One way of viewing planning is as an outer-loop on decision theory.
My approach to the general problem of planning skills was to start with decision theory and build up. In my Guild of the Rose Decision Theory courses was to spend time focusing on slowly building the most fundamental skills of decision theory. This included practicing manipulation of probabilities and utilities via decision trees, and practicing all these steps in a variety of both real and synthetic scenarios, to build an intuition regarding the nuances of how to set up decision problems on paper. The ultimate goal was to get the practitioners to the point where they usually don’t need to draw up a decision tree on paper, but rather to leverage those intuitions to quickly solve decision problems mentally, and/or recognize when a decision problem is actually tricky enough to merit breaking out the spreadsheet or Guesstimate project.
In my experience, even long-time rationalists are so incredibly bad at basic decision theory that trying to skip the step of learning to correctly set up a basic decision tree might actually be counterproductive. So my inclination is to focus on really mastering this art before attempting planning.
Another way of viewing planning is that planning is search.
For computationally bounded agents like us, search involves a natural tradeoff of breadth versus depth. Breadth is essentially idea generation, depth is idea selection and refinement. The tricky think about planning, in general, is that if 100x solutions exist, then those solutions are going to be found by spending the majority of the time on breadth-search, i.e. blue sky brainstorming for ways that the plan could look wildly different from the default approach, but that most situations don’t admit 100x plans. Most things in life, especially in our technological civilization, are already sort of optimized, because there is some existing refined solution that has already accommodated the relevant tradeoffs. I could get to work faster if I flew there in a helicopter, but considering in costs, the Pareto optimum is still driving my car on the freeway. Most things look like this. Well-considered Pareto solutions to real-world problems tend to look boring!
Therefor, if you spend a lot of time looking for 100x solutions, you will waste a lot of time, because these solutions usually won’t exist. Then, after failing to find a truly galaxy-brain solution, you will spend some amount of time refining the probably-already-obvious plan, realize that there are a lot of unknown-unknowns, and that the best way to get clarity on these is to just start working. Then you will realize that you would have been better off if you had just started working immediately and not bothered with “planning” at all, and you will either be Enlightened or depressed.
It gives me no pleasure to say this! Ten years ago I was all fired up on the idea that rationalists would Win and take over the world by finding these clever HPJEV-esque lateral thinking solutions. I have since realized that one creative rationalist is usually no match for tens of thousands of smart people exploring the manifold through natural breadth-first and then refining on the best solutions organically.
I am not actually completely blackpilled on the idea of scenario planning. Clearly there are situations for which scenario planning is appropriate. Massive capital allocations and long-term research programs might be two good examples. Even for these types of problems, it’s worth remembering that the manifold probably only admits to marginal optimizations, not 100x optimizations, so you shouldn’t spend too much time looking for them.
Both of these thoughts are pretty interesting, thanks.
I’d be interested in hearing a bunch more detail about how you trained decision theory and how that went. (naively this sounds like overkill to me, or “not intervening at the best level”, but I’m quite interested in what sort of exercises you did and how people responded to them)
re: “how useful is planning”, I do think this is specifically useful if you have deep, ambitious goals, without well established practices. (i.e. Rationality !== Winning in General).
One way of viewing planning is as an outer-loop on decision theory.
My approach to the general problem of planning skills was to start with decision theory and build up. In my Guild of the Rose Decision Theory courses was to spend time focusing on slowly building the most fundamental skills of decision theory. This included practicing manipulation of probabilities and utilities via decision trees, and practicing all these steps in a variety of both real and synthetic scenarios, to build an intuition regarding the nuances of how to set up decision problems on paper. The ultimate goal was to get the practitioners to the point where they usually don’t need to draw up a decision tree on paper, but rather to leverage those intuitions to quickly solve decision problems mentally, and/or recognize when a decision problem is actually tricky enough to merit breaking out the spreadsheet or Guesstimate project.
In my experience, even long-time rationalists are so incredibly bad at basic decision theory that trying to skip the step of learning to correctly set up a basic decision tree might actually be counterproductive. So my inclination is to focus on really mastering this art before attempting planning.
Another way of viewing planning is that planning is search.
For computationally bounded agents like us, search involves a natural tradeoff of breadth versus depth. Breadth is essentially idea generation, depth is idea selection and refinement. The tricky think about planning, in general, is that if 100x solutions exist, then those solutions are going to be found by spending the majority of the time on breadth-search, i.e. blue sky brainstorming for ways that the plan could look wildly different from the default approach, but that most situations don’t admit 100x plans. Most things in life, especially in our technological civilization, are already sort of optimized, because there is some existing refined solution that has already accommodated the relevant tradeoffs. I could get to work faster if I flew there in a helicopter, but considering in costs, the Pareto optimum is still driving my car on the freeway. Most things look like this. Well-considered Pareto solutions to real-world problems tend to look boring!
Therefor, if you spend a lot of time looking for 100x solutions, you will waste a lot of time, because these solutions usually won’t exist. Then, after failing to find a truly galaxy-brain solution, you will spend some amount of time refining the probably-already-obvious plan, realize that there are a lot of unknown-unknowns, and that the best way to get clarity on these is to just start working. Then you will realize that you would have been better off if you had just started working immediately and not bothered with “planning” at all, and you will either be Enlightened or depressed.
It gives me no pleasure to say this! Ten years ago I was all fired up on the idea that rationalists would Win and take over the world by finding these clever HPJEV-esque lateral thinking solutions. I have since realized that one creative rationalist is usually no match for tens of thousands of smart people exploring the manifold through natural breadth-first and then refining on the best solutions organically.
I am not actually completely blackpilled on the idea of scenario planning. Clearly there are situations for which scenario planning is appropriate. Massive capital allocations and long-term research programs might be two good examples. Even for these types of problems, it’s worth remembering that the manifold probably only admits to marginal optimizations, not 100x optimizations, so you shouldn’t spend too much time looking for them.
Both of these thoughts are pretty interesting, thanks.
I’d be interested in hearing a bunch more detail about how you trained decision theory and how that went. (naively this sounds like overkill to me, or “not intervening at the best level”, but I’m quite interested in what sort of exercises you did and how people responded to them)
re: “how useful is planning”, I do think this is specifically useful if you have deep, ambitious goals, without well established practices. (i.e. Rationality !== Winning in General).