A short account on Noticing
[Early this summer, I stumbled upon the opportunity to do some ‘serious rationality exploration’ in the scope of a CFAR instructor training. I have a pile of notes, though most of them are unpolished and require a fair bit of work to be made legible to anyone-that-isn-not-me. I hope to get around tidying up most of these notes at some point soon.
The following is part 1/2 of my notes on noticing.]
I believe that noticing is a key meta-skill for rationalists.
It’s a key faculty if you want to master the 5-second-level of rationality - the place where you either win (at this entire rationality enterprise), or you don’t.
I surely am not the first person remarking this; and neither will I make this case as elegantly as others have before me. There exists a range of great resources on noticing, most saliently a series of articles from agentyduck (all of which I highly recommend!). A quote:
“It doesn't matter how many techniques you've learned if you miss all the opportunities to apply them, and fail to notice the obstacles when they get in your way. Opportunities and obstacles are everywhere.”
My personal observation is such that the serious exploration and training in noticing I have recently engaged in yielded a lot of benefits. In particular, it feels like it set me up to become ‘a better rationalist’ (these are strong apostrophes).
Some examples for how noticing has been immensely valuable to me :
see more of ‘what is going on’, e.g. seeing where I’m ‘going astray’ in my thinking/acting; identifying recurrent thinking or behavioural patterns, internally and interpersonally; noticing shoulds, flinching, rationalization, bugs; possibly build a taste for blind spots (?);
build better theories and hypotheses about what is happening, when and why. Subsequently, this allows to engage in better experiments about the utility of different interventions (techniques) and allows to improve/tailor/refine the interventions as well as the underlying theory more effectively;
create affordance to deal with mental states (e.g. confusion, overwhelm, anxiety, resistance, impetus, impatience, excitement, ...) and eventually increase agency
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This is why, over the recent weeks and months, I have spent a fair bit of time and mental energy at trying to improve my noticing skills. An account on how I went about this will follow in an upcoming post.
What is noticing?
Noticing propagates normally ‘unreported’ experiences into your conscious mind.
In other words, noticing is about moving an experience from your peripheral awareness into your conscious attention.
Here is a ‘working model’ that I like to use:
Everything we ever pay attention to first appears in our peripheral awareness.
In order to ‘treat’ something, we have to become conscious/aware of it first.
If we want to be conscious of what-is-going-when-it-is-going-on (as opposed to some significant time later), we have to get good at moving the object from awareness to attention.Doing that requires us to ‘notice’ the thing. Normally, we propagate into our attention only things that are threatening, surprising or otherwise salient to us.
However, we can train our minds to notice more, and/or more of-a-specific-‘thing’.
There are roughly two (related) approaches that I am aware of:
A) Increasing you general capacity (bandwidth) of conscious awareness.
B) Prime your brain to notice a specific thing, i.e. make it ‘artificially’ more salient to your brain.
A) is sometimes referred to as increased meta-cognition. Some form of meditation train this skill.
Related to this is what I currently call ‘granular noticing’. The specifier ‘granular’ ought to point at the capacity to notice what my mind does, instance by instance, in a very fine-grained manner.
“The more tiny and subtle are the thoughts you're aware of, the more precise can be the control you gain over the workings of your mind, and the faster can be your cognitive reflexes.” (agentyduck)
B) is how I have heard the term noticing being used most often in the rationality community. Many of my Trigger-Action-Plans (TAPs) are basically just this.
These ‘mental TAPs’ have proven really useful to me. In ‘Why mere noticing solves so much’, agnetyduck writes: “If you recognize something as a mistake, part of you probably has at least some idea of what to do instead. Indeed, anything besides ignoring the mistake is often a good thing to do instead. So merely noticing when you're going wrong can be over half the battle.”
I agree with this, and also want to add an aspect that feels important to me.
Being able to notice an internal experience as it happens gives us the change to ‘reconsider’ the default choice. (Basically, we manage to spot a trigger-action-patterns - a process that is usually happening fully on autopilot. For me see here.)
If I am sufficiently self-aligned, meaning if all of me agrees about the ‘correct’ or ‘desired’ (re)action in this situation, the act of noticing alone can build the necessary affordance to change the course of action. In other words, whenever I manage to pick up on a mental move (for example: flinching, rationalizing, getting triggered, defensiveness, ...) I have significantly higher chances than otherwise to follow my true volition.
Using a metaphor to illustrate this, affordance feels to me like standing on the top of a hill from where any direction I could take is downhill. Meaning, I don’t need to exert energy or willpower to pick a specific course of actions. I can do whatever seems most appropriate without having to ‘overcome an inner demon’. Things can just roll.
A framework I like
“Do you know what you are doing? And why you are doing it?”
At EA Global San Francisco, Duncan gave a class that I liked a lot on ’How to invent your own rationality’. I often use the proposed framework when thinking about what (and when) I want to notice (something).
The following is my attempt at rephrasing his idea - what I came to call the “Where am I?”-, short “WAI”-Framework (^^):
There is You, there is a Goal; and that’s the path how you move from where you are now, to where you want to be at t+1.
However, there is also a path that leads you away from your goal. More often than note, we somehow end up on this second path.
Can we learn to more reliably stay on the ‘good’ path?
(… ever heard of applied rationality?!)
So, this is where noticing comes in.
You can notice:
What happened way before you derailed.
Example: Your work is piling up and a deadline is approaching fast. You had this unpleasant and still unresolved disagreement with one of your co-workers that you are still pondering upon. On your way home from work, you realize how mentally and emotionally exhausted you are.
Maybe that’s a good time to put up some yellow flags. Maybe you want to let your partner know what is occupying you so that you can prevent from getting caught up in one of these unnecessary fights over dinner, that usually stem from a mismatch in expectations.This can help you to formulate theories/hypotheses about contextual factors that systematically hamper/support you in achieving your goals.
The very moment of (or just before?) derailing.
Example: The moment when you reach for the third cookie and in your mind a belief forms that "ah, f.. it! I've eaten too many of them already anyway.")
This awareness alone can often be enough to build the affordance necessary to activate your wisdom and self-efficacy and ‘stay on track’.
Shortly after you derailed.
Example: Noticing that you are being defensive (e.g. you raised your voice, you are trying to defend something, you feel upset, frustrated and angry with the other person, ...).
This awareness alone can often be enough to let go of the undesired behaviour and 'get back on track'.
When you ended up at the wrong destination
Example: the cookie jar is empty.
This is late, yes, but rather late than never. You can still learn from your experience and reflect back on what happened before and along the way. And maybe you want to train yourself to, next time, notice earlier when things were starting to go off-track.
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June 2019 - a little slanted…