Note:  This is part of a series of posts on skills which we're trying to teach, explaining each skill and then asking the reader to help invent exercises that will train the skill.

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The Center for Modern Rationality is now offering prizes for suggested exercises:

• $50 for each exercise promising enough that we test it during a Saturday session.
• A $500 prize for any exercise which actually seems to work (as in, we decide to adopt it into the unit after testing).

We need help on this.

This prize extends to "Check Consequentialism", the current post "Be Specific", and any other Skill of the Week posts until announced otherwise.  Considering the wide variety of skills we're trying to teach, there are no prespecified success metrics besides "Looks good enough to try" and "We decide to keep it".  Prizes are payable via Paypal.  For a sample of where the bar lies, and further description of the sort of exercise we're looking for, look at the "Really Getting Bayes" game described at the bottom of "Check Consequentialism", which we did decide to adopt.

We potentially have resources that can "build a simple computer game" or "come up with specific exercises along general pattern X", or even people who can "research large numbers of trivia questions with known answers to use as tests".  Suggestions of this type will have to look good in advance to be tested - since testing them requires resources - but shouldn't be eliminated from consideration.  But "Hire an author to write a novel that..." is too resource-intensive.

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Skill of the Week:  Be Specific

During YCombinator's Startup School 2011, Paul Graham and Harj Tagger did "office hours" onstage.  One pair of entrepreneurs were doing a matchmaking (dating) startup, and Paul and Harj were trying to figure out what their startup did, exactly - for example, what their startup could do that the existing low-tech solution couldn't.  (Video.)

Harj:  Low-tech like, you know, just like word of mouth, telling someone "hey, you should like, meet up with my friend" or "we're getting drinks, why don't you come along?" Like, what can the software do that's specifically better than that?

Entrepreneur:  I think that our software specifically is providing the better connections for people, um...

Paul: Providing the better connections for people...?

Entrepreneur:  I mean, one way you can think about it, I don't know if this is the right answer, but... there's a lot of things that are happening in real life that they're trying to mimic online, maybe that's not the correct way to...  Look at it like this: to give them an online tool to also do this, like they're already doing in real life, maybe they could reach, uh expand their reach through the online website.

This had been happening with most of the startups Paul and Harj were interrogating - they just could not seem to provide a customer use-case - and I couldn't stand it any more; which is why at this point I whispered audibly enough for a few nearby people to hear, "Be specific!  Be specific!"

A moment later, on stage:

Paul:  Hm.  Not very specific.

I got some strange looks from the people sitting next to me.

I hope this provides some background for my guess that around half of Paul Graham's advantage is based on years of incubator experience, and the other half is unusual rationality skills of the sort that the Center for Modern Rationality is trying to figure out how to teach.  Obviously this is only a very rough conjecture.  But you can see the basis for the hope that - after a fair amount more work - we'll be able to offer a 2-day course for YCombinator entrepreneurs that eliminates 50% of the overhead from their conversations with Paul Graham.

(Also, note how this post starts off with a specific example - an instance of the concrete-abstract writing pattern in which you state the example first and the generalization afterward.  This is one of the most common bits of nonfiction writing advice I dispense:  "Open with the concrete example, not the abstract explanation!")

Skill of the Week: Check consequentialism

(The Center for Modern Rationality needs ideas for how to teach this skill, so we're farming out the problem to Less Wrong.  If this works - i.e. if there are useful suggestions generated in the comments - I plan/hope on doing it once a week.)

Overview:

In philosophy, "consequentialism" is the belief that doing the right thing makes the world a better place, i.e., that actions should be chosen on the basis of their probable outcomes.  It seems like the mental habit of checking consequentialism, asking "What positive future events does this action cause?", would catch numerous cognitive fallacies.

For example, the mental habit of consequentialism would counter the sunk cost fallacy - if a PhD wouldn't really lead to much in the way of desirable job opportunities or a higher income, and the only reason you're still pursuing your PhD is that otherwise all your previous years of work will have been wasted, you will find yourself encountering a blank screen at the point where you try to imagine a positive future outcome of spending another two years working toward your PhD - you will not be able to state what good future events happen as a result.

Or consider the problem of living in the should-universe; if you're thinking, I'm not going to talk to my boyfriend about X because he should know it already, you might be able to spot this as an instance of should-universe thinking (planning/choosing/acting/feeling as though within / by-comparison-to an image of an ideal perfect universe) by having done exercises specifically to sensitize you to should-ness.  Or, if you've practiced the more general skill of Checking Consequentialism, you might notice a problem on asking "What happens if I talk / don't talk to my boyfriend?" - providing that you're sufficiently adept to constrain your consequentialist visualization to what actually happens as opposed to what should happen.

Discussion:

The skill of Checking Consequentialism isn't quite as simple as telling people to ask, "What positive result do I get?"  By itself, this mental query is probably going to return any apparent justification - for example, in the sunk-cost-PhD example, asking "What good thing happens as a result?" will just return, "All my years of work won't have been wasted!  That's good!"  Any choice people are tempted by seems good for some reason, and executing a query about "good reasons" will just return this.

The novel part of Checking Consequentialism is the ability to discriminate "consequentialist reasons" from "non-consequentialist reasons" - being able to distinguish that "Because a PhD gets me a 50% higher salary" talks about future positive consequences, while "Because I don't want my years of work to have been wasted" doesn't.

Update March 2012: We are still accepting and processing applications for this work on an ongoing basis.

Imagine trying to learn baseball by reading essays about baseball techniques. [1]

We're trying to make the jump to teaching people rationality by, metaphorically speaking, having them throw, catch, and hit baseballs in the company of friends. And as we develop curriculum to do that, we're noticing that we often improve quite a lot ourselves in the course of coming up with 20 examples of the sunk cost fallacy. This suggests that the best of us have a lot to gain from practicing basic skills more systematically. Quoth Anna Salamon:

There are huge numbers of basic, obviously useful rationality habits that I do about 10% as often as it would be useful to do them. Like "run cheap experiments/tests often”, and “notice mental flinches, and track down the thought you’re avoiding”.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, Anna Salamon, several others paid on an hourly basis, and a few volunteers, have been designing exercises and exercise-sets for a rationality curriculum. Our current working point is on the exercises for "Motivated Cognition". Currently the only completed session is "Sunk Costs", which is still being tested - yes, we're actually testing these things repeatedly as we build them. The main purpose of the sessions is to be performed in person, not read online, but nonetheless the current version of the Sunk Costs material - presentation and exercise booklets - is available as a sample: [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. This is a presentation on sunk costs in which background explanations are interspersed with "do as many of these exercises as you can in 3 minutes", followed by "now pair up with others to do the 'transfer step' parts where you look for instances in your past life and probable future life."

We're looking for 1-2 fulltime employees who can help us build more things like that (unless the next round of tests shows that the current format doesn't work), and possibly a number of hourly contractors (who may be local or distant). We will definitely want to try your work on an hourly or monthly basis before making any full-time hires.

Singularity Institute desperately needs someone who is not me who can write cognitive-science-based material. Someone smart, energetic, able to speak to popular audiences, and with an excellent command of the science. If you’ve been reading Less Wrong for the last few months, you probably just thought the same thing I did: “SIAI should hire Lukeprog!” To support Luke Muelhauser becoming a full-time Singularity Institute employee, please donate and mention Luke (e.g. “Yay for Luke!”) in the check memo or the comment field of your donation - or if you donate by a method that doesn’t allow you to leave a comment, tell Louie Helm (louie.helm@singinst.org) your donation was to help fund Luke.

Note that the Summer Challenge that doubles all donations will run until August 31st. (We're currently at $31,000 of $125,000.)

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.

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.