Trying the Obvious Thing
A nice anti-troll defence mechanism
I haven't posted in a while, so this will be a shorter post than usual.
I am quite harsh in impersonal settings, such as on the Internet or at work. Attention is a scarce resource, and I am stingy with it. The world is Out To Get Us. In many ways, nice or not.
Social Media platforms explicitly try to capture our attention. Children, despite being wonderful, are foremost an attention pit. It's always possible to do more for them. The same goes for People Being Wrong On The Internet or Social Obligations.
At large, too many get got, and do not have enough attention left to reflect. This traps them in situations that they cannot escape: reflecting is what would let them see a way out in the first place.
You ought to meditate 20 minutes a day. Unless you're too busy. Then you ought to meditate 1 hour a day.
Trying the Obvious Thing
This is why I have built some defence mechanisms.
The main one is that whenever someone wants me to consider a choice (for me or for them) to make, I first check if they tried the obvious thing. If they did not, then I politely ignore them.
The Weak
I have quickly written about that trick in The Responsibility of the Weak. The context was someone wanting to defend themselves from an obligation by using the excuse of being incapable or inadequate for the task.
From my point of view, if they haven't even tried the obvious thing and failed, I do not care about their excuse. I do not even evaluate whether it is reasonable or not, lest I get trolled.
Put simply, someone who has not even tried simply does not deserve my attention.
Conversely, I have met many incredible people who tried despite life being unfair to them, and some even succeeded.
If they give me an excuse, I at least pay attention. They have earned it. It does not mean that I will believe them. But I will properly engage with them, take it seriously, and partially accept their frame for the purpose of our conversation.
Fake Experts
Trying the obvious thing is not only about excuses. It's also about evaluating which expertise is relevant.
Let's take AI policy for instance.
Many "political experts" (at least on paper) advised colleagues and friends that extinction risks are too extreme to explain. Even if they believe the risks are serious, they should never talk about them. It would tank their credibility because mainstream audiences will not relate and that elite will only take it as sci-fi.
This was later proven false through our own documented experience. But this article is not about the "political experts" being wrong. It's about why my colleagues and friends should have discarded their opinions in the first place.
Most of the "political experts" had never even tried to mention extinction risks. They might have been very confident that we should never do this, but they had never tried. Once challenged, they had excuses for why they didn't try (on par with being cursed to spontaneously human combustion if they'd ever say the word extinction once in public).
To be fair to my colleagues, I actually engaged with a bunch of the "political experts". This led to a common pattern. In general, people who have not tried and have excuses for it, have not even tried to try.
Concretely, let's say it would burn too much of their reputation to lightly experiment with saying that they believe in extinction risks and make the case for them. Then they could just say that they heard about this statement from the top experts in AI, and enquire about how the people in their network feel about it.
Of course, they never had tried this either, nor did they try to come up with such ideas. They had not tried to brainstorm alternatives, they had not asked around for ideas. In other words, they hadn't even tried to try.
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To end this part on a positive note, not all political experts are fake. I personally pay attention to what Lawrence Newport says. He tried the obvious thing by directly campaigning for the ban of the American Bully XL Dog, based on data and his true beliefs. This succeeded. He is now trying a similar strategy with LFG, which describes itself as "a political movement to push Britain out of decline".
What counts as the Obvious Thing?
I could add more examples, but I want to keep it short. So I'll just address one last question.
What counts as the Obvious Thing?
It's a hard one, but right now, I would say "any direct solution to the problem". Anything that fits the first line of the Mental Gymnastics meme.
The goal is just to weed out after-the-fact justifications and Giga-Braining. Everyone can trivially come up with excuses for why their actions count as trying. I just want a simple criterion that lets me counter this.
I am explicitly asking not for much here, just a token amount of effort. This is not an advanced reasoning tool, it's just a way to avoid Gish Gallops, intellectual DoS attacks, and in general, people trying to claim my attention without putting in even a token effort.
Conclusion
This might not look like much, but things are dire.
On one hand, with only this criterion, I still consistently weed out a lot of bullshit. It helps me a lot with knowing when employees, colleagues, clients and other professional relationships are actually trying to solve a problem.
On the other hand, I find that people are not using it and constantly get trolled. They will pay attention to people with the worst arguments, advice or excuses, even though there is virtually no warrant to do so.
Even worse, people fail to apply this criterion to themselves. I personally consider it a great reflection tool, especially once it's internalised. I'm at a point where if someone asks me for advice on a problem, I'll tell them explicitly if I never tried to solve it, and even then, my recommendation will almost always be "Try the obvious thing."
Cheers!
As someone who benefited enormously from you bringing back this advice over and over again, I wanted to add something about the self-reflection use of this.
My experience has been that the main way in which this injunction feels wrong is that I think "I know the obvious thing is not going to work".
First, if you have never done it before, how do you know that?
* If it's only from your own beliefs and models, as Gabe says above, this smells bad and is highly susceptible to post-hoc rationalization of not doing annoying/painful things.
* If it's from other people/experts, then we're back to the main point of the post: check if they have done the obvious thing, otherwise you're delegating modeling to people just as ungrounded as you.
But there is another reason: even if you were right that the obvious thing is not going to work as is, doing it is probably still your best move. Because what you cannot know without having done the obvious thing is where and why it fails. And since the obvious thing is generally simple, naive, cheap, this gives you feedback from reality much faster than more advanced plans.
(Espectially since a classic failure mode of Galaxy Braining is to never start, since you can always find some weird edge case that you absolutely need to patch before even trying anything...)