For-Profit Rationality Training

ksvanhorn

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,

Why aren't "rationalists" surrounded by a visible aura of formidability? Why aren't they found at the top level of every elite selected on any basis that has anything to do with thought? Why do most "rationalists" just seem like ordinary people...

Yvain writes in Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great,

...I've gotten countless clarity-of-mind benefits from Overcoming Bias' x-rationality, but practical benefits? Aside from some peripheral disciplines, I can't think of any.

patrissimo wrote in a comment on another article,

Sorry, folks, but compared to the self-help/self-development community, Less Wrong is currently UTTERLY LOSING at self-improvement and life optimization.

These writers have also offered some suggestions for improving the situation. Eliezer writes,

Of this [question] there are several answers; but one of them, surely, is that they have received less systematic training of rationality in a less systematic context than a first-dan black belt gets in hitting people.

patrissimo describes what he thinks an effective rationality practice would look like.

It is a group of people who gather in person to train specific skills.

While there are some theoreticians of the art, most people participate by learning it and doing it, not theorizing about it.

Thus the main focus is on local practice groups, along with the global coordination to maximize their effectiveness (marketing, branding, integration of knowledge, common infrastructure). As a result, it is driven by the needs of the learners [emphasis added].

You have to sweat, but the result is you get stronger.

You improve by learning from those better than you, competing with those at your level, and teaching those below you.

It is run by a professional, or at least someone getting paid [emphasis added] for their hobby. The practicants receive personal benefit from their practice, in particular from the value-added of the coach, enough to pay for talented coaches.

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,

Would you pay $75 for an interactive online course teaching effective decision-making skills?

I got 299 responses in total. These are the numbers that responded with "likely" or "very likely":

23.4% (62) overall.
49% (49 of 100) of the respondents from India.
10.6% (21 of 199) of the respondents not from India.
9.0% (8 of 89) of the respondents from the U.S.

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

not everyone can go to meetups,
it should be easier to scale up, and
not to put too fine a point on it, but online training is probably more profitable.

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?

Why aren't "rationalists" surrounded by a visible aura of formidability? Why aren't they found at the top level of every elite selected on any basis that has anything to do with thought? Why do most "rationalists" just seem like ordinary people...

Yvain writes in Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great,

...I've gotten countless clarity-of-mind benefits from Overcoming Bias' x-rationality, but practical benefits? Aside from some peripheral disciplines, I can't think of any.

patrissimo wrote in a comment on another article,

Sorry, folks, but compared to the self-help/self-development community, Less Wrong is currently UTTERLY LOSING at self-improvement and life optimization.

These writers have also offered some suggestions for improving the situation. Eliezer writes,

Of this [question] there are several answers; but one of them, surely, is that they have received less systematic training of rationality in a less systematic context than a first-dan black belt gets in hitting people.

patrissimo describes what he thinks an effective rationality practice would look like.

It is a group of people who gather in person to train specific skills.

While there are some theoreticians of the art, most people participate by learning it and doing it, not theorizing about it.

Thus the main focus is on local practice groups, along with the global coordination to maximize their effectiveness (marketing, branding, integration of knowledge, common infrastructure). As a result, it is driven by the needs of the learners [emphasis added].

You have to sweat, but the result is you get stronger.

You improve by learning from those better than you, competing with those at your level, and teaching those below you.

It is run by a professional, or at least someone getting paid [emphasis added] for their hobby. The practicants receive personal benefit from their practice, in particular from the value-added of the coach, enough to pay for talented coaches.

Would you pay $75 for an interactive online course teaching effective decision-making skills?

I got 299 responses in total. These are the numbers that responded with "likely" or "very likely":

23.4% (62) overall.
49% (49 of 100) of the respondents from India.
10.6% (21 of 199) of the respondents not from India.
9.0% (8 of 89) of the respondents from the U.S.

not everyone can go to meetups,
it should be easier to scale up, and
not to put too fine a point on it, but online training is probably more profitable.

Yesterday, I started playing around with the idea of doing rationality business consulting.

My basic idea is as follows. Use my contacts to get in touch with a number of suitable companies and offer to hold them a free presentation on rationality ideas. If they agree, hold a lecture maybe an hour long, packed full of interesting and obviously valuable concepts thrown at the audience at a rapid pace. At the end, thank them for their time, take any questions they might have, and mention that I also have an extended lecture series prepared that covers these topics in more detail, and many others besides. Offer to hold those lectures in exchange for a sizable sum, or if they're not interested, ask them if they could at least recommend me to somebody who might be.

If I just have a good enough presentation, act confident enough and price myself appropriately, it seems to me like this should result in sales pretty quickly. And presentations are one of the few areas where I don't have issues with confidence - if I've practiced a lecture enough and know the content, I get more excited than nervous.

I've scribbled down some random ideas on content to be included in my opening lecture: this is still a very rough draft, with ideas chosen more or less at random as they came to mind, but feedback is more than welcome.

How to act and decide better

How to communicate better

Take inferential distances into account
The illusion of transparency
Explainers shoot high, aim low
Be specific
Hold off proposing solutions
If a debate is becoming confrontational, adopt a rule saying that each debate partner must start their comment by briefly recapping what the other person just said. This helps to both make sure that they understood correctly, and to convince the other that their point was heard and understood. Studies show that this reduces the amount of time debates on average take.

How to improve company atmosphere: status games and offense

Humans constantly play various status games with each other, often more or less unconsciously. Becoming more aware of the status games helps take them less seriously. Impro has a lot of status game exercises that can be used to make people more aware of them.
A major reason for people taking offense is that they think their status is being lowered. If everyone understands this, it can help defuse conflicts as it becomes easier to make explicit the reasons for being offended. "I experienced X as offensive because I felt that it implied I wasn't good at Y, and that I therefore wasn't of much value." "Oh, I didn't mean that."
The ABC of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Activating Event, Belief, Consequence. A boss asks "have you done the task I gave you, the deadline is approaching?", the subordinate believes this to mean that the boss doesn't trust his ability to get things done without micromanagement, gets depressed. CBT attacks the "Belief" stage and encourages one to ask whether the beliefs are reasonable.
Verbal self-defense: ways to deflect hostile statements so that they don't escalate into conflict.
Various cultural differences that may lead to conflict, e.g. askers versus guessers.

Other

Signaling and the damage done by excess signaling; The Curse of Identity

Other, completely unorganized

(This section was written when I just started coming up with ideas one after another and stopped trying to sort them or make them very comprehensible to outsiders, so don't worry if you don't understand all of the points.)

59 seconds
Robbins: coloring memories, other things
Radical Honesty? Perhaps something a bit less radical...
commitment effects
- beware identity
- Goertzel's quote on identity
- self-signaling
- success spirals
- Mindset
PJ Eby on Akrasia, lukeprog on procrastination, procrastination book
sick relationships
life hacker?
“think of the opposite”; bayes' theorem in everyday life
what intelligence tests miss
what data generated that thought
that one paper on an ideal working environment
flow
psychology of happiness and well-being; the 3-1 rule
pjeby: instant motivation
prediction markets?
humans are not automatically strategic
relating to the curse of identity: analyzing the concrete consequences of decisions, the effect of social norms on decision-making (school example), charity examples, scope neglect, political ignorance
- expected utility
value of information? decision analysis sequence?
bureaucracies and avoiding responsibility
status quo bias; groupthink; review meetings; devil's advocates
fundamental attribution error & benefit of doubt
taboo your words
the content hilighted in the comments for the various "what's been the most useful LW insight to you" posts

You'll notice that I also have a lot of content that's not strictly rationality-related. That's intentional: I figure that having useful insights on a wide variety of topics will seem more impressive and increase the likelihood that at least something in there does catch one's interest. (Also, I wrote in more detail about the non-rationality stuff because for the rationality stuff I could just link to the LW posts.)

You should take a look at what existing executive coaches, business coaches, business consultants, and management training programs do. There are some of these that actually apply the methods of decision analysis to their clients' problems, or teach their clients how to do so. Here are some that I have encountered:

Hubbard Decision Research. Training, consulting, and tools for difficult measurement, forecasting and investment decisions facing organizations, using Applied Information Economics (basically, decision analysis with an emphasis on expected valu

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13AnnaSalamon14y

My guess is that thematic unity is important; it's good to have "insights into a wide variety of [business problems]", but you want those insights to seem to come from a unified source, so that the person ends up with some clear, vivid association with you ("Kaj: rational decision-making") instead of associating you with a random hodge-podge of key words. Do you have friends who are in your target audience, so that you can give them two-sentence descriptions of each of your potential themes and see which ones they're excited about? Do you know anyone who does business consulting for money, who you could ask questions of? I don't know how often people make money for lectures, vs. for the sort of "consulting" where they listen to folks' particular problems, and try to help them with them? It sounds worth pursuing, anyhow -- the idea of "rationality business consulting" has been batted around for a while, and it would be great if someone actually tries it.

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