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List of techniques to help you remember names

8 Elo 11 December 2015 12:41AM

Name are very important. Everyone has one; everyone likes to know when you know their name. Everyone knows them to be a part of social interaction. You can't avoid names (well you can, but it gets tricky). In becoming more awesome at names, here is a bunch of suggestions that can help you.

 

The following is an incomplete list of some reasonably good techniques to help you remember names.  Good luck and put them to good use.


0. Everyone can learn to remember names

in a growth mindset sense, stop thinking you can’t.  Stop saying that, everyone is bad at it.  Your 0’th task is to actually try harder than that, if you can’t do that - stop reading.  Face blindness does exist but most of these will help with that.

 

1. Decide that names are important. 

If you don't think they are important then change your mind. They are. Everyone says they are, everyone responds to their name. It’s a fact of life that being able to be communicated with directly by name will be useful.

 

2. Make sure you hear the name clearly the first time, and repeat it till you have it. 

I tend to shake people's hands, then not let go until they tell me their name, and share them mine clearly (sometimes twice).  

 

3. Repeat their name*

Part of 2, but also – if you repeat it (at least once) you have a higher chance of remembering it. Look them in the eye and say their name. "Nice to meet you Bob". Suddenly your brain got a good picture of their face as well as a good cue as to their name.  If you want to supercharge this particular part; “Nice to meet you bob with the hat”, “susan with the glasses”, “john in the dress” works great!

*Repeating a name also has the effect of someone correcting you if you have it wrong.  And if you are in a group - allowing other people to learn or remember a name more easily.

 

4. Associating that name.

Does that name have a meaning as another thing? Mark, Ivy, Jack.

Does that name rhyme with something? Or sound like something? Victoria, IsaBelle, Dusty, Bill, Norris, Jarrod (Jar + Rod), Leopold.

Does someone you already know have that name? Can you make a mental link between this person and the person who's name you already remember. Worst case about being able to remember their name, "oh I have a cousin also called Alexa"-type statements are harmless.

Is the name famous? Luke, Albert, Jesus, Bill, Simba, Bruce, Clark, Edward, Victoria. Any thing that you can connect to this person to hold their name.

 

5. Write it down

Do you have a spare piece of paper? Can you write it down?  I literally carry a notebook and write names down as I hear them.  Usually people compliment me on it if they ever find out.

 

6. Running a script about it

There are naturally lulls in your conversation.  You don’t speak like a wall of text, or if you do you could probably learn to do this over the top. If you take a moment during one of those lulls, while someone else is talking - to look around and take note of if you have forgotten someone's name, do so at 1minute, 5minutes, 10minutes (or where necessary).  Just recite each person’s name in your head.

 

7. The first letter.

There are 26 English letters. If you can't remember – try to remember the first letter. If you get it and it doesn't jog your memory, try use the statement, "your name started with J right?"

 

8. Facebook, LinkedIn, Anki

Use the resources available to you. Check Facebook if you forget! Similarly if people are wearing nametags; test yourself (think – her name is Mary – then check) if you don't remember at all then certainly check. Build an anki deck - I am yet to see a script to make an anki deck from a Facebook friends list but this would be an excellent feature. 

 

9. put that name somewhere.  

It seems to help some people to give the name a box to go in.  “This name goes with the rest of the names of people I am related to”, “this name goes with the box of the rest of my tennis club”, By allocating boxes you can bring back names via the box of names.  (works for some people)

 

10. Mnemonics

I never bothered because with the above list; I don’t need this yet.  Apparently they work excellently. It’s about creating a sensory object in your head that reminds you of the thing you are after, i.e. a person named Rose – imagine a rose on top of her head, that was bright red, and smelt like a rose. Use all senses and make something vivid. You want to remember? Make it vivid and ridiculous.  Yes this works; And yes it’s more effort.  Names are really valuable and worth remembering.


Disclaimer: All of these things work for some of the people some of the time.  You should try the ones you think will work; if they do - excellent, if they don’t - oh well.  keep trying.

Also see: http://lesswrong.com/lw/gx5/boring_advice_repository/8ywe

and this video on name skill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1_o4oZCEmM

Note: This is also recommended from the book "how to win friends and influence people"


Meta: I wrote this post for a dojo in the Sydney Lesswrong group on the name remembering skills following a lightning talk that I gave in the Melbourne Lesswrong group on the same ideas.

time: 3hrs to write.

To see my other posts - check out my Table of contents

Any suggestions, recommendations or updates please advise below.

Speculative rationality skills and appropriable research or anecdote

3 Clarity 21 July 2015 04:02AM

Is rationality training in it's infancy? I'd like to think so, given the paucity of novel, usable information produced by rationalists since the Sequence days. I like to model the rationalist body of knowledge as superset of pertinent fields such as decision analysis, educational psychology and clinical psychology. This reductionist model enables rationalists to examine the validity of rationalist constructs while standing on the shoulders of giants.

CFAR's obscurantism (and subsequent price gouging) capitalises on our [fear of missing out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out). They brand established techniques like mindfulness as againstness or reference class forecasting as 'hopping' as if it's of their own genesis, spiting academic tradition and cultivating an insular community. In short, Lesswrongers predictably flouts [cooperative principles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle).

This thread is to encourage you to speculate on potential rationality techniques, underdetermined by existing research which might be a useful area for rationalist individuals and organisations to explore. I feel this may be a better use of rationality skills training organisations time, than gatekeeping information.

To get this thread started, I've posted a speculative rationality skill I've been working on. I'd appreciate any comments about it or experiences with it. However, this thread is about working towards the generation of rationality skills more broadly.

Min/max goal factoring and belief mapping exercise

-1 Clarity 23 June 2015 05:30AM

Edit 3: Removed description of previous edits and added the following:

This thread used to contain the description of a rationality exercise.

I have removed it and plan to rewrite it better.

I will repost it here, or delete this thread and repost in the discussion.

Thank you.

The January 2013 CFAR workshop: one-year retrospective

34 Qiaochu_Yuan 18 February 2014 06:41PM

About a year ago, I attended my first CFAR workshop and wrote a post about it here. I mentioned in that post that it was too soon for me to tell if the workshop would have a large positive impact on my life. In the comments to that post, I was asked to follow up on that post in a year to better evaluate that impact. So here we are!

Very short summary: overall I think the workshop had a large and persistent positive impact on my life. 

Important caveat

However, anyone using this post to evaluate the value of going to a CFAR workshop themselves should be aware that I'm local to Berkeley and have had many opportunities to stay connected to CFAR and the rationalist community. More specifically, in addition to the January workshop, I also

  • visited the March workshop (and possibly others),
  • attended various social events held by members of the community,
  • taught at the July workshop, and
  • taught at SPARC.

These experiences were all very helpful in helping me digest and reinforce the workshop material (which was also improving over time), and a typical workshop participant might not have these advantages. 

Answering a question

pewpewlasergun wanted me to answer the following question:

I'd like to know how many techniques you were taught at the meetup you still use regularly. Also which has had the largest effect on your life.

The short answer is: in some sense very few, but a lot of the value I got out of attending the workshop didn't come from specific techniques. 

In more detail: to be honest, many of the specific techniques are kind of a chore to use (at least as of January 2013). I experimented with a good number of them in the months after the workshop, and most of them haven't stuck (but that isn't so bad; the cost of trying a technique and finding that it doesn't work for you is low, while the benefit of trying a technique and finding that it does work for you can be quite high!). One that has is the idea of a next action, which I've found incredibly useful. Next actions are the things that to-do list items should be, say in the context of using Remember The Milk. Many to-do list items you might be tempted to right down are difficult to actually do because they're either too vague or too big and hence trigger ugh fields. For example, you might have an item like

  • Do my taxes

that you don't get around to until right before you have to because you have an ugh field around doing your taxes. This item is both too vague and too big: instead of writing this down, write down the next physical action you need to take to make progress on this item, which might be something more like

  • Find tax forms and put them on desk

which is both concrete and small. Thinking in terms of next actions has been a huge upgrade to my GTD system (as was Workflowy, which I also started using because of the workshop) and I do it constantly. 

But as I mentioned, a lot of the value I got out of attending the workshop was not from specific techniques. Much of the value comes from spending time with the workshop instructors and participants, which had effects that I find hard to summarize, but I'll try to describe some of them below: 

Emotional attitudes

The workshop readjusted my emotional attitudes towards several things for the better, and at several meta levels. For example, a short conversation with a workshop alum completely readjusted my emotional attitude towards both nutrition and exercise, and I started paying more attention to what I ate and going to the gym (albeit sporadically) for the first time in my life not long afterwards. I lost about 15 pounds this way (mostly from the eating part, not the gym part, I think). 

At a higher meta level, I did a fair amount of experimenting with various lifestyle changes (cold showers, not shampooing) after the workshop and overall they had the effect of readjusting my emotional attitude towards change. I find it generally easier to change my behavior than I used to because I've had a lot of practice at it lately, and am more enthusiastic about the prospect of such changes. 

(Incidentally, I think emotional attitude adjustment is an underrated component of causing people to change their behavior, at least here on LW.)

Using all of my strength

The workshop is the first place I really understood, on a gut level, that I could use my brain to think about something other than math. It sounds silly when I phrase it like that, but at some point in the past I had incorporated into my identity that I was good at math but absentminded and silly about real-world matters, and I used it as an excuse not to fully engage intellectually with anything that wasn't math, especially anything practical. One way or another the workshop helped me realize this, and I stopped thinking this way. 

The result is that I constantly apply optimization power to situations I wouldn't have even tried to apply optimization power to before. For example, today I was trying to figure out why the water in my bathroom sink was draining so slowly. At first I thought it was because the strainer had become clogged with gunk, so I cleaned the strainer, but then I found out that even with the strainer removed the water was still draining slowly. In the past I might've given up here. Instead I looked around for something that would fit farther into the sink than my fingers and saw the handle of my plunger. I pumped the handle into the sink a few times and some extra gunk I hadn't known was there came out. The sink is fine now. (This might seem small to people who are more domestically talented than me, but trust me when I say I wasn't doing stuff like this before last year.)

Reflection and repair

Thanks to the workshop, my GTD system is now robust enough to consistently enable me to reflect on and repair my life (including my GTD system). For example, I'm quicker to attempt to deal with minor medical problems I have than I used to be. I also think more often about what I'm doing and whether I could be doing something better. In this regard I pay a lot of attention in particular to what habits I'm forming, although I don't use the specific techniques in the relevant CFAR unit.

For example, at some point I had recorded in RTM that I was frustrated by the sensation of hours going by without remembering how I had spent them (usually because I was mindlessly browsing the internet). In response, I started keeping a record of what I was doing every half hour and categorizing each hour according to a combination of how productively and how intentionally I spent it (in the first iteration it was just how productively I spent it, but I found that this was making me feel too guilty about relaxing). For example:

  • a half-hour intentionally spent reading a paper is marked green.
  • a half-hour half-spent writing up solutions to a problem set and half-spent on Facebook is marked yellow. 
  • a half-hour intentionally spent playing a video game is marked with no color.
  • a half-hour mindlessly browsing the internet when I had intended to do work is marked red. 

The act of doing this every half hour itself helps make me more mindful about how I spend my time, but having a record of how I spend my time has also helped me notice interesting things, like how less of my time is under my direct control than I had thought (but instead is taken up by classes, commuting, eating, etc.). It's also easier for me to get into a success spiral when I see a lot of green. 

Stimulation

Being around workshop instructors and participants is consistently intellectually stimulating. I don't have a tactful way of saying what I'm about to say next, but: two effects of this are that I think more interesting thoughts than I used to and also that I'm funnier than I used to be. (I realize that these are both hard to quantify.) 

etc.

I worry that I haven't given a complete picture here, but hopefully anything I've left out will be brought up in the comments one way or another. (Edit: this totally happened! Please read Anna Salamon's comment below.) 

Takeaway for prospective workshop attendees

I'm not actually sure what you should take away from all this if your goal is to figure out whether you should attend a workshop yourself. My thoughts are roughly this: I think attending a workshop is potentially high-value and therefore that even talking to CFAR about any questions you might have is potentially high-value, in addition to being relatively low-cost. If you think there's even a small chance you could get a lot of value out of attending a workshop I recommend that you at least take that one step. 

Health/Longevity Link List

3 Dorikka 05 May 2013 03:17AM

Dying or becoming severely physically/mentally ill is very likely going to significantly lower the output of your utility function, so it would probably be a very bad idea to ignore the low-hanging resources which can significantly extend the time for which you are alive and well. I have attempted to search LessWrong for a list of such resources, and haven't been able to find one.

Are there any books, websites, or posts that contain significantly low-hanging fruit in this area? If so, please list them in the comments below.

Rationalist Lent

44 Qiaochu_Yuan 14 February 2013 06:32AM

As I understand it, Lent is a holiday where we celebrate the scientific method by changing exactly one variable in our lives for 40 days. This seems like a convenient Schelling point for rationalists to adopt, so:

What variable are you going to change for the next 40 days?

(I am really annoyed I didn't think of this yesterday.) 

Thoughts on the January CFAR workshop

37 Qiaochu_Yuan 31 January 2013 10:16AM

So, the Center for Applied Rationality just ran another workshop, which Anna kindly invited me to. Below I've written down some thoughts on it, both to organize those thoughts and because it seems other LWers might want to read them. I'll also invite other participants to write down their thoughts in the comments. Apologies if what follows isn't particularly well-organized. 

Feelings and other squishy things

The workshop was totally awesome. This is admittedly not strong evidence that it accomplished its goals (cf. Yvain's comment here), but being around people motivated to improve themselves and the world was totally awesome, and learning with and from them was also totally awesome, and that seems like a good thing. 

Also, the venue was fantastic. CFAR instructors reported that this workshop was more awesome than most, and while I don't want to discount improvements in CFAR's curriculum and its selection process for participants, I think the venue counted for a lot. It was uniformly beautiful and there were a lot of soft things to sit down or take naps on, and I think that helped everybody be more comfortable with and relaxed around each other. 

Main takeaways

Here are some general insights I took away from the workshop. Some of them I had already been aware of on some abstract intellectual level but hadn't fully processed and/or gotten drilled into my head and/or seen the implications of. 

  1. Epistemic rationality doesn't have to be about big things like scientific facts or the existence of God, but can be about much smaller things like the details of how your particular mind works. For example, it's quite valuable to understand what your actual motivations for doing things are. 
  2. Introspection is unreliable. Consequently, you don't have direct access to information like your actual motivations for doing things. However, it's possible to access this information through less direct means. For example, if you believe that your primary motivation for doing X is that it brings about Y, you can perform a thought experiment: imagine a world in which Y has already been brought about. In that world, would you still feel motivated to do X? If so, then there may be reasons other than Y that you do X. 
  3. The mind is embodied. If you consistently model your mind as separate from your body (I have in retrospect been doing this for a long time without explicitly realizing it), you're probably underestimating the powerful influence of your mind on your body and vice versa. For example, dominance of the sympathetic nervous system (which governs the fight-or-flight response) over the parasympathetic nervous system is unpleasant, unhealthy, and can prevent you from explicitly modeling other people. If you can notice and control it, you'll probably be happier, and if you get really good, you can develop aikido-related superpowers
  4. You are a social animal. Just as your mind should be modeled as a part of your body, you should be modeled as a part of human society. For example, if you don't think you care about social approval, you are probably wrong, and thinking that will cause you to have incorrect beliefs about things like your actual motivations for doing things. 
  5. Emotions are data. Your emotional responses to stimuli give you information about what's going on in your mind that you can use. For example, if you learn that a certain stimulus reliably makes you angry and you don't want to be angry, you can remove that stimulus from your environment. (This point should be understood in combination with point 2 so that it doesn't sound trivial: you don't have direct access to information like what stimuli make you angry.) 
  6. Emotions are tools. You can trick your mind into having specific emotions, and you can trick your mind into having specific emotions in response to specific stimuli. This can be very useful; for example, tricking your mind into being more curious is a great way to motivate yourself to find stuff out, and tricking your mind into being happy in response to doing certain things is a great way to condition yourself to do certain things. Reward your inner pigeon.

Here are some specific actions I am going to take / have already taken because of what I learned at the workshop. 

  1. Write a lot more stuff down. What I can think about in my head is limited by the size of my working memory, but a piece of paper or a WorkFlowy document don't have this limitation. 
  2. Start using a better GTD system. I was previously using RTM, but badly. I was using it exclusively from my iPhone, and when adding something to RTM from an iPhone the due date defaults to "today." When adding something to RTM from a browser the due date defaults to "never." I had never done this, so I didn't even realize that "never" was an option. That resulted in having due dates attached to RTM items that didn't actually have due dates, and it also made me reluctant to add items to RTM that really didn't look like they had due dates (e.g. "look at this interesting thing sometime"), which was bad because that meant RTM wasn't collecting a lot of things and I stopped trusting my own due dates. 
  3. Start using Boomerang to send timed email reminders to future versions of myself. I think this might work better than using, say, calendar alerts because it should help me conceptualize past versions of myself as people I don't want to break commitments to. 

I'm also planning to take various actions that I'm not writing above but instead putting into my GTD system, such as practicing specific rationality techniques (the workshop included many useful worksheets for doing this) and investigating specific topics like speed-reading and meditation. 

The arc word (TVTropes warning) of this workshop was "agentiness." ("Agentiness" is more funtacular than "agency.") The CFAR curriculum as a whole could be summarized as teaching a collection of techniques to be more agenty. 

Miscellaneous

A distinguishing feature the people I met at the workshop seemed to have in common was the ability to go meta. This is not a skill which was explicitly mentioned or taught (although it was frequently implicit in the kind of jokes people told), but it strikes me as an important foundation for rationality: it seems hard to progress with rationality unless the thought of using your brain to improve how you use your brain, and also to improve how you improve how you use your brain, is both understandable and appealing to you. This probably eliminates most people as candidates for rationality training unless it's paired with or maybe preceded by meta training, whatever that looks like.

One problem with the workshop was lack of sleep, which seemed to wear out both participants and instructors by the last day (classes started early in the day and conversations often continued late into the night because they were unusually fun / high-value). Offering everyone modafinil or something at the beginning of future workshops might help with this.

Overall

Overall, while it's too soon to tell how big an impact the workshop will have on my life, I anticipate a big impact, and I strongly recommend that aspiring rationalists attend future workshops. 

Question: Being uncertain without worrying?

4 fiddlemath 17 April 2012 01:56PM

I currently face a pretty major life decision. After some careful analysis, I've concluded that my final decision depends on the answers from some queries that I have made, but whose answers I won't receive for days or perhaps weeks.

In the meantime, I've had great difficulty not obsessing over the pending decision. It warps my priorities and kills my motivation; I'm doing less, with less vigor, and enjoying it less. I've noticed, in the past, that compulsion to worry correlates tightly with depressed mood; given what I know about the mind, I assume that each can cause the other.

In general, this connection seems to make changing one's mind painful, and probably conditions people to hold their ideas with certainty, rather than uncertainty. As such, ways to stave it off should be of major use to this community...

I know some things to do to stave off a depressed mood (e.g. get exercise, eat well, talk to friends, achieve small-but-satisfying goals). I don't know any ways to avoid the compulsion to worry about an uncertain future decision, except, possibly, to notice the worrying and tell myself, verbally, that uncertainty is ok. Which brings me to my

Question: Does anyone know any methods for avoiding fruitless worrying over properly-uncertain facts or actions?

Rough calculations: Fermi and the art of guessing

9 XiXiDu 08 September 2011 10:39AM

Fermi problem

In science, particularly in physics or engineering education, a Fermi problem, Fermi question, or Fermi estimate is an estimation problem designed to teach dimensional analysis, approximation, and the importance of clearly identifying one's assumptions. Named after physicist Enrico Fermi, such problems typically involve making justified guesses about quantities that seem impossible to compute given limited available information.

Fermi was known for his ability to make good approximate calculations with little or no actual data, hence the name. One example is his estimate of the strength of the atomic bomb detonated at the Trinity test, based on the distance travelled by pieces of paper dropped from his hand during the blast. Fermi's estimate of 10 kilotons of TNT was remarkably close to the now-accepted value of around 20 kilotons, a difference of less than one order of magnitude.

[...]

Scientists often look for Fermi estimates of the answer to a problem before turning to more sophisticated methods to calculate a precise answer. This provides a useful check on the results: where the complexity of a precise calculation might obscure a large error, the simplicity of Fermi calculations makes them far less susceptible to such mistakes. (Performing the Fermi calculation first is preferable because the intermediate estimates might otherwise be biased by knowledge of the calculated answer.)

Fermi estimates are also useful in approaching problems where the optimal choice of calculation method depends on the expected size of the answer. For instance, a Fermi estimate might indicate whether the internal stresses of a structure are low enough that it can be accurately described by linear elasticity; or if the estimate already bears significant relationship in scale relative to some other value, for example, if a structure will be over-engineered to withstand loads several times greater than the estimate.

Although Fermi calculations are often not accurate, as there may be many problems with their assumptions, this sort of analysis does tell us what to look for to get a better answer.

Link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

Fermi Problem: Power developed at the eruption of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcanic system in June 2011

Enrico Fermi was renowned for his ability to make reliable estimates. But how well can you do on a modern estimation problem?

[...]

Hernan Asory and Arturo Lopez Davalos at the Comision Nacional De Energia Atomica in Argentina, have set themselves (and their students) a similar estimation task. The problem is to estimate the energy release as well as the volume and mass of sand ejected during the eruption of the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano in Chile on 4 July.

You can look up the calculations and the assumption they make in the paper. You might want to try the estimate yourself.

Link: technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27140/

If you want to get better at doing rough mental calulcations, the following books might provide some valuable heuristics:

Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving

Time for some quick arithmetic: Is 3600 x 4.4 x 104 x 32 larger or smaller than 3 x 109?

Finding the right answer, says Sanjoy Mahajan, associate director for teaching initiatives at MIT’s Teaching and Learning Laboratory, does not require crafting a long, tedious calculation. Instead, the key to solving this problem — and many others — lies in having informal tools on hand that let us attack the problem. Though the result may not be perfectly precise, he believes, intuitive mathematical reasoning is often sufficient for our needs.

“That’s not to say exact answers aren’t useful,” says Mahajan, “but if looking for them is your only approach, you may never get any answer at all. Sometimes it’s better to start with something rough.”

[...]

Mahajan believes we should learn practical math tools and understand why they work.

[...]

Mahajan’s unconventional teaching practices stem from his focus, as a physicist, on finding quick, practical answers. Then again, perhaps rolling up one’s sleeves and hacking through problems is how everyone works. “There is a culture in pure mathematics that emphasizes rigor and careful proofs,” says Strogatz. “Yet all practicing mathematicians know we also use our intuitions, then we clean our answers up.”

[...]

So let’s get back to the initial question (the numbers relate to the storage capacity of a data CD-ROM). The key to solving it, says Mahajan, is to recognize that the components of the first, messy-looking number can be broken into powers of 10. Then we can temporarily set aside these powers of 10 — Mahajan calls this “taking out the big part,” one of his tenets of problem-solving — while handling the smaller, simpler multiplication problem.

Okay: Picture the number as (3.6 x 103) x (4.4 x 104) x (3.2 x 101). To multiply powers of 10 in practice, we add them, here producing 108. Leave that aside momentarily and multiply 3.6 x 4.4 x 3.2. The answer is about 50, or 5.0 x 101. Combine that with 108, and we have our answer: Roughly 5.0 x 109, which is bigger than 3 x 109. Street-fighting math, and we barely got a scratch. 

Link: web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/street-fight-0329.html

Secrets of Mental Math: The Mathemagician's Guide to Lightning Calculation and Amazing Math Tricks

Yes, even you can learn to do seemingly complex equations in your head; all you need to learn are a few tricks. You’ll be able to quickly multiply and divide triple digits, compute with fractions, and determine squares, cubes, and roots without blinking an eye. No matter what your age or current math ability, Secrets of Mental Math will allow you to perform fantastic feats of the mind effortlessly. This is the math they never taught you in school.

N-back news: Jaeggi 2011, or, is there a psychologist/statistician in the house?

14 gwern 16 June 2011 06:47PM

Following up on the 2010 study, Jaeggi and University of Michigan people have run a Single N-back study on 60 or so children.

The abstract is confident and the mainstream coverage unquestioning of the basic claim. But reading it, the data did not seem very solid at all - I will forbear from describing my reservations exactly; I have been accused of being biased against n-backing, however, and I'd appreciate outside opinions, especially from people with expertise in the area.

(Background: Jaeggi 2011 in my DNB FAQ. Don't read it unless you can't render the above requested opinion, since it includes my criticisms.)

When to scream "Error!"

10 Dorikka 26 February 2011 05:40PM

In Anna’s recent post, she talked about training your mind to notice when it wasn’t curious about something and scream “Error! Look for a different way to do this” in such cases. Johnicholas and TheOtherDave's list of what stupidity feels like also looks useful for this purpose. I'm creating this post to make a more comprehensive list of feelings which indicate that people should reanalyze different possible paths to make sure that the one which they're taking is the most effective one to their objective.

Please suggest additions to the list in your comments -- I'll move them up here (along with links to further explanation, if given.) Keep in mind that your description of the feeling should be as illustrative as possible. For example, "feeling stupid" is unhelpful, while "you feel like you've taken a wrong turn into a never-ending tunnel" is better. Of course, metaphors which are immediately understood by some people may not be so easily understood by others, so try to give a more detailed description of the feeling if other people express that you're probably saying more than they're hearing.

List: "Error! Look for a different way to do this" if you feel like:

  • being bored, being in pain, being distracted, wanting to do anything else than this
  • being unworthy of these divine (external) ideas
  • blind plodding obedience
  • being tired all the time, even if you're not2
  • not having enough fingers to hold all of my thoughts in place
  • merging onto the highway when I can't see all the oncoming traffic
  • someone's playing loud distracting music that I can't hear
  • riding on a train with square wheels

1. Sometimes tedious/boring tasks genuinely cannot be made easier or less boring, so your "Error!" message might not return anything useful. However, you should at least look.
2. This may also indicate that your stupidity has biological causes, such as nutrition/sleep deficiency. 20-30 minute naps are awesome, though longer ones might make you groggy.
3. Of course, if a goal-achieving action is also supported by authorities, that is a good thing.

Dual n-back news

12 gwern 08 October 2010 10:16PM

A long awaited study on dual n-back has recently come out in pre-publication: http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ#jaeggi-2010 (For background, read the rest of my FAQ.)

 

It replicates the IQ boost, but it's by the same person as Jaeggi 2008 and has the same issue with the IQ tests being speeded rather than full-time. You can see my argument about this at the DNB mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training/browse_frm/thread/c0fe2e1f14b8af06

 

(Meta: is this appropriate for the discussion area? I know some people here are interested in IQ enhancement like DNB promises, but normally I would just drop this into an open thread as a comment, not make a whole quasi-article about it.)

A Novice Buddhist's Humble Experiences

12 Will_Newsome 04 October 2010 10:40AM

This is an introduction and description of vipassana meditation [edit: actually, anapanasati, not vipassana as such] more than Buddhism. Nonetheless I hope it serves as some testament to the value of Buddhist thought outside of meditation.

One day I hope more people take up the mantle of the Buddhist Conspiracy, the Bayesanga, and preach the good word of Bayesian Buddhism for all to hear. Until then, though, I'd like to follow in the spirit of fellow Bayesian Buddhist Luke Grecki, and describe some of my personal experiences with anapanasati meditation in the hopes that they'll convince you to check it out.

Nearly everything I've learned about anapanasati/vipassana comes from this excellent guide. It's easy to read and it actually explains the reasoning behind all of the things you're asked to do in vipassana. I heavily encourage you to give it a look. Meditation without instruction didn't lead me anywhere: I spent hours letting my mind get tossed about while I tried in vain to think of nothing. Trying to think of nothing is not a good idea. Vipassana is the practice of mindfulness, and it is recommended that you focus on your breath (focusing on breath is sort of a form of vipassana, and sort of its own thing; I haven't quite figured it out yet). I chose that as my anchor for meditation as recommended. Since reading the above linked guide on meditation, I've meditated a mere 4 times, for a total of 100 minutes. I'm a total novice! So don't confuse my experiences for the wisdom of a venerable teacher. But I think that maybe since you, too, will be a novice, hearing a novice's experiences might be useful. A mere 100 minutes of practice, and I've had many insights that have helped me think more clearly about mindfulness, compassion, self-improvement, the nature of feedback cycles and cascades, relationships between the body and cognition, and other diverse subjects.

The first meditation session was for 10 minutes, the second for 40 minutes, the third for 10 minutes, and the fourth for 40 minutes again. Below are descriptions of the two 40 minutes sessions. In the first, I experienced a state of jhana (the second jhana, to be precise; I'm about 70% confident), which was profoundly moving and awe-inspiring. In the the second, my mind was a little too chatty to reach a jhana, but I did accidentally have a few insights that I think are important for me to have realized.

The below are very personal experiences, and I don't suspect that they're typical. But I hope that describing my experiences will inspire you to consider mindfulness meditation, or to continue with mindfulness meditation, even if your experiences end up being very different from mine. You might find that some of the 'physiological effects' I list are egregious, but I decided to leave them in, 'cuz they just might be relevant. For instance, I find that, quite surprisingly, my level of mindfulness seems to directly correlate with how numb various parts of my body are! Also, listing what parts of me were in pain at various points might alert future practitioners to what sorts of pain might be expected from sitting still for longer than thirty minutes. The most interesting observations will probably be in the 'insights' sections.


40 minutes, Evening/night, September 17, 2010.

Setting: First laying down on a bed with a pillow over my eyes, then sitting up on the bed on a pillow.

Physiological effects:

  • Before jhana:
  • I lay down on my bed with a pillow over my eyes. I think this is interesting, because many texts I've read emphasize the importance of sitting up straight. I don't think it is necessary. That said, they do seem to know what they're talking about, and I'm very new to this, so perhaps being able to enter a jhana from a position of lying down was something of a fluke.
  • I started concentrating on my breath.
  • My breath alternated between deep and slow and a more natural breath. As time went on and I became more comfortable, my breath became less slow and more normal.
  • I experienced numb facial muscles and random eye muscle flickers. I felt trong sense of peace, compassion, and wellbeing.
  • The numbness and joy gave way to a full-out jhana experience after about 5 to 10 minutes of meditation.
  • During jhana:
  • Incredibly intense feeling of bliss, compassion, and piece. I involuntarily laughed at loud about five times. I think there must have been some kind of feedback loop going on here. I felt clearheaded.
  • Incredibly intense body high. My whole body was quivering, including especially my eyelids. It was a numbness-like feeling, though perhaps different in that if felt like quivering. It could be that my perception of the feeling had changed.
  • I sat up on a pillow.
  • Watching the inside of my eyelids was entirely grey, where most of the time there are neon patterns on a black background. This was rather odd and the most obvious evidence that something really weird was going on with my perception.
  • I tried to sit in a half-lotus position. This was mildly painful, though the pain wasn't bad, if you take my meaning. I kept at it for about two to five minutes, after which I reverted to a normal cross-legged position.
  • I had a strong compulsion to sing out 108 'Om mane padme hum's, which I did, followed by 108 more, counting on my fingers.
  • I then got up and played a few blitz chess games online, still feeling the very strong effects of the meditation. Surprisingly, in the 3 games I played I was a tad subpar. I sorta expected to play amazingly well, though I wasn't sad when it turned out I was wrong. This might be a sign that my feelings of clearheadedness were not entirely justified, but the results aren't very indicative either way. By the third game the effects had mostly worn off, but I still felt very peaceful, compassionate, self-accepting, and joyful. The flittering quivering numbness and energy had mostly worn off.

Insights on breath:

  • I could feel the temperature difference of the air as it was inhaled and exhaled.
  • When I breathed heavily, inhalation was very slightly painful.
  • (A few others that I've forgotten.)
  • (I had the above insights before entering jhana. I think they helped achieve jhana.)

General insights:

  • Previously I'd heard that meditation could lead to feelings of profound bliss, compassion, and even a sort of very strong physical body high. I'd mostly discounted such reports on the grounds that 1) I've done some drugs and didn't expect the effects to be as strong as e.g. cannabis, and 2) it didn't seem clear how just focusing on your breath could cause significant physiological changes of the sort necessary to have such strong effects. After experiencing jhana, I can say I was wrong. However, I still do not understand the neurochemical mechanisms behind my experience, besides postulating the magical hypothesis of 'cascades'.
  • More generally, I realized more fully that the Buddhists really do have a lot of very good and very credible thoughts on mindfulness and rationality. I'd known this for awhile just by studying Buddhist texts and teachings, but feeling vipassana meditation working so strongly and obviously really made it sink in that Buddhism is very worth studying attentively.
  • Cascades and feedback loops in the mind are very, very strong. By becoming more mindful and more accepting, I allowed myself to become even more mindful and accepting, until the feedback loop led me to an incredible altered state. This led me to really believe that the mind is very messy and prone to accidentally allowing causation between two parameters when it'd probably be better to allow just one to push on the other, like happiness causing laughter and not the other way around. Nonetheless, I can use the messiness of my mind to my advantage by thinking the right kinds of thoughts. I got a better sense of this when I meditated again a two weeks later.
  • I am naturally rather severely self-critical. Previously I'd considered this, if not a virtue, then it least a necessary evil and a good habit that I should keep: it keeps me from being excessively narcissistic, it reminds me of areas where I can improve, it keeps me from feeling too justified in a dispute, and it allows me to better understand faults others see in me. However, becoming so accepting of both my faults and others' during meditation led me to think that perhaps the disgust I feel for myself and others is a needless emotion, and that simply acknowledging areas of improvement without associating them with negative affect is a much better way to make myself a more awesome person and understand the plights of others. The whole time I'd thought that getting angry at myself was a necessary part of being self-critical, but after meditating I realized that anger isn't a necessary part of realizing faults, just like self-love isn't a necessary part of realizing strengths. Both are affect-laden thoughts where simple awareness will do better. I have a feeling that this insight generalized to a lot of other problems.
  • If the Buddhist concept of Enlightenment is anything like a constant state of jhana (and this is somewhat implied by accounts of Gautama Buddha's path), then I can definitely see why people would want to aim for it, and I can see how it could be a very real, very effective, and very profound state of mind. It doesn't seem to me as if one has to postulate anything spiritual to think of Enlightenment as an amazing state of being that we should all aim for as rationalists. The magnaminity, compassion, competence, acceptance, and feeling of awesomeness created by the jhanas should be cultivated and drawn upon whenever possible.
  • Because of this, it is very worth researching ways to 'cheat' and induce jhana states without having to undergo careful meditation. Neurofeedback, isochronic beats, and transcranial magnetic stimulation all seem like potential paths towards easy Enlightenment. (The jhanas seem to allow strong clarity of mind where drugs do not; but it is possible that being on drugs as much as possible might also be an interesting path. I'd rather not go down it yet.) 'Course, we might still have to just do it the hard way.


40 minutes, Midnight, October 4, 2010.

Setting: Seated on a pillow on blanket on roof of my house in Tucson.

Physiological effects:

  • My left leg (quadricep) was mildly sore throughout from running/sprinting two days before. At times in went mildly numb, though not painfully so. My left foot also went slightly numb at various points throughout the sitting.
  • My shoulders and facial muscles would tense moderately at various times near the beginning of the sitting and slightly near the end. This normally followed losing track of my breath. My breathing also got heavier and faster during these times. When I focused on my breath again, my shoulders and facial muscles dropped and relaxed, and my breath returned to normal rapidity/intensity.
  • After 10 minutes and at various points after, for roughly 15 seconds each, I could feel certain facial muscles go slightly numb, though not painfully so.
  • Roughly 15 to 20 minutes in (not sure), my left hand went somewhat numb for one to three minutes.
  • Roughly 20 minutes in, my left arm went very numb for roughly two minutes, though I didn't feel any pain. My arm felt 'tight'. The numbness went away rather rapidly, followed immediately by what felt like increased blood flow and thus warmth in the rest of my body.
  • Roughly 25 minutes in I felt mild pain in my lower left back. It mostly went away within a minute or two.
  • After the meditation was over (40 minutes) I stood up and stretched. I felt very peaceful and happy. At first I felt a tad dizzy but soon felt fine.

Insights on breath:

  • Breathing was faster and more intense when I stopped focusing on it and thought of other things. (Sometimes it was slower and more intense. I think intensity was the real key change.) When I refocused on my breath, it naturally became smoother and at a more normal pace.
  • Previously, I'd always thought that air went 'up' my nose when I breathed in. I suddenly realized that air actually entered my nose diagonally, and this whole time I'd thought I'd been breating 'up' because of confirmation bias. All of a sudden it was obvious that I was breathing in diagonally. But moments later I realized I was actually mostly breathing 'up', and only a little diagonally: my new theory had also been subject to confirmation bias! So I settled on thinking that I did indeed breathe in 'up', but also a little diagonally.
  • I noticed that there are two types of breath. The first is very airy and goes through the top of your nose; it is the one that comes most naturally to me and I imagine most others. The second is throaty and maybe a little stuffy, and it seems as if less air is passing through. I tend to breath the second way a little more naturally when I try to tuck my chin in against my neck; but I can still breathe in the more airy way as well when I do this, so your mileage may very.

General insights:

  • Patterns of muscle contractions, patterns of thoughts, and patterns of breathing are all interrelated and can cause feedback loops. Being mindful of my thoughts helps me relax my muscles; relaxing my muscles helps my breathing be more natural; having a natural breath allows me to be more mindful; and so forth. This is good if I am diligent, but bad if I am not; I tend to gravitate towards whatever state I'm in. It takes effort to move between states of mind, but it seems that entropy and novel stimuli tend to push me toward patterns of thought that are irritant. I believe it is eminently possible that I could cultivate the disposition such that entropy and novel stimuli tend to push me towards mindfulness, compassion, and awesomeness.
  • Confirmation bias is there even at the very low instinctual level of breathing. As soon as you come up with a theory, even direct sensory experience doesn't always change it when it's wrong.
  • Psychic irritants, as they are sometimes called, are constantly mucking around in your brain, causing low level stress, anxiety, guilt, and general discomfort. It seems likely that this was the natural state of the brain for thousands upon thousands of years. I find it very odd that with an hour of focused mindfulness -- all you do is pay wordless attention to your breath! -- you can make a naturally fuzzy and pained human mind into a pure and blissful meditative engine. The difference is striking. It is hard for me to imagine why living in the moment has such a profound effect on cognition.

I'd love for others to share their meditative experiences, or offer feedback for this post. I'm not sure if it should become a top-level post or not. But hopefully LW starts moving in a more Buddhist and effectiveness-oriented direction.

Taken out of original essay for being egregious: I've talked previously of how there seems to be a libertarian/technophile/futurist set of rationalists and a liberal/Buddhist/scientist set of rationalists, and each eyes the other's origin with a cocked eyebrow. Well, I'm from the LBS origin group, and I still think it's the better of the two. We're better at cooperating and we're more okay with praise. But we also seem to lack an unfortunate meme that I've seen in the LTF crowd: uncharitable misinterpretation of what the best ideas of Buddhism really are, even if not every practitioner or teacher is at the standard of the best philosophers of that tradition. Hofstadter made Zen cool, but other easier and probably more useful forms of Buddhism have been left unplundered. I think it has more to do with an instinctual negative reaction towards anything that seems vaguely spiritual or religious. And don't get me wrong, there's a lot of religion and spirituality in Buddhist countries, especially of the Mahayana sort. But the best texts in the Theravada tradition have very good, very deep, and very insightful epistemology and rationality in them, of the kind that wasn't to be found anywhere else in the world for hundreds upon hundreds more years, if at all.

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