How to learn from a stronger rationalist in daily life? — LessWrong

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How to learn from a stronger rationalist in daily life? — LessWrong

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I find myself somewhat struggling to answer this question because I'm not sure I understand what you're looking for.

It sounds like you are generally noticing:

Some people are more skilled at rationality than you, and you've learned from them.
You want to gain skills.
You don't want to turn a friendship into a formal mentorship
You don't want to accidentally learn to defer to other people (I sympathize with this – I think I got worse at thinking during my first 3 years in the rationality community for this reason)

Those all make sense.

The title of the question here is "how to learn from a stronger rationalist in daily life" (which I do have some thoughts about).

The more specific question you ask is "are there exercises/drills in applied rationality where one participant is much stronger than the other, but doesn't have CFAR instructor-level skills?". Here's where I'm not quite sure what you mean. Any exercise involving two people can have one person who's more skilled than the other, who can offer guidance. But that seems obvious. "What are some exercises that are worth doing together even if neither person is a certified instructor" is a reasonable, if somewhat broad question. But this feels a bit like you're asking for a more specific thing that makes sense to me.

Curious if you could unpack what you're looking for a bit more?

[-]Thomas Kwa6y30

Here's what I think I notice. When practicing the Training Regime sequence with Mark and some other friends, I felt stronger by the day. But since then, I think talking to stronger people I know has made me weaker. This is strange because, well, whenever I know someone else with expertise in a particular area, I tend to learn about it. I suspect that I'm learning to defer, because I'm only comfortable holding a separate belief from them when I cite someone even stronger (Yudkowsky, Ord, the stock market), and often not even then. There could be other effects that make me weaker, but this is particularly scary because it's a vicious cycle.

My general plan to level up is to practice the CFAR techniques I can get immediate benefit from (TAPs, goal factoring) and the skills I need the most work with (probably Noticing, Murphyjitsu, Deflinching, getting myself to practice, and knowing when to build form on a small problem vs tackle a big one). I expect this to take a few months, possibly longer if I hit more pitfalls.

Eventually I want to make interventions roughly as successful as Brienne Yudkowsky c. 2015, and move on to difficult techniques like CoZE or mantras or something once I've taken the lower-hanging fruit. But this will probably take years.

Even though the current way I interact with strong rationalists is probably net-negative in the long run, I feel like it's an overreaction to completely neglect the resource and slog through everything on my own. Also, maintaining the friendship more or less requires talking about rationality if the friendship is mostly based on it. The admittedly weak inference I make here is that I want an exercise that does not teach me to defer, or some way of talking to people about rationality in general that avoids the temptation to defer. Or addresses other problems with the default approach that I don't notice yet.

So, I did have similar issues with "it was hard for me to hold opinions different from obviously-competent people" (especially when they projected confidence), and I learned to defer to them rather than practicing thinking on my own.

Doing various CFAR-esque exercises helped. However, what I personally found most helpful was ending up in a situation where I had to figure out the answers on my own, and mentor-figures couldn't help me (they didn't understand the situation as well as I did, or care). This forced me to actually learn to think independently. Afterwards, I found it much easier to interact with mentor-figures in a way I could learn the good parts without accidentally practicing deference.

This is a hard thing to force, unfortunately. But until my second such experience, CFAR esque exercises had very slow returns (like, 3% a year, not really noticeably changing my life for 4 years)

[-]Thomas Kwa6y10

So you're saying that CFAR exercises suddenly became more valuable once you had the experience of thinking independently? What did the shift subjectively feel like?

[-]johnswentworth6y40

Socratic Ducking fits the criteria; it's a good way to get a feel for what kinds of questions someone else asks theirself.

[-]Lukas_Gloor6y30

I recommend finding some kind of goal other goal than "becoming more rational." Going to a workshop here and there or discussing rationality techniques with someone sounds good, but if that's your primary goal for several months or longer, that IMO risks turning into a failure mode of looking at rationality as an end rather than a means. I think you learn most by trying to do things that are important to you.

I strongly agree with the advice of trying to surround yourself with some people you want to learn from.