You use math as an example, but that’s highly focused on System 2 learning. That suggests that you have false assumptions about what CFAR is trying to teach.
There are many subjects where written instructions are much less valuable than instruction that includes direct practice: circling, karate, meditation, dancing, etc. Most of those analogies are fairly imperfect, and some have partially useful written instructions (in the case of meditation, the written version might have lagged in-person instruction by many centuries). Circling is the example that I’d consider most apt, but it won’t mean much to people who haven’t taken a good circling workshop.
A different analogy, which more emphasizes the costs of false assumptions: people often imagine that economics teaches something like how to run a good business or how to predict the stock market, because there isn’t any slot in their worldview for what a good economics course actually teaches. There are plenty of mediocre executive summaries of economics, which fail to convey to most people that economics requires a pervasive worldview shift (integrating utilitarianism, empiricism about preferences, and some counterintuitive empirical patterns).
The CFAR handbook is more like the syllabus for an economics course than it is like an economics textbook, and a syllabus is useless (possibly harmful) for teaching economics to people who have bad assumptions about what kind of questions economics answers. (This analogy is imperfect because economics textbooks have been written, unlike a CFAR textbook.)
Maybe CFAR is making a mistake, but it appears that the people who seem most confident about that usually seem to be confused about what it is that CFAR is trying to teach.
Reading the sequences, or reading about the reversal test, are unlikely to have much relevance to what CFAR teaches. Just be careful not to imagine that they’re good examples of what CFAR is about.
Sometimes, we don’t know how to teach a subject in writing because the subject matter is inherently about action (rather than concepts, analysis, explanation, prediction, numbers, words, etc.).
But sometimes, we don’t know how to teach a subject in writing because there is, in fact, nothing (or, at best, nothing much) to be taught. Sometimes, a subject is actually empty (or mostly empty) of content.
In the latter case, attempting to write it down reveals this (and opens the alleged “content” to criticism)—whereas in person, the charisma of the instructors, the social pressure of being in a group of others who are there to receive the instruction, possibly the various biases associated with having made some costly sacrifice (time, money, etc.) to be there, possibly the various biases associated with the status dynamics at play (e.g. if the instructors are respected, or at least if those around you act as if they are), all serve to mask the fundamental emptiness of what is being “taught”.
I leave it to the reader to discern which of the given examples fall into which category. I will only note that while the subjects found in the former category are often difficult to teach, nevertheless one’s mastery of them, and their effectiveness, is usually quite easy to verify—because action can be demonstrated.
Meditation is action, in some important sense, and mostly can’t be demonstrated.
It is hard to reliably distinguish between the results of peer pressure and actual learning. I think CFAR’s best reply to this has been it’s refund policy: last I knew they offered full refunds to anyone who requested it within one year (although I can’t find any online mention of their current policy).
Meditation is action, in some important sense, and mostly can’t be demonstrated.
Everything is “action” in “some sense”. (Whether that sense is “important”, in any given case, is a matter of perspective.)
As far as I am concerned—for the purposes of this topic—if it can’t be demonstrated, it ain’t action.
It is hard to reliably distinguish between the results of peer pressure and actual learning.
I submit to you that if this is true of any given case, then that is an excellent signal that no actual learning has taken place. (And the more true it is—the harder it is to distinguish between actual learning and the results of various biases, social pressure included—the stronger the signal is.)
There are many subjects where written instructions are much less valuable than instruction that includes direct practice: circling, karate, meditation, dancing, etc.
Yes, I agree: for these subjects, the “there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know how to teach in writing” disclaimer I suggested in the grandparent would be a big understatement.
a syllabus is useless (possibly harmful) for teaching economics to people who have bad assumptions about what kind of questions economics answers
Useless, I can believe. (The extreme limiting case of “there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know how to teach in this format” is “there is literally nothing we know how to teach in this format.”) But harmful? How? Won’t the unexpected syllabus section titles at least disabuse them of their bad assumptions?
Reading the sequences [...] are unlikely to have much relevance to what CFAR teaches.
Really? The tagline on the website says, “Developing clear thinking for the sake of humanity’s future.” I guess I’m having trouble imagining a developing-clear-thinking-for-the-sake-of-humanity’s-future curriculum for which the things we write about on this website would be irrelevant. The “comfort zone expansion” exercises I’ve heard about would qualify, but Sequences-knowledge seems totally relevant to something like, say, double crux.
(It’s actually pretty weird/surprising that I’ve never personally been to a CfAR workshop! I think I’ve been assuming that my entire social world has already been so anchored on the so-called “rationalist” community for so long, that the workshop proper would be superfluous.)
The idea that CFAR would be superfluous is fairly close to the kind of harm that CFAR worries about. (You might have been right to believe that it would have been superfluous in 2012, but CFAR has changed since then in ways that it hasn’t managed to make very legible.)
I think meditation provides the best example for illustrating the harm. It’s fairly easy to confuse simple meditation instructions (e.g. focus on your breath, sit still with a straight spine) with the most important features of meditation. It’s fairly easy to underestimate the additional goals of meditation, because they’re hard to observe and don’t fit well with more widely accepted worldviews.
My experience suggests that getting value out of meditation is heavily dependent on a feeling (mostly at a system 1 level) that I’m trying something new, and there were times when I wasn’t able to learn from meditation, because I mistakenly thought that focusing on my breath was a much more central part of meditation than it actually is.
The times when I got more value out of meditation were times when I tried new variations on the instructions, or new environments (e.g. on a meditation retreat). I can’t see any signs that the new instructions or new environment were inherently better at teaching meditation. It seems to have been mostly that any source of novelty about the meditation makes me more alert to learning from it.
My understanding is that CFAR is largely concerned that participants will mistakenly believe that they’ve already learned something that CFAR is teaching, and that will sometimes be half-true—participants may know it at a system 2 level, when CFAR is trying to teach other parts of their minds that still reject it.
I think I experienced that a bit, due to having experience with half-baked versions of early CFAR before I took a well-designed version of their workshop. E.g. different parts of my mind have different attitudes to acknowledging my actual motivations when they’re less virtuous than the motivations that my system 2 endorses. I understood that pretty well at some level before CFAR existed, yet there are still important parts of my mind that cling to self-deceptive beliefs about my motives.
CFAR likely can’t teach a class that’s explicitly aimed at that without having lots of participants feel defensive about their motives, in a way that makes them less open to learning. So they approach it via instruction that is partly focused on teaching other things that look more mundane and practical. Those other things often felt familiar enough to me that I reacted by saying: I’ll relax now and conserve my mental energy for some future part of the curriculum that’s more novel. That might have led me to do the equivalent of what I did when I was meditating the same way repeatedly without learning anything new. How can I tell whether that caused me to miss something important?
You use math as an example, but that’s highly focused on System 2 learning. That suggests that you have false assumptions about what CFAR is trying to teach.
There are many subjects where written instructions are much less valuable than instruction that includes direct practice: circling, karate, meditation, dancing, etc. Most of those analogies are fairly imperfect, and some have partially useful written instructions (in the case of meditation, the written version might have lagged in-person instruction by many centuries). Circling is the example that I’d consider most apt, but it won’t mean much to people who haven’t taken a good circling workshop.
A different analogy, which more emphasizes the costs of false assumptions: people often imagine that economics teaches something like how to run a good business or how to predict the stock market, because there isn’t any slot in their worldview for what a good economics course actually teaches. There are plenty of mediocre executive summaries of economics, which fail to convey to most people that economics requires a pervasive worldview shift (integrating utilitarianism, empiricism about preferences, and some counterintuitive empirical patterns).
The CFAR handbook is more like the syllabus for an economics course than it is like an economics textbook, and a syllabus is useless (possibly harmful) for teaching economics to people who have bad assumptions about what kind of questions economics answers. (This analogy is imperfect because economics textbooks have been written, unlike a CFAR textbook.)
Maybe CFAR is making a mistake, but it appears that the people who seem most confident about that usually seem to be confused about what it is that CFAR is trying to teach.
Reading the sequences, or reading about the reversal test, are unlikely to have much relevance to what CFAR teaches. Just be careful not to imagine that they’re good examples of what CFAR is about.
Sometimes, we don’t know how to teach a subject in writing because the subject matter is inherently about action (rather than concepts, analysis, explanation, prediction, numbers, words, etc.).
But sometimes, we don’t know how to teach a subject in writing because there is, in fact, nothing (or, at best, nothing much) to be taught. Sometimes, a subject is actually empty (or mostly empty) of content.
In the latter case, attempting to write it down reveals this (and opens the alleged “content” to criticism)—whereas in person, the charisma of the instructors, the social pressure of being in a group of others who are there to receive the instruction, possibly the various biases associated with having made some costly sacrifice (time, money, etc.) to be there, possibly the various biases associated with the status dynamics at play (e.g. if the instructors are respected, or at least if those around you act as if they are), all serve to mask the fundamental emptiness of what is being “taught”.
I leave it to the reader to discern which of the given examples fall into which category. I will only note that while the subjects found in the former category are often difficult to teach, nevertheless one’s mastery of them, and their effectiveness, is usually quite easy to verify—because action can be demonstrated.
Meditation is action, in some important sense, and mostly can’t be demonstrated.
It is hard to reliably distinguish between the results of peer pressure and actual learning. I think CFAR’s best reply to this has been it’s refund policy: last I knew they offered full refunds to anyone who requested it within one year (although I can’t find any online mention of their current policy).
Everything is “action” in “some sense”. (Whether that sense is “important”, in any given case, is a matter of perspective.)
As far as I am concerned—for the purposes of this topic—if it can’t be demonstrated, it ain’t action.
I submit to you that if this is true of any given case, then that is an excellent signal that no actual learning has taken place. (And the more true it is—the harder it is to distinguish between actual learning and the results of various biases, social pressure included—the stronger the signal is.)
Yes, I agree: for these subjects, the “there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know how to teach in writing” disclaimer I suggested in the grandparent would be a big understatement.
Useless, I can believe. (The extreme limiting case of “there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know how to teach in this format” is “there is literally nothing we know how to teach in this format.”) But harmful? How? Won’t the unexpected syllabus section titles at least disabuse them of their bad assumptions?
Really? The tagline on the website says, “Developing clear thinking for the sake of humanity’s future.” I guess I’m having trouble imagining a developing-clear-thinking-for-the-sake-of-humanity’s-future curriculum for which the things we write about on this website would be irrelevant. The “comfort zone expansion” exercises I’ve heard about would qualify, but Sequences-knowledge seems totally relevant to something like, say, double crux.
(It’s actually pretty weird/surprising that I’ve never personally been to a CfAR workshop! I think I’ve been assuming that my entire social world has already been so anchored on the so-called “rationalist” community for so long, that the workshop proper would be superfluous.)
The idea that CFAR would be superfluous is fairly close to the kind of harm that CFAR worries about. (You might have been right to believe that it would have been superfluous in 2012, but CFAR has changed since then in ways that it hasn’t managed to make very legible.)
I think meditation provides the best example for illustrating the harm. It’s fairly easy to confuse simple meditation instructions (e.g. focus on your breath, sit still with a straight spine) with the most important features of meditation. It’s fairly easy to underestimate the additional goals of meditation, because they’re hard to observe and don’t fit well with more widely accepted worldviews.
My experience suggests that getting value out of meditation is heavily dependent on a feeling (mostly at a system 1 level) that I’m trying something new, and there were times when I wasn’t able to learn from meditation, because I mistakenly thought that focusing on my breath was a much more central part of meditation than it actually is.
The times when I got more value out of meditation were times when I tried new variations on the instructions, or new environments (e.g. on a meditation retreat). I can’t see any signs that the new instructions or new environment were inherently better at teaching meditation. It seems to have been mostly that any source of novelty about the meditation makes me more alert to learning from it.
My understanding is that CFAR is largely concerned that participants will mistakenly believe that they’ve already learned something that CFAR is teaching, and that will sometimes be half-true—participants may know it at a system 2 level, when CFAR is trying to teach other parts of their minds that still reject it.
I think I experienced that a bit, due to having experience with half-baked versions of early CFAR before I took a well-designed version of their workshop. E.g. different parts of my mind have different attitudes to acknowledging my actual motivations when they’re less virtuous than the motivations that my system 2 endorses. I understood that pretty well at some level before CFAR existed, yet there are still important parts of my mind that cling to self-deceptive beliefs about my motives.
CFAR likely can’t teach a class that’s explicitly aimed at that without having lots of participants feel defensive about their motives, in a way that makes them less open to learning. So they approach it via instruction that is partly focused on teaching other things that look more mundane and practical. Those other things often felt familiar enough to me that I reacted by saying: I’ll relax now and conserve my mental energy for some future part of the curriculum that’s more novel. That might have led me to do the equivalent of what I did when I was meditating the same way repeatedly without learning anything new. How can I tell whether that caused me to miss something important?