I.

Epistemic status: I’m making a big claim based on little more than how useful it’s been to me personally. Pushback is encouraged. That said, I’m also putting this forward as one tool; if your brain is like my brain then you may find this a very useful tool indeed, while other people may not find it’s something they use.

It has been written that the fundamental question of rationality is “What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?” There is a further claim that a question of equal importance is “Do you know what you are doing, and why you are doing it?”

 I would like to propose a third fundamental question, which I believe completes a rule of three: “What are you about to do and what do you think will happen next?”

That sentence is a Sazen. The rest of this post is how the question works, some examples, and the benefits.

(Pedants in the audience, I am aware this is two questions joined by a conjunction. They work together, and the original is referred to as the fundamental question, singular.)

• Past: What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?
• Present: Do you know what you are doing, and why you are doing it?
• Future: What are you about to do, and what do you think will happen next?

II.

The following are examples drawn from my life. Events and quotes in this section are not exact, and are subject to the vagaries of memory.

1.

When I was a young child, I wasn’t notably athletic or graceful. However, I do think I had an unusually good sense of how my body moved and what it was capable of. When I stared at a river crossing of stones or a jungle gym or an obstacle course, I could run through the motions in my head, imagining how I would have to move to make it to the other side. Often in my imagination I’d slip, and then I’d back up and think through the sequence again until I found something that worked. Only when I had a path that worked in my head did I try it for real.

I wasn’t always right; sometimes there was a patch of slippery moss or other hazard I hadn’t seen and accounted for. Sometimes I was just wrong about how far I could leap or how much my grip could hold and I’d fall to the ground, but when I was wrong like that I noticed and gradually I was wrong less often. Even today, if I have time to think through a rock climbing ascent or a Jenga tower pull, I ask myself what I’m about to do and what I think will happen next.

2.

When I was a teenager, I had a classmate who loved horses. She had pictures of horses on her backpack. She drew horses in the margins of her notebooks. She talked about horses at lunch. I didn’t find horses interesting, but I liked hearing people talk about what they knew a lot about, and wanted to make friends. I was not, however, socially adroit, so what I said was “why do you care about something boring like horses?”

She complained to the teachers about me being rude, which in hindsight was entirely fair. This was one of several turning points that made me realize I was obnoxious and irritating without intending to be. I still like hearing people talk about their fields of interest, but these days I usually phrase the question as “I don’t know much about that subject, can you tell me more about it?” or “so what subject are you fascinated by?” More generally, before I speak I ask myself what I’m about to say and how I think the person I’m talking to is going to react next. If I had asked myself ahead of time what I thought the response would be to calling a subject she was obviously interested in boring, I would have said something else.

3.

When I first started programming computers I was on a TI-83 calculator, where you didn’t so freely type so much as picked from a list of commands. I would enter commands I barely understood and hit run, watching to see how it broke. I’d look at the errors, find the line that wasn’t doing what I wanted, and replace bits with different commands to see if that worked better. Obviously, this wasn’t a very fast way to write new code, so I learned to think about what was going to happen before I ran it. The process of checking the code in my own head was important in discerning what the commands actually did.

Experienced and skilled programmers can look at a normal function and take a pretty good guess at what it’s going to do if you run the code. Even novice programmers can look at simple bits of code and predict what it’s going to do; think of Hello World. In other words, they can answer you if you ask them what they’re about to do and what will happen next.

III.

It is surprisingly easy to not do this. “I’m doing this because that’s what the instructions say, and I haven’t thought at all about what will happen next.” “I’m saying this because I’m angry, and I haven’t thought at all about what he’ll say in response.” “I’m doing this because I want to do something to help, and I haven’t thought at all about whether this will actually help.” “I dunno, I didn’t think about it, I just did it.” It seems like a really poor way for brains to work! I know! Perhaps people are doing this subconsciously all the time, and thinking about it explicitly is unnecessary?

Meh. Maybe. Ideally we’d be thinking about what we know and how we know it subconsciously all the time, and doing it explicitly would be unnecessary. I don’t put a lot of thought into these questions every time I act or think. “There’s a glass of water on the desk next to me, which I know because I put it there five minutes ago and I can see it in my peripheral vision. I’m going to reach out to pick it up for a drink, which will result in me being less thirsty.” If this formulation (“What are you about to do?” and “What do you think will happen next?”) is awkward to you, go ahead and do whatever you’ve been doing enough to go about your day for now, perhaps setting aside time to practice this deliberately. Beware the valley of bad rationality.

Just like learning proper running form or lifting technique can make you faster or let you pick up more while damaging your body less, I believe using proper form can help you think faster or come up with ideas you otherwise wouldn’t have thought of while making fewer mistakes. While I don’t usually put a lot of thought into this sequence, I also don’t put a lot of thought into how my pen moves when I write or how to ride on a bike. That’s not because it doesn’t matter how you run or bike, but because I already put a lot of deliberate practice into getting proper form. When I started running laps with a friend who was a trained track and field runner, he pointed out numerous ways that my untrained form was bad. I deliberately practiced better form, and then I got faster.

A note: in my experience, this question scales up and down gracefully. It’s helpful for large topics with a lot of approaches and the second to second level of how I move or speak. “If I book a big convention space, what’s going to happen next? Hrm, I think nobody will come because they don't know about it. Okay, what if I book this venue, then announce it?” That’s the question for something big. “If while he’s talking about his day I smile like this, what’s going to happen next? He’s going to ask what’s funny and feel annoyed because the emotional content of his speech is sad, he had a rough day at work. Okay, what if I give this sort of encouraging half smile?” To be clear, you don’t have to start from zero; instead start from your current best plan and think about the outcomes.

The third question of rationality relies on what the CFAR handbook calls the Inner Simulator, and it ties really well with predictions and calibration. You want to notice when you’re habitually wrong about something, and ideally in which direction you’re usually wrong. If you have a tiny bit of extra bandwidth when asking yourself what you’re about to do and what you think will happen next, using a tool like Fatebook or even just writing it down on a piece of paper can prevent the sneaky parts of your brain from pretending you knew all along what would happen. 

You don’t need to do that, though I think it makes the technique more effective. Asking the question at all, promoting it to the explicit part of your brain, seems to be sufficient to get some useful improvements.

What am I about to do? I’m about to publish a post about this question of rationality and how I use it. What do I think will happen next? I think I’ll get a little pushback on whether this is fundamental or not, plus some people saying this sounds useful to them. A few years from now I’ll hear someone say that it has been useful to them and they regularly use this, or they read this article and found it changed how they thought or worked for the better.