Let's suppose you start with $1000 to invest, and the only thing you can invest it in is stock ABC. You are only permitted to occupy two states:

* All assets in cash

* All assets in stock ABC

You incur a $2 transaction fee every time you buy or sell.

Kind of annoying limitations to operate under. But you have a powerful advantage as well. You have a perfect crystal ball that each day gives you the [probability density function](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_density_function) of ABC's closing price for the following day (but no further ahead in time).

What would be an optimal decision rule for when to buy and sell?

(cross-posted from my blog)

It is a basic principle of reinforcement learning to distinguish between reward and value, where the reward of a state is the immediate, intrinsic desirability of the state, whereas the value of the state is proportional to the rewards of the other states that you can reach from that state.

For example, suppose that I’m playing a competitive game of chess, and in addition to winning I happen to like capturing my opponent’s pieces, even when it doesn’t contribute to winning. I assign a reward of 10 points to winning, -10 to losing, 0 to a stalemate, and 1 point to each piece that I capture in the game. Now my opponent offers me a chance to capture one of his pawns, an action that would give me one point worth of reward. But when I look at the situation more closely, I see that it’s a trap: if I did capture the piece, I would be forced into a set of moves that would inevitably result in my defeat. So the value, or long-term reward, of that state is actually something close to -9.

Once I realize this, I also realize that making that move is almost exactly equivalent to agreeing to resign in exchange for my opponent letting me capture one of his pieces. My defeat won’t be instant, but by making that move, I would nonetheless be choosing to lose.

Now consider a dilemma that I might be faced with when coming home late some evening. I have no food at home, but I’m feeling exhausted and don’t want to bother with going to the store, and I’ve already eaten today anyway. But I also know that if I wake up with no food in the house, then I will quickly end up with low energy, which makes it harder to go to the store, which means my energy levels will drop further, and so on until I’ll finally get something to eat much later, after wasting a long time in an uncomfortable state.

Typically, temporal discounting means that I’m aware of this in the evening, but nonetheless skip the visit to the store. The penalty from not going feels remote, whereas the discomfort of going feels close, and that ends up dominating my decision-making. Besides, I can always hope that the next morning will be an exception, and I’ll actually get myself to go to the store right from the moment when I wake up!

And I haven’t tried this out for very long, but it feels like explicitly framing the different actions in terms of reward and value could be useful in reducing the impact of that experienced distance. I skip the visit to the store because being hungry in the morning is something that seems remote. But if I think that skipping the visit is exactly the same thing as choosing to be hungry in the morning, and that the value of skipping the visit is not the momentary relief of being home earlier but rather the inevitable consequence of the causal chain that it sets in motion – culminating in hours of hunger and low energy – then that feels a lot different.

And of course, I can propagate the consequences earlier back in time as well: if I think that I simply won’t have the energy to get food when I finally come home, then I should realize that I need to go buy the food before setting out on that trip. Otherwise I’ll again set in motion a causal chain whose end result is being hungry. So then not going shopping before I leave becomes exactly the same thing as being hungry next morning.

More examples of the same:

• Slightly earlier I considered taking a shower, and realized that if I'd take a shower in my current state of mind I'd inevitably make it into a bath as well. So I wasn't really just considering whether to take a shower, but whether to take a shower *and* a bath. That said, I wasn't in a hurry anywhere and there didn't seem to be a big harm in also taking the bath, so I decided to go ahead with it.
• While in the shower/bath, I started thinking about this post, and decided that I wanted to get it written. But I also wanted to enjoy my hot bath for a while longer. Considering it, I realized that staying in the bath for too long might cause me to lose my motivation for writing this, so there was a chance that staying in the bath would become the same thing as choosing not to get this written. I decided that the risk wasn't worth it, and got up.
• If I'm going somewhere and I choose a route that causes me to walk past a fast-food place selling something that I know I shouldn't eat, and I know that the sight of that fast-food place is very likely to tempt me to eat there anyway, then choosing that particular route is the same thing as choosing to go eat something that I know I shouldn't.

Related post: Applied cognitive science: learning from a faux pas.

This article does a good job of explaining how betting can be a useful rationality practice. An excerpt:

The interesting thing about this practice was that it made us both think very carefully about the accuracy of all of our statements. The most embarrassing thing ever was to say, "I bet you anything that I'll be on time..." and then be unwilling to back up the assertion with a bet. Failing to bet was an admission that you'd just said something that you had no real confidence in.

I've seen Richard Hamming's classic talk You And Your Research referenced several times on LessWrong and figured I would post the full version. The introduction is reproduced below:

The title of my talk is, ``You and Your Research.'' It is not about managing research, it is about how you individually do your research. I could give a talk on the other subject - but it's not, it's about you. I'm not talking about ordinary run-of-the-mill research; I'm talking about great research. And for the sake of describing great research I'll occasionally say Nobel-Prize type of work. It doesn't have to gain the Nobel Prize, but I mean those kinds of things which we perceive are significant things. Relativity, if you want, Shannon's information theory, any number of outstanding theories - that's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Now, how did I come to do this study? At Los Alamos I was brought in to run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists and physicists could get back to business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted to know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up close. I saw Fermi and Teller. I saw Oppenheimer. I saw Hans Bethe: he was my boss. I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done.

When I came to Bell Labs, I came into a very productive department. Bode was the department head at the time; Shannon was there, and there were other people. I continued examining the questions, ``Why?'' and ``What is the difference?'' I continued subsequently by reading biographies, autobiographies, asking people questions such as: ``How did you come to do this?'' I tried to find out what are the differences. And that's what this talk is about.

I consider this talk good and useful not only for those interested in research, but for those interested in achieving much of anything. Check it out!

Here's an interesting post about calculating the value of your free time and why it might not be as simple as some tend to think.

The Internet contains vast amounts of useful content. Unfortunately, it also contains vast amounts of garbage, superstimulus hazards, and false, meaningless, or outright harmful information. One skill that is hence quite useful in the modern day is using search engines correctly, allowing you to separate the wheat from the chaff. When doing so, one can often uncover preexisting work that solves your problem for you, the answers to relevant factual questions, and so on. It is rare to find a situation where search engines are outright useless-- at the very least they tend to point you in the direction of useful information.

Further, the time cost of setting up and refining a search is extremely low, meaning that most of the time "just Google it" should in fact be your default response to a situation where you don't have very much information.^[1] Overall, I consider one's ability to use search engines-- and, just as importantly, one's ability to recognize what types of situations can benefit from using them-- a basic but fairly significant instrumental rationality skill.

Much of the above sounds extremely obvious, and in point of fact it should be-- but the fact remains that people don't use search engines anywhere near as often as they seemingly should. I've frequently found myself in situations where someone in the same room as me asks me a trivially searchable factual question while we are both using computers. Worse still, I've been in situations where people do the same over IRC! The existence of lmgtfy indicates that others have noticed this issue before, and yet it remains a problem.

So, how can we do better?

One easy trick that I've found very helpful is to use Goodsearch instead of Google. Goodsearch is a service that automatically donates a cent to a charity of your choice whenever you search.^[2] Further, it can be installed into your search toolbar in Firefox, making the activation cost of using Goodsearch rather than Google essentially zero if, like me, you tend to search in the search bar instead of the URL field. Goodsearch has had profound effects on my tendency to perform searches because it gives me a little hit of "doing good" every time I perform a search, thus encouraging me to do so in more situations, thus causing me to accrue more money via Goodsearch, etc.

This has not only made me more productive by causing me to search more but added positive externalities to every search I conduct. Earlier, I would say that I frequently used search engines to find out information about a new topic or project-- now I would say that I nearly automatically do this as the first step in most situations where I need some information before proceeding. The potential information gained from a search is very high, the costs of performing a search are very low, and with Goodsearch you can donate a little bit to charity while you do so.

If you're reading this in Firefox and haven't already spent large amounts of time getting used to advanced search methods in other engines (and maybe even if you have), I strongly suggest navigating over to Goodsearch, signing up for an account, and installing the Goodsearch App to make it your default toolbar search. For me, this proved to be a big win-- opportunities to increase instrumental rationality for only a minimal time expenditure while also earning free money for charity are not exactly common!

[1] Note that there are some things you might not want to Google. I would, for instance, be very careful about what terms I used if I were looking into the history of political assassinations.

[2] Before anyone gets too clever, there are restrictions.

I read things like "Rationality should win!", and I feel validated. That's basically what I've believed as far back as I can remember (and though my memory isn't as reliable as I'd like, I do think it is pretty decent, based on comparisons I've made with video evidence. Not that said video evidence includes much of me talking about my beliefs.).
 
Yet, clearly, I am no master of rationality, given that my situation at present is not what I would define as having won. When my father was my age, he was employed, married (to his second wife, with whom he is still married), and I was three years old. It wasn't long after that when my sister was born and my dad started work for his father-in-law, whose business he eventually came to own and still runs for a viable profit today. He did set some goals for himself that he hasn't quite met--gaining enough self-sustaining wealth to retire at age 45 (he turned 45 in February 2012) and/or spend his days lounging at the beach without negative consequences--but considering how much money he's put into vacations to the beach, and that he's still able to support his business and family (my stepmother makes a non-negligible contribution to this), I'd call him much closer to successful than me.
 
So, clearly I didn't pick up everything that made my father successful. I don't think dwelling on the differences will help much, but relevant is that I was born with no vision in one eye, and had some vision loss in the other a few years later, until it finally dropped to near-useless starting around age fourteen. (Incidentally, this is my excuse if I fail to catch any spelling errors in this post.) I was taught to believe strongly in the power of human intelligence, and that peer pressure is evil, and that education is the most important thing ever.
 
By 2008, I'd discovered that most of this was extremely flawed, and it was too late to correct the damage that acting on my perceived value of these beliefs had caused (I hadn't realized the extent of that damage by then, but was beginning to pick up on some of it). I'd gotten into an expensive college because the best education possible was apparently important and expensive... yet between my vision, attention to what I thought of as rationality, and rejection of many social conventions, I was completely lacking the skills to get much out of the college experience other than some basic details on a few foreign cultures. After six years of that, I'm back with my parents, $30,000 in debt, unemployed, lacking in the social department to an extent that seems more uncurable than not, still require a French credit to receive a diploma that will in all likelyhood be of very little utility to me, with a serious defficit in skills necessary for independence. Oh, and have less than $400 that I can use ($90 may or may not be in a bank account I don't know how to access, $123.51 in paypal, and the rest in cash). I was recently reapproved for supplemental security income (which I don't expect to be any more than $400 per month), conditional on me living at the property my grandmother left me.
 
I said all of that to ask: how do I fix these problems? I think I've gone on way too long with this post, but explaining some of the obstacles won't help me find solutions without goals, so I'll list some.
 
* I have lived in the same town for 24 years, and in the same house for close to 20 of those, yet I cannot travel anywhere beyond our property on my own without serious risk (getting lost / injured / trespassing / doing accidental damage to someone else's property / etc). I have more mobility skills than my parents give me credit for (About a week and a half ago, I decided to go across the street to ask my stepmother about lunch, and my father said "There's a road! You'll get run over!". I have crossed more dangerous roads than that one unaided multiple times, though he wasn't witness to any of this.). I believe I could get to the store down the road from my grandmother's house unaided (getting back might be more difficult, though), but that's about it. Being able to travel independently seems likely to increase my abilities to accomplish other things tremendously, so this is a problem to be overcome.
* My financial situation is horrible. By my estimates, I could live on $500 per month, assuming I was efficient with food, electricity, etc, and still be able to afford internet access and possibly avoid incurring the wrath of whoever my student loans are paid off to (an understanding of my finances was never given priority before 2010, so I only vaguely know what's going on). I'd much rather have a bit more ($1000 a month would be spectacular, although if part of that is SSI I wouldn't be able to save more than $2000 at a time without losing it). I am led to believe that my employment opportunities are extremely limited (my region has handled the economic recession well, but my other issues seem likely to add to the difficulty). Actually finding local employment without being able to travel to locations independently and fill out application forms would be more than a little difficult, and I have a strong preference for something with a physical component that would make online work undesirable. (My programming skills are also less than spectacular; I've been able to develop accessible computer games and have actually turned a slight profit on that (by which I mean less than $300), but I don't believe I can program on the level that would get someone else to hire me. And if I could write on demand, I wouldn't have an outstanding French credit.). (Here's what the American Foundation for the Blind has to say on employment among disabled Americans: http://www.afb.org/section.aspx?SectionID=15&SubTopicID=177 ).
* Health. I'm sure just living on my own would have a serious impact on my ability to adjust my diet for nutritional value (I find that I tend to eat whatever is easiest, which is usually horribly unhealthy). I can cook with a microwave, and am told that a slow-cooker/crockpot is easy to use. I'm more concerned about exercise, seeing as I can't safely go running or anything of the sort. (I also don't like treadmills, for some reason. I'd be ok with an eliptical, if I could acquire one and find somewhere to put it...).
* I have no experience with romantic relationships (I'm not even sure about strong platonic relationships, for that matter). I am possibly interested in changing this. As a hint at some almost-definitely-harmful things that I haven't been able to remove from my mind, the previous statement was far more painful to write than those before it (as in, if I wound up in a romantic relationship, I would absolutely dread discovery from my parents, knowing that the worst they'd do is make comments intended to be humorous rather than harmful.).
* I've had my creative endeavors (writing fiction, game development, etc) as side-goals for a while, but recently I've started to consider that making them higher priority is probably a good thing. The problem, other than combatting procrastination and other sorts of akrasia, is that I'm at a point where, to keep moving forward almost definitely requires funding. (I can't see well enough to do graphics, and haven't been able to find a decent way around this that doesn't involve paying someone to do graphics; I can't do all the voice-work I'd need, and volunteer voiceactors are horribly unreliable; sound libraries, software licenses, web hosting, etc). The goal is of course the creation of the products to my satisfaction, not the funding itself, but funding seems like a crucial upcoming step.

Solving/accomplishing any of the above would be a significant victory, yet I feel extremely limited in my personal ability to do so. If we can call any one of those successfully resolved using methods promoted at LessWrong, I'd definitely try to provide as much evidence for the victory as possible, as all the questions about the utility of LW make substantiated claims of successes due to the methods of rationality seem valuable to the community.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/08/quantity-always-trumps-quality.html

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

For some reason it just seems we in particular could learn something from this anecdote.

Iterate more. The practice effect is your friend as is mining out positive outliers in really huge sets. I wanted to also mention something about using going meta as a way to procrastinate but I feared I would summon a Newsome.

Edit: This has been mentioned before. I think it is good to remind people of it. Desrtopa writes:

Not only has it been mentioned before, last time it came up I searched and failed to find corroboration of the claim that it actually happened. Since applying a deliberately inconsistent grading rubric is not something professors are normally allowed to do, I strongly suspect that the anecdote is fictional.

It is therefore best to assume this is a parable.

I need help writing a college application essay that will maximize my chances of getting into a school that the world considers prestigious. (17 years old, preparing to enter 12^th grade at a central California high school as of this writing.)

Throughout high school, I resisted being over-scheduled, and basically eschewed all extracurricular activities in favor of having time to think and read. Even when my parents pushed me into things like tennis, dance, or debate clubs (ugh), I was secure in the belief that I could forgo them and rely on my grades and test scores to get me into a college that was good enough to earn a useful engineering degree and find a few interesting friends. (I was right.)

However, my priorities have changed, and I’m starting to really value the extra leverage prestige can bring me. I plan to start a Less Wrong/80,000 Hours club at whatever university I end up attending. I would have access to more intelligent, interested people at Stanford than at, say, UC Irvine. Perhaps more importantly, the club itself would have a better standing in the outside world if it were founded in Stanford. (This in addition to the fact that Stanford already has a world-class Decisions and Ethics Center that may be able to help.)

This is not to say I now regret not being an officer in a dozen useless clubs or participating in endless extracurricular activities. I do, however, regret not doing at least one really impressive, externally-verifiable thing like writing a book. Nothing in my life would make someone say, “Wow, how the hell did she do that?” If admissions officers could scan my brain, they would find a lot that would make them say, “How the hell could she think that?” – but not much of it would be positive.

So my question is, how do I write a personal statement essay, 250-500 words, that will leave an impression in an admissions officer’s mind, without lying or plagiarizing, given that my adolescence was spent thinking and reading, not *doing*? Each university then has 2-4 follow-up prompts (<= 250 words), such as these from Stanford:

1. Stanford students possess intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.
2. Virtually all of Stanford’s undergraduates live on campus. What would you want your future roommate to know about you? Tell us something about you that will help your roommate—and us—know you better.
3. What matters to you, and why?

The problem with answering these is that all of my *best* answers for these questions (“Newcomblike problems,” “Hey, do you want to join this rationality club I want to start?”, and “optimal philanthropy,” respectively) would take way more than 250 words to explain.

The focus on Stanford, by the way, is because my parents would be extremely unwilling to send me to a university on the East Coast, even if it were really prestigious. But feel free to give me general advice or advice specific to another university. :) If it actually happens, I'll be in a better position to convince them.

May Be Relevant:

I once tutored a girl in Algebra 1 over a period of three months, bringing her grades up from a D to a B. She stopped needing help and I didn’t go looking for another tutee.

I completed NaNoWriMo my freshman year – yeah, it was pretty bad.

I’ve been writing a daily essay on 750 words since December 2010, and have written over 518,000 words in 562 days – writing something 98% of the time, and completing my words 95% of the time. (Although a lot of the missed days were due to glitches in the early website eating my words.)

I entered the Science Fair with a couple friends, hated it because it crushed the spirit of curious inquiry under a predetermined experimental procedure with a predetermined result, and unsurprisingly didn’t win – although we got a certificate from the US Army.

I joined a community service club, hated it because we were just unpaid labor for rich people who didn’t need much help, but stayed anyway because my friends were in it.

General SAT: Reading and Writing scores slightly above the median for most prestigious universities, Math score slightly below. 800's on SAT Math II (Pre-calculus), SAT Biology Molecular, and SAT US History.

5's on AP Calculus AB, AP English Language, and other, less relevant AP's. Five AP classes so far taken, received A's, planning to take 6 more next year.

High probability of a good letter of recommendation from APUSH and Calculus teachers.

Thank you!

Edit: Fixed the hyperlink formatting.

Note: I am testing two versions of my new post on rationality and romance.

Please upvote, downvote, or non-vote the below post as you normally would if you saw it on the front page (not the discussion section), but do not vote on the other version. Also, if your last name begins with l–z, please read and vote on this post first. If your last name begins with a–k, please stop reading and read this version instead. 

Rationality Lessons from Romance

Years ago, my first girlfriend (let's call her 'Alice') ran into her ex-boyfriend at a coffee shop. They traded anecdotes, felt connected, a spark of intimacy...

And then she left the coffee shop, quickly.

She told me later: "You have my heart now, Luke."

I felt proud, but even Luke₂₀₀₅ also felt a twinge of "the universe is suboptimal," because she hadn't been able to engage that connection any further. The cultural scripts defining our relationship said that only one man owned her heart. But surely that wasn't optimal for producing utilons?

And thus began my journey toward rational romance — not at that exact moment, but with a series of realizations like that about monogamy, about the assumed progression toward marriage, about the ownership of another person's sexuality, etc. I began to explicitly notice the cultural scripts and see that they might not be optimal for me.

Rationality Skill: Notice when things are suboptimal. Think of ways to optimize them.

Gather data

But I didn't know how to optimize. I needed data. How did relationships work? How did women work? How did attraction work? I decided to become a social psychology nerd. The value of information was high. I began to spend less time with Alice so I could spend more time studying. 

Rationality Skill: Respond to the value of information. Don't keep running in what is probably the wrong direction just because you've got momentum. Stop a moment, and invest some energy in figuring out which direction to go.

Sanity-check yourself

Before long, I noticed that Alice was always pushing me to spend more time with her, and I was always pushing to spend more time studying psychology. I was unhappy, and I knew I could one day attract better mates if I had time to acquire the skills that other men had; men who were "good with women."

So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked. I thought she would appreciate this because she had previously expressed admiration for detailed honesty. Later, I realized how hard it is to think of a more damaging way to break up with someone.

She asked that I kindly never speak to her again. I can't blame her.

Rationality Skill: Know your fields of incompetence. Sanity-check yourself by asking others for advice, or by Googling "how to break up with your girlfriend nicely" or "how to not die on a motorcycle" or whatever.

Study

During the next couple years, I spent no time in (what would have been) sub-par relationships, and instead invested that time optimizing for better relationships in the future. Which meant I was celibate. But learning.

Alas, neither Intimate Relationships nor Handbook of Relationship Initiation existed at the time, but I still learned quite a bit from books like The Red Queen and The Moral Animal. I experienced a long series of 'Aha!' moments, like:

• "Aha! It's not that women prefer jerks to nice guys, but they prefer confident, ambitious men to pushovers."
• "Aha! Body language and fashion matter because they communicate large packets of information about me at light speed, and are harder to fake than words."
• "Aha! Women are attracted to men who make them feel certain ways and have positive subjective experiences. That's why they like funny guys, for example!"

Within a few months, I had more dating-relevant head knowledge than any guy I knew.

Rationalist Skill: Scholarship. Especially if you can do it efficiently, scholarship is a quick and cheap way to level up.

Avoid rationalization

Scholarship was comfortable, so I stayed in scholar mode for too long. I hit diminishing returns in what books could teach me. Every book on dating skills told me to go talk to women, but I thought I needed a completed decision tree first: What if she does this? What if she says that? I won't know what to do if I don't have a plan! I should read 10 more books, so I know how to handle every contingency.

The dating books told me I would think that, but I told myself I was unusually analytical, and could actually benefit from completing the decision tree in advance of actually talking to women.

The dating books told me I would think that, too, and that it was just a rationalization. Really, I was just nervous about the blows that newbie mistakes (and subsequent rejections) would lay upon my ego.

Rationalist Skill: Notice rationalizations and defeat them: Consider the cost of time and trust happening as a result of rationalizing. Consider what opportunities you are missing if you don't just realize you're wrong right now.

Use science

The dating books told me to swallow my fear and talk to women. I couldn't swallow my fear, so I tried E&J brandy instead. That worked.

So I went out and talked to women, mostly at coffee shops or on the street. I learned all kinds of interesting details I hadn't learned in the books:

• Politics, religion, math, and programming are basically never the right subject matter when flirting.
• Keep up the emotional momentum. Don't stay in the same stage of the conversation (rapport, storytelling, self-disclosure, etc.) for very long.
• Almost every gesture or line is improved by adding a big smile.
• 'Hi. I've gotta run, but I think you're cute so we should grab a coffee sometime" totally works when the girl is already attracted because my body language, fashion, and other signals have been optimized.
• People rarely notice an abrupt change of subject if you say "Yeah, it's just like when..." and then say something completely unrelated.

After a while, I could talk to girls even without the brandy. And a little after that, I scored my first one-night stand.

I was surprised by how much I didn't enjoy casual flings. I wasn't very engaged when I didn't know and didn't have much in common with the girl in my bed. But I kept having casual flings, mostly for their educational value. As research projects go, I guess they weren't too bad.

Rationalist Skill: Use empiricism and do-it-yourself science. Just try things. No, seriously.

Try harder

By this time my misgivings about the idea of owning another's sexuality had grown into a full-blown endorsement of polyamory. I needed to deprogram my sexual jealousy, which sounded daunting. Sexual jealousy was hard-wired into me by evolution, right?

It turned out to be easier than I had predicted. Tactics that helped me destroy my capacity for sexual jealousy include:

• Whenever I noticed sexual jealousy in myself, I brought to mind my moral objections to the idea of owning another's sexuality.
• I thought in terms of sexual abundance, not sexual scarcity. When I realized there were thousands of other nearby women I could date, I didn't need to be so needy for any particular girl.
• Mentally, I continually associated 'jealousy' with 'immaturity' and 'neediness' and other concepts that have negative affect for me.

This lack of sexual jealousy came in handy when I grew a mutual attraction with a polyamorous girl who was already dating two of my friends.

Rationality Skill: Have a sense that more is possible. Know that we haven't yet reached the limits of self-modification. Try things. Let your map of what is possible be constrained by evidence, not popular opinion.

Finale

I now enjoy higher-quality relationships — sexual and non-sexual — of a kind that wouldn't be possible with the social skills of Luke₂₀₀₅. I went for years without a partner I cared about, but that's okay because the whole journey was planted with frequent rewards: the thrill of figuring something out, the thrill of seeing people respond to me in a new way, the thrill of seeing myself looking better in the mirror each month.

There might have been a learning curve, but by golly, at the end of all that DIY science and rationality training and scholarship I'm actually seeing an awesome poly girl, I'm free to take up other relationships when I want, I know fashion well enough to teach it at rationality camps, I can build rapport with almost anyone, my hair looks great and I'm happy.

Note: I am testing two versions of my new post on rationality and romance.

Please upvote, downvote, or non-vote the below post as you normally would if you saw it on the front page (not the discussion section), but do not vote on the other version. Also, if your last name begins with a–k, please read and vote on this post first. If your last name begins with l–z, please stop reading and read this version instead. 

Rationality Lessons from Romance

Years ago, my first girlfriend (let's call her 'Alice') ran into her ex-boyfriend at a coffee shop. They traded anecdotes, felt connected, a spark of intimacy...

And then she left the coffee shop, quickly.

She told me later: "You have my heart now, Luke."

I felt proud, but even Luke₂₀₀₅ also felt a twinge of "the universe is suboptimal," because she hadn't been able to engage that connection any further. The cultural scripts defining our relationship said that only one man owned her heart. But surely that wasn't optimal for producing utilons?

This is an account of some lessons that I learned during my journey into rational romance. That journey started with a series of realizations like the one above — that I wasn't happy with the standard cultural scripts: monogamy, an assumed progression toward marriage, and ownership of another person's sexuality. I hadn't really noticed the cultural scripts up until that point. I was a victim of cached thoughts and a cached self.

Lesson: Until you explicitly notice the cached rules for what you're doing, you won't start thinking of them as something to be optimized. Ask: Which parts of romance do you currently think of as subjects of optimization? What else should you be optimizing?

Gather data

At the time, I didn't know how to optimize. I decided I needed data. How did relationships work? How did women work? How did attraction work? The value of information was high, so I decided to become a social psychology nerd. I began to spend less time with Alice so I could spend more time studying. 

Lesson: Respond to the value of information. Once you notice you might be running in the wrong direction, don't keep going that way just because you've got momentum. Stop a moment, and invest some energy in the thoughts or information you've now realized is valuable because it might change your policies, i.e., figuring out which direction to go.

Sanity-check yourself

Before long, I noticed that Alice was always pushing me to spend more time with her, and I was always pushing to spend more time studying psychology. I was unhappy, and I knew I could one day attract better mates if I had time to acquire the skills that other men had; men who were "good with women."

So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked. I thought she would appreciate this because she had previously expressed admiration for detailed honesty.

She asked that I kindly never speak to her again. I can't blame her. In retrospect, it's hard to think of a more damaging way to break up with someone. This gives you some idea of just how incompetent I was, at the time. I had an inkling of that myself - though I'm not sure if I realized right away, or if it only dawned on me six months later. But it was part of the motivation to solve my problems by reading books.

Lesson: Know your fields of incompetence. If you suspect you may be incompetent, sanity-check yourself by asking others for advice, or by Googling. (E.g. "how to break up with your girlfriend nicely", or "how to not die on a motorcycle" or whatever.)

Study

During the next couple years, I spent no time in (what would have been) sub-par relationships, and instead invested that time optimizing for better relationships in the future. Which meant I was celibate.

Neither Intimate Relationships nor Handbook of Relationship Initiation existed at the time, but I still learned quite a bit from books like The Red Queen and The Moral Animal. I experienced a long series of 'Aha!' moments, like:

• "Aha! It's not that women prefer jerks to nice guys, but they prefer confident, ambitious men to pushovers."
• "Aha! Body language and fashion matter because they communicate large packets of information about me at light speed, and are harder to fake than words."
• "Aha! Women are attracted to men with whom they have positive subjective experiences. That's why they like funny guys, for example!"

Within a few months, I had more dating-relevant head knowledge than any guy I knew.

Lesson: Use scholarship. Especially if you can do it efficiently, scholarship is a quick and cheap way to gain a certain class of experience points.

Just try it / just test yourself

Scholarship was warm and comfy, so I stayed in scholar mode for too long. I hit diminishing returns in what books could teach me. Every book on dating skills told me to go talk to women, but I thought I needed a completed decision tree first: What if she does this? What if she says that? I won't know what to do if I don't have a plan! I should read 10 more books, so I know how to handle every contingency.

The dating books told me I would think that, but I told myself I was unusually analytical, and could actually benefit from completing the decision tree in advance of actually talking to women.

The dating books told me I would think that, too, and that it was just a rationalization. Really, I was just nervous about the blows that newbie mistakes (and subsequent rejections) would lay upon my ego.

Lesson: Be especially suspicious of rationalizations for not obeying the empiricist rules "try it and see what happens" or "test yourself to see what happens" or "get some concrete experience on the ground". Think of the cost of time happening as a result of rationalizing. Consider the opportunities you are missing if you don't just realize you're wrong right now.

Use science, and maybe drugs

The dating books told me to swallow my fear and talk to women. I couldn't swallow my fear, so I tried swallowing brandy instead. That worked.

So I went out and talked to women, mostly at coffee shops or on the street. I learned all kinds of interesting details I hadn't learned in the books:

• Politics, religion, math, and programming are basically never the right subject matter when flirting.
• Keep up the emotional momentum. Don't stay in the same stage of the conversation (rapport, storytelling, self-disclosure, etc.) for very long.
• Almost every gesture or line is improved by adding a big smile.
• 'Hi. I've gotta run, but I think you're cute so we should grab a coffee sometime" totally works — as long as the other person is already attracted because my body language, fashion, and other signals have been optimized.
• People rarely notice an abrupt change of subject if you say "Yeah, it's just like when..." and then say something completely unrelated.

After a while, I could talk to women even without the brandy. And a little after that, I had my first one-night stand.

I was surprised by how much I didn't enjoy casual flings. I didn't feel engaged when I didn't know and didn't have much in common with the girl in my bed. But I kept having casual flings, mostly for their educational value. As research projects go, I guess they weren't too bad.

Lesson: Use empiricism and do-it-yourself science. Just try things. No, seriously.

Self-modify to succeed

By this time my misgivings about the idea of owning another's sexuality had grown into a full-blown endorsement of polyamory. I needed to deprogram my sexual jealousy, which sounded daunting. Sexual jealousy was hard-wired into me by evolution, right?

It turned out to be easier than I had predicted. Tactics that helped me destroy my capacity for sexual jealousy include:

• Whenever I noticed sexual jealousy in myself, I brought to mind my moral objections to the idea of owning another's sexuality.
• I thought in terms of sexual abundance, not sexual scarcity. When I realized there were thousands of other nearby women I could date, I didn't need to be so needy for any particular girl.
• Mentally, I continually associated 'jealousy' with 'immaturity' and 'neediness' and other concepts that have negative affect for me.

This lack of sexual jealousy came in handy when I built a mutual attraction with a polyamorous girl who was already dating two of my friends.

Lesson: Have a sense that more is possible. Know that you haven't yet reached the limits of self-modification. Try things. Let your map of what is possible be constrained by evidence, not by popular opinion.

Finale

I now enjoy higher-quality relationships — sexual and non-sexual — of a kind that wouldn't be possible with the social skills of Luke₂₀₀₅. I went for years without a partner I cared about, but it felt okay because the whole journey was seeded with frequent rewards: the thrill of figuring something out, the thrill of seeing people respond to me in a new way, the thrill of seeing myself looking better in the mirror each month.

There might have been a learning curve, but by golly, at the end of all that DIY science and rationality training and scholarship I'm seeing an awesome poly girl, I'm free to take up other relationships when I want, I know fashion well enough to teach it at rationality camps, and I can build rapport with almost anyone. My hair looks great and I'm happy. If you start out as a nerd, setting out to become a nerd about romance totally works, so long as you read the right nerd books and you know the nerd rule about being empirical. Rationality for the win.