Availability: Imaginations Gone Wild

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut we use in place of time-consuming statistical algorithms when making decisions under uncertainty.

When we estimate the likelihood of being eaten by a grumple bug, we substitute for other statistical methods a subjective measurement of how easy it is to imagine being eaten by a grumple bug. If I live in a small nomadic tribe where no one has ever recounted the tale of how his great aunt was eaten by a grumple bug while out hunting--indeed, a tribe where no one has ever even heard of a grumple bug--I'll understandably estimate the likelihood of being eaten by a grumple bug to be low. As a result, I'll spend very little time worrying about grumple bugs, and will instead devote my resources to watching for dangers I hear about all the time, like tigers, rival tribes, and poisonous mushrooms that take your soul to the afterlife even before your body bites the dust. Grumple bugs aren't very available in memory compared to tigers.

If, however, the tale of the time great aunt Cathy was eaten by a tiger while out on a hunt is told over and over again around the camp fire, I may begin to spend more of my time watching out for tigers than avoiding heat exhaustion. Never mind that heat exhaustion is actually much more likely and equally deadly. When that happens, the availability heuristic dons its other masque: the availability bias.

Ease of Imagery

Availability, as both a heuristic and a bias, apparently comes down to ease of imagery. By "imagery", I mean something broader than "how easy it is to conjure up a visual representation". When you imagine a tiger, you probably don't just see a still photograph or painting of a tiger in your mind. Imagination can be fully immersive; imaginary tigers are big and orange with black stripes, but they also growl, slink stealthily while stalking prey, drip wet blood from their fangs, and smell of musk and raw meat.

Several things contribute to ease of imagery. One is actual frequency in the local environment, which might  or might not match global frequency. Maybe grumple bugs are a thing a couple hundred miles south, and I'll be caught unaware if the tribe heads that direction. Another is repetition. It's useful to rely on ease of imagery when I'm unlikely to hear about grumple bugs very often in a place where there are no grumple bugs; on the other hand, I'll probably hear about tigers more frequently than the occurrence of tigers in the local environment warrants, because tiger stories are way more gripping than heat exhaustion stories. They have conflict, protagonists, antagonists, narrative arcs, and often social drama. That's the formula for deep significance to a human brain. "Tom died 'cause he got too hot" doesn't measure up. As with tigers on the ancestral savanna, so too with cougars in the modern American Midwest, alligators in the sewers of New York, and kidney theft.

Tigers seem more at home in the imagination than does heat exhaustion, don't they? I can come up with an equally detailed description of heat exhaustion if I try, but it takes more work. There's something more going on with ease of imagery than frequency of exposure and narrative structure. Since I'm cheating with the picture of the tiger in the top right, imagine instead a human-sized duck holding an umbrella while playing a kazoo.

Got it? Ok, now imagine the availability heuristic. Very different sort of experience, right?

Here's what's up with the wacky duck. The duck is simple, concrete, vivid (for multiple sensory modalities), and emotionally engaging (humorous, specifically, and also surprising due to its strangeness). The availability heuristic, by contrast, is complicated, abstract, murky, and boring (at least at first blush).

To recap, the core of availability is ease of imagery, which is a combination of frequency of exposure (repetition), meaningful narrative context, concreteness, vividness, and emotional impact.

It's not true, of course, that drugged travelers sometimes wake up in bathtubs full of ice to discover that their interanal organs have been stolen for sale on the black market. But it's a concrete, vivid, meaningful story oft repeated for emotional impact, so people accept it as fact before System Two ever gets a chance to go, "Wait a minute, you want me to believe what?"

Further Resources

• intro to availability by Eliezer Yudkowsky
• study of ease of imagery, purposful imagining, and availability
• study of emotion and availability
• wonderful book about why some ideas survive and others die
• the next post in this sequence, which I'll link to as soon as it exists and will be about engineering memory for availability

Salvaging Sacraments

I'm a recovering Catholic. Although I don't believe in God and don't attend Mass except on rare occasion for the purpose of singing, I miss the Sacraments dearly, and in particular I miss the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

I get that Confession seems kinda weird at first blush. You're telling someone who may or may not be a total stranger about all of the bad things you did, highly personal and otherwise, possibly in great detail, in order to receive imaginary forgiveness from an imaginary god, and then you're letting the stranger dole out a punishment that might not be at all related to your actual sins. I can understand why that would appear creepy, pointless, and horribly unpleasant, perhaps even to a pseudo-Catholic let alone to an atheist and total outsider.

Let me see if I can explain why anyone would ever be motivated to go to Confession out of something besides obligation or fear of damnation. Catholics often say that the Sacraments are "outward signs of inward grace". When I was little, coming to understand (some of) what they meant by that had a pretty profound effect. Abstract ideas like contrition, forgiveness, devotion, and faith are invisible and elusive. It's not always easy to get your brain around them enough for them to impact your daily life.

It's a bit like when you genuinely believe that it's a good idea to learn calculus, but "calculus" feels like such a murky, distant, impenetrable concept that you're not sure how to do anything about it. Sacraments are concrete symbols for abstract ideas and events that help you get a handle on similarly murky things like your relationship with God.

If I made a Catholic-style sacramental rite out of calculus, it would go something like this.

1. Recite: "Mathematics is vast and immaculate. My understanding is meager and flawed. May studying the Calculus one day unite me with Mathematical perfection. Amen."
2. Open a Calculus textbook. Read a section. Do the exercises. Reflect on what I do and don't understand, what I could have done better, and what flaws in my pre-existing understanding are preventing me from progressing further.
3. State my current understanding of what I read to a professor. Show them my exercises. Listen to their feedback. 
4. The professor recites: "Mathematics is vast and immaculate. May your understanding advance toward perfection. In the name of the Calculus, I grant you your next assignment." (I receive the assignment.)

Reconciliation is similar.

1. Examine my conscience. Call to mind the sins I've committed, and reflect on them.
2. Recite (something along the lines of): "Most merciful God, I confess that I have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what I have done, and by what I have left undone. I have not loved you with my whole heart; I have not loved my neighbors as myself. I am truly sorry, and I humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on me and forgive me; that I may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name. Amen."
3. Go to a priest and tell him what I've done wrong. Maybe talk to him about it a bit so I better understand why I did what I did and why I am sorry.
4. The priest says, "Almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you all your sins through our Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen you in all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit keep you in eternal life." Then he assigns a penance, an actionable plan for atonement, and I carry it out.

Inasmuch as reconciliation can have positive effects--and I think it can(1)--what we're dealing with here is a sort of urge propagation.

Through concrete actions and carefully designed rituals, you are forcing yourself to encounter something you'd rather flinch away from, and you're grappling with it right now instead of leaving your future selves to endure a vague and undirected sense of guilt over mistakes you don't even think about let alone correct. Religious or not, nobody benefits from ignoring problems that need solving, and nobody's as good at allowing abstract ideas like "being a good person" to transform their day-to-day lives as they are at making incremental improvements via specific actions (though those actions may be motivated by abstract ideas). Lofty resolutions are not effective without well-designed mechanisms of action, and rituals are awesome at being that.

I don't think you'd need to change much to salvage the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Try this, and see how it goes. (And if you do try it, tell me how it went.)

1. Pick a regular time to think about what mistakes you made that week.
2. Write them down. Consider why each was a mistake, and why you made it. For the most important ones, think of plans for mitigating or repairing the damage if possible, and for preventing the mistake in the future.
3. If you know someone who would be willing to help you with this, tell them some of your thoughts, and request advice for improving your plans. If you're the sort of person who's likely to benefit from it, choose a highly respected mentor instead of a peer. Make sure you know precisely what specific action to take next for each mistake you want to address. (This is something like, "This evening, ask Cathy whether what I said hurt her, and actually listen to what she has to say about it." It is not something like, "Be nicer to Cathy.")
4. Take the actions on your list. After each action, punch the air and shout "VICTORY!" When your whole list is done, call up your friend so they can tell you YAY!

What other parts of life might be improved by secular rituals?

_____________________________________________________________________

1) Don't get me wrong; I'm aware that the Sacrament of Reconciliation is harmful overall--as are all the Sacraments--since it propagates and reinforces a destructive memeplex. And probably for other reasons.

Perceptual Editing

In a practice run of his CFAR unit called “Narratives”, Val brought to my attention a pretty awesome skill, and I’d like to share the basics with you. His class includes some more advanced techniques that build on what follows, but I want to try to highlight their foundations.

You may be familiar with the idea that we view reality through a flawed lens. Our experiences do not convey information about the external world with perfect accuracy. For example, there is a blind spot in your visual field that your brain automatically fills in with its best guess (sometimes wrong) of what’s actually out there.(1)

The technique I want to talk about relies on the fact that our experiences comprise not only things that have passed through the perceptual lens, but also content we personally contribute. In cognitive biases called “selective perception” and “attentional bias”, for example, what we already expect to experience and where those expectations direct our attention prevent us from perceiving an accurate reflection of what’s happening. If you've tried this attention test, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

How Thoughts Feel From the Outside

But not all of our personal contributions to experience are so drastic, and they certainly aren’t all harmful. Every time I let a judgement, evaluation, or attitude affect how the world seems to me, that’s something that’s coming from inside my own head, not outside of it. Even if my judgement is totally accurate and instrumentally valuable, it’s nevertheless a process occurring strictly inside my own mind. Many Buddhists strongly emphasizes this point, and prescribe terminating such contributions so we can become more directly acquainted with reality. (I’m just pointing out that it’s been a topic of interest for thousands of years, not suggesting you follow those instructions.)

“Perceptual editing” (my term) is the ability first to recognize when you’re making a personal contribution to experience, then to decide whether it’s a contribution you actually want to make, and finally to leverage the opportunity and deliberately choose what contribution you’d rather make, if any.

Perceptual contributions often happen in the form of verbal narration (a process called “subvocalization”). When you read these words, it’s likely you’re hearing them spoken by a little imaginary voice inside your head. Unless, I suppose, you've eliminated that in the course of learning to speed read, in which case I ask that you slow down so you can play along. That voice is your very own creation. Once you've noticed that it exists and that it’s neither part of the world nor identical with whatever is listening to the voice, you’re most of the way to gaining some degree of control over it. You can, for example, re-read this sentence and replace your internal narration of the words in red with a narration of “popsicle”. (Humor me and give it a try.)

Similarly, this same internal voice narrates nearly all of our experiences (at least for most people). It’s so ubiquitous that we hardly ever notice it, like a fish unaware of the water. For example, I just thought, “I’m getting hungry. I wonder if Robby wants to get lunch.” Had I not deliberately distanced myself from my inner narration in order to examine its contents as though from the outside, that thought would have drifted on by and been erased from my memory before I ever so much as attended to its existence. If you don’t believe me (or if you want a better grasp on this idea), try the following.

Noticing, Distancing, Editing

Set a timer for two minutes. Just sit there and attempt, for those two minutes, not to subvocally narrate your experiences. Ready, set, go.

To the extent you were successful, you probably had to exert effort to squash verbalizations the moment they began to arise in consciousness. It may have felt like pushing something down.

Now try that exercise again, but this time don’t try to prevent subvocalization. Simply notice when it happens. More importantly, pay attention to how being aware of your inner narration feels different from your usual experiences. Notice how it feels like there’s more distance than usual between yourself and your thoughts.

Finally, sit silently just long enough to notice the next subvocalization that arises. Then pick something to change about it, and then think that instead. For example, if I noticed myself thinking, “I really love chocolate ice cream,” I might edit that phrase to “I really like chocolate covered strawberries”. (The purpose here is merely to observe the sensation of making decisions about what you think.) 

How quickly can you edit? Can you feel the gist of what you're about to think and change the course of your thought before it's over? It's not easy at first, but neither is it impossible.

It's Sort Of a Superpower, Actually

Subvocalization is not, of course, the only kind of contribution we make to experience. We contribute all sorts of things, such as moods, attention, and interpretations. Although you can eventually gain direct control over other kinds of perceptual contributions, you may find that narration is the easiest one to get a handle on. Fortunately, changing the content of your narration can cause changes to your mood, attention, and interpretations as well.

Why is that fortunate? Because our personal contributions to experience do not always help us. Sometimes they do--if I’m working on a difficult problem and I think “I can totally do this”, it might keep me motivated to find a solution--and sometimes they have no noticeable effect at all. But sometimes they harm us, adding aversive aspects to an experience that would be easier to deal with otherwise.

Harmful subvocalization is especially pronounced in clinical depression. Depressed people tend to get in these feedback loops where they feel bad, they tell themselves about how they’re feeling bad, it makes them feel worse, and they become more likely to say things to themselves about how bad they feel as a result. Phrases that contribute to this sort of problem include “I’m worthless” and “I’ll never be happy”.

But you don’t have to be depressed to benefit from the ability to edit your thoughts. Whenever you notice yourself thinking something, if you can distance yourself from it enough to consider it from the outside, you can decide whether it’s a helpful thought or not, and choose, if you prefer, to think something else instead.

The process of noticing, distancing, and editing takes practice, and I think time spent practicing this ability is probably time very well spent indeed. The better you get at shaping the contents of your experiences, the less you are at the mercy of contributions you did not choose to make.

___________________________________________________________________

(1) Not everyone thinks this is how the optical blind spot works. Dennett's view is quite interesting (and here Ramachandran summarizes it and argues against it).

____________________________________________________________

Edited to add: 

Distancing is also useful all by itself without editing. I just tried it on a strongly aversive experience. 

The simple facts (without much contribution from me) are: I committed a faux pas, my friend pointed it out to me, I understood both my error and how to prevent it in the future, and I apologized. Since I committed it in the course of helping him with something (at which I was successful overall), he went on to thank me after asking me not to make the mistake again.

But I personally contributed most of what I actually ended up experiencing. The moment I saw the subject line of the email, which said "Please do not [mistake I made] again," I interpreted it as being scolded, and thus felt a huge wave of shame and embarrassment. Fortunately, since I'd just written the above, I noticed that I was responding with emotions that I seldom find useful (though I am beset by them frequently, alas).

So I created some distance between myself and the thought. From there, I was able to separate out the externally derived components of the experience from the components I'd imposed on it myself. The strong emotional reaction was a response caused by my interpretation of the situation, and not by the email itself. 

I determined that not only was my interpretation almost certainly false (since a more likely motive than punishing me is causing me to not repeat the mistake by merely requesting it), but even if it did reflect reality it was unlikely to have a positive effect on my actions. Since the interpretation (and my reaction to it) no longer felt like an inextricable part of the experience--in fact it had already been extricated--I just let it drift away like a subvocalization that doesn't interest me. 

Now the only remaining effects are new knowledge of how to do better, resolution to act on it, and very mild remnants of shame and embarrassment that are quickly fading since they're no longer being fed by the harmful contribution to experience that I did not choose to make. All of this took around 30 seconds (though I expect it would have taken a lot longer were it not for my background with meditation).

This is huge for me. I've possessed all the sub skills for a long time, but I had no idea they could be so potent when combined and purposefully directed.  I don't think I've ever felt this much power over the effects of my social anxiety.

The Vagabond of Tragedy and Triumph

Something important happened to me tonight.

On the train home, an old black man with patchy gray hair was slumped pathetically across the seats in clear view of where I sat. With a torn and dirty jacket draped over his shoulders, he cradled his head in his hands, propped up on the armrest while his legs stretched out to the seat opposite him.

He was not in good shape. He was trembling slightly, and his long yellowing fingernails tapped against the armrest. Every couple of minutes, he would lean over slightly and spit a thin stream of vomit onto the floor of the train. Once when he shifted, the left arm of his jacket fell down into the puddle.

His unwashed, tattered appearance suggested he was riding the train more for the shelter than to go anywhere in particular. Anything looks more comfortable than his awkward position across those seats, but I suppose the concrete must get awfully cold and hard after a while.

I've never been one to reach out and help strangers whose lives have fallen apart, even when all they ask of me is a dollar for some food. I once felt at least a little bit of empathy for them. Mostly, though, what I felt was helpless.

Making one person's day slightly less horrific just isn't a very good use of my money, time, or emotional energy. To be mumbling paranoid nonsense on a street corner while you slowly starve and freeze is to live a life so shattered that picking up any one of the pieces will not restore wholeness. My dollar will not save anyone, and, more saliently to me, will not bring an end to the conditions that allow such misery to exist in the first place. I do believe that I can bring an end to those conditions, but not by helping any individual person in misery. So I've learned to feel very little at all when I pass them without more than a brief glance.

But I was seated beside him for several minutes, so I could not walk past. I probably could have ignored him anyway if I'd chosen, but for some reason, this time I engaged my thoughts and emotions. I guess I was curious. I wondered what it might be like to be inside his head.

And this is when the important thing happened. As soon as I felt the first pang of empathy, I imagined the world I was trying to create. I felt suffering with him (tiny though  mine was), and immediately, automatically, I envisioned a future free of suffering. It wasn't so much like flicking a switch as like being the flicked switch. I did not participate deliberatively in this event.

It was familiar to feel responsible for his pain, and for all the pain in the world. I've long been wired that way. Yet I felt neither helpless, nor guilty, nor even charitable confronting the experience. I just knew, more plainly and clearly than I ever have, that the future of humanity will not be so ugly as that present moment in which a tragic old man failed to sleep above a growing puddle of vomit.

And simultaneously I knew that it would not be that way because I would not let it. On one side was the man on the train, on the other the salvation of all sentient beings, and bridging the two states of affairs was a solid progression of cause and effect consisting of precisely the kinds of actions I take every day.

There's a CFAR unit called "propagating urges" in which students learn to take their desires to accomplish long-term goals and use them to fuel motivation for the individual actions required to accomplish those goals. For instance, I might propagate the urge to grade all 70 essays so I can successfully complete my degree by imagining receiving my diploma every time I reach for a new page.

I think I may not need to propagate urges when it comes to my work anymore. The drudgery of carrying out the kind of altruism I consider maximally effective is saving the world. It's suddenly become a simple fact of my life. The world will be saved, and I will save it.

What is "Effective Altruism"?

Effective altruism is altruism that attempts to be maximally effective. An effective altruist chooses her charitable actions not, for instance, by thinking of what she's most passionate about (helping the homeless, say) and then taking the most obvious, readily available actions, or those with the most emotional impact for her (like volunteering at a soup kitchen), but instead tries to take into account all the possible ways she might have of affecting the world, and then picking the one she expects, based on empirical evidence and careful thought, to cause the most good.

Some people's answer to, "What's the most good I can do?" is "Donate to the charity that's most cost-effective at saving lives." (It's orders of magnitude more effective to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation than to donate to your local children's hospital, for example.) Some take non-human animals into account and end up with very different kinds of answers, as you can imagine given how many more non-humans there are than humans. Some think the answer is to choose a career that will make them as much money as possible while doing relatively little harm so they'll eventually have lots more money with which to do good. Some think preventing the sudden extinction of all of humanity ("reducing existential risk") is more effectively altruistic than any specific short-term act of charity we could perform for an individual.

The effective altruists focused on the far distant future are those who value future people as much as current people, and who believe that the distant future is likely to to contain vastly more people than the present. This is the category I fall into. A focus on the far distant future can look even less like conventional charity, because some methods of affecting the future of humanity can be extremely unintuitive. Some people intend to eradicate death caused by aging. One organization called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute intends to build and artificial intelligence that understands and cares primarily about human values, can modify its own code in order to get better at effective altruism, and by this means ends up way better than any human could ever be at making the entire future awesome.

So effective altruism is extremely diverse. It can be giving a dollar directly to someone who needs it, or it can be researching how to teach a computer what humans care about. What matters is the motivation: effective altruists want to be effective, and they try to know something about how to do that.

A few organizations in what's recently become know as "the EA movement":

• Give Directly, which takes your dollar and hands it directly to someone in Kenya
• Giving What We Can, which encourages people to pledge 10% of their income to effective charities
• Give Well, which researches charities and ranks them by lives saved per dollar donated
• 80,000 Hours, which provides career advice for people who want to find the path toward doing the most good
• Effective Animal Activism, which aims to prevent as much animal suffering as possible
• Leverage Research, which studies how to make humanity better at things on a very large scale
• The Center for Applied Rationality, which researches how to help individual people become better at things
• Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which researches how to cure aging
• The Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which studies how to make a smarter-than-human computer that makes the world better

For a somewhat more in-depth look at the EA movement, check out lukeprog's summary on lesswrong.com, written shortly after the very first Effective Altruism Summit in July, 2013. Or see Peter Singer's Ted Talk on the topic if you're tired of reading.

At the very least, use your enemies wisely.

Guns don't kill people. The boundary conditions of the universe kill people.

A friend of mine shared this image on Facebook, and it showed up in my feed. I have some things to say to all of you, pro-life and pro-choice alike, about it.

I feel like we're talking past each other. And by "we" I mean everyone. This image really bothers me, not because there are guns pointed at a fetus, or because I strongly support Planned Parenthood, but because it reinforces the misrepresentation of the pro-choice position as anti-life. This really is not so far from an image of pro-choicers eating babies.

If we want to make progress, we have to be willing to communicate and collaborate rather than antagonize, and that means making an honest effort to understand the beliefs and motives of those who disagree with us. The terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are already a huge barrier, because they frame the issue confusingly and counterproductively.

If I understand correctly, and I've made an honest effort to, people who support legislation that denies a women the right to kill a fetus, should one begin growing inside her body, do so because they believe fetuses are a type of child, and therefore a moral patient toward whom we are responsible as we would be any other person.There are variations, of course: Some believe fetuses have human souls, and that the same religious doctrines apply to them as to any other child of God. Some are concerned that since we can't currently be certain at what point a developing human becomes capable of suffering, we're obligated to behave as though even a zygote can suffer. But by and large, those who want to restrict reproductive rights in favor of the rights of fetuses believe that humans are people regardless of their age, be that three days, three months, or thirty years. The right of a person to live is more fundamental than the specific rights a person has over her body. Not only does this make good sense to me, but I agree on that final point, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't.

But it is inane, petty, and intellectually dishonest to suggest that we can rightly conclude from knowledge of someone's anti-abortion beliefs that she therefore does not highly value women's reproductive rights. Let alone that she therefore hates women and wants the government to dictate everything that happens to her body.

The implicit claim of this image is similarly inane, petty, and dishonest. It suggests that if a person doesn't support legislation that limits women's access to medical procedures that kill fetuses, she therefore thinks such specific rights should be valued above the right of a person not to be killed. It shouldn't take more than five seconds to see the problem here. Perhaps one need be a monster to murder another person in cold blood, but that's not even in the ballpark of concluding that embryos don't have enough of the relevant properties to be thought of as people.

If we didn't childishly divide ourselves along these lines into the good people and the evil people, the humanists and the misogynists, the godly and the baby killers, both sides could make progress toward what they value at the same time. If we saw each other as people instead of as murderers who hold guns to the heads of unborn babies, we could join forces to decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies, to support mothers who do want children, to ease the burden of caring for an infant so the prospect of carrying to term isn't so devastating when things don't go as planned. And all the while, we could continue talking about the core issue, which is what a fetus really is and what rights it ought to have, and people will be a hell of a lot more willing to change their minds when recognizing the truth doesn't mean joining The Dark Side.

So regardless of your position on abortion, it is not in your interest, or the interest of those whose rights you want to protect, to promote hatred, misunderstanding, and the desire to Defeat the Enemy. Instead, promote kindness, promote understanding, and promote collaboration toward shared goals. Do not post this garbage. If you're on my feed or reading this blog, you're almost certainly above it.

Polyphasic Sleep: Reprise

(Original post on the polyphasic sleep experiment here.)

Welp, this got a little messy. The main culprit was Burning Man, though there were some other complications with data collection as well. Here are the basics of what went down.

Fourteen people participated in the main experiment. Most of them were from Leverage. There were a few stragglers from a distance, but communication with them was poor. 

We did some cognitive batteries beforehand, mostly through Quantified Mind. A few people had extensive baseline data, partially because many had been using Zeos for months, and partly because a few stuck to the two-week daily survey. Leverage members (not me) are processing the data, and they'll probably have more detailed info for us in three months(ish).

With respect to the adaptation itself, we basically followed the plan outlined in my last post. Day one no sleep, then Uberman-12, then cut back to Uberman-6, then Everyman-3.

Most people ended up switching very quickly to Uberman-6 (within the first two or three days), and most switched to Everyman-3 after about five to seven days on Uberman-6. Three people tried to hold the Uberman schedule indefinitely: One person continued Uberman-6 for two full weeks, and two held out for twenty-one days. Afterwards, all three transitioned to Everyman-3. 

During the originally planned one-month period, five people dropped out. Nine were on some form of polyphasic for the whole month. One returned to monophasic at the end of the official experiment with only partial adaptation achieved. 

Then Burning Man disrupted everybody's sleep schedule. Afterward, one person continued experimenting with less common variations of the Everyman schedule. Three went back to Everyman-3. One switched to Everyman-2. Two people have flexible schedules that include two hours less sleep per day. One person's schedule was disrupted by travel for a while after Burning Man, and they're now re-adapting.

Now that all is said and done, eight of the original fourteen are polyphasic.

I'll hold off on concluding very much from this until I see the results of the cognitive battery and such, plus the number who are still polyphasic after three months. In the mean time, I'll just stick with this: Some people are capable of going polyphasic and staying that way (probably?). Sleep is complicated and confusing. I don't know how it works. I don't think anyone else really does either. More research is desperately needed.

My next post, which will probably happen in the next two weeks, will discuss what I think we did poorly, what I think went really well, and how you and your friends can improve upon our work. In the mean time, here's a video of what zombie-Brienne is like during the really difficult stretches, and here is how she entertained herself when she could manage to do things besides pace. (I was one of the few who bailed out early :-p)