The Nonlinear Library LW - Noticing Panic by Cole Wyeth
Feb 5, 2024
04:54
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Noticing Panic, published by Cole Wyeth on February 5, 2024 on LessWrong.
In Competent Elites @Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses "executive nature," which he describes as the ability to "function without recourse," to make decisions without some higher decision maker to fall back on.
I do not have executive nature.
I like to be well prepared. I like to read every word of every chapter of a textbook before a problem set, take a look, give the last chapter another skim, and then start working.
Being thrust into a new job and forced to explore a confusing repository and complete an open ended project is... stressful. The idea of founding a startup terrifies me (how could I settle on one business idea to throw years of my life at? And just thinking about the paperwork and legal codes that I would have to learn fills me with dread).
There's a particular feeling I get just before freezing up in situations like this. It involves a sinking suspicion that failure is inevitable, a loss of self confidence, and a sort of physical awkwardness or even claustrophobia, like trying to claw my way up the sheer wall of a narrow shaft. In a word, it is panic.
I believe that this is, for me, the feeling of insufficient executive nature.
It may sound a little discouraging, but the very consistency of this feeling is, perhaps, a key to overcoming my limitations.
The rationalist technique that I've found most useful is probably noticing confusion. It is useful because it is a trigger to re-evaluate my beliefs. It is a clue that an active effort must be made to pursue epistemic rigor before instinctively brushing over important evidence. In a way, "noticing confusion" is useful because it links my abstract understanding of Bayes with the physical and emotional experience of being a human. It is not, by itself, a recipe for correct epistemic conduct, but it provides a precious opportunity to take hold of the mind and steer it down a wiser path.
Perhaps noticing panic is for planning and acting what noticing confusion is for belief.
So how should one act when noticing panic?
I do not know yet. But I do have a guess.
I think that I panic when there are too many levels of planning between me and an objective.
For instance, a simple task like performing a calculation or following a recipe has zero levels of planning. Solving a more difficult problem, for instance a routine proof, might have one level of planning: I do not know how to write down the proof, but I know I can (typically) come up with it by rereading the last couple of sections for definitions and reasoning through their conclusions.
Solving a harder problem might require an unknown approach; I might have to consider which background I need to fill in to prepare myself to undertake it, and the correct route to a proof may not be clear; this is of course the third level.
At the fourth level, I might not even know how to reason about what background I might need (sticking with mathematical examples, if a very difficult problem remains open for long enough, conventional approaches have all failed, and becoming an expert in any mainstream topic is unlikely to be sufficient - one strategy for succeeding where others have failed is to specialize in a carefully chosen esoteric area which no one else has realized is even related. Of course mathematicians usually only do this by accident).
I actually suspect that many engineering tasks are pretty high up this hierarchy, which may be one reason I am less comfortable with them than theoretical work. Though much of an engineer's work is routine, roadblocks are often encountered, and after every out-of-the-box solution fails, it's often unclear what to even try next. A lot of mucking about ensues until eventually a hint (like a google-able line in a stack trace) appears, which... leads nowhere.
The proc...
In Competent Elites @Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses "executive nature," which he describes as the ability to "function without recourse," to make decisions without some higher decision maker to fall back on.
I do not have executive nature.
I like to be well prepared. I like to read every word of every chapter of a textbook before a problem set, take a look, give the last chapter another skim, and then start working.
Being thrust into a new job and forced to explore a confusing repository and complete an open ended project is... stressful. The idea of founding a startup terrifies me (how could I settle on one business idea to throw years of my life at? And just thinking about the paperwork and legal codes that I would have to learn fills me with dread).
There's a particular feeling I get just before freezing up in situations like this. It involves a sinking suspicion that failure is inevitable, a loss of self confidence, and a sort of physical awkwardness or even claustrophobia, like trying to claw my way up the sheer wall of a narrow shaft. In a word, it is panic.
I believe that this is, for me, the feeling of insufficient executive nature.
It may sound a little discouraging, but the very consistency of this feeling is, perhaps, a key to overcoming my limitations.
The rationalist technique that I've found most useful is probably noticing confusion. It is useful because it is a trigger to re-evaluate my beliefs. It is a clue that an active effort must be made to pursue epistemic rigor before instinctively brushing over important evidence. In a way, "noticing confusion" is useful because it links my abstract understanding of Bayes with the physical and emotional experience of being a human. It is not, by itself, a recipe for correct epistemic conduct, but it provides a precious opportunity to take hold of the mind and steer it down a wiser path.
Perhaps noticing panic is for planning and acting what noticing confusion is for belief.
So how should one act when noticing panic?
I do not know yet. But I do have a guess.
I think that I panic when there are too many levels of planning between me and an objective.
For instance, a simple task like performing a calculation or following a recipe has zero levels of planning. Solving a more difficult problem, for instance a routine proof, might have one level of planning: I do not know how to write down the proof, but I know I can (typically) come up with it by rereading the last couple of sections for definitions and reasoning through their conclusions.
Solving a harder problem might require an unknown approach; I might have to consider which background I need to fill in to prepare myself to undertake it, and the correct route to a proof may not be clear; this is of course the third level.
At the fourth level, I might not even know how to reason about what background I might need (sticking with mathematical examples, if a very difficult problem remains open for long enough, conventional approaches have all failed, and becoming an expert in any mainstream topic is unlikely to be sufficient - one strategy for succeeding where others have failed is to specialize in a carefully chosen esoteric area which no one else has realized is even related. Of course mathematicians usually only do this by accident).
I actually suspect that many engineering tasks are pretty high up this hierarchy, which may be one reason I am less comfortable with them than theoretical work. Though much of an engineer's work is routine, roadblocks are often encountered, and after every out-of-the-box solution fails, it's often unclear what to even try next. A lot of mucking about ensues until eventually a hint (like a google-able line in a stack trace) appears, which... leads nowhere.
The proc...