impossiblewizardry | (no subject)

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Level Zero skill: When you make a mistake, rather than rehearsing the action you wish you'd taken, rehearse the plausible thought process that you wish had led up to that action. Like, if I fail to notice confusion, I imagine what it would have felt like at the time to notice the small note of discord, promote it to my attention, and reason about it using general heuristics that would have led to the right conclusion. Basically you want to visualize what it would have felt like, experientially, to be the nearest person to you who would have avoided that mistake using general thought processes and without any advance foreknowledge.

Ziz:

It's also important that you test whatever heuristics you come up with on other past experiences where the opposite choice was correct and you chose it. "Sure this heuristic would have saved me from trusting this untrustworthy person, but would it have also prevented me from trusting these other trustworthy people I did trust?"

This is what I love about programming computers compared to trainin myself. Computers make "rerun on all previously considered cases" easy, but for my own life it's difficult and timeconsuming