Skill: Being strategic. I.e., life-consequentialism, where you actually do things based on their expected future consequences, as opposed to drifting into a PhD program because your friends are doing it.
Exercise materials: We either need to develop efficient probes for getting people to list out major life choices that they could actually remake (are under serious reconsideration) or we need to develop hypothetical life stories and policy decisions to use in exercises.
Subskill: Avoid pitfalls of verbal strategic reasoning.
List consequences without shifting from intuitive-sum to verbal-justification mode.
Don’t exacerbate scope insensitivity or attending to rare events.
There are studies showing that people who consider their decisions more make worse decisions. As I understand it, the main explanation for this is that people shift from an intuitive sum of costs and benefits, to seeking verbally justifiable decisions, which in turn might lead them to one-reason-decisionmaking, ignoring some of their costs and benefits which are important to them but seem less “sensible”. I also suspect it may exacerbate other biases like scope insensitivity or rare events—thinking about cases which are rare or short in duration.
The classic case being “Let’s get a bigger house, further away from work, so it has an extra bedroom in case Grandma comes over”, which she does once a year, but the 20 minutes of extra commute time happen every day and are not acclimated-to.
Exercise A: Give somebody two hypothetical package deals to choose from. First, have them choose quickly and intuitively. Then, have them think about consequences and list out desiderata and alternatives… but at the end of that, have them do the intuitive sum and state a preference, rather than coming up with a verbal reason for the decision.
Exercise B: Have some of the desiderata be rare cases or cases of short duration. Detect these, cross them out with a black marker.
“Let’s get a bigger house, further away from work, so it has an extra bedroom in case Grandma comes over”
Not saying this is a bad example, but it COULD be the case that grandma never being able to come over is totally unacceptable. Which is also a pitfall—something can seem trivial until it goes away.
Subskill: Unbundling; optimize separate things separately.
Example 1: Optimize fuzzies and utilons separately.
Example 2: Optimize grades and learning separately (instead of just optimizing grades, or haphazardly optimizing both at the same time).
5SL: Notice when you’re optimizing two things at once. (Maybe because you (a) have a sense of awkwardness or of not getting enough done, and when you list out the desirable consequences, there’s more than one?) Then, find two different things you can do which optimizes each one individually and without worrying about the other one.
Yet I’ve done better doing the opposite. When faced with incompatible courses of action that optimize different things, look for a third alternative that gets both. The choice doesn’t have to be hard—even if the optimizing targets are “save the world” and “talk to cool people”, frustration with the obviously right choice triggers a search for a third alternative as well.
I’d conclude that the most important skill is to stop, notice you’re confused, and work out that it’s because you’re trying to optimize two goals. Whether you then optimize them separately, or find a third alternative, you’ll probably do better than if you conflate “grades = learning” or “utilons = fuzzies” and try to optimize that non-existent conflation.
If you need to work on several projects at once (as is often necessary in the real world), then do it by creating and maintaining a clear separation between them. A separation both of time and attention.
Besides scheduling different projects at different times, do things related to neither project in between so your attention to the earlier project doesn’t carry over. This is an ideal time for routine maintenance/chores. Check email, do the dishes, go grocery shopping, take lunch; to the extent that you need to think about something other than the immediate task, think about the upcoming project, not the one you just left. Then go to work on the second project with your attention on the first broken.
Sense of unproductivity is a good flag for unbundling goals. I recently tried to figure out why I haven’t finished as many free-time programming projects as I used to, and realized that I had at least 4 goals for free-time programming: learn a new language, build something personally useful, build something other people will use, and apply techniques from a textbook I’ve been working through. I couldn’t find a project that satisfied all my goals, so I was skipping back and forth and not finishing anything.
Subskill: Notice foreign goals. Are your parents making you do it? Are you doing it because you read it in a book? Did you just drift into doing that?
Converse subskill: Notice feeling of actually caring about something. Notice whether that caring is giving energy to what you’re doing. Notice its absence.
Material for exercises: Requires a case where the person has sunk costs and the option of continuing or not continuing. Might want to choose cases slightly less fraught than a marriage or a PhD program—you want to work up to those gradually.
Exercise A: For a case where sunk costs exist, imagine that you are a new person who was just now teleported into this person’s life. Variant: Imagine you were just teleported into this person’s life, and everyone else knows this, and they all expect you to execute sudden changes of course. See what this changes about your thinking, regardless of whether it changes your decision.
Exercise B: For whatever sunk costs you’re in the middle of expending, look at the same scenario and rephrase it as a sunk benefit, the purchased option to finish a task more quickly than before. E.g., if you already paid $100 on a $150 item, change from “I paid $100” to “I now have the option of purchasing this item for $50″. Again, the stated objective of the exercise will be, “Notice the difference in your thinking”, not, “try to change your decision”.
Exercise C: As above, but imagine that you bought the option for a penny on eBay. E.g. if you’re one year into a four-year PhD program, imagine that you paid a penny on eBay to purchase an option to get a PhD in three years rather than the usual four years. Would you exercise that option if you paid a penny for it?
That last exercise seems to run afoul of some value-related heuristics. Price is so common a proxy for utility that imagining that you paid a penny for the option on eBay might irrationally devalue whatever you’re looking at.
Of course, looking at the contrast might still give you some useful insights—provided you can untangle them.
Subskill: Use fungibility. There are different ways to achieve many goals. E.g. instead of wasting an evening with a relative in a way you resent, send them a postcard.
Subskill: Don’t express emotions as policy decisions. (Anna.) Find some other outlet for the emotion besides the policy decision, i.e., screaming. (Eliezer.)
Keep in mind that the current psychology literature indicates that cathartic release is actually undesirable—while catharsis might improve affect in the short term, this is largely because it represents giving in to one’s anger, and in the long run it actually makes you more likely to experience anger in the future.
I therefore advise that, in the event that one needs to make a particularly important decision and is currently angry, cathartic screaming may be effective, but its use should be restricted only for cases where it is strictly necessary.
(and this is coming from the ex-leader of a cathartic screaming club :P)
Or, more generally, what you do reinforces your mental state at the time. Acting in anger (even just a cathartic release) reinforces your tendency toward (the likelihood of future) anger; the same with acting from fear and most other emotions. Also, whatever the cause of your procrastination, acting on it, letting yourself get away with procrastinating, increases your problems with it in the future. As a poster I made for my study wall many years ago said: “Commit through Action: Do It”.
Exercise: Recall acts you’ve done while your emotions were running high, in cases where it seems like something that might be worth optimizing. Of those acts, ask whether the action/policy/response can best be interpreted as maximizing a worthwhile criterion, or as direct expressions of the emotion.
Subskill: Before the final moment of doing something that has any sort of cost or downside, ask whether you’re doing it because of its consequence or merely because you previously decided to do it.
Not just in a restaurant. I am trying to lose weight, and one of the more effective strategies is to make myself stop and ask myself if I really want to fix and eat something right now, or if I am thinking about eating for some other reason. It helps that I have gotten rid of most of the ready to eat food in my house and have to take the time to actually fix something, which slows me down enough to ask the question.
Like many people, I have the opposite problem. (Not trying to gain weight exactly, but to keep from becoming weak and sick.) Even readily available ice cream gets put off for hours, and then some more hours. The limiting cached thought in my case seems to be “it’s not worth the effort”. Might be self-fulfilling.
Even ice-cream has to be actually pulled out of the fridge, scooped out of the punnet into a bowl. This may seem like a small hurdle—but it’s obviously enough to keep you from eating.
Instead—try getting a bunch of non-perishable food (eg mixed nuts or dried fruit/trail mix) and leaving it in an open jar somewhere easily accessible (eg on the bench). Every time you walk past it—grab a small handful and nibble on it.
From there, you can progress to a bowl of pre-cut-up fresh fruit or veg (keep a lid on it so it doesn’t gather flies) for a healthier option. (cut it up all at once at the beginning of the week—leave out a day’s worth each morning).
Anna’s subskill list from “Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic”:
Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;
Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;
Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;
Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past);
Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren’t habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don’t work;
Focus most of the energy that isn’t going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;
Make sure that our “goal” is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won’t continually sap our energies;
Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting.
“The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him.”
Pretty sure it’s mentioned in Twelve Virtues of Rationality, which provides a decent summary in context—although you should read Musashi’s Book of Five Rings if you really want to absorb the concept. He’s a lucid (if sometimes infuriatingly vague) writer, and there are several good translations floating around.
Probably not great advice if you’re looking specifically for a practice that’ll quickly teach the habit of carrying tactical decisions through into strategic goals—in this context that’s something you only get from lots of blade-to-blade practice, and the koryu arts are almost universally very heavy on kata. In a typical dojo you might not get to freestyle sparring for a year or more. Western reconstructionist fencing tends to be less so, but there’s still a pretty serious ramp-up period in every salle I’ve ever been exposed to.
On the other hand, if you can get past that period, just about any martial art which involves partnered practice is remarkably good at developing the skill of instrumentalizing strategic thinking (though it still needs to be generalized to the rest of life, a difficult trick which probably qualifies as a virtue of rationality in its own right). Weapon arts (and aikido, but it’s unique in this respect among the empty-hand arts I’ve studied) are also good for developing a habit which is difficult to put into words, but which might be approximated as “presence” or “mindfulness”.
Exercise A: For some policy that someone is carrying out today, starting as close to the object level as possible (answering an email, making a phone call, buying something at the store), ask about the consequences, and the consequences of the consequences. Identify the consequences that are desirable or that the action is being carried out for-the-sake-of. State the goal in abstract terms. Ask whether achieving the goal has further consequences—even things terminally desirable often have other, instrumentally desirable or undesirable consequences. Trace out the chain of specific events and the abstract instrumental and terminal goals they correspond to.
Exercise B: For each goal node, find some other policy—not necessarily a superior policy, but some other policy—that would be helpful for the same goal, not necessarily in the same way. (The point being to unanchor your concept of that goal from the exact, specific means of achieving it. This also obviously starts on the habit of searching for superior alternatives.)
Skill: Being strategic. I.e., life-consequentialism, where you actually do things based on their expected future consequences, as opposed to drifting into a PhD program because your friends are doing it.
Exercise materials: We either need to develop efficient probes for getting people to list out major life choices that they could actually remake (are under serious reconsideration) or we need to develop hypothetical life stories and policy decisions to use in exercises.
Subskill: Avoid pitfalls of verbal strategic reasoning.
List consequences without shifting from intuitive-sum to verbal-justification mode.
Don’t exacerbate scope insensitivity or attending to rare events.
There are studies showing that people who consider their decisions more make worse decisions. As I understand it, the main explanation for this is that people shift from an intuitive sum of costs and benefits, to seeking verbally justifiable decisions, which in turn might lead them to one-reason-decisionmaking, ignoring some of their costs and benefits which are important to them but seem less “sensible”. I also suspect it may exacerbate other biases like scope insensitivity or rare events—thinking about cases which are rare or short in duration.
The classic case being “Let’s get a bigger house, further away from work, so it has an extra bedroom in case Grandma comes over”, which she does once a year, but the 20 minutes of extra commute time happen every day and are not acclimated-to.
Exercise A: Give somebody two hypothetical package deals to choose from. First, have them choose quickly and intuitively. Then, have them think about consequences and list out desiderata and alternatives… but at the end of that, have them do the intuitive sum and state a preference, rather than coming up with a verbal reason for the decision.
Exercise B: Have some of the desiderata be rare cases or cases of short duration. Detect these, cross them out with a black marker.
“Let’s get a bigger house, further away from work, so it has an extra bedroom in case Grandma comes over”
Not saying this is a bad example, but it COULD be the case that grandma never being able to come over is totally unacceptable. Which is also a pitfall—something can seem trivial until it goes away.
Only if there’s really no other way for Grandma to come over—not even for example sleeping in the living room so she can have the sole bedroom.
Subskill: Unbundling; optimize separate things separately.
Example 1: Optimize fuzzies and utilons separately.
Example 2: Optimize grades and learning separately (instead of just optimizing grades, or haphazardly optimizing both at the same time).
5SL: Notice when you’re optimizing two things at once. (Maybe because you (a) have a sense of awkwardness or of not getting enough done, and when you list out the desirable consequences, there’s more than one?) Then, find two different things you can do which optimizes each one individually and without worrying about the other one.
Yet I’ve done better doing the opposite. When faced with incompatible courses of action that optimize different things, look for a third alternative that gets both. The choice doesn’t have to be hard—even if the optimizing targets are “save the world” and “talk to cool people”, frustration with the obviously right choice triggers a search for a third alternative as well.
I’d conclude that the most important skill is to stop, notice you’re confused, and work out that it’s because you’re trying to optimize two goals. Whether you then optimize them separately, or find a third alternative, you’ll probably do better than if you conflate “grades = learning” or “utilons = fuzzies” and try to optimize that non-existent conflation.
If you need to work on several projects at once (as is often necessary in the real world), then do it by creating and maintaining a clear separation between them. A separation both of time and attention.
Besides scheduling different projects at different times, do things related to neither project in between so your attention to the earlier project doesn’t carry over. This is an ideal time for routine maintenance/chores. Check email, do the dishes, go grocery shopping, take lunch; to the extent that you need to think about something other than the immediate task, think about the upcoming project, not the one you just left. Then go to work on the second project with your attention on the first broken.
Sense of unproductivity is a good flag for unbundling goals. I recently tried to figure out why I haven’t finished as many free-time programming projects as I used to, and realized that I had at least 4 goals for free-time programming: learn a new language, build something personally useful, build something other people will use, and apply techniques from a textbook I’ve been working through. I couldn’t find a project that satisfied all my goals, so I was skipping back and forth and not finishing anything.
Subskill: Maximize on big things, satisfice on small things.
“and the wisdom to know the difference”
Subskill: Notice foreign goals. Are your parents making you do it? Are you doing it because you read it in a book? Did you just drift into doing that?
Converse subskill: Notice feeling of actually caring about something. Notice whether that caring is giving energy to what you’re doing. Notice its absence.
Subskill: Detach from sunk costs.
Material for exercises: Requires a case where the person has sunk costs and the option of continuing or not continuing. Might want to choose cases slightly less fraught than a marriage or a PhD program—you want to work up to those gradually.
Exercise A: For a case where sunk costs exist, imagine that you are a new person who was just now teleported into this person’s life. Variant: Imagine you were just teleported into this person’s life, and everyone else knows this, and they all expect you to execute sudden changes of course. See what this changes about your thinking, regardless of whether it changes your decision.
Exercise B: For whatever sunk costs you’re in the middle of expending, look at the same scenario and rephrase it as a sunk benefit, the purchased option to finish a task more quickly than before. E.g., if you already paid $100 on a $150 item, change from “I paid $100” to “I now have the option of purchasing this item for $50″. Again, the stated objective of the exercise will be, “Notice the difference in your thinking”, not, “try to change your decision”.
Exercise C: As above, but imagine that you bought the option for a penny on eBay. E.g. if you’re one year into a four-year PhD program, imagine that you paid a penny on eBay to purchase an option to get a PhD in three years rather than the usual four years. Would you exercise that option if you paid a penny for it?
That last exercise seems to run afoul of some value-related heuristics. Price is so common a proxy for utility that imagining that you paid a penny for the option on eBay might irrationally devalue whatever you’re looking at.
Of course, looking at the contrast might still give you some useful insights—provided you can untangle them.
Subskill: Use fungibility. There are different ways to achieve many goals. E.g. instead of wasting an evening with a relative in a way you resent, send them a postcard.
Subskill: Don’t express emotions as policy decisions. (Anna.) Find some other outlet for the emotion besides the policy decision, i.e., screaming. (Eliezer.)
Keep in mind that the current psychology literature indicates that cathartic release is actually undesirable—while catharsis might improve affect in the short term, this is largely because it represents giving in to one’s anger, and in the long run it actually makes you more likely to experience anger in the future.
I therefore advise that, in the event that one needs to make a particularly important decision and is currently angry, cathartic screaming may be effective, but its use should be restricted only for cases where it is strictly necessary.
(and this is coming from the ex-leader of a cathartic screaming club :P)
Or, more generally, what you do reinforces your mental state at the time. Acting in anger (even just a cathartic release) reinforces your tendency toward (the likelihood of future) anger; the same with acting from fear and most other emotions. Also, whatever the cause of your procrastination, acting on it, letting yourself get away with procrastinating, increases your problems with it in the future. As a poster I made for my study wall many years ago said: “Commit through Action: Do It”.
Exercise: Recall acts you’ve done while your emotions were running high, in cases where it seems like something that might be worth optimizing. Of those acts, ask whether the action/policy/response can best be interpreted as maximizing a worthwhile criterion, or as direct expressions of the emotion.
Subskill: Chain from feelings of angst and frustration into saying, “I need to be strategic!” and the other skills listed.
Subskill: Before the final moment of doing something that has any sort of cost or downside, ask whether you’re doing it because of its consequence or merely because you previously decided to do it.
Exercise: Before ordering food in a restaurant, check whether you want the food, or just have a cached belief that you like it.
Not just in a restaurant. I am trying to lose weight, and one of the more effective strategies is to make myself stop and ask myself if I really want to fix and eat something right now, or if I am thinking about eating for some other reason. It helps that I have gotten rid of most of the ready to eat food in my house and have to take the time to actually fix something, which slows me down enough to ask the question.
Failure mode: comfort food. Thinking about eating for non-hunger, non-appetite reasons, but persistent and inducing a real desire for food.
Like many people, I have the opposite problem. (Not trying to gain weight exactly, but to keep from becoming weak and sick.) Even readily available ice cream gets put off for hours, and then some more hours. The limiting cached thought in my case seems to be “it’s not worth the effort”. Might be self-fulfilling.
Even ice-cream has to be actually pulled out of the fridge, scooped out of the punnet into a bowl. This may seem like a small hurdle—but it’s obviously enough to keep you from eating.
Instead—try getting a bunch of non-perishable food (eg mixed nuts or dried fruit/trail mix) and leaving it in an open jar somewhere easily accessible (eg on the bench). Every time you walk past it—grab a small handful and nibble on it.
From there, you can progress to a bowl of pre-cut-up fresh fruit or veg (keep a lid on it so it doesn’t gather flies) for a healthier option. (cut it up all at once at the beginning of the week—leave out a day’s worth each morning).
...and that should get the ball rolling.
Anna’s subskill list from “Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic”:
Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;
Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;
Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;
Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past);
Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren’t habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don’t work;
Focus most of the energy that isn’t going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;
Make sure that our “goal” is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won’t continually sap our energies;
Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting.
Subskill: Musashi’s “cut through in the same motion”.
Since LW lore has grown wide, can you please at least point to the reference for the uninitiated?
From Musashi:
“The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him.”
Pretty sure it’s mentioned in Twelve Virtues of Rationality, which provides a decent summary in context—although you should read Musashi’s Book of Five Rings if you really want to absorb the concept. He’s a lucid (if sometimes infuriatingly vague) writer, and there are several good translations floating around.
I think this is one of the earlier mentions.
Exercise: take a class in historical fencing techniques. :)
Doesn’t have to be Japanese style. Italian or Spanish schools teach this too. Avoid the modern sport/olympics style classes.
Probably not great advice if you’re looking specifically for a practice that’ll quickly teach the habit of carrying tactical decisions through into strategic goals—in this context that’s something you only get from lots of blade-to-blade practice, and the koryu arts are almost universally very heavy on kata. In a typical dojo you might not get to freestyle sparring for a year or more. Western reconstructionist fencing tends to be less so, but there’s still a pretty serious ramp-up period in every salle I’ve ever been exposed to.
On the other hand, if you can get past that period, just about any martial art which involves partnered practice is remarkably good at developing the skill of instrumentalizing strategic thinking (though it still needs to be generalized to the rest of life, a difficult trick which probably qualifies as a virtue of rationality in its own right). Weapon arts (and aikido, but it’s unique in this respect among the empty-hand arts I’ve studied) are also good for developing a habit which is difficult to put into words, but which might be approximated as “presence” or “mindfulness”.
Subskill: “What is the consequence, what is the goal?”
Exercise A: For some policy that someone is carrying out today, starting as close to the object level as possible (answering an email, making a phone call, buying something at the store), ask about the consequences, and the consequences of the consequences. Identify the consequences that are desirable or that the action is being carried out for-the-sake-of. State the goal in abstract terms. Ask whether achieving the goal has further consequences—even things terminally desirable often have other, instrumentally desirable or undesirable consequences. Trace out the chain of specific events and the abstract instrumental and terminal goals they correspond to.
Exercise B: For each goal node, find some other policy—not necessarily a superior policy, but some other policy—that would be helpful for the same goal, not necessarily in the same way. (The point being to unanchor your concept of that goal from the exact, specific means of achieving it. This also obviously starts on the habit of searching for superior alternatives.)