I like teaching, I like rationality, and last year I was encouraged to combine both. The result was a workshop that had a quarter of people falling asleep and a quarter of people telling me it changed their lives.

I’ll take it.

So I applied for a grant to do the same for the Dutch EA community. 3 days a month, I’d develop and teach workshops about epistemics and decision-making, and I’d apply the techniques on the meta-level and actually measure progress and think about scaling. In the end, 119 people attended an average of two workshops (243 attendances) of the total of 16 workshops across 12 months. I developed 5 new workshops, hosted each twice, rehosted the successful workshop mentioned above, and collaborated with Damon Sasi on additional workshops.

People generally liked them. By the power of graphs, I instill in you this insight:

Scores given across all workshops to the question “How engaging was this workshop for you?”

And found them pretty useful:

Scores given across all workshops to the question “How useful was this workshop to your EA work?”

There were also tangible effects. Some of these came in over WhatsApp, like:

Hi there! I just wanted to share that one of your rationality workshops was among the things that nudged me to take a sleep apnoea test, for which I am now successfully being treated! Thank you for that!

Others were responses to the exit forms that contained questions like “Which part of the workshop do you expect to use in your EA work?” One person responded:

Pretty much everything

Another responded:

Not much

To which I responded:

Well, not to their faces. Just in my mind.

Anyway, if you want to try something similar, here is what I learned from teaching one year of monthly rationality workshops for EA’s in the Netherlands.

Step 0: Fuel Yourself

If you remember one thing about teaching good rationality workshops, then I recommend this one: Shape the process around things that excite you. Of course, actually teach the useful things and do actually effective things, but do that while not giving up on what keeps you energized and engaged. A lot of people who host events get “drained” cause the process costs them more energy than they gain. Additionally, when you are standing in front of an audience, half of your impact comes from your own energy. So here are some specific recommendations:

Make jokes you find funny
Host the workshops at times and locations that work for you
Talk about things that excite you or find an angle that makes you excited about the topic
Make sure you are having fun :D

This is one of the slides of my first workshop. It has a word joke half the room couldn’t understand but I find hilarious. I’d be cracking up explaining it each time: The Dutch word for “well” is “put”, and additionally there is a saying that a depressed person is “in the well”, so each time I’d explain that your productivity is good if you get more out of the well (“out-put) then you put in (“in-put”). I’m sure my glee was more entertaining than the joke XD

Step 1: Get People In The Door

Attendance is hard. If you are not already famous, then why would people travel to sit down to listen to you specifically? It’s the first challenge I ran into with these workshops but it turned out ok. The recipe I used was: Make a list of workshops you’d love to teach, send it out on the busiest EA platform for your region, then have people vote on what session they are most excited to see. Make sure the list is quite varied and that you are reasonably sure you have something useful to say on each topic.

I listed 7 possible topics people could vote on. This is the anonymized top slice of the Google sheet.

This way the first workshop was not going particularly hard on epistemics or decision-making, but it was well attended and popular. It gave people a chance to try out my workshop style and see if they felt I had interesting things to say. Then with future workshops, they already knew what quality and type of content to expect and would pass this on through word of mouth as well. Thus the first workshop was about "Increasing Productivity" and the second one about the "Art of Disagreement", cause these were the top-voted topics. Later workshops were about "Landing Moonshots" (independent and critical thinking applied to hard projects), "Less(ons on) Groupthink" (how it works & how to protect yourself), and "How to Do The Right Thing" (a mix of agency and epistemics: what is the "right" thing and how to actually get yourself to take actions in that direction).

Step 2: Build the Workshop

There are a lot of options here, but I'll just tell you what works for me in case that works for you too: The workshops I created took 1 hour, consisted of about 30 slides, and featured 3-4 exercises of 2-5 minutes each that were spaced out throughout the entire session. Each exercise was about applying the thing I just explained to your own life, work, or mind.

Exercises can be simple, like this 2-minute prompt to think of a health issue participants might address and to then put it in their calendar to explore later that week:

But exercises can also be more complicated, like this simulated game of adversarial groupthink (“mindguard” is a term invented by Irving Janis to point to individuals who actively increase groupthink in a given group).

People really enjoyed this!

The game was enough of a success that some people mentioned it to me months later as helping them realize how groups can force decisions on them without them noticing. Before the game started, I had explained how “mindguards” use time pressure, reframing, and social pressure to discredit other ideas and any form of dissension. I think the game ended up playing like a social deception game that let both parties (mindguards and regulars) notice how these “weapons” might be used, and people had fun trying to guess who the mindguards were and trying to notice and resist the pressure.

Besides exercises, I also recommend leaning into visuals if you have any affinity for that. Here is the title slide for one of the workshops:

Some people don’t care about pictures and some do. I had something in the order of 10% of participants actively come and tell me the visuals helped them stay engaged and more easily absorb information. It takes a bit of time to create them, and your mileage may vary. Feel free to cannabilize some of the pictures from my slides below. They aren’t all stellar. Some are jokes or simple diagrams. The trick is to 80/20 keeping people’s brains turned on through efficient preparation on your part.

Step 3: Experiment with the Format

So you’ve hosted a workshop and it was great/terrible/mweh/mixed bag. Maybe everyone loved it but only 5 people showed up. Maybe 30 people showed up, but feedback was underwhelming. This is ok! You are doing things! Learning things! Don’t stop now. The trick is to experiment along any axis that didn’t work while keeping the ones that do work stable.

Here are some experiments that I ran:

Tried hosting online workshops to increase attendance: The opposite actually happened.
Created exercise-heavy workshops where attendees spend most of their time doing things instead of listening to me: Similarly successful as the standard format.
Created 6-hour EAxRationality days with 3 workshops in a row: Wild success.

Now to do these experiments you need data or you can’t tell what works or not. I recommend having an exit survey with a QR code at the end of each workshop. Then once you are done, you can make cool graphs like this:

The response scale was a 5-point Likert scale and total workshop attendance ranged from 11 to 38 participants. Some workshops were taught once and others twice. "Art of Disagreement" and "Landing Moonshots" were both taught once online (8 and 6 participants respectively) and once offline (18 participants in both sessions). "How To Do the Right Thing" was the activity-heavy workshop, which received roughly similar ratings as the other workshops. All workshops on the 3 EAxRationality days had almost 20 participants, with no reduction in ratings. A third of workshops were part of larger EA events and so contained a possible sample bias (e.g., an AIS retreat versus a an EA career day). Overall, this makes the numbers more a general impression of larger trends than anything to draw significant findings from. That said, the overall trend seems to be "engaging and useful workshops, but please don't host them online cause it halves attendance".

Step 4: Work Together

The co-director of EA Netherlands took care of much of the logistics of workshops for me. Later Damon Sasi would co-teach workshops with me on the 3 EAxRationality days. Finding people to collaborate with really scales what you can do. Possibly a workshop about how to train new workshop instructors would actually be the next logical step!

About the Actual Workshops

I’m not sure how to scale these workshops now I’ve done them and reflected on the process. I tried working together with another EA director in another country to find a format they could reuse, but the key element turned out to be “actually have a good instructor”. This leads me to think a retreat or other such program to teach people how to teach workshops might be useful. Though taking another step back, I expect you might want to fill that program through a talent scouting program for proto-teachers.

That said, for the workshops I created, I want to share the slides in case that helps. And I may write them up as essays in the future (like I did for that very first workshop last year). My slides don’t have a lot of words. The words are in my head. But you can get the gist about topics as well as an impression on what visuals you can try. Creating the idea for the workshop and then developing the slide deck took me about 15-25 hours a piece.

Takeaways

So did Dutch EA’s get better at epistemics and decision-making?

I think so, but it’s pretty hard to tell honestly. I sent out a final survey to all attendees and about 10% responded (13 people). Here is what they said:

This pie chart would be so cool if the “13” was a “30” or something

There are also anecdotes that I think can be fairly considered strong signals, cause people don’t have any other incentive to reach out on WhatsApp about solving health issues or recommend these workshops on LinkedIn like this:

I suspect the workshops also help start discussions and foster an environment of self-improvement and thinking more clearly about trade-offs and optimal strategies when doing EA work (or in life in general). I’d be curious to hear thoughts from others on how such workshops could be scaled. At the last workshop I hosted there was a participant who was new to the EA and rationality community. They told me afterward they were surprised the workshops weren’t attended by 100+ people with paid tickets. I’m still a little confused by this idea, but it does make me wonder if there are other avenues we might still explore.

LESSWRONG
LW