Reminds me a bit of David Foster Wallace's famous speech... the idea that the real reason you should strive for education is to control and understand your thoughts? Which is hard - how often I find I am on auto-pilot and then hours later I am in the wrong place with work or trying to solve a problem and didn't even notice. Or worse, a bias puts me in a bad mood and then I am stuck there because I don't pay attention to how this time its different / not the same.
>The really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
>That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
One of the best ways to improve performance in mentally demanding tasks is to be conscious about every single decision and the reason behind that decision, yes even for minute things like why we are craving something[1].
It introduces a non trivial amount of overhead but, with time, these processes become internalized, which improves speed while retaining the correct course of action.
I experienced this when I was climbing in competitive games. The first step was to get over the 'not my fault' mentality and transition to an 'I need to improve' mentality. I began by analyzing everything that I understood, and becoming more conscious and aware of the current situation, the available information and my mistakes and every game I was aiming to improve my play instead of winning.
[1] I remember reading that cravings are an indication of the kind of nutrients the body needs, more so than the specific food itself. When I was transitioning to a vegetarian diet, I found that I could cure/reduce my meat cravings e.g. burgers by increasing protein and fat on my next meal, my sugar cravings were associated with a) low energy or b) the need to take a break and let subconscious do the work to figure out the solution.
But all of these could be attributed to confirmation or other memory biases.
> I experienced this when I was climbing in competitive games. The first step was to get over the 'not my fault' mentality and transition to an 'I need to improve' mentality. I began by analyzing everything that I understood, and becoming more conscious and aware of the current situation, the available information and my mistakes and every game I was aiming to improve my play instead of winning.
This is what I've done recently with my approach to playing music. I'd always have described myself as very 'self-critical' of my musical skills, but this criticism was never more than "Ugh, this sucks. Try harder!"
What I've realized fairly recently (and wish someone had told me when I was much younger) is that my self-criticism wasn't constructive criticism. I was aware that I was unhappy with my performance, but I wasn't aware of why. Now when I'm not happy with my playing, I try to stop and think about exactly what it is that's bothering me about it. If it's multiple things, I'll just pick one to focus on and try to improve that. I'm still self-critical, but it's constructive criticism now, and that's something I can improve from.
The "not my fault" mentality you mentioned feels safe, because if someone believes there's nothing that could have done to change the outcome, then there's nothing that might make them feel bad[1]. Of course, sometimes things really aren't your fault, and believing there's something you could have done when there's in fact nothing is also a problem. There's a balance to be struck between the two perspectives.
[1] I'm not saying they ought to feel bad, just that I think it's common experience to feel bad when we don't achieve our goals, and worse when we think of something we could have done differently.
Indeed it is difficult to strike a balance. It is especially important to reward and be proud of, at least relatively, good plays and moves, as well as novelty. The former has shown to be more effective than the opposite, while the latter, imho, expands the 'branches' of our internal decision trees as it increases our toolbox.
In an effort to eat healthier I also went about analyzing my cravings. Maybe I don't really want fast food, maybe I'm actually in the mood for something salty. I spent a long time finding a healthy alternative to these base cravings and eventually my body adapted and I found myself craving the healthy alternatives. Being mindful in this case led to an outcome that I considered favorable.
Note that it's good to be angry about losing or doing poorly. The trick is to really feel the pain, and not take the easy route out and find excuses in the things that weren't in your control. High feedback situations or 1v1 games give you fewer opportunities to dip out of the internal locus of control mindset.
Maybe. I'm with you on the [not seeking excuses; embrace feedback] parts, but not "good to be angry". Unsure about "control mindset"... care to expound?
This was a great read but I found the end of the speech to be a letdown. He does a good job of introducing his core idea:
> The really significant education ... isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
But then at the end of the speech he seems to undermine it by telling us what we should think about, namely that we should be highly empathetic and self-sacrificing:
> The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
Wait, why should we be living a life of perpetual self sacrifice? He hasn't built the case for this. But he says it's the real freedom. So which is really his core point: the freedom to choose your perspective, or the virtue of self-sacrifice?
Imho he makes a good argument in favor of choosing a non-default (if you adhere exclusively to self-interest, you'll be miserable because everyone's your enemy).
But he doesn't defend the latter proposition (commitment to self-sacrifice), and if we accept it as dogma it will conflict with the first. I guess an example of when self-sacrifice goes too far is Stockholm Syndrome, where a victim empathizes with their abuser and accepts the abuse.
Beyond this conflict I wonder whether the question of how to live should be viewed as a binary like he seems to have presented it (live for yourself, or live for others). It is a complex and open-ended question. Reducing it to a one or the other choice fails to represent that complexity.
Also I know this question commits an ad hominem fallacy, but it's hard not to ask it: should we be listening to a guy who committed suicide about how to live well?
I think he does explain his reason for this way of life / "worship" as he calls it.
"There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive"
There’s no argument about a commitment to self sacrifice.
By focusing on things around you and the world as a greater whole, you’ll naturally be more empathetic, help people more, etc. If your only obsession day after day is improving yourself or improving your “thoughts” via education to get yourself out of the grind, then you’ll be less happy. “This job will make me happy. This profession. This commitment to an idea.” But doing those things only incurs a further grind.
The only thing to do is accept that “this is water” and attempt to reason about the implications from there. I think empathy and caring are natural consequences of that type of displacement from individual satisfaction or understanding and a desire to better understand the world naturally leads to more empathy.
If your goal is to understand your world rather than “conquer” it ideologically, you’ll naturally be kinder and more empathetic to your neighbor.
A writer would attempt to better understand the world and communicate it to the people they love. Repeatedly failing (in your own eyes) to properly communicate is incredibly disheartening, so I wouldn’t say the absolute goal here is your own satisfaction.
> I think empathy and caring are natural consequences of that type of displacement from individual satisfaction or understanding and a desire to better understand the world naturally leads to more empathy.
Makes sense, it's impossible to feel empathy for someone who you're not aware of. To use one of Wallace's examples if you don't consider the circumstances of the "fat, dead-eyed screaming lady" (or don't even notice she's there) you won't have any empathy for her. So in effect mindfulness increases your net empathy (which starts at more or less zero in infancy, I think in developmental psychology they say babies start developing self awareness at around 2, and awareness of others at around 3).
How about not trying to use the intellect to stop the suffering that comes from trying and using the intellect?
There is a long story a buddhist monk tells about a professor on a ship who has learned all about the constellations, cetations and land formations, and looks down on the sailors who "don't think" about that stuff. The ship sinks and the professor drowns because he didn't learn how to swim.
The point is to that there's things to learn first, absolutely before anything else - which is how to get find the pleasure in life and not feel too much pain due to the negatives, how to not cause yourself suffering by your thinking. Foster Wallace is a guy who couldn't figure out the first thing.
Perhaps you can both be right. I don’t see why these goals need to be mutually exclusive: Find the pleasure in life first, but then also make the effort to refine your worldview and gain control over how thoughts enter your head and which thoughts.
Whether or not DFW had a fatal tendency to over-intellectualize he can still be correct in his assessment and aims as described in his speech. Failing to meet your first criteria (find the pleasure and don’t lose sight of it) doesn’t make his goal any less worthwhile if you can maintain a balance in all things.
This is a tale told by S.N. Goenka in the Vipassana meditation discourses. The whole story:
----
"Once a young professor had made a long journey by sailing. He got an excellent degree, but he had no real experience.
Also, there was an elderly, illiterate sailor on the same ship he was sailing in. Every day, the sailor will come to the professor and listen to his lecture on different subjects. The old sailor was intrigued by the young professor’s talk.
One day the sailor was about to leave after listening to the professor’s talk, then the professor said, “You old man, have you studied geology?” The old man responded, “No sir, I’ve never been to school or college, and I’ve never studied anything. What’s the geology?”.
The young professor answered, “In Geology we study about the earth. Elderly man, if you haven’t learned geology, you’ve wasted a quarter of your life.”
“If such an intelligent individual suggests so, it will be accurate that I’ve lost a quarter of my existence”, the old man thinks and leaves.
The next day after listening to the professor’s speech the sailor was about to leave, the young professor asked, “Reply me you old sailor, have you studied meteorology?”. The old man responded, “No sir, What’s the meteorology?”
The professor responded, “Meteorology is the science related to the wind; the study of the wind. Poor guy, you’ve wasted half of your career.”
“As this qualified young guy claims that I’ve wasted half of my life and has to be true”, the old man says to himself and leaves.
Again the next day, as the sailor was preparing to leave after listening to the professor’s speech, the professor inquired, “Tell me, old sailor, did you study oceanography?” The old man responded, “I already told you I have never been to school or college and studied nothing. What’s oceanography?”.
The young professor answered, “In Oceanography, we study about the ocean. Poor old man, you’ve wasted half of your career.”
“Half my life had to have been lost as this deeply educated young man says,” said the old man to himself and left.
Then the next day, the old sailor comes rushing to the young professor and calls out, “Professor Sir, have you learned swimology?”. “Swimology, what’s that?” the professor asked surprisingly.
I was questioning, “Can you swim, Sir?”. “No, I don’t know how to swim. Yet why is that?” the professor questions again.
“You young man, sir, can’t swim. The ship has hit a wide rock and is sinking. Those who can swim can swim to the nearby shore, but those who can’t swim may drown. I’m so sad, you’ve lost your whole life.”
I've always faced problems when people start moving from thinking/speaking/reading/doing to "thinking about how to think", "reading about how to read", etc. It's just not accessible or concrete or practically useful, quickly becomes mumbo jumbo that can be interpreted in any way, and the lines between science and philosophy and religion and culture begin to blur out.
At work I consciously avoid "thought leaders" and philosophical mentors. They fall into this mumbo jumbo quite a lot.
> Would you like to be more rational? Of course you would.
Personally I'm not jumping on that "of course". Rational thinking only works for clearly limited scope problems where you have all the data. Otherwise even perfect rational thinking - an unattainable ideal - fails because of "garbage in garbage out". Life in general being far from a clearly defined set of problems where you have all the data.
> By “mindfulness”—a feature of Buddhism for thousands of years, and a subject of scientific investigation for a few decades—most people mean a mental state you can be in.
What/where are the results from those thousands years of mindfulness? If the practice has an impact surely we should be able to see some things at a society level, or at least in some individuals who are particularly good at it.
> Rational thinking only works for clearly limited scope problems where you have all the data. Otherwise even perfect rational thinking - an unattainable ideal - fails because of "garbage in garbage out". Life in general being far from a clearly defined set of problems where you have all the data.
Not so. Rationality isn’t just about perfect knowledge situations (e.g. like chess), it’s also about maximising your chances of success — or your expected utility, or whatever your goal is — based on the information you do have (e.g. in poker).
This is different from the GIN=GOUT problem; if you think you’re playing poker but you’re actually hallucinating wildly while negotiating an international trade deal, things will go badly no matter how rational the rest of your thought processes are.
>it’s also about maximising your chances of success — or your expected utility, or whatever your goal is — based on the information you do have (e.g. in poker).
You are offered the opportunity to play a game of chance. The house draws one card from a standard, fair, deck. Number cards win their face value in $, jack/queen/king/ace wins $20/$25/$30/$100 respectively. Assuming each dollar you win has the same utility to you, what is the largest amount you should be willing to pay to enter the game?
Expected value = expected win - cost; anything which makes the EV positive is worth playing
But most people get more utility from their first dollar than from their 1000th, so: if your net worth is $100k and the utility of money to you is sqrt(dollars), how does this change? I’m still learning this one on brilliant.org right now; I think it works out as:
EV = mean of EVs of all possible outcomes, each outcome being sqrt(100000 - cost to play + result of that win)
What if you are in a sketchy casino and you’re not confident the game is fair? If there’s a 10% chance the game is rigged and will force you to draw a 2, now what is the fair price to play the game?
Same idea, but now weight the results by the chances; 10% chance of a $2 return, 90% chance of previous result.
I don’t play poker; what little I do know is that it is a hidden information game where in order to win you have to attempt to infer the other player’s hands relative to your own, and that this is a game of skill rather than pure guesswork.
Thanks for the reply! It helps to understand the principle, but I was also curious how you apply Rational thinking to everyday situations. Using math as a tool is great, but that might only work in some situations.
Poker is still a very limited scoped problem with fixed rules. Not having perfect knowledge is not the issue. Think about more "human" problems. Let's start with something very simple as far as life questions go: should you play poker? Try to solve that with rational thinking.
GIN=GOUT can be a lot more subtle than being mad on mushrooms. One simple unknown detail (in that international trade deal the others are secretly working against you, the deck of cards is fixed in that poker game) makes all your rational actions lead you to disaster.
Rational thinking doesn’t preclude data gathering. There’s lots of data points to inform that position: who will I be playing against? What is my relative skill compared to them? Is skill a major factor in my poker play? Can I expect to lose money? If I expect to lose money, would I enjoy that anyway because the game itself is fun? Would I have a particular threshold over which my losses would ruin my fun? Can I come up with a sure fire way to prevent my losses breaching the fun threshold?
After data gathering, it’s no longer garbage in and garbage out. You’ll note the questions assumed a randomness to the results, captured the worst case scenario, and minimized it to something I can live with.
You can do this with everything. That’s the beauty of rational thinking. It’s less about knowing the absolute correct solution and more about being conscious of the process of decision, rather than letting intuitive cues be the only deciding factors.
>should you play poker? Try to solve that with rational thinking
Rational thoughts:
- I've played with these guys before and I know I'm more likely to win than lose. So it would be in my favor to play.
- I've lost more than I've won in the past, but the bets are small and these people are fun to hang around so as long as I don't come out more than $20 behind tonight, its worth the time
- I've lost more than I've won in the past and I have no connections with these people. I shouldn't play
- There's no money involved in this match, and I enjoy poker. So why not?
Irrational thoughts:
- I've lost more than I've won in the past, so I'm sure to win this time so the "luck" in the universe evens out
- Some sort of fortune told me I'd have good luck today, so it would be stupid not to play
- Gambling has put me in severe debt in the past, but I'm just going to push that negative thought out of my mind since its unpleasant to think about. Let's play
> One simple unknown detail (in that international trade deal the others are secretly working against you, the deck of cards is fixed in that poker game) makes all your rational actions lead you to disaster.
The rational things to do in the trade deal example are:
1: have an intelligence agency so you don’t get surprised by such plans
2: have a backup plan for how to deal with the inevitable time when someone else’s interests are anti-aligned with your own
A rationalist playing poker with a dodgy deck will notice this by virtue of the improbable happening too often.
Since we can’t have perfect knowledge in all situations, I took the meaning of “rational” to align more with making the most likely “right” choice under uncertainty. It’s more aligned with Bayesian decisions, where our prior beliefs get modified as more information gets processed. We may still be operating under some degree of uncertainty but there are certain choices that are more rational than others.
> What/where are the results from those thousands years of mindfulness? If the practice has an impact surely we should be able to see some things at a society level, or at least in some individuals who are particularly good at it.
Oh man, I can't tell you how much it hurts me to hear this. But I get where you're coming from.
It's hard because with mindfulness and meditation there's nothing to sell and nothing to show for it. All you have is your own inner peace. And you can't just give it away, you have to teach how to get there, and it's a long and arduous process that most people just give up on.
So I guess what I'm saying is I take issue with "surely." It's not actually true. The practice has a major impact -- an earth-shattering, mind-expanding impact on one's life -- but because of the inability to "prove" it works or "make" someone do it, people tend to write it off.
If you're more interested in what mindfulness is about you can check out the book The Mind Illuminated. It's an alright book, written for the serious secular meditator, (even though the author isn't secular.) There's also Mindfulness in Plain English.
Here's to hoping that you're able to see past your skepticism and learn a little bit about these potentially life-changing tools. All the best man.
> What/where are the results from those thousands years of mindfulness? If the practice has an impact surely we should be able to see some things at a society level, or at least in some individuals who are particularly good at it.
I've seen it argued that the main value is avoiding the failure modes that lead to depression, and the result is much lower rates of depression in those societies.
A few patterns about rationality I have seen a lot recently:
False rationality - People claim to be rational while touting some dogma they learned somewhere. Not even looking at any data. And when given data or counter-examples they just ignore it.
Anti-Rational - People claim that life is uncertain and data is garbage - while in fact there is a lot of good data available - and drawing conclusions is not even difficult.
I don't think the problem is with rationality. It feels more like rationality is going down because psychological pathologies (narcissm, cargo-cults, dogmas) are taking over.
Being too rational - over thinking, ruminating, are real things. I think more and more people would answer yes.
"Rational = good" is the opinion of just one philosophy - the Enlightenment. And it has been rightfully criticized by all the other philosophy schools that came after it.
Overthinking can be a problem, though I think this is only because of one of our other biases: we mistake how often we think about something for how likely it is to actually happen, the “availability heuristic”.
"Paying attention", in all senses of the phrase, has been one of "killer features" of well-being, dating back to ancient Greeks.
That said, the "conjunction fallacy" mentioned in the article, it seems to be one of the biases that casts quite a powerful spell. I first came across it six years ago, and got it wrong. I recently tried the famous "Linda Problem" from Kahneman & Tversky on a few friends — some of them are working scientists — and almost all of them went with the incorrect answer, and they're in good company for that.
The Linda Problem being:
[/quote]
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.
Now, which alternative is more probable?
(a) Linda is a banker.
(b) Linda is a banker and is active in the feminist movement.
[/quote]
This is one of the neatest examples that demonstrate how much we run on autopilot.
By the way, I think in the problem Linda is supposed to be a bank teller, not a banker.
It doesn't actually change the correct answer (a conjunction is always less probable: P(a) > P(a) & P(b), and the same with P(b)), but it does affect the framing of the question.
Is it likely Linda is active in the feminist movement? Yes.
Is it likely Linda is a banker? No, given the priors in the first sentence, she would likely not choose a capitalist profession contrary to her values.
Is it likely Linda is a bank teller? In the absence of more information, 50/50. It's just a job.
Linda ostensibly being a bank teller works better.
I simplified the term bank teller to banker when I wanted to pose that problem to some non-native English speakers. I did that reduce some "distraction" — the term 'teller' (or bank teller) is uncommon in most regions other than North America. But when posting it here on HN, I forgot to put back the original phrasing.
>It might be better to interpret these findings as showing that cognitive bias can be reduced by encouraging people to pay closer perceptual attention to their environment
As the article itself points out, they primarily measured observantness (followed by a fallacy quiz). So no wonder being observant improved metrics for "rationality," as the author celebrates.
>The really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
>That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
Full speech: https://www.butwhatfor.com/david-foster-wallace-this-is-wate...