Recent brainstorming sessions at SIAI (with participants including Anna, Carl, Jasen, Divia, Will, Amy Willey, and Andrew Critch) have started to produce lists of rationality skills that we could potentially try to teach (at Rationality Boot Camp, at Less Wrong meetups, or similar venues). We've also been trying to break those skills down to the 5-second level (step 2) and come up with ideas for exercises that might teach them (step 3) although we haven't actually composed those exercises yet (step 4, where the actual work takes place).
The bulk of this post will mainly go into the comments, which I'll try to keep to the following format: A top-level comment is a major or minor skill to teach; upvote this comment if you think this skill should get priority in teaching. Sub-level comments describe 5-second subskills that go into this skill, and then third-level comments are ideas for exercises which could potentially train that 5-second skill. If anyone actually went to the work of composing a specific exercise people could run through, that would go to the fourth-level of commenting, I guess. For some major practicable arts with a known standard learning format like "Improv" or "Acting", I'll put the exercise at the top and guesses at which skills it might teach below. (And any plain old replies can go at any level.)
I probably won't be able to get to all of what we brainstormed today, so here's a PNG of the Freemind map that I generated during our session.
Addressed to general audience, not katydee specifically.
Michael Vassar, 5th comment down: "It's important to pay attention to what people's words actually say. ..." I am going to attempt an exercise trying that out and see what happens. I'll also poorly echo Yvain.
Eliezer and others were looking for exercises to aid aspiring rationalists in developing generally applicable social/conversational skills/attributes. For aspiring rationalist males, the common perception is that PUA has demonstrated large positive effects. Eliezer or Amy suggested that succeeding at "getting a handsome guy to buy you a drink without promising him anything else" would build skills for female rationalists. Eliezer then relays Amy's suggestion that PUA and "getting a handsome guy to buy you a drink" might be of equivalent difficulty. Note that "equivalent" was used as an adjective, not a noun. This is the only flavor of equivalence suggested by Eliezer or Amy. It is a bad comparison. Female attractiveness is harder to substantially improve than male attractiveness, and "handsome" is vague.
The thread goes downhill immediately. Manfred writes: "The female possible-equivalent kind of skeeves me out, and doesn't seem to exercise the same skills." What does 'equivalent' mean here? It does not appear to be a reference to Eliezer/Amy's suggestion of equivalence of difficulty, and Manfred notes that the exercises utilize somewhat different skills. The most likely explanation is that Manfred misinterpreted Eliezer's unfortunate use of "equivalent" as a much stronger claim. He thus probably-accidentally-automatically designated the female rationalist exercise the "possible-equivalent" of the male exercise without finding a concrete and exclusively interesting relationship between the two clusters in conceptspace, simply because he felt no need to do what he perceived as flatly disagreeing with Eliezer's claim of PUA-equivalence. His skepticism that "getting a handsome guy to buy you a drink" is PUA-equivalent is apparent. No one would have independently thought that up.
Also worth noting is Manfred's use of "skeeves". He later clarifies that he is not sure which aspects of the man-buying-drink-for-woman scenario are off-putting, but "Maybe it's the injection of money/commodification, or maybe it's just that I dislike many people in that culture so the badness gets associated." Additionally it should be noted that the rest of Manfred's comment was okay, and the subtly introduced and subtly misleading 'equivalence' blunder could theoretically have been patched.
Then, Alicorn, quoting Manfred's "The female possible-equivalent kind of skeeves me out", replies "There is something to notice here." katydee explained Alicorn's comment: "Alicorn is suggesting that, just as the female equivalent of PUA skeeves Manfred (presumably a male) out, the traditional version of PUA skeeves her (and presumably other females) out." Alicorn essentially confirmed this interpretation. The comment, interpretation, and confirmation picked up 14 karma as of my writing this. I really like Alicorn's posts and think she is awesome. And even here, if you squint your brain a little, her comment seems reasonable. But if you actually read the words, it's insane troll logic.
Manfred is not skeeved by the female equivalent of PUA. No one ever talked about a female equivalent of PUA. Manfred incorrectly called something a "female possible-equivalent" due to what really looks like a combination of a misinterpretation, an accident of doxastic language, and social norms.
One could attempt careful, complex arguments about social psychology intending to show that "getting a handsome guy to buy you a drink without promising him anything" and PUA use cognitive machinery or social capital in similar fashions or have other concrete similarities, but it wouldn't work, and it would be the result of rationalizing a misleading artifact of LW social epistemology to make a demonstrably false point about the preferences of females generally. (If not about youngish American females generally, then a speculative claim about whatever reference class Alicorn thinks she is in.)
For the sake of argument, even given a powerful connection in the territory between "PUA-related behaviors" and "beta-sapping-related behaviors including gold digging" (which, sufficiently generalized, cover most humans), enough to make them "equivalent", it is still not clear that Manfred is averse to either, as long as they are not happening in crass bars with crass beers. PUA skills and wealth-absorbing/gold-digging/beta-exploiting skills can be used anywhere, anytime. And again if there was such a connection, it would still be incorrect to make an argument for skeeving symmetry between PUA (a large class of general purpose social interaction skills/attributes used in many ways towards many ends) and a single bar skill that is known for being particularly easy to use unvirtuously.
If I am wrong to think that Manfred's use of "female possible-equivalent" was unintentional, he still used the word incorrectly, and thus the symmetry arguments still do not apply. And if Alicorn had picked up on clues I had not, and noticed that Manfred had used "female possible-equivalent" intentionally, and furthermore decided to reply to the comment implicitly only addressing those with conceptual schemas sufficiently like Manfred's seemingly accidental one (i.e. no one, I think), then I admit my criticism does not apply as strongly. I find such a scenario to be very unlikely.
Summary: katydee put 95% on a total breakdown of sanity within 4 sentences including Eliezer's 2 word sentence, written by 3 people, 2 of which are number 1 and number 3 on Less Wrong's Top Contributors list, and ended up guessing correctly, as if the reasoning was obvious. And I find it kinda funny...