But I don’t think there’s a good reason to expect rationalists to do better unprompted—to have more unprompted imagination, creativity, to generate strategies—or to notice things better: their blind spots, additional dimensions in the solution space.
I wonder if it would help to build a habit about this. Something like dedicating 15 minutes every day to a rationalist ritual, which would contain tasks like “spend 5 minutes listing your current problem, 5 minutes choosing the most important one, and 5 minutes actually thinking about the problem”.
Another task could be “here is a list of important topics in human life { health, wealth, relationships… }, spend 5 minutes writing a short idea for each of them how to improve, choose one topic, and spend 5 minutes expanding the idea into specific plan”. Or perhaps “make a list of your strengths, now think how you could apply them to your current problems” or “make a list of your weaknesses, now think how you could fix them at least a little” or… Seven tasks for seven days of the week. Or maybe six tasks, and one day should be spent reviewing the week and planning the next one.
The idea is to have a system that has a chance to give you the prompt to actually think about something.
When I talk about doing useful work, I mean something much more substantial than what you outline above. Obviously 15 minutes every day thinking about your problems is helpful, but the people at the leading edges of most fields spend all day thinking about their problems.
Perhaps doing this ritual makes you think about the problem in a more meta way. If so, there’s an empirical question about how much being meta can spark clever solutions. Here I have an intuition that it can, but when I look at any particular subfield that intuition becomes much weaker. How much could a leading mathematician gain by being more meta, for example?
I guess we are talking about two different things, both of them useful. One is excellence in a given field, where the success could be described like “you got a Nobel price, bunch of stuff is named after you, and kids learn your name at high school”. Other is keeping all aspects of your life in good shape, where the success could be described like “you lived until age 100, fit and mostly healthy, with a ton of money, surrounded by a harem of girlfriends”. In other words, it can refer to being at top 0.0001 % of one thing, or at top 1-10 % at many things that matter personally.
One can be successful at both (I am thinking about Richard Feynman now), but it is also possible to excel at something while your life sucks otherwise, or to live a great life that leaves no impact on history.
My advice was specifically meant for the latter (the general goodness of personal life). I agree that achieving extraordinary results at one thing requires spending extraordinary amounts of time and attention on it. And you probably need to put emphasis on different rationality techniques; I assume that everyday life would benefit greatly from “spend 5 minutes actually thinking about it” (especially when it is a thing you habitually avoid thinking about), while scientists may benefit relatively more from recognizing “teachers’ passwords” and “mysterious answers”.
How much could a leading mathematician gain by being more meta, for example?
If you are leading, then what you are already doing works fine, and you don’t need my advice. But in general, according to some rumors, category theory is the part of mathematics where you go more meta than usual. I am not going to pretend having any actual knowledge in this area, though.
In physics, I believe it is sometimes fruitful (or at least it was, a few decades ago) to think about “the nature of the physical law”. Like, instead of just trying to find a law that would explain the experimental results, looking at the already known laws, asking what they have in common, and using these parts as building blocks of the area you research. I am not an expert here, either.
In computer science, a simple example of going meta is “design patterns”, a more complex example would be thinking about programming languages and what are their desirable traits (as opposed to simply being an “X developer”), in extreme cases creating your own framework or programming language. Lisp or TeX would be among high-status examples here, but even JQuery in its era revolutionized writing JavaScript code. You may want to be the kind of developer who looks at JavaScript and invents JQuery, or looks at book publishing and invents TeX.
Hm. Yes, rationality gave us such timeless techniques like “think about the problem for at least 5 minutes by the clock”, but I’m saying that nothing in the LW canon helps you make sure that what you come up with in those 5 minutes will be useful.
Not to mention, this sounds to me like “trying to solve the problem” rather than “solving the problem” (more precisely, “acting out the role of someone making a dutiful attempt to solve the problem”, I’m sure there’s a Sequence post about this). I feel like people who want to do X (in the sense of the word “want” where it’s an actual desire, no Elephant-in-the-brain bullshit) do X, so they don’t have time to set timers to think about how to do X.
What I’m saying here about rationality is that it doesn’t help you figure out, on your own, unprompted, whether what you’re doing is acting out a role to yourself rather than taking action. (Meditation helps, just in case anyone thought I would ever shut up about meditation.)
But rationality does help you to swallow your pride and listen when someone else points it out to you, prompts you to think about it, which is why I think rationality is very useful.
I don’t think you can devise a system for yourself which prompts you in this way, because the prompt must come from someone who sees the additional dimension of the solution space. They must point you to the additional dimension. That might be hard. Like explaining 3D to a 2-dimensional being.
On the other hand, pointing out when you’re shooting yourself in the foot (e.g. eating unhealthy, not working out, spending money on bullshit) is easy for other people and rationality gives you the tools to listen and consider. Hence, rationality protects you against shooting yourself in the foot, because the information about health etc. is out there in abundance, most people just don’t use their ears.
I might be just repeating myself over and over again, I don’t know, anyway, these are the things that splosh around in my head.
I feel like people who want to do X (in the sense of the word “want” where it’s an actual desire, no Elephant-in-the-brain bullshit) do X, so they don’t have time to set timers to think about how to do X.
Yeah. When someone does not do X, they probably have a psychological problem, most likely involving lying to themselves. Setting up the timer won’t make the problem go away. (The rebelling part of the brain will find a way to undermine the progress.) See a therapist instead, or change your peer group.
The proper moment to go meta is when you are already doing X, already achieving some outcomes, and your question is how to make the already existing process more efficient. Then, 5 minutes of thinking can make you realize e.g. that some parts of the process can be outsourced or done differently or skipped completely. Which can translate to immediate gains.
In other words, you should not go meta to skip doing your ABC, but rather to progress from ABC to D.
If instead you believe that by enough armchair thinking you can skip directly to Z, you are using “rationality” as a substitute for prayer. Also, as another excuse for why you are not moving your ass.
I wonder if it would help to build a habit about this. Something like dedicating 15 minutes every day to a rationalist ritual, which would contain tasks like “spend 5 minutes listing your current problem, 5 minutes choosing the most important one, and 5 minutes actually thinking about the problem”.
Another task could be “here is a list of important topics in human life { health, wealth, relationships… }, spend 5 minutes writing a short idea for each of them how to improve, choose one topic, and spend 5 minutes expanding the idea into specific plan”. Or perhaps “make a list of your strengths, now think how you could apply them to your current problems” or “make a list of your weaknesses, now think how you could fix them at least a little” or… Seven tasks for seven days of the week. Or maybe six tasks, and one day should be spent reviewing the week and planning the next one.
The idea is to have a system that has a chance to give you the prompt to actually think about something.
When I talk about doing useful work, I mean something much more substantial than what you outline above. Obviously 15 minutes every day thinking about your problems is helpful, but the people at the leading edges of most fields spend all day thinking about their problems.
Perhaps doing this ritual makes you think about the problem in a more meta way. If so, there’s an empirical question about how much being meta can spark clever solutions. Here I have an intuition that it can, but when I look at any particular subfield that intuition becomes much weaker. How much could a leading mathematician gain by being more meta, for example?
I guess we are talking about two different things, both of them useful. One is excellence in a given field, where the success could be described like “you got a Nobel price, bunch of stuff is named after you, and kids learn your name at high school”. Other is keeping all aspects of your life in good shape, where the success could be described like “you lived until age 100, fit and mostly healthy, with a ton of money, surrounded by a harem of girlfriends”. In other words, it can refer to being at top 0.0001 % of one thing, or at top 1-10 % at many things that matter personally.
One can be successful at both (I am thinking about Richard Feynman now), but it is also possible to excel at something while your life sucks otherwise, or to live a great life that leaves no impact on history.
My advice was specifically meant for the latter (the general goodness of personal life). I agree that achieving extraordinary results at one thing requires spending extraordinary amounts of time and attention on it. And you probably need to put emphasis on different rationality techniques; I assume that everyday life would benefit greatly from “spend 5 minutes actually thinking about it” (especially when it is a thing you habitually avoid thinking about), while scientists may benefit relatively more from recognizing “teachers’ passwords” and “mysterious answers”.
If you are leading, then what you are already doing works fine, and you don’t need my advice. But in general, according to some rumors, category theory is the part of mathematics where you go more meta than usual. I am not going to pretend having any actual knowledge in this area, though.
In physics, I believe it is sometimes fruitful (or at least it was, a few decades ago) to think about “the nature of the physical law”. Like, instead of just trying to find a law that would explain the experimental results, looking at the already known laws, asking what they have in common, and using these parts as building blocks of the area you research. I am not an expert here, either.
In computer science, a simple example of going meta is “design patterns”, a more complex example would be thinking about programming languages and what are their desirable traits (as opposed to simply being an “X developer”), in extreme cases creating your own framework or programming language. Lisp or TeX would be among high-status examples here, but even JQuery in its era revolutionized writing JavaScript code. You may want to be the kind of developer who looks at JavaScript and invents JQuery, or looks at book publishing and invents TeX.
Hm. Yes, rationality gave us such timeless techniques like “think about the problem for at least 5 minutes by the clock”, but I’m saying that nothing in the LW canon helps you make sure that what you come up with in those 5 minutes will be useful.
Not to mention, this sounds to me like “trying to solve the problem” rather than “solving the problem” (more precisely, “acting out the role of someone making a dutiful attempt to solve the problem”, I’m sure there’s a Sequence post about this). I feel like people who want to do X (in the sense of the word “want” where it’s an actual desire, no Elephant-in-the-brain bullshit) do X, so they don’t have time to set timers to think about how to do X.
What I’m saying here about rationality is that it doesn’t help you figure out, on your own, unprompted, whether what you’re doing is acting out a role to yourself rather than taking action. (Meditation helps, just in case anyone thought I would ever shut up about meditation.)
But rationality does help you to swallow your pride and listen when someone else points it out to you, prompts you to think about it, which is why I think rationality is very useful.
I don’t think you can devise a system for yourself which prompts you in this way, because the prompt must come from someone who sees the additional dimension of the solution space. They must point you to the additional dimension. That might be hard. Like explaining 3D to a 2-dimensional being.
On the other hand, pointing out when you’re shooting yourself in the foot (e.g. eating unhealthy, not working out, spending money on bullshit) is easy for other people and rationality gives you the tools to listen and consider. Hence, rationality protects you against shooting yourself in the foot, because the information about health etc. is out there in abundance, most people just don’t use their ears.
I might be just repeating myself over and over again, I don’t know, anyway, these are the things that splosh around in my head.
Yeah. When someone does not do X, they probably have a psychological problem, most likely involving lying to themselves. Setting up the timer won’t make the problem go away. (The rebelling part of the brain will find a way to undermine the progress.) See a therapist instead, or change your peer group.
The proper moment to go meta is when you are already doing X, already achieving some outcomes, and your question is how to make the already existing process more efficient. Then, 5 minutes of thinking can make you realize e.g. that some parts of the process can be outsourced or done differently or skipped completely. Which can translate to immediate gains.
In other words, you should not go meta to skip doing your ABC, but rather to progress from ABC to D.
If instead you believe that by enough armchair thinking you can skip directly to Z, you are using “rationality” as a substitute for prayer. Also, as another excuse for why you are not moving your ass.