Confession Thread: Mistakes as an aspiring rationalist

I spent 7 years playing a video game that started to become as important to me as the real world, at least in terms of how it emotionally effected me. If I had spent the 6ish hours a day, on average, doing something else - well, it makes me vaguely sick to think of the things I might have better spent the time and energy on. Don't get me wrong - it was fun. And I did not sink nearly so low as so many others have, and in the end when I realized what was going on - I left. I am simply saddened by the lost opportunity cost. FWIW - this is less about the "virtual" nature of things - I had good, real human beings as friends - and more about not having the presence of mind and fortitude to spend that time, oh, learning an instrument, or developing a difficult skill, or simply doing things in the real world to help society as a whole. I mean - 6 hours a day (average, 7 days a week) for 7 years is what, a doctorate program? Not that I value the paper and all, but the education means something.

1. I wrote about my startup failure here.

2. I fail to anticipate disaster.

3. I'm moderately biased towards inaction.

4. I used to not know what the outside view was, and I didn't give nearly enough weight to "outside view evidence".

5. I suffer from wishful thinking. I want to believe in people, but they continue to disappoint me.

6. Related to 5, I instinctively model people as "thinking like me" moreso than I should. Ie. I assume that they perform cost-benefit analyses and stuff. (To be clear, I'm just saying that I have a moderate bias towards doing this, not that I'm incompetent and don't adjust my models at all to the fact that I know people don't think this way.)

7. I'm biased towards self-consistency.

8. I know about scope insensitivity, and I try to adjust accordingly, but I don't do nearly a good enough job. And I don't make nearly an honest enough effort.

9. Arguing against weak opponents/arguments can make you too confident. It could lead to reversed stupidity. You have to argue against the strongest counterarguments. I know this. I've gotten a lot better at avoiding this problem, but I still have a ways to go.

10. I should probably try harder to be happy (in the short-term). Things like paying attention to all the amazing things in the world. Ex. I got to eat a delicious dinner tonight. And be entertained by a great show (Prison Break!). And... I get to sleep in a comfortable bed in precisely the temperature I want. I live in a beautiful apartment that is literally a 90 second walk away from my job. I pretty much don't have to worry about money at all. I have access to a gym, a pool, a park with basketball, roads to run and bike on, a football stadium where I get to run the stairs which I really enjoy. I'm incredibly self-confident and legitimately like who I am. I get to shop for pretty much anything I want and have it delivered right to my door for free (Amazon is amazing!). I have access to some of the best courses in the world online. I live in a world where "the american dream is real", and the barriers to starting a startup are as low as ever. There's a ton of interesting information for me to read at moments notice (via the internet). I get to know a ton about how the world works because billions of people have been working at it for thousands of years before me. It'd really really suck if I had to start from the beginning. I get to learn from smart people like Eliezer and Nate Soares. I get to discuss things with smart people on LW whenever I want! Anyway, my point is that there are some legitimately amazing things in this world/my life, it's rational to acknowledge them, but I don't do nearly a good enough job of doing so. (That said, there's a lot of horrible things too...)

11. I don't realize that X isn't about Y as often as I should. Ex. I thought that standups were stupid because the communication isn't valuable (in my situation), but then I realized that it's actually more about the social pressure. I'm learning.

(I have a ton of other confessions, but this is all that comes to my head right now.)

Arrogance: I caution you not to take this as advice for you to your own life, because frankly, arrogance goes a long, long loooooong way. Most rationalists are less arrogant in person than they should about their subject areas, and rationalist women who identify as females and are straight are even less frequently arrogant than the already low base rate. But some people are over-arrogant, and I am one of these. Over arrogance isn't about the intensity of arrogance, it is about the non-selectivity. The problem I have always had and been told again and again isn't generalized arrogance, it is leaking the arrogance into domains I'm not actually worth a penny. To see this with full clarity: that one should have a detailed model of when to be confident, when arrogant, and when humble took me a mere fourteen days, eleven months and twenty eight years, and counting.

The less painful ones:

Ugh Field / Wishful Thinking - when I came up with 10-12 truly clever explanations why I am not moderately depressed and not abusing alcohol: that probably means I am. I don't have 10-12 clever explanations why don't watch hockey. I just don't. Things you really aren't / don't tend to be simple.

Missing the level - trying a million things that would repair the consequences of the above rather than the root causes. For example, overcompensating for the feelings of inferiority instead of having that removed. Example: chasing girls who were pretty but empty, but still feeling like a womanizer made me feel less inferior. It is missing the level, theoretically, any treatment that kills minor depression should kill the inferiority feeling that it causes.

Not knowing what I want. I like and dislike to socialize at the same time. I like the idea of socializing. I just don't like people, usually. I would like being the kind of person who likes it.

On a meta note, I think that this should be a monthly thread. I really like this idea, both as a way of provoking thought about one's mistakes, and a way to get help for them. Thoughts?

I misread a bug report right today and almost escalated the issue with the customer.

I shouldn't have dealt with the issue at all because I'm down with a cold and I know quite well that it reduces my mental capacity. But I saw the email and immediately thought: That's no bug. I covered exactly that case! And wrote back a small reply pointing to the change request specifying that. Shortly the project manager repeated the point - and quoted the spec. Full of self-righteousness I wrote a lengthy reply to the customer taking the report apart and quoting lots of spec (wrongly). The only thing the prevented a further escalation was that I realized that this was an instance of a pattern encountered earlier. Namely that even if I was right it might hurt my intermediary. So I decided to send the mail to him first. Luckily. Shortly I got a call, he wanted it explained and it became clear that the spec was right but the implementation indeed wrong - and my memory of the expected result clouded. The actual fix was easy. But the time collecting the reply and clarifying was still wasted.

Lessons: 1) Don't trust your mental capacity if ill. 2) Let hot mails cool or route them thru a supervisor.

A Big Fish in a Small Pond: for many years I assumed it was better to be a big fish in a small pond than to try to be a big fish in the ocean. This can be decomposed into a series of mistakes, only part of which I learned to overcome so far.

1)It is based on the premise that social rankings matter more than they actually do. Most of day to day life is determined by environment, and being in a better environment, surrounded by better and different people is more valuable experientially and in terms of output than being a big fish in a small pond.

2)It encouraged blindspots. The more dimensions in which I was the big fish, the more dimensions nearby in vector space I failed to optimize. The most starking one: having a high linguistic IQ and large vocabulary made me care little about grammar and foreign languages.

3)One of the reasons for me to want to be big at a small pond was reading positive psychology showing most people prefer a 50k income in a 25k average world than a 75k in a 100k average. I was unable to disentangle "empirical study", which serves to inform me into two very distinct sets. "Empirical study about how people actually feel in different situations" and "Empirical study about how people judge abstract counterfactual situations with numbers attached to them". I was very proud of taking science seriously into my life (which in fact most people don't), but I was taking the part of science that is specifically about people being wrong without noticing, in my reckless youth.

4)It has a unidimensional function Max(deltaBigness) which doesn't capture the complexity and beauty of our actual multidimensional lives and feelings. There are millions of axes in which it is personally valuable to nudge, to push, to move, and to optimize, relative importance is a relatively unimportant one.

I consistently misinterpret what people are saying when in the heat of the moment, and get upset about it. For instance, I was recently playing Warframe with a couple friends, and one playfully grumbled at me for getting killed; and I got really upset in response, thinking they were being deliberately cruel.

This is quite an annoying habit for me given the people I hang around (they lack tact), and I'm doing my best to solve it. I suspect I'm falling prey to the Mind Projection fallacy and thinking them heated when I am, which only escalates it.

Whenever I read sources of rationalist authority, I just take it as a given that the community has vetted that knowledge as the standard to which I should align my beliefs.

It's hard to give an example, since rationalists examples get very abstract, but here is a different example: today I wanted to look up the state of research on the economics of psychiatric interventions. I found a WHO document (http://www.who.int/mental_health/economic_aspects_of_mental_health.pdf) which I scanned through and thought okay cool, and skipped my attention to anything actionable.

This caught my eye: 'Specifically, there is a need for evidence showing that mental health care strategies can be cost-effective'

Arguably, the most obvious example of policy-based evidence making I had ever seen. I expected better, but I guess that kind of thinking is inevitable for any institution which is governed top-down by non-researchers.

Fell prey the planning fallacy with my new course, and didn't leave enough time to get partners.

Since the launch, I've been pretty unproductive and eating pretty unhealthy - I'm not sure what the failure here was but it happened.

I become incrediby "blamey" when I get stressed at work - given my dream job as CEO of a large company, this is a response I have to work on.

The typical mind fallacy/other-optimizing/illusion of transparency is the mistake I keep making and see others making all the time. Yours and mine interaction on this forum is a good example of both sides falling prey to this.

Oooh, I've got another one:

My mum was really abusive growing up. She probably has intermittent explosive disorder or something else of that sort. I tried to classically condition her by threatening (and sometimes delivering) to damage the house - like kick holes in the wall and such when she lost it.

This was obviously a terrifying gambit, but it eventually paid off. However, I was aware I was scared and that it was inhibiting my ability to make a concerted effort to change her behaviour long before I did anything of this sort.

In hindsight, I would have tried to get my hands on propranolol or another Beta blocker to enhance my confidence. It probably would have helped me grow out of the shell I sunk into and continue to rise from after all the negative stuff I heard.

Ironically, propranolol is used as a treatment for intermittent explosive disorder...but that's beside the point.