Hi all, I'm Jeff.

I've started mentally rewarding myself with a happy thought and a smile when I catch myself starting a bad habit ("Hey! I noticed!") instead of castigating myself ("Doh! I'm doing it again!"). Seems to work so far; we'll see how it goes.

I started using the Pomodoro technique today (pick a task, work on it for 25 minutes, break for 5, repeat). I'll had to adjust it somewhat to deal with interruptions during the day, but that wasn't too hard: when I get done with the interruption, I just have less time before the next break. (I'm keeping the breaks at :25 and :55 to make it easier to keep track.)

There are a number of minor tasks that I've been putting off for weeks (or months) that I finished today, just because I was stuck in the middle of a 25-minute assignment and I wasn't allowing myself to switch to something "more important" until then. So so far Pomodoro is very promising.

I allocated the first time block this morning to scraping together my notes and planning for the week. I didn't get a plan made, but I did realize how ridiculously overcommitted I was once I started thinking of tasks in terms of available half-hour slots.

I also have a strong aversion to posting my writing publicly, especially if it reveals anything personal about myself. So this post right here is a direct attempt to overcome that by just doing it. I'm not sure if this is using any specific technique from the minicamp, or just making use of the crazy mental energy from the camp while I'm still feeling it.

We have a number of volunteers for this, and we're very grateful to those of you who have volunteered! But we could really use about twice that number of people. You can help us raise the sanity waterline this way - either by volunteering or by pointing another LWer toward this. But we need people soon since the first minicamp is in just a week. So please, help us make a more sane world by helping us develop tools that will keep our efforts honest. Thank you!

While I love the idea I think you're missing the problem that most of our in-group view themselves as people who don't dance.

It's not, but then LW group members can't be presumed rational. What sort of synchronized group movement or synchronized group voice or both would bypass the Cthulhulian-horror-of-conformity filters?

7b) Is there any evidence I'll be glad I went that a Christian retreat could not produce just as easily?

Edit: Okay, 15 seconds to this being downvoted was a little hasty.

The cues people have for noticing their rationalizations are things they notice before they're done thinking. They have not rationalized; they had a thought that could lead to rationalization or a feeling they associate with rationalizing. And then they stopped. But there was a large enough time between when they started arguing for a conclusion and when they decided to think about it that they noticed their rationalization. Having a reflex to think about a question fast enough compared to the reflex to rationalize can cause someone to not notice their arguments for some answer, then say they never rationalize, or just not rationalize.

I don't relate to anyone's examples of their own rationalizations or have use for the Litany of Tarski except for explaining myself to people who don't think deliberately. I would say I never rationalize if that is the alternative to giving an example of a time when I did because I haven't noticed such an example. But I also know that I am not in conscious control of most of my thought process, and that enumerating potential evidence for a hypothesis looks suspiciously like rationalization, so I would say I do rationalize if I can explain that instead of giving examples. Rationalization can occur subconsciously and not be recognized as a rationalization if it is not allowed to corrupt the whole line of thinking.

But in several of our test sessions for teaching rationality, a handful of people report never rationalizing and seem to have little clue what Tarski is for.

Don't you have exercises designed to catch people rationalizing? If not, you ought to, if yes, did you catch them rationalizing?

I tend to agree that anyone who denies the tendency to rationalize is either in denial or has a different definition for the word "rationalize". In fact I would argue that rationalization is the default for human beings, and that anything else requires either focused effort or serious mental re-programming (which is still probably only partially effective).

One possible way to try to elicit an understanding for any given individual's capacity for rationalization is to ask them about the last time they did something they knew was a bad idea (perhaps a comrpomise they felt uncomfortable making, or an indulgence they knew they were going to regret), and then to ask them what excuses went through their brains to justify it. If someone still denies ever having had such an experience then they are beyond redemption.

Anyone volunteers to go through Vladimir_Nesov's comments on LW and point out his rationalizations to him?

I don't think I rationalize to any significant extent. Even the examples I came up with for Anna's thread concern inefficient allocation of attention and using zero-information arguments, not something specifically directed to defense of a position. I admit being wrong or confused on simple things, sometimes incorrectly (so that I have to go back to embrace a momentarily-rejected position). It's possible I'm completely incapable of noticing rationalization and would need a new basic skill to fix that, but doesn't seem very likely.

(Alternatively, perhaps "rationalization" needs to be unpacked a bit, so that problems like those in the examples I referred to above can find a place in that notion. As it is, they seem more like flaws in understanding unbiased with respect to a favored conclusion, unless that conclusion is to be selected in the hindsight.)