Hello, I am a CFAR contractor who considers nearly all of their job to be “original research into human rationality”. I don’t do the kind of research many people imagine when they hear the word “research” (RCT-style verifiable social science, and such). But I certainly do systematic inquiry and investigation into a subject in order to discover or revise beliefs, theories, applications, etc. Which is, you know, literally the dictionary.com definition of research.
I’m not very good at telling stories about myself, but I’ll attempt to describe what I do during my ordinary working hours anyway.
All of the time, I keep an eye out for things that seem to be missing or off in what I take to be the current art of rationality. Often I look to what I see in the people close to me, who are disproportionately members of rationality-and-EA-related organizations, watching how they solve problems and think through tricky stuff and live their lives. I also look to my colleagues at CFAR, who spend many many hours in dialogue with people who are studying rationality themselves, for the first time or on a continuing basis. But since my eyes are in my own head, I look most for what is absent in my own personal art of rationality.
For example, when I first read the Sequences in 2012 or 2013, I gained a lot, but I also felt a gaping hole in the shape of something like “recognizing those key moments in real-life experience when the rationality stuff you’ve thought so much about comes whizzing by your head at top speed, looking nothing at all like the abstractions you’ve so far considered”. That’s when I started doing stuff like snapping my fingers every time I saw a stop sign, so I could get a handle on what “noticing” even is, and begin to fill in the hole. I came up with a method of hooking intellectual awareness up to immediate experience, then I spent a whole year throwing the method at a whole bunch of real life situations, keeping track of what I observed, revising the method, talking with people about it as they worked with the same problem themselves, and generally trying to figure out the shape of the world around phenomenology and trigger-action planning.
I was an occasional guest instructor with CFAR at the time, and I think that over the course of my investigations, CFAR went from spending very little time on the phenomenological details of key experiences to working that sort of thing into nearly every class. I think it’s now the case that rationality as it currently exists contains an “art of noticing”.
My way of investigating always pushes into what I can’t yet see or grasp or articulate. Thus, it has the unfortunate property of being quite difficult to communicate about directly until the research program is mostly complete. So I can say a lot about my earlier work on noticing, but talking coherently about what exactly CFAR’s been paying me for lately is much harder. It’s all been the same style of research, though, and if I had to give names to my recent research foci, I’d say I’ve been looking into original seeing, some things related to creativity and unconstrained thought, something about learning and what it means to own your education, and experiences related to community and cooperation.
It’s my impression that CFAR has always had several people doing this kind of thing, and that several current CFAR staff members consider it a crucial part of their jobs as well. When I was hired, Tim described research as “the beating heart” of our organization. Nevertheless, I personally would like more of it in future CFAR, and I’d like it to be done with a bit more deliberate institutional support.
That’s why it was my primary focus when working with Eli to design our 2019 instructor training program. The program consisted partially of several weekend workshops, but in my opinion the most important part happened while everyone was at home.
My main goal, especially for the first weekend, was to help the trainees choose a particular area of study. It was to be something in their own rationality that really mattered to them and that they had not yet mastered. When they left the workshop, they were to set off on their own personal quest to figure out that part of the world and advance the art.
This attitude, which we’ve been calling “questing” of late, is the one with which I hope CFAR instructors will approach any class they intend to teach, whether it’s something like “goal factoring” that many people have taught in the past, or something completely new that nobody’s even tried to name yet. When you really get the hang of the questing mentality, you never stop doing original rationality research. So to whatever degree I achieved my goal with instructor training (which everyone seems to think is a surprisingly large degree), CFAR is moving in the direction of more original rationality research, not less.
How do CFAR’s research interests/priorities compare with LW’s Open Problems in Human Rationality? Based on Brienne and Anna’s replies here, I suspect the answer is “they’re pretty different”, but I’d like to hear what accounts for this divergence.
I quite like the open questions that Wei Dai wrote there, and I expect I’d find progress on those problems to be helpful for what I’m trying to do with CFAR. If I had to outline the problem we’re solving from scratch, though, I might say:
Figure out how to:
use reason (and stay focused on the important problems, and remember “virtue of the void” and “lens that sees its own flaws, and be quick where you can) without
going nutso, or losing humane values, and while:
being able to coordinate well in teams.
Wei Dai’s open problems feel pretty relevant to this!
I think in practice this goal leaves me with subproblems such as:
How do we un-bottleneck “original seeing” / hypothesis-generation;
What is the “it all adds up to normality” skill based in; how do we teach it;
Where does “mental energy” come from in practice, and how can people have good relationships to this;
What’s up with people sometimes seeming self-conscious/self-absorbed (in an unfortunate, slightly untethered way) and sometimes seeming connected to “something to protect” outside themselves?
It seems to me that “something to protect” makes people more robustly mentally healthy. Is that true? If so why? Also how do we teach it?
Why is it useful to follow “spinning plates” (objects that catch your interest for their own sake) as well as “hamming questions”? What’s the relationship between those two? (I sort of feel like they’re two halves of the same coin somehow? But I don’t have a model.)
As well as more immediately practical questions such as: How can a person do “rest days” well. What ‘check sums’ are useful for noticing when something breaks as you’re mucking with your head. Etc.
Hello, I am a CFAR contractor who considers nearly all of their job to be “original research into human rationality”. I don’t do the kind of research many people imagine when they hear the word “research” (RCT-style verifiable social science, and such). But I certainly do systematic inquiry and investigation into a subject in order to discover or revise beliefs, theories, applications, etc. Which is, you know, literally the dictionary.com definition of research.
I’m not very good at telling stories about myself, but I’ll attempt to describe what I do during my ordinary working hours anyway.
All of the time, I keep an eye out for things that seem to be missing or off in what I take to be the current art of rationality. Often I look to what I see in the people close to me, who are disproportionately members of rationality-and-EA-related organizations, watching how they solve problems and think through tricky stuff and live their lives. I also look to my colleagues at CFAR, who spend many many hours in dialogue with people who are studying rationality themselves, for the first time or on a continuing basis. But since my eyes are in my own head, I look most for what is absent in my own personal art of rationality.
For example, when I first read the Sequences in 2012 or 2013, I gained a lot, but I also felt a gaping hole in the shape of something like “recognizing those key moments in real-life experience when the rationality stuff you’ve thought so much about comes whizzing by your head at top speed, looking nothing at all like the abstractions you’ve so far considered”. That’s when I started doing stuff like snapping my fingers every time I saw a stop sign, so I could get a handle on what “noticing” even is, and begin to fill in the hole. I came up with a method of hooking intellectual awareness up to immediate experience, then I spent a whole year throwing the method at a whole bunch of real life situations, keeping track of what I observed, revising the method, talking with people about it as they worked with the same problem themselves, and generally trying to figure out the shape of the world around phenomenology and trigger-action planning.
I was an occasional guest instructor with CFAR at the time, and I think that over the course of my investigations, CFAR went from spending very little time on the phenomenological details of key experiences to working that sort of thing into nearly every class. I think it’s now the case that rationality as it currently exists contains an “art of noticing”.
My way of investigating always pushes into what I can’t yet see or grasp or articulate. Thus, it has the unfortunate property of being quite difficult to communicate about directly until the research program is mostly complete. So I can say a lot about my earlier work on noticing, but talking coherently about what exactly CFAR’s been paying me for lately is much harder. It’s all been the same style of research, though, and if I had to give names to my recent research foci, I’d say I’ve been looking into original seeing, some things related to creativity and unconstrained thought, something about learning and what it means to own your education, and experiences related to community and cooperation.
It’s my impression that CFAR has always had several people doing this kind of thing, and that several current CFAR staff members consider it a crucial part of their jobs as well. When I was hired, Tim described research as “the beating heart” of our organization. Nevertheless, I personally would like more of it in future CFAR, and I’d like it to be done with a bit more deliberate institutional support.
That’s why it was my primary focus when working with Eli to design our 2019 instructor training program. The program consisted partially of several weekend workshops, but in my opinion the most important part happened while everyone was at home.
My main goal, especially for the first weekend, was to help the trainees choose a particular area of study. It was to be something in their own rationality that really mattered to them and that they had not yet mastered. When they left the workshop, they were to set off on their own personal quest to figure out that part of the world and advance the art.
This attitude, which we’ve been calling “questing” of late, is the one with which I hope CFAR instructors will approach any class they intend to teach, whether it’s something like “goal factoring” that many people have taught in the past, or something completely new that nobody’s even tried to name yet. When you really get the hang of the questing mentality, you never stop doing original rationality research. So to whatever degree I achieved my goal with instructor training (which everyone seems to think is a surprisingly large degree), CFAR is moving in the direction of more original rationality research, not less.
How do CFAR’s research interests/priorities compare with LW’s Open Problems in Human Rationality? Based on Brienne and Anna’s replies here, I suspect the answer is “they’re pretty different”, but I’d like to hear what accounts for this divergence.
I quite like the open questions that Wei Dai wrote there, and I expect I’d find progress on those problems to be helpful for what I’m trying to do with CFAR. If I had to outline the problem we’re solving from scratch, though, I might say:
Figure out how to:
use reason (and stay focused on the important problems, and remember “virtue of the void” and “lens that sees its own flaws, and be quick where you can) without
going nutso, or losing humane values, and while:
being able to coordinate well in teams.
Wei Dai’s open problems feel pretty relevant to this!
I think in practice this goal leaves me with subproblems such as:
How do we un-bottleneck “original seeing” / hypothesis-generation;
What is the “it all adds up to normality” skill based in; how do we teach it;
Where does “mental energy” come from in practice, and how can people have good relationships to this;
What’s up with people sometimes seeming self-conscious/self-absorbed (in an unfortunate, slightly untethered way) and sometimes seeming connected to “something to protect” outside themselves?
It seems to me that “something to protect” makes people more robustly mentally healthy. Is that true? If so why? Also how do we teach it?
Why is it useful to follow “spinning plates” (objects that catch your interest for their own sake) as well as “hamming questions”? What’s the relationship between those two? (I sort of feel like they’re two halves of the same coin somehow? But I don’t have a model.)
As well as more immediately practical questions such as: How can a person do “rest days” well. What ‘check sums’ are useful for noticing when something breaks as you’re mucking with your head. Etc.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “something to protect.” Can you give an example?
[Answered by habryka]
Presumable it’s a reference to: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect
Thanks! forgot about that post.
If Brienne wanted to give their own answer to that post, even if it was incomplete, I’d be very excited about that.
Done.
Hurrah! :D