Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance

54 lukeprog 04 October 2011 02:45AM

Gooey personal details alert! See also: Alicorn's Polyhacking.

Years ago, my first girlfriend (let's call her 'Alice') ran into her ex-boyfriend at a coffee shop. They traded anecdotes, felt connected, a spark of intimacy...

And then she left the coffee shop, quickly.

Later she explained: "You have my heart now, Luke."

I felt proud, but even Luke2005 also felt a twinge of "the universe is suboptimal," because Alice hadn't been able to engage that connection any further. The cultural scripts defining our relationship said that only one man owned her heart. But surely that wasn't optimal for producing utilons?

This is an account of some lessons in rationality that I learned during my journeys in romance.* I haven't been very rational in my relationships until recently, but in retrospect I learned a fair bit about rationality from the failures resulting from my irrationality in past relationships.

Early lessons included realizations like the one above — that I wasn't happy with the standard cultural scripts. I hadn't really noticed the cultural scripts up until that point. I was a victim of cached thoughts and a cached self.

Rationality Lesson: Until you explicitly notice the cached rules for what you're doing, you won't start thinking of them as something to be optimized. Ask yourself: Which parts of romance do you currently think of as subjects of optimization? What else should you be optimizing?

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Why Real Men Wear Pink

51 Yvain 06 August 2009 07:39AM

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable we have to alter it every six months."

-- Oscar Wilde

For the past few decades, I and many other men my age have been locked in a battle with the clothing industry. I want simple, good-looking apparel that covers my nakedness and maybe even makes me look attractive. The clothing industry believes someone my age wants either clothing laced with profanity, clothing that objectifies women, clothing that glorifies alcohol or drug use, or clothing that makes them look like a gangster. And judging by the clothing I see people wearing, on the whole they are right.

I've been working my way through Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works, and reached the part where he quotes approvingly Quentin Bell's theory of fashion. The theory provides a good explanation for why so much clothing seems so deliberately outrageous.

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Learned Blankness

130 AnnaSalamon 18 April 2011 06:55PM

Related to: Semantic stopsigns, Truly part of you.

One day, the dishwasher broke. I asked Steve Rayhawk to look at it because he’s “good with mechanical things”.

“The drain is clogged,” he said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

He pointed at a pool of backed up water. “Because the water is backed up.”

We cleared the clog and the dishwasher started working.

I felt silly, because I, too, could have reasoned that out.  The water wasn’t draining -- therefore, perhaps the drain was clogged.  Basic rationality in action.[1]

But before giving it even ten seconds’ thought, I’d classified the problem as a “mechanical thing”.  And I’d remembered I “didn’t know how mechanical things worked” (a cached thought).  And then -- prompted by my cached belief that there was a magical “way mechanical things work” that some knew and I didn’t -- I stopped trying to think at all.  

“Mechanical things” was for me a mental stopsign -- a blank domain that stayed blank, because I never asked the obvious next questions (questions like “does the dishwasher look unusual in any way?  Why is there water at the bottom?”).

When I tutored math, new students acted as though the laws of exponents (or whatever we were learning) had fallen from the sky on stone tablets.  They clung rigidly to the handed-down procedures.  It didn’t occur to them to try to understand, or to improvise.  The students treated math the way I treated broken dishwashers.

Martin Seligman coined the term "learned helplessness" to describe a condition in which someone has learned to behave as though they were helpless. I think we need a term for learned helplessness about thinking (in a particular domain).  I’ll call this “learned blankness”[2].  Folks who fall prey to learned blankness may still take actions -- sometimes my students practiced the procedures again and again, hired a tutor, etc.  But they do so as though carrying out rituals to an unknown god -- parts of them may be trying, but their “understand X” center has given up.

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The benefits of madness: A positive account of arationality

101 Skatche 22 April 2011 07:43PM

This post originated in a comment I posted about a strange and unpleasant experience I had when pushing myself too hard mentally.  People seemed interested in hearing about it, so I sat down to write.  In the process, however, it became something rather different (and a great deal longer) than what I originally intended.  The incident referred to in the above comment was a case of manic focus gone wrong; but the truth is, often in my life it's gone incredibly right.  I've gotten myself into some pretty strange headspaces, but through discipline and quick thinking I have often been able to turn them to my advantage and put them to good use.

Part 1, then, lays out a sort of cognitive history, focusing on the more extreme states I've been in.  Part 2 continues the narrative; this is where I began to learn to ride them out and make them work for me.  Part 3 is the incident in question: where I overstepped myself and suffered the consequences.

Some of you, however, may want to skip ahead to part 4 (unless you find my autobiographical writings interesting as a case study).  There, I've written a proposal for a series of posts about how to effectively use the full spectrum of somatic and cognitive states to one's advantage.  I have vacillated for a long time about this, for reasons that will be discussed below, but I decided that if I was already laying this much on the line, I might as well take it a step further.  Read if you will; and if you're interested, please say so.

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So You've Changed Your Mind

60 Spurlock 28 April 2011 07:42PM

Related to: Politics is the mind-killer, Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies, The Importance of Saying "Oops", Leave a Line of Retreat, You Can Face Reality

This is something I wrote, sort of in brain-dump mode, in the process of trying to organize my thoughts for a song I'm working on. I don't think it covers any new ground for this community, but I was somewhat taken with the way it turned out and figured I'd go ahead and post it for LW's enjoyment.

 

So you've changed your mind. Given up your sacred belief, the one that defined so much of who you are for so long.

You are probably feeling pretty scared right now.

Your life revolved around this. There is not a single aspect of your life that will not feel the effects of this momentous tumult. Right now though, you're still in shock. You know that later, little by little, as you lie awake in bed or stare at your desk at work, the idea will creep its way through the web of your mind. It will touch each and every idea, and change it, and move on. And that changed idea will change other ideas, and those ideas will change as well. Who are you as a person if not the person who holds that idea? For as this new notion gradually but violently makes its way through your skull, will it not upset everything that you know, everything that you do, everything that you are? Will you not then be another person?

The thought is terrifying. What person will you be?

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Willpower Hax #487: Execute by Default

47 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 May 2009 06:46AM

This is a trick that I use for getting out of bed in the morning - quite literally:  I count down from 10 and get out of bed after the "1".

It works because instead of deciding to get out of bed, I just have to decide to implement the plan to count down from 10 and then get out of bed.  Once the plan is in motion, the final action no longer requires an effortful decision - that's the theory, anyway.  And to start the plan doesn't require as much effort because I just have to think "10, 9..."

As usual with such things, there's no way to tell whether it works because it's based on any sort of realistic insight or if it works because I believe it works; and in fact this is one of those cases that blurs the boundary between the two.

The technique was originally inspired by reading some neurologist suggesting that what we have is not "free will" so much as "free won't": that is, frontal reflection is mainly good for suppressing the default mode of action, more than originating new actions.

Pondering that for a bit inspired the idea that - if the brain carries out certain plans by default - it might conserve willpower to first visualize a sequence of actions and try to 'mark' it as the default plan, and then lift the attention-of-decision that agonizes whether or not to do it, thus allowing that default to happen.

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