A few people during the beta-tests expressed interest in “Feedbackloop rationality club” (as opposed to my original vision of ’feedbackloop rationality school/research center where people are mostly training fulltime 1-12 weeks at a time).
I have some ideas for such a club. It does seem wholesome and fun and more practical for most people. But it’s still a pretty effortful project, and I’d personally be most interested in doing it if I’d first spend 1-3 months actually reducing my major uncertainties about whether this project is competitive with other x-risk reduction work I could be doing.
I think the club-version would take too long for me to figure out whether people are really improving. But one thing I like about this whole idea is that it does feel fairly scalable/parallelizable, and it feels like a healthy/good feature of the broader rationality community if people tried out doing this sort of thing as a local meetups, and reported on their results.
I think “Feedbackloop Rationality Club” is, if you had a good working version of it, way better than “Feedbackloop rationality school” for the goal of getting the skillset to spread. Few people can actually spend a month training full time at something. Doing so involves taking a leave from work or school. It involves a bigger social explanation than a club or a once-a-week class does. It’s harder to pitch someone on, since you can’t try a little bit and easily walk away if you don’t like it.
I’m a lot more uncertain about what teaches the skillset to individuals better. If I imagine someone playing the guitar for an hour a week for a year vs someone playing the guitar all day for one week and then not touching an instrument for a year, I’m maybe 60% sure the person doing once a week will do better. If you would rather have ten people who are S tier guitarists rather than a million people who are B tier guitarists, the months long intensive training school sounds like a much better approach. (Though if I was in charge of that, I’d be tempted to do both. Get a million people to practice once a week, check if any of them stand out, and invite those people to the intensive program.) For X-risk, especially AI risk, I’d expect you want a smaller number of better rationalists.
I don’t know how to make S tier rationalists. I have some ideas on how to turn D tier rationalists into C tier rationalists, and I have ambitions of hitting the B range. This topic is very relevant to my interests, especially these days, and if you have an idea of what the payload of such a meetup would look like then I think I can contribute some of the wrapper and the reporting.
I think “Feedbackloop Rationality Club” is, if you had a good working version of it, way better than “Feedbackloop rationality school” for the goal of getting the skillset to spread.
I agree with this, but, I think we’re aways away from it being clear what the skillsets exactly what you want to spread are. I think there’s a lot of versions of this that are kind of fake, and I think it’s an important gear in my model that you should actually see yourself demonstrably improving to verify you’re doing it right. (I think it’s much easier to tell if you’re getting better at guitar than at “thinking”)
That all said… I’ve had on my TODO list to ping you about this and say “hey, I think encouraging meetup organizers to do this is probably a) at least worth trying once, and b) Probably better than a lot of other meetups types for leveling up rationalists, even in the unguided, less committed fashion.” (It’s also fun, so, it’s at least competitive on that axis)
I agree we don’t know what the best skillsets are. I have a version in my head that’s maybe one third The Art Of Rationality and two thirds The Art Of Screwtape though the boundaries between those are fuzzy. There is a confounder I’ve noticed where people tend to be growing all the time anyway, so it’s common for them to get better at random tasks and generate false positives. (Example: A ten year old who doesn’t know Bayes loses Magic games to a ten year old who does, but they can both lose to twenty year olds with experience and money.)
I notice I don’t have that high of a threshold for trying things here. Most of that willingness to flail about and risk fake versions of this (especially if I flag it as fun meetup ideas more than flagging it as intensive rationality training) are downstream of a lot of thinking about which parts of a meetup are load bearing. “Rationalists get together to play 7 Wonders or Hanabi and chat” is a beloved pastime which I wouldn’t try to replace with “Rationalists get together to do physics homework” but would be cheerful about trying to replace with “Rationalists get together to play Rationality Cardinality or Calibration Trivia and chat.” Double Crux continues to be a popular ACX meetup activity, and I suspect that’s because it involves pairing up to talk about something that’s divisive.
A few people during the beta-tests expressed interest in “Feedbackloop rationality club” (as opposed to my original vision of ’feedbackloop rationality school/research center where people are mostly training fulltime 1-12 weeks at a time).
I have some ideas for such a club. It does seem wholesome and fun and more practical for most people. But it’s still a pretty effortful project, and I’d personally be most interested in doing it if I’d first spend 1-3 months actually reducing my major uncertainties about whether this project is competitive with other x-risk reduction work I could be doing.
I think the club-version would take too long for me to figure out whether people are really improving. But one thing I like about this whole idea is that it does feel fairly scalable/parallelizable, and it feels like a healthy/good feature of the broader rationality community if people tried out doing this sort of thing as a local meetups, and reported on their results.
I think “Feedbackloop Rationality Club” is, if you had a good working version of it, way better than “Feedbackloop rationality school” for the goal of getting the skillset to spread. Few people can actually spend a month training full time at something. Doing so involves taking a leave from work or school. It involves a bigger social explanation than a club or a once-a-week class does. It’s harder to pitch someone on, since you can’t try a little bit and easily walk away if you don’t like it.
I’m a lot more uncertain about what teaches the skillset to individuals better. If I imagine someone playing the guitar for an hour a week for a year vs someone playing the guitar all day for one week and then not touching an instrument for a year, I’m maybe 60% sure the person doing once a week will do better. If you would rather have ten people who are S tier guitarists rather than a million people who are B tier guitarists, the months long intensive training school sounds like a much better approach. (Though if I was in charge of that, I’d be tempted to do both. Get a million people to practice once a week, check if any of them stand out, and invite those people to the intensive program.) For X-risk, especially AI risk, I’d expect you want a smaller number of better rationalists.
I don’t know how to make S tier rationalists. I have some ideas on how to turn D tier rationalists into C tier rationalists, and I have ambitions of hitting the B range. This topic is very relevant to my interests, especially these days, and if you have an idea of what the payload of such a meetup would look like then I think I can contribute some of the wrapper and the reporting.
I agree with this, but, I think we’re aways away from it being clear what the skillsets exactly what you want to spread are. I think there’s a lot of versions of this that are kind of fake, and I think it’s an important gear in my model that you should actually see yourself demonstrably improving to verify you’re doing it right. (I think it’s much easier to tell if you’re getting better at guitar than at “thinking”)
That all said… I’ve had on my TODO list to ping you about this and say “hey, I think encouraging meetup organizers to do this is probably a) at least worth trying once, and b) Probably better than a lot of other meetups types for leveling up rationalists, even in the unguided, less committed fashion.” (It’s also fun, so, it’s at least competitive on that axis)
I agree we don’t know what the best skillsets are. I have a version in my head that’s maybe one third The Art Of Rationality and two thirds The Art Of Screwtape though the boundaries between those are fuzzy. There is a confounder I’ve noticed where people tend to be growing all the time anyway, so it’s common for them to get better at random tasks and generate false positives. (Example: A ten year old who doesn’t know Bayes loses Magic games to a ten year old who does, but they can both lose to twenty year olds with experience and money.)
I notice I don’t have that high of a threshold for trying things here. Most of that willingness to flail about and risk fake versions of this (especially if I flag it as fun meetup ideas more than flagging it as intensive rationality training) are downstream of a lot of thinking about which parts of a meetup are load bearing. “Rationalists get together to play 7 Wonders or Hanabi and chat” is a beloved pastime which I wouldn’t try to replace with “Rationalists get together to do physics homework” but would be cheerful about trying to replace with “Rationalists get together to play Rationality Cardinality or Calibration Trivia and chat.” Double Crux continues to be a popular ACX meetup activity, and I suspect that’s because it involves pairing up to talk about something that’s divisive.