[Note: I also attended the workshop and am writing this before reading the main post to avoid being biased.]
The out of class discussions alone were more than worth my while. However this is partially due to my circumstances, I am about to graduate college with a double major in CS and psychology. Deciding which (if either) field to pursue, and how to best pursue it is obviously quite important to me. Before going to the workshop, I had already done most of the obvious “due diligence” research on the matter, but still updated significantly during the workshop. Talking to several of the other CfAR participants, the instructors, and several LW people who stopped by (Lukeprog, Yvain ect.) uncovered many important points that I had missed. For example, I assumed the median staring salary for computer scientists was a reasonable estimate for what my starting salary would be. It turns out that I can expect to make about twice that much money if I use certain job hunting techniques I learned at the workshop and optimize for money (instead of, say, cool sounding problems). I don't expect most people to be in similar positions, but I do think asking questions at a CfAR event is a ver...
Upvoted for writing this before reading the main post. Is that the sort of technique they taught you?
To repeat my request to Qiaochu: would you be willing to follow up in a year or two and tell us whether the effects lasted? If you commit now, and use Boomerang to remind yourself, I would be grateful.
Thank you for writing up your thoughts, Qiaochu!
I feel the need to offer one very minor correction:
For example, sympathetic nervous system activity, which governs the fight-or-flight response, is unpleasant, unhealthy, and can prevent you from explicitly modeling other people.
It's actually sympathetic dominance over the parasympathetic side that does this. Both the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are running all the time, and that's really quite essential. You cannot stand up without the sympathetic system, for instance, nor can you lie down without going into a panic without the parasympathetic side doing its job.
But as long as you replace "activity" with "dominance," I think we're good!
I was waiting for Val to answer this, but I'll give it a shot. The relevant CFAR unit is called "againstness." You can think of sympathetic dominance as related to (being?) a sensation of "againstness," e.g. when you get angry during a heated argument your feelings are directed against the person you're arguing with. Val gave us both mental and physical techniques for releasing againstness ("fighting againstness" is kind of againsty). The mental techniques (which I'm just going to quote verbatim from the worksheet; hopefully Val won't mind):
That might sound a little woo but the above is intended to be a descri...
Also see The Power of Agency.
And for those who want to pronounce Qiaochu's name correctly in their heads when reading his username, I think it's "Chow-chew."
Well said.
We CFAR workshop participants got workbooks containing materials for the various sessions (and some other things, like the rationality habits checklist). I took my notes right in the workbook. Sometime today or tomorrow I'm going to start going through the workbook and transferring the stuff I want to capture to the computer. I've started a list of things to think about while doing so. Below, "this" means "this tool, concept, exercise, worked example of an exercise, personal failure mode, etc.".
I've made a couple other comments about the workshop: thank-you to my hosts (I showed up a day before and stayed a few days after); impressions of the workshop written for my family and friends.
Offering everyone modafinil or something at the beginning of future workshops might help with this.
It would help, but would inevitably offend people and not at all worth the consequences.
We couldn't afford them this year for cost reasons, but by next year we'll hopefully be able to supply Time-Turners for all workshop participants.
I was at the workshop, brought my own (legally obtained) modafinil but never used nor needed it.
I loved the workshop. I intend on teaching my game theory students (an 80 person class at Smith College) some of what I learned. Today we did 15 minutes on goal factoring.
So, I wouldn't call this a solution to the sleep problem. The sleep problem as I conceive it is the following: staying up during a CFAR workshop has unusually high value because of the people you can talk to, but on the other hand sleep is important for learning things. It's not obvious to me how to optimally handle this tradeoff and I'd like a way of handling it that involves decreasing the need for sleep rather than increasing the quantity of sleep if this is feasible.
I'm curious as to why caffiene wasn't sufficient, but also why modafinil would offend people?
As a schedule IV drug, it's surely some sort of crime to offer or accept. Some people will not want to associate with such people or organizations on moral grounds, risk-aversion grounds, or fear of other people's disapproval on either ground etc.
It is, some places. Just not the USA where CFAR is operating now and the foreseeable future. I'm a big fan of modafinil as you might guess, but if CFAR were even idly considering providing or condoning modafinil use, I'd smack them silly (metaphorically); organizations must obey different standards than individuals.
My current stance, which I'll push for quite strongly unless and until I encounter enough evidence against to update significantly, is that CFAR would do very poorly to talk explicitly about any drugs that the USA has a neurosis about. We can talk at a layer of abstraction above: "How might you go about determining what kinds of effects a given substance has on you?" But I am pretty solidly against CFAR listing potential benefits and drawbacks of any drugs that have become rallying cries for law enforcement or political careers.
CFAR folk, please consider/research NYC as a location.
Logistics might be different of course, but there is a lot of people here who wouldn't have to travel or need sleeping arrangements, lowering the total time+money cost for them without taking away CFAR revenue (since they are not a hotel/travel agency).
Also, these workshops are entrepreneur-oriented and there is an active and geographically concentrated start-up scene here, in which I'm somewhat active and would be happy to help with promotion and maybe some of the logistics.
We really are considering it. Some much more key things have emerged that will keep our focus mostly in the Bay area for the next six or so months, but New York City is definitely on the table for a CFAR event this year. No promises, of course, but we very much care about the LW community and know that there's a rather huge core of it in NYC.
This is useful to me as I'll be attending the March workshop. If I successfully digest any of the insights presented here then I'll have a better platform to start from. (Two particular points are the stuff about the parasympathetic nervous system, which I'd basically never heard of before, and the connection between the concepts of "epistemic rationality" and "knowing about myself" which is more obvious-in-retrospect).
Thanks for the write-up!
And yes, I'll stick up at least a brief write-up of my own after I'm done. Does LW have an anti-publication-bias registry somewhere?
while it's too soon to tell how big an impact the workshop will have on my life
Would you be willing to follow up in, say, two years and tell us how well these changes lasted? If you commit now, and use Boomerang to remind yourself, I would be grateful.
For the GTD stuff, I use emacs + org-mode + .emacs based on this configuration + mobile org.
Since I try to work exclusively in emacs, I can quickly capture notes and "things that need to get done" in their proper context, all of which is aggregated under an Agenda window. The Agenda window manages a collection of ".org" files which store the specific details of everything. MobileOrg syncs all these .org files to my phone. Combined with the GTD philosophy of never having anything uncategorized bouncing around in my mind, this system work...
I'm glad to hear it is working well and is well received!
Once there has been some experience running these workshops I really hope there is something that CFAR can design for meetup groups to try / implement and/or an online version.
Is there a CFAR webpage that covers this particular workshop and how it went?
tricking your mind into being more curious
that sounds very useful. How exactly does this technique work?
Offering everyone modafinil or something at the beginning of future workshops might help with this.
Probably better to offer 1/4 of the participants modafinil or something to see if affected more than just wakefulness. E.g. a friend with lots of modafinil experience reports that modafinil may "make it too easy to work enthusiastically on slightly the wrong thing".
So, the Center for Applied Rationality just ran another workshop, which Anna kindly invited me to. Below I've written down some thoughts on it, both to organize those thoughts and because it seems other LWers might want to read them. I'll also invite other participants to write down their thoughts in the comments. Apologies if what follows isn't particularly well-organized.
The workshop was totally awesome. This is admittedly not strong evidence that it accomplished its goals (cf. Yvain's comment here), but being around people motivated to improve themselves and the world was totally awesome, and learning with and from them was also totally awesome, and that seems like a good thing.
Also, the venue was fantastic. CFAR instructors reported that this workshop was more awesome than most, and while I don't want to discount improvements in CFAR's curriculum and its selection process for participants, I think the venue counted for a lot. It was uniformly beautiful and there were a lot of soft things to sit down or take naps on, and I think that helped everybody be more comfortable with and relaxed around each other.
Here are some general insights I took away from the workshop. Some of them I had already been aware of on some abstract intellectual level but hadn't fully processed and/or gotten drilled into my head and/or seen the implications of.
Here are some specific actions I am going to take / have already taken because of what I learned at the workshop.
I'm also planning to take various actions that I'm not writing above but instead putting into my GTD system, such as practicing specific rationality techniques (the workshop included many useful worksheets for doing this) and investigating specific topics like speed-reading and meditation.
The arc word (TVTropes warning) of this workshop was "agentiness." ("Agentiness" is more funtacular than "agency.") The CFAR curriculum as a whole could be summarized as teaching a collection of techniques to be more agenty.
A distinguishing feature the people I met at the workshop seemed to have in common was the ability to go meta. This is not a skill which was explicitly mentioned or taught (although it was frequently implicit in the kind of jokes people told), but it strikes me as an important foundation for rationality: it seems hard to progress with rationality unless the thought of using your brain to improve how you use your brain, and also to improve how you improve how you use your brain, is both understandable and appealing to you. This probably eliminates most people as candidates for rationality training unless it's paired with or maybe preceded by meta training, whatever that looks like.
One problem with the workshop was lack of sleep, which seemed to wear out both participants and instructors by the last day (classes started early in the day and conversations often continued late into the night because they were unusually fun / high-value). Offering everyone modafinil or something at the beginning of future workshops might help with this.
Overall, while it's too soon to tell how big an impact the workshop will have on my life, I anticipate a big impact, and I strongly recommend that aspiring rationalists attend future workshops.