The Zeroth Skillset

I don't mean to be rude but as an FYI:

At times, this evidence can be of critical importance. I can attest that I have personally saved the lives of friends on two occasions thanks to good situational awareness, and have saved myself from serious injury or death many times more.

Lowers my confidence of the post. Almost everyone I know has a story about how they almost died except for a moment of abnormal cunning or pure luck; yet I know few people who have died for reasons that would have been avoidable had they or someone around them been more observant. This suggests to me (since not everyone can be above-average observant or lucky) that in most of those stories, they didn't have as high of a chance of death as they thought they did. It's certainly possible that it's not the case with you, but I'd prefer to either see the specific stories or maybe just use a less extreme example in the post. Or maybe it's just me and no one else is bothered by it.

Some concrete examples would be most helpful

Noticing is a useful habit and skill that has been touched on from time to time here: for example, noticing when you are confused.

I should have paid more attention to that sensation of still feels a little forced. It's one of the most important feelings a truthseeker can have, a part of your strength as a rationalist. It is a design flaw in human cognition that this sensation manifests as a quiet strain in the back of your mind, instead of a wailing alarm siren and a glowing neon sign reading "EITHER YOUR MODEL IS FALSE OR THIS STORY IS WRONG."

Situational Awareness looks like a special case of this, applied to life-threatening situations. Does it have a relevance to rationality more than that of being a case study in the general skill of noticing?

What good are lucid dreams if you can't remember them?

You might use the time in the lucid dream to practice a physical skill. There some research that indicates that visualising to perform a physical skills helps you to get better at it. Tim Ferriss advocates to practice physical skills during lucid dreams.

Even if you don't remember having practiced you might still get valuable effect from practicing during your sleep.

There are also other mental activities that give you benefits without having needing to remember them explicitely.

An example of situational awareness being useful in non-terribly-time-constrained situations (to address a point made by several commenters) is that if you notice what people around you wear, you'll be less likely to unknowingly signal stuff you don't want to signal through your clothes.

EDIT: Another one: if you're going to some place with somebody, and you don't pay attention where you're going, if you later want to go there on your own, you won't remember how to get there.

I can attest that I have personally saved the lives of friends on two occasions thanks to good situational awareness, and have saved myself from serious injury or death many times more.

I have no idea who you are and what you do for a living, but it appears you are or have been living a rather dangerous live, so I wonder what benefits compensate for this?

if those individuals for whom correct decisions are most immediately relevant all stress the importance of situational awareness, it may be a more critical skill than we realize.

It may be a critical skill only for those who need to make correct decisions under very tight time costraints. Maybe the skill of avoiding dangerous situations is preferable to the skill of mastering them.

The topic looks promising. This post already achieved a result: it made me realized that SA is quite likely improvable trough training, and not some sort of magical skill someone is born with (see Sherlock Holmes and pretty much every detective in every detective story). May seem obvious in retrospect, but reading these few lines made me aware of this chached belief of mine. I'm looking forward to reading more about it.

I am very excited about this. Ever since I was young I have had trouble with being aware of my surroundings. I have been improving slowly but I have found little good advice / guidance. I look forward to reading what you think about the subject.

I'm convinced it will be interesting. Looking forward to it.

The 'absentminded genius' is a sufficiently strong archetypal image desirable to certain populations that frequent LW that I would suggest explicit treatment of encouraging strong situational awareness. Make me want to be situationally aware, even if it means I will never be Norbert Wiener. Perhaps this sequence should be careful to reinforce the existing counter-image of hyper-aware geniuses, like Sherlock Holmes. Any real-life examples of such?

Situational awareness is further lauded by elite military units, police trainers, criminals, intelligence analysts, and human factors researchers. In other words, people who have to make very important-- often life-or-death-- decisions based on limited information consider situational awareness a critical skill. This should tell us something-- if those individuals for whom correct decisions are most immediately relevant all stress the importance of situational awareness, it may be a more critical skill than we realize.

While agreeing with the general idea in the post- that SA is important, I think you are slightly overstating the case by calling it the zeroth skill. Where SA helps is in helping you collect more information for your decision making process, but we the world has a lot of data that could be collected. Not all information has the same value for decision making.

In any case, as a person with low SA, I'm interested in seeing the rest of this sequence. What would be helpful, if you've also thought of it is: is this a skill that you can "switch off" when it's not required? If I were in a setting where it's safe to do so, it could be of value to turn off SA and focus more on - a book perhaps, or my own thoughts.

I think this is a great idea and you should go for it! I'm looking forward to reading your posts. I agree that this community somewhat under-values getting a lot of good info, and instead focuses perhaps too much on getting the most out of the info you have. But: garbage in -> garbage out, you need good data, and I, personally, have been pretty negligent in my life in that respect.

I find the definition of SA given in the post somewhat flawed:

Situational awareness is the skillset and related state of mind that allows one to effectively perceive the world around them.

That's fuzzy and descriptive rather than defining, and seems to broadly describe what I would call being perceptive. If I had sharper eyes, would my SA be better? Or would that not count as a skill? Is the ability to concentrate on something part of SA? How about eidetic memory, balance/kinesthesia, absolute pitch, pattern recognition, psychological resilience, spatial visualization, or eye adaptation?

In my opinion SA should properly be defined prior to any sequence posts or, if that would be impractical, the term should be tabooed.

Situational awareness is further lauded by elite military units, police trainers, criminals, intelligence analysts, and human factors researchers. In other words, people who have to make very important-- often life-or-death-- decisions based on limited information consider situational awareness a critical skill.

Note that most of those people operate in very time-sensitive environments. Yes, perceptual efficiency matters a lot with limited information.

In general, I agree that SA is useful, though I wouldn't quite call it the zeroth skillset. For the sequence, are you intending a description of what being SA means, or are you trying to prescribe a training regimen for SA? If so, remember to build small skills in the right order.

This is a subject of great personal importance to me. I recently quit a research position (was offered another one in computational role at the same laboratory) because my lack of SA rendered me unable to do lab work. I went to a psychologist at a friends insistance due to a resulting, brief spate of depression.

The psychologist caused me to realize that I'd built an ugh field around my lack of SA, which was my major problem in life. The constant litany of small humiliations had caused me to internalize an image of myself as laughable and incompetent. My inability to pay attention during conversations made most human interaction unpleasant and stressfull. I had frequently injured myself, and my career was suffering.

SA (which I understand as being basically identical to "mindfullness") isn't just about avoiding danger. It's about actually experiencing what's happening around you. You can't form accurate models of other people for instance, or empathize with them, if your not actually paying attention to them. You can't stick to a schedule or execute a complex plan if you aren't aware of what you're doing at any given time. I think I've improved mine considerably over the past few months. It has benefit me in almost everything I do. My anecdata suggests the following have helped:

1)Meditation see david M's post. http://lesswrong.com/lw/5h9/meditation_insight_and_rationality_part_1_of_3/ 30 minutes per day alone, meditating with a group is a lot more effective. This is the most reproducible and subjectively dramatic effect, coming a close second is

2)Sleep Obviously enough.

3)Methylphenidate

I'm less sure of these last three.

4)Reducing computer usage. I strongly suggest that for me at least, computers, tabbed browsing etc. are overstimulating, and make it difficult to pay attention to anything that isn't a constant stream of information. Not multitasking when using a computer is preferable.

5)Decluttering the physical environment. This is probably more symptom that cause but for the same reasons I think removing clutter and distractions aids situational awareness.

6)Scheduling a regular bell to go off on your cell phone, habitually observing yourself and your surroundings when it does (what am I doing, where am I etc.)

All of this, like attempts to improve rationality itself, suffer from the huge difficulty in measuring improvements. Self experimentation is likely to be the only option for anyone else trying to improve this.

Update: The next post in this sequence is coming as soon as I post the two posts about getting offended that took over my brain's writing module. The first of those, if you're curious, is here.

How general is this skill? Will it allow me to get better at researching things using the internet or solving math problems?

Here is my take on the list of mistakes from your poker link that seems to be related to situational awareness, directly or indirectly, classified by levels:

• Inattention is the tendency to fail to concentrate on information that could be useful for future decision making. (Failure of perception, L1)

• Clustering illusion (Apophenia) is the tendency to see patterns where none exist. (Failure of comprehension, L2)

• Projection bias is the tendency to unconsciously assume that others (or one’s future selves) share one’s current emotional states, thoughts and values. (Failure of projection, L3)

Of course, L3, " extrapolating [...] information forward in time to determine how it will affect future states of the operational environment" includes basically all of the instrumental rationality skills.

I disagree with the importance you seem to place on it. Situational awareness implies realtime processing of high bandwidth environmental data, and that's orthogonal to rationality (cf. your stereotypical situationally unaware professor, lost in thought, and processing some data far away from the situation).

The next post in this sequence is running slightly late but will be posted within the next two days, three at most. This comment is a commitment device-- downvote me heavily if I do not post the next post by 11:59 PM (PST), February 9th, 2013.