Category: Uncategorized

Some things I think about Double Crux and related topics

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

I’ve spent a lot of my discretionary time working on the broad problem of developing tools for bridging deep disagreements. I’m also probably the person who has spent the most time explicitly thinking about and working with CFAR’s Double Crux framework. It seems good for at least some of my high level thoughts to be written up some place, even if I’m not going to go into detail, defend, or substantiate, most of them.

The following are my own beliefs and do not necessarily represent CFAR, or anyone else. I, of course, reserve the right to change my mind.

Here are some things I currently belive:

(General)

  1. Double Crux is one (highly important) tool/ framework among many. I want to distinguish between the the overall art of untangling and resolving deep disagreements and the Double Crux tool in particular. The Double Crux framework is maybe the most important tool (that I know of) for that goal, but it is only one tool/framework in an ensemble.
    1. Some other tools/ frameworks, that are not strictly part of Double Crux (but which are sometimes crucial to bridging disagreements) include NVC, methods for managing people’s intentions and goals, various forms of co-articulation (helping to draw out an inchoate model from one’s conversational partner), etc.
    2. In some contexts other tools are substitutes for Double Crux (ie another framework is more useful) and in some cases other tools are helpful or necessary compliments (ie they solve problems or smooth the process within the Double Crux frame).
    3. In particular, my personal conversational facilitation repertoire is about 60%  Double Crux-related techniques, and 40% other frameworks that are not strictly within the frame of Double Crux.
  2. Just to say it clearly: I don’t think Double Crux is the only way to resolve disagreements, or the best way in all contexts. (Though I think it may be the best way, that I know of, in a plurality of common contexts?)
  3. The ideal use case for Double Crux is when…
    1. There are two people…
    2. …who have a real, action-relevant, decision…
    3. …that they need to make together (they can’t just do their own different things)…
    4. …in which both people have strong, visceral intuitions.
  4. Double Cruxes are almost always conversations between two people’s system 1’s.
  5. You can Double Crux between two people’s unendorsed intuitions. (For instance, Alice and Bob are discussing a question about open borders. They both agree that neither of them are economists, and that neither of them trust their intuitions here, and that if they had to actually make this decision, it would would be crucial to spend a lot of time doing research and examining the evidence and consulting experts. But nevertheless Alices current intuition leans in favor of Open Borders , and Bob’s current intuition leans agains Open Borders. This is a great starting point for a Double Crux.)
  6. Double cruxes (as in a crux that is shared by both parties in a disagreement) are common, and useful. Most disagreements have implicit Double Cruxes, though identifying them can sometimes be tricky.
  7. Conjunctive cruxes (I would change my mind about X, if I changed my mind about Y and about Z, but not if I only changed my mind about Y or Z) are common.
  8. Folks sometimes object that Double Crux won’t work, because their belief depends on a large number of considerations, each one of which has only a small impact on their overall belief, and so no one consideration is a crux. In practice, I find that there are double cruxes to be found even in cases where people expect their beliefs have this structure.
    1. Theoretically, it makes sense that we would find double cruxes here: if a person has a strong disagreement (including a disagreement of intuition) with someone else, we should expect that there are a small number of considerations doing most of the work of causing one person to think one thing and the other to think something else. It is improbable that each person’s beliefs depend on 50 factors, and for Alice, most of those 50 factors point in one direction, and for Bob, most of those 50 factors point in the other direction, unless the details of those factors are not independent. If considerations are correlated, you can abstract out the fact or belief that that generates the differing predictions in all of those separate considerations. That “generating belief” is a crux.
    2. That said, there is a different conversational approach that I sometimes use, which involves delineating all of the key considerations (then doing Goal-factoring style relevance and completeness checks), and then dealing with each consideration one at time (often via a fractal tree structure: listing the key considerations of each of the higher level considerations).
      1. This approach absolutely requires paper, and skillful (firm, gentle) facilitation, because people will almost universally try and hop around between considerations, and they need to be viscerally assured that their other concerns are recorded and will be dealt with in due course, in order to engage deeply with any given consideration.
  9. About 60% of the power of Double Crux comes from being specific.
    1. I quite like Liron’s recent sequence on being specific. It re-reminded me of some basic things that have been helpful in several recent conversations. In particular, I like the move of having a conversational paint a specific, best case scenario, as a starting point for discussion.
      1. (However, I’m concerned about Less Wrong readers trying this with a spirit of trying to “catch out” one’s conversational partner in inconsistency, instead of trying to understand what their partner wants to say, and thereby shooting themselves in the foot. I think the attitude of looking to “catch out” is usually counterproductive to both understanding and to persuasion. People rarely change their mind when they feel like you have trapped them in some inconsistency, but they often do change their mind if they feel like you’ve actually heard and understood their belief / what they are trying to say / what they are trying to defend, and then provide relevant evidence and argument. In general (but not universally) it is more productive to adopt a collaborative attitude of trying to sincerely trying to help a person articulate, clarify, and substantiate the point your partner is trying to make, even if you suspect that their point is ultimately wrong and confused.)
  10. Many (~50%) disagreements evaporate upon operationalization, but this happens less frequently than people think: and if you seem to agree about all of the facts, and agree about all specific operationalizations, but nevertheless seem to have differing attitudes about a question, that should be a flag. [I have a post that I’ll publish soon about this problem.]
  11. You should be using paper when Double Cruxing. Keep track of the chain of Double Cruxes, and keep them in view.
  12. People talk past eachother all the time, and often don’t notice it. Frequently paraphrasing your current understand of what your conversational partner is saying, helps with this. [There is a lot more to say about this problem, and details about how to solve it effectively].
  13. I don’t endorse the Double Crux “algorithm” described in the canonical post. That is, I don’t think that the best way to steer a Double Crux conversation, is to hew to those 5 steps in that order. Actually finding double cruxes is, in practice, much more complicated, and there are a large number of heuristics and TAPs that make the process work. I regard that algorithm as an early (and self conscious) attempt to delineate moves that would help move a conversation towards double cruxes.
  14. This is my current best attempt at distilling the core moves that makes Double Crux work, though this leaves out a lot.
  15. In practice, I think that double cruxes most frequently emerge not from people independently generating their own list cruxes (though this is useful). Rather double cruxes usually emerge from the move of “checking if the point that your partner made is a crux for you.”
  16. I strongly endorse facilitation of basically all tricky conversations, Double Crux oriented or not. It is much easier to have a third party track the meta and help steer, instead of the participants, who’s working memory is (and should be) full of the object level.
  17. So called, “Triple Crux” is not a feasible operation. If you have more than two stakeholders, have two of them Double Crux, and then have one of those two Double Crux with the third person. Things get exponentially trickier as you add more people. I don’t think that Double Crux is a feasible method for coordinating more than ~ 6 people.
  18. Double Crux is much easier when both parties are interested in truth-seeking and in changing their mind, and are assuming good faith about the other. But, these are not strict prerequisites, and unilateral Double Crux is totally a thing.
  19. People being defensive, emotional, or ego-filled does not preclude a productive Double Crux. Some particular auxilary skills are required for navigating those situations, however.
    1. This is a good start for the relevant skills.
  20. If a person wants to get better at Double Crux skills, I recommend they cross-train with IDC. Any move that works in IDC you should try in Double Crux. Any move that works in Double Crux you should try in IDC. This will seem silly sometimes, but I am pretty serious about it, even in the silly-seeming cases. I’ve learned a lot this way.
  21. I don’t think Double Crux necessarily runs into a problem of “black box beliefs” wherein one can no longer make progress because one or both parties comes down to a fundamental disagreement about System 1 heuristics/ models that they learned from some training data, but into which they can’t introspect. Almost always, there are ways to draw out those models.
    1. The simplest way to do this (which is not the only or best way, depending on the circumstances, involves generating many examples and testing the “black box” against them. Vary the hypothetical situations to triangulate to the exact circumstances in which the “black box” outputs which suggestions.
    2. I am not making the universal claim that one never runs into black box beliefs, that can’t be dealt with.
  22. Disagreements rarely come down to “fundamental value disagreements”. If you think that you have gotten to a disagreement about fundamental values, I suspect there was another conversational tact that would have been more productive.
  23. Also, you can totally Double Crux about values. In practice, you can often treat values like beliefs: often there is some evidence that a person could observe, at least in principle, that would convince them to hold or not hold some “fundamental” value.
    1. I am not making the claim that there are no such thing as fundamental values, or that all values are Double Crux-able.
  24. A semi-esoteric point: cruxes are  (or can be) contiguous with operationalizations. For instance, if I’m having a disagreement about whether advertising produces value on net, I might operationalize to “beer commercials, in particular, produce value on net”, which (if I think that operationalization actually captures the original question) is isomorphic to “The value of beer commercials is a crux for the value of advertising.  I would change my mind about advertising in general, if I changed my mind about beer commercials.” (In this is an evidential crux, as opposed to the more common causal crux. (More on this distinction in future posts.))
  25. People’s beliefs are strongly informed by their incentives. This makes me somewhat less optimistic about tools in this space than I would otherwise be, but I still think there’s hope.
  26. There are a number of gaps in the repertoire of conversational tools that I’m currently aware of. One of the most important holes is the lack of method for dealing with psychological blindspots. These days, I often run out of ability to make a conversation go well when we bump into a blindspot in one person or the other (sometimes, there seem to be psychological blindspots on both sides). Tools wanted, in this domain.

(The Double Crux class)

  1. Knowing how to identify Double Cruxes can be kind of tricky, and I don’t think that most participants learn the knack from the 55 to 70 minute Double Crux class at a CFAR workshop.
  2. Currently, I think I can teach the basic knack (not including all the other heuristics and skills) to a person in about 3 hours, but I’m still playing around with the how to do this most efficiently. (The “Basic Double Crux pattern” post is the distillation of my current approach.)
    1. This is one development avenue that would particularly benefit from from parallel search: If you feel like you “get” Double Crux, and can identify Double Cruxes fairly reliably and quickly, it might be helpful if you explicated your process.
  3. That said, there are a lot of relevant compliments and sub-skills to Double Crux, and to bridging disagreements more generally.
  4. The most important function of the Double Crux class at CFAR workshops is teaching and propagating the concept of a “crux”, and to a lesser extent, the concept of a “double crux”. These are very useful shorthands for one’s personal thinking and for discourse, which are great to have in the collective lexicon.

(Some other things)

  1. Personally, I am mostly focused on developing deep methods (perhaps for training high-expertise specialists) that increase the range of problems (in this case, disagreements) that the x-risk ecosystem can solve at all. I care more about this goal this than developing shallow tools that are useful “out of the box” for smart non-specialists, or in trying to change the conversational norms of various relevant communities (though both of those are secondary goals.)
  2. I am highly skeptical of teaching many-to-most of the important skills for bridging deep disagreement, via anything other than ~one-on-one, in-person interaction.
  3. As such, I am publishing my drafts of Double Crux stuff here, over the next few weeks. But making writeups for the public internet, particularly of content that I don’t yet know how to teach via writing, is not a priority for me.

I have a standing offer to facilitate conversations and disagreements (Double Crux or not) for rationalists and EAs. Email me at eli [at] rationality [dot] org if that’s something you’re interested in.

On Double Crux tests and tournaments

~ elityre ~ 3 Comments

Most of the tests I’ve heard people pitch for DC don’t seem very valuable to me, and I want to at least gesture at why.

Other folks seem to be thinking of Double Crux as a complete method, to be directly compared with other methods: “which one works better”. I think of Double Crux as one (very important) pattern in an ensemble for the overall goal of bridging disagreements. “Testing Double Crux”, as I often hear people talk about it, sounds to me a little like “testing bank shots” in basketball: it is clearly useful sometimes, it isn’t always the right thing to go for, and it depends heavily on personal skill.

I think that example overstates it somewhat: Double Crux is more of a broad framework for disagreement bridging than bankshots are for basketball. And that’s not to say that you can’t test bank shots: it’s plausible that there are superstitions about it, and it isn’t as effective as many practitioner’s belive. But the value of information seems lower to me (at least at this stage, where approximately no one has put in more than 20 hours in explicitly training disagreement bridging, compared to basketball, which has hundreds of highly skilled experts.)

I would be more excited in organizing a “disagreement resolution tournament”, where experts who have developed their art and trained to excellence, compete, rather than (for instance) a setup where we give 20 undergrads a 30 minute long double crux lecture with 30 minutes of practice, and compare them to a control group.

(That second things isn’t useless, but I care a lot less about developing shallow tools that are helpful for ~0-skilled folks, out of the box, than I do about deep experts who increase the range of problems (in this case, disagreements) that humanity  / the x-risk ecosystem can solve at all.)

The logistics of such a tournament seem hard to make work, because there’s not an obvious way to standardized disagreements to resolve, and in practice there are very few highly skilled experts of differing schools. So the value of information in 2019 still seems low. But it seems more promising than most of the tests I hear proposed.

Capability testing as a pseudo fire alarm

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

[epistemic status: a thought I had]

It seems like it would be useful to have very fine-grained measures of how smart / capable a general reasoner is, because this would allow an AGI project to car-fully avoid creating a system smart enough to pose an existential risk.

I’m imagining slowly feeding a system more training data (or, alternatively, iteratively training a system with slightly more compute), and regularly checking its capability. When the system reaches “chimpanzee level” (whatever that means), you stop training it (or giving it more compute resources).

This might even be a kind of fire-alarm. If you have a known predetermined battery of tests, then when some lab develops a system that scores “at the chimp level” at that battery, that might be a signal to everyone, that it’s time to pool our resources and figure out safety. (Of course, this event might alternatively precipitate a race, as everyone tries to get to human-level first.)

Probably the best way to do this would be for both training data, and compute / architecture. Start with a given architecture, then train it, slowly increasing the amount or quality of the training data, with regular tests (done on “spurs”, the agent should never have eposodic memory of the . When increasing training data plateaus, iteratively improve the architecture in some way, either by giving the systems it more compute resources, or maybe making small adjustment. Again train the new version of the system, with regular tests. If you ever start to get very steep improvement, slow down and run tests more frequently.

Naively, it seems like a setup like this would prevent an AI team from overshooting and making a system that is much more capable that they think (which gives rise to all kinds of problems, like treacherous turns), regardless of how close “chimp” is to “human” on some absolute intelligence scale.

Some considerations:

  • This of course, depends on having metrics that work. Of course, it seems very likely that early general AIs will be minds with a very unusual “shape”, such that it has sophisticated reasoning abilities along dimensions that are not natural categories to humans, while being weak on many of the dimensions we’re testing for.
    • Although, this seems a bit surprising, since presumably we would be training it to hit those metrics? Somehow it would get better, faster, at a kind of reasoning we were not intending to train, than at the kind of reasoning that we were optimizing for?
    • Also, can we just design metrics that get around this problem, by measuring exactly what we care about, i.e. danger? Something like a metric for consequentialist reasoning?
  • This idea depends on the system not deceiving you, or intentionally underperforming on your metrics.
    • Naively, this doesn’t seem like that much of an issue, if you are doing tests regularly enough. I’m presuming (perhaps wrongly), that a chimpanzee is not smart enough to infer that it is an agent in a simulation that is overseen by human agents, and that it should try to decide those humans. That is, we stop our progression before the agent is at the point where deception is a consideration.
      • Which means we really need to be confident about how smart something needs to be before it tries to deceive us?
        • Really? Its first attempts at tricking humans will be bad. Just as the attempts of animals to trick us will be pretty bad.
  • At least one “danger point”, is when the system is capable enough to realize the instrumental value of self improving by seizing more resources.
    • How smart is this?
      • My guess, is really smart. Animals come pre-loaded with all kinds of instincts that cause them to seek out food, water, etc. These AI systems would not have an instinct to seek more training data / computation. Most humans don’t reason their way into finding ways to improve their own reasoning. If there was a chimp, even loose in the internet (whatever that means), would it figure out to make itself smarter?
      • If the agent has experienced (and has memories of) rounds of getting smarter, as the humans give it more resources, and can identify that these improvements allow it to get more of what it wants, it might instrumentally reason that it should figure out how to get more compute / training data. But it seems easy to have a setup such that no system has episodic memories previous improvement rounds.
        • [Note: This makes a lot less sense for an agent of the active inference paradigm]
          • Could I salvage it somehow? Maybe by making some kind of principled distinction between learning in the sense of “getting better at reasoning” (procedural), and learning in the sense of “acquiring information about the environment” (episodic).

 

 

IQ and impulsiveness

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

[Real short post. Random. Complete speculation.]

Childhood lead exposure reduces one’s IQ, and also causes one to be more impulsive and aggressive.

I always assumed that the impulsiveness was due, basically, to your executive function machinery working less well. So you have less self control.

But maybe the reason for the IQ-impulsiveness connection, is that if you have a lower IQ, all of your subagents/ subprocesses are less smart. Because they’re worse at planning and modeling the world, the only way they know how to get their needs met are very direct, very simple, action-plans/ strategies. It’s not so much that you’re better at controlling your anger, as the part of you that would be angry is less so, because it has other ways of getting its needs met.

Hypothesis: three kind of mental energy

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

[epistemic status: private research note, except on the internet. Not even wrong. Thought in progress.]

I need to distinguish between different kinds of mental energy in the same way that I distinguish between different kinds of “feeling out of it”.

Here’s a start:

  1. Global energy – How energized you are to act on the scale of days (and shorter timescales). Relates to whether key goals are handled, or unhandled in a way that is being ignored, or that you’ve given up on, or is intractable, or is otherwise “stuck” (alternatively, key goals can be unhandled in a way that induces action). Probably related to depression.
  2. Phenomenological mental energy – The feeling of running out of mental steam. This is probably analogous to boredom. The longer you engage in an activity (that you dislike, or that isn’t fun, or something), the more you feel averse to exerting yourself. This is distinct from…
  3. “Cognitive resources” –  This is in quotes because it is probably fake in the way that phlogiston is fake: it is the absence of a thing (phlogiston is the absence of oxygen). This is whether ones performance on a task is actually declining.

This is informed by reading that I’ve been doing lately, and introspection that I’ve been doing, neither of which I will share in detail here.

How do I jumpstart into productivity momentum?

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

Initial ideas:

  • Start working as soon as I wake up
  • Start working at some pre-selected time, or at some pre-selected trigger.
  • Do my serenity protocol.
  • Process one of my inboxes (push through the crud, the small effort-aversions, and get into the rhythm of completing tasks)
  • Meditate
  • Mastrubate
  • Pick a task, then do 90 seconds of cardio.

My intervention, just learn to notice when my productivity momentum is low.

Looking at my listed hypotheses, from last year:

Hypothesis 1: My mind is mostly driven by short-term gratification. I can get short term gratification in one of two ways: via immediate stimulation, or by making progress towards goals. Making progress towards goals is more satisfying, but it also has some delay. Switching from immediate stimulation to satisfaction by making progress on goals  entails a period of time when you’re not receiving immediate stimulation, and also not being satisfied by goal-progress, because you’re still revving up and getting oriented. It takes a while to get into the flow of working, when it starts being enjoyable.

But once you’re experiencing satisfaction from goal-progress, it feels good and you’re motivated to continue doing that.

  • This suggests that I should do something that makes progress towards goals, but also gives me immediate gratification (like touch typing practice)?
    • Other options:
      • Processing email or reminders

Hypothesis 1.5: Same as above, but it isn’t about gratification from immediate stimulation vs. gratification from goal-progress. It’s about gratification from immediate stimulation vs. gratification from self actualization or self exertion, the pleasure of pushing yourself and exhausting yourself.

  • This suggests the same kind of actions as 1. + things like just setting an timer for an hour and switching to deep work (which I predict I will be resistant to, which is evidence for 1.

Hypothesis 2: There’s an activation energy or start up cost to the more effortful mode of being productive, but once that cost is paid, it’s easy.

[I notice that the sort of phenomenon described in Hyp. 1, 1.5, and  2, is not unique to “productivity”. It also seems to occur in other domains. I often feel a disinclination to go exercise, but once I start, it feels good and I want to push myself. (Though, notably, this “broke” for me in the past few months. Perhaps investigating why it broke would reveal something about how this sort of momentum works in general?)]

  • Intervention: make it as easy as possible to pay that activation energy (which sounds kind of like “productive task with immediate gratification”).

Hypothesis 3: It’s about efficacy. Once I’ve made some progress, spent an hour in deep work, or whatever, I the relevant part of my mind alieves that I am capable of making progress on my goals, and so is more motivated do that.

In other words, being productive is evidence that something good will happen if I try, which makes it worth while to try.

(This would sugest that other boosts to one’s self-confidence or belief in ability to do things would also jump start momentum chains, which seems correct.)

  • I could do autosuggestion, or affirmations?
  • I just need to do something hard?
    • But I don’t feel motivated to do something hard. That’s the point.

Hypothesis 4: It’s about a larger time budget inducing parts-coordination. I have a productive first hour and get stuff done. A naive extrapolation says that if all of the following hours have a similar density of doing and completing, then I will be able to get many things done. Given this all my parts that are advocating for different things that are important to them settle down, confident that their thing will be gotten to.

In contrast if I have a bad morning, each part is afraid that it’s goal will be left by the wayside, and so they all scramble to drag my mind to their thing, and I can’t focus on any one thing.

[This doesn’t seem right. The primary contrasting state is more like lazy and lackadaisical, rather than frazzled.]

Yeah. This seems not right.

Hypothesis 5: It is related to failing with abandon. It’s much more motivating to be aiming to have an excellent day than it is to be aiming to recover from a bad morning to have a decent day. There’s an inclination to say “f*** it”, and not try as hard, because the payoffs are naturally divided into chunks of a day.

Or another way to say this: my motivation increases after a good morning because I alieve that I can get to all the things done, and getting all the things done is much more motivating than getting 95% of the things done because of completion heuristics (which I’ve already noted, but not written about anywhere).

Note: I think that I have learned about not failing with abandon, and this hypothesis dose not seem on point anymore.

Hypothesis 6: It’s about attention. There’s something that correlates with productivity which is something like “crispness of attention” and “snappiness of attentional shifts.” Completing a task and then moving on to the next one has this snappiness.

Having a “good morning” means engaging deeply with some task or project and really getting immersed in it. This sort of settledness is crucial to productivity and it is much easier to get into if I was there recently. (Because of fractionation?!)

This snappiness of attention seems like “cognitive effort/cognitive readiness“.

Hypothesis 7: It’s about setting a precedent or a set point for executive function, or something? There’s a thing that happens throughout the day, which is that an activity is suggested, by my mind or by my systems, and some relevant part of me decides “Yes, I’ll do that now”, or “No, I don’t feel like it.”

I think those choices are correlated for some reason? The earlier ones set the standard for the later ones? Because of consistency effects? (I doubt that that is the reason. I would more expect a displacement effect (“ah. I worked hard this morning, I don’t need to do this now”) than a consistency effect (“I choose to work earlier today, so I’m a choose-to-work person”). In any case, this effect is way subverbal, and doesn’t involve the social mind at all, I think.)

This one feels pretty right. But why would it be? Maybe one of hypotheses 1-5?

And here I mention cognitive effort/ readiness, pretty exactly.

Are there other ways to adjust the setpoint?

It matters if this is a positive effect, that causes actions (as this framing implies), or a negative effect, that prevents actions (as the framing of hyp. 7.5 implies). Is is about increasing my cognitive effort, or about not giving in to fleeding temptations?

  • practice noting my urges, instead of acting on them.

Hypothesis 8: Working has two components: the effort of starting and reward making progress / completing.

If you’re starting cold, you have to force yourself through the effort, and it’s easier to procrastinate, putting the task off for a minute or an hour.

But if you’ve just been working on or just completed something else and are feeling the reward high from that, then the reward component of tasks in general, is much more salient, is pulled into near-mode immediacy. Which makes the next task more compelling.

I think this captures a lot of my phenomenological experience regarding productivity momentum and it also explains the related phenomena with exercise and similar.

(Also, there’s something like an irrational fear of effort, which builds up higher and higher as long as you’re avoiding is, but which dissipates once you exert some effort?)

(M/T on Hyp. 8:) If this were the case, it seems like it would predict that momentum would decay if one took a long break in the middle of the day. I think in practice this isn’t quite right, because the “productivity high” of a good morning can last for a long time, into the afternoon or evening.

  •  Again, this seems to imply some kind of bootstrapping activity, that is both easy and/or engaging, and effectively productive.

Hypothesis 7.5: [related to 1, 1.5, and 3. More or less a better reformulation of 7.] There’s a global threshold of distraction or of acting on (or reacting to) thoughts and urges flashing through one’s mind. Lowering this threshold on the scale of weeks and months, but it also varies day by day. Momentum entails lowering that threshold, so that one’s focus on any given task can be deep, instead of shallow.

This predicts that meditation and meditative-like practices would lower the threshold and potentially start up cycle of productivity momentum. Indeed, the only mechanism that I’ve found that has reliably helped me recover from unproductive mornings and afternoons is a kind of gently-enforced serenity process.

I think this one is pretty close to correct.

 

Hypothesis 10: [related to 2, and 8] It’s just about ambiguity resolution. Once I start working, I have a clear and sense of what that’s like which bounds the possible hedonic downside. (I should write more about ambiguity avoidance.)

Bah. Seems wrong.

 

Notes:

  • Why is it that getting up and working first thing in the morning jumpstarts momentum?
  • Why is it that starting at a particular time, jumpstarts productivity momentum.

 

Cognitive readiness

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

[not obviously coherent]

There’s cognitive effort, which is, approximately, “thinking hard”, using your System 2, dilating your pupils. This should vary second to second, minute to minute, as you switch tasks, and as difficulty changes within tasks.

But there’s something like “willingness to exert effort”, or what I’m tentatively calling “cognitive readiness.” This accounts for how much resistance you have to increasing cognitive effort.

When I have a spare minute at the airport, how do I feel about processing tasks, vs. continuing to mostly-passively listen to an audio book.

It’s possible that cognitive readiness is just a matter of not being in an unproductive state + having your goals loaded up. But it might still be useful to ask what the inputs to cognitive readiness are.

  • Available mental energy
  • Cutting off easy attractor?
    • You are lazy, and there is always an attractor toward passivity?
  • Good posture?
  • Clear planning?
  • …

What is mental energy?

~ elityre

[Note: I’ve started a research side project on this question, and it is already obvious to me that this ontology importantly wrong.] 

There’s a common phenomenology of “mental energy”. For instance, if I spend a couple of hours thinking hard (maybe doing math), I find it harder to do more mental work afterwards. My thinking may be slower and less productive. And I feel tired, or drained, (mentally, instead of physically).

Mental energy is one of the primary resources that one has to allocate, in doing productive work. In almost all cases, humans have less mental energy than they have time, and therefore effective productivity is a matter of energy management, more than time management. If we want to maximize personal effectiveness, mental energy seems like an extremely important domain to understand. So what is it?

The naive story is that mental energy is an actual energy resource that one expends and then needs to recoup. That is, when one is doing cognitive work, they are burning calories, depleting their bodies energy stores. As they use energy, they have less fuel to burn.

My current understanding is that this story is not physiologically realistic. Thinking hard does consume more of the body’s energy than baseline, but not that much more. And we experience mental fatigue long before we even get close to depleting our calorie stores. It isn’t literal energy that is being consumed. [The Psychology of Fatigue pg.27]

So if not that, what is going on here?

A few hypotheses:

(The first few, are all of a cluster, so I labeled them 1a, 1b, 1c, etc.)

Hypothesis 1a: Mental fatigue is a natural control system that redirects our attention to our other goals.

The explanation that I’ve heard most frequently in recent years (since it became obvious that much of the literature on ego-depletion was off the mark), is the following:

A human mind is composed of a bunch of subsystems that are all pushing for different goals. For a period of time, one of these goal threads might be dominant. For instance, if I spend a few hours doing math, this means that my other goals are temporarily suppressed or on hold: I’m not spending that time seeking a mate, or practicing the piano, or hanging out with friends.

In order to prevent those goals from being neglected entirely, your mind has a natural control system that prevents you from focusing your attention on any one thing at a time: the longer you put your attention on something, the greater the build up of mental fatigue, causing you to do anything else.

Comments and model-predictions: This hypothesis, as stated, seems implausible to me. For one thing, it seems to suggest that that all actives would be equally mentally taxing, which is empirically false: spending several hours doing math is mentally fatiguing, but spending the same amount of time watching TV is not.

This might still be salvaged if we offer some currency other than energy that is being preserved: something like “forceful computations”. But again, it doesn’t seem obvious why the computations of doing math would be more costly than those for watching TV.

Similarly, this model suggests that “a change is as good as a break”: if you switch to a new task, you should be back to full mental energy, until you become fatigued for that task as well.

Hypothesis 1b: Mental fatigue is the phenomenological representation of the loss of support for the winning coalition.

A variation on this hypothesis would be to model the mind as a collection of subsystems. At any given time, there is only one action sequence active, but that action sequence is determined by continuous “voting” by various subsystems.

Overtime, these subsystems get fed up with their goals not being met, and “withdraw support” for the current activity. This manifests as increasing mental fatigue. (Perhaps your thoughts get progressively less effective, because they are interrupted, on the scale of micro-seconds, by bids to think something else).

Comments and model-predictions: This seems like it might suggest that if all of the subsystems have high trust that their goals will be met, that math (or any other cognitively demanding task) would cease to be mentally taxing. Is that the case? (Does doing math mentally exhaust Critch?)

This does have the nice virtue of explaining burnout: when some subset of needs are not satisfied for a long period, the relevant subsystems pull their support for all actions, until those needs are met.

[Is burnout a good paradigm case for studying mental energy in general?]

Hypothesis 1c: The same as 1a or 1b, but some mental operations are painful for some reason.

To answer my question above, one reason why math might be more mentally taxing than watching TV, is that doing math is painful.

If the process of doing math is painful on the micro-level, then even if all of the other needs are met, there is still a fundamental conflict between the subsystem that is aiming to acquire math knowledge, and the subsystem that is trying to avoid micro-pain on the micro-level.

As you keep doing math, the micro pain part votes more and more strongly against doing math, or the overall system biases away from the current activity, and you run out of mental energy.

Comments and model-predictions: This seems plausible for the activity of doing math, which involves many moments of frustration, which might be meaningfully micro-painful. But it seems less consistent with activities like writing, which phenomenologically feel non-painful. This leads to hypothesis 1d…

Hypothesis 1d: The same as 1c, but the key micro-pain is that of processing ambiguity second to second

Maybe the pain comes from many moments of processing ambiguity, which is definitely a thing that is happening in the context of writing. (I’ll sometimes notice myself try to flinch to something easier when I’m not sure which sentence to write.) It seems plausible that mentally taxing activities are taxing to the extent that they involve processing ambiguity, and doing a search for the best template to apply.

Hypothesis 1e: Mental fatigue is the penalty incurred for top down direction of attention.

Maybe consciously deciding to do things is importantly different from the “natural” allocation of cognitive resources. That is, your mind is set up such that the conscious, System 2, long term planning, metacognitive system, doesn’t have free rein. It has a limited budget of “mental energy”, which measures how long it is allowed to call the shots before the visceral, system 1, immediate gratification systems take over again.

Maybe this is an evolutionary adaption? For the monkeys that had “really good” plans for how to achieve their goals, never panned out for them. The monkeys that were impulsive some of the time, actually did better at the reproduction game?

(If this is the case, can the rest of the mind learn to trust S2 more, and thereby offer it a bigger mental energy budget?)

This hypothesis does seem consistent with my observation that rest days are rejuvenating, even when I spend my rest day working on cognitively demanding side projects.

Hypothesis 2: Mental fatigue is the result of the brain temporarily reaching knowledge saturation.

When learning a motor task, there are several phases in which skill improvement occurs. The first, unsurprisingly, is durring practice sessions. However, one also sees automatic improvements in skill in the hours after practice [actually this part is disputed] and following a sleep period (academic link1, 2, 3). That is, there is a period of consolidation following a practice session. This period of consolidation probably involves the literal strengthening of neural connections, and encoding other brain patterns that take more than a few seconds to set.

I speculate, that your brain may reach a saturation point: more practice, more information input, becomes increasingly less effective, because you need to dedicate cognitive resources to consolidation. [Note that this is supposing that there is some tradeoff between consolidation activity and input activity, as opposed to a setup where both can occur simultaneously (does anyone have evidence for such a tradeoff?)].

If so, maybe cognitive fatigue is the phenomenology of needing to extract one’s self from a practice / execution regime, so that your brain can do post-processing and consolidation on what you’ve already done and learned.

Comments and model-predictions: This seems to suggest that all cognitively taxing tasks are learning tasks, or at least tasks in which one is encoding new neural patterns. This seems plausible, at least.

It also seems to naively imply that an activity will become less mentally taxing as you gain expertise with it, and progress along the learning curve. There is (presumably) much more information to process and consolidate in your first hour of doing math than in your 500th.

Hypothesis 3: Mental fatigue is a control system that prevents some kind of damage to the mind or body.

One reason why physical fatigue is useful is that it prevents damage to your body. Getting tired after running for a bit, stops you for running all out for 30 hours at a time, and eroding your fascia.

By simple analogy to physical fatigue, we might guess that mental fatigue is a response to vigorous mental activity that is adaptive in that it prevents us from hurting ourselves.

I have no idea what kind of damage might be caused by thinking too hard.

I note that mania and hypomania involve apparently limitless mental energy reserves, and I think that theses states are bad for your brain.

Hypothesis 4: Mental fatigue is a buffer overflow of peripheral awareness.

Another speculative hypothesis: Human minds have a working memory: a limit of ~4 concepts, or chunks, that can be “activated”, or operated upon in focal attention, at one time. But meditators, at least, also talk a peripheral awareness: a sort of halo of concepts and sense impressions that are “loaded up”, or “near by”, or cognitively available, or “on the fringes of awareness”. These are all the ideas that are “at hand” to your thinking. [Note: is peripheral awareness, as the meditators talk about,  the same thing as “short term memory”?]

Perhaps if there is a functional limit to the amount of content that can be held in working memory, there is a similar, if larger, limit to how much content can be held in peripheral awareness. As you engage with a task, more and more mental content is loaded up, or added to peripheral awareness, where it both influences your focal thought process, and/or is available to be operated on directly in working memory. As you continue the task, and more and more content gets added to peripheral awareness, you begin to overflow its capacity. It gets harder and harder to think, because peripheral awareness is overflowing. Your mind needs space to re-ontologize: to chunk pieces together, so that it can all fit in the same mental space. Perhaps this is what mental fatigue is.

Comments and model-predictions: This does give a nice clear account of why sleep replenishes mental energy (it both causes re-ontologizing, and clears the cache), though perhaps this does not provide evidence over most of the other hypotheses listed here.

Other notes about mental energy:

  • In this post, I’m mostly talking about mental energy on the scale of hours. But there is also a similar phenomenon on the scale of days (the rejuvenation one feels after rest days) and on the scale of months (burnout and such). Are these the same basic phenomenon on different timescales?
  • On the scale of days, I find that my subjective rest-o-meter is charged up if I take a rest day, even if I spend that rest day working on fairly cognitively intensive side projects.
    • This might be because there’s a kind of new project energy, or new project optimism?
  • Mania and hypomania entail limitless mental energy.
  • People seem to be able to play video games for hours and hours without depleting mental energy. Does this include problem solving games, or puzzle games?
    • Also, just because they can play indefinitely does not mean that their performance doesn’t drop. Does performance drop, across hours of playing, say, snakebird?
  • For that matter, does performance decline on a task correlate with the phenomenological “running out of energy”? Maybe those are separate systems.

Napping Protocol

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

Followup to: Notes on Interventions for Falling Asleep

[This is a draft]

Some people seem to have a natural affinity for napping. They can just lie down and easily fall asleep. Unfortunately, I am not one of them. So over the past 2 months, I’ve been experimenting with and iterating on napping procedures, aiming to acquire the minor superpower of sleeping durring the day.

I have not yet gotten to a ~100% success rate: my current protocol effectively causes me to fall asleep something like 70% of the time. But I’ll keep iterating and post and update if and when I find a more robust procedure.

How to Fall asleep durring the day

  1. Make the room as dark as possible.
    1. (In my case, simply using blackout curtains is insufficient, I need to cover my window with with cardboard sheets, with the blackout curtains over it.)
  2. Cool the room or set up a chilling airflow.
    1. (This one might be specific to me, I have long needed cold to fall asleep: when I was 3, I would ask my parents to put my red blanky in the freezer.)
  3. Lay down in a comfortable position with your arms over your chest or by your sides.
  4. Progressively relax each part of your body.
    1. Put your attention on each body part, and silently tell it to relax. Continue until that body part has a tingly, heavy, “set” sensation (a feeling like it would resist moving or is encased in clay).
    2. Continue up the body:
      1. Toes
      2. Feet
      3. Lower legs
      4. Upper legs
      5. Buttocks
      6. Back (this part is hardest)
      7. Arms
      8. Neck
      9. Face (this is the most important one, I think)
  5. [Still experimental, so maybe useless] Lean into the hypnogogic imagery.

I usually have the subjective impression that it’s not going to work, that I’m not going to fall asleep, and then the next thing that I’m aware of is waking up an hour or so later.

As I said, this procedure is very much still experimental. It seems plausible that some parts are superfluous or inefficient, and also that there are still pieces missing. I’m going to keep tinkering.