Simulate and Defer To More Rational Selves

I have found that the more I use my simulation of HPMOR!Quirrell for advice, the harder it is to shut him up. As with any mental discipline, thinking in particular modes wears thought-grooves into your brain's hardware, and before you know it you've performed an irreversible self-modification. Consequently, I would definitely recommend that anybody attempting to supplant their own personality (for lack of a better phrasing) with a model of some idealized reasoner try to make sure that the idealized reasoner shares your values as thoroughly as possible.

What I want to know is Why didn't Anna tell me about her technique for managing decision fatigue earlier?

Sounds somewhat like exploiting the Fundamental Attribution Error. Other people (including imagined selves) are not that much influenced by external situational factors in our minds. Thus, they act more consistent with their internal characteristics. ActualMe is always thrown around by external forces and emotion chaos.

I was trying to think of what a more rational response to this, since I agreed with your points and also used a very similar trick. I then came up with 'The rational thing to do is to say you agree, upvote, and then get back to the other tasks you have, rather than spending an hour worrying about a perfect response, which sounds a lot like the very social anxiety she was trying to avoid.'

I agree with your post. Upvoted.

I use a variant of this from my tabletop gaming days, ever since I noticed that player characters in rpgs don't really suffer from decision fatigue or hyperbolic discounting in the same way. I simulate myself as a player making choices about the Toggle-character in a game. "If the GM asked me what my character was going to do today/for the next hour/in response to this challenge, what would I say?"

So, I just had a weird turn at work, that's made it obvious that I can't stay here.

And when I ask myself, "what does Protagonist Brent do?", I immediately imagine powering through my flu, putting my most valuable possessions in my car, pointing West, and driving until I reach Berkeley - then finding an apartment and walking into start-ups and big companies and saying "I can code. I just moved here from Idaho. I need a job. What have you got?"

And then I don't do that, because I'm too dizzy to get out of bed, let alone drive 10 hours to Berkeley, and I have no idea where I'd stay, and I only have $3,000 to my name.

Because my imagination does NOT conserve detail, it just builds a narrative.

How do you work around that?

"WWRMD?" (RM for "rational me".)

I wish this were posted in main.

I've found something like this useful, especially at work, but hard to calibrate. "What would a more less shy kalium do? Tell the CTO that he's wrong, because he's wrong." Sometimes this is a good idea, but sometimes it's not. "What would an optimally shy kalium do?" is not so easy to predict.

This seems to be an extremely powerful method for handling decision fatigue - it's one of the few (maybe the only?) things I've seen on Less Wrong that I'm going to start applying immediately because of the potential I see in it. On the other hand, I doubt it would be so effective for me for handling social anxiety or other emotion-laden situations. A voice in my head telling me to do something that I already know I should do won't make the emotion go away, and, for me, the obstacle in these sorts of situations is definitely the emotion.

Great post!

Others have mentioned the HPMOR-style "take a poll of different aspects of your personality," which I have found to be entertaining and useful.

I'd also like to endorse the method for troubleshooting. I got the idea from Ridiculous Fish's blog post from 3 years ago.

When I have a technical problem I'm stuck on, I try to ask myself "What would someone who's smarter than me do?" This is really just "imagine a parody version of person x and see if that causes you to think about the problem in a different way."

I like to consult Imaginary Dr. House ("The problem is something very rare and obscured because your data is lying to you"), my former boss ("The problem is the most obvious thing it could be, trust yourself and go solve it!"), my college roommate ("Maybe there's a YouTube video from a dedicated hobbyist that explains this"), and some others.

I wrote up one experience with this technique (not as good as Ridiculous Fish's) a few months ago, when I had a baffling issue to solve at work (FTP on April 26th at 2 AM).

I don't carry around a mental model of myself, but I think I will start on it.

I do explicitly carry around a mental model of my boss. Whenever I am working out a deal and I'm not sure about whether to agree to a point, I ask the little boss simulation. One of my boss's sterling qualities is that he makes decisions quickly, much more quickly than I do. Where I tend to gather lots of information and examine nuances, he simplifies. He is also better at (and institutionally more appropriate for) comparing incommensurate values (like different risks and rewards, where the units are not comparable). The little boss simulation has a very good batting average; I am very surprised when he gets things wrong.

The reason I think I will extent this to a model of myself is that I have people working for me who also do deals. We talk about how to step back from a conflict in the process of a negotiation, but I have not had much good advice to give there. "Take a deep breath." Yeah, that actually works a lot of the time, but what about when it does not? The simulated rational me might be just the thing. I'll just ask myself what I would think about the proposal if I weren't offended / backed into a corner / embarrassed at being insufficiently prepared for the negotiation / desperate to get the deal done.

Max L.

I've tried this before and I find it difficult to trust this "other self". What works better for me is to treat "other self" as an information source and then have "real me" make a decision with this information in mind.

The "real me" is sort of like a benevolent dictator. It has to have the final say, but ultimately it's capable of deferring to "other self" when appropriate. Maybe this is just a thing with me ("real me" always has to have the final say, I can't just trust someone else).

Of course, this is just one data point. Other people very well may be different.

I'd be invited to a party. I'd feel paralyzing fear, and a sense of impending doom as I noticed that I likely believed going to the party was the right decision.

Hah! I know that feeling so well. Then when I notice it, I feel doomed AND stupid!

This sounds like a good technique for dealing with social phobias or ADHD, but I hope you don't use it for complex, long-chain-single-point-of-failure personal or ethical problems. Those are areas where emotions stop us from doing terrible things because we forgot to carry the 1 in column 3.

This is a line of development that-- while clearly useful-- seems somewhat hacky and unpromising to me. While I agree that this is likely to yield useful benefits in the short run, it strikes me that fixing one's internal structure in order to produce reliably correct external actions without these sorts of hacks seems more promising in terms of long-term growth and skills.

About a year ago, I thought that lucid dreaming was a great path to rationality. While lucid dreaming is a great way to train the skill of noticing confusion, I no longer recommend it to people asking me for advice on rationality practice, because I think you hit the skill ceiling relatively fast and it doesn't particularly lend itself to further development.

I'm worried that this strategy falls prey to the same flaw-- while it's quite effective in the short run, I think that people using these methods will ultimately have to learn the internal solutions anyway if they wish to progress to more advanced domains. Therefore, it makes more sense to me to just start with the internal solutions.

(Of course, if you need rapid skill growth in the short term, this might well be a useful strategy to adopt-- just be aware of the downsides.)

Hm, so I tried thinking about how I could apply this to a problem I have and can't quite see how to do it. Any suggestions? Am I missing or misinterpreting a point or is this just not a good problem to apply this solution to?

Here's the problem: I like rock climbing, but I'm not very good at it. The thing holding me back in the situation I'm most concerned with here (lead climbing outdoors) is primarily that I'm scared. I'm frequently in a position where I'm capable of executing the next move with very high probability, but I don't want to attempt it because I'm afraid that I'll fail and fall.

Of course there are lots of ways to try and work on this, but I'm curious whether this seems like the kind of situation where this approach ought to be applicable. I can try to simulate a not scared Emily, and this is quite easy to do: of course she would execute the move right away, but I still have plenty of resistance to just copying her. My knee-jerk tendency is to rationalise that if she's not scared, there must be a good reason: she must also be better at climbing! So I can't just copy her, because I'm not as good! What if I fall?

Should I be trying to convince myself that I'm successfully simulating a climber with the same skill level, but less fear? Or perhaps this is just not a situation where this is a good approach, because my fear is for a reason, and if my assessment of my ability is accurate then I'm right to be scared given the (small, but not really tiny) probability of failure?

I like this, and I'm going to try it on a decision I've been putting off for years.

(said decision involves whether or not I should tell deeply religious family that I don't believe in god(s))

This trick is pretty powerful. I'm channeling a model of the more confident version of myself to post this comment, rather than just lurking like I normally do.

Thanks a lot!

This resonated with me instantly, thank you!

I now remember, I used to do something similar if I needed to make decisions, even minor decisions, when drunk. I'd say, "what would I think of this decision sober"? If the answer was "it was silly" or "I'd want to do it but be embarrassed" I'd go ahead and do it. But if the answer was "Eek, obviously unsafe", I'd assume my sober self was right and I was currently overconfident.

A structural explanation would be that your map of yourself doesn't well enough correspond to the territory (your actual self). And the rational self is a way to create a new - better - map. Using the better map (by consulting the rational self)) effectively connects both maps. My understanding of how the brain works lets me guess that the two maps will slowly merge - hopefully fixing whatever was at odds with the old map.

In a way the new map is less detailed, but at least the projection is better - so to speak.

Does this make sense?

Reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

Using an imaginary external source to solve problems internally.

What I'm interested in is whether this method is applicable to social situations as well. I am not a naturally social person, but have studied how people interact and general social behaviors well enough that I can create a simulation of a "socially acceptable helltank".

I already have mental triggers (what I like to call "scripts") in place for a simulation of my rational mind - or rather a portion of my rational mind kept in isolation from bias and metaphorically disconnected from the other parts of my mind to override my "main" portion of my mind in case the main portion becomes irrational at some point, similar to a backup system overriding a corrupted main system.

Until today, however, I have not thought of using them to simulate social skills. I suppose I might eventually spread out a bunch of simulations, what eli_sennesh called a Parliament of different aspects of your personality in his cancelled post, in order to guide my decision making in certain situations, with a "master aspect" (the aforementioned rational simulation) controlling when to give an aspect override privileges.

Still a very good post. Thank you for it.

I second the call to move this to Main.

I suspect this trick works by not only reducing decision fatigue, but by also offloading rejection fear, which makes this hack appropriate for social anxiety. Fear of embarrassment is one step removed from myself.

Does anyone who tried this years ago have an update on the long-term effects?

I find it interesting that Less Wrong appears to be rediscovering existing ethical theories.

This article argues for a form of virtue ethics arising from utilitarianism - in order to be a good person, simulate an alternate self free of whatever desire is applicable, and then use them as a moral exemplar.

Similarly, Elizer's arguments for Coherent Extrapolated Volition in FAI bear a striking resemblance to Rousseau's arguments regarding the collective will of a state.

Another example of this that springs to mind is this less-popular post on beeminding sin. http://lesswrong.com/lw/hwm/beeminding_sin/

We have a large body of collected philosophical thought available to us. At least some of those concepts are adaptable to everyday problems and therefore useful things to carry around in your mind. However, biases exist that make many people hesitant to listen to historical sources: "In the past, people had less technology than we do" is often conflated into "in the past, people were less intelligent than we are."

Even if we accept that people in the past were less intelligent, that still doesn't rule out that they may have had some good ideas. If it did, then we would be able to make arguments from human reasoning. "People from the past said it" is not an argument for or against a topic any more than "Hitler said it." (Note that this also is an argument against the failure mode of treating these ideas as the "wisdom of the ancients.")

It seems to me that a general critical reading of acclaimed philosophers could save everyone in the Less Wrong community a lot of trouble reinventing their ideas, given that examining an already-stated hypothesis is a lot easier than going out and finding one.

Ah, it's just like "What Would Jesus Do" bracelets.

I loved the exaplanation about using it to control your temper. In fact, just after reading the part where you talk about the party, my very first thought was how I could use this to get a hold of my temper. This happened before I finished reading that paragraph.

There was an interesting segment on NPR's Morning Edition this morning along these lines.

I just want to say that the title of this post is fantastic, and in a deep sort of mathy way, beautiful. It's probably usually not possible, but I love it when an appropriate title - especially a nice not-too-long one - manages to contain, by itself, so much intellectual interest. Even just seeing that title listed somewhere could plant an important seed in someone's mind.

I imagined what rational me would do a couple of hours ago, and he'd have gotten a head start on next week's workload until he was tired and then started tomorrow off on much better footing (I'm not talking about being a workaholic -- I'm lazy and have kind of fallen behind -- I could stand to work a bit more)

Instead, I read about why the great filter probably doesn't lie between the evolution of a nervous system and dolphin-level intelligence, learned about 'biological dark matter', dismissed it as viruses, undismissed it, learned that it was probably just material from unsequenced portions of microbe genomes, learned things I never knew about the difference between archaea and bacteria, about how they might have combined to form eukaryotes, about tons of various external factors that could keep life from getting the chance to evolve in the first place, read far too much discussion about hypothetical engineers in hypothetical dolphin bodies, then finally came back to this thread and read all the comments.

I guess I did it wrong? :(

It's a good way to "gamify" decision pressure such that insecurities and the typical anxiety involved with "I have to admit I'm doing this wrong" don't rear their ugly heads. Instead, you dissolve the sense of self just a bit, with a "I'm a bunch of modules"-approach that makes it oh-so-easier to acknowledge and fix mistakes, since there's less of the monolithic "I did wrong, I am bad"-response triggered.

Nice trick, in short.

A variation of this technique (pretending to be Batman) works for children.

This rational asshole makes me do stuff I don't wanna do :(

I'd say that to a certain degree all of us do this, even if we're not all consciously aware of it. The unintentional use of this "trick" in my view is as obvious as when people imitate others. To the more extreme end, as you describe here, it can be the deliberate and wilful act of simulating the thoughts of another person for apparent guidance in times of stress.

Overall, I'd say this is just a version of thinking of what a "prudent man" would do, or some might even use the term "straw man" (to separate themselves from reality for the purposes of winning an argument), and for me I have spent much of my life referring to the guidance of others, including a long list of gym trainers - both real and simulated.

The danger, however, is that the subjective nature of the mind running the simulation does create a bias, even if you can't see it. Just as my simulated gym trainer will advise me against eating junk food, ultimately it is my own motivation to follow through on the final act. It might be a "trick" only because it is actually you making the decision without admitting it, but that doesn't mean your decisions are any better and don't ultimately suffer as a result in times of fatigue.

See also: dissociation.

I think I've been doing something like this for a long time, but imagining the simulated decision-maker as a "Ghost of Agency and Making Things Better" rather than an idealized version of myself. People seemed to find that a lot more confusing than this, though, so I'm going to start describing it this way instead.

You mean that you don't have an entire Parliament filled with models designed to represent aspects of your own psychology?

You're buggy software running on corrupted hardware. Fork redundant copies and vote.

I hope that it will one day. I would rather not have to rely on tricks like this. I hope I'll eventually just be able to go straight from noticing dissonance to re-orienting my whole mind so it's in line with the truth and with whatever I need to reach my goals. Or, you know, not experiencing the dissonance in the first place because I'm already doing everything right.

No. Your mind is never magically going to turn nonbuggy. AFAICT, managing the bugginess is one of the most important but most understated tasks we face in life: all our interactions with other people are supposed to be pre-filtered for non-bugginess.

EDIT: This apparently came off as way more harsh than intended. Retracting for tone but leaving in existence.

It seems like you're continually rediscovering NLP.

WWRBD