Sunny from QAD
I like this post.
promise yourself to keep steering the plane mostly as normal while you think about lift
This is a good, short, memorable proverb to remember the point of the post by.
It’s happened again: I’ve realized that one of my old beliefs (pre-LW) is just plain dumb.
I used to look around at all the various diet (Paleo, Keto, low carb, low fat, etc.) and feel angry at people for having such low epistemic standards. Like, there’s a new theory of nutrition every two years, and people still put faith in them every time? Everybody swears by a different diet and this is common knowledge, but people still swear by diets? And the reasoning is that “fat” (the nutrient) has the same name as “fat” (the body part people are trying to get rid of)?
Then I encountered the “calories in = calories out” theory, which says that the only thing you need to do to lose weight is to make sure that you burn more calories than you eat.
And I thought to myself, “yeah, obviously.”.
Because, you see, if the orthodox asserts X and the heterodox asserts Y, and the orthodox is dumb, then Y must be true!
Anyway, I hadn’t thought about this belief in a while, but I randomly remembered it a few minutes ago, and as soon as I remembered its origins, I chucked it out the window.
Oops!
(PS: I wouldn’t be flabbergasted if the belief turned out true anyway. But I’ve reverted my map from the “I know how the world is” state to the “I’m awaiting additional evidence” state.)
The ball-on-a-hill model of reputation
This is a model I came up with in middle school to explain why it felt like I was treated differently from others even when I acted the same. I invented it long before I fully understood what models were (which only occurred sometime in the last year) and as such it’s something of a “baby’s first model” (ha ha) for me. As you’d expect for something authored by a middle schooler regarding their problems, it places minimal blame on myself. However, even nowadays I think there’s some truth to it.
Here’s the model. Your reputation is a ball on a hill. The valley on one side of the hill corresponds to being revered, and the valley on the other side corresponds to being despised. The ball begins on top of the hill. If you do something that others see as “good” then the ball gets nudged to the good side, and if you do something that others see as “bad” then it gets nudged to the other side.
Here’s where the hill comes in. Once your reputation has been nudged one way or the other, it begins to affect how others interpret your actions. If you apologize for something you did wrong and your reputation is positive, you’re “being the bigger person and owning up to your mistakes”; if you do the same when your reputation is negative, you’re “trying to cover your ass”. Once your action has been interpreted according to your current reputation, it is then fed back into the calculation as an update: the rep/+ person who apologized gets a boost, and the rep/- person who apologized gets shoved down even further.
Hence, “once the ball is sufficiently far down the hill, it begins to roll on its own”. You can take nothing but neutral actions and your reputation will become a more extreme version of what it already is (assuming it was far-from-center to begin with). This applies to positive reputation as well as negative! I have had the experience of my reputation rolling down the positive side of the hill—it was great.
There are also other factors that can affect the starting position of the ball, e.g. if you’re attractive or if somebody gives you a positively-phrased introduction then you start on the positive side, but if you’re ugly or if your current audience has heard bad rumors about you then you start on the negative side.
I’d be curious if anyone else has had this experience and feels this is an accurate model, and I’d be very curious if anyone thinks there is a significant hole in it.
This is a nice story, and nicely captures the internal dissonance I feel about cooperating with people who disagree with me about my “pet issue”, though like many good stories it’s a little simpler and more extreme than what I actually feel.
So it’s been 11 years. Do you still remember pjeby’s advice? Did it change your life?
When you estimate how much mental energy a task will take, you are just as vulnerable to the planning fallacy as when you estimate how much time it will take.
I’m told that there was a period of history where only the priests were literate and therefore only they could read the Bible. Or maybe it was written in Latin and only they knew how to read it, or something. Anyway, as a result, they were free to interpret it any way they liked, and they used that power to control the masses.
Goodness me, it’s a good thing we Have Science Now and can use it to free ourselves from the overbearing grip of Religion!
Oh, totally unrelatedly, the average modern person is scientifically illiterate and absorbs their knowledge of what is “scientific” through a handful of big news sources and through cultural osmosis.
Moral: Be wary of packages labeled “science” and be especially wary of social pressure to believe implausible-sounding claims just because they’re “scientific”. There are many ways for that beautiful name to get glued onto random memes.
I just saw a funny example of Extremal Goodhart in the wild: a child was having their picture taken, and kept being told they weren’t smiling enough. As a result, they kept screaming “CHEEEESE!!!” louder and louder.
A koan:
If the laundry needs to be done, put in a load of laundry.
If the world needs to be saved, save the world.
If you want pizza for dinner, go preheat the oven.
I’m starting to feel frustrated (and confused) by this conversation, because it feels to me like people are responding to something other than what I’m saying. Let me try to clarify what I’m getting at.
As far as I know, this conversation began on Put A Num On It, where Jacob used the phrase “overcoming intuition” as a name for one of his hypotheses about why rationalists are more polygamous than others. He says:
The willingness to entertain the idea that your intuitions about truth may be wrong is a prerequisite for learning Rationality, and Rationality further cultivates that skill.
So it seems to me that he was trying to bind the phrase “overcoming intuition” to the idea of overcoming the tight grip that intuitions hold over most people. Not throwing out all of our intuitions’ conclusions (I completely agree that that would be bad) but rather getting our intuitions under control so that we don’t just automatically obey them at every turn.
Do you agree that this is what Jacob meant by the phrase? Separately, do you agree that this is a reasonable thing to do?
Since I am confused, I will generate some hypotheses about what’s going on:
I have completely misunderstood Jacob’s intent for what the phrase means.
Evidence in favor of this hypothesis: This is going to sound sulky, but I cross my heart that I’m just trying to be a good rationalist: I seem to be the one with the less popular opinion here. Obviously it might just be the case that I really do have an unpopular opinion, but it’s also exactly what you’d expect to see if I was on a different page than everybody else about what we were talking about.
Others are jumping into the conversation late and are not aware of the commentary given about the phrase by the person who wrote it.
Evidence in favor of this hypothesis: The comment at the top of this chain says “I absolutely hate this phrase and everything it represents”, but I don’t see why OP would feel so strongly about “the willingness to entertain the idea that your intuitions about truth may be wrong”, which is what the phrase is being used to represent here. This makes me think that the phrase represents something other than that to OP.
Before I joined the site, there was some divide between people who really did think that we should throw out all of our intuition’s conclusions and people who did not acknowledged that sometimes correct conclusions could have illegible conclusions, and people responding to this comment chain are thinking of that divide when they profess their hatred of the phrase “overcoming intuition”.
Evidence in favor of this hypothesis: Even though I pointed out that Jacob was using the phrase to mean a certain thing, two different people have insisted that the phrase really means something different. That makes me think that the phrase has a history in this community.
When you ask a question to a crowd, the answers you get back have a statistical bias towards overconfidence, because people with higher confidence in their answers are more likely to respond.
Oh, I see. Reading through his post again, I think I actually agree with you that Jacob was conflating the two. Thanks for clarifying, the whole conversation seems reasonable now.
This could be a great seed for a short story. The protagonist can supposedly see the future but actually they’re just really really good at seeing the present and making wise bets.
This reminds me of something I thought of a while back, that I’d like to start doing again now that I’ve remembered it. Whenever I sense myself getting unfairly annoyed at someone (which happens a lot) I try to imagine that I’m watching a movie in which that person is the protagonist. I imagine that I know what their story and struggles are, and that I’m rooting for them every step of the way. Now that I’m getting into fiction writing, I might also try imagining that I’m writing them as a character, which has the same vibe as the other techniques. The one time I’ve actually tried this so far, it worked really well!
I’ll just throw in my two cents here and say that I was somewhat surprised by how serious the Ben’s post is. I was around for the Petrov Day celebration last year, and I also thought of it as just a fun little game. I can’t remember if I screwed around with the button or not (I can’t even remember if there was a button for me).
Then again, I do take Ben’s point: a person does have a responsibility to notice when something that’s being treated like a game is actually serious and important. Not that I think 24 hours of LW being down is necessarily “serious and important”.
Overall, though, I’m not throwing much of a reputation hit (if any at all) into my mental books for you.
Yeah, I’ve just read the Wikipedia page again, and I think you (and elephantiskon) are right. I’m going to edit the post to redirect others to this conclusion.
From the post:
It reminds them of an experience they might want to forget. Further, it requires them to deal with a topic they may be completely sick and tired of.
From the comment above me (emphasis mine):
Apologies communicate knowledge of harmful behavior, ideally in a way that lets the victim understand and get closure on the incident. They help in reducing attribution bias (where people assume you’re a jerk, rather than a fallible human).
I’ll note that this means that an apology can turn an experience one wants to forget into a completely tolerable one. If someone shows up late to a bunch of meetings and acts disrespectful while they’re there, I’ll be annoyed at them and find our interactions unpleasant in the future, even if don’t act out anymore. But if they then say “Sorry about last week, I was having a rough time and I let my emotions get the best of me. I’m not going to act like that in the future” then the experience of “this person was a jerk, which I find unpleasant” is retroactively transformed into “this person was going through something, which happens to all of us”
This is a lovely post and it really resonated with me. I’ve yet to really orient myself in the EA world, but “fix the normalization of child abuse” is something I have in my mind as a potential cause area. Really happy to hear you’ve gotten out, even if the permanent damage from sleep deprivation is still sad.
Nice time. Here are some thoughts for possible additional timesaves:
Wake your partner up before even putting the coffee on so she can be a little more awake when she’s helping with your hair.
Sleep in your work clothes to skip the part where you get dressed.
Drive 20-30mph over the speed limit. (This is probably best as an IL strat, since if you crash or get pulled over then the run is pretty much dead.)
If you manage to get all these in a run, then depending on the length of your commute I think you’ll be able to gold this split by 5-10 more minutes.
I think this correlation only appears if you’re choosing strategies well. If you’re tasked with earning a lot of money to give to charity, and you generate a list of 100 possible strategies, then you should toss out all the strategies that don’t lie on the pareto boundary of pain and success. (In other words, if strategy A is both less effective and more painful then strategy B, then you should never choose strategy A.) Pain will correlate with success in the remaining pool of strategies, but it doesn’t correlate in the set of all strategies. And OP is saying that people often choose strategies that are off the pareto boundary because they specifically select pain-inducing strategies under the misconception that those strategies will all be successful as well.