Roles are Martial Arts for Agency

I'm really surprised by the clear logic of this. Lots of interesting corollaries follow:

• Roles are an efficient optimization to use instead of acting dumb (provided you got trained in the right ones).

• To train your chosen roles is a good idea.

• Roles can be tuned to better match your needs.

• It should be possible to look for missing roles covering interesting behavior patterns.

• All of the above implies rational behavior can be trained.

The clear exposition makes this Main material although I wonder whether that applies to cross-posted material. I also wonder how to place this in the sequences context. Seems to be related to Teachable Rationality Skills and Rationality Dojo. It also reminds me of Geek Fu - which I did consider as rather humorous until now.

EDIT: Typos fixed.

Good post; you should put it in Main. It's nice to see more stuff here on some of the aspects of instrumental rationality from HPMoR. Similarly, the two linked posts on your blog are brilliant; I'd been vaguely intending to write about them myself at some point, but you might have saved me the work.

Roles allow real-time action under stress.

There is a trade-off, of course: your reaction is fixed by training and it's not necessarily appropriate to the specific situation.

Another point is that I am not sure you're speaking of the same thing when you talk about the training of instinctual response in martial arts and about taking on particular roles. Taking on a role is basically an exercise in self-perception, it is sometimes expressed in terms of wearing a particular hat. It's not that you need to react so fast that you conscious mind doesn't have time to get involved, it's more like you pre-select a viewpoint from which your conscious mind will evaluate the situation and choose what to do.

This isn't a very concrete comment, I'll just point out some connections I'm seeing with a few dual-process theories of mind. For instance, a la Robin Hanson, the actions that we take / signals that we give in near mode are especially telling to those around us, and his theory of identity is that we want to give off a set of reliable signals (so as to be trustworthy), and so it makes sense that there are various coherent personalities that we can run. Also, Joshua Greene makes the case for a dual-system theory of ethical decision making, that our inflexible yet highly efficient System 1 comes up with intuitions that let us run our every day lives, and our considered, yet highly inefficient System 2 comes up with our reflective, utilitarian judgements, and can allow us to overrule our intuitions sometimes. Your identity/role, in near mode, seems to tell your System 1 what to be thinking, and your System 2 can change what identity/role you're running at a given time.

I used to love Rock Band. One day when playing a particularly difficult guitar solo on expert I nailed 100%… except “I” didn’t do it at all. My eyes saw the notes, my hands executed them, and no where was I involved in the process. It was both exhilarating and creepy, and I basically dropped the game soon after.

One man's modus ponens...

See, I used to notice this in my guitar playing.

Now I'm a classically-trained concert musician.

I find it quite inteesting to watch my fingers do things that I don't feel I'm controlling. It's interesting if I notice I'm making a mistake, I can even shift my hand position to allow a better reach, without making a conscious decision to do so.

A great article, Eneasz.

Reminds me of something that is sitting in my quotes file, apparently coming from a Navy SEAL:

"Under pressure you don't rise to the occassion, you sink to the level of your training."

Ensure that you have trained enough for the next challenge, because it is the training that will see you through it, not your agenty conscious thinking.

Spent the last 5+ years of my life trying to do this, specifically for the role of Nurse (and Lifeguard before that). It's been fairly successful, and even generalizes a little–I am frequently the Person who Gets Shit Done in non-nursing contexts.

I'm not sure that the competence/learned skill routines/martial arts for rationality aspect is the same thing as "Being Responsible For This Shit." The former is something that takes years of doing hard things over and over, training the right mental motion the same way you'd train the physical motion. Almost all the things that actually make me a competent ICU nurse fall into this category.

The latter is something that can change in a day, with the right mental reframe. (Example: I usually basically never volunteer to drive places, although I've learned how–I'm not super comfortable and I don't have to. Then I was The Person In Charge of logistics for a large event, and hardly anyone else could drive, and I was responsible–so rather than spend a ton of energy convincing other people to drive places for me, I just got in the car.)

The two skills are probably related and probably correlated–for example, I suspect that many people have trouble taking on the role of "Person In Charge" because they have low confidence in their ability to actually take the right action and make things better rather than worse. (Given that in plenty of situations, taking the wrong action confidently is worse than doing nothing, that may be justified). Acquiring competence in one area, like nursing, brings confidence, and I think that's the thing that generalizes to the rest of my life, rather than any of the specific routines and skills and dealing-with-emergency templates that I've spent years training. It feels like I have a good understanding of which situations actually require very little skill, where the main thing is having the necessary confidence to speak. (Then again, I'm not sure I could distinguish this from "having ingrained a skill to the point that it doesn't even feel like a skill anymore.)

After reading Benito's rephrasing of the point...

Your identity/role, in near mode, seems to tell your System 1 what to be thinking, and your System 2 can change what identity/role you're running at a given time.

I immediately had the same reaction as Lumifer:

There is a trade-off, of course: your reaction is fixed by training and it's not necessarily appropriate to the specific situation.

A carefully crafted role (or set of roles) that allows your System 1 to function the way you want it to in most circumstances, while being a huge improvement for most, will still have problems if it is restricted only to System 1 responses. The appropriate reaction is sometimes to switch to System 2 where one can go through all the methods of rationality, not to just perform certain habits or responses that rationality has shown to be better than the default.

At first, this seemed contradictory to me, as many of the high-value things on LW seem to be System 2 processes. But then I realized that many of the habits of rationality involve training your System 1 to fire up your System 2 in the right circumstances and it seems that this could be crafted into the Roles that we try to adopt. For example, not "flinching away" from an Ugh Field. Noticing when you are about to do it and kicking over to System 2 to do something about it. If you see yourself as the kind of person who does this (and practice of course) then I don't see why that can't be a part of the Roles that you train.

Excellent article Eneasz!

As a student of Martial Arts, I especially enjoyed the crystal clarity of the first half of your submission. I would like to add, however, that it is the beginner’s lesson that teaches us to appreciate that it is possible to respond far more quickly and fluidly with a well rehearsed set of moves void of thought interference. The greater aspiration though and the life lesson for me is that in other areas of our lives, we should believe that everything will come together naturally based on the wide range of investments already made to date; but in order to reap the full benefits, we should attempt to be "without mind" to allow the spontaneous development of sequences across disciplines and even across roles.

There is a particular danger in "grokking" quick-response and that is - it's extremely hard to self-evaluate that you're doing it wrong, and it takes a lot of time to unlearn a particular. I attest to this as a professional musician and advanced modal interfaces afficionado.

Also, I'm doubting the optimality of "eliminating your slow, conscious deliberation" in any non-synthetic scenario (like most Martial Arts contests and most Martial Arts in general are). There's a reason Law Enoforcers do not act as Martial Artists, and draw a fine line between deliberating consciously and acting on their motoric training, and run a scenario through a specific rule set.

I'd rather see this article using Law Enforcement instead of Martial Arts as an analogy. It would plant it in the grounds of reality more thoroughly.

I think an excellent follow up article on this article would be "How to choose your roles wisely" or "How to develop roles in your psyche". In fact, the more I think about it, this has the potential to evolve into its own sequence if done carefully.

On the flip side, and this really is the million dollar question (and one that has been asked many many times on lesswrong), how to create the role of perfect agency? Now, it may be early to expect an answer to that, but certainly, if someone is up for writing that sequence it will be a step in the right direction.

Nice analogy!

I remember reading that the reason why athletes choke is because they consciously think about their movements instead of letting their unconscious procedural memory execute the actions.

This is why musicians play scales and arpeggios. Nobody really cares about scales or arpeggios. But when you run into a long sequence of them in some piece you are studying, it makes the difference between sight reading it and spending a week learning it.

FWIW, I think this is also why Design Patterns in SW Engineering is important. They are roles for programs.

I second the recommendation that this be moved to Main.

I liked this post overall. Minor nitpick: I found the use of "guy who VERBs" to be a little jarring. Saying "person who VERBs" would be more inclusive.

I like this post, it gets to the point and explains it well.

I've found training myself in a consequentialist/rationalist role to be pretty useful in my own life.

Upvote, valuable insight. And meta thinking is switching from Tiger style to Crane style as the situation warrants. Good idea to have a set of modules ready to go.

Very interesting. I wonder how general the roles are. What you talk about at the end is basically bystander effect: I believe that different people are more or less vulnerable to that, and I wonder whether being more 'bystander' prone goes with being more likely to go along with pressure to conform (Millgram etc.) and possibly (to make it clear this isn't a straightforwardly ethical thing) more likely to collaborate in Prisoner's Dilemma. The most important role question might be simply whether you see yourself as a generalised Agent with responsibility for what actually happens beyond fulfilling set roles you've been given.

To quote HPMOR again: 'PC or NPC, that is the question'

I'd recommend a persona over a role. Make it a person to inhabit, instead of an idea to correspond to.

I really enjoyed this post. Useful topic, some new insight that suggests other insights (as Gunnar_Zarncke pointed out), good examples.

This depends a lot on how you define "I". If you define it to be about deliberation then that means there no agency. There however no need to define deliberation as a central part of conscious action.

People meditate partly to be in a state where they aren't driven by mental deliberation. You frequently find that state described as being of a higher form of consciousness.

Role: vexatious litigator

Copy anything you sign

Role: Amoralist

If you're committing the just world fallacy. Learn to check consequentialism.

Role: Conservative

Be cautious of great ideas. Even metamed went out of business

I would caution that the term "roles" should perhaps be modified if the intended connotation is positive to "adaptive roles" or "considered roles" to help avoid confusion with the idea that seems prevalent in the LW community, for good reason, that roles are generally not at all well calibrated to maximize utility

How does one get their karma up?

Recently I started to notice this kind of third-person perception of situations where I explain things that I understand well enough. The perception is more vivid when the topic is unusual, things I might've thought about a lot but only rarely discussed in similar contexts. I'm guessing explanation of a familiar topic can run mostly on System 1, freeing System 2 to observe the performance, and unfamiliar circumstances make the performance more interesting, hence perception of it more vivid.