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Bob and Carl are about to negotiate. Conveniently, the thing they're negotiating over is the division of six spherical cows. Each of them would ideally like all six for themselves.
Bob considers the situation and opens by saying "I think the reasonable thing to do here is go with 3 each. That seems fair."
"I'd rather have 5," says Carl breezily.
"That doesn't seem fair at all," says Bob, a little surprised. "That's not compromising."
"Hrm, tell you what. I'll compromise, and I'll have 4." Carl says with good cheer.
"I- what? No, the fair thing is 3 each." Bob sounds a little angry now.
"Now who isn't compromising?" Carl asks, and Dean (who started watching the discussion recently, but wasn't around long enough to have a good sense of what their goals are) nods in agreement.
"Fine, I'll take 2," Bob splutters. But he's not happy about it.
Bella and Chloe are about to negotiate. Conveniently, the thing they're negotiating over is the division of six spherical cows. Each of them would ideally like all six for themselves.
"I want 6," Bella says, "do you want to just meet in the middle?"
"That's hardly fair," Chloe says. "You're not giving anything up."
"I said I wanted 6. I can compromise. You want 6 as well, right?" Bella asks.
"How about I get 15?" Chloe proposes as though that's a reasonable number of spherical cows to be given out of the six at hand.
"I- what?" Bella is baffled. "Is that what you want or what you suggest as a compromise?"
"I suppose I'll be generous. I'll take 5."
"I'm sorry, but no. That's not fair at all." Bella says, starting to get annoyed.
"Why not?" asks Darla, who has been watching long enough to hear the conversation but not long enough to have a sense of their goals, or of the range of spherical cows. "Chloe is offering a lot more to go from 15 to 5 than you are to go from 6 to 1."
"You can't actually expect me to take her getting 15 as a reasonable starting position. That's blatantly setting the zero point." Bella argues, getting heated.
"I suppose I accept your apology, but to make up for it can we compromise at least on me getting 4?" Chloe says, with an air of resignation.
"See Bella? Chloe is offering to compromise again," Darla points out, trying to be helpful. "And you did say sorry, which sounds like you agree you made a mistake."
"That's not- you know what, fine, whatever," Bella says. But she's not happy about it.
Bryer and Cameron are about to negotiate. Conveniently, the thing they're negotiating over is the division of six spherical cows. Each of them would ideally like all six for themselves.
"I think the fair thing is 3 each." Bryer says.
"Well, I think-" Cameron starts, but Bryer interrupts them.
"And since both of us know the standard way to divide gains, you know I'll randomly reject divisions that stray from that with a probability proportionate to how unfair it seems to me," Bryer finished.
". . . I get 4?" Cameron suggests.
"If that's your final offer I'll accept with slightly less than 3/4 probability. 3 because that's what I think I is fair for you to get, 4 because that's what you think is fair for you to get," Bryer says.
"That's a weird bit of math you just suggested, and I'm not sure it's applicable," Cameron says.
"It's not that weird," Dakota says. Dakota wasn't really paying attention, at least not long enough to know what everyone's goals are, but who did pay attention to the math. "We all learn that in school, usually by the time we're ten. And if we didn't, we pick it up from the Dungeons and Dragons[1] BDSM fanfiction that's required reading for everyone in our subculture. I was as surprised as you were when the rightful caliph declared it was required reading, but we did all read it. And there's a short version to point people at if they don't know it."
Cameron opens and closes their mouth a few times. They say "3 then." But they're not happy about it.
- ^
I agree this is actually Pathfinder. I also stand by calling it D&D here because I expect calling it Pathfinder would confuse more people than it enlightens, Pathfinder's close enough to round to D&D for these purposes, and I guess I can add this footnote.
2
2
1:)
A couple of notes:
4 because that's what you think is fair for you to get
4 should be there not because it's what Cameron thinks is fair but because it's what they're offering.
Cameron opens and closes their mouth a few times. They say "3 then." But they're not happy about it.
That's only the right thing to do if Camerons know that the fair split is actually 3:3 (it's unclear why they'd be unhappy about it if they think it's fair: are they unhappy because they were interacting with someone who couldn't be convinced to give up some of the cows?). If Cameron thinks the fair split is 4, they are supposed to still offer 2:4. (They could also offer 3:3 with a bit under 2/3 chance and walk away otherwise, but they don't need to do it here.)
Maybe Cameron is a CDT agent, though, in which case they're unhappy about the unfair split but can't do anything about it. In that case, the right course of action for Bryer would be to say that they're going to accept splits with a probability of 1/(6-offered), so that Cameron offers 5 and gets 1.[1]
- ^
If they're allowed to do more than that, you could also say that you will reject any offer unless the procedure that Cameron employs is offering 6 99.99999% of the time and offering 5 the rest of the time.
It's hard being a CDT agent. You are often not happy about what you do.
4 should be there not because it's what Cameron thinks is fair but because it's what they're offering.
How about "4 because that's what you say is fair for you to get"? Cameron isn't offering 4 to Bryer, it's a 2:4 split with 4 to Cameron.
(I want to make sure I get this part right, and appreciate the edit pass!)
1The calculation is just based what C gets if their offer is accepted, and on what B thinks is fair; it doesn’t matter if the split is fair according to C, it’s just in the calculation B does so that the expected payout of C is not higher than what’s fair according to B due to them offering this split. If C thought that the fair split is 5:1, but offered an C!unfair (unfair-according-to-C) split of 4:2, B does the same calculation; the goal is to make C get a bit less than 3 in expectation in all B!unfair splits, because the B!fair split is 3:3
The high-level purpose is that this enables people with different notions of fairness to mutually cooperate almost always; and if you do this procedure, you incentivize fair-according-to-you splits. Others don’t have to do what you think is fair; and even if they offer what you consider unfair, you’ll often accept (you just need to reject enough for it you!unfair splits to not be worth offering just for the purpose of exploiting you, as it won’t work).
That's only the right thing to do if Camerons know that the fair split is actually 3:3 (it's unclear why they'd be unhappy about it if they think it's fair: are they unhappy because they were interacting with someone who couldn't be convinced to give up some of the cows?). If Cameron thinks the fair split is 4, they are supposed to still offer 2:4. (They could also offer 3:3 with a bit under 2/3 chance and walk away otherwise, but they don't need to do it here.)
In these stories, the Cs are not aiming at a fair split (or to the extent they are, it's more of an "all's fair in love, war, and spherical cow negotiations" kind of fair.) They are aiming at getting as many cows as they can. This is not stated explicitly and I do think there's a valid reading of the text where the Cs are just really badly calibrated on what's fair, but in my head I was writing it with a mind to "okay, what's some really annoying low hanging fruit for aggressive negotiation tactics?" Cameron is written as unhappy because in the author's head, their attempts to get some 'free' extra cows failed.
Depending on context, I don't think the Cs are doing something morally wrong- if I go to buy a used car from a dealer, I expect them to try this kind of thing on me and I'll do it right back to them if I can. If I'm negotiating salary with a standard corporation, I expect them to try this kind of thing on me and I'll to it to them too. But it's not behavior I want from people on my team within the team.
Xannon: "Oh, dear. It seems we have a dispute as to what is fair. For myself, I want to divide the pie the same way as Yancy. But let us resolve this dispute over the meaning of fairness, fairly: that is, giving equal weight to each of our desires. Zaire desires the pie to be divided {1/4, 1/4, 1/2}, and Yancy and I desire the pie to be divided {1/3, 1/3, 1/3}. So the fair compromise is {11/36, 11/36, 14/36}."
(from The Bedrock of Fairness)
This caused me to get around to writing a comment on the linked How to Give in to Threats post, which I had meant to for a while.
I have added a footnote: "I agree this is actually Pathfinder. I also stand by calling it D&D here because I expect calling it Pathfinder would confuse more people than it enlightens, Pathfinder's close enough to round to D&D for these purposes, and I guess I can add this footnote."
I'm curious if this satisfies you?
(I'm also amused that I see the "It's not D&D, it's Pathfinder" point brought up repeatedly but don't think I've run across someone making the "It's not BDSM, those are abusive relationships" point.)
I'm curious if this satisfies you?
It does. Strenuously arguing the distinction, with the bold and caps, was mostly in jest: I've myself referred to all TTRPGs as "D&D."
The irony of quibbling over the D&D vs. Pathfinder distinction instead of what one might have expected would be the sticking point was intended to be funny.
IDK, imagine someone made an LLM that felt so much like 3 Opus that it was informally nicknamed 3.1 Opus
(Also, is planecrash placed in a world that descended from the first edition of Pathfinder and not second?)
I mean, mostly this is in jest, but like, Pathfinder is really mostly DnD with some changes. Pathfinder is much more similar to DnD than any other TTRPG setup. So referring to it as "Dungeons and Dragons" seems appropriate, given the former is much more widely known.
1
1It really is, though.
There’s not any reasonable standard by which you could label Pathfinder (especially 1st edition PF, which is what Project Lawful is based on) as being “not D&D”, while also labeling D&D 5e as being “D&D”[1]. PF was, after all, informally called “3.75” when it was released (referring to the goal of the Pathfinder RPG project being to clean up and improve the D&D “3.5e” rule set).
I won’t even get into the 4e question… ↩︎
I'd say it's more like D&D 3.5 than any two of [AD&D, D&D 3.5, D&D 4E, D&D 5E] are like each other.
“You can’t actually expect me to take her getting 15 as a reasonable starting position. That’s blatantly setting the zero point.” Bella argues, getting heated.
This is a very odd response. Why would Bella reply by invoking this sort of abstract, somewhat esoteric, meta-level concept like “setting the zero point”, instead of saying something more like “… uh, Chloe, are you ok? you know we don’t have 15 cows to divide, right?”.
This makes me suspect that whatever this fictional conversation is a metaphor for, is not actually analogous to dividing six spherical cows between two people.
Why would Bella reply by invoking this sort of abstract, somewhat esoteric, meta-level concept like “setting the zero point”, instead of saying something more like “… uh, Chloe, are you ok? you know we don’t have 15 cows to divide, right?”.
Because she's in a silly shortform dialogue that's building up to the esoteric, meta-level concept like the game theory in the third part mostly. I wanted some kind of underhanded negotiating tactic I could have Chloe try, I came up with asking for way more than is reasonable to set the stage for "compromise," and then I noticed that the tactic had a good conceptual handle and I referenced it.
This makes me suspect that whatever this fictional conversation is a metaphor for, is not actually analogous to dividing six spherical cows between two people.
It's pretty generic, abstracted negotiation and Chloe is being pretty blatant and ambitious. Asking for value that the other person didn't even think was on the table is a negotiation move I've seen and heard of though, sometimes successfully. For a more realistic version, compare a salary negotiation where the applicant asks for 10% higher salary, gets told the company doesn't have that much to pay employees, and then tries for a couple weeks extra vacation time or more company stock instead.
I think the math at the end still works even if the two sides don't agree on how many cows are actually available.
There's this concept I keep coming around to around confidentiality and shooting the messenger, which I have not really been able to articulate well.
There's a lot of circumstances where I want to know a piece of information someone else knows. There's good reasons they have not to tell me, for instance if the straightforward, obvious thing for me to do with that information is obviously against their interests. And yet there's an outcome better for me and either better for them or the same for them, if they tell me and I don't use it against them.
(Consider a job interview where they ask your salary expectations and you ask what the role might pay. If they decide they weren't going to hire you, it'd be nice to know what they actually would have paid for the right candidate, so you can negotiate better with the next company. Consider trying to figure out how accurate your criminal investigation system is by asking, on their way out of the trial after the verdict, "hey did you actually do it or not?" Consider asking a romantic partner "hey, is there anything you're unhappy about in our relationship?" It's very easy to be the kind of person where, if they tell you a real flaw, you take it as an insult- but then they stop answering that question honestly!)
There's a great Glowfic line with Feanor being the kind of person you can tell things to, where he won't make you worse off for having told him, that sticks with me but not in a way I can find the quote. :(
It's really important to get information in a way that doesn't shoot the messenger. If you fail, you stop getting messages.
2How much or how little does this cross over with the espionage-coded topic of Elicitation? I understand that you would prefer if these dynamics could be more transparent, but in the absence of that, what is the alternative?
Not that much crossover with Elicitation. I think of Elicitation as one of several useful tools for the normal sequence of somewhat adversarial information exchange. It's fine! I've used it there and been okay with it. But ideally I'd sidestep that entirely.
Also, I enjoy the adversarial version recreationaly. I like playing Blood On The Clocktower, LARPs with secret enemies, poker, etc. For real projects I prefer being able to cooperate more, and I really dislike it when I wind up accidentally in the wrong mode, either me being adversarial and the other people aren't or me being open and the other people aren't.
In the absence of the kind of structured transparency I'm gesturing at, play like you're playing to win. Keep track of who is telling the truth, mark what statements you can verify and what you can't, make notes of who agrees with each other's stories. Make positive EV bets on what the ground truth is (or what other people will think the truth is) and when all else fails play to your outs.
(That last paragraph is a pile of sazen and jargon, I don't expect it's very clear. I wanted to write this note because I'm not trying to score points via confusion and want to point out to any readers it's very reasonable to be confused by that paragraph.)
The main issue is, theories about how to run job interviews are developed in collaboration between businesses who need to hire people, theories on how to respond to court questions are developed in collaboration between gang members, etc.. While a business might not be disincentized from letting the non-hired employees better at negotiating, it is incentivized to teach other businesses ways of making their non-hired employees worse at negotiating.
From a conversation:
"What do you call each other in LessWrong? is it like, Brother, or Comrade, or Your Majesty?"
"Based on observation, I think it's 'You're Wrong.'"
9Every so often I see the following:
Adam: Does anyone know how to X?
Bella: I asked ChatGPT, and it said you Y then Z.
Adam: Urgh, I could ask ChatGPT myself, why bother to speak up if you don't have anything else to add?
I'm sort of sympathetic to Adam- I too know how to ask ChatGPT things myself- but I think he's making a mistake. Partially because prompting good answers is a bit of a skill (one that's becoming easier and easier as time goes on, but still a bit of a skill.) Mostly because I'm not sure if he's reinforcing people to not answer with LLM answers, or if he's reinforcing not telling him it's from an LLM.
Citing sources is valuable! In grade school I sometimes got told not to use sources I found on the internet, and what happened isn't that I stopped using the internet it's that I stopped citing the sources that were from the internet and left them as assertions, instead adding requisite citations from other sources. It changed some of my essay structure sometimes, but not as often as I think the teachers were hoping.
Anyway, I don't really want to encourage more people to give LLM answers when I ask questions, but if you do give me that kind of answer I appreciate it being cited as such. I try to score such that you do not lose more points telling me relevant true things vs where you don't tell me things.
Mostly because I’m not sure if he’s reinforcing people to not answer with LLM answers, or if he’s reinforcing not telling him it’s from an LLM.
Which behavior he's reinforcing is not up to him, it depends on the learner as well. Let's take an analogy. Alice tells Bob "don't steal", and Bob interprets it as "don't get caught stealing". Who's in the wrong here? Bob, of course. He's the one choosing to ignore the intent of the request, like a misaligned AI. Same for people who misinterpret "don't post AI slop" as "get better at passing off AI slop as human". How such people can become genuinely aligned is a good question, and I'm not sure it can be done reliably with reinforcement, because all reinforcement has this kind of problem.
2Instead of "Does anyone know how to X?" Adam could ask, "Has anyone Xed before (or recently)?" In other words, make a request for someone's personal experience rather than for instructions.
The issue is greater when people do not have the relevant expertise to judge whether the LLM output is correct or useful. People who find things on websites generally have to evaluate the content, but several times people have responded to my questions with LLM output that plainly does not answer the question or show insight into the problem.
Possible justifications for Bella's response in slightly different hypotheticals.
- Maybe X is a good fit for an LLM. So Adam could have asked an LLM himself. Bella is politely reinforcing the behavior of checking with an LLM before asking a human.
- Maybe Adam doesn't have a subscription to a good LLM, or is away from keyboard, or doesn't know how to use them well. Not relevant here, from Adam's response, but Bella might not know that.
- Maybe Adam is asking the question for the secondary purpose of building social bonds. Then Bella's response achieves that objective. Compare giving Adam flowers, does he say "Urgh, I could buy flowers myself"?
1Adam: Does anyone know how to X?
I think this is part of a broader problem about asking questions and is not limited to LLM. The broader topic I've been thinking about a lot recently is "How to ask for help?". The better way to ask for help often involves being specific and targeted about who you ask for help.
In this example Adam is casting a wide net, he's not asking a domain expert on X how to do X. Casting a wide net is always going to get a lot of attempts at helpful answers form people who know nothing about X. The helpful-but-clueless to expert ratio will often increase drastically the more esoteric X is.
It's probably pretty easy to find someone credible who knows how to cook a half-decent Spaghetti Bolognese, but, what about a Mousaka which is slightly more esoteric is going to be a bit harder. I am one of only two people in my very broad face-to-face friendship group that has ever written code in GLSL, and I'm not very good at it, so if a third friend wanted to learn about GLSL I probably won't be a good person to ask.
I believe people like Bella are genuine in their desire and intention to help.
I also sympathize with Adam's plight, but I think he is the problem. I sympathize because, for example, I don't know anything about the legal structures for startup financing in my country. I wouldn't even know if this is something that I should talk to an accountant or a lawyer about. So I understand Adam's plight: not even knowing where to begin asking how to do X necessitates casting a wide net: going to general online communities, posting to social media, asking friends if they "know someone know who knows someone who knows how to X". And then you're bound to catch a lot of Bellas in that net: people genuinely trying to help, but maybe also too enthusiastic to rush in for their participation trophy by asking ChatGPT.
And the less said about people who when you ask for recommendations online give you a title of a book without any explanation about why it is relevant, why it is good, or how they expect it to help, the better. haha.
1I think this dynamic more-or-less existed before ChatGPT, as well, with just plain Googling something. Especially with simpler things where the answer could be quickly found without much skill.
Even if Adam knows how to get the answer out of GPT/Google/tea leaves/etc, though, Bella is still doing something of value (it seems to me) by going through the trouble of digging around and trying to distill an answer out of the murk of digital information. Even if it only takes a couple minutes! Generally a friendly human is better at presenting the given answer, and it's a way of signaling (at least a minimum level of) investment in helping Adam with the question. Which might even, hopefully, extend beyond a single ChatGPT query, if he'd already tried that and found its answer lacking.
So, I agree that Adam is making a mistake.
Today I'm running a meetup about AI 2027. I plan to end it with a short pitch on If Anyone Builds It. I think the meetup itself is solid- talking about some of Scott's writing and making predictions about the future, both good ways to spend an afternoon. I wouldn't run it if I thought it was just going to be bad.
But part of the motive is marginal If Anyone Builds It pre-orders. I'm wary here, because several notable previous organizations that looked like they were not for AI x-risk eventually turned out to be mostly for AI x-risk. I dont want to wind up like that, and I super don't want to be basically focused on x-risk under the hood but most people think I'm working on something else.
Current solution- say out loud the extra motive here.
I want a word that's like "capable" but clearly means the things you have the knowledge or skill to do. I'm clearly not capable of running a hundred miles an hour or catching a bullet in my bare hand. I'm not capable of bench pressing 200lbs either; that's pretty likely in the range of what I could do if I worked out and trained at it for a few years, but right this second I'm not in that kind of shape. In some senses, I'm capable of logging into someone else's LessWrong account- my fingers are physically capable of typing their password- but I don't have the knowledge of what to type.
This comes up in places where a thing is obviously possible to achieve, and wouldn't require, say, the kinds of built up physical changes to my body that lifting 200lbs would require, but I still don't expect to be able to pull it off. If I had someone experienced, who did know how to do it, sitting at my shoulder giving me advice the whole way it would be obviously possible.
Nevertheless, acting like I'm capable of flying an airplane or resolving a messy divorce or interpreting a blood test if I had to do it right now is going to result in some problems. I'd like to be able to say I'm not able to accomplish that without a bunch of disclaimers that yes, I could learn, or I could follow someone's close directions and manage it, but that's different.
"I can do X" seems to be short for "If I wanted to do X, I would do X." It's a hidden conditional. The ambiguity is the underspecified time. I can do X -- when? Right now? After a few months of training?
Q. "Can you hold the door?" A. "Sure."
That's straightforward.
Q. "Can you play the violin at my wedding next year?" A. "Sure."
Colloquial language would imply not only am I willing and able to do this, I already know how to play the violin. Sometimes, what I want to answer is that I don't know how to play the violin, I'm willing to learn, but you should know I currently don't know.
Which I can say, it just takes more words.
much has been made of the millennial aversion to phone calls that could have been an email, and I have a little bit of this nature, but I think most of my aversion here is to being on hold and getting bounced around different call departments.
I kind of want to check if 1. the aversion is real and generational as common wisdom holds, 2. if it is real, if calling became a genuinely worse experience around the time millennials started trying to do things.
Data point: I'm millennial (born 1992) and have a pretty strong aversion to phone calls, which is motivated mainly by the fact that I prefer most communication to be non-real-time so that I can take time to think about what to say without creating an awkward silence. And when I do engage in real-time communication, visual cues make it much less unpleasant, so phone calls are particularly bad in that I have to respond to someone in real time without either of us seeing the other's face/body language.
If I had to take a wild guess at why this seems to be generational, I'd suggest that older generations spent much of their lives with phone calls being the only way to quickly contact people far away, and prefer them due to familiarity. Perhaps if they'd grown up with email/texting being options, they'd be more likely to prefer them instead.
My guess is the aversion is real, and maybe somewhat cynically I see the rejection of phone calls and emails as motivated mostly by rebellion/fashion cycles rather than anything else. Phone calls and emails just aren't cool anymore. Your parents used them, yuck! And all the boring, very uncool workplaces and companies require them. Very similar to how gen-z dislikes Facebook in favor of Instagram. Facebook is where the boomers are.
Game design thoughts:
Missing information or a too-complex information environment is a big part of where I'm excited about cohabitive game design. The market works to summarize many many preferences. Large WoW guilds run into problems of organizing information.
I'm musing about some kind of fog of war chess game. Each player controls one piece, and can see all of the squares they can move to. They can't see the whole board, and can only communicate to the king how badly they want to move, and the king decides. This would be a team competitive game, but the idea of adding small side goals for pieces (such as, you get 2 points if your team wins, and 1 point if you're alive at the end win or lose) could make for an unusually focused cohabitive design space.
In general a lot of my cohabitive game design ideas come out in the form of having larger player bases. I should try and make a really tight two player cohabitive setup.
(Very tangentially related but if you want to talk Cohabitive Game Design stuff, I'll be hanging around at Metagame.games this weekend.)
A bullet point from an unsorted list of complaints I have against the English language. (And I think most languages.)
- "I think" is an annoying extra three syllables, and should be stuck on the front of almost everything I saw. "[I think] we have apples at home." "[I think] we take a left turn here." This adds a lot of extra clunk to talking properly with rationalists where I want to be careful and precise in my speech. Proposal: That the normal and unmodified sentence assumes the "I think" and you instead prefix "It is a fact" or something similar when you're making a stronger claim.
1- English is liberal and ambiguous with possessives. "My hat" is fine, "my spouse" I guess works but I'd rather not, "my country" seems wrong to me. I have all the decision making authority for the hat, I have next to none about the country. Proposal: that there are different words denoting "ownership of" and "associated with."
- "Listened to" has an interesting ambiguity in English. Consider the sentence "I listen to the people" or "Me and George don't think you're listening to us." It can mean "heard the words of." I listened to a radio talk show on how to fix a car's broken fan belt. It can mean "done what those words said." I listened to my theatre director's coaching on where to stand during the show. Proposal: Two short phrases which mean one of those two things, and no short phrases that are ambiguous.
- "will" is supposedly supposed to be interpreted as a statement of fact, but colloquially isn't especially when it's a contraction. "I'll grab eggs from the store later tonight" is not normally read as a deep and abiding commitment to obtain eggs come hell or high water, but that's sort of what a literal reading of the sentence should mean? Proposal: That the contraction form of "will" indicate an intention or light commitment.
I take back every misgiving I ever had about emote reacts on LessWrong this is a top tier feature.
Usage of ChatGPT/Dall-E I did not think about until I had the idea to try it- in the middle of a tabletop RPG session, pulling out my phone, describing the scene in a couple of quick sentences, and then showing the phone and the resulting picture to the players without breaking my pacing.
Anyway, the current results of music AI make me suspicious the next time I play a bard I might be able to come up with new songs mid session.
When I've tried to do rationality practice, (as distinct from skills practice) a lot of the time what I do is set up toy problems and try to solve them. Essentially this is like trying to learn to ice skate by strapping on skates, wandering onto the ice, and falling over a lot while figuring things out. I try and pay attention to how I'm solving the problem and deliberately try different things (randomly jumping around in thought space instead of just hill climbing) ideally to find things that work better than what I'd been doing.
A number of my Meetups In A Box follow this pattern. Skill Acquisition is the most blatant, but Calibration Trivia, The Falling Drill, and Puzzle Cycles are doing the same thing. Here's a challenge that's trying to require a particular skill, keep trying and failing and trying and failing and in theory gradually you'll get better.
One of the important missing pieces is more teaching of the skill. This came to mind when Raemon posted Tuning Your Cognitive Strategies and reminded me of his comment on Puzzle Cycles suggesting that (paraphrasing) he'd be interested in the combination. Going back to the ice skating example, I learned to ice skate in part by watching other people ice skate and with some people who were good at it showing me the motions slowly and then watching me do it and pointing out my mistakes. I haven't posted this variation because I'm not confident I know how to write it in a way that's better than "Read this article. Now do these puzzles. Anything clicking for you?"
Teaching how to think is harder than teaching how to move in some ways, particularly in that it's harder to watch and observe exactly what's going wrong.
(Tangent: I'm tempted to suggest that a useful skill while learning is verbalizing what's going on in your head and saying it out loud, because that gives a hypothetical teacher a window to spot this kind of thing. Verbalizing what's going on in your head might or might not be useful apart from learning, but having ever taught cognitive subskills (math, card evaluation, programming) getting people to talk through the problem out loud and in detail is helpful for noticing what mistake they're actually making in a way that I could visually see if I was teaching martial arts.)
Teachers are also harder to scale than challenges. I could mail a copy of Zendo to every meetup. I can't mail a CFAR instructor to every meetup. (Yet, growth mindset.) I. . . can hypothetically mail a copy of Tuning Your Cognitive Strategies to every meetup, which tries to walk someone through the skill by written instruction.
There's something I really want to exist between written instructions on the skills and challenges for the skills. I think instructions and challenges are together greater than the sum of their parts.