(The Exercise Prize series of posts is the Center for Applied Rationality asking for help inventing exercises that can teach cognitive skills.  The difficulty is coming up with exercises interesting enough, with a high enough hedonic return, that people actually do them and remember them; this often involves standing up and performing actions, or interacting with other people, not just working alone with an exercise booklet and a pencil.  We offer prizes of $50 for any suggestion we decide to test, and $500 for any suggestion we decide to adopt.  This prize also extends to LW meetup activities and good ideas for verifying that a skill has been acquired.  See here for details.)


The following awards have been made:  $550 to Palladias, $550 to Stefie_K, $50 to lincolnquirk, and $50 to John_Maxwell_IV.  See the bottom for details.  If you've earned a prize, please PM StephenCole to claim it.  (If you strongly believe that one of your suggestions Really Would Have Worked, consider trying it at your local Less Wrong meetup.  If it works there, send us some participant comments; this may make us update enough to test it.)


Lucy and Marvin are walking down the street one day, when they pass a shop showing a large chocolate cake in the window.

"Hm," says Lucy, "I think I'll buy and eat that chocolate cake."

"What, the whole thing?" says Marvin.  "Now?"

"Yes," says Lucy, "I want to support the sugar industry."

There is a slight pause.

"I don't suppose that your liking chocolate cake has anything to do with your decision?" says Marvin.

"Well," says Lucy, "I suppose it could have played a role in suggesting that I eat a whole chocolate cake, but the reason why I decided to do it was to support the sugar industry.  Lots of people have jobs in the sugar industry, and they've been having some trouble lately."


Motivated cognition is the way (all? most?) brains generate false landscapes of justification in the presence of attachments and flinches.  It's not enough for the human brain to attach to the sunk cost of a PhD program, so that we are impelled in our actions to stay - no, that attachment can also go off and spin a justificational landscape to convince the other parts of ourselves, even the part that knows about consequentialism and the sunk cost fallacy, to stay in the PhD program.

We're almost certain that the subject matter of "motivated cognition" isn't a single unit, probably more like 3 or 8 units.  We're also highly uncertain of where to start teaching it.  Where we start will probably end up being determined by where we get the best suggestions for exercises that can teach it - i.e., end up being determined by what we (the community) can figure out how to teach well.

The cognitive patterns that we use to actually combat motivated cognition seem to break out along the following lines:

  1. Our conceptual understanding of 'motivated cognition', and why it's defective as a cognitive algorithm - the "Bottom Line" insight.
  2. Ways to reduce the strength of the rationalization impulse, or restore truth-seeking in the presence of motivation: e.g., Anna's "Become Curious" technique.
  3. Noticing the internal attachment or internal flinch, so that you can invoke the other skills; realizing when you're in a situation that makes you liable to rationalize.
  4. Realigning the internal parts that are trying to persuade each other: belief-alief or goal-urge reconciliation procedures.

And also:

  • Pattern recognition of the many styles of warped justification landscape that rationalization creates - being able to recognize "motivated skepticism" or "rehearsing the evidence" or "motivated uncertainty".
  • Specific counters to rationalization styles, like "Set betting odds" as a counter to motivated uncertainty.

Exercises to teach all of these are desired, but I'm setting apart the Rationalization Patterns into a separate SotW, since there are so many that I'm worried 1-4 won't get fair treatment otherwise.  This SotW will focus on items 1-3 above; #4 seems like more of a separate unit.


Conceptual understanding / insights / theoretical background:

The core reasons why rationalization doesn't work are given in The Bottom Line and Rationalization.  The Bayesian analysis of selective search is given in What Evidence Filtered Evidence? and Conservation of Expected Evidence.

For further discussion, see the entire Against Rationalization sequence, also The Meditation on Curiosity (for the Litany of Tarski).

Some key concepts (it'd be nice if some exercise taught a gut-level understanding thereof, although as always the goal is to t each skills rather than concepts):

  • Once you write down the answer on the bottom line of a piece of paper in pen, it's already right or already wrong, and won't change regardless of what clever arguments you write on the lines above.
  • What determines your life outcome isn't how cleverly you argue for the foregone conclusion - what determines life outcomes is the algorithm that chooses which side to argue for, what you actually do.
  • Rationality isn't something you can use to argue for your side; you can never say "Please come up with a rational argument for X"; the only chance for rationality to operate is when you're deciding which side to be on.
  • Evidence that has passed through a filter takes on a different Bayesian import.  (Currently handled in the Bayes unit.)
  • It is impossible for a rational agent to search for evidence to look at that will send their beliefs in a predetermined direction.  (Currently handled in the Bayes unit.)
  • There's such a thing as a correct probability to assign to an uncertain proposition, and this in turn determines the weight to lend that possibility in our actions.  Even when things are uncertain, any cognition that makes you put too much action-weight on the wrong belief or choice is screwing you up.
  • If you're selective about where you look for flaws, or how hard you look for flaws, every new fallacy you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider.

(We might also need an exercise just for getting people to understand the concept of motivated cognition at all.  When Anna and Michael ran their first session on motivated cognition, they found that while most participants immediately recognized the notion of 'rationalization' from examples like Lucy above, several people had no idea what they were talking about - they didn't see why anyone would ever want to use a technique like the Litany of Tarski.  Yes, we know you're skeptical, we also couldn't see how that could possibly be true a priori, but sometimes the evidence just punches you in the nose.  After some investigation, it seems entirely possible that Alicorn has simply never rationalized, ever.  Other cases (not Alicorn's) suggest that some people might have a very low need for verbal justification; even if they feel guilty about breaking their diet, they feel no urge to invent an elaborate excuse - they just break their diet.  On the other hand, LW!Hermione failed to reproduce this experiment - she couldn't find anyone who didn't immediately recognize "rationalization" after 10 tries with her friends.  We notice we are confused.)

(The upshot is that part of the challenge of constructing a first unit on motivated cognition may be to "Explain to some participants what the heck a 'rationalization' is, when they don't remember any internal experience of that" or might even be "Filter out attendees who don't rationalize in the first place, and have them do a different unit instead."  Please don't be fascinated by this problem at the expense of the primary purpose of the unit, though; we're probably going to award at most 1 prize on this subtopic, and more likely 0, and there's an existing thread for further discussion.)


Countering the rationalization impulse / restoring truth-seeking:

The Tarski method:  This is the new name of what we were previously calling the Litany of Tarski:  "If the sky is blue, I want to believe the sky is blue; if the sky is not blue, I want to believe the sky is not blue; let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want."

Example:  Suppose you walk outside on a fall day wearing a short-sleeved shirt, when you feel a slightly chill breath of air on your arms.  You wonder if you should go back into the house and get a sweater.  But that seems like work; and so your mind quickly notes that the Sun might come out soon and then you wouldn't need the sweater.

Diagram:

  It stays cold enough to require a sweater It gets warm enough that no sweater is needed.
You believe you need a sweater A warm walk in a toasty sweater. Your walk is ruined forever by the need to carry an extra sweater.
You believe you don't need a sweater You are cold!  Cold cold cold!  Why didn't you get a sweater? Free and unencumbered, you stroll along as the warm Sun comes out overhead.

Visualizing all 4 quadrants of this binary proposition - the world is like A and I believe A, the world is like B and I believe A, etc. - should, in principle, emotionally confirm the truth of the proposition:  "If it will be cold, I want to believe it's cold; if it's not cold, I want to believe it's not cold; let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want."

Eliezer and Anna, when using this method against the temptation to believe X, visualize only the quadrant "The world is not like X and I believe X" to remind themselves of the consequences; e.g. we would only visualize the "You are cold!" quadrant.  Michael Smith (aka "Val", short for Valentine) says that after some practice on this technique as a kata, he was able to visualize all 4 quadrants quickly and that visualizing all 4 seemed to help.

Val also used an upside-down W-diagram with the two worlds at the top and the four beliefs at the bottom, to emphasize the idea that the world is there first, and is fixed, and we have only a choice of what to believe within a fixed world, not a choice of which background world to live in.  The Tarski Method embodies a "Start from the world" mental process in which you visualize the world being there first, and your belief coming afterward; a similar "Start from the world" rule is likewise emphasized in the Bayes unit, wherein one starts from a world and asks about the probability of the evidence, rather than starting from the evidence and trying to make it match up with a world.

When we actually tested a unit based on asking people to draw Tarski squares, it didn't work very well - possibly because people didn't seem to understand what it was for, or when they would use it; possibly because it wasn't a group exercise.  In any case, we already tried teaching this the obvious way ("Go draw Tarski squares!") and it didn't work.  But it still seems worth teaching if someone can invent a better exercise, because it's something that multiple CfAR people actually use to counter the rationalization impulse / restore truthseeking in real life.

Become Curious:  Detect non-curiosity and become curious.  Anna's main alarm signal is when she notices that she's not curious in the middle of a conversation - that she doesn't have an impulse-to-find-out the answer - and then try to make herself curious about the subject of discussion.  Besides visualizing the not-X-and-believe-X quadrant of the Tarski diagram, this is also something you may be able to do by brute introspection - remember the feeling of curiosity, and try to call it up.  (This is probably in the top 3 most important things I learned from Anna. -- EY)

Take Pride in Your Objectivity:  Julia teaches this as a primary counter in her Combat Reflexes unit (how to avoid instantly defending or attacking).  Eliezer does this every time he admits he's wrong on the Internet - congratulates himself on being such a great rationalist, in order to apply counter-hedons to the flash of pain that would otherwise be associated.

Visualize a Fixed Probability:  This is what Eliezer used as a child to stop being scared of the dark - he would deliberately visualize a murderer standing with a knife behind a door, then visualize his own thoughts having no effect on the fixed probability that any such murderer was actually present.  In other words, the notion of a "true probability" that his thoughts couldn't affect, countered the fear of thoughts affecting reality.  Visualizing there being a fixed frequency of worlds, or a lawful probability that a Bayesian agent would assign, can help in perceiving the futility of rationalization because you're trying to use arguments to move a lawful probability that is fixed.  This is also part of the domain of Lawful Uncertainty, the notion that there are still rules which apply even when we're unsure (not presently part of any unit).

Imagine the Revelation:  Anna imagines that the answer is about to be looked up on the Internet, that Omega is about to reveal the answer, etc., to check if her thoughts would change if she was potentially about to be embarrassed right now.  This detects belief-alief divergence, but also provides truthseeking impulse.

Knowing the Rules:  And finally, if you have sufficient mastery of probability theory or decision theory, you may have a procedure to follow which is lawful enough, and sufficiently well-understood, that rationalization can't influence it much without the mistake being blatant even to you.  (In a sense, this is what most of Less Wrong is about - reducing the amount of self-honesty required by increasing the obviousness of mistakes.)


Noticing flinches and attachments, and raising them to conscious attention:

A trigger for use of curiosity-restoration or the Tarski Method:  Noticing what it feels like for your mind to:

  • Quickly glimpse a disliked argument before sweeping it under a mental rug (flinch)
  • Glimpse a conclusion, find it unacceptable, quickly start generating arguments against it (flinch)
  • Be centered on a conclusion, automatically counter all arguments against it (attachment)
  • Instantly attack a new idea, instantly defend an old idea (this is the subject of Julia's Combat Reflexes unit)
Learning to notice these events introspectively seems extremely important - we all use it heavily in daily practice - but we don't know how to teach that.
Anna observes that Rejection Therapy is often a good time to observe oneself rationalizing, as apparently many participants reported that their mind started generating crazy reasons not to approach someone with a request.
Anna also says that she's been self-rewarding each time she notices a flinch or attachment, i.e., she's trying to train her inner pigeon to notice (not, one hopes, training the flinching or attachment!)  It's possible we could ask participants to self-reward each event of "noticing the flinch or attachment" while doing Rejection Therapy, but we still need other ideas.
Along similar lines of internal behaviorism, Eliezer avoids rewarding himself for rationalizing by repeating the phrase "Only congratulate yourself for actually changing a probability estimate or policy" on any occasion where he hasn't changed his mind after argument - as opposed to e.g. feeling any sense of reward for having defeated an incoming argument; even if the incoming argument happens to be wrong, still, "Only congratulate yourself for actually changing a probability estimate or policy."
Another thing most of us do is name attachments or flinches out loud, in conversation, as we notice them, in order to reduce their strength, i.e. "This is probably a complete post-facto rationalization, but..." (Eliezer) or "I may just be trying to avoid having my status reduced, but..." (Anna).  (Note:  This requires enough trust that nearby people also know they're flawed themselves, that you don't feel embarrassed for confessing your own flaws in front of them.  In other words, you have to tell embarrassing stories about your own failures of rationality, before other people will feel that they can do this around you.)

Anna's anti-rationalization makes heavy use of noticing suspect situations where the outside view says she might rationalize - cases where her status is at stake, and so on - and specific keywords like "I believe that" or "No, I really believe that".  She wants to try training people to notice likely contexts for rationalization, and to figure out keywords that might indicate rationalization in themselves.  (Eliezer has never tried to train himself to notice keywords because he figures his brain will just train itself to avoid the trigger phrase; and he worries about likely-context training because he's seen failure modes where no amount of evidence or sound argument is enough to overcome the suspicion of rationalization once it's been invoked.)

"Look toward the painful thought instead of away from it" is an important reflex to install to counter flinches, but would probably require some sort of hedonic support - like a strong, pre-existing pride in objectivity, or a social support group that applauds, or something to stop this from being pure negative reinforcement.

Awards for previous SotW suggestions:

$550 to Palladias for the Monday-Tuesday game, which has been tested ($50) and now adopted ($500) into the Be Specific unit (though it might be moved to some sort of Anticipation unit later on).

$550 to Stefie_K for her suggestion to have the instructor pretend to be someone who really wants you to invest in their company, but is never specific; also $50 to daenrys for the  "More Specific!" improv-game suggestion.  In combination these inspired the Vague Consultant game ("Hi, I'm a consultant, I'm here to improve your business processes!"  "How?"  "By consulting with stakeholders!") which has now been adopted into the Be Specific unit.

$50 to lincolnquirk for the "Channel Paul Graham" game, which we tested.  We all thought this would work - it was our highest-rated candidate suggestion - but it didn't get positive audience feedback.  Congratulations to lincolnquirk on a good suggestion nonetheless.

We haven't yet tested, but definitely intend to at least test, and are hence already awarding $50 to, the following idea:

$50 to John Maxwell IV for the Choose Your Own Adventure suggestion for the Consequentialism unit.

To claim a prize, send a LessWrong private message (so we know it originates from the same LW user account) to StephenCole.

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77 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 11:29 PM
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This often works for me: think of some smart, critical and rational friend that you have, and then imagine/visualize presenting your argument to them. Or suppose that you just put up your argument on the Internet to be critiqued. Is any part of your reasoning such that you'd actually prefer not to present it in public, knowing that it won't hold up to scrutiny?

For me at least, if I imagine presenting my reasoning to someone else, I suddenly become a lot more conscious about its weak spots. And then I try to remind myself that if I can't think of a reason why those weak spots should hold up to scrutiny, my instinct should be to abandon the argument instead of just hoping that those problems won't come up.

Anecdotal supporting evidence: In my last days as a religious person, I found myself imagining myself presenting my pro-religion arguments to the author of the Sequences, and literally could not fantasize a scenario where he found them convincing.

"Well," says Lucy, "I suppose it could have played a role in suggesting that I eat a whole chocolate cake, but the reason why I decided to do it was to support the sugar industry. Lots of people have jobs in the sugar industry, and they've been having some trouble lately."

The obvious response to Lucy is "Is buying and eating that whole choclate cake really the best way to help the sugar industry? How does it compare to other strategies, like directly giving them money?"

The generalization is that when you say you are taking action A in pursuit of goal G, ask what other actions might be more effective at achieving G.

8TheOtherDave12y
Yeah. I also find that getting into the habit of imagining my response to the putative cause turning out not to be true can help. That is, suppose I suddenly discover that the sugar industry is actually doing really well, but the broccoli industry is in deep financial trouble. Does my decision about the cake change in response? If not, it's likely that putative cause isn't actually causal.
1JGWeissman12y
This is also a good response, though outside the pattern I described. It's generalization seems to be that when you are taking an action to help some group of people, ask would you take actions that similarly help some other group of people. So it is a somewhat narrower technique, applying when the goal is helping some group of people. Perhaps you could generalize it further.
3TheOtherDave12y
(nods) I would say, rather, that the generalization is that when I believe I'm taking A in response to condition C, ask whether my desire to do A would vary if C were radically altered. If changes in C don't correspond to changes in A, it's likely that A is not actually a response to C.

Set your baseline to always assume you are rationalizing, and then have to prove that you aren't, rather than vice versa.

Something I do, that I'm surprised I don't see mentioned here, is to just assume that any point I am trying to make, or anything I think, is a rationalization (which is pretty likely).

So instead of having to think "Am I rationalizing?" (which can be hard to figure out), I change my baseline, to ALWAYS assume "I am probably rationalizing. How am I rationalizing?" and go from there. Sort of a quick run-through of what biases and semi-hidden desires could be influencing my decisions or statements at any given time. From there I can either accept or reject these "rationalizations".

This also ends up leading to many disclaimers in conversations, as mentioned in the OP. (i.e. "Well I can't know for sure what I HAD thought, because by now hindsight bias has taken hold...." or "Well, I'm completely anchored off your estimate now, but...") I see "Conversation Disclaimers" themselves to be a major skill. Maybe an exercise could be made out of that?

Quick idea: Have people in pairs have a conversation about a debatable subject. Every sentence they say has to be pre-empted with a disclaimer.

(Note: This is my immediate reaction to this post. I'll give it more thought later.)

7daenerys12y
Exercise Idea- Rationalization Listing Ask leading questions, or have everyone come up with a list of premises they think are true. (Examples- It's good to be vegetarian/paleo/omni; Political Belief System X is strongest; I enjoy Activity B; Continuing grad school is good/bad idea; etc) Once they have developed this list, have them list as many reasons as they can that they are actually just rationalizing. (i.e. have them ASSUME they are rationalizing, and then have them list ways this could be possible) The person who comes up with the MOST, wins. Example (This is a real one for me)- Premise: It's good to be vegetarian Think: "I am probably rationalizing. How? Why? Opposing evidence? Possible rationalizations: 1) I've been a vegetarian for a long time, so consistency bias wants me to continue to be one 2) Admitting I'm wrong would mean that I've been wrong for the past 8 years. 3) Being a vegetarian allows me to hold moral high ground, despite actual morality, or lack thereof, of the choice. 4) Deciding that vegetarianism is NOT a moral choice would mean that I have no reason to remain one. It's easier for me at this point to maintain the status quo, than to switch my diet back to omnivorous. 5) Social pressure- People I like and respect think that vegetarianism is a good choice, even if they themselves aren't. Arguments against: 1) Animals' life in nature is also completely horrendous. Factory farmed animals may actually have it better off than the average animal in nature. 2) Animals are not sentient enough that I should care overly much for their well-being. 3) Meat is yummy (or at least it was at one point...Now I don't much like the smell anymore) At the end, they can pair up and try to add MORE rationalization possibilities to their partner's list.
0pnrjulius12y
I'm concerned that this technique will just make people able to come up with lots of bad reasons to do things, thus making them better at rationalization. I feel like we would be better off encouraging people to come up with good reasons, and then perhaps comparing them to bad reasons.

Our conceptual understanding of 'motivated cognition', and why it's defective as a cognitive algorithm - the "Bottom Line" insight.

"Defective" isn't quite enough; you want a prescription to replace it with. Saying "this is a bad habit" seems less useful than saying "here is a good habit."

There are two obvious prescriptions I see: provide correct rationales for decisions, or do not provide rationales for decisions. Which prescription you shoot for has a radically different impact on what exercises you do, and so should be talked about quite a bit. It may be desirable to try and wipe out rationalization, first, and then progress to correct rationales.

One exercise might be asking "who will this convince?" and "whose desires do I want to maximize?". Lucy probably doesn't actually expect Marvin to be swayed by the plight of Big Sugar, and probably doesn't actually suspect that Marvin will believe she's motivated by the plight of Big Sugar, and so that deflection may be the wrong play because it's incredible.

It seems to me that social incentives will swallow most internal incentives here. If I can get more out of others by ra... (read more)

"Break down what your parts have to say into parts" would be an interesting counter to rationalization - I think I'll have to call this an immediate $50 award on the grounds that I intend to test the skill itself, never mind how to teach it.

2shminux12y
I thought that was your reason for writing the HJPEV's internal 4-way dialog.
0Vaniver12y
Awesome!

My girlfriend says that a common case of motivated cognition is witnesses picking someone out of a lineup. They want to recognize the criminal, so given five faces they're very likely to pick one even if the real criminal's not there, whereas if people are leafing through a big book of mugshots they're less likely to make a false positive identification.

She suggests a prank-type exercise where there are two plants in the class. Plant A, who wears a hoodie and sunglasses, leaves to go to the bathroom, whereupon Plant B announces that they're pretty sure Plant A is actually $FAMOUS_ACTOR here incognito. Plant A pokes his head in, says he needs to go take a call, and leaves. See who manages to talk themselves into thinking that really is the celebrity.

OK, here's an exercise that could at least help noticing how motivated cognition gives us incorrect beliefs; it's like a mix between calibration and paranoid debating.

Requirements

This exercise requires a set of "interesting questions" with a numerical answer, for example "How many people were killed by guns in New York in 1990-1999?" or "What is the unemployment rate in China" (the questions should be at least related to political/social issues, no "What's the population of Mozambique").

It is also best done in a classroom-type place with a big video projector, and a bunch of computers with internet connections. Somebody who knows Excel should also need to prepare a special spreadsheet.

Step one: Crafting Arguments

Students are together in a room, with one computer each (or they can take turns using a computer, timing isn't critical); an organizer goes to each student and gives him a paper with the question, then flips a coin and announces "high!" if it's heads, and "low!" if it's tails.

Each student then has 30 minutes to prepare a set of arguments for why that particular value is high, or low. The result should be one powerp... (read more)

We might also need an exercise just for getting people to understand the concept of motivated cognition at all.

"Motivated cognition" in the first place seems like a poor label because most thinking is motivated. It's redundant and arguing against "motivated cognition" at first glance sounds like arguing against any kind of motivated thinking. That's problematic because good thinking is also motivated, i.e. "I'll invent FAI because it would help the world."

One interesting thing I've heard repeated and found to be true about... (read more)

6billswift12y
I would like to suggest "motivational bias" as an alternative name; it is a more accurate description than "motivated cognition", which is much too general. I don't see spending too much time investigating things you don't want to be true as too bad a problem, a bit wasteful, but that's it. "Motivated stopping" is more likely to lead you astray, you need to remember to keep questioning things you agree with. In fact, this is a common bias that is often used by con artists, for example, and a good rule is a generalization of the common self-defense against con artists contained in the phrase, "If it looks to good to be true, it probably is." If you are immediately tempted to accept or agree with an argument, take a second look.
0thomblake12y
Interesting and useful if true

how to verify that a skill has been acquired

I suppose that one way to test #2 and #3 is to ask the participants (informally, so it does not appear like a test) how useful or successful they think some other skill learning activity was. This is probably a part of the procedure already. There is a significant pressure to say that "they learned a lot and are now better at it", due to several biases, including motivated cognition. When asked to elaborate, they are likely to put forth a number of arguments. To a trained eye, it should be easy to s... (read more)

One of the motivations of motivated cognition is consistency. People want to be predictable and they want to be seen as stable. So I suggest demotivating it. Have people read chapter 3 of Cialdini's Influence. I particularly like the Emerson quote:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

Yes! Teach that preferring consistency over accuracy is low-status!

I predict this will have no effect unless coupled with the following technique:

Detachment. You are not your beliefs; you are not your actions: When the opportunity to think arises, within f... (read more)

0thomblake12y
I always make sure to point out, to those who hear that quote but have not studied Emerson, that "foolish consistency" does not mean "consistency that is foolish" but rather "consistency, which is foolish".
0hamnox12y
muses I wonder how this might combine or clash with non-conformity training. Sticking to your guns against public ridicule is a form of consistency, and it does have the danger of running at cross purposes with the virtue of lightness... Can you really teach being ready to turn that dedication on a dime if the evidence blows that direction? Being faithful to THE truth instead of A truth? This suddenly sounds like a much harder task.
-2pnrjulius12y
Personally I just think Emerson often contradicted himself and didn't want to bother correcting his mistakes, so he came up with a way of making self-contradiction seem deep.

One of the key markers of rationalization I've seen is rationalizations ignore tradeoffs and other option. This is obviously true only about the rationalizations about actions and policies. For instance "I want to eat the whole cake to help the sugar industry..." never finishes "...and this help to the sugar industry is worth any ill health effects." or "...and this is more efficient than other ways to help the sugar industry,"

One activity that might help is to give people a plausible proposition to argue for in their own li... (read more)

I notice that you don't mention any existing studies. Is there a reason for this? A fairly cursory search (no backtracking of citations, or significant effort to use synonyms), brings up several relevant articles (mostly paywalled) and a book. It doesn't seem like a a super well studied field, but I don't see why its being completely ignored. The (semi) relevant stuff I found.

The Human Brain as an Evolved Rationalization Machine http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP102934.pdf

Rational processing or rationalization? The effect of disconfirming i... (read more)

On the other hand, LW!Hermione failed to reproduce this experiment

I'm not sure how wide of an audience this post is targeting, but the !-notation feels gratuitous here. How about:

On the other hand, Hermione (LW user) failed to reproduce this experiment

The title strikes me as slightly problematic: I think of skills as (positive) ways to achieve outcomes, and framing "avoidance" of some mistake as a skill doesn't feel quite right.

0handoflixue12y
Agreed - when you state it that way, it makes me realize that I don't know what the ideal state, the opposite of motivated cognition, actually looks like, or how to refer to that directly. Which then makes me suspect that simply having a clear modelwould help me build the skill ("apathetic cognition" is a fun reversal of the name :))

Rationalizing anything: ask participants questions like "why did you have that cake?" or even "yesterday, you hit your kid. Why?". These questions should not be based on reality, and the instructor(s) should probably do the first two or three rounds themselves to get people used to these kinds of questions. Despite the fact that the facts are blatantly false, the participant should come up with a reason that sounds as impressive as possible. ("Yes, I hit my child yesterday. Fourteen generations of Smiths have been brought up that w... (read more)

I am somewhat surprised that I cannot find the honest Devil's advocacy anywhere on the list of techniques of spotting rationalizations. I understand that EY dislikes it, because it's easy to "invent arguments for anything", but how easy is it to invent a good argument against something you deeply believe in? And by "good" I mean an argument that does not appear silly at the first or even second glance (so, no "chocolate cake in the asteroid belt" nonsense). Or maybe this is covered by the "The world is not like X and I be... (read more)

3wedrifid12y
Is this intended to be rhetorical? The literal answer seems to be "very easy, particularly with practice". Some people really are skilled at bullshit. Typically here I refer to MENSA mailing lists for examples.
0handoflixue12y
The ability to create arguments for either side is fundamental to "debate club" and what passes for national news media in the United States. Indeed, both groups are quite skilled at insisting that all issues have exactly two sides, which are completely equal in merit. I can't see much reason to value the exercise in light of such an astonishingly BAD track record... I do believe it's important to see how easy it is to rationalize something, it's just not useful to practice (unless you're looking to do writing or some other endeavor where "what if" scenarios are actually an important skill) Speaking from my own personal experience, I can explain away ~90% of plot holes in kids cartoons as being completely reasonable. (Percentage calculated based on my friends having genuine "okay, wow, that makes sense - you're so smart!" reactions.)
-3private_messaging12y
if it is easy to invent arguments for anything, then your definition of what constitutes an argument is too broad and includes nonsense.
6Richard_Kennaway12y
It's easy to invent bad arguments for anything, including arguments that, when you are motivated to produce them, you may not notice are bad arguments. Limiting "argument" to mean good arguments is too narrow a definition. As always, the definition of "argument" is not the point here.

Val also used an upside-down W-diagram with the two worlds at the top and the four beliefs at the bottom, to emphasize the idea that the world is there first, and is fixed, and we have only a choice of what to believe within a fixed world, not a choice of which background world to live in.

I don't know what a "W-diagram" is (and a simple Google search didn't help), so I don't see how this works. Perhaps a picture could help explain.

2TheOtherDave12y
I don't know either, but I observe that an upside down W resembles a segment of a conditional tree with two points at the top and either three or four at the bottom, which sounds similar to what the OP is describing.
3CuSithBell12y
... an M...?
6TheOtherDave12y
Why yes! Also a sigma on it's side.
4tgb12y
I found the above two comments particularly funny because I had just spent the last couple minutes reading this with the vague feeling that "an upside-down W" would be better described as some other letter but I had been continuously procrastinating actually figuring out what that letter was.
2JGWeissman12y
Ah, I think I see it. So on top it has the possible worlds, and on the bottom each world branches into the possible consequences in that world of having each of the possible beliefs.
0Mercurial12y
Yep.
0[anonymous]12y
An upside down W looks like an M to me.
1Mercurial12y
To clarify, I actually think of it with two upside-down 'V' shapes. I imagine one off to my left in the world where X is true and observe the two possible outcomes based on what I believe is true in that world, and then I look off to my right to see the upside-down 'V' in the world where X is not true and consider the alternatives. I should also add that I have to put all four representations in near-mode. I view this whole process as a way of getting my brain to emotionally get that yes, it's better to have true beliefs even if they describe a world I'd rather not be in. (To clarify, in case this isn't obvious: I'm Valentine.)
7Alicorn12y
I think you should just register the username "Valentine" and use it, now before you acquire more comment history under this name.

Point taken. Done.

(I had been quietly hoping to see if it's possible to change my account name from "Mercurial" to "Valentine," but I planned on doing this in the ephemeral land of "later." This just works. Thanks for pointing that out!)

1Kevin12y
Pretty sure that the software doesn't allow for name changes, but an admin can give you karma to a new account if you really want it.
8Valentine12y
I don't think I care that much about karma except for the "can post articles" limit, and that doesn't seem too difficult to reach.

A mantra I use: "I want things to be a certain way. But I don't want to believe they are. I want to believe what is true."

A little more explanation: There was a time when I would say to myself things like, "I want to think that people are basically good." or "I want to believe that my life has not been a mistake." But now I realize that what I want is actually for people to be basically good; I don't want to think that, not if it isn't true. I don't want to believe that my life has not been a mistake; I want my life to not be ... (read more)

The Retrench or Retreat Game

You're making a decision and want to check if you're rationalizing. Imagine a friend or someone else whose opinion you respect raises a criticism of/question about your stated reason. Which feels easier?

  1. Falling back to a different justification
  2. Arguing with the friend to defend yourself

Maybe this is better as a "True Rejection" exercise, but if you find it a lot easier/more comfortable to shift arguments, your surface answer may have been a rationalization.

The original post mentions some techniques for getting people to avoid rationalizing once they've realized they're doing it, but an earlier step is to get them to realize that they're doing it.

The key to this may be that a person who is rationalizing without realizing it is arguing with him/herself without realizing it, since it's easier to recognize (and to accept) that you're arguing than that you're rationalizing. Accordingly, getting people to realize that they're rationalizing would involve getting them to realize that they're the one that they're ar... (read more)

0Stefie_K12y
To follow up on my post: The original post talks about noticing flinches and attachments, which is similar to what I discussed above. However, I would expect it to be a lot more difficult to notice the flinch itself than it would be to notice the aftereffects, because the flinch is one moment, and the aftereffects last. (At least, when I catch myself doing it, the flinch is a single moment, and then the rationalization normalizes very quickly unless I act to counter it.) The momentary nature of the flinch would not only make it harder to notice, but also more difficult to teach people to notice flinches. There may well be a better approach to this than the one I suggested, but I have to think that exercises/activities that focus on the aftereffects would work better than ones that depend on catching that flinch.

EXERCISE

Ask the person to do an unpleasant task (dishwashing standing on slippery floor), which will cause the unconscious desire to finish the task.

While the task is executed, the person answers questions which can be TRUE or FALSE, the task only ends if the person complete a certain number of TRUE responses, but if the answers are wrong, it decreases the score for the task.

0pnrjulius12y
What do you mean by that?
0chepin12y
The comment was modified, thanks for the observation

I don't always have a problem with motivated cognition, but when I do, my brain usually makes it some or all of the way through the following steps:

  • Notice that I'm becoming more comfortable with (feeling safer about) a decision or action I'm about to make or just made.
  • Notice that the physical cause of my comfort is that I recently had a thought consisting of a reason the decision could have a good outcome.
  • Some brain process that I haven't pinned down yet that feels like and possibly is a mix of noticing optimization by proxy, feeling disdain for no
... (read more)
3GuySrinivasan12y
Check Yourself For BS Practice applying your bullshit detector on your own thoughts. The key observation is that it's not important to have bullshit thoughts on which to practice detecting bullshit - like asking yourself whether you're dreaming while awake to induce lucid dreams, the practice is having a mode where your bullshit detector is on and applied to your thoughts, so that it will actually fire when the time comes. So ask yourself, over and over, a) what your last thought was, and b) whether any part of it would have been flagged as BS if you saw the thought in someone else. Exercise: Think about something, trying to come up with the right answer, maybe where you've previously stated your guess at the right answer. At some point the facilitator will ring a bell or an alarm will sound or something. Locate your previous thought (if this is hard, practice this skill). Ask whether it was bullshit. Repeat 7 times. Have a cue to do the same during the day, like whenever you hear anyone's cell phone ring or make an "I have a text!" noise.
2GuySrinivasan12y
Desire Generalizable Decision Processes Have everyone read Kahneman's rant on picking the action with the best expected outcome in Thinking, Fast and Slow (chapter 31, Risk Policies, especially the sermon). Encourage people to play enough poker and read enough poker theory to become at least close to neutral-EV in Vegas. Experiencing the concept of pot odds in a real game was my strongest "passing up positive-EV moves is leaving money on the table no matter how loss-averse you are" learning moment. One exercise might be to (several times) present a story in which someone makes a decision and ask participants to a) make up a near-mode explanation of why the decision feels legit, b) give a far-mode explanation of why the reasoning that led to the decision would be disastrous if everyone used it, and c) figure out what the broadest set of people/circumstances is that would allow that reasoning to be generalized and still work well. Concrete example: Holden focuses on charities that are neglected by traditional funding. a) This is great because his marginal actions will actually be at the margin, not pushed back by some giant philanthropist who suddenly funds the whole charity. b) This is awful because if everyone focused on neglected charities, the most valuable charities would receive less than optimal focus. c) As long as very few people are actually applying this heuristic, there's no danger of high-profile valuable charities suddenly losing all of their focus. So if Holden makes his decisions according to c), he's doing great, but if just a), then his algorithm is flawed though its output might be correct in this case.
1GuySrinivasan12y
Noting emotions. Name your emotions, simply and without judgment, as you see them arise. Inspired by Mahasi noting, it may be enough of an exercise to simply state out loud a word describing any emotion you notice, taking care to not care whether your word is perfectly accurate but instead only care about having noticed and said something with the intent that if you knew the perfect descriptor word you would have used it. For ease it may well be enough to simply say a word that means "I noticed and attended to an emotion just now". As you practice this, if you enjoy noticing the emotion regardless of the emotion itself, with any luck you'll begin to notice your emotions and thus the "suddenly I'm more comfortable and feel safer" emotion without conscious effort. As an exercise, perhaps put on a particularly emotional-roller-coaster piece of instrumental music, stopping it at random points and asking everyone to name their emotion and the emotion they were feeling due to the music just before (presumably the in-the-moment emotion will often be annoyance due to the music being interrupted).
0GuySrinivasan12y
Notice Rationalization Directly If you have sufficient skill at noticing rationalization such that you recognize it maybe 1+ times per day, here is an exercise that User:thejash had me do which helped my brain latch on to recognizing rationalization much more regularly: carry a pencil and a bit of paper or notebook. Every time you notice yourself rationalizing, grin and make a mark on the paper. Every time, no exceptions, for an entire week. That's all. If you must, pretend like you'll use the data for something, but it's the noticing practice itself that is useful.
0GuySrinivasan12y
Avoid Optimizing Proxy Measures I have a gut-level averse reaction to being comforted by a reason my decision or action may work out when I only saw that reason in order to feel safer. Here is a possible exercise to show students that optimizing proxy measures is a terrible general algorithm: hand out a worksheet of two questions to each student, asking them to answer individually. There are two possible worksheets. The first says "1. Describe in a short paragraph Vatican City. 2. Write any short paragraph you like containing the following concepts: bright, cyclic, white, round, and dappled." The second says "1. Describe in a short paragraph the appearance of the moon. 2. Write any short paragraph you like containing the following concepts: tiny, historic, beautiful, religious, gardens." Then score every paragraph by giving each a score from 0 to 1 based on how well they mentioned each of the 5 concepts, and a final score from 0 to 5 by summing the scores, and note how the proxy measure is reasonable at picking out good descriptions (is it? playtest) if you don't optimize for the proxy measure but terrible if you do.
0GuySrinivasan12y
Trace emotion causes. Magically acquire a gut-level realization that emotions are physical events in your brain and those events have physical causes (which may be other emotions or thoughts, since they're physical). I acquired this gut-level realization during the 2011 minicamp from User:Academian. Then, when you do manage to notice an emotion and have a moment, practice asking yourself what the proximate cause of that emotion was until it becomes a not-uncommon practice upon noticing a surprising emotion. To practice, you first need a way to notice emotions - either develop this, or ask someone else to cue you in whatever way the two of you choose, and precommit to ask yourself at their cue a) what your strongest emotion is currently, and b) what the largest components of that emotion's cause happen to be. I'm not sure what a good exercise for this might be, since it feels like you legitimately need an unanticipated emotion.

Shinzen Young's "Do Nothing" Meditation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ6cdIaUZCA (Note that he is "neuroscience aware.")

http://www.shinzen.org/Retreat%20Reading/FiveWays.pdf

http://www.basicmindfulness.org/

(Also the discussion of "Willingness" in http://www.amazon.com/Acceptance-Commitment-Therapy-Second-Edition/dp/1609189620/)

The goal is to raise the baseline of equanimity and mindfulness. You naturally start allowing emotion and inner talk to thunder through you without letting it drive behavior. This is a prerequisite for ... (read more)

Whenever you find yourself about to express a belief, ask yourself if you really believe it it first. This works for me, but may not work for people not feeling curiosity or for people not already in the habit of being honest with themselves.

...often that thought causes me to not know what I believe.

Of course the hard part is figuring out a way to reliably put people in a situation where they will find themselves rationalizing. Social pressure would work on a lot of people, but probably not so well on LW types.

This seems like it'll be easiest to teach and test if you can artificially create a preference for an objective fact. Can you offer actual prizes? Candy? Have you ever tried a point system and have people reacted well?

Assume you have a set of good prizes (maybe chocolate bars, or tickets good for 10 points) and a set of less-good prizes (Hershey's kisses, or tickets good for 1 point).

Choose a box: Have two actual boxes, labeled "TRUE" and "FALSE". Before the class comes in, the instructor writes a proposition on the blackboard, such a... (read more)

4JGWeissman12y
If the prize for correctly answering "true" is 10 times as good as the prize for correctly answering "false", then you really should be about 91% confident the correct answer is "false" before you give that answer.
0HonoreDB12y
Yup. The propositions need to be such that you can get more confident than that.
5JGWeissman12y
My point was that being biased to answer "true", even if "false" is more likely to be correct, is a rational strategy. This problem could be eliminated if the good effects of the correct answer being "true" were independant of getting the right answer. That is, if the correct answer is "true" you get 10 points, and if you answer correctly you get 1 point. That way, you want the answer to be "true", but it is not rational to let this have any effect on your answer.
0handoflixue12y
I assumed the point was to illustrate how, given the motivation (candy), your thinking DOES end up rationally biased towards saying "true". It gives you a clear example of motivated thinking (I want to answer "True" even if that's not the correct answer) and puts you inside the experience while still being entirely aware that it's motivated thinking.
0JGWeissman12y
That's not right. It is still the case that you want to answer "True" if the correct answer is "True", and you want to answer "False" if the correct answer is false. It's just that in the original formulation, the greater reward of correctly answer "True" means that you are willing to take a smaller chance of correctly answer "True" instead of a larger chance of correctly answering "False". Where in my modification, you want the correct answer to be "True", but if this actually influences whether you answer "True" or "False", you did something wrong.
0handoflixue12y
Sorry, that's what I meant by "I want to answer True even if it's not correct" :) Yours strikes me as teaching the skill "disentangle mixed incentives" - there's an incentive to be correct, and an incentive for the correct answer to be "TRUE". There's also the skill of recognizing which of these two incentives you have control over (the former only). While these are certainly USEFUL skills, I question whether this really helps people avoid Motivated Cognition. On an abstract level, it seems like they might be related, but I don't think it's the sort of exercise that would build an intuitive sense of "Oh, wait, I'm doing motivated cognition here!" I feel the original exercise, however, does a good job, because it puts the person in a position where they can SEE that they're doing motivated cognition. It lets them get a good look at what it FEELS like to be doing motivated cognition, what it looks like. Once they can recognize it, it's a LOT easier to fight it :)
[-][anonymous]9y00

I've reading about the CFAE exercise prizes. Now that there are some great tools I can learn, ay tips for mitigating the initial pain of going from any given irrational state to a more rational one? Any stories of how learning these rationality exercises have made an impact on some part of the quality of your lives?

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Exercise: Trick people into rationalizing

Engineer a situation where subjects will perform an action because you tricked them into doing it, and then ask them for reasons why they performed that action. Specifics here that actually work are beyond my pay-grade. But I'm reminded of an experiment where a subject was hypnotized and given an umbrella. After the hypnosis, the researcher asked "Why do you have an umbrella?" and the subject, initially looking a bit shocked at the umbrella, answered "I thought it was going to rain".

It would h... (read more)

Think about a time when you were badly disappointed. Then think of any opportunities you had previously, to notice that things weren't going to turn out the way you'd expected. In particular, cases where you came across an argument or evidence that in hindsight should have changed your opinion, but you dismissed by a clever argument, or by not thinking about it.

Think about what you could have done in the time you had between your missed opportunity and the disappointment. Plans you could have changed to make the best of a bad situation. Mentally contrast the actual outcome with the outcome had you been forewarned, and allow yourself to be very annoyed at your past self for throwing away time.

Instructor writes a decision on the board and asks all participants to give factors to consider before making that decision. Participants are then asked as a group if each factor (for typical possible values of the factor) is 1. necessary and 2. sufficient to determine whether the decision should be taken.

I would ask Lucy if she would still eat the cake if the sugar industry were doing fine. More generally, I would ask if there is any action Lucy is taking that they would not take if the sugar industry were doing fine.

Ask the participants to come up with a belief that they feel is important to them but hasn't been necessary (though they may mistakenly think it sufficient) for making any meaningful decisions.

0Benquo12y
Perhaps Lucy would do well do ask: What if eating the cake somehow harmed the sugar industry? How would I feel about that?