Examples of growth mindset or practice in fiction
As people who care about rationality and winning, it's pretty important to care about training. Repeated practice is how humans acquire skills, and skills are what we use for winning.
Unfortunately, it's sometimes hard to get System 1 fully on board with the fact that repeated, difficult, sometimes tedious practice is how we become awesome. I find fiction to be one of the most useful ways of communicating things like this to my S1. It would be great to have a repository of fiction that shows characters practicing skills, mastering them, and becoming awesome, to help this really sink in.
However, in fiction the following tropes are a lot more common:
- hero is born to greatness and only needs to discover that greatness to win [I don't think I actually need to give examples of this?]
- like (1), only the author talks about the skill development or the work in passing… but in a way that leaves the reader's attention (and system 1 reinforcement?) on the "already be awesome" part, rather that the "practice to become awesome" part [HPMOR; the Dresden Files, where most of the implied practice takes place between books.]
- training montage, where again the reader's attention isn't on the training long enough to reinforce the "practice to become awesome" part, but skips to the "wouldn't it be great to already be awesome" part [TVtropes examples].
- The hero starts out ineffectual and becomes great over the course of the book, but this comes from personal revelations and insights, rather than sitting down and practicing [Nice Dragons Finish Last is an example of this].
Example of exactly the wrong thing:
The Hunger Games - Katniss is explicitly up against the Pledges who have trained their whole lives for this one thing, but she has … something special that causes her to win. Also archery is her greatest skill, and she's already awesome at it from the beginning of the story and never spends time practicing.
Close-but-not-perfect examples of the right thing:
The Pillars of the Earth - Jack pretty explicitly has to travel around Europe to acquire the skills he needs to become great. Much of the practice is off-screen, but it's at least a pretty significant part of the journey.
The Honor Harrington series: the books depict Honor, as well as the people around her, rising through the ranks of the military and gradually levelling up, with emphasis on dedication to training, and that training is often depicted onscreen – but the skills she's training in herself and her subordinates aren't nearly as relevant as the "tactical genius" that she seems to have been born with.
I'd like to put out a request for fiction that has this quality. I'll also take examples of fiction that fails badly at this quality, to add to the list of examples, or of TVTropes keywords that would be useful to mine. Internet hivemind, help?
The Importance of Sidekicks
[Reposted from my personal blog.]
Mindspace is wide and deep. “People are different” is a truism, but even knowing this, it’s still easy to underestimate.
I spent much of my initial engagement with the rationality community feeling weird and different. I appreciated the principle and project of rationality as things that were deeply important to me; I was pretty pro-self improvement, and kept tsuyoku naritai as my motto for several years. But the rationality community, the people who shared this interest of mine, often seemed baffled by my values and desires. I wasn’t ambitious, and had a hard time wanting to be. I had a hard time wanting to be anything other than a nurse.
It wasn’t until this August that I convinced myself that this wasn’t a failure in my rationality, but rather a difference in my basic drives. It’s around then, in the aftermath of the 2014 CFAR alumni reunion, that I wrote the following post.
I don’t believe in life-changing insights (that happen to me), but I think I’ve had one–it’s been two weeks and I’m still thinking about it, thus it seems fairly safe to say I did.
At a CFAR Monday test session, Anna was talking about the idea of having an “aura of destiny”–it’s hard to fully convey what she meant and I’m not sure I get it fully, but something like seeing yourself as you’ll be in 25 years once you’ve saved the world and accomplished a ton of awesome things. She added that your aura of destiny had to be in line with your sense of personal aesthetic, to feel “you.”
I mentioned to Kenzi that I felt stuck on this because I was pretty sure that the combination of ambition and being the locus of control that “aura of destiny” conveyed to me was against my sense of personal aesthetic.
Kenzi said, approximately [I don't remember her exact words]: “What if your aura of destiny didn’t have to be those things? What if you could be like…Samwise, from Lord of the Rings? You’re competent, but most importantly, you’re *loyal* to Frodo. You’re the reason that the hero succeeds.”
I guess this isn’t true for most people–Kenzi said she didn’t want to keep thinking of other characters who were like this because she would get so insulted if someone kept comparing her to people’s sidekicks–but it feels like now I know what I am.
So. I’m Samwise. If you earn my loyalty, by convincing me that what you’re working on is valuable and that you’re the person who should be doing it, I’ll stick by you whatever it takes, and I’ll *make sure* you succeed. I don’t have a Frodo right now. But I’m looking for one.
It then turned out that quite a lot of other people recognized this, so I shifted from “this is a weird thing about me” to “this is one basic personality type, out of many.” Notably, Brienne wrote the following comment:
Sidekick” doesn’t *quite* fit my aesthetic, but it’s extremely close, and I feel it in certain moods. Most of the time, I think of myself more as what TV tropes would call a “dragon”. Like the Witch-king of Angmar, if we’re sticking of LOTR. Or Bellatrix Black. Or Darth Vader. (It’s not my fault people aren’t willing to give the good guys dragons in literature.)
For me, finding someone who shared my values, who was smart and rational enough for me to trust him, and who was in a much better position to actually accomplish what I most cared about than I imagined myself ever being, was the best thing that could have happened to me.
She also gave me what’s maybe one of the best and most moving compliments I’ve ever received.
In Australia, something about the way you interacted with people suggested to me that you help people in a completely free way, joyfully, because it fulfills you to serve those you care about, and not because you want something from them… I was able to relax around you, and ask for your support when I needed it while I worked on my classes. It was really lovely… The other surprising thing was that you seemed to act that way with everyone. You weren’t “on” all the time, but when you were, everybody around you got the benefit. I’d never recognized in anyone I’d met a more diffuse service impulse, like the whole human race might be your master. So I suddenly felt like I understood nurses and other people in similar service roles for the first time.
Sarah Constantin, who according to a mutual friend is one of the most loyal people who exists, chimed in with some nuance to the Frodo/Samwise dynamic: “Sam isn’t blindly loyal to Frodo. He makes sure the mission succeeds even when Frodo is fucking it up. He stands up to Frodo. And that’s important too.”
Kate Donovan, who also seems to share this basic psychological makeup, added “I have a strong preference for making the lives of the lead heroes better, and very little interest in ever being one.”
Meanwhile, there were doubts from others who didn’t feel this way. The “we need heroes, the world needs heroes” narrative is especially strong in the rationalist community. And typical mind fallacy abounds. It seems easy to assume that if someone wants to be a support character, it’s because they’re insecure–that really, if they believed in themselves, they would aim for protagonist.
I don’t think this is true. As Kenzi pointed out: “The other thing I felt like was important about Samwise is that his self-efficacy around his particular mission wasn’t a detriment to his aura of destiny – he did have insecurities around his ability to do this thing – to stand by Frodo – but even if he’d somehow not had them, he still would have been Samwise – like that kind of self-efficacy would have made his essence *more* distilled, not less.”
Brienne added: “Becoming the hero would be a personal tragedy, even though it would be a triumph for the world if it happened because I surpassed him, or discovered he was fundamentally wrong.”
Why write this post?
Usually, “this is a true and interesting thing about humans” is enough of a reason for me to write something. But I’ve got a lot of other reasons, this time.
I suspect that the rationality community, with its “hero” focus, drives away many people who are like me in this sense. I’ve thought about walking away from it, for basically that reason. I could stay in Ottawa and be a nurse for forty years; it would fulfil all my most basic emotional needs, and no one would try to change me. Because oh boy, have people tried to do that. It’s really hard to be someone who just wants to please others, and to be told, basically, that you’re not good enough–and that you owe it to the world to turn yourself ambitious, strategic, Slytherin.
Firstly, this is mean regardless. Secondly, it’s not true.
Samwise was important. So was Frodo, of course. But Frodo needed Samwise. Heroes need sidekicks. They can function without them, but function a lot better with them. Maybe it’s true that there aren’t enough heroes trying to save the world. But there sure as hell aren’t enough sidekicks trying to help them. And there especially aren’t enough talented, competent, awesome sidekicks.
If you’re reading this post, and it resonates with you… Especially if you’re someone who has felt unappreciated and alienated for being different… I have something to tell you. You count. You. Fucking. Count. You’re needed, even if the heroes don’t realize it yet. (Seriously, heroes, you should be more strategic about looking for awesome sidekicks. AFAIK only Nick Bostrom is doing it.) This community could use more of you. Pretty much every community could use more of you.
I’d like, someday, to live in a culture that doesn’t shame this way of being. As Brienne points out, “Society likes *selfless* people, who help everybody equally, sure. It’s socially acceptable to be a nurse, for example. Complete loyalty and devotion to “the hero”, though, makes people think of brainwashing, and I’m not sure what else exactly but bad things.” (And not all subsets of society even accept nursing as a Valid Life Choice.) I’d like to live in a world where an aspiring Samwise can find role models; where he sees awesome, successful people and can say, “yes, I want to grow up to be that.”
Maybe I can’t have that world right away. But at least I know what I’m reaching for. I have a name for it. And I have a Frodo–Ruby and I are going to be working together from here on out. I have a reason not to walk away.
A discussion of heroic responsibility
[Originally posted to my personal blog, reposted here with edits.]
Introduction
You could call it heroic responsibility, maybe,” Harry Potter said. “Not like the usual sort. It means that whatever happens, no matter what, it’s always your fault. Even if you tell Professor McGonagall, she’s not responsible for what happens, you are. Following the school rules isn’t an excuse, someone else being in charge isn’t an excuse, even trying your best isn’t an excuse. There just aren’t any excuses, you’ve got to get the job done no matter what.” Harry’s face tightened. “That’s why I say you’re not thinking responsibly, Hermione. Thinking that your job is done when you tell Professor McGonagall—that isn’t heroine thinking. Like Hannah being beat up is okay then, because it isn’t your fault anymore. Being a heroine means your job isn’t finished until you’ve done whatever it takes to protect the other girls, permanently.” In Harry’s voice was a touch of the steel he had acquired since the day Fawkes had been on his shoulder. “You can’t think as if just following the rules means you’ve done your duty. –HPMOR, chapter 75.
Something Impossible
Bold attempts aren't enough, roads can't be paved with intentions...You probably don’t even got what it takes,But you better try anyway, for everyone's sakeAnd you won’t find the answer until you escape from theLabyrinth of your conventions.Its time to just shut up, and do the impossible.Can’t walk away...Gotta break off those shackles, and shake off those chainsGotta make something impossible happen today...
The Well-Functioning Gear
I feel like maybe the hospital is an emergent system that has the property of patient-healing, but I’d be surprised if any one part of it does.Suppose I see an unusual result on my patient. I don’t know what it means, so I mention it to a specialist. The specialist, who doesn’t know anything about the patient beyond what I’ve told him, says to order a technetium scan. He has no idea what a technetium scan is or how it is performed, except that it’s the proper thing to do in this situation. A nurse is called to bring the patient to the scanner, but has no idea why. The scanning technician, who has only a vague idea why the scan is being done, does the scan and spits out a number, which ends up with me. I bring it to the specialist, who gives me a diagnosis and tells me to ask another specialist what the right medicine for that is. I ask the other specialist – who has only the sketchiest idea of the events leading up to the diagnosis – about the correct medicine, and she gives me a name and tells me to ask the pharmacist how to dose it. The pharmacist – who has only the vague outline of an idea who the patient is, what test he got, or what the diagnosis is – doses the medication. Then a nurse, who has no idea about any of this, gives the medication to the patient. Somehow, the system works and the patient improves.Part of being an intern is adjusting to all of this, losing some of your delusions of heroism, getting used to the fact that you’re not going to be Dr. House, that you are at best going to be a very well-functioning gear in a vast machine that does often tedious but always valuable work. –Scott Alexander
Recursive Heroic Responsibility
Heroic responsibility for average humans under average conditions
I can predict at least one thing that people will say in the comments, because I've heard it hundreds of times–that Swimmer963 is a clear example of someone who should leave nursing, take the meta-level responsibility, and do something higher impact for the usual. Because she's smart. Because she's rational. Whatever.
Fine. This post isn't about me. Whether I like it or not, the concept of heroic responsibility is now a part of my value system, and I probably am going to leave nursing.
But what about the other nurses on my unit, the ones who are competent and motivated and curious and really care? Would familiarity with the concept of heroic responsibility help or hinder them in their work? Honestly, I predict that they would feel alienated, that they would assume I held a low opinion of them (which I don't, and I really don't want them to think that I do), and that they would flinch away and go back to the things that they were doing anyway, the role where they were comfortable–or that, if they did accept it, it would cause them to burn out. So as a consequentialist, I'm not going to tell them.
And yeah, that bothers me. Because I'm not a special snowflake. Because I want to live in a world where rationality helps everyone. Because I feel like the reason they would react that was isn't because of anything about them as people, or because heroic responsibility is a bad thing, but because I'm not able to communicate to them what I mean. Maybe stupid reasons. Still bothers me.
“And that’s okay": accepting and owning reality
The Context
I was having a conversation with Ruby a while back–the gist of it was that I was upset because of a nightmare I’d had the night before, and mad at myself for being upset about something that hadn’t even really happened, and trying to figure out how to stop feeling terrible. He said a thing that turned out to be surprisingly helpful.
Life involves feeling bad, often with good reason, often, not. A lot of the time the best response is to say 'Yes, I'm feeling shitty today, no, I'm not going to able to focus, and that's crap, but that’s today.’
It's different from tolerance or resignation, it's more 'this is reality, this is my starting point and I've got to accept this is what it is'.
Then if you can find a way to make it go away, great, if not, most things pass soon enough, and even if didn't, you could accept that too.”
I’m not good at this. I’m frequently using System 2 to fight System 1: for example, when I’m feeling introverted and really don’t want to be at work having face-to-face conversations with patients and co-workers, I basically tell that part of my brain to suck it up and stop being a baby. I get mad at myself for wanting things that I can’t reasonably ask for, like praise from random other nurses I work with. I get mad at myself for wanting things for what I think are the wrong reasons: for example, wanting to move to San Francisco because I’m friends with lots of people there, and reluctantly accepting that I would need to leave my current job to do that, is one thing, but wanting to leave my job because it’s stressful–not okay! And then I mistrust my brain’s motivations to move to San Francisco at all–heaven forbid I should behave “like a groupie.” I ignore my desires for food that isn’t the same bean salad I’ve been eating for four days, for an extra evenings of sleep, or to cancel on plans with a friend because I just want an afternoon alone at home.
And even though I’m pretty good at overriding all of my desires, the sub-agents that represent those desires don’t go away. They just sit there, metaphorically, fuming at being ignoring and plotting revenge, which they usually achieve by making the desires ten times stronger...and then I go out and buy hot dogs at midnight, or stay in bed for thirteen hours, or spend an entire stretch of days off hiding in my apartment reading fanfiction. Or I just end up confused and conflicted and not capable of wanting anything. In other words, I’m a society of mind that’s frequently in a civil war with itself.
I hadn’t thought of trying to accept the civil war. Of saying “tonight, during this hospital shift, I will not be able to solve the civil war. Rather than adding to the negative affect by getting mad at myself, I will accept that today will simply suck and I will feel shitty. Going into the future I will work on peace talks, but today I must endure.”
"And that’s okay."
There’s one area where I’ve successfully taken a thing that I was confused and conflicted and frustrated about, and turned it into a thing that’s okay, even though the original conflict hasn’t been solved. That thing is relationships. At some point, around the time that I started applying the term asexual to myself and first read about tactile defensiveness and suddenly had words for the things that were ‘wrong’ with me, I stopped being frustrated about them. I haven’t solved all the problems. I’m still confused about relationships, I still get super anxious and avoidant in the face of being wanted too much, and that’s okay. Maybe it’ll change. I haven’t given up, and I’m trying things on purpose. It turned out that most of the suffering from this problem was meta-suffering and now it’s gone.
Somehow, when it wasn’t okay, it was a lot harder to try things on purpose.
I hypothesized that adding the mental phrase “and that’s okay” onto all your problems would be a good general-purpose strategy.
Non-complacency
Ruby disagreed with me: “One of my strongest virtues, but I pay a cost for it, is how not-complacent I am. I'm not good enough, the world's not good enough. And I just see it. It's there. And I'm not okay with it.”
The problem is, even though I don’t have the virtue of acceptance, I don’t have the virtue of non-complacency either–in the sense that seeing the things that aren’t good enough, and not being okay with them, rarely causes me to do something to make the things better. It causes me to not think about them, unless it’s something as object-level as “my patient is in pain and the doctor refuses to give me an order for more pain meds.” And sometimes even then, I’ll retreat into it no longer being my problem.
I think that I, and probably others, need a certain amount of acceptance, a certain amount of “and that’s okay”, to let the wrong things into the circle of our awareness–to admit that yes, they really do suck. It’s a bit like the Litany of Gendlin. What’s true is already true, and even though thinking about it being true makes me feel like I must be a bad person, it can’t cause me to be more of a bad person than I already am.
"You need to own it."
Once, I had a fairly awful nursing school placement at a very large, stressful ICU. I made mistakes, despite the fact that ‘I knew better’ in theory. (I’ve since learned that nursing is something that takes place under average conditions, not optimal conditions, meaning that you will have good days and bad days and that on your bad days, you will make dumb mistakes.)
As a perfectionist, I found this really hard, even though I knew enough cogsci to recognize that my brain was behaving predictably and understandably. My mentor said a lot of things that weren’t helpful, but one of the things that she said is “you need to own your mistakes.” At that time, those words left her mouth and reached my ears and then got processed and turned into “you should admit that you’re hopelessly incompetent and a failure.” The only obvious conclusion to draw was that I ought to quit nursing school right then. I didn’t want to quit, and the only other option was to not think about the stupid mistakes–or, rather, try not to, and then end up thinking about them anyway and being anxious all the time.
Nowadays, when I process those words from a much better emotional place, they come through as “you need to let your mistakes into your self-concept, so that you can learn not to make them again even if you’re put under those same awful conditions again.” The fact that being distracted by an interruption and then trying to put an un-primed, full-of-air IV tubing in the pump is understandable and predictable doesn’t make it less likely to kill someone. The correct response is to develop habits and routines that cause you to predictably not make that mistake. But if thinking about it means automatically bringing up the possibility that you should just quit nursing school now before you actually kill someone, it’s hard to think of good routines or focus on training your brain to do them.
In this case, what eventually helped was letting my past mistakes be just okay enough that I could admit them into my mental autobiography, think about them, strategize, and learn from them–in short, own them.
On Having Priorities
When I brought this up to my friend Ben Hoffman, he had another point to add.
The obvious-to-me alternative here is the trick of putting EVERYTHING on a list, prioritizing, and optimizing for working on the "most important thing" instead of for getting all the "important things" done. (Or solving the most important problem, however you want to word it.) This is the strategy I've started using, and when I'm disciplined about it I feel nearly no badness above the baseline level from having some problems unresolved.
This rings true with a part of my nursing clinical experience, and a thing I found especially frustrating about my interactions with my mentor. Once, I accidentally gave my patient an extra dose of digoxin because I misread the medication sheet. Which ended up doing basically nothing, but the general class of “medication error” contains a lot of harmful options. (The most embarrassing and potentially serious med error that I’ve made so far at my current job involved accidentally running my patient’s fentanyl infusion an order of magnitude too high.) There was also the IV-tubing-full-of-air incident.
Then, there was the thing where I would leave plastic syringe caps and bits of paper from wrappers in patients’ beds. This incurred approximately equal wrath to the med errors–in practice, a lot more, because she would catch me doing it around once a shift. I agreed with her on the possible bad consequences. Patients might get bedsores, and that was bad. But there were other problems I hadn’t solved, and they had worse consequences. I had, correctly I think, decided to focus on those first.
That being said, I wasn’t actually able to stop feeling bad about it enough to actually free up mental space for anti-med-error strategizing. This is partly because an adult in a position of authority was constantly mad at me, and I wasn’t able to make that stop feeling bad. But it’s partly because I genuinely felt like a failure every time I caught myself doing something wrong, whether it mattered a lot or not.
Making lists and prioritizing is a useful thing to do, but the physical motion of writing down a list isn’t all that’s involved. There’s the “being disciplined about it”, the ability to actually take all the problems seriously and then only work on the first and most important. I think that's non-trivial, and doesn't automatically happen when you make a list of Important Problems 1 through 5.
Conclusion
There are two closely related concepts here. One is the idea that you can let go of struggling against unpleasant feelings–you can just have the unpleasant feelings and accept them, forgoing the meta-suffering and the useless burning of mental energy that comes with fighting them. If you apply this mental habit of not struggling against suffering, the result is that you have less overall suffering.
The second concept is related to owning mistakes you've made, or personal flaws, or atrocities in the world. By default, it seems like most people either obsess over these or don't think about them–I expect that this happens because the things are too awful. If you apply the mental habit of admitting that you made that mistake and it really was dumb, or that poverty really is bad, but that that's okay, the result is that you can think about it sanely, set priorities, and maybe actually fix it.
However, when I go through these mental motions, they feel like the same operation, applied to a different substrate. It's an habit that I would like to cultivate more.
Appendix
Ruby sourced much of his original thoughts on this from Acceptance and Commitment Theory, and from Russ Harris’ book The Happiness Trap.
In stark contrast to most Western psychotherapy, ACT does not have symptom reduction as a goal. This is based on the view that the ongoing attempt to get rid of ‘symptoms’ actually creates a clinical disorder in the first place. As soon as a private experience is labeled a ‘symptom’, it immediately sets up a struggle with it because a ‘symptom’ is by definition something ‘pathological’; something we should try to get rid of. In ACT, the aim is to transform our relationship with our difficult thoughts and feelings, so that we no longer perceive them as ‘symptoms’. Instead, we learn to perceive them as harmless, even if uncomfortable, transient psychological events. Ironically, it is through this process that ACT actually achieves symptom reduction—but as a by-product and not the goal.
Meetup : Upper Canada LW Megameetup: Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo, London
Discussion article for the meetup : Upper Canada LW Megameetup: Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo, London
Hi all LWers and CFAR alumni in the eastern Canada region! We'll be hosting a megameetup in Ottawa, Canada, running from 7:00 pm on Friday, July 18th, until early afternoon on Sunday, July 20th. We have a house available and enough space for everyone to sleep on site for the duration. We'll be eating communally, and there will be lots of snacks stocked up at the house, but please plan on contributing some money to cover food costs.
Friday night will be a fun social. Saturday will have a schedule of talks, activities, and CFAR-style classes. Sunday, we will most likely have an outing to a park or beach, depending on weather.
If you would like to come to this meetup, please fill out the following Google Form for logistics purposes: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1zAFz-2nFUfQ31aVW6nFl61gsmnsER7PVCSvlJjwU__E/viewform?usp=send_form
If you have any questions, you can message Swimmer963 and I will try to answer them.
Discussion article for the meetup : Upper Canada LW Megameetup: Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo, London
On Terminal Goals and Virtue Ethics
Introduction
A few months ago, my friend said the following thing to me: “After seeing Divergent, I finally understand virtue ethics. The main character is a cross between Aristotle and you.”
That was an impossible-to-resist pitch, and I saw the movie. The thing that resonated most with me–also the thing that my friend thought I had in common with the main character–was the idea that you could make a particular decision, and set yourself down a particular course of action, in order to make yourself become a particular kind of person. Tris didn’t join the Dauntless cast because she thought they were doing the most good in society, or because she thought her comparative advantage to do good lay there–she chose it because they were brave, and she wasn’t, yet, and she wanted to be. Bravery was a virtue that she thought she ought to have. If the graph of her motivations even went any deeper, the only node beyond ‘become brave’ was ‘become good.’
(Tris did have a concept of some future world-outcomes being better than others, and wanting to have an effect on the world. But that wasn't the causal reason why she chose Dauntless; as far as I can tell, it was unrelated.)
My twelve-year-old self had a similar attitude. I read a lot of fiction, and stories had heroes, and I wanted to be like them–and that meant acquiring the right skills and the right traits. I knew I was terrible at reacting under pressure–that in the case of an earthquake or other natural disaster, I would freeze up and not be useful at all. Being good at reacting under pressure was an important trait for a hero to have. I could be sad that I didn’t have it, or I could decide to acquire it by doing the things that scared me over and over and over again. So that someday, when the world tried to throw bad things at my friends and family, I’d be ready.
You could call that an awfully passive way to look at things. It reveals a deep-seated belief that I’m not in control, that the world is big and complicated and beyond my ability to understand and predict, much less steer–that I am not the locus of control. But this way of thinking is an algorithm. It will almost always spit out an answer, when otherwise I might get stuck in the complexity and unpredictability of trying to make a particular outcome happen.
Virtue Ethics
I find the different houses of the HPMOR universe to be a very compelling metaphor. It’s not because they suggest actions to take; instead, they suggest virtues to focus on, so that when a particular situation comes up, you can act ‘in character.’ Courage and bravery for Gryffindor, for example. It also suggests the idea that different people can focus on different virtues–diversity is a useful thing to have in the world. (I'm probably mangling the concept of virtue ethics here, not having any background in philosophy, but it's the closest term for the thing I mean.)
I’ve thought a lot about the virtue of loyalty. In the past, loyalty has kept me with jobs and friends that, from an objective perspective, might not seem like the optimal things to spend my time on. But the costs of quitting and finding a new job, or cutting off friendships, wouldn’t just have been about direct consequences in the world, like needing to spend a bunch of time handing out resumes or having an unpleasant conversation. There would also be a shift within myself, a weakening in the drive towards loyalty. It wasn’t that I thought everyone ought to be extremely loyal–it’s a virtue with obvious downsides and failure modes. But it was a virtue that I wanted, partly because it seemed undervalued.
By calling myself a ‘loyal person’, I can aim myself in a particular direction without having to understand all the subcomponents of the world. More importantly, I can make decisions even when I’m rushed, or tired, or under cognitive strain that makes it hard to calculate through all of the consequences of a particular action.
Terminal Goals
The Less Wrong/CFAR/rationalist community puts a lot of emphasis on a different way of trying to be a hero–where you start from a terminal goal, like “saving the world”, and break it into subgoals, and do whatever it takes to accomplish it. In the past I’ve thought of myself as being mostly consequentialist, in terms of morality, and this is a very consequentialist way to think about being a good person. And it doesn't feel like it would work.
There are some bad reasons why it might feel wrong–i.e. that it feels arrogant to think you can accomplish something that big–but I think the main reason is that it feels fake. There is strong social pressure in the CFAR/Less Wrong community to claim that you have terminal goals, that you’re working towards something big. My System 2 understands terminal goals and consequentialism, as a thing that other people do–I could talk about my terminal goals, and get the points, and fit in, but I’d be lying about my thoughts. My model of my mind would be incorrect, and that would have consequences on, for example, whether my plans actually worked.
Practicing the art of rationality
Recently, Anna Salamon brought up a question with the other CFAR staff: “What is the thing that’s wrong with your own practice of the art of rationality?” The terminal goals thing was what I thought of immediately–namely, the conversations I've had over the past two years, where other rationalists have asked me "so what are your terminal goals/values?" and I've stammered something and then gone to hide in a corner and try to come up with some.
In Alicorn’s Luminosity, Bella says about her thoughts that “they were liable to morph into versions of themselves that were more idealized, more consistent - and not what they were originally, and therefore false. Or they'd be forgotten altogether, which was even worse (those thoughts were mine, and I wanted them).”
I want to know true things about myself. I also want to impress my friends by having the traits that they think are cool, but not at the price of faking it–my brain screams that pretending to be something other than what you are isn’t virtuous. When my immediate response to someone asking me about my terminal goals is “but brains don’t work that way!” it may not be a true statement about all brains, but it’s a true statement about my brain. My motivational system is wired in a certain way. I could think it was broken; I could let my friends convince me that I needed to change, and try to shoehorn my brain into a different shape; or I could accept that it works, that I get things done and people find me useful to have around and this is how I am. For now. I'm not going to rule out future attempts to hack my brain, because Growth Mindset, and maybe some other reasons will convince me that it's important enough, but if I do it, it'll be on my terms. Other people are welcome to have their terminal goals and existential struggles. I’m okay the way I am–I have an algorithm to follow.
Why write this post?
It would be an awfully surprising coincidence if mine was the only brain that worked this way. I’m not a special snowflake. And other people who interact with the Less Wrong community might not deal with it the way I do. They might try to twist their brains into the ‘right’ shape, and break their motivational system. Or they might decide that rationality is stupid and walk away.
Ottawa meetup: Applied Rationality Series, Value of Information
The sixth talk in the Ottawa Applied Rationality series will take place on Tuesday, May 20th at 7:00 pm, at the Canal Royal Oak in Ottawa, Canada. These events are run through the Ottawa Skeptics meetup group. See link here: http://www.meetup.com/Ottawa-Skeptics/events/181263842/
The usual format consists of an approximately 15 minute talk on the topic of the day, followed by semi-structured exercises, followed by beers and unstructured discussion. Previous topics have included "Rational Debating", "Bayes", "Calibration", "Rationality Dojo" (a review session), and "Goal Factoring."
If you are not from Ottawa, but are interested in running meetups in your area, send me a PM and I can give you the PowerPoints that I use for these talks.
Book Review: So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport
Very brief summary of main themes
1) “Follow your passion” is terrible advice for most people. Don’t try to find your “true calling” because it’s a false concept.
2) The craftsman’s mindset: build skills through deliberate practice.
3) The importance of control: use your career capital to ask for and obtain autonomy, and other things that make jobs pleasant.
4) Have a mission: once you have skills, use them to explore options and find something that can be your life’s work and driving motivation.
Introduction
This book came to me highly recommended, and didn’t quite live up to its reputation. It’s not that I disagree with anything, but Newport seems to be trying to claim that his point is more new and exciting than I think it actually is. The style reeks of self-help manual. (This isn’t a thing wrong with the book itself, just a fact about my personal taste). Still. It has some points that would be new to me if not for LW/CFAR, and it frames them all together in a tidy package, which may not have happened before. I would definitely recommend it to the average smart high school student.
Favourable Points
1) Promoting Hufflepuff. The world needs more people making hard work and conscientiousness look shiny.
2) The concept of deliberate practice, associated with a career. Deliberate practice doesn’t seem to be an obvious concept, and I’ll get behind any popular book that explains it.
3) Pointing out that mastery can create its own enjoyment; that it’s possible to grow to love an arbitrary activity, if it’s challenging and you can take pride in your skill. Example: the author quoted a study1 that asked people whether they considered their work to be a job (just a way to pay the bills), a career (a path towards better work), or a calling (a vital part of your life and identity.) Looking at a single occupation, college administrative assistants, the study found that the employees were roughly evenly split between calling it a job, career, or calling, and that the strongest predictive factor was time spent in the position. Although there’s a possible sample bias here (employees whose needs aren’t satisfied will keep looking for other opportunities and leave if they find them), it’s still an important point.
4) The fungibility of this thing called “career capital.” You don’t have to find the perfect dream job in order to be happy; you can find a job that provides value to society and is bearable, build up enough skill that you’re indispensable, and then bargain for the things that actually make jobs good over the long term.
5) Specific examples of people exploring opportunities and using their career capital in creative ways. For example, the book mentions a marketing executive, Joe Duffy, who wanted to work creativity into his working life–but instead of quitting and trying to make a living as an artist, he build skills and a reputation in brand icons and logos, until he was offered a job at a company that gave him the creative freedom he wanted. The anecdotes still aren’t that specific, but they feed the availability heuristic with examples.
Downvotes
The author disparagingly discusses the popular literature on career choice. I think that the “don’t follow your passion” point is less novel than he’s making it out to be. I read a lot of self-help career books as a young teenager, like ‘What Color is your Parachute’, and I wasn’t left with a belief that I ought to follow my passion. If I had been, I’d have gone into music or physics, not nursing. I don’t think that “do what you love, and the money will follow” is by any means the common sense advice peddled by life coaches.
I’m more prepared to believe that pop culture says there’s a tradeoff between doing a poorly paying job that you can love, or a well-paid job that will be boring; that you may have to make a choice about which one you want. There are solid economic reasons for this to be true.
I’m not sure to what degree the author cherry-picked his examples, but it would have been very easy to do, even without realizing. The examples break down into ‘naive, idealistic people who daydreamed about being famous and quit their jobs to pursue fantasies’, and ‘driven hard-working people who pursued ambitious careers and were lucky enough to succeed big.’
If he’s trying to make the point that drive and hard work matter more than idealism, I am the easiest person to make that point to...and I still don’t like the way he makes it. Where are the ambitious people who burned out and quit? The unambitious people who found steady jobs and raised families and had gardens in their backyards and lived happily ever after? The rest of the people in the world who don’t fit clearly into one category or another?
I guess maybe my true rejection is that none of the people profiled were nurses, or anything in that reference class. The book, however it claims not to, seems to implicitly reinforce the idea that there are “good” jobs–shiny high status jobs that anyone would find impressive–and then there are jobs like community centre manager and social worker and librarian and nurse, which aren’t even worth mentioning.
Thoughts on learning coefficients, economic demand, and how the book applies to my life
This isn’t mentioned in the book explicitly, but it’s a thought that came to me afterwards and feels related.
The “career capital”, or bargaining power, that you have in your job depends on how valuable you are to your employer. This, in turns, depends on several things: one of them is your skill relative to the other people they could be employing, but another factor is the supply/demand balance of people with your qualifications.
I’m pretty good at writing, and I suspect I could get a lot better if I spent the time. But I’m by no means an above-average nurse, even for my reference class of nurses with just under a year of experience.
I still have a ton of bargaining power, probably much more than I’d have in any job that involved my writing skills. Being a writer is cool, and lots of people want to do it, but there’s not that much need in the world for writers...and so it’s hard to make a living, even if you’re a very good writer. Nursing, on the other hand, is unglamorous and hard, and the supply/demand mismatch is in the opposite direction. As a result, less than a year out of university, I have a lot of something like career capital. I’ve managed to bargain for a flexible part-time position that lets me work basically as many or as few hours as I want to (at the cost of a weird schedule), with arbitrary flexibility to take time off and travel. I could move to approximately anywhere in the world and have a job on a few months’ notice. And I happen to like my job a lot, so I win all around. The author doesn’t mention this type of career capital at all.
Still, I guess the thing that I’m doing with my career capital–getting a flex schedule so that I can do shiny exciting things like volunteering for CFAR, without having to give up income and stability–is probably something that Newport would approve of would approve of.
References
1. Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin, et al. “Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People’s Relations to Their Work,” Journal of Research in Personality 31 (1997): 21?33.
Why I haven't signed up for cryonics
(OR)
How I'm now on the fence about whether to sign up for cryonics
I'm not currently signed up for cryonics. In my social circle, that makes me a bit of an oddity. I disagree with Eliezer Yudkowsky; heaven forbid.
My true rejection is that I don't feel a visceral urge to sign up. When I query my brain on why, what I get is that I don't feel that upset about me personally dying. It would suck, sure. It would suck a lot. But it wouldn't suck infinitely. I've seen a lot of people die. It's sad and wasteful and upsetting, but not like a civilization collapsing. It's neutral from a point of pleasure vs suffering for the dead person, and negative for the family, but they cope with it and find a bit of meaning and move on.
(I'm desensitized. I have to be, to stay sane in a job where I watch people die on a day to day basis. This is a bias; I'm just not convinced that it's a bias in a negative direction.)
I think the deeper cause behind my rejection may be that I don't have enough to protect. Individuals may be unique, but as an individual, I'm fairly replaceable. All the things I'm currently doing can and are being done by other people. I'm not the sole support person in anyone's life, and if I were, I would be trying really, really hard to fix the situation. Part of me is convinced that wanting to personally survive and thinking that I deserve to is selfish and un-virtuous or something. (EDIT: or that it's non-altruistic to value my life above the amount Givewell thinks is reasonable to save a life–about $5,000. My revealed preference is that I obviously value my life more than this.)
However, I don't think cryonics is wrong, or bad. It has obvious upsides, like being the only chance an average citizen has right now to do something that might lead to them not permanently dying. I say "average citizen" because people working on biological life extension and immortality research are arguably doing something about not dying.
When queried, my brain tells me that it's doing an expected-value calculation and the expected value of cryonics to me is is too low to justify the costs; it's unlikely to succeed and the only reason some people have positive expected value for it is that they're multiplying that tiny number by the huge, huge number that they place on the value of my life. And my number doesn't feel big enough to outweigh those odds at that price.
Putting some numbers in that
If my brain thinks this is a matter of expected-value calculations, I ought to do one. With actual numbers, even if they're made-up, and actual multiplication.
So: my death feels bad, but not infinitely bad. Obvious thing to do: assign a monetary value. Through a variety of helpful thought experiments (how much would I pay to cure a fatal illness if I were the only person in the world with it and research wouldn't help anyone but me and I could otherwise donate the money to EA charities; does the awesomeness of 3 million dewormings outway the suckiness of my death; is my death more or less sucky than the destruction of a high-end MRI machine), I've converged on a subjective value for my life of about $1 million. Like, give or take a lot.
Cryonics feels unlikely to work for me. I think the basic principle is sound, but if someone were to tell me that cryonics had been shown to work for a human, I would be surprised. That's not a number, though, so I took the final result of Steve Harris' calculations here (inspired by the Sagan-Drake equation). His optimistic number is a 0.15 chance of success, or 1 in 7; his pessimistic number is 0.0023, or less than 1/400. My brain thinks 15% is too high and 0.23% sounds reasonable, but I'll use his numbers for upper and lower bounds.
I started out trying to calculate the expected cost by some convoluted method where I was going to estimate my expected chance of dying each year and repeatedly subtract it from one and multiply by the amount I'd pay each year to calculate how much I could expect pay in total. Benquo pointed out to me that calculation like this are usually done using perpetuities, or PV calculations, so I made one in Excel and plugged in some numbers, approximating the Alcor annual membership fee as $600. Assuming my own discount rate is somewhere between 2% and 5%, I ran two calculations with those numbers. For 2%, the total expected, time-discounted cost would be $30,000; for a 5% discount rate, $12,000.
Excel also lets you do calculations on perpetuities that aren't perpetual, so I plugged in 62 years, the time by which I'll have a 50% chance of dying according to this actuarial table. It didn't change the final results much; $11,417 for a 5% discount rate and $21,000 for the 2% discount rate.
That's not including the life insurance payout you need to pay for the actual freezing. So, life insurance premiums. Benquo's plan is five years of $2200 a year and then nothing from then on, which apparently isn't uncommon among plans for young healthy people. I could probably get something as good or better; I'm younger. So, $11,00 for total life insurance premiums. If I went with permanent annual payment, I could do a perpetuity calculation instead.
In short: around $40,000 total, rounding up.
What's my final number?
There are two numbers I can output. When I started this article, one of them seemed like the obvious end product, so I calculated that. When I went back to finish this article days later, I walked through all the calculations again while writing the actual paragraphs, did what seemed obvious, ended up with a different number, and realized I'd calculated a different thing. So I'm not sure which one is right, although I suspect they're symmetrical.
If I multiply the value of my life by the success chance of cryonics, I get a number that represents (I think) the monetary value of cryonics to me, given my factual beliefs and values. It would go up if the value of my life to me went up, or if the chances of cryonics succeeding went up. I can compare it directly to the actual cost of cryonics.
I take $1 million and plug in either 0.15 or 0.00023, and I get $150,000 as an upper bound and $2300 as a lower bound, to compare to a total cost somewhere in the ballpark of $40,000.
If I take the price of cryonics and divide it by the chance of success (because if I sign up, I'm optimistically paying for 100 worlds of which I survive in 15, or pessimistically paying for 10,000 worlds in which I survive in 23), I get the total expected cost per my life being saved, which I can compare to the figure I place on the value of my life. It goes down if the cost of cryonics goes down or the chances of success go up.
I plug in my numbers and get a lower bound of $267,000 and an upper bound of 17 million.
In both those cases, the optimistic success estimates make it seem worthwhile and the pessimistic success estimates don't, and my personal estimate of cryonics succeeding falls closer to pessimism. But it's close. It's a lot closer than I thought it would be.
Updating somewhat in favour that I'll end up signed up for cryonics.
Fine-tuning and next steps
I could get better numbers for the value of my life to me. It's kind of squicky to think about, but that's a bad reason. I could ask other people about their numbers and compare what they're accomplishing in their lives to my own life. I could do more thought experiments to better acquaint my brain with how much value $1 million actually is, because scope insensitivity. I could do upper and lower bounds.
I could include the cost of organizations cheaper than Alcor as a lower bound; the info is all here and the calculation wouldn't be too nasty but I have work in 7 hours and need to get to bed.
I could do my own version of the cryonics success equation, plugging in my own estimates. (Although I suspect this data is less informed and less valuable than what's already there).
I could ask what other people think. Thus, write this post.
Meditation: a self-experiment
Introduction
The LW/CFAR community has a fair amount of interest in meditation. This isn't surprising; many of the people who practiced and wrote about meditation in the past were trying to train a skill similar to rationality. Schools of meditation seem to be the closest already-existing thing to rationality dojos–this doesn't mean that they're very similar, only that I can't think of anything else that's more similar.
People are Doing Science on meditation; there are studies on the effects of meditation on attention, depression, anxiety, stress and pain reduction. [Insert usual disclaimer that many of these studies either won't be replicated or aren't measuring what they think they're measuring]. Meditation is apparently considered a form of alternative medicine; this is quite annoying, actually, since it's a thing that might help a lot of people being lumped in with other things that almost certainly don't work.
[There's the spiritual enlightenment element of meditation, too. I won't touch on that, since my own experience isn't related to that aspect.]
Brienne Strohl has posted about meditation and metacognition; DavidM has posted on meditation and insight. Valentine, of CFAR, talked about mindfulness meditation helping to dispel the illusion of being hurried and never having enough time.
In short, lots of hype–enough that I found it worthwhile to give it a try myself. The main benefit I hoped to attain from practicing meditation was better control of attention–to be able to aim my attention more reliably at a particular target, and notice more quickly when it drifted. The secondary benefit would be better understanding and control of emotions, which I had already tried to accomplish through techniques other than meditation. However, I’d had the experience for several years of thinking that meditation was a valuable thing to try, and not trying it–evidence that I needed more than good intentions.
The experiment
Sometime in early September, I saw a poster on the wall at the hospital where I work, advertising a study on mindfulness meditation for people with social anxiety. I called the number on the poster and got myself enrolled because it was a good pre-commitment strategy. The benefits were deadlines, social pressure, and structure, with a steady supply of exercises, audio recordings, and readings. This came at the cost of two hours a week for twelve weeks, not all of which was spent on the specific skills that I wanted to learn. Another possible cost could be thinking of myself more as someone who has social anxiety, which might become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I don’t think this actually happened. If anything, sitting down in a group once a week with people whose anxiety significantly affected their functioning had the effect of making my own anxiety seem pretty insignificant. (I was able to convincingly make the case that I suffer from social anxiety during my interview; I've cried in front of my teachers a lot, including during my last year of nursing school, which caused some adults to think that I wasn't cut out for nursing).
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