Remark: This post was written collectively by the organizing team of the Epistea Summer Experiment.

Cross-posted to the EA Forum here.

Epistea Summer Experiment (ESE, /ˈiːzi/) was an experimental summer workshop in Prague combining elements of applied rationality and experiential education. The main goals were to:

Try new ideas about rationality education, such as multi-agent models of minds, and ideas about group epistemics and coordination
Try to import insights and formats from experiential education
Connect people interested in rationality education

We consider the event successful and plan to use the insights gained for creating more content along similar lines.

The remainder of the post will outline our motivation for focusing on these goals, our takeaways, and future plans.

Motivations

Group Rationality

Most of today’s rationality curriculum and research is focused on individual rationality, or ‘how to think clearly (alone)’. The field of group rationality - or ‘how to think well and act as groups of humans’ - is less developed, and open problems are the norm.

[...] I feel like group rationality remains a largely open and empty field. There’s a lot of literature on what we do wrong, but not a lot of ready-made “techniques” just sitting there to help us get it right — only a scattering of disconnected traditions in things like management or family therapy or politics. My sense is that group rationality is in a place similar to where individual rationality was ~15 years ago [...]. (cited from ‘Open Problems In Group Rationality’, by Duncan Sabien)

The central problem is that people use beliefs for many purposes - including tracking what is true. But another, practically important purpose is coordination. We think it’s likely that if an aspiring rationalist decides to “stop bullshitting”, they lose some of the social technology often used for successfully coordinating with other people. How exactly does this dynamic affect coordination? Can we do anything about it?

There are more reasons why we believe progress in the domain of group rationality is needed. There are for example the classical problems in coordination (e.g. Moloch), communication (e.g. common knowledge and miasma), social dynamics (e.g. groupthink, pluralistic ignorance, etc.) and others...

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