I think the original mythology of the rationality community is based around cheat codes

A lot of the original mythology, in the sense of the things Eliezer wrote about in the sequences, is about avoiding self-deception. I continue to think this is very important but think the writing in the Sequences doesn't do a good job of teaching it.

The main issue I see with the cheat code / munchkin philosophy as it actually played out on LW is that it involved a lot of stuff I would describe as tricking yourself or the rider fighting against / overriding the elephant [LW · GW], e.g. strategies like attempting to reward yourself for the behavior you "want" in order to fix your "akrasia." Nothing along these lines, e.g. Beeminder, worked for me when I experimented with them, and the whole time my actual bottleneck was that I was very sad and very lonely and distracting myself from and numbing that (which accounted for a huge portion of my "akrasia," the rest was poor health, sleep and nutrition in particular).

I like having these distinctions laid out to think about. While it's on my mind I'd like to share an extension of Brienne's quadrants I'd made in my own notes.

To "Easy vs. Difficult" and "Fast vs. Slow", I added a third dimension of "Hype vs. Signal". A grand epiphany can turn out to be insight porn. A long gruel to attain wizardry could be an investment scam. Bug patches can be surface-level fads. Tortoise skill practice might be lotus-eating distraction.

(I may have been a bit disillusioned with rationality lore at the time I named these. Because yes, it *was* demoralizing to get 2-3% returns when I expected bursts of 300%.)

A useful core can have many subtly-off instantiations. The expected signal-to-noise ratio matters, when you're figuring out where it makes sense to focus your efforts.

The growth I've experienced in the past several years:

• Emotional introspection, via low-key practice (over several years, mostly through the lens of improving my relationship with my girlfriend, occasionally through noticing stuff during non-romantic drama).
• Brienne's Noticing Sequence, and Focusing were both helpful.
• Emotional impulse control, via low-key practice (i.e. noticing "I'm feeling angry or spiteful", and then running a check of "is this a useful emotion to feel? Do I endorse this?" and then more complicated stuff downstream). Also over several years, generally in tandem with the introspection.
• Ability to focus at work, combination of:
• Changing environment (getting a job that mattered to me, tasks that were difficult-but-at-my-skill-level)
• Cheat code (selfcontrol.app)
• Low-to-moderate practice cultivating habits, plus Try Things. The first several years of habits did not appear to work for longer than 2 weeks.
• General Agency I via having a major project I was excited about, and gaining a social environment that fostered my belief that that sort of project was worth doing. (This was mostly inventing Solstice, which started at my current skill level. Rationality community encouraged "ambition", which led me to attempt to scale it much larger than I otherwise would have.
• I had serious plans to scale it to the "millions of people" range, which I eventually gave up on because it didn't seem worth it, but the process of trying still changed me permanently)
• (remembering this makes me want to consider "having a project" as a strategy unto itself. It's sort of like changing environment but the environment is largely internal)
• General Agency II via "realizing it was up to me", combination of:
• reading inspiring texts that led me to care more about the world, by reframing it in terms that resonated more with me
• Being in a social environment where "try to have a big impact on the world" was incentivized (similar but subtly different from the version of this that encouraged Solstice). Having friends who were trying to do that.
• Realizing in turn that I didn't trust any of those friends to have quite the same values as me and/or approach it a way that I trusted.
• Years later, I now trust the people around me more, but having been through a period of "the world's all fucked up and nobody seems to quite see it through the same lens as me" left a permanent change
• Thinking Strategically – Similar to general agency II, but coupled with being at a job where there were strategic questions just above my current skill level that would require me to level up to answer them (who I couldn't get help with answering).
• Got a one-time upgrade by reading an email from a colleague that thought about some strategy in detail, outlining their thought process, which showed me how I could improve. (I guess this falls under Learning?)
• Improved Epistemic Rationality – low-key practice + social environment over several years, building off of introspection skills. Having people around who also practiced betting, model building, etc. Somewhat noticing that there weren't enough people around who practiced that, which gave me a sort of spite/smugness based motivation to do it myself (felt more smug than the desperation which fueled General Agency II + Thinking Strategically)
• Math – Social environment incentivized me to learn calculus to understand AI landscape better. Actual practice was maybe the closest thing I've done to "serious practice", although it still felt more like "moderate practice." I only did this for a week. It gave me a small boost to my actual math knowledge, coupled with an upgrade to my self-image as someone who can learn math. (Sort of improvement to mental architecture / healing? Maybe more like just an "Epiphany" in Brienne's grid frame)

I like this a lot! I also think this is an entirely appropriate kind of post for LW.

Right now I'm doing a lot of finding & fixing blockers and also healing and attempting some internal aligment, along with low-key practice of various stuff. I guess some of those things are made more effective by learning sometimes. I would like to be doing a lot more serious practice of certain skills because I sometimes find that very rewarding, but that is an "eventually" thing.

It seems to me that defining whether something is low-key or serious practice by the amount of time spent is a wrongheaded approach.

There's work that's very hard but that requires a low time investment and that has high returns.

I disagree with having "Try Things" identified with one of these strategies. IMO it can be applied to (nearly?) any strategy. e.g., You can try different ways of doing low-key practice, or try different skills or subskills to practice. Or you can run experiments in internal alignment, like what happens if I let the part of me that has been saying "I want cake!" have complete control of what I eat for the next week?

Promoted to curated: Most of the stuff in this post is stuff that I learned from Ray in person, but it has been quite valuable to me, and am happy that it now exists in written up form. It's also good for being more accessible than the average post in the last few weeks.

This has been useful for me in crystallising things that I had noticed but not made as clear.

In particular, it...

• highlights the importance of practice, the value of which I think is neglected in the rationality community. (The thing that caused me to stop neglecting it was training to become a cfar instructor, and being put in the environment where it was expected that anything you taught should be grounded in actual, real examples; and that if you didn't have any you weren't ready to teach, and it would not be unreasonable to practice a technique for 20+ hours; and that techniques are learnable skills just like playing the piano or something; and that any person working at cfar, regardless of seniority, will attend classes and think anew about the content and how they can improve)
• deconfuses several self-improvement concepts that are often batched together

Something I feel unsatisfied with, a year after posting this (and yet another year after Sunset at Noon [LW · GW]) is that I think the most important habit to cultivate is "Try Things", because it unlocks all the higher return options. But I don't really have a good framework for doing that systematically or reliably.

I could do things like have a "go to at least one new meetup a week or month", as part of a general increase luck-surface-area thing. That feels like only one dimension of the thing though.

Can someone please tell me what FB stand for? (It's mentioned in the very first sentence) Thanks!