You once told me that there were ~20 things a person needed to be generally competent. What were they?
I’m not sure I had an exact list, but I’ll try to generate one now and see how many things are on it:
Numeracy
“What surprised you most during your time at CFAR?
Surprise 1: People are profoundly non-numerate.
And, people who are not profoundly non-numerate still fail to connect numbers to life.
This surprised me a lot, because I was told (by somebody who read CFAR handbook) that CFAR isn’t mostly about numeracy, and I’ve never heard about skills involving number crunching from people who went to CFAR workshops. Didn’t they just fail to update on that? If that’s the most important skill, shouldn’t we have a new CFAR who teaches numeracy, reading and writing?
I think the key issue here is that CFAR workshops were optimized around being 4 days long. I think teaching someone numeracy in 4 days is very hard, and the kind of things you end up being able to convey look different (and still pretty valuable, but I do think end up missing a large fraction of the art of the art of rationality).
That makes sense, but it should’ve been at least mentioned somewhere that they think they aren’t teaching the most important skills, and they think that numeracy is more important. The views expressed in the post might not be views of the whole CFAR staff.
This surprised me a lot, because I was told (by somebody who read CFAR handbook) that CFAR isn’t mostly about numeracy, and I’ve never heard about skills involving number crunching from people who went to CFAR workshops. Didn’t they just fail to update on that? If that’s the most important skill, shouldn’t we have a new CFAR who teaches numeracy, reading and writing?
I think the key issue here is that CFAR workshops were optimized around being 4 days long. I think teaching someone numeracy in 4 days is very hard, and the kind of things you end up being able to convey look different (and still pretty valuable, but I do think end up missing a large fraction of the art of the art of rationality).
That makes sense, but it should’ve been at least mentioned somewhere that they think they aren’t teaching the most important skills, and they think that numeracy is more important. The views expressed in the post might not be views of the whole CFAR staff.