Litmus Tests

I collect tests or clarifying questions that are useful for quickly orienting my thinking about a subject upon a first encounter. Like the semi-recent Lexicon, this is not an exhaustive list, and I’ll add to it as I think of more. Several of these are red flag indicators for judging yourself or other people.

• Tilt’d Scales: The classic response to many dichotomies such nature vs nurture is that it’s probably both, but that’s incomplete and dodges the question. How likely is it that both factors contribute exactly equally to the outcome? Usually not very. “Balance” doesn’t require perfect symmetry. Determine which factor if any is the greatest contributor, and whether it’s the dominant fraction or merely the plurality.

• Infinity Analysis: Extend the contrasting possibilities of a polarizing subject to infinity and see which side is better or worse, and also what you’d consider the middle. I would prefer to totally abolish copyright and other intellectual property law rather than have permanent copyright, the latter being closer to the current state. Plays nicely with Tilt’d Scales, since the exact middle between the ridiculous extremes is often not the best possible arrangement.

• Kant Universality: Would it be viable if everyone did this at every opportunity? If yes, the strategy has longterm stability. Originally in my notes as Kant Let You Do That StarFox.

• 4 Sides of a hypothesis: For a given test, what are the rates of: affirmative, negative, false positive, false negative, and the consequences for each?

• Reversal of causality: Whenever you see “A causes B”, consider how likely it is that “B causes A”. This is a natural fit for set-subset relationships, such as hard work and success: hard work doesn’t guarantee success, but the majority of the successful were hard working because success has an inbuilt selection bias towards effort. Depression may cause weight gain due to hormone changes, or weight gain might cause depression due to hormone changes, and intuition alone is insufficient to draw an arrow of causation between the coinciding factors. Consider also that they might both be caused by a 3^rd factor.

• A 4^th Option: When given a dichotomy or dilemma, the question pulls you in 2 directions and it may be tempting to find a compromise between them via a 3^rd option. I prefer responses that break the boundaries of the question entirely and choose something off-spectrum.

• Conflict of interest: Is the argument preceed’d by an incentive to have that belief? Most arguments and beliefs are motivated reasoning to justify existing behaviour. See the survivorship bias of “I worked hard for what I have”, which stems from “whatever anyone has is what they deserve to have” regardless of whether that was the deciding factor.

• True Aims: Does the effective goal served by an action/a series of actions match the stated goal? The education system’s stated goal is knowledge and understanding, which it fails at spectacularly. It’s effect, and thus its true aim, is flagging graduates for employment. This is why percentage of a degree doesn’t track linearly with employment nor income, and students can barely remember a third of the material after a year. Do your actions demonstrate your stated beliefs and values?

• Eros & Thanatos: Does the motivation seek to go towards something good or away from something bad? Generally the former is healthier. See: drugs, exercise, diet, media consumption, etc.

• Spocking: Does the distinction being made have any practical effects? From the pragmatist quote “there’s no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference somewhere else”, often attributed to Spock as “a difference which makes no difference is no difference.” This test is why I adopt’d the terms meaningfully and trivially distinct.

• If you met yourself, would you be your friend?

• Music these days: Do you enjoy new kinds of music? An inability to do so is the result of a mental calcification closing you to new experiences, and is a sign you might be over as a person.

• Rhetorical Strawman: I often “confirm” what someone means using a purposefully inflammatory example to highlight cases that are excluded by their proposed framework or make explicit something unstated that’s assumed to be impossible. f.x “Are you saying it’s impossible to be both wealthy and sad?”

• Subjectivity: One of the key properties of subjectivity is that it can’t have truth value. The only reason “it’s just my opinion” can work as a defense is if true and false cannot apply, which also means that any statement that’s provably true or false is by default not an opinion.

• Where did you get that opinion? If you can’t support an opinion from first principles and you can’t recall what inform’d your opinion on a subject then you can’t really defend that source as a good one, which makes the opinion itself suspect. Bonus points in that this is a nice rhetorical device for undermining an opponent in a debate, since most people generally don’t keep track of their sources.

• What gives you the right: True rights, rather than mere legal rights, cannot by their nature be grant’d or revoked. You gain them when you qualify by meeting the conditions to have them, such as how the capacity for feeling entitles you to a freedom from suffering. Rights are also usually pair’d with obligations, in that if you have a right not to suffer then others are obliged not to harm you. A critical reframing of this is in the negative: if something is not a right, then I can infringe it freely. If you have no right to comfort, then I can freely infringe your comfort. If you have no right to food, I can starve you, etc. Note that you may defend the capacity to infringe what seems like a right by others means: if I reject the right to life as intrinsic, I can still say that if a sapient mind desires life, then to kill it is to subvert it’s right to selfdetermination, which it qualifies for by its sapience.

• Flip a coin, if you’re still unsure when you get the outcome, you want the opposite outcome that the coin gave. Not everyone has free transparent account of their thoughts and feelings in a way that allows them to organize and consolidate into a singular decision. To some people, many of their thoughts are in a shape they can’t put words to, and to some poor souls that happens mostly in the background of their minds, so their decisions aren’t clear. They still give an overall indication though, and you can force them to one side or another of a binary decision with this trick.

There are a few of these that, while useful to think about as applies to yourself, are also extremely good predictors of my dismissal of a person.

• Choice of insult: Often a person’s primary or initial point of attack is one of their own central values or sensitivities, and an infringement of that offends them. f.ex “Shrimpdick virgin” means they primarily conceive of value in terms of sex.

• Do you resist correction?

• Do you listen, or only wait for your turn to speak?

• Empathy: Do you think everyone is like you, or do you try to understand how they are? How able are you to imagine what others want, their mindset & beliefs, or how they would respond to something? An indicator of intelligence.

• Manipulating abstracts: How able are you to deal with hypotheticals or general statements? An indicator of intelligence.

• Complains someone else “always has to be right”.

• Complains about “thinking too hard” about something.

The Voice Within & Getting It Out

Reddit asks:

Is it normal not to have an inner monologue? I can intentionally create one, but it feels unnatural.

I have an inner monologue and most of my friends do, but it isn’t always perfect sentences as fiction might lead you to expect. It can take the form of full sentences, but it’s often phrases or sentence fragments with ephemeral connection to one another. When I read, it’s my internal monologue doing the reading, and when I speak, it’s that same inner voice using my throatpipe instead of speaking into my head. Listen to natural speech, to someone ramble disjoint’d loose threads trying to express an idea they haven’t put words to yet and that’s what it’s like for most people I ask.

Alternately, watch yourself compose a text message or comment. You change word choice, back up over it and start again in bursts of rhythm that ebb and break and pause. Occasionally you change course, delete a whole paragraph, and come at it from a different angle. Now imagine doing that outloud, but instead it’s in your mind.

Pareto Curves Make Doctor Who Good

The Pareto Curve is one of those basic shapes from the branch of maths that most people aren’t as familiar with, like the bell curve. If you’ve heard of it at all, it’s probably gone by the name the 80-20 rule, which is a terrible name because it implies that they have to sum to 100 despite not measuring the same thing or even being the same axis. The 80-20 rule, if you’ve never heard of it, is something of the form “80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers”, “80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts”, “80% of incidents are caused by 20% of problems” etc, though it shows up in other places too like wealth distribution. Each of the variations on this rule are typically close approximations of the truth because they call on the same sort of organizational principle as Zipf’s Law, which is the discrete version of the exact same idea.

Tuning Activation Energy to Create or Destroy Habits

I saw this video on reddit the other day, and many of the comments were dismissive or miss’d the point, so I wrote a small response that I’ll mirror here.

The whole concept is to lower the activation energy as much as possible. If you want to pick up a skill, make your practice materials as available as possible, make everything that competes with learning less available.

The major factors to watch out for are time, number of decisions, and visibility. The video specifically focuses on reducing startup time, which is a massive psychological barrier if it’s above a relatively small threshold.

You should keep the number of decisions and actions required to start something as low as possible also. You see that alot in interface design or web promotion: the more clicks something takes, exponentially fewer people do it. That’s actually exponential, as in population * small fraction^{(number of steps * time spent deciding)}. You only have so much decision-making power in a waking cycle, so when you choose to do something is very important. It builds like a muscle, but it also tires out like a muscle and needs recharging. The earlier you start something the easier it is because of decision fatigue later in the day, so this might mean shifting your waking hours to favour the habit or project. If it must be later in the day then you should do something that restores your deciding meter, but even that can require already having a different habit built up such as meditation. As a general life tip, spending more time on one decision is the same as making lots of little decisions, so hone your ability to make concise choices.

Making the subject more visible puts a psychological gravity on it. If eating is a distraction, having food in your field of vision makes it much harder to function. It nags you, and you constantly have to make the decision not to indulge the entire time. If the thing you want to do has constant visibility or proximity, your chances of doing it are much higher.

Remember that these all work both ways. Don’t just ease the things you want to do, obstruct the things you don’t want to do or that compete against your goal activity.

Edit: If you’re trying to extinguish a habit, a replacement is much more effective than just trying to resist something you’ve already built up. The brain resists the active suppression of a connection because any mental energy whatsoever uses the connection, even if it’s just keeping it down. Ever try getting a song out of your head? Just trying to fight it doesn’t work. This is one of the reasons smokers frequently develop an oral fixation while quitting: they’re pacifying an existing habit by connecting it to something else instead of letting it back up the pattern they’re trying to break. It doesn’t even have to be a near-neighbor like one oral thing to another, as long as it’s a new connection that’s activated by the same trigger.

The other method for constructing a new habit is to attach it to an existing habit. If you find yourself doing something often, add your new habit onto it and always do them together. An extremely low activation energy helps with this, so use all of those tricks. I recently add’d 2 squats to my feeling of distraction if I ever get off task while I’m working, and needing literally no materials is getting me to exercise more consistently in little ways. You can use this anchoring to build whole chains of habits, or you can use it to build up a replacement for the habit you want to eliminate by putting it between the cue and what you’re trying to extinguish.

What prompt’d me to update this was this video on habit generation.

How to improve mental performance?

Original

A reader writes:

This is in response to a comment you posted awhile back:

it depends on the strength of your faculties. I have to be pretty far gone exhaust’d to notice a drop in my performance, at least in that kind, but presumably my ability to measure my own performance is also decreased. I don’t consider my regular level of attention to be any effort at all, rather like standing or sitting up straight when you’re condition’d to it

Can you describe the things you do that you think allow you to maintain this high level of mental performance all the time?

Production of Serialized Rhythms to Stoke the Creative Mind

Original

^{I don’t have the time to make 3 posts in one day, so consider this a live article for the next few weeks. If you’re wondering where the others are, stalk my comments. I generally let posts cook for a few days before they make it to the sub.}

I’ve long had a desire to create music, but I never actually went about it due to other demands on my time and a lack of imminently available tools. I have composed a few pieces than vanish’d into the aether because I had no way to record them, but that was half my age ago. And “composed” might be a strong word.

How To Sleep

Original

^{Another request, in a roundabout way. Sleep better, Little Bird.}

Feel at will

Original

Might mirror the comments later, depending on how valuable I decide they are.

tl;dr I think I have a nonstandard psyche.

Tried asking this elsewhere in a comment thread about a month ago, but got no response. Here’s the text of that comment:

Elements of Rationality

Original

TrueAskReddit says: What makes something rational or irrational?

There are a few elements.

• A reason for acting that’s based in reality to the best of your knowledge.

• An action that is compatible with that reason in its intentional effects and side effects.

• The lack of unmitigated competing reasons that themselves fit the first criterion.

Virtue of Brevity

• Why

When I was a young child waiting for something soon, I would watch the seconds pass. When I did this again after a great lull of several years I was horrified to notice that seconds felt twice as quick. Each year of life represents a smaller fraction of your whole life, and as you spend more time waiting your brain “helpfully” optimizes the passage of time. The longer you live, the faster you die. It can be slow’d, but I don’t yet know a cure. And time is running out.

Less mortal terror and more courtesy. Value your own time and others’. Decompress’d conversation seldom accomplishes all you meant, and you may never come back to those unraised topics and hanging tangents. Lucky to even remember them by the end. Working memory is short, you may forget.