I'm guessing this is the first time that links to Less Wrong appeared in a Huffington Post article, and three links at that! Please correct me if I'm wrong on this one. I'm also guessing this is the first time that the concept of agency in the rationalist sense was discussed and promoted on the Huffington Post. Another gain for raising the sanity waterline as part of my broader project to promote rationality to the masses! If you want to help, email me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org

Disclaimer: This post is mainly relevant to those who are interested in Effective Altruism

Introduction

As a Less Wronger and Effective Altruist who is skilled at marketing, education, and outreach, I think we can do a lot of good if we improve the effectiveness of Effective Altruism outreach. I am not talking about EA pitches in particular, although these are of course valuable in the right time and place, but more broadly issues of strategy. I am talking about making Effective Altruism outreach effective through relying on research-based strategies of effective outreach.

To be clear, I should say that I have been putting my money/efforts where my mouth is, and devoting a lot of my time and energy to a project, Intentional Insights, of spreading rationality and effective altruism to a broad audience, as I think I can do the most good through convincing others to do the most good, through their giving and through rational thinking. Over the last year, I devoted approximately 2400 hours and $33000 to this project. Here's what I found helpful in my own outreach efforts to non-EAs, and lots of these ideas also apply to my outreach regarding rationality more broadly.

Telling Stories

I found it quite helpful to focus much more on speaking to people's emotions rather than their cognition. Now, this was not intuitive to me. I'm much more motivated by data than the typical person, and I bet you are too. But I think we need to remember that we suffer from a typical mind fallacy, in that most EAs are much more data-driven than the typical person. Moreover, after we got into the EA movement, we forget how weird it looks from the outside - we suffer from the curse of knowledge.

Just published an article in the The Huffington Post about using rationality-informed strategies to manage my mental illness. Hope this helps people think more rationally about this topic.

Something that I haven't seen really discussed is what kind of emotional tools would be good for beginner rationalists. I'm especially interested in this topic since as part of my broader project of spreading rationality to a wide audience and thus raising the sanity waterline, I come across a lot of people who are interested in becoming more rational, but have difficulty facing the challenges of the Valley of Bad Rationality. In other words, they have trouble acknowledging their own biases and faults, facing the illusions within their moral systems and values, letting go of cached patterns, updating their beliefs, etc. Many thus abandon their aspiration toward rationality before they get very far. I think this is a systematic failure mode of many beginner aspiring rationalists, and so I wanted to start a discussion about what we can do about it as a community.

Note that this emotional danger does not feel intuitive to me or likely to many of you. In a Facebook discussion with Viliam Bur, he pointed out how he did not experience the Valley. I personally did not experience it that much either. However, based on the evidence of the Intentional Insights outreach efforts, this is a typical mind fallacy particular to many but far from all aspiring rationalists. So we should make an effort to address it in order to raise the sanity waterline effectively.

I'll start by sharing what I found effective in my own outreach efforts. First, I found it helpful to frame the aspiration toward rationality not as a search for a perfect and unreachable ideal, but as a way of constant improvement from the baseline where all humans are to something better. I highlight the benefits people get from this improved mode of thinking, to prime people to focus on their current self and detach themselves from their past selves. I highlight the value of self-empathy and self-forgiveness toward oneself for holding mistaken views, and encourage people to think of themselves as becoming more right, rather than less wrong :-)

Another thing that I found helpful was to provide new aspiring rationalists with a sense of community and social belonging. Joining a community of aspiring rationalists who are sensitive toward a newcomers' emotions, and help that newcomer deal with the challenges s/he experiences, is invaluable for overcoming the emotional strains of the Valley. Something especially useful is having people who are trained in coaching/counseling and serve as mentors for new members, who can help be guides for their intellectual and emotional development alike. I'd suggest that every LW meetup group consider instituting a system of mentors who can provide emotional and intellectual support alike for new members.

Now I'd like to hear about your experiences traveling the Valley, and what tools you and others you know used to manage it. Also, what are your ideas about useful tools for that purpose in general? Look forward to hearing your thoughts!

As part of my broader project of promoting rationality widely, I'm going to work on making rationality-themed merchandise with slogans. I'd appreciate any ideas on what slogans would be short (5 words or less), engaging, and accessible, and appealing for both aspiring rationalists and smart youth and young adults who are just starting to learn about rationality. As an example, slogans like "Growing Mentally Stronger" or "Updating My Beliefs" are good, but "Tsuyoku Naritai!" is not, however much I personally like that slogan.

As part of my broader project of promoting rationality to a wide audience , I published an article in Salon entitled "Get Donald Trump out of my brain: The neuroscience that explains why he’s running away with the GOP." I'd welcome your thoughts on this article itself, and also meta-comments on the strategy of using mindkillers such as politics to raise the sanity waterline by smuggling in rationality memes into such popular and populist venues.

As part of my broader project of popularizing rationality and raising the sanity waterline, I'm writing a blog about how to make a major financial decision more rationally. The audience we're targeting are educated people into self-improvement, so the blog post, as all of our other content, is couched in that language and style. Any feedback on how to improve the blog to make the blog more clear and emotionally evocative, and thus better suited to spread rationality among a broad audience, would be helpful, as would specific comments on the methodology described.  The blog draft itself is below the solid line. Thanks!

P.S. The blog was inspired by this earlier LW discussion post.

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Avoid Emotional Traps for Your Happiness!

That backyard was simply gorgeous. Entering it was like going into a magic grove. Lush and shady trees spread their branches around you and protect you from the summer’s heat. Oh, and how beautiful the leaves would get in the fall. Can you imagine all the range of colors that would emerge – different shades of red, yellow, and orange?

The image of that backyard was my single most vivid experience looking for a new house after my wife and I decided to move. It was the strongest impression left after our day of intense house shopping when we were looking at the finalists on our list. I imagined myself lounging in a hammock in the shade of the trees all day, experiencing the calm of a majestic forest, except in the middle of a city. Yet unlike a forest or a public park, it was private, and could be all ours!  Exhausted and excited at the end of that long day, my wife and I discussed our top choices, and the backyard was the clincher for both of us. We told our realtor to put in a bid on that house, and couldn’t wait to move in. Little did we know, the backyard was a trap!

Ok, so that might have been a bit overly dramatic. We weren’t going to be swarmed by the Empire’s starfighters in that house. However, it was indeed a trap for our decision-making processes.

Why is that? Here’s an example of similar trap, see if you can spot it.

Doesn’t that Toyota FJ Cruiser look great going into the rugged peaks of the San Juan mountains? Yeah, it’s perfect there. Indeed, Toyota promoted it as the ideal car for that purpose. So if you live in the mountains and drive only there, it’s the car for you!

But let’s be honest. The vast majority of the customers do not live in the mountains, and spent the large majority of their time driving in the city or on highways, and the car had a number of problems for everyday driving. Toyota’s marketing was appealing for people who want to feel like they could go to the mountains, but in actuality, how often are you going to go there?

So now can you guess what is the parallel between the car and the house? If you guessed the actual usage of the backyard, you’re right! Just like taking the car on an off-road trip, using the backyard for lounging around all day is a relatively rare experience. On my days off, I’m much more likely to go visit my friends or go out with my wife than lounge around. I was excessively motivated by my emotional thinking system’s attachment to one aspect of the house at the expense of everything else. This is a classic thinking error, called attentional bias, caused by our brain’s tendency to focus on emotionally dominant information in our environment. Such emotional traps could really undermine long-term happiness with big decisions, such as getting a new car and especially a new home!

Fortunately, my wife and I avoided this trap. The next day after we told our agent to make the offer, we decided to re-evaluate our decision by applying the tool of probabilistic thinking to our estimated likelihood of happiness with our new home.

Below is a photo of our calculations. We compared our first-choice house (170) to our second choice (450). To avoid excessive emotional attachment to any part of the house, we wrote out the various parts of the house (first column). We then gave each a rating of quality on a 1-3 scale, from low to moderate to high. Then, to account for the actual usage of each part of the house, we gave the same rating to usage. We then multiplied both of these numbers by each other to get total value (only the total value is included in the chart). Each of us gave our own ratings for each category to account for our different intuitive valuations of the rating of quality and usage, as you can see from the separate columns for A and G, Agnes and Gleb. Finally, we added them all up at the bottom, and included a couple of small fudge factors due to things like price difference.

Both of us were really surprised by the result. Our second-choice house beat out our first-choice house, and by a lot, 95 to 67.5. We were way off base in our initial decision-making due to our attentional bias on the backyard, which turned out to be much less significant than we originally anticipated once we accounted for actual usage. I shared about my experience with others, and many had similar stories. We quickly called our realtor and asked her to make the bid on the second house. We were so excited when it was accepted!

From that episode, I learned that this type of calculation is incredibly valuable when making any significant financial decisions that can impact your long-term happiness. So how can you use this method to avoid emotional traps for your own happiness?

Let’s go back to the car as an example. Before making a decision, sit down and assign numbers to various components of the car. First, consider how you plan to use the car – city driving, highway driving, road trips, driving in the mountains, driving by yourself, driving with family and friends, driving your date, etc. How much of your time will you use the car for each activity and how important is each activity for you? Assign a numerical value to each activity based on a combination of usage and importance. For instance, you might not be taking family road trips often, but it might be important for the car to be really well suited for those times, so give a higher number for that area.

Then, based on your usage ratings, consider what aspects of the car are important to you – safety, gas mileage, comfort for the driver and passengers, trunk space, off-road capacity, coolness factor, etc.? For example, it might be important to you to impress your dates and friends with your car, so give a higher rating to the coolness factor if that’s the case. Or it might be very valuable to have comfort for yourself and good trunk space if you are taking long car trips around the state for your job. Assign a numerical value to each based on your personal evaluation.

Now, you have a great list to look for in a new car! You know what aspects are most important for you, and are much less likely to be led astray by attentional bias due to test-driving a fun car when you actually need a family-friendly one.

Apply this method to any significant financial decision – car, furniture, vacation, computer, house, etc. A smart investment of less than a half-hour of time could lead to a much happier future for you. Moreover, with a little imagination, this method can be applied to any important decisions, not only financial ones. In future posts, I will discuss how to quantify less tangible values to make the most optimal decisions for your long-term happiness.

Questions to consider

• What are your strategies for making big decisions wisely?

• Has attentional bias ever led you astray in big decisions? If so, how could you have applied what you just learned to your previous decisions to make better ones?

• What kind of significant financial decisions do you have coming up? What kind of factors might inspire attentional bias in these decisions? What specific steps can you take to avoid these problems?

As part of a broader project of promoting rationality, Raelifin and I had some luck in getting media coverage of rationality-informed approaches to probabilistic thinking (1, 2), mental health (1, 2), and reaching life goals through finding purpose and meaning (1, 2). The media includes mainstream media such as the main newspaper in Cleveland, OH; reason-oriented media such as Unbelievers Radio; student-oriented media such as the main newspaper for Ohio State University; and self improvement-oriented media such as the Purpose Revolution.

This is part of our strategy to reach out both to mainstream and to niche groups interested in a specific spin on rationality-informed approaches to winning at life. I wanted to share these here, and see if any of you had suggestions for optimizations of our performance, connections with other media channels both mainstream and nice, and any other thoughts on improving outreach. Thanks!

So does spreading rationality contribute to Effective Altruism? I certainly think so, as a rationality popularizer and an Effective Altruist myself. My own donations of money and time is focused on my project, Intentional Insights, of trying to spread rationality to a broad audience and thus raise the sanity waterline, including about effective, evidence-based philanthropy. Specifically in relation to EA, in blogs for Intentional Insights, and in our resources page, I make sure to highlight EA as an awesome thing to get involved in.

I'd particularly appreciate feedback on a draft fundraising letter (link here) for Effective Altruists on the way that Intentional Insights contributes to improving the world and specifically by getting people more engaged with Effective Altruism. I'd like to hear any thoughts on how I can optimize the letter to make it more effective. You can simply respond in comments, or send an email to gleb@intentionalinsights.org

I'd also like to hear your opinion of the broader issue of how spreading rationality helps contribute to improving the world and the EA movement in particular. Let me share my take. For the first, I think that, as shown by Brian Tomasik in this essay, increasing rational thinking is robustly positive for a broad range of short and long term future outcomes, and thus our broader work contributes to improving people’s lives overall. For the second, getting people to think rationally about themselves and their interactions with the world and use evidence-based means to evaluate reality and make their decisions will result in people applying these methods of thinking to their altruism.

What do you think?

As part of my project of spreading rationality to a broad audience and thus raising the sanity waterline, I'm writing a book on using rationality-informed strategies to help people find terminal values, with an orientation toward encouraging a positive and externally-oriented higher purpose carried out in an effective way. To be appealing a wide audience, the book is couched in the language of self-improvement, while also being based on and studying much recent research in the sphere of meaning and purpose, from psychology, cognitive neuroscience, medicine, etc. The goal of the book is to get readers to use rationality-informed, science-based methods to find their long-term goals, and also to get them interested in rational, science-based thinking more broadly, the whole point of my project.

To fund the costs of publishing the book, I'm running a crowdfunding campaign, and the campaign page describes the book in full. I would appreciate any support for the campaign, as well as feedback on optimizing the story and rewards in the campaign in such a way as to make it more appealing to a broad audience. Thank you!

EDIT: Several people messaged to ask how much is appropriate to contribute. My answer in these cases is always based on how many utilons and hedons you think this book has the potential to bring to the world. That's how I measure my own giving, and my own approach to rationality as a whole, as I describe in this LW Main Post.

Wanted to share two articles published in mainstream media, namely Ohio newspapers, about how rationality-informed strategies help people improve their lives.

This one is about improving one's thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns overall, and especially one's highest-order goals, presented as "meaning and purpose."

This one is about using rationality to deal with mental illness, and specifically highlights the strategy of "in what world do I want to live?"

I know about these two articles because I was personally involved in their publication as part of my broader project of spreading rationality widely. What other articles are there that others know about?

Glad to share an op-ed piece I published in one of the most premier higher education media channels on how I as a professor used rationality-informed strategies to deal with mental illness in the classroom. This is part of my broader project to promote rationality to a broad audience and thus raise the sanity waterline, so good news on that front. I'd also be glad to hear your advice about other strategies to promote rationality broadly, and also any collaboration you may be interested in doing together around such public outreach.

I'd appreciate feedback on optimizing a blog post that shares about my mental illness and popularizes future-oriented thinking to a broad audience. I'm using story-telling as the driver of the narrative, and sprinkling in elements of rational thinking, such as hyperbolic discounting, mental maps, and future-oriented thinking, in a strategic way. The target audience is college-age youth and young adults. Any suggestions for what works well, and what can be improved would be welcomed! The blog draft itself is below the line.

P.S. For context, the blog is part of a broader project, Intentional Insights, aimed at promoting rationality to a broad audience, as I described in this LW discussion post. To do so, we couch rationality in the language of self-improvement and present it in a narrative style.

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 Coming Out of the Mental Health Closet

My hand jerked back, as if the computer mouse had turned into a real mouse. I just couldn’t do it. Would they think I am crazy? Would they whisper behind my back? Would they never trust me again? These are the kinds of anxious thoughts that ran through my head as I was about to post on my Facebook profile revealing my mental illness to my Facebook friends, about 6 months after my condition began.

I really wanted to share much earlier about my mental illness, a mood disorder characterized by high anxiety, sudden and extreme fatigue, and panic attacks. It would have felt great to be genuinely authentic with people in my life, and not hide who I am. Plus, I would have been proud to contribute to overcoming the stigma against mental illness in our society, especially since this stigma impacts me on such a personal level.

Ironically, the very stigma against mental illness, combined with my own excessive anxiety response, made it very hard for me to share. I was really anxious about whether friends and acquaintances would turn away from me. I was also very concerned about the impact on my professional career of sharing publicly, due to the stigma in academia against mental illness, including at my workplace, Ohio State, as my colleague and fellow professor described in his article.

Whenever the thought of telling others entered my mind, I felt a wave of anxiety pass through me. My head began to pound, my heart sped up, my breathing became fast and shallow, almost like I was suffocating. If I didn’t catch it in time, the anxiety could lead to a full-blown panic attack, or sudden and extreme fatigue, with my body collapsing in place. Not a pretty picture.

Still, I did eventually start discussing my mental illness with some very close friends who I was very confident would support me. And one conversation really challenged my mental map, in other words how I perceive reality, about sharing my story of mental illness.

My friend told me something that really struck me, namely his perspective about how great would it be if all people who needed professional help with their mental health actually went to get such help. One of the main obstacles, as research shows, is the stigma against mental health. We discussed how one of the best ways to deal with such stigma is for well-functioning people with mental illness to come out of the closet about their condition.

Well, I am one of these well-functioning people. I have a great job and do it well, have wonderful relationships, and participate in all sorts of civic activities. The vast majority of people who know me don’t realize I suffer from a mental illness.

That conversation motivated me to think seriously through the roadblocks thrown up by the emotional part of my brain. Previously, I never sat down for a few minutes and forced myself to think what good things might happen if I pushed past all the anxiety and stress of telling people in my life about my mental illness.

I realized that I was just flinching away, scared of the short-term pain of rejection and not thinking about the long-term benefits to me and to others of sharing my story. I was falling for a thinking error that scientists call hyperbolic discounting, a reluctance to make short-term sacrifices for much higher long-term rewards.

To combat this problem, I imagined what world I wanted to live in a year from now – one where I shared about this situation now on my Facebook profile, or one where I did not. This approach is based on research showing that future-oriented thinking is very helpful for dealing with thinking errors associated with focusing on the present.

In the world where I would share right now about my condition, I would be very anxious about what people think of me. Anytime I saw someone who found out for the first time, I would be afraid about the impact on that person’s opinion of me. I would be watching her or his behavior closely for signs of distancing from me. And this would not only be my anxiety: I was quite confident that some people would not want to associate with me due to my mental illness. However, over time, this close watching and anxious thoughts would diminish. All the people who knew me previously would find out. All new people who met met would learn about my condition, since I would not keep it a secret. I would make the kind of difference I wanted to make in the world by fighting mental stigma in our society, and especially in academia. Just as important, it would be a huge burden off my back to not hide myself and be authentic with people in my life.

I imagined a second world. I would continue to hide my mental health condition from everyone but a few close friends. I would always have to keep this secret under wraps, and worry about people finding out about it. I would not be making the kind of impact on our society that I knew I would be able to make. And likely, people would find out about it anyway, whether if I chose to share about it or some other way, and I would get all the negative consequences later.

Based on this comparison, I saw that the first world was much more attractive to me. So I decided to take the plunge, and made a plan to share about the situation publicly. As part of doing so, I made that Facebook post. I had such a good reaction from my Facebook friends that I decided to make the post publicly available on my Facebook to all, not only my friends. Moreover, I decided to become an activist in talking about my mental condition publicly, as in this essay that you are reading.

What can you do?

So how can you apply this story to your life? Whether you want to come out of the closet to people in your life about some unpleasant news, or more broadly overcome the short-term emotional pain of taking an action that would help you achieve your long-term goals, here are some strategies.

1) Consider the world where you want to live a year from now. What would the world look like if you take the action? What would it look like if you did not take the action?

2) Evaluate all the important costs and benefits of each world. What world looks the most attractive a year from now?

3) Decide on the actions needed to get to that world, make a plan, and take the plunge. Be flexible about revising your plan based on new information such as reactions from others, as I did regarding sharing about my own condition.

What do you think?

• Do you ever experience a reluctance to tell others about something important to you because of your concern about their response? How have you dealt with this problem yourself?
• Is there any area of your life where an orientation to the short term undermines much higher long-term rewards? Do you have any effective strategies for addressing this challenge?
• Do you think the strategy of imagining the world you want to live in a year from now can be helpful in any area of your life? If so, where and how?

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Thanks in advance for your feedback and suggestions on optimizing the post!

I'd appreciate feedback on optimizing a blog post that promotes rational thinking about one's career choice to a broad audience in a way that's engaging, accessible, and fun to read. I'm aiming to use story-telling as the driver of the narrative, and sprinkling in elements of rational thinking, such as agency and mere-exposure effect, in a strategic way. The target audience is college-age youth and young adults, as you'll see from the narrative. Any suggestions for what works well, and what can be improved would be welcomed! The blog draft itself is below the line.

P.S. For context, the blog is part of a broader project, Intentional Insights, aimed at promoting rationality to a broad audience, as I described in this LW discussion post. To do so, we couch rationality in the language of self-improvement and present it in a narrative style.

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Title:

"Stop and Think Before It's Too Late!"

Body:

Back when I was in high school and through the first couple of years in college, I had a clear career goal.

I planned to become a medical doctor.

Why? Looking back at it, my career goal was a result of the encouragement and expectations from my family and friends.

My family immigrated from the Soviet Union when I was 10, and we spent the next few years living in poverty. I remember my parents’ early jobs in America, my dad driving a bread delivery truck and my mom cleaning other people’s houses. We couldn’t afford nice things. I felt so ashamed in front of other kids for not being able to get that latest cool backpack or wear cool clothes – always on the margins, never fitting in. My parents encouraged me to become a medical doctor. They gave up successful professional careers when they moved to the US, and they worked long and hard to regain financial stability. It’s no wonder that they wanted me to have a career that guaranteed a high income, stability, and prestige.

My friends also encouraged me to go into medicine. This was especially so with my best friend in high school, who also wanted to become a medical doctor. He wanted to have a prestigious job and make lots of money, which sounded like a good goal to have and reinforced my parents’ advice. In addition, friendly competition was a big part of what my best friend and I did. Whether debating complex intellectual questions, trying to best each other on the high school chess team, or playing poker into the wee hours of the morning. Putting in long hours to ace the biochemistry exam and get a high score on the standardized test to get into medical school was just another way for us to show each other who was top dog. I still remember the thrill of finding out that I got the higher score on the standardized test. I had won!

As you can see, it was very easy for me to go along with what my friends and family encouraged me to do.  

I was in my last year of college, working through the complicated and expensive process of applying to medical schools, when I came across an essay question that stopped in me in my tracks:

“Why do you want to be a medical doctor?”

The question stopped me in my tracks. Why did I want to be a medical doctor? Well, it’s what everyone around me wanted me to do. It was what my family wanted me to do. It was what my friends encouraged me to do. It would mean getting a lot of money. It would be a very safe career. It would be prestigious. So it was the right thing for me to do. Wasn’t it?

Well, maybe it wasn’t.

I realized that I never really stopped and thought about what I wanted to do with my life. My career is how I would spend much of my time every week for many, many years,  but I never considered what kind of work I would actually want to do, not to mention whether I would want to do the work that’s involved in being a medical doctor. As a medical doctor, I would work long and sleepless hours, spend my time around the sick and dying, and hold people’s lives in my hands. Is that what I wanted to do?

There I was, sitting at the keyboard, staring at the blank Word document with that essay question at the top. Why did I want to be a medical doctor? I didn’t have a good answer to that question.

My mind was racing, my thoughts were jumbled. What should I do? I decided to talk to someone I could trust, so I called my girlfriend to help me deal with my mini-life crisis.  She was very supportive, as I thought she would be. She told me I shouldn’t do what others thought I should do, but think about what would make me happy. More important than making money, she said, is having a lifestyle you enjoy, and that lifestyle can be had for much less than I might think.

Her words provided a valuable outside perspective for me. By the end of our conversation, I realized that I had no interest in doing the job of a medical doctor. And that if I continued down the path I was on, I would be miserable in my career, doing it just for the money and prestige. I realized that I was on the medical school track because others I trust - my parents and my friends - told me it was a good idea so many times that I believed it was true, regardless of whether it was actually a good thing for me to do.

Why did this happen?

I later learned that I found myself in this situation because of a common thinking error which scientists call the mere-exposure effect. It means that we tend our tendency to believe something is true and good just because we are familiar with it, regardless of whether it is actually true and good.

Since I learned about the mere-exposure effect, I am much more suspicious of any beliefs I have that are frequently repeated by others around me, and go the extra mile to evaluate whether they are true and good for me. This means I can gain agency and intentionally take actions that help me toward my long-term goals.

So what happened next?

After my big realization about medical school and the conversation with my girlfriend, I took some time to think about my actual long-term goals. What did I - not someone else - want to do with my life? What kind of a career did I want to have? Where did I want to go?

I was always passionate about history. In grade school I got in trouble for reading history books under my desk when the teacher talked about math. As a teenager, I stayed up until 3am reading books about World War II. Even when I was on the medical school track in college I double-majored in history and biology, with history my love and joy. However, I never seriously considered going into history professionally. It’s not a field where one can make much money or have great job security.

After considering my options and preferences, I decided that money and security mattered less than a profession that would be genuinely satisfying and meaningful. What’s the point of making a million bucks if I’m miserable doing it, I thought to myself. I chose a long-term goal that I thought would make me happy, as opposed to simply being in line with the expectations of my parents and friends. So I decided to become a history professor.

My decision led to some big challenges with those close to me. My parents were very upset to learn that I no longer wanted to go to medical school. They really tore into me, telling me I would never be well off or have job security. Also, it wasn’t easy to tell my friends that I decided to become a history professor instead of a medical doctor. My best friend even jokingly asked if I was willing to trade grades on the standardized medical school exam, since I wasn’t going to use my score. Not to mention how painful it was to accept that I wasted so much time and effort to prepare for medical school only to realize that it was not the right choice for me. I really I wish this was something I realized earlier, not in my last year of college.

3 steps to prevent this from happening to you:

If you want to avoid finding yourself in a situation like this, here are 3 steps you can take:

1.      Stop and think about your life purpose and your long-term goals. Write these down on a piece of paper.

2.      Now review your thoughts, and see whether you may be excessively influenced by messages you get from your family, friends, or the media. If so, pay special attention and make sure that these goals are also aligned with what you want for yourself. Answer the following question: if you did not have any of those influences, what would you put down for your own life purpose and long-term goals? Recognize that your life is yours, not theirs, and you should live whatever life you choose for yourself.

3.      Review your answers and revise them as needed every 3 months. Avoid being attached to your previous goals. Remember, you change throughout your life, and your goals and preferences change with you. Don’t be afraid to let go of the past, and welcome the current you with arms wide open.

What do you think?

·        Do you ever experience pressure to make choices that are not necessarily right for you?

·        Have you ever made a big decision, but later realized that it wasn’t in line with your long-term goals?

·        Have you ever set aside time to think about your long-term goals? If so, what was your experience? 

Happy to share that I got to discuss rationality-informed thinking strategies on the American Humanist Association's well-known and popular podcast, the Humanist Hour (here's the link to the interview). Now, this was aimed at secular audiences, so even before the interview the hosts steered me to orient specifically toward what they thought the audience would find valuable. Thus, the interview focused more on secular issues, such as finding meaning and purpose from a science-based perspective. Still, I got to talk about map and territory and other rationality strategies, as well as cognitive biases such as planning fallacy and sunken costs. So I'd call that a win. I'd appreciate any feedback from you all on how to optimize the way I present rationality-informed strategies in future media appearances.

I wrote a blog post that popularizes the "false consensus effect" and the debiasing strategy of "imagining the opposite" and "avoiding failing at other minds." Thoughts on where the post works and where it can be improved would be super-helpful for improving our content and my writing style. Especially useful would be feedback on how to make this post more shareable on Facebook and other social media, as we'd like people to be motivated to share these posts with their friends. For example, what would make you more likely to share it? What would make others you know more likely to share it?

For a bit of context, the blog post is part of the efforts of Intentional Insights to promote rational thinking to a broad audience and thus raise the sanity waterline, as described here. The target audience for the blog post is reason-minded youth and young adults who are either not engaged with rationality or are at the beginning stage of becoming aspiring rationalists. Our goal is to get such people interested in exploring rationality more broadly, eventually getting them turned on to more advanced rationality, such as found on Less Wrong itself, in CFAR workshops, etc. The blog post is written in a style aimed to create cognitive ease, with a combination of personal stories and an engaging narrative, along with citations of relevant research and descriptions of strategies to manage one’s mind more effectively. This is part of our broader practice of asking for feedback from fellow Less Wrongers on our content (this post for example). We are eager to hear from you and revise our drafts (and even published content offerings) based on your thoughtful comments, and we did so previously, as you see in the Edit to this post. Any and all suggestions are welcomed, and thanks for taking the time to engage with us and give your feedback – much appreciated!

I am working on a blog post that aims to convey the concepts of “map and territory” and the “fundamental attribution error” to a broad audience in an engaging and accessible way. Since many people here focus on these subjects, I think it would be really valuable to get your feedback on what I’ve written.

For a bit of context, the blog post is part of the efforts of Intentional Insights to promote rational thinking to a broad audience and thus raise the sanity waterline, as described here. The target audience for the blog post is reason-minded youth and young adults who are either not engaged with rationality or are at the beginning stage of becoming aspiring rationalists. Our goal is to get such people interested in exploring rationality more broadly, eventually getting them turned on to more advanced rationality, such as found on Less Wrong itself, in CFAR workshops, etc. The blog post is written in a style aimed to create cognitive ease, with a combination of personal stories and an engaging narrative, along with citations of relevant research and descriptions of strategies to manage one’s mind more effectively.

This is part of our broader practice of asking for feedback from fellow Less Wrongers on our content (this post for example). We are eager to hear from you and revise our drafts (and even published content offerings) based on your thoughtful comments, and we did so previously, as you see in the Edit to this post.

Below the line is the draft post itself. After we get your suggestions, we will find an appropriate graphic to illustrate this article and post it on the Intentional Insights website. Any and all suggestions are welcomed, and thanks for taking the time to engage with us and give your feedback – much appreciated!

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Where Do Our Mental Maps Lead Us Astray?

So imagine you are driving on autopilot, as we all do much of the time. Suddenly the car in front of you cuts you off quite unexpectedly. You slam your brakes and feel scared and indignant. Maybe you flash your lights or honk your horn at the other car. What’s your gut feeling about the other driver? I know my first reaction is that the driver is rude and obnoxious.

Now imagine a different situation. You’re driving on autopilot, minding your own business, and you suddenly realize you need to turn right at the next intersection. You quickly switch lanes and suddenly hear someone behind you honking their horn. You now realize that there was someone in your blind spot and you forgot to check it in the rush to switch lanes. So you cut them off pretty badly. Do you feel that you are a rude driver? The vast majority of us do not. After all, we did not deliberately cut that car off, we just failed to see the driver. Or let’s imagine another situation: say your friend hurt herself and you are rushing her to the emergency room. You are driving aggressively, cutting in front of others. Are you a rude driver? Not generally. You’re merely doing the right thing for the situation.

So why do we give ourselves a pass, while attributing an obnoxious status to others? Why does our gut always make us out to be the good guys, and other people bad guys? Clearly, there is a disconnect between our gut reaction and reality here. It turns out that this pattern is not a coincidence. Basically, our immediate gut reaction attributes the behavior of others to their personality and not to the situation in which the behavior occurs. The scientific name for this type of error in thinking and feeling is called the fundamental attribution error, also called the correspondence bias. So if we see someone behaving rudely, we immediately and intuitively feel that this person IS rude. We don’t automatically stop to consider whether an unusual situation may cause someone to act this way. With the driver example, maybe the person who cut you off did not see you. Or maybe they were driving their friend to the emergency room. But that’s not what our automatic reaction tells us. On the other hand, we attribute our own behavior to the situation, and not our personality. Much of the time we feel like we have valid explanations for our actions.

Learning about the fundamental attribution error helped me quite a bit. I became less judgmental about others. I realized that the people around me were not nearly as bad as my gut feelings immediately and intuitively assumed. This decreased my stress levels, and I gained more peace and calm. Moreover, I became more humble. I realized that my intuitive self-evaluation is excessively positive and that in reality I am not quite the good guy as my gut reaction tells me. Additionally, I realized that those around me who are unaware of this thinking and feeling error, are more judgmental of me than my intuition suggested. So I am striving to be more mindful and thoughtful about the impression I make on others.

The fundamental attribution error is one of many problems in our natural thinking and feeling patterns. It is certainly very helpful to learn about all of these errors, but it’s hard to focus on avoiding all of them in our daily life. A more effective strategy for evaluating reality more intentionally to have more clarity and thus gain greater agency is known as “map and territory.” This strategy involves recognizing the difference between the mental map of the world that we have in our heads and the reality of the actual world as it exists – the territory.

For myself, internalizing this concept has not been easy. It’s been painful to realize that my understanding of the world is by definition never perfect, as my map will never match the territory. At the same time, this realization was strangely freeing. It made me recognize that no one is perfect, and that I do not have to strive for perfection in my view of the world. Instead, what would most benefit me is to try to refine my map to make it more accurate. This more intentional approach made me more willing to admit to myself that though I intuitively and emotionally feel something is right, I may be mistaken. At the same time, the concept of map and territory makes me really optimistic, because it provides a constant opportunity to learn and improve my assessment of the situation.

Now, what are the strategies for most effectively learning this information, and internalizing the behaviors and mental patterns that can help you succeed? Well, educational psychology research illustrates that engaging with this information actively, personalizing it to your life, linking it to your goals, and deciding on a plan and specific next steps you will take are the best practices for this purpose. So take the time to answer the questions below to gain long-lasting benefit from reading this article:

• What do you think of the concept of map and territory?
• How can it be used to address the fundamental attribution error?
• Where can the notion of map and territory help you in your life?
• What challenges might arise in applying this concept, and how can these challenges be addressed?
• What plan can you make and what specific steps can you take to internalize these strategies?

We at Intentional Insights would appreciate your help with feedback on optimize a workbook that conveys rational thinking to find meaning and purpose in life for a broad audience. Last time, we asked for your feedback, and we changed our content offerings based on comments we received from fellow Less Wrongers, as you can see from the Edit to this post. We would be glad to update our beliefs again and revise the workbook based on your feedback.

For a bit of context, the workbook is part of our efforts to promote rational thinking to a broad audience and thus raise the sanity waterline. It’s based on research on how other societies besides the United States helped their citizens find meaning and purpose, such as research I did on the Soviet Union and Zuckerman did on Sweden and Denmark. It’s also based on research on the contemporary United States by psychologists such as Steger, Duffy and Dik, Seligman, and others.

The target audience is reason-minded youth and young adults, especially secular-oriented ones. The goal is to get such people to engage with academic research on how our minds work, and thus get them interested in exploring rational thinking more broadly, eventually getting them turned on to more advanced rationality, such as found on Less Wrong itself. The workbook is written in a style aimed to create cognitive ease, with narratives, personal stories, graphics, and research-based exercises.

Here is the link to the workbook draft itself. Any and all suggestions are welcomed, and thanks for taking the time to engage with this workbook and give your feedback – much appreciated!

I'd like the opinion of Less Wrongers on the extent to which it is appropriate to use Dark Arts as a means of promoting rationality.

I and other fellow aspiring rationalists in the Columbus, OH Less Wrong meetup have started up a new nonprofit organization, Intentional Insights, and we're trying to optimize ways to convey rational thinking strategies widely and thus raise the sanity waterline. BTW, we also do some original research, as you can see in this Less Wrong article on "Agency and Life Domains," but our primary focus is promoting rational thinking widely, and all of our research is meant to accomplish that goal.

To promote rationality as widely as possible, we decided it's appropriate to speak the language of System 1, and use graphics, narrative, metaphors, and orientation toward pragmatic strategies to communicate about rationality to a broad audience. Some example are our blog posts about gaining agency, about research-based ways to find purpose and meaning, about dual process theory and other blog posts, as well as content such as videos on evaluating reality and on finding meaning and purpose in life.

Our reasoning is that speaking the language of System 1 would help us to reach a broad audience who are currently not much engaged in rationality, but could become engaged if instrumental and epistemic rationality strategies are presented in such a way as to create cognitive ease. We think the ends of promoting rationality justify the means of using such light Dark Arts - although the methods we use do not convey 100% epistemic rationality, we believe the ends of spreading rationality are worthwhile, and that once broad audiences who engage with our content realize the benefits of rationality, they can be oriented to pursue more epistemic accuracy over time. However, some Less Wrongers disagreed with this method of promoting rationality, as you can see in some of the comments on this discussion post introducing the new nonprofit. Some commentators expressed the belief that it is not appropriate to use methods that speak to System 1.

So I wanted to bring up this issue for a broader discussion on Less Wrong, and get a variety of opinions. What are your thoughts about the utility of using light Dark Arts of the type I described above if the goal is to promote rationality - do the ends justify the means? How much Dark Arts, if any, is it appropriate to use to promote rationality?

Edit: After reading the comments, I see that this is not crossing into real Dark Arts territory in the traditional sense after all. I wasn't sure how LessWrong would perceive things, so thanks for your feedback!

What do you think of this post as a way to use graphics, narrative, metaphors, and orientation toward pragmatic strategies to communicate about dual process theory to a broad audience? It's part of the work of our new nonprofit organization, and we're trying to optimize ways to convey rational thinking strategies widely and thus raise the sanity waterline. So advice on how to improve this post, as well as our other posts, with an orientation toward a broad audience, would be helpful. Thanks, all!