Interesting. Reading your comment makes me notice that I’m more motivated to learn object level skills than meta level skills.
“meta level” != “rationality. E.g. I would count most of the CFAR curiculum as object level skills. But the traingin you’re working on seems more meta level skills.
I expect motivation to be super central for what leanring methods works. There has been a number of posts on ACX about school (including 2 that are part of the reveiw contest). The common theme is that the main bottleneck is students motivation.
I’m not sure that answered your question, but maybe you can ask a more specific one now.
The thing I was after was, what is the actual concreet causal chain from rationality training to you getting better at debuging.
I currently think the answer is that the rationality training made you motivated, and that was the missing part that stopped you from getting better before. Let me know if you think I’m missing something important.
Hmm, that doesn’t feel like the right summary to me. (I acknowledged the motivation thing as probably
I’m not sure where you draw the boundary between object level and meta skill. I think there are:
skills you can apply to metalearning (i.e. make it easier to learn new skills)
general reasoning skills
domain specific skills
The first two I’d (often but not always[1]) call rationality skills. Also, most general reasoning skills you can apply towards metalearning as well as object level domains. I think maybe the only pure meta-level skills I found/worked on were:
track what subskills would be helpful for a given task (so that you can then practice them separately, and/or pay more attention to them as you practice)
generalized “practice applying existing general reasoning skills to the domain of gaining new skills”
generalized (but sort of domain-specifically) apply general reasoning skills to the domain of inventing better feedback loops.
idk a couple domain-specific skills for inventing better feedback loops.
I think that’s probably it? (and there were like 20+ other skills I focused on). Everything else seems about as object level as CFAR skills. I’m maybe not sure what you mean by meta though – CFAR skills all seem at least somewhat meta to me.
At the very top of the post, I list 7 skills that I’d classify as general reasoning rationality skills. I could theoretically have gained those purely by practicing debugging, but I think it would have taken way longer and would have been very difficult for me even if I was more motivated. (They also would probably not have transferred as much to other domains if I didn’t think of myself as studying rationality)
An important early step was to gain Noticing / Tuning your Cognitive Strategies skills, which I think unlocked the ability to actually make any kind of progress at debugging (because they made it so, when I was bouncing off something, I could figure out why).
I think they are “rationality” if they involve making different choices about cognitive algorithms to run. “speed reading” is a meta-learning and general-reasoning skill, but it feels like a stretch to call it a rationality skill.
Interesting. Reading your comment makes me notice that I’m more motivated to learn object level skills than meta level skills.
“meta level” != “rationality.
E.g. I would count most of the CFAR curiculum as object level skills. But the traingin you’re working on seems more meta level skills.
I expect motivation to be super central for what leanring methods works. There has been a number of posts on ACX about school (including 2 that are part of the reveiw contest). The common theme is that the main bottleneck is students motivation.
The thing I was after was, what is the actual concreet causal chain from rationality training to you getting better at debuging.
I currently think the answer is that the rationality training made you motivated, and that was the missing part that stopped you from getting better before. Let me know if you think I’m missing something important.
Hmm, that doesn’t feel like the right summary to me. (I acknowledged the motivation thing as probably
I’m not sure where you draw the boundary between object level and meta skill. I think there are:
skills you can apply to metalearning (i.e. make it easier to learn new skills)
general reasoning skills
domain specific skills
The first two I’d (often but not always[1]) call rationality skills. Also, most general reasoning skills you can apply towards metalearning as well as object level domains. I think maybe the only pure meta-level skills I found/worked on were:
track what subskills would be helpful for a given task (so that you can then practice them separately, and/or pay more attention to them as you practice)
generalized “practice applying existing general reasoning skills to the domain of gaining new skills”
generalized (but sort of domain-specifically) apply general reasoning skills to the domain of inventing better feedback loops.
idk a couple domain-specific skills for inventing better feedback loops.
I think that’s probably it? (and there were like 20+ other skills I focused on). Everything else seems about as object level as CFAR skills. I’m maybe not sure what you mean by meta though – CFAR skills all seem at least somewhat meta to me.
At the very top of the post, I list 7 skills that I’d classify as general reasoning rationality skills. I could theoretically have gained those purely by practicing debugging, but I think it would have taken way longer and would have been very difficult for me even if I was more motivated. (They also would probably not have transferred as much to other domains if I didn’t think of myself as studying rationality)
An important early step was to gain Noticing / Tuning your Cognitive Strategies skills, which I think unlocked the ability to actually make any kind of progress at debugging (because they made it so, when I was bouncing off something, I could figure out why).
I think they are “rationality” if they involve making different choices about cognitive algorithms to run. “speed reading” is a meta-learning and general-reasoning skill, but it feels like a stretch to call it a rationality skill.