Rationalist Practice Dojo
- [Open in Google Maps] [Open in local app]
- 7 February 2026, 2:00 pm
- 70 5th Street, Cambridge, MA, USA
What: Drill a few skills
Where: 70 5th St, Apt 2, Cambridge
When: Saturday February 7th, 2:00pm.
Style: Dojo
Run By: Skyler and Evan
Many of you may have heard Skyler’s spiel on how it’s not sufficient to read a blog post on how to make better decisions or observe more true things about the world, you should practice and drill as well. Today we’re going to try this the way soccer practice or a karate dojo would do it; lots of repetition on several skills.
Another note: while I try to announce the local meetups in lots of places, the two that I’m most reliable at are the discord and the mailing list.
There are two times and two locations; I realize that is just a mistake, the 2pm event is what is on the facebook page. Do you have any examples of drills?
The time and place is a mistake, I just fixed it. (This is why I usually do the What Where When, as a kind of checksum when I’m cross posting something to a lot of places.) Thanks for pointing that out!
Planned drills, list might get tweaked a bit between now and the meetup date:
calibration trivia: get asked a question the answer to which is known but not to you (“what’s the population of Hyderabad, India?”) and put down how confident you are about your answer.
cambist booking: get asked sets of questions about what you value such that they form a loop, and try to be consistent such that you aren’t vulnerable to arbitrage.
brainstorming: get asked for solutions to a problem, and then keep coming up with more and more and more solutions until you feel like you’ve actually started to exhaust the search space.
evidentials: relate some facts you know, explicitly denoting what you think you know and how you think you know it and noticing the distinction between “I have observed this with my own eyes” and “someone I trust told me it was so.”
bayes problems: the mammogram is the classic example but I’ve got more, we’re going to go fast and get used to working the numbers in odds form.
This is an experiment in format. Usually I’d make one of these the focus of a meetup and take our time with each example. This time around I’m going to hit all five repeatedly and at speed.