Author Archives: Benquo

Rationality Cocktails

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Sphex on the Beach

1) Assemble bottles of vodka, peach schnapps, creme de cassis, orange juice, and cranberry juice, and an orange slice and a maraschino cherry.

2) Rinse glass.

3) Put ingredients aside to make another cocktail.

4) Go to step 1.

 

Bayesian Update Martini

1) Start with 2 ounces of the last Bayesian update Martini. If this is your first Bayesian Update Martini, start with one ounce of gin and one ounce of Vermouth.

2) Ask the customer for their preferred gin:vermouth ratio.

3) Add 2 ounces of gin and vermouth, in the requested ratio.

4) Pour out 2 ounces into a vessel with ice, and shake our stir, then serve. Reserve the other 2 ounces for the next Bayesian Update Martini.

Words and Techniques

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How do you learn a behavior? How do you teach it?

Well, let's say you want someone to, when in potentially dangerous situations, scan their environment for threats. You could just tell them that. But what happens? If you tell them once, it's just thing someone told them. If you tell them many times, they'll get a little voice in their head that says, occasionally, "when you're in a potentially dangerous situation, scan your environment for likely threats." That's the behavior you've taught - to rehearse the admonition. At most, if "potentially dangerous" is really understood, they might remember your admonition when they're already scared, and look around one more time.

So the problem with general verbal admonitions is that they aren't very good at producing helpful behavior. What you really need to do is tell them, "before you cross the street, look both ways."

Why is that better? Because it prescribes a specific action, and a specific situational cue to execute the behavior. That's how people actually learn to do things. Concepts like "potentially dangerous" are too abstract to trigger a stereotyped response, though maybe "feeling scared" is specific enough. But even in that case, it's not actually the same thing - if I'm scared of the dark, should I look around my dark hallway at night for threats? No.

Here are some more examples:

Too general: My car is broken -> fix it

Better: A light on the dashboard turned on -> go to the mechanic

Too general: Eat healthier

Better: It it's not mealtime, I don't eat anything but fresh vegetables. At mealtime, I always start with a small amount protein-heavy and some vegetables, and then wait a few minutes to determine whether I'm still hungry.

Notice that the first example obviously doesn't cover all cases, and the second one has a very specific behavior that won't be appropriate for everyone. So you might want to think about how to teach more generalized good behaviors.

I can think of two ways to train more generalized behavior. You can teach a behavior-generating behavior or an explicit diagnostic tool.

What's a behavior-generating behavior? Well, you could teach someone how to use a map when they need to figure out how to get somewhere. Then every time they have the situational cue "I don't know how to get there," they can pull out their map and design a new route that they've never done before.

What's a diagnostic tool? You could learn to recognize feeling frustrated, and train the habit of asking what you can do in the future to fix the problem instead of trying to assign blame.

This has helped me understand a lot of the changes in the curriculum at CFAR since the 2011 Minicamp.

Rationality is often divided up into "epistemic" and "instrumental" rationality, where epistemic rationality is about having explicit verbal beliefs that are accurate, and instrumental rationality is about taking actions that accomplish your goals.

At Minicamp, we spent a lot of time on "epistemic rationality," but most of it didn't really rise above the level of verbal admonitions. I spent a while figuring out how to put these into Anki cards so I'd at least have the cached thoughts in my head. Here are a few of them (I've omitted the cloze-deletion):

  • When I notice defensiveness/pride/positive affect about a belief, I reward myself for noticing, and ask myself what new evidence would change my mind.
  • When I notice that I am considering changing my mind, I reward myself for noticing, and write it down.
  • Once I have decided whether to change my mind, I write down the outcome.
  • When I avoid thinking about what happens if I am wrong, I might be overconfident.
  • If I am not asking experts what they think, I might not be curious enough.
  • My beliefs should predict some outcomes and prohibit others.
  • When I think of or ask for an example, I reward myself.
  • When I can't think of any examples, I consider changing my mind.
  • When I keep finding different reasons to avoid thinking about or doing something, but do not feel a salient negative affect, I notice that I have a strong aversion.
  • When I notice an opportunity to make a prediction in advance, I make a prediction and reward myself for noticing.
  • When someone whose opinion I respect disagrees with me , I consider changing my mind.

I now have these cached thoughts, but I'm not sure they've affected my behavior much. There were also some things that were so general I didn't even know how to write an Anki card that I expected might work.

There was basically none of this at this past weekend's CFAR workshop. Instead, we had techniques that applied some of these principles, in specific well-described situation.

For example, a big part of epistemic rationality is the idea that beliefs should cash out to anticipated experiences, and you should test your beliefs. We didn't cover this at a high level anywhere, but we did talk about using the "inner simulator" to troubleshoot plans in advance. Basically, imagine that someone tells you your plan failed, after the fact. How surprised do you feel? That's just a special case of noticing your subjective anticipation beforehand, to give you the opportunity to reconcile it with your explicit belief.

"Inner simulator" also gives you an opportunity to make excuses in advance, by asking your imagined future self why the plan failed.

The sad thing about this technique is that my brain didn't connect it automatically with the admonition "test your beliefs!" The nice thing about this technique is:

I might actually use it.

In my "first impression" review of the CFAR workshop I spent a lot of time talking about the things that were missing. Well, aside from the fact that it was less than half the length of the Minicamp, the workshop had another good reason to drop that stuff: the actually existing epistemic rationality training just didn't work yet. The folks at CFAR did a lot of testing, and it turned out that people basically don't change their lives in response to high-level epistemic rationality admonitions. So they had to choose between two options:

1) Do what works

2) Fix the broken thing

This is a pretty common decision to have to make, and it's often not obvious which is the right one. The advantage to "Do what works" is it doesn't take much extra effort once you've identified where the problems are - you just stay away from them!

The upside to "Fix the broken thing" is that it is often the only way to get extraordinary results. Chances are, someone else has already tried "do what works," though that's not so likely that it's not worth testing. It's an uphill climb to fix something that doesn't work, you'll have to try a lot of things, most of them won't work, you'll be really frustrated and want to pull your hair out, and then you'll stumble on something so obvious in hindsight that you'll feel like an idiot. You'll have to give up a whole bunch of beautiful ideas that all seemed like just the insight you needed, because they didn't actually work.

So why put up with all that? It depends on what you think the world needs. If the world needs a bunch of people who are all just a little more effective, then by all means stick with the things that work.

But it the world has big important problems that must be solved, but can only be solved by going against the grain, by reaching into solution space for something far away from our local maximum - then only the hard way can save the world. Not just making people who have power over their own emotions, habits, and behaviors, which makes them more effective, but people whose explicit verbal reasoning is correct as well, so they can notice the alternative that's 10 or 1,000 times as good as the default action.

Wait vs Interrupt Culture

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At this past weekend's CFAR Workshop (about which, by the way, I plan to have another post soon with less whining and more serious discussion), someone mentioned that they were uncomfortable with pauses in conversation, and that got me thinking about different conversational styles.

Growing up with friends who were disproportionately male and disproportionately nerdy, I learned that it was a normal thing to interrupt people. If someone said something you had to respond to, you'd just start responding. Didn't matter if it "interrupted" further words - if they thought you needed to hear those words before responding, they'd interrupt right back.

Occasionally some weird person would be offended when I interrupted, but I figured this was some bizarre fancypants rule from before people had places to go and people to see. Or just something for people with especially thin skins or delicate temperaments, looking for offense and aggression in every action.

Then I went to St. John's College - the talking school (among other things). In Seminar (and sometimes in Tutorials) there was a totally different conversational norm. People were always expected to wait until whoever was talking was done. People would apologize not just for interrupting someone who was already talking, but for accidentally saying something when someone else looked like they were about to speak. This seemed totally crazy. Some people would just blab on unchecked, and others didn't get a chance to talk at all. Some people would ignore the norm and talk over others, and nobody interrupted them back to shoot them down.

But then a few interesting things happened:

1) The tutors were able to moderate the discussions, gently. They wouldn't actually scold anyone for interrupting, but they would say something like, "That's interesting, but I think Jane was still talking," subtly pointing out a violation of the norm.

2) People started saying less at a time.

#1 is pretty obvious - with no enforcement of the social norm, a no-interruptions norm collapses pretty quickly. But #2 is actually really interesting. If talking at all is an implied claim that what you're saying is the most important thing that can be said, then polite people keep it short.

With 15-20 people in a seminar, this also meant that no one could try to force the conversation in a certain direction. When you're done talking, the conversation is out of your hands. This can be frustrating at first, but with time, you learn to trust not your fellow conversationalists, but the conversation itself, to go where it needs to. If you haven't said enough, then you trust that someone will ask you a question, and you'll say more.

When people are interrupting each other - when they're constantly tugging the conversation back and forth between their preferred directions - then the conversation itself is just a battle of wills. But when people just put in one thing at a time, and trust their fellows to only say things that relate to the thing that came right before - at least, until there's a very long pause - then you start to see genuine collaboration.

And when a lull in the conversation is treated as an opportunity to think about the last thing said, rather than an opportunity to jump in with the thing you were holding onto from 15 minutes ago because you couldn't just interrupt and say it - then you also open yourself up to being genuinely surprised, to seeing the conversation go somewhere that no one in the room would have predicted, to introduce ideas that no one brought with them when they sat down at the table.

By the time I graduated, I'd internalized this norm, and the rest of the world seemed rude to me for a few months. Not just because of the interrupting - but more because I'd say one thing, politely pause, and then people would assume I was done and start explaining why I was wrong - without asking any questions! Eventually, I realized that I'd been perfectly comfortable with these sorts of interactions before college. I just needed to code-switch! Some people are more comfortable with a culture of interrupting when you want to, and accepting interruptions. Others are more comfortable with a culture of waiting their turn, and courteously saying only one thing at a time, not trying to cram in a whole bunch of arguments for their thesis.

Now, I've praised the virtues of wait culture because I think it's undervalued, but there's plenty to say for interrupt culture as well. For one, it's more robust in "unwalled" circumstances. If there's no one around to enforce wait culture norms, then a few jerks can dominate the discussion, silencing everyone else. But someone who doesn't follow "interrupt" norms only silences themselves.

Second, it's faster and easier to calibrate how much someone else feels the need to talk, when they're willing to interrupt you. It takes willpower to stop talking when you're not sure you were perfectly clear, and to trust others to pick up the slack. It's much easier to keep going until they stop you.

So if you're only used to one style, see if you can try out the other somewhere. Or at least pay attention and see whether you're talking to someone who follows the other norm. And don't assume that you know which norm is the "right" one; try it the "wrong" way and maybe you'll learn something.

 

Cross-posted at Less Wrong.

What Nietzsche Said to Me

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Nietzsche famously wrote that he was writing to be understood only by his friends, which raises the obvious question of why so many people who don't like what they think he says claim to understand him. This weekend I listened to a few conversations that seemed to get him totally wrong. I resisted the urge to correct them at the time since it wasn't completely material to the conversation, so I'm dominating that urge into a blog post to get writing practice.

Note that Nietzsche didn't write this way, presumably for a good reason. You may superficially understand what I'm saying but fail to internalize it, unless you follow up by reading the original until you understand how this is the same thing as that.

According to Nietzsche, in the beginning, there were people and power relations.

Words are Powerful

Words are one of the main ways people interpret, keep track of, and interact with their world. Words like "one" and "two" and "tree" and "sheep are important tools of agriculture, trade, etc. But words like "good," "wicked," "proud," "sinful," "man," "woman," "justice," and "sexism" also affect people's behavior in profound ways. One simple example of this is that in standard English the default pronoun for one person it's always either male or female. This makes it much more natural to make statements about men or women rather than humans, and it cuts against the grain to make sex-neutral statements. For another consider the Christian sin - but Aristotelian virtue - of pride. For more on this, read 1984 by George Orwell.

But they're Made Up

The framework of ideas we use to understand our world is not an attribute of the things themselves. It is a behavior of our minds. It's made up! And someone made it up. Whoever made up the thoughts you use determined not which propositions you affirm or deny, but which ones are thinkable in the first place.

The ancients seem alien and incomprehensible because their basic ideas are so different from ours that only a truly deep thinker can understand them. The Greek "soul" is not necessarily separable from the body, or entirely rational in nature - Aristotle thought a soul was something a body did, even an animal's or plant's body - but the moderns think either that there are no souls ("Huh? Do the bodies just lie there motionless our something?" - Aristotle) or that only humans have them and they go to heaven or hell after we die.

Now Everyone is a Wizard

Modernity (the legacy of Hobbes, Machiavelli, Locke, Descartes, Hume, etc.) is not that it's the first time anyone said that the people should rule. That's old. These are the features of modern ideas:

Baconian science means that you can add to our stock of true attributes we know about nature without understanding your tools.

Algebra means you can perform lots of calculations without understanding math.

Liberalism means that lots of people are allowed to talk about different "moralities" and choose a god, ethos, and role in society as one might choose a shirt. We don't have a unified cultural elite controlling how we're allowed to talk about things. Instead, our elite believe in and endorse total freedom of speech. Which means that anyone can playing around with the lens through which humans are able to think about their world and decide right from wrong.

You can't get arrested for killing the gods, because after all, it's only words. Not that it makes the gods any less dead.

With no unified control over language, controversy over what to call things is a power struggle more akin to war than to politics, because the goal is not to enact a set of preferred practical policies, but to permanently destroy the enemy's ability to fight, by ripping out their tongues. At the same time, seeing that all values are questionable, people lose faith in words about rightness and wrongness, the just and the true and the good, so nothing holds them back from this return to the war of all against all.

The Nietzschean Hero

You can't fix this with arguments about what the good should be. Arguments are just another piece in the Game of Words. Which set of ideas you use determines which combinations of words you evaluate as true propositions. Aristotle is correct when he says that animals have souls, but Descartes is correct when he says they don't.

Is there a way out? Not an easy our a likely one. We're probably doomed to this forever. But if someone were to make up - and popularize, at least among the elite - a new set ideas, one with a new set of values appropriate for out times and circumstances, who would that person have to be?

They would need a sufficiently deep understanding to know that the words they have received are not the only words that can be, that to make a new thing you have to destroy, distort, or forget the post.

And they would have to be profoundly creative. Creative enough to be able to come up with a totally new set of ideas adequate to give modern people the power they need, while taking away the curse of infinitely malleable values.

That is the Nietzschean superman.

A First Impression Review of the CFAR NY Workshop

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UPDATE: This review is old. My revised take is here.

I'm writing this on the train on my way back from the Center for Applied Rationality's workshop in Ossining, NY, a little less than an hour north of the city. Because I was wondering what to do and my brain wanted to do this instead of just reading. So that's a good sign.

Please bear in mind that this is just a first impression and that I am likely to change my mind about both both the good and the bad over the next few months. If you read this and a lot of time has passed, feel free to contact me directly to find out what I think then.

I went to the equivalent workshop back in 2011, when the institution was still part of the Singularity Institute (now called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI), and was excited to see what had changed and improved as a result of CFAR's extensive testing and iteration. I was hoping the training would resemble the Jeffreyssai stories much more than it did then.

My literal first and last impressions were actually pretty bad. I found out only a few weeks before the event that it wouldn't actually be in NYC like I'd thought but in much harder to get to Ossining, 45 minutes north of the city. (By contrast the site in Berkeley was within walking distance of a BART station.) Then about a week before the workshop I finally got the promised email with logistic information, which said there would be pickups provided at the Ossining train station. Amtrak only goes to the nearby Croton-Harmon station, and I didn't want to go all the way across Manhattan to transfer to the Metro-North commuter train that does go to Ossining, so I asked if they could pick me up from there. It's a lot closer than the airports they promised pickup from, so I figured this would be a reasonable request. No response. A few days later I got an email asking me to fill out a survey, which also asked what my transportation situation was. Again I asked about pickup from Croton-Harmon. Again no response, though I did get another email asking me to fill out the survey. Finally, the day before the workshop, I sent another email asking what was going on, and got a response that they had gotten my survey answer and also could pick me up from the Croton-Harmon station, and to send a text message when I arrived.

When I got to the station, I sent the text message, and got a response saying wait 30-45 minutes and they'd be able to pick me up. Half an hour later I got a text that said "Here now. In parking lot. Where are you?" I was looking at the parking lot. After a few confused texts back and forth, I called and it turned out that they were at Ossining, not Croton-Harmon where I was, the shuttle was full, and they wouldn't be able to pick me up. They said they had lost a driver and might not be able to come back soon. They suggested I try to get a cab. ... At least they reimbursed me for that one, and at the end of the workshop they told me with a bit more warning that I had no ride (but no reimbursement). But you'd really hope people running a workshop on cognitive bias would know to make sure the first and last parts of the experience are extra good.

Whining aside, things were better once I finally got there. We were busy pretty much all day for four days straight and in nearly every session I got either a technique I'm excited about applying to my life, or a major insight about a skill I need to develop. I really want to do some goal factoring to figure out if my current behavior is well suited to the goals it is trying to satisfy or whether there's a more efficient or effective solution is be happy with, aversion modeling to figure out why I'm not doing things I think I want to do, offline habit training to"practice" a new habit with the power of imagination,, urge propagation to build positive urges to do things that accomplish outcomes I like, value of information calculations to learn when I should spend resources on gaining information to optimize my life, build an emotional library to gain control over my emotions, and practice moving between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system modes.

I also learned that I don't have a good memory for the bodily sensations associated with my emotions, so I'll need to practice that. And I dissolved some confusion around long term planning, when I realized that my goals were actually a bunch of different things: urges/desires, behaviors, plans, and preferences about future world states.

Now for the bad stuff, especially by comparison to the Singularity Institute minicamp in 2011 - these core epistemic rationality issues were not covered much if at all:

  • Noticing confusion
  • Noticing rationalization or motivated cognition
  • Doing literature research effectively in order to use existing scientific knowledge
  • Becoming curious and noticing curiosity, and what to do when you're curious about a factual question (gather data, ask an expert, review the literature, etc)
  • How to change your mind
  • Why and how to "stick your neck out" and make testable predictions (though there were prediction markets, which was great).
  • The relationship between beliefs and anticipation - making beliefs pay rent (though there was a related instrumental rationality segment called "internal simulator")

This felt like a rational self-improvement workshop, not a rationality workshop. To be fair, the epistemic rationality segments in 2011 were the worst segments - I agreed with the content but didn't learn any skills. But the thing to do in make it better, not drop it entirely!

A lesser disappointment was that nearly everything was in a "class" format, except for Comfort Zone Expansion, or CoZE, where we went out separately to practice with little accountability or real-time feedback. Some of the units made sense this way, but for example there should have been drills in Being Specific, and sticking your neck out, exposing yourself to the possibility of being wrong, since many participants seemed to lack that skill on the 5-second level. And in a lot of other areas I would have benefited from paired practice out something else that would have put me on the spot and forced me to execute one step from a technique.

Most of the classes focused on a single technique, and were specific about what situations the techniques were for. I loved this level of specificity and it made the knowledge feel more genuinely procedural and usable. But for a few of the classes, it took a while to figure out exactly which techniques were applicable to which problems, because the techniques' intended results were often described vaguely. For example, a class on how to develop habits turned out to be a class on how to develop a tendency to remember to do something, when there wasn't an aversion stopping you. (Whereas I'd figured at first, not unreasonably I think, that a habit is just a regularly repeated behavior.) In one case there was the opposite problem - the technique was so universal and high-level that it seemed difficult to translate it into specific actions.

All in all, it was a very fun experience, and I think it will turn out to have been well worth my time. The instructors were great, the missing pieces were mostly things I already had, and I think what I learned we'll make me much more effective.

The workshop also comes with 6 follow-up sessions via Skype, which is a great idea; one of the best things about the minicamp in 2011 was the follow-ups the participants did with each other. I'm really looking forward to that too.

Actually, you haven't adjusted your expectations.

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I’ve been seeing two articles pop up on social media a lot lately. One is this article via Huffington Post from Wait but Why about the Millennials and how they’re unhappy because they expect too much out of life. The article is pretty tightly written so I won’t excerpt it, only try to summarize it:

Their parents lived in an unusually good time, and they basically expect everything to be handed to them on a platter – a fulfulling job that they are uniquely good at, that pays them enough to live a pleasant life outside of work. Not only is life not usually like that (they see the end result but not what life was like for their parents – or grandparents – starting out), but they also compare their life outcomes not to their peers’ actual lives, but to the carefully curated social media images of their friends’ lives, which naturally emphasize the successes. So even though the truth that most people aren’t unusually special is a disappointment, in fact their perception is even worse, because it seems like their friends actually are special, and each person thinks they’re the only one in their peer group who isn’t.

The other is this rebuttal by Adam Weinstein saying that it’s not that the Millennials have unusual expectations – it’s just that things are actually worse. Students have more debt than ever before, and it’s really hard to find a good job, and even “good” jobs have long hours and don’t pay enough to live a decent life:

You have no idea about student debt, underemployment, life-long renting. “Stop feeling special” is some shitty advice. I don’t feel special or entitled, just poor. The only thing that makes me special is I have more ballooning debt than you. I’ve tempered the hell out of my expectations of work, and I’ve exceeded those expectations crazily to have one interesting, exciting damned career that’s culminated in some leadership roles for national publications. And I’m still poor and in debt and worked beyond the point where it can be managed with my health and my desire to actually see the son I’m helping to raise.

What’s interesting about this is the hidden assumptions – and these hidden assumptions are very stereotypically millennial. Adam Weinstein is a journalist. In case you hadn’t noticed, people have been talking about the decline of journalism as a business for more than a decade. They’ve been talking about how the major publications don’t make the kind of profits they used to, because there’s more competition. Because of the internet.

At no point in the article does Weinstein talk about the choice to pursue a career in journalism. It seems like it is unthinkable to him that he would choose any other career than his passion. It is thinkable that the job he loves would not pay very much, require nearly unbearable hours, or be very difficult to advance in. Because these are the things he talks about. But who said he had to be in journalism? If the pay and hours are so bad that they make your life miserable, why not pick a different career?

If the suggestion that you might abandon your “dream job” to do something less fulfilling that supports a better lifestyle otherwise offends you, that is a very millennial attitude.

Adam Weinstein seems like a smart guy. He knows how to make a cogent argument (within the limits of his personal blind spots and biases). He could probably be a good technical writer, or a mediocre project manager, mediocre computer programmer, or system administrator. The hours would be much lighter, and the pay would be higher too.

If the prospect of a career where you are only “mediocre” offends you, that is also a very millenial attitude.

But ask yourself – what would you do if you’d been born into (or found yourself teleported into) a world where your dream job didn’t exist at all. What would Adam Weinstein do if he were born in the Roman empire, before the invention of journalism? He wouldn’t write an article complaining that there are no jobs for journalists. He would never have gotten the idea to be a journalist. There’s nothing in his genes that makes him uniquely suited for this one and only one job. And even if there were, most people at most times haven’t been able to do their “dream job” – if in fact their dream is to have a job at all.

Or what would you do if you were born in a place or time where your “dream job” was not just on the decline, but had ceased to exist at all? Someone today who wants to be a blacksmith could maybe find a factory metalworking job, or make swords or shears as special curio pieces at Ren Faires or for ARMA hobbyists or the few remaining bespoke tailors - but most of them will just not have that particular dream job, and find some other outlet for their skills and interests.

It is not unreasonable to expect a lifestyle on the order of what your parents enjoyed – or better (because of economic progress). Separately, it is not unreasonable to expect a job that is fulfilling. But what is an unreasonable expectation is to assume that there is no tradeoff; to assume that you will enjoy your parents’ level of affluence (or even a comfortable middle class life), and then separately and independently pick a job based solely on what you want to do during your workday.

I don’t know why some people do and others don’t, but I have never really had a firm idea of a “dream job.” So when I graduated college I picked something that seemed moderately interesting, would teach me some useful skills I could use later in other interesting jobs, and paid well. I love my friends and want them to do well, so of course I sympathize when the jobs they would love to do are unavailable, hard to get, or available on an unpaid or low-paid internship basis only. But the world changes, people have always been doing jobs they didn’t love, and there’s always been a tradeoff between the agreeableness of the job and the amount you get paid for it.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t real problems with the economy of course. Unemployment is high. Lots of people are going onto SSI or SSDI, who in a different economy might have found remunerative work. And that’s not because people suddenly became greedy, unreasonable, or spoiled in 2007 or 2008. But a journalist with college debt is not a typical exemplar of that. Most people in America don’t go to college, and most of those that do get a degree to qualify them for some particular field, and seek out a secure decent-paying job. The fact that those people can’t find work as often is a problem we ought to do something about – and the fact that the same degrees require more and more debt relative to lifetime earnings, but are still the only way to buy into a certain type of professional-class job. But the fact that someone who chose to work in a dying industry (or at least, an industry suffering from oversupply) has trouble finding a job where they can make ends meet – that’s sad for them, but it is and has always been the cost of economic growth through “creative destruction” – and the good jobs they heard about growing up would never have existed were it not for the same process.

Dreamloss

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Have you ever had one of those dreams where you had an idea, and it seemed so profound that losing it to forgetfulness seemed unbearable, so you wrote it down, and in the morning it seemed somewhere between banal and incomprehensible?

Well, last night I had one of those dreams – I had an idea for an event in a story – but even in the cold light of day I think it still has pathos.

It’s set in the middle of a story in a scavenger world. It’s maybe a hundred or two hundred years after the collapse of the high culture, and the characters – including a very old man, who grew up in the high culture, so he doesn’t age much at all – are exploring a tower suspended in the air. One of the characters falls through some rotten floorboards into the open air, and the old man drops a rope with a lead weight on the end, which catches up to her, so she’s able to catch it and climb back up. Meanwhile another member of the party has gone to an outer room, closer to the outer wall, where the winds blow faster and the structure is less reliable. The elder comments on how he’s a little worried about her off on her own, and she, on her way back (having endured an unexpected ordeal) says something to the effect of, “We don’t need your sympathy. It’s not like you put yourself at any risk – you don’t know loss the way we do.”

They continue, as he leads them over the structural beams of durasteel, which lasts longer than the common floor.

“I had a wife, once,”

“Good for you.”

“Before the fall. And after.

“We lived near one of the floating towers. It was over Paris. In those days there were still things to salvage, and still beautiful things to see. From the heights, the great cities looked almost as they had when they were still alive.

“On the day before the third anniversary of the fall, we had talked about going up one last time for supplies that would help us in our new life, and then going to ground forever, starting anew, to rebuild what we’d lost.

“Then that night, I was awoken by a thunderbolt. She was gone.

“I turned on our 2-way radio. We had one left over, we didn’t have to worry about interference, so we could boost the signal and talk over a long distance. I heard:

“‘Don’t be afraid. It will all be done soon. Oh!’

“I heard the wind rush past her. I told myself the wind had just picked up a bit, that she was still holding the tether connecting the ground with the tower, the tether we’d climbed together hundreds of times before in clear weather.

“‘It’s beautiful. Paris, oui.’

“There was no room in her last words for me. I told myself later that she’d lost her grip. Or that the wind had blown her off. I lied.

“She knew what would happen that night. Our new life was too much for her – no, too little. Too little compared with what came before. I was insufficient company for the many hundreds of years that must pass between our old world and the new one we would patiently build.

“So don’t tell me that you alone know how to survive. Or that you know what it is to lose the ones you love. The ones you love are mortal, you meet them knowing that some day they must die. I didn’t.

“You know that each moment might be your last together. I didn’t.

“Your death is inevitable. Hers wasn’t.

“But I lost her anyway.

“So don’t tell me I don’t know what it is to survive against all hope.”

Leveling Up

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I've been thinking about two different dramatic approaches to leveling up, and how to apply them to real life. (This post came out of a conversation with a friend, a lot of it was copied from my comments, but I wanted to give myself "credit" for doing the writing, since it is in fact actual writing.)

One is the training montage, which I think is basically equivalent to grinding for levels. You have a skill you want to work on, so you practice that skill, and then you get better. Wax-on wax-off is a related trope. Everyone theoretically knows how to do that, at least when you've already successfully decomposed whatever you want to accomplish into a bunch of discrete, simple skills.

The other is "breaking stronger", when an impossible task motivates you to learn the skills you need to do it on the fly. It seems like the latter requires less willpower, or at least less sustained willpower, so I should be thinking about which skills I want to develop, that would be well-developed by it.

Examples of "breaking stronger":

In real life, a math professor at Georgetown assigned me very computationally intensive problems, so that I just plain couldn't get them done by the deadline unless I thought really carefully about how to solve them efficiently. It didn't feel like the practice or working hard. What it felt like was just being really terrible at something for a long time and desperately flailing for solutions, until I looked back at some past problems and realized they all seemed really easy now.

In fiction, when Frodo and Sam get back to the Shire, all of the sudden they are tremendous badasses by comparison to everyone else, even though they never explicitly tried to become badass. But even barely surviving Mordor, they had to build those skills.

To be fair to explicit practice, there are techniques like "deliberate practice" that make it somewhat better. I'm practicing "deliberate practice" by practicing piano, where I can tell very easily if I'm doing it wrong and need more work on something. And there are probably a bunch of skills I could get a lot better at if I could just decompose them into simple practiceable skills, and then apply deliberate practice to one at a time.

For example, to get better at social interaction with strangers, I could break that down into approaches, probing for a topic of mutual interest, reading body language and other nonverbal cues, sending body language and other nonverbal cues, etc., and practice one at a time - but it's not clear how to do that. The best concentrated practice I've had so far was a few consecutive hours of rejection therapy at the first CFAR Minicamp. I highly, highly recommend it. I am not a particularly smooth or charming person to strangers, but I came up with some "reach" requests that would have actually been quite cool, like getting a random passerby to do a dramatic reading from the book he was carrying (he turned out to be a literature professor and was happy to oblige), and getting a stranger to go have tea with me (the conversation turned out to be quite nice).

But on the other hand, I have finite willpower, and if I can set myself up to break stronger, that would be a low-willpower-cost dramatic improvement. Some workouts, for example, are like that, and it's for this reason that I'm going to invest in a personal trainer or some kind of intense fitness classes like CrossFit - so someone can push me to the outside of my limits - without pushing me in a way that's likely to injure me.

The trick is finding a task that's not literally impossible, but seems like it. And to ratchet up the intensity of what's required from you, not to raise the stakes. What are some things like that, that I can do to improve ordinary life skills?

Last night I dreamt I lost a tooth.

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Last night I dreamt I lost a tooth. The fourth from the left on the top row, right behind the canine (i.e. right behind the pointy one). There was no pain, just "oops - something broke off! Oh, crap, that was a tooth." It crumbled like dried-out grout.

So naturally I went to the dentist to have it looked at.

Not my current dentist, whom I love, because he and his team of hygienists actually focus on preventive care. The first time I came in for a visit, he asked me how often I flossed, I said daily, and then he said, either you're lying or you're doing it wrong. And then he actually performed an experiment to distinguish between the two hypotheses, and asked me to show him how I floss! I was doing it wrong. He showed me how to do it right. The next time, the hygienist told me which mouthwash to use. The time after that, which toothbrush. Etc. I like that they are always thinking about how to reduce my need for future dental work, but parceling it out into bite-sized (sorry) advice that I'm likely to actually follow, instead of an overwhelming torrent of advice. And since I haven't had cavities yet, they let me go longer that usual between x-rays, which I like because who needs more cancer?

So, not my current dentist. Nor the previous one, whom I found through an anonymous tip posted on the wall of my office pantry. His office was in the building across the street from my office, so I figured I had to give it a shot. I visited once, but decided not to visit again after he "joked" that I should eat more candy so he can make money filling cavities.

Instead, my brain decided that I had had a dentist in between - one with a personality and appearance clearly modeled on one of my favorite math professors in grad school. He taught computational math. This professor was the kind who gives you assignments that keep you up and working the whole weekend, but absolutely no busywork. He assigned problems he didn't already know how to solve, just to give us practice doing something really hard. He took points off not only for code that wouldn't work correctly, but code that worked, inefficiently. At first I thought this was terrible and I'd get a B or something just because of stupid nitpicky code errors, but then it turned out that my code just got better in response instead. He was also the kind of lecturer who watched the students closely, and reacted immediately if someone's eyes glazed over - by reteaching us in 15 minutes a semester's worth of background material we needed a refresher in. I didn't really understand linear algebra until he explained it. In each course I took from him, I learned as much as in any other two courses in the program.

So this professor was my dream-dentist, with a dentist's chair in his living room in his home. It turned out that to operate on the tooth, he had to open up my skull (okay...) and stick a few pins into me just above my right eyebrow (Nooooo! Not near my eye!). I really don't like things stuck near my eye. But I figured, okay, whatever, as long as I'm out for the surgery, I don't care.

Tthe really awful part was next. According to dream-dentist, because I'm signed up for the DMO option (like an HMO for dental) through work, rather than the PPO option (pay per service, no referrals), general anaesthetic is not covered, only local anaesthetic. While dream-Ben is totally unconcerned with potentially extremely dangerous and unnecessary surgical procedures, he is still relatively frugal. So I seriously considered asking the dentist to do some kind of stopgap operation now, signing up for the PPO for the next benefit year, and then having the surgery done with general anaesthetic.

But dream-Ben also understands that dental problems can get really bad really quickly if they're not dealt with, and that there's a serious possibility that I could have the stopgap procedure, wait a couple of months, wake up one day in blinding pain, and still end up needing the surgery (after a few more days of extreme pain) before the next benefit year. So I decided to tough it out and go ahead with the surgery, under local anaesthetic only.

Then I woke up and checked my tooth. It was still there. Whew!

The whole ordeal reminded me of this SMBC comic:

Welcome to Tooth Fairy laaaaand! First you must navigate this insurance bureaaaaucracy!
SMBC Caterpillar Land

Bad at Math

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Over at Slate Star Codex, YVain has a post about being bad at math. Being YVain, he keeps coming up with gems like this one:

It’s not that I don’t recognize that math is awesome. If there were “Pray the lack-of-interest-in-math away” camps, I would totally go to one.

It's things like this that make me glad I went to St. John's, which basically is "Pray the lack-of-interest-in-math away" camp (among other things).

Read the whole thing of course, but I'd like to respond directly to Deiseach's comment:

I don’t know how best to describe this; the only time I have ever shed tears in school (and this is not a metaphor or a fanciful example or hyperbole; I mean real tears running down my face and dripping on my copybook) was when I was aged eight, in Second Class, and trying to understand the maths problem we had just been given – and failing miserably.

The teacher was sympathetic but baffled; no matter how she tried to explain it, it Just. Did. Not. Click. With. Me.

Other subjects, I could feel my mind “wrapping around” them (think of an enzyme binding to a substrate) – it was like my brain ‘reached out’ and took hold of the concept.

Maths – no. It was like trying to jam a key into a lock where you couldn’t even get it in the hole, never mind force it to turn.

It still functions like that – I get so far and then – jammed up. No shape. No way this will fit. You may as well tell me “Just flip your left hand over and you’ll have two right hands!” when it comes to getting my head round maths.

Now, of course, I have to believe that Deiseach is telling the truth about her experience - that she just gets permanently stuck after a while and can't wrap her mind around something.

But if I were teaching a math class, and I had a student cry because she didn't understand the material - not because she couldn't get the right answer on the test, or because she couldn't perform the calculations, or memorize something, but because she didn't understand - then I would identify that student as special, and worth cultivating, and possibly unusually talented at math - because she knows the difference between getting the right answer and understanding the math!

Math is big and it has lots of parts. There are lots of different ways to get stuck. You can be stuck because you're just not familiar enough with some common identities or ways of solving equations, in which case the solution seems to be slogging through a bunch of problem sets or flashcards until you get it. But then there is another type of stuck, where even if you can follow each step, the whole thing makes no sense to you. Some people never even know that it's supposed to make sense. Others are bad at telling the difference between a proof they can recite, and one they really grasp intuitively. But knowing the difference - that's gold.

When you're stuck on a concept, you can't just slog through the way you can when you're stuck on vocabulary. You have to take a break. Sometimes your brain is tired. Sometimes you need to see something used in a few different ways. And sometimes you've gotten stuck because you're trying to understand it one way, and that doesn't work, and your mind needs time to reset before trying another approach.

And then, of course, if there's something basic you've missed, it can be really hard to notice that too. Unfortunately there don't seem to be good, readily available checklists to go through to see whether you've missed some simple identity or definition that a proof relies on. I've had a weird mathematical education, so it's happened many times that I've been stuck on a problem forever, only to find out that there's a well-known, easy to prove mathematical identity that makes the problem trivial, that I would have recognized the application of immediately, if only I had ever heard of it.