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.

Brienne's Workflow

I've dramatically improved my workflow over the past month or so. I don't expect this exact formula to work for you, but working is *so* much more fun now that I feel like I've got to share, just in case somebody gets a small part of the benefit from one of these ideas.

Here is the formula I use today. I added each thing in succession, and each one improved my experience of working immediately and obviously.

1. Pomodoros. The pomodoro technique is a work schedule with 25 minute blocks separated by short breaks. I've worked in pomodoros off and on for a couple years, but until now I've used them on an as-needed basis. They've always been good for getting me through highly aversive work, but they've never felt like a boost to projects I don't mind working on. I seem to be pretty good at focusing and not procrastinating by default, so I think I had less to gain from pomodoros than a lot of people. For example, my instinctive response when I first heard about browser extensions that block distracting websites during work periods was "...why don't you just close those tabs?". (I understand why, it's just not how my brain works.) Pomos in a social context, though, have proved powerful for me.

2. The Less Wrong Study Hall is a Tinychat room where people work together silently, webcam broadcasting optional, in extended pomodoros of 32 minutes with 8 minute breaks. Chatting and being social during break times is encouraged, as are bragging about what you accomplished in the past pomo, seeking moral support during difficult projects, encouraging others, and announcing your intentions for the next work block. The password is lw. Social conventions for the room can be found here.

Breaks sometimes get a little silly:

I tried this expecting it not to work. I was really just curious, because I'd never tried anything like it. I'm a very introverted person, and when I had social anxiety I found video chat completely terrifying. I also don't tend to respond well to punishment-based motivation methods, and the original idea behind the LWSH was to create a sense of accountability to others who are watching you work (or something like that).

Instead, it seems to have restored a positive social element that I've been craving since I left college. Maybe I like people after all, but only when they're being quiet, productive, highly predictable, and completely independent of me. Those things happen all the time in libraries, coffee shops, and dorm lounges--at least on college campuses--but I've not encountered the combination in many other contexts.

Hanging out in a video chat room also seems to be breaking down my negative associations with video chat that accumulated during the years of social anxiety. I scheduled a Skype meeting the other day with zero discomfort, and I'm still not worried about it even though it's happening tomorrow. I also participated in a CFAR alum Google hangout a while back, and didn't feel even the tiniest twinge of anxiety.

3. Ambient sounds of rain, thunder, and a coffeeshop (with the voices as indistinct murmurs). I went through a a list of ambient websites trying out each, just because I happened upon the list and was curious, and found Rainy Cafe to be the best for me. It turned out to be on too short a loop, so I've switched to A Soft Murmur, which offers all three types of sounds as options to combine. (I think the loop here might also be too short, and I need to look for more alternatives, or maybe make my own track.) I've tried each of these sounds individually, and the combination works best. Like with the LWSH, I was surprised that the coffee shop sounds were a plus. They seem to increase my sense of comradery in the LWSH. When I shut off the cafe sounds, I suddenly feel slightly lonely, and work becomes less fun.

4. Complice is Malcolm Ocean's productivity startup. It targets a type of person I am not, so it didn't really work for me when I first tried it. I imagine it's great if you have trouble staying focused on your goals, acting in line with your priorities, and not procrastinating. I guess you could say I stand to gain from productivity vitamins, not productivity medicine.

But when he added Less Wrong Study Hall integration, that feature turned out to be a big boost for me. (He plans to make other similar rooms eventually.) It added to my experience of the LWSH more precise and automatic timing, the ability to see what other people are working on and to show others what I'm working on, a simple to-do list, and a visual reminder of how many pomos I've completed. Here's the LWSH as it appears in Complice at the moment.

5. Chocolate at the beginning of each pomo break. I tried a few different kinds, and of those the best for this purpose proved to be After Eight Mint Chocolate Thins. They have a distinctive flavor and texture that I can tie to pomos exclusively (unlike plain milk chocolate, which I'll encounter in many different situations), but I'm pretty sure their superiority is mostly about the packaging. (LOOK HOW PRETTY!!!)

The result of all these things together is that I look forward to getting to work, even if the project isn't all that interesting. I'm usually sad to stop working. Several times I've sat down to complete a single task, and ended up knocking out a bunch of things it would have been fine to do later, just because of the momentum.

Without any of these elements, I usually do about the minimum without a lot of trouble. Procrastination and distraction aren't big problems, but long work periods take a lot out of me, and I'm not motivated to do more than necessary.

My main workflow problem at this point is lunch. I don't want to stop focusing to make or eat it. I've even stated putting "lunch" on my to-do list and staying signed in to the LWSH while I cook, so it feels more like food is part of work.

Tortoise Report 1: Growing the Roses Of Success

This post is part of a year-long project for learning to install habits of thought. For more about the tortoise skills project itself, see the Tortoise Skills Page.

Summary

Habit: Growing the Roses Of Success
Duration: 7 Days
Success: 7/10
Trigger: The very beginning of a trapped, sinking sensation in my stomach and chest associated with having failed.
Action: ???Magic unconscious hypnosis repair???
Result: Upon encountering the beginning of a slight sinking sensation associated with a failure, I no longer get dragged into counterproductive emotions. Instead, I feel 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.

Strategy Updates

Here's what I've learned over the past week about habits and installing them, and what I plan to do about it.

1. The current version of the installation procedure works best for a narrower class of habits than I recognized at first.
   
   Next actions:
   1. Pin down more precisely what kinds of habits it's good for.
   2. Look for small tweaks to the procedure that might accommodate more kinds of habits.
   3. Consider investing in large changes or multiple procedures.
   
   
2. I need to dig into Rule 1. ("Aim: I will endeavor for every habit I train to be the one I most desperately need at that time.") I meant for it to be an often unattainable ideal to strive for, something to keep my from getting distracted and losing my purpose, and not so much a "rule" that I must adhere to perfectly. My intuitive feel for what I need most isn't turning out to be quite as strong as I expected, and I'm experiencing some analysis paralysis.
   
   Next actions:
   1. Make a list of possible criteria for choosing the next habit.
   2. Write it up as a blog post if it goes well.
   
   
3. Offline training should definitely be more streamlined. How best to use my offline training time will vary a lot by context and mood, but I found myself wishing I had a list of questions posted in front of me to guide me. (Terminology: "Offline training" comes from machine learning. Online learning updates mappings when each new data point comes in. It's good when data become available sequentially. Applied to humans, we call this "learning on the fly". Offline learning techniques are good when a large batch of data is available at once. Cramming for an exam is a human example. What I'm calling "offline training" in this context is whatever I decide to do when I sit down for a few minutes to look at all the relevant facts at once.)
   
   Next actions:
   1. Brainstorm a list of offline training questions
   2. Pick the best ones and make a list to post in the zendo
   3. Write a blog post about offline habit training (pending feedback from at least one more installation)
   
   
4. Offline meta sessions (to reflect on and strategize about the overall procedure) aren't built into the current installation procedure. In retrospect, it's obvious they should be.

Next actions:
1. Decide what the schedule should be for meta strategy sessions
2. Make a list of questions to guide meta strategy sessions

Log

12/31/2014

[This first entry is all prep work. It's probably more detailed than future reports on prep work will be.]

My best guess at the skill I most desperately need right now is resilience: the ability to recover rapidly, especially from failure; to bend without breaking.

1. Be able to generate concrete examples of successes and failures to apply the skill.
   
   An example of successful application: Every time another approach to teaching epistemic rationality failed, CFAR adjusted and tried something else, rather than giving up on teaching epistemic rationality.
   
   An example of failure to apply the skill: I got a C on my very first logic test in college. Rather than correct my mistakes and study for the next test, I was crushed and spent several days agonizing over whether to drop the class. Complete failure would have been dropping the class at that point (which I didn't and went on to excel in highly advanced logic courses), but perfect resilience would have prevented any waste of time or energy.

2. If a skill requires multiple habits, train them serially, and repeat step 1 for each individual habit.
   
   This skill seems to require several habits. It's difficult to pin them all down, but I have at least identified a few. I'll start with "growing the roses of success": feeling emotions in line with knowledge that my failure has been educational.
   
   For every big mistake you make be grateful!
   That mistake you'll never make again!
   Every shiny dream that fades and dies,
   Generates the steam for two more tries!
   So when it gets distressing it's a blessing!
   Onward and upward you must press!
   From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success!
   
   An example of growing the roses of success is burning a batch of cookies and feeling happy to have learned that my new oven is hotter than my old oven. Failure to grow the roses of success in the same situation would be sulking about having burnt the cookies.

3. Clearly define at least one high-quality trigger for the proposed action before beginning to train that habit.
   
   When I imagine burning the cookies, the deciding moment that splits the success worlds from the failure worlds is the moment when I'm surprised to find smoke and blackened cookies after opening the oven door and I feel a trapped, sinking sensation in my stomach and chest. In the failure worlds, I let that feeling drag me into an inescapable pit of negative emotions. In the success worlds, I respond to it in a way that shifts my focus from the badness of my mistake to the goodness of information. (Figuring out exactly what intervention will cause that shift comes later.)
   
   Imagining other concrete examples produces the same results, so my first guess at the right trigger is "the experience of unpleasant surprise at my mistake accompanied by a trapped sinking sensation in my stomach and chest". Therefore, if I encounter that experience, then I will activate reflective attention to reveal further details and inconsistencies with my prediction.

That's it for the prep work!

1/2/2015

I'm not encountering enough instances of my trigger. It happened once yesterday, and I didn't catch it fast enough. That means it's time for...

4. Seek opportunities to practice.
   
   I will now study the experience of realizing I've made a mistake by playing 2048.
   
   Results: Oh man, awesome side effects.
   
   
   1. I'm using my knitting counter, and since that's already a conditioned reinforcer, I'm automatically coming to associate noticing I've made a mistake with positive feelings. I didn't even notice before how much I direct my attention away from my own mistakes. I wonder if I could break that habit even faster using a primary reinforcer.
   2. This is quickly training me to notice the difference between an error of judgement and a random "shit happens", since I only get to click the counter for errors of judgement.
   
   This is the best game of 2048 ever. I'm rewarded in the natural way by the game when I don't fuck up, and I'm rewarded by the habit training every time I notice I've fucked up. I'm literally laughing out loud at my fuckups. This is so much fun. I love rule 4.
   
   My count for today is 38 so far, so I'm clearly in the middle of...
   
   
5. Train triggers before actions.
   
   I actually updated my trigger partway though without being foveally aware of it. I think my first hypothesis for the trigger was wrong. The surprise at my mistake and the dread/sinking sensation are not simultaneous. In fact, the dread/sinking sensation isn't even my usual response to noticing I've made a mistake. My usual response actually seems to be to try to ignore the mistake. It's only when I fail to ignore it that I experience the dread.
   
   Trying to ignore a mistake feels like trying to avoid eye contact. I even seem to be more likely to make another mistake immediately afterward, because I act hastily. I think maybe I'm trying to distract myself from the first mistake, though it actually feels more like I'm trying to distract the world, like if I move fast enough the world won't notice I messed up and it won't count. Same as the five second rule when I dropped food on the floor as a kid.
   
   Updated trigger: The sensation of surprise directed at something I recognize as my mistake, independent of the sinking sensation or even the sensation of trying not to look at the mistake.

1/4/2015

I feel like I'm doing something wrong, but I'm a bit sleep deprived and I'm having a lot of trouble concentrating enough to work out what it is.

It might be that I'm practicing the wrong thing. My current trigger is "the sensation of surprise directed at something I recognize as my mistake", but I updated to that in an attempt to not ignore my mistakes, which wasn't the original goal. The original goal was to cut back on despair in response to mistakes and promote something like satisfaction and curiosity. It's only the very tiny mistakes that I'm able to ignore anyway, so although not ignoring tiny mistakes is an important skill (one I'm adding to my wishlist), I don't think it's part of resilience, and I don't think it's The Most Important Thing for me to learn right now.

The times when I've made and noticed mistakes on my own so far this week, I've not felt the despair-type feelings that I flagged as problematic before. Like when I accidentally left my knitting counter upstairs this morning. I just felt "oops" and maybe a tiny bit of frustration, then I ran upstairs to retrieve it. That's all there was to it. That kind of feeling doesn't have the potential to get in my way.

The only times in the past few days when I've felt the problematic thing I flagged have been while interacting with other people. And I don't think I clicked the knitting counter for any of those, because they weren't straightforwardly mistakes. In retrospect, some of them actually were things I perceived as evidence of mistakes, but I didn't notice that at the time: for example, when I made a Facebook update and people responded with apparently off-topic comments, indicating I hadn't made my point clearly.

I'm thinking the problem is closely related to inadequacy in the eyes of other people, not so much myself. It definitely feels like every time I've felt big anti-resilience emotions, it has been because other people have not responded the way I hoped for them to. It's a little confusing, because if I perceive a failure myself that I don't believe others perceive as a failure, I still feel the despair thing, but only if other people are somehow involved. If I write a blog post that includes a mistake people criticize, I feel it, and if I write a blog post that people like but don't interpret as I intended, I also feel the thing. I mostly don't feel the thing if I make a private mistake that nobody else finds out about.

Updated trigger: I think I'll go back to noticing the trapped, sinking sensation in my stomach and chest, and I'll seek opportunities to practice by reading critiques of things I've written.

1/6/2015

6. Test a variety of actions if required.
   
   This sometimes happens. It's a little inconvenient given that I wanted to use this first habit to demonstrate in quite a bit of detail how the habit installation process works. But for me, at least, it happens at least half the time.
   
   Sometimes, without my conscious direction, my brain skips the "test a variety of actions" part. I jump from "ok, I mostly have a handle on my default response to the trigger, and I can notice it reliably" to "have the preferred response to the trigger instead", with no purposeful intervention at all beyond simply learning to notice the trigger. In this case, it's happening even without me having become consciously aware of what exactly my preferred response to the trigger is.
   
   The new response isn't exactly like I predicted. What I imagined originally was more of a focused curiosity and maybe a triumphant feeling similar in intensity to the sinking sensation from before. Instead, I've replaced the trapped feeling and sinking sensation with a 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. In retrospect, that does seem like the best emotional response for producing the most desirable behavioral responses. I suppose I was imagining overpowering the negative reaction with a positive one. This seems better.

I still need to stick with it for a few days before starting on another habit to make sure I don't lose the ability to notice the trigger, but at the moment it looks like the problem has mostly been fixed, and the new habit mostly installed.

The main problem when I perform an unconscious intervention like this is that if in the future it fails to work, I won't know what levers to manipulate to get it working again. Since I don't know that that issue will actually arise and I can just take a few days to implement step six if it does, I declare this habit 80/20d. I'll move on to my next habit on Thursday (a week from the start date) if I don't encounter more problems.

1/8/2015

I'm not entirely satisfied with the installation of this habit because the intervention (whatever it is) hasn't been tested harshly enough for me to feel confident that the problem's mostly fixed. But I also have a feeling it's not quite the right kind of habit for this process. Instances of the trigger that are high enough intensity to thoroughly test my progress are quite context dependent, and aren't happening frequently enough for training on the scale of one week to a month. I suspect I either need habits with more frequent triggers, I need to be more opportunistic by picking habits with triggers that will be frequent in contexts I predict will occur in the near future, or I need to change the procedure to accommodate less frequent triggers, perhaps by training more than once habit at a time. Or perhaps I should have a tiered system, where at any given time I'm training one high-frequency habit, one mid-frequency habit, and one low-frequency habit. I'll think on it.

The meta stuff is really important, especially this early on, so I'm going to hold off on choosing a new habit for a few days while I work out how to respond to problems that have arisen so far.

2/9/2015

One month since this post, and things seem to be holding steady with Growing the Roses. I fairly rarely notice the trigger consciously (maybe once a week), but my experience of small failures has been awfully smooth sailing. (Performing the desired action without noticing the trigger consciously is part of the goal. Noticing is essential for training, but mastery of a habit means completely effortless, automatic performance.) My failures are notable for their lack of salience, so the change isn't obvious when I'm not reflecting on it, but my memory of the past month is not punctuated by failures, and that's definitely new. I still haven't encountered anything I consider a really big failure. I'll update again with a full report on my experience of it as soon as one happens.

Reflective Recording

Related Posts: Mindfulness, How To Train Noticing, Feeling Clearly, Tathatā: Why Be Here Now?, Simulating Confusion, What It's Like To Notice Things

What is a reflective record?

A reflective record is anything you write down while in reflective attention.

What does a reflective record look like?

Here's a typical example of one of my reflective records from a couple months ago.

The sound of cars on the road, and a fly flitting through a beam of sunlight. I’m sleepy and my head feels fuzzy. The laptop is uncomfortably warm on my legs, and I think I should move it. The room smells like empanadas from lunch. A moment of blankness, which gives way as I realize I’ve simply lost direction for a moment. I gently nudge it back to the flow of my stream of consciousness. I notice that I have a Facebook notification, wonder what it is, and now I’m deciding to close all my tabs but this one. A feeling of familiarity like an openness in my chest, and as I watch that, memories of having performed this exercise many times. Through my inner monologue, the words “What will my readers think of the chapter I'm working on?”, accompanied by a very dull and mild pang of anxiety. I take a deep breath, and I’m enjoying the sensation of the air rushing out of my nostrils as I exhale. The words “categories of experience”, and I imagine circling phrases with colored pencils. A feeling of sufficiency and completion, part of my experience of the belief that I should stop writing now.

And here's what happens if I make a reflective record right now.

Cars passing by on the road making a swooshing noise. I'm imagining the scene out the window, though I'm looking at my computer screen. I'm imagining the visuals of a sunset over the ocean framed by hills and buildings, though it's actually morning and the sky is cloudy and gray. A pang of hunger rising in my stomach, feeling sharp and insistent. Words in my head: "what should I eat?", and a little frustration. Stopping work to eat feels at once aversive and enticing. The thought of eating causes relief and happiness, but the thought of cooking causes gumbly dark denial and I want to ignore the thought. My socks are gray-blue and fuzzy, and they make me content and comfortable. A memory of the way my attention suddenly retreated from the thought of food to grasp the nearest non-food-related sensation. Sleepiness, a constant temptation for my attention to wander away and forget itself, and apparently I'm more willing to describe my experience in imprecise metaphor than I feel I remember having been in past reflective records. My mind wants to focus on the difference between reflective recording and free writing. The locking-in-place-resolution of a decision not to bother writing about free writing in this post, but to reconsider after I eat.

What is reflective recording good for?

I use reflective recording for three things.

1. Habit training. Suppose you're trying to learn a more productive psychological response to confusion than the one you usually have. If you want to respond with curiosity, you'll need an intervention that inputs the beginning of your default response and outputs curiosity. To figure out what that intervention should be, it helps to have a detailed model of the input. Human memory isn't designed to store most of the sorts of things that go on in moment-to-moment awareness, so if you don't capture the details right away, you'll probably forget something important. If gather several reflective records after the same trigger over time, you'll get a better idea of how widely your default responses to the trigger vary.
   
   The same goes for testing the output: To know quickly if the intervention reliably causes the desired mental state, you need to know what mental state it causes, and you need to keep track of the results over time.

2. Responsible introspection. Responsible introspection is a way to gain self-knowledge while bypassing the introspection illusion. It means paying attention to immediate experience first, and reasoning abstractly about that data later.
   
   We do not have direct access to the origins of our mental states, but we do have mental states, and the contents of those mental states aren't arbitrary. Our experiences provide data about our patterns of thought. To introspect responsibly, collect that data by activating reflective attention in the presence of whatever stimulus interests you (a thought about a new job offer, for instance), and then writing down what you experience. You can repeat that a few times to find out how your reactions to the thought vary over time.
   
   Once you have detailed first-person data that isn't contaminated by inference and belief about belief, you can add it to third-person observations about your past behaviors. From there, it's relatively safe to reason abstractly about problems that depend on predictions about how you'll think and feel.

3. Predicting experience. Most of immediate experience is forgotten. Most of it doesn't matter, isn't vivid, isn't unusual, and doesn't make a lasting impression. It takes an extra reflective effort of become aware that your mind's doing whatever it's doing. A lot of the truth of what it is to be a mind slips through the cracks, so our default models of immediate experience lack crucial information. For example, we tend to hold onto beliefs we form and dispense with memories of what observations led us to form those beliefs, and what emotions colored our perceptions as we integrated those observations.
   
   When you have a better model of immediate experience, you can make better predictions about how you'll think and feel on a moment-to-moment basis in the future. Practicing reflective attention regularly can't bring back information you've already lost, but it can reduce illusions about experience that result from biases of memory.
   
   Making a reflective record now and then is even better than reflective attention alone, since it lets you review data taken from many time slices all at once.

Reflective recording is inspired by free writing and (my problems with) Gendlin's focusing, but it's a practice I developed myself. To my knowledge, nobody else has tried it yet, so I'll be very interested to hear about how it works, or doesn't work, for you.

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Here's a conversation in response to this post from Facebook. I'll incorporate what I learned from it into the post soon (probably), but for now, I'm putting it here because it might clear some things up.

Malcolm: I would expect the act of writing stuff down to be way too slow and I wouldn't be able to think things in time. Might try this with speaking aloud and recording it as audio (which is actually what I expected it would be, based on the name).

Jamie:I found that attempting this slowed me right down. I can't write, type or speak even close to the speed I notice thoughts. Converting impressions and awareness into words and then into movement instructions for recording them is almost uselessly slow for stream-of-consciousness stuff. I can sort of 'buffer' because I can sustain two mental streams at once, but even so it's the mental equivalent of trying to run in knee-deep water. By the time I've finished writing something I lost awareness of 90% of the other things I was experiencing at the same moment as whatever it was I was writing down, and almost have to pick the next thing to write at random.

On the plus side, it did make me aware of just how MUCH I notice and immediately throw away without acting on, including stuff I probably ought to record or remember.

Me: You're both probably trying to catch a whole lot more than I am. I wait for a particular kind of thought when I'm actually using this for specific things. When I'm not I pick sort of at random with a huge bias toward stuff it's easy to put into words.

Malcolm: Hmmm... oh! Okay, yeah, I think I have a better sense of the structure. I think the examples you give are kind of misleading about this, as they imply just the random version.

Jamie: Right, so it's not a logfile, it's either a listener or a random activity sample. That feels a lot less close to 'awesome superpower', but a great deal closer to 'physically possible for unaugmented humans'. Your examples felt pretty much stream-of-consciousness, so I had interpreted it as 'log everything that seems important about a given moment'.

Me: Yeah, I was erring on the side of not including enough because I'm trying to learn to only say precisely what is needed. But when I designed a series of exercises on reflective attention, most of the point was to get to "partial reflection", which means keeping your attention fixed on a single category of thought (like physical sensations, emotional sensations, reactions to another person).

But I expect different people to parse their experiences differently, and I found that even for myself sans communication with others, it helped to have identified the most natural system of categorization for my moment-to-moment experiences. The random-ish sampling was originally just for finding those categories. It turns out that it's also great for moving into partial reflective recording if you're having a hard time getting a particular category in focus at first. Also, beginning with partial reflective recording and moving out of it only when it feels right tends to make my free writing sessions a lot more productive a lot more quickly.

Here's my categorization of the first example in the post. (It was edited a little to make more sense in context.)

How To Train Noticing

Alice wants to stop treating her beliefs as binary and start treating them probabilistically—that is, she wants to update herself incrementally. So she's hoping to work on the skill of raising her credence a little bit when she encounters weak evidence against her beliefs, instead of entirely disregarding anything that doesn't completely "change her mind". What should she do?

Obvious plan is obvious: If she encounters weak contrary evidence, then she should update slightly away from the hypothesis.

But obvious plan is not best plan. Why not?

Let's assume that Alice already knows exactly what she means by "update slightly away from the hypothesis" and knows exactly how to do it. (So the first problem is that in real life, she might not know either of those things.) The problem I want to focus on in this post is that "encounter weak contrary evidence" is a shitty trigger no matter how good the action you plan to take when the trigger happens.

Imagine one of those fake duck ponds you see at carnivals, the ones with the kiddie pool and the yellow rubber ducks. A current is pushing the floating ducks in circles around the edge of the pool. There are nine ducks with their bellies painted red, and one duck with its belly painted purple. To win the prize, you have to grab the purple-bellied duck when it floats by.

Now imagine the same duck pond, but instead of their bellies being painted, it's their backs. There are nine red-backed ducks and one purple-backed duck, and to win the prize, you have to grab the purple-backed duck when it floats by.

The second game's a lot easier, right? Why is that?

The mere fact that the purple duck is in front of you is an insufficient trigger. When you play the second game and win, you're not just grabbing the duck in front of you when it's purple. You're grabbing the duck in front of you when you see that it is purple. You notice a purple experience happening in your mind, and that's how you know to grab the duck. In the first game, you lose, because there's nothing to notice. Even though the ducks are in fact different, they all look the same from your vantage point.

Back to Alice.

The game she's playing is "update slightly when I encounter weak contrary evidence". The duck pond is the world, the current is time, and the ducks are events. Most of the ducks are red, and the purple ducks are "weak contrary evidence". "When I encounter weak contrary evidence" is a bad trigger in exactly the same way that "when the purple duck is in front of me" is a bad trigger. It doesn't pick out a subjective experience that distinguishes the attempted trigger from everything else. There's nothing to notice.

To make a good training plan, Alice needs an analogue to an experience of purpleness. She needs to know exactly what it feels like to encounter weak contrary evidence. Once she has that, then she has a reliable trigger.

So how can Alice find out what subjective experience is a function of weak contrary evidence? First of all, she's got to know what weak contrary evidence is. Not just what it feels like, but what it means. Let's assume she knows that already. So what's left is to identify the corresponding subjective experience.

Here's how I do it.

1. I guess. I remember or imagine a few specific instances of encountering weak contrary evidence (such as when I thought my friend wasn't attracted to me, but when I made eye contact with him across the room at a party he smiled widely). On the basis of those simulations, I make a prediction about what it will feel like, in terms of immediate subjective experience, to encounter weak contrary evidence in the future. The prediction is a tentative trigger. For me, this would be "I feel a sort of matching up with one of my beliefs, there's a bit of dissonance, a tiny bit of fear, and maybe a small impulse to direct my attention away from these sensations and away from thoughts about the observation causing all of this".
2. I test my guess. I keep a search going on in the background for anything in the neighborhood of the experience I predicted. Odds are good I'll miss several instances of weak contrary evidence, but as soon as I realize I've encountered one, I go into reflective attention so I'm aware of as many details of my immediate subjective experience as possible. I pay attention to what's going on in my mind right now, and also what's still looping in my very short-term memory of a few moments before I noticed. Then I compare those results to my prediction, noting anything I got wrong, and I feed that information into a new prediction for next time. (I might have gotten something wrong that caused the trigger to go off at the wrong time, which probably means I need to narrow my prediction.) The new prediction is the new trigger.
3. I repeat the test until my trigger seems to be accurate and precise. Now I've got a good trigger to match a good action.

If I were Alice, I'd take one more step toward noticing every instance of weak contrary evidence. A precise and accurate trigger is necessary, but it's not always sufficient. This kind of skill takes practice.

I have a knitting counter, which I bought for $7.13 on Amazon. Knitting counters are very simple: You press a button, and it advances the count by one. When I'm training myself to notice a trigger, I carry the knitting counter in my pocket. Every time I notice the trigger, I push the button. I reset the counter to zero at the end of the day, and the next day I try to beat my highest score.

(There are plenty of substitutes for the knitting counter, of course, such as keeping track in your head. But it does make a highly satisfying cliking sound.)

I keep doing this until my score levels out. Then, I swap out the action of pressing the button for whatever other action I think is useful. In this case, it would be "update slightly away from the hypothesis".

Usually, the leveling out process runs into the action-swapping process, so for a while I'm responding with the action while I'm still getting better at noticing the trigger. But if the action is any more complicated than pressing a button, I hold off on taking it and train noticing specifically until I'm feeling pretty comfortable with the noticing itself.

So in short, here's how to train noticing: Identify a subjective experience you want to notice, predict what the experience will be like, test your prediction, repeat 'til you've got it right, and gamify your practice.