Comments by pjeby - Less Wrong

pjeby on Rationality Quotes May 2013

2013-05-09T10:58:41.985147+10:00

The naive application of that is to go around thinking "I shouldn't be thinking about 'should' all the time! I should stop doing that! I'm not thinking like I should!".

I have not found that this actually helps.

As Jamie Zawinski might put it, "Now you have two problems."

pjeby on Rationality Quotes May 2013

2013-05-06T03:49:12.203836+10:00

my model of how people work has them understanding the difference between "ought" and "expected" most of the time

Understanding it and applying it are two different things, in the same way that knowing about a bias doesn't stop you from exhibiting it.

People tend to obsess over things that "shouldn't have" happened -- a mistake they made, an embarrassing situation, something infuriating that somebody else did, or some impending but inevitable life change. They fret and scheme and worry and just can't seem to get it out of their mind, even if they want to.

This behavior is generally caused by the alief that the thing "should not" have happened that way, or that the upcoming thing should not happen, or that they "should have done better", or some other "should" belief. Byron Katie's book is about a method of surfacing and questioning these aliefs, so as to stop fretting over what can't be changed, thus to focus on what can. As Quirrelmort put it:

"Amateur foolisshnesss."

"Pardon? " hissed Harry.

"You ssee misstake, think of undoing, ssetting time back to sstart. Yet not even with hourglasss can time be undone. Musst move forward insstead."

While Byron Katie and Quirrelmort would disagree on quite a few things, this is one thing they have in common.

(Interestingly, her book "I need your love; is that true?" is very Quirrelmortish in the sense of highlighting how much people's seeming goodness or altruism is driven by self-centeredness -- but it's a book about how to stop doing that yourself, not using other people's actions as a way to justify doing more of it. Indeed, it's about being able to have compassion for the misguided or self-centered actions of others, not contempt ala Quirrelmort. Hm. Actually, the more I think about it, the more she seems like a true opposite to Quirrelmort, in a way that neither Harry nor Dumbledore are. If she were in-world, she'd be sort of like a non-naive McGonagall crossed with a Dumbledore who could not be made to despair or blinded by grief or regret or vengeance.)

pjeby on Rationality Quotes May 2013

2013-05-05T15:24:06.241205+10:00

Nowadays many educated people treat reinforcement theory as if it were something not terribly important that they have known and understood all along. In fact most people don't understand it, or they would not behave so badly to the people around them.

-- Karen Pryor, Don't Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training

pjeby on Rationality Quotes May 2013

2013-05-05T14:07:39.163370+10:00

I was originally confused when I read this quote, assuming that "should" was being used in the sense of "morally just". It makes a lot more sense with "should" meaning "according to my model of reality"

A little of both. Her point is that human brains have a tendency to confuse "is" and "ought", mixing the moral or preferential with the actual, thereby clouding the issue.

If you don't want it to be raining, then feeling or protesting that it shouldn't be happening is an error. But it's an error that human brains commonly make, because our genes wish us to signal our disapproval of things we find objectionable, so that others will be persuaded to behave differently.

The problem is that reality isn't going to behave differently because you think it should, and most of the time even people aren't going to behave differently just because you think they should. Protesting that something should or shouldn't be a particular way is generally a non-helpful response to things as they are: if you want to change how things are, that change can only be made to happen in the future. At the present moment, things simply are how they are, and there is nothing you can do about that without using a time machine. (Even then, the change will still have to happen in your subjective future!)

The reason this passage uses "raining" is that it's a relatively innocuous example to introduce the problems involved in "arguing with reality", in a non-controversial way. Most of the subjects touched on in the rest of the book are things that people usually feel much more strongly about... and therefore have even more reason to separate "is" and "ought" about. (Like, "my spouse should listen to me", to stick to a still relatively-innocuous example.)

pjeby on Developmental Thinking Shout-out to CFAR

2013-05-04T05:28:01.393542+10:00

Eugene Gendlin and colleagues developed ... The "focusing" technique

Just want to mention that this isn't just important for therapy, it's foundational to any sort of mindhacking or self-improvement technique that's directed at internal self-modification (as opposed to environmental intervention). Indeed, Gendlin's "focusing" is basically the same thing I've previously written about as "RMI", or that Byron Katie describes as "thinking with the heart", or that NLP calls "transderivational search" and many other people refer to as "the small, still voice". It can also be considered as akin to fractionation in self-hypnosis, where you're dropping in and out of a trance-like state, though it's exactly the same kind of trance you go into when you're say, trying to remember where you left your keys.

As Gendlin and co report, many people do this automatically and naturally, others have to be trained. And it makes a big difference in whether a given class of cognitive techniques will produce genuine behavioral change, vs. just intellectual insights and superficial agreement that one ought to act differently.

pjeby on What do professional philosophers believe, and why?

2013-05-03T09:51:19.252749+10:00

My answer to Newcomb's problem is to one-box if and only if Omega is not defeatable and two-box in a way that defeats Omega otherwise

But now you've laid out your decision-making process, so all Omega needs to do now is to predict whether you think he's defeatable. ;-)

In general, I expect Omega could actually be implemented just by being able to tell whether somebody is likely to overthink the problem, and if so, predict they will two-box. That might be sufficient to get better-than-chance predictions.

To put it yet another way: if you're trying to outsmart Omega, that means you're trying to figure out a rationalization that will let you two-box... which means Omega should predict you'll two-box. ;-)

pjeby on What do professional philosophers believe, and why?

2013-05-02T06:21:54.629030+10:00

The conclusion is: experts are no good

We actually see this across a lot of fields besides philosophy, and it's not LW-specific. For example, simply adding up a few simple scores does better than experts at predicting job performance.

It's been shown that expertise is only valuable in fields where there is a short enough and frequent enough feedback loop for a person to actually develop expertise -- and there is something coherent to develop the expertise in. Outside of such fields, experts are just blowhards with status.

Given the nature of the field, the prior expectation for philosophers having any genuine expertise at anything except impressing people, should be set quite low. (Much like we should expect expert short-term stock pickers to not be expert at anything besides being lucky.)

pjeby on Rationality Quotes May 2013

2013-05-02T06:11:29.936739+10:00

When I argue with reality, I lose -- but only 100 percent of the time.

-- Byron Katie, Loving What Is

pjeby on Rationality Quotes May 2013

2013-05-02T06:10:23.963206+10:00

Reality, for me, is what is true. The truth is whatever is in front of you, whatever is really happening. Whether you like it or not, it's raining now. "It shouldn't be raining" is just a thought. In reality, there is no such thing as a "should" or a "shouldn't." These are only thoughts that we impose onto reality. The mind is like a carpenter's level. When the bubble is off to one side -- "It shouldn't be raining" -- we can know that the mind is caught in its thinking. When the bubble is right in the middle -- "It's raining" -- we can know that the surface is level and the mind is accepting reality as it is. Without the "should" and "shouldn't," we can see reality as it is, and this leaves us free to act efficiently, clearly, and sanely.

-- Byron Katie, Loving What Is

pjeby on LW Women Entries- Creepiness

2013-04-29T12:51:11.534406+10:00

The dichotomy breaks down a bit here, but the important property is that both parties maintain plausible deniability.

Right. I mentioned this example partly because it's a PUA technique in the category of "forced IOIs", which is an awkward name for maintaining plausible deniability about whether a request has been made and whether it has been rejected, to avoid awkwardness and social status loss.