In response to Why CFAR's Mission?
Comment author: alyssavance 31 December 2015 01:11:21PM *  11 points [-]

I mostly agree with the post, but I think it'd be very helpful to add specific examples of epistemic problems that CFAR students have solved, both "practice" problems and "real" problems. Eg., we know that math skills are trainable. If Bob learns to do math, along the way he'll solve lots of specific math problems, like "x^2 + 3x - 2 = 0, solve for x". When he's built up some skill, he'll start helping professors solve real math problems, ones where the answers aren't known yet. Eventually, if he's dedicated enough, Bob might solve really important problems and become a math professor himself.

Training epistemic skills (or "world-modeling skills", "reaching true beliefs skills", "sanity skills", etc.) should go the same way. At the beginning, a student solves practice epistemic problems, like the ones Tetlock uses in the Good Judgement Project. When they get skilled enough, they can start trying to solve real epistemic problems. Eventually, after enough practice, they might have big new insights about the global economy, and make billions at a global macro fund (or some such, lots of possibilities of course).

To use another analogy, suppose Carol teaches people how to build bridges. Carol knows a lot about why bridges are important, what the parts of a bridge are, why iron bridges are stronger than wood bridges, and so on. But we'd also expect that Carol's students have built models of bridges with sticks and stuff, and (ideally) that some students became civil engineers and built real bridges. Similarly, if one teaches how to model the world and find truth, it's very good to have examples of specific models built and truths found - both "practice" ones (that are already known, or not that important) and ideally "real" ones (important and haven't been discovered before).

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 11 January 2016 03:45:25AM *  5 points [-]

Example practice problems and small real problems:

  • Fermi estimation of everyday quantities (e.g., "how many minutes will I spend commuting over the next year? What's the expected savings if I set a 5-minute timer to try to optimize that?);
  • Figuring out why I'm averse to work/social task X and how to modify that;
  • Finding ways to optimize recurring task X;
  • Locating the "crux" of a disagreement about a trivia problem ("How many barrels of oil were sold worldwide in 1970?" pursued with two players and no internet) or a harder-to-check problem ("What are the most effective charities today?"), such that trading evidence for the crux produces shifts in one's own and/or the other player's views.

Larger real problems: Not much to point to as yet. Some CFAR alums are running start-ups, doing scientific research for MIRI or elsewhere, etc. and I imagine make estimates of various quantities in real life, but I don't know of any discoveries of note. Yet.

In response to Why CFAR's Mission?
Comment author: Gleb_Tsipursky 31 December 2015 08:57:14PM 11 points [-]

First, on a meta-note, since Anna was too humble to mention it herself, I want to highlight that the CFAR 2015 Winter Fundraiser will last through January 31, 2016, with every $2 donated matched by $1 from CFAR supporters. Just to be clear, for those who don't know me, I'm not a staff person or Board member at CFAR, and am in fact the President of another organization spreading rationality and effective altruism to a broad audience, so with a somewhat distinct mission with CFAR, which targets, as Anna said, those elites who are in the strongest position to impact the world. However, I'm also a monthly donor to CFAR, and very much support the mission, and encourage you to donate to CFAR during this fundraiser, since your dollars will do a lot of good there.

Second, let me come down from meta, and speak from my CFAR donor hat. I'm curious to learn more about the target group of elites that you talk about Anna, namely those "who are most likely to actually usefully impact the world." When I think of MIRI Summer Fellows, I totally get your point regarding AI research. But what about offering training to others such as aspiring politicians/bureaucrats who are likely to be in the position to make AI-relevant policies, and also policies that address short and medium-term existential risk in the next several of decades before the possibility of FAI becomes more tangible - existential risk like cyberwarfare, nuclear war, climate change, etc. If we can get politicians to be more sane about short, medium, and long-term existential risk, it seems like that would be a win-win scenario. What are CFAR's thoughts on that?

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 11 January 2016 03:19:35AM *  3 points [-]

If we can get politicians to be more sane about short, medium, and long-term existential risk, it seems like that would be a win-win scenario. What are CFAR's thoughts on that?

Getting politicians to me more sane sounds awesome, but somewhat harder for us and more outside our immediate reach than getting STEM-heavy students to be more sane. I realize I said "who are most likely to actually usefully impact the world", but I should perhaps instead have said "who have high values for the product of [likely to usefully impact the world if they think well] * [comparatively easy for us to assist in acquiring good thinking skills]"; and STEM seems to help with both of these.

Still, we are keen to have aspiring politicians, civil servants, etc. to our workshops, we've found financial aid for several such in the past, and we'd love it if you or others would recommend our workshops to aspiring rationalists who are interested in this path (as well as in other paths).

Comment author: Xachariah 06 January 2016 08:13:12AM *  2 points [-]

This is my main question. I've never seen anything to imply that multi-day workshops are effective methods of learning. Going further, I'm not sure how Less Wrong supports Spaced Repetition and Distributed Practice on one hand, while also supporting an organization that's primary outreach seems to be crash courses. It's like Less Wrong is showing a forum wide cognitive dissonance that nobody notices.

That leaves a few options:

  • I'm wrong (though I consider it highly unlikely)
  • CFAR never bothered to look it up or uses self selection to convince themselves it's effective
  • CFAR is trying to optimize for something aside from spreading rationality, but they aren't actually saying what.
Comment author: AnnaSalamon 11 January 2016 03:11:54AM 5 points [-]

See my reply above. It is worth noting also that there is follow-up after the workshop (emails, group Skype calls, 1-on-1 follow-up sessions, and accountability buddies), and that the workshops are for many an entry-point into the alumni community and a longer-term community of practice (with many participating in the google group; attending our weekly alumni dojo; attending yearly alumni reunions and occasional advanced workshops, etc.).

(Even so, our methodology if not what I would pick if our goal was to help participants memorize rote facts. But for ways of thinking, it seems to work better than anything else we've found. So far.)

In response to Why CFAR's Mission?
Comment author: ChristianKl 02 January 2016 12:30:42PM *  12 points [-]

Why is CFAR's main venue for teaching those skills a 4-day workshop?

Why not weekly classes of 2 to 3 hours?
Why not a focus on written material as the original sequences had?
Why not a focus on creating videos that teach rationality skills?
Why not focus on creating software that trains the skills?

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 11 January 2016 02:59:41AM 14 points [-]

The short answer: because we're trying to teach a kind of thinking rather than a pile of information, and this kind of thinking seems to be vary more easily acquired in an immersive multi-day context -- especially a context in which participants have set aside their ordinary commitments, and are free to question their normal modes of working/socializing/etc. without needing to answer their emails meanwhile.

Why I think this: CFAR experimented quite a bit with short classes (1 hour, 3 hours, etc.), daylong commuter events, multi-day commuter events, and workshops of varying numbers of days. We ran our first immersive workshop 6 months into our existence, after much experimentation with short formats; and we continued to experiment extensively with varied formats thereafter.

We found that participants were far more likely to fill in high scores to "0 to 10, are you glad you came?" at multi-day residential events. We found also that they seemed to us to engage with the material more fully and acquire the "mindset" of applied rationality more easily and more deeply, and that conversations relaxed, opened up, and became more honest/engaged as each workshop progressed, with participants feeling free to e.g. question whether their apparently insoluble problems were in fact insoluble, whether they in fact wanted to stay in the careers they felt "already stuck" in, whether they could "become a math person after all" or "learn social skills after all" or come to care about the world even if they hadn't been born that way, etc.

We also find we learn more from participants with whom we have more extensive contact, and the residential setting provides that well per unit staff time -- we can really get in the mode of hanging out with a given set of participants, trying to understand where they're at, forming hypotheses that might help, trying those hypotheses real-time in a really data-rich setting, seeing why that didn't quite work, and trying again... And developing better curricula is perhaps CFAR's main focus.

That said, discussed in our year-end review & fundraiser post, we are planning to attempt more writing, both for the sake of scalable reading and for the sake of more explicitly formulating some of what we think we know. It'll be interesting to see how that goes.

(You might also check our Critch's recent post on why CFAR has focused so much on residential workshops.)

Comment author: TheMajor 05 January 2016 06:40:44PM 13 points [-]

How very deep. But if I'm not mistaken the original argument around Chesterton's fence is that somebody had gone through great efforts to put a fence somewhere, and presumably would not have wasted that time if it would be useless anyway. In your example, "the common practice of taking down Chesterton fences", this is not the case. The general principle is to not undo that which others have worked hard for to create, unless you are certain that it is useless/counterproductive. Nobody worked hard on making sure people could remove fences without understanding them (or at the very least I'm willing to claim that this is counterproductive), so this principle is not protected.

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 09 January 2016 06:42:02AM *  2 points [-]

Nobody worked hard on making sure people could remove fences without understanding them ..., so this principle is not protected.

This seems false to me. I agree with Stuart's opening suggestion that democracy, free markets, and the Enlightenment more generally are in part designed to make it easy to dismantle historical patterns (e.g. religion, guilds, aristocracy, traditions; one can see this discussion explicitly in e.g. Adam Smith, Locke, Toqueville, Bacon). Bostrom's "status quo bias" also comes to mind.

Why CFAR's Mission?

38 AnnaSalamon 02 January 2016 11:23PM

Related to:


Briefly put, CFAR's mission is to improve the sanity/thinking skill of those who are most likely to actually usefully impact the world.

I'd like to explain what this mission means to me, and why I think a high-quality effort of this sort is essential, possible, and urgent.

I used a Q&A format (with imaginary Q's) to keep things readable; I would also be very glad to Skype 1-on-1 if you'd like something about CFAR to make sense, as would Pete Michaud.  You can schedule a conversation automatically with me or Pete.

---

Q:  Why not focus exclusively on spreading altruism?  Or else on "raising awareness" for some particular known cause?

Briefly put: because historical roads to hell have been powered in part by good intentions; because the contemporary world seems bottlenecked by its ability to figure out what to do and how to do it (i.e. by ideas/creativity/capacity) more than by folks' willingness to sacrifice; and because rationality skill and epistemic hygiene seem like skills that may distinguish actually useful ideas from ineffective or harmful ones in a way that "good intentions" cannot.

Q:  Even given the above -- why focus extra on sanity, or true beliefs?  Why not focus instead on, say, competence/usefulness as the key determinant of how much do-gooding impact a motivated person can have?  (Also, have you ever met a Less Wronger?  I hear they are annoying and have lots of problems with “akrasia”, even while priding themselves on their high “epistemic” skills; and I know lots of people who seem “less rational” than Less Wrongers on some axes who would nevertheless be more useful in many jobs; is this “epistemic rationality” thingy actually the thing we need for this world-impact thingy?...)

This is an interesting one, IMO.

Basically, it seems to me that epistemic rationality, and skills for forming accurate explicit world-models, become more useful the more ambitious and confusing a problem one is tackling.

For example:

continue reading »
Comment author: Academian 19 December 2015 04:12:34AM 27 points [-]

Just donated $500 and pledged $6500 more in matching funds (10% of my salary).

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 21 December 2015 11:02:24AM 8 points [-]

Thank you! We appreciate this enormously.

Comment author: Gleb_Tsipursky 19 December 2015 05:53:36PM 9 points [-]

Great progress, and I just donated! As a nonprofit director myself, I am especially happy to see your progress on systematization going forward. That's what will help pave the path to long-term success. Great job!

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 21 December 2015 11:01:59AM 3 points [-]

Thanks!

Comment author: lukeprog 20 December 2015 07:57:54PM 18 points [-]

Just donated!

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 21 December 2015 11:01:55AM 6 points [-]

Thanks!

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 21 December 2015 08:52:43AM 3 points [-]

We revised the text some after posting; apologies to anyone who replied to original text that has now been changed.

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