trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Personal experimentation: summary
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T06:39:48.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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I asked how it could be that experimenting in my own life could be worthwhile, given that if such things were worthwhile other people should have already figured them all out. My suggested explanations:

I am strange: nerdy, recent, young

Innovation: there are constantly new things to experiment with

Findings are not spread: or so much noise is also spread that the information is lost

Context-specificity: your findings don’t apply to me, because people are unique or situations are complicated

I am wrong: it’s easy to underestimate nebulous costs, to overstate fleeting or illusory benefits, to want to be the kind of person who tries new things, or to be too hopeful that life can improve fast

It seems to me that 3 is the biggest: results are collected so badly as to be often worthless and are aggregated poorly. It’s not clear to what extent this is because of 4: other people’s findings are just not so useful. Personal experimentation seems worth it even without good aggregation, but probably only if you avoid the same errors of measurement yourself. It could be worth it even with purely placebo gains, if you enjoy the placebo gains enough. But in this scenario, the gains are much smaller than you imagine, so you are probably over-investing a lot. There also seems to me a real risk that everything is so context specific that what you learn will be worthless as soon as you change many other things (4).

Explanations that involve others finding experimentation a lot less worthwhile (e.g. 1) seem unlikely to help much because it looks like others often find experimentation worthwhile. The problem seems to be somewhere between others making such efforts, and me having useful information as a result. Innovation (2) seems a bad explanation because it doesn’t explain the lack of information about age-old lifestyle questions. It seems likely that I have overestimated gains relative to losses in the past (5), but gains still seem larger than losses (it’s hard to disentangle causes, but my lifestyle has obviously improved substantially over the last year or more, some of which seems directly attributable to purposeful experimentation and the rest of which seems at least not terribly damaged by it).
What motivates cognition?
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T06:36:49.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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When I was a teenager, I think I engaged in a lot of motivated cognition. At least in an absolute sense; I don’t know how much is common. Much was regarding trees. Before I thought about this in detail, I assumed that how motivated cognition mostly works is this: I wanted to believe X, and so believed X regardless of the evidence. I looked for reasons to justify my fixed beliefs, while turning a blind eye to this dubious behavior.

On closer in(tro)spection, this is what I think really happened. I felt strongly that X was true because many good and smart adults had told me so. I also explicitly believed I should believe whatever my reasoning told me. I was inclined to change my beliefs when the information changed. However I knew that I did this, I feared that my reasoning was fallible, and I was terrified that I would come to believe not-X even though X was the truth. Then the truth would come out, or more evidence at least (and obviously the truth would be X), then all the good people who knew X would consider me evil, which was equivalent to being evil. They would also consider me stupid, for not seeing the proper counterarguments. So it was sickening to not be able to come up with a counterargument, because such a failure would immediately turn me into an evil and stupid person. Needless to say, I was quite an expert, especially on counterarguments.

So unlike in my usual model of motivated cognition, my arguments were directed at persuading myself of things I feared doubting, rather than justifying fixed beliefs to others. How often is this really what’s going on?
Personal experimentation: I’m wrong?
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T06:34:04.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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I’ve been wondering why experimentation seems worthwhile. I’ve given some explanations in my last few posts. The last category of explanations to consider are the ones in which my judgement is wrong. Where experimentation seems worth it because I don’t see the costs, or because I overestimate the benefits.

A lot of the cost from experimentation is plausibly nebulous and hard to account for well in a simple explicit analysis. Life can’t run smoothly on habits when they are always in flux. Mental effort is used up in keeping track. Every new thing takes a little while to do well, and to integrate into your lifestyle.

It’s easy count the costs of living in Oxford for a month in airfares and flight times, and forget the freezing afternoon you might spend negotiating to reclaim your foreign credit card from an ATM that ate it. Or the hassle of urgently buying boots, or of running up the high street looking for a working internet connection to finish your Skype call, or the sleep loss due to alien fire alarm policies at the college where you are staying. It seems to me that I have tended to underestimate such costs in the past substantially.

I mentioned in earlier posts some reasons I might overestimate the benefits. Innovation is less worth finding if it is quickly obsoleted by context specificity or further innovation. Informal data collection seems to see benefits too easily in every change. Nerds may underestimate the wisdom embodied in tradition. The first of these seems unlikely, given my experience. The others seem dangerous, but I do guard against them.

One might also overestimate the benefits if one is motivated to do so. Being willing to try new things is a telling sign about a person, or often taken to be one. Often it is a sign you should want to send. This hypothesis is supported in my case by the observation that many people I know seem to find experimentation particularly useful. However I rarely talk about this kind of stuff, and feel a bit silly when I do. Which doesn’t fit a signaling hypothesis well. Though this blog sequence undermines my claims some.

One might also be biased by other motivations. For instance if you badly hope that life can get much better, it might be hard to accept a route to that which involves sitting by and waiting when there are so many ways to aggressively search. I admit...
Personal experimentation: context specific?
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T06:30:40.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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A last way that personal experimentation could be worth it for me, yet not already completely covered by others, is that most of the facts one is likely to learn are quite context-specific. That way, everyone in history might have figured out for themselves what the best time and sugar-content for lunch is, and it would be worthless to me.

This also seems quite plausible. It could either be that people are so varied that there is just no good answer to whether it is better for productivity to eat snacks throughout the day or a few big meals for instance. Or it could be that which value of one parameter is best depends on all the other ones, so if you tend to eat more sugar than me and sleep less and laugh more, exercise might make you less sleepy than I.

The latter possibility bodes poorly for those who would experiment a lot. After you have determined the best quantity and timing of exercise, you might go on to try to optimize your sleep or sugar intake and make the original finding worthless.

This explanation would also seem to explain the observations in the last post: that many people do seem quite keen advise on the details of one’s life, but that the content of such recommendations seem a bit all over the place. Perhaps each person’s discoveries really do work well for them, but just look like a sea of noise to all the other people.
Personal experimentation: not shared?
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T06:23:09.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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I’ve been talking about how personal experimentation could be worth it for people like me, without relevant info being depleted long ago.

My next potential explanation is that people do experiment, but results aren’t aggregated and spread, so everyone has to reinvent everything.

This is exactly what you would expect in a simple model where people benefit from information, but bear a net cost from spreading it. Without incentives to contribute one’s own findings to others, there is no reason information should spread. But on closer inspection this is roughly the opposite of what the world looks like. There is a lot of advice about how to run the details of a life. Sometimes it is offered for money, but often so enthusiastically and freely as to make the most curious life-optimizer want to run away. The problem seems to be more that there is so much advice, advising pretty much the full range of behavior. There are apparently incentives for spreading such ‘information’, but not incentives to actually find any information to begin with.

This is doubly puzzling. It’s not surprising if all the possible self-help books exist. But for folks volunteering their own time to tell me about whatever relaxation technique or diet, spreading random misinformation seems low value. And again we have the question of why it wasn’t worth it, for their own benefit, to get some actual information to begin with.

A plausible explanation to me for both of these things is that just about any random innocuous change makes life seem better, and people are genuinely trying to be helpful by telling others about such ‘discoveries’. So the problem then would be widespread use of informal data collection, which is much more unreliable than people think. In which case, my own experimentation is just as likely to fail if I rely on such data collection. Experimentation in general would not be as useful as suspected – continually experimenting would make you feel like things were good, but none of your efforts would have long term payoffs.

This leaves the questions of whether and why people would be misinformed about their abilities to casually collect information about the effects of interventions on their lives. What say you?
Personal experiments: fueled by innovation?
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T06:19:56.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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Another way personal experimentation might be worth it for me, yet not used up by those before me: there is so much innovation that there are constantly new things to test, even if people experiment a lot. Beeminder and Workflowy are new. The abilities to prompt yourself to do things with a mobile phone or eat Japanese food or use your computer in a vast number of ways are relatively new.

I doubt this explains much. The question applies to many things that have been around and not that different for a long time, e.g. wheat, motivation, reading, romantic arrangements. And even if Beeminder is new, many of the basic ideas must be old (e.g. ‘don’t break the chain‘). As a society we don’t seem to have a much better idea of the effects of wheat on a person than we do of Beeminder.

Another way innovation could explain the puzzle is if all kinds of innovations change the value of all kinds of ancient things e.g. prevalence of internet use changes the effects of going to bed early or sitting in a certain way or doing something with your hair or knowing a lot of stories. If this is the case, experimentation is worth less than it seems, as the results will soon be out of date. So this goes under the heading ‘I’m wrong: experimentation isn’t worth it’, which would explain the puzzle, except the bit where everyone else perceives this and knows not to bother, and I don’t. I will get back to explanations of this form later.
Personal experiments: for the unusual?
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T06:16:27.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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I asked in what kind of world personal experimentation could seem worth it for me yet not already exhausted. Today I’ll look at one potential explanation, popular with commenters last time: I and my friends are weird in some way that causes to benefit more than usual from experimentation. Several of the suggestions below were seconded by commenters.

Robin makes a plausible suggestion in this realm: in general people do quite well by copying the right other people’s behavior in some kind of clever, intuitive, context specific way. Nerds are terrible at this though (either because they fail to copy at the outset, or because they can’t do the social interpretation necessary to correctly generalize). So they have the choice to copy other people badly, or try to reinvent a lot of things from scratch. So experimentation is much more useful for nerds. Coupled with the premise that I’m a nerd, this explains the observations and has some intuitive appeal.

If something like this is true, there seem to me to be traits beyond lack of copying skill that incline nerds toward working such things out from scratch. In general if you are already unusual on many axes, copying others on a particular one is less good, so you will have to figure things out for yourself more. Once you have determined to sleep in the daytime and practice radical honesty, the usual answers about how to improve your mood or attract a partner may not apply as well. Nerds are also more likely to have the quantitative skills to do experiments well. And nerds seem more unsettled by adherence to traditions handed to them without explanation or instructions.

These things might explain enthusiasm for explicit experimentation and innovation, but the reasons experimentation seems worth it didn’t make reference to enthusiasm. Non-nerds may copy one another fine, but there seem to be better things to do than copying. It could also be that experimentation is not worthwhile, and nerds just tend to over-rate it. But fits nicely into a category to be explored later: ‘I’m wrong’.

Another relevant way I and my friends might be weird is that we live so late in history, and in such a rich world. Perhaps it has only recently become cheap enough to track such experimentation usefully. This seems important for the more elaborate data-tracking kinds of experiments. But it s...
Why personal experimentation?
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T06:12:53.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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I experiment with many things, as do those around me. Some of this is randomization and explicit records, more is just trying different things, muttering ‘VOI‘ and repeating what felt good. I refer here to everything between a cautious banana-mustard-ham sandwich and polyamory.

Robin has suggested that I over-invest in such exploration. That most new things should be bad, and so most experimentation a private loss for public gain. What’s more, there shouldn’t be lots of low hanging fruit in trying things out. Most of the things humans frequently want to do (eat, sleep, change moods, organize time, learn, interact with others) should have been well figured out in ancient times. And anything that does still need checking out should be divided between many people.

Nonetheless, it looks to me like experimentation is worth it. Lots of the things we do seem barely satisfactory, there seem likely to be better alternatives, it seems hard to learn what has been tried for what ends, or what is good from listening to others or reading, and I and my friends seem to actually find good things by looking. e.g. Beeminder, explicit charity evaluation, unusual degrees of honesty, workflowy and explicit organization seem to often add value over the defaults, not to mention many tiny things, like banana-mustard-ham sandwiches.

If it is true that a lot of experimentation is worth it, we have a slight puzzle: if there is valuable information I might glean by experimentation, why hasn’t it been worth it for others in the past to collect it and put it where I can see it?

I will try to answer this over the next few posts. Before that, what do you think?
More signaling
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T06:06:49.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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Centurion: Where is Brian of Nazareth?

Brian: You sanctimonious bastards!

Centurion: I have an order for his release!

Brian: You stupid bastards!

Mr. Cheeky: Uh, I’m Brian of Nazareth.

Brian: What?

Mr. Cheeky: Yeah, I – I – I’m Brian of Nazareth.

Centurion: Take him down!

Brian: I’m Brian of Nazareth!

Victim #1: Eh, I’m Brian!

Mr. Big Nose: I’m Brian!

Victim #2: Look, I’m Brian!

Brian: I’m Brian!

Victims: I’m Brian!

Gregory: I’m Brian, and so’s my wife!

– Monty Python’s Life of Brian

It’s easy for everyone to claim to be Brian. What Brian (and those who wish to identify him) need is a costly signal: an action that’s only worth doing if you are Brian, given that anyone who does the act will be released. In Brian’s life-or-death situation it is pretty hard to arrange such a thing. But in many other situations, costly signals can be found. An unprotected posture can be a costly signal of confidence in your own fighting ability, if this handicap is small for a competent fighter but dangerous for a bad fighter. College can act as a costly signal of diligence, if lazy, disorganized people who don’t care for the future would find attending college too big a cost for the improved job prospects.

A situation requires costly signaling when one party wishes to treat two types of people differently, but both types of people want to be treated in the better way. An analogous way to think of this as a game is that Nature decides between A or -A, then the sender looks at Nature’s choice, and gives a signal to the receiver, B or -B. Then the receiver takes an action, C or -C. The sender always wants the receiver to do C, but the receiver wants to do C if A and -C if -A. To stop the sender from lying, you can modify the costs to the sender of B and -B.

Suppose instead that the sender and the receiver perfectly agreed: either both wanted C always, or both wanted C if A and -C if -A. Then the players can communicate perfectly well even if all of the signals are costless – the sender has every reason to tell the receiver the truth.

If players can have these two kinds of preferences, and you have two players, these are the two kinds of signaling equilibria you can have (if the receiver always wants C, then he doesn’t listen to signals anyway).

Most of the communication in society involves far more than two players. But you m...
Filters and bottlenecks
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T05:50:47.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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Lots of processes have filters: a certain proportion of the time they fail at that stage. There are filters in the path from dead stars to booming civilizations. There are filters in the path from being a baby to being an old person. There are filters in the path from having an idea to having a thriving business.

Lots of processes also have bottlenecks. These look similar, in that many things fail at that point. For instance the path to becoming a Nobel Prize winner is bottlenecked by there only being so many Nobel Prizes ever year. Rather than a fixed fraction of people getting past that barrier, a fixed number of people do.

It’s worth noticing if something is a filter or a bottleneck, because you should treat them differently often. Either way you can increase the fraction reaching the end by widening the filter or bottleneck to let more past. But for the filter it might be worth doing this at any other stage in the process, whereas for the bottleneck it is pointless at all earlier stages. You can’t get more Nobel Prize winners by improving education, but you might get more thriving businesses.
Can a tiny bit of noise destroy communication?
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T05:47:55.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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If everyone knows a tenth of the population dishonestly claims to observe alien spaceships, this can make it very hard for the honest alien-spaceship-observer to communicate fact that she has actually seen an alien spaceship.

In general, if the true state of the world is seen as not much more likely than you sending the corresponding false message somehow, it’s hard to communicate the true state.

You might think there needs to be quite a bit of noise relative to true claims, or for acting on true claims to be relatively unimportant, for the signal to get drowned out. Yet it seems to me that a relatively small amount of noise could overwhelm communication, via feedback.

Suppose you have a network of people communicating one-on-one with one another. There are two possible mutually exclusive states of the world – A and B – which individuals occasionally get some info about directly. They can tell each other about info they got directly, and also about info they heard from others. Suppose that everyone likes for they and others to believe the truth, but they also like to say that A is true (or to suggest that it is more likely). However making pro-A claims is a bit costly for some reason, so it’s not worthwhile if A is false. Then everyone is honest, and can trust what one another says.

Now suppose that the costs people experience from making claims about A vary among the population. In the lowest reaches of the distribution, it’s worth lying about A. So there is a small amount of noise from people falsely claiming A. Also suppose that nobody knows anyone else’s costs specifically, just the distribution that costs are drawn from.

Now when someone gives you a pro-A message, there’s a small chance that it’s false. This slightly reduces the benefits to you of passing on such pro-A messages, since the value from bringing others closer to the truth is diminished. Yet you still bear the same cost. If the costs of sending pro-A messages were near the threshold of being too high for you, you will now stop sending pro-A messages.

From the perspective of other people, this decreases the probability that a given message of A is truthful, because some of the honest A messages have been removed. This makes passing on messages of A even less valuable, so more people further down the spectrum of costs find it not worthwhile. And ...