It’s worth noting that in the rationalist vocabulary we also have Hamming Circles and Doom Circles. Neither of those are about Circling as described in this post but both terms point to different practices.
There’s no extensive writeup on Hamming Circles currently on LessWrong. At the same time a few posts cover some of the ground:
Doom Circles, in short, are as follows: someone is the focus of attention, and the circle will, one by one, point out their “doom”—this is something like “this is what your Hamming problem looks like to me” or “this is your core problem” or “if you fail at your goals, it will be because of X.”
The main goal is something like exposing your blind spots, or calibrating you on how much things matter / how much various problems you have are visible on the outside.
I’ve also personally benefited a lot from doom circles.
At the last CFAR reunion I experimented with a modified version of the protocol based on the idea that a surprising amount of doom circle feedback is projection (which doesn’t mean it’s not true), which I called “doom mirror circles” at the time: after each person gives doom, they point a mirror (in this case we used a phone camera) at themselves and then see what happens when they apply the doom to themselves. Worked pretty well, but I haven’t tried it since.
This is good! Keep going! Bringing awareness of projection into circling should also help ameliorate some failure modes. This works best when you experience it (via doom mirror in this case) than just think about it.
An element that’s easy to leave out in a description, but which I understand to be fairly critical, is the deliberate over-the-top nature of it. You don’t just say “That is your doom”, you go DOOOOOM, DOOMY DOOMY DOOM between one person receiving doom and the next. I believe its function is to both allow for people to be more extreme than they would if they didn’t have the vague feeling that anything could be taken as exaggeration, and simultaneously to lessen the emotional impact of the criticism.
Do keep in mind that Hamming circles have some very relevant differences from the sort of circling being described here. As someone who has facilitated many Hamming circles, I consider them broadly unrelated aside from both having “circle” in the name.
(probably you know this already, but just making sure!)
I was wrong on producing a writeup that qualifies as “a writeup” (I’m not sure exactly where I would have put it after the draft had been finished). I am poorly calibrated in personal action predictions (it may be the case that I am only tempted to make a prediction that I’ll do a thing when I want to signal to myself or others that I will in fact do a thing when the outside view says I won’t, so I should probably update downward that I’ll do a thing if I find myself trying to predict a probability that I’ll do it, over and above the normal downward adjustment for planning fallacy and Hofstadter’s Law).
Thankfully there is satisfactory content on the subject. For instance, “Group Debugging” seems to be the thing-that-is-doing-the-closest-thing-to-this at meetups that is more repeatable and tractable than the original Hamming question (it’s basically what the Hamming thing I said I facilitated was), though it is somewhat different from the broad scope of the original (though I don’t like the word “Debugging” associated with this exercise, it seems to fetishize using programming metaphors to apply to human psychology, which feels sterile, cliquey, overreliant on usage of “System 2” solutions, and not as obviously descriptive of what is happening as it could be. Maybe “Group Problem-Solving”?).
It’s worth noting that in the rationalist vocabulary we also have Hamming Circles and Doom Circles. Neither of those are about Circling as described in this post but both terms point to different practices.
There’s no extensive writeup on Hamming Circles currently on LessWrong. At the same time a few posts cover some of the ground:
https://vkrakovna.wordpress.com/2015/05/17/hamming-questions-and-bottlenecks/
https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/pjGGqmtqf8vChJ9BR/unofficial-canon-on-applied-rationality
For Doom Circles I unfortunately don’t know of any writeup.
Doom Circles, in short, are as follows: someone is the focus of attention, and the circle will, one by one, point out their “doom”—this is something like “this is what your Hamming problem looks like to me” or “this is your core problem” or “if you fail at your goals, it will be because of X.”
The main goal is something like exposing your blind spots, or calibrating you on how much things matter / how much various problems you have are visible on the outside.
I’ve also personally benefited a lot from doom circles.
At the last CFAR reunion I experimented with a modified version of the protocol based on the idea that a surprising amount of doom circle feedback is projection (which doesn’t mean it’s not true), which I called “doom mirror circles” at the time: after each person gives doom, they point a mirror (in this case we used a phone camera) at themselves and then see what happens when they apply the doom to themselves. Worked pretty well, but I haven’t tried it since.
This is good! Keep going! Bringing awareness of projection into circling should also help ameliorate some failure modes. This works best when you experience it (via doom mirror in this case) than just think about it.
An element that’s easy to leave out in a description, but which I understand to be fairly critical, is the deliberate over-the-top nature of it. You don’t just say “That is your doom”, you go DOOOOOM, DOOMY DOOMY DOOM between one person receiving doom and the next. I believe its function is to both allow for people to be more extreme than they would if they didn’t have the vague feeling that anything could be taken as exaggeration, and simultaneously to lessen the emotional impact of the criticism.
I facilitated a Hamming Circle two days ago and it looks like I will produce some kind of writeup someday, >50% probability.
Do keep in mind that Hamming circles have some very relevant differences from the sort of circling being described here. As someone who has facilitated many Hamming circles, I consider them broadly unrelated aside from both having “circle” in the name.
(probably you know this already, but just making sure!)
I was wrong on producing a writeup that qualifies as “a writeup” (I’m not sure exactly where I would have put it after the draft had been finished). I am poorly calibrated in personal action predictions (it may be the case that I am only tempted to make a prediction that I’ll do a thing when I want to signal to myself or others that I will in fact do a thing when the outside view says I won’t, so I should probably update downward that I’ll do a thing if I find myself trying to predict a probability that I’ll do it, over and above the normal downward adjustment for planning fallacy and Hofstadter’s Law).
Thankfully there is satisfactory content on the subject. For instance, “Group Debugging” seems to be the thing-that-is-doing-the-closest-thing-to-this at meetups that is more repeatable and tractable than the original Hamming question (it’s basically what the Hamming thing I said I facilitated was), though it is somewhat different from the broad scope of the original (though I don’t like the word “Debugging” associated with this exercise, it seems to fetishize using programming metaphors to apply to human psychology, which feels sterile, cliquey, overreliant on usage of “System 2” solutions, and not as obviously descriptive of what is happening as it could be. Maybe “Group Problem-Solving”?).