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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on The Wrongness Iceberg - Less Wrong Discussion

20 Post author: alfredmacdonald 04 February 2013 09:02AM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 04 February 2013 05:36:46PM *  4 points [-]

Several ideas and techniques from the CFAR workshop are relevant:

  • Value of information: how much better can I make decisions after getting this advice?
  • Cultivating curiosity: gee, I wonder what advice I'll get?
  • Overcoming aversions / comfort zone expansion: what motives do I have for avoiding asking for advice? Does thinking about asking for advice make me feel bad? Do I view myself as someone who doesn't ask for advice? What do I expect will happen if I ask for advice and, taking the outside view, how realistic are those expectations?
  • Evaluating advice: now that I've gotten some advice, how much should I trust it (taking the outside view again)? Is the sample I've chosen to ask for advice from biased? How independent is the advice that I get from multiple people? When I asked for advice, did I accidentally prime the person I was asking in a particular direction?

The workshop included a practical session on comfort zone expansion (we went to a mall and did mildly uncomfortable things involving strangers) which I found helpful, mostly because it helped me internalize social pressure in the direction of comfort zone expansion. At the workshop this was abbreviated as CoZE and there was a half-serious idea floating around of awarding "CoZE points" to people whenever they expanded their comfort zones, which is the main technique I used the last time I tried asking for advice. (The other technique I used was a social commitment mechanism, but explaining how that fit in would make the story too long.)