I’ve communicated with Frank by email; here is a rough rewrite he seems to mostly endorse.
Over the past year, I’ve spent hundreds of hours thinking about human psychology and made progress on: decreasing akraisa, improving understanding of others, improving social skills, improving rationality, decreasing perfectionism, and some other stuff. This post is my attempt to share the insights that lead to these benefits with you.
Summary
I see two primary causes of dysrationalia:
“Impression management”: making sure other people think we are smart, hip, tough, whatever.
Subconscious mistakes. If you’re not aware that you’re making a mistake, it’s hard to fix it.
The key to fixing dysrationalia is to notice broken subconscious thought patterns and apply conscious thinking to fix them. Three kinds of conscious fixes:
Improved understanding of the world and how it works.
Improved thinking about the relationships between lower- and higher-level goals.
Improved thinking on managing trade-offs between two or more conflicting goals.
Two core skills that will be discussed in subsequent posts:
Redirecting attention from instrumental to terminal goals
Succeeding socially without using “impression management”
On Deprecation
I’ll use the term “deprecate” to refer to lowering someone else’s status.
Can deprecating people (e.g. by saying they are being silly or stupid) ever be a good way to improve their rationality? It does work; it’s worked on me.
But I think we can do better by figuring out why someone is behaving irrationally and fixing that instead. Deprecation has the harmful side effect of causing people to focus more on impression management, so any alternative is good.
On Subconscious Thinking
Our subconscious thoughts have lots of horsepower behind them and often do the right thing. Unfortunately, subconscious thoughts are harder to reflect on than conscious ones. So it’s essential to achieve conscious awareness of subconscious thought patterns.
On Impression Management
If other people judge us to be powerful, popular, reliable, and similar to them, they will be more interested in entering relationships of all kinds with us. They’ll also be reluctant to move against us.
Thus we try to affect the assessments of others through subconscious impression management. For example, a religious person might pray in order to signal similarity to other religious folks, and thereby gain their affiliation. Or a skilled backgammon player might explain to a friend how backgammon develops real-world skills better than chess. Subconsciously, the backgammon player may not actually care if backgammon really develops useful skills—they just needs persuasive arguments to convince others.
But impression management has lots of downsides:
If your story about how great you are doesn’t match up with reality, you’ll be fighting a constant battle against the truth.
If others do manage to discover that you’re putting up a front, you’ll be in trouble.
Keeping up an image of yourself makes it harder to kick back and have fun.
And if others notice that you are trying hard to affect their impressions, that sends a negative signal.
Fortunately I think I’ve discovered some ways to succeed socially without using impression management.
Reflecting on Subconscious Thoughts
Subconscious thinking allows your brain to do lots of computation quickly, but it’s also something of a black box from the perspective of your conscious mind.
I find it useful to think of the subconscious thinking as an opaque process. The inputs to the process are the current state of the world and some desired state of the world. The output is an emotion/desire/inclination. Observing what inputs produce what outputs isn’t really that hard, but knowing what’s going on in between is tougher.
But with enough reflection, understanding the reasons for subconscious thoughts becomes possible. Then we can zoom in and correct our subconscious mistakes, or correct our conscious thinking if the subconscious actually makes sense.
I find that journaling and thought experiments are the best way to puzzle this out.
Even if everything’s going all right, this process of reflecting on subconscious thoughts can be beneficial if we find a better way of doing things. The improved way of doing things could be a strategy we employ consciously, or one that we program to be subconscious.
Once you’ve been doing this for long enough, you may start to notice subconscious patterns from your own thinking manifesting themselves in the behavior of others.
Three Fixes for Subconscious Thinking
Improved Understanding of the World
Learning about availability bias is a great example of this kind of fix. Once you learn that your event frequency estimates are biased by what appears on the news, you’ll subconsciously start correcting for this bias. If I ask you to estimate how frequently sharks attack people, you don’t make an initial subconscious estimate and then consciously adjust for availability bias afterwards. (If conscious thoughts do come into the picture, it probably just realizes you forgot to correct for availability bias and runs the subconscious computation again.)
Improved Plans for Achieving Your Goals
By inspecting your subconscious thinking, you might realize that several things you’re doing are actually subconscious attempts to accomplish some goal. Then you can lean hard on what seems effective and accomplish your goal faster.
Through introspecting on my goals, I realized that I don’t actually care that much about the opinions of passing strangers. I also realized that transient, temporary impressions of my friends don’t matter to me that much. This has allowed me to stop obsessing about unimportant past social interactions and focus on important stuff.
In both cases I noticed I was paying a lot of attention to a subgoal that was actually pretty unimportant for my supergoal of having good friends.
Improved Strategies for Trading Off Between Goals
Sometimes you may find through introspection that you have subconscious goals that are mutually incompatible. What then?
Obviously you may not be able to get everything you want, so it’s important to accept that fact as soon as possible to cut down on internal tension. Then you can figure out what the best way to trade off between conflicting desires is.
For example, at one point I noticed that I had two conflicting goals: I wanted to appear superior in social situations, but I also wanted to have close friends. After thinking about both goals for a while, they melded into a single value function I was trying to optimize, and I ended up heavily favoring the “having close friends” objective. (I suspect that appearing superior was only an instrumental goal anyway.)
Frank, how would you feel if I rewrote this for you so it was much shorter and snappier?
I’ve communicated with Frank by email; here is a rough rewrite he seems to mostly endorse.
Over the past year, I’ve spent hundreds of hours thinking about human psychology and made progress on: decreasing akraisa, improving understanding of others, improving social skills, improving rationality, decreasing perfectionism, and some other stuff. This post is my attempt to share the insights that lead to these benefits with you.
Summary
I see two primary causes of dysrationalia:
“Impression management”: making sure other people think we are smart, hip, tough, whatever.
Subconscious mistakes. If you’re not aware that you’re making a mistake, it’s hard to fix it.
The key to fixing dysrationalia is to notice broken subconscious thought patterns and apply conscious thinking to fix them. Three kinds of conscious fixes:
Improved understanding of the world and how it works.
Improved thinking about the relationships between lower- and higher-level goals.
Improved thinking on managing trade-offs between two or more conflicting goals.
Two core skills that will be discussed in subsequent posts:
Redirecting attention from instrumental to terminal goals
Succeeding socially without using “impression management”
On Deprecation
I’ll use the term “deprecate” to refer to lowering someone else’s status.
Can deprecating people (e.g. by saying they are being silly or stupid) ever be a good way to improve their rationality? It does work; it’s worked on me.
But I think we can do better by figuring out why someone is behaving irrationally and fixing that instead. Deprecation has the harmful side effect of causing people to focus more on impression management, so any alternative is good.
On Subconscious Thinking
Our subconscious thoughts have lots of horsepower behind them and often do the right thing. Unfortunately, subconscious thoughts are harder to reflect on than conscious ones. So it’s essential to achieve conscious awareness of subconscious thought patterns.
On Impression Management
If other people judge us to be powerful, popular, reliable, and similar to them, they will be more interested in entering relationships of all kinds with us. They’ll also be reluctant to move against us.
Thus we try to affect the assessments of others through subconscious impression management. For example, a religious person might pray in order to signal similarity to other religious folks, and thereby gain their affiliation. Or a skilled backgammon player might explain to a friend how backgammon develops real-world skills better than chess. Subconsciously, the backgammon player may not actually care if backgammon really develops useful skills—they just needs persuasive arguments to convince others.
But impression management has lots of downsides:
If your story about how great you are doesn’t match up with reality, you’ll be fighting a constant battle against the truth.
If others do manage to discover that you’re putting up a front, you’ll be in trouble.
Keeping up an image of yourself makes it harder to kick back and have fun.
And if others notice that you are trying hard to affect their impressions, that sends a negative signal.
Fortunately I think I’ve discovered some ways to succeed socially without using impression management.
Reflecting on Subconscious Thoughts
Subconscious thinking allows your brain to do lots of computation quickly, but it’s also something of a black box from the perspective of your conscious mind.
I find it useful to think of the subconscious thinking as an opaque process. The inputs to the process are the current state of the world and some desired state of the world. The output is an emotion/desire/inclination. Observing what inputs produce what outputs isn’t really that hard, but knowing what’s going on in between is tougher.
But with enough reflection, understanding the reasons for subconscious thoughts becomes possible. Then we can zoom in and correct our subconscious mistakes, or correct our conscious thinking if the subconscious actually makes sense.
I find that journaling and thought experiments are the best way to puzzle this out.
Even if everything’s going all right, this process of reflecting on subconscious thoughts can be beneficial if we find a better way of doing things. The improved way of doing things could be a strategy we employ consciously, or one that we program to be subconscious.
Once you’ve been doing this for long enough, you may start to notice subconscious patterns from your own thinking manifesting themselves in the behavior of others.
Three Fixes for Subconscious Thinking
Improved Understanding of the World
Learning about availability bias is a great example of this kind of fix. Once you learn that your event frequency estimates are biased by what appears on the news, you’ll subconsciously start correcting for this bias. If I ask you to estimate how frequently sharks attack people, you don’t make an initial subconscious estimate and then consciously adjust for availability bias afterwards. (If conscious thoughts do come into the picture, it probably just realizes you forgot to correct for availability bias and runs the subconscious computation again.)
Improved Plans for Achieving Your Goals
By inspecting your subconscious thinking, you might realize that several things you’re doing are actually subconscious attempts to accomplish some goal. Then you can lean hard on what seems effective and accomplish your goal faster.
Through introspecting on my goals, I realized that I don’t actually care that much about the opinions of passing strangers. I also realized that transient, temporary impressions of my friends don’t matter to me that much. This has allowed me to stop obsessing about unimportant past social interactions and focus on important stuff.
In both cases I noticed I was paying a lot of attention to a subgoal that was actually pretty unimportant for my supergoal of having good friends.
Improved Strategies for Trading Off Between Goals
Sometimes you may find through introspection that you have subconscious goals that are mutually incompatible. What then?
Obviously you may not be able to get everything you want, so it’s important to accept that fact as soon as possible to cut down on internal tension. Then you can figure out what the best way to trade off between conflicting desires is.
For example, at one point I noticed that I had two conflicting goals: I wanted to appear superior in social situations, but I also wanted to have close friends. After thinking about both goals for a while, they melded into a single value function I was trying to optimize, and I ended up heavily favoring the “having close friends” objective. (I suspect that appearing superior was only an instrumental goal anyway.)
“Subconscious” isn’t a thing.
Frank made the same complaint. I’ll fix it.
This rewrite is much better than the original.