Applied rationality

Applied Rationality Workshop November 2013

Bailey Farms, Ossining, NY

Table of Contents Rationality Checklist.............................................................................................................................3 Annotated Schedule...............................................................................................................................9 What is Applied Rationality?..............................................................................................................13 Getting the Most out of the Workshop................................................................................................16 Prediction Markets..............................................................................................................................19 Opening Session – Further Resources.................................................................................................22 Friday – How to Use Your Brain..............................................................................................................26 Building Bayesian Habits....................................................................................................................26 Your Inner Simulator...........................................................................................................................52 Emotional Re-Association...................................................................................................................60 Goal Factoring.....................................................................................................................................76 Attention..............................................................................................................................................80 Saturday – Try Things..............................................................................................................................82 Aversion Factoring and Calibration.....................................................................................................82 Againstness..........................................................................................................................................93 Implementation Intentions...................................................................................................................97 Curating Your Emotional Library......................................................................................................100 Comfort Zone Expansion (CoZE).....................................................................................................104 Sunday – Compound Returns.................................................................................................................113 Delegating to Yourself.......................................................................................................................113 Propagating Urges.............................................................................................................................118 Offline Habit Training.......................................................................................................................135 Turbocharging Training.....................................................................................................................148 Value of Information.........................................................................................................................152 Names and Faces: Staff.....................................................................................................................161 Names and Faces: Volunteers............................................................................................................165 Names and Faces: Participants..........................................................................................................168 Contact Info.......................................................................................................................................176

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Rationality Checklist This checklist is meant for your personal use so you can have a wish-list of rationality habits, and so that you can see if you're acquiring good habits over the next year—we're not using it to decide how rational you are at the start of the program. 1. Reacting to evidence / surprises / arguments you haven't heard before; flagging beliefs for examination.

a) When I see something odd - something that doesn't fit with what I'd ordinarily expect, given my other beliefs - I successfully notice, promote it to conscious attention and think "I notice that I am confused" or some equivalent thereof. (Example: You think that your flight is scheduled to depart on Thursday. On Tuesday, you get an email from Travelocity advising you to prepare for your flight “tomorrow”, which seems wrong. Do you successfully raise this anomaly to the level of conscious attention? (Based on the experience of an actual LWer who failed to notice confusion at this point and missed their plane flight.))

b) When somebody says something that isn't quite clear enough for me to visualize, I notice this and ask for examples. (Recent example from Eliezer: A mathematics student said they were studying "stacks". I asked for an example of a stack. They said that the integers could form a stack. I asked for an example of something that was not a stack.) (Recent example from Anna: Cat said that her boyfriend was very competitive. I asked her for an example of "very competitive." She said that when he’s driving and the person next to him revs their engine, he must be the one to leave the intersection first—and when he’s the passenger he gets mad at the driver when they don’t react similarly.)

c) I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode. (Recent example from Anna: Noticed myself explaining to myself why outsourcing my clothes shopping does make sense, rather than evaluating whether to do it.)

Date of last example: □ Never □ Today/yesterday □ Last week □ Last month □ Last year □ Before the last year Date of last example: □ Never □ Today/yesterday □ Last week □ Last month □ Last year □ Before the last year Date of last example: □ Never □ Today/yesterday □ Last week □ Last month □ Last year □ Before the last year

d) I notice my mind flinching away from a thought; and when I notice, I flag that area as requiring more deliberate exploration. (Recent example from Anna: I have a failure mode where, when I feel socially uncomfortable, I try to make others feel mistaken so that I will feel less vulnerable. Putting this thought into words required repeated conscious effort, as my mind kept wanting to just drop the subject.)

Date of last example: □ Never □ Today/yesterday □ Last week □ Last month □ Last year □ Before the last year

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e) I consciously attempt to welcome bad news, or at least not push it away. (Recent example from Eliezer: At a brainstorming session for future Singularity Summits, one issue raised was that we hadn't really been asking for money at previous ones. My brain was offering resistance, so I applied the "bad news is good news" pattern to rephrase this as, "This point doesn't change the fixed amount of money we raised in past years, so it is good news because it implies that we can fix the strategy and do better next year.")


2. Questioning and analyzing beliefs (after they come to your attention).

a) I notice when I'm not being curious. (Recent example from Anna: Whenever someone criticizes me, I usually find myself thinking defensively at first, and have to visualize the world in which the criticism is true, and the world in which it's false, to convince myself that I actually want to know. For example, someone criticized us for providing inadequate prior info on what statistics we'd gather for the Rationality Minicamp; and I had to visualize the consequences of [explaining to myself, internally, why I couldn’t have done any better given everything else I had to do], vs. the possible consequences of [visualizing how it might've been done better, so as to update my actionpatterns for next time], to snap my brain out of defensive-mode and into should-we-do-that-differently mode.)

b) I look for the actual, historical causes of my beliefs, emotions, and habits; and when doing so, I can suppress my mind's search for justifications, or set aside justifications that weren't the actual, historical causes of my thoughts. (Recent example from Anna: When it turned out that we couldn't rent the Minicamp location I thought I was going to get, I found lots and lots of reasons to blame the person who was supposed to get it; but realized that most of my emotion came from the fear of being blamed myself for a cost overrun.)

c) I try to think of a concrete example that I can use to follow abstract arguments or proof steps. (Classic example: Richard Feynman being disturbed that Brazilian physics students didn't know that a "material with an index" meant a material such as water. If someone talks about a proof over all integers, do you try it with the number 17? If your thoughts are circling around your roommate being messy, do you try checking your reasoning against the specifics of a particular occasion when they were messy?)

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Date of last example: □ Never □ Today/yesterday □ Last week □ Last month □ Last year □ Before the last year Date of last example: □ Never □ Today/yesterday □ Last week □ Last month □ Last year □ Before the last year

d) When I'm trying to distinguish between two (or more) hypotheses using a piece of evidence, I visualize the world where hypothesis #1 holds, and try to consider the prior probability I'd have assigned to the evidence in that world, then visualize the world where hypothesis #2 holds; and see if the evidence seems more likely or more specifically predicted in one world than the other (Historical example: During the Amanda Knox murder case, after many hours of police interrogation, Amanda Knox turned some cartwheels in her cell. The prosecutor argued that she was celebrating the murder. Would you, confronted with this argument, try to come up with a way to make the same evidence fit her innocence? Or would you first try visualizing an innocent detainee, then a guilty detainee, to ask with what frequency you think such people turn cartwheels during detention, to see if the likelihoods were skewed in one direction or the other?)

e) I try to consciously assess prior probabilities and compare them to the apparent strength of evidence. (Recent example from Eliezer: Used it in a conversation about apparent evidence for parapsychology, saying that for this I wanted p < 0.0001, like they use in physics, rather than p < 0.05, before I started paying attention at all.)



f) When I encounter evidence that's insufficient to make me "change my mind" (substantially change beliefs/policies), but is still more likely to occur in world X than world Y, I try to update my probabilities at least a little. (Recent example from Anna: Realized I should somewhat update my beliefs about being a good driver after someone else knocked off my side mirror, even though it was legally and probably actually their fault—even so, the accident is still more likely to occur in worlds where my bad-driver parameter is higher.)


3. Handling inner conflicts; when different parts of you are pulling in different directions, you want different things that seem incompatible; responses to stress.

a) I notice when I and my brain seem to believe different things (a belief-vsanticipation divergence), and when this happens I pause and ask which of us is right. (Recent example from Anna: Jumping off the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas in a wire-guided fall. I knew it was safe based on 40,000 data points of people doing it without significant injury, but to persuade my brain I had to visualize 2 times the population of my college jumping off and surviving. Also, my brain sometimes seems much more pessimistic, especially about social things, than I am, and is almost always wrong.)

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b) When facing a difficult decision, I try to reframe it in a way that will reduce, or at least switch around, the biases that might be influencing it. (Recent example from Anna's brother: Trying to decide whether to move to Silicon Valley and look for a higher-paying programming job, he tried a reframe to avoid the status quo bias: If he was living in Silicon Valley already, would he accept a $70K pay cut to move to Santa Barbara with his college friends? (Answer: No.))


c) When facing a difficult decision, I check which considerations are consequentialist - which considerations are actually about future consequences. (Recent example from Eliezer: I bought a $1400 mattress in my quest for sleep, over the Internet, and hence much cheaper than the mattress I tried in the store, but non-returnable. When the new mattress didn't seem to work too well once I actually tried sleeping nights on it, this was making me reluctant to spend even more money trying another mattress. I reminded myself that the $1400 was a sunk cost rather than a future consequence, and didn't change the importance and scope of future better sleep at stake (occurring once per day and a large effect size each day).


4. What you do when you find your thoughts, or an argument, going in circles or not getting anywhere.

a) I try to find a concrete prediction that the different beliefs, or different people, definitely disagree about, just to make sure the disagreement is real/empirical. (Recent example from Michael Smith: Someone was worried that rationality training might be "fake", and I asked if they could think of a particular prediction they'd make about the results of running the rationality units, that was different from mine, given that it was "fake".)


b) I try to come up with an experimental test, whose possible results would either satisfy me (if it's an internal argument) or that my friends can agree on (if it's a group discussion). (This is how we settled the running argument over what to call the Center for Applied Rationality—Julia went out and tested alternate names on around 120 people.)


c) If I find my thoughts circling around a particular word, I try to taboo the word, i.e., think without using that word or any of its synonyms or equivalent concepts. (E.g. wondering whether you're "smart enough", whether your partner is "inconsiderate", or if you're "trying to do the right thing".) (Recent example from Anna: Advised someone to stop spending so much time wondering if they or other people were justified; was told that they were trying to do the right thing; and asked them to taboo the word 'trying' and talk about how their thought-patterns were actually behaving.)

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5. Noticing and flagging behaviors (habits, strategies) for review and revision.

a) I consciously think about information-value when deciding whether to try something new, or investigate something that I'm doubtful about. (Recent example from Eliezer: Ordering a $20 exercise ball to see if sitting on it would improve my alertness and/or back muscle strain.) (Non-recent example from Eliezer: After several months of procrastination, and due to Anna nagging me about the value of information, finally trying out what happens when I write with a paired partner; and finding that my writing productivity went up by a factor of four, literally, measured in words per day.)

b) I quantify consequences—how often, how long, how intense. (Recent example from Anna: When we had Julia take on the task of figuring out the Center's name, I worried that a certain person would be offended by not being in control of the loop, and had to consciously evaluate how improbable this was, how little he'd probably be offended, and how short the offense would probably last, to get my brain to stop worrying.) (Plus 3 real cases we've observed in the last year: Someone switching careers is afraid of what a parent will think, and has to consciously evaluate how much emotional pain the parent will experience, for how long before they acclimate, to realize that this shouldn't be a dominant consideration.)


6. Revising strategies, forming new habits, implementing new behavior patterns

a) I notice when something is negatively reinforcing a behavior I want to repeat. (Recent example from Anna: I noticed that every time I hit 'Send' on an email, I was visualizing all the ways the recipient might respond poorly or something else might go wrong, negatively reinforcing the behavior of sending emails. I've (a) stopped doing that (b) installed a habit of smiling each time I hit 'Send' (which provides my brain a jolt of positive reinforcement). This has resulted in strongly reduced procrastination about emails.)


b) I talk to my friends or deliberately use other social commitment mechanisms on myself. (Recent example from Anna: Using grapefruit juice to keep up brain glucose, I had some juice left over when work was done. I looked at Michael Smith and jokingly said, "But if I don't drink this now, it will have been wasted!" to prevent the sunk cost fallacy.) (Example from Eliezer: When I was having trouble getting to sleep, I (a) talked to Anna about the dumb reasoning my brain was using for staying up later, and (b) set up a system with Luke where I put a + in my daily work log every night I showered by my target time for getting to sleep on schedule, and a — every time I didn't.)

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c) To establish a new habit, I reward my inner pigeon for executing the habit. (Example from Eliezer: Multiple observers reported a long-term increase in my warmth / niceness several months after... 3 repeats of 4-hour writing sessions during which, in passing, I was rewarded with an M&M (and smiles) each time I complimented someone, i.e., remembered to say out loud a nice thing I thought.) (Recent example from Anna: Yesterday I rewarded myself using a smile and happy gesture for noticing that I was doing a string of lowpriority tasks without doing the metacognition for putting the top priorities on top. Noticing a mistake is a good habit, which I’ve been training myself to reward, instead of just feeling bad.)

d) I try not to treat myself as if I have magic free will; I try to set up influences (habits, situations, etc.) on the way I behave, not just rely on my will to make it so. (Example from Alicorn: I avoid learning politicians’ positions on gun control, because I have strong emotional reactions to the subject which I don’t endorse.) (Recent example from Anna: I bribed Carl to get me to write in my journal every night.)


e) I use the outside view on myself. (Recent example from Anna: I like to call my parents once per week, but hadn't done it in a couple of weeks. My brain said, "I shouldn't call now because I'm busy today." My other brain replied, "Outside view, is this really an unusually busy day and will we actually be less busy tomorrow?")


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Annotated Schedule Friday - How to Use Your Brain On the first day of the workshop, you’ll learn about the basic building blocks of human reasoning (and some of the biases that turn up when they’re misapplied). You’ll learn how to draw on your best habits and heuristics more often, and start adding to your arsenal of cognitive tools. Opening Session What does it mean to be rational? Popular culture shows us a Spock-like figure – a narrow powerhouse, unable to deal with nuance or emotion. At CFAR, we train thinkers who work well across many domains, as ready to use quick and dirty heuristics as careful, deliberate reasoning. We’ll also cover the logistics for the weekend: introducing the instructors, how to get the most out of classes and conversations, and the betting game that runs during the workshop. Building Bayesian Habits Probability theory shows us how to best update our picture of everyday reality in response to evidence. So how can you remember how to do that in everyday life? Learn the habits and heuristics to apply Bayesian reasoning to everything from qualitative data (“I had a good feeling about that interview”) to information that seems too small-scale for statistics (“My friend liked this book, should I read it?”). Your Inner Simulator You can trust your reflexes to dodge a thrown ball, but when else is your intuition likely to be reliable? How can you frame problems in the language and images you brain is most prepared to parse? You might use “pre-hindsight” as you imagine a message from the future saying a project has failed, and watching as your brain instinctively fills in “It didn’t work because…” Emotional Re-Association Our emotions distill data quickly, powerfully, unreliably, and often in strange ways. We’ll teach you how you can use our understanding of neuroscience to learn from your instinctive, emotional reactions and how to change emotional gears (e.g. if you’re in a situation where it would be more useful to be curious than angry). Goal Factoring Do you ever find yourself saying, “Unfortunately, I have to… X?” Goal factoring teaches you to systematically break down everything obvious and non-obvious you’re accomplishing, and ask about ways you could achieve those factors separately and more effectively – a new perspective on everything from reading habits to email etiquette to outings with friends. Attention What pulls your concentration away from work you'd like to do, or experiences you'd like to enjoy? How can you maintain your focus and even expand the amount of attention you can place on your experience when you're at your best.

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Saturday - Try Things! On day one, we taught you about how you think and reason, and gave some tips on exploiting this knowledge to achieve your goals. On day two, we shift into exploration mode so you can start expanding your ability to act, imagine, and create. Overcome aversions, try out a new internal story, and find valuable opportunities to step outside your comfort zone. Aversion Factoring and Calibration We daily shy away from risks and opportunities that aren’t really harmful. What are some possiblyvaluable things you’ve “never gotten around” to trying? Would it really be that painful to try them? Order new foods, break your commute routine, speak to an intimidating coworker, and learn not to take ‘never’ for an answer. Againstness Tensing up can win a physical fight, but it won’t win a debate or make a good life decision. Learn to notice and control your body’s instinctive fight-or-flight response; in stressful situations, remain calm and open to new information. Use your understanding of your body to be able to redirect an unhelpful kneejerk reaction. Implementation Intentions If you could make only one change to your planning habits, what would you expect would have the largest effect? Give yourself the chance to follow through on plans more successfully and increase your sense of having opportunities to seize as you go through your day. Curating Your Emotional Library A piece of art, whether highbrow or low, can transfix us. Learn to make deliberate use of images, audio, places, and people that have a strong emotional effect on you, so you can change your disposition or just experience life more richly. Comfort Zone Expansion (CoZE) It’s tempting to stick to the habits you trust. And it’s hard to estimate the cost of the opportunities you miss. In this class, figure out how to experiment socially and see where your fear is limiting your fun. This class is followed by a real life practicum in a public shopping mall, where you can practice with real, live people. Use improv exercises to get some practice thinking on your feet and experimenting with new ideas under pressure.

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Sunday - Compound Returns How will you make use of your new skills and habits? On the final day of classes, learn how to make a new behavior routine, stick to plans, aquire skills efficiently and other tools for helping you get the most out of what you know faster. Delegating to Yourself How can you make plans (from the everyday to the ambitious) that you can trust yourself to carry out? Lower your strain by thinking socially when you plan, so you keep yourself accountable in the future without becoming a hectoring taskmaster. We’ll also teach you a way to batch process the way you learn from experience, so you can recursively improve your strategy for planning or anything else you want to adjust. Propagating Urges Use some of the best-tested principles in experimental psychology to connect the intermediate steps toward your goal to your natural enthusiasm for the result. Instead of actively reinforcing the behaviors you want to want, learn how to run that reinforcement on autopilot, using your brain’s natural facility for shaping behaviors. Offline Habit Training Do you want to remember to plug in your cellphone each time you get home for work, or stop yourself from interrupting others? Learn how to use visualization, associations, and practice to break destructive habits and create beneficial ones. Kick the habit of checking email in bed by setting aside five minutes to practice your ideal morning routine. Turbocharging Training You’re probably wondering how to budget time to practice and internalize all these wonderful new techniques. Gain new skills much faster by understanding how you learn and find the most effective ways of expanding your competencies. Value of Information Quantify the expected value of new information and revamp your guesses about the relative importance of evidence you can gather and predictions you can test. Learn to try the easy and affordable experiments that ‘probably won’t work’ and search for $20 expenditures that might return $2,000 of value. Finding a way to save 10 minutes on one leg of your commute buys you five extra days per year, and that’s worth a minute to consider carefully or half an hour to test. Closing Attendees and instructors gather to share their reflections on how it all fits together and what they plan to do when they get home to start making use of these tools. Party Play rationality games, write satiric songs, or just hang out with your fellow attendees as you unwind. Attendees of past workshops will stop by to welcome you to the CFAR alumni network of people, businesses and ideas.

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Monday – Practice/Troubleshooting On Monday, you’ll start rotating through discussion groups to identify and extend the underlying and unifying themes of the classes. After the recap, you can meet with instructors one on one or in small groups to practice the techniques you’ve been learning and/or to get advice on how to use these new tools for a specific problem or project in your life.

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What is Applied Rationality? (Part I) The sphex is a small digger wasp that seems to exhibit complicated, deliberate behavior. When it catches a cricket, it drags the body back to the entrance of its burrow, leaves the cricket outside, goes into the burrow to makes sure there are no lurking enemies, and then drags the cricket inside and lays eggs. But, it turns out there’s a funny way to interfere with the sphex’s routine. While the sphex is inspecting the burrow, if you pull the cricket an inch or two to the left, then, when the sphex comes out, it pulls the cricket back to the entrance, and then goes in and inspects the burrow all over again. And if you move the cricket again, the sphex will tug it back into position and then go inspect the burrow a third time. Essentially, you can keep running a sphex through its loop indefinitely, without it ever noticing that it should break the pattern. That inspired Douglas Hofstadter to coin the word sphexish. Sphexish (adj) – following patterns by rote, even when maladapted to the situation at hand. Although the word is inspired by a wasp, its applications are unfortunately broad. When humans stay stuck in a loop, we’re behaving like the sphex. Here are some loops that some of us get stuck in: 1. Read something wrong on the internet → write reply 2. Parent brings up touchy subject → give the same cached response as in the last fight 3. Sit down at computer → open facebook The opposite of being sphexish is being agenty. An agent is an ideal at the other end of the spectrum: someone who could analyze beliefs, habits, and repeated behaviors and choose which ones to reinforce and which ones to drop. In order to make those choices, we’re going to give you a better view of your inner workings. You’ll get a clearer sense of how your mind works and what heuristics it uses. That way you can notice what your habits are, revise them, or add new ones. Becoming more agenty doesn’t happen all at once. Making a small amount of progress can make it easier to keep going and improving. You can bootstrap larger changes from small ones. The more you practice applied rationality, the more like an agent you can be – using automatic and analytic processes deliberately, and being able to course-correct when an old strategy no longer works.

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What is Applied Rationality? (Part II) When we make analyze information or make decisions, we tend to talk in terms of two modes of thought. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman described them as System 1 and System 2.

System 1

System 2

Comes first in evolutionary history

Developed later, more unique to humans

Processes information quickly

Processes information slowly

Sometimes called ‘intuition’

Sometimes called ‘analytic thinking’

Process of thinking is not transparent

Often a verbal mode of thinking

Doesn’t use up working memory

Limited by available working memory

Neither system is perfect. System 1 can fail by making the wrong connections – if a new acquaintance resembles an old enemy, you may find yourself feeling anxious without knowing why. System 2 can fail by limiting the information you tag as relevant – if you can’t put a feeling of unease into words, you may be tempted to leave it out of your calculations. Sometimes, people think applied rationality is the process of muting System 1 and just relying on System 2. After all, the System 2 parts are the bits that are most unique to humans; wouldn’t it be great to do our best thinking all the time? Applied rationality is about using the best tools at hand to achieve your goals, and turning off the bulk of your brain is seldom helpful. In the classes at this workshop, we’ll talk about how to better understand System 1 and System 2, so you can play to their strengths and be more efficient. The aim is to make deliberate, thoughtful use of all the skills you have, not to only use the skill of thinking slowly and deliberately.

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What is Applied Rationality? (Part III) You can imagine all possible actions you could take being laid out according to (x,y,z) coordinates, mapped out according to three dimensions: •

How much you enjoy the action

•

How well the action serves your goals

•

How often you take the action

So you might find breathing at something like (not very much fun, enormously necessary, constantly doing), because you don't particularly enjoy breathing, but must do it to achieve any other goal, and are always doing it. Browsing through your RSS reader might be a bit more like (moderately fun, relatively unneeded, frequently doing) if you like checking your reader, but don't feel very strongly, tend not to make much use of what you're reading, but keep finding yourself hitting refresh. You can imagine all of your possible actions being graphed within some kind of agency cube, that represented graphically all the ways you're currently choosing to spend your time.

You can think of this cube as having two very valuable regions. First, there's the corner (on top in the image above) where you are doing useful, pleasurable things frequently. And then there's the diametrically opposed corner where you don't do things that you hate and that frustrate your goals. Part of applied rationality is trying to concentrate your possible actions as densely as possible in these to corners, so you're doing the most of what's best for you, and the least of what's harmful.

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Getting the Most out of the Workshop Digestion As a child, you might have thought that when you ate food, it just became part of you without alteration. Eat a hotdog, and there would be little tiny pieces of hot dog studded throughout your body. Eventually, we learned that food isn’t just incorporated into us, it’s digested. We break it down into something we can use, that may look very different than what we originally ingested, even if it has the same nutrients. In a similar way, when we learn, we don’t just take up the instructor’s opinions and material wholesale. We adapt it and process it and try to extract what we need most. So it doesn’t help too much to just memorize what you hear in class. The goal is to internalize it and make it your own. When you digest food, you use stomach enzymes to break it down into building blocks that you can use to become stronger. When you digest content and ideas, you have a number of tools to break down what you’re hearing: •

Paraphrase the instructor, make sure you can put the idea in your own words

•

Try teaching the material to a friend

•

Look for new applications for the material (especially in your own life)

•

Look for predictions, if this theory is true, what would you observe

•

Ask questions

•

Talk about the content with others

•

...and many more

Over the course of the workshop, look for opportunities to digest the material in the classes, so it becomes a part of you, not just something you can describe having happened to you. Deliberately digesting content helps you get the most useful, personal material out of a lesson, and the information will be a lot easier to retain.

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Getting the Most out of the Workshop Try Things! When you’re exploring new ideas and habits, trying them out is a great way to gather data. It can be faster and simpler to just try out a new practice and see whether it works for you than to spend a lot of time trying to anticipate whether or not you’ll find it useful. When you try something out, and it works, you get to keep doing it, which can be really valuable over the long run. For example, if friends kept inviting you to ok-to-mediocre-sounding leisure activities, you might keep declining their offers. But what if you agreed to try them out? Maybe your list of attempts would look something like this: Activity

T1

T2

Yoga

X

Ultimate Frisbee

X

Meditation Classes

√

Salsa

X

T3

√

T4

√

T5

√

T6

√

T7

√

T8

√

T9

√

√

The failed trials (represented by X) are more than counterbalanced by the sustained run of a now successful habit (shown with √). So it can be worth your time to try out a number of lower probability trials, as long as a couple pay off as long-term habits. So when you listen and participate in class, look for ways to turn lessons into actions that you can try out and test drive. The act of turning class content into practical activities is a great way to digest material (you’re paraphrasing theory into practice) and helps you decide which material you want to prioritize when you return from the workshop.

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Getting the Most out of the Workshop Capture At the end of the workshop, what will you remember? What will you need to be able to take action? How do you make sure you retain the lessons that are the most valuable to you? There are two common failure modes when taking notes or trying to retain information: •

You might trust your brain too much. Because something feels important in the moment, you figure you’ll retain it. Has this strategy worked in the past? How many important-feeling things can you be exposed to before your working memory is strained?

•

You might just try transcription. Instead of experiencing and digesting the class, you might put most of your mental energy into just capturing everything. This means you’ll still have to filter the useful information later, and you won’t have access to the instructor or the other participants while you do it.

We try to preserve the basic material of each class in the workbook, so you don’t have to worry about transcription. Instead, try capturing the actions and insights that pertain to you, that aren’t already in the workbook. When it comes to these ideas, err on the side of inclusion. This are the content you won’t be able to find anywhere else, because you’re the one who created it. We’ve included a capture strip at the bottom of each page in the workbook, so it’s easy to retrieve what you captured. If you already have a working capture system for idea, plans, and actions, you may want to use it instead. Don’t forget, you won’t only think of interesting things in class! Have a plan to capture important actions and insights in conversation or during digestion of material. Why not write that plan down in the ‘Action’ section at the bottom of this page? Make the commitment effect work for you! But don’t let capture drive you crazy. You’re storing up notes for you whole post-workshop life -- don’t panic about trying to put everything into practice the week or the month after you get home. If you just make one small change (using pomodoros, doing a few VOI calculations, etc) you’re making it easier to bootstrap to other changes in the future.

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Prediction Markets Overview Scattered throughout the camp on various walls, you’ll see large sticky sheets with predictions, probabilities, and times on them. These are prediction markets, and they offer a playful way to help refine your predicative accuracy. To play in a market, just pick up a pen, write a probability below the last one already written, and write your name and the time next to your probability. When the prediction is settled, you will receive a (possibly negative) number of points - called centibits, or hundredths of a bit - according to one of two rules. For the sake of describing the rules, let’s say your bet is X% and the one before yours is Y%. If the claim turns out to be true, then the number of centibits you receive will be: If the claim turns out to be false, however, the number of centibits you receive will be:

The House (i.e., an assigned staff member) will keep track of how many points you have. At the end of the camp, there will be a lottery for prizes and your chance of winning will be proportional to the number of points you've won in the betting markets! (But the real point of this is to engage in the practice of putting your degree of confidence on the table. The point is the process, not the product!)

Example Suppose there’s a market with the claim, “It will be raining on Monday at noon.” At noon on Monday the market is automatically closed, at which point the following bets have been made: P(true) P(false) Sun 12pm

50%

50%

House

Sun 9pm

40%

60%

Alice

Mon 11am

90%

10%

Bob

Mon 11am

55%

45%

Alice

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At noon on Monday, let’s suppose that it is in fact raining. That means we use the first column to calculate the payoffs: those were the probabilities the players were assigning to the true state of the world. Alice would lose some centibits for causing the market to update in the wrong direction on two occasions. Specifically, she would “gain” -32 centibits for her first bet:

and “gain” -71 centibits for her second bet: Bob, on the other hand, would gain 117 centibits, reflecting that he caused the market to update strongly in the correct direction:

For contrast, let’s pretend that it turns out that it’s not raining on Monday at noon. That means we use the second column of numbers to calculate the payoffs: those were the probabilities the players were assigning to the true state of the world. Here, Alice would be rewarded 26+217 centibits for causing the market to update in the correct direction on two occasions:

Bob would lose 259 centibits for his significant overconfidence in causing the market to update in the wrong direction:

In Sum The following theorem summarizes game play: ● When you bet, your score is the amount of information, in hundredths of a bit, that your probabilities have provided as an update to the previous probability. ● Your best strategy is to honestly report your credence at any time. That is, at any moment, if your credence is not exactly the same as the last credence written on the board, then you expect to win centibits by writing up your own. ● Over time, being better calibrated (being right X% of the time that you're X% sure) will make you better at the game. (For an explanation of why we use this scoring rule, look up Eliezer Yudkowsky’s online essay “A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation.”)

Proposing betting markets Anyone can propose a betting market. However, the House may choose to ignore any given market that they did not put up themselves. (We’ll avoid ignoring markets this way as much as possible. This is in 20

place primarily to avoid breaking the system with overly clever markets.) Also, the House has to know about a market for it to count. Every proposed market should have: ● a statement whose truth or falsity can be and will be determined to everyone’s satisfaction during the camp, ● a condition for closing (ideally one that happens automatically), and ● an initial bet assigned to the creator of the market.

Well-formed bets The House will ignore any bet of 100% or 0% when calculating points, treating such lines as though they were never written. (This is to prevent you from losing infinitely many points, or from allowing the person following your bet to potentially gain infinitely many points.) You need to specify a percentage that the House’s computer can score. Variable notation like “ ” will cause the line in question to be completely ignored when calculating points. If you want to specify a very large or very small probability, use something fairly standard like scientific notation. Clever uses of unusual notation like tetration (e.g., 1/(3^^^3)) might force the House to ignore your bet, unless you care to explain how to enter your bet into the computer (and offer to write the program if entering the score requires programming!). Bear in mind that you don’t gain all that much by being extremely confident and correct, but you can lose an arbitrary number of centibits for being overconfident and wrong. If you offer a severely overconfident bet and lose huge numbers of centibits, you are in effect paying those centibits to whomever follows your bet with anything more reasonable. (But if you actually, honestly have a gargantuan amount of confidence, your expected score is still maximized by correctly stating your confidence!)

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Opening Session – Further Resources Sphexishness and Agency In a 1982 Scientific American article (later reprinted in his book Metamagical Themas), Douglas Hofstadter coined the term “sphexish” to refer to repetitive, pre-programmed behavioral patterns, and identified the ability to reflect on one’s own patterns as essential to breaking out of these loops. Hofstadter, D. R. (1985). “On the seeming paradox of mechanizing creativity.” In Metamagical Themas, 525-546. http://amzn.com/0465045669 In his book The Robot’s Rebellion, cognitive scientist Keith Stanovich (2004) connects the issue of sphexishness to recent psychology research on human judgment and decision making. Stanovich, Keith. (2004). The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin. http://amzn.com/0195341147

System 1 and System 2 Psychologists distinguish between “System 1” cognitive processes (which are fast, intuitive, associative, and parallel) and “System 2” cognitive processes (which are slow, reflective, deliberate, and serial). Daniel Kahneman’s (2011) book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, elaborates on this distinction (and the field of judgment and decision making research which he co-founded) in depth; Kahneman’s (2003) review article provides a briefer summary. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. http://goo.gl/5J0zj Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58, 697-720. http://tinyurl.com/kahneman2003 System 1 processes share many similarities to the human perceptual system. When they are functioning well, they can draw on a large body of low-level data to identify patterns, which come to mind readily without any explanation attached. However, there is a risk that the variable which System 1 reports will be subtly different from the one which you are attempting to assess. This type of error (called “attribute substitution”) is analogous to a visual illusion where you attempt to assess the twodimensional size of a drawing on paper, but your perceptual system reports the three-dimensional size 22

that the depicted object would have (Kahneman, 2003; 2011).

Getting the most out of the workshop Education research emphasizes that students learn more when they engage with the material in a way that goes beyond simply listening to the words in a lecture or reading the words in a book. Active learning focuses on getting students involved in activities which lead them to think through and make use of the material that they are learning about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning A review article of research on the benefits of active learning: Prince, M. (2004). Does active learning work? A review of the research. Journal of Engineering Education, 93, 223-231. http://goo.gl/omHuJ Cognitive scientist Roger Schank (1995) argues that people have a set of learned “scripts” for how to interact with the world, such as a script for how to order food at a restaurant. Doing new things allows a person to learn new scripts (or variations on the scripts that they already know), which increases the opportunities available to them and reduces their sphexishness. Schank, R. C. (1995). What we learn when we learn by doing. (Technical Report No. 60). Northwestern University, Institute for Learning Sciences. http://cogprints.org/637/1/LearnbyDoing_Schank.html Capture is the first step of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” organization system. Capture involves writing things down (in particular, things that you want to do) and putting them into your system. Having a functioning capture system ensures that this information will come back to your attention later on when you have time to process it and act on it, and frees your attention in the moment to do something other than memorizing things-to-do. Allen, David (2001). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done Knowledge tends to decay over time, as people gradually forget information that they have learned. Regularly accessing knowledge helps a person retain it. For a given amount of studying, a person is more likely to retain long-term memories of the material if the studying is spread out over time rather than condensed into a single session of “cramming”, a phenomenon known as the spacing effect (although cramming is effective at forming short-term memories). These discoveries about memory date back to research by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 19th century, and have been repeatedly replicated 23

by more recent studies (e.g., Cepeda et al., 2006). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect Spaced repetition software is designed to help people retain long-term memories by providing reviews that are timed efficiently based on the human forgetting curve. Programs such as Anki and Supermemo use a flashcard-based model that repeats a given flashcard less and less often over time as long as you remember it, so that you are reminded of the information before you forget it but do not spend much time reviewing information that you already know well. An in-depth review of research on spaced repetition, including summaries of published research as well as advice on how to use spaced repetition software: Gwern. “Spaced repetition.” http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition An online article with tips on how to design spaced-repetition cards effectively: Wozniak, Piotr. “The 20 rules of formulating knowledge in learning.” http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm A meta-analysis, providing a quantitative review of research on the spacing effect (also known as “distributed practice”): Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 354-380. http://goo.gl/KgP0n

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Predictions People’s intuitive sense of probability tends not to be properly calibrated; among events that someone thinks are 80% sure to happen, typically only 60% actually take place (Russo & Schoemaker, 1992). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect Repeated rounds of prediction and feedback allow a person to calibrate their expectations to reality. Sufficient training and experience in a domain with clear feedback (like weather forecasting) can lead to more accurate, unbiased estimates in that domain (Kahneman & Klein, 2009). Calibration practice can also lead to less biased estimates across many domains (Russo & Schoemaker, 1992). A review article of research on expertise, with an emphasis on which areas of subject matter allow people to develop expertise and which do not: Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2009). Conditions for intuitive expertise. American Psychologist, 64, 515-526. http://goo.gl/lGIPZ A review article of research on calibration and calibration training: Russo, J. E., & Schoemaker, P. J. H. (1992). Managing overconfidence. Sloan Management Review, 33, 7-17. http://goo.gl/C98as A website where you can make, share, and track probabilistic predictions about any event: http://predictionbook.com/ The Credence Game, developed by CFAR, provides calibration training by giving you immediate feedback on probabilistic judgments. http://www.acritch.com/credence-game/

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Friday – How to Use Your Brain

Building Bayesian Habits Building Bayesian Habits - Overview Using Bayes' Theorem to update your beliefs involves four steps: 1. Determine the hypothesis being considered and what the alternative hypothesis is 2. Determine your prior 3. Determine the strength of the evidence you’re considering 4. Combine the prior and the strength of evidence to produce a conclusion (“posterior”) Each of these steps has a mathematical formalism. For instance, the strength of evidence is technically defined to be a ratio of two conditional probabilities that are related in a particular way. However, we will also practice some "quick-and-dirty" heuristics to engage parts of your intuition (like your "inner simulator") that don't really operate in terms of numbers. Depending on how important a decision is, there are varying amounts of time you can spend using Bayes Rule in various ways to update your beliefs: •

10-minute Bayes --- Doing careful research into priors and strength of evidence, spanning minutes to hours. Useful for: ◦ High-stakes decisions --- In situations where it's worth taking some time to think and investigate, Bayes Rule can help you evaluate conflicting sources of evidence, and identify useful questions to ask next. ◦ Settling disagreements --- Bayes can help you navigate a disagreement with someone, by isolating whether you have different background knowledge or have differing impressions of what evidence means.

•

10-second Bayes --- A quick-and-dirty mathematical estimate, taking around 5-20 seconds. Useful for: ◦ Emotional situations --- Sanity-checking your judgments when you feel tired, stressed out, or otherwise emotionally compromised. ◦ Confusing situations --- when you notice your previous experience is at odds with something you're seeing or that someone is saying.

•

1-second Bayes --- Thinking in terms of calibrated intuitions instead of numbers, which takes around 1-3 seconds. ◦ Following arguments --- Deciding from moment to moment whether an argument or reasoning process makes sense, as it is being presented.

This last 1-second version requires having "Bayesian habits" installed as automatic mental reflexes, taking almost no conscious reflection time at all. This means training your "System 1" as Kahneman or Stanovich would say. The types of exercises we will focus on are designed to help you hone and accelerate those reflexes. A note on engaging in exercises: 26

Many exercises will involve reading a claim (e.g. “This restaurant can’t be good, or it would be more crowded”) and then reasoning about it. Rather than reasoning verbally about the claim, please make up and imagine (i.e. mental simulate) a specific scenario fitting the description, and answer the claim about the scenario you made up. (This will causes our answers to be different, but ensures you are practicing something closer to a real-life decision.)

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Building Bayesian Habits – Drill #0 Accessing Anticipations You have an inner simulator that lets you check how surprising something would feel if it happened. It’s a way to query your System One mind with a specific useful question written up by System Two. For example, imagine a friend of mine had RSVP’d “yes” to a party but didn’t show up. If I imagine how I would feel if this happened, I would be, at least, a bit surprised – it’s not what I anticipated happening that night. But my surprise falls along a spectrum – I might be a good deal more surprised if she showed up on time but had shaved off her hair. And I can categorize those experiences as qualitatively different before either happens. I can use my surprise as a crude measure of how likely I expect something to occur, and get a clearer intuitive answer than if I immediately try to ascribe a numerical probability to it. When to use Accessing Anticipations: • • •

A question or decision is high stakes. You have a lot of emotional bias clouding your response. You’re in a disagreement.

How to use Accessing Anticipations: • • • • • • •

Imagine the situation as vividly as possible. Be specific, don’t just imagine a vague friend, think of a particular one. Think about where your surprise falls on a spectrum. Don’t argue with your System 1 until you acknowledge its answer. Then feel free to probe at any discomfort or confusion about how surprised you were and decide which part you want to adjust. Notice if System 1 was responding to data you hadn’t consciously factored in. You can try to translate back and forth from intuitions to probabilities to tune calibration. Are your surprise reactions synched up to how unlikely something actually is? Can you use some known events as markers on your surprise thermometer?

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Practicing Accessing Anticipations: Try to imagine each of these experiences vividly; notice how surprising it seems. Then, you can try and place it along a spectrum of experiences. You can use the letters for each example to label the spectrum, with more surpising (less likely) things near the bottom.

A. Your friend doesn’t turn up for a party s/he RSVP’d for. B. You do badly on an exam that you felt good about while taking. C. The cashier greets you by name at the grocery store. D. You receive a parking ticket in the mail. E. Your parent dyes her/his hair purple. F.

You find a bear cub in your living room.

G. You wake up naked in the woods. H. A sunny day turns to rain. I.

You receive a summons for jury duty.

J.

Your name is misspelled on your reissued driver’s license.

K. Your bookcase is missing, but all the books are neatly piled on the floor. L. Your bookcase and books are both missing. M. You turn a corner with a friend in a city and meet a tiger. N. You can’t find your car keys in the usual spot. O. It snows on Christmas Day, where you live. P.

Someone you meet at a party has the same birthday as you.

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A thought experiment: Imagine, while walking across a large public university’s campus, you meet a guy named Tom who seems very reserved and introverted. Would you guess that Tom is a business major or a math major?

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Building Bayesian Habits – Drill #0 Parsing hypotheses and evidence It takes effort and practice to change casual speech into word problems. In a conversation (or an argument), your interlocutor may not clearly identify what evidence she’s considering and what hypothesis she intendeds it to support. The quickest way to ensure we mean the same thing by "hypotheses" and "evidence" will be to work through some examples below. Evidence: This is what you observe to be true. Hypothesis: Your guess about what is true, often based on some evidence. It may be a prediction, or a speculation for what could have caused or explained the evidence you saw. Useful times to parse colloquial language into hypotheses and evidence: When you hear any of these phrases (or similar ones) come out of your mouth or someone else’s: ● “X happened because of Y.” ● “I believe X because Y happened.” ● “Well, I know Y, because X!” ● “Y is another reason to believe X.” ● “X can’t be true because of Y!” Exercises / examples of parsing casual language into hypotheses and evidence: Put a circle around the evidence (observation) the speaker is presenting and a box around the hypothesis (prediction or speculation) she's using it to support. Then, as a precursor to using Bayes later, give a short name or "handle" for the hypothesis, an alternative hypothesis, and the evidence. Note: There may be extraneous data and/or background information. 1. This restaurant can’t be good, or it would be more crowded. Hypothesis: Evidence:

"bad" "not crowded"

Alternate hypothesis:

"good"

2. A volunteer from the campaign visited me; so they're probably well organized. Hypothesis: Evidence:


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3. I’m very good at this subject, so my low test score must mean there was a Scantron error. Hypothesis: Evidence:


4. My car keys are missing, because my kids hid them. Hypothesis: Evidence:


5. I believe she’s telling the truth, because she didn’t look away when she told me. Hypothesis: Evidence:


6. My friend hasn’t mentioned the fight again, so he’s not angry. Hypothesis: Evidence:


7. This candidate graduated from an Ivy League school; she’s probably qualified for the job. Hypothesis: Evidence:


8. This candidate stumbled over a question in the interview; she’s probably not qualified. Hypothesis: Evidence:


9. This candidate has previously worked in this field; she’s probably qualified for the job. Hypothesis: Evidence:


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Building Bayesian Habits – Drill #1 Anchoring off the Prior Many studies have shown that people tend to systematically neglect their own background information when presented with evidence, especially if the background information is less salient in their intuition or "System 1". So, before you start to make sense of a new piece of evidence, it’s important to check your baseline assumptions about the possible explanations: that is, what you would have expected before seeing the evidence. This is called your prior. Our brains do not do this automatically. This phenomenon is called Base Rate Neglect, or Prior Insensitivity. When your prior is lopsided in favor of a particular hypothesis, it needs to be intentionally weighed in against new evidence, otherwise your brain is liable to ignore it. To do this, you can anchor on your prior, and use evidence to adjust away from it. When your prior doesn't favor any hypothesis in particular, this step is less important, as the new evidence alone is enough to determine your new belief. When to Anchor on your the Prior: • Not that often! Only if there’s a big disparity between the two options. • When you see strong evidence favoring a theory and want to check if you should shift your belief sharply. Note: You don’t always have to come up with a plausible prior yourself, if Googling is faster. How to use your Surprisometer to check whether a prior is lopsided: ● Imagine sampling from a bag of outcomes --- what do you expect to pull out? ● How many people do you think you’d need to survey to find five people in whatever category you’re talking about? ● In a big city (say, NYC – 8 million people), how many people do you expect to fall into this category? Calibrating your sense of confidence http://acritch.com/credence/ --- This is a simple game to give you practice assigning probabilities to your guesses and getting feedback about your actual success rate. After playing for a while, you can develop the property that when you say you are 70% sure, you are actually correct 70% of the time... for most people, this is not true by default!

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Practicing using your Surprisometer to construct a prior odds ratio: In each of these examples, write down a short name for the hypothesis being considered and an alternative, as in Drill #0. Your prior is what you would have expected before seeing the evidence, and what odds you'd give to that expectation. You may use the techniques listed above to help you decide your prior. 1. Example: The restaurant can’t be good, or it would be more crowded. ( good : not good ) Prior odds = (3 : 1) (This means you think that good restaurants are about 3 times more common than bad ones.) 2. [A specific friend] enjoyed this book, therefore I will, too. Prior odds

=

3. A volunteer from the campaign visited me; that’s evidence that they’re well-organized. Prior odds

=

4. I’m very good at this subject, so my low test score must mean there was a Scantron error. Prior odds

=

5. My car keys are missing, because my kids hid them. Prior odds

=

6. I believe she’s telling the truth, because she didn’t look away when she told me. Prior odds

=

7. My friend hasn’t mentioned the fight again, so he’s not angry. Prior odds

=

8. This candidate graduated from an Ivy League school; she’s probably qualified for the job. Prior odds

=

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Building Bayesian Habits – Drill #2 Strength of Evidence You can use your Surprisometer to help check whether evidence actually supports a given hypothesis, and to gauge how strongly it supports that theory. Evidence supporting a given explanation X means that it’s more likely to occur in a world where X is true than where X is false. It doesn’t mean that X is necessarily the most plausible cause of whatever you’ve observed.

•

•

• • •

Techniques for using your Surprisometer to judge Strength of Evidence as a likelihood ratio: Imagine the same situation repeats a number of times (e.g. you go on 20 job interviews, 10 of which you’re a good match for and 10 of which are a reach). In how many of the interviews for which you’re well qualified do you expect to stumble over at least one question? How many of the 10 for which you’re a little less qualified? Your internal simulator should flag some results as more surprising than others. So you can home in on a fuzzy estimate of an odds ratio (e.g. [4-5] : [6-7]), which can give you a sense of how strongly the evidence (flubbed a question) supports a given hypothesis (can do this job capably) Other tips: You’re trying to trigger a strong intuitive, System One reaction, so remember to be vivid and specific. Estimates can be helpful, even if they’re fuzzy. You can use ranges here, just as you used orders of magnitude when estimating priors. If there’s a large disparity between your tallies in the two cases, the evidence is strong; if they’re close to even, the evidence is weak (q.v. the section on Bayes without numbers).

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Practicing using your Surprisometer to judge Strength of Evidence as a likelihood ratio: Go back over the list of propositions, and try to estimate an odds ratio by checking how often you expect to see this piece of evidence appear when the hypothesis is true and when it’s false. After you finish the list, compare to the previous page to see if the magnitude of your ratings varied, depending what method you used. 1. Example: The restaurant can’t be good, or it would be more crowded. Evidence: “not crowded” Qualitative strength of evidence: weak, for “not good”

OR

Likelihood ratio

( good : not good) = (60% : 80%) = (3 : 4)

2. [A specific friend] enjoyed this book, therefore I will, too.

3. A volunteer from the campaign visited me; that’s evidence that they’re well-organized.

4. I’m very good at this subject, so my low test score must mean there was a Scantron error.

5. My car keys are missing, because my kids hid them.

6. I believe she’s telling the truth, because she didn’t look away when she told me.

7. My friend hasn’t mentioned the fight again, so he’s not angry.

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8. This candidate graduated from an Ivy League school; she’s probably qualified for the job.

9. This candidate stumbled over a question in the interview; she’s probably not qualified.

10. This candidate has previously worked in this field; she’s probably qualified for the job.

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Building Bayesian Habits – Drill #3 Bayes, altogether Finally, we put the first two steps of Bayes together --- the prior and the likelihood ratio --- for form our new belief, called the posterior. 1. Example: The restaurant can’t be good, or it would be more crowded. ( good : not good) Prior odds: = (3 : 1) Evidence:

"not crowded"

Likelihood ratio

= (60% : 80%) = (3 : 4) Posterior: = (3*3 : 1*4) = (9 : 4) ~ (2 : 1) 2. [A specific friend] enjoyed this book, therefore I will, too.





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10. This candidate has previously worked in this field; she’s probably qualified for the job.

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Optional: Using your Surprisometer for Bayes without numbers Surprise behaves a lot like the logarithm of probability. The advantage of thinking entirely in terms of surprise affects is that this process can become very instinctive and take on the order of a second or so. This is the kind of 1-second Bayes discussed in the outline. Here's what the steps look like when combined, for the restaurant example above:

40

Without the instructions written in, the thought process looks a bit simpler:

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Practicing using your Surprisometer to construct a prior as a surprisal difference: In each of the following examples, write down a short name for the hypothesis being considered and an alternative, as in Drill #0. Your prior is that you would have expected before seeing the evidence, and what odds you'd give to that expectation You may use the techniques listed above to help you decide your prior. 1. Example: The restaurant can’t be good, or it would be more crowded.

(This means your Surprisometer thinks good restaurants are more common than bad ones.)




42




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How to use your Surprisometer to judge Strength of Evidence as a surprisal difference 1 Imagine you knew that your hypothesis was true (you like the book). Would it be surprising to find out that you saw the evidence that you observed (that your friend liked it, too)? 2 Imagine you knew that your hypothesis was false (you don’t like the book). Would it be surprising to find out that you saw the evidence that you observed (that your friend liked it, too)? 3 Compare how far out on your surprise-o-meter each of these hypotheticals fall. a If there’s a large disparity, the evidence is stronger. b If the gap is small, the evidence is weaker. 4 It could be that you’d be very surprised to see this evidence in either case. Whether or not intelligent aliens exist, you’d be surprised to be personally contacted. But the gap is large, even though both scenarios are unexpected.

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Practice using your Surprisometer to judge Strength of Evidence as a surprisal difference: Imagine you knew the hypothesis was true. – How surprising would it be to have observed this evidence? How surprised would you be to see it if the hypothesis were definitely false? Compare your surprise gap to judge whether this evidence is strong, moderate, or weak. When you’ve rated them all, check if propositions in the same category feel similar, or if you want to subdivide your ratings. 1. The restaurant can’t be good, or it would be more crowded. (This means you are more surprised when a good restaurant turns our to be not crowded than when a bad restaurant turns out to be more crowded.)


3. A volunteer from the campaign visited me: that’s evidence that they’re well-organized.


45






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Practice using your Surprisometer to form a Posterior as a surprisal difference Imagine you knew the hypothesis was true. – How surprising would it be to have observed this evidence? How surprised would you be to see it if the hypothesis were definitely false? Compare your surprise gap to judge whether this evidence is strong, moderate, or weak. When you’ve rated them all, check if propositions in the same category feel similar, or if you want to subdivide your ratings. 1. Example: This restaurant can’t be good, or it would be more crowded.


3. A volunteer from the campaign visited me: that’s evidence that they’re well-organized.


47





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Practice choosing what evidence to seek Pick 3 of the examples from the previous list. Try to come up with a different piece of evidence that would be stronger evidence for the given hypothesis. Use either likelihood ratios or surprisal differences to compare your assessments of strength of evidence.

Pick 3 of the examples from the previous list. Try to come up with a different piece of evidence that would be weaker evidence for the given hypothesis. Use either the qualitative or quantitative exercises to compare your assessments of strength of evidence.

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Building Bayes Habits – Further Resources Once a person has a theory in mind that explains why something happened, they tend to give too much weight to that theory and not pay enough attention to alternative hypotheses. Research on the “unpacking effect”, for example, has found that people tend to overestimate the likelihood of possible explanations that they have explicitly considered, and underestimate the likelihood that some other unstated explanation is correct (Tversky & Koehler, 1994). Tversky, A., & Koehler, D.J. (1994). Support theory: A nonextensional representation of subjective probability. Psychological Review, 101, 547–567. http://goo.gl/oXNzN The first explanation that a person considers can have a disproportionate effect on the conclusions that they reach, because one’s attention and reasoning are often guided by the best-available-theory which is at hand. This leads to several related biases in how people interpret information and test their hypotheses, which are forms of confirmation bias. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias Intentionally considering alternative explanations and imagining what you would see if they were true is an instance of the strategy called “consider the opposite”, which is one of the debiasing techniques with the strongest empirical support for countering confirmation bias and other cognitive biases (Larrick, 2004). Larrick, R. P. (2004). Debiasing. In D. J. Koehler & N. Harvey (Eds.), Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making (pp. 316-337). Oxford: UK. http://goo.gl/nerBh Evaluating the strength of the evidence is one component of Bayes’ theorem, which is the mathematical rule for how to reason under uncertainty. An online explanation of Bayes’ theorem, including a gradual introduction to the math involved: Eliezer Yudkowsky, “An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem” http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes Base rate neglect (the underweighting of prior probabilities, such as the fact that there are more business majors than math majors) is a common error of probabilistic reasoning, as people tend to pay too much attention to the salient piece of evidence and neglect their background knowledge. A review article on heuristics and biases research, including base rate neglect: Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58, 697-720. 50

http://tinyurl.com/kahneman2003 Concretely imagining a scenario as if it is near-at-hand can allow people to make use of information in their minds which they do not access when thinking more abstractly about the event. Research on Construal Level Theory has documented how people’s thoughts about an event vary with psychological distance: Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review, 117, 440-463. http://psych.nyu.edu/trope/Trope_Liberman_2010.pdf One line of research showing the benefits of thinking about an event as if it is near-at-hand has varied whether the event actually is near-at-hand. Unrealistic optimism about one’s performance is common for events that are hypothetical or far in the future, but people become more realistic about tasks that they are about to perform. (Armor & Sackett, 2006). Armor, D. A., & Sackett, A. M. (2006). Accuracy, error, and bias in predictions for real versus hypothetical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 583–600. http://goo.gl/VosW2

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Your Inner Simulator

When you move to catch a falling pen before you compute the parabola it’s tracing out or when you notice a friend is upset just by the way they enter the room (even if you couldn’t explain how you noticed), you’re using your Inner Simulator. This unit will help you learn: • When to trust this kind of intuition, and • How you can harness it to solve the problems it’s best suited for. So, what is your Inner Simulator and what does it do? Inner Simulator Explicit/Verbal Models Part of Kahneman’s System 1 Called ‘anticipations’ on Less Wrong (prompts fear when dog enters the room) Learns well by watching, storing up examples; must be shown how, not told how Good at social judgment and other situations where you have a lot of experience Vulnerable to giving different answers depending on how query is framed

Part of Kahneman’s System 2 Called ‘professions’ on Less Wrong (e.g. “I believe the dog is safe”) Learns well from textbooks, statistics, Wikipedia Good at noticing equivalences and reframes (e.g. $1 / day and $365 / year are equivalent) Vulnerable to distortion by wishful thinking, ideology

So, make sure you’re accessing your Inner Simulator using the kinds of prompts that it’s good at answering! You can imagine your Simulator as a piece of hardware that has a couple built in functions you can pass information. Here are three useful functions:

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Start-a-movie: “What happens next?” Input: Visualize the beginning of a scenario, vividly Output: What does your simulator see happening next? Examples: • Input: A laptop placed 60% of the way off the table. Output? •

Input: Imagine lifting a piece of watermelon to your mouth and taking a bite. Output?

•

Input: Picture sneaking up on a friend at their desk. You take aim with your water gun and pull the trigger. Output?

Surprise-o-meter: “How surprised do I feel?” Input: Visualize a scenario from start to finish Output: How surprised do you feel? How much disbelief are you suspending? Examples: ● Input: You’re trying to figure out how much food to buy for a party to which 25 people RSVP’d. Visualize 20 people showing up. Output? ● Input: Visualize 70 people showing up to the party in the previous example. Output? ● Input: Imagine you finished a specific current project in less than half the time you’ve allotted for yourself. Output? •

Input: Imagine you find out that in three months you haven’t made any deliberate use of your Inner Simulator. Output?

Your surprise-o-meter is discussed more in the Bayes unit.

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Pre-hindsight: “What went right/wrong?” Input: Imagine finding out (in a message from the future) whether a project succeeded or not Output: What explanation leaps to mind about why this happened? Examples: • Input: Think of a specific email you plan to send in the next few days. Imagine you find out tomorrow that the email you’re about to send ticked off the recipient. Output? •

Input: Imagine you get a visit from you-from-the-future who tells you to make sure you stay at your current job for the next year, thanks you warmly, and then vanishes. Output?

•

Input: Imagine you find out that in three months you haven’t made any deliberate use of your Inner Simulator. Output?

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Being Specific: Making the Best Use of Your Inner Simulator These are three ways you can make function calls on your Inner Simulator, but how can you make sure you’re passing it the best inputs? Your Inner Simulator is especially good at being a check on wishful thinking or what you feel like you ought to believe, but you need to make sure your explicit/verbal models aren’t rigging the game by phrasing questions the wrong way. By being specific, concrete, and vivid, you can mostly avoid getting stuck in Garbage In, Garbage Out. The Ask for Examples! and Next Actions skills will help. Ask for Examples! For a concrete example of using examples, try this story from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I'm trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they're all excited. As they're telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball) - disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn't true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, "False!" If it's true, they get all excited, and I let them go on for a while. Then I point out my counterexample. "Oh. We forgot to tell you that it's Class 2 Hausdorff homomorphic." Your inner simulator needs something to visualize. Just saying something as words isn’t enough. You want something specific that your imagination can interact with. You can ask yourself for examples, too! Asking for examples is a really handy thing to do in conversation. When you keep your Inner Simulator engaged during a conversation, and keep feeding it data, you might notice that it’s easier to: 1. Notice if your friend’s claim is false – Just like Feynman, you may be able to notice where the error is, instead of just having a vague sense of something not adding up if you’re concrete. 2. Notice if you’re misunderstanding your friend – When we listen to someone else, we try to approximate and anticipate what they’re explaining. If you ask for examples from your friend, you can see if you’ve been accidentally adding or leaving out extraneous features on yours. 3. Notice if you’re the one who’s wrong – It’s easy to avoid noticing if you’ve made a mistake; it’s painful! The more concrete your disagreement is, the easier it is to notice if there’s a flaw in your own argument and to own up to it.

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Next Actions A goal isn’t the same thing as a plan. I might have the goal of exercising more, but to have a plan I need to think about when I’ll go to the gym, what I’ll do, and how I’ll remember in the moment. But before I get up to any of those parts of the plan, I’ll need to take my next action, which might be printing out my gym coupon or setting a reminder in my calendar or choosing a time to go buy workout clothes. A next action is the step that sets your plan in motion. It’s the first thing you’d have to do to keep the plan going, which is often as pedestrian as putting something on your calendar or placing a library hold or asking someone to have coffee to talk over the plan. Often, when you’re deciding on a next action, it’s helpful to think about a trigger – some specific event or time that reminds you to do your next action (such as 5pm Tuesday, or when my boss returns my email, or when I wake up tomorrow morning ) Write down one goal you have (a larger scale thing you want to accomplish): Take a few minutes to think about your plan to make this goal happen. What’s the next action you need to take to get the plan moving? What specific trigger will let you know when it’s time to complete this next action? Now practice going through this process a few more times: Goal: Next action: Trigger: Goal: Next action:

Trigger:

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Inner Simulator Practice: Murphyjitsu! Murphy’s Law says that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, but you can use some of the skills and safeguards you’ve learned for your Inner Simulator to anticipate and evade these hazards. Step 1: Pick a plan/project/goal

Step 2: Make it specific enough to visualize. What’s the next action you would need to take to keep this project/plan moving forward? It should be concrete enough that you can picture yourself doing it, not something vague like “work out more.”

Step 3: Check your surprise-o-meter Visualize putting this plan in motion, then ask, how surprised would I be if this plan failed? If you’d be shocked, then you’re done! Otherwise, continue to step 4.

Step 4: Use Pre-Hindsight Your plan didn’t work! And it failed at the stage of the next action you wrote in Step 2! What happened?

Step 5: Use Looking Forward What action would you have had to take to prevent this particular failure mode? Visualize taking this preemptive action and then ask “What comes next?” Have you successfully defused the danger? Did you create a new weak point to patch?

Step 6: Iterate! Repeat Steps 3-5 several times (sometimes this technique is called “Simulate 17 times, act once”). What else might have gone wrong? What could have prevented it? You’re battle-hardening your plan against happenstance and poor habits. Remember that this should be very quick – all “17” iterations should take maybe a few minutes total.

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Your Inner Simulator – Further Resources Kahneman and Tversky (1982) proposed that people often use a simulation heuristic to make judgments. Mental simulation of a scenario is used to make predictions by imagining a situation and then running the simulation to see what happens next, and it is also to give explanations for events by mentally changing prior events and seeing if the outcomes changes. Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1982). The simulation heuristic. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (eds.) Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases (pp. 201-208). Research on mental simulation has found that imagining future or hypothetical events draws on much of the same neural circuitry that is used in memory. The ease with which a simulated scenario is generated often seems to be used as a cue to the likelihood of that scenario. For a review, see: Szpunar, K.K. (2010). Episodic future thought: An emerging concept. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 142-162. http://goo.gl/g0NNI “Focusing” is a practice of introspection systematized by psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin which seeks to build a pathway of communication and feedback between a person’s “felt sense” of what is going on (an internal awareness which is often difficult to articulate) and their verbal explanations. It can be understood as a method of querying one’s inner simulator (and related parts of System 1). Gendlin’s (1982) book Focusing provides a guide to this technique, which can be used either individually or with others (in therapy or other debugging conversations). Gendlin, Eugene (1982). Focusing. Second edition, Bantam Books. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focusing The idea of identifying the concrete “next action” for any plan was developed by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done. Allen, David (2001). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done Mitchell, Russo, and Pennington (1989) developed the technique which they called “prospective hindsight.” They found that people who imagined themselves in a future world where an outcome had already occurred were able to think of more plausible paths by which it could occur, compared with people who merely considered the outcome as something that might occur. Decision making researcher Gary Klein has used this technique when consulting with organizations to run “premortems” on projects under consideration: assume that the project has already happened and failed; why did it fail? Klein’s (2007) two-page article provides a useful summary of this technique. Mitchell, D., Russo, J., & Pennington, N. (1989). Back to the future: Temporal perspective in 58

the explanation of events. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2, 25–38. http://goo.gl/GYW6hg Klein, G. (2007). Performing a project premortem. Harvard Business Review, 85, 18-19. http://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem/ar/1

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Emotional Re-Association Brainstorming a wish list of emotions For each row in the table below, think of: 1. A target situation where you might like to change how you feel (bonus points if it's a recurring situation). Example: Alice forgets to send me some documents I asked her for. 2. The emotion or emotions X you'd typically feel in that situation. Example: Indignation... it feels like something is unfair... 3. A possible new emotion Y you'd like to feel instead. Example: Amused... some people find Alice funny... could I be amused by the situation instead? Hint: it might help to think of someone else who reacts differently than you. How might they feel differently from you? 4. A situation that inspires/causes you to feel the new emotion Y. Example: When my friend Bob forgets things, I find it funny and forgive him. (leave the “Primary affects” section blank unless we've discussed them first.) 1. Target situation

2. Typical emotion (X)

3. New emotion (Y)

4. Situation inspiring Y

Example: Alice doesn't send me those documents.

Indignation... feels like something is unfair...

Amusement?

When my little cousin drops his toys.

Primary affects: RAGE

Primary affects: PLAY

Primary affects:

Primary affects:

Primary affects:

Primary affects:

(leave the “Primary affects” section blank unless we've discussed them first) 60

1. Target situation

2. Typical emotion (X)

3. New emotion (Y)

Primary affects: RAGE

Primary affects: PLAY

Primary affects:

Primary affects:

Primary affects:

Primary affects:

4. Situation inspiring Y

Tips if you get stuck: •

Try browsing this list of emotions taken from Wikipedia:

Anger Annoyance Irritation Frustration Contempt Disgust •

Fear Doubtful Worried Anxious Helplessness Powerlessness

Sadness Disappointment Embarrassment Shame Guilt Envy

Arousal Craving Curiosity Interest Surprise Lust

Caring Love Affection Friendliness Courage Hope

Calm Contentment Relaxation Relief Serenity Trust

If we've already discussed “primary emotional affects”, try focussing on those: RAGE

SEEKING

Disgust?

FEAR

CARING

Surprise?

LOSS

LUST PLAY

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Happiness Amusement Excitement Delight Pride Joy

Cultivating a new emotion Step 1: Pick an emotion to cultivate Identify a new emotion that could help you in some way. It could be one you chose in your wish list, or something different.


•

Consider the basic emotions discussed by Panksepp and others: RAGE SEEKING Disgust? FEAR

CARING

LOSS

LUST

Surprise?

PLAY Try to temporarily suspend appraisal, i.e. try not to assign judgment or approval to yourself, your emotions, your situation, or other people. Think of things as they are, in terms of cause and effect, rather than in terms of "should" or "ought".

Step 2: Look for an inspiration Examples below are for PLAY: 1. What are some specific situations that cause or inspire you to feel Y? Example: When my nephew takes something from me and I chase after him, I feel playful.

2. Are there any songs, books, movies, or historical events that make you feel Y? Example: When I feel really wrapped up in some deep philosophical question, remembering the movie “I Heart Huckabees” makes me feel more playful about it.

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Step 3: Cognition/emotion associations Think of the new emotion Y that you want to cultivate, and build your awareness of what mental associations you have with it. (For now, don't think about where you want to cultivate it; instead just focus on the emotion itself.) 1. What does feeling Y already help you do? Example: I find it easier to brainstorm new ideas and try new things when I feel playful.

2. When you feel Y, what are some things you might think? Example: “Tee hee, this is awesome.”

3. What might you say? Example: “Oh man, what if we...”

4. How can you tell when other people might be feeling Y? Does that give you more ideas for the questions above? Example: They smile more, and maybe they seem a little bouncy?

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Step 3: Body/emotion associations Keep thinking about the emotion Y that you want to cultivate, and now build your awareness of physical associations with it. Examples below are for the SEEKING affect:. 1. What physical environments or situations increase your likelihood of feeling Y? Example: when I'm outdoors and exploring places, I feel SEEKING, like I know there's something interesting to be found.

2. Where in your body do you feel Y, and how? Example: in my forehead and eyebrows, and maybe my hands.

3. What physical movements are you inclined to make when you feel Y? Example: forward movements like reaching, learning, and walking, peering, tilting my head...

4. What happens to your voice when you feel Y? Example: I think I speak faster, with more staccato, and end with more upward inflexions.

5. Does Y remind you of a texture? Temperature? Color? Anything else? Example: My environment feels crisp and open, like stars at night; fI also feel like I'm being pulled, directed, and am reminded of the colors blue and orange.

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Step 4: Look for low-hanging fruit What are some situations in your life where you don't feel Y, but where it might be helpful and not too difficult? Example: I could feel more SEEKING/curiosity when I'm talking to others about their work.

Now choose a target situation where you feel minimal resistance to feeling Y. To get started, we want to aim for easy emotional shifts, not difficult ones. Maybe one of the target situations from your wish list seems like low hanging fruit, but if it doesn't, try to think of an easier application to work on first.

Step 5: Re-associate Think back to the situations that naturally inspire Y for you. Now ask yourself: What can I do to approach my target situation more like my inspiring situation? 1. Change the situation? Example: I could listen to some music that would make me feel silly and less irritable. And I can avoid talking to Bob right before dinner, when I tend to be cranky.

2. Reframe your thoughts? Example: Maybe if I think of Bob a little more as not knowing any better, I might find his quirks funny and endearing instead of annoying, sort of the way I tend to see my little brother.

3. Move your body differently? Example: I tend to cross my arms when I'm feeling judgmental... if I can uncross my arms as a reminder, I might feel a little bit like I'm breaking my pattern of judgment towards Bob.

Circle your favorite ideas above so you can come back to them later and try them out!

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Unit Notes: Emotional Re-Association I've begun to think of each of my units as organized around a method --- a useful mental procedure or movement --- along with some tools that can be used as part of the method. The method of this unit will be designing and implementing changes in how our emotions work, which I like to call "Emotional Re-association". It's like reframing, but involves bodily associations as well. In broad brush-strokes, the method is this:

Emotional Re-Association: The Method 1. Choose a recurring situation or thought X about which you might want to try tweaking your emotions. 2. Choose a new emotion you could try feeling instead. 3. Think of other situations where you already feel that new emotion. 4. Reflect on how you think/feel/speak/act/etc. in the those other situations, vs in the recurring situation from step 1. 5. Use 1-4 as inspiration for new ways to •

change your situation,

•

reframe your thoughts, and

•

move your body

in ways that might cultivate the desired emotion.

A number of concepts and techniques will be presented as tools for doing this, which can be generally useful on their own:

Emotional Re-Association: The Tools •

A basic understanding of how emotions physically work in the brain and the body

•

A list of seven primary emotional affects

•

Questions for probing your emotional associations

•

Situational changes

•

Mental reframes

•

Physical movements

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A story about curiosity One day while preparing for my PhD oral qualifying exam in algebraic geometry, I was meeting with my advisor to compute the genus of some curves. (For the purposes of this story, think of the genus of a curve is the number of holes in it). In the middle of working, we paused and had a conversation that went like this: Advisor: "Wait a minute... are you curious about this problem?" Me: "Oh, definitely. I really love this topic." Advisor: "No, I didn't ask if you loved it... are you curious about it?" Me: "Oh yeah, for sure. I find this kind of problem really fun." Advisor: "Yeah, but I'm not asking if you find it fun... I'm asking if you're curious about it. What I mean is, do you want to know the answer?" My answer was a resounding no. So I began to wonder, Is this what people mean by being curious? Wanting to know the answer? I usually just enjoy the process of figuring it out... Having recently read Affective Neuroscience, a list of seven primary emotional affects common to all mammals came to mind: RAGE, FEAR, LOSS, CARING, LUST, PLAY, and SEEKING. I began to realize that a lot of my motivation while doing math came from loving the subject --- which to me felt like the CARING affect --- and finding it fun to think about --- which felt like PLAY affect. That evening, hypothesizing that that my advisor felt a kind of SEEKING affect about math that I didn't, I decided I wanted to cultivate more of it. So I thought about other situations when I did feel SEEKING, the way a squirrel wants to find nuts, even when it's not hungry. For me, the strongest feelings came from actually pretending to be a squirrel. So, I held up my textbook and began pawing through the pages in what felt like a squirrel-like manner, imagining I needed to find a lot of curves and compute their genii so I could store then my burrow for the cold hard winter that was to be my qualifying exam. With a few more intentional emotional re-associations like that, I leveled up from studying 4 hours a day to 12... and I nailed my exam.

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Metaphor 1: Emotions as children Imagine you have a child, and he's asking you to feed him ice cubes for breakfast. Some people might react by saying, •

"Don't be foolish, eat your eggs!"

Others might say, •

"Oh yes honey, whatever you feel like you can have!"

But consider a third reaction: •

Huh, why does my kid want ice cubes? Huh! That's a symptom of anemia! "Alright honey, you can have ice cubes, right after you finish eating this iron fortified cereal!"

Here, we learn something from the fact that the child is asking for ice cubes, and do something productive about it, without necessarily taking the child's request as face value. We can take a similar approach to emotions. Instead of saying •

"Shut up, stupid emotions!", or

•

"I must do whatever my heart tells me at all times!",

we can wonder how our emotions work, and what they might mean. That brings us to our next metaphor, which is actually pretty close to just being true.

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Metaphor 2: Emotions as Organs The limbic system is a region in the brains of mammals commonly known as “the emotional brain” because of its involvement in processing emotions. There have been many attempts to classify human emotions and their features throughout history. To be sure we are really “carving reality at the joints”, here we focus our attention around seven circuits that have been found in the limbic systems of humans and other mammals. The activity of these circuits are called primary (emotional) affects by Panksepp et al, and have been given folk names based on the behaviors they seem to evoke. By convention, their names are capitalized to signal that they refer to a particular neurological circuit, which may not correspond perfectly to the folk use of the term. They are: RAGE FEAR LOSS SEEKING CARING LUST PLAY Cross-cultural face-recognition studies by Ekman et al. have identified two other human affects which are less understood at the neurological level. In English, they are called disgust and surprise.

Just like organs, emotions are physically real things, they have analogues across various species, they serve very important functions, and they can sometimes malfunction.

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RAGE:

FEAR:

LOSS:

Disgust:

Surprise:

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CARING:

LUST:

PLAY:

SEEKING:

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Panksepp, p.44, Figure 3.2, "... a more accurate perspective that is based on existing neuroscience evidence, where centrally situated emotional systems in the brain extensively interact, in strong and weak ways (as highlighted by bolder and lighter lines, respectively), with higher and lower brain functions."

The autonomic nervous system (ANS), divided into the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS); image from from scholarpedia.org

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Metaphor 3: Emotions as Apps Our emotions process huge amounts of data extremely quickly, albeit sometimes in a buggy way. Learning to use them effectively is like using a library of apps that don't always work as expected, but which are nonetheless extremely powerful, and familiarizing with them is the best way to get the most our of them. To draw an analogy, it's good to know that Google Maps should not be trusted when you're in a tunnel or somewhere else where GPS might not work so well. One response is to think "Stupid Google Maps is so irrational!" and discard it. Another response is to trust it completely at all times. But clearly the optimal approach is to know when and how to use and interpret google maps most effectively. We can take the same approach to our emotion

"Causes, not Justifications" When thinking about our emotions, it can be enlightening to focus attention away from what we think of as "justifications" (e.g., I'm justified in being angry with you because you did a bad thing) and ask more neutral/objective questions of cause and effect (e.g., my anger is being caused by a combination of not getting what I wanted, remembering a previous angry situation, and not having eaten in a while). Temporarily turning off thinking in terms of just/unjust, good/bad, or wanted/unwanted is sometimes called suspending appraisal.

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Emotional Re-Association – Further Resources Animal behavioral neuroscience has identified several basic emotions that are shared by mammals and can be induced by directly stimulating the brain. Panksepp J. 1998. Affective neuroscience. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. An interview with Jaak Panksepp, a foundational researcher in animal behavioral neuroscience: http://goo.gl/7y3Jd Researchers studying the psychology of judgment and decision-making have noted the large influence that emotions and other visceral states (such as hunger or tiredness) can have on thoughts and actions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotions_in_decision-making Lerner, J. & Keltner, D. (2000). Beyond Valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgment and choice. Cognition and Emotion, 14, 473-493. http://goo.gl/UPa9j Emotion regulation research has identified a variety of methods to influence one's own emotions, which include strategies used before and after the full-blown emotional response takes place. A strategy that has been found to be effective is reappraisal (reframing a situation). For example, people who saw a slideshow of grisly images while taking on the point of view of a medical professional felt less disgust, but were still able to remember the contents of what they had seen (for a review, see Gross, 2002). Gross, J. J. (2002). Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive, and social consequences. Psychophysiology, 39, 281-91. http://sprweb.org/articles/Gross02.pdf People can also influence their own emotions through their bodies. A growing number of carefully controlled studies show bi-directional causal relationships between a person’s emotions and their facial expressions, posture, and other bodily expressions of emotion. For example, activating the muscles involved in a smile increases feelings of happiness, even for people who are not thinking of their facial behavior as a smile (because they are following instructions to hold a pencil in their mouth). McIntosh, D. N. (1996). Facial feedback hypotheses: Evidence, implications, and directions. Motivation and Emotion, 20, 121-147. http://goo.gl/Fq5GZ

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Similarly, anything that increases a person’s heart rate (such as crossing a rickety bridge) can make them more likely to feel other high-intensity emotions (such as romantic attraction). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misattribution_of_arousal

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Goal Factoring Step 1: Pick an Action Pick an action that you do frequently or are planning to do frequently.

Write it here: __________________________________________________________________

Step 2: List Goals List the goals you hope to achieve by the action. Remember: •

There is a difference between wanting to be X and wanting to appear to be X.

•

There is a difference between wanting to do X and wanting to appear to do X.

•

Don’t forget about goals pertaining to interpersonal relationships!

•

Don’t forget about goals pertaining to social acceptance!

Goals: __________________________________

__________________________________

__________________________________

__________________________________

__________________________________

__________________________________

__________________________________

__________________________________

Step 3: Design Better Plans Go through your goals one at a time. Focus on just that one goal. Brainstorm new ways of achieving that goal. Try to find a better plan than you have now. After you finish one goal, move on to the next.

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Step 4: Notice Hidden Goals Were you unhappy with your new plan? Maybe there’s another goal your old action satisfied that you’ve left out of your diagram. It’s worth acknowledging your implicit goals, even if you would find them awkward to admit publicly. Add in any implicit goals and try to come up with new ways to achieve them.

Step 5: Think in Terms of Currencies Try thinking in terms of currencies. •

How much money does this action cost?

•

How much time?

•

How much attention?

•

How much political capital? etc.

Pick an action and write down answers to these questions. Then, try to find cheaper ways to purchase the very same results and write those down.

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Step 6: Look for Deeper Goals Pick one of your goals. Do you value it for its own sake? •

If so, that’s fine. Select a different goal.

•

If not, why do you value it? Write down the further goals it serves. ◦ (Try thought experiments!)

After you finish one goal, move on to the next. Trace the goals deeper and deeper.

Further Uses, Greater Value We’ve seen how you can come up with better plans for achieving your surface-level goals. The same is true for your deeper goals. And the payoff is often significantly higher.

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Goal Factoring – Further Resources Human behavior is commonly goal-directed, rather than proceeding aimlessly, but people are far from systematic in how they pursue their goals. For example, a person might put a lot of effort into saving $50 in one context, while wasting hundreds of dollars in another context, because they consider each decision in isolation (focusing only on the information that is immediately at hand). Kahneman (2003) calls this problem “narrow framing” of decisions, and recommends taking a broader view by considering many related decisions at once (e.g., those related to trading off effort and money) and choosing a set of actions across those decisions. A review article on heuristics and biases research, including narrow framing: Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58, 697-720. http://tinyurl.com/kahneman2003 Sheldon and Kasser (1995) have investigated the relationship between people’s lower-level goals (what motivates your day-to-day activities) and their higher-level goals (what you’d like to do with your life). They found that a closer alignment between lower-level goals and higher-level goals is associated with psychological well-being: Sheldon, K. M., & Kasser, T. (1995). Coherence and congruence: Two aspects of personality integration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 531-543. http://goo.gl/7R1AO

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Attention [this space deliberately left blank for notes]

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Attention – Further Resources Working memory has a limited capacity. A well-established result in cognitive psychology is that people who are using some of their working memory on one task (such as remembering a six-digit number) perform worse on a variety of other tasks which require cognitive engagement or executive control, such as reading comprehension, forming impressions of other people, or resisting temptation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory Task switching has also been found to impair performance, including a large temporary drop in performance immediately after a task switch and a smaller persistent impairment as long as switching tasks is a possibility (for a review, see Monsell, 2003). Being engaged in a task activates a variety of cognitive processes (involving attention, memory, etc.) that are relevant for performing that particular task, which are collectively known as a task-set. One proposed explanation for the impairments caused by task switching is that they are due to the cost of switching task-sets and of having multiple competing task-sets activated at once. Monsell, S. (2003). Task switching. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 134-140. http://goo.gl/f6Ek3 A brief summary of the psychological research on multitasking: http://www.apa.org/research/action/multitask.aspx When a person is in the midst of performing a task or acting according to a particular goal, goalrelevant information tends to be accessible or active in working memory. As social psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik discovered in the 1920s, this goal-relevant information quickly dissipates after the task is completed, but it remains active if the task is interrupted or left incomplete. This effect is commonly referred to as the “Zeigarnik effect” for working memory, and “goal turnoff” for accessibility. A short description of the Zeigarnik effect, with applications to gaming: http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2013/03/the-zeigarnik-effect-and-quest-logs/ A study showing the goal turnoff effect: Förster, J., Liberman, N., & Higgins, E. T. (2005). Accessibility from active and fulfilled goals. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41, 220-239. Background on the importance of cognitive accessibility and priming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29 Wikipedia's summary of the research on attention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention 81

Saturday – Try Things

Aversion Factoring and Calibration Are there any aversions you already want to address? Take 30 seconds to write down any aversions you have that you're already motivated to analyze right now:

Then, take 1 minute per each of the following lists to write down as many avoidances as you can. (You can take more time if you repeat this worksheet later.)

Brainstorming for avoidances 1. Things I often procrastinate doing:

2. Activities I am easily distracted from in the moment of doing them:

3. Things my parents, partner, or friends suggest, but that I don't do:

4. Domains of knowledge or skills I've “never gotten around” to learning: 82

5. Questions about life or myself that I've "never gotten around" to addressing:

6. Why I'm not trying to become rich, famous, attractive, physically fit, an expert in some field, or a political leader:

(many people have an aversive reaction to at least one of the above pursuits!) 7. Anything else that comes to mind that I want to list:

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Aversion factoring Choose an activity X that you avoid doing or feel averse to, but where you may want to overcome the aversion:

Now think how might benefit from doing X, and what might be bad or aversive about it: What's good about X? What's aversive about X?

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Now draw a graph below or on the next page depicting the causal structure of your aversion. Note when some aversive aspects actually lead to others, so you might get closer to the root cause of things. Also be sure to include trivial inconveniences as factors, e.g. if you don't floss because the floss is kept in a drawer that you don't remember to open. Now, for each aversion factor, ask if it is: 1. Worth solving? Is this aversion alerting me to a real problem that is worth solving? 2. Over-calibrated? Is my aversion larger or more persistent than the actual problem it's about? Would I push a button to just “get over” this? Are my emotions only protecting me from my emotions here, and can I overcome them with some combination of exposure therapy and bigpicture reframing? 3. A deal breaker? Is this actually a good reason to avoid X, given my goals?

1 + 1 = ? worth solving

overcalibrated

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dealbreaker

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Notes: Aversion Factoring and Calibration

The purpose of this unit is to help you overcome factors that may be preventing you from doing things that would otherwise be helpful or enjoyable to you. Dancing, singing, public speaking, talking to strangers, asking for help, doing taxes, filling out forms, dealing with bureaucracies, doing the dishes, calling people you haven't talked to in a while, talking to strangers, talking to people with high status... These are all common aversions we hear about in our workshops. Take a moment to think about whether you have or have ever had an aversion like one of these. Now ask yourself: have you ever overcome an aversion? Have you ever made or experienced a change in yourself that made something more tolerable or enjoyable that was previously aversive or inhibiting? How did that feel? Our goal is to become masters of repeating that kind of growth, at will, whenever we need it.

Clarification: We'll use the words “aversion” and “avoidance” differently. Avoidance is a behavior: we might avoid doing our taxes. The word aversion will refer to any brain mechanism --- be it conscious, unconscious, emotional, verbal, or anything else --- that prevents tor tends to cause avoidance. For example, painful memories, simple verbal arguments, and old habits will all be considered aversions if they inhibit our behavior or make it unpleasant. Also, we won't examine aversions that are very clearly helpful, like an aversion to getting hit by cars. But arguments like "disliking dancing saves me time" are something we'll at least temporarily cast doubt upon.

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I've begun to think of each of my units as organized around a method --- a useful mental procedure or movement --- along with some tools that can be used as part of the method. The method of this unit will be a way of overcoming aversions by breaking them down into pieces, which I'll call Aversion Factoring.

Aversion Factoring: The Method 1. Choose an aversion or something you avoid. 2. Break it down. What's stopping you? Identify smaller aversion factors that cause your avoidance or negative reactions. 3. Assess calibration. Ask whether each factor is is well-calibrated indication of a real-world problem or not. Then: •

Make external changes to solve problems that the other aversions alerted you to, and

•

Make internal changes to get over the mis-calibrated aversions.


Aversion Factoring: The Tools •

To help break down the aversion: ◦ Explicit / outside-view reasoning ◦ Inner simulator ◦ Thought experiments ◦ Mindful walkthroughs

•

To decide whether to make changes inside or outside yourself: ◦ A calibration criterion

•

To re-calibrate miscalibrated aversions: ◦ Exposure therapy ◦ Big-picture reframing

•

To make the behavior easier to initiate: ◦ Removing trivial inconveniences

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A tree-climbing story One day, I realized it would be really fun to make a habit of climbing trees. It's a kind of exercise I really enjoy, and it always gives me a boost of energy. I figured if I climbed trees 10 minutes a day, then within a year I'd rack up at least 40 hours of tree-climbing, so it was worth a little time figuring out how to get started. So, I found a bunch of nice trees to climb around my walk to work, and resolved to climb them regularly. But I quickly realized an aversion would soon stop me: tree climbing can be dangerous. So, I resolved that I would find ways to climb that were difficult but not dangerous. For example, I'd try climbing all the way around the trunk on the lowest branches without touching certain ones. I also practiced falling drills to hone my catch-myself and land-safely reflexes. But I soon found that I didn't like how climbing the trees made my light-colored pants look dirty. So I bought jeans! A quick sanity check compared the price of jeans to the status quo of a climbing gym membership, and found I was in the clear. And the rest of my clothes were dark enough that it didn't matter. Still, somehow, even though I found the climbing super fun, I found myself avoiding it for some reason. I went climbing and paid close attention to what I might not like about it, and realized: I didn't like my hands feeling icky for the 10 minutes between climbing and washing them. When I thought about this, I decided: This is not a real problem. Hand washing is really easy. I think if I could just press a button and stop caring about this icky feeling, then I would. So that's essentially what I did: I went outside, stuck my hands in some mud on the ground, and sat for 10 minutes paying attention to the feeling of mud on my hands. And as I sat there, I reflected on my bigger goals in life, like health, enjoyment, and doing good in the world, and how completely irrelevant the dirt was to any of these goals except for my internal reaction to it. Gradually, my internal level of disgust and anxiety subsided until it felt as insignificant as the external consequences. .... And now I climb lots of trees!

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To apply this process for yourself, choose an activity X that you avoid doing or feel averse to, but where you may want to overcome the aversion. Next, ask you might benefit from doing X, and what might be aversive about it. For each aversive aspect, ask if it is: 1. Worth solving? Is this aversion alerting me to a real problem that is worth solving? 2. Over-calibrated? I.e., is my aversion larger or more persistent than the actual problem it's about? Would I push a button to just “get over” this? 3. A deal breaker? I.e., is this actually a good reason to avoid X, given my goals?

1 + 1 = ? worth solving

overcalibrated

dealbreaker

In the tree-climbing story, I was averse to danger, having dirty-looking clothes, and my hands feeling icky. The first two aversions were problems I decided to solve, and the last aversion was one I thought was over-calibrated and decided to get over. In this case, there were no deal-breakers.

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Aversion calibration Take something X that you always avoid. You can ask: Do I always avoid X, even though X is only slightly bad on average? Should I be a little more willing to making exceptions and do X sometimes? Is X something other people do sometimes without much harm? If yes, your aversion to X may be over-calibrated, in the sense that the aversion is stronger than necessary to avoid X at a reasonable rate. Over-calibrated aversions can result in missed opportunities: it means you are liable to avoid X even when it's a good idea. So, we adopt the

Comfort Zone Expansion principle (CoZE): Even if your aversion to X seems mostly helpful, but over-calibrated — that is, if you avoid X like the plague when it's more like the common cold — then you might want to sometimes do X when it's only slightly harmful, so your emotions can learn that it's not such a big deal, just a small one. Think of this like exercising: you're expending some resources now to make yourself stronger and better adapted for later. CoZE is a lot like exposure therapy (google it!), which is somewhat of an art: Ideally, you want to work at the edge of your comfort zone, in situations where you know the external consequences are especially low. This seems to work better than traumatizing yourself by diving in too quickly or carelessly. It helps to feel in control of your choice to expand your comfort zone, rather feeling victimized or forced to do it. Sometimes taking a moment to re-frame things in the “big picture” of your life can help CoZE feel more like an honest communication with your System 1 processes instead of feeling like masochism or “trying to trick yourself”. Besides the exposure therapy effect, CoZE might also work via Cognitive dissonance resolution, or Costly signaling to oneself about the aversion.

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Aversion Factoring and Calibration – Further Resources One proven technique for overcoming aversions involves identifying what thoughts lead to an aversion, tracing out the links between those thoughts, negative emotions, and avoidant behavior, and critically investigating the accuracy of those thoughts. This technique, known as cognitive therapy, has been shown to be effective even with clinical phobias and anxiety disorders (Norton & Price, 2007). A brief summary of how cognitive therapy is used to treat anxiety disorders: “Therapy for Anxiety Disorders” http://www.helpguide.org/mental/anxiety_therapy.htm A meta-analysis of treatments for anxiety disorders, which compiles quantitative evidence showing that exposure therapy and cognitive therapy are both effective (compared to relaxation techniques): Norton, P. J., & Price, E. P. (2007). A meta-analytic review of cognitive-behavioral treatment outcome across the anxiety disorders. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 195, 521-531. http://www.ebbp.org/resources/nortonprice.pdf

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Againstness Components of a PSNS algorithm

Awareness These are tools that help engage your conscious processing in your immediate experience. •

Remember your feet Notice the details of how you experience your feet: pressure, temperature, position, etc. Then let that awareness expand to include your whole body at once, letting your awareness of bodily sensations become more detailed.

•

Space is huge Notice that, if you could see through the roof above you and past the light of the sky, you’d see a vast space above you. There is empty spaciousness practically infinitely above you. The same is true in every direction: in front of you, to your sides, behind you, and even below you. (It just so happens that there’s this tiny pebble called “Earth” pressing against your feet.) Get the sense of how enormous space is in all directions around you, and notice that you’re in the center of this vast void.

•

Existence is exquisite Zoom in on something immediate to your physical senses at this moment - the way light comes in through the window, or how air glances against your skin, or a sound, or whatever else you like. Notice something pleasing about it; maybe the light makes some interesting shadows against the wall, for instance. Breathe deeply and let your mildly positive sense of that experience grow into a gentle delight. Carry that delight in sensory experience to other things immediate to you. Eventually you might get to a point of noticing that the very fact that you exist and can experience at all is itself a delight. (This approach is not about looking at the bright side, but is rather about enjoying experience as it is.)

Body These are methods for priming PSNS dominance via physical behaviors.. •

Open your posture Notice what’s closed and protected, and move your body to a more vulnerable position. Stand upright, spread your arms, and expose your belly and throat. (Typically this increases SNS activity for a moment before it helps you to relax.)

•

Breathe deeply Breathe low and slow into your belly. Don’t push air down if you can avoid it, but instead just let it fall as low as it will when you relax into breathing.

•

Relax Focus on your muscles, especially the ones you can tell are tense, and work on letting them relax. This is especially relevant for the upper arms, the shoulders, the neck, and the face. Some people find it easier to tense their muscles really hard before trying to get them to relax.

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Mind These are ways of shifting your thinking to help see the world from a more PSNS perspective. •

Reframe “should” as “prefer” Thoughts that can be expressed in terms of “should,” “must,” “have to,” and so on (e.g. “He shouldn’t have said that!”) tend to have an SNS character to them and tend to be about resisting (i.e. being against) what is real. Reframing a “should” as a preference acknowledges your emotional state and can help let go of the resistance (e.g. “I would prefer he not have said that”).

•

Practice empathy “Empathy,” in this case, refers to modeling the other person in enough detail to understand why what they are doing is, to them, the most sensible thing they could possibly be doing right then. In other words, it’s recognizing that it’s like something to be them, and that you’d do the same thing if you were them. SNS thinking tends to simplify others and not see them as experiencing beings, so this can help to reverse that.

•

Be grateful Gratitude can a powerful PSNS vector. Finding anything to be grateful for can be helpful. It’s best, though, if you can be grateful for the aversive stimulus. Here are two often useful ways to do this: ◦ Be grateful for the other’s intent. A parent who lectures you about what you’re doing wrong might be doing so out of concern and caring, even if you’d prefer they’d express it differently. Similarly, a self-condemning thought (“I messed up again!”) can be seen as trying to make you a better person. ◦ Be grateful for the opportunity to train. If you were to lift weights at a gym, you could get upset at them for being heavy, or you could be grateful for the training their heaviness is giving you. Similarly, situations that inspire SNS vectors in you are offering you a chance to practice getting better at controlling where you are on the autonomic spectrum.

•

Label your mental experiences Giving a very brief statement of how you feel in the form like “I feel X” (e.g. “I feel sad”) can give you a verbal handle on your feelings while giving you a little space from them. It’s important that your label be (a) very brief and (b) have no implication of another person in them (as with “I feel judged” - generally speaking, the “X” in “I feel X” is best not derived from a verb). You can also quickly label mental processes: if you notice you’re judging the other person a lot, you can just note “My mind is judging.” You don’t have to say your labels out loud for this to be effective.

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Againstness – Further Resources The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) are two components of the autonomic nervous system, which regulates the body's organs and tissues. The SNS is responsible for rapidly mobilizing resources, as seen in the stress response, which involves a rapid heartbeat, narrowing attention, and inhibition of non-essential bodily activities like the digestive system. Sudden SNS activation in the presence of an environmental threat produces the fight-or-flight response (sometimes called the fight-or-flight-or-freeze response), and the SNS can also remain active more chronically in cases of prolonged stress. PSNS activation serves to counteract the SNS, and has been characterized as a “rest and digest.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response Research in the psychology of emotions has found that positive emotions tend to counteract the stress response (e.g., lowering heart rate in people who are about to give a speech; Fredrickson et al., 2000), which has been termed the “undoing effect.” Physiological research has tracked the specific chemical pathways by which the parasympathetic nervous system counteracts the stress response, including the role of oxytocin (a hormone which is closely associated with comfort, empathy, and other positive emotions) (e.g., Heinrichs et al., 2009). A set of studies showing that positive emotions (such as contentment and amusement) lead to faster cardiovascular recovery for people exposed to stressful situations: Fredrickson, B. L., Mancuso, R. A., Branigan, C., & Tugade, M. M. (2000). The undoing effect of positive emotions. Motivation and Emotion. 24, 237-258. http://goo.gl/AP920 A review of the function of oxytocin in humans and other species, including its social and emotional functions and its role in stress responses: Heinrichs M., von Dawans B., and Domes G. (2009). Oxytocin, vasopressin, and human social behavior. Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 30, 548-557. http://goo.gl/kGaz6 In her TED Talk, psychologist Amy Cuddy describes her research on the physiological effects of body postures. Open, expansive postures reduce levels of cortisol (a stress-related hormone) and increase testosterone, while closed, constricted postures have the opposite effect. Cuddy found that people who spent a minute in an expansive posture one minute prior to a job interview were evaluated more positively by the interviewer, as the feeling of self-confidence carried over into their behavior. Video of Cuddy's TED Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks-_Mh1QhMc 95

The paper that Cuddy’s talk is based on: Carney, D., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Yap, A. (2010). Power posing: Brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance. Psychological Science, 21, 1363-1368. http://goo.gl/FuSzV Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is an approach to stress reduction that borrows tools of mindfulness practices from Buddhism (but without the spirituality). Many clinical studies point toward the effectiveness of MBSR for helping decrease anxiety and depression. For a meta-analysis of 20 studies conducted before 2004, see: Grossman, P., Niemann, L., Schmidt, S., & Walach, H. (2004). Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health benefits: A meta-analysis. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 57, 35-43. http://goo.gl/5D6oM9 Based on his experiences as an FBI agent, Joe Navarro’s book What Every Body Is Saying describes how a person’s body posture and movement reflect their autonomic activity. Although it is based on his professional experience rather than systematic research, the book provides a useful starting point for learning to read body language in other people and yourself. Navarro, J. (2008). What Every Body Is Saying. New York: Harper-Collins. http://goo.gl/o6xNu

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Implementation Intentions [this space deliberately left blank for notes]

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Implementation Intentions – Further Resources Locke and Latham (2002) review decades of research on goal setting and performance. Among their findings: people who set a challenging, specific goal tend to accomplish more than people who set a vague goal (such as “do as much as possible”) or those who set an easy goal. Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task performance: A 35 year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57, 705-717. http://goo.gl/9krv3Q Gollwitzer and Oettingen (2011) review research on planning and goal pursuit, with an emphasis on implementation intentions (if-then plans). They discuss evidence that implementation intentions can be helpful for several subskills of goal pursuit, including getting started, staying on track, overcoming obstacles, and taking advantages of opportunities, as well as cases where implementation intentions are less effective (such as when a person is not very committed to the goal). They also include specific suggestions for how to formulate if-then plans. Gollwitzer, P. M., & Oettingen, G. (2011). Planning promotes goal striving. In K. D. Vohs & R. F. Baumeister (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation: Research, theory, and applications (2nd ed., pp. 162-185). New York: Guilford. http://goo.gl/Dj8NC A meta-analysis of 94 studies involving 8461 participants found that interventions involving implementation intentions produced an average effect size of d = 0.65 (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). That is, people who used implementation intentions performed 0.65 standard deviations better on the outcome measure than the control group. A similar effect size was found in the 34 studies which involved behavioral change on a personal or health goal (d = 0.59). Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69119. http://goo.gl/AHHUUk Mental contrasting is the practice of imagining a desired future where a goal has been achieved, and then contrasting it with the current imperfect situation where there are still obstacles to achieving the goal. Oettingen (2012) reviews dozens of research showing that mental contrasting tends to increase commitment to a goal, including energy and determination, in a way that does not occur in people who merely fantasize about a desired future, or in those who merely think about the current situation and its obstacles (though this effect only occurs when the desired future seems achievable). Oettingen, G. (2012). Future thought and behavior change. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone 98

(Eds.), European Review of Social Psychology, 23, 1-63. http://goo.gl/ov54yp Mental contrasting can be a helpful precursor to the formulation of implementation intentions, since it increases goal commitment and brings to mind obstacles which if-then planning can address. Several experiments involving real-world behavior change have used an intervention which combined mental contrasting and implementation intentions, and one such study (Adriaanse et al., 2010) found that this combined intervention was more effective than either one alone at reducing consumption of an unhealthy food. Adriaanse, M. A., Oettingen, G., Gollwitzer, P. M., Hennes, E. P., de Ridder, D. T. D., & de Witt, J. B. F. (2010). When planning is not enough: Fighting unhealthy snacking habits by mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII). European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 1277-1293. http://goo.gl/MCV88X

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Curating Your Emotional Library Motivation – Unprepared Mental States List some situations where you know the right thing to do but have trouble completing the task due to unprepared emotional state, such as nervousness, fatigue, laziness, or apathy. Feel the difficulty you have when the rational side of your brain has the plan but the emotional side is being unhelpful. List these triggers – what does your head do? Your breathing? Do you sigh? Do you roll your eyes?

Deliberate Shelfing of Emotional Experiences When experiencing an emotion or a scene, here are some things we can do to store the experience more mindfully: •

Savor, not gulp. Pay attention to all of your sensory input, including ones that do not fire as hard as the main ones. Examples: Try paying attention to the tingling of your skin when you bite into a nice cake your father baked for you. “It is interesting how flushed my face got when I heard about the award.”

•

Think very hard about how you can use this feeling in the future. Examples: “I let my friend get hurt and this felt horrible; next time I drink too much I should remember this.” “This scene where the masked hero trains hard to become a fighting machine made me feel like I want to go to the gym. Next time I want to go to the gym I should watch it.”

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•

Explore emotion-experience-space. Think about how the experience you just stored compare and contrast to other experiences you have. Examples: “This feeling of happiness I just felt from finishing that difficult email feels just like the feeling of turning in a good final paper during University.” “This feeling of being lean and 85% full after eating this nice protein-filled salad is different from the feeling last week I got after stuffing myself full of ribs and beer – it has more of a crisp, clean texture as opposed to a grimy, hearty texture.”

The analogy is active note-taking, which appears in all forms of crafts and professions. Try thinking about how you “take notes” actively in skills that you are proficient at, and make analogies to that process.

Well-Shelved Experiences as Boosters to Unprepared States On the left, list some emotional scenes involving images, sounds, movies, people, and/or physical feelings. ● try to stay away from scenes that you recall on a regular basis; practice finding scenes you've stashed in the “mental attic,” or imagining new scenes that you are likely to experience. ● Important: do not select for abstract significance of the scenes, but instead select for the

intensity of the emotions they invoke. For example: the savory moment of victory you had beating your friend at tennis last week is probably both more intense and less significant than your foggy recallection of your graduation from college. On the right, think about how you can actively store each scene. Imagine yourself experiencing the scene for the first time. What sensory inputs may you be missing? How can you use this in the future? How does this scene compare in relation to the rest of your “bookshelf?”

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Scenes

Active Storage Notes

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Curating Your Emotional Library – Further Resources Actors who follow the approach known as “method acting” keep a library of emotional experiences which they draw on to re-experience an emotion that they need to portray in a scene: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_acting Creating an emotional library involves storing items in your memory for later recall. Research on memory has found that people are more likely to remember things if they are emotionally-charged, personally relevant, and connected to other items in memory in a meaningful way. Symons and Johnson (1997) provide a review of memory research, including a meta-analysis on the effect of personal relevance: Symons, C. S., & Johnson, B. T. (1997). The self-reference effect in memory: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 371-394. http://goo.gl/0D4V7 A review of psychological and neurological research on the role of emotion in memory: Kensinger, E. A. (2004). Remembering emotional experiences: The contribution of valence and arousal. Reviews in the Neurosciences, 15, 241-251. http://goo.gl/6TxbNP Stoics recommend negative visualization - imagining losing the things that you care about - as a useful exercise for developing resilience, perspective, and an appreciation of what you have (Wiegardt, 2010). Negative visualization can also be a source of content for your emotional library, both by providing a negative scene of an imagined loss and by making the thing that you already have and care about more vivid and emotionally salient. Wiegardt, Erik (2009). The Stoic Handbook, 2nd ed. http://goo.gl/CyNrtg Computer memory can be extremely useful for supplementing human memory. Many different software programs can help you catch text, images, and other information. One popular program is Evernote, which features tagging and integration across multiple devices. http://www.evernote.com

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Comfort Zone Expansion (CoZE) CoZE means “Comfort Zone Expansion.” Sometimes uncomfortable emotions – such as fear, disgust, shame, guilt, embarrassment, or helplessness – can actually help protect us or other people from harm. But like any sensor, these emotions can be mis-calibrated. The idea behind CoZE is that safe and gradual exposure can help us re-calibrate these aversions and expand our comfort zones in useful directions. (CoZE is definitely not meant to completely eliminate these discomforts from our emotional repertoire!) This class focuses on expanding comfort zones in social arenas, because they tend to be a particularly high value sphere of activity. The social realm is where we manage jobs, meet friends, find love, share interests, recruit collaborators, etc. There are four broad domains that past participants have found particularly useful to experiment with: Identity, Playfulness, Vulnerability, and (the slightly catchall) Adding to Your Social Utility Belt.

The goal of this class is to help you explore the periphery of your current comfort zone and to find new good ideas that you can add to your social repertoire and affordances. You can also better calibrate your social instincts by giving your System 1 real data to update on, instead of imagined data.

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Identity How would you describe yourself? What adjectives would you use, what group memberships would you cite? And how do those affiliations restrict the actions you feel that you can take? Example 1 Cat thought of her self as the kind of person who didn't inconvenience others. So, she felt terrible about the idea of waking the sleeping person in the aisle seat, even though she badly needed to use the bathroom. She waiting til she was in physical pain before bothering him, and still felt uncomfortable about disturbing him. Later, Cat decided her reluctance to bother people wasn't wrong, but it was miscalibrated. She did small CoZE exercises where she mildly inconvenienced people by stopping them and asking them for directions until it felt less aversive. Example 2 After campaigning to run a college organization, Chris had a lot of flashcards with the photos of people in his class on them. Every week, he drew one card from the deck and thought about a particular virtue or fluency that the person on the card had, and which he could improve. Then he'd spend the week “dressing up” like that person, with regard to the desired behavior. And you? I’m not the kind of person who….

I would never ___________ in public

People like me can’t ___________

I wish I could ___________ like [name of friend]

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Playfulness If something is aversive, you're probably experiencing FEAR, one of the seven primary emotional affects. When you add in a sense of PLAY, the mixed emotion tends to feel like exhilaration. So, finding a way to make an aversive activity a little silly or playful might shift your experience from the sickening drop of freefall to the fun of riding a roller-coaster. Not to mention that PLAY is fun in and of itself. So you might want to be playful for it's own sake, so your life (and that of people around you) can be more engaging and delightful. Example 1 Anna felt a bit uncomfortable drawing attention to herself in public, so, when she went to the mall on a CoZE exercise, she did something that felt funny. She walked through stores and danced to the Muzak playing on the speakers. Some of the other shoppers looked surprised, and then amused. Example 2 In the run-up to the release of Les Miserables, Leah kept hoping, as she went through her commute, that people around her would break into a flashmob of “One Day More.” After a week or two of wishing, she decided to be the kind of person she wanted to exist, and organized a group to sing in Union Station. And you? What do you wish/would be fun for other people to do around you?

How could something intimidating be a bit ridiculous?

What are you “too old” to do?

What amusing/silly things have you enjoyed that you would like to happen more often?

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Vulnerability Playfulness can help you get over an aversive hurdle or just enrich your life, but, for some goals, this affect can be a bit counterproductive. Comedians like Stephen Colbert can use playfulness to interact with people shielded by a persona, rather than as themselves. It isn't an approach you want to use in all circumstances. So, some participants like to spend CoZE times deliberately being more open and honestly present to others. Example 1 James found it easy to goof off in public, but he wasn't so sure what to do with strangers besides entertain them. So, on the CoZE outing, he chatted up a barber, and ended up talking to him about his concerns about a romantic relationship. The barber had some advice (not quite helpful) but James felt a lot better just being to think through his concerns with someone else. Example 2 Sarah tended to self-censor her more abstract analogies and digressions when speaking to people she didn't already know or meet through mutual friends. So, at the mall, she went browsing in a department store and talked to the sales clerk the way she would talk to her friends. The clerk was thrown, but nothing bad happened except a bit of awkwardness, so Sarah felt a bit less urgency to monitor her speech in the future. And you? What’s a part of yourself that you’d like to show to others?

What’s a part of yourself that you could never show to others?

What feels tiring/worrying to care about?

Context switching What would happen if you were the way you are around your significant other when you were with a stranger? What would happen if you were the way you are around your family at your job?

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Adding to Your Social Utility Belt There may be some affordances you'd like to have that don't fall into any of the three previous categories. Based on your goals, your job, your relationships, what would you like to be able to do, or to be able to do more often or easily? Example 1 Anthony liked drawing, but he felt very self-conscious when he sketched in public. During a CoZE trip, he brought he sketchpad and didn't plan to talk to anyone or do anything explicitly 'social.' He sketched, first in less trafficked parts of the mall, and then in the busiest areas. By the end of the trip, he felt a bit freer to pull out his pencils whenever he saw something he wanted to draw. Example 2 Aaron is a musician, and would like to improve his music and eventually sell it. So he brought his demo and a set of headphones to the mall and asked people if they'd like to hear a song and give him feedback. This exercise helped him expand two skills: feeling comfortable approaching people about his projects and feeling comfortable soliciting feedback. And you? Is there an affordance you’d like to have?

Do you have a goal with a social sticking point?

What do other people do that you wish you could do too?

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CoZE ethics: The novice-driver paradigm In any social interaction, there is always the possibility of bothering the other person. So if everyone practiced CoZE all the time, perhaps everyone would be constantly and unsustainably annoyed! This is not an outcome we want. On the other hand, expanding our own comfort zones can give us more ways to make other people more comfortable in the future. For example, if someone is nervous around you, it can be soothing for them if you can actively lower your own anxiety. In this way, CoZE exercises are something like being a novice driver in driving lessons. It may result in slight inconveniences for others on the road at the time, but in the end it makes everyone's life run more smoothly. And if no one was ever a novice driver, then no one would drive at all; roads would never even be built. Similarly, if we never expand our social comfort zones, many positive social connections might never form.

Safety and common sense The CoZE outing will be in a well-lit mall. Please stay within the mall, and of course don't break any laws, or approach any minors (people under the age of 18). Also, in the rare event that you see someone who appears aggressive, angry, yelling, or otherwise likely to be violent, don't approach them (even though that might make you uncomfortable!). In other words, use common sense :)

Edge, Stretch, and Scrunch Goals When you actually try out your chosen activity, you may find that you've misjudged where the edge of your social comfort zone is. So you may want to also pick a stretch goal, in case your initial attempt is easy, and a scrunch goal, in case your first try is much more aversive in the moment than it was hypothetically. Once you find the level that works for you, you can move to incrementally more challenging activities or keep trying the first activity, so your System 1 has lots of lived experience to learn from. You can try to set goals in all four categories, or just the subset that seems most valuable to you. Most participants find it helpful to write their goals down in detail, so you don't bounce off the task in person (“Well, I said I'd talk to some people, but I just won't talk to this one).

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Your CoZE Outing Goals Identity Edge: Scrunch: Stretch:

Playfulness Edge: Scrunch: Stretch:

Vulnerability Edge: Scrunch: Stretch:

Social Utility Belt Edge: Scrunch: Stretch:

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Comfort Zone Expansion – Further Resources Social acceptance is a basic human need; being rejected or excluded produces an unpleasant experience similar to physical pain (Williams & Nida, 2011). Even rejection from strangers can be painful; many social exclusion studies use a simple computer game (which mimics playing catch) played with two other people who are not present. A review of research on social exclusion and rejection: Williams, K. D., & Nida, S. A. (2011). Ostracism: Consequences and coping. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20, 71-75. http://goo.gl/vuGLD Conditioning can be used to overcome one’s fears or aversions. One technique involves exposing someone to a mild dose of the aversive thing in a safe context and maintaining the exposure until their anxious response wears off. When the person feels comfortable while remaining exposed to the aversive thing, this weakens their negative associations to the aversive thing. Over time, they can expand their comfort zone by applying stronger doses of the aversive thing. This process, known as exposure therapy, has proven effective at reducing aversions even for people with clinical phobias and anxiety disorders (e.g., Norton & Price, 2007). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_therapy A review of research on exposure therapy, focused on why the technique is effective: Hoffman, S. G. (2008). Cognitive processes during fear acquisition and extinction in animals and humans. Clinical Psychology Review, 28, 199-210. http://goo.gl/xKcnt A meta-analysis on treatments for anxiety disorders, which compiles quantitative evidence showing that exposure therapy and cognitive therapy are both effective (compared to relaxation techniques): Norton, P. J., & Price, E. P. (2007). A meta-analytic review of cognitive-behavioral treatment outcome across the anxiety disorders. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 195, 521-531. http://www.ebbp.org/resources/nortonprice.pdf An object’s (or environment’s) affordances for a person are the set of actions that the person readily perceives as possible. A person’s social comfort zone can be considered to be defined by the social affordances that they perceive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

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In his short essay “Keep Your Identity Small”, Paul Graham warns that identifying as an X (or an opponent of Y) makes it difficult to think clearly or have a productive discussion about X or Y. Identity may also narrow one’s affordances; for example, identifying as a person who can figure things out on their own may prevent a person from noticing options that involve asking someone else for help. Graham, Paul (2009). Keep your identity small. http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

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Sunday – Compound Returns

Delegating to Yourself What ways of handing on an assignment make you feel resentful or frustrated? What are some ways bosses or coworkers have delegated to you that made you more enthused about carrying out the task?

How have you delegated effectively to your coworkers or subordinates? What helped you feel confident that the project would move forward and left them feeling fairly treated? What made them balk or you feel antsy?

Are there any changes you plan to make to your current delegation strategies, to treat yourself as you’d treat others or as you’d want to be treated by them?

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When do you plan to have your first strategic review? Can you set a reminder now? If not, how will you remember in the moment? Time: Method of recall:

What kind of questions do you plan to have on the agenda at your strategic reviews? You should probably include a recurring question about whether your current list is working!

What data do you need at hand to answer these questions?

How will you capture and store this information, so you’ve got it ready?

Expand the scope of your reflections. What other information do your need or preparations will you make?

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Systems to consider trying In order to get your system going, you’ll want to start with something pre-set and then modify it over time with your strategic reviews. Here I’ll point you toward a few systems to consider adopting to get you started. I recommend you pick any one of them and run with it for a while. Remember, every system will be a little wrong for you, but having no system whatsoever can’t help you at all.

Getting Things Done (GTD) One of the most common productivity systems around, David Allen’s GTD system describes several key principles for keeping track of everything in one’s life as a way of entering a state of flow. The system is described in his book Getting Things Done, which you can get at nearly any bookstore. Here is its Amazon link: http://goo.gl/yVRZn David Allen developed this system for corporate workers in the 1990s, and in some ways the methods described show their age. It is, however, a fairly tried-and-true foundation for a productivity system. It usually takes a few days of full-time investment to really get a good standard GTD system going. Monk to Done Based on GTD, Monk to Done is a slightly modified implementation using an app called Remember the Milk. The description of the system is here: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/tips/12222/ This implementation is free, although if you have a smartphone you’ll probably want to pay the $25 per year to have the Pro version of the Remember the Milk phone app. Zen to Done Based even more loosely on GTD, Zen to Done follows Leo Babauta’s “Zen Habits” philosophy of minimalism and simplicity as a path to productivity. His basic description of the system can be found here: http://zenhabits.net/zen-to-done-ztd-the-ultimate-simple-productivity-system/

Autofocus Recommended by Josh Kaufman (CFAR alumnus and author of The Personal MBA), the Autofocus system is very simple and encourages a balance between logical and intuitive thinking when it comes to choosing tasks to do. The system is described here: http://markforster.squarespace.com/autofocus-system/ Josh Kaufman also uses an iPhone app called TimeBend that’s compatible with this system. The link to the app is here: http://goo.gl/PeB9Z

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Delegating to Yourself – Further Resources People tend to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task, an error known as the planning fallacy (Buehler et al., 2010). People focus on what they plan on doing, which is a best-case scenario, and do not adjust sufficiently for the many ways in which things could fail to go according to plan. People tend to make more accurate predictions when they take the “outside view” by considering how long it has typically taken to complete similar tasks in the past. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Peetz, J. (2010). The planning fallacy: Cognitive, motivational, and social origins. In M. P. Zanna & J. M. Olson (Eds.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Volume 43, pp. 1-62). San Diego: Academic Press. http://goo.gl/3s21N Social psychology research has found that the more people that are present in an emergency, the less likely any individual is to intervene. This effect, known as the bystander effect, is explained in part by diffusion of responsibility - when many other people are available to intervene, no individual feels particularly responsible for helping. Psychologists recommend assigning responsibility for a task to a specific individual (e.g., “You, call 9-1-1!” instead of “Someone call 9-1-1!”), which drastically increases their likelihood of helping. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility Behavioral economist George Ainslie has developed the idea of “multiple selves”, in which a single person can be modeled as a succession of different selves. He has used this model investigate akrasia (especially the tendency to excessively discount the future), and to develop planning strategies based on negotiation or bargaining between one’s “selves.” His website contains a precis of his book Breakdown of Will and other resources: Ainslie, George (2001). Breakdown of Will. http://picoeconomics.org Economists Jamison and Wegener (2009) elaborate on the theory that people treat their future selves as other people, and review neuroscience research which suggests that some of the brain processes involved in thinking about one’s future prospects are used for thinking about other people’s mental states. Jamison, J. & Wegener, J. (2009). Multiple selves in intertemporal choice. Working paper series, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, No. 09-17.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10419/55557 Commitment devices are tools that help a person combat akrasia by imposing additional consequences on one’s future selves, so that they will have incentives to act in a way that is consistent with their current goals. Available commitment devices include StickK, where users make a commitment and set a cost that they must pay if they do not stick to their commitment, and Beeminder, where you set a goal and a path to that goal and pay if you stray too far from the path. http://www.stickk.com/ https://www.beeminder.com/ Small factors can have a large effect at channeling a person’s behavior in a particular direction. Thaler and Sunstein’s (2008) book Nudge reviews this area of research, including a classic study which found that students were far more likely to go get a tetanus shot after seeing a presentation on the benefits of the shot if they were also asked to check their schedule for a time when they were available to go to the health center. Understanding how these “channel factors” influence people’s behavior can help a person delegate tasks more effectively, including to their future selves. Thaler, R. H. & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. http://nudges.org/ Getting Things Done provides one system for carrying out one’s plans. David Allen’s GTD system includes identifying the “next actions” for each of your projects/tasks and the context where you will engage in each action. An advantage of this concrete advanced planning is that, when the specified context arises, the planned action can be triggered without a need for further deliberation or planning. Allen, David (2001). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done Another benefit that Allen cites for having an organized system for planning your actions is that it frees up attention, since it there is no need for a project to be on your mind if you can trust that it is in your system. A recent set of studies by psychologists Masicampo & Baumeister (2011) provides empirical support for this claim. They found that unfinished goals led to intrusive thoughts and worse performance on other tasks, but the intrusive thoughts disappeared among those who were given a chance to make specific plans for how to pursue their goal. Masicampo, E.J., & Baumeister, R.F. (2011). Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101, 66783. http://goo.gl/4UkT7

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Propagating Urges Urges vs Goals Goal: Verbal/deliberate wants (“I want to write a book”) Urge: Your desires moment to moment. These are felt in the body (“I want to finish reading this webcomic”) English uses the word ‘want’ to denote both the declarative, verbal wanting of goals and the immediate, compelling wanting of urges. That’s how you can end up saying, “I want to exercise, but I don’t want to exercise!” However, it’s very helpful to distinguish wants and urges; any time one finds oneself saying “X, but also not-X!”, it’s a clue one could use more distinctions. Often, you’ll have a goal and an urge for a big project (“I want to write a book”). You know it’s an urge and not just a goal because just saying the words almost makes you see the cover emblazoned with “NYT Bestselling Author” and causes a surge of preemptive pride. But, even though your verbal, System 2 thinking understands that editing a particular paragraph is a necessary step to achieve your goal, the urge doesn’t propagate down and cause you to have a burning, in the moment desire to tighten up the language in paragraph #241.

The goal of this unit is to make it easier to use your urge to complete a goal (e.g., your urge to write a book) to fuel an urge to work on its subgoals (e.g., an urge to edit paragraph #241).

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List some goals where you fall into a “I want to X, but I don’t want to X” pattern:

List some subgoals/next-actions that you would like to have an in-the-moment urge to complete:

Let’s look, now, at a case where urges naturally propagate correctly – and at a similar case where they do not. A case where urges naturally propagate correctly: The other day, I received a paycheck in the mail. Now, like many people, I have both an urge and a goal to have money in the bank. The state “I have money in the bank” can be furthered by the actions: 1. Open envelope 2. Put check in wallet 3. Next time I’m at the ATM, deposit check into ATM. Sure enough, I felt an urge to take each of these actions – and a little “ka-ching!” feeling after I did it. My experience went something like this: feel urge to open envelope… Open envelope: “ka-ching!” Feel urge to put check in wallet… Put check in wallet: Ka-ching! And so on.

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A very similar case, where urges didn’t naturally propagate: That same week, I also received in the mail a parking ticket. Now, parking tickets in Berkeley initially cost $28, but if you don’t pay them for 31 days, they cost $90. Given this state of affairs, my urge and goal to have money in the bank would have been well served by actions like: ● Promptly open envelope ● Fill out little slip; write check ● Put slip and check in mail.

But here, my brain’s automatic urge propagation failed. Instead of feeling an urge to tear open the parking ticket (and a “ka-ching! I’m furthering the ‘have money in the bank’ worldstate feeling when I did), I felt an urge to avoid paying, or even looking at, the parking ticket. And when I did open the ticket, instead of “ka-ching!” I felt an “ow!”

It’s interesting to meditate on how similar the two situations are. First off, the causal structure of the situations was quite similar. The parking tickets situation was isomorphic (structurally identical) to a situation in which parking tickets cost an immediate $90, but, when you receive a parking ticket, you also get a $62 check in the mail that will expire after 31 days. Secondly, the actions required to increase my bank account balance are quite similar. Tearing open a paycheck envelope is quite similar to tearing open a parking ticket envelope. Filling in the parking ticket slip is similar to filling in a deposit slip. And yet the one set of actions felt attractive while the other set felt aversive – probably because my unconscious mind understood that check-opening helped get money, but felt that parking-ticket-opening cost money. Getting the parking-ticket-opening urges to propagate, with a bit of conscious help: I ended up visualizing that the envelope with the parking ticket actually held a check for $62 that would expire in 31 days. I just had to open it to be able to claim the check. I also practiced the ka-ching feeling while opening the envelope, by saying “yes!” out loud. That vivid image did the trick. Opening parking tickets, and paying bills promptly in general, began to feel like opening paychecks.

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Why urges are critical for your current goals Why might you want to spend time and effort wiring up your subgoals so that you have an urge and not just an obligation to complete them?

Urges can help you actually work, but so can willpower or social pressure. Expending willpower can be exhausting and costly, so it’s nice to spare yourself the strain. But urges can do more for you than that. When you work on a project, even if you’re already working hard, you may notice a spurt of energy and focus once you suddenly are given a real deadline. You might focus more on the most urgent tasks of the project, instead of less necessary work. Having a real urge to complete a project (or to complete it well) can give you the same kind of productivity boost that a deadline can give you – all the time. Many report that this boost is much larger than the boost they get by just sitting down in front of the task and “working as hard as they can”. A somewhat silly example of how urges matter: Plenty of different urges can get you to ‘work’ but not all of them spur useful work. When writing wedding thank yous, I used pomodoros to do focused work in short bursts that helped me propagate an urge from the goal ‘be diligent’ to the task ‘write thank yous.’ I tallied how many pomodoro blocks I had completed and felt accomplished.

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But then, as an experiment, I tried tallying how many thank yous I wrote in each pomodoro session. Suddenly I was completing literally twice as many thank you notes per 25 minute period than I was when I was just counting pomodoros instead of “score” per pomodoro. I had connected my diligence urge to the wrong action, or, at least, to a sub-optimal one. I was better off connecting my feeling of “Diligence accomplished!” to my number of items completed, not the elapsed time I spent working on the project. (In fact, I was literally twice as well off!) What are some actions that might spur you to work harder or smarter? What might help you connect urges to these actions? (Think simple: scheduling check-ins with a coworker, tallying dealt-with email (answering or permanent ignoring), watching a user use the current version of your software and feeling his pain from the currently missing or broken features, etc.)

Inside the Brain: How do urges naturally propagate? Your brain naturally conditions your behavior. The “ka-ching!” feeling when I open an envelope with a paycheck and the “ow!” feeling when I touch a parking ticket are internal -- you’re not actually getting a reward or punishment from the outside world. The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) may be the part of the brain that helps provide this internal reinforcement, linking urges to actions. We want to recruit your natural conditioning circuits to help you have urges for more useful actions. So, let’s start by reviewing the basics of conditioning. Imagine you wanted to condition a dog to step on a green tile.

What would happen if you put a pressure pad under the tile, so every time the dog stepped there, a treat would automatically be dispensed three days later? What would you do if, after several sessions, the dog hadn’t stepped on the tile at all and had never triggered the treat dispenser?

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Conditioning depends on rapid responses. The treat need to come almost immediately, so it reinforces the behavior you want to train. Conditioning is far more effective if you shape behaviors incrementally. First you reward the dog for being near the tile, and then shrink the radius that qualifies as ‘near’ over time. This process is called ‘shaping’ and it’s very powerful. For example, B.F. Skinner successfully used it to train pigeons to pick out a specific tune on a toy piano (first be near the piano, then touch it, then play any note, then a note near the first note, then only the first note, etc). Imagine you could give instructions to the part of Anna’s brain that naturally conditions her, and you wanted it to be as savvy as possible as it tried to get her to write her summer research paper on phage metagenomics. What small behaviors would you reinforce to shape a complex one? Look at icon for note taking software Enter office Visit pomodoro timer website Walk toward computer Click note-taking icon Think about phage metagenomics Think about the paper Think about going to the office Open calendar Schedule timeblocks Have pomodoro begin Choose some ongoing project you want to complete:

Note that these can be considered as if-then implementation intentions of the form "If (do behavior), then (connect viscerally to goal, feel a "ka-ching!" of progress, and a moment of "that goal! I want to get to that goal!"). Cf. Peter Gollwitzer's research. What small behaviors of yours would you like to reinforce to help you shape the large endeavor? When would it be handy for you to feel a “ka-ching!”, or a sense of “I want that!” that connects to the longer-term urge?

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When your brain conditions you naturally, the orbitofrontal cortex is building up a causal model of the world and using it to decide what to reinforce and shape. In a primate experiment, monkeys were fitted with electrodes to track dopamine spikes and then played a simple video game. When they scored, they got a squirt of juice, which triggered a dopamine spike. But, after a couple rounds of the game, the spike shifted earlier – now the monkey’s brains were rewarding them when the game flashed a victory sign, before the juice was dispensed. The brain had put together an unconscious causal model and moved the dopamine spike closer to the behavior that triggered the desired outcome. Their brain was conditioning them internally, based on its guesses at the interim world-states that indicated impending juice – much as your brain might condition you internally based on its guesses about the impact of opening paychecks or parking tickets. The goal in this class is to patch some of the gaps in your brain’s causal model of the world that keeps it from reinforcing actions that are necessary to a goal. That is, the goal of this class is to help you get the part of your brain that is already conditioning your behavior – the part that is already sending you dopamine when you open paychecks, and “eek!” signs when you notice mistakes – to have a more accurate causal model of the world, so that it can give you a strong urge toward all the actions that help toward your goals (including e.g. opening parking tickets, acknowledging mistakes, turning around when you’ve been heading in the wrong direction, and editing paragraph #241 on your road to being an author).

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How urges are critical for the goals you could have and your freedom to act Urges (or the lack thereof) can shape what you notice, imagine, or believe, as well as what you actually do.

The principal and the candy dishes

What small pleasure or pain signals can shape your behavior without you noticing? What turns up in your environment? What does your brain administer habitually without deliberate intent?

Look for ways to use urges and reinforcement to increase your scope of action, image, and thought. For example, look for ways to make it “Yes! I noticed a mistake!” and not “Damn! I just noticed a way that I’ve been being terribly inefficient!” (since it’s useful to notice mistakes, and feeling pain teaches you not to notice!). The main point: We have some specific urge-propagation techniques below. But honestly, these techniques are not the main point. The main point is to notice, on a visceral level, that urges matter. Even if you’re “very diligent” and “have no trouble with procrastination”, you’ll get far more done, far more quickly, if you have a visceral urge to accomplish the substeps. (A mental image to help this out: doing a 100-hour task without first spending an hour creating task-aiding urges is about as wasteful as, say, attempting the 100-hour task while lying in bed half asleep. Sure, you can make progress, but 125

nothing like the kind of progress you’ll able to make if you can engage more of your mind.) So the main point of this unit, really, is to: (a) notice how much urges matter; (b) make a habit of noticing, for all work tasks, what urges would help you accomplish those tasks; and (c) tinker around until you manage to create more of an urge. The urge-propagation techniques below offer a starting point for this tinkering – but this tinkering is the main point. (Note that many kinds of urges may be useful for task-completion. Sometimes it’s useful to just want to get the task done. Other times, if a task involves e.g. solving a problem, it’s useful to find the problem obsessively interesting – which is a different feeling than wanting to check the problem off your todo list. Or again, if your task involves collaboration with others or sales to others, it may be useful to have a warm urge to help those others (so that they unconsciously notice your feelings and feel positively toward you). The point is just to take a minute to notice which urges are useful; to then take another minute to notice whether you already have the useful urges at full-blast; and, if not, to play around some until you have more of them.)

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Propagating Urges Deliberately You want your OFC to patch its causal model of the world, so your urge to achieve goals will naturally drive an urge to tackle the subgoals. The ultimate aim is to have the reinforcement proceed without your active intervention. Here is one approach to helping your OFC improve its causal model (so that it can give you “ka-ching”s and “eeps” in the right places, and your urges will naturally propagate). Step 0: Observe. Pay attention as you open your parking tickets, head to the gym, or sit down at your desk to work hard on that project. Notice when you feel the little “eeps!” and “ka-chings”; notice what details seem interesting and what details seem like boring nuisances. What set of urges are you starting out with? Where is your OFC already positively or negatively conditioning your behavior? Step 1: Meditate on the causal structure Choose the subgoal you want to feel an urge for (e.g. “regularly use pomodoros to practice writing/editing”). Meditate on the way this subgoal promotes the larger goal that you do feel an urge for. Walk through lots of concrete sense-experiences in your imagination, or in reality: how will your year unfold differently if you do this well, vs. if you stick with your current default? What will the contrast feel like? Is the causal connection trustworthy, or is there some reason the new action might backfire? Step 1’: If possible, expose your OFC to real experiences: If you want to viscerally get that smoking is a health risk, don’t just draw a causal diagram – go visit some people with lung cancer. Watch them with the explicit causal link in mind. Look for a way to get vivid, non-verbal experience with the causal link; speak to your System 1 in the language it understands – the language of concrete experiences. Similarly, in order to get that your current software is painful to use, watch users use it painfully. Or in order to get that writing/editing pomodoros will further your goal of being an author, try asking authors how they leveled up their skills at book signings, so you can hear how emphatic they are. Remember that the goal is not System 2 verbal understanding, but System 1 visceral understanding. Then, to make the experience stick:

Step 2: Come up with a vivid pointer for the causal link Think of an image that’s funny or grotesque that heightens your awareness of the causal link between the sub-action and the goal whose urge you want to propagate. For example: Sebastian Marshall, a blogger, needed a way to stay motivated to stick with his goal of dieting and body building. He had to make sure that his goal of being healthy propagated down to actions like 127

“don’t take a potato chip from the bowl.” And picturing a tiny marginal decrease in heart attack risk wasn’t enough to prompt a visceral urge. So he pictured something a lot more vivid -- he imagined himself clad in a loincloth, rippling with muscles, a barbarian warlord. So every time he resisted temptation, he brought this image to mind.

CFAR instructor Valentine helped himself keep feeling an urge to do pushups, even when they were painful by linking his goal+urge of a strong healthy body with an image of the agony of pushups being caused by a purifying fire that burned away bad health gremlins in his body.

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Step 3: Practice! Whenever you encounter the desired trigger for your new urge (e.g., seeing a parking ticket ought to trigger a desire to open the parking ticket; beginning to edit a paragraph ought to trigger an urge to edit it), repeat the image from step 2. Conjure it up viscerally. At the same time, do a “happy gesture” with your body to help feel the visceral, “I’m getting closer to that thing I really want goodness that the image should conjure. After you repeat it consciously for a while, it usually sticks. You can repeat it either as occasions arise in the natural course of life, or else in a deliberate practice session (“offline training”). Try it: What is an urge you actually want to propagate? How is it causally linked to a sub-action that you currently lack an urge for? Urge for long-term outcome: Sub-action where you want to propagate this urge: Step 0: Observe. In your inner simulator, or in reality, go through the action as you find it now. What “ka-chings”, “eeks!”, or urges do you notice?

Step 1: Get your System 1 to understand the causal connection. Where could you go to get real world data or experience to help your System 1 internalize this connection? Or what experiences can you usefully meditate on, to get it more concretely?

Step 2: What are some vivid images you could use to cement this causal link? (In the style of Barbarian Warlord!)

Step 3: What will practicing this (step 3) look like?

Make sure to repeat the three practices above (meditating on the causal link, seeking real world experience, generating a vivid reminder), to help install your new routine. Consider using techniques from Offline Habit Training to help trigger the vivid image. 129

Practicing your image for the causal link may be easier or more successful if you link it to a happy gesture. You’re trying to reinforce a behavior and trigger an emotional spike. That can be hard to do if your body is slouching in a chair and you’re working from imagery alone. Visit BJ Fogg’s TinyHabits.com and sign up for his emails in order to get useful practice with these techniques without having to actively remind yourself to practice. Seriously, I’d highly recommend this. It’s free. And past participants (and I!) have found BJ Fogg’s stuff very helpful for getting started.

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Appendix 1: Troubleshooting Ask your “inner simulator” if it expects this process (steps 0-3 above) to work! If the process feels odd or unlikely to work, check these steps: 1. Make sure you actually want your brain to reinforce this action. If you could just press a button and thereby have an urge to do the action, would you press the button? Or might that cause problems? Take a moment to search for good reasons not to acquire this urge, and for any emotional hesitations you might have. Think them through. 2. Make sure your emotional brain agrees with you, about wanting to feel a visceral, in the moment pull toward this action. If you balk emotionally at desiring this new action, your brain will be giving you a little electric shock every time you try to condition yourself toward the habit – and the urge propagation won’t work. 3. Make sure you’re using a real causal link to meditate on, experience, and generate images. If you don’t buy (verbally and emotionally) that the goal and the sub-action are really connected, the process might fizzle out. 4. Make sure your emotional brain (and you) are okay with the urge propagation process. If you balk emotionally at the idea of changing your own urges, your brain will (again) be giving you a little electric shock every time you try to link the urge to a new action – and the new feeling won’t stick. Note that steps 1-4 are parts of goal-factoring. It is good to do goal-factoring on “be a famous author” and “regularly rewrite paragraphs” before you try to propagate the urge “be a famous author” into the urge “regularly rewrite paragraphs”.

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Appendix 2: Urges that are often useful to propagate A lot of participants (and CFAR staff) have found the following urges particularly useful to propagate. The first set help make common, everyday goals faster and easier. The second help subvert the unconscious, unhelpful conditioning that many people habitually engage in. We’ve given a few starting points for these urges, to help kickstart your urge propagation process (steps 0-3 above). You’ll need to take some time to find motives that resonate with you. For everyday goals: •

Every time you send an email: a fist pumping feeling of “Yes! I just sent an email!”

•

Pomodoros: ◦ When you start a pomodoro: “Yes! I’m about to get closer to [vivid thing you like about goal]!” ◦ When you finish a pomodoro: “Go me! I just made progress toward [goal]!”

•

When you discard unnecessary things: “Huzzah! I repelled the advancing forces of mess!”

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When you cut a low-priority item from your todo list: “Woohoo! I just brought into being a better-rested, less-stressed me to do the tasks I really care about!”

For expanding your ability to act/perceive/imagine: •

When you notice you made a mistake: “Yes! I noticed! Now I have the ability to learn and/or intervene!”

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When you notice you’re rationalizing: “Wow! I spotted that I’m rationalizing! I can pause and reflect now!”

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When you notice you’re resisting information/experiencing a mental flinch: “Aha! My brain is trying to hide this from me! I’ll find strength to sally forth into the ugh field!”

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When you’re going outside your comfort zone: “Ka-ching! I just earned a CoZE point! This is a bit uncomfortable which means I’m exploring!”

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When you notice that you’re floundering with a new skill or feel like you look dumb/like a novice: “Whew! I’m at the edge of my current competency. This is what real learning feels like.”

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Propagating Urges – Further Resources Operant conditioning is the process by which people come to associate behaviors with the pleasures or pains that they produce, and to engage in behavioral patterns that lead to more pleasant consequences (while avoiding those that result in pain). Associations are formed most strongly when the pleasure or pain immediately follows the behavior. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning Complex behaviors can be learned through operant conditioning through a gradual step-by-step process known as “shaping.” Pleasant results are structured to provide positive reinforcement for behaviors which represent a small step in the direction of the desired behavior, beginning with behaviors that already occur, so that the individual is led towards the desired behavior by a hill-climbing algorithm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaping_(psychology) An engaging take on how the techniques of operant conditioning which are used to train animals can also be applied to people: Pryor, Karen (1999). Don’t Shoot the Dog. Psychologists Carver and Scheier (2002) use the theory of control systems to model goal pursuit, where feedback about one’s progress towards a goal is translated into pleasant or unpleasant feelings. These feelings then motivate the person to continue an effective approach or change an ineffective approach. In order for the system to function smoothly, it is necessary for the relevant part of the system to recognize the connection between the goal and one’s current behavior. Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (2002). Control processes and self-organization as complementary principles underlying behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6, 304-315. http://goo.gl/U5WJY Hollerman and Schultz (1998) review research on conditioning which investigated how monkeys’ dopamine system responds when they receive a juice reward. Their dopamine response was based on the information that they received about whether they were getting juice, rather than the juice itself. Thus, an unexpected juice reward produced a dopamine spike, and a cue which indicated that they were about to receive juice also produced a spike. However, expected juice did not produce a dopamine spike, and if a monkey that expected to receive juice did not receive juice then there was a decrease in dopamine. Hollerman, J. R., & Schultz, W. (1998). Dopamine neurons report an error in the temporal prediction of reward during learning. Nature Neuroscience, 1, 304-309. http://goo.gl/3NKDhY Sebastian Marshall explains his Barbarian Warlord image in more detail on his eponymous blog: 133

http://sebastianmarshall.com/barbarian-warlord Stanford psychologist BJ Fogg offers has developed a simplified, systematic approach to behavior change. His free tutorial (which you can sign up to receive by email at his website) provides extremely useful practice at developing a new habit, as well as a clear explanation of the process. He emphasizes making the new behavior extremely simple and quick to do, having a clear trigger for the behavior, and celebrating each time that you complete the behavior in order to reinforce the new habit. http://tinyhabits.com/ (Highly Recommended)

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Offline Habit Training The purpose of this unit is to make it easier to get new habits, make desirable habits take less attention, and break unwanted old habits. Let's start by brainstorming for changes we'd like to make.

Warm-up: Brainstorming a habit wish-list... 1. Habits you wish you had :

2. Habits you wish you didn't have : (Often the best way to break an old habit is to install a new one that aborts it. This is especially true if the new habit can satisfy whatever was reinforcing the old one, but that's not always necessary.)

3. Habits you have but wish were easier or took less effort:

4. Goals you have with some moment-to-moment subtasks that are not automatic/pleasant for you (name the subtasks, too):

5. Habits or attitudes that other people have which serve them well, but which you don't have:

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Design your offline training exercise Step 1: Choose the habit change that you want to install. Remember that breaking an old habit is often most easily accomplished by establishing a new habit which aborts or overrides the old one, e.g. closing Reddit to avoid reading it.

Consider doing a Fermi estimate to help you decide how effective 10 minutes of offline training would need to be in order to be worth it:


Frequent means valuable. All else being equal, habits you can do every day have 30 times more impact than habits you do once a month. ◦ Example: 10 minutes per day = 60 hours per year; this is a great anchor to keep in mind!

•

To break old habits, think of new habit that could stop them. ◦ Example: I wanted use Facebook less, so I trained the habit of closing Facebook. Eventually, it felt silly to use it unless I had a particularly good reason to.

•

Take inspiration from other participants. Many past participants have focused on social habits, relationships, exercise, meals, sleep, writing, computer use, stress reduction, learning new skills, remembering to be self-aware... maybe take some inspiration from them.

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Step 2: Consider alternatives. Are you sure you really want this habit? Remember many factors affect your habits. If you lack motivation, maybe it's time for Goal Factoring and/or Propagating Urges. If you find an action aversive, maybe it's time for Aversion Factoring or CoZE. If there's a skill involved with this habit, e.g. a social or motor skill, maybe it's time for Turbocharging or skill-focused CoZE. THOUGHTS:


Try a different habit idea. If you're not sure about these other factors, perhaps choose a different habit to focus on during this unit.

•

Learn by doing. If you're not sure about any habits, also remember that many habits are something you can just try out, and use the habit as an opportunity to notice things about your motivations, aversions, and skills. And you can always try uninstalling the habit later if you think that would be better.

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Step 3: Make it concrete and repeatable. What's a very concrete and repeatable [Trigger]-->[Action] pattern you could train to help with your new habit? (Concreteness is meant to make it easier for "System 1", particularly procedural memory, to help you with the habit, and repeatability lets you train it many times in a 10-minute time-span.)

(Bonus: following the Propagating Urges unit, design a [Reinforcement] step after the action that meaningfully links the action to your long term goals.) Tips if you get stuck: •

Use existing habits as triggers.

•

Train your “get started” reflex for tasks you procrastinate or forget to start. ◦ Example: one participant wanted to go to the gym after getting home, so he practiced [arrive home] -> [pack gym bag and take it to the car] -> "wee, sexy fitness!" ◦ Example: I used to delay starting work because it required clearing off my desk. So, I first practiced the skill of clearing off your desk quickly with minimal mental effort. Once I had that, I combined with a trigger: [walk into office] -> [clear desk quickly] -> "yay, space to think!"

•

Win the war by winning battles. If you want to become more patient, you don't have to make yourself universally more patient in all situations right away. You can start by training patience in a particular recurring context, and expand your empire of patience from there. For example, [enter meeting room] -> [sit, relax, and visualize it's a beautiful garden] Once you try this, you might learn things about what works or doesn't, which will make you more prepared for more contexts.

•

Train the little things for tasks you get distracted from or frustrated by, to make them more automatic and natural. ◦ Example: Seeing my whole email inbox between every pair of messages I send is distracting and slows me down. So I trained myself to move through them 20% faster by practicing: [just clicked send] -> [press [ to archive and view next message] -> "ahh, mental clarity :)" This saves me around 20 minutes per day, or 120 hours per year.

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Step 4: Choose vivid associations and movements to link the trigger to the action. It's okay to be silly here if you want ;)


Think of movies, songs, stories, or historical events you find epic or memorable ◦ Example: Iron man! I'm training my System 1 to be as helpful as Iron Man's AI!

•

Make associations sensually and emotionally vivid; get lots of neurons firing together! (Related google searches for later: Hebbian learning, associative memory) ◦ Example: I visualized the door to my apartment was replaced by a giant copy of my cell phone open to my to-do-at-home list.

•

Use physical movements to engage your motor memory and make the action extra memorable. (Related google searches for later: motor learning, procedural memory) ◦ Example: One participant trained a "mindful eating" gesture to help him associate mindfulness with starting a meal so that he wouldn't over-eat.

•

Try “self-signaling”, i.e. demonstrating to yourself that the habit is important and valuable. (Related google searches for later: cognitive dissonance, costly-signaling ) ◦ Example: I bought a chocolate bar just to ceremonially throw it in the garbage, because I had a mild chocolate allergy. Later when I was about the buy or eat chocolate, I'd remember this and decide not to. This cost me little money, saved me much itching, and caused less food waste than if I hadn't broken my habit.

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Step 5: Design a 5-10 minute offline training exercise. How can you practice the [Trigger]--[Association]-->[Action] pattern for 10 minutes?

(Give yourself bonus points if you can also find a way to practice a reinforcement step after each action, like in Propagating Urges ;)

Step 6: Schedule a time and send a message to future-you Following the Self-Delegation unit, think about when it will actually be convenient for future-you to practice your habit. Also make sure the instructions are will be somewhere easy for future-you to find. ... don't write the scheduling here! Maybe set an alarm, put it in your calendar, or Boomerang an email to yourself... but do something to actually help your future self remember at a time when it's convenient.

Step 7: Do the practice, not just the habit. Yes, for real. Really take those few minutes to intently fire your do-things neurons along with your think-things neurons. Take advantage of procedural memory caching. And remember that if it doesn't work, it's a chance to learn about your motivations, aversions, and skills.

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Unit Notes: Offline Habit Training I've begun to think of each of my units as organized around a method --- a useful mental procedure or movement --- along with some tools that can be used as part of the method. The method of this unit will be a way of using allocated chunks of time in order to train new habits or break old ones.

Offline Habit Training: The Method •

Choose a habit change you want to make in your life

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Identify a concrete [Trigger]->[Action] pattern that could help you make the change.

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Train this behavior for 5-10 focused minutes of your time.


Offline Habit Training: The Tools •

Fermi estimation to help you prioritize habits by how recurrent they are and how much value you can get from them.

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Vivid associations and movements to help you brain start linking triggers and actions together.

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Actual repetition of desired actions as a way to train your brain to make certain behavioral transitions more easily and automatically.

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Attention to motivation, aversion, and skills as critical factors (which are addressed by other CFAR units).

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Important factors in building habits Some important factors influencing habits are addressed in other CFAR units:

If you lack motivation, maybe it's time for Goal Factoring and/or Propagating Urges. If you find an action aversive, maybe it's time for Aversion Factoring. If there's a skill involved with this habit, e.g. a social or motor skill, maybe it's time for Turbocharging. But sometimes skill, motivation, and absence of aversion isn't enough to change your habits. Habits are also sustained by triggers that remind you or or make it natural to do certain actions, e.g., [at computer] --> [open addictive website] Noticing our triggers, and using practice and associations to make it easy for ourselves to transition from new triggers to desirable actions, is the focus of this unit:

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Before installing a habit, consider alternatives Take at least a little time to consider each of the factors above, like motivation, aversion, and skill, and wonder if there's a good reason you don't have this habit already; you might discover a modified version of the habit would work better. (q.v. Goal Factoring, Propagating Urges, Aversion Factoring, and Turbocharging Training.)

The value of setting aside time to practice By “offline” training, I mean setting aside some time, e.g. 10 minutes, when you can focus all your attention on developing a new habit. You are “offline” in the sense of being disconnected from the other data/distractions of your daily life, and protected from the consequences of failing or being too focused on your habit. Being “offline” is a feature of what is commonly called deliberate practice, while being “online” is a feature of deliberate performance. For example, a musician does not rely entirely on concert performances (online) to improve; she sets aside many hours (offline) to focus entirely on practicing the parts she most needs to improve. Offline training is analogous to programming, in the sense that it takes an initial investment of time and attention to write a program or install a habit, but if you manage to make the program/habit run smoothly, it can save you a lot of time and attention later! To train a habit offline, I recommend working through the steps in in the Design your offline training exercise section at the beginning of this section.

NOTES:

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Bonus: The Pomodoro Technique A "pomodoro" is a short, focused work interval, named after the italian word for "tomato" because it was popularized by someone using a 25-minute timer shaped like a tomato. Why do people like it? For a number of reasons, which may vary by person. It can: •

break work into less scary, bite-sized pieces that are easier to commit to;

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increase your working memory by focusing on one task at a time;

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separate doing work and wondering what to do into different periods so you're less stressed;

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make work more enjoyable and/or healthy via the breaks;

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strengthen your "get started" reflex by having you start work many times per day instead of just once or twice;

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give you a source of timed triggers for other habits.

How it works. As I recommend it, the Pomodoro technique works like this:

+

1. Place a blank piece of paper next to you and write "Distractions" at the top. 2. Decide a task to focus on, set a 25-minute timer, and begin focused work. (Yay! Congratulate yourself for getting started :) 3. As distractions like come to mind, write them on your piece of paper, say "Thanks brain, let's do that later!", and get back to your focused work. Distractions can be things like "call Joe" "watch cat videos" "wonder if this is the best use of my time" 4. When the timer ends, yay! You did a pomodoro! Celebrate for a second :) 5. Set a 5- or 10-minute break timer, and use your list of distractions as a source of ideas for something fun to do on your break, and maybe how to spend your next pomodoro.

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Ideas for break-time: •

Really enjoy yourself! ◦ watch a cat video ◦ play a short game ◦ listen to a song you love ◦ dance :)

•

Do something healthy, like: ◦ stretches ◦ drinking water ◦ jumping jacks ◦ mindfulness ◦ gratitude exercises

Variation: Pomodoros Technique with working memory dumps. When my work involves holding complex ideas in mind, I like to use a Pomodoro technique with 3 stages: •

40 minutes of focused work with distraction-logging

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5 minutes of writing down idea fragments and associations to help me get started again after a break

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10 minutes of break

You can play with this idea to get times that work better for you.

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Offline Habit Training – Further Resources Procedural memory is memory for the performance of particular types of action. Procedural memory guides the processes we perform, and typically operates outside of conscious awareness. When needed, procedural memories are automatically retrieved and utilized for the execution of the integrated procedures involved in both cognitive and motor skills, from tying shoes to flying an airplane to reading. They are created through “procedural learning,” which involves repeating a complex activity over and over again until all of the relevant neural systems work together to automatically produce the activity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_memory Much of human (and animal) learning is based on associations. People learn habits in part by developing an association between contextual cues (such as the various physical features of a particular location) and a behavior, which leads to a tendency to engage in that behavior in that context. A review article on habits: Wood, W., Neal, D. T. (2007). A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface. Psychological Review, 14, 843-863. http://goo.gl/QKbl9 Hebbian learning is a theory of associative learning which posits that neurons that fire together, wire together. Evidence for increased functional connectivity between neurons that have fired together has come from research on long-term potentiation in the hippocampus of rabbits and rats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation Charles Duhigg’s (2012) book The Power of Habit provides a readable and usable review of the research on how habits are formed, maintained, and changed. An excerpt on his website explains the importance of what he calls the “cue → routine → reward” feedback loop, and how being aware of this structure can help you strategize about how to change your habits. http://charlesduhigg.com/how-habits-work/ (Highly Recommended) One explanation for the observed benefits of implementation intentions (plans of the form “If I’m in situation X, then I’ll do action Y”) is that they make goal pursuit more automatic by turning the situation X into a trigger for the action Y. An fMRI study by Gilbert and colleagues (2008) found some evidence for this hypothesis, as participants who repeated the implementation intention “IF the same 146

letter is on both sides, THEN I will press the middle button” had less activity in a region of the brain believed to be involved in top-down action control (lateral area 10) and more activity in a region believed to be involved in bottom-up action control (medial area 10). Gilbert, S., Gollwitzer, P. M., Cohen, A.-L., Oettingen, G., & Burgess, P. W. (2009). Separable brain systems supporting cued versus self-initiated realization of delayed intentions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35, 905-15. http://goo.gl/Rifd1e People often infer their own goals, emotions, and beliefs based on their own behavior, in the same way that they would draw inferences about other people’s behavior. Thus, engaging in a behavior (particularly in a context where there is no other obvious explanation for it) can change a person’s selfimage and future behavior by signaling to yourself that you are the kind of person who wants to engage in that behavior. The classic psychology paper on this self-signaling effect is Daryl Bem’s (1972) article on self-perception theory. Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 6), 1-62. http://www.dbem.ws/SP%20Theory.pdf

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Turbocharging Training [this page left deliberately blank for notes, wait until after the class to read on]

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Key ideas 1. Know the skill you're practicing a) "What skill am I actually practicing?" b) "How might I train the skill I want to practice?" (& then go back to (a)) 2. Use feedback well a) Make sure there is feedback b) Make the feedback as rapid as possible c) Be sure you can know how to do better next cycle d) Internalize feedback by attempting to predict it 3. Maximize intensity while minimizing error a) Go faster (or slower) b) Be pickier (or more lenient) about what counts as an error c) Add (or decrease) changes that are irrelevant to the skill d) Zoom in on a subskill / reintegrate a subskill to its context of use e) ...and possibly others

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Turbocharging Training – Further Resources Engaging in “deliberate practice” (Ericsson et al., 1993), as athletes and musicians do in their training, allows a person to develop their skills more quickly and to keep their learning curve from plateauing. Deliberate practice involves: • active and focused attention on the activity • varying the activity • feedback and instruction from coaches or peers The classic review article on deliberate practice: Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100, 363-406. http://goo.gl/LC5ep Similar techniques of “deliberate performance” (Fadde & Klein, 2010) can be used while engaging in the activity during one’s everyday life rather than in separate practice sessions: • Experimentation: trying different things and noticing the result • Estimation: making quantitative, readily testable predictions • Extrapolation: identifying similarities between familiar events and new events • Explanation: putting beliefs into words; making one’s model explicit A recent article identifying techniques for deliberate performance: Fadde, P. J. & Klein, G. A. (2010). Deliberate performance: Accelerating expertise in natural settings. Performance Improvement, 49, 5-14. http://goo.gl/txCNp Research on neuroplasticity has investigated how people’s brains change as they learn. Intense effort at using an ability, such as using a limb that has been affected by a stroke (in constraint-induced movement therapy), can lead to surprisingly large improvements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint-induced_movement_therapy A readable overview of the research on neuroplasticity: Doidge, Norman (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. http://goo.gl/X91bi 150

The research psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman notes that activities that strongly engage “System 2” – our deliberative, reflective, “slow” thinking – create physiological symptoms of stress and a subjective state of intensity. An accessible description of his research in this area is in his book: Kahneman, Daniel (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. http://goo.gl/5J0zj Much research in STEM education points toward the transition from novice to expert being defined largely by replacing old heuristics with new, more adaptive ones after a period of intense, explicit focus on the topic. Vicente Talanquer illustrates this in chemistry education: http://goo.gl/hMRon Summarizing a great deal of mathematics education research, James Hiebert and Douglas Grouws suggest that the experience of struggle when engaging with mathematics is key in students’ ability to learn: Hiebert, J. & Grouws, D. (2007). The effects of classroom mathematics teaching on students’ learning. In Frank K. Lester Jr. (Ed.), Second Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning (pp. 371-404). Reston, VA: NCTM. Many mathematicians report concentration and intense effort as being essential to mathematical research, and that learning to tolerate and even appreciate the feeling of effort is key to solving challenging problems. Two surveys of this are Jacque Hadamard’s (1949) The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field and Leone Burton’s (2004) Mathematicians as Enquirers. http://goo.gl/RkstL http://goo.gl/NnRFq Todd Becker’s blog, Getting Stronger, discusses research on how to use intense training to develop one’s abilities, typically by alternating with periods of rest. He also discusses several applications of these ideas, some more speculative than others. http://gettingstronger.org/about-this-blog/

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Value of Information

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Expected Value of Information Estimation Unit outline: 1. Basic concept (5 min) 2. Practice doing VOI estimates. Basic principles for VOI estimates. (30 min) 3. Systematizing your practice. (20 min) 4. Final thoughts, take-aways (5 min) Definition of VOI: Expected Value of Information (VOI) = How much better your life will be if you have the information, than if you don’t (measured in $, hours, or some other handy currency). VOI ≈ [Expected value of decision w/o info] * [percent improvement enabled by info] Example: SFO-Paris flight purchase. Total cost, if you buy the first flight you see: $1500. Estimated percent savings from carefully searching through flights: 10%. VOI on further flight search: $1500 * 10% = $150.

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Try it: Estimate the “expected value of information” in: 1. Microwave purchase. You are standing in Target, wondering whether to buy the very first microwave you see (which is on display in front of you), or to bring up Amazon reviews or otherwise attempt to compare several microwaves. How much VOI in buying a carefully chosen microwave, vs. this first microwave? (Assume it’s you buying a microwave for yourself – with your own actual habits, preferences, etc.)

2. Improving your commute method/route. How much value is there in testing/googling alternative driving routes or methods, vs. just commuting the way you do now? (Again, pretend you’re you, with your own current habits, goals, etc.)

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3. Improving your reading speed + comprehension, or your method of figuring out which sections of which books to read. (That is: how much better will your life be in expectation (total, measured in dollars or hours) if you spend 10 hours working to improve your reading methods, vs. if you don’t?)

4. Some further VOI estimates to try: a. Ear plugs: Finding out whether you sleep better with ear plugs (by trying them). b. Career check: If you’re considering changing lines of work (including e.g. moving from programming to startups or to management): how much value from checking salary.com before you re-train? From shadowing a couple folks who are already in that occupation, to see how you enjoy their job? c. “Meta-VOI calculation”: How much expected goodness would you gain, if you did 5 oneminute VOI estimates every day for the next year?

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Some heuristics for VOI calculations, and other expected value calculations: a. Notice all relevant currencies: • Time • Money • Attention / hassle / distraction • Impact on [someone you love]’s well-being • Impact on [someone]’s goodwill toward you • Impact on your own goodwill toward [key person] • … In most expected value calculations, a single currency will dominate (e.g., for my microwave purchase, time costs dominated) – but it’s good to briefly consider other currencies, to make sure the currency you’re focused on is the most important one. b. Time costs are often more important than money costs. c. Attention costs (costs in causing you to be more distracted or stressed) are often more important than time costs. d. Repeated actions add up quickly! • For less than $1 per day, you can… spend $300 per year! • For less than 10 minutes per day, you can… spend 60 hours per year. e. Therefore: estimate the components, then multiply. f. Even very rough estimates are often better than unarticulated guesses. g. Estimates can also help motivate your emotional brain.

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II. Choosing your starting examples: Domains where past participants gained hugely There are four key currencies to focus on: •

Attention

•

Time

•

Money

•

Social currencies (your partner’s goodwill; your boss’s goodwill; your goodwill toward others; status; ...)

Some areas where past participants gained hugely: 5 Sleep quality a Do you have trouble falling asleep? b Do you hit snooze alarms most mornings? How many minutes does that cost over a year? c Have you tried blindfolds, earplugs, a dark room, a bedtime ritual, etc., to see if it improves sleep quality? 6 Reading speed, comprehension, focus 7 Commute length a How long does it take by different routes? Different times of day? b Should you move closer to work? 8 Audiobooks during commutes a Or during gym b Or meals 9 Typing speed 10 Salary negotiations a Do you negotiate for your salary? b Do you practice with a friend, before you go in for the real negotiation? 11 Career choice. How much time to spend investigating? 12 Keyboard shortcuts a For Gmail b For other applications you use every day 13 Email efficiency, more generally 157

a Best try many folks’ methods, and use a stopwatch. b As an example, I’m more efficient when I: (a) go from the top down, instead of picking and choosing; (b) record my “score” for each Pomodoro (how many emails I’ve vanquished – so my emotional brain will want to sprint!). 14 Batch processing a Saves time and attention 15 Social comfort zone expansion a Lots of VOI toward gaining social currencies b Reduced anxiety can free attention 16 Implementing a “Getting things done” system, or similar system for freeing up attention a See “Delegating to Yourself” unit If one of the above rings a bell for you, circle it! I’d love to help you troubleshoot any of the above; so would many others. If you think of something that should be on the above list (saves huge numbers of hours of sizable numbers of people), let me know!

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Value of Information – Further Resources Explicit calculations are useful in part because people’s intuitions often have a hard time dealing with quantities (for a review, see Kahneman, 2003). In a classic study on scope neglect, people were willing to spend about as much to save 2,000 birds as to save 200,000 birds. Similar insensitivity to variations in quantity, which Kahneman (2003) calls “extension neglect,” arise in other contexts. For example, people’s evaluations of an experience (such as a medical procedure without anesthesia) tend to be relatively insensitive to its duration (compared to the peak level of emotion). Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58, 697-720. http://tinyurl.com/kahneman2003 People are more sensitive to quantities when they can make side-by-side comparisons of multiple options which vary on that quantity or when they have enough familiarity with the subject matter to have an intuitive sense of scale, but in the absence of these conditions a person’s intuitions may be essentially blind to the magnitude of the quantity (Hsee, 2000). In order to incorporate the magnitude in one’s judgment, it may be necessary to engage in explicit effort to make sense of it. A review article on “attribute evaluability,” which is the extent to which a person is sensitive to quantitative variations in an attribute: Hsee, C. K. (2000). Attribute evaluability and its implications for joint-separate evaluation reversals and beyond. In D. Kahneman & A.Tversky (eds.), Choices, Values and Frames. Cambridge University Press. http://goo.gl/3lXoD Research on decision making suggests that people who care a lot about making the best decision often neglect the implicit costs of the decision making process such as time and money. For example, they might spend a lot of timing trying to pick a good movie to watch (neglecting the time cost) or channel surf while watching television (neglecting how dividing attention can reduce enjoyment); self-reports of both behaviors have been found to correlate with personality trait of “maximizing.” Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D.R. (2002). Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 1178-1197. http://goo.gl/HLImnQ CFAR alum Lincoln Quirk has an insightful post on how to put a dollar value on one's time: http://goo.gl/fVDuFj Wikipedia summarizes the ideas behind value of information calculations: 159

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_information A blog post with several vignettes in which value of information calculations are relevant: http://lesswrong.com/lw/85x/value_of_information_four_examples/ The introduction to Aaron Santos’s book How Many Licks? provides a simple guide for how to make rough estimates of quantities, and how to break a difficult-to-estimate quantity into components. The rest of the book contains sample problems for practicing Fermi estimation. Santos, Aaron (2009). How Many Licks?: Or, How to Estimate Damn Near Anything http://goo.gl/8ytNye

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Names and Faces: Staff

Critch's interests include tree climbing, polyphonic singing, and Markov chain accept-reject sampling meditation.

Critch Andrew Critch

Anna likes finding analogies between programming rationality in machines (AI/machine learning) and programming it in people. She also is interested in talking about implicit models of the structure of the human psyche expressed in continental philosophy and religion. Finally, she always loves to hear what people think may be missing from the CFAR curriculum, that could help participants and staff become more agent-y.

Anna Anna Salamon

Cat Cat Lavine

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Dan is interested in what research can be done to put rationality training to the test. What variables can we measure to identify the benefits of learning rationality, and what methods can we use to determine which approaches to training rationality are most effective? What research projects should CFAR be running? What studies could academic researchers be conducting? What kinds of self-tracking could individuals be doing?

Dan Dan Keys

David David Kayvanfar

Geoff Geoff Anders

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Julia is interested in the philosophy of ethics, particularly in utilitarianism. For example: What do I do when my utilitarian intuitions contradict other intuitions I have, like respecting autonomy? How should I take into account the utility of future generations? etc.

Julia Julia Galef

Kenzi has deferred admission to medical school to work on rationality with CFAR, so she would appreciate people indulging her love of life sciences and striking up conversations about biochemistry, evolutionary biology, and/or neuroanatomy.

Kenzi McKenzie Amodei

Leah likes that Alan Perlis quote about not learning a programming language that doesn’t change the way you think, and likes talking about how aesthetics and art (fiction, music, theatre) fits into applied rationality.

Leah Leah Libresco

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Valentine is interested in applying mindfulness to rationality - which often means stripping out the mystical/transcendental talk and honing in on how it works in practice and what it does for rational thought.

Valentine Michael Smith

Stephen has terrible taste in movies & literature. If you're familiar with the show Mystery Science Theater 3000, you'll understand.

Stephen Stephen Cole

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Names and Faces: Volunteers Aaron is a Computer Science and Mind Brain Behavior student at Harvard University, and has been interested in rationality for a couple of years, founding the DC meetup group, and living in the Bay Area for about 5 months during his gap year.

Aaron Aaron Tucker

Alex is an epidemiologist, and PhD student at McGill University. He's done research on the genetics of cancer and the risk of infectious diseases arising from livestock.

Alex Alex Demarsh

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Ben is a junior at Harvard studying pure math, although he's a closet applied mathematician/computer scientist. He co-runs Harvard's effective altruist group, Harvard HighImpact Philanthropy, blogs, and is mildly involved in the entrepreneurial scene. Outside that, he spends his time pretending to be a stereotypical New Englander by hiking, folk singing and contra dancing.

Ben Ben Kuhn

Miranda is a newly graduated nurse who now works in the intensive care unit at a Frenchspeaking hospital in Ottawa, Canada. She enjoys writing fiction, as well as Less Wrong posts as Swimmer963.

Miranda Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg

After doing corporate analysis work for a few years now, I'm on a mission to find something better suited for me. I'm assuming applied rationality will "improve" this search - though I'm not sure yet what to expect that "improvement" to look like. Hence why I'm here.

Trevor Trevor Murphy

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I am a statistics grad student at Harvard, and dabble in industry jobs over the summer (hedge fund and Google so far). I used to do a lot of math contests for fun and profit. I enjoy blues dancing, singing, rock climbing, traveling, obstacle races, and learning new skills of any kind. I recently cofounded the Boston rationalist house, and I have been teaching some of the CFAR techniques there that I learned at the July workshop.

Victoria Victoria Krakovna

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Names and Faces: Participants I am working for a tech startup in Manhattan on computer vision problems related to indoor navigation. During my PhD I ran a rationality meet up and hosted speakers including Eliezer Yudkowsky and Aubrey de Grey.

Alex Flint

Alice Monday

Ben Hoffman

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Bethany Soule

Bethany is a programmer who built Beeminder from scratch, has lived in Russia, has worked in biochem labs to bakeries, is an expert in behavioral science by her own estimation, and a Master of Computer Science by the authority of Columbia University. She's also into lifting heavy things, riding her bicycle as fast as she can, climbing stairs competitively -- and in fact she's so hardcore that one time she pushed a human out of her cervix, and then again. She speaks publicly about her crazy Quantified Self life-hackery and sources say she's pretty nice.

I'm married and have a 6 year old son. I'm an attorney but identify more as an entreprenur. Attending this workshop is part of an effort to seek personal and professional improvement.

Charles Castellon

Spent most of the last year travelling Asia, after founding a tech startup. Other interests include swing and blues dancing, and a side-business making chocolate.

Daniel Haran

169

Software Craftsman with Novus, a hedge fund data processing firm (they sell hedge fund data back to the hedge funds). I grew up in Montana, received degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Rocky Mountain College, a small liberal arts school. A humanist by creed and technologist by passion, I work to apply technology to help other humans better achieve their goals. David Souther

I'm just a dude who is curious about everything. In general I love theory but find execution boring.

Delen Heisman

Hi! I'm Geoff! I was a Math/CS major in college, currently working for Palantir. I am currently involved with the Rationality community in NYC and love blues dancing and baking pies.

Geoff Cameron

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Kerry Vaughan

Kerry is the Technology and Innovation Manager at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation where he manages the Foundation’s portfolio of innovative technology-based philanthropic projects, including the Giving Library and Innovation Labs. He is also responsible for providing the Foundation with ideas for new technology-related innovation projects that align with its overall strategic goals. Kerry holds a joint degree in philosophy and psychology from Trinity University and is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Rice University.

I'm a computational biologist with a degree from an American university, now living in Luxembourg and working in Germany. My Erdös-Bacon number is 7.

Luis Pedro Coehlo

Maddy is an ever-curious techie disguised as a fashionophile. Always learning & forever in beta, she resides in Brooklyn and aspires to make the next wave of fashion-tech innovations under the Thiel Fellowship.

Maddy Maxey

171

I recently graduated from college and am now working in finance in NY.

Matt Wage

Michal Bak

I'm a software engineer at a startup in Manhattan. I'm originally from Spokane, Washington, and have also lived in southern California.

Nathan Bouscal

172

A faux philosopher, wannabe artist and avid learner, Nicole has a strong desire to change the world and is a fan of brevity.

Nicole Tolch

I am a nanotechnology engineering student at the University of Waterloo in southern Ontario, Canada. While I am satisfied with my life as a whole, I think there are an enormous number of things that I can and should do better.

Oberon Dixon-Luinenburg

I work as a probability-based trader on financial markets. Avid reader of the rationality literature. Open minded and happy to be told I am wrong.

Rasheed Sabar

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Ross Rheingans-Yoo

Satvik is an earning-to-give Effective Altruist focused on math, technology, psychology and finance. He's extremely interested in persuasion and has had significant success teaching people how to negotiate salary raises and promotions. He's currently working on helping EAs earn more money and succeed at their careers, so if you're interested, say hi! Satvik Beri

Stephanie Matysiak

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I am a neuroscience researcher living in New York. I'm also a dancer and I teach swing and blues part-time. I like science and learning and sharing those things with other people.

Tim Martin

Vijay Singh

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November 2013 Applied Rationality Workshop

Contact Info Staff, guest instructors

Anna Salamon [email protected]

Andrew Critch [email protected]

Julia Galef [email protected]

Yan Zhang [email protected]

Michael “Valentine” Smith [email protected]

Stephen Cole [email protected] (425) 737-0451

Kenzi Amodei [email protected] (541) 760-1181

Geoff Anders [email protected]

Leah Libresco [email protected]

Cat Lavigne [email protected]

Dan Keys [email protected]

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Applied rationality

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