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comment by John_Maxwell (John_Maxwell_IV) · 2012-04-30T19:29:42.715Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Frank, how would you feel if I rewrote this for you so it was much shorter and snappier?

Replies from: John_Maxwell_IV
comment by John_Maxwell (John_Maxwell_IV) · 2012-05-03T07:15:59.395Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I've communicated with Frank by email; here is a rough rewrite he seems to mostly endorse.


Over the past year, I've spent hundreds of hours thinking about human psychology and made progress on: decreasing akraisa, improving understanding of others, improving social skills, improving rationality, decreasing perfectionism, and some other stuff. This post is my attempt to share the insights that lead to these benefits with you.

Summary

I see two primary causes of dysrationalia:

  • "Impression management": making sure other people think we are smart, hip, tough, whatever.
  • Subconscious mistakes. If you're not aware that you're making a mistake, it's hard to fix it.

The key to fixing dysrationalia is to notice broken subconscious thought patterns and apply conscious thinking to fix them. Three kinds of conscious fixes:

  • Improved understanding of the world and how it works.
  • Improved thinking about the relationships between lower- and higher-level goals.
  • Improved thinking on managing trade-offs between two or more conflicting goals.

Two core skills that will be discussed in subsequent posts:

  • Redirecting attention from instrumental to terminal goals
  • Succeeding socially without using "impression management"

On Deprecation

I'll use the term "deprecate" to refer to lowering someone else's status.

Can deprecating people (e.g. by saying they are being silly or stupid) ever be a good way to improve their rationality? It does work; it's worked on me.

But I think we can do better by figuring out why someone is behaving irrationally and fixing that instead. Deprecation has the harmful side effect of causing people to focus more on impression management, so any alternative is good.

On Subconscious Thinking

Our subconscious thoughts have lots of horsepower behind them and often do the right thing. Unfortunately, subconscious thoughts are harder to reflect on than conscious ones. So it's essential to achieve conscious awareness of subconscious thought patterns.

On Impression Management

If other people judge us to be powerful, popular, reliable, and similar to them, they will be more interested in entering relationships of all kinds with us. They'll also be reluctant to move against us.

Thus we try to affect the assessments of others through subconscious impression management. For example, a religious person might pray in order to signal similarity to other religious folks, and thereby gain their affiliation. Or a skilled backgammon player might explain to a friend how backgammon develops real-world skills better than chess. Subconsciously, the backgammon player may not actually care if backgammon really develops useful skills--they just needs persuasive arguments to convince others.

But impression management has lots of downsides:

  • If your story about how great you are doesn't match up with reality, you'll be fighting a constant battle against the truth.
  • If others do manage to discover that you're putting up a front, you'll be in trouble.
  • Keeping up an image of yourself makes it harder to kick back and have fun.
  • And if others notice that you are trying hard to affect their impressions, that sends a negative signal.

Fortunately I think I've discovered some ways to succeed socially without using impression management.

Reflecting on Subconscious Thoughts

Subconscious thinking allows your brain to do lots of computation quickly, but it's also something of a black box from the perspective of your conscious mind.

I find it useful to think of the subconscious thinking as an opaque process. The inputs to the process are the current state of the world and some desired state of the world. The output is an emotion/desire/inclination. Observing what inputs produce what outputs isn't really that hard, but knowing what's going on in between is tougher.

But with enough reflection, understanding the reasons for subconscious thoughts becomes possible. Then we can zoom in and correct our subconscious mistakes, or correct our conscious thinking if the subconscious actually makes sense.

I find that journaling and thought experiments are the best way to puzzle this out.

Even if everything's going all right, this process of reflecting on subconscious thoughts can be beneficial if we find a better way of doing things. The improved way of doing things could be a strategy we employ consciously, or one that we program to be subconscious.

Once you've been doing this for long enough, you may start to notice subconscious patterns from your own thinking manifesting themselves in the behavior of others.

Three Fixes for Subconscious Thinking

Improved Understanding of the World

Learning about availability bias is a great example of this kind of fix. Once you learn that your event frequency estimates are biased by what appears on the news, you'll subconsciously start correcting for this bias. If I ask you to estimate how frequently sharks attack people, you don't make an initial subconscious estimate and then consciously adjust for availability bias afterwards. (If conscious thoughts do come into the picture, it probably just realizes you forgot to correct for availability bias and runs the subconscious computation again.)

Improved Plans for Achieving Your Goals

By inspecting your subconscious thinking, you might realize that several things you're doing are actually subconscious attempts to accomplish some goal. Then you can lean hard on what seems effective and accomplish your goal faster.

Through introspecting on my goals, I realized that I don't actually care that much about the opinions of passing strangers. I also realized that transient, temporary impressions of my friends don't matter to me that much. This has allowed me to stop obsessing about unimportant past social interactions and focus on important stuff.

In both cases I noticed I was paying a lot of attention to a subgoal that was actually pretty unimportant for my supergoal of having good friends.

Improved Strategies for Trading Off Between Goals

Sometimes you may find through introspection that you have subconscious goals that are mutually incompatible. What then?

Obviously you may not be able to get everything you want, so it's important to accept that fact as soon as possible to cut down on internal tension. Then you can figure out what the best way to trade off between conflicting desires is.

For example, at one point I noticed that I had two conflicting goals: I wanted to appear superior in social situations, but I also wanted to have close friends. After thinking about both goals for a while, they melded into a single value function I was trying to optimize, and I ended up heavily favoring the "having close friends" objective. (I suspect that appearing superior was only an instrumental goal anyway.)

Replies from: Jack, lavalamp
comment by Jack · 2012-05-13T14:47:23.059Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

"Subconscious" isn't a thing.

Replies from: John_Maxwell_IV
comment by John_Maxwell (John_Maxwell_IV) · 2012-05-14T01:10:57.529Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Frank made the same complaint. I'll fix it.

comment by lavalamp · 2012-05-12T00:33:50.604Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This rewrite is much better than the original.

comment by Kingoftheinternet · 2012-04-29T18:30:08.800Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think you overestimate how willing people are to read very long articles without a great reason to think it'll be worth their time at the beginning. You have three meaty paragraphs before you even start what seems to be the article proper, and then that's a summary of an abstract idea. Something this long needs to start with an awesome story.

Replies from: FrankAdamek
comment by FrankAdamek · 2012-04-29T18:33:42.980Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That...would be why I posted the first two posts :)

But I think you mean that it would be good to have something short at the beginning of this post. That would probably be a good idea.

Replies from: Kingoftheinternet, GuySrinivasan, bryjnar, Richard_Kennaway
comment by Kingoftheinternet · 2012-04-29T18:40:00.137Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

So you're hoping people will read two other long articles so they know that this long article will be worth their time?

comment by GuySrinivasan · 2012-04-30T04:43:25.100Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

There's a lot of very interesting stuff here. But I only figured that out after reading the comments, copying your post to a local editor to see if there was an obvious way to cut it to 1/3 the length, and then reading carefully. Your writing is... unskimmable to me. Usually I can skim a paragraph, get the gist, and go back to an individual sentence or two if I feel I missed something. I could not do that with this article.

Replies from: FrankAdamek
comment by FrankAdamek · 2012-04-30T05:59:58.041Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Your feedback on skimmability seems potentially really useful - that wasn't even something I was thinking of before. I'm going to try to improve on that point, though I also suspect that I'm not going to succeed as much and as quickly as I would like. I may do some research on writing styles and tips. Thanks very much for pointing this out.

Was there an obvious way to cut it to 1/3 the length? If a professional editor was able to do so and you were willing to send it to me, that would probably be really helpful for me.

Replies from: Richard_Kennaway
comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2012-04-30T10:34:25.185Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Was there an obvious way to cut it to 1/3 the length? If a professional editor was able to do so and you were willing to send it to me, that would probably be really helpful for me.

1/3 the length would still be far too long. Does the following leave anything out?

To improve your performance in any sphere:

  1. Observe and learn what works.

  2. Most goals are subgoals of higher goals. Conflicts among them can often be resolved by looking for the higher goals and asking what will really serve them.

There. 41 words instead of 4388. The remainder is unsupported folk psychology, repetition, and superfluous elaboration.

I think you need to improve your own writing, rather than using someone else to fix it up afterwards. A programmer has to fix his own code, and a writer likewise.

Replies from: FrankAdamek, erratio, Hul-Gil
comment by FrankAdamek · 2012-04-30T15:14:06.099Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I would summarize the main points as:

  • The process behind deprecation
  • The role of social considerations in rationality and dysrationality
  • More information on how the unconscious works (and what it can do when we understand it)
  • A more detailed overview of the ways we can improve unconscious thinking, along with examples of actually doing so.
  • Information on the process of investigating this thinking

The remainder is unsupported folk psychology, repetition, and superfluous elaboration.

There should be a "looks like" in there somewhere, at least with regard to "unsupported folk psychology" (repetition and superfluous elaboration...I wouldn't put the latter in those terms, but those may be an issue). Again, this may look similar in ways. But it is the process of multiple revisions of the ideas, looking for different ways to think of them that help me use them more productively, cutting things down to their fundamentals and removing elements from the model that didn't buy me any bits of prediction. (Mostly) everything here is load-bearing.

I think you need to improve your own writing, rather than using someone else to fix it up afterwards. A programmer has to fix his own code, and a writer likewise.

Obviously that would be better! While I've received moderate compliments on my writing in the past, I obviously wish I was much better. I would love to be able to phrase an idea more clearly, simply, and accurately, while keeping the reader engaged and perhaps even entertained. These posts are my current best efforts, and I know that despite this the writing isn't going to be that excellent, and that a more experienced writer would probably be able to put together something much better, and with less work. I would love to know how to do that!

But that doesn't mean I'm not going to try and use whatever tools I might find available to improve that writing, such as looking at a professionally-edited version of the very thing I worked on, if I get a chance to read something like that.

Replies from: Mass_Driver, Hul-Gil
comment by Mass_Driver · 2012-04-30T22:58:13.879Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

One exercise that I found extremely helpful when learning how to condense my writing was:

  • Try to include a verb and a direct object in each of your bullet points.
  • Try to make sure each of your bullet points makes a falsifiable claim.

This forces you to confirm that each of your major points has substantive, useful content. "The process behind deprecation" is an excellent 'note to self' to remind you of what your topic is, but a person can write that note without having the faintest idea what the process behind deprecation is. My Bayesian prior for notes like that after reading thousands of social science articles is that you're most likely going to go on for pages and pages without drawing any firm conclusions. If, instead, you make a bold claim like "Deprecation is strictly dominated by other social strategies," then I predict that you're going to try to say something interesting. I may disagree with your methods or your evidence, but at least I can gauge whether your effort, if successful, would be of interest to me.

comment by Hul-Gil · 2012-05-01T02:03:32.863Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think you're a good writer, in that you form sentences well, and you understand how the language works, and your prose is not stilted or boring. The problem I personally had, mostly with the previous two entries in this series, was that the "meat" - the interesting bits telling me what you had concluded, and why, and how to apply it, and how (specifically) you have applied it - seemed very spread out among a lot of filler or elaboration. I couldn't tell what you were eventually going to arrive at, and whether it'd be of use or interest to me. Too much generality, perhaps: compare "this made my life better" with "by doing X I caught myself thinking Y and changed this to result in the accomplishment of Z."

I tell you this only in case you are interested in constructive criticism from yet another perspective; some undoubtedly consider the things I have mentioned virtues in an author. In any case, I have upvoted this article; it doesn't deserve a negative score, I think - long-winded, maybe; poorly done or actively irrational, certainly not. The ideas are interesting, the methodology is reasonable, and the effort is appreciated.

comment by erratio · 2012-04-30T12:44:39.825Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think you may have missed 3. Most people optimise for perceived status

Or was that included under 'folk psychology'?

Replies from: Richard_Kennaway
comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2012-04-30T13:05:38.574Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think you may have missed 3. Most people optimise for perceived status

Or was that included under 'folk psychology'?

Possibly, or I just thought it not worth retaining. "People care what other people think of them" is the same idea, but without the LessWrong jargon, and as such a truism known to everyone.

Replies from: FrankAdamek
comment by FrankAdamek · 2012-04-30T15:32:05.250Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The key thing is this: when a rationalist is investigating a bias or some irrational behavior, they may notice that there seems to be a social influence on their thinking, think to themselves "well that's obviously silly and wrong", and then stop there. They go on believing that rationality has to be painful, that we have to do something to overpower these instincts, and that the only way to succeed is to look for ways to trick their unconscious mind into having a belief that seems more appropriate.

An alternative to this approach is to keep going, to look deeper at what's really going on, spend hours or days looking for something sensible that the unconscious could possibly be doing, until enough pieces come together and suddenly you say "Oh. That's what's going on." And then the most important part, you can solve the problem, so that it's not hard or painful anymore.

Or for something more direct and operable, if you notice that your aversion to something is that you don't want to look stupid, rather than try to power through it, look for ways that you could do the same thing without looking stupid. In fact if you look at a lot of the useful rationality techniques, the way they help us out is by doing this very thing.

Replies from: metaphysicist, Richard_Kennaway
comment by metaphysicist · 2012-04-30T20:38:14.297Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

A blog that takes a rational approach to writing improvement is Disputed Issues

comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2012-04-30T15:37:10.888Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

when a rationalist is investigating a bias or some irrational behavior, they may notice that there seems to be a social influence on their thinking, think to themselves "well that's obviously silly and wrong", and then stop there. They go on believing that rationality has to be painful, that we have to do something to overpower these instincts, and that the only way to succeed is to look for ways to trick their unconscious mind into having a belief that seems more appropriate.

I can't say I've particularly noticed this.

An alternative to this approach is to keep going, to look deeper at what's really going on

This is what I am more familiar with myself.

Replies from: FrankAdamek
comment by FrankAdamek · 2012-04-30T16:31:55.401Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This is what I am more familiar with myself.

Cool!

comment by Hul-Gil · 2012-05-01T01:42:58.223Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That's nicely done! Clear, concise, and immediately applicable. I think Frank himself is an intelligent person with good and interesting ideas, but the "meat" of these posts seems spread out among a lot of filler/elaboration - possibly why they're hard to skim. I wasn't even sure, for quite a while, what the whole series was really about, beyond "general self-improvement."

This latest article is much more "functional" than the previous two, though, so I think we're moving in the right direction.

One thing your comment brings to mind - Frank notes something about unconscious mental processes being trainable, and the suggestion is that one can train them to be rational, or at least more accurate. (If I remember correctly.) Is this idea included your comment? Perhaps under "folk psychology"?

It seems like an interesting concept, though I was unable to find any instruction on how to actually accomplish it. (But I haven't looked too hard yet.)

Replies from: Richard_Kennaway
comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2012-05-01T12:31:42.593Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

One thing your comment brings to mind - Frank notes something about unconscious mental processes being trainable, and the suggestion is that one can train them to be rational, or at least more accurate. (If I remember correctly.) Is this idea included your comment? Perhaps under "folk psychology"?

I tuned out all that stuff about "the unconscious". How does Frank know that "our unconscious thinking is actually very powerful, very intelligent, and fairly sensible"? That it is "extremely powerful, doing massive amounts of computation very quickly"? And yet, "When they make a mistake they have no way of telling that they made a mistake"? Where does this come from? What does he mean by "the unconscious"?

When he says "When I realize this disconnect and see how the information about underlying frequency was shifted as it passed through my sources, I unconsciously come to a better estimate of how often something happens", what is the word "unconscious" doing there? Looks like a description of something conscious.

Replies from: FrankAdamek
comment by FrankAdamek · 2012-05-01T15:19:14.390Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

By "the unconscious" I mean the mental operations we perform without getting internal mental feedback about the process of the operation.

That's not very concrete. The most widely recognized extension of this part of reality is emotions we don't understand the reasons for, along with other mysterious-by-default things like why we spend a long time mentally reviewing our stated positions. We can simply ask "Why do I feel that way, and why do I spend my time that way?" This question doesn't require any mention of unconscious thinking, or thinking at all. At this state of knowledge, the answer could conceivably involve any number of mechanisms, and those mechanisms may not be mental.

But in my own attempts to answer these questions, the most efficient way to model the source of those things is actually to model them as a mind. (I say "efficient" to emphasize a goal of using the concept, but the model appears to be accurate as well.) By a "mind", I mean something that has a model of the world, that takes in evidence it receives about that world, that performs a very great amount of inference on that model and evidence, and even undertakes strategic thinking in the attempt to reach goals. In other words, the answer to why we feel and do those things is that there's a genuine optimization process there, and the feelings and actions are its output.

We receive the conclusions of this part of our thinking, but we don't have feedback about the thoughts taking place there. The system-of-us does not receive as input the process of these thoughts, and this is what distinguishes conscious and UNconscious thinking.

comment by bryjnar · 2012-04-29T23:10:07.659Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It also really needs to start with some more concrete content. I'm not sure how interested I am that you've theorised about your experiences until I'm convinced there's something of value in those experiences; and having your "core content" would really help with that.

If you're writing a textbook about an established field, then you can afford to start with the theory; it may even be helpful, but in this case I think you should start at a lower level of abstraction.

Replies from: FrankAdamek
comment by FrankAdamek · 2012-04-29T23:55:57.546Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

(Upvoted) [Is it poor etiquette to say so? I recall seeing it in the past but I'm not familiar with online LW etiquette.]

Yeah, I think that's a very good point. The things a model should be built on include actual uses of that model, some weight that it's lifting. In this case I'm not actually sure that starting with the overview was not the way to go; it may well not have been, but many of the particular points draw from a larger model that might differ from some common beliefs, such as that people are intrinsically incoherent kludges or that our unconscious instincts can't and don't respond to subtle and genuinely important details in the world around us. If I included ideas like "Just about everything people do makes a fair deal of sense" in a concrete model without providing more information about that general claim - and that fact that it's actually present throughout all of the ideas I've been using - I think it may be taken as an arbitrary and unjustified assumption, rather than something that's come up time and time again in my attempts to understand what people are doing.

comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2012-04-29T21:20:19.331Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It would be good to have something short, period.

Replies from: FrankAdamek
comment by FrankAdamek · 2012-04-29T21:21:34.565Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Hmm, a good point :)

comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2012-04-29T21:25:30.334Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

"Theoretical Overview of Strategy Theory"? That's a title I'd think up as a parody. I think the body of the article is beyond what could be achieved with the postmodernism generator, but not by much.

Replies from: Jack, FrankAdamek
comment by Jack · 2012-04-30T19:24:25.643Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm holding off my review for the forthcoming "Strategic Overview of Theoretical Strategy".

comment by FrankAdamek · 2012-04-29T21:57:53.124Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I realize this overview is very abstract, and the extent of that abstraction may necessarily make it a little hard to see a connection to particular details of reality, to see the predictions this framework does and doesn't make. My goal with this had been to present a high-level coherent model of how everything fits together, which people could internally add to as additional material is presented, and which would also serve as a point of reference when wondering "wait, how does thing X connect to thing Y?"

The title, for sure, could be better. But the body of the article was not in fact achieved with the postmodernism generator, though it may bear similarities to what that generator would produce. There are many superficially similar models, we could shift around the words and concepts and use terms like "value" and "strategic consideration", but if the model doesn't actually describe reality, is isn't going to be helpful.

How would we tell what we're looking at? Certainly, there are similarities to lots of useless models, that don't meaningfully descibe what's going on, that don't buy the user any bits of prediction. How do we distinguish how useful and accurate the model really is? One way might be looking at what the user of that model is able to do - if he is actually able to achieve better results, there must be some mechanism by which he is doing so. Another way might be looking at how well the ideas seem to predict and explain the things we see around us - unfortunately there haven't been many specific examples of the ideas presented (the point about deprecation is one such case).

comment by AShepard · 2012-04-30T23:54:39.745Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

From your introductory paragraphs, it appears that you have a genuine desire to respond to feedback but are significantly underestimating the degree of change required to do so. Perhaps a good old fashioned dose of Strunk and White would help. Especially this (note both the content and the style):

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Replies from: dlthomas
comment by dlthomas · 2012-05-01T00:20:07.615Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

While I don't have anything in particular to recommend in its place, it's perhaps worth noting that the contributors over at Language Log don't think terribly highly of Strunk & White; to paraphrase from my recollection, I think the criticism runs that the authors frequently ignore their own advice, much of which isn't any good anyway.

Replies from: Hul-Gil
comment by Hul-Gil · 2012-05-01T01:28:13.711Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Upvoted both this and its parent, because the quoted bit of Strunk and White seems like good advice, and because the linked criticism of Strunk and White is lucid and informative as well as entertaining. I learned about two new but related things, one right after the other; my conclusions about Strunk and White swung rapidly from one position to the opposite in quick succession. Quite an experience! ("Oh look, there are these two folks who are recognized authorities on English, and they're presenting good writing advice. Strunk and White... must remember. Wait; here's a response... Oh - turns out not much of their advice is that good after all! Passive voice IS acceptable! Language Log... must remember.")

Replies from: Bugmaster
comment by Bugmaster · 2012-05-01T02:50:25.455Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You might enjoy this post, as well: Don't put up with usage abuse. It's one of many, many posts on Language Log in which the authors thoroughly destroy the notion of prescriptivist grammar.

The first thing to say is that the only possible way to settle a question of grammar or style is to look at relevant evidence. I suppose there really are people who believe the rules of grammar come down from some authority on high, an authority that has no connection with the people who speak and write English; but those people have got to be deranged.

Replies from: dlthomas, None
comment by dlthomas · 2012-05-01T04:30:17.073Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Upvoted for linking to something that mentions an alternative.

comment by [deleted] · 2012-05-01T03:37:09.674Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

As someone who routinely abuses grammar for comedic effect, I greatly appreciated this link. Language Log is one of my favorite blogs on the internet.

comment by [deleted] · 2012-04-30T16:06:22.298Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

theoretical overview of ... theory

lulz