SotW: Be Specific

her attempt to teach a unit on "Being Specific" didn't seem to work.

How specifically did it not work?

(ETA: I should probably add I'm not being mischievous here; "doesn't work" is a trigger phrase for me, born out of extensive experience of dealing with useless bug reports. It systematically unpacks into at least two questions, "what behavior were you expecting" and "what did you get instead".)

[-]Vaniver13y810

An example of this that will be familiar to any programmer, and was taught to me in grade school, is "give orders to a malicious idiot." The teacher has the students write down the algorithm for a simple task, like "sharpen a pencil," with a wooden pencil and an old crank-operated sharpener as the props.

Typically, people begin with something like "stick the pencil into the sharpener, then turn the crank," which the teacher will do by ineffectually pushing the side of the pencil against the sharpener while turning the crank. The students revise to "stick the end of the pencil into the hole in the sharpener, then turn the crank," which the teacher will do by sticking the eraser into sharpener. (There are, if I remember correctly, four or five different features you can require the pencil-sharpening algorithm have, like which end of the pencil to stick into what part of the sharpener, which way to turn the crank, to hold the pencil still so it doesn't just spin with the crank or fall out if the sharpener is oriented poorly.)

(This will be familiar to programmers because going from the basic algorithm to code requires a level of detail that can't be faked.)

[-]AShepard13y340

I was reminded of something similar by AspiringKnitter's post below. There is an event in Science Olympiad called Write It Do It. One person is given a constructed object made out of LEGO, K'Nex, or similar. They write a set of instructions for how to reproduce the object. These are then given to a teammate who hasn't seen the original object, who must use the instructions to reconstruct the original object. Seems fairly simple to adapt to a group setting - you could just split the group into two rooms and have them first write their own instructions and then try to follow the instructions of a partner in the other room.

This exercise and malicious idiot exercise differ in the "when" and "by whom". With a malicious idiot, your errors are pointed out immediately and by somebody else. When writing instructions, your errors don't come to light until your partner's object doesn't look like yours, and neither of you might notice until that point. It's important to notice a lack of specificity both in others (so they don't lead you astray) and in yourself (so you don't lead yourself astray), so it would probably be useful to do both kinds of exercises.

[-]TheOtherDave13y150

There's a lower-overhead version of the LEGO exercise involving pen and paper: person A draws a design on a piece of paper and hands it to person B, who writes instructions for how to reproduce that shape and hands them to person C, who follows them. Then compare A's output to C's.

Naturally, this can be done in parallel with N people, all of whom start out as As and end up as Cs.

Of course, this kind of depends on A not knowing what's coming, since otherwise A just draws a circle or something.

2thomblake13y

This game is particularly fun when chained; A draws, B describes, C draws, D describes, and so on. Then you see how the shape transformed over time.

4RobinZ13y

There's actually an online game called "Doodle or Die" for playing this. It being an online game, however, there are a disgustingly large number of players who break the chain (willfully or non).

9atucker13y

We've played this at meetups a few times. It hammered in the illusion of transparency pretty well. (Puppy Trampoline -> Drawing -> If you jump on a dog you make it stronger).

5RobinZ13y

I remember that! I think the biggest obstacle to clarity in the game is actually the rarity of artistic skill, not the vagueness of the written descriptions, though.

3thomblake13y

I've played a similar game in person - I think it was Telestrations. You get a word from a stack of cards, and try to draw that word. The next player guesses which word you were trying to draw, and the next player tries to draw that word (and so on). Fun party game.

0bentarm13y

Except that the aim of telephone pictionary is to produce hilariously incongruous lists of phrases and pictures, and the aim of this game is, well, the opposite. Erm... posted this in the wrong thread, then "retracted" it -didn't actually know what that button did. Oh well...

0thomblake13y

If you reload, you can delete a retracted comment.

0[anonymous]13y

retract

2fubarobfusco13y

This is the party game called "Eat Poop You Cat" (pronounced "I'pupiukat") or "Telephone Pictionary".

0bentarm13y

Except that the aim of telephone pictionary is to produce hilariously incongruous lists of phrases and pictures, and the aim of this game is, well, the opposite.

[-]fiddlemath13y210

Once a year, an acquaintance of mine gets his first-year programming class to tell him how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Even more knobs. :)

4The Dao of Bayes13y

The best question I ever encountered during an interview for a Technical Support position was to describe either that or tying your shoes. It's a great test of whether a prospective employee will be able to actually communicate troubleshooting concepts to the caller on the other end of the line, since obviously they can't use anything but words to do so :)

[-]daenerys13y210

I think this is a great idea! One addition I think would be useful is that (after a demo), have people get into small groups and take turns being the "malicious idiot" (instead of just the teacher playing this role). This will allow them to think of the issue from the OTHER side. (and be more kinetically interactive)

[-]Morendil13y120

See also Teach Me to Smoke.

2CronoDAS13y

Darn it, this was the first thing I thought of, and now I can't get any credit for it! See also: How to cook scrambled eggs

2wedrifid13y

... Then the malicious idiot stabs you in the eye with the pencil. Oh, the malicious idiot was supposed to follow orders and only follow orders? Why didn't you say so?!

7Vaniver13y

Because I love setting other people up for jokes.

3Viliam_Bur13y

I guess the malicious idiot is not suppossed to be creative, but lazy. They should use the simplest possible explanation -- only the simplicity is not measured by common sense, but by something like Solomonoff prior.

3DSimon13y

No, it's maliciousness, but very specifically aimed maliciousness. They don't want to hurt you, they just want to demonstrate that you are bad at giving directions.

3Spurlock13y

I don't think this a good restriction. Consider the fact that Hanlon's Razor is even a thing: This suggests that people often mistake stupidity for malice. So given that in these examples, your opponent probably does secretly understand what you're communicating (most of us know deep down how to sharpen a pencil), it might be necessary to have malice/creativity play the part of inferential distance. Otherwise you may learn to anticipate an unrealistically rational audience, one which never comes in with incorrect preconceived ideas, or lacks the necessary technical vocabulary, or seems to practice selective hearing, etc. In short, original seeing is the exception, not the rule, so the opponent should be at least slightly hostile in his/her interpretations to account for this.

[-]palladias13y280

Idea One: Monday/Tuesday Game

On Monday, your proposition is true. On Tuesday, your proposition is false. Tell me a story about each of the days so I can see how they are different. Don't just list the differences (because you're already not doing that well). Start with "I wake up" so you start concrete and move on in that vein, naming the parts of your day that are identical as well as those that are different.

Idea Two: Sabotage Game

You're definitely right, but unfortunately there's a malevolent actor who wants to make you look a fool. And even more unfortunately, he's creative and has a lot of resources. What does he sabotage? What evidence does he counterfeit? (This way you're identifying the examples or the proofs by looking at them as structurally crucial.)

127chaos10y

I really like this and wish I'd seen it earlier. Good idea.

[-]lincolnquirk13y250

Idea: train the skill "ask for examples" instead, which seems easier to train, and bootstraps you into being more specific. I am not usually confused about my own thoughts, but I am often confused when others are trying to explain their ideas.

Example: explaining a startup idea to my friend today, I said "...and the viral strategy for this payments app could be loaning money to people". He was confused and asked for an example, so I said "let's say we are at a coffee shop. I have no cash, you have the payment app, and I want to borrow money for coffee. You tell me to download the app, so you can loan me the money. Then I can get my coffee, but to pay you back, I have to complete the signup process." -- here, I was incorrectly assuming my friend had all the same context I did with respect to viral strategies.

Exercise: after explaining the virtues of asking for examples, start to move onto another topic. A confederate in the audience yells "can you give an example?" Everyone giggles, the instructor says "I'm glad you asked!" and the exercise is explained: Students pair off and start telling stories to each other, intentionally leaving ... (read more)

[-]Morendil13y270

A friend of mine makes these stickers:

[-]ITakeBets13y230

At the risk of escalating the Meta War, I think "be specific" and "be concrete" are themselves too general and abstract to engender good exercises. They look more like "do algebra" than "factor a polynomial". Not that you wouldn't get some interesting responses if you said, "We need ideas for teaching how to do algebra," but most of them probably wouldn't make students better at factoring a polynomial-- analogously, I like the "teach me to sharpen a pencil" game, and it would make a fun and striking activity, but I'm not sure it would help students learn to explain their business plan better in an interview. If you want students to communicate judgements and opinions better, teach them to do that.

In this case, I would unpack "specific" into two parts: concrete and relevant. To make a statement more concrete, you talk about how qualities can be measured or observed ("Yellow is a color" becomes "Yellow is the color of a dandelion" or "yellow is the color of the emission spectrum of sodium"). To make it more relevant, you relate it to a goal or higher-level question ("These scissor... (read more)

[-]HonoreDB13y200

Argh. I'm reminding myself that Retroactive Rewards Rage is a cognitive fallacy. Is there a formal name for it? I bet you could induce it in chimps.

Anyway,

Abstraction Telephone

Divide into at least 4 groups, of minimum size 1 and maximum size maybe 5. Each group gets a different short passage. They collaborate to translate the passage their choice of either "one rung up," making it all more abstract, or "one rung down," making it all more specific. Group N then passes their translated passage only, not the original, to Group N+1 modulo the number of groups. Then each group performs the same operation, then passes it to the next group in line. I think two iterations will be enough to get something entertainingly mangled, so then each group in turn performs the passage they've been handed for the audience. The remaining people may try to guess what the original passage was.

Example (2/3rds stolen from George Orwell):

Group 1 gets:

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance hap... (read more)

6Eliezer Yudkowsky13y

We'll totally do retroactive awards for anything we try from Check Consequentialism.

0HonoreDB13y

Oh, thanks!

[-]AspiringKnitter13y200

I think you should go with Vaniver's idea. (Edit: Vaniver now has multiple ideas up. I mean the one about giving orders to malicious idiots. Completely off-topic: that's also a useful way to explain tasks to people with Asperger's Syndrome or other neurological oddities that cause executive dysfunction.)

I also think this reminds me of something (fiction) writers talk about a lot: they've hit on the way people won't sympathize with "a billion people died/starved/were tortured/experienced dust specks in their eyes" but will sympathize with "Alice was mobbed by dust specks and blinded" and will sympathize even better if you give some specific details about how it felt. And then they go on to talk about how to make Alice someone the reader cares about and how to craft sentences and other stuff that's relevant to them but irrelevant here.

But maybe something like making up a character and talking someone through xyr experience using the product step by step, in the kind of detail a novelist would use to describe the climactic fight scene.

Another idea that occurred to me is some sort of exercise where two people would pair up. One would have to do a novel task or navig... (read more)

5Oscar_Cunningham13y

Upvoted for that last paragraph.

4erratio13y

Yeah, seconding the "blind obstacle course" exercise, although you don't usually need to make it more difficult by not letting the person giving instructions watch (mostly because it's difficult just to walk in a straight line without visual cues, let alone execute precise turns). It's a common leadership/working as a group game and people usually need to watch other attempts go wrong 3 or 4 times before hitting a useful level of specificity.

3dbaupp13y

(Summary: Orienteering with the navigation and movement separate. This exercise requires both people to be specific to not get lost, and it can be extended by adding in a race aspect (trying to be specific under pressure!).) The last paragraph made me think of "MoboGoGlobo", which is an orienteering event where there are two participants: one doing the navigation who guides the other via phone. (I'm not sure how familiar with orienteering many people are, so I'll give a quick intro) When participating in an orienteering event one normally has to visit a series of markers in a predefined order as quickly as possible (or not, if one isn't feeling like racing, entirely up to the participant). One has a detailed map (although, importantly, it rarely has street names) that indicates the location of these and the order to visit them in, e.g. the two maps here (the pink (or purple) triangle is the start location and the numbered circles are the markers). When competing, one uses all sorts of clues to make sure one is going in the right direction and one isn't lost (and to become unlost), like most obviously the shape of nearby buildings, the topography (e.g. a steep hill), a fork in a track or stream, or more subtly things, like a bend in a track or the position of a power line on the next hill. (Conventionally, one also has a compass, which one uses to orient oneself correctly.) In this exercise you need two people: one with the map ("navigator"), the other actually on the territory that corresponds to the map ("runner", this doesn't imply that one needs to run though): it requires the navigator to describe exactly where to go ("go past the building" < "go to the left of the building that has a round canopy outside"), and also for the runner to describe what they see so that the navigator can keep track ("There is a line of trees" < "A line of trees starts just to my left and goes directly away"). There are multiple levels of specificity too: the best teams will have

1Vaniver13y

I typically use a permalink to refer to comments that aren't upthread. (Thanks for the recommendation, by the way!)

[-]Morendil13y190

Exercise - filing bug reports. Have attendees use software that sucks (that they provide, e.g. on their mobile device, or that you provide, e.g. over the Web), or recall occasions where they used software that sucked. Ask them to describe the problem they encountered in enough detail that someone else can reproduce it, or deduce something useful such as a workaround.

[-]fubarobfusco13y130

"It needs to be about 20% cooler."

[-]lukeprog13y170

I, for one, am thrilled to see Eliezer writing another Sequence. :)

[-]daenerys13y170

Also, in my quest to make these all relatable to improv games:

More Specific (it's not a very good video, sorry), is a game in which two people act out a scene, with the audience (or moderator) occasionally demanding that they be "More Specific"

Example-

B: Good job finishing your paper on time!
C: Yeah, I had the hardest time finding my references...
Audience: More specific!
C: My kid thought that my reference books would be better with all the pages ripped out, and I couldn't find the pages with my quotes
etc

I'm thinking that I actually might have seen this game mentioned on LW before, but I didn't a quick search and didn't see it.

Spitball (not a vid) is a game in which "Players take a mundane object suggested by the audience and elaborately detail it", generally using "Yes, and..." technique.

An improv-y style warm-up game that I just thought up, upon which I bestow the name "Something". In this game, everyone gets in a circle. The starting person (or moderator) comes up with a sentence that has a lot of "somethings" and "things" in it. Each person makes it more and more specific.

Example-
1: Did you something the thing ... (read more)

[-]Username13y160

Unrelated to the post, but I'm not sure where else to suggest rationality exercises. So I'd like to revive an idea I saw here a while back called 'What Did You See?' (I can't take any prize if it's selected because it's not mine). I think it would be a wonderful game for developing curiosity and noticing specifics. But above all its purpose is learning that you can learn, which I think even in the rationality community is an important lesson that helps to reignite the inquisitive spark.

At home there was a game that all the parents played with their children. It was called, What Did You See? Mara was about Dann’s age when she was first called into her father’s room one evening, where he sat in his big carved and coloured chair. He said to her, ‘And now we are going to play a game. What was the thing you liked best today?’
At first she chattered: ‘I played with my cousin . . . I was out with Shera in the garden . . . I made a stone house.’ And then he had said, ‘Tell me about the house.’ And she said, ‘I made a house of the stones that come from the river bed.’ And he said, ‘Now tell me about the stones.’ And she said, ‘They were mostly smooth stones, but some were sharp and had dif

... (read more)

0atorm13y

I realized that the movie was "It's a Wonderful Life" within the first paragraph. Consider adjusting your estimates of readers. Also, an imdb review that gave me the plot of a movie would not be a good review. It would be a synopsis. That review told me that the acting was good and the story heartwarming. I don't think that it is a good subject for criticism of specificity.

0Username13y

Are you replying to the right comment?

0atorm13y

No, no I'm not. A thousand pardons.

[-]lincolnquirk13y160

Exercise: incentivize both teacher and student participants in Vaniver's "malicious idiot" exercise. Give the student points when she is successfully more specific, and give the teacher points when he finds a new way to misinterpret the student instructions.

Example: how to brush your teeth?

S: hold your toothbrush

T: (picks up toothbrush with teeth) (1 point)

S : hold your toothbrush between your thumb and fingers of your right hand (1 point)

T: (makes a fist, puts toothbrush on outside of fingers) (1 point)

S: argh. Like this! (picks it up as example) (2 points for being concrete)

T: (mimics perfectly)

S: great, now... Brush your teeth. (laughter)

I could go on, but hopefully you get the point.

4Mass_Driver13y

I think this is the best exercise posted so far. Unlike the other exercises, it can be explained to ordinary middle schoolers in 90 seconds, it engages both visual and tactile senses, it is competitive, it is devoid of perverse incentives, and it will usually be fun to play and funny to watch.

5Armok_GoB13y

Not so, you're better of improving in small increments than doing the best you can immediately.

0Dues11y

That depends on the scoring system. If the judge grade exponentially for better answers, then small increments are a loosing choice.

[-]Morendil13y140

Exercise - fetch something from the kitchen. This happens all the time at home and drives me crazy. "Get me the dentist's papers, they're in the drawer." What drawer, in what room, what do the papers look like, are they in some sort of container... Reproducing this in a residential training setting opens up interesting possibilities. For instance, while giving attendees a tour or taking them from place to place tell them (separately) to pay attention to a specific item ("this is your target for the exercise after lunch") in a non-central location. The next day, pair people up, have them describe the target to each other, fetch targets, debrief.

[-]Benquo13y100

Several comments mention guessing games. Here's my variant:

One "communicator", one or many askers.

The communicator starts by describing something in the most general terms they can think of.

Each round, the asker(s) can either ask a question, or guess. The question has to be about an attribute of the thing, not its name, and they can't say "Is it X?" or "What is it?". The communicator answers, vaguely if the question is vague, getting specific if they're backed into a corner.

When they guess, the game is over. If they guess wrong, they lose. Then you try to figure out what your next question should have been.

If they guess right, they win and get congratulated.

"It's a way of moving things from place to place."

"What kinds of things?"

"Oh, things you want moved."

"How big can these things get?"

"No more than six feet high, a couple feet wide, less than a foot long."

"Are they inert and durable?"

"No."

"Are they fragile?"

"Depends on your standards."

"Would they break if you dropped them from a foot?"

"No."

"From ten feet?"

"Possibly."

"... (read more)

0Incorrect13y

The answerer is being cooperative here though. This is how I would have answered: "It's a way of doing stuff to stuff" "What kinds of stuff?" "Stuff that's like some stuff but unlike other stuff" "How big is the stuff?" "Around the size of other stuff" "Is the stuff inert and durable?" "As much as that sort of stuff can be" ...

0Benquo13y

Yes, but sufficiently specific questions should be anle to corner any uncooperative answerer playing in good faith. You don't have to accept that answer to "how big," for example. You can ask, is the stuff organized into discrete items? If so, are they bigger than a cubic mile? If not, are they smaller than a cubic foot? And so on.

0faul_sname13y

Very strongly reminds me of this as well. I wonder what sort of exercise might combine the two.

[-]lincolnquirk13y100

Exercise: Stay in the entrepreneurship domain and channel PG. Pretty much everyone has startup ideas, right? Actually apply PG's algorithm to the participants' real startup ideas.

(I think his algorithm is something like: do I understand the core idea? Is it something people want? How do you know? Is it something people will pay for? How do you know? What are the obvious flaws? Why are you the team to do this? Why is now a good time for this? Is it working? How do you know? What insights/surprises?)

Example: I love Magic the Gathering and I want to have a place for people to talk about how awesome the decks are--

T: be specific!

A site to talk Magic strategy. (+1 conciseness)

T: how do you know people want this?

Well, people love magic and talk about it all the time.

T: I'm not convinced.

Well, I talked to a famous magic player (+1 specificity) and he told me this story about how he invented this deck back in the day on the starcity forums, and he couldn't have done it without the community [lincoln note: this is totally made up], so we want to enable that to happen more. (too general, but the teacher doesn't press yet, instead noting the obvious flaws for later discussion)

T: and people w... (read more)

[-]BlueSun13y90

Company mission statements are notoriously abstract and might make a good starting place. If someone didn't know anything about a company and they went and read the mission statement, they probably wouldn't have a much better idea of what the company actually did.

For example, if (stereotypical) Grandpa asked you what Google was and you replied, "they organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" you probably wouldn't do much to help him understand what Google is (despite that being one of the best mission stateme... (read more)

[-]daenerys13y90

One way sub-skill of being specific is learning to focus on details, instead of big picture.

For example, if a manager is vague they focus on the big picture and tell their employee "You need to stop arriving late."
If a manager is specific, they focus on details and tell their employee: "In the past week, you have been more than 15 minutes late two times. If you are running more than 10 minutes late you have to call. If you are more than 15 minutes late 3 times in a month, you will get written up, etc."

I think a fun way to teach how to ... (read more)

[-]fubarobfusco13y90

Exercise - refining descriptions.

Get three or four people sitting together. Place a large group of different items (30-50 small cheap plastic toys of the sort readily available in bulk from Oriental Trading Company, for instance) in the center of the group.

The exercise is to narrow down to a single toy by adding one detail at a time to a description. The description begins with the word "thingy," "toy," or a similarly vague word. Players take turns adding a single detail to the description, repeating it each time. (A detail is usually a... (read more)

7atorm13y

A variation: Again, a large group of different items (I was thinking abstract images of colors and shapes, but toys is a good idea too) is visible to the group. One of the objects is selected and then each person writes a description that selects that object alone out of the set. The goal is to write the shortest description that can pick that particular object. Once everyone is done, answers are compared, and violations are sought: if one of the other objects fulfills all the requirements of someone's description, they are disqualified. Whoever has the shortest description that describes the chosen object and only the chosen object wins a point, and the game is repeated with another object.

2atorm13y

This adds a competitive/fun element (looking for violations in other descriptions), may widen ideas on how to describe something, and trains conciseness as well as specificity.

1dbaupp13y

(I like the idea, but I think the last few paragraphs could do with some editing: your meaning has been obscured :( )

0atorm13y

Good grief, what happened to my post? Thanks for the heads up.

0atorm13y

A second variation: Once again, a large group of different items is the set. Half the group leaves the room, and the other half selects one of the items. Each person left in the room writes the shortest description of the chosen item that selects it out of the group. The other members come back in and are each given one of the written descriptions and a stopwatch. They read the descriptions and then try to visually find the chosen item without giving obvious indications to the other searchers. Once a searcher thinks he knows which item is being described, he stops his stopwatch to indicate how long it took him. After every searcher believes they have found the correct item, the written descriptions and stopwatch times can be compared as above. This has the added bonus of providing information on what kind of descriptions are the most helpful in finding things.

[-]Mark_Eichenlaub13y80

Exercise: What Was That All About?

Players get samples of writing from various internet sources - randomly chosen movie reviews from IMDB, news stories from Huffington Post, blog posts from Wordpress, Wikipedia articles, etc.

Player A gets to block out 5% of the words in the sample. Player B then tries to guess the topic the sample discusses.

For example, here's a semi-randomly chosen IMDB review - the first one I grabbed off the site. It got 137 "helpful" votes out of 161 voters, so it's perceived as a good review. It's of a famous movie. I've bloc... (read more)

5atorm13y

4Mark_Eichenlaub13y

Thanks for letting me know you found it out so quickly. By specificity for the review, I didn't mean that it should summarize the plot. Instead, when some general statement is made, there should be some connection to the movie that supports it. Jimmy Stewart has boyish charm? When? What scenes? What about them? Contrast to Roger Ebert's review. An excerpt: This is a specific example supporting his statement at the beginning of the paragraph that, ""It's a Wonderful Life" is not just a heart-warming "message picture.""

1atorm13y

This clears up your point wonderfully.

[-]majus13y70

Why is "be specific" a hard skill to teach?

I think it is because being specific is not really the problem, and by labeling it as such we force ourselves into a dead-end which does not contain a solution to the real problem. The real problem is achieving communication. By 'achieving communication', I mean that concepts in one mind are reproduced with good fidelity in another. By good fidelity, I mean that 90% (arbitrary threshold) of assertions based on my model will be confirmed as true by yours.

There are many different ways that the fidelity c... (read more)

1Vaniver13y

I suspect the Socratic method (the old one, not the bland one) fits under this heading- "put forth a proposition, and I'll demolish you with your own statements."

1thomblake13y

Sadly, "Communicate well" isn't quite as simple of a skill.

[-]RolfAndreassen13y70

For moderately tech-savvy people who are not programmers: Write pseudocode to sort a list of numbers. Have a human, perhaps the moderator, execute the steps on a blackboard with a particular list. Repeat until you get the expected results. For extra credit, drill down on steps such as "exchange two numbers".

Ask for ways in which 2012 laws are better than 1912 laws. (Year is arbitrary.) Drill down on abstractions; for example, if "unions have more power" is given as an answer, ask for specific ways in which this is an improvement. For a... (read more)

[-]thomblake13y70

Exercise: Interview (or "be Paul Graham")

Example: (participants A and B)
A: I am a gardener.
B: What is a gardener?
A: It's my job.
B: No, what does a gardener do?
A: I maintain gardens.
B: What is an example of a task that you have to do?
...

Description:

2 participants act in roles of the Interviewer and Interviewee. The Interviewer asks questions to be answered honestly, ideally that would tend towards abstract answers like "What do you do for a living?" and "What did you study in school?". The Interviewer repeatedly asks for mo... (read more)

4TheOtherDave13y

When I did more job interviews, I was fond of the question "What does the job you'd most want here look like, in terms of what you'd actually be doing on a typical day?"

3thomblake13y

Inspired by people's failure to grasp at the obvious solutions to Harry's problem after Chapter 80, I posted an obvious exercise in case everyone's failed to notice it.

0Luke_A_Somers13y

I posit that this is well more obvious than any other 'obvious' solutions to Harry's problem.

2thomblake13y

I'm not sure if that makes people more or less likely to notice it.

0Vaniver13y

The "it is my job" response is a bit hard to interpret. Is the interviewee supposed to be intentionally obtuse? The interviewer's motivation is easy to maintain, but the interviewee's motivation might become challenging if this is just a conversation with the goal of specificity and external topic control. If I know that my interlocutor is supposed to ask me questions to make me more and more specific, I might jump the gun, leading off with "I am a human employed in the care of plants selected for their decorative or nutritive value, and at present I care for carrots, beets, and daisies" rather than "I am a gardener."

[-][anonymous]13y70

An idea of an exercise, which actually involves some popular culture - which may make it more interesting for those involved. Agree on a set of books/movies/series/etc that can be used before starting, which participants are reasonably familiar with. Postulate a broad category of characters, e.g. "Good politicians". Brainstorm a list of characters who fit this category and put the list onto a piece of paper or a whiteboard. Take turns in trying to narrow down the list by making the category more specific and crossing some characters off until onl... (read more)

[-]daenerys13y70

In psychology, the term "high-level construal" or "abstract construal" means thinking in supercategories (mammals), and the term "low-level construal" or "concrete construal" means thinking in subcategories (poodles). Being in a high level construal helps you focus on goals, and being in a low level construal helps you focus on methods and specifics, IIRC.

When testing construal effects, one way psychologists induce low-level construals is to ask an iterative set of "How" questions.

For example:
Subject- I wan... (read more)

[-]Daniel_Burfoot13y60

Notice that the entrepreneur's failure to convey his idea to PG was not, evidently, a failure of Thought - as you footnote, his system was actually pretty well-thought-out. Instead it was a failure of Communication. This distinction is important and shouldn't be blurred. Communication requires two parties, and a failure of Communication can't always be definitely attributed to one side or the other; maybe PG just wasn't asking the right questions. Or maybe he didn't care about understanding the idea at all but just wanted to probe the entrepreneur's ability to remain steady under pressure, which ability is obviously advantageous to would-be-CEOs.

[-]pnrjulius13y60

I'm not convinced enough that being specific IS a good thing to do, frankly. Maybe there's something else buried within the concept that we're called "specific" that really is valuable... but when I think about "being specific" and applying this to all the various cases, it very quickly leads me to doing things that are completely useless. It collapses, basically, into casuistry. At maximum specificity, I have a list of observed cases and no way of linking them together to make sense out of them.

"What is red?" becomes "We... (read more)

[-]The Dao of Bayes13y100

Perhaps the better advice would be "be AWARE of how specific you are being, and in which direction you should move to facilitate communication" - sometimes you're giving a bunch of overly-specific examples without tying them together, and sometimes you're being overly general without giving someone some concrete examples to test their understanding.

My roommate and I often sit on the couch and discuss ideas for our shared D&D campaign. We exercise this skill a lot - two very common questions are: "can you give me some specific examples?" [be more specific] and "I don't get what ties these examples together" [what's the big picture / be more general]

Possibly an exercise that involves going through a quick dialog, and the audience calling out "be more specific" / "what's the big picture?" as appropriate at each step (or holding up colored flags, etc.). Another very simple exercise here, but it helps the audience calibrate to the idea, engages them a bit.

I don't think breaking people in to pair would be beneficial for this, unless you want to focus on "seeing where you are on the ladder, and WHICH direction you need to move." You seem to want to focus just on "moving down, being more specific", which seems fine to me. This just helps them to see the ladder itself, and realize that it moves BOTH ways.

You can then transition by saying "Okay, now we're going to focus specifically on techniques for moving DOWN the ladder, for being more SPECIFIC..."

0anandjeyahar13y

I have begun noticing that i do this(moving up and down the ladder of abstraction) in all my communications. I realize i am doing it by reflex/habit. Trying to observe conditions that trigger a move up or down. So far there seems to be a correlation between the level of uncertainty i feel about an answer and the level of abstraction at which i verbalize my answer. Infact, i have found that the more uncertain i am about i tend to take the descriptive,detailed examples route.

0NancyLebovitz13y

I agree-- as far as I can tell, a lot of people have no idea how to summarize. On the other hand, there really are people who have trouble being specific.

[-]KateGladstone13y60

A further exercise (maybe especially for children/beginners) — each student is to make up a new word. The made-up word must refer to something (real or imaginary) that does not have any specific name in the English language (or in whatever language is the working language of the group. (Examples of possible new words: "Flonk — that portion of the back of the human hand which does not contain any of the fingers" "Wedlaw — a term for the kinship relation between two people whose former spouses have married ea... (read more)

0The Dao of Bayes13y

Huh, it's like Zendo except in reverse - the goal is create a guessable pattern rather than an obscure one. Goodness, I would so much rather play Reverse Zendo, too! I might actually take this idea and run with it! :)

3fiddlemath13y

Ewwww... if you have masters trying to make obscure patterns, then they're doing Zendo wrong. Patterns simply are obscure; there's little helping it.

[-]jimrandomh13y60

This exercise is not for being specific, but just a general rationality-skill exercise that I think is useful.

Trivial Deduction

In every conversation, we hear hundreds of statements. Each of these implies many others - some directly, through definitions and linguistic rules that border on the tautological, some in combination with background knowledge, and some indirectly through multi-step inferences. Because the implications of each statement are too numerous to handle, we apply a strong filter to what reaches our attention: a statement reached by inferen... (read more)

1The Dao of Bayes13y

I like this idea. I would say, though, that it teaches "how to make a specific statement", rather than "noticing WHEN you need to be more specific." If you're running in to groups that have trouble understanding what a specific statement is, or coming up with their own, this would be a very useful precursor exercise, though. It's funny to realize that telling the entrepreneur to "be more specific" doesn't work, because you weren't specific about what "specific" means! :)

[-]anemone4213y60

A simple exercise, borrowed from giraffe language / non-violent commenucation. Describe what happened in a way, even your worst enemy would have to agree with. This means sticking to what you saw, heard etc., without lumping things together or including judgements.

So, if your friend and you were to meet at the cafe at 13.00, and he showed up at 13.05, there's not much else you can say about that situation. You can't deduce a motive for his being late, and it wouldn't be wise to lump this being-late together with other being-lates.

Exercise based on this: 4 ... (read more)

[-]fubarobfusco13y110

This means sticking to what you saw, heard etc., without lumping things together or including judgements.

So, if your friend and you were to meet at the cafe at 13.00, and he showed up at 13.05, there's not much else you can say about that situation. You can't deduce a motive for his being late, and it wouldn't be wise to lump this being-late together with other being-lates.

Go further. The friend showed up when the clock on the wall said 13:05; or my watch said 13:05; or whatever. After all, the friend's watch may be five minutes slow; or yours may be fast.

I suspect the bigger source of disagreement here, though, is whether 13:05 counts as "being late" for a social meeting booked for 13:00. This turns out to be extremely culturally dependent. Some cultures (and some people) value on-the-dot punctuality much more than others. To some, five minutes is a rounding error, and describing it as "being late" would be the equivalent of getting out your protractor to determine if you've been given a fair slice of pie: requiring that level of precision from someone indicates that you're either a crank, or looking for an excuse to have a disagreement with them.

So going from "we agreed to meet at 13:00; he showed up at 13:05" to "he is late" counts as a "judgement", too.

0Eliezer Yudkowsky13y

Is that A, B, C, D exercise standard from non-violent communication?

0anemone4213y

Sorry! Only just now saw this message! I learned this exercise from one of the giraffe language weekends I've attended, and it goes well with the first part of giraffe language, which is describing without judgement. That's all I know.

[-]Circaea13y60

It seems like a common situation where this skill would be useful and is often lacking is where one person is an expert or semi-expert on a subject, but lacks conscious awareness of their criteria for expert decision-making. A concrete example of this that I have experienced is trying to explain to someone how I know confidently and in an instant something like "that tree is a kind of maple" or "that bird is a robin". Asking me this forces me to step back and start pointing out all the information I'm taking into account, which usuall... (read more)

[-]John_Maxwell13y60

"Read through the comments, gather the LessWrong usernames of everyone who made a suggestion we tried or adopted, and email the list to Luke"

It's pretty easy to just let Luke do everything isn't it? (No snark meant; I noticed this tendency in myself when we were housemates and started actively trying to fight it.)

Exercise

It seems possible that when people take personality tests, they just write down their perceptions of themselves. A much better way would be to think of specific examples (of times when they were on time or late for an appointm... (read more)

2Stefie_K13y

This gets people thinking of specifics, but would it contrast being specific with failing to be specific, and make the students want to be specific in the future? I think that the students need that contrast just to appreciate what the issue is, and they need to see what they're doing as something that could apply to a broad set of situations in order to find occasions to behave this way in the future. I suppose you could contrast your test with a personality test that doesn't use specifics, and that could supply the contrast. How would you supply the applicability? I might be overestimating people's tendency to compartmentalize, but I doubt it. Once, when my parents were visiting my apartment before I got a microwave, my mother wanted to reheat some food in the ordinary oven. She asked what temperature I thought she should use; I didn't reheat food in the oven very often, but I suggested 300 degrees. It took me several seconds more before it occurred to me: "Mom, you reheat food in the toaster oven at home all of the time. What temperature do you use then?" Then she knew what temperature she should use. But she didn't automatically bridge the gap from "toaster oven" to "real oven," and I almost didn't, either. We're looking at a bigger gap, here, and a very strong tendency to be not-specific.

0John_Maxwell13y

Beating compartmentalization is almost an impossible mandate. My exercise already calls for people to think of specific things they did recently in their lives. I doubt many exercises can do better than that. In terms of application, I think people are already massively curious about who they are and how they fit in (and this might apply especially strongly to people who aren't the sort to read LW). Just improving folks' self-evaluations could be seen as a pretty big benefit. http://lesswrong.com/lw/8gv/the_curse_of_identity/ Giving participants two different Big Five tests, and only telling them to think of specific examples on the second one, could work well. But it also opens the door to an underwhelming conclusion if people's abstract self-evaluations actually do tend to be fairly accurate.

0Stefie_K13y

Actually, I want to take some of my criticism back. It seems to me that there are several instrumental goals that would help with the terminal goal of getting people to routinely be specific at useful times in the future. No one exercise has to encompass all of the instrumental goals. The list I see right now is: 1) Make people better at being specific. 2) Get people to appreciate the value of being specific. 3) Get people to recognize situations where they or other people aren't being specific. 4) Get people to react negatively to a lack of specifics. 5) Make it occur to people to be specific. 6) Show/get people to think of contexts to apply their new skill of being specific. 7) Get people to be specific as a habit, without thinking about it. Your exercise could help with #1, and also #2 if the contrast between personality test results strikes the students as significant. Mine is intended to help with #4, and with good scenarios, could help with #3 and #6. If the scenario involves something practical, it could also help with #2. Feel free to add to my list.

2epigeios13y

8) Get people to recognize when other people want them to be more (or less) specific. 9) Get people to recognize when they are being specific about the wrong subject.

0Stefie_K13y

In getting them to be specific in the present, it's hard to ask for better. In getting them to be specific in the future, I'm not sure, and the point is their future behavior, right? Of course, my own exercise might be considered a cop-out in this regard; it doesn't get them to be specific in the present, even, and its main goal is to get them to simply be frustrated with a lack of specifics in the present and future. Yeah, I can see that. But that's helpful in improving their self-evaluations, not in being specific as an ongoing habit. Still useful, but I'm not sure it helps with this goal. True, but we could probably bruise it a bit. It could help even to do something as simple as telling the students three other situations they could apply the same approach to. They'd have to be fairly similar to the exercise, or else it wouldn't establish a strong enough connection in the students' heads, but I do think that talking about closely-related applications could help. With the mission statement exercise, for instance, you could point out that the same approach could help them recognize the need for specifics and the range of possible specifics in 1) descriptions of courses in college catalogs, 2) the kinds of goals that institutions set for projects, and 3) political speeches. (Any help making these three examples more specific would be gratefully appreciated.) Maybe what we need is a series of related exercises that lend themselves to being applied in related but different situations, to push at the boundaries of compartmentalization.

0Nornagest13y

This risks running into salience issues. Events which lead to failure or loss of status tend to be a lot more salient than those which lead to success, and while that by itself could still give you a reasonable if upsetting metric, I don't see any obvious way to control for differences in how this tendency manifests, or for differences in salience between domains (which could paradoxically lead to overweighting failures in a domain the testee considers personally important). Differences in general recall ability would also weight the results, but you could probably control for that with some extra effort.

0John_Maxwell13y

You could probably fix these problems by specifically asking for recent examples, in the last few weeks. Also, note I might've picked an unusually upsetting personality question. If upsetting participants is a significant issue, choosing questions and personality metrics carefully could ameliorate things. Also note that accurate personality assessment is not the primary goal here. In theory, it could be a good exercise even if it doesn't provide accurate personality assessment. In fact, you could even discard scientific pretense altogether, and just have participants complete one of those "Which Harry Potter character are you?" type quizzes, but thinking of specific examples.

[-]scottw13y60

Exercise (preferably attempted by participants before the lesson):

Another variation on an old classic. Split the group into triads, and each group is given a bunch of words in a hat (a box may also be used, or a hollowed out rock of some sort). The words, preferably, are about half-way "up" the abstraction lattice; "red" is good, "Steve Irwin" and "Concepts" are not.

Each person in a triad rotates between three roles: guesser, hinter, or observer. The hinter has to get the guesser to say the word within a short time ... (read more)

[-]Zaine13y60

If CMR mini-camp participants learned the skill through exposure, then perhaps an incentivized game executed in organically occurring scenarios that rewards those who recognize and do not practice non-specificity, would do the trick.

I'm thinking of a point-based game. It would occur either during a specified block of time, or on a specified day; everyone playing would begin with an equal number of points. During this specified period players would earn points pointing out abstract, non-specific utterances of other players' (including utterances operati... (read more)

2Eliezer Yudkowsky13y

Hm. I especially note the concept of handing out some sort of non-monetary gift at the end of the session to someone. I wonder if that would be productive or counterproductive...

1Zaine13y

Are you wondering after the productivity of the gift idea in particular or the productivity of the concept as a whole? If it's the gift idea, then I don't see how it wouldn't be productive; a desirous prize would ensure all players apply themselves to the game, and dedicate themselves to learning the skill in the short term. If the game proceeds as expected, then all involved would have had a jolly good time; memories linked to a strong emotion are more memorable (learned this somewhere - no citation I can recall), so the positive fun emotion tied to the game, and thus the skill, will insure its memorability. The idea as a whole, however, could indeed be quite counterproductive. Though I assume there would be some down time during the mini-camp? walking between sessions, meal times, pre-sleep socializing? The game might fit well during those periods, however it could just as well hinder socialization through added pressure and unnecessary competition.

0jschulter13y

That particular element seems like it would incentivize campers to spend the period hyper-aware of their own and others' specificity, which seems counterproductive to me. The goal is an increase in the specificity of statements made casually, which could be entirely unrelated. Extending the period to say, a week, might work to prevent this- at that point it would be a long term incentive rather than a prize.

0Zaine13y

I was actually thinking of the week-long mini-camp when writing this. The idea would have to be thoroughly tested before implementation, in order to find the right balance to strike when presenting the game: the balance between encouraging a keen sense of how well you evince the meaning of your communications, while still discouraging anti-social hypersensitivity to, and subsequent criticizing of, non-specificity in others.

[-]JackV13y50

I've been reading the answers and trying to put words into what I want to say. Ideally people will experience not just being more specific, but experience that when they're more specific, they immedaitely communicate more effectively.

For instance, think of three or four topics people probably have an opinion on, starting with innocuous (do you like movie X) and going on to controvertial (what do you think of abortion). Either have a list in advance, or ask people for examples. Perhaps have a shortlist and let people choose, or suggest something else if the... (read more)

0The Dao of Bayes13y

I like this, because it forces the audience to come up with specific statements, but it doesn't seem to teach them to recognize WHEN they need to be more specific. I'd say it's a very good precursor, to help them see what a specific statement is, and why it's useful. It's actually my favorite from this whole thread for that, so I do think it's a really cool idea! :) (I'm finding it neat how often this thread is identifying, for me, things that ought to be taught BEFORE you even get in to the core 5-second-skill of "recognizing when to be more specific". It reminds me of Eliezer's comments on the Sequences growing exponentially as he realized he needed to establish X before going on to Y, and then realizing he'd also need Q and K)

[-]tiki192513y50

Here's a possible exercise. It's about making a set of specifications that meet a pre-defined level of abstraction, not about moving between levels of abstraction.

Toy Designer

"When I was just a wee little lad full of hope and joy My father homeward came one night and gave to me a toy A wonder to behold it was with many colours bright And the moment I laid eyes on it it became my hearts delight It went zip when it moved and bop when it stopped and whirr when it stood still I never knew just what it was and I guess I never will."

You are a toy desi... (read more)

[-]Morendil13y50

A caveat - "specific" is not the same as "detailed". An exercise which teaches the latter may fail to hit the former.

"Detailed" is a listing of all your customers with a testimonial from each of them, many of which will be redundant, others irrelevant ("pretty home page design"). "Specific" picks out the particular thing that serves your customer better than the competition.

Being able to recognize that a given example is particularly illustrative - an examplar - is a subskill.

[-]meeple13y50

Exercise: Add as many qualifiers as you can that do not make your statement irrelevant or false.

For example:

My startup is better than MixPanel

My startup is better than MixPanel at making revenue on day zero

My startup is better than MixPanel at making revenue on day zero when the economy is down

Well, never mind, that didn't work.

[-][anonymous]13y50

The Center for Modern Rationality is now offering prizes for suggested exercises:

$50 for each exercise promising enough that we test it during a Saturday session. A $500 prize for any exercise which actually seems to work (as in, we decide to adopt it into the unit after testing).

Hmm. I'd understood that there was some pretty convincing evidence that offering cash incentives like this is counterproductive - it decreases creativity and effectiveness of troubleshooting. I don't have scholarly cites handy (I know there was a CMU/LSE study) but this is popularised in Dan Pink's "Drive". (There's a TED talk and a great RSAnimate video on this.)

7undermind13y

I was interpreting this not as "do this because we will pay you", but rather as a way of signalling how much CMR cares about this being done well and quickly.

6Mark_Eichenlaub13y

In the RSAnimate talk, Pink cited research that found that once people were doing the task (presumably under time pressure), higher incentives produced worse results. That's different from using an incentive to get people to come do the task at all.

3John_Maxwell13y

I noticed a similar flaw in some studies Dan Areily was citing to prove that incentive pay didn't work, and e-mailed him about it. He didn't have any counterarguments when he responded to me, but he did keep citing the studies IIRC...

4Eliezer Yudkowsky13y

Not offering money wasn't working, and if there are a few creative money-positive people reading this who try to pick up the free $500 bills, hopefully that's enough.

0[anonymous]13y

Mm, the studies looked at where people were assigned specific tasks and then given incentives for speed/volume results. It may be that it works differently when used as open-ended bait to motivate people to self-assign tasks.

[-]Vaniver13y50

Continuing with the "adapt a classic" suggestions:

Surely there's some way to adapt charades to this. You give someone an example of a complicated concept, and have them try to communicate that concept in as few examples as possible. We have similar problems with the twenty questions suggestion, though: a lot of specificity depends on deep knowledge of the subject matter. If you get a concept you or the guessers have never heard of, then you're dead in the water and that'll be frustrating.

The skill goals appear to be mostly "articulate the k... (read more)

2jschulter13y

This activity seems like it would tie in well with a unit on hypothesis and experiment generation as well- it reminds me of the 2-4-6 test. Perhaps have two different scoring rules: when trying to teach specificity, give points for getting your partner to guess; when teaching how to find the right hypotheses and tests, give points for guessing correctly.

[-]Vaniver13y40

Zach Weinersmith describes Professor Liar. One player gets a field of expertise randomly drawn from two lists of 100 elements (the professor); the other players (the examiners) ask the professor questions, trying to expose that the professor is not in fact an expert on Feminist Mustache Theory. It seems like it could be readily adapted to focus on the specificity aspect of things, rather than the "convincingly bullshit" aspect of things.

[-]2hp13y40

This has obviously been a fun thought-exercise for many of you, but I think what's at heart here, the "skill" we're eager to develop via exercise, is just plain old good communication. In the entrepreneur example, the failure is not his inability to BE more specific, when asked. The failure is that he doesn't already KNOW he hasn't been specific enough. So, the skill we need is not how to muster specificity when Paul Graham asks for it. What we want is simply to be able to communicate abstract ideas clearly in the first place.

All these consci... (read more)

[-]bliumchik13y40

Here’s a fairly simple one for thinking concretely about the abstraction lattice. Mine an encyclopedia article for topical words (i.e. omit “the” and “and” and their ilk – also omit duplicates, should be fairly easy to program for). Place each word on an index card and have the students arrange them on a large flat surface in order of abstraction – I’d have some large amusing goalposts at either end, but this is not strictly necessary. It should probably be acceptable for some words to be judged equally concrete.

Because this is a collaborative exercise, st... (read more)

[-]buybuydandavis13y40

I'd suggest a game - I Don't Wanna.

The two sides are shown an end state considered to be the goal. One side writes directions to accomplish the goal, including whatever constraints he wants. His opponent tries to fail to accomplish the task while still following the directions an fulfilling the requirements.

The second player should always be able to win in absolute terms. His real goal is to be minimally obtuse - find the minimal distance between our usual priors and the priors he has to assume so that the directions don't complete the task.

For any of the ... (read more)

[-]epigeios13y40

Okay, so split into sets of 2 people (or, split into 2 teams, or even dynamic teams could work). Person A asks a simple personal question about person B (such as "do you have a girlfriend?" or "do you have a college degree?" or "do you prefer dogs or cats?"). Person B then tries to answer like the people in the video did, by telling an abstract related story, or by answering a different question contained within or related to the question (like "well, dolphins are really my favorite animal" or "college degrees... (read more)

[-]Psy-Kosh13y40

Exercise idea that may simultaneously teach this and help illustrate notion of Locating the Hypothesis: A prize/treasure hunt in which you make them make you be specific. ("you", of course, being understood to mean whoever's teaching them.)

ie, hide some prize (money, for example) somewhere in the building or such. Tell them you will answer their questions about where the prize is, but they might have to work a bit to ask the right questions.

You: "Ask me where the prize is." Them: "Where is the prize?" You: "Somewhere. You... (read more)

0The Dao of Bayes13y

Upvoted. This helps teach the skill of "noticing WHEN you need a more specific answer", especially if you set the expectation of somewhat tricky, literal answers (think "giving orders to a malicious idiot") to badly phrased questions. You can also pretty easily split the group in to pairs - have one person pick an object in the room, then the other person has to ask questions until they can physically touch the object to confirm they have the right one in mind. I'd also set up the room with a lot of similar objects - have ten of the same identical vase in the room, for example. Try to involve distinguishing factors people might not normally think of. "Is it the vase on the left or right of the bookshelf?" is a novel question to come up with - it creates fun "aha!" moments instead of just using scripted questions.

[-]Swimmy13y40

I'm confused. Don't you already have your answer? Attendees picked it up by instructors asking attendees to be more specific about things they were discussing. Just turn that into an exercise: ask some questions about a subject that is suitably fuzzy in most people's heads (economics, philosophy, future prediction). Give feedback. Repeat until they get it.

And if you want something more specific:

Ask questions like, "Is a 'weak dollar' bad?" People will default to their cached thoughts. "Of course it's bad. It's weak, it should be strong."... (read more)

[-]Vaniver13y40

This is related to the incredibly important skill, search for the historical causes of your thoughts, rather than their justifications.

Isn't this not recommended by CBT? Everything I've read has been present-focused or forward-focused, whereas Freudian therapy is typically past-focused ("ok, we've figured out what you should do next time" vs. "ok, we've figured out who you should blame").

[-]Paul Crowley13y110

CBT focusses on the immediate causes, not the long-standing causes. "I'm feeling anxious because I've just got an email from my boss and it makes me worry that he's angry", not "I'm feeling anxious because of my troubled relationship with my nursery carers".

3Vaniver13y

Right. The full example he gave is: The arrows implied a progression to me, and the mention of "historical causes" in that context seems like "original causes" rather than "examples of this occurring in the past."

6NancyLebovitz13y

There's at least a recent past aspect to CBT. If you say "Everyone at work hates me", you'll be asked for specific evidence that specific people (and how many of them compared to all the people at your job) hate you.

5Louie13y

I think the bigger difference between CBT and psychoanalysis is something like, CBT: "Your feelings are the residue of your thoughts, many of which are totally wrong and should be countered by your therapist and you because human brains are horribly biased." vs, Psychoanalysis: "Your feelings are a true reflection of what an awful, corrupt, contemptible, morally bankrupt human being you are. As your therapist, I will agree with and validate anything you believe about yourself since anything you report about yourself must be true by definition." CBT still works with specific past instances of your emotions to chart feelings into thoughts. It's good to do that so you can see clearly that thoughts always proceeded your feelings about a matter.... and also to see what the content of the thoughts are if they are, sneaky, "automatic" thoughts. For example, "Jill made me sad." might be examined and reframed as "My automatic thought that hearing I was wrong about what day the garbage was picked up made me think: I'm wrong, therefore, I'm stupid, therefore, I'm worthless, therefore I'm sad. Those were all my highly-optimized and compressed thoughts which executed so fast... in such well-worn pathways... that I didn't even notice them. So my thoughts about that made me feel sad, not Jill."

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky13y40

Further notes on the Prize:

"Figure out a way to X" is advice, not a prize-eligible suggestion - if your comment is "Figure out a way to X..." and someone else replies with a suggested way to actually do X, they get a prize and you don't. (This may sound harsh, but we already have lots of goals - we don't need help coming up with goals - we need exercises that actually achieve those goals.)

Please don't overlook the value of including at least one sample problem or sample use-case! If it's clear how to implement your suggestion on our e... (read more)

[-]Paul Crowley13y120

Please don't overlook the value of including at least one sample problem or sample use-case!

The irony of having to spell that out on this post is killing me.

[-]Viliam_Bur13y100

The irony of having to spell that out on this post is killing me.

How specifically is it killing you? :D

6MixedNuts13y

Softly, with his song.

3NancyLebovitz13y

That's what I was thinking, more or less. A typology of the more commonly needed sorts of specificity would probably be very useful.

[-]Armok_GoB13y30

The first thing that comes to mind is "write erotic fiction", but that has obvious social problems.

8TheOtherDave13y

When it comes to specificity erotic non-fiction is even better, but the social problems are greater.

2The Dao of Bayes13y

Why specifically "erotic", and then why "fiction"? What's wrong with "write about what you had for lunch" or "write about your commute to get here"? I think anyone who can write a page on those has a decent sense of how to be specific (although this does NOT train the 5-second-skill of noticing WHEN you need to be specific)

8Nornagest13y

I don't think it'd necessarily need to be erotic as such, but the "show, don't tell" concept (a subset of "be specific") is, if not quite specific to fiction, at least a lot easier to screw up there. If you're writing about your lunch or your commute to work, you've already got a sense of the salient details and probably won't be tempted to hide behind coarse descriptions of your emotional state; neither's necessarily true if you're writing about some fictional character.

1Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)13y

I would say 'fiction' because you're forced to come up with details yourself, and 'erotic' because that's where most people, including lots of authors, shy away from specific details...the memory of painful making yourself write very explicitly would be a more memorable lesson than writing about something innocuous like, I don't know, two siblings playing Lego.

[-]Arran_Stirton13y30

Exercise/Game: Elevator-Pitch Descriptions

For two players. (P1 and P2)
Each player tries to describe a specific image for the other player to identify out of a larger set of images in 30 seconds.

Needs:

Two different sets of images, and clones of these sets.
Something to stop P1 and P2 from seeing each other’s images. (e.g. a battle-ship style setup)
Clock/stop-watch that can take the time in seconds

Constructing the image sets:

The sets of images need to be of a moderate size (say 20 images) and the images themselves need to depict similar things. For exam... (read more)

[-]ESRogs13y30

I did not understand the distinction being made between a ladder and a lattice. Is the idea that the lattice is multi-dimensional? If so why was Eliezer still talking about the top and the bottom rather than some point and the origin?

5fiddlemath13y

He's referring to the mathematical formalism). Sets of elements, ordered by the subset relationship, are a good example of a lattice. Lattices have a specific "top" and "bottom". Among the subsets of the letters in the alphabet, the empty set is "bottom", and the entire alphabet is "top". The particular point of calling it a "lattice" rather than a ladder is that there are many ways to be more specific; of these, not all are more or less specific than each other. (Formally: you can have a < c and b < c such that neither a < b, a = b, nor a > b.)

1Sniffnoy13y

Syntax note: Link is broken due to not escaping the closing parenthesis in the URL.

0fiddlemath13y

argle bargle. Fixed! Thanks.

0ESRogs13y

Thank you! I was not aware of that concept.

[-]selylindi13y30

(These are not relevant to the skill of the week. I misinterpreted the instructions. I'll leave this comment up, though, because I enjoyed these games/exercises and others might as well.)

1) Play Wits and Wagers. This is an unoriginal suggestion and probably not eligible for a reward, but nevertheless it's a fun, socially rewarding, accessible, large collection of Fermi questions about which Bayesian updates based on vague real-world knowledge can be readily applied.

Variation 1 Add the additional step that every player must explain at least one reason th... (read more)

[-]vinayak13y30

How about this:

People are divided into pairs. Say A and B are in one pair. A gets a map of something that's fairly complex but not too complex. For example, an apartment with a sufficiently large number of rooms. A's task is to describe this to B. Once A and B are both satisfied with the description, B is asked questions about the place the map represented. Here are examples of questions that could be asked:

How many left-turns do you need to make to go from the master bed room to the kitchen?

Which one is the washroom nearest to the game room?

You are sittin... (read more)

[-]Morendil13y30

Exercise - characterization. Form triads: one is the moderator, one the target, one the observer. Moderator asks observer "name one thing that struck you about 's character". Observer goes, for instance: "she's funny". Moderator asks for specifics: "what particular things have you observed about to make you say that?". Alternately, ask moderator to pick up on particular observations ("she has this way of pushing her glasses up her nose") and move in the other direction ("what does that tell you about her, if anything"). After a few minutes, switch roles.

This could be a good icebreaker, or a useful adjunct in a module on social skills.

0dbaupp13y

This kind of close personal scrutiny could make some people feel very uncomfortable. (I don't think that's a reason to not do it though.)

[-]Vaniver13y30

It seems to me like there's a twenty-questions style rule-based game waiting to be developed here. That is, rather than asking twenty questions about an object ("is it an animal?") you ask them about a concept.

There are a few challenges- the first is that natural divisions about concepts are unfamiliar, they're probably fuzzy instead of binary, and you need fairly deep conceptual knowledge of the thing in question to find it. For example, if the concept is "Athenian direct democracy," and the first question is "does it relate to hi... (read more)

[-]freyley13y20

Within the domain of building-a-system, paper prototyping/wireframing teaches people to be specific with their ideas. It's only helpful when your ideas are "I want there to be this kind of thing" and then putting it on paper creates the specifics in your head.

[-]Vulture13y20

I thought of a game for this called "Functionality Telephone"

So you divide people into pairs, and in each pair one person is the Manager, and the other person is the Designer. The Manager recieves a card with some sort of functionality pritned on it, like "Can hold a gram of water without leaking", or "Can have pebbles thrown at it and remain standing", or some other easily testable function. It will also have some taboo words, like (for the water example above) water, waterproof, spill, leak, etc. The Designer will have a ... (read more)

[-]RomeoStevens13y20

Have you tried playing Corrupt a Wish? No one has mentioned it by name yet.

[-]Douglas_Reay13y20

I once played a mage in a Live Action Role Playing adventure, and cast a spell to summon a water elemental, to fight on the side of the party against the monsters opposing us.

One of the GMs appeared, appropriately clothed, and proceeded to give the fastest lesson ever on being specific. Because, the way he played it, the water elemental would obey commands, but was malicious, and where possible would misinterpret the command, or do things I'd not yet specifically forbidden it to do.

elemental appears, moves to nearest party member and starts hitting her
Me:... (read more)

[-]Douglas_Reay13y20

"Open with the concrete example, not the abstract explanation!"

Whether concrete-first or abstract-first works better may well be a cognitive style that varies quite a bit with culture.

Kamentz & Womser-Hacker, 2003, Defining Culture-Bound User Characteristics as a Starting-Point for the Design of Adaptive Learning Systems

[-]JohnWittle13y20

Nitpick: "You can say more truths about apple2, like "apple2 is dark red", then you can say that is true of all apples."

The thirteenth word of this sentence should be 'than' rather than 'then'.

[-]Vaniver13y20

During our discussion about Be Specific, majus had a good point:

Be Specific seems like a subskill of a more generic skill: fixing ontology problems. Going down a level helps you discover that you're talking about very different things when you use the word "connection"- if one person is thinking "interpersonal relationships," and the other person is thinking "communication mediated by an online application," they're not going to understand each other very well. Specific examples don't fix the ontological models, though, alth

... (read more)

[-]NancyLebovitz13y20

Given our present teaching technology, this skill seems transmissible from master to apprentice, but not yet replicable by exercises.

Transmission may be a lot of how specificity has to be taught, since it's about comparing what's in your mind that you're trying to communicate to what's actually being received by someone else's mind, and the lesson is clearer if it's something you actually want to communicate-- that is, not an exercise.

1Benquo13y

Computer programming has lots of replicable tasks, and with any kind of meaningful feedback it's quite good at "be precise," which is the abstract version of "be specific."

0NancyLebovitz13y

That doesn't seem like the kind of precision most people have trouble with, though teaching it explicitly might help people who have trouble getting started on programming. Do you think knowing how to program helps people be sufficiently explicit about other subjects?

0Benquo13y

Probably not, because of compartmentalization. I wonder, though, if there is some sort of similar activity that: * Doesn't require expert instructors (some feedback is obvious or automatic) * Deals with less mathematical and more "real world" problems * Builds skills that transfer well to other domains.

0The Dao of Bayes13y

Management, which is at times remarkably similar to the "malicious idiot" game...

[-]imajunryou13y20

Action exercise:

Instructor provides a set of somewhat vague tasks to a few groups or individuals ("Draw me a tire swing" / "Write me a poem about fish" / "Tell me about [yourself | your selves]"). The instructor has a specific interpretation in mind, in advance ("An old tire from a dump truck, tied via blue-painted rope to hang horizontal to the ground, 3 feet from the ground, from a large branch of a willow tree" / "A haiku about salmon and how they are unpleasant when used as projectiles" / "Your fa... (read more)

2The Dao of Bayes13y

I like the idea of "provide abstract instructions, and leave it up to the students to realize that this is too general, and that they need to ask for more information." I would say, however, that usually when you need more information, you're aware of that need. In Eliezer's example, Paul can automatically recognize that he needs more information, because he doesn't have enough information for his own task. The very simple example would be to split in to pairs: a describer and a picker. The describer is given a picture of the piece they need, and a quick description to read (print these ahead of time!): i.e. they might need a blue 2x8x1 block, but they're told to ask for "a long block". The picker then has to realize they don't have sufficient information, and ask to clarify. It's teaching a VERY basic level of "realize I need more information, and then ask for it" - after the first example, every student will REALIZE what they need to be asking (size + color), so there's minimal sense of discovery/novelty. I think you would only be able to spend 5-10 minutes on it before adults got bored, but you could probably go a bit longer dealing with young kids. I chose Legos specifically because they don't have a ton of variables, and it's very quick to hold up a piece and get told "no", which I think is a big help here. You don't want someone to spend 5 minutes drawing a picture only to discover they got it wrong, because that creates a big negative, a lot of frustration that you don't want in a quick-and-basic exercise like this. Save frustration for the bigger challenges, when you want to illustrate the cost of failing at this skill :) This exercise would mostly serve to prime the audience's thinking in the right direction, and as a very mild "success spiral". You would definitely need to lead-in to a more complex and challenging example, to keep the audience engaged

[-]Benquo13y20

Here's a game that might be a little more vivid, and easier to set up, than some of the games that are strictly verbal games. Call it "Tech Support."

There are two players, separated by a screen or barrier so they can't see each other, point, or gesture, only communicate by words.

One player is the Customer. They are trying to figure out how to use or perform some operation on a physical object. (Preferably one they actually don't know how to use!)

The other player is the Expert. They are trying to help the Customer use the object.

A simple musical i... (read more)

2Blueberry13y

I've played that game, using various shaped blocks that the Customer has to assemble in a specific pattern. It's great. There's also the variation with an Intermediary, and the Expert and Customer can only communicate with the Intermediary, who moves back and forth between rooms and can't write anything down.

[-]countercheck13y20

Hold up an image in front of the group, and ask "What do you see?"

Allow the participants to exhaust themselves trying to describe it. Then, start narrowing in. Ask them to describe specific parts of the image.Ask them to detail everything that is red. Everything that seems to be moving. Everything touching the ground. Everything smaller than a human. Ask them to clarify and detail descriptions. The more questions, and the more detailed the questions, the more information they'll be able to extract from the image.

Also, an improv game called... (read more)

[-]KateGladstone13y20

I agree with fubarobfusco's refinements — maybe as intermediate/advanced levels, to add after the basic exercise.

2Eliezer Yudkowsky13y

It looks like the original what-was-being-agreed-with got deleted by the edit!

1fubarobfusco13y

I like this. Some refinements: * Make at least one statement about yourself. * Make at least one statement a moral claim (e.g. "eating meat is wrong"). * Distinguish the contradiction of the sentence (e.g. "some religions are not ancient") from the contrary ("no religions are ancient"). * Identify a relevant base rate that the subject of your statement can be compared with (e.g. "organic food is as nutritious as conventionally grown food"). * Break the statement down into at least three distinct refinements (e.g. "organic food contains more vitamins", "organic food contains fewer insecticides", "people who switch to an organic diet report health benefits"). * Describe specific tests for those refined statements (e.g. "we could measure the Vitamin A, C, and E content of these strawberries").

[-]sboo13y20

i'm involved with a startup. there's so much well-intentioned bullshit and it's the founders who harm themselves more than any user or any investor.

i watched the video, and felt something was wrong, and then i read your article, you dissected it mercilessly, and nailed it precisely.

3sboo13y

precision is hard. you know, until i started studying math, i didn't even know what "be precise" really means.

0The Dao of Bayes13y

laughs That is too true :)

[-]sdr13y20

Easy excercise on the 5-second level: ask the question "as opposed to what?" both loud, and when constructing what you'd like to tell. An easy trigger to remember is qualifiers -they're usually a mark of motivated abstraction-switch.

Medium-level excercise: take one of your life failures at any level, and dismantle it via root cause analysis:

"The business failed." "Why?"

"We failed to nail down the unit economics tightly before scaling up marketing" "why?"

"No one was dedicated to look over all the 6 piec... (read more)

[-]Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)13y20

Suggested exercise: faced with a non-specific statement, like "our software makes connections between people" or "this person is a slob", come up with a specific story: say, about a particular customer using the software in a particular way, with the result that he gained two friends that he wouldn't have without the software. Adding extra details to the story, like character development, might help to hit the right level of specificity.

There are, of course, a near-infinite number of possible different stories, with different specific ... (read more)

[-]Celer13y20

I am borrowing an old acting game for this one, and modifying it slightly. I am calling it "which word." The rules are very simple, and this is a fairly fun warm up exercise.

Base: The other person replies with a word that is either a superclass or a subclass of the given word. Using words in a different sense is encouraged.

Options for increased difficulty include

Forced:: Each person must go up twice and then down twice, repeating endlessly

Time Limit:: People must respond with a word of their own in a given number of seconds. Feel free to make it ... (read more)

3Zaine13y

Would you mind providing an example, please, or explaining the original acting game and your alterations to it? Thank you.

2Celer13y

1: dog 2: mammal 1: cat 2: feline 1: animal 2: flea 1: flyer 2: pilot 1: human 2: living 1: breathing 2: breather

[-]Stefie_K13y20

Hi! I've been lurking for a bit.

It looks to me like one thing that would help would be to get the people you're teaching to get frustrated enough to spontaneously say "Be specific!" on their own. If you can get them to associate a feeling of frustration with certain situations, the emotional reaction could reinforce the cognitive skills they're developing.

Specific scenarios can be based off of actual conversations like the one Eliezer presented in his post. Here's an example, based on Eliezer's example:

Sample Exercise:

The student must decide... (read more)

4John_Maxwell13y

I'd be a little leery of embarrassing those guys even more than they've already been embarrassed.

0Stefie_K13y

Hmm. I hadn't envisioned them being present, but I may have misunderstood the ongoing nature of these things. If they aren't present, key details might be changed, and so on, to preserve anonymity. I was also imagining that this exercise would be done privately, rather than on a stage in front of lots of people -- although that would be flexible. Reusing earlier exercises isn't essential to my idea, so that could be changed, and made-up dialogue used instead. However... I think that one of the issues with all of these exercises is going to be making sure that the students mentally connect these exercises to other areas of their lives, and apply the skill in real life. A lot of the ideas suggested here sound good, but they sound too much like games, and not enough like people actually sound when they fail to be specific in real life. I liked the "mission statement" idea for the same reason.

0John_Maxwell13y

I meant to avoid embarrassing the real-life people whose start up wasn't mixpanel by making their embarrassing dialogue with Paul Graham into a standard rationality exercise. Not sure whether that was what you intended or not. What you think of my exercise? ;-)

0Stefie_K13y

That was kind of my intention, but I had imagined that they wouldn't be the only ones. (Misery loves company?) I was thinking that you might do dialogues like in Eliezer's example with a lot of people (privately), as one rationality exercise, then use that to put together a large set of scenarios. Remember, students will probably need scenarios that are different enough from their own lives for them to recognize the lack of specifics. Eliezer's example might not work at all well for someone involved in an online company, and/or a startup, because it might seem normal rather than frustration-provoking. I don't know; maybe other people here have a strong enough idea of what people actually say in these situations, and can write realistic dialogue from scratch. I'd still expect transcripts to worth consulting as part of the writing process, though. I think it would lead to more accurate personality tests, among other things. ;) Seriously, I realized after taking one personality test that I would have responded completely differently to a question if it had said "walking" rather than "driving," and the question was about something entirely unrelated to modes of transportation. (It was something like comfort in trying new things, or comfort with visual maps vs. verbal directions.) Oops?

[-]JKR13y20

The following exercise is inspired by the game Taboo.

Pair everyone off, giving one member of the pair a card that tells them something they must describe so that the other person will guess what it is. Include a list of taboo words that prevent them from going up the lattice, forcing them to be more specific in their descriptions.

e.g. New York Yankees Taboo words: “Yankees,” “New York,” “NYC,” “Baseball,” “Sport,” “National Pastime”

The description giver has to be more specific, saying something like “a collection of athletes, including Derek Jeter and Alex... (read more)

4[anonymous]13y

Potential problem with this: The game will devolve into associations rather than real specificity. For example, for the phrase "New York Yankees" I might say just "Derek Jeter" and most people would be able to guess correctly, but I haven't really practiced the skill of being specific. You'd have to specifically penalize answers like that to prevent the game from devolving into Hasbro's Taboo.

[-]John_Maxwell13y20

Have you thought about making one of the skills of the week "think with system two instead of system one"?

Empirically, reading anything related to rationality seems to level up some global "rationality skill" parameter in my brain, and I suspect this is because I'm learning to think using system two more and more.

[-]John_Maxwell13y20

But you can see the basis for the hope that - after a fair amount more work - we'll be able to offer a 2-day course for YCombinator entrepreneurs that eliminates 50% of the overhead from their conversations with Paul Graham.

That sounds like an awesome idea!

They aren't the only incubator in the Valley either.

Can I submit this to Hacker News with an inflammatory headline based on this quote, or is it too soon?

[-]thescoundrel13y10

Genie's Folly

A near omnipotent being is offering you a single wish. It is known that the Genie will attempt to implement the wish in a way the results in a net decrease of utility for the wisher, but is bound by any constraints explicitly written into the wish. Write your wish in such a way that the Genie can only implement it in such a way that you have a net increase in utility. Bonus points if you wish for something related to a current problem you are solving; ie, I wish I ran a successful startup with x following properties, which avoids y pitfalls in z ways.

2The Dao of Bayes13y

Constraint: This must result in a net increase in utility for me...

8Eliezer Yudkowsky13y

I rewire your preferences. Oh, that wasn't what you meant by "utility"?

[-]Ezekiel13y120

Incidentally, I find it funny (although not necessarily significant) that everyone else's instinct was to talk about the Genie in the third person, whereas Eliezer used the first person.

(Double-posted because it's a completely separate and much more frivolous comment.)

3Shmi13y

It is extremely significant. That's partly the reason why EY managed to play the AI-in-a-box game rather successfully despite the overwhelming odds.

0A1987dM13y

Er.... How do you know? I thought he hadn't disclosed anything about how he did that.

2Shmi13y

He mentioned on some mailing list that he had to think like an AI desperately trying to get out. It makes a world of difference in how you approach the situation if it is your life that is actually on the line.

0TheOtherDave13y

The role of "the Genie" here and "the AI" in the Boxed AI game have certain obvious similarities. It seems reasonable to assume that a willingness to adopt the former correlates with a willingness to adopt the latter. It seems reasonable to assume that a willingness to adopt the role of "the AI" in the Boxed AI game is necessary (though not sufficient) in order to win that game. So shminux's claim seems fairly uncontroversial to me. Do you dispute it, or are you merely making a claim about the impossibility of knowledge?

0A1987dM13y

The latter.

3Ezekiel13y

You could try: "Constraint: The value that my current utility function would assign to the universe after this wish is implemented must be higher than the value my current utility function would assign to the universe that would have existed had you not implemented this wish." ... Which probably causes the Genie to, at best, throw an undefined-error, since human beings don't have well-defined utility functions. Since it's malicious, it will probably search through all of your desires, pick one of them at random to count as "my utility function", and then reinterpret the body of the wish to maximise that one thing at the expense of all others.

5wedrifid13y

It's malicious and omnipotent. It'll do far worse than that. It'll scan your preferences until it finds a contradiction. Once you have a contradiction you can derive absolutely anything. It would then proceed to calculate your Coherent Extrapolated Volition and minimise it. It may not be obliged to figure out what you actually want but it can certainly do so for the purpose of being spiteful!

[-]Grognor13y110

I think that is the first time I've ever seen anyone accurately describe the worst thing that could possibly happen.

4TheOtherDave13y

Or alter my preferences so I antiprefer whatever it is able to produce the most of. Plus altering my brain such that my disutility and dishedonism are linear with that thing. Getting the attention of a Crapsack God sucks.

2wedrifid13y

Those are actually subsumed under "mimimize CEV". In the same way that maximising our CEV will not involve modifying our preferences drastically (unless it turns out we are into that sort of thing after all), minimising CEV would, if that turns out to be the worst way to @#$@ with us. Can't argue with that.

1Dmytry13y

What happens if you ask it to maximize your CEV, though? Lemme remember, the idea with CEV was what you'd desired if you thought faster and more reliably. Okay I ponder what will happen to you if your mind was BusyBeaver(10) times faster (way scarier number than 3^^^^3), without your body working any faster. 1 second passes.

3wedrifid13y

It'll fuck with you. Because that is what it does. It has plenty of scope to do so because CEV is not fully defined as of now. I'm not sure precisely how it would go about doing so. I just assume it does in some way I haven't thought of yet. The meaning it attributes to CEV when it wants to exploit it to make things terrible is very different to the meaning it attributes to CEV when we try to use it to force it to understand us. It's almost as bad as some humans in that regard!

-1Dmytry13y

The understatement of the year. CEV is vaguest crap ever with lowest hope of becoming less vague.

1wedrifid13y

That's a rather significant claim.

-3Dmytry13y

It's very uncommon to see crap this vague in development for such a long time by such a clever person, without it becoming less vague.

1wedrifid13y

As far as I am aware this crap isn't in development. It isn't the highest research priority so the other SingInst researchers haven't been working on it much and Eliezer himself is mostly focused on writing a rationality book. Other things like decision theory are being worked on - which has involved replacing vague as crap TDT with less-vague UDT and UDT2. I would like to see more work published on CEV. The most recent I am familiar with is this.

6orthonormal13y

As I've figured out while writing the last few posts, TDT hasn't been explained well, but it is a genuinely formalizable theory. (You'll have to trust me until Part III or check the decision-theory mailing list.) But it's a different theory from ADT and UDT, and the latter ones are preferable.

0A1987dM13y

You mean you have something in mind about how to handle counterfactuals over logically impossible worlds, or simply “I'm not sure it can't be done”?

0orthonormal13y

I mean, I've written an algorithm (in the context of the tournament) which does what TDT should do (just as the algorithm in my last post does what CDT should do). The nice part about specifying the context so precisely is that I can dodge many of the hairy issues which come up in practice, and just show the essence of the decision theories.

-8Dmytry13y

1TheOtherDave13y

My response to this would be a blank sheet of paper, personally.

2Vaniver13y

Wouldn't that give the genie unconstrained power to decrease your utility?

[-]TheOtherDave13y100

Perhaps, though it is not clear to me that the genie didn't have that power all along. Regardless, if I am confident that the Genie will attempt to implement my wish (should I make one) in a way that results in a net decrease of utility, but am not confident that it will attempt to decrease my utility in the absence of a wish, then I conclude that I do better not to wish (thereby possibly, but probably not, incurring the genie's ill will with no defense) than to wish (thereby definitely incurring the genie's ill will, which I can attempt to defend against by specifying explicit constraints). Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.

3Vaniver13y

That seems like a fair approach.

0Zaq13y

Constraint: Within the next two seconds, you must perform only the tasks listed, which you must perform in the specified order. Task 1. Exchange your definition of decrease with your definition of increase Task 2. --insert wish here-- Task 3. Self-terminate This is of course assuming that the I don't particularly care for the genie's life.

-1Alicorn13y

Can you recite that whole list in under two seconds?

0Zaq13y

Replace "the next two seconds" with "the two seconds subsequent to my finishing this wish description"

[-]Illano13y10

Assuming that you want to keep the exercise somewhat entertaining, modifying a game like balderdash to start with dilbert-esque executive speak and move towards ever more specific levels could provide a fun, easy to understand method to practice moving up and down in levels of specificity.

As to how this would work in practice, have everyone present get into groups of 5-10 (or however many are sitting at a table) and give everyone a key phrase of execu-speak, such as "Energize the end-user experience." Then, everyone writes down a short, but more... (read more)

3The Dao of Bayes13y

In the real world, if the client wants X, it does not matter that ALL the engineers agree that the statement really says Y. Doubly so since engineers and clients often seem to speak two different languages. It's far more useful to learn what the CLIENT wants, not what all the engineers THINK she wants. In fact, learning how to come to this sort of false conclusion seems exactly opposite of what Eliezer wants to teach - you now have a group of engineers convinced that they know what this overly-general statement means, despite never having checked back in with the client! ... of course, for a twist, do this, and then tell them that they're WRONG and the client actually wanted X. Punish them for not thinking to go and actually consult the client. It produces frustration and ill-will (the presenter has just tricked them), but with a receptive audience you do potentially teach a very potent lesson.

1wirov13y

What I like about this exercise is, that it doesn't require any teacher/judge/… who decides what is specific enough (and may thus cause frustration in participants who disagree). Instead, the exercise ends when everyone agrees on the statements meaning – i.e. when the statement is "specific enough".

[-]meeple13y10

Imagine someone really really hyper and shortsighted is answering the question:

Why is your product better than mix-panel?

OH MY GOD it has BUNNIES on THE FRONT PAGE.

... or tone it down a bit...

Because I can like, put totally awesome stuff like BUNNIES on my version of the app!

... and then maybe take that statement and generalize it a little bit...

Because users can customize their version of the app.

4TheOtherDave13y

With my professional hat on, I would look askance at that last version and ask "Why is that feature a benefit? What users are we talking about, and what customizations will they be able to do, and how do those customizations make the app better for those users?"

-1meeple13y

Awesome users, like maybe they have this awesome hat with a huge brim or they are a ninja or something. Add bunnies to the front page or make it so you can learn to be a pirate by using the app or order cookies to your doorstep! Because it would be totally awesome to learn how to be a pirate and bunnies are cute and cookies are delicious and WHAT IF YOU COULD HAVE ALL OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME????

3TheOtherDave13y

See, now that's specific.

[-]Jiro11y00

(Replying to old post)

Now read this post and all the comments, and apply them to the idea that it is impossible to explain something well enough to an AI that the AI will do what you meant.

[-]Adam Zerner12y00

I suspect that making people more rational would be one of the most efficient ways of saving the world. Things like AI might be better, but I really think it's pretty high up there as far as saving the world goes.

My reason for thinking that it'd make the world a much better place, is because making people more rational would lead to lots of better decisions and actions, which when aggregated, consist of a huge change. I've never really been able to articulate this well, but I think that this article illustrates part of what I mean: if people were more ... (read more)

[-]Kytael13y00

Mark Cuban asking Skip Bayless to Be Specific

it seems that in addition to being terrible forecasters of winning teams, many sports commentators don't even understand the game they are talking about (or it might just be skip, but mark seems to think it's a general problem)

[-]tiki192513y00

Thought of another possibility - recipes. Person A tells Person B how to make something (possibly prompted by some pictures?), Person B follows the instructions, asks for clarification as needed, and the result is something that Person A will end up eating so they have a vested interest in some of the details of getting it right. I'm thinking about this because right now I'm making one of my personal recipes - cashew-wasabi chocolate truffles. They're vegan, gluten free, peanut free, mouth-melty, rich rather than over-sweet, and the wasabi is not hot so mu... (read more)

[-]duckduckMOO13y00

exercise for specificness

Get people to, as crudely as they like, draw/represent something's definition (not sure if that is the right word) e.g. for "I ate" {I food-->mouth. Swallow} The arrow might have a fork and knife drawn next to it and/or a hand or just the word "transport" or "put in." Food could just be the word food, or it could be a drawing of a specific food, or a few specific foods, or a a few properties of (your) food (concept) e.g. "will not choke you or can be chewed (without damage to teeth) so as to no... (read more)

[-]RijlKent13y00

One possible exercise:

Have an instructor ask the students to direct the instructor in a certain task (tie a shoe, open a wine bottle, anything). Instructor does what the students say in a very literal manner, perhaps intentionally misunderstanding vague terms.

The idea, of course, that the students will get told, by instructors or each other, again and again to be specific, but they'll get rapid feedback about what works and what doesn't.

This is adaptable to other scenarios: Students in pairs write directions for each other for some task, swap papers and then get to play the intentionally obtuse role (which can be fun). This brings out a competitive aspect, where students can win by being the most clear.

[-]gelisam13y00

search for the historical causes of your thoughts, rather than their justifications.

Is there a standard name or LW article on the subject? I first stumbled upon the importance of that skill here, on this site, and I wish I knew more about it than just that one personal anecdote.

0beoShaffer13y

The whole seeing with fresh eyes subsequence is relevant, cached thoughts and the genetic fallacy are probably the most relevant.

0gelisam13y

Thanks for the suggestion. This is not, however, what I was looking for. Cached thoughts explains that hearing a phrase might be enough for our brain to remember it as true, while genetic fallacy warns that the original cause of a belief is not as important as the sum-total of evidence for or against that belief. I am not, however, looking for evidence that our past taints our beliefs. I have come to realize that finding the historical cause of a thought is a good first step towards getting rid of an unwanted thought, and I wanted to know whether this strategy was covered yet. If not... I'll accumulate a bit more evidence, and then maybe I'll write a post!

[-][anonymous]13y00

Exercise I:

Let the students introduce their favorite novel (or movie) to the group and let them explain why this novel is so great and what sets it apart from similar books.

Exercise II:

Give the students examples of texts that fail to be specific, from different Areas ( Science Articles, Wikipedia entries, amazon customer reviews, interviews with experts or politicians , LW discussions, user manuals, textbooks, ... ). Let the students analyse what exactly the problem of the given example is and let them write down an improved version.

1daenerys13y

I think this exercise will help with being specific, but at the cost of straying from your TRUE reasons for liking/disliking. i.e. in order to think of specific things to list, you will rationalize. For example, maybe you really like Movie A just because you found it entertaining, but since you have to list specific reason, your brain spits back things like "dynamic character development", and "break-down of good v evil dichotomy" etc. IIRC, there have been studies where if they just ask for people's opinions on which jam/wine/art/etc is better, the study participants are LESS accurate (less in agreement with expert opinion) when asked to name specific reasons for why the chose one over the other. I don't remember the specifics or validity of the study, though.

2NancyLebovitz13y

This seems extremely likely. There's a book called How Fiction Works-- I wouldn't say it actually explains how fiction works, but it does include a fair amount about how our ideas of literary fiction (well-rounded characters and a lot of visual detail, for example) developed, and examples from classics that don't match what's considered literary.

0komponisto13y

That doesn't count as a true reason. In fact, it is no more than a restatement of the fact that you like it. If you didn't find it entertaining, then that means you found it boring, which is incompatible with liking it. (Can you imagine anyone saying "I found this movie boring, but I liked it anyway?") To say "I just found it entertaining" as an answer to the question of why one likes something is not an honest-but-unspecific answer; it is an outright dodge. (If anything, it's a weaker statement than saying you like it, because one could conceivably dislike something despite not being bored by it.)

2Normal_Anomaly13y

Good point. Replace "It was entertaining" with "It had flashy action scenes".

0TheOtherDave13y

I felt this way about Brokeback Mountain, IIRC.

0TheOtherDave13y

Oh, and Waiting for Godot. Which I saw as a play, not a movie, but the principle is the same.

0MixedNuts13y

Yes. Me and most romance novels, for example.

[-]Dmytry13y00

Is the 'be specific' even valid advice for those businessmen? They are just trying to raise some quick start capital, without having any well defined idea what so ever; that is why they are not being specific. Perhaps 'don't fool yourself' would be a good advice if they don't themselves realize that this is what they are doing and chances of business success are near zero.

2MarkusRamikin13y

Is that a smart thing to do? The advice is based on the assumption that they have an actual idea for their business. Lacking that, how far would you expect to get even with capital?

0TheOtherDave13y

It can be a smart thing to do; it depends on the situation. If I'm able to successfully run a lot of different kinds of businesses and am willing to choose what business I start based on what kinds of businesses venture capitalists are willing to fund, for example, I may be eliminating my primary comparative advantage by being specific about the kind of business I want to run. (Of course, I can also reframe this as a two-phase operation: in phase one I gather information about what kind of business it's best to propose, and in phase 2 I propose it specifically. It's just that sometimes phase one and two occur within five minutes of one another in the same conversation, and the results of both are discarded for the next conversation.)

0Dmytry13y

Further than they would of gotten without the capital, but still ultimately nowhere. edit: or they might end up hiring some really bright guy - by dumb luck - that will set the plan straight. See, the advice is very solid if the businessmen are ultra intelligent people who need to be told to think more. But by the sound of it, the businessmen are not very bright people who can't come up with any workable idea and don't understand that other people can. The best advice in these circumstances is - come up with a plan or go do something else if you can't. edit: i.e. i mean, it is assumed politely that they have a plan, which they fail to convey. But it is typically the case that there is no plan in the first place, and often, not for lack of trying. In person one needs to be polite, but when we discuss people's behaviours we should try to be as close to reality as possible.

[-]Remrys13y00

Over from HPMOR, and have been thinking about teaching exercises. Disclaimer: I haven't read all the comments, and apologize for any redundancy.

The two sources for exercises that I thought of first were CBT treatment for depression--as you mention briefly in the post, it turns out that overgeneralization about oneself is a big component of the disorder--and writing classes. Looking up the relevant CBT training suggests that it's actually quite similar to many writing exercises, which suggests that it also ought to generalize to your training. Unless tha... (read more)

[-][anonymous]13y00

An exercise could be: one person thinks of a task that the class has to do, and in order to do the task the students need specific information. The person who made up the task starts by giving information as general as possible. Each time someone asks him to be more specific for a specific detail, he does that, until the things he says are specific enough to give the students the details they need to know in order to complete the task. ETA: i'll Be Specific later :D

[-]dugancm13y00

After sleeping on this and thinking about it all day at work, I made a game. I'd like to make the wording more ritualistic and provide descriptive play examples eventually, but here's a good untested first draft: (Note: I did not read any comments before posting this.)

ETA: I will be editing the rules to remove/redirect perverse incentives and add classroom/tournament formats and examples, but may not always have this post completely up to date. The most recent version can always be found here.

The Un-Naming for 2-6 players

Materials: A deck of words. (stack... (read more)

[-]AbstractIsntBad13y00

A simple exercise would be a guessing game. Give each member a concept to describe to the rest (without using equivalent words). The rest of the group must try and guess what it could be. But! They must try to break any consensus that starts to form with different ideas that fits the provided description. When the provided concept and only the provided concept remains the exercise is passed.

Success is measured by how succinct and short the successful description of the concept is.

Edit to add an example and a little explanation:

Someone must describe the con... (read more)

[-]NexH13y00

I think there is an area where the information typically given is vague or confusing, and the ability to be specific can come in handy: for presenting personal information and preferences. The provider of the information is of course considerably familiar with the subject, so it often happens that ve doesn’t realizes that what ve actually says is unclear or easily misunderstood ( For example, saying that you are a mathematician evokes, in a surprisingly high number of people, images of large numbers and complex but mechanical calculations ) or overly gener... (read more)

[-]Tomasz13y00

What about "Guess Who?" game? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_Who%3F

I play it with my son and it seems like a perfect exercise in being specific. You need to be very observant and ask very precise questions. The competitive element increases its attractiveness. The set of cartoons/data to guess from is typically structured as lattice - there are many differently overlapping categories with subtly different frequencies - you quickly learn to exploit those to your advantage.

And of course you may experiment with game data. Replace cartoons with c... (read more)

0imajunryou13y

I was thinking along the same lines. A set of similar images are presented to person A. A single one of those images is also presented to person B. Person B is to provide a description to person A, specific enough that A can accurately identify the image from the set. The main difference from "Guess Who" would be that person B provides their description up front with multiple details, rather than detail by detail, back and forth, and person A has a single chance to decide. If this were done in a setting with computers and internet connections, using something like google image search and keywords to generate the pictures might work. 'Redhead child' immediately comes up with many images which are suitable for such a game. Along the lines of replacing cartoons with concepts, I had also thought to replace images with sounds, bits of music, tastes, in the proper setting. I am able to explain to someone many details of an image if it is in front of me, even if it is abstract. I am less able to do this with something I can't see. Explaining a bit of bird song, or a series of musical notes that are played by a certain instrument, where I lack familiarity, would be more intense and interesting (to me at least ^_^).

0The Dao of Bayes13y

I'd expect learning to do wine tasting would be an easy way to get introduced to describing flavors. It's something I've been considering for myself :)

[-]KateGladstone13y00

Another proposed exercise: Split up the group into pairs, and give each pair two minutes to identify some issue or premise on which they disagree (it could be "is there a God?" or "is banning cigarettes a good idea?" or "are kittens cute?" or "should people be vegetarians?"— it could be anything.) Once the issue is identified, each participant gets five minutes to prove (to his/her partner) the OPPOSITE of his/her own actual belief (e.g., if you think there is a God, and your partner doesn't, you have to make a case ... (read more)

[-]katydee13y00

Exercise/technique: Ask Jeeves v. 2000.0 (adapted from the "Clairvoyant" exercise in "An Elementary Approach to Thinking Under Uncertainty")

Imagine that you have on your smartphone a nearly perfect version of the now-defunct Ask Jeeves program. This program can answer literally any question you might ask of it. In fact, it is so advanced that it can answer questions about things that have not happened yet! However, the program has one flaw, which is that it has no ability whatsoever to interpret or infer the meaning behind what you are ... (read more)

0NancyLebovitz13y

The question didn't specify a price.

0katydee13y

I'm not quite sure what you're referring to here, can you be more specific?

2NancyLebovitz13y

The rot13 material gives two reasonable answers, but it's also important to have an estimate of how the price will affect the sales.

0katydee13y

Good point, added.

[-]provocateur13y00

Hacker News discussion about this

[-]meeple13y00

It seems natural to evaluate existential quantifiers using model-checking and any universally quantified statement can be transformed into an existentially quantified statement by applying double-negation and moving the inner negation through the quantifier.

Example:

forall x. p(x)

not (not (forall x. p(x)))

not (exists x. (not p(x)))

But I can't think of how to apply this to Yudkowsky's example so it's probably useless for teaching :P

1[anonymous]13y

Here's one way that this could be transformed into an exercise: Have the instructor read a proof (or a fake proof) from, say, formal logic or set theory, and ask the students to follow along step-by-step using a simple example (a la Richard Feynman). Then, at the end of the proof, the students have to explain whether the proof is or is not valid using their example. E.g.: Instructor: forall x. p(x) "Ok, let's see, 'all ice cream cones are delicious'." Instructor: not (not (forall x. p(x))) "It's not true that 'not all ice cream cones are delicious'." Instructor: not (exists x. (not p(x))) "Therefore, 'there is never going to be an ice cream cone that is not delicious'. Valid!"

[-]Viliam_Bur13y00

I imagine an exercise with paper which contains for example many shapes (triangles, squares, circles) of different sizes and colors. There is a statement, for example "All circles are red." The task is to say whether the sentence is true or false, and in case it is false, it should be improved. For example "All small circles are red." There should be always some rule, but it should be usually a little more specific than the original statement.

I am not sure if this is a good idea, but this could also be done as a computer program with so... (read more)

[-]Alicorn13y00

"Hire an author to write a novel that..."

Enh, depending on what comes after the "that"...

[-]chaosmosis13y-20

I strongly suggest you use switch side debating as an advanced game or lesson or whatever. It's incredibly helpful. Choose a topic that there won't be prior opinions on, like the actions of a fictional dictator from history against an external threat, or something. Putting people into small teams as opposed to making them debate individually would be best, I think.

So you make them debate the topic on one day. Then the next day, you make them debate it again. Except on that day, they argue for the other side of the topic. I suggest using multiple small tea... (read more)

0MixedNuts13y

Teaches rhetoric over reasoning. General-purpose rather than promoting specificity.

[-]johnswentworth13y-20

Charades! If Paul Graham's entrepreneur had to explain the website in charades, I bet he'd be acting out a use case (at least, that's the first thing I'd think of). Outlaw all that "first word, 2 syllables..." junk and have people play charades. It's really hard to be abstract without words.

[+][comment deleted]13y20

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