Author's note: During CFAR's 4.5d workshops, concepts that had been formalized as "techniques," and which could be described as algorithms and practiced in isolation, generally received 60+ minute sessions. Important concepts which did not have direct practical application, or which had not been fully pinned down, were often instead taught as 20-minute "flash classes." The idea was that some things are well worth planting as seeds, even if there was not room in the workshop to water and grow them. There were some 30 or 40 flash classes taught at various workshops over the years; the most important dozen or so make up the next few entries in this sequence.

Polaris

Imagine the following three dichotomies:

A high school student mechanically following the quadratic formula, step by step, versus a mathematician who has a deep and nuanced understanding of what the quadratic formula is doing, and uses it because it’s what obviously makes sense
A novice dancer working on memorizing the specific steps of a particular dance, versus a novice who lets the music flow through them and tries to capture the spirit
A language student working on memorizing the rules of grammar and conjugation, versus one who gesticulates abundantly and patches together lots of little idioms and bits of vocabulary to get their points across

By now, you should have a set of concepts that help you describe the common threads between these three stories. You can point at goal factoring and turbocharging, and recognize ways in which the first person in each example is sort of missing the point. Those first three people, as described, are following the rules sort of just because—they’re doing what they’re supposed to do, because they’re supposed to do it, without ever pausing to ask who’s doing the supposing, and why. The latter three, on the other hand, are moved by the essence of the thing, and to the extent that they’re following a script, it’s because they see it as a useful tool, not that they feel constrained by it.

How does this apply to a rationality workshop?

Imagine you’re tutoring someone in one of the techniques—say, TAPs—and they interrupt to ask “Wait, what was step three? I can’t remember what came next,” and you realize that you don’t remember step three, either. What do you do?

You could give up, and just leave them with an incomplete version of the technique.

You cou...

Quadrivium

Quadrivium