Related to: Semantic stopsigns, Truly part of you.

One day, the dishwasher broke. I asked Steve Rayhawk to look at it because he’s “good with mechanical things”.

“The drain is clogged,” he said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

He pointed at a pool of backed up water. “Because the water is backed up.”

We cleared the clog and the dishwasher started working.

I felt silly, because I, too, could have reasoned that out.  The water wasn’t draining -- therefore, perhaps the drain was clogged.  Basic rationality in action.[1]

But before giving it even ten seconds’ thought, I’d classified the problem as a “mechanical thing”.  And I’d remembered I “didn’t know how mechanical things worked” (a cached thought).  And then -- prompted by my cached belief that there was a magical “way mechanical things work” that some knew and I didn’t -- I stopped trying to think at all.  

“Mechanical things” was for me a mental stopsign -- a blank domain that stayed blank, because I never asked the obvious next questions (questions like “does the dishwasher look unusual in any way?  Why is there water at the bottom?”).

When I tutored math, new students acted as though the laws of exponents (or whatever we were learning) had fallen from the sky on stone tablets.  They clung rigidly to the handed-down procedures.  It didn’t occur to them to try to understand, or to improvise.  The students treated math the way I treated broken dishwashers.

Martin Seligman coined the term "learned helplessness" to describe a condition in which someone has learned to behave as though they were helpless. I think we need a term for learned helplessness about thinking (in a particular domain).  I’ll call this “learned blankness”[2].  Folks who fall prey to learned blankness may still take actions -- sometimes my students practiced the procedures again and again, hired a tutor, etc.  But they do so as though carrying out rituals to an unknown god -- parts of them may be trying, but their “understand X” center has given up.

There are few places where society values rational, objective decision making as much as it values it in judges. While there is a rather cynical discipline called legal realism that says the law is really based on quirks of individual psychology, "what the judge had for breakfast," there's a broad social belief that the decision of judges are unbiased. And where they aren't unbiased, they're biased for Big, Important, Bad reasons, like racism or classism or politics.

It turns out that legal realism is totally wrong. It's not what the judge had for breakfast. It's how recently the judge had breakfast. A a new study (media coverage) on Israeli judges shows that, when making parole decisions, they grant about 65% after meal breaks, and almost all the way down to 0% right before breaks and at the end of the day (i.e. as far from the last break as possible). There's a relatively linear decline between the two points.

Follow up to: Less Wrong NYC

Tl;dr:  Two new regular weekly meetups in the Bay Area:  In the Berkeley Starbucks on Wednesdays at 7pm (host Lucas Sloan), and in Tortuga (in Mountain View) on Thursdays at 7pm (hosts Shannon Friedman and Divia Melwani).  New Google Group for the whole Bay Area, all welcome to join.

Hi everyone in the (San Fransisco) Bay Area.  I'm Lucas Sloan and I've been organizing LW meet ups in Berkeley for about 8 months now.  I think that we've accomplished great things in that time, the last week's had about 40 people show up, which is a number that was beyond my wildest dreams when I held my first meet up and 7 people showed up.  As good as things are, I've been spending a lot of time thinking how we can do even better in the future.  The main catalyst in my thinking has been the accounts I've been hearing over the last two months from people who've visited the New York Less Wrong group and the amazingly positive reactions people have had to their accomplishments.  Now that Cosmos has written a post describing what he sees as their successes, I think now is an excellent time to start a discussion about the future of the Bay Area Less Wrong group, and how to make it awesome.

The main thing that the New York group has that I want for the Bay Area group is a sense of being a close-knit community of like-minded friends.  At a Berkeley meet up we get into all sorts of very interesting conversations with our fellow rationalists, but I don't feel a personal connection with most of the people who come to meet-ups, even those people I've seen at many - I am friendly with everyone who comes to meet-ups, but I am not friends with everyone who comes.  I see two things that contribute to this problem (though I'm sure there are more) - size of meet-ups, and the frequency of meet ups.  The large size of meet ups makes it impossible to establish rapport with everyone, because there is no way to have a good conversation with 40 other people in 4 hours.  Even more insidious, the large size makes it hard to establish rapport with even a subset of the people who come to a meet up - the group of 40 splits into 10 groups of 4 and everyone keeps churning between conversations as their interest wanes and waxes.  The first meet up I held, with only 7 people, was socially fulfilling in a way that recent ones simply haven't been - everyone was participating in the same conversation, and everyone was getting to know everyone else.  As to the frequency of meet ups, it's hard to become friends with people you only interact with once a month - you can easily forget a person in a month, and the format encourages talking about high minded "rational" topics, not the personal small talk that forms the basis of friendship.

It is perhaps the best-kept secret on Less Wrong that the New York City community has been meeting regularly for almost two years. For nearly a year we've been meeting weekly or more.  The rest of this post is going to be a practical guide to the benefits of group rationality, but first I will do something that is still too rare on this blog: make it clear how strongly I feel about this. Before this community took off, I did not believe that life could be this much fun or that I could possibly achieve such a sustained level of happiness.

Being rational in an irrational world is incredibly lonely. Every interaction reveals that our thought processes differ widely from those around us, and I had accepted that such a divide would always exist. For the first time in my life I have dozens of people with whom I can act freely and revel in the joy of rationality without any social concern - hell, it's actively rewarded! Until the NYC Less Wrong community formed, I didn't realize that I was a forager lost without a tribe...

Rationalists are still human, and we still have basic human needs. lukeprog summarizes the literature on subjective well-being, and the only factors which correlate to any degree are genetics, health, work satisfaction and social life - which actually gets listed three separate times as social activity, relationship satisfaction and religiosity. Rationalists tend to be less socially adept on average, and this can make it difficult to obtain the full rewards of social interaction. However, once rationalists learn to socialize with each other, they also become increasingly social towards everyone more generally. This improves your life. A lot.

We are a group of friends to enjoy life alongside, while we try miracle fruit, dance ecstatically until sunrise, actively embarrass ourselves at karaoke, get lost in the woods, and jump off waterfalls.  Poker, paintball, parties, go-karts, concerts, camping... I have a community where I can live in truth and be accepted as I am, where I can give and receive feedback and get help becoming stronger. I am immensely grateful to have all of these people in my life, and I look forward to every moment I spend with them. To love and be loved is an unparalleled experience in this world, once you actually try it.

So, you ask, how did all of this get started...?

Related to: Rationalization, Meditation on curiosity, Original Seeing.

Why aren’t you learning faster?

For me, one answer is: because I’m not asking questions.  I blunder through conversations trying to “do my job”, or to look good, or elaborating my own theories, or allowing cached replies to come out of my mouth on autopilot.  I blunder through readings, scanning my eyes over the words and letting thoughts strike me as they may.  Rarely am I pulled by a specific desire to know.

And most of my learning happens at those rare times.

How about you?  When you read, how often do you chase something?  When you chat with your friends -- are you curious about how they’re doing, why their mouth twitched as they said that, or why exactly they disagree with you about X?  When you sit down to write, or to do research -- are you asking yourself specific questions, and then answering them?

Are there certain situations in which you get most of your useful ideas -- situations you could put yourself in more often?

Lately, when I notice that I’m not curious about anything, I’ve been trying to interrupt whatever I’m doing.  If I’m in a conversation, and neither I nor my interlocutor is trying to figure something out, I call a mini “halt, melt, and catch fire” (inside my head, at least), and ask myself what I want.  Surely not stale conversations.  If I’m writing, and I don’t like the sentence I just wrote -- instead of reshuffling the words in the hopes that the new version will just happen to be better, I ask myself what I don’t like about it.  

Thus, for the past six months, several times a day, I've interrupted my thoughts and put them back on an “ask questions” track.  (“Grrr, he said my argument was dishonest... Wait, is he right?  What should it look like if he is?”; “I notice I feel hopeless about this paper writing.  Maybe there’s something I should do differently?”)  It's helping.  I'm building the habit of interrupting myself when I'm "thinking" without trying to find something out, or taking actions that I expect won't accomplish anything.  As a human,  I’m probably stuck running on habits -- but I can at least change *which* habits I run on.

You may have heard about IARPA's Sirius Program, which is a proposal to develop serious games that would teach intelligence analysts to recognize and correct their cognitive biases.  The intelligence community has a long history of interest in debiasing, and even produced a rationality handbook based on internal CIA publications from the 70's and 80's.  Creating games which would systematically improve our thinking skills has enormous potential, and I would highly encourage the LW community to consider this as a potential way forward to encourage rationality more broadly.

While developing these particular games will require thought and programming, the proposal did inspire the NYC LW community to play a game of our own.  Using a list of cognitive biases, we broke up into groups of no larger than four, and spent five minutes discussing each bias with regards to three questions:

1. How do we recognize it?
2. How do we correct it?
3. How do we use its existence to help us win?

The Sirius Program specifically targets Confirmation Bias, Fundamental Attribution Error, Bias Blind Spot, Anchoring Bias, Representativeness Bias, and Projection Bias.  To this list, I also decided to add the Planning Fallacy, the Availability Heuristic, Hindsight Bias, the Halo Effect, Confabulation, and the Overconfidence Effect.  We did this Pomodoro style, with six rounds of five minutes, a quick break, another six rounds, before a break and then a group discussion of the exercise.

Results of this exercise are posted below the fold.  I encourage you to try the exercise for yourself before looking at our answers.

As Tom slips on the ice puddle, his arm automatically pulls back to slap the ground.  He’s been taking Jiu-Jitsu for only a month, but, already, he’s practiced falling hundreds of times.  Tom’s training keeps him from getting hurt.

By contrast, Sandra is in her second year of university mathematics.  She got an “A” in calculus and in several more advanced courses, and she can easily recite that “derivatives” are “rates of change”.  But when she goes on her afternoon walk and stares at the local businesses, she doesn’t see derivatives.

For many of us, rationality is more like Sandra’s calculus than Tom’s martial arts.  You may think “overconfidence” when you hear an explicit probability (“It’s 99% likely I’ll make it to Boston on Tuesday”).  But when no probability is mentioned -- or, worse, when you act on a belief without noticing that belief at all -- your training has little impact.

Learn error patterns ahead of time

If you want to notice errors while you’re making them, think ahead of time about what your errors might look like. List the circumstances in which to watch out and the alternative action to try then.

Here's an example of what your lists might look like.  A bunch of visiting fellows generated this list at one of our rationality trainings last summer; I’m including their list here (with some edits) because I found the specific suggestions useful, and because you may be able to use it as a model for your own lists.

Related to: Best career models for doing research?, (Virtual) Employment Open Thread

In the spirit of offering some practical real world advice, let's talk about employment rationality. Let’s talk about optimal employment.¹

You're young, smart, and hoping to have a positive impact on the world. Maybe you finished college, maybe you didn't. You want to pay your bills but also have time to pursue your intellectual goals. You want a low-stress job that doesn't leave you drained at the end of the day. And it would be nice to earn lots of extra money, because whatever you value, money tends to be a good way to get it.

And it is possible to find easily obtained, low-stress jobs with flexible hours that allow you to save as much money as someone in the USA making $100,000/yr... if you leave the USA to look for them.

Your instinctive reaction is probably that there’s no free lunch, so I must be mistaken or dishonest. And while you may have the right prior, I hope to persuade you that these jobs exist and tell you how to get one if you're interested.

This, I think, is a special opportunity for rationalists, an illustration that we can get better life outcomes from our investment in rationality - better outcomes such as low-stress jobs that leave us with ample discretionary income and enough free time to pursue whatever else we're interested in, obtained by being willing to break habits and think in numbers.