Mercurial

Karma: 531

Mercurial 26 May 2012 22:46 UTC
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in reply to: JGWeissman’s comment on: SotW: Avoid Motivated Cognition
Yep.

Mercurial 26 May 2012 22:45 UTC
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in reply to: JGWeissman’s comment on: SotW: Avoid Motivated Cognition
To clarify, I actually think of it with two upside-down ‘V’ shapes. I imagine one off to my left in the world where X is true and observe the two possible outcomes based on what I believe is true in that world, and then I look off to my right to see the upside-down ‘V’ in the world where X is not true and consider the alternatives.

I should also add that I have to put all four representations in near-mode. I view this whole process as a way of getting my brain to emotionally get that yes, it’s better to have true beliefs even if they describe a world I’d rather not be in.

(To clarify, in case this isn’t obvious: I’m Valentine.)

Mercurial 24 May 2012 19:15 UTC
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on: Group rationality diary, 5/21/12
Continuing from here, I’ve found the self-modification stuff Critch talked about to be an absolutely amazing tool. I now find myself wanting to take every spare few minutes to work on my dissertation, which is quite novel. It felt just like tedium before. I’ve also found my applications of CBT to be fantastically more effective because (a) rewarding myself for noticing distorted thoughts makes it a lot easier to notice them later (especially with TDT supplementation) and (b) rewarding small improvements from a rational response had made the rational responses vastly better at causing emotional improvement. I’ve also been rewarding self-change to make that more automatic, though I have as yet to determine if that’s too meta to actually work.

Mercurial 24 May 2012 19:03 UTC
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in reply to: taw’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
Thank you!

Do you happen to know anything about the claim that we’re running out of the supplies we need to build solar panels needed to tap into all that wonderful sunlight?

Mercurial 24 May 2012 18:57 UTC
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Group rationality diary, 5/21/12

Being Specific. Holy crap! Once you start noticing this, it is everywhere. Still not super good at automatically being specific, but I’m quite good at noticing unspecific things now.

Such as...?

(Sorry, it just begged to be said, and no one else took the bait!)

Mercurial 21 May 2012 4:50 UTC
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in reply to: taw’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
Can you pretty, pretty please tell me where this graph gets its information from? I’ve seen similar graphs that basically permute the cubes’ labels. It would also be wonderful to unpack what they mean by “solar” since the raw amount of sunlight power hitting the Earth’s surface is a very different amount than the energy we can actually harness as an engineering feat over the next, say, five years (due to materials needed to build solar panels, efficiency of solar panels, etc.).

And just to reiterate, I’m really not arguing here. I’m honestly confused. I look at things like this video and books like this one and am left scratching my head. Someone is deluded. And if I guess wrong I could end up wasting a lot of resources and time on projects that are doomed to total irrelevance from the start. So, having some good, solid Bayesian entanglement would be absolutely wonderful right about now!

Mercurial 21 May 2012 4:39 UTC
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in reply to: zntneo’s comment on: Group rationality diary, 5/14/12
Possibly! We considered it before but decided against it for a number of reasons. One was that CBT is its own thing, and none of us are formally trained in its use or in teaching it. Another is the unfortunate context of it being therapy, which tends to turn a lot of people off.

However, the latter effect didn’t seem to be relevant this last minicamp. That has caused me to update in favor of at least suggesting an overview of the process. And I think I’d be quite comfortable providing an overview. So we might bring it up—but I’d guess only in the July camp due to time considerations, if at all.

Mercurial 17 May 2012 22:07 UTC
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in reply to: taw’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
Okay, this has been driving me bonkers for years now. I keep encountering blatantly contradictory claims about what is “obviously” true about the territory. taw, you said:

Renewable energy available annually is many orders of magnitude greater than all fossil fuels we’re using[...]

And you might well be right. But the people involved in transition towns insist quite the opposite: I’ve been explicitly told, for one example, that it would take the equivalent of building five Three Gorges Dams every year for the next 50 years to keep up with the energy requirements provided by fossil fuels. By my reading, these two facts cannot both be correct. One of them says that civilization can rebuild just fine if we run out of fossil fuels, and the other says that we may well hit something dangerously close to a whimper.

I’m not asking for a historical analysis here about whether we needed fossil fuels to get to where we are. I’d like clarification on a fact about the territory: is it the case that renewable forms of energy can replace fossil fuels without modern civilization having to power down? I’m asking this as an engineering question, not a political one.

Mercurial 17 May 2012 4:51 UTC
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in reply to: NoSignalNoNoise’s comment on: Developing Empathy
I can see where you think that. When I’m being akrasic, though, I’m still doing it for some reason. I’m motivated to do what I’m doing for some reason, not for no reason. For instance, someone who is akrasic about getting their bills paid isn’t just insane; they have an aversion and get some slight relief from distracting themselves with non-bill activities. Understanding that in first-person near-mode (rather than just seeing them as a machine to be trouble-shot) seems to help a lot with empathy. In my experience!

Mercurial 17 May 2012 4:47 UTC
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on: Group rationality diary, 5/14/12
Hello everyone! This is Valentine.

I spent my first day back from minicamp… sleeping! And spending time with my wonderful wife. I was optimizing for recovery there after getting a total of something like 12 hours of sleep over the weekend. Totally worth it for all those amazing conversations and connections, though!

But after that, starting this morning I used a number of Critch’s techniques to help deal with some aversions and emotional distaste surrounding writing my dissertation. I’ve been using the trick Anna & Critch told me independently (I think!) of rewarding the noticing of something that I want to change; that was the one key piece of habit-changing that I had totally missed.

I noticed rather quickly that there’s always a sufficiently meta-level that can be modified in order to deal with the difficulty at hand. For instance, this morning when it came time to start working on my dissertation, I noticed some disquiet inside about that. It wasn’t immediately obvious that I could just make myself want to write. But I wanted to want to write, and I could use the why behind that in near-mode to create a slight increase in my wanting to write—which I immediately rewarded. And then that snowballed.

I found I had to add an odd loop I hadn’t initially expected: I had to (a) reward noticing feelings of guilt or anxiety associated with the writing and (b) reward any small improvements from a CBT blow against the distorted thinking underlying the feelings. I’ve known CBT to work pretty well in the past, but adding this bit with conditioning via rewarding small improvements made it much more rapid to turn into relatively automatic habit.

I also spent a good chunk of time journaling the whole weekend since that’s what I’ve found to be effective for reinforcing episodic memory.

Much of this happened via the Pomodoro technique. I’ve used it before, but I weaved conditioning stuff into it (rewarding myself for starting one & rewarding myself for having completed one, and rewarding noticing a desire to do something distracting and also for returning attention to the task at hand).
What links here?
- Mercurial's comment on Group rationality diary, 5/21/12 by cata (24 May 2012 19:15 UTC; 6 points)

Mercurial 17 May 2012 4:23 UTC
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in reply to: jpet’s comment on: Group rationality diary, 5/14/12

I also have a strong aversion to posting my writing publicly, especially if it reveals anything personal about myself. So this post right here is a direct attempt to overcome that by just doing it.

Awesome job putting yourself forward this way!

I’m not sure if this is using any specific technique from the minicamp, or just making use of the crazy mental energy from the camp while I’m still feeling it.

This is flooding, from Critch’s session on overcoming aversions. :-)

(This is Valentine, by the way. I’ll see if I can get my handle here changed since “Mercurial” just isn’t well-associated with me.)

Mercurial 5 May 2012 2:07 UTC
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on: Urgent: Subjects needed for rationality measure development
We have a number of volunteers for this, and we’re very grateful to those of you who have volunteered! But we could really use about twice that number of people. You can help us raise the sanity waterline this way—either by volunteering or by pointing another LWer toward this. But we need people soon since the first minicamp is in just a week. So please, help us make a more sane world by helping us develop tools that will keep our efforts honest. Thank you!

Mercurial 25 Apr 2012 16:51 UTC
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in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: To like each other, sing and dance in synchrony
I definitely dance. I met my wife doing ballroom dancing. I picked up social dancing after breaking up with a long-term girlfriend because I knew I’d fare better if I were to make a bunch of friends and have a new hobby that wasn’t moping or being lonely.

Mercurial 25 Apr 2012 16:48 UTC
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in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: To like each other, sing and dance in synchrony
The minister’s cat might play this role, although people do get kind of frustrated with it.

Mercurial 29 Mar 2012 21:16 UTC
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in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: Minicamps on Rationality and Awesomeness: May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28
Why our kind can’t cooperate.

Mercurial 3 Mar 2012 7:08 UTC
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in reply to: EchoingHorror’s comment on: People who “don’t rationalize”? [Help Rationality Group figure it out]
This is helpful. Thank you!

Mercurial 3 Mar 2012 7:06 UTC
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in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: People who “don’t rationalize”? [Help Rationality Group figure it out]

Don’t you have exercises designed to catch people rationalizing? If not, you ought to, if yes, did you catch them rationalizing?

Getting people to rationalize during a session is actually quite a challenge. What we have are exercises meant to illustrate situations that people might find themselves in where rationalization is likely. And after a dozen or so examples, this particular subgroup—about 25% of our tested population so far! - just flat-out does not relate to any of the examples.

However, one of them seemed to get “caught” by one example after a friend of theirs explicitly pointed out the analogy to their life. We haven’t yet followed up on that case to explore more solidly whether it’s really denial or if it was actually our misunderstanding and this person really doesn’t rationalize.

Mercurial 3 Mar 2012 7:04 UTC
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in reply to: Shephard’s comment on: People who “don’t rationalize”? [Help Rationality Group figure it out]

I tend to agree that anyone who denies the tendency to rationalize is either in denial or has a different definition for the word “rationalize”. In fact I would argue that rationalization is the default for human beings, and that anything else requires either focused effort or serious mental re-programming (which is still probably only partially effective).

I absolutely relate. I totally would have said that a week ago. Evidence has smashed my belief’s face quite solidly in the nose, though.

One possible way to try to elicit an understanding for any given individual’s capacity for rationalization is to ask them about the last time they did something they knew was a bad idea (perhaps a comrpomise they felt uncomfortable making, or an indulgence they knew they were going to regret), and then to ask them what excuses went through their brains to justify it. If someone still denies ever having had such an experience then they are beyond redemption.

That’s a good idea, and we did it several times. They sincerely do deny having such experience, but not in a knee-jerk way. It’s more like a, “Huh. Hmm. Um… Well, I honestly can’t think of something quite like that, but maybe X is similar?” And “X” in this case is something like, “I knew eating a cookie wasn’t good for me, but I felt like it and so I did it anyway.” It’s like the need for justification is just missing, at least in their self-reports.

Mercurial 3 Mar 2012 6:59 UTC
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in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: People who “don’t rationalize”? [Help Rationality Group figure it out]
That could actually be quite helpful. No offense to Vladimir; we’re just sincerely curious about this phenomenon, and if he’s really a case of someone who doesn’t relate to Tarski or rationalization, then it’d be helpful to have good evidence one way or the other about whether he rationalizes.

Mercurial 3 Mar 2012 6:58 UTC
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in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: People who “don’t rationalize”? [Help Rationality Group figure it out]
That’s helpful. Thank you.

And yes, I agree, the term “rationalization” is a bit loaded. We already checked by tabooing the word in exploring with at least one case, so it’s not just that these people freeze at the word “rationalization.” But it’s quite possible that there are multiple things going on here that only seem similar at first glance.