exact opposite advice than you did: I really suggest that everyone try this out without thinking about it forever beforehand. Don't be afraid to do low-cost experiments. Tighten your feedback loops.
I promise you that you will achieve more this way.
Agreed with this x10!
I didn't take the workshop so I don't know the exact curriculum. As far as I understand besides teaching people who do use Bayes the workshop also includes exercises to expand peoples comfort zone.
The idea is to train these skills separately. CoZE training will be hard for introverts, but this doesn't mean they need to be constantly out of their comfort zone during all of the other classes.
The workshops still aren't an easy environment for introverts. The negative parts of my experience in May 2012 were mostly because of this.
In what sense is a personal development seminar to be supposed to feel easy? If someone is really overloaded they can excuse themselves and pause for some time.
There is a part of the workshop; CoZE training; that is meant to build social skills. If it feels hard, it's working. But if Bayes or Value of Information classes feel hard because participants are exhausted and want to lock themselves in the bathroom alone, that doesn't help with learning the specific skills. Exercise, for example, works well with intense training and rest periods, not 4 days of constant slow jogging.
The workshops currently cost $3,900 + travel, I don't think it was much lower a year ago. Have your improvements recouped that cost? Has the workshop increased your income?
I paid about $1000 total for workshop plus travel. The social confidence and "try new things" aspects led me to obtain a scary part-time job at the hospital that brought well over $1000 in income, plus networking and comfort zone expansion. I also started thinking about job options in terms of different salaries and world-changing leverage, which my brain had previously tagged as somehow immoral. This hasn't yet led to me, for example, moving to the USA where nursing salaries are higher or looking for startup opportunities, but it's explicitly on my mind and I've done a few rough value calculations. I expect the idea of "you don't need to do the same thing for 30 years" will lead to quite divergent events in the next 5 years of my life.
The Centre for Applied Rationality: a year later from a (somewhat) outside perspective
I recently had the privilege of being a CFAR alumni volunteering at a later workshop, which is a fascinating thing to do, and put me in a position both to evaluate how much of a difference the first workshop actually made in my life, and to see how the workshops themselves have evolved.
Exactly a year ago, I attended one of the first workshops, back when they were still inexplicably called “minicamps”. I wasn't sure what to expect, and I especially wasn't sure why I had been accepted. But I bravely bullied the nursing faculty staff until they reluctantly let me switch a day of clinical around, and later stumbled off my plane into the San Francisco airport in a haze of exhaustion. The workshop spat me out three days later, twice as exhausted, with teetering piles of ideas and very little time or energy to apply them. I left with a list of annual goals, which I had never bothered to have before, and a feeling that more was possible–this included the feeling that more would have been possible if the workshop had been longer and less chaotic, if I had slept more the week before, if I hadn't had to rush out on Sunday evening to catch a plane and miss the social.
Like I frequently do on Less Wrong the website, I left the minicamp feeling a bit like an outsider, but also a bit like I had come home. As well as my written goals, I made an unwritten pre-commitment to come back to San Francisco later, for longer, and see whether I could make the "more is possible" in my head more specific. Of my thirteen written goals on my list, I fully accomplished only four and partially accomplished five, but I did make it back to San Francisco, at the opportunity cost of four weeks of sacrificed hospital shifts.
A week or so into my stay, while I shifted around between different rationalist shared houses and attempted to max out interesting-conversations-for-day, I found out that CFAR was holding another May workshop. I offered to volunteer, proved my sincerity by spending 6 hours printing and sticking nametags, and lived on site for another 4-day weekend of delightful information overload and limited sleep.
Before the May 2012 workshop, I had a low prior that any four-day workshop could be life-changing in a major way. A four-year nursing degree, okay–I've successfully retrained my social skills and my ability to react under pressure by putting myself in particular situations over and over and over and over again. Four days? Nah. Brains don't work that way.
In my experience, it's exceedingly hard for the human brain to do anything deliberately. In Kahneman-speak, habits are System 1, effortless and automatic. Doing things on purpose involves System 2, effortful and a bit aversive. I could have had a much better experience in my final intensive care clinical if I'd though to open up my workshop notes and tried to address the causes of aversions, or use offline time to train habits, or, y'know, do anything on purpose instead of floundering around trying things at random until they worked.
(The again, I didn't apply concepts like System 1 and System 2 to myself a year ago. I read 'Thinking Fast and Slow' by Kahneman and 'Rationality and the Reflective Mind' by Stanovich as part of my minicamp goal 'read 12 hard nonfiction books this year', most of which came from the CFAR recommended reading list. If my preceptor had had any idea what I was saying when I explained to her that she was running particular nursing skills on System 1, because they were engrained on the level of habit, and I was running the same tasks on System 2 in working memory because they were new and confusing to me, and that was why I appeared to have poor time management, because System 2 takes forever to do anything, this terminology might have helped. Oh, for the world where everyone knows all jargon!)
...And here I am, setting aside a month of my life to think only about rationality. I can't imagine that my counterfactual self-who-didn't-attend-in-May-2012 would be here. I can't imagine that being here now will have zero effect on what I'm doing in a year, or ten years. Bingo. I did one thing deliberately!
So what was the May 2013 workshop actually like?
The curriculum has shifted around a lot in the past year, and I think with 95% probability that it's now more concretely useful. (Speaking of probabilities, the prediction markets during the workshop seemed to flow better and be more fun and interesting this time, although this may just show that I was more averse to games in general and betting in particular. In that case, yay for partly-cured aversions!)
The classes are grouped in an order that allows them to build on each other usefully, and they've been honed by practice into forms that successfully teach skills, instead of just putting words in the air and on flipcharts. For example, having a personal productivity system like GTD came across as a culturally prestigious thing at the last workshop, but there wasn't a lot of useful curriculum on it. Of course, I left on this trip wanting to spend my offline month creating with a GTD system better than paper to-do lists taped to walls, so I have both motivation and a low threshold for improvement.
There are also some completely new classes, including "Againstness training" by Valentine, which seem to relate to some of the 'reacting under pressure' stuff in interesting ways, and gave me vocabulary and techniques for something I've been doing inefficiently by trial and error for a good part of my life.
In general, there are more classes about emotions, both how to deal with them when they're in the way and how to use them when they're the best tool available. Given that none of us are Spock, I think this is useful.
Rejection therapy has morphed into a less terrifying and more helpful form with the awesome name of CoZE (Comfort Zone Expansion). I didn't personally find the original rejection therapy all that awful, but some people did, and that problem is largely solved.
The workshops are vastly more orderly and organized. (I like to think I contributed to this slightly with my volunteer skills of keeping the fridge stocked with water bottles and calling restaurants to confirm orders and make sure food arrived on time.) Classes began and ended on time. The venue stayed tidy. The food was excellent. It was easier to get enough sleep. Etc. The May 2012 venue had a pool, and this one didn't, which made exercise harder for addicts like me. CFAR staff are talking about solving this.
The workshops still aren't an easy environment for introverts. The negative parts of my experience in May 2012 were mostly because of this. It was easier this time, because as a volunteer I could skip classes if I started to feel socially overloaded, but periods of quiet alone time had to be effortfully carved out of the day, and at an opportunity cost of missing interesting conversations. I'm not sure if this problem is solvable without either making the workshops longer, in order to space the material out, and thus less accessible for people with jobs, or by cutting out curriculum. Either would impose a cost on the extroverts who don't want an hour at lunch to meditate or go running alone or read a sci-fi book, etc.
In general, I found the May 2012 workshop too short and intense–we had material thrown at us at a rate far exceeding the usual human idea-digestion rate. Keeping in touch via Skype chats with other participants helped. CFAR now does official followups with participants for six weeks following the workshop.
Meeting the other participants was, as usual, the best part of the weekend. The group was quite diverse, although I was still the only health care professional there. (Whyyy???? The health care system needs more rationality so badly!) The conversations were engaging. Many of the participants seem eager to stay in touch. The May 2012 workshop has a total of six people still on the Skype chats list, which is a 75% attrition rate. CFAR is now working on strategies to help people who want to stay in touch do it successfully.
Conclusions?
I thought the May 2012 workshop was awesome. I thought the May 2013 workshop was about an order of magnitude more awesome. I would say that now is a great time to attend a CFAR workshop...except that the organization is financially stable and likely to still be around in a year and producing even better workshops. So I'm not sure. Then again, rationality skills have compound interest–the value of learning some new skills now, even if they amount more to vocab words and mental labels than superpowers, compounds over the year that you spend seeing all the books you read and all the opportunities you have in that framework. I'm glad I went a year ago instead of this May. I'm even more glad I had the opportunity to see the new classes and meet the new participants a year later.
HI there! Awesome post! Especially the agonizing tradeoff between going now and enjoying the compounding benefits earlier, and going later and getting better material. Obviously, I came down on the side of the first option, but this may not be optimal for everyone. Minor point: 'Rationality and the Reflective Mind' is by Stanovich, not by Kahneman.
(BTW, this is Tarn from the workshop)
Fixed the part about Stanovich/Kahneman, thanks!
Still recommended?
(As always, the term "magical reality fluid" reflects an attempt to demarcate a philosophical area where I feel quite confused, and try to use correspondingly blatantly wrong terminology so that I do not mistake my reasoning about my confusion for a solution.)
This seems like a really useful strategy!
Such jobs can also be acquired without a CS degree.
Well, if you're good enough to teach yourself enough programming from scratch to be effective in those jobs. Not everyone is like that, IMO.
And if that seems too easy, then ask "Why does anything exist at all?", and then tell me what a satisfactory answer to that question would even look like.
And no, I don't know the answer to that last one. But I can guess one thing, based on my previous experience with unanswerable questions. The answer will not consist of some grand triumphant First Cause. The question will go away as a result of some insight into how my mental algorithms run skew to reality, after which I will understand how the question itself was wrong from the beginning—how the question itself assumed the fallacy, contained the skew.
Yup, basically. See
- Stephen Maitzen (2012). "Stop Asking Why There's Anything", Erkenntnis, 77(1), 51-63.
The fact that this linked to a PDF that wasn't behind a paywall made me very happy... It looks interesting. Currently converting the saved .pdf to .epub and putting it on my iPhone for later reading. Thanks!
Until posting this, I didn't realize that I was particularly unusual in that respect; I thought having one or two people you know die every year was normal. Does this not happen for most people?
My maternal grandfather died of a stroke when I was about 12 years old; my paternal grandfather died of cancer when I was 19. Those are the only people I knew personally who have died, and I think those numbers (and causes of death) are fairly typical for young people. I've seen lots more dead people, as a nursing student, including some who died of accidental/preventable causes, but I don't count that as evidence I can generalize from–it's a massively biased sample.
Situational awareness is further lauded by elite military units, police trainers, criminals, intelligence analysts, and human factors researchers. In other words, people who have to make very important-- often life-or-death-- decisions based on limited information consider situational awareness a critical skill. This should tell us something-- if those individuals for whom correct decisions are most immediately relevant all stress the importance of situational awareness, it may be a more critical skill than we realize.
While agreeing with the general idea in the post- that SA is important, I think you are slightly overstating the case by calling it the zeroth skill. Where SA helps is in helping you collect more information for your decision making process, but we the world has a lot of data that could be collected. Not all information has the same value for decision making.
In any case, as a person with low SA, I'm interested in seeing the rest of this sequence. What would be helpful, if you've also thought of it is: is this a skill that you can "switch off" when it's not required? If I were in a setting where it's safe to do so, it could be of value to turn off SA and focus more on - a book perhaps, or my own thoughts.
What would be helpful, if you've also thought of it is: is this a skill that you can "switch off" when it's not required? If I were in a setting where it's safe to do so, it could be of value to turn off SA and focus more on - a book perhaps, or my own thoughts.
Based on my experience, yes. I am an absentminded person currently trying to retrain myself to function as a critical care nurse–see my related post here. At work/in clinical, I am slowly developing the skill of being aware of everything as it happens, keeping an ongoing plan/list of priorities, separating out important changes in a patient's condition from noise, and knowing when I have to re-prioritize. Of course, focusing on modelling the world around me constantly (or at least the few cubic meters of my patient and relevant equipment) is exhausting and makes me worse at nearly everything else, from remembering theory to social skills.
However, in a written exam (or at home posting on the Internet), I don't hesitate to block out distracting stimuli and focus on one thing. I can still churn out an essay in 2-3 hours, and I write novels for fun and can focus about as well as I used to be able to, although exhaustion is a confounding factor. (I'm sleep deprived a lot of the time, because of shift work, which wasn't the case when I was in high school). My comfort zone is still absentmindedness, being 'zoned out' and focused on my own thoughts, and I don't think this will ever change–but I already have a degree of situational awareness that I can switch on at will, which will probably increase over my next few years of work experience.
I do tend to give responses like this, but they feel awfully fake to me. I may appear more authentic than I feel when giving them. One time I asked my mother if she would describe me as a warm person (I wouldn't, but I wanted to know what other people thought,) she said that she generally wouldn't, but sometimes I am, and gave an example of a time when she was distressed over a cancer scare, and when she started crying, I immediately walked up and hugged her.
But I also remembered that event very well, and to me, hugging her didn't feel like a natural reaction to consoling someone in distress, it felt like "Crap, I am required to Do Something, what do I do?" and desperately searching for a socially appropriate response.
This probably makes me sound a lot more uncaring than I actually am. It's certainly not that I don't empathize with others' distress, but I'm not nearly as emotive as I am emotional, and I become distressed when I feel like I suddenly have to signal compassion in a way that's different from my response to actually feeling compassionate.
This probably makes me sound a lot more uncaring than I actually am.
Not at all. It makes you sound exactly like I feel a lot of the time–as someone who didn't naturally pick up a lot of social scripts, it just feels frustrating that people have these scripts, and expect you to know when and how follow them even though they're completely counterintuitive, and that people care about how you appear, not your intentions (or what you actually get accomplished).
I do tend to give responses like this, but they feel awfully fake to me. I may appear more authentic than I feel when giving them.
Fake it till you make it! And take this as consolation: plenty of people's natural, instinctive responses to people in distress aren't helpful. The fact that you're actually thinking consciously about your response means you can notice over time what works and what doesn't and adjust accordingly.
I expected that. My own opinion is that if it is necessary for some reason, it's a good idea, but personally I'd rather be possibly, indirectly, and one instance of a poorly understood syndrome responsible for my baby's death than actually being the one that crushed him.
It seems that sleeping separately very drastically decreases your chances of personally killing your baby in your sleep.
It seems that sleeping separately very drastically decreases your chances of personally killing your baby in your sleep.
In the story, maybe. I think nowadays you can get specially designed cribs that sort of merge onto the bed, so you're co-sleeping but can't roll onto your baby–see http://www.armsreach.com/
Well, for what it is worth I'm not extremely concerned about dying, and I was much more afraid of dying before I figured out that subjective expectation doesn't make sense.
My present decisions are made by consulting my utility function about what sort of future I would wish to see occur. That optimal future need not necessarily contain a being like myself, even after taking into account the particularly deep and special affection I have for future me.
Don't get me wrong here - death as arbitrarily set by our biology is bad and I wish it wouldn't happen to me. But that doesn't mean that preserving my consciousness for an arbitrarily long time is the optimum good. There may well come a time when my consciousness is outdated, or perhaps just made redundant. Following the same thought process that keeps me from making 100 copies of myself for no good reason, I wouldn't want to live forever for no good reason.
Finally, in the comments someone remarked that he still has an aversion to creating repetititve conscious moments
I'm the one who mentioned having an aversion to creating redundant consciousnesses, by the way. An interesting universe is one of my many terminal values, and diversity keeps things interesting. Repetition is a problem for me because it saps resources away from uniqueness and is therefore a sub-optimal state. The first hundred or so duplicates would be pretty fascinating (think of the science! Best control group ever) but if you get too many copies running around things get too homogeneous and my terminal value for an interesting universe will start to complain. There is a diminishing return on duplicates - the extent to which they can make unique contributions declines as a function of the number of copies.
Got infinite resources? Sure, go crazy - create infinite copies of yourself that live forever if you want. As a matter of fact, why not just go ahead and create every possible non-morally aberrant thing you can imagine! But I'm not sure that infinite resources can happen in our universe. Or at least, I was assuming significant resource constraints when I said that I have an aversion to unnecessary duplication.
The same thought process applies to not necessarily living forever. It's not interesting to have the same individuals to continue indefinitely - it's more diverse and interesting to have many varied individuals rising and falling. There are better things to do with resources than continually maintain everyone who is ever born. Of course, some of the more emotional parts of me don't give two shits about resource constraints and say "fuck no, I don't want myself or anyone else to die!" but until you get infinite resources, I don't see how that's feasible.
The same thought process applies to not necessarily living forever. It's not interesting to have the same individuals to continue indefinitely - it's more diverse and interesting to have many varied individuals rising and falling. There are better things to do with resources than continually maintain everyone who is ever born. Of course, some of the more emotional parts of me don't give two shits about resource constraints and say "fuck no, I don't want myself or anyone else to die!" but until you get infinite resources, I don't see how that's feasible.
This does an awesome job of putting into words a thought I've had for a long time, and one of the big reasons I have trouble getting emotionally worked up about the idea of dying. Although it's not necessarily true that an individual living forever would be less interesting–the more time you have to learn and integrate skills, the m ore you can do and imagine, especially because assuming we've solved aging also kinda suggets we've solved things like Altzeimer's and brain plasticity and stuff. Then again, when I imagine "immortal human", I think my brain comes up with someone like Eliezer being brilliant and original and getting more so with practice, as opposed to Average Joe bored in the same career for 1000 years. The latter might be closer to the truth.
This may sound a bit too critical and patronizing, but...
Practice will make you better, but you might find yourself always struggling to achieve a level of minimal functionality. Even if you become a good nurse, you might never be as productive as you would have been if you had chosen a career more suited to your dispositions.
Be aware of comparative advantage, don't be afraid of sunk costs and most importantly, don't do things just to differentiate yourself from your parents.
Thank you for your input.
you might never be as productive as you would have been if you had chosen a career more suited to your dispositions. [...] Be aware of comparative advantage.
I would agree with this if I was better at math and physics. I maintained grades of around 90% in high school science classes, but that's by no means an indication of genius. I liked science, and was exposed to it from an early age through my parents, so a lot of concepts weren't new to me the way they were to my peers, and I was a conscientious, hard-working student. I certainly don't think I would have been more likely than any of my Grade 12 classmates to accomplish anything revolutionary in science.
don't do things just to differentiate yourself from your parents.
Ha, you noticed one of the unstated wrong reasons why I wanted to go to nursing school. Although the fact that my father was extremely unhappy in academics (for anxiety-related reasons) is good evidence that I wouldn't have done any better going straight into academic research, so I don't consider that a wrong reason.
but you might find yourself always struggling to achieve a level of minimal functionality.
"Minimal functionality" would be an excellent description of my performance as, say, a professional athlete or an musician/composer–both of which I at some point thought of pursuing as a career. I think I can achieve a lot better than that in nursing.
FWIW - My mom is a nursing instructor working on a PhD (her thesis topic is "Critical thinking in nursing," and she oversees a senior nursing practicum like what you describe!). I sent her this, and she said she wanted to show it to her students.
She also said she wanted to recruit you for her thesis research, if you're in our area :-P
She's welcome to show it to her students! I would like to hear their response.
As to area, I live in Ottawa, Ontario. Not sure where you're from. But if there's any way I can help with your mom's research, I would love to.
if I saw that situation in the form of a written exam question, I wouldn't think it was very complicated or difficult.
This seems like a symptom of discrepancy between your belief (I know the right thing to do in this situation) and your alief (I am not qualified/experienced enough to know the right thing to do in this situation). Sort of like walking on a narrow ledge 3 feet off the ground vs walking on a narrow ledge 300 feet off the ground. I wonder if there are exercises to work explicitly on aligning one's alief with one's belief. Maybe jimmy can chime in.
That is so much more helpful than "you need to work on your confidence"!
Me: “Our patient’s blood pressure dropped a bit.”
Her: “Yeah, it did. What do you want to do about it?”
Me: “I, uh, I don’t know... Should I increase the vasopressors?”
[...]
This conversation sounds like a textbook example of guessing the teacher's password and it sounds like your preceptor is trying to tell you that the role you are taking — that of the student who is trying to figure out the "right" answer, which the teacher knows but is withholding — is inappropriate to the situation. Obviously this is not my domain of expertise, but I would suggest that any time you want to ask a "should I" question, you should instead be saying something like "I'm going to increase the vasopressors. Does that sound reasonable?" As you become more confident in your decisions you can leave off the second part.
Obviously this is not my domain of expertise, but I would suggest that any time you want to ask a "should I" question, you should instead be saying something like "I'm going to increase the vasopressors. Does that sound reasonable?"
This is exactly what she's explicitly told me I need to be doing!
I hadn't really thought of it as an example of "guessing the teacher's password", but I do know that I feel very uncomfortable applying my own judgement to real-life situations. Even though, if I saw that situation in the form of a written exam question, I wouldn't think it was very complicated or difficult. It's like part of me assumes that real life always has 10 million hidden variables that mean the obvious answer is never right...
Interesting. In the normal version, it looks to me like the waves are lifting the boats, and mirror-reversed it looks like the boats are driving against it.
Actually, my normal way to look at it is to focus on the wave, then the mountain, and scarcely notice the boats.
On my first look at the mirror version, the wave looked like a giant claw attacking the mountain.
Yeah, I spent a while looking for the boats in the image... I thought one of them was a beach. I think the question of which is more "agenty" was contaminated for me, though, since I read the comments before following the link to look at the image. I can make myself see either the wave as 'chasing' the boats, or the boats as fleeing the wave, or the boats sailing into the wave...
I am sure that you can get through this and learn to internalize Type 2 thinking as Type 1, and it will be of great help to you in general, but you will probably not be as good at it as those who are natural and don't get as stressed out when thinking under pressure. I'm wondering if down the road you would be better off finding a career which plays more to your strengths as a Type 2 thinker, while at the same time allowing you to express your need for altruism and compassion. From what I know, many ICU nurses operate close to breaking point and burn-out nearly all the time, one has to have a specific type of personality to thrive in such an environment.
Oh, I have no doubt that there are a dozen careers that would play more to my strengths than nursing. If I'd wanted to stay in my comfort zone, I would have gone into academia, like my parents. And maybe there are some aspects of nursing where I'll never be as good as the "naturals"–but I think you overestimate the number of "naturals" out there, and what percentage of nurses they represent. My preceptor, who makes everything look effortless now, confesses that she was scared shitless for the first year that she worked in ICU–and she did nursing as a second career, after a degree in biology, and had already worked as a nurse for a year in med/surg, acquiring the basic organization skills that I'm still working on.
For all the constructive criticism I've gotten, no one has suggested I find another career. Most of my teachers have told me clearly that they think I'm going to be an awesome nurse, once I get my feet under me. Being curious and conscientious and eager to learn new things and aware of the importance of deliberate rather than haphazard practice goes a long way. I tend to have a flatter learning curve than most people, when it comes to acquiring Type 1-ish skills–but I keep improving and end up just as good as everyone else. My parents might have told me when I was eleven that I ought to find a job that didn't involve working with people, since my social skills were spectacularly awful–but I worked on that, and today my nursing profs tell me that "interpersonal communication" is one of my strengths.
From what I know, many ICU nurses operate close to breaking point and burn-out nearly all the time, one has to have a specific type of personality to thrive in such an environment.
That sounds like a badly run ICU. In general, the place in a hospital where I'd most expect to see burnout is an understaffed surgery floor, maybe ortho–nurses looking after six to eight hip and knee surgery patients, overworked, bored because they've been having the same sort of patients for 10 years, and working with other nurses who are just as burnt out. My preceptor, who's worked in both areas, confirms this. The ICU where I'm placed right now is probably the least understaffed part of the hospital, and has the best teamwork, both amongst the nurses and with other health care professionals. Not to mention you get to have interesting patients.
(The idea of working in emerg scares me though. Not enough structure.)
Thanks for the clarification!
The hard part is noticing early on, and knowing the difference between a not-important and an important change
Hmm. This sounds like it would be best done with a mix of Type 1 and Type 2 processes, e.g. Type 1 flags things for your attention and Type 2 assesses whether they actually deserve your attention, or something like that. But I'm not a domain expert.
I think you're right. The Type 1 flags come from a combination of theory and hands-on experience, and become reflexes quite early on. Mine work fairly well. The type 2 part, assessing whether or not it deserves your attention, seems to be to be about 10 million times harder for me, and is mostly what I'm trying to work on. I ask my preceptor "is this normal or should I be freaked out?" a lot. Of course, she rarely tells me straight up, and usually tries to make me reason through it on my own with a series of guiding questions.
It sounds to me like your goal is to consistently override your Type 1 responses with better Type 2 responses. In an environment like nursing where you presumably have to make decisions quickly, I don't think you can make decisions quickly enough this way (cf. Blink). CFAR describes rationality not as the habit of overriding Type 1 responses but as the habit of improving communication between the Type 1 and Type 2 parts of your brain, which among other things improves your Type 1 responses.
Clarification:
There are lots of times when I use Type 1 responses, and they're perfectly appropriate and correct. Maybe this is even most of the time. A significant part of nursing is procedural knowledge learned until it becomes reflex. I don't have to think too hard about mixing IV meds anymore, and this is a good thing. In fact, wanting to have more developed and useful Type 1 responses is a big part of why I chose to study nursing, although I didn't have that vocabulary at the time.
But for self-improvement purposes, I can pretty much ignore what I do right and focus on what I do wrong. And the "critical thinking" aspect of nursing is one thing that I doubt ever becomes reflex. There's never going to be a point when I've seen every possible situation and know intuitively what's wrong with my patient, with their confusing and unexpected symptoms, without having to think about it.
I do expect it to get easier–partly because my theory knowledge will be more integrated, with more association chains to things I've actually seen in real life, and partly because right now I'm running a lot more than just critical thinking on Type 2. There are a ton more skills that will eventually become reflexes, but they haven't yet, and right now they're taking up a ton of working memory.
Also, I think it's a misconception that all decisions in nursing happen too quickly for Type 2 processes to be useful. Some things are very time-critical, but they tend to be the things that don't take a lot of thought anyway. If my patient gets accidentally disconnected from the ventilator, I really don't have to think very hard about whether or not I should reconnect them. It's basically a reflex. (I don't know who designed the tubing to get disconnected so easily.) If a patient goes into cardiac arrest, that's obviously very time-critical, and dealing with it is fairly complex–which is why their are procedures in place that we've been drilled on since first year, and algorithms for the doctors to follow so they don't have to think it out on the spot.
But quite a lot of complex problems aren't super time-critical. Usually it takes time for a patient's condition to change. The hard part is noticing early on, and knowing the difference between a not-important and an important change–whether or not stopping and figuring out what's going on is more of a priority than preparing meds and charting and changing dressings and all the other busywork of nursing. That's a skill that can probably be trained to the 5-second level. Once you've noticed that something confusing is going on, you do need to use Type 2 reasoning to figure out what and why.
This seems oddly reminiscent of high-level video game competition; there's a lot going on, things can go horribly wrong at any moment, and you have to very quickly figure out what's important, what isn't, and what you need to do about it.
This reminds me of a conversation I had in the staffroom recently. Two nurses had been talking about some dragon-breeding game they both played on Facebook. I stopped paying attention to the conversation for a bit, and when I zoned back in, they were talking about how annoying it was to have to "restart their sled." I asked if this was something in their dragon-breeding game. They both laughed for a solid thirty seconds before correcting me–it was a dialysis machine. Apparently 'SLED' stands for 'sustained low-efficiency dialysis'. They said it would make the world's worst game.
But a critical care medicine or critical care nursing video game might actually be quite fun and exciting, for people who aren't already doing that stuff all day...
Learning critical thinking: a personal example
Related to: Is Rationality Teachable
“Critical care nursing isn’t about having critically ill patients,” my preceptor likes to say, “it’s about critical thinking.”
I doubt she's talking about the same kind of critical thinking that philosophers are, and I find that definition abstract anyway. There’s been a lot of talk about critical thinking during our four years of nursing school, but our profs seem to have a hard time defining it. So I’ll go with a definition from Google.
Critical thinking can be seen as having two components: 1) a set of information and belief generating and processing skills, and 2) the habit, based on intellectual commitment, of using those skills to guide behaviour. It is thus to be contrasted with: 1) the mere acquisition and retention of information alone, because it involves a particular way in which information is sought and treated; 2) the mere possession of a set of skills, because it involves the continual use of them; and 3) the mere use of those skills ("as an exercise") without acceptance of their results.1
That’s basically rationality–epistemic, i.e. generating true beliefs, and instrumental, i.e. knowing how to use them to achieve what you want. Maybe part of me expected, implicitly, to have an easier time learning this skill because of my Less Wrong knowledge. And maybe I am more consciously aware of my mistakes, and the cognitive factors that caused them, than most of my classmates. When it’s forty-five minutes past the end of my shift and I’m still charting, I’m also calling myself out on succumbing to the planning fallacy. I once went through the first half hour of a shift during my pediatrics rotation thinking that one of my patients had cerebral palsy, when he actually had cystic fibrosis–all because I misread my prof’s handwriting as ‘CP’ when she’d written ‘CF’. I was totally confused by all the enzyme supplements on his list of meds, but it still took me a while to figure it out–a combination of priming and confirmation bias, taken to the next level.
But, overall, even if I know what I'm doing wrong, it hasn’t been easier to do things right. I have a hard time with the hospital environment, possibly because I’m the kind of person who ended up reading and posting on Less Wrong. My cognitive style leans towards Type 2 reasoning, in Keith Stanovich’s taxonomy–thorough, but slow. I like to understand things, on a deep level. I like knowing why I’m doing something, and I don’t trust my intuitions, the fast-and-dirty product of Type 1 reasoning. But Type 2 reasoning requires a lot of working memory, and humans aren’t known for that, which is the source of most of my frustration and nearly all of my errors–when working memory overload forces me to be a cognitive miser.
Still, for all the frustration, I’m pretty sure I’ve ended up in the perfect environment to learn this skill called ‘critical thinking.’ I’m way out of my depth–which I expected. No fourth year student is ready to work independently in a trauma ICU, but I decided to finish my schooling here in the name of tsuyoku naritai, and for all the days when I’ve gone home crying, it’s still worth it. I’m learning.
The skills
1. A set of information and belief generating and processing skills.
Medicine, and nursing, are a bit like physics, in that you need to generate true beliefs about systems that exist outside of you, and predict how they’re going to behave. This involves knowing a lot of abstract theory, which I’m good at, and a lot of heuristics and pattern-matching for applying the right bits of theory to particular patients, which I’m less good at. That’s partly an experience thing; my brain needs patterns to match to. But in general, I have decent mental models of my patients. I’m curious and I like to understand things. If I don’t know what part of the theories applies, I ask.
2. The habit, based on intellectual commitment, of using those skills to guide behaviour.
So you’ve got your mental model of your patient, your best understand of what’s actually going on, on a physiological and biochemical level, down under the skin where you can’t see it. You know what “normal” is for a variety of measures: vital signs, lung sounds, lab values, etc. Given that your patient is in the ICU, you know something’s abnormal, or they wouldn’t be there. Their diagnosis tells you what to expect, and you look at the results of your assessments and ask a couple of questions. One: is this what I expect, for this patient? Two: what do I need to do about it?
I’m not going to be surprised if a post-op patient has low hemoglobin. It’s information of a kind, telling the doctor whether or not the patient needs a transfusion, and how many units, but it’s not really new information, and a moderately abnormal value wouldn’t worry me or anyone else. If their hemoglobin keeps dropping; okay, they’re actively bleeding somewhere, that’s irritating, and possibly dangerous, and needs dealing with, but it’s not surprising.
But if a patient here for an abdominal surgery suddenly has decreased level of consciousness and their pupils aren’t reacting normally to light, I’m worried. There’s nothing in my mental model that says I should expect it. I notice I’m confused, and that confusion guides my behaviour; I call the doctor right away, because we need more information to update our collective mental model, information you can’t get just from observation, like a CT scan of the head. (Even this is optimistic–plenty of patients are admitted to the ICU because we have no idea what’s wrong with them, and are hoping to keep them alive long enough to find out.)
The basics of ICU nursing come down to treating numbers. Heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturations, urine output, etc; know the acceptable range, notice if they change, and use Treatment X to get them back where they’re supposed to be. Which doesn’t sound that hard. But implicit in ‘notice if they change’ is ‘figure out why they changed’, because that affects how you treat them, and implicit in that is a lot of background knowledge, which has to be put in context.
I’m, honestly, fairly terrible at this. It’s a compartmentalization thing. I don’t like using my knowledge as input arguments to generate new conclusions and then relying on those conclusions to treat human beings. It feels like guessing. Even though, back in high school, I never really needed to study for physics tests–if I understood what we’d learned, I could re-derive forgotten details from first principles. But hospital patients ended up in a non-overlapping magisterium in my head. In order for me to trust my knowledge, it has to have come directly from the lips of a teacher or experienced nurse.
My preceptor, who hates this. “She needs to continue to work on her critical thinking when it comes to caring for critically ill patients,” she wrote on my evaluation. “She knows the theory, and is now working to apply it to ICU nursing.” Shorthand for, she knows the theory, but getting her to apply it to ICU nursing is like pulling teeth. A number of our conversations have gone like this:
Me: “Our patient’s blood pressure dropped a bit.”
Her: “Yeah, it did. What do you want to do about it?”
Me: “I, uh, I don’t know... Should I increase the vasopressors?”
Her: “I don’t know, should you?”
Me: “Uh, maybe I should increase the phenylephrine to 40 mcg/min and see what happens. How long should I wait to see?”
Her: “You tell me.”
Me: “Well, let’s say it’ll take a few minutes for what’s in the tubing now to get pushed through, and it should take effect pretty quickly because it’s IV, like a minute... So if his blood pressure’s not up enough in five minutes, I’ll increase the phenyl to 60. Does that sound okay?”
Her: “It’s your decision to make."
Needless to say, I find this teaching method extremely stressful and scary, and I’m learning about ten times more than I would if she answered the questions I asked. Because “the mere acquisition and retention of information alone” isn’t my problem. I have a brain like an encyclopaedia. My problem, in the critical care nursing context, is the “particular way in which information is sought and treated.” I need to know the right time to notice something is wrong, the right place to look in my encyclopaedia, and the right way to take the information I just looked up and figure out what to do with it.
The mistakes
Some of my errors, unsurprisingly, boil down to a failure to override inappropriate Type 1 responses with Type 2 responses–in other words, not thinking about what I’m doing. But most of them are more of a mindware gap–I don’t yet have the “domain-specific knowledge sets” that the nurses around me have. Not just theory knowledge; I do have most of that; but the procedural habits of how to stay organized and prioritize and dump the contents of my working memory onto paper in a way that I can read them back later. Usually, when I make a mistake, I knew better, but the part of my brain that knew better was doing something else at the time, that small note of confusion getting lost in the general chaos.
Pretty much all nurses keep a “feuille de route”–I have yet to find a satisfactory English word for this, but it’s a personal sheet of paper, not legal charting, usually kept in a pocket, and used as an extended working memory. In med/surg, when I had four patients, I made a chart with four columns; name and personal information, medications, treatments/general plan for the day, and medical history; and as many rows as I had patients. If something was important, I circled it in red ink. This system doesn’t work in the ICU, so my current feuille de route has several aspects. I fold a piece of blank paper into four, and take notes from the previous shift report on one quarter of one side, or two quarters if it’s a long report. Across from that, I draw a vertical column of times, from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm (or 8:00 pm to 6:00 am). 7:00 pm and 7:00 am are shift change, so nothing else really gets done for that hour. I use this to scribble down what I need to get down during my twelve hours, and approximately when I want to do it, and I prioritize, i.e. from 1 to 5 most to least important. Once it’s done, I cross it off–then I can forget about it. On the other side of the paper, I make a cheat sheet for giving report to the next nurse, or presenting my patient to the doctors at rounds.
This might be low-tech and simple, but it takes a huge load off my working memory, and reduces my most frequent error, which is to get so overwhelmed and frazzled that my brain goes on strike. In other words, the failure to override Type 1 responses due to the lack of cognitive capacity to run a Type 2 process. It’s drastically cut down on the frequency of this mental conversation:
Me: “I turned off the sedation, and my patient isn’t waking up as fast as I expected. I notice I’m confused–”
My brain: “You’re always confused! Everything around here is intensely confusing! How am I supposed to use that as information?”
Odd as it might sound, I often don’t notice when my brain starts edging towards a meltdown. The feeling itself is quite recognizable, but the circumstances that lead to it, i.e. overloaded working memory, mean that I’m not usually paying attention to my own feelings.
“You need to stop and take a breath,” my preceptor says about fifty times a day. Easier said than done–but it’s more efficient, overall, to have a tiny part of my mind permanently on standby, keeping an eye on my emotions, noticing when the gears start to overheat. Then stop, take a breath, and let go of everything except the task at hand, trusting myself to have created enough cues in my environment to retrieve the other tasks, once I’m done. Humans don’t multitask well. Doing one thing while trying to remember a list of five others is intense multitasking, and it’s no wonder it’s exhausting.
The implications
“You can’t teach critical thinking,” my preceptor says, but I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what she’s doing right now. A great deal of what I already know is domain-specific to nursing, but most of what I’m learning right now is generally applicable. I’m learning the procedural skills to work through difficult problems, under what Keith Stanovich would call average rather than optimal conditions. Sitting in my own little bubble in front of a multiple choice exam–that’s optimal conditions. Trying to figure out if I should be surprised or worried about my patient’s increased heart rate, while simultaneously deciding whether or not I can ignore the ventilator alarm and whether I can finish giving my twelve o’clock antibiotic before I need to do twelve o’clock vitals–that’s not just average conditions, it’s under-duress conditions.
I’m hoping that after a few more weeks, or maybe a few more years, I’ll be able to perform comfortably in this intensely terrifying environment. And I’m hoping that some of the skills I learn will be general-purpose, for me at least. It’d be nice if they were teachable to others, too, but I think my preceptor might be right about one thing–you can’t teach this kind of critical thinking in the classroom. It's about moulding my brain into the right shape, and everyone's brain starts out in a different shape, so the mould has to be personalized.
But the habits are general ones. Notice when you're faced with a difficult problem, or making an important decision. Notice that you're doing this while distracted. Stop and take a breath. Get out a piece of paper. Figure out how the problem is formatted in your mind, and format it that way on the paper. (This is probably the hardest part). Dump your working memory and give yourself space to think. Prioritize from 1 to n. Keep an eye on the evolving situation, sure, but find that moment of concentration in the midst of chaos, and solve the problem.
Of course, it's far from guaranteed that this will work. I'm making an empirical prediction; that the skills I'm currently learning will be transferable to non-nursing areas, and that they'll make a difference in my life outside of work. I'll be on the lookout for examples, either of success or failure.
References
Scriven, Michael; Paul, Richard. Defining critical thinking. (2011). The critical thinking community. http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/410
This happened to me two days ago, in a workshop on inter-professionalism and conflict resolution, with the word "objective". Which, in hindsight, was kind of obvious, and I should have known to avoid it. The man leading the discussion was a hospital chaplain–a very charismatic man and a great storyteller, but with a predictably different intellectual background than mine. It wouldn't have been that hard to avoid the word. I was describing what ties different health care professionals together–the fact that, y'know, together they're taking care of the same patient, who exists as a real entity and whose needs aren't affected by what the different professionals think they are. I just forgot, for a moment, that people tend to have baggage attached to the word "objective", since to me it seems like such a non-controversial term. In general, not impressed with myself, since I did know better.
There hasn't been a lot of money spent researching it, but meta-analysis of the studies that have been conducted show that on average there is no placebo effect.
That's really interesting...I had not heard that. Thanks for the info!
Well... as something completely and obviously deterministic (the amount of money you have at the end of the month is the amount you had at the beginning of the month, plus the amount you've earned, minus the amount you've spent, for a sufficiently broad definition of “earn” and “spend”), that's about the last situation in which I'd expect people to rely on God. With stuff which is largely affected by factors you cannot control directly (e.g. your health) I would be much less surprised.
With stuff which is largely affected by factors you cannot control directly (e.g. your health) I would be much less surprised.
"Praying for healing" was quite a common occurrence at my friend's church. I didn't pick that as an example because's it's a lot less straightforward. Praying for healing probably does appear to help sometimes (placebo effect), and it's hard enough for people who don't believe in God to be rational about health–there aren't just factor you cannot control, there are plenty of factors we don't understand.
Put them in a situation where they need to use logic and evidence to understand their environment and where understanding their environment is crucial for their survival, and they'll figure it out by themselves. No one really believes God will protect them from harm...
No one really believes God will protect them from harm...
I have some friends who do... At least insofar as things like "I don't have to worry about finances because God is watching over me, so I won't bother trying to keep a balanced budget." Then again, being financially irresponsible (a behaviour I find extremely hard to understand and sympathize with) seems to be common-ish, and not just among people who think God will take care of their problems.
Most people don't spend their own money on saving their grandparents, they spend other people's money. Don't act surprised that other people's willingness to throw tens of millions at your grandfather's last year is not unlimited.
Also if people really cared about how long other people in their country lived, total cigarette ban would be a super simple and super cheap way to start (especially since e-cigarettes are an existing and viable low-cancer substitute - people want the psychoactive bits not the tar). And trans fat ban - or at least strict labeling requirement (which would amount to the same, since nobody want that, and trans fats don't have any special taste or anything, they're just industrial poison in food). Or throwing some money at making roads safer (most accidents happen on small fraction of bad spots). And in countless other ways. Throwing ridiculous amount of money at people when they're oldest is stupid way to achieve an already stupid goal.
And trans fat ban - or at least strict labeling requirement (which would amount to the same, since nobody want that, and trans fats don't have any special taste or anything, they're just industrial poison in food).
I think you overestimate the degree to which people are intentional about their food intake.
3) Can strongly intellectual jobs be reformatted in a more physical way? For example, in the future, could programmers and mathematicians manipulate symbols in the air, like Tony Stark does in Iron Man? This would at least activate significantly more visual cortex than symbols on a screen.
I was going to make just such a point about programming. If one were to look at coding as a means of controlling data flow, or controlling state machines or decision paths, then 'coding' by means of drawing up an active flow chart and manipulating this spatially, much like what Stark did, would be awesome fun. This lets me visually and in space stack the scaffolding of ideas, blocks, functions and subroutines, 'see' the connections between blocks and watch the -- the flow of control and data, yank things around 'literally', and so on and so forth.
If people announced that they had emailed you in this thread, would that be good or bad? I can see short arguments for both.
Good: Might encourage participation? Bad: Might bias results?
Overall, I would say bad. I don't think it would be a huge effect, though.
It's a very old observation, that Homo sapiens was made to hunt and gather on the savanna, rather than work in an office. Civilization and its discontents...
I'm wondering if you don't necessarily need to modify the human brain in order to make this problem at least a bit better. There are already some jobs that are much closer to "savanna" than "office." I chose to go into nursing because, among other things, I knew about my father's experience working in a cubicle and I never wanted that. Nursing is both intellectually stimulating (very much so in critical care/ICU, which is where I'm currently doing my final clinical rotation), and also "sensual" in the way you describe. I get a huge amount of satisfaction from manipulation physical materials and supplies–mixing drugs, priming IV tubing, changing dressings, etc. It's fun. And then there's the direct human contact, which is kind of exhausting for an introvert like me, but also really, really rewarding.
I'm guessing that jobs like electrician, plumber, etc, are probably similar in having both intellectually and sensorially stimulating aspects. Manual labor or construction leans more towards the sensory, engineering/science towards the intellectual (although some scientists get to play with cool equipment, samples, etc), math and programming are almost solely intellectual, and a great deal of office work seems to be neither.
There are a couple of questions this brings up for me. 1) Can "boring" jobs be made more sensual? I wonder how much of a difference it would make if offices were more colourful, contained obstacle courses, involved walking around more, etc? It sounds silly and even like a waste of time, but if it keeps employees engaged, it might save time. 2) Do boring jobs really need to be done by humans? I'm not talking about jobs like math and programming, which aren't 'boring', just unilaterally intellectual. 3) Can strongly intellectual jobs be reformatted in a more physical way? For example, in the future, could programmers and mathematicians manipulate symbols in the air, like Tony Stark does in Iron Man? This would at least activate significantly more visual cortex than symbols on a screen. And all of these options seem significantly more achievable, with current technology, than trying to change the human brain.
flyers around your university? Still not really representative but it would get you the standard WEIRD group
Would likely have to jump through the hoops of the university ethics board... Might be worthwhile though.
Do you remember how to spell all of those words you let the spellcheck catch? Do you remember what fraction of a teaspoon of salt goes into that one recipe, or would you look at the list of ingredients to be sure? Do you remember what kinds of plastic they recycle in your neighborhood, or do you delegate that task to a list attached with a magnet to the fridge?
I don't know if this says anything important or relevant, but I remember nearly all of these things. Spelling, in my first language of English, anyway, is effortless for me. I always end up memorizing things like recipes because, well, I use them. And hate having to take time to look it up, so I deliberately try to learn "shortcuts", for example "all cookie recipes have 1 teaspoon baking soda". I have occasionally kept calendars, and it was a big stress reliever, but it was also time consuming and mostly unnecessary–I don't forget that I got called in for a random weeknight shift at the hospital, or that I have an appointment on X day.
I think this is secondary to two factors. A) I have a pretty encyclopedic memory. I read literally thousands of books as a child, and to this day I can dredge up a significant fraction of the major plot of almost any of them, and actual quotes if I read them more than once. To me this is normal, but my mom is surprised when I remember things like that, so I guess it's uncommon. B) I don't like wasting time, and having to look stuff up that's easy to remember, for me, and that I use frequently feels like wasting time.
I do tend to store the minimum. For example, once I find out the due date for a school project, I'm pretty unlikely to forget the date and have to look it up, but that doesn't mean I'll bother to learn anything about the content of the project until I plan on starting it, and finishing it shortly thereafter.
Throughout nursing school, I've often "known" things in the sense of "I would have a 100% grasp of it quite easily with 2 minutes of looking stuff up." This is useful in areas like pharmacology, where the underlying structure (drug classes and mechanisms of action) is fairly logical and interesting, and thus easy to remember, but the surface structure (generic and commercial names and the side effects that aren't an example of the drug being 'too effective') is ridiculously difficult to memorize. That being said, my non-looking-up grasp is about 90%–enough to get really good grades in theory classes without being able to look stuff up on the spot, but not enough to feel comfortable actually treating patients without re-looking it up.
I've also noticed that I "purge" my autobiographical memory–as if I'm making more space for data that I find interesting. I'm very good at staying on top of day-to-day life and remembering due dates and work shifts and stuff, but I'm hard pressed to think of more than ten specific episodes that I remember from elementary school. I know the general 'story' of my childhood but I don't bother to retain the details–which means that I often don't understand my younger self's thoughts and decisions very well.
Also, the subset of people who participate on lw is going to be an incredibly unrepresentative sample,
I'm likely going to run the same experiment with a group recruited through a different medium–just trying to decide which one would be the most "random"/"representative of the general population", but also within my means.
This seems interesting. Are you just doing the whole thing through email? Also, voluntary response isn't a great way to get accurate results, but I guess it's all you have to work with.
It's going to be a survey to fill out online once a week. And I know we won't get the best quality data, necessarily, but I think this is the first study that's ever been done on this, AND I don't have a research background, so if the results come back super interesting, Shannon Friedman might try to recruit some people who do have a research background and are interested in doing it more rigorously.
Who do you want as participants? Everyone? Only people who think they are depressed? Only people with clinically diagnosed depression?
Are you looking for test subjects or researchers? It would help if you gave more detail of what you want from people in the description (unless something in the nature of the experiment makes that unwise).
Test subjects. And I didn't want to say more because I don't want to "contaminate" the results. It involves filling out a survey though.
Presumably this is a proper research study for your degree, not a personal effort?
Nope. Personal effort. I'm doing it as a favour to Shannon Friedman, because she was speculating in some comments that it'd be nice to have some data on her ideas, and I thought "cool, I could do that."
Study on depression
I am currently running a study on depression, in collaboration with Shannon Friedman (http://lesswrong.com/user/ShannonFriedman/overview/). If you are interested in participating, the study involves filling out a survey and will take a few minutes of your time (half an hour would be very generous), most likely once a week for four weeks. Send me an email at mdixo100@uottawa.ca, and I can give you more details.
Thank you!
Ekman's studies on lying nurses found about half of them leaked nothing when lying about the emotional content of films they were watching. ("Oh, these are pretty flowers, not a gruesome surgery on a burn victim.") I don't think 'few' is the way I'd put it.
I hadn't known someone had decided to study that specifically...
Based on my experience of nursing school, I would say this ability not to leak emotional reactions is true of nurses in particular, because you do get used to seeing a lot of really gross or upsetting stuff and reacting matter-of-factly. I basically don't experience disgust anymore. (Specification: in certain situations where most people would be disgusted, I experience pretty much no emotions, i.e. cleaning up diarrhea or changing bandages on infected wounds. There are some situations where I wouldn't previously have been grossed out and I am now, i.e. by the idea of doing CPR without a pocket mask.) Even in the case of empathy in others' pain, I've had to learn to control my emotional reactions so that I can, you know, get my work done and not be totally useless.
This is exactly what I was trying to describe, and this happens to me as well. If you ever do write such a figure, be sure to let me know, I'd like to read about them. :)
Well, to a first approximation, on a moral level, Quirrell is who I try not to be and Hermione is who I wish I was, and on the level of intelligence, it's not possible for me to be viscerally impressed with either one's intellect since I strictly contain both. Ergo I find Hermione's choices more impressive than Quirrell's choices.
Quirrel strikes me as the sort of character who is intended to be impressive. Pretty much all his charactaristics hit my "badass" buttons. The martial arts skills, the powerful magical field brushing at the edges of Harry's little one, etc. However, I wouldn't want to be like Quirrel, and I can't imagine being Quirrel-like and still at all like myself. Whereas Hermione impresses me in the sense of being almost like a version of myself that gets everything I try to be right and is better than me at everything I think matters. Hermione is more admirable to me than Quirrel, but my sense of awe is triggered more by badass-ness than admiration.
Harry seems more awesome to me because he has a strong drive to get to the bottom of things-- not the same thing as intelligence, though it might be a trait that wouldn't be as interesting in an unintelligent character. (Or would it be? I can't think of an author who's tried to portray that.)
I would be fascinated to read a character who can Get Curious and think skeptically and reflectively about competing ideas, but is only of average intelligence.
Trying to model this character in my head has resulted in some sort of error though, so there's that...
I can imagine writing this character, because it's the way I feel a lot of the time... Knowing I read some important fact once but not being able retrieve it, lacking the working memory to do logic problems in my head and having to stop and pull out pen and paper, etc. I'm arguably of somewhat higher than average intelligence, but I'm quite familiar with the feeling of my brain not being good enough for what I want to do.
I'm basically only curious because of the interesting title (found it while I was searching for a different LW post), but did you ever rewrite this?
Nope. Forgot it existed. Whoops.
You approving of the "ambitious kids" (or your status-cheating valedictorian friend) as people won't actually contribute to some sort of moral decay in society, no matter how much your tribal brain makes you feel like it is.
I'm... not actually convinced this is true. Actually, the opposite seems true. If I approve of people whose activities (I believe) constitute "moral decay" (i.e. who do things that I disapprove of), then that encourages such behavior. The more other people approve of them, the more the behavior is encouraged. Moral decay results.
I think the original writer's point is more nuanced than that. A) Something that is annoying to me/that I disapprove of isn't necessarily something I consider "moral decay", if I actually think about it. B) Many of my attitudes are acquired from childhood and thus don't represent society as a whole, or anything objective–so I should be suspicious of my judgements of morality anyway. C) I don't know most of the 'annoying ambitious people' very well, and this is why the human morality-judging instinct is a misfire; yeah, if my tribe consisted of 20 people, my disapproval could have a big effect on any given person, but given the size and complexity of our current society and the number of other friends all these people have, I'm likely to have a negligible effect even on the person I'm judging, much less on society as a whole.
Your point is valid for groups that closely represent the human ancestral environment–for example, small-ish tightly knit groups of friends, like those seen in middle and high school, or among people who go to the same church. In which case disapproval of 'moral decay' does have a significant effect. But I'm not in the tight-knit circle of any of the people I disapprove(d) of.
Excellent article!
I've always seen life in terms of stories. I used to tell stories to myself from age 5 or so, and probably earlier–definitely before I could write, because my mom used to record them on tape. The most common thing I'll do when I'm bored is create mini-story scenarios in my head, involving myself and people I know, and dramatic events taking place, and how people react. (Like "myself and the rest of my swim team are stranded on a desert island" or, years later, "I'm trapped at work in the hospital with the rest of the staff after a nuclear strike".)
I've always been an avid reader, and looked up to the main characters with heroic qualities, and been all too aware that I don't have those qualities–I'm clumsy, I have slow reaction times, I don't cope well under pressure, etc. I think the biggest bias that "narrative thinking" has given me is the thought that you, as a person, are defined by that "climactic moment of your story" where you're in the position to do something heroic. Thus, I think my literally greatest fear is that my climactic moment will come, and I'll fail due to lack of heroic qualities.
This has motivated quite a lot of my large-scale life decisions–I chose to go into nursing, among other reasons, because I thought it would improve my ability to actually be useful in a crisis situation. (I'm not saying it was a wrong decision–I think it was an even better decision than I realized at the time, if not for the same reasons.) Still, there are definitely drawbacks to seeing the world in such a biased way. And though my intellectual self may be more sophisticated than that now, my emotional self definitely still thinks that way–and has a way to see every situation as "the author of my story is testing my skills."
More recently, I've tried to incorporate "tsuyoku naritai" into my self-concept, to see myself as the kind of person who is constantly working to become stronger. This helps a lot to persuade my reluctant emotional mind to do all the things that I find unpleasant or that scare me, like dragging myself to taekwondo at the end of a long day, or going to help out when a patient is in cardiac arrest.
An injury that prevented me from climbing this semester lead to me feeling chronically meh for about a month, until I realized it was because my self-image as a physically active and playful person was threatened.
This could be a purely physiological thing. Exercise releases endorphins, and if your body's used to getting its daily endorphin boost and suddenly isn't anymore, it isn't all that surprising that you would feel "meh." Quite apart from the psychological aspects–which are huge as well–you can suffer purely physical "withdrawal" from lack of exercise. I certainly do!
That is an excellent question.
The most godawful example I've seen of EP being used as a cover for blatant sexism and misogyny is this NRO article, which basically says that as a rich boss with many male sons, Mitt Romney exudes alpha male power, and all women should fall in trance and vote for him.
This article isn't a joke?
Are you referring to the neuroscientist's discussion linked in the OP? This comment seems quite clear regarding the information-theoretic consequences:
Distortion of the membranes and replacement of solvent irretrievably destroys information that I believe to be essential to the structure of the mind. (...) (information simply isn't there to be read, regardless of how advanced the reader may be).
In our lingo: the state transformation is a non-injective function (=loss of information).
However, the import of the distance between a "best guess" facsimile and the original is hard to evaluate. Would it be on the order of the difference between before and after a night's sleep? Before and after a TBI injury (yay pleonasm)?
Undifferentiable from your current self in a hypothetical Turing test variant, with you squaring off against such a carbon copy?
Speculatively, I'd rather think all that damage to not play that big of a role. Disrupted membranes should still yield the location of the synapses with high spatial fidelity, and the way we interfere with neurotransmitters constantly, the exact concentration in each synapse does not seem identity-constituting.
Otherwise, we'd incur information-theoretic death of our previous selves each time we take e.g. a neurotransmitter manipulating drug such as an SSRI. Which we do in a way, just not in a relevant way.
On reflection I think I misused the word altruism. I'm an egoist, but my actions towards others may seem altruistic in cases where those others are optimizing for futures I prefer. For example, Aubrey de Grey is better at optimizing for a future in which I don't die than I am, so I prefer to give him some of my optimization power.
OK, so what you're trying to say is "I, personally, act 'altruistic' towards people who are working on x-risk, and don't buy the concept of being 'altruistic' towards anyone else." Is that right? I was reading it as "a given person's behaviour can't be called altruistic unless they are working on x-risk."
I kind of assumed that was the anonymous author's point. (I've seen it attributed to many different French.)
It may have been the original author's point, but that makes it kind of a non sequitur comment to this post, at least to my first reading of it. Yes, indispensable people die. People who try to make themselves replaceable also die. The people left behind are better off if the deceased is "more replaceable" in at least a practical sense.
...On further thought, I think I automatically interpreted the comment as disagreeing with the article, because my brain seems to assume that most one-like comments are going to be disagreements. If I interpret it as agreeing with the article, then it makes perfect sense.
What if by making myself irreplaceable I maximize my income and donate more money to x-risk reduction? I don't buy the concept of altruism towards people who don't care about x-risk.
I don't buy the concept of altruism towards people who don't care about x-risk.
Can you clarify what you mean by this?
"The graveyards are full of indispensable men" - De Gaulle.
"The graveyards are full of indispensable men" - De Gaulle.
The graveyards are full of everyone who has ever lived up until ~1850 (and a lot of people born after that).
Between 9 and 11PM, I shut off my laptop, don my robe, light scented candles, and draw a bath.
I'd point out that there's a plausible physiological mechanism here: aside from a nice hot bath being relaxing (no doubt there's research on this), avoiding electronics may also mean avoiding blue light which suppresses melatonin secretion.
There's a program called f.lux that you can download on a computer/laptop, and it senses your current location, looks up time of sunrise and sunset, and changes your screen to warm hues only after your local sunset. It's not distracting at all–I only notice it if I actually see the transition happen. However, I don't know if it makes any difference.
I also turn the screen brightness down if I'm on the computer right before bed, i.e. now.
Love this.
How do you feel about using rituals to reinforce habits and create momentum for new policies? It's basically outsourcing willpower to past selves.
For instance, I've always had a hard time regulating my sleep schedule. It's not always that I can't sleep, but that I seldom want to go to sleep and lack the willpower to not do whatever I want to do instead, no matter how sleepy I am. What finally worked was a ritual that served as both positive reinforcement and physiological manipulation. I love bubble baths, and they put me in a relaxed mindspace where much less willpower is required to go to sleep. Bubble baths are now my bedtime ritual. Between 9 and 11PM, I shut off my laptop, don my robe, light scented candles, and draw a bath. Exactly like that, every single time.
It's not difficult, in part because a ritual doesn't really feel like my decision. It feels more like an external way the world is, something it would take effort to change, like the lunch meeting scheduled for Wednesday. Taking a bath is the last thing I'm allowed to do before sleeping, and it's something I always look forward to. Sleeping is simply the conclusion of the ritual.
Obviously, rituals are dangerous, especially in group contexts. But they're dangerous because they really are powerful. We can delude ourselves with rituals, but we can also use them as cheat codes for winning. We just have to use them judiciously.
Between 9 and 11PM, I shut off my laptop, don my robe, light scented candles, and draw a bath. Exactly like that, every single time.
Glad it works for you, but I don't have 2 hours a night that I can spend not doing anything.
Then again, I don't have a huge amount of difficulty regulating my sleep schedule. It takes me a long time to fall asleep (I would say 45 minutes on average) but it always has and it doesn't stress me out–it's awfully comfy lying in bed. I tend to get tired fairly early–in fact, I'm often pretty tired all the time, because my schedule is insane, thus the lack of 2 hours a day for bedtime rituals.
Every once in a while I'll pass my bedtime while engaged in a superstimulus, like reading a good book, but most of the time I look at when I have to wake up, count back eight to nine hours, and put myself to bed at that time. If not a ritual, this is definitely a strongly reinforced habit–it doesn't take much willpower to get myself off my laptop 10 minutes before bedtime, because I know full well how good being in bed will feel, and how I'll feel the next day if I don't go to bed on time.
Actually it is quite good (even for an "advanced country") if you compare the test scores of, say, Swedes and Swedish-Americans rather than Swedes and Americans as a whole.
I wonder what that's controlling for? Cultural tendencies to have different levels of work ethic?
Only 80%?
In the USA, about 30% of adults have a bachelor's degree or higher, and about 44% of those have done a degree where I can slightly conceive that they might possibly meet Bayes' theorem (those in the science & engineering and science- & engineering-related categories (includes economics), p. 3), i.e. as a very loose bound 13% of US adults may have met Bayes' theorem.
Even bumping the 30% up to the 56% who have "some college" and using the 44% for a estimate of the true ratio of possible-Bayes'-knowledge, that's only just 25% of the US adult population.
(I've no idea how this extends to the rest of the world, the US data was easiest to find.)
You did your research and earned your confidence level. I didn't look anything up, just based an estimate on anecdotal evidence (the fact that I didn't learn it in school despite taking lots of sciences). Knowing what you just told me, I would update my confidence level a little–I'm probably 90% sure that less than 25% of adults know Bayes Theorem. (I should clarify that=adults living in the US, Canada, Britain, and other countries with similar school systems. The percentage for the whole world is likely significantly lower.)
someone's capacity and habits to re-compute a problem's answer, using the algorithmic mind, rather than accept the intuitive default answer that their autonomous mind spits out.
I don't think you could really apply any 'algorithmic' method to that question (other than looking it up, but that would be cheating). It was a test on how much confidence you put in your heuristics. (BTW, It seems that I've underestimated mine, or I've been lucky, since I've got the date off by one year but estimated my confidence at 50% IIRC). Still, it was a valuable test, since most of human reasoning is necessarily heuristic.
most people in the general public don't know Bayes' theorem
Really? What probability do you assign to that statement being true? :D
I'm under the impression that Bayes' theorem is included in the high school math programs of most developed countries, and I'm certain it is included in any science and engineering college program.
most people in the general public don't know Bayes' theorem
Really? What probability do you assign to that statement being true? :D
I assign about 80% probability to less than 25% of adults knowing Bayes theorem and how to use it. I took physics and calculus and other such advanced courses in high school, and graduated never having heard of Bayes' Theorem. I didn't learn about it in university, either–granted, I was in 'Statistics for Nursing', it's possible that the 'Statistics for Engineering' syllabus included it.
I'm glad you seem to have benefited from my explanation. If you want to do mentally draining reading, maybe weekends or later on in the evenings after you've rested would be a good time for that? If you've rested first, you might be able to scrape up a little extra juice.
Of course everyone has their own mental stamina limit, so nobody can tell you whether you do or don't have enough stamina to do additional intellectual activities after work. And it may vary day to day, as work is not likely to demand the exact same amount of brainpower every day.
An interesting experiment would be to see if there's anything that restores your stamina like a bath, a 20 minute nap after work, meditation, watching TV, or playing a fun game. Simply laying down in a dark quiet place does wonders for me if I am stressed out or fatigued. I would love to see someone log their mental stamina over time and correlate that to different activities that might restore stamina.
There are also stress reduction techniques that may help prevent you from losing stamina in the first place that could be interesting to experiment with.
And if you're not taking 15 minute breaks every 90 minutes during work, you might be "over-training" your brain. Over-training might result in an amplification of fatigue. "The Power of Full Engagement: Manage Energy Not Time" is likely to be of interest.
If you decide to do mental stamina experiments, definitely let me know!
If you decide to do mental stamina experiments, definitely let me know!
I hadn't actually thought of that before...but it's an awesome idea! I will let you know if I get around to it.
You can always get more time by spending money. For example, consider hiring a personal chef (not as expensive as you might think) or look at other options for having packaged & cooked food shipped to you (even cheaper).
When it comes to exercising, doing the right kind of exercise is the most important part. You actually don't need to do that much. Read "4-hour body" and look into high intensity interval training (e.g. tabata sprints).
For example, consider hiring a personal chef (not as expensive as you might think)
Probably quite expensive compared to the monthly budget of a student–I can only work on weekends–but something to think about when I graduate. I have this weird aversion to doing things like that, which I think is based on the association with 'stuff that snobby rich people do."
I already have a very efficient cooking routine–I probably spend an hour on cooking once every four days, to make a large pot of something I can put in waterproof glass Tupperwares and take to work or school, and then I spend another 10 minutes a day heating up food to eat it, etc, and packing my lunchbag for that day. I know how to shop cheaply and I spend well under $200 a month on all food-related expenses. I'm guessing a personal chef is more expensive than that. Plus I like cooking–it's therapeutic when I'm stressed.
I will very likely hire someone to clean my house for me once I have a house, though–I hate cleaning. Right now my apartment just isn't very clean. And it was someone on LW who gave me the idea of hiring a cleaning lady to trade money for time. I had the same snobb-rich-people aversion, but convinced myself to overcome it.
You actually don't need to do that much. Read "4-hour body" and look into high intensity interval training (e.g. tabata sprints).
Sounds efficient. Also doesn't sound like much fun. I'm not a fan of sprints, mostly because I've always done exercise with a group (swim team a long time ago, now taekwondo), and I likely have a genetic tendency towards having lots of slow-twitch muscle fibres, and great endurance, but fewer fast-twitch muscles, therefore awful sprinting ability. Sprints and high-intensity stuff in general is now associated, in my mind, with me being the slowest one, whereas I used to overtake even much faster swimmers in long endurance sets.
That's not an excuse not to look into it, though... I'll read the book and see if there's anything I would find bearable to do regularly. I need to re-motivate myself in this area, anyway; if I don't exercise I get cranky and emotional, so I have to exercise, but most of the time I don't like it and it saps my motivation.
You know that, Katydee, but do all the people who are taking the survey think that way? The majority of them haven't even finished the sequences. I agree with you that it's ideal for us to be good rationalists all the time, but mental stamina is a big factor.
Being rational takes more energy than being irrational. You have to put thought into it. Some people have a lot of mental energy. To refer to something less vague and more scientific: there are different levels of intelligence and different levels of intellectual supersensitivity (A term from Dabrowski that refers to how excitable certain aspects of your nervous system are.) Long story short: Some people cannot analyze constantly because it's too difficult for them to do so. They run out of juice. Perhaps you are one of those rare people who has such high stamina for analysis that you rarely run into your limit. If that's the case, it probably seems strange to you that anybody wouldn't attempt to maintain a state of constant analysis. Most people with unusual intellectual stamina seem to view others as lazy when they observe that those other people aren't doing intellectual things all the time. It frequently does not occur to them to consider that there may be an intellectual difference. The sad truth is that most people have much lower limits on how much intellectual activity they can do in a day than "constant". If you want to see evidence of this, you can look at Ford's studies where he shows that 40 hours a week is the optimum number of hours for his employees to work. Presumably, they were just doing factory work assembling car parts, which (if it fits the stereotype of factory work being repetitive) was probably pretty low on the scale for what's intellectually demanding, but he found that if they tried to work 60 hours for two weeks in a row, their output would dip below the amount he'd normally get from 40 hours. This is because of mistakes. You'd think that the average human brain could do repetitive tasks constantly but evidently, even that tires the brain.
So in reality, the vast majority of people are not capable of the kind of constant meta-cognitive analysis that is required to be rational all the time. You use the word "ingrained" and I have seen Eliezer talk about how patterns of behavior can become habits (I assume he means that the thoughts are cached) and I think this kind of habit / ingrained response works beautifully when no decision-making is required and you can simply do the same thing that you usually do. But whenever one is trying to figure something out (like for instance working out the answers to questions on a survey) they're going to need to put additional brainpower into that.
I had an experience where, due to unexpected circumstances, I developed some vitamin deficiencies. I would run out of mental energy very quickly if I tried to think much. I had, perhaps, a half an hour of analysis available to me in a day. This is very unusual for me because I'm used to having a brain that loves analysis and seems to want to do it constantly (I hadn't tested the actual number of hours for which I was able to analyze, but I would feel bored if I wasn't doing something like psychoanalysis or problem-solving for the majority of the day). When I was deficient, I began to ration my brainpower. That sounds terrible, but that is what I did. I needed to protect my ability to analyze to make sure I had enough left over to be able to do all the tasks I needed to do each day. I could feel that slipping away while I was working on problems and I could observe what happened to me after I fatigued my brain. (Vegetable like state.)
As I used my brainpower rationing strategies, it dawned on me that others ration brainpower, too. I see it all the time. Suddenly, I understood what they were doing. I understood why they kept telling me things like "You think too much!" They needed to change the subject so they wouldn't become mentally fatigued. :/
Even if the average IQ at LessWrong is in the gifted range, that doesn't give everyone the exact same abilities, and doesn't mean that everyone has the stamina to analyze constantly. Human abilities vary wildly from person to person. Everyone has a limit when it comes to how much thinking they can do in a day. I have no way of knowing exactly what LessWrong's average limit is, but I would not be surprised if most of them use strategies for rationing brainpower and have to do things like prioritize answering survey questions lower on their list of things to "give it their all" on, especially when there are a lot of them, and they're getting tired.
Long story short: Some people cannot analyze constantly because it's too difficult for them to do so. They run out of juice. Perhaps you are one of those rare people who has such high stamina for analysis that you rarely run into your limit.
Fascinating!
It's making me realize why my summer project, which was to read Eat That Frog by Brian Tracey, was such a failure. The book is meant to be applied to work, preferably in an office environment–i.e. during your 40 productive work-hours. I was already working 40 hours a week at my extremely stimulating job as a nurse's aid at the hospital, where I had barely any time to sit down and think about anything, and I certainly didn't have procrastination problems. Then I would get home, exhausted with my brain about to explode from all the new interesting stuff I'd been seeing and doing all day, and try to apply Brian Tracey's productivity methods to the personal interest projects I was doing in my spare time.
This was a very efficient way to make these things not fun, make me feel guilty about being a procrastinator, etc. It gave me an aversion to starting projects, because the part of my brain that likes and needs to do something easy and fun after work knew it would be roped into doing something mentally tiring, and that it would be made to feel guilty over not wanting to do it.
I'm hoping that once I'm graduated and work as a nurse for a year or two, so that I have a chance to get accustomed to a given unit and don't have to spend so much mental effort, I'll have more left over for outside interests and can start reading about physics and programming for fun again. (Used to be able to do this in first and second year, definitely can't now.)
I can see why you'd criticize someone for saying "the problem is that the setting wasn't formal enough" but that's not exactly what I was getting at. What I was getting at is that there's a limit to how much thinking that one can do in a day, everyone's limit is different, and a lot of people do things to ration their brainpower so they avoid running out of it. This comment on mental stamina explains more.
My point was, more clearly worded: It would be a very rare person who possesses enough mental stamina to be rational in literally every single situation. That's a wonderful ideal, but the reality is that most people are going to ration brainpower. If your expectation is that rationalists should never ration brainpower and should be rational constantly, this is an unrealistic expectation. A more realistic expectation is that people should identify the things they need to think extra hard about, and correctly use rational thinking skills at those times. Therefore, testing for the skills when they're trying is probably the only way to detect a difference. There are inevitably going to be times when they're not trying very hard, and if you catch them at one of those times, well, you're not going to see rational thinking skills. It may be that some of these things can be ingrained in ways that don't use up a person's mental stamina, but to expect that rationality can be learned in such a way that it is applied constantly strikes me as an unreasoned assumption.
Now I wonder if the entire difference between the control groups results and LessWrong's results was that Yvain asked the control group only one question, whereas LessWrong had answered 14 pages of questions prior to that.
Agreed that rationality is mentally tiring...I went back and read your comment, too. However:
A more realistic expectation is that people should identify the things they need to think extra hard about, and correctly use rational thinking skills at those times.
To me, rationality is mostly the ability to notice that "whew, this is a problem that wasn't in the problem-set of the ancestral environment, therefore my intuitions probably won't be useful and I need to think". The only way a rationalist would have to be analytical all the time is if they were very BAD at doing this, and had to assume that every situation and problem required intense thought. Most situations don't. In order to be an efficient rationalist, you have to be able to notice which situations do.
Any question on a written test isn't a great measure of real-life rationality performance, but there are plenty of situations in everyday life when people have to make decisions based on some unknown quantities, and would benefit from being able to calibrate exactly how much they do know. Some people might answer better on the written test than if faced with a similar problem in real life, but I think it's unlikely that anyone would do worse on the test than in real life.
Good points, Kindly, thank you. New alternate explanation idea:
When these people encounter this question, they're slogging through this huge survey. They're not doing an IQ test. This is more casual. They're being asked stuff like "How many partners do you have?" By the time they get down to that question, they're probably in a casual answering mode, and they're probably a little tired and looking for an efficient way to finish. When they see the Bayes question, they're probably not thinking "This question is so important! They're going to be gauging LessWrong's rationality progress with it! I had better really think about this!" They're probably like "Output answer, next question."
If we really want to test them, we need to make it clear that we're testing them. And if we want them to be serious about it, we have to make it clear that it's important. I hypothesize that if we were to do a test (not a survey) and explain that it's serious because we're gauging LessWrong's progress, and also make it short so that the person can focus a lot of attention onto each question, we'd see less atrocious results.
In hindsight, I wonder why I didn't think about the effects of context before. Yvain didn't seem to either; he thought something might be wrong with the question. This seems like one of those things that is right in front of our faces but is hard to see.
I think that people may be rationing their mental stamina, and may not be going through all the steps it takes to answer this type of question.
When these people encounter this question, they're slogging through this huge survey. They're not doing an IQ test. This is more casual. They're being asked stuff like "How many partners do you have?" By the time they get down to that question, they're probably in a casual answering mode, and they're probably a little tired and looking for an efficient way to finish... If we really want to test them, we need to make it clear that we're testing them.
My first thought about this is that people's rationality 'in real life' totally is determined by how likely they are to notice a Bayes question in an informal setting, where they may be tired and feeling mentally lazy. In Keith Stanovich's terms, rationality is mostly about the reflective mind: it's someone's capacity and habits to re-compute a problem's answer, using the algorithmic mind, rather than accept the intuitive default answer that their autonomous mind spits out.
IQ tests tend to be formal; it's very obvious that you're being tested. They don't measure rationality in the sense that most LWers mean it; the ability to apply thinking techniques to real life in order to do better.
It might still be valuable to know how LWers do on a more formal test of probability-related knowledge; after all, most people in the general public don't know Bayes' theorem, so it'd be neat to see how good LW is at increasing "rationality literacy". But that's not the ultimate goal. There are reasons why you might want to measure a group's ability to pick out unexpected rationality-related problems and activate the correct mindware. If your Bayesian superpowers only activate when you're being formally tested, they're not all that useful as superpowers.
I'm not sure how well it classifies, but I find that my "overacheiver" and "just don't fail me" are facets of the same thought. It's probably an arrogance thing, but going from "this is good, I'm doing well, I've done this right" to "no, you haven't" to "oh god oh god oh god i'm such a moron" etc etc is rather quicker and easier and (shudder) more intuitive than I would like. And it's not like I'm a pilot or anything where that's the appropriate response!
Too Cool for School got me through High School, but when I got to uni and failed miserably it made me question how and why I was there, and I got out after 18 months.
I'm not sure how well it classifies, but I find that my "overacheiver" and "just don't fail me" are facets of the same thought.
Definitely not the case for me, but there's no reason why it couldn't be the case for you. Although you're right, it probably isn't the appropriate response.
BTW, by "assuming girls are upset where they'd assume boys are angry" I am referring to unconscious fact judgements about infants too young to verbalize the problem. (Cite: "pink brain blue brain" by Lise Eliot). Macho emotions are attributed to babies in who appear male and gentle ones to babies who appear female. Since baby sex is almost unmarked, that means going by the colour of the clothes. (And google "baby Storm" for an example of adults panicking and pillorying the parents if the cues that allow them to gender the baby are intentionally witheld.)
Ohh. Oops. Not how I interpreted it. Your original meaning is much less likely to be a true-ish stereotype than my interpretation.
What's your distinction between upset and angry?
When in a situation of conflict: Upset: assume you're the one in the wrong, blame yourself, not try to defend yourself, cry. (Or some but not all of these elements.) Angry: Assume you're right, blame the other person, argue back, yell. Or some but not all of these elements.
Obviously it depends on context. Some people have a very strong tendency to get upset, whereas others will sometimes be upset and sometimes be angry. I'm pretty strongly skewed towards getting upset; I don't like the experience of anger; but in a conflict with family members, I will frequently behave more angrily than upset.
This is what I was criticizing:
Until the child tells you their gender identity, don't assume it matches their body
learn the standard ways that parents treat children differently by gender (assuming girls are upset where they'd assume boys are angry, for example) and proactively refuse to do, or permit them done by other adults.
I also disagree with the first paragraph. If I have a daughter someday, I'm not going to treat her as gender-neutral-it's too much work and probably wouldn't work. I guess I just think that the examples in the second group aren't "gender identity" examples. At most they're gender stereotypes. I will treat my daughter as a girl, unless she tells me not to, but I'll happily climb trees with her, I wouldn't tell her to be polite because "girls are polite" (boys should be too!) and I won't encourage or expect her to be upset rather than angry.
I generally try to use probability when interacting with people. I know they are not as likely to jump of a bridge as to cross it. Amazingly it seems to help me have good relations with them. Incredible I know. I hear statistical reasoning about humans is evil though so maybe I shouldn't be sharing this advice.
I never did get why that is though.
Are the specific examples that JulianMorrison gave things that are statistically true about girls versus boys. Is it statistically true that girls don't climb trees? (I'm a girl, and tree climbing is awesome!)
Also, there's a difference between what you're talking about (using probability to predict behaviour when you know nothing else about others) and ways to raise children, since parents in part determine the future behaviour of their children. Even if it is statistically true, right now, that girls don't wear Spider-Man suits as often as boys, and get upset rather than angry, I don't think those states are the ideal world states. Treating your children like these stereotypes are true might be a self fulfilling prophecy.
Note that there are some examples that I think would be true. I do think that, on average, girls are more likely to get upset than angry when in a situation of conflict. But not always: I get upset more often, my brother gets angry, my sister gets angry, my dad gets upset. I do think that the average boy, if given a Barbie, is more likely to re-enact battles with it than dress it. But that doesn't mean it's a good parenting strategy to yell at your son because he's an outlier who likes to dress Barbies. (From a purely predictive view, you could probably make a boy happier by giving him something other than a Barbie for his birthday, but that's if you're not the parent and your actions aren't influencing his future preferences.)
is this what oppression feels like? i can't write a comment reply to the daenerys post because it's like the subculture i'm in is so trigger-happy with demonization that i'm too afraid to even try to move them
I for one would like to hear what you have to say about the post, and I won't downvote you. If you don't want to get down voted by others, send me a PM and I promise I will read it thoughtfully no matter what my intuitive response is.
Some of us look at the state of LW and fear that punishment of this appropriate behaviour is slowly escalating, while evaporative cooling is eliminating the rewards.
I concur with this diagnosis -- and I would add that the process has already led to some huge happy death spirals of a sort that would not be allowed to develop, say, a year an a half ago when I first started commenting here. In some cases, the situation has become so bad that attacking these death spirals head-on is no longer feasible without looking like a quarrelsome and disruptive troll.
Could you give some examples? I don't like the thought of my brain being happy-death-spiralled without my noticing. I promise to upvote your comment even if it makes me angry.
I think the point of the Star Wars anecdote is: Woman do engage in roleplaying but when they do they don't focus on papers-and-dice fighting and instead have a discussion about moral issues.
Is that actually true, though ? This seems to fit the pattern of "men are combative, women are nurturing", which is often denounced as a stereotype; at the very least, there is a lot of debate on whether or not this principle is generally applicable.
I'm not saying that the statement is wrong, necessarily; only that I require more evidence to be convinced.
This seems to fit the pattern of "men are combative, women are nurturing",
I would read it more as "men like to model situations, women like to model people." This may be a stereotype, but I've noticed it to be anecdotally true. Men, when spending time together socially, tend to talk more about sports and politics than women do; women spend more time talking about other people (i.e. gossip) and analyzing their motivations. Fighting elves is a situation; you don't have to try to understand the elves' motivations and 'drama' in order to fight them.
This is a brilliant post–thank you so much for writing it!
The idea here is to have a constant reinforcer instead of a variable one, and it seems to work as far as avoiding addiction is concerned.
This is so obviously true from a behavioural-psychology point of view, yet I had never thought of applying it to my own addiction behaviours. Clever!
For me, there seems to be a very strong effect where if I make a policy when I'm not feeling very high-willpower, I won't take it seriously and will ignore it later on. So I recommend just noting down policy ideas if you're feeling tired. Then you can refine them and commit to actually following them later on.
I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but my tired/low willpower self doesn't actually agree with my energetic self as to what I want to change.
A trivial example: when I'm feeling tired, grumpy, or physically sluggish, I usually dislike my body and think I'm too fat. I think it's almost an automatic thing for girls from Western cultures. When I'm well rested and cheerful, I like my body perfectly well. Objectively speaking, I definitely don't need to lose weight for health reasons–my BMI is well within normal range even though I have higher-than-average muscle mass for a female. My tired self thinks that's stupid and wants to look like a magazine model, but lacks the energy to do anything about it.
A more significant example: my biggest prioritization issue is that I try to fit too many activities into my life, and end up tired. I like all of these activities–in fact, they're all the things that make me happiest. School takes up about 35 hours a week just of classroom time, not including homework, but I wouldn't give up school. Taekwondo takes up severals hours per class, on average three days a week, not including transportation time. I would never give up taekwondo. I go swimming one to three times a week–I wouldn't give that up either. Lack of exercise makes me cranky. I work 12 hours as a lifeguard and swim instructor on Sundays–it's a job I love. I also work part time as an orderly at the hospital, most nights shifts at the ER, which is fun (and pays well). And I volunteer. And I try to have a social life and hang out with friends at least once a week. And see family maybe once a week...
All these things are awesome. On the whole I don't like relaxed days at home–they make me feel sluggish. I like all the things I do–but I do too many things, and then I'm tired, and that reduces the amount of pleasure I get from doing them. However, choosing to do less means I have to give up Activity X, and that sucks! Not only that, in exchange I get to spend more time sitting around at home not getting stuff done.
My energetic self thinks my life is perfect–I get to do so many things I love doing! My tired self wants to murder my energetic self for betraying me and making me pre-commit to doing something when I'm so exhausted I can't focus or experience pleasure. (Fortunately or unfortunately, the context tends to determine my mood, and I'm fairly good at hacking my moods, too–I arrived at clinical this morning wanting to murder someone, after having been up for 30 hours straight the day(s) before and sleeping 7 hours that night. By 10 am I was Supernurse and having a blast.)
I also want to be and stay as healthy as possible–exercise is good, but lack of sleep is bad, and I would be able to eat healthier if I had more time to cook and didn't have to cram enough food for 16 hour days into a lunch bag. However, the only time I succeeded in having a less packed schedule was when I was in a long-term relationship, and that was a deliberate sacrifice towards the relationship itself. I probably slept less during that time period, and may have done more things that I endorsed myself doing but didn't actually have an urge to do ever (i.e. sex).
Has anyone successfully hacked this type of problem?
I'm with you - I cook most things I eat from scratch - but some people seem indifferent to the disadvantages of making the tradeoff here.
I think most people just haven't considered it as a tradeoff. Then again, maybe there are some people for whom the effort/unpleasantness of buying ingredients, looking up a recipe, and cooking from scratch is less than the unpleasantness of working X extra hours (or losing the ability to buy Y other things) in order to pay for more expensive prepared foods. I also think that a lot of people do like prepared foods better-I cook everything I eat from scratch, and there's always plenty in the fridge, but my roommate still buys frozen pizzas and TV dinners and eats out frequently, even though she's financially worse off than me and could eat my food for free without even having to make the effort to cook it.
When epistemic rationality is counter to instrumental rationality
Epistemic rationality is about knowing the truth. Instrumental rationality is about meeting your goals.
The general case is that the more truth you know, the better you are at meeting your goals (and so instrumental and epistemic rationality are heavily tied to each other), however there exist rare occurrences where this is not the case.
More importantly, there are many times when SPEAKING the truth is counter to your goals.
For an absurd example: Say you are in a room full of angry convicts with knives. It probably is counter to your goal of staying alive and healthy to start proclaiming TRUE but insulting statements.
More realistically, raising children is one example where, if your goal is to raise happy, sane, well-adjusted adults, there are many statements that should NOT be spoken, no matter how true they are.
Examples:
- No, that's a horrid drawing. I can't tell at all what it is. I could do better in 5 seconds. I will probably throw it away as soon as you forget about it.
- Your mom and I just had sex on the living room couch. What's sex? Well...
- Let's learn about the history of torture! Or how about I tell you about factory farming and where your hamburger came from. Or poverty! (if said to a preschooler)
Even if it the cooking and cleaning statement were epistemically true, it is not instrumentally rational to tell this to your child if your goal is to have her grow into an independent adult who can support herself, and does not feel bound by the "traditional" gender roles (which are falling out of favor anyway).
Likewise, if you value having a higher percentage of women on this site, it is not instrumentally rational to make statements such as "You only got upvoted because you're a girl", or "<X> girls aren't as attractive as <Y> girls," EVEN IF you believe that said statements are true.
I highly value truth. But a prime reason I value it is because it allows me to meet my goals. When speaking the truth is harmful to my goals, it is wise to hold my tongue.
•Let's learn about the history of torture! Or how about I tell you about factory farming and where your hamburger came from. Or poverty!
I don't think this example is in the same class as the other ones...as in, there's a certain age at which I would think that it is a good idea to tell your child, at the very least, that torture/factory farming/poverty exist. Preferably in a "let's think of something small that you could do about nasty situation XYZ" format. I wouldn't recommend telling 4-year-olds about these things-they aren't at an age to understand them-but 10-11 year olds is a different story. To do otherwise is to raise children to unconsciously ignore these issues, as most adults do. These issues exist.
Sally doesn't give Jack the cake because Jack hasn't had any, rather, Sally gives Jack the cake because she wants to. That's why explicitly calling the motivation selfish is useful, because it clarifies that obligations are still subjective and rooted in individual values (it also clarifies that obligations don't mandate sacrifice or asceticism or any other similar nonsense). You say that it's obvious that all actions occur from internally motivated states as a result of neurons firing, but it's not obvious to most people, which is why pointing out that the action stems from the internal desires of Sally is still useful.
Why not just specify to people that motivations or obligations are "subjective and rooted in individual values"? Then you don't have to bring in the word "selfish", with all its common-usage connotations.
It's not an argument about definitions, it's an argument about logical priority. Altruistic impulses are logically a subset of selfish ones because all impulses are selfish because they're only experienced internally. (I'm using impulse as roughly synonymous with an action taken because of values). Altruism is only relevant to your morality insofar as you value altruistic actions. Altruism can only be justified on somewhat selfish grounds. (To clarify, it can be justified on other grounds but I don't think those grounds make sense.)
all impulses are selfish because they're only experienced internally.
I think defining "selfish" as "anything experienced internally" is very limiting definition that makes it a pretty useless word. The concept of 'selfishness' can only be applied to human behaviour/motivations–physical-world phenomena like storms can't be selfish or unselfish, it's a mind-level concept. Thus, if you pre-define all human behaviour/motivations as selfish, you're ruling out the opposite of selfishness existing at all. Which means you might as well not bother with using the word "selfish" at all, since there's nothing that isn't selfish.
There's also the argument of common usage–it doesn't matter how you define a word in your head, communication is with other people, who have their own definition of that word in their heads, and most people's definitions are likely to be the common usage of the word, since how else would they learn what the word means? Most people define "selfishness" such that some impulses are selfish (i.e. Sally taking the last piece of cake because she likes cake) and some are not selfish (Sally giving Jack the last piece of cake, even though she wants it, because Jack hasn't had any cake yet and she already had a piece.) Obviously both of those reactions are the result of impulses bouncing around between neurons, but since we don't have introspective access to our neurons firing, it's meaningful for most people to use selfishness or unselfishness as labels.
Upon consideration, I think I have pinpointed what bothers me about the bit in the post about Crocker's Rules. It's the imposition on the reader, not just of potentially offensive content, but also of a waiver of the right to object to the content as being offensive.
That is, I don't object to this part:
Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness
Fine and well. A good warning.
, so this is your warning that Crocker's Rules apply to the following content
But this part seems to suggest that by reading this, I'm waiving my right to say, e.g., "Wait a bit, this isn't just impolite, this is offensive! This reads like an insult!" It seems like the warning is saying: "If you find this offensive, too bad. By reading this, you're agreeing to shut up and take it" — and I don't think that prefacing your post with that is conducive to good discussion, not at all.
Note: I don't actually think any of the anecdotes in this post are offensive.
Note: I don't actually think any of the anecdotes in this post are offensive.
Me neither. I think the post needs a more specific set of ground rules, something like "the anonymous submitters are putting themselves out on the line here, and in order to have the most honest and useful discussion, they were told not to hold back for politeness...but they'll probably be reading all your comments and replies, so in order to encourage future honest and useful discussions, please don't respond angrily or rudely, since that will discourage submitters in the future from being honest." Which isn't quite in the spirit of Crocker's Rules. (I don't know if 'Crocker's Warning' is a concept that has actually been elaborated...is it?)
But... it... is... awesome...
Anyway, when I did that I was (and still am) very surprised by how little I was cognitively impaired, especially given that I had slept very little in the previous couple days. My hangovers usually last very short, but not when I'm sleep-deprived. (I did collapse on my bed as soon as I got home after the exam and not wake up until my mother phoned me five hours later, though.)
and I even go further.
Like what?
I did the same thing once (by accident, actually, in the sense that I hadn't yet explored the limits of my alcohol tolerance.) Passed out on my friend's stairs, had to be carried into a bedroom where I proceeded to vomit on myself, etc. Woke up the next morning at 7:30, left an apology note on the floor and wobbled out of my friend's house, did grocery shopping on the way home, studied for a few hours, wrote my programming exam (got 84%, which was bad for me but probably still one of the higher marks in the class), coached a kids' swim meet, and made it to dinner at my other friend's house.
I wouldn't do it again–it is self-handicapping–but telling the story does get reactions of awe.
So, would any intentionally crafted cached self count for his? Is a cached self formed for the purpose of education fundamentally different from one formed for anything else? I don't really see what you're going for here.
In any case, I always found it pretty obvious that I did something similar to this. (I always liked to imagine it's because I sometimes pretend to be a supporting character in some kind of story so I can enjoy breaking the fourth wall)
The most common "character" I play would probably be best described as a mildly unbalanced sociopath who lives in his own head and has a warped, but relentless sense of humor. Think "Black Hat Guy" from XKCD only severely less competent, and in high school. I'm pretty sure it came from trying the "too cool for school" route, failing at it, and covering for said failure by acting crazy. I don't really think of non-peers that I don't feel comfortable overtly manipulating as people so much as scenery, like rocks, so any role I try out will mostly be for the sake of dealing with other students, as opposed to teachers.
So, I'm not really sure what the point of this post is other than bringing up a specific type of cached self, but it is fun to talk about personal quirks, so I'm gonna upvote this anyway for giving me the chance to. It should probably go in "Discussion", though.
So, would any intentionally crafted cached self count for his? Is a cached self formed for the purpose of education fundamentally different from one formed for anything else? I don't really see what you're going for here.
Well, the education system isn't like 'real life' in a lot of ways. So it's easier to create cached selves that aren't useful anywhere else, and then accidentally start using them in other ways.
So, I'm not really sure what the point of this post is other than bringing up a specific type of cached self.
I hadn't noticed I was doing it until recently, which means there are likely to be others who do it, maybe at school, maybe at work, and who also haven't noticed yet. And it hasn't been harmless for me so far.
Playing the student: attitudes to learning as social roles
This is a post about something I noticed myself doing this year, although I expect I’ve been doing it all along. It’s unlikely to be something that everyone does, so don’t be surprised if you don’t find this applies to you. It's also an exercise in introspection, i.e. likely to be inaccurate.
Intro
If I add up all the years that I’ve been in school, it amounts to about 75% of my life so far–and at any one time, school has probably been the single activity that I spend the most hours on. I would still guess that 50% or less of my general academic knowledge was actually acquired in a school setting, but school has tests, and grades at the end of the year, and so has provided most of the positive/negative reinforcement related to learning. The ‘attitudes to learning’ that I’m talking about apply in a school setting, not when I’m learning stuff for fun.
Role #1: Overachiever
Up until seventh grade, I didn’t really socialize at school–but once I started talking to people, it felt like I needed a persona, so that I could just act ‘in character’ instead of having to think of things to say from scratch. Being a stereotypical overachiever provided me with easy material for small talk–I could talk about schoolwork to other people who were also overachievers.
Years later, after acquiring actual social skills in the less stereotyped environments of part-time work and university, I play the overachiever more as a way of reducing my anxiety in class. (School was easy for me up until my second year of nursing school, when we started having to do scary things like clinical placements and practical exams, instead of nice safe things like written exams.) If I can talk myself into always being curious and finding everything exciting and interesting and cool I want to do that!!!, I can’t find everything scary–or, at the very least, to other people it looks like I’m not scared.
Role #2: Too Cool for School
This isn’t one I’ve played too much, aside from my tendency to put studying for exams as maybe my fourth priority–after work, exercise, and sleep–and still having an A average. (I will still skip class to work a shift at the ER any day, but that doesn’t count–working there is almost more educational than class, in my mind.) As one of my LW Ottawa friends pointed out, there’s a sort of counter-signalling involved in being a ‘lazy’ student–if you can still pull off good grades without doing any work, you must be smart, so people notice this and respect it.
My brother is the prime example of this. He spent grades 9 through 11 alternately sleeping and playing on his iPhone in class, and maintained an average well over 80%. In grade 12 he started paying attention in class and occasionally doing homework, and graduated with, I believe, an average over 95%. He had a reputation throughout the whole school–as someone who was very smart, but also cool.
Role #3: Just Don’t Fail Me!
Weirdly enough, it wasn’t at school that I originally learned this role. As a teenager, I did competitive swimming. The combination of not having outstanding talent for athletics, plus the anxiety that came from my own performance depending on how fast the other swimmers were, made this about 100 times more terrifying than school. At some point I developed a weird sort of underconfidence, the opposite of using ‘Overachiever’ to deal with anxiety. My mind has now created, and made automatic, the following subroutine: “when an adult takes you aside to talk to you about anything related to ‘living up to your potential’, start crying.” I’m not sure what the original logic behind this was: get the adult to stop and pay attention to me? Get them to take me more seriously? Get them to take me less seriously? Or just the fact that I couldn’t stomach the fact of being ordinarily below average at something–I had to be in some way differently below average. Who knows if there was much logic behind it at all?
Having this learned role comes back to bite me now, sometimes–the subroutine gets triggered in any situation that feels too much like my swim coach’s one-on-one pre-competition pep talks. Taekwondo triggers it once in a while. Weirdly enough, being evaluated in clinicals triggers it too–this didn’t originally make much sense, since it’s not competitive in the sense of ‘she wins, I lose.’ I think the associative chain there is through lifeguarding courses–the hands-on evaluation aspect used to be fairly terrifying for my younger self, and my monkey brain puts clinicals and lab evaluations into that category, as opposed to the nice safe category of written exams, where I can safely be Too Cool for School and still get good grades.
The inconvenience of thinking about school this way really jumped out at me this fall. I started my semester of clinicals with a prof who was a) spectacularly non-intimidating compared to some others I’ve had, and b) who liked me from the very start, basically because I raised my hand a lot and answered questions intelligently during our more classroom-y initial orientation. I was all set up for a semester of playing ‘Overachiever’, until, quite near the beginning of the semester, I was suddenly expected to do something that I found scary, and I was tired and scared of looking confident but being wrong, and I fell back on ‘Just Don’t Fail Me!’ My prof was, understandably, shocked and confused as to why I was suddenly reacting to her as ‘the scary adult who has the power to pass or fail me and will definitely fail me unless I’m absolutely perfect, so I had better grovel.’ I think she actually felt guilty about whatever she had done to intimidate me–which was nothing.
Since then I’ve been doing fine, progressing at the same rate as all the other students (maybe it says something about me that this isn’t very satisfying, and even kind of feels like failure in itself...I would like to be progressing faster). That is, until I’m alone with my prof and she tries to give me a pep talk about how I’m obviously very smart and doing fine, so I just need to improve my confidence. Then I start crying. At this point, I’m pretty sure she thinks I should be on anti-depressants–which is problematic in itself, but could be more problematic if she was the kind of prof who might fail me in my clinical for a lack of confidence. There’s no objective reason why I can’t hop back into Overachiever mode, since I managed both my clinicals last spring entirely in that mode. But part of my brain protests: ‘she’s seen you being insecure! She wouldn’t believe you as an overachiever, it would be too out of character!’ It starts to make sense once I stop seeing this behaviour as 'my learning style' and recognize it as a social role that I, at some point, probably subconsciously, decided I ought to play.
Conclusion
The main problem seems to be that my original mental models for social interaction–with adults, mostly–are overly simplistic and don’t cut reality at the joints. That’s not a huge problem in itself–I have better models now and most people I meet now say I have good communication skills, although I sometimes still come across as ‘odd’. The problem is that every once in a while, a situation happens, pattern recognition jumps into play, and whoa, I’m playing ‘Just Don’t Fail Me’. (It’s happened with the other two roles too, but they’re is less problematic.) Then I can’t get out of that role easily, because my social monkey brain is telling me it would be out of character and the other person would think it was weird. This is despite the fact that I no longer consciously care if I come across as weird, as long as people think I’m competent and trustworthy and nice, etc.
Just noticing this has helped a little–I catch my monkey brain and remind it ‘hey, this situation looks similar to Situation X that you created a stereotyped response for, but it’s not Situation X, so how about we just behave like a human being as usual’. Reminding myself that the world doesn’t break down into ‘adults’ and ‘children’–or, if it did once, I’m now on the other side of the divide–also helps. Failing that, I can consciously try to make sure I get into the 'right’ role–Overachiever or Too Cool For School, depending on the situation–and make that my default.
Has anyone else noticed themselves doing something similar? I’m wondering if there are other roles that I play, maybe more subtly, at work or with friends.
Hi!
Long time lurker here.
I'm 26 years old, CS graduate living in Wrocław (Poland), professional compiler developer, cryptography research assistant and programmer. I'm an atheist (quite possibly thanks to LW). I consider the world to be overall interesting. I have many interests and I always have more things to do than I have time for. I'm motivated by curiosity. I'm less risk-averse than most people around me, but also less patient. I have a creative mind and love chellanges. While being fairly successful lone wolf until now, I seek to improve my people skills because I belive I can't get much further all by myself.
When I found LW for the first time, it absorbed me. It took me about 4 months at 4-6h a day to read all of the Sequences and comments. While I strongly disagree with some of the material, I consider LW to have accelerated my personal developement 2 to 3 times simply by virtue of critical mass and high singal to noise ratio. I don't know any better hub for thought (links welcome!). I joined becuse I finally have something to say.
W.
Welcome!
I'm an atheist (quite possibly thanks to LW).
If you're interested in making a post, I bet lots of us would be interesting in hearing that story.
I have many interests and I always have more things to do than I have time for.
Join the club! It sounds like you've chosen a good career for someone who likes challenges, too.
It took me about 4 months at 4-6h a day to read all of the Sequences and comments. While I strongly disagree with some of the material, I consider LW to have accelerated my personal developement 2 to 3 times simply by virtue of critical mass and high singal to noise ratio.
Agreed–same for me. If anything, the Sequences that I've disagreed with were better for me, in terms of making me think...even if I still disagreed after thinking about it, they were mostly things I had never thought about to that degree of depth before.
The sex is something I put up with in order to make this weird alien beast happy, so that I can have the other parts of the relationship–I kind of like the whole living together, cooking together, "playing house" thing. And I want kids, and don't want to be a single mom.
You could date ace people and not have to make this tradeoff.
I could–now how do I meet ace people?
Well, duh. Having high status people fall in love with you is an obvious sort of wish fulfillment plot.
Yet in films targeted largely at males, for example James Bond, the sex interest girls are generally low status. High status girls is not a major male wish fulfillment fantasy, whereas in romance, high status guys are as uniform as moaning in porn.. Even when the sex interest girl is a badass action girl with batman like athletic abilities, for example Yuffie the thief, she gets in trouble for stealing stuff, making her low status.
Further I doubt that there are what males would call action scenes in twilight because if there had been, males would have willingly watched it. What you are calling action scenes were probably status scenes involving violence and cruelty. I assume this because many, possibly most, romances have status scenes involving violence and cruelty. Love interest cruelty in romance is as predictable and repetitious as the girl moaning in porn. The point is not action, but to prove the love interest is potentially capable of cruelty and violence.
In an action scene, James Bond is in grave danger. In a romance cruelty scene, the love interest hurts someone really badly without the audience ever feeling the love interest to be in danger. The heroine is never in danger from the love interest, but the main point of the scene is that she could be. He is dangerous and badass. Hence the propensity of the prince to knock off relatives of the princess with that prominent and lovingly depicted sword.
In contrast, the main point of an action scene is that the hero is in danger. For example the henchman Jaws in "the spy who loved me" is way more badass than James Bond, so that the audience believes James Bond is in danger. No one is ever more badass than the romance love interest.
So yeah...there's a pretty high activation barrier for me to get into a relationship at all
That is because all the available guys are roughly equal to you in status. So you don't really want any of them. Not enough immortal vampires to go around. Hence Saint Paul's policy that females should remain silent in church, wear a head covering, etc - harmless ways to make all females in church artificially lower status than all males in church, thus artificially making all males in church hot, thus making it possible to accomplish his directive: "let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband." without the woman having to wait until they run out of eggs in their thirties, thereby causing their status in the sexual market place to drop like a stone until, at last, due to their lowered sexual market place status, they finally find that males are hot enough that they want to put out the necessary effort.
In order to ban hypergamy, Paul had to make females not want hypergamy.
Like Groucho Marx, you will only find them interesting when they start losing interest - hence the extremely low reproduction rate and high fertility clinic attendance rate of intelligent well educated women.
Observe the reasonably high rates of marriage near the age of maximum fertility among Mormons, Palestinians, and Amish.
That is because all the available guys are roughly equal to you in status. So you don't really want any of them. Not enough immortal vampires to go around.
Well, maybe. But I think one of the serious confounding factors is that I don't actually like sex and all the associated relationship crap. My friend, who does, has been in lots of relationships with guys who seemed low status to me (and yes, I had specifically that thought...most of them so far still live with their moms.) Granted, she's a single mom who hasn't finished her high school, and doesn't give off the impression of intelligence when she speaks (apparently I do)–so perhaps her status is closer to theirs, and maybe she feels that it's lower. So it's possible for her to have a relationship where she doesn't get along great with the guy, and sometimes doesn't even like his personality that much, but the sex is awesome and that balances it out. Wouldn't happen with me. The sex is something I put up with in order to make this weird alien beast happy, so that I can have the other parts of the relationship–I kind of like the whole living together, cooking together, "playing house" thing. And I want kids, and don't want to be a single mom. Honestly, that's probably the main reason I make any effort–I don't get lonely per se being single. (Are you implying that my feelings will change and I suddenly will start to get massively lonely once I perceive that my status has dropped and I'm no longer desirable to males?)
I'm trying to think of times that I did perceive myself as lower status, i.e. high school. Hard to know if I remember correctly, but I had crushes on guys and a few girls. Same as now. If I fantasized at all, my fantasies didn't include kissing or touching–should have been a clue-in, although at that point I was still expecting to be "normal" with respect to those things. I remember dating a guy at the end of high school who, physically, was considered much more relatively attractive than me, enough that people made comments about it to my friends–but I think he considered me similar or even higher status–I was much more independent, living on my own while he lived with his mom, working and paying my own tuition and rent, getting 90s in first-year university while he failed a couple of his first exams. And he was very aware of that and made comments about it. (In hindsight, that may have been a problem in that relationship, and may have contributed to why we broke up. Maybe I should have learned to play lower status in the sense of "act less smart"? Is that what most girls do?)
To the extent that anything in aesthetics is objective, I think we can agree that most of these movies probably are, in fact, objectively crappy.
"Subjectively crappy on average" based on the sample population who has evaluated them.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe they simply mean what they said? That JB's music is objectively crappy music?
I happen to like Justin Bieber's music okay. It's easy to sing along to–most of his songs are in my singing range–and he has a pretty boy-church-choir sort of voice (I used to be in a choir.) I'm not sure how you can define his music, or anything that is the subject of aesthetic preferences, as "objectively crappy" given that, obviously, some people find it enjoyable.
Did I seriously just get downvoted on Less Wrong for pointing out what music I like? And making the point that you can't define something as 'objectively crappy', only as 'subjectively crappy on average' based on how many people like/dislike it–in fact, JB likely fails this test based on the sheer number of pre-teens and tweens who like his music. I think it's just that a lot of people who aren't tweens don't want to signal affiliation with them. I would expect this of the commenters on a site like , but not here.
This is the exact opposite of my experience. Mood tracking just makes me focus on how bad I feel. Thinking "this too shall pass" of bad moods and "carpe diem" of good ones makes me go "I know I'm biased the other way, but come on, at least pretend to be consistent". I know low points go away, but I know they'll come back worse so it's even more depressing. I know high points will come back, but I know they'll be weaker each time and that soon my best mood will be my current worst mood. Actually curing the depression is the only thing that helped.
Actually curing the depression is the only thing that helped.
What did you use to actually cure it? Is this the kind of depression that was probably a result of a random imbalance of neurotransmitters, rather than anything actually going hugely wrong in your life? In that case, yeah–if your mood is unrelated to your surroundings and seems to be newly and frighteningly negative, I can see that tracking it wouldn't be helpful.
Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.
a) I've never seen one that had a similar plot arch to what you describe,
Did it have an immortal vampire instead of a prince, a vampire who kills people by drinking them, instead of by chopping them up with a sword?
If so, I would say that would probably be seen by me, though not necessarily by you, as having a plot arch that was not merely similar, but for all practical purposes identical.
Much as all porns probably look indistinguishable to you, (naked girl moans a lot) all romances look identical to me.
All romances have a plot that corresponds to marriage as commanded by the New Testament, and endorsed by Church and state until the nineteenth century: Dangerous powerful high status male overwhelms weak frail low status female, but then falls gooey in love with her and only her.
And now we have a completely different system, and all the indications are that women do not like it, even though they said, and keep on saying, that the new system is what they want.
Did it have an immortal vampire instead of a prince, a vampire who kills people by drinking them, instead of by chopping them up with a sword?
I've read Twilight and ended up seeing the films with family members. I liked the action scenes. I think I miss a lot of the romantic cues–to me it's just characters looking at each other–and I think I skipped those sections in the books.
Dangerous powerful high status male overwhelms weak frail low status female, but then falls gooey in love with her and only her.
Well, duh. Having high status people fall in love with you is an obvious sort of wish fulfillment plot. I expect that females in the past who chose, or just ended up with, low-status men with nice personalities got less resources for them and their children than women who were able to attract high-status men. Maybe having that instinct misfires now sometimes–there are plenty of men who are extremely nice and caring and make enough money at their low-status job to provide for a family. But I'm definitely not attracted to guys who come across as significantly lower status than me.
The confounding factor for me is that I'm non-neurotypical and I basically don't experience physical attraction, definitely not at first glance–I can have a crush on people for their personality (or status) and I develop a solid bond of affection over time, and although I don't generally like being touched, I can overcome this for specific people with enough repetition and conditioning. But relationships are time consuming, and guys tend to start whining about how I always prioritize other stuff (work, school, extracurriculars) over spending time with them, which drives me crazy because if I spend more time on those things, it's because they are higher priorities for me. And I guess I'm physically attractive enough that I don't have a ridiculously hard time finding guys who like me–in fact, I feel like it being too easy is a problem now and makes me less motivated to try to make my relationships work. So yeah...there's a pretty high activation barrier for me to get into a relationship at all, and if the guy behaves in any way that sets off "low status behaviours" in my monkey brain (i.e. whining about how life is unfair to him, coming across as desperate, being unemployed, spending lots of time at unproductive activities like video games and generally seeming to have poor willpower, etc), it feels like I have no reason to push through the initially unpleasant-for-me phase of dating, because he wouldn't be a good provider-for-children anyway.
Those are all reasons why I'm probably an outlier, as female go...although I think, when queried in imagine-if format, my brain still gives the usual answer to a lot of romance questions. (Would it be kind of cool to have an immortal vampire gooey in love with me? Well, yeah. But if he tried to nag me into being less of a workaholic or not biking alone in downtown late at night or stuff like that, it would still annoy me.)
Much as all porns probably look indistinguishable to you.
Probably–I've only seen 1 or 2 so I don't actually know. I'm curious as to whether they seem varied to you.
tldr, but:
I don't think shorthand interpretations like these are accurate for most people who claim that JB sucks. Instead, I suspect most people who argue this are communicating some combination of (a) negative affect towards JB and (b) tribal affiliation with fellow JB haters. I've taken to referring to statements like these, that are neither preference claims nor empirical claims, as "attitude claims".
Did it ever occur to you that maybe they simply mean what they said? That JB's music is crappy music according to some standard? I know, far be it from a rationality community to focus on the rational communication presumably being made, instead focusing on "signalling" is what's in style for some stupid reason.
Same goes for:
"Atlas Shrugged is the best book ever written."
Which is a direct quote from a comment I made here long ago :)
EDIT: removed "objectively". I keep forgetting this word causes people's brains to explode.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe they simply mean what they said? That JB's music is objectively crappy music?
I happen to like Justin Bieber's music okay. It's easy to sing along to–most of his songs are in my singing range–and he has a pretty boy-church-choir sort of voice (I used to be in a choir.) I'm not sure how you can define his music, or anything that is the subject of aesthetic preferences, as "objectively crappy" given that, obviously, some people find it enjoyable.
Let me expand on my comment from the Hacker News thread.
I went to the July workshop. I think it was probably the most useful week of my life in terms of exposure to things I could be doing to be more productive and effective. Since then, I've mainly been trying to incorporate the low-hanging fruit---the obviously good simple ideas---into my life. Some examples:
- At work, I realized I wasn't doing anywhere near enough planning. My employees were spending time on the wrong things because I hadn't planned things out in enough detail to make it clear what was the most important thing to do next. I fixed this immediately after the camp.
- Again at work, I now document most discussions as they happen. It slows down the discussion a bit, but it's a net win because next time you can just have the delta of the discussion and avoid rehashing things.
- Val explained to me how he changed his diet in order to decouple the relationship between his energy levels and when he last ate. I hadn't actually realized such a thing was possible. It also works for me.
- I realized that it's a waste of time to learn things/watch video lectures and not put what I want to remember into anki. I make the cards while I watch the lectures, and have trained myself to review them on my phone when waiting in lines, walking down the street etc.
- I'm training myself to no longer think things like "I should go to the gym tomorrow." Instead I decide to go at X o'clock and set an alarm on my phone to remind me. (I apparently haven't got this one completely down yet, because yesterday I thought "I should go to the gym tomorrow" and didn't catch myself: it's now 11pm and I never went.)
I feel like I'm still a beginner at instrumental rationality and have an enormous amount to work on (I haven't even started trying to adopt most of the actual curriculum!). Since attending, I've been getting considerably more work done: my brother, who is also my business partner, has noticed too.
When I got back I was super busy and have been really bad at staying in touch with the instructors and other attendees, but there are a few people I met at the camp who I would really like to have more contact with.
I realized that it's a waste of time to learn things/watch video lectures and not put what I want to remember into anki. I make the cards while I watch the lectures, and have trained myself to review them on my phone when waiting in lines, walking down the street etc.
This is an excellent idea!
I'm having trouble evaluating your arguments because, as a woman with a fierce need for independence, who is really enjoying life in this day and age, I deeply disagree with your premise that less patriarchy is a Bad Thing.
Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.
Roissy would of course dismiss your self report as a shit test and the rationalization hamster running, but then you would say that your observations are more reliable than my and Roissy's observations, because you are female and can see the truth from inside, whereas I can only see it from outside.
Downloading a girly cartoon romance at random, labelled as a romance and intended for a female audience, and skimming it: Princess is much younger than the prince, and has been given to the prince to seal a peace treaty: The deal was that she was supposed to marry the King, but the King took one look at her and unilaterally changed the deal, giving her to the Prince instead. Prince treats her like the small brat that she in fact is. Prince is a leader of men, commander of the army, and has slaughtered various people in princess' immediate family. The deal is that her land conditionally surrenders to the prince's King as a result of military defeat, but the prince has to marry her so that her people get representation and her royal lineage does not totally disappear. Story is that, like the King, he does not want to marry her, because she is a small brat and much hotter chicks keep trying to get his attention, and she homicidally hates him because he has with his own sword killed one of her beloved relatives, and his army under his direct command has killed most of her other relatives (hence the marriage)
Skipping over a zillion frames of the prince in manly poses experiencing deep emotions, thinking about deep emotions, and talking about deep emotions, to the end, they start to like each other just in time for the scheduled wedding,. Final scene is that he goes off to war again and realizes he misses her. He wears the sword with which he killed her beloved relatives in every frame except for a frame when they go to bed, including the frame where he realizes he misses her.
Well I did not check every frame, but every frame that I checked he is wearing that sword, except when they were in bed. As far as I could tell in my somewhat superficial reading, he never regrets or apologizes for killing off much of her family, and treats her as an idiot for making a fuss about it until she stops making a fuss about it.
My account of the story is probably not completely accurate, (aagh, I am drowning in estrogen) but it is close enough. Prince, Princess, sword, arranged marriage, and sword.
So, I would say that the intended readers of that romance rather like patriarchy, and I would not believe anything they said to the contrary.
Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.
I wouldn't know. I don't really read romance novels–I much prefer sci-fi and thrillers, of which there is more than enough to read. I've occasionally watched romantic comedy films–being dragged there by family members, usually–but a) I've never seen one that had a similar plot arch to what you describe, and b) I wouldn't go voluntarily anyway.
So you may be right that the 'intended audience' of that novel likes patriarchy, but I am obviously not the intended audience and I have no idea who they are.
Are you claiming that the end of patriarchy caused an economic decline leading to middle- and working-class families being worse off to the point that both parents now have to work?
Yes I'm quite explicitly arguing it contributed to it. I said this to Multiheaded right after what you quoted.
And I don't think you will have trouble seeing how the loss of status of the archetype of "honourable working man" resulted in loss of political power and weakened non-monetary incentives for work which contributed to the erosion of the middle class and the implosion of the lower class into the rapidly decivilizing underclass.
I guess the problem is that yes, I do have trouble seeing the "loss of status of the archetype of 'honorable working man'" leading to an overall economic decline that means both parents have to work–why wouldn't it be balanced out by the new archetype of the "independent working woman"?
I think I'm probably running into some belief bias here–I'm having trouble evaluating your arguments because, as a woman with a fierce need for independence, who is really enjoying life in this day and age, I deeply disagree with your premise that less patriarchy is a Bad Thing.
You're probably right that it's a bad idea for some men, though. Hell, I know some of those men–friends and friends' boyfriends who are in their 20s and still live with their moms. I'm also not all that familiar, personally, with the "American inner city" that you talk about. And I have no idea how to evaluate the fact that women are apparently less happy with their marriages–but if someone did a study on it and showed a correlation, then something is going on there.
However, there's no going back at this point (or, at least, I really think there shouldn't be). Why not wait until society settles into this massive, unprecedented change and creates some new archetypes?
Sorry. I'm really trying to look at your point of view with fresh eyes. This doesn't happen to me very often, that I have such a strong (and until now unnoticed) opinion on something that I can't properly think about the opposite being true. It's a somewhat unpleasant feeling, to be honest.
But gaaaaaah, I'm so entirely grateful that I don't live in the 1950s! And that's despite the fact that I've sometimes felt like arranged marriage would be just, well, convenient–the main reason I think it would be convenient is because it would be so much less time consuming, and give me more time to do whatever the hell I want with my spare time, as opposed to spending it dating, which I find tedious.
One thing, however: why have you said "right-wing traditionalist" instead of "right-wing authoritarian"?
A right wing traditionalist is authoritarian, but not all right wing authoritarians are traditionalist. I was hoping you would have noticed by now that I while I think he is right about progressivism and power in American society I have my own disagreements with Moldbug. BTW Moldbug hasn't argued for chattel slavery as much as pointed out that the modern educated person has only ever heard the straw man argument for chattel slavery.
So you want me to talk about traditionalism? I don't know if I can do so with justice as my brain is thoroughly modern due to upbringing. But I will try with my broken mind to point to some traces left behind by the poorly understood institutions we have lost.
Patriarchy as existed in 1900 Britain was probably an incredibly good arrangement for most people involved. On utilitarian grounds I'm pretty sure moderate patriarchy wins out over the sexual marketplace of today. Before you dismiss this out of hand pause to consider that we have data showing men today are about as happy with their marriages as they where 50 years ago, but women are much unhappier. And far fewer people marry today. Let that sink in. So even wives that really want to marry today are more unhappy with their relationships than women who may not have wanted to get married that much but did so because of social pressures and lived under the alleged horror of 1950s relationship norms. I don't know maybe married women are much much unhappier than unmarried women and its just marriage becoming (even more) broken and unmarried women are much happier? But if this is so, where is the evidence of this? I haven't seen it.
In addition to this parents experience a much smaller drop in happiness after the birth of children if they are married (a proxy in the US for a stable relationship where the father takes care of the child together with the mother-- I have no doubt the difference is smaller in Sweden where lots of people just remain in that kind of relationship unmarried). So how is abolishing moderate patriarchy working out when it comes to personal romantic and family happiness of average women?
And aren't you someone that cares about economic inequality? Let us again look at the numbers. What happened to the relative position of working class and middle class families since the 1950s. If it wasn't for technological progress they would be living materially much worse lives, de facto they need now two working parents to reach a relative position that one working parent could acheive before. And I don't think you will have trouble seeing how the loss of status of the archetype of "honourable working man" resulted in loss of political power and weakened non-monetary incentives for work which contributed to the erosion of the middle class and the implosion of the lower class into the rapidly decivilizing underclass. Speaking of which how do men and women like the American inner city? You know the one with "strong single mothers" and thuggish boyfriends. Oh but that is caused by material poverty and racism and... but that doesn't make sense if you think about it like at all. Since they where doing better on measures of social dysfunction when absolute material poverty and racism where much worse. I'm not arguing for material poverty and racism or that they made stuff better, but they probably can't be blamed for the negative changes since the 1960s.
This has all been utilitarian arguing, once you get to virtue ethics moderate patriarchy gets really interesting, but enough about that. Its getting late here and I have other topics I'd like to touch. Humans have instincts to display fierce egalitarian norms. These are misfiring in the modern world. And I'm not speaking of the macro scale, I'm speaking of the micro interpersonal scale. We have the same social instincts as foragers, but none of the institutions of foragers to channel these instincts and we've just de-constructed the farmer institutions that evolved much more recently around them too. Re-emergent status games are more vicious. What feels like the cure, the mechanism that in forager tribes ensured equality and everyone being a productive member of the tribe, in fact make things worse.
And recall even in the ancient tribe man the sly rule bender found ways to have formal equality between tribe members but informal hierarchy. Explicit hierarchical society one that does not endorse egalitarian memes is one that removes much of this hypocrisy. We say we are all equal, but Ung decides most matters. We say the Louis is in charge, and Louis decides most matters. Which do you prefer? The non-neurotypical in me longs for a society where things do what they say on the label.
In addition consider the effects of status competition in a caste system being partitioned very clearly into several different status ladders. Can you see the space it leaves to developing healthy and adaptive norms unique to each profession? Can you see the psychological benefits?
And aren't you someone that cares about economic inequality? Let us again look at the numbers. What happened to the relative position of working class and middle class families since the 1950s. If it wasn't for technological progress they would be living materially much worse lives, de facto they need now two working parents to reach a relative position that one working parent could acheive before.
Are you claiming that the end of patriarchy caused an economic decline leading to middle- and working-class families being worse off to the point that both parents now have to work? Because if not, your argument is a non-sequitur–if the economy declined due to reasons unrelated to a less patriarchal structure, then patriarchy having persisted would have made families worse off.
Personally, I think it's less a story of economic decline, and more a story of there being more consumer goods. Nowadays there are cell phones, expensive flatscreen TVs, tons of video game consoles/entertainment systems, and other things to spend money on, and people who don't have those things feel materially pool–but in the 1950s, none of those things existed.
It doesn't seem to me that this post actually makes any coherent argument. It spends a fair amount of words using seemingly metaphysical terms without actually saying anything. But that's not even the important thing.
Is this post supposed to increase my happiness or lifespan, or even that of someone else?
Well, for one, "beliefs in beliefs" are embodied in patterns of neurons in human brains–they're a real phenomenon, not a "metaphysical" one, and they can influence peoples' thoughts, words, and actions. Someone who every week donates money to their their church, because they go to a church, because they "believe in God", may not really belief in God in the sense of not letting it determine any important decision. But the belief is still there, floating around interacting with the rest of their value system, combining with social pressure, pulling their personal opinions over towards the beliefs endorsed by that church, and of course costing them $x money every week, which, based on how churches usually spend money, is probably mostly spent on installing the belief in belief in God into other peoples' heads. On an individual level, it's hard to evaluate whether that person is more or less happy or will live longer, but on a societal level, there are definite effects.
So the normal chain of events here would just be that I argue those are still all subgoals of increasing happiness and we would go back and forth about that. But this is just arguing by definition, so I won't continue along that line.
To the extent I understand the first paragraph in terms of what it actually says at the level of real-world experience, I have never seen evidence supporting its truth. The second paragraph seems to say what I intended the second paragraph of my previous comment to mean. So really it doesn't seem that we disagree about anything important.
But this is just arguing by definition, so I won't continue along that line.
Agreed. I find it practical to define my goals as all of those subgoals and not make happiness an explicit node, because it's easy to evaluate my subgoals and measure how well I'm achieving them. But maybe you find it simpler to have only one mental construct, "happiness", instead of lots.
The second paragraph seems to say what I intended the second paragraph of my previous comment to mean.
I guess I explicitly don't allow myself to have abstract systems with no measurable components and/or clear practical implications–my concrete goals take up enough mental space. So my automatic reaction was "you're doing it wrong," but it's possible that having an unconnected mental system doesn't sabotage your motivation the same way it does mine. Also, "what I actually end up doing" doesn't, to me, have to connotation of "choosing and achieving subgoals", it has the connotation of not having goals. But it sounds like that's not what it means to you.
I would hope that they're not going to focus on X-Risk, AI, and cryonics much at all, given that it's not mentioned in the schedule and does not seem to fit with the material they are promising to deliver.
No, and it wasn't in the curriculum of the spring and summer minicamps either, which I think is a good thing–those topics tend to be polarizing. However, there was a fair amount of casual discussion among the participants on these topics. This workshop is targeting a different subset of the LW population (at the very least, it's definitely not targeting me) so I don't know if that would still be the case.
What exactly is meant by the phrase "LW-style rationality?"
Jargon/concepts for one: there are a lot of Less Wrong-specific terms and concept clusters that aren't found in the cognitive science literature. To a degree, associating rationality with existential risk, AI, cryonics, etc–not everyone on LW endorses these, but they are talked about.
This may be the single most useful thing I've ever read on LessWrong. Thank you very, very much for posting it.
Here's one I use all the time: When a problem seems overwhelming, break it up into manageable subproblems.
Often, when I am procrastinating, I find that the source of my procrastination is a feeling of being overwhelmed. In particular, I don't know where to begin on a task, or I do but the task feels like a huge obstacle towering over me. So when I think about the task, I feel a crushing sense of being overwhelmed; the way I escape this feeling is by procrastination (i.e. avoiding the source of the feeling altogether).
When I notice myself doing this, I try to break the problem down into a sequence of high-level subtaks, usually in the form of a to-do list. Emotionally/metaphorically, instead of having to cross the obstacle in one giant leap, I can climb a ladder over it, one step at a time. (If the subtasks continue to be intimidating, I just apply this solution recursively, making lists of subsubtasks.)
I picked this strategy up after realizing that the way I approached large programming projects (write the main function, then write each of the subroutines that it calls, etc.) could be applied to life in general. Now I'm about to apply it to the task of writing an NSF fellowship application. =)
When I notice myself doing this, I try to break the problem down into a sequence of high-level subtaks, usually in the form of a to-do list. Emotionally/metaphorically, instead of having to cross the obstacle in one giant leap, I can climb a ladder over it, one step at a time. (If the subtasks continue to be intimidating, I just apply this solution recursively, making lists of subsubtasks.)
I think the most important aspect of this, for me anyway, is being able to dump most of what you're working on out of your working memory, trusting yourself that it's organized on paper, so that you can free up more brain space to do each of the sub-parts.
I have decided that maximizing the integral of happiness with respect to time is my selfish supergoal and that maximizing the double integral of happiness with respect to time and with respect to number of people is my altruistic supergoal. All other goals are only relevant insofar as they affect the supergoals. I have yet to be convinced this is a bad system, though previous experience suggests I probably will make modifications at some point. I also need to decide what weight to place on the selfish/altruistic components.
But despite my finding such an abstract way of characterizing my actions interesting, the actual determining of the weights and the actual function I'm maximizing are just determined by what I actually end up doing. In fact constructing this abstract system does not seem to convincingly help me further its purported goal, and I therefore cease all serious conversation about it.
In fact constructing this abstract system does not seem to convincingly help me further its purported goal
I think this is a common problem. That doesn't mean you have to give up on having your second-order desires agree with your first-order desires. It is possible to use your abstract models to change your day-to-day behaviour, and it's definitely possible to build a more accurate model of yourself and then use that model to make yourself do the things you endorse yourself doing (i.e. avoiding having to use willpower by making what you want to want to do the "default.")
As for me, I've decided that happiness is too elusive of a goal–I'm bad at predicting what will make me happier-than-baseline, the process of explicitly pursuing happiness seems to make it harder to achieve, and the hedonic treadmill effect means that even if I did, I would have to keep working at it constantly to stay in the same place. Instead, I default to a number of proxy measures: I want to be physically fit, so I endorse myself exercising and preferably enjoying exercise; I want to have enough money to satisfy my needs; I want to finish school with good grades; I want to read interesting books; I want to have a social life; I want to be a good friend. Taken all together, these are at least the building blocks of happiness, which happens by itself unless my brain chemistry gets too wacked out.
I have read this post and have not been persuaded that people who follow these steps will lead longer or happier lives (or will cause others to live longer or happier lives). I therefore will make no conscious effort to pay much of any regard to this post, though it is plausible it will have at least a small unconscious effect. I am posting this to fight groupthink and sampling biases, though this post actually does very little against them.
Longer? Probably not. Happier? Possible, depending on that person's baseline, since we don't know our own desires and acquiring these skills might help, but given the hedonic treadmill effect, unlikely. Achieving more of their interim goals? Possible if not probable. There are a lot of possible goals aside from living longer and being happier.
Very nice list! I feel like this one in particular is one of the most important ones:
I try not to treat myself as if I have magic free will; I try to set up influences (habits, situations, etc.) on the way I behave, not just rely on my will to make it so. (Example from Alicorn: I avoid learning politicians’ positions on gun control, because I have strong emotional reactions to the subject which I don’t endorse.) (Recent example from Anna: I bribed Carl to get me to write in my journal every night.)
To give my own example: I try to be vegetarian, but occasionally the temptation of meat gets the better of me. At some point I realized that whenever I walked past a certain hamburger place - which was something that I typically did on each working day - there was a high risk of me succumbing. Obvious solution: modify my daily routine to take a slightly longer route which avoided any hamburger places. Modifying your environment so that you can completely avoid the need to use willpower is ridiculously useful.
Modifying your environment so that you can completely avoid the need to use willpower is ridiculously useful.
My personal example: arranging to go exercise on the way to or from somewhere else will drastically increase the probability that I'll actually go. There's a pool a 5 minute bike ride from my house, which is also on the way home from most of the places I would be biking from. Even though the extra 10 minutes round trip is pretty negligable (and counts as exercise itself), I'm probably 2x as likely to go if I have my swim stuff with me and stop off on the way home. The effect is even more drastic for my taekwondo class: it's a 45 minute bike ride from home and about a 15 minute bike ride from the campus where I have most of my classes. Even if I finish class at 3:30 pm and taekwondo is at 7 pm, it still makes more sense for me to stay on campus for the interim–if I do, there's nearly 100% likelihood that I'll make it to taekwondo, but if I go home and get comfy, that drops to less than 50%.
How can you be sure you aren't being judged?
Clarify that to "people don't display all the usual behaviours of judging someone, i.e sharing looks and smirking with each other, avoiding me afterwards, etc." Maybe they go on to judge me behind my back, but I've seen no reflection on my overall social standing...except that I've possibly developed more of a reputation since then, in the sense that I went from being semi-invisible to fairly interesting.
If this is the case, what mechanism explains the steady decline in willpower over the last 70 years?
What steady decline?
Huh. I'd love to see such a study done. I don't know if I have the time and energy for it right now, but I will consider it and keep this in mind.
I would be willing to run a study like this for you–it would have to be long distance/online, since I'm in Canada, but I could get some of the local LW-Ottawa people to help set up an online survey format.
Try monitoring your moods for awhile and get a baseline for what your moods actually are.
This suggestion needs to be more specific. Otherwise, people will just say, "well, when I thought about my mood over the past week, it wasn't so great," or "I already know what my mood is like."
I found this app more-or-less at random. It has the advantage that the source code is on github so you can customize it to meet your specific needs.
Also, this article needs some citations. Like, any.
Also, this article needs some citations. Like, any.
I'm not sure how including citations would improve this article. It's based on a personal experience. If the author had gone out and done a bunch of research, chosen a depression-relieving method based on those already studied, tried it, and then written about it, it would have made sense to include citations to the original research. But at this point, with the bottom line already written, looking up a couple of articles on depression just to have citations doesn't add anything to the presentation.
Why is there this cultural assumption that everyone dislikes their job and would do something else if they had the option?
While not everyone dislikes their job, many if not most people do. Although "dislike" is not the same as "burning hatred"; many people are content with doing their jobs, but would still prefer to do something else if given freedom to do so.
I honestly think that if I had ten billion dollars, I would continue to do a lot of the things I currently get paid to do, only for fun.
I have no idea what you do, so I can't comment on your exact situation. My guess is that, if you were freed from life-support tasks such as earning money to buy food and shelter, and spending time to prepare and maintain said food and shelter -- then you would, at the very least, have more hours in the day to spend on doing those things you enjoy. This is only a guess, though.
I should add that another interesting effect of having an extremely large supply of money (one that I didn't cover in my original comment) is that you can now perform activities that are categorically different from the activities that a middle-class person can engage in. An ordinary middle-class citizen can study astronomy in his spare time -- or, if he's lucky, during the course of his main job. A multi-billionaire can launch his own space program.
but given that most people do have to work, shouldn't enjoying it be more of a goal?
I don't know whether it should be or not, morally speaking, but I do acknowledge that it's a reasonable goal. If you find yourself spending a lot of time on doing things you don't enjoy, and you cannot change the things you do due to the lack of money, then changing yourself to enjoy those things is a practical solution.
I have no idea what you do, so I can't comment on your exact situation. My guess is that, if you were freed from life-support tasks such as earning money to buy food and shelter, and spending time to prepare and maintain said food and shelter -- then you would, at the very least, have more hours in the day to spend on doing those things you enjoy.
I'm currently a student in my last year of nursing school. The best job I've ever had was this summer, as part of a program where Ontario hospitals hire 3rd year nursing students to work as non-reglemented health care providers and follow a nurse around on a unit of their choice. I got my first choice, which was the intensive care unit, and I was excited to go to work for every shift–including night shifts. I was sad when my every other weekend off came around, because that meant 2 whole days of not being up to date on what was happening on the unit.
I think the reason I liked that job so much, and expect to love nursing as a career, is that it involves all five senses in a way that your standard office job doesn't. I rarely got to sit down at work. I saw some of the most interesting things I've ever seen in my life. Being someone who is basically immune to disgust–I don't know if I really know what being "grossed out" feels like–and who has quite a poor sense of smell, was likely helpful. I acquired a reputation of being extremely curious and wanting to help everyone, and the nursing staff happily answered all my questions and would come find me to show me anything interesting. The staff was also awesome–I was surrounded by motivated people who liked being busy and hated being bored. I also had tons of awesome anecdotes to relate to my (usually grossed-out) friends and family. I found it personally meaningful, being there to make a difference in people's lives. And I learned a lot–working there for the summer gave me a huge advantage going into my fourth year of nursing school.
So some of it is likely the fact that nursing in general, and ICU nursing in particular, is hardly ever boring–if I worked in an office doing spreadsheets and answering emails, I probably wouldn't like going to work as much. But it's also the fact that little things make me disproportionately happy. I've really liked working as a lifeguard and swim instructor at a community pool, too, and I still like it after doing it for 5 years–it's something I'm good at, I get to play in the water, I get to teach adorable children and see direct results when I teach them to swim, the parents usually love me, and I'm on good terms with the staff and get my daily socialization in while working there. I've had incredibly fascinating conversations with fellow lifeguards while "buddy-guarding" during boring 6 am shifts, and I've made friends with all the regulars. I wouldn't volunteer to lifeguard, but I probably would teach swimming lessons for free, if only a few hours of the week–why waste a skill I've spent years acquiring, not to mention one that's fun to apply?
An ordinary middle-class citizen can study astronomy in his spare time -- or, if he's lucky, during the course of his main job. A multi-billionaire can launch his own space program.
100% agreed. Money gives you a lot of leverage and influence in the world. Being a billionaire would be useful for making the changes you want to see happen.
Or they just enjoy working... I've read quite a few accounts of work being a fairly meaningful part of life, and when you're worth billions, you probably run the company, set your own dress code, can casually fire anyone that annoys you, etc..
I'd also suggest that being a billionaire and enjoying your work probably go hand in hand - it would explain why so many of them work 80+ hours a week...
Agreed that being a billionaire and enjoying work go hand in hand–obviously they enjoyed it enough to put in the work required to earn billions. It's not impossible that someone could say "well, I sort of got dragged into working 80-hour weeks running my company and making billions, but I wish I'd just worked 9-5 for $100,000 a year and spent my leisure time doing x, y, z." But I doubt you hear it often–if they were the kind of person who enjoyed leisure activities more than working, earning, and promotions, they probably would have ended up in the 9-5 job by default–it's hard to accidentally get to be a billionaire.
A billion dollars would give you all the freedom you need to be happy -- but going from that to "a billionaire must be unusually happy", or even "most billionaires are unusually happy", seems to depend on a lot more self-awareness and agency than I think most people of any income actually have.
One thing I muse over sometimes in the context of billionaires is that, by and large, we should expect them to be strange and often unhappy people - simply because anyone more normal and well-adjusted would have stopped at, say, $10 million and $10 million typically doesn't accidentally turn into billions. Continuing past the point where all one's real needs are met indicates a bizarrely low estimate of the utility of switching to consumption and away from earning additional money (or perhaps the inability to stop working).
One thing I muse over sometimes in the context of billionaires is that, by and large, we should expect them to be strange and often unhappy people - simply because anyone more normal and well-adjusted would have stopped at, say, $10 million and $10 million typically doesn't accidentally turn into billions.
I think this is unlikely to be the case (that "well-adjusted" people would stop at $10 million), because the processes that lead you to earn $10 million, i.e. being the CEO of a major corporation, aren't things you just quit doing because you felt like "switching to consumption." Also, the type of person who is ambitious and self-driven enough to earn $10 million is likely to be someone who enjoys the process of their work more than consumption anyway.
I don't expect I'll ever earn $10 million, so that is a moot point, but if it happened you could earn millions of dollars working as a nurse, I wouldn't quit nursing just because all my "needs" were met. A lot of my needs (emotional, self-worth, social life) are met at work. Maybe an "inability to stop working" is an adequate description–but how is that unhealthy compared to, say, an inability to stop watching sci-fi movies? If your job provides a significant part of the meaning in your life, it wouldn't make sense to quit it and live a life of luxury. And high earning jobs (like being a CEO), although stressful, are probably much more "meaningful" than sitting in an office all day, at least to the type of people who are likely to succeed in those jobs.
I place zero value on the fact of ownership.
I think I might be the same way. It almost seems weird to be any other way.
If you want to become this way yourself, here's a possible way to do it. Next time you're moving, as you're packing your stuff, decide, for each item, whether you ought to keep, sell, or trash it. (Keep in mind that most of the things you own you could buy anew pretty easily, so selling something amounts to converting it to a more convenient form of wealth (currency) for a certain overhead cost.) I used to experience a lot of cognitive dissonance when I did this, because I'd find myself wanting to hold on to stuff that had negligible market value and no obvious use cases. Then I made the connection with the endowment effect, realized I was irrationally overvaluing the stuff just because it was mine, and became way more willing to throw stuff out.
Or read this essay. Or watch this video.
realized I was irrationally overvaluing the stuff just because it was mine.
I think that for some people, and some things, it may be rational to value things with 'negligible market value' just because they are theirs. Examples are knicknacks that you bought as souvenirs of an enjoyable trip, gifts that you don't use but like looking at once in a while, photos, etc... I don't personally like having souvenirs lying around, and gifts that I don't use are annoying, but I know other people who seem to get a lot of emotional comfort from physical objects.
You can also avoid the permanency of owning things by renting/leasing/borrowing/returning for refund.
EDIT: I place zero value on the fact of ownership. That is, I derive no satisfaction from knowing that something (or someone) belongs to me. I am given to understand that this is rather unusual. Of course, I value having hassle-free access to things when I need them, and often the only way to ensure this is by owning them, but when there is a choice, I'd rather not, even if it costs a bit more. Unfortunately, the society around me is not set up for this, except for really expensive items, like a place to live or a means of transportation. I wonder if other places in the world are more access- rather than ownership-friendly.
Of course, I value having hassle-free access to things when I need them, and often the only way to ensure this is by owning them, but when there is a choice, I'd rather not, even if it costs a bit more.
That's really interesting. Do you think this has to do with the hassle of looking after stuff you own, maintaining it, having it take up space, etc? Or is it something else?
Thinking about it, it's also true for me that I dislike some aspects of owning things I need–storage, mostly, and having to organize stuff and keep track of it. Every time I move apartments, I feel a brief urge to give away half of my belongings, even though nearly all of them I do use on a day-to-day basis. I still err on the side of buying rather than renting/leasing, though, mostly because it usually leads to long-term savings and this is something I place a high value on.
If money doesn't buy you happiness, you don't have enough money.
For example, what would you do if you had ten billion dollars ? Some people would answer, "I'd buy my own zoo !" or whatever, but the real answer is, "I would never work again; instead, I'd pursue whatever projects I found interesting“. That kind of freedom could enable you to be quite happy.
I'm not sure if this kind of experience scales to lower amounts of money; there's probably a minimum threshold above which wealth becomes entirely self-sustaining, and below which you'd still have to work for a living. Still, even below the threshold, you can still spend your money on automating and outsourcing smaller chunks of your daily drudgery, thus indirectly purchasing happiness.
"I would never work again; instead, I'd pursue whatever projects I found interesting“. That kind of freedom could enable you to be quite happy.
Why is there this cultural assumption that everyone dislikes their job and would do something else if they had the option? I honestly think that if I had ten billion dollars, I would continue to do a lot of the things I currently get paid to do, only for fun. This has a lot to do with the way my brain's motivational system works–if I'm not in a structured environment, my default is to mess around doing random stuff that doesn't output much of value, which I don't endorse myself doing and which I don't actually find all that pleasurable (although it is a good way to recharge when I'm exhausted.) Work provides a structured environment, and it's not all that hard to modify the environment a little bit and yourself a little bit to enjoy work more.
Maybe this isn't attainable for everyone–there are some jobs I wouldn't want to do–but given that most people do have to work, shouldn't enjoying it be more of a goal?
This doesn't mean something stodgy like "before you get something, think carefully about whether you will actually use and enjoy it, using outside view information about items in this reference class".
Shame, that would have been an excellent message. It sounds much more practical than self-modifying into someone who likes to make muffins just because I bought a muffin tin.
I'd go as far as to say that a bias towards changing yourself to be someone who uses the stuff you buy is something to beware of. Perhaps before I buy something I should ask the question "How will owning this item change my preferences and my habits? Do I want my preferences and habits to be changed in this way?" (Sometimes the answer is "Yes!")
I think Alicorn's intended point was closer to "How will owning this item change my preferences and my habits? Do I want my preferences and habits to be changed in this way?" (Sometimes the answer is "Yes!")" than "self-modifying into someone who likes to make muffins just because I bought a muffin tin." You need to do the value-weighing before you purchase something.
Also, she's made an underlying assumption that a) you have limited resources, such that buying something is a tradeoff against buying something else, and b) having stuff you don't use creates "clutter" which is unpleasant. These points may not be true for everyone: someone making $150,000 a year probably doesn't have to ponder very hard on whether or not buying a muffin tin is worth it, because it has a negligible effect on their savings, and not everyone finds having a lot of stuff distressing. I do think it's true that most people err on the side of buying too much (see rising Canadian household debt) and keeping too much stuff around.
I stopped reading around the cloak part. I don't understand. If it makes you happy to buy a cloak, buy it. If it makes you happy to wear a cloak, wear it. Why mete out wearing the cloak as penance for buying the cloak?
Is this supposed to be a way to save money? If so, maybe this strategy makes sense if you frequently find yourself overcome with difficult-to-resist urges to buy stuff that your rational mind considers a low-utility use of your money? I guess I'm lucky to not suffer from that problem much?
What are your goals here, and how are you trying to achieve them?
Is this supposed to be a way to save money? If so, maybe this strategy makes sense if you frequently find yourself overcome with difficult-to-resist urges to buy stuff that your rational mind considers a low-utility use of your money?
This is a fairly common problem. Mostly with girls–it's kind of a Western-cultural thing for girls to go shopping "for fun" and get pleasure from acquiring stuff, which they won't necessarily use frequently. I don't have this problem either, mostly because my threshold for actually buying stuff is really high and I've integrated "being thrifty and good at saving money" as part of my self-concept. But I observe it a lot.
There's also the aspect that using stuff is a good way to increase your day-to-day physical pleasure. A cloak feels nice on your skin, it's warm, it's comfy, etc...and reminding yourself to use it increases the amount of attention you pay to those simple, easy-to-obtain pleasures.
After I first read this article about a year ago, I set out to be more honest in all my conversations. (At this point in time it has become a part of my persona and I no longer do it consciously.) There are a few things I've noticed since I made the switch:
It is easier for me to think clearly during social events. I suspect this is because I no longer have to generate lies and keep track of all of them.
I have become more outgoing, although undoubtedly more socially awkward. Occasionally, a person will be shocked at how carelessly I reveal something considered to be embarrassing.
It is easier for me to detect certain lies. I attribute this to my being able to think more clearly, because as Eliezer points out, detecting falsehood might be negatively correlated to being honest.
Note that there is still much more room for me to improve, and my personal reflections on this matter are likely to be deeply flawed.
I have become more outgoing, although undoubtedly more socially awkward. Occasionally, a person will be shocked at how carelessly I reveal something considered to be embarrassing.
I am like this. It occasionally creates a false note in a conversation, but for the most part it doesn't harm my relations with other people...and it feels good to realize that people don't actually judge me for the things I might be judging myself for.
...Confronted with a choice between (a) "the person asking me directions was just spontaneously replaced by somebody different, also asking me directions," and (b) "I just had a brain fart," I'll consciously go for (a) every time, especially considering that I observe similar phenomena all the time (people spontaneously replacing each other immediately after having encountered them). ...
I'm curious, why do you take that view?
Am I the only one who's really confused that this comment is quoting text that is different than the excerpt in the above comment?
You're a few years behind on this research, Eliezer.
The point of the research program of Mussweiler and Strack is that anchoring effects can occur without any adjustment. "Selective Accessibility" is their alternative, adjustment-free process that can produce estimates that are too close to the anchor. The idea is that, when people are testing the anchor value, they bring to mind information that is consistent with the correct answer being close to the anchor value, since that information is especially relevant for answering the comparative question. Then when they are then asked for their own estimate, they rely on that biased set of information that is already accessible in their mind, which produces estimates that are biased towards the anchor.
In 2001, Epley and Gilovich published their first of several papers designed to show that, while the Selective Accessibility process occurs and creates adjustment-free anchoring effects, there are also cases where people do adjust from an anchor value, just as Kahneman & Tversky claimed. The examples that they've used in their research are trivia questions like "What is the boiling point of water on Mount Everest?" where subjects will quickly think of a relevant, but wrong, number on their own, and they'll adjust from there based on their knowledge of why the number is wrong. In this case, most subjects know that 212F is the boiling point of water at sea level, but water boils at lower temperatures at altitude, so they adjust downward. This anchoring & adjustment process also creates estimates that are biased towards the anchor, since people tend to stop adjusting too soon, once they've reached a plausible-seeming value.
Gilovich and Epley have shown that subjects give estimates farther from the anchor (meaning that they are adjusting more) on these types of questions when they are given incentives for accuracy, warned about the biasing effect of anchors, high in Need For Cognition (the dispositional tendency to think things through a lot), or shaking their head (which makes them less willing to stop at a plausible-seeming value; head-nodding produces even less adjustment than baseline). None of these variables matter on the two-part questions with an experimenter provided anchor, like the Africa UN %, where selective accessibility seems to be the process creating anchoring effects. The relevance of these variables is the main evidence for their claim that adjustment occurs with one type of anchoring procedure but not the other.
The one manipulation that has shown some promise at debiasing Selective Accessibility based anchoring effects is a version of the "consider the opposite" advice that Eliezer gives. Mussweiler, Strack & Pfeiffer (2000) argued that this strategy helps make a more representative set of information accessible in subjects' minds, and they did find debiasing when they gave subjects targeted, question-specific instructions on what else to consider. But they did not try teaching subjects the general "consider the opposite" strategy and seeing if they could successfully apply it to the particular case on their own.
Mussweiler and Gilovich both have all of their relevant papers available for free on their websites.
------------ Epley, N., & Gilovich, T. (2001). Putting adjustment back in the anchoring and adjustment heuristic: Differential processing of self-generated and experimenter-provided anchors. Psychological Science, 12, 391â396.
Mussweiler, T., Strack, F., & Pfeiffer, T. (2000). Overcoming the inevitable anchoring effect: Considering the opposite compensates for selective accessibility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 1142-1150.
Gilovich and Epley have shown that subjects give estimates farther from the anchor (meaning that they are adjusting more) on these types of questions when they are given incentives for accuracy, warned about the biasing effect of anchors, high in Need For Cognition (the dispositional tendency to think things through a lot), or shaking their head (which makes them less willing to stop at a plausible-seeming value; head-nodding produces even less adjustment than baseline).
Shaking their heads? If this is really an effective way to de-bias your thinking a tiny bit...COOL! I will try that!
Not deaf, just hate phones and am very much aware of my tendency to just not make calls even when I really should.
I have the same tendency... I find it a lot of work to hold a conversation even with a friend–my mom is pretty much the only person I can comfortably have a phone chat with, probably because she has a very loud, clear voice and because she isn't unpredictable. Calling strangers, or answering a call which I think is from a stranger i.e. my phone/Internet provider company, is stressful. I'll put off phone calls as long as I possibly can, although I'm not sure if it's because of the anxiety or just because they're more time consuming than writing an email.
I've been working on this by forcing myself to offer to make any necessary phone calls at my current job (at the hospital). This is stressful because a) it's usually to strangers, i.e. a patient's family, a doctor, or the X-ray department, and b) it's in French, my second language. The act of saying "oh, I'll take care of that phone call for you" is both easy and rewarding, because I like being really really helpful, and then once I've said I'll do it, I'm committed and I have to do it. Weirdly enough, I'm still scared to answer the phone at work.
Disliking answering phones is part of a long list of semi-phobias I had as a kid–ordering food in restaurants, going up to the checkout to buy things in stores, etc. I still get anxious ordering drinks in a bar. It feels like this is part of the same category as my phone-phobia.
I really don't like the word 'bias' especially in combination with 'overcoming'. It implies that there's the ideal answer being computed by your brain, but it has a bias added to it, which you can overcome to have a correct answer. Much more plausible is that you do not have the answer, and you substitute some more or less flawed heuristic. And if you just overcome this heuristic you will get dumber..
I think your point is a good one. However, I don't think you're disagreeing with the main point of the post, since 'flawed heuristics' are more an example of the traditional 'biases' studied by researchers, which aaronsw is indeed claiming aren't that important for improving general rationality. The "not getting around to reading a 'nonprofits for dummies' book" isn't an example of overcoming a heuristic and becoming dumber, it's an example of having a knowledge/common sense gap and not applying any kind of heuristic at all. "Always read the relevant 'for dummies' book first if you want to start working on a project" is a heuristic, which is probably biased in itself, but which most people don't follow when they would be better off following it.
Also, I think there is more subtlety to 'overcoming bias' than just not using that heuristic anymore (and maybe being dumber). Heuristics exist because they are useful in most circumstances, but they occasionally fail massively when subjected to new and unexpected types of situations. Realizing that thinking happens in the form of heuristics, and then trying to notice when you're in a situation where you wouldn't expect the heuristic to apply, can help with the problem of being overconfident on a given problem. Recognized ignorance is preferable to being very certain of an answer that is likely wrong, in terms of not making decisions that will blow up in your face.
Hm.
So, call -C1 the social cost of reporting a .9 confidence of something that turns out false, and -C2 the social cost of reporting a .65 confidence of something that turns out false. Call C3 the benefit of reporting .9 confidence of something true, and C4 the benefit of .65 confidence.
How confident are you that that (.65C3 -.35C1) < (.65C4-.35C2)?
I would say I'm about 75% confident that (.65C3 -.35C1) < (.65C4-.35C2)... But one of the reasons I don't even want to play that game is that I feel I am completely unqualified to estimate probabilities about that, and most other things. I would have no idea how to go about estimating the probability of, for example, the Singularity occurring before 2050...much less how to compensate for biases in my estimate.
I think I also have somewhat of an ick reaction towards the concept of "tricking" people to get what you want, even if in a very subtle form. I just...like...being honest, and it's hard for me to tell if my arguments about honesty being better are rationalizations because I don't want being dishonest to be justifiable.
Hello everyone, Like many people, I come to this site via an interest in transhumanism, although it seems unlikely to me that FAI implementing CEV can actually be designed before the singularity (I can explain why, and possibly even what could be done instead, but it suddenly occurred to me that it seems presumptuous of me to criticize a theory put forward by very smart people when I only have 1 karma...).
Oddly enough, I am not interested in improving epistemic rationality right now, partially because I am already quite good at it. But more than that, I am trying to switch it off when talking to other people, for the simple reason (and I'm sure this has already been pointed out before) that if you compare three people, one who estimates the probability of an event at 110%, one who estimates it at 90%, and one who compensates for overconfidence bias and estimates it at 65%, the first two will win friends and influence people, while the third will seem indecisive (unless they are talking to other rationalists). I think I am borderline asperger's (again, like many people here) and optimizing social skills probably takes precedence over most other things.
I am currently doing a PhD in "absurdly simplistic computational modeling of the blatantly obvious" which better damn well have some signaling value. In my spare time, to stop my brain turning to mush, among other things I am writing a story which is sort of rationalist, in that some of the characters keep using science effectively even when the world is going crazy and the laws of physics seem to change dependent upon whether you believe in them. On the other hand, some of the characters are (a) heroes/heroines (b) awesomely successful (c) hippies on acid who do not believe in objective reality (not that I am implying that all hippies/people who use lsd are irrational). Maybe the point of the story is that you need more than just rationality? Or that some people are powerful because of rationality, while others have imagination, and that friendship combines their powers in a my little pony like fashion? Or maybe its all just an excuse for pretentious philosophy and psychic battles?
Welcome!
But more than that, I am trying to switch it off when talking to other people, for the simple reason (and I'm sure this has already been pointed out before) that if you compare three people, one who estimates the probability of an event at 110%, one who estimates it at 90%, and one who compensates for overconfidence bias and estimates it at 65%, the first two will win friends and influence people, while the third will seem indecisive.
Made me think of this article. Yes, you may be able, in the short run, to win friends and influence people by tricking yourself into being overconfident. But that belief is only in your head and doesn't affect the universe–thus doesn't affect the probability of Event X happening. Which means that if, realistically, X is 65% likely to happen, then you with your overconfidence, claiming that X is bound to happen, will eventually look like a fool 35% of the time, and will make it hard for yourself to leave a line of retreat.
Conclusion: in the long run, it's very good to be honest with yourself about your predictions of the future, and probably preferable to be honest with others, too, if you want to recruit their support.
I wait at a bus stop. A car passes by at high speed, and a woman that was standing too close to the road has just the time to jump clear of a shower of slush. Note to self: be aware of this danger, never stand too close, as there is no benefit but potential for ruining your clothing. Next time I notice myself standing too close to puddle/slush on the road, I move away and reinforce the heuristic.
A person from my department at work admonishes me for breaking the standard procedure for connecting to the Internet, which resulted in me being able to work that evening while causing no harm. I attempt to reason with the man, relying on my usual analytic ability to clearly explain the situation to everyone's satisfaction. Since the argument matches the template some of my psychological adaptations recognize as confrontational, emotions start to interfere with my normal cognition, and as a result I'm unable to think carefully and my argument is much less persuasive than expected. Note to self: when expected to enter a situation that can evoke strong emotions, plan what to do and what to say in advance, before emotions start interfering with ability to think, rehearse the plan in your mind, and only then allow the exposure. Next time I notice that I started to argue with emotions rising up, I cut myself short and regroup. Later, I reflect on the signs that could allow me to notice the situation approaching in advance (such as an unusual social interaction, something I wouldn't already have the heuristic associated with), and rehearse the response of recognizing the situation when exposed to appropriate cues.
I slip on an iced street, but recover without falling. I look around, and realize that a low fence that goes along the road has sharp spikes on its top, and the adjoining building a sharp stone border, so that unlucky fall on either would have me injured. There is potential for harm in falling close to them, and no benefit in choosing to walk close to them as opposed to giving enough room to fall clear. So I adopt a heuristic of not walking close to dangerous structures on slippery surface, or going much slower where necessary. Next time I notice that I'm unnecessarily close to a dangerous structure while there's room to walk clear of it with no additional inconvenience, I correct my trajectory, thus reinforcing the heuristic.
Note to self: when expected to enter a situation that can evoke strong emotions, plan what to do and what to say in advance, before emotions start interfering with ability to think, rehearse the plan in your mind, and only then allow the exposure. Next time I notice that I started to argue with emotions rising up, I cut myself short and regroup.
Addition a year later: I'm currently doing a study group with a friend based on a book called 'Crucial Conversations', which is entirely about being more effective at communicating in emotion-laden situations. Highly recommended.
The first example you give doesn't sound to me like exploring multiple sides of the question "Does God exist?" so much as exploring multiple questions I might ask instead: is what humans experience when they claim to experience God's presence interesting? Should it be studied more? Do faith-based institutions do more good than harm? Can I empathize with a believer? Can belief in God make one stronger, and if so under what circumstances? Etc.
You're right, they aren't the same question–but that's what my brain brought up when queried with "what would you say if asked to debate the existence of God?" Somehow just saying that "no, I think that God doesn't exist for reasons X, Y, Z" doesn't seem to be enough. I think this may be because of the "arguments as soldiers" approach–if I tell someone I'm an atheist, but don't go on to clarify my beliefs on all those other questions, the assumption tends to be that I must think theists are stupid, stupid people.
I think it also might be a strategy I use to increase the feeling of "being on the same side" when talking to people who I know are theists, since not clarifying might lead them to believe that I'm, in some sense, their intellectual enemy.
In nearly all Classical schools of logic & rhetoric - Sanskrit, Talmudic, Buddhist, Socratic, Islamic, and Christian as shown by St. Thomas Aquinas - an educated person is expected to know all the major arguments for the important sides of key questions.
In fact to obtain a "doctorate," I have often heard that Tibetan Buddhists used to require a student monk to perform an all-day public argumentation of several sides of the same question, refute all the arguments, and offer a new, original synthesis. I believe the Indian Math followed the same procedure for millenia, and Socrates got himself killed for embarrassing public figures by humiliating them this way in the agora.
The ability to argue your opponents' position better than they can and then handily defeating it in summary has long been considered the mastery of rhetoric. Thus playing the Devil's Advocate is a valuable intellectual tool for the aspiring orator or public intellectual. Rose is right; Dawkins, wrong.
Thus playing the Devil's Advocate is a valuable intellectual tool for the aspiring orator or public intellectual. Rose is right; Dawkins, wrong.
The ability to play devil's advocate may indeed make you a better orator, and thus better at "public" intellectualism. But I don't think this is the point of the article. The point is that the human brain is a messy, biased thing that can convince itself of almost anything, and if you want to be reacting to reality itself, instead of to your own wishful thinking, you don't want to encourage habits of thinking that would make you better at convincing yourself of untruths. And given the messiness of human reasoning (priming, etc), even if a public intellectual resolved to base his own beliefs off one process while playing the devil's advocate in public, he is likely to contaminate his personal beliefs in the process.
In high school I was on a debating team, and I can remember eventually forming the view that it was a potentially corrupting exercise, because you had to argue for the position you were given, not the position that you believed or the position that you might rationally favor. Occasionally the format permitted creative responses; I recall that once, the affirmative team had to argue 'That Australia has failed the Aborigine', and we on the negative team decided to outflank rather than straightforwardly oppose; we said that wasn't true because what Australia had done was much much worse than that. But even that was basically an exercise in lawyerly ingenuity, resulting from a desire to win rather than from a desire to arrive at the truth.
In high school I was on a debating team, and I can remember eventually forming the view that it was a potentially corrupting exercise, because you had to argue for the position you were given, not the position that you believed or the position that you might rationally favor.
I have always found the debates that we had to do in school difficult and painful, mostly because of having to argue for points of view that I didn't believe. The problem wasn't, however, that I believed strongly in one side but had to argue the other–it was usually that I didn't strongly believe in either side, found the arguments for both sides reasonable, and found it hard not to play Devil's Advocate with myself during a debate (warning: this will annoy the rest of your debating team!)
It's not that I don't have beliefs or opinions–it's just that they tend not to be black-and-white, and I'm constantly questioning myself, i.e. "No, I don't think God exists, but I do think the question of what humans experience when they claim to experience God's presence is really interesting and should be studied more, and I think faith-based institutions usually do more good than harm, and I can empathize with the emotional state of someone who believes in God, so if they say their belief makes them stronger, who am I to question that–I think it's a fact about the world that God doesn't exist, and a fact about my brain that believing true things makes me stronger, but I know people who've experienced a lot of emotional trauma and they might be right that, in the short term, faith does make them stronger in the sense of being able to cope better with the randomness of day-to-day life..." I'm like that even more on questions where I don't think I'm educated enough to have any kind of opinion. Imagine how that would go over in a standard debate.
Then again, the usual debate question is something like "does violence in video games make children more violent?" That may be an empirical question, but at least back in high school when I had to debate on it, it hadn't been researched enough for someone to argue either side based on the evidence. Also, the answer you get when you study it probably depends on how you define your terms, since "children", "violence", and "video games" are all imbedded parts of a massively complex system with many, many inputs and outputs much more complicated than just a sliding scale of violent tendencies. To me, the ability to come up with arguments for why one side is true won't actually help you do anything more intelligently in your life.
Oh, it's not a topic-specific behavior. Every time I go too far down a chain of reasoning ("too far" meaning as few as three causal relationships), sometimes people start complaining that I'm giving too much thought to it, and imply they are unable to follow the arguments. I'm just not surrounded by a lot of people that like long and intricate discussions.
(Funnily, both my parents are the type that get tired listening to complex reasoning, and I turned out the complete opposite.)
I'm just not surrounded by a lot of people that like long and intricate discussions.
That is...intensely frustrating. I've had people tell me that "well, I find all the points you're trying to make really complicated, and it's easier for me to just have faith in God" or that kind of thing, but I've never actually been rebuked for applying an analytical mindset to discussions. Props on having acquired those habits anyway, in spite of what sounds like an unfruitful starting environment!
This happens frequently in places where reasoning is suspect, or not valued. Kids in poor areas with few scholastic or academic opportunities find more validation in pursuits that are non-academic, and they tend to deride logic. It's parodied well by Colbert, but it's not uncommon.
I just avoid those people, now know few of them. Most of the crowd here, I suspect, is in a similar position.
I just avoid those people, now know few of them. Most of the crowd here, I suspect, is in a similar position.
I may be in a similar position of never having known anyone who was like this. Also, I'm very conflict averse myself (but like discussing), so any discussion I start is less likely to have any component of raised voices or emotional involvement that could make it sound like an argument.
'Twas about time that I decided to officially join. I discovered LessWrong in the autumn of 2010, and so far I felt reluctant to actually contribute -- most people here have far more illustrious backgrounds. But I figured that there are sufficiently few ways in which I could show myself as a total ignoramus in an intro post, right?
I don't consider my gender, age and nationality to be a relevant part of my identity, so instead I'd start by saying I'm INTP. Extreme I (to the point of schizoid personality disorder), extreme T. Usually I have this big internal conflict going on between the part of me that wishes to appear as a wholly rational genius and the other part, who has read enough psychology and LW (you guys definitely deserve credit for this) to know I'm bullshitting myself big time.
My educational background so far is modest, a fact for which procrastination is the main culprit. I'm currently working on catching up with high school level math... so far I've only reviewed trigonometry, so I'm afraid I won't be able to participate in more technical discussions around here. Aside from a few Khan Academy videos, I'm still ignorant about probability; I did try to solve that cancer probability problem though, and when put like that into a word problem, I used Bayes' theorem intuitively. (Funny thing is, I still don't understand the magic behind it, even if I can apply it.) I know no programming beyond really elementary C++ algorithms; I have a pretty good grasp of high school physics, minus relativity and QM. I am seeking to do everything in my power to correct these shortcomings, and when/if I achieve results, I'll be happy to post my findings about motivation & procrastination on LW, if anyone is interested.
That which I have in common with the rest of this community is a love for rational, intelligent and productive discussions. I'm hugely disappointed with the overwhelming majority of internet and RL debates. Many times I've found myself trying to be the voice of reason and pointing out flaws in people's reasoning, even when I agreed with the core idea, only to have them tell me that I'm being too analytical and that I should... what... close off my mind and stop noticing mistakes, right? So I come here seeking discussions with people who would listen to reason and facilitate intellectually fruitful debates.
I'm very eager to help spread the knowledge about cognitive biases and educate people in the art of good reasoning.
I'm also interested (although not necessarily well-versed, as mentioned above) in most topics people here are interested in -- everything concerning mathematics and science, as well as philosophy and the mind (which are, by comparison, my two strongest points).
There are quite a few ways in which I don't fit the typical LW mold, though, and I'm mentioning this so that I find out whether any of these are going to be problematic in our interaction.
- For one, I'm not particularly interested in AI and transhumanism. Not opposed to, just indifferent. The only related topic which interests me is life extension research. In the eventuality that some people might try to change my mind about this from the get-go, as I've seen some do with other newbies, I know you probably have some very good arguments for your position, but hopefully nobody's going to mind one less potential AI enthusiast. My interests are spread thin enough as they are.
- I seem to be significantly more left-leaning than the majority of folks here. I'm decidedly not dogmatic about it, though, and on occasion I speak out against heavily ideological discourse even when it has a central message that I agree with.
- Kind of clueless and mathematically illiterate at this moment.
This has to be getting rather long, so I'll stop here, hoping that I've said everything that I believed to be relevant to an intro post.
Welcome!
Many times I've found myself trying to be the voice of reason and pointing out flaws in people's reasoning, even when I agreed with the core idea, only to have them tell me that I'm being too analytical and that I should... what... close off my mind and stop noticing mistakes, right?
That's interesting... I don't think I've ever had someone respond to my pointing out flaws in this way. I've had people argue back plenty of times, but never tell me that we shouldn't be arguing about it. Can you give some examples of topics where this has happened? I would be curious what kind of topics engender this reaction in people.
Hello!
- Age: Years since 1995
- Gender: Female
- Occupation: Student
I actually started an account two years ago, but after a few comments I decided I wasn't emotionally or intellectually ready for active membership. I was confused and hurt for various reasons that weren't Less Wrong's fault, and I backed away to avoid saying something I might regret. I didn't want to put undue pressure on myself to respond to topics I didn't fully understand. Now, after many thousands of hours reading and thinking about neurology, evolutionary psychology, and math, I'm more confident that I won't just be swept up in the half-understood arguments of people much smarter than I am. :)
Like almost everyone here, I started with atheism. I was raised Hindu, and my home has the sort of vague religiosity that is arguably the most common form in the modern world. For the most part, I figured out atheism on my own, when I was around 11 or 12. It was emotionally painful and socially costly, but I'm stronger for the experience. I started reading various mediocre atheist blogs, but I got bored after a couple of years and wanted to do something more than shoot blind fish in tiny barrels. I wanted to build something up, not just tear something down (no matter how much it really should be torn down.)
The actual direct link to Less Wrong came from TV Tropes. I suspect it's one of the best gateway drugs because TV Tropes, while not explicitly atheist or rationalist, does more to communicate the positive ideals and emotional memes of LW-style rationality than most of the atheosphere does. For the first time, I got the sense that "our" way of thinking could be so much more powerful than simply bashing religion and astrology.
One important truth beyond atheism that I have slowly come to accept is inborn IQ differentials, between individuals and groups of individuals. I had to face the fact that P(male| IQ 2 standard deviations above mean) was significantly higher than 50%. I had to deal with the fact that historical oppression probably wasn't the end-all be-all explanation for why women on average hadn't done as much inventing and discovering and brilliant thinking as men. I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.
I further learned that my brain was modular, and the bits of me that I choose to call "I" don't constitute everything. My own brain could sabotage the values and ideals and that "I" hold so dearly. For a long time I struggled with the idea that everything I believed in and loved was fake, because I couldn't force my body to actually act accordingly. Did I value human life? Why wasn't I doing everything I possibly could to save lives, all the time? Did I value freedom and autonomy and gender equality? Why could I not help sometimes being attracted to domineering jerks?
It took me a while to accept that the newly-evolved, conscious, abstractly-reasoning, self-reflecting "I" simply did not have the firepower to bully ancient and powerful urges into submission. It took me a while to accept that my values were not lies simply because my monkey brain sometimes contradicted them. The "I" in my brain does not have as much power as she would like; that does not mean she doesn't exist.
Other, non-rationality related information: I love writing, and for a long time I convinced myself that therefore I would love being a novelist. Now, I recognize that I would much rather compose a non-fiction or reflective essay, although ideas for fiction stories still flood in and I rarely do much about it due to laziness and/or fear. I fell in love with Avatar: The Last Airbender for its great storytelling and its combination of intelligence and idealism. I adore Pixar and many Disney movies for the sweetness and heart. I like somewhat traditional-sounding music with easily discernible lyrics that tells a story; I can't get into anything that involves screaming or deliberate disharmony. Show-tunes are great. :)
I don't want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me able to in-ironically enjoy Disney and Pixar and Avatar; I consciously cultivate it and am lucky to have it. If this disposition will be "destroyed by the truth"...well, I have a choice to make then.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and I for one am glad to have you here (again)! You sound like someone who thinks very interesting thoughts.
I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.
I can't say that this is something that has ever really bothered me. Your IQ is what it is. Whether or not there's an overall gender-based trend in one direction or another isn't going to change anything for you, although it might change how people see you. (If anything, I found that I got more attention as a "girl who was good at/interested in science"...which, if anything, was irritating and made me want to rebel and go into a "traditionally female" field just because I could.
Basically, if you want to accomplish greatness, it's about you as an individual. Unless you care about the greatness of others, and feel more pride or solidarity with females than with males who accomplish greatness (which I don't), the statistical tendency doesn't matter.
I don't want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me able to in-ironically enjoy Disney and Pixar and Avatar; I consciously cultivate it and am lucky to have it. If this disposition will be "destroyed by the truth"...well, I have a choice to make then.
I think that more than idealism, what I wouldn't want to lose is a sense of humour. Idealism, in the sense of "believing that the world is good deep down/people will do the best they can/etc", can be broken by enough bad stuff happening. A sense of humour is a lot harder to break.
It seems to me that emergence is the opposite of rigorous structure. Take human brain function (similar to your intelligence comment in the article). Claiming that brain function is emergent versus rigorously ordered allows you to make a prediction, namely that a child who has a portion of their brain removed will retain all or a large portion of the functionality of the removed portion, or they will not. A child with half of their brain missing would be expected to be extraordinarily impaired. A simple search of the literature should prove it one way or another.
Thus, when one says that some property is emergent, it means that it is not limited by the macro form, but by the conditions effecting the micro components from which the property emerges. This should allow for all manner of predictive ability. Of course, there are plenty of people who latch on to the word, just like there are plenty of people who latch on to the word "evolution", and don't think or use it to make predictions, and in that, your point is well taken.
Sorry for commenting 5 years after the fact, but this place seems to have at least some ongoing discussion.
A child with half of their brain missing would be expected to be extraordinarily impaired. A simple search of the literature should prove it one way or another.
According to this, a child with half of their brain removed can sometimes do just fine. It has a lot to do with age, though, given that children have more neuroplasticity–a fully functioning adult would probably lose a lot of their normal abilities.
most people
Not really the issue in this discussion, which is about the negative effects of a filtering system that excludes a certain small but highly valuable population.
Can you give me examples of people who were not conscientious and were nonetheless able to complete large, multi-step projects?
As I've suggested earlier, EY is a pretty good example of the type of personality I have in mind.
most people
Not really the issue in this discussion, which is about the negative effects of a filtering system that excludes a certain small but highly valuable population.
Fair enough. The highly valuable 'outliers' are likely going to be different enough from me that I'll have trouble mapping and comparing my traits onto theirs, which makes that kind of comparison not very useful.
EY is a pretty good example of the type of personality I have in mind.
You may know better than me, but as far as I can tell, EY does have the ability to coax himself into working productively on projects that aren't necessarily a lot of fun all the time. He just won't do it for any goal that that he doesn't consider important. He strikes me more as someone who dislikes authority figures and cares less about the typical social reinforcement that comes of achieving more "conventional" goals, like going to university.
Conscientiousness is what you need in order to finish what you start, when what you started is something that somebody else told you to do. When it's your own thing, you need a lot less of it.
As for political savvy -- that isn't required at all. Unless by "research" you mean "political success in the human occupation customarily but misleadingly labeled 'research'." (The "as such" qualifier a few comments above was intended to rule that out.)
When it's your own thing, you need a lot less of it.
This strikes me as untrue for most people. Can you give me examples of people who were not conscientious and were nonetheless able to complete large, multi-step projects?
Any non-sugary food related reinforcer?
Coffee/tea. Twice in the past week, during extremely busy shifts at work, one of the doctors has decided to buy Tim Hortons for all the nurses. I can't think of any other single event that has made me as happy (albeit for a short 5-minute time period.)
"The Camel Has Two Humps", which IIRC has been linked here before, does purport to find a bimodal distribution between people who can and can't program. I'm not at all sure if that has anything to do with inborn talent, though, at least beyond basic general intelligence.
At various points in my career I've found reasons to teach people programming skills, and my n=1 impression is that the ability to internalize basic programming has little to do with personality (though conscientiousness helps, and I suspect openness to experience might too) and a lot to do with the student's level of comfort with mathematical thinking. Not necessarily advanced math (you don't need anything more complicated than algebra to program except in specialized domains), but you do need to be very comfortable with a certain level of abstraction. I suspect that might have more to do with the distribution in the linked paper than the "geek gene" concepts I've heard tossed around elsewhere: at the level of the math prerequisites for CS 1 it's still possible to do well by solving problems mechanistically without a good grasp of the abstractions involved, but that won't cut it in computer science. And it'd probably be difficult to teach that in a semester.
I don't think it has much to do with personality either, except, like you said, willingness to work hard (especially if you're someone who starts out finding it very difficult.) But I think that a lot of people, even people who can work up to the level of calculus in math, go at it with the mindset of "memorize that Formula X gives Answer Y" instead of trying to understand how and why Formula X relates to the underlying structure of the problem so that it's obvious that it should give answer Y, but gives Answer Z in a different context... You can get by with memorizing formulas in math classes, at least the way they're currently taught and tested. It's a lot harder to get by with that habit that when you're programming.
(On the whole, the people I've known whose minds appear to work like this aren't noticeably "lower" intelligence, however you define that. They just don't think of math as something where they should be applying the analytic part of their mind.)
My first reaction was pretty much identicle, right now you can do well at almost anything purely based on conscientiousness, including video games, work, school, and social interaction. I don't know of any good way to measure general talent, but when I learn most things I tend to be quite bad at them until I enter tsukoku naritai mode. Perhaps this should influence my career decision somewhat, its hard to tell if talent or effort is more crucial for programming.
its hard to tell if talent or effort is more crucial for programming.
I would suggest talking to some programmers.
My intuition is that there's something of innate talent involved in programming, so that you can divide people into two populations: those whose brain makeup causes them to find programming intuitive and fascinating and cool, and those to whom it just doesn't make sense. If you're considering it as a career, presumably you fall into the first category. Beyond that, I would guess that conscientiousness is the biggest predictor–my one-semester programming elective was enough to show me that it's really time-consuming.
But I'm not a programmer by specialty. An unusual percentage of LWers are, though, so maybe someone can give you advice?
For the most part I agree with this post, but I am not convinced that this is true:
Anyone can develop any “character trait.” The requirement is simply enough years of thoughts becoming words becoming actions becoming habit.
A lot of measured traits are extremely stable over lifespan (IQ, conscientiousness, etc.) and seem very difficult, if not impossible, to train. So the idea that someone can just get smarter through practice does not appear to be supported by the evidence.
I don't think most people would consider IQ a 'character trait'... However, that's a matter of terminology and doesn't negate your point. I agree that 'fluid intelligence' is probably relatively innate and would be hard to change (although there's some research that training tasks such as the dual n-back can have an effect.) Crystallized intelligence, as basically the sum of your knowledge and ability to apply it, can definitely be increased by practice. IQ in isolation strikes me as something that wouldn't matter as much as IQ and amount of experience and good work habits and openness to criticism and improvement.
As for conscientiousness, I have no idea what kind of research has been done on its stability as a character trait, but I see no reason why someone who was aware enough to make a decision to become more conscientious wouldn't be able to train themselves in habits that would, at the very least, make them able to get more work done and appear harder-working to others.
Really good post...it makes a point that is completely new to me, which is always nice.
It does occur to me that the current (negative selection) system would reward "hard work" more, relative to "talent", than a positive selection system. (In quotation marks because those are both metrics that are hard to measure separately from one another.) Someone who is very conscientious and hard-working is likely to compensate for wherever areas they're weaker, in terms of "natural talent", however you define that.
My first, emotional reaction to your post was "I would be screwed in a positive selection system!" As someone who's above average in a lot of areas, not really exceptional in any, and obsessively hard-working enough that it's a running joke among my friends, I like the current system just fine (although I'm not in academia.) I don't know if conscientiousness would have a bigger long-term effect on results than innate brilliance; it probably depends on what field you're talking about.
My intuition says that a positive selection system would probably be a good idea in fields where there is big variance in natural ability, i.e. math or physics, and less so in fields like medicine where a lot of "talent" depends on how willing you are to work hard and keep improving over your whole career.
Solution: have a community where you can gain respect and status by having successfully noticed and avoided sunk cost reasoning.
This has its own failure mode.
I had read that article before. It's not something that I would consider a problem for myself...I rarely if ever abandon a project in the middle, and when I do, it's a) always been a personal project or goal that affects no one else, and b) always been something that turned out to be either a bad idea in the first place (i.e. my goal at age 14 of weighing 110 pounds...would never happen unless I actually develop an eating disorder), or important to me for the wrong reasons (going to the Olympics for swimming). Etc.
Note that this isn't any kind of argument against your point... If anything, it's my own personal failure mode of assuming everyone's brain is like mine and that their main problems are like mine.
However, I think it does count for something that nyan_sandwich posted this article, noticing a flaw in his reasoning, on LW...and got upvotes and praise.
In the case of any person whose judgement is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself...the fallacy of what was fallacious.
–John Stuart Mill
You may just have convinced me that I should start paying for my music and movies, as a way of training my moral thinking to be less "sloppy"!
Heh. But why did I do that? Selfish motives also (I make software for living).
I came up with another example. Consider the sunk cost issue. Suppose that you spent years working on a project that is heading nowhere, the effort was wasted, and there's a logical way to see that it is wasted effort. Any time your thought wavers in the direction of understanding that the effort was wasted, you get stab of negative emotions - particular hormones are released into bloodstream, particular pathways activate - and that is negative reinforcement for everything you've been doing including the use of mental framework that did lead you to that thought. I think LW calls something similar an 'ugh field', except the issue is that reinforcement is not so specific in it's action as to make you avoid one specific thought without also making you avoid the very method of thinking that got you there.
I think it may help in general (to combat the induced sloppiness) to do some kind of work where you are reliably negatively reinforced for being wrong or sloppy. Studying mathematics and doing the exercises correctly can be useful. (Studying without exercises doesn't even work). Software development, also. This will build a skill of what to do not to be sloppy, but won't necessarily transfer onto moral reasoning, for skill to transfer something else may be needed.
Consider the sunk cost issue. Suppose that you spent years working on a project that is heading nowhere, the effort was wasted, and there's a logical way to see that it is wasted effort. Any time your thought wavers in the direction of understanding that the effort was wasted, you get stab of negative emotions - particular hormones are released into bloodstream, particular pathways activate - and that is negative reinforcement for everything you've been doing including the use of mental framework that did lead you to that thought.
Solution: have a community where you can gain respect and status by having successfully noticed and avoided sunk cost reasoning. LW isn`t the best possible example of such a community, but a lot of the exercises done at, say, the summer minicamps in San Francisco were subsets of "get positive reinforcement for noticing Irrational Thought Pattern X in yourself, when normally various kinds of cognitive dissonance would make it tempting to sort of vaguely not notice it."
Morals are significantly restrictive and influence personal pleasure (to the point that thinking about your own action produces guilt, a pain-like feeling, and the morals stand in the way of getting what you want).
Subsequently the thought is subject to reward/punishment conditioning.
If you rationalize why you should have more cake than the other, you get cake, which is reward, if you think too clearly about your ill-doings, you are hurt by feeling of guilt; if you engage in particular form of thought whereby you do not ensure correctness of the reasoning and do not note the ways how your argument may fail (implicit assumptions etc) you can easily rationalize away the things you did wrong.
Basically, you are being conditioned to feel good about bad approach to reasoning - where you make huge jumps, where you don't note the assumptions you make, where you just make invalid assumption, where you don't search for faults, etc., and feel bad about good approach to reasoning. Your very thought process is being trained to be sloppy and broken, with only very superficial resemblance to the logic - only sufficient resemblance that the guilt circuit won't be triggered.
There is some minor conditioning from the situations where you received some external punishment or reward, but those are too uncommon and too inconsistent, and the reward/punishment is too delayed, and at the very best those would condition mere avoidance of being caught.
Basically, you are being conditioned to feel good about bad approach to reasoning - where you make huge jumps, where you don't note the assumptions you make, where you just make invalid assumption, where you don't search for faults, etc., and feel bad about good approach to reasoning.
My initial response to this was "that seems completely untrue," so I decided to hunt for examples. I think you're right, because I was able to come up with an example of myself doing this, namely downloading music and movies for free from the Internet. I do consider this kind-of-vaguely-like-stealing, but the "kind-of-vaguely" part is a good indication that my thinking is deliberately fuzzy in this area.
When I think about it, I don't know why–I don't consume enough entertainment materials that paying for it would be a significant pull on my finances, and I'm hardly financially strapped. I think it's because the usual strong positive reinforcement I would get for knowing I was "doing the right thing" despite wanting Thing X really badly is outweighed by the knowledge that several of my friends would make fun of me for paying for stuff on iTunes. Which...if I think about it...is also a pretty selfish reason!
You may just have convinced me that I should start paying for my music and movies, as a way of training my moral thinking to be less "sloppy"!
I think this is about the best interprentation of it. Most comments here are too focused on the statistically common Male-on-Female rape. I think in between lies a significant reduction in the number of men with libido-control problems and so (giving lots of inteprentative room and not to offend feminists) women might actually be revealed as having an on-average more ravenous sexual apetite?
From what little I know of human neurology, male sex-stuffs are the basic things in the ancient parts of the brain that most any higher mammal share, while female sex-stuffs are much later and closer to our large frontal lobes. (This might be entirely incorrect, please correct me if I am.)
From what little I know of human neurology, male sex-stuffs are the basic things in the ancient parts of the brain that most any higher mammal share, while female sex-stuffs are much later and closer to our large frontal lobes. (This might be entirely incorrect, please correct me if I am.)
Based on my (also limited) understanding, I think it's partly correct. The brain circuits that create arousal in females are just about as ancient as in males, I think, but in males those circuits can be activated by pretty basic stimuli (i.e. looking at a human with boobs), whereas females may require a lot more complex, nuanced stuff, like emotional closeness–just looking at a naked, muscular guy won't suffice.
I have an impression that most of the explicit thinking about "morality" gets sabotaged by conditioning. The type of thought that allows you to eat the last piece of cake is associated with eating cake, the type of thought that leads to sense of guilt is associated with guilt.
Subsequently a great deal of self proclaimed systems of morality are produced in such a manner that they are much too ill defined to be used to determine the correct actions , and are only usable for rationalization (utilitarianisms, i am looking at you).
Meanwhile, there is an objective scale: how effective are the rules for peer to peer cooperation (intellectual and other); and for the most part the moralities we find entirely reprehensible are also least productive. There is no relativism in the jungle. No survival relativism, no moral relativism. And the morality as practiced gets produced by selection on this criteria.
If you want to know if you should transplant organs out of 1 healthy person who was doing routine check up, into 10 people who will otherwise die, against healthy person's will - well, the sort of societies who just cut up the healthy person and transplant end up with hardly anyone ever going to check ups. The answer is clear if you actually want the answer what you should do (when doing something for sake of everyone). Unfortunately, when people think of morality, what results is a product of lifelong history of conditioning that includes multiple small misdemeanors with associated rewards, and the guilt that resulted from thinking too clearly, and the pleasure that resulted from thinking sloppy and grand. People don't think along the lines of what is the best action; people think along the lines of what type of thought was most self serving, and the one where ends justify means is usually the most self serving (when coupled with rationalization).
Unfortunately, when people think of morality, what results is a product of lifelong history of conditioning that includes multiple small misdemeanors with associated rewards, and the guilt that resulted from thinking too clearly, and the pleasure that resulted from thinking sloppy and grand. People don't think along the lines of what is the best action; people think along the lines of what type of thought was most self serving, and the one where ends justify means is usually the most self serving (when coupled with rationalization).
Can you clarify this/give some concrete examples?
physical contact? karaoke? the outdoors? What does that have to do with rationality? Genuine progress requires Weirdtopia, not just Eutopia.
Physical contact and the outdoors, at least, pattern-match to me as something that a) are inherently enjoyable to the typical human brain, and b) that the stereotypical LessWrong member, a somewhat geeky male, doesn't already do a lot of. Low-hanging fruit, I guess–although I should beware of stereotypes and pattern-matching, because I'm probably mostly wrong.
physical contact? karaoke? the outdoors? What does that have to do with rationality?
It's not really any of my business, since I'm not a New Yorker, but I'd be inclined to ask the same question. I understand that you're trying to build a community... I just have no idea why.
I understand that you're trying to build a community... I just have no idea why.
Because being part of a community is something that, for most people, is just innately nice...and being in a community of people with particular values and habits makes most people better at living up to those values and building those habits.
One of the nice things about a community is being able to talk to a bunch of people who, although you may not know them personally, are not far from you in inferential distance and share much of the same jargon/vocabulary. Less Wrong has a very particular jargon, which isn't shared by other "skeptics" meetups, and the focus of discussion is slightly different: thinking accurately, making good decisions, and achieving goals, along with a bunch of Singularity memes...there is some overlap with other skeptics' meetups, but not totally.
There are already a ton of communities organized around religion, and it's been tempting for me in the past to go to church just because it provided a ready-made community of nice people who were already in the habit of being helpful to each other, singing together, etc. I don't know if the instinct to latch onto a community is stronger or weaker in myself than in the average LWer, but it would certainly be nice to have a possible community of people who actually shared my beliefs.
Law, as an area of practice, is made of Hidden Complexity of Wishes issues.
I read the example and my first instinct was to check whether it was actually an article on The Onion. But apparently it is not. (Cries.)
conveys new information
This is indeed key, thank you for putting it more concisely than I
Am I right that you would find specific praise, or praise on something that you genuinely didn't know whether you'd done well on, less annoying?
It varies. "Be specific" is usually better, but "be brief" is also often important to me. A slow break-down of specifics is important if I don't know how to improve. A brief summary is fine if I'm improving on my own and really just need to get more repetitions. These days I'm usually aware of which one I need, and can ask for it. Previously, I'd just get frustrated if I needed more specific advice, because communication is exhausting, and learning is exhausting, and the combination of the two sucked.
I damn well like getting points for effort–they're likely to be the only points I get for a while
I've found that it varies - if I have things down and just need to drill, I'll often be entirely content off in a corner repeating something mindlessly with minimal feedback (an occasionally "good effort, you will improve on this, don't worry" is very rewarding, but we're talking every 15-30 minutes)
Basically, I can enjoy drilling. I actually find it a ton of fun with most skills I've gotten good at - the skills I fail to improve are usually the ones where I don't enjoy drilling, and thus... don't drill. The assumption that just because I'm stuck repeating something a lot, I must need encouragement... tends to de-motivate me, because it says "hey, you're slow and abnormal and so I'm going to focus a lot on fixing you", which has a lot of bad connotations for me.
I strongly suspect your teaching style would not annoy me (or that you'd quickly adapt it around me), but a lot of people get stuck in the meme of "ALWAYS follow this script" and start completely ignoring body language cues that indicate a particular student DOESN'T do well with a certain script.
As an example: I hate, HATE the "positive - negative - positive" sandwich. It means I associate positive feedback with a lead-in to "something bad", and so any compliment is now a threat to me, a sign I did something else wrong. I also pattern-match fairly well, and once I figure out when it's a sandwich vs a genuine compliment, I'll get impatient to know why I was REALLY brought in to talk (i.e. what I did wrong).
Previously, I'd just get frustrated if I needed more specific advice, because communication is exhausting, and learning is exhausting, and the combination of the two sucked.
This sounds like a challenging situation. How were you able to move past this in order to be able to ask for more specific feedback when you needed it?
I've found that it varies - if I have things down and just need to drill, I'll often be entirely content off in a corner repeating something mindlessly with minimal feedback (an occasionally "good effort, you will improve on this, don't worry" is very rewarding, but we're talking every 15-30 minutes)
You are very lucky to be content in this kind of situation. I wish I could be more content.
The assumption that just because I'm stuck repeating something a lot, I must need encouragement... tends to de-motivate me, because it says "hey, you're slow and abnormal and so I'm going to focus a lot on fixing you", which has a lot of bad connotations for me.
I think I almost have a good connotation around this kind of situation. There are at least two areas (singing as a strong example, and competitive swimming as a weaker example) where I started out pretty awful. I could have compared myself to the people starting out at the same skill level as me...but that would have been pretty pointless. Other people who were as tone deaf as I was at age 11 just didn't try learning to sing. So I made my reference group the people who were doing solos in my choir. After a few years, I think most people actually forgot that they had originally considered me "slow and abnormal." I started to get the comment "well, obviously someone with your natural musical talent..." Ha. Right. But I did succeed in proving, to myself if not anyone else, that if I put myself into situations where I am "slow and abnormal" compared to everyone else, I will make much bigger improvements than if I stick with the activities where I'm already stronger than average.
Not only is it similar, the abilities in those areas are significantly correlated.
In order to use that ability, you have to realize it needs to be used. If someone is setting out to change their own mind, then they have already realized the need. If someone is being offered advice by others, they may or may not realize there is anything to change their mind about. It is this latter skill (noticing that there's something to change your mind about) that I'm distinguishing from the skill of changing your mind. They are not at all similar, nor is there any particular reason for them to be correlated.
Really? You don't think the sort of person why tries harder than average to actually change their mind more often will also try harder than average to examine various issues that they should change their mind about?
Oh, probably. I hear Luke has more real-life charisma... Though he kind of kills the "fosters a distrust of outside sources" with the amount he cites outside sources.
Quite a lot of charisma, but nothing near the level a cult leader would need to pull off a personality cult. (Although he could probably make up for this if he really wanted to by spending a few weeks reading up research on cult formation then applying it systematically as a 'how to' guide.)
Quite a lot of charisma, but nothing near the level a cult leader would need to pull off a personality cult. (Although he could probably make up for this if he really wanted to by spending a few weeks reading up research on cult formation then applying it systematically as a 'how to' guide.)
I would like to see Lukeprog post an article on that topic. It would be fascinating.
7 is the one I have the biggest problem with. The opposite of happiness is sadness, not boredom. Anyone who says otherwise fails at opposites, and should probably retake the first grade.
Yes, happiness and sadness are both sides of the same coin, as are love and hate, but they are sides that are as far away from each other as it is possible to be on that coin, and anything not on the coin isn't pertinent.
Opposites are not things with as few commonalities as possible. Black has more common with white than it does with ketchup, but that does not make black and ketchup opposites.
More relevantly, if you want to achieve happiness, achieving boredom constitutes failure, but achieving sadness constitutes an even greater failure. If advice that prioritizes avoidance of boredom with ample resources has anything going for it, it's that boredom is a more stable attractor than sadness.
This quote and its various derivatives constitute one of my pet peeves.
More relevantly, if you want to achieve happiness, achieving boredom constitutes failure, but achieving sadness constitutes an even greater failure. If advice that prioritizes avoidance of boredom with ample resources has anything going for it, it's that boredom is a more stable attractor than sadness.
This doesn't constitute a refutal, but when I'm in a state of boredom, and don't feel that I can achieve happiness right then and there, I will often seek something out to make me sad, or at least angsty. I think this is partly because my brain has a much greater tendency to get "stuck" in boredom than to get "stuck" in sadness... Something about the intensity of feeling sad makes it just more interesting than boredom, and I can pop out of it pretty easily. (I did meet someone who was surprised that I did this, since he found his brain had a greater tendency to get stuck in states of sadness that would become depression.)
On a more general note, whether or not happiness/sadness or happiness/boredom are opposites is based on how you define the word 'opposite', and I don't think it's necessarily pertinent to deciding which one is the 'greater enemy.' Sadness and boredom are both signals that something is wrong with your current situation and you need to start behaving differently to fix it. Sadness is probably the more urgent signal, in that it tells you something about your situation is actively deteriorating or has been permanently broken, whereas boredom is just a signal that things are okay currently but you should probably be exploring a wider range of options. I would like to be capable of experiencing both, because just like humans incapable of feeling pain are pretty dysfunctional, anyone incapable of either sadness or boredom would likely find all of their decisions affected by it. Shutting off the negative-emotion signals doesn't achieve happiness anymore than shutting off pain receptors instantaneously achieves pleasure.
This is really different -- changing your own mind is in no way similar to being open to someone else changing your mind, since somebody else trying to change your mind creates internal resistance in a way that changing your own mind does not.
Not only is it similar, the abilities in those areas are significantly correlated.
Agreed. Wanting to be "the kind of person who changes their mind" means that when you get into a situation of someone else trying to change your mind, and you notice that you're getting defensive and making excuses not to change your mind, the cognitive dissonance of not being the kind of person you want to be makes it more likely, at least some of the time, that you'll make yourself be open to changing your mind.
It may be worth sharing, anecdotally, that years ago my husband expressed annoyance with me over the fact that I only ever rubbed his back while he was doing dishes, and it made him feel much like how wedrifid describes.
This utterly bewildered me, so I agreed to pay attention to the behavior and see what was going on. Pretty quickly it became clear to me that this was absolutely true, for reasons I wasn't entirely clear on myself, although my working theory was it was the only time that I'd regularly walk past him while he was hunched over in that particular posture, which apparently served as a "give me a backrub" signal for me, for whatever reason.
My response to this was to start giving him random backrubs at other times, which solved the problem.
My point being that (a) being annoyed by this sort of behavior is not at all unique to wedrifid, and (b) whether the behavior pattern is intentional doesn't necessarily matter very much. (I don't mean to suggest that it doesn't matter to wedrifid; actually, they have made it somewhat clear that it's part of what they're objecting to.)
The main lesson I'm taking from your anecdote is "people are complicated, everyone is complicated in a different way, and for almost any action or behaviour X, there will be a person somewhere who finds it awful." It's hard to guess at the relative numbers without doing a poll, but I'm guessing there's a range of people who wouldn't care if their significant other used physical affection as a reward (or who would even like it, because "yay, more total physical affection!"), and there's a range of people who would find it mildly to extremely unpleasant.
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.
Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.
My wife, if pulling that kind of stunt, would quickly find that her affections were shunned and her thanks were met with clear contempt (after she was asked politely not to do that the first time). It is almost certainly not in her interests to produce a pavlovian association between her affections and attempts to control me against my wishes. My aversion to hostile takeover of internal motivations is much stronger than my desire for the affections of any particular individual.
This would be entirely different if I had made a prior agreement regarding shirts and hampers. Making it motivationally easier and more enjoyable to do things I am willing to do is to be encouraged.
What would you see as the difference between a) the story described, and b) a wife who kisses her husband because it makes her happy when he does helpful, nice things, of which putting laundry in the hamper is one, and her automatic response to this surge happiness is "thank you, you're an amazing man!" [kiss]? The latter includes most of the same actions on the part of the wife, and probably occurs in a lot of healthy relationships.
My aversion to hostile takeover of internal motivations is much stronger than my desire for the affections of any particular individual.
Are there some internal motivations that you are less protective of than others? For example, if someone tried to condition me to be less averse to harming people, I would have a pretty big reaction, because that particular internal motivation is sacrosanct to me. But preferences for levels of tidiness...meh. I barely consider that an internal motivation, and definitely not a facet of who I am...it's just a habit, and I don't really care about changing it in either direction.
Is the difference with you that you consider all of your motivations to be a sacrosanct part of who you are? Or just that you place a higher value on your autonomy, and being the one 100% entirely responsible for all of your decisions?
I was originally going to say I don't like excessive praise, but thinking about it, what I actually dislike are two things:
1) False praise. I really hate it when it's obvious someone is formatting EVERYTHING they say to match a script (the one that annoys me most is the "sandwich" model of praise-critique-praise. It's great for blows that need to be softened, but if you soften everything, then every mistake becomes equally trivialized).
2) Wasting my time. If the feedback boils down to "You did exactly as well as you did last time" then (a) I probably know this and (b) you can say approximately that without spending 2 minutes extolling my virtues. I'm usually impatient to get back to actually doing the activity. If I'm not impatient, it means I'm either seriously discouraged or don't value the activity at all - either way, unless it's my actual job, I'm unlikely to care about feedback at that point.
These apply to critiques even more-so than praise, but the style of "make everything 90% praise and act like mistakes are just this mild little thing" is a pattern I recognize very quickly, and find extremely discouraging, since it means I'm no longer receiving feedback that actually honestly represents how well I'm doing.
I also hate being given "points for effort" unless the person is correctly reinforcing "You'll probably need to repeat this drill 500 times before you have it down correctly, so be patient with yourself" (saying this when others are figuring it out in 5-10 drills is clearly lying, and will again seriously impact all feedback from that source >.>)
Well, it sounds like you're someone who, if you already know how you did on something, don't need people to shower on praise unless it conveys new information. Am I right that you would find specific praise, or praise on something that you genuinely didn't know whether you'd done well on, less annoying?
I also hate being given "points for effort" unless the person is correctly reinforcing "You'll probably need to repeat this drill 500 times before you have it down correctly, so be patient with yourself" (saying this when others are figuring it out in 5-10 drills is clearly lying, and will again seriously impact all feedback from that source.)
As someone who regularly takes more repetitions of a drill to learn a certain (physical) skill than the average person, I damn well like getting points for effort–they're likely to be the only points I get for a while, and I tend to get seriously discouraged watching other people learn stuff easily when I'm struggling with it. I agree that someone who says "be patient, everyone needs to do this 500 times to get it right", when that's not the case, is not being helpful...but a simple "good effort, you will improve on this, don't worry" is a) not lying, and b) helps with the discouragement factor.
More generally, a positive motivation often contains an implicit negative motivation -- a threat of not receiving the same reward next time. ("What pushes you forward, holds you back.")
Telling someone they are smart implies that the teacher has ability to judge smart and stupid students based on their work. So if tomorrow the work is not good enough, the same student could be judged as stupid. This could also happen if the student tries something new, where they obviously cannot have as good results as when they stick with what they already know well.
Telling someone they work hard avoids this danger somehow. Maybe because it contains an actionable advice what to next time to achieve the reward -- so it feels more under control, less threatening.
Maybe the secret is in finding a motivation that feels under control, but not too much to allow cheating. Maybe it's a moving target; I suspect that given enough time, some children in the experiment would find ways to appear working hard without doing the hard work.
Telling someone they work hard avoids this danger somehow. Maybe because it contains an actionable advice what to next time to achieve the reward -- so it feels more under control, less threatening.
Yeah, working hard is something that isn't associated with a fixed mindset in the same way that intelligence is. A lot of people see intelligence as something that you either have or you don't.
"I already know I'm doing it wrong! I just can't get my body to listen to my brain!
Any advice on getting one's body or one's student's body to be more cooperative?
Break complex movements down into lots of simple movements ("drills") and practice them individually, a lot...then string together the first two simple movements and practice that sequence a lot...then the first three in sequence...etc. Also, don't start by teaching/trying to learn the full complex movement in the first place–always start with the simplest possible subset, master that, and then worry about the next step.
Is this because of the "damn it, I know I made a mistake, you telling me I did doesn't help!" effect?
No, I react the same way whether I was previously aware of my mistake or not. I only experience that effect when I'm told to do something I am already doing.
A good thought experiment is that if I was making a type of mistake that I couldn't automatically tell I was making on my own, I would prefer it to be pointed out, even if not in a concise detailed fashion–the idea of not knowing that I'm making a mistake is kind of scary. What would your reaction be in that situation?
Pragmatically, we as humans, just barely over the threshold into sapient intelligence, make mistakes we're not aware of constantly. If we didn't, we wouldn't need a superintelligence to fix the world; we'd have already done it ourselves. So finding the concept scary seems kind of pointless.(Sort of like being hydrophobic about the water in one's own body.) However, I would, of course, rather be aware of my mistakes than not.
But none of this is really on the topic, which was that the listed reinforcements don't seem even remotely applicable to humans in a universal way.
So finding the concept scary seems kind of pointless. However, I would, of course, rather be aware of my mistakes than not.
My actions have impacts on others. In general, I prefer to help other people or at least not harm them–however, I may harm someone by mistake, and I really don't want this to happen. If I make a mistake once and I realize it–fine, hopefully no harm done, I won't do it again. If I make a mistake and I don't know about it, well, maybe no harm done that time in particular, but I'm likely to keep making this mistake over and over, and possibly the first time I'll find out is when there is harm done. I think that justifies finding it scary.
Well, my position is that doing things like asking how someone is doing so as to reinforce behavior rather than because you want to know the answer is ethically bad. I used the example of the friend to try to motivate and explain that position, but at some point if you are totally fine with that sort of behavior, I don't have very much to argue with. I think you're wrong to be fine with that, but I also don't think I can mount a convimcing argument to that effect. So you've pretty much reached the bottom of my thoughts on the matter, such as they are.
I'm curious about whether your reasons for considering this kind of behaviour "unethical" are consequentialist (i.e. a world where people do X is going to be worse overall than a world where no one does X) or deontological (there are certain behaviours, like lying or stealing, that are just bad no matter what world they take place in, and using social cues to manipulate other people is a behaviour that falls into that class.)
The reason you should ignore poor performance if you say "No, you're doing it wrong!" you are inadvertently punishing the effort. A better response to a mistake would be to reinforce the effort: "Good effort! You're almost there! Try once more.
I am probably unusual in this regard, but I think I would find both approaches equally aggravating. If someone points out that I've made a mistake, anything other than a concise detailing of exactly how what I did differs from what I was supposed to do, is just going to irritate me. Also, my brain tends to interpret being ignored as a signal that I'm doing correctly.
If someone points out that I've made a mistake, anything other than a concise detailing of exactly how what I did differs from what I was supposed to do, is just going to irritate me.
Is this because of the "damn it, I know I made a mistake, you telling me I did doesn't help!" effect? I get that too... A good thought experiment is that if I was making a type of mistake that I couldn't automatically tell I was making on my own, I would prefer it to be pointed out, even if not in a concise detailed fashion–the idea of not knowing that I'm making a mistake is kind of scary. What would your reaction be in that situation?
Well, I guess I'll tap out then. I'm not sure how to voice my position at this point.
Your position is that you have a certain emotional response to knowing someone is trying to modify your behaviour. My position is that I have a different emotional response. I can imagine myself having an emotional response like yours...I just don't. (Conversely, I can imagine someone experiencing jealousy in the context of a relationship, but romantic jealousy isn't something I really experience personally.) I don't think that makes either of us wrong.
I don't think I would be suspicious of him, as long as I agreed with the behaviours he was trying to reinforce.
Really? So say I tell you that all those times that I smiled at you and asked how you were doing were part of a long term plan to change the way you behave. The next day I smile and ask you how you're doing. Has my confession done nothing to change the way you think about my question?
I'm saying that things like smiles and friendly, concerned questions have a certain importance for us that is directly undermined by their being used for for the purposes of changing our behavior. I don't think using them this way is always bad, but it seems to me that people who generally treat people this way are people we tend not to like once we discover the nature of their kindness.
Like I said, thoughts experiments about "how would I feel if X happened" are not always accurate. However, when I try to simulate that situation in my head, I find that although I would probably think about his smile and question differently (and be more likely to respond with a joke along the lines of "trying to reinforce me again, huh?") I don't think I would like him less.
Anyway, I think I regularly use smiles and "how are you doing?" to change the way people behave...namely, to get strangers, i.e. coworkers at a new job, to start liking me more.
This seems to contradict the very powerful effect of learning from failure and corrective feedback. See http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/why-do-some-people-learn-faster-2/ for an accessible overview.
I'd conjecture this works better when someone can already perform the desired behavior and wants to form a habit, whereas learning from failure comes in when new information needs to be stored and reorganized.
I was about to reply "hmm, I wonder how you could reward someone for making an effort rather than just for succeeding, or reward them for noticing when they make a mistake." Then I read the article, and realized that that's basically what it talks about.
Yeah, failures are important. But the natural tendency, whether teaching others or trying to change our own behaviour, is to correct and criticize failures–which is basically negative reinforcement and trains people to stop trying because failing is so painful. The interesting new point in the article is that positively reinforcing for success, if done in a certain way (the "wow you're smart!" group of kids) can actually have the same effect as negatively reinforcing for failure.
That's a fair point: I may have been treating a conditional like a bi-conditional. I think my sense of the matter is this: if a friend told me that he spent a lot of our time together thinking through ways to positively reinforce some of my behaviors, even to my benefit, I would become very suspicious of him. I would feel that I'd been treated as a child or a dog. His behavior would seem to me to be manipulative and dishonest, and I think I would feel this way even if I agreed that the results of his actions were on the whole good and good for me.
Do you think this sort of reaction on my part would be misguided? Or am I on to something?
I don't think I would be suspicious of him, as long as I agreed with the behaviours he was trying to reinforce. (I don't know for sure–my reactions are based only on a thought experiment.) I think I would be grateful, both that he cared enough about me to put that much time and effort in, and that he considered me emotionally mature enough to tell me honestly what he was doing.
However, I do think that being aware of his deliberate reinforcement might make it less effective. Being reinforced for Behaviour A would feel less like "wow, the world likes it when I do A, I should do it more!" and more like "Person X wants me to do A", which is a bit less motivating.
Excellent point. I stand corrected.
I think you do have a valid point... However, in my experience, most instructors err way on the side of "too little praise" and don't have to worry about using it too much and lowering its effectiveness. And most humans I know have a brain setup where after hearing "good job on X" ten times, hearing it an eleventh time is still really reinforcing. So you'd have to really go to extremes to praise them too much...
I'm not sure a lot of praise is a good idea since that would lower its effectiveness as a reinforcer.
Well, a lot of non-specific praise would water down the value of non-specific praise as a reinforcer, but taking the time to pick out more specific elements that are good/improving would probably reduce discouragement.
I think one of the things I forget most as an instructor is how easy it is to get discouraged, especially when you're being taught by someone who seems to be able to do all of it effortlessly. There's also the element of "I already know I'm doing it wrong! I just can't get my body to listen to my brain!" Instructors who don't acknowledge this and give praise for trying or noticing that I'm doing it wrong are a major source of discouragement for any new physical skill I try to learn.
To help someone improve at dance or sport, ignore poor performance but reward good performance immediately, for example by shouting "Good!" (Buzas & Allyon 1981) The reason you should ignore poor performance if you say "No, you're doing it wrong!" you are inadvertently punishing the effort. A better response to a mistake would be to reinforce the effort: "Good effort! You're almost there! Try once more."
I got a demonstration of how true this is yesterday when, during my taekwondo class, I was paired up with one of the senior black belt students, who has some but not a lot of experience teaching. He was supposed to be fixing up my poomsae (same thing as a kata in karate) and each time he watched me do it, I would finish and he would immediately launch into a description of what I was doing wrong. His feedback was pretty useful–specific, with demonstrations of exactly what to change in order to do it right–but without any prelude of "yay, good job!" or even "okay, the punches were way better that time...now let's work on the stances", I found myself getting really discouraged. Reminding myself that I wasn't actually doing worse than usual, that he just had a different teaching style, helped a little... But my subconscious brain still decided to feel resentful and unenthusiastic, no matter how counterproductive that might be towards my actual goal of improving my poomsae.
As a swimming instructor, I do make sure to dole out a LOT of praise, but I'm wondering if I should push it even further...
Oddly enough, there are some people who aren't particularly interested in learning or becoming stronger. Would your preferred radical change sit well with them?
I wasn't claiming that the future should be scary and different because of my personal preference...any more than Alicorn was claiming that her personal preference for no surprises should determine the future for everybody. I was really just pointing out that although I agree with Alicorn on a lot of things, this is a particular area where we are different, probably more because of personality than values.
I guess this was more my point: there's a wide variance in terms of human preferences for novelty vs familiarity, and I'm far from the novelty extreme. Any future that doesn't take that into account is going to make someone unhappy–well, either overwhelmed and terrified or really bored, depending on which side of the continuum that future ends up on. But given that even in today's world, it's possible for at least some people to choose the level of risk/novelty/scariness they want in life, hopefully it shouldn't be too hard to tailor a eutopia in that sense, either.
27 and 28 are useful tools for fiction and interesting thought exercises, but it is not how we build houses (mine is right-side-up and has its plumbing in its bathrooms rather than on the roof, thank you). It may not be how we should build eutopias in which we hope to actually live. I like comfort. I expect culture to change radically - the way cultures do when time passes and/or things change - once everyone has settled into transhumanity, but the form that transhumanity takes needn't itself be frightening, and trying to design this in sounds like a bad idea.
I think the point of including those 2 laws was that most people are made uncomfortable by almost all radical changes, in culture or in anything else...and the few radical changes that they think are obviously a good idea probably don't align with other people's sensibilities. But put them in that radically changed (but in some way truly better) culture, and they'll adapt and stop finding it scary/weird/disturbing/etc.
(On another note: this must be a place where our personalities/outlooks differ, because I find the idea of an initially-scary Eutopia kind of...well, exciting and appealing. It sounds like a situation where I would learn something and where I would become stronger, and I have a lot of warm fuzzies towards those concepts.)
Well, how would you answer my hypothetical?
if I was starting from zero rather than replacing them, I wouldn't mind ending up with a fully simulated social circle so long as it was similarly engaging / persistent / etc.
And suppose I rephrased it thus: your friend needs help say, getting through a painful divorce, and you knew that this will be a difficult process taking many years. But you also know that if you put yourself in an experience machine for the rest of your life, you could soothe your (virtual) friend's wounded soul in half an hour. Supposing the move to the experience machine doesn't interfere with any of your other plans (they could be simulated too, of course), would you consider the experience machine simply a more efficient means to your end? Or would it fail to achieve your end at all?
I would consider my goal not accomplished at all...it seems to be one of the basic tenets of my value system that other people exist and one other person is just as valuable as me, therefore one of my responsibilities in life is to help other people. I am very, very leery of futures where I would end up in a virtual world–if they're simulated deeply enough to be sentient beings, I would care about them as well, but I would be abandoning any chances of influencing the fate of everyone else.
I think maybe I could justify it to myself if I knew in advance, and could prove to myself, that everyone else was also ending up in a virtual world where they would be even happier... But the idea still makes me uncomfortable. I think it seems like 'cheating at life', somehow, taking the easy road out. Although that's probably a random emotional prejudice more than a logical objection.
Intestinal bacteria have an effect on the nervous system: they affect how we think and how we feel and how our mind develops. This is pretty recent science written by scientists about the function of our mind (or murine minds, at least). That makes it an interesting rationality quote, in my opinion.
Really? If true, then that is fascinating... Can you link to any of the recent research, though?
This is awesome. I want more articles like this. I want to read an article like this every day until every trip to the pharmacy or grocery store makes me feel full of intimate and arcane knowledge, and every aspect of my life is 10% more fulfilling.
A followup question I'd be interested in: if I bought an electric toothbrush, I would (a) have trouble bringing it during travels (I am traveling maybe two months out of the year), and (b) when my roommates' electric brushes are plugged in, I often bump into them which I both dislike and am concerned about the effects on their cleanliness.
However, whatever the results in this case, I personally already have an extremely low rate of cavities (on the order of .05/year) and so am probably less interested in paying more for dental care than average; changes in habits should have orders of magnitude lower expected value for me. Which is to say that if nobody else cares about these questions, it's fine if they go unanswered.
I've had 1 cavity in my life that had to be filled (yeah, adds up to 0.05/year). However, it probably depends on factors like mineral composition of teeth, which could be genetic, as well as lifestyle factors like Coke/soft drink consumption, etc.
It certainly could be - I read the anecdote from a book I picked idly off a shelf in a bookstore, and I retained the vague impression that it was from a book about the importance of social factors and the effects of technology on our social/psychological development, but I could have been conflating it with another such book. After reading an excerpt from "The Boy who was Raised as a Dog", the style matches, so that probably was the one I read. Would you recommend it?
Yes yes yes! An awesome book!
I heard a horror story (anecdote from a book, for what it's worth) of a child basically raised in front of a TV, who learned from it both language and a general rule that the world (and social interaction) is non-interactive. If you could get his attention, he'd cheerfully recite some memorized lines then zone out.
Was the book "The boy who was raised as a dog?" Because I remember reading the same story in that book.
Similarly, Cryogenics is the science of keeping things really cold. And of course Cryonics is a form of that. But saying "Cryogenics" when you really mean exactly Cryonics is an incredibly harmful practice which actual Cryonicists generally avoid. Most people who work in Cryogenics have nothing to do with Cryonics, and this kind of confusion in popular culture has apparently engendered animosity towards Cryonics among Cryogenics specialists.
I wouldn't so much call that "inflationary". I'd usually call that a typographical error! ie. The speaker is usually intending to use the label of the corpsicle specific practice and just said it wrong.
Agreed. I didn't know there was a difference until I was 17-18 (possibly because a couple of novels in which I encountered it misused the term.)
Really? Got any examples?
I've read some in which the transhuman technologies were ambiguous (had upsides and downsides), but I can't think of any where it was just better, the way that actual technologies often are---would any of us willingly go back to the days before electricity and running water?
I've read some in which the transhuman technologies were ambiguous (had upsides and downsides), but I can't think of any where it was just better, the way that actual technologies often are---would any of us willingly go back to the days before electricity and running water?
Having upsides and downsides isn't the same thing as being ambiguous. Running water and electricity do have downsides–namely, depletion of water tables due to overuse, and pollution, resource depletion, and possibly global warming due in part to the efforts required to make electricity...But I wouldn't say that either technology is ambiguous. The advantages pretty clearly outweigh the disadvantages, which are avoidable with some thought and creativity.
Do you have tips for Recalling what it was like before you understood?
Find a way to do the activity in a way that negates your previous knowledge and training.
For example, when I used to teach hooping, if I wanted to remember what it was like to try doing a move that you don't already "have", I would do it in my non-dominant direction. It would feel completely awkward, and I would catch myself making all the mistakes that first-timers to that move make, since I hadn't already trained it into muscle memory. Then when I taught a class, I would be prepared with what mistakes to look for, and already thought of ways to explain how to correct it.
As another example, in a Math Education course I took, they taught us how to do basic arithmetic in different bases (i.e. binary or hexxadecimal) in order to get rid of our intuitive understanding of those operations. That way, we could learn and explain it from a fundamental level, and we would remember how difficult it was at first, to learn.
It would feel completely awkward, and I would catch myself making all the mistakes that first-timers to that move make, since I hadn't already trained it into muscle memory.
This is an awesome strategy!
One of the things I do to figure out how people can do stuff wrong (i.e. in swimming, which isn't something you can try doing in your non-dominant direction) is to break down the motion into tiny parts and do that tiny part while watching them, to figure out if that tiny part is the one they're getting wrong.
I also do a lot of trial and error, because sometimes someone's stroke will look intuitively wrong to me in a way I can't really explain to myself, so I make a guess, teach them how to correct that, and then watch again and see if my intuition is any happier with it.
I strongly prefer wheat to rice, and rice to corn (also, white wheat to whole wheat). I enjoy the bread I bake enough to eat until I physically can't store more food in my stomach. When I bake bread with 75% wheat and 25% amaranth, it tastes noticeably worse (which I can tell because I eat what I cut and don't try to eat it all).
From personal experience, I can say that wheat is a) very addictive for me (I am much more likely to pig out on large quantities, to get cravings for the texture and flavour of wheat-based products, etc), and b) is definitely bad for me. I lack the willpower to cut it out entirely; it's quite inconvenient trying to get enough calories to sustain my very active lifestyle without wheat, especially while trying to save money by not eating much meat, and it's nearly impossible to eat out cheaply 'on the fly' wheat-free. I spend most of my life being a bit bloated and having intermittent diarrhea.
Based on anecdotal evidence from family members and friends, a lot of people feel better when they cut wheat out of their diet, even if they didn't realize it was causing problems beforehand. This may not be everyone, though...if you really feel fine, then you're most likely fine with it.
The main thing that worries me about your stated diet is protein intake. Unless you supplement with a lot of eggs and dairy, grains contain incomplete protein, i.e. not enough of certain essential amino acids, which means that your body can't use the amino acids to build tissue proteins at all and just breaks them down for energy. Do you eat any beans, nuts, etc? Legumes combined with grain create complete protein, not quite as high-quality as meat sources, but almost. And beans are cheap, and come with the added benefit of high fibre.
School essay: outsourcing some brain work
I'm currently writing an essay for one of my classes, 'Theoretical Foundations of Nursing.' I'm about the most 'gong-si' class I've ever taken. (That is a Chinese term for 'shit talking,' which is my boyfriend's favourite term for any field that gets into arguments over definitions, has concepts that don't correspond to any empirical phenomena, is based on ideology, etc.)
The essay involves analyzing a clinical situation (in this case a 55-year-old recently divorced, recently unemployed man, admitted to the psychiatric ward with major depression and suicidal ideation) using a theory (in this case, Roy's Adaptation Model). Done. The next step involves finding criticisms with the model...and despite the fact that I've been complaining about this class and its non-empirical nature all semester, I seem unable to come up with specific criticisms of what this nursing theory is missing.
Which is what I need your help for, because LessWrong is the best community ever when it comes to specific criticisms.
Here is a very brief overview of Roy's Adaptation Theory:
- Defines 'health' as 'state or process of becoming integrated with the environment, in the domains of survival, growth, reproduction, mastery, and personal/environmental transformation.'
- Defines a 'person' as an 'adaptive system with coping processes.' Goes on to subdivide this a bit: there are 'regulator mechanisms' (i.e. innate, not consciously controlled) and 'cognitive mechanisms' of adaptation within four different modes: physiological, role function, interdependence, and self-concept.
- Defines environment as 'all conditions, circumstances, and influences that affect the development and behavior of individuals and groups.' Further subdivides environmental stimuli into focal (which demand the person to immediately adapt), contextual (which affect how they adapt), and residual (i.e. attitudes, beliefs).
- The nurse's goal is to manipulate stimuli to improve the person's level of adaptation, as well as teaching more effective coping methods.
- The steps in the process of creating a care plan are: assessment of behavior, assessment of stimuli, choosing a nursing diagnosis from this huge lookup table, setting a goal, choosing an intervention, and evaluation the results.
Now my question is, what is a specific criticism I can make of this particular theory in general...not "your definitions aren't specific enough" or "the whole field of nursing theory isn't reductionist enough", but something that this kind of theory should have but doesn't. Any ideas?
Emotional regulation Part II: research summary
Abstract: Emotional regulation is a topic currently being studied in the field of psychology. Five different types of emotional regulation strategies have been identified, distinguished by the stage of the emotion-response process in which they occur. To drastically simplify, this strategies are: situation selection, situation modification, deployment of attention, changes in cognition, and modulation of responses.
Introduction
This is a follow-up to my previous post about my problem with emotional regulation. This is also my first outside-of-the-classroom foray into scholarship, lukeprog style. Mainly what I found is that it’s surprisingly time-consuming and frustrating. I suffered a lot of akrasia, compared to my usual, while writing this post–mainly because I kept thinking ‘oh my god, and then I have to cite my sources!’ This may be an area where I need more practice...
What is emotion anyway?
Apparently there are quite a lot of competing definitions for ‘emotion’. Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising–the concept of emotion seem simple because most of the processing happens below conscious awareness, but emotions are as complex as the brains that create them.
The definition that most research in emotional regulation uses is the ‘response tendency’ definition: emotions are adaptive behavioral and/or physiological responses, and they happen when the organism is put in evolutionarily significant situations. The internal experience of emotion may lead to a particular behaviour, but may not: emotion is a feedback mechanism that leads to various behaviours, rather than the direct cause of behaviour. Recent research has covered the specific purposes that emotions accomplish. They can facilitate decision-making, prepare the individual for a fast response to a given situation, inform on the match between organism and environment, and serve a social function; in general, they allow for learning. Emotional responses are not set in stone, and can be modulated on the way to taking their final shape. (Gross, 1988).
What does this mean for me, personally? One, emotions exist for a reason. They are adaptive, and attempting to turn mine off entirely or prevent them from affecting my decisions would likely not be adaptive. Two, emotions are triggered by ‘evolutionary significant’ situations. To take a wild guess on what that might mean, being in a situation that involved competition against people who were much, much better than you might have had severe consequences in the ancestral environment...and even if not, for most of human history survival was more important than fun, and that would mean focusing on activities where you were likely to succeed, rather than those you liked. My emotional response may be trying to inform me that the match between my organism and the environment is less than ideal–or would have been if I were living 50 000 years ago.
Emotional Regulation
According to the people who study it, emotional regulation is what happens when people try to increase, decrease, or maintain their emotions, whether positive or negative. (For once, this seems like a pretty straightforward definition.) People may try to change the kind of emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them.
“The available evidence does not support the existence of discrete emotional states. Instead, emotional responding appears to be organized in terms of a few fundamental dimensions, including valence, arousal, and approach-avoidance. The influence of emotion regulation on people’s emotional states is therefore likely to be similarly dimensional. In other words, "emotion regulation may not be so much concerned with getting people in or out of discrete emotional states like anger, sadness, or joy. Rather, emotion regulation may change people’s emotional states along dimensions such as valence, arousal, and approach-avoidance.” (Koole, 2009).
The study of emotion regulation isn’t new. Freud studied it in the form of ego defenses, which he saw as non-conscious processes that could, depending on the specific method used, result in reality distortion, excess energy consumption, and unnecessary non-gratification–to him, these forms of emotional regulation were maladaptive. (Gross, 1998).
More recently the study of coping has focused on emotional regulation from the point of view of conscious, deliberate, and adaptive processes. These can be based on fixing the underlying problem, i.e. problem-focused coping, or on reducing the negative emotions without changing the physical reality, i.e. emotion-focused coping. In general, emotion-focused coping is less effective and more likely to be associated with psychological distress. (Watson & Sinha, 2008). According to more recent research, emotional regulation processes “may be automatic or controlled, conscious or unconscious, and may have their effects at one or more points in the emotion generative process.” (Gross, 1998).
An individual’s skill at emotional regulation must also be distinguished from their innate emotional sensitivity, which affects how much and how quickly they respond to an emotion-causing stimulus. In theory, Person A could be very sensitive, and experience a swift rush of negative emotions in response to an upsetting stimulus, but still be able to down-regulate the feelings afterwards, whereas Person B responds less quickly and steeply but lacks the skill to redirect the emotions they do experience. And whereas emotional sensitivity correlates with temperament differences in infants, and seems to develop independently of environmental influences, skill in emotional regulation develops and changes based on the quality of children’s social interactions, and can continue to improve throughout life. (Koole, 2009).
Different strategies of emotional regulation can be classified by whether they are consciously controlled or automatic–however, since conscious control is a complex and hard-to-define concept in itself, it may be more useful to classify strategies by when they occur during the emotional response process.
- Selection of situation: occurs before the stimulus that causes the emotion.
- Modification of situation: occurs after the stimulus, but before the emotional response begins.
- Deployment of attention: occurs during the emotional response process.
- Change in cognition: occurs during the emotional response process.
- Modulation of responses: occurs after the emotional response process. (Gross, 1998).
Methods #1 and #2, situation selection and modification, require a certain degree of self-knowledge, in order to decide which situations to seek out and which to avoid. There can be a conflict here between long term and short-term goals–for example, a timid person can reduce their anxiety by avoiding social situations, but in the long run this can lead to undesirable social isolation. To further complicate things, the emotional response itself can back-propagate and modify the situation–witness my taekwondo instructor’s response to my freak-outs.
Deployment of attention has three sub-categories: distraction, concentration, and rumination. Distraction involves focusing attention onto neutral or non-emotional aspects of the situation, or shifting attention from difficult to tractable goals. Concentration involves focusing further on the situation, trying to enter a state of flow in order to avoid frustration. In rumination, attention is directed onto the feelings themselves, analyzing them. Wadlinger and Isaacowitz (2011) suggest that attention can be trained in order to better develop emotional regulation skills. Skill at directing and controlling attention is partly an innate trait, but studies indicate that attentional skills are also plastic and can improve with practice. For example, low mood can be improved with (gaze-based) training, which creates a bias towards looking at positive stimuli, such as happy instead of angry faces,
The fourth category, change in cognition, happens during the step where perceptions of the situation are given an emotional weight. The perceived capacity to manage or control a situation affects the emotions assigned to it. Classical Freudian defenses include denial, isolation, and intellectualization of the situation. Events can also be reinterpreted in a more positive light–for example, downward social comparison, or a goal being reframed so that failure at the initial goal becomes a success according to the new goal. According to studies, this kind of reappraisal has a larger effect in complex than in simple situations. Factors that affect reappraisal include attribution of an event to self versus others, beliefs about the controllability of the event, accountability, expectations, and implicit personal theories of how emotion works. (Koole, 2009).
The last category, response modulation, does not affect the internal emotional experience at all, but only the expression of it. Examples given by the author include various medications such as anxiolytics, exercise, relaxation therapy, and self-soothing with alcohol, cigarettes, other drugs, or food, as well as simply initiating or hiding the expression of a given emotion. (Gross, 1998).
How does this help me?
Well, for one, it gives me a good idea of which techniques I’ve already tried, and which ones I might try next.
1. Situation selection. To start with #1, I have used situation selection in the past, mainly when I decided to quit swimming to avoid pre-race meltdowns. That worked in the short term; when I wasn’t putting myself under that much competitive pressure anymore, I had no reason to freak out, and my general stress levels dropped as well. But #1 is a method I would prefer to use sparingly, if at all; it seems that it would seriously limit my future prospects, and running away from the things that scare me doesn’t really fit with the mindset of wanting to be stronger.
If anything, finding something challenging or even scary causes me to be even more motivated to keep doing it until I don’t find it scary anymore. (I think the thought process goes something like ‘life could through you into a situation where you need this skill at any moment, and wouldn’t it be way less stressful if you’d already been practicing it?’
2. Situation modification. Is there any way that, without quitting taekwondo entirely, I could find a way to pick and choose what I do in class, avoiding the things that I know will make me upset? I can’t think of any specific examples of how I could do this, except for making up excuses not to do particular exercises that I’m bad at and that frustrate me. (I have an actual excuse not to do frog jumps–bad knees–but I think the fact that I can’t do it makes me more frustrated than if I went ahead and did them, because it makes me feel like I’m not as good as the others.)
I can think of other situations where I’ve used this technique to calm myself down, though. Recently, at our university’s Social Sciences Ball, I wasn’t having that much fun and I was running out of what little steam I’d had to begin with by 11 pm. I was very upset to learn that the bus to take us back to campus, which I’d thought would come at 11:30 pm, actually would come at 12:30 pm. (My stamina for social events lasts about 3 hours, and if I can’t remove myself from the situation at that point, I start feeling some strange equivalent of claustrophobia, and will probably start crying if I can't get away.) Over my boyfriend’s protests of ‘it’ll look bad on me if you leave by yourself now!’ I resourcefully texted my brother and got him to look up the bus schedule online. It didn’t end up working as planned, but having the feeling of control restored calmed me down a lot, and when it turned out that the bus schedule was wrong, I came back to the party and went on enjoying myself like nothing had happened.
This tells me that anytime my stress is due to feeling like I’m not in control, and there’s some proactive ‘taking-control’ move that I can execute, it’s probably worth it even if it doesn’t change my actual situation much–it’ll still have a huge effect on my emotional state, which in some cases is more important than the situation causing it.
3. Deployment of attention: distraction, concentration, and rumination. If I think about it, distraction is exactly what I do when I have a compelling stimulus available to distract myself with. This is more likely to be when I’m alone, and that might well be the reason why meltdowns aren’t a problem when I’m alone. (One reason. Lack of social pressure is probably another.) If I’m in public, and I’m about to burst into tears, I’ll tell myself ‘okay, start thinking about one of your stories, now!’ But if someone tries to talk to me, especially if the subject of conversation is the same as what’s frustrating me, my attempts at self-distraction get derailed fast. Conclusion: I could probably make this a useful method, but I need to come up with better distractions.
Concentration, getting into a flow state, is a promising method, but likely it’s something I would have to start doing before I became frustrated at all. Certainly sparring in taekwondo is complex enough to occupy someone’s full attention, leaving behind no excess processing power for frustration. Correction: this is the case for someone who knows what they’re doing. As a beginner, my inability to plan strategy fast enough to use it in real time means that I don’t normally plan my strategy at all while fighting. That means a lot of space left over for frustration-inadequacy-failure thought chains. The implication: as I do get good enough to plan in real time, and coordinated enough to enjoy the moment-to-moment satisfaction of pushing myself hard (like I do while swimming), frustration won’t be so much of a problem.
Rumination is a strategy I’ve definitely used before, but I’m not at all sure that it’s an effective strategy in this context. In an exception to the general rule that thinking about my emotions dulls them, thinking about frustration and what’s causing it leads to an explosive feedback loop. However, I might find it desirable to use this method when I’m alone, in order to track down and list all the thoughts and emotions that occur, as user: aelephant suggested in this comment.
4. Changes in cognition. This step of the process, where the emotion itself actually happens, seems like a productive place to start. The ‘downwards social comparison’ method could be translated into ‘comparing myself to people who’re the same belt level as me, instead of comparing myself to the black belts,’ or at the very least persuading myself that not being as good as the black belts isn’t a reason to get frustrated.
Reappraising a situation in a more positive light, or reframing your goal so that your actual results count as success rather than failure, also seems promising–especially because often, when in the process of reappraising a goal, I realize that it wasn’t even my real goal. Back when I was 14 and competing in swimming, ‘win lots of races’ and even ‘go to the Olympics someway’ were explicit goals, even if I didn’t want to admit it to friends and family.
But I didn’t start taekwondo intending to ‘win lots of tournaments’. That wasn’t even something I thought about at all. My goals were, approximately, ‘become fitter and more flexible, learn some self defense in case anyone ever tries to rape me when I’m out late at night, and anyway martial arts are cool so I’ll acquire coolness just by showing up.’ The fact that I turned out to have really awful reaction times, making it hard for me to win at sparring, doesn’t equate to a failure at any of these goals–but the goal of ‘beat other people in sparring’ sneaked in there somewhere, probably because it’s easier to measure than my original goals, and then starting causing me frustration when I failed to achieve it.
6. Response Modulation. I do the simplest form of this a lot–the iron-jaw, stare-into-space-and-don’t-cry approach does work a significant portion of the time to keep anyone from noticing until the emotions subside on their own. But that’s if no one tries to talk to me.
As for the subtler methods, I already use exercise as a mood regulator, and frequently candy or baked goods to cheer myself up, and/or addictive books and shows. (Telling myself “if you get through this, you can watch 30 minutes worth of Rescue 911 episodes on Youtube” is a significant cheer-up factor.) But most of those methods aren’t available to me on the spot when I’m actually in a taekwondo class and starting to get upset.
Conclusion
My miniature foray into scholarship has allowed me to make a list of methods that humans use to regulate emotions. Methods that look promising include: finding ways to change the situation so that I feel in control; distracting myself from upsetting situations; trying to get into a state of concentration or flow; and reevaluating my goals to be realistic or achievable.
My plan for the future: try to think of specific ways I could use this methods, i.e. a particularly compelling chain of thought that I could use as a distraction, and then try all of them out and compare. I plan to show part or all of this article to at least one of my instructors, too, so that they have an idea of what I’m working on, and can help me a little.
Note #1: I did get feedback from juliawise on my first post, suggesting that I investigate cognitive behavioural therapy and dialectical behaviour therapy. I think this article is long enough, though, so if I do investigate it, it’ll go in a separate post. Don’t worry, juliawise, it was good advice and I’m not ignoring it.
Note #2: If anyone wants to see the articles in my reference list, I can't post links because I accessed them through my school account, but I have the PDFs saved and I can email them to you.
References
Sander L. Koole. (2009). The psychology of emotion regulation: an integrative review. Cognition and Emotion, 23 (1), 4_41
James J. Gross. (1998). The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review. Review of General Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 5,271-299
Watson David C., Sinha, Birenda. (2008). Emotion Regulation, Coping, and Psychological Symptoms. International Journal of Stress Management, Vol. 15, No. 3, 222–234
Wadlinger, Heather A., Isaacowitz, Derek M. (2011). Fixing Our Focus: Training Attention to Regulate Emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review,15(1) 75–102
Emotional regulation Part II: research summary
Abstract: Emotional regulation is a topic currently being studied in the field of psychology. Five different types of emotional regulation strategies have been identified, distinguished by the stage of the emotion-response process in which they occur. To drastically simplify, this strategies are: situation selection, situation modification, deployment of attention, changes in cognition, and modulation of responses.
Introduction
This is a follow-up to my previous post about my problem with emotional regulation. This is also my first outside-of-the-classroom foray into scholarship, lukeprog style. Mainly what I found is that it’s surprisingly time-consuming and frustrating. I suffered a lot of akrasia, compared to my usual, while writing this post–mainly because I kept thinking ‘oh my god, and then I have to cite my sources!’ This may be an area where I need more practice...
What is emotion anyway?
Apparently there are quite a lot of competing definitions for ‘emotion’. Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising–the concept of emotion seem simple because most of the processing happens below conscious awareness, but emotions are as complex as the brains that create them.
The definition that most research in emotional regulation uses is the ‘response tendency’ definition: emotions are adaptive behavioral and/or physiological responses, and they happen when the organism is put in evolutionarily significant situations. The internal experience of emotion may lead to a particular behaviour, but may not: emotion is a feedback mechanism that leads to various behaviours, rather than the direct cause of behaviour. Recent research has covered the specific purposes that emotions accomplish. They can facilitate decision-making, prepare the individual for a fast response to a given situation, inform on the match between organism and environment, and serve a social function; in general, they allow for learning. Emotional responses are not set in stone, and can be modulated on the way to taking their final shape. (Gross, 1988).
What does this mean for me, personally? One, emotions exist for a reason. They are adaptive, and attempting to turn mine off entirely or prevent them from affecting my decisions would likely not be adaptive. Two, emotions are triggered by ‘evolutionary significant’ situations. To take a wild guess on what that might mean, being in a situation that involved competition against people who were much, much better than you might have had severe consequences in the ancestral environment...and even if not, for most of human history survival was more important than fun, and that would mean focusing on activities where you were likely to succeed, rather than those you liked. My emotional response may be trying to inform me that the match between my organism and the environment is less than ideal–or would have been if I were living 50 000 years ago.
Emotional Regulation
According to the people who study it, emotional regulation is what happens when people try to increase, decrease, or maintain their emotions, whether positive or negative. (For once, this seems like a pretty straightforward definition.) People may try to change the kind of emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them.
“The available evidence does not support the existence of discrete emotional states. Instead, emotional responding appears to be organized in terms of a few fundamental dimensions, including valence, arousal, and approach-avoidance. The influence of emotion regulation on people’s emotional states is therefore likely to be similarly dimensional. In other words, "emotion regulation may not be so much concerned with getting people in or out of discrete emotional states like anger, sadness, or joy. Rather, emotion regulation may change people’s emotional states along dimensions such as valence, arousal, and approach-avoidance.” (Koole, 2009).
The study of emotion regulation isn’t new. Freud studied it in the form of ego defenses, which he saw as non-conscious processes that could, depending on the specific method used, result in reality distortion, excess energy consumption, and unnecessary non-gratification–to him, these forms of emotional regulation were maladaptive. (Gross, 1998).
More recently the study of coping has focused on emotional regulation from the point of view of conscious, deliberate, and adaptive processes. These can be based on fixing the underlying problem, i.e. problem-focused coping, or on reducing the negative emotions without changing the physical reality, i.e. emotion-focused coping. In general, emotion-focused coping is less effective and more likely to be associated with psychological distress. (Watson & Sinha, 2008). According to more recent research, emotional regulation processes “may be automatic or controlled, conscious or unconscious, and may have their effects at one or more points in the emotion generative process.” (Gross, 1998).
An individual’s skill at emotional regulation must also be distinguished from their innate emotional sensitivity, which affects how much and how quickly they respond to an emotion-causing stimulus. In theory, Person A could be very sensitive, and experience a swift rush of negative emotions in response to an upsetting stimulus, but still be able to down-regulate the feelings afterwards, whereas Person B responds less quickly and steeply but lacks the skill to redirect the emotions they do experience. And whereas emotional sensitivity correlates with temperament differences in infants, and seems to develop independently of environmental influences, skill in emotional regulation develops and changes based on the quality of children’s social interactions, and can continue to improve throughout life. (Koole, 2009).
Different strategies of emotional regulation can be classified by whether they are consciously controlled or automatic–however, since conscious control is a complex and hard-to-define concept in itself, it may be more useful to classify strategies by when they occur during the emotional response process.
- Selection of situation: occurs before the stimulus that causes the emotion.
- Modification of situation: occurs after the stimulus, but before the emotional response begins.
- Deployment of attention: occurs during the emotional response process.
- Change in cognition: occurs during the emotional response process.
- Modulation of responses: occurs after the emotional response process. (Gross, 1998).
Methods #1 and #2, situation selection and modification, require a certain degree of self-knowledge, in order to decide which situations to seek out and which to avoid. There can be a conflict here between long term and short-term goals–for example, a timid person can reduce their anxiety by avoiding social situations, but in the long run this can lead to undesirable social isolation. To further complicate things, the emotional response itself can back-propagate and modify the situation–witness my taekwondo instructor’s response to my freak-outs.
Deployment of attention has three sub-categories: distraction, concentration, and rumination. Distraction involves focusing attention onto neutral or non-emotional aspects of the situation, or shifting attention from difficult to tractable goals. Concentration involves focusing further on the situation, trying to enter a state of flow in order to avoid frustration. In rumination, attention is directed onto the feelings themselves, analyzing them. Wadlinger and Isaacowitz (2011) suggest that attention can be trained in order to better develop emotional regulation skills. Skill at directing and controlling attention is partly an innate trait, but studies indicate that attentional skills are also plastic and can improve with practice. For example, low mood can be improved with (gaze-based) training, which creates a bias towards looking at positive stimuli, such as happy instead of angry faces,
The fourth category, change in cognition, happens during the step where perceptions of the situation are given an emotional weight. The perceived capacity to manage or control a situation affects the emotions assigned to it. Classical Freudian defenses include denial, isolation, and intellectualization of the situation. Events can also be reinterpreted in a more positive light–for example, downward social comparison, or a goal being reframed so that failure at the initial goal becomes a success according to the new goal. According to studies, this kind of reappraisal has a larger effect in complex than in simple situations. Factors that affect reappraisal include attribution of an event to self versus others, beliefs about the controllability of the event, accountability, expectations, and implicit personal theories of how emotion works. (Koole, 2009).
The last category, response modulation, does not affect the internal emotional experience at all, but only the expression of it. Examples given by the author include various medications such as anxiolytics, exercise, relaxation therapy, and self-soothing with alcohol, cigarettes, other drugs, or food, as well as simply initiating or hiding the expression of a given emotion. (Gross, 1998).
How does this help me?
Well, for one, it gives me a good idea of which techniques I’ve already tried, and which ones I might try next.
1. Situation selection. To start with #1, I have used situation selection in the past, mainly when I decided to quit swimming to avoid pre-race meltdowns. That worked in the short term; when I wasn’t putting myself under that much competitive pressure anymore, I had no reason to freak out, and my general stress levels dropped as well. But #1 is a method I would prefer to use sparingly, if at all; it seems that it would seriously limit my future prospects, and running away from the things that scare me doesn’t really fit with the mindset of wanting to be stronger.
If anything, finding something challenging or even scary causes me to be even more motivated to keep doing it until I don’t find it scary anymore. (I think the thought process goes something like ‘life could through you into a situation where you need this skill at any moment, and wouldn’t it be way less stressful if you’d already been practicing it?’
2. Situation modification. Is there any way that, without quitting taekwondo entirely, I could find a way to pick and choose what I do in class, avoiding the things that I know will make me upset? I can’t think of any specific examples of how I could do this, except for making up excuses not to do particular exercises that I’m bad at and that frustrate me. (I have an actual excuse not to do frog jumps–bad knees–but I think the fact that I can’t do it makes me more frustrated than if I went ahead and did them, because it makes me feel like I’m not as good as the others.)
I can think of other situations where I’ve used this technique to calm myself down, though. Recently, at our university’s Social Sciences Ball, I wasn’t having that much fun and I was running out of what little steam I’d had to begin with by 11 pm. I was very upset to learn that the bus to take us back to campus, which I’d thought would come at 11:30 pm, actually would come at 12:30 pm. (My stamina for social events lasts about 3 hours, and if I can’t remove myself from the situation at that point, I start feeling some strange equivalent of claustrophobia, and will probably start crying if I can't get away.) Over my boyfriend’s protests of ‘it’ll look bad on me if you leave by yourself now!’ I resourcefully texted my brother and got him to look up the bus schedule online. It didn’t end up working as planned, but having the feeling of control restored calmed me down a lot, and when it turned out that the bus schedule was wrong, I came back to the party and went on enjoying myself like nothing had happened.
This tells me that anytime my stress is due to feeling like I’m not in control, and there’s some proactive ‘taking-control’ move that I can execute, it’s probably worth it even if it doesn’t change my actual situation much–it’ll still have a huge effect on my emotional state, which in some cases is more important than the situation causing it.
3. Deployment of attention: distraction, concentration, and rumination. If I think about it, distraction is exactly what I do when I have a compelling stimulus available to distract myself with. This is more likely to be when I’m alone, and that might well be the reason why meltdowns aren’t a problem when I’m alone. (One reason. Lack of social pressure is probably another.) If I’m in public, and I’m about to burst into tears, I’ll tell myself ‘okay, start thinking about one of your stories, now!’ But if someone tries to talk to me, especially if the subject of conversation is the same as what’s frustrating me, my attempts at self-distraction get derailed fast. Conclusion: I could probably make this a useful method, but I need to come up with better distractions.
Concentration, getting into a flow state, is a promising method, but likely it’s something I would have to start doing before I became frustrated at all. Certainly sparring in taekwondo is complex enough to occupy someone’s full attention, leaving behind no excess processing power for frustration. Correction: this is the case for someone who knows what they’re doing. As a beginner, my inability to plan strategy fast enough to use it in real time means that I don’t normally plan my strategy at all while fighting. That means a lot of space left over for frustration-inadequacy-failure thought chains. The implication: as I do get good enough to plan in real time, and coordinated enough to enjoy the moment-to-moment satisfaction of pushing myself hard (like I do while swimming), frustration won’t be so much of a problem.
Rumination is a strategy I’ve definitely used before, but I’m not at all sure that it’s an effective strategy in this context. In an exception to the general rule that thinking about my emotions dulls them, thinking about frustration and what’s causing it leads to an explosive feedback loop. However, I might find it desirable to use this method when I’m alone, in order to track down and list all the thoughts and emotions that occur, as user: aelephant suggested in this comment.
4. Changes in cognition. This step of the process, where the emotion itself actually happens, seems like a productive place to start. The ‘downwards social comparison’ method could be translated into ‘comparing myself to people who’re the same belt level as me, instead of comparing myself to the black belts,’ or at the very least persuading myself that not being as good as the black belts isn’t a reason to get frustrated.
Reappraising a situation in a more positive light, or reframing your goal so that your actual results count as success rather than failure, also seems promising–especially because often, when in the process of reappraising a goal, I realize that it wasn’t even my real goal. Back when I was 14 and competing in swimming, ‘win lots of races’ and even ‘go to the Olympics someway’ were explicit goals, even if I didn’t want to admit it to friends and family.
But I didn’t start taekwondo intending to ‘win lots of tournaments’. That wasn’t even something I thought about at all. My goals were, approximately, ‘become fitter and more flexible, learn some self defense in case anyone ever tries to rape me when I’m out late at night, and anyway martial arts are cool so I’ll acquire coolness just by showing up.’ The fact that I turned out to have really awful reaction times, making it hard for me to win at sparring, doesn’t equate to a failure at any of these goals–but the goal of ‘beat other people in sparring’ sneaked in there somewhere, probably because it’s easier to measure than my original goals, and then starting causing me frustration when I failed to achieve it.
6. Response Modulation. I do the simplest form of this a lot–the iron-jaw, stare-into-space-and-don’t-cry approach does work a significant portion of the time to keep anyone from noticing until the emotions subside on their own. But that’s if no one tries to talk to me.
As for the subtler methods, I already use exercise as a mood regulator, and frequently candy or baked goods to cheer myself up, and/or addictive books and shows. (Telling myself “if you get through this, you can watch 30 minutes worth of Rescue 911 episodes on Youtube” is a significant cheer-up factor.) But most of those methods aren’t available to me on the spot when I’m actually in a taekwondo class and starting to get upset.
Conclusion
My miniature foray into scholarship has allowed me to make a list of methods that humans use to regulate emotions. Methods that look promising include: finding ways to change the situation so that I feel in control; distracting myself from upsetting situations; trying to get into a state of concentration or flow; and reevaluating my goals to be realistic or achievable.
My plan for the future: try to think of specific ways I could use this methods, i.e. a particularly compelling chain of thought that I could use as a distraction, and then try all of them out and compare. I plan to show part or all of this article to at least one of my instructors, too, so that they have an idea of what I’m working on, and can help me a little.
Note #1: I did get feedback from juliawise on my first post, suggesting that I investigate cognitive behavioural therapy and dialectical behaviour therapy. I think this article is long enough, though, so if I do investigate it, it’ll go in a separate post. Don’t worry, juliawise, it was good advice and I’m not ignoring it.
Note #2: If anyone wants to see the articles in my reference list, I can't post links because I accessed them through my school account, but I have the PDFs saved and I can email them to you.
References
Sander L. Koole. (2009). The psychology of emotion regulation: an integrative review. Cognition and Emotion, 23 (1), 4_41
James J. Gross. (1998). The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review. Review of General Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 5,271-299
Watson David C., Sinha, Birenda. (2008). Emotion Regulation, Coping, and Psychological Symptoms. International Journal of Stress Management, Vol. 15, No. 3, 222–234
Wadlinger, Heather A., Isaacowitz, Derek M. (2011). Fixing Our Focus: Training Attention to Regulate Emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review,15(1) 75–102
Emotional regulation, Part I: a problem summary
I have a problem with emotions.
I’ve known this for a long time. It’s a very specific problem, one that only affects me a small percentage of the time: most people I know don’t describe me as an emotional person. I’m lucky enough to have been born with the sort of brain that keeps my overall mood on an even keel, no matter how many annoying things I force myself to do.
From my (less than rigorous) comparisons between myself and other people, I think that have good luminosity: almost all of the time, I can trace back the reasons why I feel a certain way and explain it to others in a way that is consistent with my behaviour. I think I know myself pretty well-I don’t like unpredictable situations, I have sucky reaction times, and my brain does not operate at full capacity when under pressure and tends to succumb to the most obvious biases when making decisions. I like to please people, even though I try to give off an impression of not caring what other people think. I have an overactive conscience, and in order to be happy with myself, I need to at least feel like I’m working harder than average. The flip side of my sometimes-rigidity is that I’m not at all impulsive. I may be awful at changing plans in the heat of the moment, but I’m very good at deliberating on my long-term life plan and then carrying it out. Etc.
I suspect that the reason I’m not considered an emotional person is that my moment-to-moment emotional experience isn’t (usually) very intense. I feel annoyance and frustration, even anger, but not strongly enough to alter already made plans or cause me to do something I’ll later regret. I like analyzing myself, and so most of my basic emotions are accompanied by thoughts about those emotions, and I suspect that this process of deliberate analysis causes the actual emotions to be less intense. I don’t experience joy that often, or that strongly, but most of the time I’m experiencing satisfaction with my life, or thinking about things I find interesting, or taking pleasure in what I’m doing at the moment or what I anticipate doing in the near future.
But there’s one exception to the rule, one area where my emotions are anything but muted, and where years of introspection have failed to help me. It’s like a switch flips in my brain, and I’m pretty familiar now with what specific inputs will flip that switch...but being aware of it doesn’t stop it, meta-analysis of the process makes it worse, and although I can prevent almost all incidents by not doing the things that trigger it, many of those things I would otherwise want to do. Avoidance works in the short term, and I’ve used it in the past, but I don’t want to be the kind of person who has to avoid scary things.
The usual characteristics of this switch-flip are the following: a deep sense of despair, helplessness, and lack of control, accompanied by the knowledge that I’m helpless and out of control because I’m not good enough, because I’m incapable of things that other people find easy, etc. My usual method for dealing with emotions, i.e. a detailed analysis, fails because it triggers a feedback loop of negativity. More recently, I’m often aware during one of these episodes that the ‘evidence’ does not indicate all the bad things I’m thinking about myself, and that my thinking it does is a temporary state (usually lasting only a few minutes), but I can’t force myself out of the state. The best I can do is stop thinking about it...but as I’m sure most of you know, deliberately not thinking about something is easier said than done.
The usual causes of the switch-flip: some kind of competition pressure. Any situation where I want to or am expected to win against other people, rather than just meeting a certain standard, is likely to be a trigger. Failing at something, or letting someone down, is another trigger. My thoughts very quickly escalade into “it’s not fair that I’m worse than everyone else at X” and “I’m never going to be the sort of person that I want to be, because I’m bad at X,” and then my brain goes into a feedback loop of coming up with examples why I’m worse than everyone else X, intensifying the initial despair, which then makes it easier to think of examples.
The other condition, which is necessary to go from a state of silent suffering to one of full-on meltdown, is any kind of social pressure for me not to have a meltdown. Not wanting to embarrass myself, especially if it’s in front of people whose opinions I care about, has almost always had the opposite effect. Being asked to justify why I’m upset makes me more upset, because once in this state I literally can’t explain, usually just because crying gets in the way of talking.
Nowadays, once the state wears off, it has pretty much no effect on me. In hindsight, I’m perfectly aware that I was being silly. Having had a meltdown doesn’t leave me with an aversion to the context that caused it, or cause any particular anxiety about putting myself in that circumstance again. There’s a small aversive effect of having embarrassed myself and not wanting to look stupid again, but I’m pretty stubborn about not letting myself care what others think, so the simple fact of having meltdowns doesn’t nowadays stop me from doing any given activity.
However, in the past the aversive effect was much stronger. My emotional outbursts are the main reason that I left competitive swimming. There was too much cognitive dissonance involved between wanting to meet my coaches’ expectations and knowing that I simply wasn’t physically talented enough to get any faster, and having that dissonance in my head all the time meant a lot of meltdowns. I left swimming in a very negative mental state, and to this day I can’t think clearly about it–I get pulled back under a mild cloud of despair.
In this case, I allowed my emotions to make my decisions for me. Had I been making the same decision now, I don’t think I would have quit. I had plenty of good reasons to swim other than wanting to make the Olympic team: it kept me fit, involved spending time with people I liked, provided me with endorphins after practice, etc. The only time I’ve come close to being depressed was the year I quit swimming and was faced with sudden exercise withdrawal. I would have liked to have been still fast enough to make the university swim team, whether or not I could expect to win a lot of races for them. Etc.
Since starting taekwondo nine months ago, the first sport I've attempted since leaving swimming, I’ve had one running-out-of-the-room-in-tears meltdown, one occasion that I remember when I started crying but didn’t run away, and a few other times where my ‘switch’ flipped but where I managed to stick to silent suffering. I find this a huge improvement over my swim team experience. My instructor thinks that it’s my biggest problem. About a month ago, after one particularly silly episode (after an already frustrating class, I had missed the 8:10 bus because class ended at about 8:11, and I had to wait another forty minutes for the next one, which seemed like an incredibly big deal at the time), he gave me a lecture. This made it worse by forcing me to keep my attention focused on the meltdown for twenty straight minutes rather than letting it wear off naturally. He also taught me a meditation breathing exercise, which has been unhelpful so far–again, it keeps my attention focused on ‘I’m doing a breathing exercise right now because I’m about to burst into tears otherwise’, and makes it more likely that sooner or later I'll notice all the people looking at me and I will burst into tears. Giving him a more detailed description of my problem afterwards, when I was in a state that allowed me to talk, failed to elicit any more specific suggestions. My brain, concluding that “obviously he has no idea what he’s talking about,” got ready to move on.
On the bus ride home, though, when I could safely think about dangerous topics in the privacy of my jacket hood, I was forced to conclude that my instructor not knowing how to teach me not to have meltdowns is not actually a full-on excuse to stop searching. Even if my problem is specific, rather than a general lack of emotion-management skills, it’s still going to limit me in some things. (For example, it was a problem for the first four months or so of my current relationship). And there probably is a way out there to solve it.
In spirit of the virtue of scholarship, I’m in the process of doing the most thorough research project that I’ve ever done ‘for fun’. It may end up being more extensive than anything I’ve done for school, too. I’ve already started, but I’m posting this basic description in order to get recommendations for sources I should consult. So far I’ve searched a couple of online databases available through my university library, using keywords such as ‘emotional regulation’, ‘emotional control’, ‘stress management’, and various combinations. I’ve come up with several dozen articles, which I am working my way through to summarize. If there’s anything else I should look for, or if there are any books that I might find useful to consult, please let me know. Likewise, if anyone has ever experienced something similar, I'll take your advice on how you ended up dealing with it.
Part II will be coming in a few weeks, hopefully, depending on how extensive my research ends up being.
Hi, I'm Josh. I found this site by way of HPMOR more than half a year ago, but just now got around to making an account. I hadn't seen any reason to until I actually had something to add to a conversation. After registering and leaving a few comments here and there, i figured i may as well introduce myself.
Im 17 years old and trying to narrow down what to do with my life. My long term goal, much like most patrons to this site, is to do as much as i can to aid the development of FAI. Im smarter than the vast majority of people, but i doubt that im anywhere near intelligent enough to add directly to the project, so the issue becomes finding a career that pays enough to allow large donations while also satisfying short term needs and pressures, (most of which are related to serving my ego which is of an astronomical size).
Im generally a slacker due to akrasia, with a C average for my first two years of high school, despite almost straight A's on exams ( ive raised it to a B average after finding Less Wrong, but im still putting off doing my homework even at this moment).
I spend a good deal of time trying to figure ways to introduce rationality to my friends and relatives, but without much luck. any advice on the issue would be helpful, but i think that question would be more appropriate for an open thread or discussion.
I'm motivated on the most basic level by the fact that something is horribly wrong with the world when it doesn't have to be. If i could sum up my life in any one purpose it would be ensuring that death is banished from the world never to touch mankind again. This is the same sentiment that led to the creation of this community and i will try to offer as much as i can.
Welcome, Josh! It sounds like you're in a similar place to my brother right now, with similar interests. He goes by zephyrianr on LW, maybe you could send him a message if you're interesting in talking about these issues. Especially when I read your phrase: "If i could sum up my life in any one purpose it would be ensuring that death is banished from the world never to touch mankind again," I think you two would get along well.
This is all good stuff, but it makes curiosity sound complicated. I thought that the point of using curiosity as a hook into epistemic rationality is that once you feel the emotion of curiosity, your brain often just knows what to do next.
Also curiosity feels good.
Curiosity in itself isn't necessarily complicated, and yes it feels good, but a lot of times, for a lot of people, it doesn't happen by itself. And it sounds like the process of producing curiosity in oneself is more complicated than simply feeling it naturally.
Anyone have any experience or advice about optimal dosing? What is the maximum amount of caffeine I can consume while still avoiding dependency? What pattern of consumption is best?
Personally I find caffeine to be amazing for basically everything, but it becomes too weak after you build some tolerance, and withdrawal seems to affect me particularly badly.
I've dealt with the tolerance effect by using caffeine only intermittently. After an extremely hectic semester, when my policy was "drink coffee on mornings when I'm up before 6 am, and not on mornings when I get to sleep in to a normal time." The result: I was more tired when I slept in, because of caffeine withdrawal, and when I did drink coffee on early-wakeup days, it no longer made me feel especially alert or cheerful, but rather brought my energy and mood up to average.
My current policy is to drink coffee only when I get up early and I find myself feeling extremely tired and groggy, and I have good reason to need my alertness (i.e. for an exam). If I have an exam and I got to sleep in that day, no coffee, whether or not I'm groggy. If I'm sleep deprived, I wait on drinking coffee until I actually feel tired and groggy, because often if I'm busy enough, I'll stay alert for the whole day anyway. If I didn't get much sleep and I'm groggy, but it's a weekend and/or I don't have anything important to do, no coffee...I just take a nap. I have only one coffee per day, max, and two days per week max, preferably not consecutive days.
Probably the only reasons I was able to make this change are that a) instead of waking up at 5 am on four or five days out of the week and getting around five hours of sleep most nights, I get up at 7 or later most days and can get 8 hours of sleep per night, and b) I was able to wean myself off coffee during a two-week family vacation, when I could sleep 10 hours a night and laze around all day. I don't think I would have made it through the caffeine withdrawal if I was extremely busy at the time and had important things to do.
That being said, the transition was very worth it. I've acclimatized so that I don't feel especially groggy without caffeine, and if I do, I have non-caffeine methods that work, i.e. taking a 5-minute nap while on break at work, or getting up and walking around when I start to get sleepy. And when I do drink coffee...look out! It catapults me to ecstatic joys of cheerful alertness.
Exercise 2.2: Make plans for different worlds... Maybe you live in a world where you'd improve your cognitive function by taking nootropics, or maybe you live in a world where the nootropics would harm you.
On the bright side, this is pretty much the thought process I go through whenever I don't know the right answer to something. On the other hand ("on the dark side"?) I think my automatic instinct is "there's no scientific consensus on this that I've read about in my textbooks...therefore this is a Permanent Blank in my map and I just have to live with it." Even if I'm not up to going out and doing the original research to answer Question X, I suspect that I would often be wrong about there being no already-investigated answers. Looking a given topic up and reading about all the conflicting theories, rather than a scientific conseusus, still provides more information than not reading up on it at all.
And again, thank you for the excellent article! I really like this one.
I haven't encountered the rationalist ethic of "psychological pain is unimportant". Can you link to it?
It reminds me of the article on Ugh Fields. Though that doesn't exactly say that 'psychological pain is unimportant', but more that 'psychological pain is based on unreliable emotions, intuitions, and heuristics, and isn't by itself a good reason not to do something'.
Fascinating article! I have to confess that I don't know a lot about the legal system or how it works. It strikes me as the kind of field that would be both useful to know in some detail, and interesting to learn about. So "study the modern legal system" is somewhere on my list of "random personal research projects."
I try to treat my emotions in the following way: Emotions just ''are'' and as such carry information only about emotions themselves. They have meaning only in relation to other emotions, both mine and those of others. I've found that the most effective way to consistently take the outside view. Once I made that leap, it became much easier to apply rationality in mastering them for my own benefit. I can collect empirical data about my emotions and make predictions about my emotions. I can devise strategies to change my emotions and then assess whether they work. If you feel sad and it's raining today, you might infer that rain leads to an increased probability of sadness. If you feel excited about a job opportunity, you might infer that you will generally be happy on a day to day basis. If I meet someone and feel comfortable talking to them, that's only an indication that I will feel comfortable talking to them in the future. And if you pay attention for long enough, you realize that many emotions are ultimately harmless. If you stop feeding them, they drift away, they pass.
It is partly a dissociative approach, being a spectator to your own emotions (as mentioned by EE43026F). But at the same time, it's like treating your emotions as you treat your toes. They are a part of you, but they're only mildly informative about whether you should change careers.
Looking back on what I just wrote, I should also say that dealing with emotions is a skill. I don't mean to suggest that one little insight outweighs practice. About two years and a half years ago I made a commitment to not be some completely oblivious to emotions and it's taken a while to develop the skills. The simplest skill is just identifying emotions. At various points of the day, ask yourself how you are feeling. When I started, I literally could not give a verbal response, I could not produce a word describing how I felt.
Looking back on what I just wrote, I should also say that dealing with emotions is a skill.
Have you read Alicorn's Luminosity sequence? If not, you might find it relevant.
Also, I've discovered the same thing as you: dealing with emotions is hard-to-develop skill. I'm pretty good at identifying my emotions, maybe even better than most people, and if I have time to sit down and think about it, I'm pretty good at dissecting what is causing them. So far that has not made it any easier to control them, or to get rid of my automatic negative responses to things that I don't want to respond negatively to. Just knowing what my emotions are and what is causing them isn't enough.
Positive emotions, too, can be correct or mistaken.
it's lines like this that make me a little uneasy about your essay. If you say that sometimes emotions are worth listening too and sometimes not, doesn't this imply that they are quite worthless as an advisor? If they are wrong roughly the same amount as they are right, that does not mean that they are "half good" it means they totally fail, as a coinflip would give you the same result. Shouldn't it then be the conclusion that one should just ignore emotion all together and rethink issues from scratch if they are somehow relevant? In other words: if you are forced to reconsider all the data given by emotional input anyway, what good is it in the first place?
Even if it was 50%, noticing and then re-evaluating your emotional 'advisor' won't have the same result as ignoring it. For example, if 50% of your bad moods are because of random brain-chemistry imbalances, and 50% indicate a problem, you can either ignore all bad moods, or notice all bad moods and then go look for problems that might be causing them. In which case you'll find a potentially fixable problem 50% of the time, and no apparent cause the other 50%. So at the cost of more energy spent on thought and emotion-evaluation, you can catch some problems in your life that you might not have noticed otherwise. This would still be true even if only 25% of bad moods were in response to a fixable problem: there would be a higher cost of emotion-evaluation relative to payoff in problem-discovery, but the result would still be different than if you just ignored the bad moods.
If that is to happen, the bridge needs to be built from the higher-level intuitive downwards. Neuroscience is already building up from the bottom, so the unexplored and key parts are more likely in the upper-middle. If they were in the lower-middle, we'd probably feel closer to a solution by now.
Good point. Although I'm not sure exactly how you'd go about building downwards from intuitions. Has that ever been done before?
I don't mean beliefs in a strictly religious sense (I didn't think that's how it's usually used here, either), but your attitude might have changed due to your deeper understanding of human psychology/biology. Then again, I'm not following you around with a notepad. So you think that you haven't learned anything useful from LessWrong?
I have learned things, and I guess they make it easier in some ways to understand how and why people can be wrong. I have definitely learned a lot of useful things, but I don't find that 'being annoyed by religious people' is a useful thing to have learned.
You yourself just said that you've updated on your beliefs due to things you've heard here. Ergo, the person that went back to church wouldn't be the same person that was there before you quit. Now that you have additional information about HOW to not be so stupid, it will be harder to accept the fact that SO MANY people seem like they are intentionally clinging to obviously false beliefs.
They're still the same, you're the one who's different now. You should only "blame" LessWrong's memes if you would, given the chance, undo that learning. Do you really wish that you hadn't learned what you've learned here?
You yourself just said that you've updated on your beliefs due to things you've heard here.
I'm not entirely sure that it's beliefs I've updated on. Yeah, my attitude has changed since I started spending a lot of time on LW, but I was already an atheist before, too.
Hello!
I'm a 20 year old student at Georgia Tech, double majoring in Industrial Engineering and Psychology, and am spending the current semester studying abroad at the University of Leeds in the UK.
I read HPMOR this weekend on a bus trip to London and as soon as I returned I found this site and have been enthralled by the Sequences, which I am slowly working my way through.
All of my life I have loved to read and learn new things and think through them, but last year I came to the realization that my curiosity had started to die in my late high school years. I found myself caring about getting a good grade and then abruptly forgetting the information. Much of what I was "learning" I never truly understood and yet I was still getting praise from teachers for my good grades, so I saw no reason to invest more effort. Early last year, I realized that this was happening and attempt to rededicate myself to finding things that again made me passionate about learning. This was a major contribution to adding Psychology as a second major.
This semester of new classes in a new educational system combined with the past few days of reading the Sequences have sparked my interest in many subjects. I'm itching to go to the school library and start picking up anything that catches my interest now that the the thirst to learn has been reawakened. I'm especially interested in Evolutionary Psychology, Social Psychology, and Statistics. I have absolutely no idea what I would like to do as a future career, but have this reoccurring thought that I would love to do some sort of work which involved restructuring the education system. (Every person at my University that I have mentioned that thought to gives me a strange look and says either "Education? You???' or "But then you wouldn't make any money!')
Anyways, I am extremely glad to have found this site and community.
I'm itching to go to the school library and start picking up anything that catches my interest now that the the thirst to learn has been reawakened.
That's a dangerous idea! Books in the library that are more interesting than your textbooks tend to result in "waking up" four hours later to realize you've read an entire book on [interesting subject x] and are still no closer to researching [boring essay topic y].
Good luck though! Your classes do sound pretty interesting. Hopefully you can stay engaged.
I would love to do some sort of work which involved restructuring the education system.
I think that's a brilliant idea, and it really needs to be done. The "but then you wouldn't make any money!" people are pretty annoying, but you can ignore them.
I recently had an idea that seemed interesting enough to post here: "Shut Up and Multiply!", the video game
The basic idea of this game is that before each level you are told some probabilities, and then when the level starts you need to use these probabilities in real time to achieve the best expected outcome in a given situation.
The first example I thought of is a level where people are drowning, and you need to choose who to save first, or possibly which method to use to try to save them, in order to maximize the total number of people saved.
Different levels could have different scenarios and objectives.
You are given time to examine the probabilities before the level starts, but once it starts you need to make your decisions in real-time.
Another twist: You see the actual outcome of your actions, randomly generated by the probability formulas. However, you aren't scored based on the actual outcome, but instead you are scored on the expected outcome of your actions, using the expected utility formula. I originally intended this to prevent people from getting a high score just by luck, or to prevent low scores caused by bad luck. Though I later realized that this doesn't actually fix the problem - you can still play repeatedly until, by luck, you happen to guess high-scoring actions. Still, I think it would be a good idea to show both scores.
Other random ideas:
The first few levels should be a tutorial. Showing how to do the calculations in order to maximize your expected score. Or there could be a separate turotial mode. Or maybe the game itself is a bad idea, but the tutorial might still be useful.
During each level you need to make your decisions as quickly as possible - the longer you wait the worse you score. Though maybe only some levels should be like this.
Later levels require more options to choose from, and more complex scenarios.
As much content as possible should be generated randomly, to prevent the game from being the same if you play it again.
Maybe the player could also be scored based on some calculations they do before the level starts? Or just integrate this with the tutorial?
And most importantly: Specifically design the game so that the player must learn to overcome some of the standard biases, in order to maximize their score. We should try to work in as many of these biases as possible. And also plenty of generally useful advice for working with probabilities.
So, now that I posted this idea, I'll let you decide what, if anything, we should do with this idea.
First, is this a stupid idea, that couldn't possibly work as described?
Or is it a good idea, but a low priority, compared to the other projects we're working on?
Should this be a group project? Does anyone volunteer to lead the project? Does anyone want to take on the project entirely on their own? Or should I lead the project, or work on it on my own?
What language would be best to implement this in? Flash? Java? PHP? Python? Something else?
I still haven't earned much karma on this site (only 1 point actually, when I originally posted this). Mainly because I don't expect to have anything original to say. And so I'm posting this here as a comment in the Open Thread, rather than making an actual post of it. If this comment gets enough upvotes for me to be able to make this into its own post, I plan to do so, unless someone objects. Or if anyone would like to take over the idea, please feel free to do so. I don't care about credit, and generally prefer to avoid it. Possibly by the flawed reasoning "credit = responsibility = blame", which I suppose might deserve a post of its own.
The first example I thought of is a level where people are drowning, and you need to choose who to save first, or possibly which method to use to try to save them, in order to maximize the total number of people saved.
I do competitive lifeguarding (possibly the world's weirdest recreational activity) and there is actually an event like this, called Priority Assessment or PA. Your team walks in and finds an area of the pool with a bunch of people drowning (for a team of 4 rescuers, usually it's about 12 victims.) The scoresheets are set up so that you get more points for rescuing the victims who are more likely to survive–i.e. non-swimmers and injured swimmers have a much higher point multiplier than unconscious, submerged victims. PA involves a lot of strategy–it's not always the teams of fast swimmers that win, although that helps. There is an optimal strategy, which has to be worked out in advance because it's a two-minute event.
I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
Ohh man, that would be convenient... Actually, given my current schedule, it'd be pretty irritating. I'd spend my mornings sitting in class, fuming that I couldn't just leave and go write all day.
I don't actually know. For all I know, articles become Promoted when Eliezer likes them enough to do background things in the blog. Maybe I should repost this in Discussion as well. I might worry that that would irritate people who see it twice, though.
I might worry that that would irritate people who see it twice, though.
You could post a disclaimer at the beginning: "This article is also posted in Main; however I want as many people as possible to see it. Please ignore if you have already read it."
I don't know. Maybe. What's that certain value?
From the Less Wrong FAQ:
Posts are "promoted" to the front page by the editors on the basis of substantive new content, clear argument, good writing, popularity, and importance. The posts with karma totals in green disks instead of gray circles have been promoted.
I give $40 per month to World Vision (have been for over 2 years now) and $30 per month to Modest Needs. Both are automatic deductions from my bank account, and right now nearly 10% of my monthly income. I will increase my amount of automatic deductions when I'm reliably working full-time (right now I work full time in summer, with my income far exceeding rent and other expenses, and then go back to part-time during the school year and often either barely break even or have to draw on my savings. Ideally I would like to give 10% of my income, which on a starting nurse's salary would be over $5000/year.
I am also thinking of ending my donation to World Vision and moving to Village Reach or another charity that is rated highly on GiveWell.
This should be on the front page.
I expect it will be, fairly soon.
I really have seen multiple people (some of whom I significantly cared about) malfunctioning as a result of misinterpreting this point. As a stand-alone system for pulling your actions, urges have all kinds of problems. Urges can pull you to stare at an attractive stranger, to walk to the fridge, and even to sprint hard for first base when playing baseball. But unless coupled with goals and far-mode reasoning, urges will not pull you to the component tasks required for any longer-term goods. When I get into my car I have a definite urge for it not to be broken. But absent planning, there would never be a moment when the activity I most desired was to take my car for an oil change. To find and keep a job (let alone a good job), live in a non-pigsty, or learn any skills that are not immediately rewarding, you will probably need goals. Even though human goals can easily turn into fashion statements and wishful thinking.
I sort of run this way. Contrary to the description, though, I sometimes do get urges to clean, do laundry, etc. This usually occurs when I happen to be annoyed by the feel of dirt on my bare feet, or find my clothes hamper full, or some other stimulus triggers the behavior. Incidentally, I also am the one in my family who takes the cars for oil changes.
On the other hand, I also have no job. I have a hard time acting on anything that I don't have an urge to do; fortunately or unfortunately, I also have parents to provide me with reasons to have urges to do things I wouldn't otherwise have an urge to do. (This might also be why I once said I didn't have an understanding of how people did things they didn't feel like doing, because the process I use to decide what activity to do at any given moment seems to consist of weighing my various urges in order to figure out what it is that I "feel like" doing, and then doing it, which is a process that almost entirely relies on emotional/unconscious processes rather than conscious verbal reasoning.)
This might also be why I once said I didn't have an understanding of how people did things they didn't feel like doing.
Do you still feel this way, or do you feel that you understand what I meant in Action and Habit? Have you changed any of your decision-making methods?
I'm now being entertained by contemplating the difference between an occasional solipsist who believes that they are occasionally the only real person in the world, and one who occasionally believes they are (and have always been) the only real person in the world.
I wonder what the first kind of occasional solipsist would think happened to all the other people when they became the one real person.
I suspect this is the reason I did well in high school chemistry, physics, and bio–if you tried to really grasp the underlying concepts, the memorization required was trivial, or at least it didn't feel like memorization.
This was my experience in physics, but didn't feel at all true in chemistry and bio. I understood the concepts fine, but nothing about the concepts seemed to let me derive anything on the fly or avoid rote memorization.
I don't think it was taught that way in chem or bio, but I tried to understand it that way... My parents have always bought me science books, and I had already read most of my high school library's science section, so most of what I was learning wasn't new. The concepts I was learning didn't necessarily let me predict the other concepts, but they all fit together in a logical, meshed framework where they relied on each other, and I could use that to trigger my memory to retrieve particular concepts. Which is much harder in something like "nursing theory", which a) I didn't spend most of my childhood reading books about, and b) doesn't hold together in a logical framework, except in some superficial ways.
For several years I have known that I 'max out' at groups of five. If I'm in a conversation with up to four other people I'm charming and relaxed. Add a sixth and I clam up and turn into a totally different person. My working explanation is that my, as you call it, social modeling circuitry gets saturated and can't handle the combinatorial jump. For me it feels like an exponential increase in difficulty. I can't get the timing right, I don't feel like anything I say is interesting enough to cut in.
Interestingly, I am excellent at public speaking, because there's no need to model the audience on an individual basis.
That's really interesting!
I have a similar "transition mode", but it's between one-on-one conversations and groups of three. If I'm talking one-on-one, I usually contribute at least 50% of the conversation, sometimes significantly more. In theory, talking to two other people should result in me contributing about 1/3 of the conversation...but it's more like 5%. I think part of it is because the conversation dynamics with three people are more complicated, making it hard to manage things like taking your turn without interrupting the others. Part of it is because in a group of three, I'm not needed to avoid awkward silences.
The amount I'll actually talk in a group conversation drops even more steeply above three. I wouldn't say specifically that I'm less relaxed, that I'm uncomfortable, or even that my comments become less interesting, but I tend to go to "listening mode" instead of "talking mode", which is less work for me anyway.
I have no problems in public speaking, or elaborating on a question someone asks me specifically during a group discussion.
I hate breaking my routine. It makes me anxious, and I have to spend more energy motivating myself, and in general it’s hard. I tend to only depart from that routine when forced.
One of the most important things I consider myself to have ever done is break out of my routine. It is scarring in a serious and personal way, but it's necessary if you want to excel at anything you put your mind to.
Besides, what can guarantee that some catastrophe might break your routine against your will? Pre-empting the break is a way of ensuring that you've got a thick skin in case catastrophe strikes.
This is one reason why I've focussed on improving the things I'm bad at, like my ability to react in stressful situations, or do teamwork under time pressure. Obviously I haven't covered every possible variation of "something horrible could happen and you'd be screwed over if you didn't have this particular skill", but bringing as many scenarios as possible from the realm of the Scary Unknown to the zone of "things my brain has a script for" has done a lot for my peace of mind. I'm maybe 50% confident that, for example, if I was right there at the scene of a car crash, I could force my brain into "Lifeguard: First Aid" script instead of "panic and run away screaming." Which is something, I guess.
Why necessarily psychology? You can go the biology route, then take a grad neuroscience program, though I suppose this is nearly impossible to pull off while working as a nurse full time.
Yeah... I may end up doing it, or something like that. My mother and father are making bets with each other on me ending up back in school for a significant chunk of my life.
I had no idea when I wrote that that the talk I was going to tonight would be closely related to this topic. It was a talk about the 20th century polymath Michael Polyani (physician, physicist, economist, philosopher), given by a former surgeon and teacher of surgery who's made a late-in-life career change into teaching writing. One of the things he touched on, and which deserves a lot more thought on my part, is the relationship between reductionism and heuristics in critical decision making.
A good chunk of medicine (and I think many, but not all, aspects of nursing in particular) is about decision-making under conditions of limited information. The speaker observed that doctors coming into surgery from a hard science background tended to be less good at it, because their versions of reductionism led them into continuous loops of information gathering, trying to find more and more grains of detail. Doctors who were able to reductively eliminate information in order to converge on decisions were more talented. I asked him how this related to the current developments in medicine with respect to machine learning, robotic surgery, "AI"-driven imaging, etc. He said he didn't have any good answers, but if he were starting his medical career again, that's where he'd want to be.
So first, I think that the kind of intelligence required to make good decisions in an information-restricted environment is maybe not as immediately glamorous as the kind that makes the cover of Nature, but it's just as important. Second, the ways in which different areas of knowledge are converging in medicine makes it a pretty exciting place to be for someone with your interests, and you've got a lot of time to explore them.
Edited to add: I suppose I should note that almost all the nurses I know are or were ER, flight, or ICU nurses, which colors my views.
Agreed.
Also, I looked this up on Wikipedia to confirm, and Michael Polanyi is the father of John Polanyi, who my father worked with in graduate school! (And who apparently got the Nobel Prize in chemistry!)
I've known at least one person (and possibly more, it's hard to remember...) who went for a MD after years as a nurse, a couple who went on to nurse-practitioner or PA, and one or two who have shuffled between RN and EMT-P positions as pay and adventure dictate. If you spend some years as a nurse and decide later that you want more schooling, you'll be experienced regarding the options available and probably in a more financially stable position. If you continue to yearn for academia, there are a both teaching and research avenues out there in the nursing and nurse-practitioner fields.
The versatility was a big plus for nursing when I was choosing my major... That being said, if the people cited in our textbooks are any indication of what nursing research is like, I don't want to go there. I don't like qualitative research in general–either it sets off my "social sciences bullshit" detector or I just can't make any sense of it at all–and I like "nursing paradigms and conceptual models" even less. Give me a nice hard science problem to work on and I'll be happy...
Before I get bogged down in reading all the comments, I just want to say: nursing is one of the most admirable and versatile professions in existence. There are very few people I'd rather have available in any generic critical situation than an experienced and competent nurse. Good on you.
Thank you!
The reactions I get from people when I tell them I'm in nursing tend to be either very negative or very positive. The negative ones, most often from my parents' friends who knew me growing up, are "you're a smart girl, why would you want to do that?", at which point my usual defensive retort is, "So? Do you really want a dumb nurse looking after you?"
But an awful lot of people, probably more than 50%, start gushing about how much they respect me for it. As far as I can tell, being in a fancy hard degree like biomed will get you respect for brains, but studying nursing gets you points for character. People know that it's a hard job, not hard in the sense of "only a a few really bright or talented people can do it", but tough physically and emotionally. At work, I tell old ladies who come to aquafit classes that I'm in nursing, and they automatically think I'm a good person...
Do you have any interest in working on something like that?
My automatic answer is YES!!!!!, but I don't exactly have relevant schooling.
Also, from what I've seen I tend to clash slightly with psychology majors...I had a roommate in 4th year psychology and we used to have hours-long debates where she would eventually accuse me of being a reductionist (which to me is a good thing).
How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious
I have a confession to make. My life hasn’t changed all that much since I started reading Less Wrong. Hindsight bias makes it hard to tell, I guess, but I feel like pretty much the same person, or at least the person I would have evolved towards anyway, whether or not I spent those years reading about the Art of rationality.
But I can’t claim to be upset about it either. I can’t say that rationality has undershot my expectations. I didn’t come to Less Wrong expecting, or even wanting, to become the next Bill Gates; I came because I enjoyed reading it, just like I’ve enjoyed reading hundreds of books and websites.
In fact, I can’t claim that I would want my life to be any different. I have goals and I’m meeting them: my grades are good, my social skills are slowly but steadily improving, I get along well with my family, my friends, and my boyfriend. I’m in good shape financially despite making $12 an hour as a lifeguard, and in a year and a half I’ll be making over $50,000 a year as a registered nurse. I write stories, I sing in church, I teach kids how to swim. Compared to many people my age, I'm pretty successful. In general, I’m pretty happy.
Yvain suggested akrasia as a major limiting factor for why rationalists fail to have extraordinarily successful lives. Maybe that’s true for some people; maybe they are some readers and posters on LW who have big, exciting, challenging goals that they consistently fail to reach because they lack motivation and procrastinate. But that isn’t true for me. Though I can’t claim to be totally free of akrasia, it hasn’t gotten much in the way of my goals.
However, there are some assumptions that go too deep to be accessed by introspection, or even by LW meetup discussions. Sometimes you don't even realize they’re assumptions until you meet someone who assumes the opposite, and try to figure out why they make you so defensive. At the community meetup I described in my last post, a number of people asked me why I wasn’t studying physics, since I was obviously passionate about it. Trust me, I had plenty of good justifications for them–it’s a question I’ve been asked many times–but the question itself shouldn’t have made me feel attacked, and it did.
Aside from people in my life, there are some posts on Less Wrong that cause the same reaction of defensiveness. Eliezer’s Mandatory Secret Identities is a good example; my automatic reaction was “well, why do you assume everyone here wants to have a super cool, interesting life? In fact, why do you assume everyone wants to be a rationality instructor? I don’t. I want to be a nurse.”
After a bit of thought, I’ve concluded that there’s a simple reason why I’ve achieved all my life goals so far (and why learning about rationality failed to affect my achievements): they’re not hard goals. I’m not ambitious. As far as I can tell, not being ambitious is such a deep part of my identity that I never even noticed it, though I’ve used the underlying assumptions as arguments for why my goals and life decisions were the right ones.
But if there’s one thing Less Wrong has taught me, it’s that assumptions are to be questioned. There are plenty of good reasons to choose reasonable goals instead of impossible ones, but doing things on reflex is rarely better than thinking through them, especially for long-term goal making, where I do have time to think it through, Type 2 style.
What do I mean by ‘ambition’?
Here is the definition from my desktop dictionary:
(1) A strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work: her ambition was to become a model | he achieved his ambition of making a fortune.
(2) Desire and determination to achieve success: life offered few opportunities for young people with ambition.
The first definition sounds like a good description of me. Since around tenth grade, I’ve had a strong desire to study nursing, and it’s required a moderate amount of determination and hard work, especially the hands-on aspects, which are harder for me than academics has ever been. I want to be the kind of person described in (1).
What about the second half? More people than I can count have asked me why I’m not studying medicine. Or physics. Or just about anything aside from nursing, which is apparently kind of low-status. I inevitably get defensive when these conversations occur, and I end up trying to justify why nursing is the morally correct thing for me to do. For some reason, in some deep-down part of me that I don’t normally have conscious access to, I don’t want to be the sort of person described in (2).
Introspection isn’t accurate enough for me to automatically find my true rejection of ambitious goals, but I will take the rest of the post to speculate on my own personal reasons. They may or may not be reasons that generalize to anyone else.
1. Idealism versus practicality
My mother tells me I would be a good academic, and enjoy it too. She’s usually right about that kind of thing, but I decided around eighth grade that academia wasn’t for me.
Why? Well, my mother and father both studied science at the undergraduate level (biology and physical chemistry, respectively) and then both went on to complete PhDs. From the sound of it, those student years were among the happiest in their lives. My father went on to do a postdoc at Cambridge, and then to get a crappy part-time teaching position at a small university in Washington State. He hated it. Eventually he quit and we moved up to Ottawa, Canada, where he worked at Nortel, was laid off during the company’s decline, and eventually found another job at a small company that takes apart computer chips and analyzes them. Meanwhile, my mother spent most of those years as a housewife, and has only recently begun working again, part-time and for a token salary.
I’ve asked my father what he thinks of the decisions he made, and he told me that his biggest problem was that he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. He told me that he still doesn’t. His job is boring and stressful, but he can’t quit because he didn’t start saving for retirement until he was 40. As a grad student, he worked with John Polanyi, a well-known academic; much later he told me he “always sort of thought I would end up being well-known and cool like that, but all of a sudden I’m almost 50 and I realize that’s not going to happen.”
I remember the year when he developed a sudden passion for career self-help books, of the ‘What Color Is Your Parachute’ and ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ variety. I must have been about thirteen years old. He encouraged me to read them, and warned me that “it’s better to think about what you want to do, not what you want to be.”
The lesson my 13-year-old self I took from all this: don’t have hopes and dreams, especially not ambitious ones. You won’t achieve them, and you’ll end up in a mid-life crisis with no retirement savings, full of regrets. Far better to have a practical, achievable life plan, and then go out and damn well achieve it. I read the self-help books, figured that nurses did around the same stuff all day as doctors and didn’t have to spend eight years in school paying tuition, and never looked back.
The lesson I didn’t learn from all this: my parents weren’t actually ambitious either. They enjoyed their studies in university, but primarily they had fun: going to the philosophy faculty parties, getting drunk with chemistry students, volunteering on coffee plantations in Nicaragua... Those are the stories they tell me from their studies, not stories of the research they did and the papers they published. I can’t be sure what their true feelings were at the time, but I don’t think they cared especially. They were smart young people who wanted to have a good time and didn’t especially care if they had no money. And I don’t think they have as many regrets as I assumed when I was thirteen. They didn’t exactly make life goals and then fail to achieve them. They just hadn’t made their long-term goals ahead of time.
The lesson I should have learned: if you head into adulthood without big goals, don’t be surprised if you don’t achieve them.
2. Fear of failure
The second life lesson about ambition happened a few years later, when I was around fourteen. I had been training as a competitive swimmer for a number of years. My parents didn’t sign me up because they wanted me to go to the Olympics someday; they wanted me to stay fit and have opportunities to socialize. It was a good decision; swim team made me happy, to the point that I often forget how unhappy I was up until then.
But after a while I started to get good at swimming, and coaches, even kids’ coaches, implicitly want their athletes to win, and keep winning, and maybe someday they’ll be known as the one who coached an Olympic athlete. Training made me happy, but competition emphatically did not; anxiety, stress, and bursting into tears before a race soon became part of my day-to-day life. My coaches told me that if I worked hard and believed in myself, I could do anything. But eventually I hit a point when I was racing kids who were simply more talented than me: taller, slimmer, bigger hands and feet, a genetic predisposition to fast-twitch muscles, whatever. And then I hit my body’s limits, and I stopped getting faster at all, no matter how hard I trained. My coaches accused me of not trying hard enough. Understandably, this made me feel worse, since I certainly felt like I was trying as hard as I could.
The lessons my 14-year-old self learned from this: don’t have high expectations for yourself when competing against other people. You’ll just end up feeling worthless and depressed. In fact, don’t compete against other people at all. Do things that are solely based on how good you are, as opposed to how good you are relative to other people who might be more talented. Even better, do things that aren’t that hard in an absolute sense, so that you don’t risk failing.
This is kind of a fallacy, of course. Success in anything is measured relative to other people, if only relative to the average. Even grades, because classes and tests and grades are set up for students of average intelligence, so students of relatively higher intelligence will find them easier, and students of lower-than-average intelligence will feel like they’re fighting a losing battle, as I did in swimming competitions. Possessing above average intelligence let me grow up seeing school as non-threatening, but I know that isn’t true for everyone. I’ve known people whose above-average athletic skills led them to be far more confident in sports than at school.
Still, fallacy or not, I later applied this idea to a lot of my decision. I was interested in physics all along, but my father’s tales of academia and the competition and pressure involved turned me off it. I also considered studying music theory and composition, but decided not to because, aside from being impractical for finding a job afterwards, I’d heard it was an incredibly competitive field. To a degree, this is why I chose not to make a career as a writer. (A degree in English didn’t seem particularly interesting to me, so I doubt I would have studied it, but even in high school I never really thought about earning money with my writing.) Success or failure was too far beyond my control for comfort.
The lesson I didn’t learn from this: find an area where you do have natural talent on your side, and use it for all it’s worth. In fact, I’ve done the opposite of this: one reason I chose nursing was because I felt that I was bad at a whole range of skills; empathy, social skills, fine motor skills and coordination, reacting in emergencies; and I wanted to force myself to improve. As a result, I’m far from the strongest student in my classes, and labs, simulations, and hospital placements bring me to a level of anxiety far above anything I ever experienced during academic tests or exams.
The lesson I should have learned from this: you never know what you are and aren’t capable of until you try it. I tried competitive swimming, and found out I didn’t have the raw talent to go to the Olympics. Who knows if this would have been true of physics? My father tells me that in his fourth year of undergraduate studies, he took several physics courses with a level of advanced math that he found almost impossible. He had reached his brain’s natural limit in math, which he might or might not have been able to exceed with hard work and hours of study; still, it was much more advanced than the first-year calculus I took as an elective. I have no reason to think that I’m worse at math than my father, and I suspect my obsessive work ethic would help me exceed any limits I did bump up against. And why not try?
3. The morality of ambition
There’s a third aspect of my aversion to ambitious goals, and I can’t say where it comes from. It might be my parents’ attitude of moderation in everything: they consistently disapproved of my involvement in any ‘obsessive’ activities, swim team included. It might be the way my mother always got mad at me for talking about my achievements, even my grades, in front of friends; it’ll make other people feel bad, she said. (For a long time I was incredibly self-conscious about high grades, and wouldn’t tell my friends if they were above 90%.) It might be the meme that ‘money doesn’t buy happiness’ or the idea that it’s greedy to be ambitious, or that power corrupts and wise people choose not to seek it.
I can’t trace the roots of this idea completely, but for whatever reason, I spent a long time thinking that being ambitious was in some way immoral. That really good people lived simple, selfless lives and never tried to seek anything more. That doing something solely because you wanted more money or more respect, like going to med school instead of nursing school, was selfish and just bad. It might come from the books I read as a kid, or maybe it’s just a rationalization to cover up my other reasons with a nobler one.
But if this is my true reason, then it’s a way to feel superior to people who’ve accomplished cooler things than me, of whom part of me is actually jealous, and that’s not the person I want to be.
4. Laziness
I don’t normally think of myself as a lazy person. Other people are constantly telling me that I’m diligent and have an excellent work ethic. But there’s a way in which all this hardworking dedication to my current occupations has prevented me from spending much time thinking or acting about what I’m going to do next. Working a bunch of 12-hour shifts makes me feel productive, brings the direct benefit of a fat paycheck, and leaves me pretty exhausted at the end of the day, too tired to do the (in some ways harder) work of searching for cool job opportunities, looking at online classes to take, and in general breaking the routine. I hate breaking my routine. It makes me anxious, and I have to spend more energy motivating myself, and in general it’s hard. I tend to only depart from that routine when forced.
Conclusion
I think I was right about some of the conclusions I drew from these various experiences. Practicality is important: ask the English majors working at Starbucks. Thinking about what you want to do all day, as opposed to the title and respect associated with what you want to be, is good life advice and will likely result in a more satisfying career. Trying hard to project an image of success, i.e. “keeping up with the Jones’”, isn’t a good path to happiness. And relative talent is a factor to take into consideration; if my dream career were to be an Olympic swimmer, unfortunately I wouldn’t be likely to succeed.
But one of the problems with thinking things through too deeply when you’re young, and think you’re wiser than everyone else, is a tendency to over-generalize. Doing cool, interesting, world-changing things with your life...even if the actual job position are competitive and hard to obtain...well, on reflection, it doesn’t seem be a bad idea.
The lesson my current self has learned from this: investigate more. Spend less time on work and more time on actually planning future goals. Seek out interesting things to do, and interesting people to work with. Go for opportunities even if they're inconvenient and I have to break my routine a bit. Set concrete goals, and don’t wiggle out of achieving them because they’re ‘not actually that important.’ They’re probably more important than working at a community centre, and I seem to be able to dedicate 1000 hours a year to that... Try not to worry about sunk costs (although it’s worth finishing nursing school, since an RN certificate is incredibly versatile in Canada and will guarantee me a job if any other prospects fail.) Force myself to step out of my comfort zone once in a while and do something kind of crazy, but awesome. And if I can do that, succeed to the point that I can break my reflex-of-being-average...then I'll know for sure whether rationality, of the Less Wrong variety, will help me to 'win'.
The lesson my future self will learn from this: who knows?
The first thing that should be noted is that any theory of a massively parallel system simply must be abstracted in order for humans to be able to understand it. Take, for example, anything that tries to describe the behavior of a large population of people: economics, sociology, political science, etc. We always create high-level abstract concepts (describing the behavior of groups of people rather than the fine details of every single individual).
Keeping that in mind, psychology is intentionally high-level and uses abstract concepts, which have an as-of-yet unclear correspondence to the lower level descriptions of the brain we have from neuroscience. This relation is analogous to that between high-level descriptions of large populations, and actions of individuals.
The answer then, in my opinion, is to keep working towards bridging the gap between the lowest level which we have a near-deterministic understanding of (we know how individual neurons work and a little about how they are connected in the brain), and the higher level intuitive descriptions of mind which are descriptive but not predictive. The massive parallelism required by the low level theories is NOT ignored, so far as I know, by neuroscientists and neuropsychologists, which makes me a bit confused as to why you think further emphasizing the role of parallelism is necessary.
Unless of course, you are criticizing the intuitive, "folk psychology" understanding of the mind. That, however, is arguably instilled in us evolutionarily (Dennett has argued for this).
The answer then, in my opinion, is to keep working towards bridging the gap between the lowest level which we have a near-deterministic understanding of (we know how individual neurons work and a little about how they are connected in the brain), and the higher level intuitive descriptions of mind which are descriptive but not predictive.
This would be awesome! School would be so much better if psychology could be understood from a neuroscience point of view...and vice versa, I guess.
Note that I wrote this post in two hours flat and made little attempt to optimize presentation in this case.
It's still better than the posts I write in 2 hours! Did that 2 hours include the time spent researching, or were you just citing sources you'd already read for other reasons? In either case...not bad.
I'm not sure I understand the difference between 2 and 3. The term pavlovian is being applied to the third system, but 2 sounds more like the archtypal pavlovian learned response (dog learns that bell results in food). Does 3 refer exclusively to pre-encoded pleasant/unpleasant responses rather than learned ones? Or is there maybe a distinction between a value and an action response that I'm missing?
It appears to me like 3 is only pre-encoded preferences, whereas 2 refers to preferences that are learned in an automatic, "reflex-like" way...which, yeah, sounds a lot like the Pavlovian learned response.
I've changed the post title to "How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious" and promoted.
Reasons for change: More specific description of actual content; worry about titles that countersignal at the expense of such specificity (original was "Why Less Wrong hasn't changed my life (yet)".)
I was just about to comment and ask why the title changed...after I figured out it wasn't some other "copycat" post that someone else had made on the same theme. Thanks, though... I spent quite a while switching titles and trying to find a good one, and yours is better.
Come to think of it, one significant reason why I became apathetic with regards to the activities the "ambitious kids" did in high school is that they annoyed me so much. The idea of spending a lot of time with the kind of people who were in Volunteer Club in high school is pretty unbearable.
Yeah, it's that sort of "annoyance" and "ick" that's the sort of disapproval I'm talking about. When you have one attached to a group stereotype, it means you'll have an aversion to expressing any characteristic of yourself that "means" you'd be one of "them".
For example, at one point I found vegans annoying, and this made it difficult for me to switch to a mostly-vegetable diet, because then I'd be one of "them".
Unfortunately, this ingroup/outgroup signaling by our brains has almost nothing to do with actual morality OR personal utility. Our brains will rationalize like crazy to give us high-sounding reasons for our annoyance, to make us feel we're taking a principled stand somehow, but in actuality the whole thing is moot. You approving of the "ambitious kids" (or your status-cheating valedictorian friend) as people won't actually contribute to some sort of moral decay in society, no matter how much your tribal brain makes you feel like it is.
You approving of the "ambitious kids" (or your status-cheating valedictorian friend) as people won't actually contribute to some sort of moral decay in society, no matter how much your tribal brain makes you feel like it is.
I think I get that more now...I wouldn't use my annoyance to claim that he was a bad person. What I find annoying is a fact about my brain, not a fact about the outside world...and anyway, intellectually I know that I have no good reason to disapprove of people who try, and that the fact that I do disapprove of them doesn't make me any better a person.
When I try to analyze it in my head, the thought of joining, I don't know, the student council or something doesn't so much turn me off because I'll be "one of them", but because I'll have to be in the same room as "them." I respect the kind of people who do student council, and politics later on...it's a hard thing to do, and someone has to do it. It's just really, really not my thing...and it's possible that some of the unpleasantness I experienced doing certain activities rubbed off, in my head, on the people who did those activities. Which I can now say is unfair to them, but my thinking wasn't that sophisticated when I was 15.
i never really had that problem. I usually feel less bored wasting time in my room than working towards something productive. When i do take up a task i always feel relieved when i have an excuse to give up and not worry about it any more. most of my troubles came from the realization that the world would not allow me to live a comfortable life doing nothing.
im only in Junior year and havent actually got accepted anywhere but im planning to study something in the way of computers or science.
most of my troubles came from the realization that the world would not allow me to live a comfortable life doing nothing.
Good to realize that now, rather than later! I have an acquaintance who is in his mid-twenties years old, failing his way through various college programs, living at his parents' house with his girlfriend (they have a young kid together), and still doesn't seem to grasp that he's not going to be able to live comfortably and do nothing forever. (Actually, I'm being kind of hard on him...he does work part-time at a clothing store in a mall, his first part-time job ever, which he started around when the baby was born. Quite a change of habit for him. And he's an awfully likeable guy, partly because he's so laid back. It just drives me insane sometimes watching the way he drifts through his life.)
You're right, I didn't make it clear whether or not I've changed this. The answer is, I don't really know. I've noticed it, which is about as far as I've gone with the other reasons, too...noticing alone doesn't mean I'll be able to overcome my instincts next time I face a decision.
I could be wrong, but my interpretation of what you've written is that the other things are things you changed through your questioning them, and that this one is the one you haven't really questioned at the same level yet -- to the level of specific scenarios imagined, and seeing through the mistaken assumptions made by your earlier selves.
Do I disapprove of ambitious people? Not really.
In other words, yes, you do. ;-)
Let me rephrase the question: Can you approve of ambitious people? (Think of specific ambitious people, and imagine what it would be like to approve of them, inwardly smiling warmly at them as people.)
"Disapproval" is actually almost synonymous with "withholding approval". So, if you can't approve of someone (independent of approving their behavior), then you almost certainly disapprove of them.
I still get some strong conflicted emotions when I think about it, but I suspect that has more to do with jealousy...
There are two separate things there: disapproval is not equal to jealousy. You may be unwilling to approve of someone because you are jealous, but that doesn't make them the same thing. Can you not approve of someone and be jealous of them at the same time?
There's a difference between, "I'm so jealous -- and I hate her", and "I'm so jealous -- I want to have what she's having". One is with disapproval, the other without. Jealousness itself is the same in both cases, the desire to have what someone else has, and that it ought to have been yours by right.
Think of specific ambitious people
The first person who comes up when I give my brain that query is a guy I knew in high school, who I find pretty obnoxious to spend time with. Let me revise: he was likeable enough in grade nine, when the two of us were both in the geeky outgroup of our school. He's ambitious in that he wants to be a politician, not a scientist. (For whatever reason, I find politicians a lot more irritating than scientists!)
He was our school valedictorian (which he deserved, he was involved in an incredible amount of volunteer work), and I remember finding his speech pretty irritating. I don't recall much of the substance...in fact, the problem may have been that there wasn't that much substance. Even my mom commented that he came across as kind of arrogant.
...In retrospect, I think I found him irritating because he seemed to be signalling a higher level of "coolness" than he actually had in the high school social environment, and my brain was like "you can't do that! That's cheating!" Now, I'm sure he's done a lot of neat stuff since then, and is probably respected for reasons that he deserves. (Every once in a while one of his Facebook updates comes up on my news feed, and it's something about campaigning for Israel, and my religion-mixed-with-politics detector goes off and triggers annoyance. But I expect a lot of people respect him for that work, too, and at the very least he's more involved than me, which I should be able to respect.) Still...even thinking about him now gives me an "ick" reaction.
The second person that comes to mind when I ask myself to think of ambitious people is my boyfriend. Obviously I don't disapprove of him. He doesn't come across as arrogant to me at all, even though his area of ambition lies in economics and finance, which isn't an area I necessarily approved of before. (I have an uncle who constantly mails us conspiracy-theory films about how banks are evil. I wouldn't say I agree with him, but my family's general attitude towards the financial sector is "parasites!", and I couldn't help absorbing it a little.) My boyfriend is passionate about economics (we've ended up literally lying in bed, in the dark, discussing the state of Third World economies), and for entertainment he reads books about it. He wants to be a "baller", but that ambition seems to stem from his parents, Chinese immigrants who came to Canada at the cost of their own careers in order to do better for their children. I don't know, but somehow my brain labels that reasoning as healthy. And most of the work of noticing my own lack of ambition as a motive came from the discussions I've had with him, the times our ideology has grated and made me realize it was ideology after all and not just the way the world was.
Come to think of it, one significant reason why I became apathetic with regards to the activities the "ambitious kids" did in high school is that they annoyed me so much. The idea of spending a lot of time with the kind of people who were in Volunteer Club in high school is pretty unbearable. I haven't dug deep enough yet to figure out why that is.
why tae-kwon-do?
Also be careful not to overstretch if you are stocky. I did. It sucks. More specifically don't strain so hard to stretch you end up stretching the wrong thing.
Also if you want to improve your reaction time i've found that video games as well as just plain old reaction time tests help (as will sparring). My reaction time has improved a lot with practice.
As a response to the grandparent comment, weight class limits just remove "size" from the pool of stuff you can have a natural aptitude for. The pool of stuff is still very large. I also tend to think of natural obsessiveness/liking for something as a type of talent that aids training rather than directly effecting performance.
why tae-kwon-do?
Funny story... We were having a discussion of our goals at a LW meetup and I said I wanted to start doing martial arts. There was a guy (his username is Cyan, I think) who had done a lot of different martial arts, so he started talking about the particular benefits and downsides of each. I said I wanted to work on balance and flexibility (these are areas where I'm pretty bad, swimming didn't do a lot for either), and he recommended TKD. I signed up within a week. Overall I've liked it.
Also if you want to improve your reaction time i've found that video games as well as just plain old reaction time tests help (as will sparring).
This is literally what my instructor told me to do. Unfortunately, I find video games pretty tedious. I grew up reading books instead... On the bright side, I love sparring, and that along with my good cardio fitness seems to outweigh the disadvantage of reaction times–especially if we do multiple rounds, I've actually beaten black belts in training before because after a while they get too exhausted to resist.
I also tend to think of natural obsessiveness/liking for something as a type of talent that aids training rather than directly effecting performance.
I definitely had that for swimming! Probably the reason I went a lot further than anyone suspected I would.
Weirdly enough, I probably would have preferred doing pharmacology the hard way, i.e. learning chemistry to an advanced enough level that I could understand approximately how and why different drugs have the effects that they do.
Is this even possible with the current best theories in medical science? It was my understanding that it was no where near that advanced.
Probably not, but it's possible to go to a much deeper level of detail than we did, i.e. learning about receptors and physiology, to the point that all you have to memorize, pharmacology-specific, is "drug X is an antagonist for receptor Y", and the rest (uses, side effects, etc) flows naturally from that. We did some of this, for agonists/antagonists of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. (Beta blockers, i.e. metaprolol are, let me draw out this memory for a moment...antagonists of the sympathetic nervous system, which is why they lower blood pressure, because increased heart output is something you get when you stimulate the sympathetic nervous system. I would not have remembered this if I'm just had to memorize it offhand.) I'm sure we could have done more learning of this style...it might have taken 2 or 3 semesters instead of just one, though. Also, some drugs do things that medical science doesn't understand, i.e. anti-psychotics, and that would still have to be memorized.
There’s a third aspect of my aversion to ambitious goals, and I can’t say where it comes from. It might be my parents’ attitude of moderation in everything: they consistently disapproved of my involvement in any ‘obsessive’ activities, swim team included. It might be the way my mother always got mad at me for talking about my achievements, even my grades, in front of friends; it’ll make other people feel bad, she said. ... I can’t trace the roots of this idea completely, but for whatever reason, I spent a long time thinking that being ambitious was in some way immoral. ... But if this is my true reason, then it’s a way to feel superior to people who’ve accomplished cooler things than me, of whom part of me is actually jealous, and that’s not the person I want to be.
Out of everything you said, I notice this is the one that you don't seem to have actually changed, or at least it's not as clear from what you said.
A quick way to test: do you disapprove of other ambitious people? If so, imagine what it would be like if you didn't disapprove of them. Then notice any objections that come up from your brain.
(The pattern of a learned moral disapproval applied to a behavioral stereotype, subsequently interfering with individual goals is one we see a lot in the Mind Hackers' Guild; they are relatively easy to fix, but not always easy to spot. Your introspection skills are probably more accurate than you realize.)
You're right, I didn't make it clear whether or not I've changed this. The answer is, I don't really know. I've noticed it, which is about as far as I've gone with the other reasons, too...noticing alone doesn't mean I'll be able to overcome my instincts next time I face a decision. However, it's the kind of thing where just knowing makes it less likely for me to obey it, because to me it's not a flattering reason and I would get pretty annoyed with myself for obeying it.
Do I disapprove of ambitious people? Not really. I still get some strong conflicted emotions when I think about it, but I suspect that has more to do with jealousy...and I'm okay with it being about jealousy. I don't want to be the kind of person who doesn't feel jealousy, but there are circumstances in which I'd expect any given person to feel jealous, and it's okay for now if I feel jealous in those circumstances too. I haven't spent much effort on changing it yet.
From a pretty young age, I remember being able to distance myself from my immediate circumstances and imagine "which part of the story" I was in now.
If I'm a character in a story, I'm a minor side character in someone else's.
Whose story? Is their story interesting? Do you have a crucial role to play at some point, or are you mainly an observer?
I'll try to provide an example.
I have natural ability for a few things, all artistic. It I taboo "natural ability," I get automatic, plentiful idea generation and high deliberate-practice-to-broadened-vocabulary ratio (I don't have to work much to be able to do a lot).
I'm best at drums and filmmaking. I've played in lots of bands and gone pretty far career-wise, but I've hardly done any filmmaking besides a few music videos. Why?
I can improve at drums mostly by myself, at my own pace -- essential, as it turns out (I've tested this in music classes and on a drumming retreat, both of which I quit because I got too overwhelmed). When I have to work with others, it's usually a small group. Rock band instrumentation usually consists of drums, guitar, bass, and vocals, just enough for my poor social modeling circuitry to handle. Filmmaking requires cooperation with dozens or even hundreds. Giving direction to more than a couple of people at once doesn't really work, because I get impatient... and then rude... or think I've been rude even if I haven't, which starts a silent spiral into apathy. Coping mechanisms probably exist, but I've never been in a position to discover them.
So I think for me it comes down to limited social ability/energy. Being socially incompetent is personally exhausting, as well as harmful to proper networking (being seen as someone who's easy to work with). To avoid burnout, I have to funnel my talents through the pursuit that saps my vigor the least.
Reading LW has only changed my life in that I'm much less likely to wall off entire sections of my mind and experience just because they imply stress. Knowledge is power... but that power isn't necessarily sublime... unless its sublime in the way evolution or a glacier is sublime; that is, not necessarily impressive on a moment-to-moment basis.
It sounds like at the very least, you are quite aware of what your "limiting factor" is, and which things it limits or doesn't limit. If you're an adult and still have this problem, you might be right that it would be difficult or even impossible to overcome.
However, it seems to me that building social skills for structured situations, i.e. the particular situation of filming and giving a bunch of people directions, are things that improve with time and practice. I used to find most social situations stressful and exhausting, but the ones I've put myself into over and over again have become comparatively comfortable. For example, teaching first aid to a group of rowdy 20 thirteen-year-olds is something I would have found extremely challenging and frustrating when I was younger, and I still would have been scared as little as three years ago–but now I'm confident enough to enjoy it. Whereas large group events, like school cocktail evenings and parties where I don't know a lot of people, are still generally unpleasant–I don't know what I'm supposed to do, what my role in the situation is and how I can execute it gracefully. That's likely because I hardly ever go to those kind of parties.
[Side note: your experience of directing in filmmaking brings me back to a tenth grade experience being the unofficial leader of a group in drama class and trying to direct a mini play. This is probably one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had at school–I have no ability to tell other people (my equals) what to do in a socially graceful way, without being rude and making them dislike me. Situations with a power differential, i.e. teacher-student, make it a lot clearer to me how I can and can't instruct other people.]
I don't know whether your social skills are an overcome-able barrier to success, or not. If you've reached adulthood without them improving at all, that doesn't sound promising–but if you've improved from the point of not being able to work in small groups, i.e. bands, to being able to...then it might just be a matter of structured practice in situations where you have positive feedback. Though your "deliberate-practice-to-broadened-vocabulary" might be very low compared to areas where you are "talented".
Less Wrong is entertainment, if it surprises you that it didn't change your life, your expectations were very irrational.
Like all entertainment, sometimes it has some positive (or negative) side effects, but they're not the real reason people are here.
Reading LW is fun. In that sense, it's entertainment, just like some people read physics textbooks for fun. People also watch reality TV for fun. Does that mean reading LW, or physics textbooks, is equivalent to watching reality TV? I would say that physics textbooks have a lot of fringe benefits aside from their entertainment value–you end up understanding physics really well. LW maybe isn't as good as a physics textbook, because it's based less on tried-and-true science and more on a bunch of concepts, hypotheses, and ideology thrown together into the idea of "rationality." But I'd bet most people get more fringe benefits out of LW than out of reality shows.
I get the feeling a large portion of this story can be classified as learned helplessness.
Several studies(google for cal newport) have shown that base talent has little effect on how good you can be at something, the real variable is deliberate practice, pushing the limits of what you can handle a tiny bit to slowly keep improving. ( obviously your swimming example does have harder limits imposed by the limits of your body, this does not seem to apply to fields outside of sports though and in sports like boxing there are different classes because of the differences in bodies)
When I learned about grade signalling I started making mistakes on purpose to lower my average (which was around 9.5 at the time). That was a terrible tactic in hindsight and it still causes selfdoubt on exams today.
and in sports like boxing there are different classes because of the differences in bodies
That doesn't necessarily make all body types equal, either. I recently started taekwondo, and based on what my instructors have said, I don't have a great body for that either. The weight class structure, and the fact that taller fighters have a major advantage because of leg reach, means that tall, thin girls have a big advance, and I'm neither–my natural body type tends towards chubby/muscular depending on how hard I exercise. Most competitive taekwondo fighters in my weight class would be significantly taller. (In terms of cardio, I'm in better shape than most people at my current level, because I do a lot of exercise outside of class, and I was already quite strong before I started...but I seem to be genetically set to have slow twitch muscles instead of fast twitch muscles, i.e. good endurance and comparatively little explosive power. And I have slow reaction times.)
Then again, other weight-class sports, like boxing, might rely less on the leg length and more just on strength, fitness, and technique. In which case I might be better off.
Oh, man. The fatal event in my failed study of engineering was getting 99% on a first-year dynamics exam. I'd reduced the semester to a page of notes, then the page to a quarter page, then the quarter page to four equations [which of course I can't remember now - this was 1988], which it seems had been the point of the entire semester. I then proceeded to ace it. (Got a sign wrong in one problem, hence 99%.) This was absolutely fatal to doing well henceforth, since I had no idea how I'd managed to do that well except showing up at lectures and usually doing my homework.
Damn it! I wish I still had classes like this! ...I love classes where literally just understanding the material (in a deep, comprehensive way) is enough to get 100% if you don't make stupid mistakes. I suspect this is the reason I did well in high school chemistry, physics, and bio–if you tried to really grasp the underlying concepts, the memorization required was trivial, or at least it didn't feel like memorization.
Whereas many of my classes now are pure memorization of stuff with hardly any underlying logical structure (like pharmacology...stupid list of over 100 drug names to memorize, generic AND commercial!), or based on legal standards and "best practice guidelines" which, although they must be based on research results, don't yield easily to my attempt to find underlying concepts. One class consisted almost entirely of memorizing the names (and acronyms, in French and English) for the various nursing regulatory organization in Ontario, and the documents they released on stuff like ethics. Gaaaah. There have been so many classes where I finished with an A- not because the class was hard, not because an A+ would have been ridiculously difficult, but because the material was so boring that I literally could not make myself study for more than a few minutes at a time, and only then by bribing myself.
Weirdly enough, I probably would have preferred doing pharmacology the hard way, i.e. learning chemistry to an advanced enough level that I could understand approximately how and why different drugs have the effects that they do. This would obviously be harder, but it would also be interesting, which would make it psychologically easier–I spend a lot more willpower on studying boring things than on studying interesting things.
Before discovering Less Wrong, i took an unusual view of ambition. I actually managed to use excessive ambition to justify a total lack of ambition. I would deem unachievable goals to be the only goals worth achieving. Since this made it impossible for me to achieve any "valuable" goals, i would be able to accept having no goals as a suitable alternative. As you've probably noticed, this is eerily similar to a Mysterious Answer. I never believed in any Spiritual ideals (although i did subscribe to intelligent design due to a misunderstanding of Occam's Razor). I still am baffled by the lengths i went to to screw myself up in this regard. As you can probably imagine, this idea led to a great deal of depression, lowered self esteem, and worsened relationships with family members. I was seriously considering suicide (i probably wouldn't have done anything, but the idea was still there). Despite Scoring in the 99th percentile on standardized testing, I was resolved to avoid college.
Upon reading the Sequences and Methods of Rationality, I instantly realized how absurd these ideas were and disposed of them appropriately. Though this bias (which i highly suspect to be related to undervalue of the mundane) does rear its head at times, it is generally under control. In any case, I think i can say with at least 85% certainty that Less Wrong and all it represents have had an amazingly positive effect on my life. Even discounting the incredible boost to mental well being, since finding rationality, my GPA has gone up two letter grades (would be more if not for akrasia), I have begun learning programming, took up an after school project, and resolved to go to college.
ince this made it impossible for me to achieve any "valuable" goals, i would be able to accept having no goals as a suitable alternative... Despite Scoring in the 99th percentile on standardized testing, I was resolved to avoid college.
What did you do all day? Weren't you bored? ...Then again, I should avoid generalizing from one example and assuming you shared my tendency to get antsy if I wasn't doing something "productive" during a significant enough fraction of my time. Obviously you didn't have this tendency. Or the tendency to get incredibly frustrated with yourself and feel worthless if you weren't progressing towards your goals at a steady rate... If you did feel this way, you must have been miserable.
Anyway, I'm glad to hear the Sequences helped you out! Just out of curiosity, what are you planning to study in college?
I'm surprised that I liked this very personal post so much. You don't seem confused. You explain clearly.
Perhaps you've been able to see yourself more clearly after reading about specific emotional/perceptual obstacles. Perhaps you've always been so introspective. Perhaps you've merely produced a story about yourself that sounds convincing. In any case, if you now feel freer of avoidance/defensiveness, that's a boon.
Of course I recommend you do something you're well suited for, provided that your competitiveness isn't abnormally low. Alternatively, if you like doing it (e.g. nursing) and it pays well enough, that's better than doing something significantly less fun/lucrative that you merely have a greater competitive rank in.
In case you haven't thought about it, it makes sense to consider the expected future (10+ years out) demand/pay for professions whenever you're not near the top of the competitive heap, so you don't suffer the slow erosion of something that's merely satisfactory now.
It sounds like your parents were mostly good to you and for you. Perhaps it would have been better if you'd rejected some of their influence sooner than this. The adolescent tendency to distance yourself from parts of your parents can sometimes have fantastic effects (if it's not only the result of toxic peer-approval-seeking). I remember changing from "I want to be exactly like my dad" to "I want to be exactly like my dad EXCEPT ..." by 7 years old. (usual "reversed stupidity is not intelligence" caveat)
Odd use of "hindsight bias".
"one of the problems with thinking ... and think you’re wiser" -> thinking
Perhaps you've been able to see yourself more clearly after reading about specific emotional/perceptual obstacles. Perhaps you've always been so introspective. Perhaps you've merely produced a story about yourself that sounds convincing.
I've always thought about stuff a lot on a deliberate, analytical level. From a pretty young age, I remember being able to distance myself from my immediate circumstances and imagine "which part of the story" I was in now. (The tendency to fit my life into story format is one that's been with me all along, and is probably helpful in some ways and unhelpful in others.) I've always been able to put words to my emotions and describe the way they interact in detail–I think I've found that just the act of analyzing the way I feel allows me to step back far enough that negative emotions aren't painful anymore, just interesting. One of the most common topics of discussion between me and my sister is trying to analyze other people's actions, mostly people in her high school crowd, where social dynamics are exaggerated in terms drama and scope–I apply my knowledge of cognitive science and ev-psych, and it's one of my favourite conversation games.
That being said, my ability to tell a coherent, convincing story for my own actions doesn't mean that's what's really going on, underneath all my opaque brain circuitry. Introspection is imperfect. Just because it feels true to me doesn't mean it is.
I don't think ambition is a single dial in the brain that some people have turned up higher than others. I think it's made of lots of other things, like low social anxiety, high stress tolerance, high stimulation threshold, greater-than-normal obsessive tendencies, escape velocity levels of talent during formative years, financial stability, peers with which to compete, familial support, role models, and on and on, with innumerable exceptions and contradictions. The point is "ambition" as it is usually discussed feels like a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. Ambition-that-works seems like a positive feedback loop... in that your talents aren't undermined too greatly by your personality or circumstances to the extent that trying to succeed results more often in succeeding that not.
This whole "rationalists should win" thing doesn't sit well with me. I think it's reasonable to expect LW to provide better explanations, but it seems like people want wholly different personalities, too. Just because someone in the world works harder than you, that doesn't mean the only thing separating you from them is akrasia.
Personality diversity ≠ distribution of character failure.
Agreed. People are different. There are tons of different things that could be the "limiting factor" for someone's success in the world; some are overcome-able, like akrasia, and some aren't. However, people don't know themselves perfectly, and a lot of the reasons I articulated to myself for why I wanted to be a certain way were bad reasons, in that they weren't entirely consistent with my actual preferences, interests, and talents.
Things like akrasia, which prevent people from achieving goals they've already formed, have been discussed in detail on LW. However, the factors that decide which goals people choose, and whether those goals are easy or hard relative to their abilities, haven't been discussed as much. Undoubtedly some of those factors are hard to change, but some might not be.
Generic "ambition" is a serious case of putting the cart before the horse. If you have ambition to do something, that's great; if not, deciding you should be "ambitious" and then trying to figure out what to be ambitious about rarely ends well.
I think this is why I get creeped out by ambitious people sometimes. I'd much rather my doctor be passionate about medicine than be someone who decided medicine was more "prestigious" than nursing. As a personal anecdote, I am currently in medicine because I want to specialize in psychiatry. I am passionate about psychiatry and plan to be an awesome psychiatrist. I am not quite as passionate about organic medicine with its heart attacks and kidney infections, and although I work hard at it and am pretty good, some of my classmates who get up every morning super excited because they've dreamed of treating kidney infections their whole lives are better. I don't begrudge them this and if I ever got a kidney infection I'm going straight to them and not to the doctor who went into medicine as a subgoal of something else; if they ever get depression I hope they'll come to me for the same reason.
I understand it's the same in many other fields. Paul Graham writes that successful startup founders start with a problem they want to solve, eg Larry Page and Sergey Brin were frustrated with terrible online search; unsuccessful startup founders decide they would really like to earn fantastic amounts of money and only worry about what business they'll do it in as an afterthought.
The only problem here is charity: I do think it may be morally important to be ambitious in helping others, which might even include taking a lucrative career in order to give money to charity. This is especially true if the Singularity memeplex is right and we're living in a desperate time that calls for a desperate effort. See for example Giving What You Can's powerpoint on ethical careers. At some point you need to balance how much good you want to do, with how likely you are to succeed in a career, with how miserable you want to make yourself - and at the very least rationality can help clarify that decision.
As far as it goes, you're absolutely right. I think that's one of the good lessons that my dad taught me, with his self-help books...it matters more (in terms of happiness, and of being good at what you do) that you like what you do all day, as opposed to enjoying the reputation of what you are.
The problem is, I think I would enjoy the day-to-day work of a doctor more than that of a nurse-there's more thinking involved, more theory, and that's always been the part I liked. I would almost certainly enjoy the schooling more than nursing school, too–I can't pretend I'm not bored and underchallenged in the academic aspects of nursing. And my mother is almost certainly right that I would like many aspects of academia–the thinking and researching and studying, if not the competitive atmosphere. I used to read physics and biology books for fun, something I can never claim to have done for nursing textbooks.
Side note:
I am passionate about psychiatry and plan to be an awesome psychiatrist. I am not quite as passionate about organic medicine with its heart attacks and kidney infections, and although I work hard at it and am pretty good, some of my classmates who get up every morning super excited because they've dreamed of treating kidney infections their whole lives are better.
I was pretty meh about my psychiatry placement this fall. The theory is pretty fascinating, and I had some surreal conversations with patients, but in general the nurses don't have a lot to do with theory-basically we just gave out meds, wrote notes in the chart, and then had lots of down time. I loved med-surg partly because of the lack of downtime, which didn't give me a chance to get bored.
That doesn't make it an invalid question. There are tall women and short women, and there are tall men and short men, but asking whether women as a class are taller than men is a perfectly valid question, made no less so by my not happening to know the answer.
I agree with your immediate point: however, height is something which is easily measurable and easily compared between both sexes. I don't know if there's a quality of books and video games which is equally easy to measure and compare. Reading books teaches kids to be better at reading (and probably writing too, or at least it did so for me), and exposes them to a range of ideas, concepts, and role model characters. Some books are well written, some badly written...some characters are useful role models for children, others aren't. As for video games, I've been told that they improve information processing and reaction times. In fact, my taekwondo instructor says that likely one of the reasons I'm slow is because I never played video games as a kid. Different people have told me that video games encourage creative and out-of-the-box thinking. These are all good things, and books don't have an effect on them, I would assume.
I guess, in theory, you could ask "are children raised solely on books better adapted and more successful than children raised solely on video games"? Still, 'success' is such a broad category and depends on so many factors that I don't know if the answer could be measured even in theory.
It struck me that I think you can still see the imagination debate playing out today. Consider the following conversation, which most people will have encountered a variant of at least once+:
-- Mr. Highbrow: It is better to read books than watch movies based on them. The movies limit you to someone else's perspective on the material, but the book gives maximum reign to your imagination.
-- Mr. Lowbrow: What are you smoking? The movie is an immersive experience that makes me feel like I'm really in the story. The book is just somebody else's description of the story.
Having thought about it, my highest-probability hypothesis is now that Mr. HB has more vivid mental imagery than does Mr. LB. Further introspection led me to realize that when I read fiction, I often have very specific images of places and scenery, but usually only vague impressions of faces. When I watch film adaptions, I'm often struck that the setting is "wrong," but rarely have that feeling about the appearance of people (unless the actors are grossly divergent from the description of them in the book).++
++ I considered putting this in the "How is your mind different" thread, but I don't know how typical or atypical I am. Which is, I suppose, the point.
Reminds me of the debate 'books-vs-video games', some people claiming books are better for children because they encourage imagination, others saying that video games are better because they're interactive and thus encourage creativity. As for myself...I don't think it's a valid question. There are good books and bad books, and there are good video games and bad video games. Being more immersive, a violent video game might be more likely to de-sensitize children to violence than a violent book, but I don't know, and I have no idea if it's been studied before.
Having never met the man, my mental image is basically HJPEV.
Here, have a better mental image.
But for Sanity's sake don't look at the comments. (Apparently Eliezer joined the 'illluminaty' when we weren't looking.)
I watched the video up until the toy problem with blue circles and red diamonds, then paused it, got out a piece of paper, and worked through the problem using Bayes' theorem. So proud of myself right now...
I don't endorse telling people they are right when I don't believe they are right. But there are lots of possibilities in between "You're wrong" and "You're right."
For example, wedrifid recently disagreed with something I said. He neither told me I was wrong nor told me I was right; he told me that he couldn't think of any examples of something I'd described as common. This puts the ball back in my court: if I want to dig up examples, I can (and perhaps discover that I'm wrong); if not, we can leave it there.
Other strategies that work well: "That's a good point, I think that [x, y] are true...but I think that [w, z] might also be true..." Basically, focus on the part of their argument that was valid, praise them for it, and then make a point of your own, without necessarily saying directly that your argument invalidates part of their argument.
I am entirely incapable or many of the things mentioned, I am unable to commit or fully participate due to helth and geographical reasons, and a bunch of other things...
On the other hand I have a feeling feeling of ability to be useful, despite all those things. This kind of deliberate growing of intuitions and making the brain do some specific thing is right up my alley and I might be very good at coming up with certain types of examples or providing a certain kind of hard to articulate meta intuition. I also know a bunch abaut art and design.
I'd also likely find it great fun and far more meaningful than anything I normally do.
So this is a bit of a dillema, what should I do?
Apply for 'can work part-time but would not be willing to relocate.' Or 'volunteer', I guess.
When I consider the the question of Dawkins' tone (is he strident?) the context in which I locate my inquiry is provided by international news stories which I stumble across. Against that background he seems mild; any milder and I would fault him for weakness and irresolution.
What is the background against which he stands out as obnoxious and unnecessarily critical?
I read the news stories. Wow. That is...sad. As in 'society is more messed up than I thought.'
What is the background against which he stands out as obnoxious and unnecessarily critical?
Around the same time as I was reading Dawkins, I was also reading "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis. I can't say any of the arguments for God's existence convinced me, or held much weight at all really, but the tone of the book, and pretty much all of C.S. Lewis' books, was quite polite and respectful. Even of atheists.
I just wanted to say that the presentation is wonderful. It's a refreshing change from the usual posts and I would love to see it continue. In fact you should stop the other posts or let them post them on their own blogs or something. This type of content will make a difference in the world, the other guy is more like a well-researched "top 10 ways to lose weight" type of article and has limited tangible benefit.
More please. This is what lesswrong should be about!
Probably true. Still, I think the number of people who would spend hours of their time reading LW would decrease if they were disallowed from posting. And EY may be too busy now to write posts like this every week.
If you don't plan on a continued relationship with the group, but feel that there are some like minded people there, there is every reason for you to state your own mind plainly to them. Those who agree may invite you to some other venue more appropriate to both of you, and those who don't agree will cease to exist in your world very shortly anyway.
It pays to advertise who and what you are, so that those who appreciate you can find you better. Also, being willing to show that you disagree with the group often wins some points with all involved for your self confidence, but particularly with those who wish they had had the courage to have done the same.
Also, being willing to show that you disagree with the group often wins some points with all involved for your self confidence
Someday I will acquire the self-confidence to disagree with the group publicly... Someday.
One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
I don't want to believe that I live in a society where people have to be embarrassed into changing their minds.
This has been a wonderful thread. It has demonstrated in many ways that many if not most people are not primarily moved by reason or evidence, and are instead moved by the social considerations of their beliefs. Why don't you want to believe what is manifestly true?
On the rudeness of Dawkins. By the standards of the taboo on criticism of religion, he is rude. That taboo is what keeps the nonsense alive.
By the ordinary standards that other ideas have to live by, he is a perfect gentleman.
Why don't you want to believe what is manifestly true?
I'm sorry if I was unclear in what I mean by 'don't want to believe it.' I do want to believe things that are true...therefore, if it's true that humans are more moved by social consideration than reason, then I want to believe that. I don't like it, but pretending it's not true won't change that. But if I had a choice between living in that world, or moving to a world where humans were more swayed by reason than social consideration, I would pick the latter. Just like I'd pick a world without human trafficking and sex slaves in it over a world with them.
And it's not as if his books stand a chance of converting people who are already religious...the dismissive attitude that comes through in his writing is exactly what WON'T make people really change their minds.
You (and a lot of people) say that, but I haven't seen evidence presented that they don't work - just people's models of other people.
However, I note David Colquhon's discussion of how he killed the study of homeopathy at several UK universities:
Dr Baggini, among others, has claimed that the “new atheists” are too strident, and that they only antagonise moderate atheists (see The New Atheist Movement is destructive, though there is something of a recantation two years later in Religion’s truce with science can’t hold). I disagree, for two reasons.
Firstly, people like Richard Dawkins are really not very strident. Dawkin’s book, The God Delusion, is quiet and scholarly. It takes each of the arguments put forward by religious people, and dissects them one by one. It’s true that, having done this, he sets forth his conclusions quite bluntly. That seems to me to be a good thing. If your conclusions are stifled by tortuous euphemisms, nobody takes much notice. Just as in science, simple plain words are best.
The second, and more important, reason that I like Dawkin’s approach is that I suspect it’s the only approach that has much effect. There is a direct analogy with my own efforts to stop universities giving BSc degrees in subjects that are not science. Worse, they are actively anti-science. Take for example, homeopathy, the medicine that contains no medicine. I started by writing polite letters to vice chancellors. Usually they didn’t even have the courtesy to reply. All efforts to tackle the problem through the “proper channels” failed. The only thing that has worked was public derision. A combination of internal moles and Freedom of Information Act requests unearthed what was being taught on these courses. Like Westminster’s assertion that “amethysts emit high Yin energy”. Disclosure of such nonsense and headlines like
Professor Geoffrey Petts of the University of Westminster says they “are not teaching pseudo-science”. The facts show this is not true
are certainly somewhat strident. But they have worked. Forget the proper channels if you want results. Mock what deserves to be mocked.
Or, as Mencken put it decades ago:
One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
I suspect your true rejection is the claim that Dawkins is "unnecessarily critical". Unfortunately, this usually means "critical at all".
.One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
Probably true. Very depressing. I don't want to believe that I live in a society where people have to be embarrassed into changing their minds.
Also, I'm changing my opinion on whether or not Dawkins does convert people...a number of comments have been made in this thread about people having friends whose final conversion to atheist was made after reading 'The God Delusion' and similar books. Why not, I guess.
all the venom against religious people
That's really quite an accusation. Citations, please.
I have only my subjective feeling, when I finished reading 'The God Delusion' of "that could have been a really interesting book, but his attitude ruined it." Whether that response was based more on the book itself or on my own attitude, I can't say. (But I loved Dawkins' other books, i.e. 'The Selfish Gene' and others related to biology...they are still among my favourites.)
In general, though, I don't see a big difference between the actual day-to-day, real-life behavior of religious 20-year-olds and non-religious 20-year-olds...
I think this depends on the population. I have some Catholic acquaintances, for example, who are committed to a child-bearing schedule set by their pastors; this behavior is certainly different from that of non-Catholics. But that's just a single data point, not a statistically significant trend.
except that many of the religious young people tend to spend more time volunteering or otherwise trying to change things for the better, and spend more time thinking about how they can be better people. (Or at least talk more about these things.)
Is there some data to back this up, adjusted for various meanings of "better" ?
No rigorously collected data, unfortunately (although someone may have studied it.) It's more a weighted average in my head of people I know personally.
Am I the only one who thinks $3k/month is actually a lot of money?
It's a lot if you're a student, I guess. The most I've ever made was about $2500/month, and that's working 55 hours a week...at $12/hour. Pretty much any non-student job pays more.
Well, don't feel bad about not going to Africa to build houses! Paying Africans to build houses in Africa is better in almost every way.
Are there any organizations that do that? i.e. you can donate money and it will be used to pay the employees of a company in Africa who build houses for their communities? Because if that doesn't exist, someone should make it exist...
I can't imagine what the arguments are in support of "church doesn't advance your goals". What are they?
I know all sorts of arguments that "churches lead to all sorts of horrible political-social effects" and ones about "churches ruin some particular lives (imagine some closeted, self-hating homosexual who would have been happy in a secular background)", but if you get something from going to church, and it's your goal to do so... that seems very straight-forward.
It's more like "you think going to church advances your goals, but you're wrong because you haven't taken into account the fact that going to church with irrational people makes you more irrational/insane." I guess it's a reasonable assumption that one of my goals is to become more rational, given that I'm on LW, but apparently people don't give me the benefit of the doubt for having thought about that already on my own, and made a decision one way or another.
I doubt very much he used the word 'stupid' to label religious people. He has said, though; "It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is either ignorant, stupid, or insane.”
And of course, people will take from that what they want. "I'm religious, I'm not insane nor am I ignorant, so he must be calling me stupid!"
Another one is his opening to the God Delusion where he lists a long list of characteristics of the christian god. People have of course taken issues with that list, however you can find bible references for every single one of those characteristics, words you'll even hear in church, so again it's mostly being taken negatively by people who want it to be negative.
But if you have something concrete, do tell. It's a puzzle I've long wanted to solve.
"It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is either ignorant, stupid, or insane.”
It's an interesting characteristic of human language that the word 'ignorant', which I find pretty innocuous if used on its own, comes across as a lot harsher when put in the company of 'stupid' and 'insane.' Some kind of context-building I guess, the brain automatically assuming that the author's point is simple and uni-faceted.
Obviously, that doesn't mean that's the right way to read that sentence, or that it's constructive to get offended by it. I'm not offended by it now. It's perfectly possible for one of my friends to be one of those three things and still be a kind, generous, awesome person to hang out with. Maybe I made that distinction less when I was in high school, which is when I read "The God Delusion."
Come to think of it, I read 'The God Delusion' before I'd even heard of Less Wrong, or cognitive biases, or ways in which words could be misinterpreted... I might find it illuminating to read it again.
In your LW articles, you come off as both charismatic and intelligent. You have interesting insights, you're willing and able to post your thoughts (and they're frequently even not-in-sync with the general LW zeigeist), you use lots of engaging personal examples... Are you sure you're not being humble or maintaining a wrong self-image for some other reason?
In your LW articles, you come off as both charismatic and intelligent.
I think my intelligence is above average (general population average, not LW average), but that's not at all the same thing as being intelligent enough to be a good physicist...although I think that may not be my true rejection, and I'm going to try and spend some more time finding out what my true rejection is.
Also, LW is an entirely written forum and I'm very confident in writing, and have a lot of experience. I'm not as good a public speaker: I don't have as much practice, and there's the added challenge of not having time to sit staring at a screen for five minutes trying to decide if my argument is phrased unclearly and I need to fix it. So stuff comes out a lot less elegantly when I'm saying it to people, and I tend to say "um" and "uh" a lot, or sound a bit incoherent because my brain isn't running at the same rate as my mouth.
I think he could have presented the same facts (and even the same opinions) more effectively without all the venom against religious people and sense of superiority
I don't actually understand this bit. I've heard the argument being made many times, yet no one seems to be able to pinpoint what they mean by it.
Here's a recent example I can think of. Richard Dawkins said a little while ago that early bible writers were ignorant of certain facts we now take for granted. People reacted to the "ignorant" bit, to which Dawkins asked "Do you know what the word ignorant means?" This is a fair question; do you know what the word mean, or are you reacting because your knowledge is lacking? I often find that people are fuming more over clear writing than over fuzzy language, even if there is no real venom or sarcasm or superiority within. (I could go into a tirade about people getting offended at mere words, and whether people generally fully, truly understand what it means to be offended, again with pointers to the identity comments at the top of this post!)
I can discuss with people - say the change of musical styles from the renaissance to the baroque in early Italian music (and the early influence on German music through Schuts) - and rightfully and without any venom say that most people are ignorant of the issue. It's not an insult, it's a word describing a lack of knowledge on something (knowledge I'm not proud of, btw, as my geekery is a negative liability in society ... more on this one later). I am myself terribly ignorant on a number of issues and subjects, and have no problem admitting so; I use the word for what it means. Yet people think it means a negative when it really is neutral. (Same problem with liability, btw. Something can be a liability to you, but there's positive and negative liability, and we often just say "liability" and draw a negative over anything we say by being less precise)
I think Dawkins attempt to be precise is often misinterpreted as having some negative connotation they read into it. (Hitchens is another chapter all-together, of course) I think, in general, that people should strive to be less wrong in their own reaction to the world. Things would quickly be a far gentler place.
I don't have any particular negative reaction to the word 'ignorant', AFAICT, so I doubt that was the source of me finding 'The God Delusion' a turn-off. (I read it a long time ago, so I'm not sure I can pinpoint exactly why I disliked it, especially since my opinions and attitudes have changed appreciably in the meantime.) It might even not have been vocabulary so much as just the general attitude that came across...basically, that you'd be stupid to believe in God, and furthermore, you'd be stupid to want to believe in God. I don't know if he used the word 'stupid' but that's what I remember as coming across, and there's a big difference between calling someone ignorant and implying that they're stupid.
Why is that an indicator that it's probably true? (Actual honest question, not disagreeing... or agreeing for that matter)
It's a good psychological indicator. If something is unflattering, and kind of painful to think about, usually it's because I see elements of it in myself and don't want to admit they're there. If something is unflattering but it's not painful to think about, that's because it's not threatening...because I have no worry at all that it's true about me. (Although I might be wrong not to worry...my introspection isn't always perfect.)
I've done this once or twice. It is always taken as criticism by the original speaker, but with good enough presentation you could probably manage to sound to the larger audience like you weren't being sarcastic.
Yeah, that's unsurprising. People (or most people, including me a lot of the time) are quite sensitive about how their arguments and opinions are perceived by others. "Let's go about testing this" doesn't sound, to most people, like "wow, I'm being validated."
The problem with too many rational memes
Like so many of my posts, this one starts with a personal anecdote.
A few weeks ago, my boyfriend was invited to a community event through Meetup.com. The purpose of the meetup was to watch the movie The Elegant Universe and follow up with a discussion. As it turns out, this particular meetup was run by a man who I’ll call ‘Charlie’, the leader of some local Ottawa group designed to help new immigrants to Canada find a social support net. Which, in my mind, is an excellent goal.
Charlie turned out to be a pretty neat guy, too: charismatic, funny, friendly, encouraging everyone to share his or her opinion. Criticizing or shutting out other people’s views was explicitly forbidden. It was a diverse group, as he obviously wanted it to be, and by the end everyone seemed to feel pretty comfortable.
My boyfriend, an extremely social being whose main goal in life is networking, was raving by the end about what a neat idea it was to start this kind of group, and how Charlie was a really cool guy. I was the one who should have had fun, since I’m about 100 times more interested in physics than he is, but I was fuming silently.
Why? Because, at various points in the evening, Charlie talked about his own interest in the paranormal and the spiritual, and the books he’d written about it. When we were discussing string theory and its extra dimensions, he made a comment, the gist of which was ‘if people’s souls go to other dimensions when they die, Grandma could be communicating with you right now from another dimension by tapping spoons.’
Final straw. I bit my tongue and didn’t say anything and tried not to show how irritated I was. Which is strange, because I’ve always been fairly tolerant, fairly agreeable, and very eager to please others. Which is why, when my brain responded ‘because he’s WRONG and I can’t call him out on it because of the no criticism rule!’ to the query of ‘why are you pissed off?’, I was a bit suspicious of that answer.
I do think that Charlie is wrong. I would have thought he was wrong a long time ago. But it wouldn’t have bothered me; I know that because I managed to attend various churches for years, even though I thought a lot of their beliefs were wrong, because it didn’t matter. They had certain goals in common with me, like wanting to make the world a better place, and there were certain things I could get out of being a community member, like incredibly peaceful experiences of bliss that would reset my always-high stress levels to zero and allow me to survive the rest of the week. Some of the sub-goals they had planned to make the world a better place, like converting people in Third World countries to Christianity, were ones that I thought were sub-optimal or even damaging. But overall, there were more goals we had in common than goals we didn’t have in common, and I could, I judged, accomplish those goals we had in common more effectively with them than on my own. And anyway, the church would still be there whether or not I went; if I did go, at least I could talk about stuff like physics with awe and joy (no faking required, thinking about physics does make me feel awe and joy), and increase some of the congregation’s scientific literacy a little bit.
Then I stopped going to church, and I started spending more time on Less Wrong, and if I were to try to go back, I’m worried it would be exactly the same as the community meetup. I would sit there fuming because they were wrong and it was socially unacceptable for me to tell them that.
I’m worried because I don’t think those feelings are the result of a clearheaded, logical value calculation. Yeah, churches and people who believe in the paranormal waste a lot of money and energy, which could be spent on really useful things otherwise. Yes, that could be a valid reason to reject them, to refuse to be their allies even if some of your goals are the same. But it’s not my true rejection. My true rejection is that them being wrong is too annoying for me to want to cooperate. Why? I haven’t changed my mind, really, about how much damage versus good I think churches do for the world.
I’m worried that the same process which normalized religion for me is now operating in the opposite direction. I’m worried that a lot of Less Wrong memes, ideas that show membership to the ‘rationalist’ or ‘skeptic’ cultures, such as atheism itself, or the idea that religion is bad for humanity...I’m worried that they’re sneaking into my head and becoming virulent, that I'm becoming an undiscriminating skeptic. Not because I’ve been presented with way more evidence for them, and updated on my beliefs (although I have updated on some beliefs based on things I read here), but because that agreeable, eager-to-please subset of my brains sees the Less Wrong community and wants to fit in. There’s a part of me that evaluates what I read, or hear people say, or find myself thinking, and imagines Eliezer’s response to it. And if that response is negative...ooh, mine had better be negative too.
And that’s not strategic, optimal, or rational. In fact, it’s preventing me from doing something that might otherwise be a goal for me: joining and volunteering and becoming active in a group that does good things for the Ottawa community. And this transformation has managed to happen without me even noticing, which is a bit scary. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who was aware of my own thoughts, but apparently not.
Anyone else have the same experience?
Agreed that most of the poor critical thinking in the world has causes other than religion.
But I also agree with Bugmaster that a lot of religious institutions discourage critical thinking.
The situation seems to me analogous to thieves in a poor neighborhood. No, eliminating the thieves will not suddenly make the neighborhood wealthier. On the other hand, if the thieves are allowed to operate unimpeded, nothing else will make the neighborhood wealthier either. On the other other hand, perhaps other techniques for making the neighborhood wealthier will cause the thieves to leave the neighborhood on their own.
Personally, I suspect that if all religious institutions suddenly vanished tomorrow, it would be easier to propagate certain forms of critical thinking, but that nobody would actually take significant advantage of the opportunity thus created.
Good analogy. Maybe I'll find an opportunity to bring it up next time I'm discussing this with friends... I'll make sure to cite it as coming from you.
In the evangelical community, especially the more fundamentalist regions of it, one is taught from a very young age that the "spiritual world" is more real than the real world and that everyone knows this fact, at least subconsciously. People who treat Christianity as a reasonable thing that they just happen not to believe in are, of course, merely in denial.
Dawkins was the first writer I came across who expected other people to actually be reasonable if they wanted to be taken seriously, rather than spiraling off into a cloud of nonsense about only God being certain and being tested by Satan. He presented plenty of evidence for his position too, but attitude and evidence are separate things and both are important when you're dealing with someone who's convinced that faith is more meaningful than evidence.
In the evangelical community, especially the more fundamentalist regions of it, one is taught from a very young age that the "spiritual world" is more real than the real world and that everyone knows this fact, at least subconsciously. People who treat Christianity as a reasonable thing that they just happen not to believe in are, of course, merely in denial.
That's probably one of those things that I always forget, not having been raised in a fundamentalist evangelical community. But you're right, attitude (and what is counted as "evidence") is very important, and maybe more important than whether mere facts are for/against a given hypothesis.
My model of this situation is less sanguine than others here, though Yvain and Tetronian hinted at it: it's identity politics. Humans very naturally associate themselves with many different groups, some of them arbitrarily defined, and often without any conscious thought. Religion, favorite sports teams, the street/neighborhood/city/state/country you live in, and many other things can be the focal point of these groups. The more you associate with one of these groups, the more its part of your identity - i.e. how you see yourself. If you associate with one of these groups particularly strongly, any action which appears to make a rival group look better will personally offend you and elicit a response.
I'm from the St. Louis area in Missouri (US), and our baseball team, the St. Louis Cardinals, has a longstanding rivalry with the Chicago Cubs, a nearby team. In the past (when the Cubs were fairly good and actually a threat), I've seen Cardinals and Cubs fans get into fights for no other reason than one of them insulted the other's favorite team. I've heard similar stories about fans of St. Louis and Chicago's hockey teams (another rivalry). I had a philosophy professor in undergrad who would get visibly upset at times in class when arguing against reductionism (he's Christian), and I think we've all seen both religious and political debates get heated.
My model of all these situations is the same as my model of your situation. Before joining LessWrong, you spent a certain amount of identity points on "being rational," but probably didn't have much of a group to identify with, so when someone who's religious or superstitious got in a jab against their hated rival, the rationalists, you didn't feel anything or think much of it. Now that you've been a member of LW for some time and absorbed its memes, you're spending many more identity points on "being rational" primarily because, I conjecture, you now can point to a large, dedicated group of like-minded people. As such, you're much more likely to react with offense when someone brings up religion or homeopathy in a positive light, since that's implicitly an attack on your group.
Identity actually terrifies me because of how it seems able to control my actions and even my beliefs. I remember writing a political philosophy paper in undergrad and actually thinking "but if I use this argument, then I can't argue for Anarcho-Capitalism anymore." If that wasn't a red flag, I don't know what is - though naturally I didn't notice it as one at the time. One way to deal with this is to keep your identity small so that you minimize how often you're swayed in one direction or another for reasons purely of identity politics. Also, crafting a particular identity for yourself can work. I try to think of myself as curious and tolerant of beliefs that I know to be crazy.
My own experience has been similar to badger's - I've grown more tolerant of crazy beliefs (and beliefs that simply contradict my own) since discovering OB/LW. I can't really be sure about why, but I'd like to think it's because I've implemented the two strategies above. Learning that politics is the mind killer and realizing that this applied more broadly than groups based on political affiliation actually scared me to some extent. My immediate reaction was to reject all group affiliations (that I could anyway), but since then I've let some of the more innocuous ones back in because I'd rather consciously spend my identity points than let my brain subconsciously do it.
I agree. The fact that your model paints an unflattering picture of a person I don't particular want to be like is a bigger indicater that it's probably true.
Right now my estimate leans more towards religion having a net positive effect, for now, at our society's current level of rationality and general sanity.
My own estimate leans the opposite way, primarily because I see the overall chilling effect that religion has on critical thought (as we discussed elsewhere on this thread) as having a massively negative utility. Yes, the effect is relatively mild compared to some of the other things religion does, but it's everywhere.
I don't think getting rid of churches would get rid of superstition, something would spring up in its place...but slowly getting rid of superstition might naturally lead to churches becoming more and more similar to secular organizations in their scope and goals.
Agreed; plus, I should probably mention that no one in their right mind would advocate "getting rid of churches" by force (even by force of law). Coercive tactics like that have a very poor track record, and besides, they're pretty evil.
That said, one thing I'd like to see is a diminished respect for religion in general. In our current world, if you said something like, "Bugmaster advocates banning consumption of meat", most people would probably just shrug. But if you said "Reverend Bugmaster advocates banning consumption of meat", people would sit up and take notice. But why ? There's nothing about being a "Reverend" that makes me somehow more competent at making decisions -- no more than being a 10-th level Conjuration-specced Wizard, or president of my local Twilight fanclub, or whatever.
I don't have the power to single-handedly eradicate organized religion.
If you had that kind of power, you'd be a god, and then you'd have to eradicate yourself :-)
They already know I'm an atheist, and that I'm ok with their being religious, but if I wasn't ok with it, I'm not sure how our friendships would fare. And I value those friendships.
That's fair enough; no one is expecting you to become some sort of a righteous anti-paladin of atheism (well, I can't speak for Richard Dawkins, but I know I'm not). Still, I think it's possible to disagree with a person, even on a fundamental level, while still respecting that person. That all depends on the person in question, of course.
"Bugmaster advocates banning consumption of meat", most people would probably just shrug. But if you said "Reverend Bugmaster advocates banning consumption of meat", people would sit up and take notice.
I'm pretty sure these two statements would have exactly the same effect on me...i.e. proportional to how much other information I know about you and how many reasons I already have to respect your expert opinion. I do have a lot of reasons to respect Dawkins' statements on a lot of things. He knows more about biology than I do, and so if he says something about biology or evolution, I'm prepared to take it at face value. I don't think he's studied religion in depth, though, or really undergone a non-biased process of weighing its pros and cons. I have no reason to conclude that his religion arguments are more valid just because he's a good biologist.
Religion is also harmful (and again, this is just my own opinion) because it discourages critical thought, replacing it with faith.
I'm actually not sure to what degree this is true for religion in general. The emphasis on faith-in-itself seems to be mainly a Christian thing to me, although it's contaminated a lot of later (i.e. New Age) thought in the Christian cultural sphere; what I've read of Islam, for example, puts a pretty heavy emphasis on scholarship, and doesn't seem to isolate religious observations from empirical confirmation nearly to the same degree that Christianity does. The same goes for Buddhism, for several branches of occultism, and even for some minor Christian traditions, especially prior to the Enlightenment.
I think a fully general objection to religious thought would have to be a bit more subtle: even when a religion contains a tradition of inquiry, even when clerical roles look a lot like research positions, usually only confirming evidence is accepted. This doesn't have quite the same structure as faith in the modern Christian sense: tautological belief isn't thought of as virtuous. But the bottom line is already written, and arguments are only respected insofar as they provide support for it. Critical thought isn't discouraged, but it's only thought of as beneficial insofar as it serves preexisting goals. (Eliezer gets into this a bit in "Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points", although I don't think it's limited to orthodox Judaism by any means.) Actually, I don't even think this is specific to religion: lots of identity groups behave in similar ways.
But the bottom line is already written, and arguments are only respected insofar as they provide support for it.
This seems to describe a lot of what I've heard about Jewish 'scholarship', mostly according to Eliezer. Also, their definition of what constitutes strong versus weak evidence, and what it's evidence of, is very different from scientific evidence. I don't deny that the Old Testament exists, or even that its content is evidence of something (it shows what the culture and thought was like back in the ancient Middle East), but I wouldn't think of proving a scientific hypothesis by pulling out a Torah quote that supported it.
My opinion is that most people are religious because they are poor critical thinkers...not poor critical thinkers because of their religion., although to a degree the two might interact in a kind of loop or vicious cycle.
The "vicious cycle" hypothesis sounds right to me. Most people tend to simply follow the religion of their parents, simply accepting it as a given, because that's what they were raised with from childhood. And, since most religions encourage faith and discourage doubt, this has an overall chilling effect on the prevalence of critical thinking skills across the entire population... which, in turn, makes it easier to raise one's children in the religion, as well, thus completing the cycle.
I think all of that is true.
I also know an awful lot of totally non-religious people who don't seem to have the best critical thinking skills either. Maybe it's a thing of youth...maybe most middle 20-year-olds are sheltered and complacent and it's a bias of juvenile brains in particular to care more about status and having fun than about being right or being curious about the world. I certainly hope it gets better as I get older. In general, though, I don't see a big difference between the actual day-to-day, real-life behavior of religious 20-year-olds and non-religious 20-year-olds...except that many of the religious young people tend to spend more time volunteering or otherwise trying to change things for the better, and spend more time thinking about how they can be better people. (Or at least talk more about these things.)
I don't claim to speak for anyone else, but I grew up in the "evangelical Christian" community and was a fairly strong believer (constantly worrying about sin, street preaching, missions work, and a host of other things). Dawkins alone wouldn't have been able to convince me of the incorrectness of my beliefs, but his attitude certainly helped.
His writing introduced me to the idea that it was possible not to take one's "personal relationship with Christ" seriously! Before that I was quite thoroughly convinced that everyone who wasn't a Christian was constantly experiencing a terrible internal conflict over religion.
His writing introduced me to the idea that it was possible not to take one's "personal relationship with Christ" seriously!
I'm not 100% sure what you mean. It seems likely that you mean that Richard Dawkins was the first model you observed of an atheist who was confident in and content with their lack of belief in God, whereas you hadn't known any examples of that before and had assumed no one could really be that different from you inside, to the point of not having a relationship with Christ and being okay with it.
My first assumption on reading, which seems less likely on second thought, is that Dawkins exposed you to reasons why what might seem like a "relationship with Christ", a subjective experience that couldn't be disproved, could actually be due to factors other than Christ actually existing. This is what LW changed the most about my thinking...I was somewhat swayed before by my friends' earnest insistence that "yes, they talk to God! Yes, their prayers have been answered! Yes, they feel God's presence and it gives them strength!" My naive self tended to think "well, if they say they experienced something, and they have no good reason to lie, how can I just ignore that as evidence?" My current self says "well, it's perfectly possible that my friends really and truly do think that such-and-such subjective experience came from God. That doesn't mean God existing is the simplest explanation. Cognitive biases and poor introspection and "mystical" experiences, due to certain circuits being triggered in the human brain by singing/meditation/prayer, are actually a simpler explanation."
I think that their reasons for believing this are that humans act more ineffectively and waste energy on irrational pursuits like religion.
That's one of the reasons, but not the only one. IMO religion is also harmful because it closes off legitimate avenues of inquiry: once you've decided that the answer to some question is "god did it', or "it's a mystery of mysteries", you tend to not spend much time looking for the answer. Historically, though, the answer usually turned out to be something like "this question makes no sense because it rests on incorrect assumptions", or something like "GMm / r^2" (which is an informative and useful answer).
Religion is also harmful (and again, this is just my own opinion) because it discourages critical thought, replacing it with faith. This not only reduces the overall effectiveness of our decision-making processes, but also contributes to legitimizing religious practices that directly harm people, such as faith healing.
Religion is also harmful (and again, this is just my own opinion) because it discourages critical thought, replacing it with faith.
I agree with you 100% on this. If we're ever going to move towards a world where significantly more people have good critical thinking skills, religion will have to either be abolished or slowly fade. However, I don't think removing all churches and religions right now would change much in terms of critical thinking. My opinion is that most people are religious because they are poor critical thinkers...not poor critical thinkers because of their religion., although to a degree the two might interact in a kind of loop or vicious cycle.
People have done bad things in the name of pretty much everything. Some people don't need a reason to do bad things.
That's true, but IMO religion makes it a lot easier for people to do bad things, and a lot harder for other people to stop them. It does this by emphasizing faith over critical thinking, and by inventing all kinds of new reasons for doing bad things. Thus, for example, the statement "we should go and wipe out our neighbours because they believe in different gods than we do, and we know that our gods are the only true gods because we have faith in them, amen" is a uniquely religious statement. It combines an in-group/out-group mentality, an unfalsifiable worldview, and a harmful moral imperative, all in one tidy package.
Yes, there are harmful secular statements that follow the same pattern (and plenty of them), but IMO the faith-based nature of religion makes harmful religious memes a lot more virulent.
Speaking of which:
Religion often advocates a weird morality, i.e. by spending more time talking about abortion than starving kids...but at least it advocates morality at all.
Firstly, I'd rather have no morality at all than a harmful one.Secondly, one big problem with religious morality is that it's unfalsifiable. For example, why is homosexuality immoral ? Because God (or gods) said so. That's it. You could spend all the time in the world pointing out that homosexuality hurts no one and that prohibiting it harms everyone in the long run, but none of that matters, because evidence can never trump faith. By contrast, secular moral systems, such as Consequentialism, for all their flaws, do have error-correction methods built in.
Involvement in many religious groups encourages people to become more empathetic...
I think this depends on the group. Some groups, such as Scientology or many radical Christian sects, have the opposite effect.
Religion genuinely makes a lot of people happier, including people I've known who had very screwed-up lives previously.
Of all the arguments you offer, this is probably the strongest. Is the tradeoff of becoming happier worth the sacrifice of believing things that are actually true ? For some people, and perhaps even many people, this could very well be the case... but, if everyone thought like that, we'd never have invented fire, spaceflight, or representative democracy. I am definitely biased on this topic, though, since believing true (plus or minus epsilon) things makes me personally very happy, and thus for me there's no conflict.
But as it stands, I don't think religion slows the rate of scientific progress enough to blot out all the good things it does do.
Really ? What about climate change, or stem-cell research, or evolutionary biology (which is to say, biology) ? Religion has a pretty strong chilling effect on these areas and many others, at least here in the US. In general, though, religion discourages inquiry simply by making faith a virtue, and doubt a sin. This chilling effect is much milder than religious prohibitions against specific topics, but it is more pervasive.
Religion cements people together into groups that stay motivated and get stuff done, including some stuff I think is misguided (like convincing people Jesus is the solution to everything), but also some stuff I want to help them with, like building schools in the Canadian North.
And sometimes, religion spends a lot of time getting harmful things done, like discouraging condom use in Africa, or promoting abstinence-only sex education right here in the US. The problem, once again, is that there's no error correction mechanism. If you believe that your god wants people to have unprotected sex (or possibly no sex at all), then any negative effects of acting on this belief are irrelevant. As with morality, I'd rather have no motivation than motivation to accomplish bad things -- especially since there are plenty of secular organizations that seem to be doing ok (such as Doctors Without Borders, AFAIK).
And sometimes, religion spends a lot of time getting harmful things done, like discouraging condom use in Africa, or promoting abstinence-only sex education right here in the US.
This is a completely valid point. There is a right answer to whether it, and all the other bad things that get accomplished as a direct effect of religion existing, outweigh all the good things that get accomplished also as a direct effect of religion existing. I don't know.
Right now my estimate leans more towards religion having a net positive effect, for now, at our society's current level of rationality and general sanity. I don't think getting rid of churches would get rid of superstition, something would spring up in its place...but slowly getting rid of superstition might naturally lead to churches becoming more and more similar to secular organizations in their scope and goals. (This seems to be what's happening to the Anglican Church of Canada...socially, they are just as liberal as the Canadian government.)
There are almost certainly things I don't know about how churches affect the world, and if I did know them, maybe it would sway my opinion more towards the cons and away from the pros. If someone could do an in-depth study, comparing a world identical to ours only without religion and showing that it would be better, I would willingly change my mind.
However, I'm not sure it would change my behavior, at least not right now. I don't have the power to single-handedly eradicate organized religion. Unlike Richard Dawkins, I'm not famous or well-known or respected, so my mere disapproval of religion would do nothing at all, aside from possibly alienating me from some of my friends. (They already know I'm an atheist, and that I'm ok with their being religious, but if I wasn't ok with it, I'm not sure how our friendships would fare. And I value those friendships.) Also, if I see a church organization working towards a goal I also want accomplished, and they're more convenient or more fun to work with than any secular organizations with the same goals, I want to be able to ally with them. I don't want to be turned off any kind of cooperation because it annoys me that they're wrong...therefore, that annoyance is an irrational emotion for me to have. It's not like my not working with them is going to make them convert to atheism to get me on their side... I'm not that important.
If you're having this experience, it might be helpful to find ways to actively combat this tendency. Probably more exposure to those sorts of groups would help.
If church advances my goals, I want to believe that church advances my goals, and the Way opposes my anger.
If church advances my goals, I want to believe that church advances my goals, and the Way opposes my anger.
Upvoted because this is exactly what I'm getting at. Many people are currently trying to convince me of why church doesn't advance my goals...some of their arguments are valid, some I've already been over and weighed pros with cons, etc. But the reason I wrote this article was because my newfound intolerance to religion was bothering me.
In any case, 'New Atheists' like Dawkins and Harris are raising the sanity waterline, albeit in a relatively confrontational manner.
Sam Harris did considerable damage with The Moral Landscape. His new book about free will probably be just as bad.
Dawkins...meh. There's nothing original in The God Delusion, and his meta-ethics is sloppy. But he's basically right, which is more than Sam Harris can say.
There's nothing original in The God Delusion, and his meta-ethics is sloppy. But he's basically right.
I think so, too. I don't disagree with any of the facts Dawkins presents, not enough for it to annoy me anyway. I disagree with the execution, because I think he could have presented the same facts (and even the same opinions) more effectively without all the venom against religious people and sense of superiority.
Sure, that makes sense. There are lots of different techniques communities can use for making it clear what sorts of contributions are unwelcome and preventing those sorts of contributions from getting much attention, and techniques that appeal to one person often rub other people the wrong way. From what you've said elsewhere about your preference for fitting in to a social milieu and earning approval and admiration there, I would expect that the Hitchens/Dawkins/Harris style of in-your-face disagreement would rub you the wrong way.
For my own part, I'm OK with in-your-face disagreement, but there's a variety of more indirect methods of control and conversational reframing that make my teeth ache.
From what you've said elsewhere about your preference for fitting in to a social milieu and earning approval and admiration there...
SOOO true about me. To the point that I sometimes end up angry and conflicted because I'm in a situation where doing one thing with upset one person, and doing another thing will upset a different person, and I literally have no option that will allow me to please everyone. Obviously situations like this are unavoidable, but a part of my brain always screams that they are not fair and then gets subconsciously annoyed at the people involved and their stupid incompatible preferences because they are preventing me from fulfilling the part of my utility function that involves "keeping everyone on your good side all the time." Even though this is obviously impossible...
And it's not as if his books stand a chance of converting people who are already religious...the dismissive attitude that comes through in his writing is exactly what WON'T make people really change their minds.
Just as a data point, I'm somebody who became an atheist through reading Dawkins and I have a few friends who went through the same process. The attitude that you mention actually helped in forcing me to examine my beliefs. It could be true that people who have a religious faith deeply entrenched in their worldview might not change their minds, but young people, people who have a tenuous hold to religion, etc., certainly do stand a chance of de-converting because of a book like The God Delusion.
In any case, 'New Atheists' like Dawkins and Harris are raising the sanity waterline, albeit in a relatively confrontational manner.
Just as a data point, I'm somebody who became an atheist through reading Dawkins and I have a few friends who went through the same process.
What were you before you became an atheist? If you were someone with a 'tenuous hold to religion', i.e. family background, how likely is it that you would eventually (maybe sooner, maybe later) have become an atheist without having read Dawkins? Or maybe just with having read his biology-based books? (I made the transition from not-really-caring to atheism after I realized that there were lots of neat domains where we have a lot of established knowledge, and believing in God actually made the world look messier.)
If you were someone with strong personal reasons for your religion, I don't think Dawkins' writings would have had the same effect.
I'm curious: why don't you?
Mainly because I'm a really, really non-spontaneous person. I do give fairly large amounts to charity, close to 10% of my monthly income right now, but to be honest, I like my routine and I have a hard time departing for it, and taking a semester off to go build schools in Africa or something would be very much outside of my routine, would set me back by a year in my program, etc, etc. My best hope is to plan, non-spontaneously, to do things like that. For example, once I'm graduated as a nurse, I'll feel much more secure moving somewhere for, say, a year to do volunteer work... I'll be able to settle in, get to know people, establish a routine, and in general set up the conditions that work for me to enjoy myself.
I find that pretty odd. Nearly everyone I can think of who objects to them either is devoutly religious, or condemns them by comparing them to religious evangelicals.
I find Richard Dawkins comes across as arrogant in his books on religion. And just...obnoxious, and unnecessarily critical. And it's not as if his books stand a chance of converting people who are already religious...the dismissive attitude that comes through in his writing is exactly what WON'T make people really change their minds. I find his attitude comes across as "hey, we're all atheists here, let's feel superior." Which kind of makes me ashamed to be an atheist. When I tell people I'm an atheist, in fact, I often qualify it with "but I don't like Richard Dawkins' books about atheism." (I adore his books about biology and evolution."
This is a good point, but there is a difference between criticism and shutting out. It is likely the latter that Charlie was most concerned about — perhaps a prior bad experience led him to institute the rule — and furthermore it's unclear to me that simply expressing disagreement politely is enough to be considered criticism.
Additionally, simply as a matter of effectiveness, you are not likely to change any minds by dismissing ideas out of hand or even presenting an eloquent and sound rebuttal. A person who seriously entertains idea of the paranormal has so many holes in their faculties for determining truth that you really have to start from the very basics. And even then it is not worth the time or effort unless you are very close to this person.
it's unclear to me that simply expressing disagreement politely is enough to be considered criticism.
I don't think it would have been. Criticism is a direct attack: "X is wrong because of arguments w, y, z... (wow, wasn't he dumb to fall for that belief)?" Expressing disagreement is more like saying "I think that y, for reasons w and z." Which leaves a lot less open for criticism.
Well, I've definitely noticed that I have less patience for correcting basic flaws of reasoning that are covered in the Sequences than I was before I started participating here, but I wouldn't say I've become less tolerant. I did become less tolerant of my own accord when I was a teenager and started questioning the beliefs I'd been brought up with about freedom of religion, tolerance, etc. and concluded that on factual matters, being right or wrong makes a difference, and it's better to make an effort not to be wrong.
Humans tend to internalize norms. We're not built to fluently switch between the norms of one culture and another as convenient. The trouble isn't with the rational memes, the trouble is that adopting any social norms which are at odds with the ones prevailing in your culture will create friction. If you'd become a Born Again Christian, for instance, you'd probably be facing similar problems.
Because culture is not completely stable, adopting new norms can sometimes be advantageous. If everyone knew nobody else would become a feminist, it would never have been in anyone's interests to be a feminist. Or an abolitionist, etc. But when the new norms are attractive enough, communities can develop around them. If rationalist memes in particular have a problem, it's not that they cause friction in communities with different norms, it's that they aren't sufficiently attractive.
If you'd become a Born Again Christian, for instance, you'd probably be facing similar problems.
Yeah, but at least they can stick up to it, as a community, in a way I don't find obnoxious. I really don't like the atheism campaigns of people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens...they just rub me the wrong way. I don't know why.
I mostly ask myself the following question whenever I meet somebody with crazy beliefs: Is he/she going to act on those beliefs with any kind of significant consequences?
If the answer is No, then I usually completely ignore the subject and try to keep it out of all future conversations.
If the answer is Yes, then it's more complicated. I then try to estimate the following:
a) How much I care? This includes estimates of what is the magnitude of the consequences of their action, how close the person is to me,etc.
b) How likely is it that anything I say would have an affect on their behavior?
c) Is it likely to backfire? For example, they might take offense at their beliefs being challenged.
Usually, the result of estimating these variables is that I keep my mouth shut. I usually try much harder if the person is someone very close to me or if it affects me directly. It's probably not the best strategy for propagating rationality, but it kind of works out for me. After being around very religious people for a long time, I've kinda become pretty good at it.
I mostly ask myself the following question whenever I meet somebody with crazy beliefs: Is he/she going to act on those beliefs with any kind of significant consequences?
I don't actually know that many people who would act on a lot of their crazier beliefs. I'm sure that they exist, but most people I've met through church are pretty solidly compartmentalized. It's a bit less so for the people who converted as adults into the rather more evangelical/fundamentalist Pentecostal church. But even then, the 'crazy things' that they do are not especially weird. Giving large amounts to charity...throwing aside their plans of the moment to go on volunteer aid trips...those are things I wish I could do more!
Conversational intolerance is just really, really hard. Very few people are good at it. I'd like to think that, if I'd been in your shoes and first heard the ground rules (criticism "expressly forbidden," etc) and then heard about Grandma's spoon tapping, I'd have been able to use the perfect, Sagan-esque mixture of body language, word choice, and tone of voice to plant a non-threatening seed of skepticism into the minds of all present.
But of course I'd have failed. I simply don't possess that kind of mastery, especially in social circumstances devoid of magical clickers. And I'd be even worse off than you, because I am not one to fume silently. I probably would've alienated a lot of people, and quickly.
So I think that you possess more mastery than you realize. But I don't think the level above yours looks like perfect, silent equanimity amidst the wrong beliefs you hear propagated around you. I think it looks more like walking carefully through a minefield because the other side is worth getting to.
to plant a non-threatening seed of skepticism into the minds of all present.
I kind of tried to do that, by making sure all my comments in the discussion afterwards were about the actual physics content, and reductionism, and how scientific ideas are evaluated... But I'm not incredibly charismatic, or especially good at breaking physics down into easily-teachable segments on the spot, and I think most people's reaction was to assume I was really smart and then stop trying to understand anything. (At least six people asked me if I'd thought about switching my major to physics...I had to explain that I hadn't because I'm not actually really smart, at least not enough to be a good theoretical physicist, and if the choice is between being a mediocre-to-poor physicist or an awesome nurse, I'd pick being an awesome nurse any day.)
To that list I'll add:
- Satire. Create your own complete bullshit that exploits the same 'no criticism' rule and start rambling about it.
- Dominate the conversation within the rules. Never reply to his supernatural nonsense but instead constantly be changing the subject to something that interests you, something that you know interests the other people in the room or a meme which would undermine the bullshiter's credibility.
"Leave the room" sounds like the best option here. This Charlie guy had gone out of his way to create a group where he can speak bullshit. You don't like bullshit. There are no obvious important networking opportunities here. Doesn't sound like there is anything in it for you. Just leave. Making it obvious that you are registering contempt for the discussion is optional..
Leave the room" sounds like the best option here. This Charlie guy had gone out of his way to create a group where he can speak bullshit. You don't like bullshit. There are no obvious important networking opportunities here.
This is what will end up happening. I'm almost certainly not going back to that group, even if the theme is on something I find as interesting as physics. Not worth the frustration... It makes me sad, though, because that group is one of many that could be a good match for me, and give me somewhere to apply my hard work and efforts, but someone had to go ruin it by believing in the supernatural.
OK. And if I'm understanding you correctly, you believe that the existence on LW of the belief you describe in #5/#6, that religion and supernatural beliefs are harmful, is causing you to be less able to coordinate usefully with people who hold religious and supernatural beliefs, despite the fact that you endorse such coordination, entirely because you want to fit in here and the way to fit in is to treat such people in ways that are mutually exclusive with such coordination.
Is that correct?
I think that's the underlying motivation, yeah. Putting it explicitly makes it a lot easier to say to myself "well, that's stupid... It's my brain and I can do with it what I want."
feels like the dominant meme here is 'religion is a bad thing for society, you shouldn't respect it or like it!' I know this isn't representative of what everyone on LW thinks...
I personally used to think pretty much like that before I encountered Less Wrong... and now, I still do. I believe I have good reasons for thinking this way. But if I'm wrong about this, I'd very much like to find out, so I'm open to persuasion.
That said, while I believe that religion does not deserve the privileged position that it enjoys, and that it's harmful in the long run, this doesn't mean that I automatically disrespect individual religious people. One great thing about communities like Less Wrong, IMO, is that they make it possible for two people to legitimately disagree with each other, without the whole situation descending into name-calling and other personal attacks. At least, I hope that this is the case...
OK. These are the reasons why I don't think religion is a horrible thing. (I don't necessarily think we should always have religion, just that for the moment I don't find it to be enormously bad.)
Yeah, some people have done bad things in the name of religion (i.e. Crusades). People have done bad things in the name of pretty much everything. Some people don't need a reason to do bad things. Yeah, there are other people who might not have done bad things otherwise, who just followed along because they were a member of the community. That's not common to religion, either. People in the Stanford Prison experiment and the Milgram experiment went along with doing bad things because they thought they were expected to, no religion needed. If we took religion out of the world, it wouldn't do much to solve those flaws in human nature.
Religion often advocates a weird morality, i.e. by spending more time talking about abortion than starving kids...but at least it advocates morality at all. This is mostly based on people I actually know, but most of my religious friends have thought quite deeply about what they think of as right versus wrong, and most of my non-religious friends haven't thought it about it at all. Involvement in many religious groups encourages people to become more empathetic, more generous, and more open and welcoming to community members in need. I was a better person, in those ways, when I hung out with Christians.
Religion genuinely makes a lot of people happier, including people I've known who had very screwed-up lives previously. Yeah, maybe they could have become happier by studying happiness like Lukeprog, but it happens no one was around to guide them through that process, and there were people in local churches lining up to have a chance to be helpful and kind and teach them to pray and reflect, and invite them into close-knit communities. Yeah, I would cheer if something replaced religion in this role. I'm pretty foggy on how to design a replacement, and I have nothing near the leadership skills required to actually run one. I didn't get nearly the same pleasure out of LW meetups as I did out of going to church. (No offense.)
I would've had a lot more problems with religion back when it controlled everything, including intellectual thought. I like being able to study whatever I want and fulfill my curiosity with knowledge that wouldn't have been discovered if religion had been allowed to keep its iron hold. I'm glad religious groups don't have as much political power now. But as it stands, I don't think religion slows the rate of scientific progress enough to blot out all the good things it does do.
Religion cements people together into groups that stay motivated and get stuff done, including some stuff I think is misguided (like convincing people Jesus is the solution to everything), but also some stuff I want to help them with, like building schools in the Canadian North. Like I said, I'm a follower, not a leader. I would be incredibly excited about a LW "mission" to somewhere to build a school and buy kids books, but I doubt my ability to organize it.
Well, regardless of how those beliefs "seeped" into your brain initially, now you have the option of paying attention to them and making some informed decisions about what beliefs you endorse, what beliefs you reject, what beliefs you intend to research further, etc.
It might be helpful to start by simply articulating the various beliefs that are relevant here, and your reasons for believing and not believing them (by which I mean both the evidence in favor of or against them, and your motives for endorsing or rejecting them independent of evidence).
now you have the option of paying attention to them and making some informed decisions about what beliefs you endorse, what beliefs you reject, what beliefs you intend to research further, etc.
Just noticing that my beliefs and their associated emotions had changed was enough for me to start listing them to myself...which has done a lot to cut off the emotions associated, too. Here are some beliefs which I think are relevant here:
I believe that it is a good thing to try and hold only beliefs that are true relative to the outside world, and to update on evidence from that world. I believe this, well, because it's useful, and maybe partly because it's a high-status LW idea. To a degree, I did not always believe this...I went through a 'the truth is relative' phase.
I believe that the current evidence says that reductionism is true, that the universe is made up of interactions between smaller parts which are not in themselves intelligent, that cause-and-effect holds. I believe this because it's what I've read in textbooks and books I read for fun, and because it feels elegant and satisfying to believe it. I already believed this before LW and I don't think LW has influenced it much. Nor has going to church.
I believe that there are people who believe in spirits. I expect that they believe in them because someone told them about it, or they read about it, and thought it was neat.
I believe that many people do not think about whether their beliefs are true relative to the outside world, or what evidence of their truth/falsehood would look like, or why evidence matters. I believe this because it seems obvious to me that the laws of science as we know them do not imply supernatural beings, that the only 'evidence' for their existence is the fact that people talk and write about them, and that their are other, simpler explanations for people talking and writing about supernatural beings than their actual existence (i.e. people misconstruing actual experiences, or wishful thinking.)
I do not actually believe that the existence of people believing in the supernatural is that much a bad thing for the world, as long as they don't go around doing destructive things because of those beliefs. I believe this because most people I know have a firm moral compass regardless of what they think about religion or the supernatural.
I believe that there are people on LW who do think that religion, and people who believe in the supernatural, is a very bad thing for the world. I think that their reasons for believing this are that humans act more ineffectively and waste energy on irrational pursuits like religion. I agree with this, but I disagree on the final outcome because I think many people on LW overestimate the effectiveness of people who aren't religious or obviously irrational. Most of the people my age who I know to be involved in charity, curious, thoughtful, wanting to be better people, and generally passionate about life, are religious. Many of the 'atheists' I know are apathetic or don't reflect much on their lives.
Even though excessive amounts of irritation are definitely unpleasant and counterproductive, irritation in itself can be a useful alarm bell. I've noticed that, through some kind of fast heuristic, my brains turns irritation on very fast when I'm hearing or reading something that contradicts my beliefs. This often happens before I've consciously fully evaluated the statement, and triggers further analysis. It's actually a very precious instrument, and I'm more worried when it doesn't trigger at all.
and triggers further analysis.
That's the key phrase. It works that way for you...but I suspect that for a lot of people, and maybe for me, it would act to turn off further analysis, because the idea is so irritating to even think about.
The problem with too many rational memes
I don't think the title is correct. Based on your anecdote and those in the comments thus far, the kind of irritation you're talking about probably isn't a result of being exposed to too many rational memes, it's more likely a result of some kind of social signalling effect or repeated exposure to particular rational memes. I don't have a particularly good title in mind, but something like "Irritation at Irrational Beliefs" removes the inaccuracy.
If I add 'social signalling effects' as a subtitle, does that make it more clear? I don't think 'Irritation at Irrational Beliefs' explains it as well because I have always spent time around people with 'irrational' beliefs, and never been bothered by it until I also spent a lot of time on LW.
I remember a cartoon where a lot of different animals were gathered, amongst them a giraffe, a monkey and a goldfish in a bowl. A human opposit of them said "To make it fair everybody gets the same task: climb that tree." Of course, all animals except the monkey were quite unhappy.
That is the situation of the "no critizism" rule. While it might sound fair and reasonable, the truth is, that this rule favours the cultists. And that is what Charlie seems to be, a cultist who wishes to recrute the weakly minded. So your emotions might have been quite a rational response.
I guess, the important question is, what do you do about your emotions? Will you continue to be angry whenever you think about him, or do you only feel that anger when someone close to you is threatened to fall for him like your boyfriend seemed to? If it is the former, then you're might be right, your emotions seem to be social signaling, but if it's the latter then it's probably a good rational immune reaction and it might be better to cultivate it.
Wow...your comment definitely made me look at the situation in a different light! I'm going to try and respond, but bear in mind that if I'm ignorant of someone's motivations, I tend to ascribe them the best possible reasons for their actions.
First off, I had not thought of Charlie as a cult leader. You're right, the 'non-criticism' rule would favour cultists more than skeptics, but the immediate feeling I got was that Charlie wanted to encourage more viewpoints to be talked about, not less. I ended up talking rather a lot about physics, that being the topic of the meetup, and no one criticized the fact that my points implied I was an atheist. (I didn't directly state I was an atheist because I felt like it would be a conversation-stopper and pointless, and maybe the real reason was that I didn't want to be excluded, but I don't think I would have been.)
I'm 100% not worried about my boyfriend being drawn into any kind of cult. He has far greater independence of thought than I do, in that he really doesn't try to impress people or fit in by believing the same thing as them, and would be offended if anyone tried to ask it of him. He's not per se a skeptic, but his temperament is so skeptical that he can't help it a little.
But yeah...it does bother me that Charlie is saying these things to a group of new immigrants who are doubtless feeling a little bit shy and wanting to impress. Vulnerable, in other words. He explicitly says that everyone's welcome no matter where they come from and what they believe, and that no one criticizes anyone else, but implicitly, just by being the leader of the group and a good public speaker, he's going to root the ideas of ghosts and dead grandmothers in other dimensions into their minds. Not that I think he intends to do anything by implanting those ideas...he just believes them himself, AFAICT. But when I do the thought experiment, it wouldn't annoy me nearly as much if he were a low-status weird guy talking about the same beliefs, or if he were in the same position and believed the same things but kept them to himself.
Excellent post! Glad to see someone talking about this.
Anyone else have the same experience?
About 6 months ago I started reading r/atheism, and a few weeks later I noticed a kind of subverbal irritation whenever I saw someone wearing religious imagery or talking about their religious beliefs. At the time, I attributed this to r/atheism conditioning me to feel anger when prompted with anything that reminded me of religion. I was very scared that my mind was doing this, so I stopped reading r/atheism and reddit altogether. Since then, the effect has greatly decreased in frequency and intensity. I still notice the irritation every once and a while, possibly because I still read LessWrong, but (if my memories are accurate) it used to be much worse. Looking back, the emotions I felt seem almost identical to the ones you described.
it’s preventing me from doing something that might otherwise be a goal for me: joining and volunteering and becoming active in a group that does good things for the Ottawa community
In addition to this, I'm worried that this kind of instinctive irritation could inhibit updating. If you react negatively to a particular belief, you will probably be less inclined to update in its favor regardless of what the evidence shows.
In addition to this, I'm worried that this kind of instinctive irritation could inhibit updating. If you react negatively to a particular belief, you will probably be less inclined to update in its favor regardless of what the evidence shows.
Exactly! Kind of a scary thought, that.
I don't quite follow how you get from the observation that you are adopting certain habits you reject, to the idea that you need to reject science in order to get the social benefits you want. Can you unpack that a little?
It's the reverse of what's happening now...which is a part of me feeling like I have to reject religion and the supernatural if I want to be respected and liked on Less Wrong. I never felt like my religious friends respected me less because I loved to read about physics and evolution and talk about how cool they were. They thought it was cool, too. I didn't have to reject anything to get social benefits...I just had to refrain from criticizing their beliefs, which I was fine about.
I think religion is really cool too, as a concept and as an institution in human society. I can (or used to be able to) get inside the reasons why people believe, really truly believe. I had empathy for them. Now a part of me (again, this isn't necessarily representative of all LW opinions) feels like the dominant meme here is 'religion is a bad thing for society, you shouldn't respect it or like it!' I know this isn't representative of what everyone on LW thinks, so I don't know how it's managed to seep so far into my brain.
(acknowledging that Kaj only said his posting exudes a vibe, not that the vibe reveals his actual state)
I don't have any reason to suspect lukeprog of overconfidence or overexuberance. He really is more successful and happy than he'd have been without thinking about how to optimize both, and then acting on those thoughts. It's been a long time now; illusions would have crashed.
If you're forgiving enough of yourself, it doesn't grate as much to hear someone congratulating themselves. It's annoying when someone wastes time by falsely signaling their great success via some questionable method, but I've noticed that when I feel under-appreciated by others, I can become excessively skeptical about others' bragging. (apologies if the psychoanalysis isn't relevant to you; it definitely is to me).
The antidote to excessive cheerleading is more focused, concrete advice toward the 5-second end of the spectrum. If you're encouraging luke to mix it up, I'd agree, in that it's probably best for all of us, whether or not we're posting. Too much thinking for too long at a high level of abstraction can become self-rewarding and divorced from reality.
I've noticed that when I feel under-appreciated by others, I can become excessively skeptical about others' bragging.
Incredibly true, incredibly irritating tidbit about human nature. It happens to me too, and makes me feel like a huge asshole when I catch myself.
You could consciously work on developing the skill of accepting others for who they are and not letting your built in, evolved morality let you get angry, frustrated, or judgmental. (That's not to say that you don't try to change people, just that when you do, you use effective techniques like reinforcing behaviors you want to encourage and disagreeing with people in a calm, friendly, collegial way that might actually get them to change their mind.)
I used to be good at this! (Or at least I used to consider myself good at this...and I still can be quite good at it in circumstances when I have to, or when the person concerned is already someone I'm close friends with or respect.) Maybe the problem is that I'm such an emotional sponge that unless I make sure I hang out with people who have a variety of opinions, one side is going to start winning out and the emotional weights I attach to my beliefs will get messed up.
I've certainly had the experience at various times in my life of developing habits I reject because they are pervasive in a group I socialize with, sure.
If you previously considered yourself immune to this sort of thing, and now you realize that your habits and expectations can be modified by social setting without you being aware of it: yay! That's a useful piece of knowledge, and I'm happy for you.
Now you need to decide whether and how to change your behavior based on that knowledge.
This has happened to me before, so in hindsight I shouldn't be surprised. But it's always been in the other direction: i.e. increased zone of tolerance, increased empathy. I never felt like I had to reject science if I wanted to hang out with religious people. Maybe that's not surprising either, because most religious people I know don't actually reject science in the same way the atheists reject religion. They tend to think it's all true and beautiful and awe-worthy, etc.
I assume you mean formulations (especially post titles) like "rational home buying", "rational childcare" or "rational dating".
While I do not like those formulations, I like formulations that replace "rational" with "optimal" even less. To me the word "optimal" is mostly a mathematical term (Wikipedia redirects optimal to mathematical optimization) and does not acknowledge that humans have complex values, limited knowledge and resources and that there are costs in those activities. Also I understand "optimal" to mean maximally good. If something could be better, it's not yet optimal. That means something like optimal childcare might require super human capabilities.
Formulations like "rational home buying" sound silly and even cultish, because "rational" is completely redundant here (it makes you wonder why they won't shut up about their favorite subject "rationality"). "Rational home buying" is just about home buying. No one is is deliberately irrational. I'd suggest to just say "home buying", unless you really want to contrast it with irrational home buying.
How about 'strategic home buying'? See comment by Zed above. I think this makes it much more obvious what you actually mean.
I agree: this post felt like a self-congratulatory collection of applause lights. (I wonder if the habit of linking to previous posts every other word is an indicator of this. Most people aren't going to follow those links, they're just going to think, "Ah yes, a link to a Sequence post. That must be an accepted thing!")
I also think there's a worrying tendency towards ideology here. Luke suggests that "levelling up" in rationality led him to a bunch of beliefs, which are, coincidentally, fairly widely accepted views around here. Cue a round of back-slapping as we all congratulate ourselves on how rational we are.
But rationality doesn't necessarily lead you anywhere: the evidence should do that. And if the evidence starts pointing somewhere else, you should move. And so I'm a bit wary of the tendency to draw too close a link between any particular beliefs and rationality. You never want to be in the situation where you're trying to persuade someone of your views and you find yourself saying "But it's the rational thing to believe!" instead of presenting the evidence.
Also: hints of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
When genuine curiosity tore down those walls, it didn't take long for the implications of my atheism to propagate.
Woe betide you who don't come to the same conclusions as Luke: your curiousity clearly isn't genuine!
Now this may all sound a bit harsh, but frankly I really wish Luke would stop writing posts like this and start doing some hard-headed thinking about some actual problems.
I do agree with some of your points, especially with the fact that this post is annoyingly self-congratulating in places (though I know I have a bias to find that annoying, and so I don't necessary think my annoyance means much. However, I don't think this post is content-less...in fact, content is a lot of what you're disagreeing with, i.e. that specific Less Wrong beliefs are associated with being rational.
I liked the Can the Chain Still Hold You? because the baboon example felt inspiring. But two essentially contentless "yay rationality" posts in a row is overdoing it, and starting to give an "overzealous recent convert caught in a happy death spiral" vibe.
I don't necessarily think that this post was written in the same spirit as the previous one. 'Can the Chain Still Hold You' was one of lukeprog's more abstract, ideology-related posts, whereas this one, though it may be 'yay, rationality', is at least very specific in what it's yay-ing about.
Building and running a church, paying for a bishops education and the time he works there, training children to sing, and all of the time people spend there is not a small investment. Multiply that by all the churches in the world, and add the cost of various missions and church plants to spread religion, or the charities which do their work sub-optimally because they take religion more seriously then saving lives and I imagine that the figure would become inappropriately ludicrous. Not that just eliminating religion would make us all much more efficient, humans are very gifted at wasting time and money.
I've heard that argument before, and it does have a lot of weight. In this case, though, are we talking about religion or about costly ritual? Both are cultural phenomena, and they're frequently found together, but there are religions that aren't into ritual at all, like Quakers, who are best known for their simple, silent style of prayer and worship, and don't go around building fancy cathedrals). And there are costly "rituals" which are not related to religion at all: football, for example, or theatre.
Agreed that churches which run charities may run their sub-optimally from an atheist's point of view, since a lot of the time one of the unstated aims of their charity is to convert people. (This used to make me furious when I attended the Pentecostal church mentioned in one of the parent comments.) But we were talking about ritual, and I was specifically talking about deeply moving, meaningful rituals. It just so happens that the ones that have meaning to me are religious in nature. I know a lot of people find arts and theatre meaningful, and likely there are people who find watching sports meaningful, in a similar way. There's some kind of human instinct to gravitate towards activities that are communal, repetitive, and have a sense of tradition that imbues them with meaning. There's also a human instinct to think superstitiously, which I don't share much, and which makes it hard for me to really enjoy those meaningful moments in church.
Nitpick: yes, paying for a bishop's work and teaching children to sing is something that happens "under religion's umbrella." That doesn't make it bad! I learned to sing better through the church choir (for which I was paid a monthly stipend for the community service of singing during Sunday worship!) than I would have in the $400-per-month children's choir, which I probably wouldn't have been allowed into...most people thought I was tone deaf until I proved them wrong. Bishops who organize community events and charities are doing something good for the community, whether or not it's sub-optimal, and face it...are any human activities run optimally? Yes, it's possible to have a better community-runner than a church, but the amount of money that goes into churches right now does produce something of value!
Building and running a church, paying for a bishops education and the time he works there, training children to sing, and all of the time people spend there is not a small investment. Multiply that by all the churches in the world, and add the cost of various missions and church plants to spread religion, or the charities which do their work sub-optimally because they take religion more seriously then saving lives and I imagine that the figure would become inappropriately ludicrous. Not that just eliminating religion would make us all much more efficient, humans are very gifted at wasting time and money.
I've heard that argument before, and it does have a lot of weight. In this case, though, are we talking about religion or about costly ritual? Both are cultural phenomena, and they're frequently found together, but there are religions that aren't into ritual at all (like <Quakers>(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers), who are best known for their simple, silent style of prayer and worship, and don't go around building fancy cathedrals). And there are costly "rituals" which are not related to religion at all: football, for example, or theatre.
Agreed that churches which run charities may run their sub-optimally from an atheist's point of view, since a lot of the time one of the unstated aims of their charity is to convert people. (This used to make me furious when I attended the Pentecostal church mentioned in one of the parent comments.) But we were talking about ritual, and I was specifically talking about deeply moving, meaningful rituals. It just so happens that the ones that have meaning to me are religious in nature. I know a lot of people find arts and theatre meaningful, and likely there are people who find watching sports meaningful, in a similar way. There's some kind of human instinct to gravitate towards activities that are communal, repetitive, and have a sense of tradition that imbues them with meaning. There's also a human instinct to think superstitiously, which I don't share much, and which makes it hard for me to really enjoy those meaningful moments in church.
Nitpick: yes, paying for a bishop's work and teaching children to sing is something that happens "under religion's umbrella." That doesn't make it bad! I learned to sing better through the church choir (for which I was paid a monthly stipend for the community service of singing during Sunday worship!) than I would have in the $400-per-month children's choir, which I probably wouldn't have been allowed into...most people thought I was tone deaf until I proved them wrong. Bishops who organize community events and charities are doing something good for the community, whether or not it's sub-optimal, and face it...are any human activities run optimally? Yes, it's possible to have a better community-runner than a church, but the amount of money that goes into churches right now does produce something of value!
But maybe because of my particular brain architecture, the pain of cognitive dissonance was far outweighed by the pleasure of having a ready-made community.
I used to have that kind of brain architecture for quite some time, and I kind of miss it. But as I started studying more and more physics, it just became harder and harder. So, I guess the trade-off got really skewed at some point of time.
I have to mention that my religiosity kind of went through cycles. There was a time when I was an internally-militant (not very outspoken) atheist, followed by a period of considerable appreciation for religion, and again followed by a (currently) pretty comfortable atheism. If I think back to my first episode of atheism (religion was my default state as I was born in a pretty religious family), I guess I was pretty uncomfortable with it, in the sense that I felt that a lot more needed to be explained. In the intervening episode of religiosity, I appreciated the exact things that you mention about religion, but I just didn't like all the baggage, i.e. the time and money spent in rituals. My religion was Hinduism, which is highly ritualistic, but enjoys some nice philosophies. I still like some of the philosophy but I dislike most of the ritual.
I appreciated the exact things that you mention about religion, but I just didn't like all the baggage, i.e. the time and money spent in rituals.
Funny. That's probably a brain architecture thing, too, but I really enjoy a lot of the High Anglican rituals at the church where I used to sing in choir. The traditional carols that all of us know by heart, every single word... The ministers and the bishop in their beautiful robes leading the choir in a procession around the cathedral while we sing in insane harmony... Stuff like the ritual of turning out all the lights and everyone leaving in the dark on Maundy Thursday (day before Easter Friday) to symbolize Jesus' death. It's all very theatrical, and very moving, and usually makes me cry.
I have a feeling that you might be talking about a different kind of ritual, though, if you're frustrated by the amount of time and money spent on them.
For what it's worth, it depends a lot on the church service: I know quite a few very sharp thinkers whose church membership is an important and valuable part of their lives in the way you describe. But they are uniformly members of churches that don't demand that members profess beliefs.
One gentleman in particular gave a lay sermon to his church on Darwin's birthday one year about how much more worthy of admiration a God who arranges the fundamental rules of the universe in such a way that intelligent life can emerge naturally out of their interaction, than is a God who instead must clumsily go in and manually construct intelligent life, and consequently how much more truly worshipful a view of life is the evolutionary biologist's than the creationist's, which was received reasonably positively.
So you might find that you can get what you want by just adding constraints to the kind of church service you're looking for.
I know quite a few very sharp thinkers whose church membership is an important and valuable part of their lives in the way you describe. But they are uniformly members of churches that don't demand that members profess beliefs.
Sounds like the Unitarian church that my parents took us to for a few years...I'm not sure why they took us, but I think it might have had more to do with "not depriving the children of a still-pretty-typical childhood experience like going to Sunday school" than with a wish to have church an important part of their lives.
I would probably enjoy the Unitarian community if I joined for long enough to really get to know them... I'm sure the adults were all very kind, welcoming people. Still, the two churches that I've attended the most are High Anglican and Pentecostal. The Anglican cathedral is where I sang in the choir for more than five years, and the music is what really drew me; although the Anglican church is very involved in community projects and volunteering, almost the whole congregation is above the age of fifty, and the young people who do attend are often cautious, conservative, and not especially curious about the world, which reduces the amount of fun I can have with them.
Surprisingly enough, in the Pentecostal church where the actual beliefs professed are much more extreme, most of the congregation are young and passionate about life and even intellectually curious. They are fun to hang out with...in fact, I frequently had more fun spending a Friday night at a Pentecostal event than at a party. They took their beliefs seriously and really lived according to how they saw the Bible, even though I have no doubt their actions would have been considered weird in a lot of contexts and by many of their friends. I think a lot of the apparent mental health benefit of this church came from the community's decision to stop caring about social stigmas and just live. This is, I think, what I most respected about them...but for a lot of the same reasons, I now find their ideas and beliefs a lot more jarring than those of the Anglican church.
I have no doubt that there are churches on all sides of the continuum: "traditional" communities, like the Anglican church, which are socially liberal and also composed of fun young people...and also fundamentalist evangelical churches which have ossified into organizations with strict rules and a lot more old people than young people. Maybe somewhere out there is a church that has all the aspects I like (singing, rituals, fun young people who do outrageous things together and bond over it) and is also bearable non-evangelical, non-fundamentalist, and socially liberal, but I haven't found it yet.
Hey everbody,
I'm a PhD Student in Physics. I came across Lesswrong when I read Eliezer's interview with John Baez. I was very intrigued by his answers: especially with his idea that the world needs to understand rationality. I identify with rationalism and especially with Lesswrong, because it just clicked. There were so many things in the world which people accepted and which I knew were just plain wrong. And before I found Lesswrong, I was a frustrated mess. And when I found Lesswrong it was a breath of fresh air.
For example: I was a pretty good debater in college. So in order to be a better debater, I started reading more about logical fallacies, which are common in argument and debate, such as ad hominem, slippery slope, appeal to authority etc . And the more I learnt about these, the more I saw that these were exactly the techniques common in debate. I was forced to conclude that debating was not about reaching the truth, but about proving the other person wrong. The people in debating circles were very intelligent; but very intelligent in a useless (and maybe harmful) way. They were scarcely interested in the truth. They could take any argument, twist it, contort it, appeal to emotions and use every fallacy listed in a beautiful way to win. And moreover, that was the exactly the kind of person I was becoming. In retrospect, it's clear to me that I got into debating only out of desire for status and not for any actual interest in the truth. But as soon as I saw what I was becoming, I walked away. I guess, the kernel of honesty left in me from being a student of physics rescued me in the end.
Second example: One of the first articles that really brought me into reading major portions of Lesswrong was the article on Doublethink by Eliezer. So when I was going through a phase of depression, I thought that religion held the key. Now, I did not believe in any kind of spiritual god or any spiritual structure whatsoever. But my family is extremely religious and I saw the happiness they got from religion. So I tried. I tried to convince myself that religion has a very important social function and saves people from anomie and depression. I tried to convince myself that one could be religious and yet not believe in god. I tried to go through all the motions of my religion. Result? Massive burnout. My brain was going to explode in a mass of self-contradiction. That post by Eliezer really helped me. There's a line in there:
The happiness of stupidity is closed to you. You will never have it short of actual brain damage, and maybe not even then... You cannot unsee what you see.
As I read these lines, I literally felt a huge wave of relief sweep over me. I wasn't going to be happy with religion. Period. I wasn't going to be happy with self-deception. Period. And I knew I had finally found people who 'got it'.
So that was a glimpse of how and why I got interested in Lesswrong. I'm reading the Sequences and looking around these days. I hope to start posting soon. And also attend LW meetups in my city.
I'm deeply interested in ideas from evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, computer science and of course physics! I work broadly on quantum information theory.
Cheers!
-Stabilizer
Welcome, Stabilizer!
So I tried. I tried to convince myself that religion has a very important social function and saves people from anomie and depression. I tried to convince myself that one could be religious and yet not believe in god. I tried to go through all the motions of my religion. Result? Massive burnout. My brain was going to explode in a mass of self-contradiction.
Interesting that you say this...I haven't had the same experience at all. I was raised basically agnostic/atheist, by parents who weren't so much disapproving of religion as indifferent. I started going to church basically because I made friends with a girl who I had incredibly fun times hanging out with and who was also a passionate born-again Christian. I knew that most of the concepts expressed in her evangelical Christian sect were fallacious, but I met a lot of people whose belief had allowed them to overcome difficult situations and live much happier lives. Even if true belief wasn't an option for me, I could see the positive effect that my friend's church had, in general, in the community it served. And I was a happier, more positive, and more generous person while I attended the group. There was a price to pay: either I would profess my belief to the others and feel like I was lying to a part of myself, or I wouldn't, and feel like ever-so-slightly an outsider. But maybe because of my particular brain architecture, the pain of cognitive dissonance was far outweighed by the pleasure of having a ready-made community of kind, generous (if not scientific-minded) people eager to show me how welcoming and generous they could be. I have yet to find something that is as good for my mental health and emotional stability as attending church.
That being said, a year of not attending church and reading LessWrong regularly has honed my thinking to the point that I don't think I could sit back and enjoy those church services anymore. So that avenue is closed to me now, too.
Cannabis allows connections to be made between concepts which normally seem unrelated.
Which leads to the problem of thinking up connections between ideas that are actually unrelated. Creative, interesting, neat-sounding insights are not always true insights.
Also, I suspect that different brains respond differently to this kind of experience. I know that a friend of my parents' is a mathematician by profession and frequently smokes marijuana to "help his thought process." As for myself and the small amount of personal experience I have, the feeling of being high isn't an unpleasant one and can even be fun as an experience in itself, but the quality of my thought processes drops quickly and if I'm actually trying to accomplish any kind of specific goal, being high (or drunk) quickly becomes irritating.
I do think your idea might be valid in the sense that anyone brainstorming under the influence of drugs is likely to produce more ideas than someone who is sober. Even if a lower percentage of those ideas are useful, someone whose sober thinking process is rigid or self-censored, and who thus has trouble coming up with any ideas during a brainstorm, might benefit from a little de-inhibition.
"is morality an innate quality of the universe or purely evolved by human brains?"
Your use of the word "purely" here confuses me; this isn't an either-or question. Evolution happens due to selection effects, selection effects come from contingent facts about the environment but also less-contingent logical facts about types and equilibria of timeless games and many other things like that. Superrational game theory is an "innate" quality of the universe and seems to have a lot to do with our intuitions about morality. We don't know if "morality" is a powerfully attractive telos or contingent result of primate evolution. In general moral philosophy is not obvious. If it was then my life would be a lot easier.
(ETA: And when it comes down to actual decision policies you have to do a lot tricky renormalization anyway, so even if it was obvious that morality (the truly optimal-justified decision policy) was a powerful telos it's not clear how much it would help us to know that fact. Yeah, maybe everything will turn out okay in the end, but maybe it will only do that if you act as if it won't. (Or maybe it only will if you act as if it will, as Borges and Voltaire talked about.))
Agreed that it's more complicated than either/or. However, I was using it as an example of a "Big Question" that some people believe shouldn't be investigated for fear of damaging moral consequences. To people who see it that way, I think it would be an either/or.
If it is in the genetic interests of the children to perform actions with such-and-such a risk level relative to the reward in social recognition, why is it not in the genetic interests of the parent to promote that precise risk level in the child?
No idea, actually. The following is possible stuff that my brain has produced, i.e. pure invented bullshit.
It could be that this discrepancy used to be less of a problem, when society was more constant from one generation to the next and most 'risky' behaviours were obviously rewarding to both teens and adults . Based on anecdotal conversations with my parents, it seems like some things that are considered 'cool' by most of my own peer group were considered 'just stupid' by the people my parents hung out with when they were teenagers.
There's also the factor that in the modern environment, as compared to the ancestral environment, most people don't keep the same group of friends in their twenties and thirties as in their teens. The same person can be unpopular in high school, when "coolness" is more correlated to risk taking, and yet be popular in a different group later when they have a $100 000-a-year job and an enormous house with a pool in it, and nobody remembers that back in high school they had no friends. Parents who have survived this phase may consider it okay for their children to be less popular as teenagers in order to prepare for later "success" as they define it, but to a teenager actually living through it day by day, the <adaptation executer>(http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/) in their brain will still rate their peers' approval as far more important than safety, and adjust their pleasure and pain in different situations accordingly...since, in an ancestral environment of small groups that stayed together, impressing people at age 14 would have a much greater effect on your later success as an adult.
You may find the article in http://lesswrong.com/lw/jx/we_change_our_minds_less_often_than_we_think/5lkb well worth your time.
It's not that big questions often don't have answers, it's that most proffered answers are often wrong. So the majority of the time finding "answers" is foolishness, whereas continuing to search for an answer is wise. (If the questions were presumed not to have answers then searching for those answers would be somewhat odd.) Anyway I realize that's not how you interpreted the quote. As to your interpretation...
yet it was resisted by those who used words like "big questions."
Um... that is the weirdest form of argument I have seen in awhile.
Anyway, it's not that people thought that the question was unanswerable, they just thought they already had the answer. Kinda unrelated. Your conclusion is almost certainly correct, but you need to rationalize it better. (ETA: I don't think good rationalization is bad, by the way; I didn't intend any negative connotations.)
yet it was resisted by those who used words like "big questions."
Um... that is the weirdest form of argument I have seen in awhile.
My interpretation of that argument was that 'people who used words like "big questions"' refers to people who considered the question of whether or not the sun revolved to be a philosophical matter with moral implications, rather than a mundane true-or-false. If the truth of the statement "the sun revolves around the earth" is implied to mean that "God created our planet at the centre of the universe because he loves mankind", then most people who believe in its truth would be reluctant to look for mundane, commonplace answers concerning actual gravity and solar system models and stuff.
And once there was a concrete answer to that question, for many people it ceased to be a "big question" with moral implications about human worth. I know plenty of people who are well educated in cosmology and say "well, duh" to the statement that "the earth revolves around the sun", but who still think that "is morality an innate quality of the universe or purely evolved by human brains?" to be a Big Question, with good versus bad answers instead of true versus false.
Orthonormal, thank you for suggesting the Straw Vulcan talk to me. It was a fairly interesting talk I was encouraged to see rationality defined through various examples in a way that is useful, accepts emotionality and works with it. I did not myself have a Straw Vulcan view of rationality, far from it, but I do recognise a few of it's flawed features in rationalistic social theories.
However, even this speaker seemed to overstate people´s rationality. An example is given of teenagers doing dangerous things despite stating they consider the risks. The taking of the risk is attributed to flawed reasoning, miscalculation of risks and the like. From my perspective, it is much more likely that the teenagers considered the risks because they were warned against the behaviour and they realised that their peer group was about to do something their parent´s, guardians, etc. disagree with; the were somewhat anxious because they were aware of a moral conflict. However, their bond with the peer group, the emotional dynamic of the situation was not disrupted by the doubt, nor was it strong enough for them to exclude themselves from the situation (to leave), and so they took whatever risk they had pondered. I wouldn't appropriate this to flawed thinking; as I see it the thinking was fairly irrelevant to the situation, as it seems to me that it is to most situations.
An example is given of teenagers doing dangerous things despite stating they consider the risks.
It seems to be that there is a systematic bias in teenage thinking, especially of the male sex; many teenagers I know/have known in the past place a much higher weight on peers' opinions than on parents' opinions, and a considerably higher weight on 'coolness' than on 'safeness.' Cool actions are often either unsafe or disapproved of by the parents' generation. I've started to wonder whether there might be a good evolutionary reason for teenagers to act this way. After all, being liked and accepted by peers is more important to finding a mate than being accepted by the older generation. In an ancestral environment, young males' ability to confidently take risks (i.e. in hunting) would have been important to success, and thus a factor in attractiveness to girls. Depending on just how risky the 'cool' things to do are, and how tough the competition for mates, the boys who ignored their parents' warnings and took risks with their peer group might have had more children compared to those who were more cautious...and thus their actions would be instrumentally rational. If this hypothesis were true, the 'thinking' that leads modern teenagers to do dangerous things would be an implicit battle of popularity-vs-safety, with popularity usually winning because of an innate weighting.
This is a testable, falsifiable hypothesis, if I can find some way of testing it.
I wouldn't necessarily pay for an online course, partly because I'm "cheap" and more reluctant to pay for a lot of things than most people, and partly because my life is going rather smoothly right now and I'm not sure how much added benefit I could get out of a $75 course. That being said, I pay significantly more than $75 to learn martial arts, for the main reason that it's fun and thus makes my life better. So if I had good evidence that your rationality course was fun, that might sway me. And when I translate $75 into my current hourly wage, it does seem that the good (and fun) obtained from such a course is worth as much as a shortish day at work.
Anyway best of luck!
living alone and a lack of social interaction are correlated with poor health and unhappiness, and the pain levels reported by people reliving socially painful events, especially ostracism, are "comparable to pain levels reported ... for chronic back pain and even childbirth".
And yet, when a person finds themselves in this sort of situation, they're near-universally treated as though they're living that way by choice, and can expect only empty platitudes or outright disdain in response to pleas for help getting out of said situation.
Do you consider yourself an example of this? If not (and even if so), what are some other examples?
Note: it might have something to do with the apparently innate human tendency to want to "save face." One way to save face in socially painful situations is to try to appear as though you are doing it all on purpose, to present yourself, for example, as a 'free spirit' rather than a 'loser.' I know for sure that I did this a lot as a child, and even now I have a tendency to emphasize the 'weird' things that I do, to look like I do them confidently and deliberately.
I'm not sure how much new material you cover.
New to Less Wrong? Almost all of it.
New to the scientific community? Almost none of it.
Those are the kinds of posts I generally try to write.
And a very valuable kind of post that is, because I'm sure there are plenty of people who haven't read the material that's in the scientific literature, and even for the people who have, it's great to have a well-written summary. In a format that's easier to forward to friends to read, too.
I guess i would like to see an exercise routine that was designed from the ground up to provide a nice balance of benefits vs injury risk, and then specifically a routine that you can keep doing indefinitely.
But maybe i'm not giving the breakdown of the human body enough weight...
I guess i just want a lifelong exercise plan with easy to follow steps, one that has a lot of evidence behind it that it won't cause early damage to bone, tissue, etc...
I'm sure that such routines exist. There are probably books about them. I haven't investigated because I started exercising when I was younger than ten (swim team) and though I haven't always kept up the routine as much as I`d like, my level of fitness has never descended back to start-from-scratch.
Walking and swimming are both low-impact. I know that for swimming specifically, there are numerous 'Masters' clubs that you can join at any level, where the idea is to keep it up indefinitely as opposed to training for a particular race or event.
Interesting article, and I enjoyed reading it, although I'm not sure how much new material you cover. A lot of this looks familiar, but I'm not sure whether it's from your other articles or from random reading. Could be just from random reading, actually. I've read a lot in this area because relationships and sexuality are so generally mystifying to me. And real-world 'just go out and do it' experience is what seems to help the most, but 'the virtue of scholarship' helps too, so your articles are useful to me.
Although I agree with the general thrust of your statement, I cannot forgive the incorrect subargument, "It's worse than being religious."
But yes, definitely: atheists should aspire to be skillful, competent, elegant, logical rude jerks. Those of our kind with the rare talent not to be rude jerks could aspire to that part too.
Why exactly is it rare for atheists not to be rude jerks? This isn't something I've observed strong evidence for.
Although you should be able to decide on what you want to work, a thing that seems to be excluded by the sentence "work obsessively".
Exactly. You could say that I have just as much akrasia as others, just about different things. I always tell my friends/family/boyfriend that I'll be less busy/take a break at some point, and I keep putting it off, despite often realizing that a state of constant near-exhaustion is not maximally efficient and that I would be able to focus my efforts a lot more optimally if I did take a break.
(I type this as I sit at the keyboard at 6 am, ready to bike halfway across the city in 2º C weather, with my swimsuit packed so that I can go swim at the campus pool after my 12 hours placement in the hospital. The marks of a workaholic indeed.)
Thanks for taking the time to explain that.
That exercise works to some extent is clear, just look at bodybuilders. However i do not see a lot of evidence based work on exercises that find a good balance between health and body damage. You might notice that many bodybuilders no longer look so healthy after their 40's.
I'll keep searching.
That exercise works to some extent is clear... However i do not see a lot of evidence based work on exercises that find a good balance between health and body damage.
Are you talking about a specific type of high-performance exercise, or exercise in general? If the former, maybe you're right, but I still kinda doubt it. If the latter...yeah, maybe a 40-year-old bodybuilder doesn't look or feel as healthy as a 20-year-old bodybuilder. But I would bet you a lot of money that they are healthier than a 40-year-old who spent those 20 years not exercising.
In general, I think, the direct health benefits of exercise (lower risk of heart disease, lower risk of osteoporosis) happen even with half an hour a day of fairly gentle aerobic exercise. Beyond that, you get what you train for. By that I mean: if you want to be able to run a marathon, you have to practice running long distances fast. If you want to be able to lift 400 pounds, you have to practice lifting heavy weights. The human body adapts to the load expected of it; that's the whole point of exercise.
There are always tradeoffs, of course. Lifting weights is hard on your joints. Running can be too. But I've known plenty of people who are in their 40s, are very fit, and have managed to avoid injuries. (Granted, they were people who had done swimming, cross-country skiing, martial arts, that kind of thing. Not bodybuilding, which might be a bit more 'unbalanced.' Older people do have to be careful to avoid injuries and do take longer to recover than younger people.)
I referred to its author by username and referenced the account's recent deletion...?
I just checked and the account IS deleted. Weird. Wasn't that article was pretty recent, too?
Point of evidence re learning to like any kind of music:
Until I was about 11 years old, I didn't like music. I didn't dislike it, per se, but I didn't pay much attention to whether there was music playing or not. I have memories of going to the local Folk Festival and playing at the crafts table or playing tag, but no memories of actually noticing the live music that was playing. I was pretty much completely tone deaf at the time, and my parents decided not to put me in piano lessons along with my siblings, partly because they didn't think there was much point for someone as unmusical as I appeared to be.
This changed when I started learning an instrument at school (flute) in seventh grade. Once I was actually using my own fingers and lips to produce notes, I started to notice melodies, and get them stuck in my head sometimes. I joined choir originally so that I wouldn't have to go outside for recess in winter, but after a few months I started having emotional responses to music, having favourite songs, etc.
Skip forwards by 7 years of playing in various school bands, singing in various choirs, and learning enough classical music theory to start composing singable choir pieces, and almost all music affects me deeply once I know the song, whether it's 16th century sacred choral music or modern heavy metal.
Summary: I see nothing contradictory about having to learn how to appreciate music.
I came up with something like DH7 out of a rather irrational reason: that is, I hate disagreeing with people, and I used to especially hate criticizing people, but I also get (perhaps understandably) annoyed by people being wrong about things. So my typical strategy has been to point out the things that they are right about to them, and look for a version of their central argument which is right, whether because its claim is weaker and its area of interest is narrower, or because there was a logical flaw which was simple to fix.
I know there's at least one person who found my discussion style really irritating and started trying to make me argue 'against myself' and then point that fact out. But I don't get especially attached to most of the ideas or points I argue about, so I remember thinking it was kind of pointless that he did that.
Interesting article. I really like the example that you use at the beginning, and I agree that it's a useful metaphor for everyday life and human behaviour.
The 'Now for some ideas on making yourself go FOOM' section was a couple of levels of abstraction above the kind of concrete suggestion that I could actually go out and use in real life. (Maybe because I suspect that I'm not one of the 'really smart' people.)
They would have the ability to flat-out ignore pain. They would do everything the way cold, hard logic says is most efficient. They wouldn't ever sit, they would stand or run. They would run on a treadmill on one leg while listening to a French audiobook (despite not knowing French) while juggling 5 tennis balls with one hand while doing SRS reviews.
Maybe I'm weird, but to me this sounds like an absolutely miserable way to live. And I'm already further towards that end of the spectrum than most people I know. Then again, I consider my tendency to work obsessively to be a flaw that I want to fix.
To understand musical consonance/dissonance, you must understand that consonance of simple harmonic ratios is an artifact of a much simpler underlying rule. The human hearing system does not analyze frequency ratios of individual notes, it examines the frequency domain clustering of partials of the sound as a whole.
If you listen to two sine waves of near identical frequency they sound consonant. Widen the frequency difference and they become dissonant. Further widen the frequency difference and they become consonant again. This was measured back in 1967 by R. Plomp and W. J. M. Levelt. The consonance of a musical harmony depends on the separation of the individual partials. We need a "critical bandwidth" of separation between frequencies to clearly distinguish them. You could think of dissonance as the unpleasant feeling of hearing different frequencies but failing to resolve them.
The majority of musical instruments used in Western classical music create sound by vibration constrained at two points, either the ends of a string or the ends of a column of air. Therefore the partials are all integer multiples [2] of the fundamental. It turns out that if these sounds are played together at small integer frequency ratios, the frequency of the partials align such that the quantity of dissonant, smaller than the "critical bandwidth", frequency differences is at a local minimum.
However, percussion instruments are not constrained in this way, so cultures with a percussion focused musical tradition (eg. Indonesian gamelan music) developed alternative tuning systems better suited to the timbres of their instruments. Early electronic musicians, eg. Wendy Carlos, also noticed how the consonance of different tuning systems depended on the timbre of the notes.
As far as I am aware, the first person to mathematically formalize this relationship, and develop a method to generate arbitrary tuning systems for arbitrary timbres and vice-versa, was William Sethares [3]. He has a great webpage at http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ , with many audio examples. His book "Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale" should be considered the most important book on music theory ever written because it generalizes all previous musical theories, and solves the problem of the exhaustion of harmonic novelty in music without having to resort to unlistenable crap like serialism.
And now we get to the link to the main article, and the reason why Sethare's work was such a revelation to me. I shared a house with a music student for several years, and I became heavily involved in the classical music subculture. Back then I only knew of the Pythagorean ratio-based concept of harmony. I listened to a great variety of Western classical music, and attended several concerts. As my knowledge increased, I became disillusioned with pre-modern classical music, because each new composition began to sound like a reworking of something I had heard before. Traditional music theory simply didn't have enough scope for novelty. I studied the works of Harry Partch, who pushed ratio-based music theory about as far as it can go, and I wasted a lot of time attempting to extend his theory, but I never felt I had reached a satisfactory conclusion.
Of course I was exposed to atonal composition via my musician friends, and my initial reaction was the same as almost everybody's: I hated it. But both the obvious high status of this kind of music and my lack of knowledge of any alternative source of novelty slowly changed my preferences. I started listening to Second Viennese School composers and free jazz. The more I listened the more I liked it, and I gradually turned into an atonal music snob like my musician friends.
And then I left university and lost all contact with them. I forgot all about classical music for several years. When I listened to atonal music again I found I had reverted to my original preference. I'm now very certain the only reason I liked it was social signaling. I declared music to be dead and lost all interest in it.
When I later discovered Sethares's work it shook my beliefs about music to the core. My whole atonal adventure was built on a mistake. We're no longer limited by physical instruments and it's really possible to compose music simultaneously strange and beautiful. I now promote Sethares's work in the hope that more musicians will adopt it and create sometime great.
[1] R. Plomp and W. J. M. Levelt, "Tonal Consonance and Critical Bandwidth," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.38, 548-560 (1965). [2] Approximately. Note that octaves on a piano are tuned slightly sharp, because piano strings are not simple mathematical abstractions, but have thickness and other properties such that they don't produce perfectly harmonic sound. [3] Sethares, W.A. (1993), Local consonance and the relationship between timbre and scale. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94(1): 1218.
That's fascinating, thank you! I will definitely check out Sethares' work, as a music listener and an amateur composer. It sounds very different for the type of music I have the most experience with (choral church music of various eras.)
It sounds like you really want to be a writer...
What I say to most people is that I already am a writer. I've completed a number of novel-length stories. I'm just not a published writer yet.
I've had very mixed results with this technique. Some people respond to it very positively, others very negatively. The same is true of asking targeted questions (e.g., "Are you angry...?") or open-ended questions (e.g. "How do you feel about that?") or asserting my own observations (e.g., "You seem angry to me").
Face to face, I can usually figure out with some tentative probing which approach works best before I commit to one. But the safest tactic I've come across, and the one I generally use on the Internet (where I cannot tell who is listening to me or how they might respond), is sticking to related statements about my own experience (e.g. "That would anger me") and avoiding the second person pronoun altogether.
and the one I generally use on the Internet
I can barely read people's feelings at all on the Internet, or in any text-based medium really. So I tend to avoid discussing their feelings at all unless it's in response to them bringing up feelings and describing it themselves.
I'm pretty good at reading body language and facial expressions it in real life (well, I can place people quite easily on a spectrum of 'relaxed' to 'uncomfortable', and it's sometimes harder to tell what particular kind of uncomfortable they are feeling, i.e. sad vs frustrated vs angry). What I find works well is "summarizing" what they have said and then adding one comment at the end that is my interpretation or observation, if I have one. Most people I know respond well to this; I find that even if I've interpreted their feelings wrong, they are eager to go deeper into the conversation and correct me, rather than getting frustrated and walking off. Which is ultimately what I want: more conversation time, about more topics, so that I have more data for my 'model.'
I don't have a handy exercise regimen, but I'll toss in my two cents.
An exercise I often do in this space involves explicitly looking for symmetry: if I am judging someone for doing X, I look for and articulate ways in which I also do X; if I am feeling aggrieved because Y has happened to me, I look for and articulate ways in which Y has also happened to other people. I doubt it helps build empathy directly, but it helps me curtail some reflexes that seem incompatible with empathy.
Another involves building models of worlds in addition to people: if someone is behaving in a way that seems inconsistent with how the world actually is, I try to work out in some detail how the world would have to be for their behavior to make sense... or, rather, what the minimal changes would have to be. It seems like something that ought not make a difference, and yet it does: the way I approach someone who I model as operating in a fictional world where everyone is a dangerous threat, for example, is different (and much more compassionate) than the way I approach someone who I model as being frightened of everyone.
Taking a step back... I find it's helpful to remember that every time someone seems to be doing or saying something unconscionably stupid, or thoughtless, or evil, or otherwise behaving in ways that I want to classify as other-than-me, that's an opportunity to instead practice empathy and compassion. (I don't mean to suggest here that one ought to practice empathy and compassion in such cases; I don't think that's a useful claim to make in this context.)
Taking a step back... I find it's helpful to remember that every time someone seems to be doing or saying something unconscionably stupid, or thoughtless, or evil, or otherwise behaving in ways that I want to classify as other-than-me, that's an opportunity to instead practice empathy and compassion.
I think this is an excellent point. From most people's own point of view, they never do anything stupid, thoughtless, or evil. Everything is justified as the best or only course of action that anyone they consider reasonable could take when put into the same circumstances. If you look at what they're doing and judge it to be stupid, thoughtless, or evil, and you don't understand how they could see it otherwise, then your model of them is incomplete. This method has almost always worked for me in terms of figuring out the missing bit of my model, and usually works for reducing frustration. (Sometimes my own emotional response is still "I know I'd do exactly the same thing in your place, but it's still freaking annoying!")
Example case: choosing to study nursing instead of physics
Whoa, that's a serious career decision based on that one consideration. Do you feel particularly deficient in this area or attribute greater importance to it than average? It's not like physicists don't talk to each other at all.
It was a decision based on multiple factors, including the likelihood that I would find a job after graduating, the likelihood that I would enjoy my day-to-day work (my father hated academia, and our personality is similar enough that I considered this evidence about me, too), and the likelihood that I could be good at my job. (I may not be intelligent enough to be a really good physicist. Then again, I may not be capable of learning enough people skills to be a really good nurse, either...)
I often walk out of an exam thinking I did brilliantly, only to be highly surprised with my crap grades later.
My brother said to me a few days ago that "whenever I think I've done well, I've done terribly, and whenever I think I've done terribly, I've done well."
It occurs to me that I also neglected to include participating on Lesswrong in my list. It's a slightly different phenomenon, but here the local sample is so skewed in terms of intelligence that even those of us with IQs 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean can be quietly nursing the humiliating thought that maybe we are idiots after all.
That is especially so for those of us who excel more in verbal intelligence than in math and programming capabilities.
So I'm not the only one who's found that!
When I was younger, for reasons that I don't understand well now, I really didn't want to be defined by "intelligence." People often told me that I was smart, and that because I was smart, I ought to do x, y, z (be a biologist, be a physicist, whatever, and if it was a teacher, it was usually the subject they taught.) Which prompted me not to want to do x, y, z even though I found pretty much all subjects fascinating.
So I went into nursing, where a lot of the material (practical skills and empathy-based skills) involves stuff I'm not naturally good at...and all of the sudden intelligence is something I want to prove, and the fact that most people on LW are smarter than I am bothers me way more than it should.
I'd really like to know some basic, repeatable exercises that build empathy and social skills. Changing your everyday behavior to incorporate little bits of training here and there is not very effective. It's like wanting to get fit and deciding to walk a little faster whenever you need to get somewhere, instead of joining the gym. Or wanting to be a musician and deciding to hum along to songs more often, instead of getting a tutor.
Many parts of nursing school are a giant exercise in building empathy :) Also, volunteering at social events can be really good. I found volunteering at church events helpful, but you may not want to do that.
I suppose you could do the equivalent of "getting a tutor" if you have a friend who is much more empathetic than you are, and willing to teach you. Actually, it would be useful to have a structured system for that kind of thing...
I'm wondering how much reading fiction can help with that. I never really thought about it before reading HP:MoR which uses the argument quite extensively, but I do feel that my ability to understand others was greatly improved by the fact that, since early childhood (I remember being like 8 or 9 and spending a whole afternoon just devouring a book) I read a lot of fiction (mostly sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, and a bit of thrillers too).
Reading fiction, especially as a child, forces you to put yourself in the shoes of other people (usually the hero(es) of the book), which will vary greatly from book to book, and to make models of people (both the heroes and the secondary characters) to try to guess what will happen later in the book. It gives some kind of mental flexibility about understanding people, a bit like stretching gives flexibility to your muscles. And it does it much more efficiently than a movie to me, first because books can much more easily than movie speak about what's happening inside the head of the character (how he takes his decisions, what he feels, ...) and because a book gives you much more time to think about it than a movie.
Also, I think role-playing helps too. Even before playing "official" RPGs like D&D with dices and stats and everything, as a child, I was often "role-playing" in an intuitive way with my siblings, so putting myself in the shoes of someone else.
Those two may have a drawback : they may tend to lead me to have stereotyped views of others, to fall more easily to the halo effect, since often (but hopefully not always) the heroes have lot of qualities together, and the villains lots of flaws together.
Do any of you have a pointer to some deeper study about the link of reading fiction (especially as a child) with the ability to empathize with/understand others ?
I read a lot as a child too, but it was writing that I've found has motivated me to develop more complete models of people. Whether it was my mom's detailed criticism of early stories that I wrote (included the dreaded "that's awfully implausible, sweetie"), or the fact that writing gave me incentive to go out and talk to people or try new things in order to have something to write about, that's where a lot of my motivation came from to develop better empathy.
Aside: I think a surprising number of my life decisions boil down to wanting to understand people better (whether "just because" or in order to be better at other things.) Example case: choosing to study nursing instead of physics. Despite my mother's insistence that I would be "an incredible academic", there was a part of me that always chimed in: "You're already good at school/studying/learning/etc. You're terrible at people skills. People skills are more important than study skills for writing good stories. Can you imagine how awesome your people skills would be after 10 years of being a nurse? There you are!"
Interesting article about optimism
According to this brain-imaging study, volunteers presented with negative scenarios (i.e. car crashes, cancer), and asked to estimate the probability of these scenarios happening to them, would only update their beliefs if the actual rate of ocurrence in the population, given to them afterwards, was lower, i.e. more optimistic, than what they had guessed. The more "optimistic" the subjects were, according to a personality test, the less likely they were to update their belief based on more negative information, and the less activity they showed their frontal lobes, indicating that they weren't "paying attention" to the new information.
Sounds like confirmation bias, except that interestingly enough, it's unidirectional in this case. I wonder if very pessimistic people would have the opposite bias, only updating their estimate if the actual probability was higher, or more negative.
Link to article on kurzweilai.
Link to abstract in Nature journal. I can't access the full text.
I've written about 50 pages in the last few weeks (working on a novel), and gotten to feel the awesome high of a writing "flow state" again, which I hadn't felt in quite a while. Schoolwork may have been neglected somewhat. I am trying to commit to at least looking at all of my stories every day and seeing if there is anything that I want to write.
I'm training for my first taekwondo tournament, which is in 2 weeks. I've made huge gains in flexibility, probably put a bit more muscle on my legs (calves especially, swimming does not do a lot for that), noticeably improved my balance and general coordination, and finally started to get the hang of poomsae (patterns).
I'm also signed up for the Stanford AI online course, along with at least one other member of the Ottawa lesswrong community, who will hopefully be able to support me through catching up in linear algebra and programming skills.
I'll be doing the free online Stanford AI course.
Oh, and yesterday I were feeling to ill to do anything actually productive like hang on internet forums, so I started messing around in python and got a fair bit into an experimental, and I quote, "brain machine interface using only hardware available on a normal PC" through a bunch of neurological tricks mostly learned from this site. It's crazy enough that it might actually work, in which case it's a pretty rad shortcut to IA and getting yourself a codeic cortex for the price of only a beeping-induced aching head and a seemingly-pointless-circular-movement-induced aching hand. I may or may not work on this again.
Cool, me too! Unfortunately I never took a linear algebra class (calculus and computer programming filled up the electives allowed to me in my program) so I will be having a crash course on it with the Ottawa LW groups tonight, and then attempting to learn the rest as I go.
The number of people living today because their ancestors invested their money in themselves/their status and their children, all of us:
The number of people living today because they or someone else invested their money in cryonics or other scheme to live forever, 0.
Not saying that things won't change in the future, but there is a tremendously strong bias to spend your resources on ambulatory people and new people, because that has been what has worked previously.
Women might have stronger instincts in this respect as they have been more strongly selected for the ability to care for their children (unlike men).
If you want to change this state of affairs, swiftly at least, you have to tap into our common psyche as successful replicators and have it pass the "useful for fitness test". This would be as easy as making it fashionable or a symbol of high status, get Obama to sign up publicly and I think you would see a lot more interest.
High status has been something sort after because it gets you better mates and more of them (perhaps illicitly).
Women might have stronger instincts in this respect as they have been more strongly selected for the ability to care for their children (unlike men).
Maybe this is why I find it so hard to be emotionally troubled by the thought of dying, as long as my children survive. (As long as anyone survives, really, but the thought of children is more emotionally compelling.)
Upvoted for suggesting concrete examples.
What is this thing called "Meetup" that everyone keeps talking about? Does it have some meaning beyond the obvious that I'm unaware of? Because the way its used around here makes it seem like it refers to something more specific than the literal definition.
I'm assuming given your sunlight issue that you can't really drive very far on sunny days?
I have a very good pair of sunglasses, which combined with a modern car windshield are enough that I can drive without being too limited by that(though I still prefer to make long trips at night when I can), plus cars have roofs which means there are a lot of relative positions the sun can be in which does not put the driver in direct sunlight. The bigger limitation is paying for gas. Occasional long trips are no problem. ~weekly long trips would break the bank. (Long > 25 miles )
Does your town have Greyhound bus service? This could be a cheaper alternative, possibly, if you find bus trips bearable. Also you can sleep on the bus, which would help if the time you needed to make the trip correlated with a 'sleeping' phase of your schedule.
I read TLP with a giant grain of salt, because sometimes the things he says about the psychiatric profession just seem downright implausible.
It reads like the writing of someone with an enormous axe to grind...
And the simple reason why it is so easy to fool psychiatrists with words like "atypical" and "tricyclic" is that most psychiatrists are stupendously ignorant of even kindergarten-level pharmacology and have barely any idea about how to interpret a study-- I don't mean p values, I mean looking at the y-axis; I mean the introduction. Much, much easier to base all of their arguments on empty terms that are nothing other than branding choices. Never mind the senseless term "atypical". Gun to head, is Seroquel an "antipsychotic" or an "antidepressant"? Confused? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, I guess.
-- The Last Psychiatrist, "The Rise and Fall of Atypical Antipsychotics"
I went and read the original article and was massively entertained, mainly because I just studied for weeks to memorize all those drug names. I remember it saying in our textbook that the second-generation "atypical" antipsychotics had fewer side effects...and I was surprised because my friend is on a second-generation antipsychotic (Zyprexa) and at some point has had pretty much every possible side effect.
That's actually exactly what I usually try to do. Unfortunately, most advice-givers in my experience tend to mistake #4 for #3. I point out that they've made an incorrect assumption when formulating their advice, and I immediately get yelled at for making excuses. I do actually have a tendency to seek excuses for non-action, but I've been aware of that tendency in myself for a long time and counter it as vigorously as I am able to.
I suppose it couldn't hurt to explain my actual situation, though. Gooey details incoming.
I live in the southwestern suburbs of Fairfield, California, on a fixed income that's just enough to pay the bills and buy food, with a little left over. (Look the town over in Google Maps to get a sense of what kind of place it is.)
Most critically, i suffer from Non-24, which, in the past, was responsible for deteriorating health and suicidal depression during high school, for forcing me to drop even the just-for-fun classes I was taking at the community college, as well as causing me to completely lose touch with my high school acquaintances before I figured out what I had and that there was a pattern to it and not just random bouts of hypersomnia and insomnia. It rules out doing anything that involves regularly scheduled activities; I even had to quit my World of Warcraft guild because of it.
Before I lost touch with my high school acquaintances, I did get to experience some normal social gatherings, though to me there was never anything particularly fun about being pelted with straw-wrappers at Denny's or dancing to Nirvana under a strobe-light or watching them play BeerPong. None of those people were ever my friends or even much of a support structure, and I don't actually miss any of them. I've been on several dates through OkCupid and my brief time in college, but they were all failures of emotional connection and in each case I was relieved when the girl told me she didn't want to go out with me anymore. I mention this to show that I'm not just assuming certain generic solutions won't work for me; I've confirmed it by experiment.
So, I'm living without much disposable income, with a sleep disorder that precludes regularly scheduled activities of any kind, in a highway-tumor town, with no friends or contacts of any kind. Oh, and I have a mild photosensitivity condition which means I'm slaved to my sunglasses during the day and even with them can't do anything that involves exposure to direct sunlight for more than a few minutes at a time, just for the sake of thoroughness.
That's the summary of the situation.
My career goals aren't actually precluded by any of this, though becoming a successful graphic artist, or writer, or independent filmmaker or webcomic author or whatever I end up succeeding at, is made more difficult. I only included the professional category because my social goals mostly pertain to my career goals: I'd like to have a useful social network. It'd be nice to have friends just for the sake of having friends, but that's of low value to me. My only high value purely-social goal is meeting and befriending a woman with whom I can have a meaningful and lasting intimate relationship, which dissolves away the romantic category as well.
Most critically, i suffer from Non-24
Have you seen doctors about this or tried any treatments? I did a quick Wikipedia search and the 'Treatment' section suggested light therapy or melatonin therapy. It said they don't always work well and may be completely ineffective for some people, and it sounds like a lot of work for not much gain, but if you haven't tested it out, it might be worth at try.
for forcing me to drop even the just-for-fun classes I was taking at the community college.
Are online classes perhaps a better option? I don't know how flexible they are in terms of what time of day you can view the lectures and stuff, and I don't know whether you've already tried that.
Actually, there may be online work opportunities as well. I've never investigated this personally, but it might be worth hunting around or asking some other LWers.
RE: writing, that's something that fits pretty well into an irregular schedule. You can do it at home at whatever time of day. What sort of material are you interested in writing? I've been working on writing fiction for a number of years now, and I would happily do an email exchange and read/edit your work. I can't offer to do the same thing for graphic art, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are other people on LW who can.
though to me there was never anything particularly fun about being pelted with straw-wrappers at Denny's or dancing to Nirvana under a strobe-light or watching them play BeerPong.
I can understand that. Those things are pretty boring. Feeling emotionally connected to the people you're doing them with is what makes it worthwhile, and if you don't, you just don't.
As for your original comment about having some cognitive flaw, it might boil down to the fact that you just aren't interested in the same life experience as, say, your high school acquaintances were. Having a group of acquaintances and doing regular social activities with them is a conventional solution for a lot of people, but it if doesn't work for you, it just doesn't work. And when your reward structure isn't the same as everyone else's, there will be fewer "opportunities to be rewarded" that automatically presen themselves.
What will work for you is another question. Finding a job that would self-select for coworkers who had similar interests to yours could help. Also, learning how to steer a conversation from something banal towards something interesting to you is a skill that can help deepen your social connections. (Although the first step is to have enough practice with conversations that you know how to make yourself interesting to the other person. This took me a long time and a lot of conscious effort to acquire.)
Also, depression is its own form of cognitive bias that might make you more likely to see opportunities negatively or as a "waste of time", when otherwise you might think "why not?" If you were depressed for several years, these kind of thoughts or more subtle versions might have become habits.
My only high value purely-social goal is meeting and befriending a woman with whom I can have a meaningful and lasting intimate relationship, which dissolves away the romantic category as well.
I wish you the best of luck with this. It does make a huge difference once you can find that person.
4.5hrs of sleep every 24 on everyman 3 since January and I've never felt better!
[full disclosure: the first couple of months were tough and involved much experimentation with schedules close to everyman 3.]
Neat. However, how regimented does your sleep schedule have to be in order for it to work? (My main problem with sleeping enough isn't that I have trouble going to bed early enough, like seems to be true for a lot of people... It's that some days I have shifts at work that start at 6 am and then I'm busy until 10 pm, and some days I get home after 11 pm and have to work 6 an the next day, and somehow even though I sleep 8-10 hours a night on the other days, I never really seem to catch up. (Also, can't nap during the day, at least not on demand. I taught myself to do it a bit during first-year university, but my schedule no longer allows napping anyway.)
None of that information would constrain the space of possibilities in which the cognitive flaw exists, no matter what my answers happened to be. That's all a level above the actual problem, and irrelevant.
It seems highly unlikely to me that you can fix this "cognitive flaw" in isolation, before you've found a few concrete avenues of advancement.
Well, that seems rather boot-strap-ish, since finding concrete avenues of advancement is exactly what the cognitive flaw is preventing me from doing.
Okay, I'm sorry none of my answers were helpful to you. I don't know what to suggest.
Alright, since no one seems to be understanding my question here, I'll try to reframe it.
(First, to be clear, I'm not having a problem with motivation. I'm not having a problem with indecision. I'm not having a problem with identifying my terminal goal(s).)
To use an analogy, imagine you're playing a video game, and at some point you come to a room where the door shuts behind you and there's no other way out. There's nothing in the room you can interact with, nothing in your inventory that does anything; you poor over every detail of the room, and find there is no way to progress further; the game has glitched, you are stuck. There is literally no way beyond that room and no way out of it except reseting to an earlier save point.
That is how my life feels from the inside: no available paths. (In the glitched video game, it is plausible that there really is no action that will lead to progression beyond the current situation. In real life, not so much.)
Given that it is highly unlikely that this is an accurate Map of the Territory that is the real world, clearly there is a flaw in how I generate my Map in regards to potential paths of advancement in the Territory. It is that cognitive flaw that I wish to correct.
I am asking only for a way to identify and correct that flaw.
I think I understand the feeling you're having now. Still, It seems highly unlikely to me that you can fix this "cognitive flaw" in isolation, before you've found a few concrete avenues of advancement...I find that my habits, including habits of thought, are trainable rather than fixable in the abstract.
Are you in school? If so, would you like to study something different? If not, is there something you do want to study? Are you working or is there somewhere you want to work? These are conventional paths to life-advancement.
'here's how you find out about things like meetup.com/okcupid/LW meetups/etc'
This is still one step ahead of the problem I'm actually trying to solve (Ie. it's on the level of answers to "What am I supposed to just go out and do?") but advice on that level could be somewhat useful. However, what I was actually asking about in my original post are cognitive tools that will help me get better at answering that question myself.
Yeah, the big thing with specific solutions is that while they may be helpful, they don't teach you a new way to think. (Also, what might be fun for one person could be boring or unpleasant for someone else. I don't know whether you enjoy debating, or sports, or watching plays, etc. But I'm assuming you know what would be fun for you.)
In terms of why no one is getting at the root of the problem... for me at least, I've never thought about it consciously. School happened to me, work happened to me, and the few times I decided to spontaneously start a new activity (i.e. taekwondo) I just googled "taekwondo in Ottawa", found a location, and showed up. If anything, my problem has always been noticing too many opportunities to do fun things and been upset that I couldn't do all of them. So there may well be something that you do differently than I do, but since 'noticing' fun things to do happens below the level of my conscious awareness, trying to figure out the cognitive strategies involved takes a lot of work.
If I'm understanding the original question properly, the issue is along the lines of the following situation: EphemeralNight finds emself sitting at home, thinking 'I wish there was something fun I could do tonight. But I don't know of anything. So how might I find something? I have no idea.' It's not that e's running into akrasia on the path to doing X, it's that e doesn't have an X in the first place and doesn't know how to find one.
Useful answers will probably be along the lines of either 'try meeetup.com/okcupid/your local LW meetup/etc', or 'here's how you find out about things like meetup.com/okcupid/LW meetups/etc'.
That's what I thought, too, but the comment seemed to be asking for a general rather than a specific solution.
You're still attempting to solve the wrong problem.
"Just go out an do it" doesn't even apply to the problem of finding the cognitive flaw in my ability to identify opportunities that is damaging my ability to figure out what I can "just go out and do". You're trying to solve a problem that is two whole steps ahead of the one my post was about. What was it about my original question that was unclear?
Maybe that it's so far removed from any state I've experienced that I'm not even sure what you mean. Hopefully there is someone else on this site who has been in a similar place before and can recognize it. But it does look to me like you're trying to solve a specific problem, not a general problem. I just interpreted the wrong specific problem when I read your comment.
Also, all the answers my brain produces when I ask it to imagine "cognitive biases that would result in not noticing opportunities" come out sounding judgmental, and as a general rule I don't write things down if they sound judgmental or negative.
I don't see how asking for rationalist techniques to make me better at noticing opportunities requries any context. Not that I'm unwilling to give context, I just think it would be irrelevant. I'm asking if there's anything I can to do get better at spotting opportunities. What was unclear about my question that prompted you to assume I was asking for specific opportunities to be identified for me?
I suggested a general technique that worked well for me in my first comment. I think it's the only technique that has ever worked well for me. When you said I'd misunderstood your problem, and I reread your comment and decided I still didn't understand, I realized that our life-situations were probably different enough that any technique I suggested based on personal experience would inevitably not work for you. This may be a flaw in my thinking, but I have trouble thinking of any "general" rationalist techniques that would work to optimize a particular person's life in a particular context. My brain is now trying to produce more solutions, but I'm not really expecting them to be helpful to you.
Yeah, that's not really what I was talking about. My problem is with being unable to see that there's anything I should just go out and do, not with actually going out and doing it. I don't have any trouble following a path to my goal once that path has been identified; it's identifying possible path(s) to my goal(s) in the first place that I seem to have a deficiency in. What was unclear about my question that prompted you to answer a different question than the one I asked?
You may have to explain some context here, because I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'not seeing anything that you should go out and do.' Do you find your lack of employment/social/romantic opportunities distressing? If not, then there isn't a problem unless you want there to be a problem. If you do want to change this situation, then I can't point out the opportunities you have because I know nothing about your day-to-day. However, you're right that unless your situation is very unusual, it's unlikely that there are really no opportunities.
How did you learn what you know, then? Is there anything that you could recommend reading?
What little I know about fashion, I've learned from magazines (women's fashion magazines in my case, but I'm pretty sure there are men's magazines too) and from helpful friends (which are probably easier to find if you are a girl.) I could learn a lot more from friends if I was willing to put in any effort or spend money on new clothes.
For the passed year or two I've felt like there are literally no avenues open to me towards social, romantic, or professional advancement, up from my current position of zero. On reflection, it seems highly unlikely that this is actually true, so it follows that I'm rather egregiously missing something. Are there any rationalist techniques designed to make one better at noticing opportunities (ones that come along and ones that have always been there) in general?
Probably. The technique I've had the most success with is "just go out and DO it!" Whether or not it's a job/friend group/ relationship that seems viable or desirable in the long term, you probably benefit more from trying it than not trying it.
I wouldn't take it. I desire to help others, and it gives me pleasure to do so, it makes me suffer to harm others, and I desire not to do so.
Being perpetually in a state of extreme pleasure would make this pleasure/suffering irrelevant, and might lead me to behave less in line with my desires.
So, being perpetually in a state of extreme pleasure seems like a bad idea to me.
I agree with you completely. I can understand why others might not agree with me, but for me, pleasure isn't so much a goal as a result of accomplishing my goals.
That guy needs to train his gut instincts more. Because I find mine damn useful and seldom 'dangerously wrong'.
In order to train gut instincts, wouldn't you already have to understand the thing that you were having gut instincts about, in order to know whether or not your instincts were telling you the right thing?
And for most university students, it probably takes willpower to go to bed early, since nearly everyone I know who is my age seems to be on a longer-than-24-hour natural sleep schedule.
It seems likely that this is a combination of youthful endurance plus a lack of night cues (computer screens make fake-sunlight at any time of the night), rather than young people actually having a circadian rhythm that's longer by hours.
I do remember reading in a variety of places that young people, especially teenagers, tend to have more trouble sticking to an earlier sleep schedule. But you're right that this isn't necessarily biological in origin. It could just be that young people have a) greater benefits to gain from staying up late, since that's when a lot of socializing takes place, and b) less practice using willpower to force themselves to go to bed, and maybe less incentive, since with their "youthful endurance" they can push through on 2-3 hour of sleep.
And being able to do this, or for example get really drunk and still make it to work early the next morning, is definitely a status thing that people are almost competitive about. Maybe some kind of signalling at work, too: "I'm so healthy and strong, I can afford to get really, really drunk and hardly get any sleep and still function...I must have awesome genes." That could explain how being a compete idiot and passing out on my friend's floor in front of my supervisor when I had an exam the next day somehow made me cooler to all the staff.
It's possible that some people with symptoms of depression are actually sleep deprived
I'm skeptical of this. Yes, five hours of sleep is bad for your mental health, but usually in a different direction. Did you have depressive symptoms that year? A key symptom of depression is lack of willpower - depressives don't normally have the willpower not to sleep. Quite the opposite, they sleep more the than normal. This would solve simple sleep deprivation. It's possible that they lack something more specific that normal people are able to get by sleeping, but even that does not sound terribly likely to me.
ETA: As various people comment, this is largely backwards. I particularly regret suggesting that people who spend a lot of time in bed get useful sleep. So maybe sleep deprivation contributes to some of the symptoms of depression. But there are other symptoms and I am skeptical that the two are confused.
Quite the opposite, they sleep more the than normal.
Actually, according to my nursing textbooks, depression can manifest either by sleeping more or less than usual. So five hours of sleep a night could, for some people, be a symptom of depression. And I do remember reading somewhere about first-year college or university students developing clinical depression after a few months of unaccustomed stress and lack of sleep. And for most university students, it probably takes willpower to go to bed early, since nearly everyone I know who is my age seems to be on a longer-than-24-hour natural sleep schedule. So lack of sleep could cause depression, although once you were depressed, you might find yourself wanting to sleep more (and having an even harder time keeping up with classes).
Personal anecdote: long periods of sleep deprivation can mess up your neurotransmitter levels enough to cause an episode of psychosis. This actually happened to one of my good friends. (When you're waking up at 4:30 am every day for swim practice, and staying up late for whatever reason including just wanting to have a life, sleep deprivation can very quickly get out of hand.) You probably have to be genetically predisposed, but still...it scares me.
I'd like to share one day's worth of experience with modafinil.
I noticed a huge difference in alertness. I was filled with an urge to be doing something every second. I don't believe I was more intelligent (some of the work I did that day turned out to be low quality) but I was much more productive. And happy. I felt like I was just "riding the day" -- that going through life, minute by minute, running errands, checking items off my to-do list, and seeing what happened next, was boundlessly fascinating.
I suspect that, at least for me, and maybe for others, most unhappiness is really fatigue, coupled with the guilt of not having accomplished much in a state of fatigue. Simply not being tired makes me deliriously happy. I am not surprised by the study that coffee reduces depression in women, though I know to be suspicious of medical study methodology. The symptoms of clinical depression look a lot like the symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation (fatigue, inability to concentrate, clumsiness, weight gain or weight loss, dramatic and irrational emotions). It's possible that some people with symptoms of depression are actually sleep deprived (or that a typical amount of sleep for a modern-day working or student life is too little for their biological needs.) I had a year when I thought I was losing my mind; in retrospect, it may have had something to do with getting no more than five hours of sleep a night.
I had a year when I thought I was losing my mind; in retrospect, it may have had something to do with getting no more than five hours of sleep a night.
Five hours of sleep a night for a whole year? I'm amazed you functioned! One five-hour night and I'm moderately functional, maybe a slightly shorter attention span and more mood swings than usual. Two nights in a row and I'm a zombie unless I drink a lot of coffee. Three nights and I'm a zombie anyway no matter how much coffee I drink. Unless I get 9+ hours of sleep every night, I will feel sleepy at various points during the day.
Something that seems to be getting ignored in the discussion of pain being good is the existence of pain asymbolia. People with pain asymbolia still get the signal of pain, so they know about damage and can mediate it, but it doesn't feel bad. If we accept that having the information content of pain without the negative affect would be preferable to having the information and the negative affect, then there's clearly something bad about pain.
I think there are two main bad things about pain.
1: Pain produces a strong negative affect, aka suffering, aka I just hate it.
2: Pain produces an aversion strong enough that people will do anything to stop or avoid enough of it. That makes pain something that can severely restrict people's freedom just by existing, more so than most other unpleasant things.
People with pain asymbolia still get the signal of pain, so they know about damage and can mediate it, but it doesn't feel bad.
One problem I can see with this: imagine that someone is in the middle of an activity that isn't life-or-death, but that they care about, i.e. running in a race that they really want to win. They step on something uneven and twist their knee or whatever. They get the signal of pain in their knee, but because it doesn't feel bad, they might just ignore it and try to win the race anyway, possibly causing a lot more damage in the process. The problem is that their temporary goal (i.e. increased social status after winning or whatever) conflicts with the long-term goal of having a functional body. Presumably humans or animals who were able to ignore pain in this way would have been more likely than average to injure themselves and exacerbate those injuries, and might not have survived to have as many children.
And the reasons those students don't take opportunities for help tend to be embarrassingly pathetic. Like, so embarrassing that they avoid even thinking about it, because if they made their real reason explicit, they would be pained at how dumb it is. (I've done this sot of thing myself, more times than I'm comfortable with.)
For example, I discovered that a significant fraction of the students in a certain class were afraid to ask questions of the professor because they found him scary. Now, I know the professor in question, and he's a friendly person who wishes that his students would talk to him more -- but he has an abrupt, somewhat awkward way of speaking, and an eastern European accent. Such superficial details are apparently what leaves the biggest impression on most people.
Or there are the guys who get depressed and stop coming to class for a week or two, and then keep on not coming to class because they haven't been to class for a while, and it would be hard trying to get back up to speed. I really sympathize with these guys, but that doesn't make their reasoning any saner. (A fair number of them come in at the end of a semester to flunk their final exams. Damn it all, this is painful to watch.)
Or there are the people who won't read textbooks, or Wikipedia, or whatever, because they feel like everything ought to be covered in class well enough that they can just show up every day and get a good grade. I can not think of any good pedagogical reason why this should be so, and indeed, it usually isn't.
I could go on. There are plenty more examples. But instead I think I'll just paraphrase the not-actually-evil professor from eastern Europe. "These kids," he said. "They aren't resourceful because they have never had to be resourceful. They need more adversity in life. When I was their age, I had to bribe a local official just to get a dorm room."
Or there are the people who won't read textbooks, or Wikipedia, or whatever, because they feel like everything ought to be covered in class well enough that they can just show up every day and get a good grade. I can not think of any good pedagogical reason why this should be so, and indeed, it usually isn't.
I've often found that this is so. I do try to read my textbooks, at least the assigned readings, because...well, because you're supposed to, I guess. But for most of my first year classes (three anatomy courses, psych 101, microbiology) just going to class was enough. (I did of course take detailed notes, with colourful diagrams, and then study from my notes afterwards. I have now bequeathed my anatomy notes to a friend a couple of grades younger.) One possible reason why this is true for me is that I like biology-related subjects, and I've always read anything I could get my hands on, and so I arrived in university to find that I already knew at least 50% of the material.
Areas where this isn't true: English classes, history classes, etc, where there are a lot of required readings that cover material not covered in class, and where there are essays or papers to be written on material that isn't covered in class. And of course there's no rule that you can get good grades without reading textbooks. It just happens to be true sometimes, for some people.
People are different, I guess. "Deciding" to do something on Friday night has little correlation with whether I will actually do it on Friday night, or at all. It mainly just makes me feel bad when I haven't written the essay as of Saturday morning.
See, there's a part of me that really doesn't like writing essays-- actually, not writing essays in particular, as I've mostly fixed that problem, but just being productive, doing effortful things. If I try to power through it, that part of me complains so loud that I'm very motivated to rationalize doing whatever it is later. Giving it advance warning just makes it complain louder, if anything. But it's easily distracted.
I can't identify with what you say about resenting being "tricked". I actually feel pretty good when I successfully circumvent the part of me that doesn't care what happens tomorrow. Now, ideally, I'd like to train the complaining part of me to just shut up when I do productive things, but that's not easy, and I suspect I'll need to experience many successes first so that I can associate trying with good things.
That's a very interesting difference. I find that being psychologically prepared to do something productive makes it way easier. If I trick myself into going for a swim by telling the lazy part of myself that I'll just go for 20 minutes, you can bet that if 20 minutes is up and I try to motivate myself to keep going, there will be several sub-components of my mind screaming 'but you promised!' This is even more true for things that aren't habits for me. (Exercise is something I do pretty easily by pure habit.)
deny that there even are true bisexual men.
I, meanwhile, am not entirely sure that there are straight women.
(Every woman I have met has fallen into one of the following categories: 1) She would not know if she were non-straight, due to inadequate self-examination or understanding of the concept of orientation. 2) I would not know if she were not straight, due to not having a close enough relationship with her or due to social constraints on her end preventing her from being out or due to the topic never having come up. 3) I know her to be bisexual, gay, asexual, or some other non-straight sexuality.)
Counterexamples are welcome to present themselves, of course.
Reminds me of a study I read about. They basically showed men and women different types of porn and measured genital arousal. The results were straightforward for men: if they identified as straight, girl-on-girl porn caused the greatest arousal, girl-on-guy was ok, and guy-on-guy caused almost no arousal. For gay men, the results were reversed. For girls, there were no simple categories, and their identification as straight or gay didn't predict which images would be the biggest turn-on.
Sometimes you distract or fool yourself into starting, and then it's not so bad after that. Like, you don't want to write a paper, so you start a video on youtube, and while you're distracted with that, tell yourself you're just going to open MS Word, and then maybe write something or maybe not; then you tell yourself you're just going to write 100 words, and so on. Do it a few times in a row, and the process becomes habit, and then you might not even have to lie to yourself about why you're opening MS Word, because it's not a conscious decision anymore.
You don't have to be unhappier not doing the thing than you are doing it, necessarily. You just have to be unhappy enough not doing the thing to keep trying to try.
That works for you? For me, the best way is to plan, preferably a day in advance, that 'I will write my essay on Friday night' or something. There is definitely a part of myself that resents having another part of myself 'trick' it into anything, productive or not.
Greetings, LessWrong!
I'm Saro, currently 19, female and a mathematics undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. I discovered LW by the usual HP:MoR route, though oddly I discovered MoR via reading EY's website, which I found in a Google search about Bayes' once. I'm feeling rather fanatical about MoR at the moment, and am not-so-patiently awaiting chapter 78.
Generally though, I've found myself stuck here a lot because I enjoy arguing, and I like convincing other people to be less wrong. Specifically, before coming across this site, I spent a lot of time reading about ways of making people aware of their own biases when interpreting data, and effective ways of communicating statistics to people in a non-misleading way (I'm a big fan of the work being done by David Spiegelhalter). I'm also quite fond of listening to economics and politics arguments and trying to tear them down, though through this, I've lost any faith in politics as something that has any sensible solutions.
I suspect that I'm pretty bad at overcoming my own biases a lot of the time. In particular, I have a very strong tendency to believe what I'm told (including what I'm being told by this site), I'm particularly easily inspired by pretty slogans and inspirational tones (like those this site), and I have, and have always had, one of those Escher-painting brains, to the extent that I was raised very atheist but am now not so sure. (At some level, I have the thought that our form of logic should only apply to our plane of existence, whatever that means.) But hey, figuring all that out is what this site's about, right?
Welcome! Sweet, another girl my age!
though oddly I discovered MoR via reading EY's website, which I found in a Google search about Bayes' once.
Kind of similar to how I discovered it. I think I googled EY and found his website after seeing his name in the sl4 mailing list.
Have you tried snacking on almonds and such all day and never being hungry?
When I'm at home all day, I will snack instead of eating meals. I tend to snack on pretty healthy foods, because they're there and I never get to the desperate-hunger stage of craving a particular junk food. I have a much lower frequency of stomachaches and cramps/diarrhea. But I don't know if I eat less overall. I probably eat more.
Fat is pretty much necessary if you're restricting carbs (which you are, in practice, if you cut out gluten.) It sounds like you're trying to eat too little, and then eating "bad" foods when you inevitably get hungry. Fat is calorie dense and makes you feel fuller. You can pack cheese. 1500 calories worth of cheese is two bricks, and will definitely fit in your pack. I used to prefer sugar to fat, but eventually my preferences switched over, because I really liked the full feeling.
Moderately lactose intolerant. I can handle yogurt (usually) but cheese, especially large blocks of it, is bound to have some cramping/diarrhea effect. I do eat eggs. Hard-boiled take 10 minutes to prepare and I can take them from anywhere, doesn't matter whose house I'm sleeping at.
Are you restricting fats?
I never eat a lot of fat. It's not something I get cravings for. I'm not per se restricting it, but I can't think of anything I've eaten today that would have a lot of fat in it.
ebooks are usually much cheaper than physical books
Rarely true for secondhand older books, usually true for newer books or relatively rare older works (which unfortunately includes many academic books). I can often pick up secondhand books for literally pennies; I'm a newcomer to e-reading but not convinced yet that it's going to bring savings overall.
ETA: in case that's not clear, I think this post is missing a huge tip for efficient acquisition of words: secondhand physical books. It's worth saying because some people - I used to be in that number - have a hangup about buying used books. I've totally changed my mind on that, largely thanks to Amazon Marketplace. Riffling through stacks in a used book store holds no appeal for me, but looking up some title that looks interesting and seeing a copy on Marketplace for a euro or less, and buying it without even a second thought? Pure bliss.
I have to say, my automatic thought when I read your comment was "riffling through stacks in a used book store? Bo-ring! And time consuming!" Then I saw the addition about online shopping. I have bought a few physics books second-hand online before, although if I'm not mistaken it still cost $50 for a first year textbook, not something I'm willing to pay unless I'm very interested in the subject.
I'll just mention that if anyone needs a paper for LW related reasons, I (and others probably) will get it for you.
Likewise, if I can find it on the university-supported databases.
Very good post. I have the benefit currently of being a university student and having access to an enormous library, plus a password that allows me to access free PDFs of articles from a dozen different databases. Once that's no longer true, I'll keep your suggestions in mind.
I use caloriecount and a kitchen scale (it sounds like a pain to weigh ingredients, but it's usually easier than using measuring cups, and after a while you get pretty good at estimating). Caloriecount.com is a bit messy, but becomes pretty easy to use if you tag all the foods you eat regularly. You can enter and analyze recipes and save them for later, too.
Maybe you should overshoot with more things that won't perish for lack of refrigeration - bring apples and bananas and oranges and avocados, bring rice bread or some other gluten-free baked goods, bring popcorn and chips and jerky, etc. Also bring your mom's cooking to eat earlier in the day, but pack it with one of those freezeable cold things (they won't last 16 hours, but they might last half that) - or freeze the servings of food themselves, and they may well take many hours to thaw depending on the weather, especially if there are several of them together in the bag. Bring sealed bottles of juice and tea. If you don't consume these things, put the half-defrosted food in the fridge (refreezing is unwise, but you can let it thaw and someone can eat it at home) and leave the nonperishables in your bag for the next day.
Thanks! That sounds like a good suggestion. Fruit is my go-to now, but compared to wheat products it isn't as calorie-dense, so to get the same amount of food value takes up a lot of space. In the past I've brought almonds and homemade gluten-free granola bars. I do bring a thermos of tea almost every day, but in general 1 thermos = 1 three-hour class. If I have 3 classes in a day, I will drink all of my tea during the first one. (Temporary solutions: many of the cafeteria ladies will let me use hot water for free if I bring my own teabag from home. I probably can't sustain this if I never actually buy anything at the cafeteria, but if I restrain my purchases to gluten-free things like coffee or soup, I can stay on my diet and have unlimited hot water.)
The trick comes when you have a metabolism that means the benefits of having food now are very, very high - I've met a number of people who deal with all sorts of dizziness, clouded thinking, migraines, etc. if they lose weight more than very, very slowly. For most of them, there are dietary adjustments that can be made to lose weight faster, without suffering through that - thus far it's generally been allergies or low blood sugar levels causing issues. (In the latter case, eating small meals regularly tends to help a lot; a lot of people diet by eating less frequently instead of smaller portions)
(In the latter case, eating small meals regularly tends to help a lot; a lot of people diet by eating less frequently instead of smaller portions).
I'm supposed to do this anyway: it helps with irritable bowel syndrome, which is supposedly what I have since I don't have celiac apparently. If I go for more than 3-4 hours without eating (unless I just had a massive meal, in which case it takes that long to digest), then I get crabby, I get stomachaches, and eventually I'll start getting dizzy and weak. I had a 5-hour straight shift of teaching lessons at the pool one semester and it was a nightmare...by the end I would be ready to pass out climbing out of the pool.
How does your boyfriend eat? I find that my diet is highly dependent on the diets of those I spend time with. Wheat aside, are you eating sugary food?
In general, we eat very healthy: lots of home-cooked, vegetable-and-rice meals, and very little eating out or fast food. That being said, he has a typical guy metabolism and can eat like a pig, and he buys 'fat food' like ice cream and chips to reward himself for staying up studying and stuff. For several years when I was living alone, I just didn't buy that stuff, or anything with wheat for that matter. I would occasionally slip up and go buy a bit of candy (sugar is my comfort food a lot more than fatty foods) but I would have to make a conscious effort to go buy it. It wasn't freely available. My boyfriend is not going to gain weight from eating junk food, so persuading him not to have it in the house at all could be tricky.
In terms of sugary food, I mainly eat cookie dough when I'm baking cookies, and then sometimes the cookies themselves if I don't give them away. Or candy, when I cave into a craving. My main 'junk food' of the summer was whole wheat bagels with peanut butter, which I suppose aren't unhealthy, but which I find it way too tempting to eat a lot of.
I do not believe that you identified your problem correctly.
Hunger has more endurance than most people's willpower, so the trick is not to make it into a contest. That's why lifestyle change is one of the standard recommendations of slimming down in a healthy way.
So, I would re-frame your question as "How do I change my lifestyle to get more sleep and less stress?"
"Work less" maybe. But I'm still at a phase of my life where I have limited earning power and a lot of unavoidable expenses, so I prefer to squeeze work in while I can. And shift work as a nurse later on isn't likely to be any less stressful.
I don't diet, in the sense of setting out a program of food restrictions that I have to stick to. I just count all my calories. I lose more weight that way.
I started doing it when I realized that my finances work because I track my expenses, even though I have little success sticking to a budget.
Maybe a food journal would help? Or do you already do that?
I lost some weight when I was doing the metabolism study, without really trying to be on a diet. I think a lot of it came from a) knowing that at the end of the month I would go to the lab and have my body fat scanned, and b) keeping a food diary that I knew someone was going to analyze and count calories for.
Out of curiosity, how do you manage to count up all the calories for your food diary? 95% of what I eat is home cooked and doesn't have convenient labels on the side. Are their websites that list the amount of calories in, for example, various types of vegetables per weight? Would this likely be a time consuming process?
Why is it inevitable that you cannot pack enough food for 16 hours? Do you not have a bag of adequate size? Are you not calibrating effectively or willing to overshoot?
Partly. I could get around it more if I packed 2 or 3 servings of the same dish, since there are usually only 2 or 3 containers of gluten-free food in my parents' fridge. (I could get around this by cooking more, which is another willpower-intensive activity.) I do overshoot sometimes and it pisses my mom off, especially if I end up having to throw food out because it had meat in it and I was in class all day and didn't have access to a fridge. And for some reason, my actual food intake within those 16 hours varies from day to day. Some days I won't be especially hungry until I get home at the end of the day, but some days I will sit in class absolutely starving, having eaten all my food within the morning.
Unfortunately "quit nursing school" is probably the only good answer to that question.
You guys: nursing school suuuuucks.
Willpower and diet: advice?
Since the beginning of September, I have been attempting a gluten-free diet. (I was tested and I'm not celiac, but eating wheat, and especially highly refined-flour foods like cookies, tends to make me bloated and give me diarrhea.) I also wanted to lose 5 to 10 pounds. I'm not overweight per se, but I possess a roll of belly fat that I (and my boyfriend!) would prefer to say goodbye too.
The first little while went well, and almost effortlessly. I was at the cottage with my family, exercising moderately (about 2 kilometers of swimming daily) and eating my mom's excellent-tasting cooking. After about one and a half weeks, I had lost 5 pounds, although I suspect a lot of it was water retention/bloating, since I had been eating wheat and various junk foods all summer.
Then school started, and with it my 16-hour days away from home, including one marathon session where I leave my parents' house at 5:00 am on Monday morning, sleep at a friend's house, and don't come back again until 11 pm on Tuesday, only to work 5:30 am to 4 pm at the pool the next day.
In short: my diet is quickly deteriorating and I have regained those 5 pounds. I find it next to impossible to stay gluten-free, since I have to be incredibly organized and pack everything from home, and inevitably it isn't quite enough for 16 hours. (I eat 3000 calories a day or more when not dieting. According to a metabolism study I participated in last year, this is actually how much I burn per day with the amount of exercise I get. If I eat much less, say less than 2000 for one day or less than 2,500 for several consecutive days, I get dizzy and weak when I exercise, which is really irritating.) I would probably be able to lose weight more easily if I exercised LESS, but this would a) kind of defeat the point, and b) be difficult because exercise is my main stress control method.
Willpower is a big issue, which is weird and annoying because usually it's not a big issue for me. Especially when I'm sleep deprived (nearly all the time), stressed, or bored to tears in my classes, I tend to comfort or reward myself with food, and nearly all my 'comfort foods' have wheat in them. I can resist to a degree if I have access to other reward/comforts, like sleep, or lots and lots of tea.
I've never really had to learn any willpower tricks for dieting, since I usually let my weight sit at its natural set-point. Does anyone have suggestions?
To me, that reads as a more complicated form of "feeling like it"...
To me, simplifying it down to 'feeling like it' collapses the difference between someone who consistently will choose to swim in the aforementioned example, and someone who consistently won't. You could call the difference 'being better at delayed gratification' but I think the usual definition of willpower covers it quite well.
If I've read this correctly, you're saying you were 19 when this happened? That seems too young to be under such tremendous pressure to be in a relationship or to extrapolate anything meaningful from the success or failure of prior relationships.
Possibly. But I was worried by the fact that it seemed awfully tempting not to do relationships at all and just to declare myself off limits at the start. I didn't want to do that without definitive evidence. And I had been watching a lot of my close friends engage in casual or serious relationships for years. 19 is not that young.
I don't understand how is it even possible to do something without feeling like doing it.
Oh, for sure! "It's -20º C outside and I've been out of the house for 16 hours and I really don't want to go jump into a cold pool and swim laps for an hour, and I'll be exhausted after, but I haven't exercised in 2 days and I really should." This is kind of a worst-case scenario. Most of the time, for me anyway, the parts of me that do want to do something and the parts that don't are equally lined up. (For example: I don't want to swim because I could go home and play on the computer and go to bed early instead, but I do want to swim because I'll get crabby if I don't and I'll feel better afterwards if I do.)
I can understand why you feel that way.
Several LWers have spent quite some time finding and investigating the returns of several ways to boost willpower in order to complete tasks(doing more with less, building up willpower in the long term, short term willpower spkies like consuming sugar) and even IQ (nbacking, nootropics). So there are a few things you can do for your friends.
But what your are concerned about dosen't really seem to be fairness, at least not fairness in the usual sense of the word (note: I am not saying this in a disapproving tone!), but I'm not quite sure where you fit. Could you help me out? If so please read on.
In another comment you noted that trainable skills are an important category for you. Even in a system where everyone had the same starting conditions and same ability to self-modify for more willpower and higher IQs, differences would arise over time. Before answering if you would consider such differences fair, please consider the following.
People have different values, some values are rewarded by our universe more than others. The more generous reward can obviously be used to invest more than others do into enhancement. Would this bother you?
Now lets assume all values are locked in and are thoroughly homogeneous. Differences will still arise. Unavoidably so. Can you guess why this is so? Are you ok with that?
To answer the other half of your question:
Even in a system where everyone had the same starting conditions and same ability to self-modify for more willpower and higher IQs, differences would arise over time. Before answering if you would consider such differences fair, please consider the following.
Yes. I would consider it fair. Because if I lived in that world, and there was something I wanted to succeed, I would never be in a position where someone else could succeed at it easily while I struggled with transcendent efforts and might ultimately fail anyway. I might live in that world and not choose to self-modify for higher IQ, for example if I preferred to expend my self-modification energy on being more generous or more fun to party with, and I might end up with less money or fame or books published than someone else who chose intelligence, but I could have chosen differently if I'd wanted to.
I can understand why you feel that way.
Several LWers have spent quite some time finding and investigating the returns of several ways to boost willpower in order to complete tasks(doing more with less, building up willpower in the long term, short term willpower spkies like consuming sugar) and even IQ (nbacking, nootropics). So there are a few things you can do for your friends.
But what your are concerned about dosen't really seem to be fairness, at least not fairness in the usual sense of the word (note: I am not saying this in a disapproving tone!), but I'm not quite sure where you fit. Could you help me out? If so please read on.
In another comment you noted that trainable skills are an important category for you. Even in a system where everyone had the same starting conditions and same ability to self-modify for more willpower and higher IQs, differences would arise over time. Before answering if you would consider such differences fair, please consider the following.
People have different values, some values are rewarded by our universe more than others. The more generous reward can obviously be used to invest more than others do into enhancement. Would this bother you?
Now lets assume all values are locked in and are thoroughly homogeneous. Differences will still arise. Unavoidably so. Can you guess why this is so? Are you ok with that?
But what your are concerned about dosen't really seem to be fairness, at least not fairness in the usual sense of the word (note: I am not saying this in a disapproving tone!), but I'm not quite sure where you fit. Could you help me out? If so please read on.
The 'unfair' part comes in when someone wants to be different, and I can't help them change even though I've already achieved what they want, seemingly without a lot of effort. For example, a friend of mine knows that she has poor willpower and self-control, and she commits to do things which are a good idea and will help her in the long run, but she finds the short-term pain overwhelming...and she has told me repeatedly that she wishes she could be more like me and be able to stick to precommitments. I would have an easier time with this if it was hard for me to make plans and follow them, because then at least I could detail the steps I followed, and if she failed to follow the same steps, it would be a matter of her not having tried as hard. But tasks involving willpower have always been easy for me, and I can't describe any steps I follow aside from "making a plan to do something productive, and then doing it even if I'm tempted to do other unproductive-but-fun things later."
[Attempting to analyze this thought pattern...] I think a lot of this comes from the fear that someday I'll encounter some task that I'll desperately want to accomplish, and no matter how hard I try I won't be able to keep up with someone who is talented in a particular area and does it without trying. I haven't encountered this before, because ultimately I am very stubborn and there's nothing I've really failed at. But watching my friend reminds me that "but for the grace of God, there go I."
with a little willpower
How much willpower you have is also very likley affected quite heavily by your genetic heritage.
Which also seems unfair to me sometimes. I'm quite well endowed in the willpower department, but I watch friends my age struggle with things that seem so freaking simple, like going back to graduate high school, and eventually I realize it's not because they're not trying but because they struggle to keep up the willpower to make a continuous effort without immediate returns, and it depresses me. And there's nothing I can do about it.
I think you can dissolve the argument by substituting "under individual's control" with "trainable".
Well, even by this definition success will always be based on things beyond an individual's control. I'm assuming you mean success at something zero-sum like status. After all, since people will try their hardest to succeed (to their innate limits of willpower and drive), the factor distinguishing success form failure cannot be under their control.
Maybe dividing things into a continuum of 'under the individual's control' to 'beyond the individual's control' doesn't make sense. It's still something my brain tries to do, and it still feels unfair that intelligence would so strongly determine outcomes.
(I hate the idea of intelligence, something not under the individual’s control and thus unfair-seeming, being that important to success, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.)
Unless you believe in libertarian free will, "being under the individual’s control" in the sense you mean is not a meaningful concept.
"being under the individual’s control" in the sense you mean is not a meaningful concept.
It feels like a meaningful concept. For example, if I want to learn how to draw, or run a marathon, these are skills that most people can learn through approximately the same process, with a little willpower. Some people find it easier than others, but barring physical disability, almost anyone can train to run that marathon. If I decide I want to be more intelligent (rather than knowledgeable), there doesn't seem to be any way to increase this through practice and willpower, and not just anyone can train enough to, say, complete a degree in math.
I think it took the human race much longer to develop speech than basic counting and drawing which even less evolved animals have been known to utilize.
I know that chimpanzees will draw or paint if given materials, but is there any sense in which a chimpanzee's drawings contain information about the way it understands the world?
That's a beautiful story. I want to comment on it in the third person, since I don't know you well enough to respond to you personally.
This is what storytelling without the illusion of a unitary self looks like. It starts with a conscious decision — an experiment in romance — that quickly spirals out of control. Several desires come into conflict, and the consensus on running an "experiment" no longer exists. Some of the desires are labelled "irrational", but they manage to make themselves heard anyway. At a critical juncture it is the desire not to hurt the boy, and the fear of not living up to expectations, and no doubt some other things besides, that cause the relationship to proceed.
Eventually, the mind notes that personal growth has happened. There is more emotional self-awareness now, and there are skills pertaining to romantic relationships that weren't there before. The conscious mind, in its role as PR office, declares the experiment a success. The success was due more to a fortuitous confluence of different desires than to a unitary desire to be stronger. But that is true of everyone's accomplishments. In this case, the conscious mind has decided to appropriate the outcome of the relationship as an achievement, and in doing so reclaims its locus of control.
Several desires come into conflict, and the consensus on running an "experiment" no longer exists. Some of the desires are labelled "irrational", but they manage to make themselves heard anyway.
That's exactly what it felt like, too.
Writing was the next step. For the first time, a significant amount of knowledge could be stored outside of anyone’s brain.
Nitpick - you can externalize a lot of information in the form of drawings, which predate writing by about 30K years. Counting and tallying are about that ancient - and numbers are an important form of knowledge.
Interesting... I didn't realize that writing numbers down predated writing words down.
Complexity: inherent, created, and hidden
Related to: inferential distance, fun theory sequence.
“The arrow of human history…points towards larger quantities of non-zero-sumness. As history progresses, human beings find themselves playing non-zero-sum games with more and more other human beings. Interdependence expands, and social complexity grows in scope and depth.” (Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.)
What does it mean for a human society to be more complex? Where does new information come from, and where in the system is it stored? What does it mean for everyday people to live in a simple versus a complex society?
There are certain kinds of complexity that are inherent in the environment: that existed before there were human societies at all, and would go on existing without those societies. Even the simplest human society needs to be able to adapt to these factors in order to survive. For example: climate and weather are necessary features of the planet, and humans still spend huge amounts of resources dealing with changing seasons, droughts, and the extremes of heat and cold. Certain plants grow in certain types of soil, and different animals have different migratory patterns. Even the most basic hunter-gatherer groups needed to store and pass on knowledge of these patterns.
But even early human societies had a lot more than the minimum amount of knowledge required to live in a particular environment. Cultural complexity, in the form of traditions, conventions, rituals, and social roles, added to technological complexity, in the form of tools designed for particular purposes. Living in an agricultural society with division of labour and various different social roles required children to learn more than if they had been born to a small hunter-gatherer band. And although everyone in a village might have the same knowledge about the world, it was (probably) no longer possible for all the procedural skills taught and passed on in a given group to be mastered by a single person. (Imagine learning all the skills to be a farmer, carpenter, metalworker, weaver, baker, potter, and probably a half-dozen other things.)
This would have been the real beginning of Robert Wright’s interdependence and non-zero-sum interactions. No individual could possess all of the knowledge/complexity of their society, but every individual would benefit from its existence, at the price of a slightly longer education or apprenticeship than their counterparts in hunter-gather groups. The complexity was hidden; a person could wear a robe without knowing how to weave it, and a clay bowl without knowing how to shape it or bake it in a kiln. There was room for that knowledge in other people’s brains. The only downside, other than slightly longer investments in education, was a small increase in inferential distance between individuals.
Writing was the next step. For the first time, a significant amount of knowledge could be stored outside of anyone’s brain. Information could be passed on from one individual, the writer, to a nearly unbounded number of others, the readers. Considering the limits of human working memory, significant mathematical discoveries would have been impossible before there was a form of notation. (Imagine solving polynomial equations without pencil and paper.) And for the first time, knowledge was cumulative. An individual no longer had to spend a number of years mastering a particular, specific skill in an apprenticeship, having to laboriously pass on any new discoveries one at a time to their own apprentices. The new generation could start where the previous generation had left off. Knowledge could stay alive indefinitely, almost, in writing, without having to pass through a continuous line of minds. (Without writing, even if the ancient Greek society had possessed equivalent scientific and mathematical knowledge, it could not have later been rediscovered by any other society.) Conditions were ripe for the total sum of human knowledge to explode, and for complexity to increase rapidly.
The downside was a huge increase in inferential distance. For the first time, not only could individuals lack a particular procedural skill, they might not even know that the skill existed. They might not even benefit from the fact of its existence. The stock market contains a huge amount of knowledge and complexity, and provides non-zero-sum gains to many individuals (as well as zero-sum gains to some individuals). But to understand it requires enough education and training that most individuals can’t participate. The difference between the medical knowledge of professionals versus uneducated individuals is huge, and I expect that many people suffer because, although someone knows how they could avoid or solve their medical problems, they don’t. Computers, aside from being really nifty, are also incredibly useful, but learning to use them well is challenging enough that a lot of people, especially older people, don’t or can’t.
(That being said, nearly everyone in Western nations benefits from living here and now, instead of in an agricultural village 4000 years ago. Think of the complexity embodied in the justice system and the health care system, both of which make life easier and safer for nearly everyone regardless of whether they actually train as professionals in those domains. But people don’t benefit as much as they could.)
Is there any way to avoid this? It’s probably impossible for an individual to have even superficial understanding in every domain of knowledge, much less the level of understanding required to benefit from that knowledge. Just keeping up with day-to-day life (managing finances, holding a job, and trying to socialize in an environment vastly different from the ancestral one) can be trying, especially for individuals on the lower end of the IQ bell curve. (I hate the idea of intelligence, something not under the individual’s control and thus unfair-seeming, being that important to success, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.) This might be why so many people are unhappy. Without regressing to a less complex kind of society, is there anything we can do?
I think the answer is quite clear, because even as societies become more complex, the arrow of daily-life-difficulty-level doesn’t always go in the same direction. There are various examples of this; computers becoming more user-friendly with time, for example. But I’ll use an example that comes readily to mind for me: automated external defibrillators, or AEDs.
A defibrillator uses electricity to interrupt an abnormal heart rhythm (ventricular fibrillation is the typical example, thus de-fibrillation). External means that the device acts from outside the patient’s body (pads with electrodes on the skin) rather than being implanted. Most defibrillators require training to use and can cause a lot of harm if they’re used wrong. The automated part is what changes this. AEDs will analyze a patient’s heart rhythm, and they will only shock if it is necessary. They have colorful diagrams and recorded verbal instructions. There’s probably a way to use an AED wrong, but you would have to be very creative to find it. Needless to say, the technology involved is ridiculously complex and took years to develop, but you don’t need to understand the science involved in order to use an AED. You probably don’t even need to read. The complexity is neatly hidden away; all that matters is that someone knows it. There weren't necessarily any ground-breaking innovations involved, just the knowledge of old inventions in a user-friendly format.
The difference is intelligence. An AED has some limited artificial intelligence in it, programmed in by people who knew what they were talking about, which is why it can replace the decision process that would otherwise be made by medical professionals. A book contains knowledge, but has to be read and interpreted in its entirety by a human brain. A device that has its own small brain doesn’t. This is probably the route where our society is headed if the arrow of (technological) complexity keeps going up. Societies need to be livable for human beings.
That being said, there is probably such thing as too much hidden complexity. If most of the information in a given society is hidden, embodied by non-human intelligences, then life as a garden-variety human would be awfully boring. Which could be the main reason for exploring human cognitive enhancement, but that’s a whole different story.
"The original plot for the Matrix called for the humans' brains to be used as powerful computers to run all the software - that was why anyone plugged in could become an Agent - but someone at Warner Bros decided people weren't that clever. Besides, our body heat is nowhere near as efficient as nuclear power. Anyway! The Matrix ...."
This is how I start simulation arguments off on a good footing. Peoples' minds are a little blown by such a sensible version of the Matrix, so they're more accepting...
The original plot for the Matrix called for the humans' brains to be used as powerful computers to run all the software - that was why anyone plugged in could become an Agent - but someone at Warner Bros decided people weren't that clever. Besides, our body heat is nowhere near as efficient as nuclear power. Anyway! The Matrix ....
Are you serious? Why did they change it? That version would have been sooo much more awesome. (Cries.)
Congratulations. I'm sorry what's so easy for many people (sex, I mean - everything else is hard) used to be so difficult for you.
Would you have described things differently midway through (or, did you, when confiding in real time)?
What seemed like tension between what you wanted and what your partner wanted would have concerned most of us, were we not hearing the fait accompli "contended ending" version. It seems like this tension existed between parts of you, and that your conscious decision was to override those parts and allow yourself to be pulled by your attachment to your partner (from the very beginning, you planned to do so with someone).
You must have learned how to communicate about difficult things, openly. It must have been quite hard for both of you, but along the way, a reservoir of investment, affection, trust, love, fear-of-loss, whatever, must have filled. I think sometimes giving up on "us" is absolutely the wisest decision (there will always be others!) but in hindsight you don't want such advice. I think the idea that you had to make it work with someone first (even as that chosen person becomes specifically significant) was a good guess.
I'd like to think that you could have developed deep non-family relationships even if you weren't able to be "normal", but of course it's good that you were able to become more typical in a way that you enjoy - it means more opportunity in general and a more compatible relationship with your current partner.
I think sometimes giving up on "us" is absolutely the wisest decision (there will always be others!) but in hindsight you don't want such advice.
Absolutely. But there were a couple of reasons (which I reluctantly repeated to myself at the time, when I really wanted to give up. (One) If I gave up this time, there probably wouldn't be another time. The initial stages (i.e. first 5 months) of the relationship were disruptive enough to my routines that I found it exhausting. I wasn't emotionally bothered by the thought of being the 40-year-old virgin, but I also didn't want that to become the outcome by default. I think my thought was "if I can make it work once, I'll have the confidence to make it happen again if I have to." (Two) Various people told me, and I had to admit, that Billy was approximately the best guy I would find for this, in terms of agreeing with lots of my values (thriftiness, physical fitness, etc) so that there was less to fight about, and also in terms of sheer patience and willingness to talk about and work on my problems. I think a lot of guys have been socialized NOT to talk about these things openly, which would have made it nearly impossible to solve the problems that we did.
What has this to do with rationality?
A lot to do with luminosity and tsuyoku naritai. Kind of inspired by Alicorn's post on polyhacking, since I think a similar level of self-modification was involved.
Upvoted for not conditioning your behavior on romantic love!
I feel a strong urge to give some advice that may or may not be applicable, so feel free to disregard: a significant percentage of relationships like yours eventually end because the boy grows too emotionally dependent, which makes the girl lose attraction. So try to take choices that make your boyfriend a stronger person.
Thanks for the advice. I don't know whether it will be applicable; I've already spent the last 8 months trying to REDUCE his emotional dependency from "has a bad day if he doesn't see me" (I don't know, but I think it'd be pretty depressing to live like that) to "can go a couple of days without absolutely needing to see or talk to me." If it starts to rise again, though, yeah that'd be pretty annoying.
(I don’t know exactly when I started commenting, but I don’t feel like clicking through dozens of pages of old comments to find out.)
Your first comment was made 9 Feb 2011.
Is there a fast way of looking that up which I didn't know about? Or did you actually scroll through pages and pages?
My Greatest Achievement
[warning: this is another gooey self-disclosure in the spirit of Alicorn and lukeprog’s recent posts, except more so.]
According to my submissions summary, my first top-level post dates back to February 18th, 2011. (I don’t know exactly when I started commenting, but I don’t feel like clicking through dozens of pages of old comments to find out.) By then, it had already been a month since I embarked on the most deliberate and probably the most difficult act of self-modification that I’ve ever attempted, and definitely the one I’m proudest of. At this point, I think I can say confidently that I’ve fixed one of the most irrational facets of my behaviour. A few people here know quite a bit about this, namely molybdenumblue.
[Aside: some people might find this article very personal. I’ve never had a strong privacy instinct, and since in this case it’s all my personal information*, and I talk openly about most of it with my friends and family, I have no qualms about publishing it. If it makes you uncomfortable, please feel free to stop reading.]
My New Year’s resolution for 2011, which I clearly remember making in my parents’ kitchen, was to experiment more with relationships. I had been in 2 relationships by my 19th birthday: one at age 14 with a much older recent immigrant to Canada who went to my high school, and one at age 17 with a boy who I worshipped when I was 12. Neither of them led anywhere interesting, in either an emotional or a physical sense. After breaking up with my second boyfriend, I was about ready to give up and start calling myself asexual. But since I had very little data to go on, an experiment seemed like a good idea.
I chose my experimental subject carefully: Billy, a boy I met through competitive lifeguarding, who was my age and seemed to share some of my values; he was in good shape, anyway; and whom I found moderately attractive. (I’ve been attracted to girls in the past, but that seemed like a more complicated experiment to set up.) I found him interesting without being too intimidating.
I had had some success in the past with getting boys’ initial attention, and I felt like I knew what I was doing. I started a conversation one evening when I came to swim at the campus pool and he was the lifeguard on duty, and I made an effort to be my friendliest and chattiest self. The next day I added him on Facebook, and suggested via the chat function that maybe we could hang out after guard team practice…The message must have gone though, because less than a week later, after he made me dinner at his apartment, he walked me home and kissed me outside the shared house where I was living. I went inside, shaking all over and not really sure whether I’d enjoyed it, but triumphant: success!
The only problem was that now that I had my result, I couldn’t end the experiment as easily as I’d started it. Some making out ensued, at my place and at his place. I found all of it vaguely embarrassing and a bit freaky, too; my only previous experience was with my first boyfriend, and at fourteen it had seriously grossed me out. By the end of the week, we ended up back at his apartment after some alcohol consumption, and clothes came off. I tried really hard to be okay with it. After all, it was part of my experiment, and I’d thought it was something I wanted. But irrational fears aren’t turned off that easily. When he told me that I drove him crazy, I wasn’t flattered: I was completely terrified.
I spent the next week or so putting on my game face and pretending everything was awesome, while crying on the phone with my younger sister every other night. (I can honestly say that although she’s five years younger, her social skills are much better than mine.)
I thought over and rejected various solutions because, ultimately, I liked Billy okay and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Open communication hadn’t existed in my previous relationships, so I didn’t know what to do. I was also more and more sleep deprived; my schedule had already been busy before, juggling school with two part-time jobs, and now it was unsustainable. The emotions built up, and I ended up handling it in what was probably the worst possible way: walking home from guard team practice, I started crying when he asked me if I was okay. (Bursting into tears when I don’t want to talk about something or do something and someone pushes me is a bad habit I picked up during my days of swim team performance anxiety.) It took at least an hour to get everything out: that I didn’t know what my feelings were, that it freaked me out when he touched me, and that if I had to sacrifice another night’s sleep to hang out I would probably go insane. And also the part I’d been too embarrassed to tell him earlier: I had a condition called vaginismus, and I wouldn’t be able to have sex even if I wanted to and felt ready. He walked me back to my house, carefully not touching, and I went upstairs to bed, feeling like a terrible person but also relieved. At least that was over.
I can’t really take the credit for this next part; if I hadn’t heard from him again, I think I would have walked away from it, not happily exactly, but determined never to get myself into a mess like that again. But I woke up at 6:30 to a text: Check your email. He had written me a long, fairly incoherent message, full of grammatical mistakes, but probably the sweetest thing that anyone had ever written to me, ever, in my whole life. Ending with: “With all that said, I realize that I am not just about ready to give up on us. [...] For now, I see what we have together is worth fighting for.”
I cried, felt trapped, felt miserable, and finally made myself a cup of tea, sat in my living room, decided that I’d gotten myself into this situation in the first place and I would have to cope with it. I phrased my reply carefully.
“I wanted to be everything you wanted me to be, and as soon as I knew for sure that I couldn't be that, I was terrified that you would find out and you wouldn't want me anymore. [...] I'm scared that as soon as I open myself to you, you'll reject me for being such a freak and then I'll lose you AND be hurt. [...] I kinda wish we could just start over, and go more slowly, and I wouldn't get scared and I'd be able to act maturely and not like a 13-year-old in over her head.” The problem wasn’t that I didn’t like him. I liked him as much as I’d liked any other boy. That was the scary part.
A few weeks later we went out for his birthday. I baked a cake and he blew out the candles. Later he told me that he had made a wish; that our relationship would work out. It was a lot of pressure, and I tried to hide the fact that it still freaked me out when he said things like that. But part of me found it romantic, and that was the part I tried hard to focus on.
I don’t remember the timeline as clearly for the next few months. We hung out regularly, swam together and worked out together, and spent an entire guard team competition getting in trouble with the coach (“no touching!”). I brought him Tupperwares of food when he worked Saturday afternoon shifts at the pool. We did our homework together (him doing economics math problems, me making a colorful cardboard poster for my nursing placement in a daycare, probably the first time in my life I felt like the non-nerd in the room). We both said, “I love you.”
We fought about a lot of things, too, mainly the fact that he always wanted to see me more and I always wanted more time to read, write, swim, and sleep. But we talked everything through and usually came to some kind of compromise. I started sleeping over at his apartment once or twice a week, which I resented because sharing a single bed meant that I didn’t so much sleep as lie awkwardly awake for almost the whole night. We did our grocery shopping together. Gradually we started touching again, and I habituated to it, although some things still freaked me out. I only felt comfortable making out if the lights were on. I didn’t want to do anything at my place, because I was afraid my roommates would judge me. (They probably did.) In short, those months weren’t exactly the happiest of my life: I was stressed, exhausted, and under pressure all the time.
At some point during the spring, I can’t remember the month exactly, I had my first orgasm when he was touching me. It was a huge surprise: “my body can do that?” Molybdenumblue and my mother both recommended that I practice, so I started masturbating for the first time in my life. But sex was still the main thing we fought about. Eventually we worked out a routine where I could at least satisfy his needs without too much time or effort. The semester was nearly over by now, and at some point we had decided that we wanted to try living together in the summer. We had been dating for less than four months. All of my roommates and many of my friends thought it was a terrible idea. My mother approved wholeheartedly, though, and I trusted her judgment. We moved into a subletted apartment on campus at the beginning of May.
It could have gone badly, but it went incredibly well. We had a double bed and I was actually able to sleep well nearly every night. I was working a lot, usually more than 45 hours a week, and juggling my mandatory exercise routines, but seeing each other at night was the default, rather than another commitment to slot into my schedule. Sex still wasn’t happening, so I went to see my family doctor and she recommended a physiotherapy routine that I could practice at home, and we were having sex maybe three weeks later. About the only thing I liked was that it was over quickly, but it still felt like an incredible accomplishment. My mother bought me chocolate as a reward for my hard work.
It seemed to be the end of the last snag in our relationship, the last obstacle that would have kept us from staying together long-term. We talk about everything, from the possibility of having kids someday (though definitely not soon, even though kids are uber-cute and I have to work with them every day at the pool and I want one too) to my crush on a girl at work. (When I was planning to go for a swim with her at the campus pool: “Aww, have fun on your lesbian date!”)
Conclusion: Billy left for a four-month exchange in France at the end of September, just before I went back to school for another semester of madly juggling school, work, and exercise, hoping that I would be able to cut back on my workaholic-ism; it’s irrational to think I’ll actually go bankrupt if I only work one shift a week. I was optimistic.
...And that was when I realized that I don’t feel like a scared thirteen-year-old girl anymore. I don’t feel like a freak and I don’t feel inadequate. I don’t find the day-to-day of a relationship stressful. I’ve made a ton of compromises, smoothed off some of the stubbornly contrarian aspects of my personality, and I don’t resent it; I feel good about it. My feelings are no longer as unpredictable as the weather, and when something does upset me, I almost always understand why and know how to fix it.
I couldn’t have achieved this on my own. I’ve relied on my mother, my sister, my best friend, and molybdenumblue. Not to mention one of the most incredibly patient, open-minded, and persistent people I’ve met in my life: Billy himself. But it’s a success story for me, even so. I wanted to be stronger, so I tried to change myself, and it was harder than anything I had ever done before, and I could have given up and walked away, but I decided to keep trying. And that's what makes it my greatest achievement.
*Billy has read this and ok'd everything I wrote, too.
Many of the underlined words feel like they're supposed to be links. Did something go wrong?
No. Just emphasis. Although I could link to the Wikipedia articles...
don't interrupt.
Which I found incredible hard.
As a rule, I try not to openly disapprove of anything a casual friend or acquaintance tells me in conversation.
This segment I find rather sad. I disagree about the usefulness, but it saddens me to see someone be stuck in a situation and not be able to even tell them about it. It took a while to find a way to deal with that.
I deal with it by finding some non-critical, non-judgmental way to get THEM to admit that they're stuck in a less-than-ideal situation. Most people know that they have problems, and are more than willing to talk about them if they feel comfortable and not defensive. One thing I have to STOP doing is making passive-agressive comments that imply I disapprove but without saying it outright.
How do YOU deal with it?
If facebook is like twitter in that regard, I mostly wouldn't expect you to get feedback about an article having been read - but I'd also not expect an especially high probability that the intended person actually read it, either. What I meant was more along the lines of emailing/IMing them individually with the relevant link. (Obviously this doesn't work too well if you know a whole lot of people who you think should read a particular article. I can't advise about that situation - my social circle is too small for me to run into it.)
Sorry for the delayed reply...
I don't know what Twitter is like, but the function on Facebook that I prefer to use (private messages) is almost like email and seems to be replacing email among much of my social circle. I will preferentially send my friends FB messages instead of emails, since I usually get a reply faster.
Writing on someone's wall is public, and might result in a slower reply because it seems less urgent. But it's still directed at a particular person, and it would be considered rude not to reply at all. But when I post an article or link, the reply I often get is "thanks, looks neat, I'll read that later."
These are perhaps good pointers for communicating with normal people, but go against a number of useful things that you should be able to do to communicate more efficiently, with someone you can cooperate with in that regard, or teach to get better at eventually:
- Interrupting to fix (point out) a technical problem with reasoning, that would be forgotten and ignored as insignificant otherwise. Persisting at this leads to gradual improvement. (For example, fighting the many faces of rationalization the moment it's detected, or problems with misusing words.)
- Interrupting an explanation that doesn't help you, that you don't accept and won't benefit from for one reason or another, getting the conversation back on track or reframing it.
- Make sure you understand details of the described idea, and not just the outline. Summarizing at the end only checks the outline and ignores the texture.
- I concur that approving/disapproving is not a good idea, but for a different reason, for you should point out considerations that you think relevant and expect the other didn't take into account, which can change the conclusion.
- Confronting emotionally-driven reasoning helps with developing a measure of immunity to it, and ability to notice. People can be at their craziest when driven by emotion, so it's particularly important to notice when you are so influenced and take sufficient precautions to confound the craziness.
- Above all these is, of course, educating people about the basic concepts that would allow communicating the nature of the problem when it manifests.
Good points. That is the easiest way to quickly communicate with someone and figure out why, if at all, you aren't coming to the same conclusions. That being said, with 90% of the people I know, speaking in this way wouldn't help the conversation and would annoy them. Back before I had realized this, much fewer people liked talking to me.
Interrupting to fix (point out) a technical problem with reasoning, that would be forgotten and ignored as insignificant otherwise.
If I can find a good place to interrupt (a pause or break in the explanation), and I'm speaking to a "normal" person, I'll say "sorry, can you go back to X again? I don't think I get it." Or "I think we might be using the word 'value' for different things. What do you think it means?" Which, to 'normal' people, doesn't sound as much like "your logic is flawed, you idiot."
for you should point out considerations that you think relevant and expect the other didn't take into account, which can change the conclusion.
No reason not to do this. Most people don't find it rude or confrontational, AFAICT.
Interrupting an explanation that doesn't help you, that you don't accept and won't benefit from for one reason or another, getting the conversation back on track or reframing it.
I will do this, as gently as I can, in an intellectually-driven conversation. The number of people I can have intellectually driven conversations with is already significantly less than the total number of people I know. I will not do this if the conversation is in any way a person seeking advice or empathy about their personal life. It's their life. They get to decide what parts are important. (And yes, I do value being someone who people come to when they want advice or empathy. Not only does hearing about their inner emotions help me better understand people in generally, but it makes me feel valued.)
Confronting emotionally-driven reasoning helps with developing a measure of immunity to it, and ability to notice. People can be at their craziest when driven by emotion, so it's particularly important to notice when you are so influenced and take sufficient precautions to confound the craziness.
Nurses are supposed to do this, too. Usually you would do it by making an observation like "You seem angry. Am I right?" "..." "Do you think maybe you're thinking X because you're angry?"
Rational Communication
As I've probably mentioned elsewhere, I am currently studying nursing. My third year started off with a bang today: a six-hour workshop on communication skills to prepare us for our month-long psychiatric/mental health placement, scheduled for October.
The workshop would have been a lot more useful if we’d, for example, done role-playing scenarios instead of watching a series of PowerPoint presentations. Like most of the skills involved in nursing, and like many of the skills involved in rationality, communication skills aren't well transmitted by book learning. The specific techniques we are supposed to learn are for "therapeutic communication", as opposed to "non-therapeutic communication". However, my first impression, as someone who has always found social skills a little bit challenging, was "wow! This is something I can use "all the time!"
Good Communication Techniques
One of the major skills that we've talked about in class, and tried to practice in our hospital placements, is active listening: trying to really listen to what a person is saying and, maybe more importantly, appearing as though you're really listening. I'm sure that to some people, the non-verbal, body-language half of this is as automatic as breathing. It wasn't obvious to me. However, here is a helpful acronym from this site.
- Sit squarely facing the client.
- Observe an open posture.
- Lean forward toward the client.
- Establish eye contact.
- Relax.
The verbal half of this is: don't interpret and don't interrupt. Nod and use filler words like "uh-huh" and "yeah" to show that you're still paying attention. If they seem stuck or blocked, repeat their last sentence with "and then?" or encourage them with "go on..." or "I'm listening" The goal is to accept what they are saying and listen without criticizing or judging, whether or not you agree. Pretty much everyone likes to be listened to, and prefers it if their listener is attentive. I've been practicing this with my friends and family. Not quite to the point that it's automatic, but I have a reputation as a good listener.
There are a few other techniques that I've tried to work on and that seem to improve the quality of my general communication. If a person's train of thought doesn't make sense to you, or if their explanation seems muddled and overly complicated, use clarification: try to explain what you think they mean in your own words, and see if they agree. Focusing is another technique: if you would really like to understand one particular point that they’ve passed over, then bring the conversation back to that point. (“Can you tell me more about X…?”). Exploring is similar, but encourages someone to broaden rather than narrowing the scope of their argument. At the end of the conversation, you can restate their points and yours. This is a good way to make sure that every thread of the conversation was followed up and that the meaning they took from your arguments is the same meaning that you intended.
Bad Communication Techniques
There is a time and a place for approving or disapproving. There are plenty of times and places when doing will only hold up the conversation and distract from the actual topic. As a rule, I try not to openly disapprove of anything a casual friend or acquaintance tells me in conversation. Even if I really want to. It doesn’t help. Casual acquaintances don’t care enough about my opinion to stop doing something that I disapprove of, and most people have an instant “dislike” reaction towards anyone who criticizes them, even if they try to compensate for it. Some of my closer friends will actually listen to my disapproval and update on it, but when it comes to my best friend, I’ve learned that she will almost always respond defensively.
Yes, it's annoying. Yes, it’s irrational that people respond this way. It’s the way things are. In my best friend’s case, I really do wish she would exercise more and eat a healthier diet, but I put a higher value on being friends with her than on making her change her lifestyle. And there are gentler, more positive ways to point this out to her. Most people know about their problems, and likely spend their time trying to avoid thinking about them. Passing judgement really, really doesn’t help.
This surprised me, but “why?” is generally not a good question to ask, at least not when the topic is someone’s emotions or personal life. I think it’s because, to a lot of people, emotions just are. They feel less like part of the mind and more like part of the environment. Asking one of these people “why are you upset about Bob and Sue’s divorce?”, especially in a demanding-an-answer sort of voice, is less likely to produce a calmly reasoned explanation, and more likely a defensive “I just am!” and a strong feeling of not being listened to. Again, this is kind of annoying, especially because I always found why to be a neutral word. But there are more neutral ways to fulfill your curiosity: “Obviously this is important to you. Do you think you can tell me more about it?” No way to take offense from that.
The other examples of bad techniques in our textbook that I’ve found applicable in real life are: changing the subject, false reassurance, and using stereotyped or clichéd comments to steer a conversation away from whatever it is you want to avoid. Yeah, sometimes my friends talk about things that make me uncomfortable, that scare me, or that I just don’t care that much about, but they care. I owe it to them to listen attentively, whether or not I have anything useful to add. I try to extend that courtesy to acquaintances, too, since in some ways it benefits me: anything that makes me uncomfortable is probably a topic I can learn more about.
Application to Rationality and Winning
I’ve found it much easier to help people change their minds (as opposed to making them change their minds) since I started following these simple rules. Almost everyone will learn more by focusing on their own arguments and finding the flaws than from having those flaws pointed out in a disapproving manner. And the level of enjoyment I get from day-to-day conversation and small talk has definitely risen. I might be able to say whatever I think to my parents or my brother and expect a reasoned and interesting response, but most people aren’t as obliging, and if I’m going to be sitting in the pool office at work anyway, I might as well hone my social skills and not be bored.
As I said before, I expect these skills come naturally to a lot of people, at least when they’re talking to someone who they like. I try to communicate in the same way with people I like and people I dislike, since learning more about someone’s life generally means I will stop disliking them (and if they disliked me, they will like me more when I am trying to be my nicest possible self). Since enemies aren’t something I like to cultivate, this is always a good thing.
In short: being a good conversation partner is useful, whether you want to change people's minds or just have fun, and being a better listener will help with that goal.
Depending on what you mean by 'format', you might be able to direct those people to the specific articles you think they'd benefit from, or even pick out particular snippets to talk to them about (in a 'hey, isn't this a neat thing' sense, not a 'you should learn this' sense).
"Pick out particular snippets" seems to work quite well. If something in the topic of conversation tags, in my mind, to something I read on LessWrong, I usually bring it up and add it to the conversation, and my friends usually find it neat. But except with a few select people (and I know exactly who they are) posting an article on their facebook wall and writing "this is really cool!" doesn't lead to the article actually being read. Or at least they don't tell me about reading it.
You're confuting two things here: whether rationality is valuable to study, and whether rationality is easy to proselytize.
My own experience is that it's been very valuable for me to study the material on Less Wrong- I've been improving my life lately in ways I'd given up on before, I'm allocating my altruistic impulses more efficiently (even the small fraction I give to VillageReach is doing more good than all of the charity I practiced before last year), and I now have a genuine understanding (from several perspectives) of why atheism isn't the end of truth/meaning/morals. These are all incredibly valuable, IMO.
As for proselytizing 'rationality' in real life, I haven't found a great way yet, so I don't do it directly. Instead, I tell people who might find Less Wrong interesting that they might find Less Wrong interesting, and let them ponder the rationality material on their own without having to face a more-rational-than-thou competition.
Instead, I tell people who might find Less Wrong interesting that they might find Less Wrong interesting, and let them ponder the rationality material on their own without having to face a more-rational-than-thou competition.
This phrase jumped out in my mind as "shiny awesome suggestion!" I guess in a way it's what I've been trying to do for awhile, since I found out early, when learning how to make friends, that most people and especially most girls don't seem to like being instructed on living their life. ("Girls don't want solutions to their problems," my dad quotes from a book about the male versus the female brain, "they want empathy, and they'll get pissed off if you try to give them solutions instead.")
The main problem is that most of my social circle wouldn't find LW interesting, at least not in its current format. Including a lot of people who I thought would benefit hugely from some parts, especially Alicorn's posts on luminosity. (I know, for example, that my younger sister is absolutely fascinated by people, and loves it when I talk neuroscience with her. I would never tell her to go read a neuroscience textbook, and probably not a pop science book either. Book learning just isn't her thing.)
A child taking the advice of trained and informed mental health professions that they are not ready to learn about something, say human sexuality, might preserve their emotional development.
Perhaps, but I'm skeptical that anyone's emotional development is really harmed by learning about human sexuality at an early age provided it's not done in a particularly shocking way. Sure, plenty of kids find it discomforting, and don't want to think about their parents "doing it," but does it cause lasting psychological harm? Without actual research backing up that conclusion, my initial guess would be "almost never."
Data point: I used to take books out of the adult section of the library as a fairly young child (8-9 years old) and though I was a little baffled by the sexual content, I don't remember finding it at all disturbing. I've been told that I now have an unusually open attitude to sex, though I'm still a little baffled by the whole phenomenon.
Extensive use of abbreviations and acronyms was primarily a convenience for writers, when writing was done by hand and then by typewriter, there is less justification for it now when most writing is done by computer.
This is a claim I don't understand. Most people with computers can't type much faster than they can write.
Incidentally, there are much worse examples than RMS. For example, FLT is Fermat's Last Theorem, Fermat's Little Theorem, and Faster Than Light Travel. Note that the first two of these are in the same area of study and only have a one word difference.
All of that said, I don't think this is really a big deal. Humans do context recognition really well. A lot of language is much more ambiguous than it would seem at first glance. It is very rare that acronyms create actual confusion.
Faster Than Light Travel.
The only acronym I've ever seen for this is FTL (Faster Than Light)...granted that was in the context of sci-fi not technical discussion, and there are probably other phrases with FTL as an abbreviation.
Just to clarify, I work in a very low-performing school (bottom 10% of UK). In many schools, children will be much more able. However, it still surprises me that people who spend hours a day online can't use google.
True. The school I attended was situated in a very wealthy neighborhood, and was well-known for its academics...and classes were segregated into "enriched", "regular", and "applied". I spent most of my time in the enriched stream, and barely ever interacted with the "applied" kids, since they weren't usually the ones doing band or drama club.
I did the IB diploma program too. Except I live in Spain, so I had to follow both the Spanish education system and the IB diploma at the same time. We actually had three different philosophy subjects in two years: Philosophy, History of Philosophy and TOK. All three were absolute shit. Well, we did actually learn about the history of philosophy: we had to memorize every detail about ancient philosophers' thoughts, from the presocratics (Thales, Pythagoras...) to Nietzsche (nothing beyond 1900 though). We didn't actually learn much about actual philosophy (i.e. the basics of how the universe works, the principles of observation, deduction, induction, logic, reductionism, what words mean, etc.). So we could spend months talking about how Plato's intelligible world, but we didn't hear once about reductionism or cognitive science. I guess it really depends on what teacher you get.
Anyway, this has motivated me and I've thinking of writing a book in Spanish covering some of LessWrong's basic topics to see if I can reduce the cultural gap a bit. Or at least starting a blog.
Also it's worth mentioning that an IB diploma is virtually useless to access Spanish universities. I could literally have left my final exams blank if I had felt like doing so, with no practical consequences.
</rant>
Anyway, this has motivated me and I've thinking of writing a book in Spanish covering some of LessWrong's basic topics to see if I can reduce the cultural gap a bit. Or at least starting a blog.
This strikes me as an important thing to do. Good luck with it! (Incidentally, is there a demand for Less Wrong material in French? I expect I'm fluent enough to translate some of the articles.)
I agree with you, as a teacher. Students of ages 11-16 often don't even know how to find the answer to a simple question online, for example 'between what frequencies is EM radiation visible?'
That surprises me. Definitely in my high school we had a lot of web-research assignments, and by grade 12 we were expected to cite 'high-quality' sources like journal articles and the web pages of major (and thus respectable, I guess) organizations. Although I still use Wikipedia for a lot of my casual personal research, I never found those assignments hard.
...Then again, like I'm starting to realize, I may have encountered sample bias in high school, considering that I was in mostly AP classes.
In the first of several irresponsible assumptions I'm going to make, let's assume that the information evolved in time t is proportional to i = log(t), while the intelligence evolved is proportional to et = ee^i. I haven't done the math to support those particular functions; but I'm confident that they fit the data better than linear functions would.
This may be covered by the following assumption about 'spurts', but this doesn't seem to work for me.
If intelligence really could jump like that, shouldn't we expect to see that in humans already? For example, shouldn't we expect to see small mutations or genes with outsized effects on intelligence? Instead, we see that even a highly inbred population with many dozens of nasty genetic problems like the Ashkenazi only get 10 or 20 IQ points*, and we see a long-term stagnation in cranial capacity, and genetic surveys seem to (as far as I've heard) turn up hundreds or thousands of genetic variations weakly linked to small IQ increases. (I cover some related points in my article on evolution & drugs.) All of this makes intelligence look like it has a logarithmic relationship with diminishing returns.
* My understanding is that on a hypothetical 'absolute' scale of intelligence, as you get smarter, each IQ point corresponds to less and less 'actual' intelligence, due to the bell curve/relative ranking that IQ is - it's an ordinal scale, not a cardinal scale.
I cover some related points in my article on evolution & drugs.
I followed the link and read the page. Fascinating!
Most believers (in God or other kinds of unproven phenomena) that I met seem quite hard to convince with reasoning -- because that's just not how they think. Often, there seems to be some amorphous blob of beliefs and convictions, and the Arrows Of Reason simply bounce off.
Many people simply do not seem interested in thinking about the reasons for their beliefs, let alone question them.
Often, there seems to be some amorphous blob of beliefs and convictions, and the Arrows Of Reason simply bounce off.
That's exactly what I found in my interactions with evangelical Christians especially. (Also, they take into account "evidence" that is only valid if they already believe in God AND the whole Christianity-specific complex...i.e. quoting Bible verses to make a point.)
But I don't see parents taking their older, less-easily-amused children to meetups unless they're more like church: There should be more than one child; and space for them to play while the adults do adult things; and, depending on the geography of the venue, an adult to supervise them; or a more structured activity just for the children.
Do churches have these things in your area? The few churches I know of do not do this at all; children are simply expected to sit through long and boring sermons just like the adults.
The Unitarian church that my parents took me too (both of them, actually, the one in Washington State and the one in Ottawa, Canada) had a Sunday school, with classes divided by age. I remember reading a storybook about Buddhism, coloring, acting out stories from the Old Testament, etc. There was a class for slightly older children (I was maybe 11) and that was where I got my first book about puberty, and the grownup talk that came with it. I don't remember finding Sunday school incredibly fascinating, but I don't remember not wanting to go, either. (My brother hated it and his resistance was the main reason why we eventually stopped going, but he also hated skiing lessons, cottage trips, and pretty much all the activities we did as a family.)
The problem with the 'god shaped hole' situation (and questions of happiness in general) is that if something doesn't make you happy NOW, it becomes very difficult to believe that it will make you happy LATER.
For example, say some Soma-drug was invented that, once taken, would make you blissfully happy for the rest of your life. Would you take it? Our immediate reaction is to say 'no', probably because we don't like the idea of 'fake', chemically-induced happiness. In other words, because the idea doesn't make us happy now, we don't really believe it will make us happy later.
Valuing truth seems like just another way of saying truth makes you happy. Because filling the god shaped hole means not valuing truth, the idea doesn't make you happy right now, so you don't really believe it will make you happy later.
For example, say some Soma-drug was invented that, once taken, would make you blissfully happy for the rest of your life. Would you take it?
I try my best to value other peoples' happiness equal to my own. If taking a happiness-inducing pill was likely to make me a kinder, more generous, more productive person, I would choose to take it (with some misgivings related to it seeming like 'cheating' and 'not good for character-building') but if it were to make me less kind/generous/productive, I would have much stronger misgivings.
And the easiest way to learn perfect front crawl isn’t to do it over and over again with tiny changes, but to practice exaggerated and simplified “drills” that teach particular fragments of muscle memory.
This reminds me of something that happened in my early years of teaching mind hacking: I noticed that some people were way better at applying the techniques than others, and then began discovering that it was a function of lower-level introspection skills I didn't yet know how to teach. (For example, some people were just better at "shutting up and listening" or not adding interpretations onto their experiences.)
Faced with a given stroke problem, I can look over a list of about eight different front crawl drills to find the one best suited for fixing it. To place some objective measure on the improvements, I can time my swimmers or count their strokes per length.
I certainly wish I had technology that specific: what I have now are mostly mnemonics, rules of thumb, and individual coaching feedback. Objective measures are particularly hard to come by, though I suppose I have a couple of them.
and then began discovering that it was a function of lower-level introspection skills I didn't yet know how to teach.
Have you experimented or played around with ways of teaching these lower-level skills?
While I really like this post, I down-voted it because it doesn't seem to offer any conclusions. It's really wonderfully written, but I don't think LessWrong needs more wonderfully written descriptions of the problem :)
You're probably right. I guess I was hoping someone else who knows more than I do would have a solution.
I don't think that's a complete explanation. I would say it's more along the lines of "If you start with somebody working a three-day week, it's much easier to employ them for another two days, than to hire a new person to work two days because that requires creating a whole new business relationship." Then both corporations and governments, I think, tend to be as inefficient as they can possibly get away with without dying, or maybe a little more inefficient than that. Work expands to fill the time available...
I would have to sit down and write this out if I really wanted to think it through, but roughly I think that there are forces which tend to make people employed for a full workweek, everyone want to be employed, and society to become as inefficient as it can get away with. Combine these factors and it's why increasing productivity doesn't increase leisure.
The full work week makes sense, depending on what sort of job you're talking about. Is it a job where a certain number of staff have to be working at a given time but it doesn't really matter who, i.e. my job at the pool, etc, or is it a job where a certain amount of work has to get done and it's simpler for one person to do a set of tasks because sharing the tasks between brains is complicated, i.e. my job at the research institute? For the former, it doesn't really matter whether you have 20 staff working 40 hours a week or 40 staff working 20 hours a week. (In fact, at the pool we tend to flip between the two: in winter, when most employees are in school, there are a lot more staff and many of them have only 1 or 2 shifts a week. In summer, the number of staff drops and nearly everyone is full-time.) It doesn't matter whether a given staffperson is there on a certain day; lifeguards and waitresses and grocery store cashiers (and nurses, to a lesser degree) are essentially interchangeable. For the latter, it makes a lot of sense for any one employee to be there every day, but why 8 hours a day? Why not 5? If the full-time employees at the research institute were each in charge of a single study, instead of 2 or 3, they could do all the required work in 5 hours a day plus occasionally overtime or on-call work.
I'm guessing that most work for corporations and governments is in the latter category. Most work in the former category is relatively low-paying, so adults in this jobs have to work full-time or more to make ends meet. I can see why right now, neither corporations nor the government are endorsing shorter work-days or work-weeks: they would have to hire more staff, spend more time on finding and interviewing qualified people, and providing these extra staff with the expected benefits (i.e. health insurance, vacation time) would be more complicated. The current state is stable and locked in place, because any business or organization that tried to change would be at a disadvantage. But in theory, if every workplace transitioned to more employees working fewer hours, I can't see why that state wouldn't be stable as well.
Fixed. (It's more reliable to PM me, since I don't read all comments; it just so happens that you are among the people whose comments I'm subscribed to.)
You can subscribe to people's comments? That's...pretty nifty! How do you go about doing it?
I can't see what's causing the problem in either the WYSIWYG editor or the HTML one, both of which show spaces around the words that are cramped in the published version. I'm confused.
That's happened to me before. I just put in extra spaces, so that when it was published it appeared normal. Still don't know what caused it.
I was reading a prediction from fifty years ago or so that by 2000, people would only work a few hours a day or a few days a week, because most work would be computerized/roboticized and technology would create amazing wealth. Most work has been computerized/roboticized, technology has created amazing wealth, but working conditions are little better, and maybe worse, than they were fifty years ago.
Technological advances can't shorten the work hours because even in a society wealthy and technologically advanced enough that basic subsistence is available for free, people still struggle for zero-sum things, most notably land and status. Once a society is wealthy enough that basic subsistence is a non-issue, people probably won't work as much as they would in a Malthusian trap where constant toil is required just to avoid starvation, but they will still work a lot because they're locked in these zero-sum competitions.
What additionally complicates things is that habitable land is close to a zero-sum resource for all practical purposes, since to be useful, it must be near other people. Thus, however wealthy a society gets, for a typical person it always requires a whole lot of work to be able to afford decent lodging, and even though starvation is no longer a realistic danger for those less prudent and industrious in developed countries, homelessness remains so.
There is also the problem of the locked signaling equilibrium. Your work habits have a very strong signaling component, and refusing to work the usual expected hours strongly signals laziness, weirdness, and issues with authority, making you seem completely useless, or worse.
As for working conditions, in terms of safety, cleanliness, physical hardship, etc., typical working conditions in developed countries are clearly much better than fifty years ago. What arguably makes work nowadays worse is the present distribution of status and the increasing severity of the class system, which is a very complex issue tied to all sorts of social change that have occurred in the meantime. But this topic is probably too ideologically sensitive on multiple counts to discuss productively on a forum like LW.
As for working conditions, in terms of safety, cleanliness, physical hardship, etc., typical working conditions in developed countries are clearly much better than fifty years ago. What arguably makes work nowadays worse is the present distribution of status and the increasing severity of the class system, which is a very complex issue tied to all sorts of social change that have occurred in the meantime. But this topic is probably too ideologically sensitive on multiple counts to discuss productively on a forum like LW.
This sounds like such an interesting topic for discussion, though!
I was reading a prediction from fifty years ago or so that by 2000, people would only work a few hours a day or a few days a week, because most work would be computerized/roboticized and technology would create amazing wealth. Most work has been computerized/roboticized, technology has created amazing wealth, but working conditions are little better, and maybe worse, than they were fifty years ago.
Technological advances can't shorten the work hours because even in a society wealthy and technologically advanced enough that basic subsistence is available for free, people still struggle for zero-sum things, most notably land and status. Once a society is wealthy enough that basic subsistence is a non-issue, people probably won't work as much as they would in a Malthusian trap where constant toil is required just to avoid starvation, but they will still work a lot because they're locked in these zero-sum competitions.
What additionally complicates things is that habitable land is close to a zero-sum resource for all practical purposes, since to be useful, it must be near other people. Thus, however wealthy a society gets, for a typical person it always requires a whole lot of work to be able to afford decent lodging, and even though starvation is no longer a realistic danger for those less prudent and industrious in developed countries, homelessness remains so.
There is also the problem of the locked signaling equilibrium. Your work habits have a very strong signaling component, and refusing to work the usual expected hours strongly signals laziness, weirdness, and issues with authority, making you seem completely useless, or worse.
As for working conditions, in terms of safety, cleanliness, physical hardship, etc., typical working conditions in developed countries are clearly much better than fifty years ago. What arguably makes work nowadays worse is the present distribution of status and the increasing severity of the class system, which is a very complex issue tied to all sorts of social change that have occurred in the meantime. But this topic is probably too ideologically sensitive on multiple counts to discuss productively on a forum like LW.
Technological advances can't shorten the work hours because even in a society wealthy and technologically advanced enough that basic subsistence is available for free, people still struggle for zero-sum things, most notably land and status. Once a society is wealthy enough that basic subsistence is a non-issue, people probably won't work as much as they would in a Malthusian trap where constant toil is required just to avoid starvation, but they will still work a lot because they're locked in these zero-sum competitions.
That is the clearest explanation I've seen so far for this. (I've read a lot of SF, and asked myself the question.)
I think you miss the point of the linked article, which is not that we are "not very good" at introspection, but that introspection is literally impossible. We don't have any better access to our own brain processes than we do to a random persons. We don't have little instruments hooked up to our internal mental mechanisms telling us what's going on. I fear that people who think they do are somewhat fooling themselves.
That doesn't mean we can't have models of ourselves, or think about how the brain works, or notice patterns of mental behavior and make up better explanations for them, and get better at that. But I think calling it introspection is misleading and begs the question, as it conjures up images of a magic eye that can be turned inward. We don't have those.
but that introspection is literally impossible.
To me, it seemed like the article said only that we were unexpectedly bad at introspection when actually trying it in practice, not that it was impossible for anyone ever to do any kind of introspection.
Introspection considered questionable, reflection considered absolutely mandatory.
Sometimes you can elicit the difference by first asking yourself why you believe/do something, then asking yourself how you came to believe/do something. "Why didn't I upvote this article? Well because it doesn't have qualities X, Y, Z and J. Oh, how did I come to not upvote this article? Well I never really actually considered that course of action, so it's not like I ever had the option to, now that I think about it." Notice the difference between moral justification/reasons and explanatory justification/reasons. Everything has reasons, but many reasons pretend to be the "true" reasons when they're not. When you downvote a LW comment or post ask what caused you to downvote it and try to answer honestly, rather than introspecting on why you downvoted it. They can be the same question but it's surprising how often they're not. Likewise for all negative social judgments: ask the self-reflective question, How did I come to be so contemptuous of this person/idea/group?, not the other-focused Why is this person/idea/group so contemptible? It's really important that you frame such questions the right way if you want your reflection to not accidentally spit out pleasant-sounding "introspection". Doing this regularly makes rationalization or cloaked signalling look obvious, both from yourself and others, and serves as a basis for still further reflection.
Introspection considered questionable, reflection considered absolutely mandatory.
To me "reflection" means just thinking about something you already know, and "introspection" adds the act of digging around in your mind for something you don't yet know. But it's happened to me before that the complex concepts in my head, tied to a given word, are different than the concepts that that word encodes for other people. Is this another of those times?
“I didn’t mean it, I just did it because I was angry!”
One illustrative example of cause and effect within an environment is the relationship between genotype and phenotype within an environment. To say an aspect of an animal is "just because" of an individual feature of its genotype or environment (or the absence of a feature), is either untrue or assumes for the counterfactual that an endless list of other features and absences is held constant.
"I did it partially because I was angry, were I not angry, I wouldn't have done it," doesn't have the same ring to it though, does it?
If ever it feels like something is just because of something else, that is the first sign that introspection has failed!
"I did it because I was angry" is still a more accurate explanation of cause and effect than "I did it because X is an idiot and deserved it" or "I did it because it's obvious that was what I should do, anyone could see that." You're right that "I did it partially because I was angry, were I not angry, I wouldn't have done it" is an even better illustration of cause and effect, but I was using the example to refer to more naive people who aren't very introspective, but who can't avoid doing it a bit.
Meditation seemed useful to me. Other forms of "introspection" (cognitive biases, direct querying of "what would I do in situation X" in my brain, psychology) were more like "extrospection"--I'd infer my thoughts by my behavior. Meditation seemed to have a shorter inferential distance. I don't have a good non-introspective reason to believe this, although it did seem to get me over procrastination for the first time in weeks, and helped me graduate. I'll find out whether this continues to hold true as I resume meditation.
I like the word "extrospection." Learning better "extrospection" is probably just as useful in its own way as learning better introspection, and you're right that it uses different skills. It would be neat if it were possible to somehow link the two..
Teaching Introspection
As Yvain pointed out in his recent post The Limits of Introspection, humans are not naturally good at inferring our cognitive processes. We resort to guessing with plausible-sounding stories about ourselves, and we aren’t very accurate.
I was reminded of this recently while teaching a swimming lesson. (You'll understand later why this reminded me.) A recurring problem that I’ve noticed with both children and adults is that it isn’t obvious to them what their bodies are doing. Feet go in strange directions, hands fail to lift above the water, and they literally can’t describe what it feels like. It’s pretty much impossible for a novice swimmer to watch the instructor demonstrate front crawl and then imitate it perfectly–muscular control isn’t that perfect. That’s why there are swimming instructors: because it’s very, very hard to learn swimming (or dance, or soccer, or a martial art) by reading a book, even if that book has illustrated diagrams. Two friends reading the book together and watching each other’s attempts in the pool would probably do better, but that’s still a case, metaphorically, of the blind leading the blind. Most sports have instructors and coaches who are, relatively speaking, experts. (I competed at the regional level in swimming for something like five years and trained five to seven times a week the whole time, which pretty much qualifies me to teach eight-year-olds. An Olympic coach would need a much higher level of mastery.)
The most basic thing a coach provides that the two friends practicing together don’t have is relevant feedback. I watch a young swimmer demonstrating her front crawl, and I can immediately chunk my observations into “what’s done properly” and “what’s done wrong” and translate the latter category into “things to change.” And the easiest way to learn perfect front crawl isn’t to do it over and over again with tiny changes, but to practice exaggerated and simplified “drills” that teach particular fragments of muscle memory. Faced with a given stroke problem, I can look over a list of about eight different front crawl drills to find the one best suited for fixing it. To place some objective measure on the improvements, I can time my swimmers or count their strokes per length The coaches of more elite swimmers have even fancier tools in their hands: videotaping, fins and hand paddles, and the flume, basically a wind tunnel in the water. (I wish I had one of these in my basement!) All to provide better feedback: even Olympic-level swimmers don’t automatically know what their bodies are doing wrong or what needs to be fixed. (I’m assuming this is true of sports other than swimming, too.)
Granted, human muscles do start out under some voluntary control. A baby learns how to walk with no instruction, only the feedback of trial and error. (And of seeing adults walk? I seem to remember reading that some feral children crawl on hands and knees, and seem to prefer this method to walking.) But even apparently involuntary skills can be learned, with the help of creative technology. With biofeedback, people can control their blood pressure and anxiety levels and apparently various other processes . The parallel should be obvious here. Introspection, like physical coordination, is only imperfectly under conscious control…but there is some control. That’s what consciousness is: self-awareness. Most people are aware that they have emotions, and that they make decisions because of their emotions, i.e. “I didn’t mean it, I just did it because I was angry!” Likewise, most people are aware of their likes and dislikes. It’s only a small leap to recognize that these kinds of preferences are malleable facts about the state of the brain, not immutable facts about the outside world. People do succeed in wrestling with their uncooperative minds, fighting akrasia and making deliberate and reasoned decisions.
Nevertheless, most people aren’t even at the same level, metaphorically speaking, as a non-swimmer trying to learn from diagrams in a book. The literature on cognitive biases and Alicorn's sequence on luminosity are a start on the ‘book of introspection’ and some of the Less Wrong groups that meet in person are trying to help each other master these skills. The various schools of meditation are arguably about teaching introspection, and clinical psychology could be seen the same way. Is it possible to go further? Olympic coaches have probably maxed out how fast an unmodified human can swim; your technique can't be any better than perfect; but I would like to think that we haven’t even scratched the limits of how well a completely unmodified human brain can understand itself. As far as I know, most traditions of meditation are just that: traditions, often ancient, that don’t accommodate recent discoveries about the brain and about thought processes. And psychology is limited by the focus on fixing ‘problems’ and returning patients to ‘normal.’ (And if you are ‘normal’, you don’t need a psychologist!) But everyone is affected equally by our apparently-innate inability to notice what our brains are really up to, and normal isn't a very ambitious standard.
What does a cognitive bias feel like? I can’t look back on my actions and say “yeah, I’m pretty sure I said Tide was my favourite detergent because I was still thinking about oceans and moons.” Or at least, I can’t do that automatically. But if a scientist can predict that participants in an experiment will choose Tide when thinking about oceans and moons, then I can predict that about myself, too, and look back on all my decisions, trying to infer what factors were present at the time that could have primed my choice. It’s still a guess, but it’s an informed, useful one. And with practice, with an expert instructor to point out what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong, maybe a given cognitive bias does feel like something recognizable. Maybe the hidden secrets of your thought processes would become transparent and obvious. The next problem is finding instructors who are sufficiently advanced, and teaching exercises to use. The repetitive and level-based nature of video games would make them ideal as “thinking drills" training "neural memory" instead of "muscle memory."
I don't know enough to guess at the specifics of what this kind of school might look like, but I would definitely take lessons in introspection if they were available…I can’t really see a downside. Finding out that my decisions were due more often to random factors unconnected to to the Great Story That Is My Life might be unflattering, but it's equally awful whether I know about it or not, and knowing gives me a chance to fix those decisions that might otherwise turn out damagingly irrational. Anyone, or any group of people, willing to take on the task of becoming expert instructors in this field would hugely help those of us who have trouble learning procedural skills from books.
I'm bringing my brother this week! (He's 17 but I'm hoping they won't make a big deal about that as long as he doesn't order alcohol.)
Interesting post. I do occasionally watch myself interacting with people, smiling at the right times, joking at the right times, getting people to laugh and feel comfortable...and it absolutely amazes me that I can do this. Even with grownups! (Actually, older adults and young children are much easier to interact with than people in my age group, probably because I'm not expected to compete with them for status...that game still throws me off.) Yeah, socializing is fun, and it's awesome that I can now find it fun. It took years of spending a lot of my time among extroverts and feeling really, really out of place there...but now I'm glad that I didn't immediately segregate into a group with "people like me", because I probably wouldn't have learned better social skills from them.
You know, I ''still'' can't get the hand of joking. Not telling jokes or using witticisms, but, you know, the taunting, the stealth insults, the "in good fun" stuff. Maybe I'm working under Law Of Conservation Of Detail, but I tend to process them as unwarranted, intentional insults, made by people who won't openly engage you, and that come entirely out of the blue and can't be refuted in less than a small paragraph. Which is obviously not a witty response and marks you as unfunny and "someone who takes themselves too seriously". This really exasperates and confuses me.
I don't understand sarcasm. I mean, I know what it is and everything, and I can participate in a sarcastic exchange if I'm expecting it, but if I'm not paying attention, a remark meant to be sarcastic gets automatically processed as serious, and I respond defensively. Various people over the years have noticed this and used it to their own amusement. (Which I don't really mind. I was ignored enough as a kid that even just being teased is a sign of social inclusion for me and makes me feel warm and fuzzy.)
I said social grace. True kindness and honesty and loyalty have their reward.
Exactly. Particularly if you choose the right people to be kind to and the right times to be loyal.
people tend to notice if your virtues are fake
Believing in the pretty lining, and even erring slightly in the direction of being 'virtuous' when the stakes are low tends to be a practical policy. Because doing the calculations of just when not to be kind is hard.
Note people can get by satisfactorily by living by the Golden Rule. At least they can if they are sufficiently sheltered. Yet this does not appear graceful. It looks kludgey and naive.
A perhaps even more important point is that when being kind/nice/virtual/reciprocal/cooperating/etc the golden rule, "One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself", still isn't the one to follow. Again you can get by treating others as you would like to be treated but - some people will be able to tolerate you. But to be 'socially graceful' you need to be able to read people and infer how they will respond best to being treated.
Note that
while "true gentlemen" don't need to fight each other off. It's the difference between getting power and getting respect.
"One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself"
I thought that the golden rule was treat others as they would like to be treated, not as you would like to be treated.
I generally avoid telling people I'm here because I'm a bit embarrassed about spending time on the internet at all. Two exceptions so far: one a friend of mine who essentially thinks like Robin Hanson, and one a friend who'd have a really interesting perspective to add.
"Spending time on the internet" (as opposed to "wasting time on various things when you're supposed to be working on something productive") seems like an odd thing to be embarrassed of in today's world. Can you elaborate?
Cut the crap, nobody cares about rationality in the abstract.
But rationality in the abstract is so interesting! (To a certain subset of the population, and maybe the people who don't belong to that subset feel alienated by ideas that seem boring to them, but that doesn't mean it's wrong to be interested in rationality because it's cool to think about.)
I am noticing that I am very, very confused. What is so controversial about ugh fields? Why is this a Banned Idea? I was somehow able to read the original article (didn't even notice it was deleted, I must have found a link to the original URL) and it seemed uncontroversial to me. Or is there a different 'Banned Idea' that I'm completely missing?
Interesting.
Where does this fit with the idea that voluntary behavior can become involuntary in time. Like driving, where you start by fully thinking (consciously) of each move, and in time it becomes unconscious (not sure if we can call it involuntary). This was discussed a bit by Schrodinger in What is Life.
Will this, now unconsious action, be susceptible to reinforcement? If you find you make lots of accidents, maybe driving will jump back to voluntary?
I'm not sure if automatic, learned behavior such as driving is at all the same as truly 'involuntary' behavior, like bile secretion and body temperature/heart rate. To me, it seems that the voluntary behavior of driving has just been 'chunked' so that decisions occur at a higher level. Instead of deciding 'ok, now I will put on my turn signal, I will slow down and check my blind spot and look in my mirrors and if there's no cars coming I'll make a left-hand turn', the decision is 'i'll turn left on the way to Suzy's house.' If the route to Suzy's house is also memorized to the point of being automatic, the voluntary point is leaving home and the decision is 'I'll drive to Suzy's house'.
Even a novice driver's behavior is chunked; you don't think of each individual muscle contraction involved in turning the steering wheel. For most people, this is already learned and chunked. It's still voluntary.
Also, you can use Splenda, for no calories at all, and it tastes just fine. I know some people can get downright militant about how awful the stuff is, but they are the same people who buy organic when the term is essentially meaningless, and they seem to hate the thought that you are "cheating" to get deliciousness. I simply say to them "Er, human technology has progressed to the point where I can have, say, a sweet breakfast without consuming any sugar, and I'm going to do so. Cheating has nothing to do with it." I drink tea with it alllll the time, too. :)
Does it taste the same as sugar? I've found that diet Coke doesn't taste the same to me as regular Coke, and I would prefer non-sweet tea to sweet but weird-tasting tea. Then again, I like unsweetened tea and coffee. To someone who found them really unpalatable, artificial sweeteners would definitely be worth it.
We can describe this hard way in terms of reinforcement learning: after intending to learn Swahili but not doing so, I feel stupid. This unpleasant feeling propagates back to its cause, the behavior of intending to learn Swahili, and negatively reinforces it.
I think I've always had this unpleasant feeling back-propagation, to the point that at the start of your article, I thought you must be wrong...surely everyone knows better than to get pleasure from thinking about doing something that isn't yet done! But maybe I'm wrong.
No one here has yet made fun of me for my interest in religion, even though I expect most people disagree with it.
What does it mean to disagree with an interest? That sounds like it means that most LWers either disapprove of your involvement with religion, do not share your interest, or expect that you could increase your utility by decreasing your involvement with religion. I'm not sure which of these, if any, you meant, but as to the first, I don't think most of us do disapprove of it. As to the second, that's not disagreement. And as to the third, I'm not sure what most LWers think, but I think that you are in a much better position to judge that than I am.
In general, from the posts I've seen, the LessWrong attitude to religion is one of derision. (This may represent Eliezer's point of view more than it represents the average point of view.) But that derision has never been directed at me personally. A number of posts use religion as an example of 'widespread irrationality that is bad for individuals and for world' but no one has accused me directly of propagating an irrational or damaging meme.
As for your second point, yeah, lack of interest is not disapproval or disagreement. I have very little interest in finance and investment; that doesn't mean I disagree with the premise of it. In fact, I have a lot of respect for people who can put up with studying something that seems so tedious to me. And I doubt that no one on LessWrong is interested in religion in the abstract, since it is one of the more surreal and bizarre aspects of human behaviour.
Reasons for being rational
When I found Less Wrong and started reading, when I made my first post, when I went to my first meetup….
It was a little like coming home.
And mostly it wasn’t. Mostly I felt a lot more out of place than I have in, say, church youth groups. It was hard to pinpoint the difference, but as far as I can tell, it comes down to this: a significant proportion of the LW posters are contrarians in some sense. And I’m a conformist, even if I would prefer not to be, even if that’s a part of my personality that I’m working hard to change. I’m much more comfortable as a follower than as a leader. I like pre-existing tradition, the reassuring structure of it. I like situations that allow me to be helpful and generous and hardworking, so that I can feel like a good person. Emotionally, I don’t like disagreeing with others, and the last thing I have to work hard to do is tolerate others' tolerance.
And, as evidenced by the fact that I attend church youth groups, I don’t have the strong allergy that many of the community seem to have against religion. This is possibly because I have easily triggered mystical experiences when, for example, I sing in a group, especially when we are singing traditional ‘sacred’ music. In a previous century, I would probably have been an extremely happy nun.
Someone once expressed surprise that I was able to become a rationalist in spite of this neurological quirk. I’ve asked myself this a few times. My answer is that I don’t think I deserve the credit. If anything, I ended up on the circuitous path towards reading LessWrong because I love science, and I love science because, as a child, reading about something as beautiful as general relativity gave me the same kind of euphoric experience as singing about Jesus does now. My inability to actual believe in any religion comes from a time before I was making my own decisions about that kind of thing.
I was raised by atheist parents, not anti-theist so much as indifferent. We attended a Unitarian Universalist church for a while, which meant I was learning about Jesus and Buddha and Native American spirituality all mixed together, all the memes watered down to the point that they lost their power. I was fourteen when I really encountered Christianity, still in the mild form of the Anglican Church of Canada. I was eighteen when I first encountered the ‘Jesus myth’ in its full, meme-honed-to-maximum-virulence form, and the story arc captivated me for a full six months. I still cry during every Good Friday service. But I must have missed some critical threshold, because I can’t actually believe in that story. I’m not even sure what it would mean to believe in a story. What does that feel like?
I was raised by scientists. My father did his PhD in physical chemistry, my mother in plant biology. I grew up reading SF and pop science, and occasionally my mother or my father’s old textbooks. I remember my mother’s awe at the beautiful electron-microscope images in my high school textbooks, and how she sat patiently while I fumblingly talked about quantum mechanics, having read the entire tiny physics section of our high school library. My parents responded to my interest in science with pride and enthusiasm, and to my interest in religion with indulgent condescension. That was my structure, my tradition. And yes, that has everything to do with why I call myself an atheist. I wouldn’t have had the willpower to disagree with my parents in the long run.
Ultimately, I have an awfully long way to go if I want to be rational, as opposed to being someone who’s just interested in reading about math and science. Way too much of my motivation for ‘having true beliefs’ breaks down to ‘maybe then they’ll like me.’ This is one of the annoying things about my personality, just as annoying as my sensitivity to religious memes and my inability to say no to anyone. Luckily, my personality also comes with the ability to get along with just about anyone, and in a forum of mature adults, no one is going to make fun of me because I’m wearing tie-dye overalls. No one here has yet made fun of me for my interest in religion, even though I expect most people disagree with it.
And there’s one last conclusion I can draw, albeit from a sample size of one. Not everyone can be a contrarian rationalist. Not everyone can rebel against their parents’ religion. Not everyone can disagree with their friends and family and not feel guilty. But everyone can be rational if they are raised that way.
I suggested "Learning to say 'No'" as an addition to Swimmer963's goal list at one of our first meetups. This sounds like a good way to implement it (should she so desire, of course).
Ok. Next meetup (that I can make it to), let's do it!
This thread is getting long enough to be a little inconvenient to monitor, though the bright green edges on new comments help a lot.
Maybe it's time for a True Rejection Challenge, part 2.
though the bright green edges on new comments help a lot.
That's what the bright green edges mean!
I don't know how "Bruce-like" I am in issues of personal goals and so on -- probably about average. But I have a freakishly bad case of the Bruce when it comes to competitive games.
I don't win games. Ever. I played Catan every week for a whole summer -- never won. I haven't won a poker game since I was seven. You don't want to know what happens if I try Mario Kart. I used to go bowling a lot -- I never, ever won. I run slower in a race than when I time myself on my own. Come to think of it, I don't believe I've ever won an argument.
The variety of games I suck at is too broad for it to be a simple matter of lacking a skill: I lose at competitions of strategy, probability, hand-eye coordination, and fitness. No. I have some kind of hang-up against winning. I've won "competitions" that involve taking a test or mailing in an application, but I just can't win if I can see my opponent face-to-face. On some level, I really don't want to.
It's got to be psychological. I suppose the cure would be to find a "game" of something that I actually am skilled at, and defeat someone face to face. The weird thing is, that sounds terrifying. Unlike MOR:Harry, I know how to lose; I don't know how to win.
Interesting. I used to have a similar thing going on with competitive swimming. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to impress my parents, I wanted my coach to be proud, I wanted to earn my place at the team...but when it came to actually standing on a block beside seven other swimmers, the pressure would build until something snapped. I don't think I ever really believed I could win, and thanks to my body type I rarely did. (I seem to almost completely lack fast-twitch muscle fibers; I once swam 17 km straight, at age 14, and I don't think anyone else on the team could have done that, but even much slower swimmers would beat me easily in a sprint.)
I don't agree that we should tiptoe around someone's irrationality (and bend over backwards to try to accommodate it!) just because it has a biological cause, or because it's something associated with "our kind of people". If someone with schizophrenia came here and started posting about conspiracy theories, I don't think the schizophrenia would be a good excuse to put up with that either.
The question I would ask is, does it help Alicorn to phrase your comment the way you did: "If you refuse to change your behavior in any substantial way I don't know why you're asking for advice." That would antagonize anyone, rationalist or not. If you said that to someone with schizophrenia, the last thing it would do is cure their disease. There are medications for that...and unfortunately, I don't think there are any medications for autism yet. And if anyone is bending backwards to accommodate it, it's Alicorn herself; this is something that must be extremely annoying on a day-to-day basis. You, on the other hand, don't have to change your day-to-day life at all.
That being said, I think your original suggestion (gradual habituation) was a good one. I don't know if Alicorn's tried exactly that strategy before, and there's a possibility it might work.
NOTE: This is not bragging, I really really want to change many of my ways and think part of this info is relevant to that. Trying to give you a bit more precision about my intentions and perceptions. 1) I'm very good at finishing stuff if it is social/sexual/friendship stuff, or reading, or writing essays. 2) What I am not good is what requires feedback, things like finding an agent for book publishing, writing a good paper even though I am from Brazil and no one would revise it, or pretending to be interested in a low-impact master thesis. Now, to your comments: Sure man, having gotten something done is great, now the kinds of things that really make me shine inside for having done them: Creating new friendships between two similiar people, giving presentations on transhumanism or philosophy and being high regarded, seducing women whom I'm likely to love, winning in intelectual games, and more than everything, being regarded, after planning an event, as a person who really takes the fact that we only live once and thus ought to savour every moment seriously. I've been told that I'm the person who most changed their lives by at least five people. I've optimized for being considered awesome by those who know me little. These things, I like the feeling of having done. Now if you ask me about how good I feel about having written a book on Dan Dennett, about having writen three unpublished philosophical articles, or about having caused 5 people to take immensely seriously the possibility of dedicating themselves to transhumanism/singularity/utilitarianism, I would be ridiculously lying to say that it makes me happier than, say, reading less wrong replies about my comments.
So basically, what you're saying is that you get satisfaction from doing things that give you fairly immediate rewards (being considered awesome) from people. If I guess correctly, you are probably quite extroverted and like being around people. (This is fairly rare on LessWrong, and it isn't the case for me.) A possible solution would be to try to tie those things you don't get as much satisfaction from (writing a book, writing philosophy articles, etc) to getting respect and having people think you are awesome. If you can think of a way to do that, I'm guessing it would help.
I would be ridiculously lying to say that it makes me happier than, say, reading less wrong replies about my comments.
Like I said. Making the world a 'better place' is not necessarily about making just yourself happier. (Though I haven't done a huge amount on that front either.)
I should learn to drive and get my license.
Reasons I don't:
I originally took driving lessons in grade 12, when they were competing for my time with homework, working at the pool, scholarship applications, and actual sleep. Being in control of a large, potentially dangerous vehicle, and being clumsy with slow reaction times, was already stressful for me to begin with, and I think I developed a "driving=stress" association that causes mild anxiety every time I think about it, and major anxiety when I actually get in a car.
I don't live at home at the moment and have no easy access to a car to practice in. (I will be living at home in the fall.)
My parents' current car is a standard transmission. When I started learning over 2 years ago, it was in an automatic transmission car. My mother and I are both dubious that I can handle the multitasking involved without becoming freaked out.
Paying for lessons would involve spending money. I hate spending money.
I don't think I'll ever enjoy driving unless I do it enough to overcome the anxiety, and I probably won't for various reasons. (Cars and insurance and gas are expensive, bad for the environment, I can get more exercise if I bike, etc.) So it drops on my priority list.
I do not allocate enough time in making the world a better place. In particular, and I will stress only this most important particular, I do not get around doing the bureocratic things that precede execution. I plan, and stop after planning. Ex: I wrote a book but am not getting it published Everyone who meets me think I am awesome and wants to join my project, but my projects don't last enough time before the next project takes over my mind I can't pay with my money for loads of utilitarian stuff because I don't feel safe donating so I'm not actually outputting the stuff I should (websites for instance)
MY AVOIDING conditions: 1) There are always better experiential options available instead of bureaucracy. From reading Less Wrong, to going out with girlfriend, or a pic-nic, or playing card-games, watching how I met you mother. Reading Cognitive Neuroscience papers. All those are way more fun, easier, than actually getting things done 2) I'm not safe putting money into stuff that is not me because I do not alief that I am able to acquire money. Being the son of a successful engineer and having chosen to study philosophy/psychology and not buying in to the christian/American morality of work as a value in itself, I hardly think I'll want to make enough money to pay for me. Even if investing little into Utilons is something I really believe would be good for the world. 3) My life has been generally great over the course of the last quarter century, and it does not seem to be the case that going through any bureocracy was required for that. Now that my parents are stepping away, and money is being drained away, this is not the case anymore, but this is not something I alief, only something I barely know.
Being the son of a successful engineer and having chosen to study philosophy/psychology and not buying in to the christian/American morality of work as a value in itself, I hardly think I'll want to make enough money to pay for me.
Wow. I had a surprisingly strong emotional response against that. I'm still trying to parse why, and it probably says more about my psychology than about yours. I think it boils down to the following beliefs that I seem to have: a) everyone should try their best to be self-sufficient, otherwise the weight of freeloaders will drag the rest of society down, b) anything can happen to anyone at any time and if you're not trying your best to be prepared, you're an idiot. Etc. Again, I'm not trying to attack you in any way. Your system sounds reasonably healthy, as long as you can afford it financially. (I know people who are similar but who really can't afford it, and that may be coloring my perception.)
That probably means that my mind works sufficiently differently from yours that my suggestions may not work, but I'll try my best.
a) Focus on the good feeling of having gotten something done, rather than the negative feeling of starting something that seems like harder work than the 'better experiential options'. Over time, you might find that the satisfaction of having accomplished something is so addictive that it bleeds through into 'I want to start more projects and finish them, so I can have the fulfillment of having finished them.' Of course there are things that are easier than finishing difficult projects, but you might find that after a while, they aren't as fun because you become conscious of how little you've accomplished at the end of doing them. That being said, that's how my psychology works. Yours may require other tactics to get it to cooperate.
b) Your life may have been great for the past 25 years. Don't focus on your life. Making the whole world a better place is not about you. In fact, plenty of people who've tried to make the world a better place, and sometimes succeeded, have suffered in the process. It's not about you. According to utilitarian moral theories, every person's happiness is of equal weight. If the stress of putting off spontaneous, fun activities to finish projects makes you a teeny bit less happy, but it makes just 2 other people much happier, than the total sum of happiness in the world is greater and you can be at ease, having accomplished your goal.
Note to Alicorn: have you ever succeeded in getting rid of a textural or other sensory aversion through gradual exposure?
My sensory issues do morph over time, but largely outside my control. The closest thing I can think of is that when I was little, I couldn't stand denim, but then I had a pair of very soft stonewashed jeans that I did like, and thereafter I was able to touch all varieties of denim comfortably. Trying to figure out how to not be bothered by such a thing on purpose would be a little like trying to rewire myself to not mind pain: surely a worthy ultimate goal, but not currently within reach for any practical purpose. It's too base-level.
That's what I thought. It's not a simple matter of habituation, although the fact that your liking the one pair of jeans generalized to all denim suggests it might have to do with what category your mind places different textures into, rather than just how they feel.
Has this ever happened in reverse: there was a texture/other stimulus that didn't bother you until you encountered a particularly nasty instance of it, and it generalized to all instances?
My suggestion is that you learn to get over your fear of sweating. There's nothing objectively harmful about it, so it's merely a preference that can (and probably should) be changed through gradual exposure. Start slowly and work your way up. If you refuse to change your behavior in any substantial way I don't know why you're asking for advice.
ShardPhoenix, I believe that Alicorn has a form of autism (please correct me if I'm wrong, Alicorn.) Being sensitive to sensory stimuli and having aversions to some of them is common for people who suffer from autism, and I don't think these aversions are particularly easy to overcome. I'm guessing that Alicorn's aversion to sweating is in this category. She isn't just 'being lazy' and refusing to attempt to change a preference.
Note to Alicorn: have you ever succeeded in getting rid of a textural or other sensory aversion through gradual exposure?
Maybe you should consider a career in politics where having a spine is optional :P
EDIT: Wait, what am I saying... it's of cause not optional but actually prohibitively costly.
Maybe you should consider a career in politics.
No way! There's a possibility I wouldn't be able to keep everyone happy all the time! There's a possibility people would dislike me for policies I implemented! It would be WAY too stressful!
I’m a conformist, even if I would prefer not to be
I like situations that allow me to be helpful and generous
Emotionally, I don’t like disagreeing with others
Sounds like you'd score very high on tests for the personality trait "agreeableness".
Yes, I score high on Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.
If you truly did not care about what other people thought
vs.
I care comparatively less about what people think
You're right about the emotions part, but I'm certainly not bashing people as hard as Dr. House and I'm also not gonna take nice delusions of heaven away from poor old granny. Yes, of cause I too care about the emotions of people, depending on the person and the specific circumstances.
I'm also usually not the one to open up the conversation on the kind of topics we discuss here, but if people share their opinion I'll often throw my weight in and voice my unusual opinions without too much concern about tiptoeing around sensibilities of -say- the political, religious or the new age types.
Of cause I'm not claiming to be a total hardliner, deep within my brain there is such a thing as a calculation taking place about whether or not giving my real opinion to person X Y and Z will result in too much damage for me, others, or our relationship... it's just that I'm less inclined to be agreeable in comparison with others. I'm not claiming to be brain damaged after all, of cause I care as well to some (considerably less than average) extent about social repercussions.
Addendum: Agreeableness is also something that is known to rise with progressing age, so it's likely that I will become more agreeable over time, seeing how I'm still just 23. Another factor in agreeableness is impulsiveness, which thankfully diminishes with age - and I'm a fairly impulsive person. Agreeableness isn't just composed of "one thing", it's the result of several interactions.
Addendum: Agreeableness is also something that is known to rise with progressing age, so it's likely that I will become more agreeable over time, seeing how I'm still just 23. Another factor in agreeableness is impulsiveness, with also diminishes with age - and I'm a fairly impulsive person.
I'm 19, and I'm already one of the most agreeable and least impulsive people I know. I'm fucked...
I think you are thinking about the wrong kinds of parties. In fact, you are solving the wrong problem. If your goal is to network and meet people, there are much much better ways of doing that than going out to parties. Go to local clubs/meet-ups (chess, book, poker, sewing, toast masters, etc...). Meet more people through other people you already know, and through workplace if you have a job. You said you like going to church, do activities with those people. You'll meet new people there. See what fun things they do. Go to those things too.
I probably am solving the wrong problem...in fact, I'm solving someone else's problem. I'm solving the problem that my boyfriend likes going to parties and meeting people, and thinks that networking is an indispensable part of university life, and feels his social status increase if he can bring his girlfriend along, suitably dolled up, and show her off. Except that I consistently mess with his plans by not wanting to dress up and by not enjoying parties all that much. I'm pretty happy with the current rate at which I'm meeting people through work (I work at a pool and know pretty much every member who comes in during mornings), school, church, activities like taekwondo, and LessWrong meetups. Granted, most of them aren't my age, but compared to older people, people my age tend to be less interesting anyway.
If you didn't see it already, I wrote a whole post about that.
I went and tracked down the link after I made this comment. I'm not sure if I use the same strategy as you...a lot of the time, I don't really need to. I'm not easily annoyed, and my annoyance set-point is pretty malleable if I want it to be. Generally the way I go about liking someone is by having at least one in-depth conversation with them, whether about science or politics or their romantic life or drama at work. Once I convince myself that they're not a shallow, robotic automaton after all, once I can convince myself that they're like me, it feels natural to empathize rather than judge when they do something annoying... But like I said, this has come fairly easily to me. (Not to say that I don't ever feel annoyed at people, or complain about them to friends and family. I do, more than I should. But when I'm actually in the room with them, I can almost always get along civilly and even enjoy myself.)
I have actually not included any insights about myself that came as a result of my luminosity project. My hatred of surprises, for instance, was manifestly obvious; only the exact mental background, which I did not publicly disclose in the post, was dug up when I started introspecting seriously. The trouble with including personal disclosure is that it would feel uncomfortably like bragging to advertise things I like about myself; meanwhile, things I don't like about myself tend to be obsolete by the time I've properly understood them because I can fix them, and the ones I can't or haven't fixed yet wouldn't be very good advertising ("I discovered I have the following nasty trait which is still there, and you can too!").
In the interest of disclosure, I will brag some:
I have raised my happiness set point. This requires some maintenance work, but at a "neutral" time now I am happier than I was at a "neutral" time five years ago.
When I identify a mood as being non-endorsed, decidedly useless, and unpleasant, I can often simply get rid of it. This takes a few moments now, although if I leave them to fester too long it can require a night's sleep.
I can, with some concerted effort, enforce my desire to like certain people (whether this be for comfort reasons, i.e. I'll have to be around them a lot, or for practical reasons, i.e. it would be instrumental to befriend them). This is more difficult with some people than others but I have yet to try very hard to like someone without being able to sincerely do it.
I can, with some concerted effort, enforce my desire to like certain people (whether this be for comfort reasons, i.e. I'll have to be around them a lot, or for practical reasons, i.e. it would be instrumental to befriend them). This is more difficult with some people than others but I have yet to try very hard to like someone without being able to sincerely do it.
I have been able to do this for a number of years. Most people don't seem to realize how useful it is to be in control of who you like/dislike. Disliking someone is uncomfortable and it generally doesn't help. Congratulations on teaching yourself to do this; I expect it's difficult when it doesn't already come naturally.
Ultimately, I have an awfully long way to go if I want to be rational, as opposed to being someone who’s just interested in reading about math and science.
What exactly is your benchmark for being "rational"? If you mean becoming more openly critical in situations where your agreeableness prevents you from it, you should be aware that there are topics much more dangerous than religion where an uncompromising quest for truth might lead you to clash with the respectable opinion, both public and private. With this in mind, and considering the rest of what you wrote, it seems to me that for you, becoming hostile towards religion would not mean becoming more rational in any meaningful sense of the term. It would merely be a way to signal to a certain sort of people, without increasing the accuracy of your beliefs in any way, and distracting from topics that are far more difficult and dangerous, and thus a more critical test of rationality.
What exactly is your benchmark for being "rational"? If you mean becoming more openly critical in situations where your agreeableness prevents you from it, you should be aware that there are topics much more dangerous than religion where an uncompromising quest for truth might lead you to clash with the respectable opinion, both public and private.
That is not what I meant. I have no intention in becoming more hostile to religion; I'm having fun with it at the moment. My main issues are a) right now it doesn't feel like it hurts much to change my mind, meaning I'm probably not really changing my mind and I need to learn how to do it better, and b) my current schema for living life is deeply flawed. I care way too much about what others think of me, I've unthinkingly absorbed a ton of social conventions that I wish I hadn't, and my inability to say no means that I'm overbooked and exhausted all the time. Also I behave very irrationally when it comes to romantic relationships, but that's another story. And I'm a workaholic, though I would really be happier and get more done that I care about if I was able to work a little bit less.
You're the negative mirror image of myself.
I'm very lucky to live in this day and age. If I was born any sooner, (or in some other place) I'd probably be killed by some aggravated superstitious mob or the officials - that is if I was indeed stupid enough to talk as I please. Contrariety and a need to oppose run incredibly deep within me.
I am majorly disgusted by religion and have real trouble to sit through a church service. I'm just counting down the minutes while mentally cringing at virtually every single stupid thing the pathetically deluded pastor drivels from the pulpit, until at last the primitive medieval circus grinds to a halt and I feel like can finally take a deep breath of sanity once I left the building.
I despise human hypocrisy intensely and am somewhat nauseated every time I detect it in others and myself. But ultimately, I believe at the very bottom of my behavior lies a simple mixture of genetic components and what I picked up from my father (who was also somewhat of a rebel in the former Soviet Union, but without any real opportunity to vent). Maybe it runs even deeper than that and I'm just the human archetype of the "male rogue" that can be encountered in many species - not dominant or agreeable enough to gain the status of an alpha male, but way too pretentious and certainly not submissive enough to suck up to anyone or cut back on my directness. I'm not quite as disagreeable as Dr. House fortunately, but he could serve as an exaggerated caricature of myself if I felt miserable and took any pleasure in cynicism.
In many ways I wish I were more like you, it would certainly make my life and enduring (some) human company so much easier. People only want to hear what they like to hear and I almost can't help myself but to provoke and startle, if given the opportunity.
At any rate you got nothing to apologize for. If anything, your attitude is much better suited than mine, if your goal is to make other people think more rational. I'm sure you can spin things in such a way, that will enable you to much more easily and effectively convert people into rationalists, than any confrontational hardliner could hope to accomplish in comparison. As long as you don't allow yourself (or others) to sucker you out of your rational frame of mind, your "skill" of hyper-agreeableness is much more of an asset than you seem to realize. Agreeableness indeed seems to be a rather rare social skill around these parts of the internet and the overall rationalist community.
We need more people like you around, especially for PR-purposes.
Addendum: By the way, I may have to clarify that my disgust with religiosity doesn't extend to the people themselves. Often my attitude may get misinterpreted as me somehow despising religious people, which is not the case at all. I suppose an intuitive explanation of how I feel about religion would be to imagine that you're the parent of a "disconnected" Scientologist. You can hate every single bit of the meme with every fiber in your body but still love the person "infected". I suspect many rationalists feel similarly. Religion is a grim reflection of just about anything that's terribly wrong with human cognition and morality - and instead of being actively opposed and ironed out, our society indulges in superstition and dresses it up with nice colors and hats and even let's it run the show. It just utterly crushes my spirit when I hear something like "representatives of the church attend a meeting with politics and industry to discuss the future of nuclear energy" - as if a pastor or bishop actually knows anything about anything. (Let alone something about morality and ethics).
People only want to hear what they like to hear and I almost can't help myself but to provoke and startle, if given the opportunity.
I've known people like that. From what I've seen, for many people it's a game to make social interaction more interesting. I play it very poorly (for example, I almost never get sarcasm unless it's pointed out to me, and even if I do, I'm usually too lazy to come up with something sarcastic to say in return, so I just ignore it, which is awfully boring for the person being sarcastic.) Is this why you do this?
I'm sure you can spin things in such a way, that will enable you to much more easily and effectively convert people into rationalists, than any confrontational hardliner could hope to accomplish in comparison.
I am very good at engaging in dialogue with just about anybody and presenting my points in such a way that it's natural for them to agree. I think the most important component is making it obvious to people that "I don't dislike you because you disagree with me; if anything, I like the fact that we disagree, because maybe I can learn something new from you." Even confrontational people usually respond well to that kind of attitude, and it's a win-win situation because I get to engage in the discussion that I want.
"representatives of the church attend a meeting with politics and industry to discuss the future of nuclear energy" - as if a pastor or bishop actually knows anything about anything. (Let alone something about morality and ethics).
I disagree. After spending some very formative years of my adolescence singing in the church choir, I've found that the ministers do seem to...well, maybe know more about morality isn't the right phrase, but they've thought about it more. A large percentage of the population never thinks about morality. Some because they just live their life without really questioning anything (like at least 50% of my fellow pool staff), some because they base their values off selfishness and don't want to have to change it. The Church morality has its flaws, for example the implicit biblical attitudes towards sex before marriage, women, homosexuality, etc. But in the Anglican church anyway, and even in the more conservative Pentecostal church, I know hardly any actual Christians who believe that someone is inherently bad for being homosexual. There are a lot of "good" memes in the Christian morality complex, ideas of being radically generous and loving your enemies. I have seen some incredible acts of generosity in the Pentecostal church especially.
There's also a sample bias in the kind of people who become ministers, especially Anglican ministers (this branch of Christianity is already extremely liberal; they do gay marriages and everything.) They tend to be fairly intellectual, i.e. introspective and likely to meditate on moral principles, and they tend to already like people and want to help them. And they spend years studying the material. Thus, compared to Joe Smith who works at the movie theater, I think most pastors do know more about morality and ethics. Of course, someone who's put in the same amount of time thinking about it but isn't limited to agreeing with a book written two thousand years ago is still more likely to be right, but I don't know that many people like that firsthand.
Nice self-introduction. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "mystical experience of music," but if you mean spine-tingling transportation, I think that's pretty common, even among us'ns. For example, here's a good performance of a piece my own group (not this one) sang a year ago - turn it up :)
Thank you, that was beautiful. Here is a link to a neat piece my choir did this past Christmas. (Fast-forward to about the halfway point if you want to skip the massively long introduction.) I am actually standing in the second row on the far right, just behind the choir director's head when there's a close up of him.
Taking evening walks while listening to audiobooks seems to deal with all of those issues, assuming you aren't like one of my friends who can't stand audiobooks. Audiobooks aren't free, but if you take 3 30 minute walks a week it will take you months to get through a single book.
Audiobooks can be free if you get CDs from a library. (Then if you want, burn them onto your computer.) Also they may be available online as torrents.
b+c: drink caffeine, not alcohol?
Have considered that. I probably would have more fun. And be more social. Although I enjoy the sensation of being drunk, I tend to be antisocial.
a) What are you doing at parties, then? You seem to do something wrong. b) Go to a party where not everyone drinks, often quite a few persons will drive home so they won't drink. Alternatively, drive other people home. c) You can shift your sleep schedule by going to sleep 15 minutes (or more) later each day. It's a quite simple mechanism, and it works. d) Simple: attend a dancing course! It's a simple yet valuable skill, worth the money and the time. Alternatively, you could watch tutorials on youtube. e) You don't. You don't want to tell me that you're busy with such other things every single evening. If that really is the case, take one of those activities and either let it fall or do it somewhen (I'll just use this word, I don't care whether it's proper English) else.
Now, because that was your true rejection, it's party time for you. Let your friend take you to a party, and have a good time.
I do have fun at some parties, for example pool staff parties with people I've known for years, where all the gossip is relevant to me and I get all the in-jokes. I simply am not extroverted enough to enjoy going to parties where nearly everyone is a stranger, and I have to keep up with my boyfriend's manic introducing-himself-to-people pace. So the real solution is to track down more parties where I'll know the people well, but that reduces the number of people I'll meet, which according to my boyfriend is the point of going to parties.
Your dancing comment is very relevant. I should. I'm currently going swing-dancing once a week, and I should really take a couple of hip-hop classes or something. It would help a lot and I might actually enjoy clubbing then. I do like most of the music they play in clubs.
And no, I'm not busy with things every single evening, but there are an awful lot of days each week when I leave the house first thing in the morning and don't get home until 9 pm, after having been on my feet or in the pool all day and then biking halfway across the city. Yeah, technically my Saturday nights are free, but I'm exhausted, and when I'm exhausted I get antisocial.
Shifting sleep schedules around by going to sleep later each day does not work for people who are strongly aligned to certain sleep schedules.
Or for people who work 6 am shifts multiple times per week, and start work at 9 am the rest of the time. I could conceivably stay up til 2 am partying if I stayed up til 2 am every night and didn't have to get up until 10 every morning, but the real problem is that I can't get up at 5 am on a Friday morning and be able to stay up late on a Friday night. I could conceivably change this by working fewer opening shifts and more evening shifts, but I like getting up early and then having my evenings at home.
I should go to more parties and events, and introduce myself to more people, so that I can 'network' and build a base of contacts who might be useful in the future. People who tell me this: my boyfriend.
Reasons I don't: a) I don't actually have all that much fun at parties, compared to the amount of fun I have, for example, singing in church. b) Parties with people in my age group almost always involve alcohol, and it's extremely boring to be the only sober person at a party, and alcohol is expensive. c) I am a morning person, emphatically not a night person. I can occasionally stay up late reading or writing, activities that I can get caught up in, but in social settings I start yawning and getting sleepy and boring around 11 pm. The last thing I want to be doing at 11 pm is getting ready to go to a club. d) I'm not a good dancer and I feel self-conscious in clubs. e) I have a busy enough schedule already.
I do not exercise.
(Caveat: I will refrain from taking any advice that would lead to me starting to significantly exercise until I have a diagnosis and a treatment plan of my apparent heart condition, which doesn't indicate it would be unsafe or otherwise a medically bad idea. I'd be really surprised if my doctor told me not to exercise, but in case she does I want to wait and make sure that my body is really lying to me when it says "don't do that, bad things will happen".)
Reasons (and existing known routes around each):
Sweat is horrible, and I overheat too easily. (Swimming gets around these; outdoor exercise in cold weather, interestingly, does not.)
Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues). (Anything indoors or at night gets around the sunshine thing. Other environmental issues are mostly limited to smelly gyms and excessively humid indoor pool facilities. Anything outdoors and at night and in nice weather gets around this.)
Many forms of it are financially costly (equipment, facility use). (Going for walks does not have this problem.)
It is boring. (When I tried jujitsu, it did not have this particular problem. Merely being able to listen to music does not solve this, although it could combine with another partial solution. If this problem is solved by simultaneously watching a movie, it has to be in a context where I can turn on subtitles, because I will not be able to reliably hear dialogue over any non-perfectly-silent form of exercise.)
Known route around all of these problems: happening to have free access to an outdoor pool which is open at night and a person who will go with me and chat while we both backstroke laps. This would be great but I don't happen to have access to a free outdoor pool that is open in the dark.
Known route around all of these problems: happening to have free access to an outdoor pool which is open at night and a person who will go with me and chat while we both backstroke laps. This would be great but I don't happen to have access to a free outdoor pool that is open in the dark.
Make friends with someone who has a backyard pool and invite yourself to swim laps with them. I don't actually know where you live and what the climate is like there, but even if it's colder, you can at least swim for part of the year. Ask everyone you know if they know anyone who has a backyard pool, and invite yourself.
Ideal long-term solution: build your own backyard pool. Probably not financially feasible right now, though.
Actually for me it's all mental. Normally I hate being hungry: that gnawing feeling in your stomach that says "FEED ME NOW". But if I'm trying to lose weight, I somehow flip my mental state such that the gnawing feeling is a GOOD thing: that's what losing weight feels like. As long as you've got that feeling, you're losing weight. However, if you eat enough that the gnawing feeling goes away, that's a bad thing: you're not losing weight any more. And god forbid you should eat enough to actually feel FULL - that's the absolute opposite of losing weight! Whatever happens, you don't want that!
Because of the mental flip, I don't feel like I'm depriving myself of something - instead I feel like I'm moving towards a goal, which is a positive feeling, not a negative one.
I wish I could tell others how to perform that mental flip, but I really wouldn't know how to start - it's one of those things you just DO.
I have definitely achieved that state before and I know exactly what you mean. Unfortunately, it was while I was a) not especially overweight, only thought I was, being 14 and self-consciously trying to be anorexic so I would be "less ugly and more popular", and b) swimming 7 times a week. I now associate making myself hungry with that not-especially-healthy period in my psychological development, and also with constantly feeling like I'm about to pass out. Also, when I've used that technique in the past, once I've either lost the weight I wanted to lose or given up, I tend to stop caring and just eat high-calorie foods all the time. I can definitely see how it would work in specific circumstances, though.
There are a lot more things that people can consider a 'habit' than most people would consider, I would expect. It's easy to think of 'getting up at 5 AM' or 'eating well' or 'exercising' to be a habit. I've witnessed exercise as a habit, to be sure, when I watched my siblings - who were very active in sports - get downright surly if they didn't have time for their morning jog.
But there's a lot of small habits in everything we do, that we don't really notice. Necessary habits. When someone asks you how you are, the habitual answer is 'Fine, thank you,' or something similar. It's what people expect. The entire greeting ritual is habitualness, to the point that if you disrupt the greeting, it throws people off.
The most important habits this can be used to engender and train yourself, relative to this site, are the habits of rationality. For instance, the habit of asking 'why?' Amusingly enough, this is the habit of breaking habits.
I feel bad. Why? I'm not that sort of person. Why? I don't like that. Why? I do like that! Why? I don't believe you. Why?
This can also be the habit of listening. It's so easy to cross something off a list of things that you'll consider - for instance, aliens, or ghosts. Someone claims that they believe in aliens. I see many people who absolutely refuse to even consider that. It's stupid. The arguments are all the same. No one's ever actually seen one, they just know someone who's seen one. The arguments for not listening are many and varied...
But it takes only a couple minutes, when someone tells you that they believe in aliens, to listen and actually appraise their reason. And I mean, really listen. Tell yourself, "Well, it's possible I'm wrong. Let's hear." The thought, in your head, is more vital than the act of listening.
If you act like you're listening, but your thoughts are saying, "There is no possible way they are right, I'm just listening because rationality demands it, and I'll be able to dismiss their arguments in a moment," then you're closing your mind. But if you truly let yourself listen, and tell yourself, in the silence of your mind, that there's a chance they're right, then you open yourself up to amazing things... even if it's not something that supports what they're arguing, you might come across some stray fact, some mental structure, that you hadn't considered before, and it could open up some level of understanding on an otherwise unrelated area of consideration, such as, "Ah, wait... what if this is why people act in this way?"
What I find the most important part of this article is not 'how can we use our thoughts to create habits,' but instead 'be more aware of the thoughts you have - are they the thoughts you want to become word and act?' Just having a thought does not guarantee it will become word or act, but if you find yourself in the habit of evaluating the thoughts running through your mind ... you will be far more able to encourage the good habits and destroy the bad habits.
Only then can you move forward to 'create' habits... for instance, what you were saying about sustainable habits, and coming up with exceptions for 'new habits' - you need an all or nothing approach, or else you think your way around it and make excuses. That suggests that your thought was not controlled, and that you think you're the sort of person who makes excuses. What if, instead of trying to get into the habit of eating less meat ... you instead had a goal of trying to create a habit of not making excuses for yourself?
Not trying to target you specifically, but more thinking about the topic on a much more general level and tossing out some general ideas that might apply to a number of different people.
What I find the most important part of this article is not 'how can we use our thoughts to create habits,' but instead 'be more aware of the thoughts you have - are they the thoughts you want to become word and act?'
I think that's one of the most powerful messages of the quote. A thought doesn't have to become word or action, but an unquestioned thought, a thought that is allowed to determine what kind of person we think we are, is much likelier to become word, action, habit, character...etc. Whereas if a thought that is stopped in its tracks and corrected, then it will stop there. And yes, that has a lot to do with asking 'why'.
Intuitively, this feels true. I rarely do things based on how much pleasure they bring me. Some of my decisions are indirectly linked to future pleasure, or other people's pleasure, i.e. choosing to work 6 am shifts instead of sleeping in because then I won't be poor, or doing things I don't really want to but said I would do because other people are relying on me and their plans will be messed up if I don't do it, and I wouldn't want them to do that to me... Actually, when I think about it, an awful lot of my actions have more to do with other people's pleasure than with my own, something which the pleasure machine doesn't fulfill. In fact, I would worry that a pleasure machine would distract me from helping others.
True: and you can also impose 'drinking less' through saying 'I will drink a pint of water between each alcoholic drink' or 'I will drink no more than X drinks a week.
When I saw this response, I thought you'd missed my point, but actually I think you've put your finger on the nub of the issue: my successes are to do with highly specific, clear-cut things that involve total abstinence on one front. Obviously the specific side helps in itself, and all-out approaches aren't necessary. But I find it easier to stick to the all-out ones for some reason.
But I find it easier to stick to the all-out ones for some reason.
In the short run. Until it becomes really, really inconvenient to never drink, even when all your friends are drinking and you're sober and bored to death, or never eat junk food, even when the junk food in question is your best friend's birthday cake. All-or-nothing is much easier for periods of days to weeks, because it stops you from negotiating with yourself. The danger of all-or-nothing, though, is that if you do eat your friend's birthday cake, or drink with your friends, it might be harder to go straight back to all-or-nothing the next day. Whereas a five-year-old habit of 'only drinking when everyone else is, to a maximum of twice a week, and spacing each drink half an hour apart to a maximum of five drinks per night' could accomodate this.
When I try to generate a new habit, I usually ask myself "Do I want to keep this up for the rest of my life?" and "Would it even benefit me to keep it up for the rest of my life?" If not, the initial habit needs re-shaping.
Very interesting post: but I wonder what counts as a 'habit'. 'Getting up at 5am for swimming three times a week' is very different to 'eating healthily', and I think they need to be distinguished. The first sort is more specific and rigid: you know WHAT you're meant to do and (more importantly?) you know WHEN you've failed to hit it.
As an example of these two kinds of habit:
I have tried to cut down drinking by 'drinking less' or 'only drinking when it's a particularly special occasion', and within weeks this went back to default of 'drinking when I wanted'. Ditto with 'eating less meat', 'eating healthier food' etc.
On the other hand, I have also had times of quite happily not drinking AT ALL, or not eating meat AT ALL: within a few weeks, I get to a point where I'm quite content with this, and only start drinking or eating meat because I've reached the end of the intended time of 'fasting' or because of more external events.
Now, I'm not sure whether the latter sort of habit is actually more sustainable or just easier to sustain right at the start - or possibly it depends on the purpose. For me, the absolute terms make the system feel external: I can't think my way round it and make excuses on individual cases.
Other people have the same experience?
I have tried to cut down drinking by 'drinking less' or 'only drinking when it's a particularly special occasion', and within weeks this went back to default of 'drinking when I wanted'. Ditto with 'eating less meat', 'eating healthier food' etc.
'Eating healthier food' is not, I don't think, in the same category as 'drinking less'. You can impose it on yourself by, for example, making yourself eat whatever you count as "healthy food" before you go near the "junk food", with the necessary consequence that you'll eat more healthy food, and less junk food because you'll be full. Also, all of those categories can be turned specific. Eating healthy can 'eat at least 3 fruits every day, less than 1 fried thing.'
Re: dancing.
There's almost always a surplus of women at dancing-lessons. If you really don't want the men touching you - you can always volunteer to be the "man" to some of the other women. Plus you really get a better feel for how the dance works if you learn it from both sides. :)
That's actually a really good idea! (Although in swing dancing, it's a lot harder work being the man because you lead, while the woman follows.) Also, the touching thing is getting better with time. It bothered me less the second time I went.
I'm pretty sure, come to think of it, that everything I've ever trained myself to do or be has been as a result of "I am the kind of person who" thinking. I suspect that it would be a lot harder to do that consciously with any real effect, but it's an interesting thought!
Maybe "I am the kind of person who can resist those crisps" would work with enough application. Maybe...
I use this kind of thinking all the time. 'I have done [blank] which was difficult and required willpower, therefore I am the kind of person who can do difficult things that require willpower...therefore I can resist those chips." (Or whatever. Actually I don't usually resist chips if they're free.)
My kids are still very young, so they're not self-sufficient readers yet, but they really like story-time, so it's looking good that they'll grow up into book lovers (and I'm sure they got book-lover genes from my wife and I ;).
I don't see TV as inherently bad - in fact, some of the kids programming on Treehouse in Canada is quite good! It's just a tool that is particularly prone to misuse.
As an aside - one of the shows "Guess with Jess" teaches a kid-version of hypothesis formation and testing and inferential reasoning.
I don't see TV as inherently bad - in fact, some of the kids programming on Treehouse in Canada is quite good!
I've sometimes regretted not watching TV for this reason. When I was in seventh grade, my friend called me 'culturally deprived'. A lot of kids watched the same TV shows and talked about them, and I didn't get the references. Whereas up until high school, hardly anyone had read the same books that I had. In a way, I was excluded from pop culture. And my general knowledge in areas that don't specifically interest me, like politics, is probably much lower as a result of not having been plunked in front of educational shows.
Still, I think that not having the habit of watching TV to relax outweighs those downsides. I'm able to get a lot more done in the time I don't spend watching TV.
There's a simpler explanation then either this, or seatbelts, that I've discovered in my field research as a parent ;). Television, for young kids, is a super-stimulus that completely captures their attention. For parents, this means you don't have to attend to your kid - you can do other things without being interrupted with questions or requests, and because their attention is fully occupied, you don't have to monitor that closely. It's easy to imagine that using TV in this way is a great temptation for some types of parents (or, arguably, most types) - there's always chores around the house to do, and you need a break every so often, etc. After a while, I'm sure both parents and kids forget there's other fun stuff do to, and you now have a TV habit. It's hard to break, too - kids tend to flip out when you turn it off on them.
Another reason that I'm so glad my parents didn't have a TV when I was growing up, although sci-fi books provided an adequate superstimulus. I'm pretty sure my parents figured out by the time I was 8 that giving me tons of books for Christmas and birthdays was the best way to keep me out of trouble.
I agree that in practical terms you are probably correct that things like acquiring the character trait of perseverance will work.
My only objection was that the way you phrased it, you seemed to leave no room for the possibility of something different happening. Perhaps your theory is airtight enough to do so; but I am curious what you would think if someone came to you and convinced you that they had tried to acquire a character trait in this way and failed.
Perhaps your theory is airtight enough to do so; but I am curious what you would think if someone came to you and convinced you that they had tried to acquire a character trait in this way and failed.
I would say "really? you're not at all better at perseverence than when you started? Not even a tiny bit?" And maybe they wouldn't be, but in that case my theory would be wrong. It seems to me that it would be very hard not to change in a permanent way after following a new habit for a year.
Did they ever encourage it?
It definitely used to happen a lot, judging by the sample size in twin adoption studies (usually 200-something pairs of separated twins).
Someone else linked to that somewhere in the comments.
Where?
I went through all the comments and tried to find it. I can only conclude that I saw it somewhere else. I'll keep looking and see if I can find it for you.
Schwabe, L., & Wolf, O. T. (2011). Stress-induced modulation of instrumental behavior: From goal-directed to habitual control of action. Behavioural Brain Research, 219(2), 321-328.
If I'm reading that article correctly, I think they're saying that if you learn something while under stress, you're more likely to make a habit of it than if you learn it while not under stress. The text leading up to the footnote lead me to expect something about a connection between habitual vs instrumental learning and performance under stress:
Imagine the advantages of automatically setting aside an hour a day to exercise! Not only will you experience the health benefits, but if it’s an automatic rather than an intentional behavior, you’ll tend to exercise whether or not you feel motivated on given day, even under stress, even when you're tired and drained after a bad day.
Am I misreading either the OP or the cited paper?
If I did understand it right, the cited paper supports the hypothesis that boot camps are effective. They teach people while they are under artificial stress so the resulting learnings are habitual rather than instrumental. It also explains why PTSD happens.
Were you able to find the actual article? I was able to access the PDF using my university password, which is why I couldn't post it. What I gathered from reading part, not all, of the article is that behaviours that are automatic, i.e. controlled by habit, tend to take over under stress. Thus, if your decision to exercise is consciously controlled, i.e. it isn't yet a habit, then it becomes much harder to choose to exercise under stress, and you'll tend to revert to actions that are habitual, i.e. going on the Internet and eating junk food if those are your habits.
I did only read part of the article in detail and skimmed the rest. Bad habit.
I remember a post describing a study that showed that telling others about your resolve makes it less likely that you'll do it (can't remember relevant keywords to look up the post).
Someone else linked to that somewhere in the comments. The idea is that if you tell all your friends about your high-status plan to write a novel, and they congratulate you, then it becomes a 'social reality'...you get some of the benefits of having written a novel without having done any work, and so you're less likely to do the work.
I wonder what would happen if you told your friends about your plans and they were extremely skeptical. From personal experience, I think that to a degree you feel more motivated to 'show them' and 'prove yourself', as I did when nearly all my friends and family were skeptical that I could learn to sing. I did learn to sing. However, my friends and family were also skeptical that I could become the youngest person to swim across Lake Ontario (at 14) and I didn't end up doing it...without my parents' material and financial support, it was pretty much impossible.
That data should be possible to obtain, but there are some confounding factors -- I can definitely imagine a family more inclined to drive than walk passing the factors that led to those preferences on to their children, for example. And I'm not sure how you'd control for that.
And I'm not sure how you'd control for that.
Most studies that try to separate genetic factors from "nurture" factors provided by the parents will twins that were adopted separately. It's a small-ish subject pool though, and probably not recent since I don't think they encourage separating siblings for adoption now.
This makes me think that one could probably graph result:time logarithmically. At the start, you get much higher results out of just a bit more time, but as you aim for higher goals, it takes progressively more time for each improvement.
Given the diminishing returns involved, it'd probably be a useful life skill to be aware of these curves, and able to work with them. I'd probably be much happier being decent at swimming and four other things, rather than a top competitor at swimming...
I'd probably be much happier being decent at swimming and four other things, rather than a top competitor at swimming...
That was basically the choice I made when I left competitive swimming at age 16. (In terms of times, especially in short-distance, I peaked at around 13-14 and was actually getting slower in several events despite swimming 6-7 times per week.) Quitting allowed me to coach kids and work part-time at the pool during my last year of high school, which in retrospect was a lot more valuable than one more year of competition. I'm still the fastest swimmer on the pool staff, and the fact that my 100-meter time is almost 20 seconds slower than it was has no practical effect on anything except my ego.
I don't like quitting stuff, and I need to overcome a lot of inertia to start new things, but I'm attempting to this summer for that reason: I think doing something new, where I can see a rapid learning curve, could be really satisfying. (Swing dancing=random men asking me to dance and then touching me=pretty much my worst nightmare. But my boyfriend thinks it will be good for my social skills and he's probably right.)
I've wondered whether carseats and seatbelts end up training some children to accept not moving much.
You'd have to do a study of whether children were more active before seatbelts became common. Which may be impossible. I would expect that children who spend less time in cars (i.e. who live close enough to school that they can walk) would be less likely to develop couch-potato habits.
Also I'm pretty sure you can't improve your swimming times with half an hour once a week.
I used to do low-key competitive swimming as a kid, and trained at most once a week. I didn't improve fast, but I definitely improved. Same with pull-ups and jogging now that I'm an adult. I've noticed that once a week actually gives great returns when I'm new to something, and then seems to slope off to a very gradual improvement after a month or two.
So do my kids in swim team. I guess what I'm saying is that I can't improve my swimming times by going once a week. Maybe if I wanted to improve my running times (something I've never done before) once a week would be sufficient.
Not sure if you can get cardio with just lifting weights.
Lifting weights can give impressive cardio gains if you choose the right kind of lift. For example if you split the 30 minutes into 4 sessions of tabata backsquats you are going to get some powerful cardio improvement.
Neat. I should try that.
Shouldn't you improve to a plateau? At least in the limiting case where you have not swum at all in a while?
It's true that half an hour a week is enough to learn a few technique changes that can make the stroke more efficient, and thus faster. But even my adult private lessons, who come once a week for a half-hour of stroke correction plus another few times a week to practice, rarely improve their two-length (50 m) time by more than a second or two. Improving your swimming technique takes more than knowing what to do.
I agree, most personality traits can be aquired, even if they are heavily selected against genetically. But it isn't always desirable to do so, even if these habits are considered socially useful.
For instance, I'm naturally a night person, but I developed through self discipline, over the course of holding down a standard 9-5 job, a habit of 'early rising', even on weekends. This had, over a period of time, a seriously negative effect on my health and cognitive ability. Switching to a job that allowed me to revert to a more natural sleep cycle was a much better solution for me and my employers.
It's important to do a cost-benefit analysis when attempting to change behaviour, sometimes a change of environment is more feasible.
Agreed. Also, someone who has naturally strong self-control and feels guilty when they "slip up" can still develop a habit of not exercising and eating junk food. That doesn't mean it's a useful habit.
Note: I think the "natural sleep cycle" problem might have more to do with social expectations than innate tendencies. For example, I work mostly mornings, including several shifts a week that start at 6 am. My sleep schedule is set at 11pm-7am, although I can fall asleep as early as 9:30 if I know I have to be up at 5:00, and I have a lot of trouble staying up for, say, parties. I miss out on most of the reputation-related benefits of actually going out with people my age...when I do, I'm usually a tired wreck by midnight. It seems to me that anyone who wanted to make more of an effort than I do to be social would necessarily sacrifice the ability to easily wake up early.
BTW the first link takes you to a page of gibberish. I posted the second link with the references in the article, thank you.
Anyone can develop any “character trait.”
This claim struck me as somewhat more strong than can be supported. The neurological and genetic basis for some "character traits" is real.
Agreed in that personality traits have some genetic basis, and so it might be harder for someone who is, say, impulsive, to enact a habit of being thorough and methodical. Or someone who is shy and introverted and/or inflexible to enact a habit of being spontaneous. I still think that the brain is plastic enough that even genetically based traits can be modified or at least circumvented to some degree.
Words also become thoughts. Communicating (even to yourself) an analysis or judgment will make you reluctant to gainsay it. I'm hoping to learn to hold my tongue in ways that leave me more flexible, or at least happier (for example: in most cases, why bother expressing contempt or outrage?).
On the other hand, creativity sometimes requires building speculation on speculation (when verification costs too much); perhaps all that's needed is a delight in tearing down what's faulty.
I was thinking about that as I was writing this...I thought I'd mentioned it at some point, but I guess not. Thus telling my friends I'm going to go to the gym or the pool later makes it a lot more likely that I'll actually go, even if they can't verify whether I do or not. Useful tactic.
Imagine the advantages of automatically setting aside an hour a day to exercise!
I set aside an hour a week, or 30 minutes if I focus well, following the instructions in Body by Science by McGuff, but that's weight lifting instead of swimming. Does anyone have good reason to believe you can do better than McGuff's procedure? My goal is to have a durable body and incur a minimal risk of injury while getting there.
30 minutes a week does something, I'm sure. Not sure if you can get cardio with just lifting weights. I like having good cardio because it allows me to do things like, say, run all the way to the bus stop if I'm late or bike 3 hours in a day if that's what my schedule demands. I'm sure your potential for injuries is lower than mine...I seem to suffer one minor injury after another, and that's with swimming, pretty much the lowest-impact sport ever.
Also I'm pretty sure you can't improve your swimming times with half an hour once a week. Or running, skiing, cycling, etc...
Thanks a million. I was using Scholar's Portal with my university password, but all the clicking in the world couldn't seem to bring me to a page that didn't require a password.
I liked your post; it was well written with good practical illustration of your point. And it is definitely the case that lesswrong needs more posts about creating good habits on a practical level.
However I do have one concern; when you say that it is possible for anyone to acquire any character trait. I know eliezer has repeatedly bemoaned the state of "nothing fucking works," and I can imagine simple physiological mechanisms such that some character traits are practically impossible for certain people to acquire.
Agreed. I'm sure it would be harder for Eliezer to acquire the character trait of "being a fit person who exercises an hour every day" simply because his body seems to give less positive reinforcement. He stated in one post that although he tries to walk an hour a day (or something equivalent, I can't remember) he feels exhausted afterwards, rather than euphoric like a lot of people do after exercising. (Then again, the "runner's high", for me anyway, comes at its strongest after very intense exercise. Walking an hour leaves me pretty exhausted too.)
However, I'm sure there are invisible health effects to Eliezer's physical exercise, just in terms of cardiovascular health and aerobic capacity. As far as I can tell, his attitude is "I don't get as much visible benefit from exercise anyway, but I'm going to keep trying anyway." Perserverence is a character trait, too.
Action and habit
I remember a poster that hung on the wall of my seventh grade classroom. It went like this:
Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become your character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.
It was as a competitive swimmer that these words were the most meaningful to me. Most sports are ultimately about the practice, about repeating an action over and over and over again, so that actions become habits and habits become character. The fleeting thought that I really hate getting up at 5:00 am for swim practice is just that: a fleeting thought. But if I justified it with words, speaking it aloud to my parents or siblings or friends, it became a fact that others knew about me, much realer than just a wispy thought. The action of forgetting-on-purpose to set my alarm, or faking sick, was a logical next step. And one missed practice might not be huge, in the long run, but it led easily to a habit of missing practice, say, once a week. A year of this, and I would start to think of myself as the kind of person who missed practice once a week, because after all, isn’t it silly of anyone to expect a twelve-year-old to get up at 5:00 three times a week? And that attitude could very easily have led, over a couple of years, to quitting the team.
As a matter of fact, none of this happened. As a child I had a large measure of Conscientiousness, and putting long-term goals, like getting best times and earning my coach’s approval, ahead of short-term goals like sleeping another three hours, came to me without too much difficulty. The cycle went the other way. My habitual response to the brief temptation to sleep in, namely screw sleep, this is how you’re going to get faster, my verbal statements to just about everyone that I loved swimming, and the action of getting up three times a week and trekking to the pool after school another three times all reinforced the habit of working hard...which, over the five or so years that I competed, did become a fairly permanent character trait that generalized to things like school and work.
Of course, the quote doesn’t only apply to hard work. It applies to being generous or to being thrifty, to kindness or anger. A thought that happens once leaves a small trail. If it happens a thousand times, it leaves a deep trench. As positive (I can do anything I set my mind to!) or negative (I always fail, no matter how hard I try) thoughts become associated with given situations, they lend those situations their emotional colour. Swim practice, or school or work, becomes either positive or negative.
Actions and Habits
A lot of what I’ve read on LessWrong about habits is in the context of breaking them. And yes, in some ways habits can act as a cognitive bias, a way of filtering the world that causes us to miss important opportunities, and habits are just as likely to be "bad" as to be good. (Maybe more likely.) But habits are also a powerful tool to get stuff done. As most of us know, an intention to do something doesn't necessarily translate to doing it. However, according to this article1, the strength of habit predicts how much students exercise, which their intention to exercise often to fails to predict.
Habits are routinized behaviors that have been frequently paired with stable environmental contexts and, as a result of this pairing, are automatically rather than intentionally set in motion… Habit theory postulates that the intention–exercise relationship is a function of habit strength with a stronger intention–exercise relationship at lower levels of habit strength.
Imagine the advantages of automatically setting aside an hour a day to exercise! Not only will you experience the health benefits, but if it’s an automatic rather than an intentional behavior, you’ll tend to exercise whether or not you feel motivated on given day, even under stress, even when you're tired and drained after a bad day.2 And yes, this is a habit I’ve (re)constructed in myself after a post-swim-team year of barely exercising at all. Having been active as a child and teenager, it was probably easier for me to build it into a habit than it would have been for a lifelong couch potato, but it would still be possible for them. Likewise, as far as I can tell from anecdotal evidence, it’s much easier to stick to a long-term habit of healthy eating than to a temporary diet.
How can you turn something into a habit, as opposed to a series of intentional actions? This post suggests planning for the long-term rather than the short term. “If I’m really good with my diet this month, I’ll lose weight and then I can start eating whatever I like again” is not a good long term motivational thought. Even in the short term I’ve found that I resent the things I force myself to do with this excuse, whereas I don’t resent my habitual behaviors like “exercise every day” and “never buy fast food or unhealthy snacks.”
Habits and Character
The habit of exercising doesn’t necessarily influence other behaviors, but if maintained for long enough, it segues into the character trait of being a health-conscious person with good self-control. If I have evidence to present to myself that I have healthy habits (“just look, I swam for an hour three to five times a week for a whole year, I must be the kind of person who’s fit”) then it becomes easier to start new “good” habits, like healthy eating. I can correct my fleeting thoughts of how tempting the free baked goods are, tell myself “of course you have enough self-control not to eat those cookies, you’re the kind of person who has healthy habits.” At this point the motivational quote becomes circular; Habits and Character affect Thoughts, which affect Words and Actions. This isn’t a logical paradox if it works, and it seems to work well for me. The more I exercise in a given month, the easier it is to have self-restraint in other areas.
And even the fact that I have good self-control is, I think, partly based on believing it about myself (“I got up at 5 am for swim practice three times a week for five years, I must have good self-control!) This seems to relate to the finding that willpower depletion depends on whether you believe your willpower will be depleted.3
Conclusions
Anyone can develop any “character trait.” The requirement is simply enough years of thoughts becoming words becoming actions becoming habit. If you believe that something will get easier to maintain over time, it will. Not in the sense of time and resources; to get the continuing benefits of an hour’s daily exercise, you have to pay the opportunity cost of that hour a day, no matter how many years you’ve been doing it for; but in the sense of willpower and motivation. Your actions and habits will eventually change the person you believe yourself to be, which will affect just about everything else. I don’t have any direct evidence that this process works if begun in adulthood, but intuitively it seems that it might work better, since adults are almost always intrinsically motivated in what they do, whereas children often do whatever activities their parents choose, whether or not it’s something they’re motivated to do.
References:
1. De Bruijn, G. J. , Rhodes, R. E. Exploring exercise behavior, intention and habit strength relationships. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports. 2011: 21: 482–491.
2. Schwabe, L., & Wolf, O. T. (2011). Stress-induced modulation of instrumental behavior: From goal-directed to habitual control of action. Behavioural Brain Research, 219(2), 321-328.
3. Job, V., Dweck, C. S., & Walton, G. M. (2010). Ego depletion-is it all in your head? implicit theories about willpower affect self-regulation. Psychological Science, 21(11), 1686-1693. Link provided by Dr_Manhatten
Well, there's a difference between "bliss" and "equanimity". The first is arguably "happier", but the second much more peaceful. I'm not sure I agree with the idea of eliminating positive affect, but I can certainly understand where they are coming from. I've been bored with happiness myself and was at times relieved to return to a dissociated state that wasn't clouded by emotion, regardless how positive. "Bliss", "excitement", "love" and so on have all, at times, done bad things to me, so getting rid of them at some times seems useful.
My main objections are that this a) looks like a false dichotomy (proper dissociation doesn't have to eliminate emotion, just its "stickiness") and b) it's outright irreversible wireheading. It might be good, but if it turns out that there are better options, then you just screwed yourself out of them.
it's outright irreversible wireheading. It might be good, but if it turns out that there are better options, then you just screwed yourself out of them.
Why should it be particularly irreversible?
Very thought-provoking post. I know that I have lots of 'aversions'...I seem to develop them easily to anything that's 'unknown' and thus scary, and attempts to make a habit of 'doing something scary every day' help at the time but not permanently...once I no longer try to maintain the habit, I go back to avoiding leaving my comfort zone.
On the other hand, a lot of my 'small-gain' habits are deliberate, and benefit me a LOT in the long run. My habit of hardly ever eating out and always packing food from home saves me hundreds or thousands of dollars a year over my friends, not to mention improving my health. And this isn't why I have the habit...I can rationalize it now, but the truth is that I have it because my parents have it.
Great post!
- The Prior Obligation System responded with the message: ”You've already previously agreed to go somewhere else. You know it'll be fun, and besides, several people are expecting you to go. Not going bears an unacceptable social cost, not to mention screwing over the other people's plans.”
This is something I'm very familiar with. My Prior Obligation System is active in the extreme, perhaps overactive, to the point that I once cried for half an hour after sleeping through my alarm when I was supposed to cover a morning swim practice for the coach who was out of town. I feel awful when I have two conflicting commitments and have to choose between them. I'm pretty good at scheduling stuff so it doesn't conflict, which leads to me being ridiculously over-scheduled, because the long-term suffering of being exhausted a lot of the time is less than the short-term but much more intense suffering of giving something up. This is possibly something I'll have to address eventually, depending on whether I ever consider "my own happiness" a higher priority than "getting lots of stuff done and not disappointing anyone."
Why downvote a perfectly good, reasonable comment just because another comment by the same user wasn't as appealing to you?
I don't think that wedrifid was saying that he does this. (I'm not sure that you were reading him that way.) I think that he just expects that, if explaining downvotes were the norm, then he would read a comment every week or so saying, "downvoted because something you said in a different thread offended me".
I didn't interpret the comment as meaning that wedrifid would downvote on this policy, or that he advocated. It's probably true that there are people who do. That just makes me sad.
Downvoter here. Is there a custom of always explaining downvotes? Should there be one?
No! I don't have enough time to write comments for all the times I downvote. And I'd rather not read pages and pages of "downvoted because something you said in a different thread offended me" every week or two.
Just click and go. If you wish to also verbalize disapproval then by all means put word to the specific nature of your contempt, ire or disinterest.
downvoted because something you said in a different thread offended me.
I'm somewhat upset and disappointed that adults would do this. It seems like a very kindergartener thing. Would you go around upvoting all of a user's comments because you liked one? I wouldn't, and I have a tendency to upvote more than I downvote. Why downvote a perfectly good, reasonable comment just because another comment by the same user wasn't as appealing to you?
Judges go through pretty complicated cognitive algorithms in an absolute sense to make their decisions, but since we can predict them by running similar cognitive algorithms ourselves, the rules look simple - simpler than, say, Maxwell's Equations which have much lower Kolmogorov complexity in an absolute sense. So this is the sense of "predictability" that we're concerned with, but it's noteworthy that a world containing meddling gods - in the sense of their being smarter than human - is less predictable on even this dimension.
Oh, and I should have added earlier that modern legal systems score a nearly complete FAIL on this attribute of Fun Theory - no one human mind can even know all the rules any more, let alone optimize for them. There should be some Constitutional rule to the effect that the complete sum of the Law must be readable by one human in one month with 8 hours of sleep every night and regular bathroom breaks.
Oh, and I should have added earlier that modern legal systems score a nearly complete FAIL on this attribute of Fun Theory - no one human mind can even know all the rules any more, let alone optimize for them. There should be some Constitutional rule to the effect that the complete sum of the Law must be readable by one human in one month with 8 hours of sleep every night and regular bathroom breaks.
That's a good idea. Why did no one think of that?
I've started to do this for social effectiveness. My map of all social skills is in the very early stages, but I hope to eventually granularize all social skills down to the level of specific exercises that can be done to train each sub-sub-sub-skill of social effectiveness.
Brilliant! I am somewhat tempted to do this for swimming, which (much more obviously, I think) consists of a long list of subskills that have to be learned through repetition before they can be put together.
Actually I find that I almost never understand philosophy.
IMO most philosophers don't understand the stuff they write themself... Which philosophy do you have in mind? I'm from Germany so many of my friends are fans of Heidegger, Sartre, Hegel or some other continental or postmodern philosopher. You know, I don't claim to understand what these folks are talking about. But it's probably because most continental philosophers are kinda crazy, not because I'm stupid. In contrast to this I don't understand QM or AI, simply because it's too complicated, not because it's gibberish. Well, it could be that e.g. Heidegger is simply too intelligent and complicated for guys like me, but this hypothesis appears to be rather improbable after you actually read some lines of this dude. But if we are talking about, say, Dennett, then the situation is different...
I'm not actually sure. The only philosophy I've read is as it relates to moral theories (for school) or other mandatory classes, and LW posts. The former I was able to pass exams on, although I did badly on the essay because my point was 'unclear' (because my understanding was unclear, probably).
It's really annoying to be more curious than intelligent...I'm acutely aware that I don't understand most of quantum mechanics (or a dozen other fascinating fields) and probably never will, because understanding would require years of dedicated studying.
Puh, I've always felt I was alone in that I think that quantum physics is one of the most interesting topics in the world and that I'm too dumb to grok it. All people I know, who are too stupid to understand quantum mechanics, say things like " Oh, physics is not important, I rather read Hegel" or " The mind is irreducible and feelings, poetry and art are far more essential!". IMO many people hate or reject science since they don't want to acknowledge their own intellectual inferiority, which is particularly apparent in fields like math or physics. Whereas every mildly intelligent person can discuss Nietzsche, Schopenhauer etc. ( I admit that these guys indeed have some important things to say.) , and it feels so good to utter seemingly deep, vague, not falsifiable gibberish, because nobody can say that you've made a mistake. Hm, I guess this rant is already off-topic, and ceteris paribus it is good to read some philosophy but it really frustrates me that so many people find science boring, I simply do not understand this attitude...
Whereas every mildly intelligent person can discuss Nietzsche, Schopenhauer etc. ( I admit that these guys indeed have some important things to say.) , and it feels so good to utter seemingly deep, vague, not falsifiable gibberish, because nobody can say that you've made a mistake.
Actually I find that I almost never understand philosophy. I occasionally find phrases clever, or see analogies that make me see ideas in a new light, but a lot of philosophy is so abstract that I feel lost in it. I guess I think very concretely. The parts of math and science that are concrete are easy for me (and fascinating) and I think that's what I like about science; ultimately, it's always grounded in something concrete. When I really grasp a piece of pure math, it feels concrete to me in that it's obviously true and couldn't be otherwise, and I pretty much always understood my high school science classes on this level, but with the reading I do in my spare time, often I don't understand the math on a deep enough level for it to seem concrete. So I feel confused.
Whatever it is that makes women less likely to participate in sites such as Less Wrong, I am completely oblivious to it. For whatever reason, a high percentage of boys would find Less Wrong boring, and so would an even higher percentage of girls. It is true that my everyday-life interests are more "feminine" than seems to be the LW average (writing fiction, composing music, singing in a choir, as opposed to hard-sciences math and physics, which I chose not to study in university partly for the reason that my teachers wanted me to because I'm a girl. And I refused to be told what to study based on the fact that "we need more women in X." So I'm in nursing, a program that fulfills my requirement of immediately providing me with a well-paid job.
More or less, it's schizophrenic/delusional episodes, with an awareness that this is in fact what they are. Mostly what I use 'spiritual' to refer to is that, during these episodes, I tend to pick up a strong sense of 'purpose' - high level goals end up developed. I have no clue how I develop these top-level goals, and I've never found a way to do it via rationality. Rationality can help me mediate conflicts between goals, conflicts between goals and reality, and help me achieve goals, but it doesn't seem able to set those top-level priorities.
About the closest I've come to doing it rationally is to realise that I'm craving purpose, and do various activities that tend to induce this state. Guided meditation is ideal, since it seems to produce more 'productive' episodes. It varies heavily whether I will get any particularly useful purpose out of one of these episodes; many episodes are drifting and purposeless, and others result in either impossible goals or 'applause light' goals that have no actual substance attached.
Ostensibly I could try to infer my goals from my emotional preferences, which I've been slowly working on as an alternative. Being bi-polar and having a number of other neurological instabilities makes it very difficult to get any sort of coherent mapping there, beyond very basic elements like 'will to live'. Even those basics can be unstable: For about a year I had no real preference on my own survival due to a particularly bad schizophrenic episode.
I'd actually be rather curious how others handle the formation of top-level goals :)
I do also notice certain skills that I'm much more adept at when I'm having such an episode. I've observed this empirically, and can come up with rational explanations for it. I'm pretty certain the same results could be replicated rationally, either by studying the skills or by figuring out what I'm doing different during the schizophrenic episodes. I don't feel that 'spiritual' is necessarily a good label for this aspect; "intuition" or simply "changing my perceptual lens on reality" seem more accurate. I mention it here simply because it happens to stem from the same source (schizophrenic episodes)
I'd actually be rather curious how others handle the formation of top-level goals :)
I find I have very little emotion attached to my highest-level goals. I'm not sure but I think I derive them by abstracting from my lower-level goals, which are based more on habit and emotion, and from ideas I absorb from books, etc. I then use them to try and make my lower-level goals less contradictory.
Finally, a really 'low-cost' way to make a project and follow up. Right before the conclusion of a Less Wrong group, give everyone a slip of paper and ask them to write down one thing they are going to do differently next week as a result of the discussion. For two minutes (total) at the beginning of the next meeting, let people tell what they did.
This is a really good idea. I've enjoyed your series of posts and I think you have a lot of really good ideas.
One might be underestimating the value that video lectures offer to certain people like myself. Reading a textbook demands to be proactive. If you are easily distracted, or don't really enjoy the subject, you have to force yourself to keep reading. In the case of video lectures you only have to bring yourself to start the video. Once the video is playing, your attention is naturally drawn to the ongoing action, whereas text is just inactive and has to be animated actively by the reader. Videos exhibit a tractive force, videos drag you along as they play.
That's interesting. I've never been able to watch video lectures for anything. I think speed is an issue. Reading, I can go at my own (fast) pace. I have a lot of randomly scattered general knowledge from past reading, so in textbooks there are bits and pieces I can skim over if I know I already understand those areas. With videos, the slower pace of speech feels dragging, and I can't tell without actually listening to the whole video whether or not I'm missing something. Videos might be an effective learning method, but for me they're less efficient. (Then again, I don't think distraction or disliking the subject has ever been my biggest problem when reading.)
Having been raised Unitarian Universalist, I always find it very odd that "religion" is conflated with "unquestionable dogma". I don't think Unitarians have that any more than LessWrong does.
That said, if "religion" is being used as a shorthand for "unquestionable dogma", then the comments about religion make significantly more sense :)
Having been raised Unitarian Universalist, I always find it very odd that "religion" is conflated with "unquestionable dogma". I don't think Unitarians have that any more than LessWrong does.
I was raised a Unitarian Universalist too, by agnostic parents. It probably has a lot to do with my generally positive attitude towards religion. (I now sing in a High Anglican church choir and attend services regularly mostly because I find it benefits my mental health.)
Should we become Amish? If you were teleported into an Amish person's life, would you leave?
My visceral fear is created not by their existence, but by the potential that they will not remain a minority. Could you see badstuff resulting from them becoming a much larger percentage of the population?
Should we become Amish? Probably not. If I were teleported into an Amish person's life, would I leave? No, I think I would stay. In some ways I think it would suit my personality better than the life I currently live.
I can see handoflixue's logic, and your appeal to popularity does not defeat it. It makes LW seem to be irrational. To directly answer the logic, remind handoflixue that goals form a hierarchy of goals and subgoals, and a subgoal can be incorrect relative to a goal. Similarly, emotions can be subservient to goals. For example, anger can serve the goal of self-protection. A specific feeling of anger can then be judged as correct or incorrect depending on whether it serves this goal.
Finally, all of our conscious goals can be judged from the standpoint of natural selection. And conversely, a person may judge natural selection from the point of view of his conscious goals.
To directly answer the logic, remind handoflixue that goals form a hierarchy of goals and subgoals, and a subgoal can be incorrect relative to a goal.
That...seems true. I guess I've never divided my goals into a hierarchy, and I often find my emotions annoying and un-useful. I think my comment holds more true for emotions than for goals, anyway. I'll have to think about this for a while. It's true that although I have tried to modify my top-level goals in the past, I don't necessarily do it because of rationality.
Speaking solely for myself, I've found that my spiritual / religious side helps me to set goals and to communicate with my intuitions. Rationality is simply a tool for implementing those goals, and processing/evaluating that intuitive data.
I've honestly found the hostility towards "spirituality writ large" here rather confusing, as the majority of the arguments seem to focus on a fairly narrow subset of religious beliefs, primarily Christian. I tend to write it off as a rather understandable bias caused by generalizing from "mainstream Christianity", though, so it doesn't really bother me. When people present actual arguments, I do try and listen in case I've missed something.
Or, put another way: Rationality is for falsifiable aspects of my life, and spirituality is for the non-falsifiable aspects of my life. I can't have "incorrect" goals or emotions, but I can certainly fail to handle them effectively.
I can't have "incorrect" goals or emotions, but I can certainly fail to handle them effectively.
Maybe you disagree, but from what I've seen, a large subset of the LW population thinks that both goals and emotions can and should be modified if they are sub-optimal.
I find most of this article extremely enlightening on the foundation of many problems with modern life. I also, however, have issues with your examples concerning government and other semantic stop signs. Liberal democracy is not necessarily a stop sign. It is easily countered by asking what that has to do with anything, as no current country in the world has a true democracy. They have republics due to the sheer size of countries rendering direct democracy pointless. Also, governments are reliant on the intelligence of their leaders and on those who chose policies and laws. Stopping at Liberal Democracy means that you fail to ask about the possibility that the leaders are misguided or just plain wrong. With the nature of politics, there will always be one current political representative that a voter dislikes. Finally, there is one spot where a stop sign must be placed, and this is on right and wrong. I cannot foresee anyway in which an argument can be advanced past the point where morality dictates one action as better than another. There are explanations, but essentially right and wrong cannot be questioned, otherwise humanity may end up in a world much less pleasant than the current one.
I cannot foresee anyway in which an argument can be advanced past the point where morality dictates one action as better than another. There are explanations, but essentially right and wrong cannot be questioned, otherwise humanity may end up in a world much less pleasant than the current one.
If only everyone had the same definition of what is right and what is wrong...
...if I go for a swim to feel better, and end up going slower than my usual speed, I feel like I've failed at something and my mood is worse, although physically I feel better.
I recently read through one of the Ericsson papers on expert performance (looking for sleep-related statistics for my melatonin article), and saw in http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf the following (emphasis added):
'In a longitudinal study of visual artists, Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1976) found that most artists were drawn to painting be- cause it allowed social isolation. However, aspiring painters have to promote social relations with art dealers, art critics, and buyers to gain notoriety, increase the demand for their art, and generate sufficient sales for full-time artistic activity. Failure to do so forced many of the best artists to take another job unrelated to painting. Once these artists could no longer commit sufficient time and energy to maintain and improve their performance they stopped painting completely because they could not accept performing at a lower level.'
Yup sounds like me, although I don't think I would be capable of giving up swimming entirely without becoming seriously depressed. (I'm somewhat addicted to exercise, and I have bad knees which make it difficult to run, and cycling just isn't the same full-body cardio workout.)
I may be experiencing a fluke, but it appears that my university's library's website allows any computer to use it as proxy for viewing and downloading articles from many paywalled sites (in fact, every site it gives me access to with my student login, which is a very large selection). I only discovered this by accident, and I'm hoping it isn't unintentional on their part. If anybody is interested, the address is here. If you try it and it doesn't work, please tell me.
ETA: It appears that my browser simply cached my login, and that this service is unfortunately not actually available to the general public. Sorry for any confusion.
Based on the policy at my university, don't you need a student number and login to use those services?
I believe so. His career path seems to go: 70s - studies with John Wheeler, makes some small but clever contributions to cosmology and relativistic physics.
80s - Co-writes widely praised book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle with John Barrow, first suggests Omega Point hypothesis
90s - Writes The Physics Of Immortality, laying out Omega Point hypothesis in much more detail and explicitly identifying Omega Point with God. People think this is clever but going a little far. Tipler's contract for a textbook on gravitation gets cancelled and the university at which he has tenure stop giving him pay-rises.
2000s - Writes The Physics Of Christianity, in which he suggests cloning Jesus from the Turin Shroud so we can learn how he annihilated baryons, becomes referee for creationist journals and occasional right-wing commentator, argues that Barack Obama is evil because the lumineferous aether is real and because of a bit of the film Starship Troopers.
he suggests cloning Jesus from the Turin Shroud so we can learn how he annihilated baryons, becomes referee for creationist journals and occasional right-wing commentator, argues that Barack Obama is evil because the lumineferous aether is real and because of a bit of the film Starship Troopers.
Ok that's really...random. (Overused and underdefined word but that was the response my brain gave me).
Luminosity in general lets me drag the "unconscious threads" into consciousness and control them better. But even before that I needed to be doing lots of things. I don't know how many processors I have and they don't have all the same features; my guess is I have two or three main ones that can do most things and another three or four that are very limited in what tasks they can do (these handle things like dealing with my sensory input). I have to do a lot of conscious handling of sensory input, which makes this less impressive than it would be.
That's really interesting. Kind of cool that you're aware of that.
Some tidbits:
Be prompt, generous, and sincere in your compliments. Ideally, don't use plain adjectives - use descriptions. (Exceptions here are compliments on articles of clothing - "your boots are AWESOME!" is kosher.) It only feels silly from your end. If you are just trying to make friends, avoid anything that (given your and the potential friend's genders) would appear laced with sexual interest, unless you can pull it off with genuine innocence and then reliably follow up with genuine innocence instead of changing tacks midway.
Have a "standby" interaction prompt that you can pull out in lulls which isn't threatening, is generally well received, and provides a hook for further conversation. I usually offer people food. I'm sure there are others that would do - if you're trying to conduct an informal survey of something, for instance ("Hey, I'm trying to find out different ways people celebrate St. Patrick's Day, what do you do?), that would probably work too.
Learn to pick apart people's dialogue for followup questions - you can practice this on fictional dialogue; just take a good-sized sentence and write down five followup tangents. Example:
"I went out to Cape Cod last week with my friend Tess and we found some sea glass."
Followups:
"Ooh, do you go to Cape Cod a lot?"
"Neat, what else did you do there?"
"Wow! How long did you stay on the cape?"
"Cool - what are you going to do with the sea glass?"
"Hm, I don't think I know Tess - tell me about her?"
Note that these all prompt the potential friend to talk, rather than providing an excuse for you to do so (any of the above would be preferable to, for instance, "Hey, I went to Cape Cod once and had the most fantastic lobster...") Also note that each sentence started with a particle that shows interest. Eliminating these runs a significant risk of making it sound like you're just interrogating the person. And: it is quite important that you actually want to know the answer to the question you pick. If you can come up with lists of five but don't give a crap about how any of them would be answered, you're talking to supernaturally boring people, you're a misanthrope, or you're doing the exercise wrong.
Go ahead and be the first to suggest exchanging contact information. On the internet, this means e-mail or better, IM. In person this means a place to meet next, or possibly phone numbers or addresses (or e-mail or IM). It's scary to most everybody else, too, so don't expect them to do it. Leave a line of social retreat if they never want to hear from you again, avoid any requests for contact info customarily laced with sexual tension, but do make it clear that you think they're neat and you'd like to be their friend. You can even haul out the elementary school line "Wanna be friends?" - if it makes you feel more comfortable with it, go on a brief tangent about how "we lose so much when we leave elementary school and it's no longer socially acceptable to make friends by walking up to someone on the playground and asking if they want to be..." beat... "Wanna be my friend?".
Cultivate social spontaneity. This one is hard to define, so I'll give an example. I was waiting for a bus and a woman I'd never met before in an awesome homemade knitted cloak tottering along on crutches said she loved my jacket. (It was my florally embroidered denim thing, by far the loudest thing I own). I was trying to make friends, so instead of thanking her and looking away, I fired back with a compliment on her cloak and soon had her talking up a storm about knitting. When she was interested in what I did with my spare time, I didn't talk about school, even though that was most salient to me at the time - I talked about cooking, gambling that the domestic handicrafts have some overlap in their aficionados. I told her I planned to make pumpkin bread as soon as I had a can of pumpkin. Which it just so happened to turn out that she had in her cupboard, and she lived in my apartment complex. So I went home with her, accepted the can of pumpkin, went home and made bread, and brought one of the loaves over to her place, where I hung out for another couple of hours chatting about textiles, her Hassidic Judaism, and her multiple personalities. (I am no longer friends with her over differences of opinion on a political/ethical matter, but it's still a great making-friends story.) Social spontaneity is what let me go to a stranger's place for canned pumpkin and bring her a loaf of bread later.
My favourite spontaneous-friendship story: I was walking through the university centre and heard a voice singing a song that I had sung before with church choir. I tracked down the source to a girl waiting in line for the ATM, and told her enthusiastically that I really liked the song she was singing. (It wasn't faked enthusiasm. Music is one of my biggest interests right now). We ended up talking for 45 minutes about music and religion, exchanging emails, and seeing each other a fair bit over the next year.
I think strength of emotional reactions and ability to distinguish between them are independent variables.
Agreed. Also I don't think the ability to control emotions is linked to their strength necessarily. Strength of emotions seems to be a innate facet of someone's personality, whereas control is improved by practice.
One problem I always seem to have is that I'm unable to evaluate what mood I'm in. The concept of a 1-10 scale of happiness is something I can't relate to. There are times when I recognize that I'm feeling better than usual, but it's always because I'm excited about a specific occurrence or new thing I've learned.
It seems to me that I'm always just... living. I don't feel any sign that there are these foreign constructs called 'emotions' that arbitrarily have their way with my consciousness. That's why when I've experienced with my own bouts of 'suicidal ideation', I've found it impossible to label them as 'depression', 'destructive', or anything other than just that: ideation. My thoughts are my thoughts. If something makes sense and sounds appealing, at what point does one blame 'emotions' for affecting his/her conclusions. I don't understand how these things work.
I think I'm the opposite of you. My emotions are easily triggered by just about anything, to the point that it's quite easy for me to recognize that they were triggered, and don't represent my beliefs/attitudes towards things. If I see a baby, I feel a strong rush of warm-fuzziness, but I can pinpoint easily that it's caused by the baby. A "foreign construct" that "arbitrarily has its way" with my consciousness is exactly what it feels like, although depending on the emotion, I may like or dislike feeling them. I think I'm also better at shutting down and ignoring my emotions than at least some people, especially when it comes to anger; if I'm paying attention, I can recognize that it's hijacking my brain into thinking things I don't want to think or doing things I don't want to do, and I can persuade myself not to be angry anymore. Sadness is probably the emotion I can control the least, just because it saps my motivations whereas anger almost strengthens them. I can occasionally mutate sadness into anger and then persuade myself not to be angry. Happiness I don't try to reduce, obviously.
Thank you for sharing this Alicorn, as usual a really encouraging analysis and description from you!
In my own experimentation, the knowledge that there are certain sure-fire mood-improving activities means that I can sometimes skip right over actually undertaking the activities. For example, being absolutely certain that my mood would be improved if I went walking for an hour is sometimes enough, without actually going walking, to lift my spirits. In fact, a long walk is the only sure-fire mood enhancer I've found, and it seems to be be important to have absolute certainty that it would work no matter how bad things seem in the present. Talking to friends and going for a short jog are also sometimes effective, but, at least for me, not always.
I think these fall into the "favourite pair of socks" category of short-term "emergency" mood enhancers.
In fact, a long walk is the only sure-fire mood enhancer I've found.
A nice hard swim does the same trick for me. Unfortunately, my ex-swim-team baggage means that if I go for a swim to feel better, and end up going slower than my usual speed, I feel like I've failed at something and my mood is worse, although physically I feel better.
For some reason, I tend to experience sleepiness and sadness as very similar feelings, to the point where I frequently have a sensation that I can't clearly identify as either one. Is this unusual, or does it match the experience of other people here?
Lack of sleep makes my mood extremely unstable, mainly in the downward direction. When sleep deprived, pretty much any negative stimulus will affect me many times more than if the same thing happened when I was well rested. When I'm tired, I feel "blah": fuzzy-brained, slow, and stupid. Is this the feeling that to you feels like sadness? (To me, sadness has a "clarity" that sleepiness doesn't, and feeling sad tends to make my thinking sharper, albeit negative). I need about 8 to 9 hours of sleep per night; 2 nights in a row of sub-7 hour sleep, and my moods become completely unpredictable.
Really fascinating post! I wouldn't say that I'm a sad person, and now that I've gone past the social isolation I suffered as a kid, my happiness set-point is actually quite high, maybe because my occasional episodes of self-hatred spur me to get stuff done (which I seem to be good at). Nevertheless, especially in the past few years I've maintained a work and school schedule that leaves me burnt out and exhausted by the end of first semester, with just enough time over the summer (while working 50+ hours per week) to recover my ability to feel motivated before I go back and do it to myself again. Unfortunately for me, I'm good at overriding what I actually want to do in order to do what I feel needs doing, and I'm good at getting the mandatory stuff done regardless of how unmotivated I feel, so it's never become enough of a problem to actually do anything about it.
This involved working around some neuroses, like my unwillingness to spend money, and overcoming some background reluctance to try new things.
That sounds exactly like me!
"I cannot control the speed of the bus. I caught it, and it will get there when it gets there. There is no point in further fretting about being late until I'm moving under my own power again - so I'll stop. To manage my strong, intrusive desire to be on time, I will start thinking about how to choose an efficient path to walk once I get off the bus."
So I'm not the only one who does this!
I can think of at least two other stable states - in one, you've had an experience that has acted as strong Bayesian evidence for you of the evidence of $DEITY, but which is either a purely subjective experience or which is non-repeatable. As an example of this class of event, if I were to pray "Oh Lord, give me enough money to never have to work again" and then two hundred thousand people were to buy copies of my books in the next five years, that would be enough evidence that it would be rational for me to believe in God.
Another stable state might be someone who has been convinced by Frank Tipler's Omega Point hypothesis. Tipler himself is now clearly extremely irrational, but the hypothesis itself is taken seriously enough by people like David Deutsch (who is one of the less obviously-egregiously-stupid public intellectuals) that it's not obviously dismissable out-of-hand.
I'm sure there are others, too.
EDIT - when I said "in the next five years" I meant to type "the next five minutes", which would of course be much stronger evidence.
Tipler himself is now clearly extremely irrational
Was he more rational before? (I did read two of his books a while back, and I remember being very excited beforehand and very disappointed afterwards, but I can't remember enough specifics to say why.)
Reading this, I wonder why a LDS missionary got interested in a rationalist community which is generally hostile to religion. I would appreciate some explanation about the author's motivations.
Because there are things I can learn here. I can handle the hostility to religion. But if you don't cross-pollinate, you become a hick.
Because there are things I can learn here.
I think that is an excellent attitude to take.
Materialist as in reductionist, as in Thou Art Physics not as in being materialistic.
Ok (sigh of relief). That's what I thought but I'm not used to seeing the word used to mean 'reductionist'.
How much of what you don't like about LDS is entangled with the organizational structure?
I don't have a strong answer, just some concerns.
It may be that a lot of what's wrong there is having a hard boundary between members and non-members. If so, rationalists may be able to beat that one by wanting people to be more rational, though there do seem to be some firm lines in this community, like being obligated to be a materialist.
I don't want to have to remember people and feel sorry that they're part of a malignant memeplex, and that I can't do anything to help them.
You may be stuck with that one, especially in regards to cryonics, at least in the sense that you can't do much to help them.
If so, rationalists may be able to beat that one by wanting people to be more rational, though there do seem to be some firm lines in this community, like being obligated to be a materialist.
I'm not sure what you mean by the word "materialist" in this context. Could you explain?
But rationalism doesn’t have a well-defined set of norms/desirable skills to develop. As a result, we Less Wrongians unsurprisingly also lack a well-developed practical system for implementation.
Implementation of what? What's the purpose of these hypothetical norms? There's no point in propagating arbitrary norms. You are describing it backwards.
But rationalism doesn’t have a well-defined set of norms/desirable skills to develop
I'm not sure that "norms" are the same as "desirable skills to develop". The LessWrong community definitely has a list of desirable skills: improve understanding of Bayes, for example.Maybe not well-defined though.
Some of it is difficult to pull apart into clear thought, but I'll try.
I don't want to have a list of groups I have to hate to belong. I don't want to have someone trying to control my behavior by defining things as 'sin'. I don't want to be told 'we love you, we just don't like your actions', when it's clear that there is no love involved in any case. I don't want to have to remember people and feel sorry that they're part of a malignant memeplex, and that I can't do anything to help them. I don't want to dread going to a meet because I don't fit in.
No, I really don't like the LDS church. That's probably never going to change, though I'll try not to influence others' decisions on the matter. I don't hate the members, I just feel sad when I think of them, and of my ex-family.
Edit - please disregard this post
I don't hate the members, I just feel sad when I think of them, and of my ex-family.
That makes me sad too. I don't have a particularly negative attitude towards religion (alll my personal interactions with religions and religious people have been pretty positive and haven't included any of the aspects on your list) but I hear stories like yours about the incredibly toxic things people can do with their religions, and it depresses me, mostly because I don't think it's purely a symptom of people being religious. Otherwise, how could nearly all the religious people I've met be more accepting and less hypocritical about their daily life decisions than my atheist-by-default friends? It's more a symptom of people being flawed humans, and that is depressing.
That's exactly what I do. I try to downvote comments based on how they're written (if they're rude or don't make sense, I downvote them) instead of what they're written about. (Though I may upvote comments based on agreeing with the content.)
That's exactly what I do too. (Although my downvote threshold is likely a tad more sensitive. :P)
(Although my downvote threshold is likely a tad more sensitive.
Likely. Mine will probably become more sensitive with time.
If you're not angry, what would motivate you to do any of those things?
If you are dealing with someone in your social circle, or can be seen by someone in your social circle and you want to build or maintain a reputation as someone it is not wise to cross. Even if it's more or less a one shot game, if you make a point of not being a doormat it is likely to impact your self-image, which will impact your behaviour, which will impact how others treat you.
Even if in the short run retaliating helps nobody and slightly harms you, it can be worth it for repuatational and self-concept reasons.
Point taken. I am a doormat. People have told me this over and over again, so I probably have a reputation as a doormat, but that has certain value in itself; I have a reputation as someone who is dependable, loyal, and does whatever is asked of me, which is useful in a work context.
If you're not angry, what would motivate you to do any of those things?
Put simply, sometimes displaying a strong emotional response (genuine or otherwise) is the only way to convince someone that you're serious about something. This seems to be particularly true when dealing with people who aren't inclined to use more 'intellectual' communication methods.
Seems true. Nevertheless I've never used it in this way. This may have more to do with my personality than anything: from what I've read here, I'm more of a conformist than the average Less Wrong reader, and I put a higher value on social harmony. I hate arguments that turn personal and emotional.
I think his comment came across as kind of snarky ("oh you should totally...") and that might be why.
Oh dang girl, I've sent you PM's about how I use my vagina and you still call me he? I think I just won the least feminine woman on the internet award or something.
You are probably justified in being insulted that I completely forgot the vagina conversation was with you.
The problem with the downvote is that it mixes the messages "I don't agree" with "I don't think others should see this". There is no way to say "I don't agree, but that post was worth thinking about", is there? Short of posting a comment of your own, that is.
Short of posting a comment of your own, that is.
That's exactly what I do. I try to downvote comments based on how they're written (if they're rude or don't make sense, I downvote them) instead of what they're written about. (Though I may upvote comments based on agreeing with the content.)
I think his comment came across as kind of snarky ("oh you should totally...") and that might be why.
Oh dang girl, I've sent you PM's about how I use my vagina and you still call me he? I think I just won the least feminine woman on the internet award or something.
Whoops. I think more to the point, I don't always remember who has what username. I'm a bit that way in real life too: I don't always pay attention to who I'm talking to when I get onto discussing ideas. (I'm not sure if you meant "feminist" or "feminine" but I'm neither so that's fine.)
I have the same debt-flinch, and the same feeling about how well it works, but with one qualification: I was persuaded to treat mortgage debt differently (though I've always been very conservative about how much I'd take on) and that seems to have served me very well too.
This isn't meant as advice about mortgages: housing markets vary both spatially and temporally. More as a general point: it's probably difficult to make very sophisticated flinch-triggers, which means that even good flinching habits are likely to have exceptions from time to time, and sometimes they might be big ones.
This is what my mother said to me: all types of debt are bad, but mortgage debt is unavoidably. My chosen career field is nursing, which is a pretty reliable income source, so I'm not worried about taking on a mortgage when the time comes.
"Be specific" is a nice flinch, I've always had it and it helps a lot. "Don't moralize" is a flinch I learned from experience and it also helps. Here's some other nice flinches I have:
"Don't wait." Waiting for something always takes more time than I thought it would, so whenever I notice myself waiting, I switch to doing something useful in the meanwhile and push the waiting task into the background. Installing the habit took a little bit of effort, but by now it's automatic.
"Don't hesitate." With some effort I got a working version of this flinch for tasks like programming, drawing or physical exercise. If something looks like it would make a good code fix or a good sketch, do it immediately. Would be nice to have this behavior for all other tasks too, but the change would take a lot of effort and I'm hesitating about it (ahem).
"Don't take on debt." Anything that looks even vaguely similar to debt, I instinctively run away from it. Had this flinch since as far as I can remember. In fact I don't remember ever owing >100$ to anyone. So far it's served me well.
"Don't take on debt." Anything that looks even vaguely similar to debt, I instinctively run away from it. Had this flinch since as far as I can remember. In fact I don't remember ever owing >100$ to anyone. So far it's served me well.
Same. And it has also served me well, although maybe not solely because of that preference–I was in a better financial situation to start with than many university students, and I'm a workaholic with a part-time job that I enjoy, and I also enjoy living frugally and don't consider it to diminish my quality of life the way some people do.
I did this when I was a teenager. A few months later I found myself regularly jumping out of bed, taking two long running strides across my room, hitting the snooze button, running back to bed, and getting under the covers without ever properly waking up.
My brother does this. Personally I've never had trouble waking up...if anything my problem is falling asleep and staying asleep all night. I tend to stay on an early-to-bed, early-to-rise schedule, which is convenient for work and class but inconvenient for social life...overall I think I prefer it to constantly having to fight my internal clock. My main problem is mid-afternoon sleepiness on the days when I don't quite make my 8 or 9 hours.
I solved this problem by maxing out my alarm's volume and putting it in the shower.
I might hit someone because they're pointing a gun at me and I believe hitting them is the most efficient way to disarm them. I might hit someone because they did something dangerous and I believe hitting them is the most efficient way to condition them out of that behavior. I might spread gossip about them because they are using their social status in dangerous ways and I believe gossiping about them is the best available way of reducing their status.
None of those cases require anger, and they might even make the situation better. (Or they might not.)
Or, less nobly, I might hit someone because they have $100 I want, and I think that's the most efficient way to rob them. I might spread gossip about them because we're both up for the same promotion and I want to reduce their chance of getting it.
None of those cases require anger, either. (And, hey, they might make the situation better, too. Or they might not.)
I suppose the context of my comment was limited to a) me personally (I don't have any desire to steal money or reduce other people's chances of promotion) and b) to the situations I have encountered in the past (no guns or danger involved). Your points are very valid though.
One way of thinking about this:
There is behavior, which is anything an animal with a nervous system does with its voluntary musculature. Everything you do all day is behavior.
Then there are choices, which are behaviors you take because you think they will bring about an outcome you desire. (Forget about utility functions -- I'm not sure all human desires can be described by one twice-differentiable convex function. Just think about actions taken to fulfill desires or values.) Not all behaviors are choices. In fact it's easy to go through a day without making any choices at all. Mostly by following habits or instinctive reactions.
In classical economics, all behaviors are modeled as choices. That's not true of people in practice, but possibly some people choose a higher percentage of their behaviors than other people do. Maybe it's possible to train yourself to make more of your behaviors into choices. (In fact, just learning Econ 101 made me more inclined to consciously choose my behaviors.)
Not all behaviors are choices. In fact it's easy to go through a day without making any choices at all. Mostly by following habits or instinctive reactions.
There is a reason for this. Making choices constantly is exhausting, especially if you consider all of the possible behaviours. For me, the way to go is to choose your habits. For example: I choose not to spend money on eating out. This a) saves me money, and b) saves me from extra calories in fast food. When pictures of food on a store window tempt me, I only have to appeal to my habit of not eating out. It's barely conscious now. If I forget to pack enough food from home and I find myself hungry, and the ads unusually tempting, I make a choice to reinforce my habit by not buying food, although I am hungry and there is a cost to myself. The same goes for exercising: i maintain a habit of swimming for an hour 3 to 5 times a week, so the question "should I swim after work?" becomes no longer a willpower-draining conscious decision, but an automatic response.
If I were willing to put in the initial energy of choosing to start a new arbitrary habit, I'm pretty sure I could. As my mother has pointed out, in the past I've been able to accomplish pretty much everything I set my mind on (with the exception of becoming the youngest person to swim across Lake Ontario and getting into the military, but both of those plans failed for reasons pretty much outside my control.)
You don't need to be angry to hit someone, or to spread gossip, or to otherwise retaliate against them. If you recognise that someone is a threat or an obstacle you can deal with them as such without the cloud of rage that makes you stupider. You do not need to be angry to decide that someone is in your way and that it will be necessary to fuck them up.
You don't need to be angry to hit someone, or to spread gossip, or to otherwise retaliate against them.
If you're not angry, what would motivate you to do any of those things? If someone injures me in some way or takes something that I wanted, usually neither hitting them nor spreading gossip about them will in any way help me repair my injury or get back what they took from me. So I don't. Unless I'm angry, in which case it kind of just happens, and then I regret it because it usually makes the situation worse.
I'm half convinced. However, I keep reading that inactivity is unhealthy regardless of whether it is fattening. Therefore fat people have good reason to try to resist the tendency to inactivity induced in them by their fatness.
So: why are fat people inactive? My only tentative guess is that it is difficult for them to move their bodies, and they respond to the difficulty by moving less. This suggests the following possible remedy: strength training. With stronger muscles, your body feels like less of a burden, and so you are more likely to move around.
So: why are fat people inactive? My only tentative guess is that it is difficult for them to move their bodies, and they respond to the difficulty by moving less.
Very plausible. Also, fear and embarrassment could be factors. Several of my heavier friends have told me that they don't like to go to the gym because they feel self-conscious surrounded by fitter people. This is probably also true of, for example, jogging in public; they are afraid of people watching them and judging them ("Look at that fat guy/girl trying to run!").
Swimming in a temp-controlled pool is great on the overheating front and is the only known form of exercise where I am not bothered by sweating. However, pools tend to be either (A) indoors, with stiflingly enclosed humid environments where I can't breathe comfortably (I sometimes have to stick my head out from behind the shower curtain when I'm in the shower, for reference, and didn't like being in indoor pool environments even when I was kid and didn't have clinically significant breathing issues) or (B) outdoors, and open only during the day, such that I have to either wear texturally-obnoxious sunscreen or crisp up like a rasher of bacon. Arranging to swim is also inconvenient - it requires changes to my state of dress, a new venue, etc, twice. Typically it is expensive, in a way that going for a walk is not.
None of these difficulties are individually insurmountable, and if all I had to do was one of living with humidity, or putting on sunscreen, or changing clothes twice, or going to a new location twice, or paying money, I'd get over it. I imagine that I'd swim a lot if I had a pool at my home, which would reduce it to a clothes-changing inconvenience if I swam in the dark. But I do not have a pool at my home.
Incidentally, I took a pulmonary function test a couple weeks ago. The guy who administered it wasn't technically qualified to say so, but he thought everything looked normal, and if my GP agrees, the next step is probably to assume I have a heart problem.
Agreed that swimming is massively inconvenient, which is one reason I'm trying to start running more...once I move on from working at a pool, it'll be even less convenient since I won't already be there in a bathing suit anyway, or be able to swim for free. (There is one interesting thing I've noticed about myself...I find it massively inconvenient to take a shower at home, whether before bed or first thing in the morning...for the most part I only shower after teaching swimming lessons or after a workout. This is ok because I'm in the pool nearly every day for some reason or other.)
I wish I had a pool at my home...oh I can dream.
Just a heads-up: pool ventilation varies. I've swum at several dozen different pools over my life, and some were awful, with the air hotter than the water and ridiculously humid. Some were excellent. Any big Olympic-size pool that hosts competitions tends to have better ventilation than your local neighborhood pool for kids and old ladies. Saltwater pools tend to have better air quality too, if there are any near your home. And lakes and rivers in summer are my favorite, although I have pretty low squeamishness and I know some people are more bothered by weeds, mud, fish etc.
Incidentally, I took a pulmonary function test a couple weeks ago. The guy who administered it wasn't technically qualified to say so, but he thought everything looked normal, and if my GP agrees, the next step is probably to assume I have a heart problem.
Best of luck, I hope they figure it out soon.
It raises your chances of obesity,
Whereas I dropped 13kg very quickly not by more exercise, but by a change in diet.
The whole area is a minefield of YMMV ...
Valid point. I've read that for sedentary people, starting an exercise regime is a poor way to lose weight. I still think it's an excellent way not to gain weight in the first place...children who active, who remain active as teenagers and young adults (and don't grossly overeat) probably won't put on the weight in the first place. I did an energy-expenditure study that showed I burn nearly 3000 calories a day, mainly because I can maintain an 'intense' level of exercise for an hour or more, whereas someone who is unfit and overweight already probably can't and so wouldn't burn nearly as many calories. Muscle mass also burns more calories at rest than fat tissue, so that someone at a high level of fitness can eat more even on days when they don't exercise.
The moral of the story: I'm going to put my kids in one physical activity after another (like my parents did with my siblings and myself) until they find one they can stick with, and I'm going to try to keep it a part of family life. After all, it takes far less willpower to maintain a lifelong habit than to start a new regime once you start putting on weight.
It raises your chances of obesity
Recent studies have suggested that obesity causes lack of exercise, rather than the other way around, and that's why we see the correlation.
Interesting. Thanks for the heads-up. I will research that now.
Also, have you ever tried swimming for exercise? It has the benefits of burning a lot of calories without bringing your heart rate (and out-of-breath-ness) up as high as the same intensity exercise on land.
My experience with swimming is that simply being in water strains your lungs more (as you have to displace water to inhale air). Simply going to the pool and talking to someone while in up to your neck is probably good lung training, but until she can do that comfortably and without attacks I would recommend against trying laps or other sort of exercise.
My experience with swimming is that simply being in water strains your lungs more (as you have to displace water to inhale air).
That's probably where the long-term benefits of lung capacity come from. Aquafit (where your head doesn't go underwater) is pretty low-intensity compared to on-land aerobics, and you don't overheat so much so it might be preferable for her. On the other hand, something like breaststroke is a good way of training yourself to breathe rhythmically while exercising.
That was harsh...
I was in exactly the same situation when I was 15 before I was diagnosed with asthma, probably worse since there were a few days where I could not even walk up stairs because my lungs would seize up instantly. My doctor told me to try exercising more in spite of me having a low BMI, being unusually active, and having asthma, since the drugs which are available for people with asthma mainly treat the symptoms. If you want to avoid needing them in the first place, increasing your stamina is the only fix.
Of course, before you can exercise at all, you need to either find effective medications, or exercises which you can manage without killing yourself, but I don't understand your reaction to Molybdenumblue.
Tangentially, your symptoms do seem to match asthma well to me. I would recommend asking for tests next time you see a doctor.
Of course, before you can exercise at all, you need to either find effective medications, or exercises which you can manage without killing yourself, but I don't understand your reaction to Molybdenumblue.
I think his comment came across as kind of snarky ("oh you should totally...") and that might be why.
That was harsh...
I was in exactly the same situation when I was 15 before I was diagnosed with asthma, probably worse since there were a few days where I could not even walk up stairs because my lungs would seize up instantly. My doctor told me to try exercising more in spite of me having a low BMI, being unusually active, and having asthma, since the drugs which are available for people with asthma mainly treat the symptoms. If you want to avoid needing them in the first place, increasing your stamina is the only fix.
Of course, before you can exercise at all, you need to either find effective medications, or exercises which you can manage without killing yourself, but I don't understand your reaction to Molybdenumblue.
Tangentially, your symptoms do seem to match asthma well to me. I would recommend asking for tests next time you see a doctor.
My doctor told me to try exercising more in spite of me having a low BMI, being unusually active, and having asthma, since the drugs which are available for people with asthma mainly treat the symptoms. If you want to avoid needing them in the first place, increasing your stamina is the only fix.
I was diagnosed with asthma just over a year ago. (The only symptom I've ever had is that in winter when I get a cold, I cough for the rest of the year unless I go on steroid inhalers). My lung capacity dropped by 22% when I did the methacholine challenge test (inhaling an irritating chemical) but I barely noticed it. This is probably related to the fact that I started swimming competitively when I was eight, and my lung capacity is already much higher than the average for someone my height and weight. (I don't know if I could have reached this point if my asthma had started before I began swimming, though. Ironically enough, I'm pretty sure my current asthma is caused by too mcch chlorine exposure over the years, and I'm considering taking a summer off from lifeguarding to "detox" myself enough that I can test negative on the asthma test.)
Alicorn has implied that she isn't completely sedentary or bedridden-- she goes out walking, and sometimes gets seriously out of breath.
Is there any reason to think that more exercise will be good for her?
How much do you actually know about the subject?
Alicorn has implied that she isn't completely sedentary or bedridden-- she goes out walking, and sometimes gets seriously out of breath. Is there any reason to think that more exercise will be good for her?
Not exercising is a problem for anybody regardless of whether they have a breathing problem or not. It raises your chances of obesity, which later on can lead to lots of nasty consequences, and I think sedentary people show an increase in certain chronic diseases (heart disease for sure, type 2 diabetes possibly but I don't remember for sure) regardless of weight. In that sense, more exercise would be good for Alicorn.
That being said, I think it's misleading to say it would directly fix her mystery respiratory problem. (Even if it turns out to be asthma...exercise doesn't cure asthma and can even trigger it for certain people). It might improve the symptoms in the long run. It might not. There might be another way to improve the situation enough that she can exercise.
No, I should bloody well not get more exercise, because when I do, I can't fucking breathe. Understood?
(Also I overheat, really easily.)
(Also I overheat, really easily.)
Me too. I get cold easily if I stay still, but even just walking briskly makes me start to sweat. I think this is one of those thigns that you can train with practice; the more you exercise, forcing your body to overheat, the better your body gets at efficiently disposing of the excess. Also getting used to it probably makes it less unpleasant... That being said, I hate exercising indoors on a treadmill or elliptical for precisely this reason. Biking outside is great in the spring and fall months, when my wonky thermostat actually works to my advantage and makes it possible to bike across the city on a -5 C morning.
Also, have you ever tried swimming for exercise? It has the benefits of burning a lot of calories without bringing your heart rate (and out-of-breath-ness) up as high as the same intensity exercise on land. Also if you hate the feeling of being sweaty, which I do, a nice temperature-controlled pool helps a lot. My brother's asthma has improved drastically since he started swimming competitively...swimming does a lot more for your lung capacity and breath control than other activities of the same intensity.
Provide an ambient visual cue on how old a comment is. First idea is to add a subtle color tint to the background of each comment, that goes by the logarithm of the comment's age from reddish ("hot", written in the last couple of hours) to bluish ("cold", written several months or more ago).
Old threads occasionally get new comments and get readers in via them, and the date strings in the comments require some conscious parsing compared to being able to tell between "quite recent" and "very old" comments in the same thread by glance.
Awesome idea!
Remove "Popular" and "Controversial" from the "Sort by" menu that's above the comments - I'd bet 99% of users only use "Top" and sometimes "New" (Plus for some reason, on my phone it's always set to "Popular" by default, no matter how much I change it).
I never even noticed the 'Sort By' menu. Thanks for pointing it out!
I've been able to implement something like this to great effect. Every time I notice that I've been behaving in a very silly way, I smile broadly, laugh out loud and say "Ha ha! Gotcha!" or something to that effect. I only allow myself to do this in cases where I've actually gained new information: Noticed a new flaw, noticed an old flaw come up in a new situation, realized that an old behavior is in fact undesirable, etc. This positively reinforces noticing my flaws without doing so to the undesirable behavior itself.
This is even more effective when implemented in response to someone else pointing out one of my flaws. It's a little more difficult to carry out because I have to suppress a reflex to retaliate/defend myself that doesn't come up as much when I'm my own critic, but when I succeed it almost completely eliminates the social awkwardness that normally comes with someone critiquing me in public.
but when I succeed it almost completely eliminates the social awkwardness that normally comes with someone critiquing me in public.
Agreed! I started using this response to criticism several years ago, and actually got a compliment on it. I never thought of applying it to my own criticisms of myself, though...good idea.
I would like to just say that in Firefox 4, none of the vote links (for article or for comments) work at all.
Aside from that, I feel that Recent Comments and Recent posts sections are completely useless. (Why would I want to see recent comments. And there is a page for Recent posts.) That whole right sidebar is pretty useless overall, except your own user status.
I use the recent comments section all the time. If I've already read all of the recent posts, I'll click on the recent comments and see if there are any I want to reply to. That feature is one of the things that actually allows discussions to start in the comment threads.
Note that most of these are more like muscles. You deplete in the short term but build in the long term.
Agreed, though I think a lot of that has to do with building the habit of doing something (or of doing new things). If you do one new thing a day that scares you and requires significant activation energy, after a while you'll expect it, and require less activation energy to make yourself do it.
Awesome idea for a post! You've clearly done a lot of thorough research, and I appreciate the fact that you're sharing it with everyone here.
There is a small genre of sci-fi short stories in which humans turn out to be the scariest species in the galaxy due to our possession of apparently mundane abilities. For example:
Human muscles have the terrifying ability to become increasingly more massive and powerful when placed under a routine of extreme stress. Many humans systematically overload their muscles in this way. For fun.
Humans breathe oxygen, a component of starship fuel!
The brain of a human is protected by an armored skull so powerful that a human fighter is impervious to any simple attack to the brain and can even use its braincase as a weapon to bludgeon enemies.
Humans naturally produce dangerous hormones and stimulants such as epinephrine. In desperate situations these boost a human's abilities, allowing it to continue functioning even when severely wounded.
Does this genre have a name, or other googleable traits?
Or examples of stories in this genre? That would be helpful too.
You would be surprised, maybe... If you don't want to derail a public thread, would you send me a private message to discuss this?
OK - I had been assuming that "dark arts" meant "use of techniques socially considered mean, nasty or evil; may be employed for either selfish or altruistic purposes".
It seems the LW definition is more specifically about manipulation. (I'm just bringing this up in case any other readers suffered the same confusion).
This page on the Dark Arts points out "there’s no clear distinction between using these skills and regular social interaction". Does the LW community consider "regular social interaction" to be a dark art, or is there some line you have to cross?
I once made a post about hanging out with cheerful, positive Christians in order to be more cheerful and positive, because a number of my atheist friends are also more negative and cynical. Someone commented that this verges on the Dark Arts. (Manipulating my own mind?) I've come to the conclusion that I can distinguish myself using Dark Arts from "regular social interaction" but I'm not going to stop doing it unless someone can prove that doing this harms others.
"But what if you were "optimistic" and only presented one side of the story, the better to fulfill that all-important goal of persuading people to your cause? Then you'll have a much harder time persuading them away from that idea you sold them originally - you've nailed their feet to the floor, which makes it difficult for them to follow if you yourself take another step forward."
Hmmm... if you don't need people following you, could it help you (from a rationality standpoint) to lie? Suppose that you read about AI technique X. Technique X looks really impressive, but you're still skeptical of it. If you talk about how great technique X looks, people will start to associate you with technique X, and if you try to change your mind about it, they'll demand an explanation. But if you lie (either by omission, or directly if someone asks you about X), you can change your mind about X later on and nobody will call you on it.
NOTE: This does require telling the same lie to everyone; telling different lies to different groups of people is, as noted, too messy.
I'm not sure that "Technique X looks really impressive, but you're still skeptical of it" is too complicated to explain, if that's the truth.
I believe Psychohistorian's criticism is primarily about the "shell" image: if interpreted as a Venn diagram, it gets the subset inclusion hierarchy backwards. Judging by your comment above, you have a different metaphor in mind -- something like a map in which an individual starts in the center and effortfully moves to the edge.
Objection: Economics is more powerful than you give it credit for.
Microeconomics is useful in anywhere or anyplace that has sufficiently strong optimization processes, with abilities and goals closely linked enough to create markets, and when there is enough stability to justify its simplifying assumptions.
Noted. About all I know about microeconomics is that it exists and makes predictions (my knowledge of it is on a purely descriptive level!) and that it's not as fundamental as general relativity. Suffice to say that it would be useful in an environment enough like Earth, in whatever relevant sense, that you could get optimization processes, abilities and goals linked, and stability. But not, for example, in an interstellar dust cloud.
it would be more impressive...
In a certain sense, the different levels of map are like the shells of a Russian doll
I would order your heirarchy exactly backwards. Description is easy, explanation is hard, prediction is even harder. I can observe that (made-up example) 20% more subjects lose weight on a low carb diet than on a low fat one. Explaining that is much harder. Predicting how any of various other diets would work for weight loss is harder still. Your larger circles oddly require more data and will generally be less certain. Thus, I find it a little odd to say that description is a subset of prediction, when you can describe far, far more than you can predict.
Most sciences assign a hierarchy to these concepts based on their difficulty, or "impressiveness." I think this is often harmful. You need to first describe things before you can start explaining them. To a certain degree, you need to explain things in order to predict them (or at least admit you can't explain them so you don't over rely on your predictions).
Description is easy, explanation is hard, prediction is even harder.
I can't think of why I would have disagreed with this! If I seemed to disagree with it anywhere in the post, that was unintentional. The point is that description is the easiest and prediction is the hardest, thus the last to be reached, thus the outer level of the shell. Which is impressive, but only because it's harder, because you have to do all of the work involved in description before you can explain, and have a complete explanation before you can predict.
When I view the page source (always a good first step in debugging why images won't show on a page), I see tags like
<img src="webkit-fake-url://5212E7C3-2AB0-4C87-BA79-7CFA7AA54052/image.tiff" alt="">
... these are almost certainly not what you wanted. (And tiffs won't render in almost anyone's browser.) It appears the WYSIWYG editor is not doing what you wanted.
In this post, Lukeprog hosted the image on his own site and then included it in the post with this code fragment:
<a href="http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/metaethics-flowchart-smaller.png"><img src="http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/metaethics-flowchart-smallest.png" alt=""></a>
Suggestion: if you don't have your own hosting to use, put the image on tinypic.com or somewhere similar (an image host that's okay with hotlinking), and transclude it from there. I'm not sure how to do this in the LessWrong editor, you may have to edit the HTML.
Phew! I did what you suggested (uploaded the image to tinypic) and edited the HTML code. You should be able to see the images now.
Can anyone else see the images? I could see them the whole time I was editing the post, but all I see now is blue question marks...and I have no idea how to fix it!
As a new reader, I would very much like to have a method for marking how far through the sequences I am. A dot next to read articles, or possibly a timestamp of last access could work, as could a button at the bottom of the article labeled "Mark as read" that would display the article title differently in the main sequence page. I feel lost when I hop around on different computers as to what articles I've read and where I have seen them before, and simply saving read articles every time is unsuitable for this.
EDIT TO ADD: Based off of what other commenters have said, I feel like a clarification is in order. What I'm looking for is a way to mark the sequence pages I've read, so that when they're linked to in the newer articles I can tell right away if I've read that particular post. Hopefully, this would work for both backward-linking sequences AND new posts that also link to sequence pages. Perhaps a way to store the URL of a read page, link it to my account, and when that URL is displayed again within LW a new graphic could show up to the side of the link to show that it has already been read.
This is an awesome idea! I've been reading LessWrong for years, but I still fairly frequently click on links within articles that look interesting, read the first few paragraphs of the article linked to, only to realize that I've read it before (sometimes a few times before!)
This might be too hard to implement, but here is the system I would like: a way to mark articles as 'unread', 'in progress', or 'read'. This information would be saved and links to articles that you marked 'read' would change colour. (Of course, maybe I'm the only one absentminded enough to need this!)
Mapping our maps: types of knowledge
Related to: Map and Territory.
This post is based on ideas that came to be during my second-year nursing Research Methods class. The fact that I did terribly in this class maybe indicates that I shouldn’t be trying to explain it to anyone, but it also has a lot to do with the way I zoned out for most of every class, mulling over the material that would later become this post.
Types of map: the level of abstraction, or ‘how many steps away from reality’?
Probably in the third or fourth Research Methods class, we learned that any given research proposal could be divided into one of the following four categories:
- Descriptive
- Exploratory
- Explanatory
- Predictive
I started wondering to what degree knowledge in general could be divided into these categories; whether a map can be, in different people’s minds, descriptive or exploratory or explanatory or predictive depending on how well they understand the territory. Following this analogy, descriptive knowledge is a map one step, one level of abstraction, away from the territory. Every observation made is simply echoed in the model. From the Wikipedia page on descriptive research:
Descriptive research, also known as statistical research, describes data and characteristics about the population or phenomenon being studied. Descriptive research answers the questions who, what, where, when and how... Although the data description is factual, accurate and systematic, the research cannot describe what caused a situation. Thus, descriptive research cannot be used to create a causal relationship, where one variable affects another. In other words, descriptive research can be said to have a low requirement for internal validity.
A descriptive map draws no sweeping conclusions; it just copies data about the world. When I close my eyes and picture my kitchen, the model in my head is descriptive. It says nothing about why my kitchen looks a particular way, or what effects its particulars have in my daily life, or what the kitchens in other people’s houses look like. Thinking about my kitchen, I might classify the information I know into chunks; I know that spoons, forks, and knives are all in my cutlery drawer, whereas the kettle, toaster, and microwave are all next to each other in a row on the counter. The system of binomial nomenclature created by Carl Linnaeus is a descriptive map; it doesn’t suggest particular avenues of exploration, it doesn’t explain the characteristics of the species described, and it doesn’t predict anything about new species or unknown properties of existing species. It simply lays out the way things are, the current state of knowledge.
From the Wikipedia page on exploratory research:
Exploratory research is a type of research conducted for a problem that has not been clearly defined. Exploratory research helps determine the best research design, data collection method and selection of subjects. It should draw definitive conclusions only with extreme caution. Given its fundamental nature, exploratory research often concludes that a perceived problem does not actually exist.
An exploratory model contains questions. Maybe, in the course of describing my kitchen to my mother, I realize I don’t know where my eggbeater is. I’ve come to realize that part of my mental map is blank, and when I get home I have a task to do; I’m going to look through all of my cupboards and find that stupid eggbeater. Maybe it’s in some drawer; maybe I lent it to a friend and forgot. I don’t really have any idea, so I’m not hazarding a prediction, but I know it’s a question that needs answering.
In qualitative research (the study of subjective phenomena which don’t lend themselves to being measured numerically), this stage is called grounded theory; the data is collected before a theory is made. This contradicts the usual scientific method of making a theory and then testing it without modifying the theory to fit the results; however, it’s the only method that makes sense when the data is insufficient to even hint at a possible theory. There’s no point in theorizing about who stole my eggbeater when for all I know it’s in the bottom drawer and there is no thievery involved at all. An exploratory model is two levels of abstraction away from the territory; it contains facts, and also questions about the facts. I would argue that having a lot of exploratory models pretty much defines what we call “curiosity”.
Explanatory research is the next step, and so is an explanatory map. If I know that my toaster is next to my microwave and kettle because there is only one wall plug in the whole room, my map contains an explanation. Explanatory models are in some sense easier to learn than purely descriptive or exploratory; if I know about the cause-and-effect of the wall plug, I don’t have to create a new node in my memory to remember where my appliances are. Knowing the location of the wall plug contains that information in itself. I could describe my kitchen to someone else and, assuming that they understand cause and effect as well as I do, convey just as much information in fewer words. From the blurtit article on explanatory research (there is no Wikipedia article yet, sadly!):
When we encounter an issue that is already known and have a description of it, we might begin to wonder why things are the way they are. The desire to know "why," to explain, is the purpose of explanatory research... Explanatory research looks for causes and reasons. For example, a descriptive research may discover that 10 percent of the parents abuse their children, whereas the explanatory researcher is more interested in learning why parents abuse their children.
Predictive research is the most advanced, and predictive models are the most useful. It’s one thing to explain in hindsight that my kettle, microwave, and toaster are adjacent because of the wall plug; it would be more impressive if my friend, learning that there is only one plug and that I don’t own an extension cord or PowerBar, says “Wow! So your toaster and microwave and kettle must all be next to each other, then? That’ll be nice and easy to find if I come to stay at your place!” To give another example, if your mental map of, say, physics is sufficiently complete, you might do well on a test without studying at all. Even if it so happens that you’ve never seen a particular kind of problem before, you should be able to answer it from first principles. The more abstract model, four steps away from the territory, contains the smaller, less abstract maps of individual problem types. For example, if a particular problem involved the five equations of kinematics, and you had never seen them before but understood all the concepts involved, with enough time you could derive the equations and solve the problem just as well as a student who simply memorized the formulas and did hundreds of practice questions in order to form a pattern-recognition schema for when to use which equation.
In a certain sense, the different levels of map are like the shells of a Russian doll; for a given domain of knowledge, predictive contains explanatory, which contains exploratory, which contains descriptive. All four types of map can be incomplete, but you can never tell if a descriptive model is complete; there could always be one more fact to type into your giant look-up table, and how would you know? The useful thing about a predictive map is that its completeness can be measured by measuring the accuracy of its predictions, and by studying the internal consistency (though an internally consistent map might not be the right map for a given territory).
Descriptive maps are useful, of course. (“Really? That kind of flower is called a chrysanthemum? I never knew that! Now I know what kind of seeds to ask for at the store!”) Exploratory maps lead to curiosity. (“It doesn’t say on the package how long a chrysanthemum needs to sprout. Maybe I should Google it, or call my aunt, I remember seeing them in her garden.”) Explanatory maps bring that click of understanding, the aha feeling that something is completely obvious, and predictive maps take that flash of understanding and add a dollop of real-world practicality.
What category do your maps belong to?
Types of territory: levels of reductionism, or ‘what is your map of?’
Some systems lend themselves more easily to being mapped on a predictive level than others. I’m tempted to call this quality the determinism of a given domain, but technically speaking the entire universe runs on the same substrate, and it’s either deterministic or it isn’t. Volatile markets aren't any less deterministic than the earth's orbit around the sun; they just have more moving parts, namely the brains of every human who participates in trade. Some of this complexity is predictable enough on a large scale that it can be modelled with simple equations, but not all of it.
The equations for microeconomics and the equations of general relativity both accept data as input and produce predictions as output, but they aren’t the same kind of map. What is the difference? I would argue that general relativity is significantly morereductionist than microeconomics. It carves reality at its joints and tries to measure the most fundamental qualities, and by doing so has a much broader scope. General relativity is true for every mass in the universe. Microeconomics is useful on Earth (one planet orbiting one star among all the galaxies), within the timespan that humans have existed, within the historical period that markets have existed, and when there is enough stability to justify its simplifying assumptions. It can be very useful in its scope, far more so than a merely descriptive model of which companies are doing well and would be good picks for investment. Predicting the market by discovering the ultimate laws of physics, programming them into a supercomputer, inputting the current state of the universe, and running the simulation wouldn’t be exactly cost-effective or worth the benefits gained.
The diagram shows a spectrum of different maps on two axes, level of reductionism and level of abstraction. General relativity is assumed to be a map in Einstein’s head; my own map of it is explanatory at best, and thus not as high in the vertical dimension. For the periodic table example, I refer to the way I understood it in seventh grade; it was presented simply as a classification, a look-up table for answering problems like ‘is potassium a metal or a non-metal?’ The map for ‘periodic table’ in my head now is at most explanatory, though during my high school chemistry years it was predictive to a degree; I knew the equations that governed, for example acid-base reactions, and I could give numerical answers. Grocery lists are the ultimate in primitive maps, neither carving reality at its joints nor inviting curiosity, explanation or prediction.
Where do your maps fit on this graphic?
Connectivity
No matter how non-reductionist a theory becomes, how specific it is, it is presumably about phenomena in our universe. I can’t predict microeconomics from the True Theory of physics, not without a supercomputer that runs faster than the universe itself, but I can connect it, chemistry to evolution to neuroscience and evo-psych. My maps aren’t very connected. How connected are yours?
And there's also the thing that while the people who hang around at LW probably have more ammo than usual against the overt bullshit of cults, they also might have some traits that make them more susceptible to cult recruitment. Namely, sparse social networks, which makes you vulnerable to a bunch of techniques that create the feeling of belonging and acceptance of the new community, and tolerance of practices and ideas outside the social mainstream, which gets cult belief systems that don't immediately trigger bullshit warnings inside your head.
The Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan that did the subway sarin gas thing reportedly recruited lots of science and engineering students. An engineering mindset will also keep you working from the internalized bullshit against social proof, since science and engineering is a lot about about how weird stuff extrapolated beyond conventional norms works and gives results.
tl;dr: You're not as smart as you think, probably have a mild mood disorder from lack of satisfactory social interaction, and have no idea how you'll subconsciously react to direct cult brainwashing techniques. Don't mess with cults.
probably have a mild mood disorder from lack of satisfactory social interaction
Umm. Not all of us. I may be vulnerable to cults for other reasons, namely my conformist personality, but not lack of people to talk to.
Can you describe a mostly concept dream?
I always have visuals in color going on in dreams. I'm not sure that I hear sounds. I get some kinesthesia. Sometimes I get concepts in the sense of "just knowing" the backstory for something in a dream. I only remember taste/smell happening once.
I've read that no one dreams of landing a real punch, which I assume means a plausible amount of tactile/kinesthetic input.
I only remember taste/smell happening once.
I read once in a book that you never eat anything in a dream. Shortly later I had a dream where I was eating my mother's homemade pumpkin molasses muffins, and they tasted very good...and had texture in my mouth, and the satisfying solidness as I swallowed. In general, what distinguishes my dreams from reality is how the locations are similar-yet-different to real life. If I notice that "wait, this bus stop looks too similar to the one outside my rez to be a different place, but it's not the same" then sometimes I can realize I'm in a dream. Also, my schedule gets mixed up; in a dream, I might be going to choir practice directly from class, even though I know I don't have classes on Thursdays. All my senses are involved in dreams though, and usually fairly elaborate plots, like trying to get to class on time when things keep going wrong (buses not showing up, people coming to distract me) and I'm worried about something else.
This was my philosophy for a long time.
Past-tense?
Used to be more so, because I had a huge problem in seeing anyone else as wrong, so I had to twist my mind in order to make their input "true" in some sense even if not in a meaningful sense. You could say my philosophy used to be the strong version of this and is now a weaker version...
Hello Less Wrong!
I was on facebook and I saw a wall post about the fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I haven't read fanfiction much since I was a kid, but the title was intriguing, so I clicked on it and started reading. The ideas were interesting enough that I went to the author's page and it brought me here.
Anyways, I'm a 22 year old female person. I'm graduating from college in 2 weeks with a chemistry major and I have no real plans, so it makes posting about my life situation a little awkward right now. I'll probably be heading back to the Chicagoland area and trying to find a job, I guess.
I can already tell that this site is going to wreak havoc on my ability to finish up all my projects, study for finals, and hang out with my friends. I just spent a couple hours reading randomly around and I can tell I've barely scratched the surface on the content. But after I almost died laughing at the post about the sheep and the pebbles I was hooked. Really, I just want to be a freshman again so I can spend my time staying up all night thinking and talking and puzzling things out with EZmode classes and no real responsibilities.
Anyways. I'm pretty excited about getting through the material on here. I love learning to understand how other people think, and how that helps them reach the conclusions that they reach. It's always terrifying when I realize that someone has posited an argument or a scenario that challenges my interpretation or understanding of the universe in a way that I can't easily refute- especially when I can't refute it because I realize they're right and I'm not.
Oddly enough, one of the scariest experiences of my life was when someone told me about the Monty Hall problem- two goats one car. A friend explained the scenario and asked me if I would switch doors. I jokingly replied that I probably wouldn't, since I was clearly already lucky enough to miss the goat once, I shouldn't start questioning my decision now. The friend told me that I was being irrational and that by switching, I would have a better chance of picking the car. I remember being scornful and insisting that the placement of the goat occurred prior to my choosing a door, and revealing one of the other doors could have no impact on the reality of what prize had already been placed behind what door. The friend finally gave up and told me to go look it up.
I looked up the problem and the explanation, and it sent me into a bit of a tailspin. As soon as I read the sentence that explained that by switching, I would end up with the car 2/3 of the time as opposed to 1/3 of the time, I felt my intuitive ideas being uprooted and turned on their head. As soon as it clicked, I thought of 4 or 5 other ways to think about the problem and get the right answer- and of course it was the right answer, because it made logical and intuitive sense. But then thinking back to how sure I had been just 10 minutes ago that my other instincts had been correct was horrifying.
Remembering how completely comfortable and secure I had felt in my initial reasoning was so jarring because it now seemed so obviously counter-intuitive. I'm usually very comfortable refining my ideas in light of new ones, incorporating new frameworks and modifying the way I understand things. But that comfortableness derives from the fact that I'm not actually that attached to many of my ideas. When I was in high school, my physics teacher stressed the importance of understanding that the things we were studying were not the true nature of reality. They represented a way of modeling phenomena that we could observe and quantify, but they were not reality, and different models were useful for different things. Similarly, I usually try to keep in mind that the majority of the time, the understanding I have of things is going to be imperfect and incomplete, because of course I don't have access to all the information necessary to make the perfect model. It followed that I should strive to be as adept as possible at incorporating new information into my model of understanding the universe whenever possible without resisting because I had some attachment to my preexisting ideas.
But the the case of the Monty Hall problem, I was confident that I understood the whole problem already. It seemed like my friend was trying to confuse my basic understanding of reality with a mathematical wording trick. Coming to an understanding of how deeply flawed my reasoning and intuition had been was exhilarating and terrifying. It was also probably at least a bit dramatized by the caffeine haze I was in at the time.
I think I still have a lot of ideas and ways of thinking that aren't quite rational. I can find inconsistencies in my understanding of the world. I know that a lot of them are grounded in my emotional attachment to certain ways of thinking that I have in common with people with whom I identify. I'm afraid if I really think about certain things, I'll come to conclusions that I either have to deliberately ignore or accept at the cost of giving up my ability to ignore certain truths in order to favor my personal attachments (Sorry that sentences was convoluted- I can't think of a better way to phrase it at 8 AM when I've been up all night).
Sometimes I'm legitimately afraid I might drive myself crazy by thinking. Even in college I have a hard time finding people who really want to talk about a lot of the things I think about. My roommate is the most wonderfully patient person in the world- she sits for hours and listens while I spout ideas and fears about all kinds of physics and philosophy and everything in between. And even though she can follow most everything (sometimes it takes some explaining), she doesn't even really find it very interesting. But there are times when I'm seriously concerned that I could go out of my head just from thinking and getting too close to my own horizon of imponderability and trying to conclude something or anything.
So yeah. I'm not quite sure if that's quite what we're supposed to do with introduction posts. In retrospect, I think I probably took way too long to drag out a rather boring story that could have been summarized in a few sentences and confided enough fears and weirdness to be off-putting and possibly discredited as a rationalist. Anyways… I've put off biochem proposals for hours reading here and now writing this, so I'm going to stick with it instead of redoing the whole thing and running out of time and failing to graduate. Props if you got through it all. Hopefully by the time I'm done here I'll be sophisticated enough to say all this in a few concise sentences. Is eliminating excess rambling part of rationality? But yeah- I've never really read other people's ideas about all these topics, and I'm kind of pumped about it. If I can understand even a bit of what y'all are talking about and figure out how to be a little less wrong I'll be a happy camper.
I'm very interesting in reading your future posts! It sounds like you have a lot of potential and a lot of learning to do, which is always the most exciting combination. I wish I could be your roommate and get to hear all of this!
This was my philosophy for a long time. The fact of someone believing something is evidence. It's not evidence necessarily that the thing they believe is true; it may not say anything about the thing they believe; but it is evidence about their mind and about the events in the world that affected their mind. Belief is a cognitive event; it isn't outside of cause-and-effect.
I have in fact noticed that comments of mine that discuss music score consistently lower than my other comments.
Did you notice that your comments (and those agreeing with you) nonetheless score higher than your critics in such discussions? (And whoever's modding you down in this thread, it's not me -- I don't use downmods against opponents when my investment in the discussion might be compromising my judgment.)
(1) It matters when determining whether a clique is learning the structure of reality or just replaying inside jokes. If the clique judges designs based on useful models that carve reality at its joints, and that use objective, unfakeable (e.g. through consensus) metrics, we should care what they think and we should be impressed those who can hit narrow targets in the design space they define. If the clique has to keep checking on whether the rest of the clique already likes something, because there really isn't a successful model ... then none of that applies. Which category do MACs fall in?
(2) Well, then where does the rest of Mozart's value come from?
From the other stuff that people still like, voluntarily listen to, etc. after hundreds of years and no indoctrination.
As bad as Lady Gaga might be, where's the Music Theory PhD can that can demonstrate a superior understanding of the mind-music relationship, rather than just whine about how reality won't bend to fit his theories?
In the present context, this is a distinction without a difference. The point is that I could simply say to you "the market has spoken" with regard to Bell, just as you are wont to do with EKM. What criterion of "justification" are you appealing to here?
The ability to make a judgment without having to first be told what your judgment should be. Layfolk who get recordings of EKM aren't doing it because it's the hot thing right now among their friends and the elite cultural arbiters told them to.
In contrast, the royalty really wouldn't tell the difference if Bell flubbed and "only" performed at the 95% percentile. While the market has spoken, it is not announcing a victory of the characteristics you claim are important: it is showing that people will buy based on hype, and we know it's hype because their market value changes when the hype is removed (as the Bell experiment showed -- no wealthy person said, "Holy s***! Let me hire you to be my personal performer! You're way undervalued here!")
It should really raise a red flag for your when you're basing your opinion on "but rich people like this stuff when they're duped!"
As bad as Lady Gaga might be
I am fairly "indoctrinated" in classical music (my parents have been taking me to the symphony since I was small, and I sing the stuff) and I like Lady Gaga. Whatever sense in which she is awful doesn't have much effect on her popularity. Yeah, her music isn't as complex and challenging as Mozart's, but maybe that just shows that complexity isn't the only thing that makes music pleasant to listen to...in fact, if anything I think simple music is funner to listen to, since untrained people can sing along and enjoy the tune for themselves. (I enjoy classical pieces 20 times more when I know them well enough and am in a venue where I can sing along.)
Could be related to the kind of person who studies music academically, as opposed to understanding it intuitively (as I think Mozart did, based on the very catchy little songs he wrote pre-puberty). Writing something "catchy" is a non-trivial ability, is quite important to whether music is enjoyable (which is the criteria I think music should be judged on), and is hard to learn...and maybe can be learned, but not by studying theory, only by iteratively writing music and observing its emotional effect.
Well, modern music education (quite rightly) does require students to compose and play music and thus give them this kind of practice.
But the difference in understanding you're describing is exactly the kind of barrier reduction seeks to take down. A few hundred years ago, the mechanics who eked out the biggest performance for steam engines were the ones who had an "intuitive" understanding of what "just works right" and what doesn't.
Science sought to put this art on a more rigorous, learnable grounding, where you no longer need someone with "machine empathy", but can identify the governing rules behind nature and exploit them to get maximum performance -- and explain why a certain method gives better performance.
Reductionist and scientific progress occurs when we can take the black-box understanding that the earlier masters had and demystify it. Music theory should be doing the same thing: generate theories that take away much of the need for intuition in composition. And to its credit, it has done so: it identifies which chord progressions and which keys produce which kinds of emotional effects, which key changes generally "sound right", and which don't -- things like that.
But given the level of judgment MACs purport to be capable of passing on modern music -- and the musical "inferential distance" they claim lies between them and the masses -- they ought to have assimilated the kind of insight the previous masters had, such that it is trivial to write music of similar quality.
The problem, then, is that the true musical innovation just isn't coming from the ivory tower -- the very folks who should be the very be the very best at pleasing the mind of the unindoctrinated through music.
Hence my criticism.
I read this comment out loud to my father, and his comment is "it sounds convincing, but in my experience the best art and music have never come from academics".
First, a remark addressed to the two people who downvoted the grandparent: your behavior makes no sense at all. My best guess is that you disapprove of discussion of music on LW. But not only is that an unreasonable position to take, it wouldn't explain why you didn't downvote neighboring comments.
(I have in fact noticed that comments of mine that discuss music score consistently lower than my other comments. I can understand if some of the "mathy" types of people that populate this site have a perception that topics relating to art and music are "fluffy" and unprestigious, but what I've never been able to understand is why this perception doesn't seem to get updated once they run into people who are similarly "mathy" but also interested in art and music.)
Now to Silas's comment:
(1) On "insular cliques": not all cliques are equal. There exist "insular" (which I suppose means low-population) cliques such that impressing them has value.
(2) Those examples certainly did not imply (nor were intended to imply) that all of e.g. Mozart's value comes from e.g. EKM. The point is just that someone today can appreciate something like EKM enough to voluntarily listen to it on their own time .... or to put it on ringtones, etc.
Well, then where does the rest of Mozart's value come from?
You're hiding the work of your argument behind the phrases "someone today" and (especially) "something like". Who counts as an eligible appreciator? What music counts as "something like EKM"? After all, on my view, the work of MACs is like EKM (and inherits prestige thence). A distinction that places Mozart and Lady Gaga on one side and Schoenberg and Salieri on the other doesn't carve musical reality at its joints. (To do that, you'd have to put Mozart and Schoenberg and Salieri on one side, and Gaga on the other.)
(3) I don't dispute that Bell is (by the appropriate, unfakeable, non-parochial) metrics better than most other violinists. What I claim is that achieving the skill difference between him and the bottom of the e.g. 95th percentile is way past the point of diminishing returns -- that, while better, it is not so many times better to justify anything close to his proportionally higher income (on musical talent alone).
In the present context, this is a distinction without a difference. The point is that I could simply say to you "the market has spoken" with regard to Bell, just as you are wont to do with EKM. What criterion of "justification" are you appealing to here?
I can understand if some of the "mathy" types of people that populate this site have a perception that topics relating to art and music are "fluffy" and unprestigious, but what I've never been able to understand is why this perception doesn't seem to get updated once they run into people who are similarly "mathy" but also interested in art and music.
This may be a perception that some people have, but I've always perceived music as a) very mathematical, and b) not at all unprestigious. In the high school I went to, people who were smart academically and also talented in music were much higher-status than people who were only involved in academic subjects. (I'm not saying this is a universal perception, or even a good perception to have, but it's what I've observed.)
I may be very wrong about this, but I don't think that Mozart and Beethoven were, per se, "academic" composers.
True, but I mention them as a baseline against which to compare Modern Academic Composers, who have the advantage of dedicated learning and studying the history and theory of music. If they are genuinely learning the structure of reality in their studies (rather than, e.g., how to best pull off an "inside joke" among their fellow acoyltes), they ought to be capable of a lot more than just impressing classmates.
Thus, I claim that a fair standard to expect MACs to meet is that they could produce music of similar success to that of top classical composers, if given the audience -- but all they can produce is, in fact, stuff that only their classmates care about.
What is the relevant criteria to say that their music is not as good as Mozart's.
I would agree that their music is at least in the ballpark with Mozart -- no one has to be indoctrinated in years of schooling to like the Beatles (or Mozart) and yet they were able to gain the appreciation of huge sectors of society (also like Mozart).
But I think the appropriate question to ask is, why can't MACs do what the Beatles did? If they truly have assimilated the insights behind what made Mozart and the Beatles pleasing to the human mind, why can't they produce it just the same? I believe it's because they judge themselves only against the ivory tower, not reality -- and could not compete with "real world" music if they tried.
I believe it's because they judge themselves only against the ivory tower, not reality -- and could not compete with "real world" music if they tried.
Could be related to the kind of person who studies music academically, as opposed to understanding it intuitively (as I think Mozart did, based on the very catchy little songs he wrote pre-puberty). Writing something "catchy" is a non-trivial ability, is quite important to whether music is enjoyable (which is the criteria I think music should be judged on), and is hard to learn...and maybe can be learned, but not by studying theory, only by iteratively writing music and observing its emotional effect.
I may be an example of someone whose music comes from book learning more than intuition, but I do have strong emotional reactions to music, so I can modify the things I write until they produce that reaction, without necessarily knowing the music-theory name for the techniques I use.
(Maybe Bell could play a much harder piece, while the mediocre player would flounder utterly, and maybe to someone with violin training his tone and expression would be noticeably better, but not to the average Joe hurrying through the Washington Metro.)
If I remember correctly, Bell did play some truly challenging pieces. No one noticed, except that one guy.
Again, to someone with no training, what is the difference between a moderately and an extremely challenging piece? I'm not sure if I can tell, beyond a certain level; all I can say about pieces is "I could sight-read that", "I could sing that with a lot of work and practice", or "there's no way I can sing that at this level of training". I'm sure that the repertoire of pieces in the third category is huge, and they're not all the same difficulty level, but I'm not sure I could tell the difference if I heard them sung.
Also, a piece that's extremely challenging isn't necessarily catchy. People tend to react emotionally to songs they know, not obscure-but-difficult violin solo pieces.
The use of the past tense here reveals the common belief that there aren't any composers any more. I would like to bring it to your attention that this is false.
(Nor is it true that today's composers lack the aural skills of their predecessors.)
Perhaps, but they (modern academic composers) lack the skill to produce profitable hits that work their way into the culture like Ode to Joy and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik have.
I will credit them, though, with having the ability to come up with convincing reasons why, despite their extreme, objectively recognizable musical skill, they cannot pass that kind of test of skill.
Perhaps, but they (modern academic composers) lack the skill to produce profitable hits that work their way into the culture like Ode to Joy and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik have.
I may be very wrong about this, but I don't think that Mozart and Beethoven were, per se, "academic" composers. They wrote in the style that was popular at the time; music that could be performed, with instruments, in a hall where people would pay tickets to see it. The era of recording changed that completely, but the Beatles had a lot of musical talent and training, including classical training in harmony, and their songs are very well known. What is the relevant criteria to say that their music is not as good as Mozart's.
First of all, maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought Swimmer963 was a "she".
Thanks for pointing that out; I've changed the 'he's to 'they's.
I am entitled to be bothered by it, and to correct it when I come across it.
Ok, but emotionally satisfying responses are rarely strategic responses. The positive advice in your post (this ability can be trained) seems like an afterthought. If you led off with that, you would impart the same content (modern composers exist and have comparable or superior skill levels) and far superior context ('I am confident and helping' instead of 'I am offended and correcting').
It doesn't actually bother me what gender people think I am; I would like to think the ideas in my posts don't depend on the fact that I'm female to be relevant.
(1) It's relevant to the question of whether modern academic composers (MACs) are learning skills that are entangled with ivory-tower-independent reality, that make distinctions carving reality at its joints, and that simply aren't about impressing an insular clique.
(2) Those examples certainly did not imply (nor were intended to imply) that all of e.g. Mozart's value comes from e.g. EKM. The point is just that someone today can appreciate something like EKM enough to voluntarily listen to it on their own time (when doing so wouldn't enhance their status) or to put it on ringtones, etc.; and that -- this is important -- they do all these things without first having to be indoctrinated by a special priestly order (as someone can appreciate commercial air travel without having to be indoctrinated into aerospace engineering).
(3) I think you're sticking with a misrepresentation of my position that I corrected last time. I don't dispute that Bell is (by the appropriate, unfakeable, non-parochial) metrics better than most other violinists. What I claim is that achieving the skill difference between him and the bottom of the e.g. 95th percentile is way past the point of diminishing returns -- that, while better, it is not so many times better to justify anything close to his proportionally higher income (on musical talent alone).
Therefore, this additional earning power is due to hype: and it is proven, by Bell's very own admission in how no one cares about him when they have something even slightly important to do, or when the Queen hasn't already ponied up $1,000/minute.
What it looks like when someone is hit with the harsh reality of life without your, um, "musical skill" having been "social proof"'ed:
"It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ."
The word doesn't come easily.
"... ignoring me." [...]
"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute. [...]
Before he began, Bell hadn't known what to expect. What he does know is that, for some reason, he was nervous.
"It wasn't exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies," he says. "I was stressing a little."
Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the anxiety at the Washington Metro?
"When you play for ticket-holders," Bell explains, "you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don't like me? What if they resent my presence ..."
There are six moments in the video that Bell finds particularly painful to relive: "The awkward times," he calls them. It's what happens right after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who hadn't noticed him playing don't notice that he has finished. No applause, no acknowledgment. So Bell just saws out a small, nervous chord -- the embarrassed musician's equivalent of, "Er, okay, moving right along . . ." -- and begins the next piece.
He lived, in other words, how I live every day -- without people being magnetically attracted to me because of hype. He learned what it's like to be without all that pre-validation.
Interesting example about Bell. I'm not entirely confident that I could tell the difference between someone with a fairly advanced violin training (for example, my parents' friends' daughter from Toronto, who is now 17 and has been playing violin since about age 5) and someone with elite world-class talent. I can tell the difference in singing, but that's because I have some training, just enough to know that it's ridiculously hard to project loudly enough to fill a whole opera hall and still stay in key, or to sing fast classical passages, or to get exactly the right tone color to make a particular emotional impression... My speculation is that people with no musical training probably can't tell the difference between someone with moderate violin training and someone like Bell playing the same piece. (Maybe Bell could play a much harder piece, while the mediocre player would flounder utterly, and maybe to someone with violin training his tone and expression would be noticeably better, but not to the average Joe hurrying through the Washington Metro.)
I can even "hear" chords by superposing several notes. (Composers such as Mozart had incredible capacities to do this, which I will probably never be able to mimic...
The use of the past tense here reveals the common belief that there aren't any composers any more. I would like to bring it to your attention that this is false.
(Nor is it true that today's composers lack the aural skills of their predecessors.)
my imagined melodies still lack "texture" i.e. the difference in sound between a flute, trumpet, voice, etc
FYI: the term for this is timbre. Texture is something different.
On the substance: yes, aural skills are very trainable. There is no magic involved whatsoever.
The use of the past tense here reveals the common belief that there aren't any composers any more. I would like to bring it to your attention that this is false.
Oops. Did not mean to imply that at all. I actually know several composers who have this ability. I guess my phrase was mixed up between "Mozart had..." and "composers (such as Mozart) have...". Agreed that if I did mean this is an ability only found in the past, people would be perfectly justified in taking offense, especially if they themselves are composers with this ability. (Are you, komponisto? Because that would be super cool.)
Neat. Your conclusions don't surprise me much, but I hadn't heard of the evaluating-your-mental-imagery exercise before. It's obvious to me now that my mental images are very foggy; they're mostly concept with a small amount of visual detail attached. However, I'm sure this a faculty that can be improved. Before I started my music training, songs stuck in my head were tuneless, basically the lyrics in rhythm but in a kind of monotone. After 7 years of being in bands and choirs, I can now hear tunes in key in my head (imagining melodies involves feeling them in my throat a little, as if I were singing them) and I can even "hear" chords by superposing several notes. (Composers such as Mozart had incredible capacities to do this, which I will probably never be able to mimic...my imagined melodies still lack "texture" i.e. the difference in sound between a flute, trumpet, voice, etc). Presumably I or anyone else could do the same with mental images by doing some kind of art training.
As an aside, in a novel I wrote, there is a community of children that use echolocation to 'see' objects underwater in flooded houses.
In a universe that contained no minds, a clean table and a cluttered table would both be neutral objects, but in the world-simulation that Mary’s brain builds, a cluttered table is obviously bad and cleaning is neutral.
In a universe that contained no minds, a table with an image painted on it that offends most people in this universe's US would also be a neutral object. As it stands, it would not be a good idea to keep such a table uncovered if you were expecting guests and wanted to maintain positive social status.
The same goes for a messy house. It may be a matter of subjective preference, but it's a subjective preference that a lot of people share. If someone prefers a messy house to the labor of cleaning it up, they may inadvertently send the signal that they do not care about the aesthetic preferences of others, just as they would if they preferred not showering to the annoyance of showering.
Furthermore, a messy house, if allowed to become messier over time, will eventually become more difficult to navigate. Even if movement isn't blocked or made hazardous, finding objects becomes a matter of mind-reading, as there is no longer an expectation that they will be returned to a specific place. Coordinating tasks also becomes more difficult - if there's no place for dirty laundry and dirty dishes, ensuring that everything gets cleaned efficiently becomes a matter of approximation. Clean dishes are a preference insofar as not having cockroaches and ants is a preference. Clean laundry is a preference insofar as having a higher probability of keeping a job is a preference.
I've seen the "if it bothers you, clean it" approach taken, and it quickly leads to a Tragedy of the Commons situation. Everyone can make a mess individually, but the cost is shared. Conversely, anyone can clean, but the social benefits go to everyone.
Likewise, negotiating with personal utility functions in mind simply gives an advantage (in terms of time spent on cleaning) to the person who dislikes cleaning. If cleaning is seen as a way of dealing with the collective harm of a mess, saying "I don't like it or care, so I shouldn't have to do as much as someone who cares about it" makes as much sense as saying "I don't mind the smell of smoke, so why can't I smoke in the house just because you dislike it? What if I only smoke in the house 50% of the time? Isn't that a compromise?"
A heuristic that works well in cases of shared harm, I think, is to give each person responsibility over minimizing harm in some specific area. In other words, "you clean the bathroom, I clean the kitchen, and our own bedrooms will be as dirty or clean as we like."
That said, all of this assumes that nobody prefers being surrounded by scavenging arthropods. Having once, some time ago, lived in such a messy way that a colony of pillbugs moved into my room to live off of the debris, I can vouch that they were pretty cute. But practically speaking, they had to go.
"I don't mind the smell of smoke, so why can't I smoke in the house just because you dislike it? What if I only smoke in the house 50% of the time? Isn't that a compromise?"
The analogy is good, but I don't think it maps exactly. Second-hand smoke is clinically proven to have negative health effects, whereas mess (in terms of clutter, at least, not filth to the point of arthropod infestation) causes no physical harm. I think that's why I feel strongly that it's NOT okay to smoke in the house as a compromise, but that it should be okay to compromise on cleaning standards.
I am looking forward to reading the sequence! Metaethics is one of the areas where I'm foggy; a lot of the stuff I read confuses me immensely. A reductionist explanation sounds very helpful.
Interesting post. Reminds me of one of the things my parents think is odd about me. It causes me a pang of emotional pain to buy lunch at the cafeteria ("I should have planned better and packed enough food and saved $2") but I have no problem donating large amounts to charity. I think it has to do with the guilt factor of spending money on myself, which is replaced by the I'm-a-good-person glow of giving to charity. I probably donate nearly 5% to 10% of my total income, which is still much less than I could donate, but I'm going to wait until I have a steady 'adult' job rather than an $11/hour lifeguarding job to really push that.
This is a fascinating post! Thank you for sharing your story.
And this is where the trouble started: I really couldn't put the book down. It was as though the mental stimulation afforded by ZAMM had pushed me over the lip of an energy barrier, and I was now in an incredible downhill rush.
This ability to dissociate from the rest of reality and focus on one thing is a gift! Albeit scary if you feel unable to stop focusing. I've felt it occasionally while working on novels, but in general I have to expend mental effort to focus on something, and I think that's true for most people. You're lucky in that it's probably easier to learn to control this focusing ability when you have it automatically than to learn how to activate it in the first place.
I'm told that Bertrand Russell was once asked: "But haven't you ever had any mystical experiences?" "Why, yes," he replied, "I ignored them."
That's basically my current perspective. Then again, my mystical experiences (usually triggered by singing church music in a group setting) are not particularly useful in an instrumental sense; they bring warm fuzzy feelings and a sense of oneness with the universe, and glimpses of 'inspiration', but I end up having to work just as hard to flesh out those inspirations as I would have anyway.
I would like to read further posts as it would be interesting to see if I have your capacity to get lost in 'arational' focus; terrifying as it might be, it's new ground to explore and that's tempting.
Laziness is a bad reason to seek a publisher as a debut author. It takes a lot of work. Lots of them will reject you, this simply being a fact about the industry.
Good to know. Thanks for the advice.
Why not self-publish? I've written two books (and a third coming out tomorrow, with a fourth next month) and published paper versions through lulu.com , Kindle versions through kdp.amazon.com , and versions for other e-readers through smashwords.com . I'm making quite a reasonable amount of money from them - not enough to live on, but an average of fifty pounds per book per month - and that's for fairly niche books with zero promotion.
Zero promotion? Really? I guess the main reason I was looking for a publisher is laziness, in that I know I personally won't do any promotion. I'll check out those websites though.
I can trigger ecstatic, mystical "religious experiences" fairly easy in other ways; even just singing in a group setting will do it.
Wow, impressing that nevertheless you've managed to become a rationalist! Now I would like to hear how you achieved this feat :-)
I would rather read about the neurological underpinnings of my experience, especially since grokking science's answers can sometimes trigger a near-mystical experience!
I totally agree. Therefore neuroscience of "altered states of consiousness" is one of my pet subjects...
Wow, impressing that nevertheless you've managed to become a rationalist! Now I would like to hear how you achieved this feat :-)
Mainly by having read so much pop science and sci-fi as a kid that by the time the mystical-experience things happened in a religious context (at around 14, when I started singing in the choir and actually being exposed to religious memes) I was already a fairly firm atheist in a family of atheists. Before that, although I remember having vaguely spiritual experiences as a younger kid, they were mostly associated with stuff like looking at beautiful sunsets or swimming. And there's the fact that I'm genuinely interesting in topics like physics, so I wasn't going to restrict my reading list to New Age/religious books.
Publishing industry contacts, anyone?
I finished a novel last September, did most of the editing over Christmas, and have been procrastinating ever since. My novel has significant rationalist themes and would probably be of interest to a number of people here. Below is a plot synopsis. If you would be interesting in reading it, send me a private message with your email address and I can email you the Word file. I am still acceptiong editing suggestions.
Also, if anyone has suggestions as to where I could submit it, that would be very helpful.
Plot Synopsis: After the Flood
Ten-year-old Ash lives with a band of orphans in the flooded remains of a 21st-century city, where they live by diving for salvage in submerged buildings and trading it to adults in the mainland city. One day, when she watches a stranger attempting to climb the Wall, a mysterious and impregnable structure in the flooded city, he is injured and she saves his life. He claims that there are people living in the Wall, people who still have the knowledge and power that were lost during the long-ago flood.
Armed with her determination and cunning mind, Ash manages to break into the Wall and obtain medicine for the boy's sister, who is dying of tuberculosis. In the mainland city, however, the boy's parents are captured by the Church of Candles, which controls the city, and executed for their attempt to use the old knowledge.
Six years later, now a young adult apprenticed to a herb-woman on the outskirts of the city, Ash meets the brother and sister again and continues searching for the truth about the flood and the city's past.
hi everybody,
I'm 22, male, a student and from Germany. I've always tried to "perceive whatever holds the world together in its inmost folds", to know the truth, to grok what is going on. Truth is the goal, and rationality the art of achieving it. So for this reason alone lesswrong is quite appealing.
But in addition to that Yudkowsky and Bostrom convinced me that existential risks, transhumanism , the singularity, etc. are probably the most important issues of our time.
Furthermore this is the first community I've ever encountered in my life that makes me feel rather dumb. ( I can hardly follow the discussions about solomonoff induction, everett-branches and so on, lol, and I thought I was good at math because I was the best one in high school :-) But, nonetheless being stupid is sometimes such a liberating feeling! Everytime desperation takes hold, caused by the utter stupidity of my fellow human beings, I only have to imagine how unbearable it must be for someone like Yudkowsky to endure the idiocy of most folks ( myself included). But maybe the fact that dumb people drive me insane is only a sign of my own arrogance...
To spice this post with more gooey self-disclosure: I was sort of a "mild" socialist for quite some time ( yeah, I know. But, there are some intelligent folks who were socialists, or sort-of-socialists like Einstein and Russell). Now I'm more pro-capitalism, libertarian, but some serious doubts remain. Furthermore my atheistic worldview was shattered by some LSD-trips, and new-age, mysterious quantum-physics-interpretations. I drifted into a spooky pantheistic worldview. The posts on LessWrong were really useful to help me overcome this weltanschauung. This story may seem not too harmful, since the distinction between atheism and pantheism is not entirely clear afterall, but mystic experiences, caused by psychedelics ( or other neurological "happenings"), may well be one of the reasons why some highly intelligent people remain/ or become religious. Therefore I'm really interested in neuropsychological research of mystic experiences. ( I think I share this personal idiosyncrasy with Sam Harris...) And I think many rational atheists ( myself included before I encountered LSD), underestimate the preposterous and life-transfomring power of mystic experiences, that can convert the most educated rationalist into a gibbering crackpot. It makes you think you really "know" that there is some divine and mysterious force at the deepest level of the universe, and the quest for understanding involves reading many, many absurd and completely useless books, and this endeavor may well destroy your whole life. Such a mystic experience may well be the Absolute Bias, almost impossible to overcome, at least for me it was really hard. But do mystic experiences have some benefits???I think so. Ah, life is soo ambivalent...
Oops, probably already talked way too much. I hope I can contribute some useful stuff in the future and meet some like-minded people...
But mystic experiences, caused by psychedelics (or other neurological "happenings"), may well be one of the reasons why some highly intelligent people remain/ or become religious.
I can personally support this. I've never taken LSD or any other consciousness-altering drug, but I can trigger ecstatic, mystical "religious experiences" fairly easy in other ways; even just singing in a group setting will do it. I sing in an Anglican church choir and this weekend is Easter, so I expect to have quite a number of mystical experiences. At one point I attended a Pentecostal church regularly and was willing to put up with people who didn't believe in evolution because group prayer inevitably triggered my "mystical experience" threshold. (My other emotions are also triggered easily: I laugh out loud when reading alone, cry out loud in sad books and movies, and feel overpowering warm fuzzies when in the presence of small children.)
I have done my share of reading "absurb and useless" books. Usually I found them, well, absurd and useless and pretty boring. I would rather read about the neurological underpinnings of my experience, especially since grokking science's answers can sometimes trigger a near-mystical experience! (Happened several times while reading Richard Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene'.)
In any case, I would like to hear more about your story, too.
Everything is a fact about great many things. It's a fact about her, and a fact about table, and a fact about evolutionary history, and a fact about fusion in the long-dead stars. What makes a certain event a fact about a specific idea for us is usefulness of information gained about that idea, not just existence of a certain relationship between an idea and the event.
Okay, I'll try to clarify what I mean. If Mary did not exist, the table could still be messy; that's a fact about the table. But with no one to observe it, the messiness wouldn't be bad. The badness of the table being messy is a fact about how Mary perceives messiness...which is why the same table, with the same messiness, could be "not-bad" through someone else's eyes, i.e. Albert. Obviously it's a fact about the table in that the table has to exist, and be messy, in order for Mary to think it's bad, but you can't describe it by only describing the table...you have to describe Mary's brain too.
Is there any way I can make this clearer in the article?
A while ago, Bryan Caplan considered the Albert and Mary scenario and concluded that Albert was right:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/01/how_can_guys_be.html
That's my feeling too. Luckily I'm a girl, and I'm fairly messy, and hopefully I'll marry a man who's at an equivalent level and we won't have to go through that battle.
I actually am such a person, if anyone wants to ask relevant questions. I grew up in a very messy house - my father didn't care, and my mother was disabled enough to have trouble keeping on top of things - and I find living-places that are too clean to be anxiety-inducing.
I expect my best friend's son (now 6 months old) may grow up this way. They live with her mother-in-law and I have never in my life seen so much stuff in one house. The overall impression is of abundance rather than clutter, but there's still a lot of clutter. It's the kind of house where a student like me goes empty handed and leaves with a bag full of food and old clothes to try on and extra Tupperwares.
In a universe that contained no minds, a clean table and a cluttered table would both be neutral objects, but in the world-simulation that Mary’s brain builds, a cluttered table is obviously bad and cleaning is neutral.
In a universe that contained no minds, a table with an image painted on it that offends most people in this universe's US would also be a neutral object. As it stands, it would not be a good idea to keep such a table uncovered if you were expecting guests and wanted to maintain positive social status.
The same goes for a messy house. It may be a matter of subjective preference, but it's a subjective preference that a lot of people share. If someone prefers a messy house to the labor of cleaning it up, they may inadvertently send the signal that they do not care about the aesthetic preferences of others, just as they would if they preferred not showering to the annoyance of showering.
Furthermore, a messy house, if allowed to become messier over time, will eventually become more difficult to navigate. Even if movement isn't blocked or made hazardous, finding objects becomes a matter of mind-reading, as there is no longer an expectation that they will be returned to a specific place. Coordinating tasks also becomes more difficult - if there's no place for dirty laundry and dirty dishes, ensuring that everything gets cleaned efficiently becomes a matter of approximation. Clean dishes are a preference insofar as not having cockroaches and ants is a preference. Clean laundry is a preference insofar as having a higher probability of keeping a job is a preference.
I've seen the "if it bothers you, clean it" approach taken, and it quickly leads to a Tragedy of the Commons situation. Everyone can make a mess individually, but the cost is shared. Conversely, anyone can clean, but the social benefits go to everyone.
Likewise, negotiating with personal utility functions in mind simply gives an advantage (in terms of time spent on cleaning) to the person who dislikes cleaning. If cleaning is seen as a way of dealing with the collective harm of a mess, saying "I don't like it or care, so I shouldn't have to do as much as someone who cares about it" makes as much sense as saying "I don't mind the smell of smoke, so why can't I smoke in the house just because you dislike it? What if I only smoke in the house 50% of the time? Isn't that a compromise?"
A heuristic that works well in cases of shared harm, I think, is to give each person responsibility over minimizing harm in some specific area. In other words, "you clean the bathroom, I clean the kitchen, and our own bedrooms will be as dirty or clean as we like."
That said, all of this assumes that nobody prefers being surrounded by scavenging arthropods. Having once, some time ago, lived in such a messy way that a colony of pillbugs moved into my room to live off of the debris, I can vouch that they were pretty cute. But practically speaking, they had to go.
The same goes for a messy house. It may be a matter of subjective preference, but it's a subjective preference that a lot of people share.
Apparently one my roommates and landlady all shared and I didn't. I like clean countertops and clean dishes and I would not like pill-bugs in my room (I almost always did my dishes and I don't leave food or dishes in my room for more than 24 hours) but papers on the desk and clothes on the floor don't bother me at all...in fact, I think I find them vaguely comforting. Messy is not necessarily the same thing as dirty. I think most people don't like dirty, but some people are more okay with messy.
If someone prefers a messy house to the labor of cleaning it up, they may inadvertently send the signal that they do not care about the aesthetic preferences of others, just as they would if they preferred not showering to the annoyance of showering.
If their friends who they have over have higher cleanliness standards, then maybe. Otherwise...most of my friends live in messier houses than I do, and it doesn't bother me at all. Maybe we'll get tidier as we get older and fussier.
It doesn’t matter where she acquired this attitude; it’s so deeply entrenched in her mind that clean is good that she doesn’t even realize it’s a preference, instead of a fact.
Still a fact, just more complicated one.
See also: 2-Place and 1-Place Words.
Fair enough, but it's a fact about her, not a fact about the table or the floor.
AFAICT, the italics have no spaces around them because you didn't type them in the Word document. Yes, it looks fine in Word, but only because the M$ renderer places a lot of blank space around italicized text.
When I went back to edit it, there were spaces around the italics...I know there were spaces because I could delete it. When I re-submitted, it again looked like there weren't any spaces. So I added two spaces around each italic word. Hope that's an improvement.
Perhaps it was pasted in from a M$ Office document? The HTML source includes the following:
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-indent: 36pt;" class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">...
Guilty. I noticed the italics thing. It wasn't like that when I was writing it in the Word document.
I do not like the term "values" here. Values to me refers to an abstract, subjectively objective, moral principle rather than a concrete, objectively subjective, psychological fact.
You could be talking about instrumental values, but it's really the fundamental underlying psychology that you want to be talking about.
Fair point. To me, I think the term 'value' feels concrete, but evidently it's confusing the point for you. What term would you use, other than 'fundamental underlying psychology?'
Vanilla and chocolate and preference judgements
Related to: 2-Place and 1-Place Worlds, Offence versus harm minimization.
Note: edited to replace 'value' with 'preference' as suggested by orthonormal.
Imagine you overheard two children having an argument over whether vanilla ice cream was better than chocolate ice cream. To you as an observer, it would be obvious that this kind of argument has no content. The children aren’t disputing anything measurable in the exterior world; they would agree with each other than chocolate ice cream contains elements from cocoa beans, and vanilla contains the extract from vanilla beans. Most adults wouldn’t have this argument at all, because it’s self-evident that if Mary says, truthfully, that she likes vanilla better than chocolate ice cream, and her husband Albert confesses that he prefers chocolate, then both of them are right. There is no contradiction; vanilla and chocolate are both neutral items until they come into contact with human tastebuds and human brains, at which point their positive or negative weighting is a fact about those brains, not about the substances themselves.
I think that this concept generalizes. Imagine that Mary and Albert are having an argument. Mary hates how Albert leaves papers spread across the kitchen table with empty coffee mugs on top. She wishes he would remember to put his clothes in the laundry basket instead of leaving them on the floor. She nags about it. Albert is helplessly baffled at why she thinks it’s such a big deal. He accuses her of being a nitpicker and a perfectionist.1
It’s hard to say that both of them are right, if each is hurting the other’s feelings. Again, though, their argument isn’t about anything factual. They both agree that there are papers on the desk and clothes on the floor, and that Albert is the one responsible. Where they diverge is the preference they place on this world-state.
Mary is a bit of a neat freak. She likes shiny floors and spotless counters, and she finds cleaning pleasant and relaxing. Seeing a cluttered countertop causes her a small amount of psychological pain. It doesn’t matter where she acquired this attitude; it’s so deeply entrenched in her mind that clean is good that she doesn’t even realize it’s a preference, instead of a fact.
Albert, in turn, has no particular opinion about a clean living space. It doesn’t bother him if the floors are clean enough to eat off, but it doesn’t bring him any particular happiness either. He just doesn’t notice his environment as much. However, he finds cleaning tedious to the point of pain. Left to his own devices, he would live contentedly in squalor.
To Mary, Albert seems incredibly lazy. After all, if cleanliness is so pleasant, and the act of cleaning really isn’t so bad, what except for laziness could keep her husband from holding up his end of the housework? It’s a health hazard, leaving all those dishes everywhere. Doesn’t it bother him?
To Albert, Mary seems obsessive and unreasonable. Why hold yourself to such high standards when it could be so much more rewarding to relax once in a while? It’s one thing for her to work herself to the bone keeping the house that clean, but she doesn’t have to, and she has no right to ask him to, that’s for sure.
These viewpoints are not contradictory. In a universe that contained no minds, a clean table and a cluttered table would both be neutral objects, but in the world-simulation that Mary’s brain builds, a cluttered table is obviously bad and cleaning is neutral. In Albert’s world, a cluttered table is neutral and cleaning is bad. Since they live together and each presumably wants the other to be happy.
If Mary and Albert were rationalists, Mary might say the following:
“Albert, you know that keeping a clean house has a large positive weighting in my utility function, but I know that stuff like vacuuming and scrubbing the bathroom is a big negative in your utility function. I want you to be happy; that means that my utility function includes a miniature copy of yours. Part of me wishes we could share the chores equally because that would feel fairer, but I know it wouldn’t be fair; I enjoy cleaning as a way to wind down at the end of a stressful day, but you don’t, and I don’t have the right to ask you to self-modify so that you would enjoy it. Since I’m too busy to do all of the cleaning by myself, would it be too much to ask for you to do 10% of it? That should balance out my desire for fairness with your lack of enjoyment for cleaning. Also, I know you like to spread out and making a mess when you’re working, so why don’t we say that the study on the second floor belongs to you and you can keep it as messy as you want as long as it doesn’t start to smell. In return, I want you to keep your clothes off the floor and please don’t leave your papers or your coffee-cups anywhere except the study. That shouldn’t be too much to ask?”
Albert has a few minor suggestions to make. Maybe he’s willing to do up to 15% of the cleaning, maybe he doesn’t mind mopping the floor and just hates vacuuming because it makes his ears hurt, maybe he wants to clarify that he doesn’t leave coffee mugs everyone on purpose, he’s just really forgetful and may need to be reminded once in a while. But because Albert’s a rationalist, too, the discussion goes smoothly. Maybe he even offers to try hacking his attitudes to cleaning so he doesn’t find it so unpleasant.
If Mary and Albert aren’t rationalists, though, they have a long way to go to reach that conversation. To each of them, it seems like the other is being pig-headed and deliberately blind about something obvious. Albert doesn’t realize that he’s making a preference judgement about tidiness versus messiness, let alone that he could change how he feels about it.
In the past year, I’ve started to realize how many of the arguments I have, or hear others having, are not about anything that can be measured. (Maybe this was obvious all along to most people; it wasn’t obvious to me.) Different minds work differently. I wish some of my friends would work out more and be fitter, because to me it’s really obvious that fitness is incredibly important and exercise is really not all that bad and you feel better afterwards and you focus better and sleep better…but that’s a preference judgement. I made it with my brain, with all its particularities, and even if it’s verifiably true for me (and I don’t know if I actually focus better after exercise or whether that’s just a biased perception) it may be verifiably false for other people. Maybe there are people who just feel tired and sweaty and grumpy after they work out. They might agree that it would be nice to be fitter, but they’re not making the same trade-off that I am, because the act of exercising, as separate from its long-term benefits, has a negative rather than a positive weight to them.
I don’t exercise because I judged it a rational thing to do; my mother put me on a swim team when I was eight years old and my body is so used to being worked hard in the pool every day that I get crabby if I don’t swim. That a particularity about my childhood and the way it affected the wiring in my brain. It might take someone else orders of magnitude more motivation to follow the same routine that I do, but that doesn’t mean they’re just being lazy and irrational when they don’t work out every day.
Ultimately, for me this means that if I want to go out and help someone because I think they’re making sub-optimal decisions, first I have to make sure my mental model of them is accurate, right down to their preferences and where they differ from mine. What might seem like ‘helping’ to me could be annoying interference to them, and it’s useful to know that in advance. If someone I know spends all their time writing poetry instead of going to the gym, and they fully enjoy that and would consider trading poetry-writing-time for gym-time to be an unreasonable and unnecessary drop in their quality of life, then that’s a true fact about how their brain works. It doesn’t have to be, and maybe their total happiness would be higher once they got used to getting out of the house; maybe they would find that exercise brought a wave of inspiration; but telling someone they’re wrong about their own preferences is not going to help them make that change.2
This applies to the arguments I choose to have, too. If I notice that a pet peeve I have is really a more complicated equivalent of vanilla vs. chocolate, it helps me to find it less irritating and bring it up less often. I don’t apply this method often enough in my daily life, but when I do, it snips a lot of needless conflict in the bud, leaving time for discussions and yes, sometimes conflict, over facts or over preferences that I really want to change people’s minds about.
Notes
1. Albert and Mary are loosely based on the dynamic between myself and my former landlady. She was the tidy one, as were most of my roommates; I was the messy one who apparently drove everyone crazy. It took me most of the year to realize how irrational I was being in the way I treated the whole issue. I did, and still do, value sleeping over cleaning, and my schedule is busy enough that there is a trade-off between the two, but I did sign the contract and agree to live in the house, and there was a certain implicit assumption that I would hold up the same standards as everyone else … and if I could do the year over, I would either live somewhere else or do a better job of cleaning, because according to my value system it isn't okay to treat other people's values as less worthwhile than your own.
2. They might not be right about their values; some people have remarkably poor models of what really makes them happy and what they find unpleasant, and another, more rational person might have a better model of them than they do of themselves.
"People who can't or won't think for themselves" is how a friend of mine characterised his customers as a freelance Windows NT admin (a very good one - and good NT admins aren't cheap). "There's a lot of money in sewage."
Outsourcing thinking to anyone who can be convinced or coerced into doing it seems quite common to me. People will so often do things just because someone else demands it of them. I have commented before on how my ridiculously charming daughter [1] is remarkably creative in intellectual laziness, and how I have to be sure not to let her get away with it. She will damn well learn not to be lazy just because she can!
I blank on programming, which is not so good for a sysadmin to a development team. I don't write anything more than shell scripts and I have the algorithmic insight of someone who doesn't. I suppose I should learn more.
Too many people consider computers malevolent boxes of evil completely unamenable to any rational consideration, even in theory. Your "Sandra" example is many programmers I've worked with.
[1] and it works on people other than me, e.g. the man in the coffee shop at 5pm yesterday she asked to get her a babycino (frothy milk with chocolate on top). He switched the machine back on after he'd switched it off and cleaned it just because the cute little girl asked for a 50p drink.
[1] and it works on people other than me, e.g. the man in the coffee shop at 5pm yesterday she asked to get her a babycino (frothy milk with chocolate on top). He switched the machine back on after he'd switched it off and cleaned it just because the cute little girl asked for a 50p drink.
Good customer service? Regardless of the 'cuteness' of the customer, I think most employees wouldn't say 'no' unless the shop had already closed.
Very observant post. I've noticed this 'learned blankness' in a lot of people when it comes to 'nerdy' areas like math and science, probably because I'm not as blank in these areas. (There are plenty of things I don't know very much about, like for example the North American legal system, but my usual thought is "wow I would really like to get a book/do a wikipedia search out on that!") Unfortunately it's not as easy to pinpoint the areas where I am blank.
But before giving it even ten seconds’ thought, I’d classified the problem as a “mechanical thing”.
As part of my 'mission to become a real grownup', I've started trying to solve small household problems like this on my own. Sometimes it leads to a lot of time-wasting, like the time I spent half an hour trying to fix the toilet when it turned out my roommate had just turned the water off because the sound kept her awake. I would have saved myself an hour if I'd made the problem not my responsability, but now I have a pattern-recognition schema in my head for toilet problems...the first thing I'll check for next time, after "is is plugged?" will be "is the water on?" I'm assuming that this is how most people become good in these areas...
Once you've mastered that, ask them to pretend like they are a stranger so you can approach them and open a conversation 20 times in a row.
A friend actually did this exercise with me when I was about grade 9. At the time I was not so much shy as overwhelmed by small talk; I couldn't process it in real time, so if someone said "what's up?" to me I would freeze and eventually blurt out some rude-sounding conversation-killer. We were on some kind of volunteer field trip, I think, and we spent an hour in the hotel room with her 'starting conversations' with me and me responding. ...Wow, I had actually forgotten I had that much trouble with social skills.
Answering questions like this 100 times in a row will reveal how often most of us speak softly, fail to enunciate, and use filler words like "um."
Some of us wish we could learn to speak more quietly! I don't know if it's because of my family dynamics or the crowd I hung out with in high school, but when I'm excited I speak very loudly and people find it disruptive.
This is the basis for the Montessori method of education.
After 2 years of failed swimming lessons by "professionals" I taught my daughter to swim in a few weeks using this technique (learn one step at a time).
BTW one benefit of Montessori education, for the early childhood years 3-5yo, is that the children develop amazing powers of concentration for some reason. My daughter is just amazing in this regard.
After 2 years of failed swimming lessons by "professionals" I taught my daughter to swim in a few weeks using this technique (learn one step at a time).
This technique has a name? I teach swimming lessons as part-time job and I guess I'm still getting used to it not being obvious to most teachers (of swimming or other things) how important it is to break down skills into small chunks. Just out of curiosity, what progressions did you use with your daughter? I may be able to use them in my classes.
Is Which Parts are Me relevant to that?
Yes, probably. Thanks.
(For the sake of abstract curiosity:)
If that holds for unintentionally bumping into someone, or spilling coffee on their shoe, then as a logical extension it holds true for things I say, whatever medium I use to say them.
I would apologise for spilling coffee on someone but not in this situation. The analogy is not a good one and definitely not one of logical deduction! Some relevant factors:
- Astro was being obnoxious and disrespectful. (Barring a couple of exceptions that would not apply in this case) apologising to people when they are being obnoxious and disrespectful legitimises people behaving that way to you.
- This isn't direct personal interaction going on in good faith. It's an absurd public spectacle. It's an entirely different situation and one in which people's judgement changes drastically, losing perspective. An apology here wouldn't just be
- Give an inch and they'll take a mile. See JGWeissman's behaviour here with Constant for an illustration. An apology would be twisted into a confession of guilt. As though Dfranke actually did something wrong. (Apart from spam the forum with Qualia nonsense - I'd appreciate an apology for that!)
- Dfranke didn't call Astro a dude - it was a guess that it was even one distinct individual and picking an arbitrary gender for the hypothesised individual isn't saying anything about Astro at all. In fact the unknown downvoter could just as easily have been me. My voting patterns (everything by Dfranke in this thread down whenever I noticed it) match exactly what he described.
- Dfranke apologising would be a (minor) slight to all those who have defended him from perceived unjust accusations. The clear consensus (by voting pattern) is that Astro was behaving inappropriately and there was a solid base of support for Dfranke at least as far as pronoun use goes. You don't undermine that without good reason.
- Dfranke basically isn't involved in this discussion. That's a good way to be. Some people have taken it as an excuse to push their spivak related political agenda but he has chosen not to try to desperately justify himself. Staying uninvolved is a wise move and if he did choose to make a statement it would be significant primarily as a political feature, not an instrument of furthering interpersonal harmony.
- If Dfranke did feel guilt (or, more realistically given that it would be a response to public criticism, shame) then that is a problem of miscalibrated emotions and not something to submit to. Guilt would not be serving him in this instance and he has the opportunity to release that feeling and move the stimulus response pattern (disapproval -> shame -> supplication) one step closer to extinction.
- Even if an apology is met with approval in the moment it is not necessarily producing an overall good outcome for you. It may get an apparently encouraging response from a minority but would not lead to being treated with respect in the future either by those people doing the encouraging or by others. You apologise when you have actually done something wrong, not because someone else tries to emotionally bully you.
Astro was being obnoxious and disrespectful. This isn't direct personal interaction going on in good faith. It's an absurd public spectacle. It's an entirely different situation and one in which people's judgement changes drastically, losing perspective.
I guess maybe I did not read the entire comment string, since I didn't notice any 'obnoxious' comments from Astro, or much of an 'absurd public spectacle'. You may be right about that.
Dfranke basically isn't involved in this discussion. That's a good way to be. Some people have taken it as an excuse to push their spivak related political agenda but he has (wisely) chosen not to try to desperately justify himself.
Agreed!
Guilt would not be serving him in this instance and he has the opportunity to release that feeling and move the stimulus response pattern (disapproval -> shame -> supplication) one step closer to extinction.
I would still apologize. That is the person I've chosen to be (and by extension, the person I've chosen to represent myself as). It may not produce an overall 'good' outcome, but I'm not sure what you define as 'good'. I've never been treated with disrespect by people I've apologized too.
This is a really interesting post! I've been thinking about exactly this issue lately, mainly in the context of trying to figure out what I'm doing right. A lot of people my age live either in a state of perpetual Level 1 (working as a lifeguard and swim instructor at the same pool for 4 years and earning $11.00 an hour) or Level 2 (constantly embarking on and then abandoning projects because "it's not really what they want to do"). For whatever reason, I don't have this problem.
My hypothesis is that Level 2 comes naturally to me, something to do with the fact that my internal monologue never turns off and I like to think about stuff...but at the same time, probably thanks to 5 solid years of competitive swimming with up to 7 practices a week, I know that doing something once isn't enough to improve at it, or even maintain a constant performance...you have to do it indefinitely. So I put some thought into big life decisions, but I still get up the next morning and go to class/work/gym, because that's just maintenance, the things I need to do to stay at the level I'm at now (financially, in terms of grades, in terms of fitness, etc).
To me this is really obvious. I maybe lean a little far towards focusing on Level 1 at the expense of Level 2, but this is partly strategic as well...I like being perceived as a borderline workaholic who can handle stress and get stuff done, because that comes with its own perks.
For what it's worth, commenting on LW is so far from normal conversation and normal internet use that most intellects haven't developed methods for it
This is interesting-- LW seems to be pretty natural for me. I think the only way my posting here is different from anywhere else is that my sentences might be more complex.
On the other hand, once I had a choice, I've spent most of my social life in sf fandom, where the way I write isn't wildly abnormal, I think.
Anyone who's reading this, do you think what's wanted at LW is very different from what's wanted in other venues?
Anyone who's reading this, do you think what's wanted at LW is very different from what's wanted in other venues?
I haven't noticed, but this is the first online community I've belonged to. I'm used to writing fiction, which may affect the way I post here, but if it does I don't notice it affecting it. Commenting feels natural. I don't try to make my sentences complex; if anything, I try to make them as simple as they can be to still convey my point. And at the very least, my comments and posts aren't drastically downvoted.
Maybe I'm just being habitually contrarian here for no good reason, but it seems to me that for a supposedly "rationalist" community, people here seem to be far too willing to accept claims of LessWrong exceptionality based on shockingly weak evidence. Group-serving bias is possibly the most basic of all human biases, and we cannot even overcome that little?
Claiming that your group is the best in the world, or among the best, is something nearly every single group in history did, and all had some anecdotal "evidence" for it. Priors are very strongly against this claim, even after including these anecdotes.
Yet, in spite of these priors, the group you consider yourself member of is somehow the true best group ever? Really? Where's hard evidence for this? I'm tempted to point to Eliezer outright making things up on costs of cryonics multiple times, and ignoring corrections from me and others, in case halo effect prevents you from seeing that he's not really extraordinarily less wrong.
There is a big difference between something being 'the best group ever' and being 'an easier shortcut to rationality than digging through philosophical writings the old-fashioned way', which is how I interpreted this post. There is a community component to LessWrong that obviously isn't present in old books, but I don't think that's paramount for most people. For me, in the beginning, the Sequences were just a good way to read about interesting ideas in small, digestible chunks during my breaks at work. Now it's a bit more than that; LessWrong gives me a chance to post my ideas where they'll be criticized by people who don't have any social-etiquette reason not to tear apart my arguments. But there's a big difference between a group being the optimum, the best any group of its kind could be, which LessWrong obviously isn't...and between being the best out of all the options in a limited area, which is more what this post is claiming (I think).
Dfranke apologising would be faux pas. Or at least it would be a strategically poor social move.
Dfranke apologising would be faux pas. Or at least it would be a strategically poor social move.
Really? If I unintentionally do something to offend someone, I apologize. If that holds for unintentionally bumping into someone, or spilling coffee on their shoe, then as a logical extension it holds true for things I say, whatever medium I use to say them. The relevant aspect in this case isn't what I say, it's what effect that has. If I said (or wrote) something that seemed reasonable at the time, but offended someone or hurt their feelings, then I'm sorry to have hurt their feelings. I won't necessarily censor myself forever after, or even change the things I say, but I will apologize because it's a social ritual that hopefully makes me feel less guilty and the hurt/offended party feel less offended or hurt.
It was complicated, but fixed.
That happens to me sometimes...if I write a post in Word and then copy-paste, sometimes the last paragraph comes out in a different font than the rest, or the whole of it is in a weird font. I think most of this site is in Arial or something similar, but I usually write in Times, so that might have something to do with it.
I don't really know a lot about anthropics, but once I read through this article with a sufficient level of focus, it made sense. I had not heard of the Shangri-La problem before...I have read about the Sleeping Beauty problem. I don't know any of the others: what is Duplication or John Collins' Prisoner?
when I saw the title my initial thought was that it was talking about people who were short in stature.
Agreed.
Did you ever figure out what the intended meaning was?
People who only exist for a short period of time. Once I read the actual article, I thought the title was a clever pun, but I can see how it could be confusing.
I find philosophy dense and difficult to understand ... if you could recommend a book or webpage
In that case I'd suggest starting with:
(try it and see if the style/approach appeals to you, if not no worries) or
http://www.amazon.com/Popper-Modern-masters-Bryan-Magee/dp/0670019674
(This summary book on Popper is only 115 pages. The easiest to read book option.)
Open-mindedness and curiosity are one thing. Raw native intelligence is something different. I might be above average on the first two, but I expect I have less of the second that the average LWer. For example, I would love to understand the math of quantum mechanics, but it's hard for me and really learning it, if I decided to, would likely be a multi-year endevour. Same with computer programming...I would love to actually be able to do it, but it doesn't come super easily.
I think you're mistaking subject specific skills for raw native intelligence. Being good at math and programming isn't what intelligence is about. They are specific skills.
BTW I believe most educational material is quite bad and makes stuff far harder and more confusing than necessary. And for quantum physics in particular the situation is pretty terrible (if you want to learn it in depth; there's OK popular science books for a lower level of detail). The situation with programming is better: there's way more self taught programmers and more non-academic efforts to try to create material to help people learn programming, which I think are often more successful than the stuff schools put out.
I would equate intelligence with basically how good one is at learning in general, without giving priority to some fields. I think open mindedness and curiosity are crucial traits for that. A lot of people aren't much good at learning in general, but have a specific field or two where they do OK. They can be impressive because in the area where they are rational they gain a lot of expertise and detailed knowledge. But I don't regard them as more intelligent than more broad people.
You find math hard to learn. But most mathematicians find various things hard to learn too, such as (commonly) social skills. Most people are more impressed by math knowledge than social knowledge because it's more common. Most people learn social skills, it's nothing special. Yet that doesn't really imply math is harder. More people try hard to learn social skills. And more people are alienated from learning math, at a young age, by their teachers (especially females).
Whatever topics one is bad at learning, I don't think it's normally caused by intelligence itself. I think raw native intelligence is itself a misconception and that the hardware capabilities of people's brains don't vary a lot and the variance doesn't have much practical consequence. Rather, I think what people call "intelligence" is actually a matter of their philosophical theories and rationality, especially either general purpose ideas (which allow one to be good at many things) or ideas in specific fields people are impressed by (e.g. math).
What I think causes people to have trouble with math, or social skills, or other things, besides the inherent difficulty of the subjects, is irrationalities, caused largely by external pressure and cruelty. Those people who have trouble learning social skills were teased as children, or had trouble finding friends, or something. They did not try to learn to interact with others in an environment where everyone was nice to them, and they could fail a bunch of times with no harm coming to them, and keep trying new things until they got it. With math, people are forced to do things they don't want to like unpleasant math homework and math tests. They don't get to learn at their own pace for their own intrinsic motivations. This commonly alienates people from the subject. Causes like these are cultural.
I would equate intelligence with basically how good one is at learning in general, without giving priority to some fields. I think open mindedness and curiosity are crucial traits for that.
Maybe I was above average in, say, my high school graduating class, but I doubt that is true of the Less Wrong community. People wouldn't be here if they lacked that degree of open-mindedness and curiosity.
They don't get to learn at their own pace for their own intrinsic motivations. This commonly alienates people from the subject. Causes like these are cultural.
Would you like to comment on how non-Western cultures view math differently? Or offer a suggestion as to why I was the only white girl in my high school calculus and vectors class? (I like math a lot...it's just that most people who like math like it because they're good at it, so the only people who want to talk to me about math and how awesome/fascinating it is are usually massively better at it than I am, which may be why I perceive myself as not being good at it.)
I do have stubbornness, which can be an advantage to learning new things (I spent 8 years teaching myself to sing, and went from complete tone-deafness to composing my own piano and vocal pieces and performing moderately difficult solos.) I am also stubbornly loyal to prior commitments, which basically means that once I start doing something I never stop...after awhile this limits my ability to start new things. (I can't teach myself quantum mechanics while I'm working 2 jobs, singing in a church choir, and going to school full-time.)
And for quantum physics in particular the situation is pretty terrible (if you want to learn it in depth; there's OK popular science books for a lower level of detail).
Agreed! I ran into exactly this problem; I've read enough pop science books that I no longer learn anything new from them, but when I took a textbook out of the university library, I took one look at the first page and was lost. Eliezer's intro to quantum mechanics would probably help, if I made the commitment to go through it entirely and practice all the math, but again, not something I can do very easily on my breaks at work.
This isn't a good week, I have 3 exams and a paper due, but I'll find time.
There's no hurry. I might stop checking this website, but I'll be happy to continue the discussion any time if you email me curi@curi.us
It would be fine if you were busy and delayed for a month, or whatever. No big deal.
You seem pretty calm so far, no big danger signs, though it's hard to tell if you'll continue replying much. It's hard to explain why I have some doubt there. A lot of agreeable people don't like to push issues into too much depth to the point of bringing out disagreements and then discussing them.
I would like to continue this conversation. It's awfully nice to be discussing with someone and have them post a comment the length of a short story full of points that, while I might not agree with them, are well-thought-out. And nothing you said has really annoyed me. Some of the things you say I wouldn't say, because a) that's just not my attitude to life, and b) I have no particular reason (yet) to try to filter who I talk to. However, I think I understand why you take that attitude, and it doesn't seem to have any negative consequences for your emotions, assuming you don't care that people comment on your reputation. (Wish I could cite that comment but I don't think I can find it again...)
Just checked your karma though. With that much you must discuss a fair amount, unless you're account is really old or you're good at writing popular top level posts that get 10 points per vote.
My account is about 3 months old. I would need to add it up properly, but for sure more than 3/4 of my karma comes from my top-level posts. I have a few (Being a Teacher and Ability to React, neither of them very controversial) that were upvoted more than I think they deserved (46 and 68 upvotes respectively, or around that) and the rest are between 10 and 20. My post Positive Thinking probably has the most comments of anything I've written...it's about the benefits of religious communities, which makes it fairly controversial here. I'm not good at writing controversial stuff (or writing non-fiction at all, really) but it's a nice feeling when you're 19 and feel kind of powerless in the world-at-large to see people replying to and discussing your ideas.
My own intelligence had affected every aspect of my life and mind and personality; that was massively obvious, seen at a backward glance.
Obviously you are a great deal smarter than I was as a child...and maybe more of a contrarian. I have a tendency to smooth conflicts over rather than attack them head-on, which probably makes it harder for me to be a rationalist, and most of what I experience is bumping up against the limits of my native intelligence: concepts I kind of understand, but which are too complex to hold in my working memory all at once so I can really look at them, or music that sounds amazing, but which is too complex for me to break it down and figure out how to replicate the effect, or my struggles with learning computer programming. (I didn't struggle relative to other people, but subjectively I felt like it was difficult and frustrating.) If I could take a pill to increase my working memory (which is below average), ability to consolidate to long-term (probably above average but always room for improvement) or spatial skills and ability to grasp concepts at a glance, I would likely choose that over any kind of physical enhancement. It's really annoying to be more curious than intelligent...I'm acutely aware that I don't understand most of quantum mechanics (or a dozen other fascinating fields) and probably never will, because understanding would require years of dedicated studying.
The thing is, an AI doesn't have to use mental tricks to compensate for known errors in its reasoning, it can just correct those errors. An AI never winds up in the position of having to strive to defeat its own purposes.
A self-modifying AI. Not all AI has to be self-modifying, although superhuman Friendly AI probably does have to be in order to work.
This is a really interesting post, and it does a good job of laying out clearly what I've often, less clearly, tried to explain to people: the human brain is not a general intelligence. It has a very limited capacity to do universal computation, but it's mostly "short-cuts" optimized for a very specific set of situations...
It seems like the right perspective to think about things goes something like this:
Facts about the world can be good or bad. It is good, for instance, when people are happy and healthy, and bad when they are not.
- It is bad that Alice fell and hit her head.
- It is bad that Bob, due to dizziness, stumbled and hit his head.
- It is bad that Carol, due to a sudden bout of violent behavior, momentarily decided to punch Dan in the head.
- It is bad that Erin carried out a plan over a period of weeks to punch Fred in the head.
These are all pretty much equally bad, but 4 and possibly 3 are also someone's responsibility, and therefore morality is involved.
Some facts about the world are some people's responsibility. These seem to be some fraction of the facts that are true about their brain - yes 4 but not 2. Good things that are people's responsibility are moral in a different sense than good things that are not people's responsibility.
but this responsibility is philosophically very fuzzy and mostly isn't a useful concept.
Interesting breakdown.
Facts about the world can be good or bad. It is good, for instance, when people are happy and healthy, and bad when they are not.
My interpretation is that facts about the world are interpreted as good or bad by a brain capable of feeling pain, the usual indicator that a world-state is 'bad', and pleasure, the indicator that it is 'good'. Outside of the subjective, there are facts but not values. In the subjective, there are values of good and bad.
If I understand correctly what you're saying, it's that a fact having positive or negative value assigned to it by a brain (i.e. Alice falling and hitting her head) does not necessarily imply that this fact has a moral flavour attached to it by the same brain. It's not wrong that Alice fell, it's just bad...but it is wrong that Carol hit Fred. Am I reading your argument correctly?
I do plan to start talking about my tithing, slowly, as it comes up in conversation. If everybody who decided to give rationally influenced at least one other person to do so too, the idea grows virally. But, gently, gently. Nobody's convinced by brow-beating moralising.
In academia, especially, forming a group that thinks through the impacts of different charities (and that potentially helps you decide where to donate) might allow you to get others engaged in a manner that feels more like recognizing their status/brains, and asking for intellectual help they might like to give, than like moralizing.
That sounds like a good idea. I'll keep it in mind, although I'm not exactly in academia.
Good idea! Images always make things clearer for me. Your redo is very nicely done, too.
Talking about morality causes much confusion, because most philosophers - and most people - do not have a distinct concept of morality. ...
I think - and have, for as long as I can remember - that morality is about doing the right thing. But this is not what most people think morality is about!
And more in this vein. I really dislike this post. The author proclaims that he is shocked, shocked that other people are wrong, even though he himself is right. Then he proceeds to analyze why almost everyone else got it wrong, without once trying to justify his own position using any argument other than professed astonishment that any thinking person could disagree.
Downvoted.
The author proclaims that he is shocked, shocked that other people are wrong, even though he himself is right. Then he proceeds to analyze why almost everyone else got it wrong, without once trying to justify his own position using any argument other than professed astonishment that any thinking person could disagree.
I think you took this post in unnecessarily bad faith, Perplexed...unless this is an area where you've already had frustrating head-banging-on-wall discussions, in which case I understand. I did not detect any particular 'shocked-ness' in the author's explanation of how he understands morality.
I think - and have, for as long as I can remember - that morality is about doing the right thing. But this is not what most people think morality is about!
Okay, reading back I can see your point, but I still don't find it offensive in any way. As far as I can tell, all that he's claiming is that a) people claim morality is about one thing (doing the right thing) but they discuss it and act on it as if it's something different (the freedom to choose, or soul-karma-points). If he's right, it wouldn't be the first time that a word had multiple meanings to different people, but it would explain why morality is such a touchy subject in discussion. I read this post and thought "wow, I never noticed that before, that's interesting...that could explain a lot."
My one complaint is that 'doing the right thing' is presented as atomic, as obvious, which I'm pretty sure it isn't. What paradigm do you personally use to determine 'right', Phil?
My impression is that there are a few issues where contrarian positions will tick people off and result in undeserved downvotes unless they're extremely well written and argued. There is also a somewhat larger set of issues where posts and comments will get upvoted heavily, and sometimes stratospherically, despite being pure applause lights. However, as someone who has written many comments of varying quality criticizing various positions that are prevalent on LW, I can say that as long as they don't touch any of the few third rails, contrarian comments overwhelmingly end up with non-negative scores even if they're less than stellar.
When it comes to posts downvoted to -1, and sometimes also -2, one confounding issue are the passive-aggressive downvotes of frustrated participants in the discussion. (Scores below -2 usually indicate a wider range of downvoters.) These typically get reversed by other readers, but sometimes nobody sees it or cares enough.
On the whole, I think the present system works as well as could be reasonably expected. The only change I'd like to see is separate tracking of upvotes and downvotes, so that controversial comments would stand apart from those that are just plain uninteresting.
The only change I'd like to see is separate tracking of upvotes and downvotes, so that controversial comments would stand apart from those that are just plain uninteresting.
I would like that too...also for top-level posts, it would be nice to know.
In a post referencing a paper claiming "...orbitofrontal cortex and ventral tegmental area are necessary ..." in the title, I somehow doubt that the complaint was about economic jargon. But then I do have a background in economics.
I suppose that I do have some background in neuroscience (at least the basics covered in our mandatory Anatomy and Physiology courses). I don't know per se what the ventral tegmental area does, but I know it's a part of the brain and, well, I'm relying on the post/article to tell me what it does if that is relevant to the point.
This serves as a great collection of references, but the post itself has too much opaque jargon to be a helpful explanation.
Really? I didn't notice it was jargon-y at all...and I have zero background in economics.
As Eliezer pointed out, if it's fairness, then you probably have a curved but continuous utility function - and with the numbers involved, it has to be a curve specifically tailored to the example.
and with the numbers involved, it has to be a curve specifically tailored to the example.
A pure utilitarian who could grasp a number as large as 3^^^3 might choose the one person being tortured. My point was that intuitively, the unfairness of torture jumps out more than the huge, huge number of people being minorly annoyed.
Maybe fairness as an intuition is more a flaw than a value. That's actually an interesting thought. I'm going to ponder that now for a while.
I remember a short story - title and author escape me - where this was actually much like what was going on. Everyone had their relevant types on file, and if some number of people needed an organ you could supply, you were harvested for said organs. The protagonist got notified that there were nearly enough people who needed his organs and he went undercover and visited them all, thinking he'd kill one and get out of it, but he finds that they aren't what he expected (e.g. the one who needs a liver is a girl with hepatitis, not some drunk) and decides not to, and then one dies anyway and he's off the hook.
That sounds like an interesting short story...I wish you remembered the title so I could go track it down.
Most people choose the many dust specks over the torture. Some people argued that "human values" includes having a utility aggregation function that rounds tiny (absolute value) utilities to zero, thus giving the "dust specks" answer. No, Eliezer said; this was an error in human reasoning. Is it an error, or a value?
I'm not sure. I think the answer most people give on this has more to do with fairness than rounding to zero. Yeah, it's annoying for me to get a dust speck in my eye, but it's unfair that someone should be tortured for 50 years just to spare me (and 3^^^3 others) from dust specks. I would choose getting a dust speck in my eye over someone else being tortured, and I think most people are similar enough to me that I can assume the same of the other 3^^^3 people.
I don't remember believing in Santa Claus. It was always a game to be played with grown-ups.
My experience of other children believing in Santa was very much one of them not quite realising it was a game, and my not wanting to spoil their fun.
Conversely, I did and still do believe in God, though again I have no memory of believing in the old man on a cloud version often given to children.
Likewise. I love hearing about how other people understand the concept of God, considering it's not something I was raised with (I was agnostic/atheist from early childhood until about 17, a theist for maybe 6 months, and now agnostic again but a lot more curious about the roots of religion and faith.) You can send me a private message if you don't want to write it all here.
I get up most easily when I've slept enough. If I get 8 hours of sleep, I don't even have to try getting up. I feel refreshed and am happy to get up. I'm not sure if the number of hours is 8, but from memory it seems to be around that much.
Does anyone else have the same experience?
Right now, no, but that's probably because I permanently have a sleep debt of who-knows-how-many-hours. If I have to get up early in the morning (which is usually), I'll aim to go to bed 8 hours before I have to get up, which is never enough because I don't fall asleep instantaneously. If I don't have to get up early, I'll usually stay up later (where "later" is midnight or so) and drag myself out of bed at some ridiculous-for-me hour of 9 or 9:30 am, because if I get up later than that I feel like I'm wasting my whole day. But there have been times in my life where getting up was easy EVERY day. Getting up at the same time every day helps, especially if that time is 7:30 or so...getting up at 5:00 always feels horrible, probably because it's really hard to reliably be in bed by 9 pm when most people my age are night owls and want to socialize in the evenings. Maybe I could adjust to a schedule where I slept 9 pm to 5 am, but it would mean seeing people less.
Despite gender-neutral pronouns, it would be a LOT more surprising if the younger member were male.
For what it's worth, my husband is ~10 years older than I am.
Of course, you were probably assuming a heterosexual couple.
How old were you when you got together? The 10 year age difference seems to become less relevant if both parties have finished school, have a full-time job, do similar things in their spare time, etc.
Thanks very much for your help on this DSimon. I really appreciate it.
You say "Being guilty over having done something bad is itself a moral good, no doubt, but it doesn't replace the bad moral state that was arrived at by doing the bad thing, it's just added to it."
Are you saying that one can be in two moral states in the same moment? How can that be?
Are you saying that one can be in two moral states in the same moment? How can that be?
Isn't this true all the time? Say you took money from your sister's wallet and lied to her about it...that's morally wrong...but you donated the money to charity, which is morally right.
This might get me downvoted due to the tribal dynamics on LW but I just wanted to share that I think my reason for missing your excellent point (upvoted) was perhaps some assumptions I made reading the following paragraph:
Bob is part of her crowd. Her friends like him; he respects women and treats Sally well and, like any healthy teenage boy, fairly horny. According to her belief system, that shouldn’t set off any alarm bells. She’s been warned about abusive relationships, but Bob is a nice guy.
I'm sorry but Bob is a very unsexy sounding guy.
This seems to hold true when dissected from a variety of perspectives, thought this is probably just the result of unfortunate signalling side effects of some words. Anyway I find it amusing some of the heuristics I've employed with such great confidence should happen to misfire on a LW article where I should have known better.
This might get t me downvoted due to the tribal dynamics on LW
Has that happened to you before? What exactly are the tribal dynamics on LW?
Oh yes, absolutely. In fact most people I've met use it "correctly" at some times and as a counter argument at others...
I totally agree with the actual phrase, as stated. It's a useful social heuristic for getting along with others - especially where people are disagreeing over a point of personal taste. (No matter how much I argue that Vegemite is "just better" - the Marmite-lovers won't agree... so we should indeed learn to just be tolerant of one another ):)
However I can get quite upset if somebody uses this heuristic as a means to shout-down an argument about verifiable fact - or even just force people not to have a discussion about whether or not something is a verifiable fact (which is where I most often see this mis-used).
or even just force people not to have a discussion about whether or not something is a verifiable fact (which is where I most often see this mis-used.
I've never seen it used this way, probably because the friends I spend the most time with love discussing anything and the last thing they would want to do would be to shut down a conversation. Agreed that people who don't like discussing the issues closest to their heart would probably use it for this.
The meme ‘don’t pass judgement on other people’ is, I think, pretty widespread in North America and maybe more so in Canada [...]
Insofar as it actually exists, this is a very context-dependent principle. As someone who grew up in a moderately alien culture, I perceive a strong note of frightfully stern judgmentalism in the Anglo-American culture. (Of course, the exact range of issues on which this judgmentalism is manifested depends on people's ideological position.)
In fact, the way it is expressed in North America, even the "don't pass judgment" attitude itself paradoxically often strikes me as sternly judgmental. Admittedly, sometimes I perceive it as an expression of a pleasant and easygoing disposition, but more often, it looks more like a harsh moralistic condemnation of those who differ ideologically and thus express disapproval of different things.
but more often, it looks more like a harsh moralistic condemnation of those who differ ideologically and thus express disapproval of different things.
Really! I have never noticed that...and I'm glad I haven't, it sounds like a very unpleasant attitude for one's friends to have! I may have casual acquaintances who do take this attitude, but I wouldn't know if I've never discussed issues that set off their ideological judgements.
Except that I don't think everyone uses it as a counter-judgement. There are a significant number of people who take it literally and assume that we really should be tolerant of everyone and not judge people for their lifestyle choices.
Even among that group there is a majority for whom 'tolerant of everyone and not judge people for their lifestyle choices' in fact applies to a specific set of lifestyle choices that have been legitimised according to their perspective of political correctness. For example many of that group would not be especially tolerant and non-judgemental of a 40 year old and a 14 year old who have an entirely voluntary and evidently satisfying sexual relationship.
(Decrement the second figure if necessary until the example is sufficiently inconvenient.)
Agreed. I'm trying to think what my reaction would be to that situation...if, say, my 14-year-old sister was dating a 40-year-old man. I would worry that she was being exploited, of course, but I think I know my sister well enough to tell if she is comfortable and happy with something, and if she was, then what right do I have to take that away from her? (Although I'm trying to think what long-term prospects such a relationship has. Even 10-year age difference relationships, if one party is 19 and the other is 29, often break up over the members being in different life phases, i.e. the 19-year-old is starting university and wants to be a little bit wild and discover who ey is, and the 29-year-old wants a house and children before ey gets too old... Despite gender-neutral pronouns, it would be a LOT more surprising if the younger member were male.)
Comment on that: it's not just that relationships between very young girls and much older men are not legitimized according to political correctness, it's that I think they bring up a strong emotional current of 'pedophile!' And I think a lot of (generally open-minded) people might react the way I did, if a friend or family member were in that situation; with discomfort and protectiveness at first, but acceptance if and when they realize the relationship is voluntary and satisfying. (Although they might warn their younger sibling/niece/friend about all the possible consequences to their reputation, etc.)
(Wow that's weird...now I can't think why a relationship between a sexually mature 14-year-old and a 40 year old WOULD bother me, as someone's personal choice. My brain got used to that fast. And there are cultures that did accept those age differences, in marriage at least...Henry VIII and his 5th wife come to mind.)
I apologize for banging on about the railroad question, but I think the way you phrased it does an excellent job of illustrating (and has helped me isolate) why I've always vaguely uncomfortable with Utilitarianism. There is a sharp moral contrast which the question doesn't innately recognize between the patients entering into a voluntary lottery, and the forced-sacrifice of the wandering traveller.
Unbridled Utilitarianism, taken to the extreme, would mandate some form of forced Socialism. I think it was you who commented on OvercomingBias, that one of the risks associated with Cryogenics is waking up in a society where you are not permitted to auto-euthanize. Utilitarianism might argue that the utility of your own diminished suffering would be less than the utility of others people valuing your continued life.
While Utilitarianism is excellent for considering consequences, I think it's a mistake to try and raise it as a moral principle. I lean towards a somewhat Objectivist viewpoint: namely, that the first principle we ought to start with is that each person has the right to their own person and property, and that it is immoral to try and take it from them for any cause.
Following from this, let me address your third question: I'd argue that this type of wealth transfer not only undermines long-term economic develop of the African country (empirical, I could be proved wrong), not only prevents me from spending money on quality products & investing in practical businesses (once again, empirical), but that on a deeper level it undermines the individuality which I value in the human condition. Askin which produces greater happiness & material wealth, Communism or Capitalism, is an empirical question: Omega could come down and tell me that Communism will produce 10x the happiness, or 100x, or whatever. But the idea of slamming everybody into the same, mass produced box to maximize happiness utility sounds suspiciously like Orgasmium.
I don't see how you can compromise on these principles. Either each person has full ownership of themselves (so long as they don't infringe on others), or they have zero ownership. Morality (as I would define it) demands that we fight to protect others freedom, but it says nothing about ensuring their welfare. Giving something for 'free' is just another form of enslavement - even if it's only survival and dependence in exchange for a smug sense of superiority.
On a side note, you did a brilliant job of deconstructing 'morality based on empiricism.'
Either each person has full ownership of themselves (so long as they don't infringe on others), or they have zero ownership.
The Canadian government has socialist elements, and I wouldn't mind and would even choose to live in a society that had more. As far as I know, the only freedoms it takes away are those that infringe on other people...considering that human beings are social animals, many or most of our decisions do affect other people. (I have not researched this. Feel free to prove me wrong or enlighten me on other aspects.)
I guess it depends on whose voice the quote was in. If that was Sally talking about Bob to herself in her own thoughts, she doesn't seem truly interested in him. However, I took it instead that the quote was in the voice of the original poster, describing a hypothetical from a somewhat (but not entirely) detached viewpoint.
That is how I intended it. I also didn't intend for Sally to be very strongly attracted to Bob...the problem in the story is that her being mildly attracted to him is enough, initially, for her to go along with having sex with him because her explicit beliefs say that sex is casual fun...and yes I've heard people express this explicit belief before.
This might get me downvoted due to the tribal dynamics on LW but I just wanted to share that I think my reason for missing your excellent point (upvoted) was perhaps some assumptions I made reading the following paragraph:
Bob is part of her crowd. Her friends like him; he respects women and treats Sally well and, like any healthy teenage boy, fairly horny. According to her belief system, that shouldn’t set off any alarm bells. She’s been warned about abusive relationships, but Bob is a nice guy.
I'm sorry but Bob is a very unsexy sounding guy.
This seems to hold true when dissected from a variety of perspectives, thought this is probably just the result of unfortunate signalling side effects of some words. Anyway I find it amusing some of the heuristics I've employed with such great confidence should happen to misfire on a LW article where I should have known better.
I don't necessarily know a whole lot about what girls are attracted to...I only have my point of view and my sister's point of view, and both of us like boys who respect girls and treat them, well, nicely. Maybe you're right and the phrase 'nice guy' sets off non-sexy alarm bells...I'll change it. But in any case, the description isn't from Sally's point of view. When I say that he's a nice girl, what it means is that she doesn't find him threatening.
I agree. I also see it strongly as a counter-judgement. If you express your own strong views on a subject (especially when backed up by evidence), North Americans can be quick to shout "we all should be tolerant of each other". This has happened to me a lot in conversations with the religious... "We shouldn't judge one another" being used as a thought-stopper.
I also see it strongly as a counter-judgement. If you express your own strong views on a subject (especially when backed up by evidence), North Americans can be quick to shout "we all should be tolerant of each other".
Agreed. Except that I don't think everyone uses it as a counter-judgement. There are a significant number of people who take it literally and assume that we really should be tolerant of everyone and not judge people for their lifestyle choices.
Yes!
I'd love it if the editor also used markdown.
Considering I had to teach myself markdown AND HTML to post on this site, I don't really care what they use, but it would be nice if they stuck to one.
You also have double newlines everywhere and a lot of newlines at the end of the post.
I did not create those! Will have a go at fixing them though.
It would be helpful to see your non-working attempted post.
However, here are mistakes I've made-- leaving a space between the ] and the ( and accidentally typing a curly bracket instead of a square bracket.
Thanks but I fixed it... Markdown doesn't work in the story editor, you have to use HTML, and I know next to nothing about HTML but internet tutorials are awesome.
Thanks I'll have a go.
It ate my links!
Because it doesn't work in the story editor at all %-D Click on "HTML" and use plain HTML.
Thanks I'll have a go.
Umm is there any particular reason why I can't get the Markdown link format to work?
The peril of ignoring emotions
Related to: Luminosity Sequence, Unknown Knowns,
Let me introduce you to a hypothetical high school student, Sally. She’s smart and pretty and outgoing, and so are her friends. She considers herself a modern woman, sexually liberated, and this is in line with the lifestyle her friends practice. They think sex is normal and healthy and fun. Sally isn’t just pretending in order to fit in; these really are her friends, this really is her milieu, and according to health class, sex between consenting adults is nothing to be ashamed of. Sally isn't a rigorous rationalist, although she likes to think of herself as rational, and she's no more self-aware than the average high school girl.
Now Sally meets a boy, Bob, and she things he’s cute, and he thinks she’s cute too. Bob is part of her crowd. Her friends like him; he respects women and treats Sally well and, like any healthy teenage boy, fairly horny. According to her belief system, that shouldn’t set off any alarm bells. She’s been warned about abusive relationships, but Bob is a nice guy. So when they go upstairs together at her friend’s party, she has every reason to be excited and a little nervous, but not uncomfortable. The idea that Mom wouldn’t approve is so obviously irrelevant that she ignores it completely.
...And afterwards, she feels guilty and violated and horrible about herself, even though it was her decision.
I used this example because I expect it’s not unusual. On the surface, Sally’s discomfort seems to come out of nowhere, but modern North American society is chock-full of contradictory beliefs about sex. Sex is normal and healthy. Sex is dirty. Sex is only for when you’re married. If Sally’s mother is Christian, or even just conservative, Sally would have internalized those beliefs when she was a child. It would have been hard not to. They’re her unknown knowns, and she may not have noticed them before, because there’s a wide psychological gap between believing it’s okay for others to behave a particular way, and believing it’s okay for you. The meme ‘don’t pass judgement on other people’ is, I think, pretty widespread in North America and maybe more so in Canada, but so is holding oneself to a high standard...and those are contradictory.
I think that the nagging, seemingly irrational moment of ‘that doesn’t feel right’ is important. It potentially reveals something about the beliefs and attitudes you hold that you don’t even know about. Sally’s response to her nagging doubt could have been the following:
Hmm, that’s interesting, why does it bother me so much that Mom would disapprove? I guess when we used to go to church, they said sex was only for when you’re married. But I don’t believe anything else they said in church. ...Well, I guess I want Mom to be proud of me. I want her to praise me for doing well in school. And I think lying is wrong, so the fact that I either have to lie to her about having had sex, or face her disapproval, maybe that’s why I’m uncomfortable? But I don’t want to say no, it’ll make me look like a prude... Still, what if everyone feels this way at the start? I know Alice went to church too when she was a kid, and her mom would kill her if she knew she was sexually active, I wonder if that bothers Alice? Hmm, I think maybe it’s still the right choice to sleep with Bob, but maybe I’m taking this too lightly? Maybe this should be a big deal and I should feel anxious? After all, he might judge me anyway, he might think I’m too easy, or a slut. Maybe I can just explain to him that I want to think about this longer... After all, why should I assume something is right just because they told us in health class? That’s just like in church, it’s taking someone else’s opinion on faith. I’ve never actually thought about this, I’ve just followed other people. Who’s to say they’re right?
Whatever decision Sally makes, she probably won’t feel violated. She listened to her feelings and took them into consideration, even though they seemed irrational. As it turned out, they were a reasonable consequence of a belief-fragment that she hadn’t even known she had. So as a consequence of stopping to think, she knows herself better too. She’ll be better able to predict her behaviour in future situations. She’ll be less likely to ignore her threshold-warning discomfort and make risky choices as a result of peer pressure alone. She’ll be more likely to think.
To conclude: emotions exist. They are real. If you ignore them and plow on ahead, you won’t necessarily thank yourself afterwards. And that nagging feeling is a priceless moment to find out about your unknown knowns...which may not be rational, which may have been laid down in some previous era and never questioned since, but which part of you is going to try to uphold until you consciously deconstruct them.
I think (though I'm not quite sure) that you're presuming that the only potentially valuable difference between friendships and romantic relationships is sex, so if you don't value sex with more than one person, you see no reason to value romantic relationships with more than one person.
Looking at my poly friends, I conclude that for some people, their romantic relationships have a valuable nonsexual component that their friendships don't have.
So presumably they calculate the benefits differently than you do.
Also, my friendships may be unusual. I talk about literally everything with my best friend, including subjects that may be taboo for most people, like pubic-hair-shaving. Likewise with my mom and my siblings; I can talk to them about anything and not be judged. I think this is an element that some people only find in relationships.
I think (though I'm not quite sure) that you're presuming that the only potentially valuable difference between friendships and romantic relationships is sex, so if you don't value sex with more than one person, you see no reason to value romantic relationships with more than one person.
Looking at my poly friends, I conclude that for some people, their romantic relationships have a valuable nonsexual component that their friendships don't have.
So presumably they calculate the benefits differently than you do.
Or have more experience and can actually differentiate. The one relationship I've been in that didn't have a sexual component was emotionally draining for other reasons. As I get older and actually experience more variations, I may change my mind. I'm sure there's a potentially valuable difference...but I'm reluctant to chase after polyamorous-but-non-sexual relationships just to recoup that difference.
so if you don't value sex with more than one person, you see no reason to value romantic relationships with more than one person.
If I had a choice between having sex and not having sex, period, I might choose not having sex. This is complicated because I have a condition that means I can't actually have sex, yet, and although my boyfriend and I are attempting to work on this problem, our attempts involve very little pleasure for me. But I'm holding off judgement because maybe once this is dealt with, I will find sex and related activities more pleasurable. I consider this a separate problem from the fact that I'm not very touchy-feely in general.
This is my current reason for choosing monogamy: my sex drive, and general interest in the touchy-feely part of romantic relationships, is so much lower than the average that I have a hard time sustaining one relationship, and don't see what the benefit to me would be from having more people to have sex with. The emotional connection of romantic relationships is different, but isn't that what very-close-intimate-but-platonic-friendships are for?
Hey Eliezer,
Interesting point. I think part of the problem is that sex theorists have to work very hard to get ourselves taken seriously, so many of us overcompensate. Another problem is that while sex is totally fun, sex also comes with an enormous potential to harm, so it's important to take it seriously at least somewhat.
Also, sex is a highly-triggering area for most people. I specifically try to include some humor and/or sexy anecdotes in my writing, but I find that I am considerably likely to be misinterpreted when I do so, and when I'm misinterpreted it can get really bad really fast ("I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU JUST MADE LIGHT OF ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIPS!11").
One of the projects I'm outlining right now is a BDSM erotica novella in which I try to include as much theory as I possibly can while still keeping it sexy. We'll see if I succeed.
I want to read that novella. It sounds educational.
a lot of things that other people seem to do for pleasure or relaxation, I find very exhausting. If I go to a party on the weekend, the effort of socializing uses up my willpower to study or exercise.
That sounds like a problem of introversion vs. extraversion to me, rather than one of willpower. An introvert "mentally recharges" by spending time alone, whereas an extrovert "mentally recharges" by spending time around other people. (The Wikipedia article on the subject addresses various hypotheses and evidence for the difference in mental function.)
This is a very good description. The problem comes in because more of my friends are extroverts than introverts. This may be because I can play extroverted for short periods of time, and that's what most people see of me. Being my friends, they want to do things with me that they enjoy and that they assume I'll enjoy too. It's not that I don't like parties, but I like them in the same way I like, say, hiking a difficult mountain trail. They can be fun and even exhilarating, but not relaxing. (In fact, probably less relaxing in a psychological sense than climbing a mountain trail, which implies solitude and time to think.)
I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that willpower is only an exhaustible resource if you think of it that way. That being said, in my own life I've found my willpower very exhaustible...and this is annoying, since a lot of things that other people seem to do for pleasure or relaxation, I find very exhausting. If I go to a party on the weekend, the effort of socializing uses up my willpower to study or exercise.
So for you guilt is less of a signal in and of itself but the origin of your modified-behavior signal? Several others have raised the point of guilt as an evolutionary facilitator and it makes sense to me that individuals who self-corrected due to a guilt response would be the most socially accepted and thus most likely to procreate. The shoulder-angel doesn't need to be there if the behavior remains the same as if it had been.
It makes sense to me that individuals who self-corrected due to a guilt response would be the most socially accepted and thus most likely to procreate.
It makes sense to me, too.
My experience has been that many people consider Ottawa to be Eastern Canada and Nova Scotia/New Brunswick/Newfoundland "Atlantic Canada". I just tend to forget that, since all that stuff is so far "west" to me.
When tourists come in to town off of the American cruise ships, they tend to pour into town asking how much a cab to Montreal and back will cost, and if they'll get there in time for lunch in half an hour.
I checked, and Ontario is in the Eastern time zone. The Maritime provinces are in the 'Atlantic' time zone. The 'Central' time zone is mostly Manitoba, which is probably why it doesn't sound right to say that Ottawa is 'Central Canada' either.
There's no contradiction -- you're both right. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, groupthink would be adaptive for small tribes living in an extremely familiar environment for generations. In the ancestral environment it was possible to know everything, and nearly everyone did.. Truly new problems would be rare or nonexistent. In the modern era ... things have changed a bit.
Exactly what I was about to write. At some point I'm sure it was adaptive, when groups of humans were small and faced harsh but relatively simple threats. Now, it's sometimes adaptive but sometimes not.
I've noticed this too. If I hang out for a group of people for a long time, my style of thinking starts to mimic theirs. If I'm with a group of school peers who think a given task is easy and fun, it literally feels easier to me than if the group of people around me is complaining about the boringness and difficulty of the task. Moods are contagious. Memes are contagious. Attitudes are contagious... And from an evo-psych perspective, being influenced heavily by your situation (especially your social situation) makes sense, because a group of people that all mirror each other in attitude and life goals will work better as a team.
The explanation that I usually read is that it's a cultural phenomenon, that within Chinese culture in particular, people are more inclined to describe others as inhabiting various roles instead of having persistent character traits (with this being reflected in some older Chinese literature and philosophical traditions) - but this is mostly just a vague impression I have that was probably formed by reading blog posts by people who don't really know what they're talking about, so take this with a grain of salt. ;)
An amusing bit of trivia: among the Japanese nobility at the time The Tale of Genji was being written, referring to someone by their name was a privilege reserved for family and very close acquaintances (and not something that would be appropriate to do in public), so all the characters in the story are referred to by titles and descriptions of various kinds - and these "names" change when the characters end up in different life circumstances.
within Chinese culture in particular, people are more inclined to describe others as inhabiting various roles instead of having persistent character traits.
Fascinating. Makes me want to do some research on this to see whether Chinese-raised people would behave differently because of this.
This post rings true for me. I have a pretty overactive guilt reaction, and I think I'm considered to be trustworthy and reliable (except when it comes to group academic projects, as per previous posts!). For example, if I make plans with somebody, even the thought of cancelling makes me feel guilty...so I don't cancel on people. Thus I have a reputation as someone who doesn't cancel. More to do with self-behaviour modification than with overt displays of guilt, and I don't think most people know that the reason why I'm reliable is because I feel guilty if I'm not.
No way! Me too! Are you in Halifax (per chance)?
No... Ottawa. Which come to think of it is not usually referred to as "Eastern" Canada, despite being east of most of the provinces.
I suppose the counterargument is "put the large rocks in first"... that is, that there is a large enough supply of easy problems that the "if it's easy, do it now" strategy means you never get to the hard important problems.
"put the large rocks in first"
Do you happen to know where that quote is from? My dad uses it a lot and I had the vague impression it was from a self-help book.
True. But in the party-guests example, at least, having any kind of answer, biased or not, is better than an "I don't know".
Very interesting post. I do think some of your examples are more realistic than others. The "how many people are coming to the party?" example is the most plausible: you want a direct, numerical answer so you can build your plans on it, and a roundabout answer is frustrating because it prevents you from executing any plans.
The "what kind of car?" and "what kind of house?" questions are, I think, naturally more open-ended. In most of the contexts where I would ask those questions, it would be to start a conversation, or to signal interest in the other person's life. (Maybe not when I was eleven, considering I lacked basic social skills back then.) Unless I needed the purely factual information of car colour to make a decision, I wouldn't want to restrict those questions. Even if I want to decide what kind of car to buy, I would probably learn more from letting the other person, who almost certainly knows more about cars than I do, decide what they think is pertinent. Likewise for the house-building; anyone who is building a house of their own probably has a very interesting story about what kind it is and why. And in the process, their story will reveal something about their personality, so that I can model them better, which will allow me to interact with them more efficiently in future because I'll know how they see things and how they communicate. (This is assuming I have time to invest in a conversation, but I consider it a quite important investment, as well as being pleasurable for its own sake.)
However, your point holds very true for conversations that are fundamentally about ideas or concepts and not socializing/personal enjoyment. If you're going to discussion politics or quantum physics, you definitely want information to be transmitted clearly and efficiently, and you want your keywords to mean the same thing to the other person as they do to you.
You make some good points here, Alicorn.
One thing to watch out for: When you find out that your interlocutor has interpreted your question differently than you intended it may be polite/friendly to let her finish speaking before following up with the more specific thing you wanted to know. People (often) enjoy open conversation more than specific interrogation.
I seem to have this problem with my mother-in-law, we don't understand each other very well. A recent conversation went like this.
MIL: So, what sort of girl is this babysitter you've hired?
Me: Oh, she's a lovely sweet country girl, a bit shy. This one time she was... [want to launch into a funny story]
MIL: [interrupts] No, no, I mean - is she a student or does she work somewhere?
Me: [annoyed that I didn't get to tell my story] She's a student.
Agreed. That seems to exemplify the difference between social interaction for its own sake, and social interaction for the sole purpose of gathering certain information or getting something done. I think the point in my life when I became a good listener (or at least a better listener than before!) is when I started seeing people as versions of me rather than as confusing-but-potentially-useful furniture. And I like to have a chance to tell stories, so I give other people that latitude too, and the stories are usually more interesting than whatever fact I might have specifically wanted to learn.
One of the things that troubles me about poker is that it seems like a major time sink and a deeply unhealthy lifestyle if you just want to calibrate yourself; but if you are interested in making some money as well or even making it your livelihood, it's still troubling because online poker is a negative expected sum game which is receiving a lot of media exposure.
Just now the New York Times is running yet another profile of a young geeky guy making and losing millions at online poker. If this were the first one, that'd be one thing, but I've seen quite a few such articles - here, on Hacker News, in my RSS reader.
It's starting to trip my general 'bubble' pattern-recognition system. This reminds me of the original Internet Bubble where you would read about young people making ludicrous sums for crap work or no real reason at all, and so everyone piled into computer science programs (or into law schools, for that matter).
One of the things that troubles me about poker is that it seems like a major time sink and a deeply unhealthy lifestyle if you just want to calibrate yourself.
It also sounds extremely boring. Then again, I also find video games and online multiplayer games equally boring, which could be a difference between me and the average LW poster...
Well, I've never passed out, and I tend not to take much exercise that this is interfering with, and doctors in general like to say that absolutely everything that could possibly be wrong with me will be fixed with exercise, which advice I ignore, which can then go on indefinitely "explaining" my problem. (I went in with little muscle twitches in my legs and eyelids once - I still get those, still don't know what they are - doctor says, "Consider getting more exercise". Exercise my eyelids, right? I'm not blinking enough?)
Agreed that the doctor telling you to exercise, at this point, is unhelpful and kind of a stupid thing to say. And I don't think exercise would solve your problem. Not exercising is a risk factor for all sorts of other problems later in life, especially if it's in combination with a not-very-healthy diet...but that's a reason to look for solutions to your lung problem, not a reason for doctors to tell you that exercising will solve your lung problem.
I have never had to blow into a thing. Since I have consulted plural doctors about this, I'm not sure why none of them would have thought of athsma if that were consistent with my symptoms. Why might that be?
Asthma usually shows up in childhood, not at 17, and maybe some of the doctors you saw assumed that previous doctors would have checked out the possibility of asthma already. The definitive test for asthma is called a methacholine challenge; basically you inhale a chemical that irritates your lungs, and if you're asthma-prone then you have trouble breathing (there is no physical activity involved).
It probably isn't a heart issue if you haven't always had it...those are usually congenital...but I could be wrong. (Also not a doctor). But it sounds very debilitating, and worth fixing.
Interesting post. Not sure you said anything new, but this area has been worked over so thoroughly that it would be hard to find a truly novel interpretation.
The fact that they're better explained by other causes than the divine? The fact that people with similar experiences are objectively most likely to be factually incorrect in that specific domain? What good reason is there?
Edit: Consider all the people who have faith in some religion based on subjective personal conviction, and separate them into mutually exclusive groups. No one group is in the majority. Thus, your subjective personal conviction regarding religion is, best case scenario, more likely to be wrong than right.
I would say their criteria for a "better" explanation is different; they see an explanation as "better" if it implies the kind of world they want to live in. And of course that's irrational, but I doubt it feels irrational from the inside.
Then why leave it til later? three solid evenings today or thee solid evenings a week before it's due? it shouldn't matter to you... but if you do it now you'll at least know that you don't have any other matters interfering with it, and that if something suddenly comes up you can always finish it next weekend.
Whereas if you leave it to the last week... if a personal emergency comes up - there's nothing you can do, you still have to get it done anyway.
It's much better time-management to do it early.
No matter when I choose to do it, I have to give up something I pressingly want to do at the time, whether it's cooking or posting on LessWrong or sleep. Doing a project early always makes me feel like I'm giving up what I really want to be doing for no good reason, since it's not even due yet. ...And no that's not especially rational, but it's not (usually) dysfunctional either.
Yep, thats a good summation.
I can say that I personally do not know a single person of whom proactivity comes naturally. Everybody that I know that has learned it... has had it metaphorically beaten into them - either through a parent (lots of women learn this skill from their mothers) or through their own personal failures (mainly through crying over lost opportunities only spotted in hindsight...).
If you can get started on learning this skill early... I predict that it will be of wide-ranging benefit to you in the future :)
I predict that my 2-and-a-bit remaining years of nursing school will hammer it pretty deep. And I do try to be proactive...or at least slightly more so than my classmates, so that my teachers think I am!
Oops, I think you've got team #2 and team#1 backwards there... in the post above, team#1 members are procrastinators and team #2 members want to get quality work done.
I didn't. I learned the rule when I was left to my own devices and began to fail because nobody was prodding me (ie in university, fresh out of high school).
I think failing personally (rather than watching other people fail) is a far more powerful motivator.
Really? University was terrible for my work habits. I was used to having a constant stream of projects and assignments, and all of a sudden it was just midterms and finals. I went to all my anatomy classes and studied maybe a few hours total and pulled off an A+. Which was awesome, but now I expect school to be like that and I feel resentful when they give us assignments that actually need to be worked on outside of class.
(The fact that my academic courses in first year were all related to biology, the area where I had the most general knowledge already, made it a lot easier. In, say, physics, I would have had to study very hard for an A+).
Of course, in this case (unlike with religion) you have a good reason to believe that your subjective personal conviction correlates with the truth - and even so you should be open to the possibility of being wrong.
From a religious person's point of view, why do they not have a good reason to believe that their personal convictions don't correlate with truth?
Yep - it's not more efficient.
Don't forget that overconfidence bias will make you think it'll take a shorter time than it does... therefore if you estimate that you can get it done in the last week, you may find that actually it's a week and a half's work to turn in a really good job, but you now don't have the time to do that.
With more time you can review it if necessary... or just kick back and relax, knowing that everything's already done.
I don't have a lot of trouble with overconfidence bias; I base my time-to-finish-project estimates on other projects I've done in the past, and it's generally about right. If it's a kind of project I've never done before, I leave a bit more time. Also, I'm busy enough, during the school year anyway, that I'll never be able to "kick back and relax" unless I put something aside for later.
And it really bothered me that I hadn't held up my end
Cool stuff - this means you've spotted the main important point to learn from this experience.
But don't take it too badly. This is a one-off. An eye-opener, for sure - but now you know that groups exist out there where everybody just gets on and does the work... where everybody trusts each other to do what needs doing without being asked. It's called being proactive - and it's looked upon very highly in the "Real world".
Personally - I think that, now that you understand what's expected of you - you'll find that your "new experience" kind of group is actually better suited to your personality...
Sure thing there are lots of "group 1" types out there... that only work when somebody pushes them, but if you don't want to become the person doing the pushing, you won't want to join that kind of group.
However - you have to internalise that if you're not doing the pushing.. you're also not going to be pushed (and will have to push yourself)... or you'll find yourself left behind. So - learn when to push yourself. Don't beat yourself up if you miss the signs a few times, but use the experience as a lesson to know what to look out for next time. eg to start straight away, instead of putting it off for later. To look for things that could be done - instead of waiting for other people to ask you.
This is actually a really important skill for nurses. You can't just react to what other people are telling you. The patient doesn't know what's wrong with themselves... and neither do the other nurses - you have to dig to find out. That means using your own initiative.
My mum has been a nurse for decades now, and she has stories from saving several people's lives where she spotted something that she didn't have to do... could have put off... but just went and did anyway.
Oh - and she's a total control freak too, so don't worry about that part. ;)
So keep at it. you're going great.
So basically it's all about proactivity...which does not come naturally to me. Outside events that require a real-time response always feel like an intrusion to my personal bubble. Which may be the source of my 'reaction problem'. It's like "I was in the middle of thinking about quantum physics, what do you mean I have to go deal with this kid crying and bleeding on the pool deck?" See my post Ability to React, http://lesswrong.com/lw/4fo/ability_to_react.
On the other hand, when I'm already doing something, and I feel fairly competent and in control, I get into a state of "flow" where being proactive is easier than not being proactive. I managed to get into that state this morning, during my first clinical placement when I was actually looking after a patient.
I agree. I was deliberately pushing the lack of evidence as far as I could in order to make the point as strongly as I could. In my imagined scenario (someone perfectly framed of a crime who nevertheless knows perfectly well that he is innocent - though has absolutely no evidence to lean on), I find it completely realistic to be such a person and to have a strong conviction in my own innocence even though there is not a scrap of evidence for it and a lot of evidence against it. This, I think, may provide a basis for trying to imagine what it is like to have a strong belief in a religion despite no evidence, even in the face of contrary evidence. As you say, the religious actually do have certain kinds of evidence.
I think it's worthwhile to, if it is possible, try to understand people sympathetically, to try to understand them from the inside. I think that the ease of imagining myself as a perfectly framed person who remains firmly convinced of his own innocence in the face of zero evidence for and plenty against suggests that the difference between believers and nonbelievers is not as deep as it might have seemed. There is, necessarily, some difference, but I don't think it's a matter of the brain functioning drastically differently.
There is, necessarily, some difference, but I don't think it's a matter of the brain functioning drastically differently.
I don't think so either. From the explanations others have given me, belief seems to come from a) wanting the world to be a certain way, b) thinking (probably not consciously) that the world is this way if they believe it is, and c) interpreting observations about the world as evidence for the world being that way. Well, I have a) as well. It would be really freaking awesome if there was a God who talked to you and answered your prayers and never let anything bad happen. But I know that my believing that doesn't make it true, and so I interpret the same real-world observations as meaning different things.
I worked the same way until I started doing correspondence courses. With nobody to hassle me, no classes to hand stuff in at, and no peers I had to learn to motivate myself and follow a schedule fast.
I am motivated well by deadlines as well, but its amazing how much easier schoolwork is when you actually choose when to do it. instead of cramming in a sleep deprived state for the night before, you can break it up into easier pieces when you are most alert. Hopefully these newfound skills will carry over when I start university...
Instead of cramming in a sleep deprived state for the night before, you can break it up into easier pieces when you are most alert.
I don't pull all-nighters for school. That would make me unproductive at work the next day. I don't even stay up late for school, and if I do, I consider it a failure in my time management. I'm pretty good at predicting how long it takes me to do things (planning fallacy doesn't seem to affect me much) and often that time is much shorter than the time it (seems to) take other people, and...well, why would I start a ten-page essay a month early when it takes me three solid evenings to finish it?
Aside from various other issues on which people have remarked, one thing that hasn't been pointed out so far is the problem with college projects: they're too damn small.
For every project, there is a good range of team sizes, large enough for many hands make light work, but not large enough for too many cooks spoil the broth (where you start having to split it up so finely that coordination overhead swamps the actual project work - see Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, for a classic discussion of this).
I remember one college project I had, we were supposed to do it in teams of four. Problem was, like other college projects, it was comfortably sized for one person, a moderately tight squeeze for two; four people was an insane glut. Solution: the two best programmers in our team did the project, the other two paid for our beer for an evening.
Now you say "all of a sudden, foom!, my part of the project is done because one of the girls was bored on the weekend and had nothing better to do. (Huh? When does this ever happen?)"
Well the answer is, it doesn't happen often in real life, because it's a symptom of a project much too small for the team size, or equivalently a massive glut of manpower for the project size - in real life, you have a to-do list stretching to somewhere around the middle of the next century, that grows by two items for every one item you knock off, and a desperate shortage of skilled people to do the work.
So while teamwork is important in real life, and many issues thereof do arise, that particular problem is mostly endemic to college projects.
That seems quite plausible. I work part-time in an institute for real medical research, and all of the full-time employees are swamped. All the time. They may or may not have teamwork problems for other reasons, but they certainly don't have this problem.
[To clarify, I'm an atheist, and this is not intended as a defense of religion, only as an analogy which might possibly illuminate the nature of religious belief.]
Suppose you're framed. You know that you didn't commit that crime, but you've been perfectly framed. All the evidence points to your guilt. And yet, in the face of all the evidence, you know that you didn't commit it.
What's your evidence? You might say, "I remember clearly". But some psychologist might argue with you that you are in denial, that you have constructed a false memory, and so on. He might even show brain scans which he says proves that you've suppressed your memory.
Some of us will continue to believe that our memory is true and that we are innocent and that somehow we've been framed. We have a strong inner conviction about what happened - which conviction is nothing more or less than our own memory.
That conviction in one's own innocence in this scenario resembles religious belief in various respects. All the physical evidence points to guilt. You can show not a scrap of evidence in defense of your innocence. All you have is your own conviction that you are innocent. And, similarly, all the physical evidence points to the falsehood of your religion (we suppose for the sake of argument). You can't show a scrap of evidence in defense of your religion. All you have is your own conviction that your religion is true.
That describes it pretty well. I would argue that a lot of Christians do have some form of evidence, though; the experiences of transcendent joy that they call the 'presence of God'. I know they're not lying about that because I've felt that as well. I can induce it in myself fairly predictably by singing the right kind of music with a group of people...or even just thinking about things I find beautiful, like math. I just don't consider it evidence for God, per se.
I have this problem, and I've gotten to a place that works for me. Most times, the project is small enough that one person can do much of it easily, in which case I say that I'll do it and then split the work with anybody who objects. Other times, I ask, "who wants to do part X?" and all the parts that nobody picks up I do. I make sure that nobody has more work than they want, and I check in regularly to make sure people are doing it. Tip for this: people are less likely to mind my checking on them if they can see that I've already done my part.
Tip for this: people are less likely to mind my checking on them if they can see that I've already done my part.
Doing it at the last minute is never going to work, is it?
Sigh. I suppose at some point I need to get over my superstition that it's somehow more efficient to finish things the night before.
I may have missed it, but it didn't really seem like you explained why you had the problem-of-a-different-sort. Could you elaborate on this? You go into far more detail about the first type of problem, when you think your standards will be higher, when you care about the outcome more than the others, etc. (type #1).
But you kind of gloss over the second (type #2), simply admitting that it happened.
It might be helpful for you to reflect (or if you have, add it to an "Edit" section) on why when you were in a type #2 situation that sounds like pretty much what you dream about when in type #1 situations... you seem to have produced the tangible results of a type #1 team member.
I clarified results as tangible, as I am saying nothing of your internal state, what you would have said if you asked whether you thought the outcome was important, whether you cared, etc. What I'm saying is that the output you fear/loathe from others in type #1 situations (not much in the way of contributions, little interaction, procrastination) might not be discernible from your actual output when in your desired type #2 situation, at least to a removed observer.
Have you thought about why that is?
I probably didn't say enough about it in the article, if you thought it seemed glossed over, but I thought a lot about why this happened at the time, and I was pretty upset (more than I should have been, really, over a school project) and that's why I left the group...because unlike type#1 team members, I actually cared a lot about making a fair contribution and felt like shit when I hadn't. I never consciously decided to procrastinate, either...I just had a lot of other things on my plate, which is pretty much inevitable during the school year, and all of a sudden, foom!, my part of the project is done because one of the girls was bored on the weekend and had nothing better to do. (Huh? When does this ever happen?)
So I guess I'm like a team #1 member in that I procrastinate when I can get away with it, but like a team#2 member in that I do want to turn in quality work and get an A+. And I want it to my my quality work, not someone else's with my name on it.
I find that its better to know that you're going to do a lot of work and plan for that than to be surprised when you find at the very end that someone didn't pull their weight, and you wind up cramming to do it.
Both ways you do the samish amount of work, but in the first way you can actually deal with it on your schedule.
I do a lot of my work at the last minute anyway, since I a) try to pretend school doesn't exist a lot of the time, and b) focus better when I have a tight deadline. Which is why I ran into trouble with this group project, but it makes it easier to deal with other groups where last-minute cramming ends up happening.
First, something not-particularly-useful-now but hopefully comforting: group projects in school, even ones that mimic real world problems, very often are not comparable to Real World projects in the sense of group composition and motivation. In school, you just can't get away from the fact that your ultimate goal is a grade, which is intangible and at least partially arbitrary. Because of that fact, you will nearly always have less total group motivation and more total disagreement on how much work is required for an "acceptable result" on a project for school than you will once you are out of school. As you noted in your lifeguarding example, being paid for your work helps no small amount. I'd also rather think that the fact that someone's life rides on the group's performance (as it certainly will in situations you encounter in nursing) takes motivation to a whole new height.
I had your problem all through high school and most of my undergraduate education. I attribute its fading primarily to learning to trust my group members more, which was facilitated through
1) picking group members carefully when I got the chance, to maximize potential for # 2
2) realizing that in my field, chances were high that at least half of any group I was in would be in the same ballpark as I was where motivation was concerned.
Each time I had to work in a group, I made a conscious decision to trust my group members to do a decent job, which helped me remember not to let my control freak tendencies make me objectionable. Sometimes this involved noting members I didn't trust and resolving to watch for slack from their end, as well, but quietly.
I also became a good leader by creating and administrating a very diverse group of players in World of Warcraft for almost three years, but I really don't recommend that route unless you have either an absurd amount of free time or a very low regard for sleep.
I’m more invested in the outcome than the others (...) I skimmed the email and put it aside for later, since it seemed less than urgent to me.
Notice a contradiction?
To a reasonable first approximation teamwork consist of exchanging and fulfilling promises. (To a first approximation only; in particular, affect turns out to count for a lot, but more over the long run.)
See this article for an introduction to one framework for thinking about promises, inspired by the work of Fernando Flores and Terry "SHRDLU" Winograd, and by Searle's theory of speech acts.
The situation you describe can easily be analyzed in terms of failure to negotiate a reliable promise - consider the specific details "an exercise for the reader". The failure isn't necessarily on your part - but one major point of the article is that reliable promises are a shared responsibility.
That is why I said this was a different problem than my usual one. And it really bothered me that I hadn't held up my end, which is why I left the group, even though they would certainly have put my name on the final draft. If I ever end up in this situation again, I'll know that they actually do mean they want the project finished a month early...most people, if they say that, don't mean it.
Actually, if I ever encounter this situation again, I'll probably leave the group if that's an option. I don't like the feeling of being less invested in the outcome than the others any more than I like being more invested. It just makes me feel bad for putting in a level of effort that's reasonable for my expectations by not for theirs.
Incidentally, I'm looking forward to doing the project alone. It's actually quite an interesting assignment now that I can put aside worrying about group dynamics.
a number of people seemed confused when I tried to explain my inability to believe.
Maybe this is key to the problem, such that they are able to build such a strong mental block between those two aspects of the brain so that the concept of the conflict of belief is actively rejected.
A strong mental block. Interesting. Plausible...
I have quite a bit of experience racing sailboats, in roles including skipper, tactictian, and trimmer/regular crew. I have raced with novices and with experienced crew. The single best predictor I have found for success at teamwork is that everyone is interested in winning (in a way that typical students may not be interested in doing a good job on a school project, even one that closely resembles a real world project). If my crew want to win, they will follow my instructions, even if they are inexperienced they will accept my coaching (or better yet, my more experienced crew will coach them and take the cognitive load off of me) and still do a good job. Given that, the most likely obstacle is too many leaders though I have been in several races where we solved that by just letting one person be in charge for the race even though several of could have done that job.
Good example! I think most of the frustration I have with group work is when I could do the whole thing myself, faster or at least more efficiently, but I'm being arbitrarily forced to coordinate with other people. In sailboat racing, I'm assuming, it doesn't make sense to go at it alone no matter how good you are, any more than it makes sense to play soccer as a team of one.
Too many leaders happened a lot in the school clubs I participated in. Main reason i stopped participating; it was frustrating to watch people waste time arguing over who was in charge when they could have been doing stuff.
them to really, truly believe without (apparent) cognitive dissonance.
The problem is that you can only be sure about the appearance of such. The cognitive dissonance just needs to be small enough so that it doesn't manifest in outward action.
Maybe. I've asked them, though, and they don't seem to find it a serious problem. They find ways to get around it...I could quote examples if I remembered the vocabulary better. In fact, a number of people seemed confused when I tried to explain my inability to believe.
The trouble with teamwork
I've hated group projects since about Grade 3. I grew up assuming that at some point, working in groups would stop being a series of trials and tribulations, and turn into normal, sane people working just like they would normally, except on a shared problem. Either they would change, or I would change, because I am incredibly bad at teamwork, at least the kind of it that gets doled out in the classroom. I don’t have the requisite people skills to lead a group, but I’m too much of a control freak to meekly follow along when the group wants to do a B+ project and I would like an A+. Drama inevitably ensues.
I would like to not have this problem. An inability to work in teams seems like a serious handicap. There are very few jobs that don’t involve teamwork, and my choice of future career, nursing, involves a lot.
My first experiences in the workplace, as a lifeguard, made me feel a little better about this. There was a lot less drama and a lot more just getting the work done. I think it has a lot to do with a) the fact that we’re paid to do a job that’s generally pretty easy, and b) the requirements of that job are pretty simple, if not easy. There is drama, but it rarely involves guard rotations or who’s going to hose the deck, and I can safely ignore it. Rescues do involve teamwork, but it’s a specific sort of teamwork where the roles are all laid out in advance, and that’s what we spent most of our training learning. Example: in a three-guard scenario, the guard to notice an unconscious swimmer in the water becomes guard #1: they make a whistle signal to the others and jump in, while guard #2 calls 911 and guard #3 clears the pool and does crowd control. There isn’t a lot of room for drama, and there isn’t much point because there is one right way to do things, everyone knows the right way to do things, and there isn’t time to fight about it anyway.
I’m hoping that working as a nurse in a hospital will be more this and less like the school-project variety of group work. The roles are defined and laid out; they’re what we’re learning right now in our theory classes. There’s less of a time crunch, but there’s still, usually, an obviously right way to do things. Maybe it gets more complicated when you have to approach a colleague for, say, not following the hand-hygiene rules, or when the rules the hospital management enforces are obviously not the best way to do things, but those are add-ons to the job, not its backbone.
But that’s for bedside nursing. Research is a different matter, and unfortunately, it’s a lot more like school. I’m taking a class about research right now, and something like 30% or 40% of our mark is on a group project. We have to design a study from beginning to end: problem, hypothesis, type of research, research proposal, population and sample, methods of measurement, methods of analysis, etc. My excuse that “I dislike this because it has absolutely no real-world relevance” is downright wrong, because we’re doing exactly what real researchers would do, only with much less resources and time, and I do like research and would like to work in that milieu someday.
Conflict with my group-members usually comes because I’m more invested in the outcome than the others. I have more motivation to spend time on it, and a higher standard for "good enough". Even if I think the assignment is stupid, I want to do it properly, partly for grades and partly because I hate not doing things properly. I don’t want to lead the group, because I know I’m terrible at it, but no one else wants to either because they don’t care either way. I end up feeling like a slave driver who isn’t very good at her job.
This time I had a new sort of problem. A group asked me to join them because they thought I was smart and would be a good worker. They set a personal deadline to have the project finished nearly a month before it was due. They had a group meeting, which I couldn’t go to because I was at work, and assigned sections, and sent out an email with an outline. I skimmed the email and put it aside for later, since it seemed less than urgent to me. ...And all of a sudden, at our next meeting, the project was nearly finished. No one had hounded me; they had just gone ahead and done it. Maybe they had a schema in their heads that hounding the non-productive members of the team would lead to drama, but I was offended, because I felt that in my case it wouldn’t have. I would have overridden my policy of doing my work at the last minute, and just gotten it done. It’s not like I didn’t care about our final grade.
My pride was hurt (the way my classmate told me was by looking at my computer screen in the library, where I’d started to do the part assigned to me in the outline, and saying “you might as well not save that, I already did it.”) I didn’t feel like fighting about it, so I emailed the prof and asked if I could do the project on my own instead of with a team. She seemed confused that I wanted to do extra work, but assented.
I didn’t want to do extra work. I wanted to avoid the work of team meetings, team discussions, team drama... But that’s not how real-world research works. Refusing to play their game means I lose an opportunity to improve my teamwork skills, and I’m going to need those someday, and not just the skills acquired through lifeguarding. Either I need to turn off my control-freak need to have things my way, or I need to become charismatic and good at leading groups, and to do either of those things, I need a venue to practice.
Does anyone else here have the same problem I do? Has anyone solved it? Does anyone have tips for ways to improve?
Edit: reply to comment by jwendy, concerning my 'other' kind of problem.
"I probably didn't say enough about it in the article, if you thought it seemed glossed over, but I thought a lot about why this happened at the time, and I was pretty upset (more than I should have been, really, over a school project) and that's why I left the group...because unlike type#2 team members, I actually cared a lotabout making a fair contribution and felt like shit when I hadn't. I never consciously decided to procrastinate, either...I just had a lot of other things on my plate, which is pretty much inevitable during the school year, and all of a sudden, foom!, my part of the project is done because one of the girls was bored on the weekend and had nothing better to do. (Huh? When does this ever happen?)
So I guess I'm like a team #2 member in that I procrastinate when I can get away with it, but like a team#1 member in that I do want to turn in quality work and get an A+. And I want it to my my quality work, not someone else's with my name on it."
I think it was justified to be surprised when the new kind of problem happened to me. If I'm more involved/engaged than all the students I've worked with in the past, that doesn't mean I'm the most engaged, but it does mean I have a schema in my brain for 'no one has their work finished until a week after they say they will'.
But if you offered me a pill which let me believe in Mormonism, I would go for it, which I think is the relevant question.
It isn't the relevant question. There is no such pill. You can't do it. Yet there are millions of people who are able to do it!
I believe this is because their subconscious, rational decision-making process can compute expected utility without being aware of their own operation, and thus being hindered from setting beliefs so as to maximize utility rather than correctness.
This isn't wrong - it's adaptative! If your decision-making were purely conscious, you would be unable to choose beliefs that are false but likely to lead to preferred outcomes.
You can't do it. Yet there are millions of people who are able to do it!
I have spent a long time trying to figure out what exactly works differently about my Christian friends' brains that allows them to really, truly believe without (apparent) cognitive dissonance. Not to say that I would choose to believe unconditionally if I had the ability, but I would like to understand.
I believe this is because their subconscious, rational decision-making process can compute expected utility without being aware of their own operation, and thus being hindered from setting beliefs so as to maximize utility rather than correctness.
Maybe. I wish there was a way of researching this without biasing the results.
This site is based on reddit tech. I joined hacker news, which is related, made my first comment, which lost karma. My karma was at that point slightly below zero. And guess what happened at that point. nobody saw any of my comments from that point forward, because I was below reading threshold, which meant also that my karma was stuck (I think it was -4). I checked, by logging off and looking for my own comments. I fixed the problem by creating a new account, which gained karma steadily.
But what kind of system is one which permanently silences someone who happens to go negative on his first try? Reflection on this soured me toward hacker news and I eventually left, haven't been back. The obvious fix is to start people off with, say, 50 karma points. Give people a chance, don't silence them if their first comment displeases somebody. Which I don't see anybody implementing.
Right now, I have karma below 200. I want to build up karma because I don't want to have to create a new account.
Frankly, though, I don't care for karma. I think the main use of karma is to prevent flame wars, because obviously, if you say something really offensive, your karma will drop off a cliff and go negatively quickly. That's about it. I don't think it is otherwise terribly useful.
My karma was at that point slightly below zero. And guess what happened at that point. nobody saw any of my comments from that point forward, because I was below reading threshold, which meant also that my karma was stuck (I think it was -4).
I did not know that. That makes no sense! I assumed the karma would start at zero for each comment, and if it went below the threshold, then that comment would disappear, but that any new comments would start at zero and be visible, and might get upvoted based on its merits.
Also, for me karma has a definitive role as a motivator to make intelligent, well-thought out comments and posts.
I deliberately condition myself to not be afraid of losing karma. Trying to strike a balance between accepting other peoples opinions and listening to my own judgement is difficult. But when too many people delete anything which is unpopular, a sites content becomes monolithic.
Although since it was an easy to misinterpret joke, my karma policies may be irrelevant. Feel free to downvote.
I've decided I would rather have more comments than more karma... And the two do seem to be somewhat inversely related. My first post, on a nice non-controversial topic like reaction speed, has triple the karma of my post on religious communities...but the latter has triple the comments of the former. Maybe people tend to comment more on something they disagree with. I think that ultimately the comments people make are more productive and useful for me to change my mind or see things from a new perspective, whereas karma really just means I can brag to my brother.
Sounds good to me... I cannot say that I have ever been involved in something this long that could take up nearly all of my time, but I tend to do well under pressure.
It sounds fun... Hopefully they will do it again at some point in the future when I no longer find myself obliged to work all summer to pay tuition.
Though the privacy concern was valid, the post was really interesting and made me think more carefully about possible negative impacts of rationality.
If you ever feel you can write something similar that avoids the concerns people had, that would be great.
I am planning to rewrite it minus privacy concerns, but it will require more research so I can't do it until the school year is over.
I hope you didn't take my initial comment as being aggressive or judgemental; it was a good post, well written and interesting. I hope, too, that there's no kind of fallout.
I don't remember what your original comment was. However, when I read the gist of all the privacy comments, I realized I really had not thought about that aspect. Aggressive has nothing to do with it.
I deleted this post. I will write another post later about why I deleted it.
If Swimmer963 and her roommate have overlapping social circles, and Swimmer963 talks about posting on LW with her real life acquaintances, it's fairly likely that someone will be able to put two and two together.
We don't have the same circles, and we're no longer roommates, and I don't talk about Less Wrong with most people, and if any of you did meet her you might find out about it from her first...
Nevertheless, I did not think through all of that. I have some problems with privacy, i.e. I don't actually notice situations that involve 'personal' information, whether it's mine or other people's. At least I have the right to post whatever personal stuff I want wherever I want...but I don't have that right for other people.
I did change the wording of the original post to 'friend'.
I think I formed the idea pretty early on that my teachers were idiots, like age five or thereabouts. Never realized before how important that could've been in preventing this particular bit of early brain damage!
Apparently I have too agreeable a personality to be a child prodigy... To be honest, I remember very little about anything before Grade 5 or so, but I don't remember specifically disliking my teachers or finding them stupid. I liked my teachers most of the time even if a lot of the time I just ignored them and read books under my day, which may be why my grades were mediocre up until junior high, when I discovered that you were supposed to pay attention in class (and when the material became slightly more interesting!)
I have personally had some significant issues getting myself to deal with problems in a constructive way--I was diagnosed with depression several months ago.
I put off seeking treatment, and especially medication, for essentially irrational reasons.
More recently I have started taking Lexapro, and I am MUCH happier. A large part of being able to make that decision came from Less Wrong--the ideas of "happiness set points," beating procrastination, and the idea that using technology to help improve myself is natural and necessary, helped me close the gap between not doing anything and doing something effective.
There are plenty of stories going around about people using decision theory to lose weight.
I would say there are several examples of people who have used the methods of rationality (or at least have used Less Wrong) to help with uncommon problems.
Unless your friend is intensely theist or overly sensitive to contrarianism I can't think of what downside there is to this experiment.
She is definitely not theist, so that isn't a problem.
I will try not to make this particular mistake in the future, but I still seem to be horrible at choosing when to just say nothing...
I don't think you should necessarily censor yourself. If it looks to you like your comment is useful, then post it...and if you get a negative response, then you learn something about yourself and others learn something about themselves.
It's not necessarily a mistake to do this, because attitudes are not truly independent of one another. Given your specific genes/environment/attitudes, one particular attitude may work well for you even if it would work poorly for another person. It's difficult to examine beliefs in any manner other than "one at a time", but a belief which is wrong independently may be useful given your overall set of circumstances/beliefs.
example: one may be able to get away with substandard food cleanliness if one is vegetarian.
example: one may be able to get away with substandard food cleanliness if one is vegetarian.
Definitely something I do.
I'm a little surprised to see the issues of LWers interacting with women reduced to "being careful when discussing explicit awareness of social reality" ... with a link to PUA stuff.
1) PUA stuff is hardly the only example out there of "explicit awareness of social reality".
2) It's quite telling that the implication of the post is that "women don't like explicit awareness of social reality", rather than the (more accurate) "women don't like PUA".
One way to encourage women to participate in rationalist communities might be to make a conscious effort not to portray us as silly, manipulative, fickle, irrational gold-diggers. Some rationalists do a good job of this ... many don't. And PUAs, rationalist and otherwise, are usually bad at this. (Yes, there are exceptions.)
I actually had not noticed that LWers alienated women in any way. And yes, I am female. And maybe not very observant.
I agree with this notion somewhat tangentially. I think that learning feels hard, but that too much is played up about it actually being hard. I think this is comparable to some of the historical remarks found in this post:
<http://lesswrong.com/lw/pc/quantum_explanations/>.
More often than not, in the circle of topics that I have experience with teaching and learning, syntax represents the first hurdle. I believe this is true in many domains of learning, even swimming. Learning the grammar rules associated with balance in a body of water and how to generate motive force to make yourself go are, at the most basic level, instances of syntax, although the (perhaps context-free) language of human activities doesn't necessarily feel very much like the type of algorithmic rule-following we learn in lectures.
Speaking of that post on quantum explanations, there is a nice quote buried in there or in one of the posts nearby, "There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model."
I feel that, when properly understood, this expresses the reason why learning feels hard. There was a recent publication in PAMI, a machine-learning journal, on a quantity called Bayesian surprise (reference at end of post). The Bayesian surprise of some observed data, given a class of models to be used for describing the observation, was loosely defined as the distance between the posterior distribution and the prior distribution -- that is, after updating one's beliefs in the face of the evidence, how much have those beliefs changed from the moment before the evidence was observed? If they have changed a great deal, the surprise (defined in terms of the KL-divergence and other information-theoretic quantities) will be large, hence that observation is surprising.
To a young person (or someone with little practical experience around water), the models of human motion and balance trained in bipedal movement would be incredibly surprised by the feelings and feedback in the water. It is similar in a probability lecture I am giving to some engineering students. Various Bayesian decision questions, dressed up in rudimentary coin-flipping examples, feel hard and appear to be counter-intuitive when a student's prior model (usually based upon limited experience and intuition) is challenged.
I wholeheartedly agree that we ought to take this Bayesian surprise into account when thinking of the best way to teach new material. In some sense, there may be a "geodesic path" connecting a pupil's current (prior) belief to the desired posterior belief, which may provide a quantitative basis for optimal teaching strategies... but that seems far off.
Interesting post!
Thank you, that's a very interesting comment.
I don't know how I learned to swim. One day I couldn't stay afloat without a life jacket or other flotation device, and the next day I could.
Were you going to the pool regularly and swimming in a life jacket? The transition from swimming with flotation to swimming without is one that everyone makes (unless they learn how to swim perfect front crawl in the shallow end before ever trying out the deep end). Kids can make it quite suddenly, and although I can usually tell what they're doing differently (body position, arm and leg movements, etc), I don't think they can.
1 more bit to remember:
Commuting really really sucks. Least happy part of almost everyone's day, who does it. Minimizing commute is a not-inconsequential path towards increased happiness.
I avoid this problem by biking as much as possible. Granted, this wouldn't work if I lived in the suburbs an hour's drive from work, but since I live about a 15-minute drive, that works out to a 35-minute bike ride. Multiply that by two for every day I work, add whatever extra minutes I spend going to friend's houses or grocery shopping, and that's a lot of outdoor aerobic exercise, which improves my mood hugely. And I arrive at work awake and pumped even for 6 am shifts.
Bleah. Still not used to this high status thing.
But seriously, if you are not metabolically privileged, what happens if you try this is that your body shuts down and goes into starvation mode instead of losing weight. Your fat cells do not release fat under any circumstances, though they're happy to hoover up blood sugar so you always feel tired. We're not talking "feeling hungry", we're talking that you stop feeling hungry and lie down, feeling very very cold and having a hard time moving. Literal starvation, instead of your fat cells releasing fat. I've never tried starving myself that much (I worry that it will cause my brain to cannibalize irreplaceable neurons or something, the way the rest of the body cannibalizes muscle) but I've just recently watched that happen to someone else who tried to lose weight by not eating and wasn't metabolically privileged enough to get away with it.
A calorie is not a calorie. The thermodynamic theory of metabolism is a fucking lie. And it seriously does wear away on your nerves like sandpaper, after a while, to be blamed for it, when the exact same diet can make one person thin and cause the other to blow up like a balloon...
Eh, just read "Beware of Other-Optimizing."
We're not talking "feeling hungry", we're talking that you stop feeling hungry and lie down, feeling very very cold and having a hard time moving.
Have you had your thyroid hormone levels checked? Lethargy, feeling cold, and weight gain/inability to lose weight are ALL symptoms of hypothyroidism. Basically, without enough thyroid hormone telling your cells to be active, your metabolism shuts down. Just a thought.
Don't they teach floating before swimming any more? I'm probably missing something, but it sounds like the process is being made unnecessarily difficult and frightening because the student must learn floating and rudimentary swimming at once. We learned the dead-man's float, then the flutter kick, then the arm stroke, and finally breathing. Learning to float was the easy part; co-ordinating the three motor components was what was hard.
Floating to gliding to kicking to front crawl is one progression. Swimming in deep water with your head up, i.e. doggy paddle or treading water, is a separate skill and has to be taught differently. Let me think... In Preschool A and B, the first swimming levels, I teach assisted floats, i.e. the child doesn't have to hold themselves up because the instructor does, but they have to have the correct body position. In order to pass Preschool C, the child has to do unassisted floats on their front and back. In order to pass Preschool D, they have to tread water for 5 seconds in deep water. So that comes after floats, but it's not the same skill exactly, and it's not what progresses into front crawl.
No question that wasting money and effort is bad, and you should make that note and that smaller pot. But often such things are not possible, especially if you are not cooking for yourself.
For a good pure example, I would prefer if the muffins they sell at my local bagel place were slightly smaller, even if they cost the same price.
Among the many things you have to put up with if you don't cook for yourself. (I have a pretty big appetite, so I have the opposite problem; I find that restaurant helpings leave me still hungry).
Still, I understand that some people live in conditions that make cooking for themselves hard (packed work schedule, inadequate kitchen facilities, etc). You should consider making a comment to the staff at the bakery that they sell different sizes of muffins, maybe the small ones for 15 cents less so they still make a higher profit margin. They wouldn't necessarily have to buy different muffin tins, just fill them with less dough, since bakery muffins are often all top anyway.
Briefly and crudely, carbs affect insulin, insulin affects how greedy and stingy the fat cells are. Greedy fat cells grab energy-carrying molecules, effectively starving the rest of the body. Stingy fat cells are reluctant to let go of the energy they've stored, keeping the rest of the body starved. A starved body is simultaneously hungry and lethargic, for obvious reasons. This in effect reverses the usual causal picture. Greedy stingy fat cells cause a person to feel hungry and lethargic, which causes a person to be inactive and eat a lot. The picture that most people have in their minds is the reverse: a person who eats a lot and who exercises little will, as a consequence of these two vices, get fat. Taubes argues that these so-called vices are a symptom of starvation, which is caused by fat cells hoarding energy, which in turn is caused primarily by high insulin. To break the vicious cycle, cut out the part of the food which spikes insulin, and that is primarily the carbs, and specifically certain kinds of carbs which are rapidly digested.
To repeat, while I'm trying to give the best answer I can, it's only an approximation of his argument.
Based on what I know about biochemistry and metabolism, that sounds reasonable. Have they done any studies on humans (not mice)?
Yes, of course it's better to plan so you won't have to throw food away. But that's not what's being contested--A desire to plan efficient meals is as far from the fear of throwing food away as wanting to have accurate beliefs is from fearing having to change your beliefs.
A desire to plan efficient meals is as far from the fear of throwing food away as wanting to have accurate beliefs is from fearing having to change your beliefs.
I've reread that sentence several times, and I don't get the comparison. A strong negative emotion reaction to throwing food away can motivate you to plan efficient meals (as it does for me), but being afraid to change your beliefs won't motivate you to make them accurate–the two are working in opposite directions!
I can't think of any way to answer you correctly and yet also briefly, because Taubes's ideas are not easy, at least not easy for me, to put into a nutshell.
Therefore what I am about to say should be taken as no more than a very crude, and greatly exaggerated, approximation of Taubes's theory. Here it is: if you eat more carbs, you turn yourself into a Zucker rat. If you eat fewer carbs, you stop being a Zucker rat.
What is a Zucker rat? I'll let Taubes describe the Zucker rat:
These rats, like Mayer’s mice, are genetically predisposed to get fat. When Zucker rats are put on a calorie-restricted diet from the moment they’re weaned from their mothers’ milk, they don’t end up leaner than their littermates who are allowed to eat as much as they want. They end up fatter. They may weigh a little less, but they have just as much or even more body fat. Even if they want to be gluttons, which they assuredly do, they can’t, and they still get even fatter than they would have had they never been put on a diet. On the other hand, their muscles and organs, including their brains and kidneys, are smaller than they’d otherwise be. Just as the muscles in Mayer’s mice “melted away” when starved, the muscles and organs in these semi-starved Zucker rats are “significantly reduced” in size compared with those fat littermates who get to eat freely. “In order to develop this obese body composition in the face of calorie restriction,” wrote the researcher who reported this observation in 1981, “several developing organ systems in the obese rats [are] compromised.” Let’s think about this for a second. If a baby rat that is genetically programmed to become obese is put on a diet from the moment it’s weaned, so it can eat no more than a lean rat would eat, if that, and can never eat as much as it would like, it responds by compromising its organs and muscles to satisfy its genetic drive to grow fat. It’s not just using the energy it would normally expend in day-to-day activity to grow fat; it’s taking the materials and the energy it would normally dedicate to building its muscles, organs, and even its brain and using that.
I suppose the point is less that you can lose weight on 3000 carb-free calories a day, and more that you can't lose weight if you're eating carbs.
Just out of interest, what's the proposed mechanism by which carbs turn us into Zucker rats?
Gary Taubes basically says that one generally loses weight if and only if one eats fewer carbs, so this is some evidence for his claim (not strong evidence, since it's consistent with most other models of weight loss too).
Um... Is that logical? If you eat 3000 calories a day of fat and protein, wouldn't you still gain weight?
I heartily endorse eating better food, including making trade-offs with time and/or money to do so. There can be little doubt that there's a trade-off between long term health and hedonic value of food as well, but certainly most of us are not at the frontier.
I would recommend also:
Step four: Be willing to throw food away.
A lot of people attach strong negative emotions to throwing away food, even if the food is no longer worth eating. Some of it is pure sunk costs, but often it goes beyond that and many people look upon it as a moral issue, or that it means somehow taking food away from someone else who needs it. It isn't one, and you're not.
Still, isn't it better to plan so you won't have to throw food away? For example: if I cook a big pot of lentils to last me all week, and then end up eating at friends' houses several times and my lentils are smelling bad, I'll throw them out, but I'll make a mental note not to make such a big pot next time, or to put some in the freezer if I think I'll be away a lot.
I'm going to say that this advice doesn't work for everyone.
Some people are taste-motivated and some people are fullness-motivated.
My whole family is taste-motivated. They have specific foods that they love; fine food is very important to them; to them, "dieting" means eating smaller quantities, because giving up their favorite foods altogether is out of the question. I'm the one who horrifies my mother by eating beef jerky. It's fairly healthy, it satisfies my hunger, and it tastes good to me, the way all food does. Seriously, all food tastes good to me, with few exceptions. Sometimes I crave fat or protein or sugar, but I never crave a specific food. What's really important to me is feeling full -- I hate being hungry.
So I actually hate that "savoring" business. I'm starving! I want to be not-starving! That's the point of food! Savoring it is just prolonging the period when I'm starving. And the "want" vs. "like" confuses me -- I understand the notion, but I can't apply it to food in my case. I like (almost) everything! (Sure, I desire things I shouldn't eat, like desserts, but it's not a want/like thing -- I both want and like them.)
Where this logic actually makes sense to me is recreation. Intense fun -- going out with friends to have a new, exciting, transcendently wonderful experience -- is actually remarkably easy. It's just that most people spend their free time budget on mild fun -- TV, movies, internet. One of the things I'm trying to do is to focus more of my fun budget on intense fun.
I know what you mean in terms of food. I am very non-picky, and while I prefer to eat a variety of different foods over a day to avoid boredom, I don't really mind what. (I do have favorite foods, like muffins, which I shouldn't really eat because I have a wheat sensitivity...)
However, I don't find it more fun necessarily to go out and do new things with friends... It can be fun, but I mainly find it exhausting. My 'transcendental fun' usually takes the form of engaging conversations with interesting people. This is probably an introverted trait.
I still can't clap with one hand. my life is not complete.
I clap with one hand all the time if I'm holding something in my other hand. You just have to find something to hit. Walls and/or other body parts work well.
I have no intention of rushing things, I assure you. (Although if we're going by anecdotal evidence, I have a friend who got married when she was nineteen very shortly after meeting her husband, and they are among the most happily married couples I have met.)
Which I know. But emotionally, I think my parents' anecdotes weigh the most heavily on me. (This is something I've noticed: I pick out particular attitudes I have that are a result of my specific upbringing, and then go on holding those same attitudes anyway.)
I suspect that I won't find any teas I like that aren't sweet. I prefer my comestibles & potables to be either definitively sweet or definitively not-sweet, and items that have features of one (e.g. a fruit flavor) without being sweet (or while being sweet, in the opposite case) are not pleasant to me.
Interesting. Both my brother and sister have the same phenomenon: they love candy and desserts, but dinner foods that have any element of sweetness (like beets, sweet potatoes, or even sweet-and-sour sauces) gross them out.
You can sweeten most of those teas a little...of course, that means adding calories to something that's essentially calorie-free.
I do drink juice. I add a little water to it, but find that any more than a little (about one part water to five or six parts juice) drops it below a relevant threshold of pleasantness. I realize it is not a health drink, but I really hate water, and I do need some liquid intake. (With meals, it's (skim) milk.)
Have you ever tried adding a drop or two of lemon juice to water? Or (and this might sound weird) plain hot water? It depends on how hot it is where you live, of course, but my ex-boyfriend's entire family used to drink plain hot water, and after thinking they were very odd, I tried it and found it quite soothing.
Well, I hate ginger, but I suppose I could afford to look around a little more thoroughly in teaspace to see if there's one I like without massive amounts of sugar dumped in.
Personally, I adore fruity teas like cranberry. They manage to taste juice like without actually being sweet. Do you like green tea, chai tea or ginseng? You could also try rooibos; it's an African tea that doesn't have caffeine and tastes a lot milder than black tea without being exactly herbal.
This is in fact part of my ideal life trajectory, but I'm not presently engaged or even seeing anyone, so there's no timetable in place that I can accelerate on demand.
I'm not even sure if it's a good idea to date people with the thought of accelerating your marriage trajectory. It seems to me like a) a lot of pressure, and b) a recipe for ignoring your own uncertainty because you want to get married fast. Of course, I'm biased because my parents waited from 1983 until 1995 to get married, a solid 12 years of courtship, and because my mother's brother, who did marry young and impulsively, had a very negative experience of it.
The way I learned to swim was pretty interesting, I remember the moment pretty clearly because of the absolute shock of fear at the time -- but it was a rather interesting method. I don't remember if the teacher tried to teach me in the same failed way you're talking about here to being with -- but whether she did, or didn't, I couldn't swim. I was pretty young at the time, so the surrounding memories are a little hazy -- though the moment itself is quite clear.
So since I couldn't swim, and couldn't figure out how from explanations, the teacher had me pushing off from the wall and grabbing onto this floating barbell thingy -- no swimming involved, except for bringing it back to the wall, which I could do because I had something keeping me from going under. I'd then push it away from the wall, push off the wall and grab it, and do it again. The teacher had to fetch it a few times, because it got too far away for me to get to in one push.
Then one day (I don't remember how long I did the push-off-the-wall thing) I was proceeding as normal, and the teacher came along to watch. And I pushed off the wall again, as hard as I could, to grab the floating thing -- and she grabbed it and pulled it back. And with what I realize now was probably a shock of adrenaline, I swam towards it. And she swam backwards with it, and I kept swimming towards it. It was a horrid doggy paddle, of course, but I was swimming.
I don't think this is an effective method for most things, and it might not work for some people, but it certainly worked for me, in that situation. Problem is, I can't think of many other situations where it would be effective -- bike riding is the only other skill I can think of where this method might work. Can anyone think of anything else?
And I pushed off the wall again, as hard as I could, to grab the floating thing -- and she grabbed it and pulled it back. And with what I realize now was probably a shock of adrenaline, I swam towards it. And she swam backwards with it, and I kept swimming towards it. It was a horrid doggy paddle, of course, but I was swimming.
This is actually a fairly standard method. It's called a progression: you go from something easy (pushing off and gliding to a barbell) to something hard (swimming to a barbell). It sounds like in your case it wasn't a very smooth progression (there was a big jump in the difficulty level, as shown by your "absolute shock of fear), but it worked.
There is feedback to be gleaned when teaching badly if one knows what to look for. And I think being able to interpret the passive feedback and respond appropriately is a large part of what makes a good teacher.
Many teachers, in my experience, don't notice when students are confused or bored -- or maybe they notice but don't care -- and their teaching method and pace is completely unresponsive to the immediate feedback of how well it is working.
And I think being able to interpret the passive feedback and respond appropriately is a large part of what makes a good teacher.
I think this is a lot of Nancy's point: it takes a good teacher to notice feedback. This suggests a sort of vicious circle: good teachers get better, but bad teachers stay bad.
I'm a big Penzey's fan (for one thing, it seems to be the only place I can get ground celery seed), but I cook nearly everything I make myself - I use garlic powder when it's texturally important but otherwise mince my own cloves of the stuff.
I don't think Penzey's exists here in Canada, but my favorite store is Bulk Barn. Pretty sure they have dried garlic flakes. They also have about a dozen kinds of chocolate chips, and incredibly cheap beans and lentils. And pure MSG in powder form...I always laugh.
I do drink juice. I add a little water to it, but find that any more than a little (about one part water to five or six parts juice) drops it below a relevant threshold of pleasantness. I realize it is not a health drink, but I really hate water, and I do need some liquid intake. (With meals, it's (skim) milk.)
I don't generally drink juice at all. I don't find it all that satisfying, and it often gives me heartburn... I drink multiple pots of tea per day, though.
It seems to me that one needs to place a large amount of trust in one's future self to implement such a strategy. It also requires that you be able to predict your future self's utility function. If you have a difficult time predicting what you will want and how you will feel, it becomes difficult to calculate the utility of any given precomittment. For example, I would be unconvinced that deciding to eat a donut now means that I will eat a donut every day and that not eating a donut now means I will not eat a donut every day. Knowing that I want a donut now and will be satisfied with that seems like an immediate win, while I do not know that I will be fat later. To me this seems like trading a definite win for a definite loss + potential bigger win. Also, it is not clear that there wouldn't be other effects. Not eating the donut now might make me dissatisfied and want to eat twice as much later in the day to compensate. If I knew exactly what the effects of action EAT DONUT vs NOT EAT DONUT were (including mental duress, alternative pitfalls to avoid, etc), then I would be better able to pick a strategy. The more predictable you are, the more you can plan a strategy that makes sense in the long term. In the absence of this information, most of just 'wing it' and do what seems best at the given moment. It would seem that deciding to be a TDT agent is deciding to always be predictable in certain ways. But that also requires trusting that future you will want to stick to that decision.
I suspect that some people behave more predictably and/or can predict their own behaviour better than others (I don't think those two things are the same, or necessarily correlated). Which would make it easier to be a TDT agent. Mood stability might be a factor.
I had problems from worrying to much constantly when I tried to get decent at swimming recently. I think I might have taken lessons for a year over a decade ago, but I forgot almost everything I learned so I was eventually only able to swim by just flailing around inefficiently in a way that does not resemble any stroke. A few months ago, I decided that I actually wanted to be able to swim quickly, dive, and tread water as long as necessary without exhausting myself. So I went to a pool every week after studying a guide, and spent a few hours drilling the movements until I no longer felt on the verge of drowning constantly. I learned more slowly when someone was teaching me because it made every failure feel worse, but when I was motivated to improve and willing to look like an idiot in the process it went quite quickly. The more I assume that I should already be good at something, the worse I am as a student, which is something I really need to fix.
The more I assume that I should already be good at something, the worse I am as a student, which is something I really need to fix.
I can understand that. Don't know how much it's true of me. It is interesting that you learned more slowly with a teacher because you felt your failures more strongly. I've never experienced that but I can see why someone might.
Maybe if you just noted down the ideas so you could go back to them later?
I do sometimes. But when my brain looks at the week ahead and sees a solidly filled schedule, it oftens decides "screw it, if I don't do this now I'll never have the opportunity." Also, I have creative and non-creative moods, and if I don't write while in a creative mood, I often lose out on the chance.
Once in a while I wonder if it's possible to permanently damage your creativity with enough sleep deprivation, but then I stay up half the night writing, which answers that question.
Ack, that might be a case of the candle burning twice as bright but less than half as long, resulting in a loss in net light emitted.
In other words, forcing yourself to do creative work while also sleep deprived might be burning yourself out faster than if you got more sleep.
If only it were a matter of forcing myself...then I could decide not to, and get sleep! Usually if I stay up all night, it's because I've been itching to work on a particular story all week and haven't had time and am going insane from pent-up ideas.
I do have awesome friends :)
I consider my life adequately independent in the sense that I do not depend on my family. (I haven't lived with them full-time since I was fifteen, or at all since I was nineteen.) There's an important limit to how independent I can be when I don't drive, though, so I find it valuable to be among people; I may as well enjoy the largesse available under that circumstance. (Current roommate doesn't drive either but has a close friend who does and helps out.)
I don't know if I'm actually in a better financial situation than I would have been without this string of fortuitous circumstances. My income is vastly greater than my expenses, but my expenses are almost nil, so said income... is tiny. I'd need to get a job-job and keep it if I were paying for rent and food on my own, and might have more leftover cash that way than I do now. However, I have lots and lots of low-stress free time, which is very valuable to me.
If I valued my spare time more, I might have more of it... Instead, my life consists of running from one part time job to the other to school to choir practice, and basically collapsing in bed at the end of the day. Once in a while I wonder if it's possible to permanently damage your creativity with enough sleep deprivation, but then I stay up half the night writing, which answers that question. I would probably enjoy all the things I do more (and do them better) if I did less of them...but choosing school over work isn't an option, and I have a "loyalty problem": once I join something, it becomes really hard for me to leave. (Which is why I'm still in a girls' church choir, 5 years later.)
This article should probably reference Inferential Distance
Yes, probably... How do you do that?
When I read this, I remembered also being told to "move your arms and legs".
Seriously?
Seriously?
WTF WAS WRONG WITH THOSE PEOPLE oh never mind OP said it better.
It does work eventually. If you tell kids enough times to move their arms, and prevent them from actually drowning, they figure it out by trial and error in the end. But that's not teaching.
I was forced to do school-age swimming lessons, which pissed me off, since I could totally swim already.
Anyway, do you have any tricks to getting them over the fear (other than the obvious and marginally effective 'encourage them to get in the water and remind them that they arent going to die')?
The best trick I've found is to get kids to try things that, to them, seem scary and impossible, but which I know that no one can actually fail at. Example: stand on the side of the deep end with them, jump in holding their hand, and push them to the surface as soon as my feet hit the bottom. They're not underwater long enough to panic, and then I'm holding them up in the deep end, and I can praise them warmly for jumping into the deep end...and even if they didn't jump entirely voluntarily, they can't exactly say 'no I didn't jump'.
I'm 22. I live with a friend who is willing to cover our joint grocery bill and not charge me rent in exchange for my charming company and a handful of domestic tasks (I cook, pick up around the place a bit, make some of our grocery trips on my own, do the dishes, stuff like that). Before I lived here I lived with different friends; there was a similar deal in place but there were some unresolved issues about how big a handful of domestic tasks I needed to be doing, so I left. Before I lived with those friends, I lived in Benton House working for SIAI, and got my nibbles out of their budget. Before that I was in grad school, lived off campus with a roommate, and did pay for groceries (splitting the bill for both the apartment and the food with my roommate-at-the-time).
I should note that if my current roommate says "begone", I don't have any clever ideas lined up for carrying on this enviable situation - I might be able to move in with my best friend, depending on the timing, but I suspect she would charge me rent and that I'd wind up buying my own food. (I have lived with my best friend before, during two summers before my first and second years of grad school; first time around I had a job and paid rent but not for food, second time around I did not pay her anything; but now her living situation is different and I would be less enthusiastically welcomed and would probably have to make up the difference with money.)
You have awesome friends! I live in a shared house with a bunch of girls, but I didn't originally know them (I found the room through an ad on the Internet) and we don't share anything except for toilet paper and dishsoap. I'm not sure if my company is "charming" enough to wangle a deal like yours: I can play extroverted and funny at school or at work, but home is my place and I tend to spend a lot of time in my room with the door wedged shut. Anyway, I'm not sure I would like a situation like that: my instincts for living cheaply are strong, but my instincts for living independently are even stronger, which is why I moved out at 17 even though it wasn't really necessary. I'm glad because it's forced me to mature pretty quickly in a lot of ways, which might not have happened otherwise.
I should note that if my current roommate says "begone", I don't have any clever ideas lined up for carrying on this enviable situation.
If that happens, you'll still have saved a year or more of rent and food, and you'll have whatever extra amount in the bank. Always a huge bonus.
I taught my daughter to swim after well over a year's worth of "professional" swim training had seemingly achieved very little.
The approach I used worked well. I tried to teach her one skill at a time - like the Montessori method.
Learning to swim is hard because you have to do several things at once or you start to drown.
So, contrary to dogma, I got her some flippers and a floating vest. Her first task was to work out how to move around. Because of the floating vest she did not have to worry about keeping afloat. Because of the flippers she found learning to get around by kicking quite easy.
I progressively let down the vest over a period of a few visits. She progressively learned to leverage her "getting around" skills into "staying afloat" skills.
I then showed her how to swim in various styles ie dog paddling, breast stroke, then freestyle with head out of the water, then freestyle with proper breathing.
Eventually we took off the flippers and after a short adjustment, she could swim! All in less than a month. It was amazing to see after all those swimming lessons.
I would love to find a similar way to teach riding a bicycle. You can easily take learning to pedal offline. Steering plus balancing seem to be tightly coupled though, and the way you have to turn is very unintuitive thus hard to learn.
Teaching requires that you take all your implicit procedural knowledge and turn it into explicit declarative knowledge. In effect you have to reverse-engineer your skill.
When I was teaching my daughter French, she said "French is so dumb - why do they have all those irregular verbs?". So I took her through a few irregular English verbs. She had learned them all without explicitly realizing the fact that many common English verbs are irregular.
Learning to swim is hard because you have to do several things at once or you start to drown. So, contrary to dogma, I got her some flippers and a floating vest.
I don't know what the swimming programs in your area are like, but where I live (under the jurisdiction of the Canadian Lifesaving Society), the kids start out with skills in the shallow end (floats, front and back, first assisted and then unassisted, kicking on noodles, dunking their heads, etc) and as soon as Preschool C, the third level, one of the items on the checklist is having them swim around in a lifejacket in the deep end. I don't rigidly follow the checklists because I find it limiting, but most instructors do, meaning that in most of Canada at least, they should be taking 4-year-olds in the deep end with aids.
Learned to program at five. If someone has the programming gear, five is a perfectly good time to teach them to program. Just show them some Python code (I was reading BASIC, bleah) and see if they can deduce the rules and try writing their own. If someone is meant to be a programmer then a programmer they shall be.
Was it your parents' decision that you were going to learn to program at five, or yours? The latter would be even awesomer.
Somehow I doubt it would have worked for me though. I started trying to teach myself programming a few years ago (I was maybe 15) and I was looking at Python, but it was really opaque to me and even with my dad's "help" (he had no idea what he was doing either and we proceeded by trial and error) I got pretty much nowhere...I succeeded in writing a program that got stuck in an infinite loop, which I thought was hilarious, and that was it. I did take an introductory university course in Java later on though, and it was the easiest A+ of my life, so maybe I'm not completely hopeless.
I'm pretty pleased with myself about it, yeah :)
I'm sorry if this is a personal question, but how did you manage that? I'm under the impression that you're fairly close to my age (which is 19).
I like lentils and fruits and (cooked) veggies and whatnot too. I don't do it to save money - I don't even pay for my own groceries now, and haven't for about a year.
Nice!
It does seem like there's an age effect. None of my little cousins have ever showed fear of water, and I suspect this is because they've been in the water before they knew that it could be scary- they knew how to swim before they were physically strong enough to keep their head out of the water.
Dogs show the same effect- dogs that grow up never having swam seem to always dislike water, and dogs that were thrown in the water as puppies seem to love it and not start out scared.
Exactly...which is why I hate it when parents wait until their kids are school-age and then sign them up for group swimming lessons when they've never set foot in a pool. It's a nightmare waiting to happen, and by the time I get them, they've usually been through enough classes with lazy or just plain incompetent instructors that they're really scared, and set in their beliefs that they can't swim. We offer parent-and-tot swimming lessons starting at age 3 months; I just wish more parents took advantage of it. Or you could do this program: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL7XOo_LyWU
Heh, I learned to program when I was six, I don't happen to remember it being hard -- and I think I therefore pretty much suck at teaching programming.
I rock at explaining specific concepts to programmers -- libraries, techniques, tools -- but I cannot teach a non-programmer to program. "What do you mean? You just write functions! They accept arguments, and do stuff...ummm...it's like subroutines?"
Six! That's crazy, and I'm so going to teach my kids to program at that age! Yeah, I can see why you wouldn't find teaching others easy. Still, if you discovered you liked teaching (like I discovered I liked swimming) and spent a lot of time explaining concepts to beginners, I expect you could be a good teacher.
And in spite of this, you'd probably find it even harder to explain how to walk.
I don't think I'd call myself a healthy eater. I eat a lot of chocolate, put plenty of sweetness into my desserts, and am not shy about the use of butter and oil. "Scratch" doesn't mean "healthy", although it does tend to minimize certain types of unhealthy.
Okay then... I call myself a healthy eater, but that's mainly because I do cook from scratch, because I happen to like things like lentil stew, and because I adore fruits and raw carrots and that kind of thing. But I probably bake cookies twice a week, and while I don't eat all of them, one of the main reasons I like making them is getting to snack on cookie dough...mmm...
Aside from health reasons, cooking your own food saves a lot of money. I could keep my grocery bill to $25/week if I were willing to give up a few luxuries like, well, chocolate.
I taught my daughter to swim after well over a year's worth of "professional" swim training had seemingly achieved very little.
The approach I used worked well. I tried to teach her one skill at a time - like the Montessori method.
Learning to swim is hard because you have to do several things at once or you start to drown.
So, contrary to dogma, I got her some flippers and a floating vest. Her first task was to work out how to move around. Because of the floating vest she did not have to worry about keeping afloat. Because of the flippers she found learning to get around by kicking quite easy.
I progressively let down the vest over a period of a few visits. She progressively learned to leverage her "getting around" skills into "staying afloat" skills.
I then showed her how to swim in various styles ie dog paddling, breast stroke, then freestyle with head out of the water, then freestyle with proper breathing.
Eventually we took off the flippers and after a short adjustment, she could swim! All in less than a month. It was amazing to see after all those swimming lessons.
I would love to find a similar way to teach riding a bicycle. You can easily take learning to pedal offline. Steering plus balancing seem to be tightly coupled though, and the way you have to turn is very unintuitive thus hard to learn.
Teaching requires that you take all your implicit procedural knowledge and turn it into explicit declarative knowledge. In effect you have to reverse-engineer your skill.
When I was teaching my daughter French, she said "French is so dumb - why do they have all those irregular verbs?". So I took her through a few irregular English verbs. She had learned them all without explicitly realizing the fact that many common English verbs are irregular.
Unfortunately a lot of swim instructors do not teach very well...maybe because we're all teenagers getting paid $0.50 an hour more than minimum wage to be wet and freezing for 3 to 4 hours at a time. I'm fairly passionate about teaching swimming, but I'm a bit if an anomaly at work and people think I'm odd. If your daughter listens to you, she's probably better off learning at least preliminary swimming skills from you. If you want her to get really good, the quality of swim team teaching is usually better than your standard public swimming lessons. Or I could send you a list of suggestions...it would actually make me really happy. How old is your daughter?
My diet isn't a lot like a traditional American one. I'm a pescetarian, I cook nearly everything I make from scratch or close to it, and while I sometimes eat junky snackfood, I don't do it that often. I also don't consume soda or alcohol. There might be some obvious trivial-loss-of-pleasure alteration to make (and if you think of one, please tell me) but it's not jumping out at me.
Another healthy eater! I also cook nearly everything I eat from scratch (mainly beans, rice, and lentil stews). My guilty pleasures are a) baking, which I find very therapeutic (although I bring most of what I bake to share at work or choir practice, or else leave it for my roommates) and b) eating whatever junk food I can when it's free.
I like teaching adult lessons because adults can, and often do, ignore their fears and "shut up and swim already". At which point they realize they aren't going to die, and the fears tend to diminish with time and practice. Do you find that's happening with you? If it isn't yet, it will. I've never had a student who didn't get used to the water eventually.
Not to imply that adults' fears are worth less consideration than childrens' fears. Adults learning to swim for the first time can be a lot MORE afraid, especially if they've had bad experiences with water, but they can be incredibly self-motivated to overcome these fears, whereas three year olds...just aren't.
I think it's not just realizing that it's hard. It's realizing that it is potentially hard in a lot of different ways.
I recently learned how to swim after many failed attempts. I'm not any good, but I can do it, and the primary problem was that I was (am) afraid of the water rather than a lack of technique, and it was very frustrating because the wonderful woman teaching me could wrap her head around what it was that I found to be hard; she assumed at first I didn't know how, then when it was clear that I did know how she did work on my fears with me but she still basically tried repeatedly to get me to shut up and swim already.
I like teaching adult lessons because adults can, and often do, ignore their fears and "shut up and swim already". At which point they realize they aren't going to die, and the fears tend to diminish with time and practice. Do you find that's happening with you? If it isn't yet, it will. I've never had a student who didn't get used to the water eventually.
Learning to walk again after my stroke was both frustrating and hysterically funny that way.
I mean: it's walking! How can I not know how to walk? But of course it's something I hadn't given any thought to in over three decades... my body knew how to walk, I didn't have to. And then it forgot... sort of... and I had to learn it again.
Physical and occupational therapists are really good at this -- or, well, good ones are. I figured out how to walk level on my own (with some very funny-in-retrospect failures, including once when I missed the floor altogether), but someone had to tell me how to climb a flight of stairs... I just couldn't quite figure out what to do with my knee. Most people were, like, "just step up!" My PT actually talked me through the process of bending and raising my knee, planting my foot on the stair, and then straightening it out to lift my other foot off the ground.
Of course, most people don't remember the frustrating months or years they spent learning to climb stairs (compounded by the fact that children are physically too small for adult size staircases). Whereas most people remember learning, say, computer programming, and remember it being hard, and would probably be better at teaching it than teaching someone to walk even though their "level of expertise" in walking is higher. (Also, programming is based on language, and thus easier to explain using language, than a purely procedural skill like walking or climbing stairs.)
I used to teach English as a second language. It was a mind trip.
I remember one of my students saying something like "I saw a brown big spider". I responded "No, it should be 'big brown spider'". He asked why. Not only did I not know the rule involved, I had never even imagined that anyone would ever say it the other way until that moment.
Such experiences were pretty much daily occurrences.
Do you know the rule now why you say 'big brown' and not 'brown big'? I don't...I'm very curious though!
The answer from Body by Science is yes, very much so. I can drown you with quotes from the book if you like. Sadly, Amazon seems not to have fully implemented page numbers into the Kindle highlighting feature.
The overall argument as I understand it (my understanding may be faulty) is this:
1) Low intensity exercise does not do any part of you including your heart much good because it fails to significantly stimulate the kind of adaptation you want. You need to get your heart pumping hard if you want to trigger an adaptation, and low-intensity aerobics does not do that. High intensity aerobics does, but that is (3).
2) Long-duration furthermore potentially does your body much bad through wear and tear and accidents (don't forget probability of accident per second is multiplied by time to get total probability). As you'll see in the quotes, they claim (and have evidence for the claim, but you need to consult the actual book for full details) that exercising for long periods does not give you additional body-adapting benefits over and above exercising for short periods. So the long duration is (a) mostly wasted (except I suppose for direct calorie burning, but they emphasize that exercise is overrated as a calorie burner) and (b) potentially harmful.
3) High intensity (this can be high intensity aerobics such as the stationary cycle and it can also be high intensity resistance) does your body good (including your cardiovascular system, because your heart is working hard) by stimulating adaptation (for example, muscle building, but not only that). You can get much more information on the benefits of high intensity exercise (for all parts of you including your heart) if you google "high intensity interval training".
As a consequence of (1), (2), and (3), they recommend high intensity short duration exercise with a long rest period in between (for your body to recover and build).
They make the interesting additional point that steady-state activity (which is necessarily low-intensity long-duration exercise), while not benefiting you physiologically, creates the illusion of physiological adaptation when in fact what is adapting is essentially your nervous system. You learn to move your body more efficiently. So for example, if you walk for long periods, then as a result you will learn to walk for long periods (through economy of motion) but your learning will be limited to that one activity (because each activity has a different set of efficient motions which has to be learned anew).
Keep in mind that here I am only relaying the claims of the book's authors. Much of what they say makes sense to me but I have suspicions about some bits of it and I do not vouch for it.
Quotes (with some bit boldfaced by me):
Strength training is actually the best way to train the cardiovascular system precisely because, unlike what we refer to as “aerobics,” strength training actually involves and stimulates all of the components of metabolism. This includes the metabolism that goes on in the cytosol (the liquid portion of the cell and in the absence of oxygen) and the metabolism that occurs in the mitochondria (i.e., in the presence of oxygen).
and
Your cardiovascular system, it should be remembered, is always engaged. It’s engaged when you are standing in a room talking to someone: your heart is beating, your blood is circulating, and your lungs are taking in air and expelling carbon dioxide 24-7. The only way to get your cardiovascular system to work harder is by performing mechanical work with muscle. Any increase in muscular demand simultaneously increases the involvement of your cardiovascular system to a much greater extent. So, you are always “doing cardio” in the popular sense of the term whenever you do anything—or nothing.
Given the interrelatedness of the various metabolic cycles, the notion that you can separate any of these metabolic cycles out from each other is erroneous; they are always running concurrently and together, though some of them can outpace the others. Anything that defines exercise from a metabolic sense is raising the intensity level above its baseline, and even if such pathways could be isolated, they shouldn’t be if your goal is total health and fitness.
and
Remember that the purpose of the cardiovascular system is to supply certain nutrients that are needed by the muscles and to help remove the by-products of the consumption and utilization of these nutrients. Cardiovascular health is often confused with aerobic conditioning, the latter of which is always specific to a particular activity, such as running or stationary cycling. Cardiovascular health, by contrast, equates to the ability of the heart, lungs, and bloodstream to supply whatever the muscles need. According to an abundance of studies, the cardiovascular system receives tremendous stimulation and benefit from resistance exercise.
and
Indeed, there is no additional physiological advantage afforded to one’s body, including endurance or cardio benefits, by training that lasts more than six to nine minutes a week.
and
(Most of the perceived conditioning in steady-state activity is actually a result of the body’s finding a way to make the exercise easier through improved economy of motion, and not because of improved cardiovascular condition. This is why a runner who performs another steady-state activity such as cycling will be gasping for air.
and
Your heart and lungs cannot tell whether you’re working your muscles intensely for thirty seconds on a stationary bike or working them intensely on a leg press. The heart and lungs know only about energy requirements, which they dutifully attempt to meet. Four thirty-second intervals of high-intensity muscular exertion is four thirty-second intervals of high-intensity muscular exertion, whether that takes place exclusively in the lower body, as in stationary cycling, or in both the upper and lower body, as in resistance exercise. In either scenario, it is mechanical work by muscles that is the passkey to the aerobic and other metabolic machinery within the body’s cells.
and
If the intensity of exercise is too low, nothing much in the way of a stimulus is presented to the body. On the other hand, if the intensity is too high in an activity such as running, you will increase the stimulus for positive adaptation, but you will also appreciably increase the chance of doing damage that will undermine your health.
This is why a runner who performs another steady-state activity such as cycling will be gasping for air.
Maybe that's why I gasp and feel like I'm dying every time I try to run, despite being in supposedly good shape. On the other hand, conditioning my body to run efficiently would be very useful in terms of transportation (using your own body to walk or run places is free!)
Your heart and lungs cannot tell whether you’re working your muscles intensely for thirty seconds on a stationary bike or working them intensely on a leg press.
Can your muscles tell? I'm often sore the day after doing weights in the gym, but also the day after biking, or running, or playing tag with children (if I haven't done any of these things in a while.) I swam with one of my friends who doesn't swim regularly, and pushed her hard, and she was pretty sore the next day.
Being a teacher
A few weeks ago, while giving unofficial swimming lessons to an acquaintance about my age, I had an insight. It was that before you can teach something, you have to realize it’s hard.
I don’t think I noticed this before, because I thought it was obvious. Of course someone who doesn’t know how to swim isn’t going to learn perfect front crawl just by looking at yours. If I was told to watch someone else swimming a brand-new stroke that I’d never seen before, I could imitate it pretty easily, because to me it’s a trivial skill. But to someone who has nothing to refer to, it’s hard.
“You’re like the fifth person who’s tried to teach me how to swim,” my acquaintance said as I led her into the shallow end holding a foam noodle. “People just tell me to move my arms and legs, and they didn’t seem to understand why I couldn’t do it.”
There are, needless to say, a lot of different ways to move your arms and legs. Some of them resemble swimming. A subset of those actually work to keep someone’s head at the surface, and an even smaller subset of those are effective enough that they have names, like front crawl. To me, this is obvious, because I’ve watched hundreds of children in my classes flail and struggle in their front crawl, or lift their head to breathe, or turn their toes inwards in whip kick, and make the same mistakes persistently even when I corrected them, both verbally and by literally grabbing their arms/legs and moving them. I know it’s hard.
I went through this flailing/struggling phase too and have no memory of it whatsoever, having been three at the time. This is probably true of most good swimmers; the procedural memory is so embedded that it makes sense to say “move your arms and legs” because that's all you think about consciously; you forget how many other things you’re doing just to stay afloat. (Poor swimmers might have a different perspective, but they aren’t likely to use that perspective to try to teach other people how to swim.)
In order to bring a non-swimmer to the point of doing perfect front crawl, you have to teach them, one at a time, a long list of motor skills that have to be learned well enough to come naturally before you can move on. With adults, you can compress this process into a much shorter period than with restless, distractible, and lacking-fully-developed-motor-skills children, but you can’t omit it. You have to teach them how to float, and you can’t just tell them to float; you have to hold them up in the water and tell them, one at a time, which muscles to relax and which parts of their body position to change, and then you can let go. You have to teach them how to blow bubbles out their nose to avoid getting water in it. (I wonder how many people are eternally wary of jumping into the water or doing somersaults because no one told them this). You have to slowly shape their flutter-kick from a flailing mess into something that will actually move them somewhere. And then you can teach them front crawl, which comes with its own miles-long list of small details to fix and ways to fix them.
I watch my coworkers teach their class, and it amazes me how often they tell their kids to swim, watch them, and say “that was bad. Do it again.” As if that comment is useful in any way. As if doing the same thing over and over again will ever produce different results.*
I wonder how much this applies to other areas (teaching math in elementary school, for example?) How many teachers teach the same skills the same way, over and over, answering confused questions with exactly the same explanation they gave originally? Different minds work differently, just like different bodies work differently. You have to find the right metaphors, the right words to describe things that aren’t really conveyed by words. (“Kick your legs like a ballet dancer would” is a swimming metaphor I found recently that works quite well with some people and not at all with others.)
I would be interested to hear from other people who’ve either taught in other areas and found useful tricks or metaphors, or who’ve been taught in either good or ineffective ways.
*Note: Although I criticize it here, this is basically how I teach treading water. I hold children in water above their head, tell them to make scooping motions with their arms and legs, let go of them while maintaining eye contact, and immediately pick them up again the moment they start to go under. Two seconds becomes five seconds, becomes ten seconds, becomes a minute, and then I teach them fancy skills like eggbeater. But this is because treading water is a very basic, simple skill that I find really, really hard to explain verbally to four-year-olds.
When I took my IQ test, at least two oddities stood out to me which may have affected its (already nonexistent given that I hit the ceiling) accuracy.
1) There was a segment of the test in which I was instructed to try to memorize a paragraph of text read aloud to me so I could repeat it back "exactly as [the tester] said it". For the first third or so of this test, I thought "exactly" meant that I would be marked not only on exact wording, but also on things like inflection [edit: apparently this is a technical term; I didn't mean the technical definition, I meant the reference class which includes things like tone, pitch, emphasis, etc.] and speed, and tried very hard to imitate those aspects of her reading. Then I asked for clarification and she told me that it was only the words that mattered. A neurotypical might not have misunderstood the instructions as I did; someone more autistic than me who made the same error might not have thought to check for such a misunderstanding (and would probably also have taken much more processing power to try to remember inflection etc. while under the misapprehension).
2) There was a section where I was shown pictures of sheets of paper with pieces cut out of it (a la paper snowflakes except rectangular), both folded and unfolded (they were to be matched to each other; this was multiple-choice but I don't remember if the choices were the unfolded or folded versions). I asked for a pencil and paper. The proctor remarked that there wasn't an official policy about whether pencil and paper were allowed for the section, and made a judgment call and gave them to me. I'm not sure how, if at all, my autism interacted with this irregularity.
I remember doing the folded-sheets part you mentioned as part of a test required to enter the military*. It was a test on paper, and I completed the language/reading/writing section so quickly that I could afford to take my time, but I don't remember if I drew diagrams or pictures to help myself. I do remember that apparently I did very well and have the spatial skills to be a fighter pilot if I want to (I laughed).
*I was rejected later on for health reasons. Which I'm still sore about, but that's unrelated.
That assumes a very straightforward calculation of being willing to 'pay' time to fufil various outcomes.
I am making an educated guess about a key factor of people's costs, and I am addressing that factor. Time is, in fact, very limited. After you subtract work and sleep and other necessities (bathroom activities, kitchen activities, meals) there is very little free time left in the day.
I am also writing from the point of view of someone who is not yet sure what the outcomes are. I touched on outcomes and I will touch on your claims about outcomes, but I deliberately am trying to write from the point of view of someone who does not know, because I don't want to set myself up as an authority, I merely want to reason with the reader on the basis of what the reader himself already knows or can work out for himself.
Personally, I'd find walking a lot more enjoyable
That's you. I am addressing myself to the writer of the essay who abandoned exercise (for the duration of their weight loss) and to anyone like them. Since they abandoned the exercise program, evidently they did not find it sufficiently enjoyable to do it. The exercise program was in all likelihood walking. Or, if weights were included, it was in all likelihood one of the more common, more time consuming resistance training programs.
The reality is that walking is not enjoyable to many people. Intense resistance training is, admittedly, even less enjoyable, but it can be fantastically brief.
and it would have clearer other benefits:
That's biased. Under what circumstances are the benefits clearer? If you want to be fair, you either take a position of ignorance with regard to both, or you take a position of knowledge with regard to both, in which case either their benefits are both clear, or they are both unclear. To treat the benefits of walking as known and the benefits of resistance training as unknown is slanted.
it certainly makes you good at walking without getting tired/sweaty, just like weightlifting makes you good at lifting weights.
This implies that resistance training only makes you good at resistance training, which is wildly false. After starting squats, I found my ability to walk was transformed. I really do not want to get into this, in part because it's TMI about myself. So I'll leave it at that.
Different people also find different routines easier. Some might find 12 minutes easy to find and fit in, but others would get into the swing of walking to work, whereas a 12 minute slot of intensive weights would not be enough to click as part of their routine.
I would be willing to bet that for most people, walking to work is not realistic, for a variety of reasons. In any case I am addressing myself to an audience who has abandoned exercise, and I am guessing that the exercise they abandoned is probably walking or something like it.
Does intense-but-brief resistance training have the same positive effects on the cardiovascular system as aerobic exercise? This is an important reason why I exercise; because it's generally established that regular exercise has benefits for the heart independent of weight.* Does resistance training have the same effect? I guess probably if you do it intensely enough to raise your heart rate, which I don't; I find my "aerobic" workouts (usually hour-long swims) much more intense than the weight-lifting portion of my workout, which I don't consider as important.
*Wise, F. (2010). Coronary heart disease--the benefits of exercise. Australian Family Physician, 39(3), 129-133. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
"As soon as I notice it, it will go away."
Wow, you are blessed. When I hear sounds in my head, whether remembered or imagined, I feel as though I literally hear them. They are not merely background noise... on some days all of the music in my head gets so loud I just can't think straight and I have to find a way to silence my inner world. When I hear a melody, even in isolation, I hear full harmonization in my mind, which is why if I start singing along with a friend I have to work at sticking to the melody and not expressing the accompanying harmonies I hear in my mind. Because hearing them so vividly while knowing the sensory sells in my choclea are not vibrating accordingly is sometimes frustrating, thus by creating phsyical expressions of the sounds I hear in my mind, I reconcile my external reality and my internal reality. All this, too, is anecdotal evidence, and evidence of perhaps nothing more than my own strangeness.
That is actually pretty cool. Are you a musician/composer in any form? If not...I think you could be without too much effort. I would love to have the ability to sing harmony on the spot...I know the theory well enough to write harmonized parts, but not in real-time because it's not intuitive to me. And when I have a song in my head, it's usually just the main vocal line my attention can hold. With a LOT of effort I can "hear" chords or two parts in counterpoint, but I have to work hard at it.
All this, too, is anecdotal evidence, and evidence of perhaps nothing more than my own strangeness.
I can imagine hearing imagined sounds like you do, maybe because it's something I wish I could do...although you find it annoying, so maybe I should revise my expectations. I do know that up until about age 11, when I was completely tone-deaf, I had almost no ability to hold a tune in my head..."songs" stuck in my head consisted of the lyrics, in rhythm, but in a sort of monotone. Which is how I would then sing them, which is why everyone said I was tone deaf.
I am...very impressed. Currently searching for areas in MY life where I can apply this.
(shrug)
She believed that the way I lived my life wasn't in my best interests and wasn't moral/ethical, and she therefore offered her assistance should I wish to change the way I live my life. She did that without trying to impose herself into my life or take away my freedoms or damage me or etc.
I actually endorse all of that, as far as it goes. The world would be a far better place if more people responded to that situation that way.
And given the number of people in the world who do try to impose themselves into my life, take away my freedoms, damage me, etc. based on their beliefs about my interests and/or the morality of my life (or do the equivalent for people in my reference class), I feel it's important to calibrate my reaction. If I get bent out of shape by people like her, then I don't have a way of dealing with people who would, say, beat me up and hang me from a tree, or remove legal protections from my marriage, or force me into a behavior-modification program.
I consider her evaluation of my interests flawed, of course, but that's just as true of the many people who offered to, or informed me that they were, praying for my recovery after my stroke. And I really appreciated them.
She did that without trying to impose herself into my life or take away my freedoms or damage me or etc. I actually endorse all of that, as far as it goes. The world would be a far better place if more people responded to that situation that way.
I...guess. Maybe I'm just spoiled by living in a country, and belonging to an age group, where the people who are okay with homosexuality say so loudly and the people who AREN'T okay with it don't talk about that. The church I go to (the Anglican Church of Canada) officially accepts homosexuals into its clergy, and that's kind of what I'm used to. So to me, a response like hers does seem pretty awful, but not to you because you're used to worse...
I still think what you said was a good comeback. Not helpful, maybe, but snappy and funny, and it might have made her think...
Ian C.: Is there any reason in particular that you think that adults are so different from children? I would say that most adults most of the time act pretty childish, though they often couch it in a form that seems more mature.
Agreed. The main difference between adults and children, I think, is that adults are more capable of criticizing their own actions according to a moral framework. But they aren't necessarily inclined to do so. Adults who don't question their own thoughts and actions won't necessarily behave any better than children, just more within social convention, since they've had time to absorb those "rules".
Sure. There's a reason I talk about support for my family here, rather than support for me.
I mean, something like "Hey, Dave, we think you're awesome, and it's a real shame that you're caught up in this relationship, and we want you to know that whatever we can do to help you get over that, we're here for you, buddy!" is perhaps supportive of me, but it is certainly not supportive of my family.
(I actually had someone say essentially this to me once, upon discovering that I was queer. We'd met professionally, and she made me a job offer to join her on a startup, and had commented that she was a devout Christian and that was very important to her. I commented in turn that I was indifferent to her religion, but it might make her reconsider the offer upon knowing about my sexuality. Which indeed it did. I thanked her for her concern, let her know that I didn't consider my family to be at all inappropriate, and offered my assistance should she ever choose to get over her religious affiliation, and we haven't spoken since. But I digress.)
That is...fairly horrible. Good comeback though.
Can you show some research on that claim?...Having observed a puppy gleefully searching new stuff found in his territory...I'm uncertain that we could claim they were non-curious.
Number of species according to Wikipedia: at least 7 million, of which:
- at least 5 million (71%) are bacteria
- 1,203,375 (17%) are invertebrate animals
- 297,326 (4%) are plants
- 59,811 (0.8%) are vertebrate animals, of which 5,416 (0.07%) are mammals (the category that includes humans, chimpanzees, dogs, and every other species to which the emotion of "curiosity" might conceivably be attributed).
"Species" != "things like cute puppies".
5,416 species is a LOT. Even if only 20, or 10, of these species have 'curiosity', that's still a very different thing from ONLY humans having curiosity.
I personally see little difference in kind between that and the similar actions seen in baby humans. The fact that a human is far better able to direct their curiosity, I think is based on our different quantity, or capacity for intelligent curiosity.
Precisely what I thought. A dog's curiosity doesn't get it as far as a human's does, since a dog has much less capacity for symbolic thought (but probably still some capacity) and no way to record its thoughts or share the thoughts of other dogs.
The 'younger the better' belief is quite common. I assume that it's because most people worrying about age and childrens are at the older end and thinking they should be younger, and so they project that backwards. Also it fits with some popular myths of 'everyone used to have kids at 14'.
On the generalising from one example, I was actually addressing Alicorn's original point. That babies are cute is pretty generally accepted, but I wouldn't be able to guess how many people prefer bunnies.
Surveys sound interesting, but there are also areas where people misreport, either because they think there's a 'right response' or because they simply mistake their own views.
I'm squeamish about killing animals, and mammals more than lizards etc., but I don't think cute baby mammals would be harder to kill.
I have been attempting a Google search to find out the average age of first-time mothers in the year 1500. I'm guessing it would tend to be younger in rural regions, but my search so far as turned up nothing but noise.
Surveys sound interesting, but there are also areas where people misreport, either because they think there's a 'right response' or because they simply mistake their own views.
This is one of the skepticisms I had when we first learned about qualitative research in my nursing class. But I guess the point is less to be objective and more just to gather descriptive data. Later on you can choose your variables and find reliable ways to measure them, and your research becomes quantitative.
If the teen mother comment implies that you yourself are a teenager, I'd be interested in your source for saying you're 'right at the age when, biologically speaking, I should be having kids'. I can't find stats on this because babies in general are one of the areas where internet searches create too much noise for easy research, but a friend who studied some social demography stuff once told me that fertility doesn't peak until the 20s.
On the main topic, there's a big danger of generalising from one example: whether you find babies cute is likely to relate to a whole host of your personal experiences and feelings about babies as well as the instinctive cuteness response. But beyond that, I don't think there would be strong selective pressure against a cuteness response that also encompassed baby animals. Farmers don't seem to find the cuteness of lambs to be a barrier to killing them, after all. If I was making up just-so stories, I'd guess that cuteness serves to get attention, increase patience and prevent boredom during childcare, rather than to make us want to look after them.
You could do some interesting studies on this, though. I wouldn't be surprised if some subconscious effects of cuteness responses (whether direct physical correlates or side effects on future actions etc.) would link more to bunnies, while people felt they should claim that babies are cuter.
I am 19, and apparently I had a cached belief that 16 is the ideal age for childbirth. (I've tried to track down the source, and I think it's from a novel I read a really, really long time ago, where a character was 'legally too young, but biologically the ideal age for childbirth'.) A quick Google search suggested 25-35 years of age as the period of peak fertility. Which I did not know. And which makes me feel better about having to delay having kids until then.
On the main topic, there's a big danger of generalising from one example: whether you find babies cute is likely to relate to a whole host of your personal experiences and feelings about babies as well as the instinctive cuteness response.
No doubt. But in general, I think a LOT of people (especially females) will have had the personal experiences that lead them to think babies are cute. And I wouldn't be surprised if mothers whose 'cuteness' instinctive response is lower would have more trouble raising children, no matter how good their intentions. (I have a very sad story about this, actually, but I'm saving it for a top-level post.)
If I was making up just-so stories, I'd guess that cuteness serves to get attention, increase patience and prevent boredom during childcare, rather than to make us want to look after them.
This reminds me of the area of qualitative research (in nursing, but you can do it anywhere I assume.) You go out and interview a whole bunch of people (mothers with babies in this case) and ask them a lot of questions about the emotions they feel surrounding their child and how their warm fuzzy feelings affect the way they care for your child. Then you compile the results, pick out common trends, and you have some empirical evidence to justify your just-so stories. (Assuming that baby-cuteness serves the same purpose now as it did during our evolution, which I think is safe.)
As an aside, I really don't have much of a cuteness response to animals. I occasionally feel guilty eating meat because of a top-down moral belief that they have some form of consciousness and ability to feel pain, but on a purely emotional level I doubt I would have any trouble killing and eating a rabbit.
A friend of mine has a three-year-old who is so cute that she looks like she walked out of an illustrated fairy tale. I met this three-year-old when she was one, and while she wasn't precisely awful to look at then, she was definitely less cute than she is now and less cute than the bunny. Another friend of mine has a new baby, and while this baby is unprecedented for me in the sense that I can identify her as looking like her parents, she is not as cute as the bunny.
Note that I do like holding and interacting with babies. They are small and warm and have itty-bitty fingers and toes to play with and soft hair to pet. But visually, bunnies win.
Note that I do like holding and interacting with babies. They are small and warm and have itty-bitty fingers and toes to play with and soft hair to pet. But visually, bunnies win.
I guess I lump all of those in with "general tendency towards cuteness" since when I think "baby" I think of the whole experience: holding, feeding, changing, bouncing up and down, the first time they hold up their head, the first time you smile and they smile back... Visually, yeah, some bunnies can be cuter than some babies. If you had chosen different images, I might have agreed that the bunny was cuter.
Agreed that in some ways, three-year-olds are cuter than one-year-olds. All babies look about the same (except to their parents) and although they're cute, from what I've their cuteness doesn't vary as much. Whereas some three-year-olds are walk-out-of-a-fairy-tale cute and some, well, aren't. (Again, except to their parents.)
I'm going to stop commenting about babies now because the I-want-a-baby-now thing is a preoccupation of mine that I doubt many people on this site share. (Not to mention inconvenient in our current society that strongly penalizes teen mothers.)
I have never been mistaken for male in person or on the phone, ever. Additionally, people who identify me as male (or choose to express their uncertainty with male pronouns) on the Internet aren't typically doing so because there's positive evidence to that effect; they're guessing based on my location ("the Internet" or the specific site), which amounts to careless, casual stereotyping and rankles horribly. If people tended to only identify me as male after I dropped a casual reference to an ex-girlfriend without mentioning in the same context that I'm bi, that would bother me less, albeit still some, because it would be a reasonable update to make on the basis of information I'd provided beyond simply having wandered into an area that they suppose to be the province of males.
I completely agree. Well, it doesn't rankle for me in the same way because I probably post a lot less on the Internet than you do, and thus get a lot fewer assumptions. (Also, I kind of like the thought of people not knowing my gender.) But I completely agree that the Internet, and especially sites like LessWrong, is assumed to be populated by males.
I think I knew YOU were female... However, I apparently mis-remembered this article as being by Eliezer, and had that in mind when I made my earlier comment about gender links. Maybe because the perspective it takes feels more like the perspectives of my male friends than of my female friends.
I'm a girl too, and I'm 22 (was 21 when I wrote the article) - I'm not sure if you categorize that as the biological age where I should be having babies, but it's not just a sex thing, although that might factor in weakly somehow.
Of course it's not JUST a sex thing. That would make no sense, either in evolutionary terms or in terms of actual evidence (there are a lot of very loving fathers in the world). But I suspect that when we're talking about random babies on the street, the tendency to go gaga over them is more than weakly a sex thing. I've met maybe 2 guys who do that, but maybe 25% of girls (this is a guesstimation). It probably varies more between individuals than between the genders, though. (Note: my mother tells me she also had a strong gaga-over-babies reflex when she was in her teens.)
Have you EVER had a warm fuzzy feeling looking at babies? Also, do you spend a lot of time with children? Do you have warm fuzzy feelings for friends' and relatives' babies? I see the same children every week when teaching them swimming lessons, and it's probably the "making friends" part that makes me want to take them home at the end of the day.
Actually, I find the baby about 75 000 cuter. This might have something to do with the fact that I'm a) a girl, and b) right at the age when, biologically speaking, I should be having kids. I see babies in the street and get warm fuzzy feelings. My (female) friends and I at work talk about how much we want to take home every baby in the Parent & Tot swimming classes. We show each other pictures of friends' babies and go completely gaga. Just wanted to point out that this may be something that varies with sex. (Although not for everyone, of course.)
It's my understanding that most people would be reluctant to admit this sort of historical fact, because it makes them sound childish - in the sense that they're still being governed by the causal history of a child.
Really? I've never felt ashamed of being governed, in some sense, by my childhood...maybe because I had a pretty awesome childhood in pretty much every way. If anything, I think I've gone TOO far, in the past, towards attributing my present characteristics to childhood formative experiences. This may be an occupational hazard of living with a psych major...
This doesn't seem to take into account the fact that pain hurts. I suggest that "why pain is bad" rests ultimately on that fact. Torture isn't bad just because it confuses signals and doesn't increase reproductive success.
You are right. I was trying to give a reductionist, objective description of what pain is, but that doesn't really cover what it is.
I think you are probably right that people who make a great contribution to humanity tend to be unusually curious. But that doesn't mean that being unusually curious is rational for individuals.
Replace "curious" with "X", and you've got a Fully General argument against any claim that it's rational to imitate people who make a great contribution.
Most people are highly unlikely to make a great contribution even if they really wanted to
...which may be due in part to their lack of curiosity...
and most people have other priorities anyway
Most people don't read LW. Among people who do, I expect a higher than normal percentage to have goals for which curiosity is atypically instrumentally valuable.
But even in general: most people's priority is maximizing their status. I claim that curiosity is positively correlated with status. (I don't claim the correlation is perfect.)
Kevin Laland and others recently ran a tournament to study how different learning strategies fared in evolution....[which] suggests that contestants generally overestimated the instrumental value of curiosity.
If your only goal is maximizing inclusive genetic fitness, then the "instrumental value" of a trait that only one species on Earth possesses is indeed unlikely to be very high.
If your only goal is maximizing inclusive genetic fitness, then the "instrumental value" of a trait that only one species on Earth possesses is indeed unlikely to be very high.
Are humans the only species on Earth that have curiosity?
What I am trying to say is three levels removed from your objection to it.
Associating with people is a proxy for believing as they do or taking their beliefs seriously, and I wouldn't particularly expect atheists to be less judgmental about associating with Christians than vice versa.
I am instead suggesting erroneous belief systems are the source of the belief that it is wrong to associate with people of different beliefs. Not that it is indicative of negative qualities, but wrong per se.
Also, it is the belief system that spawned the error, for false belief systems do relatively better in a meta-environment of discouraging freedom of association and encouraging group reinforcement than true belief systems do. This is a comment on belief systems and the negative consequence of false ones' persistence, not on any individuals who are members of the system.
Finally, the idea that belief systems should naturally discourage member contact with others has become so natural to you that you assume rationalist belief systems have it, and argue against the objection before it is raised. That it should seem so natural is sad, and I see it as a consequence of being surrounded by so many religious systems in modern American society.
1) The problem is not judging people based on their friends. This is sound Bayesian evidence, even if just a scrap. Be judgmental to the appropriate degree: too much is too much, and too little is too little. 2) The problem is that false belief systems have spawned the idea of limiting one's associations. 3) The problem is that the evil idea in 2) above has become viewed as natural, and even become an attitude rationalists are assumed to hold!
One comment: the atheist friends who judge me on associating with Christians are, for the most part, not professed rationalists. I doubt their belief systems are any more self-consistent than those of my religious friends; they just don't happen to contain God. I certainly don't think it should be part of any rationalist belief system to judge! Just that it happens to me (and it also happens to me from my brother, who DOES claim to be a rationalist and reads LessWrong) and that I find it unpleasant.
I like how you make the distinction between judging people based on the friends, and limiting contact with them based on your judgement. I do the first (probably a bit less than most people, but that has more to do with the fact that I have an "agreeable" personality than anything else) but I try very hard not to do the latter, and hate it when people (mostly coming from the atheist side) try to ask that of me.
This is my idea:
Pain is a signal. Like pleasure, it converts neutral events in the body or mind into concepts imbued with value, positive or negative. Things that happen that are (evolutionary) determined to be bad for an organism's survival or reproduction are, over time, linked to a pain signal in the brain, giving the organism a reason not to do them. Pleasure is also a signal. Some events can cause pleasure AND pain, which just means that they trigger both signals (with varying strength.) The signalling mechanism is, of course, imperfectly calibrated, since evolution rarely results in anything perfect, and since the environment and the cues the organism needs to respond to are constantly changing anyway. Chronic pain could be seen as a misfiring. As for people who enjoy pain, the pain-signal in the brain could (for certain events and situations, after the right past history and operant conditioning) be tied directly to the pleasure-signal.
So...sometimes pain is good, and sometimes it's bad, depending on whether the signalling system is working correctly, is a rational response to the environment. To torture someone is, because you're subjecting their brain to a pain signal that serves no useful purpose in helping them survive.
Did you find the luminosity series yet?
I have read the luminosity posts in the past, hadn't thought of using them for that.
I find this is true for writing (fiction): I feel such a strong compulsion to do it that sometimes I can hardly drag myself away long enough to do my schoolwork. Needless to say, this has a lot to do with the fact that I write for fun, not for status/grades/money. And it's part of the reason I chose not to pursue writing professionally.
Yes, I specifically avoid identifying groups who's rights we can take away because once we do that it becomes very tempting, and very easy, to define anyone you dislike as belonging to such a group. One can quickly find themselves in Ray Comfort territory.
Eek... Who writes this stuff? This is definitely the negative side of Christianity, although hopefully not an influential sect...
I am trying to do this for my best friend right now...under the pretext of 'helping her to control her emotions better.' Searching through LessWrong to find helpful posts...
"Bad code can contaminate otherwise good code that interacts with it, if the interface is not right."
Coding is dealing with abstractions and the way that things relate to one another. You're not just constructing the pieces, you are constructing how they will be put together. If you set it up wrong, it can be tricky to change later, if other people are relying on the parts that you'd like to change to keep working the same way they have been working from the beginning. And creating new software is usually a process of discovering requirements and uses for the software as you go along, so it is often difficult to know how to approach something at the beginning. Also, working with other people on the code means working with people who set up abstractions differently and have a slightly different, or wildly different understanding of what the code is meant to do, and the assumptions that underly it.
Working on a software project is a good way to see how people think differently, and how errors and assumptions affect the project and how people work together.
I like Frederick P. Brooks' books on software design, and design in general. They are classics: "The Mythical Man-Month" and "The Design of Design".
Can anyone think of a good textbook on research in nursing? The one I have is abysmal and I literally cannot read it, thus I have a C in the class. Something in English might help. (I'm taking the class in French and although I'm almost equally fluent in both, I do find it harder work to read in French.)
Do you find it plausible that if your atheist friends took up religion, they would become less negative? Perhaps to the degree obtainable by associating with those with a more positive outlook, but I don't think that's the predominant cause of the corresponding attitudes.
It sound to me that what you describe as a positive attitude is being high on the Agreeableness Big Five trait, which happens to be the strongest predictor of religiosity of the five:
"Kosek (1999), MacDonald (2000;0, and Taylor and MacDonald (1999) found that measures of Agreebalenes and Conscientiousness were positively associated with measures of religious involvement and intrinsic religious orientation.MacDonald found somewhat differet patterns of correlations acroos the Big Five, depending on the domain of spirituality examined. A factor labeled "Cognitive orientation toward spirituality" was related to Extraversion ad Openness only. A meta-analytic review (Saroglou, 2002) found that religiousness is consistently associated with high Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and low Psychoticism, where it is unrelated to other Big Five Traits." (Handbook of personality: theory and research)."
Going against this conclusion is the fact that the correlations aren't high. Agreeableness correlates with religiosity about r = .25. But your description makes it sound like your religious friends are at one pole of this trait and your atheist ones at the other.
No question that in general high Agreeableness is easier to live with, both for oneself and one's associates. (I say this while I'm low on Agreeableness.) But the Big Five Traits are bipolor: neither pole is an unmitigated benefit. I don't think it's unfair to say that low agreeableness is a trait more propitious for pursuing rational conclusions regardless of where they lead, that is, for epistemic rationality. You, however, seem obviously high on Agreeableness, you might say an anomalous atheist. Since similarity leads to liking it isn't surprising that you prefer the company of the Agreeable Christians. (Even low Agreeables such as I, might prefer Agreeables for personal association--Agreeableness is essentially "likability"-- although perhaps not so much that we'd be willing to go to church for the experience. When I was a child hereditary atheist, some friends brought me to a meeting of the "Ethical Culture Society," which tries to obtain the benefits of religion without supernaturalism. I didn't like it--the experience was too Agreeable for me.)
Thank you, your conclusions seem very plausible.
You, however, seem obviously high on Agreeableness, you might say an anomalous atheist.
I have noticed this. (My family, all atheists, are a lot less agreeable, and I think they get a lot less out of church services than I do.) I've also noticed that I'm conscientious in the extreme, and I like my general agreeability; it makes my head a more pleasant place to live. (Also, most of the time I don't feel emotions strongly.)
Do you find it plausible that if your atheist friends took up religion, they would become less negative? Perhaps to the degree obtainable by associating with those with a more positive outlook, but I don't think that's the predominant cause of the corresponding attitudes.
My personal experience is that attitudes are VERY contagious. I'm very introverted, although I can play extroverted, and I often go around wrapped up in my own thoughts...but I'm STILL strongly affected by the attitude of those around me. I think that if anything, more extroverted people would be influenced more by this.
The problem at my work at the pool, for example, is that nearly EVERYONE has a negative attitude towards the job (i.e. not taking it seriously, coming in hungover on Sunday mornings and never doing maintenance), and a lot of people have negative attitudes towards their lives in general (maybe because it's a predominantly university-student jobs, and students tend to be poor and face a lot of uncertainty.) Being conscientious, I try very hard, to the point that it's a running joke with my coworkers. Another milieu, like a cushy government office job where the employees are comfortably settled into their lives and have spouses and kids and fulfilling hobbies they can afford to pursue, might not have the same bias.
Good point!
Still, isn't a solemn vow to pursue truth better than no vow at all? Even if a burning itch to know is better... How DO you create a burning itch to know in someone who doesn't have one?
I approve. Also, I wonder why your personal anecdote is such good rhetoric. I guess it makes me care more about what you're advocating, because it makes me care for you.
I think that's generally true of using anecdotes to introduce general topics. It's harder work for people to visualize generalities, but anecdotes are concrete.
I don't spend every minute decrying all the injustices of humanity, but if someone I know says in my presence that muslims are violent I at least let them know of my disapproval. Maybe that's a contributing factor to Swimmer's non-believing friends seeming grumpy and judgmental.
Actually I like it when people frankly correct other people's incorrect opinions. The negativity I'm talking about is more on the line of 'I hate this job, I'm so bored, my family is so stupid, I'm so sick of school' and also comments like 'That kid has the biggest head ever, I bet it makes her sink to the bottom of the pool' or 'seriously, why do fat people keep coming here and buying chips? They should just die.' This is the kind of negativity I see a LOT less of in Christian circles. Atheists may also be more likely to correct people's opinions, being more contrarian, but it's not something I've noticed personally.
at one point the main character has to learn how to 'lose' and admit that other characters are right.
Really? That's not at all the lesson I took away, admitting that the other characters were 'right'. Snape was quite wrong; the bullies were even more wrong. Nothing in the narrative tells us that they were 'right'.
The lesson I took away was that one shouldn't try to win in every situation, that doing so is very short-sighted, that some victories are Pyrrhic or Cadmean, that sometimes one has to let wrong people/characters go on their wrong way because the cost of correcting them is too high.
Harry, in those chapters, refuses to lose and is willing to escalate all the way to his nuclear option even when the issue doesn't merit taking such a risk. One wants to accomplish things, not destroy oneself over principles. Thinking is for doing, as the saying goes.
I guess I phrased that badly. When I'm in conflict with someone else, I don't necessarily think they're right, but I almost invariably back down. And usually I TELL them 'maybe you're right' because that pacifies people really well. I don't think this is a good strategy.
A very interesting point. At the London get-together we talked about how people that are into rationality are the kinds of people who are driven to question everything.
People that continually question everything would certainly not do well in a dogmatic religion - which is often defined by a set of things that you are not allowed to question. When you're in the religion, this is often seen as accepting what other people say "on faith", and that questioning them is being rude to them (perhaps as you say by not taking their feelings into consideration). But a questioner isn't actually trying to be rude... just trying to get to the truth.
I once wrote a blogpost about the spectrum of preference between Truth and Harmony. People that value Truth will continue to seek the Truth even if it disturbs the harmony amongst a bunch of people - Harmony people will be more likely to "agree to disagree" or make other ameliorating behaviours to preserve the Harmony where people disagree over Truth.
I put forward that everyone is on that spectrum. I think an awful lot of people are on the Harmony end of that spectrum. ie they're willing to forego the Truth for the sake of some temporary Harmony.
From what I can tell, rationalists are on the other end. Rationalists believe that finding out the Truth is important. They they'll try hard not to hurt people's feelings, but when there is a direct conflict between them, that Truth is more valuable in the long run.
I am way on the end of the Harmony spectrum. I like lively discussion, but I hate conflict. I don't know if you've read Eliezer's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but at one point the main character has to learn how to 'lose' and admit that other characters are right. I read that part and thought 'that's my default already.' This probably makes it harder for me to be a rationalist.
At this point, my Expectancy for positive results from single changes like "just use a trainer at the gym" has hit essentially zero - I've tried all sorts of stuff, nothing ever fucking works - so I'm not willing to spend the incremental money. If I have a lot of money to spend, I'll try throwing a higher level of money at all aspects of the problem - get a trainer on weights, try the latest fad of "short interval bursts" for aerobic exercise, get LASIK and a big TV and a separate room of the apartment to make exercising less unpleasant (no, dears, I don't get any endorphins whatsoever), buy a wide variety of grass-fed organic meats and take one last shot at the paleo diet again, and... actually I think that's most of what I'd do. That way I'd be able to scrape up enough hope to make it worth a shot. Trying one item from that list doesn't seem worth the bother.
I did try Shangri-La again when Seth Roberts contacted me personally and asked me to take another shot. It was just wearing tight, uncomfortable noseplugs while eating all my food and clearing out time at night to make sure I took oil 1 hour away from eating any other food or brushing my teeth, a trivial inconvenience when I'd walk over broken glass to lose weight. I lost 20 pounds and then despite trying out around 10 different things Seth Roberts said to do, my weight slowly started creeping up again, and when after a while I gave up and stopped taking the oil to see what would happen, there was no change in the behavior of my weight - the same slow creep. It's clear that Shangri-La worked initially but then, contrary to all theory, it just mysteriously stopped working. So far I've gained 10 of those 20 pounds back, in accordance with the one truly reliable law of dietary science: 95% of the people who manage to lose weight put it back on shortly thereafter. BTW, exercise didn't lead me to lose any weight whatsoever, even when combined with an attempt at the paleo diet (albeit not one that spent lots of money, or involved a personal trainer).
So far as I can tell, all the advice here is from metabolically privileged folks who don't know they're metabolically privileged and don't comprehend the nothing fucking works phenomenon that obtains if you're not metabolically privileged.
If you want to give advice, that's fine. Don't tell me how well it's going to work or how easy it's going to be; that just tells me you're clueless.
Do you want to lose weight or do you want to be fit? I've been frustrated in the past by the fact that my body doesn't look like the North American female ideal, but I think of the number of hours I put into exercise compared to some of my skinny but sedentary peers, and I'm sure that's going to make a difference in future health. I think it's generally accepted that exercise improves health INDEPENDENT of weight. (I should try to cite this but I have a midterm in an hour... If you want, I can do more in-depth research when I have time.)
BTW, exercise didn't lead me to lose any weight whatsoever, even when combined with an attempt at the paleo diet (albeit not one that spent lots of money, or involved a personal trainer).
I think that's true for most people. Exercise seems to be better for maintaining a given weight than for losing weight.
I went to church without being convinced that god existed for years, so I can kind of see where you are coming from with this. What made me actually decide to become openly atheist was probably that I got involved in competitive gaming, and met a large enough group of friends who were interested in rationality that I no longer felt it was necessary to be in a church to have that kind of tight knit community. I like seeing groups of people and having interesting discussions regularly, but it makes me even happier when the ideas we share are non contradictory and you don't have a wide range of topics you need to steer clear in case they are instrumental to someone elses identity.
Hopefully, if rationality becomes mainstream, even small cities like mine will have large enough numbers of people interested in rationality for the pressure to belong in a church to subside. A lot of the cynicism that I feel and notice in fellow aspiring rationalists comes from the isolation that it can bring.
Also, I have never been to a lesswrong meetup but I find the idea appealing. if there are actually other LW readers in winnipeg, that would be great.
Re: meetup. There's a page somewhere on how to start a LessWrong meetup. But it's not hard: create a top-level post, say you want to meet in [city], give a location and time decently in advance, and wait for people to say they're coming in the comments.
I went to church without being convinced that god existed for years, so I can kind of see where you are coming from with this. What made me actually decide to become openly atheist was probably that I got involved in competitive gaming, and met a large enough group of friends who were interested in rationality that I no longer felt it was necessary to be in a church to have that kind of tight knit community. I like seeing groups of people and having interesting discussions regularly, but it makes me even happier when the ideas we share are non contradictory and you don't have a wide range of topics you need to steer clear in case they are instrumental to someone elses identity.
Hopefully, if rationality becomes mainstream, even small cities like mine will have large enough numbers of people interested in rationality for the pressure to belong in a church to subside. A lot of the cynicism that I feel and notice in fellow aspiring rationalists comes from the isolation that it can bring.
Also, I have never been to a lesswrong meetup but I find the idea appealing. if there are actually other LW readers in winnipeg, that would be great.
I like seeing groups of people and having interesting discussions regularly, but it makes me even happier when the ideas we share are non contradictory and you don't have a wide range of topics you need to steer clear in case they are instrumental to someone elses identity.
Very good way of putting it. I was very frustrated at times having discussions with Christian friends, and I'm lucky enough to have people outside that circle who I can talk to (for example, my brother, who also reads LessWrong.) It would be even nicer if these people outside my Christian circle had any inclination to a) band together in community, or b) make an effort to be positive, nice, generous, etc.
There are plenty of activities that I don't approve of, but which friends of mine engage in.
I don't see any inconsistency there. Being someone's friend does not require endorsing everything they do. (Hell, I don't even endorse everything I do.)
Can you say more about the nature of the inconsistency that troubles you?
See my reply above. I guess the inconsistency is that it DOES bother me when my friends do things I don't endorse. I try not to let it affect the way I treat them, as my friends, but it does rankle.
human beings need roughly value homogenous peer groups in order to activate the part of the brain that says "these are my allies". If that part of the brain pretty much never fires it will lead to the ennui, apathy, negativity and judgment mentioned here. We've been brainwashed to think diversity good, and it is, but it is not a monotonic good. There are lots of negative connotations around communities that share and reinforce strong values. They are often perceived to be xenophobic, and of course they sometimes are, but it is not a fair universal judgement.
If that part of the brain pretty much never fires it will lead to the ennui, apathy, negativity and judgment mentioned here.
That's quite insightful, nazgulnarsil.
Recently, I had a look around the internet's atheist/skeptic blogging community, which was new to me. I noticed that there tended to be a distinctive attitude among posts and comments: nice, for the most part, but embattled. There was an unspoken ideal of being the sort of person who faces tough truths, not being weak enough to seek comfort in delusions. There was a lot of snark and a tendency to feud. And the internet atheists/skeptics seemed to think it was really important to have the right opinions and win arguments.
This is all in contrast to the atheists I know in real life, who tend to be happy pragmatists. Usually, to them, it's kind of obvious that there isn't any God, and it's not even an interesting question -- they're more interested in science, or food, or something. And they're quite positive and generous. Because the mere act of not believing in God isn't taking up a lot of their mental and emotional energy, so they have plenty to spend on other things.
I think that most new "converts" to an idea start out being very focused on winning arguments, which probably correlates to grouchiness or at least excuse-making and the inability to get things done.
I don't see any reason why you can't hang out with Christians if the ones you know happen to be better company than the atheists.
I think that most new "converts" to an idea start out being very focused on winning >arguments, which probably correlates to grouchiness or at least excuse-making and the >inability to get things done.
I don't know if this is the reason why my 'atheist' friends seem unhappy to me. I think a lot of them are atheist by default, because they haven't thought about the question in years, and unhappy or negative by default, because they don't question that either. It's very easy to be atheist-by-default in my community. Being obviously religious is the thing that stands out.
See the 'Help' link at the bottom right of the comment box for explanations of the Markdown syntax used here. In particular, quote a paragraph by preceding it by ">".
Thank you wedrifid! I have been wondering for weeks how people do that!
I applaud you on your willingness to share this experience. I might even call it brave, because there is a strong sort of stigma against anything religious in most "rationalist" circles. I also congratulate you on finding a workable solution in spite of those stigmas, rather than sticking to absurd, self-contrived constraints on being Rational(TM). I hardly think that church-going is the best long-term solution to a chronic negativity problem, but when supposedly ideal methods are shown to consistently fail in some way or another.. Well, there's a word for doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
The causes of this sort of thing have been discussed elsewhere, and I'm sure are being reiterated in other comments right now. Believe me, Swimmer, you’re not the first person to think of it. It always comes up sooner or later. We even have a few names for it: Reversed Stupidity, Being Half A Rationalist, or even Meta-Signaling. ;-)
Couldn't tell you what the answer is though, short of starting up a dojo for rationality and drilling the community into us. I would think that an actual Less Wrong group would be a better place to find that sort of positive community than just an assortment of nontheists, since we do seem rather dedicated to moving beyond developing a hard shell skepticism and into the greater realm of Luminous living and group rationality.
Note: Okay, you might notice some of this is jokingly taken from The Simple Truth. I had way too much fun with that reference to spoil it in text, but school has instilled in me a healthy fear of plagiarism so I'm just letting you know.
"I applaud you on your willingness to share this experience. I might even call it brave, because there is a strong sort of stigma against anything religious in most "rationalist" circles."
Actually, what I've been thinking is "I should post controversial-by-Lesswrong-standards things more often." This post has double the comments of any of my other posts.
Shocked and horrified by what, exactly? The state of health care in the U.S.?
By the fact that they asked for money and got it. I was partly being sarcastic, but she wasn't impressed when I paid my friend's rent, and I think she would disapprove of this even more.
but it seems that according to lesswrong doctrine, they are above the sanity waterline while my first friend group is below.
No. Having religous beliefs places an upper bound on how rational a person could be, past a certain level of rationality, a person will necessarily discard religion. But this does not mean that any particular atheist became an atheist by achieving that level of rationality. Most have not.
The article Raising the Sanity Waterline proposes not directly arguing against religion, but to instead teach the skills that would enable people to level up to the point where they systematically reject religion on their own, in part because just getting someone to reject religion does not actually make them more rational.
Thank you. You've provided the clearest explanation so far of why it was misleading for me to use that phrase.
I wouldn’t describe many of them as rationalists, particularly, but it seems that according to lesswrong doctrine, they are above the sanity waterline while my first friend group is below.
Woah there! I never signed up to any doctrine like that! Where is that one written down? (So that I can reject it explicitly in the right context!)
For a start, a lot of those non-believers that you know I would almost certainly consider below the sanity waterline. And some of your Christian friends probably come in above. My immediate family members, for example, are some of the sanest people I know yet most of them remain sincere Christians. Sane enough that I mean no insult at all to any of us when I declare them more sane than the average lesswrong user. I don't judge people as below the sanity line based off them believing one stupid thing. I mean, I don't outright consider Eliezer to be below the sanity water line just because he believes (or signals believing for some practical purpose) really dumb stuff here and there.
That is what I sincerely hoped most people would think. I used the phrase partly as sarcasm.
I tend to comment when I have something to say and not when I don't.
I don't generally have much to say about religion at a "pro or con" level, which is mostly the level at which this community engages with the subject.
"I tend to comment when I have something to say and not when I don't."
That sounds like a good system.
I totally endorse tight-knit communities, ones in which bonds of friendship are formed and nurtured, ones that foster hope, ones whose members help one another out when needed.
And I certainly endorse the choice of being mindful about how you respond to criticism, how you respond to other people's behavior, how you respond to other people's emotions.
For my own part, I have been lucky enough to find such a community in my own life, and I value it enormously. I've seen that community help one another pay rent, take care of one another's children, help one another through periods of grief and join one another in periods of joy. When I had my stroke and was delirious in the ICU for a week, they organized a 24-hour heel-and-toe watch so I would always have someone I knew in the room when I awoke. Many of us spent much of this past weekend visiting a friend whose father died recently.
It's not a religious community, although many members are religious -- many different religions, both mainstream and non-mainstream. Many members are atheist. In most cases, I neither know nor care about their religious or spiritual stance, nor do they mine. It's not a much-of-anything-in-particular community, though it has its origins in several online and university communities.
Personally, I don't think I could find the kind of support you've found in a community that denounces my marriage, for example. Nor in a "relentlessly positive" community that discourages expressions of negative emotion. But if you've found support there, if it helps you be more mindful of your choices and to make choices that improve your life, then I'm happy for you.
I also endorse not confusing fundamentals with accidentals. What I endorse in your community is the reliable (within strict limits) mutual support, which is also what I value in my own. I assume you would similarly endorse that in my community.
That yours is a religious community, and mine is not, is beside the point.
I'm happy that you've found such a community, and I find it very encouraging. It originated online? Really? That is...also encouraging.
Unitarian Universalism comes close in practice. I have an atheist friend who's a UU minister. Because he likes people.
Maybe that's why my agnostic/atheist parents felt comfortable bringing us to a Unitarian church when we were kids. I never understood that.
My point is that this is not an inconsistency at all. It is just something that is surprising to many since on subjects like homosexuality people tend to associate public disapproval of a specific behavior with political aggression to those with the identity and so personal conflict with the individuals who happen to practice it. But that just doesn't logically follow. To get from "disapprove of behaviour X" to "have a problem with person B who does X" you need to add in a whole other premise... which is not something everybody does.
Bear in mind that the kind of Christians (ie. nice ones) who can denounce homosexuality when asked directly but hold nothing against their homosexual friends are also the kind who take particular delight in the verse "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God". And the meaning that conveys is uplifting to them. Becomes it comes loaded with the connotation "And it doesn't matter. Jesus loves us all and we can all be forgiven and we should forgive. How can I hold anything against anyone when God doesn't hold anything against me despite all my naughty thoughts about Sam naked? Just because we believe in omnipotent imaginary friends doesn't mean we are obliged to be intolerant dicks. Hallelujah". Well, they really do think the first bit. The not being intolerant is just a pleasant side effect from my perspective. :)
You know what? That makes a LOT of sense. There are enough things my friends do that I disapprove of, or that at least seem irrational to me, but if they're not hurting others I don't hold it against them. I understand this more, thank you.
As always, generalising from anecdotes can be dangerous. I am married to a christian, and have occasion to meet both non-religious and religious people. I see a wide variety of mental behaviours in them, with depressive and positive in both communities. In most cases these behaviours actually have their root in (I suspect) other parts of their background.
What I will agree with is that religousity can encourage people to be more altruistic than they might be otherwise. While a rationalist might carefully reach the same results, it is a more difficult course to enter without getting caught up in simple selfish action. That said, the bonus of group altruism brings with it distate for outsiders, and a slavish devotion to a set of behaviours that the group has decided are "good"
Agreed that generalizing from anecdotes can be dangerous. Thus the posting it to a public forum where people can tell me whether or not my conclusions are generalizable...so far the consensus is probably not.
This occasionally involves a tricky kind of doublethink, for example a person who denounces homosexuality when asked directly but who holds nothing against their homosexual friends.
That combination isn't especially hard to do even without doublethink. But there are plenty of other examples (including other more incoherent combinations of beliefs related to homosexuality) that would demonstrate your point!
I can't believe both at the same time and I find it hard to imagine how someone could. Maybe this shows childish simplicity in my thoughts more than anything else, but even if I try to be okay with inconsistencies in my belief system, they drive me up the wall.
I think you're talking about two different things here.
One is the "supportive positive social groups are beneficial, and church is the only one around"
and the other is "atheists are a grumpy lot but religious people are all happier from their religion"
I won't comment on the latter for now.
I can, however, attest that it is perfectly possible to find non-religious supportive social groups. Not just self-help groups - and I really think you should rethink your idea of stigma... a "single parents" group or an "ethnic expats" group has (or should have) zero stigma attached. There are also many other socially supportive groups.
I, personally, am not only a geek, but also a bit of a nerd. I belong to a group called the Society for Creative Anachronism. We're a bunch of people that use "medieval recreation" as an excuse for dressing up nice, eating feasts and learning ancient forms of crafts and/or sport. It's a hell of a lot of fun... it's also quite a thriving community. Totally non-religious.
With the principles of "Honour, chivalry, and service" it's also got its own morality...while I personally have never done a midnight rent-donation, I have seen more acts of effective charity than I ever did when I used to go to church (mainly because I don't consider evangelism to be a form of charity). We're a world-wide organisation and I recall the outpourings of help for friends and strangers in time of need (eg the Katrina victims), as well as locally (eg for the Aussie victims of recent natural catastrophes), but mostly for acts of individual, personal service.
I've personally seen countless personal acts of altruism of this sort. A lot of our events are outdoor camping events, run entirely by volunteers almost universally for zero profit (the few for-profit events I've seen were basically fund-raising for some other event for the group). But even the non-organisers generally help out too. From manning the registration desk to heading out back to the kitchen to wash-up. From helping a burdened woman carry a heavy load, to helping a newbie pattern a frock or build a helmet, or all pitching in to help raise somebody else's communal tent. I can't remember the number of times I've seen people give away their stuff to newbies to help them get started - with the general advice going with it of "just do this for somebody else some time".
I am constantly surprised at how well this philosophy works on bringing up honest, sharing children that actually help each other without being asked... (proof that it doesn't take fear- of hell to motivate ethics if ever I saw one).
So yes, it is possible to be part of a completely non-religious social support group.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. That sounds awesome. The fact that I've had more trouble finding such a group maybe has more to do with my age. How did you find this community; was it accidental or deliberate? What are my chances of finding such a group in my own city?
Most of the people here who talk about religion have a VERY negative view. The people who don't feel obliged to talk about it typically view religion only a little more negatively than a taste for country music and a little less negatively than a taste for WWE wrestling.
Which was not obvious to me. I tend to comment on posts I like and ignore ones I dislike. Maybe others do the opposite...?
Sure, but they have negative views on lots of things. Your religious friends are clearly insane by lesswrong standards, but aren't your nonreligious friends also insane?
On the internet? Wow!
My mother would be shocked and horrified. (I did check out the link and read a bit of the article. I'm surprised but not shocked.)
Agreed. I used it partly in jest, to try and show that it WAS an unrealistic assumption.
Do you have a point other than "hey, here's a correlation"? I haven't found any correlation, personally.
Have you specifically LOOKED for a correlation? i.e. have you attended a church to see how its members behave? I won't say this is why I went to church, because it had more to do with a) liking the music, social atmosphere, etc and b) wanting to understand how someone could 'believe' things that seemed so irrational. (And now I think I understand that better.)
I too have noticed this. In fact, most of your post could have been written about me.
Would you mind explaining how? I would like to see more of other people's observations, since mine are likely to be biased.
"It was religion, in the first place, that told you it is wrong to hang out with people who don't share your beliefs."
Actually, my friends and relatives who are atheists have been WAY more judgemental about the fact that I go to church than my religious friends have been about my being a (fairly open) atheist.
But that could be the exception to the norm.
As always, generalising from anecdotes can be dangerous. I am married to a christian, and have occasion to meet both non-religious and religious people. I see a wide variety of mental behaviours in them, with depressive and positive in both communities. In most cases these behaviours actually have their root in (I suspect) other parts of their background.
What I will agree with is that religousity can encourage people to be more altruistic than they might be otherwise. While a rationalist might carefully reach the same results, it is a more difficult course to enter without getting caught up in simple selfish action. That said, the bonus of group altruism brings with it distate for outsiders, and a slavish devotion to a set of behaviours that the group has decided are "good"
"What I will agree with is that religousity can encourage people to be more altruistic than they might be otherwise. While a rationalist might carefully reach the same results, it is a more difficult course to enter without getting caught up in simple selfish action."
Very well put. This is exactly the behavior I've noticed in myself since I stopped going to the church.
If I were to take all of my friends and divide them into two groups, there are plenty of criteria I could choose, but probably the most relevant slice would be between my friends who believe in God, and my friends who don’t...I find it so refreshing to be with a group of people who are relentlessly positive about life, who constantly remind one another to be positive, and who offer concrete help rather than judgement.
It seems that by "relevant" you meant something like "best at dividing my friends into distinct groups". However, the most relevant criteria to you are more likely attitude towards life and judgement. Therefore, you should try dividing people by those measures directly.
But what I’ve seen suggests to me that my church (a Pentacostal evangelical Christian group, by the way) served a function in our city that wasn’t being filled by anything else...Could the principles of rationality prompt a group of people to form this kind of community? I don’t know.
It's possible that the only principle needed for such a group to form is the absence of a similar group. It's not crucially important that a Christian group is doing something and rationality might not impel that thing, because humanity outside of Christianity might have caused it in the first place!
But until then, I’m going to keep hanging out with Christians and sharing their positive thoughts.
Wow, I cringed when I read that. Major Dark Side Epistemology at work here. This is precisely the problem with partially neutered religion, that is allowed to treat as normal an ideology formed specifically around (largely) recanted falsities. It was religion, in the first place, that told you it is wrong to hang out with people who don't share your beliefs. If not for religions' creating the idea of constraining relationships due to such things, you would not have thought you needed to defend associating with Christians.
Religions are organized falsehoods that depend on social restrictions to survive. Atheism does not depend on such an association and due to the Asch experiments I don't worry about you having any number of Christian friends provided that for most of their core propositions you have a friend who disagrees. One atheist could cover your bases, or a Muslim and a Taoist, etc.
"It was religion, in the first place, that told you it is wrong to hang out with people who don't share your beliefs."
Actually, my friends and relatives who are atheists have been WAY more judgemental about the fact that I go to church than my religious friends have been about my being a (fairly open) atheist.
And altruism doesn't seem right either; it wasn't out of altruism that I went to church, it was because I fulfilled MY utility function.
One's utility function describes the process by which one makes decisions; it can be altruistic. You may have been thinking of your personal hedonic function. I doubt that many of the other people were attending for selfish reasons.
I have no idea why most people attended. However, though I doubt they would have wanted to view their reasons as selfish, I suspect it had more to do with their own stability, happiness, etc than with making the world a better place.
The way your post more or less conflates the need for a community, the need for 'positive thinking', and the need for self-deception feels like grade A Dark Arts to me, especially because you've managed to slip in a suggestion that there's something bad about condemning self-deception.
If someone wants to deceive themself, and the self-deception makes them LESS likely to behave hurtfully towards others, I feel I have no right to condemn them. I have the right to condemn MYSELF for self-deception, because it's my choice to aim for greater rationality, but I wouldn't force someone else to take that choice any more than I would force them to be religious.
This recalls some of Dennett's thoughts on religion from "Breaking the Spell". He wonders if there is something in religion that can't be replaced by secular institutions, and whether those are on net more helpful than the harms that seem to come along with it.
My intuition is that many newly converted atheists are just guilty of applying reversed stupidity to their social lives, and that a bit more practice in things like luminosity might go a long way once they start to get over their initial disillusionment.
I am not from the southern US (I presume you are, given the content of your post), but I would think this is especially true there, where a very huge majority of the atheists will be "new" ones.
I am not from the southern U.S. either. I'm actually from eastern Canada.
Atheists are a small minority in the United States, where society tends to give religious irrationality a pass. That alone is enough to make a person critical, judgmental, and sarcastic. It's not necessarily productive in changing society; it's a way for atheists to feel like at least they're not standing idly by.
Self-directed negativeness is not, in my experience, a trend among atheists. It may be a consequence of the atheists you know not having found their own coherent philosophies after rejecting religious ones, or maybe they haven't realized there's nothing wrong with having something to protect. The step from atheism to humanism (or rationality in general), from ceasing to believe in the afterlife to realizing just how valuable our lives really are, is a non-trivial one for most people.
Possibly true. I wouldn't say that atheists are a "small minority" in my community. (I live in Canada.) This may change things. And many of the "atheists" I know certainly haven't made that step from atheism to humanism.
How large is your sample? My impression is that most religious people don't get nearly as much good out of their religion as the folks you know.
My sample is not small in terms of people, but it may not be representative in terms of demographics, and a lot of the people do come from the same church, so in that sense it's biased.
The belief that complaining, casting blame, and making excuses are the preferred ways to deal with problems is probably less (instrumentally) sane than belief in god. But I don't see why a person without one must have the other.
In theory. But in practice, this is the correlation I've noted.
Judging by the existence of Google Mail Goggles, I'd guess that people often write things tired that they later regret.
That is...hilarious.
Is there a Unitarian Universalist congregation in your community? Pentacostalists can be more fun than UUs, but it's something. (I don't know where you live; I believe that UUs as such only exist in North America, but hopefully there's something similar wherever you are.)
My parents took us to a Unitarian Universalist church when I was growing up. I remember it being pretty boring. Then again, I had the attention span of the usual 7-year-old, so it might be worth going back.
Are your nonreligious friends really above the sanity waterline? There are a variety of common insane delusions, and all that we clearly know is that they don't have one specific one.
By this question, I mean to cast doubt on the premise that, by the standards of this blog, your religious friends are less sane than your nonreligious friends.
Judging by previous posts, and confirmed by the comments here, most LessWrongers have a VERY negative view of religion. And I'm not saying that my religious friends are necessarily more or less sane, only that they're often happier and pleasanter to spend time with. (Depends on how you define 'sanity' though.)
I don't think that rationality and Christianity occupy the same place in one's life -- rationality in itself is only a means to an end, not an end in itself, while following the principles of Christianity does seem to be an end in itself for Christians.
Rationality is an art which one follows to acquire true beliefs and take effective action, regardless of one's utility function. The question 'Could the principles of rationality prompt a group of people to form this kind of community?' feels like it's asking something of rationality that is completely tangential to its purpose.
I could better understand the question 'Could the principles of transhumanism and/or altruism prompt a group of people to form this kind of community?'
Also for me, going to church and ish-following the principles of Christianity was a means to an end ("I want something to hold me accountable to being a better person") whereas trying to become more rational has less of a well-defined end.
Well, for one, it sounds like it explicitly condemns homosexuality? Maybe that's not precisely what you'd call a "position on human rights", but it still causes harm.
From what I saw, the general sentiment was "we feel like we should believe homosexuality is wrong because it says so in the Bible, but we're a bit embarrassed about that, so we're just not going to talk about the issue." Some churches focus more on that element than others though. (One branch of the Canadian Anglican church, for example, has explicitly declared that they're OK with homosexual ministers.)
I think all cities benefit from some kind of commonly shared activity: a festival or a carnival, a public concert, or an art show. Something that has very broad appeal. It seems to me what you are saying is that churches fulfill that need in communities (often by default) and therefore should be kept and/or celebrated.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of garbage that comes with the church community, namely religion. It seems a much better investment would be in actual culture (see above examples: art, music, games, etc...). If we stop accepting churches as default community centers, other more profitable (culture-wise) avenues will be explored.
I think this is a good idea. I'm not saying that churches should be celebrated, more that the need they fulfill should be recognized. It's simplistic to say "people who've lost religion don't have anything to replace it" but that's the feeling I have, although I'm sure what's actually happening is more complex and subtle.
I don't think that rationality and Christianity occupy the same place in one's life -- rationality in itself is only a means to an end, not an end in itself, while following the principles of Christianity does seem to be an end in itself for Christians.
Rationality is an art which one follows to acquire true beliefs and take effective action, regardless of one's utility function. The question 'Could the principles of rationality prompt a group of people to form this kind of community?' feels like it's asking something of rationality that is completely tangential to its purpose.
I could better understand the question 'Could the principles of transhumanism and/or altruism prompt a group of people to form this kind of community?'
I guess maybe it's not the ideal wording. But it seems like a very rational thing to do to seek out a supporting community. And if one doesn't exist that suits your ideology, it seems rational to create it. That being said, maybe not everyone feels the same desire for this type of community that I do, so it does depend on what your utility function is.
I used rationality because it's more general than the term transhumanism, which not everyone on lesswrong reacts positively to. And altruism doesn't seem right either; it wasn't out of altruism that I went to church, it was because I fulfilled MY utility function.
Ah, was my language too strong? I apologize - my point was simply this: that all too often in discussions of the value of Christian community etc., the political, emotional, and physical harms tied up in the same structures that maintain these communities are elided.
This is why I said "not all Christian communities are like the one I attended." I cannot think of a single area where "my" church took a noxious position on human rights. It meant that they focused more on certain parts of the Bible ("love your neighbor as yourself" etc) than on other more negative parts.
Yes, I do prefer, and I don't see any reason why I should pretend that jimrandomh meant that when he wrote "Some types of deviations are allowed, but some aren't". In any case, it seems scarcely credible that Swimmer963 is unaware that poetry has traditionally tended to have (perhaps even by definition) a lot of metrical regularity and that many people strongly prefer it to be that way, so on your reading jimrandomh's comment seems to convey little actual information. (And what actual information there was seemed to imply that all poetry should be iambic tetrameter, which is just ridiculous.)
Also: You might want to consider the possibility that Swimmer963 (or jimrandomh or T S Eliot) might have criteria of poetic merit other than "what will gain me status". (I find that a lot of the comments here about status, signalling, etc., give me the impression that their authors haven't appreciated how indirect a lot of this stuff is. Yes, a lot of human behaviour can be explained in terms of status-seeking; that doesn't mean that the people who do those things are actually, literally, seeking status. A lot of human behaviour can be explained in terms of trying to optimize one's reproductive success, but the humans behaving in those ways are often going out of their way to avoid actual reproduction. The same goes for status.)
[EDITED to add: Those remarks about status often seem to me like very clear examples of status-seeking behaviour themselves. "See how much more sophisticated I am, seeing through what Picasso might have said about beauty or artistic integrity to the status-seeking core beneath."]
"In any case, it seems scarcely credible that Swimmer963 is unaware that poetry has traditionally tended to have (perhaps even by definition) a lot of metrical regularity and that many people strongly prefer it to be that way, so on your reading jimrandomh's comment seems to convey little actual information."
Apparently I was more unaware than I thought. Almost all the poetry I've read recently doesn't rhyme or fit into iambic pentameter, to the point that when I read poetry that does, it almost feels weird. (Granted, a lot of what I read is medieval and translated into English from Latin. Maybe it rhymed originally.)
There's a lot of variety in the content of hip hop. There's introspective hip hop from Black Star, sci-fi from Deltron 3030, liberal politics from Blue Scholars, storytelling about innercity life from Capital D & The Molemen, clever wordplay from Binary Star, or music from Jurassic 5 where the words are like another instrument so you don't have to worry about what they mean. If there are a few songs that you like, you can probably find more like them.
Thank you. I will check some of these guys out.
I respond now only to say that the poem may be appreciable in ways other than my feeling like it's sort of like hip-hop. I find myself the first totally positive critic here, but seriously, Swimmer, you have something there, if you want to do something with it. I'm just trying to offer my point of view.
Allow me to add for Swimmer's benefit that I totally support the development of poetry for the benefit of yourself and others even when it completely doesn't appeal to me. Most sophisticated poetry and art isn't supposed to appeal to people like me. I have absolutely no problem with using lesswrong to present it or develop it and didn't downvote it even on the main page (even though the folks may be right that it is more of a discussion thing.)
To be honest, if I read this poem written by someone else, I would probably think "whoa!" I'm not so much of a 'transhumanism, yay!' type either, but the last three lines randomly popped into my head, and they seemed suited to a poem about transhumanism rather than a poem about, say, flowers. Presenting ideas that jar with people a little bit is a good way to get comments, as demonstrated.
If everything were iambic tetrameter, as you suggest, poetry would be really, really boring. The first stanza has excellent rhythm, placing emphasis on important words, and causing you to place emphasis on words where in normal spoken prose you might not otherwise, enhancing the imagery. imAGine the FIRST MAN who HELD a STICK in ROUGH HANDS and DREW LINES on a COLD STONE WALL imAGine when the OTHers LOOKED when they SAID i see the ANtelope i SEE it
Swimmer963, I think the first stanza makes an excellent poem, whether or not you agree with the way I would read it. The rest could use some work, IMHO, but there's good imagery throughout. My best poems have always been the ones where I don't try to make a point on the first go round, but let the point come out upon rereading.
Is it sad that I just had to Google IMHO to figure out what you meant? Also, it's funny that you like the first stanza, because I started with the last three lines and sort of built backwards from there.
(For me it is when feeling contemptuous. Contempt seems to be a greater mind killer than hunger or tiredness. Anger doesn't seem to have the same problem - it seems to result in somewhat better thinking, even though it does alter intentions.)
I think there are enough examples of people who've said or written stuff in anger or frustration and regretted it afterwards that I'm inclined to think twice. As far as I can tell, there aren't very many examples of people regretting things they said or wrote when they were tired or hungry.
I perceived it as "the first man that held a stick" and didn't notice the other way of seeing it.
It was a metaphor that felt natural. There probably wasn't one person who invented cave paintings, any more than there was a literal 'first man', but it makes sense to (to me) to use it in a poem, as a metaphor, because it makes a more concrete image than trying to be literal. Also, I guess I assumed that on lesswrong, no one would interpret 'the first man' in the Christian sense.
Positive Thinking
If I were to take all of my friends and divide them into two groups, there are plenty of criteria I could choose, but probably the most relevant slice would be between my friends who believe in God, and my friends who don’t.
Many in the believer group know each other as well. The evangelical Christian community in my city is fairly tight-knit. Every once in a while I’ll meet someone new, I’ll mention offhand something about church, it’ll become the topic of conversation, and suddenly we discover that we share a dozen mutual friends.
My non-believer friends come from all walks of life. My old friends from high school fit in this category; so do many of the friends I’ve met through university or part-time jobs. There’s no tight-knit community here. I wouldn’t describe many of them as rationalists, particularly, but it seems that according to lesswrong doctrine, they are above the sanity waterline while my first friend group is below.
Something about this bothers me. Maybe it’s because I find it so refreshing to be with a group of people who are relentlessly positive about life, who constantly remind one another to be positive, and who offer concrete help rather than judgement. Once, when another of our friends couldn’t pay her rent, my Christian friend and I got up at four, took out five hundred dollars in cash at a convenience store, and biked to her house to leave it anonymously in her mailbox before I left for my six am shift at work. The high lasted all day. I can’t think of any other community where this would happen, where it would even be socially acceptable.
I met people at church who had survived the worst circumstances; they had been abused, they had been addicts, they had been homeless. But aside from the concrete help they’d found at church, they’d found some kind of hope as well. They believed that they could succeed. I’ve been incredibly lucky in my life, and I’ve never had reason to doubt that I would succeed, or that people would be there to help me if I ever failed. But for people who’ve only seen evidence that they will fail and be stepped on, the benefits of being told that God loves them unconditionally seem to be non-trivial.
Now to contrast with my non-religious friends; this isn’t universally true, but I’ve seen a trend of general negative-ness. This attitude can be self-directed, i.e. complaining about work or school or relationships without any effort to find solutions. I know some very unhappy people, and it seems insane to me that they just sit back and take it, month after month. The negative attitude can also be directed outwards into biting sarcasm and rude, judgemental comments about others. This often comes from people who seem happy enough with their own lives. Maybe I didn’t notice this as much before I started going to church, where it became obvious in its absence.
I have the same tendencies to criticize and judge as anyone, but at least I notice them and try to keep them in check. I try to ask myself if it really helps to criticize someone. Does whatever I think they’re doing wrong really affect me? Is it my business to correct them? Would they listen to criticism? If I’m a reliable example, most people hate being criticized. It takes a conscious effort to step back and see criticism in a positive light. I try to take this step, and maybe most rationalists-in-the-making do the same, but that’s not the general population, and starting with a criticism tends to close people off and put them on the defensive. The last question I ask myself is, do I want to help them by suggesting a change, or do I only want to vent my own frustration? Venting doesn’t help them, and it doesn’t help me, because for me anyway, focusing on the negative side of an issue tends to flip my entire mindset into the negative. And negative attitudes are contagious. If one person at work is ranting about a bad breakup or a fight with their family, I’ll often catch myself brooding about someone or something I’m annoyed with. If I’m lucky and I’m paying attention, I notice the subliminal messaging before it really gets to be. Sometimes I feel like barking “hey, keep your problems to yourself, I’m trying to be positive here.” But again, if I’m paying attention to my own reactions, I ask myself if it’ll really help to snap at them, and the answer is no, so I’ll try to be an understanding listener.
These are things I do consciously, but since I stopped going to church regularly, I’ve noticed that it’s more of an effort. It feels like I’m holding up a heavy weight alone, going through my day talking to roommates and classmates and co-workers who don’t make any special effort to be positive or non-judgemental or helpful. And as soon as I let down my guard, I slip back into the trap of reacting to criticism defensively instead of constructively, of snapping back on reflex, of making excuses for why I was rude to someone or left my dirty dishes in the sink. I hate the way I act in this default mode, but it’s easy to make excuses for that too. I tell myself that I’m tired, that I’m burnt out, that I can’t be everything to everyone. I tell myself it’s not fair that I try so much harder than everyone else.
At church, there was a marked lack of excuses. The general attitude was that you could be as strong as you needed to be, because it wasn’t your strength, it was God’s strength. The way I see it, it was more the combined strength of a community united by a common ideal. It was like a self-help group, but without the stigma. (Maybe the stigma is imaginary; I just know that I have a negative emotional reaction to self-help books and websites. I know this is probably counterproductive, but I can’t seem to get rid of it.)
I talk to some of my friends, the non-religious ones, and I notice that maybe half the time they’re grumpy or upset or angry or offended, and they don’t stop to think about it, or take the step away that would allow them to question and overcome those feelings. My Christian friends aren’t perfect, and they do occasionally slip into anger and frustration, but they often notice. They often bring it up afterwards, in front of the group, as an example of something they need to work on.
This is why, even though I don’t believe in God and would probably be incapable of it at this point, the last thing I want to do is judge people who believe. A lot of the time, they’ve found something that helps them. This is why I found it instrumentally rational, for six months, to go to youth group once a week and sing songs about Jesus. Happiness is a hard thing to pin down, but I liked myself better during that time. It’s easier to be generous when everyone is being generous around you; it’s easier to be kind and helpful when everyone else is acting that way too. It feels like being held accountable.
I don’t really know what this means. It’s hard to generalize, because I’m talking about people in my age group; most of us are poor and not settled in our lives, without firmly developed social networks. Maybe later on in life, people can make their own tight-knit communities without religion as binding glue; my parents, for example, have an incredibly extensive social group. And I certainly don’t want to imply that all Christian organizations are as open and welcoming as the one I attended. I’m sure than plenty of people have had bad experiences. But what I’ve seen suggests to me that my church (a Pentacostal evangelical Christian group, by the way) served a function in our city that wasn’t being filled by anything else.
It’s limited, of course, by the fact that its founders believe the Bible is literally true, even if they don’t apply that belief thoroughly. (This occasionally involves a tricky kind of doublethink, for example a person who denounces homosexuality when asked directly but who holds nothing against their homosexual friends.) Could the principles of rationality prompt a group of people to form this kind of community? I don’t know. But until then, I’m going to keep hanging out with Christians and sharing their positive thoughts.
This doesn't have a consistent number of syllables per line or a consistent stress pattern. Try rewriting it so that each line has exactly 8 syllables, and the syllables alternate between unstressed and stressed. This makes some words unavailable, like silicon (stressed-unstressed-unstressed), and limits which pairs of words can be next to each other ("rough hands" and "stone wall" both put stressed syllables next to each other), but will make it flow better and sound more like a poem, as opposed to prose-with-linefeeds. You might need to practice tagging the syllables of some existing poems to get the hang of distinguishing syllable types. And no, affirming a great truth does not make good poetry.
(Edit: The link was missing due to incorrect Markdown formatting)
Here is a poem I wrote that does use rhythm. I don't really like it that much though.
Poem #1
You can't turn the colors of the rainbow into black and white/ You can't write the ending to this story so it comes out right/ You don't know until it matters if you're weak or if you're strong/ But no one has the right to say that what you did was wrong.
Tomorrow is a new day that you might not live to see/ The first night is the hardest, yet by morning, you'll be free/ You thought you were invincible but anyone can fail/ It only took a moment for a life's work to derail.
Anybody else could have made the same mistake/ You know it intellectually but still you lie awake/ Repeating like a mantra that you did the best you could/ Asking, "if I die tomorrow, will my friends say I was good?"
This time
Small suns ignite everywhere
In a panic
They try to pull the plug.
I laughed hysterically. Then wondered if it was actually a laughing matter.
"Envy me! Aim at me! Rival me! Transcend me!"
Eliezer,
Can you name 3 people who have transcended you in particular areas of rationality, and those areas? How about Spearman's g? Capacity/willpower for altruistic self-sacrifice? Conscientiousness? Tendency not to be overconfident about disastrous philosophical errors? Philosophical creativity? Mathematical creativity? Same questions with respect to 'rivaled.'
Also, your use of poetry and talk of the 'Way of Rationality' seems to be counter-signaling.
Nick,
Plenty of religious and political organizations accuse outsiders and heretics of various kinds of bias and irrationality, and 'apply' the same criteria to themselves. The problem is that they do so in a biased fashion.
"Also, your use of poetry and talk of the 'Way of Rationality' seems to be counter-signaling."
In what sense is this counter-signaling?
I've always felt that constraining yourself to poetry that rhymes restricts both what you can say and the artfulness with which you can say it.
I've had this thought before too, but I don't think there's any overall limit on how artful rhyming poetry can be. It's just harder and more time consuming. And yeah, sometimes you come up with a beautiful line and then can't use it because it doesn't fit with the syllable count.
I would personally put this on discussion-level.
Possibly the moral of the story is "don't post anything on lesswrong at 5 am."
consistent number of syllables per line or a consistent stress pattern
It's a long time since these were regarded as essential to poetry!
I used to write poetry mainly in that style, but I find it a) time consuming, and b) I often can't use the words I really want to use because they don't fit. Not to mention almost all modern poetry doesn't use this pattern, and poetry that does tends to feel archaic. But like I said, this isn't something I do often.
I've been told I'm very curious. However, this tends to show itself mainly during intense conversations and discussions. Being curious about what I'm learning in school is somewhat more of a challenge. Being curious about anything while extremely sleep deprived is MUCH more of a challenge. Any recommendations?
A Transhumanist Poem
**Note: I'm not a poet. I hardly ever write poetry, and when I do, it's usually because I've stayed up all night. However, this seemed like a very appropriate poem for Less Wrong. Not sure if it's appropriate as a top-level post. Someone please tell me if not.**
Imagine
The first man
Who held a stick in rough hands
And drew lines on a cold stone wall
Imagine when the others looked
When they said, I see the antelope
I see it.
Later on their children's children
Would build temples, and sing songs
To their many-faced gods.
Stone idols, empty staring eyes
Offerings laid on a cold stone altar
And left to rot.
Yet later still there would be steamships
And trains, and numbers to measure the stars
Small suns ignited in the desert
One man's first step on an airless plain
Now we look backwards
At the ones who came before us
Who lived, and swiftly died.
The first man's flesh is in all of us now
And for his and his children's sake
We imagine a world with no more death
And we see ourselves reflected
In the silicon eyes
Of our final creation
I'm considered to be a shy person, but I think whether I am slower at responding or not depends on the situation.
I am a much better communicator when I have time to think over my response and put it in writing. I have trouble getting a word in during large group conversations, because by the time I think of something I can add, someone else starts talking. Then the conversation shifts to a different topic, and what I was going to say is no longer relevant.
If I'm talking to a friend one on one I can respond quickly and the conversation flows well. Though occasionally there might be a pause, and I may wonder what to say next to keep the conversation going. But in a large group, I am slower to respond. Like when it comes to participating in class, I'm often too slow to raise my hand because I have an inner battle of negative thoughts and worries in my head urging me to keep my hand down. I think if I didn't have all those anxious thoughts and my heart wasn't beating like crazy, I'd be able to raise my hand a lot quicker. But still I don't know if I'd be able to respond faster than those who just yell out the answer or shoot their hand up immediately.
I wouldn't say that I'm very bad at reacting though like #4 speculates, it just depends on the situation and the type of reaction we're talking about. I have very good reaction time when it comes to physical things like playing tennis and other sports, video games, etc. But when it comes to reacting orally in a larger group, I'd say I'm much slower because I have so many thoughts and worries in my head that keep me from speaking right away. Plus I like to think over my response very carefully, sometimes down to the very words I want to say.
March should be an interesting month for me though, because my goal for March is to participate in class. I've hardly ever participated in class before because whenever I think about doing it my arm goes limp, my heart starts beating like crazy, and my palms get a little sweaty. And of course all the worries and thoughts come rushing in my head. But I'm really going to try and raise my hand as much as I can. Maybe if I just don't think so much about what I'm doing it will be easier? I'll find out I guess. I'll be posting about it here:
It looks like you have a reaction problem in a difference sense than I do; I have no trouble thinking of intelligent conversation in real time, but physical skills elude me. I would guess you have faster reaction times with sports and video games because it's easier for you to gain expertise in these areas and "chunk" your skills so that you don't have to constantly re-evaluate. But in conversation, you find it harder to "chunk" intelligent replies. (I'm not sure if this is chunkable, but having a large store of general knowledge to incorporate in your comments would help.) If you're going to try participating more in class, it might help to read your textbooks or do your own Internet/library research the day before, so that you're more likely to have something to say. Good luck!
Try MS Access. It is pretty simple to use, and has a nice export to Excel feature. Once you "get" Access it should be easy to move on to more advanced DB tools. Access also has a better UI that should make data-input work easier.
The only sport I was ever deeply involved in was competitive swimming, which is a) an individual and not a team sport, and b) ALWAYS involves the maximum physical effort for the duration of a race.
Something doesn't seem right there. People swim faster in a 200m race than they do in the first 200m of a 1500m race. They do not exert the same amount of physical effort during that time.
I guess that's true... It was always less true for me because I was a distance swimmer with almost no capacity to sprint, so my first 200 split in an 800 or 1500 is quite close to my 200 time. There is some pacing involved, but you want to be just as tired after a 1500 as after a 100, so overall the race uses maximum effort.
This is very useful advice. I'm still a student, and I've frequently tried to employ my own curiosity to learn about whatever it is we're studying in class. I'm actually in an interesting honors program, outside my own major (chemistry) that is interdisciplinary. We have to study everything from philosophy to astrophysics. Right now I'm in a World Literature class, and I'm wondering if anyone can give me any advice on activating my curiosity about whatever book I'm supposed to be reading. I'm a fast reader, and I will sometimes enjoy the book we're reading (assuming it's any good, and many classics are not), but I'm typically not actively "chasing something".
Considering most of us here are science people, there probably are not a whole lot of individuals with large backgrounds in literature, but if anyone has a good idea for something to chase while I'm reading, it would be greatly appreciated.
When I'm reading fiction that I enjoy, I'll try to predict what's going to happen next (if it's a plot-based book, i.e. mystery/thriller) or imagine mini-scenarios with the characters (if it's a character-development based book, i.e. most literature.) Ask yourself "Why did the author choose to have this character do this action? How did he/she make it plausible that this character would act in this way? Was it rational for the character to act this way? If not, what is causing them to act irrationally? Is there any other action the character could have taken that would have served the same plot purpose and been more 'in character'."
It makes it easier to be actively curious about reading fiction if you also write it. I don't suppose being good at writing fiction is important; it's the process, the mindset. You could try writing fanfiction of classics where the main characters are rationalists; that could be very interesting!
Not being terribly good at sports, I tended to be very nervous leading up to a game. I frequently made mistakes that hurt my team (I only ever played team sports in any organized way), and I began to learn to fear making new mistakes. Then, once the game started and as it progressed, that anxiety changed depending on how much I was actually exercising and what skill I was showing (i.e. was I making us lose again, or was I actually being helpful?) And--here is the useful point for this discussion--I could observe during the game what effects my nerves were having. I could tell when I was getting too hung up on performing well and it was making me perform badly. I could tell when I was keeping the energy pumping enough and I was missing things. Not caring and caring too much about winning are the Scylla and Charybdis of sport. Sympathetic nervous system responses are the churning of the water, making you always have to adjust course.
You're not exactly correct about wanting me wanting my heart rate low before a launch. I clearly don't want to be bouncing off the walls, but I want a certain level of eustress (as opposed to distress) so that I can think quickly and clearly. That's how I work best.
The only sport I was ever deeply involved in was competitive swimming, which is a) an individual and not a team sport, and b) ALWAYS involves the maximum physical effort for the duration of a race. The pre-race adrenaline rush seemed to help a lot of people to go faster, but not me; I was the same speed in competition as in practice. I did experience nervousness before a race, but more on a psychological than a physiological level. I would feel a sense of doom, but my heart rate wouldn't go up much.
Interesting, what you're saying about eustress/distress. I suppose maybe you need a certain level of sympathetic nervous system activation in order to be focused on outside events in real-time. This is what I noticed at a recent lifeguard team competition; I wasn't nervous and I didn't feel pressured to do well, and my performance fell drastically! Maybe next time I won't be so irritated by the pre-competition butterflies, since apparently they serve a purpose.
One of my first thoughts, on starting to consider this situation, was how higher levels of expertise (in the Dreyfus sense) relate to this. I wouldn't consider myself, in general, someone who has good/fast reactive abilities, but in my areas of expertise I often work quite comfortably even under pressure because I simply "do what I do," and don't need to think about it too much. However, when someone at a lesser level of expertise demands justification for my proposals, I typically cannot quickly come up with a good argument; it's generally hours or even days later I can formulate an explanation of why my proposed approach to the problem is a good one.
I'm not sure if the Dreyfus brothers have been discussed here before (it would seem likely, given my impression of the type of people here, but I'm new), but, given the field of the original poster, this is certainly an appropriate place to mention again Patricia Benner's <i>From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice</i>, as well as mention that this has been one of the most influential books I've read on my career as a software developer and sysadmin.
Thank you for that book recommendation. I will check it out.
Calling it optimism is a bit strong. Much of the world is already transitioning to nuclear power for non-transportation uses, and there are no technical obstacles to converting virtually all power generation in the long run.
I did not know that. Can you cite this information? What percentage of the world's energy actually comes from nuclear?
"It doesn't feel planned."
Alright, exercise time: rather than picking out the individual things wrong with this scenario, can you describe (at a relatively high level) what your plan would be, if you were to plan this? From scratch, with today's technology, what would be the optimal way to run this sort of study?
OK, I'll give it a go.
1) Start with a list of all hemodialysis patients in your area (city, province, or country depending on how participants you want.) The information on them should all be held in one database. (At my workplace, it's split between two databases, only one of which I am cleared to access.) Say there are 100,000 names on the list.
2) Use a simple program to search through those names, marking true/false for various selection criteria. Even if the program isn't perfect, say you reduce the list to 1,000 names. A human employee could then check over this much shortened list.
3) Contact the patients who qualify. Right now, the research staff have to drive to the clinic or hospital and see the patients during their dialysis in order to 'consent' them, or ask them whether they want to participate in the study. I don't know how much of this is based on the regulations for medical research, but maybe the nurses could hand out pamphlets and patients could check YES or NO if they were interested in being in the study and willing to be contacted by telephone. This wouldn't always work, but it could be helpful.
4) The consented patients need to have baseline, 6 month, 12 month and 18 month blood draws. I probably spend 8 to 10 hours a month making colour-coded packages of blood tubes to give to the nurses. What if instead we could mail them a box of blood tubes and sheets of blank labels, and send the label with patient code numbers by email? Assuming each clinic has the facilities to print, they could print the labels themselves, and use another cheat sheet we send by email to connect each patient to their number code. (For confidentiality and other reasons, the tubes can't be stored with the patient names.) This would mean a little extra work for the staff at each clinic, but assuming most nurses can read and follow directions as well as I (not even a nurse yet) can, it would save hugely on labour overall.
5) Right now we use couriers to move blood samples to the labs. I can't think of any ways to improve the efficiency of this step, but they probably exist.
6) Once the samples are studied, it would be nice to receive the data as a file by email, rather than as paper lab printouts that have to be entered into our database by hand, increasing the risk that an over-tired student employee like me will make an error. Some of our results appear in the main patient database under monthly blood work; another simple program could retrieve these.
7) At this point, analyzing the data is done on the computer anyway, but following this process, it might be in a more optimal format.
I've tried to stay within the bounds of today's technology. Obviously research will get easier if and when portable 'labs-on-a-chip' can be made on desktop fabricators on location, with the results uploaded automatically into our files.
could you write the program in your spare time and run the program while you're there, while making it seem like you're working?
Maybe in 6 months. Right now it would take me weeks just to teach myself how to write a program on that level.
As a theist, I don't believe in God because I perceive some positive benefit from that belief. My experiences and perceptions point to the existence of God. Of course those experiences and perceptions may be inaccurate and are subject to my own interpretations, so I can't claim that my beliefs are rational. I accept on an intellectual level that my belief could be wrong. This doesn't seem to enable me to stop believing.
However, I am involved in a religious community because there are positive benefits -- chiefly that of being able to compare notes with other people who share my irrational belief in God and my desire to do good work in the world. I can see that there might be positive benefits in religious communities for non-theists, though I don't really see the point.
I've found the same thing–if you want to actually accomplish good things in the world, it seems more rational to attach yourself to a religious community than not. I have my own reasons for believing that it's morally right to help others, but a lot of the non-religious/atheist people my age haven't really thought about this at all, and religious people my age tend to be VERY involved.
I know several non-theists, including atheists, who belong to religious communities because they value the benefits that such belonging provides. It helps, of course, that they belong to the kinds of religious communities that welcome people like them.
I was one of those people for a while. I was accepted, I think, because the particular group I hung out with had an overwhelming need to convert people, and couldn't resist a juicy atheist/agnostic specimen like me.
I also sing in a church choir, which is kind of similar except that it's explicit I'm there for the musical education and not the religion.
I think that people who had actual mental models of the world would notice a contradiction that large.
People who profess two different beliefs may not see a contradiction. It's just good to profess one, and also good to profess the other, for different reasons. They aren't visualizing a world that, at one time or another, needs to either poof or go on. They're visualizing that "science" and "religion" both seem like good groups to join.
From what I've seen, fundamentalist Christians (this is the only group I've had a chance to speak to) often see the contradiction, and are PROUD of their ability to believe on 'pure faith' despite it. As if it's some kind of accomplishment to say 'wow, god is so powerful that he can even overcome THAT'. I don't know how far they carry through in creating mental models of the world, but I know that their expectations of a world with God in it are VERY different from a world without god, i.e. the node is included in their models. This is a particular religious group where receiving "prophetic words" and visions is common, and the people I knew based their expectations on what "God" said to them in these visions. And were sometimes sorely disappointed, but their 'faith' never seemed to be affected. At the start, they seemed as alien to me as the woman you're describing seemed to you. After befriending some people in this group, I started to understand the geometry of their minds a little bit more. This was nearly a year ago, though, so I have trouble explaining the insights I've had because my mind has gone back to 'how could anybody be that STUPID?'
Don't worry about fossil fuels, if you see the future where software will do the jobs. I wouldn't worry about FF even if not, but that's another thing.
You are an optimist about energy sources, then. What energy source do you think will replace fossil fuels? How long do you think the transition take? How easy will it be? I guess I'm fairly optimistic that SOMETHING will replace fossil fuels eventually, when the demand soars enough and scarcity sets in, but I don't know enough about alternative energy sources to say which ones will play a major role.
A few thoughts:
- I am continually amazed at the amount of data that should be put and manipulated in a proper database that's mucked about in spreadsheets instead.
- Gene Callahan at ThinkMarkets recently had a post on how health care is especially bad when it comes to technology.
- Eric Falkenstein says there are a lot of "skilled" jobs that could be replaced by computers too.
Working with a 'proper' database is a skill I still lack, which I would very much like to acquire. I was hoping this job would help, but instead I just enter everything into Excel. (To be fair, you can manipulate data a fair bit using Excel formulas. I just don't know all of them.)
Here are some of my recollections about the costs associated with transitioning to a paperless office.
I was recently employed for a month and paid $13 an hour archiving documents for a medium-sized (~40 fulltime employees) office in a much larger company. The office was transitioning to paperless records, and the entire previous year's worth of printouts had to be scanned. There were three other people on my team. We each had a commercial scanner that the company had purchased new. The scanned documents were stored on multiply redundant company servers that had to be purchased for this transition. Every person in the office received a second monitor. The internal IT staff spent months on the transition, and a number of highly paid executives had to spend a not-insignificant amount of time deciding on the configuration of the final system. Additionally, another IT firm was contracted to set up some large portions of the system. While I was still there, the servers crashed and went down for a day and the office mostly halted, being unable to continue much of their work without access to their digital files. I witnessed frustrated staff vent some anger about the new system occasionally and support for it was mild at best.
Going paperless requires a very large commitment of resources up front and can significantly negatively impact productivity if everything doesn't go exactly as planned. And even if things do go well, at that.
My workplace does things in a similar way, scanning in documents by hand without 'interpreting' them in any way. (The result is helpful; you can go on your computer and look at a patient's chart without having to physically go to their hospital campus; but it's also unhelpful in that you can't run a keyword search on anything in the charts, because they're saved as images as opposed to more search-friendly formats.) It looks messy and inefficient to ME that they're keeping both paper and digital records, but I'm sure the immediate cost of making a full transition would be enormous.
Still, I can't imagine that offices in fifty years will still be using this half-and-half method. As technology advances, maybe the transition will get easier; parts of the transition process itself could be automated, with software automatically converting scanned images into searchable text files. Either way, I think the transition has to be made eventually. (But that's a personal opinion.)
Research methods
I think I’ve always had certain stereotypes in my mind about research. I imagine a cutting-edge workplace, maybe not using the newest gadgets because these things cost money, but at least using the newest ideas. I imagine staff of research institutions applying the scientific method to boost their own productivity, instead of taking for granted the way that things have always been done. Maybe those were the naive ideas of someone who had never actually worked in a research field.
At the medical research institute where I work one day a week, I recently spent an entire seven-hour day going down a list of patient names, searching them on the hospital database, deciding whether they met the criteria for a study, and typing them into a colour-coded spreadsheet. The process had maybe six discrete steps, and all of them were purely mechanical. In seven hours, I screened about two hundred and fifty patients. I was paid $12.50 an hour to do this. It cost my employer 35 cents for each patient that I screened, and these patients haven't been visited, consented or included in any study. They're still only names on a spreadsheet. I’ve been told that I learn and work quickly, but I know I do this task inefficiently, because I’m not a simple computer program. I get bored. I make mistakes. Heaven forbid, I get distracted and start reading the nurses’ notes for fun because I find them interesting.
In 7 hours, I imagine that someone slightly above my skill level could write a simple program to do the same task. They wouldn’t screen any patients in those 7 hours, but once the program was finished, they could use it forever, or at least until the task changed and the program had to be modified. I don’t know how much it would cost the organization to employ a programmer; maybe it would cost more than just having me do it. I don’t know whether allowing that program to access the confidential database would be an issue. But it seems inefficient to pay human brains to do work that they’re bad at, that computers would be better at, even if those human brains belong to undergrad students who need the money badly enough not to complain.
One of the criteria I looked at when screening patients was whether they did their dialysis at a clinic in my hometown. They have to be driving distance, because my supervisor has to drive around the city and pick up blood samples to bring to our lab. I crossed out 30 names without even looking them up because I could see at a glance that they were a nearby city an hour’s drive away. How hard would it be to coordinate with the hospital in that city? Have the bloodwork analyzed there and the results emailed over? Maybe it would be non-trivially hard; I don’t know. I didn’t ask my supervisor because it isn’t my job to make management decisions. But medical research benefits everyone. A study with more patients produces data that’s statistically more valid, even if those patients live an hour’s drive away.
The office where I work is filled with paper. Floor-to-ceiling shelves hold endless binders full of source documents. Every email has to be printed and filed in a binder. Even the nurses’ notes and patient charts are printed off the database. It’s a legal requirement. The result is that we have two copies of everything, one online and one on paper, consuming trees. Running a computer consumes fossil fuels, of course. I don’t know for sure which is more efficient, paper or digital, but I do know that both is inefficient. I did ask my supervisor about this, and apparently it’s because digital records could be lost or deleted. How much would it take to make them durable enough?
I guess that more than my supervisor, I see a future where software will do my job, where technology allows a study to be coordinated across the whole world, where digital storage will be reliable enough. But how long will it take for the laws and regulations to change? For people to change? I don’t know how many of my complaints are valid. Maybe this is the optimal way to do research, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like a papier-mâché of laws and habits and trial-and-error. It doesn't feel planned.Hi swimmer, It sounds to me you are writing about the difference between mindfulness and concentration. In the practice of meditation one goal is to find balance between these two. Too much concentration and you stop being aware of the moment to moment experience, too little concentration and your mind flutters a.k.a "monkey mind". For some basics about mindfulness/meditation google "mindfulness in plain english".
According to that text both concentration and mindfulness can be learned. Mindfulness is the more difficult skill to master.
I have also noticed this ability-to-react for several years. I am definitely good at it. Unfortunately, I cannot offer any advice on developing the skill, but I do have some observations:
-I tend to get nervous after doing something. For instance, when presenting to a large group, I feel completely calm. Afterward, however, I often start shaking as I go over it in my head.
-Regarding public speaking, I don't generally need to write out what I'm going to say, but I do need to think it out in advance. Usually, I have a 5-10 line summary for a 10 minute presentation. Otherwise, I ramble.
-This skill is especially useful in dancing. I dance blues, salsa, and some swing socially. I almost never plan out moves; dance partners have asked me many times what that cool move was, and I have no idea. Apparently this is very unusual. The flip side is that I cannot dance pre-choreographed moves at all. Usually I forget the sequence within 3 measures and just do something else.
-I also love simulations like those you mentioned. We used to do emergency simulations in the Scouts, and I felt very in-my-element. I just go into this alert problem-solving mode and everything seems to flow smoothly. It feels great.
Two hypotheses:
Is this skill related to left/right brain dominance? I believe my ability-to-act is unusually good, and I know that I am extremely right brained. Intuitively, this ability-to-act sounds like a right-brain skill. Any other observations for/against this hypothesis?
I would bet money under long odds that this skill correlates closely with parallel thinking. Parallel thinking is the ability to consider multiple approaches to a problem simultaneously; I do it constantly. If you've ever looked at a problem,immediately seen three ways of doing it, estimated the difficulty of each, and gone with the best, that's parallel thinking. When I'm in ability-to-act mode, it becomes a subconscious process. Any one else want to submit evidence for or against for this one?
I actually thought about including this in the post: what is the correlation between ability-to-act and creativity (which is considered to be a right-brain phenomenon, I think)? I've known people who were extremely creative and also very open and able to react. They tend to be performers in theatre or music, and very extroverted. I've also known very creative people who are introverted and shy in person. They tend to be poets or writers. And most of the lifeguard team people I know are quite analytical rather than creative, but they can still have fast reactions.
(Disclaimer: Nothing I say here should be construed as speaking for NASA. These are strictly my personal thoughts. All technical information written here is in the public domain.)
In my job as a spacecraft engineer, most of my time is spent designing and testing the systems that control spacecraft pointing and propulsion. However, those of us who design the pointing system generally need to be on-hand for launching a new spacecraft and establishing a stable attitude. So, I have helped operate a couple of spacecraft in their first few months (the first was WMAP, and the most recent was SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory).
Leading up to launch, it is customary to do a lot of simulations, especially of potential failures. The simulations sometimes go badly, with things really getting screwed up. But practicing until everyone is bored with simulations seems a key to a successful launch team.
On the actual launch day, the adrenaline level is weird. You have taken all these actions before in sims, yet you know it's quite likely to have no failures, but that it's more important this time that you catch any failures early.
Frankly, I love it. It's one of my favorite things about my job. Here are three things that I know have helped me be comfortable in high-tension situations:
I'm the oldest of three close brothers. We were a team so often as kids, with me the leader, that it feels natural to take control. (My friends in high school used to call me "O Imperious One" when I got too bossy.)
I played sports (badly) at an early age. Sport combines a need for quick reactions with physical exertion. By wearing myself out and still needing to perform, I think it helps me ignore the adrenaline. Then, I took that knowledge of my body's responses to stress to other situations.
I have performed music in front of audiences since I was a little kid. In performances, something can always go wrong. You rehearse and rehearse, but you still keep in mind that you have to react to unexpected events. I'm a decent but not great singer. The one time I got a choral solo in college was my final year. I did fine in rehearsal, but in the performance, my voice cracked horribly on the first note (the song was the Russian "Kalinka"). getting the error out of the way early let me calm down and focus on performing like I rehearsed. By the end, I was doing great and got some really nice applause (audiences love a recovered failure even more than a perfect performance).
So, that's my experience with what you're talking about. Great post!
I'm interested by your mention of sports. Anxiety and stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, raising the heart rate, reducing bloodflow to the gastrointestinal tract, etc. Exercise has the same effects. I swam competitively as a teenager and I didn't tend to notice feeling nervous DURING a race, possibly because the exhaustion of swimming masked the physiological stress reaction. Also, sports are one of the few areas where the sympathetic "fight-or-flight" reaction can serve its original evolutionary purpose. You want your heart rate to be up before a race, whereas that reaction is pretty useless before, say, a spacecraft launch.
I loosely suspect this has to do with how you've conditioned your use of working memory and your amount of it. I've heard of a study where they found that some people with high IQ and high WM do poorly on standardized tests, because the situation narrowed and shrunk their WM temporarily. High IQ/low WMers did not appear to suffer this effect.
The analogy given was that you're used to working on a nice executive desk, and suddenly you have to do the same tasks but with a clipboard and sheet of paper. Whereas if you have low WM, you're already used to working with little space. In this crowd monitor size is probably a better analogy.
The chunking strategy puts more of your skills on autopilot, allowing you to do more higher level function rather than stalling out (see Sian Beilock's new book Choke). I don't really know what to think of those who are TOO open to stimuli, though.
As for my own experiences:
The most relevant situation I can think of is when I was in my first and only car accident. It was a two lane road, and in the opposite lane, a car was intending to turn left. Just before we would pass it that car was hit from behind and propelled into our car. Things went spinning; the car stopped. I was in the passenger seat and both my dad and I were dazed from the impact.
I had the strangest experience of being absolutely clear and focused - which I would kill to be able to activate at will, by the way. I was not able to move very fast, being slightly injured and whiplashed, and had lost my glasses. But my mind went clicking - even though I felt like I was moving through molasses, I saw smoke in the car and assessed it as dangerous to stay, roused my dad from semi-consciousness, unbuckled him and myself, pried open my door, got out and around and dragged my dad out to the opposite curb. Just no hesitation, one step after another, boom boom boom. This held for the rest of the day and allowed me to coordinate logistics before going off in the ambulance with my dad.
Like I said, strange, as if some 'alert and analytical' switch in my brain had been jammed for a few hours.
Thank you for the well-thought-out comment.
According to a test we did in my first-year psych course, I have a very poor short-term memory (and an excellent long-term memory, partly because I intuitively use word and image associations to memorize things.) I've always done well in school pretty easily, possibly because my learning style is well suited to the most common teaching styles.
Your car accident story is fascinating. I've never been put into a situation like that before, and I tend to worry how I would react–would my brain be able to rise above the immediate shock to reach the 'alert and analytical' level that you reached, or would I freeze and be useless?
I suspect a large part of the ability to deal with stressful situations relies on pre-established cognitive shortcuts that free up more of the brain for flexible analysis. One part of this I imagine involves what psychologists call "chunking", the ability to fit large data sets into the mind by unifying disparate data points into unified chunks.
Chess grandmasters, for example, can memorise the complete positions of twenty or more chess boards and play them out blindfolded, as long as the board positions are sensical and distinct, and they do so by remembering the board as chunks of interrelated data. They do not remember the position of each piece individually, but rather they remember clusters of pieces that are interacting: "this knight threatened by that bishop, who is near those pawns, who are protecting the queen from the rook" is a cluster and is remembered as such.
I suspect that those who practice dealing with specific stressful situations use such mental constructions to model the situation using less of their brain's processing time, freeing up more run-time for observation and prediction. So part one of dealing with stressful situations might be practising them until you can "chunk" them.
I also suspect that a large part of it is simple habituation to stressful stimuli and the human body's stress responses.
In my own experience doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, when I first started wrestling other people 90% of my mind was taken up with being distressed because someone was sitting on me trying to put me in an unpleasant submission hold, 9% was trying and failing to remember any of the moves I had been taught and 1% at most was analysing the situation dispassionately. Over the course of four years or so that changed to the point where almost none of my mind was taken up with distress, I had a ready move for most situations and in some cases a library to choose from, and my opponent's exact position and intentions were "chunked" from relatively small amounts of data. This freed up most of my brain for strategic thinking, positional awareness of other wrestling pairs nearby on the mat and mentally rehearsing whatever new moves I was trying to functionalise.
So as far as shortcuts go all I can offer is an anti-shortcut. Spend years deliberately putting yourself in a specific stressful situation, and you will become good at handling that specific stressful situation. Possibly this habituation generalises to other stressful situations. I tend to avoid them so I have no data, and I don't think that I handle high-stress situations better than anybody else as a result of wrestling but I don't know for sure.
In a third and more nerd-specific vein, playing World of Warcraft in a group at a competent level largely boils down to simultaneously moving strategically to position yourself correctly in the game world while playing a rhythm game to activate your abilities in the optimum pattern. Doing these two tasks at once is non-trivial, and practise at the rhythm game element frees up more cognitive space for panning the camera around to maintain situational awareness, strategic thinking on the rare occasions when some kind of strategy is needed and deviating from the standard rhythm game pattern when it is optimal to activate some rarely-used button.
So practising relevant skills until "muscle memory" takes over also frees up more cognitive room for situational awareness and forward thinking.
Hypothesis: Practising isolated skills to build up "muscle memory" should help deal with stressful situations that use those skills to some extent. Habituating yourself to stress and distress should also help to some extent. Deliberate efforts to see the interrelationships between relevant stimuli to develop the ability to "chunk" data should also help to some extent. People who act effectively under stress are probably stress-habituated persons who have freed up a large part of their brain for situational awareness by automating or chunking the mental processes that take up most of the brain-space of neophytes in such situations.
For some reason, I've always imagined that "nerd-type" people would have less ability-to-react than the general population. Maybe it's partly the stereotype of the awkward geek, or the fact that programmers, in particular, spend long periods of time alone without social interaction to impose thought-deadlines. But this population also (stereotypically) plays a lot of online multiplayer games. I wonder if playing games like World of Warcraft could lead to transferable skills, like better awareness/awakeness to immediate events.
Some people, not necessarily the same people who can ace tests without studying or learn math easily or even do well in sports, are still naturally good at responding to real-life, real-time events. They can manage their stress, make decision on the spot, communicate flexibly, and even have fun while doing it.
We call them "winners".
I think a similar thing happens in dancing. I've taken hundreds of dance lessons, in most styles of dance, over a period of ten years. I still can't go out onto the dance floor and dance. I've probably taken 200 salsa lessons; and at salsa lessons, I routinely have to ask people who started a few months ago for help. I literally can't perceive what the instructor is doing. Visually, I can see everything in fine detail; but if you asked me what they did, whether they spun left or right, or the man held the woman's left hand with his right or her right with his left, I couldn't say. It happens at a speed far above what my brain is able to process. Many instructors refuse to believe this, and will not demonstrate a movement at half-speed because they think it's wasting time. Instructors usually teach as long a sequence as they can in a lesson, guaranteeing that I won't remember any of it. They teach what a person can learn to mimic in one lesson, and don't understand that that's far beyond what a person can learn and remember in one lesson. In fact, after taking lessons from maybe 2 dozen different dance instructors, I would say that being a great dancer almost guarantees someone will make a lousy instructor. (A shout out to Michael Rye of Dance Bethesda, who is the best dance instructor I've had.)
When I tell people I have difficulty dancing, they always assume it's because I lack coordination or rhythm. In fact I have decent coordination and outstanding rhythm (though I have difficulty spelling it). But in dancing salsa, the man needs to keep in his head a list of about 100 different moves or short sequences, and every 4 seconds, he needs to review what he's just done and choose a new one that fits the previous sequence but isn't mere duplication of it. It takes the average man about 10 lessons to surpass me in salsa.
I had similar difficulties in martial arts, which I also studied for about 10 years. I did well in fights, because I only needed a set of about 10 precondition-attack combos to fight at the sub-blackbelt level where people don't get a chance to study their upcoming opponents. But I could never learn the kata (ritualized, pointless dance-like routines that are part of the belt exams), so I gave up advancing. And karate in particular was never fun for me - it was always stressful; I generally dreaded going, a feeling which just got worse and worse over time.
This is a reason why I'm skeptical that pickup can be taught to everyone. It's a skill that relies on deeply-embedded personality traits that might not be changeable. There can be many people who lack the skill but have the necessary traits, and they can learn. People who lack the skill and the traits, and fail to learn, are dismissed as not trying.
All the examples you gave involve physical coordination. Have you tried any activities that involve on-the-spot thinking but not coordination? Debate club and improv theatre are two examples that other people listed in the comments. If you have tried these, I would be curious to know what your experience was like.
As for the coordination thing...I feel your pain. It takes me a lot longer than most people to fit new skills into muscle memory. It took me an entire semester before I could reliably take blood pressure.
I remember my friends in rez used to learn hip-hop routines by watching Youtube videos. I wonder if being able to pause a video and observe each frame would help you? It would allow you to learn the moves at your own pace, but if you're not very aware of your own body, it might be hard without the feedback of an instructor.
I would buy that some people are "generally fast." I am. Talk fast, walk fast, learn (simple things) fast, write fast, type fast, eat fast.
I tested my reaction times, though, for, say, pushing a button as soon as I hear a beep, and they're average; so this is probably a temperament thing rather than literally having a brain that "runs faster."
I'm good at spontaneous reaction, I think -- I've been complimented on my ability to travel well (orient myself, seize opportunities in unfamiliar surroundings, notice the crucial road signs). I used to love debates in middle school and high school because I was damn good at adapting arguments on the fly. I can also solo/improv/learn musical pieces by ear.
Stress is a different issue. I can become completely freaked by fear.
So if my own experience is any gauge, "ability to react" seems to mean a lot of things, not all correlated with each other.
Interesting. I suppose I'm pretty much equally bad in all areas of "ability to react" except for learning fast–I soak up information easily, but I've never noticed that I walk or talk faster than usual. I guess I was quick to point out "speed of learning new information" as separate from reaction speed because my abilities in the two domains are so opposite-end-of-the-spectrum. Which is why it's always a good idea to have other peoples' input...
Glad to hear it.
By the way, who wrote The Speed of Dark? I didn't find anything in a quick google search that seemed to be about swordfighting specifically, although it is possible that some of the characters could be fencers. the reviews didn't state anything explicit.
It's by Elizabeth Moon. It's not expressly about swordfighting, but the main character is autistic and does fencing as a hobby. I was interested by the descriptions of how he struggles at first to learn the technique, but ends up being quite good because he is better than most people at thinking through and planning his actions.
Thanks for bringing this up. Now that you've said it, I think I'd observed something similar about myself. Like you, I find it far easier to solve internal problems than external. In SCUBA class, I could sketch the inner mechanism of the 2nd stage, but I'd be the last to put my equipment together by the side of the pool.
Your description maps really well onto introversion and extroversion. I searched for psychology articles on extraversion, introversion and learning styles. A lot of research has been done in that area. For example:
Through the use of EPQ vs. LSQ and CSI questionnaires (see FOOTNOTE below), Furnham (1992) found that extraverts are far more active and far less reflective in their learning. They don’t need to chew over the information before they act on it.
Jackson and Lawty-Jones (1996) confirmed those findings with a similar study but fewer questionnaires (only EPQ vs. LSQ).
Zhang (2001) administered more questionnaires (TSI vs. SVSDS) to find that, unsurprisingly, having a social personality makes you more likely to want to employ external thinking style—that is, interact with others.
More studies used more questionnaires to find the same—i.e. Furnham, 1996; Furnham, Jackson, and Miller 1999; and many others, I’m sure.
The above seem to answer Swimmer963’s question: extraverted people are the ones who are better at actively applying the knowledge that they have quickly and on the spot in collaborative situations. Introverted people need time to reflect. Caveat: this conclusion is based on questionnaire studies, where people described their behavior instead of demonstrating it.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single good experiment that addressed this question directly. But I did find this one…
Suda and Fouts (1980) set up an experiment where a sixth-grader would be left to believe that a little girl in the room next door had fallen off a chair. The sixth-grader then faced a choice: go into the girl’s room (active help) or go into the experimenter’s room (passive help) or continue with the “apparent” experiment (something about children’s drawings of people). If the sixth-grader tried to help, the experimenter would return. The peer was a confederate instructed not to initiate interactions or helping behavior.
I wish they'd included a table of their results in the article. Here’s what I managed to glean from the blurb: Overall, more extraverts helped. Extraverts tended to help actively, by going to the girl’s room themselves. Only a couple introverts tried to help actively; most of those who chose to help at all have done so passively.
During the interviews afterwards, half of the introverted kids said that they didn’t actively help because it might’ve been “wrong” to stop drawing.
What conclusions / interpretations can we draw from this experiment, aside the obvious? Introverted kids might not have been as good at reacting to the world around them as extraverted kids. This might be the very same dynamic that leads to introverted adults being unable to do as well in the real world “people situation” of the Quebec test as well as they could do on the written Ontario test.
FOOTNOTE:
A popular classification of personality traits in the articles I’ve read was due to the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ). Personality is measured across three dimensions: Extraversion vs. Introversion, Neuroticism vs. Stability and Psychoticism vs. Socialisation Wikipedia article.
Honey and Mumford’s (1982) Learning Style Questionnaire (LSQ) identifies four learning styles: Activists jump into the problem at hand. “They revel in short-term crisis fire fighting,” as Furnham puts it. Reflectors are careful and methodical; they prefer to stand back and analyze everything carefully before they act. Theorists tend to synthesize the facts they observe into coherent theories. And Pragmatists want what they learn to be practical and applicable, preferably immediately.
Whetten and Cameron’s (1984) Cognitive Style Instrument (CSI) considers the learning styles form a slightly different angle than LSQ, by analyzing how people: gather information (perceptive vs. receptive), evaluate information (systematic vs. initiative) and respond to information (active vs. reflective). The last parameter is the most interesting in this case. It describes whether people act on the information quickly (active) or prefer to reflect on it before taking action (reflective).
Sternberg and Wagner (1992) Thinking Styles Inventory (TSI) asks 65 questions to classify people into one of 13 learning styles. Two of them are external and internal; people who think externally are eager to use their knowledge to interact with people, and those who think internally prefer to work independently.
Short-Version Self-Directed Search (SVSDS) assesses personality types across 6 scales, one of which is social.
REFERENCES:
(1) Furnham A. Personality and Learning Style - a Study of 3 Instruments. Personality and Individual Differences 1992 APR;13(4):429-438.
(2) Jackson C, LawtyJones M. Explaining the overlap between personality and learning style. Personality and Individual Differences 1996 MAR;20(3):293-300.
(3) Zhang LF. Thinking styles and personality types revisited. Personality and Individual Differences 2001 OCT 15;31(6):883-894.
(4) Furnham A. The FIRO-B, the learning style questionnaire, and the five-factor model. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality 1996 JUN;11(2):285-299.
(5) Furnham A, Jackson CJ, Miller T. Personality, learning style and work performance. Personality and Individual Differences 1999 DEC;27(6):1113-1122.
(6) Suda W, Fouts G. Effects of Peer Presence on Helping in Introverted and Extroverted Children. Child Dev 1980;51(4):1272-1275.
WOW MoreOn...this is exactly the kind of thorough research/data I was looking for. I think I may have done the Eysenck test or a similar one in high school, during our "Civics and Careers" class.
Musical performance. A few things I think are rationality-enhancing:
Realizing the difference between what your perception and others'--and between your perception and your recall. A confident, assured performance that has many mistakes you are aware of will often be impressive to an audience who is not expert or does not know the music--presentation goes a long way. But an expert will often perceive mistakes that you don't. And hearing yourself recorded will very sharply inform you of the difference between what you recall and what you actually did.
It's also useful for learning to understand others--especially playing in a section. (Orchestral winds usually play 2-4 to a section, with parts partially independent and partially in harmony; the first player is the "principal", while the 2nd and subsequent players generally attempt to match the tone and playing style of the principal so that when the parts harmonize, it sounds like a single player. Orchestral strings play in larger sections--8 or more--all playing the same part as the principal.) Learning to model and anticipate others' musical behavior--how they will react to conductors' gestures, to unfamiliar music--and imitate it. How will they think about the music; what do their physical gestures indicate that their future actions will be? Get it correct and be rewarded by making beautiful sounds and impressing those around you.
Self-improvement through imitating and analyzing successful techniques: when I want to play better, it often helps me to consciously imitate people who are better, and then am able to identify what it is I'm doing that is causing the improvement. If I want a richer wind sound, I'll try to imitate a college friend's style and mannerisms; in doing so, I realize, I'll sit straighter, take deeper breaths, relax more, be less hesitant at the beginnings of notes. If I want to be more agile in a tricky string passage, I'll try to imitate a different person, and realize I'm not tensing up as much, I'm using less bow motion, and moving my fingers faster.
Instant feedback: you can hear when you have or haven't mastered a task. You can try again continually until you reach success. (Also, not-so-instant feedback: will strangers will pay to hear you more than once?)
Emotional control under stress: performance can be very emotionally stressful. Learning to control this through practice is valuable. (In my first college recital, I had to stop halfway through because I was in a full panic: I'd forgotten the music and I was shaking too hard to continue. I left the stage to calm down before returning. I'd panic similarly when forced to give speeches in public. Through sheer repetition I'm now mostly unfazed by giving recitals or speeches in front of large crowds.)
No upper bound: I'm not going to exhaust the available material, as new challenges always exist and new ways to further refine existing skills are always possible.
And not a lesson but a benefit: status-raising (as some Overcoming Bias posts tickle the back of my brain). It has pretty much always been a plus in my personal and professional life to mention that I am a classical musician, particularly as many high-achieving people had some musical training. It makes people think both that I come from a higher social class than I do, and that I am more diligent and conscientious than I actually am...
Not to mention the warm-fuzzies you probably get from playing and being surrounded by beautiful sound. I sing in a church choir, which isn't exactly status raising; I tend to get odd looks from my university-age friends. However, I started out as a tone-deaf eleven-year-old and can now sing solos in front of the entire congregation, which contributes hugely to a self-image of 'I can accomplish anything that I'm willing to work hard enough on.'
Have you studied theory? Do you compose any music of your own?
This sounds useful but not like fun or like a game.
I think this was more of a preliminary brainstorm. Making games would require a lot of people-hours of work. Although a good idea! (Possible birthday present for family member = java applet rationality game?)
My own experience learning fencing may illustrate some solutions. Fencing is not an "instinctive" sport. None of the motions feel natural, and if you try to rely on instinct, you almost invariably lose. You literally have to outthink your opponent. Obviously, this isn't something you have a whole lot of time to do (most fights last significantly under 30 seconds), so you do have to develop that "ability to react" that you're talking about. Typically, beginning fencers will get so caught up in their own thoughts as they make a plan that they can't react to anything the other fencer does that is unexpected. They way this is typically overcome (at least with the groups I've worked with) is by developing the student's own aptitude, and simultaneously forcing them to adapt their thoughts to fit whatever is changing in the fight. In general, I think those two things are the best things to develop in order to get better at reacting.
Make sure you know what you are doing. Freaking out about it, or feeling like you are unsure of what to do slows you down and makes you hesitate. This doesn't sound like your problem, since you're apparently a competent nurse-in-training.
Learning, by experience, that in these situations the world changes frequently and rapidly, and when it does, you shouldn't try to hold onto your old plan or what it was that you were trying to do, but instead you should decide what to do now and do it. Experience is extremely important for this.
Fascinating. Fencing is something I have zero experience with (although I once read a book, The Speed of Dark, that you might find interesting.) Your second suggestion is very relevant to me; once I get past the beginner step of really having no idea what I'm doing, I like to turn my knowledge and experience into a plan, but I don't think fast enough on the spot to make a second plan if the first one doesn't work. I guess one thing that comes with experience is the ability to plan in real time.
Also, it makes me very happy to be described as a "competent nurse-in-training"!
I strongly agree that this type of dynamic intelligence can be enhanced through training.
When humans are placed in a stressful situation for the first time, this is usually what happens by default: 1. Human enters stressful situation. 2. Human experiences a physiological stress response, e.g. sweating, stuttering. 3. Human says, "I am freaking out," and loses all confidence in their ability to perform. 4. Loss of confidence leads to decreasing performance, a vicious cycle of failure is entered upon.
With practice / experience, a human can retrain themselves toward: 1. Human enters stressful situation. 2. Human experiences a physiological stress response, e.g. sweating, stuttering. 3. Human says, "I notice that I am experiencing a normal stress response. This is alright, and I will not let it affect my performance." 4. Human performs well, and enters a cycle of increasing confidence.
For me, this is a hard-won observation. For example, there is a tendency to assume that some people are born "good public speakers." I think it is more likely that there are simply people who are better at noticing their own physiological nervousness for what it is, and maintaining their mental composure despite it.
From my own subjective experience, once this ability is gained in one situational domain, it at least partially translates to other domains.
Very true. I've known a few people who enjoy that adrenaline-buzz and will actively seek it out. And even though I hate the physiological side of nervousness normally, it can be exhilarating when I feel confident and in control. That confidence takes a while to attain, though.
In your third speculation, I think the first and second category have got swapped round.
I edited it and fixed that, and also the numbers, which weirdly all turned into 1s when I copy-pasted.
In your third speculation, I think the first and second category have got swapped round.
You're completely right. Thank you for reading it carefully enough to make that observation.
I most often hear it referred to as "thinking on your feet," which is admittedly not noticeably more felicitous than "ability to react."
If you haven't read Gladwell's Blink, you might find it interesting.
You might also find extemporaneous speaking and improv theatre a useful way to improve at this.
That's funny, because I actually did improv theatre for a while in high school. Like you might expect, I found it very stressful and difficult. I would get about a month of practice before they picked the competitive team, and I was never good enough to make it. Good experience, though, and I would probably find it much easier now.
Ability to react
*Note: this post is based on my subjective observations of myself and a small, likely biased sample of people I know. It may not generalize to everyone.
A few days ago, during my nursing lab, my classmates and I were discussing the provincial exam that we’ll have to sit two years from now, when we’re done our degree, in order to work as registered nurses. The Quebec exam, according to our section prof, includes an entire day of simulations, basically acted-out situations where we’ll have to react as we would in real life. The Ontario exam is also a day long, but entirely written.
I made a comment that although the Quebec exam was no doubt a better test of our knowledge, the Ontario exam sounded a lot easier and I was glad I planned to work in Ontario.
“Are you kidding?” said one of the boys in my class. “Simulations are so much easier!”
I was taken aback, reminded myself that my friends and acquaintances are probably weirder than my models of them would predict (thank you AnnaSalamon for that quote), and started dissecting where exactly the weirdness lay. It boiled down to this:
Some people, not necessarily the same people who can ace tests without studying or learn math easily or even do well in sports, are still naturally good at responding to real-life, real-time events. They can manage their stress, make decision on the spot, communicate flexibly, and even have fun while doing it.
This is something I noticed years ago, when I first started taking my Bronze level lifesaving certifications. I am emphatically not good at this. I found doing “sits” (simulated situations) stressful, difficult, and unpleasant, and I dreaded my turn to practice being the rescuer. I had no problem with the skills we learned, as long as they were isolated, but applying them was harder than the hardest tests I’d had at school.
I went on to pass all my certifications, without any of my instructors specifically saying I had a problem. Occasionally I was accused of having “tunnel vision”; they meant that during a sit, treating my victim and simultaneously communicating with my teammates was more multitasking than my brain could handle.
Practice makes perfect, so I joined the competitive lifeguard team (yes, this exists, see https://picasaweb.google.com/lifeguardpete for photos of competitions). We compete in teams of four. In competition, we go into unknown situations and are scored on how we respond. Situations are timed, usually four minutes, and divided into different events; First Aid, Water Rescue, and Priority Assessment, with appropriate score sheets. It was basically my worst nightmare come true. And thanks to sample bias, instead of being slightly above average, I was blatantly worse than everyone else. It wasn’t just a matter of experience; even newcomers to the team scored higher than me. I stubbornly kept going to practice, and went to competitions, and improved somewhat. When I had my first nursing placement, something I had been stressing about all semester, it went effortlessly. There are advantages to setting your bar way, way higher than it needs to be.
There are various types of intelligence. The kind I have, the ability to soak up new information and make connections, is only one kind. But this ability-to-react must come from an actual difference in how my brain works compared to the brains of my teammates who perform well under stress, don’t get distracted, don’t suffer tunnel vision, and can communicate as a team and divide their labor on the spot. It’s another facet of the multi-sided phenomenon we call intelligence. As far as I’ve seen, it isn’t discussed much on lesswrong.
The following are my speculations. Hopefully some of them are testable.
1. Reacting in real time requires focus, but not the same kind of focus needed for, say, writing or programming. My evidence: I seem to be above average when it comes to the latter, but below average for the former, so they can’t be entirely the same thing.
2. The difference is related to the ability to silence your internal monologue, so that your thoughts are reactions to the outside world of the moment instead of reactions to, say, something you read a week ago. Based on the questions I’ve asked and the answers I’ve gotten, most people don’t notice specifically that they have to do this; it’s automatic.
3. People who are bad at reacting can be at either end of a spectrum; either they’re too open to stimuli and get distracted before they can plan their response, or they’re too closed and react in a stereotyped way based on their first impression, ignoring any new information. I’m in the second category. Watching other lifeguard teams compete in situations, I can pick out who leans which way. The first category people tend to be looking around constantly to the point that they can’t treat the victim in front of them. The second category people plant themselves, look at their victim, and don’t watch or listen to what’s happening around them.
4. If someone is very bad at reacting, we call them shy. Even having a conversation challenges their ability to think in real-time, so that they find social interaction stressful. I’m basing this hypothesis on how I used to feel talking to people, although I wouldn’t consider myself shy now.
5. You can improve your actual performance by memorizing chunks of your responses, which you can then string together appropriately. The chunks can’t be too small, or stringing them together will be more work than it’s worth. They can’t be too big, or they become stereotyped and create tunnel-vision. In guard team, we memorize “speeches” that we recite to every victim. When my section prof for my nursing lab demonstrated a head-to-toe examination, I’m pretty sure she had a similar kind of speech memorized, although she probably never thought of it explicitly that way. This kind of practice is obviously non-transferable; I can’t use the same speech for guard team and my nursing lab.
6. You can improve on your innate reaction times by practicing. With considerable effort, I’ve learned how to shut off my internal monologue, to a degree, and keep my ears and eyes open. I’m pretty sure this is transferable.
I don’t know how ability-to-react correlates with “school smarts,” the ability to absorb and integrate information. Most of my friends are better in one area than another, but the people I’ve known who are exceptionally good at reacting are usually quick learners as well. Is it a positive correlation? Negative correlation? No correlation? Can it even be measured reliably.
I would assume that this affects people’s career choices, too. Fighters and paramedics need good reaction times; they need to be able to focus on external events. Programmers and scientists need to focus on internal events, on their own thought process. I have no real evidence to support this, though.
These are my questions.
1. Has anyone else noticed this? If so, which area do you think you’re better in? It would be interesting to gather some lesswrong community statistics.
2. Is there anything in the literature? I’m hesitant to give ability-to-react a name, because it almost certainly has one already that I can’t find because I can’t think of the right keywords to put into Google.
3. Does anyone have short-cuts or practice tips that have improved their ability to react? I’ve read a lot about study methods, which apply to “school smarts,” but less about this.
Hi everyone!
I found this blog by clicking a link on Eliezer's site...which I found after seeing his name in a transhumanist mailing list...which I subscribed to after reading Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near when I was fifteen. I found Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality at the same time, and I've now successfully addicted my 16-year-old brother as well.
I'm 19 and I'm studying nursing in Ottawa. I work as a lifeguard and swim instructor at a Jewish Community Centre. (I'm not Jewish.) I sing in a girls' choir at an Anglican church. (I'm not Christian.) This usually throws people off a little. My favourite hobbies are writing and composing music. I can program in Java at a fairly beginner level after taking one class as my elective.
I've been reading this site for about a year and I decided it was time to start being useful. Cheers!
You can't get a $30 haircut if you're a woman. It's $40-$60, minimum. Let's not even get started on styling.
I used to get my hair cut at barbershops because of the price; lately I don't live near a barber who'll make an exception for me, unfortunately. (No, I don't have a man's haircut. Some barbers will just cut a woman's hair if you ask nicely.)
Honestly, I would be surprised if being more "serious" about hair (blow-drying, styling product, straightening) made much of a difference in my appearance and people's impression of me. Am I underestimating the importance of hair?
I get a haircut (trim for dead ends) from my mother about once a year. The haircuts I have paid for in the past were NEVER as much as $40. Then again, as a student maybe I can get away with the scruffier look.
I live in the US. If I want to mail someone an item bigger than can be fit in a simple envelope, what is the procedure for determining the proper packaging, postage, etc? Will I have to actually bring the package to the post office to have them determine that? What is the protocol for doing so?
I find it easiest just to bring it at the post office. I'll put it in a box/wrap it myself, but from what I've seen, the (very small) post office near my house also sells packaging materials. I just join the line up, bring the package to the clerk at the front and say "I want to mail this to __" and I received instructions.
(I live in Canada, but I'm assuming the system is similar.)
If I wasn't already halfway through my undergrad, I would consider programming as a career solely on that basis!
Your existing undergrad experience is a sunk cost. Do you want to be a programmer, or a whatever-you've-already-started-learning-to-be? (For that matter, do you have spare time? You could learn to program therein.)
I am studying nursing and for various reasons, that's where I want to stay. (There's actually a lot of appeal for me in a field where I'll never be out of work, can travel and work pretty much anywhere, and can easily branch out into many, many related fields.)
I took programming as one of my electives and I've tried to continue the learning process by giving myself extracurricular projects, but spare time is a limiting factor. Thanks for the advice though. If you have any advice for good books/online tutorials to read, or challenging projects I could assign myself, I would really appreciate that.
f I wasn't already halfway through my undergrad, I would consider programming as a career solely on that basis!
Then learn to programme and see if you like it enough to do it as a job, or if it could be helpful in the field you're doing your degree in. Being an X who can programme can be a powerful force multiplier of your effectiveness in quite a few fields. An assume very little intro to programming is Learn Python the Hard Way
I did take a class in programming last semester as one of my electives. My major is in nursing, and my father made the comment that "you'll be the only nurse in Canada who can program." I learned it pretty effortlessly (that class was the easiest A+ I've had in years) but it was a huge time sink, and I think I drove the TA insane by starting projects at home and then sending him emails at 2 am asking why my program wasn't working.
Also I'm sure you're right and it could be very helpful just to know programming as a nurse. At one of my part time jobs, the software we use to keep track of dialysis patients was actually written BY a dialysis patient, who I guess worked as a programmer and saw a need that wasn't being filled. (I'm not QUITE at the level where I can write big, complex, useful programs.)
You mean "damage" as in bad coding that you'll just have to redo later?
Yes, though it is worse than that. Bad code can contaminate otherwise good code that interacts with it, if the interface is not right.
Regardless, is it not true that anyone who works as a programmer has deadlines, and can't afford to leave a project for later because they're not in the mood to be productive?
No, not necessarily. Usually the closest I have to a deadline is my own declared estimate of when I will be done. Sometimes it is an effort just get the relative priorities of my concurrent projects.
If you are working full time programming, you should manage to get in the productive zone at least once a day. "Not being in the mood" is not an excuse to put a project off indefinitely.
"Bad code can contaminate otherwise good code that interacts with it, if the interface is not right."
That's kind of fascinating, but I can see that it would be really irritating as well having to deal with it every day.
"Usually the closest I have to a deadline is my own declared estimate of when I will be done."
Really? If I wasn't already halfway through my undergrad, I would consider programming as a career solely on that basis!
I see people running around with Che Guevara T-shirts.
I've seen that plenty of times. Seems to be a fairly common university-campus phenomenon, especially for students in the humanities.
Do any of these projects involve anything as hard as designing and implementing novel software that you may have to debug or expand a year later? Or designing an API that you will have to expand later after after lots of other programmers have written programs that use it, which you are not allowed to break?
I have no idea how to do any of those things. I would assume that they involve applying the rules of a given domain more rigorously than when you are, say, working on a novel or composing a piece of music. Which for sure would make them harder.
Also, I think I misunderstood your comment. You mean "damage" as in bad coding that you'll just have to redo later? As opposed to damage to your own motivational framework that will make it harder for you to motivate yourself in future? The latter is the way I understood it.
Regardless, is it not true that anyone who works as a programmer has deadlines, and can't afford to leave a project for later because they're not in the mood to be productive?
Your friends and family are weirder (more unlike your models) than you think they are.
This seems like a weird thing to be confidently asserting in a discussion of overconfidence.
I wasn't reading it as a confident statement of fact, more as a warning to consider the possibility that other minds are more unlike you than you've imagined.
You have to learn to be productive on demand rather than when you're in the mood for it.
That sounds like a way to end up spending your in the mood for productivity time undoing the damage you do when you try to be productive on demand.
"That sounds like a way to end up spending your in the mood for productivity time undoing the damage you do when you try to be productive on demand."
I find that once I've pushed myself to finish something I've been procrastinating on, or even to do a small amount of work on it, my mood and general sense of my own competence improves enough to make the minor pain worth it. This is true of any work that has a deadline, self-imposed or not, and yes it's usually true when I'm sleep deprived.
However, I'm not a programmer, so this applies more to school assignments or to extracurricular projects like composing music. Maybe coding is different. (My experience of programming is limited enough that there isn't much creativity involved, and the limit is my knowledge, not how sharp I am.)
I wait at a bus stop. A car passes by at high speed, and a woman that was standing too close to the road has just the time to jump clear of a shower of slush. Note to self: be aware of this danger, never stand too close, as there is no benefit but potential for ruining your clothing. Next time I notice myself standing too close to puddle/slush on the road, I move away and reinforce the heuristic.
A person from my department at work admonishes me for breaking the standard procedure for connecting to the Internet, which resulted in me being able to work that evening while causing no harm. I attempt to reason with the man, relying on my usual analytic ability to clearly explain the situation to everyone's satisfaction. Since the argument matches the template some of my psychological adaptations recognize as confrontational, emotions start to interfere with my normal cognition, and as a result I'm unable to think carefully and my argument is much less persuasive than expected. Note to self: when expected to enter a situation that can evoke strong emotions, plan what to do and what to say in advance, before emotions start interfering with ability to think, rehearse the plan in your mind, and only then allow the exposure. Next time I notice that I started to argue with emotions rising up, I cut myself short and regroup. Later, I reflect on the signs that could allow me to notice the situation approaching in advance (such as an unusual social interaction, something I wouldn't already have the heuristic associated with), and rehearse the response of recognizing the situation when exposed to appropriate cues.
I slip on an iced street, but recover without falling. I look around, and realize that a low fence that goes along the road has sharp spikes on its top, and the adjoining building a sharp stone border, so that unlucky fall on either would have me injured. There is potential for harm in falling close to them, and no benefit in choosing to walk close to them as opposed to giving enough room to fall clear. So I adopt a heuristic of not walking close to dangerous structures on slippery surface, or going much slower where necessary. Next time I notice that I'm unnecessarily close to a dangerous structure while there's room to walk clear of it with no additional inconvenience, I correct my trajectory, thus reinforcing the heuristic.
"Since the argument matches the template some of my psychological adaptations recognize as confrontational, emotions start to interfere with my normal cognition, and as a result I'm unable to think carefully and my argument is much less persuasive than expected."
I've trained myself to notice when I start to get emotionally involved in a confrontation, and to make a conscious effort to take "one step back" and I deliberately apologize to the person for something, though not necessarily what we're arguing about. That one step will a) snap me out of the confrontational mode, and b) convince whoever I'm talking to that I'm reasonable and open to their point of view. This method has helped me a lot at work and with family, and I wish I could remember to use it all the time.
This article made me think of a list I've been informally trying to make, of what stupidity feels like on the inside. The point is to identify when I'm writing code poorly - as the output will probably be even more bugridden than normal, and possibly the output is appropriate to debug-by-starting-over (Though starting over violates my normal policy.)
Stupidity feels like being bored, being in pain, being distracted, wanting to do anything else than this. Stupidity feels like being unworthy of these divine (external) ideas. Stupidity feels like blind plodding obedience. Stupidity feels like lovely and/or grotesque baroque clevernesses.
Trying to stop working and recover when I notice myself being stupid might be the right move, but I think pushing through it (aside from staying up late, which is a mistake) is a better policy. You have to learn to be productive on demand rather than when you're in the mood for it.
"You have to learn to be productive on demand rather than when you're in the mood for it."
Very true, and it's part of the reason I like to arrange structured activities that force me, on a day-to-day basis, to do the things I enjoy. I could have taught myself programming (maybe) but taking a course as my elective forced me to actually write the code when the assignment was due the next morning, as opposed to when I felt like it. It's a good feeling, getting something done and knowing you did a good job, but it's depressing how bad I am at motivating myself to push through and get it done without a deadline. (I don't know if this is true of other people, but actually I've been told I'm unusually productive.)
Not every day, but yep in general.
Definitely exercise helps. Working out first thing in the morning is probably the best way to ensure you'll be a) energized to start your day, and b) tired enough to go to bed at night. However, that might be tough if you already are on a deadline to get to work.
I wouldn't recommend working out at night if you're already a night owl. If you're at all like me, you'll end up super-awake right when you should be going to bed.
Odd, I posted something related to this about two days ago. Coincidence?
I can attend on February 16th and 17th. Can't make it on the 18th-19th. 20th might work too, but I have to look into it.
Locale doesn't matter, as long as it's not too noisy, which would, in my mind, defeat the purpose.
Also, I'm rather ignorant about general pub etiquette, due to my lack of experience in this particular setting. I don't drink. They don't kick you out for that, do they?
You'll be fine. Usually at pubs you can order food as well as alcohol, so you don't feel silly sitting there with nothing.
I'm in Ottawa, but would try to make a future Toronto meetup. Unfortunately I'll be out of the country from Feb. 12-19.
Aside: Is there interest in an Ottawa meetup? I know Cyan and myself would probably be in, anyone else?
I'm also in Ottawa! Would definitely be interested in a meet-up. Aside from that, I will be in Toronto the week of February 21-24th and I could maybe push it as early as the 20th. Any location is good.
I find it reassuring sometimes to look at other people's accomplishments, especially those in areas where I'll probably never push my brain to its full potential, which probably wouldn't meet their potential anyway. (Composing music is an example.) It's reassuring to look away from everyday life, where everyday people seem to spend so much of their time just surviving and not really outputting anything, and see that it IS possible to output something incredible. A beautiful piece of music can be enjoyable in itself, but it's also an inspiration to me to produce something equally amazing in another area.
Loading…

A few notes.
Writing leveling up in an engaging way is hard. Groundhog Day is one classic example where it's done well, and is pure growing mindset and determination, no extra talent.
I think in the Hunger Games it is implicitly assumed that she both has a gift for archery and had worked hard to develop it. I agree that her wins look mostly like luck or some behind-the-screen force.
Indeed in the Honor Harrington series the brutal training schedule, while not often explicitly shown, is alluded to multiple times, and the explanation for the original villain remaining largely technically incompetent is rather contrived and hand-waved. I chalk that one to David Weber being completely incapable of writing non-cartoonish villains, ever.
A big offender in the "all talent, little work" department is Ender's Game: Ender manages to beat a more experienced player 2 out of 3 without ever touching the game controls prior to the contest. Later on, he trains his troops, but he is already magically there himself. Though there is the bit where he levels up properly under Mazer Rackham.
Brandon Sanderson's writings tend to be quite decent. The characters tend to put a lot of work into achieving their potential, but there is never a "growing mindset is all you need" premise, one always needs a healthy measure of talent to excel. Even geniuses with an obvious talent at least have to work hard at learning how to control it.
I'd thought about putting the Mistborn series in the "things that are close to what I'm talking about", but I've only read 2/3 of the first book.
I'd forgotten about that. I think maybe I assumed the incompetent-villain characters were finding ways to skimp on the training that was supposed to be required?