I've been workshopping a new rationality training paradigm. (By "rationality training paradigm", I mean an approach to learning/teaching the skill of "noticing what cognitive strategies are useful, and getting better at them.")

I think the paradigm has promise. I've beta-tested it for a couple weeks. It’s too early to tell if it actually works, but one of my primary goals is to figure out if it works relatively quickly, and give up if it isn’t not delivering.

The goal of this post is to:

Convey the framework
See if people find it compelling in its current form
Solicit ideas for improvements, before I decide whether to invest heavily into a larger experiment around it.

Rationality needs better feedback loops

Claim: Feedback loops are the most important thing ever. Hard things are hard because they have bad feedback loops. Some of the most important things (e.g. x-risk mitigation research) have the worst feedback loops.

Bold prediction: You can learn to think better, even about confusing, poor-feedback domains. This requires developing the art of inventing feedback loops. And then, actually putting in a lot of deliberate practice effort.

I've long been haunted by this Romeo Stevens comment (slightly paraphrased)^[1]

Deliberate practice deliberate practice until you get really good identifying good feedback loops, and working with them.
People have a really hard time with interventions often because they literally do not have a functioning causal model of the skill in question. People who apply deliberate practice to a working causal model often level up astonishingly quickly. Don't know if you have the appropriate causal model? Well, when you apply deliberate practice do you not get better? You're pulling on fake levers.

In the past, I've tried to practice thinking. I've done explicit puzzle-solving exercises, and I have a day job that forces me to think about challenging questions on a regular basis. I sometimes have tried to refactor my day-job into something deliberate practice-shaped, but it never gelled.

I think I've gotten better at thinking in the past 12 years. But I haven't gotten overwhelmingly obviously better at thinking. I recently decided to deliberate practicing "solve confusing problems", until I was demonstrably better at it, and to host some workshops where I tried helping other people practice too.

I ended up settling into a pa...

Prakrti Zephyr

Prakrti Zephyr

Prakrti Zephyr

Prakrti Zephyr