I am curious, what were other “visions” of this workshop that you generated in the pre-planning stage? And now that you have done the workshop, which part of the previous visions might you incorporate into later workshops?
I’m hoping to go into more detail in the examples for the “Having 2+ plans at 3 levels of meta” post. But, when I was generating visions, it mostly wasn’t at the “workshop” level. Here’s what actually happened:
I started out thinking “MATS is coming to Lighthaven (the event center where I work). MATS is one of the biggest influxes of new people into the community, and I would like to experiment with rationality training on them while they’re here.”
My starting vision was:
run an initial single-afternoon workshop early in the MATS program based on the Thinking Physics exercises I ran last summer.
invite MATS students for beta-testing various other stuff I’d come up with, which I’d iterate on based on their needs and interests
try to teach them some kind of research-relevant skills that would help them go on to be successful alignment researchers
I hoped the longterm result of this would be, in future years, we might have a “pre-MATS” program, where aspiring alignment researchers come for (somewhere between 1 week and 3 months), for a “cognitive boot camp”, and then during MATS there’d be coaching sessions that helped keep ideas fresh in their mind while they did object level work.
I got some pushback from a colleague who believed::
there wasn’t a sufficient filter on MATS students such that it seemed very promising to try and teach all of them
In general, it’s just really hard to teach deep cognitive mindsets, people seem to either already have the mindsets, or they don’t, and tons of effort teaching them doesn’t help. It also seems like meaningfully contributing to alignment research requires those hard-to-teach mindsets.
At best, the program would still be expected to take 3 months, and take maybe like 1-2 years to develop that 3-month program, and that’s a. lot of time on everyone’s part, enough that it seemed to them more like a “back to the drawning board” moment than an “iterate a bit more” moment.
They felt more promise “teaching one particular skill that seemed important, that many people didn’t seem to able to do at all.”
I disagreed with the collaborator, but, did grudgingly admit to myself “well, the whole reason I’m optimistic about this idea is I think people could be way better at making plans. If this program is real, I should be able to make better plans. What better plans could I make?
Then I sat and thought for an hour, and came up with a bunch of interventions in the class of “improve researcher hours”:
Targeted interventions for established researchers I thought were already helping.
Instead of trying to teach everyone, figure out which researchers I already thought were good, and see if they had any blindspots, skill gaps or other problems that seemed fixable.
Get everyone Thinking Assistants.
There’s a range of jobs that go from “person who just sorta stares at you and helps you focus” to “person who notices your habits and suggests metacognitive improvements” to “actual research assistant.” Different people might need different versions, but, my impression is at least some people benefit tremendously from this. I know of one senior researcher who got an assistant and felt that their productivity went up 2-4x.
Get everyone once-a-week coaches.
cheaper than full-time assistants, and might still be good, in particular for independent researchers who don’t otehrwise have managers.
Figure out particular skills that one can learn quickly rather than requiring 3 months of practice.
a skill that came up that felt promising was teaching “hamming nature”, or, “actually frequently asking yourself ’is this the most important thing I could be working on?”.
I also considered other types of plans like:
Go back and build LessWrong features, maybe like “good distillation on the Alignment Forum that made it easier for people to get up to speed.”
Go figure out what’s actually happening in the Policy World and what I can do to help with that.
Help with compute governance.
I actually ended up doing some of many of those plans. Most notably I switched towards thinking of it as “teach a cluster of interelated skills in a short time period.” I’ve also integrated “weekly followup coaching” into something more like a mainline plan, in tandem with the 5-day workshop. (I’m not currently acting on it because it’s expensive and I’m still iterating, but I think of it as necessary and a good compromise between ‘3 month bootcamp’ and ‘just throw one workshop at them and pray’)
I’ve also followed up with a senior researcher and found at least some potential traction on helping them with some stuff, though it’s early and hard to tell how that went.
I am curious, what were other “visions” of this workshop that you generated in the pre-planning stage?
And now that you have done the workshop, which part of the previous visions might you incorporate into later workshops?
I’m hoping to go into more detail in the examples for the “Having 2+ plans at 3 levels of meta” post. But, when I was generating visions, it mostly wasn’t at the “workshop” level. Here’s what actually happened:
I started out thinking “MATS is coming to Lighthaven (the event center where I work). MATS is one of the biggest influxes of new people into the community, and I would like to experiment with rationality training on them while they’re here.”
My starting vision was:
run an initial single-afternoon workshop early in the MATS program based on the Thinking Physics exercises I ran last summer.
invite MATS students for beta-testing various other stuff I’d come up with, which I’d iterate on based on their needs and interests
try to teach them some kind of research-relevant skills that would help them go on to be successful alignment researchers
I hoped the longterm result of this would be, in future years, we might have a “pre-MATS” program, where aspiring alignment researchers come for (somewhere between 1 week and 3 months), for a “cognitive boot camp”, and then during MATS there’d be coaching sessions that helped keep ideas fresh in their mind while they did object level work.
I got some pushback from a colleague who believed::
there wasn’t a sufficient filter on MATS students such that it seemed very promising to try and teach all of them
In general, it’s just really hard to teach deep cognitive mindsets, people seem to either already have the mindsets, or they don’t, and tons of effort teaching them doesn’t help. It also seems like meaningfully contributing to alignment research requires those hard-to-teach mindsets.
At best, the program would still be expected to take 3 months, and take maybe like 1-2 years to develop that 3-month program, and that’s a. lot of time on everyone’s part, enough that it seemed to them more like a “back to the drawning board” moment than an “iterate a bit more” moment.
They felt more promise “teaching one particular skill that seemed important, that many people didn’t seem to able to do at all.”
I disagreed with the collaborator, but, did grudgingly admit to myself “well, the whole reason I’m optimistic about this idea is I think people could be way better at making plans. If this program is real, I should be able to make better plans. What better plans could I make?
Then I sat and thought for an hour, and came up with a bunch of interventions in the class of “improve researcher hours”:
Targeted interventions for established researchers I thought were already helping.
Instead of trying to teach everyone, figure out which researchers I already thought were good, and see if they had any blindspots, skill gaps or other problems that seemed fixable.
Get everyone Thinking Assistants.
There’s a range of jobs that go from “person who just sorta stares at you and helps you focus” to “person who notices your habits and suggests metacognitive improvements” to “actual research assistant.” Different people might need different versions, but, my impression is at least some people benefit tremendously from this. I know of one senior researcher who got an assistant and felt that their productivity went up 2-4x.
Get everyone once-a-week coaches.
cheaper than full-time assistants, and might still be good, in particular for independent researchers who don’t otehrwise have managers.
Figure out particular skills that one can learn quickly rather than requiring 3 months of practice.
a skill that came up that felt promising was teaching “hamming nature”, or, “actually frequently asking yourself ’is this the most important thing I could be working on?”.
I also considered other types of plans like:
Go back and build LessWrong features, maybe like “good distillation on the Alignment Forum that made it easier for people to get up to speed.”
Go figure out what’s actually happening in the Policy World and what I can do to help with that.
Help with compute governance.
I actually ended up doing some of many of those plans. Most notably I switched towards thinking of it as “teach a cluster of interelated skills in a short time period.” I’ve also integrated “weekly followup coaching” into something more like a mainline plan, in tandem with the 5-day workshop. (I’m not currently acting on it because it’s expensive and I’m still iterating, but I think of it as necessary and a good compromise between ‘3 month bootcamp’ and ‘just throw one workshop at them and pray’)
I’ve also followed up with a senior researcher and found at least some potential traction on helping them with some stuff, though it’s early and hard to tell how that went.