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cyclicreferenceerror · 8 years ago

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Excusejitsu

confidence: likely, importance: high

[Often I feel “stuck” because I don’t know what to do next. Many important things need to be done, but no one thing is a satisfying candidate, and I just sit around doing nothing and feeling uncomfortable. This is a technique to generate the Most Important thing to do in a way that resolves the stuck-ness.]

You visit Las Vegas[0] with a friend to have a great time poring over the intricacies of betting odds and casino security. Once you arrive however, you’re not sure which casino to go to first, since there are so many good options to choose from.

Friend: Look, there’s Circus Circus! It’ll be fun to look at the lions, let’s start with that. You: Hmm, I’m not sure. I’d rather look at the enormous skylight on top of the Luxor, than at lions. And besides, one of them escaped recently. Friend: Yes, I remember, and I don’t trust lions who escape. Alright, let’s go to the Luxor. You: Okay... but wait, wasn’t Ocean’s Eleven based around the Bellagio? We can visit all the locations from the movie. Why don’t we go there instead? Friend: Aha, we can buy some balloons and try to block the security cameras. Maybe we’ll get taken to the boss? I do like the sound of that, the Bellagio it is! You: Here we go… although… I’ve heard the Cosmopolitan is new and really swanky. Plus they have this really expensive nightclub, called The Marquee. If we sit in the coffee shop just outside, we can make up background stories about all the people going in and out. I bet there are some real Bond villains there. Friend: Yes, in fact, you’ve put into words exactly the thing I’ve been wanting to do as well. Oh, Vegas is so exciting!

Las Vegas motivation works as follows:

Choose any task that you want to do, but don’t feel motivated to do.

Generate any solution to “if I could muster the motivation/time to do this task, what other more important task would I rather do instead?”. Pick that as the current task.

Repeat 2 until you feel motivated to do the current task, then do it.

It relies on the fact that it feels easy to generate solutions in step 2. We’re good at coming up with comparatively more important tasks, even if only as an excuse not to do the original task. My thought process looks a bit like:

“Do the dishes? If I had enough motivation to do that, I’d be going for a run instead. Hmm, it doesn’t seem like I can figure out what to do. Let me think about this after a few games of online blitz…” 3 hours pass

A better solution is right there: go for a run! And if that doesn’t work, use the next task-for-an-excuse your incredibly clever brain comes up with. Excusejitsu!

This works is because you build towards increasingly important tasks, and eventually, you can’t (or don’t want to) come up with excuses.

Here’s an example that worked well for me this evening:

read a book (random task I picked, couldn’t be bothered doing)

reply to messages on okcupid (if I can read a book, I might as well get this out of the way first)

go over monthly goals, and re-prioritise as necessary (hmm, this is beginning to seem interesting and doable)

restart writing habit (yes, I remember wanting to do this! In fact I can start with this very technique)

meditate, practice mindfulness (I know this will get me out of this spiral of procrastination, and it feels awesome - let’s start!)

As you can see, I grew progressively more excited about the tasks I was able to generate, until it was easy to overcome inertia and actually start. I’m curious about whether this works as well for other people, so if you try it, do let me know.

[0] Not just by co-incidence, Las Vegas algorithms are a class of randomized algorithms that always generate correct results, but gamble with the running time.

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cyclicreferenceerror · 8 years ago

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Chronomorph

This post is based on Archimedes’s Chronophone and its Motivations, which I urge you to read now if you haven’t. Properly understood, the chronophone teaches us why it was so hard for Archimedes to arrive at beliefs that our own culture holds to be obvious (like “slavery is wrong”).

I like it because it could be a powerful tool to derive an intuitive measure of the change-inducing potential of an idea. To come up with cognitive strategies you could transmit to Archimedes to get him to do the things you consider good, you have to think of the things future generations would consider obvious and good, but which our own generation thinks incorrect and possibly outrageous. And in reverse, it serves as a test to measure the cultural impact of a cognitive strategy you’re following. Talking about “prediction markets” is sufficiently non-obvious in our culture that it might get Archimedes to, say, think about tax reforms, but getting him to change his mind about slavery would require coming up with something worth centuries of progress in our time. “Make money by inventing technological gadgets” is so obvious in our time that it would probably just come out as “conquer enemy territories”.

On first glance, it would seem that the notion of transmitting cognitive strategies rather than beliefs is simple enough to understand:

You cannot suggest, for example, that women should have the vote. Maybe you could persuade Archimedes of Syracuse of the issue, and maybe not; but it is a moot point, the chronophone will not transmit the advice. Or rather, it will transmit the advice, but it will come out as: "Install a tyrant of great personal virtue, such as Hiero II, under whose rule Syracuse experienced fifty years of peace and prosperity." That's how the chronophone avoids transmitting overly anachronistic information - it transmits cognitive strategies rather than words. If you follow the policy of "Check my brain's memory to see what my contemporary culture recommends as a wise form of political organization", what comes out of the chronophone is the result of Archimedes following the same policy of looking up in his brain what his era lauds as a wise form of political organization.

However, the problem with transmitting cognitive strategies instead of beliefs is that a cognitive strategy is derived from other strategies, and that chain usually has many levels. For instance, if I want to transmit “donate money to an effective charity”, what cognitive strategy do I transmit? How do I even identify my own cognitive strategy here? To oversimplify it a bit, it looks like:

Belief: “earn to give to the most effective charities”

strategy 0: “read widely to understand current thinking on effective altruism”

strategy A1: “seek to help the less privileged”

strategy A2: “understand my own (axiomatic) morality, whatever its origins”

strategy B1: “apply rational strategies since they help me win”

…

It’s cognitive strategies all the way down. Multiple strategies can combine (creating branching) to give rise to a new strategy, and strategies may feed back into each other (creating loops). Each of these levels will have a different cultural equivalent in Archimedes’ time because they have different cultural status in our time, so how does the chronophone select which level to transmit? Or in less abstract terms, how do you really figure out the result of trying to communicate a particular piece of advice over the chronophone? Saying “donate money to an effective charity” could be arrived at using any (and probably all) of the cognitive strategies “try the advice of the last reasonable-sounding book you read”, “follow your culture’s best stance on your favourite school of ethics”, or even “figure out something useful to say into a chronophone”, all of which would produce different results at the other end.

To really get at the heart of what powers the chronophone, you need to bypass Archimedes altogether. Imagine that our scientists, inspired by the chronophone, invent a kind of temporal manipulation device (“chronomorph” for short) which lets you manipulate physical reality across time! If the chronomorph is focused on you, then whatever actions you take here will be transmitted across to an ancient version of you that will dutifully obey.

Unfortunately, the chronomorph is subject to the same restrictions of time travel as the chronophone, so actions are translated through culturally equivalent cognitive strategies (“chronomorphed” for short).

The important thing to understand about the chronophone is that it is functionally equivalent to the chronomorph – that is, no more or less powerful. If you can describe a strategy into the chronophone that would come out the other end as something that’s actually useful for Archimedes to hear, then you can always execute the same strategy in your time and achieve the same amount of change-relative-to-your-culture (“chronomorphic delta” for short). As a consequence, you can test the impact of anything you want to say into a chronophone by instead focusing a chronomorph on yourself, and actually executing that strategy to measure its delta in your own culture.

This makes it much clearer what the result of saying “donate to an effective charity” into a chronophone would be. If you actually did this in our culture, it’s sufficiently non-obvious that the marginal benefit you achieve can be quite large. As a cultural ideal, if large numbers of rich people started paying attention to this, any measure of lives saved and improved would show massive gains. Yet it’s something that’s been around for a while without really taking off, suggesting that people don’t respond to merely being aware of it. It also faces valid criticisms. Any belief that comes out of the chronophone will hold the same promises and be beset by the same problems, and that’s all you need to know. It almost doesn’t matter what cognitive strategy is used to arrive at this belief; indeed you can back-calculate the common strategy that, when applied in the two cultures, gives rise to those two beliefs.

When we say that a chronophone transmits strategies instead of beliefs, we’re obliquely getting at what’s really conserved – the chronomorphic delta – the impact that believing in, talking about, and implementing a cognitive strategy has.

So what kinds of beliefs/strategies are good candidates to transmit through a chronophone? Or equivalently, what actions should you take today, that could be chronomorphed into desirable outcomes in Archimedes’s time?

A basic principle of the chronophone is that to get nonobvious output, you need nonobvious input. If you say something that is considered obvious in your home culture, it comes out of the chronophone as something that is considered obvious in Archimedes's culture.

Non-obvious is often a synonym for “weird”, “nerdy”, “socially unacceptable”, or even “subversive”, so the budding chronophonist must be prepared to cheerfully accept these labels. If you try to seek out especially those new ideas that are ignored, rejected, or suppressed by the mainstream, that’s probably fertile ground for finding good candidates. The chronophone is the bridge that transports the horror of slavery in Archimedes’s time into our own time, transmitted through invariant chronomorphic ignorance.

In Archimedes's time, slavery was thought right and proper; in our time, it is held an abomination. If, today, you need to argue that slavery is bad, you can invent all sorts of moral arguments which lead to that conclusion - all sorts of justifications leap readily to mind. If you could talk to Archimedes of Syracuse directly, you might even be able to persuade him to your viewpoint (or not). But the really odd thing is that, at some point in time, someone must have turned against slavery - gone from pro-slavery to anti-slavery - even though they didn't start out wanting to persuade themselves against slavery. By the time someone gets to the point of wanting to construct persuasive anti-slavery arguments, they must have already turned against slavery. If you know your desired moral destination, you are already there. Thus, that particular cognitive strategy - searching for ways to persuade people against slavery - can't explain how we got here from there, how Western culture went from pro-slavery to anti-slavery.

This gives us another clue: “searching for ways to persuade people against slavery” wouldn’t work in Archimedes time just as “searching for ways to persuade people against… umm… X” wouldn’t work in our time, because we don’t know what X is. If you wanted to chronomorph “figure out slavery is bad”, the action you would need to take here couldn’t be anything you already know is right. You have to start with your best guesses, and take step by blind step, always trying to course-correct, without knowing your destination.

So how could Archimedes have figured out that he should be anti-slavery, if he didn’t know his destination? How can you figure out truths about your world when you don’t already know them, when you don’t know others know, and when no one knows?

At a minimum, you need to admit your own ignorance, and acknowledge explicitly that many, if not most things in your culture will be recognised by future generations as bad. But you can’t stop there – the proper use of humility is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors.

How would you behave today if you knew you were being chronomorphed?

Footnotes:

So how could Archimedes have figured out that he should be anti-slavery, if he didn’t know his destination?

Perhaps the first step would have been acknowledging explicitly that there were probably in his world that were non-obvious to his culture, and that future generations would recognise them as such. Then he could actively seek out philosophers of his time who were considered subversive, and try to understand their thinking. He could have been more wary of mainstream ideas, prodding and poking at them until one rung hollow. He could have enlisted his smartest friends to help, but also tried to talk to the least obvious sources, even a slave. Maybe if he biased more towards the non-obvious, towards the fringe, it would have helped.

This strategy isn’t the best, and maybe not even good enough (given how deeply entrenched slavery was), but it’s a start. In our time, the closest equivalent I can think of is something like CFAR.

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