GuySrinivasan comments on Minicamps on Rationality and Awesomeness: May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28 - Less Wrong

24 Post author: AnnaSalamon 29 March 2012 08:48PM

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Comment author: GuySrinivasan 30 March 2012 01:03:16AM *  17 points [-]

Here are some points, as I think of them.

The Good

  • It was fun. On par with the best one-week vacations I've had, but less fun than Hawaii.
  • I look significantly better, directly caused by the fashion workshops. My sister was briefly jealous because while I usually won in the raw-g department, she had always handily won in the looking-good department, and this is no longer true.
  • I took to heart Try Things, (hypothesis) directly caused by in-person admonitions by high-status instructors. Previously I had focused far too much on exploitation over exploration. Concrete example: I went to a code retreat with Arlo Belshee last weekend and my roommate did not, while any normal reference class would have said he was more likely to go, and it was super-useful.
  • I actually applied (and am applying) Gendlin and Tarski to the scary object of my inner mental life. I recommend Internal Family Systems as very useful though I have no direct comparisons I can make. If it turns out that it's actively harmful or even significantly worse than average mainstream psychotherapy I will update strongly towards standard-retreat-rather-than-awesome.
  • Directly after the minicamp, I made several time-management changes to my lifestyle that have persisted until now, giving me many effective extra hours per week. Concrete example: noticing that the marginal return on playing Dominion online was negative past about the first 10% of my time spent, and actually cutting way back.
  • Noticing when I'm being too abstract that I should try to provide or ask for a concrete example. ;) This was very much caused by admonitions during minicamp and some supporting reminders afterwards by John.

The Bad

  • The minicamp became more and more disorganized toward the end. IIRC this was because the instructors were updating as they went and thought they discovered that they could do better in the second half than originally planned, but the fact of disorganization stands.
  • Several of the exercises we did felt artificial and did not feel like they hit their intended target. Concrete example: when we played the game of arguing for an answer instead of reasoning towards an answer, to feel what rationalization felt like, I just felt like I was playing a game, nothing like when I actually notice rationalization.
  • I felt like there was too much stuff to learn and not enough practicing stuff. By a wide enough margin that I'd list this here.

The Ugly

  • I came unsettlingly close to not looking for counterevidence like this when presented with investment advice. Not actually too close, but it was still unsettling. Constant vigilance!

Edit: formatting, also the investment advice did not come from SI, but from one of the attendees.

Comment author: GuySrinivasan 30 March 2012 05:15:03PM 7 points [-]

A couple of notes:

Directly after the minicamp, I made several time-management changes to my lifestyle that have persisted until now, giving me many effective extra hours per week.

a) Two of the changes I made account for most of the gains: cutting the tail of my gaming (not just Dominion) and buying a car. There were other changes but they were all an order of magnitude smaller. b) The process I used does not require minicamp (but was caused by minicamp). You can do it now, in a couple hours. Write down everything you do in the 24*7 hours in a week. Look at the biggest chunks of time. There are two basic types: things you kinda have to do, and things you do because you want to. For those you have to do, ask (be curious!) how you can spend less time doing them, and then see if any of your methods are net positive. For those you want to do, ask how much better spending all of this time is than spending half of this time. Wherever the value starts to drop off sharply, just cut back to that amount.

If it turns out that [IFS is] actively harmful or even significantly worse than average mainstream psychotherapy I will update strongly towards standard-retreat-rather-than-awesome.

This is one of those examples of trusting that something is well worth investigating because people you recently came to trust say it's well worth investigating. Finding out that it wasn't would cause me to take a step back and wonder again "have I been brainwashed? are my defenses truly up like I feel they are? was the minicamp actually awesome or just the standard glow of decently-run retreats, 'cause if it wasn't actually awesome then the halo effect is an invalid bias, not a useful heuristic".