Articles Tagged ‘teaching’ - Less Wrong

Drawing Less Wrong: An Introduction

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 09:39:12 +1100

Submitted by Raemon • 33 votes • 38 comments

This post begins a mini-sequence that discusses how to draw, reports on an experiment about teaching people how to draw, and examines how rationality and good drawing practices are related. (As it turns out, a fair amount)

I'm a professional artist. I have a fairly extensive background in traditional drawing, but most of my training is in computer animation. I chose my career because I liked the control offered by the computer - the ability to undo, to manipulate art in procedural ways, and most of all for the flexibility to duplicate things, repurpose them for different projects and combine my love of visual art with my love of game design, animation, and various other mixed media.

But now I work 10+ hours a day at an advertising agency. I spend all day getting paid to stare at a computer screen. Most of my other hobbies also involve staring at a computer screen. And many types of digital work are taxing on the same set of creative muscles, so at the end of the day I didn't have energy to work on the personal projects I wanted.

One option would be to get a different job that didn't tax those creative muscles or involve staring at a screen. I've actually considered getting a "physical" job - after years and thousands of dollars of college to get a nice posh job without physical labor, I actually think it might be better to get PAID to exercise. And instead, use my free time to channel my skills from colleges into personal creative projects that I'm passionate about.

I may do that some day, but I DO like my job, I like the people there, and I continue to learn important skills. So instead of modifying my job, I modified my hobbies. A few months ago I began drawing people - on subways, in coffee shops, in parks, etc. This gave me a new creative outlet, as well as a new social outlet. (Starting a conversation with "Hey, can I draw you?" is a pretty useful technique - not only does it provide an excuse to begin talking, but if you follow up with a good drawing, you've established right off the bat that you're an interesting person with a valuable skill. You've also flattered the other person a bit, and if the conversation enters a lull, it's okay - just draw for a while until you can think of something to say.)

So I've been getting better at traditional drawing, and better at social interaction, and more confident in general. And at a local Less Wrong meet up, it recently it became clear that A) other people wanted to learn to draw, B) I wanted to learn to teach, C) a few people wanted to model. So the "Drawing Less Wrong" meetup was born. I prepared some lesson plans and began holding 4-hour workshops.

What interested me was how much the study of drawing was relevant to rationality. Not only do you have to learn to observe reality (this is surprisingly hard), but you have to pretty much scrap your entire model of how you think drawing works. (Almost everything you will naturally gravitate towards is wrong). Most artists don't notice that they should be applying these lessons to the rest of their life, but I think the skills can generalize if attention is brought to that notion.

In the past, I've been to figure drawing workshops where I saw people go from not being able to draw much at all (one person showed up to class with a *horribly* copied manga drawing that they said had taken them 12 hours), to being able to execute a reasonable gesture drawing¹ in about 60 seconds. It took them about 8 hours of dedicated practice. I wanted to try and replicate that.

Soon to follow are a collection of posts discussing the nature of talent, how to draw effectively, and lessons I learned from trying to teach people extremely counterintuitive models of reality.

The next post in this sequence is "Should you Learn to Draw?"

[1] "Reasonable Gesture Drawing" is a specific phrase that means something to trained artists, which non-artists may misinterpret. It doesn't mean "looks amazing." It does mean that this person improved in important ways in a short time.

38 comments

Teaching Introspection

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 11:10:34 +1000

Submitted by Swimmer963 • 23 votes • 31 comments

As Yvain pointed out in his recent post The Limits of Introspection, humans are not naturally good at inferring our cognitive processes. We resort to guessing with plausible-sounding stories about ourselves, and we aren’t very accurate.

I was reminded of this recently while teaching a swimming lesson. (You'll understand later why this reminded me.) A recurring problem that I’ve noticed with both children and adults is that it isn’t obvious to them what their bodies are doing. Feet go in strange directions, hands fail to lift above the water, and they literally can’t describe what it feels like. It’s pretty much impossible for a novice swimmer to watch the instructor demonstrate front crawl and then imitate it perfectly–muscular control isn’t that perfect. That’s why there are swimming instructors: because it’s very, very hard to learn swimming (or dance, or soccer, or a martial art) by reading a book, even if that book has illustrated diagrams. Two friends reading the book together and watching each other’s attempts in the pool would probably do better, but that’s still a case, metaphorically, of the blind leading the blind. Most sports have instructors and coaches who are, relatively speaking, experts. (I competed at the regional level in swimming for something like five years and trained five to seven times a week the whole time, which pretty much qualifies me to teach eight-year-olds. An Olympic coach would need a much higher level of mastery.)

The most basic thing a coach provides that the two friends practicing together don’t have is relevant feedback. I watch a young swimmer demonstrating her front crawl, and I can immediately chunk my observations into “what’s done properly” and “what’s done wrong” and translate the latter category into “things to change.” And the easiest way to learn perfect front crawl isn’t to do it over and over again with tiny changes, but to practice exaggerated and simplified “drills” that teach particular fragments of muscle memory. Faced with a given stroke problem, I can look over a list of about eight different front crawl drills to find the one best suited for fixing it. To place some objective measure on the improvements, I can time my swimmers or count their strokes per length The coaches of more elite swimmers have even fancier tools in their hands: videotaping, fins and hand paddles, and the flume, basically a wind tunnel in the water. (I wish I had one of these in my basement!) All to provide better feedback: even Olympic-level swimmers don’t automatically know what their bodies are doing wrong or what needs to be fixed. (I’m assuming this is true of sports other than swimming, too.)

Granted, human muscles do start out under some voluntary control. A baby learns how to walk with no instruction, only the feedback of trial and error. (And of seeing adults walk? I seem to remember reading that some feral children crawl on hands and knees, and seem to prefer this method to walking.) But even apparently involuntary skills can be learned, with the help of creative technology. With biofeedback, people can control their blood pressure and anxiety levels and apparently various other processes . The parallel should be obvious here. Introspection, like physical coordination, is only imperfectly under conscious control…but there is some control. That’s what consciousness is: self-awareness. Most people are aware that they have emotions, and that they make decisions because of their emotions, i.e. “I didn’t mean it, I just did it because I was angry!” Likewise, most people are aware of their likes and dislikes. It’s only a small leap to recognize that these kinds of preferences are malleable facts about the state of the brain, not immutable facts about the outside world. People do succeed in wrestling with their uncooperative minds, fighting akrasia and making deliberate and reasoned decisions.

Nevertheless, most people aren’t even at the same level, metaphorically speaking, as a non-swimmer trying to learn from diagrams in a book. The literature on cognitive biases and Alicorn's sequence on luminosity are a start on the ‘book of introspection’ and some of the Less Wrong groups that meet in person are trying to help each other master these skills. The various schools of meditation are arguably about teaching introspection, and clinical psychology could be seen the same way. Is it possible to go further? Olympic coaches have probably maxed out how fast an unmodified human can swim; your technique can't be any better than perfect; but I would like to think that we haven’t even scratched the limits of how well a completely unmodified human brain can understand itself. As far as I know, most traditions of meditation are just that: traditions, often ancient, that don’t accommodate recent discoveries about the brain and about thought processes. And psychology is limited by the focus on fixing ‘problems’ and returning patients to ‘normal.’ (And if you are ‘normal’, you don’t need a psychologist!) But everyone is affected equally by our apparently-innate inability to notice what our brains are really up to, and normal isn't a very ambitious standard.

What does a cognitive bias feel like? I can’t look back on my actions and say “yeah, I’m pretty sure I said Tide was my favourite detergent because I was still thinking about oceans and moons.” Or at least, I can’t do that automatically. But if a scientist can predict that participants in an experiment will choose Tide when thinking about oceans and moons, then I can predict that about myself, too, and look back on all my decisions, trying to infer what factors were present at the time that could have primed my choice. It’s still a guess, but it’s an informed, useful one. And with practice, with an expert instructor to point out what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong, maybe a given cognitive bias does feel like something recognizable. Maybe the hidden secrets of your thought processes would become transparent and obvious. The next problem is finding instructors who are sufficiently advanced, and teaching exercises to use. The repetitive and level-based nature of video games would make them ideal as “thinking drills" training "neural memory" instead of "muscle memory."

I don't know enough to guess at the specifics of what this kind of school might look like, but I would definitely take lessons in introspection if they were available…I can’t really see a downside. Finding out that my decisions were due more often to random factors unconnected to to the Great Story That Is My Life might be unflattering, but it's equally awful whether I know about it or not, and knowing gives me a chance to fix those decisions that might otherwise turn out damagingly irrational. Anyone, or any group of people, willing to take on the task of becoming expert instructors in this field would hugely help those of us who have trouble learning procedural skills from books.

31 comments

Teachable Rationality Skills

Sat, 28 May 2011 07:57:39 +1000

Submitted by Eliezer_Yudkowsky • 51 votes • 257 comments

Recent brainstorming sessions at SIAI (with participants including Anna, Carl, Jasen, Divia, Will, Amy Willey, and Andrew Critch) have started to produce lists of rationality skills that we could potentially try to teach (at Rationality Boot Camp, at Less Wrong meetups, or similar venues). We've also been trying to break those skills down to the 5-second level (step 2) and come up with ideas for exercises that might teach them (step 3) although we haven't actually composed those exercises yet (step 4, where the actual work takes place).

The bulk of this post will mainly go into the comments, which I'll try to keep to the following format: A top-level comment is a major or minor skill to teach; upvote this comment if you think this skill should get priority in teaching. Sub-level comments describe 5-second subskills that go into this skill, and then third-level comments are ideas for exercises which could potentially train that 5-second skill. If anyone actually went to the work of composing a specific exercise people could run through, that would go to the fourth-level of commenting, I guess. For some major practicable arts with a known standard learning format like "Improv" or "Acting", I'll put the exercise at the top and guesses at which skills it might teach below. (And any plain old replies can go at any level.)

I probably won't be able to get to all of what we brainstormed today, so here's a PNG of the Freemind map that I generated during our session.

257 comments

The 5-Second Level

Sat, 07 May 2011 14:51:45 +1000

Submitted by Eliezer_Yudkowsky • 100 votes • 304 comments

To develop methods of teaching rationality skills, you need to learn to focus on mental events that occur in 5 seconds or less. Most of what you want to teach is directly on this level; the rest consists of chaining together skills on this level.

As our first example, let's take the vital rationalist skill, "Be specific."

Even with people who've had moderate amounts of exposure to Less Wrong, a fair amount of my helping them think effectively often consists of my saying, "Can you give me a specific example of that?" or "Can you be more concrete?"

A couple of formative childhood readings that taught me to be specific:

"What is meant by the word red?"
"It's a color."
"What's a color?"
"Why, it's a quality things have."
"What's a quality?"
"Say, what are you trying to do, anyway?"

You have pushed him into the clouds. If, on the other hand, we habitually go down the abstraction ladder to lower levels of abstraction when we are asked the meaning of a word, we are less likely to get lost in verbal mazes; we will tend to "have our feet on the ground" and know what we are talking about. This habit displays itself in an answer such as this:

"What is meant by the word red?"
"Well, the next time you see some cars stopped at an intersection, look at the traffic light facing them. Also, you might go to the fire department and see how their trucks are painted."

-- S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

and:

"Beware, demon!" he intoned hollowly. "I am not without defenses."
"Oh yeah? Name three."

-- Robert Asprin, Another Fine Myth

And now, no sooner does someone tell me that they want to "facilitate communications between managers and employees" than I say, "Can you give me a concrete example of how you would do that?" Hayakawa taught me to distinguish the concrete and the abstract; and from that small passage in Asprin, I picked up the dreadful personal habit of calling people's bluffs, often using the specific phrase, "Name three."

But the real subject of today's lesson is how to see skills like this on the 5-second level. And now that we have a specific example in hand, we can proceed to try to zoom in on the level of cognitive events that happen in 5 seconds or less.

Over-abstraction happens because it's easy to be abstract. It's easier to say "red is a color" than to pause your thoughts for long enough to come up with the example of a stop sign. Abstraction is a path of least resistance, a form of mental laziness.

So the first thing that needs to happen on a timescale of 5 seconds is perceptual recognition of highly abstract statements unaccompanied by concrete examples, accompanied by an automatic aversion, an ick reaction - this is the trigger which invokes the skill.

Then, you have actionable stored procedures that associate to the trigger. And "come up with a concrete example" is not a 5-second-level skill, not an actionable procedure, it doesn't transform the problem into a task. An actionable mental procedure that could be learned, stored, and associated with the trigger would be "Search for a memory that instantiates the abstract statement", or "Try to come up with hypothetical examples, and then discard the lousy examples your imagination keeps suggesting, until you finally have a good example that really shows what you were originally trying to say", or "Ask why you were making the abstract statement in the first place, and recall the original mental causes of your making that statement to see if they suggest something more concrete."

Or to be more specific on the last mental procedure: Why were you trying to describe redness to someone? Did they just run a red traffic light?

(And then what kind of exercise can you run someone through, which will get them to distinguish red traffic lights from green traffic lights? What could teach someone to distinguish red from green?)

When you ask how to teach a rationality skill, don't ask "How can I teach people to be more specific?" Ask, "What sort of exercise will lead people through the part of the skill where they perceptually recognize a statement as overly abstract?" Ask, "What exercise teaches people to think about why they made the abstract statement in the first place?" Ask, "What exercise could cause people to form, store, and associate with a trigger, a procedure for going through hypothetical examples until a good one or at least adequate one is invented?"

Coming up with good ways to teach mental skills requires thinking on the 5-second level, because until you've reached that level of introspective concreteness, that fineness of granularity, you can't recognize the elements you're trying to teach; you can't recognize the patterns of thought you're trying to build inside a mind.

To come up with a 5-second description of a rationality skill, I would suggest zooming in on a concrete case of a real or hypothetical person who (a) fails in a typical fashion and (b) successfully applies the skill. Break down their internal experience into the smallest granules you can manage: perceptual classifications, contexts that evoke emotions, fleeting choices made too quick for verbal consideration. And then generalize what they're doing while staying on the 5-second level.

Start with the concrete example of the person who starts to say "Red is a color" and cuts themselves off and says "Red is what that stop sign and that fire engine have in common." What did they do on the 5-second level?

Perceptually recognize a statement they made as overly abstract.
Feel the need for an accompanying concrete example.
Be sufficiently averse to the lack of such an example to avoid the path of least resistance where they just let themselves be lazy and abstract.
Associate to and activate a stored, actionable, procedural skill, e.g:
4a. Try to remember a memory which matches that abstract thing you just said.
4b. Try to invent a specific hypothetical scenario which matches that abstract thing you just said.
4c. Ask why you said the abstract thing in the first place and see if that suggests anything.

and

Before even 1: They recognize that the notion of "concrete" means things like folding chairs, events like a young woman buying a vanilla ice cream, and the number 17, i.e. specific enough to be visualized; and they know "red is a color" is not specific enough to be satisfying. They perceptually recognize (this is what Hayakawa was trying to teach) the cardinal directions "more abstract" and "less abstract" as they apply within the landscape of the mind.

If you are thinking on this level of granularity, then you're much more likely to come up with a good method for teaching the skill "be specific", because you'll know that whatever exercise you come up with, it ought to cause people's minds to go through events 1-4, and provide examples or feedback to train perception 0.

Next example of thinking on the 5-second scale: I previously asked some people (especially from the New York LW community) the question "What makes rationalists fun to be around?", i.e., why is it that once you try out being in a rationalist community you can't bear the thought of going back? One of the primary qualities cited was "Being non-judgmental." Two different people came up with that exact phrase, but it struck me as being not precisely the right description - rationalists go around judging and estimating and weighing things all the time. (Noticing small discordances in an important description, and reacting by trying to find an exact description, is another one of those 5-second skills.) So I pondered, trying to come up with a more specific image of exactly what it was we weren't doing, i.e. Being Specific, and after further visualization it occurred to me that a better description might be something like this: If you are a fellow member of my rationalist community and you come up with a proposal that I disagree with - like "We should all practice lying, so that we feel less pressure to believe things that sound good to endorse out loud" - then I may argue with the proposal on consequentialist grounds. I may judge. But I won't start saying in immense indignation what a terrible person you must be for suggesting it.

Now I could try to verbally define exactly what it is we don't do, but this would fail to approach the 5-second level, and probably also fail to get at the real quality that's important to rationalist communities. That would merely be another attempt to legislate what people are or aren't allowed to say, and that would make things less fun. There'd be a new accusation to worry about if you said the wrong thing - "Hey! Good rationalists don't do that!" followed by a debate that wouldn't be experienced as pleasant for anyone involved.

In this case I think it's actually easier to define the thing-we-avoid on the 5-second level. Person A says something that Person B disagrees with, and now in Person B's mind there's an option to go in the direction of a certain poisonous pleasure, an opportunity to experience an emotional burst of righteous indignation and a feeling of superiority, a chance to castigate the other person. On the 5-second level, Person B rejects this temptation, and instead invokes the procedure of (a) pausing to reflect and then (b) talking about the consequences of A's proposed policy in a tone that might perhaps be worried (for the way of rationality is not to refuse all emotion) but nonetheless is not filled with righteous outrage and indignation which demands that all others share that indignation or be likewise castigated.

(Which in practice, makes a really huge difference in how much rationalists can relax when they are around fellow rationalists. It's the difference between having to carefully tiptoe through a minefield and being free to run and dance, knowing that even if you make a mistake, it won't socially kill you. You're even allowed to say "Oops" and change your mind, if you want to backtrack (but that's a whole 'nother topic of 5-second skills)...)

The point of 5-second-level analysis is that to teach the procedural habit, you don't go into the evolutionary psychology of politics or the game theory of punishing non-punishers (by which the indignant demand that others agree with their indignation), which is unfortunately how I tended to write back when I was writing the original Less Wrong sequences. Rather you try to come up with exercises which, if people go through them, causes them to experience the 5-second events - to feel the temptation to indignation, and to make the choice otherwise, and to associate alternative procedural patterns such as pausing, reflecting, and asking "What is the evidence?" or "What are the consequences?"

What would be an exercise which develops that habit? I don't know, although it's worth noting that a lot of traditional rationalists not associated with LW also have this skill, and that it seems fairly learnable by osmosis from watching other people in the community not be indignant. One method that seems worth testing would be to expose people to assertions that seem like obvious temptations to indignation, and get them to talk about evidence or consequences instead. Say, you propose that eating one-month-old human babies ought to be legal, because one-month-old human babies aren't as intelligent as pigs, and we eat pigs. Or you could start talking about feminism, in which case you can say pretty much anything and it's bound to offend someone. (Did that last sentence offend you? Pause and reflect!) The point being, not to persuade anyone of anything, but to get them to introspectively recognize the moment of that choice between indignation and not-indignation, and walk them through an alternative response, so they store and associate that procedural skill. The exercise might fail if the context of a school-exercise meant that the indignation never got started - if the temptation/choice were never experienced. But we could try that teaching method, at any rate.

(There's this 5-second skill where you respond to mental uncertainty about whether or not something will work, by imagining testing it; and if it looks like you can just go test something, then the thought occurs to you to just go test it. To teach this skill, we might try showing people a list of hypotheses and asking them to quickly say on a scale of 1-10 how easy they look to test, because we're trying to teach people a procedural habit of perceptually considering the testableness of ideas. You wouldn't give people lots of time to think, because then that teaches a procedure of going through complex arguments about testability, which you wouldn't use routinely in real life and would end up associating primarily to a school-context where a defensible verbal argument is expected.)

I should mention, at this point, that learning to see the 5-second level draws heavily on the introspective skill of visualizing mental events in specific detail, and maintaining that introspective image in your mind's eye for long enough to reflect on it and analyze it. This may take practice, so if you find that you can't do it right away, instinctively react by feeling that you need more practice to get to the lovely reward, instead of instinctively giving up.

Has everyone learned from these examples a perceptual recognition of what the "5-second level" looks like? Of course you have! You've even installed a mental habit that when you or somebody else comes up with a supposedly 5-second-level description, you automatically inspect each part of the description to see if it contains any block units like "Be specific" which are actually high-level chunks.

Now, as your exercise for learning the skill of "Resolving cognitive events to the 5-second level", take a rationalist skill you think is important (or pick a random LW post from How To Actually Change Your Mind); come up with a concrete example of that skill being used successfully; decompose that usage to a 5-second-level description of perceptual classifications and emotion-evoking contexts and associative triggers to actionable procedures etcetera; check your description to make sure that each part of it can be visualized as a concrete mental process and that there are no non-actionable abstract chunks; come up with a teaching exercise which seems like it ought to cause those sub-5-second events to occur in people's minds; and then post your analysis and proposed exercise in the comments. Hope to hear from you soon!

304 comments

Being a teacher

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 07:03:27 +1100

Submitted by Swimmer963 • 50 votes • 152 comments

A few weeks ago, while giving unofficial swimming lessons to an acquaintance about my age, I had an insight. It was that before you can teach something, you have to realize it’s hard.

I don’t think I noticed this before, because I thought it was obvious. Of course someone who doesn’t know how to swim isn’t going to learn perfect front crawl just by looking at yours. If I was told to watch someone else swimming a brand-new stroke that I’d never seen before, I could imitate it pretty easily, because to me it’s a trivial skill. But to someone who has nothing to refer to, it’s hard.

“You’re like the fifth person who’s tried to teach me how to swim,” my acquaintance said as I led her into the shallow end holding a foam noodle. “People just tell me to move my arms and legs, and they didn’t seem to understand why I couldn’t do it.”

There are, needless to say, a lot of different ways to move your arms and legs. Some of them resemble swimming. A subset of those actually work to keep someone’s head at the surface, and an even smaller subset of those are effective enough that they have names, like front crawl. To me, this is obvious, because I’ve watched hundreds of children in my classes flail and struggle in their front crawl, or lift their head to breathe, or turn their toes inwards in whip kick, and make the same mistakes persistently even when I corrected them, both verbally and by literally grabbing their arms/legs and moving them. I know it’s hard.

I went through this flailing/struggling phase too and have no memory of it whatsoever, having been three at the time. This is probably true of most good swimmers; the procedural memory is so embedded that it makes sense to say “move your arms and legs” because that's all you think about consciously; you forget how many other things you’re doing just to stay afloat. (Poor swimmers might have a different perspective, but they aren’t likely to use that perspective to try to teach other people how to swim.)

In order to bring a non-swimmer to the point of doing perfect front crawl, you have to teach them, one at a time, a long list of motor skills that have to be learned well enough to come naturally before you can move on. With adults, you can compress this process into a much shorter period than with restless, distractible, and lacking-fully-developed-motor-skills children, but you can’t omit it. You have to teach them how to float, and you can’t just tell them to float; you have to hold them up in the water and tell them, one at a time, which muscles to relax and which parts of their body position to change, and then you can let go. You have to teach them how to blow bubbles out their nose to avoid getting water in it. (I wonder how many people are eternally wary of jumping into the water or doing somersaults because no one told them this). You have to slowly shape their flutter-kick from a flailing mess into something that will actually move them somewhere. And then you can teach them front crawl, which comes with its own miles-long list of small details to fix and ways to fix them.

I watch my coworkers teach their class, and it amazes me how often they tell their kids to swim, watch them, and say “that was bad. Do it again.” As if that comment is useful in any way. As if doing the same thing over and over again will ever produce different results.*

I wonder how much this applies to other areas (teaching math in elementary school, for example?) How many teachers teach the same skills the same way, over and over, answering confused questions with exactly the same explanation they gave originally? Different minds work differently, just like different bodies work differently. You have to find the right metaphors, the right words to describe things that aren’t really conveyed by words. (“Kick your legs like a ballet dancer would” is a swimming metaphor I found recently that works quite well with some people and not at all with others.)

I would be interested to hear from other people who’ve either taught in other areas and found useful tricks or metaphors, or who’ve been taught in either good or ineffective ways.

*Note: Although I criticize it here, this is basically how I teach treading water. I hold children in water above their head, tell them to make scooping motions with their arms and legs, let go of them while maintaining eye contact, and immediately pick them up again the moment they start to go under. Two seconds becomes five seconds, becomes ten seconds, becomes a minute, and then I teach them fancy skills like eggbeater. But this is because treading water is a very basic, simple skill that I find really, really hard to explain verbally to four-year-olds.

152 comments

Replaying History

Fri, 08 May 2009 15:35:23 +1000

Submitted by gworley • 7 votes • 19 comments

One of my favorite fiction genres is alternative history. The basic idea of alternative history is to write a story set in an alternate universe where history played out differently. Popular alternate histories include those where the Nazis win World War II, the USSR wins the Cold War, and the Confederate States of America win the American Civil War. But most of the writing in this genre has a serious flaw: the author starts out by saying "wouldn't it be cool to write a story where X had happened instead of Y" and then works backwards to concoct historical events that will lead to the desired outcome. No matter how good the story is, the history is often bad because at every stage the author went looking for a reason for things to go his way.

Being unsatisfied with most alternate histories, I like to play a historical "what if" game. Rather than asking the question at the conclusion, though (like "what if the Nazis had won the war"), I ask it at an earlier moment, ideally one where chance played an important role. What if Napoleon had been convinced not to invade Russia? What if the Continental Army had not successfully retreated from New York? What if Viking settlements in Newfoundland had not collapsed? These are as opposed to "What if Napoleon had never been defeated?", "What if the Colonies had lost the American Revolutionary War?", and "What if Vikings had developed a thriving civilization in the Americas?". I find that replaying history in this way a fun use of my analytical skills, but more importantly a good test of my rationality.

One of the most difficult things in thinking of an alternative history is to stay focused on the facts and likely outcomes. It's easy to say "I'd really like to see a world where X happened" and then silently or overtly bias your thinking until you find a way to achieve the desired outcome. Learning to avoid this takes discipline, especially in a domain like alternate history where there's no way to check if your reasoning turned out to be correct. But unlike imagining the future, making an alternate history does have the real history to measure up against, so it provides a good training ground for futurist who don't want to wait 20 or 30 years to get feedback on their thinking.

Given all this, I have two suggestions. One, this indicates that a good way to teach history and rational thinking at the same time would be to present historical data up to a set point, ask students to reason out what they think will happen next in history, and then reveal what actually happened and use the feedback to calibrate and improve our historical reasoning (which will hopefully provide some benefit in other domains). Second, a good way to build experience applying the skills of rationality is publicly present and critique alternate histories.

In that vein, if there appears to be sufficient interest, I'll start doing a periodic article here dedicated to the discussion of some particular alternative history. The discussion will be in the comments: people can propose outcomes, then others can revise and critique and propose other outcomes, continuing the cycle until we hit a brick wall (not enough information, question asks something that would not have changed history, etc.) or come to a consensus.

What do you all think of this idea?

19 comments

Guessing the Teacher's Password

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 13:40:48 +1000

Submitted by Eliezer_Yudkowsky • 43 votes • 74 comments

Followup to: Fake Explanations

When I was young, I read popular physics books such as Richard Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. I knew that light was waves, sound was waves, matter was waves. I took pride in my scientific literacy, when I was nine years old.

When I was older, and I began to read the Feynman Lectures on Physics, I ran across a gem called "the wave equation". I could follow the equation's derivation, but, looking back, I couldn't see its truth at a glance. So I thought about the wave equation for three days, on and off, until I saw that it was embarrassingly obvious. And when I finally understood, I realized that the whole time I had accepted the honest assurance of physicists that light was waves, sound was waves, matter was waves, I had not had the vaguest idea of what the word "wave" meant to a physicist.

There is an instinctive tendency to think that if a physicist says "light is made of waves", and the teacher says "What is light made of?", and the student says "Waves!", the student has made a true statement. That's only fair, right? We accept "waves" as a correct answer from the physicist; wouldn't it be unfair to reject it from the student? Surely, the answer "Waves!" is either true or false, right?

Which is one more bad habit to unlearn from school. Words do not have intrinsic definitions. If I hear the syllables "bea-ver" and think of a large rodent, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the syllables "bea-ver". The sequence of syllables "made of waves" (or "because of heat conduction") is not a hypothesis, it is a pattern of vibrations traveling through the air, or ink on paper. It can associate to a hypothesis in someone's mind, but it is not, of itself, right or wrong. But in school, the teacher hands you a gold star for saying "made of waves", which must be the correct answer because the teacher heard a physicist emit the same sound-vibrations. Since verbal behavior (spoken or written) is what gets the gold star, students begin to think that verbal behavior has a truth-value. After all, either light is made of waves, or it isn't, right?

And this leads into an even worse habit. Suppose the teacher presents you with a confusing problem involving a metal plate next to a radiator; the far side feels warmer than the side next to the radiator. The teacher asks "Why?" If you say "I don't know", you have no chance of getting a gold star—it won't even count as class participation. But, during the current semester, this teacher has used the phrases "because of heat convection", "because of heat conduction", and "because of radiant heat". One of these is probably what the teacher wants. You say, "Eh, maybe because of heat conduction?"

This is not a hypothesis about the metal plate. This is not even a proper belief. It is an attempt to guess the teacher's password.

Even visualizing the symbols of the diffusion equation (the math governing heat conduction) doesn't mean you've formed a hypothesis about the metal plate. This is not school; we are not testing your memory to see if you can write down the diffusion equation. This is Bayescraft; we are scoring your anticipations of experience. If you use the diffusion equation, by measuring a few points with a thermometer and then trying to predict what the thermometer will say on the next measurement, then it is definitely connected to experience. Even if the student just visualizes something flowing, and therefore holds a match near the cooler side of the plate to try to measure where the heat goes, then this mental image of flowing-ness connects to experience; it controls anticipation.

If you aren't using the diffusion equation—putting in numbers and getting out results that control your anticipation of particular experiences—then the connection between map and territory is severed as though by a knife. What remains is not a belief, but a verbal behavior.

In the school system, it's all about verbal behavior, whether written on paper or spoken aloud. Verbal behavior gets you a gold star or a failing grade. Part of unlearning this bad habit is becoming consciously aware of the difference between an explanation and a password.

Does this seem too harsh? When you're faced by a confusing metal plate, can't "Heat conduction?" be a first step toward finding the answer? Maybe, but only if you don't fall into the trap of thinking that you are looking for a password. What if there is no teacher to tell you that you failed? Then you may think that "Light is wakalixes" is a good explanation, that "wakalixes" is the correct password. It happened to me when I was nine years old—not because I was stupid, but because this is what happens by default. This is how human beings think, unless they are trained not to fall into the trap. Humanity stayed stuck in holes like this for thousands of years.

Maybe, if we drill students that words don't count, only anticipation-controllers, the student will not get stuck on "Heat conduction? No? Maybe heat convection? That's not it either?" Maybe then, thinking the phrase "Heat conduction" will lead onto a genuinely helpful path, like:

"Heat conduction?"
But that's only a phrase—what does it mean?
The diffusion equation?
But those are only symbols—how do I apply them?
What does applying the diffusion equation lead me to anticipate?
It sure doesn't lead me to anticipate that the side of a metal plate farther away from a radiator would feel warmer.
I notice that I am confused. Maybe the near side just feels cooler, because it's made of more insulative material and transfers less heat to my hand? I'll try measuring the temperature...
Okay, that wasn't it. Can I try to verify whether the diffusion equation holds true of this metal plate, at all? Is heat flowing the way it usually does, or is something else going on?
I could hold a match to the plate and try to measure how heat spreads over time...

If we are not strict about "Eh, maybe because of heat conduction?" being a fake explanation, the student will very probably get stuck on some wakalixes-password. This happens by default, it happened to the whole human species for thousands of years.

Part of the sequence Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

Next post: "Science as Attire"

Previous post: "Fake Explanations"

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