Thoughts on the January CFAR workshop

[Note: I also attended the workshop and am writing this before reading the main post to avoid being biased.]

The out of class discussions alone were more than worth my while. However this is partially due to my circumstances, I am about to graduate college with a double major in CS and psychology. Deciding which (if either) field to pursue, and how to best pursue it is obviously quite important to me. Before going to the workshop, I had already done most of the obvious “due diligence” research on the matter, but still updated significantly during the workshop. Talking to several of the other CfAR participants, the instructors, and several LW people who stopped by (Lukeprog, Yvain ect.) uncovered many important points that I had missed. For example, I assumed the median staring salary for computer scientists was a reasonable estimate for what my starting salary would be. It turns out that I can expect to make about twice that much money if I use certain job hunting techniques I learned at the workshop and optimize for money (instead of, say, cool sounding problems). I don't expect most people to be in similar positions, but I do think asking questions at a CfAR event is a very powerful way of researching a fairly large class of problems. If all else fails pick one position and offer ridiculous side-bet odds with a high burden of proof on the other person.

As for the official lessons, if I actually internalize them all, and they work as advertised they will be some of the most important things I have learned in my life. If we take the outside view and assume that I will retain and successfully use them at the same rate as skills I learned at similar retreats then the expected value drops by more than half, but is still pretty high. Furthermore, I have several strong inside view reasons to believe I will retain more of what I learned here. The most obvious is the six weeks of follow up, but there are other reasons, like the fact that I actually slept at CfAR which should increase my retention.

-Edit, minor gramar stuff fixed. Also, I endorse the OP's view of the workshop, except for the sleep part. In particular I forgot to mention the venue, but both the Rose Garden Inn and the food were both spectacular (this was despite my having dietary restrictions). One minor complaint, the Inn could use more writing/setting food down surfaces.

In conclusion tell CfAR “Shut up and take my money.” or you will not go to space today.

Thank you for writing up your thoughts, Qiaochu!

I feel the need to offer one very minor correction:

For example, sympathetic nervous system activity, which governs the fight-or-flight response, is unpleasant, unhealthy, and can prevent you from explicitly modeling other people.

It's actually sympathetic dominance over the parasympathetic side that does this. Both the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are running all the time, and that's really quite essential. You cannot stand up without the sympathetic system, for instance, nor can you lie down without going into a panic without the parasympathetic side doing its job.

But as long as you replace "activity" with "dominance," I think we're good!

Also see The Power of Agency.

And for those who want to pronounce Qiaochu's name correctly in their heads when reading his username, I think it's "Chow-chew."

Well said.

We CFAR workshop participants got workbooks containing materials for the various sessions (and some other things, like the rationality habits checklist). I took my notes right in the workbook. Sometime today or tomorrow I'm going to start going through the workbook and transferring the stuff I want to capture to the computer. I've started a list of things to think about while doing so. Below, "this" means "this tool, concept, exercise, worked example of an exercise, personal failure mode, etc.".

• Do I want to put this into my spaced repetition system?
• Do I want to do this in the future? If so, how can I make that happen? (E.g., schedule a time or put it in my to-do list system.)
• How much can I improve at this, and how valuable would improving at this be?

I've made a couple other comments about the workshop: thank-you to my hosts (I showed up a day before and stayed a few days after); impressions of the workshop written for my family and friends.

Offering everyone modafinil or something at the beginning of future workshops might help with this.

It would help, but would inevitably offend people and not at all worth the consequences.

CFAR folk, please consider/research NYC as a location.

Logistics might be different of course, but there is a lot of people here who wouldn't have to travel or need sleeping arrangements, lowering the total time+money cost for them without taking away CFAR revenue (since they are not a hotel/travel agency).

Also, these workshops are entrepreneur-oriented and there is an active and geographically concentrated start-up scene here, in which I'm somewhat active and would be happy to help with promotion and maybe some of the logistics.

This is useful to me as I'll be attending the March workshop. If I successfully digest any of the insights presented here then I'll have a better platform to start from. (Two particular points are the stuff about the parasympathetic nervous system, which I'd basically never heard of before, and the connection between the concepts of "epistemic rationality" and "knowing about myself" which is more obvious-in-retrospect).

Thanks for the write-up!

And yes, I'll stick up at least a brief write-up of my own after I'm done. Does LW have an anti-publication-bias registry somewhere?

while it's too soon to tell how big an impact the workshop will have on my life

Would you be willing to follow up in, say, two years and tell us how well these changes lasted? If you commit now, and use Boomerang to remind yourself, I would be grateful.

For the GTD stuff, I use emacs + org-mode + .emacs based on this configuration + mobile org.

Since I try to work exclusively in emacs, I can quickly capture notes and "things that need to get done" in their proper context, all of which is aggregated under an Agenda window. The Agenda window manages a collection of ".org" files which store the specific details of everything. MobileOrg syncs all these .org files to my phone. Combined with the GTD philosophy of never having anything uncategorized bouncing around in my mind, this system works very well for me.

Example workflow (a better and more complete example is in the configuration I linked above):

1. At the end of class, Professor assigns a programming project due in a week. I pull out my phone and quickly capture a TODO item with a deadline in Mobileorg. Mobileorg syncs this to google calendar.
2. I get home and pull up the agenda in emacs. The item referencing the programming project shows up in my "Tasks to refile" category (equivalent to "Inbox" in GTD terms), along with any other TODOs I captured while I was at school.
3. I refile the project to an org file that contains all the information about my classes and define a NEXT item under it, which represent the next action I need to take on the project. When I start working on the project, I can attach any files related to it directly on the TODO item identifying the project.
4. The NEXT item shows up on a list of NEXT items on the agenda. I can filter these by project (defined in the GTD way) or by the tag system.

It all seems very complicated, but all of this is literally a couple of keystrokes. And this barely scratches the surface (take a look at the aforementioned configuration to see what I mean).

Pros:

• Forces you to learn emacs.
• Easily configurable and incredibly robust.
• Optimized for functionality rather than prettiness (i.e if you end up liking it, you'll know it wasn't because of the nice UI, which is usually the main selling point for any computer based organizational system).

Cons:

• Forces you to learn emacs.
• Takes a huge amount of effort to set up. I would compare it to setting up an Arch Linux system.
• Can get messy if you don't know what you're doing.
• Getting the syncing functionality isn't easy.

A spaced repetition package is also available for org-mode, which really ties the whole thing together for me.

EDIT: You can also overlay latex fragments directly in org-mode, which is really nice for notetaking. Whole .org files can be exported to latex as well.

I'm glad to hear it is working well and is well received!

Once there has been some experience running these workshops I really hope there is something that CFAR can design for meetup groups to try / implement and/or an online version.

Is there a CFAR webpage that covers this particular workshop and how it went?

tricking your mind into being more curious

that sounds very useful. How exactly does this technique work?

Offering everyone modafinil or something at the beginning of future workshops might help with this.

Probably better to offer 1/4 of the participants modafinil or something to see if affected more than just wakefulness. E.g. a friend with lots of modafinil experience reports that modafinil may "make it too easy to work enthusiastically on slightly the wrong thing".