This comment records the prizewinners of the Rationality Exercises Prize of September 2019 ($1,000), and shares some of my thoughts on the submissions.
Rationality Exercise Prizewinners
A prize of $125 goes to elriggs, for their sequence Arguing Well. I did the first post, which had 11 simple exercises on Scott Alexander’s fallacy of ‘Proving too much’, plus 2 reflection steps.
A key thing that elriggs did (and TurnTrout below), was to not divorce the exercises from the understanding and the explanation—they weren’t added on at the end, but were part of the learning. Elriggs’ reminded me a bit of The Art of Problem Solving, where the act of solving the problems how you discover the mathematics.
Each post combines of a wealth of examples with points where you stop and try to generalise the rule / make your algorithm explicit. The latter part especially helped me resolve some confusions I had. I wrote down my experience and more specific thoughts doing the exercises in a comment here.
A prize of $125 goes to whales, for Exercises #1 and #4. Exercise #4 was ~75% of the reason I gave whales a prize, and is (roughly) about having an integrated world-model by looking at social science results.
I’m having a hard time saying why I liked whales’ exercises. If I try to point at what I liked about them, I’ll say that I think they were picked to be fairly simple-yet-confusing, and also permitted clear answers at the end—not unlike all the problems in the book Thinking Physics—and they helped me to notice my confusion along the way. Something about them felt very provocative/opinionated in a positive way, which differed from the other prizes. I approached them expecting to get something out of them, and managed to get out value pretty proportional to what I put in. I wrote about my experiences doing the exercises in a comment here.
A prize of $250 goes to lifelonglearner, for their postCalibrating With Cards. This was primarily a lesson in close-up card magic, but one that used principles rationality sufficiently well that it helped me learn some general principles.
As I said in my comment on lifelonglearner’s post, I really appreciated being guided in what to notice. Normally instructions tell me what to achieve, and instructions for how to achieve it, but lifelonglearner also spent a lot of of words on where I should focus my attention, which feels like a key insight about how to learn.
A prize of $500 goes to TurnTrout, for his sequence Reframing Impact (which was submitted via private message). These posts were about open problems in AI alignment, where TurnTrout was attempting to explain his solution simply enough that you could derive it for yourself in the course of reading the posts.
The posts had lots of concrete examples that you were explicitly invited to use to form categories. They also had questions and worked-examples incorporated in the reading and understanding, and built up to a key test, where you try to solve the problem for yourself before you see the author explain their solution. I read the first three posts in the sequence, did the 15 minute exercise on the Deducing Impact post, and wrote down my thoughts.
As I said above, a key thing that TurnTrout did was make sure the exercises were not divorced from the understanding and the explanation—they weren’t added on at the end or anything, but part of the learning. One thing TurnTrout’s exercises reminded me of is my experience of CFAR workshops, where I repeatedly get given space to solve a problem myself before an instructor tell me their solution/explanation. Of all the submissions, the ideas and the exercises felt most intertwined in this post, which is the main reason it gets the first place prize.
Thoughts on other entries
The main reason I didn’t give entries prizes was that I had a hard time either following the explanations or doing the exercises. I will name Mr-Hire’s Exercises for Overcoming Akrasia and Procrastination as especially good—I found the triggers didn’t quite match my experiences at the time, and didn’t end up finding a good way to practise the recommended actions, but I think the writing was detailed and expect some others will find it useful. If anyone does them, I hope they write their experiences in a comment on his post.
This comment records the prizewinners of the Rationality Exercises Prize of September 2019 ($1,000), and shares some of my thoughts on the submissions.
Rationality Exercise Prizewinners
A prize of $125 goes to elriggs, for their sequence Arguing Well. I did the first post, which had 11 simple exercises on Scott Alexander’s fallacy of ‘Proving too much’, plus 2 reflection steps.
A key thing that elriggs did (and TurnTrout below), was to not divorce the exercises from the understanding and the explanation—they weren’t added on at the end, but were part of the learning. Elriggs’ reminded me a bit of The Art of Problem Solving, where the act of solving the problems how you discover the mathematics.
Each post combines of a wealth of examples with points where you stop and try to generalise the rule / make your algorithm explicit. The latter part especially helped me resolve some confusions I had. I wrote down my experience and more specific thoughts doing the exercises in a comment here.
A prize of $125 goes to whales, for Exercises #1 and #4. Exercise #4 was ~75% of the reason I gave whales a prize, and is (roughly) about having an integrated world-model by looking at social science results.
I’m having a hard time saying why I liked whales’ exercises. If I try to point at what I liked about them, I’ll say that I think they were picked to be fairly simple-yet-confusing, and also permitted clear answers at the end—not unlike all the problems in the book Thinking Physics—and they helped me to notice my confusion along the way. Something about them felt very provocative/opinionated in a positive way, which differed from the other prizes. I approached them expecting to get something out of them, and managed to get out value pretty proportional to what I put in. I wrote about my experiences doing the exercises in a comment here.
A prize of $250 goes to lifelonglearner, for their post Calibrating With Cards. This was primarily a lesson in close-up card magic, but one that used principles rationality sufficiently well that it helped me learn some general principles.
As I said in my comment on lifelonglearner’s post, I really appreciated being guided in what to notice. Normally instructions tell me what to achieve, and instructions for how to achieve it, but lifelonglearner also spent a lot of of words on where I should focus my attention, which feels like a key insight about how to learn.
A prize of $500 goes to TurnTrout, for his sequence Reframing Impact (which was submitted via private message). These posts were about open problems in AI alignment, where TurnTrout was attempting to explain his solution simply enough that you could derive it for yourself in the course of reading the posts.
The posts had lots of concrete examples that you were explicitly invited to use to form categories. They also had questions and worked-examples incorporated in the reading and understanding, and built up to a key test, where you try to solve the problem for yourself before you see the author explain their solution. I read the first three posts in the sequence, did the 15 minute exercise on the Deducing Impact post, and wrote down my thoughts.
As I said above, a key thing that TurnTrout did was make sure the exercises were not divorced from the understanding and the explanation—they weren’t added on at the end or anything, but part of the learning. One thing TurnTrout’s exercises reminded me of is my experience of CFAR workshops, where I repeatedly get given space to solve a problem myself before an instructor tell me their solution/explanation. Of all the submissions, the ideas and the exercises felt most intertwined in this post, which is the main reason it gets the first place prize.
Thoughts on other entries
The main reason I didn’t give entries prizes was that I had a hard time either following the explanations or doing the exercises. I will name Mr-Hire’s Exercises for Overcoming Akrasia and Procrastination as especially good—I found the triggers didn’t quite match my experiences at the time, and didn’t end up finding a good way to practise the recommended actions, but I think the writing was detailed and expect some others will find it useful. If anyone does them, I hope they write their experiences in a comment on his post.