Nov 16-18: Rationality for Entrepreneurs

Let me expand on my comment from the Hacker News thread.

I went to the July workshop. I think it was probably the most useful week of my life in terms of exposure to things I could be doing to be more productive and effective. Since then, I've mainly been trying to incorporate the low-hanging fruit---the obviously good simple ideas---into my life. Some examples:

• At work, I realized I wasn't doing anywhere near enough planning. My employees were spending time on the wrong things because I hadn't planned things out in enough detail to make it clear what was the most important thing to do next. I fixed this immediately after the camp.
• Again at work, I now document most discussions as they happen. It slows down the discussion a bit, but it's a net win because next time you can just have the delta of the discussion and avoid rehashing things.
• Val explained to me how he changed his diet in order to decouple the relationship between his energy levels and when he last ate. I hadn't actually realized such a thing was possible. It also works for me.
• I realized that it's a waste of time to learn things/watch video lectures and not put what I want to remember into anki. I make the cards while I watch the lectures, and have trained myself to review them on my phone when waiting in lines, walking down the street etc.
• I'm training myself to no longer think things like "I should go to the gym tomorrow." Instead I decide to go at X o'clock and set an alarm on my phone to remind me. (I apparently haven't got this one completely down yet, because yesterday I thought "I should go to the gym tomorrow" and didn't catch myself: it's now 11pm and I never went.)

I feel like I'm still a beginner at instrumental rationality and have an enormous amount to work on (I haven't even started trying to adopt most of the actual curriculum!). Since attending, I've been getting considerably more work done: my brother, who is also my business partner, has noticed too.

When I got back I was super busy and have been really bad at staying in touch with the instructors and other attendees, but there are a few people I met at the camp who I would really like to have more contact with.

Maybe get someone to blur out the lower half of señor dropbox's shirt.

tl;dr - I went to the July minicamp, met interesting, ambitious people and am still applying things I learnt at camp months later to a subjectively great effect. Also, instructors and speakers were good, the food was good and I had lots of fun.

I went to a previous CFAR camp, and so can help give evidence regarding how helpful this might be from my personal experience. (I am not affiliated with CFAR).

I signed up for the July minicamp, not really knowing what to expect (and flying half-way around the world to get there). Having gone, I'm very happy that I did (although that might just be me rationalizing my choice). Here are some things that are more objective that happened (Note: That camp had a different syllabus than the workshop):

• I learned new skills I use every day. For Example - Curiosity (I think about how to be more curious often), Value of information and micro-econ related things (Which I now use to convince my friends to do research before buying expensive things and gauge how much effort to put into negotiating with clients), habit forming and how to have more rational discussions. Its hard to assess whether they brought me a significant improvement (I don't know how life would be not knowing them), but for the more concrete ones (GTD, Anki) the results are immediate. I feel that the fuzzier ones are also helping me (measured for example by how I feel better when using them compared to not) - but that's harder to say for sure.

• I met a diverse group of people. Some of them I would call ambitious, and most I would call interesting, but that's a judgment call. They did include managers of small companies, programmers, software freelancers, scientists of various fields, journalists and a movie producer. Also, I think I gained from talking to every single one of them. I am still in touch with a couple of them.

• I learned about X-Risk. While I am very into the instrumental rationality area of Less Wrong, I was never very sold on the FAI-Cryo subjects, and at camp I got to talk to smart people with opinions different than mine and explore the subject. I am still not sold, btw.

• I learned about subjects outside curriculum, from neuroscience to professional poker. This came from casual discussions with other participants.

• I had lots of fun. Hanging out with cool, smart, rationality minded people is awesome.

From a personal perspective the CFAR staff did a tremendous job. The speakers were good at speaking, prepared and cared about their material. The camp instructors were constantly available to talk to one-on-one and were knowledgeable and passionate about rationality in general and improving me as a camp-goer specifically. The environment was clean and the food was good. (I think the workshop is in a different venue, so no guarantees on the food :) )

Again, all in all I am very happy that I went and think it was a good investment. This doesn't mean you should go - but given that you are similar to me (analytic, loves instrumental rationality, software entrepreneur, doesn't already know the subject matter, doesn't hang out with lots of rationalists day to day, social), I would give an over 50% probability that you would be happy that you did.

Would you be interested in a session on anti-akrasia techniques for entrepreneurs? As the co-founder of Beeminder the danger would be that it would come off as a Beeminder infomercial. On the other hand, OMG BEEMINDER IS SO GREAT. Especially for surviving down cycles in the rollercoaster that is startupland, as we can attest from dogfooding the living crap out of Beeminder. Like our one-user-visible-improvement-per-day goal, which has kept us moving inexorably forward for 629 days now.

Here are 3 things that may convince you that this may be a good idea:

1. Katja Grace's "On the Goodness of Beeminder": http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/08/on-the-goodness-of-beeminder.html
2. Robert Wiblin on beeminding your way to greatness: http://robertwiblin.com/2012/04/16/beeminding-your-way-to-greatness/
3. My own manifesto on "How to Do What You Want": http://blog.beeminder.com/akrasia and sequel on "Flexible Self-Control": http://blog.beeminder.com/flexbind

(I just pitched that to the organizers and thought I'd repeat it here to gauge interest.)

There may be some overlap with the Overcoming Procrastination session, but this could be much more general.

I attended the June rationality camp, and had mixed feelings about it. But I've also attended parts of it (such as sessions to test new units) before and after, and I've seen a significant improvement over time.

For instance, the unit that's called Panic here is one of the best, but hadn't been developed in June. I've attended two versions of it, and the second one was clearly better than the first.

The Comfort Zone Expansion convinced me that I have irrational fears that may cause problems and that I didn't understand well before taking it. But I'm skeptical of the "entertainment guaranteed" - I found the June version unpleasant. They've improved it since then, but I still don't see how it can entertain a group of people with widely varying comfort zones.

It's hard to tell how much benefit I got from it, because the changes are subtle and likely to build slowly as I alter my habits. (Rereading this comment, I see that I've only made a little progress on the "be specific" advice).

I would love to attend, and the $6k price tag (including estimated transportation and the value of the leave I would have to take to attend) is not a bar.

However, I need several weeks in order to secure time off, and the expected value of the summit is significantly less than the expected loss of my current employment from not showing up on those days.

Is there a way to become informed of these type of retreats at least a month in advance?

I attended the July minicamp and found it quite useful. I've read through the Sequences, so not all of the material felt new, but interacting with the instructors and other campers made me a lot more attentive to opportunities to optimize in my day to day life. Here are some benefits:

• Thinking more about ways to use fungibility to reach a desired outcome more cheaply/easily/painlessly - I already tended to think this way with regard to monetary expenditures ("You're not getting a drink?" "No, it doesn't give me one chocolate lava cake unit of pleasure, and they're the same price") but minicamp helped me apply this to decisions where the units aren't so clearly denominated (Can I make my friend happy by doing a different thing for her? etc)

• Breaking tasks and decisions into small tasks - instead of blaming myself when I don't do something I want to want to do, coming up with ways to make it easier to get the task done. Maybe rewards, maybe beeminder, maybe thinking about TDT. But not just thinking "I should be willful enough to get this done without crutches"

• Getting things done/efficiency advice - the tools I've found most helpful are beeminder, remember the milk, and pomodoros. I do freelance writing/blogging and the time it takes me to write posts has declined by easily 50% since minicamp. (I've promptly filled the spare time with other tasks, so I'm still stressed). RTM means I don't drop casual committments ("I'll send you the article when I get home") and am better about assigning tasks to specific days ("I'll clean the shower Saturday morning, not 'by the end of the week'"). That means they're more likely to get done and it's easier for me to notice when I've overscheduled.

There are a lot of places to pick up getting-more-done advice, but what was really useful about CFAR's camp was they didn't just give you a list of skills. They taught you how to spot triggers that a skill was relevant to a problem you're facing. Remembering the skills is no good if you don't know when to deploy them. (Just thinking "I should think about fungibility more" isn't as useful as "When I think 'I wish I didn't need to X, but I have no choice' I should think specifically about fungibility and see if that's true).

Also: the people were nice, the food was excellent (dill ricotta bread as a side dish, nom nom), and there was a fun prediction market game going through the week where the incentives got really screwy. "Probability that a randomly selected prediction market will be settled at False" "Probability that [specific instructor] will have been thrown in the pool by Tuesday noon"

We came up with a betting strategy to form a thowing the instructor in the pool posse which prompted the following conversation:

“What if someone writes a higher estimate than it’s their turn to?”
“Then we all defect and they’re on the hook for their high guess.”
“Will that be enough of an incentive?”
“Ok, we’ll also all commit to throwing defectors in the pool.”

I had a lovely, productive time, and I'm glad to answer questions in reply comments.

Some train-the-trainer session in future? I am interested in teaching this to my students.

V_V, this is a prime example of what people consider "trolling" on your behalf, and it's fully accurate.

You not only seem to have failed to notice the big three "CFAR" "Singularity Institute" "Future of Humanity Institute" logos at the forum's banner, you're trying to assert a moderator-like role in determining what is or isn't appropriate usage of the forum.

I can't believe you're doing this because you care about the presence of spam in LessWrong, you're doing this just to offend, to stir shit. To label something as spam, much like you label other things "religious" or "cultish" or whatever, for the purpose of insulting.

Your presence has finally tipped me over into fully supporting the latest changes about the karma-penalty of replying to massively downvoted comments. You're a troll.

I'm very interested in hearing details about Geoff Anders's claims about productivity. Their website doesn't seem to say anything about it; is there any way I can learn more without going to this event?

I'm a little skeptical about this: "Attendees will be surrounded by other ambitious, successful, practically-minded folks"

Can I get some evidence?

OK, firstly, you're circumventing the karrma penalty and should be ashamed of yourself >:-(

In any case, as I already pointed out, the purpose of this site is "refining the art of human rationality", yes? And this is a course in rationality, yes?

There should be a branch of CFAR on the east coast.

I went to the very first rationality workshop in May of 2011, and it was literally life-altering. See here for my review and discussion about it in the context of a similar post for the workshops that happened earlier this year:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/b98/minicamps_on_rationality_and_awesomeness_may_1113/66nz

I have attended the very first workshop (last summer, it was a full week) and the first workshop this summer (3 days). Both have been extremely helpful in terms of broadening my understanding of what is possible, and how I can get there. This workshop will supply you with all the tools to succeed. It will even teach you how to use those tools in the most effective way possible. And it will even motivate you to actually use them! I can say without over-exaggeration that both of the workshops I attended were life-changing for me, and now I'm doing so much better than I could have without them. I use the skills I learned in those workshop every day, for things big and small: value of information calculations, fermi estimation, noticing rationalizations, optimizing and modifying my mood, noticing when I'm not being strategic, updating on evidence, and noticing the big irrationalities in my life, like not interacting with enough people. I could go on, but I hope I made my point pretty clear. :) I hope you'll sign up for this, and I'll see you at the after-party!

CFAR is a spinoff of SI, as you could have discovered from the SI web site. Anna Salomon is Executive Director of CFAR and a Research Fellow of SI, as you could have discovered from their web sites. The organisations' respective goals are closely related, as you could have discovered from their web sites. The posting is absolutely appropriate here, as you could have discovered by having any inclination at all to check your beliefs against reality before blurting them out.

If this behavior is consider appropriate here, then I'll update my expectations and I apologize for causing such a fuss (least people accuse me of "trolling"), but in this case I'll suggest explicitely stating in the forum policy that advertising is allowed here, since that's not the standard expectation on a typical internet forum.

"This behavior" isn't considered appropriate as a general rule. However, the history of CFAR's creation reveals that CFAR is pretty much an effort to bring LessWrong material into practical application. Nearly all of the CFAR material is built from or inspired by LessWrong content AFAIK, and some of the more recent LessWrong official posts are closely linked to discussions that happened around CFAR.

As such, it's reasonable to expect that most people on LessWrong would like to know what's going on with CFAR and would like to be informed about services CFAR provides, since CFAR is (so far) the best platform we have for structured training of LessWrong skills.

On the other hand, I agree with army1987 that it is questionable whether this belongs in the "Main" section of LW, and I think it belongs more in the Discussion section, even if that would risk getting it less exposure.

Do you know any other meaning [for "commercial"]?

I often hear and use the term to mean "where a provider of goods or services is attempting to maximize profit by getting more customers or getting customers to pay more", taking the context of advertising into account. By these connotations of the term, CFAR is not a commercial organization, and this advertising isn't "commercial" because they don't aim to make as much profit as they can from people who attend the training.

This meaning is often used to put contrast between "commercial intent" and "altruistic intent", or similar comparisons.

You're trying to circumvent the rules of the forum, so you're effectively waging war: much as if you had attempted to hack into the database or smash the servers with a hammer.

Every further comment by you that seems to do the same by responding to a different thread than it's placed in, will be downvoted by me, unread -- and I also encourage the moderators to delete such comments on sight.

EDIT TO ADD: If you're really burning to respond to people's individual responses in downvoted threads, you can just PM them. Or just accumulate enough positive karma in other threads to be able to endure a 5 karma point penalty. But ofcourse in reality, and given the ludicrous ease by which people upvote people, it tends to be only absolute jerks that tend to hold negative karma scores.

Spam is defined as unsolicited advertising on Internet media.

By you maybe. Not by anyone else.

EDIT: Fixed link.

What exactly is meant by the phrase "LW-style rationality?"

You are wrong. CFAR helps operate LW as well; you can see its logo in the upper right corner.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I thought this site was about rationality?

Yes, websites often show logos and links to other websites which the authors consider interesting. That doesn't mean that by visiting one website you are giving implicit consent to receive advertising from all the websites it links to.

This is a site about rationality. They are telling people about a course in rationality. Where's the problem? If you just hate the idea of reading something that was written by someone who might not be objective, well, you're screwed anyway, but no-one forced you to read this particular article.

EDIT: "Goodbye"?

Ok, firstly, this. With that said, it was unsolicited, in the sense that I personally did not track down the author and ask them to publish it. However, since I chose first to browse LessWrong, which implies I am interested in rationality-related articles, and while doing so saw the title "Nov 16-18: Rationality for Entrepreneurs" and clicked on it. That kinda implies I want to read about it, don't you think? As for commercial ... what exactly is a "commercial message"? Is it one made by anyone affliated with a company regarding that companies product? Is it any message intended to encourage use of a particular product? Is it one that is biased? Do you have a new defenition of "commercial message" that would preclude it from being posted here?

To the extent that you would take "unsolicited" to mean "not explicitly and specifically requested beforehand by user V_V", then everyone here does agree that this was an unsolicited message at the very least, and an unsolicited commercial one to the extent that you take "commercial" to mean "anything for which you have to expend money in some manner".

If it's a rationality course, yeah, it kinda does. A few examples.

Not sure this belongs in Main.