I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule.  Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting.  One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure.  Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized.  (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)

This seems like a bad situation.  And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama.  Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right?  So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge.  No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.

(And yes, I have one.  It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market?  Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website.  There goes my one idea.  Where do I go and what do I do there?)

I just spent some time reading Thomas Schelling's "Choice and Consequences" and I heartily recommend it. Here's a Google books link to the chapter I was reading, "The Intimate Contest for Self Command."

It's fascinating, and if you like LessWrong, rationality, understanding things, decision theories, figuring people and the world out - well, then I think you'd like Schelling. Actually, you'll probably be amazed with how much of his stuff you're already familiar with - he really established a heck of a lot modern thinking on game theory.

Allow me to depart from Schelling a moment, and talk of Sam Snyder. He's a very intelligent guy who has lots of intelligent thoughts. Here's a link to his website - there's massive amounts of data and references there, so I'd recommend you just skim his site if you go visit until you find something interesting. You'll probably find something interesting pretty quickly.

I got a chance to have a conversation with him a while back, and we covered immense amounts of ground. He introduced me to a concept I've been thinking about nonstop since learning it from him - reference points.

Now, he explained it very eloquently, and I'm afraid I'm going to mangle and not do justice to his explanation. But to make a long story really short, your reference points affect your motivation a lot.

An example would help.

What does the average person think about he thinks of running? He thinks of huffing, puffing, being tired and sore, having a hard time getting going, looking fat in workout clothes and being embarrassed at being out of shape. A lot of people try running at some point in their life, and most people don't keep doing it.

On the other hand, what does a regular runner think of? He thinks of the "runner's high" and gliding across the pavement, enjoying a great run, and feeling like a million bucks afterwards.

Since that conversation, I've been trying to change my reference points. For instance, if I feel like I'd like some fried food, I try not to imagine/reference eating the salty greased food. Yes, eating french fries and a grilled chicken sandwich will be salty and fatty and delicious. It's a superstimulus, we're not really evolved to handle that stuff appropriately.

So when most people think of the McChicken Sandwich, large fry, large drink, they think about the grease and salt and sugar and how good it'll taste.

I still like that stuff. In fact, since I quit a lot of vices, sometimes I crave even harder for the few I have left. But I was able to cut my junk food consumption way down by changing my reference point. When I start to have a desire for that sort of food, I think about how my stomach and energy levels are going to feel 90 minutes after eating it. That answer is - not too good. So I go out to a local restaurant and order plain chicken, rice, and vegetables, and I feel good later.

Introduction

Less Wrong is explicitly intended is to help people become more rational.  Eliezer has posted that rationality means epistemic rationality (having & updating a correct model of the world), and instrumental rationality (the art of achieving your goals effectively).  Both are fundamentally tied to the real world and our performance in it - they are about ability in practice, not theoretical knowledge (except inasmuch as that knowledge helps ability in practice).  Unfortunately, I think Less Wrong is a failure at instilling abilities-in-practice, and designed in a way that detracts from people's real-world performance.

It will take some time, and it may be unpleasant to hear, but I'm going to try to explain what LW is, why that's bad, and sketch what a tool to actually help people become more rational would look like.

(This post was motivated by Anna Salomon's Humans are not automatically strategic and the response, more detailed background in footnote [1].)

Update / Clarification in response to some comments: This post is based on the assumption that a) the creators of Less Wrong wish Less Wrong to result in people becoming better at achieving their goals (instrumental rationality, aka "efficient productivity"), and b) Some (perhaps many) readers read it towards that goal.  It is this I think is self-deception.  I do not dispute that LW can be used in a positive way (read during fun time instead of the NYT or funny pictures on Digg), or that it has positive effects (exposing people to important ideas they might not see elsewhere).  I merely dispute that reading fun things on the internet can help people become more instrumentally rational.  Additionally, I think instrumental rationality is really important and could be a huge benefit to people's lives (in fact, is by definition!), and so a community value that "deliberate practice towards self-improvement" is more valuable and more important than "reading entertaining ideas on the internet" would be of immense value to LW as a community - while greatly decreasing the importance of LW as a website.

Why Less Wrong is not an effective route to increasing rationality.

Definition:

Work: time spent acting in an instrumentally rational manner, ie forcing your attention towards the tasks you have consciously determined will be the most effective at achieving your consciously chosen goals, rather than allowing your mind to drift to what is shiny and fun.

By definition, Work is what (instrumental) rationalists wish to do more of.  A corollary is that Work is also what is required in order to increase one's capacity to Work.  This must be true by the definition of instrumental rationality - if it's the most efficient way to achieve one's goals, and if one's goal is to increase one's instrumental rationality, doing so is most efficiently done by being instrumentally rational about it. [2]

That was almost circular, so to add meat, you'll notice in the definition an embedded assumption that the "hard" part of Work is directing attention - forcing yourself to do what you know you ought to instead of what is fun & easy.  (And to a lesser degree, determining your goals and the most effective tasks to achieve them).  This assumption may not hold true for everyone, but with the amount of discussion of "Akrasia" on LW, the general drift of writing by smart people about productivity (Paul Graham: Addiction, Distraction, Merlin Mann: Time & Attention), and the common themes in the numerous productivity/self-help books I've read, I think it's fair to say that identifying the goals and tasks that matter and getting yourself to do them is what most humans fundamentally struggle with when it comes to instrumental rationality.

Figuring out goals is fairly personal, often subjective, and can be difficult.  I definitely think the deep philosophical elements of Less Wrong and it's contributions to epistemic rationality [3] are useful to this, but (like psychedelics) the benefit comes from small occasional doses of the good stuff.  Goals should be re-examined regularly, but occasionally (roughly yearly, and at major life forks).  An annual retreat with a mix of close friends and distant-but-respected acquaintances (Burning Man, perhaps) will do the trick - reading a regularly updated blog is way overkill.

And figuring out tasks, once you turn your attention to it, is pretty easy.  Once you have explicit goals, just consciously and continuously examining whether your actions have been effective at achieving those goals will get you way above the average smart human at correctly choosing the most effective tasks.  The big deal here for many (most?) of us, is the conscious direction of our attention.

What is the enemy of consciously directed attention?  It is shiny distraction.  And what is Less Wrong?  It is a blog, a succession of short fun posts with comments, most likely read when people wish to distract or entertain themselves, and tuned for producing shiny ideas which successfully distract and entertain people.  As Merlin Mann says: "Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging".  Well, reading a blog to overcome akrasia IS joining a Facebook group about creative productivity.  It's the opposite of this classic piece of advice.

Many adults maintain their intelligence through a dedication to study or hard work.  I suspect this is related to sub-optimal levels of careful introspection among intellectuals.

If someone asks you what you want for yourself in life, do you have the answer ready at hand?  How about what you want for others?  Human values are complex, which means your talents and technical knowledge should help you think about them.  Just as in your work, complexity shouldn't be a curiosity-stopper.  It means "think", not "give up now."

But there are so many terrible excuses stopping you...

Too busy studying?  Life is the exam you are always taking.  Are you studying for that?  Did you even write yourself a course outline?

Too busy helping?  Decision-making is the skill you are aways using, or always lacking, as much when you help others as yourself.  Isn't something you use constantly worth improving on purpose?

Too busy thinking to learn about your brain?  That's like being too busy flying an airplane to learn where the engines are.  Yes, you've got passengers in real life, too: the people whose lives you affect.

Emotions too irrational to think about them?  Irrational emotions are things you don't want to think for you, and therefore are something you want to think about.  By analogy, children are often irrational, and no one sane concludes that we therefore shouldn't think about their welfare, or that they shouldn't exist.

So set aside a date.  Sometime soon.  Write yourself some notes.  Find that introspective friend of yours, and start solving for happiness.  Don't have one?  For the first time in history, you've got LessWrong.com!

Reasons to make the effort:

Happiness is a pairing between your situation and your disposition. Truly optimizing your life requires adjusting both variables: what happens, and how it affects you.

You are constantly changing your disposition.  The question is whether you'll do it with a purpose.  Your experiences change you, and you affect those, as well as how you think about them, which also changes you.  It's going to happen.  It's happening now.  Do you even know how it works?  Put your intelligence to work and figure it out!

The road to harm is paved with ignorance.  Using your capability to understand yourself and what you're doing is a matter of responsibility to others, too.  It makes you better able to be a better friend.

You're almost certainly suffering from Ugh Fields:  unconscious don't-think-about-it reflexes that form via Pavlovian conditioning.  The issues most in need of your attention are often ones you just happen not to think about for reasons undetectable to you.

How not to waste the effort:

Don't wait till you're sad.  Only thinking when you're sad gives you a skew perspective.  Don't infer that you can think better when you're sad just because that's the only time you try to be thoughtful.  Sadness often makes it harder to think: you're farther from happiness, which can make it more difficult to empathize with and understand.  Nonethess we often have to think when sad, because something bad may have happened that needs addressing.

Introspect carefully, not constantly.  Don't interrupt your work every 20 minutes to wonder whether it's your true purpose in life.  Respect that question as something that requires concentration, note-taking, and solid blocks of scheduled time.  In those times, check over your analysis by trying to confound it, so lingering doubts can be justifiably quieted by remembering how thorough you were.

Re-evaluate on an appropriate time-scale.  Try devoting a few days before each semester or work period to look at your life as a whole.  At these times you'll have accumulated experience data from the last period, ripe and ready for analysis.  You'll have more ideas per hour that way, and feel better about it.  Before starting something new is also the most natural and opportune time to affirm or change long term goals.  Then, barring large unexpecte d opportunities, stick to what you decide until the next period when you've gathered enough experience to warrant new reflection.

(The absent minded driver is a mathematical example of how planning outperforms constant re-evaluation.  When not engaged in a deep and careful introspection, we're all absent minded drivers to a degree.)

Lost about where to start?  I think Alicorn's story is an inspiring one.  Learn to understand and defeat procrastination/akrasia.  Overcome your cached selves so you can grow freely (definitely read their possible strategies at the end).  Foster an everyday awareness that you are a brain, and in fact more like two half-brains.

These suggestions are among the top-rated LessWrong posts, so they'll be of interest to lots of intellectually-minded, rationalist-curious individuals.  But you have your own task ahead of you, that only you can fulfill.

So don't give up.  Don't procrastinate it.  If you haven't done it already, schedule a day and time right now when you can realistically assess

• how you want your life to affect you and other people, and
• what you must change to better achieve this.

Eliezer has said I want you to live.  Let me say:

I want you to be better at your life.

Knowledge is great: I suspect we can agree there.  Sadly, though, we can't guarantee ourselves infinite time in which to learn everything eventually, and in the meantime, there are plenty of situations where having irrelevant knowledge instead of more instrumentally useful knowledge can be decidedly suboptimal.  Therefore, there's good reason to work out what facts we'll need to deploy and give special priority to learning those facts.  There's nothing intrinsically more interesting or valuable about the knowledge that the capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. than there is about the knowledge that the capital of Bali is Denpasar, but unless you live or spend a lot of time in Indonesia, the latter knowledge will be less likely to come up.

It seems the same is true of procedural knowledge (with the quirk that it's easier to deliberately put yourself in situations where you use whatever procedural knowledge you have than it is to arrange to need to know the capital of Bali.)  If your procedural knowledge is useful, and also difficult to obtain or unpopular to practice or both, you might even turn it into a career (or save money that you would have spent hiring people who have).

Rationality is sort of the ur-procedure, but after a certain point - the point where you're no longer buying into supernaturalist superstition, begging for a Darwin Award, or falling for cheap scams - its marginal practical value diminishes.  Practicing rationality as an art is fun and there's some chance it'll yield a high return, but evolution (genetic and memetic) didn't do that bad of a job on us: we enter adulthood with an arsenal of heuristics that are mostly good enough.  A little patching of the worst leaks, some bailing of bilge that got in early on, and you have a serviceable brain-yacht.  (Sound of metaphor straining.)