There were some concerns here (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2po/selfimprovement_or_shiny_distraction_why_less/) regarding value of LessWrong community from the perspective of instrumental rationality. 

In the discussion on the relevant topic I've seen the story about how community can help  http://lesswrong.com/lw/2p5/humans_are_not_automatically_strategic/2l73 from this perspective.

And I think It's a great thing that local community can help people in various ways to achieve their goals. Also it's not the first time I hear about how this kind of community is helpful as a way of achieving personal goals.

Local LessWrong meetups and communities are great, but they have kind of different focus. And a lot of people live in places where there are no local community or it's not active/regular.

So I propose to form small groups (4-8 people). Initially, groups would meet (using whatever means that are convenient for a particular group), discuss the goals of each participant in a long and in a short term (life/year/month/etc). They would collectively analyze proposed strategies for achieving these goals. Discuss how short term goals align with long term goals. And determine whether the particular tactics for achieving stated goal is optimal. And is there any way to improve on it?

Afterwards, the group would meet weekly to:

Set their short term goals, retrospect on the goals set for previous period. Discuss how successfully they were achieved, what problems people encountered and what alterations to overall strategy follows. And they will also analyze how newly set short-term goals coincide with long-term goals. 

In this way, each member of the group would receive helpful feedback on his goals and on his approach to attaining them. And also he will fill accountable, in a way, for goals, he have stated before the group and this could be an additional boost to productivity.

I also expect that group would be helpful from the perspective of overcoming different kind of fallacies and gaining more accurate beliefs about the world. Because it's easier for people to spot errors in the beliefs/judgment of others. I hope that group's would be able to develop friendly environment and so it would be easier for people to get to know about their errors and change their mind. Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

Group will reflect on it's effectiveness and procedures every month(?) and will incrementally improve itself. Obviously if somebody have some great idea about group proceedings it makes sense to discuss it after usual meeting and implement it right away. But I think regular in-depth retrospective on internal workings is also important.

If there are several groups available - groups will be able to share insights, things group have learned during it's operation. (I'm not sure how much of this kind of insights would be generated, but maybe it would make sense to once in a while publish post that would sum up groups collective insights.)

There are some things that I'm not sure about: 

• I think it would be worth to discuss possibility of shuffling group members (or at least exchanging members in some manner) once in a while to provide fresh insight on goals/problems that people are facing and make the flow of ideas between groups more agile.
• How the groups should be initially formed? Just random assignment or it's reasonable to devise some criteria? (Goals alignment/Diversity/Geography/etc?)

I think initial reglament of the group should be developed by the group, though I guess it's reasonable to discuss some general recommendations.

So what do you think? 

If you interested - fill up this google form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1IsUQTp_6pGyNglBiPOGDuwdGTBOolAKfAfRrQloYN_o/viewform?usp=send_form

Edit 3: Removed description of previous edits and added the following:

This thread used to contain the description of a rationality exercise.

I have removed it and plan to rewrite it better.

I will repost it here, or delete this thread and repost in the discussion.

Thank you.

Hey guys,

Don't normally post from my blog to here, but the latest massive post on goal achievement in 2015 has a ton that would be relevant to people here.

Some things that I think would be of particular interest to LWers:

• The section called "Map the Path to Your Goal" has some really great stuff on planning that haven't seen many other places. I know planning gets a bad wrap here, but when combined with the "Contigency Plans" method near the bottom of the post, I've found this stuff to be killer for getting results for students.
• At the bottom, there's a section called "Choosing More Habits" that breaks down habits into the only five categories you should ever focus on. If you're planning to systematically take on new habits in 2015, this will help.
• The section called "a proactive mindset" has some fun mental reframes to play around with.

Although I feel that Nick Bostrom’s new book “Superintelligence” is generally awesome and a well-needed milestone for the field, I do have one quibble: both he and Steve Omohundro appear to be more convinced than I am by the assumption that an AI will naturally tend to retain its goals as it reaches a deeper understanding of the world and of itself. I’ve written a short essay on this issue from my physics perspective, available at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.0813.pdf.

Followup to: The Domain of Politics

To create your own political world view you need to know about societies and your own political goals/values. In this post I'll discuss the latter, and in the next post the former.

What sort of goals? Those which you wish to achieve for their own sake, and not because they simply are a means to an end. That is, those goals you value intrinsically. Or, if you believe that there exists only one ultimate goal or value, then think of those means which are not that far removed from being intrinsic goal. That is, a birthday party might be just of instrumental value but most would agree that it is more far away from the intrinsic value than, say, good tires. I will for the rest of the post assume that most people value a lot of things intrinsically, and by values I will denote intrinsic values.

So, I'd like to draw a line between values and that which achieve those values. The latter is what we're trying to figure out what they are, without first proposing what they are. Those are political systems, or parts of them; they are institutions and laws. This is not to say that these things cannot be valued for their own sake – I put value on a system, possibly for aesthetic reasons – but those values should be disentangled from the other benefit a system produces.

With that in mind, you should now list all the things you value in ranking order. To rank them is necessary since we live in a world of scarce resources, so you won't necessarily achieve all your goals, but you will want to achieve those that are most important to you.

Now, what one values may change over time, so naturally what seems to be most important may also change. That which was on place #7 may go to #1 and vice versa. That is, values are changing with new information and a change in one's condition. That said, one's political values don't probably shift all that much. And even if they do, if you can't predict how they will change, you still need them to be able to know what political system is good for you.

There are many ways to get a feel of what your most highly valued political values are. Introspection, discussing with friends, think through a number of thought experiments, read the literature on what makes most people happy, listen to what experiences have been most horrible or pleasurable to others, etc.. In any case, here's a thought experiment to help with finding your ideological preferences, should you need it:

A genie appears and it says that it will make ten wishes come true and then it will be gone forever. As this genie will make more than three wishes come true it has an added restriction: all wishes need to be political in nature. By luck you get to make the wishes – what do you wish for?

The important thing to remember is that, if you should lose one wish, you will be less sorry to give up your tenth wish than any other. And less sorry to give up the ninth wish than the eight if you lost two wishes, and so on.

To make it clearer what I mean I'll write down some of the things I value. Not my most preferred goals, but those on 11th to 20th place:

1. Those who have trouble excelling in life should receive whatever help can be given so they may become better.
2. If someone comes up with a previously unknown idea for improving the world, and if three knowledgeable and unrelated individuals believe the idea is very good, it should only take some hours for everyone to be able to know that this matter is of importance.
3. Everyone should have access to some means of totally private communication.
4. There should be no infringement on the right to develop one's mind, whatever technology one uses.
5. All animals should be, if the technology ever becomes available, sufficiently mentally enhanced to be given the choice of whether or not to become as intelligent (or more) as humans.
6. If it ever seems likely to be possible, we should strive towards creating a technology to resurrect the dead sooner rather than later.
7. The civilization should be able to co-exist with other peaceful civilizations.
8. There shouldn't be any ultimate certainty on the nature of existence or in any one reality tunnel; some balkanization of epistemology is good.
9. Everyone who share these values should know or learn the art of creating sustainable groups for collective action.
10. The civilization which embodies these values should continue indefinitely.

EDIT: DanielLC notes that this simple ranking wouldn't give you any information on how valuable a 90% completion of one goal is relative to a 95% completion of another goal. That information will however be important when you have to choose between incremental steps towards several different goals.

To create a ranking which displays that information, imagine that each goal you have written down can be in progress in five stages - 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100% - so that it is possible to be 75% or 0% on the way to achieve any particular goal. So, for instance, the goal of having private communication for everyone might be 50% completed if half the population have access to secret communication channels, but the other half doesn't.

Next, assume your one wish (in the scenario) is divided into five parts, one for each stage. And then rank every wish again following the same rule. This will look something like this:

1. 100% of my first goal.
2. 100% of my second goal.
3. 100% of my third goal.
4. 100% of my fourth goal.
5. 75% of my first goal.
6. 100% of my fifth goal.
7. 50% of my first goal.
8. 75% of my second goal.

(This was made purely for illustrative purposes. I haven't thought the matter through completely on how much I value these incremental parts.)

Another option is to do these more fine-tuned rankings on a gut level. Just having an imprecise feeling that, somewhere being closer to goal A stops being as important as being closer to B. This should be appropriate for those areas where your uncertainty about your preferences is high or where you don't care that much about which goal gets satisfied.

Next post: "Consider the Most Important Facts"

By learning to overcome the Nirvana fallacy, I have managed to find my hypothetical apostasy: I want to cure aging!

I think that awesome stuff will happen in the far future and I plan on getting there, so I'll do my best to make sure that I stay alive as long as I can. (Also, my primitive survival instincts make me want to become immortal.) Unfortunately, due to my evolutionary baggage, my own genes are going to kill me in a few decades.

What's your hypothetical apostasy and how do you plan to put it in practice?

Edit #1: If you're downvoting this article, I'd like to know why you're doing that. Send me a message or reply here.

Edit #2: I totally misunderstood what the hypothetical apostasy means. I was under the impression that it meant defending a view that most people deem too weird to contemplate. See Lark's explanation. I guess you should downvote this article!