"How To Become Less Wrong" - Feedback on Article Request

post by Gleb_Tsipursky · 2015-10-26T14:42:58.650Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 40 comments

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  Article - How I Became Less Wrong
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40 comments

Would appreciate feedback on this article I plan to submit to a broad media publication as part of my broader project of promoting rationality and raising the sanity waterline. Can't make it much longer as I'm at word limit, so if you suggest adding something, also suggest taking something away. The article is below the black line and thanks for any feedback!

 

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Article - How I Became Less Wrong

 

On a sunny day in early August, my wife Agnes Vishnevkin and I came to a Rationality Dojo in Columbus, OH. Run by Max Harms, this group is devoted to growing mentally stronger through mental fitness practices. That day, the dojo’s activities focused on probabilistic thinking, a practice of assigning probabilities to our intuitive predictions about the world to improve our ability to evaluate reality accurately and make wise decisions to reach our goals. After learning the principles of probabilistic thinking, we discussed how to apply this strategy to everyday life.

 

We were so grateful for this practice in early September, when my wife and I started shopping for our new house. We discussed in advance the specific goals we had for the house, enabling us to save a lot of time by narrowing our options. We then spent one day visiting a number of places we liked, rating each aspect of the house important to us on a numerical scale. After visiting all these places, we sat down and discussed the probabilities on what house would best meet our goals. The math made it much easier to overcome our individual aesthetic preferences, and focus on what would make us happiest in the long run. We settled on our top choice, made a bid, and signed our contract.

This sounds like a dry and not very exciting process. Well, we were very excited!

 

Why? Because we were confident that we made the best decision with the information available to us. The decision to get a new house is one of the biggest financial decisions we will make in our lifetime. It felt great to know that we could not have done any better than we did through applying the principles of probabilistic thinking and other rationality-informed strategies. Of course, we could still be wrong, there are no guarantees in life. Yet we know we did the best we could - we grew less wrong.

 

These strategies are vital for improving our thinking because our brains are inherently irrational. Research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, and other fields from the middle of the twentieth century has discovered hundreds of thinking errors, called cognitive biases. These thinking errors cause us to make flawed decisions – in finances, relationships, health and well-being, politics, etc.

 

Recently, popular books by scholars such as Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, Chip and Dan Heath, and other scholars have brought these problems from the halls of academia to the attention of the broad public. However, these books have not focused on how we can address these problems in everyday life.

 

So far, the main genre dedicated to popularizing strategies to improve our patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns has been in the field of self-improvement. Unfortunately, self-improvement is rarely informed by science, and instead relies on personal experience and inspiring stories. While such self-improvement activities certainly help many, it is hard to tell whether the impact comes from the actual effectiveness of the specific activities or a placebo effect due to people being inspired to work on improving themselves.

 

The lack of scientific popularization of strategies dealing with thinking errors in large part resulted from the fact that early scholarly efforts to address thinking errors on an individual level did not lead to lasting improvement. Consequently, the brunt of the scholarship and consequent efforts to address these problems focused on organizations and government policy creating nudges and incentives to get people to “do the right thing.” A recent example is Barack Obama issuing an Executive Order for the federal government to use behavioral science insights in all aspects of its work.

 

However, research in the last decade, from Keith Stanovich, Hal Arkes, and others revealed that we can fix our thinking, sometimes with a single training. For example, my own research and writing shows how people can learn to reach their long-term goals and find their life meaning and purpose using science-based strategies. This scientific approach does not guarantee the right decision, but it is the best method we currently have, and will improve in the future with more research.

 

This science is mostly trapped in academic books and articles. I teach on this topic to my college students, and they find it  enriching: as one student stated, the class "helped me to see some of the problems I may be employing in my thinking about life and other people." Yet most people do not have university library access, and even if they did, would not be interested in making their way through dense academic writing.

 

Yet a budding movement called Rationality has been going through the complex academic materials and adapting them to everyday life, as exemplified by Rationality Dojo. This small movement has relatively few public outlets. The website LessWrong is dedicated to high-level discussions of strategies to improve thinking patterns and ClearerThinking offers some online courses on improving decision making. The Center for Applied Rationality offers intense in-person workshops for entrepreneurs and founders. Effective Altruism brings insights from rationality to philanthropy. Intentional Insights is a new nonprofit devoted to popularizing rationality-informed strategies to a broad public through blogs, videos, books, apps, and in-person workshops.

 

Right now, scholars such as myself are testing the strategies developed by Rationality. My probabilistic estimate is that these studies will show that this science-based form of self-improvement is more effective than self-improvement based on personal experience.

 

In the meantime, I encourage you to consider science-based strategies adapted to everyday life such as probabilistic thinking. You do not have to be nudged by policy makers and CEOs. Instead, you can be intentional and use rationality to make the best decisions for your own goals!

 

EDIT: Edited based on comments by Lumifer, NancyLebovitz, Romashka, ChristianKi, Vaniver, RichardKennway

 

 

 

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