sdr comments on SotW: Be Specific - Less Wrong

37 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 April 2012 06:11AM

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Comment author: sdr 04 April 2012 04:26:40AM *  1 point [-]

Easy excercise on the 5-second level: ask the question "as opposed to what?" both loud, and when constructing what you'd like to tell. An easy trigger to remember is qualifiers -they're usually a mark of motivated abstraction-switch.

Medium-level excercise: take one of your life failures at any level, and dismantle it via root cause analysis:

"The business failed." "Why?"

"We failed to nail down the unit economics tightly before scaling up marketing" "why?"

"No one was dedicated to look over all the 6 pieces on the value chain" "why?"

...etc.

Also known as 5-whys, this practice basically drills down a single causality chain via "why" questions to 4-6 levels, untangling human, skill, intention, and other components that lead to the failure. You can verify, whether you were specific enough, by being able to come up with concrete solutions for each of these levels.