BrassLion 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: BrassLion 12 November 2012 08:48:37PM 1 point [-]

You have the right conclusion but the wrong reason. Most people would appreciate being thought of in a disaster, so calling him if he's alive would be good - except that the phone networks, particularly cell networks, tend to be crippled by overuse in sudden disasters. Staying off the phones if you don't need to make a call helps with this.