Beware of Other-Optimizing

As an aspiring rationalist you've already learned that most people don't listen, and you usually don't bother - but this person is a friend, someone you know, someone you trust and respect to listen.

I've actually had some success with Other-optimizing, so I'm going to go out on a limb and defend it. Doing it well isn't easy and doesn't give you the quick ego/status boost you get from giving someone a pithy injunction. You need to gather enough information about the other person's goals to uniquely determine what action you take, essentially giving away some of your optimization power for the other person to use for their own purposes. Of course, this mostly eliminates the usual motivation (i.e. status) while also being vastly more difficult.

I agree with you that power brings blinders (as well as bringing some useful sorts of vision: I've watched more than one person improve their self-understanding, and their understanding of why organizations are structured as they are, once they got in a position of responsibility).

I also agree that people who have something work for them often run around recommending it way too much, with way too little attention to the person in front of them.

That said, when I get advice from people or books, and when I actually try the advice, it often works. Enough so that I should be ditching my current habits and trying out new forms a lot, if I want to actually be effective. I would have thought this would obtain for most people (and that most of us stay consistent in our habits for much the same reason that we stay consistent in our initial disagreements with epistemic peers -- inertia, fear of a status hit from changing, that sort of thing). But maybe people vary here?

Hmmm...

I've lived with being pushed on by people with power over me my whole life. My parents were far more determined to see me graduate from college than I was, and they succeeded in ensuring that I did so, by supervising me to the extent that I was supervised in high school. And, to be honest, if they hadn't insisted that I do my homework and literally driven me to classes, I probably wouldn't have graduated.

In general, unless someone pushes me, all I do is waste time. I play video games, or Magic, or surf the Internet and write comments. Everything else, I have to be forced to do by someone. I've never learned how to force myself to work hard on something that isn't purely mechanical and that I don't feel like doing at the moment, because whenever I tried to fail, my parents just kept pushing harder and harder until I succeeded. Willpower? What a horrible, terrible concept! Why would any sane person want to do something they don't feel like doing, if they weren't being coerced into doing it? I don't need willpower. I have parents!

I have a tendency to divide activities into "things I want to do" and "things I do because other people make me do them", and I try to optimize the former at the expense of the latter. As Paul Graham put it:

When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing.

I definitely have this mindset. If you have to pay someone to get something done, "obviously" it's not worth doing for its own sake; otherwise, people would get day jobs and pay you for the opportunity to do it in their spare time. As a side effect, if I suddenly found myself being paid to play video games, I'd start procrastinating over them, too.

Although I am currently 26 years old, I have no source of income and am still being supported by my parents. I am definitely at the mercy of my parents right now, but I accept this, because my parents just don't demand that much from me. (I put up with college coursework because it seemed better than getting a job - but I'll jump in front of a speeding car before I let myself get sent to graduate school.) If I were to get a job, I'd only end up increasing the amount of time spent doing things because other people are forcing me to, so I don't want a job. This, however, does not exactly make me a person of high social status...

Just to be clear -- I originally started mentioning things to you for the reasons you mention in this post, i.e., "I don't normally give out this much individual advice for less than $200/hour, but hey, this is Eliezer..."

However, after I (pretty quickly) realized that you weren't actually taking my comments any more seriously than you would random blog posts, I changed strategy, and focused on including information in my replies to you that would be useful to other people... which is why my replies to you now often end up pretty highly rated; in fact, they're usually my highest-rated comments. (It's of course also possible that people are more likely to read replies to your comments, or that I get status attributed by daring to advise you, or any number of other reasons.)

Anyway... once I noticed that you weren't actually listening, I stopped actually trying to teach you anything and started using your comments more as a springboard for teaching others, while maintaining the illusion that the advice was directed at you. Hope you don't mind too much. ;-)

(By the way, "different things work on different people" is bullshit when it comes to the brain. "My brain works differently from other people's" is not a valid extenuating circumstance: I don't accept it as an excuse from my clients, any more than Jeffreyssai would.)

Ha! Little did you know that I optimize other people's lives using advice I haven't even tried myself. (That way I'm not biased by my own experience.)

"Different things work for different people."

Living life, getting through the day, is obviously an enormously complex process. Whether we are rational or irrational, we make decisions based on a large number of short-cuts. These "short-cuts" have evolved over time and have their origins in our routines, our values, etc. However, since they don't completely capture our full decision-making system (i.e., don't reproduce every time the decision we'd make if we had enormous time and energy to decide each one), they introduce certain inefficiencies (or even inconsistencies).

I think that a lot of advice represents "hacks" for getting around certain built-in inefficiencies. It would be enormously trouble-some (and arguably counter-productive) to rewrite your whole meta-code, but a patch is worth adding, if it works.

Thus I think the reason advice works for some and not for others is because it is a patch for a particular (hopefully common) form of inefficiency, but the patch only works if you have that efficiency or if the source of the inefficiency is the same.

I had a friend in graduate school that had a mental breakdown and lost most of her short-cuts. It was a really amazing thing to watch her make decisions from ground zero. I think she appreciated the experience because, to a large extent, she had the opportunity to pick and choose which new short-cuts to assimilate. As an intelligent adult that was more or less X-rational as well, she proceeded in a very systematic way. The result was a very efficient but somewhat strange decision making process.

Maybe we need a site like reddit for self-help tips. That way you could try the thing that worked for the most people first.

"And because I have encountered a great many people trying to optimize me, I can attest that the advice I get is as wide-ranging as the productivity blogosphere"

This is awesomely hilarious. People are constantly trying to optimize me too. Since I'm constantly trying to optimize myself, I kinda like it :). But it is true that they often seem very confident about what will work, when it doesn't for me.

The worst one is sleep apnea. Here I have a serious medical condition, confirmed by sleep studies, that I've tried several surgeries for, and I make it clear that this is the case on my blog...and intelligent people constantly, for years, have responded to my posts about it by suggesting random folk remedies for insomnia that don't address sleep apnea at all! Blows my mind, but I guess it's just what you are talking about here.

I agree that there are many people running around who are overconfident with their advice because it happens to work for them. But could there also be people out there with potentially good advice who never talk about it because of underconfidence?

Personally, I relish all advice, good or bad. I would consider it worth to hear bad advice from 10 people in order to hear substantially good advice from one. I can just toss out the bad advice; it doesn't cost me much, and I'm pretty confident about my bullshit filter. Of course, this approach to advice may not work for everyone in every domain. If you don't have a good way of evaluating advice in a particular domain, then it would be difficult to filter out bad advice which could harm you. And if the person has power over you, then you can't throw out their advice so easily.

There have been some times where I've followed bad advice (usually some sort of oversimplification) that lead me to figure out some new things, to see the flaw in the advice, and to find my own way of doing things.

I support people giving advice, and just including YMMV caveats.

Reasonably good Other models are something I strongly suggest aspiring x-rationalists to work on. Among other things they let you mimic the talents of deep empathy and avoid many of the problems described in this post. It's one of the major benefits I've seen coming from serious rationality.

It requires seriously paying attention to individuals, and eventually groups of people, and periodically questioning all your assumptions about why they behave they way they do. And eventually it can open your eyes up about how your own mind works.

Just don't expect it to take less than a decade or two...

I wonder if it would help to make a site called something like "rate my advice", with separate rating axes for effectiveness, ease and long-term sustainability.

This is a great post.

We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape.

And distances of values. Even when the advice in question is given for some neutral, instrumental aim, it can contain implicit, non-obvious trade-offs that may interact poorly with other goals. These may be things that simply never occurred to the adviser, as there was nothing to draw his attention to them.

My rule of thumb is to discard the "should" parts of the advice I'm given, look for pointers to any potentially valuable, previously unknown information contained in or hinted at by it, and move along. Everyone should do this.

Relevant: This is a post I wrote on my personal blog. I had taken up Tim Ferriss' slow carb diet with huge success, and friends were very interested in it because it was working for me - influence of friends being the main reason most people take up anything. So I had to write a post detailing all the necessary epistemic cautions to avoid other-pessimising.

Two points:

First, if the person trying to tell you about their Amazing! New! Method! doesn't provide enough sufficiently strong evidence to at least rationally convince you that you should look further into the matter, it's almost certainly a scam. It's the same as someone trying to convince you that they've discovered/built a potent new energy source. The people who discovered radioactivity behaved very differently than people peddling perpetual motion usually do.

Second, the bit about "But most of the advice rings so false as to not even seem worth considering. " is dangerous. If you always go along with your intuition, you'll never discover the counterevidence that permits you to counter the flaws in your intuition. No rationalist ever considers something not worth considering. Everything is worth consideration. Not all things are worth further consideration - and in order to check yourself for error, every once in a while, even the things you discard after thinking about should be further examined.

What actions are recommended when you think a friend is making bad choices?

True, our advice is imperfect.
True, our advice is often ignored. True, giving advice may damage our friendship.

But its not acceptable to do nothing.

I think part of the problem is subconscious status-seeking. If you give someone advice, it kind of puts you in a high status position relative to the recipient of the advice.

But you've got to try telling Eliezer Yudkowsky. He needs it, and there's a pretty good chance that he'll understand.

Perhaps part of it is that Yudkowsky has high status in this community. So that status-seekers will be especially tempted to give advice to Yudkowsky.

One of the critical events was when someone on the Board of the Institute Which May Not Be Named, told me that I didn't need a salary increase to keep up with inflation - because I could be spending substantially less money on food if I used an online coupon service. And I believed this, because it was a friend I trusted, and it was delivered in a tone of such confidence. So my girlfriend started trying to use the service, and a couple of weeks later she gave up.

You got me curious - what was the problem?

How did Mandatory Secret Identities have to do with this post? I think you should try to reduce explicit connections between posts as much as possible, so people feel comfortable reading them in any order.

Sorry, this was an useless post so now it's gone

This is rather unnerving. I shamefully admit that the idea that I might accidentally do harm is something I hadn't seriously considered. People come to me for advice all the time and I always qualify it by saying things like "Here is what I would do, but every situation is different" and "consider that there is probably a lot more to be said on this topic" but it never occurred to me that I could accidentally do serious harm to someone by offering a little advice.

Between this and the inferential difference, is there much hope at all for trying to educate and help people?

This does appear all too common. This was a needed post.

Be grateful that people think you are important enough to be worth optimizing. It's a compliment, even if it can be frustrating. You alpha, you!

This is a very refreshing thing to hear. I think the best lesson to take from the pattern of things not working to everyone is to tailor advice to different people. As a simplistic example, a forgetful friend isn't likely to benefit from a strategy to do anything that relies on them remembering to do something. And to be correspondingly less enthusiastic about getting people to try things the less well you know them and the track record of their strategy use.