Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/doing-the-causation-backwards/

About two years ago, when I first got my smart phone (yes, later than most of the other humans).  I was new to apps, and I was new to environments.  When I decided on what apps should be on my home screen, I picked the ones that I thought I would use most often.

My home screen started with:

• google bar (the top of the page)
• calendar
• facebook
• notepad app (half the page)
• ingress (because I play)
• maps
• camera
• torch

My home screen has barely changed.  I don't play ingress very often these days, but that's by choice, however I was seeing the facebook notifications far too often.  Ending up on facebook far too often for what I wanted.

Recently I decided to try out some tracking systems that include 1/0 metrics.  It looks something like this:

I wanted this in a place where I could see it and fill it out every day, and at the same time I began to question why I have my facebook app on my front page.  This link is now on my front page and I easily fill it out once a day (a win for a habit successfully implemented).

The concept that I want to impart today is that the causation goes the wrong way.  Instead of wanting apps that I regularly use on my front page so that I can easily access them - I want apps that I want to use regularly on my front page.  That way I will tend to develop habits of regularly using them instead of the other ones.  

Fridge

This applies to the refrigerator too.  Instead of the things you use and eat all the time being at the front (assuming they might be different), you want the foods that you want to eat most readily accessible and at the front.  If this means healthy foods at the front - do that.  If this means having a fruit bowl on the table - do that.

TV

This applies to TV too.  If you find book-reading more interesting than TV watching but find yourself watching a lot of TV all the same; put the remotes in a harder to reach place and leave really good books lying around.

Computer shortcuts

Want to play less games?  Get to Reddit less?  Maybe put the games in slightly harder to access places.  Buried in other folders.  Delete the auto-fill in your browser that completes to Reddit.  Want to do equations by hand more often than using a calculator (for practicing math purposes) - make the calculator slightly harder to get to, and make sure you have a pen/paper handy around the computer.

Junk food

Do you have a candy cupboard?  Find yourself eating too much of it.  A simple answer would be to empty it, and don't fill it again.  But an alternative that still lets you have candy in the house is to place slightly healthier and tasty food choices in front of the candy.  for example dried fruit - still sweet and bite-sized, in a similar class of choices to Candy, but significantly healthier.  Some days you will reach past the dried fruit for the chocolate, and many more days you will reach for the dried fruits.

The meta strategy

Without creating more examples.  There are often behaviours you want to do better, actions that you want to take instead of other actions, or behaviours that have a "better form" than you might otherwise be doing.  

The strategy is:

1. Take 5 minutes writing out what you usually do on a daily basis
2. For each one, consider if this is the optimum form of the action, (or one that leads to acceptable levels of results) - don't be afraid to dream of the possible optimal actions.
   
3. Make the better option more available in your life.
   
4. Make it easier for yourself to do the better option.
5. Check progress in a month (put a reminder in your diary) and iterate on solutionspace
6. Winning!

We know about System 1 and System 2.  We live some of our life in S1 and some in S2.  S2 know's it's not always going to be "in charge" and making deliberate actions but it does have periods of lucid thought in which to set up S1 with better easiest-path behaviours and actions.  This applies to planning, setting up a workspace, avoiding the pain of paying and many more.

Think: How can I set this up so that I do the better possible path in the future with the least effort?

Meta: this post took 2hrs to write.

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/giving-people-personhood-and-taking-it-away

This post is about the Kegan levels of self development.  If you don't know what that is, this post might still be interesting to you but you might be missing some key structure to understand where it fits among that schema.  More information can be found here (https://meaningness.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/)

I am not ready to definitely accept the Kegan levels as a useful model because often it makes retrospective predictions.  Rather than predictions of the future.  A model is only as useful as what it can predict, so if it can't be used on the fly when you want to explain the universe you might as well throw it out.  Having said that, this idea is interesting.

When I was little, people fell into different categories.  There was my parents - the olderClass humans (going to refer to them as Senior-humans), my siblings - which, as I grew up turned into my age-group humans and through school - my peergroup humans.

People like doctors fell into SeniorClass, Dentists, Vets, Plumbers, PIC (People In Charge) - all fell into the SeniorClass of humans.  A big one was teachers - they were all PIC.  A common trope among children is that the teachers sleep at school.  Or to use a gaming term - we feel as though they are the NPC's of that part of our journey in life.

As far as I can tell (from trying to pinpoint this today); the people I meet on my own terms become peergroup humans.  Effectively friends.  People I meet not on my terms; as well as strangers - first join some kind of seniorclass of humans, if I get to know them enough they transition to my peergroup.  Of course this is a bit strange because on the one hand I imagine I want to be friends with the PIC, or the senior-class humans because of the opportunity to get ahead in life.  the good ol' I know a guy who know's a guy.  Which is really not what a peergroup constitutes.

Peergroup humans are not "A guy with skills" much as we might hope for; they are (hopefully) all at our own, or near our own skill level.  (on Kegan's stage 3) people who's opinions and ideas we care about because they are similar to us.

Recently I have noticed events that have taken some of my long term SeniorClass and shift them into my peergroup.  Effectively "demoting" them from "Professional" to "human".  When I think "person has their shit together" or "person doesn't have their shit together".  I guess there were always people who seemed to have their shit together.  Now that I am an adult it's clear that less and less people are competent and more and more people are winging it through their lives.  It's mildly uncomfortable to think of people as being less "together" than I thought they were.

The other place where it's been an uncomfortable transition is in my memory.  I will from time to time think back to a time when I deferred judgement, decision making capacity, or high-level trust in someone else having my own best interests at heart - where now looking back retrospectively they were just as lost and confused as I was in some of those situations, but they had a little kid to take care of/be in charge of/be in seniority to.

What I wonder about this process of demoting people is - what if instead of demoting my adults as they prove their humanity; I instead promote all the humans to Senior-Class.  What would that do to my model of humans?  And I guess I don't really know where I stand.  Am I an adult?  Am I a peer?  I have always been an observer...

I'm not really getting at anything with this post.  Just interesting to observe this reclassification happening and fit kegan's stages around it.  Obviously some of the way that I sorted Senior-class humans is particularly relevant to a stage 3 experience of how I managed my relationships when I was smaller.  I also wonder that given the typical mind - whether this is normal or unusual.  

Question for today:

• Do you divide people into "advanced" and "equal" and "simpler" - (or did you do it when you were younger?)
• Do people ever change category on you?  In which direction?  What do you do about that?
• Assuming I am on some kind of path of gradually increasing understanding and growing and changing models of the world around me - what is next?

Meta: this took 3 hours to write over a few days.

Original post:  http://bearlamp.com.au/low-hanging-productivity/

Tl;dr - Simple changes to workspaces like a big screen can make a big difference.

This week I spent a few days away from my usual desk.  I have been house sitting.  I didn't think too much of it; I tend to carry with me a portable lifestyle.  My laptop, some power blocks for my phone, and various supplies that make for easy "office"-ing around the place.  I usually don't carry a charger with me because when I know I will be gone a while I will take it with me.  

I have always liked a portable office.  The ability to stop, and continue later at ease was always important to me.  However recently I moved into a new place and set up a desk.  I figured I would tryX where X is workspaces (a post for the future).  I never set up a workspace for the reason of it not being portable.  The interesting thing that has surprised me this week is that I miss my big screen (which was a gift - I might have never bought myself a big screen).  

For whatever reason, the ability to view more space at once makes me more productive.  Combined with Linux's natural tendencies to have several desktop environments with simple switching.  My laptop screen is about 19in.  Which is plenty.  The new screen is about 1.5x that.  I never thought it would be useful, it took me years to do it.  If it broke today, I would be willing to spend up to $900 to get it back (which is more than six times the price of a new screen).  Right now I wonder how productive I might be with a 3rd screen... Or a 4th.  (or a 3D virtual reality work environment with screenspace limited by my eyeballs not my screen resolution...)

I feel like (along with other habits) I am probably working at 120% of what I was working before.  A fair chunk of which I owe to the extra screenspace.

Questions for today:

1. What part do you remember adding to your workspace to help you be more productive.
2. What's the coolest most awesome or productive workspace that you have seen in action?  How hard would that be to get for yourself?
3. How can you make your current workspace a tiny bit more productive in anticipation for things you have to do tomorrow?

Meta:  This took 45mins to write.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.

Originally posted here: http://bearlamp.com.au/people-who-lie-about-how-much-they-eat-are-jerks/

Weight loss journey is a long and complicated problem solving adventure.  This is one small factor that adds to the confusion.  You probably have that one friend.  Appears to eat a whole bunch, and yet doesn't put on weight.  If you ever had that conversation it goes something like,

"How are you so thin?"
"raah raah metabolism"
"raah raah I dont know why I don't put on weight"
"Take advantage of the habit"

Well I have had enough.  You're wrong.  You're lying and you probably don't even know it.  It's not possible. (Within a reasonable scope of human variation) Calories and energy are a black box system.  Calories in, work out, leftovers become weight gain, deficit is weight loss.  If a human could eat significantly more calories for the same amount of work and not put on weight we would be prodding them in a lab for breaking the laws of physics on conservation of mass and conservation of energy.

So this is you, you say you gain weight no matter what you eat and that's scientifically impossible.  Now what?  You probably don't mean to break the laws of physics (and you probably don't actually break them).  You genuinely absentmindedly don't notice when you scoff down whole plates of food and when you skip dinner because you didn't feel like it (and absentmindedly balance the calories automatically).  It's all the same to you because you naturally do that.

This very likely is about habits, and natural habits that people have.  If for example John has the habit of getting home and going to the fridge, making dinner because it's usually the evening.  Wendy doesn't have the habit.  She eats when she is hungry.  Not having a set mealtime sometimes means that she gets tired-hungry and has a state of being too exhausted to decide what to eat and too hungry to do anything else that would help solve the problem.  But for Wendy she doesn't get home and automatically cook dinner.  (good things and bad things come from habits.)

Wendy and john go to a big lunch together.  They both eat 150% of the calories they should be eating for that meal, and they don't mind - enjoying food is part of enjoying life.  It was a fancy restaurant with good food.  Later that evening when Wendy gets home she doesn't feel hungry and goes off to read a book or talk to friends on the internet.  Eventually she has a light snack (of 10% of her "dinner" calories) and heads off to totalling 160% of the calories for the two meals.  Effectively under-eating for the day.  John on the other hand, has his habit of heading home and making dinner.  Even after the big lunch, his automatic systems take over and he makes and ordinary dinner of 100% of his calories for that meal.  John's total for that day is 250% for two meals or effectively half a meal extra for that day.

If W and J do this every week (assuming the rest of their diets are perfectly balanced), John will have an upwards trajectory and Wendy will have a downwards one.  John might ask Wendy how she stays so skinny, and Wendy wouldn't know.  After all they eat about the same amount when they are together.

No one understands this.  

What can we do about it?

1. We can hire scientists to follow both J and W around for a week and write down every time they eat something. (this is impractical - maybe if we are in an isolated environment like a weekend retreat it would be easier to do this)
2. We can get them to self report via an app (but people are usually pretty bad at that)
3. We can try ask more specifically, "what do you eat in a day?", or "what have you eaten since this time yesterday?" and gather data points to try to build a picture of what a person eats.
4. We can search for people with similar habits around food to us and ask them how they stay healthy.
5. We can look for people with successful habits around food, ask them for advice and then figure out why that advice works, and how to make that advice work for us.

On the noticing level.  You should notice that every single thing that you eat adds to your caloric intake. Every single piece of work you do adds to your burn.  It's easier to eat another piece of chocolate (for 5 seconds) than run another 15minutes to burn that chocolate off.  If something is not working towards your dieting success it's probably working against it.

Meta: this took one hour to write.

“In 2015, there were roughly 214 million malaria cases and an estimated 438 000 malaria deaths.”  While we don’t know how many humans malaria has killed, an estimate of half of everyone who has ever died isn’t absurd.  Because few people in rich countries get malaria, pharmaceutical companies put relatively few resources into combating it.   

The best way to eliminate malaria is probably to use gene drives to completely eradicate the species of mosquitoes that bite humans, but until recently rich countries haven’t been motivated to such xenocide.  The Zika virus, which is in mosquitoes in the United States, provides effective altruists with an opportunity to advocate for exterminating all species of mosquitoes that spread disease to humans because the horrifying and disgusting pictures of babies with Zika might make the American public receptive to our arguments.  A leading short-term goal of effective altruists, I propose, should be advocating for mosquito eradication in the short window before rich people get acclimated to pictures of Zika babies.   

Personally, I have (unsuccessfully) pitched articles on mosquito eradication to two magazines and (with a bit more success) emailed someone who knows someone who knows someone in the Trump campaign to attempt to get the candidate to come out in favor of mosquito eradication.  What have you done?   Given the enormous harm mosquitoes inflict on mankind, doing just a little (such as writing a blog post) could have a high expected payoff.

It's been a few years since I read http://lesswrong.com/lw/qj/einsteins_speed/ and the rest of the quantum physics sequence, but I recently learned about the company Nutonian, http://www.nutonian.com/. Basically it's a narrow AI system that looks at unstructured data and tries out billions of models to fit it, favoring those that use simpler math. They apply it to all sorts of fields, but that includes physics. It can't find Newton's laws from three frames of a falling apple, but it did find the Hamiltonian of a double pendulum given its motion data after a few hours of processing: http://phys.org/news/2009-12-eureqa-robot-scientist-video.html

I'm playing around with an article on Motivated Cognition for general consumption

I think it's one of the most important things to teach someone about rationality (any other suggestions? Confirmation bias, placebo, pareidolia, and the odds of coincidences come to mind...)

So, I've taken the five kinds of motivated cognition I know of 

(Motivated skepticism)

(Motivated stopping)

(Motivated neutrality)

(Motivated credulity)

(Motivated continuation)

added a counterpart to "neutrality," and then renamed neutrality.

The end result being six kinds of motivated cognition, three pairs of two kinds each, which are opposites of each other. Also, each pair has one kind that beings with an S and the other that begins with a C, which is good for mnemonic purposes.

So, I've got

Stopping and Continuation - Controls WHICH arguments you put in front of yourself (Do you continue because you haven't found what supports you yet, or do you stop because you have?)

Self-deprecation and Conceit - these control WHETHER you judge an argument in front of you (Do you refuse to judge ("Who am I to judge?") clear arguments that oppose your side or do you judge arguments you have no capacity to understand (the probability of abiogenesis, for example) because it lets you support your side?)

Skepticism and Credulity - Controls HOW you judge arguments (Do you demand higher evidence for ideas you don't like, and less for ideas you do? Do you scrutinize ideas you don't like more than ideas you do? Do you ask if the evidence forces you to accept, or if it allows you to accept an idea?)

I'm thinking of introducing them in that order, too, with the "Which/Whether/How you judge" abstraction.

Anybody see better abstractions, better explanations, better mnemonic techniques? Any advice of any kind on how to teach this effectively to people? Other fundamentals to rationality? (Maybe the beliefs as probabilities idea?)

Original post:  http://bearlamp.com.au/against-the-five-love-languages/

You are in a relationship, someone made some objection about communication, you don't seem to understand what's going on.  Many years later you find yourself looking back at the relationship and reflecting with friends.  That's when someone brings up The Five Love Languages.  Oh deep and great and meaningful secrets encoded into a book.

The 5 languages are: 

1. Gifts
2. Quality time
3. Words of affirmation
4. Acts of service (devotion)
5. Physical touch (intimacy)

Oooooh if only you had spent more energy trying to get quality time, and less effort on gifts that relationship could have been saved.  Or the other way - the relationship was doomed because you wanted quality time and they wanted gifts as a show of love.  

You start seeing the world in 5 languages, your coworker offering to get you a coffee is a gift.  Your boss praising your good work is words of affirmation.  You start thinking like a Man with a hammer.  Strictly speaking I enjoy man with a hammer syndrome.  I like to use a model to death, and then pick a new model and do it all again.

What I want you to do now is imagine you didn't do that.  Imagine we cloned the universe.  In one universe we gave you the love-languages book and locked you in a room to read it.  In the second universe we offered to run you through a new relationship-training exercise.  "It's no guide book on how to communicate with your partner, but it's a pretty good process", we lock you in a room with a chair, a desk, some paper, pens (few distractions) and order you to derive some theory and idea about how to communicate with your partner.

Which one do you predict will yield the best result?

When I ask my system 2, it is fairly happy with the idea that using someone else's model is a shortcut to finding the answers.  After all they pre-derived the model.  No need to spend hours working on it myself when it's all in a book.

When I ask my system 1, it thinks that the self-derived system is about a billion times better than the one I found in a book.  It's going to be personally suited, it's going to be sharp and accurate, and bend to my needs.

Meta-strategy

Which is going to yield the best result for the problem? Self-derived solutions to all future problems? Book-derived solutions for all problems?

I propose that the specific strategy used to answer the problem, depending on the problem (obviously sometimes 1+1 will only be solved with addition, and solving it with subtraction is going to be difficult), is mostly irrelevant compared to having the meta-strategy.  

In the original example:

My relationship has bad communication, so we end the relationship.

The meta-strategy for this case:

My relationship has bad communication, how do we find more information about that and solve that problem.

In the general case:

I have a problem, I will fix the problem.

the meta strategy for the general case:

I have a problem, what is the best way to solve the problem? 

Or the meta-meta strategy:

I have a problem, how will I go about finding what is the best way to solve the problem? 

I propose that having the meta strategy, and the meta-meta strategy is almost as powerful as the true strategy.  On the object level for the problem example, instead of searching for the book in the problem field that is the five love languages you could instead search for any book about the problem area.  Any book is better than no book.  In fact I would make a hierarchy:

The best strategy > a good strategy > any strategy > no strategy
The best book > a good book > any book on the topic > no book on the topic

You encounter a problem in the wild - what should you do?

1. Try just solve the problem
2. Try any strategy (with a small amount of thinking - a few seconds or minutes)
3. search for a better strategy
   

Depending on the problem, the time, the real factors - the best path forward may be to just "think of what to do then do that", or it may be to "stop and write out a 10 page plan before executing 10 pages worth of instructions".

Should you read the five love languages book?  That depends.  What is the problem?  and have you tried solving the problem on your own first?

Meta: this took an hour to write.

My table of contents: lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mp2/my_future_posts_a_table_of_contents/ (which needs updating)

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.