So, you might think I wouldn’t get much value from a CFAR workshop because (1) I know all the instructors personally, (2) I work in the same office from which they develop and test their lessons, (3) I used to be a visiting CFAR instructor, and (4) I’m a Less Wrong veteran with 50k+ karma.
But in fact CFAR’s March workshop was one of the most useful weekends I’ve ever experienced.
A few of the classes had little new material for me, but the classes are just meant to explain the basic tools, anyway. Most of the workshop’s value comes from interacting with the teachers and other alumni to figure out how best to apply the tools to your current life situation.
First, let me give a few general notes:
The curriculum has evolved quickly. Even somebody who attended in May-July 2012 would probably get several new skills + helpful followup sessions from attending in April-July 2013. In particular, the pieces of the curriculum fit together into a coherent picture of rationality far better than they did last year.
Because the curriculum evolves quickly, some classes are more polished than others, though (AFAIK) all classes have been tested and iterated a few times.
The continuous supply of good food, snacks, and drinks helped make the workshop pleasant.
On the last day of the workshop there will be 50 exciting new things you want to do, but you should only try to implement a few at a time, with help from whichever CFAR staffer you do the regular follow-ups with.
Going forward, I will probably have nearly all MIRI staff members attend a CFAR workshop.
What concrete benefits did I get from the March 2013 workshop? There are many, and there are many promising plans that I haven’t yet implemented because I’m implementing only a few at a time. Here, then, is just one of the concrete benefits I got: the Murphyjitsu tool + solved sleep problem.
Murphy’s Law says that “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” That’s not literally true, of course, but it’s often the case slight bumps can derail our plans. Hence the need for contingency planning overkill.
This is one reason it’s important to model your degree of agency properly. If you have strong free will intuitions, your answer to “What if something unplanned happens?” might be “Well, I’ll just use my Free Will to choose to accomplish my goals anyway.” But if you’re modeling yourself as a kluge of mostly-Sphexish cognitive modules, then you’ll say “Outside view says I can easily be derailed by small bumps, so I’d better prepare specifically for each of the most likely failure scenarios, and do some cognitive training now to make sure my brain does the right thing when one of those failure scenarios hits.”
One of my top priorities after the workshop was to fix my sleep problem: I was only getting good sleep 1-2 nights a week. I had tried lots of hacks but wasn’t doing enough of them consistently enough to overcome my insomnia-ish condition. In my first follow-up session, Anna helped me fix this with Murphyjitsu.
One problem was that I would stay late at the office or my girlfriend’s place and then be too tired to go home where I have a good mattress and can run through my whole sleep routine. So for example: What if I’m working late and get too tired to walk home? Never stay out past 12:30am, and tell others to send me to Milvia if they see me elsewhere later than that. Make sure I always have a jacket at the office so that it’s not uncomfortably cold if I want to walk home. Also, do the Fermi estimate so my brain can see that it’s obviously worth it to hire a taxi to take me home and get good sleep, if that’s necessary. Then, simulate in my head the situation of working late at the office and then calling a taxi (“offline training”). Etc.
After doing Murphyjitsu on my entire sleep routine, I now get good sleep almost every night.
Toward a Rationality Dojo
Eliezer’s very first post on Overcoming Bias was The Martial Art of Rationality. Quick summary: in the past 50 years we’ve learned a lot about how to improve human judgment and decision-making (JDM). If you want to become a better “rationalist”, you could develop those skills and practice them regularly — just like you would if you wanted to become a better pianist, a better chess player, or a better rugby player.
I’ve always wanted a Rationality Dojo, but it wasn’t until I attended CFAR’s March workshop that I acquired a concrete, detailed picture of what that could look like.
Based on my CFAR workshop experience, let me fill in Patri Friedman’s list of important Rationality Dojo qualities:
“It is a group of people who gather in person to train specific skills.” The “gather in person” part of the CFAR workshop was hugely important. I have never been so motivated to diligently learn and practice the art of rationality. Training together in person leverages good news of situationist psychology.
“While there are some theoreticians of the art, most people participate by learning it and doing it, not theorizing about it.” Few workshop participants know as much psychology as Dan Keys or as much probability theory as Anna Salamon, and that’s fine. CFAR staffers are around to answer questions, but participants’ new powers come from repeatedly drilling Murphyjitsu, reinforcement training, “goal factoring,” Fermi estimates, VoI calculations, quick odds-ratio Bayes calculations, and so on — day after day, week after week.
“Thus the main focus is on local practice groups… As a result, it is driven by the needs of the learners.” CFAR’s early material was driven by abstract considerations of what seemed best to teach. While that’s still a factor, CFAR’s current lessons have been iterated repeatedly in response to the needs of session participants, and lessons that didn’t work, or didn’t help people much when tested, have been discarded.
“You have to sweat, but the result is you get stronger.” Doing a Fermi estimate every day is kind of a burden, but they’re definitely starting to feel easier and more natural to perform. One thing CFAR has done well is to break the skills down into concrete steps (often at the 5-second level) so that it’s obvious how to practice the skill repeatedly.
“You improve by learning from those better than you, competing with those at your level, and teaching those below you.” CFAR workshops bring together people of varying skill levels, obviously.
“It is run by a professional… The practicants receive personal benefit from their practice, in particular from the value-added of the coach, enough to pay for talented coaches.” CFAR makes it the case that there are now several people who have the full-time job of figuring out how to teach people the martial art of rationality. They have time to develop carefully crafted lessons, test them and iterate them, follow-up with people, build a large dataset of what’s working and what isn’t and what life outcomes follow.
A CFAR workshop isn’t yet a Rationality Dojo, because it’s not open every day from 10 to 8 with Fermi practice on Mon-Wed-Fri and Bayes practice on Tue-Thu-Fri, but after attending the March workshop I can finally see how such a thing could exist, if there was enough interest in at least one city to have people pay a monthly fee to develop the martial art of rationality with others, week after week.
Even somebody who attended in May-July 2012 would probably get several new skills + helpful followup sessions from attending in April-July 2013. In particular, the pieces of the curriculum fit together into a coherent picture of rationality far better than they did last year.
I attended May 2012 and March 2013, and agree that the difference between them is perceptible. The coherence is the largest change. There were several changes in focus and presentation that made things significantly better.
For example, in May 2012 there was a session about installing and using Freemind and yEd that didn’t go particularly well (if you hadn’t preinstalled them, you couldn’t follow along because the internet was slow), and in March 2013 there was a session about implementing Getting Things Done with Google tools and Boomerang (which also had internet troubles, but was designed as an installation tutorial you could do at a later date). I only use Freemind and yEd sparingly (the first has been almost completely replaced by Workflowy), but a capturing and reminder system is far more valuable.
The continuous supply of good food, snacks, and drinks helped make the workshop pleasant.
Not if a given participant is on a weight-loss diet and would prefer to spend the willpower needed to not eat the snack on something else, I guess. :-)
I attended the March workshop. Below is my report.
So, you might think I wouldn’t get much value from a CFAR workshop because (1) I know all the instructors personally, (2) I work in the same office from which they develop and test their lessons, (3) I used to be a visiting CFAR instructor, and (4) I’m a Less Wrong veteran with 50k+ karma.
But in fact CFAR’s March workshop was one of the most useful weekends I’ve ever experienced.
A few of the classes had little new material for me, but the classes are just meant to explain the basic tools, anyway. Most of the workshop’s value comes from interacting with the teachers and other alumni to figure out how best to apply the tools to your current life situation.
First, let me give a few general notes:
The curriculum has evolved quickly. Even somebody who attended in May-July 2012 would probably get several new skills + helpful followup sessions from attending in April-July 2013. In particular, the pieces of the curriculum fit together into a coherent picture of rationality far better than they did last year.
Because the curriculum evolves quickly, some classes are more polished than others, though (AFAIK) all classes have been tested and iterated a few times.
The continuous supply of good food, snacks, and drinks helped make the workshop pleasant.
On the last day of the workshop there will be 50 exciting new things you want to do, but you should only try to implement a few at a time, with help from whichever CFAR staffer you do the regular follow-ups with.
Going forward, I will probably have nearly all MIRI staff members attend a CFAR workshop.
What concrete benefits did I get from the March 2013 workshop? There are many, and there are many promising plans that I haven’t yet implemented because I’m implementing only a few at a time. Here, then, is just one of the concrete benefits I got: the Murphyjitsu tool + solved sleep problem.
Murphy’s Law says that “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” That’s not literally true, of course, but it’s often the case slight bumps can derail our plans. Hence the need for contingency planning overkill.
This is one reason it’s important to model your degree of agency properly. If you have strong free will intuitions, your answer to “What if something unplanned happens?” might be “Well, I’ll just use my Free Will to choose to accomplish my goals anyway.” But if you’re modeling yourself as a kluge of mostly-Sphexish cognitive modules, then you’ll say “Outside view says I can easily be derailed by small bumps, so I’d better prepare specifically for each of the most likely failure scenarios, and do some cognitive training now to make sure my brain does the right thing when one of those failure scenarios hits.”
One of my top priorities after the workshop was to fix my sleep problem: I was only getting good sleep 1-2 nights a week. I had tried lots of hacks but wasn’t doing enough of them consistently enough to overcome my insomnia-ish condition. In my first follow-up session, Anna helped me fix this with Murphyjitsu.
One problem was that I would stay late at the office or my girlfriend’s place and then be too tired to go home where I have a good mattress and can run through my whole sleep routine. So for example: What if I’m working late and get too tired to walk home? Never stay out past 12:30am, and tell others to send me to Milvia if they see me elsewhere later than that. Make sure I always have a jacket at the office so that it’s not uncomfortably cold if I want to walk home. Also, do the Fermi estimate so my brain can see that it’s obviously worth it to hire a taxi to take me home and get good sleep, if that’s necessary. Then, simulate in my head the situation of working late at the office and then calling a taxi (“offline training”). Etc.
After doing Murphyjitsu on my entire sleep routine, I now get good sleep almost every night.
Toward a Rationality Dojo
Eliezer’s very first post on Overcoming Bias was The Martial Art of Rationality. Quick summary: in the past 50 years we’ve learned a lot about how to improve human judgment and decision-making (JDM). If you want to become a better “rationalist”, you could develop those skills and practice them regularly — just like you would if you wanted to become a better pianist, a better chess player, or a better rugby player.
I’ve always wanted a Rationality Dojo, but it wasn’t until I attended CFAR’s March workshop that I acquired a concrete, detailed picture of what that could look like.
Based on my CFAR workshop experience, let me fill in Patri Friedman’s list of important Rationality Dojo qualities:
“It is a group of people who gather in person to train specific skills.” The “gather in person” part of the CFAR workshop was hugely important. I have never been so motivated to diligently learn and practice the art of rationality. Training together in person leverages good news of situationist psychology.
“While there are some theoreticians of the art, most people participate by learning it and doing it, not theorizing about it.” Few workshop participants know as much psychology as Dan Keys or as much probability theory as Anna Salamon, and that’s fine. CFAR staffers are around to answer questions, but participants’ new powers come from repeatedly drilling Murphyjitsu, reinforcement training, “goal factoring,” Fermi estimates, VoI calculations, quick odds-ratio Bayes calculations, and so on — day after day, week after week.
“Thus the main focus is on local practice groups… As a result, it is driven by the needs of the learners.” CFAR’s early material was driven by abstract considerations of what seemed best to teach. While that’s still a factor, CFAR’s current lessons have been iterated repeatedly in response to the needs of session participants, and lessons that didn’t work, or didn’t help people much when tested, have been discarded.
“You have to sweat, but the result is you get stronger.” Doing a Fermi estimate every day is kind of a burden, but they’re definitely starting to feel easier and more natural to perform. One thing CFAR has done well is to break the skills down into concrete steps (often at the 5-second level) so that it’s obvious how to practice the skill repeatedly.
“You improve by learning from those better than you, competing with those at your level, and teaching those below you.” CFAR workshops bring together people of varying skill levels, obviously.
“It is run by a professional… The practicants receive personal benefit from their practice, in particular from the value-added of the coach, enough to pay for talented coaches.” CFAR makes it the case that there are now several people who have the full-time job of figuring out how to teach people the martial art of rationality. They have time to develop carefully crafted lessons, test them and iterate them, follow-up with people, build a large dataset of what’s working and what isn’t and what life outcomes follow.
A CFAR workshop isn’t yet a Rationality Dojo, because it’s not open every day from 10 to 8 with Fermi practice on Mon-Wed-Fri and Bayes practice on Tue-Thu-Fri, but after attending the March workshop I can finally see how such a thing could exist, if there was enough interest in at least one city to have people pay a monthly fee to develop the martial art of rationality with others, week after week.
I attended May 2012 and March 2013, and agree that the difference between them is perceptible. The coherence is the largest change. There were several changes in focus and presentation that made things significantly better.
For example, in May 2012 there was a session about installing and using Freemind and yEd that didn’t go particularly well (if you hadn’t preinstalled them, you couldn’t follow along because the internet was slow), and in March 2013 there was a session about implementing Getting Things Done with Google tools and Boomerang (which also had internet troubles, but was designed as an installation tutorial you could do at a later date). I only use Freemind and yEd sparingly (the first has been almost completely replaced by Workflowy), but a capturing and reminder system is far more valuable.
Not if a given participant is on a weight-loss diet and would prefer to spend the willpower needed to not eat the snack on something else, I guess. :-)