If I knew precisely what I wanted from rationality training, I wouldn’t need to buy the knowledge, would I?
What would I want from it? Immediate results that aren't tied to an incredibly specific problem. I want procedures to define the problem clearly, to map the potential answer space, and then to organise that answer space with evidence. And I want to be able to go home and do at least one of those three things better than I could when I got there.
What do I think would be effective? Games. Why? It lets you test what you’re doing. You’re talking about making good decisions, and those decisions should make you win in a game that works with the rules that the heuristic concerns just as they would anywhere else. Even more helpfully, you can compare the results of your game to those of people who play differently.
Gambling? Probability and evidence. Role-playing? Planning. You’d probably want role-playing games based on the real world with a high rate of iteration that restart every time one side loses. Switch up the roles whenever one side starts to win consistently. Get people used to generating a load of options, losing them and chucking them away in favour of another set. Pick a general task - i.e. don’t invest too much in the background waffle or constrain the options too much....
Besides, games are fun and people learn better when they’re having fun than when they’re bored senseless.
Point out at the end how you can tie the same heuristics you’re teaching to win in the games can be applied to make money, or to achieve some other concrete goal that people are likely to want. Which should be a fairly easy step, if you actually have something to sell.
What would I pay for it? At the moment, nothing. I've seen no evidence you're better at winning than me. Ideally you should have something you can show being used for a task, even if I can’t see precisely how it works, before you try and sell it to me. Otherwise I’ll be very suspicious that you’re just trying to sell a fashionable style of thought that gives people The Right Answer.
As I've been reading through various articles and their comments on Less Wrong, I've noticed a theme that has appeared repeatedly: a frustration that we are not seeing more practical benefits from studying rationality. For example, Eliezer writes in A Sense that More Is Possible,
Yvain writes in Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great,
patrissimo wrote in a comment on another article,
These writers have also offered some suggestions for improving the situation. Eliezer writes,
patrissimo describes what he thinks an effective rationality practice would look like.
Dan Nuffer and I have decided that it's time to stop talking and start doing. We are in the very early stages of creating a business to help people improve their lives by training them in instrumental rationality. We've done some preliminary market research to get an idea of where the opportunities might lie. In fact, this venture got started when, on a whim, I ran a poll on ask500people.com asking,
I got 299 responses in total. These are the numbers that responded with "likely" or "very likely":
These numbers were much higher than I expected, especially the numbers from India, which still puzzle me. Googling around a bit, though, I found an instructor-led online decision-making course for $130, and a one-day decision-making workshop offered in the UK for £200 (over $350)... and the Google keyword tool returns a large number of search terms (800) related to "decision-making", many of them with a high number of monthly searches.
So it appears that there may be a market for training in effective decision-making -- something that could be the first step towards a more comprehensive training program in instrumental rationality. Some obvious market segments to consider are business decision makers, small business owners, and intelligent people of an analytical bent (e.g., the kind of people who find Less Wrong interesting). An important subset of this last group are INTJ personality types; I don't know if there is an effective way to find and market to specific Meyers-Briggs personality types, but I'm looking into it.
"Life coaching" is a proven business, and its growing popularity suggests the potential for a "decision coaching" service; in fact, helping people with big decisions is one of the things a life coach does. One life coach of 12 years described a typical client as age 35 to 55, who is "at a crossroads, must make a decision and is sick of choosing out of safety and fear." Life coaches working with individuals typically charge around $100 to $300 per hour. As far as I can tell, training in decision analysis / instrumental rationality is not commonly found among life coaches. Surely we can do better.
Can we do effective training online? patrissimo thinks that gathering in person is necessary, but I'm not so sure. His evidence is that "all the people who have replied to me so far saying they get useful rationality practice out of the LW community said the growth came through attending local meetups." To me this is weak evidence -- it seems to say more about the effectiveness of local meetups vs. just reading about rationality. In any event, it's worth testing whether online training can work, since
To conclude, one of the things an entrepreneur needs to do is "get out of the building" and talk to members of the target market. We're interested in hearing what you think. What ideas do you think would be most effective in training for instrumental rationality, and why? What would you personally want from a rationality training program? What kinds of products / services related to rationality training would you be interesting in buying?