I hope you didn’t interpret my post Wednesday as saying that nothing you wrote was useful. My only gripe was that people seemed to be talking in terms of “this is absolutely certain to change the world and transform us all into ubermenschen!” and that we should start off more sober. Or maybe no one was really talking that way, and I was misinterpreting people’s deliberate hyperbole in terms of my own Happy Death Spiral. But that was all I was arguing against. Thus the admission that rationality should have a .1 correlation with success, and the comment that “Good use of rationality will look more like three percent productivity gain than Napoleon conquering Europe”.
I think Crisis of Faith can be good for certain situations, but I am skeptical about it being completely game-changing for a few reasons.
Most smart people already have a naive version of this technique: that when all the evidence is going against them, they need to stop and think about whether their beliefs are right or wrong. For Crisis of Faith to be practically valuable, you need lots of cases where:
(1) EITHER people don’t apply the naive technique often enough in situations where it could give practical real-world benefits, and formalizing it will convince them to do it more often, (2) OR the specific advice you give in the Crisis of Faith post makes a full-blown Crisis of Faith more likely to return the correct answer than the naive technique. (3) AND once they finish Crisis of Faith, they go through with their decision.
I give (1) low probability. People don’t change their religious or political views often enough, but they’re often good at changing their practical situations. I’ve heard many people tell stories of how they stayed up all night agonizing over whether or not to break up with a girlfriend. In many cases I think the difficulty is in reaching the point where you admit “I need to seriously reconsider this.” I doubt many people reach a point where they feel uncomfortable about their position on a practical issue but don’t take any time to think it over. And the people who would be interested in rationalism are probably exactly the sort of people who currently use the naive technique most often already. I used a naive version of Crisis of Faith for a very important decision in my life before reading OB.
I give (2) high but not overwhelming probability. Yes, all of this ought to work. But I was reading up on evidence-based medicine last night in response to your comment, and one thing that struck me the most was that “ought to work” is a very suspicious phrase. Doctors possessing mountains of accurate information about liver function can say “From what we know about the liver, it would be absolutely absurd for this chemical not to cure liver disease” and then they do a study and it doesn’t help at all. With our current state of knowledge and the complexity of the subject, it’s easier to make mistakes about rationality than about the liver. Yes, my completely non-empirical gut feeling is that the specific components of Crisis of Faith should work better than just sitting and thinking, but maybe anyone unbiased enough to succeed at Crisis of Faith is unbiased enough to succeed at the naive method. Maybe Crisis of Faith creates too much pressure to reject your old belief in order to signal rationality, even if the old belief was correct.
I give (3) medium probability.
And all this is an upper bound anyway. The next question is whether some specific training program will teach people to use Crisis of Faith regularly and correctly. I predict that the “training program” of reading about it on Overcoming Bias in most cases does not, but this is easy to test:
Everyone please comment below if (how many times?) you’ve actually used the formal Crisis of Faith technique in a situation where you wouldn’t have questioned something if you hadn’t read the Crisis of Faith article. Please also mention whether it was about a practical real-world matter, and whether you ended up changing your mind
Again, not saying this to prove Crisis of Faith is worthless, just to show that there are factors to be considered beyond its raw value as a technique.
I talked to someone at an OB meetup who did change his mind about something important, by use of the full-fledged crisis of faith, with his use occasioned by Eliezer’s post. It impacted his practical actions in significant ways. If each of us does one of these every three years, with something equally important, the technique will be paying off hugely.
For myself: I went to a coffee shop shortly after Eliezer’s post, with a free afternoon and intent to try the technique. No particular subject matter. I started by making a list of “topics potentially warranting crises of faith”, which itself probably made me more aware of existing gaps in my thinking. Then I picked the most emotionally difficult topic from my list, got a bit of the way in… and changed my mind about whether I wanted to think that one through. Then I picked another topic (also a practical, real-world matter) and… got partway through, farther than above, with some but not huge change to my beliefs and practices. I should try the procedure again.
Like Yvain, I’d love to hear others’ experiences with the Crisis of Faith technique, positive or negative.
Just to add more data to my experience: I broke the technique into steps when I tried it. The steps did seem helpful. But maybe someone who used the technique more successfully could give us better lines of approach. The steps I used (I wrote out answers to each step, since writing or speaking aloud to myself makes it easier to follow out difficult lines of thought):
Step 1: Pick a question.
Step 2: Find a reason to care about having actually an accurate answer. Find something to protect that hinges on believing whatever it is that’s accurate about this question, whether or not that accurate answer turns out to be my current belief.
Step 3: Notice any reasons I might want to stick to my current belief, even if that belief turns out to be untrue. See if they in fact outweigh the reasons to want the actual answer.
Step 4: Create doubt or curiosity: Find my current belief’s weakest points, or the points I am most afraid to consider. Go through a list of outside people I respect, and ask what points they might balk at in my beliefs. Ask if my belief has anything in common with past errors I’ve made, or if an uncharitable stranger might think so. Ask if anything I’m saying to myself makes me feel squicky. Brainstorm. Ask what the space of alternatives might look like.
Step 5: Actually do the Crisis of Faith technique. [Except that I didn’t get to this step.]
I hope you didn’t interpret my post Wednesday as saying that nothing you wrote was useful. My only gripe was that people seemed to be talking in terms of “this is absolutely certain to change the world and transform us all into ubermenschen!” and that we should start off more sober. Or maybe no one was really talking that way, and I was misinterpreting people’s deliberate hyperbole in terms of my own Happy Death Spiral. But that was all I was arguing against. Thus the admission that rationality should have a .1 correlation with success, and the comment that “Good use of rationality will look more like three percent productivity gain than Napoleon conquering Europe”.
I think Crisis of Faith can be good for certain situations, but I am skeptical about it being completely game-changing for a few reasons.
Most smart people already have a naive version of this technique: that when all the evidence is going against them, they need to stop and think about whether their beliefs are right or wrong. For Crisis of Faith to be practically valuable, you need lots of cases where:
(1) EITHER people don’t apply the naive technique often enough in situations where it could give practical real-world benefits, and formalizing it will convince them to do it more often,
(2) OR the specific advice you give in the Crisis of Faith post makes a full-blown Crisis of Faith more likely to return the correct answer than the naive technique.
(3) AND once they finish Crisis of Faith, they go through with their decision.
I give (1) low probability. People don’t change their religious or political views often enough, but they’re often good at changing their practical situations. I’ve heard many people tell stories of how they stayed up all night agonizing over whether or not to break up with a girlfriend. In many cases I think the difficulty is in reaching the point where you admit “I need to seriously reconsider this.” I doubt many people reach a point where they feel uncomfortable about their position on a practical issue but don’t take any time to think it over. And the people who would be interested in rationalism are probably exactly the sort of people who currently use the naive technique most often already. I used a naive version of Crisis of Faith for a very important decision in my life before reading OB.
I give (2) high but not overwhelming probability. Yes, all of this ought to work. But I was reading up on evidence-based medicine last night in response to your comment, and one thing that struck me the most was that “ought to work” is a very suspicious phrase. Doctors possessing mountains of accurate information about liver function can say “From what we know about the liver, it would be absolutely absurd for this chemical not to cure liver disease” and then they do a study and it doesn’t help at all. With our current state of knowledge and the complexity of the subject, it’s easier to make mistakes about rationality than about the liver. Yes, my completely non-empirical gut feeling is that the specific components of Crisis of Faith should work better than just sitting and thinking, but maybe anyone unbiased enough to succeed at Crisis of Faith is unbiased enough to succeed at the naive method. Maybe Crisis of Faith creates too much pressure to reject your old belief in order to signal rationality, even if the old belief was correct.
I give (3) medium probability.
And all this is an upper bound anyway. The next question is whether some specific training program will teach people to use Crisis of Faith regularly and correctly. I predict that the “training program” of reading about it on Overcoming Bias in most cases does not, but this is easy to test:
Everyone please comment below if (how many times?) you’ve actually used the formal Crisis of Faith technique in a situation where you wouldn’t have questioned something if you hadn’t read the Crisis of Faith article. Please also mention whether it was about a practical real-world matter, and whether you ended up changing your mind
Again, not saying this to prove Crisis of Faith is worthless, just to show that there are factors to be considered beyond its raw value as a technique.
I talked to someone at an OB meetup who did change his mind about something important, by use of the full-fledged crisis of faith, with his use occasioned by Eliezer’s post. It impacted his practical actions in significant ways. If each of us does one of these every three years, with something equally important, the technique will be paying off hugely.
For myself: I went to a coffee shop shortly after Eliezer’s post, with a free afternoon and intent to try the technique. No particular subject matter. I started by making a list of “topics potentially warranting crises of faith”, which itself probably made me more aware of existing gaps in my thinking. Then I picked the most emotionally difficult topic from my list, got a bit of the way in… and changed my mind about whether I wanted to think that one through. Then I picked another topic (also a practical, real-world matter) and… got partway through, farther than above, with some but not huge change to my beliefs and practices. I should try the procedure again.
Like Yvain, I’d love to hear others’ experiences with the Crisis of Faith technique, positive or negative.
Just to add more data to my experience: I broke the technique into steps when I tried it. The steps did seem helpful. But maybe someone who used the technique more successfully could give us better lines of approach. The steps I used (I wrote out answers to each step, since writing or speaking aloud to myself makes it easier to follow out difficult lines of thought):
Step 1: Pick a question.
Step 2: Find a reason to care about having actually an accurate answer. Find something to protect that hinges on believing whatever it is that’s accurate about this question, whether or not that accurate answer turns out to be my current belief.
Step 3: Notice any reasons I might want to stick to my current belief, even if that belief turns out to be untrue. See if they in fact outweigh the reasons to want the actual answer.
Step 4: Create doubt or curiosity: Find my current belief’s weakest points, or the points I am most afraid to consider. Go through a list of outside people I respect, and ask what points they might balk at in my beliefs. Ask if my belief has anything in common with past errors I’ve made, or if an uncharitable stranger might think so. Ask if anything I’m saying to myself makes me feel squicky. Brainstorm. Ask what the space of alternatives might look like.
Step 5: Actually do the Crisis of Faith technique. [Except that I didn’t get to this step.]