Participants may want to learn “rationality”/“CFAR techniques”/etc. so that they can feel cool, so others will think they’re cool, so they can be part of the group, so they can gain the favor of a “teacher” or other power structure, etc.
So what? Just embrace it, learn a ton of techniques, some of them will be useless. Probably still way better than doing nothing. Later you can selectively drop the techniques that feel useless.
(What I am trying to do here is to put the risk of imperfect action as an alternative to the risk of inaction.)
This could go wrong if people keep inventing techniques for the sake of keeping people busy. Happens in cults or for-profit organizations: as long as you have customers, keep shoveling new techniques at them, and they keep giving you their money; also, make the new techniques require more time and money, so the customers cannot complete your course too fast. This could be prevented by CFAR publishing their official list of rationality techniques for free, and publishing an update every two years.
Note: “cool” is good; it motivates you to persevere in your efforts. Becoming more rational should be fun! (Otherwise, you will never raise the sanity waterline of the population at large.)
But I would predict that people will try the “cool” techniques for a year or two, then burn out. The more they can learn during that one active year, the better.
Unfortunately, our CFAR curriculum development efforts mostly had no such strong outside mooring. That is, CFAR units rose or fell based on e.g. how much we were personally convinced they were useful [...] but not based (much/enough) on whether those units helped us/them/whoever make real, long-term progress on outside problems.
Suggestion: split CFAR into “those who invent the techniques” and “those who teach them”. Have the latter group find some different audiences (e.g. scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, students...) and test the techniques on them and provide reports to the inventors.
I suspect these features made the workshop worse than it would otherwise have been at allowing real conversations, allowing workshop participants, me, other staff, etc. to develop a real/cooperative art of rationality, etc. (Even though these sorts of “minor deceptiveness” are pretty “normal”; doing something at the standard most people hit doesn’t necessarily mean doing it well enough not to get bitten by bad effects.)
How about doing exactly this… but at the end admitting what you did and explaining why?
So what? Just embrace it, learn a ton of techniques, some of them will be useless. Probably still way better than doing nothing. Later you can selectively drop the techniques that feel useless.
(What I am trying to do here is to put the risk of imperfect action as an alternative to the risk of inaction.)
This could go wrong if people keep inventing techniques for the sake of keeping people busy. Happens in cults or for-profit organizations: as long as you have customers, keep shoveling new techniques at them, and they keep giving you their money; also, make the new techniques require more time and money, so the customers cannot complete your course too fast. This could be prevented by CFAR publishing their official list of rationality techniques for free, and publishing an update every two years.
Note: “cool” is good; it motivates you to persevere in your efforts. Becoming more rational should be fun! (Otherwise, you will never raise the sanity waterline of the population at large.)
But I would predict that people will try the “cool” techniques for a year or two, then burn out. The more they can learn during that one active year, the better.
Suggestion: split CFAR into “those who invent the techniques” and “those who teach them”. Have the latter group find some different audiences (e.g. scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, students...) and test the techniques on them and provide reports to the inventors.
How about doing exactly this… but at the end admitting what you did and explaining why?
I want to reiterate (stated elsewhere in this thread) that the goals of CFAR were not to raise the sanity waterline of the population at large.