waveman comments on Teachable Rationality Skills - Less Wrong

52 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 May 2011 09:57PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 May 2011 12:16:51AM 3 points [-]

Running list of major skill areas not yet discussed:

  • Curiosity - the true and honest feeling, or failing that, how to get as close there as possible. Litany of Tarski, "ask whether, not why", Update Yourself Incrementally, etc.
  • Bottom-line stuff - noticing when you already know your destination, hold off on proposing solutions, etc.
  • Connecting belief to anticipation.
  • Use-of-words skills - people trying to milk definitional arguments for inferences, etc.
  • Empiricism - keeping a constant eye out for ways to test things. Not big official scientific reliable tests, just keeping your eyes open.
  • Concreteness / specificity - managing your levels of abstraction (this is surprisingly important in practice).
  • Productivity - adding new good habits, breaking old bad habits, scholarship
  • Argument flow awareness - things like motivated stopping, motivated continuation, flinching away from a counterargument that might carry; also positive aspects like knowing which question an argument is intended to resolve
  • Nonconformity
  • Cooperation
  • Saying oops
  • Munchkinism, minmaxing, "burn the spirit of the game", zs'hanh, assume the problem is solvable and continue solving it
  • Fun
Comment author: waveman 01 June 2011 08:08:31AM 0 points [-]
  • Consciously work to get faster and more accurate feedback.

Example - periodically write down your goals for the next month and year. At the end of the period, review progress. This gives feedback on how much you can currently get done.

It also gives feedback on whether what you are correct in your opinion of what your goals are. If you are not progressing towards your goals they may not actually be important goals. You can use the reviews to reverse engineer what your goals must be given what you spend your time on. Eg if you spend a lot of time surfing the web in an undisciplined manner, then being amused and entertained may be very important to you, or maybe it's novelty that's important.

Example - break down larger projects into stages that provide value at each stage, and where you can clearly tell if you have completed a stage. Review the project at the end of each stage to see if you want to continue with it.

Example - ask people around you for feedback on your behavior, strengths, weaknesses. You will probably have to go out of your way to reward "bad news" feedback until people get confident you can take it.

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