[SEQ RERUN] Singlethink
Today’s post, Singlethink was originally published on 06 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
The path to rationality begins when you see a great flaw in your existing art, and discover a drive to improve, to create new skills beyond the helpful but inadequate ones you found in books. Eliezer’s first step was to catch what it felt like to shove an unwanted fact to the corner of his mind. Singlethink is the skill of not doublethinking
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A commenter wondered what the results would be if we were to teach this skill in schools. Is there any way to teach this skill, other than simply noticing it?
If I had to try, I’d try to teach people about thoughts about thoughts (or “second thought” as in Pratchett’s books). Not just noticing what you’re thinking, but noticing when you’re not noticing what you’re thinking—I think it would be entirely possible.
My question is more about how. What sort of exercises or class activities could you do to teach them how to notice themselves not noticing something?
People do a ton of thinking, all the time. Even dumb people. Not thinking about something that you’d usually think about can therefore be quite noticeable.
For training people to notice thoughts, I might start with getting people to notice sub-subvocalizations—the thoughts you have quickly, faster than speech, that are easy to forget. Then just put people into situations like picking a type of cookie to buy and getting them to remember and think about their thoughts. Some small group exercises would work well here, like sharing of thoughts in group and then picking some to share with class.
Then once people can notice their thoughts, it’s time to start getting a broad view—how much thinking did they put into things? What thoughts can they list, and how does this correlate with their subjective feeling? How much time did it take them to start and stop thinking new thoughts? Once people are decently calibrated we can start moving into very slightly touchy subjects, maybe. The subconscious associations test might also be useful to illustrate sub-sub-thoughts.