A short account on TAPs

Overview

1. Trigger-Action-Patterns

2. From patterns to plans

   1. Side note: In the academic literature

3. TAP Design

   1. The Algorithm

   2. Common failure modes

   3. How to master this technique? Some concrete tips for successful TAP design

      1. When/where to use TAPs

      2. The right trigger

      3. The right action

      4. Commitment

      5. Making TAPs stick: the initial investment

      6. Getting better at TAPs generally

   4. A non-exhaustive list of useful TAPs

4. Broadening the application space

   1. Epistemic TAPs

[I put this together as auxiliary material for the aspiring rationalists in my local community, as a follow up on a meetup where I taught TAPs. This does not intend to be a stand-alone explanatory peice for what TAPs are or how to use them. Instead, this is supposed to serve as a repository and refrence piece of the key ideas behind this technique.]

[Much of the following content is pieced together from a small number of sources. At times, I have copied entire sentences or paragraphs. The soureces are the CFAR Handbook (edition Summer 2016), the Hammertime series (Hammertime: TAPs 1, Hammertime: TAPs 2, Hammertime: TAPs 3), and Kaj’s LW post: Making intentions concrete - Trigger-Action Planning.]

***

1 - Trigger-Action-Patterns

Ever come across any of the following, or similar, behavioural patterns: 

• Hear a buzz or a ping? ➞ Pull your phone out of your pocket.

• Opened a web browser? ➞ Go to [your usual first-click site].

• Get stuck somewhere in a tasks ➞ Check [site of your choice].

• The traffic lights go green ➞ Start driving.

• Bowl of chips in front of you? ➞ Grab one. (Grabbed one? Eat it!)

• “. . . I’m fine, and you?” ➞ “. . . I’m fine, and you?” (loop)

These are examples of tigger-action-patterns. They always have the same underlying architecture: [when x] → [then y].

System 1 is the driving force behind these automatic patterns. It’s constantly running in the background, aggregating all of our lived experiences and guiding our actions when we’re not paying attention. It’s because of our System 1 that we can do things that approximate multitasking - carrying on conversations while driving, thinking about upcoming weekend plans while cooking dinner, exercising while watching TV.

Often, these patterns are deeply ingrained in our behaviour. They are derived from our model of the universe and constantly reinforced through experience. Consequently, it can be extremely difficult for us to change these patterns, even if we want to. 

The above examples were just single-step patterns. We are also capable of chaining together a series of atomic reflex actions into complex and appropriate behavior without any need for active cognition. 

Somme trigger-action-patterns are very visible (e.g. a person sneezes, you immediately respond “bless you”). Other patterns can be much more difficult to spot, however. We each have triggers which result in a particular emotion (referred to as trigger-affect patterns), or triggers which bring specific words or memories to mind (like the first few words of a well-known song, or the first half of a common phrase).

2 - From patterns to plans

The overwhelming majority of the time, our brains work in S1-mode. This explains why these trigger-action-patterns can be so powerful. The great news is that we can take advantage of this aspect of mind architecture for our own benefits. 

The idea here is to think about what patterns we want (while normally, they emerge naturally and in an unreflected manner). By injecting an element of intentionality, we can streamline our mind architecture to serve our goals. 

In other words, we are looking to deliberately draft and implement ‘if-then’ plans - or so called, Trigger-Action-Plans. This can be helpful for better goal attainment, establishing habits and other behavioural modifications, like emotional regulation. 

Let’s look at a few more concrete examples of where TAPs can be useful:

1. Goal: Eat more healthy food

2. TAP: Grab handle of shopping cart ➞ Ask myself whether this is a “healthy” shopping trip, or a regular one

***

1. Goal: Do a better job of showing my friends that I care about them 

2. TAP: Notice that something made me think of a particular friend ➞ Write it down right away on my list of possible birthday gifts

***

1. Goal: Remember to bring a book from home 

2. TAP: Drop my keys into the bowl by the door ➞ Pause and get the book and put it with my keys.

***

1. Goal: Reducing time spent on phone 

2. TAP: Type in the code to unlock phone ➞ Pause and verbalise what I intend to do on the phone (if no good reason, put it back)

In more general terms, TAPs are able to do different types of work for us:

1. Helping us notice situations where we want to carry out a specific intention.

2. Helping us automate the intention.

   1. They help us to get started.

   2. They help us to continue through unpleasant phases of goal pursuit. 

   3. They help us to deal with distraction.

   4. They help us to counteract unwanted habitual responses.

3. Forcing us to make our goals (i.e. thus the situation and behaviour of interest) concrete and specific.

Side note: In the academic literature

TAPs are known as ‘implementing intentions’ in the literature. They have been studied in academia, with a range of individual studies as well as a meta-analysis (covering 94 studies and 8461 subjects) finding them to improve people's ability for achieving their goals.

• Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: strong effects of simple plans

• Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta‐analysis of effects and processes

3 - TAP Design

Enough theory, now we want to understand how to make use of TAPs. 

The Algorithm

1. Choose a goal (a desired outcome or behavior)

2. Identify a trigger (something that will happen naturally)

3. Decide on an action that you want to occur after the trigger

4. Rehearse the causal link (e.g. with deliberate visualization)

You can either:

• take existing trigger-action patterns and tweak them; or

• establish a new pattern from scratch.

*** 

The above algorithm appears simple. The reliable implementation of TAPs in real life isn’t always, though. 

Many people experience some frustration with TAPs when they first start using them as TAPs usually require some practice until you are able to reliably and accurately install them. 

In order to make the technique more reliable, and consequently useful, it is important to understand what the most common failure modes look like. In the following, we will cover a list of tips and tricks to defend against these and other failure modes to eventually master the technique. 

Before we tackle this, it seems worth emphasizing that attaining mastery in TAPs is a process and likely involves a lot of experimentation. 

Some common failure modes

Essentially, the technique fails in one of two places: 

1. you either do not notice the trigger, or 

2. you end up not taking the action.

Regarding 1., the difficulty lies in finding the right balance where 

1. the trigger always goes off when you want it, and 

2. the trigger doesn’t go off when you don’t want it.

If the trigger goes off in too many situations, that’s not conducive to your goals and it is unlikely that you can build a solid and sustainable pattern. If the trigger doesn’t go off, that’s not conducive to your goals and it is unlikely that you can build a solid and sustainable pattern. (Remember:  TAPs are constantly being reinforced through experience. Thus, if we miss the pattern, we also reinforce ’missing’ it.) 

Regarding 2, the key insight is that the more effortful or aversive the intended action, the less likely you are to take it. 

Based on experience, TAPs are primarily a tool to notice opportunities. For example, instead of having a TAP like: "when I feel the metal of the door handle in my hand, I'll TAKE the stairs”, you are likely to be more successful in the long run if you adapt the TAP to say:  "when I feel the metal of the door handle in my hand, I'll LOOK AT the stairs". 

Our unconscious brains do a lot to circumvent micro-hedonically averse states. If the action of your TAP is micro-hedonically too averse or costly (e.g. ‘taking the stairs’), your unconscious mind might track down this link very quickly and work towards sabotaging your ability to notice the trigger in the first place. On the other hand, your unconscious mind has no reason to prevent you from triggering a cheap or costless action, such as ‘looking at the stairs’.

In this latter case, all the TAP does is ‘build affordance’ (in other words: increase the number of perceived action possibilities). Once you notice a situation, meaning you become consciously aware of it, you are turning on your S2 thinking. This gives you the chance to think about what action you want to take that is maximally conducive to your goals - even if that might be a micro-hedonically averse one.  Upon reflection, you might come to the conclusion that either the action isn’t in fact as aversive as your unconscious mind thought, or the level of discomfort is worth it in view of your bigger goal.

Furthermore, once you regularly notice the absence of the behavior you want, you are likely to either a) automatically correct it, or b) realize that your motivations might not actually be sufficiently aligned with doing the thing. 

How to master this technique? Some concrete tips for successful TAP design

1 - The right places for TAPs

• Look for high leverage - places where you’ll have the opportunity to get significant value out of very little effort (e.g. changing shopping habits is much easier than resisting food that’s right there in the cupboard). 

• Look for weak links - places that will help you head off problems before they arise, and recover quickly from the ones you can’t prevent. 

2 - The right trigger

• Look for triggers that are clear. 

  • Concrete, specific, noticeable, visible

  • Examples:

    • "When I see stairs" is good, "before four o'clock" is bad (when before four exactly?); “When the microwave beeps” rather than “at dinnertime”

  • Some useful prompts to find clear triggers: 

    • Natural

      • Whenever possible, look for triggers that are natural, concrete, that you notice already. For example, pay attention to boundaries and thresholds, such as in “stepping across the doorstep of my apartment.”

    • Sensual/Phenomenological

      • A felt sense is a bodily sensory experience attached to an emotion or idea. Many powerful cognitive habits amount to building smart TAPs for specific felt senses. A twisting in the heart that feels like Sour Patch Kids can signal romantic feelings. A buzzing of energy that travels up the spine can signal excitement. Physical pressure on the whole chest can signal anxiety. Build plans for responding to each felt sense. 

    • Novelty   

      • Surprise is the easiest way to notice. If, for example, you buy new furniture, their presence is registered as unusual for weeks. Take advantage of new possessions to build micro-habits. A new welcome mat can be a reminder to check your keys and phone before leaving the apartment. A new bean-bag chair can tell you to notice and relax any muscle tension. A new reading lamp wants you to read every night before bed.

    • Sentimental

      • There’s a process by which we naturally become attached to the items that accompany us through thick and thin. You might be attached, for example, to the freckle on your thumb, to a long-sleeve shirt gifted to you by a childhood friend, to a particular gaming mouse – relic of a past life. Pay attention to these objects. Notice how they gain three-dimensionality. Inject meaning into them. For example, you might find a well of metaphysical space under your thumb freckle where you store a preternatural calm for a minute of need.

• Look for triggers that are consistent.   

  • The action is something that you'll always want to do when the trigger is fulfilled. 

  • For Instance: "When I leave the kitchen, I'll do five push-ups" is bad, because you might not have the chance to do five push-ups each time when you leave the kitchen. 

• Whenever possible, choose triggers that are close and relevant to the behavior you’re trying to change.

  • For instance, a toilet flush is closer to the ideal prompt for flossing than a phone alarm would be, even though the phone alarm is highly reliable.

• It can be easier to pick triggers of already existing trigger-action-patterns.

• Don’t forget that internal triggers (like specific thoughts and feelings) can be just as good as external ones. However, these can be a bit more difficult to install when you are new to the technique. 

Remember: “The best triggers are not only easy to notice, but hard to miss.” 

3 - The right action

• Remember to pick things that you are capable of, and that require as little effort as possible. 

• Think concretely and focus on relevance—choose actions that are actually useful, not ones that train the wrong skill.

• Choose actions that are simple and atomic - if you want to do something complicated, consider slowly building up a multi-TAP chain.

4 - Commitment

Studies have shown that both the level of commitment to the goal as well as to the implementation intention mattered for the achievement of the goal. (see for example: Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: strong effects of simple plans.)

5 - Making TAPs stick: the initial investment 

• Add new TAPs one or two at a time, rather than in large batches.

• Stay close to your current/natural trigger-action patterns, and make incremental changes.

• Practice mentally rehearsing each new TAP at least ten times until you’ve gotten the hang of it (not three or five, but actually ten, closing your eyes and going through a complete imaginary run-through each time).

• Write down all of your intended TAPs in one place, and check the list at the end of the week.

6 - Getting better at TAPs generally

• Practice noticing the trigger-action patterns that already exist in your life by looking backwards (e.g. huh, I’m suddenly feeling tired and pessimistic; what happened in the last thirty seconds?).

• Use meta-TAPs, like a TAP to ask yourself if there are useful TAPs to be made in a given situation.

• Try gain-pain movies—first imagine some exciting or attractive aspect of the future where you’ve achieved your goal, and then think about the obstacles that lie between you and that future, and then repeat several times.

• Use them frequently! They’re good for goals of all sizes, and every CFAR technique can be productively framed in terms of TAPs.

A non-exhaustive list of useful TAPs

• When I find myself using the words "later" or "at some point", I'll decide on a specific time when I'll actually do it. [Kaj]

• If I'm given a task that would take under five minutes, and I'm not in a pressing rush, I'll do it right away. [Kaj]

• When I notice that I'm getting stressed out about something that I've left undone, I'll either do it right away or decide when I'll do it. [Kaj]

• When I feel aversion against doing a certain tasks, I check whether I want to apply micro-intentions on it.

• When I notice that I am flinching away from a tasks, I check whether the problem lies in its ambiguity - and if so, I make a concrete list of next steps I have to do to reduce this ambiguity.

• When I am about to go crawl into bed, I remember that I might want to meditate.

• When I notice myself getting ‘mentally restless’ during work, I check a list of likely responses: whether I want to do deliberate focusing, or whether I need to get up, drink, go outside...

• When I check my habit tracker and realize that I haven’t been doing a certain thing, I remember installing a mental reminder. (for example with this technique)

• When I notice the phenomenology of ‘closing down’ in a discussion, I remember to adapt my body posture and to loosen my mental grip. I also check the volume of my voice and how much I have been talking, and listening.

• When I notice my thoughts getting hazy, when I notice myself rambling, an other person being visibly confused about what I just said, I check the level of my mental energy. When it is low, I will consider letting the other person know that I cannot think well right now and what actions I could take to recharge my mental energy. 

• The Sapiens Spell (Hammertime: TAPs 1, or: be a new homunculus), and possible applications of it: 

  • Refresh: At every scale, the Sapience Spell can be the refresh button you need to clear sunk cost, memory leaks, and bad vibes. A “step back and relax” button for heated political conversation. A Ctrl-Alt-Delete for a clever but content-free blog post. A System Restart button for a project worth nothing but sunk cost. A FACTORY RESET (WARNING: ARE YOU SURE?) for triggering that mid-life crisis you desperately need.

  • Reality Check: Inspired by techniques used to train lucid dreaming where one has to automise reality checks to figure out whether one is awake or dreaming. For example, you can look down at your hand and count your fingers.  A reality check is a moment to notice your body exists and check for a bare minimum of sanity. 

• A TAP for revisiting your TAPs

  • E.g. “I frequent a restaurant on campus called The Axe & Palm. Every time I go I reflect on all the TAPs I’m currently installing.” (Hammertime: TAPs 1) 

Epistemic TAPs

Beyond the very practical applications of TAPs, their utility can also span into the area of epistemic rationality. We have seen that most of our thinking happens fast and undeliberate - and this is also where we are most prone to fallacies and biases. If you want to get really good at thinking, you need to apply constant vigilance, and get down to the 5-second-level of your thinking. While it’s not humanly possible to always be deliberate about our thinking, we can install ‘epistemic TAPs’ (epistemic micro-habits) that can help us to notice moments where we are prone to be irrational, or even preempt them.   

Zeeland NL, July 2019 - Meadows and the smell of sea

Circling in on the diamond

A skill I have been pursuing recently (my ‘diamond’) is attaining mastery at noticing.

In some ways, noticing is a fairly well distinguished (mental) action. The most obvious way to learn noticing is to do it. And that’s probably not a bad way to learn it.

I suspect thought that, if your goal is to attain mastery at it, going straight for what we perceive to be noticing might not be enough. While this would likely make me better at noticin, it is plausible that this approach would have me miss out on some things - sub-skills, nuances, understanding - and eventually prevent me from actually attaining mastery.

This is why I chose a different approach the endeavor. I came to call it: circling in on the diamond.

Essentially, this means taking a number of different approaches to learning to thing. There or two reasons why to use this approach. Possibly, none of the approaches, on their own, would be enough to learn it, but the complex they form when applied together is exactly what you need to attain your learning goal. Secondly, there might be no clear, direct route (at least from where you are standing at the time) to attain the skill. Therefore, you adopt a portfolio-approach to learning of which you can be fairly certain it will lead you to the diamond. You might not be certain that any of the approaches on their own will allow you to learn the thing, but you can be fairly certain that you will make progress thanks to one or some of the approaches.

Based on my own experimentation, I have come up with a few categories for the types of approaches you might want to make part of your learning portfolio.

1. Train the same muscles

Here, you are looking for other skills that share some of their processes with your diamond. Maybe this process (the muscle) is easier to train when engaging in a skill or activity that is not the one you are interested directly. Another way to frame this is to think about sub-skills to your diamond and what the different ways are to practice this subskill independently.

Example: According to me, doing focusing and noticing both use the ‘same muscles’. It appears as if one is the inverse process of the other. When doing focusing, you reach down into your unconscious (via felt senses) in order to bring it to your conscious mind. In noticing, the goal is for certain phenomena to be propagated into your conscious experience automatically.
My hypothesis is that by training focusing, I engage some of the same processes as the ones I’m using in noticing, which could plausibly be useful to my goal of attaining mastery in noticing.

2. Go astray

This is the more ventured asset in your portfolio. We are looking for skills you somehow came across in the process of thinking about your diamond. The causal links between that skill and your diamond however can be vague, on mostly be based on an intuition. Of course, you don’t want to make this part of your portfolio too heavy - just like in real-world investing - but you probably also don’t want to neglect it entirely as there might be some drop of secret sauce in this asset.

Example:I was inspired for this by reading “How emotions are made” - which made me think that it is plausible that I can get better at noticing when I have more reified concepts of what I there could be to notice. The ‘ventured’ approach was to start explicitly working on expanding my active vocabulary on emotions and emotional states - meaning, learning one new word (from my emotional vocab list) a day.
I am very unsure that this is actually useful for my endeavour. But it didn’t seem like a huge cost to me (, and has some other positive externalities,) so I found it good enough of a bet to take.

3. Tackle it heads-on

This is the ‘common way’ we usually try to learn something. In most of the cases, this just means ‘actually do the thing’.

Example: In my case, I set up some TAPs to overtrain my noticing skills. I identified some mental moves I was interested in noticing more and, well, did that. (There are some specific ingredients to how noticing works, which is important to executing this part, but since this post is not about noticing as such, I will restrain from writing this up.)

4. Move in parallel

This is what I also call working on ‘auxiliary skills’. Unlike with subskills, they don’t necessarily share the same processes (or same ‘muscles’), but they are skills that are generally helpful to your goal of reaching your diamond. Sometimes I think of it as being part of your ‘internal learning environment’.

Example: Regular meditation practice contributes to my mental cliamt and makes me generally (on expectation) more focusI and clear minded. It seems to be easier to do noticing with a clear (as opposed to a stormy mind), thus part of my learning regime was to maintain my daily meditaiton practice.

5. Declarative and procedural knowledge

Declarative knowledge is conceptual understanding about how something works. Procedural knowledge is practical understanding of how something works.

I think that for most skills, it is valuable to build both declarative and procedural knowledge. The ratio of the two depends a lot of the type of skill, but I would argue that there is no skill where you should neglect the declarative or the procedural part of it completely. This is important to keep in mind explicitly, as we often tend to put an overproportional attention on one of the two.

Example: In order to increase my declarative knowledge of noticing, I did a lot of reading and mapping of my own thoughts. For the procedural knowledge, I did different types of practice (see above) but also deliberate exploration of what ‘doing noticing’ consists of from a practical point of view.

Note: Exploring the declarative as well as procedural aspects to my diamond informed a lot my choices for what learning approaches I engaged in thereafter. For instance, it was crucial in helping me to generate hypotheses about the processes and sub-skills involved in noticing and how to learn them.

6. Apply and test

I think that this category is particularly important and often is forgotten. Whenever you are trying to learn something, it is probably a good idea to track your learning progress and operationalize your success criteria. ‘Apply and test’ approaches also work as a sort of ‘stress test’ for what you believe to have learnt. They are indicators for your progress as well as the real world application of the skill you set out to learn. This is probably not an approach you want to engage in from the very beginning of your learning process, but I would also claim that it shouldn’t be something you only do at the very end. Instead, it is valuable to make it part of your learning process, once you have made some headway in your quest.

Example: In order to apply and test my noticing skills, I started to install a lot of TAPs. For some context, I have always been a ‘theoretical fan’ of TAPs, but haven’t used them much as they never really worked that well for me - I never really got the hang of them. Finding the right triggers for your TAPs is crucial for their success, and that’s where noticing becomes relevant. The success criteria was thus to be able to successfully install a bunch of TAPs, which was something that I wasn’t able to do prior to my noticing training.

Prague, June 2019 - Symmetries

Hypotheses on Pica

• Pica (medical diagnosis): “Pica is a psychological disorder characterized by an appetite for substances that are largely non-nutritive, such as ice; hair; paper; drywall or paint; sharp objects; metal ; stones or soil; glass; faeces; and chalk.” (wiki)

• Pica (as coined by the rationalist community): “a metaphor for actions which people take that are intended to meet a goal (often one that is not articulated) but are ill-suited to actually do so” (CFAR Handbook, Version 2016)

I’ve found the concept of Pica an insightful and useful one, ever since I was first introduced to it. However, I guess I struggled feeling its relevance, because, at least in my personal experience, it is really hard to identify substantial picas in your own life.

By substantial, I mean a non-trivial, non-immediately obvious pica. It’s easy to see some picas: we tend to eat sugary and fatty foods when we need comfort, consolidation or something that helps us de-stress; we distract ourselves with facebook or youtube when we hope for a task to get easier or less ambiguous, or done, by magic; we cut our hair when we feel like it’s time for a radical change in our lives;  we pester our loved one(s) to be tidier in the kitchen while all we want is that they listen to us…

These pica-esque behaviours are relatively ‘obvious’ as they have been discussed and written about a lot - so much that we can probably judge them as part of the well of common knowledge. Once behavioural patterns like these are sufficiently present in everyone's subconscious, it becomes much easier to identify them. Thus, I call them obvious or trivial picas.

[Which isn’t to say they are necessarily easy to defend against. There are many reasons for why this can be hard to do. Moreover, we might not even be able to reliably notice these patterns in the first place (not when we are in the midst of the battle anyway). Humans have a plethora of defence mechanisms (and some of them there for good reasons!) that prevent us from consciously identifying pica-esque behaviour. However, exploring these failure modes is not the focus of this post.]

Meanwhile, most picas are far from obvious or easy to spot. Personally, I haven’t yet managed to clearly identify many cases of non-trivial picas myself. In ‘Experiential pica’, Alicorn states: “The trouble [...] is that it's hard to tell what your experiential deficiencies might be.” Yep.

To my surprise, I think a recent epiphany had me identify a few such substutional behaviours and how they relate to (and fail to serve) some of my goals and desires. Since that has so far been a rare phenomenon, and even thinking hard about where the picas are in my life is far from reliably insightful, I decided that it would be valuable to write down what I’ve recently discovered.

So, let’s get to the pica (I think) I have encountered. Picas consist of a) a behaviour and b) a goal; where a) doesn’t suit b).

1 - The behaviour: ‘Not taking responsibility’

To put this right, I don’t think this is what I have been doing generally. There are many areas in my life where I am and have been taking on responsibilities over-proportionally to what one might expect from somebody my age. Instead, what I mean here is that I have been avoiding, or rather ‘actively not assuming’, responsibility in a very specific area of my life. As a pica for something I am lacking.

Some examples:

• Getting my bike fixed: I manage to let my broken bike stand around for months at a time, without being able to make the minimal effort of bringing it to a nearby mechanic to get it fixed. Sometimes it’s even just a flat tire. (And we have a bike pump at our place. I didn’t use to have one, but now I do!)
  What is noteworthy here is that I indeed need my bike, nearly every day. But for some crazy reason, I always find ways around the issue. (I usually just happen to borrow a bike from someone or somewhere else, sometimes for longer periods of time.) Which, of course, quasi-eliminates the incentives to get my own bike fixed.
  The superficial explanation for ‘my bike-situation’ is that, by trying to get as much work and productive time into my day as possible, I seem to be unable to find a 5 minute time window to pump up my tires. Of course, this isn’t more than a bad excuse. (As I am wasting 5 minutes on much less useful things all the time.)
  But the possibility of ‘just doing it’ (i.e. pumping up my tires) somehow appears to be not part of my option space for things I can do on any given day. When I notice that I theoretically could fix my bike/get my bike fixed now (or in 30’ from now), I just always can think of an alternative thing to do that is ‘a much better use of my time’ (from the point of where I am standing right then).

• Buying clothes: I never go clothes shopping. For all that is of practical relevance, I actually mean never.
  I do realize that I need new clothes. I do get frustrated about not having enough clothes that I like, that fit me, that are comfortable, that are apt to the current season/weather conditions, etc. I also would like to have more clothes of the sort I like.
  But going to town to get some - nah. Doing some online shopping - nah. I sometimes even start tackling it. And then just not go through with it.
  Superficially, the observation is about as follows: I like having nice clothes. But I actively dislike clothes shopping - a lot. Much more so than I like having nice clothes.    

• Looking after myself: I recently was not doing exactly great health-wise. (Nothing major, just things like (substantially) lacking sleep, being overworked, having a weakened immune system, struggling with nasty day-long headaches. I also had some small wounds on my leg that were getting infected. (As I learnt, this sort of thing is non-negligible, because it poses the risk of developing into sepsis if not taken care of properly.))
  I kind of cared about these things. I took some measures to counteract them: trying to go to bed earlier, talking about finishing work earlier this week, observing whether my wounds were getting worse and thinking about what I would do if they did.
  But to be honest, these measures were simply the lowest-effort things I could come up with, the most low-hanging fruit that didn’t actually require me to do something outside of my usual routine.

And here is the common pattern: I always kind of care, I always kind of do something to tackle these sort of issues. But if I’m honest, I just do whatever is needed to make it look like I cared. Things that get me around being straightforwardly accused of not doing anything. Things that save my face. And which leave me lacking and needy.

This doesn’t resolve the question though: why don’t I do these things properly? After all, they would clearly benefit me.

And this question directly points us to the substance of this pica.

2 - The goal: Reassurance (of/and Love)

In other words, feeling and experiencing that someone cares. That someone sees what is going on in my life, what I am working towards or struggling with; when I am in need of an extra push of motivation, an extra dose of love, a moment of warmth and connection; when I need a reminder of the greater reasons for why I am committed to what I’m committed to; or when I just need a second of being fully human.

To clarify, this doesn’t necessarily mean I am waiting for someone to get my bike fixed for me, or buy clothes for me. It might just mean that I want somebody to talk through it and encourage me to do it myself.

I imagine a large part of this comes from the way I was brought up: what I learnt love is, and looks and feels like. Growing up, the key, and most trustworthy sign indicating that someone loved and cared for me was not a very concrete action (e.g. that they would solve a problem for me), but a sense that that person was there for me, that they were having my back. The fact that they listened, again and again; that they were interested in and tried to relate to what was going on in my life and how I was feeling about it.

Love is the feeling that they are there for me:  standing at the sidelines while I am doing the thing I need to do.

[I was relatively young when I moved away from parents’ place and during the (so far) most challenging periods of my life my family wasn’t physically close to where I was living at that time. Furthermore, a lot of the things I did and was interested in (which is still true today, more so than ever), my family knows very little about. These two factors mean that they rarely could help me in a very hands-on way. I often couldn’t and cannot connect to them via talking about object-level things I am interested in. The way we connect, the way they show and prove to me that they love me, is by listening and caring anyway, and spending their time and attention on me.]

***

Let me sum this up:

I am engaging in a behaviour that

1. ensures I can make others (and myself) believe I care about the issue at hand and that I am (about to) take steps towards solving it (akin to ‘plausible deniability’); while

2. never actually solving the problem for good and maintaining a state of need or insufficiency with regards to the issue.

This is my ‘ill-suited’ way to ask [and maybe test?] for care and love from my surroundings.

Sometimes, having a friend check whether I “finally got around to getting my bike fixed” does more in terms reassuring me in that they care, than actually getting the bike fixed would.

Obviously, and that’s why this is a pica, there are much better ways to get both: a functioning bike and the reassurance that people care.

October 2018 - Seeing patterns

The missing puzzle piece

I’ve had this experience a couple of times by now:

I have this bug.

I’ve been working on it a lot: I’ve disentangled and mapped out what ‘it’ is about. Tried tackling it with different techniques, from different angles. I’ve also mapped out the entire space around the bug. It feels like I know everything about it.

And still. The bug remains unsolved.

***

In the past, solving some of my biggest bottlenecks involved not more than one single, simple mental move.

A small piece of information that was missing; a simple act of pointing out this one thing I had been disregarding; reframing this one piece of information or emotion, simply looking at it from a different angle; encouraging this intuition I had, but didn’t trust enough to fully buy into; etc. [1]

Once I finally found the missing puzzle pieces, the subsequent ‘moments of resolution’ felt unilaterally very underwhelming and very transformative at the same time. I have mixed feelings about this...

Either way, this made me realize that one failure mode of mine is to be looking for this ‘big, exciting, groundbreaking revelations’ that will allow me to solve my bug.

This expectation, however, can make me blind to what would actually solve the bug.  

An analogy: Our eyes adapt to whether we are looking at things close up or far away from us. We can skim the space for some large object, or we can scan it for some tiny object. If you’ve tried to spot wildlife somewhere in the bushes or savanna, you might have encountered that, once you learned what sort of thing you are looking for, spotting it because much easier. When searching for some visual object, we are primed to what we think is its likely size and shape or colour. This allows us to be better at finding the object of interest - if we are primed right.

What does that mean for rationality?

Insight 1 : When you are onto that bug - having nearly exhausted your arsenal of techniques and sources of information while the bug remains unsolved - you might want to consider the possibility that you are scanning the solution space at a different level of resolution, than where your solution is to be found.

***

In some sense, this is exciting. Big, nasty bugs might just need a teeny tiny gesture in the right direction and they dissolve into warm air.

At the same time, finding that missing puzzle piece is much like finding the needle in the haystack.

The first step is to notice that you might be facing such a situation, so you can consider changing your level of resolution.

I’ve started to develop a taste for bugs that only need a tiny piece of information for everything to fall into place properly. However, even knowing that, it often remains largely intractable to identify what that missing part is about.

Usually, the missing piece has to do with something that involves my ‘ego’. This is probably the main reason why it is really hard to find it myself.

The only somewhat reliable way to go about this (that I’ve discovered and tried so far) is to reach out to other people for help. Their outside perspective on things, and sometimes their additional life experience, can be all that is needed.

At times, I would just throw all I know about the issue at them, letting them do the work of rephrasing my story and pointing at what I might be missing. It can be useful to just ask them to share their understanding of this thing and try to notice where I’m surprise or confused, or spot a mismatch between our models.

Some people are extremely skilled at pointing out these blind spots in others. Given that one cannot really observe anything in particular they’re doing, it often creates the impression of them having a secret magic power. (Which is not the case.)

Here some of my guesses for what makes a person good at this. Most of these people just have a lot of life experience to draw from. They probably simply have had a similar problem in the past and can tell you the password. Also, these people seem to be usually good at spotting patterns, often even based on very scarce information. I guess many patterns are fairly common across humans, so being able to spot pattern likely correlates with life experience.

And so, it happens that ‘big annoying bugs I have been battling with for so long’ are resolved in not more than a minute, due to not more than a tiny gesture.

To be fair, reaching out to people hoping to find the missing puzzle piece can also utterly fail. The times it failed for me, I might have had too big expectations, wanted to outsource the work too  much to someone else? I might have done a really bad job at communicating what I was after, in the first place? I imagine it can feel bewildering when someone comes up to you, lays out the entire map of their bug-landia, and then looks at you, expecting you to do… what exactly??

At the end of the day, you probably just have to try a lot, to find the one person that does have/know about the missing puzzle piece. This attempt might fail a lot. But when it works, well it works.

***

Who best to reach out to in order to help with blind spots? My answer here is bad, namely : it depends.

I have made different experiences. Roughly speaking, there are two categories: i) people that know you very well, and ii) people that hardly know you at all.

People that know me very little also tend to not have their own ego entangled in my story. (This seems to correlate, is not always true though.) This can be helpful in order to bring an outside view and give unbiased advice.

On the other hand, in some situations, it had been essential that the person knew me very well, meaning they had a lot of background information about who I am, how I normally function and where I’m coming from.

***

The next step, after having found the missing puzzle piece, is to properly internalize it and make it a part of yourself. I have recently started to think more about internalization and will treat, and experiment with, it sometime soon - as it’s one sub-skill to master as part of my larger quest(s).

[1] Some examples of puzzle pieces I have been missing:
- Simply and bluntly dismissing an entire bucket of S1 information/input.
- Realizing that what I thought of as being the problem wasn’t necessarily and unilaterally bad.
- Noticing and letting go of ‘shoulds’ and ‘not allowed to think/feel/want this’.
- Realizing that I could also just not do the thing.
- Introducing a sense of playfulness or curiosity.
- Reframing an underlying sense of scarcity.

Geneva to Prague, September 2018 - Resolution

Quest : Transparency of Mind

[Note 1: This is highly tentative: the entire idea, as well as its framing. I’m sure my thinking about both will change a whole lot over the next few weeks. But ‘ya gotta staat sumwhre’ , so, this is my starting point. For now.]

[Note 2: What I have in mind is basically a mega-quest. Much likely, it’s somewhat unhelpful to frame this as a single quest. In practice, I need to and am breaking this whole thing up into many sub-quests (of which many deserve the name ‘quest’ all on their own). However, it can be valuable to know ‘what you’re in for’ (oh, my dear utopia); for reasons of motivation, prioritizing and in order to not lose sight of the bigger picture. The way I want to break up this mega-quest is still ‘under construction’ - some thoughts, however, are are outlined below.]

[Note 3: This mega-quest can be tackled from many different sides. I haven’t yet reached very high levels of clarity in my thinking about this, so I wouldn’t at all be surprised if these notes will appear fairly incoherent or confusing to readers (that aren’t me) at times.
I myself remain uncertain about a bunch of things myself: Most of the ideas, concepts and delineations are still fuzzy; the nodes, links and interactions are complex; the model is very (too?) extensive; even if this wasn’t the case, I still have a long way to go until I will be actually good at communicating my ideas effectively.
However, I want to make progress on all these fronts and hope that, with some more work, it will become clearer what I want and how I want to get there. That’s why I’m writing this down.]

(1) Rationale

The quest:

• Train the transparency of my mind;

• Build a granular awareness of what my mind does, instance by instance

Why?

This will allow me to:

• ‘see’ more of what is going on, e.g. see where I’m ‘going astray’ in my thinking/doing, identify common patterns of my cognition, notice shoulds, flinching, rationalization, other S1-information, possibly build a taste for blind spots;

• build better theories and hypothesis about what is happening and why, experiment with interventions (techniques) to examine their utility and reliability and improve/tailor them to me/different circumstances;

• create affordance to deal with mental states (e.g. confusion, overwhelm, anxiety, resistance, impetus, impatience, excitement, ...) and eventually increase agency

Some vague handles (ignore this if you are not me):

• A rationality meta-skill

• “Illuminating the dark room I call ‘my mind’”

• Working best with “what is”

• Handling emotions, and mental states

• Clarity - In-Self (?) - Agency - Power

Concretely, what I want to get out of this:

> Bottlenecks

• Fuzzy mental states I don’t know what to do with; lack of mental and emotional clarity

  • A) Decreasing the quality of my thinking and my productivity  

    • 1 - blacking-out, shutting down, over-contraction (as opposed to clear, luminous, spacious thinking)

      • Note: I don’t know what is going on/what this is about, and thus cannot reliably identify helpful interventions; the lack of understanding triggers strong resistance with and frustration about the ‘status quo’, which impedes my thinking even more.  

    • 2 - I cannot adequately channel the available resources towards moving towards my goals/what is valuable to me

      • Note: mental states come with different sets of resources attached to each of them. Sometimes, it is hard to optimally channel these resources into something that is valuable to me.

  • B) Hampering my ability to communicate effectively (i.e. making ideas and/or myself understood);

  • C) Compromising my ability to connect

    • Note: confusion leading to pulled-backness, overshadowed by confidence signaling; self- and other-aloofness (‘emotional vitrine’); not being able to ‘give of myself fully’

    • Note: Connection and opportunity to be authentic as a key resource and key bottleneck

  • D) Causing distress, frustration, self-rejection and decreasing my subjective well-being

• My brain obscuring part of itself which increases the risk of my decisions to be non-optimal (one-sided, i.e, relying on incomplete information; or skewed, i.e. weighting different pieces of information inadequately)

> Desirables:

• Creating a granular map of my mental states (and their resource profile) to

  • Counter resistance (‘understanding’ helps with acceptance), which allows to:

  • Build affordance to

    • a) work with best the resources I have and/or

    • b) extend the resources available in the next moment

  • Eventually: increase agency (which is the key resource for me to attain my goals)

• Mind transparency

  • Track mental moves, instance to instance → key meta-skills to rationality (epistemic and instrumental)

    • Note: ‘map of noticing’

• Clarity of mind

  • Most of the value I can contribute comes from intellectual work; clarity of mind is key

  • Related, important faculties :

    • Free thinking (important for idea generation, re-conceptualization, prioritization, …)

    • Full commitment (key to getting great things done, and a lot of them)

• Intention setting

  • I seem to have some aversion against setting intentions explicitly (I, de facto, never do it). I do think that there are often good reasons for this aversion, and I don’t think this is my key bottleneck. But increasing the faculty to set intentions and follow through on them when this is appropriate seems valuable. (Essentially, I think I could get some of the things I am getting now, but cheaper.)

  • Moreover, I have the intuition that digging into why I am not setting more intentions, more explicitly might bring to light some interesting insights.  

  • Note: different types (willpower-based, policy-based)  and sizes of intentions (life-goals vs TAPs)

• Agency

  • More of this, more often!

  • My current theory: there are very few things to increase agency directly. It seems that it is the fruit I hope to harvest from training all the faculties outlined above, or in the map. Like an emergent faculty from raising the waterlines of many other faculties.

  • Agency + Clarity = what I want (?)

• Authentic, well-calibrated confidence (?)

Some thoughts on what comes after (next, but also related, quests):

• Wide Presence vs./and Self-Connection

  • > How can I combine two skills I have somewhat separately but not simultaneously?

    • Social manager: wide presence and meticulous tracking of the social space (the ‘script’) and all its actors (their ‘roles’)

    • Self-connection/In-Self: being in connection with me, with “what is”, authenticity, source of clarity and power.

      • Precise attention/full presence: being in connection with another person

    • Note: Up to now, these two faculties have appeared to be at odds with each other. (I.e. I can be in ‘wide-presence’, but lose the connection to myself. And I can be in ‘precise attention’ and ‘fully present’ with another person, but tend to forget about everything around me and even on other people that are (theoretically) part of the interaction.)
      I have an intuition that this doesn’t have to be this way, and I might just be getting some part of this wrong. Hence, I want to figure out whether I can combine these faculties, use them simultaneously.  

  • > How to increase my agency in these situations (e.g. altering, guiding, breaking the script)?

    • In my experience, in the case of social space, high levels of ‘seeing’ (social manager) doesn’t directly translate into high levels of agency (here, the faculty to alter the social space/script). I wonder what is up with this (Guess 1: my levels of seeing are not high enough or still demand too much resources in the moment that I cannot also think about how to act upon what I see. Guess 2: too much ego/identity involved in the situation, i.e. I’m constraining myself. Which would link to getting better at being ‘in-self’ in every instance.)

• Extraordinary Teams

  • > How to reliably create and foster extraordinary/outstanding teams?

  • I suspect this might be a highly effective intervention point.

    • Few notes on the underlying rationale:  In many cases, it’s the success of teams, not individuals, that matters. The value of a extraordinary teams is bigger than the sum of its parts. The higher the complexity of a task, the more specialists cannot be successful where teams can be (i.e. non-linearity of combining skills). We should focus on creating highly effective teams, instead of highly effective individuals.

  • I also suspect that I (and my team) might be comparably good position to work on this.

    • Combining my training in (individual) rationality and our experience with deliberately crafting a highly effective team; plus the exposure and connection to a handful of other individuals that are thinking about similar things.

  • When scaling individual rationality/performance to collective rationality/performance, we are faced with new challenges and opportunities. I think there is a lot to be learned and figured out in order to overcome these challenges and really tap into the full potential a strong team can offer.

(2) Quest mapping

This map will still change a lot. I expect to change things on it within 30’ from posting this.

[I want a better way to share this!]

(3) Sub-quests

An overview of required Mastery:

1. Focusing

   1. Product: Concept Map of Phenomenology/Mental States

   2. Explorations of Focusing

2. Noticing

   1. Product: Concept Map of Noticing

   2. Explorations of Noticing

3. Acceptance

   1. Handle: Work with “what is”

   2. Also: Let go of Resistance

4. Affordance

   1. Handle: sitting on the top of the hill, from where I can decide which side I want to slide down

   2. Note: ‘affordance’ doesn’t seem to me to be a skill in itself, but a place to reach (not more than an instance, where all options are open); the related skill would be ‘building affordance’, my current theory predicts this to be the same as ‘noticing + acceptance + internalization’)

5. Internalization

   1. Handle: reducing ‘wanting to wants’ to ‘wants’; internal value-alignment (?); moving from intellectual understanding to emotional understanding

   2. Note: I haven’t yet very consciously experimented with internalization techniques (eg. core transformation, propagating) beyond deep intellectual examination that sometimes leads to S2 updating.
      However, I know that I have performed very deep ‘internal operations’ on my S2-understanding in the past, although not under an explicit framework. Given what sort of believes I have internalized by pure will-power in the past (very low entropy ones), I might have an above average capacity to internalize believes (notes: correlates with strong will, determination, stubbornness, high conscientiousness, control) .
      This is a double-edged sword, though, and I have been cut in the past. Probably one of the main reasons why  I have (both consciously and unconsciously) distanced myself a lot from the sheer levels of discipline I had lived up to throughout my teenage years. After a significant detour (swing-back of the pendulum), I am again slowly approaching a, what seems to be, more optimal equilibrium in terms of discipline. It seems promising to make this a conscious and explicit process.  

6. Intentions

   1. What intentions to adopt? (crucial)

   2. Try - Commit - Follow-through

7. Presence/Attention

   1. Energy management: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual

   2. Skill: concentration/focus + awareness (loosening my grip)

8. TAPs

   1. Combination of ‘Noticing + Marker + Intention’

   2. Actually Try (?)

Supportive skills/practices:

• Meditation

  • Introspection

  • Metta

  • Acceptance / Loosening my grip / Letting go of stress (counter default)

  • Concentration/focus, presence

• Engaging my senses

  • Concentration/Focus, presence

  • Self-connection

  • Loosening my grip

• Micro intentions

  • Overtraining

  • Also: (self-)transparency, bravery, facing “what is”

• Conceptual clarity (mapping, writing up)

• NVC framework

  • Acceptance, giving from the heart

  • Clarity: observation, feeling, needs, request; responsibility

• Authentic relating

  • self-connection/self-transparency

  • Communication; broadening my vocabulary for mental states

• Letting go / Loosening grip (mental move)

  • Clearing space

  • IDC/IFS/multi-agent discourse

  • Kindness

  • Playfulness

  • Acceptance

• Committed engagement

  • Setting intentions

  • Face what is, let go of flinching  

• Epistemic Rationality

• Empirical Rationality

(4) Plan of action to obtain mastery:

I will treat the ‘plan of action to obtain mastery’ individually for each of the above mentioned sub-skills. Somewhere else. Some other time.

Tennessee Valley, California, May 2019 - Aliens

What I have been reading - March/April 2019

[Purpose: I decided to start collecting what I’m reading (roughly) over the course of a month (roughly). The reason I do this is because I want to be able to go back later in time and remember what I’ve read and consequently, what I have been thinking about (partially). Moreover, I hope that the act of collecting the links/articles/papers will as of itself already increase my memory of what I’ve been reading.]

[Note 1: This is not an exhaustive list. Even if I tried, it would be extremely difficult (and not worthwhile) to note down every single piece of text I’ve read in the last month. But having some overview is better than none.]

[Note 2: For the sake of having an overview, I wanted to group roughly related articles together. I haven’t spent much time on thinking about the categories, so they remain very hand-wavey and I’m not particularly embarrassing what I came up with as group headers.]

Epistemic Rationality   

• The Optimizer’s curse and wrong-way reductions + comments on EA Forum (did some more reading down a similar ally; this remains the best article though)

  • terms/concepts I found particularly interesting: empirically grounded vs hazy probabilities , model skepticism, wrong-way reductionism; made me think of a paper on cluelessness’ by Hillary Greaves

• Following an idea to its logical conclusion

• Frequentist and bayesian approaches in statistics

• Evidence on good forecasting practice from Good Judgement Project

Rationality (general)

• Thesis Culture (triggered thoughts on team/group rationality and (our) epistemic standards)

• Phenomenological Complexity Classes (made me want to read up more Kegan again)

• Degrees of Freedom - LessWrong 2.0

• On the nature of Agency (triggered thoughts on: locus of action and stoicism)

• “Boosting” (as part of a deep dive on nudging, for the research agenda)

  • Paper: Nudge Versus Boost: How Coherent are Policy and Theory? - Ralph Hertwig, Till Grüne-Yanoff, 2015

  • Paper: Nudging and Boosting: Steering or Empowering Good Decisions - Ralph Hertwig, Till Grüne-Yanoff, 2017

• Literature review: distributed teams

• Paper: Variability in the interpretation of Dutch probability phrases - a risk for miscommunication - Willems et al., 2019 (ties into extensive discussions on the nature and use of language)

Instrumental Rationality (specific)

• Mental Habits and 5 second rationality, among others:

  • Culture vs Mental Habits

  • Slipping Sideways

• Agenty Duck, among others:

  • Creative Focusing

  • Person Framing Language

  • Memorization

• Musings and Rough Drafts, among others:

  • Committed Engagement and the Critical Importance of Ambiguity

  • Some ways to “clear space”

  • What to do with should/flinches: TDT-stable internal incentives

Philosophy

• What’s Wrong with Moral Foundations Theory, and How to get Moral Psychology Right

• Being 97

• What AI Safety Researchers Have Written About the Nature of Human Values

Neuroscience, AI, multi-agent minds

• Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences

• Predictable Identities 6

• Brain Areas May Use “Subspace” Communication to Talk to One Another

• Attention and Learning in a Predictive Processing Framework (Eli)

• Multi-agent predictive minds and AI alignment

Relationships

• Pain as Active Ingredient in Dating

• The short instruction manifesto of relationship anarchy

• Relationship Anarchy Smorgasbord

Podcasts

• SSC (a selection)

  • Beware the Man of One Study

  • Rule thinkers in, not out

  • Book review: Black Swan

  • Book Review: The Mind Illuminated

  • The Economic Perspective on Moral Standards

• Rationally Speaking

  • Helen Toner on "Misconceptions about China and artificial intelligence"

  • John Nerst on "Erisology, the study of disagreement"

• Making Sense, Sam Harris

  • #153 - Possible Minds (Conversations with George Dyson, Alison Gopnik, and Stuart Russell)

• The odd Kurzgesagt video for an occasional episode of mind boggling

Miscellaneous

• Serious Games, among others:   

  • A Paradim for game design - Duke, 1980

• Typology of Meditation Traditions

• Pros and Cons of knowing one’s own IQ

• Squarespace info material (learnt how to set up, design and manage a website/blog)

• Started using Yeb

Geneva, Summer 2018 - Hello Sun, I have been looking for you!

Mental Restlessness and some possible responses

[Note: This is a mental model purely based on introspection. I’m neither claiming high probability of this being generalizable to anyone other than me, nor that I will still be having the same model in 3 month from now, nor that the following is particularly original. Writing this up has been and is useful for me personally.]

This post depicts some of my thoughts on mental restlessness.

I’m interested in learning more about this phenomenon. In particular, I want to understand when and why it appears, and how to deal with it - because, at the time of writing, it is an important bottleneck of mine with regard to productivity, originality of ideas, clarity of thought and overall well-being.

I am determined to figure out and learn what to do about it so that, on the medium to long run, this cease to be a bottleneck. In order to do so, I decided to start an experiment [1] allowing me to look at the phenomenon (its Gestalt, facets, environment, related factors, their interactions, correlates and causalities) more closely, and to test hypothesis and possible remedies.

I use these observations to inform my reflection, model building and hypothesis generation. This might inspire new experiments in the future, in case mental restlessness remains or returns to being a bottleneck, or in case I simply stay interested in learning more in depth about it, regardless of it being a personal bottleneck or not.

The post is structured as follows:

1. Specification: I start by specifying the nature of mental restlessness and describe my observations on what forms and shapes it typically takes (for me);

2. Theory and mental model: I theories about sources, causal links and important factors contributing to the appearance and my experience of mental restlessness.

3. Interventions: I collect possible interventions for dealing or getting rid of mental restlessness and think about how/what exactly they might help with and how to apply them.

***

(1) Specification

I’m affected - sometimes more, sometimes less - by what I came to call mental restlessness.

This is an umbrella term for a range of correlated phenomena. Some examples:

• the inability to get myself into a deep work mode (allowing only for relatively shallow levels of engagement/concentration)

• the inability to focus on a task for long and with a high quality of attention (clear-headed-ness)

• the impulse to flinch away from/be avoidant towards certain tasks (typically, pivoting towards doing small and (pseudo-)urgent in order to avoid tackling the bigger, scarier, more ill-defined, fuzzier tasks)

• the tendency to flinch away form non-embraced thoughts or ‘thoughts I’m not allowed to think (right now)’ (typically, something in my social life I’m worried about but don’t want to effect my work)

• informational and/or sensory overload (manifests itself for example in the inability to hold a mental object in my mind; thoughts slipping through my fingers; really bad short term memory (what was that thought I just had 3 seconds ago?);

• getting easily distracted

• (much more so) being distracted: having a restless mind is a distraction in itself; there is no need for external factors. really, in order to be distraction; auto-distraction

• mentally roaming around without being able to ever actually zoom into/focus on/hold one thought steady for deeper inquiry

Upon introspection and reflection, I came up with two general types of how my mind can be restless.

a) (Auto-)Distraction [Includes (from the above list): the inability to get myself to do deep work; to focus on a specific task (or to decide what task to work on in the first place); getting easily distracted; being distracted, the tendency to flinch away from non-embraced thoughts]

b) Mental Overload [Includes (from the above list): informational or sensory overload, mentally roaming around]

***

(2) Theory and mental model:

a) Auto-Distraction

Roughly speaking, the cause for problems related to auto-distraction can be external or internal.

External reasons include:

• The task is ambiguous.

  • ill-defined: I don’t really know what the tasks entails, and, more importantly, how to start;

  • scary: The tasks seems ‘big and scary’ and, next to not knowing how to start, I’m unsure about my abilities to tackle it.

Generally speaking, this doubt (about how to start or about my abilities) is unpleasant and my mind wants to escape this sense by lowering the barriers for things to distract me. In more accentuated cases, my mind will even start producing distraction itself. [2] The reason remains the same, ambiguity is a unpleasantness-inducing that rather is avoided.

Internal sources include:

• Energy management: I might lack some type of energy. I could be physically tired, mentally tired, emotionally tired or I might have been lacking purpose or meaning recently. My mind simply isn’t in the shape for doing that sort of ‘heavy-lifting’ I would want it to do, or wants to let me know/draw my attention to the fact that I’m lacking some form of energy (by being distracted, see above).

• Sub-agents: I might also have some worries in the back of my mind, or thoughts that want to be thought, or fears that wan to be heard. In the language of IFS, some exile of mine is causing turmoil and firefighters are trying hard to distract from that fact.
  This has been a hypothesis of mine for a long time, but I never had a really good grasp on it because I would never go investigate my mind in these moments. That’s pretty much the paradox - while these moments would benefit most from meditation, introspection or focusing, it’s also these moments where it’s hardest to make yourself do it. But recently (mainly thank to the set up of the experiment), I did, and the insights (and effects) were each time astonishing. More about this later in this post.

b) Mental Overload

Although mental overload leads to quite similar behavioral patterns (classified as mental restlessness) as auto-distraction, it’s nature, underlying causes and subjective experience of is pretty different. I view it as somewhat more ‘severe’ - I experience it less often, but when I have it, it’s effects are usually stronger and longer lasting. Finally, it is trickier to deal with, harder to nail down as a problem and more difficult to get traction with.

Mental overload largely feels like my working memory being overfilled. Any attempt to store new item/piece of information fails helplessly.

Mostly, mental overloads happens in the aftermath of a very insightful, inspirational and thought-provoking encounter (talks, read, interaction, event, …). My mind is still vividly producing new thoughts and ideas - and all of them make me really excited! - but at a certain point - when reaching informational capacity -, it is as if my thought suddenly became really, really slippery, slithery and fleeting. I struggle holding a single thought steady. Even my memorization tricks, that would otherwise work quite reliably, don’t help. By the time I thought about a trigger to help me remember, the thought has long past. My short term memory becomes so bad that I often wouldn’t even manage to retrace a thought I had only 3 seconds ago.

I think this phenomenon is significantly exacerbated my my emotional state, which usually is a mix of fierce excitement and increasing exasperation about the fact that ‘all my thoughts are floating off downstream, where I will never find them again’.

The analogy of a water bucket is fairly apt. If you fill a bucket to its maximal capacity, any additional drop of water causes the bucket to overflow. Not only will there be no space for the additional drop; because the surface tension has been broken, many more drops of water flow over the buckets edges and are lost. Once I’ve reached maximal information capacity with my mind,

Not only is my memory affected, I also find it more difficult to sit down and capture the thoughts that are floating around in my head. This has to do with the fact that my thoughts are more slippery and unsteady. However, this seems to feel more difficult than what it ends up being. When I do try writing things down, I normally manage to do so quite well and there usually is a strong sense of relief and alleviation. Like opening the outlet at the bottom of your water bucket and the pressure decreases.

While this allows me to moderate the urgency some, simply writing down some thoughts would often still leave me with a 'partially overloaded mind’, and a few hours or the next day, the bucket might be back at capacity.

***

(3) Interventions:

First, I will list all interventions that come to mind, before picking a few that seem most promising or that I actually consciously experimented with (and have something to say about).

Possible Interventions

1. Writing down or mapping out the thoughts

2. Shield/insulate myself from possible sources of external distraction

3. Checking my energy levels and responding to eventual needs

4. Reducing ambiguity

5. ‘Getting traction’

6. Give in to the distraction, consciously, for a given time

7. Focusing

8. Increase awareness

9. Meditation, IFS, introspection

10. IDC

11. Goal and/or aversion factoring

12. Create positive pressure (eg. social accountability)

Details on interventions:

1. Writing down and mapping out thoughts

Already alluded to above. Seems helpful, especially when possible to do quite extensively (When I’m actually mentally overloaded, this might well take me several hours). Smaller time investments are still useful but, as mentioned, the positive effects are usually less and more short-lived.
Mapping is another way I achieve pretty similar things as with writing and it usually is more time effective. While it’s quicker to get an overview by mapping, writing down allows for more details.

2. Shielding/insulating myself from possible sources external distractions

This is only relevant for distraction caused by external factor. While it’s more obvious and less of an interest to me, it’s still good to have it on the list. An easy fix is still a fix.

For me personally, the most room of improvement in this category lies in :

• installing rescue time

• improve the rhythm/algorithm based on which I’m checking mail and other communication channels

• only open the taps I use at the moment

3. Checking my energy levels and responding to eventual needs

Understanding the four main characters of energy as suggested here (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual) has been pretty useful to me in order to understand (and name) in a more differentiated way, what sort of energy I’m lacking. I find it a useful prompt.

I’m planning to write a separate post on my personal thoughts on energy management and ideas how to expand my absolute energy capacity over time. A few very rough thoughts here:

• Physical energy: lack of sleep, too much or too little sports, too much or too little or not healthy food, deficiencies, lack of fresh air/outdoors, hormones, sickness/infections, …

  • Prompts: check my routine (sleep, sport, outdoors), check whether I might be lacking some micro-nutrients, take rest (nap), energize (sports, outdoors, coffee)

• Mental energy: overworked, overloaded, stressed out…

  • Prompts: take a break (chill, sports, call/meet friends), re-frame stress, meditation, focusing

• Emotionally energy: lacking connection or lacking me-time (too many social events recently); lacking the outdoors; worries, internal conflict, self-doubt

  • Prompts: call/meet/talk to friends, go out (dinner? drinks? party? mdma?), date; go outside, for a stroll/walk/run/swim/bike ride, meditate, go to my room, write (my blog), music, poems; talk through with someone, focusing, re-framing (self-criticism)

• Spiritual energy: (perceived) lack of meaning or purpose

  • Prompts: reconnect with what is meaningful to me, me goals and my achievements until now, bigger picture re-framing, meditation, watch/read an inspirational video/text (from the top of my mind: RGS), psychedelics

4. Reducing ambiguity

If the degree of ambiguity of a tasks makes you flinch away from working on it (for a possible model on why, see here), the most obvious thing to do is to actively try to reduce ambiguity (before starting with the actual task).

There are two obvious things I can think of here:

4a) seeking more information:

About how to do the task, about where to expect difficulties, how to confront them, about the underlying goals, …

4b) setting clear deadlines:

It has been often been immensely helpful to me to simply set a clear deadline to a tasks. This can be both until when I want to have it finished, or until when I will continue working on it (before taking a break, doing something else. This sort of re-framing (mostly the latter example) is a simply but surprisingly powerful way to appease those parts of my mind that are rebelling against me working on the task. (This framework draws some inspiration from the IFS/multi-agend model of the mind. More below.)

If, for example, some parts of my mind are wary of me working late and (again) not getting to do these other things I was wanting to do (eg. read, write, talk to x, …), they might try hard to distract me from working at all until I give up and go do something else. And they (often) have a point. By listening to them, just for a second, and agreeing on some sort of compromise (“What about this: I give this tasks another 30’. After that, whether I’ve finished it or not, we will do this other things you want.”), my mind suddenly regains a lot of mental space and focus and work flows again.

However, this needs to be a sincere compromise. If my only goal was to outsmart myself by promising something I' have no intention of keeping, it will either not work at all or my sub-agents will quickly learn that ‘I am not to trust’. I’m by far not sure about this but I have the impression that this sort of breach of trust is really hard (to quasi impossible) to remedy.

5. Building traction

[This could be a sub-point of decreasing ambiguity. But it seemed relevant enough to give it its own number.]

‘Getting traction’ is a handle I use a lot. There are many ways to do so, and they are usually pretty situation dependent. Some examples include:

a) detailing out next steps

The more concrete and tangible your very next step, the easier it is to take it. In fact, if you pave your way sufficiently well, the whole undertaking my (sort of) turn into a peasant ride.

b) visualization (of next steps)

If clarifying my next steps isn’t enough yet to get me going, I can introduce half-step (that is easy to take from where I am and already brings me halfway to where I want to be) by visualizing the logical next step: putting on my running shoes, opening my laptop, opening the appropriate applicaiton, picking up the first piece of clothing, … For some funny reason, I often notice myself realizing that, “hmm, that doesn’t feel too bad”, and then actually doing it becomes much less aversive.

There is one failure mode I sometimes run into: when I keep on visualizing (let’s say, I’m not only putting on my running shoes (mentally) but start running down the street into the woods nearby), I might discover some sort of obstacle (wait, what route should I take today? hmm, is this road still blocked? ahh, this fucking hill spring again…). If I stop my visualization at that point (and that’s the norm, since, again, minds like to flinch away from unpleasant thoughts), I’m left with a feeling of “yuck” or aversion. And don’t want to do the thing.

6. Give in to the distraction, consciously, for a given time

Sometimes, it might be okay or even conducive to just give in to a given distraction. Important is to not give in out of a sense of defeat (destructive) but out of an understanding for what I need right now (constructive). Indicating deadlines (when will I go back to this task and try again?) are probably very useful to not get properly side tracked.

7. Focusing

This is one of the interventions I’m most interested in. While focusing has always come really naturally to me, and I enjoy doing it, I struggle using it as often as I would like to (as often as I think it would be useful). As I mentioned before, the situations focusing is likely most useful are also the situation when it’s hardest to make yourself do it.

I have two thoughts on this, not entirely original though:

7a) Buddy system

I have recently installed an accountability with one of my co--workers that he would, for the duration of the experiment at least, be always available for me to do focusing with him. Now, the idea is to help myself push through the first defense wall of my psyche (making myself sit down and get in touch with myself) from where usually everything is just downhill.

However much I like the idea in theory, it is immensely difficult for me to ask someone to do focusing with me. It really feels like a huge waste of time for the other person, and I could as well just do it myself. Also, I think I actually prefer doing it myself. The only way I could imagine this to be useful to me is if my buddy could notice when I’m mentally restless and make me do focusing (with him). But as this is not possible, I figured that I need another mechanism to get myself to do focusing in those moments.

7b/8. Increase awareness

[This is partially a sub-point of 7. Focusing, and partially its very own point. I find this step super useful and thus deserving of its own number.]

I found inspiration for this step here:

At that moment, I feel the pressure of the “should”, the knowing that I’m supposed to/I reflectively want to be making progress, and also feel the inclination to flinch away, to distract myself with something […]

This is a moment of awareness. [...] I have the opportunity right now, to choose something different. I, in actual fact, will not have that opportunity in five minutes.

The point is that, when I am mentally restless, I do realize (at least after a while). I do know that I should do focusing (in the sense that, it would help). The hard things is the get up, drop things and make myself turn inward (especially if in there currently doesn’t feel very pleasant). What is not hard, however, is to deepen my awareness about the moment. About the fact that I’m mentally restless and should do focusing. That’s easy and comes without the impulse to flinch away.

And once, I’ve increased my level of awareness, the step towards actually doing focusing becomes easier. Maybe I need to iterate the increasing awareness one or a few more times. But that’s still easy, and thus looks like a fairly reliable route to actually doing focusing.

[add experience]

8a) Noticing

A prerequisite to increasing awareness, obviously, is being aware in the first place; more, specifically, being aware of my mental restlessness.

Noticing common bahavioural or mental patterns is a skill that can be trained. Meditation - improving my general level of meta-cognition - has proven extremely valuable hear. This is more of a long term strategy though.

On top of this, it has proven immensely helpful to me to write down an extensive description of the phenomenon you want to notice more, what forms and shapes it likes to take and in what sort of situation it often appears. Reification at its best.

I also liked this:

Keep this in mind: Your mind flinches away from ambiguity. But you can learn to notice, and counter-flinch.

(So, learning how to get good at counter-flinching should be another element on this list.)

9. Meditation/IFS/introspection

Basically the same story as focusing.

I tend to do an IFS meditation in more drastic cases of mental restlessness. I use these audios:

• IFS meditation 1

• IFS meditation 2

Otherwise, I might just do my usual practice (Vipassana Goenka-style, i.e. watching the breath and body scan) or use my Headspace app.

10. IDC

Internal double crux falls for me in pretty much the same conceptual bucket as meditation/IFS/introspection. Very useful. Quite a strong and heavy tool though. Again, I’m probably not using it (and especially it’s 5-second version) not often enough.

11. Aversion factoring

If an aversion is involved in making me flinch away from a certain tasks, a good way to increase my understanding of this aversion and find ways around it is aversion factoring. Recently taught this to people in my community (slides).

12. Create positive pressure (eg. social accountability)

Finally, one of my general go to methods : If your incentives are not aligned with what you want (or want to want) to do, well, change the incentives.

If I really want to get this specific tasks done and, after having tried some other techniques, figure that I’m probably just being silly, I like to let people around me know what my plan of aspiration looks like. This is usually surprisingly powerful and increases my affordance to do desired thing x.

It is important however to be fair to yourself. Don’t overload the system. Or it breaks. If you try to make yourself do a quasi impossibly task by putting more pressure onto yourself, you are likely not going to do it after all. And if you are unlucky, the efficacy of your external pressure system is damaged irreversibly. For example, if you promise to do thing x to a group of people to whom you really don’t want to loose your face, this is a pretty strong incentive. If you promise to do thing x to a group of people you have ‘let down’ a hundred times before, well, who really cares if this becomes a hundred and one.

***

[1] (Should I rather not use (and butcher) this term?)
I’m not so deluded to think that this ‘experiment’ will produce any sort of ‘scientific evidence’. Anything I find will only contain information about me (theoretically), and in practice, this information might have close to zero weight (as I simply cannot correct for all relevant factors, etc.).
However, my primary goal is to more to consciously commit to look at this phenomenon, closely. Having an experiment-type set up (and mindset) - including clear start and end dates, prior assumptions, daily tracking and written-up notes to look back to - helps me to get to more information and experiential insight in a shorter amount of time. It allows me to reflect on the ‘experiment’ more thoroughly what might lead to new, better hypothesis (to test) or insights.

[2] Ending up spending hours on fb, youtube, blogs, reddits or other internet sites is not really a thing for me. I actually hardly ever drawn into any of these attention-seeking applications. (I am largely unable to stop watching a series on netflix ones I started.) Instead, when I complain about being distracted, I find myself looking for possible distractions for example by switching between taps, searching stuff, looking up, following some random thoughts, checking whether I want coffee/tea/food, checking my calendar, checking my mail/communication apps. Rather than ‘falling pray to’ attention absorbing applications, my mind starts to ‘actively look for’ any acceptable source of distraction in order to avoid facing the ambiguous, unpleasant task.

Geneva, February 2019 - Clarity (of Mind)

Bugs Mapping - April 2019

[Note: the exercise was originally conceived to map hamming problems. However, when I do the mapping, I tend to quickly 'expand the picture' to also cover other, related (but not necessarily hamming-level) bugs. Which is why I renamed my exercise into (simply) 'Bugs Mapping'.]

Bugs Mapping Exercise

I really like the approach of mapping and modelling my bugs as an interconnected system. I think my mind largely works like this to start with, but last weekend, I had a first go at making this mapping explicit.

The exercise starts with prompts to identify potential hamming problems (and other bugs). In the following a collection of hamming questions and prompts I came across over time: (I'm not claiming any authorship over the following list of questions.) [I want to keep expanding this list (and other prompt lists) over time and collect them in a central location.]

1. What are the most important problems in my life? Which problems in my life are the largest order of magnitude? What changes could I make that would result in a 100x or 1000x increase in either personal satisfaction or positive impact on the world?

2. Rate-limiting steps: What’s the limiting factor on my growth and progress? What’s the key resource I have the least of, or the key bottleneck that’s preventing me from bringing resources to bear?

3. What am I not allowed to want? What do I feel I’m “not allowed to care about,” or that I generally don’t think about because it feels too big or impossible?

4. Genre-savvy: If my life were a novel, what would be the obvious next step? Where is the plot dragging, and what do I need to do to move the story forward? Imagine yourself as the hero in a science fiction story. What are the obvious things the hero needs to do/learn/get better at? What are the obvious things that currently prevent the hero from living up to their role? If you imagine yourself in 10 years, NOT having reached your goal, what were the reasons for this?

5. Pica: What sorts of goals am I already pursuing, but in a bad/convoluted/ inefficient/distorted way?

6. Advice to yourself: Imagine looking at an identical copy of yourself. What does your copy need, what is ‘wrong’ with it, what doesn’t work the way it should?

7. Focusing: If I say “Everything in my life is fine, and I’m on track to achieve all of my goals,” what feels untrue about that? What catches in my throat, that makes it hard to say that sentence out loud? What feels most alive to me right now? Alternately, what feels most endangered?

8. Doom: Ask your friends or colleagues (or anyone else who's judgement you trust or who's perspective might be interesting) what you Hamming Problem is.

Next, you proceed to map the bugs you identified and indicate their relationship to each other by drawing arrows/edges between the nodes. Arrows can point away from the node, pointing into the node, or pointing in both directions (indicating a mutually reinforcing bug-duplex; more on this below). The arrows can be 'positively reinforcing' or 'negative reinforcing'.

[I suspect it could be valuable to further elaborate on different ways bugs can interact with each other, and thereby extending the usefulness of bugs mapping exercise. I intend to simply play with and explore this informally (when doing the exercise for myself), at least for the time being.]

I ended up producing several 'maps' - one (pretty chaotic) trying to capture all/as many bugs as I could and a few other ones, zooming in on a particular topic area or axis at the time. I found it very useful to try doing this exercise several times after each other, while varying venture points or framing. I like to imagine my 'bug-ecosystem' as a high-dimensional complex space, where different cross sections produce different 'screenshots' of the same network.

What do I find particularly valuable about the Bugs Mapping?

For one, it makes self-reinforcing, detrimental (or conducive) links or cycles between multiple bugs more salient. (I was usually aware of these interactions before, but seeing them appear on paper seems to have some added value to the way I can track these cycles in real life.)

Also, it becomes easier to think more creatively about all the possible intervention points and possibilities to tackle one or several bugs. The interesting thing about vicious bug cycles is that you can intervene at many different points. To think of possible interventions, I look both at the bugs themselves and at the connection between bugs.

Furthermore, it is a good way for me to 'get an overview' of a(aa)ll the things I (so desperately) need to work on (!), which is a good (although partial) remedy against overwhelm and confusion (to be treated in more detail in a future post).

(Finally, the exercise inspired a (at this point in time still vague) mental model which I'm planning on exploring in a future post. It's about a way to categories/describe different bugs through a quality I call 'depth'. Later more.)

***

Prague, April 2019 - Connection

An overview of topics I want to write about sometime soon

(the order is random, the list is probably not exhaustive)

• Overwhelm

  • phenomenology/classification

  • Intervention (experiment)

  • Formalization

• Seeing darkness; and what it means when I say 'It's okay'

  • narrative from the self vs detached narratives - phenomenology - stepping out of the spirals

• Agency

  • recent (1y) changes and observations

    • rediscovering speech 1

    • rediscovering speech 2

• Game theory and communication:

  • Social reality vs Baseline Reality (include conceptual drawings)

• 'Uncomfortable situations' and rapid inoculation (building up resilience) [unsure]

• Bugs mapping:

  • recent insights into my personal bug-ecosystem

  • Different levels of depth

• Social interactions and authentic relating:

  • Social manager (SM), Nora-felt (NF) and authentic relating

  • The ‘relating paradox’

  • Recent shifts and insights

  • Emotional maturity, and maturity in relationships

  • Communication culture vs codes of interaction

• Mental flinching/distraction/craving:

  • Experiment with using (too much) focusing

  • Model building: hypothesis and assumption; reflect on results/insights from experiment

  • Slipping sideways - what my mind does when it’s afraid or board or feels incapable

• Focusing

  • Reflecting on the experiment, and exploring new insights (see above) ;

  • Personal interpretation and take on focusing

  • Update on the value of focusing

  • Where to use focusing and what prevents me from/how to get myself to do it (incl. experiment),

  • Creative Focusing (see: Agency Duck) and my use of language

• Thoughts on transparency, honesty and self-transparency

• Thoughts on narrative, self-image and identity

  • “non-identity is an identity“ (reflections on the past)

  • towards a beneficial usage of self-image?

• TAPs

  • Experiment with usage, get better at it, how I can make it work for me (experiment and social accountability to give it a fair try)

• Noticing

  • Test interventions to get better at it

  • model building/phenomenology (are they substantial differences depending on what I try to notice? implications on technique/mechanisms

• Memorization skills

  • My intuitive technique, evaluated; other techniques

  • Overtraining (experiment?)

• Status and human interaction

  • summary/reflection on ‘Improv’

  • exploring/testing hypothesis (conceptual, practical)

• Thoughts on meta-ethics and moral uncertainty

• Meditation practice

  • Reflections on regular practice

  • Reflections on retreats

  • Techniques /schools and what goals to have

  • Stoic reflections

• Experiences with IFS, thoughts on multi-agent minds and predictive processing

• Energy balance and Total Energy expansion

  • Exploring elements of peak-performance (?) and peak-well being

  • Increasing total energy levels (over the short and, especially, long term)

• Productivity

  • Mapping, exploring and experimenting with my personal ‘productivity factors’: including things like working structure (focus work, light work, writing, reading, ...), meditation, sports, food, social interactions, thinking time, applications, (daily/weekly/monthly) reviews/checklists

• Team/group rationality

  • Epistemic standards in groups

  • Behavioural patterns and roles

  • Collective truth seeking (methods for effective communication, double crux and paired model building)

  • Long-term strategic planning (concretely)

  • Long-term strategic planning: comparative advantages of a strong team

• Communication

  • Levels of communication; and failure modes

  • Improving communication: experiences and experiments

  • Language and (inherent or not) ambiguity

    • related: how to deal with ‘living in different worlds’

• Skills

  • Map of skills

  • thoughts on acquiring skills, and timing

• Personal reviews

  • Loyalty, trauma and friendships in the extreme

  • Auto-sufficiency and vulnerability

  • What it means to live a good life?

  • Intelligence

  • Living in a group house (and moving)

Mont Soleil, December 2018 - On to new levels of clarity and inner peace

'Getting Empirical' with my rationality practice

I've recently been inspired to make my rationality practice more empirical.

Concretely, I envision to start a more rigorous process of coming up with and testing hypotheses about matters related to rationality, my personal productivity, well-being, social life and possibly more. By making this process more explicit, I expect to be able to gather more information, quicker, and make the pseudo-experimentation I've been doing (largely in my head) until now more systematic, more effective, more explicit and better documented.

Why? And what to I hope to get out of make my rationality practice more empirical?

First of all, there is the direct value of generating and testing hypothesis and interventions which will hopefully result in me resolving some of my bugs sooner (rather than later), and, ideally, in a more sustainable manner. Moreover, I pursue second, more indirect/meta goal. Namely, I want to reliably build up certain mental habits that I think are very useful. This is basically what I call 'improving the way I think' and, while I already know how to do these things, what I really I want to get to here is the process of internalizing these standards/mental moves to a degree that they become actual habits, reliable and don't require conscious effort anymore. Concretely, I want:

1. Empirical mindset: get in the habit (always, rather than sometimes) of coming up with falsifiable hypothesis ex ante, making my assumptions explicit, actively looking for ways the experiment could be biased and reasons my hypothesis might be wrong, actually going back to the experiment ex post and consciously process and update on its results).

2. Noticing and original exploration: This is still a little ill-defined and I don’t feel like I have capture everything I’m interested here yet. It's vaguely about training my mind to detect more bugs, more reliably (even the “not ideal but sufficient”-type bugs that I often struggle to detect reliably - write on this at some point) and incite myself to be more creative, original and proactive when it comes to thinking of and trying interventions, and generating hypothesis and models.

In practice: my ‘rationality experiments’

Some first thoughts (non-exhaustive) on how I want the process to go and what sort of parameters I might want to track in any experiment: (I expect this list to be significantly improved, refined and extended overtime. This might also be helpful to make experiments increasingly low effort while keeping a relatively high quality by systemizing the process as good as possible.)

1. Writing up my hypothesis in advanced and making assumptions explicit; ideally, I'd model the issue (using Yeb or on my remarkable) to refine my hypothesis and draw out as many of the underlying assumptions, aliefs as possible before the experiment itslef - I think this would likely increase the informational value I can get from running the experiment

2. Defining what indicators I'm interested in (eg. what would 'success' look like, what are things that might arise but that I am actually not interested in, …) and defining how I want to track them;

3. Thinking about obvious ways the experiment could be biased, invalidated or otherwise screwed. (I.e. how am I to interpret and contextualize the results?)

4. Defining a clear time window (start and end date) for the experiment; not only is this necessary for being able to properly evaluate the experiment, most of all, I think this is a quite reliable way to increase my dedication to 'actually try' and put me in the right mind space, instead of half-heartedly tinkering around.

5. Increase my commitment, rigor  (social accountability) and documentation (external memory) via posting the set up and underlying thoughts of the experiment here.

6. Discuss with a third party (mostly my friends) to reevaluate the set up of the experiment and check for obvious obstacles or blind spots; and set up accountabilities with them if necessary/useful.

7. Set up everything else that is necessary to run a fair experiment (eg. check whether I have actually enough time and mindspace to sufficiently commit to what I've planned)

This type of experiments are obviously limited in many ways and I'm vigilant of not over-updating on any of the results. Most importantly, they are experiments about how I function (usually, n=1=me), and their external validity will in most cases be very low. At most, I'd hope that the experiments and write ups of my mental models and how they change might serve others as inspiration and/or prompts for their own hypothesis generation. In other words, I am hopeful my write ups will ask useful questions, rather than give final, conclusive answers.

Some things I want to run experiments on? (a loose list of very rough ideas)

• Overwhelm (model building, phenomenology; test interventions)

• Distraction, flinching and craving (test interventions)

• Focusing (experiment with usage, ‘personalize’)

• TAPs (experiment with usage, get better at)

• Noticing (test interventions to get better at it; model building/phenomenology (are they substantial differences depending on what I try to be noticing)

• Memorization skills (test techniques; overtraining)

• Status and human interaction (test, explore ideas from Improv)

• Energy balance and Total Energy expansion (test hypothesis, come up with interventions)

• Productivity (test interventions; supposedly strongly related to the above, including things like working structure (focus work, light work, writing, reading, ...), meditation, sports, food, social interactions, thinking time, applications, (daily/weekly/monthly) checklists, etc.)

• Team rationality (?)

• Ways to learn certain skills

• ...

The next experiment I will run (and first under this concrete mental umbrella) will be about noticing when I’m flinching away from certain (non-embraced) thoughts; when I’m not able to do deep focus work but get distracted by too many thoughts.

Particularly, I’ve installed an accountability system with my co-workers to notice this mind state and to it by getting up and doing deliberate focusing. This serves to purposes: a) testing focusing as an intervention to respond to this ‘mind-restlessness’ and b) I expect the information I get from focusing on the source of mind-restlessness to improve my mental model of why my mind starts distracting itself, and hopefully illuminate my understanding of its causal patterns.

However, I will write about the details of the experiment, my underlying hypothesis and assumptions in more detail in a separate post.

Geneva, January 2019 - Thanks, Michael, for living your inner child with me.