Quick summary:
gworley tries to give some background for psychology, about how most people tend to use it to recover from bad places, like depression. So a lot of mainstream conception of psychology is that of a feedback loop people use to prevent bad things. Then he moves into talking about positive psychology, and how it might be beneficial. Now it’s a feedback loop to do more good things. The remainder of the essay is about abstracting from theories of growth, which follows the basic pattern of how breakdown comes before growth. (I’m reminded of how muscles use micro-tears as a signal to grow)
Actual comments:
1) While I can say that rationality feels like it’s had a large positive effect on me, I think outside-view says that we should have fairly low priors on the ability of rationality to boost people. Without any additional physical augmentation, what we’re basically doing here is finding incremental ways of improving people’s thinking, except that the only tools available to us are both clunky and mental in nature. I don’t think that going deep into rationality can realistically boost someone’s productivity by more than, perhaps, 2X.
2) The abstraction of integration, disintegration, confusion, reintegration, and integration again feels a little too loose as to be super useful. (If you have any cool applications, I’m all ears.) I think this might be good to know, in general, like most obvious things, so you can keep in mind things like “being confused is part of the pattern!” but I think being able to be specific and apply the instantiation of the pattern to your specific skill (e.g. “being unsure how to handle rowdy spectators is a point everyone hits when they’re trying to be a magician, so just power through!”) feels like the most useful extension here.
I don’t think that going deep into rationality can realistically boost someone’s productivity by more than, perhaps, 2X.
Speaking about boosting productivity by X depends a lot on how you measure productivity. If you use rationality to recognize that a project in which you sent a lot of time should be abandoned despite of sunk costs that can increase productivity by 2X if you simply measure productivity by useful output.
I agree with your assessment. This is mostly a work of philosophy and not operationalized. I think knowing the pattern is mostly helpful if you’re constructing a technique that you want to share with others (or are the sort of person like me who generally only finds success with something after understanding in deep detail how it works). Knowing what the general pattern looks like helps you know if you’re forgetting anything in teaching a technique or developing a process.
For example, forgetting about safety is probably the number one thing I’ve seen cause advice in general and rationality training in particular to not work. People first and foremost need an environment in which growth is possible and without it techniques only sometimes get lucky and work despite everything.
Think how we venerate stories of people turning their lives around against the odds. Those stories are interesting in part because they are not what normally happens. Similarly, stories about people who are already effective at things learning to be more effective are not very interesting to most people in part because they are what’s expected.
What’s interesting is that in “against the odds” stories, often the turning point is when “safety” is created by the person hitting “rock bottom” and having “nothing left to lose”. This is a painful kind of safety but it sometimes works (although I think we hear about it positively mainly due to survivorship bias and it’s actually a really bad strategy). Many people, though, never find safety even in despair and instead remain stuck defending themselves without being able to apply techniques and grow.
So if you want to help people, knowing this seems important and you probably want to account for creating an environment for participants where something might work because otherwise nothing will likely work.
Quick summary: gworley tries to give some background for psychology, about how most people tend to use it to recover from bad places, like depression. So a lot of mainstream conception of psychology is that of a feedback loop people use to prevent bad things. Then he moves into talking about positive psychology, and how it might be beneficial. Now it’s a feedback loop to do more good things. The remainder of the essay is about abstracting from theories of growth, which follows the basic pattern of how breakdown comes before growth. (I’m reminded of how muscles use micro-tears as a signal to grow)
Actual comments:
1) While I can say that rationality feels like it’s had a large positive effect on me, I think outside-view says that we should have fairly low priors on the ability of rationality to boost people. Without any additional physical augmentation, what we’re basically doing here is finding incremental ways of improving people’s thinking, except that the only tools available to us are both clunky and mental in nature. I don’t think that going deep into rationality can realistically boost someone’s productivity by more than, perhaps, 2X.
2) The abstraction of integration, disintegration, confusion, reintegration, and integration again feels a little too loose as to be super useful. (If you have any cool applications, I’m all ears.) I think this might be good to know, in general, like most obvious things, so you can keep in mind things like “being confused is part of the pattern!” but I think being able to be specific and apply the instantiation of the pattern to your specific skill (e.g. “being unsure how to handle rowdy spectators is a point everyone hits when they’re trying to be a magician, so just power through!”) feels like the most useful extension here.
Speaking about boosting productivity by X depends a lot on how you measure productivity. If you use rationality to recognize that a project in which you sent a lot of time should be abandoned despite of sunk costs that can increase productivity by 2X if you simply measure productivity by useful output.
Yep! This is true! I didn’t do a good job of thinking about more upstream things like that.
I agree with your assessment. This is mostly a work of philosophy and not operationalized. I think knowing the pattern is mostly helpful if you’re constructing a technique that you want to share with others (or are the sort of person like me who generally only finds success with something after understanding in deep detail how it works). Knowing what the general pattern looks like helps you know if you’re forgetting anything in teaching a technique or developing a process.
For example, forgetting about safety is probably the number one thing I’ve seen cause advice in general and rationality training in particular to not work. People first and foremost need an environment in which growth is possible and without it techniques only sometimes get lucky and work despite everything.
Think how we venerate stories of people turning their lives around against the odds. Those stories are interesting in part because they are not what normally happens. Similarly, stories about people who are already effective at things learning to be more effective are not very interesting to most people in part because they are what’s expected.
What’s interesting is that in “against the odds” stories, often the turning point is when “safety” is created by the person hitting “rock bottom” and having “nothing left to lose”. This is a painful kind of safety but it sometimes works (although I think we hear about it positively mainly due to survivorship bias and it’s actually a really bad strategy). Many people, though, never find safety even in despair and instead remain stuck defending themselves without being able to apply techniques and grow.
So if you want to help people, knowing this seems important and you probably want to account for creating an environment for participants where something might work because otherwise nothing will likely work.