= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
AnnaSalamon comments on The January 2013 CFAR workshop: one-year retrospective - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (19)
IMO, this misses the causes of Qiaochu's subsequent shifts: the thing he describes getting is the thing we're aiming for, and it somehow seems to happen much more when folks attend a CFAR workshop than when folks spend a similar amount of time with similarly intelligent people in other contexts.
The thing we're trying to teach at CFAR isn't the techniques, but is taught via teaching the techniques. This is perhaps best explained by analogy, as follows:
In computer science, when a person learns their first programming language, they learn it via learning to use a set of particular functions in a particular language (e.g., learning the syntax of for loops in language X) and doing related exercises. But the change that happens in the programming student in somehow a harder to name shift toward being able to "think like a computer scientist"; we know this because, when the student later learns further programming languages, it takes them fewer weeks to learn it, and they are more able to generate solutions to new problems in the new languages.
What we now say at the workshops' opening session is that the techniques folks are about to learn aren't the skills that e.g. the CFAR instructors actually use, but that they form components of a "soup" that we do actually use -- they are training exercises that help to teach something harder to phrase, that involves components of the techniques used in a more fluid way, and that also involves the general system 1 expectation that problems are soluble, that difficult or magical-looking skills are secretly made up of simple components, that you yourself are made of components that are simpler and sillier than you might think (and that it's agenty to acknowledge that and plan training exercises for yourself, instead of expecting to 'just use your freewill'), etc.
I stand corrected. Thanks. The programming analogy helps; I'm in IT and I'm familiar with the phenomenon you describe.
Qiaochu Yuan noted in the post that he's a local, and had regular post-workshop meatspace contact with CFAR personnel. It would be interesting to compare his experience to those who travel in from out of town.
This is a wonderful description of something I usually take for granted, and sometimes get incredibly confused by people who don't. It feels like a natural counterpart to the thought pjeby expressed in this post.
I came in from out of town for the April 2013 workshop on a partial scholarship, and since then haven't been in touch with the community, apart from the six follow-up chats with an instructor. I don't know about the typical out-of-town experience -- I was a little underwhelmed leaving the workshop, largely because I felt I'd already made much of the shift that Anna and Qiaochu describe and things were already going very well for me. (Those two points are related -- I agree that making that shift is really valuable. I can also believe that the workshops effect it in some people.)
I think that in the longer term, there was still a lot of value in taking a lot of ideas and ways of thinking that were floating around unconnected in my head, and putting them all under a more accessible and salient "CFAR" umbrella. It's hard to quantify that effect relative to where I might have been without the workshop, but I still feel good about it 10 months out.
The similarly intelligent people are not necessarily rational. You could find hundreds of highly intelligent people at any university; a dozen of them would be extremely intelligent. But most of them seem like they have no desire to self-improve (generally; not just in their knowledge of the subject they specialize in); although they may profess that self-improvement is a good and noble goal. Actually, the mere fact that they already are successful in what they do, may alleviate their desire to improve.
Meeting intelligent and epistemically rational and instrumentally rational people... is still probably better in a context that makes it obvious that one is supposed to learn from them. If nothing else, the students are not ashamed to ask.
Yes, this is what I was attempting to say. Thanks for phrasing it so concisely!
Also this!