Oct 21, 2018

Predicting this post--and other plans

Instead of deciding to write this, I predicted that I would. I later revised my prediction. And now it’s been written. I predict I’ll post it in the next few minutes. If you see it, then let’s hear it for predictive processing.
Predictive Processing (PP) is a new theory of how the brain works. It argues that the brain is a prediction machine, not a plan executing machine. The brain makes predictions about the world based on a world-model then compares its predictions with sense data. Sometimes the sense data is adjusted to match the prediction—so we see what we expect to see. Other times the model is adjusted to reflect reality.
In the old model of brain function eyes collected data which was then sent to the visual cortex for processing. The visual cortex determined the contents of the scene and informed the rest of the brain. In the PP model, the visual cortex predicts what the the eye is going to see and sends a signal forward to the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). The retina encodes visual data and sends it back to the LGN which compares the sense data with the prediction. If they match, well and good. If they don’t match then the LGN sends a difference signal to the visual cortex so that it can update its model. (It’s a bit more complex than that because there are multiple such layers, and sometimes the sense data is adjusted to match the expectations.)
According to PP the high-level functions of the brain control the body by predicting the position of parts of the body and the lower-level functions activate muscles to make the predictions come true.
I read about PP in Scott Alexander’s SlateStarCodex blog in this post and this one and decided to apply the principle to my own problems getting things done.
I remembered an earlier time, working with Elsa, my personal coach. I’d made a plan and didn’t do what I had planned to do. When we talked about it, I said that I wasn’t surprised that my plan had failed. I’d made plans that had failed hundreds of times before. My failure was unsurprising. We then worked to make a plan that might fail—but whose failure would at least be surprising.
Said differently: after I’d made my first plan, if I’d asked myself to predict the result, I would have predicted failure. Why? Because most of my plans fail. Most don’t even deserve to be called plans. Vague intentions is more like it. I need to make a plans that I predict will succeed.
Psychological research tells us we are poor predictors of our own behavior. After deciding to do something, I’ll ask myself: do I predict I’ll do it. If I don’t predict success, then I need to decide whether I really want to do it or not. If I do, I need to at least predict success.
But there’s an even better question I can ask: would I be surprised if I failed to follow through? If I wouldn’t be surprised, then my prediction is probably too generous. If I make a decision that I care about I need to predict that I’ll succeed and be surprised if I don’t.
Now I predict I’m going to post this as soon as I finish this sentence and convert the post from markdown.

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