Divia Eden – Page 7 – More Meaning than Magic

Draco’s Rules

At their best, human relationships are mutual self-actualization optimization processes. One major obstacle I’ve found to thinking of interactions this way is that people are concerned about manipulation. This post [link broken, and I don’t remember what the post said :-(] addresses the issue well enough that I’ll link to it instead of trying to reproduce it.

Despite the fact that I find concerns about manipulation largely incoherent, I’ve found it useful to explicitly clarify to other people that I am open to all methods of influence being used on me.

I might be aware of what you’re doing and I might not. I very much want to be aware of the forces that are influencing my decisions and behavior. I like it when people tell me how they’re manipulating me: I’m a big fan of open communication and meta-discussion both during and after actual discussions, and I’ve found increased self-knowledge to be very broadly useful.

I can also learn a lot about how other people are influencing my behavior just by paying attention, particularly if they’re actively experimenting [another broken link]—explicitly telling me is just a bonus.
And the primary reason I care about knowing myself is that it’s instrumentally useful. I agree with Francis Bacon’s perspective, “Your true self can be known only by systematic experimentation, and controlled only by being known.” So when I’m someone influences me to achieve my goals without my knowledge, that’s a positive outcome too.

So, to help clear up issues of consent and ethics, I’m defining Draco’s Rules, by analogy with Crocker’s Rules.

Declaring yourself to be operating by “Draco’s Rules” means that other people are allowed to optimize their messages for influencing you, not for transmitting information, or being nice to you. Draco’s Rules means that you have accepted full responsibility for the security holes of your own mind – you will never complain that you are being “manipulated”. Anyone is allowed to lie to you to push you in the direction of achieving your CEV and claim to be doing you a favor. (Which, in point of fact, they would be. One of the big problems with this culture is that everyone’s afraid to take full responsibility for their potential to shape the behavior of those around them, or think they have to dance around it.) Two people using Draco’s Rules should be able to expose all exploitable vulnerabilities in the minimum amount of time, without unnecessary explanation or negotiation of permission. Obviously don’t declare yourself to be operating by Draco’s Rules unless you have that kind of mental discipline.
“Draco’s Rules” are named after Draco from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
To clarify, I am operating by Draco’s Rules.
I reserve the right to object when people don’t manipulate me skillfully enough, or I find out that they’re trying to get me to act against my own best interest.

20 Rules of Formatting Knowledge deck

I believe that spaced repetition is an excellent way to internalize knowledge, that time spent explicitly trying to optimize is usually worthwhile, and that that thinking meta is an important part of the optimization process. So it’s only natural that, fairly early on, I made a spaced repetition deck about how to make spaced repetition decks.

Piotr Wozniak, who created Supermemo, and who I find quite inspirational, has been making cards for more than a decade now, so instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, I went with his best practices.

After making this deck, the main effect I noticed was that I was using cloze deletion a lot more often and deleting fewer words per card than I had been before. I try to follow the rules as much as possible when I’m creating the cards, and then I think the even more important part is having the habit of noticing which cards I’m getting wrong more than a few times and reformatting them.

Here’s the deck:

supermemo.anki
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Responding to difficult psychedelic experiences deck

I like the idea of being prepared for whatever difficult situations might come up in my life. That’s why I made the deck about how to talk to the police. Given that I do stuff like, say, attend Burning Man, I figured I’d throw some knowledge about how to deal with people having psychedelic crises into the mental preparedness backpack too. I made this deck from the resources I found on the MAPS website:

psychedelichelp.anki
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And even though I haven’t had occasion to use the advice in its intended context, I think it is much more broadly useful. For example, “Talk through, not down”, and “Difficult is not necessarily bad” are useful principles to remember when talking to anyone who’s upset.

I’ve noticed a pattern: the selection pressures on specialized communication advice seem to be especially good. Some of my favorite tips on how to talk to people came from advice about how to talk to kids, abusers, crazy people, and people having psychedelic crises.

Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming deck

I’ve been interested in lucid dreaming ever since I was a kid, and Stephen LaBerge‘s book, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming is the strongest text on the subject. The deck I made from this book mostly covers two things: how we sleep and how our minds perceive reality.

I wanted to internalize information about how sleep works in order to help my brain better model that it was sleeping while it was sleeping. Not sure whether it really had much effect.

I’d LaBerge’s book years ago, at a time in my life before I had a good model of what people meant when they talked about the ego, so it was cool to revisit it and see that what once sounded mystical and confusing now made sense to me. Some sentences from the book that I think do a good job explaining what the ego is:

1. “Seeing that the ego cannot be who you really are makes it easier to stop identifying with it.”
2. “Once you no longer identify with your ego, you are freer to change it.”
3. “Simply recognizing that the ego is a simplified model of the self gives you a more accurate model of the self, and makes it more difficult for you to mistake the map for the territory.”
4. “If you can see your ego objectively in its proper role as the representation and servant of the self, you won’t need to struggle with your ego.”
5. “You cannot get rid of it in any case, nor would it be desirable to do so—the ego is necessary for effective functioning in the world.”

When I was actively keeping a dream journal and working on lucid dreaming, I was having them a few times a week, but these days I’ve let that slide so I only have them every once in a while. The intent behind making the deck was to help me have them more often, so it mostly failed there, but I do think having a more complete model of how to be more conscious of the craziness that goes on in dreams has helped me be more conscious of the craziness that goes on in waking life. The deck:

dreaming.anki
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Crucial Conversations deck

The third deck of communication cards I made was from Crucial Conversations. Recommended to me by Anna Salamon, this book gave me a lot of insight into the inner workings of the stories we tell ourselves that create our emotions.

The basic model is that the purpose of dialogue is to get all the relevant information into the shared “pool of meaning”, and then to decide what to do with it. When people don’t feel safe, they become either silent, withholding meaning from the pool, or violent, trying to force meaning into the pool. The entrance condition of dialogue is Mutual Purpose–having a shared reason to talk about the thing in the first place. The continuation condition of dialogue is Mutual Respect.

The book also describes what it calls our “Path to Action”, where we first see or hear facts about the world, then tell ourselves stories about them, then feel emotions based on the stories, then act based on the emotions. We want our emotions to both be based on true stories and to lead us in useful directions. If any of our emotions lacks one or both of these qualities, we can change it by figuring out the facts that generated the relevant story and choosing to tell a different story.

One of the key lessons for me was learning to recognize three types of stories the book calls “clever stories”: the Victim Story (“it’s not my fault”, the Villain Story (“it’s all your fault”), and the Helpless Story (“there’s nothing else I can do”). We make up these stories because they conveniently excuse us from responsibility and help us justify continuing to act in the same way that created the problem instead of modifying our behavior. We tell the stories when we’ve done something we feel bad about and don’t want to admit it–and they’re almost never true. I started tagging both my own and others’ stories with these labels when they applied, and I’ve found it quite valuable.

A lot of the rest of the advice in the book is so simple it’s embarrassing how much mileage I’ve gotten from using it. For example, if someone misunderstands something you said, Contrasting (“I didn’t mean X, I did mean Y”) can be very useful. Don’t let yourself get away with saying stuff like “Someone has to tell her how she’s acting, even if it means being cruel”. Instead, present your brain with a more complex question: “How can I tell her how she’s acting AND be kind?”. If you find that you’re becoming either silent or violent in conversation, return to your motive. Ask yourself, “What do I really want to get out of this conversation?” and “How would someone who really wanted those results behave?”.

Here’s the deck:

crucialconversations.anki
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10 Rules for dealing with the police deck

Getting clear about what why legal rights are in police encounters had been in the back as something I wanted to do someday for years. I finally did it! I used the information from Flex Your Rights to make this deck. They do a good job of explaining what the official rules are, which is most of what I wanted to know. Barry Cooper, who has actual experience being a cop has some conflicting advice: he recommends minimizing suspicion by consenting to searches during traffic stops if you have items you don’t want the police to see that you’ve hidden well.

With that caveat, here’s the deck:

police.anki
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The only police encounter I’ve had since learning the deck was a cop who saw me walking (barefoot :-)) along the side of a highway in a place that wasn’t for pedestrians. Didn’t need to use any of this–he was friendly and he gave me a ride home. It still makes me feel safer to have the information internalized though.

How to Talk to Kids deck

I’ve been living with Tovar, my favorite five-year-old, for a little over a year now. I’ve always liked kids a lot, so when I moved in I knew my plan was to interact with him a bunch, and I wanted it to go as well as possible. I didn’t have much experience handling situations where kids didn’t want to do what I wanted them to, and I wanted to be better at connecting with them overall, so I read the book on this subject that my friends recommended the most highly: How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. I loved it, and as with NVC, the hardest time to remember all the advice was during an actual conflict with Tovar. The book came with helpful cheat sheets with the most important strategies for different categories of communication.

The cards really helped even more than I thought they would. Sometimes the strategies improved the situation a lot right away, and sometimes they didn’t, but having a mental list of things to try helped me feel a lot more in control, and THAT always helped quite a bit. The real secret about this book is that it’s definitely not just for communicating with kids. I use this stuff all the time on adults and kids both. And to be clear, I love it when people use the techniques on me! In particular, when I’m upset an easy and fun one to use is #3 from helping children deal with their feelings, give the child his wishes in fantasy (e.g. “I wish I could make that banana ripe for you right now!”). It cracks me up that this works as well as it does.

Here’s the deck:

talklistenkids.anki
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Nonviolent Communication deck

Nonviolent Communication has a lot of ridiculously useful communication advice. Of course, the hardest time to remember communication advice is in the middle of a conflict. Eventually, after getting frustrated with myself for not being able to remember how to do what the book said in the moment, I got an idea! If the problem was about forgetting, perhaps SRS was the solution…

So I extracted all the material that seemed important and made an Anki deck. Reviewing the deck made me realize that successfully practicing Nonviolent Communication relied on understanding more of the subtleties than I had realized, so I ended up including a fair amount of detail. I also put all the exercises from the book in there, and the NVC half of all the sample conversations. I found that doing so made it easier for me to automatically mentally classify and translate statements. Evidence that memorizing these things was actually have an effect is that for a while I was having crazy NVC Tetris effect dreams.

My best NVC story is that I was on Caltrain once and there were some drunk guys fighting loudly about some sports thing, and I noticed that my visceral reaction to the situation had changed: in the past my impulse was to move away from angry drunk potentially violent people, but instead I felt drawn to them, and I intuited that the safest thing would be to go empathize with them and defuse the situation. My brain pattern matched the situation to the sample conversations in the book. Sure enough, it worked! I cornered one guy, calmed him down, and then when I was done with that the other guy came over to talk to me because he wanted to be heard too. I like to brag about this one, so feel free to ask for details if you see me in person and haven’t already heard my story :-).

nvc.anki
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Please email me with any questions that come up when you use it, and I’ll post my answers here.

Less Wrong Sequences as Tab-delimited Text File

lesswrongcards.txt
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Now with Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and A Human’s Guide to Words.