ScottL

Karma: 611

ScottL 31 Aug 2016 0:54 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Elo’s comment on: Wicked Problems
Actually, if you read further the above is described as taming the problem, which is bad, and is not solving it.

Taming a wicked problem is a very natural and common way of coping with it. Instead of dealing with the full wickedness of the problem, people simplify it in various ways to make it more manageable and solvable

While it may seem appealing in the short run, attempting to tame a wicked problem will always fail in the long run. The problem will simply reassert itself, perhaps in a different guise, as if nothing had been done; or worse, the tame solution will exacerbate the problem.

For a further explanation, see this document

There is a variety of ways that organisations try to tame wicked problems by handling them too narrowly. The most common way is locking down the problem definition. This often involves addressing a sub-problem that can be solved. If the problem is how to reduce violence in schools, for example, policy makers may focus on the more tractable, narrow problem of how to install metal detectors in school entrances. Or, if the problem is obesity in children, the more tractable but narrow problem could be removing unhealthy food from school canteens.

If policy and performance measures are limited to the sub-problem rather than the wicked problem, the problem can appear solved at least in the short-term. If the performance measure is that school canteens no longer offer unhealthy foods, for example, this may be achievable. An unintended consequence and a reassertion of the wicked problem may be that more children no longer buy their lunch at school canteens but instead miss lunch, save their lunch money, and buy junk food at the shops on the way home from school. This is also a good example of how a tame solution can exacerbate the problem—some children may now eat more unhealthy food than they did previously, and they miss their lunch! It is also another illustration of the unintended consequences that can result from interventions to address wicked problems. Unintended consequences tend to occur even more frequently if the problem has been artificially tamed, that is, it has been too narrowly addressed and the multiple causes and interconnections not fully explored prior to measures being introduced. This does not mean that at some stage in the policy formulation process it will not be necessary to identify the components of the wicked problem and possible practical solutions as part of a comprehensive and coordinated set of measures to address the problem. Obviously, the type of food offered in school canteens is part of the solution to childhood obesity. But this fragmentation of the wicked problem would ideally occur after all the interconnections and social complexities have been identified, discussed and addressed as part of a coordinated strategy.

ScottL 16 Aug 2016 12:04 UTC
2 points
on: Wicked Problems
Quotes from post and this: http://www.cognexus.org/Rotman-interview_SharedUnderstanding.pdf

It took me a while to realise what a wicked problem was. It is evil. It’s a challenge.

“Wicked” in this context means resistance to resolution, rather than evil.

I looked to cooking. No two ingredients are the same. Even if you are cooking a thing for the 100th time, the factors of the day, the humidity, temperature, it’s going to be different.

This doesn’t sound like a wicked problem to me. I think a more “wicked” problem would be something like where you have to create a meal for a whole hall full of people. Now, you want to make a meal that everyone will like and you have a limited amount of resources, so you can’t create separate meals for everyone, but some people might be vegetarians, some might have allergies, some might want one type of meal in particular etc. There is a social complexity aspect to this problem. You cannot come up with a best meal because there are different stakeholders with strongly-held beliefs about what the problem is.

As a current example there is global warming and energy policy where people from the developed world have one set of views about what needs to be done, and the developing world has a completely different set of views. Nobody ‘owns’ the problem and no-one has a clear idea of how to work out the answers

The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.

This is less about quantifying things and more about how requirements change or are only realized after the solution of the problem or part of the problem is implemented. For example, let’s say you are renovating a house and there are 10 people involved. Every time you change something like a chair you need to check that it still aligns with everything else. You might need to go through many iterations of having to change and rechange things.

Every solution that is offered exposes new aspects of the problem, requiring further adjustments to the potential solutions. There is no definitive statement of ‘the problem’: these problems are ill-structured and feature an evolving set of interlocking issues and constraints.

Wicked problems have no stopping rule.

How do you make sufficient stopping rules when there are conflicts over what the problem is?

Since there is no definitive ‘the problem’, there is also no definitive ‘the solution.’ The problem-solving process ends when you run out of resources such as time, money or energy, not when an optimal solution emerges.

Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one shot operation.’

Developing models, trying scenarios etc. all take effort and send you down a particular track in terms of the conception of the problem. I think that wicked problems are like the conglomeration of multiple problems or people’s conception of the problem. Each time you try to move forward on one part of the problem you kind of entrench yourself in seeing the problem that particular way and it also spawns new problems directly related to only that one conception of the problem.

Every attempt has consequences. This is the ‘Catch 22’ of wicked problems: you can’t learn about the problem without trying solutions, but every solution is expensive and has lasting consequences that may spawn new wicked problems.

Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

A host of potential solutions may be devised, but another host that are never even thought of. Thus it is a matter of creativity to devise potential solutions, and a matter of judgement to determine which should be pursued and implemented.

ScottL 17 Jul 2016 3:33 UTC
1 point
on: [CORE] Concepts for Understanding the World
For rationality related concepts, see this page

ScottL 25 May 2016 13:31 UTC
6 points
on: Wrong however unnamed

Yet how is a lichen ‘more than the sum of fungus and alga’?

I don’t know anything about lichen, but the below is what I assume “more than the sum of” in this context means:

“The symbiosis between the mycobiont and the photobiont creates an organism that is more than the sum of its parts, in other words, a lichen is an emergent property. Lets take a step back to examine this statement. On the one hand, neither the photobiont nor the mycobiont can withstand intense UV radiation, dessication, or extreme temperatures. But on the other hand, when the photobiont and mycobiont work together within the context of the lichen symbiosis, they create an organism that can withstand living in outer space – thats more extreme temperature and radiation (not to mention vacuum exposure) than is experienced on Earth! Lichen can even grow within rocks (endolithic lichen)! These are conditions that would kill a fungus or algae.”

ScottL 13 May 2016 16:25 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: May Outreach Thread

My wish is to create rationalist communities which are emotionally healthy, capable of action, and successful in life. […] Similarly how the Sequences are not about “how to think rationally during a meetup”, but how to think rationally in general.

Is your wish actually to create rationalist communities which are emotionally healthy, capable of action, and successful in life so that you can become these things?

That people often try to avoid an extreme by running into the opposite extreme […] and it will be necessary not only to navigate them properly, but also make them notice when someone else promotes an extreme form of behavior.

I think the problem here is that the underlying problem that caused these people to take on an extreme view in the first place is still there and so when they do change their view they just tend to adopt another similarly extreme view. For example you mentioned PUA before; I have noticed that there are some men who have a strong level of neediness and so become ‘nice guys’ in the worst sense. They then read some of the PUA stuff and instead of doing good things like: developing genuine confidence, self-respect, a healthy sense of boundaries etc. they take a shortcut. They just change their perspective on women. The neediness is still there, however, and so they adopt a view where they objectify women. They essentially become ‘assholes’. In both the ‘asshole’ and the ‘nice guy’ cases there is a sense in which these people are giving up or altering part of who they are. This is what I think these people would actually need to solve if they were going to make an improvement in their situation.

But people are less unique than they imagine. For example, read Games People Play—this book describes about a dozen patterns of dysfunctional human interaction, and most people are shocked to find their own story described there.

That’s probably true, but I was trying to say that unlike with cognitive errors, which most people can relate to, most people would only be able to relate to a few of the games and would find the others to be largely irrelevant for them.

one of my big concerns is that I think that successful groups sooner or later attract psychopaths who will try to get into positions of power and exploit the whole thing for themselves. No idea how to prevent this

I would expect that any group like the one you propose would have a very flat hierarchy of power. In fact, if people become dependent on the group or find themselves seeming to need the group to improve then the group probably isn’t working too well. You reduce dependency by maximizing the free exchange of information and the ability for people to improve outside of the group.

ScottL 12 May 2016 13:38 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: May Outreach Thread
I have an idea about a sequence I would love to see, but only if it is written well (because it would be very easy and tempting!!! to make it wrong in various ways): Starting with scientifically describing human emotions, social behavior, and sexual behavior.

This seems way too broad. If it was done right, I don’t think it would end up being a single sequence.

How much have you looked into this already and do have any more concrete ideas on where you would want the sequence to go?

Progressing to social skills.

I think there are two main problems with trying to do a sequence on this:
- I think that the problems that people have with social skills are more individualistic than the heuristics and biases that are normally discussed on this site. They are largely due to ingrained perspectival and strategical problems, which are in constrast, to say, the representativeness heuristic which we can all relate to. A consequence of this is that most people are going to find a lot of the content to not be applicable for them. I would guess that this problem could be overcome by creating more of a debug guide like if you have problems expressing yourself go to post 3 or you could also go meta and let people realize their own problems.
- As you mention, it is important: “to have some ideas actionable”, but I think it is also especially important for these type of skills that they be easily able to be put into action and that there are opportunities available to easily put them into action. In this area, I would think that most of the ideas that would make an impact in people lives are not going to seem particularly insightful or revolutionary, in fact, they may at first appear to be incredibly obvious. It is only when they are put into practice that people come to recognize their importance. I would think that simulation of these skills is not as useful or as interesting as it is for the other content on this site.
And culminating with community building.

Something like this?

ScottL 7 Apr 2016 11:56 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Gyrodiot’s comment on: Open Thread April 4 - April 10, 2016

I’m exploring the following hypothesis : sometimes, you have to give up constructive actions for the sake of focus.

I would try to make the hypothesis a bit more concrete. Something like: flow, immersion and engagement are all important factors in productivity. An implication of this is: (your hypothesis here). You should of course look at the literature and explain what flow, engagement etc. is and how it relates to productivity.

If you want this to be interesting, then you should probably also try to find some implications that people normally don’t think about because they’re not strategic. Maybe, things like that you should: remove clutter, have the right perspective, exercise, practice, gamify things, learn how to beat akrasia, learn when its a good idea to relax etc.

The cfar class called turbo charging training which I described here seems to be related to your hypothesis . The underlying idea of it is the rule of intensity which states that the experience of intensity or effort that you are expending to learn something corresponds with the rate at which you are learning it.

ScottL 7 Apr 2016 2:31 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Turning the Technical Crank
This from here seems pretty accurate for Usenet:

Binary groups being a great big cost sink would be the main thing.

The store and forward protocol required quite some disk space at the time.

The network relied on “control” messages to create/delete groups automatically (as opposed to manual subscription), which due to the lack of authentication/encryption in the protocol, were very easy to spoof. A gpg-signing mechanism was later put into place, so that nodes peering with each other could establish a chain of trust by themselves. This was pretty nice in retrospect (and awesome by today standards), but the main problem is that creating new groups was a slow and painful approval-based process: people often wanted small groups just for themselves, and mailing lists offered the “same” without any approval required.

Having a large open network started to become a big attractor for SPAM, and managing SPAM in a P2P network without authentication is a harder problem to solve than a locally managed mailing list.

running a local server became so easy and cheap, that running mailing list offered local control and almost zero overhead. People that had niche groups started to create mailing lists with open access, and people migrated in flock. Why share your discussions in comp.programming.functional where you could create a mailing list just for your new fancy language? (it’s pretty sad, because I loved the breadth of the discussions). Discussions on general groups became less frequent as most of the interesting ones were on dedicated mailing lists. The trend worsened significantly as forums started to appear, which lowered the barrier to entry to people that didn’t know how to use a mail client properly.

For NNTP for LessWrong, I would think that we have to also take into account that people want to control how their content is displayed/styled. Their own separate blogs easily allow this.

ScottL 7 Apr 2016 1:29 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Turning the Technical Crank
As far as I see it, there are 2 basic classes of solutions.

The first type of solution is something like reddit or Facebook’s newsfeed which involves two concepts: linkposts which are links to or cross posts of outside content and normal posts which are hosted by the site itself. Making use of RSS or ATOM can automate the link posts.

The second type of solution is something like the Blogger API with extended functionality to allow you to access any content that has been posted using the API. Other things it would include would be, for example, the ability the list top pages based on some ranking system.

In the first type of solution, LessWrong.com is a hub that provides links to or copies of outside content. Smooth integration of the comments and content hosted outside of this site would, I think, be hard to do. Searching of the linked content and handling permissions for it nicely would be difficult as well.

In the second type of solution LessWrong.com is just another site in the LessWrong Sphere. The functionality of all the sites in this sphere would be driven by the API. You post and retrieve using the API which means that all posts and comments regardless of their origination sites can be available globally. Creating a prototype for this type of solution shouldn’t be too hard either which is good.

So, that’s Reddit with more freedom to set up custom CSS for subreddits? Or there are deeper differences?

The deeper difference is the elimination of linkposts. All content posted using the API can be retrieved using the API. It is not linked to. It is pulled from the one source using the API.

ScottL 6 Apr 2016 6:12 UTC
4 points
on: Turning the Technical Crank
Is this a good summary of your argument?

NNTP was a great solution to a lot of the problems caused by mailing lists. The main ones being:
- content duplication—mailing lists are bad because everyone gets their own copy of each article.
- reduced content accessibility—mailing lists suck because you miss out on great articles if they were sent before you were part of the mailing list.
We are facing similar problems now. A lot of people have their own sites where they host their own content. We either miss out on great content if we don’t trawl through a ton of different sites or we try to make lesswrong a central source for content and face problems with:
- content duplication—through needing to cross post content (essentially duplicating it)
- harder content accessibility—the alternative to cross posting is providing a link, but this is an annoying solution that can be jarring as you need to go to an entirely different site to access the content you want.
NNTP would solve the problems we have now in a similar way to how it solved the problems with mailing lists. That is, it would provide a central repository for content and a way to access this content.

I am currently thinking that the best way to think about the last point is that it means that we should set up a Web API similar to the Blogger Web API. Discussing NNTP, at least to me, is making the solution appear a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Although, I don’t know much about NNTP, so I could be overlooking something very important and am interested about what your future posts will explore.

With a Less Wrong Web API, websites could be created that act like views in a database. They would show only the content from a particular group or author. This content would, of course, be styled according to the style rules on the website.

These websites could be free, dns name and web development costs aside, using services like github pages. This is because there should be no need for a back-end as the content and user information is all hosted on Less Wrong. You post, retrieve content and vote using the API. It should also be fairly easy to create more complicated websites that could aggregate and show posts based on user preferences or even to create mobile applications.

ScottL 1 Apr 2016 2:52 UTC
9 points
on: Consider having sparse insides
I think of identity as if it were a kind of ‘thought groove’ or as if it was similar to trampling a path in snow that others will naturally tend to follow. By this I mean that it tends to cause some types of thoughts to be activated and others to be attenuated. The stronger your identity the stronger this effect.

What we perceive, is largely a product of what we have been primed and conditioned to perceive. Our perception is shaped by our previous experiences and beliefs for it is filled with assumptions and predictions. Gaps which must be filled by drawing upon pre-existing information in our minds. Whether a certain argument feels right or whether a particular remark is funny to you will depend largely on who you are and what your identity is.

Identity can be a great way to get certain thoughts and ways of thinking down to the 5 second level. On the other hand, it is also a common way to embed and propagate harmful or unhelpful thoughts. The best strategy to deal with it in my opinion involves four things:
- removing unhelpful identities, e.g. learned blankness.
- embedding helpful and life affirming identities, e.g. growth mindset, trying new things, being a person who is compassionate and grateful
- learning how to choose identities that can be adaptable. Retirees (especially men) commonly experience depression after giving up work because their identities were tied to it. The ones who avoid this trouble are the ones who are able to retain a sense of purpose after retirement. The identity: “I am a person who regularly exercises” is better than: “I am a runner” because it points to a larger class of possible activities. If you had a leg injury, you can still retain the first identity by weight lifting, for example, but there is no way for you to retain the second.
- learning how to keep your identities fluid. It is much better in my opinion to allow your identities to remain in a state of flux rather than becoming cemented in your psyche. This is because there may come a time when you need to abandon an identity or amplify it or shrink it.

ScottL 25 Mar 2016 2:25 UTC
1 point
in reply to: johnlawrenceaspden’s comment on: In Defence of Simple Ideas That Explain Everything But Are Wrong
Perhaps, ‘laws’ would have been a better word than ‘rules’.

I was thinking of it more in terms of complexity. When things are looked at in isolation, it is much easier to see how the simple laws apply. But as things get more complex, we also need to figure out how the different systems interact and influence each other. This makes the simple laws harder to discern.

Simple systems have few components and their behavior is in all respects fully understandable and predictable. An example would be a solid ball falling under the action of gravity through air. This simple system consists of the ball, the air, and the gravitational force. Here we usually assume a single ball, constant acceleration of gravity, a viscous drag on the ball, and Newton’s laws. When making these assumptions, we arrive at very useful answers. We did, however, neglect many aspects. If, for example, we would ask how the behavior changes when we go from one ball, to two, to three, or even more balls that fall close to each other, our “Simple System” assumption fails. It is not sufficient to generalize from one ball’s behavior to many. Instead we need to consider the interaction of the balls through their self‐generated vortices.

ScottL 23 Mar 2016 6:43 UTC
7 points
on: In Defence of Simple Ideas That Explain Everything But Are Wrong
I think that it would probably be a good idea to differentiate: ‘simple explanations’ and ‘explanations that are based on simple rules’. See Fake Simplicity for a description of simple explanations. An example would be attributing all of the causality to some other entity, e.g. god. Explanations that are based on simple rules can sometimes also be easy to understand, but the way in which they are reached is rarely simple. They are grounded in extensive research and evidence.

Simple explanations can be dangerous because they are easy to believe. They are:
- Easy to understand
- Sometimes partly correct as they can be true some of the time even though they don’t describe the whole picture
- Often overly broad so that they are hard to disprove
- Etc.
I am just trying to saying that we should also be careful of simple explanations as well because they can be enticing. I would think that non-experts rarely have enough experience to reach explanations based on simple rules and will instead often just find simple explanations. This is because it is really hard or, perhaps, even impossible to find these simple rules without a lot of ground work. We often have to understand something intimately and deeply before we even begin to sense the undercurrent from the operation of these simple rules.

Here’s an extract from Feynman which is related:

The world is strange. The whole universe is very strange, but you see when you look at the details that the rules of the game are very simple – the mechanical rules by which you can figure out exactly what is going to happen when the situation is simple. It is like a chess game. If you are in a corner with only a few pieces involved, you can work out exactly what is going to happen, and you can always do that when there are only a few pieces. And yet in the real game there are so many pieces that you can’t figure out what is going to happen – so there is a kind of hierarchy of different complexities. It is hard to believe. It is incredible! In fact, most people don’t believe that the behavior of, say, me is the result of lots and lots of atoms all obeying very simple rules and evolving into such a creature that a billion years of life has produced. There is such a lot in the world. There is so much distance between the fundamental rules and the final phenomena that it is almost unbelievable that the final variety of phenomena can come from such a steady operation of such simple rules.

ScottL 23 Mar 2016 0:47 UTC
3 points
in reply to: 2ZctE’s comment on: Open Thread March 21 - March 27, 2016
I tend to view depression as an evolved adaptation and a certain state which it is natural for humans to move into in certain situations. I think that it can be helpful to recognize that dysphoria, sadness and grief are all natural reactions. It is ok to be sad. Although, like with all conditions if it becomes chronic or persists for an overly long time then you should probably get some help to deal with it. See here for more information.

For general advice for dealing with grief, see this article and apply whatever you think is applicable or would be helpful. Excerpt:
- Establish a simple routine
  - Regular meal and bed times
- Increase pleasant events
- Promote self-care activities
  - Regular medical check-ups
  - Daily exercise
  - Limited alcohol intake
- Provide information about grief and what to expect
  - Grief is unique and follows a wave-like pattern
  - Grief is not an illness with a prescribed cure
  - Children benefit from being included and learning that grief is a normal response to loss
- Compartmentalise worries
  - List the things that are worrying
  - Create a ‘to-do’ list, prioritise and tick off items as they are completed
  - Use different coloured folders for the paperwork that needs to be finalised
- Prepare to face new or difficult situations
  - Graded exposure to situations that are difficult or avoided
  - Plan for the ‘firsts’ such as the first anniversary of the death – How do you want it to be acknowledged? Who do you want to share it with?
  - Adopt a ‘trial and error’ approach; be prepared to try things more than once
- Challenge unhelpful thinking
  - Encourage identification of thoughts leading to feelings of guilt and anger
  - Gently ask the following questions – What would your loved one tell you to do if they were here now? What are the alternatives to what you thought? Where is the evidence for what you thought?
- Provide a structured decision-making framework to deal with difficult decisions e.g., When to sort through belongings? Whether to take off the wedding ring? Whether to move or not?
  - Base decisions on evidence, not emotions
  - Avoid making major, irreversible decisions for 12 months to prevent decisions being based on emotion
  - Identify the problem and possible solutions
  - List the positives and negatives for each potential solution
  - Determine the consequences for each solution – can they be lived with?
  I guess, and it sucks. I’ve been regretting not valuing him more during his peak health, as well, although maybe I’d always feel guilty for anything short of having been perfect.
I would try to stop doing this. It will gnaw at you and we can always find something that we could have done better in the past. The better thing to do is learn from the past, appreciate it and experience, to the utmost, what is happening now.

ScottL 19 Mar 2016 13:35 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Jacob Falkovich’s comment on: Unofficial Canon on Applied Rationality
The moon. This is either really important or completely meaningless, I don’t know because I’m not there yet.

I prefer the concept of Fingerspitzengefühl (finger tips feeling) which basically means having an intuitive grasp of a situation and being able to zero in on the accurate region of the problem without wasteful consideration of a large range of unfruitful, alternative diagnoses and solutions. The mechanism behind this is probably similar to how we learn physical patterns.

Expert piano player’s movements largely happen automatically or intuitively. That is, without conscious thought. This happens due to their extensive practice and because of concepts like chunking, spreading activation and hebbian learning. I would guess that we also learn psychical (thought) patterns through a similar mechanism.

I would at least change the word “CFAR” to “applied rationality”

Thanks for your suggestion. I removed the CFAR from the title.

I’m going to try to write what would have convinced “Jacobian-2015” that he should attend a workshop.

There are two extra things that my post isn’t good at conveying.
- Depth in the material. For example, goal factoring I have a paragraph on this and, I guess, that it describes the concept, but it would take a whole other post to describe how to use it in practice.
- A framework. The post just describes the techniques, but it doesn’t really describe the underlying mechanisms of how they work or how they relate to each other. In practice, the techniques would rarely be used in isolation, but would instead be combined.
I’m really concerned that this write-up may cause some people to decide against attending a workshop they otherwise would’ve gone to.

My intent was never for this post to be used as a replacement to attending CFAR. My goal was to put the material out there so that there was some base material upon which I could expand.

ScottL 18 Mar 2016 15:50 UTC
2 points
on: Genetic “Nature” is cultural too
If anyone is interested in twin studies or trait heritability, they should look at this site.

ScottL 17 Mar 2016 11:07 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ThrustVectoring’s comment on: Unofficial Canon on Applied Rationality

this is essentially why John Boyd preferred presentations over manuals when running his reform movement in the US military.

It’s strange that you mention John Boyd because, to be honest, I was thinking of him when I decided to post the material. I don’t believe that John’s preference for presentations over documentation was a good one. In general, I oppose obscurity and restriction of information although there are times that I don’t, e.g. when it’s from a lack of resources or an extremely short material turnover rate etc. In regards, to John Boyd’s stuff, personally, I know that I had to waste a lot of time wading through a lot of simplistic and pretty useless information (pretty much just the simple OODA loop stuff) to understand his material. I believe that this is his only published paper. Also, it was only really the Osinga thesis which has allowed me to understand his ideas. Although, I do need to go over it again.

This is particularly true when you’re worried about the processes you want to encourage getting stuck as a fixed doctrine

Wouldn’t most of these issues would be avoided if you gave some warning that the material is in flux and versioned it as well. So, you had a CFAR material version 1, version 2 etc. Also, doesn’t it seem a bit weird to give the potential of the information becoming a doctrine enough weight that it causes the restriction of this information? It seems weird to me since the skills that CFAR and Boyd are/were trying to teach are in large part about breaking out of fixed doctrines. It’s kind of like stopping someone from learning martial arts because you don’t want them to get hurt while training.

ScottL 2 Mar 2016 12:24 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ScottL’s comment on: Request for advice: high school transferring
I will now explain some practical techniques that I would give someone in your position. It looks like you have already implemented some of them. FYI I haven’t provided much background on any of the techniques, so if you want any more information on any of the mentioned techniques check out my post on the CFAR material as well.

Value Awareness
- Reframe the situation to find hidden values. You can do this, for example, by asking: “If I was already at the public school would the choice to switch to the private school be just as hard”. If there is a difference, then analysing why can often reveal hidden values.
- Use goal factoring to find hidden values. This entails finding some alternate set of actions through which you could get what you want cheaper and then analysing why you don’t choose to go with the cheaper option. For example, boarding at the school would resolve move of the problems you have, e.g. travelling and not having enough social time with the other students. I don’t know if this is an option, but if it is and you don’t want to do it then the reason for this should be in your considered valuations.
- Find out which aspects of the choice are cruxes. You can do this by creating a list of the valuable or aversive things related to the two choices and then eliminating one of them at a time to see if the choice you would make is significantly altered. If it is, then you have found a crux.
- Reference class hopping. Try and think about if your choice ever wavers. That is, if there are moments when you really want to change schools. If this happens, then it indicates that there may be some large underlying issue that is prompting the desired change. An example might be that your desire to change schools spikes when you are feeling excluded, like you are not part of the clique or like you can’t connect deeply with anyone at the school. A large underlying issue, in my opinion, indicates a problem that you should at least try to resolve before making any drastic decisions.
Prediction Accuracy
- Take an outside view. Can you find anyone who has made the same choice already?
- Trial the change to see what it will actually be like. This is probably not applicable for your situation, but it is normally one of the first things to look into.
Agency

It can often be good to spend most of your effort on thinking about how to fix existing problems rather than moving to a whole new situation. It is common for people to not think about or to underestimate the costs involved with change. In your case, example costs would be having to get to know the new teachers and students in the public school. An example of fixing a problem could be seeing if it is possible to set up a math club at your private school.
- Think through all the cruxes that you figured out earlier and try to come up with as many solutions as you can that would deal with those cruxes. For example, instead of taking the trip to the private school each day you can look into boarding at the school. Once you have come up with these strategies you can take a much more intricate approach to the choice, perhaps, employing multiple strategies to deal with different aspects relating to the choice.
- Get the advice of others especially those who can relate and are close to the problem, e.g. teachers, parents, friends etc. Be sure not to present the solution as a false dilemma, i.e. to change schools or not. Instead try to explain the situation as fully as possible. This could involve going through all the cruxes and the strategies you have come up with the resolve them. There are two extra benefits to this as well:
  1. It can often help you come up with a solution that should have been obvious. This is because there is difference between thinking you have fully understood a problem and being able to fully explain it to another person.
  2. It allows you to see the problem from a different perspective. It can, at times, be easy to miss the ramifications for other people of the choices that we make.

ScottL 2 Mar 2016 12:22 UTC
4 points
on: Request for advice: high school transferring
I will describe this first in an abstract way and then in a child comment I will describe some practical techniques that I think might help.

When facing a tough choice, it is important that you are as strong as possible in the following areas:
- Value awareness, i.e. that you have a full understanding of all the things that would impact your choice. People tend to neglect or not include certain things in their deliberations like being scared of change, for example, because either they don’t think about them or they don’t want to admit that they matter. You don’t want do this. If something is impacting your choice, then it should be included in your considerations.
- Prediction accuracy, i.e. that you have a correct understanding of how valuable each choice will actually be once it is made and in the future as well. In most instances it is possible for us to improve upon our innate and intuitive predictions.
- Agency, i.e. that you are fully aware of all of the moves and choices that you can make. You should be careful to avoid the false dilemma. As an example, let’s imagine someone wants to leave their job because even though they love it they have some major issues with a person at their work. This situation should not be framed as a choice between leaving their job or not, but as a problem in which leaving their job is one of many potential solutions. Even though the person may think at first that leaving their job is the only option, on deeper analysis they may find other better and less drastic strategies that they could follow to alleviate the problems with the person at their work.

ScottL 28 Feb 2016 2:15 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Rationality Reading Group: Part U: Fake Preferences
They are mentioned on the wiki FAQ page which has some other useful links as well. If you want to go over all the LW concepts and topics, then you might find this page that I wrote a while ago to be useful. It provides a list of concise definitions for most of the LW concepts.