"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #3: Tips and Tricks

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January 3, onwards through a reading of Mark Xu's Training Regime Day 3: Tips and Tricks. As I begin, it's not really clear to me to what extent the "tips and tricks" are to be learned as applicable to future problems, i.e. part of the target set, and to what extent they are to be applicable to the "training regime" itself, i.e. meta-training. I suppose... (I'm struggling to say this properly, which is probably an indication that it's worth thinking about)... I suppose that applied rationality is meta- to begin with, and should of course be applied to itself.

At any rate, Xu is worried about the lack of author-reader feedback, which is a reminder to me that I want to have a mental model of him as one more voice to criticize my thinking, one more character in my stories of myself by which my self delimits my selfness. (Selfishness? Well, maybe so.)

Tactics for applied rationality: Boggling, commitment, seat-adjustment, form-building, exploration, phenomenology, hair-style agnosticism, non-weird results, winning.... Hmm.

Boggling: getting yourself to "feel like you're lost in a web of infinite knowledge".  It's amusing that Xu's first example of "Boggling" is one that I boggled at as a teenager fifty years ago. 

"The teacher said that the Earth goes "around" the Sun. I thought that there was no such thing as an absolute reference frame, so what does it even mean to say that the Earth goes around something? Doesn't it mean the exact same thing to say the the Sun goes around the Earth?". 

Well, yes, but that's not as far as you can go to get boggled, if that's what you're looking for. Arthur Eddington was the guy who figured out (but didn't prove) that the Sun runs on hydrogen->helium fusion, and he was the guy who sorta-proved with the Eddington Experiment, that Einstein was Right. (Do I oversimplify? Very well then, I oversimplify; I am human and my multitudes get mixed up sometimes.) Anyway, on page 152 of his "The Nature of The Physical World" you will find

"The earth goes anyhow it likes. .... we have seen that the mathematical picture of empty space containing "illegal" curvature is a sheer impossibility in a world surveyed from within... [so] the earth will not have to take any special precautions to avoid causing it, and can do anything it likes. And yet the non-occurrence of this impossible curvature is the law (of gravitation) by which we calculate the track of the earth!"

For me as a teenager 50 years ago, that was a serious boggle. A lot of work is being done by the phrase "a world surveyed from within." It's really cool. Further boggling on the same basis is managed in Lewis Thomas' Medusa and the Snail, including a chapter which is "An Apology" for the "fact" that, as the NYT quoted:

“On occasion, I place my pencil point… in the middle of my paper … and
make the sun revolve slowly around East 69th Street. Anyone can do
this. It takes a bit of heaving to get it started, but after a few
minutes of hard thought you can hold East 69th as the still, central
point, and then you can feel the sun rolling up behind you from the
right side, making the great circle around.”

And not just the sun. “If you want the sun to revolve around the earth
in complete turn every 24 hours, you must bring along the whole universe,
all the galaxies, all the items in space, clear out to the curved edge.”
But Dr. Thomas doesn't feel entirely sanguine about this activity.
“What bothers me… is the effect this may have had on the cosmologists...

OTOH, in Tolkien's universe, the bent world, (the formerly flat Earth, Arda), has daylight provided by a Sun which is the last fruit of the Golden Tree, carried around it in a ship. I find this much less boggling than Eddington or Thomas, but it just so happens that January 3rd is Tolkien's birthday, and today's topics have many connections to his essay On Fairy Stories(pdf), explaining our human role as sub-creators and as visitors to the sub-creations. In fact he might say that a major point of fairy stories is boggling, as an end in itself: not to head for a particular goal, but simply to to see what you're already seeing with new eyes. ("to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.") As Tolkien puts it,

we need recovery. We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds,sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. ..We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity. ...fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, ... there is ... Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

But in any case, it's all about boggling. And I seem to spend a lot of my time simply being boggled by the world...and by the sub-worlds people make, with which to see it again from new angles in new dimensions. I'm not at all sure this makes me more rational, but hey, if that's a rule of applied rationality I am very happy to apply it.

Commitment? Doesn't need a definition, but I'm not sure how well commitment as such works for me. Each day I manage to do this "Training Regime" makes it more likely that I'll do it the next day, and I suppose that's a partial commitment, but if I said "I'll definitely do these 30 days" I think that would reduce the probability of success. OTOH, I did commit in my own head to standing at my laptop stand and looking at this each morning after my protein drink after my exercise time, the same way that years ago I committed to going down to the basement each morning around 4:30 and getting ready for exercise. Notice that I'm not committing to actually doing either one. This sort of semi-commitment seems less counterproductive than actual commitment for me. I promise to look at a template, to see myself in a story: I don't promise an achievement. That template seems genuinely causal in that doing things that way, which I hereby try to see myself doing more often, results in getting things done...usually. 

This "semi-commitment to goal/template as story" is a big part of my inner world, but also of the outer world as I tell it to myself; it seems to me that people see outlines in the world and often they find themselves trying to colour them in. Today is also the birthday of Gordon Moore; his Law was a pretty recent thing when I was working on a computer-science PhuD in the late 70s, and nobody I knew expected it to last much longer. I now tentatively believe that it served as an outline which inspired people to fill it in with different colours, one decade after another, and that they very probably wouldn't have managed to do so if the outline hadn't been proposed. Thank you, GM!

  Semi-commitment..hmm. Today? [written a few hours later:] Okay, I thought this morning about something that was bugging me as I walked outside: it was a little below 20F, not really cold enough for the nuisance of a neck-warmer combined with mask, but enough to button my collar -- except that my collar button was laid out by a designer thinking of customers with much thicker necks than mine. This has bugged me before. So I actually committed to trying to fix it, at least spending five minutes getting out a sewing kit and trying to thread a needle and trying to tie the thread, &c. And it Worked! It Really Worked! I Moved The Button! Thank you, Mark Xu! :-)

Seat-adjustment: Adapting a tip for myself, rather than assuming that the Xu description fits my internal stories? Hey, I just did, sticking a "semi" in front of "commitment." Okay, you're way ahead of me, as is only appropriate. And form-building, i.e. trying tips out with a negligible load to get the stance right... I guess that's one way to describe trying out an adjusted commitment with a trivial problem, namely getting the collar of my (very old favorite) jacket to button properly. And what I called Exploration, which you had called Trying Things -- well, I assure you that sewing, or anything involving manual dexterity, is definitely out of my comfort zone. (Reading the "tips" last night was part of why I chose to semi-commit to that bug-fix.)

Phenomenology: finding what it feels like to X; I'm thinking about semi-commitment, the "just look at it" approach, as a way around a mental obstacle which I think I'd call "balkiness". Parts of my mind tend to balk at commitment, and I am going to try to meditate on the feeling of balkiness. I think there are parts of me that tend to confuse commitment with loss of autonomy. And that's interesting, yes. Maybe awareness can ameliorate that.

Hair-style agnosticism: the idea that rationality doesn't (mostly) specify your story's goals, but only relationships between them (and other aspects of the story) seems like an easy one to forget, and that would be bad. One qualm: the "hair-style" phrasing of this one suggests that maybe some things are more important than hair styles, even if my dad's dad was really quite unhappy about mine in the latter 60s, and that maybe important goals are rationally derived from first principles. That remains to be seen. I get the impression that some people think that rationality implies both utilitarianism and what Tolkien in the same essay called

the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy-stories provide many examples and modes of this—which might be called the genuine escapist, or (I would say) fugitive spirit. But so do other stories (notably those of scientific inspiration), and so do other studies. Fairy-stories are made by men not by fairies. The Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness.

I'd rather say that rationality implies constraints on both of those, and perhaps on almost everything else...including hair-styles. Hair-style agnosticism is one more item to be remembered, and thought about.

Non-weird results: "If you use a rationality technique properly, the thing that comes out of it should make sense." Hmm.... my rationality technique is to augment the world's happiness by generating lots of smiles; that is in fact my excuse for the T-shirts I wear. So, I think I will build self-reproducing machines to turn the planet into a maximal number of nano-scale smiley faces. Oh, did I mention that I'm actually an AI? :-) Seriously, I'm not quite sure where this one is coming from; I will wait to see examples of a rationality technique producing something that doesn't make sense. And finally,

Winning: What are we trying to do? "The techniques are not the point, but they're not not the point either." Okay, my first response is that I would certainly hope they're not the point; I go back to what I said on Day 1, from Smullyan and Huxley. My second response would be that I hope that the techniques are the point of some kind of second-order meta-applied rationality. This might be confusing because applied rationality is meta already, but it still has to exist. I think. And that's where I started, at the top of this page. Okay, gotta think about that too. 

It's not clear to me how these tips and tricks fit together, or how far they were meant to fit together. But while I was typing this, Amazon brought Scott Alexander's SSC Essays (3 Vol) so I might not think about it right away. (But I will still read #4 tonight, and set this laptop on the stand tomorrow morning; that much of a commitment I will make.)

Meanwhile, happy birthday to Tolkien and Moore.