Lately, I’ve been musing on the nature of self-improvement in general.  When I notice that something I’ve been doing-- be it mental or physical, the next immediate chain of thought is “Okay, how do I improve my life now, knowing this phenomena exists?”  In doing so, I’ve recently realized that this is missing a crucial distinction that can lead to more confusion later down the road.

 

This important divide is the question of optimizing around, or powering through.  So before figuring out what actions I should be taking, it seems important to ask myself, “What am I trying to optimize for?” If the negative biases and habits I manage to identify are rocks, then the question is whether or not the best plan of action is to plan around these rocks, or crush them entirely.  This is far from a clear-cut division, however. It appears that breaking bad habits--powering through is going to be more costly in terms of resources spent.  Additionally, a successful plan for overcoming these errors will probably have a mix of these, especially if ridding oneself of the tendency entirely is the goal.

 

For an example of how these two are often blurred, take the planning fallacy:

 

One strategy may be to overestimate times when planning, pushing through the “it feels wrong” feeling to develop a better sense of how long things take.  To augment this, there are also planning techniques, like Murphyjitsu designed to get you considering “hidden factors”.  It’s far from clear how much actions that compensate for biases by countering their effects actually reduce the bias entirely, especially if the helpful action also becomes second nature.

But overall, I think this is an important distinction to keep in mind, because I’ll often be stuck asking myself “Should I work around X, or should I actively try to defeat X?”  

   Does anyone have experience trying to go specifically in one way or the other to counter their biases?

Hello everyone,

This is a follow-up to my last post about optimizing, which I intended to spread to nonrationalist friends of mine.  Initial feedback let me know that a lot of the language was a put-off, as well as the dry style and lack of opposing counters to arguments against optimization.

I've tried to take some of those ideas and put it into a new essay, one that tries to get across the idea that planning is important to accomplish goals.

I'd appreciate any/all critiques-- the comments last time were very helpful in learning what I could improve on:

Why Try Hard?

Life is pretty hard.  Seriously, it scores an 11/10 on the Mohs Scale.  Scratch that (eyy), it’s more like a 12/10.  Which is probably why many people go through life without too many dreams and ambitions.  I mean, it’s hard to just deal with daily problems of living, not to mention those pesky social interactions no one seems to get the hang of (“So you grasp their hand and apply pressure while vigorously shaking it a few inches up and down?”).

But you’re going to be different.  

You’re going to try and make a difference, and change the world.  Except that everyone around you seems to be talking about the “naivete of youth” and seems pretty jaded (6.5 Mohs) about life.  Obviously their cynicism isn’t sharp enough to scratch all of life (6.5<12), so you listen their warnings and run off to face the final boss anyways.

After all, if you really try hard, things should work out, right? You’ve got the drive, the dream, the baseball cap, and the yellow electrical mouse.  Why wouldn’t things work out for you, the main character?

Deep down though, you probably also already realize the futility of trying to create systemic change.  I mean, those jaded mentors of yours once had your idealism too.  And they also wanted to make the world a better place.  But they ventured out into the world, and came back, battered and wizened-- more attuned to the reality we live in.

“Might it be smarter,” that little voice in your head asks, “to bow to the reality of the situation, and lower your sights?”

And the reality of the situation is terrible.  We have hundreds of thousands of lives being lost each day.  Terrible diseases that cripple our livelihood and tear families apart.  Climate change that causes loss of biodiversity and threatens to flood communities across the globe.  We could very well be crushed by an asteroid, or suffer terribly at the hands of full-scale nuclear war.  A lonely blue and green speck in an unkind, frozen nightscape.  

Against such unequal odds, people tend to localize:  “Fighting worldwide hunger is impossible,” they say, “what can one person like me do?” This is a normal response.  The perils and problems in this world are enormous!  How can we even hope to solve them?  

“But maybe, that voice nags, “if I do my part, if I donate to my community’s food bank, I can make that little bit of difference in my own little world. And I can be satisfied with that.” There is something poetic about this-- doing what you can in your own little world.  “Forget saving the world,” it cries, “if I can inspire change in my community, that will be enough for me.  I will have done my part.”

But will you really?  Will you be truly satisfied that you’ve done all that you can to try and solve the world’s problems?  

Hi, I’m the other voice.  

You know, the stupid one?  The delusional one that refuses to accept reality as-is?  The one that insists, no matter the odds, that we should try to make things better?  The one that looks at the huge problems the world is facing and says, “If so much is wrong, it’s all the more reason to try and set them right!”  

Your mentors may have wanted to improve the world, but did they have a map, a strategy, an action plan?

“Of course,” you may respond, “who doesn’t have a plan?  You really are the stupid voice.”

But for many of us, in our heads, trying to solve these big world problems looks a little like this:

Step 1: Learn that world hunger is a big issue.

Step 3: Solve world hunger.

First off, you’ll probably notice that Step 2 is missing.  You’ll also probably notice that the above plan looks a little simple.  There’s a lot of heart (caring about the problem), but it’s missing a lot of head (trying to come up with an actual plan to solve the problem).  Sort of like the Headless Horseman.

You may ask: “What good are plans? If you care enough about things, you’ll find a way!”

Plans are deliberate maps to your goal-- getting what you want.  We use plans because they are more effective at getting to our goals than just hoping that our goals happen.  It’s just a feature of our universe: If we want to affect reality, we’ll have to do things in reality; we can’t just imagine something and have it happen-- it’s just not how our world works.

In the same way, if we want to achieve our goals, we’ll be looking for the best plan possible.  A better plan is one that has a higher chance of getting us what we want.  So, to solve complex, global problems, we’ll need a great plan.

And therein lies the key.  

Everyone that came before you who wanted to make a difference probably had a fairly good notion of what the problems were, but how many of them actually took the time to really research/create a strategy of what to do about it?

“But that’s not fair to them,” you may cry out, “they didn’t have access to resources like we do today!  The Internet has exploded in the past few decades, and my phone has more computing power than what used to require an entire room!  You can’t expect them to have been able to create detailed plans or research things out fully!  It was good enough that they even cared, at least a little!”

Precisely.  

They might not have had access to the wonderful resources we have today-- which would have seriously hampered their researching ability/ability to make plans.

“Right,” you may say, “then how can you expect anyone to do anything about these issues?  They’re too large-- you just admitted that it’s impossible to make plans that solve anything this big!”

But you can totally research to your heart’s content.  You are living in a world where information is literally at your fingertips.  As a human being, you’re already hard-wired to make plans and achieve your goals!

<Cue motivational music>

So don’t give up on your plans of solving worldwide problems just yet!  You have at least two advantages over all the idealistic youth that came before you in generations past:  

1. With the Internet, you have access to a vast majority of all of humanity’s acquired knowledge-- over 5,000 years of accumulated lore.

1. Armed with the idea that plans get things done, you can create strategies that actually lead to your goals.

To end, I’ll be giving you a basic framework that you can apply to create plans that allow you to achieve your goals: The General Action Plan (GAP):

The main idea is broken into 4 steps:

1. Identify your goal:

This is what you want to get done.  It’s going to be the focus of all your actions.

EX: “Convince all my friends that procrastination is terrible; get them to change their

habits”

1. What do you need to do to get it done?

If the goal is large, break it up into subsections of things you can do.  Identify categories.  If

you end up with a few general sections, identify subgoals for each section.  Repeat as

needed.

EX: “I will need to focus on Outreach, Persuasion, Creating a Movement, and Publicity if I

want to get my friends to change their habits.”

1. What is stopping you from getting it done?

Identify things that make it hard for you to start.  List smaller things you need to do for

each subsection.

EX: “I will have difficulty convincing people.  I need to motivate myself to get this done.  I

will have trouble getting the social media attention I’ll need.”

1. Break it down again.

Take all the vague-sounding things you wrote down earlier, and break it down again into

smaller actions.  The trick behind the G.A.P. is to take conceptual things that are hard to do into actual actionable items.

EX: “Outreach becomes:

1. Create a poster

2. Talk to friends

3. Make a Facebook post.

Breaking it down again:

Create a poster:

1. Outline poster

2. Ask friend to supply visuals

3. Post around school

Talk to friends:

1. Make a list of friends who would be interested

2. Find out what your main idea should be

3. Find opportunities to talk with them

and so on for each action.”

Concluding Thoughts:

When faced with impossible odds, don’t try to shoot lower-- make a better plan.  We’re living in a really great plan where we can network with people across the globe and learn about almost anything.

No matter what things you want to accomplish, having a basic understanding of breaking it down should make it much easier to understand how to get big, complex, and fuzzy ideas like “teach the value of persistence” done.  

Instead of focusing on the abstract “idea-ness” of the goal, focus on what the goal would look like if you were successful, and focus on cultivating those symptoms.  And remember to take all the general concepts and clarify them.

A lot of paralysis when it comes to getting anything done is uncertainty .  If you don’t know what you can do to solve a problem, it’s much scarier.  But if you can hone in on what exactly you need to get done, even if it’s an impossible task, you at least know what you can do.

So back to the original question, “Why try hard?”  

I suppose the answer is, “If you aren’t trying hard, you aren’t really trying at all.”

 

 

 

Hello everyone,

I've been trying to write some essays for friends, designed to introduce them to some rationalist ideas on a personal blog. I thought I might be able to post a few here to get some feedback on what I'm doing right/wrong so I can better get the main ideas across.

This is a new project, so I only have a few essays (in differing levels of completion).

This is one that is completed:

 

" Hello,

Before we start talking about motivational skills, I’d like to set a few fundamentals down so everything makes sense.  Concepts and ideas are often much clearer in our heads than what we actually say *1, so for the this week and the next week I’ll be writing about two building-block ideas, and then we’ll get into a few techniques.

(My apologies if this seems slow– I’d like to make sure everything makes sense for readers new to all this, so if you’ve already been exposed to general rationalist ideas, you can probably just wait until the techniques start showing up for some potentially novel content.)

Today we’re talking about optimization.  This is a term that comes up a lot in both math and economics, but we’re using it here to mean “finding the best way of doing things”.

By “best” I mean faster and better.

Personally, I believe mapping things out, writing things down, and general planning skills are super helpful.  We’ll explore all those ideas eventually, but the point is that I find that these utilizing these skills allows me to optimize my task completion process– not only do I finish in less time, but the quality of work is also improved.

Most of us don’t do this type of breakdown, I don’t think.  Sure, we’ll write down what we have to get done, but I don’t believe most people will consistently assess their goals and break down their tasks, with outlines and mapping.

However, I think we can all benefit from trying to optimize our tasks, be it through planning or finding a better method.

Why try something different, though?  Isn’t it fine that most of us go through life on a more spontaneous basis?  Can’t we do things as we think of them?  

I don’t believe this is too great.  Consider our finite day:

There are lots of things we can do.  We can separate these actions into “fun” actions and “unfun” actions.  We’ll say that “fun” actions are actions we would rather continue than stop and we would prefer doing “fun” actions to “unfun” ones.

Basically, everyday there are things we like doing and things we don’t like doing.

We can also divide actions into things we “have” to do (mandatory actions) and things we “can” do (voluntary actions).  There are actions we have a choice in doing, and actions we may have less of a choice in doing.  There is some overlap with the “fun” and “unfun” categories.  Some mandatory actions are fun, some are unfun.  

Voluntary activities can be fun or unfun, but I think most people would choose to do fun actions over unfun ones.

There’s many more distinctions we could make between actions (like instrumental and terminal values *2), but we’ll stick with fun/unfun and mandatory/voluntary for our purposes.

And this all ties back to the finite day– the number of things you can do is determined by how long it takes for you to do them.  So if you prefer doing fun things, improving how you do things may be to your benefit.  

After all, less time spent on unfun mandatory things = more time spent on fun things, generally speaking.  

Aside from having fun, many of us have long-term goals– things we want to work to achieve.  These could be part of voluntary or mandatory actions; it depends on how badly we want them, our realization of this want, and our resolve to actually put it as a goal.

For different people, however, their definition of “mandatory” actions differs.  There are more localized actions that we can more easily see and relate to– making food, working at a job, and generally securing their short-term survival needs.  

But there are also larger goals that may take more time to achieve–eradicating disease, ameliorating global poverty, and eliminating potential causes of human extinction *3.  And to some, working on these more long-term life-security issues is just as “mandatory” as securing short-term life-security.

Especially in the case of the above really hard problems where the stakes are also really high, it’s in everyone’s best interests if you optimize.  The faster and more effectively we go about dealing with these difficult problems, the better chance we all have of having more time to do fun things and not succumbing to something terrible like cancer or nuclear war.

Now, I’m not expecting us all to immediately decide to dedicate our lives to tackling threats to humanity’s long-term survival (though I’d be lying if I said it wouldn’t make me a little more comfortable), but it’s my hope that as we go along exploring thoughts, motivation, and the like that you develop a little more appreciation for the long-term view of things.

It’s very often quite helpful to explore the cause-and-effect relationships of your actions.  This seems really simple, but we’ll come back to build upon this later.  A particularly good question to ask yourself is, “What else could I be doing with this time?  What are the benefits of any of those things over what I’m doing now?”

For example, say we have to choose between watching an interesting television show that spans 7 seasons on Netflix, or we can read more of that Introductory Calculus textbook we just got.  

Intuitively, studying the textbook seems like the “right” option.  This seems even more the case if our goals include pursuing a job that is easiest to get with a degree in math that is easiest to understand with a solid math foundation that includes calculus.

But we also like fun, so we are also considering putting off studying for another day in favor of Netflix.  Of course we’d be trading knowledge points for fun points.

Economists call these sorts of tradeoffs “opportunity costs” *4.  

If we want to stick to our goals and still have fun, we can either effectively study calculus and then “reward” yourself with Netflix later on, or just change our mind into thinking that studying calculus is fun (more on this later on, too).

The point is, in either scenario, we can do more if we optimize.  

If we effectively study calculus, we’ll learn more in less time.  We could then very well find time to watch that Netflix show.

If we are trying very hard to have our actions align to your goals (which seems pretty logical), optimizing our studying allows us to reach our goal in less time.  

Of course, in the case of directly choosing to study calculus over Netflix, it’s easy to see that studying yields greater benefits (with respect to most goals), but just because it’s the better option doesn’t mean it’s easier to do.

No, oftentimes, we do the wrong thing– even when we know better…*5

But that’s also a topic for another day.  

For now, I hope you’ve gotten a basic overview of why striving for better and faster ways of doing things can range from helpful to super beneficial.

*1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_transparency

*2: http://lesswrong.com/lw/l4/terminal_values_and_instrumental_values/

*3: http://global-catastrophic-risks.com/docs/global-catastrophic-risks.pdf

*4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

*5: http://blog.beeminder.com/akrasia/ "

So overall, if things are unclear, or this seems ill-fated, I'd appreciate thoughts on how I could improve/make this more accessible to friends.

Thank you!