Thinking about a quote from HPMOR (the podcast is quite good, if anyone was interested):

But human beings had four times the brain size of a chimpanzee. 20% of a human's metabolic energy went into feeding the brain. Humans were ridiculously smarter than any other species. That sort of thing didn't happen because the environment stepped up the difficulty of its problems a little. Then the organisms would just get a little smarter to solve them. Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.

And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.

...

It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity.

Besides the quoted "Chimpanzee Politics" are there any other references to this hypothesis? I've tried Googling around for 5 minutes and I couldn't find anything.

Edit: seems like I was looking using the wrong keywords: Wikipedia seems to have a small paragraph on evolution of human brain due to competitive social behavior, but I'd still like to see if anyone else had any articles on the matter.

Personally, I prefer more produced podcasts, in the style of Serial, Freakonomics, etc, because very few people are good interviewees. I would like to hear more if you could improve the microphone quality - I couldn't distinguish some words, even upon relistening. I'm sure the person behind HPMOR Podcast would offer more tips if you contacted him.

Fascinating. Maybe he's been talking to Shane Legg of DeepMind, who also has much sooner timelines than I do.

(This is Dan from CFAR again)

We have a fair amount of data on the experiences of people who have been to CFAR workshops.

First, systematic quantitative data. We send out a feedback survey a few days after the workshop which includes the question "0 to 10, are you glad you came?" The average response to that question is 9.3. We also sent out a survey earlier this year to 20 randomly selected alumni who had attended workshops in the previous 3-18 months, and asked them the same question. 18 of the 20 filled out the survey, and their average response to that question was 9.6.

Less systematically but in more fleshed out detail, there are several reviews that people who have attended a CFAR workshop have posted to their blogs (A, B+pt2, C +pt2) or to LW (1, 2, 3). Ben Kuhn's (also linked above under "C") seems particularly relevant here, becaue he went into the workshop assigning a 50% probability to the hypothesis that "The workshop is a standard derpy self-improvement technique: really good at making people feel like they’re getting better at things, but has no actual effect."

In-person conversations that I've had with alumni (including some interviews that I've done with alumni about the impact that the workshop had on their life) have tended to paint a similar picture to these reviews, from a broader set of people, but it's harder for me to share those data.

We don't have as much data on the experiences of people who have been to test sessions or shorter events. I suspect that most people who come to shorter events have a positive experience, and that there's a modest benefit on average, but that it's less uniformly positive. Partly that's because there's a bunch of stuff that happens with a full workshop that doesn't fit in a briefer event - more time for conversations between participants to digest the material, more time for one-on-one conversations with CFAR staff to sort through things, followups after the workshop to work with someone on implementing things in your daily life, etc. The full workshop is also more practiced and polished (it has been through many more iterations) - much moreso than a test session; one-day events are in between (the ones advertised as alpha tests of a new thing are closer to the test session end of the spectrum).

Do you think it was unhelpful because you already had a high level of knowledge on the topics they were teaching and thus didn't have much to learn or because the actual techniques were not effective? Do you think your experience was typical? How useful do you think it would be to an average person? An average rationalist?

These days, most of my time on Anki is on Japanese (which I'm learning for fun) and Chinese (which I already know, but I'm brushing up on tones and characters).

Looking through my decks, I also have decks on:

• Algorithms and data structures (from a couple books I read on that)
• Communication (misc. tips on storytelling, giving talks, etc.)
• Game Design (insights and concepts that seemed valuable)
• German
• Git and Unix Command Line commands
• Haskell
• Insight (misc. stuff that seemed interesting/important)
• Mnemonics
• Productivity (notes from Lukeprog's posts and vairous other sources)
• Psychology and neuroscience
• Rationality Habits (one of the few decks I have that come all made, from Anna Salmon I think, though I also added some stuff and delted others)
• Statistics
• Web Technologies (some stuff on Angular JS and CSS that I got tired of looking up all the time)

(also a few minor decks with very few cards)

I review those pretty much every day (I sometimes leave a few unfinished, depending on how much idle time I have in queues, transport, etc.)

What made it poor use of your time?

Those who are currently using Anki on a mostly daily or weekly basis: what are you studying/ankifying?

To start: I'm working on memorizing programming languages and frameworks because I have trouble remembering parameters and method names.

I'd like to ask LessWrong's advice. I want to benefit from CFAR's knowledge on improving ones instrumental rationality, but being a poor graduate I do not have several thousand in disposable income nor a quick way to acquire it. I've read >90% of the sequences but despite having read lukeprog's and Alicorn's sequences I am aware that I do not know what I do not know about motivation and akrasia. How can I best improve my instrumental rationality on the cheap?

Edit: I should clarify, I am asking for information sources: blogs, book recommendations, particularly practice exercises and other areas of high quality content. I also have a good deal of interest in the science behind motivation, cognitive rewiring and reinforcement. I've searched myself and I have a number of things on my reading list, but I wanted to ask the advice of people who have already done, read or vetted said techniques so I can find and focus on the good stuff and ignore the pseudoscience.

Is there a listing of Yvain/slatestarcodex's fiction? I just finished reading The Study of Anglophysics, and I want more.