To develop methods of teaching rationality skills, you need to learn to focus on mental events that occur in 5 seconds or less.  Most of what you want to teach is directly on this level; the rest consists of chaining together skills on this level.

As our first example, let's take the vital rationalist skill, "Be specific."

Even with people who've had moderate amounts of exposure to Less Wrong, a fair amount of my helping them think effectively often consists of my saying, "Can you give me a specific example of that?" or "Can you be more concrete?"

A couple of formative childhood readings that taught me to be specific:

"What is meant by the word red?"
"It's a color."
"What's a color?"
"Why, it's a quality things have."
"What's a quality?"
"Say, what are you trying to do, anyway?"

You have pushed him into the clouds.  If, on the other hand, we habitually go down the abstraction ladder to lower levels of abstraction when we are asked the meaning of a word, we are less likely to get lost in verbal mazes; we will tend to "have our feet on the ground" and know what we are talking about.  This habit displays itself in an answer such as this:

"What is meant by the word red?"
"Well, the next time you see some cars stopped at an intersection, look at the traffic light facing them.  Also, you might go to the fire department and see how their trucks are painted."

-- S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

and:

"Beware, demon!" he intoned hollowly.  "I am not without defenses."
"Oh yeah?  Name three."

-- Robert Asprin, Another Fine Myth

And now, no sooner does someone tell me that they want to "facilitate communications between managers and employees" than I say, "Can you give me a concrete example of how you would do that?"  Hayakawa taught me to distinguish the concrete and the abstract; and from that small passage in Asprin, I picked up the dreadful personal habit of calling people's bluffs, often using the specific phrase, "Name three."

But the real subject of today's lesson is how to see skills like this on the 5-second level.  And now that we have a specific example in hand, we can proceed to try to zoom in on the level of cognitive events that happen in 5 seconds or less.

Related to: Problem of verifying rationality

We're excited to announce the (soft) launch of RationalPoker.com! It's a new guide developed by me, Zvi, Kevin, and patrissimo detailing how to use online poker as rationality training to conquer your cognitive biases. We want our community to go from knowing a lot about cognitive biases to actually having a training method that allows us to integrate that knowledge into our habits -- truly reducing biases instead of just leaving us perpetually lamenting our flawed brain-ware. In the coming weeks, we'll be making the case that online poker is a useful rationalist pursuit along with developing introductory "How To" material that allows those who join us to play profitably.

We want to make sure we aren’t wasting our time practicing an ungrounded art with methods that don’t work. Poker gives us an objective way to test x-rationality. The difference between winning and losing in poker once you know a small amount of domain-specific knowledge is due to differing levels of rationality. Our site will be presenting the case that a strong rationalist who can act on their knowledge of cognitive biases (a defining feature of x-rationality but not traditional rationality) should have a distinct advantage. We'll be offering the connecting material between the sequences and online poker to teach you how to apply knowledge of cognitive biases to poker in a way that verifies your current level of rationality and naturally teaches you to improve your rationality over time.

Incidentally, this also presents a solution for those of us looking to earn money from anywhere with a flexible schedule that leaves time for outside interests.

As Tom slips on the ice puddle, his arm automatically pulls back to slap the ground.  He’s been taking Jiu-Jitsu for only a month, but, already, he’s practiced falling hundreds of times.  Tom’s training keeps him from getting hurt.

By contrast, Sandra is in her second year of university mathematics.  She got an “A” in calculus and in several more advanced courses, and she can easily recite that “derivatives” are “rates of change”.  But when she goes on her afternoon walk and stares at the local businesses, she doesn’t see derivatives.

For many of us, rationality is more like Sandra’s calculus than Tom’s martial arts.  You may think “overconfidence” when you hear an explicit probability (“It’s 99% likely I’ll make it to Boston on Tuesday”).  But when no probability is mentioned -- or, worse, when you act on a belief without noticing that belief at all -- your training has little impact.

Learn error patterns ahead of time

If you want to notice errors while you’re making them, think ahead of time about what your errors might look like. List the circumstances in which to watch out and the alternative action to try then.

Here's an example of what your lists might look like.  A bunch of visiting fellows generated this list at one of our rationality trainings last summer; I’m including their list here (with some edits) because I found the specific suggestions useful, and because you may be able to use it as a model for your own lists.

Here is a 2-hour slide presentation I made for college students and teens:

You Are A Brain

It's an introduction to realist thinking, a tour of all the good stuff people don't realize until they include a node for their brain's map in their brain's map. All the concepts come from Eliezer's posts on Overcoming Bias.

I presented this to my old youth group while staffing one of their events. In addition to the slide show, I had a browser with various optical illusions open in tabs, and I brought in a bunch of lemons and miracle fruit tablets. They had a good time and stayed engaged.

I hope the slides will be of use to others trying to promote the public understanding of rationality.

Note: When you view the presentation, make sure you can see the speaker notes. They capture the gist of what I was saying while I was showing each slide.

Added 6 years later: I finally made a video of myself presenting this, except this time it was an adult audience. See this discussion post.

From Marginal Revolution:

A new meta-analysis (pdf) of 72 studies, involving 4,795 groups and over 17,000 individuals has shown that groups tend to spend most of their time discussing the information shared by members, which is therefore redundant, rather than discussing information known only to one or a minority of members. This is important because those groups that do share unique information tend to make better decisions.

Another important factor is how much group members talk to each other. Ironically, Jessica Mesmer-Magnus and Leslie DeChurch found that groups that talked more tended to share less unique information.

A result that shouldn't surprise this group. I've noticed obvious attempts to avoid this tendency in Less Wrong (for instance, Yvain's avoiding further Christian-bashing). We've had at least one post asking specifically for information that was unique. And I don't know about the rest of you, but I've already had plenty of new food for thought on Less Wrong.

But are we tapping the full potential? Each of us has, or should have, a secret identity. The nice thing about those identities is that they give us access to unique knowledge. We've been asked (though I can't find the link) to avoid large posts applying learned rationality techniques to controversial topics, for fear of killing minds, which seems reasonable to me. Is there a better way to allow discipline-specific knowledge to be shared among Less Wrong readers without setting off our politicosensors? It seems beneficial not only for improved rationality training, but also to enhance our secret identities. For instance, I, as an economist-in-training, would like to know not just what an anthropologist can tell me, but what a Bayesian-trained anthropologist can tell me.

Previously in series:  Whining-Based Communities

"But there is a reason why many of my students have achieved great things; and by that I do not mean high rank in the Bayesian Conspiracy.  I expected much of them, and they came to expect much of themselves." —Jeffreyssai

Among the failure modes of martial arts dojos, I suspect, is that a sufficiently dedicated martial arts student, will dream of...

...becoming a teacher and having their own martial arts dojo someday.

To see what's wrong with this, imagine going to a class on literary criticism, falling in love with it, and dreaming of someday becoming a famous literary critic just like your professor, but never actually writing anything.  Writers tend to look down on literary critics' understanding of the art form itself, for just this reason.  (Orson Scott Card uses the analogy of a wine critic who listens to a wine-taster saying "This wine has a great bouquet", and goes off to tell their students "You've got to make sure your wine has a great bouquet".  When the student asks, "How?  Does it have anything to do with grapes?" the critic replies disdainfully, "That's for grape-growers!  I teach wine.")

Similarly, I propose, no student of rationality should study with the purpose of becoming a rationality instructor in turn.  You do that on Sundays, or full-time after you retire.

And to place a go stone blocking this failure mode, I propose a requirement that all rationality instructors must have secret identities.  They must have a life outside the Bayesian Conspiracy, which would be worthy of respect even if they were not rationality instructors.  And to enforce this, I suggest the rule:

  Rationality_Respect₁(Instructor) = min(Rationality_Respect₀(Instructor), Non_Rationality_Respect₀(Instructor))

That is, you can't respect someone as a rationality instructor, more than you would respect them if they were not rationality instructors.