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extropianzealotEpistemic Status: Unlikely
One of the most vexing problems facing the LessWrong rationality community is the lack of useful training methods. Multiple attempts have been made, most notably the Center For Applied Rationality workshop series. These workshops are fundamentally limited by the fact that instructors can't follow people around in the world and wait for them to encounter a situation where the student can practice their rationality. It is difficult to engineer a situation where a fast feedback loop can be obtained between somewhere rationality would be useful and a student attempting to use it. In this brief post I propose a method which uses hypnosis to construct that feedback loop. Because hypnosis is well suited to shaping the subtle internal feelings and processes that rationality relies on interpreting, it is an ideal tool to set up conditions for the student to practice with.
Hypnosis is a strange psychological phenomena which allows a practitioner heightened access and influence over a cooperating persons inner world. Hypnosis can be used to induce emotions, set up hallucinatory situations, make memories more difficult to access or prevent memories from being formed, and is common in stage shows to embarrass volunteers from the audience. It is commonly thought to be a myth due to its procedural similarity to many forms of pseudoscience and woo. Red flag features include:
I'm sure this list or something like it immediately popped into mind for most of my readers. My basic response is that I'm sorry this particular thing happens to sound like bullshit but it does work. The easiest way to establish that this is true is for you to try it yourself. It's not especially difficult, and the effects are clear enough that you can readily distinguish them from what me might expect of the placebo effect.
(Note that you may want to check your local laws before doing anything like this, as it is illegal to perform hypnosis without a license in some jurisdictions)
You can find plenty of guides to hypnosis on the Internet. To avoid getting too off topic I'll provide a barebones procedure which should reliably induce a hypnotic state in those who are susceptible.
In these instructions the 'hypnotist' is the person performing hypnosis, and the 'subject' is the person cooperating to be hypnotized. 'Trance' is the state of being hypnotized.
It's actually possible to do this over a chat program. I found this guide to hypnosis over text useful. The biggest difference is that the ergonomics of computers demand you put twice as much effort into finding a comfortable position. However the subject is expected to use computer equipment can't prevent them from relaxing their body. It helps if yes/no questions are answered with single characters, to avoid significant movement. This added difficulty is further compounded by not being able to see the subject, it's difficult to monitor where a subject is if you can't see them.
How much time this takes varies, the shortest session I've done took 5 minutes, the longest two hours, and the average is perhaps 30 minutes. Some people are more hypnotizable than others, so if it doesn't work be sure you try it on a few other people before giving up.
A rationality technique can be thought of as a trained reaction to a certain stimulus or feeling or internal state. For example, noticing confusion relies on the right reaction to a subtle emotional cue. In his post Your Strength as a Rationalist, Eliezer Yudkowsky says:
This creates a necessary problem. A rationality instructor is not going to be available when you encounter these moments of confusion to help you react properly to the situation. You need the emotion and the instructor to train the reaction, but when you have the emotion you don't have the instructor and when you have the instructor the emotion is absent. This problem is analogous to another problem I encountered while reading the hypnosis literature. In it, a therapist is trying to treat a girl who has compulsive tics. But the tics only occur intermittently during her day, and don't seem to happen at all around therapists. Eventually they decide to have a hypnotist induce the tics so that they can be treated. The reactions trained on the induced tics carry over to the natural tics, and eventually the compulsive behaviors stop (cit. 1).
Given this example, I suspect a similar approach would work well for a lot of rationality techniques. Hypnosis has the advantage that it works at the level of interpretation. A hypnotic suggestion doesn't change what you see, it changes how you choose to see it. This means that instead of engineering careful scenarios to bring these emotions into a controlled context, you can induce them directly and train reactions. The reactions trained on the induced emotions should carry over to other scenarios without explicit linking.
One danger is that it's possible certain reactions, such as the ones you might train in response to noticing confusion, could interfere with the hypnotic state itself. This is plausible since many theories of hypnosis assume it is based on something similar to confusion. Another danger is that the subject can't identify the emotional state that occurs during relevant scenarios. A great deal of why certain portions of the rationality community advocate meditation is that it gets you more familiar with your inner world. From that foundation you can identify subtle emotions that coincide with scenarios you'd like to react differently to. Scott Alexander talks about this in his post on Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha:
A way around this might be to find scenarios that reliably trigger the associated mental state at least once, so that this memory can be immediately accessed in a hypnotic session right after. It would not surprise me if more convenient methods are possible however. I look forward to any reports from people who decide to try this out.
1. Dillenburger, K., & Keenan, M. (2003). Using hypnosis to facilitate direct observation of multiple tics and self-monitoring in a typically developing teenager. Behavior therapy, 34(1), 117-125.
Background
One of the most vexing problems facing the LessWrong rationality community is the lack of useful training methods. Multiple attempts have been made, most notably the Center For Applied Rationality workshop series. These workshops are fundamentally limited by the fact that instructors can't follow people around in the world and wait for them to encounter a situation where the student can practice their rationality. It is difficult to engineer a situation where a fast feedback loop can be obtained between somewhere rationality would be useful and a student attempting to use it. In this brief post I propose a method which uses hypnosis to construct that feedback loop. Because hypnosis is well suited to shaping the subtle internal feelings and processes that rationality relies on interpreting, it is an ideal tool to set up conditions for the student to practice with.
Hypnosis Background
What Most People Believe About Hypnosis
Hypnosis is a strange psychological phenomena which allows a practitioner heightened access and influence over a cooperating persons inner world. Hypnosis can be used to induce emotions, set up hallucinatory situations, make memories more difficult to access or prevent memories from being formed, and is common in stage shows to embarrass volunteers from the audience. It is commonly thought to be a myth due to its procedural similarity to many forms of pseudoscience and woo. Red flag features include:
- A requirement that the target make an earnest effort to believe and cooperate even if they think it's silly.
- Common associations with mysticism, secrecy, fantasy, and the unknown.
- No clear known scientific explanation for its effectiveness; implied placebo effect.
- Limited or absent use by professionals who we would expect to find it useful, such as doctors or psychologists.
I'm sure this list or something like it immediately popped into mind for most of my readers. My basic response is that I'm sorry this particular thing happens to sound like bullshit but it does work. The easiest way to establish that this is true is for you to try it yourself. It's not especially difficult, and the effects are clear enough that you can readily distinguish them from what me might expect of the placebo effect.
No-Frills Procedure To Induce The Hypnotic State
(Note that you may want to check your local laws before doing anything like this, as it is illegal to perform hypnosis without a license in some jurisdictions)
You can find plenty of guides to hypnosis on the Internet. To avoid getting too off topic I'll provide a barebones procedure which should reliably induce a hypnotic state in those who are susceptible.
In these instructions the 'hypnotist' is the person performing hypnosis, and the 'subject' is the person cooperating to be hypnotized. 'Trance' is the state of being hypnotized.
- Have the subject get into a position where they can completely relax their body, typically laying down. This is important because the hypnotic state is reliant on completely relaxing the body. Any position where doing this would be uncomfortable is likely to interfere with trance. I recommend having the subject get into position and then practice relaxing their body as much as possible, they should allow themselves to go completely limp. Doing this allows you to determine ahead of time whether the position will cause discomfort that might disrupt trance.
- Direct the subject to breathe steadily, and relax their body as they breathe. Continue speaking and directing their breathing as they do so. I've seen some odd hypnosis advice, but as far as I can tell this is the core of hypnosis. A feedback loop between the hypnotist speaking, the subject breathing, and relaxing the body as much as is possible. As the subject does this they should begin to feel heavy and light at the same time, if you've ever had laughing gas the sensation is similar.
- Use an induction to guide the subject towards a deeper trance state. An induction is a sort of narrative or interpretation of the hypnotic experience that helps provide a goal to the subject (and make it less awkward to sit and breathe for 30 minutes). A common one which I use often is to have the subject identify a tingling sensation, usually starting in an extremity such as the feet or hands. If you have the choice go for feet. Once the subject agrees they feel it, guide them through allowing the sensation to 'travel' upward through their body, as more and more of their body becomes completely relaxed. Typically this induction ends once the subject agrees that they can feel the tingle in every part of their body. It's important during this stage not to ask the subject to speak or move too much. Checking in on their progress, you should restrict questions to simple yes/no format and avoid the use of gestures or other movement on the subjects part.
- (Optional) Distract The Subject With A Story Or Scenario As A Second Induction. If you performed the previous steps correctly, the subject should be in trance and this isn't strictly necessary. But to help deepen the effect it can be useful to tell a calm, second person perspective story where you describe a calming or tightly focused scenario that takes the subject deeper into accepting external narrative control. A fairly realistic though compressed example is depicted in this scene from the film Stir of Echoes. Typical stories start "You're walking through a forest..." or "You're driving down a long highway at night...", you can probably look some of these up. This one has the right structure but the wrong content.
It's actually possible to do this over a chat program. I found this guide to hypnosis over text useful. The biggest difference is that the ergonomics of computers demand you put twice as much effort into finding a comfortable position. However the subject is expected to use computer equipment can't prevent them from relaxing their body. It helps if yes/no questions are answered with single characters, to avoid significant movement. This added difficulty is further compounded by not being able to see the subject, it's difficult to monitor where a subject is if you can't see them.
How much time this takes varies, the shortest session I've done took 5 minutes, the longest two hours, and the average is perhaps 30 minutes. Some people are more hypnotizable than others, so if it doesn't work be sure you try it on a few other people before giving up.
Training Rationality Techniques With Hypnotic Setup
A rationality technique can be thought of as a trained reaction to a certain stimulus or feeling or internal state. For example, noticing confusion relies on the right reaction to a subtle emotional cue. In his post Your Strength as a Rationalist, Eliezer Yudkowsky says:
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.
We are all weak, from time to time; the sad part is that I could have been stronger. I had all the information I needed to arrive at the correct answer, I even noticed the problem, and then I ignored it. My feeling of confusion was a Clue, and I threw my Clue away.
I should have paid more attention to that sensation of still feels a little forced. It’s one of the most important feelings a truthseeker can have, a part of your strength as a rationalist. It is a design flaw in human cognition that this sensation manifests as a quiet strain in the back of your mind, instead of a wailing alarm siren and a glowing neon sign reading:
Ether Your Model Is False Or This Story Is Wrong.
This creates a necessary problem. A rationality instructor is not going to be available when you encounter these moments of confusion to help you react properly to the situation. You need the emotion and the instructor to train the reaction, but when you have the emotion you don't have the instructor and when you have the instructor the emotion is absent. This problem is analogous to another problem I encountered while reading the hypnosis literature. In it, a therapist is trying to treat a girl who has compulsive tics. But the tics only occur intermittently during her day, and don't seem to happen at all around therapists. Eventually they decide to have a hypnotist induce the tics so that they can be treated. The reactions trained on the induced tics carry over to the natural tics, and eventually the compulsive behaviors stop (cit. 1).
Given this example, I suspect a similar approach would work well for a lot of rationality techniques. Hypnosis has the advantage that it works at the level of interpretation. A hypnotic suggestion doesn't change what you see, it changes how you choose to see it. This means that instead of engineering careful scenarios to bring these emotions into a controlled context, you can induce them directly and train reactions. The reactions trained on the induced emotions should carry over to other scenarios without explicit linking.
One danger is that it's possible certain reactions, such as the ones you might train in response to noticing confusion, could interfere with the hypnotic state itself. This is plausible since many theories of hypnosis assume it is based on something similar to confusion. Another danger is that the subject can't identify the emotional state that occurs during relevant scenarios. A great deal of why certain portions of the rationality community advocate meditation is that it gets you more familiar with your inner world. From that foundation you can identify subtle emotions that coincide with scenarios you'd like to react differently to. Scott Alexander talks about this in his post on Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha:
This is vipassana (“insight”, “wisdom”) meditation. It’s a deep focus on the tiniest details of your mental experience, details so fleeting and subtle that without a samatha-trained mind you’ll miss them entirely. One such detail is the infamous “vibrations”, so beloved of hippies. Ingram notes that every sensation vibrates in and out of consciousness at a rate of between five and forty vibrations per second, sometimes speeding up or slowing down depending on your mental state. I’m a pathetic meditator and about as far from enlightenment as anybody in this world, but with enough focus even I have been able to confirm this to be true. And this is pretty close to the frequency of brain waves, which seems like a pretty interesting coincidence.
A way around this might be to find scenarios that reliably trigger the associated mental state at least once, so that this memory can be immediately accessed in a hypnotic session right after. It would not surprise me if more convenient methods are possible however. I look forward to any reports from people who decide to try this out.
Bibliography
1. Dillenburger, K., & Keenan, M. (2003). Using hypnosis to facilitate direct observation of multiple tics and self-monitoring in a typically developing teenager. Behavior therapy, 34(1), 117-125.
