whales
Try more things.
A self-experiment in training “noticing confusion”
Book Review: How Learning Works
It sounds like you’re basically talking about chilling effects, if you’re looking for further arguments along these lines.
Edited to add: I don’t mean to sound dismissive. I expect there’s some use in reframing these effects in LW terms, and in coming up with non-standard generalizations. Just wanted to point out that your idea, or one very close to it, is widely discussed and recognized as important. (It’s even occasionally accounted for in court decisions!)
I’d add that this kind of misunderstanding is frequently mutual; it’s generally not the case that one party is sensitive to tone and the other is immune. The version in which someone takes an expression of feeling as an attempt to shame them into silence or otherwise limit allowable discourse is more or less the same failure mode.
Perhaps I say something, unaware that someone with different experiences and perspective might hear it differently, and it makes you mildly uncomfortable (somewhat like your examples). You try to communicate what you’re feeling, perhaps intending only to provide me with more detailed information about the kind of reaction I’m provoking and why (some version of the Emotions As Inputs To Rationality approach). There may be good reasons for your reaction: for example, maybe you’ve heard things like that before from people who caused related harms, and you want to make sure I’m not likely to hurt anyone or normalize harmful behavior in others.
But then I take your expression of feeling as an anti-rational rhetorical move meant to silence me, because that’s a thing that some people do using the same language that you used. Then my following plea for dispassionate rationality and a return to the details of the argument gets heard as dismissive/disrespectful and nitpicking, because, well, you know. And so on back and forth.
(It’s also, importantly, not always the case that these are mere misunderstandings. Even if I didn’t mean something a certain way, you can still be right that it was harmful to say or that it’s a sign that I might cause harm. And even if you’re not trying to silence me, it could conceivably be the case that by expressing your feelings you weakened our discourse, although I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that happen.)
Rationality training: academic and clinical perspectives
He said:
When you play bridge with beginners—when you try to help them out—you give them some general rules to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you’d had their hand you wouldn’t have played the thing you told them to play, because you’d have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply.
from The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (2010) is the standard text that gets thrown around (as far as education in general). I’m surprised it apparently hasn’t come up here before, since the approach is very well aligned with LW norms. I’d say it’s worthwhile for anyone who expects to teach (or learn) in the future.
I’ll plan on writing up a summary/review if no one beats me to it.
I have no idea how likely it is, but an alternative explanation is that the vote counts were first converted to percentages to one decimal place, then someone else converted them back to absolute numbers for this announcement.
Against naming things, and so on
Slightly different but still-important questions—what about when you remove the requirement that the idea be strange or unconventional? How much of taking ideas seriously here is just about acting strategically, and how much is non-compartmentalization? To what extent can you train the skill of going from thinking “I should do X” to actually doing X?
Other opportunities for victory, not necessarily weird, possibly worth investigating: wearing a bike helmet when biking, using spaced repetition to study, making physical backups of data, staying in touch with friends and family, flossing.
It’s tempting to judge what you read: “I agree with these statements, and I disagree with those.” However, a great thinker who has spent decades on an unusual line of thought cannot induce their context into your head in a few pages. It’s almost certainly the case that you don’t fully understand their statements. Instead, you can say: “I have now learned that there exists a worldview in which all of these statements are consistent.” And if it feels worthwhile, you can make a genuine effort to understand that entire worldview. You don’t have to adopt it. Just make it available to yourself, so you can make connections to it when it’s needed.
Bret Victor, reflecting on Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together by Bruno Latour
Off the top of my head, some good top-level posts touching on this area: How to understand people better (plus isaacschlueter’s particularly good comment) and Alicorn’s Luminosity sequence. Searching gives maybe a partial match for How to Be Happy, which cites some studies on training empathy and concludes that little is scientifically known about it—still, I think a top-level post on what is known would be welcome. Swimmer963′s post on emotional-regulation research is nice.
Mindfulness is something else that comes up pretty regularly. Meditation trains metacognition and Overcoming suffering are pretty good examples.
CFAR also places more explicit emphasis on emotional awareness, and that sometimes comes up in the group rationality diaries.
I think one reason that these topics are relatively neglected is that people seem to develop social skills and emotional awareness in pretty idiosyncratic ways. Still, LW seems to accept more personal accounts, like this post on a variation on the CBT technique of labeling. So it seems worthwhile to post things along those lines.
I agree with the gist of what others have said here. There are lots of ways to contaminate productive tasks with aversiveness that isn’t intrinsic to the task. Unpleasant work environment is pretty obvious. I spent one undergrad summer commuting by bike, and I’d always get to work sweaty and tired in a bad way. Because that’s what I thought of when I thought about going to work, I spent a lot of days unproductively working from home. For the next job that had a bike commute, I took active measures to avoid the same problems, and now I look forward to biking to work.
I agree especially strongly with what Kaj_Sotala says about using guilt (or other negative emotions). Boredom and frustration can also be problems. When I notice them, it’s usually not because my task is itself boring or frustrating; I’ve just become disengaged or I feel stuck. So I remind myself of this, think of all the reasons my work is actually cool and worthwhile or of the progress I’ve made, and then take a break, switch tasks, or carry on.
Or sometimes I notice that I strongly don’t feel like working and am unlikely to get much done. In these cases I’ve found it’s better to simply set things down for a while and to do some mental work to make sure I don’t feel guilty about quitting, rather than try to force myself through it. (Of course, it’s even better to make myself feel like working again. But that’s quite a trick itself.)
Conversely, I spend leisure time doing things I enjoy and endorse. The taste I’ve cultivated means that a lot of cheap and addictive entertainment doesn’t especially appeal to me, and it gives me a sense that my enjoyment of things is a little more meaningful than it was before. I’ve spent some serious thought concerning blocked-out leisure time and endorsed activities, so that I can trust my past self’s strategic planning and not worry about wastefulness.
I guess I haven’t been too specific. These ideas depend on more fundamental skills like mindfulness, or noticing and dealing with negative thoughts. Those are big topics themselves and the specific implementations tend to be idiosyncratic. Still, I hope this is helpful.
These are interesting questions. I think the keyword you want for “hash collisions” is interference. Here’s a more helpful overview from an education perspective: Learning Vocabulary in Lexical Sets: Dangers and Guidelines (2000). It mostly talks about semantic interference, but it mentions some other work on similar-sounding and similar-looking words.
(I don’t consider this rude at all, and will welcome your post-mulling thoughts should you choose to add them. I can also say more about where I’m coming from when I get the chance.)
I’ve collected some quotes from Beyond Discovery, a series of articles commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences from 1997 to 2003 on paths from basic research to useful technology. My comments there:
The articles (each around 8 pages) are roughly popular-magazine-level accounts of variable quality, but I learned quite a bit from all of them, particularly from the biology and medicine articles. They’re very well written, generally with input from the relevant scientists still living (many of them Nobel laureates). In particular I like the broad view of history, the acknowledged scope of the many branches leading to any particular technology, the variety of topics outside the usual suspects, the focus on fairly recent technology, and the emphasis bordering on propagandist on the importance and unpredictability of basic research. It seems to me that they filled an important gap in popular science writing in this way.
I’m interested in histories of science that are nonstandard in those and other ways (for example, those with an unusual focus on failures or dead ends), and I’m slowly collecting some additional notes and links at the bottom of that page. Do you have any recommendations? Or other comments?
Why does it need to be a hidden random timer? Reward yourself if you stayed on task for the past 30 minutes. (Hmm, I think we’ve just reinvented the Pomodoro Technique.)
Incidentally, have you (or others who use schemes like this) considered using intermittent reinforcement? Like, instead of just rewarding yourself upon meeting the victory condition, you flip a coin to see if you get the reward. It seems the obvious thing to do if you’re going for the whole inner pigeon thing.
I generally find that it takes less willpower to execute a plan that I’ve already made. I set aside a little time every morning, and a longer period every Sunday, to be effortfully strategic and come up with some specific next actions that I can mindlessly execute for the rest of the day/week. I think this is more or less standard GTD (although I’ve been iterating on my personal system for long enough that I can’t really remember exactly what David Allen describes).
I agree that separating ‘planning’ and ‘doing’ like this works especially well for doing aversive things. Your ‘planning self’ doesn’t have to worry about actually doing anything, and your ‘doing self’ just has to trust your planning self.
I’m reminded of Bret Victor’s recent comment on reading Latour:
That, to me, is a principle of charity well applied. I wouldn’t at all say that steelmanning is a stronger form of that—a rationalist trying to steelman Latour would be like your Roman trying to steelman progressivism. Steelmanning is about constructing what you see as stronger versions of an argument, while the principle of charity is about trying to get into your interlocutor’s head under the assumption that whatever they’re saying or doing seems reasonable and right to them. The latter is much harder and rarer, in my experience, although that’s not to say the former isn’t more valuable in some situations.
You describe some real problems with steelmen. I think a first-order defense against them is just to ask whether your interlocutor agrees with your steelman or not.