As I've been reading through various articles and their comments on Less Wrong, I've noticed a theme that has appeared repeatedly: a frustration that we are not seeing more practical benefits from studying rationality. For example, Eliezer writes in A Sense that More Is Possible,
Why aren't "rationalists" surrounded by a visible aura of formidability? Why aren't they found at the top level of every elite selected on any basis that has anything to do with thought? Why do most "rationalists" just seem like ordinary people...
Yvain writes in Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great,
...I've gotten countless clarity-of-mind benefits from Overcoming Bias' x-rationality, but practical benefits? Aside from some peripheral disciplines, I can't think of any.
patrissimo wrote in a comment on another article,
Sorry, folks, but compared to the self-help/self-development community, Less Wrong is currently UTTERLY LOSING at self-improvement and life optimization.
These writers have also offered some suggestions for improving the situation. Eliezer writes,
Of this [question] there are several answers; but one of them, surely, is that they have received less systematic training of rationality in a less systematic context than a first-dan black belt gets in hitting people.
patrissimo describes what he thinks an effective rationality practice would look like.
- It is a group of people who gather in person to train specific skills.
- While there are some theoreticians of the art, most people participate by learning it and doing it, not theorizing about it.
- Thus the main focus is on local practice groups, along with the global coordination to maximize their effectiveness (marketing, branding, integration of knowledge, common infrastructure). As a result, it is driven by the needs of the learners [emphasis added].
- You have to sweat, but the result is you get stronger.
- You improve by learning from those better than you, competing with those at your level, and teaching those below you.
- It is run by a professional, or at least someone getting paid [emphasis added] for their hobby. The practicants receive personal benefit from their practice, in particular from the value-added of the coach, enough to pay for talented coaches.
Dan Nuffer and I have decided that it's time to stop talking and start doing. We are in the very early stages of creating a business to help people improve their lives by training them in instrumental rationality. We've done some preliminary market research to get an idea of where the opportunities might lie. In fact, this venture got started when, on a whim, I ran a poll on ask500people.com asking,
Would you pay $75 for an interactive online course teaching effective decision-making skills?
I got 299 responses in total. These are the numbers that responded with "likely" or "very likely":
- 23.4% (62) overall.
- 49% (49 of 100) of the respondents from India.
- 10.6% (21 of 199) of the respondents not from India.
- 9.0% (8 of 89) of the respondents from the U.S.
These numbers were much higher than I expected, especially the numbers from India, which still puzzle me. Googling around a bit, though, I found an instructor-led online decision-making course for $130, and a one-day decision-making workshop offered in the UK for £200 (over $350)... and the Google keyword tool returns a large number of search terms (800) related to "decision-making", many of them with a high number of monthly searches.
So it appears that there may be a market for training in effective decision-making -- something that could be the first step towards a more comprehensive training program in instrumental rationality. Some obvious market segments to consider are business decision makers, small business owners, and intelligent people of an analytical bent (e.g., the kind of people who find Less Wrong interesting). An important subset of this last group are INTJ personality types; I don't know if there is an effective way to find and market to specific Meyers-Briggs personality types, but I'm looking into it.
"Life coaching" is a proven business, and its growing popularity suggests the potential for a "decision coaching" service; in fact, helping people with big decisions is one of the things a life coach does. One life coach of 12 years described a typical client as age 35 to 55, who is "at a crossroads, must make a decision and is sick of choosing out of safety and fear." Life coaches working with individuals typically charge around $100 to $300 per hour. As far as I can tell, training in decision analysis / instrumental rationality is not commonly found among life coaches. Surely we can do better.
Can we do effective training online? patrissimo thinks that gathering in person is necessary, but I'm not so sure. His evidence is that "all the people who have replied to me so far saying they get useful rationality practice out of the LW community said the growth came through attending local meetups." To me this is weak evidence -- it seems to say more about the effectiveness of local meetups vs. just reading about rationality. In any event, it's worth testing whether online training can work, since
- not everyone can go to meetups,
- it should be easier to scale up, and
- not to put too fine a point on it, but online training is probably more profitable.
To conclude, one of the things an entrepreneur needs to do is "get out of the building" and talk to members of the target market. We're interested in hearing what you think. What ideas do you think would be most effective in training for instrumental rationality, and why? What would you personally want from a rationality training program? What kinds of products / services related to rationality training would you be interesting in buying?
So, I presented a five-minute speech to my community college class on the base rate fallacy. Unfortunately, it went over their heads at about the same apparent distance as airplanes usually pass over my own. Here is the text of the speech, if anyone would be so kind as to offer criticism.
"I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass...and I'm all out of bubblegum". You might remember this line from the 80s sci fi movie They Live. In the movie, society is controlled by aliens who are using up Earth's natural resources. They're in politics, they're in law enforcement, and they look just like humans. Then the protagonist finds a box of sunglasses that let him see who's an alien and who isn't. For some reason they also make everything black and white. It's a crappy movie, but the point is, there are similar situations in real life, where we're trying to figure out who has a certain disease, or who the criminal is, or whatever the case may be. Let's consider a situation where we're trying to figure out who has breast cancer.
Let's pretend you have a friend who's going to the doctor to get a breast cancer screening. The doctor tells your friend that in her age group, 40-50, about 1% of women have breast cancer. He tells her that mammograms are 80% accurate, with a 10% false positive rate. After the screening, your friend is told that she tested positive. Now, how likely do you think it is that your friend has breast cancer? Congratulations, you just committed the base rate fallacy. Let's take another look at this question, which was originally published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Think about 1000 women just like your friend, visiting a clinic to get screened for breast cancer. We already know that on average 1% of those women will have cancer. So 10 women will actually have cancer. This means that 990 women will not have cancer. Since the test is 80% accurate, 8 of the women with cancer will test positive. But since there is a 10% false positive rate, 99 women without cancer will also test positive. So out of 107 women who test positive, only 8 actually have breast cancer. That's about a 7.5% probability that she has cancer. Would it change the way you view your test results, or the advice you might give to a loved one, if you knew how base rates affected the accuracy of the test?
When it comes to reducing uncertainty, one thing we can do is to get a second, and even a third test, independently conducted. Sometimes, however, that's simply not possible. Let's consider another situation. Imagine someone installed a camera in your city to catch terrorists. Just for the sake of the argument, let's say that we know that there are 100 terrorists among the 1 million inhabitants of your city. If the camera sees a terrorist, it will ring a bell 99% of the time. Its false positive rate is only 1%. Sounds great, right? Suppose the city's entire 1 million inhabitants pass before the camera. It will ring the bell 99 times for the 100 terrorists – and 9,999 times for the rest of the citizens. Now what? Do you stick upwards of 10,000 people in a holding cell and keep running them past the camera? Do you spend the time and money to criminally investigate 10,000 people? Is imprisoning 10,000 people to catch 100 acceptable in terms of human rights and security? What does this problem sound like?
If you said it sounds a lot like the TSA, you're right. Bruce Schneier, a security technologist, estimates we can expect to find about 1 terrorist among 8 million people passing through airports. This low base rate already makes it clear that the TSA will be relegated to screening false positives nearly all the time. It's hard to be certain. But, as one online journalist pointed out, the TSA's success rate – far from being 99% as in our example above – is close enough to 0 to be negligible. They've found lots of contraband, including weapons and even explosives. But I wasn't able to find a single instance that was linked to a terrorist or terrorist group. We do know that terrorists are still flying. They are occasionally caught – by other agencies – prior to flying. Setting aside the questionable competency or practicality of TSA procedures, and based purely on numbers alone, do you think the TSA is worth a reported 8 billion dollars and 90 million hours of waiting in line per year?
Keep in mind that base rates tend to have little to no effect if they are very high. Since about 50% of women who take pregnancy tests are already pregnant, pregnancy tests are accurate enough to be generally reliable. Of course, everyone knows that they are also not 100% accurate. A good way to think about probabilities and percentages is to use natural frequencies. Just as I did in the situations I talked about tonight, think about a group of people in terms of tens or hundreds out of thousands or millions. That will help you understand what all the numbers really mean.
I hope that you leave tonight with a good understanding of what base rates are and how they affect how we think about problems. Both problems that affect us personally, and societal issues that affect all of us.
What are you hoping that people will do with this information? Most of these folks will never run the TSA, so they can't do much except gripe about being made to take their shoes off in airports. Even in the breast cancer example, the most that your average person would take away from the speech is "you're supposed to multiply something by...something, and somehow the test might be wrong." What advice are they supposed to give their friend? Most women with a scary-looking mammogram who hear their friend say, "You're probably fine" a... (read more)