Do you think it was unhelpful because you already had a high level of knowledge on the topics they were teaching and thus didn’t have much to learn or because the actual techniques were not effective?
I don’t believe I had a high level of knowledge on the specific topics they were teaching (behavior change, and the like). I did study some cognitive science in my undergraduate years, and I take issue with the ‘science’.
Do you think your experience was typical?
I believe that the majority of people don’t get much, if anything, from CFAR’s rationality lessons. However, after the lesson, people may be slightly more motivated to accomplish whatever they want to, in the short term just because they’ve paid money towards a course to increase their motivation.
How useful do you think it would be to an average person?
There was one average person at one of the workshops I attended. e.g. never read LessWrong/other rationality material. He fell asleep a few hours into the lesson, I don’t think he gained much from attending. I’m hesitant to extrapolate, because I’m not exactly sure what an average person entails.
An average rationalist?
I haven’t met many rationalists, but would believe they wouldn’t benefit much/at all.
Well that’s a bit dispiriting, though I suppose looking back my view of CFAR was a bit unrealistic. Downregulating chance that CFAR is some kind of panacea.
Hi cursed—glad to hear your feedback, though I’m obviously not glad that you didn’t have a good experience at the CFAR events you went to.
I want to share a bit of information from my point of view (as a researcher at CFAR) on 1) the role of the cognitive science literature in CFAR’s curriculum and 2) the typical experience of the people who come to a CFAR workshop. This comment is about the science; I’ll leave a separate comment about thing 2.
Some of the techniques that CFAR teaches are based pretty directly on things from the academic literature (e.g., implementation intentions come straight from Peter Gollwitzer’s research). Some of our techniques are not from the academic literature (e.g., the technique that we call “propagating urges” started out in 2011 as something that CFAR co-founder Andrew Critch did).
The not-from-the-literature techniques have been through a process of iteration, where we theorize about how we think the technique works, then (with the aid of our best current model) we try to teach people to use the technique, and then we get feedback on how it goes for them. Then repeat. The “theorizing” step of this process includes digging into the academic literature to get a better understanding of how the relevant parts of the mind work, and that often plays a role in shaping the class. With “propagating urges,” at first none of the people that Critch taught it to were able to get it to work for them, but then Critch made a connection to some neuroscience he’d been reading, we updated our model of how the technique was supposed to work, and then more people were able to make use of the technique. (I’m tempted to go into more specifics here, but that feels like a tangent and this comment is going to be long enough without it.)
Classes based on from-the-academic-literature techniques also go through a similar process of iteration. For example, there are a lot of studies that have shown that people who are instructed to come up with implementation intentions for a particular goal make more progress towards that goal. But I don’t know of any academic research on attempts to teach people the skill of being able to create implementation intentions, and the habit of actually using them in day-to-day life. And that’s what we’re trying to do at CFAR workshops, so that class has gone through a similar process of iteration as we get feedback on whether people are making use of implementation intentions and how it goes for them. (One simple change that helped get more people to use implementation intentions: giving the technique a different name. We now call it “trigger action planning”).
So the cognitive science literature plays both of these roles for us: it’s a source of evidence about particular techniques that have been tested and found to work (or to not work), and it’s a source of models of how the mind works so that we can develop better techniques. We mention both of these types of scientific references in class (and in the further resources), and we try to be careful to distinguish them. Sharing our models in class (e.g., saying a few sentences in the propagating urges class about what we think the orbitofrontal cortex might be doing in this process) seems to be helpful for getting people to use the technique as we understand it (rather than getting confused about the steps, or rounding the technique off to the nearest cached thought). It also seems to help with getting people to take ownership of the technique and treat it as something that they can tinker with, rather than as a rote series of steps for them to follow (cf. learned blankness).
Finally, a brief comment on this:
Also, they had a giant 1-2 page listing of citations that they used to back up their lessons. I asked some extremely basic questions about papers and articles I’ve previously read on the list and they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
Each CFAR class has one staff member who takes the lead in developing the class, and I’m the research specialist who does a lot of digging into the literature and sharing/discussing research with whoever is developing the class. The aim is for the two of us to be conversant in the relevant academic literature. For the rest of the CFAR team, the priority is to be able to use the techniques and help other people use them, not to know all the studies. (Often there will be more than just us two puzzling things over together, but it typically isn’t the whole team.) The instructor who teaches a class at a CFAR event isn’t always the person who has been developing it, especially at one-day events which are just being run by 2 instructors instead of the full CFAR staff. If I’d been at the event you came to, the instructor who you asked about the articles probably would’ve referred you to me and we could’ve had an interesting conversation.
I don’t believe I had a high level of knowledge on the specific topics they were teaching (behavior change, and the like). I did study some cognitive science in my undergraduate years, and I take issue with the ‘science’.
I believe that the majority of people don’t get much, if anything, from CFAR’s rationality lessons. However, after the lesson, people may be slightly more motivated to accomplish whatever they want to, in the short term just because they’ve paid money towards a course to increase their motivation.
There was one average person at one of the workshops I attended. e.g. never read LessWrong/other rationality material. He fell asleep a few hours into the lesson, I don’t think he gained much from attending. I’m hesitant to extrapolate, because I’m not exactly sure what an average person entails.
I haven’t met many rationalists, but would believe they wouldn’t benefit much/at all.
Well that’s a bit dispiriting, though I suppose looking back my view of CFAR was a bit unrealistic. Downregulating chance that CFAR is some kind of panacea.
(Dan from CFAR here)
Hi cursed—glad to hear your feedback, though I’m obviously not glad that you didn’t have a good experience at the CFAR events you went to.
I want to share a bit of information from my point of view (as a researcher at CFAR) on 1) the role of the cognitive science literature in CFAR’s curriculum and 2) the typical experience of the people who come to a CFAR workshop. This comment is about the science; I’ll leave a separate comment about thing 2.
Some of the techniques that CFAR teaches are based pretty directly on things from the academic literature (e.g., implementation intentions come straight from Peter Gollwitzer’s research). Some of our techniques are not from the academic literature (e.g., the technique that we call “propagating urges” started out in 2011 as something that CFAR co-founder Andrew Critch did).
The not-from-the-literature techniques have been through a process of iteration, where we theorize about how we think the technique works, then (with the aid of our best current model) we try to teach people to use the technique, and then we get feedback on how it goes for them. Then repeat. The “theorizing” step of this process includes digging into the academic literature to get a better understanding of how the relevant parts of the mind work, and that often plays a role in shaping the class. With “propagating urges,” at first none of the people that Critch taught it to were able to get it to work for them, but then Critch made a connection to some neuroscience he’d been reading, we updated our model of how the technique was supposed to work, and then more people were able to make use of the technique. (I’m tempted to go into more specifics here, but that feels like a tangent and this comment is going to be long enough without it.)
Classes based on from-the-academic-literature techniques also go through a similar process of iteration. For example, there are a lot of studies that have shown that people who are instructed to come up with implementation intentions for a particular goal make more progress towards that goal. But I don’t know of any academic research on attempts to teach people the skill of being able to create implementation intentions, and the habit of actually using them in day-to-day life. And that’s what we’re trying to do at CFAR workshops, so that class has gone through a similar process of iteration as we get feedback on whether people are making use of implementation intentions and how it goes for them. (One simple change that helped get more people to use implementation intentions: giving the technique a different name. We now call it “trigger action planning”).
So the cognitive science literature plays both of these roles for us: it’s a source of evidence about particular techniques that have been tested and found to work (or to not work), and it’s a source of models of how the mind works so that we can develop better techniques. We mention both of these types of scientific references in class (and in the further resources), and we try to be careful to distinguish them. Sharing our models in class (e.g., saying a few sentences in the propagating urges class about what we think the orbitofrontal cortex might be doing in this process) seems to be helpful for getting people to use the technique as we understand it (rather than getting confused about the steps, or rounding the technique off to the nearest cached thought). It also seems to help with getting people to take ownership of the technique and treat it as something that they can tinker with, rather than as a rote series of steps for them to follow (cf. learned blankness).
Finally, a brief comment on this:
Each CFAR class has one staff member who takes the lead in developing the class, and I’m the research specialist who does a lot of digging into the literature and sharing/discussing research with whoever is developing the class. The aim is for the two of us to be conversant in the relevant academic literature. For the rest of the CFAR team, the priority is to be able to use the techniques and help other people use them, not to know all the studies. (Often there will be more than just us two puzzling things over together, but it typically isn’t the whole team.) The instructor who teaches a class at a CFAR event isn’t always the person who has been developing it, especially at one-day events which are just being run by 2 instructors instead of the full CFAR staff. If I’d been at the event you came to, the instructor who you asked about the articles probably would’ve referred you to me and we could’ve had an interesting conversation.
Well, that’s a bit dispiriting but thanks for responding anyway. Was this recently or when they were just starting up?