CFAR seems to many of us to be among the efforts most worth investing in. This isn’t because our present workshops are all that great. Rather, it is because, in terms of “saving throws” one can buy for a humanity that may be navigating tricky situations in an unknown future, improvements to thinking skill seem to be one of the strongest and most robust.
Why? You tend to be marketing your workshops to people who’ve already got significant training in much of Traditional Rationality. In my view, much of the world’s irrationality comes from people who have not even heard of the basics or people whose resource constraints do not allow them to apply what they know, or both. In this model, broad improvements in very fundamental, schoolchild-level rationality education and the alleviation of poverty and time poverty are much stronger prospects for improving the world through prevention of Dumb Moves than giving semi-advanced cognitive self-improvement workshops to the Silicon Valley elite.
Mind, if what you’re really trying to do is propagandize the kind of worldview that leads to taking MIRI seriously, you rather ought to come out and say that.
In this model, broad improvements in very fundamental, schoolchild-level rationality education and the alleviation of poverty and time poverty are much stronger prospects for improving the world through prevention of Dumb Moves than giving semi-advanced cognitive self-improvement workshops to the Silicon Valley elite.
So, I recently started training in the Alexander Technique, which is a well-developed school of thought and practice on how to use bodies well. It’s been taught for about a century, and during the 1940s there was a brief attempt to teach it in schools to children.
My impression is that the children didn’t get all that much out of it- yes, they had better posture, and the students who might have been klutzier were more coordinated. But the people that keep Alexander alive are mostly the performers and musicians and people with painful movement problems- that is, the sort of people that get enough value out of it that it makes sense for them to take special lessons and think about it in their off time and so on.
Similarly, it might be true that while there is a great mass of irrationality out there, cognitive labor, like any other labor, can be specialized- and so focusing your rationality training on people who specialize in thinking makes sense just as focusing your movement training on people who specialize in movement makes sense. (Here I’m including speaking as movement for reasons that are anatomically obvious.)
But supposing your model is correct—that a broad rationality education would do the most good—I seem to recall hearing about an undergraduate-level rationality curriculum being developed by Keith Stanovich, a CFAR advisor, and I suspect Anna or others may know more details. Once we’ve got an undergraduate curriculum being taught, that should teach us enough to develop high-school level curriculum, and so on down to songs that can be sung in kindergarten.
Mind, if what you’re really trying to do is propagandize the kind of worldview that leads to taking MIRI seriously, you rather ought to come out and say that.
Why? It seems to me that training people to think well is better, because if they end up disagreeing that gives you valuable information to update on.
Similarly, it might be true that while there is a great mass of irrationality out there, cognitive labor, like any other labor, can be specialized- and so focusing your rationality training on people who specialize in thinking makes sense just as focusing your movement training on people who specialize in movement makes sense. (Here I’m including speaking as movement for reasons that are anatomically obvious.)
This would imply that CFAR should be pitching its workshops to academics and government policymakers. Not to be a dick, but the latest local-mobile-social app-kerjigger is not intensive cognitive labor with a high impact on the world. Actual scientific research and public policy-making are (or, at least, scientific research is fairly intensive cognitive labor… I wouldn’t necessary say it has a high mean impact on any per-unit basis).
Why? It seems to me that training people to think well is better, because if they end up disagreeing that gives you valuable information to update on.
I would hope so! But what information indicates CFAR does this?
But supposing your model is correct—that we a broad rationality education would do the most good—I seem to recall hearing about an undergraduate-level rationality curriculum being developed by Keith Stanovich, a CFAR advisor, and I suspect Anna or others may know more details. Once we’ve got an undergraduate curriculum being taught, that should teach us enough to develop high-school level curriculum, and so on down to songs that can be sung in kindergarten.
That’s good, but I worry that it doesn’t go far enough. The issue is not that we’re failing to teach probability theory to kindergartners—they don’t need it and don’t want it. The issue is that our society allows people to walk around thinking that there isn’t actually an external world to which their actions will be held accountable at all, and that subjective feeling both governs reality and normatively dictates correct actions.
To make an offensive political quip: there is the assertion-based community, and the reality-based community; too many people belong to the former and not nearly enough to the latter. The biggest impact we can have on “raising the sanity waterline” is to move people from the group who believe in a Fideist Theory of Truth (“Things are true by virtue of how I feel about them”) to people who believe in the Correspondence Theory of Truth (“Things are true when they match the world outside my head!”), which also thus inspires people to listen to educated domain experts at all.
To give a flagrantly stupid example, we really really really don’t want society’s way of dealing with the Friendly AI problem determined by people who believe that AIs have souls and would never harm anyone because they don’t have original sin. Giving Silicon Valley executives effectiveness workshops will not avert this problem, while teaching the broad public the very basic worldview that the universe is lawful, rather than consciously optimizing for recognizably humanoid goals, is likely to affect this problem.
This would imply that CFAR should be pitching its workshops to academics and government policymakers.
My understanding is that CFAR is attended by both present and likely future academics; I don’t know about government policymakers. (I’ve met people on national advisory boards from at least two countries at CFAR workshops, but I don’t pretend to know how much influence they have on those boards, or how much influence those boards have on actual policy.)
Not to be a dick, but the latest local-mobile-social app-kerjigger is not intensive cognitive labor with a high impact on the world.
At time of writing this comment, there are 14 startups listed in the post. What number of them would you consider local-mobile-social apps? (This seems to be an example of “not to be X” signifying “I am aware this is being an X but would like to avoid paying the relevant penalty.”)
I would hope so! But what information indicates CFAR does this?
I have always gotten the impression from them that they want to be as cause agnostic as is reasonable, but I can’t speak to their probability estimates over time and thus how they’ve updated.
The biggest impact we can have on “raising the sanity waterline” is to move people from the group who believe in a Fideist Theory of Truth (“Things are true by virtue of how I feel about them”) to people who believe in the Correspondence Theory of Truth (“Things are true when they match the world outside my head!”), which also thus inspires people to listen to educated domain experts at all.
Are there people working on a reproducible system to help people make this move? It’s not at all obvious to me that this would be the comparative advantage of the people at CFAR. (Though it seems to me that much of the CFAR material is helping people finish making that transition, or, at least, get further along it.)
As far as I understand it, CFAR’s current focus is research and developing their rationality curriculum. The workshops exist to facilitate their research, they’re a good way to test which bits of rationality work and determine the best way to teach them.
In this model, broad improvements in very fundamental, schoolchild-level rationality education and the alleviation of poverty and time poverty are much stronger prospects for improving the world
In response to the question “Are you trying to make rationality part of primary and secondary school curricula?” the CFAR FAQ notes that:
We’d love to include decisionmaking training in early school curricula. It would be more high-impact than most other core pieces of the curriculum, both in terms of helping students’ own futures, and making them responsible citizens of the USA and the world.
So I’m fairly sure they agree with you on the importance of making broad improvements to education. It’s also worth noting that effective altruists are among their list of clients, so you could count that as an effort toward alleviating poverty if you’re feeling charitable.
However they go on to say:
At the moment, we don’t have the resources or political capital to change public school curricula, so it’s not a part of our near-term plans.
Additionally, for them to change public-school curricula they have to first develop a rationality curriculum, precisely what they’re doing at the moment—building a ‘minimum strategic product’. Giving “semi-advanced cognitive self-improvement workshops to the Silicon Valley elite” is just a convenient way to test this stuff.
You might argue for giving the rationality workshops to “people who have not even heard of the basics” but there’s a few problems with that. Firstly the number of people CFAR can teach in the short term is tiny percentage of the population, not where near enough to have a significant impact on society (unless those people are high impact people, but then they’ve probably already hear of the basics). Then there’s the fact that rationality just isn’t viewed as useful in the eyes of the general public, so most people won’t care about learning to become so. Also teaching the basics of rationality in a way that sticks is quite difficult.
Mind, if what you’re really trying to do is propagandize the kind of worldview that leads to taking MIRI seriously, you rather ought to come out and say that.
I don’t think CFAR is aiming to propagandize any worldview; they’re about developing rationality education, not getting people to believe any particular set of beliefs (other than perhaps those directly related to understanding how the brain works). I’m curious about why you think they might be (intentionally or unintentionally) doing so.
I truly wish that I was in a position to help make rationality training part of the public school curriculum because I think that would be of tremendous value to our society. I do work at a library and people hold workshops there...libraries could be a good place to “spread the word” to people who might be interested in rationality education, but may not have heard about it. The workshop would have to be free of charge, though, and CFAR isn’t there yet.
In terms of “saving throws” one can buy for a humanity that may be navigating tricky situations in an unknown future, improvements to thinking skill seem to be one of the strongest and most robust.
Improvements to collective decision making seem to be potentially an even bigger win. I mean, voting reform; the kind of thing advocated by Electology. Disclaimer: I’m a board member.
Why do I think that? Individual human decisionmaking has already been optimized by evolution. Sure, that optimization doesn’t fit perfectly with a modern need for rationality, but it’s pretty darn good. However, democratic decisionmaking is basically still using the first system that anybody ever thought of, and monte carlo utility simulations show that we can probably make it at least twice as good (using a random dictator as a baseline).
On the other hand, achieving voting reform requires a critical mass, while individual rationality only requires individuals. And electology is not as far along in organizational growth as CFAR. But it seems to me that it’s a complementary idea, and that it would be reasonable for an effective altruist to diversify their “saving throw” contributions. (We would also welcome rationalist board members or volunteers.)
Improvements to collective decision making seem to be potentially an even bigger win. I mean, voting reform; the kind of thing advocated by Electology. Disclaimer: I’m a board member.
Disclaimer: I now support you. What do you need done, what’s your vision, and where do you work? Making democracy work better has been a pet drive of mine for an extremely long time.
EDIT: Upon your website loading and my finding that you push Approval Voting, I am now writing in about volunteering.
I’m kind of curious; what do you think CFAR’s objective is 5 years from now (assuming they get the data they want and it strongly supports the value of the workshops)?
what do you think CFAR’s objective is 5 years from now (assuming they get the data they want and it strongly supports the value of the workshops)?
In all sincerity, I don’t actually know, and am very open to developing an opinion when I get actual information. I reread TFA, and it doesn’t seem to say. It does come out and state that “CFAR is one of the efforts most worth investing in”, but it doesn’t say how that worth will manifest itself within any bounded time period at all.
Why? You tend to be marketing your workshops to people who’ve already got significant training in much of Traditional Rationality. In my view, much of the world’s irrationality comes from people who have not even heard of the basics or people whose resource constraints do not allow them to apply what they know, or both. In this model, broad improvements in very fundamental, schoolchild-level rationality education and the alleviation of poverty and time poverty are much stronger prospects for improving the world through prevention of Dumb Moves than giving semi-advanced cognitive self-improvement workshops to the Silicon Valley elite.
Mind, if what you’re really trying to do is propagandize the kind of worldview that leads to taking MIRI seriously, you rather ought to come out and say that.
So, I recently started training in the Alexander Technique, which is a well-developed school of thought and practice on how to use bodies well. It’s been taught for about a century, and during the 1940s there was a brief attempt to teach it in schools to children.
My impression is that the children didn’t get all that much out of it- yes, they had better posture, and the students who might have been klutzier were more coordinated. But the people that keep Alexander alive are mostly the performers and musicians and people with painful movement problems- that is, the sort of people that get enough value out of it that it makes sense for them to take special lessons and think about it in their off time and so on.
Similarly, it might be true that while there is a great mass of irrationality out there, cognitive labor, like any other labor, can be specialized- and so focusing your rationality training on people who specialize in thinking makes sense just as focusing your movement training on people who specialize in movement makes sense. (Here I’m including speaking as movement for reasons that are anatomically obvious.)
But supposing your model is correct—that a broad rationality education would do the most good—I seem to recall hearing about an undergraduate-level rationality curriculum being developed by Keith Stanovich, a CFAR advisor, and I suspect Anna or others may know more details. Once we’ve got an undergraduate curriculum being taught, that should teach us enough to develop high-school level curriculum, and so on down to songs that can be sung in kindergarten.
Why? It seems to me that training people to think well is better, because if they end up disagreeing that gives you valuable information to update on.
This would imply that CFAR should be pitching its workshops to academics and government policymakers. Not to be a dick, but the latest local-mobile-social app-kerjigger is not intensive cognitive labor with a high impact on the world. Actual scientific research and public policy-making are (or, at least, scientific research is fairly intensive cognitive labor… I wouldn’t necessary say it has a high mean impact on any per-unit basis).
I would hope so! But what information indicates CFAR does this?
That’s good, but I worry that it doesn’t go far enough. The issue is not that we’re failing to teach probability theory to kindergartners—they don’t need it and don’t want it. The issue is that our society allows people to walk around thinking that there isn’t actually an external world to which their actions will be held accountable at all, and that subjective feeling both governs reality and normatively dictates correct actions.
To make an offensive political quip: there is the assertion-based community, and the reality-based community; too many people belong to the former and not nearly enough to the latter. The biggest impact we can have on “raising the sanity waterline” is to move people from the group who believe in a Fideist Theory of Truth (“Things are true by virtue of how I feel about them”) to people who believe in the Correspondence Theory of Truth (“Things are true when they match the world outside my head!”), which also thus inspires people to listen to educated domain experts at all.
To give a flagrantly stupid example, we really really really don’t want society’s way of dealing with the Friendly AI problem determined by people who believe that AIs have souls and would never harm anyone because they don’t have original sin. Giving Silicon Valley executives effectiveness workshops will not avert this problem, while teaching the broad public the very basic worldview that the universe is lawful, rather than consciously optimizing for recognizably humanoid goals, is likely to affect this problem.
My understanding is that CFAR is attended by both present and likely future academics; I don’t know about government policymakers. (I’ve met people on national advisory boards from at least two countries at CFAR workshops, but I don’t pretend to know how much influence they have on those boards, or how much influence those boards have on actual policy.)
At time of writing this comment, there are 14 startups listed in the post. What number of them would you consider local-mobile-social apps? (This seems to be an example of “not to be X” signifying “I am aware this is being an X but would like to avoid paying the relevant penalty.”)
I have always gotten the impression from them that they want to be as cause agnostic as is reasonable, but I can’t speak to their probability estimates over time and thus how they’ve updated.
Are there people working on a reproducible system to help people make this move? It’s not at all obvious to me that this would be the comparative advantage of the people at CFAR. (Though it seems to me that much of the CFAR material is helping people finish making that transition, or, at least, get further along it.)
As far as I understand it, CFAR’s current focus is research and developing their rationality curriculum. The workshops exist to facilitate their research, they’re a good way to test which bits of rationality work and determine the best way to teach them.
In response to the question “Are you trying to make rationality part of primary and secondary school curricula?” the CFAR FAQ notes that:
So I’m fairly sure they agree with you on the importance of making broad improvements to education. It’s also worth noting that effective altruists are among their list of clients, so you could count that as an effort toward alleviating poverty if you’re feeling charitable.
However they go on to say:
Additionally, for them to change public-school curricula they have to first develop a rationality curriculum, precisely what they’re doing at the moment—building a ‘minimum strategic product’. Giving “semi-advanced cognitive self-improvement workshops to the Silicon Valley elite” is just a convenient way to test this stuff.
You might argue for giving the rationality workshops to “people who have not even heard of the basics” but there’s a few problems with that. Firstly the number of people CFAR can teach in the short term is tiny percentage of the population, not where near enough to have a significant impact on society (unless those people are high impact people, but then they’ve probably already hear of the basics). Then there’s the fact that rationality just isn’t viewed as useful in the eyes of the general public, so most people won’t care about learning to become so. Also teaching the basics of rationality in a way that sticks is quite difficult.
I don’t think CFAR is aiming to propagandize any worldview; they’re about developing rationality education, not getting people to believe any particular set of beliefs (other than perhaps those directly related to understanding how the brain works). I’m curious about why you think they might be (intentionally or unintentionally) doing so.
I truly wish that I was in a position to help make rationality training part of the public school curriculum because I think that would be of tremendous value to our society. I do work at a library and people hold workshops there...libraries could be a good place to “spread the word” to people who might be interested in rationality education, but may not have heard about it. The workshop would have to be free of charge, though, and CFAR isn’t there yet.
Improvements to collective decision making seem to be potentially an even bigger win. I mean, voting reform; the kind of thing advocated by Electology. Disclaimer: I’m a board member.
Why do I think that? Individual human decisionmaking has already been optimized by evolution. Sure, that optimization doesn’t fit perfectly with a modern need for rationality, but it’s pretty darn good. However, democratic decisionmaking is basically still using the first system that anybody ever thought of, and monte carlo utility simulations show that we can probably make it at least twice as good (using a random dictator as a baseline).
On the other hand, achieving voting reform requires a critical mass, while individual rationality only requires individuals. And electology is not as far along in organizational growth as CFAR. But it seems to me that it’s a complementary idea, and that it would be reasonable for an effective altruist to diversify their “saving throw” contributions. (We would also welcome rationalist board members or volunteers.)
Disclaimer: I now support you. What do you need done, what’s your vision, and where do you work? Making democracy work better has been a pet drive of mine for an extremely long time.
EDIT: Upon your website loading and my finding that you push Approval Voting, I am now writing in about volunteering.
I’m kind of curious; what do you think CFAR’s objective is 5 years from now (assuming they get the data they want and it strongly supports the value of the workshops)?
In all sincerity, I don’t actually know, and am very open to developing an opinion when I get actual information. I reread TFA, and it doesn’t seem to say. It does come out and state that “CFAR is one of the efforts most worth investing in”, but it doesn’t say how that worth will manifest itself within any bounded time period at all.