I'm very surprised that in that particular form that worked, because the extremely obvious way to postpone (or, in the end, avoid) the penalty is to not go next time either (or, in the end, ever again).
This is definitely based on two assumptions that I mention in the article:
Let's assume everyone who joins generally enjoys it.
Just like in Poker the negative impact should be small. There is a reason why blinds and antes are small amounts compared to your entire stack.
If people don't really want to attend or the costs of the "blinds" are huge then things are different.
That being said, you raise a good point. I can elaborate a little about the book club:
Do you mean the explanation of Poker details is too lengthy or that you don't see value in making an analogy between how the blinds in Poker incentivize the game and how a similar social rule could incentivize a group gathering?
2022
2023?
I have no data and all I'll talk about is my experience and my gut feelings on this topic.
The first question I ask myself is what problem am I trying to solve or what am I trying to improve? The answer for me is that I suspect that I am vastly overconfident in my predictions and that I selectively forget my worst forecasts. For example I remember being skeptical about someone after interviewing them for a job, writing as much to my supervisor and the applicant getting the job anyway. A few years later the person was doing an excellent job and I was surprised when stumbling upon my own e-mail. I had forgotten about it. On the other hand, I believe I have almost never forgotten cases where I made a good call about something.
So the first problem I want to solve is to become more humble in my predictions by making my failures more visible to myself.
The second improvement I would like to achieve is determining whether the probability numbers I attach to future events are reliable indicators or completely useless. That is calibration e.g. Brier score. I suspect these values have to be interpreted by "category" (i.e. you might have good calibration in politics but bad calibration in personal relationships) and that you only start getting useful results after one or two years and a few hundred forecasts.
I find it difficult to be sufficiently detailed and specific that allows for unambiguous resolution of the questions
Future-you is presumably not maliciously trying to deceive you, right? So the only case you need to worry about is future-you misunderstanding what you meant when you wrote the forecast.
I quite dislike how fuzzy the resolution becomes this way: did I really undertake a reasonable effort? Did I undershot or overshot it?
Do you think it very likely that present-you and future-you will have a very different perspective on what "reasonable effort" means? I would only clarify things up to the point where you trust future-you to do the right thing.
Perilous feedback loops can also creep in nonetheless: my reasonable effort for a 90% prediction might mean being more relaxed than otherwise: it’s a done deal, I might think.
I agree with these feedback loops. My perspective is that you should not strive for perfection but try to improve upon the status-quo. Even without writing down explicit predictions you will have such feedback loops. Do you think they become worse when you write the predictions down i.e. worse than when you just have this gut feeling something is a "done deal"?
You are right that making predictions and asking yourself questions that you might not have asked yourself otherwise might change your behavior. I would even say that it's not uncommon to use predictions as a motivational tool because you don't want to be proven wrong in front of yourself or others. The feedback loop is then purposefully built in.
One way of minimizing this might be to try to make predictions that are farther in the future and then trying to forget about them. For example make a lot of predictions so that you forget the particulars and then only look at the file a year later. This is a trade-off with updating the predictions on a regular basis with new information, which to me is more important.
Another potential solution is to ask other people (friends) to make predictions about you without telling you the details. They could give you a happiness questionnaire once every 3 months and not tell you until after resolution what they do with the data. In this case they are the ones working on their calibration. If you want to work on your own, you can make predictions about them.
Or take this simpler version:
If I switch to another job in the next 12 months, how likely is it that I’ll be more satisfied with it in the first two months than I’m now?
Hoo boy, where do we even start with this one, even though lots of people make major life decisions on exactly these kinds of hinges! What if I am just a little bit happier afterward, and it’s hard to say? Can I grade this as 60% passed (and 40% failed)?
No, I don't think you should grade it as 60% passed. It was a yes/no question. As long as you are even a little bit happier, the answer is yes.
At evaluation, I need only concern myself with how sure I am that I’m below 9 and above 7--"or am I at only 6.8?"
When making the prediction you already knew that your judgement at resolution was going to be subjective. If you dislike that, maybe it's not a useful prediction to make.
One way around this might be to try to make "job satisfaction" something you derive from multiple variables (e.g. take the mean value of "how nice is the office", "how nice are the colleagues", "how challenging are the tasks", ...). Then it won't be obvious at resolution time how to get the result that you wanted but rather you aggregate and you roll with the result.
I am really interested in forecasting and getting better at it so I am developing Cleodora, a free and open-source tool to track such forecasts. I encourage you and other readers to have a look, leave me your thoughts and help me improve it!
I think in many cases people would have been happy to continue after the timers were done. There was no really heated interaction and I assume it was also because of the time limit. The results would probably look different (better?) with more time.
The thing I'm worried about (and the source of the suggestion not to do controversial topics early) is people searching for reasons they think are respectable, not things they have as cruxes.
Sounds plausible. We did not really try to dig into that.
I would like to repeat the event in the future and maybe I'll introduce some variation to figure some of these questions out :-)
We ran this in Freiburg, Germany.
It worked very well! 11 people came and it was suitable for that group size. I made some small changes.
I started with steps 1 - 3 as described above. People had 5 minutes to come up with the reasons why they (dis-)believed the statement ("The earth is a flat disk") and then 10 minutes to poke holes (5 minutes per partner).
Then we came back to a big circle and ensured everything was clear. I then projected a list of statements onto the wall and gave each person 5 minutes to choose one statement and come up with reasons for (dis-)believing. I explained that making any assumptions or having only a certain degree of conviction was perfectly fine (e.g. I am 60% certain that capitalism has a net positive effect on the world), they should just make that clear to their partner later. Some people struggled making a choice so I offered to choose for them, which they accepted (so having some mechanism for assigning statements at random may be valuable).
Then people split again into (different!) pairs and had 15 minutes (7.5 minutes per person) to poke holes in each other's reasoning. For the most part people randomly chose different statements from their partner, which made the exercise more interesting because you had to poke holes into something that you hadn't thought about much yourself. Funnily, in one case, a pair chose the same statement but had opposing opinions on it.
We repeated it two more times with new statements and new partners.
The list of statements I projected onto the wall. Note that I don't necessarily endorse any of these statements as they are here listed. They are intentionally meant to be though provoking and controversial.
Many people preferred the more controversial statements at the bottom.
Easy
Hard
Very nice exercise! We were a group of 11 and split into two groups of 5 and 6. After playing a few times we made one big round with all 11. Interestingly, not once did we hunt a stag! The exercise lead to some very interesting discussions afterwards.
fyi there is a second identical event :-) https://www.lesswrong.com/events/FtrnvtLZATberQewz/karlsruhe-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2023
I understand the idea of trading one things for another e.g. sleep for pleasure and I understand the idea that if you break something complex down into components and understand those components you understand the whole (reductionism). What I do not understand is the relation between the two things. Could someone explain it differently? It feels like the "Lego principle" section is disconnected and could have been omitted without losing anything.
This is a tough call. How do you determine what is a "legitimately bad enough" case to miss the event? The examples you mention are clearly bad enough but there are other situation where it's much more personal. If I'm feeling low on energy is that a choice I am making or an unavoidable fact about my metabolism? You would have to set up some kind of tribunal or voting for deciding on these cases. That's a lot of effort and would only create bad vibes. So no, if you don't come you pay, no matter the reason. However, enforcement is lax. Mostly it's up to the people themselves to say "Yeah, today is my turn since two weeks ago I couldn't make it". If someone considers their case to be special they can easily get away with not paying and in all likelihood nobody would even notice let alone question it.