The moon. This is either really important or completely meaningless, I don't know because I'm not there yet.

I prefer the concept of Fingerspitzengefühl (finger tips feeling) which basically means having an intuitive grasp of a situation and being able to zero in on the accurate region of the problem without wasteful consideration of a large range of unfruitful, alternative diagnoses and solutions. The mechanism behind this is probably similar to how we learn physical patterns.

Expert piano player’s movements largely happen automatically or intuitively. That is, without conscious thought. This happens due to their extensive practice and because of concepts like chunking, spreading activation and hebbian learning. I would guess that we also learn psychical (thought) patterns through a similar mechanism.

I would at least change the word "CFAR" to "applied rationality"

Thanks for your suggestion. I removed the CFAR from the title.

I'm going to try to write what would have convinced "Jacobian-2015" that he should attend a workshop.

There are two extra things that my post isn’t good at conveying.

• Depth in the material. For example, goal factoring I have a paragraph on this and, I guess, that it describes the concept, but it would take a whole other post to describe how to use it in practice.
• A framework. The post just describes the techniques, but it doesn’t really describe the underlying mechanisms of how they work or how they relate to each other. In practice, the techniques would rarely be used in isolation, but would instead be combined.

I'm really concerned that this write-up may cause some people to decide against attending a workshop they otherwise would've gone to.

My intent was never for this post to be used as a replacement to attending CFAR. My goal was to put the material out there so that there was some base material upon which I could expand.