I have received a couple of emails expressing interest about the results of a local rationality workshop I ran together with Nikolas Bernaola and Kadri Reis two years ago.

Since I was going to write this up for a reply to those emails, I figured I could just make it publicly available for future use.

Summary

The event was a two day immersive workshop with 3 teachers and 8 participants.

The event took place at a participant's house, starting at 18:00 on Friday and ending at 22:00 on Sunday. We slept and eat in place.

The workshop was free of charges for participants barring food costs.

Participant satisfaction was of 8.2/10 according to the follow up survey.

Content

The workshop was trying to give a concentrated version of CFAR's workshop.

The instructors were all CFAR alumni. We ran some training in the month previous to the workshop to prepare the content, but otherwise the staff was fairly untrained.

Participants specially loved and got lots of self reported value from Hamming Circles. The second most loved and reportedly useful class was the one on TAPs. Other activities that gelled specially well with the participants were Goal Factoring, 5 minute timers and the introduction of the workshop (which consisted of a mini class on brainstorming, buglist creation and standard CFAR advice on how to get the most out of the workshop).

You can check out a timetable here (it's in Spanish, with made up names for what are the standard CFAR techniques; if there is interest in a translation I will provide one later)

Culture

We achieved a fairly awesome environment during the camp. Participants and instructors felt focused and willing to be vulnerable and helpful with one another for the sake of self improvement.

It is hard to distill what contributed exactly to this culture, but if I had to guess I would go for some combination of the following factors:

• Sleeping and eating together bonds.
• The staff was really enthusiastic, and they let it show during the classes.
• The participant's backgrounds were fairly homogeneous, as the participants were for the most part from the same circles as the staff. This also meant we were specially commited in helping one another with their personal problems.
• An expectation of intensity and commitment was set up since the registration form, and reinforced during the introduction.
• The small size of the participant group also helped with the feeling of familiarity.
• The level of intensity of the classes felt engaging and challenging. We managed to cram a fairly large amount of content in two days. This would have been hard to mantain for a longer workshop however.

The only thing I would have done otherwise is not admitting one of the participants who was not entirely convinced that this was going to be a useful experience for him. In general, it seems like the participants you want to get are the ones who are really excited about participating, versus those you have to convince of coming.

Logistics

Logistics were fairly trivial to solve, an advantage of such a small size workshop. It would have been convenient to have a volunteer running in camp logistics for us though.

The food served was optimized for "cheap" rather than nutritious or enjoyable. This made sense given that our participants were students, but for a different pool of participants more elaborate food would maybe have been good.

Follow ups

We tried organizing some pair debugging buddies, pairing participants so they could follow up with each others. This initiative was met with various levels of success.

For the following year I observed anecdotically the participants engaging in rationality techniques like TAPs and goal factoring when we met.

Conclusion

The workshop was useful and engaging for participants and staff, and everyone involved got a good return for their investment of time and money.

My experience reveals this is a wonderful introduction for the participants to rationality and for the staff to teaching, no prior experience really needed.

Even with a pool of participants already familiar with the rationality techniques exposed, this kind of environment is ideal for leveling up. I would expect that one could get a lot of mileage attending an annual event of the kind.

It is also important to consider what these workshops provide in relation to other similar initiatives, specially CFAR workshops. My answer is convenience and price: hardly any of the participants would have been willing to travel to San Francisco for a CFAR workshop, yet they happily participated in a cheap event close to them.

I believe that major cities in Europe have the potential for these kind of events being organized. Reaching out to potential participants can be difficult though, and I personally could not organize further workshops due to having no more people in my inner circles interested in participating in a similar experience.

So if you are considering organizing something similar and already have evidence of even a small pool of potential participants, definitely go for it!