At the time I posted this, it was at a stage where I had just unlocked the skill, felt it’s promise, but it hadn’t really paid off yet. I feel like it has paid off in some important ways since then.
Some of my first round of “Important, Cruxy Predictions” (from 6 months ago, 3 months before I made this post), resolved recently. Many of them were of the form “6 months from now will I have recently used [various rationality techniques I was inventing]”, of which “Fluent, Cruxy Predictions” was one.
I had given relatively low chances of most of them panning out. But, it turns out I’ve used basically my entire toolkit in the past ~week.
I’d also made an overall prediction of “a year from now (6 months ago) will the Lightcone team be using various tools.” This had essentially been the motivating example behind the “Murphijitsu, and refusing to be satisfied with ‘maybe’” section. I noticed I didn’t feel optimistic about Lightcone adopting any of the stuff I was generating. Then I made a set of predictions where “in worlds where it was overwhelmingly obvious that these tools were going to end up helping the rest of Lightcone, what other observations would I make along the way?”. This was helpful in clarifying further actions I needed to take for it to work (such as “find ways to mention it more often that felt helpful instead of overbearing”).
I’ve more recently started workshopping a “group decisionmaking” UI that helps turn vague strategy disagreements into concrete disagreements. You can see a prototype spreadsheet here.
Update:
At the time I posted this, it was at a stage where I had just unlocked the skill, felt it’s promise, but it hadn’t really paid off yet. I feel like it has paid off in some important ways since then.
Some of my first round of “Important, Cruxy Predictions” (from 6 months ago, 3 months before I made this post), resolved recently. Many of them were of the form “6 months from now will I have recently used [various rationality techniques I was inventing]”, of which “Fluent, Cruxy Predictions” was one.
I had given relatively low chances of most of them panning out. But, it turns out I’ve used basically my entire toolkit in the past ~week.
I’d also made an overall prediction of “a year from now (6 months ago) will the Lightcone team be using various tools.” This had essentially been the motivating example behind the “Murphijitsu, and refusing to be satisfied with ‘maybe’” section. I noticed I didn’t feel optimistic about Lightcone adopting any of the stuff I was generating. Then I made a set of predictions where “in worlds where it was overwhelmingly obvious that these tools were going to end up helping the rest of Lightcone, what other observations would I make along the way?”. This was helpful in clarifying further actions I needed to take for it to work (such as “find ways to mention it more often that felt helpful instead of overbearing”).
I’ve more recently started workshopping a “group decisionmaking” UI that helps turn vague strategy disagreements into concrete disagreements. You can see a prototype spreadsheet here.
fyi the spreadsheet is private atm
Whoops, should be fixed now.