Sunday, Nov 8: Tuning Your Cognitive Algorithms
For this Sunday’s LW Online Meetup, I’ll be will be leading an exercise on Mindful Puzzle Solving, derived from the Tuning Your Cognitive Algorithms exercise on bewelltuned.com.
The basic premise is to solve a medium-difficulty-puzzle, while spending a lot of attention on noticing exactly what your brain is doing at every step. You can then notice which pieces of your process are doing most of the work, and which are wasted motion.
This is not only valuable for improving your puzzle-solving abilities, but for generally improving the feedback loops that improve your cognitive abilities. I’ve found this to be one of the most essential rationalist skills that I’ve learned.
We’ll be meeting in the Lecture Hall in the Walled Garden, at noon PT. (Follow this invite link to enter the Garden. Follow the path to the Tardis, and then enter the “Bacon Lecture Hall”)
I’ll give a short talk on the theory-and-practice of tuning your cognitive algorithms. We’ll spend two 20 minute periods doing individual exercises, and then talking about what we learned.
Update: For a variety of reasons I decided to host the event fully inside LessWrong’s gather.town Walled Garden.
http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=yoG1&event=guest-pass
(FYI, link doesn’t work for me)
It is supposed to start working at 11:45am
Whoops. Okay, for immediate future, just going to garden.lesswrong.com should work.
EDIT: this also doesn’t work. This one should work. So sorry:
http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=yoG1&event=guest-pass
I tried that a couple times, including just now after seeing your recommendation to, but get:
”The Walled Garden is a private virtual space managed by the LessWrong team.
It is closed right now. Please return on Sunday between noon and 4pm PT, when it is open to everyone. If you have a non-Sunday invite, you may need to log in.”
Did you try the whole URL? i.e. try clicking this link
The edit with the guest-pass worked!
Trying the link at 11:59 california time, I am getting “Your invite code is for an event that has yet started! Please come back at Monday, November 9th, 1:45am”
(Ah, I’m in central time, so that’s why mine says 1:45a but MikkW’s says 11:45p. Anyway, still locked out)
It’s saying to come back at 11:45 pm for me
Apologies. This link should hopefully work:
http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=yoG1&event=guest-pass
Sunday is November 8th. Today is November 5th. Don’t remember it THAT hard.
lol, fixed.
Now, um, off to for my quintyearly tradition of watching V for Vendetta every fifth 5th of November.
The guest pass works for me, but then I get a “Congratulations! Your invite code to Guest Pass is valid (and will be for next many hours). Please take a look at our guidelines below, then join the party!” message, and when I click on “enter the garden”, I get a blank page. The devtools console says “Failed to read the ‘localStorage’ property from ‘Window’: Access is denied for this document.” with the callstack pointing at gather.town/bundle.js. Using chromium, which has worked for me on gather.town before.
(edit: found a link to it on gather.town itself and that works)
Yeah, I think there is a chromium thing in particular with embedded iframes and gather town. Not sure why. Using the Gather Town link directly should work.
Whoops, I posted the wrong link earlier:
http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=yoG1&event=guest-pass
Although I had trouble logging in at first, I still liked having the whole thing inside the walled garden, rather than starting in zoom and switching. I think it was worth the trouble (and probably that trouble won’t happen every time)