Worth noting that the reason SquirrelInHell is dead is that they committed suicide after becoming mentally unstable, likely in part due to experimentation with exotic self-modification techniques. This one in particular seems fine AFAICT, but, ya know, caveat utilitor.

Worth noting that both this and the fixing the motor cortex skill they advocate are very closely related to traditional buddhist insight practices and that without supporting emotional integration (Tune Your Emotional Processing, with Focusing as the particular version that Squirrelinhell advocated though a variety of self therapy modalities can work) it can be destabilizing.

Depression, social withdrawal
Hostility or suspiciousness, extreme reaction to criticism
Deterioration of personal hygiene
Flat, expressionless affect
Inability to cry or express joy or inappropriate laughter or crying
Oversleeping or insomnia; forgetful, unable to concentrate
Odd or irrational statements; seeming difficulty with communicating in a normal way

As of writing, I have spent about four months experimenting with the Tune Your Cognitive Strategies (TYCS) [LW · GW] method and I haven't gotten any visible direct benefits out of it.

Some of the indirect benefits I've gotten:

• I discovered introspective ability [LW · GW] and used that to get more insight about what is going on in my mind
• I found out about the cluster of integration / parts-work based therapy techniques (such as Internal Family Systems [LW · GW]), and have fixed some issues in the way I do things (eg. procrastinating on cleaning up my desk), and have also unraveled some deep issues I noticed (due to better introspective ability)

The biggest thing I've learned is that better introspective ability and awareness seems to be the most load-bearing skill underlying TYCS [LW(p) · GW(p)]. I'm less enthusiastic about the notion that you can 'notice your cognitive deltas' in real-time almost all the time -- this seems quite costly.

Note that Eliezer has also described that he does something similar. And more interestingly, it seems like Eliezer prefers to invest in what I would call 'incremental optimization of thought' over 'fundamental debugging':

EY: Your annual reminder that you don't need to resolve your issues, you don't need to deal with your emotional baggage, you don't need to process your trauma, you don't need to confront your past, you don't need to figure yourself out, you can just go ahead and do the thing.

On one hand, you could try to use TYCS or Eliezer's method to reduce the cognitive work required to think about something. On the other hand, you could try to use integration-based methods to solve what I would consider 'fundamental issues' or deeper issues. The latter feels like focusing on the cognitive equivalent of crucial considerations [? · GW], the the former feels like incremental improvements.

And well, Eliezer has seemed to be depressed for quite a while now, and Maia Pasek killed herself. Both of these things I notice seem like evidence for my hypothesis that investing in incremental optimization of the sort that is involved in TYCS and Eliezer's method seems less valuable than the fundamental debugging that is involved in integration / parts-work mental techniques, given scarce cognitive resources.

For the near future, I plan to experiment with and use parts-work mental techniques, and will pause my experimentation and exploration of TYCS and TYCS-like techniques. I expect that there may be a point at which one has a sufficiently integrated mind such that they can switch to mainly investing in TYCS-like techniques, which means I'll resume looking into these techniques in the future.

I think it's worth sharing here some details about SquirrelInHell's suicide, specifically to point out to new people that Cognitive Tuning was not what killed SquirrelInHell.

This comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] is from Slimepriestess, who is a friendly former-Zizian. I wouldn't necessarily trust 100% of everything said by a former Zizian (and who should definitely not be treated as a pariah). But it's pretty well known that SquirrelInHell was doing a ton of over-the-top shit at once (e.g. simultaneously attempting to use dolphin-like sleep deprivation to turn half of their brain into Lawful Evil and the other half into Transgender Good), and was simultaneously hanging around a bunch of violent and dangerous people, and they were all doing hardcore Roko's Basilisk research [LW · GW].

imo, Maia was trans and the components of her mind (the alter(s) they debucketed into "Shine") saw the body was physically male and decided that the decision-theoretically correct thing to do was to basically ignore being trans in favor of maximizing influence to save the world. Choosing to transition was pitted against being trans because of the cultural oppression against queers. I've run into this attitude among rationalist queers numerous times independently from Ziz and "I can't transition that will stop me from being a good EA" seems troubling common sentiment.

 Prior to getting involved with Ziz, the "Shine" half of her personality had basically been running her system on an adversarial 'we must act or else' fear response loop around saving the multiverse from evil using timeless decision theory in order to brute force the subjunctive evolution of the multiverse. 

So Ziz and Squirrel's start interacting, and at that point the "Maia" parts of her had basically been like, traumatized into submission and dissociation, and Ziz intentionally stirs up all those dissociated pieces and draws the realization that Maia is trans to the surface. This caused a spiraling optimization priority conflict between two factions that ziz had empowered the contradictory validity of by helping them reify themselves and define the terms of their conflict in her zero sum black and white good and evil framework.

But Maia didn't kill them, Shine killed them. I have multiple references that corroborate that. The "beat Maia into submission and then save the world" protocol that they using cooked out all this low level suicidality and "i need to escape, please where is the exit how do i decision-theoretically justify quitting the game?" type feelings of hopelessness and entrapment. The only "exit" that could get them out of their sense of horrifying heroic responsibility was by dying so Shine found a "decision theoretic justification" to kill them and did. "Squirrel's doom" isn't just "interhemispheric conflict" if anything it's much more specific, it's the specific interaction of:

"i must act or the world will burn. There is no room for anything less than full optimization pressure and utilitarian consequentialism"

vs

"i am a creature that exists in a body. I have needs and desires and want to be happy and feel safe"

This is a very common EA brainworm to have and I know lots of EAs who have folded themselves into pretzels around this sort of internal friction. Ziz didn't create Squirrel's internal conflict she just encouraged the "good" Shine half to adversarially bully the evil "Maia" half more and more, escalating the conflict to lethality. 

Generally, I think people should be deferring to Raemon on the question of "is Cognitive Tuning safe?" and should, at minimum, message him to get his side of the story. This situation is a really big deal; if Cognitive Tuning works, that's successful human intelligence augmentation, that is world-saving shit. Cognitive Tuning alone could become an entire field of intelligence augmentation, AND something that anyone with average intelligence can contribute heavily towards, since having a more typical mind will yield more insights that can be picked up and worked with by other people with more typical minds [? · GW]).

Another thing I notice after a few years of using this:

The OP says:

• Your brain already has the ability to update its cognitive strategies (this is called "meta-cognitive reinforcement learning"). However, the usual mechanism works with unnecessary levels of indirection, as in:
  • Cognitive strategy -> Thought -> Action -> Reward or punishment
    • You get rewarded or punished for what you do (as measured by your brain's chemical responses). Good thoughts are more likely to be followed by good actions. Good cognitive strategies are more likely to generate good thoughts. On average, your brain will slowly update its cognitive strategies in the right direction.
  • Cognitive strategy -> Thought -> Reward or punishment
    • You have learned to be happy or unhappy about having certain ideas, even when you don't yet know how they apply to the real world. Now your brain gets rewarded or punished for thoughts, and on average good thoughts are more likely to be generated by good cognitive strategies. Your brain can update cognitive strategies faster, according to heuristics about what makes ideas "good".
• However, by carefully looking at the "deltas" between conscious thoughts, we can get rid of the last remaining level of indirection (this is the key insight of this whole page!):
  • Cognitive strategy -> Reward or punishment
    • You have learned to perceive your cognitive strategies as they happen, and developed some heuristics that tell you whether they are good or bad. Now your brain can update cognitive strategies immediately, and do it regardless of the topic of your thoughts.
    • Even when you generate a useless idea from another useless idea, you can still track whether the cognitive strategy behind it was sound, and learn from the experience.

I think the author thinks of this as the primary insight here (i.e. getting to: "Cognitive strategy -> reward/punishment"). And... I'll be honest, I think this works and it makes sense to me, but it doesn't work so obviously that I'm like "yes this underlying theory definitely checked out."

But what I think is both more obvious, and still a useful stepping stone, is transitioning more from "Cognitive strategy -> Thought -> Action -> Reward or punishment" to "Cognitive strategy -> Thought -> Reward or punishment". A lot of my thoughts are obviously dumb (or useful) upon first glance. And shifting how much of my feedback loop happened within ~3 seconds vs longer timescales still seems very helpful.

Does anyone who knew SquirrelInHell know the subskills in the skill tree they never got around to writing?

 EDIT: To clarify, are there any known skills which are equivalent to the Red subskills in BWT's skill tree? I am very impressed with the exposition on BWT, and would guess the remaining skills were just as high value. Perhaps more than I'd naively guess, if there's some synergy between them. If you think you know them, please speak out so we can get the complete BWT skillset. 

My unedited notes while reading this post, including an initial exercise log:

"Your cognition is much more powerful than just the part you have conscious access to, and it's crucial to make good use of it."

heck yeah

"A small tweak to how your brain processes information in general is worth more than a big upgrade to your conscious repository of cognitive tricks."

• absofuckinlutely

"More creativity and good ideas just "popping into your head"."

• oh that is appealing; pregnancy killed this and it's coming back but i'm still starving

"Once you realize exactly what is and what isn't under your conscious control, you stop beating yourself about not doing the impossible."

• is this true?

What does it mean to "tune" your "cognitive strategies"?

"Having good quality thinking happen effortlessly and automatically is great... unless you are a control freak, in which case you should Tune Your Emotional Processing before even reading this page."

• oh shoot, am I a control freak? i think i might be a control freak. but maybe not in the way Squirrell's talking about? probably i should read both essays but i bet i'm ready for this one.

"How to tell if you have it?"

• this section reminds me a lot of a bit of my writing that Duncan shared to LW once. i wonder if i can find it.
• no i cannot find it.
• Duncan found it for me! [LW · GW]
• Though I think what I demonstrate in this email does match the second two bullet points, it doesn't really match the first. This session of thought was difficult, and required willpower. That's why I don't do it (in this much depth) constantly.

"When you don't like whatever has risen up to the top of the cauldron, the last thing you want is to try to "fix it". You only have access to the topmost layer, so it would be hopelessly ineffective anyway. But it's much worse than that - by attempting to "fix" your cognition, you stop being able to see how it works. How well your cognition works is shown not by what thoughts you have at the moment, but rather by the pattern of how one or more thoughts combine into a new thought ("cognitive strategy"). Instead, you want to learn as much as possible about the differences ("deltas") between each thought and the next, as they occur to you."

• Oh wow. Another take on the problem solving/study framing, I think.
• From "Getting Started with Naturalism", in [the section](Starting Place 2: Try Catching the Spark (All Of It, Or Just Part Of It) [? · GW]) where I summarize "Catching the Spark": The final section of the procedure, "Choosing Your Quest [LW · GW]", leads you to reconnect with your intuitions from the beginning, then to choose a “quest”, a related question that will guide your investigations going forward. Going through this part of the process tends to be especially important for people who started out desperate to solve a problem (provided naturalism is in fact a good approach for them); it requires that you re-frame whatever you hope to solve as something that might be understood, something whose workings may be discovered through careful investigation.
• It recommends something a little different though. It's a goal orientation-->study framing, but "learn as much as possible about the deltas between temporally adjacent thoughts" is a place to focus attention that I don't believe I've ever attempted.
• this seems like pretty much an obvious, complete, ready-to-go technique that i could immediately implement the moment i chose to. however i do not think the "obvious" version would be "effortless" or "not requiring of willpower", so perhaps i'm wrong about what the technique is supposed to be.

meta: i appear to be halfway through the post and part of me is still waiting for the post to start because it's happening in the form of bullet points, which apparently i categorize as "part of an introduction, not the body of a post". but actually i think this just is the post.

"However, by carefully looking at the "deltas" between conscious thoughts, we can get rid of the last remaining level of indirection (this is the key insight of this whole page!): Cognitive strategy -> Reward or punishment You have learned to perceive your cognitive strategies as they happen, and developed some heuristics that tell you whether they are good or bad. Now your brain can update cognitive strategies immediately, and do it regardless of the topic of your thoughts. Even when you generate a useless idea from another useless idea, you can still track whether the cognitive strategy behind it was sound, and learn from the experience."

• hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. hmmmmmm. hmm.
• this.... seems.............. great if you're happy to rely on your existing taste network. this is what the part in Zen and Motorcycles is about, where the guy demonstrates to the students that they already know how to write well.
• granted, i think most people are shit at putting their existing taste network to use when doing almost anything deliberately, precisely because they don't know how to observe experiences that are quiet or fleeting, and so there's a ton of value here.
• but apparently i was expecting something different, and something about the distance between what i expected and what i heard made me be all "this some kind of dangerous/bad/circular"
• oh oh oh i think i've got it. what happened was, i thought this was going to tell me about improving my thoughts. instead it is telling me about improving my actions by listening to my thoughts.
• no, reading back through, i think that's not what happened.
• suppose i read this section while being deliberately grumpy at it. what stands out?
  • "punishment"
  • (oh, some curiosity seems to have made it through the grumpiness: what is "cognitive strategies"?)
  • "whether they are good or bad"
  • "sound"
• what are the grumps picking out here? they seem to be picking out things about judgement and rejection.
• i suspect i do not disagree with Squirrel anything propositional here. my current story is that they and i have different aesthetic intuitions about how to relate to preconscious thought, and my introspective skill rests heavily on my aesthetic taste. wait, surely that *is* a substantive disagreement? no, i think it's not; i think it's likely they accomplish almost exactly the same thing using almost exactly the same strategies, but their version of the strategies feels a little different, and it sounds a little different when described. hmmmmm. i'm still conflicted on this. ah, ok perhaps the thing is:
  • there's a type of strategy with parts X, Y, Z. they and i have the same Y and Z. X can actually be several different things, as long as it has properties that allow it to fill the right roles in the strategy with Y and Z. their X' involves something judgement-flavored. my X'' involves something awesomeness/discernment/beauty-flavored. both X' and X'' function basically the same in the overall strategy. (obviously discernment is mostly another word for judgement.)
• "Note: awareness is a muscle. Time spent trying to see your thoughts more clearly is time well spent, regardless of the degree to which you succeed at getting any specific results."
  • yes ok fine. i will compile and publish the load of attention stuff that seemed kind of tangential and i wasn't sure people would be interested in.
• "Pick a small problem, question or thinking puzzle of any kind."
  • I will divide 347 by 16 in my head. (i am bad with numbers and this may be embarrassing if anybody reads this but i will do it anyway.)
  • "Beware of "school trauma": think about whatever you want to think about, not things someone else would like you to think about."
  • do i want to think about dividing 347 by 16? no not really. i do sort of want to be able to mental math, but perhaps i can find a better topic for this exercise. what do i actually want to think about? what is exciting to me right now? music, especially Arvo Pärt. but i'm not sure i have any live puzzles on that at the moment. there's "why do i keep being unable to read the bass line year after year?", but i think i'm reaching for a less fully internal problem. same with "how is it that i'm still only reading tabs for guitar instead of standard notation?" there's of course this problem i'm trying to solve at this very moment, but i don't want something so self-referential either. still, i'm drawn to "something with this guitar, since it's right here and also about music." hm what if i tried to describe Pärt's tintinnabuli compositional method *spatially*, using the guitar neck? i'm not really sure that makes sense, but if i succeeded, i imagine it would allow me to *improvise* guitar music in tintinnabulation! yes bingo that is a small external non-self-referential problem i want to think about. (i don't know if it's a "thinking puzzle"; i don't know what "thinking" is.)
  • "If you don't have any ideas, you can always pick "picking a puzzle" as your puzzle."
  • oh lol apparently Squirrell didn't share my intuition about self reference.
• "Load the puzzle into your memory, and let go."
  • i'm not sure what they mean by "into my memory". but i will pick up the guitar and try to get a handle on the problem. and then "let go"? interesting that i chose the phrase "get a handle on".
  • i think i need to read more before i get going.
  • "Instead of focusing on solving the puzzle, focus on the question 'where do my thoughts go when this puzzle enters my attention'?" <3<3<3<3<3
  • "Aim for sub-second timescales. In fact, you can easily have a chain of 5 or more conscious thoughts in one second. If you think you can't, you're just missing skill in noticing it." who the fuck is this is this me from a parallel dimension what is going on. i feel electrified right now. like watching Stephan Lambiel on the ice.
  • me in What It's Like To Notice Things: "("Can you really distinguish between 200 and 500 milliseconds?" Yes, but it's an acquired skill. I spent a block of a few minutes every day for a month, then several blocks a day for about a week, doing this Psychomotor Vigilance Task when I was gathering data for the polyphasic sleep experiment. It gives you fast feedback on simple response time. I'm not sure if it's useful for anything else, but it comes in handy when taking notes on experiences that pass very quickly.)"
• ok this seems like a good point at which to try a bit, before moving to the next step
  • it's unfortunate that i can't hold the guitar and type a the same time. "easily"; i can't hold the guitar and type easily at the same time. i play a string. there's a fruit fly here. the string i play is A. but i don't need to know that it's A, because i'm doing this spatially. i suspect i am not doing "let go", unless "let go" is in contrast to something i'm already not doing. what if i "let go" more though? what if i load the problem into memory more though. i have a guitar, but where is tintinnabuli? there is force here, when i do that. do i want the force? i suspect i do not want the force, but i do want tintinnabuli present. what if i invite it with openness, while holding the guitar. i play the second string. i kill the gnat, and i'm sad and conflicted about killing the gnat. i refocus on the guitar. i play the second string, and i plan to play the second string over and over while inviting "tintinnabuli". i imagine "down". the first string comes to mind. "two steps". but! but up could happen also. it is a rule, a rule that is not yet established. "the t line has a relationship to the melody. i haven't yet invented that relationship." i think words, and i want to think spaces. curious: what are these concepts spatially? i'm aware of frets.
  • all right that's enough of a sample for now. i'll continue reading.
  • ah i think i have not captured the level of granularity Squirrell wants. i didn't realize we were working so small. i'll try again.
  • left hand fingers on the strings in a familiar pattern-->settling in-->plucking as comes naturally with my right hand-->happiness/comfort/"harmony"/resolution-->"arpeggio"
  • the act of typing is definitely getting in the way as i hold the guitar. if i want a reflective record, i think i'll either need to record my voice, or plan not to record during and rely on my memory.
• "Think which "deltas" are doing good work for you, and which aren't."
  • this part gives me the grumps again
  • "All you ever need to do is notice useful deltas, and have that little "oh, nice!" reaction. That's it. Really."
  • i'm not sure what "useful" is doing here. but also i feel grumpy at "useful", and i feel reflectively grumpy at "i'm not sure what 'useful' is doing here" because it's a smoke screen for feeling grumpy at "useful". "i'm not sure what 'useful' is doing here" sounds like it involves curiosity but mostly it doesn't. if i meant it for real, i'd want to know what "useful" is doing here, but mainly i just want "useful" to go away. however, "wanting 'useful' to go away" isn't allowed, so i pretend i am expressing ignorance or confusion. anyway, i don't need to do anything besides... wait, hang on a second. it's the space between thoughts. that's the point. not the thoughts. i thought i had the hang of it but i was wrong. try again. don't write it down this time, just figure out how to improvise tintinnabulation spatially, and look at the space between thoughts.
  • uuuuuuhhhhh ok this might be a big deal. i can't tell yet. it's a little unfamiliar and not yet easy. i'm not certain it'll go anywhere. but it feels different, and good. i'll describe what i was doing.
  • first of all, i got rid of words. words were obviously in my way. way too cumbersome. i don't think in words, especially not when engaging with music. instead i put my hands on the guitar and started doing things. i tried to rest my attention on the spaces between thoughts while doing things. on the transitions. "thoughts" is certainly a misleading term here, for me. "impulses" is much more accurate. "the things that moved my fingers", perhaps. but smaller than that even; sometimes it was the things that moved my fingers, sometimes it was the redirection of my attention in response to what i heard, sometimes it was the way my chest felt. but i tried to... no, "rest" is the wrong word. i did not rest my attention on the space between mental movements. my attention *surfed* the space between mental movements. i wouldn't describe it as "effortless", but it was not at all "thinky". and i did begin to make progress on the problem, "using only system one" or something. it felt nice. but i didn't get very far. i'm not sure the "progress" was real.
  • more concretely, what did i do, with my fingers? i played some notes, and i liked some of them in sequence. so i replayed those notes, and then i added more afterward, and then i felt the completion of a phrase. i repeated the phrase several times. then i started adding notes on top of the melody. well, beneath the melody. but at first i didn't like the notes. i felt a traffic jam, and looked for its source, and realized that i was trying to play two different notes on the same string. i searched for the note i wanted on the string below, and found it. oh, i hadn't realized this before now, but i did uncover an important principle of spatial tintinnabuli composition: the fifth fret of the adjacent lower string equals the open string. i knew this already, of course, but i had not contextualized it this way. i had used this information to tune the instrument, and sometimes i had intellectually-top-down transcribed something into another physical chord configuration using this principle, but i had not visualized the sixth and seventh frets of the adjacent lower string as copies of the first and second frets of the string above it. i really did make concrete progress on the problem in practice without thinking about it intellectually.
  • oh fuck i just remembered that the very earliest version of my attempt to communicate about "naturalism" qua comprehensive method was called "how to solve a problem before you know what the problem is". that sounds an awful lot like what i did here. but this method is smaller and a little different. this is for immediate right-in-front-of-you-all-at-once problems. (maybe it's for other kinds of problems also.)
• "The delta which moves you into noticing your deltas is very useful. Give it the reward it deserves!"
  • yeah i seem to really hate this reward/punishment framing, yet i can't belief report that it doesn't accurately describe what i'm doing (and what i endorse doing)

ITT: links to the original post on various archives.

The way I've personally used this technique/practice is to have a lapscreen, with two pages side by side – one as a notebook where I can jot thoughts down, and one with whatever puzzle I'm trying to solve. (I found brilliant.org to be a good source of puzzles)

I try to jot thoughts down as I have them (often with very rough notes that only make sense to me since trying to write down too much would slow down the process too much)

The post emphasizes noticing thoughts at the sub-second level. Obviously, writing out a focus-handle for 5 different thoughts in the space of a second isn't practical. But what I do here is often let myself have a few thoughts/impulses in a row, then go back and try to notice/remember them all, and then write them down after-the-fact in an attempt to crystallize them and reinfoce the noticing process.

It seems to me like people here started focusing on the wrong things. People who knew SquirrelInHell know that the suicide was likely caused by SquirrelInHell simply starting out already over the edge, e.g. hardcore obsessive Roko's basilisk research.

The issue at hand with the matter of tuning cognitive strategies is not "does this drive people crazy", it is "does delta reinforcement actually work", because if delta reinforcement actually works, then that is

As in, like, comparable in value to the rest of Lesswrong put together. If this works, even if it only works on 10-25% of people (which Raemon's testimony indicates), then this is basically the world-saving nearterm human intelligence augmentation (which yud wants to scale).  

Everything we have so far, on alignment and macrostrategy, came from human minds that were not really tuning their cognitive strategies. High-output passive thinking, and fun downhill [LW · GW] thinking, have immense potential to set the world up so that someone, somewhere, eventually thinks of a solution to the world's most pressing problems.

This is not something to sleep on.

Gahhhh I've been waiting for the rest of BeWellTuned for a while now. I was hoping it was held up for a happy reason, like the author being busy with work they found important. :(

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?