All of lynettebye's Comments + Replies

Note, I consider this post to be “Lynette speculates based on one possible model”, rather than “scientific evidence shows”, based on my default skepticism for psych research. 

A recent Astral Codex Ten post argued that advice is written by people who struggle because they put tons of time into understanding the issue. People who succeeded effortlessly don’t have explicit models of how they perform (section II). It’s not the first time I’ve seen this argument, e.g. this Putanumonit post arguing that explicit rules help poor performers, who then abandon ... (read more)

1CstineSublime
I apologize in advance for the lengthy and tangential reply. Gerd Gigerenzer offers a counterpoint - expertise in orderly systems is very different from expertise in complex systems (such as sports or financial markets). In the latter heuristics and System 1 type thinking performs better, quite simply explicit modelling is too inefficient or incapable of dealing with all the differing factors.   A sporting related example he gives is that if catcher in baseball simply fixes his eyes on the ball and runs towards it, he doesn't need to explicitly calculate the trajectory of the ball. While you could argue that indirectly the calculation is performed by the player's proprioceptors and Vestibular system, I think that it's certain it's not "explicit". However expertise tends to be narrow, I'm thinking of that overused Niels Bohr quote about how an expert is someone who has learned the hard way every mistake possible in a narrow field. Or in the Cynefin framework that you have "Simple" "Complicated" "Complex" and "Chaotic" systems, and "Simple" sits  on a cliff next to "Chaotic" in the paradigm because once the constraints are removed, the expertise or best practice that works predictably in Simple systems falls apart.  This can be exploited for competitive gain. I'm sure this all ties back to OODA loops. Double Formula One World Champion Fernando Alonso like most elite sportsmen is extremely competitive and he claims that even when he plays against professional tennis players he still needs to "kill their strength". And to do this he operates outside of their comfort zone: At the risk of throwing in another tangent Marvin Minsky's idea of negative expertise - that the mind is comprised more of 'critic circuits' that supress certain impulses more than positive or attractive circuits - to prevent us babbling or experimenting with strategies or tactics that haven't worked before. This is why when we think of leaving a room, we don't consider the window, even though it
2Seth Herd
The choking under pressure results are all about very fast athletic tasks where smoothness is critical. Most cognitive tasks will have enough time to think about both rules and then separately about intuitions/automatic skills. So getting benefit from both is quite possible.

Makes sense! Becoming more rational is a continual journey, and there’s no need to feel ashamed that you’re still learning. I expect you’ll find the process faster and smoother if you approach it as though you’re collaborating with other posters, instead of trying to score points :)

Occasionally, I get asked for feedback on someone’s resume. I’m not really a resume-editing coach, but I can ask them what they accomplished in that roll where they’re just listing their duties. Over time, I’ve found I’m completely replaceable with this rock

You did X for Y company? Great! Why is it impressive? Did it accomplish impressive outcomes? Was it at an impressive scale? Did it involve impressive other people or companies? 

You wrote an application using Z software? Great! Why is it impressive? Did the code speed up run time by an impres... (read more)

Fabricated goals

I’m really good at taking an abstract goal and breaking it down into concrete tasks. Most of the time, this is super useful.

But if I’m not sure what would accomplish the high level goal, sometimes the concrete goals turn out to be wrong. They don’t actually accomplish the high-level more vague goal. If I don’t notice that, I’ll at best be confused. At worse, I’ll accomplish the concrete goals, fail at the high-level goal, and then not notice that all my effort isn’t accomplishing the outcome I actually care about.

I’m calling the misguided c... (read more)

I actually have a heart condition that severely limits my ability to exercise. Walking three miles is beyond what I'm capable of on an average day, let alone jogging anywhere. 

This is an surprisingly harsh critique of a minor detail. In the future, I would strongly recommend a more polite, truth-seeking inquiry. 

2Productimothy
Thank you for the clarification. I am content. I congratulate you for running your errands on a bike with your condition; that's actually quite impressive. I do apologize sincerely for that unnecessarily harsh critique of a minor detail. I concede to your recommendation.  I think I have some explaining to do. I am 19, and am relatively new to rationality. I have been exposed to it for about two years, but have attained only hints of scattered progress. I am ashamed of this, but also realize how difficult it is to change the underlying dispositional features of oneself; how difficult it is to get past a local optimum that the self uses for most of its stability. I quickly acknowledge how little I know, and have spent two years descending this macro-mount stupid. In the first 6 months, it got so bad that I disassociated from the normal sources of social stability. Family, friends, school, religion--all of it. I had a few things that kept me alive, but life was mostly cold, confusing, and lonely. After the strict perfectionism settled down and the emotional stability started to come back, pragmaticism (localized perfectionism) has started to face me as the true optimum. To this day, I'm trying to figure out what to do about my current limited state. I now just want to be less wrong and less dysfunctional, because that's the only improvement I could ever attain. But the harsh season left a stain on my cognition--absolute perfectionism is a powerful tool, but crippling when facing concrete challenges (where concrete progress is born). My abstraction engine became strong, but now the polarized forms of abstraction are... polarized still. I need to find a more systematic way to weigh them properly. I presume concrete challenges with feedback from others is the next step in the right direction. On LessWrong, I almost never comment on a post. I almost never join conversations. I've been left to my own analysis, and a static and vague window into others' lines of thought.

Hmm, it would probably work well to write a longer daily FB post, like if I set a goal to publish at least 500 words each day. 

Part of the goal is ‘become comfortable submitting things I'm not fully happy with’ and part is 'actually produce words faster'. The second part feels like it needs the length requirement. I've done daily short FB posts before and found it useful, but I noticed that I tended to write mostly short posts that didn't require me to hammer out words. 

Hmm, I'm not certain where you're getting that. I interpreted this as the amount of deliberate practice contributed to success in some fields much more than it did in other fields. (Which could be explained by some fields not having developed techniques and training methods that enable good DP, or could be explained by everyone maxing out practice, or by practice not mattering in those fields.) DP still makes a difference among top performers in music and chess, indicating that not all top performers are maxing out deliberate practice in those areas.  

4Elizabeth
You're right, I misread something and made the leap to a pet theory that wasn't actually related to your point. 

I considered that early on during my exploration, but didn't go deep into it after seeing Scott's comment on his post saying:

These comparisons held positions (specialist vs. generalist) constant. Aside from whether someone is a specialist or not, I don't think there's any tendency for older doctors to get harder cases.

Now, after seeing that the other fields also match the same pattern of decline, I'd be somewhat surprised by evidence that taking on harder cases explained the majority of skill plateaus in middle age for doctors. 

Note: I was treating the 2009 study as a psudo-replication. It's not a replication, but it's a later study on the same topic that found the same conclusion, which had allayed some of my concerns about old psychology research. However, I since looked deeper into Dan Ariely's work, and the number of accusations of fraud or academic misconduct makes me less confident in the study. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely#Accusations_of_data_fraud_and_academic_misconduct

I agree with the line of reasoning, but I'd probably err on the side of adding a deadline even for designing  your office -  if you want to make sure the task gets done at some point, setting the deadline a month away seems better than not having one at all. 

2Matt Goldenberg
I tend to work in the reverse way - if I notice myself putting something off for too long, I add a deadline, but my default is to decide fresh each time what to do.

I agree that adopting high variance strategies makes sense if you think you're going to fail, but I'm not sure the candle task has high variance strategies to adopt? It's a pretty simple task.   

I feel like being the code master for Codenames is a good exercise for understanding this concept. 

I wasn't thinking of shards as reward prediction errors, but I can see how the language was confusing. What I meant is that when multiple shards are activated, they affect behavior according to how strongly and reliably they were reinforced in the past. Practically, this looks like competing predictions of reward (because past experience is strongly correlated with predictions of future experience), although technically it's not a prediction - the shard is just based on the past experience and will influence behavior similarly even if you rationally know t... (read more)

Cool, I'm happy if you're relaxing with a leisure activity you enjoy! The people I spoke with were explicitly not doing this for fun. 

Time inconsistency example: You’ve described shards as context-based predictions of getting reward. One way to model the example would be to imagine there is one shard predicting the chance of being rewarded in the situation where someone is offering you something right now, and another shard predicting the chance you will be rewarded if someone is promising they will give you something tomorrow. 

For example, I place a substantially better probability on getting to eat cake if someone is currently offering me the slice of cake, compared to someone promising that they will bring a slightly better cake to the office party tomorrow. (In the second case, they might get sick, or forget, or I might not make it to the party.)

2TurnTrout
I think you're summarizing "Shard theory views 'shards' as contextually-activated predictors of low-level reward events (i.e. reward prediction errors)." If so, that's not what I meant to communicate. On my view, shards usually aren't reward predictors at all, the shards were simply shaped into existence by past reward events. Here's how I'd analyze the situation: My cake-shard would have been shaped into existence by past reinforcement events related to cake. My cake shard affects my decisions more strongly in situations which are similar to the past reinforcement events (e.g. because I internalized heuristics like "If I see cake, then be more likely to eat cake"), and therefore I'm more tempted by cake when I can see cake. 

I have lots of points of contact with the world, but it feels really effortful to be always mindful and noting down observations (downright overwhelming if I don't narrowing my focus to a single cluster of datapoints I'm trying to understand)

2LoganStrohl
My new response to this is the TAPs section in Duncan's essay "Concentration Of Force".

yeah, a key principle is something like "start light, stay sustainable". or maybe "start with space, make more space".

there's a large range of naturalism infrastructure it's possible to lay. some people want to dive all the way in immediately: evening journal, pocket field notes, a weekly time block for focused investigation, a weekly time block for analysis, a big "catching the spark" exercise to get things started, and a full predict-observe-update loop practice. but most people are better off choosing one single TAP: "I'll snap my fingers when I think I... (read more)

@Logan, how do you make space for practicing naturalism? It sounds like you rely on ways of easing yourself into curiosity, rather than forcing yourself to pay attention.

>Logan, how do you make space for practicing naturalism?

I don't have a ready-made answer to this, so I'm going to start rambling whatever maybe-nonsense comes to mind, and see what happens. This will probably not resemble "a good answer" very closely.

I think I mostly "make space for naturalism" by having different intellectual priorities than most adults. When I want to learn something, or to solve a problem, or when I'm in some unfamiliar kind of situation, naturalism-type thoughts are way higher on my priority list than non-naturalism-type thoughts. I... (read more)

5lynettebye
I have lots of points of contact with the world, but it feels really effortful to be always mindful and noting down observations (downright overwhelming if I don't narrowing my focus to a single cluster of datapoints I'm trying to understand)

(Also, just saw the comment rules for the first time while copying these over - hope mindfulness mention doesn't break them too hard)

Speculating here, I'm guessing Logan is pointing at a subcategory of what I would call mindfulness - a data point-centered version of mindfulness. One of my theories of how experts build their deep models is that they start with thousands of data points. I had been lumping frameworks along with individual observations, but maybe it's worth separating those out. If this is the case, frameworks help make connections more quickly, but the individual data points are how you notice discrepancies, uncover novel insights, and check that your frameworks are working in practice. 

1lynettebye
(Also, just saw the comment rules for the first time while copying these over - hope mindfulness mention doesn't break them too hard)

(Copying over FB reactions from while reading) Hmm, I'm confused about the Observation post. Logan seems to be using direct observation vs map like I would talk about mindfulness vs mindlessness. Except for a few crucial differences: I would expect mindfulness to mean paying attention fully to one thing, which could include lots of analysis/thinking/etc. that Logan would put in the map category. It feels like we're cutting reality up slightly differently.

1lynettebye
Speculating here, I'm guessing Logan is pointing at a subcategory of what I would call mindfulness - a data point-centered version of mindfulness. One of my theories of how experts build their deep models is that they start with thousands of data points. I had been lumping frameworks along with individual observations, but maybe it's worth separating those out. If this is the case, frameworks help make connections more quickly, but the individual data points are how you notice discrepancies, uncover novel insights, and check that your frameworks are working in practice. 

Trying to sit with the thought of the territory as the thing that exists as it actually is regardless of whatever I expect. This feels easy to believe for textbook physics, somewhat harder for whatever I'm trying to paint (I have to repeatedly remind myself to actually look at the cloud I'm painting), and really hard for psychology. (Like, I recently told someone that, in theory, if their daily planning is calibrated they should have days where they get more done than planned, but in practice this gets complicated because of interactions between their plan... (read more)

(Copying over FB reactions from while reading) There’s something that feels familiar so far. For myself and when I’m working with clients, I often encourage experiments and journaling about the experience as they go. Part of the reason is uncertainty about the result, but another part is taking the time to check your expectations against your actual experience as it’s happening.

Like, I recently felt really drained. Noticing that feeling, I could immediately say several things that had been draining, but I wouldn’t have said they were hard while I’d been do... (read more)

1lynettebye
Trying to sit with the thought of the territory as the thing that exists as it actually is regardless of whatever I expect. This feels easy to believe for textbook physics, somewhat harder for whatever I'm trying to paint (I have to repeatedly remind myself to actually look at the cloud I'm painting), and really hard for psychology. (Like, I recently told someone that, in theory, if their daily planning is calibrated they should have days where they get more done than planned, but in practice this gets complicated because of interactions between their plans and how quickly/efficiently they work.) Yet, to the best of my knowledge, psychology isn't *not* physics... It's just that we humans aren't yet good enough at physics to understand psychology.

Coming back after finishing the series, I notice the "scary!" reaction is gone. Based on some of Logan's comments on the FB thread, I think I updated toward 1. worry less about having to explicitly remember every detail -> instead just learn to pay attention and let those observations filter into your consciousness, and 2. it's still fine to use/learn from frames, just make sure you also have direct observations to let you know if your frames/assumptions are off. 

I want to understand how to actually get humans to do the right things, and that task feels gargantuan without building on the foundation of simplified handles other people have discovered.

Yet, I value something like naturalism because I don't trust many handles as they are now, especially coming from psychology. "Confusion-spotting" seems pretty important if I'm going to improve on the status quo.

(Copying FB reactions I made as I read) 1. I care a lot about deep mastery. 2. It doesn’t feel immediately obvious that direct observation is the fastest route to deep mastery. Like, say I wanted to understand a new field - bio for example. I would start with some textbooks, not staring at my dog and hoping I’d understand how he worked. I’d get to examples and direct experience, but my initial instinct is to start with pre-existing frameworks. But maybe I’m just misunderstanding what “direct observation” means?

3lynettebye
I want to understand how to actually get humans to do the right things, and that task feels gargantuan without building on the foundation of simplified handles other people have discovered. Yet, I value something like naturalism because I don't trust many handles as they are now, especially coming from psychology. "Confusion-spotting" seems pretty important if I'm going to improve on the status quo.

Probably worth noticing that my mind spent the last half of the post trying to skip ahead. Like, there’s a storyteller setting the scene and my brain wants to skip over “Once upon a time…” ….but I’m guessing that skipping over something because it seems familiar is antithetical to the whole point of this series.

I get the problem about misleading frames and not noticing you’re skipping over counter evidence -- I’m always worried/annoyed/frustrated about how little confidence I have in any claim because I can think of nuances. But ah, that’s why I like frames! I want cached answers, damn it.

Initial reaction: “Ah, scary.” Their move from frames to unfiltered, direct observations feels scary. Like I’m going to lose something important. I rely on frames a lot to organize and remember stuff, because memory is hard and I forget so many important data points. I can chunk lots of individual stuff under a frame.

8lynettebye
Coming back after finishing the series, I notice the "scary!" reaction is gone. Based on some of Logan's comments on the FB thread, I think I updated toward 1. worry less about having to explicitly remember every detail -> instead just learn to pay attention and let those observations filter into your consciousness, and 2. it's still fine to use/learn from frames, just make sure you also have direct observations to let you know if your frames/assumptions are off. 

I wrote reactions on FB while reading, coping them here and on the other posts afterwards.

1lynettebye
Probably worth noticing that my mind spent the last half of the post trying to skip ahead. Like, there’s a storyteller setting the scene and my brain wants to skip over “Once upon a time…” ….but I’m guessing that skipping over something because it seems familiar is antithetical to the whole point of this series.
1lynettebye
I get the problem about misleading frames and not noticing you’re skipping over counter evidence -- I’m always worried/annoyed/frustrated about how little confidence I have in any claim because I can think of nuances. But ah, that’s why I like frames! I want cached answers, damn it.
3lynettebye
Initial reaction: “Ah, scary.” Their move from frames to unfiltered, direct observations feels scary. Like I’m going to lose something important. I rely on frames a lot to organize and remember stuff, because memory is hard and I forget so many important data points. I can chunk lots of individual stuff under a frame.

I don't think this post added anything new to the conversation, both because Elizabeth Van Nostrand's epistemic spot check found essentially the same result previously and because, as I said in the post, it's "the blog equivalent of a null finding." 

I still think it's slightly valuable - it's useful to occasionally replicate reviews. 

(For me personally, writing this post was quite valuable - it was a good opportunity to examine the evidence for myself, try to appropriately incorporate the different types of evidence into my prior, and form my own opinions for when clients ask me related questions.) 

Pro: The piece aimed to bring a set of key ideas to a broad audience in an easily understood, actionable way, and I think it does a fair job of that. I would be very excited to see similar example-filled posts actionably communicating important ideas. (The goal here feels related to this post https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/) 

Con: I don't think it adds new ideas to the conversation. Some people commented on the sale-sy style of the intro, and I think it's a fair criticism. The piece prioritizes engagingness and readability over nuance. 

It would be nice if microcovid was updated to take omicron (and future variants) into account. An omicron update would be worth >$10 to me personally (though probably <$100), since it saves me the time of estimating the changing risk myself. 

3Sameerishere
If you feel reasonably confident in your ability to estimate the changing risk yourself with what you currently know, I'd be grateful for your input here! 

I appreciate and regularly use microcovid to estimate the risks of social gatherings so I can decide how cautious to be socially. 

5lynettebye
It would be nice if microcovid was updated to take omicron (and future variants) into account. An omicron update would be worth >$10 to me personally (though probably <$100), since it saves me the time of estimating the changing risk myself. 

Hmm, that framing doesn't feel at odds with mine. Finding what's rewarding can definitely include whatever it is that's reinforcing the current behavior. I emphasized the gut-level experience because I expect those emotions contain the necessary information that's missing from rational explanations for what they "should" do. 

But Ericsson's research found that one group of expert violinists averaged 10,000 hours. Another group of "expert" violinists averaged 5,000 hours, and other numbers he cites for expertise range from 500 to 25,000. So really, it's generalizing from "you should have 10,000 hours of practice by the time you're 20 if you want an international career as a violinist" to "you should get 10,000 hours of practice if you want to be an expert in anything".... 

2Matt Goldenberg
Yeah, I think this passes the common sense test as well. It'd be quite suspicious if it took 10,000 hours to get to the top of the field of any discipline, regardless of the relative competitiveness or difficulty of different disciplines.   On the other hand, I think frontier's point is good as well. If you don't have any data, it's reasonable to use the average as a rule of thumb.  I think the real point of Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule is "It's almost certainly going to take a ton of practice to become an expert at the thing, and you should expect and relish that."

So I put that example because one of the things that felt like a breakthrough in cooking ability for me was seeing a post listing a bunch of world cuisines by spices (I think it was a post by Jeff Kaufman, but I can't find it now). Having a sense of which spices usually contribute to the flavor profile I want made me a better cook than my arbitrary "sniff spice and guess whether that would be good" previous method. 

So while you're spending your 10k hours on some creative pursuit, maybe it's worth spending one hour brainstorming these "other means".

Arguably a great example of deliberate practice for finding better methods. 

That seems likely. I'm not calling Gladwell out - I also haven't read the book, and there's probably a pretty defensible motte there. However, it seems likely that he laid the foundation for the popular internet version by overstating the evidence for it, e.g. this quote from the book: “The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours."&nbs... (read more)

1[comment deleted]

Interesting. None of the sleep doctors I spoke to recommended data sources. However, they seemed to consider even at-home professional sleep tests with skepticism, so this might say more about the level of accuracy they want than about the potential usefulness of personal devices. 

As for age, I tried to focus this post on actionable advice. The non-actionable factors that influence sleep are simply to numerous for me to cover properly, and, unfortunately, however impactful aging is on sleep, reversing aging isn't (yet!) in my repertoire of recommendations. 

Sounds like you're describing autonomy, mastery, and meaning - some of the big factors that are supposed to influence job satisfaction. 80,000 Hours has an old but nice summary here https://80000hours.org/articles/job-satisfaction-research.  I expect job satisfaction and the resulting motivation make a huge difference on hours you can work productively. 

2Viliam
Yes. With motivation, focusing on your work is easy. Without motivation, you burn your self-discipline, and then you give up. So, without motivation it becomes a question of how many hours worth of self-discipline you have, or rather how many you can pretend you have. With motivation, it is only a question of what else do you also need to do during the day.

For retired and homemaking folks, I think that's really up to them. I don't have a good model for external evaluation. For a student who wants to do impactful things later, I think the calculations are similar. 

Since I can't link to it easily, I'm reposting a FB post by Rob Wiblin on a similar point: 
"There's something kinda funny about how we don't place much value on the time of high school and undergraduate students.

To see that, imagine that person X will very likely be able to do highly valuable work for society and earn a high peak income of... (read more)

Maximization of neglectedness gives different results from those of maximization of impact.

I don't disagree, but my point is that you can't directly maximize impact without already knowing a lot. Other people will usually do the work that's very straightforward to do, so the highest counterfactually valuable work requires specialized knowledge or insights. 

Obviously there are many paths that are low-impact. Since it's hard to know which are valuable before you learn about them, you should make a theory-of-change hypothesis and start testing that best guess. That way you're more likely to get information that causes you to make a better plan if you're on a bad track. 

As I understand it, your objection is that "being the best" means traditional career success (probably high prestige and money), and this isn't a good path for maximizing impact. That makes sense, but I'm not talking about prestige or money (unless you're trying to earn to give). When I say "best," I mean being able to make judgement calls and contributions that the other people working on the issue can't. The knowledge and skills that make you irreplaceable increase your chances of making a difference. 

2Vladimir_Nesov
It might be, I didn't say anything about that. My point is that career success is not the same condition as maximization of impact, so using these interchangeably is misleading. I suggested that there are some examples illustrating the difference captured by the concept of maximization of impact, but not by the concept of career success. This fits my usage in this thread as well. Yes, but only all else being equal, which is hard to formulate so that multiple examples can be found in the same world. There are lots of worthless neglected occupations. Maximization of neglectedness gives different results from those of maximization of impact.

Honestly, the main thing was to start treating my life as an experiment. Before that, I was just doing what the doctors told me without checking to see if their recommendations actually produced good results. For me, experimenting mainly meant that I 1. tried tracking a bunch of things on my own and analyzing the results, and 2. was willing to try a lot more things, like caffeine pills and antidepressants, because the information value was high. (I first did my research and, when relevant, checked with a doctor, of course.) I think there was a mindset shif... (read more)

I used a Lights sheet ( https://www.ultraworking.com/lights ) to track the variables alongside my daily habits, to reduce overhead.

I also shared the PayPal link out of fairness to Dony, who organizes the group.

Yes, that link is the first reply.

1Mark Xu
I failed to see the first link and am embarassed.
2lynettebye
I also shared the PayPal link out of fairness to Dony, who organizes the group.
1Mark Xu
ah, I meant the link from "Here is the link to join."

There's a group for Effective Altruists on Focusmate:

(Dony Christie) "The Basic plan creates the group, and any member who has not subscribed to the Focusmate service for unlimited Focusmate sessions ($5/month) will be able to do 3 free sessions a week with either members of the EA group or the general public. Basic costs $50/month total, which rounds out to $2.50/month per person we currently have interested, and we will get even more people once the group exists and is popularized.

If you wish for unlimited sessions with other EAs (imagine a hi... (read more)

1Mark Xu
could I have the link? it doesn't appear to have been copied over.
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