If you want to engage with the rationalist community, LessWrong is mostly no longer the place to do it. Discussions aside, most of the activity has moved into the diaspora. There are a few big voices like Robin and Scott, but most of the online discussion happens on individual blogs, Tumblr, semi-private Facebook walls, and Reddit. And while these serve us well enough, I find that they leave me wanting for something like what LessWrong was: a vibrant group blog exploring our perspectives on cognition and building insights towards a deeper understanding of the world.

Maybe I'm yearning for a golden age of LessWrong that never was, but the fact remains that there is a gap in the rationalist community that LessWrong once filled. A space for multiple voices to come together in a dialectic that weaves together our individual threads of thought into a broader narrative. A home for discourse we are proud to call our own.

So with a lot of help from fellow rationalist bloggers, we've put together Map and Territory, a new group blog to bring our voices together. Each week you'll find new writing from the likes of Ben Hoffman, Mike Plotz, Malcolm Ocean, Duncan Sabien, Anders Huitfeldt, and myself working to build a more complete view of reality within the context of rationality.

And we're only just getting started, so if you're a rationalist blogger please consider joining us. We're doing this on Medium, so if you write something other folks in the rationalist community would like to read, we'd love to consider sharing it through Map and Territory (cross-positing encouraged). Reach out to me on Facebook or email and we'll get the process rolling.

https://medium.com/map-and-territory

Note: In this article I refer to "constructive developmental theory" as "constructive development theory", however the former is more common and should be used instead. I changed it in the version of this on my own blog, but because I think it would add some confusion to the comments if I changed it here, I'll leave it as is but just note it so you can use the more common terminology.

I used to get frustrated with myself. I'd say existential risk was an important problem or that I wanted to live an awesome life, but then I took no action to mitigate existential risks or make my life more awesome. For a long time I had no good way to explain this, often blaming it on things like akrasia, but in late 2011 I changed. I started acting to make the world have more of what I valued in it.

I've spent a lot of the past year trying to understand what happened and how I might tell other people about it. I would probably still be searching for the right framing if not for a party a few months ago. There, Malcolm Ocean and Ethan Dickinson introduced me to Constructive Development Theory, also known as Subject-Object Theory, a cognitive development theory first described by Robert Kegan et al.. Since then I've been ruminating on the idea, and after reading Malcolm's introduction to constructive development, I realize that constructive development is the concept I need to explain my 2011 mind-shift.

In short, in late 2011 I started to spend more of my time thinking at constructive development level 4 than 3, and level 4 thinking is the minimum required to stand a real chance of making the world the way you want it.

Since that sounds like utter nonsense without context, go read Malcolm's article on constructive development. Right now. Go do it. I'll still be here when you're done. Don't even bother trying to go any further until you have read it.

In fact, you should also read the links he links before you come back, and maybe do a little research on your own, because I'm not going to bother explaining constructive development theory here: I'm just going to use it.

Before we continue, one more warning. If you're not already doing most of your thinking at least half-way along the 3 to 4 transition (which I will hereon refer to as reaching 4/3), you will probably also not fully understand what I've written below because that's unfortunately also about how far along you have to be before constructive development theory makes intuitive sense to most people. I know that sounds like an excuse so I can say whatever I want, but before reaching 4/3 people tend to find constructive development theory confusing and probably not useful, and this is admittedly a weakness. My intentions must therefore be naturally limited to convincing other folks who have reached 4/3 that constructive development theory is useful for understanding what makes them different and suggests how they can help others attain a similar level of cognitive development.

Once you reach 4/3 it becomes possible to reliably apply abstract concepts to satisfy your values because you now have the ability to spend most of your time thinking about yourself from a sufficiently distant outside view that you can manipulate the concept of "you" in a way that allows you to figure out how to apply said concepts. Since that's a bit abstract, let's see what that looks like with an example.

Consider two persons in almost any given profession, but for salience let's choose teachers. Alice and Bob both value their students' learning highly and know many techniques that will successfully help their students learn. When Alice prepares for a class, she thinks mostly about the kind of teacher she needs to be in order to help her students learn. When Bob prepares for a class, he thinks mostly about what he needs to do in order to help his students learn. Both have the same goal, yet Alice is thinking mostly at level 4 while Bob is thinking mostly at level 3. Alice is trying to solve the problem of how to be a better teacher, while Bob is trying to solve the problem of how to teach better. Both are important, and Alice must also solve the problem of how to teach better, but she now views that problem as incidental to becoming a better teacher.

To complicate matters, Bob doesn't really understand that Alice is doing something different from him, nor does their colleague Carol, who spends most of her time thinking at level 2 and trying to solve the problem of how to better perform various teaching techniques. But Carol will believe she is doing the same thing as Alice and Bob, and Bob will believe he's doing the same thing as Alice (viz. thinking about how to be a better teacher) and if you try to explain this to Bob or Carol they will likely fail to appreciate that there is any real difference.

But the difference is important: at constructive development level 4, you can be the object of your own thoughts, not just the subject. At level 3 you can be the subject but not the object of your thinking, which can be incredibly frustrating, and at level 2 you can't even fully model yourself. So level 4 thinking is the minimum required to fully reason about yourself, which is why reaching 4/3 is an important inflection point in cognitive development.

If reaching 4/3 is important and actually explains different levels of achievement in satisfying values, we should find existing discussions of reaching 4/3 but with different terminology. Eliezer seems to obliquely get at something related to reaching 4/3 in his twelfth and last virtue of rationality. CFAR talks about core skill growth, which seems to include many things related to constructive development level 4 thinking. But most concretely, we see it around chapter 65 of HPMOR when other characters realize that Harry has gained agency, something talked about widely both within and outside the Less Wrong community.

But core skill growth and agency are opaque. When a person has agency we mean something like "they make their own decisions". But of course everyone trivially makes their own decisions: their brains are not directly controlled by some outside force, no matter the pressures placed upon them. What we really mean is something more like "they think, come to decisions about what to do, and then act on those decisions in ways that may be counter to the 'default' actions they would have otherwise taken". But for someone who lacks agency this is not very helpful because it frames agency like a property one either has or doesn't, not as a thought process that can be developed. Thinking of agency as a consequence of reaching 4/3 solves this problem. Similarly, understanding core skill growth as increasing time spent thinking at higher constructive development levels makes its meaning clearer.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, agency is the thing you need to make the world what you want. You can know many techniques for increasing productivity, forming friendships, earning trust, having fun, and otherwise better satisfying your values, but without agency you will be unable to reliably apply them. This makes reaching 4/3 the most important step in your cognitive development, and the faster you can get there the better off you will be.

The challenge now is to find ways of helping people constructively develop. I think we have already made some good strides here with comfort zone expansion exercises and framing rationality as the skills that help you better optimize the world for what you value, but I also think we can do better because I know many folks who have been part of the Less Wrong community for a long time yet have thus far won very little. I anticipate better progress is possible now, though, thanks to having a useful model for understanding the most fundamental aspect of becoming stronger.

Thanks to Ethan Dickinson for offering suggestions on an early draft.

Cross posted from my blog.

Some time ago I learned of the metaphor of 'digging the bull's horn'. This might sound a little strange, since horns are mostly hollow, but imagine a bull's horn used to store black powder. In the beginning the work is easy and you can scoop out a lot powder with very little effort. As you dig down, though, each scoop yields less powder as you dig into the narrow part of the horn until the only way you can get out more powder is to turn the horn over a dump it out.

It's often the same way with learning. When you start out in a subject there is a lot to be learned (both in quantity of material you have not yet seen and in quantity of benefits you have to gain from the information), but as you dig deeper into a subject the useful insights come less often or are more limited in scope. Eventually you dig down so far that the only way to learn more is to discover new things that no one has yet learned (to stretch the metaphor, you have to add your own powder back to dig out).

It's useful to know that you're digging the bull's horn when learning because, unless you really enjoy a subject or have some reason to believe that contributing to it is worthwhile, you can know in advance that most of the really valuable insights you'll gain will come early on. If you want to benefit from knowing about as much stuff as possible, you'll often want to stop actively pursuing a subject unless you want to make a career out of it.

But, for a few subjects, this isn't true. Sometimes, as you continue to learn the last few hard things that don't seem to provide big, broadly-useful insights, you manage to accumulate a critical level of knowledge about the subject that opens up a whole new world of insights to you that were previously hidden. To push the metaphor, you eventually dig so deep that you come out the other side to find a huge pile of powder.

The Way seems to be one of those subjects you can dig past the end of: there are some people who have mastered The Way to such an extent that they have access to a huge range of benefits not available to those still digging the horn. But when it comes to other subjects, how do you know? Great insights could be hiding beyond currently obscure fields of study because no one has bothered to dig deep enough. Aside from having clear examples of people who came out the other side to give us reason to believe it's worth while to deep really deep on some subjects, is there any way we can make a good prediction about what subjects may be worth digging to the end of the bull's horn?

Cryonics appears to be the best hope for continuing a person's existence beyond physical death until other technologies provide better solutions.  But despite its best-in-class status, cryonics has several serious downsides.

First and foremost, cryonics is expensive—well beyond a price that even a third of humanity can afford.  Economies of scale may eventually bring the cost down, but in the mean time billions of people will die without the benefit of cryonics, and, even when the cost bottoms out, it will likely still be too expensive for people living at subsistence levels.  Secondly, many people consider cryonics immoral or at least socially unacceptable, so even those who accept the idea of cryonics and want to pursue taking personal advantage of it are usually socially pressured out of signing up for cryonics.  Combined, these two forces reduce the pool of people who will act to sign up for cryonics to be less than even a fraction of a percent of the human population.

Given that cryonics is effectively not an option for almost everyone on the planet, if we're serious about preserving lives into the future then we have to consider other options, especially ones that are morally and socially acceptable to most of humanity.  Pushed by my own need to find an alternative to cryonics, I began trying to think of ways I could be restored after physical death.

If I am unable to preserve the physical components that currently make me up, it seems that the next best thing I can do is to record in some way as much of the details of the functioning of those physical components as possible.  Since we don't yet have the brain emulation technology that would make cryonics irrelevant for the still living, I need a lower tech way to making a record of myself.  And of all the ways I might try to record myself, none seems to better balance robustness, cost, and detail than writing.

Writing myself into the future—now we're on to something.

Follow-up to:  Fighting Akrasia:  Finding the Source

In the last post in this series I posted a link to a Google Docs survey to try to gather some data on what techniques, if any, work for people in conquering akrasia, but we haven't gotten very much information so far:  the response pool is fairly homogeneous in terms of age, sex, and personality type.  In part this is because we need to get more responses outside of the LW readership, but probably also because I'm not asking the right questions.  So, my challenge this weekend is to come up with some good revisions for the survey.

In order to maximize comment usefulness, please suggest one revision per top level comment and then any discussion of that revision can take place in the replies.

In the interest of keeping the comments on topic, I request a moratorium on discussions of whether or not akrasia exists and whether or not we can or should do something about it in the comments on this article.  It's not that I want to exclude or silence opinions contrary to what I'm trying to accomplish:  it's just that I would like to keep this article on the topic of revising the akrasia fighting survey.  By all means, if my posting about akrasia really bothers you, write up an article explaining why I'm wrong and we'll discuss the issue more there.

Thanks!

Followup to:  Fighting Akrasia:  Incentivising Action

Influenced by:  Generalizing From One Example

Previously I looked at how we might fight akrasia by creating incentives for actions.  Based on the comments to the previous article and Yvain's now classic post Generalizing From One Example, I want to take a deeper look at the source of akrasia and the techniques used to fight it.

I feel foolish for not looking at this closer first, but let's begin by asking what akrasia is and what causes it.  As commonly used, akrasia is the weakness-of-will we feel when we desire to do something but find ourselves doing something else.  So why do we experience akrasia?  Or, more to the point, why to we feel a desire to take actions contrary the actions we desire most, as indicated by our actions?  Or, if it helps, flip that question and ask why are the actions we take not always the ones we feel the greatest desire for?

First, we don't know the fine details of how the human brain makes decisions.  We know what it feels like to come to a decision about an action (or anything else), but how the algorithm feels from the inside is not a reliable way to figure out how the decision was actually made.  But because most people can relate to a feeling of akrasia, this suggests that there is some disconnect between how the brain decides what actions are most desirable and what actions we believe are most desirable.  The hypothesis that I consider most likely is that the ability to form beliefs about desirable actions evolved well after the ability to make decisions about what actions are most desirable, and the decision-making part of the brain only bothers to consult the belief-about-desirability-of-actions part of the brain when there is a reason to do so from evolution's point of view.¹  As a result we end up with a brain that only does what we think we really want when evolutionarily prudent, hence we experience akrasia whenever our brain doesn't consider it appropriate to consult what we experience as desirable.

This suggests two main ways of overcoming akrasia assuming my hypothesis (or something close to it) is correct:  make the actions we believe to be desirable also desirable to the decision-making part of the brain or make the decision-making part of the brain consult the belief-about-desirability-of-actions part of the brain when we want it to.  Most techniques fall into the former category since this is by far the easier strategy, but however a technique works, an overriding theme of the akrasia-related articles and comments on Less Wrong is that no technique yet found seems to work for all people.

Followup To:  Are You Anosognosic?, The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You

Over this past weekend I listened to an episode of This American Life titled Pro Se.  Although the episode is nominally about people defending themselves in court, the first act of the episode was about a man who pretended to act insane in order to get out of a prison sentence for an assault charge.  There doesn't appear to be a transcript, so I'll summarize here first.

A man, we'll call him John, was arrested in the late 1990s for assaulting a homeless man.  Given that there was plenty of evidence to prove him guilty, he was looking for a way to avoid the likely jail sentence of five to seven years.  The other prisoners he was being held with suggested that he plead insanity:  he'd be put up at a hospital for several months with hot food and TV and released once they considered him "rehabilitated".  So he took bits and pieces about how insane people are supposed to act from movies he had seen and used them to form a case for his own insanity.  The court believed him, but rather than sending him to a cushy hospital, they sent him to a maximum security asylum for the criminally insane.

Within a day of arriving, John realized the mistake he had made and sought to find a way out.  He tries a variety of techniques:  engaging in therapy, not engaging in therapy, dressing like a sane person, acting like a sane person, acting like an incurably insane person, but none of it works.  Over a decade later he is still being held.

As the story unravels, we learn that although John makes a convincing case that he faked his way in and is being held unjustly, the psychiatrists at the asylum know that he faked his way in and continue to hold him anyway, though John is not aware of this.  The reason:  through his long years of documented behavior John has made it clear to the psychiatrists that he is a psychopath/sociopath and is not safe to return to society without therapy.  John is aware that this is his diagnosis, but continues to believe himself sane.

Similar to trying to determine if you are anosognosic, how do you determine if you are insane?  Some kinds of insanity can be self diagnosed, but in John's case he has lots of evidence (he has access to read all of his own medical records) that he is insane, yet continues to believe himself not to be.  To me this seems a level trickier than anosognosis, since there's no physical tests you can make, but perhaps it's only a level of difference significant to people but not to an AI.

Edited to add a footnote:  By "sane" I simply mean normative human reasoning:  the way you expect, all else being equal, a human to think about things.  While the discussion in the comments about how to define sanity might be of some interest, it really gets away from the point of the post unless you want to argue that "sanity" is creating a question here that is best solved by dissolving the question (as at least one commenter does).

I lost the Way, even when I didn't know what I was trying to follow, when I learned a Dangerous Truth about school.  This is a brief recounting of how I lost the Way, came back, and what I believe we can learn from this.  I hope you find it instructive.

I suffered from insomnia as a child.  Not because of any traumatic events or abuse (if anything I had an exceptionally comfortable childhood), but because I would lay awake in bed, staring into the darkness and worrying about school.  I worried that I wouldn't complete assignments, that I would fail in subjects, and that terrible things would happen if I didn't make straight As.  None of my fears were well founded, though:  I was never at any serious risk of failing to complete an assignment, getting anything worse than a B for a quarter grade in a subject, or having indeterminate terrible things happen to me.  I experienced this anxiety in part because I was suffering from undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder and in part because I believed that the most important thing in life was to succeed in school.  If school was a game, I was playing to win.

Yesterday I heard an interesting story on the radio about US President Obama's pick to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein.  I recommend checking out the story, but here are a few key excerpts.

Cass Sunstein, President Obama's pick to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is a vocal supporter of [...] economic policy that shapes itself around human psychology. Sunstein is just one of a number of high-level appointees now working in the Obama administration who favors this kind of approach.

[...]

Through their research, Kahneman and Tversky identified dozens of these biases and errors in judgment, which together painted a certain picture of the human animal. Human beings, it turns out, don't always make good decisions, and frequently the choices they do make aren't in their best interest.

One of my favorite fiction genres is alternative history.  The basic idea of alternative history is to write a story set in an alternate universe where history played out differently.  Popular alternate histories include those where the Nazis win World War II, the USSR wins the Cold War, and the Confederate States of America win the American Civil War.  But most of the writing in this genre has a serious flaw:  the author starts out by saying "wouldn't it be cool to write a story where X had happened instead of Y" and then works backwards to concoct historical events that will lead to the desired outcome.  No matter how good the story is, the history is often bad because at every stage the author went looking for a reason for things to go his way.

Being unsatisfied with most alternate histories, I like to play a historical "what if" game.  Rather than asking the question at the conclusion, though (like "what if the Nazis had won the war"), I ask it at an earlier moment, ideally one where chance played an important role.  What if Napoleon had been convinced not to invade Russia?  What if the Continental Army had not successfully retreated from New York?  What if Viking settlements in Newfoundland had not collapsed?  These are as opposed to "What if Napoleon had never been defeated?", "What if the Colonies had lost the American Revolutionary War?", and "What if Vikings had developed a thriving civilization in the Americas?".  I find that replaying history in this way a fun use of my analytical skills, but more importantly a good test of my rationality.

One of the most difficult things in thinking of an alternative history is to stay focused on the facts and likely outcomes.  It's easy to say "I'd really like to see a world where X happened" and then silently or overtly bias your thinking until you find a way to achieve the desired outcome.  Learning to avoid this takes discipline, especially in a domain like alternate history where there's no way to check if your reasoning turned out to be correct.  But unlike imagining the future, making an alternate history does have the real history to measure up against, so it provides a good training ground for futurist who don't want to wait 20 or 30 years to get feedback on their thinking.

Given all this, I have two suggestions.  One, this indicates that a good way to teach history and rational thinking at the same time would be to present historical data up to a set point, ask students to reason out what they think will happen next in history, and then reveal what actually happened and use the feedback to calibrate and improve our historical reasoning (which will hopefully provide some benefit in other domains).  Second, a good way to build experience applying the skills of rationality is publicly present and critique alternate histories.

In that vein, if there appears to be sufficient interest, I'll start doing a periodic article here dedicated to the discussion of some particular alternative history.  The discussion will be in the comments:  people can propose outcomes, then others can revise and critique and propose other outcomes, continuing the cycle until we hit a brick wall (not enough information, question asks something that would not have changed history, etc.) or come to a consensus.

What do you all think of this idea?