"Applied Rationality Training Regime" Review#1

 

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When I go back over the last 25 days of the Mark Xu take on CFAR, I tend to want to connect the tactics to a common story-thread that helps me explain to my selves how they fit together, why they work. I'm looking at the models of the human mind as a city-state (Plato's Republic), or as a mountain-range with scattered villages and a broad central valley  (Scott Alexander), or as an elephant with rider (Haidt), or as an elaborate puppet (perhaps an elephant, why not?) managed by story-threads managed by cartoon spider-swarms grouped in working rooms, cavities within the structure (me)... or maybe as a distorted homunculus corresponding to actual brain circuitry, as mapped by neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield. (It's his birthday.) That homunculus, I believe, is incomplete in the sense that it doesn't include the central pattern generators and other circuits that may be actually outside the brain, but even inside the brain I suspect that it doesn't represent the spider-swarms themselves, but rather the individual low-bandwidth threads, the doorway spiders, that connect each swarm to a central swarm.

  What I'm rather clumsily trying to get at here is that when Haidt wants his rider to train the elephant, he's actually trying to train spider-swarms that he mostly can't get at: he can only get at message-passers. And that, to me, helps make sense of the CFAR emphasis on noticing what you feel --  it's all about taking advantage of the messages from the outer swarms, which I do accept that I've been basically ignoring almost all of for almost all of my life. The communication paths are good enough for my ancestors to have survived, but not good enough for my actions or theirs to have been well-aligned with goals. Should I really even think in terms of goals? Well, they form a convenient shorthand for... something. I'm not sure how good or bad that is, but labels are convenient and I propose to have more of them, not fewer. I'm going to give Marian, my Day#8 Noticer, a bunch of sisters who are (I hope) sensitive to individual kinds of issues; in particular I'm going to ask her to keep them sensing my tendencies to fail in attentiveness, in sensitivity to others' thinking, and in staying on task. I might eventually go to Yudkowsky's 12 virtues, or for that matter Franklin's 13, but I have to start small.

To make this work for me, I guess I have to make them fairly concrete -- as concrete as cartoon spiders need to be; they will need names. Like Sarah Som the Murphyjitsu Sense-O-Meter, they're supposed to be oriented to failures that haven't happened yet but are implicit in our model of what is happening -- that's part of Murphyjitsu, but I'm extending the idea, trying to improve my self-improvement, by asking them, and Sarah, for odds.  I'm going to think of Sergeant Sarah as being in charge of Marian and her sisters, Sarah's not just going to imagine that something has gone wrong, and see if that seems surprising. she's going to assume a hundred copies of the situation and see how many go wrong. 

And will Jim Pright, the pre-hindsight guy that works with Sarah, be similarly extended? I suppose so. I have to work that out, describing it to Spider-Duck. But in general I'm trying to apply rationality after the fashion of another guy with a birthday today: Wayne Gretzky, who says to "skate where the puck is going to be." Live according to your selves' models of what's about to have happened, in the context of an overall selves-model with rather drastic communication limits, but where reprogramming with spaced repetition can generate the TAPs that will, maybe possibly sometimes, get the puppet to move in a useful direction. 

Rationality? Well, maybe. :-)