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In addition to making lists for "work," make one for things you want to watch, read, and/or play. You'll feel more productive and motivated even when taking a break from work.
In response to
Rationalist Lent
I have a candidate and it might be an odd one. I think I'll give up watching the Daily Show for 40 days. I've been watching it for almost its entire existence (before Jon Stewart was the host) and take a certain hipster pride in the fact that I watched the show before it became the widely known, popular thing it is now. But for awhile now, I haven't derived that much enjoyment from actually watching it. Some interviews, an occasional chuckle here and there, but mostly I find myself annoyed at how lazy the writing has become and Stewart's increasing tendency to stretch out bits well past their actual punchline.
But it's been such an ingrained habit for so long and it feels like compromising part of my identity, albeit a small, insignificant part of it. So, for the next 40 days, I won't watch the Daily Show.
Not the Colbert Report though, that show is genius.
So, I wouldn't call this a solution to the sleep problem. The sleep problem as I conceive it is the following: staying up during a CFAR workshop has unusually high value because of the people you can talk to, but on the other hand sleep is important for learning things. It's not obvious to me how to optimally handle this tradeoff and I'd like a way of handling it that involves decreasing the need for sleep rather than increasing the quantity of sleep if this is feasible.
Yes, it was an opportunity cost problem - at what point did the cost of being cogent in the morning outweigh the cost of missing great late night conversations.
I can't think of any optimal solution that doesn't involve loads of caffeine or bilocation, time turner induced or otherwise.
In response to
Open Thread, June 16-30, 2012
After a week long vacation at Disney World with the family, it occurs to me there's a lot of money to be made in teaching utility maximization to families...mostly from referrals by divorce lawyers and family therapists.
I actually think you are a bit overconfident in the ability to self-described rationalists to walk away from this unchanged. I think this is valuable, and yes I even agree that rationality training should help reduce the negative side-effects. But I don't think for a second that our level-headedness will automatically return the instant we step out of the ritual room.
Hm, perhaps you're right. It would depend largely on the composition of the ritual(s). Certainly, extraordinary care must be taken when intentionally playing with any kind of death spiral. A generous dose of tongue in cheek self deprivation would probably be a good idea.
I agree with you in much of your assessment about what rituals are. Rituals are a very powerful, fundamentally irrational force on our minds. However, I don't think that our minds known weakness to rituals is something we should be trying to solve with, well, rituals.
First:
The solution, I think, lies in thinking of rituals as a mnemonic device, understanding that they're not really a way of arriving at new truth, but reinforcing what we're reasonably sure is settled truth.
"What we're reasonably sure is settled truth" does not necessarily equal truth. Nor does it necessarily equal "what we will want to believe once we know more".
Secondly, I think that a skilled rationalist should be able to avoid acquiring incorrect beliefs through rituals. If, for any reason, I have to participate in a ritual, I would like to have acquired the skills necessary to avoid getting caught up in it. This is a bias I would like to defeat, or reduce, just like any other. And I really don't think we can teach that skill through rituals. I'm rather disinclined against trying, either, since I suspect that would make us weaker to this form of manipulation.
Bottom line: I think we should try to be, well, less wrong, rather than wrong-in-opposite-directions-so-they-cancel-out.
"What we're reasonably sure is settled truth" does not necessarily equal truth. Nor does it necessarily equal "what we will want to believe once we know more".
Absolutely, which is what makes building in the ability to self modify so intrinsically important. The function of any ritual like activity shouldn't be any where near the vicinity of the "research arm" of the rationality community. Nothing should be acquired within them, nor determined through them. They should be about reinforcing the settled science, to minimize the amount of falseness that enters into the canon (I should point out, to be clear I'm using this term tongue in cheek). And for what does, something built around the Litany of Tarksi still allows for self modification.
And yes, any and all rationalists should be far enough along that they've developed a certain immunity to the process. That in and of itself makes no difference. Doing these types of things does measurable things to the brain, just as prayer/meditation do. The details are arbitrary; it doesn't matter if you're sacrificing a virgin, eating a wafer, or lighting a candle. What matters is doing the same thing as your fellow tribe members to build/maintain a sense of community. The proposition here is to simply replace the incorrect proclamations of how the universe works with correct ones. Instead of proclaiming Jesus Lord and Savior, you're proclaiming the map is not the territory and that your desire to know what is true is actually true (so if it turns out that the map IS the territory, then out it goes from the hymn book).
And the rationalist has the added (and important) benefit that no matter how much they give themselves over to the emotions of whatever ceremony, once they walk back out to the parking lot, their level headedness will return. The rationalist can walk out and think, "That sure was fun, but I understand what was happening and can safely put that suspension of rationality back on the shelf." In a way the Catholic can't (consciously) do when walking out of Mass.
So I disagree, I think these kinds of things, with effective substitutions of content, won't make us weaker to this form of manipulation, but rather stronger. Ultimately, when we cross the Singularity, we probably won't need these kinds of mind hacks anymore, but in the interim, I think they'll end up being quite important.
In response to
Ritual Report: NYC Less Wrong Solstice Celebration
Well I'm doing some serious updating in all sorts of directions. Primarily in my assessment of the attitudes of this community. I very strongly expected my response (a few twinges of worry) to be one of the most moderate responses here. In that I was correct. Most comments here seem to be of the "this is awesome" school of thought. I was expecting roughly half the comments to be people freaking out about how we're becoming a cult.
My concern is based entirely around the nature of ritual. I am not in any way opposed to poetry, music, or any other form of art based on a rationalist idea (so long as it's, you know, good). But the idea of rituals does make me worry a bit. It boils down to this: if in ten years, we learn something that causes us to abandon [insert any core idea of LW here]. Assume we've been singing a song about it for ten years. Assume the tune is really catchy. Assume that the singing of this song is something that a non-trivial number of our fellow rationalists especially look forward to each year. I am very confident that at least some members of the community will really want to keep that song as part of the yearly ritual "for tradition's sake".
I should probably note that a possible source of this concern is my own past and present attitude towards the song "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen". And certainly the emotional prediction is based off of my own personal feelings.
It might be possible to avoid this by writing new songs every year. If each year, the melody and lyrics of the song for any given idea is different, it would likely make it easier to give up that idea in that year's celebration. I do expect that this would somewhat diminish the power of the ritual. This post only really discusses the power of rituals as a positive point in their favor. But there are some possible downsides to letting loose a powerful social force in our community without knowing what it will do.
It's valid to be worried about the introduction of rituals producing death spirals. That is their express purpose after all, to produce and reinforce whatever death spirals the community has defined as essential.
Ritualism is a mind hack invented by early humanity to reinforce the group worldview and build/maintain group cohesion. And in the intervening thousands of years, either we or ritualism itself has evolved into something deeply ingrained in our cognitive makeup. At this point, it's how our brains are wired and I don't think it's feasible to simply ignore it. Instead, we have to do exactly what Raemon is attempting: coopt its techniques and replace the ones that propagate untruth and less than optimal behavior with ones that propagate truth and optimal behavior.
But rituals are a fundamentally irrational business, there's no way around it. The solution, I think, lies in thinking of rituals as a mnemonic device, understanding that they're not really a way of arriving at new truth, but reinforcing what we're reasonably sure is settled truth. Mandating constant and aribtrary change is the wrong track, since a huge part of rituals is simple reinforcement. To limit that is to cut the whole thing off at the knees.
Instead, I suggest only included the very settled science of rationality and being very conservative about what gets defined as such. For the inaugural core tenant, I would suggest the Litany of Tarski and the idea that if it's wrong it gets discarded, no matter what, with an appropriately weighty ritual to accompany it. So even if you did have something that was part of the canon for ten years that must then be discarded, you can still fall back to this ability to acknowledge mistakes and self modify. Everyone performs a ritual expunging the obsolete piece from the canon and it's forever removed. Thus, we're still taking advantage of the ritualism mind hack, while building in appropriate safeguards to keep the death spiral from going on forever and allowing for future self modification.
Welcome!
(pneumonic -> mnemonic)
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I'm using my built in camera on my mac, so can't turn it. Do you have the option to turn my video off and on? I figure its probably better to have on for the sense of socialness, but I certainly don't need to have it on.
Also, not really sure what to do about chatting on there or not. I got the sense that some people might get annoyed when there is a lot of chat, but others want to connect. I'm not sure what is optimal. I think one nice thing would be if we could have a set of guidelines/expectations.
It would be nice to have linked rooms, like a study room and a more chatty room that people can pop back and forth on.
Another potential useful feature would be if everyone was on the same pomodoro timer, so that the room is consistently quiet 25 mins then chat 5.
I was in for a bit last night and enjoyed it. On the one hand, I think it did help me keep working where I otherwise would've quit or wasted more time on Internet distractions. That said, the chat, while interesting, was distracting from the primary purpose of the chat room.
There should definitely be two separate rooms - one for general chat and one for paired working. But the shared Pomodoro timing is also a good idea and should be tried, in my opinion.
Also, we should find a different chat client than Tinychat. It's log in process and text limitations are very annoying.