I just want to say that your described solution to “Problem 1: Differentiating effective interventions from unfalsifiable woo” suggests to me that your curriculum would be mostly useless for me, and maybe for many other people as well, because it won’t go deep enough. I think either I’ve already gotten everything I can get from shallow interventions “like better nutrition, using your speaking voice more effectively, improving your personal financial organization, emergency preparedness, and implementing a knowledge management system”, or they were never that good in the first place. Personally, I am focusing on psychotherapy right now. It’s unfortunate that it consists mostly of borderline-unfalsifiable woo but that’s all we’ve got.
You’re may be right, but I would suggest looking through the full list of workshops and courses. I was merely trying to give an overall sense of the flavor of our approach, not give an exhaustive list. The Practical Decision-Making course would be an example of content that is distinctly “rationality-training” content. Despite the frequent discussions of abstract decision theory that crop up on LessWrong, practically nobody is actually able to draw up a decision tree for a real-world problem, and it’s a valuable skill and mental framework.
I would also mention that a big part of the benefit of the cohort is to have “rationality buddies” off whom you can bounce your struggles. Another Curse of Smart is thinking that you need to solve every problem yourself.
I just want to say that your described solution to “Problem 1: Differentiating effective interventions from unfalsifiable woo” suggests to me that your curriculum would be mostly useless for me, and maybe for many other people as well, because it won’t go deep enough. I think either I’ve already gotten everything I can get from shallow interventions “like better nutrition, using your speaking voice more effectively, improving your personal financial organization, emergency preparedness, and implementing a knowledge management system”, or they were never that good in the first place. Personally, I am focusing on psychotherapy right now. It’s unfortunate that it consists mostly of borderline-unfalsifiable woo but that’s all we’ve got.
You’re may be right, but I would suggest looking through the full list of workshops and courses. I was merely trying to give an overall sense of the flavor of our approach, not give an exhaustive list. The Practical Decision-Making course would be an example of content that is distinctly “rationality-training” content. Despite the frequent discussions of abstract decision theory that crop up on LessWrong, practically nobody is actually able to draw up a decision tree for a real-world problem, and it’s a valuable skill and mental framework.
I would also mention that a big part of the benefit of the cohort is to have “rationality buddies” off whom you can bounce your struggles. Another Curse of Smart is thinking that you need to solve every problem yourself.