Flew to America. Watched Birdman and Interstellar. The first excellent, the second slow but made me tears, twice. Met a lovely couple on second flight, who were in town for a concert by The Grateful Dead.

[My cousin] picked me up, we had a nice drive back. Met her lovely partner [name], and we went out for dinner, at a Mexican place, the guacamole was excellent, first time I've truly enjoyed guac. Had an ice-cream sandwich on way home.

Has been 24 hours since waking in my bed. A nice long day. Will be exciting tomorrow.

Goodnight.

Clock was stuck in Newark time, because I turned off locational services to make sure it didn't tell anyone where I was. So I woke up three hours early. Anyhow, after getting a bagel and a fruit drink for breakfast (bagel was tomato and cream cheese, delicious!) [cousin] drew me a lovely map of the area. I headed in totally the wrong direction, found a lovely book shop that I later realised [cousin] had drawn on the map, found Rosenlicht's "Introduction to Real Analysis", Pierce's "An Introduction to Information Theory", a third edition of "Thinking Physics" and "The Ethical Slut", which I bought for a total of $44. Now I'm on Dolores Park, sitting in the sun reading the info theory text. Warm and beautiful. Been listening to Bird's "Echolocations" and Richter's "The Four Seasons". CFAR soon! Will be taking the BART!

Someone is listening to Portico Quartet on speakers! Someone said I "looked like I was looking for weed" when I was trying to find the people playing Portico.

———

I have arrived at CFAR. The first thing to be said, is how amazing this place. The people are quite remarkable, as expected. Felix Abernathy has social superpowers that he learned and that I need to learn. Beatrice Pennington is incredible kind and interesting. She recognised me and hugged me, knowing me from Facebook (which I did not expect). So, even though she was very high status to me, I am totally relaxed around her (I think having her immediately in near mode and not awkward or anything is very useful, like I did with EY). Clementine Blythe and Violet Farnsworth are more intimidating for the reason that they are both high status to me yet did not enter my near mode as easily. Both seem perfectly nice, but I did not get a great chance to connect with either, so I’m still anxious around them.

I met a lot of people. Hugo Wexler is very interesting, and very different to his Facebook persona which is intelligent yet vulnerable. He is much characterful than I had perhaps expected. Linus Carroway was very encouraging towards me, acting as if he saw himself a little as in a mentor role, giving advice. He runs HIVE which runs meet-ups and attempts to facilitate world-changingness by creating a communal aspect to it that motivates people - writing down their concrete goals, their over-arching life goals, etc, in groups etc.

There’s a guy here who attended all three SPARCs, and says that most attendees didn’t learn anything, because of who they were. Some got better at planning their revision, for example, but none aligned their lives with anything important. Which satisfies me that I’m perhaps not as bad at stuff as I thought. This guy has dropped out of MIT to do his startup.

The long intro session was fascinating. Beatrice Pennington used me in one of her examples, jokingly, about System 1 and System 2, saying I’d be better using my System 1 if she threw her pen at me. The talk was excellent, with all of the different staff being introduced and giving some tips.

The place is in a rented house, giving a very homely feel to the course and getting everyone in much closer proximity than a hotel situation would be. There is a journalist here, who’s writing an article for the New York Times Magazine, a supplement to the NYT paper with longer articles inside. I’m sure she’d be interested to write about a teenager who’s just finished school.

Arthur Loomis has a guitar, which he says I can restring with my nylon strings. Woo! He seems lovely. He wears a skirt.

I had a lovely conversation with this other guy, who said there was a higher likelihood than I currently thought, that I would stay in SF longer than I currently planned to do so, given I had free time and had my interests. I should consider asking [my rich aunt] about this tomorrow. Well, talk to mum in the morning. The guy said he liked me; I made him laugh a fair bit.

Oddity: I saw this morning that the ‘h’ from my inscribed fountain pen had lost the top tip bit. This made me sad. Then, this evening, it had returned. Magic. Must’ve just been dirty. I was so surprised, I stopped mid conversation when I realised, and started for about 20 seconds before explaining to my conversational partner why.

Other fascinating things are happening all around me.

Gratitude diary:

I am so grateful for being surrounded by fascinating people who have goals with deep importance.

I am grateful for being surrounded by people who have been socially welcoming to me.

I am grateful to be in a place where I am going to work on improving my life so much.

I am grateful for the books I found in the lovely book store this morning.

I am grateful for the lovely hours spent on the park today, reading.

I am less grateful for my sunburn, for which I should ask around for relevant creams in the morning.

Damn, this is gonna be good.

The first day.

'Goal Factoring' with Felix. Fascinating. Reducing your plans into their sub-goals, and searching for other ways to obtain the goals. Then you learn about reasons you were hiding, by sufficient the other goals and seeing what's missing. Realised that the main benefit of uni for me was safety in future prospects e.g. money, jobs, etc. I could probably get the rest of the value through other methods, but with less confidence.

Also, at the beginning, he set up the problem as trying to find a way to resolve issues where you actions and goals are mismatched - your actions don’t achieve your goals e.g. the person who wants to become a stand-up comic, yet spends his free time watching Garfield. Just because it is associated with the goal, does not in fact mean it achieves the goal. He asked us for suggestions about what we would do to solve the issues. He pointed out, or maybe I noticed, that all of the people’s suggestions were for what System 2 should do, and they never gave advice on how to allow System 1 to notice that the issue required solving.

(Btw, I learned that System 1 and 2 are numbered that way because System 1 evolved first. Duh. Blew my mind. Also, System 1 now gets called ‘Systems 1’ because it’s so vast. Basically, System 2 is executive function and working memory, and Systems 1 is everything else.)

This was basically Logan Strohl’s thoughts, as I had read her blogging about how to practice noticing when you’ve felt something that signals you need to execute a skill. This is training at the level of System 1. She was in the class, and afterwards came over to say that it was cool to hear her own thoughts expressed by someone else.

Next was ‘Your Inner Simulator’ with Hazel Everton. Her model was of the brain as a king with advisers, but the advisers couldn’t advise and there isn’t a king, he only thinks he’s king. Anyway, this was advice on how to use the advisers (Systems 1). You can run a mental simulation of an event, and ask certain questions. So, you can conditionalise on finding out that your current plan has failed, and then ask your System 1 “How surprised am I?” also check that it is the complement of how surprised it is when your plan succeeds, to be consistent. This allows Systems 1 to give you its advice on the likelihood of the plan succeeding. Note that no module in your brain is a truth-giving oracle, so you must compare this to your System 2, and make them cohere. e.g. if you’re considering asking a girl to dance, System 1 could say it’s likely she’ll pour her drink over you, but System 2 here is more accurate in saying this is implausible (in general). You can also ask what explanations your Systems 1 comes up with to explain the failure of a plan (or success). This harnesses the power of your rationalising machine, to help generate possible hypotheses to consider, which is quite satisfying - using this major source of bias in your favour.

“Trigger Action Planning (TAP)” was with Clementine Blythe. It was fascinating, because it had an incredible amount of scientific support, and was very strong. Basically, it involves figuring out an action you can take to get what you want, and writing down the situations in which you should notice that you can take the action, and then taking the action.

Say you have the goal of doing more exercise, and your plan is that when you enter the office you will take the stairs up. You make this your TAP. But you know that sometimes it doesn’t work, because you just don’t feel like walking up the stairs. The cool thing, is that if you also write down the trigger “I arrive at the office, and I don’t feel like going up the stairs” and connect it with the action “I go up the stairs” then that has a significant increase in the probability that you will do it. The post-hoc explanation for this is that your model of the world sees the world where you arrive at the office, and the world where you arrive at the office and don’t want to climb the stairs, as separate worlds. There is a lot of evidence saying that TAPs have a massive impact, even spending a little time on them (an hour) has significant impacts six months later. Even with ADD kids, who basically have difficulty doing the TAP in the first place.

Clementine also gave some suggestions about making good triggers. They should be at a particular moment, and sensory. Not ‘before dinner’ because that time is difficult to pinpoint exactly, and you’re quite busy then typically. Not ‘after dinner’ because that’s also vague, but perhaps ‘the moment when I put the last dish in the dishwasher, I will then do x’. Also, sensory, so that you notice it. Not ‘at eight’ because it doesn’t feel like anything especially for it to be eight.

Then it was lunch, and I got to play Arthur Loomis's guitar to him and Logan and another person. I played one-on-one with Arthur first, and he was very appreciative. I was much more nervous playing for Logan, but she said it persuaded her to pick up the guitar again. I said I’d play more for her, more Bach and also Paper Moon at a later point. After lunch we had ‘Focused Grit’ with Hazel, which was basically setting up a situation where you thought you only had five minutes to solve the problem you had, and whatever you came up with had to be your final answer, and you couldn’t work on the problem again. This was surprisingly effective. It had a few more bells and whistles, described in the notebook.

Turbocharging Training with Felix, was mind-blowing. Felix is a real-world Derren Brown / Patrick Jane type. Social superpowers. Viscerally impressive. He explained his method of figuring out how to learn a skill in super quick time. The first exercise was to try to disconnect the motivation behind someone’s training, and look at it without the illusion that it achieves what it’s set out to achieve, and try to see what is actually being trained. He used maths and language classes as examples. For example, the maths student coming down the teacher’s monologue examples, learns to copy stuff down and follow worked proofs, not solve the problems himself. The language student does not deal with uncertainty, and always deals in (normally slowed down time) words and phrases he knows and has been defined, and rarely is truly conversational. So, looking beyond the motivation and straight at the actual training, was one big skill. This is called “Practice the skill you want". The other is “Apply the rule of intensity”. It turns out that the curve for the amount of intensity with which you practice, and the amount you learn, is like a y = -x^2 curve which starts at the bottom, rises, then falls. So, if you find that your skill level reaches a point that your practice is getting easier, you must add difficulty to keep intensity high.

A robust finding from educational research is that, whilst typically a teacher shows how to do a problem, then sets exercises, if you reverse this order, the pupils learn a great deal more. This must be kept in mind.

This class was perhaps the most impressive, in terms of “Woah! I did not know that this amount of knowledge was known about rationality!” And that was my general impression throughout the day.

Finally, there was a class with the whole group and Felix, called ‘Againstness’ which discussed the limbic system and showed how it affected our thoughts and decisions. Felix started by giving us experiences along the spectrum of SNS to PSNS, and then explaining what those things were and how they affected us, and how we could control them. Fascinating. He got a guy up, who didn’t sing, and asked him to sing happy birthday for everyone (he did all of the prerequisite explaining to everyone that he would be asking something uncomfortable, and that they could say no at any point). He worked with the guy to get him to mostly use his PSNS system, so that he was fully relaxed. Felix has superpowers. He did the thing where he explained that he studied micro-reactions of mathematicians for his PhD and had to study people’s place on the spectrum very quickly when teaching Aikido, because you have to be very relaxed to do it.

He also mentioned that with his turbocharging techniques, he taught a group of new Aikido students in 15 lessons what would be comparable to excellent students after 2 years of 2-3 lessons per week.

Afterwards, I did the seven-minute scientific workout.

In the evening, I played Felix a little classical guitar. I got the sense he was bored and felt embarrassed, although he thanked me and said he enjoyed it when he left. I then felt bad, surrounded by high-status people.

The sleeping mask and earplugs were excellent.

Day 2

Another mind blowing day. Systemization class with Felix blew my mind again. I must be wary that he is merely good at presenting ideas. He showed us the massive value of attention, and methods for making sure we weren't wasting it. Ways of making systems in our lives that make achieving our goals effortless.

After that, was Aversion Factoring and Calibration with Hazel. This worked similarly to goal factoring, as seems widely applicable. Hazel has a lot of sprit lay energy when teaching. She looks an awful lot like how I would've expected [my childhood friend] to grow up to look like. We ended by attempting to factor an aversion, and I picked 'getting out of bed in the morning'. It turned out that mine needed the technique of the following class to solve, so I took it along there.

Then was Propagating Urges with Clementine. This helped connect S1 and S2 in agreeing on the goals and actions to achieve those goals, which was very helpful.

After working on my problem, it turned out that the main reason I didn't get up for the past four years, was that my morning process is highly attention/using (i.e. Effortful: I had to spend lots of effort on finding the towel, finding the clothes, etc.) and that there was little final purpose (I did not enjoy schools). It's fascinating how I can know that I don't like school, and know that I don't get out of bed, for so long, and not make that connection.

So I need a system for effortless mornings. And I should put a picture on the ceiling that connects me to my desires for the day.

I’m now writing from the following evening, and can barely remember the actual classes.

We had a Comfort Zone Expansion (CoZE) class with Felix, where he talked about how some of the things that we won’t do are because they’re not in our identity, and that we can try out different identities by trying an act only someone with that identity would perform.

Logan Strohl answered the question ‘what relaxes you’ with ‘Debussy’, presumably because I’d been playing it on my laptop during the morning. She’d said she liked ‘the pretty music’.

Systemization 2 with Felix was about practicing Systemizing, I think. I decided to eat food on the counter in the kitchen, so it’s less effort to move to the sink and clean it (I’ll still be in kitchen mode).

Value of Info class didn’t go well, as Hazel had difficulty figuring out the important ideas herself. So there was much discussion that lead nowhere.

Propagating Urges 2 gave practice.

CoZE lab was incredible. Everyone was encouraged to find things that they weren’t comfortable doing, and figure out what identity they had that disallowed this (i.e. I won’t be assertive because I’m a shy person) and trying stuff from a new personality. This was taken quite vaguely, and people just generally tried out things outside of their comfort zone. I didn’t think performing would be useful for me, but it worked out excellently. What happened was this.

I tried to play to a water bottle like it was [person], because [they're] high status. This did not work. I went into the living area and played to people I didn’t know too well, with lots of talking in the background. This did not make nervous. I took Jen (NYT journalist) and someone else to the beds room, and played one or two things, which they enjoyed a lot and was a little nervous-making, which was helpful.

[Cut bit where I privately play music for someone. "I was very pleased that I gave a private performance to someone so high status, and that it was unambiguously positive."]

We gathered upstairs to re-tell our tales. Felix reminded us that, whilst there were often good stories, we were looking to hear about people’s experiences with CoZE first and foremost. Many amusing stories were in fact told. One guy tried talking whilst looking into people’s eyes more. One guy tried to go very PSNS (aka calm) during conversation instead of SNS (excited), and realised he’d been covering up a lot of anxiety. Jen (journalist) decided she should practice going against the social pressure of the group of friends, and so didn’t do a CoZE (because she always submits to people’s whims). She said that Clementine Blythe had come up to her and asked if she was doing a CoZE and Jen had said no, and Clementine had looked very disappointed. This caused everyone to laugh.

I mentioned to the guy who did the staring, that Luke Muehlhauser once wrote about a thing where you stare into someone’s eyes for twenty minutes nonstop. You’re not supposed to talk or laugh. We agreed to try it tomorrow.

We listened to various people talk about the phenomenon of ‘teaching’. It became apparent that ‘learning’ happens when two people agree that one wishes to ‘learn’ what the other person has, and they work together to make sure it is well implanted in the ‘student’s’ mind.

The morning of lessons I received didn’t help me much, except I realised how much of my guitar practice was motivated by status reasons. The afternoon of tutoring was incredibly helpful, and I learned a lot. Logan Strohl taught me a lot about CoZE. Also, we had to help a girl make a TAP to remember to call her mother once per month. I said ‘Is there anything that happens once per month, like someone punching you and shouting ‘punch punch first-of-the-month’ and she said ‘yes’ and I said ‘is it constant and conveniently timed?’ and she said ‘yes, always on the first day at about 4-6’ and so we used that as the trigger, and I was ecstatic about it working.

Before the Hamming Questions class, I saw Arthur Loomis dancing, and Logan Strohl and Violet Farnsworth joined in. I’ve never really known someone to be so free with their body, and I had an interesting experience watching him. I wrote in my notebook that I was very uncomfortable and close to tears. I made a note to ask him if he would dance with me at some point, privately.

The Hamming Questions was fantastic. I got a great re-framing of my life. Lots of really good questions. I realise my depressed states were super-important, and I needed to work on resolving them. During this class, I discovered that [my rich aunt] had moved my flight to the 10th July, and became ecstatic, smiling massively the whole time.

I asked lots of people for things to do in SF, and got lots of ideas. Hazel Everton helped a lot, and I asked if I could help with anything CFAR related. I don’t know that I will be able to.

The Hamming Circles didn’t go well. Four of us, and I was first to have twenty minutes focused on my problems. I didn’t want to discuss the personal problems of my home life or my depression, and so I stated I would take the least emotional of my problems, that I wasn’t good at thinking hard about problems. Linus tried to push this out of the way, but I did not let him. We discussed it, and I realised that I’ve never had a good teacher of maths or science in my life. This helps in part to explain why I’ve had difficulty in transitioning to problem-solving. I was nearly in tears at the end of such a neutral session, plausibly because I’d only ever thought these thoughts before, and I’d been thinking them for a long time.

Jen announced [challenging personal thing in her life], and she’d be leaving in the morning. She broke down a little, and said thanks to everyone, and lots of clicking applauded her.

We got Linus's email sent off to Sam Harris, with the help of the excellent Beatrice Pennington.

In the evening I stared with Jasper Whitlock for twenty minutes. This resolved into giggles for last ten minutes, especially when a random dog wandered into my periphery.

Played guitar in living room a while. Few people noticed or commented, except that Arthur danced, which was delightful. Violet Farnsworth joined in too.

Sunday 28th June

Today is the day we practiced tutoring. First there were three lightning classes on tutoring. Clementine pointed out that successful tutoring is where one person has an understanding of something, and emits sound waves, and then another person also has understanding of the something. Clementine asked us to think about this process, and say any insights we had about what exactly was going on there and how it is best done. She asked us also to think about why it often helps the tutor to understand the something.

Hazel gave us some example of things from two different categories, in order to suggest what the defining feature was.

In the first set, there was the math student who could solve quadratic equations by turning to look at and use the quadratic formula, but in the case that you alter what his textbook says the formula is, he will not notice. In the second set, is the mathematician who requires the use of the quadratic formula in a step in a proof, and reaches behind himself (figuratively) to grab the formula. This is a guy who would notice if he was somehow given the wrong formula, and would correct it (by re-deriving it).

I won’t explain the rest of the examples, but I said that the first set was ‘work’, where there was little intrinsic motivation i.e. connection to purpose, and also rigidity, whereas in the second set the members were all ‘playing’, and had much more enthusiasm for the task.

The lesson was that the CFAR techniques were an instrument of your will, but not themselves the goal.

The PCK class was all good (I will not be listing details as I can no longer recall any other than those in the workbook). Beatrice told me after, that when she mentioned to Clementine about my suggestion for a rapid way to learn PCK before having been explained the concept of PCK, Clementine had said ‘that makes me more optimistic about Ben’.

We had tutoring classes for most of the rest of the day; I was tutored in the morning, which I did not find especially useful (may have been the participant tutors). I tutored in the afternoon, and I found this immensely fascinating and informative. It allowed me practice in working through the steps without needing to over-spend cognitive resources doing them, which meant that I internalised the techniques a little better. I also came up with novel solutions, such as the person who needed a monthly reminder to call their mother. I asked if there was anyone who came up to them on the first of every month and said ‘Pinch, punch, first-of the month’ and then punched them, and the person said ‘yes'. I asked if it happened regularly and at a convenient time to phone their mother, and the person said ‘yes, every first day between 4 and 6 pm’. The person now uses that as the trigger to phone their mother.