A Call for Constant Vigilance

My understanding of the "quantity to quality conversion" phrase is that in many situations the relation between some inputs and outputs is not linear. More specifically, there are many situations where at the beginning the relation seems linear, but later at some point the increase of outputs becomes incredibly huge (incredibly = for people who based their models on extrapolating the linear relationship at the beginning). Even more specifically, you can have one input "A" that has obvious effect on "X", but almost zero effect on "Y" and "Z". Then at some moment with additional increases of "A" also "Y" and "Z" start growing (which was totally unexpected by the old model).

Specific example: You start playing piano. At the beginning, it feels like it has a simple linear impact on your life. You spend 1 hour playing piano, you get an ability to play a simple song quite well. You spend 2 hours playing piano, you get an ability to play another simple song quite well. Extrapolate this, and you get a model. According to this model, after spending 80000 hours playing piano, you would expect to be able to play 80000 simple songs quite well. -- What happens in reality is that you get an ability to play any simple song well just by looking at the music sheets, an ability to play very complex music, an ability to make money by playing the music, you become famous, get a lot of social capital, lot of friends, lot of sex, lot of drugs, etc. (Both non-linear outputs, and the outputs not predicted by the original model.)

A similar pattern appears in many different situations, so some people invented a mysteriously sounding phrase to describe it. Now it seems like some law of nature. But maybe it is just a selection effect (some situations develop like this, and we notice "oh, the law of quantity to quality conversion", other situations don't, and we ignore them).

In other words, "quantity" seems to mean "linear model", "quality" means "model", and the whole phrase decoded means "if you change variables enough, you may notice that the linear model does not reflect reality well (especially in situations where the curve starts growing slowly, and then it grows very fast)".

Right, it works for a bunch of specific instances of this phenomenon, but how do you construct a model which describes both phase transitions and human learning (and a host of other similar effects in totally dissimilar substrates)?

Agreed, but actually I would call a world where if people who chew gum get more throat abscesses one could reliably conclude that refraining to chew gum is the right choice to prevent throat abscesses a more convenient world than ours.

Okay, I'll take a stab at answering. I'm kind of loath to do this because one of the main points of this post is that specific techniques are overemphasized and I think specific examples won't help with this, but perhaps a more expansive description on my part can avoid that pitfall.

In 2010, I read Patri Friedman's Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction, which I consider to be an essentially correct indictment of things around here, or at least things around here circa 2010. This is the post that sort of jolted me out of complacency with regards to my own training.

In my experience with the martial arts, I consistently apply things that I've drilled a lot (to the point where it takes conscious effort to not do some things-- I was once called up to be a dummy for someone demonstrating a certain type of deceptive fencing attack and found it very difficult to not parry the attack, deception or no, since I had drilled the parry to that particular deception so often) I inconsistently apply things that I don't drill, and I don't apply things that I don't drill.

Rationality is, in my experience, very much the same (others have noticed this too). I consistently apply thought patterns and principles that I've invested serious time and effort into drilling, I occasionally apply thought patterns and principles that I've thought about a fair amount but haven't put really serious effort into, and I don't apply thought patterns or principles that I've heard of but not really thought about. I'm actually rather embarrassed that I didn't notice this until reading Patri's post in 2010, but so it goes.

One example of a specific rationality skill that I have invested time and effort into drilling is that of keeping my identity small. I read a lot and I read fast, and hence when I was first linked to a Paul Graham essay I read all of them in one sitting. Keep Your Identity Small stuck with me the most, but for a while it was something I sort of believed in but hadn't applied. Here's some evidence of me not having applied it-- note the date.

However, at one point in early 2011 I noticed myself feeling personally insulted when someone was making fun of a group that I used to belong to, and more importantly I noticed that that was something that I wasn't supposed to do anymore. How could this be?

Well, quite frankly, it was because despite high degrees of theoretical knowledge about rationality, I lacked the practice hours required to be good at it. Unfortunately, most rationality skills are rare enough that knowing a little bit beyond a password-guessing level makes you seem very advanced relative to others. But rationality, except in certain competitive situations, isn't about being better than others, it's about being the best you can be.

So to make a long story short, I devised methods and put in the practice hours and got better, and now I actually know a few things instead of sort of knowing a few things. I winced at how low-level I used to be when I read that post from 2010, but all in all that's probably a good sign. After all, if I didn't think my old writing was silly and confused, wouldn't that indicate that I hadn't been progressing since then? Three years of progression should yield noticeably different results.