Visual Mental Imagery Training
Previously: Generalizing From One Example
There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?
Upon hearing this, my response was "How the stars was this actually a real debate? Of course we have mental imagery. Anyone who doesn't think we have mental imagery is either such a fanatical Behaviorist that she doubts the evidence of her own senses, or simply insane." Unfortunately, the professor was able to parade a long list of famous people who denied mental imagery, including some leading scientists of the era. And this was all before Behaviorism even existed.
The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images.
Summary: I do not have visual mental imagery. I want it. How do I get it? What exercises, if any, will help?
In further detail... Here's Francis Galton's Statistics of Mental Imagery paper. I'm not quite at the 3% level of completely unable to form mental images, but I'm close. In particular there are three times I have vivid, sharp mental imagery, and the existence of such times tells me I have the brain hardware to visualize. It's enough to let me know that I want it all the time. Unfortunately I don't know how to get it. And searching online has proven difficult and frustrating... for example this article is first of all about a different meaning of "visualize", it's talking about some kind of self-help motivational thingy, and second of all it starts by saying "How to Visualize: I want you to relax and close your eyes. Picture a hot, sunny day at the beach."
Full Stop. Halt, Catch Fire and Burn.
That's already too far. For those of us who don't visualize, practice definitely does not consist of pulling up mental images, playing with them in new ways, and expanding our imagination. I'm very good at imagination in some ways, but I lack that first ability to pull up a mental image. That's what I want to learn how to have!
Here is a description of what I can do, what I have tried, what I have learned, etc.
I see vivid visual mental imagery in 3 situations:
- While dreaming. My recollection of dreams has that I see fairly vivid, sharp, whole-scene imagery.
- Just before sleep. When I am in a certain almost-sleeping state, I can tell my mind to picture something - like an apple, or a horse - and I will often be able to see that thing vividly, briefly, and then it morphs into a scene. A beach with an ocean, or a pleasant clearing in a forest. If I try to alter the scene, like putting a beach towel and umbrella on the beach, the scene changes and morphs in some way but seemingly without regard to the changes I requested. Maybe my POV starts moving forward down a newly created path in the forest, for example.
- During meditation. Sometimes I feel like I'm in exactly the same mental state during meditation as I am just before sleep, except without the tiredness. The imagery has the same characteristics in both situations.
- Staying in visualization situations. When I find myself in the just before sleep or meditation state, I stay there for a while and play with imagery. This is fun but I have seen no increase in control over what I visualize and no increase in the range of states in which I can visualize.
- Explicit imagery practice. I have found or drawn simple shapes, like a square or a ball, then stared at the shape, closed my eyes, seen the shape for as long as it stayed visualizable, opened my eyes to refresh, repeat. This straight up hasn't worked at all. I don't visualize it, only have the afterimage, and need to refresh within about a second.
- Object drawing. I have had 3D constructions of blocks and tried drawing them from different angles on paper. This is an exercise I did while growing up during summers. Unfortunately there was no actual imagery or mental rotation involved, I just logic'd out where lines must surely go and drew like that.
- Picturing breakfast. The image is extraordinarily dim, extraordinarily ill-defined (at most an edge or two changing the black-purple-brown background static texture), and not at all natural colors.
- Vividness of Mental Imagery scale. This is a sequence of 100 descriptions of imagery, organized approximately in order from most vivid to least vivid. Of the given responses I identify most strongly with 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, and 99.
Taking into account another's preferences
Question regarding: If you don't know the name of the game, just tell me what I mean to you
I've been thinking about what it means to prefer that someone else achieve their preferences. In particular, what happens if you and I both prefer to adopt and chase after each other's preferences to some extent. This has clear good points, like cooperating and making more resources more fungible and thus probably being more efficient and achieving more preferences overall, and clear failure modes, like "What do you want to do? -- I don't know, I want to do whatever you want to do. Repeat."
My first thought: okay, simple, I'll just define my utility function U' to be U + aV where U was my previous utility function and V is your utility function and a is an appropriate scaling factor as per Stuart's post and then I can follow U'!1
This has a couple problems. First, if you're also trying to change your actions based on what I want, there's a circular reference issue. Second, U already contains part of V by definition, or something2.
My second thought: Fine, first we'll both factor our preferences into U = U1 + aV where U1 is my preference without regards to what you want. (Yours is V = V1 + bU) Basically what I want to say is "What do you want to do, 'cause ignoring you I want burgers a bit more than Italian, which I want significantly more than sandwiches from home" and then you could say "well ignoring you I want sandwiches more than Italian more than burgers but it's not a big thing, so since you mean b to me, let's do Italian". It's that "ignoring you" bit that I don't know how to correctly intuit. And by intuit I mean put into math.
Assuming it means something coherent to factor U into U1 + aV, there's still a problem. Watch what happens when we remove the self-reference. First scale U and V to something you and I can agree is approximately fungible. Maybe marginal hours, maybe marginal dollars, whatever. Now U = U1 + a(V1 + bU), so U - abU = U1 + aV1 and as long as ab<1, you can maximize U by maximizing U1 + aV1. Which sounds great, except that my intuition screams that maximizing U should depend on b. So what's up there? My guess is that somewhere I snuck a dependence on b into a...
(I like that the ab<1 constraint appears... intuitively I think it should mean that if we both try to care too much about what the other person wants, neither of us will get anywhere making a decision. "I don't know, what do you want to do?" In general if no one ever lets a>=1 then things should converge.)
I feel like the obvious next step is to list some simple outcomes and play pretend with two people trying to care about each other and fake-elicit their preferences and translate that into utility functions and just check to see how those functions factor. But I've felt like that for a week and haven't done it yet, so here's what I've got.
1Of course I know humans don't work like this, I just want the math.
2"Or something" means I have an idea that sounds maybe right but it's pretty hand-wavy and maybe completely wrong and I certainly can't or don't want to formalize it.
Cooperative Surplus Splitting
Often we cooperate to extract surplus value from the government, hotels, the physics that makes operating cars cost money, or other sources - value that we could not extract individually. When I notice such a surplus I often wonder how the surplus should be split. What is fair? Purely cooperatively, without anyone trying to game the surplus-allocation-function, and assuming the stated coalitions are fixed rather than negotiable, how much of the surplus should be attributed to each contributing party?
Some concrete examples that have come up recently in real life*:
1. Matching donations. The company I work for will match donations to charity, dollar for dollar, up to a certain maximum. Viscerally, how should I feel about donating $100 to puppies**? More than $100, since puppies get $200, certainly. But less than $200, since my employer should feel puppy-love too, and presumably there's a conservation of visceral feeling law that should apply here. Further suppose that my employer's matching offer caused me to donate $100 instead of, say, $50. What math should be done and why?
2. Exemption splitting. An amicable divorce leaves two parents wondering who should claim their student daughter as a dependent. As a purely "what is fair?" financial question, how much of the tax savings from that exemption should be distributed to the father, mother, and daughter? Suppose the father's marginal tax rate is 25% and overall tax rate is 18%, and the mother's marginal rate is 15% and overall is 12%. What math should be done and why?
3. Refinancing. My friend has a debt at 12% and for silly reasons is obviously able to pay it off but cannot this year. I can pay it off, though, and so could several other people***. Assume there are 3 people including me who could pay it off, and our current expected returns on invested money are (say) 2%, 3.5%, and 6%, and for simplicity she will repay the loan plus any surplus due in one year. Who should pay off how much of the loan (say it's $5000)? I assume the 2% person should pay all of it. That's a 10% surplus - how much do each of the four of us get? What math should be done and why?
As in The Bedrock of Fairness, are there qualities of the solutions we have strong opinions on, even if we do not know the procedure which would generate solutions with those qualities?
*Details changed.
**I do not donate to puppies.
***Assume default risk is negligible.
Meetup : Board Games "Seattle"
Discussion article for the meetup : Board Games
Play board games. Have fun. Have fun while playing board games. The agenda is straightforward. Bring friends or games if you like. Here's the thread with more details including an address, ride info, and the number 3^^^3: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/lw-seattle/3KatvMGOe8A%5B1-25%5D
Discussion article for the meetup : Board Games
Meetup : Queueing and More
Discussion article for the meetup : Queueing and More
Discussion about reducing queue size as a heuristic, arbitrary discussion, dinner, boxing probably not, board games maybe, alcohol likely.
See http://groups.google.com/group/lw-seattle/browse_thread/thread/f3bac3bc1b505f7b for details and ride planning.
Discussion article for the meetup : Queueing and More
Meetup : Seattle Board Games
Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Board Games
Come play board games with fellow LWers and friends in Redmond!
Go to http://groups.google.com/group/lw-seattle to arrange carpooling.
Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Board Games
Meetup : Seattle: Intro to Bayes' Theorem
Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle: Intro to Bayes' Theorem
Intro to Bayes' Theorem. We'll go over several ways of intuiting Bayes' Theorem and practice applying it to update on evidence. There will be cheesecake and a whiteboard, and maybe Zendo afterwards.
Join http://groups.google.com/group/lw-seattle for address.
Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle: Intro to Bayes' Theorem
Anyone else work at Microsoft?
I've created an internal discussion list "lesswrong", come join it. I know there must be more of us around!
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