Learning critical thinking: a personal example

37 Swimmer963 14 February 2013 08:43PM

Related to: Is Rationality Teachable

“Critical care nursing isn’t about having critically ill patients,” my preceptor likes to say, “it’s about critical thinking.”

I doubt she's talking about the same kind of critical thinking that philosophers are, and I find that definition abstract anyway. There’s been a lot of talk about critical thinking during our four years of nursing school, but our profs seem to have a hard time defining it. So I’ll go with a definition from Google.

Critical thinking can be seen as having two components: 1) a set of information and belief generating and processing skills, and 2) the habit, based on intellectual commitment, of using those skills to guide behaviour. It is thus to be contrasted with: 1) the mere acquisition and retention of information alone, because it involves a particular way in which information is sought and treated; 2) the mere possession of a set of skills, because it involves the continual use of them; and 3) the mere use of those skills ("as an exercise") without acceptance of their results.1

That’s basically rationality–epistemic, i.e. generating true beliefs, and instrumental, i.e. knowing how to use them to achieve what you want. Maybe part of me expected, implicitly, to have an easier time learning this skill because of my Less Wrong knowledge. And maybe I am more consciously aware of my mistakes, and the cognitive factors that caused them, than most of my classmates. When it’s forty-five minutes past the end of my shift and I’m still charting, I’m also calling myself out on succumbing to the planning fallacy. I once went through the first half hour of a shift during my pediatrics rotation thinking that one of my patients had cerebral palsy, when he actually had cystic fibrosis–all because I misread my prof’s handwriting as ‘CP’ when she’d written ‘CF’. I was totally confused by all the enzyme supplements on his list of meds, but it still took me a while to figure it out–a combination of priming and confirmation bias, taken to the next level. 

But, overall, even if I know what I'm doing wrong, it hasn’t been easier to do things right. I have a hard time with the hospital environment, possibly because I’m the kind of person who ended up reading and posting on Less Wrong. My cognitive style leans towards Type 2 reasoning, in Keith Stanovich’s taxonomy–thorough, but slow. I like to understand things, on a deep level. I like knowing why I’m doing something, and I don’t trust my intuitions, the fast-and-dirty product of Type 1 reasoning. But Type 2 reasoning requires a lot of working memory, and humans aren’t known for that, which is the source of most of my frustration and nearly all of my errors–when working memory overload forces me to be a cognitive miser.

Still, for all the frustration, I’m pretty sure I’ve ended up in the perfect environment to learn this skill called ‘critical thinking.’ I’m way out of my depth–which I expected. No fourth year student is ready to work independently in a trauma ICU, but I decided to finish my schooling here in the name of tsuyoku naritai, and for all the days when I’ve gone home crying, it’s still worth it. I’m learning.

 

The skills

 1.     A set of information and belief generating and processing skills.

Medicine, and nursing, are a bit like physics, in that you need to generate true beliefs about systems that exist outside of you, and predict how they’re going to behave. This involves knowing a lot of abstract theory, which I’m good at, and a lot of heuristics and pattern-matching for applying the right bits of theory to particular patients, which I’m less good at. That’s partly an experience thing; my brain needs patterns to match to. But in general, I have decent mental models of my patients. I’m curious and I like to understand things. If I don’t know what part of the theories applies, I ask.

2.     The habit, based on intellectual commitment, of using those skills to guide behaviour.

So you’ve got your mental model of your patient, your best understand of what’s actually going on, on a physiological and biochemical level, down under the skin where you can’t see it. You know what “normal” is for a variety of measures: vital signs, lung sounds, lab values, etc. Given that your patient is in the ICU, you know something’s abnormal, or they wouldn’t be there. Their diagnosis tells you what to expect, and you look at the results of your assessments and ask a couple of questions. One: is this what I expect, for this patient? Two: what do I need to do about it?

I’m not going to be surprised if a post-op patient has low hemoglobin. It’s information of a kind, telling the doctor whether or not the patient needs a transfusion, and how many units, but it’s not really new information, and a moderately abnormal value wouldn’t worry me or anyone else. If their hemoglobin keeps dropping; okay, they’re actively bleeding somewhere, that’s irritating, and possibly dangerous, and needs dealing with, but it’s not surprising.

But if a patient here for an abdominal surgery suddenly has decreased level of consciousness and their pupils aren’t reacting normally to light, I’m worried. There’s nothing in my mental model that says I should expect it. I notice I’m confused, and that confusion guides my behaviour; I call the doctor right away, because we need more information to update our collective mental model, information you can’t get just from observation, like a CT scan of the head. (Even this is optimistic–plenty of patients are admitted to the ICU because we have no idea what’s wrong with them, and are hoping to keep them alive long enough to find out.)

The basics of ICU nursing come down to treating numbers. Heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturations, urine output, etc; know the acceptable range, notice if they change, and use Treatment X to get them back where they’re supposed to be. Which doesn’t sound that hard. But implicit in ‘notice if they change’ is ‘figure out why they changed’, because that affects how you treat them, and implicit in that is a lot of background knowledge, which has to be put in context.

I’m, honestly, fairly terrible at this. It’s a compartmentalization thing. I don’t like using my knowledge as input arguments to generate new conclusions and then relying on those conclusions to treat human beings. It feels like guessing. Even though, back in high school, I never really needed to study for physics tests–if I understood what we’d learned, I could re-derive forgotten details from first principles. But hospital patients ended up in a non-overlapping magisterium in my head. In order for me to trust my knowledge, it has to have come directly from the lips of a teacher or experienced nurse.

My preceptor, who  hates this.  “She needs to continue to work on her critical thinking when it comes to caring for critically ill patients,” she wrote on my evaluation. “She knows the theory, and is now working to apply it to ICU nursing.” Shorthand for, she knows the theory, but getting her to apply it to ICU nursing is like pulling teethA number of our conversations have gone like this:

Me: “Our patient’s blood pressure dropped a bit.”

Her: “Yeah, it did. What do you want to do about it?”

Me: “I, uh, I don’t know... Should I increase the vasopressors?”

Her: “I don’t know, should you?”

Me: “Uh, maybe I should increase the phenylephrine to 40 mcg/min and see what happens. How long should I wait to see?”

Her: “You tell me.”

Me: “Well, let’s say it’ll take a few minutes for what’s in the tubing now to get pushed through, and it should take effect pretty quickly because it’s IV, like a minute... So if his blood pressure’s not up enough in five minutes, I’ll increase the phenyl to 60. Does that sound okay?”

Her: “It’s your decision to make." 

Needless to say, I find this teaching method extremely stressful and scary, and I’m learning about ten times more than I would if she answered the questions I asked. Because “the mere acquisition and retention of information alone” isn’t my problem. I have a brain like an encyclopaedia. My problem, in the critical care nursing context, is the “particular way in which information is sought and treated.” I need to know the right time to notice something is wrong, the right place to look in my encyclopaedia, and the right way to take the information I just looked up and figure out what to do with it.

 

The mistakes

Some of my errors, unsurprisingly, boil down to a failure to override inappropriate Type 1 responses with Type 2 responses–in other words, not thinking about what I’m doing. But most of them are more of a mindware gap–I don’t yet have the “domain-specific knowledge sets” that the nurses around me have. Not just theory knowledge; I do have most of that; but the procedural habits of how to stay organized and prioritize and dump the contents of my working memory onto paper in a way that I can read them back later. Usually, when I make a mistake, I knew better, but the part of my brain that knew better was doing something else at the time, that small note of confusion getting lost in the general chaos. 

Pretty much all nurses keep a “feuille de route”–I have yet to find a satisfactory English word for this, but it’s a personal sheet of paper, not legal charting, usually kept in a pocket, and used as an extended working memory. In med/surg, when I had four patients, I made a chart with four columns; name and personal information, medications, treatments/general plan for the day, and medical history; and as many rows as I had patients. If something was important, I circled it in red ink. This system doesn’t work in the ICU, so my current feuille de route has several aspects. I fold a piece of blank paper into four, and take notes from the previous shift report on one quarter of one side, or two quarters if it’s a long report. Across from that, I draw a vertical column of times, from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm (or 8:00 pm to 6:00 am). 7:00 pm and 7:00 am are shift change, so nothing else really gets done for that hour. I use this to scribble down what I need to get down during my twelve hours, and approximately when I want to do it, and I prioritize, i.e. from 1 to 5 most to least important. Once it’s done, I cross it off–then I can forget about it. On the other side of the paper, I make a cheat sheet for giving report to the next nurse, or presenting my patient to the doctors at rounds.  

This might be low-tech and simple, but it takes a huge load off my working memory, and reduces my most frequent error, which is to get so overwhelmed and frazzled that my brain goes on strike. In other words, the failure to override Type 1 responses due to the lack of cognitive capacity to run a Type 2 process. It’s drastically cut down on the frequency of this mental conversation:

Me: “I turned off the sedation, and my patient isn’t waking up as fast as I expected. I notice I’m confused–”

My brain: “You’re always confused! Everything around here is intensely confusing! How am I supposed to use that as information?” 

Odd as it might sound, I often don’t notice when my brain starts edging towards a meltdown. The feeling itself is quite recognizable, but the circumstances that lead to it, i.e. overloaded working memory, mean that I’m not usually paying attention to my own feelings.

“You need to stop and take a breath,” my preceptor says about fifty times a day. Easier said than done–but it’s more efficient, overall, to have a tiny part of my mind permanently on standby, keeping an eye on my emotions, noticing when the gears start to overheat. Then stop, take a breath, and let go of everything except the task at hand, trusting myself to have created enough cues in my environment to retrieve the other tasks, once I’m done. Humans don’t multitask well. Doing one thing while trying to remember a list of five others is intense multitasking, and it’s no wonder it’s exhausting.

 

The implications

“You can’t teach critical thinking,” my preceptor says, but I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what she’s doing right now. A great deal of what I already know is domain-specific to nursing, but most of what I’m learning right now is generally applicable. I’m learning the procedural skills to work through difficult problems, under what Keith Stanovich would call average rather than optimal conditions. Sitting in my own little bubble in front of a multiple choice exam–that’s optimal conditions. Trying to figure out if I should be surprised or worried about my patient’s increased heart rate, while simultaneously deciding whether or not I can ignore the ventilator alarm and whether I can finish giving my twelve o’clock antibiotic before I need to do twelve o’clock vitals–that’s not just average conditions, it’s under-duress conditions.

I’m hoping that after a few more weeks, or maybe a few more years, I’ll be able to perform comfortably in this intensely terrifying environment. And I’m hoping that some of the skills I learn will be general-purpose, for me at least. It’d be nice if they were teachable to others, too, but I think my preceptor might be right about one thing–you can’t teach this kind of critical thinking in the classroom. It's about moulding my brain into the right shape, and everyone's brain starts out in a different shape, so the mould has to be personalized. 

But the habits are general ones. Notice when you're faced with a difficult problem, or making an important decision. Notice that you're doing this while distracted. Stop and take a breath. Get out a piece of paper. Figure out how the problem is formatted in your mind, and format it that way on the paper. (This is probably the hardest part). Dump your working memory and give yourself space to think. Prioritize from 1 to n. Keep an eye on the evolving situation, sure, but find that moment of concentration in the midst of chaos, and solve the problem. 

Of course, it's far from guaranteed that this will work. I'm making an empirical prediction; that the skills I'm currently learning will be transferable to non-nursing areas, and that they'll make a difference in my life outside of work. I'll be on the lookout for examples, either of success or failure.

 

References

Scriven, Michael; Paul, Richard. Defining critical thinking. (2011). The critical thinking community. http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/410

 

My Greatest Achievement

31 Swimmer963 12 September 2011 07:26PM

[warning: this is another gooey self-disclosure in the spirit of Alicorn and lukeprog’s recent posts, except more so.]

According to my submissions summary, my first top-level post dates back to February 18th, 2011. (I don’t know exactly when I started commenting, but I don’t feel like clicking through dozens of pages of old comments to find out.) By then, it had already been a month since I embarked on the most deliberate and probably the most difficult act of self-modification that I’ve ever attempted, and definitely the one I’m proudest of. At this point, I think I can say confidently that I’ve fixed one of the most irrational facets of my behaviour. A few people here know quite a bit about this, namely molybdenumblue.

[Aside: some people might find this article very personal. I’ve never had a strong privacy instinct, and since in this case it’s all my personal information*, and I talk openly about most of it with my friends and family, I have no qualms about publishing it. If it makes you uncomfortable, please feel free to stop reading.]

My New Year’s resolution for 2011, which I clearly remember making in my parents’ kitchen, was to experiment more with relationships. I had been in 2 relationships by my 19th birthday: one at age 14 with a much older recent immigrant to Canada who went to my high school, and one at age 17 with a boy who I worshipped when I was 12. Neither of them led anywhere interesting, in either an emotional or a physical sense. After breaking up with my second boyfriend, I was about ready to give up and start calling myself asexual. But since I had very little data to go on, an experiment seemed like a good idea.

I chose my experimental subject carefully: Billy, a boy I met through competitive lifeguarding, who was my age and seemed to share some of my values; he was in good shape, anyway; and whom I found moderately attractive. (I’ve been attracted to girls in the past, but that seemed like a more complicated experiment to set up.) I found him interesting without being too intimidating.

I had had some success in the past with getting boys’ initial attention, and I felt like I knew what I was doing. I started a conversation one evening when I came to swim at the campus pool and he was the lifeguard on duty, and I made an effort to be my friendliest and chattiest self. The next day I added him on Facebook, and suggested via the chat function that maybe we could hang out after guard team practice…The message must have gone though, because less than a week later, after he made me dinner at his apartment, he walked me home and kissed me outside the shared house where I was living. I went inside, shaking all over and not really sure whether I’d enjoyed it, but triumphant: success!

The only problem was that now that I had my result, I couldn’t end the experiment as easily as I’d started it. Some making out ensued, at my place and at his place. I found all of it vaguely embarrassing and a bit freaky, too; my only previous experience was with my first boyfriend, and at fourteen it had seriously grossed me out. By the end of the week, we ended up back at his apartment after some alcohol consumption, and clothes came off. I tried really hard to be okay with it. After all, it was part of my experiment, and I’d thought it was something I wanted. But irrational fears aren’t turned off that easily. When he told me that I drove him crazy, I wasn’t flattered: I was completely terrified.

I spent the next week or so putting on my game face and pretending everything was awesome, while crying on the phone with my younger sister every other night. (I can honestly say that although she’s five years younger, her social skills are much better than mine.)

I thought over and rejected various solutions because, ultimately, I liked Billy okay and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Open communication hadn’t existed in my previous relationships, so I didn’t know what to do. I was also more and more sleep deprived; my schedule had already been busy before, juggling school with two part-time jobs, and now it was unsustainable. The emotions built up, and I ended up handling it in what was probably the worst possible way: walking home from guard team practice, I started crying when he asked me if I was okay. (Bursting into tears when I don’t want to talk about something or do something and someone pushes me is a bad habit I picked up during my days of swim team performance anxiety.) It took at least an hour to get everything out: that I didn’t know what my feelings were, that it freaked me out when he touched me, and that if I had to sacrifice another night’s sleep to hang out I would probably go insane. And also the part I’d been too embarrassed to tell him earlier: I had a condition called vaginismus, and I wouldn’t be able to have sex even if I wanted to and felt ready. He walked me back to my house, carefully not touching, and I went upstairs to bed, feeling like a terrible person but also relieved. At least that was over.

I can’t really take the credit for this next part; if I hadn’t heard from him again, I think I would have walked away from it, not happily exactly, but determined never to get myself into a mess like that again. But I woke up at 6:30 to a text: Check your email. He had written me a long, fairly incoherent message, full of grammatical mistakes, but probably the sweetest thing that anyone had ever written to me, ever, in my whole life. Ending with: “With all that said, I realize that I am not just about ready to give up on us. [...] For now, I see what we have together is worth fighting for.”

I cried, felt trapped, felt miserable, and finally made myself a cup of tea, sat in my living room, decided that I’d gotten myself into this situation in the first place and I would have to cope with it. I phrased my reply carefully.

“I wanted to be everything you wanted me to be, and as soon as I knew for sure that I couldn't be that, I was terrified that you would find out and you wouldn't want me anymore. [...] I'm scared that as soon as I open myself to you, you'll reject me for being such a freak and then I'll lose you AND be hurt. [...] I kinda wish we could just start over, and go more slowly, and I wouldn't get scared and I'd be able to act maturely and not like a 13-year-old in over her head.” The problem wasn’t that I didn’t like him. I liked him as much as I’d liked any other boy. That was the scary part. 

A few weeks later we went out for his birthday. I baked a cake and he blew out the candles. Later he told me that he had made a wish; that our relationship would work out. It was a lot of pressure, and I tried to hide the fact that it still freaked me out when he said things like that. But part of me found it romantic, and that was the part I tried hard to focus on.

I don’t remember the timeline as clearly for the next few months. We hung out regularly, swam together and worked out together, and spent an entire guard team competition getting in trouble with the coach (“no touching!”). I brought him Tupperwares of food when he worked Saturday afternoon shifts at the pool. We did our homework together (him doing economics math problems, me making a colorful cardboard poster for my nursing placement in a daycare, probably the first time in my life I felt like the non-nerd in the room). We both said, “I love you.”

We fought about a lot of things, too, mainly the fact that he always wanted to see me more and I always wanted more time to read, write, swim, and sleep. But we talked everything through and usually came to some kind of compromise. I started sleeping over at his apartment once or twice a week, which I resented because sharing a single bed meant that I didn’t so much sleep as lie awkwardly awake for almost the whole night. We did our grocery shopping together. Gradually we started touching again, and I habituated to it, although some things still freaked me out. I only felt comfortable making out if the lights were on. I didn’t want to do anything at my place, because I was afraid my roommates would judge me. (They probably did.) In short, those months weren’t exactly the happiest of my life: I was stressed, exhausted, and under pressure all the time.      

At some point during the spring, I can’t remember the month exactly, I had my first orgasm when he was touching me. It was a huge surprise: “my body can do that?” Molybdenumblue and my mother both recommended that I practice, so I started masturbating for the first time in my life. But sex was still the main thing we fought about. Eventually we worked out a routine where I could at least satisfy his needs without too much time or effort. The semester was nearly over by now, and at some point we had decided that we wanted to try living together in the summer. We had been dating for less than four months. All of my roommates and many of my friends thought it was a terrible idea. My mother approved wholeheartedly, though, and I trusted her judgment. We moved into a subletted apartment on campus at the beginning of May.

It could have gone badly, but it went incredibly well. We had a double bed and I was actually able to sleep well nearly every night. I was working a lot, usually more than 45 hours a week, and juggling my mandatory exercise routines, but seeing each other at night was the default, rather than another commitment to slot into my schedule. Sex still wasn’t happening, so I went to see my family doctor and she recommended a physiotherapy routine that I could practice at home, and we were having sex maybe three weeks later. About the only thing I liked was that it was over quickly, but it still felt like an incredible accomplishment. My mother bought me chocolate as a reward for my hard work.

It seemed to be the end of the last snag in our relationship, the last obstacle that would have kept us from staying together long-term. We talk about everything, from the possibility of having kids someday (though definitely not soon, even though kids are uber-cute and I have to work with them every day at the pool and I want one too) to my crush on a girl at work. (When I was planning to go for a swim with her at the campus pool: “Aww, have fun on your lesbian date!”)

Conclusion: Billy left for a four-month exchange in France at the end of September, just before I went back to school for another semester of madly juggling school, work, and exercise, hoping that I would be able to cut back on my workaholic-ism; it’s irrational to think I’ll actually go bankrupt if I only work one shift a week. I was optimistic.

...And that was when I realized that I don’t feel like a scared thirteen-year-old girl anymore. I don’t feel like a freak and I don’t feel inadequate. I don’t find the day-to-day of a relationship stressful. I’ve made a ton of compromises, smoothed off some of the stubbornly contrarian aspects of my personality, and I don’t resent it; I feel good about it. My feelings are no longer as unpredictable as the weather, and when something does upset me, I almost always understand why and know how to fix it.

I couldn’t have achieved this on my own. I’ve relied on my mother, my sister, my best friend, and molybdenumblue. Not to mention one of the most incredibly patient, open-minded, and persistent people I’ve met in my life: Billy himself. But it’s a success story for me, even so. I wanted to be stronger, so I tried to change myself, and it was harder than anything I had ever done before, and I could have given up and walked away, but I decided to keep trying. And that's what makes it my greatest achievement.


*Billy has read this and ok'd everything I wrote, too.

Rational Communication

23 Swimmer963 10 September 2011 02:30AM

As I've probably mentioned elsewhere, I am currently studying nursing. My third year started off with a bang today: a six-hour workshop on communication skills to prepare us for our month-long psychiatric/mental health placement, scheduled for October.

The workshop would have been a lot more useful if we’d, for example, done role-playing scenarios instead of watching a series of PowerPoint presentations. Like most of the skills involved in nursing, and like many of the skills involved in rationality, communication skills aren't well transmitted by book learning. The specific techniques we are supposed to learn are for "therapeutic communication", as opposed to "non-therapeutic communication". However, my first impression, as someone who has always found social skills a little bit challenging, was "wow! This is something I can use "all the time!"

 

Good Communication Techniques

One of the major skills that we've talked about in class, and tried to practice in our hospital placements, is active listening: trying to really listen to what a person is saying and, maybe more importantly, appearing as though you're really listening. I'm sure that to some people, the non-verbal, body-language half of this is as automatic as breathing. It wasn't obvious to me. However, here is a helpful acronym from this site.  

  • Sit squarely facing the client.
  • Observe an open posture. 
  • Lean forward toward the client.
  • Establish eye contact.
  • Relax.

The verbal half of this is: don't interpret and don't interrupt. Nod and use filler words like "uh-huh" and "yeah" to show that you're still paying attention. If they seem stuck or blocked, repeat their last sentence with "and then?" or encourage them with "go on..." or "I'm listening" The goal is to accept what they are saying and listen without criticizing or judging, whether or not you agree. Pretty much everyone likes to be listened to, and prefers it if their listener is attentive. I've been practicing this with my friends and family. Not quite to the point that it's automatic, but I have a reputation as a good listener.

There are a few other techniques that I've tried to work on and that seem to improve the quality of my general communication. If a person's train of thought doesn't make sense to you, or if their explanation seems muddled and overly complicated, use clarification: try to explain what you think they mean in your own words, and see if they agree. Focusing is another technique: if you would really like to understand one particular point that they’ve passed over, then bring the conversation back to that point. (“Can you tell me more about X…?”). Exploring is similar, but encourages someone to broaden rather than narrowing the scope of their argument. At the end of the conversation, you can restate their points and yours. This is a good way to make sure that every thread of the conversation was followed up and that the meaning they took from your arguments is the same meaning that you intended.

 

Bad Communication Techniques

There is a time and a place for approving or disapproving. There are plenty of times and places when doing will only hold up the conversation and distract from the actual topic. As a rule, I try not to openly disapprove of anything a casual friend or acquaintance tells me in conversation. Even if I really want to. It doesn’t help. Casual acquaintances don’t care enough about my opinion to stop doing something that I disapprove of, and most people have an instant “dislike” reaction towards anyone who criticizes them, even if they try to compensate for it. Some of my closer friends will actually listen to my disapproval and update on it, but when it comes to my best friend, I’ve learned that she will almost always respond defensively.

Yes, it's annoying. Yes, it’s irrational that people respond this way. It’s the way things are. In my best friend’s case, I really do wish she would exercise more and eat a healthier diet, but I put a higher value on being friends with her than on making her change her lifestyle. And there are gentler, more positive ways to point this out to her. Most people know about their problems, and likely spend their time trying to avoid thinking about them. Passing judgement really, really doesn’t help.

This surprised me, but “why?”  is generally not a good question to ask, at least not when the topic is someone’s emotions or personal life. I think it’s because, to a lot of people, emotions just are. They feel less like part of the mind and more like part of the environment. Asking one of these people “why are you upset about Bob and Sue’s divorce?”, especially in a demanding-an-answer sort of  voice, is less likely to produce a calmly reasoned explanation, and more likely a defensive “I just am!” and a strong feeling of not being listened to. Again, this is kind of annoying, especially because I always found why to be a neutral word. But there are more neutral ways to fulfill your curiosity: “Obviously this is important to you. Do you think you can tell me more about it?” No way to take offense from that.

The other examples of bad techniques in our textbook that I’ve found applicable in real life are: changing the subjectfalse reassurance, and using stereotyped or clichéd comments to steer a conversation away from whatever it is you want to avoid. Yeah, sometimes my friends talk about things that make me uncomfortable, that scare me, or that I just don’t care that much about, but they care. I owe it to them to listen attentively, whether or not I have anything useful to add. I try to extend that courtesy to acquaintances, too, since in some ways it benefits me: anything that makes me uncomfortable is probably a topic I can learn more about.

 

Application to Rationality and Winning

I’ve found it much easier to help people change their minds (as opposed to making them change their minds) since I started following these simple rules. Almost everyone will learn more by focusing on their own arguments and finding the flaws than from having those flaws pointed out in a disapproving manner. And the level of enjoyment I get from day-to-day conversation and small talk has definitely risen. I might be able to say whatever I think to my parents or my brother and expect a reasoned and interesting response, but most people aren’t as obliging, and if I’m going to be sitting in the pool office at work anyway, I might as well hone my social skills and not be bored.

As I said before, I expect these skills come naturally to a lot of people, at least when they’re talking to someone who they like. I try to communicate in the same way with people I like and people I dislike, since learning more about someone’s life generally means I will stop disliking them (and if they disliked me, they will like me more when I am trying to be my nicest possible self). Since enemies aren’t something I like to cultivate, this is always a good thing.

In short: being a good conversation partner is useful, whether you want to change people's minds or just have fun, and being a better listener will help with that goal. 

Rationality Market Research

59 Raemon 14 July 2011 07:41PM

Several weeks ago, the NYC  Rationality Meetup Group began discussing outreach, both for  rationality in general and the group in particular. A lot of interesting problems were brought up. Should we be targeting the average person, or sticking to the cluster of personality-types that Less Wrong already attracts? How quickly should we introduce people to our community? What are the most effective ways to spread the idea of  rationality, and what are the most effective ways of actually encouraging people to undertake rational actions?

Those are all complex questions with complex answers, which are beyond the scope of this post. I ended up focusing on the question: "Is ' Rationality' the word we want to use when we're pitching ourselves?" I do not think it's worthwhile to try and change the central meme of the Less Wrong community, but it's not obvious that the new, realspace communities forming need to use the same central meme. 

This begat a simpler question: "What does the average person think of when they hear the word ' Rationality?' What positive or negative connotations does it have?" Do they think of straw vulcans and robots? Do they think of effective programmers or businessmen? Armed with this knowledge, we can craft a rationalist pitch that is likely to be effective at the average person, either by challenging their conception of  rationality or by bypassing keywords that might set off memetic immune systems.

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