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katydee comments on Better Rationality Through Lucid Dreaming - Less Wrong
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Comments (46)
This post feels like something written during the "honeymoon" phase of the latest trendy technique. I would take it much more seriously after you had stuck with it for several months, had made some sort of measurable improvement in your rationality (maybe count how many times you notice you are confused and it turns out there was something confusing), and had some understanding of its limitations, or alternatively, understood why the intuitive reaction to it being too good to be true was fallacious.
It doesn't seem at all obvious to me that training yourself to become less confused in dreams will translate into training this skill in real life situations. For example, the relevant part of your brain might be normally shut down during dreams for maintenance or rest of some sort, and doing this training might reactivate that part - causing it to function less optimally in real life. I believe Richard Feynman hypothesized something similar to this regarding lucid dreaming.
This isn't to say that I think this sort of training is necessarily a bad idea, or that people shouldn't try it. I have had several lucid dreams and have found them to be enjoyable. But I also don't want its benefits to be overstated.
I've been involved in lucid dreaming for about eight years now and teaching lucid dreaming for two, so I'm pretty familiar with it on a non-surface level. I've also been explicitly looking into the prospect of using lucid dreaming for rationality training purposes since 2010. I'm fairly confident that it will prove useful for at least some people.
It didn't seem obvious to me either-- I originally began getting interested in lucid dreaming solely for fun. Indeed, I was somewhat surprised to find that it seemed to have other benefits. That said, I do think those benefits are real.
Author's note 10/19: I've edited the first bit of this post into the OP following remarks from other users but am leaving it here as well to maintain the flow of the discussion.
The above information was of high relative value to me, and would've been useful if found near the top of the OP.
Thanks for the comment-- it's very useful to know what sort of content does or doesn't help. I've added that information to the OP.
Alright, this makes me feel better. But I'm still not seeing anything but very weak evidence for the assertion that it improves your rationality.
I fully admit that I do not have strong outside-view evidence that this method will objectively improve your rationality-- if I did, I would post it. But many (most?) rationality techniques discussed here lack such evidence as well.
Anecdotally, I can say that it seems to have been quite effective for me and there are many inside-view elements pointing towards this as a strong method.
That may not be fully convincing, and I agree it's a problem. Indeed, one of the main reasons that I posted this is that I hope others will attempt the same or similar and we can get a broader picture of this space.
Can you give examples?
Sure, what sorts of examples are you looking for?
Examples of the sorts of examples I'm looking for:
—Brienne's post
—Writing fiction has improved my rationality because, in writing about characters who don't know all the information I know, I've come to viscerally understand the distinction between map and territory.
—Surrounding myself with rationalists has improved my rationality because social incentives push me to actually do the things we all agree are good ideas.
How does lucid dreaming improve rationality? You've asserted that it does, but I don't know what relevant skills it trains, or how. (You mention the phrase "noticing confusion," but that's all I could find.)
Lucid dreaming has improved my rationality because one of the key skills of rationality is noticing that you are confused, and one of the key skills that can be used to induce lucid dreaming is noticing that you are confused.
Further, lucid dreaming gives me the opportunity to practice coming to the correct conclusion in spite of my brain's efforts to the contrary.
Further, lucid dreaming is an opportunity for deliberate practice with high aliveness.
Is any of the above not clear from the original post? If so, I should probably rewrite it-- the reason that I asked what you meant is because I thought the above was apparent.
Could you expand on "aliveness", please? I haven't heard the term before, and Google's mostly giving me obviously unrelated stuff mixed in with a bit of fluff that I don't trust.
Ack. Sorry, I thought that was fundamental to LW but I got my communities mixed up. It definitely merits a post of its own, which I'll put up within the week.
The first example is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for—thanks! That clarifies what you meant in the original post. I'm not sure what the other two examples mean, probably because I know basically nothing about lucid dreaming. What are "your brain's efforts to the contrary"? How does lucid dreaming invoke deliberate practice? What is "high aliveness"? I expect this probably connects to something useful, but the inferential distance is too great for me to get anything from it.
This seems like something that should be fixed. A few ideas:
Regarding my second point, it seems that this sort of thing could benefit a lot from a division of labor - where a small group of people design the experiments, and many more people just follow the instructions. It might be worth trying to organize a group of people willing to participate in these sorts of experiments, so that it is easier to test rationality techniques.