Main.Murphyjitsu . . . by Vaniver: [note from Matt: I strongly prefer the established name "Premortem" to the CFAR jargon Murphyjitsu] [note from Vaniver: check out [[https://twitter.com/AnnaWSalamon/status/1623100826783993856|Anna's tweet on this]]]
Site.PageActions . . . by achmizs: (:if auth edit:)* %item rel=nofollow class=graphviz accesskey='$[ak_graphviz]'% [[{*$FullName}?action=graphviz&group={*$Group}"Show link map for {*$FullName} (accesskey: $[ak_graphviz])" | $[Link map] ]](:ifend:)
Main.DeliberatePerformance . . . by Vaniver: ...uplinks, including horizontal links to competitors or antipatterns ---- '''.''' Advice: Look for ways to incorporate rationality practice into the things that you are already doing. Rationality practice doesn’t always involve setting aside time to work on something. It can also involve going into tricky conversations with a different frame of mind, or trying out a new approach when writing a tough email, or quickly taking the outside view when confronted with a sudden problem at work. In particular, if you find that you’re too busy to do useful rationality practice, try thinking of “rationality” as any and all more effective approaches to the things that you’re already doing (instead of as an additional thing to add to the pile).
Main.TheStrategicLevel . . . by Vaniver: Consider applying this to the CFAR material as well. Don’t be satisfied with useful techniques. Look for what generated them—including the whole idea of seeking strategic updates at all. [[Category:CFAR Class]] [[Category:CFAR Flash Class]]
Main.Gears-LevelUnderstanding . . . by Vaniver: It seems to be important to distinguish between two kinds of knowing: the knowing that comes from listening to trusted sources, and the knowing that comes from seeing why the world couldn’t possibly be any other way. Let’s imagine someone shows you a box with two gears partially sticking out of opposite sides: %width=400px%Attach:gears1.png At first, you don’t know what will happen if the gear sticking out on the left is rotated downward. It could send the right gear downward, or it could send it upward; it could have absolutely no effect whatsoever. If the person tells you that the result will be the right gear rotating downward, you’ll either take it on faith, or you won’t, depending on how confident they seem and how much you trust them. If, on the other hand, you look inside the box yourself ...
Main.Frame-by-FrameDebugging . . . by Vaniver: Often, we have general stories for why things happened as they did, and use those general stories to guide behavior. The pattern of frame-by-frame debugging involves zooming in to the specific way in which things went wrong (as an analogy to finding the 'frame of the movie' when things went off the rails), applying a fix to that specific instant, and then confirming that in fact that would have caused the movie to go differently. This helps avoid wishful thinking situations where non-solutions are accepted as solutions, instead focusing on reductionistic detailed solutions.
Main.UnitsOfExchange . . . by Gretta Duleba: * Making one-time purchases (including “purchases” of time, energy, or social effort) that remove or reduce the cost of a repeated expense * Using Craigslist, Uber/Lyft, Ebay, OKCupid/match.com, mailing lists, and event calendars
Main.OODALoops . . . by Vaniver: %width=400px%Attach:oodaloop.png USAF Colonel John Boyd was a fighter pilot and theorist who developed a model of decisionmaking called the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop|OODA loop]]. Essentially, Colonel Boyd’s theory was that people are constantly looping through the same four steps as they interact with their environment: *Observe—Sometimes also called the "notice" step, this is the point at which you become aware of something which might require your attention. For a fighter pilot, this might be a flash of light on the horizon. For everyday life, this might be something like hearing a crash come from the kitchen, or seeing an expression flicker across your partner’s face. *Orient—This is the point at which you frame your observation, and decide how you will relate to it. Is this a problem to solve? A threat to avoid? Something unimportant that you can dismiss? *Decide—Sometimes also called the "choose" step, this is the point at which you formulate a plan. What will you actually do, given the ongoing situation? How will you respond? *Act—This is the point at which thinking pauses (until your next observation) and you move toward executing the plan you’ve already formed.
Main.SocraticDucking . . . by Vaniver: ...uplinks, including horizontal links to competitors or antipatterns [[Pair Debugging]] ---- '''Problems that seem like they require the help of another to solve are sometimes solved by formulating them clearly.''' Occasionally, a software developer will get stuck trying to debug a program, walk over to a colleague’s desk for help, and then—halfway through their explanation of the problem—suddenly realize exactly what’s wrong with their code and how to go about fixing it.
Main.ThoughtLengths . . . by Vaniver: I haven't yet copied over all of the images from the [[https://www.lesswrong.com/s/KAv8z6oJCTxjR8vdR/p/afEoXzGB4yt4Hk8zy|source on LW]]. This class doesn't feel like it obviously corresponds to a pattern instead of something more like the 'time dimension', but probably it does and I'm not looking at it right. If I say “Hi, how are you?” and you live in white middle class America, you’ll almost certainly say something resembling “Pretty good, you?” If I ask something like “What’s happened this week that you’ll remember five years from now?” I’ll get a response that’s a lot less predictable, but it’ll most likely be made out of words that I at least sort of understand. There’s a lot going on in the space between question and answer, and thanks to the work of generations of psychologists and neuroscientists (and a few unlucky souls with [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage|iron rods through their brains]] and so forth), we’re getting closer and closer to having some clear/workable/reliable causal models. We don’t have them yet, though, and while we’re waiting, it’s interesting to see what we can accomplish if we don’t even try. Call it a black box, and treat humans as complicated input/output devices with a whole bunch of levers and knobs—a stimulus goes in, some stuff happens under the hood, and a response comes out. Imagine the stimulus/response pattern as a ray or vector, and your mind as a surface. The external, sensory universe is everything above the surface, and the internal, cognitive universe is everything below. Something—say, a question—sparks a line of thought, and that line of thought leads to something else—like an answer.
Main.TasteAndShaping . . . by Gretta Duleba: This class was once titled Propagating Urges 1. It is a prerequisite for [[Internal Double Crux]], which was once titled Propagating Urges 2. This class: * Introduces [[Emotional Valence]] * Points out that there is data associated with both positive and negative emotional reactions * Points out that the data associated with negative emotional reactions is also important data * Introduces [[Behavior Shaping]] * [[Hyperbolic Discounting]] matters a lot when shaping behavior
Main.FiveSecondVersion . . . by Vaniver: '''Life happens quickly; habits often need to fire within five seconds for them to impact much of behavior.''' '''Create your own shorthand variations of techniques and seek out patterns that can fit into your regular behavior.'''
Main.Systemization . . . by DTK: '''Many people have routines or recurring "attention sinks" in their lives that could benefit from a more systematic approach.''' In many cases, people have situations or routines in their daily lives that aren't very thought through and could be streamlined and made more systematic. For example, someone might find themselves spending a lot of time coming up with various ad hoc plans with respect to preparing food, with this ultimately being a major time and attention sink; someone else might find that they keep having to do the same "busy work" tasks at work and wonder whether a more automated solution might exist. By upgrading to a more streamlined and consistent process, one can potentially save a lot of time and attention while also ensuring that they implement a more efficient version of the process. In particular, CFAR recommends focusing on' 'freeing one's attention'' -- how can one make one's environment or way of interacting with it handle these things as cleanly and smoothly as possible? How can one make these problems take care of themselves? Note that this doesn't mean "one system for everything' necessarily. Therefore:
Main.EatTheInstructions . . . by Duncan Sabien: The "try things" advice says "no, really, actually give things a shot, don't just rely on your preconceptions about what will or will not be useful." The "adjust your seat" advice says "no, really, the options people offer you are often not well-shaped for you; you need to tinker with it on the fly in order for it to be useful (most of the time)." These two pieces of advice are (somewhat) in conflict. Their synthesis is to ''eat the instructions''. In essence: do indeed try the exact instructions as written, ''once,'' for the sake of making sure that you don't miss any cool or subtle nuggets of insight/wisdom. But go into this process ''expecting'' that you will find it doesn't fit you very well, and plan to give it a ''second'' try, later, after you've customized it to meet your personal needs and idiosyncrasies.
Main.AdjustYourSeat . . . by Duncan Sabien: Much of the time, educational content and interpersonal advice is shaped to be generic. It's meant to be the least wrong for the greatest number of possible listeners, and thus is geared toward a sort of imagined average person. However, no one is in fact average on all axes, and thus even very very good advice is going to be importantly wrong for everyone, in some fashion. Therefore: '''Develop a habit of noticing the ways in which incoming advice is systematically wrong for you as an individual, and adjusting accordingly.'''
Main.TryThings . . . by Duncan Sabien: It doesn't take a very high hit rate for a habit of trying new things to pay off, because once you find one that you ''do'' like or benefit from, you can continue doing it forever.
Main.LettingWantsComeAlive . . . by Duncan Sabien: '''It often makes sense to be sort of dead and numbed.''' For instance, imagine being a vegan with a circle of friends who are ''not'' vegan. Your friends like to go out on Friday night and get food and see a movie, and they tend to choose restaurants where the vegan options are lettuce-covered lettuce with a side of lettuce. Assuming that you have already decided that these friends are worth hanging out with (i.e. you're not going to abandon the group over this issue), there is a way in which it is a ''bad idea'' to open up the restaurant menu with something like hope and expectation, only to reliably have those hopes dashed. It's strategically wiser to just eat your own food, at home, and think of the social outing as ''purely'' a social outing, rather than to set yourself up for disappointment. However, there are many situations in which a sort of alive-and-active wanting is a prerequisite for anything good happening. In ''those'' situations, it's important to be able to notice something like "ah, yes, my wanting has been self-protectively anesthetized because I had an implicit sense that it was quite risky to expose myself to a high chance of disappointment." It's important to be able to notice it, such that you can then (perhaps) decide to override the standard operating procedure, and ''make'' the risky move, and let yourself wake up and want things.
Main.Goodhart . . . by Gretta Duleba: NOTE This should really be named Goodhart's Curse but we don't currently have a cheap way to rename things and not break links, needs followup
Main.Turbocharging . . . by Vaniver: * A student in a mathematics class pays close attention as the teacher lectures, following each example problem and taking detailed notes, only to return home and discover that they aren’t able to make any headway at all on the homework problems. * A police officer disarms a hostile suspect in a tense situation, and then reflexively hands the weapon back to the suspect. * The WWII-era Soviet military [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog#Deployment_by_the_Soviet_Union|trains dogs to seek out tanks]] and then straps bombs to them, intending to use the dogs to destroy German forces in the field, only to find that they consistently run toward Soviet tanks instead. * A French language student with three semesters of study and a high GPA overhears a native speaker in a supermarket and attempts to strike up a conversation, only to discover that they are unable to generate even simple novel sentences without pausing noticeably to think.
Main.Attention . . . by Duncan Sabien: Attention has increasing marginal value; as you remove distractions and drains-on-attention, each successive removal gives you more and more ability to focus and execute. This is unfortunate, because it means that when one is ''first'' considering whether to begin removing drains-on-attention, there's not a great amount to be gained. A good metaphor is "if you are surrounded by ten screaming people, you wouldn't put that much effort into getting rid of just one, because there will still be nine, so what's the point?" But in fact if there was only ''one'' screaming person, you would likely be motivated to try quite hard to get them to shut up. The key insight is that you will never reach the situation where there's one last high-value drain-on-attention to remove unless you enact a policy of chipping away at the ''pile'' of drains-on-attention, even when the marginal value seems low. Therefore:
Main.Grandteaching . . . by Duncan Sabien: '''When you convey knowledge to a student, you rarely convey to them ''all'' of the complexity and detail that existed in your own understanding.''' Knowledge tends to ''decay'' over time, accumulating compression errors. The thing you convey to your student is pared-down and simplified, and the thing they ''receive'' will contain additional leaps and connections as they integrate it into their own understanding, some of which may be unintended or inaccurate. When they attempt to pass the knowledge along to ''their'' student, this process will compound, resulting in serious drift. This is especially problematic for domains of knowledge that are not well-pinned-down and explicit; if you are teaching someone multiplication and they accumulate misunderstandings, this is not a huge problem because various algorithms for multiplication are well-known and well-described; there's something of an ''anchor'' for the core concept, preventing excessive drift. But if what you are attempting to convey is original or pre-paradigmatic, such that no anchor exists, drift can be a serious problem. Therefore: '''When teaching, it helps to make your target "my student will correctly convey this to ''their'' student," i.e. to think in terms of heading off miscommunications and miscommunications in their future explanation of the topic at hand.''' This leads to more robust communication than directly focusing on the student in front of you.
Main.AutonomicNervousSystemControl . . . by Vaniver: ...rather than being controlled by your emotions, it is useful to understand their physiological underpinnings and control them. This pattern helps to form [[Reflective Behavior]] and [[Self-understanding]]. It also allows for the anti-patterns [[Unjustified Trust]] and [[Ignoring Your Emotions]], and so should be used with caution. Ever person is different, and will get different mileage from different techniques for noticing and affecting their SNS and PSNS activations. Some commonly useful affective techniques are [[Open Posture]], [[Deep Breaths]], and [[Remember Your Feet]]. Notice that techniques to affect can also be useful to perceive--opening your posture works if you started with [[Closed Posture]], which is a sign of (among other things) SNS activation.
Main.OpenPosture . . . by Vaniver: ... one's physical stance is often seen by others as one's emotional stance; moreover, it seems to be an important component of it. This technique is useful for [[Autonomic Nervous System Control]]. Contrast with [[Closed Posture]]. ---- '''TODO.''' Should I just link to [[https://www.verywellmind.com/understand-body-language-and-facial-expressions-4147228|something like this]] here? Uncross your arms and legs, if you are sitting, and create as much space between the bottom of your ribcage and the top of your pelvis as you can. Lift your chin, and elongate your neck. If your arms are crossed or your shoulders are forward, draw them back and to the sides, and spread your fingers.
Main.Againstness . . . by Vaniver: The primary content of this class is in [[Autonomic Nervous System Control]], with important secondary content in [[Metacognitive Blind Spots]] and subtechniques in: * [[Deep Breaths]] [[Category:CFAR Class]]
Main.GoalFactoring . . . by MattOB: Sometimes we find ourselves facing apparently zero-sum conflict between two (or more) things that we want. For example, imagine that you are sitting at home at the end of a long, hard week, preparing to make plans for the evening. One of your friends is throwing a party, and has urged you to come. At the same time, there are delicious leftovers in the fridge and a movie you’ve been hoping to watch, and you’re feeling pretty lethargic. When making this sort of decision, most people do some form of weighing—whether explicitly, with System 2, or viscerally/intuitively, with System 1—comparing the pros and cons of each option and selecting the one with the highest net “goodness.” You may consider things like who is likely to be at the party, or whether your friend would be offended if you didn’t show up; you may do some internal measuring of your energy levels, to see if you’re in dire need of some rest and relaxation. The decision might come from balancing a bunch of little things, or be based on one crucial factor. Most people end up picking one or the other—we either go out, or stay in. Occasionally, we might come up with a sort of compromise option—such as going to the party for half an hour and then coming back home—but we rarely reach outside of the A, B, or A&B framework. The goal factoring technique asks that we approach these sorts of problems a little differently. Instead of simply comparing one choice to another, goal factoring encourages us to adopt a “third path” mentality—to assume, for the sake of argument, that there might be a way to get ''everything'' we want, and achieve all of the good with none of the bad. Sometimes, of course, there is no way to get everything. Sometimes, we really are constrained, and have to make tradeoffs and compromises. But we tend to feel constrained more often than we really are, thanks to social imperatives and longstanding habits and assumed entanglements between various obligations. Often, there’s a lot of wiggle room that we aren’t aware of, especially if it’s been a while since we stepped back and took a fresh look from a broader perspective. To uncover this wiggle room, the Goal Factoring technique asks you to list out, separately, the benefits or goals that contribute to making a solution or plan attractive. Then do the same for the costs or detractors from that plan. For example, if two people both reach for the last orange at the farmer's market, they might assume that they're in a zero-sum conflict. But if they each explain what the orange is ''for'', it might turn out that one wants to eat the orange, and so is interested in the pulpy flesh, and the other wants to make mulled wine, and so is interested in the peel. In that case, it's possible for both parties to get all of what they want—and they can only see such solutions after they've factored out their goals.
Main.NewPatternTemplate . . . by MattOB: ??A picture, which shows an archetypical example of that pattern ??a diagram, which shows the solution in the form of a diagram, with labels to indicate its main components
Main.SpinningPlates . . . by Vaniver: ...uplinks "motivation engineering or something similar *** '''Intrinsic interest tracks something important.''' Physicist Richard Feynman liked to tell a story about a point in his career when he felt ''dull'' toward physics, despite having loved it for so long. There was a part of him that felt it was a ''duty''—that, given his early successes, he was expected to have brilliant insight, and to tackle only important, meaningful problems.
Main.WikiSandbox . . . by achmizs: Feel free to use this page to experiment with the [[PmWiki/Text Formatting Rules]]. Just click the “Edit” link at the top of the page.
Site.FootnotesDemo . . . by achmizs: Some illustrative examples below (each example shows the markup first, and then shows how the given markup will render). (For even more usage examples, see [[https://wiki.obormot.net/Main/LoremIpsum#footnotes]].)
