When I say “I am going to try”, it means that I will put extra effort in to the task, just because I am aware of the risk of failure.
Yes, it general means that you put effort into the task. But effort doesn’t always mean effective action.
Let me clarify even more. To me, the word “try” referees to the conscious process of optimizing for succuss, with or with out constraints. Constraints, may be that I only want to put so much effort in to the problem, or that I am not willing to take certain risks, etc.
Also, to me the word “do” means that I intend to preform an action, that is trivial enough so that I do not feel a need to optimize.
For example, right now I am trying to explain my self. I am optimizing this text for clarity, under the ill defined, but very real constraint, that I am only willing to put in a limited amount of effort. But I am doing the accrual typing on the keyboard. I do not try to hit the right keys. Hitting keys are trivial, I don’t it flawlessly, but I do it well enough not to bother to optimize the effort thunder. Trying is more costly than doing, in my meaning of the words.
I never ever tried to try. I am not really sure what that would mean even using my meaning of the word “try”. I try or I do not try, there is no try to try. How ever, I did just spend some time trying to try to try, and failed.
When I say, I failed to try to try, I mean that, using my meaning of the word “try”. The action that Yudkovsky call “trying to try”, I would call “pretending to try”.
However, trying, as I use the word, does not necessarily mean trying hard. Some times a solution is worth the effort if and only if it is cheap. In this situation, if I do not know the difficulty of the problem, I will give it a light try. It can be, thinking about a problem for X minutes, and if I did not make any progress, I drop it. But that is still a try. During those minutes I optimist to win. Because I do want that win. I just don’t want it very strongly.
We do live a world where if you tell someone in hypnosis to move their arm up they will move their arm up but if you tell them to try to move their arm up they won’t move their arm up.
That is interesting. Do you know the underlying reason for this? I am guessing that it has to do with conscious and non conscious actions. Trying is a conscious effort, but doing is mostly not conscious. To my best understanding, hypnosis bypasses the conscious decision center of the brain, which would explain why there is no trying. But don’t trust me on this, because I know very little about hypnosis, and I am very good att making up explanations on the spot.
I was to a workshop once that involved hypnosis. It turned out that I am not very receptive to hypnosis. I am not saying I a immune, but it just did not work on me that time, and it did work on most of the others. I was really disappointed.
I am not convinced that there is a strong connection between the two mental phenomena, hypnosis and pretending to try, but the fact that my mind refuses both of them is evidence in this direction.
There’s the classic example of “don’t try to think of a pink elephant”. Most people you give that task will exert effort into not thinking of a pink elephant but that effort won’t lead to them not thinking of a pink elephant.
To my best understanding, hypnosis bypasses the conscious decision center of the brain, which would explain why there is no trying.
There’s trying. The person often does tense up their arm. It’s just that the arm doesn’t move as other muscles hold the arm in place.
In hypnosis you take certain metacognition away. If you tell someone to try they just try and exert effort but they don’t work towards a goal if you don’t give them a goal.
In addition to hypnosis the Alexander Technique is a system for movement where having a clear goal for movement and not trying to move is an important concept. It leads to people moving with less tension and more ergonomical.
I think in a variety of contexts where the effects of mental states matter naive people engage in effort when you tell them to try but not necessarily effort that works effectively towards a goal.
To move again to a more general level, Bob the manager who works 80 hours per week and sleeps 4 hours per day is trying really hard to do a good job. Certainly more than Dave who works 40 hours per week and sleeps 8 hours. It’s certainly possible that Bob is more productive than Dave as a result of putting in more effort but it isn’t certain. Maybe he spends too much time in busy work and isn’t rested enough to concentrate on what matters.
Ok, you, and possibly most people, associate the word “try”, only with putting in effort. For me “try” means something different (as I have tried to explain), because your try, is not a natural concept for me. I will just have to keep this difference in mind in future conversation, when ever it is important for the communication.
I think for most people if you ask them to define what “try” means they will tell you that it’s about putting in effort to achieve a goal. Emprirically that’s however doesn’t describe well the circumstances in which they use the word.
Especially on LW it might be possible that you actually don’t wouldn’t describe the manager who works 80 hours as trying to do his best at his job, but what you said doesn’t make me confident that’s the case.
I was at a hypnosis seminar where one of the exercises is about temporily forgetting numbers. There no mental action that you can do where you exert effort that gets you to forget the numbers but if you are in a mental state where you don’t try and follow the instructions of the hypnotherapist you will temporarily forget the numbers.
At the end of the seminar I think of roughly 20 people there were two for which it didn’t work. It didn’t work for me because I wanted to have the effect happen and therefore I couldn’t let go enough to stop trying to make it work. There was another person who happened to be a professional hypnotherapist for whom the same was true.
The mental state of just working towards a goal and not putting in any effort isn’t easy to achieve.
Especially on LW it might be possible that you actually don’t describe
These do not go together. People on Lesswrong often would describe things in ways that would be very weird to an average person.
Also, in the case of the manager working 80 hours, remember that the definition is about effort, not about number of hours. People need not believe that effort is strictly correlated with number of hours.
And in the hypnosis example, most people would say something like “if you try to forget, it won’t work”. In other words, they would not say that the person who exerts effort isn’t trying, just that he’s not successfully trying.
Also, in the case of the manager working 80 hours, remember that the definition is about effort, not about number of hours. People need not believe that effort is strictly correlated with number of hours.
Yes, normal people associate working 80 hours with effort and on LW you might have people who don’t.
The thing that matters for trying is effort.
The main point is that exerting effort and doing what’s necessary to achieve an objective are two different things.
There are certain effects that can be achieved in trance that you can achieve if you exert effort. Telekinesis isn’t one of them, but it makes sense that a fictional character who can do telekinesis would need an effort less trance state to do it.
There are certain tasks like sitting in front of one’s computer that where you will have less back pain if you invest less effort into the act of sitting (and in the Alexander technique you can learn how to do the task with less effort).
Than there’s EY meaning that a lot of people will say “I will try” when they are asked to achieve an outcome where they aren’t certain whether they can achieve it with the strategy they choose to persue the goal. They commit to investing some energy into following the strategy but they don’t commit to the responsibility of making the outcome happen.
I agree that, from your stand point, you are correct in not entirely trusting me, when I claim to know my own brains working, in the case of this single word. And that is ok.
I wrote my fist post out of frustration over this way of interpreting “try”:
I am rather offended by the the thought that when I say, “I am going to try”, some one might interpret that as “I am going to try to try”, or even “I am going to pretend to try”. Because that was not what I said, and it was defiantly not what I meant. When I say “I am going to try”, it means that I will put extra effort in to the task, just because I am aware of the risk of failure.
I usually succeed in keeping my rants of the Internet, but not always. Sorry about that, and for getting unnecessarily defensive at your responses.
As said, I am ok with you doubting me on weather I know my own brains working, in the case of this single word. But it would be fun if I could convince you. Do you want to help? Any idea of a test you could give me?
Regarding your example with Bob and Dave. How do I think is trying hardest? I do not know. To judge this, I would need to know the reasons for why they are doing what they are doing.
I have not yet defined how I want to measure the amount of trying. I have an intuitive idea, but it is less prices than my concept of trying. When I try to formalize my thoughs I get something like this:
Try X = Optimizing for X, usually given some constraints (e.g. unacceptable actions or risks, limited amount of time, money and other resources, that one is willing to spend on the try)
Amount of trying X = How much time, money and other resources one is spending directly on optimizing for X.
Trying ones best = Optimizing for X
Additionally, all the optimizations happens in the real world. Aside from deliberate constraints, there are always the real constraints of the real world, including how smart one is. (Edit: Shit, do I run in to the problem with determinism here? It should not matter, but I am not entirely sure. I need think more about this.)
This means that I can try my best at something, and you can still try harder, if you have more resources that can be invested. I expect that this sounds odd to you, but it actually lines up nicely with my intuition.
Do you want to help? Any idea of a test you could give me?
Most tests I could give you would would result in you trying to find the right answer and thus not test intuitive language usage. If you had a corpus of English text you wrote previously you could search it for “try” and get the first X examples. Then why could analyse what you meant with the word try.
But I think I can work with the rest of your post.
This means that I can try my best at something, and you can still try harder, if you have more resources that can be invested.
This suggest that investing more resources mean trying harder.
In cases where investing more resources means that success is less likely that notion of trying harder isn’t optimization for a goal.
The woman who’s playing hard to get isn’t “trying”. She isn’t investing resources. She might still use the strategy that produces the best results.
In the case of the hypnosis effect of forgetting the numbers, that’s not something I can achieve while trying to optimize for it. For me that seminar was a reference experience. I sat there and knew that I can only achieve the goal if I would stop trying to optimize for it. The fact that I really wanted to optimize for it and succeed only made it worse.
Investing resources and optimizing is different from doing what’s necessary.
Sometimes “Just be yourself” would be good advice if the answer person could accept it*, because it stops the optimization and the trying that are the biggest problem.
*In practice people can’t accept it so it usually isn’t effective advice.
This means that I can try my best at something, and you can still try harder, if you have more resources that can be invested.
This suggest that investing more resources mean trying harder.
Yes, I just said so
Amount of trying X = How much time, money and other resources one is spending directly on optimizing for X.
But only if the added resources actually goes towards optimizing for winning. More precisely: If and only if I think that adding more resources will improve my expected outcome, then adding more resources, is trying harder.
I know what you mean with the hypnosis, my experience was very similar. But I did less post analysis than you.
I am not going to get in to exactly why I hate the advise “Be yourself”, because it is a bit too personal and also off topic. But because I thought it was such a terrible advise, and why would anyone say that, I did some asking and thinking. Next time you are giving advise, Instead of saying “Be yourself”, say “Focus on others”. As you have already realized, saying “Be yourself” is telling people what not to do, which is not helpful. So tell them what to do instead. The best way to avoid doing X is to do Y instead, and there are extremely few situations where there are no possible Y to focus on. Mediation and trying to be hypnotized are the only examples I can think of, and even in mediation instructions, you are toled to focus on you breathing, or something, because doing nothing is too hard. But in most situations there are things you can focus you attention and efforts on, that are actually useful, and not just an artificial distraction. The circumstance where “Be yourself”, usually pop up is when someone needs advise on how to do a good impression on an other person (date, interview for a job, etc). In these situations, a good choice is to focus on the other person, to get to know them.
Mediation and trying to be hypnotized are the only examples I can think of, and even in mediation instructions, you are toled to focus on you breathing, or something, because doing nothing is too hard.
Being told to focus on breathing is indeed the version of meditation that’s popular for teaching beginners because it’s an easy entry. It isn’t too hard. There are harder version to mediate that don’t work via easy prompts.
The same goes for “Just be yourself” it’s too hard to expect the other person to do it, so you give them another prompt. But generally good social advice is more targeted to the individual person.
Let me clarify even more. To me, the word “try” referees to the conscious process of optimizing for succuss, with or with out constraints. Constraints, may be that I only want to put so much effort in to the problem, or that I am not willing to take certain risks, etc.
Also, to me the word “do” means that I intend to preform an action, that is trivial enough so that I do not feel a need to optimize.
For example, right now I am trying to explain my self. I am optimizing this text for clarity, under the ill defined, but very real constraint, that I am only willing to put in a limited amount of effort. But I am doing the accrual typing on the keyboard. I do not try to hit the right keys. Hitting keys are trivial, I don’t it flawlessly, but I do it well enough not to bother to optimize the effort thunder. Trying is more costly than doing, in my meaning of the words.
I never ever tried to try. I am not really sure what that would mean even using my meaning of the word “try”. I try or I do not try, there is no try to try. How ever, I did just spend some time trying to try to try, and failed.
When I say, I failed to try to try, I mean that, using my meaning of the word “try”. The action that Yudkovsky call “trying to try”, I would call “pretending to try”.
However, trying, as I use the word, does not necessarily mean trying hard. Some times a solution is worth the effort if and only if it is cheap. In this situation, if I do not know the difficulty of the problem, I will give it a light try. It can be, thinking about a problem for X minutes, and if I did not make any progress, I drop it. But that is still a try. During those minutes I optimist to win. Because I do want that win. I just don’t want it very strongly.
That is interesting. Do you know the underlying reason for this? I am guessing that it has to do with conscious and non conscious actions. Trying is a conscious effort, but doing is mostly not conscious. To my best understanding, hypnosis bypasses the conscious decision center of the brain, which would explain why there is no trying. But don’t trust me on this, because I know very little about hypnosis, and I am very good att making up explanations on the spot.
I was to a workshop once that involved hypnosis. It turned out that I am not very receptive to hypnosis. I am not saying I a immune, but it just did not work on me that time, and it did work on most of the others. I was really disappointed.
I am not convinced that there is a strong connection between the two mental phenomena, hypnosis and pretending to try, but the fact that my mind refuses both of them is evidence in this direction.
There’s the classic example of “don’t try to think of a pink elephant”. Most people you give that task will exert effort into not thinking of a pink elephant but that effort won’t lead to them not thinking of a pink elephant.
There’s trying. The person often does tense up their arm. It’s just that the arm doesn’t move as other muscles hold the arm in place.
In hypnosis you take certain metacognition away. If you tell someone to try they just try and exert effort but they don’t work towards a goal if you don’t give them a goal.
In addition to hypnosis the Alexander Technique is a system for movement where having a clear goal for movement and not trying to move is an important concept. It leads to people moving with less tension and more ergonomical.
I think in a variety of contexts where the effects of mental states matter naive people engage in effort when you tell them to try but not necessarily effort that works effectively towards a goal.
To move again to a more general level, Bob the manager who works 80 hours per week and sleeps 4 hours per day is trying really hard to do a good job. Certainly more than Dave who works 40 hours per week and sleeps 8 hours. It’s certainly possible that Bob is more productive than Dave as a result of putting in more effort but it isn’t certain. Maybe he spends too much time in busy work and isn’t rested enough to concentrate on what matters.
Ok, you, and possibly most people, associate the word “try”, only with putting in effort. For me “try” means something different (as I have tried to explain), because your try, is not a natural concept for me. I will just have to keep this difference in mind in future conversation, when ever it is important for the communication.
I think for most people if you ask them to define what “try” means they will tell you that it’s about putting in effort to achieve a goal. Emprirically that’s however doesn’t describe well the circumstances in which they use the word.
Especially on LW it might be possible that you actually don’t wouldn’t describe the manager who works 80 hours as trying to do his best at his job, but what you said doesn’t make me confident that’s the case.
I was at a hypnosis seminar where one of the exercises is about temporily forgetting numbers. There no mental action that you can do where you exert effort that gets you to forget the numbers but if you are in a mental state where you don’t try and follow the instructions of the hypnotherapist you will temporarily forget the numbers.
At the end of the seminar I think of roughly 20 people there were two for which it didn’t work. It didn’t work for me because I wanted to have the effect happen and therefore I couldn’t let go enough to stop trying to make it work. There was another person who happened to be a professional hypnotherapist for whom the same was true.
The mental state of just working towards a goal and not putting in any effort isn’t easy to achieve.
These do not go together. People on Lesswrong often would describe things in ways that would be very weird to an average person.
Also, in the case of the manager working 80 hours, remember that the definition is about effort, not about number of hours. People need not believe that effort is strictly correlated with number of hours.
And in the hypnosis example, most people would say something like “if you try to forget, it won’t work”. In other words, they would not say that the person who exerts effort isn’t trying, just that he’s not successfully trying.
Yes, normal people associate working 80 hours with effort and on LW you might have people who don’t. The thing that matters for trying is effort.
The main point is that exerting effort and doing what’s necessary to achieve an objective are two different things.
There are certain effects that can be achieved in trance that you can achieve if you exert effort. Telekinesis isn’t one of them, but it makes sense that a fictional character who can do telekinesis would need an effort less trance state to do it.
There are certain tasks like sitting in front of one’s computer that where you will have less back pain if you invest less effort into the act of sitting (and in the Alexander technique you can learn how to do the task with less effort).
Than there’s EY meaning that a lot of people will say “I will try” when they are asked to achieve an outcome where they aren’t certain whether they can achieve it with the strategy they choose to persue the goal. They commit to investing some energy into following the strategy but they don’t commit to the responsibility of making the outcome happen.
I agree that, from your stand point, you are correct in not entirely trusting me, when I claim to know my own brains working, in the case of this single word. And that is ok.
I wrote my fist post out of frustration over this way of interpreting “try”:
I usually succeed in keeping my rants of the Internet, but not always. Sorry about that, and for getting unnecessarily defensive at your responses.
As said, I am ok with you doubting me on weather I know my own brains working, in the case of this single word. But it would be fun if I could convince you. Do you want to help? Any idea of a test you could give me?
Regarding your example with Bob and Dave. How do I think is trying hardest? I do not know. To judge this, I would need to know the reasons for why they are doing what they are doing.
I have not yet defined how I want to measure the amount of trying. I have an intuitive idea, but it is less prices than my concept of trying. When I try to formalize my thoughs I get something like this:
Try X = Optimizing for X, usually given some constraints (e.g. unacceptable actions or risks, limited amount of time, money and other resources, that one is willing to spend on the try)
Amount of trying X = How much time, money and other resources one is spending directly on optimizing for X.
Trying ones best = Optimizing for X
Additionally, all the optimizations happens in the real world. Aside from deliberate constraints, there are always the real constraints of the real world, including how smart one is. (Edit: Shit, do I run in to the problem with determinism here? It should not matter, but I am not entirely sure. I need think more about this.)
This means that I can try my best at something, and you can still try harder, if you have more resources that can be invested. I expect that this sounds odd to you, but it actually lines up nicely with my intuition.
Most tests I could give you would would result in you trying to find the right answer and thus not test intuitive language usage. If you had a corpus of English text you wrote previously you could search it for “try” and get the first X examples. Then why could analyse what you meant with the word try.
But I think I can work with the rest of your post.
This suggest that investing more resources mean trying harder.
In cases where investing more resources means that success is less likely that notion of trying harder isn’t optimization for a goal.
The woman who’s playing hard to get isn’t “trying”. She isn’t investing resources. She might still use the strategy that produces the best results.
In the case of the hypnosis effect of forgetting the numbers, that’s not something I can achieve while trying to optimize for it. For me that seminar was a reference experience. I sat there and knew that I can only achieve the goal if I would stop trying to optimize for it. The fact that I really wanted to optimize for it and succeed only made it worse.
Investing resources and optimizing is different from doing what’s necessary.
Sometimes “Just be yourself” would be good advice if the answer person could accept it*, because it stops the optimization and the trying that are the biggest problem.
*In practice people can’t accept it so it usually isn’t effective advice.
Yes, I just said so
But only if the added resources actually goes towards optimizing for winning. More precisely: If and only if I think that adding more resources will improve my expected outcome, then adding more resources, is trying harder.
I know what you mean with the hypnosis, my experience was very similar. But I did less post analysis than you.
I am not going to get in to exactly why I hate the advise “Be yourself”, because it is a bit too personal and also off topic. But because I thought it was such a terrible advise, and why would anyone say that, I did some asking and thinking. Next time you are giving advise, Instead of saying “Be yourself”, say “Focus on others”. As you have already realized, saying “Be yourself” is telling people what not to do, which is not helpful. So tell them what to do instead. The best way to avoid doing X is to do Y instead, and there are extremely few situations where there are no possible Y to focus on. Mediation and trying to be hypnotized are the only examples I can think of, and even in mediation instructions, you are toled to focus on you breathing, or something, because doing nothing is too hard. But in most situations there are things you can focus you attention and efforts on, that are actually useful, and not just an artificial distraction. The circumstance where “Be yourself”, usually pop up is when someone needs advise on how to do a good impression on an other person (date, interview for a job, etc). In these situations, a good choice is to focus on the other person, to get to know them.
Being told to focus on breathing is indeed the version of meditation that’s popular for teaching beginners because it’s an easy entry. It isn’t too hard. There are harder version to mediate that don’t work via easy prompts.
The same goes for “Just be yourself” it’s too hard to expect the other person to do it, so you give them another prompt. But generally good social advice is more targeted to the individual person.