All of Gregory 's Comments + Replies

Thanks for sharing this! I’ve read Feedbackloop-first Rationality, and it’s definitely contributed why I want to build something like this. I’ve even been looking for Thinking Physics style problems that might be free to use online. Getting a diverse and quality set of interesting problems I think will be difficult whether its aggregated, crowdsourced, or possibly AI generated. 

My agenda is written up in the Feedbackloop-first Rationality sequence. The basic idea is that rationality is bottlenecked on inventing better feedbackloops that train the actu

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3Raemon
Yeah I'm basic using the lens of my cognitive bootcamp series to iron out the pedagogy here. I try to write up LW posts for all the key takeaways and exercises, although it takes awhile.

I appreciate the reply! 

Something about training people to categorize errors - instead of just making good decisions - rubs me the wrong way

Are you able to pinpoint exactly what gives you this feeling? The goal of this problem type would be to train the ability to recognize bias to the point where it becomes second nature, with the hope that this same developed skill would also trigger in your own thought processes. I believe it’s generally easier to evaluate the truthfulness of a statement than to come up with one initially, so this training would he... (read more)

6ChristianKl
Part of what rationality is about is that you don't just hope for beneficial things to happen.  Cognitive bias is a term that comes out of the psychology literature and there were plenty of studies in the domain. It's my understanding that in academia nobody found that you get very far by teaching people to recognize biases. Outside of academia, we have CFAR that did think about whether you can get people to be more rational by giving them exercises and came to the conclusion that those exercises should be different. In a case like this, asking yourself "What evidence do I have that what I hope will actually happen?" and "What sources, be it academic people or experts I might interview, could give me more evidence?" would be much more productive questions than "What things in my thought process might be labeled as biases?"
6abstractapplic
  Less a single sharp pinpoint, more a death of a thousand six cuts: * The emphasis on learning the names of biases is kinda guessing-the-teacher's-password-y. * You'd need to put forth an unusual effort to make sure you're communicating the subset of psychological research which actually replicates reliably. * Any given bias might not be present in the student or their social/business circle. * The suggested approach implies that the set of joints psychologists currently carve at is the 'best' one; what if I happen to see Bias A and Bias B as manifestations of Bias C? * I worry some students would round this off to "here's how to pathologize people who disagree with me!" training. * Like I said, this is the kind of fruit that's low-hanging enough that it's mostly already picked. All that said, I still think this is potentially worthwhile and would still playtest it if you wanted. But I'm much more excited about literally every other idea you mentioned.

Thanks! I have seen a similar tool like this before and enjoyed it quite a bit. I’d love to know where you source the trivia data, especially if it is available for open use. Also could be interesting to tailor to some functionality for meetups as well.

1Julius
I originally had an LLM generate them for me, and then I checked those with other LLMs to make sure the answers were right and that weren't ambiguous. All of the questions are here: https://github.com/jss367/calibration_trivia/tree/main/public/questions