Is there a non-poetic explanation for why I’d want to Expand my Comfort Zone? I can’t quite see through all the metaphor to what the benefit is supposed to be…
I think the idea is based on a general assumption that status quo bias prevails and people are too afraid of low-stakes risks.
Edited to add an excerpt from the linked paper:
Little is known about whether people make good choices when facing important decisions. This paper reports on a large-scale randomized field experiment in which research subjects having difficulty making a decision flipped a coin to help determine their choice. For important decisions (e.g. quitting a job or ending a relationship), those who make a change (regardless of the outcome of the coin toss) report being substantially happier two months and six months later. This correlation, however, need not reflect a causal impact. To assess causality, I use the outcome of a coin toss. Individuals who are told by the coin toss to make a change are much more likely to make a change and are happier six months later than those who were told by the coin to maintain the status quo. The results of this paper suggest that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices.
There would be no point in advising someone to exercise who already does, in giving nutritional advice to someone who already eats well, in urging elementary mathematics on someone with a Ph.D. in the subject. Whether any of the CoZE exercises would be useful to someone depends on where they already are in relation to what the exercises deal with. I don’t know you; you’ll have to judge that yourself. (I do like seeing your perspective on the neurobabble and psychobabble that often gets posted here, btw.)
CoZE is about the trade-off between exploitation and exploration. What proportion of your resources do you devote to finding new opportunities for whatever you want from life, and what proportion to using the opportunities you have found? Some people do too little exploration and remain stuck in their rut, taking a path of least resistance and perhaps missing out on greater things. Others do too little exploitation and never direct themselves to one thing long enough to achieve great things. There is no optimum balance. Some of the most fascinating biographies are of people who spent their whole life exploring. I can’t say I’d want to be them, but neither would I say they had misspent their life. At the opposite extreme are people like Erdös. I wouldn’t want to be him either, but the world is better for having had him in it.
CoZE exercises teach exploration. They are directed at people who may be doing too little exploration, especially if that arises from excessive anxiety about what might happen if they step outside of their accustomed routine.
Thanks, that’s definitely helpful! Some follow-up questions:
There is no optimum balance.
But there is, presumably, at least an optimum region on the spectrum, right? (Otherwise it would not make sense to describe someone as doing “too little” of either exploration or exploitation.)
Whether any of the CoZE exercises would be useful to someone depends on where they already are in relation to what the exercises deal with. I don’t know you; you’ll have to judge that yourself.
Well, that’s actually the trouble: I do know me, and yet I’m still not sure how I’d judge where I am in relation to what the exercises deal with!
Do you have any examples of the kind of “exploration” you have in mind? I’m still not sure I have a good idea of how the concept of “don’t get stuck in a rut in your life” connects to the CoZE stuff, and some examples might help.
P.S.:
CoZE exercises teach exploration. They are directed at people who may be doing too little exploration, especially if that arises from excessive anxiety about what might happen if they step outside of their accustomed routine.
In saying there is no optimum balance I only meant that there isn’t a single optimum for everyone. Each person may very well have an optimum region, although even that can change from time to time and from one area to another of their life. Consider various prominent people (Steve Jobs, Barack Obama) who decided to dress the same way every day to remove a minor decision and concentrate on the things that really matter to them.
I’ve never done any of the CoZE stuff under that brand name, although I have in the past done that sort of thing. I can’t say that my comfort zone was ever expanded, though. The result was more “well, that was interesting, but I have no reason to do it again.” When that’s the only learning from a learning experience, it hardly seems worth it.
You’re a reinforcement learner, and reinforcement learners work by exploring the possible states they can be in and the possible actions they can take to get information about what’s good to do. Many people err on the side of exploring too little for various reasons (for example, fear of being judged socially), and so don’t have anywhere near as much information in their System 1s as they could about what actions are good to take.
More concretely, suppose you’re afraid of talking to strangers. You may never have tried talking to strangers in your life, so your fear may not be based on any actual bad experiences of talking to strangers, just some vague sense that could come from a lot of different sources that it’s not the sort of thing you’re allowed to do. But if you keep not doing it then you keep not acquiring information about whether it’s good to do. So trying it is an opportunity to find out how well-calibrated your fear is.
The relatively technical term used to discuss this sort of issue in the RL literature is exploration vs. exploitation, or the explore-exploit tradeoff, etc. The standard toy model is the multi-armed bandit.
You’re a reinforcement learner, and reinforcement learners work by…
What exactly do you mean by this?
If you’re referring to some sort of “implementation details” of human cognition, then… those may be interesting, but it seems like this is an exceedingly “low level” at which to talk about the costs and benefits of intentional action. At the very least, it calls for supporting citations (which would establish that these “implementation details”-level claims translate to concrete higher-level effects).
If, on the other hand, this is some sort of metaphor (using the structure and behavior of one formal system or another as analogy for how actual human minds work), then could you explain what the non-metaphorical meaning is?
More concretely, suppose you’re afraid of talking to strangers. …
Then is CoZE meant as a sort of therapy aimed at overcoming specific phobias?
I’ve made comments that were more overtly skeptical, even a bit confrontational, and they were upvoted, while this is downvoted to −10. What gives? I thought I was asking some pretty straightforward and honest questions here…
(In addition to Qiaochu’s comment: also just noise. Your comments are generally divisive with a lot of upvotes and downvotes, and so if you are on a thread with less people, I expect that you will more often than others end up randomly with some negative karma scores)
Interesting. Is it possible to see this information (how many upvotes/downvotes, for how much, etc.)? (I seem to recall this being a feature of the old Less Wrong.) I, for one, would find it quite useful!
Personally, I’m incredibly confused about what the comment reveals about what it’s like to be you. Your questions just feel to me like they’re coming from a completely different place from my experience, and it’s hard not to have an initial sense that you must be trolling.
I think humans are reinforcement learners in a very strong sense, much stronger than just a metaphor; it’s basically the best gears model I know of what humans (also non-human animals) are like. The history of this idea starts with classical conditioning and operant conditioning and in its modern form can get very sophisticated, for example with the modern understanding of dopamine as reward prediction error.
But this is something you should be able to experience about yourself without needing to study the psychology or RL literature: have you ever tried a new food and found that you liked it a surprising amount and now you eat it all the time? That’s reinforcement learning.
CoZE can be used as a therapy to overcome phobias but it’s more general than that. There are things that you’re not afraid to do, but that you just never do because it never occurs to you, and CoZE can give you exposure to those things in such a way that they might occur to you to do later.
CoZE can be used as a therapy to overcome phobias but it’s more general than that. There are things that you’re not afraid to do, but that you just never do because it never occurs to you, and CoZE can give you exposure to those things in such a way that they might occur to you to do later.
This seems to me to be an (indeed, the) interesting claim here, and is exactly what I’d like to see explored in some detail, in the treatment of CoZE that I should like to read. Indeed, an expansion of, and justification for, this claim, is precisely the sort of thing I was asking for in the first place.
Great, thanks, I think I understand your confusion better now (this was not at all apparent to me). There’s a section of Stephan Guyenet’s The Hungry Brain that you might be interested in reading; he talks about how the brain selects actions to take at a neurological level, and his explanation is very clear.
Personally, I’m incredibly confused about what the comment reveals about what it’s like to be you. Your questions just feel to me like they’re coming from a completely different place from my experience, and it’s hard not to have an initial sense that you must be trolling.
I don’t think I’ve ever posted a comment, either here or on the original Less Wrong, that I’d describe as ‘trolling’, so for whatever my word is worth, you can be sure that that’s not my intent.
I don’t think there’s anything terribly unusual about what it’s like to be me. I, conversely, often have this sort of reaction when I read about the experiences of folks in the rationalist community (especially those from the Bay Area). Greater mutual understanding is one of our goals here, right?
[stuff about conditioning]
We’ve moved past behaviorism, though, haven’t we? Or is it now, again, the ‘in’ thing? I wasn’t aware of that; but then, I don’t keep up with all the latest developments in psychology. It’s a big field; and it seems strange to expect that all Less Wrong readers must be intimately familiar with the most current findings in neurobiology or what have you. (Perhaps a sequence of posts, describing (various aspects of) the current understanding of the mind, is in order?)
But this is something you should be able to experience about yourself without needing to study the psychology or RL literature: have you ever tried a new food and found that you liked it a surprising amount and now you eat it all the time? That’s reinforcement learning.
This seems like a strange thing to say, in exactly the way I meant in my earlier comment. Why say “that’s reinforcement learning”, when you could just as easily say “that’s you finding out that you liked something, and then acting on that newfound knowledge”—or, conversely, “that’s the action of the electromagnetic forces in the atoms of your body”? You wouldn’t say the latter, would you? But why not? Well, because it’s a rather uninformative, far too low-level, description; the interesting stuff, the stuff that has predictive value and that we can reason about, is taking place on the higher levels… and so with the “reinforcement learning” comment, which also seems to me to speak of “implementation details” that don’t tell me anything particularly interesting or specific. (I am, of course, entirely taking your word that it’s even an accurate description in the first place.)
(This is all not to mention the fact that your scenario is certainly not outside the bounds of my experience, but on the other hand neither are many adjacent but distinct scenarios, such as: (a) I try a new food, don’t much like it, but then keep eating it occasionally and develop a taste; (b) I try a new food, don’t much like it, but then some time later try it again and do like it, and then eat it occasionally; (c) I try a new food, like it a lot, but then don’t really eat it all that often; (d) I try a new food, like it a lot, eat it a lot, but then stop liking it, and stop eating it; (e) etc., etc. Are all of these things also “reinforcement learning”? If yes, then everything is “reinforcement learning” and the label is uninformative, much like “that’s EM fields among atoms”; if not, then saying that I “am a reinforcement learner” is clearly inaccurate, at best.)
Thanks for writing this. I think part of what’s going on is that when I say “reinforcement learning” it connects to a lot of gears in my head (for example, Q-learning) and I think I’ve been typical minding on how much other people know about those gears. It would probably be well worth writing a top-level post on using reinforcement learning to understand human cognition and behavior broadly, but I’m not sure I want to commit to a project that looks so big.
Yes, all of those things could be an example of reinforcement learning, depending on contextual factors such as the extent to which the food contains nutrients you’re deficient in, your history of experience with similar foods, your sense of how others around you would react to seeing you eat the food, etc. I’m aware that you’ll find this an unsatisfying answer, but since humans do in fact exhibit a large and complicated array of behaviors (I hope we can agree on this at least) a theory into which it all comfortably fits needs to be flexible enough to produce such an array.
I think part of what’s going on is that when I say “reinforcement learning” it connects to a lot of gears in my head (for example, Q-learning) and I think I’ve been typical minding on how much other people know about those gears.
Indeed; e.g., I didn’t know what Q-learning is until now—in fact I still don’t know what it is (for precisely the reason noted in the banner at the top of the Wikipedia page).
It’s entirely understandable that you are reluctant to take on a project to explain the entirety of what seems to be a large and somewhat abstruse scientific subfield. That said, the takeaway is that most readers here have no good reason to share those of your views that have, as a prerequisite, understanding of said field. (Making our way toward having a good overview of reinforcement learning would seem to be a good community goal for Less Wrong.)
Yes, all of those things could be an example of reinforcement learning, depending on contextual factors … I’m aware that you’ll find this an unsatisfying answer, but since humans do in fact exhibit a large and complicated array of behaviors (I hope we can agree on this at least) a theory into which it all comfortably fits needs to be flexible enough to produce such an array.
Indeed, but the point here is that the same could be said of atomic theory, which, while perfectly true, tells us very little about what behaviors we should engage in, what strategies and approaches to life’s challenges are likely to be successful, etc. If “reinforcement learning” and “reinforcement learner” are that broad and general of categories, then just pointing that humans are reinforcement learners, in support of a specific claim or specific advice or a specific technique, etc., is not particularly convincing.
Maybe this is Bay Area bias, but the models that Qiaochu is relying on strike me as very natural, point to a lot of meaningful gears in my head, and my model of at least a large chunk of the people on this side have a similar experience.
I feel that reinforcement-learning based models were covered by a bunch of highly upvoted content on this site, let me quickly take 5 minutes to find the references I remember:
And a bunch more. This perspective of humans as reinforcement learners has been a core topic of a lot of LessWrong writing, and it seems reasonable for people to write things that build on top of that.
As for the models—to me they seem oddly esoteric and specific to support such general claims (and, of course, I don’t have these “gears in my head” to point to).
However, perhaps I’ll change my mind after reading the posts you linked—which I will do at my earliest convenience!
Seems to me that this habit is there to help you be more like the kind of person who will satisfy their harmless curiosity on a whim. Not so much the burning desire to pursue truth that Yudkowsky wrote about; rather, a simulacrum of the same virtue we could (should?) apply to our daily lives in order to prevail over the status quo, as mentioned by another commenter.
Should one’s comfort zone be as large as possible? Or is there an optimal comfort zone size?
Is it possible to have too large of a comfort zone? Are there any people who would benefit from the opposite technique: Comfort Zone Contraction?
How does one know whether one’s comfort zone is too small, too large, or just right? Are there any rules of thumb or heuristics for determining this?
Bonus question:
How harmless does “harmless curiosity” have to be, in order for it to be a good thing, to satisfy it on a whim? Must it be totally harmless? Or can it just be mostly harmless? If so, how mostly is ‘mostly’?
1) I think it would be absurd to have a comfort zone that dosen’t preclude things to which you have a lot of emotional resistance. Anything physically or psychologically traumatising should definitely be outside of the circle for example. My assumption would be that the optimal size is always that small delta beyond your current comfort zone (dipping your toes in the water), up to the fixed point where you think things really become too uncomfortable to consider.
2) Basically covered in (1) by extension. A person who is too comfortable making high-risk-low-value choices, ie. a gambling punter, would likely benefit from the opposite, which is what I think you’re implying.
3) I don’t know the answer to that question, and it seems like one largely determined by one’s ability to make good self-reflective judgements. It could just be whether or not I think that some part of my character could be improved by experimenting with new behaviours.
Bonus Answer: Your last question is a bit imponderable to me, almost impinging on the infinitesimal. I think the important point is that we try not to focus too much on the epistemics of taking tiny risks and thereby constrain our willingless to actually do anything new. Maybe someone else has a better answer?
Is there a non-poetic explanation for why I’d want to Expand my Comfort Zone? I can’t quite see through all the metaphor to what the benefit is supposed to be…
I think the idea is based on a general assumption that status quo bias prevails and people are too afraid of low-stakes risks.
Edited to add an excerpt from the linked paper:
There would be no point in advising someone to exercise who already does, in giving nutritional advice to someone who already eats well, in urging elementary mathematics on someone with a Ph.D. in the subject. Whether any of the CoZE exercises would be useful to someone depends on where they already are in relation to what the exercises deal with. I don’t know you; you’ll have to judge that yourself. (I do like seeing your perspective on the neurobabble and psychobabble that often gets posted here, btw.)
CoZE is about the trade-off between exploitation and exploration. What proportion of your resources do you devote to finding new opportunities for whatever you want from life, and what proportion to using the opportunities you have found? Some people do too little exploration and remain stuck in their rut, taking a path of least resistance and perhaps missing out on greater things. Others do too little exploitation and never direct themselves to one thing long enough to achieve great things. There is no optimum balance. Some of the most fascinating biographies are of people who spent their whole life exploring. I can’t say I’d want to be them, but neither would I say they had misspent their life. At the opposite extreme are people like Erdös. I wouldn’t want to be him either, but the world is better for having had him in it.
CoZE exercises teach exploration. They are directed at people who may be doing too little exploration, especially if that arises from excessive anxiety about what might happen if they step outside of their accustomed routine.
Thanks, that’s definitely helpful! Some follow-up questions:
But there is, presumably, at least an optimum region on the spectrum, right? (Otherwise it would not make sense to describe someone as doing “too little” of either exploration or exploitation.)
Well, that’s actually the trouble: I do know me, and yet I’m still not sure how I’d judge where I am in relation to what the exercises deal with!
Do you have any examples of the kind of “exploration” you have in mind? I’m still not sure I have a good idea of how the concept of “don’t get stuck in a rut in your life” connects to the CoZE stuff, and some examples might help.
P.S.:
This bit in particular helps explain things, yes.
In saying there is no optimum balance I only meant that there isn’t a single optimum for everyone. Each person may very well have an optimum region, although even that can change from time to time and from one area to another of their life. Consider various prominent people (Steve Jobs, Barack Obama) who decided to dress the same way every day to remove a minor decision and concentrate on the things that really matter to them.
I’ve never done any of the CoZE stuff under that brand name, although I have in the past done that sort of thing. I can’t say that my comfort zone was ever expanded, though. The result was more “well, that was interesting, but I have no reason to do it again.” When that’s the only learning from a learning experience, it hardly seems worth it.
You’re a reinforcement learner, and reinforcement learners work by exploring the possible states they can be in and the possible actions they can take to get information about what’s good to do. Many people err on the side of exploring too little for various reasons (for example, fear of being judged socially), and so don’t have anywhere near as much information in their System 1s as they could about what actions are good to take.
More concretely, suppose you’re afraid of talking to strangers. You may never have tried talking to strangers in your life, so your fear may not be based on any actual bad experiences of talking to strangers, just some vague sense that could come from a lot of different sources that it’s not the sort of thing you’re allowed to do. But if you keep not doing it then you keep not acquiring information about whether it’s good to do. So trying it is an opportunity to find out how well-calibrated your fear is.
The relatively technical term used to discuss this sort of issue in the RL literature is exploration vs. exploitation, or the explore-exploit tradeoff, etc. The standard toy model is the multi-armed bandit.
What exactly do you mean by this?
If you’re referring to some sort of “implementation details” of human cognition, then… those may be interesting, but it seems like this is an exceedingly “low level” at which to talk about the costs and benefits of intentional action. At the very least, it calls for supporting citations (which would establish that these “implementation details”-level claims translate to concrete higher-level effects).
If, on the other hand, this is some sort of metaphor (using the structure and behavior of one formal system or another as analogy for how actual human minds work), then could you explain what the non-metaphorical meaning is?
Then is CoZE meant as a sort of therapy aimed at overcoming specific phobias?
I’ve made comments that were more overtly skeptical, even a bit confrontational, and they were upvoted, while this is downvoted to −10. What gives? I thought I was asking some pretty straightforward and honest questions here…
(In addition to Qiaochu’s comment: also just noise. Your comments are generally divisive with a lot of upvotes and downvotes, and so if you are on a thread with less people, I expect that you will more often than others end up randomly with some negative karma scores)
Interesting. Is it possible to see this information (how many upvotes/downvotes, for how much, etc.)? (I seem to recall this being a feature of the old Less Wrong.) I, for one, would find it quite useful!
Personally, I’m incredibly confused about what the comment reveals about what it’s like to be you. Your questions just feel to me like they’re coming from a completely different place from my experience, and it’s hard not to have an initial sense that you must be trolling.
I think humans are reinforcement learners in a very strong sense, much stronger than just a metaphor; it’s basically the best gears model I know of what humans (also non-human animals) are like. The history of this idea starts with classical conditioning and operant conditioning and in its modern form can get very sophisticated, for example with the modern understanding of dopamine as reward prediction error.
But this is something you should be able to experience about yourself without needing to study the psychology or RL literature: have you ever tried a new food and found that you liked it a surprising amount and now you eat it all the time? That’s reinforcement learning.
CoZE can be used as a therapy to overcome phobias but it’s more general than that. There are things that you’re not afraid to do, but that you just never do because it never occurs to you, and CoZE can give you exposure to those things in such a way that they might occur to you to do later.
Commenting on this bit separately:
This seems to me to be an (indeed, the) interesting claim here, and is exactly what I’d like to see explored in some detail, in the treatment of CoZE that I should like to read. Indeed, an expansion of, and justification for, this claim, is precisely the sort of thing I was asking for in the first place.
Great, thanks, I think I understand your confusion better now (this was not at all apparent to me). There’s a section of Stephan Guyenet’s The Hungry Brain that you might be interested in reading; he talks about how the brain selects actions to take at a neurological level, and his explanation is very clear.
Thank you, I’ll check out Guyenet’s book.
Meanwhile, here’s a question: are Guyenet’s claims / models / etc. generally accepted in the field? That is—is this, basically, orthodoxy, or what?
I don’t think I’ve ever posted a comment, either here or on the original Less Wrong, that I’d describe as ‘trolling’, so for whatever my word is worth, you can be sure that that’s not my intent.
I don’t think there’s anything terribly unusual about what it’s like to be me. I, conversely, often have this sort of reaction when I read about the experiences of folks in the rationalist community (especially those from the Bay Area). Greater mutual understanding is one of our goals here, right?
We’ve moved past behaviorism, though, haven’t we? Or is it now, again, the ‘in’ thing? I wasn’t aware of that; but then, I don’t keep up with all the latest developments in psychology. It’s a big field; and it seems strange to expect that all Less Wrong readers must be intimately familiar with the most current findings in neurobiology or what have you. (Perhaps a sequence of posts, describing (various aspects of) the current understanding of the mind, is in order?)
This seems like a strange thing to say, in exactly the way I meant in my earlier comment. Why say “that’s reinforcement learning”, when you could just as easily say “that’s you finding out that you liked something, and then acting on that newfound knowledge”—or, conversely, “that’s the action of the electromagnetic forces in the atoms of your body”? You wouldn’t say the latter, would you? But why not? Well, because it’s a rather uninformative, far too low-level, description; the interesting stuff, the stuff that has predictive value and that we can reason about, is taking place on the higher levels… and so with the “reinforcement learning” comment, which also seems to me to speak of “implementation details” that don’t tell me anything particularly interesting or specific. (I am, of course, entirely taking your word that it’s even an accurate description in the first place.)
(This is all not to mention the fact that your scenario is certainly not outside the bounds of my experience, but on the other hand neither are many adjacent but distinct scenarios, such as: (a) I try a new food, don’t much like it, but then keep eating it occasionally and develop a taste; (b) I try a new food, don’t much like it, but then some time later try it again and do like it, and then eat it occasionally; (c) I try a new food, like it a lot, but then don’t really eat it all that often; (d) I try a new food, like it a lot, eat it a lot, but then stop liking it, and stop eating it; (e) etc., etc. Are all of these things also “reinforcement learning”? If yes, then everything is “reinforcement learning” and the label is uninformative, much like “that’s EM fields among atoms”; if not, then saying that I “am a reinforcement learner” is clearly inaccurate, at best.)
Thanks for writing this. I think part of what’s going on is that when I say “reinforcement learning” it connects to a lot of gears in my head (for example, Q-learning) and I think I’ve been typical minding on how much other people know about those gears. It would probably be well worth writing a top-level post on using reinforcement learning to understand human cognition and behavior broadly, but I’m not sure I want to commit to a project that looks so big.
Yes, all of those things could be an example of reinforcement learning, depending on contextual factors such as the extent to which the food contains nutrients you’re deficient in, your history of experience with similar foods, your sense of how others around you would react to seeing you eat the food, etc. I’m aware that you’ll find this an unsatisfying answer, but since humans do in fact exhibit a large and complicated array of behaviors (I hope we can agree on this at least) a theory into which it all comfortably fits needs to be flexible enough to produce such an array.
Indeed; e.g., I didn’t know what Q-learning is until now—in fact I still don’t know what it is (for precisely the reason noted in the banner at the top of the Wikipedia page).
It’s entirely understandable that you are reluctant to take on a project to explain the entirety of what seems to be a large and somewhat abstruse scientific subfield. That said, the takeaway is that most readers here have no good reason to share those of your views that have, as a prerequisite, understanding of said field. (Making our way toward having a good overview of reinforcement learning would seem to be a good community goal for Less Wrong.)
Indeed, but the point here is that the same could be said of atomic theory, which, while perfectly true, tells us very little about what behaviors we should engage in, what strategies and approaches to life’s challenges are likely to be successful, etc. If “reinforcement learning” and “reinforcement learner” are that broad and general of categories, then just pointing that humans are reinforcement learners, in support of a specific claim or specific advice or a specific technique, etc., is not particularly convincing.
Maybe this is Bay Area bias, but the models that Qiaochu is relying on strike me as very natural, point to a lot of meaningful gears in my head, and my model of at least a large chunk of the people on this side have a similar experience.
I feel that reinforcement-learning based models were covered by a bunch of highly upvoted content on this site, let me quickly take 5 minutes to find the references I remember:
https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/zThWT5Zvifo5qYaca/the-neuroscience-of-pleasure
https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/EMJ3egz48BtZS8Pws/basics-of-animal-reinforcement
https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/hN2aRnu798yas5b2k/a-crash-course-in-the-neuroscience-of-human-motivation
And a bunch more. This perspective of humans as reinforcement learners has been a core topic of a lot of LessWrong writing, and it seems reasonable for people to write things that build on top of that.
Thank you very much for the links!
As for the models—to me they seem oddly esoteric and specific to support such general claims (and, of course, I don’t have these “gears in my head” to point to).
However, perhaps I’ll change my mind after reading the posts you linked—which I will do at my earliest convenience!
Seems to me that this habit is there to help you be more like the kind of person who will satisfy their harmless curiosity on a whim. Not so much the burning desire to pursue truth that Yudkowsky wrote about; rather, a simulacrum of the same virtue we could (should?) apply to our daily lives in order to prevail over the status quo, as mentioned by another commenter.
Ok. Follow-up questions:
Should one’s comfort zone be as large as possible? Or is there an optimal comfort zone size?
Is it possible to have too large of a comfort zone? Are there any people who would benefit from the opposite technique: Comfort Zone Contraction?
How does one know whether one’s comfort zone is too small, too large, or just right? Are there any rules of thumb or heuristics for determining this?
Bonus question:
How harmless does “harmless curiosity” have to be, in order for it to be a good thing, to satisfy it on a whim? Must it be totally harmless? Or can it just be mostly harmless? If so, how mostly is ‘mostly’?
1) I think it would be absurd to have a comfort zone that dosen’t preclude things to which you have a lot of emotional resistance. Anything physically or psychologically traumatising should definitely be outside of the circle for example. My assumption would be that the optimal size is always that small delta beyond your current comfort zone (dipping your toes in the water), up to the fixed point where you think things really become too uncomfortable to consider.
2) Basically covered in (1) by extension. A person who is too comfortable making high-risk-low-value choices, ie. a gambling punter, would likely benefit from the opposite, which is what I think you’re implying.
3) I don’t know the answer to that question, and it seems like one largely determined by one’s ability to make good self-reflective judgements. It could just be whether or not I think that some part of my character could be improved by experimenting with new behaviours.
Bonus Answer: Your last question is a bit imponderable to me, almost impinging on the infinitesimal. I think the important point is that we try not to focus too much on the epistemics of taking tiny risks and thereby constrain our willingless to actually do anything new. Maybe someone else has a better answer?
To list a few thoughts:
Comfort zone expansion often comes with a reduction in stability.
It can also result in people putting up defenses that make it harder from them to have more intimite connections.
If a person has a burnout, then they need to do less and not expand their comfort zone in a way that adds further stress.