Some clarification of fine points:
Ray thinks this is like, 40-60% of the skill of making better plans (generating them in the first place)
Here's a slightly more nuanced take:
This is me making some kind of bet, I don't have empirics to back this up. If you disagree I'd be happy to operationalize a more specific bet.
It is a bit early to tell and seems hard to accurately measure, but I note some concrete examples at the end.
Concrete examples aside, in plan making it's probably more accurate to call it purposeful practice than deliberate practice, but it seems super clear to me that in ~every place where you can deliberately practice, deliberate practice is just way better than whatever your default is of "do the thing a lot and passively gain experience". It would be pretty surprising to me if that mostly failed to be true of purposeful practice for plan making or other metacognitive skills.
I agree it's hard to accurately measure. All the more important to figure out some way to test if it's working though. And there's some reasons to think it won't. Deliberate practice works when your practice is as close to real world situations as possible. The workshop mostly covered simple, constrained, clear feedback events. It isn't obvious to me that planning problems in Baba is You are like useful planning problems IRL. So how do you know there's transfer learning?
Some data I'd find convincing that Raemon is teaching you things which generalize. If the tools you learnt made you unstuck on some existing big problems you have, which you've been stuck on for a while.
The setup for the workshop is:
Day 1 deals with constrained Toy Exercises
Day 2 deals with thinking about the big, openended problems of your life (applying skills from Day 1)
Day 3 deals with thinking about your object-level day-to-day work. (applying skills from Day 1 and 2)
The general goal with Feedbackloop-first Rationality is to fractally generate feedback loops that keep you in touch with reality in as many ways as possible (while paying a reasonable overhead price, factored into the total of "spend ~10% of your time on meta")
Some details from The Cognitive Bootcamp Agreement
I don’t have perfect feedback-loops to tell you if this workshop is working for you. So, there are
four7 different feedback-loop types, with different tradeoffs:
- Predictions
- Guess whether a given strategy will pay off in a concrete way, then see if you were right.
- Toy Exercises.
- They only vaguely resemble your real problems, but you’ll know for sure whether you got the right answer in two hours.
- Big picture planning
- You’ll generate at least one new plan.
- You won’t really know if it’s good, but a) you’ll have intuitions about whether it's more or less promising than your previous plan, which are at least some information.
- you’ll make predictions about whether it’ll seem worth having thought about in a year.
- throughout the planning process, you'll look for minor opportunities to make a prediction about whether how you'll feel about your planning process, and try to compare how it feels compared to previous planmaking you've done
- Object-level work, in 1-hour blocks
- Spend a few timeblocks doing object level work on your second likeliest plan. Each hour, you’ll make conscious choices about how to spend your time and attention. And then, reflect on whether that seemed useful.
(in addition to crosstraining your skills on the practical object-level, this will help make your second-likeliest plan feel more real)- Nearterm concrete predictions. Again, you can make concrete predictions about how an hour of object-level work will go, and whether pursuing a new strategy will seem to pay off in an intuitive sense.
- Workshop retention
- Make predictions about whether you'll be using various skills from the workshop, 6 months from now.
- Iterate on your strategies for retaining things (immediately) to see if you can improve your prediction about how much you'll retain.
- 6 months from now, see if you're still using workshop skills, or things clearly descended from them, and see if that feels useful
- Post Workshop Predictions
- Once you return to your day job, start making predictions about whether a given new strategy will pay off in a particular instance, and develop a sense of when they do and don't actually help.
- [New at the next workshop, not at the one George was at]
"How many metastrategies are people generating, which go on to help other people at the workshop."
- Next time I'm trying a big whiteboard of meta-strategies, where every time someone generates a new strategy which they strongly believe helped them solve a problem, they write it on the whiteboard and put their initials. If other people use that strategy and helps them, the other people also put their initials on it. The person who's strategies go on to help the most people gets a prize.
My own experiences, after having experimented in a sporadic fashion for 6 years and dedicated Purposeful Practice for ~6 months:
First: I basically never feel stuck on impossible-looking problems. (This isn't actually that much evidence because it's very easy to be deluded about your approach being good, but I list it first because it's the one you listed)
As of a couple weeks ago, a bunch of the skills feel like they have clicked together and finally demonstrated the promise of "more than the some of their parts."
Multiple times per day, I successfully ask myself "Is what I'm doing steering me towards the most important part of The Problem? And, ideally, setting myself up to carve the hypothesis space by 50% as fast as possible?" and it is pretty clear:
The most important general skills that come up a lot are asking:
Things that I don't yet know for sure if they'll pay off but I do successfully do most days now:
I am generally thinking of myself as having the goal of doubling Lightcone's productivity in 12 months (via a combination of these techniques + LLM automation), in a way that should be pretty obvious to the outside world. I don't actually know that I'll succeed at that, but holding that as my intention feels very clarifying and useful. I would be interested in operationalizing bets about it.
(People at Lightcone vary in how bought into that goal. I am currently mostly thinking of it as a thing I'm personally aiming for, and getting people bought into it by demonstrating immediate value is one of the subgoals.
But, notably, six months ago I made a prediction: "6 months from now, in the past week, will I have suggested to a Lightcone employee that they make multiple plans and pick the best one?", and I only gave it 10% because most of my brilliant-seeming ideas don't actually pan out. But, when the prediction resolved last week, it resolved multiple times in the previous week)
I'm a research lead at Timaeus and attended a workshop that @Raemon ran from Oct 4-6 (it was shortened from 4 days to 2.5 days to fit into a weekend). I had prior interest + experience in deliberate practice and enjoyed lots of Ray's posts about it, so I was curious about the workshop on top of being in a position to actually make impactful plans.
This is a lightly edited write up that I initially made for myself and for the team at Timaeus about my experience and takeaways. It's not super polished, but seems better to not clean up and publish than to not clean up and not publish.
What was the workshop about?
Ray is interested in metacognitive improvements. A rough definition of these are: skills or strategies you can learn that make you better able to understand your cognitive process and to influence it in ways that make you more effective as a person. Some examples might include:
This workshop was specifically about being better at making plans. The terminal goal was to help people who work in deeply confusing and long-feedback loop areas (particularly x-risk reduction). The target audience of this workshop was people who are in a position to be making meaningful plans in their job (i.e., they determine most of their own work and/or the work of others). This workshop was probably most helpful for people who are somewhat familiar with how to make good plans
Why plans?
I’ll speculate on this later.(I did not end up speculating on it)Examples from the workshop
(Note: I would recommend not trying to solve or play around with these if you think there is any chance you’d like to try out some of the workshop exercises in a formal setting)
Here are some examples of exercises that we did (may not be in order):
What lessons were useful to take away?
General skills that are OP (not all from the workshop, including my own takes in here)
(These are also skills that would make the workshop much more useful for you; having them doesn't mean the workshop won't help, it means you can use it to build on them)
Specific skills from the workshop that are OP
What did I personally take away?
This is a bit more stream of consciousness / thinking out loud.
This phrase kept getting offhandedly repeated throughout the workshop when Ray was giving examples, and it’s stuck in my head. Something like, “I would just be in the middle of doing something and I would wake up and become sentient and look around me and be like, what am I doing?”
Something about the “wake up and become sentient” thing feels like a really major core of the workshop to me. I’ve spent a bunch of time (diffuse over many years) working on or thinking about deliberate practice and decision making and stuff, but I noticed that a lot of my patterns and intuitions here have kind of become a bit too subconscious, and I’ve forgotten that they’re a thing that I can just look at and continue to polish (I’ve somehow gotten too busy to remember that deliberate practice is a thing that I should still be doing everywhere).
For example, in the Baba Is You exercise, I ended up doing 3 different levels (across two sessions), and it wasn’t until I’d thought about it a bunch afterwards that I realized I had the same type of blind spot in all three cases (my brain is a bit too eager to prune things that are above some threshold of "I’m sure the world works this way"). I think this is a pretty generalizable pattern to notice, and it required "waking up" + live logging + reflecting about the process to notice it in the game setting.
Another big thing in the workshop for me was how important it is to
This thing wasn’t really part of the workshop (the workshop was not focused on execution of plans), but it is something the workshop reminded me of: I can in fact just spend time thinking about how to deliberately practice execution as a research lead. This is something that just seems obvious to do.
TLDR the thing that maybe had the biggest impact was the workshop as a catalyst for a meta-level "waking up and becoming sentient" about the fact that I can "wake up and become sentient" about object level things. (not that I have just literally been autopiloting, but there are degrees to getting out of your head about things / switching to manual control). Besides that, two object level patterns:
And some skills that I’m interested in practicing more and / or trying to use everywhere to internalize them:
The latter two are the kind of thing where my theory of internalizing them is based on how I got myself to use ChatGPT originally, which was: shoehorn it into everything for a few weeks, then gradually prune use cases to what actually feels useful.
I also now have the idea of a “Deliberate Practice Monastery” tattooed on my brain and hear its beautiful siren call. I think there’s a real argument to be made that this work is extremely important and in its idealized, full-potential form, can make our best x-risk researchers significantly better.
I also like a rule of thumb that Ray mentioned during the workshop, which was "spend ~10% of your time on meta".
Other misc thoughts
Concrete value in my day-to-day research
I'm redacting most of this section b/c it's high context and also maybe private, I'm not sure and don't want to think too hard about it. The thrust of this section was something like:
Go to the next one!
Ray is hosting another workshop this weekend (Oct 25-27). Go do it. Actually doing the exercises is miles better than just reading about them (and going home afterwards and continuing to practice is miles better than that).