Are there resources for someone who is considering running a free local rationality workshop?
If not does anyone have any good ideas for things that could be done in a weekly hour-long workshop?
I was surprised that there weren’t any free resources from CFAR for exactly this.
The first idea is to play a “rationalist taboo”. Prepare pieces of paper with random words, and tell people to split in pairs, choose a random word, and explain it to their partner. This should only require a short explanation that it is forbidden to use not just the linguistically related words, but also synonyms and some other cheap tricks (such as telling a name of a famous person when explaining an idea). -- Then you could encourage people to use “be specific” on each other in real life. (Perhaps make it a game, that they each have to use it 3 times within the rest of the meetup.)
You could have them use CFAR’s calibration game, and then try making some estimates together (“will it rain tomorrow?”), and perhaps make a prediction market. In making the estimates together, you could try to explore some biases, like a conjunction fallacy (first ask them to estimate something complex, then to estimate individual components, then review the estimate of the complex thing)… I am not sure about that part. Or you could ask people to make 90% confidence intervals for… mass of the Moon, number of people in Bolivia, etc. (things easy to find in wikipedia)… first silently on paper, then telling you the results to write them on blackboard (the hypothesis is that way more than 10% of the intervals will be wrong).
You could do an experiment on anchoring/priming, for example giving each of the people a die, and a questionnaire where the first question would be “roll a die, multiply the result by 10 and add 15, and write it as your first answer” and “how many % of countries in Africa are members of UN? write as your second answer”, then collect the results and write all the estimates on the blackboard in columns by the first answer (as in “people who had 25 in the first answer provided the following values: …; people who has 35, provided these values: …”). People are not allowed to talk while filling out the questionnaire. Another example of priming could be asking in questionnaire the first group “what year did the first world war start?” and then “when was steam engine invented?” (emphasising that if you don’t know, make your best guess), and asking another group “when was the first crusade?” and then “when was steam engine invented?” (the hypothesis is that the first group will give later estimates for the steam engine than the second group).
Are there resources for someone who is considering running a free local rationality workshop? If not does anyone have any good ideas for things that could be done in a weekly hour-long workshop? I was surprised that there weren’t any free resources from CFAR for exactly this.
The How to Run a Successful LessWrong Meetup booklet probably has some helpful crossover ideas.
A wiki page would be helpful.
The first idea is to play a “rationalist taboo”. Prepare pieces of paper with random words, and tell people to split in pairs, choose a random word, and explain it to their partner. This should only require a short explanation that it is forbidden to use not just the linguistically related words, but also synonyms and some other cheap tricks (such as telling a name of a famous person when explaining an idea). -- Then you could encourage people to use “be specific” on each other in real life. (Perhaps make it a game, that they each have to use it 3 times within the rest of the meetup.)
You could have them use CFAR’s calibration game, and then try making some estimates together (“will it rain tomorrow?”), and perhaps make a prediction market. In making the estimates together, you could try to explore some biases, like a conjunction fallacy (first ask them to estimate something complex, then to estimate individual components, then review the estimate of the complex thing)… I am not sure about that part. Or you could ask people to make 90% confidence intervals for… mass of the Moon, number of people in Bolivia, etc. (things easy to find in wikipedia)… first silently on paper, then telling you the results to write them on blackboard (the hypothesis is that way more than 10% of the intervals will be wrong).
You could do an experiment on anchoring/priming, for example giving each of the people a die, and a questionnaire where the first question would be “roll a die, multiply the result by 10 and add 15, and write it as your first answer” and “how many % of countries in Africa are members of UN? write as your second answer”, then collect the results and write all the estimates on the blackboard in columns by the first answer (as in “people who had 25 in the first answer provided the following values: …; people who has 35, provided these values: …”). People are not allowed to talk while filling out the questionnaire. Another example of priming could be asking in questionnaire the first group “what year did the first world war start?” and then “when was steam engine invented?” (emphasising that if you don’t know, make your best guess), and asking another group “when was the first crusade?” and then “when was steam engine invented?” (the hypothesis is that the first group will give later estimates for the steam engine than the second group).