= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Is the referenced book useful if I'd like to know more about the subject?
In response to
How to Learn from Experts
There are a couple chapters in there on the subject, but it's probably not the best book specifically for that subject. I haven't read it yet, but "Working Minds: A Practitioner's Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis " looks pretty good. One of the people behind the method wrote several books for a general audience and one of them, "The Power of Intuition" (not what it sounds like) has a few tips on how to learn from experts:
*Probe for specific incidents and stories. This is not the same thing as listening to war stories. It means selecting incidents where intuition was needed, and expertise was challenged, and then digging into the details.
*Ask about cues and patterns. Try to find out what the expert was noticing while making sense of the situation. You want to uncover types of discriminations that the expert has learned to make, types of patterns the expert has learned to recognize. The decision-making critique can suggest lines of questioning.
There's more, but I don't want to quote too much... One of the other tips is to ask how a novice would approach things vs how they would. He also recommends avoiding asking for general theories, the experts may not really be able to describe how/what they do without having a story to guide them.
Thanks for putting this together. I came across a couple related links recently that I've found helpful : Ryan Holiday's note taking methods Ryan Holiday on "Digesting books above your level"
In response to
Please share your reading habits/techniques/strategies
I've recently made an effort to start getting more out of the reading that I do, I think one of the simplest things to do is to close the book every few minutes and summarize what you've just read. Writing down those summaries is even more effective. I'm sure people who post reviews and summaries (see some of the recent ones posted here for example) have a far better understanding of the material than if they just read it.
One book that might be helpful is "How To Read A Book" by Mortimer Adler. It talks about different stages of reading, questions to ask yourself, and other strategies. If you don't want to buy the book (it's fairly cheap), there are numerous summaries online. If you buy it though, you get a free book to practice on. Here is an excerpt on reading multiple books on a given topic:
I. Surveying the Field Preparatory to Syntopical Reading 1. Create a tentative bibliography of your subject by recourse to library catalogues, advisors, and bibliographies in books. 2. Inspect all of the books on the tentative bibliography to ascertain which are germane to your subject, and also to acquire a clearer idea of the subject. Note: These two steps are not, strictly speaking, chronologically distinct; that is, the two steps have an effect on each other, with the second, in particular, serving to modify the first.
II. Syntopical Reading of the Bibliography Amassed in Stage I 1. Inspect the books already identified as relevant to your subject in Stage I in order to find the most relevant passages. 2. Bring the authors to terms by constructing a neutral terminology of the subject that all, or the great majority, of the authors can be interpreted as employing, whether they actually employ the words or not. 3. Establish a set of neutral propositions for all of the authors by framing a set of questions to which all or most of the authors can be interpreted as giving answers, whether they actually treat the questions explicitly or not. 4. Define the issues, both major and minor ones, by ranging the opposing answers of authors to the various questions on one side of an issue or another. You should remember that an issue does not always exist explicitly between or among authors, but that it sometimes has to be constructed by interpretation of the authors’ views on matters that may not have been their primary concern. 5. Analyze the discussion by ordering the questions and issues in such a way as to throw maximum light on the subject. More general issues should precede less general ones, and relations among issues should be clearly indicated. Note: Dialectical detachment or objectivity should, ideally, be maintained throughout. One way to insure this is always to accompany an interpretation of an author’s views on an issue with an actual quotation from his text.
Another book I'm looking into (but haven't yet read) is Cognitive Productivity. Also, if you are open to it, you might consider reading a book on studying the Bible. It's really a series of connected books with lots of self reference and people have been studying it for a long time, so there is a lot on the topic. It's called Hermeneutics, and while I used the Bible as an example (because of the wealth of material on its study) hermeneutics is used elsewhere (other religious traditions, law, philosophy, etc).
Here a couple reviews/summaries/etc of How To Read A Book: http://www.oxfordtutorials.com/How%20to%20Read%20a%20Book%20Outline.htm http://www.thesimpledollar.com/review-how-to-read-a-book/ http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/06/17/how-to-read-a-book/ http://sachachua.com/blog/2012/03/visual-book-notes-how-to-read-a-book/ http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/tag/mortimer-adler/
These links might also be of interest: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/chase-your-reading.html http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf
Books on studying the Bible tend to have assumptions built into them that aren't appropriate for people reading books they don't regard as The Sacred Word Of God. There will probably be some useful material in there, but I wouldn't expect a great density of it.
There are books on studying the Bible written by people who don't make those assumptions, but I think those books tend to be directed more specifically at theology students, which would reduce their general relevance in other ways. (There'll likely be more attention to issues specific to the Bible, or to particular bits of it -- dealing with the fact that it's usually read in translation from somewhat-uncertain sources, addressing the original context of societies very unlike our own, etc.)
It's entirely possible that there are some Bible-study-advice books out there that are general enough, and treat the Bible enough like an "ordinary" book, that a good portion of their advice is more broadly applicable, and perhaps some of them give good advice. But I don't think just saying "look up some books about the Bible" is going to be helpful; the majority of Bible-study-advice books probably aren't so useful. Do you have a particular recommendation?
That is a good point, I've only just begun to look into it, so I don't have any general recommendations. It just seemed like as I was coming up with a reading list on reading, some books seemed to pop up in Amazon's "people also bought" section. I think part of it is because the guy who wrote "How to Read a Book" was heavily influenced by Thomas Aquinas. I also looked up hermeneutics afterwards and it seemed appropriate for what I was trying to do. One key takeaway seems to be looking at reading as work...
One book that I was looking at was "Inductive Bible Study: A Comprehensive Guide to the Practice of Hermeneutics" by Traina, as the table of contents looked interesting (survey of books as wholes, survey of parts as wholes, selecting questions and formulating premises, drawing inferences, evaluating and appropriating, correlation,...). Haven't got to it yet though.
In response to
Please share your reading habits/techniques/strategies
I've recently made an effort to start getting more out of the reading that I do, I think one of the simplest things to do is to close the book every few minutes and summarize what you've just read. Writing down those summaries is even more effective. I'm sure people who post reviews and summaries (see some of the recent ones posted here for example) have a far better understanding of the material than if they just read it.
One book that might be helpful is "How To Read A Book" by Mortimer Adler. It talks about different stages of reading, questions to ask yourself, and other strategies. If you don't want to buy the book (it's fairly cheap), there are numerous summaries online. If you buy it though, you get a free book to practice on. Here is an excerpt on reading multiple books on a given topic:
I. Surveying the Field Preparatory to Syntopical Reading 1. Create a tentative bibliography of your subject by recourse to library catalogues, advisors, and bibliographies in books. 2. Inspect all of the books on the tentative bibliography to ascertain which are germane to your subject, and also to acquire a clearer idea of the subject. Note: These two steps are not, strictly speaking, chronologically distinct; that is, the two steps have an effect on each other, with the second, in particular, serving to modify the first.
II. Syntopical Reading of the Bibliography Amassed in Stage I 1. Inspect the books already identified as relevant to your subject in Stage I in order to find the most relevant passages. 2. Bring the authors to terms by constructing a neutral terminology of the subject that all, or the great majority, of the authors can be interpreted as employing, whether they actually employ the words or not. 3. Establish a set of neutral propositions for all of the authors by framing a set of questions to which all or most of the authors can be interpreted as giving answers, whether they actually treat the questions explicitly or not. 4. Define the issues, both major and minor ones, by ranging the opposing answers of authors to the various questions on one side of an issue or another. You should remember that an issue does not always exist explicitly between or among authors, but that it sometimes has to be constructed by interpretation of the authors’ views on matters that may not have been their primary concern. 5. Analyze the discussion by ordering the questions and issues in such a way as to throw maximum light on the subject. More general issues should precede less general ones, and relations among issues should be clearly indicated. Note: Dialectical detachment or objectivity should, ideally, be maintained throughout. One way to insure this is always to accompany an interpretation of an author’s views on an issue with an actual quotation from his text.
Another book I'm looking into (but haven't yet read) is Cognitive Productivity. Also, if you are open to it, you might consider reading a book on studying the Bible. It's really a series of connected books with lots of self reference and people have been studying it for a long time, so there is a lot on the topic. It's called Hermeneutics, and while I used the Bible as an example (because of the wealth of material on its study) hermeneutics is used elsewhere (other religious traditions, law, philosophy, etc).
In response to
One thousand tips do not make a system
I've advocated Gary Klein's work here before (Deliberate Practice for Decision Making ), you may find his latest book Streetlights and Shadows interesting.
The problem is that procedures are a system that describes how to react, but the model of reality that those procedures are based on is incomplete and may be contradictory (see Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, though I may be generalizing it too much). The Drefus Model of Expertise lines up fairly well with your final questions, particularly the "Expert" stage. Unfortunately, it describe how one can develop that expertise or the answers to the questions.
Of course, Einstein has since been proved not to be neurotypical. It was all over the news. The ... science news.
The problem is that we don't know if Einstein not being neuortypical is the cause of his genius, or the result of a lifetime of thinking in a certain way. Brains aren't static and can change over time, it's entirely possible he was born with a neurotypical brain that became aytpical over the course of his life.
Deliberate Practice for Decision Making
Much of this material is sourced/summarized from Deliberate Performance: Accelerating Expertise in Natural Settings and “The Power of Intuition”. Both contain much more than what is written here. An earlier draft/version of this was posted as "Productive Use of Heuristics and Biases". Based on feedback in the comments, much has changed. Feedback is appreciated, as are any other ideas on how deliberate practice can be applied.
How does someone incorporate something like deliberate practice into a typical job and everyday life? Deliberate practice is meant to be challenging, and because of this, it is draining. Much of the expertise literature describes a limit of a few hours of deliberate practice per day. If you can sustain more than that, you probably aren’t doing it right.
While the amount you can put in per day is limited, it still takes many hours of this intense practice, so reaching expert performance in a domain takes anywhere from years to decades. Deliberate performance is a concept related to deliberate practice, but perhaps more effective and efficient. Rather than separating practice and performance, the idea is to overlap the two as much as possible. The primary aim is to accelerate the development of expertise, while also improving the productivity of practice. Since you are practicing using normal tasks, you don’t have to set as much time aside where you aren’t working.
Deliberate performance is readily applicable to decision making. You make decisions as you normally would but also record your expectations and thinking behind the decision. What do you think will happen and why? How do you feel about the decision? When you have feedback on how the decision turned out, you can go back to see what you were thinking and how well your expectations matched reality. The idea of recording this information has been recommended by Peter Drucker, and more recently by Daniel Kahneman (Kahneman sees it as a way to reduce hindsight bias).
The term deliberate performance comes from the paper Deliberate Performance: Accelerating Expertise in Natural Settings, where the concept is elaborated into four exercises:
Estimate
One of the simplest ways to do this is to estimate how long a task you have will take. Accurately predicting how long things will take is a valuable skill on its own, but in estimating it, you form a mental model of the task and where the obstacles lie. When your estimate differs from reality, you can go back and see where you went wrong.
Experiment
The simplest way to experiment is just to try something and see what happens. This can be helpful in early stages when you are exploring, but typically, a better way is explicitly state what you expect to occur. As in estimation, if the actual results aren’t what you expect, you can update your mental models. It is usually a good idea to make your experiments cheap, in the sense that you expect failure and change to occur. Steven Spear, in his studies of Toyota, described cheap experiments as preferring bolting to welding, clamping to bolting, taping to clamping, and holding to taping. The more rapidly you can experiment, the more rapidly you can get feedback and update your models.
Experimentation is sort of where the rubber meets the road in deliberate performance. Where the other exercises are more focused on thought, experimentation is more about action. You see how much your mental models match the real world.
Explain
Why did things happen as they did? Try to explain from the available evidence. Explanation gives you an opportunity to make sense of why things turned out the way they did. Whether or not things went as you expected, try to explain why and how it happened. You can also seek out explanations from others, but you should probably form your own first so you can compare.
Extrapolate
What do you know now that you can use to reason about something you don’t know or something that doesn’t yet exist? What do you already know that you can use to solve a new problem? Using induction in proofs is an example of this, as is analogical reasoning. Klein describes an example of the latter in “Sources of Power”. Engineers are trying to figure out how much parts of new airplane designs will cost, but the parts are still being developed. The engineers end up looking at existing parts for analogs. None of the analogs are perfect matches, so they extrapolate the characteristics of multiple parts to create a new “Frankenstein” part.
Feedback and Coaching
Unlike deliberate practice, where the role of a coach is more formal and explicit, deliberate performance has the more realistic expectation that you will not have a coach. Instead, you try to make the most of the feedback you can get. Rather than a coach pointing out mistakes and what you can improve, you find errors in your mental models and ask effective questions. The 4Es will likely prompt some questions, while also giving you some knowledge and experience to make sense of the answers. While the exercises probably sound simplistic, something important happens as you do them: you are forced to form mental models, compare them to reality, and adjust them as needed.
Another useful method for getting feedback is to predict or emulate what an expert would do. When things don’t go as expected, you can then explain what you did and your reasoning to the expert and get feedback. As you find and correct mistakes in your mental models, your “expert emulation” should improve. Seeking explanations to compare to your own is also an example of this.
Using the Exercises
The first example, keeping a decision journal and reflecting on how things turns out, demonstrates that the 4Es can be combined and work well together. In fact, that is probably the best way to use them, looping through them multiple times. Similar to the scientific method, start with an estimate or hypothesis. Then, experiment to see if your hypothesis is correct. Next, attempt to explain what you saw in the results of the experiment in relation to your hypothesis. You’d then finish the first loop by extrapolating from the explanation, which can provide a new hypothesis to test.
One other method that combines multiple exercises is to do what Klein calls a premortem. If you have some large project, start by imagining that what you are trying to do has been a complete failure, and you are now doing a post mortem to understand what went wrong. Assuming things have gone wrong, why did they go wrong? The reasoning behind this technique is that people don’t want something to fail (or look like they want it to fail), but assuming it already has failed reduces that bias. In a sense, this is similar to red teams but easier to implement and less resource intensive. This gives you a chance to extrapolate and estimate, then form an explanation for why you think things might go wrong.
A few more exercises specific to decision making
In “The Power of Intuition”, Klein advocates identifying decisions where problems have occurred, forming exercises based on those decisions, playing through the exercises, and then critiquing your decision making process. The idea is that the most difficult scenarios occur rarely enough that developing expertise in them is impossible without some intervention, they occur too rarely to gain significant experience.
First, identify a decision. When reviewing the decisions, note what makes it difficult, what kinds of errors are often made, how an expert might approach it differently than a novice, and how the decision can be practiced and how you can get feedback.
Identified decisions can then be turned into scenarios which can be repeatedly practiced (typically in groups). Start with describing the events that led to the decision. The players are then told what they are trying to achieve, the context, and the constraints. Try to include a visual representation whenever possible. Even if you don’t work through the exercise, forming it can be useful in and of itself.
After the exercise, critique the decision and the process used to make it. Start with a timeline and identify key judgments. For each of the key judgments, note why it was difficult, how you were interpreting the situation, what cues/patterns you should have been picking up, why you chose to do what you did, and what you would’ve done differently with the benefit of hindsight.
In response to
[Draft] Productive Use of Heuristics and Biases
Nice post! You didn't explicitly ask for criticism, but I'm going to give some anyway:
I think the standard font-size on LessWrong is smaller. Most people would prefer it if you used that.
I think there's definitely interest on LessWrong for improving intuition, but I would frame it as "Training intuition to make its judgements more rational" rather than (as your post leans towards) "Forget rationality and harness our natural biases!". This is mostly just a terminological difference.
The System 1/System 2 distinction is really between System 1 being (fast, intuitive, subconscious) and System 2 being (slow, deliberative, conscious). Around these parts, the word "rationality" tends to be used to mean something like "succeeding by using any and all means". Under this definition, rationality can use both System 2 and System 1 type thinking. Thus I believe your post could be improved by taking the sentences where intuition is being contrasted with "rationality" and replacing the word "rationality" with something like "deliberate thought" or "System 2".
As I say above, this is really just a terminological difference, but I think that making it will clarify some of the ideas in the post. In particular, I think that the main content of the post (the seven ways of improving our heuristic judgements), is really useful instrumental rationality, but that the introduction and conclusion hide it in poorly backed up statements about how reducing bias is less important than using good heuristics. I find it strange that these things are even presented in contrast; the techniques you give for improving intuition are techniques for reducing bias. The intuitive judgements become more accurate (i.e. less biased) than they were before.
Some bits of the two "Concluding thoughts" paragraphs seem especially washy. A general sentiment of "System 1 should work in harmony with System 2" sounds nice, but without any data to back it up it could just be complete bollocks. Maybe we should all be using System 1 all the time. Or maybe there are some activities where System 1 wins and some where System 2 wins. If so, which activities are which? Are firefighters actually successful decision makers?
One final thought: Do the seven methods really focus on System 1 only? Many of them seem like general purpose techniques, an in particular I think that 4, 5, 6, and 7 are actually more System 2.
After doing a bit more reading here and thinking about your comments, I think I'll focus on the 7 methods and eliminate much of the low quality fluff that make up the intro/conclusion for the next version.
I think some of my confusion was due to unsubstantiated assumptions about the standard views of LessWrong. What I've been thinking of bias is closer to Inductive bias than the standard definition, which refers to error patterns. I then interpreted rationality as "overcoming bias". Inductive bias can be useful, and the idea of overcoming bias of that type seemed to be taking things too far. That doesn't seem to be what anyone is actually advocating here though.
Again, thanks.
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Anyone have opinions on James H. Austin's Zen and the Brain and Zen-Brain Reflections? Austin is a neurologist who practices Zen Buddhist meditation, and writes some quite involved neurological speculations about what's going on with the meditation. I started reading Zen and the Brain, but once it got to the serious neuroscience part it started to look like I needed to learn a bunch of brain anatomy to keep being able to follow, so I haven't continued with it yet.
I've read his newest book, "Meditating Selflessly: Practical Neural Zen", that seems to be aimed more at a layperson than "Zen and the Brain". It also talks a bit about his speculations about what meditation does in the brain, along with some recommendations on meditation. It might be too speculative though.
He also has a third book, perhaps that is a happy medium? Depending on how motivated you are, you might even try one of those Human Brain coloring books...