Agenty Duck

Brienne

Agenty Duck

Brienne

This file was generated by an automated blog to book conversion

system. Its use is governed by the licensing terms of the original
content hosted at
agentyduck.blogspot.com/p/microrationality.html.

Powered by
Pothi.com
http://pothi.com

Contents
In Defense Of Semantics, Or: Until You Can Say What
You Mean, You Cannot Mean What You Say

Proposal for a Course in Which Students Invent

Science

Testing Is Bad

Rationalism Precludes Theism

15

"Science as Falsification" by Karl Popper: a simple

English rendition (with a bit of artistic license)

25

Science is better with Bayes.

28

How to want to want to change your mind

35

The Trouble with Quibbles

38

Hexaflexagation Visualization

41

Hexaflexagation: Holiday Edition

43

The Story of My Journey into the Secular Community

44

"Get your ass out of that closet!"

53

My Christmas Tree

54

Werewolf

55

Marriage Equality: You're Doing It Wrong

59

Mobius Chess

71

Rationality Activism

75

A Parable on the Urge to Know

81

Happy Mother's Day

85

Reflections On Reflection

89

The Powerful History of a Popular Hymn

99

Instability of Values Over Self Modification: Why

Babies Creep Me Out

104

Check Out the Badassest Baby Book Ever. Baby.

106

Polyphasic Sleep: Stand Back, I'm Going to Try

Science.

107

Polyphasic Sleep: Reprise

112

At the very least, use your enemies wisely.

115

What is "Effective Altruism"?

118

Perceptual Editing

122

The Vagabond of Tragedy and Triumph

130

Salvaging Sacraments

133

Availability: Imaginations Gone Wild

139

Running Without Lying (To Ourselves Or Each Other)

143

Press "A" To Jump

147

Ars Memoriae

150

Cuff Links and Nail Polish: How Gender Roles Hurt

Everyone

156

Book Recommendation: How To Win Friends and

Influence People

162

What Is Hypnosis?

169

Hasty Genderalizations

176

Lob's Theorem Cured My Social Anxiety

184

Trade Shoes With a Stranger

205

Change Your Own Mind First

207

Symbols, Rituals, and Effective Buddhism

208

A Stroll Through My Palace

211

Cuddle Orientation

219

Lbian Motivation Isn't Doublethink

223

Truth-Powered Mind Hacking

226

Make Rationality Delicious

229

Observing Cthia

231

A Dialogue On the Dark Arts

235

The Most Useful Mnemonic Technique

250

A Message to System 1

254

Growth Mindset Forest: A System 1 Translation

259

Systems 1?

265

Corrupted Hardware: Stuff I Learned From My Broken

Brain

271

URGENT: BLOG MOVING

276

Explaining Effective Altruism to System 1

277

Ways Nouns Verb Other Nouns

291

Small, Consistent Effort: Uncharted Waters In the Art of

Rationality

297

Take the Time: In Memoriam

308

Simulate and Defer To More Rational Selves

311

My Experiences With SAD Interventions

318

What It's Like To Notice Things

341

I notice I'm confused about noticing that I'm confused.

353

How To Learn To Dance

357

My Feels About the Secular Solstice

365

Simulating Confusion

371

Mental Postures

377

The Silent Thoughts that Run Your Life

386

Book Ninjas Sandbox

391

Identification and Seeking the Subject of Experience

392

How I Feel About Emotional Appeals

396

Tathat: Why Be Here Now?

406

The Phenomenology of Peripheral Vision

410

Directing Attention

414

The Phenomenology of Peripheral Vision (Part 2)

418

The Spotlight of Attention

425

Sunjai's Silent Stranger

429

Feeling Clearly

435

Reflective Attention

443

How To Train Noticing

449

Reflective Recording

455

Tortoise Report 1: Growing the Roses Of Success

463

Brienne's Workflow

477

Responding To Overconfidence

483

Tortoise Report 2: Fluidity

488

Ancient Earth Celebrates HPMOR

517

The Simulation Calibration Formulation

520

Tortoise Report 3: Empathy

524

Against Being For Or Against Tell Culture

547

The Art Of Noticing

550

Why Mere Noticing Solves So Much

552

Primitive Introspection

553

Cognitive Trigger-Action Planning For Epistemic

Rationality

560

CTAPs and The Miracle Question

562

Training CTAPS, Part 2

565

Training CTAPS, Part 1

566

Effective Rest Days

567

A Walking Meditation

574

Tortoise Report 5: Defensiveness

576

Tortoise Report 4: Verbal Processing

580

In Defense Of Semantics, Or: Until You Can Say What You

Mean, You Cannot Mean What You Say
August 06, 2012
Semantics matters. In a debate, it is all that matters. What matters
when youre talking with someone is what you mean by what you
say, and what the other person takes you to mean by it. Thats
what communication is. If I could just project my thoughts into your
head all at once, my choice of words and the order in which I
arrange them wouldnt matter. Words wouldnt matter. But Im not
a dolphin, so I have to use language if I want to communicate.
Language is a social behavior in which symbols such as sounds or
gestures are agreed by participants to denote entities in the world.
The symbols are arranged according to structural guidelines of
temporal progression to denote larger concepts in an organized
way. Thus, an image of a concept is projected from the mind of the
speaker into the world for listeners to observe and replicate in their
own minds. This process is called communication.
The success of the project of language depends on two things:
syntax and semantics. Syntax, the rules by which symbols are
organized to denote more complex concepts, is ultimately a servant
of semantics. It allows for the communication of thoughts far
deeper and more intricate than the mere vocabluary. But it has no
purpose whatsoever in the absence of semantics.
In natural language, semantics is a set of correspondences, some
between symbols and the things they denote, and others among
entire sentences.
For instance, the relationship between the
sentences math is exciting and challenging and math is
challenging is one of semantic entailment, because the meaning of

one entails the meaning of the other. Suppose I formulate the

following sentence and speak it aloud: Oma cabeca djorglesnuff.
Even if you know all the rules of the syntax Im employing, my
utterance will be completely useless as communication until I
explain somehow that by oma I mean cats, by cabeca i mean
eat, and by djorglesnuff I mean mice. Only then can you
understand what Im trying to say, and respond with something
equally meaningful that moves the discussion forward. You can
identify my declarative sentence as a specific claim. My oma, you
might say to me, does not cabecca djorglesnuff. I think youre
wrong to say they do.
And here were at a point where the two of us might start arguing
semantics, because the next thing I say is, I didnt mean that all
oma cabecca djorglesnuff. I only meant that some oma cabecca
djorglesnuff. Ah, you say to me, then youre correct, but you
should have specified that when you were explaining what you
meant by oma cabecca djorglesnuff in the first place. And you are
perfectly right to call me out on that.
Why? Because the sentence some cats eat mice entails the truth
of different sentences than does all cats eat mice, and if I didnt
provide you with the tools to determine which sentences my
utterances entail, then my words havent sufficiently meant and Ive
done a poor job of communicating.
Consider the following conversation.
A: God exists.
B: No he doesnt.
A: Yes he does, and I can support my claim. Behold!
A holds up a spoon.

B: What does that have to do with God?

A: It is God. See? It exists. God exists.
B: You think that God is a spoon?
A: Well... yeah. Thats what I meant by God. Youre not going to
argue mere semantics with me are you?
B: You bet your boots I am.
The above two cases are perfectly legitimate grounds for substantial
semantic disputes. In both cases, one party has done a poor job of
communicating, and the other rightly asked for more careful
formulations of what is to be projected through language. In the first
case, the failure was a matter of ambiguity. There were multiple
propositions the speaker might have intended to convey, the
distinction between the possible propositions was significant, and
thus the misunderstanding was not the fault of the listener. What
the speaker actually said did mean something, but it didnt mean as
much as it should have. What it meant was not precise enough for
the purposes of the discussion at hand. He did not mean what he
said, because he did not say what he meant.
In the second case, the speaker meant by his words something
outside of the standard, agreed-upon set of entities that might be
denoted by them. The reason the word God is mostly useless in
discussions with people who are used to attending to fine
conceptual distinctions is that the standard set of notions to which
God might be taken to refer is very large and poorly defined; not
only is there ambiguity, there is vagueness. But in the case of a
spoon, using the term God causes more confusion than usually
comes with even that word. The speaker did not mean what he
said, because he did not say what he meant. If A were to say God
exists, and B were to say, I think so too but take God to mean a

porcupine, the listener would also be making the same kind of

mistake.
So you see, the more accurate and careful we are with our
language, the more intricate, interesting, and useful will be our
communications, and the more worthwhile will be our debates.
Clarity matters.
Precision matters.
Sensitivity to semantic
distinctions is a valuable skill, as is the diligence to attend to them.
When philosophers argue semantics with you, the purpose is
neither to annoy you nor to show off. Its to actually get somewhere
with the conversation. If were asking for precision and clarity, were
doing so because we excel at identifying problems that derive from
a lack of these, problems that would lead to frustrating, tiresome
spirals of self-perpetuating confusion.
There are important things to learn from people who shatter your
semantic endeavors and ask you to rebuild them from the shards.
Developing the patience to face down the linguistic challenges of
philosophers will lead you to wield language that is sharp and strong
as the edge of a samurai blade. And if you choose instead to
dismiss such attempts at careful communication as tiresome
nitpicking, do not meddle in the affairs of philosophers, nor seek
what they have sought.
If youre too lazy to say what you mean, how are you ever to mean
what you say? And why should I believe that you do?

Proposal for a Course in Which Students Invent Science

August 22, 2012
Part One: Multiplayer Mode

Every class begins with problem solving. The question posed in the
most recent assignment is written on the board. The students, as a
class, must solve it. No one is allowed to give an actual answer to
the question until a quorum has agreed on the best way to solve the
problem, then executed the plan and interpreted the results. The
teacher can participate in the problem solving by posing leading
questions, encouraging certain directions of thought, and
suggesting that they try using tools they already have, but for the
most part the students run this part of the show. There are two
main goals here: to develop their scientific toolboxes, and to
encounter the inherent bugs of human minds (cognitive biases) so
they can learn to recognize and patch them, thus solving problems
more efficiently in the future. Questions early in the course will
emphasize revealing biases, and the later problems will emphasize
empirical methods of inquiry and testing. Overall, were working
toward inventing something like Bayes theorem or another broad
philosophy of science.

Part Two: The Meta-quest

After the question is answered, the lecture begins. The teacher

recaps everything that just happened, pointing out which things
worked and which didnt. The methods and biases involved are
given short and simple names the students can remember, like
testable hypothesis and availability heuristic. This serves as an
outline for the lecture. Lecture materials for the next several weeks
should be assembled beforehand to allow for maximum flexibility in
presentation order. The lecture explicitly covers only those methods
discovered by the students, showing how theyve been used
historically and how theyve improved overtime. (There is a little
leeway here for closely related methods that are particularly difficult
to discover in a class setting.) When biases are identified, the
lecture includes descriptions of studies and/or anecdotes evidencing
or pinpointing the bias, a discussion (perhaps with class
participation) of why we tend to think in that particular way, how we
can notice when it presents an immediate danger to reasoning, and
how to cope when it does.

Part Three: Personal Quests

An assignment is given at the end of every class: the students learn

what question theyll be answering the next day, and must come up
with a plan for finding the answer. These competing methods will
duke it out in class debate the next day. They must also propose
problems whose solutions could be found by methods learned in
class, which can be hypothetical or drawn from their lives or stories
theyve heard.

Part Four: Leveling Up

Tests will be given periodically, but their frequency will depend on

how much has been discovered how quickly. They will include
simple questions about the material covered in the lectures, and a
problem that can be solved only by using several if not all of the
tools acquired since the last test.

Part Five: Winning the Game

The final will be cumulative. There will be an in-class portion that is

similar to the basic question and answer portions of previous tests.
The take-home portion of the test will have two parts. The students
have a choice on the first part. They can either choose to answer
one particularly difficult question, or they can answer three easier
questions. They must write an essay explaining how they went
about solving the problem and why. For the second part of the test,
they must propose and defend a definition of Science.

*******************
What I'd really like to see in the comments here is a brainstorming
session in which we generate a whole bunch of useful project ideas

for a class like this. In particular I'd like to focus on things geared
toward 8th graders, but other thoughts are also welcome.

Testing Is Bad
August 27, 2012
My father is a high school science teacher in the US. Today he was
feeling a bit overwhelmed by work, so I helped him grade tests from
Bio 1, an introductory biology course for kids in their 9th or 10th
years. Its early in the course, so they havent moved on yet from
attempts to make sure everyones familiar with very basic and
central notions that they should have learned in earlier years but
likely didnt. I only graded fill-in-the-blank and definition type
questionsno essays or short answers that would require
significant interpretation. Ive never met the kids in the class, and
since I only graded page two of the tests I didnt even see their
names. Neither is this a common occurrence: I believe Ive helped
Dad with grading one other time in my whole life. Just in case some
readers wanted those disclaimers. Anyway.
It was an enlightening experience. It was very clear that the vast
majority of the students were far more focused on exploiting the
system during class and homework than on understanding the
material at hand. They were trying to learn what they needed to
pass the test, and didn't feel at all that the test is merely evidence of
what they've so far understood or failed to understand. Their whole
purpose as students is to pass the test.
This is how I ended up grading one test on which the student
defined "element" as "part of an atom which makes up an element".
I thought for a long time about what would have to happen in a
childs head for him to give an answer like this on a test. When I
was in high school myself, I never thought very hard about the
minds of other students, and assumed people did poorly in school

because they are stupid and lazy. But now, I see that something
else is going on here, something caused not by the stupidity or
laziness of individual students but by a grave systemic flaw in US
education.
There are two correct answers in this context to "define element".
The first is something along the lines of, "something without parts"
(Dad often teaches via the history of science, so this would come
from the ancient Greek notion), and the second is, "a substance
made up entirely of one kind of atom". I took Dads intro chemistry
class way back when, and I remember his wording.
Here is the real problem. It is threefold. First, the students don't
understand the goal of their lessonsthey dont know how to know
what the teacher wants them to understand. Second, they dont
know how to assess the content and level of their current
understandingthey don't know how to know what they don't
understand. These combine to create the third part of the problem:
they cannot identify the gap between what they dont know and
what theyre meant to know, so they cant focus their academic
efforts on closing it.
As it stands, high school students know what tests tend to look like
and how to streamline the process of passing them. They are
rewarded for good performance and punished for poor performance,
and no one has ever tried to explain to them the internal
mechanisms of learning beyond that. The reason they run into such
huge problems with Dad's classes in particular is that his tests
require a great deal more understanding as a prerequisite for good
performance than do the tests theyve encountered previously.

10

The kind of test you write if you dont want to spend much time
gradingthat is, understanding the minds of individual studentsis
the same kind of test you pass by knowing how to take tests. An
expert at test taking can pass a test over very difficult material
without actually understanding the material provided the test is
written in a way that allows them to exercise their expertise. This is
how I got a B+ on a college level psychology final last year without
ever going to class or studying. There were many things on that
test whose answers I didn't really know, and sometimes I didnt fully
comprehend the question itself, but I could deduce what would be
counted as correct in most cases because I know how to take tests.
Multiple choice, for instance, hardly ever requires understanding in
most contexts. It only requires memorization of associated sets of
terms. Its a skillset that takes a long time to develop, but nine or
ten years is plenty long.
So the poor kid did exactly what hed been conditioned over the
course of a decade to do. He threw together "part", "made up",
"atom", and "element" into a grammatically well-formed sentence,
and didnt even notice that it was totally nonsensical. It didn't occur
to him to actually try to understand what "element" means.
And why would he? Imagine that you arent simply trying to be
efficient so you can spend your time on other things that are more
obviously worthwhile, which is itself understandable. Imagine that
experience has shown that you arent smart enough to understand
complicated things even when you try. This is a pet theory you
pulled together after failing tests repeatedly early on. It makes a lot
of sense to spend what cognitive resources you know you do have
on exploiting the rules of the system, getting by without anyone

11

suspecting that youre failing to learn (including yourself) and

without being punished for your failure. Your teachers believe that a
good grade means youve learned, and you believe your teachers.
Because youve been doing this for as long as you can remember,
you dont even recognize anymore that theres another way.
This kid gave an answer that evidenced an almost total lack of
understanding of anything that had happened in his biology class up
to that point, but it's not because hes dumb, and it's not because he
isn't trying to succeed. He definitely would have had to have
studied to give that particular answer. He's failing to learn because
tests have taught him not to learn.
What if instead of doling out rewards and punishments in the forms
of grades for being able to answer correctly on tests, we taught kids
how to assess their own understanding? What if we taught them
that the first priority is to figure out what it is the teacher wants you
to understand, the second is to figure out in what way and to what
extent you currently understand it, and finally that the entire purpose
of all of this class time and work and testing is to figure out how to
close the gap between those two things? There's no way anyone
would be content with a nonsensical answer. Theyd have written
what they did understand about the meaning of "element".
A few students seem to have done something similar: they defined
element as something like, "all the things on the periodic table".
This is what I'd expect from kids who didn't know how to know what
they were meant to understand, but did know what they
understood. They knew that they knew that the things on the
periodic table are called "elements". They knew that they knew

12

what a definition is. They failed to give a correct definition because

they didn't know what they were meant to understand.
Here is an answer I would expect from someone who knows how to
know what he's meant to understand, knows how to know what he
currently understands, but hasn't quite completed the process of
closing the gap. "An element is a very tiny thing that builds bigger
things and takes part in chemical reactions." A kid who answered
this way would have genuinely been learning about atoms, but
wouldn't have finished refining his notion: he'd have yet to precisify
his understanding enough to distinguish between elements and
molecules.
Not a single student gave this kind of answer. In fact, I don't think
anyone gave this kind of answer to any of the questions. This
suggests that even the kids who are getting the answers right
probably don't actually understand the things the understanding of
which the test is meant to assess.
People like me, people who love learning so much that they aspire
to be professional academics, learn in spite of tests. In most cases,
we grew up believing ourselves to be so much smarter than
everyone around us that we were always confident that if someone
else was meant to understand, we sure as hell were going to
understand as well. We had confidence in our ability to learn better
and faster than required, expected, or maybe imagined. When
faced with the prospect of a test that presented any sort of
challenge, we stepped up our efforts, because we knew it would pay
off. By contrast, many students have little confidence not because
of low ability but because of learned helplessness. We did learn to

13

exploit the system because often we just weren't interested in the

material, but we never had to deal with a feeling of doubt about our
abilities or intellectual worth.
I think that not only have most people never been taught to apply
what intelligence they possess, but they've been taught specifically
to behave less intelligently than they would if left to their own
devices. They've thrown in the towel, they're flying blind, and the
best they can do is to try to exploit the system, and to pray.
For a boatload of unequivocal empirical evidence that conventional
testing is harmful, checkout this ginormous meta-study by Paul
Black and Dylan William. If youre convinced and want to know
what to do about it, I suggest reading up on formative assessment,
a good overview of which by D. Sadler can be found here.

14

Rationalism Precludes Theism

September 13, 2012

I just had a long Facebook discussion about what it would take for a
rationalist to believe in god. I raised the question because the
better we know exactly what sort of evidence would be required for
rational theism, the more justified we are in not being theists. It
turned out to be verydifficult to imagine what evidence would
suffice. In the end, I was able to prove that there are no conditions
under which it would be rational to believe in god. This surprised
me, so I thought Id share my argument.

I'll start with bunnies. One person said theyd believe in god given
fossil evidence of Cambrian rabbits. That seemed pretty weak to
me at first, but I thought I should at least think it through. I'm
imagining that tomorrow morning I wake up to coffee and NPR, and
find that the main story of the day is a claim that archeologists
uncovered fossils from the Cambrian. My first thought is, "Simple
mistake. Someone misrepresented information, got confused,
fabricated evidence, etc." I do some research. It probably is a
simple mistake. But suppose it isn't. Next, I think, "Earthquake
anomaly." That seems pretty likely. More research. Along these
lines, I entertain increasingly unlikely hypotheses (in careful order).
"God did it" is nowhere near the beginning of the list. Part of that is

15

because I'm not sure what it means, but I'll get back to that. I'd be
getting near the neighborhood of god territory about the time I
started hypothesizing that Earth is an alien science fair project and
the rabbit fossil is left over from a test run that got a little messy and
wasn't cleaned up all the way. That would indeed involve an
intelligent creator of the human race, but it's quite a long way from,
say,
omnipotence,
omniscience,
omnipresence,
and
omnibenevolence.
The first problem with imagining sufficient evidence for belief in god
is this: There are a whole lot of things we could mean when we say
"god exists". Not all of them are equally likely. Nor does one kind of
evidence justify belief in all of them. "God" is fuzzy. Much like
bunnies. It's semantically ambiguous and vague. So if we want to
know what it would take to reasonably believe in god, were going to
have to figure out what it would take to reasonably believe in a
pretty diverse range of entities individually.

That's one of the most frustrating things about talking with theists;
they're quick to tell you what they don't mean once they've
determined you're arguing for a god in whom they don't believe
either, but they usually aren't so quick to pin down what they really
do mean. When you try to reason with a theist, therefore, its a good
idea to ask them explicitly what they mean by god even before you
tell them that he doesnt exist. With many you get the impression
that they themselves don't know that they mean. You'll talk with
them for a long while, thinking you're getting somewhere, and then
when you bring them to a conclusion they don't like but can't avoid,

16

they say, "Well sure, but that's not what I mean by 'god'. What if god
is reallyx?"

Legend has it that Paul Spade was once teaching a seminar on the
philosophy of theology when someone pulled one of these. Another
student gave an exasperated sigh, turned to the first student, and
remarked, "Look, what if god is a garage in New Jersey?"

This succinctly expresses a rationalists frustrations with fuzzy

notions of god, but lets see what happens when we take the
question seriously. If god is a garage in New Jersey, convincing me
of his existence is a fairly simple matter. I already have an awful lot
of good reasons to think that there are garages in New Jersey, so
showing me a picture of the particular one you're talking about
would be plenty. But this form of theism is neither interesting nor
useful. I really hope conceptions of god never get so boring as to
be confined to garages in New Jersey.
So now lets look at the somewhat more serious kinds of gods who
are merely responsible for purposefully creating humans. In light of
the many observations about the universe we've so far made and
systematically evaluated through science, it is tremendously unlikely
that the human race was intelligently created. Finding rabbit fossils
would indeed be evidence for intelligent creation, because the
probability of intelligent creation would be slightly higher after
throwing large chunks of our model of biology into doubt. But it's
horribly weak evidence, especially relative to its strength for

17

alternative hypotheses that are far more in line with the vast majority
of what we've so far observed. It would be utterly irrational to
believe even in the very weak meanings of god on the basis of
Cambrian rabbits.
(Obviously, this isnt evidence at all for
garage-gods, since garages are equally likely to exist whether or not
there were rabbits in the Cambrian.)

If god is simply any conscious thing that purposefully created the

human race, then here is an example of what would convince me. A
very long-lived alien could land on Earth, show us the blueprints,
and explain how it did it and why. Well, that wouldn't quite be
enough, because the alien could be lying. (I mean, come on, you're

18

a brilliant alien who's run into an extremely credulous species that

likes to worship even evil gods. Honesty, or godhood? I could see
lying.) But if we took those blueprints, showed that they account for
all pre-existing observations, and made some predictions based on
them whose truth would be in direct contradiction with our current
model, then we could test those predictions and the right results
would convince me that we were in fact created intelligently by this
alien. Which, by that definition, would mean I'd become a theist.
But for meanings of god that are bigger than this (for instance, a
being that is omnipotent), I run into the following problem. It is
much, much more likely that there exists a being who is capable of
causing me to experience whatever it chooses, regardless of what's
actually going on outside of my head, than it is that there's a being
who really does possess such properties as omnipotence and
omniscience. Why? Because of conjunction.

For any events x and y, the odds of x happening cannot be greater

than the odds of x and y happening. To figure out the base
probability that x and y both happen, you multiply the odds of x by
the odds of y. Odds are expressed as percentages or fractions, so
youre multiplying something less than one by something less than
one, which makes the product even smaller than either factor.

It would take a definite, finite amount of power and/or knowledge to

appearinfinitely powerful or knowledgeable. Theres a certain set of
things youd have to know or be able to do in order, say, to run a

19

computer simulation of a lifetimes worth of human experience.

There is probably a very large number of things youd have to do,
and many of them may be awfully improbable, but because the set
isnt infinite, the probability isnt infinitesimal (provided the set is well
foundedthat is, no item on the list requires that you be able to do
all the things on the list).

A being with those powers could cause me to experience what I

would ordinarily take to be evidence of extraordinary things. There
is a certain degree of extraordinaryness beyond which it becomes
less likely that the thing Im experiencing is actually happening than
that someone is purposefully monkeying with my subjectivity. For
instance, perhaps I am actually a program running on the hard drive
of some humans computer from the future. Perhaps the future
human is amused by the game of creating consciousnesses solely
for the purpose of messing with them. That would have to be sort of
an evil person, but I must admit it's exactly my kind of evil.

20

But is a creature with the power to create such a simulation rightly

called a god? If so, then any experience (or group of experiences)
beyond the subjectivity-monkeying threshold would make me a
theist. But this god is infinitely less powerful than an omnipotent
god, so again, that's a long way from the god most theists seem to
believe in. They want a god who can do anything.
I'd planned to claim next that only an a priori proof for any god less
likely than the monkeying version would do, but it now occurs to me
that even that would be insufficient With a slight modification, the
monkeying-god becomes Plato's evil demon.

Plato described a demon whose only purpose in life is to make us

miscount the number of sides on a triangle. It could be that there
are not actually three sides to a triangle, provided that every time
we try to count the sides of a triangle, we make a mistake. This
problem is bigger than triangles. If the monkeying god can control
every aspect of my subjectivity by changing lines of computer code,
he could cause me to reason incorrectly about even an apparently
iron-clad mathematical proof. And this, too, would be much more
likely than anything even close to the god(s) of the theists.
Note, by the way, that even the first version of the monkeying god
isn't necessary for experiences of direct revelation. If an experience
could possibly be caused by a malfunctioning (or strangely
functioning) human brain, it's not sufficient evidence for theism.
Simple hallucination happens all the time. I came up with the
monkeying god to account for experience that couldn't be

21

pathological. Here's an example of the kind of experience I'm talking

about (adapted from a splendid scene by Eliezer Yudkowsky in
Harry Potter and theMethods of Rationality).

You hand a very large list of prime numbers to a friend and tell him
to select two four digit prime numbers (without telling you what they
are) and write down their product. He returns a paper on which is
written "16285467". You walk outside directly afterward, grab a
shovel, pick a random chunk of ground, and start digging. Five feet
down, you hit a rock. Upon examining the rock, you find that it
contains fossilized crinoid stems on the surface (and may or may
not contain a rabbit in the middle, presumably from the Paleozoic
this time). On one side, the crinoid stems are configured to write out
"2213". On the other side, the crinoid stems say "7359". Actually
imagine that this has happened, and imagine how you would react.
I must be hallucinating probably wouldnt satisfy you, for you lack
the ability to factor eight digit numbers in your head.

22

Now, this isn't a perfect example, because it wouldn't be impossible

to hallucinate this of your own accord. But it would indeed be
incredibly unlikely (literally), far more so than anything people
experience when they claim to communicate directly with god. I'm
not sure whether it would be more likely that an external agent is
messing with your mind than that you happened to hallucinate it
accidentally. Or that you're actually that damn good at prime
factorization. Or that you multiplied every set of pairs of four digit
numbers with one member less than half of 16285467 without
noticeably aging and then promptly forgot about it. But if it
happened several times in a row, or many similar things happened,
at some point the pathology position becomes untenable and it's
time for the monkeying god hypothesis to step in.
Therefore, it's never rational to believe in an Allah or
New-Testament-style god, because whatever your reason for
suspecting that god is responsible, its more likely one of the less

23

powerful versions of a god is the cause.

I'd originally intended to figure out exactly what it would take to

convince me of the existence of something like the Catholic god, but
it appears this really is a special case. Even if god does exist, there
simply are no conditions under which it's rational to believe in him
(unless you're willing to give the name god to something more like a
garage in New Jersey).

24

"Science as Falsification" by Karl Popper: a simple

English rendition (with a bit of artistic license)
September 17, 2012
Just to be clear, I'm not endorsing anything the authors is saying.
I'm just trying to make a paper that was highly influential in
academia accessible to everybody else too. The original paper of
which the following is a rendition was originally published in 1963 in
Conjectures and Refutations.
You can read the original
versionhere.

Karl Popper, possibly in need of some simple English.

For the past year or so, I've been worried about the question, "What
makes a theory count as scientific?" I'm not worried about what
makes something true or acceptable, just what makes it scientific as
opposed to unscientific. Science often gets things wrong, and

25

people often stumble on things that are right without the help of
science, so this can't be just about truth.
Lots of people think that what makes something count as science is
the fact that it came from observation and testing. But I don't buy
that. Plenty of stuff that doesn't count as science is all about
observation. People believe in astrology, for instance, because they
observe that astrologers make predictions that turn out to be true.
So why isn't astrology science? How is the theory of astrology
different from, say, Einstein's theory of general relativity?
The difference is that Einstein's theory might turn out to be wrong,
and if it is, we'll eventually know. We'll know because one day we'll
make observations about the world that aren't in line with his
theory. What makes theories like Astrology, Freudian analysis, and
other sorts of pseudo-science unscientific is that they can explain
everything. Usually, when we see that a theory is confirmed over
and over again, we believe in it even more. But if there's no way at
all, even in principle, to make an observation that isn't in line with
the theory, then all those confirmations don't actually mean
anything. Theories like that would be in line with all the same
observations even if the theories were false--so if the theory is false,
there's no way to find that out.
General relativity, evolution, Newtonian mechanics, and Mendelian
genetics are all scientific theories not because there's lots of
evidence confirming them, but because they make falsifiable
predictions. They predict certain things about the world, and the
predictions are risky because we can check to see if the world really

26

is that way. If the world doesn't turn out to be the way the theory
predicts, then we know the theory is false. For pseudo-science, we
get all the same predictions whether the theory is true or not.
There's no observation we could make to find out whether the
theory's false. Unscientific theories are unfalsifiable, unable to be
shown false.
Observations that support a theory only really count as support if
the theory makes risky predictions. If a theory is scientific, you
should be able to make a test so that if you get one result, you can
continue believing the theory just as much as you did before--but if
you get another result, you have to conclude that the theory is
false. Pseudoscience doesn't let you make these kinds of tests,
because there's never any result you could possibly get that would
make you change your mind and stop believing the theory.
Sometimes people have theories that really are testable, but when
the test results don't come out the way they want, they either find
some excuse to throw those results away, or they change their
theory to match the results so it looks like they were right all along.
That's not science either, because it's impossible to find out that the
theory is false when you do things that way, too.
This philosophy of science is called falsificationism, and I made it
because draws it a line between what is science and what isn't.

27

Science is better with Bayes.

September 18, 2012
My goal here is to explain how to approach science in every-day life
through Bayes' theorem. I promise it'll be fun.

(Made you look.)

One of the (several) problems with falsificationism (Popper's
approach to science I laid out in a previous post) is that it doesn't
give a useful account of degrees of certainty. It encourages this
idea that either you know a thing is true, you know it's false, or
you're completely in the dark about it and can't make any rational
decisions based on it. In reality, if you're 90% certain about
something, you should mostly act as though it's true, but give
yourself a little wiggle room in case you turn out to be wrong. We're
almost never 100% certain about things, and that's perfectly fine.
We can still do good science and make rational decisions while
working with probabilities, especially if we take a little advice from

28

Bayes.
Remember back to when you were a little kid and you were just
starting to doubt the existence of the tooth fairy. It was a difficult
question, because if there's no tooth fairy then your parents are
liars. And that's bad. But you can't shake the feeling that this tooth
fairy business doesn't quite match up with your understanding of the
way the world works. So you say to the world, "Stand back. I'm
going to try science."
You start with a question. You want to know how it is that money
appears under your pillow whenever you lose a tooth. The theory
you want to test is that the tooth fairy flies into your room, carefully
reaches under your pillow, takes the tooth, and leaves money. So
your theory seems to predict that you ought to be able to catch her
on camera. Your test consists of leaving your freshly liberated tooth
under your pillow, pointing your webcam at your bed, setting it to
record all night, going to sleep, and watching the video the next
day. Your hypothesis is that there will be a fairy somewhere in the
video. Good old capital "S", capital "M" Scientific Method, as usual.
Suppose you get exactly the result you hypothesized. Sure enough,
three hours into the video you see a light from outside, the window
opens, and a small shiny woman with wings floats in. She reaches
under your pillow for the tooth, replaces it with money, and then
leaves.
The intuitive response to this result is to become
wholeheartedly certain that the tooth fairy exists.
Popper's
falsificationism tells us it's going to take a whole lot more tests
before we should be really certain that the tooth fairy exists,

29

because even though this is a legitimately scientific theory,

confirmation isn't nearly as strong as falsification. But it doesn't tell
us how sure we *should* be. Just that we shouldn't be completely
sure. Should we be 20% sure? 50% sure? 90% sure?
How we should act when we're 20% sure vs. 90% sure is very
different indeed. If you're only 20% sure the tooth fairy exists even
though your parents insist she does, you should probably have an
important talk with them about honesty, whether they themselves
actually believe in her, and maybe skepticism if they really do. If
you're 90% sure, you might want to set up your computer to sound
an alarm when it registers a certain amount of light so you can wake
up and ask her to let you visit fairyland. So how do you know how
much certainty is rational?
Have no fear. Bayes is here.
First, you're going to have to guesstimate your certainty about a few
things. You should definitely do this before you even run the
experiment. If you want to be really hardcore about it, convince
other people, and generally run things with the rigor of a
professional scientist, guesstimating isn't quite going to do the trick.
But every-day science like this is necessarily messy, and that
doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It's perfectly fine and useful to be
somewhere in the ballpark of correct. So here are the numbers you
need.
How certain are you that you really will catch her on film if she
exists? You reason that she probably is visible. Otherwise she
wouldn't have to come at night. And fairies are supposed to

30

glow or something, right? You can't be invisible if you glow. On

the other hand, you don't really know how magic things interact
with the rest of the world, so maybe she's like a vampire and
simply can't be caught on film. Let's call it 80% certainty, or 0.8.

How certain are you about the existence of the tooth fairy in the
first place, before the experiment? Since you were definitely
becoming a tooth fairy doubter, but still thought it was pretty
up-in-the-air, you figure you were about 40% certain that there's
a tooth fairy. You can express that as the decimal 0.4.

How likely is it that you'll see a fairy on the recording even if the
tooth fairy doesn't actually exist? It seems really unlikely. But
you can imagine other things that would cause this. You
mentioned to your older brother earlier that you were doubting
the tooth fairy, so maybe he'll find out about your plan and play a
prank with his film school buddies. Or maybe there will be some
fluke that causes damage to the file so it looks like there's a
glowy person shaped thing in the recording that really is only in
the recording. So it's imaginable, but unlikely. Let's say 5%
sure something like that could happen. 0.05.

Finally, how likely is it that there's no tooth fairy? Well this one's
easy. You already decided you're 40% sure there's a tooth fairy,
so you must be 60% sure there isn't one. 0.6.

Bayes' theorem is all about finding out how much the evidence
should change your beliefs, and whether it should change them at
all. It weighs all those factors we just estimated against each other
and comes up with a degree of certainty that actually makes sense

31

when you put them together. Human brains are really bad at
weighing probabilities rationally. They just aren't built to do it. But
that's ok, because we have powerful statistical tools like this to help
us out--provided we know how to use them.
If you want to know the nitty gritties of what's really going on inside
Bayes theorem, check out Eliezer Yudkowsky's "excruciatingly
gentle introduction to Bayes' theorem". He's already got that
covered (beautifully). I just want to show you how it ends up
working in real life. So let's run the numbers.

We're looking for the probability that there's a tooth fairy after
accounting for having (apparently) caught her on camera. That's
P(A|B), read "probability of A given B", where A is "there's a tooth
fairy" and B is "she's in the recording", so "probability that there's a
tooth fairy given that she's in the recording".
In the numerator, we start with P(B|A), which is how likely it is that
we really will see her on camera if she exists--probability "she's in
the recording" given "there's a tooth fairy". And that's 0.8. Next, we
multiply that by how sure we were that there's a tooth fairy before
we caught her on film, simply probability "there's a tooth fairy". And
that's 0.4, for a total of 0.32 on top.

32

For the denominator, we start with a value we already have.

"P(B|A) P(A)" is what we just worked out to be 0.32. So that's on
one side of the addition sign. Next, we want the probability that
we'd see the tooth fairy in the recording even if the tooth fairy didn't
actually exist. The squiggly ~ symbol means "not"; P(B|~A) is
probability "she's in the recording" given "she doesn't exist". And
that's 0.05. Then we multiply that by P(~A), the probability that
there isn't a tooth fairy, which is 0.6, for a total of 0.03 on the other
side of the addition sign. Add that up, and it's 0.35 on the bottom.
Finally, divide the top by the bottom: 0.32 divided by 0.35 equals
0.914ish. What does that mean? It means that if you started out
thinking it's a bit less likely that there's a tooth fairy then that there
isn't one, and then you caught her on camera, you should change
your beliefs so that you're just a little over 90% certain that there's a
tooth fairy.
In other words, you're growing up into an excellent rationalist who
just made a groundbreaking discovery. Go show the world your
tooth fairy video, and see about having tea with the faeries.
Everything's better with science, and science is better with Bayes.
**************************************************************************
Problem Set: No, really, run the numbers.
1) Your power is out. It's storming. Use Bayes' theorem to decide
how sure you are that a line is down.

33

2) A person you're attracted to smiles at you. Are they into you too?
3) (For this one, intuit the answer first. Make your best guess before
applying the theorem, and WRITE IT DOWN. It's ok if you're way
off. Just about all of us are. That's the point. Human brains aren't
built for this kind of problem. I just don't want you falling prey to
hindsight bias.) 1% of women at age forty who participate in routine
screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer
will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast
cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age
group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is
the probability that she actually has breast cancer?

34

How to want to want to change your mind

September 30, 2012
Back in February, Julia Galef posted a wonderful video full of tips on
how to want to change your mind. When I first watched it, I was
excited to gain so many useful tools to share with others, but I must
admit I harbored some doubts as to whether I really needed them
myself. I've put so much work, I thought, into learning to be
rational. Surely I already have such a basic skill down pat.
Not so! Over the past several months, I've paid much closer
attention to the phenomenology of disagreement and what it's like
from the inside to change my mind. I've found that even after
having been raised by scientists, earning a degree in philosophy,
and putting Julia's tricks to frequent use, it really is incredibly
difficult.
Along the way, I adopted the following mantra. Just because I'm
more rational than those around me does not mean I am in fact
rational.
It's a little tricky to discover instances of my own irrationality for a
stubbornly obvious reason: If I were fully aware of being wrong, I'd
already be right! But it's not impossible once you get used to
trying. It's just a matter of recognizing what self-deception feels
like. At first, though, it's easiest to catch irrationality in retrospect,
so here's a little exercise that taught me to be on the lookout for
resistance to learning the truth.

35

Exercise One

Next time you change your mind about something, make a study of
what led you to do it.
1. Get a piece of paper and fold it in half. Great big in the top left,
write down an estimation of how certain you were about your
belief before you started the process of changing your mind.
Beneath that, write out, in as much detail as possible, why you
held the false belief in the first place. If there were several
pieces of evidence, make a list.
2. On the other side, write down all the evidence you collected or
considered that ultimately led you to abandon your former
hypothesis. Circle the one that finally did the trick.
3. Then, distance yourself from the situation. Pretend that its is a
story about someone else entirely. Consider each piece of
weakening evidence individually, and estimate how much less
certain it would make a fully rational Bayesian reasoner on its
own and in conjunction with the other pieces of evidence you
already had when you started considering this new one. If you
want to be really fancy about it, plug it into Bayes theorem and
run the numbers. Write those estimations in a column.

36

4. Finally, in another column, estimate how much each piece of

evidence really diddecrease your certainty of your false belief,
and compare those numbers to those in the first column.

Now, perhaps youre a whole lot more rational than I am. But heres
what I find almost every time. What actually happens is that my
certainty barely changes at all until the final piece of evidence, even
though the Bayesian reasoners certainty about the false hypothesis
falls way below 50% long before that.

This is what it means to cling to a belief, and it's all the more difficult
to overcome in the course of a debate. Even the most rational
among us have human brains full of cognitive biases; defending
yourself against them takes serious effort, no matter how far you've
come as a rationalist.

But you don't have to take my word for it! Go do science to it. I'll
see you next time. ;-)

37

The Trouble with Quibbles

October 05, 2012
I'd like to call your attention to a wonderful little essay by Jesse
Galef that Hemant posted at The Friendly Atheist today. Jesse
reminds us that spending too much time on the internal tensions
and dramas of a movement can undermine its overall mission. He's
talking specifically about the secular movement, but what he says
goes for any situation in which many free-thinking people with
strong critical faculties try to accomplish something together.
I thought I'd tack on a technique I employ quite frequently to ensure
that my critical comments on blogs and forums are actually
instrumentally rational with respect to reason-mongering.
We all know what it feels like when someone is wrong on the
internet, especially about something that matters to us. Even if we
think they've got it mostly right, there's a gut reaction prompting us
to call out errors and present perfected versions of arguments. But
it's not to our personal benefit, nor to the benefit of whatever cause
we support, to require perfection in every comment, post, and article
we read. Often, drawing attention to relatively minor errors or
disagreements means drawing attention away from the main point.
If the main point is one we support, and if the author more or less
accomplishes her goal of making it well and spreading the news, it
probably makes more sense to point out the best parts rather than
the worst.
The irrational tendency to pounce on the mistakes of others despite

38

one's own best interest is a side effect of the extremely useful family
of heuristics we employ to maximize rationality, a family comprising
such skills as skepticism, hypothetical reasoning, and sensitivity to
common fallacies in arguments. Applying these tools to the claims
of others protects us from believing willy-nilly whatever we happen
to read, and encourages the adoption of only the most strongly
justified beliefs. They're important skills, and without them the
secular movement wouldn't have much going for it. But for every
heuristic, there is a bias.
Quibble addiction is a cognitive bias, one we can learn to counteract
as we would any other obstacle to lucid thought.
Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that criticism itself is bad.
Obviously, it's tremendously useful.
It's essential to practice
skeptically evaluating arguments from Your Side just as you would
those from The Other Side. And when it isn't trivial, criticism is an
invaluable way to improve on your allies' message. I just want to
highlight that not all criticism is in fact productive. Criticism is a tool
for accomplishing other goals; when it functions as its own end, we
risk losing sight of our deeper values.
So here's a start on how to kick the quibble habit. Whenever I feel
the urge to analyze and expose the shortcomings of an author I
basically agree with, I ask myself the following questions. They
often reveal that I'm indulging my quibble addiction. Subsequently,
I'm able to devote my limited resources to something more
important -- at a minimum, to someone who's wronger on the
Internet.

39

What goal did the author have in mind when she wrote this in the
first place?

Do I support that goal?

Does the article/post/comment still work despite the problems I

see?

Is there something more effective I could do with the time it

would take me to point out the problems?

Are my criticisms best made in public, or in a private message?

40

Hexaflexagation Visualization
November 09, 2012
If you've never heard of a hexaflexagon, watch this.
In brief,
hexaflexagons are cool because they have really weird geometry.
They have too many sides.
If you've never seen a
hexahexaflexagon, watch this. Hexahexaflexagons have even more
too many sides. If you find yourself hexiflexagonally inclined, make
one yourself and play with it for a while. Then, once you've
accidentally sunk way too much time into trying to understand your
new toy and you're really frustrated that the sides keep
disappearing and new ones keep appearing out of nowhere, watch
this:

Embedded File ()

For the more set-theoretically inclined:

Node set: {1o, 1*, 1#, 2o, 2*, 2#, 3o, 3*, 3#, 4o, 4*, 5o, 5*, 6o, 6*}
("o" stands for "circle" (a circle drawn around the center of the
hexagon), "*" is "star" (which looks more like a snow flake), and "#"
is "box", which is actually a small hexagon drawn around the
center.)
"Open" for top side: {(1*, 5*), (1*, 3o), (1o, 3o), (2*, 1*), (2*, 4*), (2o,
1*), (3*, 2*), (3o, 6o), (3o, 2*), (4*, 3*), (5*, 20), (6*, 1o)}

41

"Open" for bottom side: {(1#, 6o), (1#, 2#), (1o, 2#), (2#, 3#), (2#,
5o), (2o, 3#), (3*, 1#), (3#, 4o), (4o, 2o), (5o, 1o), (6o, 3*)}
"Flip" for top side: {(1*, 2#), (1o, 6o), (2*, 3#), (2o, 5o), (3*, 4o), (3o,
1#), (4*, 2o), (5*, 1o), (6*, 3*)}
"Flip" for bottom side: {(1#, 3o), (1o, 5*), (2#, 1*), (2o, 4*), (3*, 6*),
(3#, 2*), (4o, 3*), (5o, 2o), (6o, 1o)}
But it's way more fun on a balloon, right?

42

Hexaflexagation: Holiday Edition

November 18, 2012
Step one: learn to make a six sided snow flake. Step two: learn to
make a hexaflexagon. Step three: paper kaleidosnowflake.
Embedded File ()

43

The Story of My Journey into the Secular Community

December 09, 2012
I was raised Catholic. My mother has been a devout (liberal)
Catholic as long as I've known her. Dad's been an atheist most of
his life, but I guess my parents agreed to let Mom raise me and my
brothers in the Church.
When I was little, I loved being Catholic. I went to a Catholic school
in the Midwest, where religion classes were mandatory beginning in
preschool.
I guess "age of reason" was a pretty accurate
description in my case, because by second grade I was very serious
about understanding theology. I considered preparing for first
communion a grave responsibility. It was, after all, the first
sacrament I'd take of my own choice.
I was dedicated to
understanding transubstantiation, why it matters, and what
sacraments are really all about. I remember struggling with the idea
of symbols; I was never satisfied by the explanations of them my
mother and teachers would give.
I was told that symbols are "outward signs of inward grace", and
that they are there to help our small mortal minds comprehend
God's infinite love and wisdom at least enough to let ourselves be
transformed by them. I was skeptical, even then. I was worried that
symbols might actually be distractions, or, worse yet, artificial
barriers designed by the Church to control my relationship with
God. Why are priests the only ones who can ask God to turn bread
into the Body of Christ? I wondered. If God is infinitely wise, what
does He care for the infinitesimal wisdom accumulated through

44

seminary? I felt fairly certain that the only reason priests could
serve as special conduits of God's grace was that their hearts were
pure and fully devoted to Him when they made the request. It
seemed implausible that the sacrament of Ordination, really just a
collection of very fancy symbols, could grant you magic powers in
virtue of its role within the thoroughly human structure of the
Church.
I called bullshit. I decided to become a priest. "The Church doesn't
let girls become priests," my second grade teacher informed me. I
told her I didn't really intend to ask permission.
My teachers had no idea what to do with me. They weren't trained
in theology. We didn't have that sort of funding. Besides, no one
expected that an eight-year-old might singlehandedly attempt the
Protestant Reformation. But I knew nothing of the other sects of
Christianity, and I was comfortable with my personal interpretation
of Catholicism, so I took my first communion happily in a white
dress like all the other little girls, and that was that.
I encountered even greater challenges to my faith in third grade.
One day, while sitting with my classmates in a circle for story time,
my teacher said something deeply puzzling. I don't recall what story
she was reading to us or what led her to say this, but she said, "Of
course, I'm sure all your parents are good Catholics, or at least
Christians." I raised my hand.
"Actually," I corrected her, "my dad's an atheist."

45

She gasped. Then, with shock on her face, she responded, "Oh,
I'm so sorry!" As I write this, it occurs to me for the first time that
she probably meant to apologize for expressing offhandedly to a
fragile group of children her rude presumption. I've always thought,
as I did when it happened, that she felt sorry for me because I was
in the awful position of having an atheist for a father.
I didn't understand her concern. I'd never talked to either of my
parents about Dad's atheism, or about whether there are other
people who aren't Catholics. I didn't know it was supposed to be a
bad thing. I just considered it one of the many ways in which he
differed from the other people I knew, like his being a biology
teacher or keeping lizards as pets.
I talked to Dad about this incident. I don't remember the content of
that conversation, but I know it resulted in his recommendation that I
read The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan. He lent me a
copy. Over the next year I read that and several other Sagan
books. Needless to say, I became even more of a nuisance during
religion class.
I think I was more upset that the adults in my life were satisfied with
ignorance when they understood my questions and criticisms but
couldn't answer than I was by the discovery that God isn't real. It
caused me to lose respect for them. I even lost respect for my
mother, to some extent.
From mid fourth grade on, school was a horribly painful experience
for me. I kept pretending to be Catholic. What skepticism I couldn't

46

contain during class and my feeling that no one else cared about
what was true created enough of a rift between me and my peers,
my mother, and my teachers that I was not about to give up
plausible denyability, thereby formalizing my isolation and rendering
it impenetrable. I became deeply depressed. I refused to turn in
homework or study for tests. I paid as little attention to class as
possible, spending all of my time absorbed in science fiction,
fantasy, and pop physics books. I remember telling my mother that
I wanted to drop out of school forever, that I'd make a living by
playing my saxophone on street corners. Fortunately, I discovered
early in seventh grade that I could get straight A's with minimal
effort, thereby keeping my teachers and my mom off my back, at
least as long as I stayed quiet.
But I couldn't stay quiet in religion class, which, by this point, was
being taught by a priest. His name was Fr. McCarthy. Fr. McCarthy
was The Enemy. Not only was he a particularly conservative
Catholic who'd apparently slept through Vatican Two, but he was
the most wretched, underhanded debater I've encountered to this
day. He knew I disagreed with everything he taught, and he'd
purposefully pick fights with me so the other students could watch
him trample the heathen.
He never trampled me fairly, though, even when I was in fact
wrong. True, in eighth grade I was already a more advanced
philosopher and theologian than he was, but I was still a kid and
had most of my cognitive developing yet to do. I was quite a bit
more wrong then. He often could have won fairly. But he didn't.
Instead, he would use insults, snide and disparaging remarks, and

47

often outright lies to undermine my credibility in the eyes of my

classmates. He could win merely by exploiting his authority.
Occasionally, I'd even catch him misrepresenting or outright
misquoting scripture, the Catechism, or Aquinas. But I'd catch him,
of course, well after the fact while researching his more dubious
claims. By then it was always too late.
The school was very small--seventeen people in my graduating
class--so everyone in every year got a play-by-play of these
skirmishes. Obviously, this did not help my social situation. I was
unbearably lonely. I tried to defend myself by being arrogant, by
thinking that no one was worthy of my friendship anyway, and that
everyone else was, after all, boring. It was a terribly dark saga.
One day during Mass, there was only one line for Communion.
Usually, there were two. But this day, taking Eucharist from Fr.
McCarthy was unavoidable. I stood before him, holding out my
hands to receive the now empty sacrament. "Body of Christ," he
said to me, raising the stale wafer in offering.
"Amen," I responded quietly.
But his hand didn't lower
immediately. He held still, staring at me quizzically. There was a
sickeningly long moment of tension, and then, quietly so that only I
could hear, he said,
"Really?"
I was mortified. Frozen. I don't remember how I responded, but I
know that soon after I ran from the church and hid from my teachers

48

behind a bush, crying. At some point I told my mom, who told the
(far more liberal) main priest of our parish, who was furious.
I hear that Fr. McCarthy was harshly reprimanded. But I would like
to thank him. If I'd not felt that moment of intense discomfort at my
years of deception, I don't know how long it might have taken me to
learn to be true to myself. I don't know that I'd ever have found the
courage to stand up, to speak out, and to be counted. I certainly
would not have found myself announcing to every other
non-Christian in my brand new public school junior year, "You are
not alone."
I was tired of hiding. I wasn't any good at it anyway. Mine had
always been an awfully noisy closet, and people were listening. I
cared about the truth, and I was angry at the world for
systematically neglecting it. So I resolved one morning to give it a
voice.
The school secretary was in charge of making announcements over
the intercom at the beginning of each day, after which she led the
school in the Pledge of Allegiance. That morning--a Friday, I think--I
skipped class for the first time. I went to the secretary's office,
introduced myself, and requested the honor of leading the Pledge.
She seemed delighted that a student was taking interest, and
obliged me.
As she read the announcements for Friday morning, my heart
pounded. My hands trembled. I was worried I might not be able to
speak. Then she handed me the intercom, and I became calm,

49

focused, and clear. I spoke:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and
to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with
liberty and justice for all.
The static of a silent intercom hung in the air for several seconds. I
was trying to hand back the receiver, but no one in the office--not
the assistants, not the principal, and not the secretary--was moving.
They all just stood petrified, staring at me, their mouths hanging
open. I turned off the intercom myself, and walked, confidently but
as quickly as possible, to my first period class.
A few minutes later, I was called to the principal's office. The
secretary was sitting in a corner. She'd clearly been crying. The
principal folded his arms and gave me a Very Stern Talking To. "Do
you understand the significance of what you've done?"
I felt awful. I'd never wanted to hurt anyone. I'd just wanted to
defend the First Amendment and to try telling everyone the truth on
for size. I certainly didn't want to make the friendly school secretary
cry. I apologized, but I did insist that including God in the pledge
every morning is unconstitutional, and that it marginalizes people
who don't believe in God. He told me that I'd offended many more
people than that, because I was probably the only non-Christian in
the school. I thought he was probably right. I left his office in tears.
The truth is, I didn't understand the full significance of what I'd
done. And neither did he.

50

But someone did. I don't know his name, but he was a small
mousey freshman whose voice I'd never heard before, and he came
to me as I was rummaging in my locker. "Hey," he said. His voice
was shaking, and he spoke so quietly it was nearly a whisper. "That
was really cool, what you did. I've always been too scared to tell
anybody I'm an atheist. I thought I was the only one. It means a lot
to me, what you said. Or didn't say, I guess. Thank you." He ran
off before I could even say you're welcome.
He wasn't the only one. More people thanked me that day. And
more the next week. And the next month. And they weren't just
telling me. I overheard people talking constitutional philosophy in
the halls, saying it's not fair to Hindus or Buddhists either, and
saying they'd just found out some of their friends don't believe in
God. A few weeks later I found out someone had pulled the same
stunt in a neighboring town, and then, to my great astonishment,
that it had even happened at my old Catholic school.
I thought coming out as an atheist was mostly just about me. I was
wrong.
By coming out publicly, I did not further ostracize myself. There was
a lot of retaliation from those who felt threatened by the challenge to
Christian authority, but I was not standing up to them alone. None
of us was. In a matter of seconds, I founded a community that had
been waiting the whole time and needed only to be given a voice.
They all just needed to see one person stand up and say, "It's ok to
be an atheist."

51

52

"Get your ass out of that closet!"

December 09, 2012
James Corft talks to closeted atheists through the We Are
Atheism campaign.
Embedded File ()
It's definitely time for me to make one of these. You have my word
it'll happen as soon as I run into a decent camera. Stay tuned.
By the way, I'm about 90% sure that James recorded this at
Skepticon 5.
WAA had a table, and they were recording
interviews... in a tiny closet. This probably amuses me more than is
strictly warranted.

53

My Christmas Tree
December 15, 2012

Embedded File ()

54

Werewolf
March 06, 2013
I recently discovered a party game called Werewolf. I'm utterly
captivated by it. I understand that there are several variations, but
I'll just explain the most basic and the two that I've played.
The basic narrative is this. You're in a medieval village, and there's
a werewolf on the loose. The werewolf is killing people at night while
the town sleeps. A sort of witch-hunt ensues, the villagers decide
one among them is the wolf, and that person is lynched. But if
they've chosen incorrectly, someone gets killed the following night,
and another person is lynched the next day.
In the variations I played, the town also has a doctor, and a visiting
professional werewolf hunter. The doctor knows how to make a
special anti-werewolf potion, and he can make exactly one dose a
day to protect a villager through the night. The hunter has a magic
pendant that glows in the presence of a werewolf, but it can only be
used on one person a night and must re-charge during the day.

1. Everyone gets a card. One card signifies "narrator", one

"werewolf", and the rest "villagers". The narrator reveals himself,
but the other players keep their cards secret.

55

2. The narrator says, "Goodnight villagers," and the other players

close their eyes, beginning the night phase of the game. They all
begin to tap their legs, making noise so no one can identify who
is taking non-verbal actions by sound. The narrator says,
"Werewolf, wake up." The werewolf opens her eyes. The doctor
asks her who she wants to kill, and she points at a player who
isn't the narrator. The narrator takes note and tells the werewolf
to go back to sleep. The narrator then says, "Good morning
villagers," and all players open their eyes, beginning the day
phase.
3. During the day phase, the non-narrator players must vote on
who they think the wolf is. The person with the most votes gets
lynched--that is, she leaves the game and reveals her card.
(Presumably they go through her belongings after the lynching
and discover her true identity.) If she was indeed the werewolf,
the villagers have won. If she wasn't, the game returns to the
night phase. The goal of the villagers is to save as many
villagers as possible, and the goal of the wolf is to kill as many
as possible without getting lynched.
Now, during the day phase, the wolf does what he can to convince
the villagers that he's not the wolf. Obviously, no one wants anyone
else to think she's the wolf, innocent or not. In this most basic case,
it's almost entirely a game of social dynamics, where you're either
trying to lie convincingly or trying to find the liar. This can be fun, but
it gets so much better.
Here's the first variation I played.

56

1. Start with five people and five cards. The cards can be from a
poker deck or something else, provided one card signifies
"werewolf", one "doctor", one "hunter", one "villager", and one
"narrator". Each player looks at her card and keeps it secret,
with the exception of the narrator, who reveals herself as such.
2. Upon the narrator's instruction, the other four players close their
eyes. They all begin to tap their legs, making noise so no one
can identify who is taking non-verbal actions by sound. The
narrator says, "Doctor, wake up." The player with the doctor card
opens her eyes. The narrator asks her, "Who do you want to
protect?" The doctor points to a player who is not the narrator,
and the narrator takes note of this. The narrator says, "Doctor,
go back to sleep," and the doctor closes her eyes. The narrator
says, "Werewolf, wake up." The werewolf opens her eyes. The
doctor asks her who she wants to kill, and she points at a player
who isn't the narrator. The narrator takes note and tells the
werewolf to go back to sleep. The narrator has the hunter wake
up, asks who she thinks the werewolf is, takes note, and has her
go back to sleep. Then the narrator says, "Good morning
villagers!" and everyone opens their eyes (and stops tapping).
3. If the doctor protected the same person the werewolf tried to kill,
and the hunter failed to discover the werewolf, the narrator says,
"No one died." If the doctor protected a different person than the
werewolf tried to kill, the narrator says, "[Name of player] died." If
the hunter discovered the werewolf, the village kills the werewolf
and villagers still alive win. If the hunter failed to discover the
werewolf and a non-werewolf character died, the dead player

57

reveals her card to the other players. (Perhaps

the villagers notice she's not at town council, go investigate at
her house, discover she's dead, and learn her true identity by
examining her belongings.)
4. The remaining villagers must now vote. By majority vote, they
can either wait another night (and risk losing someone to the
wolf), or lynch the person they vote is the wolf. If they lynch the
wrong person, that person does not reveal her card (perhaps
the lynchings take place in the evening and everyone goes
directly to bed afterward), and the game returns to night phase.
Now this gets really interesting really quickly. For the moment, I'll
leave you to think about why, and I'll describe some interesting
scenarios in the near future.
I like this variation even more: everything is as above, but if there
are n players, use (n+2)-4 villager cards. 2 cards are discarded, and
no one knows what they are. This means there's probably a
werewolf, but only the narrator (and the wolf, if there is one) is
completely certain. This might be a true witch hunt. Similarly, there
might be a doctor, and there might be a hunter, but it's not
a guarantee. Did no one die last night because the doctor protected
the right person, or because there's no wolf? Is the person claiming
to be the hunter really the hunter, or has the wolf figured out that
there isn't a hunter so he can safely pretend to hunt? Maybe if we're
confident there's no wolf, we should lynch no one and have the
doctor protect herself tonight to be certain. But this can't be a
perfect test, because if the wolf is sly she'll target the doctor to
produce a false negative. Not to mention, perhaps there's no doctor
at all!

58

Marriage Equality: You're Doing It Wrong

March 26, 2013

Guess what. I don't support gay marriage! Didn't expect that,

did you?
Chill, this has nothing to do with hating gay people. Im not
straight myself. In fact, let's take a moment to all of this Prop 8
nonsense proclaims. Ok, moving on.
Marriage itself is unconstitutional.
Before I argue for disestablishment, let's be clear that we're
talking about civil marriage here, the mode of existence
marriage takes in law. Most of the arguments for marriage the
Right exudes pertain to either religious marriage or a fanciful
idealization of historical marriage. Arguments from sanctity
and tradition are plainly irrelevant to the governmental
establishment of civil marriage, so I won't subject you to
serious consideration of them. Arguments from the Left are a
bit more diverse, but nearly all of them fall into the broad
categories delineated univocally by the Right. By and large
they are sanctity arguments presented sentimentally instead of
religiously.

59

The only common argument for civil marriage worthy of

refutation is the argument from reproduction. It goes like this.
Government should be able to regulate marital relationships
because the production of children is necessary for the
continuation of the country. As Charles Cooper put it in his ,
There is clearly a rational basis justifying the traditional
definition of marriage. The key reason that marriage has
existed at all in any society and at any time is that sexual
relationships between men and women naturally
produce children. Society has no particular interest in a
platonic relationship between a man and a woman no
matter how close, no matter how committed it may be.
But civil marriage is not about children and hasnt been since
1964. Before that year, it was illegal in Connecticut for doctors
to provide council to couples asking about contraception.
Estelle Griswold, then director of the Planned Parenthood
League of Connecticut, was convicted of violating this law
when she and the Leagues medical director were caught
advising couples on methods of birth control. She appealed,
and in the end the law was struck down by the US Supreme
Court, ruling that it violated the right to privacy implicit in the
Bill of Rights.
The cases direct effect was to grant married couples the right
to use contraceptives; but other results were far more
profound. Griswold v Connecticut impacted marriage law in
two giant ways. It first established that the first, third, fourth,
and ninth amendments together create a right to privacy within

60

marriage. Additionally, in protecting under that right the

freedom to employ contraception, all legally recognized sexual
relationships thereafter no longer existed in law for the
purpose of bearing children, as the sexually active couple was
free to choose indefinitely to not conceive. By legalizing
contraception for married couples the case divorced civil
marriage from the conception of children. Whatever the
purpose of civil marriage, it is not that proposed by Carles
Cooper and his compatriots.
So much for positive grounds for civil marriage. Onward to my
own claim.
Civil marriage is not only groundless but positively
unconstitutional. Specifically, it violates the 14th amendments
equal protection clause with respect to the class of unmarried
individuals. There is precedent supporting its lack of a rational
basis, but I claim further that it fails every other step of the
equal protection test as well.
Shortly after the Griswald case, a similar scene went down in
Massachusetts. In 1971, pro-choice activist William Baird gave
a lecture at Boston University on birth control and
overpopulation. After the lecture he gave a spermicidal foam to
a woman in the audience. In Massachusetts, contraceptives
could be distributed legally only by registered medical
professionals, and then only to married couples. As neither
condition was met in this case, the state charged Baird with a
felony. The defense argued that the Massachusetts law

61

violated the right to privacy noted in the Griswold case seven

years earlier.
In the end, the law was overthrown, but not because of the
right to privacy. The pertinent question was re-framed like this:
Rather than asking whether the right to privacy applied to the
sex lives of singles as well, the court asked whether there ever
were grounds for differentiating between married and
unmarried people in the first place.
To understand the courts ruling and its broader significance,
you have to know about the interpretation of the equal
protection clause of the 14th amendment employed in law. See,
the actual wording of the amendment is,
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor
shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property,
without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
But the broadest interpretation of the text would make most
legislation impossible. If this actually meant that every law
must apply to all citizens equally, there could not be, for
instance, distinctions in legislation between eight-year-olds
and fifty-year-olds, nor between billionaires and the poor. To
prevent this stalemate, whenever a question arises regarding
the validity of distinctions between groups, the group getting

62

shafted undergoes an equal protection test.

Here's how the test works.
First we ask, Is the characteristic defining the group
immutable? Skin color and gender, for instance, are
immutable. Choice of vehicle is not. Obviously, not all
defining characteristics are so unequivocal.
If the answer to the first question is yes, the distinction is
subject to strict scrutiny which means asking, Is there a
compelling argument that the state has a legitimate interest
in protecting one group and not the other? If the answer to
that is yes as well, then the law in question can be upheld.
Otherwise its unconstitutional.
If the answer to the first question is no, then the second
question becomes, Does the group under review have a
history of maltreatment? If yes, the state may have an
ulterior motive for legislating against them, which again
triggers strict scrutiny.
If there is no immutable characteristic and no history of
maltreatment, we move on to the question of whether or not
a fundamental interest is at stake. Fundamental interests
are a purposefully hazy class of which the most famous are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If an interest the
court deems fundamental is at stake, strict scrutiny is
triggered.

63

If not, the law can be upheld as long as there is some

rational basis for the distinction. The rational basis test is
a very easy one to pass, because any reasonable ground
whatsoever applies. Very few cases involve distinctions that
failed rational basis.

Eisenstaedt v. Baird is one of those few. Though the defenses

initial criticism of the Massachusetts law concerned an
extension of the right to privacy, the case moved into equal
protection law when singles were identified as an insular group
against which the state legislated. An equal protection test was
clearly in order.
Is it constitutional to uphold a law granting rights to married
people that singles are denied?
In this case, singles made it all the way through the first three
sections; according to the judges, the group was not defined
by an immutable characteristic, did not have a history of
maltreatment, and there were no fundamental interests at
stake. Ultimately, though, there was simply no legitimate
interest for the state, no rational basis, that warranted
distinguishing between married and single people in awarding
the right to use contraceptives.
The implications of that ruling are potentially much, much
more extensive than anyone seems to realize. As far as I can
tell, non-married people have delighted in their equal right to

64

use contraceptives and have left it at that; efforts toward

"marriage equality" remain overwhelmingly focused on
extending marital benefits to same-sex couples, while attempts
to secure further equality for single citizens barely exist.
Though denied to the unmarried, singles seem oblivious to
their own marginalization.
Assuming, keeping with the Eisenstadt ruling, that the
unmarried dont warrant strict scrutiny, the tedious enterprise
of examining every marital right and benefit for a rational basis
may appear excessive. When running singles through the full
equal protection test, however, I obtain very different results
from those judged in 1971. If it happens that upon further
consideration the unmarried fail every single step of the equal
protection test, the process of awarding them far-reaching
equality may be streamlined.
Conveniently, thats exactly the case.
Lets take it from the top: the first step is immutability. Is the
class of unmarried people defined by an immutable
characteristic? At first glance it doesn't look like it. After all,
marriage is something you can opt into or out of. No one has to
stay single, right? (Note: Ive actually heard people argue that,
Even gay men can marry women.)
Its actually not quite that simple. It helps to keep in mind that
the defining characteristic in question is that of the unmarried.

65

The status of married certainly isnt immutable, as anyone

can say no to a proposal, and anyone can get a divorce. But
unmarried is a default state that was never initially chosen by
anyone, and its simply not true that every adult is totally free
to opt out of the unmarried status. First of all, it isnt something
that can be done alone; unlike choosing a car or a career, it
requires an equal commitment by another person. While
individuals have full freedom regarding their own decision to
remain in or resign from the single class, they have no direct
reign over the decisions of potential marriage partners. Since
unmarried is the default state, an individual can not actually
choose freely to exit the class into which she was born, making
it an immutable characteristic.
Secondly, there are plenty of clear barriers indefinitely
preventing some people from getting married. Some who
desire marriage simply fail to find a partner, and others may
not have access to marriage due to physical or mental illness.
That alone is enough to trigger strict scrutiny (as opposed to
the rational basis test, or ordinary scrutiny, applied in
Eisenstadt v. Baird). But theres more.
The second question is, Does the group have a history of
maltreatment? The Supreme Court of 1971 must have
experienced a temporary lapse in most cognitive faculties to
have answered no to this question. The correct answer is
unassailably yes, and especially for the subclass of
unmarried women. Until fairly recently it was nearly impossible
for an unmarried woman to support herself, because the entire

66

structure of society was built around the bias toward

patriarchal marriage. An adult woman without a husband
underwent severe economic and social maltreatment, all the
worse if she bore children. The economic maltreatment in
particular continues today, largely as a result of the rights
denied to the unmarried.
In summary thus far: the defining characteristic of the class in
question is immutable and there is a clear history of
maltreatment. Is there also a fundamental interest at stake?
Does legislation against singles encroach upon some basic,
fundamental human right?
Yes, it does. , identifications of fundamental interests in
Supreme Court cases have included the right to parent. There
are many ways in which legislation against the unmarried
encumbers parenting. enumerates:
All unmarried parents both the truly single, and those in
committed, but unmarried relationships, will find their
parenting burdened by marriage laws, and by the scores of
financial benefits withheld them by virtue of that status.
Unmarried poor parents will not have a deceased marital
partners Social Security or military pension on which to
drawnor will she have the possibility of drawing on that of a
deceased companion, coparent, or intimate. She will not have
the benefit of favorable tax treatment, or private health
insurance provided to spouses, that are routinely accorded
married persons. She will not have a partner with a virtual

67

power of attorney to make decisions on her behalf or that of

her children, should she become incapacitated. Either directly
or indirectly, the law is deeply implicated in a regime that has
an adverse impact upon a class of people trying to engage in a
basic, fundamental life activitybearing, nurturing, and raising
childrenand trying to do so outside the protective perimeters
of marriage.
Obviously, government intervention or no, single parents face
challenges to which couples are not subject. It is the
fundamental right of an individual to confront those challenges
and raise her children, with or without a co-parent. The
problem is not that single parents have a tougher time overall.
Its that a prodigious portion of that hardship is caused by the
denial of marital benefits to unmarried parents. Surely, if
parents are receiving federal aid in caring for their children,
single parents need it most. But thats not the world were
living in. Not yet.
Finally, does the state have any interest whatsoever in denying
rights to single people it affords to married couples?
Remember Griswald vs Connecticut. The many arguments
founded on the states interest in procreation are void.
Arguments for the stability life-long partnerships create in
society are flimsy as well; no-fault divorce means a marriage
can end at any time. There is no longer any legal obligation to
remain married, and .

68

The most legitimate interest the state might have in the

institution of civil marriage is the care members of a marriage
provide for each other. Whenever one individual supports
another in a time of need, she removes that responsibility from
the state. Ideally, married couples engage in this kind of
support consistently, and theyre rewarded copiously for it
through their many rights and benefits. It makes sense for the
government to actively encourage and fortify such care-giving
behavior.
But the exclusive identification of marriage with relationships
of care-giving is transparently mistaken. Humans are social
creatures, so when something goes wrong we look to the
networks of support in which we find ourselves. Those
networks are invaluable not only to individuals but to the state,
and they are far more diverse than the traditional husband/wife
family model. The enterprise of care-giving can take
innumerable forms: a lesbian couple raising a child, a
middle-aged man caring for his elderly mother, a woman and
her male best friend together raising children from previous
marriages, or a man supporting his chronically ill brother, to
name a small handful.
Take another look at the words of Charles Cooper.
The key reason that marriage has existed at all in any
society and at any time is that sexual relationships
between men and women naturally produce children.
Society has no particular interest in a platonic
relationship between a man and a woman no matter how

69

close, no matter how committed it may be.

The truth is, society has no legitimate interest in the private
sexual lives of citizens, but it has every interest in close and
committed relationships whether or not they be of a sexual
nature as well. By indiscriminately distributing financial
support to married couples who may not require it solely by
virtue of their presumably sexual partnership, less funding
remains for singles in selfless, draining, committed care-giving
positions. There is no rational basis for providing financial
benefits and other civil rights to married people while denying
them to the unmarried.
The legal distinction between marital statuses fails the equal
protection test many times over, serves no state interest, and
harms society as a whole. Yes, it is horrible that, in the US, gay
people cant marry each other while straight people can. But if
were serious about equality for all, we should be dissolving
civil marriage. Not expanding it.

70

Mobius Chess
March 27, 2013
Many thanks to Robby Bensinger and Jesse Galef for the
feedback loops of brilliant geekery without which this might
not have happened.
I think actual game play would work best with felt and velcro.

Step one: three and a half pieces of paper. Fold.

Step two: color. And color. And color. Oh god so much
coloring. Black should be opposite black.

71

Step three: mobify.

To be honest, my original motivation was my feeling that pawn
promotion is a bit of a copout. This seemed the most
interesting way to do away with it.
Final product:
Embedded File ()

72

P.S. This is basically what I'm envisioning for the diagonally

looping bishop variant. Just imagine eight columns with the
usual two color pattern.

73

74

Rationality Activism
April 03, 2013
Secular groups should devote more resources to rationality
activism. If you know what I mean by "rationality activism" and
agree that we should be focusing on it more, you can stop
here. Otherwise, read on.
Activism?
People get a little jumpy sometimes when I mention "activism"
in the context of the secular movement. It often brings to mind
"evangelical atheists" and concerted efforts to undermine
religion. That's a scary picture when we've made so much
progress toward establishing inviting communities, engaging
in productive dialogues with religious organizations, and
improving the atheist image. But I think this comes from a
misunderstanding about what a secular group is and could be.
There's a lot of uncertainty surrounding our relationship with
religious people and organizations. Many individual members
have at least an intuition that there's something genuinely
harmful about religion (or particular kinds of religion), and that
the world would be better off without it. I strongly sympathize.
Many central features of most of the largest religions are
frightening and dangerous. On the other hand, even if a secular
group wanted to fight religion explicitly, the project would
probably fail. It isn't a practical strategy. (I'll happily defend
that for anyone who asks me to, but since my goal is to

75

describe an alternative method that would sidestep this issue,

I'm not going to use this space to re-hash that apparently
endless "confrontation vs. accommodation" debate.)
So a lot of groups make the primary focus community building;
one thing atheists lack is a ready-made community center
where they know they'll be welcomed and accepted. It's very
important secular groups maintain that particular function,
whatever else we do in addition. At the very least, a strong
community is simply a prerequisite for a successful
community-based activist project.
The mistake we frequently make is in thinking that we must
either be anti-religious or avoid activism entirely. This is silly.
There is a positive approach to activism that makes sense for
us, and not only would taking it give us direction, but we're
uniquely situated to make rapid and far-reaching
improvements to the world should we unite toward this goal.
Religion is not the problem.
"Activism" is about passionate, coordinated efforts to change
the world. What secular activism should be depends on what
changes we want to make to the world. What are those
changes? What counts as "winning" for the secular
movement? I don't think "equal social status and protection
under the laws for non-religious people" is the answer to that
particular question, even if it's definitely a significant
improvement to the current situation. (It is, of course, a

76

mission particular organizations within the secular movement

should be focusing on. I'm speaking more generally, and
especially to student groups.) It's certainly a crucial step along
the path, but our preoccupation with science, for example, is
evidence that we already have our sights set higher than that.
If we really stop to think about it, I doubt "the end of religion" is
the answer either. Imagine that, overnight, all organized
religion disappears. Everything else remains the same, but
nobody goes to church, nobody prays, and nobody believes in
God. I'll definitely grant that this is a net improvement. Shall we
call it a day and keep to ourselves from here on out, or is there
more work to be done?
Before the advent of this anti-religious miracle, what bothered
me about religion was a very simple matter: Many religious
memes are powerful deterrents to rational decision making.
They can act as parasites that latch onto our cognitive biases
and drain away whatever potential we have to inoculate
ourselves against them. My concern is not, at heart, with
religion itself, but with its exacerbation of irrationality that
comes pre-installed in human brains to start with.
Self-reinforcing systematic irrationality causes incredible
damage, and is plausibly responsible for all of the harm
religion has ever done.
If it weren't for this particular feature, I wouldn't care much
about religion, and I suspect most atheists (and anti-theists)
wouldn't either. Religious people would simply be wrong, like

77

someone who thinks the moon is made of cheese, and that

would be that.
This is why we secularists also spend our time educating
people about homeopathy, chiropractic, and astrology when
we get together in groups. We care about a deeper problem
than religion.
We don't so much want the end of religion as the dawn of
rationality.
Rationality Activism
Rationality activism means raising the sanity waterline. The
notion of rationality I have in mind amounts to "systematic
optimization from inside a human brain". I do not mean, for
example, never relying on intuition to make decisions, ignoring
emotion, or valuing only quantifiable things. I'm talking about
the notion of rationality arising from cognitive science, not
Hollywood. Rationality is the art of making decisions that are
ever more effective at moving your life and the world toward
your values. Note that if moving the world toward your values
requires actually interacting with the world, it usually helps to
have accurate beliefs about the world. When your map doesn't
match the territory, it's a lot harder to get where you're trying
to go.

Rationality activism means working collaboratively at the

grass-roots level to make ourselves, each other, and the world

78

more rational.
Religion is not responsible for all of human irrationality. It
preys on and exacerbates what irrationality already exists. With
or without religion, we are predictably irrational. We make
certain kinds of mistakes over and over again, simply because
our brains must cut a lot of corners to navigate our fast-paced,
complex environment. If everyone was expected, and given the
tools, to patch these bugs in their cognitive programming,
religion wouldn't stand a chance in the first place.
In a post to lesswrong.com, Eliezer Yudkowsky proposes a
thought experiment along the following lines. Imagine you
have the opportunity to teach everybody one general method
of rationality that is directed at making people more effective
human beings, and it can't target religion in particular. What
might you do to raise the sanity waterline high enough that
religion goes under?
Well, maybe there is no one particular method that could make
that happen. But we are, at the very least, narrowing in on a
group of habits of thought that make people better at thinking
critically, testing hypotheses, and avoidingor at least
mitigating the damage caused bythe cognitive biases we
were all born with. The world where everyone consistently
practices these kinds of habits is the one I'm really after. The
fact that it probably doesn't include religion is merely an added
bonus.

79

So hey, we don't have to funnel all our passion, frustration, and

other forces driving us to get out there and change the world
for the better into banging on church doors hoping for
deconversions. Neither do we have to settle for leveling the
playing field so atheists are treated just as well--and just as
poorly--as theists. We don't have to fight against religion,
thereby letting it set the terms of our activism.
Instead, we can work together to fight for rationality.

80

A Parable on the Urge to Know

May 04, 2013
A couple of years ago, my boyfriend and I had both come down
with bad colds. We went to the pharmacy, and he planned to
grab some cold medicine while I picked up tissues and some
other groceries. When he failed to meet me at the front after I
was done, I went back to the aisle where Id left him. He was
staring at the wall of medicines looking perplexed and
frustrated. Whats taking so long? I said.
I dont know how to choose! he replied. There were dozens
of options, and he couldnt come up with a good way to
evaluate them. Hed been stumped for fifteen minutes. He was
experiencing choice paralysis. There are a dozen different
brands that all say theyre for stuffy noses, congestion, and
coughing. How am I supposed to pick one?
I picked up a few bottles to check out the active ingredients.
Anything
with
dextromethorphan,
guicinophen,
and
phenylephrine will do, I said.
Why?

81

Because everything that says congestion has guicinophen

while nothing else does, everything that says coughing has
dextromethorphan while nothing else does, and everything that
says stuffy nose has phenylephrine while nothing else does.
They even have the same doses of all of those. The inactive
ingredients vary, but its all stuff like corn syrup and flavoring.
I want to pay for feeling healthy, not tasting bubblegum. I
tossed him the cheapest one with all three.
When we got home, I Googled each of those ingredients and
discovered that I should have gone to the pharmacist and
asked for something with ephedrine instead of phenylephrine,

82

since ephedrine reliably outperforms placebos while

phenylephrine doesnt. We went back for it a bit later. Still, I
was able to finally get us out of that damn pharmacy with
effective medication and home to watch gargoyles and eat
soup, because my first thought was What actually works, and
how can I know? instead of the epistemically neutral Which
of these brands should I buy? My urge to know the truth let
me cut through the advertizing to successfully achieve my
goals.
The elegant update I have in mind here is not Check the active
ingredients when choosing medications (though that actually
has frequent concrete advantages). The update is When
youre faced with many options, ask yourself what your end
goal is and how you would know which option is likely to bring
you closer to achieving it. My boyfriend tells me this is one of
the greatest impacts Ive had on his life over the four years
weve known each other. Its a tiny little habit Ive always taken
for granted because I was raised by scientists. But since this
was news to him, it dramatically altered how he thought about
making choices.
I ended up making an important update that day as well. Im
honored to be dating one of the smartest people Ive ever met,
and I knew that early on. This brief interaction was the first
time it really sunk in that theres more to being rational than
having an especially powerful brain--which meant that maybe I
needed to search for better methods, too. Before, Id thought I
was pretty much stuck with whatever intelligence Id been born

83

with, plus or minus memorizing a lot of facts. But really, I had

some major advantages over someone with more innate brain
power, because Id learned more powerful cognitive
methodology. Id been trained, to some extent, in epistemic
rationality.
What if, I wondered, there is even more to learn?

84

Happy Mother's Day

May 12, 2013
A post in honor of Theresa Strohl, as kick-ass at motherhood
as at everything else she does.

Children are tiny people.

Ever since I began forming long-term memories, Mom's treated

me like a person. Not a "child", not a "daughter" and not
"mine". She never put me in an essentializing conceptual box
with a label of any sort. She's always thought of me as a
separate human being with my own values, talents, and
ambitions.
I used to take this for granted, but then I met everyone else.
When you love someone and you have nearly complete power
over them, I imagine it must be very difficult not to redirect
them when they diverge from your personal model of what
you'd like them to be. I think a lot of parents let their love for
their children become oppressive; they're so afraid their child
might get hurt, or acquire unforeseen values, or believe
different things than they do, that they force them along a path
they feel to be safe.
Mom gave me the room to weigh risks myself, and trusted me

85

to discover successes she never could have provided on her

own.
This has caused me to keep my identity (relatively) small.
Curiosity, relinquishment, and most of the other virtues I care
about are extremely difficult to practice when changing feels
like killing off parts of yourself. Because Mom gave me
freedom to become, I have felt not at all constrained to remain
as I am. This freedom, combined with the urge to know for
which Dad is largely responsible, has produced a willingness
to surrender to the truth that has so far proven to be my most
powerful skill as a rationalist.
I never came out.
Perhaps the most striking evidence that this method was
effective is that I never came out as queer (or bi, or however I
thought of it when I first realized I'm often attracted to people
who aren't men). I think I wrote a blog post about it at some
point in high school (back on Livejournal *cough*), but it was
definitely an afterthought. Mom didn't essentialize my sexual
orientation any more than she did any other part of my identity,
so I had no reason to do so myself.
Let me be clear: I was raised in a tiny Midwestern town, in a
Catholic parish no less. It really is extremely strange that my
first thought upon discovering I was attracted to a female
classmate was, "Maybe I should ask her out," rather than
something along the lines of, "Oh god does this mean I'm
GAY? What do I do? AM I GOING TO HELL? No one must

86

know. What will I tell my parents? Will they still love me???"
There was absolutely none of that. I was very surprised to
discover other people react that way.
It just wasn't a thing for me.

We're totally bff's.

Our relationship has changed over the years as easily as I have

changed myself. It does not fit in a box called
"mother/daughter". Everything about our interactions means
more to me because of that.
Mom's a good friend of mine these days. We have a lot in
common, and we make each other happy. I learn from her, she
learns from me, and we think of each other as peers with a lot
of love and history between us.
When I'm making a difficult decision, I ask for her advice
because I value her opinion, and I'm never worried that I'll let
her down by not doing what she suggests. No topic is out of
bounds; she tells me about cute boys she's dating, recounts
Sunday homilies when they inspire her (though she knows I'm
an atheist), and gets genuinely excited when I tell her about a
cool book I'm reading, even if it's about number theory.
I look up to her because she is a wise and compassionate

87

woman worthy of my admiration and gratitude. I honor her

today because she is an exceptional human being. I am
tremendously lucky that she also happens to be my mother.

88

Reflections On Reflection
May 18, 2013
Note: A shorter version of this post will appear at A
Moment Of Science very soon. If you're interested in my
extra sciencey stuff, that's where to watch.
Alice peers through the looking glass.
When I was a little baby freshman philosopher, one of my very
first professors asked me this question: Why do mirrors flip
images left and right, but not up and down?
At first, I didn't understand what this had to do with philosophy
(not that I knew what philosophy was--which was exactly his
point!). It sounded like physics to me, and answering surely
required knowledge of optics that I didn't possess.
Today, I consider the process of working out the answer to this
question one of the very best illustrations of philosophical
methodology I've ever seen. This an ode to figuring things out.

Understanding the Question

First, let's make sure we know what the problem is.
Imagine that you're you. (This is either very easy or very
difficult, but I'm not sure which.) Or go find an actual glove and

89

just be you. Either way. Now put a glove on your left hand,
leave your right hand bare, and stand in front of a mirror. What
do you see? You see an image that looks just like you, except
shes wearing a glove on her right hand while her left hand is
bare.
This is what we mean when we say that mirrors seem to flip
images left and right. But if they flip left and right, why dont
they reverse up and down as well? Why isn't your mirror image
standing on her head? How does the mirror know which way is
up?

Guess
Let's try making a few guesses. Guessing give us something to
work with.

1. Maybe it has to do with binocular vision. You can draw an

imaginary line from one eye to the other, and that line is
horizontal. Could that be responsible for the strange
asymmetry?
2. Or maybe the molecules in the mirror somehow constantly
re-orient themselves according to the nearest large source
of gravity. If your last chemistry or physics class was in
high school, this is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.

90

Maybe some feature of the molecular orientation causes the

asymmetry. Mirrors would have to do it really quickly so
that if you flip a mirror 180 degrees, the molecules will have
already adjusted before you could see an upside-down
image.
3. Or perhaps mirrors are made of thousands of long thin tiles
laid side by side. Each one reflects light both up-down and
left-right, but theyre so thin in the up-down flipping
direction that the big combined reflection is only flipped
left-right.

Check
We've got some guesses above, and we want to know if any of
them is correct. Let's see how far we can get with just thinking
before we have to turn the problem over to professional
scientists.

1. Suppose it's true that mirrors do what they do because of

binocular vision. What does that mean exactly? It means
mirrors seem to know which way is "up" because our eyes
are two points defining a line. A line can be an axis, and we
think of this particular one as horizontal. If you have one
axis, you can imagine another that's perpendicular to the

91

first, and in this case we'd think of that one as vertical. Now
we've got a reference frame for what is "left" vs. what is
"up". The guess is that this reference frame determines our
perception of our reflection in the mirror.
What could we predict if we knew that were true? Well, we'd
expect to be able to change what the mirror seems to count
as "up" by changing the orientation of that horizontal axis
defined by our eyes. So let's check.
While standing in front of the mirror with the glove on your
left hand, spread your arms and lean over so that your left
hand is up in the air, your right hand is reaching toward the
floor, and your head is tilted 90 degrees from to its usual
position. What do you see?
The mirror hasnt fallen for your trick, has it? Your reflection
is still wearing a glove on her right hand, which is reaching
up--but her feet are exactly where they were before despite
being to the right from the perspective of your head rather
than down. So binocular vision can't be the answer.
2. Our second guess was that the molecules re-orient
according to the location of the nearest large gravity well.
This one's harder. To test this, it seems youd either need a
gravity well more massive than Earth (which I really hope
you dont have handy), or youd need a rocket ship headed
for the moon with a camera mounted on it filming a mirror
as the Moons gravity took over. Thats not an impossible

92

test, but its not a cheap one either. And it just doesn't quite
feel right, does it? But that's not enough to dismiss the
hypothesis.
We've mostly escaped the realm of thought experiments at
this point. But that doesn't mean it's time to stop thinking.
Lets assume, just for now, that this wont give us the
answer and try some other things first.
3. The third guess is that mirrors are made of zillions of long
thin tiles. Each strip flips the image up/down as well as
left/right, but they're so thin you don't see the up/down part.
I'm pretty fuzzy on how zillions of thin tiles would end up
making a single, cohesive, life-sized image. Perhaps that's a
problem for another day. But let's take that for granted and
see what happens.
This is much easier to test. If the tile hypothesis is correct,
you should be able to make an up-down flipping mirror by
turning a left-right flipping mirror sideways. But that's not
actually what happens, is it? So this can't be the answer
either.

Time For a Closer Look

Its looking even more now like the mirror somehow knows
which way is up. As a general rule of problem solving, when
you end up more sure that household items are conscious than
you were when you began, its time to re-check your

93

assumptions.
We assume two key things when we ask, Why do mirrors flip
images left and right, but not up and down? First, we assume
that mirrors flip images left and right. Second, we assume that
mirrors dont flip images up and down.
Lets start with the second. What would it mean if you, out in
the real world and not in mirror land, flipped yourself in the
up/down direction? It would mean you were standing on your
head. Youd have rotated yourself 180 degrees around the
(horizontal) x axis. Mirror images dont stand on their heads
when we stand on our feet, so assumption two is correct.
Mirrors really dont flip images up and down.
But what would it mean if you flipped yourself left/right? If
flipping up and down means rotating 180 degrees around the x
axis, then flipping left and right must mean rotating 180
degrees around the (vertical) y axis.
Rotating around the y axis is what we usually call turning
around. Is that actually what mirrors do? Do they make
turned-around pictures of us?
Imagine that you make a perfect, flesh-and-blood copy of
yourself. She, too, is wearing a glove on her left hand. Place
her in front of you so that youre looking at her back. Now,
while you stay perfectly still, rotate her 180 degrees around the
y axis--that is, turn her around to face you.

94

Where is her glove? Why, its still on her left hand! To shake
gloved hands, youd have to reach across your body. If she
were a mirror image, it would be on her right hand, not her left.
So the first assumption must be wrong. Mirrors do not, in fact,
flip images left-and-right.

So whats really going on?

Mirrors dont flip up and down, and it turns out that they dont
flip left and right either. But theres some sort of flipping or
reversing happening. Otherwise ambulances would just have
AMBULANCE written on them instead of the odd backward
version you can read normally in your rear-view mirror.
Theres only one obvious dimension left for flipping. If its not
up and down, and its not left and right, then it must be back to
front. But what would that mean?
Take off your glove, and hold it so the thumb is on your left
and the palm is facing up. If you turn it upside down, the palm
is facing down. If you turn it around from the starting position,
the thumb is on your right.
Now, again from the starting position, turn the glove inside out
without turning it in any other direction. The wrist part of the
glove, which used to be closest to you, is now farthest away,
while the the fingers are pointing toward you. It has not flipped

95

upside down. It has not turned left or right. The glove has
flipped front-to-back, and it now fits on your right hand instead
of your left.
If thats what mirrors were doing, then what would you expect
to see?
Suppose youre looking at a mirror while facing North. The part
of you thats farthest South in reality, namely your bottom,
would seem farthest North in the image--and, indeed, it does.
The part thats farthest North in reality, namely your nose,
would seem farthest South in the image--and, indeed, it does.
You wouldnt expect, however, to have to reach across your
body to shake gloved hands, and you wouldnt expect your
image to do a headstand without your help.
Thats it, then! Mirrors dont know which way is up after all.
They just flip images front-to-back.

The Beauty Of Confusion

To review:
We asked a question.

We took some time to understand what was being asked.

96

We made a few guesses.

We tested them in our heads when we could, and pinned

down how to go about testing them outside our heads when
we couldn't.

When none of that gave us the answer, we doubled back to

check our assumptions.

In the end, we solved the problem by dispelling a simple

misunderstanding hidden in the question.

Misunderstandings hide in questions all the time. If you're

impatient and epistemically reckless, that's horribly frustrating,
and it probably causes you to waste a lot of time trying to
answer questions that don't make sense. This is much of why a
healthy helping of philosophy is a tasty and nutritious
side-dish even when science is your main course. If you're
patient and rigorous, if you enjoy taking the time to simply
think, you can learn all kinds of new things just by reflecting on
them.
Nifty, huh?
"Hang on a minute here, you're thinking. "At first we wanted to
know why mirrors flip images left/right but not up/down. Turns
out we were confused about that. But now I don't know why
mirrors flip images front/back but not left/right or up/down!"

97

Impressive. Most impressive. But you are not a Jedi yet.

Learn More

The law of reflection

Why do mirrors seem to have depth?

The Khan Academy series on waves and optics

98

The Powerful History of a Popular Hymn

June 17, 2013
You have definitely heard "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" at
some point. It's the one with the chorus that goes "Glory, glory,
halleluiah, etc., His truth is marching on." I heard the melody at
a swing dance last night, and as all three lyrics of the chorus
that I knew were playing incessantly through my head on the
way home, I started to wonder what the rest of them might be.
When I finally looked them up, I was shocked by how strange,
powerful, and violent the verses really are. "He hath loosed the
fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword" is not something I
generally expect to hear in an apparently upbeat popular song.
Until today, there's been no better way to put me to sleep than
to start talking about American Civil War history. Boy has this
changed things! I now feel an overwhelming pride to be the
same species as the creatures who took part in creating this
song--mixed, of course, with crushing disappointment that my
American history classes failed so spectacularly. In case yours
did too, here's why The Battle Hymn of the Republic is
awesome.

Julia Howe
Just before the cold dawn of a November morning in 1861, poet
and activist Julia Howe awoke from a dream. Beating against
the cage of her skull were lyrics begging to be committed to
paper. Stumbling in the dark for the nearest pen, frantically she

99

wrote. Her verses were first published in Atlantic Monthly in

February of 1862, about a year after the beginning of the Civil
War.
The day before that dawn, she'd attended a public review of
troops just outside Washington, DC. While the soldiers were
gathered, they began to sing. They sang these words, to the
tune of a snippet from an old campfire spiritual called
"Canaan's Happy Shore", and Howe listened to their song.
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
But his soul keeps marching on
Who is this John Brown,
and what has he to do with the meaning of Howe's song?
Some consider Brown a terrorist, others a hero. To the troops
through which first "John Brown's Body" and then "The Battle
Hymn of the Republic" shot light lightning, clearly he was a
martyr.
Five years earlier, during the Bleeding Kansas border war,
Brown distinguished himself from other abolitionists by
insisting that passive resistance to southern slavery advocates
would do nothing but protect the complacency of free
northerners. If the Good Guys are to win, he thought, they'll
have to actually do something. And he knew that it would have

100

to involve violence.
His biographers say he believed he'd been sent to visit God's
justice upon slaveholders and those who supported them.
Whatever his motivation, he caused people to ask themselves,
"How much do I care about what I believe? What will I do if I'm
called to act? Would I fight for freedom? Would I kill? Would I
die?"
In 1859, under Brown's command, some proved that the
answer was "yes". His very own army set out to raid a federal
armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Their objective: Arm the local
slaves for insurection. The raid was unsuccessful, and Brown
was captured by the forces of Robert E. Lee.
In the following months, it became apparent that many more
really would fight for freedom with their own hands. A year
after John Brown's death, the song of his vision coursing
through the northern air, half of a country went to war to save
four million people they'd never even met.
This is the story Julia Howe immortalized when she wrote "The
Battle Hymn of the Republic".

Why is this my new favorite song?

Because it means that when it matters enough, when a strong
enough
leader
arises,
sometimes--not
always,
but
sometimes--humans will abandon personal comfort to fight for

101

a better world.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are
stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and
damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall
deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

102

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

103

Instability of Values Over Self Modification: Why Babies

Creep Me Out
June 27, 2013
(Inspired by "Schelling fences and slippery slopes" by Yvain.)
Dear everyone who keeps human larvae as pets,
I am sincerely happy if you've found a way to satisfy your
central values and if your children make you happy. Honestly,
there are central terms for the preferences and happiness of
others in my utility function. So please only read the following
in light of that. I am not criticizing you for choosing to spawn,
and, indeed, your kids are adorable and I like watching videos
on Facebook of them playing with puppies and eating cake
with their entire faces, so keep it up.
Here's what's bothering me. When I look at the walls of my
friends with children, almost every post involves the kid. This
is perfectly understandable. I also post almost exclusively
about the things that interest me most (namely rationality,
dance, and math), and of course your kid is the most important
thing in the entire world. If I had a kid, I'd almost certainly think
the same thing about it. I would love it more than I knew I could
love, and everything else would be at least second place.
And I find that ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING. It means that there
exists a parasite that can first implant itself in the lining of my
uterus, with or without my consent, and use me as an

104

incubator before torturing me for hours or days as it extricates

itself from my body.
And that's not the scary part.
It can then begin to covertly re-write the foundations of my
personality, undermining my adherence to beliefs about the
significance of my own happiness, the happiness of my
friends, self-optimization, world-optimization, and anything
whatsoever not directly necessary for its own survival. In fact,
it would make sure that I'd not even hesitate to die (or kill)
protecting it, regardless of whether its continued existence
would most likely help or hurt the other things I (used to) care
about.
From my perspective, this strikes me as a completely insane
thing to desire. It's like wanting to take a pill that won't satisfy
your values, but will change your values such that current
circumstances already satisfy them, never mind that it means
replacing yourself with SOMEONE ELSE ENTIRELY.
How the hell do people just take that in stride???

105

Check Out the Badassest Baby Book Ever. Baby.

June 28, 2013
What Makes a Baby, by Cory Silverberg, is an introduction to
human reproduction written and illustrated for kids as young
as 4. The awesomeness: It doesn't assume that the reader is
biologically related to his (exactly) two parents, both of whom
are cisgendered and straight, and both of whom are married
and monogamous. It explains the plain facts of the biology in a
way children can understand, and it otherwise leaves the
narrative of how the reader came to her current family for the
family to tell. Check it out!

Embedded File ()
"When an egg and a sperm meet, they swirl together in a
special kind of dance. As they dance, they talk to each
other. The egg tells the sperm all the stories it has to tell
about the body it came from."
You can order a hard copy through Amazon, or read the Kindle
version right now, and the 60 page accompanying reader's
guide for adults is available as a free PDF.
But instead of just buying it, what I really want you to do is
make sure your local library orders it if it hasn't already!

106

Polyphasic Sleep: Stand Back, I'm Going to Try Science.

July 09, 2013
A group of my friends (7 so far) will all be going polyphasic
over the next month. By that, I mean we'll be adopting a sleep
schedule that gets us 4 extra hours of productive work or play
time per day, or two whole month per year (or a decade over 60
years). If you want to tell me all about why it's a bad idea, feel
free to post comments. I don't plan to use this space to sell
you on polyphasic sleep. That might be another post,
depending on how this goes.

I'm going to be collecting some very simple data through this

here form. I invite you to join us!

107

This will be hard. It will hurt. You'll probably need a buddy to

follow you around and keep you awake. If you don't have a lot
of self-discipline, I don't recommend even trying.
Still with me? If you're in by the time you're done reading this,
email me at strohl89@gmail.com so I know who you are. Here's
the plan.

1. Stop using caffeine RIGHT NOW. If you try to maintain a

caffeine addition during this process, you will fail. I
promise.
2. Data collection starts on July 10th. Fill out the form once
every 24hrs (whenever it's convenient) until August 10th.
3. Pick a time to take a 20min nap each day from Monday, July
15th through Sunday, July 21st. You probably won't actually
sleep during this time, but you can use it for mindfulness
meditation if you stay awake. The goal is to practice
napping. This is important.

108

4. On Monday, July 22nd, begin fasting immediately after

lunch.
5. On the night of Monday, July 22nd, skip sleep. No naps,
then an all-nighter. This is the official adaptation start date.
The idea is to make you sleep deprived so your naps the
next day are more likely to take.
6. Eat breakfast on the morning of Tuesday, July 23rd. This
should be the first time you've eaten anything since Monday
lunch.
7. Starting on the morning of Tuesday, July 23rd, take a 20min
nap every 2hrs (for a total of 12 naps per day). DO NOT
oversleep. Use an obnoxious alarm or whatever other
means necessary. "Nap" counts as lying down trying to
sleep; take your naps on a strict schedule regardless of
how long you successfully sleep.
8. Start to cut your naps down toward 6 a day as quickly as
you can without it hurting too much. Beginning to dream
during your naps is a good indicator that you're ready for
this part.
9. Once you're down to one nap every 4 hours, you're on
what's known as the Uberman schedule.
10. Matt Fallshaw informs me that the next part is a little tricky.

109

1. If you managed to reach the Uberman feeling good,

you'll probably start getting really tired again shortly
thereafter. This flavor of tired will be different from what
you've suffered for the past week, and by that flavor you
will know that you have hit SWS deprivation. If this is
what happens to you, the new kind of sleepy is your cue
to transition straight to the Everyman 3 schedule, which
means a 3 hour block of core sleep plus three 20 minute
naps spaced evenly throughout the day. And that's it!
2. If you're unlucky, you'll not quite have reached Uberman
in the space of a week--that is, you'll still be hanging on
to some extra naps on July 30th. Then you'll be wolloped
by a new bout of sleepiness. This flavor of tired will be
different from the last. If it's is tolerable, drop straight to
full Uberman and try to hold out for at least 24hrs, then
convert to the Everyman 3. If the new flavor of tired is
intolerable, convert to E3 as soon as the new tired hits,
and expect the next week or so to be tougher on you
than on the lucky ones.
Why are we doing this weird naptation adaptation plan thing
instead of just going straight for the Everyman 3? Mostly
because Matthew Fallshaw said to. If you know Matt, that's
enough. In case you don't: It takes people about a month to
adapt to the Everyman 3, but only about a week to adapt to the
Uberman. The Uberman forces your body to learn to get its
REM and SWS in those tiny 20 minute naps. If you're still
giving it core sleep time, your body won't take the fullest
possible advantage of naps right away.

110

If you think you can keep the Uberman schedule indefinitely,

go for it! But keep me informed about it so I know what's up
with my data.
***
You can read about how this panned out in my next post.

111

Polyphasic Sleep: Reprise

September 21, 2013
(Original post on the polyphasic sleep experiment here.)
Welp, this got a little messy. The main culprit was Burning
Man, though there were some other complications with data
collection as well. Here are the basics of what went down.

Fourteen people participated in the main experiment. Most of

them were from Leverage. There were a few stragglers from a
distance, but communication with them was poor.
We did some cognitive batteries beforehand, mostly through
Quantified Mind. A few people had extensive baseline data,
partially because many had been using Zeos for months, and
partly because a few stuck to the two-week daily survey.
Leverage members (not me) are processing the data, and
they'll probably have more detailed info for us in three

112

months(ish).
With respect to the adaptation itself, we basically followed the
plan outlined in my last post. Day one no sleep, then
Uberman-12, then cut back to Uberman-6, then Everyman-3.
Most people ended up switching very quickly to Uberman-6
(within the first two or three days), and most switched to
Everyman-3 after about five to seven days on Uberman-6.
Three people tried to hold the Uberman schedule indefinitely:
One person continued Uberman-6 for two full weeks, and two
held out for twenty-one days. Afterwards, all three transitioned
to Everyman-3.

During the originally planned one-month period, five people

dropped out. Nine were on some form of polyphasic for the
whole month. One returned to monophasic at the end of the
official experiment with only partial adaptation achieved.
Then Burning Man disrupted everybody's sleep schedule.
Afterward, one person continued experimenting with less
common variations of the Everyman schedule. Three went
back to Everyman-3. One switched to Everyman-2. Two people
have flexible schedules that include two hours less sleep per

113

day. One person's schedule was disrupted by travel for a while

after Burning Man, and they're now re-adapting.
Now that all is said and done, eight of the original fourteen are
polyphasic.
I'll hold off on concluding very much from this until I see the
results of the cognitive battery and such, plus the number who
are still polyphasic after three months. In the mean time, I'll
just stick with this: Some people are capable of going
polyphasic and staying that way (probably?). Sleep is
complicated and confusing. I don't know how it works. I don't
think anyone else really does either. More research is
desperately needed.
My next post, which will probably happen in the next two
weeks, will discuss what I think we did poorly, what I think
went really well, and how you and your friends can improve
upon our work. In the mean time, here's a video of what
zombie-Brienne is like during the really difficult stretches,
and here is how she entertained herself when she could
manage to do things besides pace. (I was one of the few who
bailed out early :-p)

114

At the very least, use your enemies wisely.

September 23, 2013
Guns don't kill people. The boundary conditions of the universe
kill people.
A friend of mine shared this image on Facebook, and it showed
up in my feed. I have some things to say to all of you, pro-life
and pro-choice alike, about it.
I feel like we're talking past each other. And by "we" I mean
everyone. This image really bothers me, not because there are
guns pointed at a fetus, or because I strongly support Planned
Parenthood, but because it reinforces the misrepresentation of
the pro-choice position as anti-life. This really is not so far
from an image of pro-choicers eating babies.
If we want to make progress, we have to be willing to
communicate and collaborate rather than antagonize, and that
means making an honest effort to understand the beliefs and
motives of those who disagree with us. The terms "pro-life"
and "pro-choice" are already a huge barrier, because they
frame the issue confusingly and counterproductively.
If I understand correctly, and I've made an honest effort to,
people who support legislation that denies a women the right
to kill a fetus, should one begin growing inside her body, do so
because they believe fetuses are a type of child, and therefore
a moral patient toward whom we are responsible as we would
be any other person.There are variations, of course: Some

115

believe fetuses have human souls, and that the same religious
doctrines apply to them as to any other child of God. Some are
concerned that since we can't currently be certain at what
point a developing human becomes capable of suffering, we're
obligated to behave as though even a zygote can suffer. But by
and large, those who want to restrict reproductive rights in
favor of the rights of fetuses believe that humans are people
regardless of their age, be that three days, three months, or
thirty years. The right of a person to live is more fundamental
than the specific rights a person has over her body. Not only
does this make good sense to me, but I agree on that final
point, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who
doesn't.
But it is inane, petty, and intellectually dishonest to suggest
that we can rightly conclude from knowledge of someone's
anti-abortion beliefs that she therefore does not highly value
women's reproductive rights. Let alone that she therefore
hates women and wants the government to dictate everything
that happens to her body.
The implicit claim of this image is similarly inane, petty, and
dishonest. It suggests that if a person doesn't support
legislation that limits women's access to medical procedures
that kill fetuses, she therefore thinks such specific rights
should be valued above the right of a person not to be killed. It
shouldn't take more than five seconds to see the problem here.
Perhaps one need be a monster to murder another person in
cold blood, but that's not even in the ballpark of concluding

116

that embryos don't have enough of the relevant properties to

be thought of as people.
If we didn't childishly divide ourselves along these lines into
the good people and the evil people, the humanists and the
misogynists, the godly and the baby killers, both sides could
make progress toward what they value at the same time. If we
saw each other as people instead of as murderers who hold
guns to the heads of unborn babies, we could join forces to
decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies, to support
mothers who do want children, to ease the burden of caring for
an infant so the prospect of carrying to term isn't so
devastating when things don't go as planned. And all the while,
we could continue talking about the core issue, which is what a
fetus really is and what rights it ought to have, and people will
be a hell of a lot more willing to change their minds when
recognizing the truth doesn't mean joining The Dark Side.
So regardless of your position on abortion, it is not in your
interest, or the interest of those whose rights you want to
protect, to promote hatred, misunderstanding, and the desire
to Defeat the Enemy. Instead, promote kindness, promote
understanding, and promote collaboration toward shared
goals. Do not post this garbage. If you're on my feed or reading
this blog, you're almost certainly above it.

117

What is "Effective Altruism"?

September 25, 2013

Effective altruism is altruism that attempts to be maximally

effective. An effective altruist chooses her charitable actions
not, for instance, by thinking of what she's most passionate
about (helping the homeless, say) and then taking the most
obvious, readily available actions, or those with the most
emotional impact for her (like volunteering at a soup kitchen),
but instead tries to take into account all the possible ways she
might have of affecting the world, and then picking the one she
expects, based on empirical evidence and careful thought, to
cause the most good.
Some people's answer to, "What's the most good I can do?" is
"Donate to the charity that's most cost-effective at saving
lives." (It's orders of magnitude more effective to donate to the
Against Malaria Foundation than to donate to your local
children's hospital, for example.) Some take non-human
animals into account and end up with very different kinds of

118

answers, as you can imagine given how many more

non-humans there are than humans. Some think the answer is
to choose a career that will make them as much money as
possible while doing relatively little harm so they'll eventually
have lots more money with which to do good. Some think
preventing the sudden extinction of all of humanity ("reducing
existential risk") is more effectively altruistic than any specific
short-term act of charity we could perform for an individual.
The effective altruists focused on the far distant future are
those who value future people as much as current people, and
who believe that the distant future is likely to to contain vastly
more people than the present. This is the category I fall into. A
focus on the far distant future can look even less like
conventional charity, because some methods of affecting the
future of humanity can be extremely unintuitive. Some people
intend to eradicate death caused by aging. One organization
called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute intends to
build and artificial intelligence that understands and cares
primarily about human values, can modify its own code in
order to get better at effective altruism, and by this means ends
up way better than any human could ever be at making the
entire future awesome.
So effective altruism is extremely diverse. It can be giving a
dollar directly to someone who needs it, or it can be
researching how to teach a computer what humans care about.
What matters is the motivation: effective altruists want to be
effective, and they try to know something about how to do that.

119

A few organizations in what's recently become know as "the

EA movement":

Give Directly, which takes your dollar and hands it directly

to someone in Kenya

Giving What We Can, which encourages people to pledge

10% of their income to effective charities

Give Well, which researches charities and ranks them by

lives saved per dollar donated

80,000 Hours, which provides career advice for people who

want to find the path toward doing the most good

Effective Animal Activism, which aims to prevent as much

animal suffering as possible

Leverage Research, which studies how to make humanity

better at things on a very large scale

The Center for Applied Rationality, which researches how to

help individual people become better at things

Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS),

which researches how to cure aging

120

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which studies

how to make a smarter-than-human computer that makes
the world better

For a somewhat more in-depth look at the EA movement, check

out lukeprog's summary on lesswrong.com, written shortly
after the very first Effective Altruism Summit in July, 2013. Or
see Peter Singer's Ted Talk on the topic if you're tired of
reading.

121

Perceptual Editing
October 09, 2013
In a practice run of his CFAR unit called Narratives, Val
brought to my attention a pretty awesome skill, and Id like
to share the basics with you. His class includes some more
advanced techniques that build on what follows, but I want
to try to highlight their foundations.
You may be familiar with the idea that we view reality
through a flawed lens. Our experiences do not convey
information about the external world with perfect accuracy.
For example, there is a blind spot in your visual field that
your brain automatically fills in with its best guess
(sometimes wrong) of whats actually out there.(1)
The technique I want to talk about relies on the fact that our
experiences comprise not only things that have passed
through the perceptual lens, but also content we personally
contribute. In cognitive biases called selective perception
and attentional bias, for example, what we already expect
to experience and where those expectations direct our
attention prevent us from perceiving an accurate reflection
of whats happening. If you've tried this attention test, you
know exactly what Im talking about.

How Thoughts Feel From the Outside

122

But not all of our personal contributions to experience are

so drastic, and they certainly arent all harmful. Every time I
let a judgement, evaluation, or attitude affect how the world
seems to me, thats something thats coming from inside
my own head, not outside of it. Even if my judgement is
totally accurate and instrumentally valuable, its
nevertheless a process occurring strictly inside my own
mind. Many Buddhists strongly emphasizes this point, and
prescribe terminating such contributions so we can become
more directly acquainted with reality. (Im just pointing out
that its been a topic of interest for thousands of years, not
suggesting you follow those instructions.)
Perceptual editing (my term) is the ability first to
recognize when youre making a personal contribution to
experience, then to decide whether its a contribution you
actually want to make, and finally to leverage the
opportunity and deliberately choose what contribution
youd rather make, if any.
Perceptual contributions often happen in the form of verbal
narration (a process called subvocalization). When you
read these words, its likely youre hearing them spoken by
a little imaginary voice inside your head. Unless, I suppose,
you've eliminated that in the course of learning to speed
read, in which case I ask that you slow down so you can
play along. That voice is your very own creation.
Once you've noticed that it exists and that its neither part
of the world nor identical with whatever is listening to the

123

voice, youre most of the way to gaining some degree of

control over it. You can, for example, re-read this sentence
and replace your internal narration of the words in red with
a narration of popsicle. (Humor me and give it a try.)
Similarly, this same internal voice narrates nearly all of our
experiences (at least for most people). Its so ubiquitous
that we hardly ever notice it, like a fish unaware of the
water. For example, I just thought, Im getting hungry. I
wonder if Robby wants to get lunch. Had I not deliberately
distanced myself from my inner narration in order to
examine its contents as though from the outside, that
thought would have drifted on by and been erased from my
memory before I ever so much as attended to its existence.
If you dont believe me (or if you want a better grasp on this
idea), try the following.

Noticing, Distancing, Editing

Set a timer for two minutes. Just sit there and attempt, for
those two minutes, not to subvocally narrate your
experiences. Ready, set, go.
To the extent you were successful, you probably had to
exert effort to squash verbalizations the moment they began
to arise in consciousness. It may have felt like pushing
something down.

124

Now try that exercise again, but this time dont try to
prevent subvocalization. Simply notice when it happens.
More importantly, pay attention to how being aware of your
inner narration feels different from your usual experiences.
Notice how it feels like theres more distance than usual
between yourself and your thoughts.
Finally, sit silently just long enough to notice the next
subvocalization that arises. Then pick something to change
about it, and then think that instead. For example, if I
noticed myself thinking, I really love chocolate ice cream,
I might edit that phrase to I really like chocolate covered
strawberries. (The purpose here is merely to observe the
sensation of making decisions about what you think.)
How quickly can you edit? Can you feel the gist of what
you're about to think and change the course of your thought
before it's over? It's not easy at first, but neither is it
impossible.

It's Sort Of a Superpower, Actually

Subvocalization is not, of course, the only kind of
contribution we make to experience. We contribute all sorts
of things, such as moods, attention, and interpretations.
Although you can eventually gain direct control over other
kinds of perceptual contributions, you may find that
narration is the easiest one to get a handle on. Fortunately,

125

changing the content of your narration can cause changes

to your mood, attention, and interpretations as well.
Why is that fortunate? Because our personal contributions
to experience do not always help us. Sometimes they do--if
Im working on a difficult problem and I think I can totally
do this, it might keep me motivated to find a solution--and
sometimes they have no noticeable effect at all. But
sometimes they harm us, adding aversive aspects to an
experience that would be easier to deal with otherwise.
Harmful subvocalization is especially pronounced in clinical
depression. Depressed people tend to get in these feedback
loops where they feel bad, they tell themselves about how
theyre feeling bad, it makes them feel worse, and they
become more likely to say things to themselves about how
bad they feel as a result. Phrases that contribute to this sort
of problem include Im worthless and Ill never be
happy.
But you dont have to be depressed to benefit from the
ability to edit your thoughts. Whenever you notice yourself
thinking something, if you can distance yourself from it
enough to consider it from the outside, you can decide
whether its a helpful thought or not, and choose, if you
prefer, to think something else instead.
The process of noticing, distancing, and editing takes
practice, and I think time spent practicing this ability is

126

probably time very well spent indeed. The better you get at
shaping the contents of your experiences, the less you are
at the mercy of contributions you did not choose to make.

________________________________________________________
(1) Not everyone thinks this is how the optical blind
spot works. Dennett's view is quite interesting (and
here Ramachandran summarizes it and argues against it).

________________________________________________________
Edited to add:
Distancing is also useful all by itself without editing. I just
tried it on a strongly aversive experience.
The simple facts (without much contribution from me) are: I
committed a faux pas, my friend pointed it out to me, I
understood both my error and how to prevent it in the
future, and I apologized. Since I committed it in the course
of helping him with something (at which I was successful
overall), he went on to thank me after asking me not to
make the mistake again.
But I personally contributed most of what I actually ended
up experiencing. The moment I saw the subject line of the
email, which said "Please do not [mistake I made] again," I
interpreted it as being scolded, and thus felt a huge wave of

127

shame and embarrassment. Fortunately, since I'd just

written the above, I noticed that I was responding with
emotions that I seldom find useful (though I am beset by
them frequently, alas).
So I created some distance between myself and the
thought. From there, I was able to separate out the
externally derived components of the experience from the
components I'd imposed on it myself. The strong emotional
reaction was a response caused by my interpretation of the
situation, and not by the email itself.
I determined that not only was my interpretation almost
certainly false (since a more likely motive than punishing
me is causing me to not repeat the mistake by merely
requesting it), but even if it did reflect reality it was unlikely
to have a positive effect on my actions. Since the
interpretation (and my reaction to it) no longer felt like an
inextricable part of the experience--in fact it had already
been extricated--I just let it drift away like a subvocalization
that doesn't interest me.
Now the only remaining effects are new knowledge of how
to do better, resolution to act on it, and very mild remnants
of shame and embarrassment that are quickly fading since
they're no longer being fed by the harmful contribution to
experience that I did not choose to make. All of this took
around 30 seconds (though I expect it would have taken a
lot longer were it not for my background with meditation).

128

This is huge for me. I've possessed all the sub skills for a
long time, but I had no idea they could be so potent when
combined and purposefully directed. I don't think I've ever
felt this much power over the effects of my social anxiety.

129

The Vagabond of Tragedy and Triumph

October 09, 2013
Something important happened to me tonight.
On the train home, an old black man with patchy gray hair
was slumped pathetically across the seats in clear view of
where I sat. With a torn and dirty jacket draped over his
shoulders, he cradled his head in his hands, propped up on
the armrest while his legs stretched out to the seat opposite
him.
He was not in good shape. He was trembling slightly, and
his long yellowing fingernails tapped against the armrest.
Every couple of minutes, he would lean over slightly and
spit a thin stream of vomit onto the floor of the train. Once
when he shifted, the left arm of his jacket fell down into the
puddle.
His unwashed, tattered appearance suggested he was
riding the train more for the shelter than to go anywhere in
particular. Anything looks more comfortable than his
awkward position across those seats, but I suppose the
concrete must get awfully cold and hard after a while.
I've never been one to reach out and help strangers whose
lives have fallen apart, even when all they ask of me is a
dollar for some food. I once felt at least a little bit of
empathy for them. Mostly, though, what I felt was helpless.

130

Making one person's day slightly less horrific just isn't a

very good use of my money, time, or emotional energy. To
be mumbling paranoid nonsense on a street corner while
you slowly starve and freeze is to live a life so shattered
that picking up any one of the pieces will not restore
wholeness. My dollar will not save anyone, and, more
saliently to me, will not bring an end to the conditions that
allow such misery to exist in the first place. I do believe that
I can bring an end to those conditions, but not by helping
any individual person in misery. So I've learned to feel very
little at all when I pass them without more than a brief
glance.
But I was seated beside him for several minutes, so I could
not walk past. I probably could have ignored him anyway if
I'd chosen, but for some reason, this time I engaged my
thoughts and emotions. I guess I was curious. I wondered
what it might be like to be inside his head.
And this is when the important thing happened. As soon as
I felt the first pang of empathy, I imagined the world I was
trying to create. I felt suffering with him (tiny though mine
was), and immediately, automatically, I envisioned a future
free of suffering. It wasn't so much like flicking a switch as
like being the flicked switch. I did not participate
deliberatively in this event.
It was familiar to feel responsible for his pain, and for all the

131

pain in the world. I've long been wired that way. Yet I felt
neither helpless, nor guilty, nor even charitable confronting
the experience. I just knew, more plainly and clearly than I
ever have, that the future of humanity will not be so ugly as
that present moment in which a tragic old man failed to
sleep above a growing puddle of vomit.
And simultaneously I knew that it would not be that way
because I would not let it. On one side was the man on the
train, on the other the salvation of all sentient beings, and
bridging the two states of affairs was a solid progression of
cause and effect consisting of precisely the kinds of actions
I take every day.
There's a CFAR unit called "propagating urges" in which
students learn to take their desires to accomplish long-term
goals and use them to fuel motivation for the individual
actions required to accomplish those goals. For instance, I
might propagate the urge to grade all 70 essays so I can
successfully complete my degree by imagining receiving
my diploma every time I reach for a new page.
I think I may not need to propagate urges when it comes to
my work anymore. The drudgery of carrying out the kind of
altruism I consider maximally effective is saving the world.
It's suddenly become a simple fact of my life. The world will
be saved, and I will save it.

132

Salvaging Sacraments
November 04, 2013
I'm a recovering Catholic. Although I don't believe in God
and don't attend Mass except on rare occasion for the
purpose of singing, I miss the Sacraments dearly, and in
particular I miss the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

I get that Confession seems kinda weird at first blush.

You're telling someone who may or may not be a total
stranger about all of the bad things you did, highly personal

133

and otherwise, possibly in great detail, in order to receive

imaginary forgiveness from an imaginary god, and then
you're letting the stranger dole out a punishment that might
not be at all related to your actual sins. I can understand
why that would appear creepy, pointless, and horribly
unpleasant, perhaps even to a pseudo-Catholic let alone to
an atheist and total outsider.
Let me see if I can explain why anyone would ever be
motivated to go to Confession out of something besides
obligation or fear of damnation. Catholics often say that the
Sacraments are "outward signs of inward grace". When I
was little, coming to understand (some of) what they meant
by that had a pretty profound effect. Abstract ideas like
contrition, forgiveness, devotion, and faith are invisible and
elusive. It's not always easy to get your brain around them
enough for them to impact your daily life.
It's a bit like when you genuinely believe that it's a good
idea to learn calculus, but "calculus" feels like such a
murky, distant, impenetrable concept that you're not sure
how to do anything about it. Sacraments are concrete
symbols for abstract ideas and events that help you get a
handle on similarly murky things like your relationship with
God.
If I made a Catholic-style sacramental rite out of calculus, it
would go something like this.

134

1. Recite: "Mathematics is vast and immaculate. My

understanding is meager and flawed. May studying the
Calculus one day unite me with Mathematical perfection.
Amen."
2. Open a Calculus textbook. Read a section. Do the
exercises. Reflect on what I do and don't understand,
what I could have done better, and what flaws in my
pre-existing understanding are preventing me from
progressing further.
3. State my current understanding of what I read to a
professor. Show them my exercises. Listen to their
feedback.
4. The professor recites: "Mathematics is vast and
immaculate. May your understanding advance toward
perfection. In the name of the Calculus, I grant you your
next assignment." (I receive the assignment.)
Reconciliation is similar.
1. Examine my conscience. Call to mind the sins I've
committed, and reflect on them.
2. Recite (something along the lines of): "Most merciful
God, I confess that I have sinned against you in thought,
word, and deed, by what I have done, and by what I have
left undone. I have not loved you with my whole heart; I

135

have not loved my neighbors as myself. I am truly sorry,

and I humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus
Christ, have mercy on me and forgive me; that I may
delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of
your Name. Amen."
3. Go to a priest and tell him what I've done wrong. Maybe
talk to him about it a bit so I better understand why I did
what I did and why I am sorry.
4. The priest says, "Almighty God have mercy on you,
forgive you all your sins through our Lord Jesus Christ,
strengthen you in all goodness, and by the power of the
Holy Spirit keep you in eternal life." Then he assigns a
penance, an actionable plan for atonement, and I carry it
out.
Inasmuch as reconciliation can have positive
effects--and I think it can(1)--what we're dealing with
here is a sort of urge propagation.
Through concrete actions and carefully designed rituals,
you are forcing yourself to encounter something you'd
rather flinch away from, and you're grappling with it right
now instead of leaving your future selves to endure a vague
and undirected sense of guilt over mistakes you don't even
think about let alone correct. Religious or not, nobody
benefits from ignoring problems that need solving, and
nobody's as good at allowing abstract ideas like "being a
good person" to transform their day-to-day lives as they are
at making incremental improvements via specific actions

136

(though those actions may be motivated by abstract ideas).

Lofty resolutions are not effective without well-designed
mechanisms of action, and rituals are awesome at being
that.
I don't think you'd need to change much to salvage the
Sacrament of Reconciliation. Try this, and see how it goes.
(And if you do try it, tell me how it went.)
1. Pick a regular time to think about what mistakes you
made that week.
2. Write them down. Consider why each was a mistake, and
why you made it. For the most important ones, think of
plans for mitigating or repairing the damage if possible,
and for preventing the mistake in the future.
3. If you know someone who would be willing to help you
with this, tell them some of your thoughts, and request
advice for improving your plans. If you're the sort of
person who's likely to benefit from it, choose a highly
respected mentor instead of a peer. Make sure you know
precisely what specific action to take next for each
mistake you want to address. (This is something like,
"This evening, ask Cathy whether what I said hurt her,
and actually listen to what she has to say about it." It is
not something like, "Be nicer to Cathy.")
4. Take the actions on your list. After each action, punch
the air and shout "VICTORY!" When your whole list is
done, call up your friend so they can tell you YAY!

137

What other parts of life might be improved by secular

rituals?
________________________________________________________
1) Don't get me wrong; I'm aware that the Sacrament of
Reconciliation is harmful overall--as are all the
Sacraments--since it propagates and reinforces a
destructive memeplex. And probably for other reasons.

138

Availability: Imaginations Gone Wild

November 08, 2013
The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut we use in
place of time-consuming statistical algorithms when making
decisions under uncertainty.
When we estimate the likelihood of being eaten by a
grumple bug, we substitute for other statistical methods a
subjective measurement of how easy it is to imagine being
eaten by a grumple bug. If I live in a small nomadic tribe
where no one has ever recounted the tale of how his great
aunt was eaten by a grumple bug while out hunting--indeed,
a tribe where no one has ever even heard of a grumple
bug--I'll understandably estimate the likelihood of being
eaten by a grumple bug to be low. As a result, I'll spend
very little time worrying about grumple bugs, and will
instead devote my resources to watching for dangers I hear
about all the time, like tigers, rival tribes, and poisonous
mushrooms that take your soul to the afterlife even before
your body bites the dust. Grumple bugs aren't very
available in memory compared to tigers.
If, however, the tale of the time great aunt Cathy was eaten
by a tiger while out on a hunt is told over and over again
around the camp fire, I may begin to spend more of my time
watching out for tigers than avoiding heat exhaustion.
Never mind that heat exhaustion is actually much more
likely and equally deadly. When that happens, the

139

availability heuristic dons its other masque: the availability

bias.

Ease of Imagery
Availability, as both a heuristic and a bias, apparently
comes down to ease of imagery. By "imagery", I mean
something broader than "how easy it is to conjure up a
visual representation". When you imagine a tiger, you
probably don't just see a still photograph or painting of a
tiger in your mind. Imagination can be fully immersive;
imaginary tigers are big and orange with black stripes, but
they also growl, slink stealthily while stalking prey, drip wet
blood from their fangs, and smell of musk and raw meat.
Several things contribute to ease of imagery. One is actual
frequency in the local environment, which might or might
not match global frequency. Maybe grumple bugs are a
thing a couple hundred miles south, and I'll be caught
unaware if the tribe heads that direction. Another is
repetition. It's useful to rely on ease of imagery when I'm
unlikely to hear about grumple bugs very often in a place
where there are no grumple bugs; on the other hand, I'll
probably hear about tigers more frequently than the
occurrence of tigers in the local environment warrants,
because tiger stories are way more gripping than heat
exhaustion stories. They have conflict, protagonists,
antagonists, narrative arcs, and often social drama. That's
the formula for deep significance to a human brain. "Tom

140

died 'cause he got too hot" doesn't measure up. As with

tigers on the ancestral savanna, so too with cougars in the
modern American Midwest, alligators in the sewers of New
York, and kidney theft.
Tigers seem more at home in the imagination than does
heat exhaustion, don't they? I can come up with an equally
detailed description of heat exhaustion if I try, but it takes
more work. There's something more going on with ease of
imagery than frequency of exposure and narrative structure.
Since I'm cheating with the picture of the tiger in the top
right, imagine instead a human-sized duck holding an
umbrella while playing a kazoo.
Got it? Ok, now imagine the availability heuristic. Very
different sort of experience, right?
Here's what's up with the wacky duck. The duck is simple,
concrete, vivid (for multiple sensory modalities), and
emotionally engaging (humorous, specifically, and also
surprising due to its strangeness). The availability heuristic,
by contrast, is complicated, abstract, murky, and boring (at
least at first blush).
To recap, the core of availability is ease of imagery, which is
a combination of frequency of exposure (repetition),
meaningful narrative context, concreteness, vividness, and
emotional impact.

141

It's not true, of course, that drugged travelers sometimes

wake up in bathtubs full of ice to discover that their
interanal organs have been stolen for sale on the black
market. But it's a concrete, vivid, meaningful story oft
repeated for emotional impact, so people accept it as fact
before System Two ever gets a chance to go, "Wait a
minute, you want me to believe what?"

Further Resources

intro to availability by Eliezer Yudkowsky

study of ease of imagery, purposful imagining, and

availability

study of emotion and availability

wonderful book about why some ideas survive and

others die

the next post in this sequence, which I'll link to as soon

as it exists and will be about engineering memory for
availability

142

Running Without Lying (To Ourselves Or Each Other)

November 10, 2013
The truth about barefoot running is that the truth about
barefoot running is hard to find. But so far, it really does
seem
to
be
better
than
running
in
cushy-motion-controlling-arch-supporty shoes. So let's be
honest: Barefooters hurt their feet a lot, more research is
needed, and we should be a bit confused about all of this in
the mean time.

143

I've been running for about five years now. But I wasn't
really a runner until four years ago when, like many, I
read and fell deeply in love. Immediately upon finishing the
book, I started training barefoot, transitioned to minimalist
running shoes (specifically Vibram KSOs), and vowed to
one day run an ultramarathon. I even brainstormed ways of
testing out persistence hunting for myself.
For those who've never heard of this stuff, here are the
central claims that came to fuel the barefoot running
movement.
1. Distance running is central to human evolutionary
history. We evolved to run great distances--as in a good
hundred miles or so at a time--pursuing prey relentlessly
and forcing it to trot until it keels over from exhaustion.
While we're certainly not built for speed, we're good
enough at endurance to be deadly.

2. The cushy footwear you'll find on display at any athletics

store--arranged according to arch support, motion
control, and activity type--is largely responsible for the
majority of running injuries. It encourages landing on the
heel rather than the front of the foot; it enables weak,
atrophied, useless foot muscles (the true nature of "flat
feet"); and it prevents pronation of the foot, which is a
biomechanical feature rather than a defect to be
corrected by orthotics. As a result, shod runners collide

144

with the ground much harder than do barefoot runners,

and most of the shock goes straight through the heel
and knee, rather than into the foot and calf muscles that
have evolved to take it.

3. Running is good for you. Shoes and poor form are not.
Everyone should run like the Tarahumara: barefoot or in
minimalist footwear, in short, quick steps, with a forefoot
strike instead of a heel strike, and probably not on
concrete.

I originally set out in this post to write a well-reasoned

discussion of the evidence for these claims. Last time I
looked, no such thing existed; there was an awful lot of
cheering, hype, and speculation, but almost no evaluation
of actual evidence not taken directly from Born to Run. To
my delight, this time I discovered that someone has already
done it for me--and done it well.
The barefoot running sequence at Condensed Science has
three main parts. The first discusses the evolutionary basis
for barefoot running. The second is about biomechanics.
Third is an analysis of injury rates in running, and it's the
one wherein the author seriously impressed me by
explaining what we actually do and don't know at this point
rather than merely arguing for her favorite side.

145

In Summary
Yeah, we may well have been "born to run". Given that,
runners are injured at surprisingly high rates: Somewhere
around half of us are injured each year. You're more likely
to end up with joint injuries if you run in conventional
athletic shoes, and you're more likely to injure your feet if
you run barefoot-ish (You don't say!). You're definitely less
likely overall to be injured if you run barefoot, so even
though Vibrams do not in factprevent all injury, they're
better by comparison. Biomechanics is complicated, and
relevant studies are sparse; it is ok to be uncertain and to
make the least bad guess based on whatever evidence is
available.

________________________________________________________
ETA: Just to be clear, I'm making no claims here about
walking.

146

Press "A" To Jump

November 14, 2013
"You're becoming a very specific kind of guru," my best
friend divulged after one of those long conversations that
only happen on road trips. "You're like that character at the
very beginning of a video game when there's a tutorial that
teaches you things like, 'navigate with the arrow keys' and
'press A to jump'. Nobody will even survive for very long, let
alone defeat the final boss, with just those skills. But if it
weren't for knowledge like this we'd get stuck in corners
and never regenerate more than a few feet from where we
started."
The things I said to him that day are things I'd never before
articulated outside of my own head, because they seem too
obvious to me to be worth saying. I said them in this case
because I was exasperated, couldn't think of any other
reason he seemed to be running directly into a corner over
and over again, and wasn't having much luck with asking
simple questions. I was expecting him to respond with,
"Duh, I know that; the actual problem is x," which would
finally allow access to the actual problem.
But no, the truth is that sometimes very smart people intent
on winning the game simply never learn how to use the
controller. So, just in case you happen to be button
mashing at the moment, here are the things I said that have
helped him take much more control of his life.

147

You have values. Winning means fulfilling those values.

Fulfilling values requires identifying and accomplishing
causally relevant goals.
If your goals have not already been accomplished, it means
that the universe is not in your preferred configuration yet.
Since there are a whole lot of possible configurations of the
universe, unless you have extremely general goals, the
odds are pretty small that the universe will just happen to
end up in your favorite one if you simply wait. That doesn't
mean, "Don't get too set on specific goals, 'cause you'll
probably be disappointed." It means, "Don't wait." The basic
game mechanics consist of learning to manipulate causal
chains to increase the odds that the universe ends up in the
configurations you like, and doesn't end up in the
configurations you don't like. Manipulating causal chains
means trying to understand them and then reaching out and
actually acting on them accordingly.
In other words, figure out what you want, figure out how to
get it, and then do that.
It sounds so obvious that I'm embarrassed to say it. But
people really do seem to spend most of their time not doing
this. They just sort of stand around waiting and hoping that
things will go their way. They waste a lot of time lamenting
the cruelty of fate when bad things happen, and feeling
blessed when good things happen. When Karma shits on
them even through they tried really hard, they feel helpless
instead of wondering whether they're trying the wrong

148

thing.
So when you're stuck in a corner, make sure you're holding
the controller and not button mashing: Figure out what you
want, figure out how to get it, and then do that.

149

Ars Memoriae
November 16, 2013
I sense that more is possible in the art of memory.
There was a time when everyone remembered. There was a
time before smart phones, before computers, before
widespread literacy, and before writing, when there was
nothing to do with a thought besides remember it. If you
failed in that task, there would be no external reminder to
fall back on--no index to browse, text message to dig up, no
crumpled-up post-it at the bottom of your purse--and the
thought would be lost forever. That time comprises the vast
majority of human history.
It's easy to imagine that members of pre-literate societies
must have lived almost entirely in the moment, with no
libraries or photographs to hold onto their past thoughts for
them. But that is only because the art of memory has been
so thoroughly replaced by external mnemonic technologies.
Few of us have ever been prompted to explore the potential
of internal memory.
Before the printing press, people were taught from
childhood the powerful, ancient techniques of memory. How
powerful? Powerful enough to create and pass down the
15,963-line Iliad for at least a hundred years before it was
finally committed to paper. People in pre-literate societies
were constantly immersed in their history, oral tradition,

150

and the products of their previous mental labors. For all the
incomprehensible breadth of humanity's new external
memories, it is we who are bound to the present.
If you haven't heard of linking, memory palaces, or the
Major System, the most basic introduction to mnemonics
will demonstrate that you needn't be limited by the tiny
capacity of your working memory once you've learned to
embed information directly into long-term memory. I
remember the first time I learned a twenty item list in just a
few minutes. The encoding took effortful concentration
(though it gets much easier with practice; I can now
complete the same task in about 30 seconds), but the
surprise and excitement I experienced with each item
effortlessly recalled shattered deep resignations about my
own cognitive limits. That was my first taste of the
possibility in the art of memory.
I've since learned of the subculture of mnemonists, people
who compete in the memory circuit. They travel all over the
world to find out who can learn the longest string of random
digits, lines of poetry, and shuffled decks of cards. I've
learned that the only difference between myself and mental
athletes is that I've never deliberately trained my skills. I
could perform such feats if I tried, as could you.
I've not tried, though I have made my life much more
efficient (I was once terribly forgetful and absent minded) by
storing information in my very own brain for reliable recall

151

any time I want to. If I don't want to lose my keys, I simply

remember where they are. If I want to remember which bus
stop I'm looking for, I needn't leaf through my notebook
while standing in the cramped isle or pull up the right
screen on my phone. I just remember. I never forget
passwords, names, or my credit card number--not once I've
decided to remember, anyway. These conveniences alone
are well worth the half hour of study needed to become
proficient in elementary mnemonics.
But there's just no way that this is all there is. About 2,600
years have passed since we began writing things down.
And rather than putting to revolutionary use the internal
memory software responsible for the Iliad by harnessing the
ability to remember more important and different kinds of
information, we're still mostly using it to remember our
shopping lists while our hands are full? That can't be right.
Or can it? After all, there's no reason for most of us to know
that a mole of carbon atoms is 6.022*10^23 atoms of
carbon: In the unlikely event that you need to do
stoichiometry, Wolfram Alpha will answer all of your
questions. This much is certainly true. But in the context of
a discussion of mnemonics, something about it feels off.
"We don't need internal memory because our external
memory is so much better" misframes the relationship
between memory and learning.
If you take a 400 level college course, it probably has

152

prerequisites. You must first have taken a related 300 or 200

level course. Why?
Because often, in order to learn things you first must know
things. Human memory is a massive network of
associations, and recognizing relationships among
concepts requires each concept be located somewhere in
that network. Without well-traveled pathways, the memories
will get lost. They will find neither conscious awareness nor
each other.
You cannot innovate, you cannot invent, and you cannot
seamlessly integrate information stored only externally.
Creativity is not a magical spell for creating something out
of nothing. It's the ability to make new associations among
old ideas and new data. To be creative, the raw materials
must reside in internal memory. Wikipedia is simply not
available to the subtle workings of fluid intelligence.
We should not allow technologies like writing to cause our
memories to languish and atrophy. Rather, they should
enrich our memories with much higher leverage information
than was available to mnemonists past.
Our society has lost the art of memory because we can get
away with being lazy. But how might the world be if each of
us had a sprawling memory palace as lavishly furnished as
that of an erudite Greek of 660 BCE? Imagine if it contained
the most important information we encounter now.

153

This is the vision of a liberal arts education, after all; but

while we spend longer than ever before--18 years at
least--memorizing only to forget, we are no longer taught
how to learn. If we all learned to think memorably, to keep
the most important parts of past experience close at hand,
how much more creative might we become? And what
might we gain the ability to learn?
Further Resources

This half-hour lecture/audiobook by Derren Brown is the

best introduction to the basic mnemonic techniques I've
found so far.

For a look at how it was done in the good old days,

check out Cicero's Rhetorica ad Herennium (Latin
background optional). Though there's been some
innovation, this is still basically an accurate description
of how the professionals do it.

There is much to learn of the remembering mind in

Homerian verse. As Milman Parry established in the
1920's (at the age of 18), what was captured by Homer in
heroic hexameter was not merely a story, but the inner
workings of literary thought 'ere dawn of the written
word.

154

Joshuah Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein is a riveting

tour of mnemonic subculture, as well as an introduction
to the history and theory of the art of memory. The
Kindle version's only ten bucks, but if you can't spare
the resources, at least watch his TED talk on the same.

155

Cuff Links and Nail Polish: How Gender Roles Hurt

Everyone
November 21, 2013
Ever since I first realized that people consider me to be a
woman--that as a further fact beyond having visibly female
sex characteristics, they think I belong in the female gender
role--I've been struggling with how to respond to that
information.
It's clear that I shouldn't try to hate mall shopping just
because my culture has put much more pressure on me to
enjoy that than it has on my brothers. For whatever reason,
I do enjoy it, and if I stopped I'd have one fewer thing in life
from which to derive pleasure. Which would be sad. But it's
also clear that I shouldn't feel guilty for being assertive as a
result of similar pressures, if I can avoid it.
So I'm trying to become more conscious of when my
motivations spring from implicit beliefs along the lines of,
"This will preserve my social points, because women are
supposed to make themselves sexually appealing to
straight men, and this makes me sexier." (Note: Men can
gain social points for looking extra sexy, though men's
social points aren't usually conceptualized that way. But
women lose social points when they don't make a special
effort to look sexy. Because pleasing men is what we're
really here for, right?)

156

Sometimes it's pretty clear-cut. For instance, it's usually

easy for me to tell when I'm not doing something merely
because I would be perceived as less feminine/more

157

masculine, and I'd lose social points for it. It feels like
longing. I notice myself going, "I love men's dress shoes so
much; I wish I could get some really dashing men's dress
shoes and coordinate my outfit around them." For a while in
college, when I felt that way my response was, "Fuck this
shit, that's exactly what I'm going to do!" But now I'm in a
new environment where I don't feel quite so high status.
When I went shoe shopping the other day, I found myself
gazing longingly at the men's shoes while spending my
allotted shoe money, with resignation, on women's shoes.
(Much sadder to me than the shoes: Men's cologne. Oh my
god I love it so much.)
There are also clear-cut cases where I wholeheartedly adore
doing the traditionally feminine thing, and would definitely
still want to do it if I were male. I love having painted
nails--though having someone else paint them is better--and
if a male version of me wouldn't go in for a mani-pedi, it
would be for the same reason that female me is reluctant to
be visibly masculine. Transgressing gender roles comes
with a price, regardless of your sex.
The areas that give me trouble are the ones where I sort of
want to do something that falls in the female gender role,
but also sort of don't want to do it.
For example, I sort of want to wear a tight dress that shows
off my breasts and hips, and I sort of want to wear heels
that show off my calves. For a while I thought this was
because I want to appear well groomed, since that makes

158

me feel like I command attention and respect (thus

increasing my confidence), and this is simply the way to do
it when you're in a female body. (I do, by the way, like my
female body, and I usually don't like the idea of becoming
physically male.) But a female body in a suit and tie neither
appears nor feels any less well groomed. Indeed, I'd feel a
lot better groomed that way, since in men's clothes I can
dress to the nines without worrying that it's "too slutty". I
would feel elegant, in charge, and handsome.
Tight dresses and heels aren't about authority and respect.
They're about sex. The part of me that wants to wear them
loves being sexy, loves the idea of turning on strangers
when I walk down the street. The part of me that doesn't
want to wear them wants attention and respect with no
dependence on my utility as a sperm receptacle.
If I were young, fit, and male in a post-gender society, I'd
often go out dancing in skimpy head-turning dresses that
showcase my physique. But I'd go to conferences with a tie
clip and cuff-links, because that's how I roll. And color
coordinated nail polish, of course. If I were female? Same.
How I expressed myself, how I interacted with others, and
how I made my way in the world would have everything to
do with who I am and nothing to do with which behaviors
society associates with which body parts. How other people
interacted with me would be similarly gender-free.

159

I chose to talk about clothing here because it's a concrete,

simple, vivid illustration. But it's also relatively trivial.
Gender roles do not stop at attire, and it's the more subtle
things that really hurt us.
It's the way the pizza delivery person always addresses my
male companion instead of me when we answer the door
together, because priors say women are submissive and
men are dominant. It's the way I have to publish twice as
many articles in journals twice as prestigious to be
academically competitive with a man, because priors say
women are simple-minded and men are intelligent. It's the
way I'm interrupted far more often than my male discussion
partners, and the way I'm perceived as bitchy and pushy
rather than confident and authoritative when I do insist on
speaking up, because priors say women are quiet and men
do the talking. Men are agenty, and women are at their
service.
If you want to better understand exactly how gender roles
work, I highly recommend the talk below by Virginia Valian.
Alternately, check out her book Why So Slow?: The
Advancement of Women. In the latter, you'll find citations of
and notes on all the source material she mentions in the
talk.
Embedded File ()
P.S. The longer version of this is the most important lecture
I've ever listened to.

160

Edit: Shortly after I wrote this, a New York Times article

featured a clothier called Bindle and Keep, which has been
making men's suits for female bodies for over a year now. I
am SO excited about this, and I really hope the meme
spreads rapidly through the clothing industry. Hopefully, I'll
eventually get to schedule a fitting for my dream suit in the
Bay Area.

161

Book Recommendation: How To Win Friends and

Influence People
December 22, 2013
I'm finally reading How To Win Friends and Influence People
by Dale Carnegie, which has been on my list for a year now.
So far, I'm completely loving it, and I understand why it has
remained so popular for most of a century.
Here is how the book works. I'll use Chapter 3 as an
example.
Each chapter begins with a straightforward claim about
successful socialization.

The only way on earth to influence other people is to

talk about what they want and show them how to get
it.
It then goes through many concrete examples, some taken
from famous bits of history, others from students in the
author's classes or from his own experiences.

At one time I rented the grand ballroom of a certain

New York hotel for twenty nights in each season in
order to hold a series of lectures.

162

At the beginning of one season, I was suddenly

informed that I should have to pay almost three times
as much rent as formerly. This news reached me after
the tickets had been printed and distributed and all
announcements had been made.
Naturally, I didn't want to pay the increase, but what
was the use of talking to the hotel about what I
wanted? They were interested only in what they
wanted. So a couple of days later I went to see the
manager.
'I was a bit shocked when I got your letter,' I said, 'but
I don't blame you at all. If I had been in your position,
I should probably have written a similar letter myself.
Your duty as the manager of the hotel is to make all
the profit possible. If you don't do that, you will be
fired and you ought to be fired. Now, let's take a piece
of paper and write down the advantages and the
disadvantages that will accrue to you, if you insist on
this increase in rent.'
Then I took a letterhead and ran a line through the
center and headed one column 'Advantages' and the
other column 'Disadvantages.'
I wrote down under the head 'Advantages' these
words: 'Ballroom free.' Then I went on to say: 'You
will have the advantage of having the ballroom free to
rent for dances and conventions. That is a big

163

advantage, for affairs like that will pay you much

more than you can get for a series of lectures. If I tie
your ballroom up for twenty nights during the course
of the season, it is sure to mean a loss of some very
profitable business to you.
Now, let's consider the disadvantages. First, instead
of increasing your income from me, you are going to
decrease it. In fact, you are going to wipe it out
because I cannot pay the rent you are asking. I shall
be forced to hold these lectures at some other place.
There's another disadvantage to you also. These
lectures attract crowds of educated and cultured
people to your hotel. That is good advertising for you,
isn't it? In fact, if you spent five thousand dollars
advertising in the newspapers, you couldn't bring as
many people to look at your hotel as I can bring by
these lectures. That is worth a lot to a hotel, isn't it?'
As I talked, I wrote these two 'disadvantages' under
the proper heading, and handed the sheet of paper to
the manager, saying: 'I wish you would carefully
consider both the advantages and disadvantages that
were going to accrue to you and then give me your
final decision.'
I received a letter the next day, informing me that my
rent would be increased only 50 percent instead of
300 percent.

164

Mind you, I got this reduction without saying a word

about what I wanted. I talked all the time about what
the other person wanted and how he could get it.
Suppose I had done the human, natural thing;
suppose I had stormed into this office and said, 'What
do you mean by raising my rent three hundred
percent when you know the tickets have been printed
and the announcements made? Three hundred
percent! Ridiculous! Absurd! I won't pay it!'
What would have happened then? An argument
would have begun to steam and boil and sputter--and
you know how arguments end. Even if I had
convinced him that he was wrong, his pride would
have made it difficult for him to back down and give
in.
Interspersed are actionable instructions summarizing the
methods illuminated by the examples.

Tomorrow you may want to persuade somebody to

do something. Before you speak, pause and ask
yourself: 'How can I make this person want to do it?'
Each chapter concludes with a concise statement of
the principle discussed.
Arouse in the other person an eager want.

165

________________________________________________________
I do have one worry about this book.
Up through my first year of college, I was mostly horrible
with people, and I was proud of it. I didn't like people, I
didn't want them to like me, and suggestions that being nice
would make things easier offended me. I was cold and
arrogant. I did seem to have a surprising amount of a
certain kind of social success anyway, for I was always
leading groups of various sorts, and people always insisted
that my leadership was irreplaceable when I spoke of
leaving. But my domain of social success was severely
limited, and I was crippled by that.
I began to change when I finally concluded that my extreme
arrogance would prevent me from befriending a worthy peer
in the unlikely event that I might encounter one in college. I
certainly didn't decide to become "good with people", but
the resolution to become less arrogant, and my subsequent
success (yes, believe it or not, I'm vastly less arrogant than
once I was), began a success spiral that led me into a
growth mindset where dramatic change seemed possible.
Toward the beginning of my second year of college, I
decided to get very good at socialization. It was a time in my
life when I was terribly excited to dive into Impossible
Projects, and this was one. And I'm still in the midst of this
one, but I've come a long way. I still have a few gaping
holes in my social education. But I've taken the project

166

seriously, and I really have learned a lot.

Recently, I began working on an essay summarizing what
I've learned. The principles I've so far outlined are very
nearly identical to those set forth in Carnegie's book.
Therefore, while reading this book, I respond to most of
what he says with a feeling of, "Yes!!! This is so obviously
right. Why didn't anyone ever explain this to me back when I
needed it?"
There was a period of a few years between when I began the
project and when I gained sufficient proficiency to generate
these principles on my own when this book might have
given me a giant boost. I might have shot ahead by as much
as three years if it were perfectly timed. But before that
period, it would have been useless to me. It would have
been an imposition, one more person telling me the Right
Way To Live as though I had any inclination to mar my
personal aesthetic with their ugly morality. I wouldn't even
have had the capacity to understand what "Give honest,
sincere appreciation" meant.
So my worry is this. I don't know to what extent people
might be able to use this book to actually grow rather than
to merely feel either validated or offended.
I do suspect, however, that there exist many people in
precisely the right stage of social development to benefit

167

enormously. If you think you might be receptive to the sort

of advice given above, I wholeheartedly recommend that
you read How To Win Friends and Influence People, and in
fact I suggest that you move it as near the top of your
reading list as you can possibly stand.
These principles are powerful. When understood and
practiced, they change everything, including your efficiency
in accomplishing the things you'll waste a lot of time on
before reading this book if you put it off. And I do think
there's a good chance that reading the book will lead you to
practice the principles, and thereby to understand them.
The Kindle version is $2.99, and it's a quick read. You'll
know by the third chapter if it's for you.

168

What Is Hypnosis?
January 01, 2014
There are at least two things this question might mean. The
easy version has an answer along these lines: Hypnosis is a
tendency to comply with suggestions more than whatever
your base rate is. Additionally, it's characterized by
cataleptic and amnesic effects, as well as selective attention
and reduced sensitivity to pain. Let's call this set of
behaviors "hypnosis syndrome".

169

The other interpretation of "what is hypnosis" is "why does

hypnosis syndrome happen?". I don't know the answer to
that one. But here are what thoughts I do have in the
direction of an answer.
I don't think there's any one thing going on with hypnosis.
There is no button in your brain the hypnotist pushes to
cause Sudden Asleepening. I certainly don't mean to say
that there's no such thing as hypnosis. But looking for an
individual mechanism causing all of its features is like

170

studying biology by searching for the source of elan vital.

Ordinary Trance
Here are some ordinary kinds of experiences from everyday
life that I think hypnotists have probably figured out how to
replicate at will and take advantage of.
1. Suggestion: If you're cognitively taxed and experiencing
a lot of dissonance, it can be an incredible relief when
someone else takes over.
You just had a very long day full of important business
decisions. You're having dinner at a restaurant, and you
can't decide what to order off the very long menu. "Just
have the turkey," says your spouse, and that's what you
have. They make your decision for you, and you're happy to
comply without thinking deliberatively about it any further.
It doesn't feel at all like they forced you to order the turkey.
Still, they suggested you order the turkey, and you ordered
it. That's complying with suggestion. You're more likely to
comply with that particular suggestion when your feeling of
indecision is slightly unpleasant or draining, so it's safe to
say that you're in a state of heightened suggestibility when
faced with a cognitively taxing dinner menu.
2. Selective attention: You never experience every element
of your surroundings with equal attention. Sometimes, your

171

attention becomes so selective that you're completely

unaware of large portions of your perceptible environment.
You're in a state of flow. You're working on something
you're passionate about, but it's very challenging, so you're
highly focused. (Maybe you're composing music, proving a
mathematical theorem, or practicing three-pointers.)
Someone is standing right beside you trying to get your
attention, even saying your name. Yet, when they finally
touch your shoulder, you jump a bit from how surprised you
are to discover them.
It's not that the sound of their voice didn't enter your ears,
or that the light reflecting off of them didn't enter your eyes.
Your attention was just too narrowly directed to respond to
stimuli irrelevant to the object of your intense focus.
3. Catalepsy: Sometimes, you just feel too damn lazy to
move.
It's your day off and you're lying in bed. The sun's pouring
gently through the drapes, and you feel so warm and snugly
that you don't want to move a muscle. But you know it's
time to get up, so you imagine yourself moving, raising your
head to find out what time it is. You tell yourself, "I'm going
to move now". You even repeat silently to yourself, "Lift
your head. Lift your head." But your body just won't move.
You aren't paralyzed. All your nerves are firing just fine. On

172

some level, you feel that you could move, if you just wanted
to hard enough. But you can't seem to make yourself want it
enough. You can't muster up enough willpower to really try
to try. For all the power your will seems to have over your
legs, they might as well be made of lead.
4. Amnesia: It's normal to forget little things all the time. But
occasionally a really drastic memory failure happens, and it
feels as though you've jumped through time.
You're on the highway at night, and you're a little sleepy.
The drive is monotonous; everything rushing by is the
same, and the grey road just stretches on and on. It's about
an hour till your next turn. But then, all of a sudden, there's
your exit! And you think, "What? How did I just lose a whole
hour?"
You obviously experienced each moment of that hour as it
was happening--you know you didn't fall asleep, because if
you had you would have crashed. But you just don't seem
to have access to those memories for some reason. It's like
you went on autopilot.
5. Reduced sensitivity to pain: This one's especially familiar
to athletes.
You're in the final stretch of a marathon. You're sprinting
now, giving it everything you've got, when suddenly you hit
an uneven bit of ground and your ankle rolls. You know it's

173

happened, but you keep going. There's a very mild, dull

kind of nagging pain coming from your ankle, but it's easy
to ignore, and you think nothing of it. After you cross the
finish line, you collapse onto the grass beside the track. As
you slowly catch your breath, you notice that your ankle is
hurting more. Quite a lot, in fact. As you begin tearing up
from the pain, you realize that you've probably sprained it
severely.
There's no way you could tolerate putting weight on it at
this point. Yet just a few minutes ago, you were sprinting as
though nothing were wrong.

One More Ingredient

When experiences like this happen in the course of daily
life, we don't usually recognize anything strange or spooky
about them. If, however, we experience them when
someone called a "hypnotist" is dangling a pendulum in
front of us, we pay attention to them, and they no longer
fuse so seamlessly with the rest of experience. Framing is
everything.
Hypnosis seems to be some combination of suggestion,
selective attention, catalepsy, amnesia, and reduced
sensitivity to pain. These pieces of "hypnosis syndrome"
happen to us frequently in all sorts of contexts. So perhaps
there's one final, key ingredient to this apparently bizarre
practice we call "hypnosis": the belief (or suspicion) that

174

one is hypnotized.

175

Hasty Genderalizations
January 15, 2014
Gender
schemas
are
largely
non-conscious
hypotheses we all have about the different
characteristics of males and females. We see females
as nurturing, as communal, and as doing things out
of concern for other people. And we see males as
capable of independent action, doing things for a
reason, and getting down to the business at hand.
[The male gender schema includes negations of the
female gender schema and vice verse.] We have
schemas about everything, every social group
defined by race, age, sex, social class, and roles. So
students have schemas about what it is to be a
professor. And people have schemas about what it is
to be a scientist. And for most professions, the
schema that people have for being a professional
person overlaps much more with the schema for
being male than it does with the schema for being
female. So we take requirements to be successful for
most fields as being capable of independent action,
doing things for a reason, and getting down to the
business at hand.
- Virginia Valian in an address to Chairs and Senior
Administrators at the City University of New York

176

Our beliefs about the relative rationality of men and women

are importantly problematic regardless of whether our
beliefs about men and women in general are by and large
correct.
Suppose that a random male raised by gender-blind robots
who pass the Turing test is, on average, significantly less
likely to end up more nurturing, communal, and likely to do
things out of concern for other people than is a female
raised under similar circumstances. And suppose both
sexes vary greatly along those dimensions, such that men
who are innately at least as nurturing etc. as the average
woman are fairly common. When you meet a new person,
your use some model of them to predict their behavior, and
that model has only your prior beliefs about people with the
characteristics you immediately observe, such as their
appearing male or female.
If your priors are in favor of men in general being
non-nurturing (and they're accurate on average), your
implicit model of any specific randomly chosen man will
also predict that he is non-nurturing. It will take extra
evidence for you to update to expecting the man to be
nurturing. So at this point, you're already going to end up
with a gender imbalance in professions that require the
characteristics of female gender schemata, such as
teaching kindergarten, social work, and nursing.
If

the

vast

majority

of

177

professions

require

the

characteristics of the female gender role, then even given

only the things I've mentioned so far, you're going to end up
with at least a mild case of women ruling the world and men
being second-class citizens.
Now suppose people are actually not so great at Bayesian
updating--their beliefs have huge amounts of inertia due to
confirmation bias and related phenomena. If your (implicit,
unconscious) priors have grown to be strongly in favor of
men being non-nurturing, non-communal, and doing things
out of self-interest rather than a concern for other people,
then any given man will have to exhibit the characteristics
of the female gender schema much more overtly than a
random woman before you believe that he is in fact
nurturing etc. Due to cognitive biases we already know
about, a slight gender imbalance in innate tendency to
exhibit the nurturing etc. characteristics required by the
vast majority of professions could easily lead to an
overwhelming, horribly oppressive case of women ruling
the world and men being second-class citizens. If you add
to that a long history of people in power liking power and
wanting to keep it and have more of it, this scenario is even
bleaker.
In reality, this is exactly what the world looks like, except
that the vast majority of professions require the
characteristics of male gender schemata instead--most
professionals benefit from being seen as agenty, having
reasons for their actions, and working efficiently. There are

178

some exceptions: Grade school teachers, social workers,

and nurses benefit from being seen as nurturing,
communal, and doing things out of concern for other
people.

________________________________________________________
But so far the model I've described only obviously explains
things we've already observed. Does it make risky testable
predictions as well?
You bet!
For one thing, it predicts the following of people working in
a profession that emphasizes characteristics of the male
gender schema. Suppose you hand people equal evidence
of the professional competence of two candidates. Then
you tell them that one is a bio of a male, and the other the
bio of a female. The model I've described predicts that the
man will be rated as more highly competent. Why? Because
the raters will need to encounter more evidence of
professional competence for the female to overcome the
rater's priors against her. If this doesn't happen in real life,
it's strong evidence against my model.
Furthermore, it doesn't predict that men and women would
differ in their ratings of the candidates. A difference would
be
evidence
against
my
model.
Competing
hypotheses--anything along the lines of "gender inequality
happens because men dislike women more than women

179

dislike men"--do predict that the ratings should differ

according to the sex and gender of the raters.

________________________________________________________
In 1995, the ratio of admitted/rejected male applicants for
postdoctoral fellowships at a certain medical school was
twice that of female applicants. Wenners and Wold
investigated. They came up with a system for determining
the "impact points" of professional academics. The points
were awarded according to number of journal publications,
prestige of the respective journals, number of articles in
which zer name is listed first among the authors, and
number of citations zer article received in a one-year period.
They then used this system to determine the impact on their
field of applicants for postdoctoral fellowships to a certain
medical school in Sweden.
Ordinarily, the results of admissions reviews are not made
public. Due to an unusual court case, the committee
reviews for this particular round of medical students were,
and the reviews included an overall "competence rating".
From their article in Nature:
Did men and women with equal scientific productivity
receive the same competence rating by the MRC
reviewers? No! ... The peer reviewers gave female
applicants lower scores than male applicants who
displayed the same level of scientific productivity. In
fact, the most productive group of female applicants,

180

containing those with 100 total impact points or more,

was the only group of women judged to be as
competent as men, although only as competent as
the least productive group of male applicants (the
one whose members had fewer than 20 total impact
points).
Wenners and Wold controlled for the applicant's
nationality, education, field, university affiliation, evaluation
committee to which the applicant was assigned,
postdoctoral experience abroad, letter of recommendation,
and affiliation with members of the evaluation committee.
Perceived gender continued to matter. Lots.
According to the multiple-regression model based on
total impact, female applicants started from a basic
competence level of 2.09 competence points (the
intercept of the multiple regression curve) and were
given an extra 0.0033 competence points by the
reviewers for every impact point they had
accumulated. Independent of scientific productivity,
however, male applicants received an extra 0.21
points for competence. So, for a female scientist to
be awarded the same competence as a male
colleague, she needed to exceed his scientific
productivity by 64 impact points (95 per cent
confidence interval: 35-93 impact points).
So how much work does that amount to?

181

This represents approximately three extra papers in

Nature or Science (impact factors 25 and 22,
respectively), or 20 extra papers in a journal with an
impact factor of around 3, which would be an
excellent specialist journal such as Atherosclerosis,
Gut, Infection and Immunity, Neuroscience or
Radiology. Considering that the mean total impact of
this cohort of applicants was 40 points, a female
applicant had to be 2.5 times more productive than
the average male applicant to receive the same
competence score as he ((40+64)/40=2.6). [Emphasis
mine.]
Let me repeat that. A female applicant had to be 2.5 times
more productive than the average male applicant to receive
the same competence score.
Sandstrom and Hallsten replicated this study in 2008.
There were not enough women on the review committees (5
out of 55 in 1995) to determine whether women equally
favored male candidates. There are plenty of other studies,
however, demonstrating that there's no significant
difference between men and women in how they rate other
men and women. Both genders and sexes seem to be
equally subject to gender bias. Example: A study by Norton,
Vandello, and Darley on how we rationalize favoring men.

________________________________________________________

182

I'm not ready to advise on what we should do about this.

But here is the main update I'd like you to make: The
women you meet are probably more agenty, rational, and
efficient than you think they are, especially if you don't
know them well. The men around you are probably more
nurturing, communal, and compassionate. Your beliefs
about them affect your interactions whether you're aware of
it or not.

183

Lob's Theorem Cured My Social Anxiety

February 09, 2014
This post explains how I cured my social anxiety in three
minutes (sort of), which is a surprisingly long story. If
you're just interested in the practical advice that I expect to
help other people, you can skip to the section that begins,
"And so it began." If you're only interested in what actually
worked for me once and for all, skip to "This is where it gets
seriously strange." If you're only in it for the mathematical
logic jokes, skip to the very last section.
I've had something like social anxiety for as long as I can
remember. I haven't always recognized it as that. For a long
time I thought I just hated humans. Despite encountering
some humans I actually liked over time, it got worse with
age. By the time I was 20, I was having panic attacks and
running off to hide in closets during social events.
I knew my goals required I be able to deal with people, so
when I started college I decided to learn to socialize. I didn't
have to like it, but I had to be good at it. My understanding
of how to learn things wasn't very sophisticated back then,
so I just threw myself into the middle of socialization.
(Diving in headfirst had long been my custom.) I joined
clubs, ran clubs, went dancing on the weekends, and even
took a job as an RA. Although I spent much of my free time
during college huddled in my room exhausted and crying, I
gained many skills very quickly in order to survive the

184

ruthless training.
That whole time, though, I didn't think of myself as having
social anxiety, as being constrained by a psychological
illness that could be cured. I just thought of myself as
extremely introverted. It was part of my identity, more like
being obsessed with books than like having a paralyzed
limb. As a result, all the techniques I learned for navigating
social situations assumed the constraint. I framed
questions as, "Given that my brain works this way..." rather
than as, "In order to make my brain work differently...".
It wasn't until I returned from my first visit to the San
Francisco Bay Area that the reality of my situation hit me. I
took a workshop with the Center for Applied Rationality.
One of the workshop activities was called "Comfort Zone
Expansion",
or
COZe
for
short,
and
it
was
basically exposure therapy. They took everyone to a
crowded mall and told them to get a little outside their
comfort zones. Some of the men had their makeup done, for
example, and others were pushing their boundaries just by
shaking hands with a few strangers.
The night beforehand, I couldn't sleep. I was already way
outside my comfort zone, spending nearly every moment of
every day surrounded by strangers I had to interact with in
relatively unstructured ways. During dinner and other break
times, I would hide in my room instead of getting to know
the extremely intelligent and fascinating participants and

185

instructors. I felt like I was on the edge of a panic attack the

entire day leading up to the COZe exercise. When the time
came, I simply couldn't do it. I couldn't even go and sit
silently in a crowded area reading a book. The thought of
being trapped with other people in a car on the way there
made it hard to breathe. I stayed behind.
During the following week, I thought about all the
networking opportunities I'd missed. CFAR selects their
participants carefully in order to create a certain culture,
and to have the largest impact they can on the rest of the
world. Thus, the people at their workshops are invariably
extraordinary. And I'd more or less failed to make friends
with a single one of them. Without the familiar structure of
academic settings, my hard-earned coping mechanisms
hadn't been enough.
It was not because of my failure that this was a tipping
point. I'd failed before to accomplish social goals I'd set for
myself. But I'd only wanted to want to do those things, on
the meta level. They seemed like a good idea, but I felt no
motivation, so I wasn't surprised or really even
disappointed when they didn't work out. The difference this
time was that I really wanted to interact with these people,
on the object level. I wanted it, but I couldn't do it.
I noticed I was confused. If the source of my social
difficulties was a deep desire to not interact with other
humans, then why, when that desire went away, did the

186

problems remain?
The answer was very obvious when I finally asked myself
the question with the usual self narrative out of the way. My
main symptoms: Intense fear of interacting with strangers,
especially in unstructured ways. Fear of situations in which
I may be judged. Worrying about embarrassing or
humiliating myself (mostly by looking stupid). Fear that
others will notice that I look anxious. Having to fight to
make eye contact. Intense fear of tests. Extremely
inconveniencing myself to avoid socialization. Panic attacks
that include trouble breathing, tachycardia, shaking,
derealization, dissociation, and belief that I am dying.
Hatred of humans does not cause things like this. But
phobias do.

________________________________________________________
I struggled with this realization. I was in the middle of a
massive paradigm shift that led me to consider suddenly
changing course and devoting my life to existential risk
reduction rather than academia - right after receiving a five
year fellowship from my top choice philosophy program.
That was a scary dilemma in itself, but on top of that I now
understood that I had a crippling psychological disorder
that I could only survive from inside the academy.
The discussion in my head went something like this.

187

System 1: "We've finally gotten really good at the

academia thing. We're about to start getting paid to
study philosophy. Charging into the chaotic outside
world is completely insane!"
System 2: "The future of humanity is probably in
extreme danger, and you're proposing we do nothing
about it... because we're scared. You think
that's not insane?"
System 1: "Since when do we care about other
people? We study logic because it's pretty,
remember? Humans are ugly."
System 2: "Chapter 45 of Harry Potter and the
Methods of Rationality made us cry. Lots. Given that
we have social anxiety, that seems like pretty good
evidence that we've been lying to ourselves about
hating people to protect ourselves from having to
change."
System 1: "Ok fine. Look, we specialize in an unusual
kind of logic very few people study. It's really likely AI
researchers
will
eventually
need
it
they'll definitely need it - and if we're the world's top
expert they'll come to us, and we'll have advanced the
field enough to meet their needs. So we can study
philosophy and still save the world. Obviously."

188

System 2: "That is the worst bit of motivated

reasoning we have ever attempted. What are
the real odds based on our current knowledge that
Friendly Artificial Intelligence requires advances in
intuitionism specifically? Pretty damn small.
Especially compared to the things we know it needs,
like funding. Look, I just emailed the FAI guy and he
agrees with me on this. Shut up and calculate."
System 1: "I don't wanna you can't make me la la la
not listening. *falls on the ground and throws a fit*"
System 2: "Calm down, this is really simple. All we
have to do is cure our social anxiety."
System 1: "NO NO NO IF WE DO THAT THEN WE
DON'T GET TO HIDE FROM THE SCARY PEOPLE
WHAT ARE YOU THINKING HELP HELP SYSTEM 2 IS
TRYING TO KILL ME!!!"
System 2: "Woah. I... think we may have found the
problem. Listen. We won't want to not interact with
people after we cure our social anxiety. It won't be
scary. That is the point."
System 1: "Um... I... but..."
System 2: "Yes?"

189

System 1: "I know there's got to be something wrong

with this. Just gimme a minute..."
System 2: "*sigh* You know, to be honest, I'm not
sure we could do this even if we tried."
System 1: "Hey. You take that back. We can do
anything."
System 2: "No, I don't think so. We don't even have a
plan."
System 1: "What the hell? Since when does that stop
us?"
System 2: "I don't think we can cure social anxiety.
We'll just have to hide in academia forever and never
save the world, let alone achieve our full potential."
System 1: "Oh HELL no. We can totally cure social
anxiety. That's not even close to impossible."
System 2: "Oh yeah? Prove it."
System 1: "WELL OK THEN LET'S DO THIS."

________________________________________________________
And so it began.

190

I moved into a group house/startup where self-improvement

and extensive strategizing were encouraged and supported.
Yes, a group house, with around twelve people, constant
collaboration, and nothing but a large closet to myself due
to overcrowding while the housing situation was in flux. I
moved in on purpose. This should tell you something about
how much awesome Leverage Research is made of. (It was
also the quickest way back to the Bay Area.)
It was surprisingly non-horrible for a little while, likely
because of the extremely focused, academia-like
atmosphere. I was grateful to be there. But the relative calm
didnt last. The anxiety, stress, and subsequent depression
compounded day after day, and my ability to solve difficult
problems diminished proportionally.
But I was able to carry out parts of my developing plan. It
was, after all, the perfect environment in which to study my
reactions to social interaction under extreme stress.
Furthermore, some of my housemates specialized in a
certain kind of guided introspection that led me to form
several testable hypotheses about the root cause of my
condition. Through a bit of experimentation and diligent
documentation, I learned more precise details of my
symptoms, and disconfirmed a few plausible hypotheses.
For example, it doesn't seem to be the case that I'm being
constantly punished in social interactions by people's
negative body language in response to subtle incorrect
social signals I display.

191

I eventually noticed that "understand the problem" wasn't

getting very far (though I was making progress on
"understand what the problem isn't") and decided it was
time for a different approach. For some unknown reason,
System 1 was behaving strangely. Actually, it was behaving
remarkably like a previously abused dog I'd recently
befriended.
So I tried imagining what would happen if I treated myself
the way I treated the dog. Central would be compassion,
patience, and generosity. I'd engineer a safe environment
for experimentation and growth. I certainly wouldn't try to
force myself to behave like a normal human. I'd find ways to
show myself that I wouldn't be punished for behaving
unusually, but I'd reward myself quickly and copiously for
taking risks toward recovery. Operant conditioning would
be the name of the game. And I'd need cooperation from
others.
Techniques based on that line of thinking definitely caused
clear progress, and I picked up ideas from other people
along the way. Here are a few things that made startling
differences.
1. I made a special effort to spend what social energy I had
on people who made me feel especially comfortable,
happy, and fulfilled. (Thank you Katie's dog for being so
easy to anthropomorphize.)

192

2. I was completely and utterly honest about my project

with just about everyone. I told them I was battling social
anxiety, that I'd only like to schedule the date if we
agreed I would be free to cancel at any time, that I was
looking uncomfortable because I was scared of social
interaction and not because of anything they'd said, and
that they should keep on asking me to hang out even if I
said no nine times in a row because by chance they'd
eventually catch me on a really good day. I explained
that certain kinds of socialization are worse for me than
others, and that I'd respond better to proposals of
goal-directed meetings than to proposals of free-form
hangouts. Rather than indefinitely dodging their phone
calls, I told them I have a strong preference for meeting
in person or chatting through text. This hugely mitigated
my fear that others would take my symptoms personally.
(Thanks Mike B, Alexei, Leveragers, and everyone else
who took me at my word in these situations.) YAY TELL
CULTURE.

3. I installed a habit of imagining a version of myself that

wasnt afraid whenever I needed to make an important
policy decision, and I counted on my simulation of her to
reason sensibly when I couldnt. I predicted her actions
and followed suit rather than deciding whether to
socialize (thanks, Anna). Deciding, it turns out,
automatically engages the affect heuristic in a way that
predicting does not.

193

4. At the suggestion of a book on cognitive behavioral

therapy, I almost completely cut out caffeine, prioritized
sufficient sleep, and replaced part of my usual
meditation with progressive relaxation. This dramatically
reduced the frequency and severity of full-blown,
spontaneous panic attacks (which are different from the
anxiety feedback loops described below).

5. I installed a habit of distancing myself from my

emotional reactions whenever I noticed that they were
excessive or forming dangerous feedback loops.
An anxiety feedback loop looks something like this: I
would interpret a stimulus as anxiety inducing, which
would cause anxiety. Then Id take that experience of
anxiety as evidence that the original stimulus was in fact
anxiety inducing. My confidence that I would feel more
anxious increased, and the anxiety itself increased in
turn. The fear of greater panic also added epicycles on
top of this process. It could only escalate so far since my
attempts to calm down were eventually effective, but it
could sustain itself for an hour or more at whatever level
I reached before the calming effect kicked in.
Distancing had long
had never occurred
experience (thanks,
living at a Soto Zen

been in my toolkit, but somehow it

to me to apply it to this kind of
Val). I originally learned it while
temple, where meditation sessions

194

are long and frequent. When you first begin a meditation

practice, your muscles and joints are not prepared. It can
be extremely painful early on if you sit for, say, an hour
and a half at a time every single day. (I actually began
with a week-long traditional Soto retreat, so make that
four to six hours a day). The only way to get through it is
to let the pain happen without suffering from itwithout
attaching to it, as Buddhists would say. You assume a
mental posture that turns I am hurting into there
exists pain. Distancing is the opposite of attachment or
identification.
With the application of distancing to social responses, I
gained the incredibly satisfying ability to stop sudden
panic cycles in their tracks a majority of the time.
Watching a panic reaction as an outside observer breaks
the connection between evidence of anxiety and I am
feeling anxious. It didn't immediately end the panic,
because my brain was still flooded with the first spike of
stress hormones. But the physical response couldn't
sustain itself without emotional engagement, so I could
just ride out the aftereffects. There was a racing heart, a
flash of heat, and an impulse to run and hide. But none
of it was mine. None of it was me.
From there, my mind could consider alternative
hypotheses about the other persons motivations,
because I wasnt busy engaging with the panic. Usually,
some other mental state was obviously more likely, upon

195

reflection, to have caused their behavior than whatever

perceived state triggered my anxiety. So besides
causing less suffering, the new freedom for my beliefs to
grow more accurate made my interactions more
effective.
Distancing didn't do much for the constant low-grade
anxiety, but it was a clear improvement nonetheless.

Each of the above techniques caused marginal

improvement. Each made life just a little better. Even with
all of them together, my phobia was still crippling. Id solved
about 15% of the problem, and I was running out of
low-hanging fruit.
It turned out to be the process of solving that 15% that
really mattered. Every new successful technique fed a much
larger success spiral. The gradual discovery of one after
another replaced the trapped and helpless feeling with
powerful confidence in my ability to conquer my
weaknesses, to do apparently impossible things, and to
domain-generally self-modify.

________________________________________________________
This is where it gets seriously strange and awesome. But
first, youll need a little background on hypnosis.

196

Ive been playing with hypnosis recreationally for a few

years. This isn't the place for details on that, because its
mostly about sex and I dont want to distract either of us.
Youre welcome to ask me about it privately, or to try
convincing me to write about it elsewhere. Anyway.
The relevant point is that Ive dabbled as both a hypnotist
and a subject (though much more the latter than the
former). I therefore have considerably stronger priors for
the reliability of hypnotic effects than mere academic
research would justify given the current state of science on
the matter (which is abysmal).
My bottom-up, gradual improvement approach to
overcoming social anxiety wasnt moving quickly enough
(according to my standards). When I asked myself, How
can I cheat? hypnosis was the most obvious thing to reach
for. Why slowly shape through operant conditioning when
you can access unconscious processes directly?
How exactly to use it, though, was not so obvious. I puzzled
over that for at least a week, worrying that I might have to
understand the root cause after all to devise a workable
plan.
Then I encountered the Miracle Question. The Miracle
Question goes like this. Imagine that theres a miracle
overnight, and you wake up tomorrow morning to find that
your problem has magically disappeared. What is the very
first thing you encounter that is evidence of the change?

197

For me, the answer was, I think about a potential future

social interaction, and I dont feel anxious. Even for
extremely familiar interactions, there was always at least a
tiny bit of anxiety. For example, I noticed at one point that I
was consistently careless about cleaning things up in the
kitchen because I knew that my housemate could walk in at
any time, so I wanted to leave the communal space quickly.
The first evidence of the Miracle would probably be a lack of
anxiety on that level.
So I thought I might as well use that as a starting point. I
played through the following strategy in my mind. First, Id
have my hypnotist friend put me very deeply into trance.
Hed set up a clear trigger for relax, calm, untroubled.
Then hed have me begin to think about a social interaction.
The moment I noticed the slightest hint of anxiety, Id
indicate that and hed give me my calm trigger, causing
me to feel completely untroubled. We would keep doing this
until I could imagine social interactions while remaining
calm, possibly over several sessions. Finally, hed give me
access to the calm trigger as a post hypnotic suggestion,
so that I could activate it at the first sign of anxiety.
Note that I spent about three minutes developing this plan,
and I was in my mental state for creative problem solving
the whole time, which involves intense inward focus and
devoting extra resources to my imagination. Thats
probably important.

198

During the conversation in which I described my plan to

him, we meandered to the topic of a meetup of professional
hypnotists hed recently attended. He told me they talked in
passing about what its like to change their own behaviors.
They all knew they could use a long, draw-out induction (or
series of inductions and post-hypnotic suggestions) to
self-modify if they wanted. But that takes time and energy,
and it turns out that if youre sufficiently confident itll
work you dont have to bother with the hypnosis.
Think about that for a minute. They treated it as a perfectly
normal, every-day occurrence. Basically they were saying,
Yeah, when I dont like what System 1 is doing, I just tell it
to do something else instead. No biggy. They seem to have
this available as a primitive action.
Initially, I said it sort of tongue-in-cheek: Ha, well I guess
we dont really need that induction I described then!
Pause.
System 2: Surely not. It can't be that simple. Theres
just no way that will actually work. Nobody cures a
life-long psychological disorder overnight. Dont be
ridiculous.
System 1: But it would be the best cheat code that
ever happened. We have to try it. Pleeeeease?

199

System 2: I guess it doesnt really cost much. We

just have to put off the explicit induction plan for a
few more days. It might reduce our confidence in the
longer term plan slightly, but not nearly enough to
compete with the VOI were talking about here. Are
you really really sure the explicit induction plan
would work if we went through with it?
System 1: YES DEFINITELY. Thats exactly the kind of
thing hypnosis can do given enough time. Plus, have
you SEEN all the kick-ass self-modification we've
been pulling off lately? I told you we could do
anything, remember? You said, "Prove it." So let me
do that.
System 2: That's a good point. We are in the middle
of a success spiral. What the hell, lets give it a try.
My friend agreed to wait. Id watch for anxiety to hit,
snap my fingers as though the trigger already existed.
was the idea, anyway. Im not sure how seriously he
my hypothesis. Im not sure how seriously I took
suppose part of me must have been totally serious.

then
That
took
it. I

I went home, prepared for bed, and went to sleep. When I

woke up, I remembered that Id been invited to a dinner
party that night. Perfect opportunity to test it. I waited for
the first jolt of panic, fingers poised to snap, pleasantly
excited by my curiosity even as I braced for the impact -

200

- but nothing happened.

There was no jolt of panic.
I kept waiting. I imagined going to the dinner party. I even
imagined scenarios in which embarrassing things
happened and everyone thought I was stupid and
everything went horribly wrong. I reminded myself that the
dinner party really was happening, and it really was tonight,
and I really did have to go to it. Some of those awful
scenarios were even plausible.
Nothing.
My observations strongly contradicted my model of the
world. Psychology just doesn't work that way. I
purposefully scheduled several historically uncomfortable
types of social engagements throughout the week, trying to
break whatever weird and presumably temporary
coincidence was happening. I at least wanted to be able to
test the trigger.
That was three months ago. I'm still waiting.

___________________________________________________
[Trigger warning for this section: Abstract math/logic
concepts with virtually no explanation.]

201

I've thought a fair amount about how the hell I did what I
did. It still seems completely crazy. I don't really understand
it, but I have a favorite hypothesis.
Lb's theorem states that "If it's provable that (if it's
provable that p then p), then it's provable that p." In addition
to being a theorem of set theory with Peano arithmetic, it's
also a theorem of modal logic. (There's a modal
proof here.)
A standard semantic framework for modal logic is epistemic
logic, where provability here is just replaced by
"knowledge" or "belief", and "belief" is defined in terms of
possible worlds, so that you "believe" something if and only
if there's no world accessible from your perspective in
which the thing is false.
This is basically what's going on with placebos. (By the
way, placebos work even when you know they're
placebos.)
Try this on for size: If I believe that (if I believe that this
chocolate chip will cure my headache, then this chocolate
chip will cure my headache), then I believe that this
chocolate chip will cure my headache.

202

Do you believe in the placebo effect? Do you really believe

that believing that something ingested can cure a headache
actually causes the headache to get better? If you do and
you're right, then by Lb's theorem, you can now cure
headaches with chocolate chips.
I know it sounds like a joke, but it really does work. I use
this all the time now. For instance, suppose I have a
meeting at 7:15 and I fear the planning fallacy. I just think,
"If I believe that (if I believe I believe that the meeting's at
seven, then I believe that the meeting's at seven) then I
believe I believe that the meeting's at seven." (Easier said
than done, maybe, but you get the hang of this particular
convolution after a while.) Fortunately, it's actually true that
if I believe I believe something, then I probably straight up
believe it. Subsequently, I get to the meeting at 7:05
believing I'm late, and am relieved to discover that I'm
actually ten minutes early. This is real. It's just too
ridiculous for me not to laugh at it, even though it's clearly
part of reality.
Now compare this to the social anxiety cure I described. "If
I'm hypnotized such that (if I'm hypnotized such that I'm not
socially anxious, then I'm not socially anxious) then I'm
hypnotized such that I'm not socially anxious." So if it
happens to be true that being hypnotized such that one isn't
social anxious is sufficient for not being socially anxious
(as I indeed believed wholeheartedly), then if hypnosis can
be modeled similarly to doxastic phenomena, my instant
anxiety cure is an instance of Lb's theorem.

203

(Please insert your favorite evil laughter here. Alternately,

THIS IS SPARTAAAAAAA!!! But for realizies, like... woah.)
I recognize that probabilistic beliefs complicate this picture.
I don't know whether probabilistic logics have a correlate of
Lb's theorem. Dynamic doxastic Baysian systems,
anyone? I'm afraid that's still over my head at the moment.
But I take this as (very) weak evidence that they do.

204

Trade Shoes With a Stranger

February 12, 2014
Here's an idea for a school I've never heard of before.
The best math professors assign problem sets such that
solving problem n requires you learn skills needed to solve
problem n+1. I think this is obviously the best way to learn
math. In my experience, the vast majority of things worth
learning are best learned in this way as well.
Suppose you took on a problem set that looks something
like this:

1. Trade shoes with a stranger.

2. Cause a mariachi band to play at the corner of First and

Main at 4PM on Saturday.

3. Cause a group of at least five strangers to cross the

street together while skipping.

4. Cause at least twenty people in a mall foodcourt to

dance the macarena together.

205

5. Build a pillow fort the size of a basketball court in

Central Park (without using money).

6. Cause a silent rave to happen at all 12 Big Ten

universities simultaneously.

The above problem set isolates "coordination of arbitrary

groups of humans". Related skill sets are "fundraising",
"meme propagation", and "bureaucratic navigation".
Problem 6 almost certainly requiers medium-level
delegation, but you'd probably want an entire problem set
just for delegation. Once you've got all of those, you've
unlocked problems like "run a successful political
campaign".
I've been thinking about how to transfer apparent
superpowers from one person to another. I'm pretty sure
this is the correct approach. I'm also envisioning a pretty
kick-ass domain general leveling-up training program.

206

Change Your Own Mind First

March 01, 2014
Oh my gosh, I just learned this amazing thing.
Suppose I've had an argument with Ted. If it didn't go well
or hasn't been resolved, I likely have this annoying pinging
in my head that involves worry about how Ted feels about
me, and worry that he believes false things about me. The
worry is potentially productive, and is directed toward
causing Ted to believe true things or to feel about me the
way I prefer.
But other people's minds are really hard to control
compared to my own mind. So before I reach out to change
more distant parts of the world, I should say to myself,
"Suppose Ted really does feel or believe exactly what you
fear he does. Further, suppose it turns out that no matter
what you do, you can't change his mind. How would you
like to feel about how he feels about you?"
!!!
I've done similar things in the non-social realm (this feels
close to "give yourself an escape route" and "bad news is
good news"), but somehow I've never applied it to
interpersonal conflict.
Mind. Blown.

207

Symbols, Rituals, and Effective Buddhism

March 08, 2014
I recently realized my meditation practice has grown very
irregular and infrequent. For a while this was due mainly to
instability; I was moving around a lot so my schedule was
chaotic. (All the more reason to meditate, but I'm naming
causes, not justifications.) But my life hasn't been like that
for a few
months now, yet I haven't reestablished my practice. I
thought about it, and I discovered another reason.

I learned to meditate at a Zen temple where my primary

official role was doan: the person in charge of the bells. But
I was actually in charge of all of the ritual things that weren't
strictly the priest's prerogative, so all of that goes hand in
hand with meditation for me. Zazen just doesn't feel right if

208

there's no incense, chimes, candles, flowers, chanting, or

altar. I didn't do anything about this for a long time because
it felt really silly, which is a completely stupid reason to not
do something. Classical conditioning is a thing. If a specific
atmosphere or series of behaviors puts me quickly into the
frame of mind I'm after due to past immersion and
repetition, then I have a cheat code that many others would
pay thousands of dollars for (as evidenced by retreat and
workshop prices at monasteries).
So now I have a zafu, traditional Japanese incense, a
candle, and I've just ordered a chime. Most importantly, I
have a room for nothing but zazen. But having a Buddha
statue still feels really weird to me.
It felt even more so the first time around, especially when I
was expected to bow to the thing constantly, but over time
it became important as a symbol of why I was doing what I
was doing. The statue we used was Kannon, not Gautama.
Kannon is a Bodhisattva, an Eastern evolution of
Avalokitevara, who vowed to put off final enlightenment
until all sentient beings were saved from suffering. She is
not actually a Buddha yet, and in Mahayana sects like Zen,
practitioners walk the Bodhisattva path rather than seeking
Buddhahood directly.
My altar feels empty and my practice undirected without a
symbol of why I'm doing what I'm doing. But although
Kannon seems close to right, I also feel like she symbolizes

209

the misconception that it's possible to save the world

merely by meditating, cultivating compassion, and acting
compassionately on a small scale; and also the
misconception that we have eons to get it right.
So how might an effectively altruistic atheist, whose
meditation practice is the foundation of her art of rationality,
symbolize her mission?

210

A Stroll Through My Palace

March 28, 2014
Ive just picked myself up off the concrete floor of this
basement. Its cluttered, dimly lit, and smells of dust and
bananas. Some of the scattered items have been here as
long as Ive known the placethe ballerina music box, the
wedding dress, the journalbut Ive recently made a few
additions of my own.

Welcome to my memory palace. It might not be what you

expect. It is not laid out very neatly, it is certainly not
alphabetized, and its non-orientable in Euclidean space. It
is not a catalogue of tobacco

211

varieties or a repository for trivia I could find far more

quickly via Google search. My palace is a collection of
stories, symbols, music, and memories, steeped in meaning
and tangled up with reality and each other at every
opportunity.

Dont be startled by the emu. Shes just resting, hunkered

down on a luxurious velvet cushion, making little cooing
sounds that go orff, orff, orff. Another persons mind can
be uncomfortably alien, so Ill understand if youre put off
by the mannequin of myself with pointed ears who stands
nearby. If you make eye contact, shell turn inside out
through her mouth a few times before vomiting a small
plastic 747. She means you no harm. Do watch out for the
slippery banana peel, smelling ripe and attracting fruit flies,
thats always directly beneath the trap door. It gets me
every time.

This little basement is where I store everything important I

learn about cognitive biases and heuristics that involve
memory in ways directly relevant to memory techniques.
Were looking for just such a bias, so its bound to be here
somewhere. I know because an elephant lowered his trunk
so we could climb down through the floor of the IU Credit
Union. Elephants, you see, never forget.

212

The bananas definitely about humor, so that isnt it. The

emus name is Von Restorff, which is closely related but not
quite what Im after either. To the left of Von Restorff (velvet,
resting, orff orff orff), I spot something familiar. The
meaning hasnt resolved into full focus, yet it feels right.
Theres something round on the table, see it?, about two
feet tall. Ah yes, a ferris wheel! You can see colors now as it
spins slowly in place, sending quiet music drifting past as if
from a great distance. Bend down to listen. Carnival music?
What is that about? What do I associate with carnival?

Bazar! Of course. This is the bizarreness effect. Its all

coming back to me.

To review the details, well need to go one level deeper into

the imagined experience. We certainly cant fit in one of
those carriages at our present size, so lets shrink down
and hop in. Itll be just like sticking your nose in a pensieve.

The basement room dissolves, and were at a carnival on

the 4H Fairgrounds near my childhood home. The ragtime
organ is bright and clear. Tiny people down below lick
oversized lollypops, and clowns hand out balloon animals.
The summer breeze is warm and smells like buttered
popcorn, funnel cakes, and livestock. You can feel the
mechanical jerking of the carriage as we rotate slowly
toward the ground, where the operator lets us out.

213

The first thing we pass once safely on the ground is some

sort of acrobat. On a stage, he dances on his handsonly
his handsto the carnival music, and Im astonished at the
complexity of the choreography and the grace with which
he executes it given the strangeI mean, the
bizarreconstraint.

I simply must learn, so I ask for a lesson. You can too, if you
like. He obliges. He starts us out with the basics of balance,
but Im eager to try his flashy spins and stranger stunts.
Soon, he leaves us to practice on our own. I remember the
mechanics of the fancier stuff, but I cant actually perform
any of it because I keep falling over. Its terribly frustrating,
especially since I could tell during the lesson Id likely
forget the basics. Straightforward though it seems, I cant
maintain a simple handstand for more than a few seconds.
Thats the bizarreness effect at work, in one of its two
guises: Boring things dont tend to stick in memory.

When I go back to ask for a review of fundamentals, I find

that hes teaching an entire class. Theyve been on
handstands for quite a while, it seems, and though a few
people are still struggling, at least as many are clearly
getting bored. Im struck by an idea for improving the class,
and pursue that rather than further instruction. Ill be right
back, promise.

214

When I was first learning logic, my professor would assign

problems she called goats. A goat is a problem that is
much harder than anything that might appear on a test. The
idea is that anyone who tackles a goat, whether or not she
succeeds, will find the test refreshingly manageable. The
name came from a parable involving a goat, a rabbi, a large
Jewish family, and a shack that was far too small for them
all. The storys not important now, but its appearance in a
logic lecture seemed quite bizarre at the time, so Ill always
remember it effortlessly. The other side of bizarreness:
Weird shits hard to forget.

Theres a petting zoo just one booth over from the stage, so
I borrow a goat and lead it to the hand-dancer. Your
students learn at different rates, I tell him, and are
motivated by different kinds of challenges. Instead of
having everyone do basic handstands over and over, you
could challenge the advanced students to do a handstand
on this goat while it trots around the fairgrounds. He takes
my advice, and soon the students up the ante by doing
handstands on each other atop the goat. (Its a very strong
goat who doesnt mind.) Thank goodness I remembered
about the goat!

Its getting dark and we should probably head back soon.

The ferris wheel is all lit up now, a brilliant reminder of our

215

purpose here, so lets pause to review what weve learned.

The bizarreness effect, I say to you. If you want to
remember something, make it weird. But theres a little
more to it, and its something more important. A use case
we must always recognize in real life.

My trigger is a feeling of going in circles. Sometimes

information is very important, and I know its important, but
its too mundane to be memorable. You know the feeling.
You grasp at the information and let it repeat over and over
in your mind, hoping mere repeated exposure will be
enough to make it last. But it keeps spinning and going
nowhere, because your native memory software just wasnt
made to learn boring things no matter how useful they may
turn out to be.
When I fail to employ the knowledge stored at this carnival, I
do nothing about that hopeless spinning, and invariably I
forget. But when I succeed, I engage with the important but
boring information in a genuinely memorable wayeither
by writing it down, or by calling on my other memory skills.
And I know that anytime I feel the pointless spinning, I will
be transported to this carnival, if only long enough to be
reminded to act.

As you see the resolution of my renewed commitment to

real-life application reflected on my face, the ferris wheel
escapes its hinges with a screeching battle cry. It rolls off,

216

blazing victoriously across the country side, actually

getting somewhere for the first time in its life.
_____________________________________________________
I imagine that sounds like a ridiculous amount of detail, and
therefore work, just to be reminded that boring things arent
as memorable as bizarre ones. It really doesnt feel that way
from the inside, though. Constructing the carnival in the
first place took some effort, but definitely not as much as
you imagine, for I follow algorithms that get ever easier with
practice. If you knew exactly what I was doing, the same
thing might take you ten minutes.
When I walk through this sequence, either from the IU
Credit Union or directly from my trigger, it doesnt happen
in words. Its more like a holodeck movie on fast-forward. A
sequence of this length takes ten seconds at most. And the
more often I play it, the more targeted become the details.
Before long Ive distilled it down to a handful of powerful
symbolsnot by any directed effort of my own, but just by
the nature of remembering. So in practice, its more like
this:
Memory-weirdness?
404-search-Palace.
Biases
portal, trap door, search, found: wheel, bizarreness.
Carnival
sensations,
hand-dancing-flashy-moves-falling-over. Logic-goats.
Trigger:
boring-things-spinning.
Action:
bother-to-remember-wheel-rolls-away.

217

The story also means a lot more to me than it does to you. I

chose handles for several abstract concepts out of my
association network, and picked examples that I cared
about. For instance, Ive watched dance students retain the
flashy stuff while neglecting the basics again and again,
and Ive been frustrated with their resulting frustration. If
you havent grasped the boring fundamentals, all the crazy
awesome moves in the world wont help you progress much
as a dancerbut unfortunately, the flashy stuff is easier to
remember. So for the first guise of bizarreness, I chose a
concrete example with a strong emotional effect for me.
And I did the same with my example of the other guise. This
is why no one can build your memory palace but you.

218

Cuddle Orientation
April 03, 2014
I recently gained an extremely useful social concept that I'd
like to propagate. It's called "cuddle orientation".
Different people experience cuddling differently. Some
people love to be held, pet, and massaged by others.
They're most satisfied with cuddling while taking on the
more passive role. These are "cuddle bottoms" (analogous
to the BDSM "bottom" orientation). Some people love to
hold, pet, and massage others, and they're most satisfied
with cuddling when they're doing the active part. These are
"cuddle tops". As with sexual orientation, most people
probably fall somewhere in the middle. There are likely a lot
of true "cuddle switches" who are equally fulfilled by the
active and receptive roles, but I expect people cluster
toward the poles.
[The following description of my pre-cuddle-revelation
experiences should be taken as System 1 attitudes. These
phenomena never made it to System 2 consideration, so
please don't think I thought hard about it and then went on
believing dumb things.]
I am very strongly a cuddle bottom. For a long time, I was
not aware of the existence of cuddle tops. I typical minded
so hard that I assumed everyone played the active roll for
one of three reasons. Either they're counting on reciprocity

219

to bring them passive cuddles in the future, they feel

socially obligated to do their time as the active cuddler, or
they're just really nice people who tend to prioritize others'
pleasure before their own.
I never once took seriously the hypothesis that they might
derive pleasure directly from cuddle topping. Given my
immersion in BDSM culture, this was a pretty silly mistake. I
should have known better.
It was also a costly mistake. I developed an aversion to
cuddle puddles, because the more I let myself enjoy being
held, pet, and massaged, the more completely I felt I'd
bought into an implicit promise to be an active cuddler later.
I thought I was building up cuddle debt. I also thought I was
costing the other person/people hedons while they waited
for their turn. I find this kind of social pressure very painful,
so despite my love of being cuddled, I consistently turned
down cuddle invitations. (Incidentally, I went through an "I'd
really rather not bother with sex" period for exactly the
same reason before learning that I'm sexually submissive
and that dominants exist.)
When discussing this with a friend recently, I learned that
cuddle tops can experience something similar. What he
really wants is to keep doing the active cuddling, but he's
constantly worried that the other person wants him to stop
or isn't enjoying it any time they're not giving very clear "I
like this, please keep doing it" signals. And I, for one, am

220

not especially vocal when I'm completely relaxed.

But now that we know these things about each other,
cuddling together will be awesome. I'll be completely guilt
free and able to relax into the experience, and he'll know
that this is exactly what I want. Furthermore, we've set a
precedent for open communication on this topic, so if either
of us wants to change anything in the moment, we'll be
comfortable saying so.
You don't have to guess at this stuff. Don't behave as
though we're all expected to read minds. Know yourself,
volunteer that knowledge when it's useful, and ask
questions when you want to learn about others.
Here's what I want everybody to do, especially if you're in
one of my social circles where casual cuddling happens a
lot. Figure out your cuddle orientation. Maybe you're
a-cuddley (not really into cuddles), maybe you're a top or a
bottom, maybe you always want to give and receive
simultaneously (don't know what to call that, but I know it
exists), or maybe you're a cuddle switch who's happy
whenever any sort of cuddling happens.
Then establish a norm of briefly negotiating your cuddle
puddle beforehand. If cuddling looks like it's starting--or if
you'd like it to start--just say, "I'm a cuddle top. Would
anybody like to be cuddled by me?" and then "Bottom,
switch, or what?" if they haven't already told you.

221

This isn't any more difficult than asking for permission

before touching someone, which is already an established
practice (at least among my friends). It's also an excellent
time to find out who likes what kind of touch. Very light
caresses in the same area set me on edge after less than a
minute, for instance, while deeper pressure and scratching
make me melt.
If there are two bottoms, two tops, and three switches,
some cuddle puddle configurations will lead to much
greater satisfaction than others. The tops might focus on
each other, which wouldn't be much fun at all. But even
when the complementary roles happen to pair up nicely,
common knowledge of cuddle preferences leads to less
anxiety, faster and clearer feedback, and therefore much
more efficient cuddles.

222

Lbian Motivation Isn't Doublethink

April 19, 2014
Recently, my friend Malcolm was carrying very heavy bags
of groceries home from the store, and taking much longer
than he wanted to. He kept pausing to set them down, and
at one point thought, "I can't do this". Then he asked
himself, "If someone was going to reward me with a million
dollars if I could get home in 8 minutes with all of these
groceries intact, would I be able to do it? and the answer
was, "Um, duh, yes."
Then a brilliant thing happened.
He thought, "If someone was going to reward me with the
abstract knowledge that Im able to motivate myself to do
really hard things using only hypothetical rewards, would I
be able to do it? After that, he kept up his usual
light-grocery-load pace all the way home, and made it there
in 6 minutes.
Notice the wording of that. I'll modify it a bit to make my
point.

If I do this, I will have justified belief that I can

motivate myself to do really hard things using only
hypothetical rewards, which itself counts as a
hypothetical reward. I've seen people do amazing

223

things via Lbian reasoning in the past, so I'm about

80% confident it'll work. Now I shall test this
hypothesis.
Notice what he didn't say. He didn't say, "Am I the kind of
person who can do this?" and then lie to himself in the
hopes of becoming that kind of person. Nor did he say, "Do
I want to be the kind of person who can do this?"
No part of you needs to believe false things--or even
exaggerated truths--about personal identity to make stuff
like this work when you have timeless decision theory. You
can just believe true things about your brain and
mammalian behavioral psychology and manipulate the
world accordingly.
Scientia potentia est.

*************************************************************
Further Resources

Malcolm's blog (lots of other great stuff in there)

Doublethink

224

The god damn best explanation of competing decision

theories on the entire internet, by the great and goofy
Jesse Galef

The excellent paper by Alex Altair that gave me my

current understanding of timeless decision theory (bit
technical; go with Jesse's thing first, then try this if
you're curious and brave)

A Cartoon Guide to Lb's Theorem (yes, really)

225

Truth-Powered Mind Hacking

April 20, 2014
Two days ago, I experienced a flash of social anxiety, which
is something that hasn't happened in months.
I was trying to better understand odds and why they're
better than probabilities for Bayesian reasoning, and I was
writing with a marker on large sheets of paper. Then Eliezer
came home and opened the door right behind me, and I
panicked. I think System 1 doesn't want him to know that I
struggle sometimes with really basic math in addition to
provability theory and topology; it doesn't look impressive
to re-learn how to translate between odds and probabilities.
So I felt this huge spike of embarrassment (which used to
be so familiar) and quickly hid my work.
Last night at a party, I noticed myself fearing that panic
from before, and imagining the anxiety made me anxious. It
was mildly discouraging. I notice now that I tried to hide
from that.
If my freedom from social anxiety depends on nothing ever
going wrong with that part of my brain, it'll be extremely
fragile, and I don't want that. Alternately, it could depend on
my ability to ignore or rationalize problems when they do
happen.
Although I clearly have that ability, I think I don't want to

226

exercise it. I want to learn to stare into frightening problems

and discern the truth about them so I can bring all my
powers to bear on solving them once certainly understood. I
want all of me to believe true things about my challenges,
and I'm confident that if I can meet them with self deception,
I can meet them at least as well without it.
A couple months ago I'd not have written this post, because
I'm explicitly acknowledging a fact that I fear may indicate a
sudden and complete slide back into constant anxiety. It
sounds dangerous for self-fulfilling-prophesy reasons. But I
know that if I lied to myself, that slide wouldn't happen. I
believe that if I believe that I won't relapse, then I won't
relapse, so by Lob's theorem, I believe that I won't relapse.
So, in full knowledge of having been anxious, I now declare
it an isolated event.
Will I triumph, or will this happen with increasing frequency
until I return to my previous state of constant crippling
fear? Place your bets!

P(free of anxiety in 1 month)

P(free of anxiety in 4 months|free in 1 month)
P(free of anxiety in 4 months)
Don't refrain from betting against me because you're afraid
it will discourage me and affect the outcome. The whole

227

point is to demonstrate that I can

self-modification by embracing the truth.

direct

my

**************************************************
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted
with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
Eugene Gendlin

228

Make Rationality Delicious

April 23, 2014
I've been thinking about Eliezer's suggestion to "Leave a
Line of Retreat". The gist is this: Scary possibilities can be
hard to think about, but it's easier to consider evidence for
and against them once you know how you'd respond if the
scary thing turned out to be true. In his words:
The prospect of losing your job, say, may seem a lot
more scary when you can't even bear to think about
it, than after you have calculated exactly how long
your savings will last, and checked the job market in
your area, and otherwise planned out exactly what to
do next. Only then will you be ready to fairly assess
the probability of keeping your job in the planned
layoffs next month. Be a true coward, and plan out
your
retreat
in
detailvisualize
every
steppreferably before you first come to the
battlefield.
Maybe we should practice finding lines of retreat in random
situations occasionally. Then when we go to do it in a
situation where we might actually need to retreat, our brains
will be less likely to go, "Hey now, I see what you're up to."
Suppose that every time you consider the question, "What
would I do if the scary thing were true?" you end up facing
the scary thing for real immediately afterward. Then you're
classically conditioning yourself to not look for a line of

229

retreat.
For example, I walked into an ice cream shop today*, and
before entering I was already considering which flavor to
get (which for me means weighing all the alternatives
against chocolate). Because I happened to recognize the
opportunity, I practiced leaving a line of retreat by asking,
"Oh no, what if they don't have chocolate?" and answering,
"Well, I'll either get vanilla instead, or I'll go to a different ice
cream shop." Then I ordered chocolate.
Unlike in most cases where it's important to apply this skill,
there was no reason to suspect they wouldn't have
chocolate in the first place. So instead of applying the
technique and then experiencing the punishment of actually
settling for vanilla, from a classical conditioning
perspective, I was immediately rewarded for my practice
session with chocolate ice cream.
It's great to recognize a difficult rationality technique as
wise, virtuous, and resulting in positive outcomes in the
long run. But on the level of moment-to-moment decisions,
my actual behaviors are much more strongly driven by
chocolate than wisdom. Ideally, I'd also be driven by
chocolate to be rational, right?
*This is a lie. What I actually walked into was a parable.

230

Observing Cthia
April 25, 2014
I have a pretty awful memory. I've installed all the memory
techniques I teach at workshops to mitigate the damage of
this. But all the work is done on the encoding end rather
than the recall end, so things that happened before I started
studying mnemonics, or that I simply fail to encode
skillfully, are largely lost to me.
One of the upsides is that I can read books several times
and be surprised by each plot twist again and again. I
usually feel a sort of comfortable familiarity when I re-read a
book, but that is very often the closest thing to a memory of
past readings I retrieve. An effect of that particular
phenomenon is that I sometimes completely forget major
intellectual influences, and really have no idea how I came
to think the way that I do. But I read constantly as a child
and teenager, so I know the majority of it has come from
books.
For the past few days I've been reading a familiar-seeming
Star Trek book called Spock's World, by Diane Duane. I was
not completely certain until today that I had in fact read it
before.
I was sort of stunned by a particular passage and wanted to
share it, because it seems to encompass--and, given I must
have read it as a teenager, foreshadow--so much of what's

231

been going on in my life recently. Though this isn't canon,

the Vulcans really are rationalists in at least some versions
of the Trek universe. I think adopting the term discussed
may make my daily life slightly more efficient and
meaningful.
[Spoilers: I give away some of the plot of Spock's World
below. But honestly, it's not exactly a plot-driven novel, so I
wouldn't worry too much.]
Background: Vulcan is considering withdrawing from the
Federation, and Sarek, Spock's father and Vulcan's
ambassador to Earth, has been called back by T'pau to
speak in favor of withdrawing. At this point, he has
relatively little information about T'pau's motives and
reasoning, so he's not decided whether to oblige her or to
resign and be exiled. Upon meeting with members of the
Enterprise, the following conversation ensues. [Emphasis
mine.]
"This I will say to you Captain: I find being forced to
speak against the planet of my embassage
immensely distasteful, for reasons that have nothing
to do with my history there, my marriage, or my
relationships with my son and Starfleet. My whole
business for many years has been to understand
your peoples and to come closer to them; to
understand their diversities. Now I find that business
being turned on its ear, and all the knowledge and
experience I have amassed being called on to drive

232

away that other diversity, to isolate my people from it.

It is almost a perversion of what my career has stood
for."
"But if you feel you have to do it," McCoy said softly,
"You'll do it anyway."
"Of course I will, Doctor. Here, as at many other
times, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of
the few. What if, as the next few days progress, I
become certain that my own people would be more
damaged by remaining within the Federation than by
leaving it? Must I not then preserve the species of
which I am part? But the important thing is that this
matter be managed with logic." He blinked then, and
spoke again, so that a word came out that did not
translate. "No. Cthia. I must not be misunderstood.
Cthia must rule this, or we are all lost."
Jim looked puzzled. "I think I need a translation. It's
obviously a Vulcan word, but I'm not familiar with it."
Amanda [Sarek's wife] looked sad. "This is possibly
the worst aspect of this whole mess," she said. "It's
the modern Vulcan word which we translate as 'logic'.
But what it more correctly means is 'reality-truth'. The
truth about the universe, the way things really are,
rather than the way we would like them to be. It
embraces the physical and the inner realities both at
once, in all their changes. The concept says that if we

233

do not tell the universe the truth about itself, if we

don't treat it and the people in it as what they
are--real, and precious--it will turn against us, and
none of our affairs will prosper." She sighed. "That's
a child's explanation of the word, I'm afraid. Whole
books have been written trying to define it
completely. What Sarek is saying is that if we don't
handle this matter with the utmost respect for the
truth, for what is really needed by everyone involved
in it, it will end in disaster."
"And the problem," McCoy said softly, "is that the
truth about what's needed looks different to
everybody who faces the situation..."
Sarek nodded once, a grave gesture. "If I find that I
must defend the planet of my birth by turning against
my many years on Earth, then I will do so.
Alternately," he said, "if I can in good faith defend the
Federation in my testimony, I will do that. But what
matters is that cthia be observed, without fail, without
flaw. Otherwise, all this is useless."

234

A Dialogue On the Dark Arts

May 05, 2014
Doublethink
It is obvious that the same thing will not be willing to
do or undergo opposites in the same part of itself, in
relation to the same thing, at the same time.
Can you simultaneously want sex and not want it? Can you
believe in God and not believe in Him at the same time? Can
you be fearless while frightened?
To be fair to Plato, this was meant not as an assertion that
such contradictions are impossible, but as an argument that
the soul has multiple parts. It seems we can, in fact, want
something while also not wanting it. This is awfully strange,
and it led Plato to conclude the soul must have multiple
parts, for surely no one part could contain both sides of the
contradiction.
Often, when we attempt to accept contradictory statements
as correct, it causes cognitive dissonance--that nagging,
itchy feeling in your brain that won't leave you alone until
you admit that something is wrong. Like when you try to
convince yourself that staying up just a little longer playing
2048 won't have adverse effects on the presentation you're
giving tomorrow, when you know full well that's exactly
what's going to happen.

235

But it may be that cognitive dissonance is the exception in

the face of contradictions, rather than the rule. How would
you know? If it doesn't cause any emotional friction, the two
propositions will just sit quietly together in your brain,
never mentioning that it's logically impossible for both of
them to be true. When we accept a contradiction wholesale
without cognitive dissonance, it's what Orwell called
"doublethink".
When you're a mere mortal trying to get by in a complex
universe, doublethink may be adaptive. If you want to be
completely free of contradictory beliefs without spending
your whole life alone in a cave, you'll likely waste a lot of
your precious time working through conundrums, which
will often produce even more conundrums.
Suppose I believe that my husband is faithful, and I also
believe that the unfamiliar perfume on his collar indicates
he's sleeping with other women without my permission. I
could let that pesky little contradiction turn into an
extended investigation that may ultimately ruin my
marriage. Or I could get on with my day and leave my
marriage in tact.
It's better to just leave those kinds of thoughts alone, isn't
it? It probably makes for a happier life.

Against Doublethink

236

Suppose you believe that driving is dangerous, and also

that, while you are driving, you're completely safe. As
established in Doublethink, there may be some benefits to
letting that mental configuration be.
There are also some life-shattering downsides. One of the
things you believe is false, you see, by the law of the
excluded middle. In point of fact, it's the one that goes "I'm
completely safe while driving". Believing false things has
consequences.
Be irrationally optimistic about your driving skills,
and you will be happily unconcerned where others
sweat and fear. You won't have to put up with the
inconvenience of a seatbelt. You will be happily
unconcerned for a day, a week, a year. Then CRASH,
and spend the rest of your life wishing you could
scratch the itch in your phantom limb. Or paralyzed
from the neck down. Or dead. It's not inevitable, but
it's possible; how probable is it? You can't make that
tradeoff rationally unless you know your real driving
skills, so you can figure out how much danger you're
placing yourself in. --Eliezer Yudkowsky, Doublethink
(Choosing to be Biased)
What are beliefs for? Please pause for ten seconds and
come up with your own answer.
Ultimately, I think beliefs are inputs for predictions. We're
basically very complicated simulators that try to guess

237

which actions will cause desired outcomes, like survival or

reproduction or chocolate. We input beliefs about how the
world behaves, make inferences from them to which
experiences we should anticipate given various changes we
might make to the world, and output behaviors that get us
what we want, provided our simulations are good enough.
My car is making a mysterious ticking sound. I have many
beliefs about cars, and one of them is that if my car makes
noises it shouldn't, it will probably stop working eventually,
and possibly explode. I can use this input to simulate the
future. Since I've observed my car making a noise it
shouldn't, I predict that my car will stop working. I also
believe that there is something causing the ticking. So I
predict that if I intervene and stop the ticking (in
non-ridiculous ways), my car will keep working. My belief
has thus led to the action of researching the ticking noise,
planning some simple tests, and will probably lead to
cleaning the sticky lifters.
If it's true that solving the ticking noise will keep my car
running, then my beliefs will cache out in correctly
anticipated experiences, and my actions will cause desired
outcomes. If it's false, perhaps because the ticking can be
solved without addressing a larger underlying problem,
then the experiences I anticipate will not occur, and my
actions may lead to my car exploding.
Doublethink guarantees that you believe falsehoods. Some

238

of the time you'll call upon the true belief ("driving is

dangerous"), anticipate future experiences accurately, and
get the results you want from your chosen actions ("don't
drive three times the speed limit at night while it's raining").
But some of the time, if you actually believe the false thing
as well, you'll call upon the opposite belief, anticipate
inaccurately, and choose the last action you'll ever take.
Without any principled algorithm determining which of the
contradictory propositions to use as an input for the
simulation at hand, you'll fail as often as you succeed. So it
makes no sense to anticipate more positive outcomes from
believing contradictions.
Contradictions may keep you happy as long as you never
need to use them. Should you call upon them, though, to
guide your actions, the debt on false beliefs will come due.
You will drive too fast at night in the rain, you will crash,
you will fly out of the car with no seat belt to restrain you,
you will die, and it will be your fault.

Against Against Doublethink

What if Plato was pretty much right, and we sometimes
believe contradictions because we're sort of not actually
one single person?
It is not literally true that Systems 1 and 2 are separate
individuals the way you and I are. But the idea of Systems 1

239

and 2 suggests to me something quite interesting with

respect to the relationship between beliefs and their role in
decision making, and modeling them as separate people
with very different personalities seems to work pretty darn
well when I test my suspicions.
I read Atlas Shrugged probably about a decade ago. I
was impressed with its defense of capitalism, which
really hammers home the reasons its good and
important on a gut level. But I was equally turned off
by its promotion of selfishness as a moral ideal. I
thought that was *basically* just being a jerk. After
all, if theres one thing the world doesnt need (I
thought) its more selfishness.
Then I talked to a friend who told me Atlas Shrugged
had changed his life. That hed been raised in a really
strict family that had told him that ever enjoying
himself was selfish and made him a bad person, that
he had to be working at every moment to make his
family and other people happy or else let them shame
him to pieces. And the revelation that it was
sometimes okay to consider your own happiness
gave him the strength to stand up to them and turn
his life around, while still keeping the basic human
instinct of helping others when he wanted to and he
felt they deserved it (as, indeed, do Rand characters).
--Scott of Slate Star Codex in All Debates Are Bravery
Debates

240

If you're generous to a fault, "I should be more selfish" is

probably a belief that will pay off in positive outcomes
should you install it for future use. If you're selfish to a
fault, the same belief will be harmful. So what if you were
too generous half of the time and too selfish the other half?
Well, then you would want to believe "I should be more
selfish" with only the generous half, while disbelieving it
with the selfish half.
Systems 1 and 2 need to hear different things. System 2
might be able to understand the reality of biases and make
appropriate adjustments that would work if System 1 were
on board, but System 1 isn't so great at being reasonable.
And it's not System 2 that's in charge of most of your
actions. If you want your beliefs to positively influence your
actions (which is the point of beliefs, after all), you need to
tailor your beliefs to System 1's needs.
For example: The planning fallacy is nearly ubiquitous. I
know this because for the past three years or so, I've gotten
everywhere five to fifteen minutes early. Almost every
single person I meet with arrives five to fifteen minutes late.
It is very rare for someone to be on time, and only twice in
three years have I encountered the (rather awkward)
circumstance of meeting with someone who also arrived
early.
Before three years ago, I was also usually late, and I far
underestimated how long my projects would take. I knew,

241

abstractly and intellectually, about the planning fallacy, but

that didn't stop System 1 from thinking things would go
implausibly quickly. System 1's just optimistic like that. It
responds to, "Dude, that is not going to work, and I have a
twelve point argument supporting my position and
suggesting alternative plans," with "Naaaaw, it'll be fine! We
can totally make that deadline."
At some point (I don't remember when or exactly how), I
gained the ability to look at the true due date, shift my
System 1 beliefs to make up for the planning fallacy, and
then hide my memory that I'd ever seen the original due
date. I would see that my flight left at 2:30, and be surprised
to discover on travel day that I was not late for my 2:00
flight, but a little early for my 2:30 one. I consistently
finished projects on time, and only disasters caused me to
be late for meetings. It took me about three months before I
noticed the pattern and realized what must be going on.
I got a little worried I might make a mistake, such as leaving
a meeting thinking the other person just wasn't going to
show when the actual meeting time hadn't arrived. I did
have a couple close calls along those lines. But it was easy
enough to fix; in important cases, I started receiving
Boomeranged notes from past-me around the time
present-me expected things to start that said, "Surprise!
You've still got ten minutes!"
This unquestionably improved my life. You don't realize just

242

how inconvenient the planning fallacy is until you've left it

behind. Clearly, considered in isolation, the action of
believing falsely in this domain was instrumentally rational.
Doublethink, and the "Dark Arts" generally, applied to
carefully chosen domains is a powerful tool. It's dumb to
believe false things about really dangerous stuff like
driving, obviously. But you don't have to doublethink
indiscriminately. As long as you're careful, as long as you
suspend epistemic rationality only when it's clearly
beneficial to do so, employing doublethink at will is a great
idea.
Instrumental rationality is what really matters. Epistemic
rationality is useful, but what use is holding accurate beliefs
in situations where that won't get you what you want?

Against Against Against Doublethink

There are indeed epistemically irrational actions that are
instrumentally rational, and instrumental rationality is what
really matters. It is pointless to believing true things if it
doesn't get you what you want. This has always been very
obvious to me, and it remains so.
There is a bigger picture.

243

Certain epistemic rationality techniques are not compatible

with dark side epistemology. Most importantly, the Dark
Arts do not play nicely with "notice your confusion", which
is essentially your strength as a rationalist. If you use
doublethink on purpose, confusion doesn't always indicate
that you need to find out what false thing you believe so
you can fix it. Sometimes you have to bury your confusion.
There's an itsy bitsy pause where you try to predict whether
it's useful to bury.

As soon as I finally decided to abandon the Dark Arts--as an

experiment--I began to sweep out corners I'd allowed myself
to neglect before. They were mainly corners I didn't know I'd
neglected.
The first thing I noticed was the way I responded to
requests from my boyfriend. He'd mentioned before that I
often seemed resentful when he made requests of me, and
I'd insisted that he was wrong, that I was actually happy all
the while. (Notice that in the short term, since I was going to
do as he asked anyway, attending to the resentment would
probably have made things more difficult for me.) This
self-deception went on for months.
Shortly after I finally gave up doublethink, he made a
request, and I felt a little stab of dissonance. Something I
might have swept away before, because it seemed more
immediately useful to bury the confusion than to notice it.
But I thought (wordlessly and with my emotions), "No, look

244

at it. This is exactly what I've decided to watch for. I have

noticed confusion, and I will attend to it."
It was very upsetting at first to learn that he'd been right. I
feared the implications for our relationship. But that fear
didn't last, because we both knew the only problems you
can solve are the ones you acknowledge, so it is a comfort
to know the truth.
I was far more shaken by the realization that I really, truly
was ignorant that this had been happening. Not because the
consequences of this one bit of ignorance were so
important, but because who knows what other epistemic
curses have hidden themselves in the shadows? I realized
that I had not been in control of my doublethink, that I
couldn't have been.
Pinning down that one tiny little stab of dissonance took
great preparation and effort, and there's no way I'd been
working fast enough before. "How often," I wondered, "does
this kind of thing happen?"
Very often, it turns out. I began noticing and acting on
confusion several times a day, where before I'd been doing
it a couple times a week. I wasn't just noticing things that I'd
have ignored on purpose before; I was noticing things that
would have slipped by because my reflexes slowed as I
weighed the benefit of paying attention. "Ignore it" was not
an available action in the face of confusion anymore, and
that was a dramatic change. Because there are no

245

disruptions, acting on confusion is becoming automatic.

I can't know for sure which bits of confusion I've noticed
since the change would otherwise have slipped by unseen.
But here's a plausible instance. Tonight I was having dinner
with a friend I've met very recently. I was feeling s little bit
tired and nervous, so I wasn't putting as much effort as
usual into directing the conversation. At one point I realized
we had stopped making making any progress toward my
goals, since it was clear we were drifting toward small talk.
In a tired and slightly nervous state, I imagine that I might
have buried that bit of information and abdicated
responsibility for the conversation--not by means of
considering whether allowing small talk to happen was
actually a good idea, but by not pouncing on the
dissonance aggressively, and thereby letting it get away.
Instead, I directed my attention at the feeling (without effort
this time!), inquired of myself what precisely was causing it,
identified the prediction that the current course of
conversation was leading away from my goals, listed
potential interventions, weighed their costs and benefits
against my simulation of small talk, and said, "What are
your terminal values?"
(I know that sounds like a lot of work, but it took at most
three seconds. The hard part was building the pouncing
reflex.)
When you know that some of your beliefs are false, and you
know that leaving them be is instrumentally rational, you do

246

not develop the automatic reflex of interrogating every

suspicion of confusion. You might think you can do this
selectively, but if you do, I strongly suspect you're wrong in
exactly the way I was.
I have long been more viscerally motivated by things that
are interesting or beautiful than by things that correspond
to the territory. So it's not too surprising that toward the
beginning of my rationality training, I went through a long
period of being so enamored with a-veridical instrumental
techniques--things
like
willful
doublethink--that
I
double-thought myself into believing accuracy was not so
great.
But I was wrong. And that mattered. Having accurate beliefs
is a ridiculously convergent incentive. Every utility function
that involves interaction with the territory--interaction of
just about any kind!--benefits from a sound map. Even if
"beauty" is a terminal value, "being viscerally motivated to
increase your ability to make predictions that lead to greater
beauty" increases your odds of success.
Dark side epistemology prevents total dedication to
continuous improvement in epistemic rationality. Though
individual dark side actions may be instrumentally rational,
the patterns of thought required to allow them are not.
Though instrumental rationality is ultimately the goal, your
instrumental rationality will always be limited by your
epistemic rationality.

247

That was important enough to say again: Your instrumental

rationality will always be limited by your epistemic
rationality.
It only takes a fraction of a second to sweep an observation
into the corner. You don't have time to decide whether
looking at it might prove problematic. If you take the time to
protect your compartments, false beliefs you don't endorse
will slide in from everywhere through those split-second
cracks in your art. You must attend to your confusion the
very moment you notice it. You must be relentless an
unmerciful toward your own beliefs.
Excellent epistemology is not the natural state of a human
brain. Without extreme dedication and advanced training,
without reliable automatic reflexes of rational thought, your
belief structure will be a mess. You can't have totally
automatic anti-rationalization reflexes if you use
doublethink as a technique of instrumental rationality.
This has been a difficult lesson for me. I have lost some
benefits I'd gained from the Dark Arts. I'm late now,
sometimes. And painful truths are painful, though now they
are sharp and fast instead of dull and damaging.
And it is so worth it! I have much more work to do before I
can move on to the next thing. But whatever the next thing
is, I'll tackle it with far more predictive power than I
otherwise would have--though I doubt I'd have noticed the
difference.

248

So when I say that I'm against against against

doublethink--that dark side epistemology is bad--I mean that
there is more potential on the light side, not that the dark
side has no redeeming features. Its fruits hang low, and
they are delicious.
But the fruits of the light side are worth the climb. You'll
never even know they're there if you gorge yourself in the
dark forever.

249

The Most Useful Mnemonic Technique

May 12, 2014
The other day, I was talking to someone about potential
applications of biometrics to gaming and web based
education. He mentioned a really interesting study I'd never
heard of before. Roz Picard and her students have figured
out how to track someone's emotions through heartbeat
and respiration via webcam using changes in skin tone as
blood circulates. I definitely wanted to look it up later. As I
repeated back "Roz Picard?" to make sure I had it right, I
made a mental note with the name and a brief description of
the study, situated it in my memory of the restaurant where
the conversation took place, and associated it with the
trigger of opening my laptop.
If I'd not already had a fair amount of experience with the art
of memory, it would have been much easier to whip out my
smartphone and drop it in my Workflowy right then, and it
would have been worth the slight disruption to the
conversation. Given how many people object that they
could "just write it down" when I mention mnemonics, I
expect you might want to update on this about how quick
and easy mnemonic techniques get with practice. Storing it
in my brain cost less time and attention.
I'm going to sketch roughly what happened in my head
when I made that mental note, because I want to illustrate
the most foundational principle of the art of memory--a

250

principle I've never once seen laid out explicitly in anything

I've heard or read about mnemonics. (Why??? I'm not quite
sure. It's very frustrating.)
The most practical insight I've gained by studying
mnemonics is this: System 1 runs your memory, and it does
not speak English. If you want to convince System 1 to
remember something System 2 thinks is important, you
have to translate it into the language of System 1. For the
same reason you would not train a dog to sit by carefully
explaining in words how to execute the procedure of sitting,
repeating "remember about Roz Picard and biometrics"
should not be your go-to method when you want to
remember or learn.* System 1 is in charge of your memory,
and it does not care about your proper nouns and abstract
concepts.
Here's what System 1 does care about. It likes things that
are concrete, emotional, multi-sensory, vivid, dynamic,
personally engaging, and story-like.
So I translated the content System 2 flagged as important
into the language in which System 1 could actually store it. I
imagined the very fluffy black hair of my friend Roz, and
stuck it on my mental image of Jean-Luc Picard (to encode
the name). I imagined his face flashing bright red, then
white, and back again as his facial expressions cycled
through intense joy, sadness, and anger while he laughed,
cried, and yelled (to encode "you can measure emotions by
monitoring heartbeat by watching change in skin tone"). To

251

make sure I accessed the memory when I could do

something useful with it, I imagined that big fluffy black hair
protruding out from between my monitor and keyboard as I
opened my laptop, and then Picard's color-changing,
emotional face hovering in front of the screen. Finally, to
increase the odds I'd simultaneously access other
potentially relevant memories associated with the context of
the conversation, I imagined Picard's head rolling off of my
laptop--which is now sitting on the restaurant at the very
table where the conversation happened--and knocking over
my glass of wine, which then spills all over my conversation
partner.
Because it's how I operate in real life and I wanted to give a
real example, there were other things going on in that
mental note besides "translate for S1". But the main thing I
want to point to is the translation of "Roz Picard" and of
why she matters. The central image is concrete; you could
pick up that head and use it like a bowling ball if you
wanted. It is clearly emotional. It is multi-sensory because
you can feel the fluffy hair, you can hear Picard's voice, and
you can see the changing colors. It's fairly vivid, since Roz
has some pretty big and interesting hair. It's dynamic, since
the colors change and the emotions cycle. The basic image
isn't personally engaging, though you could easily make it
so by putting yourself behind a video camera that is taping
the color changes for the study; in the expanded version,
I'm opening the laptop myself. The basic image isn't
especially story-like either, but the trigger-action technique
employed in the expanded version makes that part

252

automatic (I open the laptop and the head rolls across the
table and knocks over wine that spills on my friend).
So next time you want to remember something--or learn an
abstract concept or skill--notice when it's mostly System 2
doing the talking, and see if you can explain in System 1
terms instead. It takes practice and maybe training to get
really good at this, but I bet you'll see big results from small
preliminary efforts if you give it a try.
*Yes, repeating things strengthens associations via
classical conditioning, but you can do orders of magnitude
better than that.

253

A Message to System 1
May 22, 2014
I used to be afraid of checking the balance of my bank
account. I felt as though finding out how much money I had
caused me to lose money, so I'd go weeks, sometimes a
month, without checking it--even though my income was
tiny and irregular. I'd feel guilty almost any time I bought
anything, which led to bizarre spending patterns where I'd
go for a while eating nothing but rice and beans, then
suddenly spend way too much because hey, if I'm doomed
anyway for having bought this one unnecessary thing, I
might as well enjoy myself before reality catches up with
me.
Not surprisingly, when I finally got around to checking my
balance, it was usually frighteningly low. Which, of course,
my brain took as punishment for checking my balance, and
the cycle continued.
I finally confronted this a little less than a year ago. Though
it hurt a lot to poke at the problem, I reasoned like this: In
reality, checking my balance causes me to gain money.
Nobody's paying me directly for logging into my account,
but having accurate beliefs about the resources available to
me allows for far more efficient, and not completely insane,
spending patterns, and therefore a higher balance on
average. Additionally, it's really dangerous in general to
allow myself to cling to false beliefs, regardless of how

254

comforting they may be. (This was probably inspired by

Anna explaining that paying parking tickets on time is
equivalent to cashing a check in the amount of a late fee.)
But understanding this in an abstract, System 2 way was
nowhere near enough. It didn't actually change my behavior
at all, because on an emotional level, I remained strongly
motivated to avoid checking my bank account. The
important work done by reasoning through things was to
recognize that I really did care about having money and not
lying to myself, and that checking my account balance
would lead to those larger goals.
Inspired by techniques I learned in a CFAR workshop, I
knew that my next step was to explain to System 1 why
checking my bank account leads to something I really want.
After caching that snapshot message in memory, I'd be able
to invoke my System 1-optimized explanation every time I
noticed "this would be a good time to check my bank
account" and felt myself trying to bury the thought.

255

Before me (where "me" is usually played by Duncan

MacLeod of the TV series Highlander), I'd imagine an
ominous looking lock on a Gringotts style bank vault. A
broadsword is strapped across my back. The lock
represents "clinging to comforting beliefs about my
finances", and it stands between me and all the riches
behind that door.
Focusing on the feeling of wanting to remain ignorant, of
wanting to pretend everything is ok regardless of the truth, I
draw my sword. I prepare to strike, raising the sword,
calling to mind relinquishment: "That which can be
destroyed by the truth should be... the thought I cannot
think controls me more than thoughts I speak aloud."
Remembering how it feels to let go of ignorance, I let the
sword fall, slashing right through the lock. It drops, broken,
to the stone floor, making an amplified echo of the "click"
from the enter key of my keyboard as it clatters across the
ground. Slowly, the door begins to open.
In the mean time, having taken the head of my enemy, the
Highlander quickening begins. (I'm MacLeod, remember?)
The quickening is, well...

Embedded File ()
Some background: In Highlander, an "immortal" can kill
another immortal by cutting off his head. When that
happens, all the knowledge and power of the dead immortal

256

is transferred to the victorious immortal. The transfer is

called a "quickening", and it basically looks like a giant
lightning storm focused on the winner.
Anyway, knowledge is power, so this knowledge storm
thing happens while the vault door opens. When it's all
over, I enter the vault to look upon my horde of gold pieces
and jewels so sparkly they would make a dragon jealous.
If that seems a whole lot more intricate and over the top
than you'd expect me to need for something as simple as
"check my account balance", you've got to remember I was
trying to blast through this almighty ugh field that had
crippled me for years. Usually, going straight for this
System 1 translation technique isn't recommended when
there's a solid ugh field in the way, since there are other
techniques (like aversion factoring) you can use to break
those down a little at a time. But I've found that it often
works just fine as long as your translation is solid and your
message is even stronger than the ugh field. Powerful ugh
field, powerful message. Subject doesn't really matter. Plus,
the basic idea of the quickening ended up serving perfectly
as a general purpose translation for relinquishment itself
later on.
And... it totally worked! I checked my balance multiple times
a week, and experienced no more pain than my actual
financial situation warranted. I ended up with accurate
beliefs about how much I'd spent and how much I had left.

257

Moreover, here's what prompted me to make this post: I just

checked my balance, and for the third or fourth time in a
row, I was surprised to find more money there than I
expected. I think this is because I'm so used to discovering
I've drastically overestimated my balance that the new urge
to know my real balance causes me to update right away to
something resembling what the truth should be given past
experience. But my spending patterns have improved, as
predicted, so now I really do have more cash in my account
on average than my past experiences predict!
I certainly haven't amassed vast piles of gold, but System 1
isn't so great with quantities anyway, and it understands
"room full of shiny things I can exchange for chocolate"
much better than "large percent increase in available
funds".

258

Growth Mindset Forest: A System 1 Translation

June 05, 2014
Related Posts: Urge Propagation In Action, The Most Useful
Mnemonic Technique, A Stroll Through My Palace, Ars
Memoriae
________________________________________________
I was once counseling a friend at the end of a CFAR
workshop. Unsurprisingly, she had a zillion ideas running
around in her head, and she was afraid they'd all vanish a
week after she left. "Even the most important ones," she
told me, "are so full of insight and meaning right now, and I
think that even if I remember the basics of what they are in a
week, I won't remember why they're so important. They
won't keep their effects on my patterns of thought and
emotion."
"What's the most important thing you learned this
weekend?" I asked her.
"I must cultivate a growth mindset," she declared. I could
feel the strength of that idea resonating through her in her
voice and body language as she said the words. In my view,
the most important thing I could do for her was to make
sure she had access to that feeling when she needed it
most.

259

"Why should you cultivate growth mindset?" I asked. "What

goals does it accomplish?"
"Well, sort of all of them," she said. "I have goals like
graduating college, improving my relationships, and being
more agenty in general. In the past, depression has gotten
in the way, and I've been very fixed mindset about it,
thinking I could never get any better because I was a
Depressed Person and I might as well give up. If I feel like I
can grow and change out of depression, all those other
things are a lot more likely to happen. With fixed mindset,
I'll just go with the default, never exceeding my
expectations for myself or becoming stronger than I already
am."
"Awesome. Break it down: What are the ideas at play?"
We identified five central parts of her insight*: 'the process
of growth', 'the feeling when you're tempted by fixed
mindset', 'the unwanted outcome of remaining in fixed
mindset', 'the desired outcome of adopting growth mindset',
and 'The causal link from a single instance of resisting fixed
mindset to becoming stronger'."
"Perfect," I said. "Time to translate this into The Language
of System 1. You know the drill!"
How To Translate
1. Concretize

260

Associate with the process of growth: A green and

growing tree that expends time and effort but keeps
going.

Keeping with the tree theme, associate with 'the feeling

when you're tempted by fixed mindset: A brain carved
from a tree stump made of dry, brittle wood that can
never grow.

The unwanted outcome of staying in fixed mindset: The

brain stump is dead and rotting away.

The predicted outcome of employing growth mindset

consistently: A giant redwood tree reaching up through
the canopy to the sunlight, too tall and strong to stay
hidden in the darkness or to fall in a storm.

The causal link from a single instance of resisting fixed

mindset to becoming stronger: New growth emerging
out of the rotting stump.

2. Exaggerate
The tree is so tall, it reaches up through the clouds! Not one
tree, but a whole forest. A new tree for every skill, new

261

growth from another dead stump every time I try something

new, a downpour of nourishing rain soaked up through the
roots when I risk failure to reach beyond my current
abilities, brilliant sunlight radiating from persistent practice
onto every leaf in the forest!
3. Use More Senses
Not just an image of this forest. I feel the upward stretching
in my body when I try a little harder. I feel warm sunlight,
cool rain, and wind through the branches as the trees bend
without breaking. I hear the downpour, and the music of
happy birds in the branches. I smell the rotting of the dead
stumps, and the fresh scent of healthy green life when they
begin to grow again.
4. Engage Personally
I am this forest, of course. The trees are vaguely shaped like
my body. I am the one reaching up, and I make my branches
dance in the breeze to the birdsong. I call forth the sun and
the rain, and I decide to make dead stumps nourish new
growth. In the brain stumps, I am curled up inside, hiding.
5. Tell a Story
Right now, the whole landscape is covered in dry tree
stumps. But here I am, one lone growing tree, and nothing
will stop me from reaching the sky. Whenever I feel a tree
stump rotting, I'll reach upward with new growth, I'll water

262

the ground, and over time, my whole world will all be a lush
forest.
Checking Your Work
"So what do you think," I asked. "Is this translation strong
enough to affect your actions a month down the line, six
months, a year? Does it have an emotional impact that'll hit
you every time?"
"Hell yes."
Results
After writing this, I checked back in with the friend to find
out whether she still uses the Growth Mindset Forest,
whether it works, and whether she's changed anything
about it. I committed to publishing whatever result she
reported.
Turns out she's still using this four months later, and it
works well! She's changed the name, though: She's now
calling it "Frondescence", which I completely love. She says
it's one of the few things powerful enough for her to use
when she's in a place of hopelessness and despair. It
doesn't totally solve the problem every time, but it seems to
help at least a little in most cases, and often it produces
large positive results.

263

Specific example: She got a low grade on a test and was

tempted to be all gloomy about it and give up. But instead,
she used Frondescence and kept working so she could get
a better grade next time. Yay!
________________________________________________
*This motivation-hacking technique, and especially the
identification of goals and the effects single actions have
toward accomplishing them, is inspired by a method CFAR
calls "Propagating Urges" (though the method and name
evolve over time). The idea of "System 1 Translation" was
inspired by the book Made To Stick by Dan and Chip Heath.

264

Systems 1?
July 12, 2014
[These ideas were inspired by/stolen from Nate Sores,
aka So8res, in an ongoing email conversation about the
Dark Arts of Rationality.]
Summary: There's more than one thing we might mean by
"System 1", and the different referents require different
rationality techniques.
___________________________________________
I went skydiving once. On the way up, I was scared. Not as
scared as I expected to be, but more scared than I thought I
should have been. I believed at the time that there was
about a 0.0007% chance of dying in a skydiving accident.*
In other words, if I and around 150,000 other people all went
skydiving, about one of us would die. And that's before
taking into account that I was jumping with an expert.
Part of me knew this. Otherwise, I wouldn't have gotten into
the plane. But part of me didn't seem to know it, and I knew
part of me didn't know it, because I was seriously
wondering whether I'd have the guts to jump on my own.** I
wanted all of me to understand, so I could experience the
excitement without the fear.

265

So I tried picturing 150,000 people all jumping out of planes.

(Dictionary of Numbers helpfully informs me that that's
about the population of Guam.) It helped. Then I called to
mind the people I knew who had been in car crashes, and
remembered how willing I was to climb into a car anyway.
My methods weren't as sophisticated then, but I was
basically seeking what I've recently been calling a "System
1 handle" to arm System 2's abstract understanding with a
clear emotional impact. It was enough, though, to calm my
nerves.
We lined up. I was calm. The door opened, and the wind
roared. I was calm. The pair in front of me jumped. I was
calm.
The floor disappeared from beneath me. It took me about
two seconds to regain enough composure to scream.
Dual process theory is mostly just a quick-and-dirty way of
framing cognitive processes. Speaking as though "System
1" and "System 2" are people in my head with very different
personalities lets me apply a bunch of useful heuristics
more intuitively. I've been fairly good about keeping track of
the reality that they aren't *people*. I've been less good
about guarding against a false dilemma.
The framing tracks something like "degrees of
deliberation". But there's a lot more in that continuum than
"very deliberative" and "very not deliberative". I think I've
been treating everything below some point on the line as

266

"System 1 processing", and it's simply "everything that I

don't think of as System 2".
There seem to be (at least) two natural clusters in the "not
System 2" part of the spectrum that might call for different
treatment. During skydiving, one cluster responded to vivid,
concrete examples. The other cluster was too simple, to
instinctual to get a grip on even that. The link between
"ground disappears" and "freeze in terror" was too basic to
manipulate with the kind of technique I was using. The "oh
shit I'm falling" process is a different animal than the one
responsible for "this is dangerous and therefore I'm going
to die".

The "System 1 translation" techniques I've been writing

about
are
meant
to
deal
with
the part-of-yourself-that-you-argue-with-when-you're-trying-to-con
and
the
part-of-yourself-that-needs-to-remember-important-details-but-doe
The part that's anxious about the jump and doesn't
understand the odds.

But I'm not sure S1 translation does much of anything for

the part that panics when you pull the ground out from
under it. To deal with that part, I think you probably need
tools more along the lines of exposure therapy.

267

When you're in a car driving on icy roads and you start to

slide, the best way to regain control is to steer into the skid
and accelerate slightly. But most people's instinctive
reaction is to slam on the brakes. I've tried to understand
why the steer-into-the-skid method works so I could
translate that understanding into the language of System 1,
and while I've not thought of anything I expect would work
for most people, I've got something that makes sense to
me: When I'm on

icy roads, I can imagine that I'm in a Flintstones car, with

my feet scrambling against the ice. If I were in a Flintstones
car, my immediate reaction to sliding would be to run a little

268

faster in the direction of the skid in order to gain control. I

figure this is probably because I spent some of my
childhood playing on frozen ponds, so I wouldn't suggest
that translation to just anyone.
But I doubt it would work no matter how robust the
translation. The part of my brain that panics and slams on
the brakes is more basic than the part that's scared of the
whole idea of skydiving, or that resists checking the
balance of my bank account. I'm not sure it can be reasoned
with, no matter what language I use.

To ensure I do the right thing when driving on icy roads, a

much better plan would be to find some way to practice.
Find an icy parking lot, and actually expose myself to the
experience over and over, until the right response is
automatic.
I'm not sure about this, but I'd be at least a little more
surprised if S1 translation worked for ice driving than if it
didn't. If I'm right, lumping together all the "System 1
techniques" and using them on anything that's "not System
2" can be dangerous. If this is a real distinction, it's an
important one for applied rationality.
___________________________________________

269

*I still believe that, but with less confidence 'cause I'm

better calibrated and recognize I haven't done enough
research.
**With our setup, I was actually hanging from a harness
attached to the expert by the time we were about to leave
the plane, so my feet weren't on the floor and I didn't get to
jump on my own. Still kinda pissed about that.

270

Corrupted Hardware: Stuff I Learned From My Broken

Brain
July 28, 2014
[Content note: This post discusses mental
depression, social anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.]

illness,

In a Facebook discussion, Brent Dill said, "In my personal

experience, those of us Really Smart People with Severe
Mental Issues often acquire a sort of 'rationality
superpower' to compensate." I've been thinking about this,
and I'm pretty sure something like it happened to me.
A foundational insight upon which any art of rationality
must stand is an understanding that we run on "corrupted
hardware". Our brains are kludgey meat sacks running
spaghetti code just good enough to make more kludgey
meat sacks. They aren't designed to optimize for our
preferences. And it's not really enough to just understand
that abstractly. One way or another, that knowledge has to
fuse with your soul, or I don't think you can make much
headway in rationality.
I've had seasonal affective disorder and social anxiety most
of my life. Both got worse as I aged. My social anxiety is
gone now, though I still fight with depression in the winter.
But I've been much better for the past couple years, thanks
to finally going to a doctor and getting a prescription for
bupropion. Before that, for two winters particularly, things

271

were very bad.

I notice that I benefited, though, from certain features of the
struggle.
While depressed and socially anxious, looking out at the
world from the inside, I was routinely ridiculously wrong
about many things. I was wrong about how much I'd enjoy
anticipated events or how horrible they'd be ("what, why
would I want to go for a walk to get chocolate? what even is
happiness I recall no such thing"). I was wrong about how
other people perceived me ("everyone would be better off if
I were dead, and they probably know that but are too nice to
say so"). I was wrong about how much terror and pain I
could endure before completely collapsing and/or killing
myself (I could endure far more than expected). I was wrong
about how long the darkness would last (not, in fact,
forever, and probably not even through Spring). I was
wrong about my capacity to grow ("I am weak and stupid
and will be like this forever").
Functioning despite these constant errors required I invent
a limited version of reference class forecasting. I would look
at the anticipated event (studying for finals, meeting with a
professor, teaching a class, etc.), feel the sheer
impossibility of it, remember that I'd done similar things
before and survived, extrapolate that I'd probably survive
this time as well, and then I'd resolve to do the impossible
thing. Sometimes I couldn't pull off that reasoning by
myself, and I'd ask a friend to explain to me why the

272

opposite of what I believed was true. I'd talk to people who'd

known me for a long time, and I'd try to trust their expertise.
(When I say "impossible", I mean the feeling you'd have if
you stood before a sheer cliff face and considered whether
you could make it to the top in a single leap. That's what
scheduling a meeting is like when you're depressed and
socially anxious. I am not exaggerating. It's the same
experience, except that there may be terrible consequences
to not scheduling the meeting. So it's more like you're at the
bottom of the cliff considering whether you can jump to the
top while a pack of rabid wolves closes in around you.)
I really got that my internal prediction mechanisms were
damaged, and that I needed special tools to compensate. I
got it, the knowledge fused with my soul, because my errors
were huge enough to stand out compared to the errors of
the people around me, huge enough to prevent me from
participating normally in human affairs. I felt that I was
worthless and hated, while simultaneously recognizing that
the people around me not only liked me but admired me and
wished to model themselves after me. The evidence so
totally contradicted my intuitions that I couldn't pretend my
brain was working fine.
As I recovered, my habits stuck around. Many of those
habits were very harmful and had to go. Relying on coffee
and abandoning all hope of a regular sleep schedule, for
instance. Or working until I literally couldn't stand upright
because it was one of my only available distractions from

273

the pain.
But some of the habits were useful, and stayed. One such
habit was noticing that I might be wrong, especially when I
thought I couldn't do something. Another was not giving up
just because something seems impossible at first glance.
Creating systems to automate as much of my life as
possible to conserve my memory, attention, and motivation.
Choosing my friends very carefully, communicating openly
how I feel, and testing my models of them frequently.
My brain is better now, but only about as good as a normal
human brain. And I still automatically expect many of the
same errors. For instance, despite my abstract
understanding, I notice that I usually don't empathize with
people who live in the far distant future, leading strange
lives in strange galaxies. And it feels a lot like it did to be
depressed and not able to empathize with my best friend
who's right in front of me.
It's obvious to me, because I've seen it so many times
before. I went through cycles of sanity and brokenness over
and over again. If my brain isn't working correctly, to me,
that just means I have to find a work-around. I think a lot of
people just accept the limitation when they notice a major
error like that, thinking, "Well, there's nothing I can do
about that," and go about their lives.
For a long time, I was trapped, encompassed by things I
"couldn't do anything about", that I had to either deal with

274

anyway, or die. Literally. It's amazing what I could find a

way to do when "if it doesn't work out, I'll just kill myself"
was sitting in the back of my mind reminding me that I have
nothing to lose, so I might as well pull out all the stops.
Now, I have some idea of what I can do when there's
nothing left in my way, when I decide to actually try. And in
addition to the "corrupted hardware" insight, I have a deep
intuition that I really can defeat death--because I've done it
before.
Often, it feels impossible to save all 2x10^58th(ish) people
who will exist if I give them every star in my future light
cone.
Damned if I'll let that stop me.

275

URGENT: BLOG MOVING

July 31, 2014
Be it known: I have renamed this blog, and it shall
henceforth be found at agentyduck.blogspot.com, starting
August 1st, 2014. Please update your various things that
need updating accordingly.

276

Explaining Effective Altruism to System 1

August 03, 2014
[This obviously borrows heavily from the ideas of Eliezer
Yudkowsky. In particular, much of it recaps and expands on
his talk at the Effective Altruism Retreat of 2014, though I
suspect my own ideas fed into that talk anyway. There are
also SPOILERS up to chapter 55 of Harry Potter and the
Methods of Rationality.]
I donated to the Humane Society once. There was this
charismatic twenty-something holding a clipboard, and I
hadn't yet learned to walk past such people on the street.
So I stood there and listened, while they told me about
lonely puppies raised in tiny, dirty, wire cages; sick and
shivering puppies deprived of proper veterinary care,
affection, and adequate food and water; frightened puppies,
abused and exploited for their market value.
I like puppies. They're fluffy and have great big eyes. They
make cute little noises when I play tug of war with them.
And it makes me very sad when I imagine them hurting.
Clipboard Person told me I could rescue a puppy by
donating just ten dollars a month to the Humane Society. So
I did. I couldn't help myself.*
The Humane Society of the United States is a nonprofit
organization working to reduce animal suffering in the US.
The Machine Intelligence Research Institute, another

277

nonprofit, is working to ensure prosperity for the entire

future of the humanity. HSUS stops puppy mills and factory
farming from hurting animals. MIRI stops artificial general
intelligence from destroying the world.**
In 2012, HSUS supporters outdid MIRI supporters one
hundred fold in donations.***
Look at this popup.

In this popup--the first thing I see when I visit the HSUS

website--I'm told I can be a hero. I'm shown these
pink-pawed kissable baby dogs in the arms of their new
loving owner [this might actually be a volunteer or police
officer or something, whatever], and I'm implicitly led to
imagine that if I don't donate, those puppies will suffer and

278

die horribly. If I don't act, terrible things will happen to

creatures I automatically care about, and I am personally
responsible. This message is concrete, immediate, and
heart-wrenching.
Animal advocacy activists have to do approximately zero
work to speak to potential donors in the Language of
System 1. Which means System 1 automatically gets the
message. And guess who's primarily in charge of
motivating such actions as pulling out your checkbook.
(Hint: It's not System 2.)
This just isn't fair.
__________________________________________________
Wouldn't it be great if we could grock our support of such
strange and abstract EA organizations as the Machine
Intelligence Research Institute on the same automatic
emotional level that we grock animal advocacy?
I think we can. It takes work. But I think it's possible, and I
think I've got some ideas about how to do it. The basic idea
is to translate "I should help MIRI" into a message that is
similarly concrete, immediate, and heart-wrenching.
So what is the problem, exactly? Why is MIRI so hard for
System 1 to understand?
I think the main problem is that the people MIRI's trying to

279

save are difficult to empathize with. If my best friend were

dying in front of me and there were a button beside him
labeled "save best friend's life", I'd feel motivated to push it
even if I had no idea how it worked. But even if I could give
S1 an excellent understanding of how MIRI plans to
accomplish its goal of saving everyone, it wouldn't change
much unless my emotions were behind the goal itself.
VERY IMPORTANT: Do not employ these sorts of methods
to get your emotions behind the goal before System 2 is
quite certain it's a good idea. Otherwise, you might end up
giving all your money to the Humane Society or something.
Why are most of the people MIRI wants to save so hard to
empathize with? I think my lack of empathy is
overdetermined.

1. There are too many of them (something on the order of

10^58th), and System 1 can't get a handle on that. No
matter how good S2 is at math, S1 thinks huge numbers
aren't real, so huge numbers of people aren't real either.

2. Most of them are really far away. Not only are they not
right in front of me, but most of them aren't even on my
planet, or in my galaxy. S1 is inclined to care only about
the people in my immediate vicinity, and when I care
about people who are far away, there's generally

280

something else connecting us. S2 thinks this is bollocks,

but isn't directly in charge of my emotions.

3. They're also distant in time. Though S2 knows there's no

sense in which people of the far distant future are any
less real than the people who exist right now, S1 doesn't
actually believe in them.

4. They're very strange, and therefore hard to imagine

concretely. Day-to-day life will change a lot over time, as
it always has. People probably won't even be made of
proteins for very much longer. The people I'm trying to
empathize with are patterns of computations, and S1
completely fails to register that that's really what people
are already. S1 doesn't know how such a thing would
look, feel, taste, smell, or sound. It has no satisfying
stories to tell itself about them.****

5. I don't imagine myself as living in the future, and S1 is

indifferent about things that don't directly involve me. [I
feel this so strongly that the first version of 5 said
"I don't live in the future," and it took several re-readings
before I noticed how ridiculous that was.]

281

Note that most of these obstacles to S1 understanding

apply to world poverty reduction and animal altruism as
well. People in the developing world are numerous, distant,
and tend to live lives very different from my own. This is
true of most animals as well. The population of the far
distant future is simply an extreme case.
So those are some S1 weaknesses. But S1 also has
strengths to bring to bear on this problem. It's great at
feeling
empathy
and
motivation
under
certain
circumstances.

1. S1 can model individuals. It can imagine with solid

emotional impact the experience of one single other
person.

2. It can handle things that are happening nearby.

3. It can handle things that are happening right now.

4. It feels lots of strong emotions about its "tribe", the

people in its natural circle of concern (my family, friends,
school, etc.)

282

5. It cares especially about people with familiar

experiences it can easily imagine in vivid sensory detail.

6. It loves stories.

7. It gets a better grip on ideas when things are

exaggerated.

8. It's self-centered, in the sense of caring much more

about things that involve me directly.

To translate "I should help MIRI" (and relevant associated

ideas) into the Language of System 1, you'd need to craft a
message that plays to S1's strengths while making up for
its weaknesses.
I did this myself, so I'll try to walk you through the process I
used.
__________________________________________________
[HPMOR SPOILERS BEGIN HERE]

283

I started with the central idea and the associated emotion,

which I decided is "saving people" or "protecting people". I
searched my association network near "saving people" for
something concrete I could modify and build on.
I quickly came across "Harry James Potter-Evans-Verris in
Azkaban", which is further associated with "patronus",
"dementors", and "the woman who cried out for his help
when Professor Quirrell's quieting charm was gone". Yes,
THERE is the emotion I want to work with. Now I'm getting
somewhere.
Now to encode the relevant information in a modification of
this story.
In my story, I'm the one walking the halls of Azkaban, rather
than Harry. There are too many people in the future, so I'll
focus on one person in one cell. And it will be someone
close to me, a particular person I know well and care for
deeply. One of my best friends.
My version of Azkaban will extend for a few miles in all
directions--not far enough to truly represent reality, but just
far enough to give me the emotional impression of "really
far". The future doesn't feel real, so I'll populate my Azkaban
with a bunch of those future people, and my
representations of them exist right now in this
brick-and-mortar building around me. Some of them are
strange in maybe implausible but fairly specific

284

ways--they're
aquatic,
or
silicon
crystals,
or
super-intelligent shades of the color blue, whatever. They're
people, and the woman beside me is familiar.
The central message is "save them"--save them from what?
From suffering, from death, and from nonexistance.
Conveniently, canon dementors already represent those
things.
And what's the "patronus"? That's easy too. In my mind,
"effective altruism" is the muggle term for "expecto
patronum".
Finally, with a broad outline in place, I begin the story and
run my simulation in full detail.
__________________________________________________
I imagine Azkaban. Imagine myself there. A gray prison with
cold, damp walls. There are countless cells--I'm not sure
how many, but there are at least a dozen in this hall, and a
dozen halls on this floor, and a dozen floors in this wing
alone. And in every single cell is a person.
There could be animals here, too, if I wanted. Puppies, even.
Because this isn't a prison where bad people are sent to be
punished and kept from hurting others. This is a much more
terrible place, where the innocent go, just for having been
born too early, for having lived before anyone knew how to
save them from death.

285

I imagine that I'm walking down the hallway, lined in cells

on either side. I hear the eerie clicking of my shoes against
the stone floor. Feel the fear of distant dementors washing
over me. And as I walk by, on my left, a single person cries
out.
I look through the bars, and I can see her. My friend, lying in
shadow, whose weak voice I now recognize. She is old and
wasting away. She is malnourished, and sickly, and she will
die soon. The dementors have fed on her all these years,
and she is calling to me with her last breaths. Just as
everyone in Azkaban would do if they knew that I'm here, if
they knew they were not alone.
I live in a time when things like this still happen to people.
To everyone. Some of us live good lives for a while. Others
exist always in quiet desperation. But eventually, the
dementors become too much for us, and we waste away.
It's not pretty. Our bodies fail, our minds fail. We drown in
our own phlegm after forgetting the names of our children.
I imagine my friend crying in that cell, wishing to be healthy
and happy again, to live one more day. That is just one
chosen from every other prisoner in the present and the
vast future, who will die if I just watch, doing nothing. Only I
can help. I am here, so she is mine to protect. Everyone in
Azkaban is mine to protect. They have nobody else. And if I
could be everywhere in Azkaban, the cries for help would

286

echo off of every wall.

But it doesn't have to be like this. Azkaban is an evil place,
and I do not have to stand for it. Death is not invincible. I
can think, and choose my path, and act.
What is Effective Altruism, in the limit? It is healing every
wound. Not praying that someone else will do it, but
reaching out myself, with everything I have, to destroy
every dementor. To tear down these walls. To carry every
prisoner to safety, restore them to health, and ensure no
one has to suffer and die like this ever again.
It is seeing this one suffering woman who needs my help
and choosing to protect her from the darkness--and
knowing that she is every person in the future extended
before me.
Harry cast his protronus to protect the woman, in the
original story. But then he stopped. Because it wasn't time.
He didn't have the power. Like the altruists of two hundred
years ago, he wasn't ready. There was only so much he
could do.
But now the time has come. Today is the pivotal moment in
all of human history when I have the power to intervene
effectively. I can cast my patronus, and never let it stop until
every dementor is destroyed, and every person has been
protected.

287

A dementor approaches from one end of the hall, seeking

its prey. I feel it, radiating emptiness and despair, and a
woman wimpers, "help me, please". From the other end of
the hall, others who share my goals race in to help me me.
They gather before the dementor. Leaders of EA
organizations, others who have dedicated their lives to
existential risk reduction. They draw their wands and
prepare for battle.
I look at my friend in her cell, her eyes pleading desperately,
as I draw my wand and move into the beginning stance for
the patronus charm. "I will save you," I say to her.
Moving my thumb and forefinger just the right distance
apart, I imagine her smiling, revived, prospering.
I flick my wand once, and promise she will be free. Twice,
and promise to free all the prisoners in this wing. Thrice,
and promise to free every prisoner in Azkaban. Four times,
and promise no dementor will hurt another living person
ever again.
We level our wands straight at the dementor, brandishing
them to drive away the darkness. And with victory in our
voices, together we shout,
"EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM!"

288

The thought explodes from my wand, blazing with the

brilliance of the MOST good. It joins with the patronuses of
all the other effective altruists. The light burns down the
hallway, freeing every prisoner it passes from despair and
death. It burns through the walls, and they crumble. It burns
in every direction, and one after another, the dementors are
reduced to little piles of ashen cloth. Healing the wounds in
the world. The light continues to grow, enveloping the patch
of pebbles that once was Azkaban, our whole world, our
galaxy, our future light cone.
Saving our people. Everyone. Everywhere. Forever.
"Effective altruism" is the muggle term for "expecto
patronum". It needn't be merely an abstract idea we force
ourselves to act on while our emotions lag behind. It can be
our battle cry against death.

________________________________________________________
*I'd never heard of effective altruism then, of course. In fact,
I didn't consider myself an altruist of any sort. I'm not sure
I'd donated to anything at that point besides maybe SETI.
The HSUS pitch was just really good.
**"Converting the reachable universe into quality adjusted
life years is also cute." --Eliezer Yudkowsky, Effective
Altruism Summit 2013
***In their 990s, HSUS reported $112,833,027 in grants and
contributions, while MIRI reported $1,066,055.
****The Tale of the Far Future Person: "Once upon a time,

289

there will have been an entity. The entity will have been
alive and sentient. It will have had various experiences and
values. Never dying, it will have satisfied its preferences
ever after. The end."

290

Ways Nouns Verb Other Nouns

August 12, 2014
There's an incredibly important mnemonics exercise that
I've somehow neglected to mention to anyone up to this
point: Set a five minute timer and write down as many ways
as possible for objects to interact with other objects. You
might want to work with a particular example, such as
"camera" and "watermelon". Or you might want to stick with
ways people in particular can interact with things.
In mnemonics, you're constrained by how rigidly your brain
insists on completing the usual pattern instead of doing
something else. (It occurs to me that you could replace
"mnemonics" with just about anything and preserve the
truth value of the previous sentence. But it's especially
clear-cut in mnemonics.) If you're trying to bind "camera" to
"watermelon", it may be that the first thing that comes to
mind is "camera takes a picture of the watermelon". It's
natural to get stuck on that not-very-memorable image,
going round and round with the query "camera
watermelon?" and your brain's insistence upon the answer,
"camera takes picture of watermelon". You say, "No brain, I
need something else," and your brain is all, "Um, but that's
what cameras do. How about... camera takes picture of
watermelon?"
To reliably escape loops like that, it helps to have practiced
the mental motion of trying out other possible interactions,

291

and it helps to have a whole arsenal of them ready to go.

Here, I'll demonstrate. Camera and watermelon. Off the top
of my head--really, I'm going to note the very first things
that come to mind, like I would in real life:

Yes, the camera could take a picture of the watermelon,

thanks brain, keep thinking.

The camera could transform into the watermelon, or melt

over it, or deform to surround it, or absorb it, or bounce
off of it. (Those count as one because they're my
standard, not-really-trying interaction collection.)

The water melon could eat the camera.

It could tackle the camera.

The camera could wrap its strap around the watermelon

and strangle it, or make a noose and hang it, or drag it
along on a leash. (All things to do with the strap, so
that's one.)

The camera and the watermelon could attempt to have

sex, in which case they might spend the whole time

292

looking for some configuration that would allow such a

thing to happen despite their apparently incompatible
anatomy.

The watermelon could be fired out of the barrel of the

camera.

The watermelon could fall on the camera, crushing it and

splattering its guts everywhere.

The watermelon and the camera could tango, or waltz, or

charleston, or do jumping jacks facing each other, or
skip while holding hands, or race. (Those are all physical
partner activities, so that's one.)

The watermelon could spit seeds at the camera while the

camera frantically dodges.

The watermelon could vomit the camera.

The camera could have a human-shaped body and a

super power that lets it shoot watermelons out of its
wrists the way Spider Man does with webs. (That was
overly complicated, brain, but I appreciate the...
whatever it is you just did to make that.)

293

The camera could shit the watermelon.

The watermelon could give birth to the camera.

The watermelon could roll over the camera, squishing it

and collecting it up like Katamari Damacy.

The camera could make out with the watermelon.

The camera could play tag with the water melon.

Finding things like this is quick and easy once you're used
to it. I couldn't type nearly fast enough to get these down as
quickly as I thought of them. (To be clear, I'm trying to give
you evidence of your own potential, not to show off.) I've
been at this long enough that I didn't have to stop for breath
to make that list, and it ended because I didn't want to
waste your time or use up too many ideas you might have if
you tried this exercise. The watermelon would be finding
ways to sharpen the camera's mechanical parts into various
weapons by the time I was actually done.
It's slow and effortful, though, if you try to do it in real life
without having practiced. And it's essential that this
become easy for you, if you're after order of magnitude

294

improvements to your internal memory.

Binding is the foundation of all palace-style mnemonics.
Once you have a basic two-place relationship that isn't the
normal expected thing, you can just feed that to your inner
simulator and it'll start filling in all kinds of unexpected,
emotionally potent details all on its own as you let the story
play out.* With only the expected relationship, you have to
make a separate effort to insert every single little detail
required to boost the memorability.
There's no way mnemonic techniques will work fast enough
to actually be useful if every time you cast out for
something besides the usual pattern, your net comes back
empty. You'll be stuck with the ordinary, boring, expected
pattern. And there's nothing memorable about that.
*Incidentally, the PAO system for number memorization is a
systematized application of this principle. "PAO" stands for
"Person, Action, Object". To each number between 0 and
99, you assign a person, and action, and an object. Suppose
23 is John Luc Picard sipping a cup of Earl Grey tea, 45 is
Captain Jack Harkness fucking a pterodactyl, and 83 is
Barney the dinosaur eating a cake. To memorize any six
digit number, you have the person from the first two digits
do the action from the second two digits to the object in the
third two digits. And you end up with "234,583" being
encoded as "John Luc Picard fucking a cake". Now when
you feed your brain a question like, "What does that sound

295

like?" you don't have to do any extra work to come up with

a memorable answer. Your inner simulator has something
way outside of any of its usual patterns, and just about
anything it could possibly supply for "the sound of Picard
fucking a cake" is going to be highly memorable.

________________________________________________________
In other news, I've recently started offering private lessons
in mnemonics, and it's going swimmingly so far. If you want
to get good at this stuff super fast, I don't know of a better
way than to work with me for an hour. Besides maybe
working with me for three hours. I'm charging $100 to $200
an hour depending on the goal. You don't have to live in the
Bay Area, because we all live in the future. Email me at
strohl89@gmail.com if you're interested.

296

Small, Consistent Effort: Uncharted Waters In the Art of

Rationality
August 20, 2014
Summary: I predict that there are powerful secrets yet to be
uncovered in the area of rationality skills that are fairly easy
but take a long time to learn.
I've been thinking about what sorts of things rationality
skills are, and how they are gained. By "rationality skills", I
mean patterns of thought and feeling that contribute to
systematic improvement of the accuracy of beliefs, and of
the satisfaction of values.
The sort of categorization that most interests me is based
on how the skills are acquired. I imagine a grid of rationality
skill acquisition. It looks like this.

297

Things farther to the left take less time to learn, while things
farther to the right require some combination of processing
time, many iterations, and long strings of dependencies on
other skills that must be acquired serially. While "difficult"
and "takes a long time to learn" may be highly correlated, I
don't think they're the same thing.
It can take a child quite a while to learn long division. You
generally need to lean addition in order to learn subtraction
and multiplication, multiplication in order to learn division,
and the final procedure that leads to the right answer, which
depends on multiplication and subtraction (and division, if
you want to be efficient). All together that can take a long
time.

298

But once you've got all the pieces of basic arithmetic, the
final procedure is pretty easy. If you've got detailed
instructions in front of you, it can even be carried out
correctly on the very first try. And the pieces themselves
are pretty straightforward, especially if you recognize that
the execution of algorithms will suffice, and deep
understanding isn't strictly necessary. It may be a long and
complex process if you've never seen arithmetic before, but
the greatest inferential gap is either between addition and
multiplication or between multiplication and division. Those
are leaps average gradeschoolers can make. No individual
part is all that difficult to get your head around.
But consider the simplest problems in elementary algebra.
In addition to the basic arithmetic operations, you need two
more pieces: "doing the same thing to both sides of the
equals sign", and "variable". "Doing the same thing to both
sides of the equals sign" is a even easier than "the
procedure for long division".
But "variable" is fundamentally different. It requires a new
kind of idea. It requires abstraction, which is not only new
but inferentially distant. It may even be the greatest
inferential gap a child must cross in traditional math
education up to pre-calculus. It isn't a complex idea,
though, and there's not really such a thing as "half-way
understanding variable". You get it or you don't, and when
you get it, elementary algebra suddenly makes

299

sense. "Variable" is probably an epiphany. And it's a

difficult enough epiphany that, according to Jo Boaler, a
great many adults never do have it.
I think the Lesswrong Sequences are mostly good for a few
epiphanies. They're largely boot-strapping sorts of
epiphanies, which re-order your mind in ways that allow for
further epiphanies. But they're still epiphanies. They're
skills that are difficult to gain but happen all at once, in this
case over the course of reading a blog post. They're mostly
things of the form "understanding X" or "realizing that Y".
And most of the potential lessons of the sequences are
fairly difficult unless you happen to have a mind with
exactly the right arrangement, which is part of why most
people don't have their whole mind rearranged once per
post. So the Sequences mostly exist in the upper left corner
of the skill acquisition grid.
CFAR workshops occupy the whole left half of the grid.
Most of what's taught in the actual classes falls in the
bottom left--quick and easy--because the lessons are only
fifty minutes, and they're mostly practical instead of
conceptual. Rather than lecturing you for an hour, as
though reading several Sequence posts aloud, they're more
like, "Here is a procedure that is surprisingly
domain-generally useful. Let's practice."
For example, CFAR teaches Trigger-Action Planning, known
in the Cog Sci literature as "implementation intentions". It's

300

got even more bang for the effortful buck than memory
palaces, because the effect size is similarly enormous, but it
helps with anything that can be broken down into concrete
triggers and concrete actions. And all it takes is learning to
compose specific enough if-then statements, like so: "If I
hear my alarm in the morning, then I will hop out of bed
immediately." Other bug patches CFAR installs include
Murphey Jitsu, Goal Factoring, Focused Grit, and
Againstness. (Don't worry, I'll discuss exceptions to this in
a minute.)
The rest of the CFAR experience, the socialization outside
of classes, usually causes at least one epiphany.
Participants have conversations with instructors and other
participants, and since everybody there is carefully selected
to be bright, curious, and interesting in diverse ways,
there's always somebody saying, "Wow, I've never thought
of that!"
CFAR teaches one lesson from the bottom right quadrant:
Comfort Zone Expansion, or CoZE. CoZE is basically
CFAR's take on exposure therapy. Exposure therapy can
take a long time. Though you might see progress right
away, you're usually not going to wipe out a deep fear or
anxiety in a single go. It takes repeated exposure with a
slow and steady increase in intensity.
But exposure therapy is fairly easy! Scary, though by
design not very scary, but not difficult. The principle is not

301

hard to understand, the procedure is straightforward, and

there's just not much more to it than that. It takes time, is
all. So CFAR devotes a lot more time to CoZE than to the
other units. There's a standard 50minute CoZE prep class,
and there's an entire evening devoted to the "CoZE outing",
where everybody goes off for hours in search of repeated
exposure to a feared stimulus. CoZE is a tortoise skill.
"Slow and steady wins the race." It relies almost entirely on
small, consistent efforts.
Some of CFAR's other lessons may be close to the middle
of the X axis, but I don't think there are any others that must
necessarily take many iterations to properly install.
There is one skillset CFAR attempts to impart in a class
format that I think falls in the top right quadrent: Bayesian
reasoning. It is not merely an epiphany, and if you want a
version that works in real life, it is not a bug patch. When
last I saw it (June 2014), the Bayes unit was not up to the
same standard as the Bug Patch units or CoZE, and I think I
may now understand a big chunk of why.
Bayesian reasoning depends on some pretty mind-twisty
habits of thought. Not only are the skills difficult to attain,
but they require a combination of long processing time,
many iterations, and long strings of dependencies. It takes
a couple epiphanies, a few bug patches, lots of habit
installation, and the long and difficult process of weaving all
of that together into fully Bayesian patterns of thought and

302

feeling. A two-hour class is simply not the right format to

get all of that done.
[CFAR does offer six weeks of 1-on-1s for all participants,
so there's more room for imparting Tortoise skills than the
workshop itself allows. But those are extremely
personalized, more like counseling than the usual sort of
teaching, and it's hard for them to scale in the same way as
the Sequences or the standard batch of CFAR units, so I'm
not discussing those so much.]
Wizard skillsets like Bayesian reasoning are definitely
possible to attain. I think almost all of it, if not all of it,
happens by acquiring components from the other three
quadrants and weaving them together over time. If there are
rationality skills that primitively require slow and difficult
aquisition, I don't know what they are. Most of the really
badass epistemic skills, I suspect, are Wizard skills. And so
far, CFAR plus the Sequences seldom seem to be enough to
get people there.
I've learned some hard things. I've learned to prove
theorems of nonstandard mathematics that defy my most
basic logical intuitions, for example. I've learned to interpret
ancient, bizarre, abstract Indian philosophy. I've learned to
follow Blues dance like nobody's business. And I can't think
of a single skill I've gained that simply could not be broken
down
into
quick
and
easy
bug
patches,
getting-my-mind-around-it-ness, and boatloads of small,

303

consistent efforts.
So maybe I'm wrong, and most of the Wizard skills worth
having are primitively slow and difficult to attain. After all,
that's one theory that explains why I lack Beisutzukai-level
mastery. There's got to be something Anna Salamon and
Eliezer Yudkowsky share that I lack, and maybe this is it.
But you know what Anna and Eliezer definitely have that I
don't? Practice. Years and years of practice. I heard the
word "rationalist" outside of Cartesian philosophy for the
first time just two years ago. So maybe while I've had most
of the epiphanies I'm going to from Lesswrong's material,
and while I've installed most of CFAR's bug patches, there's
a third class of easily attainable skills I must gain before I
can weave all of it together and become far stronger as a
rationalist.
If this is true, it's very good news! It means that if I can
looks at the Wizard skills I desire and break them down into
the epiphanies and bug patches I already have, I may be
able to ask myself, "What part of this puzzle is going to take
small, consistent effort?" And I might well come up with a
useful answer!
With a single exception, all of the skills I've gained directly
from Eliezer since I've lived with him over the past year
confirm this hypothesis. (He gave me one all-or-nothing
epiphany in person, which was "fail more".) All of the others

304

followed more or less the same pattern:

1. He emphasized the importance of something I already

basically had my head around, both abstractly in
principle and concretely in practice.

2. I decided to practice CONSTANT VIGILANCE for a single

failure mode associated with lack of the skill.

3. I noticed the failure several times over the course of

days or weeks until I could predict when I was about to
experience the failure mode.

4. I practiced CONSTANT VIGILANCE for times when I

could feel that the failure mode was about to happen.

5. I tested out a few ways of responding to the feeling that

the failure mode was about to happen, to find out what
overcoming the problem might feel like.

6. I let the results of those tests process for a little while.

7. Often, I ran my observations by Eliezer to get his

feedback.

305

8. I composed a trigger-action plan (though usually not in

writing) with the trigger "I notice I'm about to experience
the failure mode if I don't do anything to stop it", and an
action I expect to avert the failure.

9. I practice the trigger-action until it feels like a

background habit.

10. I weave my understanding of the problem and its import

into my practice.

Imagine a master rationalist does the exercise I described

above, picking a Wizard skill and sorting its components
into the other quadrants. And imagine she wants to teach
that skill to me. She can say some things about what must
be understood, hoping to cause the relevant quick but
difficult epiphanies. She can give me some simple bug
patches to install if quick and easy solutions are part of it.
Then, for every slow but easy tortoise component, she
could drastically speed up my skill acquisition by providing
me with, or otherwise helping me uncover, the following
information.

306

1. What it feels like to notice the failure mode itself, or how

to find out what it feels like.

2. What it feels like to notice that the failure mode is about

to happen, or some things it might feel like.

3. What to do when I notice that feeling, or a few options

for what to try.

A compilation of such advice on tortoises, especially if it

were presented in a way that encouraged consistent
check-ins and small efforts toward improvement, would be
a new kind of rationality resource.
It would not, however, be unprecedented in other domains.
Without even doing research, I am aware of books
approximating this concept focusing on yoga, mindfulness,
writing, and physics. I think we need one of these for the art
of rationality.

307

Take the Time: In Memoriam

September 05, 2014
I just found out a friend of mine has died of cancer.
We were neighbors out in the country near a small
Midwestern town for years. I composed a song about her
and her family, back when I spent most of my time making
music. It's been years since I've thought about it, but I've
been playing through it in my head for the past half hour. I
wrote it just before I left for college, and it's a memorial to
all the good things about the way of life I was leaving
behind.
I always felt that her family really got the whole being
human thing. They showed me a way of living and loving
simply, with your whole heart. And in the song, I said I'd
"keep their lesson with me".
I don't think I've done a very good job of that, I'm afraid.
Just the other day, I said that I don't much value ordinary
human experience, and that I'm only interested in
preserving the possibility of extraordinary aesthetic
experience. But when I think about Rosie and the others
who inspired my song, I remember pure and simple
friendship with joy, laughter, love, empathy, playfulness,
authenticity--

308

and, above all, folk music. Not complex, sacred, ingenious

music, like the masterpieces of the classical composers I
worship. The simple, raw, imperfect music that is meant to
be shared under ordinary circumstances with ordinary
people. The music that celebrates ordinary human
experience. The music that I used to write.
Sometimes my heart just isn't in this Saving the World
thing, because I feel like most of the world is kind of crap,
and that humanity has few redeeming qualities. But I guess
I tend to forget that Rosie, and people like her, exist.
Existed.
"Something to protect"? I thought I didn't have it. But I
would have protected her, if I could have. And I would
protect the people who laughed with her once. The people
who sang with her. I'd protect the people with pure and
simple friendship, with joy, laughter, love, empathy,
playfulness, authenticity, and celebration. And I must admit:
Even I can see that that's just about everyone, at least
sometimes.
I haven't changed that much since high school. I just forgot
for a while. I wish I could tell her that she reminded me. That
even my memory of her is a beacon of humanism. It is very
sad that I can't. I can only save the people who are left.
There will be no cancer in the world I'm building. But there
will be so, so much folk music.

309

You're not there to hear me, but I'll say it to myself, and to
everyone who's listening, so I remember this time. I miss
you, Rosie. I'm sorry. Thank you for everything.
Embedded File ()
"Take the Time" written 2007, video from 2008

310

Simulate and Defer To More Rational Selves

September 06, 2014
I sometimes let imaginary versions of myself make
decisions for me.
I first started doing this after a friend told me (something
along the lines of) this story. When she first became the
executive director of her organization, she suddenly had
many more decisions to deal with per day than ever before.
"Should we hire this person?" "Should I go buy more coffee
for the coffee machine, or wait for someone else deal with
it?" "When can I schedule time to plan the fund drive?"
I'm making up these examples myself, but I'm sure you, too,
can imagine how leading a brand new organization might
involve a constant assault on the parts of your brain
responsible for making decisions. She found it exhausting,
and by the time she got home at the end of the day, a
question like, "Would you rather we have peas or green
beans with dinner?" often felt like the last straw. "I don't
care about the stupid vegetables, just give me food and
don't make me decide any more things!"
She was rescued by the following technique. When faced
with a decision, she'd imagine "the Executive Director", and
ask herself, "What would 'the Executive Director' do?"
Instead of making a decision, she'd make a prediction about
the actions of that other person. Then, she'd just do

311

whatever they'd do!

In my friend's case, she was trying to reduce decision

fatigue. When I started trying it out myself, I was after a cure
for something slightly different.
Imagine you're about to go bungee jumping off a high cliff.
You know it's perfectly safe, and all you have to do is take a
step forward, just like you've done every single time you've
ever walked. But something is stopping you. The decision
to step off the ledge is entirely yours, and you know you
want to do it because this is why you're here. Yet here you
are, still standing on the ledge.
You're scared. There's a battle happening in your brain. Part
of you is going, "Just jump, it's easy, just do it!", while
another part--the part in charge of your legs, apparently--is
going, "NOPE. Nope nope nope nope NOPE." And you have
this strange thought: "I wish someone would just push me
so I don't have to decide."
Maybe you've been bungee jumping, and this is not at all
how you responded to it. But I hope (for the sake of
communication) that you've experienced this sensation in
other contexts. Maybe when you wanted to tell someone
that you loved them, but the phrase hovered just behind
your lips, and you couldn't get it out. You almost wished it
would tumble out of your mouth accidentally. "Just say it,"
you thought to yourself, and remained silent. For some

312

reason, you were terrified of the decision, and inaction felt

more like not deciding.
When I heard this story from my friend, I had social anxiety.
I didn't have way more decisions than I knew how to handle,
but I did find certain decisions terrifying, and was often
paralyzed by them. For example, this always happened if
someone I liked, respected, and wanted to interact with
more asked to meet with them. It was pretty obvious to me
that it was a good idea to say yes, but I'd agonize over the
email endlessly instead of simply typing "yes" and hitting
"send".
So here's what it looked like when I applied the technique.
I'd be invited to a party. I'd feel paralyzing fear, and a sense
of impending doom as I noticed that I likely believed going
to the party was the right decision. Then, as soon as I felt
that doom, I'd take a mental step backward and not try to
force myself to decide. Instead, I'd imagine a version of
myself who wasn't scared, and I'd predict what she'd do. If
the party really wasn't a great idea, either because she
didn't consider it worth my time or because she didn't
actually anticipate me having any fun, she'd decide not to
go. Otherwise, she'd decide to go. I would not decide. I'd
just run my simulation of her, and see what she had to say.
It was easy for her to think clearly about the decision,
because she wasn't scared. And then I'd just defer to her.
Recently, I've noticed that there are all sorts of
circumstances under which it helps to predict the decisions

313

of a version of myself who doesn't have my current

obstacle to rational decision making. Whenever I'm having a
hard time thinking clearly about something because I'm
angry, or tired, or scared, I can call upon imaginary Rational
Brienne to see if she can do any better.
Example: I get depressed when I don't get enough sunlight.
I was working inside where it was dark, and Eliezer noticed
that I'd seemed depressed lately. So he told me he thought I
should work outside instead. I was indeed a bit down and
irritable, so my immediate response was to feel angry--that
I'd been interrupted, that he was nagging me about getting
sunlight again, and that I have this sunlight problem in the
first place.
I started to argue with him, but then I stopped. I stopped
because I'd noticed something. In addition to anger, I felt
something like confusion. More complicated and specific
than confusion, though. It's the feeling I get when I'm
playing through familiar motions that have tended to lead to
disutility. Like when you're watching a horror movie and the
main character says, "Let's split up!" and you feel like,
"Ugh, not this again. Listen, you're in a horror movie. If you
split up, you will die. It happens every time." A familiar
twinge of something being not quite right.
But even though I noticed the feeling, I couldn't get a handle
on it. Recognizing that I really should make the decision to
go outside instead of arguing--it was just too much for me. I
was angry, and that severely impedes my introspective

314

vision. And I knew that. I knew that familiar not-quite-right

feeling meant something was preventing me from applying
some of my rationality skills.
So, as I'd previously decided to do in situations like this, I
called upon my simulation of non-angry Brienne.
She immediately got up and went outside.
To her, it was extremely obviously the right thing to do. So I
just deferred to her (which I'd also previously decided to do
in situations like this, and I knew it would only work in the
future if I did it now too, ain't timeless decision theory
great). I stopped arguing, got up, and went outside.
I was still pissed, mind you. I even felt myself rationalizing
that I was doing it because going outside despite Eliezer
being wrong wrong wrong is easier than arguing with him,
and arguing with him isn't worth the effort. And then I told
him as much over chat. (But not the "rationalizing" part; I
wasn't fully conscious of that yet.)
But I went outside, right away, instead of wasting a bunch
of time and effort first. My internal state was still in disarray,
but I took the correct external actions.
This has happened a few times now. I'm still getting the
hang of it, but it's working.

315

Imaginary Rational Brienne isn't magic. Her only available

skills are the ones I have in fact picked up, so anything I've
not learned, she can't implement. She still makes mistakes.
Her special strength is constancy.
In real life, all kinds of things limit my access to my own
skills. In fact, the times when I most need a skill will very
likely be the times when I find it hardest to access. For
example, it's more important to consider the opposite when
I'm really invested in believing something than when I'm not
invested at all, but it's much harder to actually carry out the
mental motion of "considering the opposite" when all the
cognitive
momentum
is
moving
toward
arguing
single-mindedly for my favored belief.
The advantage of Rational Brienne (or, really, the Rational
Briennes, because so far I've always ended up simulating a
version of myself that's exactly the same except lacking
whatever particular obstacle is relevant at the time) is that
her access doesn't vary by situation. She can always use all
of my tools all of the time.
I've been trying to figure out this constancy thing for quite a
while. What do I do when I call upon my art as a rationalist,
and just get a 404 Not Found? Turns out, "trying harder"
doesn't do the trick. "No, really, I don't care that I'm scared,
I'm going to think clearly about this. Here I go. I mean it this
time." It seldom works.

316

I hope that it will one day. I would rather not have to rely on
tricks like this. I hope I'll eventually just be able to go
straight from noticing dissonance to re-orienting my whole
mind so it's in line with the truth and with whatever I need to
reach my goals. Or, you know, not experiencing the
dissonance in the first place because I'm already doing
everything right.
In the mean time, this trick seems pretty powerful.

317

My Experiences With SAD Interventions

September 07, 2014
[Content note: Depression, self harm, social anxiety, eating
disorders.]
Several people (at least five) have asked me recently about
my experiences coping with depression. In response, I've
put together a list of interventions I've tried, and what
happened. There are probably lots of things missing from
all parts of this list. I have a bit of a memory problem here,
because I'm sort of two different people, and since the
depressed version of me is sleeping, her past experiences
aren't very available to me. But here are the things that are
salient right now. I think I've probably gotten all the really
big ones.
About my history: I've gotten depressed during the winter
since puberty, and probably earlier. It's gotten worse all my
life up through age 21 or so. I began purposful recovery
three years ago (maybe four?) when it didn't get better
during the spring.
Things that have helped me with Seasonal Affective
Disorder,
in order (mostly) of apparent effect size:

318

It not being winter. Duh. Didn't realize this was useful to

know until it finally occurred to me that I might try
moving to the southern hemisphere for the US winter.
Giving that a go this time around. The plan is to come
back in mid February so I can try out a few more
interventions without having to put up with an entire
winter's worth of depression should they fail.

Bupropion (300mg/day sustained release)

I started this during the deepest depths of depression

I've so far experienced, and it pulled me out.

This took care of most of the problem.

There was still enough of the problem left to be

minorly crippling. I can be a student or hold a job
during the winter if my life depends on it. I'm still
almost constantly suffering in the winter, though. My
concentration, creativity, and ambition are nearly
totally shot from late fall through late spring, and I
sink deeply enough into "my dark side" that
compassion is just about impossible, and my most
common form of positive emotion is cold amusement.
I'm not going to go into any further details about
having depression here. Just trying to let you know

319

approximately where I stand with it at the moment.

Curing my social anxiety.

I had to get my depression mostly under control

before this was even thinkable.

but they're really a nasty combination. Depression is

much easier to deal with without social anxiety.

I'd probably be even better off if I weren't also

introverted, but changing that is not the next thing on
my to-do list.

If you want to hear about effective interventions for

social anxiety, skip down to "And so it began." in the
"Lob's Theorem Cured My Social Anxiety" (which, in
addition to being the title of one of my most popular
posts, has been noted as taking the cake for the most
Lesswrongian phrase ever). For the crazy mysterious
thing that kicked it once and for all, read to the end.
But I don't actually expect that last thing to work for
other people.

320

Eating enough and regularly

It took me a ridiculously long time to figure out that

this was a thing.

My mood gets way, way worse when I'm hungry.

Unfortunately, all sorts of things come together to
prevent me from eating.

For one, my stomach is apparently the last part of

me to notice that I'm hungry, and for a long time I
didn't believe people who told me I should eat,
unless my stomach agreed with them. I suspect
this has something to do with the bupropion,
since it reduces appetite reliably enough to be
prescribed as a weight-loss drug.

I was poor for a long time, so most of the food

available was sufficiently uninteresting that it took
pretty extreme hunger before cooking and eating
was better than continuing to be hungry.

Cooking takes time and energy. Turns out there's

some fairly tasty frozen food these days. I was not
aware of this until recently.

321

Depression is not good for body image, and I

didn't want to become what felt like "even more
fat".

My body is apparently excellent at homeostasis;

instead of losing weight, it mostly just shuts down
all non-vital processes when I starve myself. And I
guess it doesn't consider much of my brain
necessary. I only actually lose weight from
exercise. When I hadn't realized this was possible,
I thought the fact that I wasn't losing weight was
strong evidence that I was eating plenty.

In retrospect, I think the sensation of extreme

hunger probably distracted me from the
psychological pain in the same way cutting myself
did, so I wasn't so quick to stop it. (Useful
self-harm thing I learned recently: Sticking your
hand in a bucket of ice water is really painful, but
harmless for 15-minute periods. If you use a
mixing bowl instead of a large bucket, the ice will
heat up to a non-harmful temperature before it
could possibly be a problem.)

Daily or near-daily exercise.

322

It's been very important to use exercise I

actually enjoy. For me, that's mostly meant running,
and especially running outside. When I'm down, it's
much easier to convince myself to go explore a trail
through a forest than to slog along on a treadmill for
half an hour.

When I injured myself and couldn't run for a long

time, it was a huge problem. When I was on campus, I
could largely make up for it by dancing. But in El
Cerrito last winter, dancing was too far away. I turned
out not to enjoy swimming enough, plus it was
relatively inconvenient.

I ended up mostly doing weightlifting last winter,

which was not nearly as good as cardiovascular
exercise, but was better than no exercise.

When I finally got a bike, it turned out to be better

than weightlifting, but not as good as running.
Probably just because I don't like it enough to do
enough of it to wear me out more than once or twice a
week. If you like cycling, I expect this will work fine.

323

Learning to think of my pain as objectless when it was

objectless.

It's easier to get stuck in a harmful obsessive cycle

when
you
believe
you're
sad
or
angry about something. Early on, I'd let myself direct
my feelings at a person or situation. Since I knew
from experience that talking to the person or
changing the situation wouldn't have much of an
effect on how I felt, so I'd just agonize over the thing
endlessly.

Installing robust anti-rationalization habits kept my

beliefs in line with the truth, and the truth was harder
to obsess over. It was too diffuse and abstract to
really latch onto emotionally. (For more cognitive
skills I picked up as a result of dealing with
depression, check out Corrupted Hardware: Things I
Learned From My Broken Brain.)

This had two main effects. One was that I directed

what energy I had toward finding actions that had
actually helped me feel better in the past (like
exercising, going outside, talking to someone, or
even eating chocolate).

324

But very often when you're depressed, there's just

nothing you can do. You're going to feel like shit no
matter what happens. I have what might be a weird
way of dealing with this.

Most distance runners are familiar with the

sensation of coming up against a wall of
exhaustion. There are a few ways people push
through it.

Some people distract themselves. They try to

get really into the music they're listening to, or
they think really hard about what they're going
to make for dinner.

A second type of runner focuses on the goal.

They have thoughts like, "Just another half
mile and I can stop. That's just a few minutes. I
can put up with this for a few minutes. Just
stick it out 'til then." This sort of person usually
knows how far they've gone, how long they've
been running, and how long they have left.

I'm a third type. What I do when I encounter a

wall of exhaustion is imagine that it will never
ever end ever. I take note of the specific

325

sensations I'm feeling--the burning in my

muscles and lungs, the desperate desire to
give
up,
the
overall
tremendous
discomfort--and I pretend that this is just how
my life is now, and how it will be forever. And
there's nothing I can do about it. So I'd better
just find some way to exist in this state. Maybe
I can even adjust my appraisals of the
sensations so I end up wanting to feel like this.
That's right. I deliberately give myself
Stockholm Syndrome. (I should note that I am
both a masochist and a submissive, so I may
have unusual psychology that lets me submit
to pain when others couldn't.)

So it might be that noticing you feel like shit and

you can't do anything about it ought to be your
cue to distract yourself. I used to do that, actually,
but it wasn't really sustainable for me. It turned me
into a workaholic, and I eventually burned out.

Or maybe it means you should focus on getting

through this particular rough patch. "Just three
more hours, then I can go home." I have a hard
time imagining what it would be like to be the kind
of person who could benefit from that, but I'd not

326

be at all surprised to hear that it does actually

work for some people, given what I know of
runners, and given how many times I've heard the
phrase "one day at a time".

Having fun reasons to spend time outside.

It's really hard for me to just go outside for no reason

when I'm depressed. And being told to go outside
feels like a punishment. This may be a leftover
psychological response to when my dad and his wife
would tell my brother and I to go play outside
(presumably mostly because they wanted to be left
alone). I'm actually not quite sure what's up with this,
because I like sunshine. *shrugs*

Excuses to go outside, however, work great. They

don't even have to be good excuses. Walking to the
store even though I could just as easily drive, for
example. Going to the park to read with my toes in
the fountain. (I live in California where we don't have
real winter. You might substitute "building a
snowman".) Going on adventures is always good for
me. I'm especially happy to leave the house and be
outside for a while if there's food at the other end of

327

the adventure, so traveling to restaurants and coffee

shops is great.

Waking up early.

This sounds like a no-brainer, since waking up early

means maximizing your exposure to sunlight. It's
likely this deserves a place at the top of the list for
you.

For me, it's all the way down here because I've found
it extremely difficult to maintain. One of my
symptoms is insomnia, so waking up early often
means getting little enough sleep that it's a huge
energy drain.

Melatonin helped a lot, though, as did building an

elaborate bedtime ritual. The bedtime ritual made it
easier to go to bed on time, and the melatonin
increased my quality of sleep so I felt more refreshed
after fewer hours of sleep.

328

Translating feelings
exhaustion.

of

despair

into

feelings

of

This actually helped almost as much as exercise, but

it took a really long time to learn. Well, that's not quite
true. Once I thought of it, I could do it almost
immediately. But I think it required a whole bunch of
other skills that I had to learn first, like thinking of my
pain as objectless, having conversations with
personified parts of myself, and adopting new mental
postures on purpose (like Val's "againstness"
training.)

This is a super useful trick if you can manage it,

though. I find it much easier to cope with being tired
all the time than with being painfully sad or
completely emotionally empty.

Borrowing my friends' brains.

It can be hard to be friends with a depressed person.

Not so much because they're always being sad at
you, as because there seems to be nothing you can
do to help. Consequently, people seem to actually
like it when when I ask them for specific small things

329

that will actually help me.

In particular, what I have in mind is outsourcing

straightforward cognitive tasks that you just can't
manage right now even though you have to.

I don't recall a specific instance of countering

depression with this just now, but here's one from
anxiety. Once, when pulled the car over because I
was having a panic attack, I found that my brain
wasn't working well enough to generate possible
solutions. So I called a friend whom I trusted to make
generally good decisions, and asked to borrow his
brain. I told him what was happening, and asked him
what he thought I should do. He told me to try to relax
for a few minutes, then, if I couldn't drive, text him my
location and he'd come by with another person who'd
pick me up, and he'd take my car home for me. It's an
obvious plan when your brain is working properly,
but non-obvious when you're panicking or thinking
through dense brain fog.

Modafinil

330

This actually makes me feel almost completely better.

I end up a bit unstable, subject to mood swings, but I
get what at first feels like a huge flood of ambition,
creativity, and concentration that is probably mostly
just my summertime self reemerging.

Unfortunately, I seem to become habituated after

about three days.

It also makes me feel like like I'm on the edge of a

panic attack for hours at a time, which is definitely
not pleasant.

Bonus effect: It seems to make orgasms way more

awesome. I have no idea what that's about. Many
they're only awesome compared to wintertime
orgasms, and normal for summertime orgasms. I
haven't kept careful track of my experience of sex
and sexuality across the seasons, except to notice
that I'm almost completely asexual when depressed,
and only mostly asexual when I'm not.

Commitment mechanisms

331

These are quite effective when I pick the right ones.

Many a time have my past selves pulled my future
selves kicking and screaming through necessary
responsibilities.

They're also dangerous. Turns out if I force myself to

deal with too many things, I do in fact completely
crash. This is how I ended up taking an incomplete in
every single class at the end of one semester.

I now use commitment mechanisms very sparingly

and as a last resort. It's often better to simply not do
the thing.

Happify.com. Happify is gamified cognitive behavioral

therapy/positive psychology. I kept this up for about two
months before I got distracted by the existence of
HPMOR, CFAR, Lesswrong, Leverage, Eliezer, and the
Bay Area. I think it was probably helping in small but
consistent ways.

Things I've tried that haven't had perceptible effects on me

332

Fluoxetine (aka Prosac, an SSRI)

I tried this during the deepest depths of depression

I've so far experienced, and it didn't pull me out. I've
not tried it since then.

Spending half an hour in front of a SAD light box in the

morning every day for three weeks.

Yes, I know. I notice that I'm confused as well.

It might not have been a powerful enough light.

I probably need more than 30 minutes.

I might need to surround myself in lights rather

than having one sitting directly in front of me.

I might need to actually look straight at the light

instead of reading in front of it.

333

I might need repeated exposure throughout the

day instead of just one stretch in the morning.

I might need a different color of light--this one had

a cold blue clinical color that made me sad.

Everything I've ever read about SAD says something

in this direction should work. This is almost certainly
worth trying if you haven't, even though I didn't
respond to it.

Light therapy is something I'll be giving another shot.

I would have tried modifications, like more powerful
lights, the first time around, but the problem with
ineffective depression interventions is that when they
don't work, trying again is really hard. Similarly for
trying other things after the first thing only worked a
little bit.

Vitamin D supplements.

This is something I did give a second shot two years

later. This time, I made sure I had the right form of D

334

(D3), and the other vitamin needed to process it,

namely K2.

Still didn't seem to help.

Reading letters to my dark side from my summer self.

This actually has very perceptible effects, I'm just not
sure if they're net good or net bad. I think the correct
evaluation is probably "dangerous". I probably have a lot
of things to say about what it's like to be made aware
that you're two people with distinct value sets, but this is
probably not the post for it.

It's important to note that the patient is often the last

person to notice improvement. It's possible to be almost
completely recovered and not know because you still
feel like shit, despite the rest of your life having put itself
back together. So these things may have actually helped,
and I just didn't notice. On the other hand, neither did
Eliezer when he observed the results last winter.

Interventions with net negative effects

335

Caffeine

This drastically improves my concentration,

creativity, and motivation, though it doesn't have as
strong of an effect on my mood as modafinil.

I've sworn it off, though, because I become not just

habituated but horribly dependent very quickly. And I
become quite a bit more depressed during withdraw
than I'd be if I'd never touched the stuff.

It also starts fucking with sleep big time as soon as

I'm dependent enough that I can't function in the
evening without using it right up until bedtime.

Caffeine is largely responsible for the big crash that

plunged me into the depressive state that finally
started me toward purposeful recovery.

Alcohol

This was actually supposed to be an intervention for

social anxiety, not depression. It was very effective

336

for social anxiety.

But it increases my depression for a day or two after I

use it.

I've stopped drinking alcohol entirely since noticing

this at the beginning of last winter.

Marijuana

This provided a much-needed respite when I used it

occasionally during my workaholic period.

But I'm pretty sure it caused the same downswing as

alcohol did. It's hard to tell since I'd often smoke and
drink simultaneously, and I'd often stay up too late
while stoned, then compensate with extra caffeine the
next day.

This would probably be worth some more

experimentation were it not for the fact that ever
since I started taking bupripion, weed has given me
all of the paranoia and none of the buzz.

337

Feeling guilty

I never would have thought of this as a possible

intervention if I hadn't read Hyperbole and a Half by
Allie Brosh, who apparently gets just about
everything done no matter her mood by noticing how
horrible she'd feel about herself if she didn't do
it. (Also, her depiction of being depressed [1, 2] is
DEAD FUCKING ON and beautiful.)

Feeling like a bad person has approximately zero

power to deter me from something, and in certain
moods it has the opposite effect.

Attempts by myself or others to make me feel guilty

simply shut me down. My response is either, "Pfft,
fuck this shit," or "Never mind, I'm no longer
interested. I'll just sit here in a ball sobbing until I
starve to death".

But hey, maybe it'll work for you. Mindspace is deep

and wide.

338

Things I plan to try in the future

More, brighter, differently colored lights for longer

periods and at different times of day

Modifying my medication, either by increasing the

dosage or by adding supplemental meds

A variety of dietary supplements I need to research some

more but have heard tell might help

Maybe things y'all suggest, though I mostly intended to

disseminate information with this post rather than to
collect it. I welcome suggestions of the type, "When I
was depressed, X helped," much more than "Y is
supposed to help with depression, why haven't you tried
Y?" People with medical degrees, especially if they have
the best blog in the world and it's largely about
medicine, are especially encouraged to suggest things. I
admit I'm a little bitter about mental health advice from
random people.

Hope that helps. I'm completely open about this topic (and
pretty much all topics, really), so feel free to ask questions.

339

340

What It's Like To Notice Things

September 09, 2014
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is the study of the structures of experience
and consciousness. Literally, it is the study of "that which
appears". The first time you look at a twig sticking up out of
the water, you might be curious and ask, "What forces
cause things to bend when placed in water?" If you're a
curious phenomenologist, though, you'll ask things like,
"Why does that twig in water appear as though bent? Do
other things appear to bend when placed in water? Do all
things placed in water appear to bend to the same degree?
Are there things that do not appear to bend when placed in
water? Does my perception of the bending depend on the
angle or direction from which I observe the twig?"
Pehenomenology means breaking experience down to its
more basic components, and being precise in our
descriptions of what we actually observe, free of further
speculation
and
assumption.
A
phenomenologist
recognizes the difference between observing "a six-sided
cube", and observing the three faces, at most, from which
we extrapolate the rest.
I consider phenomenology to be a central skill of rationality.
The most obvious example: You're unlikely to generate
alternative hypotheses when the confirming observation

341

and the favored hypothesis are one and the same in your
experience
of
experience.
The
importance
of
phenomenology to rationality goes deeper than that,
though.
Phenomenology
trains
especially
fine
grained introspection. The more tiny and subtle are the
thoughts you're aware of, the more precise can be the
control you gain over the workings of your mind, and the
faster can be your cognitive reflexes.
(I do not at all mean to say that you should go read Husserl
and Heidegger. Despite their apparent potential for
unprecedented clarity, the phenomenologists, without
exception, seem to revel in obfuscation. It's probably not
worth your time to wade through all of that nonsense. I've
mostly read about phenomenology myself for this very
reason.)
I've been doing some experimental phenomenology of late.

Noticing
I've noticed that rationality, in practice, depends on
noticing. Some people have told me this is basically
tautological, and therefore uninteresting. But if I'm right, I
think it's likely very important to know, and to train
deliberately.
The difference between seeing the twig as bent and seeing
the twig as seeming bent may seem inane. It is not news

342

that things that are bent tend to seem bent. Without that
level of granularity in your observations, though, you may
not notice that it could be possible for things to merely
seem bent without being bent. When we're talking about
something that may be ubiquitous to all applications of
rationality, like noticing, it's worth taking a closer look at
the contents of our experiences.
Many people talk about "noticing confusion", because
Eliezer's written about it. Really, though, every successful
application of a rationality skill begins with noticing. In
particular, applied rationality is founded on noticing
opportunities and obstacles. (To be clear, I'm making this
up right this moment, so as far as I know it's not a generally
agreed-upon thing. That goes for nearly everything in this
post. I still think it's true.) You can be the most technically
skilled batter in the world, and it won't help a bit if you
consistently fail to notice when the ball whizzes by you--if
you miss the opportunities to swing. And you're not going
to run very many bases if you launch the ball straight at an
opposing catcher--if you're oblivious to the obstacles.
It doesn't matter how many techniques you've learned if you
miss all the opportunities to apply them, and fail to notice
the obstacles when they get in your way. Opportunities and
obstacles are everywhere. We can only be as strong as our
ability to notice the ones that will make a difference.
Inspired by Whales' self-experiment in noticing confusion,

343

I've been practicing noticing things. Not difficult or

complicated things, like noticing confusion, or noticing
biases. I've just been trying to get a handle on noticing, full
stop. And it's been interesting.

Noticing Rain
I started by checking to see what I expected it to feel like to
notice that it's raining, just going from memory. (It doesn't
rain much in Berkeley, so it had been a while.) I tried for a
split-second prediction, to find what my brain automatically
stored under "noticing rain". When I thought about noticing
rain, I got this sort of vague impression of rainyness, which
included few sensory details and was more of an overall
rainy feeling. My brain tried to tell me that "noticing rain"
meant "being directly aquainted with rainyness", in much
the same way that it tries to tell me it's experiencing a cube
when it's actually only experiencing a pattern of light and
shadows I interpret as three faces. I could have
reasoned carefully and worked out a far more accurate
prediction, but that's not what I was after.
Then, I waited for rain. It didn't take long, because I'm in
North Carolina for the month.
The real "noticing rain" turned out to be a response to the
physical sensations concurrent with the first raindrop
falling on my skin. I did eventually have an "abstract
rainyness feeling", but that happened a full two seconds

344

later. My actual experience went like this.

It was cloudy and humid. This was not at the forefront of my
attention, but it slowly moved in that direction as the
temperature dropped. I was fairly focused on reading a
book.
(I'm a little baffled by the apparent gradient between "not at
all conscious of x" and "fully aware of x". I don't know how
that works, but I experience the difference between being a
little aware of the sky being cloudy and being focused on
the patterns of light in the clouds, as analogous to the
difference
between
being
very-slightly-but-not-uncomfortably warm and burning my
hand on the stove.)
My awareness of something like an "abstract rainyness
feeling" moved further toward consciousness as the wind
picked up. Suddenly--and the suddenness was an important
part of the experience--I felt something like a cool, dull
pin-prick on my arm. I looked at it, saw the water, and
recognized it as a raindrop. Over the course of about half a
second, several sensations leapt forward into full
awareness: the darkness of my surroundings, the humidity
in the air, the dark grey-blueness of the sky, the sound of
rain on leaves like television static, the scent of ozone and
damp earth, the feeling of cool humid wind on my face, and
the word "rain" in my internal monologue.

345

I think it is that sudden leaping forward of many associated

sensations that I would call "noticing rain".
After that, I felt a sort of mental step backward--though it
was more like a zooming out or sliding away than a discrete
step--from the sensations, and then a feeling of viewing
them from the outside. There was a sensation of the
potential to access other memories of times when it's
rained.
(Sensations of potential are fascinating to me. I noticed a
few weeks ago that after memorizing a list of names and
faces, I could predict in the first half second of seeing the
face whether or not I'd be able to retrieve the name in the
next five seconds. Before I actually retrieved the name.
What??? I don't know either.)
Only then did all of it resolve into the more distant and
abstract "feeling of rainyness" that I'd predicted before. The
resolution
took
four
times
as
long
as
the
simultaneous-leaping-into-consciousness-of-related-sensations
that I now prefer to call "noticing", and ten times as long as
the first-raindrop-pin-prick, which I think I'll call the
"noticing trigger" if it turns out to be a general class of
pre-noticing experiences.
("Can you really distinguish between 200 and 500
milliseconds?" Yes, but it's an acquired skill. I spent a block
of a few minutes every day for a month, then several blocks

346

a day for about a week, doing this Psychomotor Vigiliance

Task when I was gathering data for the polyphasic sleep
experiment. It gives you fast feedback on simple response
time. I'm not sure if it's useful for anything else, but it
comes in handy when taking notes on experiences that
pass very quickly.)

Noticing Red Barn Roofs

My second experiment was in repeated noticing. This is
more closely related to rationality as habit cultivation.
I was trying to zoom in on the experience of noticing itself,
so I wanted something as simple as possible. Nothing
subtle, nothing psychological, and certainly nothing I might
be motivated to ignore. I wanted a straightforward element
of my physical environment. I'm out in the country and
driving around for errands and such about once a day, so I
went with "red barn roofs".
I had an intuition that I should give myself some outward
sign of having noticed, lest I not notice that I noticed (if
that's possible), and decided to snap my fingers every time I
noticed a red barn roof.
On the first drive, I noticed one red barn roof. That
happened when I was almost at my destination and I
thought, "Oh right, I'm supposed to be noticing red barn
roofs, oops" then started actively searching for them.

347

Noticing a red barn roof while searching for it feels very

different from noticing rain while reading a book. With the
rain, it felt sort of like waking up, or like catching my name
in an overheard conversation. There was a complete shift in
what my brain was doing. With the barn roof, it was like I
had a box with a red-barn-roof-shaped hole, and it felt like
completion when a I grabbed a roof and dropped it through
the hole. I was prepared for the roof, and it was a smaller
change in the contents of consciousness.
I noticed two on the way back, also while actively searching
for them, before I started thinking about something else and
became oblivious.
I thought that maybe there weren't enough red barn roofs,
and decided to try noticing red roofs of all sorts of buildings
the next day. This, it turns out, was the correct move.
On day two of red-roof-noticing, I got lots of practice. I
noticed around fifteen roofs on the way to the store, and
around seven on the way back. By the end, I was not
searching for the roofs as intently as I had been the day
before, but I was still explicitly thinking about the project. I
was still aware of directing my eyes to spend extra time at
the right level in my field of vision to pick up roofs. It was
like waving the box around and waiting for something to fall
in, while thinking about how to build boxes.
I went out briefly again on day two, and on the way back, I
noticed a red roof while thinking about something else

348

entirely. Specifically, I was thinking about the possibility of

moving to Uruguay, and whether I knew enough Spanish to
survive. In the middle of one of those unrelated thoughts,
my eyes moved over a barn roof and stayed there briefly
while I had the leaping-into-consciousness experience with
respect to the sensations of redness, recognizing
something as shaped like a building, and feeling the
impulse to snap my fingers. It was like I'd been wearing the
box as a hat to free up my hands, and I'd forgotten about it.
And then, with a heavy ker-thunk, the roof became my new
center of attention.
And oh my gosh, it was so exciting! It sounds so absurd in
retrospect to have been excited about noticing a roof. But I
was! It meant I'd successfully installed a new cognitive
habit to run in the background. On purpose. "Woo hoo!
Yeah!" (I literally said that.)
On the third day, I noticed too many red roofs. I followed the
same path to the store as before, but I noticed somewhere
between twenty and thirty red roofs. I got about the same
number going back, so I think I was catching nearly all the
opportunities to notice red roofs. (I'd have to do it for a few
days to be sure.) There was a pattern to noticing, where I'd
notice-in-the-background, while thinking about something
else, the first roof, and then I'd be more specifically on the
lookout for a minute or two after that, before my mind
wandered back to something other than roofs. I got faster
over time at returning to my previous thoughts after
snapping my fingers, but there were still enough noticed

349

roofs to intrude uncomfortably upon my thoughts. It was

getting annoying.
So I decided to switch back to only noticing the red roofs of
barns in particular.
Extinction of the more general habit didn't take very long. It
was over by the end of my next fifteen minute drive. For the
first three times I saw a roof, I rose my hand a little to snap
my fingers before reminding myself that I don't care about
non-barns anymore. The next couple times I didn't raise my
hand, but still forcefully reminded myself of my disinterest
in my non-barns. The promotion of red roofs into
consciousness got weaker with each roof, until the
difference between seeing a non-red non-barn roof and a
red non-barn roof was barely perceptible. That was my drive
to town today.
On the drive back, I noticed about ten red barn roofs. Three
I noticed while thinking about how to install habits, four
while thinking about the differences between designing
exercises for in-person workshops and designing exercises
to put in books, and three soon enough after the previous
barn to probably count as "searching for barns".

What These Silly Tests Are Really About

My plan is to try noticing an internal psychological
phenomenon next, but still something straightforward that I

350

wouldn't be motivated not to notice. I probably need to try a

couple things to find something that works well. I might go
with "thinking the word 'tomorrow' in my internal
monologue", for example, or possibly "wondering what my
boyfriend is thinking about". I'll probably go with something
more like the first, because it is clearer, and zooms in on
"noticing things inside my head" without the extra noise of
"noticing things that are relatively temporally indiscrete",
but the second is actually a useful thing to notice.
Most of the useful things to notice are a lot less obvious
than "thinking the word 'tomorrow' in my internal
monologue". From what I've learned so far, I think that for
"wondering what my boyfriend is thinking about", I'll need
to pick out a couple of very specific, instantaneous
sensations that happen when I'm curious what my
boyfriend is thinking about. I expect that to be a repetition
of the rain experiment, where I predict what it will feel like,
then wait 'til I can gather data in real time. Once I have a
specific trigger, I can repeat the red roof experiment to
catch the tiny moments when I wonder what he's thinking. I
might need to start with a broader category, like "notice
when I'm thinking about my boyfriend", get used to noticing
those sensations, and then reduce the set of sensations I'm
watching out for to things that happen only when I'm
curious what my boyfriend is thinking.
After that, I'd want to practice with different kinds of actions
I can take when I notice a trigger. So far, I've used the
physical action of snapping my fingers. That was originally

351

for clarity in recognizing the noticing, but it's also a

behavioral response to a trigger. I could respond with a
psychological behavior instead of a physical one, like
"imagining a carrot". A useful response to noticing that I'm
curious about what my boyfriend is thinking would be
"check to see if he's busy" and then "say, 'What are you
thinking about?'"
See, this "noticing" thing sounds boringly simple at first,
and not worth much consideration in the art of rationality.
Even in his original "noticing confusion" post, Eliezer really
talked more about recognizing the implications of confusion
than about the noticing itself.
Noticing is more complicated than it seems at first, and it's
easy to mix it up with responding. There's a whole sub-art
to noticing, and I really think that deliberate practice is
making me much better at it. Responses can be hard. It's
essential to make noticing as effortless as possible. Then
you can break the noticing and the responding apart, so
you can recognize reality even before you know what to do
with it.

352

I notice I'm confused about noticing that I'm confused.

September 10, 2014
(h/t Julia Galef for making me aware of the photo via her
excellent TAM talk)
I haven't made "noticing and responding appropriately to
confusion" a special explicit focus of my training as a
rationalist so far, so I expect there are several things I'm
doing wrong that will become obvious quickly upon closer
inspection. But I think I just realized a huge mistake I've
been making anyway.
When I am confused, I focus on the thing that I am confused
about. I know it means I believe something false, and I want
to find out what that thing is. My automatic procedure for
doing so is, "Investigate the object of confusion for clues to
my false belief, then search nearby objects for clues."
In Zen terms, I'm looking at the pointing finger instead of at
the moon.
Check out this image. Look at it for a while, if you've never
seen it before, before reading on.

353

I noticed the rock immediately, and I flagged it as confusing.

My automatic interpretation was, "Someone threw a rock at
that raccoon, and it's about to get hit, oh no!" That felt like
an awfully strange, though, so I took a really close look at
the rock. I started looking at other elements of the picture. I
couldn't find anything strange about it (although I do see a
strange thing now that I know what's up with this picture),
so I looked around within the picture for other clues. I
noticed that the raccoon on the left didn't have the dark
markings around its eyes I'm used to raccoons having. I
noticed the raccoons are in a slightly unusual environment
for the species, since I think of them as preferring to be
hidden and in low places.
I did not ask myself, "What do I believe about this picture

354

that makes me confused about the rock? What are other

possible interpretations of this picture? If it's not the case
that that raccoon is about to be hit by a rock, what else
might be going on?"
Upon noticing confusion, I've been going through these
mental motions: "Don't ignore or rationalize the confusion.
Pay attention to it. Be curious about what false things you
believe." It's like I've been putting off examining my own
beliefs for errors by examining my observations.
Next time, I'll try this: "If I notice that I am confused, then I
will state what I believe about the situation that forbids the
confusing thing, and then generate alternative hypotheses.
Only then will I examine the situation closely to see which
hypothesis best fits my observations."
Correct movement: Notice which of my beliefs forbids the
confusing thing.
Incorrect movement: Look really hard at the confusing
thing.
I suppose I did manage to look at the moon, though, when
my response to having noticed confusion about this picture
failed to lead me to the correct answer. "I'm confused about
noticing confusion. Am I noticing confusion wrong? How do
I actually notice confusion? How else should I maybe be
doing it?"

355

ETA: Apparently it was not obvious to some that I intend for

you to work out for yourself what's actually going on with
the rock. Here's a hint: Suppose I'd swapped "clouds" for
"moon".

356

How To Learn To Dance

September 23, 2014
[This post brought to you by Structured Procrastination.]
I used to teach swing dance. To many of my students
watching me dance, it looked like what made me an
excellent dancer was my extensive vocabulary. I seemed to
know all the moves. It didn't matter what the lead threw at
me. I always knew how to respond. "How many years did it
take you to learn all those moves?" they'd sometimes ask.
It used to be that when I was watching much stronger
rationalists than myself, I'd get a similar feeling. Whatever
their goals and whatever obstacles they encountered, they
seemed to know exactly the right technique to deal with it.
Like they somehow knew every possible move.
Thinking about my dance students, I recognize that it's a
totally reasonable mistake to make. They were learning
swing dance themselves, and what was I teaching in their
class? Basic step, inside turn, outside turn, transition from
open to closed position, etc. Explicitly, I was teaching them
more and more moves.
Implicitly, I was trying to teach them how to dance, which to
any experienced dancer does not mean knowing a lot of
moves. I had to teach them a few standard movement
patterns so they'd have something to work with. But when I

357

design a lesson series, my focus is always, unwavering, on

conveying a few central principles of swing dance and
partner dance generally.
I think I've recently reached a level of cognitive
development where I'm starting to see deeper patterns in
other peoples' arts as rationalists. What makes them great
is not how many moves they know. That might be
correlated, but the central principles that allow them to
employ those techniques reliably, and to create entirely new
techniques as circumstances require, lie elsewhere. Finding
them is surely more valuable than any specific technique.
When I taught all those moves in dance classes, my deeper
purpose was to teach pulse, partner connection,
playfulness, and musicality. In that order. I taught the basic
pattern of six-count swing--step, step, rock-step--so the
students could practice pulsing in time with the beat of the
music while moving their feet. I taught the transition from
open to closed position so the lead could practice
requesting something of the follow using only his body
(asking her to come toward him, in this case), and the follow
could practice listening for, understanding, and responding
to such requests.
I occasionally gave them unusual restrictions, like, "When
you dance this song, the only part of your partner's body
you can touch is their elbow, and you can only touch it with
your elbow." This was not to teach them elbow-based

358

moves. It was to cut them off from all their cached moves,
so they had to experiment, to play together with their
partner.
I taught brief segments of choreography and had the
students dance that same string of moves to a lot of
different songs, not so they would have a cool string of
moves to pull out at any time, but so they could practice
dancing the same moves differently, according to what they
felt in the music. Does the song call for sharp, precise
movements, or languid, flowing movements? Does the
outside turn fall in a measure with a strong emphasis, or
should it be small and understated? What if the lead dances
to the clarinet while the follow dances to the fiddle? Does
this string of moves simply feel wrong when danced to this
song? That's musicality.
What makes me a great dancer, and a great follow in
particular, cannot possibly be my vocabulary. Sometimes I
go
to
dances
with
completely
unfamiliar
vocabularies--salsa, tango, waltz--and even then I stand out
as a highly skilled follow. I don't know beforehand the
standard "signal" a lead would give in Salsa to indicate that
I should step backward. I wasn't in the class where they
taught that. I don't need to know those sorts of things,
though, if I can establish a strong enough partner
connection.
I imagine that a master rationalist who happens to have

359

never heard of "goal factoring" probably doesn't really need

anybody to explain it to her. There will surely remain gaps
in her art that can be filled simply by pointing them out, so
maybe she will benefit from hearing the term. But I doubt
she stands to gain much from taking a class on goal
factoring.
In the first twenty seconds of a dance, I will learn how to
dance with my lead. I'll learn the way he moves, what
aspects of the music he prefers to express, the patterns of
tension and relaxation in his muscles, how his rhythm shifts
slightly when he's about to break a pattern he'd established
earlier. And by reading his reactions to my responses, I'll
learn how those things correspond to his intentions.
It's not a conscious process; it feels very much like I'm
simply reading his mind. One of the highest complements I
ever get on my dancing is when a lead tells me that it feels
to him as though I'm reading his mind. (I cannot resist
mentioning here that Douglas Hofstadter said something
like this to me the first time he led me in a salsa.) Once your
partner connection becomes that strong, classes on how to
execute various moves are superfluous.
What is the equivalent of partner connection in rationality?
I'm not sure. I have some vague guesses, but at this point I
think I'm only dimly aware that there is one.
I expect that the primary value of this analogy, though, is in

360

the path to mastery it suggests, the methods of training that

will eventually lead me to mastery of the central principles,
whatever they are.

_____________________________________________________
I think in the beginning, shortly after encountering the
Sequences and CFAR, I implicitly believed that becoming a
strong rationalist meant gaining all the important insights. I
thought it meant having a toolbox and filling it with more
and better tools. Like feeling the lead's right hand go up,
and knowing to execute the steps of the "outside turn" I
learned last week.
And how does one gain a new tool? Why, one browses the
aisles of the rationalist hardware store and picks up
whatever looks shiny and affordable. The point of reading
another Sequence article or attending another CFAR class
is to pick up a new cognitive procedure, so you can retrieve
it from your toolbox when the situation calls for that
particular tool. Right?
Maybe, but not if the analogy to mastering dance is
accurate.
I didn't become the kind of dancer I am by taking a lot of
classes or reading a lot of books on dance. I did it by
dancing.

361

It certainly is important that I took a lot of classes,

especially in the beginning. But not so much because of the
classes themselves. When I was traveling to dance
workshops and conferences every weekend, I was dancing
constantly with new partners of all styles and skill levels,
and thinking always about the next weakness I needed to
overcome as a dancer. All of that dancing gave me lots of
data on myself as a dancer, and I would use it to set specific
intentions designed to address my main weakness before
each dance.
For example, I once thought, "My bottleneck right now
seems to be that I dance heavily, which makes fast tempos
almost impossible. Maybe simply imagining that I am as
light as a feather will fix it. Today, I'll experiment with
dancing like objects of various weights. A feather, an
elephant, a bouncy ball, a bowling ball."
So almost all of my training occurred on the social dance
floor by constant focused experimentation. I eventually
caught on to this and started saving money by traveling to
workshops just to attend the social dances, rather than
paying for the lesson series on top of it.
I also hung out with other dancers at dinner and during
breaks, and was especially friendly with dancers with more
skill and experience than I had. Since dancers never shut up
about dance when they're around other dancers, I did my
best to absorb all of their wisdom. Improving in this way

362

was almost never a matter of gaining a totally new insight or

hearing a fact I didn't already know about dance. I was not
shopping for tools to add to my toolbox. Rather, hearing
about the experiences and interests of others influenced my
own improvisation. It suggested experiments I'd otherwise
not have thought of, or inspired questions about myself as
a dancer that it hadn't before occurred to me to ask.
This is how I've been approaching rationality of late. I
choose one particular weakness to focus on. I look for
opportunities to observe myself making the associated
mistakes. I set a specific intention to respond in a particular
way the next few times. I watch what happens, and then I let
that experience influence my next experiment.
There are other things influencing the experimentation
process, of course. My friends, my mentors, blog posts,
books. The same sources I've always relied on in my
training as a rationalist. What has changed is that I'm not
really looking for answers from them anymore. I don't
expect them to hand me exactly the right tool to solve my
problem. It's great when they can, but it's rare, and it's not
their job anyway. I'm the one inside my head. Instead, I
consider them inputs to which I can respond as I improvise.
I've been trying to focus for the past couple weeks on
things other than my weaknesses in case I can learn to
teach them, or use my observations about them to boost my
learning process in the future. I've come to the end of a

363

particular series of experiments though, and it seems that

my brain has automatically reverted to studying a salient
weakness. Like it or not, I'm now improvising on the theme
of noticing confusion. I observe mistakes carefully, I ask
new questions, I keep my ears open for related bits of
advice from others, and I try out new ways of responding,
sometimes for good reasons and sometimes on a whim.
Just like I did with dance.

_____________________________________________________
In dance, I can respond instantly to instructions never
encountered before, or to nuances in songs of unfamiliar
styles. I've molded my own patterns of thought and feeling
to partner connection, playfulness, and musicality. It's not
that I've somehow fit every possible tool into my toolbox.
It's that I myself have become a fully versatile instrument of
dance. (A far from perfect one, but the point is that I've
moved a long way in that direction.)
Taking classes to learn new moves can definitely be useful,
especially when you're first starting out. But it is not a
recipe for indefinite progress at an increasing rate, and that
is the sort of thing I will need to become a fully versatile
instrument of rationality.

364

My Feels About the Secular Solstice

October 19, 2014
In a recent blog post, Miri talked about why secular ritual is
important to her, and about her experience of the 2013
Secular Solstice in New York. Much of what she said
resonated strongly with me. In particular,
What I continue to yearn for despite all these years of
atheism is that togetherness, the feeling of being part
of a larger whole, of participating in ceremonies that
have existed virtually unchanged for centuries, of
feeling that I could go to services on Friday night in
San Francisco or London or Tokyo or Cape Town and
be welcomed in virtually the same way, with the same
greetings and food and songs. They will say Shabbat
shalom and there will be challah and red wine, in
America and in Great Britain and in Japan and in
South Africa.
and also,
... The Secular Solstice, in a weird and possibly
unintentional way, validated how much I hate winter
and how much of a big deal it is for me to get
through it without some of my favorite distractions
and coping mechanisms. Unlike the other winter
holidays, the Solstice doesnt frame winter as a
happy cheery beautiful time with family, snowball

365

fights, kissing under the mistletoe, Santa Claus, and

Jesus. It frames it as a challenge, but one that we
nevertheless get through every year.
I didn't make it to the New York Solstice last year, but I was
at the one in San Francisco, and it was similarly powerful
for me. The ritual may have been important to me for
slightly different reasons, so I wanted to share my
perspective as well.
As I've talked a little about before, I have seasonal affective
disorder. Despite much recent improvement, it's severe
enough that I'm living in Chile for the next four months to
avoid the worst of the American winter. This has led to me
having some pretty strong feelings about winter holidays,
and Advent/Christmas in particular since I was raised
Catholic.
Advent's more of a season than a holiday, but it shares with
the Solstice the property of not framing winter as a "happy
cheery beautiful time with family, snowball fights, kissing
under the mistletoe, Santa Claus, and Jesus". It's supposed
to symbolize the time at the end of the Old Testament after
both Judea and Israel had fallen, but the Messiah had not
yet come to deliver Yahweh's people from exile. Originally it
was about the time after Jesus died and before his second
coming, which is why Advent once included mandatory
fasting and other forms of penitence--but then it turned out
that he wasn't actually coming back any time soon, so
people reinterpreted.

366

Either way, it's all about preparing to be saved.

Oh, come, oh, come, Emmanuel

And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!
The Catholics imagine that the Jews were actually right at
that particular point in their history, and God really was
about to come down from the heavens and save them from
their misery. As such, the customs surrounding Advent are
filled with longing, hope, and the feeling that if we can just
hang on a little longer everything will be ok.
Which is exactly what it feels like to have SAD, at least
before you learn resignation. And of course, contemporary
Western Catholicism ties all of this very closely with Winter.
The Advent season has a lot of rituals I find quite lovely.
The Advent wreath, for example (which was actually
appropriated from the Lutherans, I just discovered, though
the tradition of a wreath decorated with candles is much
older than Christianity). Setting up a nativity scene with an
empty manger. The whole of Christmas Eve Mass is just
spectacular. It starts with a darkened church. Then, slowly,
candles are lit and people begin to sing quietly. The lights

367

aren't turned all the way up until Midnight, at which point (in
my parish anyway) there begins a joyous Mass that is sung
the entire way through.
From my perspective, though, Catholic Advent and
Christmas seem terribly broken. There's so much beauty
and so much potential there, but the moral of the story is all
wrong. What do you do when the nights are long and the
wind is cold and you have no place to call home? You
huddle together and wait meekly for a Messiah to come and
save you.
No. Just, no.
To me, the Secular Solstice is sort of what I wish Advent
and Christmas could be. The aesthetics, and even the
narrative, are very similar. But it builds toward something
else: a resolution to save ourselves, each other, and
everyone who will come after us. And to do more than that,
to keep making our world better and better until the
darkness has been permanently banished.
There is acknowledgement of hardship and the enormity of
our challenge from within a cold universe that doesn't care
about us in the slightest. That part is taken very seriously,
and is tied to the metaphors of winter and night. And then,
as a community, we accept that challenge with a vow, not to
submit to our fate until a savior is sent from heaven to
rescue us, but a vow to take the future into our own hands,

368

to ensure by our own power that it's something beautiful

and bright.
Tomorrow can be brighter than today
Although the night is cold
The stars may seem so very far away
But courage, hope, and reason burn
In every mind, each lesson learned
Shining light to guide to our way
Make tomorrow brighter than today
Winter is still hard for me, but last winter was the best one
I've had since early childhood. At the San Francisco
Solstice celebration, it was clear to me why. Not only am I
part of tight-knit community again--not quite a
congregation, but close--but I'm surrounded by people
brimming with determination to improve themselves and the
world around them, and with the self-efficacy and rationality
to actually do so.
What I experienced at the Solstice was not merely a
reminder or a symbol, but a manifestation of the things I
care about most. It was a secular sacrament, in the Catholic
sense of the word.
In the winter when I am isolated, I am consumed by fear and
despair. On the night of the Solstice, participating in that
sacrament along side others working effectively toward the
same goals, singing about the march of progress and our
plans for the future, I witnessed the power of a motivated

369

community of humans to drive back the darkness.

At one point, footage from the International Space Station
was projected onto a large screen. As we watched together
from our vantage point in space--while the lights of
civilization glittered beneath us, and as dawn broke over the
homeworld--there was one shared emotion, invoked by the
power of ritual, resonating and amplifying through the
minds of everyone present. It felt as if a single brilliant
beam of resolution were shining toward the future of
humanity.
The Secular Solstice is still new, still developing rapidly and
trying to find its feet. If you want to nurture this idea and
watch what happens, I recommend that you support the
Secular Solstice though the Kickstarter campaign.

370

Simulating Confusion
October 24, 2014
For many of the kinds of techniques I've been working with
recently, I begin by meditating on a mental state I want to
notice, modify, or bring about.
For example, if I wanted to get better at noticing and
addressing confusion, I would probably meditate on
"confusion" before I begin to practice noticing it in real
time. That way I have a much clearer idea of what it is I want
to notice, and I can install a trigger-action plan like, "When I
notice 'confusion' [that thing I just meditated on], I will snap
my fingers [or some other action]." "Meditate on confusion"
is a terrible instruction, but when I say it to myself, I mean
something very specific by it.
I want to try showing you exactly what I mean. I'm going to
actually go through the exercise I tend to call "meditating
on [mental state]", and I will type everything that I notice is
happening in my mind as I go.
3 2 1 go.
At first, there's a lot of mental clutter. I feel a little tired and
unfocused, and I'm aware of thoughts about later sections
of this post, the louder details of my physical environment
such as the barking dog and the colorful painting of the girl
with a balloon on the wall. I grope around a little for

371

"confusion", but it doesn't come to me easily.

I close my eyes to limit external inputs. I take a deep breath
and relax as I exhale. I'm still far from simulating confusion.
I need to find the capacity for imagination. I know it's in
here somewhere. What does it feel like to imagine
something? Let's imagine something easier, like a teddy
bear. Ok, I'm imagining a teddy bear. I can feel its fur and its
weight in my hands, and I can see its shape and its color.
What has changed about my experience? The other
thoughts I was aware of have drifted off into the
background, and I am focused now on this single simulated
teddy bear. Good, I've gained some control over my
experience. I take another deep breath and relax, focusing
more intensely on the teddy bear as the surrounding
thoughts melt further away.
Now, staying concrete, I will let go of the teddy bear and
imagine a time when I was confused. Preferably very
confused. Ah, good, here is one where I was so confused I
feared I was going crazy. I am holding two blue credit cards.
It later turns out that I've found a credit card I simply forgot I
ever lost and replaced, but at the moment there is a
completely unexplained extra credit card, identical to my
own credit card but for the number, and bearing my name. It
is finals week, and I am terribly tired.

372

Oh, excellent, that was the next step and I'm already filling it
in. What is the internal experience of this simulated past
self who is confused about the credit cards? She is
exasperated and frightened. Simulate it. Good. It feels like
there is something very wrong with the world, like reality
has torn, and I'm staring at the gap. I'm searching
impatiently, desperately for an explanation. I don't even
remember why this was such an intense experience, but it
was. I try out a few explanations I've managed to dig up. I
think, "Maybe Chase gave me a copy of my credit card
when I opened an account with them?" but I know that the
numbers on the cards are different, and a copy of my credit
card would not have different numbers, so I discard that
attempted explanation and dig around some more.
Good, I've now got a fairly vivid simulation of the actual
sensation of confusion going on. It is a jolt like a missed
step, followed by a search and a sharpness in my chest, a
feeling that something about the world is broken and I want
it to go back to the way it was, I yearn for it to be fixed.
Now I let the sensory details of the concrete scenario fade
away, and I make the sensation of confusion itself the
center of my attention. I relax with my eyes closed,
just letting that yearning for reconciliation between my
observations and my model of the world wash over me,
letting it be as much of my experience as I an make it.
After a minute or two, I bring back the concrete scenario,
and I rewind to the beginning, looking for that first jolt of

373

surprise that preceded more developed confusion. I am

digging through a drawer in search of my credit card, and I
find it--but it is too thick. There is actually another card
behind it, but all I notice at first is that something is strange
about the card. I feel surprised before I even recognize what
specifically is wrong about the card. It's a tiny feeling. Like
the next square of sidewalk changing elevation ever so
slightly, so that your foot meets the ground just a little
sooner than you meant for it to.
I again let the concrete scenario fade, and I focus on the
sensation of surprise itself. I do that for maybe thirty
seconds. It's difficult to simulate just the surprise all on its
own, because surprise is fleeting, and it keeps developing
immediately into either resolution or investigation, and from
there to resolution or extended confusion. But I can do it, as
long as I keep returning to the feeling whenever I fall off the
edge of it. I wait to find my balance.
Next I focus on the moment when I've begun to accept an
unsatisfactory explanation. This is the key moment. There is
so much pressure, a heavy weight, from the exhaustion and
the discomfort of the dissonance, to choose an explanation
and let it rest. To force a resolution. I don't, though. I can't.
With every explanation that comes to mind, as I try to
accept it, there is a sense of something missing hanging
above it. Even if the "explanation" is true, something is still
not right. There is something still out of place, something
I'm still stumbling over. I can feel it now, high up in my
chest and throat, a tightness resisting resolution. I set the

374

concrete scenario aside again, and I simulate the

something-wrong-hanging-above-attempted-acceptance-making-m
I let my mind become that feeling for a little while.

I now play through the sequence of abstract sensations a

few times: Surprise, investigation, the emergence of a
feeling of wrongness--almost of betrayal, then intensified
investigation, yearning and impatience for resolution, the
pressure of attempted acceptance failing, frustration, and
that feeling of wrongness remaining throughout.
All right, I think that took about fifteen minutes, but putting
it all into words slowed me down a lot. Usually when I do
this for a new mental state, it takes between five and ten
minutes. I went all the way through the sequence this time
both because I felt distracted and because I wanted to
demonstrate.
Once I've performed this exercise for a given state, though,
I can usually simulate the emotion at least weakly in just a
few seconds. So for example, starting at the end of this
sentence, I'm going to time how long it takes for me to
simulate the abstract version of "curiosity", since I've been
working with that recently. Yep, five seconds when I'm tired
and not using any particular trigger. Handy trick in a lot of
contexts, but I'll tell you about that later.

To help me improve my posts, you can answer this question

375

in the box beside the stars if you want: "What was this post
about?"

376

Mental Postures
October 25, 2014
Related posts: Simulating Confusion, What It's Like To
Notice Things, A Message To System 1, Your Strength as a
Rationalist by Eliezer Yudkowsky, I Notice I'm Confused
About Noticing I'm Confused
I'm gaining control over my mental postures.
Sometimes when it's time to work, I'm distracted and don't
feel like working. I'm supposed to be filling out a form or
whatever, and instead my thoughts are flitting about all over
the place. I'm thinking about a conversation I had over
lunch, then about how I really need to remember to send
that email to the guy about the thing, then about the lady I
can see out the window who's walking five dogs at once. Or
maybe I'm thinking about all of those things at the same
time. I realize I'm distracted, and I think, "Ok, I have got to
focus."
Often that doesn't get me very far. Usually, there is a small
and temporary change toward focus. Sometimes there's a
huge change in the overall quality of my experience, and
suddenly all my attention has moved to the task at hand.
I've been using a term for changing the overall quality of my
thoughts and feelings to something more conducive to
accomplishing my immediate goal. I call it "adopting a

377

mental posture".
It is analogous to adjusting your physical posture. Try
sitting up straighter. Now adopt a more relaxed posture.
Now pick a posture somewhere in between.
I know from teaching dance and yoga that different people
can start out at very different ability levels when it comes to
control over their physical postures. Some people can see a
two-dimensional photo of somebody in eagle pose for the
first time and know exactly which actions are required to
move their body into that configuration. Other people have
trouble purposefully rolling their shoulders back. I also
know that most people, no matter where they start, can get
much better at controlling their physical posture with
instruction and practice.
I've been deliberately practicing gaining control over my
mental postures, and it seems to be paying off. I've also had
some instruction in meditation, which I'm pretty sure gave
me leg up on this.
I think of emotions and mental postures a little differently,
but I don't draw a sharp distinction. In general, I think of an
emotion as a particular sensation or small set of
sensations taking place in my experience, where by
"experience" I mean "all the things I'm consciously aware of
at a given time." Right now my experience includes (but is
certainly not limited to) the following sensations:

378

yellow (and lots of other visual sensations representing

my notebook)

the clicking sound of the keyboard keys (and a bunch of

other sounds from my environment)

the tactile sensations of my hands on the keyboard, my

feet on the floor, and the temperature of the room (it's
very warm here)

an urge to stop writing this and get a snack

the burst of simple pleasure induced by crunching into

Chile's equivalent of an Oreo cookie

these words in my inner monologue as I compose this

sentence

the seven-ness of the number of items on this list

The "urge to stop writing" is an example of an emotion. It's

a relatively independent psychological sensation that
doesn't represent any particular thing about the external
world. ("Yellow" is an independent psychological sensation

379

that does represent a particular thing about the external

world. The distinction here is fuzzy too, but some things are
more emotion-like than others.)
My mental posture right now is not any individual,
independent element of my immediate experience. It's the
quality of the environment containing all these elements,
and it's not something I'm usually aware of. I'm not aware of
it right now. I can become aware of it by noticing what all
the contents of my awareness have in common, and then
bringing the abstraction of that commonality into
awareness. Now that I'm doing that, I can feel that it's
something like open, lethargic, and dutiful.
I named three things there, but I'm trying to point to what's
really a single sensation. It is a sensation, but it's a
sensation I'm not aware of until I look for it, and I only find it
by noticing the effect it has on all the other objects of my
awareness and recognizing what they have in common.
They all have an open-lethargic-dutiful cast to them.
My mental posture has an effect on everything to do with
my experience. It's not merely a sensation, or a quality of a
set of sensations. It also affects my thought processes, the
way I think over time. It affects the speed at which I can
have new thoughts, the level of agency I have over what my
thoughts will be, and the intensity of some kinds of
sensations. When my mental posture is focused, calm, and
alert, I have a lot of control over which thoughts I'll have,
over the speed at which they change, and over the intensity

380

of the sensations I choose to focus on. When my mental

posture is distracted, panicked, and exhausted, the
opposite is true: I have little control over which thoughts I'll
have, little control over the speed at which they change (and
many of them will undoubtedly change very quickly), and I'll
experience two kinds of things with great intensity whether I
like it or not: sensations representing loud external stimuli,
and a few negative emotions.
This is analogous to saying that your physical posture
affects how you perform physical activities, and so it is
more than the coordinates of your body parts in space.
When you sit upright with your shoulders relaxed and your
feet on the floor, you might type faster and more accurately
than when you hunch over and scrunch up your shoulder
and neck muscles, and you will probably experience
different long-term effects in the form of back pain. In a
partner dance, both a rigid posture and an extremely
relaxed posture reduce your physical response time to
inputs from your partner.
Can "mental posture" be reduced to a list of facts about
what sensations you happen to be aware of, how quickly
those sensations do in fact change, etc.? Probably. I find it
useful to think about it as an additional entity, though,
because that makes it easier to gain control over the whole
slew of things it "affects". I don't "independently reduce the
intensity of irrelevant sensations, increase my agency over
the speed of my thoughts, and choose which thoughts to
think." I simply "adopt a mental posture of focus."

381

There are a lot of ways to gain control over your mental

posture. Changing your environment will often do it. You
can become less distracted, for example, by reducing
external stimuli (turning off the television, drawing the
blinds, and so forth). You can change your physical
posture: Take a deep breath and relax your body as you
exhale. Did your mind relax? You can alter your mind's
biochemical substrate with drugs, food, exercise, and sleep.
You can use urge propagation. Or you can use imagination:
For the next twenty seconds, close your eyes and
remember as vividly as possible a recent time when you felt
joyous. (I'll wait.) Can you see a little bit of a joyous cast,
now, as you read on?
What I'm really interested in, right now, is developing a
practice that gives me direct control over my mental
postures, or at least over the ones I've practiced with. No
intermediary steps, just noticing that a different posture
would be more useful, and adopting that posture. And... it's
working.
For example, I noticed a little while ago that I was making
some mistakes in the skill Eliezer calls "noticing
confusion". When I looked for the source of those mistakes,
I found that the mental postures I most often adopt when
faced with confusion are not conducive to the mental
motions I would like to execute when I am confused. As I
described yesterday in simulating confusion, I automatically
take on a posture that colors things with betrayal,
yearning/impatience, and frustration. If I try to ask myself,

382

"What is my current model, and what part of it is in

contradiction with the confusing thing?" the thought is
bound up in betrayal, frustration, and impatience. It hurts to
feel those things about my model, which feels like a part of
me, and it's easier to direct them out at the world, at the
confusing thing.
A much more efficient posture would be something like
"curiosity".
So I created a sort of kata. I meditated on confusion, just
like I described yesterday. I practiced merely noticing
confusion for a few days to get the hang of just that part. I
meditated on curiosity. I created an urge propagator that
would help me tie the experience of confusion to the
desired state of curiosity (which I've mostly forgotten now,
but it definitely involved a trampoline). I created a
trigger-action plan, like so: If I notice that I am confused,
then I will activate my urge propagator for curiosity.
And then I began to practice the introductory version of my
kata.

Simulate confusion vividly enough to actually feel it and

notice it as confusion

In accordance with the trigger-action plan, activate

curiosity propagator

383

Let whatever results from the propagator begin a brief

meditation on curiosity

I did that at least once each morning for a few days, and I
extended my real-time "noticing confusion" practice to the
full sequence. In real life, when I noticed confusion, I
activated the curiosity propagator and felt curiosity.
Between the off-line training and the deliberate real-world
practice, I was able to go through the sequence in just a few
seconds.
I waited until there was so little time between noticing
confusion and feeling curious that the propagator didn't
have time to play all the way through. Then I made a new
trigger action plan: If I notice that I am confused, I will adopt
the mental posture of curiosity. From there, I moved to the
advanced version of the kata.

Simulate confusion vividly enough to actually feel it and

notice it as confusion

In accordance with the trigger-action plan, adopt the

mental posture of curiosity

And then, of course, I practiced that in real life.

384

I can now make myself curious at times when it is important

to be curious--directly, with no intervening steps. If I am
confused, I can immediately become curious.
I'm excited to find out how far I can generalize this practice.
To help me improve my posts,
you can answer this question in the box beside the stars if
you want:
"What was this post about?"

385

The Silent Thoughts that Run Your Life

October 30, 2014
Most people have an internal monologue. Not just when
they're reading, but much of the rest of the time too. There's
a little voice sort of narrating their day to day activities all
the time, or commenting on memories or imagined
scenarios when they're distracted. "Ugh, I forgot to take out
the garbage this morning." "Oh, that's a nice skirt!" "When
is that report due again?"
Many of your thoughts--and I use that term loosely,
referring to just about anything going on in your head that
you can potentially be aware of--are therefore verbal.
I expect that there is an enormous bias, when we talk about
our thoughts, to report the verbal ones, the ones that
express themselves through our inner monologue. At the
very least, we only tell people about our thoughts after
they've passed through a translator that renders them
verbal (unless we're using non-verbal art). But those cannot
possibly be the only thoughts we have. We are too complex
for that.
There is an exercise many people try when first dabbling in
contemplative spiritual traditions that goes like this (and I
do mean for you to try the exercise yourself):

386

Take out a watch or some other way of keeping time,

and something to write with. Sit comfortably but
upright, take a deep breath, and relax. When you're
done reading this paragraph, set the timer for one
minute. Then, sit silently, and clear your mind of all
thoughts. Just stay that way, thinking nothing at all,
for a whole minute.
Now take a few moments to write at least a sentence
about your experience of the past minute. Did
anything unexpected happen? How easy or difficult
was it? If you noticed thoughts happening, what were
they? (Feel free to post whatever you write in the
comments.)
I find this exercise interesting for several reasons. First, it's
very difficult for most people. Within seconds of starting the
timer, they think to themselves, "Ok, no more thinking.
Damn it, that was a thought!" Experts often call this
"monkey mind".
Second, people very inexperienced with this sort of activity
think their mind suddenly explodes in thought as soon as
they sit down to practice, while somewhat more
experienced practitioners come to realize that their mind is
thinking all the time, and such exercises merely bring
attention to that fact.
A few people really do get through the whole minute without
activating their inner monologue, but most of them report

387

making a continuous effort to suppress words that try to

come up.
(And then there are some people who have no idea what
you mean by "inner monologue" even after you describe it
to them. I don't actually know how many, the state of
science on this is bad, and I could talk about that for an
entire post but this post is not about that. Mindspace is
deep and wide. Moving on.)
But the most enlightening thing I've learned, both from
personal experience and from talking to others who've tried
this sort of thing, is that people implicitly believe that if
they're not using words to talk to themselves in their heads,
then they're not thinking--"no voice" equals "still, empty,
featureless mind". The thoughts they struggle against the
entire time in this exercise are the verbal ones, so much so
that they aren't even aware of any other mental activity. And
then when they finally manage a whole minute without
narrating their experience, they think they've succeeded. I
felt the same way when I first started.
Monastics, and others who sit in silence for hours every day
for years, find that the inner monologue eventually becomes
much quieter and often silent during those periods of
sitting, whether they're quieting it on purpose or not. They
also find--and this is perhaps the only really strong
justification I know of for putting in the time requiured--that
there are an awful lot of other things going on in their heads

388

besides words. When the words stop drowning out all out
all the other mental activity, it's possible become aware of
those many silent thoughts. From there, one can learn to
exert some control over the other mental activities, just like
you can probably exert some control over your inner
monologue now.
For example, you can re-read this sentence and think
"white" when you read "blue". You can choose to generate
a verbal thought about the texture of the floor below you.
You can speed up the voice, slow it down, change its pitch,
change its volume. With practice, you can even render it
mute.
Most of what happens in your head is not words. Most of
what determines your behavior has very little to do with the
voice that narrates your actions (though the voice is also a
powerful instrument once you know how to use it). You are
far more prone to influence by silent mental flinches, urges,
aversions, attitudes, emotions, shifts of attention and focus.
You can gain some control over most of these things. But
you have to become aware of them first. You have to
become intimately acquainted with aspects of experience
you usually ignore before it will begin to have implications
for your behavior in real life. Just like you can't quiet a
verbal thought you didn't know you heard, you can't
respond strategically to an aversion you didn't know you
felt, or to a belief you didn't know you held.

389

The goal of the exercises I'm developing over the next few
months is to help rationalists, and others who value clear
thinking and better decision processes, gain awareness and
control over the workings of their minds--without spending
ten years motionless on a mountain top. Specifically, I hope
to provide access to enough awareness and control that my
readers can put whatever they know or learn of epistemic
rationality to much better use.
I doubt I'll post literally everything I'm working on to this
blog, but I'll want to share my thoughts as I work through
them, and I'll want to have readers test run a lot of the
exercises. Stay tuned!

To help me improve my posts,

you can answer this question in the box below if you want:
"What was this post about?"

390

Book Ninjas Sandbox

November 01, 2014
There is now an open Facebook group for people interested
in the applied phenomenology book I'm working on. I will
use it to post exercises to get feedback, ask questions,
answer questions, and keep people updated on my
progress. It currently has a chapter by chapter overview of
the current plan, and access to the first round of exercises.
Please join if you want to play!

391

Identification and Seeking the Subject of Experience

November 06, 2014
Here is a thing that I'm pretty sure is inappropriate for the
book, but that I want to post somewhere anyway. I'm very
curious to know your reactions. It's an exercise for creating
enough distance between yourself and your experiences or
beliefs that you can evaluate them more fairly, and maybe
change your mind about them more easily. I expect it to
take five to ten minutes.

Choose a thought with which you identify. It might be, "I'm a

libertarian," or "art is really important to me," or even
something small and silly, like the belief that "asparagus
tastes awful". Something that feels like it's a part of you,
like if you didn't implicitly think this, you wouldn't quite be
the same you anymore.
Direct your attention to that thought. Focus on it intensely.
The whole thought: not just the words representing it, but
the sensations that comprise your experience of its
meaning. The way you feel about it. Become completely
absorbed in the thought. Do this for several breaths, until
you feel like it's fully in focus.

392

Now, keeping that thought in sight but softening your focus

on it considerably, move toward reflective attention:
redirect most of your focus to the process that gives rise to
your focus on the thought. Observe your observation of the
thought.
What does it mean that you can do this, that you can
observe yourself thinking a thought with which you
identify?
Shift your focus back and forth, between the thought itself,
and your attention to the thought.
Resting now on your attention to the thought, gently recall
the feeling of shifting back, zooming out, to this place of
attention to attention. If you need a reminder, refocus on the
thought and zoom back out to reflective attention again.
Can you imagine taking another backward step just like that
one, but from here? Try it. Move your attention to attention
to attention. Bring this more distant, observant state of
mind into focus as your object of attention, without losing
sight of the first two layers. Seeing now the thought,
attention to the thought, and attention to attention to the
thought.
Notice that as you step back, becoming increasingly
reflective, moving in the direction of the observer, you
become more distant from the original thought.

393

There are several things one might mean by "identifying

with a thought", but when you observe the process of
observation, you're pointing to a central component of any
notion of identity. You are moving in the direction of where
the subject of all your experiences ought to be. But you are
never actually finding it, never taking it as an object of
experience.
You can take this backward step many times, building
towers of recursive reflection. But every time you do, the
subject of your experience steps back, because it is
precisely what is doing the stepping. You cannot direct your
attention to it in the same way that you cannot direct your
visual gaze to your own eyeballs. When your gaze moves,
so do your eyes. When your attention moves, so does that
which attends.
Think again that thought with which you identify.
Is that the subject of experience? Is that you?
It cannot possibly be. Why? Because you are thinking it.
Nothing you can think of, nothing that can come under your
attention, nothing that can be an object of experience, can
be the subject of experience. So there's an important sense
in which nothing you identify with can be you.
If you keep this understanding always running as a
background habit, there is a limit to how intertwined with

394

your thoughts you can feel. Even when you're absorbed in

them, you know your thoughts to be ever so slightly distant,
always objects of experience, never the subject.
If you find yourself struggling to evaluate an experience
fairly--if you find yourself clinging to a belief that feels
distinctly yours, or flinching away from an observation that
threatens to destroy it--you can create a more comfortable
distance by repeating this exercise.
You can demonstrate to yourself that whatever the truth
turns out to be, you will still be here, behind the beliefs,
behind the observations, behind the experiences. And you
will in fact be safer, armed with a better model of reality. The
false thoughts that try to pass themselves off as you, those
are the thoughts that will harm you most. "The thought you
cannot think controls you more than the thoughts you
speak aloud." This is why.
It is much easier to let go of something that you observe,
than something that you are.

395

How I Feel About Emotional Appeals

November 10, 2014
Cross posted from Facebook by request.
Edit: Clarifications, new thoughts, and updates in response
to the Facebook discussion and my own further reflections
are below the main post as footnotes. I certainly welcome
critical comments, but do please read the notes first,
because it's likely I've already addressed your point.
_________________________________________
I went to a Catholic high school that took an annual field trip
to DC to march in a pro-life rally. I was pro-choice from the
moment I started actually thinking about it. I chose not to
join everyone else on the trip. So I was frequently prompted
to think about it, to talk about it, and to listen to others
doing the same.
I realized around sophomore or maybe junior year that there
was a really scary thing going on. The two sides acted like
they had completely different values, but they actually had
almost exactly the same values and simply disagreed about
a single question of fact: Are unborn babies moral patients?
The pro-lifers thought the answer was yes, because God
gives everyone a soul at the moment of conception. The
pro-choicers thought no, for various reasons, but usually

396

because they didn't believe in souls and had reasonable

beliefs about cognitive development. Everybody valued
bodily autonomy for women, and everyone valued sentient
human life above that.
The debates or accusations almost never went in the
direction of the central question of fact, though. Nobody
was saying, "The pro-choicers think unborn babies are
soulless and they're wrong!" or "The pro-lifers think unborn
babies can think and feel and they're wrong!" Everybody
acted like the other side believed the same thing they did
about this question, and was therefore being purposefully
evil, either by murdering soul-bearing babies or by denying
adult women bodily autonomy for the sake of a worthless
lump of flesh in their stomachs.
It was frightening, because the problem really mattered a
great deal, and ignoring the empirical question in favor of
vilifying the enemy could never lead to resolving it. If I was
wrong and babies were moral patients, there was no way a
pro-lifer was going to convince me of it by showing me
gruesome pictures of aborted fetuses, and I might end up
committing murder one day. I would at least vote to allow
others to do so. (1)
I am seeing exactly this happen to my current community
with veganism and meat-eating. It's a little more
complicated, but at heart it's the same thing, and I'm equally
frightened by it. (2)

397

Vegans post videos and descriptions of factory farms that

seem to assume the viewer believes animals are moral
patients in virtue of their subjective experiences, and that
the viewer simply doesn't care enough about the animals
yet because they don't look like humans--which is exactly
like the aborted fetus photos. Meat-eaters act like the
vegans (knowingly) care more about non-sentient meat
sacks than about humanity and its future, and (sort of
paradoxically, actually) like vegans must be stupid for
believing animals can feel.
Vegans: If the meat eaters believed what you did about
animal sentience, most of them would be vegans, and they
would be horrified by their many previous murders. Your
heart-wrenching videos aren't convincing to them because
they aren't already convinced that animals can feel. (3)
Meat-eaters: Vegans think there are billions of times more
people on this planet than you do, they believe you're
eating a lot of those people, and they care about every one
of them the way you care about every human. Furthermore,
if you can't pass the ideological turing test for every major
philosophy of mind, you should really stop calling vegans
stupid. If you *can* pass those ideological turing tests, then
I hope you already appreciate that you can be as brilliant as
either David Chalmers or Eliezer Yudkowsky and still get
this kind of question massively wrong (because at least one
of those two is wrong). (4)

398

This problem matters. It matters a lot. Which is why I am all

for valid, relevant, honest arguments about which things are
sentient, how we might know that, how sure we can be,
what actions would lead to the largest number of quality
adjusted life years given either hypothesis, and everything
along those lines. I am *not* in favor of arguments over
whether it is wrong to eat meat, let alone whether you have
to be evil to do it, before the central empirical question has
been so much as mentioned. (5)
Finally, let me tell you about what happens when you post a
heart-wrenching video of apparent animal suffering: It
works, if the thing you're trying to do is make me feel
terrible. My brain anthropomorphizes everything at the
slightest provocation. Pigs, cows, chickens, mollusks,
worms, bacteria, frozen vegetables, and even rocks. And
since I know that it's quite easy to get me to deeply
empathize with a pet rock, I know better than to take those
feelings as evidence that the apparently suffering thing is in
fact suffering. If you posted videos of carrots in factory
farms and used the same phrases to describe their
miserable lives and how it's all my fault for making the
world this terrible place where oodles of carrots are
murdered constantly, I'd feel the same way. So these
arguments do not tend to be revelatory of truth.
Thus, be it known: You are never going to convince me to
stop eating meat merely by appealing to my emotions. You
will, however, torture me every time you try, and I will not
abide pointless suffering any more than you. If you try to

399

use truth-orthogonal emotional manipulation to persuade

me of things--anything, not just veganism--I will block you
and never trust you to have a fair, truth-seeking
conversation with me ever again. (6)

___________________________________________________
1) Everything above here is an account of my memories of a
very tiny community--my high school had something like
130 students in it, my hometown 12,000--and I was between
11 and 13 years old at the time. They're also probably taken
primarily from religion class, where debates about Anselm,
Aquinas, and New Atheism were common. As such, my
cached thoughts about the pro-life/pro-choice clash are
certainly not representative of the larger debate.

But regardless, the lesson I learned from that experience

was a good one: It's easy to misunderstand people. The
person you're talking to has reasons for their beliefs and
actions just like you do. If you don't understand them, the
correct move is to try to understand them, not to dominate
them by any means necessary. It's likely you share larger
goals, and disagree about a point of fact that can be
discussed productively.

400

2) This is not quite true. It is what I have been perceiving,

but not what I have been seeing. My emotional reactions
and automatic responses are consistent with believing I've
been seeing this. It's the easiest interpretation of the facts
when your mind is configured like mine. But I know they are
largely mistaken. What I've actually been seeing is a debate
over veganism and meat-eating that shares some red-flag
characteristics with the pro-life/pro-choice debate as I
remember it. But not the ones I claim here.

3) I meant to refer to my current community, a group of a

couple hundred rationalists, when I said this, and not to the
general population. I don't know what people in the general
population would say if asked why they do or don't eat
meat. When I was a vegan myself, I lived at a Zen temple
where almost everyone was vegan and people chanted
"Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them" every
morning and believed "sentient" meant "literally
everything". I don't think that's normal either.

Update: Even restricted to that, though, I was wrong. I really

did believe this before, even reflectively and not just
automatically. I no longer do. I think the people who
changed my mind about this are underestimating how many

401

people believe non-humans aren't sentient, but I was

drastically underestimating how many believe animals have
internal experience but eat them anyway.
This is also misleading because I am mostly not in the
group of meat-eaters I was describing, despite eating meat.
Granted, I didn't claim to be, but it's a perfectly predictable
inference that I shouldn't have allowed. Before now, I
thought that other people reflectively aware of being like me
were incredibly rare, but apparently I was wrong. I've seen
several people today claim that they believe animals are
conscious and that they don't care.
However, and don't you dare quote that last paragraph
without this one, I'm in a state of transition about this. The
longer I avoid winter depression, the more I care about
ordinary experiences of ordinary people. So it will probably
be the case in a few months or maybe a year that if you can
convince me animals are conscious, I will stop eating them.
Or probably just if you raise my probability estimate
enough, regardless of whether it goes over 50%, because
there are a lot of farm animals. I am extremely doubtful that
you will do that, though, and remember that you'd have to
say something I've never heard or thought of myself before.
The
position
on
animal
consciousness
I'm thoroughly convinced of is laid out here.
4) I came to believe that meat-eaters were acting this way
toward vegans from a small and biased sample. I'm noticing

402

now that the thing about not calling the other side stupid or
irrational before you can pass the ideological turing tests
applies much more strongly to vegans I've heard from than
meat-eaters. Cut it out, everybody. The Hard Problem is a
really really really hard problem.
5) I stand by everything in that paragraph. On the other
hand, it does allow another predictable false inference,
which is that I think the problem matters because eating
meat is bad if animals are sentient. The real reason I think it
matters a lot is that if we can't solve it, building an AI with
coherent extrapolated volition is going to be a lot harder.
How are we going to get it to optimize for the wellbeing of
humans but not palm trees? How are we going to agree on
the right conclusions in metaethics--which is necessary for
the survival of humans and everything else--if we can't have
truly productive discussions about the preferences of
chickens?
The remainder of the post remains apparently accurate
upon reflection. The only thing left to note is that there is a
difference between trying to change my beliefs via
emotional appeals, and trying to inspire me to act on beliefs
I already hold. I recognize that the videos I refer to are
largely meant to do the latter, but they are sometimes used
for the former, they have the same effect on me anyway,
and multiple people have admitted today to using terror
tactics when reason doesn't work.

403

6) Fair, truth-seeking conversations are, and have always

been, essential to scientific progress of all forms. I am
extremely disappointed in many people who have
responded to my post in ways that cut off any possibility of
honest discussion.

Honesty requires vulnerability. Speaking the truth is

dangerous. Today, in a moment of despair, I declared that I
would stop doing it. But the only way I know of to cultivate a
culture of collaborative truth-seeking is by example. By
going out in the open and being uncertain, changing my
mind, correcting deception despite the social risk, revealing
facts about my mind that could be used against me, and
never, ever bullying people epistemically. If you take up
someone's emotional vulnerabilities as weapons, the first
thing you destroy is progress toward knowledge.

The discussions of animal rights I've seen in the EA and

rationalist communities in the past year have worried me
almost as much as the social justice conversations,
because the way those discussions go, it's like people are

404

at war. And they seem to know it, and think it's a good
thing, that they must dominate the evil enemy at all cost.
And when one person declares war, it's kinda hard not to
raise some shields. But we have to stop this. This is not
how the truth is revealed and applied. This problem is too
important to be overwhelmed by blue/green politics.

405

Tathat: Why Be Here Now?

November 25, 2014
None of us is born knowing the difference between a
situation and our experience of a situation.
There's so much Buddhism-inspired hype in contemporary
self-help about "being in the moment". I don't know how
much of it is completely missing the point.
But there is a point, and it's a good point.
The good point is not "you should spend all or even most of
your time attending to immediate sensory experiences,
rather than remembering the past, imagining the future, or
entertaining abstract thoughts." How dare you pass by a
flower without stopping to smell it! Unfortunately, that's the
easiest thing to take away from anything that talks about
"mindfulness" or "being here now".
When attempting to state the useful insight of "be here
now", I find myself tempted to say things like, "Immediate
experience is all we have." I don't say it, because I expect it
to sound like nonsense to anyone who doesn't already
know what I mean by it. I'll try it a slightly different way.
1. Problem solving tends to benefit from an accurate model
of the situation, the available tools, and the problem
solver.

406

2. No matter what you do, every action will be directed by a

mind that exists within its own bubble of immediate
experience.

3. We actually don't have a very good model of immediate

experience by default, despite spending every moment
of our lives in it.

When you imagine a future version of yourself, your

attention is not on that with which you're immediately
acquainted. It's on an attempt to model the future, and
attempts to model the future call on memories of the past.
Memories of the past are not faithful models of immediate
experiences.
Most of immediate experience is forgotten. Most of it
doesn't matter, isn't vivid, isn't unusual, doesn't make a
lasting impression. It takes an extra reflective effort of
become aware that your mind's doing whatever it's doing. A
lot of the truth of what it is to be a mind slips through the
cracks. So our default models of immediate experience lack
crucial information.
Additionally, they equivocate
representations of objects.

407

between

objects

and

From a distance, you don't have separate memories of

hearing your partner's voice become strained, seeing their
facial muscles tighten, interpreting their words as insults
and accusations, feeling a shadow of anger and believing it
is the emotion they feel. You don't have a memory of sense
impressions and interpretations, of forming hypotheses and
weighing evidence. Not unless you've trained that
specifically. You just have a memory of your partner being
angry.
If you use that memory to plan for the future, at some point
you're going to run headlong into the impossibility of
experiencing your partner's anger directly. Where does your
partner's actual anger exist? In your partner--and thus
outside of your experience. That event just isn't available to
you.
Why not?
Because immediate experience is all we have.
There, I said it.
It is the capacity to recognize all the features of immediate
experience, without intrusion by mnemonic distortion and
object-representation equivocation, that is cultivated by a
practice of "living in the present moment".
It doesn't always work. Maybe it almost never works. I'd bet,
though, that it works sometimes, and that almost nothing

408

else ever does.

409

The Phenomenology of Peripheral Vision

December 06, 2014
What is it like to have peripheral vision?
How narrow is your foveal center--the part of your vision
with complete clarity? How precipitously does that clarity
fade into the periphery? Where exactly does vision end
completely?
Imagine you had a hula-hoop about the diameter of your
wingspan, so that you could hold it up to make a circle
around your head on a plane with your eyes. Now imagine
there are random numbers on the hula hoop spaced about
an inch apart. How many of those numbers do you imagine
you'd be able to make out at once?
_____________________________________________
(The following experiment is adapted from (second-hand
discussions
of)
one
described
in
Dan
Dennett's Consciousness Explained.)

If you have a regular deck of playing cards, take that out

and skip the next paragraph.

410

If you don't have a deck of playing cards, get some index

cards and a pen. In a pinch, you can just cut up some blank
paper. You'll need ten cards. Write the numbers zero
through nine, one each, in the center of the cards. Make the
numbers of consistent size, about as big as your thumbnail.
Shuffle the deck. Draw a card and hold it at arms length in
front of you with your left hand, so the number is facing
you. If you can't make it out clearly at arm's length, move it
toward you until it's in focus.
Then, keeping your gaze fixed on the first card, draw
another card with your right hand, and hold it at arm's
length (or however far away the first card is), but out to the
right.
Move your right hand back behind you until the card
disappears from your vision. Move it in and out of your
vision, a hair at a time, until you're sure exactly where it
disappears. Does it feel completely binary--now you see the
card, now you don't--or is there a point where you'r not
completely sure whether you can see the card or not?
Very slowly, not letting your gaze waver from the first card,
move your right hand in toward your left, inch by inch.
There may be a point where you feel about 50% sure you
have correctly identified the card in your right hand, but you
can't make it out clearly. Note about how many inches apart
the centers of each card are at that point. If you've got a

411

friend around to help, you can even have them measure for
you.
Keep moving your right hand toward your left until you feel
certain you've correctly identified the second card. How
many inches apart are the cards now?
You might even try moving the cards even closer until the
number in your right hand is just as clear as the number in
your left hand.
_____________________________________________
I find that I can't actually do this last part without folding
one of the cards, because the numbers must be touching.
Even then I notice that I can shift my gaze slightly to bring
the number on the right into even sharper focus.
A lot of people are surprised by this experiment. Many think
there's equally high clarity for about 30 degrees of arc, and
update on the results of this experiment to two degrees of
arc. They learn that their foveal vision is much narrower
than they thought.
Ponder the implications of that for a minute.
People are wrong about what it's like to have peripheral
vision. Peripheral vision is, presumably, part of every
sighted person's experience for many hours a day. Yet, you
ask them questions about their ongoing subjective

412

experience of vision while their eyes are open, and they

report falsehoods.
Maybe the experiment itself modifies peripheral vision,
rendering the foveal center artificially narrow, and people
are actually correct in their beliefs about vision the whole
time. My priors are pretty strongly against that, though, and
I think my own account of what's going on is stronger.
Do you have one? I'll tell you about mine next time.

413

Directing Attention
December 07, 2014
Being a human having emotions of uncertainty and
dissonance is like being a horse drawing a carriage down a
busy street. As prey animals, horses find large, fast-moving
objects frightening, and cars tend to send horses into a
panic. Since a horse's visual field is about 350 degrees,
streets provide constant opportunities to spook a
carriage-drawing horse. Carriage drivers don't want their
horses to panic, so they use blinders, reducing the horses'
vision to what's right in front of them, which keeps them
calm and controllable.
That's all good and well as long as there's a carriage driver
holding the reins, directing every single turn, watching the
road and the cars and the buildings and never letting
anything bad happen to the horse. If you're a horse without
a driver, though, blinders are a bad idea. You need all the
vision you can get.
Human attention narrowly tracks our gaze most of the time.
We don't notice much about our periphery unless there's
some sudden unexpected movement. Then our attention
snaps to that spot, and our gaze quickly follows. Our
attention is like that for all sensations we can be aware of,
not just vision. Like hearing your name at a cocktail party,
or remembering you left the oven on. We evolved to turn
our attention toward those things so naturally and easily

414

that we can't help doing it.

Much of learning rationality, or at least the style I've so far
studied myself, involves attuning your mind to new types of
sensation, striving for the automatic snap-focus response
when you encounter them. We want our attention to move
toward confusion, rationalization, curiosity, and many other
sensations we didn't evolve to care so much about.
You can't flee from a motionless predator who remains dark
and indistinct in your peripheral vision. You can't turn off
the oven when your feeling that you've left it on stays quiet
and fuzzy in the periphery of your attention. And you can't
burn for investigation in response to peripheral sensations
of curiosity when your brain hasn't fully integrated the
knowledge that curiosity matters.
But we also seem to have evolved something like blinders
for other types of sensations, as though the social
structures of our tribes could act as carriage drivers to
direct and protect us during times of near blindness. When
we enter an argument with someone we consider an enemy,
for example, not only do we become even more focused
than normal on the mental activities associated with
defeating her, but we raise shields against any internal
stimulus that might lead to our defeat. So acting on
confusion isn't as simple as promoting it from peripheral to
foveal attention. You first have to take off the blinders.
That's what reflective attention is for.

415

Knowing the blinders exist, knowing when they're on,

locating them, taking them off, knowing which internal
sensations are worth extra attention, and installing
snap-focus habits for them--all of that has to happen before
you can get consistent practice with your chosen bias
interventions, whatever they might be.
The exercise from the last post decouples vision from
attention. I think that attuning your mind to sensations of
deliberate control of attention is probably necessary for
becoming reflective at will, especially on the human
equivalent of crowded streets. I hope I've explained it better
this time, so here it is again, if you want to take a shot at it.

1. Look at the "A" in the title "Agenty Duck". Keep your

gaze fixed on that letter.

2. Without moving your eyes, try to read the word directly

below "Agenty". Can you feel your attention prying itself
away from your gaze?

3. Try moving your attention around, still looking at the A.

Move your attention to different parts of the screen, then
off of the screen and around the room.

416

4. Ok, now bring your attention back to the A, joining vision

and attention once again.

5. This time, keep your attention on the A, but move

your eyes around the screen. Your attention wants to
follow, doesn't it? Don't let it. See how quickly you can
look around without losing attentive focus on the A.

417

The Phenomenology of Peripheral Vision (Part 2)

December 07, 2014
In the last post, I described an exercise that suggests many
of us are wrong about the character of our own visual
experiences. We tend to overestimate the breadth of foveal
vision, even when we're reflecting without distraction on
vision specifically while our eyes are open.
I find this result humbling.
I still accept a (very) weak infallibility thesis about present
phenomenal experience. When we explicate beliefs about
present experience, the phenomenal objects in question
partially comprise those beliefs. It's not possible for me to
believe that I'm having a red experience without having a
red experience, else I'm referring to something besides "a
red experience" when I utter the words "a red experience",
and the mistake is purely linguistic. A lot of people disagree
with me about that, but I'm not so sure it's worth arguing
over. If it's true, it's trivially true, so it's not very helpful to
know. If you're interested in this topic, I recommend the
SEP article on Self-Knowledge pretty highly.
But why are we wrong? If the world is visually clear to us
for only about two degrees of arc--the size of your
thumbnail held at arm's length--why would we ever think
otherwise, and why don't we notice our mistake before
someone hits us over the head with it?

418

I think it's a combination of two things.

The first is a sampling bias. If I ask myself "How much of
the room can I see clearly at once?" the most natural way to
find the answer is by looking at the room. Without
successful fixation on a particular object, my eyes
automatically move around without my conscious guidance.
I imagine my brain is likely running through an abbreviated,
non-conscious version of, "The wall is clear, what about the
blender? Yep, that's clear. So's the lamp, and the cabinet,
and the door. I can't see behind me, but pretty much
everything in front of me is clear." When people know
they're being asked about the phenomenology of peripheral
vision, maybe they make up for that at least a little, but
apparently not enough.
It is weird to consider visual experience of things we're not
looking at. Our brains evolved to to move our gaze toward
the objects of our attention, and we do it so automatically
that it takes a special effort to notice it happening.
The second is also a sampling bias. It's not just the case
that I tend to move my gaze to the object of my attention. I
also tend to keep my attention fairly narrowly focused on
the object of my gaze, at least while I'm attending to vision. I
bet you do to. Here, let me show you.
1. Look at the "A" in the title "Agenty Duck". Keep your
gaze fixed on that letter.

419

2. Without moving your eyes, try to read the word

directly below "Agenty". Can you feel your attention
prying itself away from your gaze?

3. Try moving your attention around, still looking at the

A. Move your attention to different parts of the
screen, then off of the screen and around the room.

4. Ok, now bring your attention back to the A, joining

vision and attention once again.

5. This time, keep your attention on the A, but move

your eyes around the screen. Your attention wants to
follow, doesn't it? Don't let it. See how quickly you
can look around without losing attentive focus on the
A.

What does this mean for the phenomenology of

peripheral and foveal vision?

It means that we're primarily aware of that which we see

most clearly. It is difficult to bring objects in peripheral
vision into the focus of attention. One person who tried the
above exercise couldn't make it past part two, because it

420

was so uncomfortable to decouple visual and attentive

focus. You have to be aware of something to notice it, so it
takes effort, and possibly practice, to notice that an object
ten degrees off center in your visual field is quite fuzzy and
indistinct.
I'd performed the above exercise, and several like it, many
times
before
encountering
these
questions
of
phenomenology of vision. As it happens, my initial
estimation of the breadth of foveal vision was nearly
right--three to five degrees of arc, instead of two. In the first
instant I did feel a temptation to say something closer to
thirty, but I successfully decoupled my attention from my
visual gaze quickly enough that I barely noticed doing it. So
my hypothesis is that I've trained myself to notice this kind
of perceptual mistake upon reflection. I'm currently running
a Tortoise Test on Facebook to see if others can do the
same. I pre-commit to publishing the results, whatever they
might be.
Results: I asked people "How many degrees of arc, would
you say, are there at the center before things start going
fuzzy in the periphery?". 16 people responded with
straightforward numerical answers. 6 of them did the above
vision/attention decoupling exercise before encountering
the question. For those who did the exercise first, the
average answer was 5 degrees of arc. The most common
answer was 2, and answers ranged from 2 to 15. For the 10
who didn't do the exercise, the average was about 15
degrees, the median was also 15, and answers ranged from

421

7.5 (actually "5 to 10") to 35.

This supports both my explanations, though it doesn't
distinguish between them. I could do that by having people
do the same thing with just fixation and no decoupling, and
then with decoupling but no fixation. I'm not sure how to do
the second thing, unless I have them move attention to
something besides location in the visual field (such as
color, or even sound). I could also test the "training
combats the illusion" hypothesis more directly by having
people do these exercises once a day for three days, and
then wait a week or two before asking them to estimate the
breadth of foveal vision. Needless to say, I'd just like more
data overall.
I concluded the last post by conceding that "Maybe the
experiment itself modifies peripheral vision, rendering the
foveal center artificially narrow, and people are actually
correct in their beliefs about vision the whole time." I also
said my priors were strongly against that, but I dismissed it
too hastily. (This may have had to do with having spent
much of the day reading anti-phenomenological infallibility
articles.)
In fact, after writing the paragraph following this one, I now
feel more than 50% sure that that's what's going on.
Time distortion may render the "illusion" true to the the
phenomenology of peripheral vision even if experiments in
reading and change blindness demonstrate that much of

422

our peripheral visual experience is fabricated. Just as you

might line up many pictures to make a completely in-focus,
seamless panoramic, we might move our eyes to several
parts of our visual field in succession, keeping the data
from each saccade in memory, and then experience all that
data with the same phenomenological time stamp.
If that's so, an activity involving careful, extended visual
fixation would create a poverty of in-focus data to piece
together, thereby revealing the narrow range of ontological
fovea compared to ordinary phenomenological fovea.
Something like this happens when you tap your nose with
your finger and experience pressure in your nose and finger
simultaneously. It takes longer for a nerve impulse to travel
to the sensory cortex from your fingertip than from your
nose*, so the experience of simultaneity is evidence that the
phenomenological "present" is a layering of recent
memories.
In these past two posts, I set out to demonstrate and
discuss a striking failure to hold accurate beliefs about our
own ongoing visual experiences. At the end of it, I find I no
longer agree with Dennett and his compatriots when they
count
this
as
a
demonstration
of
immediate
phenomenological error.
Hopefully I'll still be able to make the points in my next post
that I originally intended this to illustrate.

423

___________________________________________
*I believe this because I once heard Sam Harris say it. He is
a neurologist, after all, but I'm not entirely certain I trust him
to ask himself whether the difference in signal arrival time is
enough to be perceptible even if we don't layer recent
memories to create present experience. And I don't know
what the time difference is myself. Seems plausible, though.
But perhaps more plausible to me than you due to my overt
time dilation experiences under the influence of hypnosis
and marijuana.

424

The Spotlight of Attention

December 12, 2014
You're reading an article that claims bad news for your
current dietary habits. Beets, which are your favorite food,
are supposedly evil. According to the article, beets have
been shown to cause heart disease, cancer, and Ebola. Yes,
all at once.
Now, we can both predict what will happen to your attention
by default.
It will shun any sensations that might indicate
rationalization should they begin to arise in the periphery of
your attention. It will initiate a sharply focused, moderately
directed search for flaws in the study. And it will rapidly
withdraw from all sensations indicating evidence in favor of
the Evil Beets hypothesis.
There are a many many cognitive processes that contribute
to such complicated mental events as "rationalization", and
most of those processes are subconscious. What I want to
draw your attention to is very simply attention: The
allocation of limited processing resources at the level of
conscious awareness.
You might not know how or why the rationalization process
is happening, or even what it is really. But when you happen
to become aware of some sensation that indicates it's going

425

on, that's an opportunity to re-allocate resources, thereby

exerting some control at the interface of conscious and
unconscious processing.

There are a few things about attention that seem really

important to me.
First is direction of attention. I talked about that in the last
post, and suggested a quick (<5 minute) exercise to set off
the associated sensation.
Second is focus of attention. Direction is where you point
the spotlight. Focus is the radius of the beam.
Third is searching. Searching is a sweep of the darkness.
Searching is what happens with your attention if you're
prepared to become aware of something. It happens in a
sharply focused, highly directed way when you can't find
your keys. It happens in a more softly focused, highly
directed way when you search for something to write with.
And it happens in a softly focused, relatively undirected
way when you "keep an eye out" for someone with a hair
cut you might like to try in the future.

426

So why does this matter? I've been illustrating with vision,

but these spotlight-like properties characterize attention
generally, as far as I can tell.
Go back to the Evil Beets article. By default, your attention's
going to do some dangerous things that might make an
enemy of the truthresulting in death by heart disease,
cancer, and Ebola.
But suppose you've trained hard and have excellent control
over your attention. Then since you can predict it will do
these things by default, you can counter. You can direct it
toward sensations of rationalization. You can soften the
search for flaws. And you can assign equal focus to
sensations indicating evidence in favor of the Evil Beets
hypothesis.
You'll probably need to do more than that to save yourself.
But you couldand shouldstart by gaining control over
your attention. Becoming consciously aware of a problem is
usually the first step toward solving it.

Focusing Attention
Here's a quick exercise (<5mins) that sets off the sensation
of focusing. Focus can be hard to distinguish from
direction. It takes practice to gain precise control of either.

427

1. Rest your gaze on the top left corner of your monitor.

Pick a tiny little spot. Focus on that point as narrowly as
you can, picking out the tiniest pinprick of your visual
field and letting all of your attention shine laser-like
directly onto it.

2. Then, without moving your eyes, let your attention

soften to include about an inch of space around that
spot. Slowly let it soften to include more and more of
your visual field.

3. How much can you soften your focus without changing

anything about your vision? Once you're aware of as
much space around spot as you can manageperhaps
your whole visual fieldhop back and forth between
laser focus and a one-foot radius of attention. Take note
of the sensation of rapidly changing focus.

428

Sunjai's Silent Stranger

December 14, 2014
It was a sunny day, and Sunjai was taking a stroll down the
road through the forest. When he got to a familiar bend, he
caught something shiny out of the corner of his eye. As he
turned to look over, another elephant suddenly appeared.
Where had he come from? It's hard for an elephant to sneak
up on another elephant, but Sunjai was completely taken by
surprise.
Warily, he turned toward the newcomer, fanning his broad
ears and letting a low rumble rise from his throat in
greeting. The other man was tall, like Sunjai, and his tusks
were similarly long and almost straight. He looked so much
like the elephants in Sunjai's family that he thought they
must be related, but was sure they'd never met before.
Thought he was quite handsome overall, he had a strange
marking on his forehead, a bright red line a few inches long
and no wider than a human finger. It was the wrong hue to
be a natural marking, and Sunjai wondered if he'd been cut.
The newcomer wasn't saying a word. His ears were still
fanned out in greeting, and the nervous sweeping of his
trunk suggested he felt the same growing awkwardness as
Sunjai. Sunjai tried another "hello". Still no response.
Sunjai was really getting worried. This was not at all the
standard protocol in any family he'd encountered before. He

429

began to back up and bow his head submissively, in case

he'd somehow offended this person--but as he did, the
newcomer did the exact same!
Sunjai did not understand this game. He turned to leave
before he could make any more mistakes. But after just a
couple of steps, the newcomer had disappeared, just as
suddenly and silently as he'd arrived to begin with. In his
place was an oddly bright and shimmering patch of forest.
Curiosity got the best of him. Sunjai turned back, seeking
the hidden path the man must have found, approaching
from the side this time, nearer the bright patch--and there
he was again, only inches away this time!
What?! Sunjai reared back and almost fell over, he was so
startled. When he righted himself, the newcomer was also
stumbling, looking equally startled. "How did you do that?"
Sunjai asked. They stood still, just looking at each other, for
several long moments, while Sunjai pondered the mystery
of the surprise elephant.
I don't know how he turns invisible like that. But why
doesn't he answer me? Perhaps that is blood on his
forehead, thought Sunjai, and his injury has somehow
interfered with his ability to speak. I've been so worried
about me during this encounter, worried I might get hurt,
that I haven't spared any empathy at all for this stranger
who may be hurt and confused.

430

"Do you need help?" he asked, turning his head in

questioning. The stranger simply turned his head at the
same time, offering no reply. "I'm going to take a look at
that wound on your forehead." Sunjai lifted his trunk,
reaching up toward the apparent wound. But the stranger
lifted up his own trunk at the same time, blocking the
advance.
"No, I promise I won't hurt you. Just hold still." He reached
out a little faster this time, and the the two elephants
bumped trunks. Sunjai pulled back, startled again, for that
hadn't felt like elephant flesh. It had been cold and hard,
almost like ice. He reached out again, touched, thinking that
perhaps he'd imagined it. No, not like ice. But not like flesh
either. It was exactly like the glass through which humans
observed back at the enclosure.
Sunjai reached over again, trying to touch the man's
shoulder, to see if there was something wrong with his
trunk, or if all of his skin was like glass. But every single
move he made was perfectly blocked, exactly matched by
the movements of the other man.
Sunjai put his trunk down. He moved it left, holding it out in
a very unnatural, uncomfortable position. Maybe the
behavioral similarities were a coincidence up 'til now, but
nobody would just happen to reach their trunk stiffly out to
the side and just hold it there.

431

The stranger followed suit. He tried the same thing to the

right, and was matched again. He moved as if to reach his
trunk up, but suddenly redirected at the last minute,
reaching again out to the right. And the man was not
tricked. He followed Sunjai exactly, impossibly quickly, as
though he were behind Sunjai's eyes, watching him make
decisions before he had time to act.
This can't be happening, Sunjai thought. Something is very
wrong. And whatever it is is coming from the shimmering
patch of forest.
Sunjai leaped sideways, then forward, approaching the
bright patch from a new angle, around the other elephant,
giving him no time to run away or hide-And the stranger was gone. Just, vanished. Again.
Sunjai backed up very slowly, tentatively, peering around
the front again, reaching his trunk toward the light
patch--and another trunk emerged from nowhere, creeping
forward at the same rate and angle as his.
I'm losing my mind, thought Sunjai.
Sunjai inched sideways, watching as another elephant
emerged bit by bit from nowhere.
Then he retreated again, moving his whole body away from
the light patch. He stepped around back, placing himself

432

exactly where the other elephant must have been moments

before.
And it wasn't light at all. The light patch was actually a dark
patch, because there was a huge black rectangle blocking
out the sunlight.
He reached out to touch it, and found that it was cold and
hard, just like glass. Just like the touch of the stranger.
Sunjai reached his trunk around the side, feeling for the
front of the rectangle as he stood at the back of it. Again, he
felt glass.
Leaving his trunk on the front of the glass rectangle, Sunjai
began to slowly step back around to the front of the "light
patch", maintaining contact the whole time. And he could
see, as he passed around the side, that the rectangle was
very thin and flat, almost nothing to it.
He stopped, positioning his head so that he could see the
black glass if he moved a hair to the left, the light patch and
the disembodied trunk if he moved a hair to the right. He
waved his trunk around, knowing it would cause the other
trunk to move just the same. If there really was a trunk
behind the glass, he'd be able to see it from here.
Nothing. There was no trunk behind the glass. Somehow,
the disembodied trunk was on the front of the glass itself.

433

Sunjai's head was spinning. He was frightened and

confused, and his panic was starting to overcome his
curiosity. There was another elephant trapped in the surface
the glass, and he had direct access to Sunjai's own
intentions.
Sunjai fled. Putting the glass rectangle far behind him, he
ran and ran, panting in a one-man stampede all the way
back to his tribe.
"Sunjai!" his mother exclaimed, "Are you all right? Did you
get hurt? There's something on your forehead!"
"On my... there's something... there's..." Slowly, shakily,
Sunjai reached up to touch his own face. "There's
something on my forehead." he whispered.
"Yes," his mother responded.
"On MY forehead!" he shouted.
"Yes, and it's bright red, it looks like--"
"BLOOD!" Sunjay almost screamed, and turned back the
way he had come. "Mother, everyone, follow me. Quickly.
You have got to see this!"

434

Feeling Clearly
December 15, 2014
Every stripper knows to name a higher price than he
expects to get when selling a lap dance. He'll start out by
telling you it'll cost $75, and you'll say that's too much.
Then you'll counter with $40, and he'll say, "How about $50,
and I show you a new trick I learned yesterday." If I ask you
later why you agreed to $50, then unless you already know
about anchoring effects (or perhaps even if you do), you'll
say the guy was hot and you thought $50 was a fair price.
But if I asked you the moment you walked into the club,
"What's the highest price you'd consider fair for a lap dance
with the guy on stage right now?" you'd say, "$25" (or
something lower than $50, anyway). You wouldn't be lying
to me. It would feel true to you.
Anchoring is just one among the many guises of the
introspection illusion.
People tend to think they have direct access to the origins
of their mental states. They think they're infallible when it
comes to certain kinds of self-knowledge, like why they
chose to be a teacher, whether they like broccoli, or why
they agreed to pay $50 for a lap dance. But they're wrong.
This is a big deal.

435

Suppose you want to be more productive by making your

work periods more enjoyable, so you've decided to start
playing your favorite kind of music (French house) as you
work. Here are some judgements that might have influenced
that plan:

your favorite kind of music is French house

you're more productive when you're happy

you don't find music distracting

Maybe all of these things are true, and maybe not. If they're
not, your plan isn't going to work so well. Will you notice
when it fails, or will you go on believing all of these things
whatever happens, as long as they keep feeling true? The
introspection illusion means that how true they feel to you
is not an excellent indicator of how true they actually are,
even though they're mostly about your own thoughts and
beliefs. Empirical observations about productivity under
various circumstances must be part of the story.
But not all kinds of introspection are equally subject to this
problem.

436

The introspection illusion happens when we try to access

the processes underlying our conscious mental states.
Processes underlying our conscious mental states are not
themselves part of our conscious mental states. So this is
the illusion of feeling as though we are conscious of
unconscious processes.
But we really are conscious of some things. You're
conscious of the temperature of the room, now that I've
brought your attention to it. You're conscious of the color of
your shirt. You're conscious of the emotional sensations
that occur upon reading the phrase "your grandfather's
voice".
The surface level introspection you employed to become
aware of each of those mental contents is far more reliable
than the deep soul-searching people often associate with
the word "introspection". And you can get a lot of mileage
out of that if you know how to use it. This is what all the
"mindfulness" and "being in the moment" stuff is really
about.
If just asking yourself the question "How do I feel about my
boyfriend's new girlfriend?" and going with the first
judgement that occurs to you won't do the trick for
predicting the emotions that will influence your interactions
with her, what will work?
There's a technique I use often for making more accurate
predictions about my future mental states. I call it "Feeling

437

Clearly". It's not a method for revealing the true feelings

hidden at the core of your being. It's just careful
observation of what does in fact happen to your mind when
it encounters whatever you're wondering about. If you're
right about that, what you really truly feel deep down (if
there is such a thing) isn't so important, is it? Predicting
and influencing the contents of your consciousness is all
that matters.
This is applied experimental phenomenology. It lacks many
virtues of a randomized, double-blind, controlled,
peer-reviewed study. But your feedback loops can be way
fast.
How fast?
Quick, make a prediction about how much you will enjoy
imagining smelling a rose. Ok, now imagine smelling a rose.
How much did you enjoy it? Did you overestimate, or
underestimate? Taking that into account, make another
prediction about how much you'll enjoy imagining smelling
a rose. Ok, now imagine smelling a rose again. Were you
closer this time?
That fast.
Here's how it works.

438

Choose a simple idea or topic that makes you a little

uncomfortable. Nothing really important or painful, just
something small that's been worrying you, or that feels
unresolved. It might be something a friend said to you
yesterday. It might be an upcoming responsibility, or a
recent event that didn't go as well as you'd hoped. Whatever
it is, be specific, and then set it aside for later.
Notice what your mind is doing right now. One thing its
doing is experiencing sensations of black and white as you
read. What else are you experiencing? Are there words in
your inner monologue? Are there emotions of any kind?
Whats happening in your mind is constantly changing.
Turn your attention to the changes. When a new thought
emerges in consciousness, see if you can notice the exact
moment when it happens, becoming aware of what it feels
like for that particular change to take place.
If it helps at first, you can narrate your stream of
consciousness in words: Now Im seeing the blue of the
wall, now Im hearing the sound of a car, now Im feeling
cold, now Im curious what time it is Youll probably find
that you cant narrate anywhere near quickly enough. Once
narrating starts to become frustrating for that reason, stop
slowing yourself down with words, and just silently observe
your thoughts as they occur.
If youre finding this overwhelming because there are too
many thoughts, narrow your focus down to just your

439

breathing, and try to precisely identify the experience of an

exhale ending and an inhale beginning, of an inhale ending
and an exhale beginning. Keep doing that until you feel
comfortable with it, and then slowly expand your attention a
little at a time: to other experiences associated with
breathing, to non-breath-related bodily sensations, to
non-tactile sensations from your environment, and finally to
internal mental sensations like emotions.
If you notice an impulse to engage with a particular
thoughtperhaps you notice you feel hungry, and in
response you begin to focus your attention on planning
lunchinstead of letting that impulse take over your
attention, recognize it as yet another change in the activity
of your mind. If youre narrating, say now Im feeling an
impulse to plan my lunch, and keep your focus broad
enough to catch the next thought when it arises.
Do that for about five minutes, or until youre ready to move
on.
When youre ready, think the thought you chose at the
beginning. Drop it into your stream of consciousness. Then
immediately go right back to noticing thoughts, emotions,
and sensations as they arise.
Youll probably notice some activity occurring in response
to the thought you just dropped in. Observe those
responses, one after another, not being drawn into any one
of them but remaining aware of each.

440

Do this for as long as needed. Think the thought again

whenever you feel the responses to it have died down.
When youre done, write down each of the reactions you
recall, before they fade from memory.
As a variation, you can write down the reactions in the
middle of the exercise, as theyre happening. I dont
suggest starting off with this variation, because it
introduces a focus on words that might be disruptive. Find
out what its like without writing the first time you try it.
Try several sessions of this spread out over the course of a
day, or over a few days, and keep notes each time.

So what does this get you? It gets you reliable data on what
happens when you encounter whatever thought you're
interested in. It circumvents the introspection illusion to
help you make more accurate predictions about your mental
states, and therefore about whatever behaviors are
influenced by them.
Now, that's not going to perfectly map onto real-world
situations.
For one thing, it takes practice to get really rich, precise
data; to distinguish "fear" from "a cold tightness in my
chest I associate with anxiety, plus a feeling of directedness
at an image of being abandoned".

441

Secondly, a thought about something isn't the thing itself.

Your simulation of what it will be like to meet Tiffany will
have some correlation to what it will actually be like to meet
Tiffany, but it won't be perfect.
You can get better at that too, though. You can calibrate.
Get really comfortable with reflectivity, the central skill of
this exercise. Then, when you actually meet Tiffany in real
life, activate that reflective mode, and take note of how
exactly your predictions fail. Form hypotheses about why,
and feed those back into your next round of simulation.

442

Reflective Attention
December 20, 2014
And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small,
small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong
about that story; and it should have been a part of
Harry's art to notice that tiny note, but he was
distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are
most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when
you are most likely to forget it. HPMOR, Ch. 3
A rationalists art is most distant when it is most needed.
Why is that?
When I am very angry with my romantic partner, what I feel
is anger. I dont feel the futility of throwing a tantrum, or the
availability of other options like honest communication, or
freewriting, or taking a deep breath. My attention is so
narrowly focused on the object of my anger that Im likely
not even aware that Im angry, let alone that my anger might
be blinding me to my art.
When her skills are most needed, a rationalist is lost in an
unskillful state of mind. She doesnt recognize that its
happening, and she doesnt remember that she has
prepared for it by learning and practicing appropriate
techniques.

443

The following exercise trains a skill I call reflective

attention, and some call mindfulness. For me, it serves as
an anchor in a stormy mind, or as a compass pointing
always toward a mental state where my art is close at hand.
Noticing that I am lost in an unskillful state of mind is a
separate skill. But when I do happen to noticewhen I feel
that small, small note of confusionreflective attention
helps me find my way back. Instead of churning out even
more pointless things to yell at my partner, it allows me to
say, I am angry. I feel an impulse to yell. I notice my mind
returning over and over to the memory that makes me more
angry. Im finding it hard to concentrate. I am distracted. I
have a vague impression that I have prepared for this. And
awareness of that final thought allows me to ask, What
have I trained myself to do when I feel this way?
The goal of the following exercise is to practice entering
reflective attention.
It begins with an instruction to think of nothing, because
when you monitor yourself to make sure youre not having
any thoughts, your attention ends up directed toward the
beginnings of thoughts. Since the contents of
consciousness are always changing, maintaining focus on
the beginnings of thoughts prevents you from engaging for
an extended period with any particular thought. It prevents
you from getting lost in thought, or keeping attention
focused on a thought without awareness of doing so. The
point is not actually to be successful at thinking nothing,

444

but to notice what happens when you try.

Keeping your focus on the constant changes in your stream
of consciousness brings attention to your experience of
awareness itself. Awareness of awareness is the anchor for
attention. It lets you keep your bearings when youd
otherwise be carried away by a current of thought or
emotion.
Once youre so familiar with that feeling of mindfulness that
creating it is a primitive action, you can forget the
introductory part, and jump straight to reflective attention
whenever it occurs to you to do so.

This will probably take around five minutes, but you can do
it for much longer if you want to.
Notice what your mind is doing right now. One thing its
doing is experiencing sensations of black and white as you
read. What else are you experiencing? Are there words in
your inner monologue? Are there emotions of any kind?
Spend about thirty seconds trying not to think anything.
When thirty seconds is up, stop trying not to think, and read
on.
Whats happening in your mind is constantly changing.
Even when you were trying not to think, you probably
noticed many times when the stillness would shift and

445

some new thought would begin to emerge in conscious

awareness.
Turn your attention to those changes. When a new thought
emerges in consciousness, see if you can notice the exact
moment when it happens, becoming aware of what it feels
like for that particular change to take place.
If it helps at first, you can narrate your stream of
consciousness in words: Now Im seeing the blue of the
wall, now Im hearing the sound of a car, now Im feeling
cold, now Im curious what time it is Youll probably find
that you cant narrate anywhere near quickly enough, in part
because thoughts can happen in parallel, while speech is
serial. Once narrating starts to become frustrating for that
reason, stop slowing yourself down with words, and just
silently observe your thoughts as they occur.
If youre finding this overwhelming because there are too
many thoughts, narrow your focus down to just your
breathing, and try to precisely identify the experience of an
exhale ending and an inhale beginning, of an inhale ending
and an exhale beginning. Keep doing that until you feel
comfortable with it, and then slowly expand your attention a
little at a time: to other experiences associated with
breathing, to non-breath-related bodily sensations, to
non-tactile sensations from your environment, and finally to
internal mental sensations like emotions.

446

If you notice an impulse to focus your attention on a

particular thought, following it and engaging with
itperhaps you notice you feel hungry, and in response
you begin to focus your attention on planning
lunchinstead of letting that impulse take over your
attention, recognize it as yet another change in the activity
of your mind. If youre narrating, say, now Im feeling an
impulse to plan my lunch, and keep your focus broad
enough to catch the next thought when it arises. If you
realize that youve already become lost in a particular
thought, notice that realization itself as a new thought, and
return to observing your stream of consciousness by
noticing the next new thought that happens as well.
You might need to practice this many times before you get
the hang of it. I suggest trying it for ten minutes to half an
hour a day until you do.
Once you feel like you can recognize the sensation of
reflective attention and enter that state of mind reliably
given time, begin to train for speed. Instead of setting a
timer for fifteen minutes or however long you want to
practice, set it to go off every minute for the first half of
your practice, spending one minute in reflective attention,
and one minute out. (Dont do this for all of your practice.
You still need to practice maintenance.) When you can
consistently arrive in reflective attention by the end of the
minute, cut the intervals down to 45 seconds, then thirty,
fifteen, and five.

447

In real life, the suspicion that you may be lost in an

unskillful state of mind will be quiet and fleeting. Quiet
means youll need to learn to snap your attention to the
slightest hint of that feeling. For that, youll need to train
noticing. Fleeting means youll need to be able to
respond in less than five seconds. Youll need to begin the
process in less than one second, even if it takes a little
longer to fully arrive in reflective attention. For that, training
for speed is crucial.

448

How To Train Noticing

December 22, 2014
Alice wants to stop treating her beliefs as binary and start
treating them probabilisticallythat is, she wants to update
herself incrementally. So she's hoping to work on the skill
of raising her credence a little bit when she encounters
weak evidence against her beliefs, instead of entirely
disregarding anything that doesn't completely "change her
mind". What should she do?
Obvious plan is obvious: If she encounters weak contrary
evidence, then she should update slightly away from the
hypothesis.
But obvious plan is not best plan. Why not?
Let's assume that Alice already knows exactly what she
means by "update slightly away from the hypothesis" and
knows exactly how to do it. (So the first problem is that in
real life, she might not know either of those things.) The
problem I want to focus on in this post is that "encounter
weak contrary evidence" is a shitty trigger no matter how
good the action you plan to take when the trigger happens.
Imagine one of those fake duck ponds you see at carnivals,
the ones with the kiddie pool and the yellow rubber ducks.
A current is pushing the floating ducks in circles around the
edge of the pool. There are nine ducks with their bellies

449

painted red, and one duck with its belly painted purple. To
win the prize, you have to grab the purple-bellied duck when
it floats by.
Now imagine the same duck pond, but instead of their
bellies being painted, it's their backs. There are nine
red-backed ducks and one purple-backed duck, and to win
the prize, you have to grab the purple-backed duck when it
floats by.
The second game's a lot easier, right? Why is that?
The mere fact that the purple duck is in front of you is an
insufficient trigger. When you play the second game and
win, you're not just grabbing the duck in front of you when
it's purple. You're grabbing the duck in front of you when
you see that it is purple. You notice a purple experience
happening in your mind, and that's how you know to grab
the duck. In the first game, you lose, because there's
nothing to notice. Even though the ducks are in fact
different, they all look the same from your vantage point.
Back to Alice.
The game she's playing is "update slightly when I encounter
weak contrary evidence". The duck pond is the world, the
current is time, and the ducks are events. Most of the ducks
are red, and the purple ducks are "weak contrary evidence".
"When I encounter weak contrary evidence" is a bad trigger
in exactly the same way that "when the purple duck is in

450

front of me" is a bad trigger. It doesn't pick out a subjective

experience that distinguishes the attempted trigger from
everything else. There's nothing to notice.
To make a good training plan, Alice needs an analogue to
an experience of purpleness. She needs to know exactly
what it feels like to encounter weak contrary evidence. Once
she has that, then she has a reliable trigger.
So how can Alice find out what subjective experience is a
function of weak contrary evidence? First of all, she's got to
know what weak contrary evidence is. Not just what it feels
like, but what it means. Let's assume she knows that
already. So what's left is to identify the corresponding
subjective experience.
Here's how I do it.
1. I guess. I remember or imagine a few specific instances
of encountering weak contrary evidence (such as when I
thought my friend wasn't attracted to me, but when I
made eye contact with him across the room at a party he
smiled widely). On the basis of those simulations, I make
a prediction about what it will feel like, in terms of
immediate subjective experience, to encounter weak
contrary evidence in the future. The prediction is a
tentative trigger. For me, this would be "I feel a sort of
matching up with one of my beliefs, there's a bit of
dissonance, a tiny bit of fear, and maybe a small impulse

451

to direct my attention away from these sensations and

away from thoughts about the observation causing all of
this".

2. I test my guess. I keep a search going on in the

background for anything in the neighborhood of the
experience I predicted. Odds are good I'll miss several
instances of weak contrary evidence, but as soon as I
realize I've encountered one, I go into reflective attention
so I'm aware of as many details of my immediate
subjective experience as possible. I pay attention to
what's going on in my mind right now, and also what's
still looping in my very short-term memory of a few
moments before I noticed. Then I compare those results
to my prediction, noting anything I got wrong, and I feed
that information into a new prediction for next time. (I
might have gotten something wrong that caused the
trigger to go off at the wrong time, which probably
means I need to narrow my prediction.) The new
prediction is the new trigger.

3. I repeat the test until my trigger seems to be accurate

and precise. Now I've got a good trigger to match a good
action.

452

If I were Alice, I'd take one more step toward noticing every
instance of weak contrary evidence. A precise and accurate
trigger is necessary, but it's not always sufficient. This kind
of skill takes practice.
I have a knitting counter, which I bought for $7.13 on
Amazon. Knitting counters are very simple: You press a
button, and it advances the count by one. When I'm training
myself to notice a trigger, I carry the knitting counter in my
pocket. Every time I notice the trigger, I push the button. I
reset the counter to zero at the end of the day, and the next
day I try to beat my highest score.
(There are plenty of substitutes for the knitting counter, of
course, such as keeping track in your head. But it does
make a highly satisfying cliking sound.)
I keep doing this until my score levels out. Then, I swap out
the action of pressing the button for whatever other action I
think is useful. In this case, it would be "update slightly
away from the hypothesis".
Usually, the leveling out process runs into the
action-swapping process, so for a while I'm responding with
the action while I'm still getting better at noticing the
trigger. But if the action is any more complicated than
pressing a button, I hold off on taking it and train noticing
specifically until I'm feeling pretty comfortable with the
noticing itself.

453

So in short, here's how to train noticing: Identify a

subjective experience you want to notice, predict what the
experience will be like, test your prediction, repeat 'til
you've got it right, and gamify your practice.

454

Reflective Recording
January 05, 2015
Related Posts: Mindfulness, How To Train Noticing, Feeling
Clearly, Tathat: Why Be Here Now?, Simulating Confusion,
What It's Like To Notice Things

What is a reflective record?

A reflective record is anything you write down while in
reflective attention.
What does a reflective record look like?
Here's a typical example of one of my reflective records
from a couple months ago.
The sound of cars on the road, and a fly flitting
through a beam of sunlight. Im sleepy and my head
feels fuzzy. The laptop is uncomfortably warm on my
legs, and I think I should move it. The room smells
like empanadas from lunch. A moment of blankness,
which gives way as I realize Ive simply lost direction
for a moment. I gently nudge it back to the flow of my
stream of consciousness. I notice that I have a
Facebook notification, wonder what it is, and now Im
deciding to close all my tabs but this one. A feeling of
familiarity like an openness in my chest, and as I

455

watch that, memories of having performed this

exercise many times. Through my inner monologue,
the words What will my readers think of the chapter
I'm working on?, accompanied by a very dull and
mild pang of anxiety. I take a deep breath, and Im
enjoying the sensation of the air rushing out of my
nostrils as I exhale. The words categories of
experience, and I imagine circling phrases with
colored pencils. A feeling of sufficiency and
completion, part of my experience of the belief that I
should stop writing now.
And here's what happens if I make a reflective record right
now.
Cars passing by on the road making a swooshing
noise. I'm imagining the scene out the window,
though I'm looking at my computer screen. I'm
imagining the visuals of a sunset over the ocean
framed by hills and buildings, though it's actually
morning and the sky is cloudy and gray. A pang of
hunger rising in my stomach, feeling sharp and
insistent. Words in my head: "what should I eat?",
and a little frustration. Stopping work to eat feels at
once aversive and enticing. The thought of eating
causes relief and happiness, but the thought of
cooking causes gumbly dark denial and I want to
ignore the thought. My socks are gray-blue and fuzzy,
and they make me content and comfortable. A
memory of the way my attention suddenly retreated

456

from the thought of food to grasp the nearest

non-food-related sensation. Sleepiness, a constant
temptation for my attention to wander away and
forget itself, and apparently I'm more willing to
describe my experience in imprecise metaphor than I
feel I remember having been in past reflective
records. My mind wants to focus on the difference
between reflective recording and free writing. The
locking-in-place-resolution of a decision not to bother
writing about free writing in this post, but to
reconsider after I eat.
What is reflective recording good for?
I use reflective recording for three things.
1. Habit training. Suppose you're trying to learn a more
productive psychological response to confusion than
the one you usually have. If you want to respond with
curiosity, you'll need an intervention that inputs the
beginning of your default response and outputs
curiosity. To figure out what that intervention should be,
it helps to have a detailed model of the input. Human
memory isn't designed to store most of the sorts of
things that go on in moment-to-moment awareness, so if
you don't capture the details right away, you'll probably
forget something important. If gather several reflective
records after the same trigger over time, you'll get a
better idea of how widely your default responses to the

457

trigger vary.
The same goes for testing the output: To know quickly if
the intervention reliably causes the desired mental state,
you need to know what mental state it causes, and you
need to keep track of the results over time.

Responsible introspection. Responsible introspection is

a way to gain self-knowledge while bypassing the
introspection illusion. It means paying attention to
immediate experience first, and reasoning abstractly
about that data later.
We do not have direct access to the origins of our
mental states, but we do have mental states, and the
contents of those mental states aren't arbitrary. Our
experiences provide data about our patterns of thought.
To introspect responsibly, collect that data by activating
reflective attention in the presence of whatever stimulus
interests you (a thought about a new job offer, for
instance), and then writing down what you experience.
You can repeat that a few times to find out how your
reactions to the thought vary over time.
Once you have detailed first-person data that isn't
contaminated by inference and belief about belief, you
can add it to third-person observations about your past
behaviors. From there, it's relatively safe to reason

458

abstractly about problems that depend on predictions

about how you'll think and feel.

Predicting experience. Most of immediate experience is

forgotten. Most of it doesn't matter, isn't vivid, isn't
unusual, and doesn't make a lasting impression. It takes
an extra reflective effort of become aware that your
mind's doing whatever it's doing. A lot of the truth of
what it is to be a mind slips through the cracks, so our
default models of immediate experience lack crucial
information. For example, we tend to hold onto beliefs
we form and dispense with memories of what
observations led us to form those beliefs, and what
emotions colored our perceptions as we integrated
those observations.
When you have a better model of immediate experience,
you can make better predictions about how you'll think
and feel on a moment-to-moment basis in the future.
Practicing reflective attention regularly can't bring back
information you've already lost, but it can reduce
illusions about experience that result from biases of
memory.
Making a reflective record now and then is even better
than reflective attention alone, since it lets you review
data taken from many time slices all at once.

459

Reflective recording is inspired by free writing and (my

problems with) Gendlin's focusing, but it's a practice I
developed myself. To my knowledge, nobody else has tried
it yet, so I'll be very interested to hear about how it works,
or doesn't work, for you.

Here's a conversation in response to this post from

Facebook. I'll incorporate what I learned from it into the
post soon (probably), but for now, I'm putting it here
because it might clear some things up.
Malcolm: I would expect the act of writing stuff down to be
way too slow and I wouldn't be able to think things in time.
Might try this with speaking aloud and recording it as audio
(which is actually what I expected it would be, based on the
name).
Jamie:I found that attempting this slowed me right down. I
can't write, type or speak even close to the speed I notice
thoughts. Converting impressions and awareness into
words and then into movement instructions for recording
them is almost uselessly slow for stream-of-consciousness
stuff. I can sort of 'buffer' because I can sustain two mental
streams at once, but even so it's the mental equivalent of
trying to run in knee-deep water. By the time I've finished
writing something I lost awareness of 90% of the other
things I was experiencing at the same moment as whatever
it was I was writing down, and almost have to pick the next
thing to write at random.

460

On the plus side, it did make me aware of just how MUCH I

notice and immediately throw away without acting on,
including stuff I probably ought to record or remember.
Me: You're both probably trying to catch a whole lot more
than I am. I wait for a particular kind of thought when I'm
actually using this for specific things. When I'm not I pick
sort of at random with a huge bias toward stuff it's easy to
put into words.
Malcolm: Hmmm... oh! Okay, yeah, I think I have a better
sense of the structure. I think the examples you give are
kind of misleading about this, as they imply just the random
version.
Jamie: Right, so it's not a logfile, it's either a listener or a
random activity sample. That feels a lot less close to
'awesome superpower', but a great deal closer to 'physically
possible for unaugmented humans'. Your examples felt
pretty much stream-of-consciousness, so I had interpreted
it as 'log everything that seems important about a given
moment'.
Me: Yeah, I was erring on the side of not including enough
because I'm trying to learn to only say precisely what is
needed. But when I designed a series of exercises on
reflective attention, most of the point was to get to "partial
reflection", which means keeping your attention fixed on a
single category of thought (like physical sensations,
emotional sensations, reactions to another person).

461

But I expect different people to parse their experiences

differently, and I found that even for myself sans
communication with others, it helped to have identified the
most
natural
system
of
categorization
for
my
moment-to-moment experiences. The random-ish sampling
was originally just for finding those categories. It turns out
that it's also great for moving into partial reflective
recording if you're having a hard time getting a particular
category in focus at first. Also, beginning with partial
reflective recording and moving out of it only when it feels
right tends to make my free writing sessions a lot more
productive a lot more quickly.
Here's my categorization of the first example in the post. (It
was edited a little to make more sense in context.)

462

Tortoise Report 1: Growing the Roses Of Success

January 08, 2015
This post is part of a year-long project for learning to install
habits of thought. For more about the tortoise skills project
itself, see the Tortoise Skills Page.
Summary
Habit: Growing the Roses Of Success
Duration: 7 Days
Success: 7/10
Trigger: The very beginning of a trapped, sinking sensation
in my stomach and chest associated with having failed.
Action: ???Magic unconscious hypnosis repair???
Result: Upon encountering the beginning of a slight sinking
sensation associated with a failure, I no longer get dragged
into counterproductive emotions. Instead, I feel nonchalant
interest in what went wrong, an impulse to weigh whether
it's worth trying to repair completely, and a motivation to
make any cheap repairs that are available immediately.
Strategy Updates
Here's what I've learned over the past week about habits
and installing them, and what I plan to do about it.
The current version of the installation procedure works
best for a narrower class of habits than I recognized at

463

first.
Next actions:

1. Pin down more precisely what kinds of habits it's

good for.

2. Look for small tweaks to the procedure that might

accommodate more kinds of habits.

3. Consider investing in large changes or multiple

procedures.

I need to dig into Rule 1. ("Aim: I will endeavor for every

habit I train to be the one I most desperately need at that
time.") I meant for it to be an often unattainable ideal to
strive for, something to keep my from getting distracted
and losing my purpose, and not so much a "rule" that I
must adhere to perfectly. My intuitive feel for what I need
most isn't turning out to be quite as strong as I
expected, and I'm experiencing some analysis paralysis.
Next actions:

464

1. Make a list of possible criteria for choosing the next

habit.

2. Write it up as a blog post if it goes well.

Offline training should definitely be more streamlined.

How best to use my offline training time will vary a lot by
context and mood, but I found myself wishing I had a list
of questions posted in front of me to guide me.
(Terminology: "Offline training" comes from machine
learning. Online learning updates mappings when each
new data point comes in. It's good when data become
available sequentially. Applied to humans, we call this
"learning on the fly". Offline learning techniques are
good when a large batch of data is available at once.
Cramming for an exam is a human example. What I'm
calling "offline training" in this context is whatever I
decide to do when I sit down for a few minutes to look at
all the relevant facts at once.)
Next actions:

1. Brainstorm a list of offline training questions

465

2. Pick the best ones and make a list to post in the

zendo

3. Write a blog post about offline habit training (pending

feedback from at least one more installation)

4. Offline meta sessions (to reflect on and strategize about

the overall procedure) aren't built into the current
installation procedure. In retrospect, it's obvious they
should be.

Next actions:
1. Decide what the schedule should be for meta strategy
sessions

2. Make a list of questions to guide meta strategy

sessions

Log
12/31/2014

466

[This first entry is all prep work. It's probably more detailed
than future reports on prep work will be.]
My best guess at the skill I most desperately need right now
is resilience: the ability to recover rapidly, especially from
failure; to bend without breaking.
Be able to generate concrete examples of successes and
failures to apply the skill.
An example of successful application: Every time
another approach to teaching epistemic rationality failed,
CFAR adjusted and tried something else, rather than
giving up on teaching epistemic rationality.
An example of failure to apply the skill: I got a C on my
very first logic test in college. Rather than correct my
mistakes and study for the next test, I was crushed and
spent several days agonizing over whether to drop the
class. Complete failure would have been dropping the
class at that point (which I didn't and went on to excel in
highly advanced logic courses), but perfect resilience
would have prevented any waste of time or energy.

If a skill requires multiple habits, train them serially, and

repeat step 1 for each individual habit.
This skill seems to require several habits. It's difficult to

467

pin them all down, but I have at least identified a few. I'll
start with "growing the roses of success": feeling
emotions in line with knowledge that my failure has been
educational.
For every big mistake you make be grateful!
That mistake you'll never make again!
Every shiny dream that fades and dies,
Generates the steam for two more tries!
So when it gets distressing it's a blessing!
Onward and upward you must press!
From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success!
An example of growing the roses of success is burning a
batch of cookies and feeling happy to have learned that
my new oven is hotter than my old oven. Failure to grow
the roses of success in the same situation would be
sulking about having burnt the cookies.

Clearly define at least one high-quality trigger for the

proposed action before beginning to train that habit.
When I imagine burning the cookies, the deciding
moment that splits the success worlds from the failure
worlds is the moment when I'm surprised to find smoke
and blackened cookies after opening the oven door and I
feel a trapped, sinking sensation in my stomach and
chest. In the failure worlds, I let that feeling drag me into

468

an inescapable pit of negative emotions. In the success

worlds, I respond to it in a way that shifts my focus from
the badness of my mistake to the goodness of
information. (Figuring out exactly what intervention will
cause that shift comes later.)
Imagining other concrete examples produces the same
results, so my first guess at the right trigger is "the
experience of unpleasant surprise at my mistake
accompanied by a trapped sinking sensation in my
stomach and chest". Therefore, if I encounter that
experience, then I will activate reflective attention to
reveal further details and inconsistencies with my
prediction.

That's it for the prep work!

1/2/2015
I'm not encountering enough instances of my trigger. It
happened once yesterday, and I didn't catch it fast enough.
That means it's time for...
Seek opportunities to practice.
I will now study the experience of realizing I've made a
mistake by playing 2048.

469

Results: Oh man, awesome side effects.

1. I'm using my knitting counter, and since that's

already a conditioned reinforcer, I'm automatically
coming to associate noticing I've made a mistake
with positive feelings. I didn't even notice before how
much I direct my attention away from my own
mistakes. I wonder if I could break that habit even
faster using a primary reinforcer.

2. This is quickly training me to notice the difference

between an error of judgement and a random "shit
happens", since I only get to click the counter for
errors of judgement.

1. This is the best game of 2048 ever. I'm rewarded in the

natural way by the game when I don't fuck up, and I'm
rewarded by the habit training every time I notice I've
fucked up. I'm literally laughing out loud at my fuckups.
This is so much fun. I love rule 4.
My count for today is 38 so far, so I'm clearly in the
middle of...

470

2. Train triggers before actions.

I actually updated my trigger partway though without
being foveally aware of it. I think my first hypothesis for
the trigger was wrong. The surprise at my mistake and
the dread/sinking sensation are not simultaneous. In
fact, the dread/sinking sensation isn't even my usual
response to noticing I've made a mistake. My usual
response actually seems to be to try to ignore the
mistake. It's only when I fail to ignore it that I experience
the dread.
Trying to ignore a mistake feels like trying to avoid eye
contact. I even seem to be more likely to make another
mistake immediately afterward, because I act hastily. I
think maybe I'm trying to distract myself from the first
mistake, though it actually feels more like I'm trying to
distract the world, like if I move fast enough the world
won't notice I messed up and it won't count. Same as the
five second rule when I dropped food on the floor as a
kid.
Updated trigger: The sensation of surprise directed at
something I recognize as my mistake, independent of the
sinking sensation or even the sensation of trying not to
look at the mistake.

471

1/4/2015
I feel like I'm doing something wrong, but I'm a bit sleep
deprived and I'm having a lot of trouble concentrating
enough to work out what it is.
It might be that I'm practicing the wrong thing. My current
trigger is "the sensation of surprise directed at something I
recognize as my mistake", but I updated to that in an
attempt to not ignore my mistakes, which wasn't the
original goal. The original goal was to cut back on despair
in response to mistakes and promote something like
satisfaction and curiosity. It's only the very tiny mistakes
that I'm able to ignore anyway, so although not ignoring tiny
mistakes is an important skill (one I'm adding to my
wishlist), I don't think it's part of resilience, and I don't think
it's The Most Important Thing for me to learn right now.
The times when I've made and noticed mistakes on my own
so far this week, I've not felt the despair-type feelings that I
flagged as problematic before. Like when I accidentally left
my knitting counter upstairs this morning. I just felt "oops"
and maybe a tiny bit of frustration, then I ran upstairs to
retrieve it. That's all there was to it. That kind of feeling
doesn't have the potential to get in my way.
The only times in the past few days when I've felt the
problematic thing I flagged have been while interacting with

472

other people. And I don't think I clicked the knitting counter

for any of those, because they weren't straightforwardly
mistakes. In retrospect, some of them actually were things I
perceived as evidence of mistakes, but I didn't notice that at
the time: for example, when I made a Facebook update and
people responded with apparently off-topic comments,
indicating I hadn't made my point clearly.
I'm thinking the problem is closely related to inadequacy in
the eyes of other people, not so much myself. It definitely
feels like every time I've felt big anti-resilience emotions, it
has been because other people have not responded the way
I hoped for them to. It's a little confusing, because if I
perceive a failure myself that I don't believe others perceive
as a failure, I still feel the despair thing, but only if other
people are somehow involved. If I write a blog post that
includes a mistake people criticize, I feel it, and if I write a
blog post that people like but don't interpret as I intended, I
also feel the thing. I mostly don't feel the thing if I make a
private mistake that nobody else finds out about.
Updated trigger: I think I'll go back to noticing the trapped,
sinking sensation in my stomach and chest, and I'll seek
opportunities to practice by reading critiques of things I've
written.
1/6/2015

473

1. Test a variety of actions if required.

This sometimes happens. It's a little inconvenient given
that I wanted to use this first habit to demonstrate in
quite a bit of detail how the habit installation process
works. But for me, at least, it happens at least half the
time.
Sometimes, without my conscious direction, my brain
skips the "test a variety of actions" part. I jump from "ok,
I mostly have a handle on my default response to the
trigger, and I can notice it reliably" to "have the preferred
response to the trigger instead", with no purposeful
intervention at all beyond simply learning to notice the
trigger. In this case, it's happening even without me
having become consciously aware of what exactly my
preferred response to the trigger is.
The new response isn't exactly like I predicted. What I
imagined originally was more of a focused curiosity and
maybe a triumphant feeling similar in intensity to the
sinking sensation from before. Instead, I've replaced the
trapped feeling and sinking sensation with a nonchalant
interest in what went wrong, an impulse to weigh
whether it's worth trying to repair completely, and a
motivation to make any cheap repairs that are available
immediately. In retrospect, that does seem like the best
emotional response for producing the most desirable
behavioral responses. I suppose I was imagining

474

overpowering the negative reaction with a positive one.

This seems better.

I still need to stick with it for a few days before starting on

another habit to make sure I don't lose the ability to notice
the trigger, but at the moment it looks like the problem has
mostly been fixed, and the new habit mostly installed.
The main problem when I perform an unconscious
intervention like this is that if in the future it fails to work, I
won't know what levers to manipulate to get it working
again. Since I don't know that that issue will actually arise
and I can just take a few days to implement step six if it
does, I declare this habit 80/20d. I'll move on to my next
habit on Thursday (a week from the start date) if I don't
encounter more problems.
1/8/2015
I'm not entirely satisfied with the installation of this habit
because the intervention (whatever it is) hasn't been tested
harshly enough for me to feel confident that the problem's
mostly fixed. But I also have a feeling it's not quite the right
kind of habit for this process. Instances of the trigger that
are high enough intensity to thoroughly test my progress
are quite context dependent, and aren't happening
frequently enough for training on the scale of one week to a
month. I suspect I either need habits with more frequent

475

triggers, I need to be more opportunistic by picking habits

with triggers that will be frequent in contexts I predict will
occur in the near future, or I need to change the procedure
to accommodate less frequent triggers, perhaps by training
more than once habit at a time. Or perhaps I should have a
tiered system, where at any given time I'm training one
high-frequency habit, one mid-frequency habit, and one
low-frequency habit. I'll think on it.
The meta stuff is really important, especially this early on,
so I'm going to hold off on choosing a new habit for a few
days while I work out how to respond to problems that have
arisen so far.
2/9/2015
One month since this post, and things seem to be holding
steady with Growing the Roses. I fairly rarely notice the
trigger consciously (maybe once a week), but my
experience of small failures has been awfully smooth
sailing. (Performing the desired action without noticing the
trigger consciously is part of the goal. Noticing is essential
for training, but mastery of a habit means completely
effortless, automatic performance.) My failures are notable
for their lack of salience, so the change isn't obvious when
I'm not reflecting on it, but my memory of the past month is
not punctuated by failures, and that's definitely new. I still
haven't encountered anything I consider a really big failure.
I'll update again with a full report on my experience of it as
soon as one happens.

476

Brienne's Workflow
February 01, 2015
I've dramatically improved my workflow over the past
month or so. I don't expect this exact formula to work for
you, but working is *so* much more fun now that I feel like
I've got to share, just in case somebody gets a small part of
the benefit from one of these ideas.
Here is the formula I use today. I added each thing in
succession, and each one improved my experience of
working immediately and obviously.
1. Pomodoros. The pomodoro technique is a work schedule
with 25 minute blocks separated by short breaks. I've
worked in pomodoros off and on for a couple years, but
until now I've used them on an as-needed basis. They've
always been good for getting me through highly aversive
work, but they've never felt like a boost to projects I don't
mind working on. I seem to be pretty good at focusing and
not procrastinating by default, so I think I had less to gain
from pomodoros than a lot of people. For example, my
instinctive response when I first heard about browser
extensions that block distracting websites during work
periods was "...why don't you just close those tabs?". (I
understand why, it's just not how my brain works.) Pomos
in a social context, though, have proved powerful for me.

477

2. The Less Wrong Study Hall is a Tinychat room where

people work together silently, webcam broadcasting
optional, in extended pomodoros of 32 minutes with 8
minute breaks. Chatting and being social during break
times is encouraged, as are bragging about what you
accomplished in the past pomo, seeking moral support
during difficult projects, encouraging others, and
announcing your intentions for the next work block. The
password is lw. Social conventions for the room can be
found here.
Breaks sometimes get a little silly:
I tried this expecting it not to work. I was really just curious,
because I'd never tried anything like it. I'm a very
introverted person, and when I had social anxiety I found
video chat completely terrifying. I also don't tend to
respond well to punishment-based motivation methods, and
the original idea behind the LWSH was to create a sense of
accountability to others who are watching you work (or
something like that).
Instead, it seems to have restored a positive social element
that I've been craving since I left college. Maybe I like
people after all, but only when they're being quiet,
productive, highly predictable, and completely independent
of me. Those things happen all the time in libraries, coffee
shops, and dorm lounges--at least on college
campuses--but I've not encountered the combination in
many other contexts.

478

Hanging out in a video chat room also seems to be breaking

down my negative associations with video chat that
accumulated during the years of social anxiety. I scheduled
a Skype meeting the other day with zero discomfort, and I'm
still not worried about it even though it's happening
tomorrow. I also participated in a CFAR alum Google
hangout a while back, and didn't feel even the tiniest twinge
of anxiety.
3. Ambient sounds of rain, thunder, and a coffeeshop (with
the voices as indistinct murmurs). I went through a a list of
ambient websites trying out each, just because I happened
upon the list and was curious, and found Rainy Cafe to be
the best for me. It turned out to be on too short a loop, so
I've switched to A Soft Murmur, which offers all three types
of sounds as options to combine. (I think the loop here
might also be too short, and I need to look for more
alternatives, or maybe make my own track.) I've tried each
of these sounds individually, and the combination works
best. Like with the LWSH, I was surprised that the coffee
shop sounds were a plus. They seem to increase my sense
of comradery in the LWSH. When I shut off the cafe sounds,
I suddenly feel slightly lonely, and work becomes less fun.

479

4. Complice is Malcolm Ocean's productivity startup. It

targets a type of person I am not, so it didn't really work for
me when I first tried it. I imagine it's great if you have
trouble staying focused on your goals, acting in line with
your priorities, and not procrastinating. I guess you could
say I stand to gain from productivity vitamins, not
productivity medicine.
But when he added Less Wrong Study Hall integration, that
feature turned out to be a big boost for me. (He plans to
make other similar rooms eventually.) It added to my

480

experience of the LWSH more precise and automatic timing,

the ability to see what other people are working on and to
show others what I'm working on, a simple to-do list, and a
visual reminder of how many pomos I've completed. Here's
the LWSH as it appears in Complice at the moment.

5. Chocolate at the beginning of each pomo break. I tried a

few different kinds, and of those the best for this purpose
proved to be After Eight Mint Chocolate Thins. They have a
distinctive flavor and texture that I can tie to pomos
exclusively (unlike plain milk chocolate, which I'll encounter
in many different situations), but I'm pretty sure their
superiority is mostly about the packaging. (LOOK HOW
PRETTY!!!)

481

The result of all these things together is that I look forward

to getting to work, even if the project isn't all that
interesting. I'm usually sad to stop working. Several times
I've sat down to complete a single task, and ended up
knocking out a bunch of things it would have been fine to
do later, just because of the momentum.
Without any of these elements, I usually do about the
minimum without a lot of trouble. Procrastination and
distraction aren't big problems, but long work periods take
a lot out of me, and I'm not motivated to do more than
necessary.
My main workflow problem at this point is lunch. I don't
want to stop focusing to make or eat it. I've even stated
putting "lunch" on my to-do list and staying signed in to the
LWSH while I cook, so it feels more like food is part of work.

482

Responding To Overconfidence
February 25, 2015
Without Googling, what's your 95% confidence interval for
the longest time spent in labor? Feel free to post it in the
comments before reading on.
I just encountered this question on William MacAskill's
Facebook wall. When I looked it up, after posting my
answer, I discovered that my upper bound was off by a
factor of 10.
I was reluctant to answer the question in the first place, but
I didn't stop to examine why. It is now clear to me: When it's
revealed that I'm extremely overconfident about something,
my default response is shame and regret.
I used to respond much more strongly with shame and
regret than I do now. I recall an occurrence of this reaction
from about three years ago. The reaction was so strong that
many vivid details of the context are readily available in
memory. (Whether they're accurate is a separate question.)
Robby and I were in the the pizzeria on Kirkwood sitting at a
table by the door. It was raining. We were having bread
sticks with cheese sauce, and he asked me, "What's your
90% confidence interval for when Reverend Bayes was
born?"

483

Immediately I felt attacked and defensive. I did not know

what a confidence interval was at the time, so he spent a
few minutes explaining it to me. After that, he wanted me to
answer, and I was so scared. I don't remember why, but I
remember the feeling very well. I was terrified that I'd be
way off, and that this test would reveal my embarrassing
mistake. I answered anyway because I'd recently
discovered Lesswrong, so I felt that this was a kind of
question I was Supposed To answer if I wanted epistemic
improvement. (The question was actually taken from a
Lesswrong survey.) And I was definitely Supposed To know
when Bayes was born!
Sure enough, I was way off. And sure enough, the shame
flooded over me like a bucket of ice water. I felt terrible, and
I regretted answering the question.
A lot of things have happened in the intervening time to
lesson the shame response. I don't know what most of them
are, but watching people I respect readily and casually test
their predictions and reveal their mistakes has surely been
part of it. Curing social anxiety also contributed, obviously.
It's not been enough, though. When I answered the labor
question, I still felt enough of the shame to overshadow the
recalibration going on beneath it. I did feel the recalibration
as well, but it was subtle enough by comparison that if I
hadn't been training mindfulness of this sort of mental
motion in the recent past, I'd have missed it. And I certainly
didn't catch the details.

484

That's a problem. I can't optimize a process I'm never aware

of in real time. It doesn't matter how well I understand
Bayesian updating when some other sensation is drowning
out all my opportunities to apply my understanding.
You might think, "Ah, but those negative feelings are useful,
because if you're punished for being overconfident then
you might be less confident in the future!" What actually
happens is that I'm less likely to put myself in situations
that would reveal my overconfidence if it existed. Which
shouldn't be surprising from a behavioral psychology
perspective: The immediately preceding action was "answer
calibration question", not "form a belief and establish a
level of confidence in it".
If I were going to train a better reaction to calibration
opportunities properly, I'd spend a few days studying my
default reaction and becoming as mindful of it as possible.
I'd also examine whether my default reaction suggested an
emotional need of some sort that the optimal response
ought to address, especially if my reaction were as strong
now as it was three years ago. Only then would I begin
considering possible interventions.
But this particular reaction seems to be in a class of habits
that are very important but whose triggers are much too
rare for the current version of the Tortoise Skills installation
procedure. So instead, I'm going to try doing an abbreviated
version of the procedure in case it turns out that I can get
marginal improvements quickly from isolated cases like

485

this.
My best guess at how I'd rather respond to discovering I'm
extremely overconfident is about the same as the response
I learned to have to failures. I'd like to feel nonchalant
interest in my overconfidence. Further, I'd like that interest
to inspire targeted curiosity about the cause of the
overconfidence, and increased sensitivity to similar
contexts or patterns of thought that might signal severe
overconfidence if I encounter them when forming or
considering other beliefs.
But the most important part is just letting go of the thing
that drags me down into counterproductive emotions. A
flavor of wu wei, maybe, of fluidity. My brain's pretty good,
really, when I can keep from getting in its way. If I can just
stop doing the stupid thing, I often don't need a brilliant
solution on top of it.
I don't know how I do that "letting go of the
dragging-downward" thing, but I do know that I've learned
to do it at least once before. I'll plan to imagine Eliezer
discovering overconfidence and his usual response, as a
reminder that other responses are possible, in case I need
some extra help.
So, here's the new trigger-action plan, which I will not train
but will instead simply intend and await: If I notice that my
overconfidence has been revealed, then I will loosen my
grip on the downward-dragging sensations and direct my

486

attention instead to even the tiniest sensation of reflective

interest. If I have trouble with that, I will imagine how Eliezer
would react in my place.

487

Tortoise Report 2: Fluidity

March 05, 2015
Summary
Habit: Fluidity
Duration: 35 Days
Success: 5/10
Trigger: A clinging-grasping sensation plus fear of a
rending-jarring sensation associated with anticipation of
interruption,
or
a
clinging-grasping-rending-jarring
sensation all at once associated with interruptions or
violations of plans.
Action: Run my simulation past the desire/reality
comparison to answer the question, "How should I respond
to this?", then perform a small relinquishment-like flowing
motion to make that response more natural than continuing
as though the interruption didn't exist.
Result:
The easiest result to pinpoint is that I no longer experience
anxiety about anticipated interruptions or plan violations, or
if I do they're very mild and brief. I might be spending more
time on contingency plans than is optimal, since my new
response is "and what will I do if that happens?", but it's

488

still a dramatic improvement.

I also experience very little discomfort from actual
interruptions and plan violations beyond what seems to me
to reflect damage done by the interruption. If I'm in the
middle of solving a puzzle when my phone rings, I
experience brief clinging-like displeasure at the expectation
that it will be difficult to pick up where I left off, or that the
new object of attention won't be as fun as the one I've had
to abandon, but the rending-jarring sensation that once was
like nails on a chalkboard is now almost entirely absent.
I took two points off of my score because when I'm very
tired and stressed, I still have anti-fluidity reactions, which
are about half as frequent and about half as intense as
before. The other three points represent my estimation of
the distance between my proficiency with fluidity under
normal conditions and complete mastery of this skill.
Interactions With Previous Habits
I think I've gained a generalized resilience skill, so this
seems a good time to talk about how I distinguish cognitive
skills from cognitive habits.
When I say "skill", I'm emphasizing performance, the things
that happen in the outside world as a result of what you can
do with your mind. By "skill" I mean "a capacity to influence
the outside world in certain ways".

489

If you are skilled in traditional bowyery, you can turn

lengths of wood into efficient bows that fire arrows without
breaking. If you are skilled in epistemic callibration, you can
turn beliefs about the world into predictions that turn out to
be true about as often as you expect them to.
When I say "habit", I'm emphasizing mental motions, the
things you do with your mind, regardless of what might
happen outside of your mind as a result. Specifically, I
mean the thoughts and feelings that fire as automatic
reflexes in response to stimuli.
In part, cognitive habits constitute cognitive skills.
[This bit ended up being a whole lot longer than planned. I'll
post an in-depth discussion of cognitive skills vs. habits of
thought in the next few days.]
Notes On the Installation Procedure
Due to the getting sick, moving, officiating a wedding, and
getting sick again, all in rapid succession, I was far less
careful and reflective this time than the last. After my first
success in responding well to the trigger, I stopped using
the knitting counter almost completely, and engaged in no
offline training at all. By "engaged in no offline training", I
mean that I didn't set aside any time to think about the
project, didn't write about it, didn't meditate on it, and didn't
artificially create rapid-fire opportunities to practice. All I did
was become slightly reflective when I noticed something

490

that felt like it might be the trigger, and respond with

whatever felt like it might be the thing I'd trained myself to
do. That went on for about three weeks.
I'm taking this as evidence that I reach a point of
diminishing returns after I start to put effort into things
besides noticing triggers I've identified (where by "noticing"
I mean "entering reflective attention"). I'm even wondering
whether merely being aware of my tiny mental mistakes as
mistakes while they're happening will lead to automatic
experimentation with responses regardless of whether I've
done any planning or whether I have spare cycles to think
hard about what's happening as it's going on. If I can get
most of the benefit of this procedure just from deliberate
noticing, that would be excellent.
I'm going to test that with my next habit. I'll do the usual
things up front to prepare for training, but after that I'll just
practice noticing and see what happens.
Next Up
The next skill I want to work on has something to do with
compassion. I think that with resilience greatly
strengthened, my new bottleneck has to do with how
difficult I find it to convince System 1 that other people
actually exist as people, rather than as non-sentient meat
puppets.

491

This is not coming from a place of "it's good to be

compassionate", but from a place of "my ability to learn and
grow is severely limited by my lack of interest in/enjoyment
of what would otherwise be opportunities to learn from
others, support my mental health through socialization, and
strengthen the people I regularly interact with in ways that
clearly advance my values".
I don't yet have a concrete understanding of what this skill
is exactly, in terms of what influence I want to have over the
world - let alone what specific cognitive habits will be at the
core of it. Reporting on that and planning the next part of
my training will be an upcoming post.
Log
1/23-24/2015
For Round 2, Im going to tackle a specific kind of cognitive
inflexibility.
Ive long been very dependent on routines. When I have a
plan or an expectation, I don't tend to handle violations of it
very well. I don't like unexpected things happening, at least
when they entail a change of plans. I think the next step in
acquiring Resilience is becoming much more flexible in this
respect.
(The previous step, Growing the Roses Of Success, was
learning to respond more productively to failures or
mistakes.)

492

I did a few tests of executive function via Quantified Mind to

make sure there arent large problems there that I should be
aware of, and my scores look pretty ok to me. I dont have
data on the general population, but none of the tasks was
super difficult, anyway. I dont think this is a totally general
cognitive inflexibility issue. I think its fairly isolated, and
that Ill see results just from learning to apply my
pre-existing capacity for flexibility to the weak areas.
If that happens to end up improving my overall executive
functioning, maybe Ill see it when I repeat the tests later. I
doubt thatll happen, but I might as well try it.
Time for Prep Work!
Be able to generate concrete examples of successes and
failures to apply the skill.

Example of failure: I'm writing right now, and I

planned to spend this pomodoro writing. In fact, in
terms of my emotions, my plan is to continue writing
indefinitely, and anything that stops that before my
plan naturally changes will upset me. But I'm hungry.
I know that I'm going to have to stop writing to eat.
Possibly even in the middle of this pomo. And I don't
like that. It's absolutely necessary that I eat. It's
obviously a good idea. I will do better work later if I

493

eat. But current me's plans will have to change, and

that hurts.
Preferred outcome: When I notice Im hungry and that
my plan to keep writing is not optimal, I feel [positive
things Im not sure of yet], which smoothly motivates
me to adopt the new plan of eating before returning to
work.

Example of failure: I'm halfway through a cup of tea

while reading in the morning and Eliezer wakes up
and asks for breakfast. I feel a clinging grasping
rending jarring feeling, which results in irritability,
and I grudgingly make breakfast while wishing hed
stayed asleep through the end of my tea. I knew when
I made the tea that he might wake up in the middle of
it, and rather than being emotionally prepared for
that, I spent the first half of the tea mildly anxious that
Id have to change my plan. I still feel some
happiness and gratitude to be making breakfast for
him, but its overshadowed by the other thing.
Preferred outcome: I smoothly transition from tea to
breakfast without a sense of loss and get to enjoy
making breakfast without the irritability, then I reheat
the tea after breakfast and continue reading til Im
done with it (if thats still a good idea).

494

Example of failure: The instructions on the back of

the cookie mix are in Spanish and therefore have
temperatures in Celsius and measurements in grams.
My plan when I flipped over the cookie mix bag was
to find some Fahrenheit number and preheat the oven
to that, and to measure some fraction of a cup of
butter to make the dough. I was even prepared for
words like taza instead of cup. In fact, my oven is
in Celsius and my stick of butter is in grams, so the
Spanish instructions taped over the English ones are
far more convenient. But I still feel the clinging
grasping rending jarring feeling, because Celsius and
grams were not part of the plan. Metric
measurements are not The Way Things Are Supposed
To Be. (According to my immediate emotional
responses, that is. System 2 readily grants that metric
is much better and English Standard is dumb. Except
that it actually prefers base 12.)
When things are other than The Way Things Are
Supposed To Be, I feel cheated and irritable. I feel
entitled to futures that go the way I expect them to,
and when they dont go that way I feel like someone
has stolen the expected futures from me without
permission.
Preferred outcome: I see the metric measurements,
remember that theyre more useful here anyway, and
feel nothing but pleasant surprise. I dont feel pain or

495

irritability. I simply adjust.

Example of failure: I go to my favorite restaurant,

where I always order a bottle of sparkling water. But
this time, they don't have sparkling water. I
immediately feel something like, "Now my whole
experience of the meal is ruined."
Preferred outcome: I recognize an opportunity to find
out what my favorite meal taste like with a different
drink, and instead of feeling like somethings been
taken from me, I feel like Ive been given a gift.

Example of failure: I go to the store with a grocery list

that includes cheddar, and they don't have cheddar. I
feel grumpy and sort of at a loss, and I maybe dont
even buy any cheese at all. (I have actually written or
some other cheese like colby or mozzarella if they
dont have cheddar on my grocery list just to
prevent that particular outcome.)
Preferred outcome: Instead of clinging desperately to
the details of my grocery list, I consider it more like a
source of inspiration and freely depart from its
details, playfully improvising when circumstances
require.

496

1. I feel like a Taoist *wu wei* water metaphor belongs here.

The larger skill of resilience overall reminds me of
supple willow branches bending in storms without
breaking, but this kind of flexibility is a little more
specific. This isnt about storms, difficult things
happening that I need to be able to deal with. This is just
attachment to whatever I've declared the Should
Universe. Theres nothing bad or difficult about the
instructions being in Celsius when my oven is also in
Celsius. Celsius just happens to be the shape of reality,
and all of the difficulty comes from my own basically
arbitrary rigidity. In fact, I think Im going to re-name this
habit fluidity instead of flexibility to capture that.

2. If a skill requires multiple habits, train them serially, and

repeat step 1 for each individual habit.
I think this is a single habit? Probably?

3. Clearly define at least one high-quality trigger for the

proposed action before beginning to train that habit.
Ill start by learning to notice the clinging grasping
rending jarring feeling, but Ill work toward identifying
whatever precedes that so I can learn to prevent it.

497

4. Seek opportunities to practice.

I dont expect this to be necessary because of how
frequently my plans are violated. I logged seven
instances between 3PM and 7PM yesterday. But I can
always just spread out CoZE training if needed.

5. Train triggers before actions.

Clickers armed and ready. Though I logged seven
yesterday, Im officially starting this part today since I
didnt get going on it til 3PM before.

6. Test a variety of actions if required.

The default first action to try is hypnosis, since it may
happen automatically with the prep work and noticing
part. Ill start listing possible actions during offline
training when the time comes.

Maintain an offline training routine.

Here are some things offline training might include for
this habit.

498

MEA for Feeling Clearly:Ill do this if I encounter

trouble with noticing.

CoZE: Comfort Zone Expansion, aka exposure

therapy. I need to find ways to drill plan changes that
just barely make me uncomfortable.

Urge Propagation: I need to explain to System 1 why

the trigger means good things instead of bad things,
and what exactly those good things are. This will
probably help me transition to the preferred
emotional reaction, and the propagator will probably
involve water.

Responding In Advance: I havent written a blog post

about this yet because it needs more field testing. But
all I mean by responding in advance is 1)
simulating the trigger, default response, and
preferred response in detail, then 2) reasoning about
how the worlds where I end up on causal pathways
toward the preferred outcome differ from the ones
where I head toward the the default outcome. Thence
I obtain interventions to test.

1/24/2015

499

4 clicks
1/25/2015
8 clicks so far today, all retrospective, though about half
were just moments after the event.
Catching something about Eliezer's body language out of
the corner of my eye, I noticed myself anticipating an
interruption while I was reading. I had a distinct feeling of
trying to push that reality away while hiding from it,
distancing myself, like I could make it not come to be if I
hoped hard enough. (Turns out I read him wrong and he just
kept writing.)
Immediately after noticing the feeling, I felt curiosity about
what would be better to feel at that time, given that I might
indeed be interrupted but I couldn't be sure of it. How would
I prefer to respond to anticipation of interruption?
I don't have an answer yet, but my past experience
suggests that asking the question in real time is the fifth
milestone in habit installation. (Since you're probably
wondering at this point: The first milestone is using mid- or
long-term memory to notice that you missed a chance to
notice the trigger. The second is noticing you missed the
trigger while it's fresh in working memory. The third is
noticing the trigger as it's happening. The fourth is noticing
your default response to the trigger as it's happening. The
fifth is seeking a better response while the default response

500

to the trigger is happening. The sixth is testing a specific

alternative response upon noticing the trigger in real time.)
(PS I made up that list of milestones just now but it's been
swimming around in my brain for weeks slowly putting itself
together.)
1/26/2015
4 clicks, but I missed a bunch of opportunities to click.
There was an ant invasion first thing in the morning, which
put me in a bad mood and I had an awful day. I usually have
tea first thing in the morning, so this was an especially
unpleasant surprise interruption of routine. For a couple
hours after I killed most of the ants, there were stragglers I
kept having to get up to squish. I decided to only click once
for the entire ant invasion fiasco, but I definitely
experienced my trigger (the clinging grasping rending
jarring feeling)for every stray ant, and if I'd clicked for all of
them there'd have been dozens.
Also: I encountered the trigger at an epistemic update
instead of a change in plans. I wasn't sure whether to click
for that, but I cast my net wide in the early stages of training
so I clicked.
In the middle of the period where I was periodically
squishing stray ants, Eliezer figured out how to operate the
microwave correctly. I'd been making due with the
mysterious, apparently randomly spaced time settings that

501

happen when you push one button, and he discovered that

if you first set the power by pushing another button, you
can then set the time to the second. This is useful
information that makes my life easier, and he explained it to
me.
I resisted. I updated immediately, not rationalizing to
support my previous beliefs about the microwave or making
excuses for my having been wrong, but I felt the very same
clinging grasping rending jarring that I feel when something
doesn't go as planned. I felt he'd stolen something that had
belonged to me.
The epistemic version of this is definitely more dangerous
and more important to address, but I think that the
epistemic version almost never happens to me anymore. I
spent several months toward the beginning of 2013
focusing on relinquishment (qua rationalist virtue). I think it
worked, and these days I mostly only resist updates in this
way when I'm extremely irritable. I think that the planning
version is a much larger obstacle for me at this point, so I'm
not going to change focus.
Still, this is not the first time I've noticed an opportunity to
train a terribly important habit of thought whose trigger
occurs much too rarely for the current installation
procedure to work. This one happens to be really spread
out because I've already taken a lot of skillpoints in
relinquishment. But I'm sure that some crucial rationality
skills are by their very nature high impact/low frequency. My

502

model of how to train habits of thought can't be complete

until I've developed a different approach for those
longer-term habits.
The immediate practical implication of this observation is
that I need to make my trigger slightly more specific to
avoid firing at the wrong times. Now it will be a clinging
grasping rending jarring temporal feeling, so the same as
before but with a sensation of the loss of a possible future.
1/27/2015
4 clicks
1/28/2015
4 clicks
1/29/2015
4 clicks
All right, I'm not satisfied with how this is going. It's been a
week, and I'm still only clicking retrospectively. (By
"clicking retrospectively", I mean that I click when I noticed
that I missed a chance to notice the trigger.)
I cast my net wide at the beginning of clicker training, so at
first I click for all of the following:

503

1. Remembering a past event from the current day and

inferring that the trigger probably happened. Example: A
memory of preparing lunch comes to my attention. I
remember that I planned to make chicken salad, but
discovered that the lettuce had gone bad. My memory of
it isn't detailed enough to include my internal emotional
state at the time, but I think that I probably felt the
clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal feeling I'm
watching for. I click the knitting counter.

2. Remembering a past event from the current day and

knowing that the trigger happened because it's included
in the memory. Example: A memory of preparing lunch
comes to my attention. I remember that I planned to
make chicken salad, but discovered that the lettuce had
gone
bad.
I
also
remember
the
clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal sensation I
experienced upon discovering the rotten lettuce. I click
the knitting counter.

3. I reflect on the event that just happened, and discover an

instance of the trigger still hanging out in my working
memory. Example: I'm in the process of putting together
an alternate lunch plan shortly after having discovered
that the lettuce is rotten. I've switched gears and am
moving forward now instead of clinging to my violated
expectations, but when I recall the past few minutes, the

504

clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal sensation is
still fresh in my mind, and a shadow of it still colors my
immediate experience.
(In other words, I'm not still feeling it, but my attention
never fully left it as it moved from immediate sensation
to very recent memory. My thoughts about it have been
continuous. To know what this is like, try paraphrasing
the three bullet points you've read so far without
re-reading them, then try paraphrasing a paragraph of
something you read a few hours ago without re-reading
it. Detail at the level of paragraphs or sentences is
possible for information still contained in working
memory, but that level of detail seldom makes it to
long-term memory, and you'll probably have trouble
giving more than a rough outline or your overall
impression of the thing you read a few hours ago.)

4. I notice that the trigger is in the process of happening.

Example: I'm standing in front of the fridge holding the
rotten
lettuce
and
feeling
the
clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal
feeling
associated with my violated lunch plans. I notice that
what I'm feeling is the trigger I've been watching for, and
I click the knitting counter as it's happening.

505

So basically I'm still in parts one and two of clicker training

after a week. This pace is probably necessary for some
skills. I'd expect more patience to be necessary when the
triggers are especially subtle or are just barely frequent
enough for this installation procedure to be effective. But I
don't want to assume that this is such a skill when I don't
have
enough
information
yet
to
distinguish
lots-of-patience-requiring habits from habits that install
quickly when I do everything right. So I'm going to change
things and see what happens.
One of my hypotheses is that I've inadvertently trained the
trigger of remembering missed opportunities to notice the
original trigger, and that new trigger has solidified so that
it's no longer pointing me toward the experience I want to
notice. If this is what's going on, I could stop clicking for
situations of types 1 and 2 and look only for 3 and 4. If this
works, then I'll experiment with different widths of the net I
cast at the beginning of habit training for the next few
habits.
I don't expect that to work, though. I expect it to just lower
my daily clicker score to zero. But it's a cheap test so it's
what I'm going to try for tomorrow. If my clicker score is
zero I'll test the next hypothesis, and if it's one or higher I'll
keep going. If the average remains three or lower for more
three days in a row, I'll test the next hypothesis.
Hypothesis two is that the simulated subjective experience I
have stored in my brain as the trigger is insufficiently vivid,

506

so actually experiencing the thing in real time does not fire

an association with the fact of trigger-ness. If that's the
case, I should spend one to five minutes first thing in the
morning meditating on the mental state of the trigger.
Hypothesis three is that the trigger is simply too infrequent.
The cheaper intervention to try for this is regular CoZE
training, where I find a way to deliberately practice this
particular thing many times in a solid block. The more
expensive way, which I'll try if that doesn't work, is to
artificially increase the frequency of the trigger through an
intermittent form of CoZE training, which I'll need to design.
Hypothesis four is that I have the wrong trigger, and I need
to come up with a better one.
Hm, I just felt the "anticipating an interruption" thing again. I
don't have time to go into any more detail in this update
right now, but I think I just became convinced that the
clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal sensation is
actually a progression, and rending-jarring only happen
when my anticipation of interruption/plan violation turn out
to be correct. Yet the clinging-grasping is problematic and
distracting, and my automatic response to it is to force it
down. I need to examine this more carefully in the near
future.
1/30/2015
7 clicks

507

1/31/2015
5 clicks
2/1/2015
4 clicks today.
I'm catching the trigger in real-time now. I don't know if it's
because I stopped clicking retrospectively, or because I
thought a lot about it and that caused automatic vivid
simulation.
I've thought some more about the anticipation of the trigger
thing. I felt it yesterday and happened to spontaneously
respond well, specifically by running my simulation past the
thing I feared and on to the best way to respond should the
interruption happen. Having a preferred response in hand
already, I feel like I should run with it.
I think this habit has two closely related triggers, and
they're so closely related that I'm going to go ahead and try
training them simultaneously.
The first trigger is anticipation of interruption or plan
violation, and my default response to it is to think bad
things at my simulation of the interruption, feeling as
though that will prevent it from actually happening. That
feels like the clinging-grasping plus fear of the
rending-jarring.

508

The other trigger is what I've been talking about so far:

clinging-grasping-rending-jarring all at once, with a
temporal element indicating an interruption or plan violation
as opposed to a-temporal epistemic counterevidence. My
default response to that is to dwell on the differences
between what happened and what I wanted to happen,
which prolongs the rending-jarring and prevents
re-planning.
I'm going to try training these simultaneously not just
because the triggers are so similar, but because it seems
like the correct response might be the same in both cases.
New trigger-action plans:
If I feel the clinging-grasping sensation with fear of
rending-jarring in the future, then I will run my simulation
past the feared event to answer the question, "How should I
respond to that?"
If I feel the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring all at once,
then I will run my simulation past the present moment's
anticipation/reality comparison to answer the question,
"How should I respond to this?"
I could spend some extra off-line training time trying to pin
down what precise mental motions will be required, but it
seems like just trying it without worrying about how it'll play
out avoids premature optimization.

509

2/2/2014
1 click.
2/3/2014
2 clicks.
2/4/2014
3 clicks.
Ants have been an ongoing battle here, as you may recall
from my entry on Jan. 26th. I can keep them out, for the
most part, as long as I spray a new line of Raid across the
porch the moment I see an ant inside. If I fail to do that, the
whole colony invades my kitchen while I sleep. I was
spraying every two days for a while, and then they stopped
for a whole month, and recently they've started again.
I was in the middle of a yin yoga session just now when I
noticed an ant on the floor. I felt the trigger for an
opportunity to practice fluidity--the clinging, grasping,
rending, and jarring all at once--but before it could really get
going, I successfully responded with the action I planned
three
days
ago.
"If
I
feel
the
clinging-grasping-rending-jarring all at once, then I will run
my
simulation
past
the
present
moment's
anticipation/reality comparison to answer the question,
'How should I respond to this?'"

510

That plan included a prediction I hadn't verified in real time,

but I did indeed experience two simultaneous
simulations--the version of the present moment where
there's no ant and I continue my yoga session, and the
actual present moment where there's an ant and I have to
decide what to do about it--and there was definitely a feeling
of holding one against the other. There was something else
I didn't predict, though, which was a movement toward
something like rationalization. I felt myself checking to see
if I could get away with behaving as though the preferred
version of the present moment were the real one. (The
"default response" I'd noted previously was just the looping
present moment comparison.)
It was actually that rationalization-like movement that let me
follow through with the trigger-action plan quite quickly. It
was similar to the trigger for a habit I've already trained,
namely relinquishment of false beliefs in the face of counter
evidence, and the motion of fluidity is similar to
relinquishment. So I ran my simulation past the present
moment and toward the action I needed to take. It ouput
"pause the yoga, kill the ant, spray the Raid, return to
yoga".
That had an effect almost identical to "leaving a line of
retreat". The epistemic version of leaving a line of
retreat--visualizing the world as it would be if the thing you
hope isn't true turned out to be true--makes fair assessment
of probabilities easier. In this instrumental case, simulating
what I needed to do, on its own terms without comparison

511

to the Should Universe wherein abide My Plans, meant that

a tiny little relinquishment-like flowing motion was enough
to cause virtually painless follow through.
I think I've actually implemented this trigger-action plan
successfully a few times now, but I've been sick and thus
awfully low on concentration for the past few days. This is
probably the first one accompanied by sufficient reflectivity
for recording. I think that mastery of this skill probably
entails zero pain in follow-through. I'm not sure if that's a
realistic goal or not, but at this stage I might as well shoot
for it. But I expect an 80/20 situation again.
It's interesting, this skill is exactly non-attachment as
discussed in Zen, or at least its instrumental form. Not that
it's a Zen-specific thing in Buddhism; I'm pretty sure this is
also the heart of the third Theravada perfection, nekkhama,
"renunciation". But it's always discussed, praised,
illustrated. If there are instructions for training this specific
thing, I've never seen them written down, nor heard them in
a dharma talk. Despite having read about non-clinging and
non-attachment over and over again across several years of
Buddhist study, both academic and religious-ish, practical
experience is so important for recognizing this kind of habit
that I had no idea I was planning to train something I'd
heard of before until I was actually in the middle of training
it. I remain oh so curious about how targeted the curriculum
for monks turns out to be in real life. There's a gulf between
theory and wall-sitting, and I'm less convinced by the day
that "more sitting" is in fact the most efficient bridge.

512

2/5/2014
2 clicks
2/25/2015
Formal training of fluidity got a little bumpy. I moved home
from Chile, officiated a wedding, and got sick, without a
break in between. My new context also caused me to wear
different clothes, which made keeping the knitting counter
on me all the time much more difficult. As a result, my
training has been a lot less reflective.
But it's still been happening, and I'm sort of grateful for the
opportunity to see what happens when I get the ball rolling
and then let my attention stray elsewhere.
The most interesting result has been that fluidity and
growing the roses have both blended and expanded to
create what feels like a generalized resilience skill, which
was indeed the goal, and I'm amazed that it's happened so
quickly. It doesn't feel complete, but it's a tremendous
improvement.
The expansion started out with clicking accidentally for
growing the roses instead of fluidity. Then I started
forgetting which was which, and just taking the right action
instead of stopping to sort out which habit I was practicing.
Then
I
started
clicking
for
triggers
that
are
phenomenologically similar to one of the habits, and

513

intuiting the correct response as an extrapolation from

fluidity and growing the roses. Now I seem to be practicing
a spirit of resilience mostly unreflectively.
I think what's going on is that I've unconsciously tuned into
a proto-trigger for every sort of interaction with the Should
Universe. I think this because I'm responding differently to
things that look like my established triggers from the
outside, but are apparently completely different from the
inside, at least once they've been going long enough for me
to have become consciously aware of them.
For example, it used to be that when Eliezer delegated a
task to me and I caused an outcome he didn't want, I would
feel inadequate and sad, like I'd let him down and he must
be disappointed in me. (Like maybe he asked me to make
dinner and though I thought I did a perfectly good job, he
likes his steaks medium well instead of medium rare, and I
didn't know that. Just a toy example.) Often he'd have to
either put up with the outcome he got or seek a different
outcome himself, because I'd lost the ability to think
productively about the issue.
Although from the outside that looks like a concurrence of
the trigger for growing the roses (it's an instance of a
personal failure, sort of) with the trigger for fluidity (I
expected him to express satisfaction with the outcome, and
he didn't), it *feels* different from both from the inside.
Phenomenologically, my old default response here was a
highly social emotion that was all about inadequacy, not a

514

"surprise and trapped sinking sensation" or a "clinging

grasping rending jarring sensation".
Since I've been back, I've noticed that my new response is
to say, "Ok, how would you like it instead?" and to feel
motivated to cause the other outcome. Note that that
response is also different from either of the trained
responses. The trained response to "surprise and trapped
sinking" is nonchalant interest in what went wrong, an
impulse to weigh whether it's worth trying to repair
completely, and a motivation to make any cheap repairs that
are available immediately. This is more like, "that's ok, I'll
try something else or do it over again, even if it's sort of
costly, 'cause that's what needs doing!". The trained
response to "clinging grasping rending jarring" is to
continue my simulation past the reality/preference
comparison to play through "how should I respond to
that?". I'm not noticing a "how should I respond to that?"
query, just a complete automatic re-direction. (I notice that
something is not quite right about the things I say in this
paragraph, but I'm too sleepy to figure it out right now.)
Similar things have happened for "feeling grumpy about
having to do something that I don't want to do" and
"spending lots of energy on wishing that the world were
otherwise even when the way it is is exactly how I expected
it to be". I'm not sure I even *had* the thought "WHY DID I
HAVE TO CATCH A COLD RIGHT BEFORE OFFICIATING
THIS WEDDING?!" which is astonishing in retrospect.

515

So I think there must be a should-universe sensation that's

so tiny I'm not even reflectively aware of it yet, and a
fluidity-like mental motion that's so tiny I'm not aware of
that either, and practicing a couple of habits that contain
each of these was sufficient to train the fluidity-like thing in
response to the should-universe thing as a generalized
resilience skill.
This leads to meeting a wide range of adversities with far
more flexibility and grace than I could have imagined just
three months ago. It all feels very aikido: "Don't get in the
way, just redirect momentum."
I feel like I'm at about 5/10 with resilience, so I have as far to
go as I've come so far if I'm right about that. But the ball's
still rolling, and it looks at this point like I'll keep improving
regardless of whether I'm training formally.

516

Ancient Earth Celebrates HPMOR

March 10, 2015
On March 14th, 2015, Eliezer Yudkowsky will post the final
chapter of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. If
you've not read it, now would be an especially good time to
start. If you have, you might want to join one of the many
HPMOR Wrap Parties organized all over the world in
celebration. I was asked to share a story at the Berkeley
Wrap Party of how HPMOR has impacted my life, so if you
plan to be there, you might want to hold off on reading this
yourself. It does not contain specific spoilers for the book.
Even though I thought I wanted to be an an astronomer or a
cosmologist growing up; even though my dad taught me to
chart the movements of Jupiter's moons when I was ten;
even though I read classic science fiction with first contact,
generation ships, and interstellar empires; even though my
family's trip to visit the VLA Radio Astronomy Observatory
in Nevada was practically a religious pilgrimage for me;
even so, the stars have always been abstractions. I didn't
know that, of course. I understood what the stars were,
intellectually, and I thought I understood what they meant.
But when I looked up at the sky, they were still little holes in
a great black dome to my emotions.
To put it mildly, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
has been a powerful catalyst in my life. I read it for the first
time about two and a half years ago, and I haven't the time

517

to summarize all that's happened since then. But I think I

can tell you what, specifically, began it all: HPMOR made
me feel the meaning of the stars.
I was at my dad's house in the middle of the country in
Southern Indiana. I'd been reading the Humanism arc, and
I'd gotten to about chapter 47. It was my first read-through,
so I'd not slept in a while, and I'd reached the point where
my eyes just couldn't focus on the page any longer. It was
3AM. As my mind was in no state for sleep, I went outside
for some fresh air, and I sat down at the picnic table and
poured a glass of cider. I listened to the crickets and
peeping frogs, and watched the fireflies glittering at the
edge of the forest.
And then I looked up - and if I'd not been sitting down, I would have fallen over.
What I saw was the Milkey Way, only it wasn't above me. I
wasn't looking up at all. I was on its outskirts looking in.
And I suddenly felt, as surely as the ground beneath my
feet, that I was stuck to the surface of a giant rock covered
in trees and bugs and people, falling forever around a star.
And although I knew the lights were ancient, I felt I was
seeing the future. Over there - right there, I could point
straight at it! - across the terrifying empty distance I'd never
really tried to comprehend, was a future home of our
civilization. I felt that the stars, that night, were not pretty
pinpricks in a black velvet dome, but beacons blazing

518

across the cold and dark, calling from across the centuries.
And I knew it is up to us, the original inhabitants of Ancient
Earth, to answer.
I knew, then, that I would never again see the night sky the
way I had in the past. What I did not yet know is that I'd
never see anything else the same way, either.

519

The Simulation Calibration Formulation

May 06, 2015
It's a fairly common practice among rationalists I'm familiar
with to train epistemic calibration by making predictions,
quantifying their confidence in those predictions, tracking
their success rates, and betting actual money with each
other along the way. The idea is that with repeated practice,
you'll eventually get a gut sense that "sensation x", which
you used to associate with "80% certainty", actually occurs
more reliably in the presence of 60% probability predictions
than 80% probability predictions. That is, 60% of the time
when you feel "80% certain", the prediction comes true, and
this eventually cause that to sensation to feel like 60%
certainty instead of 80% certainty.
I'm going to call this approach "the observation correlation
calibration formulation" (because I can). [The Credence
Game] (http://acritch.com/credence-game/) allows rapid-fire
execution of the the observation correlation calibration
formulation.
But there's a second approach to epistemic calibration that
I don't hear people talk about so much, and I think at this
point in my development, it's more valuable to me.
From Luke's summary of :

520

"Suppose youre asked to give a 90% CI for the year in

which Newton published the universal laws of gravitation,
and you can win $1,000 in one of two ways:
1) You win $1,000 if the true year of publication falls within
your 90% CI. Otherwise, you win nothing.
2) You spin a dial divided into two pie slices, one covering
10% of the dial, and the other covering 90%. If the dial lands
on the small slice, you win nothing. If it lands on the big
slice, you win $1,000.
If you find yourself preferring option #2, then you must
think spinning the dial has a higher chance of winning you
$1,000 than option #1. That suggest your stated 90% CI isnt
really your 90% CI. Maybe its your 65% CI or your 80% CI
instead. By preferring option #2, your brain is trying to tell
you that your originally stated 90% CI is overconfident.
If instead you find yourself preferring option #1, then you
must think there is more than a 90% chance your stated
90% CI contains the true value. By preferring option #1,
your brain is trying to tell you that your original 90% CI is
under confident."
I call that the Simulation Calibration Formulation, and I think
it's brilliant. Especially the part about how to identify
underconfidence. It's relatively easy to humbly admit your
overconfidence, but dropping your credence after that by
exactly the right amount is hard.

521

I haven't tested this, but I expect I'd gain skill more quickly
through a rapid-fire Simulation session than through a
rapid-fire Observation Correlation session. You can also do
a calibration simulation in any real-life instance where you
might otherwise make a bet.
I think the Observation Correlation method assumes either
that you already have pretty good reflective awareness of
your credence-related subjective experiences, or more
likely that reflective awareness of those experiences isn't all
that important. Especially in the online-training version of
Observation Correlation, improvement is expected to
happen below the level of awareness. It's a quiet shifting of
gut feelings.
I think reflective awareness of credence experiences is
probably hugely beneficial. The simulation method trains
exactly that, making it a good candidate for something
earlier in a calibration training program than the
observation method.
The other reason I suspect it should come before
observation is that it isn't tied up with social feelings like
wanting to protect your reputation or social stigmas
surrounding gambling, or personal insecurities related to
intelligence and ego. In the moments of real-world
prediction and prediction-checking, any of those sensations
is likely to be so salient that it blots out credence feelings
both at and below conscious awareness. And when you
turn out to be wrong, you'll probably be punished (in a

522

behavioral psychology sense) for making a prediction in the

first place, if you're not already very skilled.
If I'm right about these things, then it would be wise to
practice Simulation Calibration until the mental movements
of balancing overconfidence and underconfidence are fast,
easy, and nearly automatic, and to do that before you get
really serious about Prediction Book or similar things. At
that point, you'll be armed with sharper phenomenological
weapons
to
cut
through
counterproductive
ego
preservation/20th century science virtue ethics of
skepticism, and you'll actually be able to hear your "80%
confidence" feeling ringing clear above the noise. You'll
know what you're listening for, and you'll store the feelings
in memory for later comparison.
You can practice this offline using the Credence Game I
mentioned before, performing the simulation for each
question, and not keeping score. When that gets easy, pay
attention to the score again. And when that's easy, stop
doing the simulation.
I don't mean that you should stop making real-world
predictions if calibration simulation isn't easy yet. I just
mean that early on, Simulation should be the focus of your
epistemic calibration training, rather than Observation. I'm
certainly going to make it the focus of mine.

523

Tortoise Report 3: Empathy

May 16, 2015
What's a "Tortoise Report"? See the Tortoise Skills page.
Habit: Empathy
Duration: 2 Months
Success: 9/10
Trigger: Curiosity directed at another person
Action: Pushing the curiosity through their external
presentation to penetrate their internal experience
Result: I enjoy socializing with people I like. (!!!) I'm giving
this 9/10 because of how surprising and useful the success
is, not because I feel like I've almost mastered the skill.
ETA 6/30/15: I went to a party last night where I saw
someone who hadn't interacted with me in person for a
year. He said I seemed a lot different socially, and in
particular he described me as "warm". That's definitely a
first.
A dialogue, in which I teach this skill to myself from a year
ago.

524

In addition to being a Tortoise Report, this is an experiment

in gaining pedagogical content knowledge by imagining the
most efficient way to bestow a skill I now possess on my
pre-skilled self.
Potentially Interesting Person: No, I'm in the Bay Area now.
I'm working through Code Academy. Been volunteering for
CFAR and sleeping on Tilia's couch.
Me: thinks: Ugh, why am I at this party. I hate this hate this
hate this. How do other people enjoy socializing???
Me: So you're planning to Earn To Give?
PIP: Yeah, that's the plan.
Me: Cool.
PIP: What about you? I follow you on Facebook but like I
don't know what you actually do with most of your time.
Me: Suppresses a sigh. Oh, this and that. I do some stuff for
CFAR myself, and I just got back from giving a series of
mnemonics workshops in the Midwest.
PIP: Right, I remember you posting about that! How'd those
go?
PIP freezes in the middle of a hand gesture. The party
around us goes quiet. Standing beside PIP is another
version of me, slightly plumper and with longer hair.

525

Future Me: Hi! I'm you from a year in the future, and I'm
going to teach you about empathy.
Me: "Empathy?" That sounds boring.
Future Me: It isn't.
Everything plays backward briefly.
PIP: Right, I remember you posting about that! How'd those
go?
Me: The first one went exceedingly well. I was shocked,
actually. The second one was so-so, though people seemed
pretty happy with it.
PIP: Cool! What did you teach?
pause
Future Me: How are you feeling right now?
Me: Trapped, bored, tired, like I'm wasting my time. I'd
rather be at home reading. Why do I even go to these
parties?
Future Me: If I recall correctly, you think that since you no
longer have social anxiety, you should be participating in
socialization like ordinary humans.

526

Me: That does sound sort of silly doesn't it. Just because
I'm not terrified doesn't mean I'm actually benefiting from
this. Maybe I should just stop going to parties.
Future Me: That might be wise. But what do you think would
happen if you declined literally every invitation to any kind
of socialization, even coffee, that you expected would make
you feel bored and tired?
Me: ...Well then I guess I just wouldn't interact in person
with anybody but Eliezer.
Future Me: Indeed. Why do you think you feel this way in
social interactions so frequently?
Me: looking a bit sad and helpless I guess I probably just...
don't like people. I mean, I know I like People, as an abstract
category, at least sometimes. My whole life is about making
sure People continue to exist for a very long time. But
whatever it is that makes other people enjoy in-person
socialization, I just don't have it.
Future Me: You think that you never care about individual
people in physical proximity, that you're not a
compassionate person, right? Like you have some
long-range compassion, or at least long-range aesthetic
appreciation for humanity, but no short-range compassion,
no empathy.
Me: That sounds about right, yeah.

527

Future Me: So first of all, I want to point out a problem with

your conception of self.
Me: I don't really have much of one of those anymore. I
mean I know I used to, I used to have a solid story about
who I was and I didn't think the central features of it could
change much. Now I think my properties are fluid and
dynamic.
Future Me: Yes, that's much better than before. But you say
that your properties are "fluid and dynamic". I know you
think you're bad at visualization, but you don't realize yet
how much skill you've gained in that area recently. Use the
same mental motion you'd use to solidify an association,
and tell me how you visualize your properties being fluid
and dynamic.
Me: Hm. I'm seeing this picture of the inside of my head,
and it's full of cloud puddles of different colors all swirling
around making whooshing sounds When I learn something,
a new one flows in through my skull, and sometimes one of
them leaves.
Future Me: So when mnemonics gave you the ability to
visualize like that, a new skill flowed into your head and you
became "someone who can visualize things".
Me: Sure.
Future Me: Doesn't that sound awfully essentialist to you?

528

Me: ...No?
Future Me: No?
Me: Well I'm just a collection of abilities and aversions and
goals and a bunch of other things, and things in that mix
can change at any time. If I were essentialist, I'd think I had
a single solid soul-like thing that was Who I Really Am, and I
think that's bullshit.
Future Me: I see. What I meant is that you're an essentialist
about personality characteristics, not about personalities.
Me: Huh. Ok, I'm listening.
Future Me: Imagine yourself as an algorithm in a neural
network. (Have you read those parts of the Sequences yet? I
think you probably have.) Can you picture that?
Me: Sure. There's a series of orange marble-like nodes with
lots of wispy connections to other nodes. I use this image a
lot. I am a brain, after all.
Future Me: Oh right, you're all about "association networks"
for mnemonics. I never realized that's where this
understanding came from. Ok, so tell me about association
networks. What happens when you think of a "horse"?
Me: A group of nodes representing "horse" fires, and the
things that are highly connected to the "horse" cluster are

529

likely to fire. Strongly connected ones, such as "hung like a

horse", are more likely to fire than weakly connected ones,
such as "horseradish".
Future Me: Suppose your ability to do the Shim Sham dance
steps is a result of having strengthened the right series of
connections in your association network.
Me: startled pause of realization I've been thinking of
"associations" as limited to "experiences".
Future Me: But experiences affect behavior, don't they. And
most of the things that happen in your brain don't make it to
the conscious level. Your association network is firing all
the time Me: And when I do the Shim Sham, I don't have to think
about it anymore because I've strengthened the
connections through repetition so thoroughly that the right
series of nodes fires in the right order without my attention
ever focusing on that process. The only thing that makes it
to my attention is a feeling of effortlessness and
satisfaction as I move.
Future Me: I'll give you a minute to process the
implications.
pause
Me: That's what a skill looks like in a neural network isn't it.

530

Future Me: Uh huh.

Me: And not just a physical skill whose output is movement.
Mental skills are the same way. They just output further
cognitive processes instead.
Future Me: Yep.
Me: This is all very interesting, but what does it have to do
with my boring conversation with PIP and my relationship
with empathy?
Future Me: Empathy is a collection of skills.
Me: You're going to have to spell it out more than that.
Future Me: Highly empathetic people have developed very
strong pathways through their minds that input certain
social experiences and output certain emotions. Or perhaps
they were born with brains organized like that. Contrast this
to your "swirling soup of personality traits" model.
Me: Your version involves a manipulable causal
mechanism. It suggests I can identify and strengthen key
associations and end up with new patterns of thought and
behavior without gaining "empathy" all at once as an
essential personality trait. Just like when I memorize stuff.
Future Me: You can indeed. Let me tell you an interesting
fact about my current self. In the past week, I've had three

531

one-on-one conversations. They happened on different

days. Two of them were with people you've tried and failed
to interact with productively before. All of them were over
an hour long, and one lasted an entire afternoon. I agreed to
these meetings because they seemed like fun. In the
moment, they were fun. At no point did I feel any of the
things you're currently feeling toward PIP. No boredom, no
exhaustion, no trapped feelings, no annoyance, no wishing I
were somewhere else. Instead I mostly felt a wide range of
positive emotions. That thing that causes other people to
want to interact with each other on purpose? There's a very
good chance I felt that.
Me: That's... astonishing. It's hard to believe that happened
to me. I honestly cannot imagine what that might have been
like.
Future Me: Haha, you can, actually. You just don't have a lot
of practice imagining being other people from the inside.
Even future versions of yourself.
Me: And you say this startling change is caused by
strengthening neural pathways comprising empathy?
Future Me: Yep.
Me: How? I'm not seeing that.
The sound of the party returns, and everything plays
backward again for a moment.

532

PIP: Cool! What did you teach?

Me: I taught people how to deliberately strengthen
associations between ideas. If you want to remember "pen"
and "orange juice", you explain to System 1 that pens and
orange juice have a relationship it considers extremely
important.
PIP: You mean like a funny story involving a pen and some
orange juice?
Me: That would work. "Funny" and "story" are both things
System 1 pays attention to. There are a lot of other things it
pays attention to as well, like hedonic rewards, rhyme and
rhythm, and strong emotions of almost any kind. Primed
with the techniques "funny" and "story", I'm currently
imagining a puddle of orange juice and a pen trying to walk
to the store together. Though the pen's just hopping right
along, the orange juice is struggling to keep up because
every time it manages to gather itself into a solid shape, it
collapses back onto the pavement with wet squishy sounds.
The pen is exasperated by this inefficiency and is trying to
drag the orange juice along, but there's not really anything
to hold on to and it doesn't like the smell of oranges. The
orange juice feels guilty that it can't keep up with the pen.
And then... well, stuff like that.
PIP: laughing I'm definitely going to remember "orange
juice" and "pen" now! I don't know why I'd want to but I bet
if you see me in a year and ask me what goes with "orange

533

juice" I will know.

Everything freezes again.
Future Me: I would like to point out that you just
experienced your model of the puddle of orange juice so
vividly that you became uncomfortable and ended the story.
Me: ...Maaaaybe.
Future Me: You totally did. I was there. You felt it struggling
to pull itself together and you felt a whole complex bundle
of unpleasant emotions when the pen started yelling at it.
Me: Yeah ok fine.
Future Me: How do you think PIP is feeling right now?
Me: Um, I'm not sure. I hadn't considered it.
Future Me: Yeah I know. That's ok. Consider it.
Me: I guess maybe he's feeling sort of happy, and probably
nervous to be talking to me.
Future Me: Whatever you did to generate that answer, did
the process involve feeling any of those emotions? Or even
simulating them as more than abstract ideas?
Me: I... don't think so. They just seem like the most likely
things given the context and his body language and so on.

534

Future Me: Correct me if I'm wrong. (I'm not.) You pretty

much see everybody as mindless walking bags of meat.
Me: Well no I don't actually think that Future Me: I know you don't think it. What you explicitly
think is that their internal experiences are as rich and
interesting as your own. But your models of them are not
nearly as rich in emotion or sensory experience as your
model of the orange juice or the pen.
Me: That makes me sound like a terrible person. Not that it's
inaccurate.
Future Me: Whether you're a terrible person is irrelevant.
You're thinking in essentialist terms about personality traits
again. Tell me what is fun about walking bags of meat.
Me: Nothing. Bags of meat are boring.
Future Me: That they are. System 1 does not find walking
bags of meat the least bit important.
Me: You're saying that if I could use the same processes to
model conversation partners that I use to model orange
juice, then people would suddenly feel a lot more
interesting.
Future Me: It seems to be working pretty damn well for me
so far.

535

Me: I see. I'm... not sure I know how to do that.

Future Me: I'm sure you don't. It'll take about two months of
practice.
Me: jawfloor Two months is not a long time.
Future Me: Well you'll have developed the method first, and
that part will take a lot longer. But since this is a fictional
reenactment of something that never happened, I'm going
to cheat and get you started right now. The first step is
curiosity.
Me: That seems to be the case for an awful lot of things.
Future Me: Verily. I'm still not quite sure what that's about,
but I'm pretty sure it's important. Anyway, you don't know it
yet, but you spend a fair amount of time being curious
about people.
Me: If I don't know it, how do you?
Future Me: The next thing you need to learn is how to
identify high-leverage intervention points in your default
cognitive patterns. Places in a string of firings where you
can intervene to strengthen one crucial connection over
another. I identified "curiosity about other people" as a
high-leverage intervention point, and started paying
attention to sensations of curiosity about other people.

536

Me: How can you pay attention to something that's below

the level of conscious awareness?
Future Me: You can't. But you can build bridges that draw it
up toward conscious awareness. For example, close your
eyes, and tell me the color of the paint on the walls.
Me: I'm... not sure. Blue maybe?
Future Me: Now open your eyes and look around.
Me: They're pink. I definitely saw them but their color failed
to register. Your point is that... No, I'm not quite sure what
your point is.
Future Me: My point is that if I hadn't said anything, you'd
have gone through the whole party seeing the color of the
walls and not being aware of it. But I prompted you to
search for your experience of the color of the walls in future
consciousness. I flagged that experience as important, and
flagging things as important, as something to watch for,
does two things. I'm not quite sure how it does them. But it
both leads your attention to the experiences you're
searching for, and it probably causes you to have more of
them (you'll spend more time looking at the walls when
you're trying to find out what color they are).
Me: I can become aware of things that usually remain
beneath the level of conscious awareness just by paying
attention to them.

537

Future Me: Exactly. And you've just dismissed a thought

about observation bias because you know it's not actually
relevant. Good job. Now look around the room at all of these
people, and when you notice anything even vaguely like a
feeling of curiosity about any of them, tap your fingers
together.
Me: Looks around. Sees someone who looks familiar. Taps
fingers.
Future Me: What happened right before you tapped your
fingers?
Me: I wondered whether I'd seen that girl over there in
person before, or if she'd just commented on my Facebook
wall at some point. But I think I only wondered it because
you primed me to be curious about people.
Future Me: That will often be the case: You'll only notice the
thing you're watching for when you're explicitly thinking
about the fact that you're watching for it. You might only do
the thing you're watching for because you're thinking about
it. That's ok. It still strengthens the relevant pathways.
Surprisingly quickly, in my experience. Empathy took a
comparatively long time. Other cognitive habits I've learned
by this method took a couple weeks or even days.
Me: So I just... tap my fingers whenever I'm curious about
somebody?

538

Future Me: Yep. For now. I started with trying to tap my

fingers whenever I noticed that I was experiencing empathy,
but this turned out to be a prerequisite. You'll eventually
realize that you've been trying to answer your curiosity
about people by making System 2 inferences about their
external appearance and behaviors, and that you get a lot
farther a lot faster if you activate System 1 the way you do
while making mnemonic associations and then just let it do
the thing it evolved to do.
Me: Wouldn't that give me a lot of wrong answers? I mean,
people are complicated. If I project a bunch of rich
experiences into their heads I'm going to be mostly wrong
most of the time.
Future Me: Yes, but you're not going to forget that while
you're doing it. Also it's not exactly the same as "projecting
a lot of rich experiences". There are extremely important
sensations of "possibility" and "uncertainty". You'll see.
And you're also going to be able to update your models way
more quickly.
Me: looks incredulous
Future Me: That shouldn't surprise you; you'll be sticking
your neck out and making riskier predictions. Furthermore,
you really did evolve to model the minds of other humans
accurately enough to predict incredibly complex behaviors.
Those instinctive tools are a hell of a lot more powerful and
accurate than you currently realize. Do you remember the

539

second time you took Val's Againstness class, the one

where you didn't have social anxiety?
Me: Yeah, that was super weird. He had somebody stand in
front of the group and asked them to do something
uncomfortable, like sing "happy birthday", while relaxing.
Then he just watched them and told them all about their
internal experiences based on ridiculously subtle external
cues of anxiety or concern or whatever. And I predicted
everything he said before he said it.
Future Me: Yep. You were doing the thing. You let System 1
be in charge of modeling the other person.
Me: Why do you think I was able to do that?
Future Me: Probably you were hypnotized.
Me: Heh, well Val was in the room, so yeah probably.
Future Me: Anyway, do the curiosity thing first. Tap your
fingers when you're curious about other people. I'll get back
to you.
sounds start again
PIP: laughing I'm definitely going to remember "orange
juice" and "pen" now! I don't know why I'd want to but I bet
if you see me in a year and ask me what goes with "orange
juice" I will know.

540

Me: It's not unlikely. It depends a lot on how strong your

emotional response to the story was. But I suppose - taps
fingers - this is your first big party in the Bay Area right?
First time meeting a bunch of people you've wanted to meet
for a long time? You're probably already in a context where
your emotions will solidify a lot of memories. ...Hey, snaps
fingers, can I ask you something sort of personal?
PIP: Sure!
Me: What are you feeling right now?
PIP: Um... sort of nervous, excited, extremely happy,
slightly drunk, worried about how you're judging me,
concerned I won't display enough introspective skill in this
answer to gain your respect, a few other things that aren't
as obvious right now.
Me: Heh. I love it that you can answer that so transparently.
Rationalists are great.
PIP: I've read some of your things about Tell Culture. I
consider you one of my allies, so I want to be as transparent
to you as possible.
Me: That's... really incredibly touching, actually. Thank you.
PIP: smiles
scene freezes

541

Me: That was... different.

Future Me: How was it different?
Me: When I noticed I was curious about him, I found that I
cared more about his answer, that I paid more attention to
what it meant.
Future Me: To get the next part I had to practice just this
"noticing curiosity about other people" thing for a month.
But if I can selectively freeze time, then I can also accelerate
your learning process. Let's put your brain in a state where
it's mastered noticing curiosity about people, and pick up
from there.
a small popping sound
Me: Woah...
scene unfreezes
PIP: smiles
Me: taps fingers Why do you want to save the world?
PIP: That's an interesting question!
scene freezes
Future Me: Tell me what happened just before you snapped
your fingers.

542

Me: I wondered why he wanted to save the world.

Future Me: What was it like to wonder why he wanted to
save the world? What was happening in your head that you
translated into the words "I wondered why he wanted to
save the world"?
Me: I imagined him doing tasks for CFAR, I imagined him
sitting in front of a computer coding and then donating
money to FHI, I imagined him smiling while doing these
things, and I felt an emotional sensation I want to call a
"question mark".
Future Me: What is it like to know why I want to save the
world?
Me: If you haven't changed too much, you have feelings of
joy and fulfillment when you imagine tiling the universe with
flourishing sentience, and you have feelings of loss and
despair when you imagine none of that sentience coming to
exist.
Future Me: When you thought about PIP wanting to "save
the world", you had a visual simulation of his body going
about world-saving tasks, and you imagined a smiling facial
expression. You then thought about me wanting to "save
the world". What's the crucial difference?
Me: I imagined you from the inside, and him from the
outside!

543

Future Me: Yes.

Me: With him, it's like I'm interacting with his mechanical
interface. I think that even my model of him is actually
mostly of his mechanical interface. When I wonder about
him, when I feel curiosity, it doesn't penetrate his exterior.
taps fingers
Future Me: What was that tap for?
Me: I just wondered what it's like to be PIP from the inside.
What it's like to be the thing that produces all of those
behaviors and experiences all of those situations. What
internal experiences motivate the activities of the
mechanical interface. I wondered who is inside the machine.
Future Me: What's it like, the kind of curiosity that
penetrates the exterior?
Me: The question mark sensation is there again, but I also
have this almost spacial sensation where my attention is
located about where his head is, and it's flipped to look out
from that perspective at the world. There's a feeling of... not
of specific emotions, but of something like the possibility of
emotions, and the possibility of other kinds of experiences.
And now I'm automatically starting to try to answer the
question of what it's like to be him, and I'm filling in the
"possibilities" with specific emotions and experiences, and
I'm experiencing those things as I do it in just the way that I
experience my memory palace when I walk around in it. It's

544

all actually there in my head.

Future Me: Congratulations! You are empathizing.
Me: Really?
Future Me: I think so. You're doing the thing that I do when I
interact with people and feel the human connection that
makes interactions worth having. Call it whatever. You're
imagining him as a person, instead of a walking sack of
meat.
Me: It's a little bit difficult and uncomfortable.
Future Me: It takes practice. ... Though not for you, I guess.
another small popping sound
Me: ...I know Kung Fu.
Future Me: grins Show me.
Me: So you want me to start tapping my fingers when I
notice I'm empathizing?
Future Me: Yep.
Me: I can do that.
Future Me: How would you feel about it if I left you alone at
this party to talk to some random rationalist you've never

545

met before?
Me: I'd... I'd like that, actually. I really want to know more
about him. More about what's inside his head, I mean. It
would be fun to try to learn. looks around I'd probably like
to talk with any of these people, really.
Future Me: That's what I thought. I'll leave you to it then.
scene unfreezes

546

Against Being For Or Against Tell Culture

May 30, 2015
Ever since I posted about Tell Culture a year ago, people
have been debating whether direct or indirect
communication is better.
(One day I will learn to frame my important points in a way
that is controversial enough to popularize them.)
I find this frustrating.
The concept of "communication cultures" is a kind of
cognitive first aid. It's better to have tourniquettes than to
not have tourniquettes, because otherwise people bleed to
death. But there's a lot more to medicine than first aid, and
a tourniquette will never reattach a severed arm.
What kind of cognitive first aid is "communication
cultures"? What does it prevent people from dying of before
they make it to the hospital?
Harmful misunderstandings can happen when people from
one communication culture interact with people from
another communication culture without recognizing that the
other group employs different assumptions, and relies on a
different skillset. That's the thing knowing about
"communication cultures" saves you from.

547

But that's first aid, no more or less. If "Tell Culture vs.

Guess Culture" is all you know about communication and
you want to communicate effectively, you're alive, but
you're a long damn way from "healthy".
There are skills, techniques, and insights you have to gain
before you can communicate well, in a way that satisfies the
values of everyone involved.
To master communication, you can't just be like, "I prefer
Tell Culture, which is better than Guess Culture, so my
disabilities in Guess Culture are therefore justified."
Justified shmustified, you're still missing an arm.
To reattach a limb, you need lots of medical knowledge and
advanced surgical skills. To master communication, you
have to actually learn things that empower you to
communicate.
My advice to you - my request of you, even - if you find
yourself fueling these debates, is to (for the love of god)
move on. If you've already applied cognitive first aid, you've
created an affordance for further advancement. Using even
more tourniquettes doesn't help.
A better use of your resources would be identifying what
you most want to do with communication, and what factors
are most important for accomplishing that. What is the next
thing you need to learn in order to get what you want out of
communication? What is the most important problem in the

548

art of communication, and what can you do to solve it?

If you're comfortable with direct communication, it may be
that what you need most right now is one of the central
Guess Techniques. Basic empathy, maybe. Go talk to
someone who thrives in Guess Culture, and instead of
picking a fight, try to learn something.

549

The Art Of Noticing

June 09, 2015
There's a super short distilled version of my method for
training cognitive habits, and I call it "The Art Of Noticing".
Skills I have so far trained using Noticing, with very little
reliance on any other technique, include empathy, not
trudging uselessly ahead when I'm trying to learn
something but have gotten lost, and anti-"guessing the
teacher's password".
The Art Of Noticing goes like this:
Answer the question, "What's my first possible clue that
I'm about to encounter the problem?" If your problem is
"I don't respond productively to being confused," then
the first sign a crucial moment is coming might be "a
fleeting twinge of surprise". Whatever that feels like in
real time from the inside of your mind, that's your
trigger.

Whenever you notice your trigger, make a precise

physical gesture. Snap your fingers, tap your foot, touch
your pinky finger with your thumb - whatever feels
comfortable. Do it every time you notice that fleeting
twinge of surprise.

550

Noticing is not the end of the story. But I am astonished by

how much of the story it appears to be. In many situations,
merely Noticing is well over half the battle, and what's left
automatically works itself out on the fly.

551

Why Mere Noticing Solves So Much

July 04, 2015
I was at first astonished by how often my pesky cognitive
mistakes were solved by nothing but skillful use of
attention. Now I sort of see what's going on, and it feels less
odd.
What happens to your bad habit of motivated stopping
when you train consistent reflective attention to "motivated
stopping"? The motivation dissolves under scrutiny.
What happens to your disputes over definitions when you
train consistent attention to having lost sight of what you
really disagree about? You gain sight of what you really
disagree about.
What happens to your neglect of base rates when you train
consistent reflective attention to the sensations of base rate
neglect? You start thinking about base rates at the times
when you need to most.
If you recognize something as a mistake, part of you
probably has at least some idea of what to do instead.
Indeed, anything besides ignoring the mistake is often a
good thing to do instead. So merely noticing when you're
going wrong can be over half the battle.

552

Primitive Introspection
July 05, 2015
[Epistemic status: This is my working model. I think
something like this is probably happening irl. Some of my
details of neurology, anatomy, and evolutionary biology are
probably wrong. I'd be only slightly surprised if I converted
from HOPs theory to some sort of HOTs theory in the next
year, but I don't think that would have strong practical
implications.]
1
Trigger-action plans exist on a spectrum. Over on the left,
you have TAPs like "If I enter my house through my front
door, I'll put my keys in the box on the side table." On the
right you have TAPs like "If I'm confused, I'll stop and
compare what I expected to happen to what happened
instead."
keys <-----------------> confusion
Roughly speaking, the stuff on the left is physical, and the
stuff on the right is cognitive.
The stuff on the right seems to be harder. Why is that? This
post is about my attempt to answer that question.

553

How do you know when you've just opened your front

door? You saw the door in front of you, felt the knob turn in
your hand, heard a creaking sound as it opened, and now
you see a hole where the door used to be.
How do you know when you've just felt confusion? In my
case, I'd know because I'd have noticed feeling a sudden
burst of surprise followed by a lack of resolution that's now
developed into a hanging that's-not-rightness.
But I know that because I spent a long time studying my
own reactions to confusing situations. I attended
strategically to confusion. If you asked me five years ago
how I know when I'm confused, I might have said, "Well, I
just... know, you know?"
And if you'd asked me five years ago, I'd have been wrong.
The truth would have been, "I usually don't know when I'm
confused."
2
I think of human introspection as analogous to the parietal
eyes of lizards. Lizards (and some other animals) have a
light sensor atop their heads that can't detect anything
more specific than the presence or absence of light.

554

If you took away a lizard's true eyes and left it with just the
primitive third eye, it would have something almost but not
quite entirely unlike vision. It could distinguish night from
day, but certainly not knights from daisies. In other words, it
would be about as blind as its distant ancestors who had
just begun to develop sight. Lizard-relevant parts of the
world would be way more complicated than its vision could
handle.
My best guess about why introspection is harder than
outrospection is this: We're in an awkward evolutionary
stage where the human-relevant goings-on inside our
brains are way more complicated than our shiny new

555

prefrontal cortices can handle.

We have an organ that lets us perceive high-order cognitive
algorithms like "my inferences from what my model of
Karen's brain predicts I will say", or "the thing happening in
my auditory cortex when I hear E above middle C".* But we
still have the primitive version of the organ. We've not yet
evolved true introspection. So we can perceive our
thoughts and feelings, maybe for the first time in
evolutionary history, but our perception tends to be vague,
fuzzy, and weak. Night and day, not knights and daisies.
3
But there's a funny thing about perception of cognitive
algorithms.
Imagine you're playing Where's Waldo...

556

...but instead of carefully scanning through the chaos, you

can turn everything without red stripes into a perfectly
blank white background. Suddenly, the game wouldn't push
your visual processing to its limits. Finding Waldo would be
easy.

557

You can't change a physical image just by thinking about it

- but you can change your cognitive algorithms by thinking.
That's what thinking is.
So introspection is hard because our PFC is primitive, but
there are still things we can do to make it easier. If I want to
train a thoroughly cognitive trigger-action plan, my strategy
should make it as easy as possible on my primitive PFC.
The art of streamlining thought for successful perception
seems to consist of strategic use of attention, as far as I can
tell. Attending in ways that make the most of a human PFC
will be the subject of my next post.

558

*Considering introspection to be a "sense" is a minority

position among philosophers of mind (I think?). I
recommend the SEP article on higher-order consciousness
theories if you're curious about other perspectives.

559

Cognitive Trigger-Action
Rationality

Planning

For

Epistemic

July 05, 2015

I suspect that the overwhelming majority of good epistemic
practice is best thought of as cognitive trigger-action plans
to customize and internalize.
[If I'm afraid of a proposition] [then I'll visualize
how the world would be and what I would actually do
if the proposition were true.]
[If everything seems to hang on a particular word]
[then I'll taboo that word and its synonyms.]
[If I flinch away from a thought at the edge of
peripheral awareness] [then I'll focus my attention
directly on that thought.]
Before looking back through some of the Lesswrong
Sequences, I installed the trigger-action plan "[If I notice
that something I read feels important] --> [then I'll ask
myself, "In what real-life situations is it important?" and
design a trigger-action plan to impliment the insight.]"
Sometimes I fail to identify a correct action, but I at least
come up with some hypothesis for what the right trigger
would be, so I can study my own experience of relevant
situations.

560

(When I train a trigger well, I often find I'm done, anyway.)

You can gain a lot of abstract insights by reading, which
can re-orient your mind and shift your whole approach to
the world. You can learn some great hacks for problem
solving by taking the right classes and workshops. But
when it comes to advancing your own art in the ongoing
context of daily life, CTAPs is the name of the game. It is the
way to change your default responses to sensations of
thought and emotion.
[If something feels key to advancing your art as a
rationalist] [stop, drop, and trigger-action plan.]

561

CTAPs and The Miracle Question

July 09, 2015
I've so far talked a lot about the "trigger" part of
trigger-action planning (which I've often called "noticing").
Here's a tip that can help identify not just the correct
trigger, but also the correct action.
Tomorrow, you wake up to find that the thought pattern
you want has miraculously established itself. Whats the
very first thing you notice thats different?
This is called The Miracle Question.
The habit of thought Im currently working on is
defensiveness. At this point, all Ive got is a trigger Im part
way through refining. Ive studied my default pattern of
thought and feeling, the one thats causing me problems.
But I dont have any idea what to do about it yet, so this is a
great time to ask The Miracle Question.
I ask myself this question via simulation, not
conceptualization. I dont just think the words or activate
the abstract concepts in my mind. Rather, I pose the
question by vividly imagining the experiences of a version
of myself who miraculously wakes up possessing the skill I
want (even if I'm not quite sure what the skill is yet).

562

Playing through that movie in my mind, what is the first

thing to tip me off that I must be imagining her instead of
me?
Ok, so I wake up. Then what? I roll over, open my eyes. I
grab my phone, push the on button, and see some
Facebook updates. I click through and start to read a
comment where someone has criticized my idea - and this
is where I feel surprise. Reading the comment, Im still
feeling just about as pleasantly languid as I was before,
modulo the added focus needed to understand the
comment. I feel the difference while imagining this, because
ordinarily I'd respond to this situation with some sort of
stress.
So what have I gained from this exercise?
I now have a concrete image of the world I hope to steer
myself toward, on the scale of moment-to-moment
experiences. Before, I just had a thought like "I want to
spend less time being defensive." That's different from
knowing in precise, concrete detail what it would look like
to spend less time being defensive. I dont know how to get
to that other world yet, but I know precisely what gap I'll
need to bridge: The specific change Im after is one that will
allow me to read a Facebook criticism when Ive just woken
up while feeling calm engagement.
My search for correct actions is now constrained to things
that would plausibly cause that outcome - that would

563

transport me into The Miracle World. Any potential action

that would fail to bridge at least part of the gap between
here and there is a step in the wrong direction.

564

Training CTAPS, Part 2

July 26, 2015
Kevin helps us train an epistemic CTAP for responding to
fearful doubt.

565

Training CTAPS, Part 1

July 26, 2015
My imaginary friend Kevin helps us learn attention
techniques that improve our ability to notice things.

566

Effective Rest Days

July 30, 2015
Today is my day off.
Ive been really good at days off recently. I used to be
terrible at them. I used to not have much of a strategy, and
I'd basically end up forcing myself to stay put and not do
anything strenuous or work-like. I often ended up feeling
sort of depressed, and the next day I wasn't at all ready to
work.
On my most recent day off, I climbed a mountain, ran
several miles, and got some chores done. I felt excellent
and ready to work hard the next day.
Here's how my new strategy has played out so far today.
When I woke up this morning, I thought I should have
breakfast, and that I should treat myself to something extra
tasty and extravagant, like bacon and a fancy omelet, or
perhaps a souffle.
I snapped my fingers. That, I realized, had been one of my
flags: an image of how my day off should be, according
some stereotype of a day off. I asked myself, What do I
actually want, right now? posing the question as an
invitation, a desire-shaped door held open for any nearby
desires that might like to wader in. Does bacon and

567

souffle fit through that door? No, actually. Thats not a

desire-shaped thought. It's a day-off-shaped thought.
On days off, [if I feel like I'm playing out the role of a
character taking a day off] --> [then I ask myself what I
actually want right now.]
My gaze happened across a box of cookies-and-cream
protein bars, and a new image sprang to consciousness: a
heated protein bar sitting on a plate beside a glass of milk
and some Soylent. I felt warm and happy thinking about it,
and it went right through the desire-shaped door Id created.
I snapped my fingers, recognizing another flag - a sensation
of desire - and then hesitated, mildly confused.
2: Really? A protein bar and Soylent?
1: Yes. And milk.
2: That sounds like the kind of breakfast wed have if
we were clumsily motivated by body image. Are we
sure we wouldnt rather have bacon? Even if we
could push a button to summon it instead of having
to cook? Even if it had no effect at all on our body,
besides giving us energy and satiating hunger?
1: summons an image of biting into a warm, gooey
cookies-and-cream protein bar Yes, definitely.

568

2: Well, ok then. We genuinely want this right now,

and it doesn't cost anything. Well have that.
On days off, [if I feel a sensation of desire] --> [then I check
whether I genuinely want it right now, and if so I give it to
myself, provided it costs less than ten bucks].
Later, I was walking down the street toward a coffee shop I
like, when I felt another flagged sensation: the cognitive
aftertaste of a recently suppressed desire. I stopped,
snapped my fingers, and invited desires from recent
memory to present themselves. Nothing was forthcoming. I
looked around, hoping to jog my memory, and quickly
locked onto a mens clothing store on the corner.
2: What? Why would we want to go in there?
1: We're curious.
2: Oh right, weve been curious every time weve
passed here for like a year and a half, havent we.
1: Yep. Lets go.
2: But we can tell from here that it wont have
anything we want to buy. Its mostly blue jeans and
flannel button-downs.
1: You say that every time, but were still curious.

569

2: Hm, yeah, that's strange. What are we curious

about?
1: We want to see what it looks like, know how big
the inside is, touch all the furry coats on that rack
outside.
2: Oh. I guess whether well buy anything is
completely irrelevant then. That was a silly reason to
suppress a desire.
1: Yep. Lets go.
2: Ok.
On days off, [if I notice I've suppressed a desire] --> [then I
excavate that desire for further examination].
My plan when I got to the coffee shop was to read fiction.
The thought of reading fiction at the coffee shop was what
caused me to leave the house in the first place, and I looked
forward to it the whole way here. Reading more fiction is
something Id like to do, and rest days are good times for
that. But as soon as I sat down in this chair and started
reading, I felt a desire to write. Specifically, I desired to write
about this recent change in my approach to rest days that
has so greatly increased their value.
2: But we told all those past time-slices wed get to
read fiction when we got to the coffee shop.

570

1: But we are here now, and we want to write, not

read.
2: Yeah but, what about reflective cooperation
across the intertemporal coalition? Our past selves
had our future wellbeing in mind when they desired
that we read. They thought we needed to spend more
time reading fiction, and we agree with them. Theyd
be disappointed to hear their decision was
overpowered by an unreflective impulse,
(translation: summons image of trying to stick to a
diet, yet succumbing to the immediate temptation to
have a cookie every time a cookie desire happens)
which would damage the power of our future selves
intentions to motivate our actions
(translation: summons image of a future self deciding
to try a new diet, while the memory of all the past
times with the cookies plays through their head and
reduces their confidence in the intertemporal
coalitions ability to stick to diets).
Thats most of what being responsible means to us.
1: Oh, I see. But youve forgotten something: The
intertemporal coalition, including the recent past
time-slices of which you speak, has consented to
privilege my needs. Remember why?"

571

2: Yes. We have a bias toward privileging the desires

of certain other people and our future selves. It leads
to fatigue when not occasionally counter-balanced.
Privileging our own current selves is a necessary
condition for successfully recharging on a rest day.
Thats what taking a day off means to us. All of our
time-slices since February have been clear on that.
Sorry, my mistake.
1: Its ok. We also forgot to snap our fingers when
we felt the sensation of feeling like the responsible
thing is to override an impulse.
2: Indeed. snaps fingers Ok, lets write.
On days off, [if I feel like the responsible thing is to override
an impulse] --> [then I'll remember why I've chosen to
privilege the desires of my present self today.]
It's not the case that I recharge best by "not doing work"
and "physically resting". The part of me that needs rest is
neither my body nor my concentration. The part that needs
rest is the part of me that manages my impulses to makes
sure the people around me and my future selves get what
they need.
This is not surprising in retrospect, given I spend all the
rest of my time in a service role.

572

So my new strategy for effective rest days is all about

attention to a few key sensations that indicate it might be
time to put my own present needs first, despite my
instincts:

desire

noticing I've suppressed a desire

playing the role of a character taking a day off

being responsible by overriding an impulse

If you're not getting much out of your days off and also
happen to be in a service role (like nursing, teaching, or
leading an organization), maybe this approach could help
you, too.

573

A Walking Meditation
August 02, 2015
There is a road stretching from here to a future I imagine.
In that future, there are experts of domain-general
reasoning, of prediction, and of cognitive boot-strapping
toward accuracy and effectiveness. Many of them have
explicit knowledge of how to masterfully wield human
intelligence, in the way a present-day fencing instructor
knows how to wield a foil. The children there can become
such masters in a single lifetime (though to be fair, a single
lifetime is probably a lot more than 80 years).
What do you think the bricks on that road are made of?
These bubbles represent possible bricks you yourself could
lay on the road to the future I imagine - things that might
carry you toward it. What happens when you arrange them
in order from the smallest, least important brick to the
largest, most important brick?

574

What are the implications of the fact that you have an

answer to that question, even if you're not very confident in
your answer?
What is the largest brick you could lay right now?

575

Tortoise Report 5: Defensiveness

August 03, 2015
What's a "Tortoise Report"? See the Tortoise Skills page.
Habit: Staying Sane While Defensive
Duration: 2 Months (This one took some time to get a
handle on.)
Success: 7/10
Trigger: A feeling of being drawn into my solar plexus and
closing a shield around myself for protection from attacks
during interactions with other people
Action: Empathy
Result: Im not sure Ive reduced the frequency with which I
get defensive very much, which is my long-term goal with
this. But the feeling doesnt get the chance to do nearly as
much damage.
If Im defensive and Eliezer says that sounds like a bad
idea, I hear, your idea is bad and you are bad and you
should feel bad. So I fear that hes updated toward I am
bad, and want to persuade him that hes made an error,
and in fact I am good. (My attempt is extremely clumsily
given my state of unreflection and confusion, of course, and
I end up completely undermining it right from the start). I

576

fear hell enforce you should feel bad with further

statements that will make me feel worse, so I feel I need to
convince him that its false that I should feel bad. All of that
defending, of course, gets tied up with a defense of the idea
itself.
Its a giant mess.
He never actually means anything like your idea is bad and
you are bad and you should feel bad. When he says that
sounds like a bad idea, he means something like I predict
that acting on the expressed beliefs and inferences will
result in outcomes neither of us wants. Which is blatantly
obvious to me the moment I bother to simulate his mental
state at all.
Empathy works surprisingly well against defensiveness for
me. When Im defensive, I tend to interpret everything thats
said to me as indicating a value judgement, which seems to
be where most of the insanity comes from. Now, when I
realize Im defensive, I imagine what it might be like to be
the other person, and what states of mind are most likely to
be motivating their behaviors. I usually find my
defensiveness-motivated interpretation was completely
ridiculous, and I have the opportunity to check when its not
so clear. I also have the opportunity to say, Im feeling
defensive, which can lead to having the rest of the
discussion when Im feeling more secure, or when Ive
eaten or exercised. But even when, upon reflection, I
simulate the other person as actually wanting to hurt me, I

577

end up feeling more compassion for them than any need to

protect myself.
I dont yet have an action that reliably leads to me leaving
the defensive state of mind, nor a trigger that might allow
me to prevent defensiveness in the first place. But being
able to not suddenly go completely bonkers when I feel
defensive is a pretty big deal.
Side note, one of my main methods when it comes to
cognitive habit training is seek opportunities to practice.
That does not seem to work for me with defensiveness. I
had a Facebook thread where I asked people to post about a
few topics I consider more or less emotionally triggering
for me, or to post about things they expected would make
me defensive, and it totally failed. Lots of great posts, no
defensiveness. There was exactly one minor success,
which caused something more like competitiveness than
the thing that makes me crazy. (I felt compelled to spend
many hours defending a certain interpretation of Indian
Buddhist doctrine and my inferences from it, and to
intellectually dominate the people who were wrong.) But for
the most part, I felt a lot of closeness and trust with
everyone in that thread, especially the people who
expressed negative emotions about me specifically. I felt
like, This is beautiful, I wish Id done this a long time ago!
Then I tried reading internet criticisms of Eliezer through
Tumblr and Rationalwiki. It all felt silly and actually made
me kind of happy, Im not totally sure why but maybe

578

because Im proud to be serving someone who gets such

strange and outrageous criticisms. I dont get the
impression that hes really an earth-shatteringly good
mathematician. Also, did you know? Less Wrong hopes
to make humanity more rational, protect the universe from
the development of evil(or "unfriendly") AI and usher in a
golden era where we will all be immortal deathless cyborgs
having hot sex with sexbots on a terraformed Mars.
Theres some great stuff out there.
I think defensiveness is one of the things that mostly
dissolves under scrutiny. I noticed big improvements in my
reactions long before I felt like I had any idea what to do
with the things I was feeling. There must be some kind of
feedback loop in defensiveness that relies on my attention
being elsewhere. And if Im actively expecting to become
defensive, the cycle cant even complete its first loop.

579

Tortoise Report 4: Verbal Processing

August 03, 2015
What's a "Tortoise Report"? See the Tortoise Skills page.
Habit: Verbal Processing
Duration: 1 Week
Success: 2/10
Trigger: Distress or loss of concentration when hearing
more than one verbal stream at once, or when reading while
people are talking nearby or music with lyrics is playing
Action: Reflective attention (didn't get any farther than that)
Result: Im much more likely to invite conversation partners
away from larger groups, and to immediately put in earbuds
playing rain when trying to read or write while hearing
music with lyrics. (Previously Id waste time and attention
attempting to focus despite distraction.)
This continues to not look like low-hanging fruit. Its
important and I hope to make progress on it eventually, but
there are more important things right now.

580

581