What Does Lighthaven Have in Common with Systems Engineering and Clinical Psychology?

Sizing up problems

There are many kinds of rationalists. It is a large community that includes self-identified people from all over the world. They speak different languages. Some have read The Sequences, some have not. Even among those that have read similar things, they are inspired by different texts specifically, and then different parts within those.

I think given how much I hang out with rationalists, how much I seek out rationalist-adjacent things, how many of my friends are rationalists, and how many of my friends are heavily involved in rationalist projects, I think it’s safe to say I’m a rationalist. If it quacks like a duck and hangs out with ducks —

Same with EA

It’s occurred to me to do a meditation on what rationalism has in common with some other main interests of mine, which include systems engineering and clinical psychology.

Each of these has a faith that things can be figured out. Identifying a problem, working through a problem with diligent iteration can get you to a result.

Each of these has a dependency on high quality real-world sensory data. If you want to do something stupid, systems engineering will help you build something stupid. If you want to change someone’s behavior to be a stupid behavior, clinical psychology can help you do that. If you want to figure out whether or not you should do something in an unlikely hypothetical situation, Rationalism will help you do it.

But the dependency on high quality real-world sensory data doesn’t mean that the paradigms around “ok if we have it then there is something we can do with it” are useless. Think about what it is like without the paradigms that something can be done with the data. What would be left are only the paradigms that you have developed over your lifetime up to that point, which would generally depend on the experiences of the people around you.

A lot of people have a lot of funny habits around problem-solving. Some of these include really trusting their flow and only their flow, and sort of solving whatever is available to be solved with whatever energy they have at the time, in a first-in, first out sort of way. And then if something big happens or there is a distraction, things get dropped.

Some people define most problems as “too big to bother with” or “too small to bother with” without having many heuristics around sizing up problems. The areas that this becomes most interesting to me is in collaborations with other people. Dismissing a problem that is actually a large problem may tank a project, or thinking something small is way bigger than it is can stop a collaboration in its tracks. Often you can manage your own stuff, in your own way, and the life you live would be somewhat alright because you are doing at least some of what you want to be doing, somewhat sustainably with the energy you have. Not all the time, but more or less. When you are working with other people on anything, “sizing up problems” becomes much more important.