You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Error comments on The January 2013 CFAR workshop: one-year retrospective - Less Wrong Discussion

34 Post author: Qiaochu_Yuan 18 February 2014 06:41PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (19)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Error 19 February 2014 05:07:47PM 2 points [-]

IMO, this misses the causes of Qiaochu's subsequent shifts: the thing he describes getting is the thing we're aiming for

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.

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

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 February 2014 08:22:39PM 6 points [-]

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.