Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/doing-the-causation-backwards/

About two years ago, when I first got my smart phone (yes, later than most of the other humans).  I was new to apps, and I was new to environments.  When I decided on what apps should be on my home screen, I picked the ones that I thought I would use most often.

My home screen started with:

• google bar (the top of the page)
• calendar
• facebook
• notepad app (half the page)
• ingress (because I play)
• maps
• camera
• torch

My home screen has barely changed.  I don't play ingress very often these days, but that's by choice, however I was seeing the facebook notifications far too often.  Ending up on facebook far too often for what I wanted.

Recently I decided to try out some tracking systems that include 1/0 metrics.  It looks something like this:

I wanted this in a place where I could see it and fill it out every day, and at the same time I began to question why I have my facebook app on my front page.  This link is now on my front page and I easily fill it out once a day (a win for a habit successfully implemented).

The concept that I want to impart today is that the causation goes the wrong way.  Instead of wanting apps that I regularly use on my front page so that I can easily access them - I want apps that I want to use regularly on my front page.  That way I will tend to develop habits of regularly using them instead of the other ones.  

Fridge

This applies to the refrigerator too.  Instead of the things you use and eat all the time being at the front (assuming they might be different), you want the foods that you want to eat most readily accessible and at the front.  If this means healthy foods at the front - do that.  If this means having a fruit bowl on the table - do that.

TV

This applies to TV too.  If you find book-reading more interesting than TV watching but find yourself watching a lot of TV all the same; put the remotes in a harder to reach place and leave really good books lying around.

Computer shortcuts

Want to play less games?  Get to Reddit less?  Maybe put the games in slightly harder to access places.  Buried in other folders.  Delete the auto-fill in your browser that completes to Reddit.  Want to do equations by hand more often than using a calculator (for practicing math purposes) - make the calculator slightly harder to get to, and make sure you have a pen/paper handy around the computer.

Junk food

Do you have a candy cupboard?  Find yourself eating too much of it.  A simple answer would be to empty it, and don't fill it again.  But an alternative that still lets you have candy in the house is to place slightly healthier and tasty food choices in front of the candy.  for example dried fruit - still sweet and bite-sized, in a similar class of choices to Candy, but significantly healthier.  Some days you will reach past the dried fruit for the chocolate, and many more days you will reach for the dried fruits.

The meta strategy

Without creating more examples.  There are often behaviours you want to do better, actions that you want to take instead of other actions, or behaviours that have a "better form" than you might otherwise be doing.  

The strategy is:

1. Take 5 minutes writing out what you usually do on a daily basis
2. For each one, consider if this is the optimum form of the action, (or one that leads to acceptable levels of results) - don't be afraid to dream of the possible optimal actions.
   
3. Make the better option more available in your life.
   
4. Make it easier for yourself to do the better option.
5. Check progress in a month (put a reminder in your diary) and iterate on solutionspace
6. Winning!

We know about System 1 and System 2.  We live some of our life in S1 and some in S2.  S2 know's it's not always going to be "in charge" and making deliberate actions but it does have periods of lucid thought in which to set up S1 with better easiest-path behaviours and actions.  This applies to planning, setting up a workspace, avoiding the pain of paying and many more.

Think: How can I set this up so that I do the better possible path in the future with the least effort?

Meta: this post took 2hrs to write.

The First Step

The first step on the path to truth is superstition.  We all start there, and should acknowledge that we start there.

Superstition is, contrary to our immediate feelings about the word, the first stage of understanding.  Superstition is the attribution of unrelated events to a common (generally unknown or unspecified) cause - it could be called pattern recognition. The "supernatural" component generally included in the definition is superfluous, because supernatural merely refers to that which isn't part of nature - which means reality -, which is an elaborate way of saying something whose relationship to nature is not yet understood, or else nonexistent.  If we discovered that ghosts are real, and identified an explanation - overlapping entities in a many-worlds universe, say - they'd cease to be supernatural and merely be natural.

Just as the supernatural refers to unexplained or imaginary phenomena, superstition refers to unexplained or imaginary relationships, without the necessity of cause.  If you designed an AI in a game which, after five rounds of being killed whenever it went into rooms with green-colored walls, started avoiding rooms with green-colored walls, you've developed a good AI.  It is engaging in superstition, it has developed an incorrect understanding of the issue.  But it hasn't gone down the wrong path - there is no wrong path in understanding, there is only the mistake of stopping.  Superstition, like all belief, is only useful if you're willing to discard it.

The Next Step

Incorrect understanding is the first - and necessary - step to correct understanding.  It is, indeed, every step towards correct understanding.  Correct understanding is a path, not an achievement, and it is pursued, not by arriving at the correct conclusion in the first place, but by testing your ideas and discarding those which are incorrect.

No matter how much intelligent you are, you cannot skip the "incorrect understanding" step of knowledge, because that is every step of knowledge.  You must come up with wrong ideas in order to get at the right ones - which will always be one step further.  You must test your ideas.  And again, the only mistake is stopping, in assuming that you have it right now.

Intelligence is never your bottleneck.  The ability to think faster isn't necessarily the ability to arrive at the right answer faster, because the right answer requires many wrong ones, and more importantly, identifying which answers are indeed wrong, which is the slow part of the process.

Better answers are arrived at by the process of invalidating wrong answers.

The Winding Path

The process of becoming Less Wrong is the process of being, in the first place, wrong.  It is the state of realizing that you're almost certainly incorrect about everything - but working on getting incrementally closer to an unachievable "correct".  It is a state of anti-hubris, and requires a delicate balance between the idea that one can be closer to the truth, and the idea that one cannot actually achieve it.

The art of rationality is the art of walking this narrow path.  If ever you think you have the truth - discard that hubris, for three steps from here you'll see it for superstition, and if you cannot see that, you cannot progress, and there your search for truth will end.  That is the path of the faithful.

But worse, the path is not merely narrow, but winding, with frequent dead ends requiring frequent backtracking.  If ever you think you're closer to the truth - discard that hubris, for it may inhibit you from leaving a dead end, and there your search for truth will end.  That is the path of the crank.

The path of rationality is winding and directionless.  It may head towards beauty, then towards ugliness; towards simplicity, then complexity.  The correct direction isn't the aesthetic one; those who head towards beauty may create great art, but do not find truth.  Those who head towards simplicity might open new mathematical doors and find great and useful things inside - but they don't find truth, either.  Truth is its own path, found only by discarding what is wrong.  It passes through simplicity, it passes through ugliness; it passes through complexity, and also beauty.  It doesn't belong to any one of these things.

The path of rationality is a path without destination.

Written as an experiment in the aesthetic of Less Wrong.  I'd appreciate feedback into the aesthetic interpretation of Less Wrong, rather than the sense of deep wisdom emanating from it (unless the deep wisdom damages the aesthetic).