Victoria Krakovna. Research scientist at DeepMind working on AI safety, and cofounder of the Future of Life Institute. Website and blog: vkrakovna.wordpress.com
Vika
Karma: 3,041
As someone who enjoyed the Solstice a great deal, I’d like to throw a data point out there:
my family doesn’t have a religious or spiritual background of any kind, so I didn’t experience rituals as a child. I still enjoy spiritual / religious singing in groups, both in languages I understand and don’t, and usually don’t take the lyrics seriously. I find most of the value in the feeling of bonding / appreciation.
The event felt more playful than solemn, and certainly not authoritative. People seemed to be taking it with a grain of salt, it was like a social experiment of sorts. I felt perfectly comfortable with not singing along for some of the time, and this didn’t feel alienating or disengaging.
That said, I think I do understand your revulsion towards rituals, and your view about collectivization of emotional experience is an interesting point that hasn’t occurred to me.
I think it’s quite unlikely for this ritual to become tied to the group’s identity, let alone define the group. There are a lot of people strongly involved in the community who don’t participate (as Yvain said), and a number of people who explicitly voice objections against it. Also, the event only happens once a year, there’s nothing as pervasive as e.g. a ritual component in every meetup, so the influence on the whole group’s mentality is probably minimal.
Not only is there no longer anywhere near the same possibility of saying “eh, on second thought, forget that, let’s do something else”
I agree that this is likely to happen, since holding the ritual and organizing “something else” are not mutually exclusive. Are you also concerned about opportunity cost?
Sorry, I misunderstood, I do agree that the ritual is connected to the group identity. Do you expect it to have significant effects on the LW group identity besides increasing the sense of community?
I think that opting out of a component of the group identity doesn’t necessarily lead to alienation. For example, caring about FAI is a significant part of the LW group identity, but people who care about FAI much less than, say, building rationality skills (like myself) are still welcome and included.
they’re now abstaining from something which defines the group, and therefore mark themselves as Not Part Of The Group.
Do you mean signaling that you’re not part of the group, or feeling that you’re not part of the group, or both?
Great illustration! This is a nice alternative to the way I usually visualize Simpson’s paradox, which involves the subgroup averages pulling the overall average proportionally to the sizes of the subgroups (then it’s possible to decrease both of the subgroup averages, but skew the sizes sufficiently towards the higher subgroup average that the overall average goes up).
It should definitely be possible to make a similar interactive illustration for a Bayesian update, where you could tweak the prior and the likelihood ratio using sliders.
Meetup : LW meetup: Polyphasic sleep and Offline habit training
Here is my long-winded origin story, with an emphasis on the importance of community.
My first exposure to a community of like-minded intelligent people was in high school math camps. The amount of motivation could almost be felt in the air. After a whole day of lectures and problem sessions, when there was finally time to chill out and play some card games, many people were still discussing the most interesting problems from the sessions, or whatever other math they had on their minds. It was a place where it was ok to care about something enough to work on it all day, and I could never match that amount of cognitive output during an ordinary day at school. Even the card games were of the more mentally challenging sort, like Mao with its ever-accumulating arbitrary rules to be guessed and kept track of. Thinking was not considered effortful.
The Canadian math camp community made my high school years a golden age of sorts. It did, however, have a narrow focus that was unsustainable on the long term. Math contest problems are neat and challenging and elegant but they are still just toys—made to be solved within an hour or two, guaranteed to have a nice solution, even if devilishly difficult to find. Applicability to the real world, even remotely, wasn’t of interest, only challenge and elegance. Most of them went into pure math afterwards, and continued to work on fascinating theoretical problems. I was one of the few to go into an applied field.
A much more prosaic problem with math camps as an environment was finiteness. After a few years of accumulating knowledge and contest awards and friendships, I got to the end of the road—namely, I graduated from high school. I came to visit during my university years a few times, and did some teaching, but it wasn’t the same. I had fallen out of the loop. But I walked away with a sense of what an awesome community of smart people is like, and how much more people can do together with the right set of values and social norms.
During my undergrad years, I was often finding myself being ineffective and confused, chasing tasks that were handed to me instead of figuring out what I actually wanted to do. Then I went to rationality minicamp, and I was struck by a sense of deja vu. It was another group of smart people solving problems together, only the people were adults and the problems were real. They were throwing their intelligence and creativity at optimizing life.
Finiteness was still a thing, though. The week of learning useful life hacks and deep conversations and bonding came to an end, and everyone dispersed around the country. We set up regular skype chats to keep in touch, and they even happened for a year or so. I tried many of the techniques, but found myself increasingly bogged down in my old habits of thought and action. The buddy chats, though encouraging and useful, were too infrequent and distant for a significant effect.
I did get sufficiently inspired by the community aspect of minicamp to start going to local LessWrong meetups in Boston. Regular meetings with the same people were helpful for reconciling my usual worldview with rationalist memes. Last year, I visited the newly formed New York rationalist house, then called Winterfell, and felt ridiculously envious. While I got out of my grad school bubble to go to the meetup once every few weeks, these guys met every day, knowing and supporting each other much more deeply. This was the kind of place I wanted to live in, and the kind of social environment I wanted to have.
At one of the following meetups, I brought up the idea of forming our own rationalist house in Boston, and a number of people put their names down. In summer 2013, we found an awesome 7-bedroom apartment in a vibrant Somerville neighborhood, and thus Citadel came to exist.
When we moved in in early September, the first thing that struck me about living here was the sheer overdose of socializing of high information density (spoken as an extrovert). The layout of the house is admittedly ideal for running into each other—two floors with all the rooms adjacent to large common areas that are connected by a spiral staircase. It was surprisingly easy for me to add structure to our social evenings by “decreeing” weekly rationality sessions. The first week, we had a quorum for the goal factoring, and the writing, and the strategic review, and the habit training. Later, we tacked on a communal dinner at the beginning of these, and while the sessions are generally late, they still happen. I am now spending much more time on self-improvement activities than I would be able to do alone, and having the input and support of my housemates has been immensely helpful.
We are generally good at developing systems for group dynamics, from chore allocation to a token economy of gems that we use for reinforcing each other. There is also a lot of playfulness—ever-changing titles, silly drawings posted on the walls, dancing outings, a countdown since the last occurrence of Pascal’s Mugging… We care about each other, we help each other be awesome, and we have a lot of fun doing it. After all these years, I feel like I’m in the right place, and this time there is no obvious reason for it to end.
I used to think that my default environment doesn’t matter, and that I “should” be able to be effective in any setting. I came to realize that this is like expecting to be healthy and strong while living on junk food, because default settings are extremely important. I hope that more people will figure out how to create a supportive social environment for themselves and each other.
One of the most important steps to becoming more rational for an average person would be to disentangle themselves from the default goals / values imposed by society or their peers. This would free up a lot of time for figuring out their own goals and developing relevant skills.
An average person could go far with instrumental rationality techniques like those taught at CFAR. Exercises like goal factoring and habit training don’t require a high capacity for abstraction, only willingness to be explicit about one’s motivations. For accumulating factual knowledge, spaced repetition software could be very useful.
Does affirmation work as a general-purpose persuasion technique? According to Cialdini’s classification, it would probably fall in the “reciprocity” category—if you affirm / praise the other person, they are more likely to cooperate with you.
I have sometimes experienced the effect of decreased intrinsic motivation from setting an explicit goal, especially when using extrinsic motivation from Beeminder. However, I found that this effect wasn’t inherent, and I could usually mitigate it by reminding myself why I wanted to do the action in the first place before sitting down to do it. The internal dialogue usually goes like this:
Grrr, it’s late, but Beeminder wants me to write a post on Facebook… Maybe I should write one sentence to get the checkmark, and then go to sleep.
Wait a second, why did my past self want me to do this? Oh right, to improve my writing skills and share my thoughts with my friends. Ok, I feel like doing this now.
I have experienced this motivation problem much more with output-based goals (like “write a Facebook post”) than with input-based goals (like “read book X for 30 minutes”).
Meetup : Comfort Zone Expansion at Citadel, Boston
How to have high-value conversations
I’m not saying that all conversations should be steered towards insight, but more of them should be, especially in the rationalist community, where the potential value of conversations is high. There is nothing wrong with entertainment per se, but conversations gravitate towards entertainment by themselves more often than not.
I have tried around half of these questions. I have asked “what have you been thinking about lately?” a couple of times, and found out about a project a friend was working on, for example. Asking what people have been reading led to learning about what people have been reading, which was interesting. Some of the questions were posed to me, like “what memes have affected you?” and “what surprised you?”, and I found them to affect the conversation positively (in the former case, we ended up discussing the effect of the diligence meme on my early life).
I agree that a lot of these require some leadup. For example, the question “what eccentric things have you done?” might come naturally after telling people about your skydiving trip last week. Vagueness is partly addressed by the “recently/lately” specification, but I agree that the questions could use some further narrowing down. Do you have any suggestions to that end?
Thanks for the great links! I agree that getting people to feel comfortable is really important for having good conversations. The list of questions in my post is intended to find personal topics that would be of common interest, but I think it’s much more likely to work if the people involved are already feeling comfortable with each other.
Your CouchSurfing experience reminds me of a class at Burning Man where people were split up into pairs, and tried to take the shortest conversational path to getting to know each other. There was a built-in affordance to ask personal questions about feelings though, since everyone was in the class with that purpose. Did you end up developing patterned ways to ask strangers about they thought and felt without it feeling awkward?
My intention is indeed to improve conversations with people I know well or semi-well. Some good questions with built-in blanks in this context are “How is your project X going?” or “What did you think of book X?”. Do you have examples of other such questions? I think the kinds of questions you would use for starting a new topic and for deepening an existing topic are likely to be different, and the latter are much more context-dependent.
It does not seem difficult to avoid being robotic/unfun with these questions, if you ask them with actual caring and curiosity, and if the motivation is not to fill silence but to learn about the other person.
Especially for a group that meets recurrently, it seems worthwhile to experience many different conversational contexts, some more structured and some less so. More structured contexts seem to be hard to sustain - the weekly sessions at my house focused on goal analysis often “devolve” into semi-related conversation.
Completely separating fuzzies and utilons doesn’t seem possible, e.g. the quantum physics lessons are likely to be at least somewhat entertaining, but it makes sense to try to focus on one or the other for a particular activity.
I find that there is a self-signaling aspect to this: “if I’m staying up late to have this conversation, it must be interesting / important”.
I am female, 25, extroverted, and living in Boston. I started out mostly introverted, and gradually became more extroverted over the years, especially after moving in to the Boston rationalist house (Citadel) a few months ago.
I have been in a variety of living situations: 1) family, 2) husband and mother in law, 3) husband and math camp friends, 4) just husband, 5) by myself and visiting husband in NYC, 6) LW friends and visiting husband in NYC (current). Out of all these, the experiences of living with friends were the happiest and most interesting by far, especially the rationalist house (it will be even better when my husband finishes up his job in NYC and moves to Citadel).
I find the rationalist house to be a near-optimal living situation in terms of the default social environment and the influences that I am routinely exposed to. We have social norms of being curious, rewarding each other for doing good things (and a “gem economy” for this purpose), discussing personal topics, asking for advice and feedback, expanding comfort zones, making predictions (using CFAR-style prediction markets), sharing activities, etc. The house is also a Schelling point for local rationalists to visit and for out of towners to stay (we have a guest room), which increases the frequency and variety of interesting conversations even further. To use Viliam_Bur’s terminology, Citadel is a combination of a feelings-oriented community and an outcome-oriented community. We run LW meetups, weekly rationality sessions (e.g. goal factoring) as well as random group activities (e.g. dancing and hiking); there is a general growth mindset besides just hanging out and having fun.
I have not experienced any particular inconveniences from living with a large number of people. On the contrary, in a house of six, economies of scale start to kick in—we have a distribution of chore assignments, a weekly cleaning service, and occasional communal dinners, so the household runs very smoothly. The downsides of living there have mostly taken the form of not doing quite enough reading and going to sleep too late, but I’m counting on Beeminder to help me with that :). I feel like I have grown a lot since I moved here—I started writing and goal factoring regularly and giving presentations at meetups, stopped being a lurker on LW, etc. I’m aware that I’m somewhat overexcited and biased about Citadel, given that it’s a new development, and the long term effects on our lives remain to be seen. That said, I would still highly recommend to try living with local LWers if you have the chance.
There is a house economy of shiny gems that are used for positive reinforcement. People get reinforced for things like helping others with tasks, initiating activities, or expanding their comfort zone (e.g. trying a dance for the first time). Everyone has their personal stash of gems that they can use to award others, and there is also a house vault. Once a week, you are allowed to take a gem from the house vault (instead of your own stash) and award it to someone.
We originally planned to use poker chips for this purpose, but decided that gems are much more conducive to staying within the domain of social norms—poker chips are like money, while a gem is more like a gift. The gems don’t have to stay within the house, and are sometimes awarded to guests.
Regarding the point about “us vs them”, I agree that some traditional rituals have this issue, but I can’t think of anyone who would fill the role of “them” in the case of the Solstice celebration. The event was mostly about humanity as a whole prevailing over darkness / death / ignorance / etc. This seems much less problematic than ritualistic bonding over being different from some particular group of people.