I think the main important lesson is to not get attached to early ideas. Instead of banning early ideas, if anything comes up, you can just write tit down, and set it aside. I find this easier than a full ban, because it’s just an easier move to make for my brain.
(I have a similar problem with rationalist taboo. Don’t ban words, instead require people to locally define their terms for the duration of the conversation. It solves the same problem, and it isn’t a ban on though or speech.)
The other important lesson of the post, is that, in the early discussion, focus on increasing your shared understanding of the problem, rather than generating ideas. I.e. it’s ok for ideas to come up (and when they do you save them for later). But generating ideas is not the goal in the beginning.
Hm, thinking about it, I think the mechanism of classical brainstorming (where you up front think of as many ideas as you can) is to exhaust all the trivial, easy to think of, ideas, as fast as you can, and then you’re forced to think deeper to come up with new ideas. I guess that’s another way to do it. But I think this is method is both ineffective and unreliable, since it only works though a secondary effect.
. . .
It is interesting to comparing the advise in this post with the Game Tree of Aliment or Builder/Breaker Methodology also here. I’ve seen variants of this exercise popping lots of places in the AI Safety community. Some of them pare probably inspired by each other, but I’m pretty sure (80%) that this method have been invented several times independently.
I think that GTA/BBM works for the same reason the advice in the post works. It also solves the problem of not getting attached, and also as you keep breaking your ideas and explore new territory, you expand your understanding or the problem. I think an active ingrediens in this method is that the people playing this game knows that alignment is hard, and go in expecting their first several ideas to be terrible. You know the exercise is about noticing the flaws in your plans, and learn from your mistakes. Without this attitude, I don’t think it would work very well.
I think the main important lesson is to not get attached to early ideas. Instead of banning early ideas, if anything comes up, you can just write tit down, and set it aside. I find this easier than a full ban, because it’s just an easier move to make for my brain.
(I have a similar problem with rationalist taboo. Don’t ban words, instead require people to locally define their terms for the duration of the conversation. It solves the same problem, and it isn’t a ban on though or speech.)
The other important lesson of the post, is that, in the early discussion, focus on increasing your shared understanding of the problem, rather than generating ideas. I.e. it’s ok for ideas to come up (and when they do you save them for later). But generating ideas is not the goal in the beginning.
Hm, thinking about it, I think the mechanism of classical brainstorming (where you up front think of as many ideas as you can) is to exhaust all the trivial, easy to think of, ideas, as fast as you can, and then you’re forced to think deeper to come up with new ideas. I guess that’s another way to do it. But I think this is method is both ineffective and unreliable, since it only works though a secondary effect.
. . .
It is interesting to comparing the advise in this post with the Game Tree of Aliment or Builder/Breaker Methodology also here. I’ve seen variants of this exercise popping lots of places in the AI Safety community. Some of them pare probably inspired by each other, but I’m pretty sure (80%) that this method have been invented several times independently.
I think that GTA/BBM works for the same reason the advice in the post works. It also solves the problem of not getting attached, and also as you keep breaking your ideas and explore new territory, you expand your understanding or the problem. I think an active ingrediens in this method is that the people playing this game knows that alignment is hard, and go in expecting their first several ideas to be terrible. You know the exercise is about noticing the flaws in your plans, and learn from your mistakes. Without this attitude, I don’t think it would work very well.