My name is Duncan Sabien.
I'm the curriculum director and COO at The
Center for Applied Rationality in Berkeley.
We put on four and a half day rationality
workshops, and also some targeted programs
for groups like AI researchers, mathematicians,
so on and so forth.
Our goal is to improve human rationality.
In this talk, I'm going to try to give you
a little taste of what we do at workshops,
and what we've been figuring out, and what
we're all about.
I'm sad to say that it's not going to work.
There's an effect that we've noticed where
when we give an hour long talk, people leave
super excited about rationality, and about
the potential to be better at achieving their
goals and figuring things out.
And what happens is, it's sort of like if
you had just found out about the concept of
pushups.
You're like, "Man, pushups, that sounds so
cool.
I can be so strong, and my arms would look
so good."
But there's a very big difference between
learning about pushups and actually doing
pushups.
So to frame this talk, most of this talk will
be me telling you guys about pushups, and
how cool pushups are.
But on base rates, very few of us will leave
this talk and then go do pushups.
So make it be you.
You're going to be the one that breaks the
frame, and goes out and actually does stuff.
Make sense?
Cool.
Occasionally there might be spots for people
to ask questions and make comments.
If so, we'll have a mic that we'll send around,
because they're recording, and it makes it
a lot easier for the recording to be sensible.
Please talk into the mic.
But otherwise, we're just going to dive right
in.
My first question is, do you know what you
are doing and why you are doing it?
I'm actually going to repeat this question
a whole bunch over the course of the hour.
So get prepared to get bored by it.
But right now you're in this room.
I'd like you to take 20 seconds and check,
do you actually know why you're in this room?
What brought you here?
Is there a reason?
Are you just on autopilot?
Take 20 seconds to check.
Every time I say take 20 seconds to check,
you're also certainly welcome to just sit
there not doing anything.
I won't know.
But from nope to yep, raise your hands to
the extent that you know what you're doing
and why you're doing it.
So here is, "I have no clue."
Here is, "I'm like a perfectly rational automaton."
Nope to yep, can I get all the hands?
Neat.
Not bad for EAG.
Okay, so human rationality.
My framing on human rationality is that it
has two major parts.
We're trying to get better at forming true
beliefs, and letting go of false ones.
And we're trying to get better at taking effective
action.
In other words, you want to actually be able
to say the sentence, "It's going to work,"
and have that sentence be true.
Right?
And when you can't honestly say that sentence
you should caveat, the way that I just caveated
a second ago.
So hopefully this is what you're interested
in, because this is what we're going to dive
into.
So, CFAR is an organization made up of specific
people who have done specific research.
CFAR has a canon.
It's sort of an attempt to make rationality
be a thing, and our canon is this large battery
of techniques.
I've drawn up a whole bunch of them.
You can come take pictures of this at the
end if you're interested.
We have techniques with neat names like Double
Crux, and Focusing, and Goal Factoring, and
Systematization, and Resolve Cycles, and Murphy-Jitsu.
And each one of these techniques is an attempt
to solve a certain problem.
I will say the problems a little bit slower
so you guys can catch them.
We have a technique that we've invented to
try to help navigate intellectual disagreement.
We asked ourselves the question, why is it
that some conversations, some fights go a
hundred times better than other conversations
and other fights.
And we tried to techniqueify the difference.
We have a technique that we stole, called
Focusing, which is for drawing info out of
your subconscious or implicit models.
The idea is, how can we take advantage of
all of the stuff that our subconscious model,
like our system one that's listening all time,
how can we take advantage of this information,
that doesn't land in our verbal loop?
How can we draw it out and get a handle on
it?
How is it that sometimes you end up doing
something that doesn't achieve your goals
very well at all?
The classic example is, raise your hand if
you or someone you knew was going to law school
or medical school because they wanted to make
their parents happy?
Is that the most cost efficient way to make
your parents happy?
So we have a technique that's designed to
deal with mismatches between goals and plans.
We have a technique for modeling just what's
going on in your second-to-second cognition,
what's actually going on in your brain.
We have a technique for bulletproofing plans.
Somehow we have this capacity to make plans
that just don't work.
And have you ever confidently declared that
you'll be at the airport by 7:00?
Right?
We have a technique for overcoming decision
paralysis.
We have a technique for automating away drains
on your time and attention, for resolving
internal conflicts.
The thing about all these techniques is they're
all sort of fake, right?
The art of human rationality is not evenly
dividable into single kicks and punches.
We make up these little kicks and punches
so that people can practice the basics and
ingrain them.
But most of our staff members, most of our
alumni rarely sit down to use goal factoring.
We will, once in a while; the techniques are
pretty cool.
They do actually work.
But what's much more important is this holistic
lump.
This big, vague, misshapen, ill-defined lump
of human rationality.
The idea of being able to see what's real,
and do what you're trying to do.
So don't think of this as a checklist.
Where like, "Once I've collected all the techniques,
then I will be a superhuman rationality machine."
In point of fact, people with that mentality
tend to plateau very early on.
What you want to do is keep looking.
All right.
I will actually teach you some of the techniques,
though.
We're going to talk about TAPs today.
And if you attended Eli's Double-Crux session
yesterday, that was great.
If you didn't, get a time machine.
And later on today there's a Murphy-Jitsu
session that will be pretty fun as well.
But okay, this is not a workshop, and we only
have an hour.
So rather than trying to feed you all of that
rationality in bite-sized chunks that won't
work, what I want you to learn how to do is
invent your own rationality... and that's
what we'll spend the next little bit talking
about.
By the way, do you know what you're doing
and why you're doing it?
Reactions of any kind are appreciated.
Yes, okay.
I'll explain later on why I'm going to keep
repeating that point over and over again.
But actually check, do you know what you're
doing and why you're doing it?
Okay, I'm going to give you three... those
of you who can squint, you can see "Ah, there's
three."
I'm going to give you three different lenses
on how to invent your own rationality.
This is basically how CFAR gets its material,
where we learn things from.
Sometimes there's something cool that comes
up in the cog-science literature that we can
just take.
They're like, "Here's this new thing that
we've discovered."
And like, "Great, we can just teach that at
the workshops."
But very often cognitive science research
doesn't really address the things that we
care about, and so we have to cobble together
our own rationality.
This is my favorite version.
This is a timeline.
You're on it right now.
You're over here.
Let's see if I have a blue in my pocket.
Yes, this is you.
And what's happening is you're on this timeline
that's pointed toward the universe where you
end up happy, and successful, and the good
thing happens.
But for some reason, over and over you end
up down here.
This is like you discover that you have eaten
an entire package of Oreos.
Or you discover that you are once again having
the same fight with your boss, or with your
significant other.
You discover that you are once again getting
angry in traffic and your blood pressure is
up.
All of this sort of thing.
This model make sense?
There's a timeline.
All right, there are three places to look
if you are trying to invent rationality, I
claim.
And those three places are, here, here, and
here.
Take a moment to stare at that.
And if you are actively participating, form
some opinions about why I circled those three
spots.
Nope to yep, do you have opinions?
Neat, I hope they agree with mine, because
that would be data that I may be right.
Okay, the idea here is humans are a process,
a very complicated, messy lump of hundreds
and hundreds of algorithms, all fighting at
the same time.
And somehow this process is ending up down
here.
I like to look in these three places.
Because here, nothing has gone wrong yet.
Here, we're just living our life.
If you're the sort of person who has road
rage, you haven't even gotten on the highway
yet.
If you're the sort of person who eats compulsively,
you haven't even gone to the cabinet yet,
right?
Your significant other walked in the door,
and all you've said is, "Hi, how are you?"
You haven't started talking about politics
yet, right?
So this is an interesting place to look, because
there's something about the way that we move
automatically through the world, kind of on
autopilot.
We'll talk more about our autopilot later
in the hour.
But you're just like... and your autopilot
is what takes you down here.
If you've ever made a New Year's resolution
and then by March you haven't made any progress
on that New Year's resolution, because you
literally just never thought of it again.
That's your autopilot in action, right?
The New Year's resolution would require you
to do something different from what you normally
do, and you just didn't.
With me so far?
Cool.
This point is also a fascinating point to
look at.
This is more obvious.
This is where most people look.
When did things go wrong?
Right?
Why did it all go wrong?
Identifying this point is not always easy.
If you're the sort of person who eats an entire
package of Oreos, was this point the moment
that you ate the fifth Oreo?
Or was it the moment that you took Oreos down
out of the cabinet?
Or was it the moment that you purchased the
Oreos?
It's not always easy to tell what the actual
point divergence is.
But if you can zero in on this point, and
you can find the actual split where you went
left and you should have gone right, according
to your own values, you can build a lot of
rationality out of that.
Especially out of looking at it like, why
did you go the wrong way in the first place?
There's a principle that we teach at CFAR.
We loosely title it The Good Faith Principle.
The idea is that everything that goes on in
your brain, everything that you do should
be taken in good faith.
The idea is that every impulse that you have,
every thought that floats across your consciousness
is trying to be good, and trying to make the
world good, and trying to make your life good.
The problem is sometimes it's just like, "Oops,
mistaken."
Like we really crave sugar, at least in part,
because in the ancestral environment sugar
was mostly found in things like fruit, which
had a ton of calories, and had a ton of micro
nutrients available.
And so our bodies learned to like sugar, because
that was a marker for other good things.
And then we learned how to separate the sugar
from the fruit, and like, "Oops," right?
But the part of you that craves sugar and
is driving you towards sugar, and wants you
to eat every single Oreo, it's trying to make
your life good.
It's trying to get you nutrients, and calories,
and that sort of thing.
It just happens to be miscalibrated for the
world that you find yourself in.
And so, rather than kicking the part of you
that likes Oreos, it's better to like, "Good
job, sugar craving.
I see how you're on my side.
You're trying, but we're going to go over
this way where the broccoli is."
So looking here and figuring out not just
what went wrong, but why it went wrong is
a fantastic place to unpack rationality.
Many of our techniques come from looking at
that moment when things either go well or
badly.
And we look at people who do things... people
who are dramatically effective.
And we're like, "What was going on in their
brain, second-by-second?"
And we look at people who are dramatically
ineffective, and like, "What was going on
in their brain, second-by-second?"
And we try to cross-compare and figure it
out.
Any questions so far?
Yes, do we have the microphone?
Yes.
Yes, so you didn't put a circle on the happy
path, on the right there.
Why not?
Yes, if you're already on the happy path,
it's less urgent that you ask questions and
figure out what's going on.
It's still great to know what's going on even
when things are going well.
But it's more critical, I claim, to figure
out what's going on when things are going
badly.
Sure.
Yes, that can help.
That's super good.
The third circle, the reason for this third
circle is, I like to look here more than most
of my colleagues do.
A lot of my colleagues are like, "We should
focus our interventions here."
But this is a place where I often have the
benefit of noticing.
I'll be sort of asleep, and then like, "Ye
wake up, and ye find ye self having eaten
two rows of Oreos, and there's one row left."
And it's like, "Well, I mean I've already
fallen off my diet.
I'm a terrible person, so I might as well."
That's the failure with abandon kind of thing.
I like to look in this place because my brain
is often awake and aware at that point.
Like if you are a road-rage type person, this
is where... down here is where you and the
other person have pulled off to the side of
the road and are getting your respective baseball
bats out of the trunk, right?
But here, this is the point where you've swerved
in front of them and turned on your windshield
wiper fluids so it's going to mess up their...
it's bad.
It's bad, but it's not hopeless.
And it's a lot easier to correct back from
here, than it is to get all the way back up
from here.
Make sense?
So for me this is another primary place to
look for interventions, and inventions, and
figuring out, "Okay, how can I re-correct
course from that spot?"
So, what we're going to do now, we're going
to put 90 seconds on the clock.
If you're exhausted, or you haven't woken
up yet, feel free to just zone out.
But if you're playing along at home, then
you're going to take 90 seconds, and you're
going to look for some dynamic in your life
that matches this model that I've drawn here.
Some place where you keep ending up in the
frowny-face land.
And you're going to just take a quick, just
quickly, quickly, see if you can find anything
in any of these three spots.
Make sense?
Cool, 90 seconds, go.
And If you can hear me, start humming... 
everybody humming.
Social peer pressure to be quiet again...
nice.
That's how we do it CFAR workshops, so I don't
have to shout all the time.
Cool, quick aside.
You guys know the trope, where there's shoulder
advisors.
There's the angel on one side, and the demon
on the other.
This one was like, "Eat all the Oreos."
And this one was like, "Eat your broccoli,"
yes?
What I would like you to do, humor me for
a moment, is pop back into this dynamic.
Visualize it, if you have visual imagery.
If you're the sort of person who doesn't have
visual imagery, just do whatever it is that
you do when you're reading a book.
But go back into that moment for me, and I
want you to imagine a tiny little Duncan popping
up on your shoulder.
And what he says is, "Do you know what you're
doing, and why you are doing it?"
Do me a favor, actually visualize that.
Cool, thanks.
All right, our second method of inventing
rationality.
This is a method we call bow tie or hourglassing.
We haven't actually turned it into a class
yet, so we're not sure what the name's going
to be.
Naming things is very important.
But here we have a blue person, that's you,
who's looking at an orange person who is awesome.
The orange person is awesome at some skill.
Maybe they're a really good writer.
Maybe they're a really good athlete.
And you, the blue person, want some of it.
You want to invent some rationality and steal
what they've got.
This method, by the way, comes in part from
Ben Franklin, you can look up more about how
Ben Franklin learned how to write.
Basically, the idea was he would take articles
that he admired from the papers, and he would
stare at them really hard.
And he would develop theories about the principles
that the author of the article was adhering
to.
So you take a large corpus of data, and you
try to boil it down to a small set of principles.
Does that make sense?
So his theory might be something like, "This
person never uses words that are more than
three syllables."
Or, "This person tries to get alliteration
into every paragraph," or something like that.
He would squint at it and try to distill out
what he thought was most important.
Then using those principles, he would generate
his own copy of the article, usually several
weeks later.
He would let the article drain out of his
head.
He would have taken notes on the specific,
boring content of the article, like who said
what, and what happened.
Because that wasn't the part he cared about.
He cared about the style of writing.
So he took notes on the boring stuff.
He would come back to his outline, "Okay,
here's the article that I have to write.
I have to write that so and so said such and
such."
And then keeping these principles in mind,
he would try to generate his own copy of the
article.
And then he would take that copy, and he would
compare it back to the original.
He would put the two of them side-by-side,
and he would look at what he had written and
what the person he admired had written, and
he would find the places where he wasn't living
up to the standard that he wanted to meet.
And he would also find the places where he
had done actually better, where he was a little
bit smug about his own turn of phrase being
even cooler than the other person's.
And then lather, rinse, repeat.
He would take the data, distill the principle,
attempt to act in accordance with the principle,
double check.
Maybe he refines his understanding of what
the principles are, like, "Actually it wasn't
this thing, it was more that thing," and looping
through and through.
Does this make sense as a concept?
Yes?
Okay.
So you can't actually do this right now, probably,
because you don't have all of this stuff.
What I would like you to do, we're going to
take another 45 seconds in silence.
I would like you to think of somebody, or
some skill, some place that you want to steal
from, where you could actually employ this
process.
So some blog author that you really would
like to copy, or some athlete who had videos
on YouTube that you could watch.
I used to steal parkour technique in a fashion
similar to this.
You're looking for a place where someone has
something that you think you could steal,
model, mimic, and compare.
To become a better person, according to you.
Better at this skill that you want.
Anybody uncertain about what I'm asking you
to do?
You're brainstorming a plan for the future,
opening up an affordance for yourself.
Is it always with the same piece of material,
or different material?
Both.
Yes.
Sometimes you'll repeat with the same exact
piece, and sometimes you'll repeat with a
different piece by the same author.
And sometimes you'll repeat with a different
author.
The overarching thing is do what makes sense.
You never want to go through motions just
because you're supposed to go through the
motions.
Remember, do you know what you are doing,
and why you are doing it?
If it's just because Steve said so, Steve
better be real darn good, and you better be
real sure that you understood exactly what
Steve wanted.
It's very easy to get lost in the weeds.
Cool, 45 seconds, brainstorming.
What do you want?
What can you steal?
Go.
Cool, raise your hand to the extent that you've
found something.
Neat.
Raise your hand if you already... immediately,
you're like, "I know.
I know what I want."
Once again, in pairs or triplets, just swap
for a couple of minutes...
You guys can be louder than that.
Come on, hum... there we go, humoring the
sixth grade teacher in me, thank you.
Quick double check.
Do you know what you are doing, and why you
are doing it?
I want you to take 30 more seconds with your
partner or triplet.
And like, "Why is this thing worth learning?"
What's the glorious, golden, juicy thing that
is behind your desire to have this skill,
or have this experience?
It doesn't have to be profound.
There's no...
I'm not being smug about, "Well, this one's
altruistic, and that one's just self-congratulatory."
But what's the... does it make your life more
beautiful?
Does it make you a more effective person?
What is the reason that you want this thing?
30 more seconds each.
Neat, if I can get the mic ready...
I just want a handful of people to share the
thing that you want, and why it's good.
Just raise your hand if you're willing to
share in front of everybody.
Yes.
My role model was Bill Clinton, and I would
love to have his mastery of relationships.
The ability to connect deeply and immediately
with people in a variety of circumstances.
Okay, cool.
Wait, you forgot to say why.
There's really two parts.
One is that relationships are the secret to
happiness, and great relationships can give
you a very satisfying life.
But also, being able to connect with people
is a means to an end.
Whatever you want to do, it's unlikely that
you can do it alone.
And so, if you're doing it with other people
then you need to be great at relationships.
And it doesn't have to be a puppeteering thing.
This wasn't puppeteering.
This is a non-verbal thumbs up.
As opposed to a thumbs up.
Niche sub-cultures.
Look, I'm signaling.
Anyone else?
I 
would like to be able to write and produce
content effortlessly.
And my two heroes, or people that I want to
steal from in this regard were Tyler Cowen,
and Scott Alexander who seem to be able to
just magically write and produce extremely
insightful and conversational blog posts in
their sleep.
And what's good about the universe where you
have this power?
It opens up a lot of professional and influence
opportunities to build your personal reputation
and brand in a way that scales.
And also to communicate whatever message you
want to communicate, to as broad of an audience
as possible.
Nice.
By the way, just in reference to Scott Alexander
in particular.
As my colleague was developing this techniquelet,
the thing that he did it on to test the model
was, How to Title Blog Posts as Well as Scott
Alexander Does.
He practiced creating...
He came up with all these principles of how
Scott Alexander makes his titles.
Maybe one more?
Yes?
Yeah.
Mine was being able to develop questions that
are very insightful, and my role model for
that was Sam Harris, who in his podcast is
able to generate really insightful questions
that aren't answered by the authors, who have
written books or newspapers.
No, I'm sorry, newsletters are something else.
Yes, his able to come up with these really
good questions.
And the reason why I'm interested is because
it's important to be able to have good conversations
with experts, and even in job interviews being
able to ask questions that haven't been answered
anywhere.
Cool, very good.
A regular thumbs up.
One thing I'll point out is that nobody, none
of the three people that I chose had as part
of their motivation wanting to feel good about
themselves, or being able to be smug, or proud,
or something like that.
Which, it's possible that that motivation
wasn't in the mix.
But surely, for at least one person in the
whole room, that motivation is in the mix.
And I don't want you to be unwilling to look
at it.
Good faith principle.
I think your desire to be smug, and your desire
to be awesome, and your desire to feel good
about yourself are also things that should
get a thumbs up.
You don't necessarily let them steer.
You don't necessarily give them the steering
wheel.
Then if you're optimizing for smugness, you'll
probably do bad things.
But if you have in you a desire for smugness,
you can channel that and use it for good the
same way that you can channel your desire
for sugar into eating more fruit.
Cool.
All right, moving ahead.
Third step, how to invent your own rationality.
So we have looking at yourself.
We have looking at other people.
And now we have, looking at the world.
Squinting at the whole world, seeing, building
models of how it works, figuring out your
own understanding of what's going on in a
situation.
And in particular, finding the places where
it seems obviously broken and bad, and why
is everybody doing it so wrong.
It's almost incomprehensible.
How could they be doing it so wrong?
Nod if this resonates for you at all.
Yes, this is where we've invented something
like a third of our rationality techniques,
is just one staff member who doesn't do it
wrong, because of luck, because of experience,
whatever.
They're just like .. they're finally just
like, "I can't stand it anymore.
I'm going to make a technique, and I'm stop
all of you from..."
And it's great.
For instance, I'm not going to say this out
loud because I don't know what the standards
are about swearing.
But probably my next essay is going to be
titled something like this, because I just
can't take it anymore.
So, again, we're going to take just 30 to
60 seconds.
Where is the world just obviously broken in
particular?
Sometimes you already have this.
You know exactly what's going on, and you
could model it, and you could explain it to
an eight-year-old, and the eight-year-old
would learn from your wisdom and never get
it wrong themselves.
Sometimes it feels like this is impossible,
like you'll never be able to crystallize out
a model.
It's just too large, too complex, you can't
really get your fingers on all the gears.
I'm looking for the places in the middle.
Places where you haven't really figured out
what's going on, but maybe if you sat down
for a Saturday afternoon you could.
Does that make sense?
Things that have been nagging you, bothering
you, they occupy your shower thoughts.
That sort of thing.
Take 30 seconds, see if you can find such
a thing in your own life, in your own experience
of the world at large.
Go.
Nice.
Okay, I'd like you to take a moment, and imagine
the universe in which I don't say anything
else, and you have eighteen minutes just siting
in this room in silence to invent your own
rationality.
To actually take, "Okay, Duncan's laid out
some principles, and some threads that I can
pull on."
I want you to connect with the world where
you in fact tug on those threads, and go forth
and try to do something to tinker with your
life on some level, or maybe on all the levels.
Can you imagine, in other words, can you imagine
yourself taking these last 40 minutes and
actually having a better life as a result?
Take 10 seconds.
If your hand is down here, this is, "I can't
imagine it.
That's dissonant, it doesn't make sense, it
doesn't feel like how the world works."
And if your hand is up here it's like, "Yes,
I can see that, I'm excited about it.
That feels real."
Nope to yep.
Cool.
Now I want you to imagine the world in which...
let's see, it's June right now.
Imagine it's September, and you've literally
never again touched on anything that I talked
about for the last 40 minutes.
It's never come to mind, it's never been useful,
it's never come in handy.
You've done nothing with it.
Imagine that world for a moment.
How surprising is that world?
Nope is like, "That's incoherent.
I can't possibly imagine."
This is like, "Yeah, that's the real world."
Okay.
So in response to those dual imaginings, I
have one thing to say, and I bet you already
know what it is.
Do you know what you are doing, and why you
are doing it?
Right.
If there is useful content here, and you expect
not to do anything with it, then like, "How
about that?"
Right.
It's important that it be like this.
It's important that it not be like, "I, fucking,
again...
I wasted my tools!"
Because that's ignoring the parts of you that
are leading you on your normal track.
Your everyday autopilot is actually pretty
darn good, right?
It's gotten you this far, and you don't want
to just spit on that.
Does that make sense?
So not like, "Gosh, once again I didn't do
what I intended to do."
But more like, "I did..."
Here I'm projecting, hopefully, "I did think
there was useful stuff in Duncan's talk, but
I can see myself never doing anything about
it.
What's up with that?"
Right?
That's the question that I want you to hold
and ask.
And the way that I want you to hold and ask
it is, do you know what you are doing, and
why you are doing it?
I want to pop up all the time for the rest
of your life in annoying fashion.
I want you to be walking down the street,
and then little Duncan pops up on your shoulders
like "Do you know what you're doing, and why
you're doing it?"
Next time you're eating the Oreos, next time
you're road raging, next time you're getting
in a fight with your manager, I'm going to
pop up.
I'm going to be there.
It's going to be hideously annoying.
You guys are going to email me five years
from now.
You'll be like, "It's still happening."
Do you know what you are doing, and why you
are doing it?
That's the key question.
Makes sense?
Cool.
So all that being said, all of the how you
should invent your own rationality, and how
you should do this work yourself.
By the way, if you don't want to do the work
yourself, come to a CFAR workshop.
They're super dope, and we will give you all
the techniques.
But just in case.
Just in case you never make it to a CFAR workshop,
you now have the beginnings that you can follow
up on should you choose to, and should you
be able to figure out how.
I'm give you one last lens.
This is actually one of our techniques.
TAPs, Trigger Action Planning.
Normally we spend over an hour teaching and
working on this.
So, again, I'm sort of just giving you the
key, and you have to go further yourself.
But hopefully this will be a useful tool for
you to take away with you.
If you want to learn more about TAPs, Trigger
Action Planning, you want to look up implementation
intentions.
The reason we call them TAPs instead of implementation
intentions, is when we call them implementation
intentions everybody refused to learn them,
and rated them at 3 out of 10.
When we started calling them TAPs, everybody
loved them and glommed onto them.
And it was like, "This is the best technique!"
So we call them TAPs.
Humans, go figure, right.
But okay, here is the core of TAPS.
You ready?
Okay.
Also, I'm not very good at faking sneezes,
but if I were to sneeze...
God bless you.
Right.
So there's this immediate if/then that happens
in your brain.
Trigger/action, stimulus/response.
When you hear "shave and a haircut" your brain
is like, "I know the answer, the answer is
two bits!"
Right?
When somebody sneezes your brain is like,
"I know what I'm supposed to do here."
And this has accumulated.
Some of these TAPs, some of these Trigger
Action ... This acronym is overloaded.
This also stands for Trigger Action Patterns.
Some of these Trigger Action Patterns in your
brain, some are there from biology, right,
like the knee reflex.
That's just there.
That's a TAP that you didn't put there, your
body just has that.
Some of them are learned.
Have you ever had the... let's see, I'm going
to draw this real quick.
Yes, ever had the experience of you're waiting
at a stop light, and there's the turn left
lane, and there's the go straight lane, and
here's you in your car.
You're going straight... and the stop light.
And this little green arrow comes on, and
your foot comes off the brake.
Nod your head if you've had this experience.
Because your brain has learned, a flash of
green in your visual field when you're at
a stop light, that means it's time to go.
But uh-oh.
Your TAPs can be more or less calibrated.
They can be more or less appropriate.
Nod your head if you've ever gotten caught
in the loop where somebody is like, "How are
you?"
And you're like, "I'm fine, and you?"
And they're like, "I'm fine, and you?"
Right?
TAP, TAP, TAP.
Your brain just chains together these if/then
patterns into actually quite astonishingly
complex behavior.
You can run on autopilot through the vast
majority of your life, and in fact, you do.
This goes back to where I was saying your
autopilot's actually pretty darn good.
It's super cool.
Most of us who drive cars, drive cars almost
entirely on autopilot in this way.
Unless the traffic is really bad, or it's
raining really hard or something, most of
the time you're just doing it.
You can have a conversation with a person.
You can be listening to the radio, and you're
not even being an irresponsible driver.
Your autopilot is actually competent to handle
checking your mirrors before you change lanes.
But there's this thing that can happen.
My colleague, Anna, likes to tell story where
she was driving down the highway at about
75 miles an hour.
And there was a refrigerator in the lane in
front of her.
And she says she experienced "an awakening
of sorts".
Where she had been on autopilot, but all of
a sudden she was conscious.
Like, "What was that?
Was that... that can not possibly have been
refrigerator."
And there's this way in which, sort of like
the Tesla autopilot assist.
Like the self-driving cars that we currently
have will be like, "Hey, driver, wake up,
put your hands on the wheel."
They'll call on the human at the appropriate
moment.
Anna's autopilot summoned Anna, the conscious,
verbal, explicit Anna.
This make sense?
It called her attention up.
And this is one of the things that we want
our autopilot to be able to do.
There are two things that I want you to think
about with your autopilot.
One, where is miscalibrated.
Where is your autopilot generating the wrong
suggestions, the wrong actions.
And two, when do you want your autopilot to
turn itself off?
My colleague Val likes to refer to this as
the summon sapiens spell.
You can actually program into your autopilot,
triggers for turning the autopilot off, and
bringing conscious you online.
In the case of Anna, it was accidental.
It was just a refrigerator in the middle of
the highway.
But you can build up yourself some reminders.
One of my favorite examples here, is they
used Trigger Action Planning, under the name
implementation intentions, as an intervention
of ADHD middle schoolers, and it worked as
well as medication, which is shocking and
astonishing.
This is actually real psychology, hundreds
of studies, large effect sizes, and it passed
the replication crisis.
This is still real, even after the replication
crisis.
What they did, imagine an ADHD middle schooler...
this story that I'm now telling is somewhat
made up and apocryphal.
This is not literally what happened in the
study.
You should go read the study if you're interested.
But this is sort of like the Sunday school
version of the story.
You've got a middle schooler who's just always
losing track, they're just always off-task.
And they're like, "I don't know.
I don't know what happened," Like, "Okay,
here's what we're going to do.
Every time you notice that you're off track,
every time your brain naturally comes to attention,
I want you to review as much as you can of
the last 30 seconds."
That's it, just try to remember what was going
on for the last 30 seconds.
And the first time you do this the middle
schooler is like, "Okay.
I notice I'm off track.
I was staring out the window, and before that,
I got nothing."
And you're like, "That's okay, that's okay,
good job.
You got the first step.
High five."
And then they keep practicing this.
And they're like, "Okay, I was passing a note
to Carl, and before that I was looking out
the window, and before that I dropped my pencil,
and before that, I was paying attention.
Yeah, I was paying attention."
You're like, "Okay, your pencil fell off the
desk, and that's what distracted you."
And then again, the next day is like, "Okay,
well, I was tapping my foot under the desk,
and then before that I was looking over at
Suzie because she coughed, and before that,
I was paying attention."
And you start to build up this pattern of
like, "Ah-ha, what's happening for this kid
is noises pull them off task," right.
When they hear a noise, they get distracted.
And so, then you can build in a new set of
Trigger Action Patterns.
This is what a Trigger Action Plan is, is
when you devise a Trigger Action Pattern.
Either by replacing an action, or by building
a wholesale new TAP, and you eventually get
it embedded into your system.
Now this kid be like, "Okay, here's what I'm
going to do.
When I hear a noise..."
That catches their attention already, right,
"When I hear a noise I will..."
What do you think.
They shouldn't just focus... they shouldn't
be like, "When I hear a noise I will ignore
it, and I will focus on the teacher," because
that's fighting human nature, right?
But, "When I hear a noise, I will investigate
its source, and once I know what it was, I
will look back at the board."
You can build up this TAP, you can build up
this pattern, and this effectively, like,
bam, ADHD cut in half.
There's still ADHD, but at least this one
problem is somewhat solved.
They can come back to the board.
In particular, they're not fighting their
own like, "I'm distracted."
What they're doing is they're practicing the
movement of returning their attention where
they want it to be.
Like the thing where people meditate, you're
not supposed to fight yourself from thinking
thoughts.
You just think the thought, but then come
back to your meditative state.
You're practicing staying in the flow.
So, the shape of TAPS is just looking at what
your autopilot is doing.
Does it make sense?
By looking at the triggers, looking at the
actions.
"When my significant other makes that face,
I ramp up and start yelling.
That's bad.
When somebody cuts me off in traffic, I immediately
narrativize that they're a bad person.
When I have a package of Oreos in front of
me, I put them in my mouth until they're all
gone," right?
So this is a lens that you can use to look
at your behavior, and then very carefully,
very slowly, tinker.
Now, a little bit of a word of warning.
As you tinker, be careful and kind to yourself.
CFAR used to recommend for people that wanted
more exercise like, "Okay, you work on the
fifth floor of a building.
How about, let's try a TAP where when you
get to work in the morning you take the stairs
instead of the elevator."
And it turned out that the TAP that people
were installing was, "When I get on the elevator
I will feel guilty about not taking the stairs."
This is bad.
In fact, what you want to do is not use your
TAPS as like a bludgeon against future you.
What you want to do is have them be like a
little dialogue box popping up like, "Hey,
you had a goal of taking the stairs.
Would you like to take the stairs?"
That's what you're looking for.
You're looking for the autopilot to catch
your attention, turn itself off, and bring
conscious you into the frame.
And then conscious you should make a choice.
And if it turns out over the course of a week
that your TAP does in fact fire.
Every time you open the door to your building
you're like, "Oh, yes, take the stairs."
If it turns out that your TAP fires every
day and you took the stairs zero times, that
just means that you have a problem that's
not solved by TAPs.
Does that make sense?
It means that you're like, "I thought that
taking the stairs would be a good plan, but
every single time the opportunity arose there
was some resistance, or some problem."
That means that you need goal factoring, which
you can learn from a CFAR workshop.
So what I'd like to do with this last couple
of minutes.
First, I'd like everybody to take a minute,
and I just want you to look at your own autopilot.
Just try to see what TAPs you have.
Do you have the tap of like, "I'm bored on
Facebook," close Facebook, open new tab, open
Facebook?
So walk through your day, or look at life
domains.
What TAPs do you have surrounding exercise?
What TAPs do you have when you talk to your
friends?
What TAPs do you have around eating?
I want to take 90 seconds.
I just want you to look at the autopilot.
See if you can notice these if/then patterns
at all.
Sometimes they're hard to spot.
Go ahead.
Nice.
I'm actually going to hold questions for office
hours.
I have office hours in the co-working space
from 1:00 to 1:30.
And if you want to ask more about this stuff,
or CFAR in general, or anything at all really,
please feel free to come to those.
My last point that I want to make, you're
going to walk out of this room, and everything's
going to fall out of your head.
You're going to drop right back into your
normal autopilot.
You're going to see people, you're going to
go to the bathroom, "Where's my next talk?"
And this is fine.
This is fine.
You don't have to be conscious all the time.
Autopilots are really good.
But there's one question that I want you to
keep in mind, and I want you to keep hearing
it in my annoying voice.
I want it to keep happening forever, for the
rest of your life.
Will you say it with me?
"Do you know what you're doing, and why you
are doing it?"
If you keep hold of that question you will
be improving your rationality all the time.
Thanks everyone.
