Man-with-a-hammer syndrome

My experiences are somewhat opposed: I find that as soon as I publicly speak about some such idea, my excitement with it will begin to vanish.

I find it curious that your post makes no mention of the possibility of the idea being right. When people first came up with the theory of evolution, I imagine it having been much like you described. People started applying it to every plant and animal and for that matter every living thing out there, and was the universal explanation for how things turned out to be the way they did. And guess what? They were right! Even more so for people who came up with the laws of physics. Yes, there is a danger if you take it too far, like if you used evolution to justify Moral Darwinism, but talking about this period of initial excitement as a purely negative issue doesn't sound right either.

In fact, I might personally prefer to extend these periods somewhat: I find that I often forget about applying such a theory after the initial excitement. Theories are declarative knowledge, but applying them is procedural knowledge, which requires practice to develop. The initial burst of excitement creates a brief time period during which you get practice by applying the theory as much as possible. After that, it might easily happen that you don't remember to seek to apply it, and therefore don't develop the skill to the point where it comes natural.

Part of higher education is an artificial replacement for this rush of excitement: I've heard several students remark that the important thing wasn't the specific courses they took or any particular facts they learned. Rather the important thing was that they learned to think like (economists/psychologists/computer scientists/Cthulhu cultists).

I'd say trying to "fight" this tendency isn't necessarily the most productive approach - instead, you might want to embrace such periods, and seek to experience as many of them as possible. That way, you'll be more likely to have a lasting set of mental tools in your toolkit, that can be applied as variedly as possible.

Man-with-a-hammer syndrome is pretty simple: you think of an idea and then, pretty soon, it becomes THE idea. You start seeing how THE idea can apply to anything and everything, it’s the universal explanation for how the universe works. Suddenly, everything you’ve ever thought of before must be reinterpreted through the lens of THE idea and you’re on an intellectual high.

Which all makes sense if you think about it from the perspective of Perceptual Control Theory.

I suggest that one especially insidious sort of hammer is the idea that you know that other people's motivations all fall into one disreputable category.

Examples are Freudians (possibly less sophisticated than Freud) who think it's all about sex (this one is no longer fashionable), Marxists who think it's all power relationships, it's all explicable in terms of hypothesized hunter-gatherer optimization, and the recent idea that it's all status signaling.

The thing is, people are almost certainly less reality-based than they think, but that doesn't mean they're all illusion-driven to the same extent in all areas or for the same reasons.

No amount of clever mental gymnastics will help you get rid of the syndrome any faster and that’s the most frustrating part

Not my experience. Realizing that "every single time I've gotten super-excited about a new idea and tried applying it to everything, I've been wrong" is effective, for me at least, in tempering how I apply it.

While you have man-with-a-hammer syndrome, you end up living in a curious world in which you are unable to disbelieve in something you know to be not true and this is a deeply weird state I’ve not seen “rationalists” fully come to terms with.

Subconscious processes (such as strong feelings of emotion and the certainty that accompanies them) are generally not consciously accessible. For example, no matter how much you know that squares A and B are the same color, they will appear to be different because the vision system processes the image automatically. Compensating for subconscious judgments that you know are misguided is an enormous part of what being a "rationalist" is.

Utilitarianism is a very general framework. Why wouldn't these things also be "man-with-a-hammer"?

• physics
• materialism
• determinism
• mathematics
• Bayesian decision theory

Systematically writing things down helps me to move on (mainly as applied to research).

If I have a moderately vague idea that isn't written down, it won't leave, as it's possible to go in circles on its terms indefinitely. New thoughts gradually supplant the old thoughts, and old thoughts, not written down, get forgotten and reinvented later.

On the other hand, if everything is sketched in writing, even if it's still raw material to the point that it doesn't make much sense at the time of writing, not to speak of a few months later, then it becomes possible to see the big picture. Systematic problems and limitations become tangible when you put names on them, lack of meaningful progress is much more visible when it's possible to look over the old notes and see that the new idea is but a rebranding on an old one. It's also easier to let go, to stop thinking about the current idea and thus to start forgetting it, as there remains a path of retreat in rereading the old notes.

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Death_Spirals_and_the_Cult_Attractor

I definitely recognize this tendency and have struggled with it. However, it would be a shame if someone discovered the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything and then failed to share it because they were afraid of man-with-a-hammer syndrome. Also, I think that even when obviously flawed this kind of thought process can be fruitful. Cross-domain analogies are one of our best ways of generating hypotheses.

I'm having a hard time getting any value from this post, I'm afraid.

I think there's another defense against "everything looks like a nail" syndrome-- associate with annoying people who ask you about counterexamples.

Once you independently discover Utilitarianism you start to believe that an entire moral framework can be constructed around a system of pleasures and pains and, what’s more, that this moral system is both objective and platonic.

Are you serious? If man-with-a-hammer syndrome involves using rusty hammers that obviously never worked in the first place then I certainly aren't going to admit to suffering from it!

Thank you for pointing out Munger's talk to us.

Man-with-hammer doesn't seem terribly interesting to me; it's just one expression of basic rationality flaws. It's consists of:

a) public commitment of advocating your hammer as the cure for all nails, leading to internal entrenchment

b) defending a continuing stream of status and reward as a leading hammer-man; attacking alternative tools proposed by young upstarts

Of course, there's strategic specialization in competitive research - identify whatever secret weapons that you have (but few others working on your problem have), and gamble that those weapons will lead to some advance on the problem (better: develop your arsenal while looking for likely nails).

What's funny is that the majority of published AI papers are just applying the latest fashionable tools (that aren't at all unique) to standard tasks. Everybody seems to be grabbing the same hammer. To give a particular example: machine learning methods used in natural language processing has moved through: Expectation-Maximization (maximum likelihood), Maximum Entropy (set parameters so as to give the model's predictions the same expectations of features as in real data), discriminative (set parameters directly on improving task accuracy), and Bayesian by sampling.