Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Shoulder Advisors 101, published by Duncan_Sabien on the LessWrong. Motivation for post: As a former CFAR instructor, longtime teacher, and rationality pundit, I find myself giving lots of advice in lots of different contexts. I also try to check in from time to time to find out which bits of advice actually proved helpful to people. Over the years, I've heard from a genuinely surprising number of people that my (offhand, very basic, not especially insightful) thoughts on "shoulder advisors" were quite useful to them, and remained useful over time. So: a primer. "There's a copy of me inside your head?" Hermione asked. "Of course there is!" Harry said. The boy suddenly looked a bit more vulnerable. "You mean there isn't a copy of me living in your head?" There was, she realized; and not only that, it talked in Harry's exact voice. "It's rather unnerving now that I think about it," said Hermione. "I do have a copy of you living in my head. It's talking to me right now using your voice, arguing how this is perfectly normal." "Good," Harry said seriously. "I mean, I don't see how people could be friends without that." The term "shoulder advisor" comes from the cartoon trope of a character attempting to make a decision while a tiny angel whispers in one ear and a tiny devil whispers in the other. Many people have multiple shoulder advisors. Some, no doubt, carry a literal metaphorical angel and devil around with them. Others may sometimes hear the whispers of some of their favorite beloved fictional characters. It's quite common in my experience for people to have shoulder copies of their parents, or their best friends, or their romantic partners, or particularly impactful teachers or bosses or mentors. This is not schizophrenia (though for all I know it may use some of the same hardware, or may be a low-key, non-pathological version of schizophrenia in the same way that a healthy self-preservation instinct could be thought of as a low-key, non-pathological version of a phobia or an anxiety disorder). Rather, there is simply some kind of subroutine in the brain of most humans that is capable of taking in training data and learning what a given person (or character, or archetype) would say, in a given situation. It's predictive software, likely evolved in response to the need to model other chimps in the ancestral environment, and strongly selected for due to the fact that being able to model those other chimps accurately generally paid off big. It's important to be clear that the experience of "hearing the voices" actually happens, in many people. This is not a metaphor, and it is not hyperbole or exaggeration. I'm not saying that people tend to hallucinate actual sounds—that probably would be schizophrenia. But in the same way that most people "hear" their own thoughts, people also "hear" the voice of their dad (or "see" his facial expression), offering thoughts or advice or reacting in real time to the current situation. "I was going to complain about having to type with my thumbs to text you, and how I'd rather just use email or Slack, but my shoulder Malo popped up to say 'Duncan, you have a Mac. Just use Messages with your keyboard.'" "My mental copy of Jack is currently freaking out a bit about how toxic and unhealthy this sounds." "I notice my inner Nate is betting this project will fail." "I can hear my mom reminding me to take jam tarts when jam tarts are offered." (Note that you don't need to "demand" that your advisor communicate in words! Often it's both easier and also just as useful to simply let them be present—to "see" their facial expressions and body language, imagine their nonverbal reactions, let yourself be aware of and attentive to them in the same way that you (likely) are aware of or attentive to other actual humans in the same room as you. Think o...