toner
Let me expand on my comment from the Hacker News thread.
I went to the July workshop. I think it was probably the most useful week of my life in terms of exposure to things I could be doing to be more productive and effective. Since then, I’ve mainly been trying to incorporate the low-hanging fruit—the obviously good simple ideas—into my life. Some examples:
At work, I realized I wasn’t doing anywhere near enough planning. My employees were spending time on the wrong things because I hadn’t planned things out in enough detail to make it clear what was the most important thing to do next. I fixed this immediately after the camp.
Again at work, I now document most discussions as they happen. It slows down the discussion a bit, but it’s a net win because next time you can just have the delta of the discussion and avoid rehashing things.
Val explained to me how he changed his diet in order to decouple the relationship between his energy levels and when he last ate. I hadn’t actually realized such a thing was possible. It also works for me.
I realized that it’s a waste of time to learn things/watch video lectures and not put what I want to remember into anki. I make the cards while I watch the lectures, and have trained myself to review them on my phone when waiting in lines, walking down the street etc.
I’m training myself to no longer think things like “I should go to the gym tomorrow.” Instead I decide to go at X o’clock and set an alarm on my phone to remind me. (I apparently haven’t got this one completely down yet, because yesterday I thought “I should go to the gym tomorrow” and didn’t catch myself: it’s now 11pm and I never went.)
I feel like I’m still a beginner at instrumental rationality and have an enormous amount to work on (I haven’t even started trying to adopt most of the actual curriculum!). Since attending, I’ve been getting considerably more work done: my brother, who is also my business partner, has noticed too.
When I got back I was super busy and have been really bad at staying in touch with the instructors and other attendees, but there are a few people I met at the camp who I would really like to have more contact with.
We’ll organize something. I’ll talk to people about it at this coming meetup. There are some other non-local Less Wrong people in Melbourne right now too.
We could do! Will you be here? We’ll at least repeat this meetup on December 21.
Meetup : Melbourne social meetup
Notes from discussion about finding better metrics to measure CfAR’s effectiveness
[Discussion about what CfAR is trying to teach.]
Have to avoid CfAR just measuring how much people are paying attention in their courses
Beforehand: write down goals
Six months later: measure them against their pre-camp goals
Control group
Just attending a camp might make it feel like you’re making more progress towards your goals.
Some goals hard to measure
How much throughput are they expecting? 3 camps/month.
Measuring income: a lot of people might decide during the camp to change career, or devote their life to effective charity, so income may well drop when your rationality goes up.
Also income has a long lag before interventions take effect
epicwin: gamify your life.
We’re going to stop proposing solutions for a while
Suggestion to generate ideas individually.
Desirable qualities: low stat noise, objective, quantitative etc.
What sorts of measures: e.g. based on other’s opinions, performance at a task, other classes
Could talk about what goals people have? Then we could think about how to measure those particular goals. Money, happier, healthier, etc.
Whose perspective are we taking? The consumer of the minicamps.
In self-help field, typically sell books or lecture tours based on how good your stuff sounds. Most of it doesn’t come with metrics. If there’s some of that works (e.g. GTD), then CfAR should be teaching it.
[Tangent about quality of scientific literature.] Problem with finding material to teach by looking for stuff whose effectiveness has already been well measured in the literature is that you’re setting the bar too high. We don’t need to published, so can make do with messier non-laboratory non-ethics-committee-approved measures.
Come up with a test you like. Try to teach to that.
Break up to discuss:
Desirable qualities of metrics
Types of test
Goals that people might have
[We break into groups]
I’m with yurifury (in hammock) + patrick (in bean bag)
Types of tests
Maybe have an interactive test that heaps you make decisions (like it includes a checklist of things to think about and biases to avoid) and it would generate metrics along the way. An iterative process, so you could track how people’s goals change. And if it’s a process to help people, people more likely to use it. Blurring line between self-help tool and pure metric. Or not a tool just for significant decisions, but a weekly thing. People’s goals might change from month to month and a tool that let you say “i’m doing well on this one” “i don’t care about this one anymore” would be helpful and would generate metrics.
An agile version opposed to the current waterfall 1-year-apart surveys pre- and post-minicamp.
Difference between quantified selfers, who measure things to detect correlations, and people who just measure things they’re trying to improve.
They should run a course specifically for quantified selfers. Gwern could be the Matt of the course. Then the could observe what changes about them and they might get less obsessive people to measure those specific things.
Goals
Big problem with motivation: how to get people to take the tests. 1. Have measurements be side-effects of something otherwise useful. 2. Social pressure.
X, what would you like to change about yourself? Answer: spend more time reading. Akrasia.
People who talk regularly following minicamp (already) could evaluate each other. People at meetups could evaluate each other. 5 minute quiz at meetups.
Have an award for the person who changes the most. ← hard to make honest
We seem to be generating more ideas/unit time in our small group, than the group as a whole. Same for other groups? Yes.
We’ll focus on goals that are easiest to measure. Health. Measures like resting heart rate not BMI Facebook friends/klout. Happiness Grades ← not so good Memory/IQish tests
[We decide that the notes above are a really good example of how useless a 12-person group discussion can be. AVOID AVOID AVOID]
The table was observed to be red-shifted.
Good suggestions from other groups:
Possible tests:
Idealogical Turing test as a measure. People learning to model each other. Tests things including: are you able to model other people well, do you understand other people’s ideas. rather labour intensive
Search skill: able to use google. measure how well people are able to find information (with time constraints). Apparently google has a daily challenge.
Get people to do a three minute video sales pitch.
Game playing. Useful metrics in how well you play poker, Wits and Wagers.
Might be worth having preprepared list of goals that are easy to achieve and/or measure and have people select goals from that list
Look at course material and try to come up with tests inspired by course material, but being sure to ask “Why are we delivering this material?” too
[Tangent/derailment]
[Splitting up again, given what we learned. Other group is dancing.]
Summary of what we want to tell CfAR:
Summarize desirable characteristics of goals. Need as common knowledge.
Directions to go in towards gathering metrics
What we learned about how to have this discussion. Talking about goals seemed too general and not useful; discussion about transferable skills seemed more useful. Things that people wanted that came up frequently: Calibrated, appraise evidence, socially competent, ability to persuade others, motivation esp. across different time scales.
Some suggestions of metrics (filter above)
Also we want to post in the meetup organizers group what we learned about group discussions. Benefit of small groups is it’s okay to interrupt.
[At this point my battery about to run out.]
Meetup : Melbourne social meetup
Meetup : Melbourne social meetup
Quixey is incredibly successful. Also, LessWrong is still young. Give it time! There may be a bunch of startups out there we haven’t heard of yet. For example, I’m doing a startup with 3 other LWers, but we need a little longer before we’re successful ;-)
Meetup : Melbourne social meetup
Meetup : Melbourne social/games meetup
I can come and I’d be happy to do the exercise I suggested last month
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bym/meetup_melbourne_practical_rationality/6gcz
but I’m thinking we’d probably prefer to hear from James and Scott about the minicamp (if they’re willing).
Meetup : Melbourne social meetup
Edit: Let’s save the updating activity below for another night or for next month, when Aubrey de Grey isn’t speaking.
We decided that we’d take it in turns to prepare activities for the practical rationality meetups, and I volunteered for this meetup.
Here’s the plan. I have a bunch of trivia questions with numerical answers. For each question: Everyone records either 50% or 90% confidence intervals. Open discussion. Everyone may alter their intervals. Record initial and updated calibration. The aim is to test our calibration (is it true that approximately half your answers lie within your 50% confidence intervals?), ability to update (are your post-discussion guesses better?), and ability to efficiently persuade a group about something you are relatively certain about.
I propose we do both the initial estimation and discussion under moderate time pressure (i) because when you need to update in real life you often don’t have much time, and (ii) so the whole thing doesn’t take too long. We’ll have to work out exactly how much time that should be but let’s start with say 30 seconds to write down intervals and 1 min for discussion.
I’ll reveal each answer immediately after and we can then take as long as we need to discuss how we’re doing, so hopefully we get better as we go along. We’ll be able to measure this, so at the end of the night we’ll have data that will tell us if the activity was useful or not.
Suggestions are welcome.
You just missed it.
It’s not a zero-sum game!
Sadly I can’t make it tonight. I find myself in the wrong timezone and I’ll be asleep.
Paleo + intermittent fasting + read Kevin’s posts on supplements.