Skill: Being strategic. I.e., life-consequentialism, where you actually do things based on their expected future consequences, as opposed to drifting into a PhD program because your friends are doing it.
Exercise materials: We either need to develop efficient probes for getting people to list out major life choices that they could actually remake (are under serious reconsideration) or we need to develop hypothetical life stories and policy decisions to use in exercises.
Subskill: Avoid pitfalls of verbal strategic reasoning.
There are studies showing that people who consider their decisions more make worse decisions. As I understand it, the main explanation for this is that people shift from an intuitive sum of costs and benefits, to seeking verbally justifiable decisions, which in turn might lead them to one-reason-decisionmaking, ignoring some of their costs and benefits which are important to them but seem less "sensible". I also suspect it may exacerbate other biases like scope insensitivity or rare events - thinking about cases which are rare or short in duration.
The classic case being "Let's get a bigger house, further away from work, so it has an extra bedroom in case Grandma comes over", which she does once a year, but the 20 minutes of extra commute time happen every day and are not acclimated-to.
Subskill: Unbundling; optimize separate things separately.
Example 1: Optimize fuzzies and utilons separately.
Example 2: Optimize grades and learning separately (instead of just optimizing grades, or haphazardly optimizing both at the same time).
5SL: Notice when you're optimizing two things at once. (Maybe because you (a) have a sense of awkwardness or of not getting enough done, and when you list out the desirable consequences, there's more than one?) Then, find two different things you can do which optimizes each one individually and without worrying about the other one.
Subskill: Notice foreign goals. Are your parents making you do it? Are you doing it because you read it in a book? Did you just drift into doing that?
Converse subskill: Notice feeling of actually caring about something. Notice whether that caring is giving energy to what you're doing. Notice its absence.
Subskill: Detach from sunk costs.
Material for exercises: Requires a case where the person has sunk costs and the option of continuing or not continuing. Might want to choose cases slightly less fraught than a marriage or a PhD program - you want to work up to those gradually.
Exercise A: For a case where sunk costs exist, imagine that you are a new person who was just now teleported into this person's life. Variant: Imagine you were just teleported into this person's life, and everyone else knows this, and they all expect you to execute sudden changes of course. See what this changes about your thinking, regardless of whether it changes your decision.
Exercise B: For whatever sunk costs you're in the middle of expending, look at the same scenario and rephrase it as a sunk benefit, the purchased option to finish a task more quickly than before. E.g., if you already paid $100 on a $150 item, change from "I paid $100" to "I now have the option of purchasing this item for $50". Again, the stated objective of the exercise will be, "Notice the difference in your thinking", not, "try to change your decision".
Exercise C: As above, but imagine that you bought the option for a penny on eBay. E.g. if you're one year into a four-year PhD program, imagine that you paid a penny on eBay to purchase an option to get a PhD in three years rather than the usual four years. Would you exercise that option if you paid a penny for it?
That last exercise seems to run afoul of some value-related heuristics. Price is so common a proxy for utility that imagining that you paid a penny for the option on eBay might irrationally devalue whatever you're looking at.
Of course, looking at the contrast might still give you some useful insights -- provided you can untangle them.
Subskill: Use fungibility. There are different ways to achieve many goals. E.g. instead of wasting an evening with a relative in a way you resent, send them a postcard.
Subskill: Don't express emotions as policy decisions. (Anna.) Find some other outlet for the emotion besides the policy decision, i.e., screaming. (Eliezer.)
Keep in mind that the current psychology literature indicates that cathartic release is actually undesirable-- while catharsis might improve affect in the short term, this is largely because it represents giving in to one's anger, and in the long run it actually makes you more likely to experience anger in the future.
I therefore advise that, in the event that one needs to make a particularly important decision and is currently angry, cathartic screaming may be effective, but its use should be restricted only for cases where it is strictly necessary.
(and this is coming from the ex-leader of a cathartic screaming club :P)
Or, more generally, what you do reinforces your mental state at the time. Acting in anger (even just a cathartic release) reinforces your tendency toward (the likelihood of future) anger; the same with acting from fear and most other emotions. Also, whatever the cause of your procrastination, acting on it, letting yourself get away with procrastinating, increases your problems with it in the future. As a poster I made for my study wall many years ago said: "Commit through Action: Do It".
From Musashi:
"The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him.”
Rationality skill: Recognize rationality skill in others.
There is a strong tendency for people to use the heuristic, "P(Person X is right) = # of times person X has been observed to be right / # of statements person X has made", or worse, "(# statements by X - # of times X has admitted to making a mistake) / # statements by X".
This encourages people who want to be respected to do 4 bad things:
Unfortunately, these methods are extremely effective.
Because normal comments will inevitably get mixed up with those that satisfy the requested sort of post, I recommend you bold the words "Skill", "Subskill" and "Exercise".
Skill: Anti-rationalization (1): Prevent your mind from selectively searching for support of only one side of an argument.
Subskill: Analyze the underlying reasons why you're trying to rationalize for or against something - why a conclusion feels required, or disallowed.
Important subskill: Notice when a candidate "the reason I'm trying to rationalize something" is a poor guess or itself a rationalization - when it's a guess that sounds plausible about someone like you in your position, but doesn't seem to ring true.
Exercise material: List of suggested conclusions to rationalize. I'm not quite sure what the prerequisites here would be; one of my own childhood epiphanies was finding that I could argue reasons why there ought to be a teapot in the asteroid belt, and thinking to myself, "Well, I better not do that, then." I suspect the primary desideratum would be more that the topic offers plenty of opportunity to come up with clever rationalizations, rather than that the topic offers motivation to come up with clever rationalizations.
Exercise A: Pick a conclusion from the list. Come up with a clever argument why it is true. Notice what it feels like to do this. Then don't do it.
(This is distinct from noticing the feeling of being tempted to rationalize, a separate subskill.)
Exercise B: In the middle of coming up with clever arguments why something is true, stop and chain into the Litany of Tarski, or some other remedy. Variant: Say out loud "Ew!" or "Oops!" during the stop part.
Exercise C: For a conclusion on the list, argue that it is true. Then "Ask whether, not why" - try to figure out whether it is true. Notice the difference between these two processes. Requires a question whose answer is less than immediately obvious, but which someone can find info about by searching their memory and/or the Internet.
Skill: negotiation - deliberately reaching a mutually beneficial trade or agreement, even in situations of slight power imbalance. Important for rationalists who aim at earning money as an instrumental goal.
(At the 5-second level a key component of this is learning to say "no", being able to overcome one's agreeableness as the default decision.)
(For some reason negotiation in situations of extreme power imbalance seems like it should have a different name, and I don't know what that should be.)
Skill: Maintaining "contextual pointers" with your knowledge, both for the sake of evidential sourcing and contextual usage.
The idea here is twofold.
First, many intellectual conversations between people who lack this skill are are random walks through topic space. Each tangential leap is potentially useful for mining relevant evidence from each person's mind... but in conversations exploring an important central thesis it is good to treat the tangents as objects pushed onto a stack in the course of linear conversation. When you go to far afield with a tangent you need the presence of mind to notice that D was inspired by C which was inspired by B, which was profoundly relevant to the pragmatically important question of A. Stepping back to C or B or even A is frequently called for in important conversations but requires contextual mindfulness.
The second use of context is evidential. Being mindful of where evidence comes from (if it can be managed) helps keep track of the value and meaning of evidence. Confabulation induced or permitted by source amnesia, isn't necessarily a bad thing in terms of "usage optimized concepts" but in terms of epistemic hygiene ...
As the Sun rose, the whole forest was filled with loud but sweet chatter of the squirrels chirping, as all the little ones were busy getting ready for school. Squeaky, the youngest among them, a very energetic and clever guy, was also gentle and kind, hence was adored by all the squirrels in the forest.
Squeaky enjoyed school very much and was always the first to get there. He loved what he learned each day and seeing his enthusiasm his parents gifted some chalk for him to practice his lessons at home. Squeaky was very happy and immediately set about scribbling on the trunk of the tree where his home was. That day in school, he was taught the number 'one', and his home tree was filled with that number. But soon there was a problem, “How could a little tree trunk be enough to hold all my knowledge?” wondered Squeaky. He thought about this and then decided to borrow the other trees in the forest for this purpose.
The next day he learned about 'two', and painted the whole forest, all the trees, including his neighbours wi...
Skill: Productivity/Munchkinism. Not giving up in pursuing a difficult worthwhile goal, always acting on the best available plan, including the search for a better one. Ability to convert additional time and resources into additional (if slow) optimization, as opposed to wasting them.
Subskill: Creativity, ability to generate new prototype ideas and refine them, modifying and combining known things to gradually reach into new territory.
Subskill: Scholarship, ability to collect ideas and skills from elsewhere, for future use as building blocks for your problem.
Subskill: Optimization of own activity. Creatively looking for better ways of doing things instead of only following a fixed routine. Improving effectiveness of the routine past the point of satisficing a "reasonable" level (where that's consequentialistically helpful).
Skill: An accurate and functional awareness of time.
By this I mean to include noticing that pre-established dates and times have arrived, predicting the amount of time things will take you or other people, not carrying through with schedules or plans inflexibly when real surprises should cause updates, understanding how to effectively communicate about time with people about time management in ways that respect the listener's time management skills, and so on.
Skill: Mindfulness / not doing things on autopilot.
An underlying capacity that seems worth exercises to train explicitly, if we can figure out how to do that.
Exercise A: Have a set of hand signals describing conversational modes and use them during conversation; something along the lines of the Philosophy Referee signals only more relevant, like a hand signal meaning "You are attempting to refute what I just said" or "I am accepting that implicit premise."
Exercise B: Hand signals to describe body language, tone of voice, facial expressions.
(What other continuously changing variables would be good to learn to pay attention to?)
Skill: Distill yourself to simple terms. Be funny and interesting.
Exercise:
Have list of topics. Select one using a random number generator. Or use random ANKI cards. Whatever.
Immediately after selecting, turn on your digital camera/computer camera and record.
You can aim for lots of different goals: tell an interesting story, give a short two-sentence answer, etc.
This is great for preparing for job interviews also.
Skill: The accurate and timely assessment of basic probability ie: determining a person's likely response in any given conversation, determining odds of common occurrences, etc. The benefit to communication and the time-saving possibilities of such a skill are such that I feel any aspiring rationalist should pay specific attention to the development of basic probabilistic abilities.
Exercise: Dancing
Single/Partnered dancing lessons. Increase body awareness and consciousness of body language signs, both emitted and received. Practice basic skills that can lead to other benefits - confidences speaking with strangers, and hugging at meet-ups.
Skill: Compartmentalizing, or keeping track of threads and subthreads in a discussion so that it doesn't become derailed by minutiae.
This is more important in board meetings with Robert's Rules of Order in place, but it can be useful in general rational discussion. Just last night I my friend was helping me with C++ references and we got caught up over array pointers, forgetting entirely about the bug we were trying to solve.
I aspire to run and manage stuff. Yet I often find myself often using low-status communication methods even when medium to high-status communication methods are appropriate. I find it uncomfortable to express expectation that others should follow my lead or listen to me, and express thanks too much. I say, "is it okay if we go now" to a friend who gave me a ride instead of "Let's go?"
I thus devised the following plan and am in the process of executing it.
Skill: Become comfortable with expressing high-status behavior.
Exercise: Ask women...
Running list of major skill areas not yet discussed:
Twilight is tolerable. The setup is quite good, but wasted (vampire politics are glossed over in favor of Bella's heartbeat). If you want to see what can be done with it go read Alicorn's Luminosity (discussion thread) which starts out a decent pamphlet for luminosity, then drops it and turns into a good book. (As in, not by the standards of online fanfic. By the standards of books.)
Twilight itself is just your usual crappy romance novel. It finds a few emotional buttons (danger, lust, beauty, resisting attraction, the high of infatuation) and presses them like a monkey on crack. It's quite possible to enjoy that. Secondary characters, while rather flat, are appealing - for example Carlisle Cullen's virtues can be genuinely moving.
I say grab it if you have time to waste, if the first five minutes bore you drop it, otherwise finish it.
I have another suggestion - not with respect to the content of those rationality lessons, but regarding one means of propagating this knowledge: Khan Academy
I'm sure many of you are aware of it by now and I am pretty convinced that Khan Academy is a predecessor of what the future of education will look like. So my suggestion is to get someone charismatic with the skill to explain the skills of rationality in a down-to-earth non-nerdy way and put these explanations up on youtube. If they are good enough and fit the style of Khan Academy lessons, they may h...
Fun fact: on my first readthrough, I saw
Recent brainwashing sessions at SIAI
and was like wut.
Skill: Other introspection / reflectiveness. (Catchall for internal self-knowledge habits that don't go elsewhere.)
Subskill: Accept that an accurate description of yourself during any given frame-instant will involve some emotions, reasons why you act, and reasons why you believe, which are less than perfectly virtuous.
Skill: Handling ideas, plans, and predictions lightly enough not to become stuck with bad ones when evidence could (should?) have pushed you into a better working model.
Roughly, this skill would involve honestly scoring as a fox on the fox vs hedgehog quiz in a self aware way... understanding some of the construct that the quiz is probing, how that construct causally connects with predictive accuracy, and how and when to engage the relevant skills. Bonus points for being able to constrain the tendencies when they are unhelpful.
Exercise: PUA. Amy suggests that an exercise of equivalent difficulty for women might be getting a handsome guy to buy you a drink without promising him anything else.
There is something about this that skeeves me out as well, and it's not simply discomfort at the idea of doing it. It's the idea of manipulating others for drinks. It reminds me of begging, almost, the whole trying to get free stuff from others. Also, it sounds like leading men on far enough to get them to buy you a drink; it sounds like making them think you're interested, even if you don't actually promise anything. I'm not so fond of things that might inconvenience others, nor the idea of getting drinks from others because I've led them to believe something false.
I believe the male version is to get a girl's phone number? What skills does this require? I'd guess confidence, the art of conversation, body language, assertiveness, initiative, etc etc. Everything that's already been listed. However, what skills does convincing a man to buy a girl a drink require? What would make a man want to buy a girl a drink? I'm getting the impression of a great deal of flirtatiousness.
I feel that a more equivalent challenge would be for a girl to get a man to accompany her to one of her hobbies, like a knitting group or an orchestra concert or a rationalists' meetup. That way, she has to present her hobby well, get the guy interested, and he has to be interested in something other than sleeping with her. It will require more communication than sexuality, and I feel it will teach the desired social skills better.
The female possible-equivalent kind of skeeves me out
There is something to notice here.
Yes, that manipulation to get drinks is a flawed analogy, not equivalent. (I reject your connotation.)
It is not easy to find a direct female equivalent to the kind of skills Eliezer was suggesting developing. Simply because of the huge difference in the usual difficulty level in that kind of interaction. Perhaps the most direct translation would be "learn how to approach, attract and build a connection with prospective mates that would previously have been out of your league".
I need to think about this more, but my current belief is that it is less of a stretch to say that a pickup artist is satisfying actual preferences of a woman who chooses to sleep with him than to say a woman who sets out to marry a rich guy so that she can divorce him is satisfying actual preferences of the rich guy.
One yardstick our legal system and our society use to determine actual preferences is the principle of "informed consent". It seems to me that the consent of most of the woman who go home with pickup artists is significantly more informed than the consent of the Beverly Hills lawyer in Intolerable Cruelty is.
For your analogy to be illuminating and not misleading, the pickup artist would have to falsely profess a desire to spend the rest of his life with the woman or at least carefully navigate conversations with the goal of concealing the fact that his interest is other than what she thinks it is, and I currently do not think a significant number of them do that. Alternatively, the rich guy would have to know or strongly suspect that her goal is to cash out in a divorce -- and marry her anyway (e.g., because he cannot live without her) -- but the expected fra...
95% probability: Alicorn is suggesting that, just as the female equivalent of PUA skeeves Manfred (presumably a male) out, the traditional version of PUA skeeves her (and presumably other females) out.
Addressed to general audience, not katydee specifically.
Michael Vassar, 5th comment down: "It's important to pay attention to what people's words actually say. ..." I am going to attempt an exercise trying that out and see what happens. I'll also poorly echo Yvain.
Eliezer and others were looking for exercises to aid aspiring rationalists in developing generally applicable social/conversational skills/attributes. For aspiring rationalist males, the common perception is that PUA has demonstrated large positive effects. Eliezer or Amy suggested that succeeding at "getting a handsome guy to buy you a drink without promising him anything else" would build skills for female rationalists. Eliezer then relays Amy's suggestion that PUA and "getting a handsome guy to buy you a drink" might be of equivalent difficulty. Note that "equivalent" was used as an adjective, not a noun. This is the only flavor of equivalence suggested by Eliezer or Amy. It is a bad comparison. Female attractiveness is harder to substantially improve than male attractiveness, and "handsome" is vague.
The thread goes downhill immediately. Manfred writes: "The female...
Summary: katydee put 95% on a total breakdown of sanity within 4 sentences including Eliezer's 2 word sentence, written by 3 people, 2 of which are number 1 and number 3 on Less Wrong's Top Contributors list, and ended up guessing correctly, as if the reasoning was obvious. And I find it kinda funny...
It would only have been surprising if it was the first time the same insanity broke down in the vicinity of the same keyword and you were unfamiliar with the politics of the number three user in the top contributor list. It wasn't exactly subtle.
Skill I: Conceptual Integration. This skill involves the ability to rapidly identify the relationship between any two concepts.
Skill II: Analogy. Be able to apply meaning from one subject to another.
Skill III: Creative Thinking. There is a wide range of ways to understand creativity, but it is generally understood to be the ability to create something new and valuable. A person thinks creatively by blending concepts from different scenarios together to generate unique ideas. This phenomenon, essential to the arts, sciences and humor goes on in the s...
Skill :
Exercise idea: provide a list of questions that have objectively right answers such as how many bones are there in the human body. Have each person on his own guess at the answers. Next, put everyone in a small group and have the groups discuss the questions and then have everyone individually redo their estimates. Finally, combined each small group with one or two others and repeat what was done before.
Tell everyone at the start of the exercise that their goal is not to just get the right answers but to also identify causes of persistent disagreements within their decision group.
I did this once in my game theory class and the students loved it, although I didn't measure how much they learned from the exercise.
"Rational people can't agree to disagree" is an oversimplification. Rational people can perfectly well reach a conclusion of the form: "Our disagreement on this matter is a consequence of our disagreement on other issues that would be very difficult to resolve, and for which there are many apparently intelligent, honest and well informed people on both sides. Therefore, it seems likely that reaching agreement on this issue would take an awful lot of work and wouldn't be much more likely to leave us both right than to leave us both wrong. We choose, instead, to leave the matter unresolved until either it matters more or we see better prospects of resolving it."
Imperfectly rational people who are aware of their imperfect rationality (note: this is in fact the nearest any of us actually come to being rational people) might also reasonably reach a conclusion of this form: "Perhaps clear enough thinking on both sides would suffice to let us resolve this. However, it's apparent that at least one of us is currently sufficiently irrational about it that trying to reach agreement poses a real danger of spoiling the good relations we currently enjoy, and while clearl...
Exercise A: For a case where sunk costs exist, imagine that you are a new person who was just now teleported into this person's life. Variant: Imagine you were just teleported into this person's life, and everyone else knows this, and they all expect you to execute sudden changes of course. See what this changes about your thinking, regardless of whether it changes your decision.
Exercise B: For whatever sunk costs you're in the middle of expending, look at the same scenario and rephrase it as a sunk benefit, the purchased option to finish a task more quickly than before. E.g., if you already paid $100 on a $150 item, change from "I paid $100" to "I now have the option of purchasing this item for $50". Again, the stated objective of the exercise will be, "Notice the difference in your thinking", not, "try to change your decision".
Exercise C: As above, but imagine that you bought the option for a penny on eBay. E.g. if you're one year into a four-year PhD program, imagine that you paid a penny on eBay to purchase an option to get a PhD in three years rather than the usual four years. Would you exercise that option if you paid a penny for it?
That last exercise seems to run afoul of some value-related heuristics. Price is so common a proxy for utility that imagining that you paid a penny for the option on eBay might irrationally devalue whatever you're looking at.
Of course, looking at the contrast might still give you some useful insights -- provided you can untangle them.
Recent brainstorming sessions at SIAI (with participants including Anna, Carl, Jasen, Divia, Will, Amy Willey, and Andrew Critch) have started to produce lists of rationality skills that we could potentially try to teach (at Rationality Boot Camp, at Less Wrong meetups, or similar venues). We've also been trying to break those skills down to the 5-second level (step 2) and come up with ideas for exercises that might teach them (step 3) although we haven't actually composed those exercises yet (step 4, where the actual work takes place).
The bulk of this post will mainly go into the comments, which I'll try to keep to the following format: A top-level comment is a major or minor skill to teach; upvote this comment if you think this skill should get priority in teaching. Sub-level comments describe 5-second subskills that go into this skill, and then third-level comments are ideas for exercises which could potentially train that 5-second skill. If anyone actually went to the work of composing a specific exercise people could run through, that would go to the fourth-level of commenting, I guess. For some major practicable arts with a known standard learning format like "Improv" or "Acting", I'll put the exercise at the top and guesses at which skills it might teach below. (And any plain old replies can go at any level.)
I probably won't be able to get to all of what we brainstormed today, so here's a PNG of the Freemind map that I generated during our session.
