I think I would be a much better-trained rationalist if I did my basic rationality practices as regularly as I do physical exercise. The practices are:
I keep a list of things I have changed my mind about. Everything from geopolitics to my personal life.
I hardly ever go looking outside my echo chamber in search for things that can challenge/correct my beliefs because I find it very effortful & unpleasant. (You know what else is effortful? Pushups).
I sometimes write letters to my future or past selves. I tried giving comprehensive life advice to my 16-year-old self, and ended up learning a lot about advice and spurious counterfactuals...
I sometimes do the Line of Retreat negative visualization. For immediate things, I tend to do it out loud while on a walk. For political beliefs, I slowly add to a private document over time and occasionally review it.
I maintain a list of my disagreements with various public thinkers. Helps me separate tribal thinking from truth-seeking.
I made an Anki deck for memorizing my defensive epistemology heuristics: “is this explainable by selection effects?”, Proving Too Much, “is this claim consistent with their previous claim?”, Reversal Test, etc.
I notice I’m at a point where I can make surprisingly good fermi estimates if I spend a couple minutes thinking really hard, usually not otherwise. Feels like there’s room for improvement.
Hard to practice with regularity, but these days I try to restrain myself from joining into an in-progress debate when I overhear one, and instead sit on the sideline and patiently wait for openings to point out (double) cruxes.
Prompt myself to answer, “what would a slightly improved version of me do in this situation? What would I think if I were more rested and better hydrated?” It’s embarrassing how much mileage I have gotten out of role-playing as myself.
Privately journaling about my internal conflicts or difficult feelings. Simple but underpracticed (much like sit-ups).
I wrote down a page of predictions about the state of crypto tech in 2031, aiming for maximum specificity & minimal future embarrassment. Similar for Twitter in this post. I guess I might call this “conscientious futurism” or just “sticking my neck out”.
Pro/Con lists. They’re effortful & time-intensive. But so is half-focused vacillating, which is what I do by default.
So yeah, those are my rationality exercises, and I really wish I practiced them more regularly. It’s not exactly high-level SEAL-inspired training, and it’s pretty hard to verify, but...it feels like it makes me more rational.
I think I would be a much better-trained rationalist if I did my basic rationality practices as regularly as I do physical exercise. The practices are:
I keep a list of things I have changed my mind about. Everything from geopolitics to my personal life.
I hardly ever go looking outside my echo chamber in search for things that can challenge/correct my beliefs because I find it very effortful & unpleasant. (You know what else is effortful? Pushups).
I sometimes write letters to my future or past selves. I tried giving comprehensive life advice to my 16-year-old self, and ended up learning a lot about advice and spurious counterfactuals...
I sometimes do the Line of Retreat negative visualization. For immediate things, I tend to do it out loud while on a walk. For political beliefs, I slowly add to a private document over time and occasionally review it.
I maintain a list of my disagreements with various public thinkers. Helps me separate tribal thinking from truth-seeking.
I made an Anki deck for memorizing my defensive epistemology heuristics: “is this explainable by selection effects?”, Proving Too Much, “is this claim consistent with their previous claim?”, Reversal Test, etc.
I notice I’m at a point where I can make surprisingly good fermi estimates if I spend a couple minutes thinking really hard, usually not otherwise. Feels like there’s room for improvement.
Hard to practice with regularity, but these days I try to restrain myself from joining into an in-progress debate when I overhear one, and instead sit on the sideline and patiently wait for openings to point out (double) cruxes.
Prompt myself to answer, “what would a slightly improved version of me do in this situation? What would I think if I were more rested and better hydrated?” It’s embarrassing how much mileage I have gotten out of role-playing as myself.
Privately journaling about my internal conflicts or difficult feelings. Simple but underpracticed (much like sit-ups).
I wrote down a page of predictions about the state of crypto tech in 2031, aiming for maximum specificity & minimal future embarrassment. Similar for Twitter in this post. I guess I might call this “conscientious futurism” or just “sticking my neck out”.
Pro/Con lists. They’re effortful & time-intensive. But so is half-focused vacillating, which is what I do by default.
So yeah, those are my rationality exercises, and I really wish I practiced them more regularly. It’s not exactly high-level SEAL-inspired training, and it’s pretty hard to verify, but...it feels like it makes me more rational.