Posts

Failures in Kindness 2024-03-26T21:30:11.052Z
On Frustration and Regret 2024-02-27T12:19:55.439Z
Causality is Everywhere 2024-02-13T13:44:49.952Z
The Assumed Intent Bias 2023-11-05T16:28:03.282Z
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. 2023-10-17T11:36:22.234Z
Runaway Optimizers in Mind Space 2023-07-16T14:26:45.091Z
Micro Habits that Improve One’s Day 2023-07-01T10:53:57.280Z
What Piles Up Must Pile Down 2023-04-09T18:37:12.119Z
Don't Judge a Tool by its Average Output 2023-02-02T13:42:28.994Z
Beware of Fake Alternatives 2023-01-31T10:21:40.413Z
Missing Mental Models 2021-12-29T14:08:34.990Z
What are some important insights you would give to a younger version of yourself? 2021-06-09T20:29:05.797Z
The Point of Easy Progress 2021-03-28T16:38:25.682Z
[Hammertime Final Exam] Quantum Walk, Oracles and Sunk Meaning 2019-09-03T11:59:45.696Z

Comments

Comment by silentbob on The Assumed Intent Bias · 2024-02-17T13:26:30.165Z · LW · GW

Thanks for the example! It reminds me of how I once was a very active Duolingo user, but then they published some update that changed the color scheme. Suddenly the duolingo interface was brighter and lower contrast, which just gave me a headache. At that point I basically instantly stopped using the app, as I found no setting to change it back to higher contrast. It's not quite the same of course, but probably also something that would be surprising to some product designers -- "if people want to learn a language, surely something so banal as a brightening up the font color a bit would not make them stop using our app".

Comment by silentbob on Causality is Everywhere · 2024-02-17T13:22:00.663Z · LW · GW

Another operationalization for the mental model behind this post: let's assume we have two people, Zero-Zoe and Nonzero-Nadia. They are employed by two big sports clubs and are responsible for the living and training conditions of the athletes. Zero-Zoe strictly follows study results that had significant results (and no failed replications) in her decisions. Nonzero-Nadia lets herself be informed by studies in a similar manner, but also takes priors into account for decisions that have little scientific backing, following a "causality is everywhere and effects are (almost) never truly 0" world view, and goes for many speculative but cheap interventions, that are (if indeed non-zero) more likely to be beneficial rather than detrimental.

One view is that Nonzero-Nadia is wasting her time and focuses on too many inconsequential considerations, so will overall do a worse job than Zero-Zoe as she's distracted from where the real benefits can be found.

Another view, and the one I find more likely, is that Nonzero-Nadia can overall achieve better results (in expectation), because she too will follow the most important scientific findings, but on top of that will apply all kinds of small positive effects that Zero-Zoe is missing out on.

(A third view would of course be "it doesn't make any difference at all and they will achieve completely identical results in expectation", but come on, even an "a non-negligible subset of effect sizes is indeed 0"-person would not make that prediction, right?)

Comment by silentbob on Causality is Everywhere · 2024-02-17T13:05:35.603Z · LW · GW

You're right of course - in the quoted part I link to the wikipedia article for "almost surely" (as the analogous opposite case of "almost 0"), so yes indeed it can happen that the effect is actually 0, but this is so extremely rare on a continuum of numbers that it doesn't make much sense to highlight that particular hypothesis. 

Comment by silentbob on Causality is Everywhere · 2024-02-17T13:01:03.588Z · LW · GW

For many such questions it's indeed impossible to say. But I think there are also many, particularly the types of questions we often tend to ask as humans, where you have reasons to assume that the causal connections collectively point in one direction, even if you can't measure it.

Let's take the question whether improving air quality at someone's home improves their recovery time after exercise. I'd say that this is very likely. But I'd also be a bit surprised if studies were able to show such an effect, because it's probably small, and it's probably hard to get precise measurements. But improving air quality is just an intervention that is generally "good", and will have small but positive effects on all kinds of properties in our lives, and negative effects on much fewer properties. And if we accept that the effect on exercise recovery will not be zero, then I'd say there's a chance of something like 90% that this effect will be beneficial rather than detrimental.

Similarly, with many interventions that are supposed to affect behavior of humans, one relevant question that is often answerable is whether the intervention increases or reduces friction. And if we expect no other causal effect that may dominate that one, then often the effect on friction may predict the overall outcome of that intervention.

Comment by silentbob on Causality is Everywhere · 2024-02-17T12:48:23.418Z · LW · GW

A basic operationalization of "causality is everywhere" is "if we ran an RCT on some effect with sufficiently many subjects, we'd always reach statistical significance" - which is an empirical claim that I think is true in "almost" all cases. Even for "if I clap today, will it change the temperature in Tokyo tomorrow?". I think I get what you mean by "if causality is everywhere, it is nowhere" (similar to "a theory that can explain everything has no predictive power"), but my "causality is everyhwere" claim is an at least in theory verifiable/falsifiable factual claim about the world.

Of course "two things are causally connected" is not at all the same as "the causal connection is relevant and we should measure it / utilize it / whatever". My basic point is that assuming that something has no causal connection is almost always wrong. Maybe this happens to yield appropriate results, because the effect is indeed so small that you can simply act as if there was no causal connection. But I also believe that the "I believe X and Y have no causal connection at all" world view leads to many errors in judgment, and makes us overlook many relevant effects as well.

Comment by silentbob on Causality is Everywhere · 2024-02-13T16:25:42.016Z · LW · GW

Indeed, I fully agree with this. Yet when deciding that something is so small that it's not relevant, it's (in my view anyway) important to be mindful of that, and to be transparent about your "relevance threshold", as other people may disagree about it.

Personally I think it's perfectly fine for people to consciously say "the effect size of this is likely so close to 0 we can ignore it" rather than "there is no effect", because the former may well be completely true, while the latter hints at a level of ignorance that leaves the door for conceptual mistakes wide open.

Comment by silentbob on The Assumed Intent Bias · 2024-02-13T16:02:42.043Z · LW · GW

Just to note I wrote a separate post focusing on pretty much that last point:


Personally I have a very strong prior that nudging must have an effect > 0 - it would just be extremely surprising to me if the effect of an intervention that clearly points in one direction would be exactly 0. This may however still be compatible with the effects in many cases being too small to be worth to put the spotlight on, and I suspect it just strongly depends on the individual case and intervention.

Comment by silentbob on The Assumed Intent Bias · 2023-11-06T06:38:04.622Z · LW · GW

Interesting, hadn't heard of this! Haven't fully grasped the "No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias" study yet, but at first glance it looks to me as if it is rather evidence for small effect sizes than for no effect at all? Generally, when people say "nudging doesn't work", this can mean a lot of things, from "there's no effect at all" to "there often is an effect, but it's not very large, and it's not worth it to focus on this in policy debates", to "it has a significant effect, but it will never solve a problem fully because it only affects the behavior of a minority of subjects". 

There's also this article making some similar points, overall defending the effectiveness of nudging while also pushing for more nuance in the debate. They cite one very large study in particular that showed significant effects while avoiding publication bias (emphasis mine):

The study was unique because these organizations had provided access to the full universe of their trials—not just ones selected for publication. Across 165 trials testing 349 interventions, reaching more than 24 million people, the analysis shows a clear, positive effect from the interventions. On average, the projects produced an average improvement of 8.1 percent on a range of policy outcomes. The authors call this “sizable and highly statistically significant,” and point out that the studies had better statistical power than comparable academic studies. So real-world interventions do have an effect, independent of publication bias.
(...)
We can start to see the bigger problem here. We have a simplistic and binary “works” versus “does not work” debate. But this is based on lumping together a massive range of different things under the “nudge” label, and then attaching a single effect size to that label.

Personally I have a very strong prior that nudging must have an effect > 0 - it would just be extremely surprising to me if the effect of an intervention that clearly points in one direction would be exactly 0. This may however still be compatible with the effects in many cases being too small to be worth to put the spotlight on, and I suspect it just strongly depends on the individual case and intervention.

Comment by silentbob on The Assumed Intent Bias · 2023-11-06T06:02:37.453Z · LW · GW

Unless I misunderstand your comment, isn't it rather the opposite of odd that user stories are so popular, given that this is what the bias would predict? That being said, maybe I've argued a bit too strongly in one direction with this post - I wouldn't even say that user stories are detrimental or useless. Depending on your product, it may well be that some significant ratio of users to have strong intent. My main claim is that in most situations, the number of people who are closer to the middle of the spectrum is >0. But it's not necessary for that group to dominate the distribution.

So in my view, it can still make sense to focus on a subgroup of your users who know what they're doing, as long as you remain aware that this will not apply to all users. E.g. when A/B testing, you should expect by default that making any feature even mildly less convenient to use will have negative effects. So you should not be surprised to see that result - but it may still be the right choice to make such a change nonetheless, depending on what benefits you hope to get from it.

Comment by silentbob on Micro Habits that Improve One’s Day · 2023-07-04T06:57:48.535Z · LW · GW

During winter, opening windows will raise your heating bills like mad.

Opening several windows/doors widely for a few minutes every couple of hours, rather than keeping one of them open for longer times, is supposed to mostly prevent this, as this will exchange the air in your room without significantly cooling down floor/walls/furniture. But of course you're still right that it's a trade-off, and for some people it's much easier to achieve consistently good CO2 levels than for others. For many it may be worth at least getting a CO2 monitor to be able to make better informed decisions.

Comment by silentbob on If Alignment is Hard, then so is Self-Improvement · 2023-04-07T09:13:35.396Z · LW · GW

One could certainly argue that improving an existing system while keeping its goals the same may be an easier (or at least different) problem to solve than creating a system from scratch and instilling some particular set of values into it (where part of the problem is to even find a way to formalize the values, or know what the values are to begin with - both of which would be fully solved for an already existing system that tries to improve itself).

I would be very surprised if an AGI would find no way at all to improve its capabilities without affecting its future goals. 

Comment by silentbob on Don't Judge a Tool by its Average Output · 2023-02-02T14:08:04.914Z · LW · GW

Side point: this whole idea is arguably somewhat opposed to what Cal Newport in Deep Work describes as the "any benefit mindset", i.e. people's tendency to use tools when they can see any benefit in them (Facebook being one example, as it certainly does come with the benefit of keeping you in touch with people you would otherwise have no connection to), while ignoring the hidden costs of these tools (such as the time/attention they require). I think both ideas are worth to keep in mind when evaluating the usefulness of a tool. Ask yourself both if the usefulness of the tool can be deliberately increased, and if the tool's benefits are ultimately worth its costs.

Comment by silentbob on Beware of Fake Alternatives · 2023-02-01T00:03:27.946Z · LW · GW

I think it does relate to examples 2 and 3, although I would still differentiate between perfectionism in the sense that you actually keep working on something for a long time to reach perfection on the one hand, and doing nothing because a hypothetical alternative deters you from some immediate action on the other hand. The latter is more what I was going for here.

Comment by silentbob on Beware of Fake Alternatives · 2023-01-31T18:28:27.853Z · LW · GW

Good point, agreed. If "pay for a gym membership" turns out to be "do nothing and pay $50 a month for it", then it's certainly worse than "do nothing at home".

Comment by silentbob on How will OpenAI + GitHub's Copilot affect programming? · 2022-12-28T20:52:46.506Z · LW · GW

I would think that code generation has a much greater appeal to people / is more likely to go viral than code review tools. The latter surely is useful and I'm certain it will be added relatively soon to github/gitlab/bitbucket etc., but if OpenAI wanted to start out building more hype about their product in the world, then generating code makes more sense (similar to how art generating AIs are everywhere now, but very few people would care about art critique AIs).

Comment by silentbob on Is it true that most studies in Kahneman's 'Thinking fast and slow' are not replicable and the book is largely not supported by evidence? · 2022-12-28T18:13:22.587Z · LW · GW

Can you elaborate? Were there any new findings about the validity of the contents of Predictably Irrational?

Comment by silentbob on A Response to A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic · 2022-11-01T14:02:59.640Z · LW · GW

This is definitely an interesting topic, and I too would like to see a continued discussion as well as more research in the area. I also think that Jeff Nobbs' articles are not a great source, as he seems to twist the facts quite a bit in order to support his theory. This is particularly the case for part 2 of his series - looking into practically any of the linked studies, I found issues with how he summarized them. Some examples:

  • he claims one study shows that a study showed a 7x increase in cases of cardiovascular deaths and heart attacks, failing to mention that a) the test group was ~50% larger than the control group (so it was actually a ~5x rather than 7x increase), b) that the study itself claims these numbers are not statistically significant due to the low absolute number, and c) that you could get the opposite result from the study when looking at the number of all cause mortality, which happened to be ~4x as large for the control group as for the test group (which too is not statistically significant of course, but still)
  • he cites a study on rats, claiming that it shows that replacing some fat in their diet with "fats that you usually find in vegetable oil" (quite a suspicious wording) increased cancer metastasis risk 4fold - but looking into the study, a) these rats had a significantly increased caloric intake when compared to the test group, and b) 90% of the fat they consume came from lard, rather than vegetable oils, making this study entirely useless for the whole debate
  • for another study he points out the negative effects of safflower oil, but conveniently fails to mention that the same study found an almost as large negative effect for olive oil (which seems to be one of his favorites)

(note I wrote this up from memory, so possible I've mixed something up in the examples above - might be worth writing a post about it with properly linked sources)

I still think he's probably right about many things, and it's most certainly correct that oils high in Omega6 in particular aren't healthy (which might indeed include Canola oil, which I was not aware of before reading his articles). Still he seems to be very much on an agenda to an extent that it prevents him from summarizing studies accurately, which is not great. Doesn't mean he's wrong, but also means I won't trust anything he says without checking the sources.

Comment by silentbob on A Response to A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic · 2022-11-01T13:36:14.651Z · LW · GW

I could well imagine that there are there are strong selection effects at play (more health-concerned people being more likely to give veganism a shot), and the positive effects of the diet just outweighing the possible slight increase in plant oil usage. And I wouldn't even be so sure if vegans on average consume more plant oil than non-vegans - e.g. vegans probably generally consume much less processed food, which is a major source of vegetable oil. 

Comment by silentbob on AGI Safety FAQ / all-dumb-questions-allowed thread · 2022-06-08T15:57:33.747Z · LW · GW

In The Rationalists' Guide to the Galaxy the author discusses the case of a chess game, and particularly when a strong chess player faces a much weaker one. In that case it's very easy to make the prediction that the strong player will win with near certainty, even if you have no way to predict the intermediate steps. So there certainly are domains where (some) predictions are easy despite the world's complexity.

My personal rather uninformed take on the AI discussion is that many of the arguments are indeed comparable in a way to the chess example, so the predictions seem convincing despite the complexity involved. But even then they are based on certain assumptions about how AGI will work (e.g. that it will be some kind of optimization process with a value function), and I find these assumptions pretty intransparent. When hearing confident claims about AGI killing humanity, then even if the arguments make sense, "model uncertainty" comes to mind. But it's hard to argue about that since it is unclear (to me) what the "model" actually is and how things could turn out different.

Comment by silentbob on AGI Safety FAQ / all-dumb-questions-allowed thread · 2022-06-08T15:46:18.202Z · LW · GW

Assuming slower and more gradual timelines, isn't it likely that we run into some smaller, more manageable AI catastrophes before "everybody falls over dead" due to the first ASI going rogue? Maybe we'll be at a state of sub-human level AGIs for a while, and during that time some of the AIs clearly demonstrate misaligned behavior leading to casualties (and general insights into what is going wrong), in turn leading to a shift in public perception. Of course it might still be unlikely that the whole globe at that point stops improving AIs and/or solves alignment in time, but it would at least push awareness and incentives somewhat into the right direction.

Comment by silentbob on AGI Safety FAQ / all-dumb-questions-allowed thread · 2022-06-08T15:41:14.828Z · LW · GW

Isn't it conceivable that improving intelligence turns out to become difficult more quickly than the AI is scaling? E.g. couldn't it be that somewhere around human level intelligence, improving intelligence by every marginal percent becomes twice as difficult as the previous percent? I admit that doesn't sound very likely, but if that was the case, then even a self-improving AI would potentially improve itself very slowly, and maybe even sub-linear rather than exponentially, wouldn't it?

Comment by silentbob on An inquiry into the thoughts of twenty-five people in India · 2022-05-28T09:55:03.294Z · LW · GW

First person (row 2) partially sounds a lot like GPT3. Particularly their answers "But in the scheme of things, changing your mind says more good things about your personality than it does bad. It shows you have a sense of awareness and curiosity, and that you can admit and reflect when decisions have been flawed or mistakes have been made." and "A hero is defined by his or her choices and actions, not by chance or circumstances that arise. A hero can be brave and willing to sacrifice his or her life, but I think we all have a hero in us — someone who is unselfish and without want of reward, who is determined to help others". Then however there's "SAVE THE AMOUNT" and "CORONA COVID-19". This person is confusing.

Comment by silentbob on Low Hanging fruit for buying a better life · 2022-01-15T15:53:09.834Z · LW · GW

The mug is gone. Please provide mug again if possible.

Comment by silentbob on Exploring Two-Level Visual Mnemonic Compression · 2021-05-23T11:38:31.465Z · LW · GW

I found the concept interesting and enjoyed reading the post. Thanks for sharing!

Sidenote: It seems either your website is offline (blog's still there though) or the contact link from your blog is broken. Leads to a 404.

Comment by silentbob on The Point of Easy Progress · 2021-03-31T17:40:02.758Z · LW · GW

Thanks a lot for your comment! I think you're absolutely right with most points and I didn't do the best possible job of covering these things in the post, partially due to wanting to keeping things somewhat simplistic and partially due to lack of full awareness of these issues. The conflict between the point of easy progress and short-sightedness is most likely quite real and it seems indeed unlikely that once such a point is reached there will be no setbacks whatsoever. And having such an optimistic expectation would certainly be detrimental. In the end the point of easy progress is an ideal to strive for when planning, but not an anspiration to fully maintain at all times.

Regarding willpower I agree that challenge is an important factor, and my idea was not so much that tasks themselves should become trivially easy, but that working on them becomes easy in the way that they excite you. Again that's something I could have more clear in the text.

but you need to encounter this uphill part where things become disorienting, frustrating and difficult to solve more complex problems in order to progress in your knowledge

I'm not so sure about this. I like to think there must be ways to learn things, even maths, that entail a vast majority of positive experiences for the person learning it. This might certainly involve a degree of confusion, but maybe in the form of surprise and curiosity and not necessarily frustration. That being said, 1) I might be wrong in my assumption that such a thing is realistically possible and 2) this is not at all the experience most people are actually having when expanding their skills, so it is certainly important to be able to deal well with frustration and disorientation. Still, it makes a lot of sense to me to reduce these negative experiences wherever possible, unless you think that such negative experiences themselves have some inherent value and can't be replaced.

Comment by silentbob on Simultaneous Randomized Chess · 2020-12-27T21:51:15.398Z · LW · GW

Very interesting concept, thanks for sharing!

Comment by silentbob on Hammertime Postmortem · 2020-12-11T13:32:57.714Z · LW · GW

Update a year later, in case anybody else is similarly into numbers: that prediction of achieving 2.5 out of the 3 major quarter goals ended up being correct (one goal wasn't technically achieved due to outside factors I hadn't initially anticipated, but I had done my part, thus the .5), and I've been using a murphyjitsu-like approach for my quarterly goals ever since which I find super helpful. In the three quarters before Hammertime, I achieved 59%, 38% and 47% respectively of such goals. In the quarters since the numbers were (in chronological order, starting with the Hammertime quarter) 59%, 82%, 61%, 65%, 65%, ~82%. While total number and difficulty of goals vary, I believe the average difficulty hasn't changed much whereas the total number has increased somewhat over time. That being said, I also visited a CFAR workshop shortly after going through Hammertime, so that too surely had some notable effect on the positive development.

My bug list has grown to 316 as of today, ~159 of which are solved, following a roughly linear pattern over time so far.

Comment by silentbob on Hammertime Day 10: Murphyjitsu · 2020-10-26T08:07:01.573Z · LW · GW

Where I find Murphyjitsu most useful is in the area of generic little issues with my plans that tend to come up rather often. A few examples:

  • forgetting about working on the goal in time, due to lack of a reminder, planning fallacy etc.
  • the plan involving asking another person for a favor, and me not feeling too comfortable about asking
  • my system 1 not being convinced of the goal, requiring more motivation / accountability / pressure
  • the plan at some point (usually early on) requiring me to find an answer to some question, such that the remaining plan depends on that answer; my dislike for uncertainty ironically often causes me then to just flinch away from that whole plan as opposed to just trying to find that one important answer

It's arguably more of a checklist than real "by the book Murphyjitsu", but still, taking a goal and going through these things, trying to figure out the most trivial and easy to fix issues with the plan, often allows me to increase the likelihood of achieving a goal by 10-20% with just a few minutes of work.

Comment by silentbob on Hammertime Day 9: Time Calibration · 2020-10-23T09:32:33.156Z · LW · GW

I've mostly been aware of the planning fallacy and how despite knowing of it for many years it still often affects me (mostly for things where I simply lack the awareness of realizing that the planning fallacy would play a role at all; so not so much for big projects, but rather for things that I never really focus on explicitly, such as overhead when getting somewhere). The second category you mention however is something I too experience frequently, but having lacked a term (/model) for it, I didn't really think about it as a thing.

I wonder what classes of problems typically fall into the different categories. At first I thought it may simply depend on whether I feel positive or negative about a task (positive -> overly optimistic -> planning fallacy; negative -> pessimistic -> vortex of dread), but the "overhead when getting somewhere" example doesn't really fit the theory, and also one typical example for the planning fallacy is students having to hand in an assignment by a certain date, which usually is more on the negative side. But I guess the resolution to this is simply that the vortex of dread is not different from the planning fallacy, but a frequent cause of it.

  • we tend to overestimate how long things take that we feel negative about -> vortex of dread
  • this causes us to procrastinate it more than we otherwise would -> planning fallacy (so the "net time" is lower than anticipated, but the total time until completion is longer than anticipated)

Which leaves me with three scenarios:

  1. positive things -> planning fallacy due to optimism
  2. negative things -> vortex of dread -> planning fallacy due to procrastination
  3. trivial things I fail to explicitly think about -> planning fallacy due to ignorance/negligence 

And thus there may be different approaches to solving each of them, such as

  1. pre-mortem / murphyjitsu, outside view
  2. knowing about the vortex of dread concept, yoda timers, scheduling, intentionality
  3. TAPs I guess?
Comment by silentbob on Hammertime Day 8: Sunk Cost Faith · 2020-10-21T06:32:01.466Z · LW · GW

I'd probably put it this way – the Sunk Cost Fallacy is Mostly Bad, but motivated reasoning may lead to frequent false positive detections of it when it's not actually relevant. There are two broad categories where sunk cost considerations come into play, a) cases where aborting a project feels really aversive because so much has gone into it already, and b) cases where on some level you really want to abort a project, e.g. because the fun part is over or your motivation has decreased over time. In type a cases, knowing about the fallacy is really useful. In type b cases, knowing about the fallacy is potentially harmful because it's yet another instrument to rationalize quitting an actually worthwhile project.

You can use a hammer to drive nails into walls, or you can use a hammer to hurt people. The sunk cost fallacy may be a "tool" with higher than usual risk of hurting yourself. This is probably a very blurry/grayscale distinction that varies a lot between individuals however, and not a clear cut one about this particular tool being bad. But I definitely agree it makes a lot of sense to talk about the drawbacks of that particular concept as there is an unusually clear failure mode involved (as described in the post).

Comment by silentbob on Hammertime Day 6: Mantras · 2020-10-16T07:18:38.267Z · LW · GW

"When in doubt, go meta". Thanks to my friend Nadia for quoting it often enough for it to have found a place deep within my brain. May not be the perfect mantra, but it is something that occurs to me frequently and almost always seems yet again unexpectedly useful.

Comment by silentbob on Hammertime Day 1: Bug Hunt · 2020-10-06T11:50:19.237Z · LW · GW

It's not that easy to come up with strange bugfix stories (or even noteworthy bugfix stories in general).

One that's still in progress is that I've been using gamification to improve my posture. I simply count the occurrences throughout the day when I remember to sit/stand straight, and track them, summing them up over time to reach certain milestones, in combination with a randomized reward system. While I wasn't too convinced in this attempt at first, it happens more and more often that I remember to sit up straight and realize I already do so, which is a good sign I guess.

Quite a few bugs could be solved for me using spreadsheets. Tracking stuff and seeing graphs of development over time often provides just enough motivation for me to stick to new habits.

The bug of occasionally watching too many youtube videos has been partially resolved by me initially being too lazy to connect speakers to my computer. I'm now more or less deliberately keeping it that way just for that advantage.

Comment by silentbob on Hammers and Nails · 2020-09-24T10:53:43.373Z · LW · GW

Going through Hammertime for the second time now. I tried to figure out 10 not too usual ways in which to utilize predictions and forecasting. Not perfectly happy with the list of course, but a few of these ideas do seem (and to my experience actually are; 1 and 2 in particular) quite useful.

  1. Predicting own future actions to calibrate on one's own behavior
  2. When setting goals, using predictions on the probability of achieving them by a certain date, giving oneself pointers which goals/plans need more refinement
  3. Predicting the same relatively long term things independently at different points in time (without seeing earlier predictions), figuring out how much noise one's predictions entail (by then comparing many predictions of the same thing, which, if no major updates shifted the odds, should stay about the same (or consistently go up/down slightly over time due to getting closer to the deadline))
  4. Predicting how other people react to concrete events or news, deliberately updating one's mental model of them in the process
  5. Teaming up with others, meta-predicting whether a particular set of predictions by the other person(s) will end up being about right, over- or underconfident
  6. When buying groceries (or whatever), before you're done, make a quick intuitive prediction of what the total price will be
  7. When buying fresh fruit or vegetables or anything else that's likely to spoil, make predictions how likely it is you're going to eat each of these items in time
  8. Frequently, e.g. yearly, make predictions about your life circumstances in x years, and evaluate them in the future to figure out whether you tend to over- or underestimate how much your life changes over time
  9. Before doing something aversive, make a concrete prediction of how (negative) you'll experience it, to figure out whether your aversions tend to be overblown
  10. Experiment with intuitive "5 second predictions" vs those supported by more complex models (Fermi estimate, guesstimate etc.) and figure out which level of effort (in any given domain) works best for you; or to frame it differently, figure out whether your system 1 or system 2 is the better forecaster, and maybe look for ways in which both can work together productively
Comment by silentbob on How to have a happy quarantine · 2020-03-16T12:30:43.081Z · LW · GW

One game/activity I generally recommend because of its potential 11/10 fun payoff in the end, which also works in relative isolation, is having fun with gap texts (just figured out this is apparently known as "mad libs", so maybe this isn't actually new to anybody). The idea being that one person creates a small story with many words left out, and then asks other people to fill in the words without knowing the context. So "Bob scratched his <bodypart> and <verb> insecurely. 'You know', he said <adverb>, 'when I was a(n) <adjective> boy, I always wanted to become a(n) <noun>, but I couldn't, because my <bodypart> is/are too <adjective>" might be part of such a story. You pick these gaps in random order and query people for the thing you need (or if you're alone, you can even do this yourself given you manage to hide the context from yourself). Afterwards you read the story out loud to everybody involved.

I've done this a few times both with groups and just with my girlfriend and it never disappointed. Usually takes some time to write and fill in the story, but I think it's very much worth it. Also, this gets funnier with experience as you figure out both what kind of text works best (involving body parts is certainly a great idea) and also what kinds of words to fill the gaps with (e.g. very visual ones, or such with certain connotations).

Comment by silentbob on Hammertime Postmortem · 2019-09-12T07:20:24.468Z · LW · GW

As mentioned in the final exam, here's my personal summary of how I experienced hammertime.

I feel like following the sequence was a very good use of my time, even though it turned out a bit different from what I had initially expected. I thought it would focus much more on "hammering in" the techniques (even after reading Hammers & Nails and realizing the metaphor worked in a different way), but it was more about trying everything out rather briefly, as well as some degree of obtaining new perspectives on things. This was fine, too, but I still feel like I haven't got a real idea about whether things such as goal/aversion factoring, mantras, internal double crux, focusing or timeless decision making actually do anything for me. I applied some of the techniques once, but it didn't really lead to any tangible results. I may have done them incorrectly, or I may need to practice more, or maybe they just don't work for me, and it's now up to me to figure this out in detail.

I derived a lot of value from creating and frequently updating the bug list. TAPs are a neat concept, and those that work are really helpful, but many fail for me. Maybe I'll get a better feeling for which triggers work for me so I can tell beforehand instead of going through days and weeks of consistent failure with a trigger. Design surely works, but I've got some aversions to applying it which I'll have to unravel. CoZE is something I never really doubted, and I like the new framing of basically just becoming the kind of person who's open to new things, as opposed to forcing oneself to do scary things. I've been following the "all else being equal expanding my comfort zone is good" heuristic for a few years already, and will continue to do so, as my natural instinct otherwise is usually to exploit rather than to explore.

Yoda timers/resolve cycles and murphyjitsu probably had the greatest effect on me. On day 10 I murphyjitsued three of my major quarter goals and increased my expected value of how many of them I'd achieve from 1.24 to 2.08 in the process. At the time these were merely predictions and would be worthless if they were not correlated with reality - now however I can say that I'm on track to reach 2.5/3, and I'm highly confident that murphyjitsu made a huge counterfactual difference and I hadn't simply been underconfident before.

I followed the sequence with a group of other people, sharing our progress in a slack channel, which kept up my motivation and probably made it a lot more interesting than "merely" following a year old sequence on my own, so that's certainly something I recommend to others who are interested in giving it a try.

To provide some numbers, I've identified 175 bugs by now, 35 of which I consider solved, and around half of which I expect to solve within the next year, which isn't overly ambitious but still in the order of "life-changing" if things work out, which sounds good enough for me.

So, overall: Thanks a lot alkjash!

Comment by silentbob on [Hammertime Final Exam] Quantum Walk, Oracles and Sunk Meaning · 2019-09-05T11:17:56.028Z · LW · GW

Quantum Walk: That's pretty much it.

Oracle: Possibly, didn't get around to reading it all so far. As far as I understand from just skimming, I guess a difference may be that the term deconfusion is used with regards to a domain where people are at risk of thinking they understand and aren't aware of any remaining confusion. I was more referring to situations where the presence of confusion is clear, but one struggles to identify a strategy to reduce it. In that case it may be helpful to focus on the origin of one's own confusion first as opposed to the thing one is trying to understand.

Sunk Meaning: Yes, plus there may be times when we are talking about meaning / interpretation without realizing so, falsely assuming we're referring to actual properties of the real world. In the above example, people may feel like "we should use the cow's skin as otherwise it is wasted" is a real argument, that reality would in some way be better when acting that way, because "wasting things = bad". That's a (usually useful but still at times) flawed heuristic though. I wonder if there are more ways where we intuitively think we're talking about properties of the real world, when in actuality we're only referring to states of our own mind.

Comment by silentbob on How Much is Your Time Worth? · 2019-09-05T10:17:56.930Z · LW · GW

I strongly agree with the essence of this post, considering I've spent quite some time recently thinking about the value of my time and trying to somehow put it into reasonable numbers in order to make everyday decisions easier and more well informed.

About a year ago I took the clearerthinking test and ended up with ~32€, which seemed high, and looking back I think it wasn't particularly accurate. I'm thus not a great fan of that test personally and think getting a correct value requires much deeper thought than this small questionnaire prompts you to do (although thinking about the issue at all is of course already useful). One benefit it has though is that it clearly shows the asymmetry in our intuitions (aka loss aversion), so that was very helpful at the time, yet the number that came out provided me with a false sense of certainty.

Thinking through things further these last few days, I revised that value now to very roughly 12€ (varying from around 6€ to 18€ depending on the type of action, although I assume EA work should very likely be rated much higher than that). But just as the earlier value, it still is mostly based on intuitions and inner simulation regarding what price I'd accept for e.g. somebody asking me to simply do nothing at all for a week. So it's still on fairly shaky grounds. Calculating the external value my time has on the world is difficult as so far I'm focusing more on learning and developing than on generating actual output (the latter only making up 1-2 hours per week so far).

One difficulty is that it's not easy to look at the marginal value only, plus the consequences it has on one's behavior could easily shift spending in a way that the marginally value itself changes significantly. If I spend 200€ more per month, money suddenly becomes more scarce and thus valuable. If I reduce my day job work time from 5 to 4 days a week, the same thing happens. So after any major change or decision I have to reevaluate and come up with new numbers.

Despite these difficulties however, thinking deeply about this and reducing one's uncertainty however far possible is certainly time well spent. Thanks for the post!

Comment by silentbob on Hammertime Final Exam · 2019-09-04T07:04:22.164Z · LW · GW

I did it: my final exam.

Thank you for the sequence, had a great time, will leave a few additional thoughts in the post mortem post.

Comment by silentbob on [Hammertime Final Exam] Accommodate Yourself; Kindness Is An Epistemic Virtue; Privileging the Future · 2019-09-02T12:13:16.031Z · LW · GW
Their hypothesis was that the child would indeed regret it, even though the decision was clearly correct - which would show that regret is not reliable information about the quality of one’s past decisions.

Food for thought! I guess System 1's tendency to overvalue the present might cause us to discount the future as well as the past. I'm not quite sure to which degree I would consider this likely however. At least I personally usually do not regret decisions from the past that had positive effects on my well being, even if the alternative would be to experience that increased well being now.

But even then, the only purpose regret seems to have is to prevent us from repeating past mistakes. But this is 1) prone to overcorrecting and 2) we'd be much better off learning the lesson without having to suffer from that nagging feeling of regret for basically ever.

Comment by silentbob on The Strategic Level · 2019-09-01T13:09:18.388Z · LW · GW
Share a story of a cure that was worse than the disease.

Not too long ago my girlfriend once said a few things I found hurtful. A few days later I decided to talk things through with her. Unfortunately that day she was in a rather bad mood for different reasons (which I hadn't fully comprehended until that point), which caused the talk to derail a bit and become more hurtful, different from the past when having these meta relationship talks always worked rather well.

My reaction to this initially was to assume she had just changed over time and had somehow "lost her empathy" -- so basically fundamental attribution error, assuming that's apparently how she is now rather than she's having a bad day and maybe we should talk about this some other time. My over-correction was to decide just not to have such talks anymore and keep stuff to myself. Fortunately though she sorted things out later and I quickly made sure to unlearn that lesson.

One meta lesson I learned from this is that I personally tend to over-correct on any kind of negative evidence in relationships and probably social situations in general.

Comment by silentbob on Internal Double Crux · 2019-09-01T12:26:24.915Z · LW · GW

I can relate. The few times when I used IDC in the past, it did feel useful, but still it's not really enjoyable. Maybe it's the fact that with IDC I'm not so much solving a problem but rather figuring out something about myself. There maybe won't be any cool hacks or workarounds to solve it all, but in the end it's more about coming to terms with things. So maybe choosing IDC as the best tool to approach a bug already feels like a small defeat which causes me to rather not choose it and try other, more outward-facing tools instead, or ignore the bug entirely. Something like that.

Comment by silentbob on CoZE 3: Empiricism · 2019-08-22T11:12:35.917Z · LW · GW
Share an experience where you radically underestimated or overestimated your own ability.

Overestimated: being filmed for an interview for a promo video of my company. Didn't think much of it beforehand, but it turned out to be awkward as hell, zero usable footage emerged. Wasting the time of all the ~8 people in the room wasn't great.

Underestimated: Nothing too radical, but giving a speech at a big birthday party. Expected it to be decent as I generally enjoy public speaking, but it went smoother than I thought, people laughed at the jokes and I think most were actually interested in what I said. Some complimented me on the speech afterwards which was nice.

Comment by silentbob on Design 3: Intentionality · 2019-08-20T20:11:19.372Z · LW · GW

Praise: The way you've layed everything out, following the hammertime routine is quite motivating and rewarding. Every new day comes with a bit of a dopamine rush.

Criticism: a few of the days don't have any real action attached, such as this one, where actually implementing design improvements appears somewhat optional and all you really ask us to do is write a comment. This may very well just be me, but more consistent "homework" (e.g. each day requiring at least one yoda timer of some kind) would be helpful to establish some consistency.

Comment by silentbob on Bug Hunt 3 · 2019-08-14T07:38:31.533Z · LW · GW
Are you better at achieving your values since Hammertime Day 1? If so, what helped?

I've been able to (probably lastingly) resolve ~20 bugs so far¹ and make notable improvements in a few areas of my life. Also my productivity increased by roughly 40% since starting hammertime, which however could have various causes (plus, last year too I was most productive during the summer months).

Regarding whether it helped me achieve my values, "no clear values" remains as one of my unresolved bugs, so I can't really tell.

I'd say the things that helped the most are yoda timers and murphyjitsu. TAPs tend to not work very well for me, but when they do, they're also very useful.

¹) That really isn't too much, and I realize it would make sense to allocate a few hours every week to just do some introspection and working on my bugs. So far I've mostly just followed hammertime and didn't do much on top, but I guess the greatest value lies in utilizing all this stuff consistently.

Comment by silentbob on How to make plans? · 2019-07-12T11:48:57.245Z · LW · GW

This may be somewhat obvious, but I'd assume optimism biases (inside view, planning fallacy, maybe competitor neglect if it's the kind of plan where competition is involved) play a big role in many if not most plans that don't work out, as well as failing to bulletproof the plan initially using e.g. murphyjitsu/premortem.

A less obvious one would be aborting a project based on noisy data causing the expected value to temporarily drop; which could be prevented by predefining clear unambiguous "ejector seats", as alkjash mentioned in their Hammertime sequence.

Comment by silentbob on Hammertime Day 7: Aversion Factoring · 2019-07-04T19:53:52.763Z · LW · GW

One rather trivial inconvenience that negatively impacts my life is having a great aversion to lack of clarity in any kind of workflow. I've been meaning to join a boat trip with my girlfriend on a nearby river for a while (the kind in a big boat where you just join 50ish other random people and tour around for an hour looking at things), but from the website it's really unclear what exactly I need to do. When to be where exactly, how and where to get the actual tickets and that stuff. So I've procrastinated that endlessly.