Similarly, I think the people-being-unreliable thing is a bullshit side effect
You may wish to consider that this community has a very high frequency of disabilities which render one non-consensually unreliable.
You may wish to consider that your stance is especially insulting towards those members of our community.
You may wish to reconsider making uncharitable comments about those members of our community. In case it is unclear: “this one smacks the most of a sort of self-serving, short-sighted immaturity” is not a charitable statement.
Oh, I missed this one in the shuffle. Note that you chose to quote less than half a sentence, because if you quoted the whole sentence you’d have a heck of a time setting up the strawman you wanted to knock down.
Hi Duncan, I’m a relative newcomer (this is my first LW thread, though I’ve participated in rationalsphere discussions elsewhere), so this may not carry much weight, but I want to somewhat agree with handoflixue here.
One of my stronger reactions to your post is “this is an impossible set of expectations for me and a lot of others”. Which is fine, obviously you can have expectations that some people can’t live up to, and of course it is very good that you are making these expectations very clear.
But I sort of get the sense that you are a person who is fundamentally capable of being reliable and regularly making good life choices pretty easily, and that you sort of don’t get that for a lot of people these things are really hard even if they understand what the right choice is and are legitimately trying their best to do that.
This is based only partly on your post and somewhat more on a mini-talk which (IIRC) you gave at a CFAR community night where you posed the question “does it even make sense for people to seek out advanced rationality techniques such as the ones discussed here when they’re not displaying basic rationality such as eating a reasonable diet and sleeping enough?”. Even then, this question struck me as dangerously wrong-headed, and now that you are proposing to be in charge of people, this seems to take on more importance.
Advanced rationality techniques, at least when applied to one’s self-conception and life choices, are basically therapy. “Failures of basic rationality” are often better described as “mental health issues”. Therapy is how you deal with mental health issues. People with mental health issues need more therapy/advanced rationality, not less! I’ve seen it hypothesized that one reason we have so many mentally ill rationalists is because people with mental health issues must learn rationality in order to function, at least to some degree that is more than most people need.
I don’t actually know you, so my information is pretty incomplete, but my impression is that if someone fails to act in a way you (and they!) think is reasonable, you’re likely to become baffled and frustrated and try to deal with the problem by imposing stricter expectations & consequences. This might work for some people, but for many, it will just make them miserable and less productive because they will be angry at themselves for failing at things that they “should” be able to do.
I think it’s likely that your way of dealing with this is basically to screen out the people who are likely to react poorly to your approach, in addition to causing others like me to self-select out. That’s fine, I guess, though I would still be on the lookout for this sort of issue as a possible failure mode, and maybe also just demonstrate more compassionate awareness that things like reliability are actually almost impossible for some people, and maybe not attribute all of this to having the wrong culture or mindset.
(My general opinion of your project is “this sounds scary and I want to stay very far away from it, and this makes me somewhat wary of the people involved, and I wouldn’t recommend participation to people I know, at the same time I am really curious about how this will go so selfishly I’m a little glad it’s happening so I can gain information from it”.)
Thanks for the long comment. I really appreciate your candor and perspective—I do think I get the fact that other minds don’t work like mine, but you’re right in sniffing out that a lot of that knowledge is top-down and parts of me are still instinctively typical-minding a lot. I work hard to remind myself, e.g. I have triggers on certain words or feelings that cause me to review memories of specific times when my assumptions about what was going on in someone else’s head were blindingly false.
I think I generally agree with you that there’s a large overlap between rationality and therapy, and I’m intrigued by the hypothesis re: mentally ill rationalists; it seems to be pretty plausible.
Here’s my actual plan if someone fails to act in a way that things seem reasonable. Note that this is the “everything but the kitchen sink option,” including aaaaaallll of the steps one might take, and that for smaller disagreements, this can be done as a speed run or stepwise.
Determine whether to follow up in the moment or later based on the needs of the activity, determine whether to follow up in private, in group, or via delegation based on the apparent needs of the person.
Start by asking. What did they think was going on? What were their thought processes? Assume from the outset that people act in consistent, coherent ways, and that basically everyone is trying to make the world a better place.
Try to pass their ideological Turing test. In other words, try to reflect back to them the priorities they were holding and the goals they were attempting to achieve, and keep falsifying my hypotheses until they give a clear endorsement of my summary.
Ask them to model me, in return (note: one important subthread of how the house will run is a check-in along the lines of “is Duncan clear, consistent, and model-able?”). See if they can predict what my priorities were, and if they have a sense of what I’m reacting to. Do not make this some kind of sick high-pressure quiz dynamic … if they shrug and say “dunno,” I’ll just explain.
Try to lay out, from as birds’-eye as possible a perspective, the conflicting goalsets. Point at the causal chains that brought them into conflict, and highlight my model of where things are broken. Ask them if they have a different model/let them update my picture with a better sense.
Form a new plan for the future; explicitly discuss weighing the goals against one another, and how they ought to stack up. Possibly include other people in the discussion at this point, particularly if the defection seemed to have externalities.
Assume that plan failed. Come up with a plausible explanation for why; try to patch the first or second obvious holes. Form an intention going forward.
Check whether reparations need to be made. Hopefully, there’s a standard formula (as in the pushups example). If not, do a similar process of attempting to converge on a good face-saving/balance-restoring action. If there isn’t a clear satisfactory solution, default to a compromise and schedule a future check-in.
Through all of this, run things by others if either party thinks that’d be beneficial. Also consider things like anxiety/introversion, and have the conversation at a deliberate time rather than forcing it if it’s not urgent.
So yeah, in a sense, this might result in stricter expectations and consequences, but not in a blind, top-down way. In situations where there needs to be an immediate response, I’ll take an action/give an order and expect it to work, but I’ll want to revisit any such quick authoritarian moves after the fact, to explain my thinking and confirm absence of undue harm (and apologize/make amends of my own if necessary).
Overall, though, the idea is to build a high trust environment, and trust goes both ways and is easier to lose than to gain. The thing I want people in the house to actually be justified in believing is “Duncan always has good intentions and is making decisions from some kind of a model. He’ll explain when he can, and if he doesn’t, it’s because he has another model saying why he can’t, and he’ll instead explain both models once the thing is over.”
The idea being that I prove trustworthiness in situations 1-8, and people grant me a little leeway in situation 9. But 1-8 definitely have to come first.
Advanced rationality techniques, at least when applied to one’s self-conception and life choices, are basically therapy. “Failures of basic rationality” are often better described as “mental health issues”. Therapy is how you deal with mental health issues. People with mental health issues need more therapy/advanced rationality, not less! I’ve seen it hypothesized that one reason we have so many mentally ill rationalists is because people with mental health issues must learn rationality in order to function, at least to some degree that is more than most people need.
Um. Quick reply before I go further—I’m really really confident that the community talk night thing you’re remembering either wasn’t me or that the quote doesn’t resemble what I said. I strongly agree with you that that’s a dangerously wrong-headed way to try carving up the world.
You may wish to consider that this community has a very high frequency of disabilities which render one non-consensually unreliable.
You may wish to consider that your stance is especially insulting towards those members of our community.
You may wish to reconsider making uncharitable comments about those members of our community. In case it is unclear: “this one smacks the most of a sort of self-serving, short-sighted immaturity” is not a charitable statement.
Oh, I missed this one in the shuffle. Note that you chose to quote less than half a sentence, because if you quoted the whole sentence you’d have a heck of a time setting up the strawman you wanted to knock down.
Hi Duncan, I’m a relative newcomer (this is my first LW thread, though I’ve participated in rationalsphere discussions elsewhere), so this may not carry much weight, but I want to somewhat agree with handoflixue here.
One of my stronger reactions to your post is “this is an impossible set of expectations for me and a lot of others”. Which is fine, obviously you can have expectations that some people can’t live up to, and of course it is very good that you are making these expectations very clear.
But I sort of get the sense that you are a person who is fundamentally capable of being reliable and regularly making good life choices pretty easily, and that you sort of don’t get that for a lot of people these things are really hard even if they understand what the right choice is and are legitimately trying their best to do that.
This is based only partly on your post and somewhat more on a mini-talk which (IIRC) you gave at a CFAR community night where you posed the question “does it even make sense for people to seek out advanced rationality techniques such as the ones discussed here when they’re not displaying basic rationality such as eating a reasonable diet and sleeping enough?”. Even then, this question struck me as dangerously wrong-headed, and now that you are proposing to be in charge of people, this seems to take on more importance.
Advanced rationality techniques, at least when applied to one’s self-conception and life choices, are basically therapy. “Failures of basic rationality” are often better described as “mental health issues”. Therapy is how you deal with mental health issues. People with mental health issues need more therapy/advanced rationality, not less! I’ve seen it hypothesized that one reason we have so many mentally ill rationalists is because people with mental health issues must learn rationality in order to function, at least to some degree that is more than most people need.
I don’t actually know you, so my information is pretty incomplete, but my impression is that if someone fails to act in a way you (and they!) think is reasonable, you’re likely to become baffled and frustrated and try to deal with the problem by imposing stricter expectations & consequences. This might work for some people, but for many, it will just make them miserable and less productive because they will be angry at themselves for failing at things that they “should” be able to do.
I think it’s likely that your way of dealing with this is basically to screen out the people who are likely to react poorly to your approach, in addition to causing others like me to self-select out. That’s fine, I guess, though I would still be on the lookout for this sort of issue as a possible failure mode, and maybe also just demonstrate more compassionate awareness that things like reliability are actually almost impossible for some people, and maybe not attribute all of this to having the wrong culture or mindset.
(My general opinion of your project is “this sounds scary and I want to stay very far away from it, and this makes me somewhat wary of the people involved, and I wouldn’t recommend participation to people I know, at the same time I am really curious about how this will go so selfishly I’m a little glad it’s happening so I can gain information from it”.)
Thanks for the long comment. I really appreciate your candor and perspective—I do think I get the fact that other minds don’t work like mine, but you’re right in sniffing out that a lot of that knowledge is top-down and parts of me are still instinctively typical-minding a lot. I work hard to remind myself, e.g. I have triggers on certain words or feelings that cause me to review memories of specific times when my assumptions about what was going on in someone else’s head were blindingly false.
I think I generally agree with you that there’s a large overlap between rationality and therapy, and I’m intrigued by the hypothesis re: mentally ill rationalists; it seems to be pretty plausible.
Here’s my actual plan if someone fails to act in a way that things seem reasonable. Note that this is the “everything but the kitchen sink option,” including aaaaaallll of the steps one might take, and that for smaller disagreements, this can be done as a speed run or stepwise.
Determine whether to follow up in the moment or later based on the needs of the activity, determine whether to follow up in private, in group, or via delegation based on the apparent needs of the person.
Start by asking. What did they think was going on? What were their thought processes? Assume from the outset that people act in consistent, coherent ways, and that basically everyone is trying to make the world a better place.
Try to pass their ideological Turing test. In other words, try to reflect back to them the priorities they were holding and the goals they were attempting to achieve, and keep falsifying my hypotheses until they give a clear endorsement of my summary.
Ask them to model me, in return (note: one important subthread of how the house will run is a check-in along the lines of “is Duncan clear, consistent, and model-able?”). See if they can predict what my priorities were, and if they have a sense of what I’m reacting to. Do not make this some kind of sick high-pressure quiz dynamic … if they shrug and say “dunno,” I’ll just explain.
Try to lay out, from as birds’-eye as possible a perspective, the conflicting goalsets. Point at the causal chains that brought them into conflict, and highlight my model of where things are broken. Ask them if they have a different model/let them update my picture with a better sense.
Form a new plan for the future; explicitly discuss weighing the goals against one another, and how they ought to stack up. Possibly include other people in the discussion at this point, particularly if the defection seemed to have externalities.
Assume that plan failed. Come up with a plausible explanation for why; try to patch the first or second obvious holes. Form an intention going forward.
Check whether reparations need to be made. Hopefully, there’s a standard formula (as in the pushups example). If not, do a similar process of attempting to converge on a good face-saving/balance-restoring action. If there isn’t a clear satisfactory solution, default to a compromise and schedule a future check-in.
Through all of this, run things by others if either party thinks that’d be beneficial. Also consider things like anxiety/introversion, and have the conversation at a deliberate time rather than forcing it if it’s not urgent.
So yeah, in a sense, this might result in stricter expectations and consequences, but not in a blind, top-down way. In situations where there needs to be an immediate response, I’ll take an action/give an order and expect it to work, but I’ll want to revisit any such quick authoritarian moves after the fact, to explain my thinking and confirm absence of undue harm (and apologize/make amends of my own if necessary).
Overall, though, the idea is to build a high trust environment, and trust goes both ways and is easier to lose than to gain. The thing I want people in the house to actually be justified in believing is “Duncan always has good intentions and is making decisions from some kind of a model. He’ll explain when he can, and if he doesn’t, it’s because he has another model saying why he can’t, and he’ll instead explain both models once the thing is over.”
The idea being that I prove trustworthiness in situations 1-8, and people grant me a little leeway in situation 9. But 1-8 definitely have to come first.
This reminds me of Romeo’s comment over here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/oym/how_id_introduce_lesswrong_to_an_outsider/dryk
Um. Quick reply before I go further—I’m really really confident that the community talk night thing you’re remembering either wasn’t me or that the quote doesn’t resemble what I said. I strongly agree with you that that’s a dangerously wrong-headed way to try carving up the world.
Oh, sorry for that mistake, then! Probably it was someone else. feels mildly embarrassed
I’m glad to hear you agree with my assessment of that way of thinking. In that case not very much of my comment actually stands.