The thing I want most from LessWrong and the Rationality Community writ large is the martial art of rationality. That was the Sequences post that hooked me, that is the thing I personally want to find if it exists. Therefore, posts that are actually trying to build a real art of rationality (or warn of failed approaches) are the kind of thing I’m going to pay attention to, and if they look like they actually might work I’m going to strongly vote for including them in the Best Of LessWrong collection.
Feedbackloop-first Rationality sure looks like an actual attempt at solving the problem. It lays out a strategy, the plan seems like it plausibly might work, and there’s followup workshops that suggest some people are actually willing to spend money on this; that’s not a clear indicator that it works (people spend money on all kinds of things) but it is significantly more than armchair theorizing.
If Raemon keeps working on this and is successful, I expect we’ll see some testable results. If, say, the graduates or regular practitioners turn out to be able to confidently one-shot Thinking Physics style problems while demographically matched people stumble around, that’ll be a Hot Dang Look At That Chart result at least in the toy problems. If they go on to solve novel, real world problems, then that’s a clear suggestion this works.
There’s two branches of followup I’d like to see. One, Raemon’s already been doing; running more workshops teaching this, teasing out useful subskills to teach, and writing up how how to run exercises and what the subskills are. The second is evaluations. If Raemon’s keeping track of students and people who considered going but didn’t, I’d love to see a report on how both sets are doing in a year or two. I’m also tempted to ask on future community censuses whether people have done Feedbackloop-first Rationality workshops ([“Yes under Raemon”, “Yes by other people based on this”, “no”] and then throw a timed Thinking Physics-style problem at them, see if there’s any signal to pick up.
Mostly, I really want people to keep trying things in this genre of finding techniques and trainings to make better decisions. I want them to keep writing up what they’re trying, what works, and what doesn’t. If LessWrong stops having space for that in our Best Of collection, or has nobody in the community trying things like that, then I think something somewhere went badly wrong.
The thing I want most from LessWrong and the Rationality Community writ large is the martial art of rationality. That was the Sequences post that hooked me, that is the thing I personally want to find if it exists. Therefore, posts that are actually trying to build a real art of rationality (or warn of failed approaches) are the kind of thing I’m going to pay attention to, and if they look like they actually might work I’m going to strongly vote for including them in the Best Of LessWrong collection.
Feedbackloop-first Rationality sure looks like an actual attempt at solving the problem. It lays out a strategy, the plan seems like it plausibly might work, and there’s followup workshops that suggest some people are actually willing to spend money on this; that’s not a clear indicator that it works (people spend money on all kinds of things) but it is significantly more than armchair theorizing.
If Raemon keeps working on this and is successful, I expect we’ll see some testable results. If, say, the graduates or regular practitioners turn out to be able to confidently one-shot Thinking Physics style problems while demographically matched people stumble around, that’ll be a Hot Dang Look At That Chart result at least in the toy problems. If they go on to solve novel, real world problems, then that’s a clear suggestion this works.
There’s two branches of followup I’d like to see. One, Raemon’s already been doing; running more workshops teaching this, teasing out useful subskills to teach, and writing up how how to run exercises and what the subskills are. The second is evaluations. If Raemon’s keeping track of students and people who considered going but didn’t, I’d love to see a report on how both sets are doing in a year or two. I’m also tempted to ask on future community censuses whether people have done Feedbackloop-first Rationality workshops ([“Yes under Raemon”, “Yes by other people based on this”, “no”] and then throw a timed Thinking Physics-style problem at them, see if there’s any signal to pick up.
Mostly, I really want people to keep trying things in this genre of finding techniques and trainings to make better decisions. I want them to keep writing up what they’re trying, what works, and what doesn’t. If LessWrong stops having space for that in our Best Of collection, or has nobody in the community trying things like that, then I think something somewhere went badly wrong.
Thank you for your work Raemon!