Can CFAR content be learned from a compilation or writeup?
A year ago I considered attending the CFAR workshop in Boston, one of the things that stopped me was that I actually read LW a lot and applied a bunch of it in real life. Kenzi and Critch at CFAR tried gently to explain how a workshop was qualitatively different from reading and trying stuff yourself, but I didn’t give them the opportunity to convince me.
This week I came back from the CFAR workshop in New York, and I actually felt my life changing on the evening of the third day. Yes, time will tell if that actually happened, but I have enough evidence even a week out that it’s going that way. How could I think that I could get that benefit by myself with no help? It scares me how close I was to never having gone to CFAR. I’m going to try to write what would have convinced “Jacobian-2015” that he should attend a workshop.
Compound interest. You need motivation to work on your motivation. You need an accurate map of knowing how to attain accurate maps. It takes a jolt of rationality to improve your rationality. There isn’t an encyclopedia of CFAR material, but the material is incredibly high quality. This causes it to compound and improve other things you learn, like the difference between $100 under your mattress (i.e. the sequences) and $20 that grows at 20% a year.
Blind spots. You can’t lift yourself up by your hair, you can’t see the mistaken beliefs you refuse to question and you can’t solve the problems in your life you refuse to admit. Some things simply can’t be done without other people helping you out. Most of my progress at CFAR was made in the hours of focused small group “therapy” sessions. The first thing I did when I got back was to set up a CFAR workgroup (can I trademark “Agenty Flock”?) with friends from the workshop.
The moon. This is either really important or completely meaningless, I don’t know because I’m not there yet. The point of CFAR isn’t to learn a bunch of techniques but to achieve the mindset in which the techniques become natural, indistinguishable and you are able to generate them yourself at will. The techniques are the fingers pointing at the moon, the mindset is the moon. I did my BSc in physics, and I retain less declarative knowledge of physics than someone who read the Feynman lectures. Still, I think I wouldn’t have fallen for the radiator plate trick. Not because I can do integrals of thermal conduction, but because I spent hours in a lab trying to get some dumb thermodynamics experiment to work the way I believed it should, and it refused. I don’t know if I really attained a physics mindset in undergrad, and I don’t know if the applied rationality mindset is attainable from a CFAR workshop. I know that it would take a super-mind to attain it from reading stuff online.
ScottL, your write-up is great. The only thing I don’t like about it is that you called it “CFAR canon”, isn’t it troubling that that’s what would show up in search results from now on? I would at least change the word “CFAR” to “applied rationality”. I’m really concerned that this write-up may cause some people to decide against attending a workshop they otherwise would’ve gone to. To everyone who reads this “canon” and considers going to a workshop, ask yourself this:
How many actual CFAR alumni do I know who feel that they could have gained most of the value by themselves?
Count my experience as a point of evidence against.
The moon. This is either really important or completely meaningless, I don’t know because I’m not there yet.
I prefer the concept of Fingerspitzengefühl (finger tips feeling) which basically means having an intuitive grasp of a situation and being able to zero in on the accurate region of the problem without wasteful consideration of a large range of unfruitful, alternative diagnoses and solutions. The mechanism behind this is probably similar to how we learn physical patterns.
Expert piano player’s movements largely happen automatically or intuitively. That is, without conscious thought. This happens due to their extensive practice and because of concepts like chunking, spreading activation and hebbian learning. I would guess that we also learn psychical (thought) patterns through a similar mechanism.
I would at least change the word “CFAR” to “applied rationality”
Thanks for your suggestion. I removed the CFAR from the title.
I’m going to try to write what would have convinced “Jacobian-2015” that he should attend a workshop.
There are two extra things that my post isn’t good at conveying.
Depth in the material. For example, goal factoring I have a paragraph on this and, I guess, that it describes the concept, but it would take a whole other post to describe how to use it in practice.
A framework. The post just describes the techniques, but it doesn’t really describe the underlying mechanisms of how they work or how they relate to each other. In practice, the techniques would rarely be used in isolation, but would instead be combined.
I’m really concerned that this write-up may cause some people to decide against attending a workshop they otherwise would’ve gone to.
My intent was never for this post to be used as a replacement to attending CFAR. My goal was to put the material out there so that there was some base material upon which I could expand.
A year ago I considered attending the CFAR workshop in Boston, one of the things that stopped me was that I actually read LW a lot and applied a bunch of it in real life. Kenzi and Critch at CFAR tried gently to explain how a workshop was qualitatively different from reading and trying stuff yourself, but I didn’t give them the opportunity to convince me.
This week I came back from the CFAR workshop in New York, and I actually felt my life changing on the evening of the third day. Yes, time will tell if that actually happened, but I have enough evidence even a week out that it’s going that way. How could I think that I could get that benefit by myself with no help? It scares me how close I was to never having gone to CFAR. I’m going to try to write what would have convinced “Jacobian-2015” that he should attend a workshop.
Compound interest. You need motivation to work on your motivation. You need an accurate map of knowing how to attain accurate maps. It takes a jolt of rationality to improve your rationality. There isn’t an encyclopedia of CFAR material, but the material is incredibly high quality. This causes it to compound and improve other things you learn, like the difference between $100 under your mattress (i.e. the sequences) and $20 that grows at 20% a year.
Blind spots. You can’t lift yourself up by your hair, you can’t see the mistaken beliefs you refuse to question and you can’t solve the problems in your life you refuse to admit. Some things simply can’t be done without other people helping you out. Most of my progress at CFAR was made in the hours of focused small group “therapy” sessions. The first thing I did when I got back was to set up a CFAR workgroup (can I trademark “Agenty Flock”?) with friends from the workshop.
The moon. This is either really important or completely meaningless, I don’t know because I’m not there yet. The point of CFAR isn’t to learn a bunch of techniques but to achieve the mindset in which the techniques become natural, indistinguishable and you are able to generate them yourself at will. The techniques are the fingers pointing at the moon, the mindset is the moon. I did my BSc in physics, and I retain less declarative knowledge of physics than someone who read the Feynman lectures. Still, I think I wouldn’t have fallen for the radiator plate trick. Not because I can do integrals of thermal conduction, but because I spent hours in a lab trying to get some dumb thermodynamics experiment to work the way I believed it should, and it refused. I don’t know if I really attained a physics mindset in undergrad, and I don’t know if the applied rationality mindset is attainable from a CFAR workshop. I know that it would take a super-mind to attain it from reading stuff online.
ScottL, your write-up is great. The only thing I don’t like about it is that you called it “CFAR canon”, isn’t it troubling that that’s what would show up in search results from now on? I would at least change the word “CFAR” to “applied rationality”. I’m really concerned that this write-up may cause some people to decide against attending a workshop they otherwise would’ve gone to. To everyone who reads this “canon” and considers going to a workshop, ask yourself this:
How many actual CFAR alumni do I know who feel that they could have gained most of the value by themselves?
Count my experience as a point of evidence against.
I prefer the concept of Fingerspitzengefühl (finger tips feeling) which basically means having an intuitive grasp of a situation and being able to zero in on the accurate region of the problem without wasteful consideration of a large range of unfruitful, alternative diagnoses and solutions. The mechanism behind this is probably similar to how we learn physical patterns.
Expert piano player’s movements largely happen automatically or intuitively. That is, without conscious thought. This happens due to their extensive practice and because of concepts like chunking, spreading activation and hebbian learning. I would guess that we also learn psychical (thought) patterns through a similar mechanism.
Thanks for your suggestion. I removed the CFAR from the title.
There are two extra things that my post isn’t good at conveying.
Depth in the material. For example, goal factoring I have a paragraph on this and, I guess, that it describes the concept, but it would take a whole other post to describe how to use it in practice.
A framework. The post just describes the techniques, but it doesn’t really describe the underlying mechanisms of how they work or how they relate to each other. In practice, the techniques would rarely be used in isolation, but would instead be combined.
My intent was never for this post to be used as a replacement to attending CFAR. My goal was to put the material out there so that there was some base material upon which I could expand.