There are many subjects where written instructions are much less valuable than instruction that includes direct practice: circling, karate, meditation, dancing, etc.
Yes, I agree: for these subjects, the “there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know how to teach in writing” disclaimer I suggested in the grandparent would be a big understatement.
a syllabus is useless (possibly harmful) for teaching economics to people who have bad assumptions about what kind of questions economics answers
Useless, I can believe. (The extreme limiting case of “there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know how to teach in this format” is “there is literally nothing we know how to teach in this format.”) But harmful? How? Won’t the unexpected syllabus section titles at least disabuse them of their bad assumptions?
Reading the sequences [...] are unlikely to have much relevance to what CFAR teaches.
Really? The tagline on the website says, “Developing clear thinking for the sake of humanity’s future.” I guess I’m having trouble imagining a developing-clear-thinking-for-the-sake-of-humanity’s-future curriculum for which the things we write about on this website would be irrelevant. The “comfort zone expansion” exercises I’ve heard about would qualify, but Sequences-knowledge seems totally relevant to something like, say, double crux.
(It’s actually pretty weird/surprising that I’ve never personally been to a CfAR workshop! I think I’ve been assuming that my entire social world has already been so anchored on the so-called “rationalist” community for so long, that the workshop proper would be superfluous.)
The idea that CFAR would be superfluous is fairly close to the kind of harm that CFAR worries about. (You might have been right to believe that it would have been superfluous in 2012, but CFAR has changed since then in ways that it hasn’t managed to make very legible.)
I think meditation provides the best example for illustrating the harm. It’s fairly easy to confuse simple meditation instructions (e.g. focus on your breath, sit still with a straight spine) with the most important features of meditation. It’s fairly easy to underestimate the additional goals of meditation, because they’re hard to observe and don’t fit well with more widely accepted worldviews.
My experience suggests that getting value out of meditation is heavily dependent on a feeling (mostly at a system 1 level) that I’m trying something new, and there were times when I wasn’t able to learn from meditation, because I mistakenly thought that focusing on my breath was a much more central part of meditation than it actually is.
The times when I got more value out of meditation were times when I tried new variations on the instructions, or new environments (e.g. on a meditation retreat). I can’t see any signs that the new instructions or new environment were inherently better at teaching meditation. It seems to have been mostly that any source of novelty about the meditation makes me more alert to learning from it.
My understanding is that CFAR is largely concerned that participants will mistakenly believe that they’ve already learned something that CFAR is teaching, and that will sometimes be half-true—participants may know it at a system 2 level, when CFAR is trying to teach other parts of their minds that still reject it.
I think I experienced that a bit, due to having experience with half-baked versions of early CFAR before I took a well-designed version of their workshop. E.g. different parts of my mind have different attitudes to acknowledging my actual motivations when they’re less virtuous than the motivations that my system 2 endorses. I understood that pretty well at some level before CFAR existed, yet there are still important parts of my mind that cling to self-deceptive beliefs about my motives.
CFAR likely can’t teach a class that’s explicitly aimed at that without having lots of participants feel defensive about their motives, in a way that makes them less open to learning. So they approach it via instruction that is partly focused on teaching other things that look more mundane and practical. Those other things often felt familiar enough to me that I reacted by saying: I’ll relax now and conserve my mental energy for some future part of the curriculum that’s more novel. That might have led me to do the equivalent of what I did when I was meditating the same way repeatedly without learning anything new. How can I tell whether that caused me to miss something important?
Yes, I agree: for these subjects, the “there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know how to teach in writing” disclaimer I suggested in the grandparent would be a big understatement.
Useless, I can believe. (The extreme limiting case of “there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know how to teach in this format” is “there is literally nothing we know how to teach in this format.”) But harmful? How? Won’t the unexpected syllabus section titles at least disabuse them of their bad assumptions?
Really? The tagline on the website says, “Developing clear thinking for the sake of humanity’s future.” I guess I’m having trouble imagining a developing-clear-thinking-for-the-sake-of-humanity’s-future curriculum for which the things we write about on this website would be irrelevant. The “comfort zone expansion” exercises I’ve heard about would qualify, but Sequences-knowledge seems totally relevant to something like, say, double crux.
(It’s actually pretty weird/surprising that I’ve never personally been to a CfAR workshop! I think I’ve been assuming that my entire social world has already been so anchored on the so-called “rationalist” community for so long, that the workshop proper would be superfluous.)
The idea that CFAR would be superfluous is fairly close to the kind of harm that CFAR worries about. (You might have been right to believe that it would have been superfluous in 2012, but CFAR has changed since then in ways that it hasn’t managed to make very legible.)
I think meditation provides the best example for illustrating the harm. It’s fairly easy to confuse simple meditation instructions (e.g. focus on your breath, sit still with a straight spine) with the most important features of meditation. It’s fairly easy to underestimate the additional goals of meditation, because they’re hard to observe and don’t fit well with more widely accepted worldviews.
My experience suggests that getting value out of meditation is heavily dependent on a feeling (mostly at a system 1 level) that I’m trying something new, and there were times when I wasn’t able to learn from meditation, because I mistakenly thought that focusing on my breath was a much more central part of meditation than it actually is.
The times when I got more value out of meditation were times when I tried new variations on the instructions, or new environments (e.g. on a meditation retreat). I can’t see any signs that the new instructions or new environment were inherently better at teaching meditation. It seems to have been mostly that any source of novelty about the meditation makes me more alert to learning from it.
My understanding is that CFAR is largely concerned that participants will mistakenly believe that they’ve already learned something that CFAR is teaching, and that will sometimes be half-true—participants may know it at a system 2 level, when CFAR is trying to teach other parts of their minds that still reject it.
I think I experienced that a bit, due to having experience with half-baked versions of early CFAR before I took a well-designed version of their workshop. E.g. different parts of my mind have different attitudes to acknowledging my actual motivations when they’re less virtuous than the motivations that my system 2 endorses. I understood that pretty well at some level before CFAR existed, yet there are still important parts of my mind that cling to self-deceptive beliefs about my motives.
CFAR likely can’t teach a class that’s explicitly aimed at that without having lots of participants feel defensive about their motives, in a way that makes them less open to learning. So they approach it via instruction that is partly focused on teaching other things that look more mundane and practical. Those other things often felt familiar enough to me that I reacted by saying: I’ll relax now and conserve my mental energy for some future part of the curriculum that’s more novel. That might have led me to do the equivalent of what I did when I was meditating the same way repeatedly without learning anything new. How can I tell whether that caused me to miss something important?