Mercurial

• MercurialMar 3, 2012, 6:56 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: steven0461’s comment on: Peo­ple who “don’t ra­tio­nal­ize”? [Help Ra­tion­al­ity Group figure it out]

  Good points.

  I’m not trying to sneak in connotations, by the way. We’re just talking about the fact that these people seem to be quite good at things like goal-factoring, VOI calculations, etc.

• MercurialMar 3, 2012, 6:54 AM

  11 points

  in reply to: Grognor’s comment on: Peo­ple who “don’t ra­tio­nal­ize”? [Help Ra­tion­al­ity Group figure it out]

  I will say that it doesn’t even seem to be possible for there to be people who don’t rationalize. (Or enough that you’re at all likely to find them.)

  You’d think not. Yet even Eliezer seems to think that one of our case studies really, truly might not ever rationalize and possibly never has before. This seems to be a case of a beautiful, sane theory beaten to death by a small gang of brutal facts.

  “Some”, “signs”, “rather”. These words all show signs of being rather belief in belief. I notice you don’t say, “Some of these people are high-level rationalists,” just that they show warning signs of being so. What does this really mean?

  It means that I don’t know how to measure how strong someone’s rationality skills are other than talking to others whom I intuitively want to say are good rationalists and comparing notes. So I’m hedging my assertions. But to whatever degree several people at the Singularity Institute are able to figure out who is or is not a reasonably good rationalist, some of our sample “non-rationalizers” appear to us to be good rationalists, and some appear not to be so.

  Also, could you explain what you mean by “seem to have little clue what Tarski is for”?

  Sure. We tell them the kinds of situations in which Tarski is useful, including some personal examples of our own applications of it, and they just blink at us and completely fail to relate. For instance, I might say, “So once I was walking past a pizza place and smelled pizza. Cheese turns out to be really bad for me, but at the time I was hungry. So I watched my mind construct arguments like, ‘I haven’t gotten much calcium for the last while.’” Nothing of this sort—fake justification, selective search, nothing—seems to connect to something they can relate to. So they just don’t see where they’d ever use Tarski.

  And yes, we’ve had at least one person be openly skeptical that anyone could possibly find Tarski useful because he didn’t think anyone rationalized the way we were describing. And another of our case studies seemed to know rationalization only as a joke. (“The cake has fewer calories and doesn’t count if I eat it while standing, right?”)

• MercurialMar 3, 2012, 6:46 AM

  9 points

  in reply to: steven0461’s comment on: Peo­ple who “don’t ra­tio­nal­ize”? [Help Ra­tion­al­ity Group figure it out]

  That’s a good hypothesis. Unfortunately this doesn’t come from asking people, “How do you know when you’re rationalizing?” or any variant thereof. The original problem arose when we could not for the life of us convey to some individuals why the Litany of Tarski might be useful. We gave examples from our own lives and watched these individuals just blink and say, “Huh. Yeah, I guess I just don’t relate to that at all.”

Peo­ple who “don’t ra­tio­nal­ize”? [Help Ra­tion­al­ity Group figure it out]

• MercurialJan 21, 2012, 5:25 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: Anatoly_Vorobey’s comment on: POSITION: De­sign and Write Ra­tion­al­ity Curriculum

  Huh. This directly contradicts what I encountered. I’ll have to explore this a bit. I knew the Greeks had a problem with decoupling their idea of number from their concepts of geometric construction, but I was told that certainly in formal logic and I thought in numerical reasoning as well, their lack of symbol system machinery handicapped them. The Muslims, on the other hand, wouldn’t use pictures of the ideas to which they wanted to refer because of the ban on iconography, so they had to encode their concept of quantity differently, I thought that’s where symbol machinery came from.

  So… I’ll have to look into this. Upvoted for offering a correction, although I don’t know yet if it’s actually correct. Thank you!

• MercurialJan 19, 2012, 5:14 PM

  31 points

  on: POSITION: De­sign and Write Ra­tion­al­ity Curriculum

  If there were a world in which algebra had been learned only through reading essays, without subskill-by-subskill practice, it would not be surprising if the world’s best algebra practitioners could be outperformed by an ordinary student who worked diligently through the exercises in a standard textbook.

  This actually happened. The ancient Greeks weren’t very capable algebraists because they didn’t develop a symbol system that they could systematically manipulate according to prescribed rules. Their description of formal logical inferences were insane to read: “If the first and the second, or the third, implies the fourth, then the first or the fourth, implying the third....” The reason our word “algebra” comes from Arabic isn’t because the Muslims were better algebraists; it was because they used symbol systems (to avoid making icons of Mohammad) in order to encode the material they were reading in the Greek literature. The result was something reasonably close to our modern symbol-manipulation system, which made it possible to train in algebra.

  So this isn’t just a theoretical example. Really, honestly, the first textbook (“al-jebr...” I don’t quite remember the title) absolutely trounced several hundred years of careful, intelligent Greek thought on the topic of numerical reasoning.

  Edit: Please see this. There’s some question about the accuracy of my statement here.

• MercurialJan 9, 2012, 1:40 AM

  0 points

  on: Meetup : San Diego ex­per­i­men­tal meetup

  As a quick addendum: If you’re interested in hearing about the Enneagram keys but weren’t at the previous meetup, you’ll get a lot more out of that discussion if you have some familiarity with the Enneagram beforehand. If you’re totally new to it, I’d suggest reading this webpage. Just two caveats:

  • You can safely stop after you’ve read the section on “Levels of Development.” I’m pretty sure the material on Directions of Integration and Disintegration is just pretty theory and doesn’t quite tie into reality the way an empirical claim should. I also don’t talk that much about the Instinctual Variants.

  • There’s a lot of fluff in Enneagram talk. It started out as a kind of sacred geometry and then went through several layers of having psychological theories woven into it. Despite its origins, though, empirically the system works extremely well in specific domains. Part of my goal in this presentation (if we elect for me to present it) will be to point out exactly how you can test it and precisely what results to expect. It’s not subtle. So please don’t be too surprised to find mystical language and dualism and other mental traps in Enneagram literature; it’s pretty ubiquitous, but unnecessarily so. There really is a rational version of the Enneagram, and that’s what I focus on and am offering to share.

• MercurialJan 9, 2012, 12:01 AM

  6 points

  on: The Third An­nual Young Cry­on­i­cists Gather­ing (2012)

  I attended the first one in 2010. It was pretty neat. I mean, I met Eliezer there and found out about Less Wrong as a result! The people were really wonderful to get to talk to, and the spirit of connection was very, very strong for many of us there. Lots of new friends as a result, even if we’re spread all over creation and stay connected only tangentially via Facebook.

  With that said, I found the conference itself often kind of silly. We spent a lot of time doing self-descriptions to everyone and then doing a few dozen ice-breaker activities. But really, almost all the social time occurred after each day of formal sessions when people would hang out in the hot tub or in hotel rooms and just chat. I watched some fantastic plans form for getting cryonics reliably available throughout Europe as part of those after-hours meetings. :-)

  I understand that the 2011 one was basically an exact repeat of the one before, which was kind of odd since many people already knew each other or at least of each other and just wanted to chat. If the same person is running it this time, I kind of suspect that’ll happen again. But it was certainly worth it for me, at least, to go through those oddball ceremonies to have a chance to chat with so many forward-thinking people. There’s something downright relieving about being with a large group of intelligent people who all get that death is bad and life is good! At least if you’re of a like mind, that is; I imagine that people who think that immortality would be horrid would feel very sorely out-of-place there.

  The tour of Suspended Animation afterwards was really neat, too. Between seeing what they do and talking to several of the scientists who were at the conference, I had to update my beliefs about how important it is to get suspended immediately after death as opposed to minutes or hours later.

  And as a sociological thing, it was really, really nice to see so many young people involved with cryonics not being total eggheads. (Bear in mind that I pretty much have to count myself as an egghead. No offense intended!) There were entrepreneurs and lawyers and artists and musicians and adventure-seekers. It was really amazing to see real variety entering the cryonics meme pool!

  I plan on going to the next one if I can. I really liked getting to chat with the people there two years ago, so even going through the same introduction scheme and presentations that spell out someone’s pet theory on the Singularity would totally be worth it. :-)

• MercurialDec 28, 2011, 10:03 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: mwengler’s comment on: Meetup : San Diego meetup

  Glad you enjoyed! (And sorry for not responding sooner; I wish there were a setting that informed me when someone replies to a top-level post of mine!)

  Don’t take the tests too seriously. Supposedly the RHETI somewhere in the ballpark of 80% accurate (although I’m not sure how they determined that), but in my experience it’s just not nearly as helpful as talking to someone who can actually use the toolset. Threes, Sixes, and Nines in particular seem to have a lot of trouble with tests: Threes keep wanting to be whatever the “best” type is, Sixes keep double-guessing their answers, and Nines tend to see most of the choices in the forced-choice tests as relatively arbitrary (“Well, I’m like A when I’m with these friends but I’m like B when I’m with those friends, so I could go either way”).

  I think training System One, like I described in the presentation, is much more likely to type you and your wife correctly. Although as you said, I’m pretty sure you’re a Nine.

  I hope we can expect you at the next meetup!

Meetup : San Diego ex­per­i­men­tal meetup

• MercurialDec 17, 2011, 2:28 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Nymogenous’s comment on: Build­ing case-stud­ies of akrasia

  -Reward myself with yummy snacks; was effective for a time, but did not last; not sure what the psychological effect there is.

  I understand that this is called an extinction burst.

• MercurialDec 17, 2011, 2:19 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: Bobertron’s comment on: How to la­bel thoughts nonverbally

  When I find myself thinking of something during meditation, I try to reestablish my focus and in the process I just drop the thought. I think that’s correct during formal meditation, but dropping an unpleasant thought after noting it in daily life is wrong, as it leads to avoidance.

  I agree, that’s something to be careful of. I think it depends on what kind of formal meditation practice you’re trying to do. Concentration meditation (such as zhiné from Tibetan dream yoga) encourages you to focus solely on the object in question and to let thoughts drop. Apparently that trains a different part of the brain than does mindfulness meditation. (See The Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness, Destructive Emotions, and Mindsight for some of the research behind that claim.) Formal mindfulness meditation focuses on just being aware of thoughts as they arise without getting “sucked in” such that you lose awareness of your surroundings. My own experience with this has been that ugh fields and related phenomena seem to become much, much easier to notice as a result of mindfulness meditative practices.

• MercurialDec 14, 2011, 8:04 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: prase’s comment on: Build­ing case-stud­ies of akrasia

  You can still help the rest of us, and maybe yourself too, if you describe your situation. You don’t need to think about a way to solve it. Just tell us what the situation is and how you know it’s akrasic. (Of course, omit details as needed to feel comfortable sharing it!)

• MercurialDec 14, 2011, 8:02 PM

  11 points

  in reply to: Mercurial’s comment on: Build­ing case-stud­ies of akrasia

  APPARENT SOLUTION: Willpower weightlifting

  I’ll explain my thinking, but with the understanding that the thinking generated a solution for reasons that might have nothing to do with the thinking that went into the solution-generation.

  It occurred to me that since I am godshatter, I should expect that I have many, many different utility functions. I’m also aware of the apparent fact from embodied cognition that physical enactment is a kind of reinforcement. Since I think it makes sense to think of akrasia as what happens when one utility function generates a behavior that another utility function judges as undesirable, it should be possible to eliminate akrasia by maximizing actions that support specific utility functions while minimizing actions reinforcing opposing utility functions.

  The main mechanism for being able to do this, as I understand it, is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In short, it’s responsible for impulse control. There are three ways to train it that we currently know of, namely (1) mindfulness training, (2) doing novel and challenging things, and (3) encountering and resisting temptation. It occurred to me that I could use #3 in order to apply hormetism to honing willpower.

  So here’s what I’ve been doing since November 21st:

  • I started by listing all things that draw me in that I could think of. That includes my checking-a-thousand-things, but also things like wanting to work on my dissertation to get it finished, writing up solutions for my students, writing entries on Less Wrong, and poking at my skin in the mirror when I’m tired. Any regular activity I tend toward pre-reflection went on this list. (These probably weren’t all in the same category, but that’s okay. I still ended up with all of about 20 things on the list, including some things I’d want to reinforce and some I’d rather do without.)

  • Along with these, I made note of the “triggers.” For instance, the “check my stuff” impulse would appear anytime I had access to the internet and had an idle moment.

  • I picked out a few I’d like to decrease and chose one (namely the “check my stuff” impulse) to use for training.

  • Every day I would pay attention specifically to the arising of that specific impulse. Whenever it would arise, I viewed it as an opportunity to train my willpower. I let my mind dwell on the possibility of following through, but I was very careful not to physically start following through at all. (The impulse control mechanism works on motor neurons. Starting something and aborting it turns out to be significantly easier and less intense as a “workout” than catching the impulse when it first appears and preventing it from moving your body is.)

  • In particular, I specifically sought out ways to trigger the “check my stuff” impulse in order to make it arise and then not follow through. Yes, I knew this would have the effect of shaping my impulse away, but that wasn’t my main purpose. My main purpose was to strengthen my willpower. I was using the impulse as a “weight” upon which to develop my inner strength in general. The diminishing of the “check my stuff” impulse would be a pleasant side-effect. (This reframing turned out to be immensely useful to me.)

  • Finally, I would let myself do this to mental exhaustion in training sessions, avoid the trigger thereafter, and then give myself permission to check my stuff at predesignated times. For instance, I can check my email at the end of the day. It seems to be important to offer myself some time to recover, much like constantly weightlifting doesn’t actually help your muscles nearly as much as having hard training sessions and then resting does.

  This has had the effect of decreasing impulsiveness in general for me. While training, though, I find that I have to watch for rationalization rather than for getting overwhelmed by the impulse. Rationalization seems to be what “getting overwhelmed by the impulse” feels like, at least for me.

  I should mention, by the way, that I haven’t worked out a good way to avoid training the mind to be really good at sending the “I’m overwhelmed with exhaustion and have had enough training” signal prematurely. I haven’t noticed this as a big problem, but of course I wouldn’t if it were a problem, would I?

  The measurable effect is that I now tend to check email twice a day and the rest of my stuff just once a day. I’ve also started to use rationalization as a signal of a wonderful opportunity for training rather than as something to which I’m overly inclined to trust. My brain keeps getting better at offering more impressive-sounding rationalizations, which is actually pretty useful; it keeps the intensity of training up.

  If nothing else, I seem to be able to notice when I’m erring in this particular respect based on a gut-feeling that I guess I would call “guilt” if I had to tag it with something. It’s very subtle, but I’ve learned to notice it because it appears along with a sort of inner “sigh” of relief when I find myself following through on an impulse I decided earlier I wouldn’t follow through on. (It’s sometimes surprising what my subconscious mind considers to be “starting to follow the impulse.” I thought that opening a new tab, putting in the email address for one of my “things to check,” and then putting my finger on the “Enter” key but choosing not to follow through would make the training more intense, but it actually feels like following through on the impulse even if I stop there.)

• MercurialDec 14, 2011, 7:29 PM

  11 points

  on: Build­ing case-stud­ies of akrasia

  INSTANCE: Checking “stuff” online

  I have a number of things I like to check online: Google Reader, email, Less Wrong, my friends’ blogs, etc. I find that if I don’t make some kind of conscious effort to avoid the entropic slide, I’ll default to checking them all impulsively in an irregular cycle. That is, I’ll check email, then look at Google Reader, then Less Wrong, then check Google Plus, then Facebook, then think “Hey, I bet someone sent me an email by now” and then go check email again, etc. If I’ve slipped into this failure mode and honestly believe there isn’t anything more for me to check, sometimes I’ll start looking for new stuff to look at, like pulling up “Damn You Auto Correct.”

  This is especially insidious if I do it first-thing in the morning. If I get up and check my email right away, my day stands an unreasonably high chance of being totally unproductive in terms of my dissertation, job applications, or even getting household chores done.

  One factor making this especially bad used to be that I’d have a nagging feeling when I was in “check my stuff” mode that I was forgetting something I usually want to check. This would prompt me to waste time exploring random junk on the internet until I either remembered something or gave up trying to remember. After a while I started developing a habit of feeling like I was forgetting something. So, I made a list of all the things I normally check in the form of hyperlinks. That cured the “Am I forgetting something?” problem—so much so that I don’t need the list anymore since I can just visualize it and notice if I’ve missed anything. This did nothing for the larger problem, but at least it helped curb the entropic death spiral.

  I do seem to have solved this problem, though. I’ll explain in a reply since the explanation requires some verbiage.

• MercurialDec 14, 2011, 7:15 PM

  4 points

  on: Build­ing case-stud­ies of akrasia

  INSTANCE: Applying for academic jobs

  I’m in graduate school finishing a doctorate. Last fall (2010) I thought I was going to finish, so I started looking around for jobs. At the time my advisor wasn’t sure whether I would graduate that academic year (by summer 2011), so he was hesitant to write a letter saying I’d have my Ph.D. by fall 2011. He decided in December that I wasn’t going to finish that year. But in the course of negotiating with him and looking for jobs, I realized that the rhythm for the academic job search required me to put my materials together sometime around September to October the year before the job would start and then send out applications from about October through December.

  Fast-forward to this year. Throughout the summer I kept thinking I had plenty of time to work on my job application materials, so I didn’t put much effort into them. Around September I started considering getting to work on it “soon.” (For those who don’t know this: Academic job searching requires putting together a curriculum vitae (kind of like a resumé on steroids), a description of current and planned future research, a description of one’s teaching philosophy, a cover letter repeating much of the same content, and usually somewhere around three letters of recommendation.) I was also preoccupied with putting material together for a conference of sorts where I’d be presenting a small chunk of my dissertation work.

  At the conference in early October, I overheard some other people talking about their submissions to a conference in Portland in February. One of the ways one gets jobs in my field is by going to conferences and making social impressions while showing off that you can do research. This particular conference is right in my area of specialization, so I felt a thrill of panic for having not attended to this sooner. I immediately put together a submission for a presentation. That took me until mid-October.

  That’s when I finally started putting my job application materials together. I figured it would take me a weekend to get it all together, and then trying to account for the planning fallacy I gave it a week. It actually took me a solid week of ignoring my dissertation just to get the curriculum vitae put together. (It’s quite amazing how mind-numbing that process is!) I also ended up trusting my department’s wall of job postings to do my basic search because I felt like I no longer had the time to figure out how to do the search myself.

  Most job announcements started reviewing in November, though, so I figured I still had a chance to get most of my job applications in. I talked to three people about getting letters of recommendation, one of whom wanted my CV, research statement, and a set of reminders about work we had done in the past. I decided to get my advisor’s feedback on the CV and research statement before giving them to the letter-writer. (It’s pretty typical that the advisor needs to approve these things before one submits them.) He, however, took his time (as I would have known he’d do if I had bothered to reflect on it), and as a result I wasn’t able to give the letter-writer her materials until late November—at which point most of the application deadlines had passed.

  In retrospect, what I should have done is asked multiple people for letters of reference, started working on the job application material in the summer, and given the thorough letter-writer an early draft of the materials she had asked for right away.

  What links here?

  • Mercurial's comment on Build­ing case-stud­ies of akrasia by Mercurial (Dec 14, 2011, 7:29 PM; 11 points)

Build­ing case-stud­ies of akrasia

• MercurialDec 12, 2011, 3:00 AM

  6 points

  in reply to: Dr_Manhattan’s comment on: khan Academy—Ra­tion­al­ity se­ries?

  Ditto. I’m in academia and had wondered idly about creating Khan-like videos for rationality training for my future graduate students. But then I forgot too!

  Given that Anna and Eliezer are putting a Rationality curriculum together, it might be good to get their input on this.

• MercurialDec 11, 2011, 4:50 AM

  14 points

  on: An akra­sia case study

  I personally think this is a fantastic contribution. I don’t know whether your techniques will work for anyone else, but this kind of specificity can give us some good directions to consider as we develop the “kicking” aspect of the Art.

  I have to wonder if the ten thousand techniques for fighting akrasia and the general theory of motivation might be at too high a level of abstraction for where we are with understanding the phenomenon. It seems like understanding the science should let us create a consistent Akrasian Judo, but I’m under the impression that it doesn’t work that way in practice. It seems more like individuals work out their own personal anti-akrasia techniques and then later can see how it fits into the procrastination equation.

  I wonder if it would be helpful if many more people here followed your example and described the problem as a case study instead of proposing solutions. In your case, you did propose a solution, and I’ll bet that it doesn’t work for most people. Yet I think even your perspective on your solution is helpful as a case study because it gives us insight into both a specific manifestation of akrasia and what at least one solution to that specific form feels like. If we had a whole lot of case studies like that (with both successful and failed attempts to apply anti-akrasia techniques), I think we might be able to see patterns in a way that keeps us from thinking that our strategies work or fail for the reasons we think they do.

  I’d like to start a new discussion to get this started, but I’ll wait a bit first to see what others think in case I’m missing something.

  What links here?

  • Build­ing case-stud­ies of akrasia by Mercurial (Dec 14, 2011, 6:42 PM; 19 points)

• MercurialNov 30, 2011, 4:46 AM

  −3 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: How ra­tio­nal­ity can make your life more awesome

  Nice.