Skills from a year of Purposeful Rationality Practice
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Similarly in Baba is You: when people don't have a crisp understanding of the puzzle, they tend to grasp and straws and motivatedly-reason their way into accepting sketchy sounding premises. But, the true solution to a level often feels very crisp and clear and inevitable.
A few of the scientists I’ve read about have realized their big ideas in moments of insight (e.g., Darwin for natural selection, Einstein for special relativity). My current guess about what’s going on is something like: as you attempt to understand a concept you don’t already have, you’re picking up clues about what the shape of the answer is going to look like (i.e., constraints). Once you have these constraints in place, your mind is searching for something which satisfies all of them (both explicitly and implicitly), and insight is the thing that happens when you find a solution that does.
At least, this is what it feels like for me when I play Baba is You (i.e., when I have the experience you’re describing here). I always know when a fake solution is fake, because it’s really easy to tell that it violates one of the explicit constraints the game has set out (although sometimes in desperation I try it anyway :p). But it’s immediately clear when I've landed on the right solution (even before I execute it), because all of the constraints I’ve been holding in my head get satisfied at once. I think that’s the “clicking” feeling.
Darwin’s insight about natural selection was also shaped by constraints. His time on the Beagle had led him to believe that “species gradually become modified,” but he was pretty puzzled as to how the changes were being introduced. If you imagine a beige lizard that lives in the sand, for instance, it seems pretty clear that it isn’t the lizard itself (its will) which causes its beigeness, nor is it the sand that directly causes the coloring (as in, physically causes it within the lizards lifetime). But then, how are changes introduced, if not by the organism, and not by the environment directly? He was stuck on this for awhile, when: “I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.”
There’s more going on to Darwin’s story than that, but I do think it has elements of the sort of thing you're describing here. Jeff Hawkins also describes insight as a constraint satisfaction problem pretty explicitly (I might’ve gotten this idea from him), and he experienced it when coming up with the idea of a thousand brains.
Anyway, I don’t have a strong sense of how crucial this sort of thing is to novel conceptual inquiry in general, but I do think it’s quite interesting. It seems like one of the ways that someone can go from a pre-paradigmatic grasping around for clues sort of thing to a fully formed solution.
1it’s immediately clear when I've landed on the right solution (even before I execute it), because all of the constraints I’ve been holding in my head get satisfied at once. I think that’s the “clicking” feeling.
It's worth noting that insight does not guarantee you have the right solution: from the paper "The dark side of Eureka: Artificially induced Aha moments make facts feel true" by Laukkonen et al.
John Nash, a mathematician and Nobel laureate, was asked why he believed that he was being recruited by aliens to save the world. He responded, “…the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously”
and
we hypothesized that facts would appear more true if they were artificially accompanied by an Aha! moment elicited using an anagram task. In a preregistered experiment, we found that participants (n = 300) provided higher truth ratings for statements accompanied by solved anagrams even if the facts were false, and the effect was particularly pronounced when participants reported an Aha! experience (d = .629). Recent work suggests that feelings of insight usually accompany correct ideas. However, here we show that feelings of insight can be overgeneralized and bias how true an idea or fact appears, simply if it occurs in the temporal ‘neighbourhood’ of an Aha! moment. We raise the possibility that feelings of insight, epiphanies, and Aha! moments have a dark side, and discuss some circumstances where they may even inspire false beliefs and delusions, with potential clinical importance.
Insight is also relevant to mental illness, psychedelic experiences, and meditation so you might find some papers about it in these fields too.
The wisdom to tell the difference between "I'm still confused and need to orient more" and "I need to get moving" is important.
My stock advice on this: if you don't even know what the hard parts are, then you should just dive in and try stuff in order to gather object-level data. Once you understand enough to have a decent idea of what the hard parts/bottlenecks are and why they're hard, you're past the point where "just dive in" has much value, and you should hold off on proposing solutions/plans.
2Curated. I think Raemon's been doing a lot of work in the last year pushing this stuff, and this post pulls together in one place a lot of good ideas/advice/approach.
I would guess that because of the slow or absent feedback loops, people don't realize how bad human reasoning and decision-making is when operating outside of the familiar and quick feedback. That's many domains, but certainly the whole AI situation. Ray is going after the hard stuff here.
And the same time, this stuff ends up feeling like the "eat your vegetables" of reasoning and decision-making. It's not sexy, or at least it's not that fun to sit down and e.g. try to brainstorm further plans when you already have one that's appealing. or backchain from your ostensible goal. I think we'd be in a better place if these skills and practices were normalized, in the sense of there's a norm that you do these things and if you don't, then you're probably screwing up.
I bet Jeff Bezos was like "okay I bet I could make an online bookstore that worked", was also thinking "but, what if I ultimately wanted the Everything Store? What are obstacles that I'd eventually need to deal"
I've heard Jeff Bezos was aiming for Everything Store from the beginning, and started with books because they have a limited range of sizes.
Yeah pretty much. In more detail:
Bezos explained why he chose to only sell books on his website — at least, at first — in a “lost” video interview recorded at a Special Libraries Association conference in June 1997, which resurfaced in 2019 when it was posted online by entrepreneur Brian Roemmele.
Out of all the different products you might be able to sell online, books offered an “incredibly unusual benefit” that set them apart, Bezos said.
“There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category, by far,” said Bezos. “Music is No. 2 — there are about 200,000 active music CDs at any given time. But in the book space, there are over 3 million different books worldwide active in print at any given time across all languages, [and] more than 1.5 million in English alone.”
When Bezos launched Amazon in 1994, the internet and e-commerce industry were still in their earliest stages. He knew it would take some time before online shopping became ubiquitous, he said, so he wanted to start with a concept that couldn’t be replicated by a seller with only physical locations.
“When you have that many items, you can literally build a store online that couldn’t exist any other way,” he explained. “That’s important right now, because the web is still an infant technology. Basically, right now, if you can do things using a more traditional method, you probably should do them using the traditional method.”
Still, Bezos hinted at the company’s potential for expansion, noting that “we’re moving forward in so many different areas.”
“This is Day 1,” he added. “This is the very beginning. This is the Kittyhawk stage of electronic commerce.”
1Here are some other lessons I learned over the last months from doing alignment research on trying to find the right ontology for modelling (my) cognition:
- make examples: if you have an abstract goal or abstract hypothesis/belief/model/plan, clarify on an example what it predicts.
- e.g. given thought "i might want to see why some thoughts are generated" -> what does that mean more concretely? -> more concrete subcases:
- could mean noticing a common cognitive strategy
- could mean noticing some suggestive concept similarity
- maybe other stuff like causal inference (-> notice i'm not that clear on what i mean by that -> clarify and try come up with example):
- basically i mean that maybe sometimes a thought pops into my mind because it is a causal consequence of some other event i modeled in my mind
- e.g. "i imagine hiking a longer path" -> "i imagine missing the call i have in the evening"
- basically i mean that maybe sometimes a thought pops into my mind because it is a causal consequence of some other event i modeled in my mind
- (NOTE: feel free to skip this.) e.g. for proposal "i might want to try to train lessons by seeing how i could've applied it to other recent problems i attacked":
- -> trigger make example -> ok what lesson could i pick -> ok let's use "don't just ask what your goal is but also why you want to achieve the goal"
- -> see how i could've applied the lesson to recent problems i attacked -> what are recent problems i attacked? (-> darn i'm in studying phase and don't have recent problems super clearly on my mind -> ok let's pick an upcoming problem -> i guess i had planned recent because then i might be better able to evaluate whether it would've actually helped but nvm now) -> upcoming problem: "plan how to setup initial deliberate practice plan for training myself to better model what is happening in my mind"
- --apply-lesson-> why do i want to do this? -> basically want to train introspection to get better data for forming models of my mind, but thought that 'introspection' is not an atomic skill but comes from training to see particular patterns or so -> also better modelling my mind might help me to notice when i ought to apply some lesson -> also want to better understand how i make progress to review and improve ---> (ok could go further here but i guess this is enough since it's just a sub-example of sth else)
- --> review: "was this useful" ->
- i guess applying the lesson for the upcoming problem is a good idea
- i guess for training lessons i need to focus more on the trigger part and not just go through problems and apply it
- i guess considering that i originally wanted to just make an example for how to come up with an example for seeing whether a hypothesis is true i derailed a lot in a way that the takeaway will be the lesson "don't just ask what your goal is but also why you want to achieve the goal" or the lesson "i might want to try to train lessons i learn from review by seeing how i could've applied it to other recent problems i attacked" instead of "if you have an abstract hypothesis/belief/model/plan, clarify on an example what it predicts" -> OOPS
- -> but i did learn that "i guess for training lessons i need to focus more on the trigger part and not just go through problems and apply it" from actually imagining a concrete example of how it would look like if i "train lessons by seeing how i could've applied it to other recent problems i attacked".
- -> see how i could've applied the lesson to recent problems i attacked -> what are recent problems i attacked? (-> darn i'm in studying phase and don't have recent problems super clearly on my mind -> ok let's pick an upcoming problem -> i guess i had planned recent because then i might be better able to evaluate whether it would've actually helped but nvm now) -> upcoming problem: "plan how to setup initial deliberate practice plan for training myself to better model what is happening in my mind"
- (yes it's often annoying and not easy, especially in the beginning)
- (if you can't you're still confused.)
- -> trigger make example -> ok what lesson could i pick -> ok let's use "don't just ask what your goal is but also why you want to achieve the goal"
- e.g. given thought "i might want to see why some thoughts are generated" -> what does that mean more concretely? -> more concrete subcases:
- generally be very concrete. also Taboo your words and Replace the Symbol with the Substance.
- I want to highlight the "what is my goal" part
- also ask "why do i want to achieve the goal?"
- (-> minimize goodhart)
- clarify your goal as much as possible.
- (again Taboo your words...)
- clarify your goal on examples
- when your goal is to understand something, how will you be able to apply the understanding on a particular example?
- (NOTE: feel free to skip this.) e.g. say my goal is "become able to model what is happening in my mind (especially when doing research)"
- => goal on example: "become able to model what happened in my mind when i came up with with the above bullet point (the one that starts with 'when your goal is to understand something')"
- => clarify goal on example: "well i don't know the right ontology yet for modelling processes in my mind, but here's an example of how it could look like (though it won't look like that, i'm only trying to get clearer on the shape of the answer):
- 'short-term-memory context: previous recalled models on "why do i want to achieve the goal" and some other bunch -> loaded query "get example for 'clarify your goal on examples'" -> parse how goal might look like -> think "perhaps i want to understand sth" -> adjust query to "get example for 'clarify your goal to understand sth on examples'" -(unconscious-in-parallel)-> background process also updates "why do i want to achieve the goal?" to "why do i want to achieve the goal to understand sth?" -(unconscious)-> suggests answer that i can better model particular cases that come up -> match the active "example" concept to "particular cases" -> try apply this -> ...'.
- (tbc this example for what might have happened in my mind is totally made up and not grounded in observations. (i didn't try to introspect there.) (in this case it was actually probably more of a cached thought.)
- 'short-term-memory context: previous recalled models on "why do i want to achieve the goal" and some other bunch -> loaded query "get example for 'clarify your goal on examples'" -> parse how goal might look like -> think "perhaps i want to understand sth" -> adjust query to "get example for 'clarify your goal to understand sth on examples'" -(unconscious-in-parallel)-> background process also updates "why do i want to achieve the goal?" to "why do i want to achieve the goal to understand sth?" -(unconscious)-> suggests answer that i can better model particular cases that come up -> match the active "example" concept to "particular cases" -> try apply this -> ...'.
- ...and well actually it's maybe not that much of a chain of thoughts but more like what mini-goals are being attacked or what models are loaded. and perhaps not actually in that much detail for some time to come. but when i have the right frames it might be easier to compress introspective observations into it. (...?)"
- (yeah sry i maybe ought to have used a simpler example.)
- also ask "why do i want to achieve the goal?"
- try to extract the core subproblems/subgoals.
- e.g. for corrigibility a core subproblem is the shutdown problem
- e.g. for "solve unbounded diamond maximizer propsoal" a core problem is "understand what kind of low-level structure can correspond to high-level abstractions".
- (for both examples above one needs to get even more precise core subproblems recursively.)
- (NOTE: bad initial example, feel free to skip.) e.g. for "solve alignment to a pivotal level" (which is actually a bad example because it doesn't factor neatly) a not-incredibly-awful initial breakdown for the my approach might be:
- find the right ontology for modelling cognition; find some way we could understand how smart AIs work.
- solve ontology identification
- solve subsystem alignment; figure out how to design a robust goal slot into the AI
- solve corrigibility
- find what pivotal act to aim for
- i guess make sure you think concretely and list subproblems and summarize the core ones and iterate. follow up on confusions where problems still seem sorta mixed up. let your mind find the natural clusters. (not sure if that will be sufficient for you.)
- tie yourself closely to observations.
- drop all assumptions. apply generalized hold off on proposing solutions.
- in particular, try not to make implicit non-well-founded assumptions about how the ontology looks like, like asking questions like "how can i formalize concepts" or "what are thoughts". just see the observations as directly as possible and try to form a model of the underlying process that generates those.
- first form a model about concrete narrow cases and only later generalize
- e.g. first study precisely what thoughtchains you had on particular combinatorics problems before hypothesizing what kind of general strategies your mind uses.
- special case: (first) plan how to solve specific research subproblems rather than trying to come up with good general methodology for the kinds of problems you are attacking.
- don't overplan and rather try stuff and review how it's going and replan and iterate.
- this is sorta an application of "get concrete" where you get concrete through actually trying the thing rather than imagining how it will look like if you attack it.
- often review how you made progress and see how to improve.
- (also generally lots of other lessons from the sequences (and HPMoR): notice confusion, noticing mysterious answers, know how an actual reduction looks like, and probably a whole bunch more)
Tbc those are sorta advanced techniques. Most alignment researchers are working on line of hopes that pretty obviously won't work while thinking it has a decent chance of working, and I wouldn't expect those techniques to be much use for them.
There is this quite foundational skill of "notice when you're not making progress / when your proposals aren't actually good" which is required for further improvement, and I do not know how to teach this. It's related to be very concrete and noticing mysterious answers or when you're too abstract or still confused. It might sorta be what Eliezer calls security mindset.
(Also other small caveat: I did not yet get very clear great results out of my research, but I do think I am making faster progress (and I'm setting myself a very high standard). I'd guess the lessons can probably be misunderstood and misapplied, but idk.)
go into a pitch black room and lie down for awhile, and the worst case scenario is your brain will mull over the problem in a somewhat more spacious/relaxed way for awhile
I wonder if this is more or less effective than a short session of mindfulness meditation.
There are two problems I often encounter: lack of (1) attention or (2) energy. Interestingly, I've found mindfulness meditation to be highly effective with (1) but I haven't seen an obvious improvement to (2).
Perhaps, "lie down in dark room" could help for (2). I'll have to test it out!
If you have 3 different hypotheses, it's much more natural to keep generating more hypotheses, and to pivot around in a multiple dimensional space of possibility.
The way I imagine this playing out—though I'm not sure how literal this is—is that three hypotheses plus the starting state generate a three-dimensional vector basis when they're in general position. A corollary would be that you want neither all three nor two alongside the starting state to be collinear.
Yeah. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the metaphor, but I use a similar metaphor.
I think, ideally, you'll have at least 3 plans and at least 3 different frames for "what are your plans trying to accomplish". i.e. the 3 plans are solving somewhat different problems. And this is specifically getting at the "being able to move around freely in 3 dimensions" thingy.
The actual top-level blogpost I plan to write is probably going to be called "3 plans, 2 frames, and a crux", which is based on what actually feels reasonable to ask of people in most circumstances. i.e:
- Come up with at least 3 different plans.
- At least two of them should looking at the problem differently.
- If it's obvious which plan is your favorite, figure out what observations you could make later on that might change your mind towards one of the other two.
When you're fluent at this sort of thing, you should have lots of different plans and backup plans in mind such that you have way more than 3, but, this felt like a reasonable bid given that people will probably find all these steps cumbersome and annoying at first.
I've also found "spreadsheet literacy" a recurring skill
What exactly do you use spreadsheets for? Any examples?
I want to acknowledge that Fluent, Cruxy Predictions isn't on this list, despite me being really into it. I am currently making a bet that this will turn out to be useful as part of a mature rationality practice, and is my current mechanism for tracking whether any of this stuff is really paying off to the best of my awareness. But it's still very much a less mature skill that I'm not quite sure how to best execute.
I too have found Google Sheets to be an incredibly useful tool in recent years. One tip, ChatGPT is really good at writing very complex scripts and formulas for spreadsheets. Usually all you need to do is tell it what your goal is. Sometimes you have to take a couple cracks at it to get it just right, but now I can figure out some pretty amazing things with them.
Always try to have 3 hypotheses
This one is important enough to be it's own post.
Duncan Sabien's Split and Commit would seem to be cover (large?) parts of that.
Yeah I do think it is basically a reformulation of that idea, but tailored for a different cluster of problems. (I also think Leave a Line of Retreat and some other sequences posts cover similar ground).
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
Random extra tip on naps is doing a yoga nidra or non sleep deep rest. You don't have to fall asleep to get the benefits of a nap+. It also has some extra growth hormone release and dopamine generation afterwards. (Huberman bro, out)