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katydee comments on 2012 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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You know that, Katydee, but do all the people who are taking the survey think that way? The majority of them haven't even finished the sequences. I agree with you that it's ideal for us to be good rationalists all the time, but mental stamina is a big factor.
Being rational takes more energy than being irrational. You have to put thought into it. Some people have a lot of mental energy. To refer to something less vague and more scientific: there are different levels of intelligence and different levels of intellectual supersensitivity (A term from Dabrowski that refers to how excitable certain aspects of your nervous system are.) Long story short: Some people cannot analyze constantly because it's too difficult for them to do so. They run out of juice. Perhaps you are one of those rare people who has such high stamina for analysis that you rarely run into your limit. If that's the case, it probably seems strange to you that anybody wouldn't attempt to maintain a state of constant analysis. Most people with unusual intellectual stamina seem to view others as lazy when they observe that those other people aren't doing intellectual things all the time. It frequently does not occur to them to consider that there may be an intellectual difference. The sad truth is that most people have much lower limits on how much intellectual activity they can do in a day than "constant". If you want to see evidence of this, you can look at Ford's studies where he shows that 40 hours a week is the optimum number of hours for his employees to work. Presumably, they were just doing factory work assembling car parts, which (if it fits the stereotype of factory work being repetitive) was probably pretty low on the scale for what's intellectually demanding, but he found that if they tried to work 60 hours for two weeks in a row, their output would dip below the amount he'd normally get from 40 hours. This is because of mistakes. You'd think that the average human brain could do repetitive tasks constantly but evidently, even that tires the brain.
So in reality, the vast majority of people are not capable of the kind of constant meta-cognitive analysis that is required to be rational all the time. You use the word "ingrained" and I have seen Eliezer talk about how patterns of behavior can become habits (I assume he means that the thoughts are cached) and I think this kind of habit / ingrained response works beautifully when no decision-making is required and you can simply do the same thing that you usually do. But whenever one is trying to figure something out (like for instance working out the answers to questions on a survey) they're going to need to put additional brainpower into that.
I had an experience where, due to unexpected circumstances, I developed some vitamin deficiencies. I would run out of mental energy very quickly if I tried to think much. I had, perhaps, a half an hour of analysis available to me in a day. This is very unusual for me because I'm used to having a brain that loves analysis and seems to want to do it constantly (I hadn't tested the actual number of hours for which I was able to analyze, but I would feel bored if I wasn't doing something like psychoanalysis or problem-solving for the majority of the day). When I was deficient, I began to ration my brainpower. That sounds terrible, but that is what I did. I needed to protect my ability to analyze to make sure I had enough left over to be able to do all the tasks I needed to do each day. I could feel that slipping away while I was working on problems and I could observe what happened to me after I fatigued my brain. (Vegetable like state.)
As I used my brainpower rationing strategies, it dawned on me that others ration brainpower, too. I see it all the time. Suddenly, I understood what they were doing. I understood why they kept telling me things like "You think too much!" They needed to change the subject so they wouldn't become mentally fatigued. :/
Even if the average IQ at LessWrong is in the gifted range, that doesn't give everyone the exact same abilities, and doesn't mean that everyone has the stamina to analyze constantly. Human abilities vary wildly from person to person. Everyone has a limit when it comes to how much thinking they can do in a day. I have no way of knowing exactly what LessWrong's average limit is, but I would not be surprised if most of them use strategies for rationing brainpower and have to do things like prioritize answering survey questions lower on their list of things to "give it their all" on, especially when there are a lot of them, and they're getting tired.
The point is to make these things automatic so that one doesn't have to analyze all the time. I definitely don't feel like I "maintain a state of constant analysis," even when applying purportedly advanced rationality techniques. It basically feels the same as thinking about things normally, except that I am right more often.
I don't believe that your claim is true, but if it is I think LessWrong is doomed as a concept. I frankly do not think people will be able to accurately evaluate when they need to apply thinking skills to their decisions, so if we cannot teach skills on this level-- teach habits, as you say-- I do not think LessWrong will ever accomplish anything of real worth.
One example of a skill that I have taken on on this level is reference class forecasting. If I need to estimate how long something will take, my go-to method is to take the outside view. I am so used to this that it is now the automatic response to questions of estimating times.
I don't use "brainpower rationing" because I frankly have never felt the need to do so. I have told people that they "think too much" under certain circumstances (most notably when thinking is impeding action), and the thought of "brainpower rationing" has never come to mind until I saw this post.
What do you make of this?
Maybe I misinterpreted here but it sounds like you're saying you don't believe in mental stamina limits? Maybe you mean that you don't think rationality requires much brainpower?
I don't think we'd be doomed, and there are a few reasons for that:
There are people in existence who really can analyze pretty much constantly. THOSE people would theoretically have a pretty good chance of being rational all the time.
People who cannot analyze anywhere near constantly can simply choose their battles. If they're aware of their mental stamina limits, they can work with them. Realizing you don't know stuff and that you don't have enough mental stamina to figure it out right now is kind of sad but it is still perfectly rational, so perhaps rationalists with low mental stamina can still be good rationalists that way.
There are things that decrease mental fatigue. For instance, taking 15 minute breaks every 90 minutes (The book "The power of full engagement: manage energy not time" talks about this). We could do experiments on ourselves to find out what other things reduce or prevent mental fatigue. There may be low-hanging apples we're totally unaware of.
Okay, so you've learned to instantly go to a certain method. I can believe that this does not take much brainpower. However, how much brainpower does it take to execute the outside view method, on average, for the types of things you use it for? How many times can you execute the outside view in a day? Have you ever tried to reach your mental stamina limit?
Do you ever get home from work and feel relieved that you can relax now, and then do something that's not mentally taxing? Do you ever find that you're starting to hate an activity, and notice you're making more and more mistakes? Do you ever feel lazy and can't be bothered to do anything useful? I bet you do experience mental fatigue but don't recognize it as such. A lot of people just berate themselves for being unproductive, and don't consciously recognize that they've hit a real limit.
My method of doing the same calculation was:
The more difficult part was the probability estimate. But using the heuristics taught to me by this book, this took only a few calculations. And the more I do these types of calculations, the faster and more calibrated I become. Eventually I hope to make them automatic at the 8 + 4 = 12 level.
If I were doing the calculation "for real" and not on a survey my algorithm would be much easier:
I know they exist on some level thanks to my experience with dual n-back, but I've yet to encounter any practical situation that imposes them (aside from "getting tired, which is different), and if I did I'm sure I could train my way out, just as I trained my way out of certain physical stamina limits. For example, it was once hard for me to maintain my endurance throughout a full fencing bout, but following some training I can do several in a row without becoming seriously fatigued. I'm sure better fencers than me can do even more.
LessWrong and CFAR, in my view, should provide the mental equivalent of that training if it is indeed necessary for the practice of rationality. I'm not, however, convinced that it is.
Immeasurably small (no perceived effort and takes less time than the alternative)/indeterminate/not in this respect. Most of the effort was involved in correctly identifying situations in which the method was useful, not in actually executing the method, but once the method became sufficiently ingrained that too went away.
No. My work is generally fun.
Not really. Sometimes I get bored, does that count?
Negative.
I think mental stamina is an important concept.
I'll add mental exuberance (not an ideally clear word, but I don't have a better one)-- how much people feel an impulse to think.
Nancy, there is already a term for this. It's "intellectual overexcitability" or "intellectual supersensitivity". These are terms from Dabrowski. Look up the "Theory of Positive Disintegration" to learn more.
Those terms seem like pathologizing-- which is not surprising, considering that Dabrowski puts emphasis on the difficulties of the path. I was thinking more of the idea that some people like thinking more than others, just as some people like moving around more than others, which is something much less intense.
I was wondering whether Dabrowski was influenced by Gurdjieff, and it turns out that he was.