"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #23: TAPs 2

 

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January 23 is Training Regime Day 23: TAPs 2 and it's an odd one; I'm a little bit confused. This is specifically a "Noticing" TAP from Day 8 where Mark said:

Essentially, you want to install the TAP 

"feel <the thing> -> <do some action>".

In this case, the "thing" is "something's wrong with the world" and the "action" is "fix it". I don't know how to treat that as a TAP, which I've been viewing as a more or less atomic action on its own. It's not specific, which was a big piece of what being a TAP was all about. I hereby do a seat adjustment: for each irritant, I will draw a mental circle to represent a story-spider for handling that irritant, and I will try to attach it to thread-lines for input and output. 

  Mark is talking about his examples being "dumb-sounding" little stuff. I'm not sure how the Pareto Principle does apply: maybe the 20% of irritants that cause 80% of the irritation will turn out to coincide with the dumbest ones? Whatever; it seems to me that paragraph would be better rewritten with a Mustachian point of view. As Mr. Money Mustache says in Eliminate Short-Termitis, the Bankruptcy Disease:

As a future young millionaire, you need to start thinking about all of your purchases as LONG-TERM events, not short-term ones. That means each decision should be carried forward in your mind for at least 10 years

   (Hmm, he said that about ten years ago.) So each of these minor irritants should likely be ignored if they only happen once but should be considered as larger if yearly, much larger if monthly, drastically larger if weekly, and so on. These story-spiders only warrant concern, they only get names, if they keep coming back.

   But -- if I'm interpreting the "fix it" mentality correctly -- this reflexive Notice/try-fix is what I've always done, to the point of being annoying to a couple of my family members. In my own notes on Day 8: Noticing, I mentioned trying to commission Marian, a story-spider, to notice when I was taking something serious as a joke and bring it to my conscious attention... but this was not the only flaw of the day. Marian is also supposed to remind me that often, I should Stop Trying to Fix Things, Just Listen! 

   And why, you ask, should I think that the same Noticer should remind me (1) to take things seriously rather than as an opportunity for wordplay, and (2) to sympathize rather than trying to identify and solve a problem? I'm glad you asked that. It's because both of these create a sense of distance, which may not be intended as defensiveness but certainly serves for defense, and I now visualize Marian as giving me a shout (a rather squeaky spider-shout) when a thread stretches. Marian is in fact coming up now, on day 23, because she thinks of herself as helping me address a problem that is not very important once or twice or three times, but that repeated over and over again for decades does get to be a big deal. Any tiny little thing that's repeated enough times will be a big problem or a big opportunity or both... As Fred Morrison (whose birthday is today) put it, "you could buy a cake pan for five cents, and if people on the beach were willing to pay a quarter for it, well—there was a business." A business which turned into the Frisbee I got as a graduate student at IJCAI-77... 

  But I don't think this day is about new tactics, it's about rethinking what I already do.