Hierarchical strategies

When Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess, was it because it ran an algorithm that searched the decision tree and spit out good moves, or was it because it spit out the specific set of moves that worked well against Kasporov's moves? Okay, stupid question.

If you're trying to learn chess, you could try memorizing "canned" sets of moves, but due to the exponential tree growth, that will only get you so far. So you could try to learn the heuristics that pop out the specific sets of moves - maybe "take out the queen first" or something. But then you're limited to the strength of those heuristics. Maybe you could work at an even higher level of abstraction so you can generate your own heuristics and know better when to use which heuristic.

There's sorta a hierarchy of abstraction with concrete moves at the bottom and chess theory at the top - and you can improve your game at any level.

The hypnotic gaze

Part of the hypnosis mythology is that the power is in the "hypnotic gaze". I've even had people refuse to look me in the eye after learning that I was a hypnotist.

To think that there's some ontologically basic and unavoidable power in a "hypnotic gaze" is pretty laughable, but there's something to it - a lot to it, actually. Much more than I initially thought, coming from a text hypnosis origin and all that.

The "hypnotic gaze" infamy comes from noticing the power of nonverbal communication when holding strong eye contact and focusing all of your attention on the person.  By using eye contact, you can create a strong frame and draw the person in to that frame – as long as you know what you are doing, that is.

Well, it's more of an invitation, really

Okay, so last time I said it was all instructions. But there's an important albeit somewhat subtle distinction to be made between "instructions" and "invitations"

Its an instruction, you fool

Back in  quasi-bayesian placebos, placebo engineering, and the like, I talk about suggestions as if they're predictions. This isn't false, but I was missing a big part of it - I'll come back to this.

How to deter without being a dick

Effectively deterring humans is a bit different than effectively deterring an idealized game theoretic agent.  If you're a skilled elephant jockey, you can remove a good amount of this discrepancy, but you need to know how it works so that you can correct for it.

Alief > Belief

Perhaps you have heard of the mystery of the haunted rationalist – where the rationalist fears ghosts even though he believes that they don't exist.  Sometimes people have aliefs that cause them to act in ways inconsistent with their explicit beliefs. 

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.

Partial transcripts from Hypnobot: What does a hallucinated rabbit look and feel like?

Introducing Hypnobot!

Different Theories

Self Modification (Part 3)

Self Modification (Part 2)

Self Modification (Part 1)

How to do introspection

How to deliver suggestions

From the inside

What Trance says about Rationality

Trance

Disinhibited Imagination

Placebo Engineering

Quasi-Bayesian Placebos

Classical Conditioning

Holy shit! It's real!

Connectionism II, the implications

Connectionism, part I

Resources

The Brain as a Dynamical System

Mind hacking: a priori not unexpected.

Why haven't people gotten this shit all figured out yet?

Intro