The System 1/2 schema is a popular and useful meme, but it feels limiting sometimes. I found this new paper interesting:

http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00993/full

I'm of two minds about this (hah!). On the one hand, it often does feel like there are sharp divides in mindspace. Something will be understood by system 2 but this understanding does not show up in behavior. I still act as if the thing is not true. Then, by some mysterious process, the thing will "click" and it feels like system 1 really gets it. After this the belief in the thing is reflected in behavior. On the other hand, there are many instances where it does not feel appropriate to divide particular mental habits into either system 1 or 2. Doing math, for instance, seems to strongly have factors of both. My immediate intuition is that the continuous model is more "correct" but that there is quite a bit of clustering in the mindspace. System 1&2 would then simply be large clusters.

Anyway, I'm curious about other people's impressions.

One thing I'm frustrated by is that I don't have a map of proposed schemas. There have been lots of different ones proposed over the centuries, and I don't know of any place where I can find a summary of them, as well as draw links between ones that shared an intellectual lineage. Does anyone know of resources relating to this?

The following is authored by Colby Davis. I am posting for him because he doesn't have an account with any karma. Someone recently requested numbers on cryo preservation costs. I'll note that my own opinion is that for young people unlikely to die investing money in research is a better bet than investing directly in your own preservation.

Here is the link for the spreadsheet. Either download it or create a copy for yourself to edit.

Hey rationalists, here's the spreadsheet I presented the other night. For those who weren't there but are interested, this is a tool I designed to break down the costs associated with signing up for cryonics under different methods of financing it. Here are some instructions for using it.

Column B is where the user puts all the inputs: age, sex, probability you think that if you are frozen you will someday be successfully revived, and discount rate (for those unfamiliar with the term, this is like the reverse of an interest rate, the rate at which cash flows become less valuable to you as they extend further out into the future).

Column D is the probability that you will die in the next 20 years (the typical term for a term life insurance policy). It is calculated based on the "life table" sheet, which i stole from a government actuarial table online.

Column E is your current life expectancy, the number of additional years you have a roughly 50% chance of surviving through.

Column F is how much the monthly fee for a 20 year, $100,000 life insurance policy would cost you, assuming "exceptional" health, as determined by the top result at http://www.term4sale.com/

Column G is the present value of that policy, using your discount rate. This means that you should be indifferent between paying this amount right now and paying the figure in column F every month for the next 20 years.

Column H is the probability that you will die within the next 20 years AND sometime thereafter be successfully revived from cryogenic suspension, making the heroic assumption that your probability belief in column B is true.

Column I is simply the dollar present value amount spent per 1 percentage point reduction in (permanent) death. This is the value you want to consider most when deciding whether to sign up or not.

The next columns consider the alternative means of paying for a cryonics policy, saving up and investing in the stock market until you have enough money to pay for it outright.

Column K gives the future value after 20 years of investing the amount you would have spent on an insurance policy in the stock market instead, as well as the present value of that figure to you now, discounted back at the rate you gave. (This is not necessarily pertinent to the cryonics decision but is provided for comparison)

Column L is the amount you would have to invest monthly to have an expected future value of $100,000 by the end of your life expectancy.

Column M is the present value of foregoing that monthly amount for the rest of your life expectancy.

Column N is the probability you will die after you life expectancy (50%) AND be successfully revived assuming yours p-value.

And finally column O is the same measure as in Column I, using this alternative plan. A lower value in one column or the other (most of you will find column O to be the lesser value) means that you can reduce your probability of permanent death cheaper (or, reduce your probability of death by a greater amount for the same dollar amount) by pursuing the cheaper strategy.

Hope you enjoy!

- Colby  

P.S.

There was a discussion at the meeting about whether the figure in column N was too high because it failed to account for the probability that poor stock market performance may leave you without enough money to afford the cost of cryonics. I believe this is false because since long-run stock returns distributions and life expectancies are approximately normally distributed and independent of one another, the chance that you will die late with a poor return (thus unable to freeze your head) is almost perfectly offset by the chance that you will die early with a great return (thus still able to freeze your head). So it's not that the mean is too high, but merely that there is a variance around it. I was trying to figure out how to work this into the spreadsheet but figured the uncertainty of our beliefs about cryonics was much more a confounding factor here than the probability distribution of possible stock-returns-time-paths.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-formula-for-decoding-health-news/

Their actual implementation is rather hand wavy, but I think getting people pointed in the right direction is a lot more important than the particulars. The high visibility of FiveThirtyEight makes me think this is a big win for sanity. I'm curious as to what others think. Which parts were done well? What might have been done differently?

Followup to: Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity.

What does it mean for exercise to be optimal?

• Optimal for looks
• Optimal for time
• Optimal for effort
• Optimal for performance
• Optimal for longevity

There may be even more criteria.

We're all likely going for a mix of outcomes, and optimal exercise is going to change depending on your weighting of different factors. So I'm going to discuss something close to a minimum viable routine based on meta-analyses of exercise studies.

Not knowing which sort of exercise yields the best results gives our brains an excuse to stop thinking about it. The intent of this post is to go over the dose responses to various types of exercise. We’re going to break through vague notions like “exercise is good” and “I should probably exercise more” with a concrete plan where you understand the relevant parameters that will cause dramatic improvements.

There is a lot of bad science and controversy in the realm of how to have a healthy lifestyle. Every week we are bombarded with new studies conflicting older studies telling us X is good or Y is bad. Eventually we reach our psychological limit, throw up our hands, and give up. I used to do this a lot. I knew exercise was good, I knew flossing was good, and I wanted to eat better. But I never acted on any of that knowledge. I would feel guilty when I thought about this stuff and go back to what I was doing. Unsurprisingly, this didn't really cause me to make any positive lifestyle changes.

Instead of vaguely guilt-tripping you with potentially unreliable science news, this post aims to provide an overview of lifestyle interventions that have very strong evidence behind them and concrete ways to implement them.

Haven't had one of these for awhile. This thread is for questions or comments that you've felt silly about not knowing/understanding. Let's try to exchange info that seems obvious, knowing that due to the illusion of transparency it really isn't so obvious!

At a recent meetup one of the topics of discussion was methods of introspection. This is an interesting topic to me because sometimes all it takes is becoming aware of a new method to clarify an area where you were making little progress. Different methods also appeal more to people with different cognitive styles.  I think it would be awesome to be surprised by useful modes we haven't thought of before!

Before you fill your brain up with what we came up with, I am asking you to spend 1-5 minutes writing down names or descriptions of the different methods you use when engaged in thought.  This can be normal thought, metacognition, etc. If you can think of a label or description that communicates something useful about it, it's fair game. An example if you have no idea what I'm talking about: imagining counterfactuals is a method of introspection, meditation can also be one, etc. It is a lot harder to brainstorm once you see 20 different ideas.

Rot13 notes from meeting, you don't have to rot13 your comments, but this means you should make your comment before reading others.

Vaare Fvzhyngbe/Perngvat Aneengvirf

Znxvat/Grfgvat cerqvpgvbaf

Gheavat bss vaare prafbe/fgernz bs pbafpvbhfarff

Tbny snpgbevat

Frrvat ceboyrz sebz 3eq crefba/ WBBGF / qrivy'f nqibpngr

Fgehpgherq Oenvafgbezvat

Dhnagvslvat orunivbef/gubhtugf

Npgvivgl Ybtf/Wbheanyvat

Zrqvgngvba

Pbyynobengvir vagebfcrpgvba, fgehpgherq be hafgehpgherq

Pynffvslvat artngvir gubhtug cnggreaf:

Vafreg ovnfrf naq snyynpvrf urer?

Zrgubqf bs pbzcnevat fhotbnyf? (VSF genafnpgvbaf?)

Pbtavgvir Bagbybtvrf:

Flfgrz 1&2

Vagreany Snzvyl Flfgrzf

Znfybj'f uvrenepul

Crefbanyvgl glcrf/Vqragvgl

In one project, 256 members of a health-insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them develop exercise routines.

The results were dramatic. Over the next four months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded similar results.

-"Lifestyle Intervention by Self-Regulation of Action (LISA)" study by Stadler, Oettinger and Gollwitzer 2005.

I don't think this topic needs a huge introduction.  Most of us have tried, at some point, to establish a new routine only to have it crash and burn. We came up with and discussed some of the more obvious failure modes at last week's southbay meetup, which generated the material here.  It would be awesome to further refine this.  Particularly, some overarching ontology of failure modes would be useful for turning them into a more mentally compact checklist. So feedback on how this material can be organized and presented better is most welcome.

Failure is Always Failure

"I would have succeeded if it weren't for those meddling kids!" The "perfect plan" that you can't actually execute on is not the perfect plan. Take responsibility for the failure and figure out what's really going on. 

Mental cue: Bad news is good news.

Negative Reinforcement

Taking responsibility for failure doesn't mean beating yourself up over it. If you have bad feelings every time you think about habit X due to past failures you are only reinforcing the act of not thinking about habit X.  Failure means you are aware that something went wrong, which means you can improve.

Mental cue: The process failed, so fix the process. Failure and iteration is part of good processes.

Perfectionism

That a good process will yield good results doesn't mean we should fall prey to paralysis by analysis. It also doesn't mean we should give up and go back to the drawing board every time we experience a bump in the road.  People commonly engage in visualizing a perfect version of themselves, who obviously wouldn't have failed.  This is frustrating, demotivating, and possibly what is going on with the planning fallacy. Notice when you are constructing a fictional narrative about how well it is possible to do.  How well would you expect a friend in the same situation to do?

mental cue: The perfect is the enemy of the good. You are your own worst critic.

Going too Big too Fast

In the perfect world of our minds, we choose big, exciting-sounding goals and execute on them flawlessly. We become fit, write the next Pulitzer-winning novel, and found a successful startup.  We usually gloss over the fact that getting fit actually means doing pushups, writing a novel involves writing individual pages, and running a successful startup involves emptying your own wastepaper basket. When there is a disconnect between our big goals and everyday actions we don't feel motivated to do those mundane tasks.  Goal factoring, and other techniques for connecting our little goals to our big goals help here.

Mental cue: Granularize

Assuming Constant Motivation

When we create sub-goals we choose things we think we can do. "Of course I can walk 30 minutes everyday." We ignore that when we are creating and evaluating plans we are likely to be in a highly motivated mood. Of course everything seems easy when we are in a motivated mood. Apportion your limited budget of highly motivated time to ensuring that you will be surrounded by cues that encourage your new habit, whether this be people, things, or situations.  This can be as simple as "surrounding yourself" with alarm apps that cue you to do the things you precommitted to doing.

Mental cue: You are the average of your surroundings.

Not Quantifying the Results

Far goals are often qualitative.  We're not sure how much we want to improve by, we just know it's a lot. The problem is that qualitative goals aren't very motivating in terms of actual actions. "I want to get better about responding to emails." Notice the word "better". Contrast with "I want to cut the number of emails I don't respond to by 50% over the next 2 weeks." Now we're getting somewhere, and we have somewhere to start. This is also related to the concept that motivation is hard to maintain when one of our sub-agents has an objection to what we're doing (usually because they aren't convinced it is a good use of time.)

Mental cue: Be specific.

Brittle Plans

This bit was somewhat disorganized. But it involves having a Plan B, as well as figuring out when you are going to reevaluate and update your plan. Also recognizing that what matters in habit formation is getting it mostly right and one shouldn't give up just because they screwed up one time, or even several times.

I'm all fired up to form new habits, now what?

If you don't have anything you're currently working on I suggest instilling the habit of researching new, possibly beneficial habits to have.

Note: In writing this I'm noticing similarity to SMART goals.  Perhaps adapting that would be better since it's already nice and memorable.

Mentions include selection bias, lack of reproduction of results, naturalistic fallacy, status signalling, habituation, science as attire, and maybe some I didn't catch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g1denSoAbc&feature=player_embedded

It suddenly occurred to me that not everyone uses a website I love.  Of all the websites I browse if you asked me which one improves my standard of living in the largest, most concrete way, it would be slickdeals.

What it is: a community driven "hot deals" website with voting.  By itself this is already useful, but the best feature is deal alerts.  you never have to actually browse slickdeals.  Just create an account, set up deal alerts for whatever strings interest you (I for example have a deal alert for "whey" to get alerted to deals on whey protein powder).

More than 50% of my belongings come from sales I've been alerted to via slickdeals.  Any big ticket items I need, but don't need immediately I just set alerts and wait.  My laptop, desktop, tablet, smartphone, clothes, toiletries, books, games, even some food are all slightly better for the price I paid than they otherwise would have been.

So what other sites am I missing out on that would make my life a lot better?

A website I just discovered for habit building chains.cc seems cool, but I haven't had time to evaluate its usefulness yet.