Noticing is a useful habit and skill that has been touched on from time to time here: for example, noticing when you are confused.
I should have paid more attention to that sensation of still feels a little forced. It's one of the most important feelings a truthseeker can have, a part of your strength as a rationalist. It is a design flaw in human cognition that this sensation manifests as a quiet strain in the back of your mind, instead of a wailing alarm siren and a glowing neon sign reading "EITHER YOUR MODEL IS FALSE OR THIS STORY IS WRONG."
Situational Awareness looks like a special case of this, applied to life-threatening situations. Does it have a relevance to rationality more than that of being a case study in the general skill of noticing?
Situational Awareness looks like a special case of this, applied to life-threatening situations. Does it have a relevance to rationality more than that of being a case study in the general skill of noticing?
Well, let me put it like this. Your ability to make a correct decision or formulate a correct belief is based on two things-- the information that you collect and your skills at deriving benefit from that information. Most rationality training that I've seen pertains to increasing your various deriving benefit from information skills. Many probably ...
Related: 23 Cognitive Mistakes that make People Play Bad Poker
Followed by: Situational Awareness And You
If epistemic rationality is the art of updating one's beliefs based on new evidence to better correspond with reality, the zeroth skillset of epistemic rationality-- the one that enables all other skills to function-- is that of situational awareness. Situational awareness-- sometimes referred to as "situation awareness" or simply "SA"-- is the skillset and related state of mind that allows one to effectively perceive the world around them.
One might ask how this relates to rationality at all. The answer is simple. Just as the skill of lucid dreaming is near-useless without dream recall,[1] the skills of updating based on evidence and actually changing your mind are near-useless without good awareness skills-- after all, you can't update based on evidence that you haven't collected! A high degree of situational awareness is thus an important part of one's rationalist toolkit, as it allows you to notice evidence about the world around you that you would otherwise miss. At times, this evidence can be of critical importance. I can attest that I have personally saved the lives of friends on two occasions thanks to good situational awareness, and have saved myself from serious injury or death many times more.
Situational awareness is further lauded by elite military units, police trainers, criminals, intelligence analysts, and human factors researchers. In other words, people who have to make very important-- often life-or-death-- decisions based on limited information consider situational awareness a critical skill. This should tell us something-- if those individuals for whom correct decisions are most immediately relevant all stress the importance of situational awareness, it may be a more critical skill than we realize.
Unfortunately, the only discussion of situational awareness that I've seen on LessWrong or related sites has been a somewhat oblique reference in Louie Helm's "roadmap of errors" from 23 Cognitive Mistakes that make People Play Bad Poker.[2] I believe that situational awareness is important enough that it merits an explicit sequence of posts on its advantages and how to cultivate it, and this post will serve as the introduction to that sequence.
The first post in the sequence, unimaginatively titled "Situational Awareness and You," will be posted within the week. Other planned posts include "Cultivating Awareness," "How to Win a Duel," "Social Awareness," "Be Aware of Your Reference Class," "Signaling and Predation," and "Constant Vigilance!"
If you have any requests for things to add, general questions about the sequence, meta-thoughts about SA, and so on, this post is an appropriate place for that discussion; as this is primarily a meta post, it has been posted to Discussion. Core posts in the sequence will be posted to Main.
[1] What good are lucid dreams if you can't remember them?
[2] This is a very useful summary and you should read it even if you don't play poker.