(I’m interpreting this in a “turn things into exercises” lens which may not have been what you meant but happens to be what I’m On About this week)
I feel like I have recently hit the level where “actually deeply grok Bayes mathematically” is plausibly a good step for me.
I second Tuning your Cognitive Strategie”. I just ran some workshops that were originally planning to teach it explicitly, and I ended up being convinced that it was better to teach a somewhat more general meta-reflection exercise as the intro-version-of-it.
Looking over the /bestoflesswrong page, some things that stick out:
Babble has already been turned into an exercise but I think there’s room to make exercises that are optimized a bit more for… also teaching relevant other useful skills? It felt the like Babble Challenge series was sort of unnecessarily fun whimsical in a way that was, like, cool if that whimsy was intrinsically motivating. (I think connecting it with your
I would like more introspection/focusing-ish practica that are… tailored more for research? (or, oriented in directions other than… self-help? [my shoulder-Logan doesn’t like me labeling the area “self-help” and it doesn’t feel quite right to me either but it’s what I can quickly come up with])
Inadequate Equilibria could probably turn more exercise-ish although it’s also maybe similar to a lot of startup advice that already exists
I think a lot of alignment research stuff should ideally turn into something exercise-y.
I’ve been teaching recently and babble was an obvious prerequisite to things like goal factoring and hamming problems. It’s pretty easy to teach but I think even pretty marginal improvements would pay big dividends because it’s upstream of so many things.
I wrote up “How To Think Of Things” for CFAR a while back. I probably wanna at least edit it some before making it a top level post, but I’m curious what you think of it.
I feel like I have recently hit the level where “actually deeply grok Bayes mathematically” is plausibly a good step for me.
I generally think that, for all math-mind integration stuff, it’s helpful for people to first look at Michael Smith’s recent twitter rant about how math education conditioned virtually all humans to hate math.
Not just because deconditioning those long years is a critical step for taking math and really feeling like working with it, but also because most of the people writing about math (e.g. textbooks, tutorials, etc) either were conditioned to hate math to some degree, or even if they thoroughly don’t, their own reading will still be largely written by people who were conditioned to hate math to some degree, because literally everyone everywhere in society went through the same long years of math from the education system.
(I’m interpreting this in a “turn things into exercises” lens which may not have been what you meant but happens to be what I’m On About this week)
I feel like I have recently hit the level where “actually deeply grok Bayes mathematically” is plausibly a good step for me.
I second Tuning your Cognitive Strategie”. I just ran some workshops that were originally planning to teach it explicitly, and I ended up being convinced that it was better to teach a somewhat more general meta-reflection exercise as the intro-version-of-it.
Looking over the /bestoflesswrong page, some things that stick out:
Something in A Sketch of Good Communication maybe should be operationalized as an exercise.
Babble has already been turned into an exercise but I think there’s room to make exercises that are optimized a bit more for… also teaching relevant other useful skills? It felt the like Babble Challenge series was sort of unnecessarily fun whimsical in a way that was, like, cool if that whimsy was intrinsically motivating. (I think connecting it with your
I would like more introspection/focusing-ish practica that are… tailored more for research? (or, oriented in directions other than… self-help? [my shoulder-Logan doesn’t like me labeling the area “self-help” and it doesn’t feel quite right to me either but it’s what I can quickly come up with])
Inadequate Equilibria could probably turn more exercise-ish although it’s also maybe similar to a lot of startup advice that already exists
I think a lot of alignment research stuff should ideally turn into something exercise-y.
Teaching how to Notice Frame Differences, and also generally how to operationalize frames better in various directions. (See Shared Frames Are Capital Investments in Coordination for one aspect, and Meta-rationality and frames). Various Framing Practicums.
Paper-Reading for Gears
Gears-Level Models are Capital Investments (I guess various stuff relating to forming gearsy models)
Integrity and accountability are core parts of rationality
Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists
Yes Requires the Possibility of No
Rest Days vs Recovery Days
To listen well, get curious
The First Sample Gives the Most Information
I have a feeling some combination of Radical Probabilism and Infra-Bayesian and other “post-Bayes” epistemologies.
I’ve been teaching recently and babble was an obvious prerequisite to things like goal factoring and hamming problems. It’s pretty easy to teach but I think even pretty marginal improvements would pay big dividends because it’s upstream of so many things.
I wrote up “How To Think Of Things” for CFAR a while back. I probably wanna at least edit it some before making it a top level post, but I’m curious what you think of it.
I generally think that, for all math-mind integration stuff, it’s helpful for people to first look at Michael Smith’s recent twitter rant about how math education conditioned virtually all humans to hate math.
Not just because deconditioning those long years is a critical step for taking math and really feeling like working with it, but also because most of the people writing about math (e.g. textbooks, tutorials, etc) either were conditioned to hate math to some degree, or even if they thoroughly don’t, their own reading will still be largely written by people who were conditioned to hate math to some degree, because literally everyone everywhere in society went through the same long years of math from the education system.
This sentence cuts off.
yes—a perfect in-situ example of babble’s sibling, prune