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Forget where I read it, but this Idea seems similar. When responding to a request, being upfront about your boundaries or constraints feels intense but can be helpful for both parties. If Bob asks Alice to help him move, and Alice responds "sure thing" that leaves the interaction open to miscommunication. But if instead Alice says, " yeah! I am available 1pm to 5pm and my neck has been bothering me so no heavy lifting for me!" Although that's seems like less of a kind response Bob now doesn't have to guess at Alice's constraints and can comfortably move forward without feeling the need to tiptoe around how long and to what degree Alice can help.
Maybe if you have very "standard" tastes this is good advice to get movies that appeal to large audiences.
If you were the type of person who ONLY likes movies where the guns are super realistic, you aren't going to love Titanic and other top-rated movies.
I have certain people I categorize as "well-aligned movie watchers" like my brother that I grew up with. We have similar tastes. I find that gets me further than aggregate rating systems.
I think when you say, "I don't think this is relevant" you mean... I agree with your premise (that user stories are related to the assumed intent bias) but I don't think that we should upend user stories yet because they do what they are supposed to.
To which I agree.
Development is complex and realistically even with user stories, developers are considering other users (not in the narrative). If you were to take away user stories and focus on tasks, developers would still imagine user intent. By using user stories we are just shifting focus on intent. Which I think is usually a net positive. This post helped me illuminate in my head where it might not be a net positive.
I may have not been clear. I am agreeing with the entire post. I agree with your comment too that "user stories" arose most likely for the same reason as this bias.
I also agree with you that figuring out intention is an important part of development. A majority of users will use my software with the same intent.
I just meant to say that I immediately thought of "user stories" while reading this post. My initial thought was that user stories focus too much on intent. For example, if you are hyper focused on the user trying to reset their password you may neglect the user who accidentally clicked the reset password button and just want to navigate back to the log-in page. Would there be benefit to removing the user story as a goal and just make the goal, create a reset password page? I agree with you though, user stories serve their purpose and might be more of a net-good. This post just helped me recognize a potential pitfall of them.
With this in mind. It seems odd that a lot of agile developers build software around "user stories". Seems to lead us right into the trap of imagining a users intentions.
Luckily I think the industry is moving away from user stories.
I wanted to test log-normal but couldn't include pictures so made it a brief post.
Spoiler alert: It works
This is an interesting post. Your linked blog also is very personal and kind and I appreciate that.
My experience is that the things that I consider myself good at are things that interest me... They are the things I am actively reading about and looking for others to share my interest. Therefore it seems to me the things I say I am good at are the things that I am actively working towards being good at. Quite the opposite of the last portion of this post.
I think certainty isn't necessarily more wrought with error. In fact, certainty SHOULD be less error prone.
I see your points though. There are some things that are so valuable to us we couldn't admit we are uncertain. Instead of doing the calculation for how certain we are we just say, "I NEED to be right here so I am certain". I agree it's important to recognize this bias but i don't think certainty is the marker for the bias. I think certainty is 99% great and 1% bad (as in the cases you warn about)
A way to detect the bias you are concerned about would be to try to identify character traits that are most important to you. Ask what would hurt the most to find out weren't true. Then evaluate yourself on those traits and identifying characteristics and recognize that you may be biased here. I don't mean to say this is easy or I have mastered it, just that it might be more dependable than certainty.
I am not sure if that's the best way to ID the bias, but that's my thoughts.
Agreed, great post. But I think you are trying to push Bayesian Statistics past what it SHOULD be used for.
Bayesian Statistics are only useful because we approach the correct answer as we gain all the information possible. Only in this limit (of infinite information) is Bayesian useful. Priors based off no information are, well, useless.
Scenario 1: You flip a fair coin and have a 50/50 chance of it landing heads
Scenario 2: (to steal xepo's example) are bloxors greeblic? You have NO IDEA, so your priors are 50/50
Even though in both scenarios the chances are 50/50, I would feel much more confident betting money on scenario 1 than scenario 2. Therefore my model of choices contains something MORE than probabilities. As far as I know Bayesian statistics just doesn't convey this NEEDED information. You cant use Bayesian probabilities here in a useful way. It's the wrong tool for the job.
Even frequentest statistics is useless here.
A lot of day-to-day decisions are based off very limited information. I am not able to lay out a TRUE model of how we intuitively make those decisions but "how much information I have to work with" is definitely an aspect in my mental model that is not entirely captured by Bayes Theorem.
One option would be to have another percentage — a meta-percentage. e.g. “What credence do i give to “this is an accurate model of the world””? For coin flips, you’re 99.999% that 50% is a good model. For bloxors, you’re ~0% that 50% is a good model.
This is a model that I always tend to fall back on but I can never find a name for it so find it hard to look into. I have always figured I am misunderstanding Bayesian statistics and somehow credence is all factored in somehow. That doesn't really seem like the case though.
Does the Scott Alexander post lay this out? I am having difficulty finding it.
The closest term I have been able to find is Kelly constants, which is a measure of how much "wealth" you should rationally put into a probabilistic outcome. Replace "wealth" with credence and maybe it could be useful for decisions but even this misses the point!
This is interesting!
I would have guessed that the process of making tea is somewhat relaxing and almost all the "Contentment and Relaxing" properties of tea were due to placebo. Especially since culture seems to tell us that teas are a way to relax. This seems like solid evidence that L-Theanine is good for relaxing without the placebo effect. It comes at a productivity cost, but if relaxation is your goal maybe it is good and not too harmless!
Agreed important at times to have closed door meetings but don't you agree work is maybe 90% closed door meetings and home should be maybe 5% closed door meetings?
My kiddos are both under 2yo so closing a door on them isn't really a possibility, I was imagining into the future which is bad. Sounds like you have more experience here so I could be wrong.
Good point! I guess I am biased as I do not have the gift of lots of work mobility right now, I can't change teams or jobs without lots of effort.
I guess I was thinking more friends and non-household relatives, but I didn't say that.
Even though I butchered the analogy; I think there is still a different dynamic at play, where my kids and wife don't owe me anything like someone who is being paid to help me.
Wow the opposite of what I was thinking. You are steps ahead of me if you have actually implemented changes. What is your experience with the change so far? If you don't mind, has it effected the measurables I wanted to investigate?
-am I able to move from work to non work tasks easily -do I feel a need to talk about work
- hopefully I should feel some sense of being more myself although this is vague
Wow thank you. This is amazing insight that fits perfectly into my model. I will find a way to implement this for a bit and see how it feels.
Agree with you that there is some overlapping tasks. If I were more precise I would say,
"I believe 85% of work behavior is an example of bad home behavior, but depending on your job and other factors this has a wide confidence interval"
Even if the tasks have the same name, they can look very different. For example: scheduling is something we do at work and at home but at work I use outlook and teams to schedule while at home I use text. Entire etiquette of what to do if someone proposes an alternative time, who is expected to come, what you are expected to say if you can't come. I would argue that while it's called "scheduling" in both home and work environments there are more differences than similarities between the two behaviors. This is going to wildly depend on your job, I kind of skipped over the assumption that a lot of less wrong users work in an office-like environment.
I think we learn how to use tools at work like spreadsheets, to-do lists, etc that grandma would never use but we are using them to accomplish different goals than at work. I am semi-confident in this even though I haven't thought through all the tasks because I believe that the incentive structure underpinning the whole work environment leads to different behaviors. It would be an odd coincidence if despite different incentives work and home behaviors were exactly the same.
Thanks. I am reading a lot of parenting books and I have found that I was missing the context in which they were written. This was the result of my research. My hope is to bring this background context to future book reviews which will be more substantial and thorough. Appreciate the comment!
I don't think I agree with you but, David Chapman who is cited in this post as coining meta-rationality wrote a mini-e-book about Kegans work so you are right that they are very related. https://meaningness.com/about-my-sites
Depends on your house, air quality outside, and air quality inside but a cheap air quality monitor has shown my that an open window can clean up the air 5x faster than an air purifier.
Even during the winter or summer there is usually a small window of time (excuse the pun) that the air temp outside is about the same as your desired temp. Lots of houses have an oversized heater to account for open windows in the cold.
Window fan can expedite the process, you can get sneaky about which direction you run fans to create circulation throughout the house. Try not to create negative pressure in your house (don't blow more air out than in) especially in your basement due to radon and other bad things with negative pressure.
I try to use windows as a plan A and HEPA filters as a plan B. I recognize this is a luxury of having good air quality outside in my area.
I'll add three that I like, although I know an extensive list isn't the purpose of this post.
- exercise outside for 20 mins (or inside of raining) is long-term healthy and short -term mood boosting.
- 10 minutes of something comedic (YouTube or Netflix) in the morning helps my mood
- background music for chores/work/productiveness.
I love the idea of experimenting and for me that's not the hard part. It is hard to think up new interventions. Maybe I'm just bad at ideas but supplementing creatine for instance is something I would NEVER think up on my own, I kind of rely on others to help with the ideas. I love posts along this vein that give me ideas to test improvements
Wow, thank you this is a really well made point. I see now how accounting for future lives seems like double counting their desires with our own desires to have their desires fulfilled.
You already put a lot of effort into a response so don't feel obliged to respond but some things in my mind that I need to work out about this:
Can't this argument do a bit too much "I'm not factoring in the utility of X (future peoples happiness) but I am instead factoring in my desires to make X a reality" in a way that you could apply it to any utility function parameter. For instance, "my utility calculation doesn't factor in actually (preventing malaria), but I am instead factoring in my desires to (prevent malaria)." Maybe while the sentiment is true, it seems like it can apply to everything.
Another unrelated thought I am working with. If the goal is to have grandpa on his deathbed happy thinking that the future will be okay, wouldn't this goal be satisfied by lying to grandpa? In other words if we have an all powerful aligned AGI and tell it give it the utility function you outlined, where we maximize our desires to have the future happy. Wouldn't it just find a way to make us think the future would be okay by doing things we think would work? As opposed to actually assigning utility to future people actually being happy, which the AGI would then actually improve the future.
You helped me see the issues with assigning any utility to future people. You changed my opinion that that isn't great. I guess I am struggling to accept your alternative as I think it may have a lot of the same issues if not a few more.
Glad you posted this.
I think everyone agrees we should take into account future people to some degree, we just disagree on how far out and to what degree.
I choose to believe that the whole ".0001% chance of saving all future lives is still more valuable than saving current lives" is a starting point to convince people to care, but isn't intended to be the complete final message. Like telling kids atoms have electrons going in circles, its a lie but a useful start.
Maybe I'm wrong and people actually believe that though. I believe that argument is usually a starting point that SHOULD get more nuanced such as, but we arent certain about the future and we need to discount for our uncertainty.
I interpreted this post as anti-longtermism but I think most real longtermists would agree with most of your points here except for one. I think your argument could be pro-longtermism if you accepted the ".0001% chance of saving all future lives is still more valuable than saving current lives" as a good starting point rather than arguing against it.
All to say I agree with almost all your points but I still call myself a long termist.
Thank you. I'm going to work on the edits. Also thank you for the link, I am going to read up on IFS before finals edits to see if I can see this with new eyes.
Thank you for this. I had been defining apology as - expressing remorse for ones actions.
Your three part apology is different, you don't have to express remorse for your actions. I like your definition better and I think if I reframe my definition of apology to what you have here, it completely fits within this framework and I can add it as an essential step.
Thank you so much for the read, the feedback and sharing your experience!
I think I see what you are saying here. If I may try to use a fake example: My wife takes out the trash bins every week, and I never thank her or even acknowledge this is something she does. Therefore she feels unrecognized and upset. Through her expressing these feelings to me, me deeply acknowledging her feelings, validating her feelings, and acknowledging all the hard work she does around the house; that might be the action needed to solve the issue.
So my rule, don't bring up something that can't be resolved by action would make the above discussion and healing impossible.
I agree with you.
Your comment also made me realize that by making rules I kind of missed the "connection" part that is so important in the book.
I will think about how to correct this but I am thinking about the following changes:
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I will remove the rule you brought up. I was coming at it from a, "it's unfair to bring up something with the expectation of an apology", but I think I can deal with that case by also...
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Adding a section in "winning the game" that discusses validating feelings and creating a connection.
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I might need to rethink my apology section too, I see how an apology WITH an acknowledgement may actually solve a problem.
Do you think I understood you correctly?
Thanks for the comment! This was my first post on lesswrong so I have been nervous. Thank you so much for the read and feedback!
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This is almost entirely theoretical. I can't pretend these are tried and true. I have been doing something like this for 6 months with awesome success but I don't have a lot of conflict.
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I see your point and agree. Maybe I was being dramatic. Maybe I should change "loss of friendship" to something like, "unresolved relationship tension"?
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Is this IFS you are talking about? I just heard it for the first time last week and then a couple more times this week. I really need to learn what it is. Considering I didn't know about IFS when I wrote this, any parallel or usages would be entirely accidental.
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I too am uncomfortable with the power Hurt has. These rules are a bit unfair because I didn't write these rules to be the "best way to resolve conflict" I wrote them to be the "best way to resolve conflict while not getting taken advantage of".
So I think you are right, sometimes a person can have misguided emotional responses and the BEST thing to do would be to try to discuss those emotions and have them see how they could avoid the inappropriate response in the future. The problem with this is that talking someone out of their emotions or trying to change their emotional response is exactly how bad actors manipulate and abuse others. So under the constraints I set up, this can't be allowed.
What if I added a part in the conclusion that states this is not the ideal rules for conflict resolution if you are willing to accept the risk of being manipulated. These are only the rules if you want to completely avoid the possibility of being manipulated, and are willing to accept the tradeoffs? Do you think that would square the vibes?
This post is great.
I think using a ratio between 5%ci and the 95%ci to determine if something is normal, might be incorrect for any highly variable dataset. What if we used the absolute difference from the ci to the mean.
log normal distribution should have a longer right tail, so this should work. So if the abs(95ci - mean) is a lot larger than the abs(5%ci - mean) then you could take an initial guess it is lognormal. If the ratio is around 1, you might have normal data.
Like you said, this is still just a quick and imperfect check.
Love this post. I am going to use the comments to air out some thoughts I have. But I am not disagreeing with you on anything to be clear. I am more trying to collaborate by presenting my similar world view.
I fully agree with you that independence levels seem to be trending towards less independent.
When deciding for my kid, I try to use the heuristic: " what choice would I make if I had unlimited time and resources?" That choice is usually the best, but it is always unreasonable. The beauty of this heuristic is it then forces me to admit to myself that I am compromising, or at least weighing my needs against my children's. Now taking care of yourself is taking care of the family and a net gain for everyone involved. It's not selfish to say you are making this calculation. But, I think ignoring the calculation is a bit dishonest.
I remember your sleep training post. I honestly feel like if I had unlimited time and resources, I would hold my baby every day until they are old enough to have a discussion and make sure they understand that I am one room away if they need anything. Spoiler alert, I still ended up sleep training my baby at 1yo because I we could not juggle work/sleep/health with a baby that just couldn't sleep without us. I did my research and I think there are benefits to sleep training, but to me it feels weird to say I am doing it for the kid when I just so happen to also get a huge quality of life improvement. I find it more true to say, in a perfect world I would stay up with my baby as they sleep on me... But I don't live in a perfect world and I need to sleep/work/function to take care of the family soooo, sleep training it is! It sounds cold, but I feel like it's more honest than "I am doing my child a favor by sleep training them".
With the independence levels. I feel like my unlimited time and resources answer would be to allow my children to feel independent while also never letting them leave my sight. Anything less than that does seem like a compromise. The best decision for me and my family may be to let my kids play at the playground by themselves while I do dishes in my house a block away, but that is a compromise from watching them from the car nearby. I think it can be the right decision, but I think it should be framed as me making a compromise/tradeoff calculation instead of "I am giving my child the gift of independence".
I don't want to belittle the importance of fostering independence, or promoting self soothing (I'm regards to sleep training). But I think they are often used to fully justify a decision when in reality they are a small variable in the balancing act between what is a perfect decision and what is a actually feasible.
If you accept my premise that "the importance of fostering independence" is something people say when they really mean "we are making a decision based off what is best for our kid and what we can feasibly provide them" then you may accept my next statements. The next portion is also the opinion I most weakly hold, it just ties the thought together ...
A more connected world means a more judgemental world where everyone is comparing themselves to others. Kids and their self image aren't the only thing effected by the internet, parents are too. Some parents can hire a house cleaner, work only 20 hours a week, hire a nanny during the day, so that if they want to stay up all night with their baby they can. In the same way teenage girls compare them to the Instagram influencers, parents compare themselves to the incredibly fortunate families who never has to worry about sleep training. Everyone is pushed to these unattainable standards where parents are shamed for having their kids walk a half mile to school. This section is starting to sound a bit "kids these days", so I will end it but you get my point, it's the internets fault.
We get so much pressure to do the unlimited time and resources thing even though we do not have unlimited time and resources. We are forced to either say, "welp I don't have those resources, but I'm doing the best that I can!" OR we say "actually what I'm doing is healthy" (i.e. I'm fostering independence, I'm giving my baby the gift of self-soothing). In my opinion the former is closer to the truth.
We are all just trying our best to maximize our children's happiness.
Jeff, thanks for your post. I want to make it clear that I'm not disagreeing or accusing you of anything here. I am more going off on a tangent. I described "independence" as a variable in everyone's equation and what you are pointing out here is that everyone weighs that variable differently. Therefore I see your post as a great example that even with the same equation different families arrive at different correct answers based off how they weight their variables. I love all your child-based posts recently and you inspired me to think about this deeply enough to write this really really long comment.
Huge fan of solonoid entity and his work on SSC. I think this is a treat choice, I'm very excited.