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Brienne
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Contents
In Defense Of Semantics, Or: Until You Can Say What
You Mean, You Cannot Mean What You Say
Testing Is Bad
15
25
28
35
38
Hexaflexagation Visualization
41
43
44
53
My Christmas Tree
54
Werewolf
55
59
Mobius Chess
71
Rationality Activism
75
81
85
Reflections On Reflection
89
99
104
106
107
112
115
118
Perceptual Editing
122
130
Salvaging Sacraments
133
139
143
147
Ars Memoriae
150
156
162
What Is Hypnosis?
169
Hasty Genderalizations
176
184
205
207
208
211
Cuddle Orientation
219
223
226
229
Observing Cthia
231
235
250
A Message to System 1
254
259
Systems 1?
265
271
276
277
291
297
308
311
318
341
353
357
365
Simulating Confusion
371
Mental Postures
377
386
391
392
396
406
410
Directing Attention
414
418
425
429
Feeling Clearly
435
Reflective Attention
443
449
Reflective Recording
455
463
Brienne's Workflow
477
Responding To Overconfidence
483
488
517
520
524
547
550
552
Primitive Introspection
553
560
562
565
566
567
A Walking Meditation
574
576
580
Every class begins with problem solving. The question posed in the
most recent assignment is written on the board. The students, as a
class, must solve it. No one is allowed to give an actual answer to
the question until a quorum has agreed on the best way to solve the
problem, then executed the plan and interpreted the results. The
teacher can participate in the problem solving by posing leading
questions, encouraging certain directions of thought, and
suggesting that they try using tools they already have, but for the
most part the students run this part of the show. There are two
main goals here: to develop their scientific toolboxes, and to
encounter the inherent bugs of human minds (cognitive biases) so
they can learn to recognize and patch them, thus solving problems
more efficiently in the future. Questions early in the course will
emphasize revealing biases, and the later problems will emphasize
empirical methods of inquiry and testing. Overall, were working
toward inventing something like Bayes theorem or another broad
philosophy of science.
*******************
What I'd really like to see in the comments here is a brainstorming
session in which we generate a whole bunch of useful project ideas
for a class like this. In particular I'd like to focus on things geared
toward 8th graders, but other thoughts are also welcome.
Testing Is Bad
August 27, 2012
My father is a high school science teacher in the US. Today he was
feeling a bit overwhelmed by work, so I helped him grade tests from
Bio 1, an introductory biology course for kids in their 9th or 10th
years. Its early in the course, so they havent moved on yet from
attempts to make sure everyones familiar with very basic and
central notions that they should have learned in earlier years but
likely didnt. I only graded fill-in-the-blank and definition type
questionsno essays or short answers that would require
significant interpretation. Ive never met the kids in the class, and
since I only graded page two of the tests I didnt even see their
names. Neither is this a common occurrence: I believe Ive helped
Dad with grading one other time in my whole life. Just in case some
readers wanted those disclaimers. Anyway.
It was an enlightening experience. It was very clear that the vast
majority of the students were far more focused on exploiting the
system during class and homework than on understanding the
material at hand. They were trying to learn what they needed to
pass the test, and didn't feel at all that the test is merely evidence of
what they've so far understood or failed to understand. Their whole
purpose as students is to pass the test.
This is how I ended up grading one test on which the student
defined "element" as "part of an atom which makes up an element".
I thought for a long time about what would have to happen in a
childs head for him to give an answer like this on a test. When I
was in high school myself, I never thought very hard about the
minds of other students, and assumed people did poorly in school
because they are stupid and lazy. But now, I see that something
else is going on here, something caused not by the stupidity or
laziness of individual students but by a grave systemic flaw in US
education.
There are two correct answers in this context to "define element".
The first is something along the lines of, "something without parts"
(Dad often teaches via the history of science, so this would come
from the ancient Greek notion), and the second is, "a substance
made up entirely of one kind of atom". I took Dads intro chemistry
class way back when, and I remember his wording.
Here is the real problem. It is threefold. First, the students don't
understand the goal of their lessonsthey dont know how to know
what the teacher wants them to understand. Second, they dont
know how to assess the content and level of their current
understandingthey don't know how to know what they don't
understand. These combine to create the third part of the problem:
they cannot identify the gap between what they dont know and
what theyre meant to know, so they cant focus their academic
efforts on closing it.
As it stands, high school students know what tests tend to look like
and how to streamline the process of passing them. They are
rewarded for good performance and punished for poor performance,
and no one has ever tried to explain to them the internal
mechanisms of learning beyond that. The reason they run into such
huge problems with Dad's classes in particular is that his tests
require a great deal more understanding as a prerequisite for good
performance than do the tests theyve encountered previously.
10
The kind of test you write if you dont want to spend much time
gradingthat is, understanding the minds of individual studentsis
the same kind of test you pass by knowing how to take tests. An
expert at test taking can pass a test over very difficult material
without actually understanding the material provided the test is
written in a way that allows them to exercise their expertise. This is
how I got a B+ on a college level psychology final last year without
ever going to class or studying. There were many things on that
test whose answers I didn't really know, and sometimes I didnt fully
comprehend the question itself, but I could deduce what would be
counted as correct in most cases because I know how to take tests.
Multiple choice, for instance, hardly ever requires understanding in
most contexts. It only requires memorization of associated sets of
terms. Its a skillset that takes a long time to develop, but nine or
ten years is plenty long.
So the poor kid did exactly what hed been conditioned over the
course of a decade to do. He threw together "part", "made up",
"atom", and "element" into a grammatically well-formed sentence,
and didnt even notice that it was totally nonsensical. It didn't occur
to him to actually try to understand what "element" means.
And why would he? Imagine that you arent simply trying to be
efficient so you can spend your time on other things that are more
obviously worthwhile, which is itself understandable. Imagine that
experience has shown that you arent smart enough to understand
complicated things even when you try. This is a pet theory you
pulled together after failing tests repeatedly early on. It makes a lot
of sense to spend what cognitive resources you know you do have
on exploiting the rules of the system, getting by without anyone
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14
I just had a long Facebook discussion about what it would take for a
rationalist to believe in god. I raised the question because the
better we know exactly what sort of evidence would be required for
rational theism, the more justified we are in not being theists. It
turned out to be verydifficult to imagine what evidence would
suffice. In the end, I was able to prove that there are no conditions
under which it would be rational to believe in god. This surprised
me, so I thought Id share my argument.
I'll start with bunnies. One person said theyd believe in god given
fossil evidence of Cambrian rabbits. That seemed pretty weak to
me at first, but I thought I should at least think it through. I'm
imagining that tomorrow morning I wake up to coffee and NPR, and
find that the main story of the day is a claim that archeologists
uncovered fossils from the Cambrian. My first thought is, "Simple
mistake. Someone misrepresented information, got confused,
fabricated evidence, etc." I do some research. It probably is a
simple mistake. But suppose it isn't. Next, I think, "Earthquake
anomaly." That seems pretty likely. More research. Along these
lines, I entertain increasingly unlikely hypotheses (in careful order).
"God did it" is nowhere near the beginning of the list. Part of that is
15
because I'm not sure what it means, but I'll get back to that. I'd be
getting near the neighborhood of god territory about the time I
started hypothesizing that Earth is an alien science fair project and
the rabbit fossil is left over from a test run that got a little messy and
wasn't cleaned up all the way. That would indeed involve an
intelligent creator of the human race, but it's quite a long way from,
say,
omnipotence,
omniscience,
omnipresence,
and
omnibenevolence.
The first problem with imagining sufficient evidence for belief in god
is this: There are a whole lot of things we could mean when we say
"god exists". Not all of them are equally likely. Nor does one kind of
evidence justify belief in all of them. "God" is fuzzy. Much like
bunnies. It's semantically ambiguous and vague. So if we want to
know what it would take to reasonably believe in god, were going to
have to figure out what it would take to reasonably believe in a
pretty diverse range of entities individually.
That's one of the most frustrating things about talking with theists;
they're quick to tell you what they don't mean once they've
determined you're arguing for a god in whom they don't believe
either, but they usually aren't so quick to pin down what they really
do mean. When you try to reason with a theist, therefore, its a good
idea to ask them explicitly what they mean by god even before you
tell them that he doesnt exist. With many you get the impression
that they themselves don't know that they mean. You'll talk with
them for a long while, thinking you're getting somewhere, and then
when you bring them to a conclusion they don't like but can't avoid,
16
they say, "Well sure, but that's not what I mean by 'god'. What if god
is reallyx?"
Legend has it that Paul Spade was once teaching a seminar on the
philosophy of theology when someone pulled one of these. Another
student gave an exasperated sigh, turned to the first student, and
remarked, "Look, what if god is a garage in New Jersey?"
17
alternative hypotheses that are far more in line with the vast majority
of what we've so far observed. It would be utterly irrational to
believe even in the very weak meanings of god on the basis of
Cambrian rabbits.
(Obviously, this isnt evidence at all for
garage-gods, since garages are equally likely to exist whether or not
there were rabbits in the Cambrian.)
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20
21
You hand a very large list of prime numbers to a friend and tell him
to select two four digit prime numbers (without telling you what they
are) and write down their product. He returns a paper on which is
written "16285467". You walk outside directly afterward, grab a
shovel, pick a random chunk of ground, and start digging. Five feet
down, you hit a rock. Upon examining the rock, you find that it
contains fossilized crinoid stems on the surface (and may or may
not contain a rabbit in the middle, presumably from the Paleozoic
this time). On one side, the crinoid stems are configured to write out
"2213". On the other side, the crinoid stems say "7359". Actually
imagine that this has happened, and imagine how you would react.
I must be hallucinating probably wouldnt satisfy you, for you lack
the ability to factor eight digit numbers in your head.
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24
25
people often stumble on things that are right without the help of
science, so this can't be just about truth.
Lots of people think that what makes something count as science is
the fact that it came from observation and testing. But I don't buy
that. Plenty of stuff that doesn't count as science is all about
observation. People believe in astrology, for instance, because they
observe that astrologers make predictions that turn out to be true.
So why isn't astrology science? How is the theory of astrology
different from, say, Einstein's theory of general relativity?
The difference is that Einstein's theory might turn out to be wrong,
and if it is, we'll eventually know. We'll know because one day we'll
make observations about the world that aren't in line with his
theory. What makes theories like Astrology, Freudian analysis, and
other sorts of pseudo-science unscientific is that they can explain
everything. Usually, when we see that a theory is confirmed over
and over again, we believe in it even more. But if there's no way at
all, even in principle, to make an observation that isn't in line with
the theory, then all those confirmations don't actually mean
anything. Theories like that would be in line with all the same
observations even if the theories were false--so if the theory is false,
there's no way to find that out.
General relativity, evolution, Newtonian mechanics, and Mendelian
genetics are all scientific theories not because there's lots of
evidence confirming them, but because they make falsifiable
predictions. They predict certain things about the world, and the
predictions are risky because we can check to see if the world really
26
is that way. If the world doesn't turn out to be the way the theory
predicts, then we know the theory is false. For pseudo-science, we
get all the same predictions whether the theory is true or not.
There's no observation we could make to find out whether the
theory's false. Unscientific theories are unfalsifiable, unable to be
shown false.
Observations that support a theory only really count as support if
the theory makes risky predictions. If a theory is scientific, you
should be able to make a test so that if you get one result, you can
continue believing the theory just as much as you did before--but if
you get another result, you have to conclude that the theory is
false. Pseudoscience doesn't let you make these kinds of tests,
because there's never any result you could possibly get that would
make you change your mind and stop believing the theory.
Sometimes people have theories that really are testable, but when
the test results don't come out the way they want, they either find
some excuse to throw those results away, or they change their
theory to match the results so it looks like they were right all along.
That's not science either, because it's impossible to find out that the
theory is false when you do things that way, too.
This philosophy of science is called falsificationism, and I made it
because draws it a line between what is science and what isn't.
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Bayes.
Remember back to when you were a little kid and you were just
starting to doubt the existence of the tooth fairy. It was a difficult
question, because if there's no tooth fairy then your parents are
liars. And that's bad. But you can't shake the feeling that this tooth
fairy business doesn't quite match up with your understanding of the
way the world works. So you say to the world, "Stand back. I'm
going to try science."
You start with a question. You want to know how it is that money
appears under your pillow whenever you lose a tooth. The theory
you want to test is that the tooth fairy flies into your room, carefully
reaches under your pillow, takes the tooth, and leaves money. So
your theory seems to predict that you ought to be able to catch her
on camera. Your test consists of leaving your freshly liberated tooth
under your pillow, pointing your webcam at your bed, setting it to
record all night, going to sleep, and watching the video the next
day. Your hypothesis is that there will be a fairy somewhere in the
video. Good old capital "S", capital "M" Scientific Method, as usual.
Suppose you get exactly the result you hypothesized. Sure enough,
three hours into the video you see a light from outside, the window
opens, and a small shiny woman with wings floats in. She reaches
under your pillow for the tooth, replaces it with money, and then
leaves.
The intuitive response to this result is to become
wholeheartedly certain that the tooth fairy exists.
Popper's
falsificationism tells us it's going to take a whole lot more tests
before we should be really certain that the tooth fairy exists,
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How certain are you about the existence of the tooth fairy in the
first place, before the experiment? Since you were definitely
becoming a tooth fairy doubter, but still thought it was pretty
up-in-the-air, you figure you were about 40% certain that there's
a tooth fairy. You can express that as the decimal 0.4.
How likely is it that you'll see a fairy on the recording even if the
tooth fairy doesn't actually exist? It seems really unlikely. But
you can imagine other things that would cause this. You
mentioned to your older brother earlier that you were doubting
the tooth fairy, so maybe he'll find out about your plan and play a
prank with his film school buddies. Or maybe there will be some
fluke that causes damage to the file so it looks like there's a
glowy person shaped thing in the recording that really is only in
the recording. So it's imaginable, but unlikely. Let's say 5%
sure something like that could happen. 0.05.
Finally, how likely is it that there's no tooth fairy? Well this one's
easy. You already decided you're 40% sure there's a tooth fairy,
so you must be 60% sure there isn't one. 0.6.
Bayes' theorem is all about finding out how much the evidence
should change your beliefs, and whether it should change them at
all. It weighs all those factors we just estimated against each other
and comes up with a degree of certainty that actually makes sense
31
when you put them together. Human brains are really bad at
weighing probabilities rationally. They just aren't built to do it. But
that's ok, because we have powerful statistical tools like this to help
us out--provided we know how to use them.
If you want to know the nitty gritties of what's really going on inside
Bayes theorem, check out Eliezer Yudkowsky's "excruciatingly
gentle introduction to Bayes' theorem". He's already got that
covered (beautifully). I just want to show you how it ends up
working in real life. So let's run the numbers.
We're looking for the probability that there's a tooth fairy after
accounting for having (apparently) caught her on camera. That's
P(A|B), read "probability of A given B", where A is "there's a tooth
fairy" and B is "she's in the recording", so "probability that there's a
tooth fairy given that she's in the recording".
In the numerator, we start with P(B|A), which is how likely it is that
we really will see her on camera if she exists--probability "she's in
the recording" given "there's a tooth fairy". And that's 0.8. Next, we
multiply that by how sure we were that there's a tooth fairy before
we caught her on film, simply probability "there's a tooth fairy". And
that's 0.4, for a total of 0.32 on top.
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2) A person you're attracted to smiles at you. Are they into you too?
3) (For this one, intuit the answer first. Make your best guess before
applying the theorem, and WRITE IT DOWN. It's ok if you're way
off. Just about all of us are. That's the point. Human brains aren't
built for this kind of problem. I just don't want you falling prey to
hindsight bias.) 1% of women at age forty who participate in routine
screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer
will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast
cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age
group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is
the probability that she actually has breast cancer?
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35
Exercise One
Next time you change your mind about something, make a study of
what led you to do it.
1. Get a piece of paper and fold it in half. Great big in the top left,
write down an estimation of how certain you were about your
belief before you started the process of changing your mind.
Beneath that, write out, in as much detail as possible, why you
held the false belief in the first place. If there were several
pieces of evidence, make a list.
2. On the other side, write down all the evidence you collected or
considered that ultimately led you to abandon your former
hypothesis. Circle the one that finally did the trick.
3. Then, distance yourself from the situation. Pretend that its is a
story about someone else entirely. Consider each piece of
weakening evidence individually, and estimate how much less
certain it would make a fully rational Bayesian reasoner on its
own and in conjunction with the other pieces of evidence you
already had when you started considering this new one. If you
want to be really fancy about it, plug it into Bayes theorem and
run the numbers. Write those estimations in a column.
36
Now, perhaps youre a whole lot more rational than I am. But heres
what I find almost every time. What actually happens is that my
certainty barely changes at all until the final piece of evidence, even
though the Bayesian reasoners certainty about the false hypothesis
falls way below 50% long before that.
This is what it means to cling to a belief, and it's all the more difficult
to overcome in the course of a debate. Even the most rational
among us have human brains full of cognitive biases; defending
yourself against them takes serious effort, no matter how far you've
come as a rationalist.
But you don't have to take my word for it! Go do science to it. I'll
see you next time. ;-)
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one's own best interest is a side effect of the extremely useful family
of heuristics we employ to maximize rationality, a family comprising
such skills as skepticism, hypothetical reasoning, and sensitivity to
common fallacies in arguments. Applying these tools to the claims
of others protects us from believing willy-nilly whatever we happen
to read, and encourages the adoption of only the most strongly
justified beliefs. They're important skills, and without them the
secular movement wouldn't have much going for it. But for every
heuristic, there is a bias.
Quibble addiction is a cognitive bias, one we can learn to counteract
as we would any other obstacle to lucid thought.
Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that criticism itself is bad.
Obviously, it's tremendously useful.
It's essential to practice
skeptically evaluating arguments from Your Side just as you would
those from The Other Side. And when it isn't trivial, criticism is an
invaluable way to improve on your allies' message. I just want to
highlight that not all criticism is in fact productive. Criticism is a tool
for accomplishing other goals; when it functions as its own end, we
risk losing sight of our deeper values.
So here's a start on how to kick the quibble habit. Whenever I feel
the urge to analyze and expose the shortcomings of an author I
basically agree with, I ask myself the following questions. They
often reveal that I'm indulging my quibble addiction. Subsequently,
I'm able to devote my limited resources to something more
important -- at a minimum, to someone who's wronger on the
Internet.
39
What goal did the author have in mind when she wrote this in the
first place?
40
Hexaflexagation Visualization
November 09, 2012
If you've never heard of a hexaflexagon, watch this.
In brief,
hexaflexagons are cool because they have really weird geometry.
They have too many sides.
If you've never seen a
hexahexaflexagon, watch this. Hexahexaflexagons have even more
too many sides. If you find yourself hexiflexagonally inclined, make
one yourself and play with it for a while. Then, once you've
accidentally sunk way too much time into trying to understand your
new toy and you're really frustrated that the sides keep
disappearing and new ones keep appearing out of nowhere, watch
this:
Embedded File ()
41
"Open" for bottom side: {(1#, 6o), (1#, 2#), (1o, 2#), (2#, 3#), (2#,
5o), (2o, 3#), (3*, 1#), (3#, 4o), (4o, 2o), (5o, 1o), (6o, 3*)}
"Flip" for top side: {(1*, 2#), (1o, 6o), (2*, 3#), (2o, 5o), (3*, 4o), (3o,
1#), (4*, 2o), (5*, 1o), (6*, 3*)}
"Flip" for bottom side: {(1#, 3o), (1o, 5*), (2#, 1*), (2o, 4*), (3*, 6*),
(3#, 2*), (4o, 3*), (5o, 2o), (6o, 1o)}
But it's way more fun on a balloon, right?
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seminary? I felt fairly certain that the only reason priests could
serve as special conduits of God's grace was that their hearts were
pure and fully devoted to Him when they made the request. It
seemed implausible that the sacrament of Ordination, really just a
collection of very fancy symbols, could grant you magic powers in
virtue of its role within the thoroughly human structure of the
Church.
I called bullshit. I decided to become a priest. "The Church doesn't
let girls become priests," my second grade teacher informed me. I
told her I didn't really intend to ask permission.
My teachers had no idea what to do with me. They weren't trained
in theology. We didn't have that sort of funding. Besides, no one
expected that an eight-year-old might singlehandedly attempt the
Protestant Reformation. But I knew nothing of the other sects of
Christianity, and I was comfortable with my personal interpretation
of Catholicism, so I took my first communion happily in a white
dress like all the other little girls, and that was that.
I encountered even greater challenges to my faith in third grade.
One day, while sitting with my classmates in a circle for story time,
my teacher said something deeply puzzling. I don't recall what story
she was reading to us or what led her to say this, but she said, "Of
course, I'm sure all your parents are good Catholics, or at least
Christians." I raised my hand.
"Actually," I corrected her, "my dad's an atheist."
45
She gasped. Then, with shock on her face, she responded, "Oh,
I'm so sorry!" As I write this, it occurs to me for the first time that
she probably meant to apologize for expressing offhandedly to a
fragile group of children her rude presumption. I've always thought,
as I did when it happened, that she felt sorry for me because I was
in the awful position of having an atheist for a father.
I didn't understand her concern. I'd never talked to either of my
parents about Dad's atheism, or about whether there are other
people who aren't Catholics. I didn't know it was supposed to be a
bad thing. I just considered it one of the many ways in which he
differed from the other people I knew, like his being a biology
teacher or keeping lizards as pets.
I talked to Dad about this incident. I don't remember the content of
that conversation, but I know it resulted in his recommendation that I
read The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan. He lent me a
copy. Over the next year I read that and several other Sagan
books. Needless to say, I became even more of a nuisance during
religion class.
I think I was more upset that the adults in my life were satisfied with
ignorance when they understood my questions and criticisms but
couldn't answer than I was by the discovery that God isn't real. It
caused me to lose respect for them. I even lost respect for my
mother, to some extent.
From mid fourth grade on, school was a horribly painful experience
for me. I kept pretending to be Catholic. What skepticism I couldn't
46
contain during class and my feeling that no one else cared about
what was true created enough of a rift between me and my peers,
my mother, and my teachers that I was not about to give up
plausible denyability, thereby formalizing my isolation and rendering
it impenetrable. I became deeply depressed. I refused to turn in
homework or study for tests. I paid as little attention to class as
possible, spending all of my time absorbed in science fiction,
fantasy, and pop physics books. I remember telling my mother that
I wanted to drop out of school forever, that I'd make a living by
playing my saxophone on street corners. Fortunately, I discovered
early in seventh grade that I could get straight A's with minimal
effort, thereby keeping my teachers and my mom off my back, at
least as long as I stayed quiet.
But I couldn't stay quiet in religion class, which, by this point, was
being taught by a priest. His name was Fr. McCarthy. Fr. McCarthy
was The Enemy. Not only was he a particularly conservative
Catholic who'd apparently slept through Vatican Two, but he was
the most wretched, underhanded debater I've encountered to this
day. He knew I disagreed with everything he taught, and he'd
purposefully pick fights with me so the other students could watch
him trample the heathen.
He never trampled me fairly, though, even when I was in fact
wrong. True, in eighth grade I was already a more advanced
philosopher and theologian than he was, but I was still a kid and
had most of my cognitive developing yet to do. I was quite a bit
more wrong then. He often could have won fairly. But he didn't.
Instead, he would use insults, snide and disparaging remarks, and
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behind a bush, crying. At some point I told my mom, who told the
(far more liberal) main priest of our parish, who was furious.
I hear that Fr. McCarthy was harshly reprimanded. But I would like
to thank him. If I'd not felt that moment of intense discomfort at my
years of deception, I don't know how long it might have taken me to
learn to be true to myself. I don't know that I'd ever have found the
courage to stand up, to speak out, and to be counted. I certainly
would not have found myself announcing to every other
non-Christian in my brand new public school junior year, "You are
not alone."
I was tired of hiding. I wasn't any good at it anyway. Mine had
always been an awfully noisy closet, and people were listening. I
cared about the truth, and I was angry at the world for
systematically neglecting it. So I resolved one morning to give it a
voice.
The school secretary was in charge of making announcements over
the intercom at the beginning of each day, after which she led the
school in the Pledge of Allegiance. That morning--a Friday, I think--I
skipped class for the first time. I went to the secretary's office,
introduced myself, and requested the honor of leading the Pledge.
She seemed delighted that a student was taking interest, and
obliged me.
As she read the announcements for Friday morning, my heart
pounded. My hands trembled. I was worried I might not be able to
speak. Then she handed me the intercom, and I became calm,
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But someone did. I don't know his name, but he was a small
mousey freshman whose voice I'd never heard before, and he came
to me as I was rummaging in my locker. "Hey," he said. His voice
was shaking, and he spoke so quietly it was nearly a whisper. "That
was really cool, what you did. I've always been too scared to tell
anybody I'm an atheist. I thought I was the only one. It means a lot
to me, what you said. Or didn't say, I guess. Thank you." He ran
off before I could even say you're welcome.
He wasn't the only one. More people thanked me that day. And
more the next week. And the next month. And they weren't just
telling me. I overheard people talking constitutional philosophy in
the halls, saying it's not fair to Hindus or Buddhists either, and
saying they'd just found out some of their friends don't believe in
God. A few weeks later I found out someone had pulled the same
stunt in a neighboring town, and then, to my great astonishment,
that it had even happened at my old Catholic school.
I thought coming out as an atheist was mostly just about me. I was
wrong.
By coming out publicly, I did not further ostracize myself. There was
a lot of retaliation from those who felt threatened by the challenge to
Christian authority, but I was not standing up to them alone. None
of us was. In a matter of seconds, I founded a community that had
been waiting the whole time and needed only to be given a voice.
They all just needed to see one person stand up and say, "It's ok to
be an atheist."
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My Christmas Tree
December 15, 2012
Embedded File ()
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Werewolf
March 06, 2013
I recently discovered a party game called Werewolf. I'm utterly
captivated by it. I understand that there are several variations, but
I'll just explain the most basic and the two that I've played.
The basic narrative is this. You're in a medieval village, and there's
a werewolf on the loose. The werewolf is killing people at night while
the town sleeps. A sort of witch-hunt ensues, the villagers decide
one among them is the wolf, and that person is lynched. But if
they've chosen incorrectly, someone gets killed the following night,
and another person is lynched the next day.
In the variations I played, the town also has a doctor, and a visiting
professional werewolf hunter. The doctor knows how to make a
special anti-werewolf potion, and he can make exactly one dose a
day to protect a villager through the night. The hunter has a magic
pendant that glows in the presence of a werewolf, but it can only be
used on one person a night and must re-charge during the day.
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1. Start with five people and five cards. The cards can be from a
poker deck or something else, provided one card signifies
"werewolf", one "doctor", one "hunter", one "villager", and one
"narrator". Each player looks at her card and keeps it secret,
with the exception of the narrator, who reveals herself as such.
2. Upon the narrator's instruction, the other four players close their
eyes. They all begin to tap their legs, making noise so no one
can identify who is taking non-verbal actions by sound. The
narrator says, "Doctor, wake up." The player with the doctor card
opens her eyes. The narrator asks her, "Who do you want to
protect?" The doctor points to a player who is not the narrator,
and the narrator takes note of this. The narrator says, "Doctor,
go back to sleep," and the doctor closes her eyes. The narrator
says, "Werewolf, wake up." The werewolf opens her eyes. The
doctor asks her who she wants to kill, and she points at a player
who isn't the narrator. The narrator takes note and tells the
werewolf to go back to sleep. The narrator has the hunter wake
up, asks who she thinks the werewolf is, takes note, and has her
go back to sleep. Then the narrator says, "Good morning
villagers!" and everyone opens their eyes (and stops tapping).
3. If the doctor protected the same person the werewolf tried to kill,
and the hunter failed to discover the werewolf, the narrator says,
"No one died." If the doctor protected a different person than the
werewolf tried to kill, the narrator says, "[Name of player] died." If
the hunter discovered the werewolf, the village kills the werewolf
and villagers still alive win. If the hunter failed to discover the
werewolf and a non-werewolf character died, the dead player
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Mobius Chess
March 27, 2013
Many thanks to Robby Bensinger and Jesse Galef for the
feedback loops of brilliant geekery without which this might
not have happened.
I think actual game play would work best with felt and velcro.
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Rationality Activism
April 03, 2013
Secular groups should devote more resources to rationality
activism. If you know what I mean by "rationality activism" and
agree that we should be focusing on it more, you can stop
here. Otherwise, read on.
Activism?
People get a little jumpy sometimes when I mention "activism"
in the context of the secular movement. It often brings to mind
"evangelical atheists" and concerted efforts to undermine
religion. That's a scary picture when we've made so much
progress toward establishing inviting communities, engaging
in productive dialogues with religious organizations, and
improving the atheist image. But I think this comes from a
misunderstanding about what a secular group is and could be.
There's a lot of uncertainty surrounding our relationship with
religious people and organizations. Many individual members
have at least an intuition that there's something genuinely
harmful about religion (or particular kinds of religion), and that
the world would be better off without it. I strongly sympathize.
Many central features of most of the largest religions are
frightening and dangerous. On the other hand, even if a secular
group wanted to fight religion explicitly, the project would
probably fail. It isn't a practical strategy. (I'll happily defend
that for anyone who asks me to, but since my goal is to
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more rational.
Religion is not responsible for all of human irrationality. It
preys on and exacerbates what irrationality already exists. With
or without religion, we are predictably irrational. We make
certain kinds of mistakes over and over again, simply because
our brains must cut a lot of corners to navigate our fast-paced,
complex environment. If everyone was expected, and given the
tools, to patch these bugs in their cognitive programming,
religion wouldn't stand a chance in the first place.
In a post to lesswrong.com, Eliezer Yudkowsky proposes a
thought experiment along the following lines. Imagine you
have the opportunity to teach everybody one general method
of rationality that is directed at making people more effective
human beings, and it can't target religion in particular. What
might you do to raise the sanity waterline high enough that
religion goes under?
Well, maybe there is no one particular method that could make
that happen. But we are, at the very least, narrowing in on a
group of habits of thought that make people better at thinking
critically, testing hypotheses, and avoidingor at least
mitigating the damage caused bythe cognitive biases we
were all born with. The world where everyone consistently
practices these kinds of habits is the one I'm really after. The
fact that it probably doesn't include religion is merely an added
bonus.
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know. What will I tell my parents? Will they still love me???"
There was absolutely none of that. I was very surprised to
discover other people react that way.
It just wasn't a thing for me.
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Reflections On Reflection
May 18, 2013
Note: A shorter version of this post will appear at A
Moment Of Science very soon. If you're interested in my
extra sciencey stuff, that's where to watch.
Alice peers through the looking glass.
When I was a little baby freshman philosopher, one of my very
first professors asked me this question: Why do mirrors flip
images left and right, but not up and down?
At first, I didn't understand what this had to do with philosophy
(not that I knew what philosophy was--which was exactly his
point!). It sounded like physics to me, and answering surely
required knowledge of optics that I didn't possess.
Today, I consider the process of working out the answer to this
question one of the very best illustrations of philosophical
methodology I've ever seen. This an ode to figuring things out.
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just be you. Either way. Now put a glove on your left hand,
leave your right hand bare, and stand in front of a mirror. What
do you see? You see an image that looks just like you, except
shes wearing a glove on her right hand while her left hand is
bare.
This is what we mean when we say that mirrors seem to flip
images left and right. But if they flip left and right, why dont
they reverse up and down as well? Why isn't your mirror image
standing on her head? How does the mirror know which way is
up?
Guess
Let's try making a few guesses. Guessing give us something to
work with.
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Check
We've got some guesses above, and we want to know if any of
them is correct. Let's see how far we can get with just thinking
before we have to turn the problem over to professional
scientists.
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first, and in this case we'd think of that one as vertical. Now
we've got a reference frame for what is "left" vs. what is
"up". The guess is that this reference frame determines our
perception of our reflection in the mirror.
What could we predict if we knew that were true? Well, we'd
expect to be able to change what the mirror seems to count
as "up" by changing the orientation of that horizontal axis
defined by our eyes. So let's check.
While standing in front of the mirror with the glove on your
left hand, spread your arms and lean over so that your left
hand is up in the air, your right hand is reaching toward the
floor, and your head is tilted 90 degrees from to its usual
position. What do you see?
The mirror hasnt fallen for your trick, has it? Your reflection
is still wearing a glove on her right hand, which is reaching
up--but her feet are exactly where they were before despite
being to the right from the perspective of your head rather
than down. So binocular vision can't be the answer.
2. Our second guess was that the molecules re-orient
according to the location of the nearest large gravity well.
This one's harder. To test this, it seems youd either need a
gravity well more massive than Earth (which I really hope
you dont have handy), or youd need a rocket ship headed
for the moon with a camera mounted on it filming a mirror
as the Moons gravity took over. Thats not an impossible
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test, but its not a cheap one either. And it just doesn't quite
feel right, does it? But that's not enough to dismiss the
hypothesis.
We've mostly escaped the realm of thought experiments at
this point. But that doesn't mean it's time to stop thinking.
Lets assume, just for now, that this wont give us the
answer and try some other things first.
3. The third guess is that mirrors are made of zillions of long
thin tiles. Each strip flips the image up/down as well as
left/right, but they're so thin you don't see the up/down part.
I'm pretty fuzzy on how zillions of thin tiles would end up
making a single, cohesive, life-sized image. Perhaps that's a
problem for another day. But let's take that for granted and
see what happens.
This is much easier to test. If the tile hypothesis is correct,
you should be able to make an up-down flipping mirror by
turning a left-right flipping mirror sideways. But that's not
actually what happens, is it? So this can't be the answer
either.
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assumptions.
We assume two key things when we ask, Why do mirrors flip
images left and right, but not up and down? First, we assume
that mirrors flip images left and right. Second, we assume that
mirrors dont flip images up and down.
Lets start with the second. What would it mean if you, out in
the real world and not in mirror land, flipped yourself in the
up/down direction? It would mean you were standing on your
head. Youd have rotated yourself 180 degrees around the
(horizontal) x axis. Mirror images dont stand on their heads
when we stand on our feet, so assumption two is correct.
Mirrors really dont flip images up and down.
But what would it mean if you flipped yourself left/right? If
flipping up and down means rotating 180 degrees around the x
axis, then flipping left and right must mean rotating 180
degrees around the (vertical) y axis.
Rotating around the y axis is what we usually call turning
around. Is that actually what mirrors do? Do they make
turned-around pictures of us?
Imagine that you make a perfect, flesh-and-blood copy of
yourself. She, too, is wearing a glove on her left hand. Place
her in front of you so that youre looking at her back. Now,
while you stay perfectly still, rotate her 180 degrees around the
y axis--that is, turn her around to face you.
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Where is her glove? Why, its still on her left hand! To shake
gloved hands, youd have to reach across your body. If she
were a mirror image, it would be on her right hand, not her left.
So the first assumption must be wrong. Mirrors do not, in fact,
flip images left-and-right.
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upside down. It has not turned left or right. The glove has
flipped front-to-back, and it now fits on your right hand instead
of your left.
If thats what mirrors were doing, then what would you expect
to see?
Suppose youre looking at a mirror while facing North. The part
of you thats farthest South in reality, namely your bottom,
would seem farthest North in the image--and, indeed, it does.
The part thats farthest North in reality, namely your nose,
would seem farthest South in the image--and, indeed, it does.
You wouldnt expect, however, to have to reach across your
body to shake gloved hands, and you wouldnt expect your
image to do a headstand without your help.
Thats it, then! Mirrors dont know which way is up after all.
They just flip images front-to-back.
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Learn More
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Julia Howe
Just before the cold dawn of a November morning in 1861, poet
and activist Julia Howe awoke from a dream. Beating against
the cage of her skull were lyrics begging to be committed to
paper. Stumbling in the dark for the nearest pen, frantically she
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to involve violence.
His biographers say he believed he'd been sent to visit God's
justice upon slaveholders and those who supported them.
Whatever his motivation, he caused people to ask themselves,
"How much do I care about what I believe? What will I do if I'm
called to act? Would I fight for freedom? Would I kill? Would I
die?"
In 1859, under Brown's command, some proved that the
answer was "yes". His very own army set out to raid a federal
armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Their objective: Arm the local
slaves for insurection. The raid was unsuccessful, and Brown
was captured by the forces of Robert E. Lee.
In the following months, it became apparent that many more
really would fight for freedom with their own hands. A year
after John Brown's death, the song of his vision coursing
through the northern air, half of a country went to war to save
four million people they'd never even met.
This is the story Julia Howe immortalized when she wrote "The
Battle Hymn of the Republic".
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a better world.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are
stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and
damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall
deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
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Embedded File ()
"When an egg and a sperm meet, they swirl together in a
special kind of dance. As they dance, they talk to each
other. The egg tells the sperm all the stories it has to tell
about the body it came from."
You can order a hard copy through Amazon, or read the Kindle
version right now, and the 60 page accompanying reader's
guide for adults is available as a free PDF.
But instead of just buying it, what I really want you to do is
make sure your local library orders it if it hasn't already!
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months(ish).
With respect to the adaptation itself, we basically followed the
plan outlined in my last post. Day one no sleep, then
Uberman-12, then cut back to Uberman-6, then Everyman-3.
Most people ended up switching very quickly to Uberman-6
(within the first two or three days), and most switched to
Everyman-3 after about five to seven days on Uberman-6.
Three people tried to hold the Uberman schedule indefinitely:
One person continued Uberman-6 for two full weeks, and two
held out for twenty-one days. Afterwards, all three transitioned
to Everyman-3.
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believe fetuses have human souls, and that the same religious
doctrines apply to them as to any other child of God. Some are
concerned that since we can't currently be certain at what
point a developing human becomes capable of suffering, we're
obligated to behave as though even a zygote can suffer. But by
and large, those who want to restrict reproductive rights in
favor of the rights of fetuses believe that humans are people
regardless of their age, be that three days, three months, or
thirty years. The right of a person to live is more fundamental
than the specific rights a person has over her body. Not only
does this make good sense to me, but I agree on that final
point, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who
doesn't.
But it is inane, petty, and intellectually dishonest to suggest
that we can rightly conclude from knowledge of someone's
anti-abortion beliefs that she therefore does not highly value
women's reproductive rights. Let alone that she therefore
hates women and wants the government to dictate everything
that happens to her body.
The implicit claim of this image is similarly inane, petty, and
dishonest. It suggests that if a person doesn't support
legislation that limits women's access to medical procedures
that kill fetuses, she therefore thinks such specific rights
should be valued above the right of a person not to be killed. It
shouldn't take more than five seconds to see the problem here.
Perhaps one need be a monster to murder another person in
cold blood, but that's not even in the ballpark of concluding
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Perceptual Editing
October 09, 2013
In a practice run of his CFAR unit called Narratives, Val
brought to my attention a pretty awesome skill, and Id like
to share the basics with you. His class includes some more
advanced techniques that build on what follows, but I want
to try to highlight their foundations.
You may be familiar with the idea that we view reality
through a flawed lens. Our experiences do not convey
information about the external world with perfect accuracy.
For example, there is a blind spot in your visual field that
your brain automatically fills in with its best guess
(sometimes wrong) of whats actually out there.(1)
The technique I want to talk about relies on the fact that our
experiences comprise not only things that have passed
through the perceptual lens, but also content we personally
contribute. In cognitive biases called selective perception
and attentional bias, for example, what we already expect
to experience and where those expectations direct our
attention prevent us from perceiving an accurate reflection
of whats happening. If you've tried this attention test, you
know exactly what Im talking about.
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Now try that exercise again, but this time dont try to
prevent subvocalization. Simply notice when it happens.
More importantly, pay attention to how being aware of your
inner narration feels different from your usual experiences.
Notice how it feels like theres more distance than usual
between yourself and your thoughts.
Finally, sit silently just long enough to notice the next
subvocalization that arises. Then pick something to change
about it, and then think that instead. For example, if I
noticed myself thinking, I really love chocolate ice cream,
I might edit that phrase to I really like chocolate covered
strawberries. (The purpose here is merely to observe the
sensation of making decisions about what you think.)
How quickly can you edit? Can you feel the gist of what
you're about to think and change the course of your thought
before it's over? It's not easy at first, but neither is it
impossible.
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probably time very well spent indeed. The better you get at
shaping the contents of your experiences, the less you are
at the mercy of contributions you did not choose to make.
________________________________________________________
(1) Not everyone thinks this is how the optical blind
spot works. Dennett's view is quite interesting (and
here Ramachandran summarizes it and argues against it).
________________________________________________________
Edited to add:
Distancing is also useful all by itself without editing. I just
tried it on a strongly aversive experience.
The simple facts (without much contribution from me) are: I
committed a faux pas, my friend pointed it out to me, I
understood both my error and how to prevent it in the
future, and I apologized. Since I committed it in the course
of helping him with something (at which I was successful
overall), he went on to thank me after asking me not to
make the mistake again.
But I personally contributed most of what I actually ended
up experiencing. The moment I saw the subject line of the
email, which said "Please do not [mistake I made] again," I
interpreted it as being scolded, and thus felt a huge wave of
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This is huge for me. I've possessed all the sub skills for a
long time, but I had no idea they could be so potent when
combined and purposefully directed. I don't think I've ever
felt this much power over the effects of my social anxiety.
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pain in the world. I've long been wired that way. Yet I felt
neither helpless, nor guilty, nor even charitable confronting
the experience. I just knew, more plainly and clearly than I
ever have, that the future of humanity will not be so ugly as
that present moment in which a tragic old man failed to
sleep above a growing puddle of vomit.
And simultaneously I knew that it would not be that way
because I would not let it. On one side was the man on the
train, on the other the salvation of all sentient beings, and
bridging the two states of affairs was a solid progression of
cause and effect consisting of precisely the kinds of actions
I take every day.
There's a CFAR unit called "propagating urges" in which
students learn to take their desires to accomplish long-term
goals and use them to fuel motivation for the individual
actions required to accomplish those goals. For instance, I
might propagate the urge to grade all 70 essays so I can
successfully complete my degree by imagining receiving
my diploma every time I reach for a new page.
I think I may not need to propagate urges when it comes to
my work anymore. The drudgery of carrying out the kind of
altruism I consider maximally effective is saving the world.
It's suddenly become a simple fact of my life. The world will
be saved, and I will save it.
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Salvaging Sacraments
November 04, 2013
I'm a recovering Catholic. Although I don't believe in God
and don't attend Mass except on rare occasion for the
purpose of singing, I miss the Sacraments dearly, and in
particular I miss the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
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Ease of Imagery
Availability, as both a heuristic and a bias, apparently
comes down to ease of imagery. By "imagery", I mean
something broader than "how easy it is to conjure up a
visual representation". When you imagine a tiger, you
probably don't just see a still photograph or painting of a
tiger in your mind. Imagination can be fully immersive;
imaginary tigers are big and orange with black stripes, but
they also growl, slink stealthily while stalking prey, drip wet
blood from their fangs, and smell of musk and raw meat.
Several things contribute to ease of imagery. One is actual
frequency in the local environment, which might or might
not match global frequency. Maybe grumple bugs are a
thing a couple hundred miles south, and I'll be caught
unaware if the tribe heads that direction. Another is
repetition. It's useful to rely on ease of imagery when I'm
unlikely to hear about grumple bugs very often in a place
where there are no grumple bugs; on the other hand, I'll
probably hear about tigers more frequently than the
occurrence of tigers in the local environment warrants,
because tiger stories are way more gripping than heat
exhaustion stories. They have conflict, protagonists,
antagonists, narrative arcs, and often social drama. That's
the formula for deep significance to a human brain. "Tom
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Further Resources
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I've been running for about five years now. But I wasn't
really a runner until four years ago when, like many, I
read and fell deeply in love. Immediately upon finishing the
book, I started training barefoot, transitioned to minimalist
running shoes (specifically Vibram KSOs), and vowed to
one day run an ultramarathon. I even brainstormed ways of
testing out persistence hunting for myself.
For those who've never heard of this stuff, here are the
central claims that came to fuel the barefoot running
movement.
1. Distance running is central to human evolutionary
history. We evolved to run great distances--as in a good
hundred miles or so at a time--pursuing prey relentlessly
and forcing it to trot until it keels over from exhaustion.
While we're certainly not built for speed, we're good
enough at endurance to be deadly.
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3. Running is good for you. Shoes and poor form are not.
Everyone should run like the Tarahumara: barefoot or in
minimalist footwear, in short, quick steps, with a forefoot
strike instead of a heel strike, and probably not on
concrete.
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In Summary
Yeah, we may well have been "born to run". Given that,
runners are injured at surprisingly high rates: Somewhere
around half of us are injured each year. You're more likely
to end up with joint injuries if you run in conventional
athletic shoes, and you're more likely to injure your feet if
you run barefoot-ish (You don't say!). You're definitely less
likely overall to be injured if you run barefoot, so even
though Vibrams do not in factprevent all injury, they're
better by comparison. Biomechanics is complicated, and
relevant studies are sparse; it is ok to be uncertain and to
make the least bad guess based on whatever evidence is
available.
________________________________________________________
ETA: Just to be clear, I'm making no claims here about
walking.
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thing.
So when you're stuck in a corner, make sure you're holding
the controller and not button mashing: Figure out what you
want, figure out how to get it, and then do that.
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Ars Memoriae
November 16, 2013
I sense that more is possible in the art of memory.
There was a time when everyone remembered. There was a
time before smart phones, before computers, before
widespread literacy, and before writing, when there was
nothing to do with a thought besides remember it. If you
failed in that task, there would be no external reminder to
fall back on--no index to browse, text message to dig up, no
crumpled-up post-it at the bottom of your purse--and the
thought would be lost forever. That time comprises the vast
majority of human history.
It's easy to imagine that members of pre-literate societies
must have lived almost entirely in the moment, with no
libraries or photographs to hold onto their past thoughts for
them. But that is only because the art of memory has been
so thoroughly replaced by external mnemonic technologies.
Few of us have ever been prompted to explore the potential
of internal memory.
Before the printing press, people were taught from
childhood the powerful, ancient techniques of memory. How
powerful? Powerful enough to create and pass down the
15,963-line Iliad for at least a hundred years before it was
finally committed to paper. People in pre-literate societies
were constantly immersed in their history, oral tradition,
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and the products of their previous mental labors. For all the
incomprehensible breadth of humanity's new external
memories, it is we who are bound to the present.
If you haven't heard of linking, memory palaces, or the
Major System, the most basic introduction to mnemonics
will demonstrate that you needn't be limited by the tiny
capacity of your working memory once you've learned to
embed information directly into long-term memory. I
remember the first time I learned a twenty item list in just a
few minutes. The encoding took effortful concentration
(though it gets much easier with practice; I can now
complete the same task in about 30 seconds), but the
surprise and excitement I experienced with each item
effortlessly recalled shattered deep resignations about my
own cognitive limits. That was my first taste of the
possibility in the art of memory.
I've since learned of the subculture of mnemonists, people
who compete in the memory circuit. They travel all over the
world to find out who can learn the longest string of random
digits, lines of poetry, and shuffled decks of cards. I've
learned that the only difference between myself and mental
athletes is that I've never deliberately trained my skills. I
could perform such feats if I tried, as could you.
I've not tried, though I have made my life much more
efficient (I was once terribly forgetful and absent minded) by
storing information in my very own brain for reliable recall
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masculine, and I'd lose social points for it. It feels like
longing. I notice myself going, "I love men's dress shoes so
much; I wish I could get some really dashing men's dress
shoes and coordinate my outfit around them." For a while in
college, when I felt that way my response was, "Fuck this
shit, that's exactly what I'm going to do!" But now I'm in a
new environment where I don't feel quite so high status.
When I went shoe shopping the other day, I found myself
gazing longingly at the men's shoes while spending my
allotted shoe money, with resignation, on women's shoes.
(Much sadder to me than the shoes: Men's cologne. Oh my
god I love it so much.)
There are also clear-cut cases where I wholeheartedly adore
doing the traditionally feminine thing, and would definitely
still want to do it if I were male. I love having painted
nails--though having someone else paint them is better--and
if a male version of me wouldn't go in for a mani-pedi, it
would be for the same reason that female me is reluctant to
be visibly masculine. Transgressing gender roles comes
with a price, regardless of your sex.
The areas that give me trouble are the ones where I sort of
want to do something that falls in the female gender role,
but also sort of don't want to do it.
For example, I sort of want to wear a tight dress that shows
off my breasts and hips, and I sort of want to wear heels
that show off my calves. For a while I thought this was
because I want to appear well groomed, since that makes
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________________________________________________________
I do have one worry about this book.
Up through my first year of college, I was mostly horrible
with people, and I was proud of it. I didn't like people, I
didn't want them to like me, and suggestions that being nice
would make things easier offended me. I was cold and
arrogant. I did seem to have a surprising amount of a
certain kind of social success anyway, for I was always
leading groups of various sorts, and people always insisted
that my leadership was irreplaceable when I spoke of
leaving. But my domain of social success was severely
limited, and I was crippled by that.
I began to change when I finally concluded that my extreme
arrogance would prevent me from befriending a worthy peer
in the unlikely event that I might encounter one in college. I
certainly didn't decide to become "good with people", but
the resolution to become less arrogant, and my subsequent
success (yes, believe it or not, I'm vastly less arrogant than
once I was), began a success spiral that led me into a
growth mindset where dramatic change seemed possible.
Toward the beginning of my second year of college, I
decided to get very good at socialization. It was a time in my
life when I was terribly excited to dive into Impossible
Projects, and this was one. And I'm still in the midst of this
one, but I've come a long way. I still have a few gaping
holes in my social education. But I've taken the project
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What Is Hypnosis?
January 01, 2014
There are at least two things this question might mean. The
easy version has an answer along these lines: Hypnosis is a
tendency to comply with suggestions more than whatever
your base rate is. Additionally, it's characterized by
cataleptic and amnesic effects, as well as selective attention
and reduced sensitivity to pain. Let's call this set of
behaviors "hypnosis syndrome".
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Ordinary Trance
Here are some ordinary kinds of experiences from everyday
life that I think hypnotists have probably figured out how to
replicate at will and take advantage of.
1. Suggestion: If you're cognitively taxed and experiencing
a lot of dissonance, it can be an incredible relief when
someone else takes over.
You just had a very long day full of important business
decisions. You're having dinner at a restaurant, and you
can't decide what to order off the very long menu. "Just
have the turkey," says your spouse, and that's what you
have. They make your decision for you, and you're happy to
comply without thinking deliberatively about it any further.
It doesn't feel at all like they forced you to order the turkey.
Still, they suggested you order the turkey, and you ordered
it. That's complying with suggestion. You're more likely to
comply with that particular suggestion when your feeling of
indecision is slightly unpleasant or draining, so it's safe to
say that you're in a state of heightened suggestibility when
faced with a cognitively taxing dinner menu.
2. Selective attention: You never experience every element
of your surroundings with equal attention. Sometimes, your
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some level, you feel that you could move, if you just wanted
to hard enough. But you can't seem to make yourself want it
enough. You can't muster up enough willpower to really try
to try. For all the power your will seems to have over your
legs, they might as well be made of lead.
4. Amnesia: It's normal to forget little things all the time. But
occasionally a really drastic memory failure happens, and it
feels as though you've jumped through time.
You're on the highway at night, and you're a little sleepy.
The drive is monotonous; everything rushing by is the
same, and the grey road just stretches on and on. It's about
an hour till your next turn. But then, all of a sudden, there's
your exit! And you think, "What? How did I just lose a whole
hour?"
You obviously experienced each moment of that hour as it
was happening--you know you didn't fall asleep, because if
you had you would have crashed. But you just don't seem
to have access to those memories for some reason. It's like
you went on autopilot.
5. Reduced sensitivity to pain: This one's especially familiar
to athletes.
You're in the final stretch of a marathon. You're sprinting
now, giving it everything you've got, when suddenly you hit
an uneven bit of ground and your ankle rolls. You know it's
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one is hypnotized.
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Hasty Genderalizations
January 15, 2014
Gender
schemas
are
largely
non-conscious
hypotheses we all have about the different
characteristics of males and females. We see females
as nurturing, as communal, and as doing things out
of concern for other people. And we see males as
capable of independent action, doing things for a
reason, and getting down to the business at hand.
[The male gender schema includes negations of the
female gender schema and vice verse.] We have
schemas about everything, every social group
defined by race, age, sex, social class, and roles. So
students have schemas about what it is to be a
professor. And people have schemas about what it is
to be a scientist. And for most professions, the
schema that people have for being a professional
person overlaps much more with the schema for
being male than it does with the schema for being
female. So we take requirements to be successful for
most fields as being capable of independent action,
doing things for a reason, and getting down to the
business at hand.
- Virginia Valian in an address to Chairs and Senior
Administrators at the City University of New York
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the
vast
majority
of
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professions
require
the
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________________________________________________________
But so far the model I've described only obviously explains
things we've already observed. Does it make risky testable
predictions as well?
You bet!
For one thing, it predicts the following of people working in
a profession that emphasizes characteristics of the male
gender schema. Suppose you hand people equal evidence
of the professional competence of two candidates. Then
you tell them that one is a bio of a male, and the other the
bio of a female. The model I've described predicts that the
man will be rated as more highly competent. Why? Because
the raters will need to encounter more evidence of
professional competence for the female to overcome the
rater's priors against her. If this doesn't happen in real life,
it's strong evidence against my model.
Furthermore, it doesn't predict that men and women would
differ in their ratings of the candidates. A difference would
be
evidence
against
my
model.
Competing
hypotheses--anything along the lines of "gender inequality
happens because men dislike women more than women
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________________________________________________________
In 1995, the ratio of admitted/rejected male applicants for
postdoctoral fellowships at a certain medical school was
twice that of female applicants. Wenners and Wold
investigated. They came up with a system for determining
the "impact points" of professional academics. The points
were awarded according to number of journal publications,
prestige of the respective journals, number of articles in
which zer name is listed first among the authors, and
number of citations zer article received in a one-year period.
They then used this system to determine the impact on their
field of applicants for postdoctoral fellowships to a certain
medical school in Sweden.
Ordinarily, the results of admissions reviews are not made
public. Due to an unusual court case, the committee
reviews for this particular round of medical students were,
and the reviews included an overall "competence rating".
From their article in Nature:
Did men and women with equal scientific productivity
receive the same competence rating by the MRC
reviewers? No! ... The peer reviewers gave female
applicants lower scores than male applicants who
displayed the same level of scientific productivity. In
fact, the most productive group of female applicants,
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________________________________________________________
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ruthless training.
That whole time, though, I didn't think of myself as having
social anxiety, as being constrained by a psychological
illness that could be cured. I just thought of myself as
extremely introverted. It was part of my identity, more like
being obsessed with books than like having a paralyzed
limb. As a result, all the techniques I learned for navigating
social situations assumed the constraint. I framed
questions as, "Given that my brain works this way..." rather
than as, "In order to make my brain work differently...".
It wasn't until I returned from my first visit to the San
Francisco Bay Area that the reality of my situation hit me. I
took a workshop with the Center for Applied Rationality.
One of the workshop activities was called "Comfort Zone
Expansion",
or
COZe
for
short,
and
it
was
basically exposure therapy. They took everyone to a
crowded mall and told them to get a little outside their
comfort zones. Some of the men had their makeup done, for
example, and others were pushing their boundaries just by
shaking hands with a few strangers.
The night beforehand, I couldn't sleep. I was already way
outside my comfort zone, spending nearly every moment of
every day surrounded by strangers I had to interact with in
relatively unstructured ways. During dinner and other break
times, I would hide in my room instead of getting to know
the extremely intelligent and fascinating participants and
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problems remain?
The answer was very obvious when I finally asked myself
the question with the usual self narrative out of the way. My
main symptoms: Intense fear of interacting with strangers,
especially in unstructured ways. Fear of situations in which
I may be judged. Worrying about embarrassing or
humiliating myself (mostly by looking stupid). Fear that
others will notice that I look anxious. Having to fight to
make eye contact. Intense fear of tests. Extremely
inconveniencing myself to avoid socialization. Panic attacks
that include trouble breathing, tachycardia, shaking,
derealization, dissociation, and belief that I am dying.
Hatred of humans does not cause things like this. But
phobias do.
________________________________________________________
I struggled with this realization. I was in the middle of a
massive paradigm shift that led me to consider suddenly
changing course and devoting my life to existential risk
reduction rather than academia - right after receiving a five
year fellowship from my top choice philosophy program.
That was a scary dilemma in itself, but on top of that I now
understood that I had a crippling psychological disorder
that I could only survive from inside the academy.
The discussion in my head went something like this.
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________________________________________________________
And so it began.
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________________________________________________________
This is where it gets seriously strange and awesome. But
first, youll need a little background on hypnosis.
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then
That
took
it. I
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___________________________________________________
[Trigger warning for this section: Abstract math/logic
concepts with virtually no explanation.]
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I've thought a fair amount about how the hell I did what I
did. It still seems completely crazy. I don't really understand
it, but I have a favorite hypothesis.
Lb's theorem states that "If it's provable that (if it's
provable that p then p), then it's provable that p." In addition
to being a theorem of set theory with Peano arithmetic, it's
also a theorem of modal logic. (There's a modal
proof here.)
A standard semantic framework for modal logic is epistemic
logic, where provability here is just replaced by
"knowledge" or "belief", and "belief" is defined in terms of
possible worlds, so that you "believe" something if and only
if there's no world accessible from your perspective in
which the thing is false.
This is basically what's going on with placebos. (By the
way, placebos work even when you know they're
placebos.)
Try this on for size: If I believe that (if I believe that this
chocolate chip will cure my headache, then this chocolate
chip will cure my headache), then I believe that this
chocolate chip will cure my headache.
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I simply must learn, so I ask for a lesson. You can too, if you
like. He obliges. He starts us out with the basics of balance,
but Im eager to try his flashy spins and stranger stunts.
Soon, he leaves us to practice on our own. I remember the
mechanics of the fancier stuff, but I cant actually perform
any of it because I keep falling over. Its terribly frustrating,
especially since I could tell during the lesson Id likely
forget the basics. Straightforward though it seems, I cant
maintain a simple handstand for more than a few seconds.
Thats the bizarreness effect at work, in one of its two
guises: Boring things dont tend to stick in memory.
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Theres a petting zoo just one booth over from the stage, so
I borrow a goat and lead it to the hand-dancer. Your
students learn at different rates, I tell him, and are
motivated by different kinds of challenges. Instead of
having everyone do basic handstands over and over, you
could challenge the advanced students to do a handstand
on this goat while it trots around the fairgrounds. He takes
my advice, and soon the students up the ante by doing
handstands on each other atop the goat. (Its a very strong
goat who doesnt mind.) Thank goodness I remembered
about the goat!
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Cuddle Orientation
April 03, 2014
I recently gained an extremely useful social concept that I'd
like to propagate. It's called "cuddle orientation".
Different people experience cuddling differently. Some
people love to be held, pet, and massaged by others.
They're most satisfied with cuddling while taking on the
more passive role. These are "cuddle bottoms" (analogous
to the BDSM "bottom" orientation). Some people love to
hold, pet, and massage others, and they're most satisfied
with cuddling when they're doing the active part. These are
"cuddle tops". As with sexual orientation, most people
probably fall somewhere in the middle. There are likely a lot
of true "cuddle switches" who are equally fulfilled by the
active and receptive roles, but I expect people cluster
toward the poles.
[The following description of my pre-cuddle-revelation
experiences should be taken as System 1 attitudes. These
phenomena never made it to System 2 consideration, so
please don't think I thought hard about it and then went on
believing dumb things.]
I am very strongly a cuddle bottom. For a long time, I was
not aware of the existence of cuddle tops. I typical minded
so hard that I assumed everyone played the active roll for
one of three reasons. Either they're counting on reciprocity
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*************************************************************
Further Resources
Doublethink
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direct
my
**************************************************
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted
with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
Eugene Gendlin
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retreat.
For example, I walked into an ice cream shop today*, and
before entering I was already considering which flavor to
get (which for me means weighing all the alternatives
against chocolate). Because I happened to recognize the
opportunity, I practiced leaving a line of retreat by asking,
"Oh no, what if they don't have chocolate?" and answering,
"Well, I'll either get vanilla instead, or I'll go to a different ice
cream shop." Then I ordered chocolate.
Unlike in most cases where it's important to apply this skill,
there was no reason to suspect they wouldn't have
chocolate in the first place. So instead of applying the
technique and then experiencing the punishment of actually
settling for vanilla, from a classical conditioning
perspective, I was immediately rewarded for my practice
session with chocolate ice cream.
It's great to recognize a difficult rationality technique as
wise, virtuous, and resulting in positive outcomes in the
long run. But on the level of moment-to-moment decisions,
my actual behaviors are much more strongly driven by
chocolate than wisdom. Ideally, I'd also be driven by
chocolate to be rational, right?
*This is a lie. What I actually walked into was a parable.
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Observing Cthia
April 25, 2014
I have a pretty awful memory. I've installed all the memory
techniques I teach at workshops to mitigate the damage of
this. But all the work is done on the encoding end rather
than the recall end, so things that happened before I started
studying mnemonics, or that I simply fail to encode
skillfully, are largely lost to me.
One of the upsides is that I can read books several times
and be surprised by each plot twist again and again. I
usually feel a sort of comfortable familiarity when I re-read a
book, but that is very often the closest thing to a memory of
past readings I retrieve. An effect of that particular
phenomenon is that I sometimes completely forget major
intellectual influences, and really have no idea how I came
to think the way that I do. But I read constantly as a child
and teenager, so I know the majority of it has come from
books.
For the past few days I've been reading a familiar-seeming
Star Trek book called Spock's World, by Diane Duane. I was
not completely certain until today that I had in fact read it
before.
I was sort of stunned by a particular passage and wanted to
share it, because it seems to encompass--and, given I must
have read it as a teenager, foreshadow--so much of what's
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Against Doublethink
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automatic (I open the laptop and the head rolls across the
table and knocks over wine that spills on my friend).
So next time you want to remember something--or learn an
abstract concept or skill--notice when it's mostly System 2
doing the talking, and see if you can explain in System 1
terms instead. It takes practice and maybe training to get
really good at this, but I bet you'll see big results from small
preliminary efforts if you give it a try.
*Yes, repeating things strengthens associations via
classical conditioning, but you can do orders of magnitude
better than that.
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A Message to System 1
May 22, 2014
I used to be afraid of checking the balance of my bank
account. I felt as though finding out how much money I had
caused me to lose money, so I'd go weeks, sometimes a
month, without checking it--even though my income was
tiny and irregular. I'd feel guilty almost any time I bought
anything, which led to bizarre spending patterns where I'd
go for a while eating nothing but rice and beans, then
suddenly spend way too much because hey, if I'm doomed
anyway for having bought this one unnecessary thing, I
might as well enjoy myself before reality catches up with
me.
Not surprisingly, when I finally got around to checking my
balance, it was usually frighteningly low. Which, of course,
my brain took as punishment for checking my balance, and
the cycle continued.
I finally confronted this a little less than a year ago. Though
it hurt a lot to poke at the problem, I reasoned like this: In
reality, checking my balance causes me to gain money.
Nobody's paying me directly for logging into my account,
but having accurate beliefs about the resources available to
me allows for far more efficient, and not completely insane,
spending patterns, and therefore a higher balance on
average. Additionally, it's really dangerous in general to
allow myself to cling to false beliefs, regardless of how
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Embedded File ()
Some background: In Highlander, an "immortal" can kill
another immortal by cutting off his head. When that
happens, all the knowledge and power of the dead immortal
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2. Exaggerate
The tree is so tall, it reaches up through the clouds! Not one
tree, but a whole forest. A new tree for every skill, new
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the ground, and over time, my whole world will all be a lush
forest.
Checking Your Work
"So what do you think," I asked. "Is this translation strong
enough to affect your actions a month down the line, six
months, a year? Does it have an emotional impact that'll hit
you every time?"
"Hell yes."
Results
After writing this, I checked back in with the friend to find
out whether she still uses the Growth Mindset Forest,
whether it works, and whether she's changed anything
about it. I committed to publishing whatever result she
reported.
Turns out she's still using this four months later, and it
works well! She's changed the name, though: She's now
calling it "Frondescence", which I completely love. She says
it's one of the few things powerful enough for her to use
when she's in a place of hopelessness and despair. It
doesn't totally solve the problem every time, but it seems to
help at least a little in most cases, and often it produces
large positive results.
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Systems 1?
July 12, 2014
[These ideas were inspired by/stolen from Nate Sores,
aka So8res, in an ongoing email conversation about the
Dark Arts of Rationality.]
Summary: There's more than one thing we might mean by
"System 1", and the different referents require different
rationality techniques.
___________________________________________
I went skydiving once. On the way up, I was scared. Not as
scared as I expected to be, but more scared than I thought I
should have been. I believed at the time that there was
about a 0.0007% chance of dying in a skydiving accident.*
In other words, if I and around 150,000 other people all went
skydiving, about one of us would die. And that's before
taking into account that I was jumping with an expert.
Part of me knew this. Otherwise, I wouldn't have gotten into
the plane. But part of me didn't seem to know it, and I knew
part of me didn't know it, because I was seriously
wondering whether I'd have the guts to jump on my own.** I
wanted all of me to understand, so I could experience the
excitement without the fear.
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illness,
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the pain.
But some of the habits were useful, and stayed. One such
habit was noticing that I might be wrong, especially when I
thought I couldn't do something. Another was not giving up
just because something seems impossible at first glance.
Creating systems to automate as much of my life as
possible to conserve my memory, attention, and motivation.
Choosing my friends very carefully, communicating openly
how I feel, and testing my models of them frequently.
My brain is better now, but only about as good as a normal
human brain. And I still automatically expect many of the
same errors. For instance, despite my abstract
understanding, I notice that I usually don't empathize with
people who live in the far distant future, leading strange
lives in strange galaxies. And it feels a lot like it did to be
depressed and not able to empathize with my best friend
who's right in front of me.
It's obvious to me, because I've seen it so many times
before. I went through cycles of sanity and brokenness over
and over again. If my brain isn't working correctly, to me,
that just means I have to find a work-around. I think a lot of
people just accept the limitation when they notice a major
error like that, thinking, "Well, there's nothing I can do
about that," and go about their lives.
For a long time, I was trapped, encompassed by things I
"couldn't do anything about", that I had to either deal with
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2. Most of them are really far away. Not only are they not
right in front of me, but most of them aren't even on my
planet, or in my galaxy. S1 is inclined to care only about
the people in my immediate vicinity, and when I care
about people who are far away, there's generally
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6. It loves stories.
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ways--they're
aquatic,
or
silicon
crystals,
or
super-intelligent shades of the color blue, whatever. They're
people, and the woman beside me is familiar.
The central message is "save them"--save them from what?
From suffering, from death, and from nonexistance.
Conveniently, canon dementors already represent those
things.
And what's the "patronus"? That's easy too. In my mind,
"effective altruism" is the muggle term for "expecto
patronum".
Finally, with a broad outline in place, I begin the story and
run my simulation in full detail.
__________________________________________________
I imagine Azkaban. Imagine myself there. A gray prison with
cold, damp walls. There are countless cells--I'm not sure
how many, but there are at least a dozen in this hall, and a
dozen halls on this floor, and a dozen floors in this wing
alone. And in every single cell is a person.
There could be animals here, too, if I wanted. Puppies, even.
Because this isn't a prison where bad people are sent to be
punished and kept from hurting others. This is a much more
terrible place, where the innocent go, just for having been
born too early, for having lived before anyone knew how to
save them from death.
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________________________________________________________
*I'd never heard of effective altruism then, of course. In fact,
I didn't consider myself an altruist of any sort. I'm not sure
I'd donated to anything at that point besides maybe SETI.
The HSUS pitch was just really good.
**"Converting the reachable universe into quality adjusted
life years is also cute." --Eliezer Yudkowsky, Effective
Altruism Summit 2013
***In their 990s, HSUS reported $112,833,027 in grants and
contributions, while MIRI reported $1,066,055.
****The Tale of the Far Future Person: "Once upon a time,
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there will have been an entity. The entity will have been
alive and sentient. It will have had various experiences and
values. Never dying, it will have satisfied its preferences
ever after. The end."
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Finding things like this is quick and easy once you're used
to it. I couldn't type nearly fast enough to get these down as
quickly as I thought of them. (To be clear, I'm trying to give
you evidence of your own potential, not to show off.) I've
been at this long enough that I didn't have to stop for breath
to make that list, and it ended because I didn't want to
waste your time or use up too many ideas you might have if
you tried this exercise. The watermelon would be finding
ways to sharpen the camera's mechanical parts into various
weapons by the time I was actually done.
It's slow and effortful, though, if you try to do it in real life
without having practiced. And it's essential that this
become easy for you, if you're after order of magnitude
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________________________________________________________
In other news, I've recently started offering private lessons
in mnemonics, and it's going swimmingly so far. If you want
to get good at this stuff super fast, I don't know of a better
way than to work with me for an hour. Besides maybe
working with me for three hours. I'm charging $100 to $200
an hour depending on the goal. You don't have to live in the
Bay Area, because we all live in the future. Email me at
strohl89@gmail.com if you're interested.
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Things farther to the left take less time to learn, while things
farther to the right require some combination of processing
time, many iterations, and long strings of dependencies on
other skills that must be acquired serially. While "difficult"
and "takes a long time to learn" may be highly correlated, I
don't think they're the same thing.
It can take a child quite a while to learn long division. You
generally need to lean addition in order to learn subtraction
and multiplication, multiplication in order to learn division,
and the final procedure that leads to the right answer, which
depends on multiplication and subtraction (and division, if
you want to be efficient). All together that can take a long
time.
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But once you've got all the pieces of basic arithmetic, the
final procedure is pretty easy. If you've got detailed
instructions in front of you, it can even be carried out
correctly on the very first try. And the pieces themselves
are pretty straightforward, especially if you recognize that
the execution of algorithms will suffice, and deep
understanding isn't strictly necessary. It may be a long and
complex process if you've never seen arithmetic before, but
the greatest inferential gap is either between addition and
multiplication or between multiplication and division. Those
are leaps average gradeschoolers can make. No individual
part is all that difficult to get your head around.
But consider the simplest problems in elementary algebra.
In addition to the basic arithmetic operations, you need two
more pieces: "doing the same thing to both sides of the
equals sign", and "variable". "Doing the same thing to both
sides of the equals sign" is a even easier than "the
procedure for long division".
But "variable" is fundamentally different. It requires a new
kind of idea. It requires abstraction, which is not only new
but inferentially distant. It may even be the greatest
inferential gap a child must cross in traditional math
education up to pre-calculus. It isn't a complex idea,
though, and there's not really such a thing as "half-way
understanding variable". You get it or you don't, and when
you get it, elementary algebra suddenly makes
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got even more bang for the effortful buck than memory
palaces, because the effect size is similarly enormous, but it
helps with anything that can be broken down into concrete
triggers and concrete actions. And all it takes is learning to
compose specific enough if-then statements, like so: "If I
hear my alarm in the morning, then I will hop out of bed
immediately." Other bug patches CFAR installs include
Murphey Jitsu, Goal Factoring, Focused Grit, and
Againstness. (Don't worry, I'll discuss exceptions to this in
a minute.)
The rest of the CFAR experience, the socialization outside
of classes, usually causes at least one epiphany.
Participants have conversations with instructors and other
participants, and since everybody there is carefully selected
to be bright, curious, and interesting in diverse ways,
there's always somebody saying, "Wow, I've never thought
of that!"
CFAR teaches one lesson from the bottom right quadrant:
Comfort Zone Expansion, or CoZE. CoZE is basically
CFAR's take on exposure therapy. Exposure therapy can
take a long time. Though you might see progress right
away, you're usually not going to wipe out a deep fear or
anxiety in a single go. It takes repeated exposure with a
slow and steady increase in intensity.
But exposure therapy is fairly easy! Scary, though by
design not very scary, but not difficult. The principle is not
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consistent efforts.
So maybe I'm wrong, and most of the Wizard skills worth
having are primitively slow and difficult to attain. After all,
that's one theory that explains why I lack Beisutzukai-level
mastery. There's got to be something Anna Salamon and
Eliezer Yudkowsky share that I lack, and maybe this is it.
But you know what Anna and Eliezer definitely have that I
don't? Practice. Years and years of practice. I heard the
word "rationalist" outside of Cartesian philosophy for the
first time just two years ago. So maybe while I've had most
of the epiphanies I'm going to from Lesswrong's material,
and while I've installed most of CFAR's bug patches, there's
a third class of easily attainable skills I must gain before I
can weave all of it together and become far stronger as a
rationalist.
If this is true, it's very good news! It means that if I can
looks at the Wizard skills I desire and break them down into
the epiphanies and bug patches I already have, I may be
able to ask myself, "What part of this puzzle is going to take
small, consistent effort?" And I might well come up with a
useful answer!
With a single exception, all of the skills I've gained directly
from Eliezer since I've lived with him over the past year
confirm this hypothesis. (He gave me one all-or-nothing
epiphany in person, which was "fail more".) All of the others
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You're not there to hear me, but I'll say it to myself, and to
everyone who's listening, so I remember this time. I miss
you, Rosie. I'm sorry. Thank you for everything.
Embedded File ()
"Take the Time" written 2007, video from 2008
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I hope that it will one day. I would rather not have to rely on
tricks like this. I hope I'll eventually just be able to go
straight from noticing dissonance to re-orienting my whole
mind so it's in line with the truth and with whatever I need to
reach my goals. Or, you know, not experiencing the
dissonance in the first place because I'm already doing
everything right.
In the mean time, this trick seems pretty powerful.
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Waking up early.
For me, it's all the way down here because I've found
it extremely difficult to maintain. One of my
symptoms is insomnia, so waking up early often
means getting little enough sleep that it's a huge
energy drain.
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Translating feelings
exhaustion.
of
despair
into
feelings
of
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Modafinil
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Commitment mechanisms
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Vitamin D supplements.
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Caffeine
Alcohol
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Marijuana
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Feeling guilty
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Hope that helps. I'm completely open about this topic (and
pretty much all topics, really), so feel free to ask questions.
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and the favored hypothesis are one and the same in your
experience
of
experience.
The
importance
of
phenomenology to rationality goes deeper than that,
though.
Phenomenology
trains
especially
fine
grained introspection. The more tiny and subtle are the
thoughts you're aware of, the more precise can be the
control you gain over the workings of your mind, and the
faster can be your cognitive reflexes.
(I do not at all mean to say that you should go read Husserl
and Heidegger. Despite their apparent potential for
unprecedented clarity, the phenomenologists, without
exception, seem to revel in obfuscation. It's probably not
worth your time to wade through all of that nonsense. I've
mostly read about phenomenology myself for this very
reason.)
I've been doing some experimental phenomenology of late.
Noticing
I've noticed that rationality, in practice, depends on
noticing. Some people have told me this is basically
tautological, and therefore uninteresting. But if I'm right, I
think it's likely very important to know, and to train
deliberately.
The difference between seeing the twig as bent and seeing
the twig as seeming bent may seem inane. It is not news
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that things that are bent tend to seem bent. Without that
level of granularity in your observations, though, you may
not notice that it could be possible for things to merely
seem bent without being bent. When we're talking about
something that may be ubiquitous to all applications of
rationality, like noticing, it's worth taking a closer look at
the contents of our experiences.
Many people talk about "noticing confusion", because
Eliezer's written about it. Really, though, every successful
application of a rationality skill begins with noticing. In
particular, applied rationality is founded on noticing
opportunities and obstacles. (To be clear, I'm making this
up right this moment, so as far as I know it's not a generally
agreed-upon thing. That goes for nearly everything in this
post. I still think it's true.) You can be the most technically
skilled batter in the world, and it won't help a bit if you
consistently fail to notice when the ball whizzes by you--if
you miss the opportunities to swing. And you're not going
to run very many bases if you launch the ball straight at an
opposing catcher--if you're oblivious to the obstacles.
It doesn't matter how many techniques you've learned if you
miss all the opportunities to apply them, and fail to notice
the obstacles when they get in your way. Opportunities and
obstacles are everywhere. We can only be as strong as our
ability to notice the ones that will make a difference.
Inspired by Whales' self-experiment in noticing confusion,
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Noticing Rain
I started by checking to see what I expected it to feel like to
notice that it's raining, just going from memory. (It doesn't
rain much in Berkeley, so it had been a while.) I tried for a
split-second prediction, to find what my brain automatically
stored under "noticing rain". When I thought about noticing
rain, I got this sort of vague impression of rainyness, which
included few sensory details and was more of an overall
rainy feeling. My brain tried to tell me that "noticing rain"
meant "being directly aquainted with rainyness", in much
the same way that it tries to tell me it's experiencing a cube
when it's actually only experiencing a pattern of light and
shadows I interpret as three faces. I could have
reasoned carefully and worked out a far more accurate
prediction, but that's not what I was after.
Then, I waited for rain. It didn't take long, because I'm in
North Carolina for the month.
The real "noticing rain" turned out to be a response to the
physical sensations concurrent with the first raindrop
falling on my skin. I did eventually have an "abstract
rainyness feeling", but that happened a full two seconds
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moves. It was to cut them off from all their cached moves,
so they had to experiment, to play together with their
partner.
I taught brief segments of choreography and had the
students dance that same string of moves to a lot of
different songs, not so they would have a cool string of
moves to pull out at any time, but so they could practice
dancing the same moves differently, according to what they
felt in the music. Does the song call for sharp, precise
movements, or languid, flowing movements? Does the
outside turn fall in a measure with a strong emphasis, or
should it be small and understated? What if the lead dances
to the clarinet while the follow dances to the fiddle? Does
this string of moves simply feel wrong when danced to this
song? That's musicality.
What makes me a great dancer, and a great follow in
particular, cannot possibly be my vocabulary. Sometimes I
go
to
dances
with
completely
unfamiliar
vocabularies--salsa, tango, waltz--and even then I stand out
as a highly skilled follow. I don't know beforehand the
standard "signal" a lead would give in Salsa to indicate that
I should step backward. I wasn't in the class where they
taught that. I don't need to know those sorts of things,
though, if I can establish a strong enough partner
connection.
I imagine that a master rationalist who happens to have
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_____________________________________________________
I think in the beginning, shortly after encountering the
Sequences and CFAR, I implicitly believed that becoming a
strong rationalist meant gaining all the important insights. I
thought it meant having a toolbox and filling it with more
and better tools. Like feeling the lead's right hand go up,
and knowing to execute the steps of the "outside turn" I
learned last week.
And how does one gain a new tool? Why, one browses the
aisles of the rationalist hardware store and picks up
whatever looks shiny and affordable. The point of reading
another Sequence article or attending another CFAR class
is to pick up a new cognitive procedure, so you can retrieve
it from your toolbox when the situation calls for that
particular tool. Right?
Maybe, but not if the analogy to mastering dance is
accurate.
I didn't become the kind of dancer I am by taking a lot of
classes or reading a lot of books on dance. I did it by
dancing.
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_____________________________________________________
In dance, I can respond instantly to instructions never
encountered before, or to nuances in songs of unfamiliar
styles. I've molded my own patterns of thought and feeling
to partner connection, playfulness, and musicality. It's not
that I've somehow fit every possible tool into my toolbox.
It's that I myself have become a fully versatile instrument of
dance. (A far from perfect one, but the point is that I've
moved a long way in that direction.)
Taking classes to learn new moves can definitely be useful,
especially when you're first starting out. But it is not a
recipe for indefinite progress at an increasing rate, and that
is the sort of thing I will need to become a fully versatile
instrument of rationality.
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aren't turned all the way up until Midnight, at which point (in
my parish anyway) there begins a joyous Mass that is sung
the entire way through.
From my perspective, though, Catholic Advent and
Christmas seem terribly broken. There's so much beauty
and so much potential there, but the moral of the story is all
wrong. What do you do when the nights are long and the
wind is cold and you have no place to call home? You
huddle together and wait meekly for a Messiah to come and
save you.
No. Just, no.
To me, the Secular Solstice is sort of what I wish Advent
and Christmas could be. The aesthetics, and even the
narrative, are very similar. But it builds toward something
else: a resolution to save ourselves, each other, and
everyone who will come after us. And to do more than that,
to keep making our world better and better until the
darkness has been permanently banished.
There is acknowledgement of hardship and the enormity of
our challenge from within a cold universe that doesn't care
about us in the slightest. That part is taken very seriously,
and is tied to the metaphors of winter and night. And then,
as a community, we accept that challenge with a vow, not to
submit to our fate until a savior is sent from heaven to
rescue us, but a vow to take the future into our own hands,
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Simulating Confusion
October 24, 2014
For many of the kinds of techniques I've been working with
recently, I begin by meditating on a mental state I want to
notice, modify, or bring about.
For example, if I wanted to get better at noticing and
addressing confusion, I would probably meditate on
"confusion" before I begin to practice noticing it in real
time. That way I have a much clearer idea of what it is I want
to notice, and I can install a trigger-action plan like, "When I
notice 'confusion' [that thing I just meditated on], I will snap
my fingers [or some other action]." "Meditate on confusion"
is a terrible instruction, but when I say it to myself, I mean
something very specific by it.
I want to try showing you exactly what I mean. I'm going to
actually go through the exercise I tend to call "meditating
on [mental state]", and I will type everything that I notice is
happening in my mind as I go.
3 2 1 go.
At first, there's a lot of mental clutter. I feel a little tired and
unfocused, and I'm aware of thoughts about later sections
of this post, the louder details of my physical environment
such as the barking dog and the colorful painting of the girl
with a balloon on the wall. I grope around a little for
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Oh, excellent, that was the next step and I'm already filling it
in. What is the internal experience of this simulated past
self who is confused about the credit cards? She is
exasperated and frightened. Simulate it. Good. It feels like
there is something very wrong with the world, like reality
has torn, and I'm staring at the gap. I'm searching
impatiently, desperately for an explanation. I don't even
remember why this was such an intense experience, but it
was. I try out a few explanations I've managed to dig up. I
think, "Maybe Chase gave me a copy of my credit card
when I opened an account with them?" but I know that the
numbers on the cards are different, and a copy of my credit
card would not have different numbers, so I discard that
attempted explanation and dig around some more.
Good, I've now got a fairly vivid simulation of the actual
sensation of confusion going on. It is a jolt like a missed
step, followed by a search and a sharpness in my chest, a
feeling that something about the world is broken and I want
it to go back to the way it was, I yearn for it to be fixed.
Now I let the sensory details of the concrete scenario fade
away, and I make the sensation of confusion itself the
center of my attention. I relax with my eyes closed,
just letting that yearning for reconciliation between my
observations and my model of the world wash over me,
letting it be as much of my experience as I an make it.
After a minute or two, I bring back the concrete scenario,
and I rewind to the beginning, looking for that first jolt of
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in the box beside the stars if you want: "What was this post
about?"
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Mental Postures
October 25, 2014
Related posts: Simulating Confusion, What It's Like To
Notice Things, A Message To System 1, Your Strength as a
Rationalist by Eliezer Yudkowsky, I Notice I'm Confused
About Noticing I'm Confused
I'm gaining control over my mental postures.
Sometimes when it's time to work, I'm distracted and don't
feel like working. I'm supposed to be filling out a form or
whatever, and instead my thoughts are flitting about all over
the place. I'm thinking about a conversation I had over
lunch, then about how I really need to remember to send
that email to the guy about the thing, then about the lady I
can see out the window who's walking five dogs at once. Or
maybe I'm thinking about all of those things at the same
time. I realize I'm distracted, and I think, "Ok, I have got to
focus."
Often that doesn't get me very far. Usually, there is a small
and temporary change toward focus. Sometimes there's a
huge change in the overall quality of my experience, and
suddenly all my attention has moved to the task at hand.
I've been using a term for changing the overall quality of my
thoughts and feelings to something more conducive to
accomplishing my immediate goal. I call it "adopting a
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mental posture".
It is analogous to adjusting your physical posture. Try
sitting up straighter. Now adopt a more relaxed posture.
Now pick a posture somewhere in between.
I know from teaching dance and yoga that different people
can start out at very different ability levels when it comes to
control over their physical postures. Some people can see a
two-dimensional photo of somebody in eagle pose for the
first time and know exactly which actions are required to
move their body into that configuration. Other people have
trouble purposefully rolling their shoulders back. I also
know that most people, no matter where they start, can get
much better at controlling their physical posture with
instruction and practice.
I've been deliberately practicing gaining control over my
mental postures, and it seems to be paying off. I've also had
some instruction in meditation, which I'm pretty sure gave
me leg up on this.
I think of emotions and mental postures a little differently,
but I don't draw a sharp distinction. In general, I think of an
emotion as a particular sensation or small set of
sensations taking place in my experience, where by
"experience" I mean "all the things I'm consciously aware of
at a given time." Right now my experience includes (but is
certainly not limited to) the following sensations:
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I did that at least once each morning for a few days, and I
extended my real-time "noticing confusion" practice to the
full sequence. In real life, when I noticed confusion, I
activated the curiosity propagator and felt curiosity.
Between the off-line training and the deliberate real-world
practice, I was able to go through the sequence in just a few
seconds.
I waited until there was so little time between noticing
confusion and feeling curious that the propagator didn't
have time to play all the way through. Then I made a new
trigger action plan: If I notice that I am confused, I will adopt
the mental posture of curiosity. From there, I moved to the
advanced version of the kata.
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besides words. When the words stop drowning out all out
all the other mental activity, it's possible become aware of
those many silent thoughts. From there, one can learn to
exert some control over the other mental activities, just like
you can probably exert some control over your inner
monologue now.
For example, you can re-read this sentence and think
"white" when you read "blue". You can choose to generate
a verbal thought about the texture of the floor below you.
You can speed up the voice, slow it down, change its pitch,
change its volume. With practice, you can even render it
mute.
Most of what happens in your head is not words. Most of
what determines your behavior has very little to do with the
voice that narrates your actions (though the voice is also a
powerful instrument once you know how to use it). You are
far more prone to influence by silent mental flinches, urges,
aversions, attitudes, emotions, shifts of attention and focus.
You can gain some control over most of these things. But
you have to become aware of them first. You have to
become intimately acquainted with aspects of experience
you usually ignore before it will begin to have implications
for your behavior in real life. Just like you can't quiet a
verbal thought you didn't know you heard, you can't
respond strategically to an aversion you didn't know you
felt, or to a belief you didn't know you held.
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The goal of the exercises I'm developing over the next few
months is to help rationalists, and others who value clear
thinking and better decision processes, gain awareness and
control over the workings of their minds--without spending
ten years motionless on a mountain top. Specifically, I hope
to provide access to enough awareness and control that my
readers can put whatever they know or learn of epistemic
rationality to much better use.
I doubt I'll post literally everything I'm working on to this
blog, but I'll want to share my thoughts as I work through
them, and I'll want to have readers test run a lot of the
exercises. Stay tuned!
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___________________________________________________
1) Everything above here is an account of my memories of a
very tiny community--my high school had something like
130 students in it, my hometown 12,000--and I was between
11 and 13 years old at the time. They're also probably taken
primarily from religion class, where debates about Anselm,
Aquinas, and New Atheism were common. As such, my
cached thoughts about the pro-life/pro-choice clash are
certainly not representative of the larger debate.
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now that the thing about not calling the other side stupid or
irrational before you can pass the ideological turing tests
applies much more strongly to vegans I've heard from than
meat-eaters. Cut it out, everybody. The Hard Problem is a
really really really hard problem.
5) I stand by everything in that paragraph. On the other
hand, it does allow another predictable false inference,
which is that I think the problem matters because eating
meat is bad if animals are sentient. The real reason I think it
matters a lot is that if we can't solve it, building an AI with
coherent extrapolated volition is going to be a lot harder.
How are we going to get it to optimize for the wellbeing of
humans but not palm trees? How are we going to agree on
the right conclusions in metaethics--which is necessary for
the survival of humans and everything else--if we can't have
truly productive discussions about the preferences of
chickens?
The remainder of the post remains apparently accurate
upon reflection. The only thing left to note is that there is a
difference between trying to change my beliefs via
emotional appeals, and trying to inspire me to act on beliefs
I already hold. I recognize that the videos I refer to are
largely meant to do the latter, but they are sometimes used
for the former, they have the same effect on me anyway,
and multiple people have admitted today to using terror
tactics when reason doesn't work.
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at war. And they seem to know it, and think it's a good
thing, that they must dominate the evil enemy at all cost.
And when one person declares war, it's kinda hard not to
raise some shields. But we have to stop this. This is not
how the truth is revealed and applied. This problem is too
important to be overwhelmed by blue/green politics.
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between
objects
and
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friend around to help, you can even have them measure for
you.
Keep moving your right hand toward your left until you feel
certain you've correctly identified the second card. How
many inches apart are the cards now?
You might even try moving the cards even closer until the
number in your right hand is just as clear as the number in
your left hand.
_____________________________________________
I find that I can't actually do this last part without folding
one of the cards, because the numbers must be touching.
Even then I notice that I can shift my gaze slightly to bring
the number on the right into even sharper focus.
A lot of people are surprised by this experiment. Many think
there's equally high clarity for about 30 degrees of arc, and
update on the results of this experiment to two degrees of
arc. They learn that their foveal vision is much narrower
than they thought.
Ponder the implications of that for a minute.
People are wrong about what it's like to have peripheral
vision. Peripheral vision is, presumably, part of every
sighted person's experience for many hours a day. Yet, you
ask them questions about their ongoing subjective
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Directing Attention
December 07, 2014
Being a human having emotions of uncertainty and
dissonance is like being a horse drawing a carriage down a
busy street. As prey animals, horses find large, fast-moving
objects frightening, and cars tend to send horses into a
panic. Since a horse's visual field is about 350 degrees,
streets provide constant opportunities to spook a
carriage-drawing horse. Carriage drivers don't want their
horses to panic, so they use blinders, reducing the horses'
vision to what's right in front of them, which keeps them
calm and controllable.
That's all good and well as long as there's a carriage driver
holding the reins, directing every single turn, watching the
road and the cars and the buildings and never letting
anything bad happen to the horse. If you're a horse without
a driver, though, blinders are a bad idea. You need all the
vision you can get.
Human attention narrowly tracks our gaze most of the time.
We don't notice much about our periphery unless there's
some sudden unexpected movement. Then our attention
snaps to that spot, and our gaze quickly follows. Our
attention is like that for all sensations we can be aware of,
not just vision. Like hearing your name at a cocktail party,
or remembering you left the oven on. We evolved to turn
our attention toward those things so naturally and easily
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___________________________________________
*I believe this because I once heard Sam Harris say it. He is
a neurologist, after all, but I'm not entirely certain I trust him
to ask himself whether the difference in signal arrival time is
enough to be perceptible even if we don't layer recent
memories to create present experience. And I don't know
what the time difference is myself. Seems plausible, though.
But perhaps more plausible to me than you due to my overt
time dilation experiences under the influence of hypnosis
and marijuana.
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Focusing Attention
Here's a quick exercise (<5mins) that sets off the sensation
of focusing. Focus can be hard to distinguish from
direction. It takes practice to gain precise control of either.
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Feeling Clearly
December 15, 2014
Every stripper knows to name a higher price than he
expects to get when selling a lap dance. He'll start out by
telling you it'll cost $75, and you'll say that's too much.
Then you'll counter with $40, and he'll say, "How about $50,
and I show you a new trick I learned yesterday." If I ask you
later why you agreed to $50, then unless you already know
about anchoring effects (or perhaps even if you do), you'll
say the guy was hot and you thought $50 was a fair price.
But if I asked you the moment you walked into the club,
"What's the highest price you'd consider fair for a lap dance
with the guy on stage right now?" you'd say, "$25" (or
something lower than $50, anyway). You wouldn't be lying
to me. It would feel true to you.
Anchoring is just one among the many guises of the
introspection illusion.
People tend to think they have direct access to the origins
of their mental states. They think they're infallible when it
comes to certain kinds of self-knowledge, like why they
chose to be a teacher, whether they like broccoli, or why
they agreed to pay $50 for a lap dance. But they're wrong.
This is a big deal.
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Maybe all of these things are true, and maybe not. If they're
not, your plan isn't going to work so well. Will you notice
when it fails, or will you go on believing all of these things
whatever happens, as long as they keep feeling true? The
introspection illusion means that how true they feel to you
is not an excellent indicator of how true they actually are,
even though they're mostly about your own thoughts and
beliefs. Empirical observations about productivity under
various circumstances must be part of the story.
But not all kinds of introspection are equally subject to this
problem.
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So what does this get you? It gets you reliable data on what
happens when you encounter whatever thought you're
interested in. It circumvents the introspection illusion to
help you make more accurate predictions about your mental
states, and therefore about whatever behaviors are
influenced by them.
Now, that's not going to perfectly map onto real-world
situations.
For one thing, it takes practice to get really rich, precise
data; to distinguish "fear" from "a cold tightness in my
chest I associate with anxiety, plus a feeling of directedness
at an image of being abandoned".
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Reflective Attention
December 20, 2014
And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small,
small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong
about that story; and it should have been a part of
Harry's art to notice that tiny note, but he was
distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are
most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when
you are most likely to forget it. HPMOR, Ch. 3
A rationalists art is most distant when it is most needed.
Why is that?
When I am very angry with my romantic partner, what I feel
is anger. I dont feel the futility of throwing a tantrum, or the
availability of other options like honest communication, or
freewriting, or taking a deep breath. My attention is so
narrowly focused on the object of my anger that Im likely
not even aware that Im angry, let alone that my anger might
be blinding me to my art.
When her skills are most needed, a rationalist is lost in an
unskillful state of mind. She doesnt recognize that its
happening, and she doesnt remember that she has
prepared for it by learning and practicing appropriate
techniques.
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This will probably take around five minutes, but you can do
it for much longer if you want to.
Notice what your mind is doing right now. One thing its
doing is experiencing sensations of black and white as you
read. What else are you experiencing? Are there words in
your inner monologue? Are there emotions of any kind?
Spend about thirty seconds trying not to think anything.
When thirty seconds is up, stop trying not to think, and read
on.
Whats happening in your mind is constantly changing.
Even when you were trying not to think, you probably
noticed many times when the stillness would shift and
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painted red, and one duck with its belly painted purple. To
win the prize, you have to grab the purple-bellied duck when
it floats by.
Now imagine the same duck pond, but instead of their
bellies being painted, it's their backs. There are nine
red-backed ducks and one purple-backed duck, and to win
the prize, you have to grab the purple-backed duck when it
floats by.
The second game's a lot easier, right? Why is that?
The mere fact that the purple duck is in front of you is an
insufficient trigger. When you play the second game and
win, you're not just grabbing the duck in front of you when
it's purple. You're grabbing the duck in front of you when
you see that it is purple. You notice a purple experience
happening in your mind, and that's how you know to grab
the duck. In the first game, you lose, because there's
nothing to notice. Even though the ducks are in fact
different, they all look the same from your vantage point.
Back to Alice.
The game she's playing is "update slightly when I encounter
weak contrary evidence". The duck pond is the world, the
current is time, and the ducks are events. Most of the ducks
are red, and the purple ducks are "weak contrary evidence".
"When I encounter weak contrary evidence" is a bad trigger
in exactly the same way that "when the purple duck is in
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If I were Alice, I'd take one more step toward noticing every
instance of weak contrary evidence. A precise and accurate
trigger is necessary, but it's not always sufficient. This kind
of skill takes practice.
I have a knitting counter, which I bought for $7.13 on
Amazon. Knitting counters are very simple: You press a
button, and it advances the count by one. When I'm training
myself to notice a trigger, I carry the knitting counter in my
pocket. Every time I notice the trigger, I push the button. I
reset the counter to zero at the end of the day, and the next
day I try to beat my highest score.
(There are plenty of substitutes for the knitting counter, of
course, such as keeping track in your head. But it does
make a highly satisfying cliking sound.)
I keep doing this until my score levels out. Then, I swap out
the action of pressing the button for whatever other action I
think is useful. In this case, it would be "update slightly
away from the hypothesis".
Usually, the leveling out process runs into the
action-swapping process, so for a while I'm responding with
the action while I'm still getting better at noticing the
trigger. But if the action is any more complicated than
pressing a button, I hold off on taking it and train noticing
specifically until I'm feeling pretty comfortable with the
noticing itself.
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Reflective Recording
January 05, 2015
Related Posts: Mindfulness, How To Train Noticing, Feeling
Clearly, Tathat: Why Be Here Now?, Simulating Confusion,
What It's Like To Notice Things
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trigger vary.
The same goes for testing the output: To know quickly if
the intervention reliably causes the desired mental state,
you need to know what mental state it causes, and you
need to keep track of the results over time.
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first.
Next actions:
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Next actions:
1. Decide what the schedule should be for meta strategy
sessions
Log
12/31/2014
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[This first entry is all prep work. It's probably more detailed
than future reports on prep work will be.]
My best guess at the skill I most desperately need right now
is resilience: the ability to recover rapidly, especially from
failure; to bend without breaking.
Be able to generate concrete examples of successes and
failures to apply the skill.
An example of successful application: Every time
another approach to teaching epistemic rationality failed,
CFAR adjusted and tried something else, rather than
giving up on teaching epistemic rationality.
An example of failure to apply the skill: I got a C on my
very first logic test in college. Rather than correct my
mistakes and study for the next test, I was crushed and
spent several days agonizing over whether to drop the
class. Complete failure would have been dropping the
class at that point (which I didn't and went on to excel in
highly advanced logic courses), but perfect resilience
would have prevented any waste of time or energy.
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pin them all down, but I have at least identified a few. I'll
start with "growing the roses of success": feeling
emotions in line with knowledge that my failure has been
educational.
For every big mistake you make be grateful!
That mistake you'll never make again!
Every shiny dream that fades and dies,
Generates the steam for two more tries!
So when it gets distressing it's a blessing!
Onward and upward you must press!
From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success!
An example of growing the roses of success is burning a
batch of cookies and feeling happy to have learned that
my new oven is hotter than my old oven. Failure to grow
the roses of success in the same situation would be
sulking about having burnt the cookies.
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1/4/2015
I feel like I'm doing something wrong, but I'm a bit sleep
deprived and I'm having a lot of trouble concentrating
enough to work out what it is.
It might be that I'm practicing the wrong thing. My current
trigger is "the sensation of surprise directed at something I
recognize as my mistake", but I updated to that in an
attempt to not ignore my mistakes, which wasn't the
original goal. The original goal was to cut back on despair
in response to mistakes and promote something like
satisfaction and curiosity. It's only the very tiny mistakes
that I'm able to ignore anyway, so although not ignoring tiny
mistakes is an important skill (one I'm adding to my
wishlist), I don't think it's part of resilience, and I don't think
it's The Most Important Thing for me to learn right now.
The times when I've made and noticed mistakes on my own
so far this week, I've not felt the despair-type feelings that I
flagged as problematic before. Like when I accidentally left
my knitting counter upstairs this morning. I just felt "oops"
and maybe a tiny bit of frustration, then I ran upstairs to
retrieve it. That's all there was to it. That kind of feeling
doesn't have the potential to get in my way.
The only times in the past few days when I've felt the
problematic thing I flagged have been while interacting with
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Brienne's Workflow
February 01, 2015
I've dramatically improved my workflow over the past
month or so. I don't expect this exact formula to work for
you, but working is *so* much more fun now that I feel like
I've got to share, just in case somebody gets a small part of
the benefit from one of these ideas.
Here is the formula I use today. I added each thing in
succession, and each one improved my experience of
working immediately and obviously.
1. Pomodoros. The pomodoro technique is a work schedule
with 25 minute blocks separated by short breaks. I've
worked in pomodoros off and on for a couple years, but
until now I've used them on an as-needed basis. They've
always been good for getting me through highly aversive
work, but they've never felt like a boost to projects I don't
mind working on. I seem to be pretty good at focusing and
not procrastinating by default, so I think I had less to gain
from pomodoros than a lot of people. For example, my
instinctive response when I first heard about browser
extensions that block distracting websites during work
periods was "...why don't you just close those tabs?". (I
understand why, it's just not how my brain works.) Pomos
in a social context, though, have proved powerful for me.
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Responding To Overconfidence
February 25, 2015
Without Googling, what's your 95% confidence interval for
the longest time spent in labor? Feel free to post it in the
comments before reading on.
I just encountered this question on William MacAskill's
Facebook wall. When I looked it up, after posting my
answer, I discovered that my upper bound was off by a
factor of 10.
I was reluctant to answer the question in the first place, but
I didn't stop to examine why. It is now clear to me: When it's
revealed that I'm extremely overconfident about something,
my default response is shame and regret.
I used to respond much more strongly with shame and
regret than I do now. I recall an occurrence of this reaction
from about three years ago. The reaction was so strong that
many vivid details of the context are readily available in
memory. (Whether they're accurate is a separate question.)
Robby and I were in the the pizzeria on Kirkwood sitting at a
table by the door. It was raining. We were having bread
sticks with cheese sauce, and he asked me, "What's your
90% confidence interval for when Reverend Bayes was
born?"
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this.
My best guess at how I'd rather respond to discovering I'm
extremely overconfident is about the same as the response
I learned to have to failures. I'd like to feel nonchalant
interest in my overconfidence. Further, I'd like that interest
to inspire targeted curiosity about the cause of the
overconfidence, and increased sensitivity to similar
contexts or patterns of thought that might signal severe
overconfidence if I encounter them when forming or
considering other beliefs.
But the most important part is just letting go of the thing
that drags me down into counterproductive emotions. A
flavor of wu wei, maybe, of fluidity. My brain's pretty good,
really, when I can keep from getting in its way. If I can just
stop doing the stupid thing, I often don't need a brilliant
solution on top of it.
I don't know how I do that "letting go of the
dragging-downward" thing, but I do know that I've learned
to do it at least once before. I'll plan to imagine Eliezer
discovering overconfidence and his usual response, as a
reminder that other responses are possible, in case I need
some extra help.
So, here's the new trigger-action plan, which I will not train
but will instead simply intend and await: If I notice that my
overconfidence has been revealed, then I will loosen my
grip on the downward-dragging sensations and direct my
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1/24/2015
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4 clicks
1/25/2015
8 clicks so far today, all retrospective, though about half
were just moments after the event.
Catching something about Eliezer's body language out of
the corner of my eye, I noticed myself anticipating an
interruption while I was reading. I had a distinct feeling of
trying to push that reality away while hiding from it,
distancing myself, like I could make it not come to be if I
hoped hard enough. (Turns out I read him wrong and he just
kept writing.)
Immediately after noticing the feeling, I felt curiosity about
what would be better to feel at that time, given that I might
indeed be interrupted but I couldn't be sure of it. How would
I prefer to respond to anticipation of interruption?
I don't have an answer yet, but my past experience
suggests that asking the question in real time is the fifth
milestone in habit installation. (Since you're probably
wondering at this point: The first milestone is using mid- or
long-term memory to notice that you missed a chance to
notice the trigger. The second is noticing you missed the
trigger while it's fresh in working memory. The third is
noticing the trigger as it's happening. The fourth is noticing
your default response to the trigger as it's happening. The
fifth is seeking a better response while the default response
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clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal sensation is
still fresh in my mind, and a shadow of it still colors my
immediate experience.
(In other words, I'm not still feeling it, but my attention
never fully left it as it moved from immediate sensation
to very recent memory. My thoughts about it have been
continuous. To know what this is like, try paraphrasing
the three bullet points you've read so far without
re-reading them, then try paraphrasing a paragraph of
something you read a few hours ago without re-reading
it. Detail at the level of paragraphs or sentences is
possible for information still contained in working
memory, but that level of detail seldom makes it to
long-term memory, and you'll probably have trouble
giving more than a rough outline or your overall
impression of the thing you read a few hours ago.)
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1/31/2015
5 clicks
2/1/2015
4 clicks today.
I'm catching the trigger in real-time now. I don't know if it's
because I stopped clicking retrospectively, or because I
thought a lot about it and that caused automatic vivid
simulation.
I've thought some more about the anticipation of the trigger
thing. I felt it yesterday and happened to spontaneously
respond well, specifically by running my simulation past the
thing I feared and on to the best way to respond should the
interruption happen. Having a preferred response in hand
already, I feel like I should run with it.
I think this habit has two closely related triggers, and
they're so closely related that I'm going to go ahead and try
training them simultaneously.
The first trigger is anticipation of interruption or plan
violation, and my default response to it is to think bad
things at my simulation of the interruption, feeling as
though that will prevent it from actually happening. That
feels like the clinging-grasping plus fear of the
rending-jarring.
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2/2/2014
1 click.
2/3/2014
2 clicks.
2/4/2014
3 clicks.
Ants have been an ongoing battle here, as you may recall
from my entry on Jan. 26th. I can keep them out, for the
most part, as long as I spray a new line of Raid across the
porch the moment I see an ant inside. If I fail to do that, the
whole colony invades my kitchen while I sleep. I was
spraying every two days for a while, and then they stopped
for a whole month, and recently they've started again.
I was in the middle of a yin yoga session just now when I
noticed an ant on the floor. I felt the trigger for an
opportunity to practice fluidity--the clinging, grasping,
rending, and jarring all at once--but before it could really get
going, I successfully responded with the action I planned
three
days
ago.
"If
I
feel
the
clinging-grasping-rending-jarring all at once, then I will run
my
simulation
past
the
present
moment's
anticipation/reality comparison to answer the question,
'How should I respond to this?'"
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2/5/2014
2 clicks
2/25/2015
Formal training of fluidity got a little bumpy. I moved home
from Chile, officiated a wedding, and got sick, without a
break in between. My new context also caused me to wear
different clothes, which made keeping the knitting counter
on me all the time much more difficult. As a result, my
training has been a lot less reflective.
But it's still been happening, and I'm sort of grateful for the
opportunity to see what happens when I get the ball rolling
and then let my attention stray elsewhere.
The most interesting result has been that fluidity and
growing the roses have both blended and expanded to
create what feels like a generalized resilience skill, which
was indeed the goal, and I'm amazed that it's happened so
quickly. It doesn't feel complete, but it's a tremendous
improvement.
The expansion started out with clicking accidentally for
growing the roses instead of fluidity. Then I started
forgetting which was which, and just taking the right action
instead of stopping to sort out which habit I was practicing.
Then
I
started
clicking
for
triggers
that
are
phenomenologically similar to one of the habits, and
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across the cold and dark, calling from across the centuries.
And I knew it is up to us, the original inhabitants of Ancient
Earth, to answer.
I knew, then, that I would never again see the night sky the
way I had in the past. What I did not yet know is that I'd
never see anything else the same way, either.
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I haven't tested this, but I expect I'd gain skill more quickly
through a rapid-fire Simulation session than through a
rapid-fire Observation Correlation session. You can also do
a calibration simulation in any real-life instance where you
might otherwise make a bet.
I think the Observation Correlation method assumes either
that you already have pretty good reflective awareness of
your credence-related subjective experiences, or more
likely that reflective awareness of those experiences isn't all
that important. Especially in the online-training version of
Observation Correlation, improvement is expected to
happen below the level of awareness. It's a quiet shifting of
gut feelings.
I think reflective awareness of credence experiences is
probably hugely beneficial. The simulation method trains
exactly that, making it a good candidate for something
earlier in a calibration training program than the
observation method.
The other reason I suspect it should come before
observation is that it isn't tied up with social feelings like
wanting to protect your reputation or social stigmas
surrounding gambling, or personal insecurities related to
intelligence and ego. In the moments of real-world
prediction and prediction-checking, any of those sensations
is likely to be so salient that it blots out credence feelings
both at and below conscious awareness. And when you
turn out to be wrong, you'll probably be punished (in a
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Future Me: Hi! I'm you from a year in the future, and I'm
going to teach you about empathy.
Me: "Empathy?" That sounds boring.
Future Me: It isn't.
Everything plays backward briefly.
PIP: Right, I remember you posting about that! How'd those
go?
Me: The first one went exceedingly well. I was shocked,
actually. The second one was so-so, though people seemed
pretty happy with it.
PIP: Cool! What did you teach?
pause
Future Me: How are you feeling right now?
Me: Trapped, bored, tired, like I'm wasting my time. I'd
rather be at home reading. Why do I even go to these
parties?
Future Me: If I recall correctly, you think that since you no
longer have social anxiety, you should be participating in
socialization like ordinary humans.
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Me: That does sound sort of silly doesn't it. Just because
I'm not terrified doesn't mean I'm actually benefiting from
this. Maybe I should just stop going to parties.
Future Me: That might be wise. But what do you think would
happen if you declined literally every invitation to any kind
of socialization, even coffee, that you expected would make
you feel bored and tired?
Me: ...Well then I guess I just wouldn't interact in person
with anybody but Eliezer.
Future Me: Indeed. Why do you think you feel this way in
social interactions so frequently?
Me: looking a bit sad and helpless I guess I probably just...
don't like people. I mean, I know I like People, as an abstract
category, at least sometimes. My whole life is about making
sure People continue to exist for a very long time. But
whatever it is that makes other people enjoy in-person
socialization, I just don't have it.
Future Me: You think that you never care about individual
people in physical proximity, that you're not a
compassionate person, right? Like you have some
long-range compassion, or at least long-range aesthetic
appreciation for humanity, but no short-range compassion,
no empathy.
Me: That sounds about right, yeah.
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Me: ...No?
Future Me: No?
Me: Well I'm just a collection of abilities and aversions and
goals and a bunch of other things, and things in that mix
can change at any time. If I were essentialist, I'd think I had
a single solid soul-like thing that was Who I Really Am, and I
think that's bullshit.
Future Me: I see. What I meant is that you're an essentialist
about personality characteristics, not about personalities.
Me: Huh. Ok, I'm listening.
Future Me: Imagine yourself as an algorithm in a neural
network. (Have you read those parts of the Sequences yet? I
think you probably have.) Can you picture that?
Me: Sure. There's a series of orange marble-like nodes with
lots of wispy connections to other nodes. I use this image a
lot. I am a brain, after all.
Future Me: Oh right, you're all about "association networks"
for mnemonics. I never realized that's where this
understanding came from. Ok, so tell me about association
networks. What happens when you think of a "horse"?
Me: A group of nodes representing "horse" fires, and the
things that are highly connected to the "horse" cluster are
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met before?
Me: I'd... I'd like that, actually. I really want to know more
about him. More about what's inside his head, I mean. It
would be fun to try to learn. looks around I'd probably like
to talk with any of these people, really.
Future Me: That's what I thought. I'll leave you to it then.
scene unfreezes
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Primitive Introspection
July 05, 2015
[Epistemic status: This is my working model. I think
something like this is probably happening irl. Some of my
details of neurology, anatomy, and evolutionary biology are
probably wrong. I'd be only slightly surprised if I converted
from HOPs theory to some sort of HOTs theory in the next
year, but I don't think that would have strong practical
implications.]
1
Trigger-action plans exist on a spectrum. Over on the left,
you have TAPs like "If I enter my house through my front
door, I'll put my keys in the box on the side table." On the
right you have TAPs like "If I'm confused, I'll stop and
compare what I expected to happen to what happened
instead."
keys <-----------------> confusion
Roughly speaking, the stuff on the left is physical, and the
stuff on the right is cognitive.
The stuff on the right seems to be harder. Why is that? This
post is about my attempt to answer that question.
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If you took away a lizard's true eyes and left it with just the
primitive third eye, it would have something almost but not
quite entirely unlike vision. It could distinguish night from
day, but certainly not knights from daisies. In other words, it
would be about as blind as its distant ancestors who had
just begun to develop sight. Lizard-relevant parts of the
world would be way more complicated than its vision could
handle.
My best guess about why introspection is harder than
outrospection is this: We're in an awkward evolutionary
stage where the human-relevant goings-on inside our
brains are way more complicated than our shiny new
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Cognitive Trigger-Action
Rationality
Planning
For
Epistemic
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desire
If you're not getting much out of your days off and also
happen to be in a service role (like nursing, teaching, or
leading an organization), maybe this approach could help
you, too.
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A Walking Meditation
August 02, 2015
There is a road stretching from here to a future I imagine.
In that future, there are experts of domain-general
reasoning, of prediction, and of cognitive boot-strapping
toward accuracy and effectiveness. Many of them have
explicit knowledge of how to masterfully wield human
intelligence, in the way a present-day fencing instructor
knows how to wield a foil. The children there can become
such masters in a single lifetime (though to be fair, a single
lifetime is probably a lot more than 80 years).
What do you think the bricks on that road are made of?
These bubbles represent possible bricks you yourself could
lay on the road to the future I imagine - things that might
carry you toward it. What happens when you arrange them
in order from the smallest, least important brick to the
largest, most important brick?
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