I have also found Eat That Frog to be an unusually good collection of the major productivity techniques. Incidentally, I also heard about the book from Patri via Divia.
For a shorter and more rationality-friendly version of the book, I summarized it here:
Great summary; just read it and bookmarked it. Much thanks for writing this. I had thought I needed to reread Eat That Frog but had been reluctant to take the hours required; now I don't have to.
this analogy is arguably obvious, but it's deep, useful, and easy to overlook in its implications - there seem to be two major kinds of wanting:
and
Obvious but it needs to be said: People are as bad at looking into hospitals for their own health as for the sake of their parents' health.
I found neither of these things the least bit obvious. I hadn't realized Implication 4 until I had been reading Less Wrong for many months and it was not obvious in retrospect. I hadn't even considered the distinction between urges and goals at all, though it did seem obvious in retrospect - only in retrospect.
I say this because I have had a ton of trouble grasping the concept that things that are obvious to me aren't necessarily obvious to other people.
(Though I don't want to make the same mistake and assume that other people also have this problem.)
I really have seen multiple people (some of whom I significantly cared about) malfunctioning as a result of misinterpreting this point. As a stand-alone system for pulling your actions, urges have all kinds of problems. Urges can pull you to stare at an attractive stranger, to walk to the fridge, and even to sprint hard for first base when playing baseball. But unless coupled with goals and far-mode reasoning, urges will not pull you to the component tasks required for any longer-term goods. When I get into my car I have a definite urge for it not to be broken. But absent planning, there would never be a moment when the activity I most desired was to take my car for an oil change. To find and keep a job (let alone a good job), live in a non-pigsty, or learn any skills that are not immediately rewarding, you will probably need goals. Even though human goals can easily turn into fashion statements and wishful thinking.
I sort of run this way. Contrary to the description, though, I sometimes do get urges to clean, do laundry, etc. This usually occurs when I happen to be annoyed by the feel of dirt on my bare feet, or find my clothes hamper full, or some other stimulus trigger...
fortunately or unfortunately, I also have parents to provide me with reasons to have urges to do things I wouldn't otherwise have an urge to do.
A good point.
Social incentives that directly incentivize the immediate steps toward long-term goals seem to be key to a surprisingly large portion of functional human behavior.
People acquire the habit of wearing seatbelts in part because parents'/friends' approval incentivizes it; I don't want to be the sort of person my mother would think reckless. (People are much worse at taking safety measures that are not thus backed up by social approval; e.g. driving white or light-colored cars reduces one's total driving-related death risk by ord mag 20%, but this statistic does not spread, and many buy dark cars.)
People similarly bathe lest folks smell them, keep their houses clean lest company be horrified, stick to exercise plans and study and degree plans and retirement savings plans partly via friends' approval, etc.; and are much worse at similar goals for which there are no societally cached social incentives for goal-steps. The key role social incentives play in much apparently long-term action of this is one reason people sometimes say...
I think I might be living by urges alone. Whenever I see something about "goals" or "self-discipline" or "self-improvement" I immediately shut down and get miserable. My brain says "I don't want to, dammit!" Of course, people tell me I am self-disciplined, but I see that as merely being practical; if it makes any sense, I'm willing to be practical but severely freaked out by aspirational or normative thinking.
Andrew Critch's "greedy algorithm": Whenever you catch yourself really wanting to do something you want to want, immediately reward yourself - by feeding yourself an M&M, or if that's too difficult, immediately pumping your fist and saying "Yes!"
I have been doing this deliberately for a few months because I was starting to get fed up with fighting my instincts every time I chose to program for an hour and wanted to spend that hour reading science fiction, so I actually started standing and exercising to watch anime or read books I did not really need to, while rewarding myself for getting something done that was relatively high up my priority list by sitting / eating food I liked.
It seems like no matter how I try to rebalance the incentives and consequences, negative stimuli always seem to have a much stronger effect on my behaviour however, so although I get more studying done now I think it comes more from the significant increases in my perceived free time than from reward mechanisms.
- Anticipations, what we actually expect to see happen;
- Professed beliefs, the set of things we tell ourselves we “believe”, based partly on deliberate/verbal thought.
This distinction helps explain how an atheistic rationalist can still get spooked in a haunted house;
I apologize if this seems nitpicky, but the implication seems to be that in Yvain's post he is merely "professing" to not believe in ghosts, but "anticipating" that they exist. I believe the actual point of the post was that Yvain both professes and anticipates the nonexistence of ghosts (hence his willingness to place a bet with the bookie as he flees the mansion), he simply hasn't internalized this anticipation/belief on a gut-level.
Porting this back to Urges vs. Goals, perhaps the analogy shouldn't be "Urges : Anticipations", but instead "Urges : Gut-level Internalizations".
Kaj forms the generalization "as soon as my brain adopted a cause, my subconscious reinterpreted it as the goal of giving the impression of doing prestigious work for the cause". I worry that our community has a tendency to explain as e.g. status signaling or "people really don't care about X", observations that can also be explained by less malice/selfishness and more "our brains have known malfunctions at linking goals to urges".
I actually agree with this, and have somewhat changed my mind about the explanation in my original post, but I just haven't had the time to write about it. Hopefully this week.
EDIT: Done.
Andrew Critch's "greedy algorithm": Whenever you catch yourself really wanting to do something you want to want, immediately reward yourself - by feeding yourself an M&M, or if that's too difficult, immediately pumping your fist and saying "Yes!"
I'm adopting this. Could someone point me to the source? I tried to google for Andrew Critch's "greedy algorithm" but haven't found anything except this LW post. Update: Sent a PM to Andrew, asked for more details.
Update 2:
I tried this for a while but alas, it didn't stick - I...
Critch, aka Academian, taught it in minicamp and unfortunately has yet to write it up anywhere. I wish he would. pm academian and ask him to :)
More generally, for the basic decision-making tools we have a collection (automatic application, automatic correction, deliberative application, deliberative correction). For goals, that's (wanting, liking, approving, approving of approving); for beliefs, (anticipation, learning/surprise, professed belief, correspondence with referent (taskian truth)).
For example, correcting wrong belief in belief (professed belief) that doesn't reflect more accurate anticipation then corresponds to getting rid of fake professed utility functions that don't reflect the act...
Andrew Critch's "greedy algorithm": Whenever you catch yourself really wanting to do something you want to want, immediately reward yourself - by feeding yourself an M&M, or if that's too difficult, immediately pumping your fist and saying "Yes!"
Closely related to the parenting advice of "Catch them being good" - which works wonders on kids. I expect it will generalize well to adults.
A lot of our community technique goes into either (1) dealing with "beliefs" being an evolutionarily recent system, such that our "beliefs" often end up far screwier than our actual anticipations; or (2) trying to get our anticipations to align with more evidence-informed beliefs.
Wow. I hadn't heard this expressed quite like this before... We have one territory and two maps, and we can help get both maps in sync with reality by getting them both in sync with each other.
Is (2) related to taking ideas seriously?
To me there seems to be ...
...And much the same way that a lot of craziness stems, not so much from "having a wrong model of the world", as "not bothering to have a model of the world", a lot of personal effectiveness isn't so much about "having the right goals" as "bothering to have goals at all" - where unpacking this somewhat Vassarian statement would lead us to ideas like "bothering to have something that I check my actions' consequences against, never mind whether or not it's the right thing" or "bothering to have some commun
Thank you for this post. The central insight that we should consider instrumental rationality by analogy to epistemic rationality is something that has never occured to me before. I wish I had thought of it.
Besides an aspiring rationalist, these days I call myself an "aspiring consequentialist".
I think I'll do that too.
I think "goals" are the wrong way to look at it.
Very few people have a complete, coherent system of terminal values. The few who do usually seem to suffer from their excessive rigidity. I can't commit to an exhaustive set of goals, all the way to the end of my life. I've had to discard and change my plans too many times. What looks like a great idea today may turn out to be fruitless on inspection.
Instead of goals I think about resources. I don't know specifically what I'm going to want to do, but whatever it is, money will be helpful. As w...
He personally had the experience of believing "If the last day where I remember having gone to bed was a Tuesday today shouldn't be Monday but Wednesday". Before the belief got challenged by hard reality I have never paid any conscious attention to the belief. Getting it challenged on the other hand produced one of the three stongest feelings of cognitive dissonce that I felt in my life.
We all have a bunch of beliefs which a very reasonable but for which they are edge cases where the beliefs don't hold.
I think the common term for those beliefs ...
I strongly endorse your second and fourth points; thanks for posting this. They're related to Yvain's post Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up?.
When I was in San Francisco, I recall the phrase "goals not roles" popping up a lot.
I find that it's a fairly easy way to remember that it's even a question whether I'm trying to accomplish something, or just do some things that make it look like I'm trying to accomplish it.
Important and timely (the next Melbourne LW meetup will focus on setting good goals, an exercise which has always confounded me).
I find particularly interesting the "wedding gift todo" example, where imagined achievement of the goal stands-in for actually achieving the stated goal (giving a wedding gift). We want to have and act on "goals" rather than "urges". But setting goals is the kind of activity where "urges" can dominate. To me this looks like the analogue of belief-in-belief. We want our reasoning processes t...
Well it seems to me that a rational goal professed by a rationalist should correspond to a few anticipations (that goal is achievable, that achieving the goal will achieve some rational super goal, serve an urge, or otherwise be positive). Not an analogy but a straightforward correspondence.
Unless of course one adopts goals of the form - suppose I am the leader of the tribe and you are regular member and I tell you to defend this hill. Or vice versa. And we adopt defending of the hill as a goal without any knowledge as to why we are defending this hill an...
Visualizing that accomplishment, and its positive rewarding consequences, until you have an urge for it to happen
I so have to try this hack. No agency without urgency?
This fits in reasonably well with an anti-akrasia framework I've been thinking over: Rephrase goal X as "I honestly believe that I will achieve X", and then carry on thinking until you actually have a reasonably solid case for believing that. This particular trick translates to breaking down the statement into "I will force myself to develop an urge to do X. And once I have ...
I agree with your article. I think that this example doesn't quite illustrate it:
Before you install Linux, do you think "What's the positive consequence of installing Linux?" or does it just seem like the sort of thing a free-software-supporter would do?
The first few times I did this, it was the second motivation. After a while, it became the first, namely that I got a system I had better control over, incorporating high-quality software. However, the first motivation was very good for the second. Without (lots of) people doing the sort of t...
Urges vary in strength, but it isn't usual to speak of one goal being stronger than another—except in the sense that it's powered by more urges. But goals, too, would seem to vary in strength. A goal's strength would bear some relationship to the expected value of striving to attain it.
You overstate the disconnection between urges and goals because you don't consider the consequences of goals having intrinsic strength, apart from their extrinsic association with urges. A stronger goal exerts a stronger pull to recruit urges to its service. Unless we're neurotic, we don't typically ignore our strongest goals because of a dearth of supporting urges.
Thought provoking post.
I got a lot out of this post, and it's obviously very high quality, but I have one humble gripe.
"and why Eliezer had to actually crash a car before he viscerally understood what his physics books tried to tell him about stopping distance going up with the square of driving speed. (I helped Anna revise this - EY.)"
I feel as if the parenthetical statement at the end of the quoted text would be unnecessarily alienating to an outside reader. Maybe it's that it feels unprofessional (I'm not really sure), but it seems like the kind of thing that ...
My workplace seems, at times, to be well-designed to align my urges and goals for me.
(also: Congratulations, Anna and Carl on your wedding!)
I love this post's anticipations : professed beliefs :: urges : professed goals. Planning seems more necessary (although I guess it's actually rare) than talking about your beliefs (which is easy to do to excess).
All the other cases involve not asking it, or not asking hard enough.
"the cases" is unclear. I assume you mean the rest of the "ways to screw up in choosing goals" yet to be listed.
...Ideals can be more ungoaly because they're sometimes about faraway things or less ancestral things - it's probably easier to improve your agen
The Inuit may not have 47 words for snow
The Inuit does not have 47 words for snow! Please, don't propagate this falsehood, especially on a 'rationality' blog.
Edit: Sorry I read incorrectly. My apologies! It says 'may not'...
Partially in response to: The curse of identity
Related to: Humans are not automatically strategic, That other kind of status, Approving reinforces low-effort behaviors.
Joe studies long hours, and often prides himself on how driven he is to make something of himself. But in the actual moments of his studying, Joe often looks out the window, doodles, or drags his eyes over the text while his mind wanders. Someone sent him a link to which college majors lead to the greatest lifetime earnings, and he didn't get around to reading that either. Shall we say that Joe doesn't really care about making something of himself?
The Inuit may not have 47 words for snow, but Less Wrongers do have at least two words for belief. We find it necessary to distinguish between:
This distinction helps explain how an atheistic rationalist can still get spooked in a haunted house; how someone can “believe” they’re good at chess while avoiding games that might threaten that belief [1]; and why Eliezer had to actually crash a car before he viscerally understood what his physics books tried to tell him about stopping distance going up with the square of driving speed. (I helped Anna revise this - EY.)
A lot of our community technique goes into either (1) dealing with "beliefs" being an evolutionarily recent system, such that our "beliefs" often end up far screwier than our actual anticipations; or (2) trying to get our anticipations to align with more evidence-informed beliefs.
And analogously - this analogy is arguably obvious, but it's deep, useful, and easy to overlook in its implications - there seem to be two major kinds of wanting:
(my urge to drink the steaming hot cocoa in front of me; my urge to avoid embarrassment by having something to add to my accomplishments log)
(I have a goal to exercise three times a week; I have a goal to reduce existential risk)
Implication 1: You can import a lot of technique for "checking for screwy beliefs" into "checking for screwy goals".
Urges, like anticipations, are relatively perceptual-level and automatic. They're harder to reshape and they're also harder to completely screw up. In contrast, the flexible, recent "goals" system can easily acquire goals that are wildly detached from what we actually do, wildly detached from any positive consequences, or both. Some techniques you can port straight over from "checking for screwy beliefs" to "checking for screwy goals" include:
The fundamental:
The Hansonian:
The satiating:
Implication 2: "Status" / "prestige" / "signaling" / "people don't really care about" is way overused to explain goal-urge delinkages that can be more simply explained by "humans are not agents".
This post was written partially in response to The Curse of Identity, wherein Kaj recounts some suboptimal goal-action linkages - wanting to contribute to the Singularity, then teaching himself to feel guilty whenever not working; founding the Finnish Pirate Party, then becoming the spokesperson which involved tasks he wasn't good at; helping Eliezer on writing his book, and feeling demotivated because it seemed like work "anyone could do" (which is just the sort of work that almost nobody is motivated to do).
Kaj forms the generalization "as soon as my brain adopted a cause, my subconscious reinterpreted it as the goal of giving the impression of doing prestigious work for the cause". I worry that our community has a tendency to explain as e.g. status signaling or "people really don't care about X", observations that can also be explained by less malice/selfishness and more "our brains have known malfunctions at linking goals to urges". People are as bad at looking into hospitals for their own health as for the sake of their parents' health; Kaj didn't actually gain much prestige from feeling guilty about his relaxation time.
We do have a status urge. It does affect a lot of things. People do tend to massively systematically understate it in much the same way that Victorians pretended that sex wasn't everywhere. But that's not the same cognitive problem as "Our brain is pretty bad at linking effective behaviors to goals, and will sometimes reward us for just doing things that seem roughly associated with the goal, instead of actions that cause the consequence of the goal being achieved." And our brains not being coherent agents is something that's even more massive than status.
Implication 3: Humans cannot live by urges alone
Like beliefs, goals often get much wackier than urges. I've seen a number of people react to this realization by concluding that they should give up on having goals, and lead an authentic life of pure desire. This wouldn't work any more than giving up on having beliefs. To precisely anticipate how long it takes a ball to fall off a tower, you have to manipulate abstract beliefs about gravitational acceleration. I have an urge to drive a car that runs smoothly, but if I didn't also have a goal of having a well-maintained car, I would never get around to having it serviced - I have no innate urge to do that.
I really have seen multiple people (some of whom I significantly cared about) malfunctioning as a result of misinterpreting this point. As a stand-alone system for pulling your actions, urges have all kinds of problems. Urges can pull you to stare at an attractive stranger, to walk to the fridge, and even to sprint hard for first base when playing baseball. But unless coupled with goals and far-mode reasoning, urges will not pull you to the component tasks required for any longer-term goods. When I get into my car I have a definite urge for it not to be broken. But absent planning, there would never be a moment when the activity I most desired was to take my car for an oil change. To find and keep a job (let alone a good job), live in a non-pigsty, or learn any skills that are not immediately rewarding, you will probably need goals. Even though human goals can easily turn into fashion statements and wishful thinking.
Implication 4: Your agency failures do not imply that your ideals are fake.
Obvious but it needs to be said: People are as bad at looking into hospitals for their own health as for the sake of their parents' health. It doesn't mean that they don't really care about their parents, and it doesn't mean that they don't really care about survival. They would probably run away pretty fast from a tiger, where the goal connected to the urge in an ancestrally more reliable way and hence made them more 'agenty'; and they might fight hard to defend their parents from a tiger too.
There's a very real sense in which our agency failures imply that human beings don't have goals, but this doesn't mean that our ungoaly ideals are any more ungoaly than anything else. Ideals can be more ungoaly because they're sometimes about faraway things or less ancestral things - it's probably easier to improve your agency on less idealy goals that link more quickly to urges - but as entities which can look over our own urges and goals and try to improve our agentiness, there's no rule which says that we can't try to solve some hard problems in this area as well as some easy ones.[2]
Implication 5: You can align urges and goals using the same sort of effort and training that it takes to align anticipations and beliefs.
Although I've heard people saying that we discuss willpower-failure too much on Less Wrong, most of the best stuff I've read has been outside Less Wrong and hasn't made contact with us. For a starting guide to many such skills, see Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy [3]. Some basic alignment techniques include:
And much the same way that a lot of craziness stems, not so much from "having a wrong model of the world", as "not bothering to have a model of the world", a lot of personal effectiveness isn't so much about "having the right goals" as "bothering to have goals at all" - where unpacking this somewhat Vassarian statement would lead us to ideas like "bothering to have something that I check my actions' consequences against, never mind whether or not it's the right thing" or "bothering to have some communication-related urge that animates my writing when I write, instead of just sitting down to log a certain number of writing hours during which I feel rewarded from rearranging shiny words".
Conclusion:
Besides an aspiring rationalist, these days I call myself an "aspiring consequentialist".
[1] IMO the case of somebody who has the belief "I am good at chess", but instinctively knows to avoid strong chess opponents that would potentially test the belief, ought to be a more central example in our literature than the person who believes they have an dragon in their garage (but instinctively knows that they need to specify that it's invisible, inaudible and generates no carbon dioxide, when we show up with the testing equipment).
[2] See also Ch. 20 of Methods of Rationality:
Professor Quirrell: "Mr. Potter, in the end people all do what they want to do. Sometimes people give names like 'right' to things they want to do, but how could we possibly act on anything but our own desires?"
Harry: "Well, obviously I couldn't act on moral considerations if they lacked the power to move me. But that doesn't mean my wanting to hurt those Slytherins has the power to move me more than moral considerations!"
[3] Thanks to Patri for recommending this book to me in response to an earlier post. It is perhaps not written in the most LW-friendly language -- but, given the value of these skills, I’d recommend wading in and doing your best to pull useful techniques from the somewhat salesy prose. I found much of value there.