My mind is already spinning excuses on overdrive.
As a teenager I spent 7 years in military school. They adopted the army ethos that if something under your responsibility goes wrong, you get punished. Regardless of whether you could have done anything about it. Trying to produce excuses usually led to being cut off with "I don't care" followed by increasing the punishment.
This had an interesting effect - if you know you are going to be punished regardless of excuses, you stop thinking about excuses and start trying to head off problems. It's like the Karate Kid approach to teaching murphyjitsu. From "you can't possibly blame me for the rain" to "hey, what's our backup plan if it rains during training".
It could have equally gone the other way into learned helplessness though, so I don't know whether it's a good approach. But perhaps that refocusing could be achieved in other ways? Maybe simply making a rule of never offering excuses - just apologise, make reparations / accept punishment and move on.
Maybe simply making a rule of never offering excuses - just apologise, make reparations / accept punishment and move on.
The problem with this rule is that a decent apology is commonly seen as including an explanation:
... when someone has transgressed a norm we become rightfully wary that they may do it again. The power of apologies, according to Martin, lies in the fact that they help to mitigate this threat of future transgression. They indicate that the person recognises the transgression and is willing to take steps to make sure it does not happen again. [...]
You must make some effort to change yourself (or your organisation) in order to ensure that the same thing does not happen again. The artful way to do this is to demonstrate change, i.e. to show that you are actually doing something. The non-artful way is to be complacent, i.e. to not demonstrate any changes.
If your apology doesn't include an explanation of why you wronged and how you are not going to do it again, then it's likely to be ineffective, since the other person has no reason to assume that you even understood what went wrong, nor that you know what you need to do in order to avoid repeating the mistake in the future. (As that linked article notes, there is a difference between an apology and an excuse in general, but here you seem to be using "excuse" as a synonym for "explanation".)
"You could call it heroic responsibility, maybe," Harry Potter said. "Not like the usual sort. It means that whatever happens, no matter what, it's always your fault. Even if you tell Professor McGonagall, she's not responsible for what happens, you are. Following the school rules isn't an excuse, someone else being in charge isn't an excuse, even trying your best isn't an excuse. There just aren't any excuses, you've got to get the job done no matter what." -HPMOR Chapter 75
Reality doesn't grade on a curve.
That advice is ironic, considering that Eliezer started writing HPMOR while procrastinating on his save-the-world rationality book.
Reality doesn't grade you. Only you can grade yourself. Or you can do what you like and screw the grades :-)
That analysis of Eliezer is false. He found a low-spoons activity that had a good shot of being high impact. I believe he continued to (and continues to) spend all of his actual spoons on his mainline saving the world plan.
This is an *excellent* use of 30 minutes.
Rationality Technique: Feel Pain
A mental move not trained won't be deployed at the correct moment
A mental move that does not resolve a pain point won't be trained
Pain that isn't noticed won't be resolved
Pain that seems a natural consequence of your current belief structure won't be noticed
Get intimate with what flinching away or ignoring a pain point feels like from the inside by creating artificial conditions to practice the technique. Observe your mind as you eat spicy food, turn the shower to cold, or run farther than your mind insists you can. Because you'll never notice the perfectly reasonable excuses if you don't start by noticing the ridiculous excuses.
Prioritizing dealing with the small pains is a commitment to cultivating the exact skills that will help you deal with the big pains.
Rationality Framework: From guessing the teacher's password to generating the teacher's password.
deliberately practice deliberate practice until you have the skill of noticing the length of feedback loops.
The purpose is to move from a model of rationality that matches desires with resources to one that understands the structure of resource generating processes.
Two questions highlight this:
When is the earliest I will know it failed?
When is the latest I will it worked?
Strategies without well defined endpoints can take up unlimited energy for unlimited time. The reason that old people annoy you is that you recognize when a person has turned into a bundle of sphexish strategies.
In order to avoid this, become a person who can notice when a strategy can not, even in principle, accomplish its stated aim. (And investigate motivated reasoning that might have lead you to instantiate such a strategy, like secretly not wanting the results of a working strategy.)
Blindspot: One Framework to Rule them All.
Deformation professionelle runs much deeper than generally supposed. Frameworks for interpreting the world generally aren't falsifiable because they mostly generate the same predictions. Instead they tend to diverge in exactly those areas where feedback loops for predicative validity are poor. This is likely a feature, not a bug. There is a selection effect on frameworks and the most successful produce correct answers in all the important ways while giving holders ways of asserting superiority in ways that are difficult to verify.
You can spend unlimited time arguing about the specifics of framework divergence rather than notice that the argument you are having is the selected for outcome.
Promoted to curated as a celebration of the whole Hammertime sequence. The sequence covered a lot of important rationality content, was written in quite engaging ways and generally made me very happy.
I would love to see you experiment with higher effort posts, but mostly just want you to keep doing what you are doing. Thanks a lot for the long and interesting journey through Hammertime.
(Biggest reasons for not curating: I think the average quality of the hammertime posts is not necessarily high enough to make it worth reading for the most time-constrained of our readers, but I think it still makes sense for them to know about the sequence)
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
Introducing Box Your Brain, Exceptions All The Way Down, and No Do-Overs.
Rationality framework: The Greenland effect:
Remember the first time, you looked at a world map: one thing that maybe cached your eye was Greenland: That huge Island, almost as big as Africa, up there in the north.
Now remember the first time, you took a closer look at a globe (or a non-Mercator projection for that matter) Greenland is a bit disappointing, isn’t it? Doesn’t seem to be THAT big at all.
Now remember that time in geography class, when you held presentations on the countries in Europe: In comparison to these folks, the icy planes of Denmark´s pet island seem gigantic. Now, not as gigantic as Africa, but still…
Depending on how much time you spend with geography, I can well imagine that cycle going back and forth some more.
What is important here, is the following: even though your knowledge about the size of Greenland ever increased over your life, your emotional attitude “oh, quite big” or “nah, it´s an island, bruh” switched around quite a lot in both directions.
Now in the case of Greenland this is all well and fine, but other scenarios in can lead to pseudo disagreements or confused arguments: Beware the Greenland effect. Beware that your emotional dispossession towards an issue, often reflects your last update on that issue (which should vary unpredictably) and not your overall believes on an issue (which should converge).
Example of Greenland effects:
“The church is good, it teaches me about God”->”God is fake, the priest must be a moron, the world lied to me” -> “These religious people are actually using a lot of their recouces to help people in need” -> “all those religious charities are so ineffective.” …
“I can’t stop this project now, I have already invested so many recources”->”I know about sunk cost bias. I will abandon my projects, whenever they seem to be a bad Idea” -> “I should carry through projects despite having downs: sunk cost faith.”…
I did it: my final exam.
Thank you for the sequence, had a great time, will leave a few additional thoughts in the post mortem post.
Inspired by lifelonglearner's submission "No Do-Overs," I want to add:
The OFFICIAL DEADLINE for Hammertime Final Exam submissions is 11:59pm PDT, April 30, 2018. High-quality submissions will be immortalized in a separate Final Exam sequence, conditional on the author's approval. I will happily accept private submissions by email, assuming you can find my email address.
You are highly encouraged to reply to this comment to pre-commit to writing the exam.
Done! Here: Accommodate Yourself; Kindness Is An Epistemic Virtue; Privileging the Future
(I spent much more than 5 minutes on each essay, oops.)
As a bonus, I've now gotten past the trivial inconvenience and mild social fear of posting things on LW, so thanks :)
Commenting here to complete my 30 day streak. I'll write up my final exam sometime this week and edit this with a link. I really appreciated the sequence! A lot has happened over the last month and it was nice to have a Hammertime post to return to every day.
edit: Looks like I didn't keep my promise!
My submission: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Rwo3S8cttKYPEvdvd/ikaxas-hammertime-final-exam Echoing the others, thanks for doing this, and I found this a worthwhile exercise.
I also did it: Hammertime Final Exam: Pledges, Activation Energy and Evaluating Productivity
Thanks for the sequence, it was really helpful! :)
This is when I constantly remind Sveta to grab a robe or do some household chores. The problem is that Sveta already remembers to do them, and my reminders only annoy her, not help her.
It's like imperative programming, where you describe how to do each step (vs. declarative programming, where you describe what to do).
It's also like spoon-feeding a baby with its own hand.
It's also like hyper-parenting when you take your kid to the hospital even when he's a teenager, or when you decide for him where he goes to school, or when you don't give him any homework at all - in general, when you relieve him of responsibility.
This is a cognitive error that I've been crashing against my entire life. I'm only now, at almost 30 years old, just beginning to realize that all people have to overcome their reluctance to do a job or solve some problem.
It's still very hard for me to realize this because I still hear time and time again from respected people that they "love" their work:
I really don't have much luck believing that people like that have it as hard as I do. I think they have some other, more mature "complexity" - not like me. I have a "difficulty" in making myself do something, while their "difficulty" is in solving the problem in the best way possible, as soon as possible. They don't force themselves, that stage is already passed for them - it's a problem they learned to solve long ago, not to face it.
This is a consequence of my hyper-parenting upbringing. I automatically, from System 1, chip away at the credibility of a decision I've made as soon as another person doubts it.
For example, a year ago I decided to apprentice as a developer. Then I watched YouTube of a developer who has been coding for 15 years purely because he likes it, for himself, and he said: "Don't do programming if you don't enjoy it". And I don't "enjoy" it! So after his words I feel sharply that I don't need to come here, that programming is not my thing, I wasted a year and a lot of money and effort.
For example, if you stay up late at the computer, you don't look at the clock on purpose to "fool" yourself - "if I can't see the time, I can go to bed at whatever time I want, and wake up at my usual time and sleep".
As a friend of mine said when her five year old son used tears to force her to go out with him in the evening after a long hard day, she said: "If I didn't want to, I wouldn't go. I would have explained to him that I was very tired and that's why I didn't want to go out. He would probably have been hysterical, but that's just him expressing his emotions. The main thing is that I explained the reason and he heard me. He understands the reason for saying no: not the authoritarian "because I said NO", but the comprehensible, coherent and logical explanation: 'because I'm tired'".
My conclusion is this: it doesn't matter how a person behaves. Separate his emotions from the meanings you communicate to each other.
I have a problem with this, by the way: even in a conversation with an adult, I emphasize emotions. That is, the person may be rude but sending signals about what they need to agree with me, and I'm so triggered by the emotions they're broadcasting that I don't notice their signals - and because of that, I continue a conversation about something I should have left long ago and moved on to the next step.
This means - understand the person. Don't "agree" but just hear him in the way he is trying to explain to you. At times like this, respond with, "I think I get it. What you're saying is that it's important to you that..., and to accomplish that, you're suggesting... because you see that as the only (or best) way to solve the problem?"
After the interviewee answers, you can ask, "Then can you flesh out what other options you see?"
There are people who have been taught by their life experience only one language of communication - through violence, through "run over", scare, yell. Politeness and cooperation, unfortunately, they perceive as weakness and therefore it is impossible to negotiate with them in such ways. Only if you reeducate these people beforehand. Therefore, in such cases you will have to switch to their language: pressure, rigidity, authoritarianism.
In other cases, always start with politeness, even if the person is angry. especially if the person is angry! Don't be confused, your job is not to overwhelm the person with your calmness. You want to create a safe environment for him, you want to get on his side to solve this problem together.
It's difficult. It's painful. You're human too and you're angry too, you may be hurt and sad and tired too. That's why we talk about this principle - because it's not easy to execute and it's not intuitive in the moment of heat of passion. That's why we talk about politeness as a tool that you have to learn and get used to using.
"Courtesy First" builds on this principle, the fundamental desire to solve a problem so that as many of the roles involved in the project as possible win.
This is taught by Eliyahu Goldratt and followed by William Detmer.
So look for every possible way to solve the problem together: you together against this pernicious problem, even if you are spouses and are arguing over who should mop the floor or if you just sold a friend your bar and the landlord of the bar space shortly thereafter decides to remove the bar from his premises and now the friend is demanding that you cancel the deal and give him his money back.
Either way you are together against the problem. Your job is to find what you have in common that can bring you together to solve it together.
Hammertime is an old, but still really helpful "challenge", if I may so. I have learned some brand new fundamentally useful habits from this 30-days period, and this way – a huge warm Thank You, alkjash!
I will answer this final exam in several messages, separating them but three themes you provided.
Kinda:
I did not actually directly engage with this post, but I found it fascinating as a concept, and sort of inspiring to see other people working on it.
I've thought about it a bit on the meta-level, in terms of what sort of exercises make sense for the LessWrong.
I do think, if there's a second nomination, it should probably come from someone who actually did the exercise and found it valuable on the object level.
Hmm, upon reflection I'm more on the fence about nominating than I thought. Retracting for now, thinking more.
At least part of my motivation is that, overall, I think the Hammertime sequence was valuable overall – but not necessarily something where any single post was quite nomination-worthy. It seemed useful both for directly writing up a lot of CFAR techniques that weren't otherwise available online, and for moving LW towards a "community of practice", where "do exercises" was more woven into the fabric.
But I'm not sure whether this post in isolation makes sense to include – in particular, while the I like Alkjash's "submission" to his own exercise, it's not a post that I think holds up as a "best of 2018" on it's own.
On the other hand, it might be worth include just the text of the test-description itself.
Dunno.
This is part 30 of 30 in the Hammertime Sequence. Click here for the intro.
One of the overarching themes from CFAR, related to The Strategic Level, is that what you learn at CFAR is not a specific technique or set of techniques, but the cognitive strategy that produced those techniques. It follows that if I learned the right lessons from CFAR, then I would be able to produce qualitatively similar – if not as well empirically tested – new principles and approaches to instrumental rationality.
After CFAR, I wanted to design a test to see if I had learned the right lessons. Hammertime was that sort of test for me. Now here’s that same test for you.
The Final Exam
I will give three essay prompts and three difficulty levels. Original ideas would be great, but shining a new light on old hammers is also welcome!
Prompts
Difficulty Levels
Bronze Mace mode. Write one essay on one of the topics above.
Steel Cudgel of the Lion mode. Write two of three.
Vorpal Dragonscale Sledgehammer of the Whale mode. Write all three. For each essay, give yourself five minutes to brainstorm and five minutes to write.
Here are my answers.
1. Cooperate First
There’s an old story about a famous painter of the Realist school who spent a whole year of his training painting still lives of eggs. Each day, he would draw a single egg over and over. He must have produced thousands of sketches and paintings of eggs. His teacher knew exactly how important fundamentals are.
This same motif is deeply embedded in stories all over the world:
Return to fundamentals. Practice your fundamentals.
The iterated prisoner’s dilemma is one of the fundamental lessons of rationality. The world is more like a number of iterated prisoner’s dilemmas than you’d think. Human beings are more like tit-for-tat players than you’d think. It follows:
Cooperate First!
The first move you make in any interaction with a new acquaintance should be a cooperate, even if you expect them to defect. Perhaps even if you observe them defecting already.
Here’s a lesson I learned from meditating on the maxim Cooperate First:
Cooperating First feels like accepting an unfair game from the inside. There will be many situations in life where things are framed in a slightly but noticeably unfair way towards you initially. Err on the side of accepting these games anyway!
2. Below the Object Level
One of my main complaints about rationalists (myself included) is our tendency to escalate to the meta-level too often. For example, in any given discussion, arguments over general discussion norms get much more heated and lively than any discussion of the underlying subject matter. We need to spend more time at the object level, touching reality, making experiments, testing our hypotheses.
The move I use to combat the tendency to escalate meta, I call looking below the object level.
Looking below the object level is like the move HPMOR_Harry does to achieve partial transfiguration: continually upping the magnification on your mental microscope to actually stare at the detail in reality. Reality is so exorbitantly detailed it’s overwhelming to take it all in. Try.
Look at the folds in your clothes, the way light and shadow play off each other. The way threads interweave. Pinch the cloth and watch the creases reorganize under your fingers.
Now reflect on this fact: falling water is attracted to both positive and negative charges.
What.
There’s so much going on under what we think of as the object level.
3. Pre-Excuses
Pre-hindsight is a version of Murphyjitsu where you query your mind for what you will learn from an action in hindsight. Pre-excuses are an unproductive cousin that often derail my work.
As a serial procrastinator, I notice a fairly regular pattern of thinking that appears the couple days before I have to meet a professor, and especially before meeting my thesis adviser. My mind is already spinning excuses on overdrive. Here’s what my mind sounds like a full day before I have to meet my adviser, when I think about the meeting:
Sorry, this paper took longer than I expected to read.
Sorry, I was busy from other classes, so I didn’t do as much paper-writing as I’d planned to.
Sorry, I got sidetracked by this research problem, so I didn’t finish the homework.
That’s right, I’m having these thoughts about how to apologize for not doing work even though I still have plenty of time to do the work. Even worse, I have these pre-excuse thoughts regularly even if I’ve done the work expected of me – it feels something like cushioning the fall in case it turns out I did it poorly.
And they’re usually not even good excuses.