Title: Rationality
Tags: rationality-habits-checklist rationality

Q: Notice when you are [...].
A: confused
Extra: Example: You think that your flight is scheduled to depart on Thursday. On Tuesday, you get an email from Travelocity advising you to prepare for your flight “tomorrow”, which seems wrong. Do you successfully raise this anomaly to the level of conscious attention?

Q: When someone says something unclear, [...].
A: ask for examples

Q: Notice when your mind is [...] instead of evaluating [...].
A: arguing for a side; which side to choose
Extra: Example: Noticed myself explaining to myself why outsourcing my clothes shopping does make sense, rather than evaluating whether to do it.

Q: Notice when you [...] from a thought and [...] for exploration.
A: flinch away; flag that area
Extra: Example: I have a failure mode where, when I feel socially uncomfortable, I try to make others feel mistaken so that I will feel less vulnerable. Pulling this thought into words required repeated conscious effort, as my mind kept wanting to just drop the subject.

Q: Consciously attempt to [...] [...].
A: welcome; bad news
Extra: Example: At a brainstorming session for future Singularity Summits, one issue raised was that we hadn't really been asking for money at previous ones. My brain was offering resistance, so I applied the "bad news is good news" pattern to rephrase this as, "This point doesn't change the fixed amount of money we raised in past years, so it is good news because it implies that we can fix the strategy and do better next year."

Q: Notice when you are not being [...] about what is true.
A: curious
Extra: Example: Whenever someone criticizes me, I usually find myself thinking defensively at first, and have to visualize the world in which the criticism is true, and the world in which it's false, to convince myself that I actually want to know. For example, someone criticized us for providing inadequate prior info on what statistics we'd gather for the Rationality Minicamp; and I had to visualize the consequences of [explaining to myself, internally, why I couldn’t have done any better given everything else I had to do], vs. the possible consequences of [visualizing how it might've been done better, so as to update my action-patterns for next time], to snap my brain out of defensive-mode and into should-we-do-that-differently mode.

Look for the actual causes of your beliefs, emotions, and habits; suppress your mind's search for justifications.
Extra: Example: When it turned out that we couldn't rent the Minicamp location I thought I was going to get, I found lots and lots of reasons to blame the person who was supposed to get it; but realized that most of my emotion came from the fear of being blamed myself for a cost overrun.

Q: When following abstract arguments, think of a [...].
A: concrete example
Extra: Example: Richard Feynman being disturbed that Brazilian physics students didn't know that a "material with an index" meant a material such as water. If someone talks about a proof over all integers, do you try it with the number 17? If your thoughts are circling around your roommate being messy, do you try checking your reasoning against the specifics of a particular occasion when they were messy?

Q: When distinguishing between hypotheses using evidence, [...] the world where a hypothesis holds and consider the [...] you'd assign to the evidence in that world.
A: visualize; prior probability
Extra: Example: During the Amanda Knox murder case, after many hours of police interrogation, Amanda Knox turned some cartwheels in her cell. The prosecutor argued that she was celebrating the murder. Would you, confronted with this argument, try to come up with a way to make the same evidence fit her innocence? Or would you first try visualizing an innocent detainee, then a guilty detainee, to ask with what frequency you think such people turn cartwheels during detention, to see if the likelihoods were skewed in one direction or the other?

Q: Try to consciously assess [...] and compare them to the apparent [...].
A: prior probabilities; strength of evidence
Extra: Used it in a conversation about apparent evidence for parapsychology, saying that for this I wanted p < 0.0001, like they use in physics, rather than p < 0.05, before I started paying attention at all.

Q: When encountering evidence insufficient to change your mind, try to [...] a little.
A: update your probabilities
Extra: Example: Realized I should somewhat update my beliefs about being a good driver after someone else knocked off my side mirror, even though it was legally and probably actually their fault—even so, the accident is still more likely to occur in worlds where my bad-driver parameter is higher.

Q: Notice when you and your brain seem to believe [...], and ask [...].
A: different things; which one of you is right
Extra: Example: Jumping off the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas in a wire-guided fall. I knew it was safe based on 40,000 data points of people doing it without significant injury, but to persuade my brain I had to visualize 2 times the population of my college jumping off and surviving. Also, my brain sometimes seems much more pessimistic, especially about social things, than I am, and is almost always wrong.

Q: When facing a difficult decision, [...] to reduce or switch around the [...].
A: reframe it; biases influencing it
Extra: Example: Trying to decide whether to move to Silicon Valley and look for a higher-paying programming job, he tried a reframe to avoid the status quo bias: If he was living in Silicon Valley already, would he accept a $70K pay cut to move to Santa Barbara with his college friends? (Answer: No.)

Q: When facing a difficult decision, check which considerations are [...].
A: actually about future consequences
Extra: Example: I bought a $1400 mattress in my quest for sleep, over the Internet hence much cheaper than the mattress I tried in the store, but non-returnable. When the new mattress didn't seem to work too well once I actually tried sleeping nights on it, this was making me reluctant to spend even more money trying another mattress. I reminded myself that the $1400 was a sunk cost rather than a future consequence, and didn't change the importance and scope of future better sleep at stake (occurring once per day and a large effect size each day

Q: In a disagreement, try to find a [...] that the different beliefs or people disagree about.
A: concrete prediction
Extra: Someone was worried that rationality training might be "fake", and I asked if they could think of a particular prediction they'd make about the results of running the rationality units, that was different from mine, given that it was "fake".

Q: In a disagreement, try to come up with an [...] that will resolve it.
A: experimental test
Extra: Example: This is how we settled the running argument over what to call the Center for Applied Rationality—Julia went out and tested alternate names on around 120 people

Q: In a disagreement centered around a word, try to [...] it.
A: taboo
Extra: Example: Advised someone to stop spending so much time wondering if they or other people were justified; was told that they were trying to do the right thing; and asked them to taboo the word 'trying' and talk about how their thought-patterns were actually behaving.

Q: When deciding whether to try something new, consciously think about [...].
A: value of information
Extra: After several months of procrastination, and due to Anna nagging me about the value of information, finally trying out what happens when I write with a paired partner; and finding that my writing productivity went up by a factor of four, literally, measured in words per day.

Q: When making decisions, [...] [...] - how often, how long, how intense.
A: quantify; consequences
Extra: Example: When we had Julia take on the task of figuring out the Center's name, I worried that a certain person would be offended by not being in control of the loop, and had to consciously evaluate how improbable this was, how little he'd probably be offended, and how short the offense would probably last, to get my brain to stop worrying.

Q: Notice when something is [...] a behavior you want to [...].
A: negatively reinforcing; repeat
Extra: Example: I noticed that every time I hit 'Send' on an email, I was visualizing all the ways the recipient might respond poorly or something else might go wrong, negatively reinforcing the behavior of sending emails. I've (a) stopped doing that (b) installed a habit of smiling each time I hit 'Send' (which provides my brain a jolt of positive reinforcement). This has resulted in strongly reduced procrastination about emails.

Q: Talk to your [...] or use other [...] on yourself.
A: friends; social commitment mechanisms
Extra: Example: When I was having trouble getting to sleep, I (a) talked to Anna about the dumb reasoning my brain was using for staying up later, and (b) set up a system with Luke where I put a + in my daily work log every night I showered by my target time for getting to sleep on schedule, and a — every time I didn't.

Q: To establish a new habit, [...] your [...].
A: reward; inner pigeon
Extra: Example: Multiple observers reported a long-term increase in my warmth / niceness several months after... 3 repeats of 4-hour writing sessions during which, in passing, I was rewarded with an M&M (and smiles) each time I complimented someone, i.e., remembered to say out loud a nice thing I thought.

Q: Don't treat yourself as if you have [...]; set up [...] on the way you behave.
A: magic free will; influences
Extra: Example: I avoid learning politicians’ positions on gun control, because I have strong emotional reactions to the subject which I don’t endorse.

Q: Use the [...] on yourself.
A: outside view
Extra: Example: I like to call my parents once per week, but hadn't done it in a couple of weeks. My brain said, "I shouldn't call now because I'm busy today." My other brain replied, "Outside view, is this really an unusually busy day and will we actually be less busy tomorrow?"

Q: When somebody says something that isn't quite clear enough for me to visualize, I notice this and [...].
A: ask for examples
Extra: Example: Cat said that her boyfriend was very competitive. I asked her for an example of "very competitive." She said that when he’s driving and the person next to him revs their engine, he must be the one to leave the intersection first—and when he’s the passenger he gets mad at the driver when they don’t react similarly.