I tried doing these exercises in my rationality group this week with 5 other people. Since we did this as part of our regular meetup, doing 1h for a single question would have taken too long (we could have done 2 questions max).
Instead, we did 4 exercises in ~90 min (steam locomotive, poof and foop, expansion of nothing, rare air). We started out with relatively strong physics background (everyone knowing mechanics), so I think that wasn’t too hasty, except for the reflection part, perhaps. I gave people the first 5 minutes to think for themselves and to record their first probabilities. Then we discussed probabilities (there ended up to always be strong disagreements. Our physicist was twice >90% confident in the wrong answer).
I think because our meetups are often just more of a social meetup, there was not as big of a buy-in to go full munchkin on the exercises. Since I had already done the puzzles, I was also not participating in the discussion, as I didn’t want to leak information. I feel like that was a mistake, since I feel like by participating in the discussion I could transfer my enthusiasm and people would have had more fun and tried harder on the exercises. Next time, I am going to pick problems that I haven’t solved yet. I also forgot to do the reflections as a discussion, instead I told everyone to think about how they could have done better on their own, which was definitely worse. I then just ended up making the reflection part really short (3 min) for the first easy exercises because people didn’t seem enthusiastic.
Once we got to the rare air exercise everyone seemed to be really involved though since the exercise was obviously hard and people actually started thinking. At the end, they still converged on the wrong answer. I had a hard time reading the room for how this went. But people actually brought up whether we can try this again at our next meetup, so I guess it went well.
One of the takeaways was that people weren’t double-checking their models enough with settings they know (for example, they got rare air wrong because their definition of pressure was incorrect: particles per volume * speed)
It also took more time than I expected, where people were just trying to grok the solution (especially for poof and foop).
I tried doing these exercises in my rationality group this week with 5 other people. Since we did this as part of our regular meetup, doing 1h for a single question would have taken too long (we could have done 2 questions max). Instead, we did 4 exercises in ~90 min (steam locomotive, poof and foop, expansion of nothing, rare air). We started out with relatively strong physics background (everyone knowing mechanics), so I think that wasn’t too hasty, except for the reflection part, perhaps. I gave people the first 5 minutes to think for themselves and to record their first probabilities. Then we discussed probabilities (there ended up to always be strong disagreements. Our physicist was twice >90% confident in the wrong answer).
I think because our meetups are often just more of a social meetup, there was not as big of a buy-in to go full munchkin on the exercises. Since I had already done the puzzles, I was also not participating in the discussion, as I didn’t want to leak information. I feel like that was a mistake, since I feel like by participating in the discussion I could transfer my enthusiasm and people would have had more fun and tried harder on the exercises. Next time, I am going to pick problems that I haven’t solved yet. I also forgot to do the reflections as a discussion, instead I told everyone to think about how they could have done better on their own, which was definitely worse. I then just ended up making the reflection part really short (3 min) for the first easy exercises because people didn’t seem enthusiastic.
Once we got to the rare air exercise everyone seemed to be really involved though since the exercise was obviously hard and people actually started thinking. At the end, they still converged on the wrong answer. I had a hard time reading the room for how this went. But people actually brought up whether we can try this again at our next meetup, so I guess it went well.
One of the takeaways was that people weren’t double-checking their models enough with settings they know (for example, they got rare air wrong because their definition of pressure was incorrect: particles per volume * speed)
It also took more time than I expected, where people were just trying to grok the solution (especially for poof and foop).