Your inner Google

PhilGoetz

I just heard a comment by Braddock of Lovesystems that was brilliant: All that your brain does when you ask it a question is hit "search" and return the first hit it finds. So be careful how you phrase your question.

Say you just arrived at work, and realized you once again left your security pass at home. You ask yourself, "Why do I keep forgetting my security pass?"

If you believe you are a rational agent, you might think that you pass that question to your brain, and it parses it into its constituent parts and builds a query like

X such that cause(X, forget(me, securityPass))

and queries its knowledge base using logical inference for causal explanations specifically relevant to you and your security pass.

But you are not rational, and your brain is lazy; and as soon as you phrase your question and pass it on to your subconscious, your brain just Googles itself with a query like

why people forget things

looks at the first few hits it comes across, maybe finds their most-general unifier, checks that it's a syntactically valid answer to the question, and responds with,

"Because you are a moron."

Your inner Google has provided a plausible answer to the question, and it sits back, satisfied that it's done its job.

If you instead ask your brain something more specific, such as, "What can I do to help me remember my security pass tomorrow?", thus requiring its answer to refer to you and actions to remember things and tomorrow, your brain may come up with something useful, such as, "Set up a reminder now that will notify you tomorrow morning by cell phone to bring your security pass."

So, try to be at least as careful when asking questions of your brain, as when asking them of Google.

Say you just arrived at work, and realized you once again left your security pass at home. You ask yourself, "Why do I keep forgetting my security pass?"

If you believe you are a rational agent, you might think that you pass that question to your brain, and it parses it into its constituent parts and builds a query like

X such that cause(X, forget(me, securityPass))

and queries its knowledge base using logical inference for causal explanations specifically relevant to you and your security pass.

But you are not rational, and your brain is lazy; and as soon as you phrase your question and pass it on to your subconscious, your brain just Googles itself with a query like

why people forget things

looks at the first few hits it comes across, maybe finds their most-general unifier, checks that it's a syntactically valid answer to the question, and responds with,

"Because you are a moron."

Your inner Google has provided a plausible answer to the question, and it sits back, satisfied that it's done its job.

So, try to be at least as careful when asking questions of your brain, as when asking them of Google.

To my understanding, what you are describing here is what is called a transderivational search in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It is basically a "satisficing" (suffice+satisfy) fuzzy search.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transderivational_search http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

Here's a pet peeve of mine: I think this site could find A LOT of benefit in delving into NLP. I mean, the whole field is basically a quest to find the machine-code of the human psyche. The version of NLP that is represented on sites like SkepDic seems like a poor representation of the amazing stuff I am always reading about, which is a shame as it turns people off from reading more about it.

Right now I'm reading Shlomo Vaknin's "Patterns of Neuro Linguistic Programming", which is pretty much a spellbook/hacking-manual containing 300+ patterns for doing all kinds of things to your mind.

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-NLP-Expanded-Programming/dp/9657489083 http://www.coachingleaders.co.uk/blog/nlp-book-review-the-big-book-of-nlp-techniques-by-shlomo-vak.html

The reason I bring up this book in particular is because it's a lot more concise and info-packed than any others I've seen, and so could serve as a good introduction.

There's an event going on right now called the NLP Mind Fest, which is proving to be very interesting. It's on day 4 already, though, and you can only listen to the presentations on a day-to-day basis.

http://www.nlpmindfestevent.com/

Oh, and this concept of asking better questions is something that Anthony Robbins is always talking about as one of the most important factors in self improvement. He says something to the effect of "the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself". And Robbins' background is in, you guessed it, NLP :)

TLDR: LessWrong needs to investigate NLP. I am a somewhat smart and non-kooky cookie and I find NLP interesting and worthwhile AND I am a big fan of LW. This might indicate that others could find value in the field as well.

I think one of my favorite things is to see someone earnestly defend a marginally valuable and slightly controversial theory on LW, because the resulting dynamics cause the good parts of the theory to be revealed while simultaneously producing an object lesson in identifying junk science and filtering poorly tested claims with reasonableness. Most of the regular commenters wouldn't advocate or support a theory like NLP and if it was left to them the community wouldn't produce conversation trees like this one, which I find quite educational.

I wish there wa... (read more)

11jsalvatier15y

Wikipedia suggests that NLP doesn't have any science behind it and it's predictions have been tested and disconfirmed. I'd have to hear a good explanation for this before giving NLP much time.

19PhilGoetz15y

I agree that it seems worth looking into. I've looked into NLP a little bit. I'm always turned off by the voices of its practitioners. Their tonality, speed, excitement, and rhythym scream "I am trying to sell you snake oil!" to me. This is odd for people who claim to be masters of subcommunication via speech. They often repeat the charlatan pattern I first observed in Tom Brown Jr., of spending as much time telling you how great what they are telling you is, as telling you things. This applies also to the popular self-improvement gurus, including Tony Robbins. I cannot stand to listen to an audio of him; it's like being trapped in a small room with a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman.

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