The workshops still aren’t an easy environment for introverts. The negative parts of my experience in May 2012 were mostly because of this.
In what sense is a personal development seminar to be supposed to feel easy?
If someone is really overloaded they can excuse themselves and pause for some time.
It’s a question of what you’re developing. The four days where you’re learning how to use Bayes in everyday life and install new habits and do goal factoring may not be the time when you want to also train not minding social overload. You can do that any time.
I didn’t take the workshop so I don’t know the exact curriculum. As far as I understand besides teaching people who do use Bayes the workshop also includes exercises to expand peoples comfort zone.
The idea is to train these skills separately. CoZE training will be hard for introverts, but this doesn’t mean they need to be constantly out of their comfort zone during all of the other classes.
If it does not feel easy, you are probably doing it wrong.
Often the hard way is the only way we know, and it is better than nothing. But I believe there is nothing intrinsically hard about personal development or anything. It’s just that the easy ways are a very small subset of all ways to do something.
Example of “hard”: Not eating chocolate, when you have chocolate at home.
Example of “easy”: Not eating chocolate, when you have no chocolate at home.
Switching from “hard” to “easy” is much easier than using your willpower to win at the “hard” mode. For some reasons many people don’t realize that, and instead spend a lot of time talking about it, motivating themselves, inventing various punishment schemes, attending motivation seminars, etc.
I suspect that something similar can be used in many situations. The first aspect is: don’t work harder, work smarter. The second aspect is: if it involves some kind of brain power (willpower, memory, creativity), feeling stressed (because you really try to do it the hard way) only makes it more difficult… but for some reason a lot of popular advice recommends increasing the stress (by using rewards and punishments of many kinds). -- I suspect this is the corrupted hardware in action (rewarding and punishing people brings higher status to one who does it).
Some people are afraid that doing things the “easy” way is somehow inferior, probably because it is not mysterious enough. That somehow if you stop eating chocolate by not buying it, you will be unable to resist it when someone brings you a piece of chocolate to your home. I suspect the experiments would show the other way round, because even resisting eating chocolate by not buying it creates a success spiral and changes your habits.
The difficult part is that sometimes you just can’t find the “easy” way. For example, sometimes you are not sufficiently in control of your environment. But many people don’t even try.
I think the problem is at least as much bad software as bad hardware, though. I believe the reason people don’t try to figure out easy ways to do things is that they’ve absorbed an idea that it’s more important to prove their virtue by doing hard things than to succeed, and I suspect that idea gets taught by people in authority who’d rather that subordinates not have initiative.
One possible approach is: If you don’t need something, throw it away; then you have an “easy” solution for given thing not cluttering your home anymore.
A similar but less extreme approach could be to buy a lot of stackable boxes and put everything there, and only take out things that you really need at some moment. After some time the things you didn’t need would naturally stay in the boxes.
This could solve some of my problems; I don’t know if your problems are of this type. Now that I think about it, I would have to do some research about a good system of boxes (big boxes for large items, small boxes for smaller items, and a system to put them all in one place), but the impact on my home could be great. I had a suspicion for a long time that the storage system has a strong impact on how the rest of the house looks, but I didn’t spend time researching a good storage system.
If it does not feel easy, you are probably doing it wrong.
If you look at the discourse about deliberate practice it nearly always describe as hard and challenging.
On an emotional level, people have ugh fields to protect them from dealing with hard issues in their life.
If you do lead people past their ugh fields they have to deal with the hard emotional issue from which the ugh field protected them.
If you break through enough ugh fields the emotional processing needs energy. If you try to do as much in a short time frame people will feel overloaded.
There are different kinds of “hard”—for example hard and fun (beating the final Super Mario level), or hard and painful (finishing the last meters of a marathon run with a broken leg). The former kind of “hard” is great for deliberate practice, but I suppose the introvert socially overloaded during rationality lessons feels like the latter kind of “hard”.
If the goal of the lesson is dealing with the ugh fields, bringing people to their ugh fields may be useful. (But seems to me that CBT shows that this is better done slowly.) If the goal of the lesson is learning bayesian statistics or similar stuff, bringing people to their unrelated ugh fields is harmful. Challenging the introverted behavior has its place during the “comfort zone expansion” exercises, but is not essential for the remaining lessons.
If the goal of the lesson is dealing with the ugh fields, bringing people to their ugh fields may be useful. (But seems to me that CBT shows that this is better done slowly.)
That depends on what you mean with “better”. People who practice CBT are generally paid by the hour and don’t have a real issue to spend more time with an issue. That different than someone who wants to produce as much personal change as possible in 3 days.
Challenging the introverted behavior has its place during the “comfort zone expansion” exercises, but is not essential for the remaining lessons.
To me that seems like a strange way of doing things. Exercises should reinforce each other instead of being completely distinct.
different than someone who wants to produce as much personal change as possible in 3 days.
Sure. But the “we must make big changes in three days” model is itself a choice, which may turn out to be suboptimal for making long-term life changes.
Exercises should reinforce each other instead of being completely distinct.
As I understand it, it’s generally true of skills training that if there are multiple independent aspects to a skill (say, precision and power in a golf swing), the skill improves faster if I train those aspects separately.
For a seminar like that it’s good to have an instructor ask you: “You look overloaded, if it’s too much just take a pause.”
Of course that needs instructors who are percetive enough.
It’s tricky to navigate this in the context of a class (which the person won’t be able to re-take later, if they do step out). Outside of classes the opportunity cost is less stark, but it’s not always easily afforded by the workshop environment / spatial layout.
One possible way to address this that’s under discussion is adding (for example) an hour right after lunch which is “quiet time” where folks are encouraged to nap, journal, go over notes, exercise, meditate etc.
It’s tricky to navigate this in the context of a class (which the person won’t be able to re-take later, if they do step out).
There nothing stoping the person from taking the workshop again in the future and then not dropping out.
If price is the concern, maybe CFAR can give rebates for people who want to take the workshop a second time.
It’s also a possibility that a lower teacher-student ratio could also CFAR to price the workshop in a way that would allow more people to retake it.
Outside of classes the opportunity cost is less stark, but it’s not always easily afforded by the workshop environment / spatial layout.
I don’t think that the case. On a workshop like this chatting with someone between classes can be often more valuable than the specific content covered in a class.
The opportunity cost of not engaging into a chat with a fellow workshop participant is harder to estimate beforehand.
I don’t see a reason why you have to mark that hour as quite time. Some people might prefer to chat others might prefer to be quite. There no reason that everyone has to do the same thing.
One possible way to address this that’s under discussion is adding (for example) an hour right after lunch which is “quiet time” where folks are encouraged to nap, journal, go over notes, exercise, meditate etc.
Mmm. This seems like an okay plan, but it doesn’t hit the root of the problem, which is that the marginal unit of social interaction at the workshop is high value. Someone who did take the hour to journal instead of interact with other participants would probably be making a mistake, even if they’re starting to get agitated from too much social interaction.
The only ways to make them more introvert-friendly in that sense that I can think of is to make them shorter or longer, neither of which seem like good ideas for economic reasons. Short workshops that occur regularly in one location targeted at locals- basically, the old idea of a rationality dojo- seem like it’s worth considering again, but I don’t see a way to extend that beyond SF and NY very easily.
I’m rather skeptical of the “rationality dojo” concept because regular dojos are far from a reliable training method. In my experience in the martial arts, I’ve been taught things that are critically unsafe, things that would be illegal to use in almost any real-world setting, and things that just plain don’t work. Finding good dojos is actually a fairly difficult problem.
Patterning a new training paradigm after one that fails in the majority of cases seems somewhat dubious to me. Also, the conventional dojo model is, uh, not exactly optimal for introverts.
Are you comparing it to some other training paradigm that succeeds in the majority of cases? If so, do you consider workshops to be such a paradigm, or do you have some other paradigm in mind?
I’m rather skeptical of the “rationality dojo” concept because regular dojos are far from a reliable training method.
The parts of the dojo model that I’m thinking of importing are:
Regular periodic meetings of a few hours, probably weekly or monthly.
A geographically local userbase.
Clear skill gradations and demarcations and test-based advancement.
Regular open training periods.
Basically, this seems to manifest as a skill-focused meetup with a bit more structure than normal, and possibly more cash transfers / dues than normal. Do you have warnings about those features, suggestions of other features I should think about importing, or other comments?
Short workshops that occur regularly in one location targeted at locals- basically, the old idea of a rationality dojo- seem like it’s worth considering again, but I don’t see a way to extend that beyond SF and NY very easily.
(Given that you are at a level where you will cause more good than harm) Decide that you will be a teacher instead of a student and start your own.
This has been my current endeavor here in Columbus. It is going better than expected, and has been easier than expected.
What worked for us, but is possibly generalizing from one example: First, develop a close-knit group of equals (good for discussion and socialization) . THEN (my personal aha! moment here)… recruit a whole bunch of newbies all at once (good for having organized workshops and classes). You can ask people from the first group to lead various classes for the people in the second group, so that you don’t have to do it all yourself. Note: Don’t ask people as a group. Ask specific individuals for specific workshops.
It is significantly harder to organize workshops and classes among people you think of as your approximate equals in the skill in question, even though every single individual there may prefer it. (This had been our failure mode for a while)
(@Vaniver- I know you, so I know that you personally probably already know all this. This comment is more for LWers in general who are thinking about going the “organizer” route.)
Assessing your level is extremely hard in this case (it includes instrumental rationality, epistemic rationality, teaching ability, marketing ability, etc. etc.) and I really suggest that nobody do this without thinking about it very seriously beforehand.
Assessing your level is extremely hard in this case (it includes instrumental rationality, epistemic rationality, teaching ability, marketing ability, etc. etc.) and I really suggest that nobody do this without thinking about it very seriously beforehand.
Oh please no.
Overestimating the value of information, and allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good are both common failure modes among Less Wrongers. You do not need to “assess your level” down to 16 sig figs (erm, pretend there is a unit of measurement here) along 7 different axes to put yourself on one or the other side of a binary measurement. You just need to ask: “Will listening to me talk about rationality be more likely to help someone, or hurt them?”
And as much as you (generic you, not you specifically) like to believe you are playing around with edgy, dangerous ideas, you are unlikely to cause serious harm to people by teaching a self-help workshop badly. (the people who WOULD be harmed by a badly taught self-help workshop have much worse things to worry about). The cost of failure is not that high. You do not have to have an extremely high level of confidence in your success for an attempt to be your best course of action.
There is probably an optimal amount of serious thinking that should be done before embarking on this sort of endeavor, but the vast majority of Less Wrongers are going to be on the OVER-thinking side of that plot, not the UNDER-analyzing side. Anecdotally, the very first meetup I hosted, about a dozen people came, all of whom had “been intending to post a meetup” and had been waiting until they were better rationalists, or had more information, etc. It is not surprising that this strategy did not accomplish much for them up to that point.
For that reason, at least here on LW I am going to give the exact opposite advice than you did: I really suggest that everyone try this out without thinking about it forever beforehand. Don’t be afraid to do low-cost experiments. Tighten your feedback loops.
I promise you that you will achieve more this way.
Don’t be afraid to do low-cost experiments. Tighten your feedback loops.
In general this is good advice. However, I disrecommend it in this specific case.
And as much as you (generic you, not you specifically) like to believe you are playing around with edgy, dangerous ideas, you are unlikely to cause serious harm to people by teaching a self-help workshop badly.
I’m not (that) worried about untrained but enthusiastic amateurs causing harm to other people, though I think this is more of a risk than you imply. I’m worried about untrained but enthusiastic amateurs causing harm to the public image of rationality, to potential future efforts along these lines, etc.
There are two failure modes here. There’s failure mode #1, where enthusiastic amateurs teach awful classes and cause some people to think less of ‘rationality’, and there’s failure mode #2 where CFAR graduates want to do cool things and don’t do them because they’re scared of failure, and a community never materializes. I think #2 is the default, and more likely, and thus worth taking more effort to avoid.
Those seem like very generalizable rationalizations for never actually doing anything.
On rationality amateurs causing harm to the public image of rationality-
They can (and DO) do this anyways. On LW, reddit, facebook, blogs, vlogs, etc etc. In fact, I would guess that an enthusiastic amateur could cause more overall harm to the movement on the internet, than running a class irl.
The people who are likely to say EXTREMELY harmful things are extremely unlikely to be the types to decide to lead an organization (require related social skills).
What do you consider to be your worst case scenario? Worst I can come up with is “I taught a terrible workshop! Who would have thought I shouldn’t have talked about infanticide to a room full of new mothers? And that one of them made a viral video about it! I won’t be able to teach another class until everyone has forgotten it in about two years! (it is unlikely to have a significant effect on cfar or miri)”
More realistic: “Wow, that was a terrible and boring class! I bet NONE of the twenty people in the room will come back next week. I will have to find new people now.”
Neither of these seem worth the level of risk aversion you are recommending here. We are not building an FAI.
I DO recommend placing yourself on the helpful/harmful binary. Obviously, a person who so new and lacking in the relevant skills that they would cause massive harm would be in the “harmful” category. Unfortunate faux pas made by the type of people in the helpful category are unlikely to be at a large scale.
Regarding harming “potential future efforts along these lines”:
Efforts made by whom?
-By myself? Because I suspect future-me will be significantly more skilled at running classes than current-me despite lack of practice?
-By CFAR? I have never seen anything from them suggesting that other people (even amateurs) should hold off on creating communities. Quite the contrary.They have invested significant effort and resources in spreading materials and knowledge to assist meetup organizers (Writing the Meetup Guide, favoring workshop applicants who are meetup organizers for spots and scholarships, etc).This is strong evidence that CFAR WANTS people to take on leadership roles and grow their local scene. It is unlikely that this is counter to their current or future goals.
-By a yet-unknown organization? Obviously bad reasoning.
Overly generalizable to “I should never attempt anything I care about, that I don’t have an extremely high confidence in succeeding in, because Failure”
Yes, and this is a very serious problem that really shouldn’t be exacerbated any further at all.
The people who are likely to say EXTREMELY harmful things are extremely unlikely to be the types to decide to lead an organization (require related social skills).
I don’t agree. Leaders of organizations say outrageous or harmful things all the time, social skills or no social skills.
What do you consider to be your worst case scenario?
Worst case likely scenario?
Rationality becomes karate. There are dozens or hundreds of different people claiming to teach rationality. What they actually teach varies wildly from instructor to instructor. Some groups teach effective skills; some groups teach useless skills; some groups teach actively hazardous skills. In the eyes of the general public, these groups are not distinguishable from one another—they all provide “rationality training.”
A newcomer to the field has no idea what groups are good and is not likely to find a good one. Worse, they may not even know that good and bad groups exist, and ultimately gain a degree of confidence unsuited to their skill level. It is dangerous to be half a rationalist, which many learn the hard way. Ultimately, rationality training becomes diluted or confused enough that it more or less possesses no value for the average person.
I think that at least some instructors were selected for things other than ability to observe human behavior, intuit the cause of said behavior, and handle it appropriately.
There is a part of the workshop; CoZE training; that is meant to build social skills. If it feels hard, it’s working. But if Bayes or Value of Information classes feel hard because participants are exhausted and want to lock themselves in the bathroom alone, that doesn’t help with learning the specific skills. Exercise, for example, works well with intense training and rest periods, not 4 days of constant slow jogging.
Understanding Bayes in the abstract is quite easy. The thing that’s hard is to use Bayes in your life when you are under emotional pressure.
The way it get’s taught in the average statistics class doesn’t give the participants the ability to use it in their daily life. Teaching it at a moment in which the people are under stress could work well to train them to be able to use it later in their daily life in situations where it matters.
There are still different levels of skills here, e.g. “learn to recognize when Bayes is relevant to a real-life situation” and then “learn to recognize when Bayes is relevant to a real-life situation even when you’re under emotional stress.” It’s probably easier to learn the first rather than skipping directly to the second. (And for what it’s worth, the Bayes unit has gone through a large number of iterations and, I have been told, has finally started working. It does indeed emphasize building habits rather than abstract understanding.)
In what sense is a personal development seminar to be supposed to feel easy? If someone is really overloaded they can excuse themselves and pause for some time.
It’s a question of what you’re developing. The four days where you’re learning how to use Bayes in everyday life and install new habits and do goal factoring may not be the time when you want to also train not minding social overload. You can do that any time.
I didn’t take the workshop so I don’t know the exact curriculum. As far as I understand besides teaching people who do use Bayes the workshop also includes exercises to expand peoples comfort zone.
The idea is to train these skills separately. CoZE training will be hard for introverts, but this doesn’t mean they need to be constantly out of their comfort zone during all of the other classes.
If it does not feel easy, you are probably doing it wrong.
Often the hard way is the only way we know, and it is better than nothing. But I believe there is nothing intrinsically hard about personal development or anything. It’s just that the easy ways are a very small subset of all ways to do something.
Could you expand on what you’ve found out about making what is usually considered hard to be not hard?
Example of “hard”: Not eating chocolate, when you have chocolate at home.
Example of “easy”: Not eating chocolate, when you have no chocolate at home.
Switching from “hard” to “easy” is much easier than using your willpower to win at the “hard” mode. For some reasons many people don’t realize that, and instead spend a lot of time talking about it, motivating themselves, inventing various punishment schemes, attending motivation seminars, etc.
I suspect that something similar can be used in many situations. The first aspect is: don’t work harder, work smarter. The second aspect is: if it involves some kind of brain power (willpower, memory, creativity), feeling stressed (because you really try to do it the hard way) only makes it more difficult… but for some reason a lot of popular advice recommends increasing the stress (by using rewards and punishments of many kinds). -- I suspect this is the corrupted hardware in action (rewarding and punishing people brings higher status to one who does it).
Some people are afraid that doing things the “easy” way is somehow inferior, probably because it is not mysterious enough. That somehow if you stop eating chocolate by not buying it, you will be unable to resist it when someone brings you a piece of chocolate to your home. I suspect the experiments would show the other way round, because even resisting eating chocolate by not buying it creates a success spiral and changes your habits.
The difficult part is that sometimes you just can’t find the “easy” way. For example, sometimes you are not sufficiently in control of your environment. But many people don’t even try.
Excellent advice. Cheating is just another way of winning.
Not cheating is often a lost purpose.
If I were reading that somewhere else, I would be going to post it in the latest Rationality Quotes thread.
Thanks.
I think the problem is at least as much bad software as bad hardware, though. I believe the reason people don’t try to figure out easy ways to do things is that they’ve absorbed an idea that it’s more important to prove their virtue by doing hard things than to succeed, and I suspect that idea gets taught by people in authority who’d rather that subordinates not have initiative.
Do you have an easy way to ensure housework is maintained to an acceptable level?
One possible approach is: If you don’t need something, throw it away; then you have an “easy” solution for given thing not cluttering your home anymore.
A similar but less extreme approach could be to buy a lot of stackable boxes and put everything there, and only take out things that you really need at some moment. After some time the things you didn’t need would naturally stay in the boxes.
This could solve some of my problems; I don’t know if your problems are of this type. Now that I think about it, I would have to do some research about a good system of boxes (big boxes for large items, small boxes for smaller items, and a system to put them all in one place), but the impact on my home could be great. I had a suspicion for a long time that the storage system has a strong impact on how the rest of the house looks, but I didn’t spend time researching a good storage system.
If you look at the discourse about deliberate practice it nearly always describe as hard and challenging.
On an emotional level, people have ugh fields to protect them from dealing with hard issues in their life. If you do lead people past their ugh fields they have to deal with the hard emotional issue from which the ugh field protected them.
If you break through enough ugh fields the emotional processing needs energy. If you try to do as much in a short time frame people will feel overloaded.
There are different kinds of “hard”—for example hard and fun (beating the final Super Mario level), or hard and painful (finishing the last meters of a marathon run with a broken leg). The former kind of “hard” is great for deliberate practice, but I suppose the introvert socially overloaded during rationality lessons feels like the latter kind of “hard”.
If the goal of the lesson is dealing with the ugh fields, bringing people to their ugh fields may be useful. (But seems to me that CBT shows that this is better done slowly.) If the goal of the lesson is learning bayesian statistics or similar stuff, bringing people to their unrelated ugh fields is harmful. Challenging the introverted behavior has its place during the “comfort zone expansion” exercises, but is not essential for the remaining lessons.
That depends on what you mean with “better”. People who practice CBT are generally paid by the hour and don’t have a real issue to spend more time with an issue. That different than someone who wants to produce as much personal change as possible in 3 days.
To me that seems like a strange way of doing things. Exercises should reinforce each other instead of being completely distinct.
Sure. But the “we must make big changes in three days” model is itself a choice, which may turn out to be suboptimal for making long-term life changes.
As I understand it, it’s generally true of skills training that if there are multiple independent aspects to a skill (say, precision and power in a golf swing), the skill improves faster if I train those aspects separately.
Knowing how to excuse oneself and pause for time is a nontrivial skill.
For a seminar like that it’s good to have an instructor ask you: “You look overloaded, if it’s too much just take a pause.” Of course that needs instructors who are percetive enough.
It’s tricky to navigate this in the context of a class (which the person won’t be able to re-take later, if they do step out). Outside of classes the opportunity cost is less stark, but it’s not always easily afforded by the workshop environment / spatial layout.
One possible way to address this that’s under discussion is adding (for example) an hour right after lunch which is “quiet time” where folks are encouraged to nap, journal, go over notes, exercise, meditate etc.
There nothing stoping the person from taking the workshop again in the future and then not dropping out.
If price is the concern, maybe CFAR can give rebates for people who want to take the workshop a second time. It’s also a possibility that a lower teacher-student ratio could also CFAR to price the workshop in a way that would allow more people to retake it.
I don’t think that the case. On a workshop like this chatting with someone between classes can be often more valuable than the specific content covered in a class.
The opportunity cost of not engaging into a chat with a fellow workshop participant is harder to estimate beforehand.
I don’t see a reason why you have to mark that hour as quite time. Some people might prefer to chat others might prefer to be quite. There no reason that everyone has to do the same thing.
Mmm. This seems like an okay plan, but it doesn’t hit the root of the problem, which is that the marginal unit of social interaction at the workshop is high value. Someone who did take the hour to journal instead of interact with other participants would probably be making a mistake, even if they’re starting to get agitated from too much social interaction.
The only ways to make them more introvert-friendly in that sense that I can think of is to make them shorter or longer, neither of which seem like good ideas for economic reasons. Short workshops that occur regularly in one location targeted at locals- basically, the old idea of a rationality dojo- seem like it’s worth considering again, but I don’t see a way to extend that beyond SF and NY very easily.
I’m rather skeptical of the “rationality dojo” concept because regular dojos are far from a reliable training method. In my experience in the martial arts, I’ve been taught things that are critically unsafe, things that would be illegal to use in almost any real-world setting, and things that just plain don’t work. Finding good dojos is actually a fairly difficult problem.
Patterning a new training paradigm after one that fails in the majority of cases seems somewhat dubious to me. Also, the conventional dojo model is, uh, not exactly optimal for introverts.
Are you comparing it to some other training paradigm that succeeds in the majority of cases?
If so, do you consider workshops to be such a paradigm, or do you have some other paradigm in mind?
The parts of the dojo model that I’m thinking of importing are:
Regular periodic meetings of a few hours, probably weekly or monthly.
A geographically local userbase.
Clear skill gradations and demarcations and test-based advancement.
Regular open training periods.
Basically, this seems to manifest as a skill-focused meetup with a bit more structure than normal, and possibly more cash transfers / dues than normal. Do you have warnings about those features, suggestions of other features I should think about importing, or other comments?
(Given that you are at a level where you will cause more good than harm) Decide that you will be a teacher instead of a student and start your own.
So, a vaguely similar plan is in the works here in Austin, but unless it goes spectacularly I don’t expect that to happen unless I move to SF or NY.
This has been my current endeavor here in Columbus. It is going better than expected, and has been easier than expected.
What worked for us, but is possibly generalizing from one example: First, develop a close-knit group of equals (good for discussion and socialization) . THEN (my personal aha! moment here)… recruit a whole bunch of newbies all at once (good for having organized workshops and classes). You can ask people from the first group to lead various classes for the people in the second group, so that you don’t have to do it all yourself. Note: Don’t ask people as a group. Ask specific individuals for specific workshops.
It is significantly harder to organize workshops and classes among people you think of as your approximate equals in the skill in question, even though every single individual there may prefer it. (This had been our failure mode for a while)
(@Vaniver- I know you, so I know that you personally probably already know all this. This comment is more for LWers in general who are thinking about going the “organizer” route.)
Assessing your level is extremely hard in this case (it includes instrumental rationality, epistemic rationality, teaching ability, marketing ability, etc. etc.) and I really suggest that nobody do this without thinking about it very seriously beforehand.
Oh please no.
Overestimating the value of information, and allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good are both common failure modes among Less Wrongers. You do not need to “assess your level” down to 16 sig figs (erm, pretend there is a unit of measurement here) along 7 different axes to put yourself on one or the other side of a binary measurement. You just need to ask: “Will listening to me talk about rationality be more likely to help someone, or hurt them?”
And as much as you (generic you, not you specifically) like to believe you are playing around with edgy, dangerous ideas, you are unlikely to cause serious harm to people by teaching a self-help workshop badly. (the people who WOULD be harmed by a badly taught self-help workshop have much worse things to worry about). The cost of failure is not that high. You do not have to have an extremely high level of confidence in your success for an attempt to be your best course of action.
There is probably an optimal amount of serious thinking that should be done before embarking on this sort of endeavor, but the vast majority of Less Wrongers are going to be on the OVER-thinking side of that plot, not the UNDER-analyzing side. Anecdotally, the very first meetup I hosted, about a dozen people came, all of whom had “been intending to post a meetup” and had been waiting until they were better rationalists, or had more information, etc. It is not surprising that this strategy did not accomplish much for them up to that point.
For that reason, at least here on LW I am going to give the exact opposite advice than you did: I really suggest that everyone try this out without thinking about it forever beforehand. Don’t be afraid to do low-cost experiments. Tighten your feedback loops.
I promise you that you will achieve more this way.
Agreed with this x10!
In general this is good advice. However, I disrecommend it in this specific case.
I’m not (that) worried about untrained but enthusiastic amateurs causing harm to other people, though I think this is more of a risk than you imply. I’m worried about untrained but enthusiastic amateurs causing harm to the public image of rationality, to potential future efforts along these lines, etc.
There are two failure modes here. There’s failure mode #1, where enthusiastic amateurs teach awful classes and cause some people to think less of ‘rationality’, and there’s failure mode #2 where CFAR graduates want to do cool things and don’t do them because they’re scared of failure, and a community never materializes. I think #2 is the default, and more likely, and thus worth taking more effort to avoid.
Those seem like very generalizable rationalizations for never actually doing anything.
On rationality amateurs causing harm to the public image of rationality-
They can (and DO) do this anyways. On LW, reddit, facebook, blogs, vlogs, etc etc. In fact, I would guess that an enthusiastic amateur could cause more overall harm to the movement on the internet, than running a class irl.
The people who are likely to say EXTREMELY harmful things are extremely unlikely to be the types to decide to lead an organization (require related social skills).
What do you consider to be your worst case scenario? Worst I can come up with is “I taught a terrible workshop! Who would have thought I shouldn’t have talked about infanticide to a room full of new mothers? And that one of them made a viral video about it! I won’t be able to teach another class until everyone has forgotten it in about two years! (it is unlikely to have a significant effect on cfar or miri)”
More realistic: “Wow, that was a terrible and boring class! I bet NONE of the twenty people in the room will come back next week. I will have to find new people now.”
Neither of these seem worth the level of risk aversion you are recommending here. We are not building an FAI.
I DO recommend placing yourself on the helpful/harmful binary. Obviously, a person who so new and lacking in the relevant skills that they would cause massive harm would be in the “harmful” category. Unfortunate faux pas made by the type of people in the helpful category are unlikely to be at a large scale.
Regarding harming “potential future efforts along these lines”:
Efforts made by whom?
-By myself? Because I suspect future-me will be significantly more skilled at running classes than current-me despite lack of practice?
-By CFAR? I have never seen anything from them suggesting that other people (even amateurs) should hold off on creating communities. Quite the contrary.They have invested significant effort and resources in spreading materials and knowledge to assist meetup organizers (Writing the Meetup Guide, favoring workshop applicants who are meetup organizers for spots and scholarships, etc).This is strong evidence that CFAR WANTS people to take on leadership roles and grow their local scene. It is unlikely that this is counter to their current or future goals.
-By a yet-unknown organization? Obviously bad reasoning.
Overly generalizable to “I should never attempt anything I care about, that I don’t have an extremely high confidence in succeeding in, because Failure”
Yes, and this is a very serious problem that really shouldn’t be exacerbated any further at all.
I don’t agree. Leaders of organizations say outrageous or harmful things all the time, social skills or no social skills.
Worst case likely scenario?
Rationality becomes karate. There are dozens or hundreds of different people claiming to teach rationality. What they actually teach varies wildly from instructor to instructor. Some groups teach effective skills; some groups teach useless skills; some groups teach actively hazardous skills. In the eyes of the general public, these groups are not distinguishable from one another—they all provide “rationality training.”
A newcomer to the field has no idea what groups are good and is not likely to find a good one. Worse, they may not even know that good and bad groups exist, and ultimately gain a degree of confidence unsuited to their skill level. It is dangerous to be half a rationalist, which many learn the hard way. Ultimately, rationality training becomes diluted or confused enough that it more or less possesses no value for the average person.
I think that at least some instructors were selected for things other than ability to observe human behavior, intuit the cause of said behavior, and handle it appropriately.
There is a part of the workshop; CoZE training; that is meant to build social skills. If it feels hard, it’s working. But if Bayes or Value of Information classes feel hard because participants are exhausted and want to lock themselves in the bathroom alone, that doesn’t help with learning the specific skills. Exercise, for example, works well with intense training and rest periods, not 4 days of constant slow jogging.
Understanding Bayes in the abstract is quite easy. The thing that’s hard is to use Bayes in your life when you are under emotional pressure.
The way it get’s taught in the average statistics class doesn’t give the participants the ability to use it in their daily life. Teaching it at a moment in which the people are under stress could work well to train them to be able to use it later in their daily life in situations where it matters.
There are still different levels of skills here, e.g. “learn to recognize when Bayes is relevant to a real-life situation” and then “learn to recognize when Bayes is relevant to a real-life situation even when you’re under emotional stress.” It’s probably easier to learn the first rather than skipping directly to the second. (And for what it’s worth, the Bayes unit has gone through a large number of iterations and, I have been told, has finally started working. It does indeed emphasize building habits rather than abstract understanding.)