apophenia comments on Checklist of Rationality Habits - Less Wrong
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This is awesome. I might remove the examples, print down the rest of the list, and read it every morning when I get up and every night before going to sleep. OTOH I have a few quibbles with some examples:
For some reason my brain is more comfortable working with numbers that with visualizations, instead. That can be bad for signalling: a few years ago there was a terrorist attack in London which affected IIRC about 300 people; my mother told me “you should call [your friend who's there] and ask him if he's all right”, and I answered “there are 10 million people in London, so the probability that he was involved is about 1 in 30,000, which is less than the probability that he would die naturally in...”; my mother called me heartless before I even finished the sentence.
There's a huge difference: someone living in Silicon Valley on $70K + x and considering whether to stay there or move to Santa Barbara and earn x would be used to living on $70K + x; whereas someone living in Santa Barbara on x and considering whether to move to Silicon Valley and earn x + $70K or stay there would be used to living on x. This would affect how much each of them would enjoy a given amount of money. Also, the former would already have a social circle in Silicon Valley, and the latter wouldn't.
Huh, no. If they are likely to respond badly, I want to believe they are likely to respond badly. If they aren't likely to respond badly, I want to believe they aren't likely to respond badly. What is true is already so, owning it up doesn't make it worse. The solution to that problem is to think twice and re-read the email and think about ways to make it less likely for it to be interpreted in an unintended way before hitting Send.
Interesting you should say that. About a week ago I simplified this into a more literal checklist designed to be used as part of a nightly wind-down, to see if it could maintain or instill habits. I designed the checklist based largely on empirical results from NASA's review of the factors for effectiveness of pre-flight safety checklists used by pilots, although I chased down a number of other checklist-related resources. I'm currently actively testing effects on myself and others, both trying to test to make sure it would actually be used, and getting the time down to the minimum possible (it's hovering around two minutes).
P.S. I'm not associated with CFAR but the checklist is an experiment on their request.
If you were to test your suggestion for two weeks, I would be interested to hear the results. My prediction (with 80% certainty) is: Lbh jvyy trg cbfvgvir erfhygf sbe n avtug be gjb. Jvguva gra qnlf, lbh jvyy svaq gur yvfg nirefvir / gbb zhpu jbex naq fgbc ernqvat vg, ortva gb tynapr bire vg jvgubhg cebprffvat nalguvat, be npgviryl fgbc gb svk bar bs gur nobir ceboyrzf. (Gur nezl anzr znxrf zr yrff pregnva guna hfhny--zl fgrerbglcr fnlf lbh znl or oberq naq/be qvfpvcyvarq.)
Can you point us to the more interesting checklist resources?
Absolutely. I can give better resources if you can be more specific as to what you're looking for.
I recommend The Checklist Manifesto first as an overview, as well as a basic understanding of akrasia, and trying and failing to make and use some checklists yourself.
The resources I spent most of my time with were very specific to what I was working on, and so I wouldn't recommend them. However, just in case someone finds it useful, Human Factors of Flight-Deck Checklists: The Normal Checklist draws attention to some common failure modes of checklists outside the checklist itself.
That's indeed what happened.
That's just a hypocorism for my first name. I have never been in the armed forces. (I regret picking this nickname because it has generated confusion several times, but I've used it on the Internet ever since I was 12 and I'm kind of used to it.)
This sounds interesting. I wasn't entirely serious, but I'm going to do this for real now. (I haven't decoded the rot13ed part, of course.)