FYI, this training is part of USAF basic training. With more yelling. I wouldn’t call it a pleasant routine, but it’s certainly effective when you do it for six hours straight and start to get an adrenaline surge when your alarm goes off.
That still persists 1.5 years later, so it may be a munchkin hack in itself.
After joining the military, where executive function on demand is sort of the meta-goal of most training exercises, i found that having a set wardrobe actually saves a great deal of mental effort. You just don’t realize how much time you spend worrying about clothes until you have a book which literally has all the answers and can’t be deviated from. I know that this was also a thing that Steve Jobs did- one ‘uniform’ for life. President Obama apparently does it as well. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2012/10/05/steve-jobs-always-dressed-exactly-the-same-heres-who-else-does/
There are a number of other things i’ve learned for this which are maybe worth writing up as a separate post. Not sure if that’s within the purview of LW though.
Subject: Warfare, History Of and Major Topics In
Recommendation: Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, by Peter Paret, Gordon Craig, and Felix Gilbert.
I recommend this book specifically over ‘The Art of War’ by Sun Tzu or ‘On War’ by Clausewitz, which seem to come up as the ‘war’ books that people have read prior to (poorly) using war as a metaphor. The Art of War is unfortunately vague- most of the recommendations could be used for any course of action, which is sort of a common problem with translations from chinese due to the heavy context requirements of the language. Clausewitz is actually one of the articles in Makers of Modern Strategy- the critical portions of On War are in the book, in historical context.
The important part of Makers of Modern Strategy is that each piece (the book is a collection of the most important essays in the development of military thought through the ages, starting with the medieval period and through nuclear warfare. I have other recommendations for the post-nuclear age of cyberwarfare and insurgency and I’ll post them separately.) is placed in context and paraphrased for critical details. Military strategy is an ongoing composition, but the inexperienced read a single strategic author and think they have everything figured out.
This book is great because it walks you through each major strategic innovation, one at a time, showing how each is a response to the last and how each previous generation being sure they’ve got everything figured out is how their successors defeat them. My overall takeaway was one of humility- even the last section on nuclear war has been supplanted by cyber and insurgent warfare, and it is a sure bet that someone will always find a way to deploy force to defeat an opponent. This book walks you through how to defeat naive and inexperienced combatants in a strategic sense. Tactics, as always, are contingent on circumstances.
Double Edged: Strict Heirarchy. More ‘qualified’ individuals give orders to others and such orders must be followed. This frees subordinates to expend mental function on how to carry out orders, and frees superiors to watch the big picture. Unfortunately promotion is not based on ability to convert a bigger picture into effective orders, and difficulties in coming up with good promotion criteria lead to it becoming largely a gerontocracy and promotion of highly unqualified technical experts out of areas of their domain-specific expertise.
the nepotist bureaucratic nightmare that was the Roman Empire
One of my goals with this thread is to figure out how to avoid such nepotist bureaucratic nightmares, which have historically dominated the long-term outlook of empires from China to Rome to, increasingly, the US.
Mmm. There are qualifications. First, your orders are enforced by other people- and limited by their ability to understand and adapt your orders. As time goes on and your orders are outdated, they will not be updated until someone of equal or greater rank devotes both attention and personnel to updating them, and it is rare for this to happen until something definitively proves they are outdated (an incident of some sort).
So, yes, a wide impact. But not a wide impact at your top quality level, a wide impact at the level that manages to percolate through your chain of subordinates and a persistent impact (for better or worse) until an incident causes a policy update.
Both. Let me explain using a concrete example of how it happens using the elites from my own field, military computer security.
First, a problem is pointed out. Usually because an adversary pearl harbors something (like a base network goes down.). A commander (usually general level, this is really all they do besides give speeches) picks someone recommended by their staff and their staff’s friends. The person picked is usually one of the few very competent people in the military. This person is given absolute dictator-level power and responsibility over the subject area wherever it does not interact with subject areas controlled by a higher-ranking person.
This person’s first task is to pick people to make a training program for more people in the field (the ‘single point of failure’ policy). They pick their friends, who are also likely among the few very competent people, and they get together and actually consult with training experts, have complete authority to make training programs (SERE training includes torturing/beating people and forcing them to eat live animal parts to prepare them for being captured and living in the wild, as an example.)
The person’s second task is to requisition people for the field as a ‘special duty.’ In order to be eligible for special duties you always require basic competence (if your pt scores are bad or you have any poor marks on your record, no go), but you can also require advanced competence (pararescue has a swim test, cybersecurity requires S+ and is moving toward CISSP certifications.)
The third task is to remove the threat using the people and the training program, and they are personally responsible and accountable for making sure the threat is removed. There are no excuses, not even reasonable ones like ‘no human being knew that was possible!’ or ‘there is not enough money in the world to solve this.’ The commander comes up with an effective, efficient way of addressing the threat, or they are removed from command.
So, you have training programs which are effective at improving competence (domain-specific competence), and you have personnel entering them who already display a modicum of this DScompetence and a basic level of generalized competence (they have followed the basic military rules like pt, get to work on time, do what you’re trained to do, don’t break the law.). You get your pick of the applicants, including for training and the people who make regulations.
Over time this urgency fades and you’re left with enforcing the (however outdated) legacy of those effective people from whenever the last pearl harbor incident was.
That being said, here are a couple of links.
Diaphragm Breathing/Speaking: http://www.roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=3
Khargyraa Techniques: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCom9ZCJAmE
The best tip for the Khargyraa stuff is just to watch that video and maybe this one and then wing it for a while, trying to get the sound right. If you manage it, try just saying some stuff in a normal voice and note the difference. It is immediate and surprising.
This link is nice because the guy is such an amateur! He clearly learned, like, one technique (probably from youtube) and then posted his immediate results on youtube, so it’s a good starting point. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X54KBdi5_xg
The scholarly literature sometimes features article-type reviews of ‘popular’ science books.
I will look on ebscohost (google scholar may work as well)
for just the title of the book,
refine my search for publication dates in the first couple years after the original book was published (although I just saw an article-review on Seeing Like a State from 2010, 12 years after the original’s publication)
And then there are often reviews from noteworthies in the same field as the work, particularly if the author has published in academia prior to the popular work.
I’ve found them largely useless for any research, however, due to their brevity and their largely not-serious approach. The review is simply not treated like a scholarly response, it’s more of a ‘five stars, would recommend’ thing usually speaking, and even criticisms in the pieces feel off the cuff and not well considered.
I’d like to see a poster of a person thinking with the top five heuristics/biases floating around them. I’d buy that poster and keep it right behind my computer on the wall as a reminder.
I wonder how many Akrasia or other self-help techniques could benefit from a little prediction and data gathering on the part of the participants. I imagine it would be productive for someone to say ‘well… I tried Getting Things Done back in August for three weeks, and by September I wasn’t remembering to enter anything in my GTD log, so for whatever reason it didn’t mesh with the way of doing things I’d already had.’ More productive, at least, than trying GTD for three weeks every year because ‘i recall it sort of worked out last time. For a while.’
It seems that some self-help methods never ask their adherents to test the goals of the framework against the results, and I wonder if some ingrained fear of permanent records of failure is behind this. Regardless of the cause, I’d be interested to see how keeping logs of key goals correlated with the effectiveness of self-help techniques in general.
Thanks for that last link, it was an interesting update on the effectiveness of psychiatry. I was weighting my knowledge of the prevalence of rotten corpses in psychology into my estimate of the effectiveness of psychiatric methods, which now seems to be conflating two very different things. Although it does still seem that the set of psychiatrists who are capable of ignoring the prevalent rotten corpses in psychology when prescribing drugs is still small enough to tip the field toward doing your own analyses. I guess i don’t have a good set of heuristics for comparing the effects of personal bias v the effects of a psychiatrist trained in psychology and prone to that field’s biases.
Yes, my example was loaded. The thought experiment was ‘weird, unrecognized by the system outlier, of personal interest to the reader,’ and whether/in-what-circumstances it should influence the reader to try the drug. If one of those circumstances is ‘pharma doesn’t try to make their drug look effective as a nootropic,’ i feel it sums my perspective a bit better than ‘pharma doesn’t try to make their drug look effective for at least some people, within the set of markets they’ve established as worth aiming marketing toward during a given time period.’
Hahaha, exact same thing here. The US Air Force makes a big thing out of attention to detail- a single errant fold in a bedsheet or T-shirt results in the entire 50 person unit’s crap being thrown everywhere and all of you have to do it again.
In contrast, we went to the shooting range once and had to hit the target a single time out of 40 shots to pass. In fairness, if the AF is using rifles everything is pear-shaped anyway.
Yes, I do have particular books, classes, youtube videos, lectures, exercises, and other resources. It is highly dependent on your particular vocal tendencies, so your mileage will vary for all of them.
But just as i don’t feel comfortable posting physical fitness advice due to the above issues, i don’t feel inclined to share the techniques which worked well for me or have worked for my students without providing the support to ensure you gain maximum benefit from them. So I will simply state some intriguing names of techniques and remain available to answer questions from your own journey, instead of listing techniques which will be mostly useless and are easily disproven in the majority of circumstances.
well, the wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic#Theorized_psychological_heuristics) on heuristics claims five ‘well known’ heuristics, which they list as ‘Anchoring and adjustment, Availability heuristic, Representativeness heuristic, Naïve diversification, Escalation of commitment.’
Good point, though. Maybe a series of posters would be better for this topic.
@army 1987, it is the difference between knowing how to do push ups well, and run well, and do situps, and being strong in the sense that a blacksmith is strong. One is a sort of ability to perform a bounded activity, the other comes from constant use of the muscles in question over time. When you’ve done the right exercises, you don’t have to remember, you’re just strong and you have a life which makes you stronger every day.
@cae_jones, the technique you are referring to here is technically known as ‘Diaphragm Breathing.’ It is very effective and good both actively and passively, and used in voice training for stage, singing, and a variety of martial arts and meditative schools. It will also become second nature very quickly when practiced, and is the single best technique to know the existence of, which is why I taught it at the first rationality minicamp and the first boot camp.
Here is the technique, in brief form. YMMV.
Take a deep breath, placing one hand on your chest and one hand on your stomach. Note which hand moves. If your upper chest hand moves, you have much to gain. If your stomach hand moves, you will have an easy time making progress. If both move, you are partway along already.
To improve your diaphragm breathing, keep one hand on your stomach and fake a yawn. Your stomach hand should move, a lot. Not a little bit, but noticeably. It should feel like you just got fat :).
continue fake yawning in this fashion until you can separate the breathing from your stomach from the concept of a ‘fake yawn,’ and whenever you have a moment include either fake yawns (at the beginning), or diaphragm breathing (same thing, without the ostentatious yawn) in your quick meditations.
@Zaine, I considered a lesswrong post on it, but it is very difficult to give general advice on the topic due to interactions between identity and voice, the fact that many people already use many techniques and so could get bored with a list, etc etc. How would you advise structuring such a sharing post?
Learn some basic voice production for stage techniques. How your voice sounds is an absurdly strongly weighted component of a first impression, particularly over a phone or prior to direct introduction, and being able to project your voice in a commanding fashion has an overpowered influence on how much people listen to you and consider you a ‘natural leader.’ In particular, learn what it means to speak from the diaphragm, and learn some basic exercises for strengthening your subsidiary vocal chords like Khargyraa and basic tuvan throat singing, and you’ll be surprised at how much it makes people sit up and listen. You might coincidentally have your voice drop into a lower register after about a month of such exercises, it (anecdatally) happened to me and several people in my voice production for stage class in college. (class of 25, 6 people had their voices drop within the first 4 months, teacher said those numbers were normal.)
Most people just assume you’re born with a voice and have to deal with it, which is demonstrably untrue, and so they consider your voice to reflect your character.