For the next Cognitive Bootcamp, I wanted to experiment with a format that is
a) more explicitly “intense”
b) a bit more opinionated on how people spend their time
while c) still flexible enough to deal with the fact that people need different things and being too intense can be bad
The next workshop is Friday, Oct 25 at 4pm thru Sunday at 7:30pm. It will cost $600 ($400 if you are staying for more than two weeks at the Lighthaven Eternal September season). I will raise prices in the future as I become more confident in the material.
This post is the terms I want people to agree to beforehand. If you are interested in attending a workshop, please read and then fill out this form.
The target audience is people who:
have decision-making power on a large project, which tackles confusing problems;
are not bottlenecked on executive function;
and, who don’t have a sneaking suspicion they’re at risk of burnout.
Note this is still an experimental beta-test (see the Disclaimers section for more info).
The Format
The format will evolve, but the frame I’m trying next is:
By coming to the workshop, you agree that you will spend the whole time either:
aiming to work basically as hard as you can.
napping / taking a walk / etc (preferably without devices)
talking to me if the workshop feels off in some way.
Your goal is to learn at least one new skill, starting from "it’s too cumbersome to use productively", and aiming to reach "Juuuust fluent enough that you can start applying it to your day job, practicing so it becomes easy."
Beforehand, you send me your default plan for the next ~week, month or quarter – whatever the longest timescale you plan on. You’ll work on improving this plan (though the main workshop goal is still “gain one new skill”)
I’ll present ~4 skills I think are valuable for solving confusing problems, and exercises that are helpful for grinding on them.
You’re welcome to pick other skills, or other exercises, that you think will help you better. But, for each session, you need to clearly explain a) why I think the original exercise was important, b) why the thing you’ll do instead is better. (We’ll chat until we both understand each other and feel good about it)
Previously, I’ve found that giving people too much leeway in changing the curriculum results in the workshop losing focus, but too little leeway results in people not quite getting what they need. I’m interested in trying out this compromise.
The Goal: Solve confusing, intractable problems
Many of the most important problems in the world are confusing, intractable, and seem impossible. They are really important to solve anyway.
But many people who try, end up in failure modes such as…
Rabbit-holing, fixating on an approach which doesn’t work, or takes too long.
Goodharting, substituting an easier problem, maybe without even noticing.
Despair. It’s impossible. You give up.
Zombified Agency, mechanically execute virtuous-seeming plans, but something inside you is dead and hollow and the plan probably won’t work and maybe you’ll hurt yourself.
I want you to leave the workshop with at least one new skill for solving impossible problems.
The Curriculum
The default curriculum focuses on “making better plans” via…
Generating multiple plans, so you don’t over-anchor on your first plan.
Tracking multiple goals, so you don’t over-anchor on your first goal.
Identifying your cruxes, and confidently deciding when to pivot or persevere.
Making cruxy predictions, so over time you can credibly, calibrated trust your intuition (and, know the limits of where you cannot)
An optional, higher level frame is Fractal Strategy – thinking of plans and goals at multiple levels, tracking how smaller plans fit into bigger plans, and when it’s time to move up, down or sideways in plan/goal-space.
The Skills
The one skill I will require everyone to attempt at least twice is generating metastrategies (see below).
Some more specific skills that will be presented:
Generalizing Takeaways, i.e. asking “how could I have thought that sooner?”
Using externalized working memory, both because it increases the complexity of problems you’re capable of tackling, and because it makes it easier for me to see your thought process and offer advice.
Noticing metacognition, to identify when you’re in particular cognitive states so that you can learn about your mind and employ relevant skills/habits.
Multiple feedback-loops
I don’t have perfect feedback-loops to tell you if this workshop is working for you. So, there are four different feedback-loop types, with different tradeoffs:
Predictions
Guess whether a given strategy will work, then see if you were right.
Toy Exercises.
They only vaguely resemble your real problems, but you’ll know for sure whether you got the right answer in two hours.
Big picture planning.
You’ll generate at least one new plan. You won’t really know if it’s good, but a) you’ll have intuitions about it, which are at least some information. And, b) you’ll make predictions about whether it’ll seem worth having thought about in a year.
Object-level work, in 1-hour blocks
Spend a few timeblocks doing object level work on your second likeliest plan. Each hour, you’ll make conscious choices about how to spend your time and attention. And then, reflect on whether that seemed useful. (in addition to crosstraining your skills on the practical object-level, this will help make your second-likeliest plan feel more real)
The Immediate Metric: General Strategies
The fundamental skill of the workshop is “brainstorming metastrategies.” That is, general strategies that work on a wide variety of problems (usually by helping you generate more “tactical” strategies appropriate to the situation)
Each session, you’ll be doing a puzzle, or intellectual work. The point isn’t whether you succeed or not on the puzzle. The point is whether you learn generalized strategies that either definitively helped you on the problem, or seem likely to help you in the future.
After each session, you’ll:
First, brainstorm as many general takeaways as you can.
Then, if there were any strategies that concretely helped, you will write it on the whiteboard.
Put a star on it if it’s a strategy you’ve never tried before.
Each time you successfully use a strategy already listed on the whiteboard (including the first time you write it down), put your initials next to it.
The (slightly Goodharty but hopefully productive) goal of the workshop is to fill the board with strategies that get used lots of times.
There will be prizes for people who generate the most-used strategies. (Exact prize TDB, probably more like a fun token than, like, money)
The way you’re supposed to tell if the workshop is helping is “are you generating strategies that help you?”.
If by the end of Day 1, if you haven’t generated any metastrategies, we’ll chat about whether we should adjust anything on Day 2 for you. If by the end of Day 2 if you haven’t generated any strategies, we’ll check in on whether the workshop is working for you or you are otherwise getting value out of it, and possibly call it quits, or radically change what you focus on for Day 3.
The Disclaimers (Important!)
Prerequisites
This is not an entry level rationality workshop. It has several prerequisites:
Executive function. You can sit down and think about a confusing problem and not immediately bounce off. Your problem should be more like “when I sit down to plan, I don’t know what to do” than “I have trouble sitting down to plan,” or “if I make a decision, I can’t follow it through.”[1]
Project Ownership. You have control over an (at least somewhat) open-ended decisionmaking processi.e. you get at least some leeway to set priorities at your day job, or you have a lot of slack for ambitious hobbies.. A primary skill at this workshop is learning when to pivot. You need to be capable of deciding when you’re pivoting. When you leave the workshop, you have a project you expect to be applying the techniques to on a daily basis.
Self awareness. You can notice when pushing yourself hard is bad for you, instead of good for you. You have at least some awareness of when things are going subtly wrong and you need to slow down. I'll do my best to help you notice this sort of thing, but there’s a limit to how much I can help.
If you are at risk of burnout (if you’ve recently worked much harder than usual, or a nagging voice inside is worried about spending a weekend doing very intense thinking) I recommend you do not attend right now. You can register your interest for future workshops though.
This will be very meta
We are going to think about thinking.
We are going to apply feedback-loops to our feedback-loops.
While we’re doing that, I will be thinking about thinking about you thinking about those things (You don’t have to do that, just me).
Meta-level optimization is the mechanism by which, maybe, I expect people to get compounding returns on thinking, and there is a real possibility that this can be leveraged into dramatically better plans.
Well designed feedback loops are the grounding mechanism to check whether we’re doing masturbatory meta, vs useful meta.[2]
I think there are basically two flavors of "I feel like thi meta sucks". One is that you've lost track of your goals, you've spent more time meta-optimizing than makes sense, and your subconscious is (correctly) flagging that it's time to get back to work. Another is "it feels overwhelming, like you can't track what's going on."
I think it can be correct (nearterm) to stop if you're overwhelmed, but one of the skills the workshop is trying to impart is the ability to navigate complex problems without getting overwhelmed (complex metacognition included).
If you are feeling disoriented or annoyed or have a nagging feeling the current amount of meta won’t help:
First, pause (if I’m the problem, say “hey Ray stop”)
Probably, go back to doing a more object level thing
But, also: consider getting out a sheet of paper / google-doc and writing things down so you can actually track what’s going on. Or, chatting with me about it and seeing if we can find a way to make it more manageable.[3]
Part of the point of becoming fluent in “working memory extension” is that your meta processes are much easier to understand, and you can leverage them more strategically.
What's the evidence that this works?
I am talking a pretty big game. I think it’s an active ingredient for me to present content confidently, and for people to lean into a mindset where they trust it’ll work, or at least is worth trying.
But an important truth is that this workshop series does not (yet) have a strong empirical track record. If the curriculum does not intuitively make sense to you, I don’t think you should particularly believe in it.
I am trying to stick my neck out such that if the workshop is not working, it should be obvious (i.e. people will not be generating strategies that help).
Here are some facts about past participant experience:
First Workshop 6-month followup
When I ran the first workshop (which I charged $200 for), I asked the 9 participants what was the most they’d have paid for the workshop. Numbers ranged from $300 to ~$2000, on average $800.
When I asked again six months later, two “$400” people and one "$1500" changed their number to “$2000”.
One of the $400 folk, because they changed their plans importantly afterwards. They weren’t sure how much credit to assign to the workshop, but it could be anywhere from $0 to $10,000, and "$2000 felt about right."
The other $400 person, because they gained an major insight that was still seemed important to their worldview.
The $1500 person explicitly changed their plan during the workshop, and after months later it seemed like
Meanwhile two people reported back they'd probably lowered their estimate:
One (who originally said "$300" said "My gut says $200. My brain says potentially $0 or potentially $1000."
Another who originally said $1500 person dropped to $0 because they realized they were too burned out to get value from the workshop (and maybe it hurt them).
When I ran the second workshop, average rating was $540, or $650 if you throw out one data point from someone (who rated it $0) who came for nonstandard reasons, and I wouldn’t have really expected to get much value out of it, if we’d talked a bit more. There was another person who also reported they were burned out[4] and now wasn't a good time for the workshop, although I don't think they were actively hurt.
What’s up with the cost? Can I get a discount?
I charge a fair amount of money (and plan to charge more as I become more confident in the curriculum), because:
People thinking it’s worth paying for is a crux. If I didn’t think I could ultimately generate thousands of dollars worth of value for people, I would give up on the project. Charging money makes it harder to delude myself that I’m helping people.
Lightcone needs the money. And on the margin, we prefer to get money from people we are delivering value to.
It filters for commitment. I want to filter for people who actually are going to try to get hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of value from the workshop, and so will put more effort in.
It soft-filters for the pre-requisites. Because the workshop isn’t a 101 workshop, I want to filter for people who have some degree of “already having your shit together”, for which “can afford to consider paying serious money for a workshop” is a proxy. (I realize that will exclude some people unnecessarily. But given the other two goals
In general, if you didn’t feel like you got your money’s worth, I prefer to solve this by giving you some free followup coaching until you feel like you got your money’s worth.
If you earnestly tried to get a thousand dollars worth of value from the workshop, including explicitly strategizing with me on how to adapt it to you, and it didn’t really pay off and it seems like my general frame or skillset isn’t useful to you, chat with me and I’ll consider a refund.
After reading through this, if you're interested in either the October 25th workshop or a future one, please fill out this form.
I do think planning can be a useful skill for fixing executive function issues (i.e. "make a plan to fix it"), but, you wouldn't really capitalize on most of the workshop, and I'd probably recommend a workshop much more focused on executive function stuff if you have a workshop-shaped-hole in your life.
Feedback-loops are kind of meta, but I argue that having many different types of feedback-loops should make you less skeptical of "cognitive meta", rather than more. Some feedbackloops should be things like "your gut feels like you are still on the right track, and isn't getting carried away Goodharting on the easier-to-measure feedback loops."
If you're overwhelmed by meta and pen-and-paper isn't helping, unfortunately trying to diagnose what's going wrong... sort of intrinsically involves more meta, which won't work. I am admittedly still figuring out my process for helping in this situation, but I default to "just stop."
They didn't exactly say "burned out", the longer description was "they'd just spent awhile being very strategic and they realized they needed a break now."
For the next Cognitive Bootcamp, I wanted to experiment with a format that is
The next workshop is Friday, Oct 25 at 4pm thru Sunday at 7:30pm. It will cost $600 ($400 if you are staying for more than two weeks at the Lighthaven Eternal September season). I will raise prices in the future as I become more confident in the material.
This post is the terms I want people to agree to beforehand. If you are interested in attending a workshop, please read and then fill out this form.
The target audience is people who:
Note this is still an experimental beta-test (see the Disclaimers section for more info).
The Format
The format will evolve, but the frame I’m trying next is:
I’ll present ~4 skills I think are valuable for solving confusing problems, and exercises that are helpful for grinding on them.
You’re welcome to pick other skills, or other exercises, that you think will help you better. But, for each session, you need to clearly explain a) why I think the original exercise was important, b) why the thing you’ll do instead is better. (We’ll chat until we both understand each other and feel good about it)
Previously, I’ve found that giving people too much leeway in changing the curriculum results in the workshop losing focus, but too little leeway results in people not quite getting what they need. I’m interested in trying out this compromise.
The Goal:
Solve confusing, intractable problems
Many of the most important problems in the world are confusing, intractable, and seem impossible. They are really important to solve anyway.
But many people who try, end up in failure modes such as…
I want you to leave the workshop with at least one new skill for solving impossible problems.
The Curriculum
The default curriculum focuses on “making better plans” via…
An optional, higher level frame is Fractal Strategy – thinking of plans and goals at multiple levels, tracking how smaller plans fit into bigger plans, and when it’s time to move up, down or sideways in plan/goal-space.
The Skills
The one skill I will require everyone to attempt at least twice is generating metastrategies (see below).
Some more specific skills that will be presented:
Multiple feedback-loops
I don’t have perfect feedback-loops to tell you if this workshop is working for you. So, there are four different feedback-loop types, with different tradeoffs:
(in addition to crosstraining your skills on the practical object-level, this will help make your second-likeliest plan feel more real)
The Immediate Metric: General Strategies
The fundamental skill of the workshop is “brainstorming metastrategies.” That is, general strategies that work on a wide variety of problems (usually by helping you generate more “tactical” strategies appropriate to the situation)
Each session, you’ll be doing a puzzle, or intellectual work. The point isn’t whether you succeed or not on the puzzle. The point is whether you learn generalized strategies that either definitively helped you on the problem, or seem likely to help you in the future.
After each session, you’ll:
Each time you successfully use a strategy already listed on the whiteboard (including the first time you write it down), put your initials next to it.
The (slightly Goodharty but hopefully productive) goal of the workshop is to fill the board with strategies that get used lots of times.
There will be prizes for people who generate the most-used strategies. (Exact prize TDB, probably more like a fun token than, like, money)
The way you’re supposed to tell if the workshop is helping is “are you generating strategies that help you?”.
If by the end of Day 1, if you haven’t generated any metastrategies, we’ll chat about whether we should adjust anything on Day 2 for you. If by the end of Day 2 if you haven’t generated any strategies, we’ll check in on whether the workshop is working for you or you are otherwise getting value out of it, and possibly call it quits, or radically change what you focus on for Day 3.
The Disclaimers (Important!)
Prerequisites
This is not an entry level rationality workshop. It has several prerequisites:
If you are at risk of burnout (if you’ve recently worked much harder than usual, or a nagging voice inside is worried about spending a weekend doing very intense thinking) I recommend you do not attend right now. You can register your interest for future workshops though.
This will be very meta
We are going to think about thinking.
We are going to apply feedback-loops to our feedback-loops.
While we’re doing that, I will be thinking about thinking about you thinking about those things (You don’t have to do that, just me).
Meta-level optimization is the mechanism by which, maybe, I expect people to get compounding returns on thinking, and there is a real possibility that this can be leveraged into dramatically better plans.
Well designed feedback loops are the grounding mechanism to check whether we’re doing masturbatory meta, vs useful meta.[2]
I think there are basically two flavors of "I feel like thi meta sucks". One is that you've lost track of your goals, you've spent more time meta-optimizing than makes sense, and your subconscious is (correctly) flagging that it's time to get back to work. Another is "it feels overwhelming, like you can't track what's going on."
I think it can be correct (nearterm) to stop if you're overwhelmed, but one of the skills the workshop is trying to impart is the ability to navigate complex problems without getting overwhelmed (complex metacognition included).
If you are feeling disoriented or annoyed or have a nagging feeling the current amount of meta won’t help:
Part of the point of becoming fluent in “working memory extension” is that your meta processes are much easier to understand, and you can leverage them more strategically.
What's the evidence that this works?
I am talking a pretty big game. I think it’s an active ingredient for me to present content confidently, and for people to lean into a mindset where they trust it’ll work, or at least is worth trying.
But an important truth is that this workshop series does not (yet) have a strong empirical track record. If the curriculum does not intuitively make sense to you, I don’t think you should particularly believe in it.
I am trying to stick my neck out such that if the workshop is not working, it should be obvious (i.e. people will not be generating strategies that help).
Here are some facts about past participant experience:
First Workshop 6-month followup
When I ran the first workshop (which I charged $200 for), I asked the 9 participants what was the most they’d have paid for the workshop. Numbers ranged from $300 to ~$2000, on average $800.
When I asked again six months later, two “$400” people and one "$1500" changed their number to “$2000”.
Meanwhile two people reported back they'd probably lowered their estimate:
When I ran the second workshop, average rating was $540, or $650 if you throw out one data point from someone (who rated it $0) who came for nonstandard reasons, and I wouldn’t have really expected to get much value out of it, if we’d talked a bit more. There was another person who also reported they were burned out[4] and now wasn't a good time for the workshop, although I don't think they were actively hurt.
What’s up with the cost? Can I get a discount?
I charge a fair amount of money (and plan to charge more as I become more confident in the curriculum), because:
In general, if you didn’t feel like you got your money’s worth, I prefer to solve this by giving you some free followup coaching until you feel like you got your money’s worth.
If you earnestly tried to get a thousand dollars worth of value from the workshop, including explicitly strategizing with me on how to adapt it to you, and it didn’t really pay off and it seems like my general frame or skillset isn’t useful to you, chat with me and I’ll consider a refund.
After reading through this, if you're interested in either the October 25th workshop or a future one, please fill out this form.
I do think planning can be a useful skill for fixing executive function issues (i.e. "make a plan to fix it"), but, you wouldn't really capitalize on most of the workshop, and I'd probably recommend a workshop much more focused on executive function stuff if you have a workshop-shaped-hole in your life.
Feedback-loops are kind of meta, but I argue that having many different types of feedback-loops should make you less skeptical of "cognitive meta", rather than more. Some feedbackloops should be things like "your gut feels like you are still on the right track, and isn't getting carried away Goodharting on the easier-to-measure feedback loops."
If you're overwhelmed by meta and pen-and-paper isn't helping, unfortunately trying to diagnose what's going wrong... sort of intrinsically involves more meta, which won't work. I am admittedly still figuring out my process for helping in this situation, but I default to "just stop."
They didn't exactly say "burned out", the longer description was "they'd just spent awhile being very strategic and they realized they needed a break now."
i.e. you get at least some leeway to set priorities at your day job, or you have a lot of slack for ambitious hobbies.