The Art and Science of Cognitive Engineering

Monday, July 16, 2012

To confirm or not confirm?

Commitment and consistency is really really good shit, but it's not for everything. Getting confirmation is fantastic for things inside their Locus of Control and "Locus of Observation", but not so great for things on the outside.

Toward reflectively consistent desires

The LW cluster is full of debates about what we really want, how to model it, meta-wants, if we can be said to actually want anything, and what we would want if we were smarter, thought faster, and were more the sort of person we wished to be. I think there's an answer.

Facets of rationality

So last time I talked about the fact that a large part of irrationality is caused by flinching away from unpleasant thoughts. This seems to cover the entirety of cases that make you want to throw up your arms and scream "You're being IRRATIONAL!!!"

However, if you define rationality as the skill of arriving at true beliefs, the skill of systematic winning, or as any other meta-intelligence like thing, then this isn't the whole story.

Irrationality as a byproduct of conditioning

So I've been thinking a bit more seriously about actively improving peoples rationality with my new skills. Direct suggestions to not flinch away from problems, and not stop at mental stop signs have been quite effective when done in real time.

Conversational Change

Sometimes I talk about hypnosis as if it's "cheating". There are no actual rules against using trance, but there are a couple reasons to take a different approach.

Power tools of influence

With deep hypnosis and a bit of strategy, absolutely crazy things are easy - but we can't always get deep hypnosis. Sometimes people have their egos in the way, or are afraid of losing control, or whatever it is. And if you can't rewrite peoples memories, emotions, and sensory inputs at will, it becomes non trivial to create situations where they want what you want. But there are still things you can do. If they're not responding to you then find out what they do respond to and manipulate that.

Hypnosis techniques for teaching rationality

One of the big reasons I got into this hypnosis thing was to help improve people that aren't "broken". As a fully general mind hacking tool set, it should be helpful in getting people to think better too, as long as we know how we should reason and decide and what we tend to do wrong. There are more applications than this, but here are a few important ones I haven't really covered yet.

Speaking with "the subconscious"

People often talk about the mind as if there are two people living inside - the conscious guy and the subconscious guy. And while you can make it functionally true if you want (or if you don't know what the fuck you're doing), there's nothing fundamental in the divide. It's just a bunch of shit that interacts more or less coherently, and we do better when it is more.