We'll be having our last Friday night Practical Rationality Meetup this week. It will be the last meetup advertised on Meetup.com. The session will be on the How To Change Your Mind sequence, and is designed for those with no prior knowledge of the sequences.
The Less Wrong Sunday Rationality Dojos are crafted to be serious self-improvement sessions for those committed to the Art of Rationality and personal growth. Each month a community member will run a session involving a presentation of content, discussion, and exercises.
Following our first immensely successful Sunday Rationality Dojo, Brayden will present in February on the Planning Fallacy. http://lesswrong.com/lw/jg/planning_fallacy/
Additionally, we will review the personal goals we committed to at the previous Dojo (I will have done X by the next Dojo). Scott Fowler recorded the commitments, if you didn't make it but would like to add your own goal to the records, send him a message (shokwave.sf@gmail.com).
The Dojo is likely to run for 2-3 hours, after which some people will get dinner together.
If you would like to present at a future Dojo or suggest a topic, please fill it in on the Rationality Dojo Roster: http://is.gd/dojoroster
RSVP on the facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1450425828502790/
Practical Rationality. This meetup repeats on the first Friday of each month and is distinct from our monthly Social Meetup. We aim to improve our thinking and decision making techniques.
The topic of this month is communication. We'll be exploring topics such as:
Storytelling - how to build an engaging narrative;
Wait vs Interrupt Culture - optimising conversations
Radical Honesty - going too far, or the ideal way to communicate?
Given and receiving feedback
Discussion can be found on our mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong
All are welcome from 6:30pm. If the door downstairs is locked, call the phone number on the door and we'll let you in. We aim to start structured activities at 7:30pm and continue until 9pm. Afterwards informal discussion will continue late into the night.
Please RSVP at our Meetup.com page if you are coming. http://www.meetup.com/Melbourne-Less-Wrong/events/143167062/
There's relatively little discussion of emotions on Less Wrong, but they occupy a central place in CFAR's curriculum and organizational culture.
[...]
"If you had any idea how much time we spend at CFAR talking about our feelings…"
This greatly raises my opinion of CFAR.
Adding my approval. I think this is an excellent direction for rationality training to be expanding into.
So did this ever get off the ground? Seems like a fantastic project, and if not, I'd like to push to make it happen.
Introduction
In the past couple of months, Melbourne LW has been working to expand our activities and community, as well generally promoting rationality. A huge shout out goes to BraydenM who is responsible for spearheading these efforts. So far we have opened up some of our meetups to new-comers, held a winter solstice dinner party, held a COZE event, created a Meetup.com group for Melbourne LW, presented at other Meetup.com groups, distributed copies of HPMoR, conducted a rationality-vox pop, and presented a public lecture on LW content.
The public lecture was my project, and here is my report.
Initial Planning
In early July, we held a planning session for expanding the community and promoting rationality. Holding public rationality lectures was deemed a possibility worth trying.
Being students in our early twenties, we judged the most receptive market would be our peers. We considered who we should target: (1) High IQ, heavily academic students with technical backgrounds in maths/science/philosophy of the sort who might join LW, or (2) everyone else as well. Having visions of a world where everyone was more rational, I opted for the latter.
I was ambitious at this point and wanted to run a series of six lectures progressing through core sequences content. Wiser heads suggested we run a single, stand-alone lecture to get data. Since I still hoped to run a whole series, the first lecture had to be given at the beginning of new semester (start of August here).
Content
To meet the deadline, I developed the lecture material unaided and without much planning or revision. Speed came at the price of quality.
The lecture could have focused on either of a) cognitive biases or b) core sequences content such as simple truth, probabilistic reasoning, beliefs paying rent, and evidence.
Reasons in favour of and against:
Cognitive Biases
+ I have a prior that biases would be more appealing and get better attendance
- requires more research to present on
- teaching people about biases can be dangerous
Core LW Material
+ I know the content well, easy to prepare material on
+ provides motivation for overcoming biases
- more abstract, philosophical, and less interesting to most
Overwhelmingly, I decided to focus on core sequence material because of the ability to prepare lecture material quickly without reading/rereading material. It may have been better to relax the deadline and lose the time constraint, but it is also I likely that I would have not completed the project if had taken longer.
Delivering the lecture, I realised that by opting to have a lecture suitable for everyone, I was caught trying to please both groups (1) and (2) above. One demands more depth, complexity, and theoretical justification, and the other needs more basic content explained even slower. It's like trying to teach high school and primary school kids together. 'Obvious in hindsight' and all that.
Assuming we have an option, targeting (1) would be better. They have the ability to understand and appreciate the material, and are more likely to be receptive. Needless to say, we haven't exhausted the pool of high IQ, mathy-sciency people.
In this lecture I tabooed the word 'rationality'. To the average student at an Australian university it does not mean at all what it means to us (and I don't see why they'd be special). The rationality vox pop we conducted demonstrated this and I'll report soon what we learnt from it, namely, how typical students perceive 'rationality'.
Venue
Running an event for students on campus is easy for student clubs. With LW members on club committees, the lecture was hosted by the University of Melbourne Sceptics Society and the Rationalist Association of Monash at their respective campuses. Both clubs provided assistance in promoting and running the events.
Advertising
We advertised the lecture through the university clubs’ facebook groups, meetup.com, flyers, and posters around campus. The cost of printing the posters was not trivial, but judging from feedback, they did not increase attendance.
Attendance and Reception
I was surprised by the number of people who expressed enthusiasm for the lecture topic, I had assumed belief and evidence seemed like completely mundane and boring topics to most people. Disappointingly, that did not translate into attendance. About 15-20 people attended each of the lectures, including members of the hosting clubs's committees and personal friends. A few friends requested a recording of the lecture.
Feedback was positive. We issued feedback forms at the end of each lecture. On a 1-5 scale of unlikely to likely, the mean response for both attending a similar event and for recommending a similar event to a friend was 4. Comments offered criticisms, recommendations, and thanks.
Conversations with attendees afterwards showed that they had understood and taken on board the idea of probabilistic reasoning. I assign a greater than 50% chance that if nothing else, the explicit idea that belief comes on sliding scale of certainty and gets pushed up and down by evidence will stick with people.
Lessons Learnt
While I never made an explicit estimate of how long this project would take, it exceeded my expectations. Planning fallacy strikes again. I also assumed I would get more assistance than I did. There were no replies to my request for assistance making a poster in either the LW Melbourne or LW global facebook group.
Crucially, I learnt that I should have finalised the content before commencing advertising. Once I'd committed to talking about certain topics I felt constrained to include them. Afterwards the point was made to me that it may have been better to violate the advertising than give a sub-optimal lecture, and in hindsight I'm inclined to agree.
The personal experience gained in presenting a lengthy lecture to a public audience was valuable. Notable lessons were to spread content out over more slides rather than concentrating it, and to generate the exact wording on the spot, rather than rehearsing a script. I relied heavily on a script the first time I gave the lecture (and duly received criticism). For the second I used only the slides as a prompt, resulting in more pauses, but a far more natural presenation. Having tried both extremes, it seems that the classic 'prompts on palm cards' is ideal.
Conclusion
Reviewing the whole process of producing this rationality lecture, I feel rather irrational. I started with a 'what' and not a 'why'. I started off with a plan I wanted to implement and an assumption that this plan was the best way to achieve my goal, rather than with the goal itself. The sequence of bad judgements and decisions followed from there:
1) conclude without any real reasoning that delivering a lecture series this semester on campus is the best way to promote rationality
2) giving a series of lectures this semester requires starting soon, imposing a short deadline
3) to meet the deadline I have to work fast
4) to work fast, I have to stick to only delivering I content already know very well
5) to work fast there is no time to work with others, get feedback, and/or revise the material.
My decisions were further biased by the fact that that having a reason to work quickly meant I had an excuse to not work with others, to do things all my way, and to avoid the unpleasant experience of receiving criticism and having to alter my work.
Tsuyoku naritai!
As much as I regret the lack of planning that went into this project, I am glad that I didn't fall into the opposite trap: trying to plan so exhaustively that I never got out there and did something. At some stage (later than I did), we need to satisfice. Despite being imperfect, this lecture had value and did good.
Thankfully, I was directed to Swimmer963’s post. Her approach is the right one, and I plan to discuss the project of increasing the sanity waterline with all others who are keen before taking further action.
RobbBB's suggestion of starting a new website as a hub for HPMoR fans seems seriously worthy of consideration, and I'd be very willing to put time and effort into making it happen awesomely.
Awesome, Israeli LWers! I'll have to come visit some day.
Because the 4th of January is a time when many people might be away on holiday or otherwise unavailable, it would probably be worth getting a sense for numbers beforehand to avoid . If you expect to attend, please let us know (no commitment!) either in a comment here (and get a free upvote for your trouble), or on the mailing list group, or via some other suitable channel.
I'll start off by saying I expect to attend (~75% probability)
I'm a relatively new LWer, so still working on the basics. Mostly, I keep catching myself rationalising impulsive decisions. It's startling just how frequently I do this.
This morning I decided to go buy new hiking boots, changing my mind from doing it in the afternoon after I'd worked on an overdue essay. Having made my decision, I justified it saying that it was an important purchase to get right and I should do it while I'm freshest - this thought occurring after the decision was made. I hardly need spell out what the true motivation was.
Well, it's one thing to catch myself rationalising and acknowledge a problem, but it's a harder step to honestly reevaluate the options and choose rationally. That's what I need to work on now. Tsuyoku Naritai.
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I'm taking an engineering course this semester in which the only task is to create a robot to compete in a "hockey" competition. I have a great team with competent, talented, and hard-working guys and I've been thoroughly enjoying it.
I mistakenly assumed that since we knew what we were doing and were working hard (I have never been on such a team before), that we'd have no problems. Turns out that even a good team needs project management, hard deadlines and all that other fun stuff.
Come the night before the preliminary competition, we were about two weeks away from ready. About 3am we finally had seemingly working hardware. I was the code guy, and at long last it was my turn to start testing the fancy code and algorithms I'd been churning out for months. I had way too much to do with five hours to go and no sleep, but I started incrementally testing the pieces regardless.
It is this point that I am proud of myself.
I noticed that one of my team-mates was unhappy, as though he'd already given up. Younger me would not have done this.
I realised that this mattered. Slightly less younger me might have noticed, but would have ignored it since he was already in a position to have his way without regard for what others wanted. After all, he'd waited so long for his turn to call the shots.
I asked my team-mate how he felt about our current position. I intended to convince him not to give up and aid me unreservedly.
After several minutes, I let him convince me that there wasn't time to test complicated code, we just needed something quick and simple which would work with little tweaking.
I had spent dozens of hours writing sophisticated code, stretched myself, mulled over algorithms and strategies morning and night - and now I was supposed to abandon all that because the rest of the project was behind schedule?
Well, I was supposed to. That was rational decision which might give us a chance at 9am and I made it with almost no internal fuss. Past me never could have made that decision, too stubborn even if it cost him, and here it wasn't even hard.
That I can point to and declare is progress. Well done me.