The Art Of Noticing

There's a super short distilled version of my method for training cognitive habits, and I call it "The Art Of Noticing".

Skills I have so far trained using Noticing, with very little reliance on any other technique, include empathy, not trudging uselessly ahead when I'm trying to learn something but have gotten lost, and anti-"guessing the teacher's password".

The Art Of Noticing goes like this:

1. Answer the question, "What's my first possible clue that I'm about to encounter the problem?" If your problem is "I don't respond productively to being confused," then the first sign a crucial moment is coming might be "a fleeting twinge of surprise". Whatever that feels like in real time from the inside of your mind, that's your trigger.

2. Whenever you notice your trigger, make a precise physical gesture. Snap your fingers, tap your foot, touch your pinky finger with your thumb - whatever feels comfortable. Do it every time you notice that fleeting twinge of surprise.

Noticing is not the end of the story. But I am astonished by how much of the story it appears to be. In many situations, merely Noticing is well over half the battle, and what's left automatically works itself out on the fly.

Against Being For Or Against Tell Culture

Ever since I posted about Tell Culture a year ago, people have been debating whether direct or indirect communication is better.

(One day I will learn to frame my important points in a way that is controversial enough to popularize them.)

I find this frustrating.

The concept of "communication cultures" is a kind of cognitive first aid. It's better to have tourniquettes than to not have tourniquettes, because otherwise people bleed to death. But there's a lot more to medicine than first aid, and a tourniquette will never reattach a severed arm.

What kind of cognitive first aid is "communication cultures"? What does it prevent people from dying of before they make it to the hospital?

Harmful misunderstandings can happen when people from one communication culture interact with people from another communication culture without recognizing that the other group employs different assumptions, and relies on a different skillset. That's the thing knowing about "communication cultures" saves you from.

But that's first aid, no more or less. If "Tell Culture vs. Guess Culture" is all you know about communication and you want to communicate effectively, you're alive, but you're a long damn way from "healthy".

There are skills, techniques, and insights you have to gain before you can communicate well, in a way that satisfies the values of everyone involved.

To master communication, you can't just be like, "I prefer Tell Culture, which is better than Guess Culture, so my disabilities in Guess Culture are therefore justified." Justified shmustified, you're still missing an arm.

To reattach a limb, you need lots of medical knowledge and advanced surgical skills. To master communication, you have to actually learn things that empower you to communicate.

My advice to you - my request of you, even - if you find yourself fueling these debates, is to (for the love of god) move on. If you've already applied cognitive first aid, you've created an affordance for further advancement. Using even more tourniquettes doesn't help.

A better use of your resources would be identifying what you most want to do with communication, and what factors are most important for accomplishing that. What is the next thing you need to learn in order to get what you want out of communication? What is the most important problem in the art of communication, and what can you do to solve it?

If you're comfortable with direct communication, it may be that what you need most right now is one of the central Guess Techniques. Basic empathy, maybe. Go talk to someone who thrives in Guess Culture, and instead of picking a fight, try to learn something.

Tortoise Report 3: Empathy

What's a "Tortoise Report"? See the Tortoise Skills page.

Habit: Empathy

Duration: 2 Months

Success: 9/10

Trigger: Curiosity directed at another person

Action: Pushing the curiosity through their external presentation to penetrate their internal experience

Result: I enjoy socializing with people I like. (!!!) I'm giving this 9/10 because of how surprising and useful the success is, not because I feel like I've almost mastered the skill.

ETA 6/30/15: I went to a party last night where I saw someone who hadn't interacted with me in person for a year. He said I seemed a lot different socially, and in particular he described me as "warm". That's definitely a first.

ETA 2/18/2016: I retained the ability to empathize deliberately, but as my motivation to practice a new skill simply because it was new skill faded, I exercised that ability less and less frequently. By November I was back to avoiding socialization completely. In the past month, I've gained a supporting skill (or property or something) that makes me feel motivated to empathize pretty much all the time: I've gained human connection as a terminal value. I feel motivated to understand people merely because I want to understand them. It feels like a direct urge, not a deliberately calculated tactic. As a result, it's pretty easy to initiate and maintain empathy. I'll write more about this later, but it seemed important to note that a second piece was needed.

A dialogue, in which I teach this skill to myself from a year ago.

In addition to being a Tortoise Report, this is an experiment in gaining pedagogical content knowledge by imagining the most efficient way to bestow a skill I now possess on my pre-skilled self.

Potentially Interesting Person: No, I'm in the Bay Area now. I'm working through Code Academy. Been volunteering for CFAR and sleeping on Tilia's couch.

Me: thinks: Ugh, why am I at this party. I hate this hate this hate this. How do other people enjoy socializing???

Me: So you're planning to Earn To Give?

PIP: Yeah, that's the plan.

Me: Cool.

PIP: What about you? I follow you on Facebook but like I don't know what you actually do with most of your time.

Me: Suppresses a sigh. Oh, this and that. I do some stuff for CFAR myself, and I just got back from giving a series of mnemonics workshops in the Midwest.

PIP: Right, I remember you posting about that! How'd those go?

PIP freezes in the middle of a hand gesture. The party around us goes quiet. Standing beside PIP is another version of me, slightly plumper and with longer hair.

Future Me: Hi! I'm you from a year in the future, and I'm going to teach you about empathy.

Me: "Empathy?" That sounds boring.

Future Me: It isn't.

Everything plays backward briefly.

PIP: Right, I remember you posting about that! How'd those go?

Me: The first one went exceedingly well. I was shocked, actually. The second one was so-so, though people seemed pretty happy with it.

PIP: Cool! What did you teach?

pause

Future Me: How are you feeling right now?

Me: Trapped, bored, tired, like I'm wasting my time. I'd rather be at home reading. Why do I even go to these parties?

Future Me: If I recall correctly, you think that since you no longer have social anxiety, you should be participating in socialization like ordinary humans.

Me: That does sound sort of silly doesn't it. Just because I'm not terrified doesn't mean I'm actually benefiting from this. Maybe I should just stop going to parties.

Future Me: That might be wise. But what do you think would happen if you declined literally every invitation to any kind of socialization, even coffee, that you expected would make you feel bored and tired?

Me: ...Well then I guess I just wouldn't interact in person with anybody but Eliezer.

Future Me: Indeed. Why do you think you feel this way in social interactions so frequently?

Me: looking a bit sad and helpless I guess I probably just... don't like people. I mean, I know I like People, as an abstract category, at least sometimes. My whole life is about making sure People continue to exist for a very long time. But whatever it is that makes other people enjoy in-person socialization, I just don't have it.

Future Me: You think that you never care about individual people in physical proximity, that you're not a compassionate person, right? Like you have some long-range compassion, or at least long-range aesthetic appreciation for humanity, but no short-range compassion, no empathy.

Me: That sounds about right, yeah.

Future Me: So first of all, I want to point out a problem with your conception of self.

Me: I don't really have much of one of those anymore. I mean I know I used to, I used to have a solid story about who I was and I didn't think the central features of it could change much. Now I think my properties are fluid and dynamic.

Future Me: Yes, that's much better than before. But you say that your properties are "fluid and dynamic". I know you think you're bad at visualization, but you don't realize yet how much skill you've gained in that area recently. Use the same mental motion you'd use to solidify an association, and tell me how you visualize your properties being fluid and dynamic.

Me: Hm. I'm seeing this picture of the inside of my head, and it's full of cloud puddles of different colors all swirling around making whooshing sounds When I learn something, a new one flows in through my skull, and sometimes one of them leaves.

Future Me: So when mnemonics gave you the ability to visualize like that, a new skill flowed into your head and you became "someone who can visualize things".

Me: Sure.

Future Me: Doesn't that sound awfully essentialist to you?

Me: ...No?

Future Me: No?

Me: Well I'm just a collection of abilities and aversions and goals and a bunch of other things, and things in that mix can change at any time. If I were essentialist, I'd think I had a single solid soul-like thing that was Who I Really Am, and I think that's bullshit.

Future Me: I see. What I meant is that you're an essentialist about personality characteristics, not about personalities.

Me: Huh. Ok, I'm listening.

Future Me: Imagine yourself as an algorithm in a neural network. (Have you read those parts of the Sequences yet? I think you probably have.) Can you picture that?

Me: Sure. There's a series of orange marble-like nodes with lots of wispy connections to other nodes. I use this image a lot. I am a brain, after all.

Future Me: Oh right, you're all about "association networks" for mnemonics. I never realized that's where this understanding came from. Ok, so tell me about association networks. What happens when you think of a "horse"?

Me: A group of nodes representing "horse" fires, and the things that are highly connected to the "horse" cluster are likely to fire. Strongly connected ones, such as "hung like a horse", are more likely to fire than weakly connected ones, such as "horseradish".

Future Me: Suppose your ability to do the Shim Sham dance steps is a result of having strengthened the right series of connections in your association network.

Me: startled pause of realization I've been thinking of "associations" as limited to "experiences".

Future Me: But experiences affect behavior, don't they. And most of the things that happen in your brain don't make it to the conscious level. Your association network is firing all the time -

Me: And when I do the Shim Sham, I don't have to think about it anymore because I've strengthened the connections through repetition so thoroughly that the right series of nodes fires in the right order without my attention ever focusing on that process. The only thing that makes it to my attention is a feeling of effortlessness and satisfaction as I move.

Future Me: I'll give you a minute to process the implications.

pause

Me: That's what a skill looks like in a neural network isn't it.

Future Me: Uh huh.

Me: And not just a physical skill whose output is movement. Mental skills are the same way. They just output further cognitive processes instead.

Future Me: Yep.

Me: This is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with my boring conversation with PIP and my relationship with empathy?

Future Me: Empathy is a collection of skills.

Me: You're going to have to spell it out more than that.

Future Me: Highly empathetic people have developed very strong pathways through their minds that input certain social experiences and output certain emotions. Or perhaps they were born with brains organized like that. Contrast this to your "swirling soup of personality traits" model.

Me: Your version involves a manipulable causal mechanism. It suggests I can identify and strengthen key associations and end up with new patterns of thought and behavior without gaining "empathy" all at once as an essential personality trait. Just like when I memorize stuff.

Future Me: You can indeed. Let me tell you an interesting fact about my current self. In the past week, I've had three one-on-one conversations. They happened on different days. Two of them were with people you've tried and failed to interact with productively before. All of them were over an hour long, and one lasted an entire afternoon. I agreed to these meetings because they seemed like fun. In the moment, they were fun. At no point did I feel any of the things you're currently feeling toward PIP. No boredom, no exhaustion, no trapped feelings, no annoyance, no wishing I were somewhere else. Instead I mostly felt a wide range of positive emotions. That thing that causes other people to want to interact with each other on purpose? There's a very good chance I felt that.

Me: That's... astonishing. It's hard to believe that happened to me. I honestly cannot imagine what that might have been like.

Future Me: Haha, you can, actually. You just don't have a lot of practice imagining being other people from the inside. Even future versions of yourself.

Me: And you say this startling change is caused by strengthening neural pathways comprising empathy?

Future Me: Yep.

Me: How? I'm not seeing that.

The sound of the party returns, and everything plays backward again for a moment.

PIP: Cool! What did you teach?

Me: I taught people how to deliberately strengthen associations between ideas. If you want to remember "pen" and "orange juice", you explain to System 1 that pens and orange juice have a relationship it considers extremely important.

PIP: You mean like a funny story involving a pen and some orange juice?

Me: That would work. "Funny" and "story" are both things System 1 pays attention to. There are a lot of other things it pays attention to as well, like hedonic rewards, rhyme and rhythm, and strong emotions of almost any kind. Primed with the techniques "funny" and "story", I'm currently imagining a puddle of orange juice and a pen trying to walk to the store together. Though the pen's just hopping right along, the orange juice is struggling to keep up because every time it manages to gather itself into a solid shape, it collapses back onto the pavement with wet squishy sounds. The pen is exasperated by this inefficiency and is trying to drag the orange juice along, but there's not really anything to hold on to and it doesn't like the smell of oranges. The orange juice feels guilty that it can't keep up with the pen. And then... well, stuff like that.

PIP: laughing I'm definitely going to remember "orange juice" and "pen" now! I don't know why I'd want to but I bet if you see me in a year and ask me what goes with "orange juice" I will know.

Everything freezes again.

Future Me: I would like to point out that you just experienced your model of the puddle of orange juice so vividly that you became uncomfortable and ended the story.

Me: ...Maaaaybe.

Future Me: You totally did. I was there. You felt it struggling to pull itself together and you felt a whole complex bundle of unpleasant emotions when the pen started yelling at it.

Me: Yeah ok fine.

Future Me: How do you think PIP is feeling right now?

Me: Um, I'm not sure. I hadn't considered it.

Future Me: Yeah I know. That's ok. Consider it.

Me: I guess maybe he's feeling sort of happy, and probably nervous to be talking to me.

Future Me: Whatever you did to generate that answer, did the process involve feeling any of those emotions? Or even simulating them as more than abstract ideas?

Me: I... don't think so. They just seem like the most likely things given the context and his body language and so on.

Future Me: Correct me if I'm wrong. (I'm not.) You pretty much see everybody as mindless walking bags of meat.

Me: Well no I don't actually think that -

Future Me: I know you don't think it. What you explicitly think is that their internal experiences are as rich and interesting as your own. But your models of them are not nearly as rich in emotion or sensory experience as your model of the orange juice or the pen.

Me: That makes me sound like a terrible person. Not that it's inaccurate.

Future Me: Whether you're a terrible person is irrelevant. You're thinking in essentialist terms about personality traits again. Tell me what is fun about walking bags of meat.

Me: Nothing. Bags of meat are boring.

Future Me: That they are. System 1 does not find walking bags of meat the least bit important.

Me: You're saying that if I could use the same processes to model conversation partners that I use to model orange juice, then people would suddenly feel a lot more interesting.

Future Me: It seems to be working pretty damn well for me so far.

Me: I see. I'm... not sure I know how to do that.

Future Me: I'm sure you don't. It'll take about two months of practice.

Me: jawfloor Two months is not a long time.

Future Me: Well you'll have developed the method first, and that part will take a lot longer. But since this is a fictional reenactment of something that never happened, I'm going to cheat and get you started right now. The first step is curiosity.

Me: That seems to be the case for an awful lot of things.

Future Me: Verily. I'm still not quite sure what that's about, but I'm pretty sure it's important. Anyway, you don't know it yet, but you spend a fair amount of time being curious about people.

Me: If I don't know it, how do you?

Future Me: The next thing you need to learn is how to identify high-leverage intervention points in your default cognitive patterns. Places in a string of firings where you can intervene to strengthen one crucial connection over another. I identified "curiosity about other people" as a high-leverage intervention point, and started paying attention to sensations of curiosity about other people.

Me: How can you pay attention to something that's below the level of conscious awareness?

Future Me: You can't. But you can build bridges that draw it up toward conscious awareness. For example, close your eyes, and tell me the color of the paint on the walls.

Me: I'm... not sure. Blue maybe?

Future Me: Now open your eyes and look around.

Me: They're pink. I definitely saw them but their color failed to register. Your point is that... No, I'm not quite sure what your point is.

Future Me: My point is that if I hadn't said anything, you'd have gone through the whole party seeing the color of the walls and not being aware of it. But I prompted you to search for your experience of the color of the walls in future consciousness. I flagged that experience as important, and flagging things as important, as something to watch for, does two things. I'm not quite sure how it does them. But it both leads your attention to the experiences you're searching for, and it probably causes you to have more of them (you'll spend more time looking at the walls when you're trying to find out what color they are).

Me: I can become aware of things that usually remain beneath the level of conscious awareness just by paying attention to them.

Future Me: Exactly. And you've just dismissed a thought about observation bias because you know it's not actually relevant. Good job. Now look around the room at all of these people, and when you notice anything even vaguely like a feeling of curiosity about any of them, tap your fingers together.

Me: Looks around. Sees someone who looks familiar. Taps fingers.

Future Me: What happened right before you tapped your fingers?

Me: I wondered whether I'd seen that girl over there in person before, or if she'd just commented on my Facebook wall at some point. But I think I only wondered it because you primed me to be curious about people.

Future Me: That will often be the case: You'll only notice the thing you're watching for when you're explicitly thinking about the fact that you're watching for it. You might only do the thing you're watching for because you're thinking about it. That's ok. It still strengthens the relevant pathways. Surprisingly quickly, in my experience. Empathy took a comparatively long time. Other cognitive habits I've learned by this method took a couple weeks or even days.

Me: So I just... tap my fingers whenever I'm curious about somebody?

Future Me: Yep. For now. I started with trying to tap my fingers whenever I noticed that I was experiencing empathy, but this turned out to be a prerequisite. You'll eventually realize that you've been trying to answer your curiosity about people by making System 2 inferences about their external appearance and behaviors, and that you get a lot farther a lot faster if you activate System 1 the way you do while making mnemonic associations and then just let it do the thing it evolved to do.

Me: Wouldn't that give me a lot of wrong answers? I mean, people are complicated. If I project a bunch of rich experiences into their heads I'm going to be mostly wrong most of the time.

Future Me: Yes, but you're not going to forget that while you're doing it. Also it's not exactly the same as "projecting a lot of rich experiences". There are extremely important sensations of "possibility" and "uncertainty". You'll see. And you're also going to be able to update your models way more quickly.

Me: looks incredulous

Future Me: That shouldn't surprise you; you'll be sticking your neck out and making riskier predictions. Furthermore, you really did evolve to model the minds of other humans accurately enough to predict incredibly complex behaviors. Those instinctive tools are a hell of a lot more powerful and accurate than you currently realize. Do you remember the second time you took Val's Againstness class, the one where you didn't have social anxiety?

Me: Yeah, that was super weird. He had somebody stand in front of the group and asked them to do something uncomfortable, like sing "happy birthday", while relaxing. Then he just watched them and told them all about their internal experiences based on ridiculously subtle external cues of anxiety or concern or whatever. And I predicted everything he said before he said it.

Future Me: Yep. You were doing the thing. You let System 1 be in charge of modeling the other person.

Me: Why do you think I was able to do that?

Future Me: Probably you were hypnotized.

Me: Heh, well Val was in the room, so yeah probably.

Future Me: Anyway, do the curiosity thing first. Tap your fingers when you're curious about other people. I'll get back to you.

sounds start again

PIP: laughing I'm definitely going to remember "orange juice" and "pen" now! I don't know why I'd want to but I bet if you see me in a year and ask me what goes with "orange juice" I will know.

Me: It's not unlikely. It depends a lot on how strong your emotional response to the story was. But I suppose - taps fingers - this is your first big party in the Bay Area right? First time meeting a bunch of people you've wanted to meet for a long time? You're probably already in a context where your emotions will solidify a lot of memories. ...Hey, snaps fingers, can I ask you something sort of personal?

PIP: Sure!

Me: What are you feeling right now?

PIP: Um... sort of nervous, excited, extremely happy, slightly drunk, worried about how you're judging me, concerned I won't display enough introspective skill in this answer to gain your respect, a few other things that aren't as obvious right now.

Me: Heh. I love it that you can answer that so transparently. Rationalists are great.

PIP: I've read some of your things about Tell Culture. I consider you one of my allies, so I want to be as transparent to you as possible.

Me: That's... really incredibly touching, actually. Thank you.

PIP: smiles

scene freezes

Me: That was... different.

Future Me: How was it different?

Me: When I noticed I was curious about him, I found that I cared more about his answer, that I paid more attention to what it meant.

Future Me: To get the next part I had to practice just this "noticing curiosity about other people" thing for a month. But if I can selectively freeze time, then I can also accelerate your learning process. Let's put your brain in a state where it's mastered noticing curiosity about people, and pick up from there.

a small popping sound

Me: Woah...

scene unfreezes

PIP: smiles

Me: taps fingers Why do you want to save the world?

PIP: That's an interesting question!

scene freezes

Future Me: Tell me what happened just before you snapped your fingers.

Me: I wondered why he wanted to save the world.

Future Me: What was it like to wonder why he wanted to save the world? What was happening in your head that you translated into the words "I wondered why he wanted to save the world"?

Me: I imagined him doing tasks for CFAR, I imagined him sitting in front of a computer coding and then donating money to FHI, I imagined him smiling while doing these things, and I felt an emotional sensation I want to call a "question mark".

Future Me: What is it like to know why I want to save the world?

Me: If you haven't changed too much, you have feelings of joy and fulfillment when you imagine tiling the universe with flourishing sentience, and you have feelings of loss and despair when you imagine none of that sentience coming to exist.

Future Me: When you thought about PIP wanting to "save the world", you had a visual simulation of his body going about world-saving tasks, and you imagined a smiling facial expression. You then thought about me wanting to "save the world". What's the crucial difference?

Me: I imagined you from the inside, and him from the outside!

Future Me: Yes.

Me: With him, it's like I'm interacting with his mechanical interface. I think that even my model of him is actually mostly of his mechanical interface. When I wonder about him, when I feel curiosity, it doesn't penetrate his exterior. taps fingers

Future Me: What was that tap for?

Me: I just wondered what it's like to be PIP from the inside. What it's like to be the thing that produces all of those behaviors and experiences all of those situations. What internal experiences motivate the activities of the mechanical interface. I wondered who is inside the machine.

Future Me: What's it like, the kind of curiosity that penetrates the exterior?

Me: The question mark sensation is there again, but I also have this almost spacial sensation where my attention is located about where his head is, and it's flipped to look out from that perspective at the world. There's a feeling of... not of specific emotions, but of something like the possibility of emotions, and the possibility of other kinds of experiences. And now I'm automatically starting to try to answer the question of what it's like to be him, and I'm filling in the "possibilities" with specific emotions and experiences, and I'm experiencing those things as I do it in just the way that I experience my memory palace when I walk around in it. It's all actually there in my head.

Future Me: Congratulations! You are empathizing.

Me: Really?

Future Me: I think so. You're doing the thing that I do when I interact with people and feel the human connection that makes interactions worth having. Call it whatever. You're imagining him as a person, instead of a walking sack of meat.

Me: It's a little bit difficult and uncomfortable.

Future Me: It takes practice. ... Though not for you, I guess.

another small popping sound

Me: ...I know Kung Fu.

Future Me: grins Show me.

Me: So you want me to start tapping my fingers when I notice I'm empathizing?

Future Me: Yep.

Me: I can do that.

Future Me: How would you feel about it if I left you alone at this party to talk to some random rationalist you've never met before?

Me: I'd... I'd like that, actually. I really want to know more about him. More about what's inside his head, I mean. It would be fun to try to learn. looks around I'd probably like to talk with any of these people, really.

Future Me: That's what I thought. I'll leave you to it then.

scene unfreezes

The Simulation Calibration Formulation

It's a fairly common practice among rationalists I'm familiar with to train epistemic calibration by making predictions, quantifying their confidence in those predictions, tracking their success rates, and betting actual money with each other along the way. The idea is that with repeated practice, you'll eventually get a gut sense that "sensation x", which you used to associate with "80% certainty", actually occurs more reliably in the presence of 60% probability predictions than 80% probability predictions. That is, 60% of the time when you feel "80% certain", the prediction comes true, and this eventually cause that to sensation to feel like 60% certainty instead of 80% certainty.

I'm going to call this approach "the observation correlation calibration formulation" (because I can). [The Credence Game] (http://acritch.com/credence-game/) allows rapid-fire execution of the the observation correlation calibration formulation.

But there's a second approach to epistemic calibration that I don't hear people talk about so much, and I think at this point in my development, it's more valuable to me.

From Luke's summary of How To Measure Anything:

"Suppose you’re asked to give a 90% CI for the year in which Newton published the universal laws of gravitation, and you can win $1,000 in one of two ways:

1) You win $1,000 if the true year of publication falls within your 90% CI. Otherwise, you win nothing.

2) You spin a dial divided into two “pie slices,” one covering 10% of the dial, and the other covering 90%. If the dial lands on the small slice, you win nothing. If it lands on the big slice, you win $1,000.

If you find yourself preferring option #2, then you must think spinning the dial has a higher chance of winning you $1,000 than option #1. That suggest your stated 90% CI isn’t really your 90% CI. Maybe it’s your 65% CI or your 80% CI instead. By preferring option #2, your brain is trying to tell you that your originally stated 90% CI is overconfident.

If instead you find yourself preferring option #1, then you must think there is more than a 90% chance your stated 90% CI contains the true value. By preferring option #1, your brain is trying to tell you that your original 90% CI is under confident."

I call that the Simulation Calibration Formulation, and I think it's brilliant. Especially the part about how to identify underconfidence. It's relatively easy to humbly admit your overconfidence, but dropping your credence after that by exactly the right amount is hard.

I haven't tested this, but I expect I'd gain skill more quickly through a rapid-fire Simulation session than through a rapid-fire Observation Correlation session. You can also do a calibration simulation in any real-life instance where you might otherwise make a bet.

I think the Observation Correlation method assumes either that you already have pretty good reflective awareness of your credence-related subjective experiences, or more likely that reflective awareness of those experiences isn't all that important. Especially in the online-training version of Observation Correlation, improvement is expected to happen below the level of awareness. It's a quiet shifting of gut feelings.

I think reflective awareness of credence experiences is probably hugely beneficial. The simulation method trains exactly that, making it a good candidate for something earlier in a calibration training program than the observation method.

The other reason I suspect it should come before observation is that it isn't tied up with social feelings like wanting to protect your reputation or social stigmas surrounding gambling, or personal insecurities related to intelligence and ego. In the moments of real-world prediction and prediction-checking, any of those sensations is likely to be so salient that it blots out credence feelings both at and below conscious awareness. And when you turn out to be wrong, you'll probably be punished (in a behavioral psychology sense) for making a prediction in the first place, if you're not already very skilled.

If I'm right about these things, then it would be wise to practice Simulation Calibration until the mental movements of balancing overconfidence and underconfidence are fast, easy, and nearly automatic, and to do that before you get really serious about Prediction Book or similar things. At that point, you'll be armed with sharper phenomenological weapons to cut through counterproductive ego preservation/20th century science virtue ethics of skepticism, and you'll actually be able to hear your "80% confidence" feeling ringing clear above the noise. You'll know what you're listening for, and you'll store the feelings in memory for later comparison.

You can practice this offline using the Credence Game I mentioned before, performing the simulation for each question, and not keeping score. When that gets easy, pay attention to the score again. And when that's easy, stop doing the simulation.

I don't mean that you should stop making real-world predictions if calibration simulation isn't easy yet. I just mean that early on, Simulation should be the focus of your epistemic calibration training, rather than Observation. I'm certainly going to make it the focus of mine.

Ancient Earth Celebrates HPMOR

On March 14th, 2015, Eliezer Yudkowsky will post the final chapter of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. If you've not read it, now would be an especially good time to start. If you have, you might want to join one of the many HPMOR Wrap Parties organized all over the world in celebration. I was asked to share a story at the Berkeley Wrap Party of how HPMOR has impacted my life, so if you plan to be there, you might want to hold off on reading this yourself. It does not contain specific spoilers for the book.

Even though I thought I wanted to be an an astronomer or a cosmologist growing up; even though my dad taught me to chart the movements of Jupiter's moons when I was ten; even though I read classic science fiction with first contact, generation ships, and interstellar empires; even though my family's trip to visit the VLA Radio Astronomy Observatory in Nevada was practically a religious pilgrimage for me; even so, the stars have always been abstractions. I didn't know that, of course. I understood what the stars were, intellectually, and I thought I understood what they meant. But when I looked up at the sky, they were still little holes in a great black dome to my emotions.

To put it mildly, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has been a powerful catalyst in my life. I read it for the first time about two and a half years ago, and I haven't the time to summarize all that's happened since then. But I think I can tell you what, specifically, began it all: HPMOR made me feel the meaning of the stars.

I was at my dad's house in the middle of the country in Southern Indiana. I'd been reading the Humanism arc, and I'd gotten to about chapter 47. It was my first read-through, so I'd not slept in a while, and I'd reached the point where my eyes just couldn't focus on the page any longer. It was 3AM. As my mind was in no state for sleep, I went outside for some fresh air, and I sat down at the picnic table and poured a glass of cider. I listened to the crickets and peeping frogs, and watched the fireflies glittering at the edge of the forest.

And then I looked up -

- and if I'd not been sitting down, I would have fallen over. What I saw was the Milkey Way, only it wasn't above me. I wasn't looking up at all. I was on its outskirts looking in. And I suddenly felt, as surely as the ground beneath my feet, that I was stuck to the surface of a giant rock covered in trees and bugs and people, falling forever around a star.

And although I knew the lights were ancient, I felt I was seeing the future. Over there - right there, I could point straight at it! - across the terrifying empty distance I'd never really tried to comprehend, was a future home of our civilization. I felt that the stars, that night, were not pretty pinpricks in a black velvet dome, but beacons blazing across the cold and dark, calling from across the centuries. And I knew it is up to us, the original inhabitants of Ancient Earth, to answer.

I knew, then, that I would never again see the night sky the way I had in the past. What I did not yet know is that I'd never see anything else the same way, either.

Tortoise Report 2: Fluidity

Summary

Habit: Fluidity

Duration: 35 Days

Success: 5/10

Trigger: A clinging-grasping sensation plus fear of a rending-jarring sensation associated with anticipation of interruption, or a clinging-grasping-rending-jarring sensation all at once associated with interruptions or violations of plans.

Action: Run my simulation past the desire/reality comparison to answer the question, "How should I respond to this?", then perform a small relinquishment-like flowing motion to make that response more natural than continuing as though the interruption didn't exist.

Result:

The easiest result to pinpoint is that I no longer experience anxiety about anticipated interruptions or plan violations, or if I do they're very mild and brief. I might be spending more time on contingency plans than is optimal, since my new response is "and what will I do if that happens?", but it's still a dramatic improvement.

I also experience very little discomfort from actual interruptions and plan violations beyond what seems to me to reflect damage done by the interruption. If I'm in the middle of solving a puzzle when my phone rings, I experience brief clinging-like displeasure at the expectation that it will be difficult to pick up where I left off, or that the new object of attention won't be as fun as the one I've had to abandon, but the rending-jarring sensation that once was like nails on a chalkboard is now almost entirely absent.

I took two points off of my score because when I'm very tired and stressed, I still have anti-fluidity reactions, which are about half as frequent and about half as intense as before. The other three points represent my estimation of the distance between my proficiency with fluidity under normal conditions and complete mastery of this skill.

Interactions With Previous Habits

I think I've gained a generalized resilience skill, so this seems a good time to talk about how I distinguish cognitive skills from cognitive habits.

When I say "skill", I'm emphasizing performance, the things that happen in the outside world as a result of what you can do with your mind. By "skill" I mean "a capacity to influence the outside world in certain ways".

If you are skilled in traditional bowyery, you can turn lengths of wood into efficient bows that fire arrows without breaking. If you are skilled in epistemic callibration, you can turn beliefs about the world into predictions that turn out to be true about as often as you expect them to.

When I say "habit", I'm emphasizing mental motions, the things you do with your mind, regardless of what might happen outside of your mind as a result. Specifically, I mean the thoughts and feelings that fire as automatic reflexes in response to stimuli.

In part, cognitive habits constitute cognitive skills.

[This bit ended up being a whole lot longer than planned. I'll post an in-depth discussion of cognitive skills vs. habits of thought in the next few days.]

Notes On the Installation Procedure

Due to the getting sick, moving, officiating a wedding, and getting sick again, all in rapid succession, I was far less careful and reflective this time than the last. After my first success in responding well to the trigger, I stopped using the knitting counter almost completely, and engaged in no offline training at all. By "engaged in no offline training", I mean that I didn't set aside any time to think about the project, didn't write about it, didn't meditate on it, and didn't artificially create rapid-fire opportunities to practice. All I did was become slightly reflective when I noticed something that felt like it might be the trigger, and respond with whatever felt like it might be the thing I'd trained myself to do. That went on for about three weeks.

I'm taking this as evidence that I reach a point of diminishing returns after I start to put effort into things besides noticing triggers I've identified (where by "noticing" I mean "entering reflective attention"). I'm even wondering whether merely being aware of my tiny mental mistakes as mistakes while they're happening will lead to automatic experimentation with responses regardless of whether I've done any planning or whether I have spare cycles to think hard about what's happening as it's going on. If I can get most of the benefit of this procedure just from deliberate noticing, that would be excellent.

I'm going to test that with my next habit. I'll do the usual things up front to prepare for training, but after that I'll just practice noticing and see what happens.

Next Up

The next skill I want to work on has something to do with compassion. I think that with resilience greatly strengthened, my new bottleneck has to do with how difficult I find it to convince System 1 that other people actually exist as people, rather than as non-sentient meat puppets.

This is not coming from a place of "it's good to be compassionate", but from a place of "my ability to learn and grow is severely limited by my lack of interest in/enjoyment of what would otherwise be opportunities to learn from others, support my mental health through socialization, and strengthen the people I regularly interact with in ways that clearly advance my values".

I don't yet have a concrete understanding of what this skill is exactly, in terms of what influence I want to have over the world - let alone what specific cognitive habits will be at the core of it. Reporting on that and planning the next part of my training will be an upcoming post.

Log

1/23-24/2015

For Round 2, I’m going to tackle a specific kind of cognitive inflexibility.
I’ve long been very dependent on routines. When I have a plan or an expectation, I don't tend to handle violations of it very well. I don't like unexpected things happening, at least when they entail a change of plans. I think the next step in acquiring Resilience is becoming much more flexible in this respect.

(The previous step, “Growing the Roses Of Success”, was learning to respond more productively to failures or mistakes.)

I did a few tests of executive function via Quantified Mind to make sure there aren’t large problems there that I should be aware of, and my scores look pretty ok to me. I don’t have data on the general population, but none of the tasks was super difficult, anyway. I don’t think this is a totally general cognitive inflexibility issue. I think it’s fairly isolated, and that I’ll see results just from learning to apply my pre-existing capacity for flexibility to the weak areas.

If that happens to end up improving my overall executive functioning, maybe I’ll see it when I repeat the tests later. I doubt that’ll happen, but I might as well try it.

Time for Prep Work!

1. Be able to generate concrete examples of successes and failures to apply the skill.
   • Example of failure: I'm writing right now, and I planned to spend this pomodoro writing. In fact, in terms of my emotions, my plan is to continue writing indefinitely, and anything that stops that before my plan naturally changes will upset me. But I'm hungry. I know that I'm going to have to stop writing to eat. Possibly even in the middle of this pomo. And I don't like that. It's absolutely necessary that I eat. It's obviously a good idea. I will do better work later if I eat. But current me's plans will have to change, and that hurts.
     
     Preferred outcome: When I notice I’m hungry and that my plan to keep writing is not optimal, I feel [positive things I’m not sure of yet], which smoothly motivates me to adopt the new plan of eating before returning to work.
   
   
   • Example of failure: I'm halfway through a cup of tea while reading in the morning and Eliezer wakes up and asks for breakfast. I feel a clinging grasping rending jarring feeling, which results in irritability, and I grudgingly make breakfast while wishing he’d stayed asleep through the end of my tea. I knew when I made the tea that he might wake up in the middle of it, and rather than being emotionally prepared for that, I spent the first half of the tea mildly anxious that I’d have to change my plan. I still feel some happiness and gratitude to be making breakfast for him, but it’s overshadowed by the other thing.
     
     Preferred outcome: I smoothly transition from tea to breakfast without a sense of loss and get to enjoy making breakfast without the irritability, then I reheat the tea after breakfast and continue reading ‘til I’m done with it (if that’s still a good idea).
   
   
   • Example of failure: The instructions on the back of the cookie mix are in Spanish and therefore have temperatures in Celsius and measurements in grams. My plan when I flipped over the cookie mix bag was to find some Fahrenheit number and preheat the oven to that, and to measure some fraction of a cup of butter to make the dough. I was even prepared for words like “taza” instead of “cup”. In fact, my oven is in Celsius and my stick of butter is in grams, so the Spanish instructions taped over the English ones are far more convenient. But I still feel the clinging grasping rending jarring feeling, because Celsius and grams were not part of the plan. Metric measurements are not The Way Things Are Supposed To Be. (According to my immediate emotional responses, that is. System 2 readily grants that metric is much better and English Standard is dumb. Except that it actually prefers base 12.)
     
     When things are other than The Way Things Are Supposed To Be, I feel cheated and irritable. I feel entitled to futures that go the way I expect them to, and when they don’t go that way I feel like someone has stolen the expected futures from me without permission.
     
     Preferred outcome: I see the metric measurements, remember that they’re more useful here anyway, and feel nothing but pleasant surprise. I don’t feel pain or irritability. I simply adjust.
     
     
   • Example of failure: I go to my favorite restaurant, where I always order a bottle of sparkling water. But this time, they don't have sparkling water. I immediately feel something like, "Now my whole experience of the meal is ruined."
     
     Preferred outcome: I recognize an opportunity to find out what my favorite meal taste like with a different drink, and instead of feeling like something’s been taken from me, I feel like I’ve been given a gift.
   
   
   • Example of failure: I go to the store with a grocery list that includes cheddar, and they don't have cheddar. I feel grumpy and sort of at a loss, and I maybe don’t even buy any cheese at all. (I have actually written “or some other cheese like colby or mozzarella if they don’t have cheddar” on my grocery list just to prevent that particular outcome.)
     
     Preferred outcome: Instead of clinging desperately to the details of my grocery list, I consider it more like a source of inspiration and freely depart from its details, playfully improvising when circumstances require.
   
   I feel like a Taoist *wu wei* water metaphor belongs here. The larger skill of resilience overall reminds me of supple willow branches bending in storms without breaking, but this kind of flexibility is a little more specific. This isn’t about storms, difficult things happening that I need to be able to deal with. This is just attachment to whatever I've declared the Should Universe. There’s nothing bad or difficult about the instructions being in Celsius when my oven is also in Celsius. Celsius just happens to be the shape of reality, and all of the difficulty comes from my own basically arbitrary rigidity. In fact, I think I’m going to re-name this habit “fluidity” instead of “flexibility” to capture that.


2. If a skill requires multiple habits, train them serially, and repeat step 1 for each individual habit.
   
   I think this is a single habit? Probably?
   
3. Clearly define at least one high-quality trigger for the proposed action before beginning to train that habit.
   
   I’ll start by learning to notice the clinging grasping rending jarring feeling, but I’ll work toward identifying whatever precedes that so I can learn to prevent it.
   
   
4. Seek opportunities to practice.
   
   I don’t expect this to be necessary because of how frequently my plans are violated. I logged seven instances between 3PM and 7PM yesterday. But I can always just spread out CoZE training if needed.


5. Train triggers before actions.
   
   Clicker’s armed and ready. Though I logged seven yesterday, I’m officially starting this part today since I didn’t get going on it ‘til 3PM before.


6. Test a variety of actions if required.
   
   The default first action to try is hypnosis, since it may happen automatically with the prep work and noticing part. I’ll start listing possible actions during offline training when the time comes.
   
   
7. Maintain an offline training routine.
   
   Here are some things offline training might include for this habit.
   • MEA for Feeling Clearly:I’ll do this if I encounter trouble with noticing.
   • CoZE: Comfort Zone Expansion, aka exposure therapy. I need to find ways to drill plan changes that just barely make me uncomfortable.
   • Urge Propagation: I need to explain to System 1 why the trigger means good things instead of bad things, and what exactly those good things are. This will probably help me transition to the preferred emotional reaction, and the propagator will probably involve water.
   • Responding In Advance: I haven’t written a blog post about this yet because it needs more field testing. But all I mean by “responding in advance” is 1) simulating the trigger, default response, and preferred response in detail, then 2) reasoning about how the worlds where I end up on causal pathways toward the preferred outcome differ from the ones where I head toward the the default outcome. Thence I obtain interventions to test.

1/24/2015

4 clicks

1/25/2015

8 clicks so far today, all retrospective, though about half were just moments after the event.

Catching something about Eliezer's body language out of the corner of my eye, I noticed myself anticipating an interruption while I was reading. I had a distinct feeling of trying to push that reality away while hiding from it, distancing myself, like I could make it not come to be if I hoped hard enough. (Turns out I read him wrong and he just kept writing.)

Immediately after noticing the feeling, I felt curiosity about what would be better to feel at that time, given that I might indeed be interrupted but I couldn't be sure of it. How would I prefer to respond to anticipation of interruption?

I don't have an answer yet, but my past experience suggests that asking the question in real time is the fifth milestone in habit installation. (Since you're probably wondering at this point: The first milestone is using mid- or long-term memory to notice that you missed a chance to notice the trigger. The second is noticing you missed the trigger while it's fresh in working memory. The third is noticing the trigger as it's happening. The fourth is noticing your default response to the trigger as it's happening. The fifth is seeking a better response while the default response to the trigger is happening. The sixth is testing a specific alternative response upon noticing the trigger in real time.)

(PS I made up that list of milestones just now but it's been swimming around in my brain for weeks slowly putting itself together.)

1/26/2015

4 clicks, but I missed a bunch of opportunities to click. There was an ant invasion first thing in the morning, which put me in a bad mood and I had an awful day. I usually have tea first thing in the morning, so this was an especially unpleasant surprise interruption of routine. For a couple hours after I killed most of the ants, there were stragglers I kept having to get up to squish. I decided to only click once for the entire ant invasion fiasco, but I definitely experienced my trigger (the clinging grasping rending jarring feeling)for every stray ant, and if I'd clicked for all of them there'd have been dozens.

Also: I encountered the trigger at an epistemic update instead of a change in plans. I wasn't sure whether to click for that, but I cast my net wide in the early stages of training so I clicked.

In the middle of the period where I was periodically squishing stray ants, Eliezer figured out how to operate the microwave correctly. I'd been making due with the mysterious, apparently randomly spaced time settings that happen when you push one button, and he discovered that if you first set the power by pushing another button, you can then set the time to the second. This is useful information that makes my life easier, and he explained it to me.

I resisted. I updated immediately, not rationalizing to support my previous beliefs about the microwave or making excuses for my having been wrong, but I felt the very same clinging grasping rending jarring that I feel when something doesn't go as planned. I felt he'd stolen something that had belonged to me.

The epistemic version of this is definitely more dangerous and more important to address, but I think that the epistemic version almost never happens to me anymore. I spent several months toward the beginning of 2013 focusing on relinquishment (qua rationalist virtue). I think it worked, and these days I mostly only resist updates in this way when I'm extremely irritable. I think that the planning version is a much larger obstacle for me at this point, so I'm not going to change focus.

Still, this is not the first time I've noticed an opportunity to train a terribly important habit of thought whose trigger occurs much too rarely for the current installation procedure to work. This one happens to be really spread out because I've already taken a lot of skillpoints in relinquishment. But I'm sure that some crucial rationality skills are by their very nature high impact/low frequency. My model of how to train habits of thought can't be complete until I've developed a different approach for those longer-term habits.

The immediate practical implication of this observation is that I need to make my trigger slightly more specific to avoid firing at the wrong times. Now it will be a clinging grasping rending jarring temporal feeling, so the same as before but with a sensation of the loss of a possible future.

1/27/2015

4 clicks

1/28/2015

4 clicks

1/29/2015

4 clicks

All right, I'm not satisfied with how this is going. It's been a week, and I'm still only clicking retrospectively. (By "clicking retrospectively", I mean that I click when I noticed that I missed a chance to notice the trigger.)

I cast my net wide at the beginning of clicker training, so at first I click for all of the following:

1. Remembering a past event from the current day and inferring that the trigger probably happened. Example: A memory of preparing lunch comes to my attention. I remember that I planned to make chicken salad, but discovered that the lettuce had gone bad. My memory of it isn't detailed enough to include my internal emotional state at the time, but I think that I probably felt the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal feeling I'm watching for. I click the knitting counter.
2. Remembering a past event from the current day and knowing that the trigger happened because it's included in the memory. Example: A memory of preparing lunch comes to my attention. I remember that I planned to make chicken salad, but discovered that the lettuce had gone bad. I also remember the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal sensation I experienced upon discovering the rotten lettuce. I click the knitting counter.
3. I reflect on the event that just happened, and discover an instance of the trigger still hanging out in my working memory. Example: I'm in the process of putting together an alternate lunch plan shortly after having discovered that the lettuce is rotten. I've switched gears and am moving forward now instead of clinging to my violated expectations, but when I recall the past few minutes, the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal sensation is still fresh in my mind, and a shadow of it still colors my immediate experience.
   
   (In other words, I'm not still feeling it, but my attention never fully left it as it moved from immediate sensation to very recent memory. My thoughts about it have been continuous. To know what this is like, try paraphrasing the three bullet points you've read so far without re-reading them, then try paraphrasing a paragraph of something you read a few hours ago without re-reading it. Detail at the level of paragraphs or sentences is possible for information still contained in working memory, but that level of detail seldom makes it to long-term memory, and you'll probably have trouble giving more than a rough outline or your overall impression of the thing you read a few hours ago.)
4. I notice that the trigger is in the process of happening. Example: I'm standing in front of the fridge holding the rotten lettuce and feeling the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal feeling associated with my violated lunch plans. I notice that what I'm feeling is the trigger I've been watching for, and I click the knitting counter as it's happening.

So basically I'm still in parts one and two of clicker training after a week. This pace is probably necessary for some skills. I'd expect more patience to be necessary when the triggers are especially subtle or are just barely frequent enough for this installation procedure to be effective. But I don't want to assume that this is such a skill when I don't have enough information yet to distinguish lots-of-patience-requiring habits from habits that install quickly when I do everything right. So I'm going to change things and see what happens.

One of my hypotheses is that I've inadvertently trained the trigger of remembering missed opportunities to notice the original trigger, and that new trigger has solidified so that it's no longer pointing me toward the experience I want to notice. If this is what's going on, I could stop clicking for situations of types 1 and 2 and look only for 3 and 4. If this works, then I'll experiment with different widths of the net I cast at the beginning of habit training for the next few habits.

I don't expect that to work, though. I expect it to just lower my daily clicker score to zero. But it's a cheap test so it's what I'm going to try for tomorrow. If my clicker score is zero I'll test the next hypothesis, and if it's one or higher I'll keep going. If the average remains three or lower for more three days in a row, I'll test the next hypothesis.

Hypothesis two is that the simulated subjective experience I have stored in my brain as the trigger is insufficiently vivid, so actually experiencing the thing in real time does not fire an association with the fact of trigger-ness. If that's the case, I should spend one to five minutes first thing in the morning meditating on the mental state of the trigger.

Hypothesis three is that the trigger is simply too infrequent. The cheaper intervention to try for this is regular CoZE training, where I find a way to deliberately practice this particular thing many times in a solid block. The more expensive way, which I'll try if that doesn't work, is to artificially increase the frequency of the trigger through an intermittent form of CoZE training, which I'll need to design.

Hypothesis four is that I have the wrong trigger, and I need to come up with a better one.

Hm, I just felt the "anticipating an interruption" thing again. I don't have time to go into any more detail in this update right now, but I think I just became convinced that the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal sensation is actually a progression, and rending-jarring only happen when my anticipation of interruption/plan violation turn out to be correct. Yet the clinging-grasping is problematic and distracting, and my automatic response to it is to force it down. I need to examine this more carefully in the near future.

1/30/2015

7 clicks

1/31/2015

5 clicks

2/1/2015

4 clicks today.

I'm catching the trigger in real-time now. I don't know if it's because I stopped clicking retrospectively, or because I thought a lot about it and that caused automatic vivid simulation.

I've thought some more about the anticipation of the trigger thing. I felt it yesterday and happened to spontaneously respond well, specifically by running my simulation past the thing I feared and on to the best way to respond should the interruption happen. Having a preferred response in hand already, I feel like I should run with it.

I think this habit has two closely related triggers, and they're so closely related that I'm going to go ahead and try training them simultaneously.

The first trigger is anticipation of interruption or plan violation, and my default response to it is to think bad things at my simulation of the interruption, feeling as though that will prevent it from actually happening. That feels like the clinging-grasping plus fear of the rending-jarring.

The other trigger is what I've been talking about so far: clinging-grasping-rending-jarring all at once, with a temporal element indicating an interruption or plan violation as opposed to a-temporal epistemic counterevidence. My default response to that is to dwell on the differences between what happened and what I wanted to happen, which prolongs the rending-jarring and prevents re-planning.

I'm going to try training these simultaneously not just because the triggers are so similar, but because it seems like the correct response might be the same in both cases.

New trigger-action plans:

If I feel the clinging-grasping sensation with fear of rending-jarring in the future, then I will run my simulation past the feared event to answer the question, "How should I respond to that?"

If I feel the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring all at once, then I will run my simulation past the present moment's anticipation/reality comparison to answer the question, "How should I respond to this?"

I could spend some extra off-line training time trying to pin down what precise mental motions will be required, but it seems like just trying it without worrying about how it'll play out avoids premature optimization.

2/2/2014

1 click.

2/3/2014

2 clicks.

2/4/2014

3 clicks.

Ants have been an ongoing battle here, as you may recall from my entry on Jan. 26th. I can keep them out, for the most part, as long as I spray a new line of Raid across the porch the moment I see an ant inside. If I fail to do that, the whole colony invades my kitchen while I sleep. I was spraying every two days for a while, and then they stopped for a whole month, and recently they've started again.

I was in the middle of a yin yoga session just now when I noticed an ant on the floor. I felt the trigger for an opportunity to practice fluidity--the clinging, grasping, rending, and jarring all at once--but before it could really get going, I successfully responded with the action I planned three days ago. "If I feel the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring all at once, then I will run my simulation past the present moment's anticipation/reality comparison to answer the question, 'How should I respond to this?'"

That plan included a prediction I hadn't verified in real time, but I did indeed experience two simultaneous simulations--the version of the present moment where there's no ant and I continue my yoga session, and the actual present moment where there's an ant and I have to decide what to do about it--and there was definitely a feeling of holding one against the other. There was something else I didn't predict, though, which was a movement toward something like rationalization. I felt myself checking to see if I could get away with behaving as though the preferred version of the present moment were the real one. (The "default response" I'd noted previously was just the looping present moment comparison.)

It was actually that rationalization-like movement that let me follow through with the trigger-action plan quite quickly. It was similar to the trigger for a habit I've already trained, namely relinquishment of false beliefs in the face of counter evidence, and the motion of fluidity is similar to relinquishment. So I ran my simulation past the present moment and toward the action I needed to take. It ouput "pause the yoga, kill the ant, spray the Raid, return to yoga".

That had an effect almost identical to "leaving a line of retreat". The epistemic version of leaving a line of retreat--visualizing the world as it would be if the thing you hope isn't true turned out to be true--makes fair assessment of probabilities easier. In this instrumental case, simulating what I needed to do, on its own terms without comparison to the Should Universe wherein abide My Plans, meant that a tiny little relinquishment-like flowing motion was enough to cause virtually painless follow through.

I think I've actually implemented this trigger-action plan successfully a few times now, but I've been sick and thus awfully low on concentration for the past few days. This is probably the first one accompanied by sufficient reflectivity for recording. I think that mastery of this skill probably entails zero pain in follow-through. I'm not sure if that's a realistic goal or not, but at this stage I might as well shoot for it. But I expect an 80/20 situation again.

It's interesting, this skill is exactly non-attachment as discussed in Zen, or at least its instrumental form. Not that it's a Zen-specific thing in Buddhism; I'm pretty sure this is also the heart of the third Theravada perfection, nekkhama, "renunciation". But it's always discussed, praised, illustrated. If there are instructions for training this specific thing, I've never seen them written down, nor heard them in a dharma talk. Despite having read about non-clinging and non-attachment over and over again across several years of Buddhist study, both academic and religious-ish, practical experience is so important for recognizing this kind of habit that I had no idea I was planning to train something I'd heard of before until I was actually in the middle of training it. I remain oh so curious about how targeted the curriculum for monks turns out to be in real life. There's a gulf between theory and wall-sitting, and I'm less convinced by the day that "more sitting" is in fact the most efficient bridge.

2/5/2014

2 clicks

2/25/2015

Formal training of fluidity got a little bumpy. I moved home from Chile, officiated a wedding, and got sick, without a break in between. My new context also caused me to wear different clothes, which made keeping the knitting counter on me all the time much more difficult. As a result, my training has been a lot less reflective.

But it's still been happening, and I'm sort of grateful for the opportunity to see what happens when I get the ball rolling and then let my attention stray elsewhere.

The most interesting result has been that fluidity and growing the roses have both blended and expanded to create what feels like a generalized resilience skill, which was indeed the goal, and I'm amazed that it's happened so quickly. It doesn't feel complete, but it's a tremendous improvement.

The expansion started out with clicking accidentally for growing the roses instead of fluidity. Then I started forgetting which was which, and just taking the right action instead of stopping to sort out which habit I was practicing. Then I started clicking for triggers that are phenomenologically similar to one of the habits, and intuiting the correct response as an extrapolation from fluidity and growing the roses. Now I seem to be practicing a spirit of resilience mostly unreflectively.

I think what's going on is that I've unconsciously tuned into a proto-trigger for every sort of interaction with the Should Universe. I think this because I'm responding differently to things that look like my established triggers from the outside, but are apparently completely different from the inside, at least once they've been going long enough for me to have become consciously aware of them.

For example, it used to be that when Eliezer delegated a task to me and I caused an outcome he didn't want, I would feel inadequate and sad, like I'd let him down and he must be disappointed in me. (Like maybe he asked me to make dinner and though I thought I did a perfectly good job, he likes his steaks medium well instead of medium rare, and I didn't know that. Just a toy example.) Often he'd have to either put up with the outcome he got or seek a different outcome himself, because I'd lost the ability to think productively about the issue.

Although from the outside that looks like a concurrence of the trigger for growing the roses (it's an instance of a personal failure, sort of) with the trigger for fluidity (I expected him to express satisfaction with the outcome, and he didn't), it *feels* different from both from the inside. Phenomenologically, my old default response here was a highly social emotion that was all about inadequacy, not a "surprise and trapped sinking sensation" or a "clinging grasping rending jarring sensation".

Since I've been back, I've noticed that my new response is to say, "Ok, how would you like it instead?" and to feel motivated to cause the other outcome. Note that that response is also different from either of the trained responses. The trained response to "surprise and trapped sinking" is nonchalant interest in what went wrong, an impulse to weigh whether it's worth trying to repair completely, and a motivation to make any cheap repairs that are available immediately. This is more like, "that's ok, I'll try something else or do it over again, even if it's sort of costly, 'cause that's what needs doing!". The trained response to "clinging grasping rending jarring" is to continue my simulation past the reality/preference comparison to play through "how should I respond to that?". I'm not noticing a "how should I respond to that?" query, just a complete automatic re-direction. (I notice that something is not quite right about the things I say in this paragraph, but I'm too sleepy to figure it out right now.)

Similar things have happened for "feeling grumpy about having to do something that I don't want to do" and "spending lots of energy on wishing that the world were otherwise even when the way it is is exactly how I expected it to be". I'm not sure I even *had* the thought "WHY DID I HAVE TO CATCH A COLD RIGHT BEFORE OFFICIATING THIS WEDDING?!" which is astonishing in retrospect.

So I think there must be a should-universe sensation that's so tiny I'm not even reflectively aware of it yet, and a fluidity-like mental motion that's so tiny I'm not aware of that either, and practicing a couple of habits that contain each of these was sufficient to train the fluidity-like thing in response to the should-universe thing as a generalized resilience skill.

This leads to meeting a wide range of adversities with far more flexibility and grace than I could have imagined just three months ago. It all feels very aikido: "Don't get in the way, just redirect momentum."

I feel like I'm at about 5/10 with resilience, so I have as far to go as I've come so far if I'm right about that. But the ball's still rolling, and it looks at this point like I'll keep improving regardless of whether I'm training formally.

Responding To Overconfidence

Without Googling, what's your 95% confidence interval for the longest time spent in labor? Feel free to post it in the comments before reading on.

I just encountered this question on William MacAskill's Facebook wall. When I looked it up, after posting my answer, I discovered that my upper bound was off by a factor of 10.

I was reluctant to answer the question in the first place, but I didn't stop to examine why. It is now clear to me: When it's revealed that I'm extremely overconfident about something, my default response is shame and regret.

I used to respond much more strongly with shame and regret than I do now. I recall an occurrence of this reaction from about three years ago. The reaction was so strong that many vivid details of the context are readily available in memory. (Whether they're accurate is a separate question.) Robby and I were in the the pizzeria on Kirkwood sitting at a table by the door. It was raining. We were having bread sticks with cheese sauce, and he asked me, "What's your 90% confidence interval for when Reverend Bayes was born?"

Immediately I felt attacked and defensive. I did not know what a confidence interval was at the time, so he spent a few minutes explaining it to me. After that, he wanted me to answer, and I was so scared. I don't remember why, but I remember the feeling very well. I was terrified that I'd be way off, and that this test would reveal my embarrassing mistake. I answered anyway because I'd recently discovered Lesswrong, so I felt that this was a kind of question I was Supposed To answer if I wanted epistemic improvement. (The question was actually taken from a Lesswrong survey.) And I was definitely Supposed To know when Bayes was born!

Sure enough, I was way off. And sure enough, the shame flooded over me like a bucket of ice water. I felt terrible, and I regretted answering the question.

A lot of things have happened in the intervening time to lesson the shame response. I don't know what most of them are, but watching people I respect readily and casually test their predictions and reveal their mistakes has surely been part of it. Curing social anxiety also contributed, obviously.

It's not been enough, though. When I answered the labor question, I still felt enough of the shame to overshadow the recalibration going on beneath it. I did feel the recalibration as well, but it was subtle enough by comparison that if I hadn't been training mindfulness of this sort of mental motion in the recent past, I'd have missed it. And I certainly didn't catch the details.

That's a problem. I can't optimize a process I'm never aware of in real time. It doesn't matter how well I understand Bayesian updating when some other sensation is drowning out all my opportunities to apply my understanding.

You might think, "Ah, but those negative feelings are useful, because if you're punished for being overconfident then you might be less confident in the future!" What actually happens is that I'm less likely to put myself in situations that would reveal my overconfidence if it existed. Which shouldn't be surprising from a behavioral psychology perspective: The immediately preceding action was "answer calibration question", not "form a belief and establish a level of confidence in it".

If I were going to train a better reaction to calibration opportunities properly, I'd spend a few days studying my default reaction and becoming as mindful of it as possible. I'd also examine whether my default reaction suggested an emotional need of some sort that the optimal response ought to address, especially if my reaction were as strong now as it was three years ago. Only then would I begin considering possible interventions.

But this particular reaction seems to be in a class of habits that are very important but whose triggers are much too rare for the current version of the Tortoise Skills installation procedure. So instead, I'm going to try doing an abbreviated version of the procedure in case it turns out that I can get marginal improvements quickly from isolated cases like this.

My best guess at how I'd rather respond to discovering I'm extremely overconfident is about the same as the response I learned to have to failures. I'd like to feel nonchalant interest in my overconfidence. Further, I'd like that interest to inspire targeted curiosity about the cause of the overconfidence, and increased sensitivity to similar contexts or patterns of thought that might signal severe overconfidence if I encounter them when forming or considering other beliefs.

But the most important part is just letting go of the thing that drags me down into counterproductive emotions. A flavor of wu wei, maybe, of fluidity. My brain's pretty good, really, when I can keep from getting in its way. If I can just stop doing the stupid thing, I often don't need a brilliant solution on top of it.

I don't know how I do that "letting go of the dragging-downward" thing, but I do know that I've learned to do it at least once before. I'll plan to imagine Eliezer discovering overconfidence and his usual response, as a reminder that other responses are possible, in case I need some extra help.

So, here's the new trigger-action plan, which I will not train but will instead simply intend and await: If I notice that my overconfidence has been revealed, then I will loosen my grip on the downward-dragging sensations and direct my attention instead to even the tiniest sensation of reflective interest. If I have trouble with that, I will imagine how Eliezer would react in my place.