Exercise For Skill I: Conceptual Integration
Ask: “Of what do I want a more cohesive conception?” Maybe it’s the Early National Era in the US. Maybe it’s the Union of European Football Associations. You pick.
Make sure you know about this thing. Hit the books. Watch a film. Take a class. Already know a lot about this thing? Good. You can skip this step.
Make note cards with key terms (events, ideas, people, etc.). No need to define them if you already know about them. You just need a deck of concepts.
Shuffle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffle) your deck. Riffle, Hindu, Pile or Weave and Faro, it doesn’t matter. Just randomize.
Pick two cards and ask yourself what relationship(s) exists between the terms. Answer yourself.
Keep doing that until you can rapidly identify the relationship(s) between any two concepts in the field.
Note: You may want to throw a third card in the mix. Generate a set of cards that deal with overarching themes and concepts within the subject matter and state a relation in the context of that theme.
Exercise for Skill II: Analogy.
See Steps 1-5 Above
Set a number of paired cards down on a big table.
Identify sets of pairs with analogous relationships.
Exercise for Skill III: Creative Thinking
Get your handy note cards.
Do the above-mentioned conceptual integration and analogy exercises with cards from unrelated fields/ schema.
Recent brainstorming sessions at SIAI (with participants including Anna, Carl, Jasen, Divia, Will, Amy Willey, and Andrew Critch) have started to produce lists of rationality skills that we could potentially try to teach (at Rationality Boot Camp, at Less Wrong meetups, or similar venues). We've also been trying to break those skills down to the 5-second level (step 2) and come up with ideas for exercises that might teach them (step 3) although we haven't actually composed those exercises yet (step 4, where the actual work takes place).
The bulk of this post will mainly go into the comments, which I'll try to keep to the following format: A top-level comment is a major or minor skill to teach; upvote this comment if you think this skill should get priority in teaching. Sub-level comments describe 5-second subskills that go into this skill, and then third-level comments are ideas for exercises which could potentially train that 5-second skill. If anyone actually went to the work of composing a specific exercise people could run through, that would go to the fourth-level of commenting, I guess. For some major practicable arts with a known standard learning format like "Improv" or "Acting", I'll put the exercise at the top and guesses at which skills it might teach below. (And any plain old replies can go at any level.)
I probably won't be able to get to all of what we brainstormed today, so here's a PNG of the Freemind map that I generated during our session.