Interested in Cognitive Bootcamp?

post by Raemon · 2024-09-19T22:12:13.348Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

Contents

  Beforehand:
  Day 1: Practice skills on quick-feedback exercises
  Day 2: Big picture strategic thinking
  Day 3: Choose your own short exercises, and object-level work
  Day 4: Consolidation
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I'm running more 4-day "Cognitive Bootcamps [LW · GW]" over the next couple months (during Lighthaven Eternal September season). DM me if you're potentially interested (either as an individual, or as a team).

The workshop is most valuable to people who:

• control their decisionmaking process (i.e. you decide what projects you or a team work on, rather than working at a day-job on someone else's vision)
• are either a) confused about planmaking / have a vague sense that they aren't as strategically ambitious as they could be.
• and/or, b) are at a place where it's natural to spend a few days thinking big-picture thoughts before deciding on their next project.

There's a secondary^[1] focus on "practice solving confusing problems", which IMO is time well spent, but requires more followup practice to pay off.

I wrote about the previous workshop here [LW · GW]. Participants said on average they'd have been willing to pay $850 for it, and would have paid $5000 for the ideal, perfectly-tailored-for-them version. My plan is to charge $500/person for the next workshop, and then $1000 for the next one.

I'm most excited to run this for teams, who can develop a shared skillset and accompanying culture. I plan to tailor the workshops for the needs of whichever people show up.

The dates are not scheduled yet (depends somewhat on when a critical mass of participants are available). DM me if you are interested.

The skills being taught will be similar to the sort of thing listed in Skills from a year of Purposeful Rationality Practice [LW · GW] and the Feedbackloop-first Rationality [? · GW] sequence. My default curriculum is aiming to teach several interrelated related skills you can practice over four days, that build into a coherent metaskill of "ambitious planning, at multiple timescales."

I'm likely updating the curriculum from last time, but for reference and a rough idea of what to expect, here was the structure at the previous workshop:

Beforehand: 

• People sent me a short writeup of their current plans for the next 1-2 weeks, and broader plans for the next 1-6 months.

Day 1: Practice skills on quick-feedback exercises

• Everyone installs the fatebook chrome/firefox extension
• Solve a puzzle with Dots and a Grid with an unspecified goal
• Solve a GPQA question with 95% confidence
• Try to one-shot a Baba is You puzzle [LW · GW]
• For both of those puzzles (Baba and GPQA), ask "How could I have thought that faster? [LW · GW]"
• Play a videogame like Luck Be a Landlord, and make fermi-calculations about your choices within the game.
• For all exercises, make lots of fatebook predictions about how the exercise will go.

Day 2: Big picture strategic thinking

• Work through a series of prompts about your big picture plans.
• Write up at least two different big-picture plans that seem compelling
• Think about short-feedback exercises you could do on Day 3

Day 3: Choose your own short exercises, and object-level work

• Morning: Do concrete exercises/games/puzzles that require some kind of meta-planning skill, that feels useful to you.
• Afternoon: Do object-level work on your best alternative big picture plan. This serves two purposes:
  • You get to practice "applying the method" on the ~hour timescale
  • You flesh out your second favorite plan, helping you treat it as "more real"

Day 4: Consolidation

• Write up your plan for the next week (considering at least two alternative plans or frames)
• Review how the workshop went together
• Consolidate your takeaways and Murphitjsu [LW · GW]. 
  • What practices do you hope to still be trying a week, month, or year from now? Do you predict you'll actually stick with them? Do you endorse that? What can you do to help make things stick.
• Fill out a feedback form

 

1. ^{^}

   I started this project oriented around "find better feedbackloops for solving confusing problems [LW · GW]", and later decided that planmaking [LW · GW] was the highest leverage part of the skill tree to focus on.

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