I think I am a little confused by the fact that CFAR 2.0 is still doing workshops in roughly the same format as CFAR 1.0. I think if I were trying to build and teach an art of rationality from first principles, I would explore the space of things more, such as teaching ongoing courses weekly, or doing individual coaching, or running clearly measurable experiments, or lots of other things as well as workshops. On the other hand it makes sense to keep doing the things you’ve spec’d into, be that for good or for ill.
Anyway I am most likely just missing something simple. I am interested to know why you are doing roughly the same shape of thing?
My belief is that we’re not doing it simply by accident or via (knowing how to do this and not having tried anything else), but rather that 4.5-day workshops full of (iteratable, tested across workshops) individual classes and activities run by CFAR instructors are a fairly ideal context in which to hill-climb our way toward being able to create a certain kind of social context. And “making that sort of social context, within which some individual training occurs, which itself changes the social context” is a more accurate angle on what we’re up to than is e.g. “individual rationality training”.
re: length: shorter is a waste, as it takes ~2 days to really drop in, and so a 4.5 day workshop lets participants have about two days in a state where they can talk freely and earnestly about real things with many others who are doing the same. Longer is also a waste, as people get tired, and 7 days seems to accomplish only a little more than 4.5. Cohorts that meet for 4.5 days, go home for some months, and then meet again (with e.g. 3 or 4 gatherings across a year and a half, say) do seem to work well.
re: coaching sessions: we do offer these, and IME they can be good. But also, back in ~2011, I kept trying to learn Andrew Critch’s techniques, and he kept trying to tutor me on them 1-on-1, and I couldn’t really get them. And then I finally watched him teach the same thing to a class, and it was so much easier for me to get them in that one hour compared to in the multiple hours he’d spent tutoring me. Partly it helped that I wasn’t on the spot (he was saying it to others; I could just listen); partly it helped that he slowed way down in order to get a whole class to follow him in a way I couldn’t seem to successfully ask him to do 1-on-1; partly it was helpful to me to get to watch other people try out similar techniques (“the same technique”) while being shaped the different ways they were each shaped, which gave me more basis for creatively figuring out how I could do it while being shaped as me and not as Critch. I’ve heard many people say things like this about CFAR workshops (that it helped to see how many different instructors did things, since we were all visibly quite different from each other, while also each visibly doing the CFAR thing; they didn’t comment as often on also seeing how the different workshop participants did it, but I suspect that helped too).
I wish I had a better articulation of why I care about social context in this way. It’s something like: for most of us, a bunch of our minds are located in other people and in our inner sims of other people (e.g., it’s easier for me to develop a line of thought when I know there’re people around me, or at least real people I can imagine in detail even if they’re not around me, who could converse with me about that line of thought and practice the right kinds of local validity checks). I like combining rationality skills training (e.g. inner sim skills, crux-finding skills, “beliefs are for true things and problems are for solving” as a basic underlying assumption that affects how folks approach specific, small life puzzles/goals) with a social context where many are practicing the same.
I think I am a little confused by the fact that CFAR 2.0 is still doing workshops in roughly the same format as CFAR 1.0. I think if I were trying to build and teach an art of rationality from first principles, I would explore the space of things more, such as teaching ongoing courses weekly, or doing individual coaching, or running clearly measurable experiments, or lots of other things as well as workshops. On the other hand it makes sense to keep doing the things you’ve spec’d into, be that for good or for ill.
Anyway I am most likely just missing something simple. I am interested to know why you are doing roughly the same shape of thing?
My belief is that we’re not doing it simply by accident or via (knowing how to do this and not having tried anything else), but rather that 4.5-day workshops full of (iteratable, tested across workshops) individual classes and activities run by CFAR instructors are a fairly ideal context in which to hill-climb our way toward being able to create a certain kind of social context. And “making that sort of social context, within which some individual training occurs, which itself changes the social context” is a more accurate angle on what we’re up to than is e.g. “individual rationality training”.
re: length: shorter is a waste, as it takes ~2 days to really drop in, and so a 4.5 day workshop lets participants have about two days in a state where they can talk freely and earnestly about real things with many others who are doing the same. Longer is also a waste, as people get tired, and 7 days seems to accomplish only a little more than 4.5. Cohorts that meet for 4.5 days, go home for some months, and then meet again (with e.g. 3 or 4 gatherings across a year and a half, say) do seem to work well.
re: coaching sessions: we do offer these, and IME they can be good. But also, back in ~2011, I kept trying to learn Andrew Critch’s techniques, and he kept trying to tutor me on them 1-on-1, and I couldn’t really get them. And then I finally watched him teach the same thing to a class, and it was so much easier for me to get them in that one hour compared to in the multiple hours he’d spent tutoring me. Partly it helped that I wasn’t on the spot (he was saying it to others; I could just listen); partly it helped that he slowed way down in order to get a whole class to follow him in a way I couldn’t seem to successfully ask him to do 1-on-1; partly it was helpful to me to get to watch other people try out similar techniques (“the same technique”) while being shaped the different ways they were each shaped, which gave me more basis for creatively figuring out how I could do it while being shaped as me and not as Critch. I’ve heard many people say things like this about CFAR workshops (that it helped to see how many different instructors did things, since we were all visibly quite different from each other, while also each visibly doing the CFAR thing; they didn’t comment as often on also seeing how the different workshop participants did it, but I suspect that helped too).
I wish I had a better articulation of why I care about social context in this way. It’s something like: for most of us, a bunch of our minds are located in other people and in our inner sims of other people (e.g., it’s easier for me to develop a line of thought when I know there’re people around me, or at least real people I can imagine in detail even if they’re not around me, who could converse with me about that line of thought and practice the right kinds of local validity checks). I like combining rationality skills training (e.g. inner sim skills, crux-finding skills, “beliefs are for true things and problems are for solving” as a basic underlying assumption that affects how folks approach specific, small life puzzles/goals) with a social context where many are practicing the same.