CFAR

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The AI Does Not Hate You

Posted by Peter on October 24, 2019
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews. Tagged: , , , , , .

Book review: The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintelligence, Rationality and the Race to Save the World, by Tom Chivers.

This book is a sympathetic portrayal of the rationalist movement by a quasi-outsider. It includes a well-organized explanation of why some people expect tha AI will create large risks sometime this century, written in simple language that is suitable for a broad audience.

Caveat: I know many of the people who are described in the book. I’ve had some sort of connection with the rationalist movement since before it became distinct from transhumanism, and I’ve been mostly an insider since 2012. I read this book mainly because I was interested in how the rationalist movement looks to outsiders.

Chivers is a science writer. I normally avoid books by science writers, due to an impression that they mostly focus on telling interesting stories, without developing a deep understanding of the topics they write about.

Chivers’ understanding of the rationalist movement doesn’t quite qualify as deep, but he was surprisingly careful to read a lot about the subject, and to write only things he did understand.

Many times I reacted to something he wrote with “that’s close, but not quite right”. Usually when I reacted that way, Chivers did a good job of describing the the rationalist message in question, and the main problem was either that rationalists haven’t figured out how to explain their ideas in a way that a board audience can understand, or that rationalists are confused. So the complaints I make in the rest of this review are at most weakly directed in Chivers direction.

I saw two areas where Chivers overlooked something important.

Rationality

One involves CFAR.

Chivers wrote seven chapters on biases, and how rationalists view them, ending with “the most important bias”: knowing about biases can make you more biased. (italics his).

I get the impression that Chivers is sweeping this problem under the rug (Do we fight that bias by being aware of it? Didn’t we just read that that doesn’t work?). That is roughly what happened with many people who learned rationalism solely via written descriptions.

Then much later, when describing how he handled his conflicting attitudes toward the risks from AI, he gives a really great description of maybe 3% of what CFAR teaches (internal double crux), much like a blind man giving a really clear description of the upper half of an elephant’s trunk. He prefaces this narrative with the apt warning: “I am aware that this all sounds a bit mystical and self-helpy. It’s not.”

Chivers doesn’t seem to connect this exercise with the goal of overcoming biases. Maybe he was too busy applying the technique on an important problem to notice the connection with his prior discussions of Bayes, biases, and sanity. It would be reasonable for him to argue that CFAR’s ideas have diverged enough to belong in a separate category, but he seems to put them in a different category by accident, without realizing that many of us consider CFAR to be an important continuation of rationalists’ interest in biases.

World conquest

Chivers comes very close to covering all of the layman-accessible claims that Yudkowsky and Bostrom make. My one complaint here is that he only give vague hints about why one bad AI can’t be stopped by other AI’s.

A key claim of many leading rationalists is that AI will have some winner take all dynamics that will lead to one AI having a decisive strategic advantage after it crosses some key threshold, such as human-level intelligence.

This is a controversial position that is somewhat connected to foom (fast takeoff), but which might be correct even without foom.

Utility functions

“If I stop caring about chess, that won’t help me win any chess games, now will it?” – That chapter title provides a good explanation of why a simple AI would continue caring about its most fundamental goals.

Is that also true of an AI with more complex, human-like goals? Chivers is partly successful at explaining how to apply the concept of a utility function to a human-like intelligence. Rationalists (or at least those who actively research AI safety) have a clear meaning here, at least as applied to agents that can be modeled mathematically. But when laymen try to apply that to humans, confusion abounds, due to the ease of conflating subgoals with ultimate goals.

Chivers tries to clarify, using the story of Odysseus and the Sirens, and claims that the Sirens would rewrite Odysseus’ utility function. I’m not sure how we can verify that the Sirens work that way, or whether they would merely persuade Odysseus to make false predictions about his expected utility. Chivers at least states clearly that the Sirens try to prevent Odysseus (by making him run aground) from doing what his pre-Siren utility function advises. Chivers’ point could be a bit clearer if he specified that in his (nonstandard?) version of the story, the Sirens make Odysseus want to run aground.

Philosophy

“Essentially, he [Yudkowsky] (and the Rationalists) are thoroughgoing utilitarians.” – That’s a bit misleading. Leading rationalists are predominantly consequentialists, but mostly avoid committing to a moral system as specific as utilitarianism. Leading rationalists also mostly endorse moral uncertainty. Rationalists mostly endorse utilitarian-style calculation (which entails some of the controversial features of utilitarianism), but are careful to combine that with worry about whether we’re optimizing the quantity that we want to optimize.

I also recommend Utilitarianism and its discontents as an example of one rationalist’s nuanced partial endorsement of utilitarianism.

Political solutions to AI risk?

Chivers describes Holden Karnofsky as wanting “to get governments and tech companies to sign treaties saying they’ll submit any AGI designs to outside scrutiny before switching them on. It wouldn’t be iron-clad, because firms might simply lie”.

Most rationalists seem pessimistic about treaties such as this.

Lying is hardly the only problem. This idea assumes that there will be a tiny number of attempts, each with a very small number of launches that look like the real thing, as happened with the first moon landing and the first atomic bomb. Yet the history of software development suggests it will be something more like hundreds of attempts that look like they might succeed. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are millions of times when an AI is turned on, and the developer has some hope that this time it will grow into a human-level AGI. There’s no way that a large number of designs will get sufficient outside scrutiny to be of much use.

And if a developer is trying new versions of their system once a day (e.g. making small changes to a number that controls, say, openness to new experience), any requirement to submit all new versions for outside scrutiny would cause large delays, creating large incentives to subvert the requirement.

So any realistic treaty would need provisions that identify a relatively small set of design choices that need to be scrutinized.

I see few signs that any experts are close to developing a consensus about what criteria would be appropriate here, and I expect that doing so would require a significant fraction of the total wisdom needed for AI safety. I discussed my hope for one such criterion in my review of Drexler’s Reframing Superintelligence paper.

Rationalist personalities

Chivers mentions several plausible explanations for what he labels the “semi-death of LessWrong”, the most obvious being that Eliezer Yudkowsky finished most of the blogging that he had wanted to do there. But I’m puzzled by one explanation that Chivers reports: “the attitude … of thinking they can rebuild everything”. Quoting Robin Hanson:

At Xanadu they had to do everything different: they had to organize their meetings differently and orient their screens differently and hire a different kind of manager, everything had to be different because they were creative types and full of themselves. And that’s the kind of people who started the Rationalists.

That seems like a partly apt explanation for the demise of the rationalist startups MetaMed and Arbital. But LessWrong mostly copied existing sites, such as Reddit, and was only ambitious in the sense that Eliezer was ambitious about what ideas to communicate.

Culture

I guess a book about rationalists can’t resist mentioning polyamory. “For instance, for a lot of people it would be difficult not to be jealous.” Yes, when I lived in a mostly monogamous culture, jealousy seemed pretty standard. That attititude melted away when the bay area cultures that I associated with started adopting polyamory or something similar (shortly before the rationalists became a culture). Jealousy has much more purpose if my partner is flirting with monogamous people than if he’s flirting with polyamorists.

Less dramatically, We all know people who are afraid of visiting their city centres because of terrorist attacks, but don’t think twice about driving to work.

This suggests some weird filter bubbles somewhere. I thought that fear of cities got forgotten within a month or so after 9/11. Is this a difference between London and the US? Am I out of touch with popular concerns? Does Chivers associate more with paranoid people than I do? I don’t see any obvious answer.

Conclusion

It would be really nice if Chivers and Yudkowsky could team up to write a book, but this book is a close substitute for such a collaboration.

See also Scott Aaronson’s review.

The Finders

Posted by Peter on June 17, 2019
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , .

Book review: The Finders, by Jeffery A Martin.

This book is about the states of mind that Martin labels Fundamental Wellbeing.

These seem to be what people seek through meditation, but Martin carefully avoids focusing on Buddhism, and says that other spiritual approaches produce similar states of mind.

Martin approaches the subject as if he were an anthropologist. I expect that’s about as rigorous as we should hope for on many of the phenomena that he studies.

The most important change associated with Fundamental Wellbeing involves the weakening or disappearance of the Narrative-Self (i.e. the voice that seems to be the center of attention in most human minds).

I’ve experienced a weak version of that. Through a combination of meditation and CFAR ideas (and maybe The Mating Mind, which helped me think of the Narrative-Self as more of a press secretary than as a leader), I’ve substantially reduced the importance that my brain attaches to my Narrative-Self, and that has significantly reduced how much I’m bothered by negative stimuli.

Some more “advanced” versions of Fundamental Wellbeing also involve a loss of “self” – something along the lines of being one with the universe, or having no central locus or vantage point from which to observe the world. I don’t understand this very well. Martin suggests an analogy which describes this feeling as “zoomed-out”, i.e. the opposite extreme from Hyperfocus or a state of Flow. I guess that gives me enough hints to say that I haven’t experienced anything that’s very close to it.

I’m tempted to rephrase this as turning off what Dennett calls the Cartesian Theater. Many of the people that Martin studied seem to have discarded this illusion.

Alas, the book says little about how to achieve Fundamental Wellbeing. The people who he studied tend to have achieved it via some spiritual path, but it sounds like there was typically a good deal of luck involved. Martin has developed an allegedly more reliable path, available at FindersCourse.com, but that requires a rather inflexible commitment to a time-consuming schedule, and a fair amount of money.

Should I want to experience Fundamental Wellbeing?

Most people who experience it show a clear preference for remaining in that state. That’s a clear medium strength reason to suspect that I should want it, and it’s hard to see any counter to that argument.

The weak version of Fundamental Wellbeing that I’ve experienced tends to confirm that conclusion, although I see signs that some aspects require continuing attention to maintain, and the time required to do so sometimes seems large compared to the benefits.

Martin briefly discusses people who experienced Fundamental Wellbeing, and then rejected it. It reminds me of my reaction to an SSRI – it felt like I got a nice vacation, but vacation wasn’t what I wanted, since it conflicted with some of my goals for achieving life satisfaction. Those who reject Fundamental Wellbeing disliked the lack of agency and emotion (I think this refers only to some of the harder-to-achieve versions of Fundamental Wellbeing). That sounds like it overlaps a fair amount with what I experienced on the SSRI.

Martin reports that some of the people he studied have unusual reactions to pain, feeling bliss under circumstances that appear to involve lots of pain. I can sort of see how this is a plausible extreme of the effects that I understand, but it still sounds pretty odd.

Will the world be better if more people achieve Fundamental Wellbeing?

The world would probably be somewhat better. Some people become more willing and able to help others when they reduce their own suffering. But that’s partly offset by people with Fundamental Wellbeing feeling less need to improve themselves, and feeling less bothered by the suffering of others. So the net effect is likely just a minor benefit.

I expect that even in the absence of people treating each other better, the reduced suffering that’s associated with Fundamental Wellbeing would mean that the world is a better place.

However, it’s tricky to determine how important that is. Martin mentions a clear case of a person who said he felt no stress, but exhibited many physical signs of being highly stressed. Is that better or worse than being conscious of stress? I think my answer is very context-dependent.

If it’s so great, why doesn’t everyone learn how to do it?

  • Achieving Fundamental Wellbeing often causes people to have diminished interest in interacting with other people. Only a modest fraction of people who experience it attempt to get others to do so.
  • I presume it has been somewhat hard to understand how to achieve Fundamental Wellbeing, and why we should think it’s valuable.
  • The benefits are somewhat difficult to observe, and there are sometimes visible drawbacks. E.g. one anecdote of a manager who became more generous with his company’s resources – that was likely good for some people, but likely at some cost to the company and/or his career.

Conclusion

The ideas in this book deserve to be more widely known.

I’m unsure whether that means lots of people should read this book. Maybe it’s more important just to repeat simple summaries of the book, and to practice more meditation.

[Note: I read a pre-publication copy that was distributed at the Transformative Technology conference.]

Ray Dalio’s Principles

Posted by Peter on February 25, 2019
Posted in: Book Reviews, Investing, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , , .

Book review: Principles: Life and Work, by Ray Dalio.

Most popular books get that way by having an engaging style. Yet this book’s style is mundane, almost forgetable.

Some books become bestsellers by being controversial. Others become bestsellers by manipulating reader’s emotions, e.g. by being fun to read, or by getting the reader to overestimate how profound the book is. Principles definitely doesn’t fit those patterns.

Some books become bestsellers because the author became famous for reasons other than his writings (e.g. Stephen Hawking, Donald Trump, and Bill Gates). Principles fits this pattern somewhat well: if an obscure person had published it, nothing about it would have triggered a pattern of readers enthusiastically urging their friends to read it. I suspect the average book in this category is rather pathetic, but I also expect there’s a very large variance in the quality of books in this category.

Principles contains an unusual amount of wisdom. But it’s unclear whether that’s enough to make it a good book, because it’s unclear whether it will convince readers to follow the advice. Much of the advice sounds like ideas that most of us agree with already. The wisdom comes more in selecting the most underutilized ideas, without being particularly novel. The main benefit is likely to be that people who were already on the verge of adopting the book’s advice will get one more nudge from an authority, providing the social reassurance they need.

Advice

Some of why I trust the book’s advice is that it overlaps a good deal with other sources from which I’ve gotten value, e.g. CFAR.

Key ideas include:

  • be honest with yourself
  • be open-minded
  • focus on identifying and fixing your most important weaknesses

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Bundle your Experiments

Posted by Peter on January 17, 2019
Posted in: Life, the Universe, and Everything. Tagged: , , , .

The point of this blog post feels almost too obvious to be worth saying, yet I doubt that it’s widely followed.

People often avoid doing projects that have a low probability of success, even when the expected value is high. To counter this bias, I recommend that you mentally combine many such projects into a strategy of trying new things, and evaluate the strategy’s probability of success.

1.

Eliezer says in On Doing the Improbable:

I’ve noticed that, by my standards and on an Eliezeromorphic metric, most people seem to require catastrophically high levels of faith in what they’re doing in order to stick to it. By this I mean that they would not have stuck to writing the Sequences or HPMOR or working on AGI alignment past the first few months of real difficulty, without assigning odds in the vicinity of 10x what I started out assigning that the project would work. … But you can’t get numbers in the range of what I estimate to be something like 70% as the required threshold before people will carry on through bad times. “It might not work” is enough to force them to make a great effort to continue past that 30% failure probability. It’s not good decision theory but it seems to be how people actually work on group projects where they are not personally madly driven to accomplish the thing.

I expect this reluctance to work on projects with a large chance of failure is a widespread problem for individual self-improvement experiments.

2.

One piece of advice I got from my CFAR workshop was to try lots of things. Their reasoning involved the expectation that we’d repeat the things that worked, and forget the things that didn’t work.

I’ve been hesitant to apply this advice to things that feel unlikely to work, and I expect other people have similar reluctance.

The relevant kind of “things” are experiments that cost maybe 10 to 100 hours to try, which don’t risk much other than wasting time, and for which I should expect on the order of a 10% chance of noticeable long-term benefits.

Here are some examples of the kind of experiments I have in mind:

  • gratitude journal
  • morning pages
  • meditation
  • vitamin D supplements
  • folate supplements
  • a low carb diet
  • the Plant Paradox diet
  • an anti-anxiety drug
  • ashwaghanda
  • whole fruit coffee extract
  • piracetam
  • phenibut
  • modafinil
  • a circling workshop
  • Auditory Integration Training
  • various self-help books
  • yoga
  • sensory deprivation chamber

I’ve cheated slightly, by being more likely to add something to this list if it worked for me than if it was a failure that I’d rather forget. So my success rate with these was around 50%.

The simple practice of forgetting about the failures and mostly repeating the successes is almost enough to cause the net value of these experiments to be positive. More importantly, I kept the costs of these experiments low, so the benefits of the top few outweighed the costs of the failures by a large factor.

3.

I face a similar situation when I’m investing.

The probability that I’ll make any profit on a given investment is close to 50%, and the probability of beating the market on a given investment is lower. I don’t calculate actual numbers for that, because doing so would be more likely to bias me than to help me.

I would find it rather discouraging to evaluate each investment separately. Doing so would focus my attention on the fact that any individual result is indistinguishable from luck.

Instead, I focus my evaluations much more on bundles of hundreds of trades, often associated with a particular strategy. Aggregating evidence in that manner smooths out the good and bad luck to make my skill (or lack thereof) more conspicuous. I’m focusing in this post not on the logical interpretation of evidence, but on how the subconscious parts of my mind react. This mental bundling of tasks is particularly important for my subconscious impressions of whether I’m being productive.

I believe this is a well-known insight (possibly from poker?), but I can’t figure out where I’ve seen it described.

I’ve partly applied this approach to self-improvement tasks (not quite as explicitly as I ought to), and it has probably helped.

Fork Science

Posted by Peter on May 11, 2018
Posted in: Health, Science and Technology. Tagged: , , , , .

No, this isn’t about cutlery.

I’m proposing to fork science in the sense that Bitcoin was forked, into an adversarial science and a crowdsourced science.

As with Bitcoin, I have no expectation that the two branches will be equal.

These ideas could apply to most fields of science, but some fields need change more than others. P-values and p-hacking controversy are signs that a field needs change. Fields that don’t care much about p-values don’t need as much change, e.g. physics and computer science. I’ll focus mainly on medicine and psychology, and leave aside the harder-to-improve social sciences.

What do we mean by the word Science?

The term “science” has a range of meanings.

One extreme focuses on “perform experiments in order to test hypotheses”, as in The Scientist In The Crib. I’ll call this the personal knowledge version of science.

A different extreme includes formal institutions such as peer review, RCTs, etc. I’ll call this the authoritative knowledge version of science.

Both of these meanings of the word science are floating around, with little effort to distinguish them [1]. I suspect that promotes confusion about what standards to apply to scientific claims. And I’m concerned that people will use the high status of authoritative science to encourage us to ignore knowledge that doesn’t fit within its paradigm.

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Models of Willpower

Posted by Peter on December 14, 2016
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: , .

[Caveat: this post involves abstract theorizing whose relevance to practical advice is unclear. ]

What we call willpower mostly derives from conflicts between parts of our minds, often over what discount rate to use.

An additional source of willpower-like conflicts comes from social desirability biases.

I model the mind as having many mental sub-agents, each focused on a fairly narrow goal. Different goals produce different preferences for caring about the distant future versus caring only about the near future.

The sub-agents typically are as smart and sophisticated as a three year old (probably with lots of variation). E.g. my hunger-minimizing sub-agent is willing to accept calorie restriction days with few complaints now that I have a reliable pattern of respecting the hunger-minimizing sub-agent the next day, but complained impatiently when calorie restriction days seemed abnormal.

We have beliefs about how safe we are from near-term dangers, often reflected in changes to the autonomic nervous system (causing relaxation or the fight or flight reflex). Those changes cause quick, crude shifts in something resembling a global discount rate. In addition, each sub-agent has some ability to demand that it’s goals be treated fairly.

We neglect sub-agents whose goals are most long-term when many sub-agents say their goals have been neglected, and/or when the autonomic nervous system says immediate problems deserve attention.

Our willpower is high when we feel safe and are satisfied with our progress at short-term goals.

Social status

The time-discounting effects are sometimes obscured by social signaling.

Writing a will hints at health problems, whereas doing something about global warming can signal wealth. We have sub-agents that steer us to signal health and wealth, but without doing so in a deliberate enough way that people see that we are signaling. That leads us to exaggerate how much of our failure to write a will is due to the time-discounting type of low willpower.

Video games convince parts of our minds that we’re gaining status (in a virtual society) and/or training to win status-related games in real life. That satisfies some sub-agents who care about status. (Video games deceive us about status effects, but that has limited relevance to this post.) Yet as with most play, we suppress awareness of the zero-sum competitions we’re aiming to win. So we get confused about whether we’re being short-sighted here, because we’re pursuing somewhat long-term benefits, probably deceiving ourselves somewhat about them, and pretending not to care about them.

Time asymmetry?

Why do we feel an asymmetry in effects of neglecting distant goals versus neglecting immediate goals?

The fairness to sub-agents metaphor suggests that neglecting the distant future ought to produce emotional reactions comparable to what happens when we neglect the near future.

Neglecting the distant future does produce some discomfort that somewhat resembles willpower problems. If I spend lots of time watching TV, I end up feeling declining life-satisfaction, which tends to eventually cause me to pay more attention to long-term goals.

But the relevant emotions still don’t seem symmetrical.

One reason for asymmetry is that different goals imply different things for what constitutes neglecting a goal: neglecting sleep or food for a day implies something more unfair to the relevant sub-agents than does neglecting one’s career skills.

Another reason is that for both time-preference and social desirability conflicts, we have instincts that aren’t optimized for our current environment.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors needed to devote most of their time to tasks that paid off within days, and didn’t know how to devote more than a few percent of their time to usefully preparing for events that were several years in the future. Our farmer ancestors needed to devote more time to 3-12 month planning horizons, but not much more than hunter-gatherers did. Today many of us can productively spend large fractions of our time on tasks (such as getting a college degree) that take more than 5 years to pay off. Social desirability biases show (less clear) versions of that same pattern.

That means we need to override our system 1 level heuristics with system 2 level analysis. That requires overriding the instinctive beliefs of some sub-agents about how much attention their goals deserve. Whereas the long-term goals we override to deal with hunger have less firmly established “rights” to fairness.

Also, there may be some fairness rules about how often system 2 can override system 1 agents – doing that too often may cause coalitions within system 1 to treat system 2 as a politician who has grabbed too much power. [Does this explain decision fatigue? I’m unsure.]

Other Models of Willpower

The depletion model

Willpower depletion captures a nontrivial effect of key sub-agents rebelling when their goals have been overlooked for too long.

But I’m confused – the depletion model doesn’t seem like it’s trying to be a complete model of willpower. In particular, it either isn’t trying explain evolutionary sources of willpower problems, or is trying to explain it via the clearly inadequate claim that willpower is a simple function of current blood glucose levels.

It would be fine if the depletion model were just a heuristic that helped us develop more willpower. But if anything it seems more likely to reduce willpower.

Kurzban’s opportunity costs model

Kurzban et al. have a model involving the opportunity costs of using cognitive resources for a given task.

It seems more realistic than most models I’ve seen. It describes some important mental phenomena more clearly than I can, but doesn’t quite seem to be about willpower. In particular, it seems uninformative about differing time horizons. Also, it focuses on cognitive resource constraints, whereas I’d expect some non-cognitive resource constraints to be equally important.

Ainslie’s Breakdown of Will

George Ainslie wrote a lot about willpower, describing it as intertemporal bargaining, with hyperbolic discounting. I read that book 6 years ago, but don’t remember it very clearly, and I don’t recall how much it influenced my current beliefs. I think my model looks a good deal like what I’d get if I had set out to combine the best parts of Ainslie’s ideas and Kurzban’s ideas, but I wrote 90% of this post before remembering that Ainslie’s book was relevant.

Ainslie apparently wrote his book before it became popular to generate simple models of willpower, so he didn’t put much thought into comparing his views to others.

Hyperbolic discounting seems to be a real phenomenon that would be sufficient to cause willpower-like conflicts. But I’m unclear on why it should be a prominent part of a willpower model.

Distractible

This “model” isn’t designed to say much beyond pointing out that willpower doesn’t reliably get depleted.

Hot/cool

A Hot/cool-system model sounds like an attempt to generalize the effects of the autonomic nervous system to explain all of willpower. I haven’t found it to be very informative.

Muscle

Some say that willpower works like a muscle, in that using it strengthens it.

My model implies that we should expect this result when preparing for the longer-term future causes our future self to be safer and/or to more easily satisfy near-term goals.

I expect this effect to be somewhat observable with using willpower to save money, because having more money makes us feel safer and better able to satisfy our goals.

I expect this effect to be mostly absent after using willpower to loose weight or to write a will, since those produce benefits which are less intuitive and less observable.

Why do drugs affect willpower?

Scott at SlateStarCodex asks why drugs have important effects on willpower.

Many drugs affect the autonomic nervous system, thereby influencing our time preferences. I’d certainly expect that drugs which reduce anxiety will enable us to give higher priority to far future goals.

I expect stimulants make us feel less concern about depleting our available calories, and less concern about our need for sleep, thereby satisfying a few short-term sub-agents. I expect this to cause small increases in willpower.

But this is probably incomplete. I suspect the effect of SSRIs on willpower varies quite widely between people. I suspect that’s due to an anti-anxiety effect which increases willpower, plus an anti-obsession effect which reduces willpower in a way that my model doesn’t explain.

And Scott implies that some drugs have larger effects on willpower than I can explain.

My model implies that placebos can be mildly effective at increasing willpower, by convincing some short-sighted sub-agents that resources are being applied toward their goals. A quick search suggests this prediction has been poorly studied so far, with one low-quality study confirming this.

Conclusion

I’m more puzzled than usual about whether these ideas are valuable. Is this model profound, or too obvious to matter?

I presume part of the answer is that people who care about improving willpower care less about theory, and focus on creating heuristics that are easy to apply.

CFAR does a decent job of helping people develop more willpower, not by explaining a clear theory of what willpower is, but by focusing more on how to resolve conflicts between sub-agents.

And I recommend that most people start with practical advice, such as the advice in The Willpower Instinct, and worry about theory later.

Anxiety Anxiety

Posted by Peter on October 19, 2016
Posted in: Health, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , , , , .

I’ve substantially reduced my anxiety over the past 5-10 years.

Many of the important steps along that path look easy in hindsight, yet the overall goal looked sufficiently hard prospectively that I usually assumed it wasn’t possible. I only ended up making progress by focusing on related goals.

In this post, I’ll mainly focus on problems related to general social anxiety among introverted nerds. It will probably be much less useful to others.

In particular, I expect it doesn’t apply very well to ADHD-related problems, and I have little idea how well it applies to the results of specific PTSD-type trauma.

It should be slightly useful for anxiety over politicians who are making America grate again. But you’re probably fooling yourself if you blame many of your problems on distant strangers.

Trump: Make America Grate Again!

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Morning Pages

Posted by Peter on August 18, 2016
Posted in: Health, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , , .

I started writing morning pages a few months ago. That means writing three pages, on paper, before doing anything else [1].

I’ve only been doing this on weekends and holidays, because on weekdays I feel a need to do some stock market work close to when the market opens.

It typically takes me one hour to write three pages. At first, it felt like I needed 75 minutes but wanted to finish faster. After a few weeks, it felt like I could finish in about 50 minutes when I was in a hurry, but often preferred to take more than an hour.

That suggests I’m doing much less stream-of-consciousness writing than is typical for morning pages. It’s unclear whether that matters.

It feels like devoting an hour per day to morning pages ought to be costly. Yet I never observed it crowding out anything I valued (except maybe once or twice when I woke up before getting an optimal amount of sleep in order to get to a hike on time – that was due to scheduling problems, not due to morning pages reducing the available of time per day).
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Conversational Spontaneity

Posted by Peter on September 30, 2015
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: , .

One small part of the recent (June 2015) CFAR workshop caused a significant improvement in how I interact with people. I’ve become more spontaneous about interacting with people.

For several years I’ve suspected that I ought to learn how to do improv-style exercises, but standard improv classes felt ineffective. I’ve since figured out that their implied obligation for me to come up with something to say caused some sort of negative association with attempts at spontaneity when I failed to think of anything to say. That negative reaction was a large obstacle to learning new habits.

Deeply ingrained habits seem to cause some part of my subconscious mind that searches for ideas or generates words to decide that it can’t come up with anything worthy of conscious attention. That leaves me in a state that I roughly describe as a blank mind (i.e. either no verbal content at the conscious level, or I generate not-very-useful meta-thoughts reacting to the lack of appropriate words).

Since I much more frequently regret failing to say something than I regret mistakenly saying something hastily that I should have known not to say, it seems like I’ve got one or more subconscious filters that has consistently erred in being too cautious about generating speech. I tried introspecting for ways to simply tell that filter to be less cautious, but I accomplished nothing that way.

I also tried paying attention to signs that I’d filtered something out (pauses in my flow of words seem to be reliable indicators) in hopes that I could sometimes identify the discarded thoughts. I hoped to reward myself for noticing the ideas as the filter started to discard them, and train the filter to learn that I value conscious access to those ideas. Yet I never seem to detect those ideas, so that strategy failed.

What finally worked was that I practiced informal versions of improv exercises in which I rewarded myself [*] for saying silly things (alone or in a practice session with Robert) without putting myself in a situation where I felt an immediate obligation to say anything unusual.

In a few weeks I could tell that I was more confident in social contexts and more able to come up with things to say.

I feel less introverted, in the sense that a given amount of conversation tires me less than it used to. Blogging also seems to require a bit less energy.

I feel somewhat less anxiety (and relatedly, less distraction from background noise), maybe due to my increased social confidence.

I may have become slightly more creative in a variety of contexts.

I hypothesize that the filtering module was rather attached to a feeling of identity along the lines of “Peter is a person who is cautious about what he says” long after the consciously accessible parts of my mind decided I should weaken that identity. Actually trying out a different identity was more important to altering some beliefs that were deeply buried in my subconscious than was conscious choice about what to believe.

I wonder what other subconscious attachments to an identity are constraining me?

Something still seems missing from my social interactions: I still tend to feel passive and become just a spectator. That seems like a promising candidate for an area where I ought to alter some subconscious beliefs. But I find it harder to focus on a comfortable vision for an alternative identity: aiming to be a leader in a group conversation feels uncomfortable in a way that aiming to be spontaneous/creative never felt.

Thanks to John Salvatier and Anna Salamon for the advice that helped me accomplish this.

[*] – I only know how to do very weak self-rewards (telling myself to be happy), but that was all I needed.

Alternate Day Calorie Restriction Update

Posted by Peter on June 25, 2015
Posted in: Health. Tagged: , , .

My alternate day calorie restriction diet is going well. My body and/or habits are adapting. But the visible benefits are still small.

  • I normally do three restricted days per week (very rarely only two). I eat 800-1000 calories on those days (or 1200-1400 when I burn more than 1000 calories by hiking). On unrestricted days, I try to eat a little more than feels natural.
  • I have an improved ability to bring my weight to a particular target, but the range of weights that feel good is much narrower than I expected. My weight has stabilized to a range of 142-145 pounds, compared to 145-148 last year and an erratic 138-148 in the first few weeks of my new diet. If I reduce my weight below 142, I feel irritable in the afternoon or evening of a restricted day. At 145, I’m on the verge of that too-full feeling that was common in prior years.
  • My resting heart rate has declined from about 70 to about 65.
  • For many years I’ve been waking in the middle of the night feeling too warm, with little apparent pattern. A byproduct of my new diet is that I’ve noticed it’s connected to having eaten protein.
  • I’m using less willpower now than in prior years to eat the right amount. My understanding of the willpower effect is influenced by CFAR’s attitude, which is that occasionally using willpower to fight the goals of one of my mind’s sub-agents is reasonable, but the longer I continue it, the more power and thought that sub-agent will devote to accomplishing its goals. My sub-agent in charge of getting me to eat lots to prepare for a famine can now rely on me, if I’m resisting it today, to encourage it tomorrow; whereas in prior years I was continually pressuring it to do less than it wanted. That makes it more cooperative.

The only drawbacks are the increased attention I need to pay to what I eat on restricted days, and the difficulties of eating out on restricted days (due to my need to control portion sizes and to time my main meals near the middle of the day). I find it fairly easy to schedule my restricted days so that I’m almost always eating at home, but I expect many people to find that hard.