apophenia comments on Checklist of Rationality Habits - Less Wrong

117 Post author: AnnaSalamon 07 November 2012 09:19PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 07 November 2012 04:16:57PM 2 points [-]

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:

Recent example from Anna: Jumping off the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas in a wire-guided fall. I knew it was safe based on 40,000 data points of people doing it without significant injury, but to persuade my brain I had to visualize 2 times the population of my college jumping off and surviving. Also, my brain sometimes seems much more pessimistic, especially about social things, than I am, and is almost always wrong.

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.

Recent example from Anna's brother: Trying to decide whether to move to Silicon Valley and look for a higher-paying programming job, he tried a reframe to avoid the status quo bias: If he was living in Silicon Valley already, would he accept a $70K pay cut to move to Santa Barbara with his college friends? (Answer: No.)

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.

Recent example from Anna: I noticed that every time I hit 'Send' on an email, I was visualizing all the ways the recipient might respond poorly or something else might go wrong, negatively reinforcing the behavior of sending emails. I've (a) stopped doing that (b) installed a habit of smiling each time I hit 'Send' (which provides my brain a jolt of positive reinforcement). This has resulted in strongly reduced procrastination about emails.

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.

Comment author: apophenia 07 November 2012 10:05:51PM *  6 points [-]

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.

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.)

Comment author: Metus 08 November 2012 12:17:11AM 3 points [-]

Can you point us to the more interesting checklist resources?

Comment author: apophenia 18 November 2012 12:45:23AM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 December 2012 01:56:30AM 0 points [-]

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.

That's indeed what happened.

(Gur nezl anzr znxrf zr yrff pregnva guna hfhny--zl fgrerbglcr fnlf lbh znl or oberq naq/be qvfpvcyvarq.)

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.)

Comment author: [deleted] 08 November 2012 03:22:28PM 0 points [-]

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.)