This is part 30 of 30 in the Hammertime Sequence. Click here for the intro.
One of the overarching themes from CFAR, related to The Strategic Level, is that what you learn at CFAR is not a specific technique or set of techniques, but the cognitive strategy that produced those techniques. It follows that if I learned the right lessons from CFAR, then I would be able to produce qualitatively similar – if not as well empirically tested – new principles and approaches to instrumental rationality.
After CFAR, I wanted to design a test to see if I had learned the right lessons. Hammertime was that sort of test for me. Now here’s that same test for you.
The Final Exam
I will give three essay prompts and three difficulty levels. Original ideas would be great, but shining a new light on old hammers is also welcome!
Prompts
- Design a instrumental rationality technique.
- Introduce a rationality principle or framework.
- Describe a cognitive defect, bias, or blindspot.
Difficulty Levels
Bronze Mace mode. Write one essay on one of the topics above.
Steel Cudgel of the Lion mode. Write two of three.
Vorpal Dragonscale Sledgehammer of the Whale mode. Write all three. For each essay, give yourself five minutes to brainstorm and five minutes to write.
Here are my answers.
1. Cooperate First
There’s an old story about a famous painter of the Realist school who spent a whole year of his training painting still lives of eggs. Each day, he would draw a single egg over and over. He must have produced thousands of sketches and paintings of eggs. His teacher knew exactly how important fundamentals are.
This same motif is deeply embedded in stories all over the world:
Return to fundamentals. Practice your fundamentals.
The iterated prisoner’s dilemma is one of the fundamental lessons of rationality. The world is more like a number of iterated prisoner’s dilemmas than you’d think. Human beings are more like tit-for-tat players than you’d think. It follows:
Cooperate First!
The first move you make in any interaction with a new acquaintance should be a cooperate, even if you expect them to defect. Perhaps even if you observe them defecting already.
Here’s a lesson I learned from meditating on the maxim Cooperate First:
Cooperating First feels like accepting an unfair game from the inside. There will be many situations in life where things are framed in a slightly but noticeably unfair way towards you initially. Err on the side of accepting these games anyway!
2. Below the Object Level
One of my main complaints about rationalists (myself included) is our tendency to escalate to the meta-level too often. For example, in any given discussion, arguments over general discussion norms get much more heated and lively than any discussion of the underlying subject matter. We need to spend more time at the object level, touching reality, making experiments, testing our hypotheses.
The move I use to combat the tendency to escalate meta, I call looking below the object level.
Looking below the object level is like the move HPMOR_Harry does to achieve partial transfiguration: continually upping the magnification on your mental microscope to actually stare at the detail in reality. Reality is so exorbitantly detailed it’s overwhelming to take it all in. Try.
Look at the folds in your clothes, the way light and shadow play off each other. The way threads interweave. Pinch the cloth and watch the creases reorganize under your fingers.
Now reflect on this fact: falling water is attracted to both positive and negative charges.
What.
There’s so much going on under what we think of as the object level.
3. Pre-Excuses
Pre-hindsight is a version of Murphyjitsu where you query your mind for what you will learn from an action in hindsight. Pre-excuses are an unproductive cousin that often derail my work.
As a serial procrastinator, I notice a fairly regular pattern of thinking that appears the couple days before I have to meet a professor, and especially before meeting my thesis adviser. My mind is already spinning excuses on overdrive. Here’s what my mind sounds like a full day before I have to meet my adviser, when I think about the meeting:
Sorry, this paper took longer than I expected to read.
Sorry, I was busy from other classes, so I didn’t do as much paper-writing as I’d planned to.
Sorry, I got sidetracked by this research problem, so I didn’t finish the homework.
That’s right, I’m having these thoughts about how to apologize for not doing work even though I still have plenty of time to do the work. Even worse, I have these pre-excuse thoughts regularly even if I’ve done the work expected of me – it feels something like cushioning the fall in case it turns out I did it poorly.
And they’re usually not even good excuses.
2. Principles
Act as if you are building a solid long-term relationship, even if it is likely you will never see that person again.
Separate the person's behavior from the meaning of your conversation.
As a friend of mine said when her five year old son used tears to force her to go out with him in the evening after a long hard day, she said: "If I didn't want to, I wouldn't go. I would have explained to him that I was very tired and that's why I didn't want to go out. He would probably have been hysterical, but that's just him expressing his emotions. The main thing is that I explained the reason and he heard me. He understands the reason for saying no: not the authoritarian "because I said NO", but the comprehensible, coherent and logical explanation: 'because I'm tired'".
My conclusion is this: it doesn't matter how a person behaves. Separate his emotions from the meanings you communicate to each other.
I have a problem with this, by the way: even in a conversation with an adult, I emphasize emotions. That is, the person may be rude but sending signals about what they need to agree with me, and I'm so triggered by the emotions they're broadcasting that I don't notice their signals - and because of that, I continue a conversation about something I should have left long ago and moved on to the next step.
Empathize
This means - understand the person. Don't "agree" but just hear him in the way he is trying to explain to you. At times like this, respond with, "I think I get it. What you're saying is that it's important to you that..., and to accomplish that, you're suggesting... because you see that as the only (or best) way to solve the problem?"
After the interviewee answers, you can ask, "Then can you flesh out what other options you see?"
Be polite first
There are people who have been taught by their life experience only one language of communication - through violence, through "run over", scare, yell. Politeness and cooperation, unfortunately, they perceive as weakness and therefore it is impossible to negotiate with them in such ways. Only if you reeducate these people beforehand. Therefore, in such cases you will have to switch to their language: pressure, rigidity, authoritarianism.
In other cases, always start with politeness, even if the person is angry. especially if the person is angry! Don't be confused, your job is not to overwhelm the person with your calmness. You want to create a safe environment for him, you want to get on his side to solve this problem together.
It's difficult. It's painful. You're human too and you're angry too, you may be hurt and sad and tired too. That's why we talk about this principle - because it's not easy to execute and it's not intuitive in the moment of heat of passion. That's why we talk about politeness as a tool that you have to learn and get used to using.
Strive to solve the problem in a way that all parties win
"Courtesy First" builds on this principle, the fundamental desire to solve a problem so that as many of the roles involved in the project as possible win.
This is taught by Eliyahu Goldratt and followed by William Detmer.
So look for every possible way to solve the problem together: you together against this pernicious problem, even if you are spouses and are arguing over who should mop the floor or if you just sold a friend your bar and the landlord of the bar space shortly thereafter decides to remove the bar from his premises and now the friend is demanding that you cancel the deal and give him his money back.
Either way you are together against the problem. Your job is to find what you have in common that can bring you together to solve it together.