Creator of the Intend app (formerly known as Complice) a system for orienting to each day with intentionality in service of long-term careabouts. It features coworking rooms, the longest-running of which is the Less Wrong Study Hall: https://intend.do/room/lesswrong
I’m working full-time on solving human coordination at the mindset & trust level. You can maybe get a sense of my thinking there via this 10min video.
I know this is much later, but for future readers I thought I’d chime in that goal-factoring is a process of breaking your goals down into subgoals and so on. At each level, you ask yourself “what am I trying to achieve with this?” and then ask yourself if there might be a better/cheaper/more efficient way to do so.
This is very closely related to the idea of purchasing goods separately.
[I attended January 2013 CFAR workshop and volunteered at the March one.]
If you want to optimize for no->yes, which I presume you do, I would say start with something much less intimate, like kissing. And even then, you’ll probably want it to happen when there’s already some vectors pointing in that direction.
If you ask the sex question out of the blue / too early, then that signals that you just generally have sex on your mind, which in many cases is seen as a bad thing. And depending on tone it can convey lots of other undesirable ideas. There are also (many) situations in which your conversational partner may simply not want to say yes to that question too early, and therefore you don’t want to ask the question yet.
It’s… kind of like inferential distances? If your state of mind is all sexy, but your partner’s is not, then it can be weird to just jump suddenly to sex. The difference (I guess) is that unlike just explaining something, there are indeed serious drawbacks (slaps, etc) from assuming the inferential gap is small. In general, I think it’s a valuable skill to be able to quickly gauge where someone is on the inference or arousal spectra and respond accordingly. Perhaps separate skills though.
I like the experimental ideas. With large enough n, one could have completely separate groups such that they aren’t even aware that light is the experimental variable. But I don’t run a psych department.
I’m going to point out that since the writing of this post, a tool has been created for exactly this purpose: Quantified Mind
Correction:
(2 Fermis per day)×(90 days) = 200 Fermi estimates.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by math geniuses—do you just mean e.g. high-performing university level math students, or math professors doing groundbreaking research? I’m also not sure if the argument you’re making is biological. I believe that, while there may be biological differences in the average mathematical aptitude between genders, the biological effects are negligible compared to the social aspects.
First of all, stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is the phenomenon that being reminded of a negative stereotype will inhibit your performance because part of your working memory becomes preoccupied with trying to reject the stereotype. This research is fairly well-established, and interventions performed by one of the researchers, Spencer, have indicated that the gender discrepancy in mathematical performance among first-year engineering students can be basically eliminated by following through on this theory. I actually took a Psych course from Spencer and had several conversations on the subject with him, so that’s how I know about the interventions, which were done at University of Waterloo. There appears to be a lot of Googleable stuff on it though: Google results for spencer engineering stereotype threat intervention
So, stereotype threat accounts for low-performing students. What about professors? Well, there are tons of factors:
Stereotypes & teacher/parent expectations cause fewer girls to care about math & science at young ages.
These same factors cause fewer high school girls to apply to STEM (Science, Technology, Math & Engineering) degree programs.
Stereotype threat causes fewer undergraduate women to perform highly in STEM, thereby reducing the odds that they make it to grad school.
Due to points 1-3, the gender ratios in STEM graduate programs are hugely slanted. I don’t know about research on the effects of this, but Spencer commented at one point that he’s heard of men leaving the English departments of universities because they didn’t feel comfortable there, being the only man. Similarly, women often find it unpleasant to be working in a predominantly male environment.
In addition to the mere ratio being detrimental, there’s also this factor: People treat male and female professors differently. This bias, again, will affect their perceived intelligence and performance, and therefore factors like funding, etc. See this article from a transgender professor who was treated profoundly differently before and after his sex change: Transgender Experience led Stanford Scientist to Critique Gender Difference
“Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but his work is much better than his sister’s work.”
and
In his commentary Barres points to data from a range of studies showing bias in science.
So sure, there are more male mathematical geniuses than female. And maybe there’s a biological difference that causes men to be more mathematical. But no significant innate difference has been found, and there is plenty of harm being done by assuming that it’s there, or even drawing attention to it, in most situations.
I’m currently adapting to polyphasic sleep and have been consistently getting about 2h of deep sleep during my ~3h core (according to my Zeo). Contrast that with e.g. gwern’s Zeo charts which show about 1h of SWS during an entire night of 8 hours. Note that even when his ZQ (~sleep quality) was about 100 (a “good” score) he was still getting about an hour.
...and I’m not even fully adapted. That said, I’m currently not getting quite enough REM, but I’m working on this.
About a week now. Just last night I had a much more appropriate distribution in my core, with a standard 1h of deep sleep and about 55mins of REM. This was accompanied by about 45mins of (wasteful) light sleep as well, but I woke feeling very refreshed thanks to the REM.
I’m planning to blog about this soon. Will link when I do.
I was expecting to find someone commenting about beliefs whose truth-value may be hard to know but whose effect is positive nonetheless. Several examples (which I don’t necessarily personally endorse)
If believing this homeopathic sugar pill works will make it work,
I desire to believe that this sugar pill works.
If believing this homeopathic sugar pill works will not make it work,
I desire to believe that this sugar pill does not work.
Let me not become attached to beliefs that do not serve me.
or
If believing in synchronicities will cause more good things to happen in my life,
I desire to believe in synchronicities.
If believing in synchronicities will not cause more good things to happen in my life,
I desire to not believe in synchronicities.
Let me not become attached to beliefs I do not want.
It appears that, if you have the ability to actually self-modify your beliefs as such, the “Litany of Instrumentarski” could be a useful way to deal with the thing where rationality breaks things like the placebo effect. Sugar pills, or whatever, if you can adopt the positive sides of beliefs that are self-fulfilling prophecies (true either way you believe them, like e.g. the Pygmalion effect) then that ought to be conducive to winning.
But if the belief is accurate either way, then you can basically pick whatever belief you want. This is the weird paradox of self-fulfilling prophecies, like the Pygmalion effect. So what then?
I know of at least three possible minds for this. Pretty sure we all assumed we were typical until talking about it.
One friend of mine is like you, and finds music horribly distracting to reading.
Another friend becomes practically deaf while reading, so music is just irrelevant.
I, on the third hand, can sing along to songs I know, while reading. I can possibly even do this for simple songs I don’t know. I would suspect this is not optimal reading from a comprehension or speed perspective, but it’s a lot of fun.
Winning at Arguments, I am already very, very good at when I want to be, which is rare these days. It took me many years too realize that even though I “won” almost every argument I cared about, winning the argument wasn’t usually all that useful. Winning an argument is the wrong goal to have for almost any purpose, and rarely leads to the outcomes I desire.
If I recall correctly, the main point of this class was to redefine the meaning of “winning” to be something more like “achieving the optimal outcome for both parties”… i.e. you pause the argument as early as possible, consider the goals of everyone involved, and (ideally together but possibly with less cooperation) work to optimize for those goals. Your comment above sounds like it’s still using the conventional definition of winning arguments, and it seems to me that you seem frustrated by that approach. Worth revisiting, perhaps?
Maybe just go with “so who are the important people in your life?”
I really like that. It gives you a good sense of how they relate to people and also how probably what they value, assuming they give any indication at all of why those people are important.
I do attribute reading PUA stuff for my creepiness.
One of my friends, who actually studied so much PUA that he briefly became a coach, was very good at not being creepy. The way he did this was being clear about his intentions. Not necessarily explicit: he would still use innuendo etc. The point was, if he was into a woman, he would flirt with her a lot, assuming she was at all warm to the prospect. If not, he was still very friendly, but interacted in a markedly different way.
This meant that women don’t have to guess about what he’s up to. He recounted a story that took place in our university residence, involving another male friend of ours and a female friend they both knew. We’ll call my PUA friend K, the woman F, and the other friend B. So, F was sitting in her room when K pushed her door ajar, saw her, and then went it and sat down on her bed, and said something to the effect of “Hey, what’s up?”
F responded warmly, “Oh, man, the weirdest thing just happened… B just came into my room unannounced and started talking to me… it was kinda creepy...”
K paused, and asked with a grin, “You mean, just like I did, just now” and she reflected that yeah, the behaviour had been almost identical. The key difference, they agreed, was that K was always very open when he was into someone, so his platonic entrance was seen as being that: platonic. B, on the other hand, falls into more of the Nice Guy category.
Bayes’ Time!
For K, if he’s into a woman, he almost always flirts with her. If he’s not, he does a little, but sparingly.
B, on the other hand, rarely flirts (proficiently) with women. In fact, he might flirt more with women he’s not into, because he has less fear of rejection. But to within error bars, he basically doesn’t flirt.
This means that K is providing very strong evidence to women about whether or not he’s interested. As mentioned, he backs off when they appear not to be as well, which is irrelevant to the comments about evidence but important for clarifying that he’s not obsessive. B does not. B doesn’t really give any evidence at all, and the resulting uncertainty is creepy/awkward/uncomfortable. It makes women uneasy, because they aren’t sure of his intentions. If they knew he liked them, they might be able to update him on whether or not they do. If they knew he didn’t, then they could relax. But not knowing sucks.
I just found this piece of software which might be a good tool to use for coworking. http://www.sqwiggle.com/
I think that’s part of it too, yeah. B trying to keep all female friends as potential partners, but not actively pursuing any of them, just kind of randomly “going for it”.
For posterity’s sake, the original reading originals page is down, but it’s here on archive.org:
I’d also like to point out that obviously there are many more ways to be creepy than being ambiguous (e.g. simply being forward in a way that doesn’t connect with the other person). This post was merely designed to deconstruct one form of creepiness, linking it (inversely) with PUA.
I am not-very-far-at-all into Decisive by Chip & Dan Heath, but even just from the introduction it’s apparent that the book has a huge overlap with a lot of CFAR’s Instrumental Rationality content. And I know from reading Switch (also a great book) that they are thorough researchers and enjoyable authors.
I suspect that even if most of the concepts are old hat, it will be helpful to have more analogies, both for my own sake and to facilitate better explanations of CFAR concepts to people-unfamiliar-with-our-terminology.
The table of contents… (text in parens indicate my guess as to what it relates to, sometimes just from the title, other times I glance at the pages)
Widen Your Options
Avoid a Narrow Frame (alternative hypothesis generation)
Multitrack (related to comfort-zone expansion, affordance-generation; not getting stuck in ruts)
Find Someone Who’s Solved Your Problem (updating on others)
Reality-Test Your Assumptions
Consider the Opposite (e.g. status quo bias)
Zoom In, Zoom Out (outside view)
Ooch (I had no idea what this was, but the first page yields “to ooch is to construct small experiments to test one’s hypothesis”)
Attain Distance before Deciding
Overcome Short-Term Emotion (System 1 vs System 2, urges vs goals)
Honor Your Core Priorities (goal factoring, winning at arguments)
Prepare to be Wrong
Bookend the Future (confidence intervals, bookends refer to the min/max etc)
Set a Tripwire (schelling points/fences, murphyjitsu / planning kata / contingency planning)
..
Trusting the Process (a concept proposed in GTD unit… just skimmed the chapter though and while it appears valuable/useful, not obviously linked to CFAR stuff)
So basically this is just workshop-in-a-book. I mean, lacking the food/face-to-face-time/intensiveness/instructors-to-ask-questions-of/interactivity/commitment-mechanisms/followup/community, but otherwise seems to be a good literature review on instrumental rationality. Again, I’ve barely started it, but the authors are good and this is a good topic, so I would bet high odds on it being worth reading.
I grew up in a relaxed Christian family, so Lent was kind of always like this for me. Well, more of a challenge than a controlled experiment. I gave up sugar (within reasonable boundaries) last year. My blog post announcing it if you’re looking for the details. I was successful, and it was surprising how many products are actually quite sweet.
I kind of forgot, this year, or perhaps I just have so many other changes I’m trying to make that it felt overwhelming to try to do something else too.