Classes began and ended on time.
+1 that this made a big difference as a participant. (I was at May 2012 with you, and then March 2013, when they had figured out the timing.)
CFAR is now working on strategies to help people who want to stay in touch do it successfully.
Has there been any talk yet about trying to do Skype chats between graduates of different workshops? It seems like a decent way to magnify the networking effects, as well as making the lists seem healthier (even if you have only 25% from each workshop going on the long-term Skype chat list, that'll still look like a pool of 30 people after 5 workshops instead of 6 people after 1 workshop).
I no longer trust, use, or recommend Skype. There's too much evidence that new owners Microsoft are monitoring conversations. If they aren't handing them over to governments today, it seems like only a matter of time before they do. My security conscious Fortune-500 employer long ago banned Skype for reasons of security.
I would welcome suggestions of more secure alternatives, particularly any that are equally easy to use across platforms and implement good end-to-end client side encryption so snooping on message contents is mathematically infeasible without compromising one end of the communication. That is, no one in the middle should have the keys. If this alternative system also protects end users' locations from snoopers so much the better.
There's too much evidence that new owners Microsoft are monitoring conversations.
And doing what exactly? Many different forms of communications can be monitored, tapped, or recorded. And sometimes you might have to worry about this... but first, you should ask who is doing it, and what they would care about.
If it's Microsoft and/or governments, to be honest I feel relatively safe in most of my conversations, and I don't see why CFAR graduates wouldn't feel the same. People planning terrorist attacks would probably have a different opinion.
There's two instances of snooping that I would worry about, and I don't think they're likely to happen through Skype:
Collecting personal data for various mass attacks (notably, spam). But just in case, don't send your credit card information over Skype, that's generally a good habit to have.
Information about my personal life being exposed to people I know. I'm having a hard time imagining the mechanism by which even my acquaintances working at Microsoft would end up having access to my Skype conversations.
I also feel somewhat safer having voice conversations than text-based ones, because these are harder to store, and harder to search t...
If it's Microsoft and/or governments, to be honest I feel relatively safe in most of my conversations, and I don't see why CFAR graduates wouldn't feel the same. People planning terrorist attacks would probably have a different opinion.
Wikileaks came out of an enviroment of smart geeks who wanted to hack the political system.
It's a possibility that you have smart CFAR graduates thinking: "Our politicians are really irrational. I could do clever hack XY and change politics for the better."
But it's not only about protecting yourself, it's also about protecting other people. A bunch of people who use LessWrong do so under nicknames. Some might be interested into doing something that their government doesn't like. They might want to expose political corruption and have a need for their anonymity.
If you tell another person who's real life persona connects to which LessWrong nickname over Skype and that Skype conversation get's monitored by the government you just have given the government information that might help the government to track down the LessWrong person who engages in exposing political corruption.
You have to assume that every word that you communicate witho...
Very good question about health care. I agree completely that we need more rationality in health care. I am very disturbed at the number of physicians who treat medicine as a job and a profession with rules to be followed rather than as a way of thinking and understanding. I really, really would like to find a scientifically minded, rational PCP. (It occurs to me that I do know a bunch of folks at Metamed. I should probably ask them.)
My meta-question for CFAR is what are they doing/planning to bring heavy-duty rationality skills into fields that need them: medicine, education, government, jurisprudence, charity, software development, etc.? Teaching workshops, no matter how life-changing, to 20 people a month doesn't scale.
Second meta-question for CFAR: does it make sense to focus on younger folks at the start of their careers, or even earlier (as SPARC does) so there's a longer compounding payoff over a lifetime or should there be more focus on established professionals, so there's more payoff sooner? or both? If both, do the same workshops, venues, and curriculum make sense for early, mid, and late-career people? E.g. Anna Salamon mentioned that "One person left early fro...
Written communication has many advantages, but it typically does not make you actually do the exercises. Typically, one just looks briefly at the exercise, thinks "yeah, I see what they are trying to do" and then clicks another hyperlink or switches to another browser tab.
Having five minutes without internet access and with a social pressure to actually do the exercise can make people actually do the exercises they found on internet a decade ago but never tried.
Sure, everyone is different, but I would expect most people who spend a lot of time on internet to be like this. (And the people who don't spend a lot of time on internet won't see LifeHacker or LessWrong, unless a book form is published.)
I see MOOC's as a big educaational improvement because of this - sure, I could get the same educational info without the MOOC structure; just by reading the field best textbooks and academic papers; but having a specific "course" with the quizzes/homework makes me actually do the excercises, which I wouldn't have done otherwise; and the course schedule forces me to do them now, instead of postponing them for weeks/months/forever.
There no reason why CFAR shouldn't be able to grow the number of participants exponentially.
I do not concur. CFAR is currently a small organization using small-organization logistics. Expanding to many more instructors would require a management layer different from the implementation layer, and selecting the best implementers to become management has a long history of failure.
One possible solution would be to spin off groups roughly the current size, preferably geographically diverse. That adds more dimensions of complexity but still allows for virtually everybody to be directly involved with the immediate returns of teaching and curriculum development.
At this moment there are already regular LW meetups in different cities around the world. We could find willing instructors in many of them, send them educational materials (one PDF they give to each student, one PDF with the instructions for the teacher), let them teach the lessons and send back the feedback.
The remote teachers and students are already there, and they wouldn't cost CFAR anything. The costs for CFAR at this moment would be: creating the PDF materials from the lessons, and evaluating the feedback.
(I need to think about it some more, and perhaps I will volunteer to make one such example lesson. And publish it on LW, and process the feedback.)
That was my first plan back when things were getting started, but it turned out to be hard to develop instructional materials that worked without a developed professional instructor.
Moving the weight from instructor to material is always a lot of work. A lot of tacit knowledge needs to be made explicit.
These days I am having (as a student) an online lecture about some Java technology. It's 3 days, 8 hours each, we received in total 600 pages of PDF. That is 12 pages per 30 minutes; minus covers and TOC it's 9 pages of useful text.
Years ago I tried to make a non-interactive lesson for high-school students where I just gave them a PDF file with explanations and exercises, and then they worked everyone at their own speed. I needed 8-10 pages for a lesson, and I spent the whole evening just writing what I already perfectly knew. Students liked it, but I gave up doing this because it was too much work for one-time use. However if I had to teach the same thing to many classes (or just the same thing for many years), then it would be less work doing it this way. And the materials can be updated when necessary.
With the rationality exercises it will be even more complicated because we are not even 100% sure about the topic, and there can be more unexpected questions and reactions during the lesson. But I still think it is possible, and that given enough students it may...
Yes, this is what we first tried before finding out that it was way below the level of working with late-2011-level knowledge and ability to produce lessons. Might be worth retrying once the lessons have been highly polished at the CFAR level.
The workshop spat me out three days later, twice as exhausted, with teetering piles of ideas and very little time or energy to apply them. I left with a list of annual goals, which I had never bothered to have before, and a feeling that more was possible–this included the feeling that more would have been possible if the workshop had been longer and less chaotic, if I had slept more the week before, if I hadn't had to rush out on Sunday evening to catch a plane and miss the social.
How much of the goals have you accomplished and how much of a difference have they actually made?
The workshops currently cost $3,900 + travel, I don't think it was much lower a year ago. Have your improvements recouped that cost? Has the workshop increased your income?
I paid about $1000 total for workshop plus travel. The social confidence and "try new things" aspects led me to obtain a scary part-time job at the hospital that brought well over $1000 in income, plus networking and comfort zone expansion. I also started thinking about job options in terms of different salaries and world-changing leverage, which my brain had previously tagged as somehow immoral. This hasn't yet led to me, for example, moving to the USA where nursing salaries are higher or looking for startup opportunities, but it's explicitly on my mind and I've done a few rough value calculations. I expect the idea of "you don't need to do the same thing for 30 years" will lead to quite divergent events in the next 5 years of my life.
HI there! Awesome post! Especially the agonizing tradeoff between going now and enjoying the compounding benefits earlier, and going later and getting better material. Obviously, I came down on the side of the first option, but this may not be optimal for everyone. Minor point: 'Rationality and the Reflective Mind' is by Stanovich, not by Kahneman.
(BTW, this is Tarn from the workshop)
I laughed at 'back when they were inexplicably called 'minicamps.'' As a member of the first minicamp, which was to be a truncated version of the first Rationality Boot Camp, i find it amusing to watch the memetic evolution into a workshop. Not that workshop is, really, any less arbitrary, just more commonly used for CFAR's sort of thing.
MetaMed is hopefully moving us towards a world with more rationality in the healthcare professions.
The workshops still aren't an easy environment for introverts. The negative parts of my experience in May 2012 were mostly because of this.
In what sense is a personal development seminar to be supposed to feel easy? If someone is really overloaded they can excuse themselves and pause for some time.
It's a question of what you're developing. The four days where you're learning how to use Bayes in everyday life and install new habits and do goal factoring may not be the time when you want to also train not minding social overload. You can do that any time.
Example of "hard": Not eating chocolate, when you have chocolate at home.
Example of "easy": Not eating chocolate, when you have no chocolate at home.
Switching from "hard" to "easy" is much easier than using your willpower to win at the "hard" mode. For some reasons many people don't realize that, and instead spend a lot of time talking about it, motivating themselves, inventing various punishment schemes, attending motivation seminars, etc.
I suspect that something similar can be used in many situations. The first aspect is: don't work harder, work smarter. The second aspect is: if it involves some kind of brain power (willpower, memory, creativity), feeling stressed (because you really try to do it the hard way) only makes it more difficult... but for some reason a lot of popular advice recommends increasing the stress (by using rewards and punishments of many kinds). -- I suspect this is the corrupted hardware in action (rewarding and punishing people brings higher status to one who does it).
Some people are afraid that doing things the "easy" way is somehow inferior, probably because it is not mysterious enough. That some...
Assessing your level is extremely hard in this case (it includes instrumental rationality, epistemic rationality, teaching ability, marketing ability, etc. etc.) and I really suggest that nobody do this without thinking about it very seriously beforehand.
Oh please no.
Overestimating the value of information, and allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good are both common failure modes among Less Wrongers. You do not need to "assess your level" down to 16 sig figs (erm, pretend there is a unit of measurement here) along 7 different axes to put yourself on one or the other side of a binary measurement. You just need to ask: "Will listening to me talk about rationality be more likely to help someone, or hurt them?"
And as much as you (generic you, not you specifically) like to believe you are playing around with edgy, dangerous ideas, you are unlikely to cause serious harm to people by teaching a self-help workshop badly. (the people who WOULD be harmed by a badly taught self-help workshop have much worse things to worry about). The cost of failure is not that high. You do not have to have an extremely high level of confidence in your success for an attempt ...
There are two failure modes here. There's failure mode #1, where enthusiastic amateurs teach awful classes and cause some people to think less of 'rationality', and there's failure mode #2 where CFAR graduates want to do cool things and don't do them because they're scared of failure, and a community never materializes. I think #2 is the default, and more likely, and thus worth taking more effort to avoid.
I recently had the privilege of being a CFAR alumni volunteering at a later workshop, which is a fascinating thing to do, and put me in a position both to evaluate how much of a difference the first workshop actually made in my life, and to see how the workshops themselves have evolved.
Exactly a year ago, I attended one of the first workshops, back when they were still inexplicably called “minicamps”. I wasn't sure what to expect, and I especially wasn't sure why I had been accepted. But I bravely bullied the nursing faculty staff until they reluctantly let me switch a day of clinical around, and later stumbled off my plane into the San Francisco airport in a haze of exhaustion. The workshop spat me out three days later, twice as exhausted, with teetering piles of ideas and very little time or energy to apply them. I left with a list of annual goals, which I had never bothered to have before, and a feeling that more was possible–this included the feeling that more would have been possible if the workshop had been longer and less chaotic, if I had slept more the week before, if I hadn't had to rush out on Sunday evening to catch a plane and miss the social.
Like I frequently do on Less Wrong the website, I left the minicamp feeling a bit like an outsider, but also a bit like I had come home. As well as my written goals, I made an unwritten pre-commitment to come back to San Francisco later, for longer, and see whether I could make the "more is possible" in my head more specific. Of my thirteen written goals on my list, I fully accomplished only four and partially accomplished five, but I did make it back to San Francisco, at the opportunity cost of four weeks of sacrificed hospital shifts.
A week or so into my stay, while I shifted around between different rationalist shared houses and attempted to max out interesting-conversations-for-day, I found out that CFAR was holding another May workshop. I offered to volunteer, proved my sincerity by spending 6 hours printing and sticking nametags, and lived on site for another 4-day weekend of delightful information overload and limited sleep.
Before the May 2012 workshop, I had a low prior that any four-day workshop could be life-changing in a major way. A four-year nursing degree, okay–I've successfully retrained my social skills and my ability to react under pressure by putting myself in particular situations over and over and over and over again. Four days? Nah. Brains don't work that way.
In my experience, it's exceedingly hard for the human brain to do anything deliberately. In Kahneman-speak, habits are System 1, effortless and automatic. Doing things on purpose involves System 2, effortful and a bit aversive. I could have had a much better experience in my final intensive care clinical if I'd though to open up my workshop notes and tried to address the causes of aversions, or use offline time to train habits, or, y'know, do anything on purpose instead of floundering around trying things at random until they worked.
(The again, I didn't apply concepts like System 1 and System 2 to myself a year ago. I read 'Thinking Fast and Slow' by Kahneman and 'Rationality and the Reflective Mind' by Stanovich as part of my minicamp goal 'read 12 hard nonfiction books this year', most of which came from the CFAR recommended reading list. If my preceptor had had any idea what I was saying when I explained to her that she was running particular nursing skills on System 1, because they were engrained on the level of habit, and I was running the same tasks on System 2 in working memory because they were new and confusing to me, and that was why I appeared to have poor time management, because System 2 takes forever to do anything, this terminology might have helped. Oh, for the world where everyone knows all jargon!)
...And here I am, setting aside a month of my life to think only about rationality. I can't imagine that my counterfactual self-who-didn't-attend-in-May-2012 would be here. I can't imagine that being here now will have zero effect on what I'm doing in a year, or ten years. Bingo. I did one thing deliberately!
So what was the May 2013 workshop actually like?
The curriculum has shifted around a lot in the past year, and I think with 95% probability that it's now more concretely useful. (Speaking of probabilities, the prediction markets during the workshop seemed to flow better and be more fun and interesting this time, although this may just show that I was more averse to games in general and betting in particular. In that case, yay for partly-cured aversions!)
The classes are grouped in an order that allows them to build on each other usefully, and they've been honed by practice into forms that successfully teach skills, instead of just putting words in the air and on flipcharts. For example, having a personal productivity system like GTD came across as a culturally prestigious thing at the last workshop, but there wasn't a lot of useful curriculum on it. Of course, I left on this trip wanting to spend my offline month creating with a GTD system better than paper to-do lists taped to walls, so I have both motivation and a low threshold for improvement.
There are also some completely new classes, including "Againstness training" by Valentine, which seem to relate to some of the 'reacting under pressure' stuff in interesting ways, and gave me vocabulary and techniques for something I've been doing inefficiently by trial and error for a good part of my life.
In general, there are more classes about emotions, both how to deal with them when they're in the way and how to use them when they're the best tool available. Given that none of us are Spock, I think this is useful.
Rejection therapy has morphed into a less terrifying and more helpful form with the awesome name of CoZE (Comfort Zone Expansion). I didn't personally find the original rejection therapy all that awful, but some people did, and that problem is largely solved.
The workshops are vastly more orderly and organized. (I like to think I contributed to this slightly with my volunteer skills of keeping the fridge stocked with water bottles and calling restaurants to confirm orders and make sure food arrived on time.) Classes began and ended on time. The venue stayed tidy. The food was excellent. It was easier to get enough sleep. Etc. The May 2012 venue had a pool, and this one didn't, which made exercise harder for addicts like me. CFAR staff are talking about solving this.
The workshops still aren't an easy environment for introverts. The negative parts of my experience in May 2012 were mostly because of this. It was easier this time, because as a volunteer I could skip classes if I started to feel socially overloaded, but periods of quiet alone time had to be effortfully carved out of the day, and at an opportunity cost of missing interesting conversations. I'm not sure if this problem is solvable without either making the workshops longer, in order to space the material out, and thus less accessible for people with jobs, or by cutting out curriculum. Either would impose a cost on the extroverts who don't want an hour at lunch to meditate or go running alone or read a sci-fi book, etc.
In general, I found the May 2012 workshop too short and intense–we had material thrown at us at a rate far exceeding the usual human idea-digestion rate. Keeping in touch via Skype chats with other participants helped. CFAR now does official followups with participants for six weeks following the workshop.
Meeting the other participants was, as usual, the best part of the weekend. The group was quite diverse, although I was still the only health care professional there. (Whyyy???? The health care system needs more rationality so badly!) The conversations were engaging. Many of the participants seem eager to stay in touch. The May 2012 workshop has a total of six people still on the Skype chats list, which is a 75% attrition rate. CFAR is now working on strategies to help people who want to stay in touch do it successfully.
Conclusions?
I thought the May 2012 workshop was awesome. I thought the May 2013 workshop was about an order of magnitude more awesome. I would say that now is a great time to attend a CFAR workshop...except that the organization is financially stable and likely to still be around in a year and producing even better workshops. So I'm not sure. Then again, rationality skills have compound interest–the value of learning some new skills now, even if they amount more to vocab words and mental labels than superpowers, compounds over the year that you spend seeing all the books you read and all the opportunities you have in that framework. I'm glad I went a year ago instead of this May. I'm even more glad I had the opportunity to see the new classes and meet the new participants a year later.