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This is some great analytical work, and the explanations are some of the clearest I've seen for this type of writeup. Kudos to Dan and anyone who helped! I'm really impressed by how readable this is.
In response to
Causal Diagrams and Causal Models
Currently it looks like this page has lots of broken images, which are actually formulas. Can this be fixed? It's kind of hard to understand now.
In response to
Stupid Questions (10/27/2014)
A question that has been asked before, and so may be stupid: What concrete examples are there of gains from CfAR training (or self-study based on LessWrong)? These would have to come in the form of very specific examples, preferably quantitative.
E.g. "I was $100,000 in debt and unemployed for 2 years, and now I have employment earning twice what I ever have before and am out of debt."
"I never had a relationship that lasted more than 2 months, but now am happily married."
"My grade point average went up from 2.2 to 3.8"
"After struggling to diet and exercise for years, I finally got on track and am now in the best shape of my life."
etc.
I worked as a neuroscience research assistant for 5 years. For the latter 3 of those years, I had wanted to leave that job and move on to something better, but had been unable to make a decision about what to pursue and to actually pursue it.
7 months after my first CFAR workshop, I started a new job making 25% more. There were other causal factors. Part of the motivation to do job searching was due to the fact that my research position would be ending, and part of the salary increase was due to the fact that I left academia. But I also credit CFAR training, including the follow-ups and the support I got from the community, as a significant cause of this success.
Other semi-quantifiable changes: -I keep a budget now. -I'm investing money for retirement each month. I was not investing any before. -I've learned 1.5 new programming languages, and have learned several new statistical analysis methods (consider that I was doing almost nothing in terms of job-relevant skill development prior to CFAR). -I've started a biweekly productivity meeting at my apartment (before I did not organize events other than the occasional party).
I've made many other changes in my life regarding habits, learning and practicing new things, and pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone. Perhaps the most important thing for me is that I no longer have the sense of being overwhelmed by life, or of there being large categories of things that I just can't do. I'd say this is mostly the result of a cascade of changes that occurred in my life due to attending CFAR. And to repeat what nbouscal said, I feel like I can change my life in ways that will both work and feel good.
once I begin thinking about a difficult decision my tendency is to want to keep going and reach some sort of conclusion
I think I remember reading that although making decisions causes decision fatigue, researching decisions does not. So you might try spending a lot of time brainstorming pros & cons for your decision, finding quotes from studies, etc. and compile them in to a big document called "guide to making decision X" for your personal use. The idea being to defer the actual stress of making the decision for the future and be able to do research, brainstorming, etc. without using up Stress Points.
...I also had not thought to think of those two things as separate. Lots of good ideas for things to try. Thank you!
In response to
Overcoming Decision Anxiety
You can do exposure therapy for bigger decisions. Spend 2 minutes thinking about the decision, then 2 minutes sitting in the yard, then repeat. It's worked for me.
Hmm, interesting. I've just realized that I've never tried this, because once I begin thinking about a difficult decision my tendency is to want to keep going and reach some sort of conclusion. I'm going to try your method next chance I get!
In response to
Overcoming Decision Anxiety
Thanks for this post! I also spend far too much time worrying about inconsequential decisions, and it wouldn't surprise me if this is a common problem on LessWrong. In some sense, I think that rationality actually puts us at risk for this kind of decision anxiety, because rationality teaches us to look at every situation and ask, "Why am I doing it this way? Is there a different way I could do it that would be better?" By focusing on improving our lives, we end up overthinking our decisions. And we tend to frame these things as optimization problems: not "How can I find a good solution for X?", but "How can I find the best solution for X?" When we frame everything as optimization, the perfect can easily become the enemy of the good. Why? Because suppose you're trying to solve problem X, and you come up with a pretty decent solution, x. If you are constantly asking how to improve things, then you will focus on all the negative aspects of x that make it suboptimal. On the other hand, if you accept that some things just don't need to be optimized, you can learn to be content with what you have; you can focus on the positive aspects of x instead.
I think this is how a lot of us develop decision anxiety, actually. In general, we feel anxiety about a decision when we know it's possible for things to go wrong. The worse the possible consequences, the more anxiety we feel. And the thing is, when we focus on the downsides of our decisions, then we have negative feelings about our decisions. The more negative feelings we have about every decision we make, the more it seems like making a decision is an inherently fraught endeavor. Something in our minds says, "Of course I should feel anxiety when making decisions! Every time I make a decision, the result always feels really bad!"
Based on all of this, I'm trying to remedy my own decision anxiety by focusing on the positive more, and trying to ignore the downsides of decisions that I make. Last weekend, I was also looking for a new apartment. I visited two places, and they both looked great, but each of them had its downsides. One was in the middle of nowhere, so it was really nice and quiet, but very inaccesible. The other was in a town, and was basically perfect in terms of accesibility, but if you stood outside, you could vaguely hear the highway. At first I was pretty stressed about the decision, because I was thinking about the downsides of each apartment. And my friend said to me, "Wow, this is going to be a hard decision." But then I realized that both apartments were really awesome, and I'd be very happy in either of them, so I said, "Actually this is a really easy decision." Even if I accidentally picked the 'wrong' apartment, I would still be very happy there.
But here's the thing: whether I'm happy with my decision will depend on my mindset as I live in the apartment. I ended up picking the accesible apartment where you can hear the highway a little. If I spend everyday thinking "Wow, I hate that highway, I should have chosen the other apartment," then I'll regret my decision (even though the other place would have also had its faults). But if I spend every day thinking "Wow, this apartment is beautiful, and so conveniently located!", then I won't regret my decision at all.
That's very true re: mindset! There was one time in my life when the decision of where to live was made for me (I used to each English in Japan), and I was placed in a location I never would have picked on my own. But because I didn't have a choice in the matter, I made the best of it, and things worked out pretty well. Telling yourself "this is fine, this is going to work" is necessary sometimes.
Overcoming Decision Anxiety
I get pretty anxious about open-ended decisions. I often spend an unacceptable amount of time agonizing over things like what design options to get on a custom suit, or what kind of job I want to pursue, or what apartment I want to live in. Some of these decisions are obviously important ones, with implications for my future happiness. However, in general my sense of anxiety is poorly calibrated with the importance of the decision. This makes life harder than it has to be, and lowers my productivity.
I moved apartments recently, and I decided that this would be a good time to address my anxiety about open-ended decisions. My hope is to present some ideas that will be helpful for others with similar anxieties, or to stimulate helpful discussion.
Solutions
Exposure therapy
One promising way of dealing with decision anxiety is to practice making decisions without worrying about them quite so much. Match your clothes together in a new way, even if you're not 100% sure that you like the resulting outfit. Buy a new set of headphones, even if it isn't the “perfect choice.” Aim for good enough. Remind yourself that life will be okay if your clothes are slightly mismatched for one day.
This is basically exposure therapy – exposing oneself to a slightly aversive stimulus while remaining calm about it. Doing something you're (mildly) afraid to do can have a tremendously positive impact when you try it and realize that it wasn't all that bad. Of course, you can always start small and build up to bolder activities as your anxieties diminish.
For the past several months, I had been practicing this with small decisions. With the move approaching in July, I needed some more tricks for dealing with a bigger, more important decision.
Reasoning with yourself
It helps to think up reasons why your anxieties aren't justified. As in actual, honest-to-goodness reasons that you think are true. Check out this conversation between my System 1 and System 2 that happened just after my roommates and I made a decision on an apartment:
System 1: Oh man, this neighborhood [the old neighborhood] is such a great place to go for walks. It's so scenic and calm. I'm going to miss that. The new neighborhood isn't as pretty.
System 2: Well that's true, but how many walks did we actually take in five years living in the old neighborhood? If I recall correctly, we didn't even take two per year.
System 1: Well, yeah... but...
System 2: So maybe “how good the neighborhood is for taking walks” isn't actually that important to us. At least not to the extent that you're feeling. There were things that we really liked about our old living situation, but taking walks really wasn't one of them.
System 1: Yeah, you may be right...
Of course, this “conversation” took place after the decision had already been made. But making a difficult decision often entails second-guessing oneself, and this too can be a source of great anxiety. As in the above, I find that poking holes in my own anxieties really makes me feel better. I do this by being a good skeptic and turning on my critical thinking skills – only instead of, say, debunking an article on pseudoscience, I'm debunking my own worries about how bad things are going to be. This helps me remain calm.
Re-calibration
The last piece of this process is something that should help when making future decisions. I reasoned that if my System 1 feels anxiety about things that aren't very important – if it is, as I said, poorly calibrated – then I perhaps I can re-calibrate it.
Before moving apartments, I decided to make predictions about what aspects of the new living situation would affect my happiness. “How good the neighborhood is for walks” may not be important to me, but surely there are some factors that are important. So I wrote down things that I thought would be good and bad about the new place. I also rated them on how good or bad I thought they would be.
In several months, I plan to go back over that list and compare my predicted feelings to my actual feelings. What was I right about? This will hopefully give my System 1 a strong impetus to re-calibrate, and only feel anxious about aspects of a decision that are strongly correlated with my future happiness.
Future Benefits
I think we each carry in our heads a model of what is possible for us to achieve, and anxiety about the choices we make limits how bold we can be in trying new things. As a result, I think that my attempts to feel less anxiety about decisions will be very valuable to me, and allow me to do things that I couldn't do before. At the same time, I expect that making decisions of all kinds will be a quicker and more pleasant process, which is a great outcome in and of itself.
In response to
Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)
Hello,
My name is Tim. I'm a neuroscience researcher and swing dance teacher living in NYC.
I originally found out about LW via one or two friends who occasionally shared LW posts with me. I didn't get into the site too much, but I did eventually come across HPMOR, and thought it was awesome. At one point, one of the author notes mentioned that CFAR would be putting on workshops in my area. I checked those out and they seemed very high-value, so I attended. That was in November. Since then I've been getting involved with the real-life LW community in New York, and now more recently, the online community. I'm still reading through a lot of the material here, but I hope to get involved in some discussions.
Some of my academic interests are neuro- and cognitive science (consciousness, morality, decision making, belief-formation), evolution, physics, and linguistics. I'm also on a bit of a history kick lately - it was always my least favorite subject in school, but now that I'm a little older I find that history sharpens my intuitions about how the interaction of systems we call "life" tends to play itself out. Less academically, I'm a fan of dancing, music (working on jazz guitar atm), ultimate frisbee, and other stuff :)
Cheers!
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We are still finishing up data collection on those (we don't ask the friend to fill out the post-survey until after the participant has filled it out, which means that it takes a few extra weeks to get all the friend data). I'll start the data analysis on those within the next week or so.
Random question - was anything ever done with data from the November 2013 participants? (That's me.)