SotW: Be Specific

her attempt to teach a unit on "Being Specific" didn't seem to work.

How specifically did it not work?

(ETA: I should probably add I'm not being mischievous here; "doesn't work" is a trigger phrase for me, born out of extensive experience of dealing with useless bug reports. It systematically unpacks into at least two questions, "what behavior were you expecting" and "what did you get instead".)

An example of this that will be familiar to any programmer, and was taught to me in grade school, is "give orders to a malicious idiot." The teacher has the students write down the algorithm for a simple task, like "sharpen a pencil," with a wooden pencil and an old crank-operated sharpener as the props.

Typically, people begin with something like "stick the pencil into the sharpener, then turn the crank," which the teacher will do by ineffectually pushing the side of the pencil against the sharpener while turning the crank. The students revise to "stick the end of the pencil into the hole in the sharpener, then turn the crank," which the teacher will do by sticking the eraser into sharpener. (There are, if I remember correctly, four or five different features you can require the pencil-sharpening algorithm have, like which end of the pencil to stick into what part of the sharpener, which way to turn the crank, to hold the pencil still so it doesn't just spin with the crank or fall out if the sharpener is oriented poorly.)

(This will be familiar to programmers because going from the basic algorithm to code requires a level of detail that can't be faked.)

Idea One: Monday/Tuesday Game

On Monday, your proposition is true. On Tuesday, your proposition is false. Tell me a story about each of the days so I can see how they are different. Don't just list the differences (because you're already not doing that well). Start with "I wake up" so you start concrete and move on in that vein, naming the parts of your day that are identical as well as those that are different.

Idea Two: Sabotage Game

You're definitely right, but unfortunately there's a malevolent actor who wants to make you look a fool. And even more unfortunately, he's creative and has a lot of resources. What does he sabotage? What evidence does he counterfeit? (This way you're identifying the examples or the proofs by looking at them as structurally crucial.)

Idea: train the skill "ask for examples" instead, which seems easier to train, and bootstraps you into being more specific. I am not usually confused about my own thoughts, but I am often confused when others are trying to explain their ideas.

Example: explaining a startup idea to my friend today, I said "...and the viral strategy for this payments app could be loaning money to people". He was confused and asked for an example, so I said "let's say we are at a coffee shop. I have no cash, you have the payment app, and I want to borrow money for coffee. You tell me to download the app, so you can loan me the money. Then I can get my coffee, but to pay you back, I have to complete the signup process." -- here, I was incorrectly assuming my friend had all the same context I did with respect to viral strategies.

Exercise: after explaining the virtues of asking for examples, start to move onto another topic. A confederate in the audience yells "can you give an example?" Everyone giggles, the instructor says "I'm glad you asked!" and the exercise is explained: Students pair off and start telling stories to each other, intentionally leaving out details. The other person's job is to try to figure out where the details are being elided and say "example?" at the right time.

For the rest of the session, the instructor intentionally leaves out details, awarding points for the first student who notices missing details and asks for example.

Intentionally set the atmosphere of jumping in / cutting in on an explanation, since it is much more valuable right then as opposed to later.

At the risk of escalating the Meta War, I think "be specific" and "be concrete" are themselves too general and abstract to engender good exercises. They look more like "do algebra" than "factor a polynomial". Not that you wouldn't get some interesting responses if you said, "We need ideas for teaching how to do algebra," but most of them probably wouldn't make students better at factoring a polynomial-- analogously, I like the "teach me to sharpen a pencil" game, and it would make a fun and striking activity, but I'm not sure it would help students learn to explain their business plan better in an interview. If you want students to communicate judgements and opinions better, teach them to do that.

In this case, I would unpack "specific" into two parts: concrete and relevant. To make a statement more concrete, you talk about how qualities can be measured or observed ("Yellow is a color" becomes "Yellow is the color of a dandelion" or "yellow is the color of the emission spectrum of sodium"). To make it more relevant, you relate it to a goal or higher-level question ("These scissors are dull" becomes "I can't use these scissors to cut hair").

For a straightforward activity, give students a list of statements, and have them classify them as vague, concrete, relevant, or concrete and relevant. Example:

• Tom is too short.-- vague
• Tom is too short to play basketball.-- relevant
• Tom is 5'6".-- concrete
• Tom is 4 standard deviations below the mean height of a college basketball player.-- concrete and relevant

For a higher-level activity, give students a vague statement, and ask them to make it concrete and relevant. Example:

Having a car gives me more flexibility. becomes: Having a car lets me get from my home to the southwest corner of town in 30 minutes; other transportation options would take more than an hour and a half. There are many employment opportunities in that part of town, so I have more work options with a car.

Argh. I'm reminding myself that Retroactive Rewards Rage is a cognitive fallacy. Is there a formal name for it? I bet you could induce it in chimps.

Anyway,

Abstraction Telephone

Divide into at least 4 groups, of minimum size 1 and maximum size maybe 5. Each group gets a different short passage. They collaborate to translate the passage their choice of either "one rung up," making it all more abstract, or "one rung down," making it all more specific. Group N then passes their translated passage only, not the original, to Group N+1 modulo the number of groups. Then each group performs the same operation, then passes it to the next group in line. I think two iterations will be enough to get something entertainingly mangled, so then each group in turn performs the passage they've been handed for the audience. The remaining people may try to guess what the original passage was.

Example (2/3rds stolen from George Orwell):

Group 1 gets:

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

They note that everything but the last clause is pretty specific, so they decide to move it up the ladder. They write

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Group 2 gets this. They note that it's extremely abstract, so they decide to make it more specific. They write

Any competent Magic: the Gathering player will beat the best one in the world at least 10% of the time. Statistical models of baseball games show that a significant amount of variance cannot be attributed to any stable ability of players and teams. Even the most carefully hedged investment strategy can be wiped out by a black swan.

Group 3 does a dramatic reading of this passage, and maybe Group 4 tries to guess what the original passage was.

Example:

Group 2's first passage was this, from Poor Richard's Almanac:

• The Family of Fools is ancient.

• Necessity never made a good bargain.

• If Pride leads the Van, Beggary brings up the Rear.

• There’s many witty men whose brains can’t fill their bellies.

• Weighty Questions ask for deliberate Answers.

They decide to add specificity. Each group member picks a proverb to translate, and they get:

• The man who is amazed that whenever he looks at his clock, it reads "11:11," would in prehistory be the man who thinks he can control the weather with a ritual.
• A thirstier person will pay more for water.
• If you won't accept handouts from your relatives now, you might be begging from strangers later.
• The market value for a degree in English is pretty damn low.
• When given a difficult question, wait 5 minutes, by an actual clock, before proposing solutions.

Group 3 gets this, and decides to take it even further down the ladder into specificity, giving real-life examples of these situations, or empirical economic formulae.

Example:

Group 3 gets a printout of The eHow page on selecting a digital camera. They take it up the ladder, and write

"Higher resolution and zoom capability should be priorities. Be sure to use a good quality lens. Look for cameras with more and better features. Don't pay more than you can afford!"

Group 4 gets this. They note that they can't reverse this process, since too much information has been destroyed, but they can further abstract it to

"Figure out what you want in a camera, and how much you're willing to pay."

I think you should go with Vaniver's idea. (Edit: Vaniver now has multiple ideas up. I mean the one about giving orders to malicious idiots. Completely off-topic: that's also a useful way to explain tasks to people with Asperger's Syndrome or other neurological oddities that cause executive dysfunction.)

I also think this reminds me of something (fiction) writers talk about a lot: they've hit on the way people won't sympathize with "a billion people died/starved/were tortured/experienced dust specks in their eyes" but will sympathize with "Alice was mobbed by dust specks and blinded" and will sympathize even better if you give some specific details about how it felt. And then they go on to talk about how to make Alice someone the reader cares about and how to craft sentences and other stuff that's relevant to them but irrelevant here.

But maybe something like making up a character and talking someone through xyr experience using the product step by step, in the kind of detail a novelist would use to describe the climactic fight scene.

Another idea that occurred to me is some sort of exercise where two people would pair up. One would have to do a novel task or navigate some kind of obstacle course blindfolded and the other would have to give directions. They wouldn't be able to get away with "turn right at the statue" but would instead have to give directions like "turn right at the big smooth stone thing" and... I guess if you were doing something like that, you'd want to give the non-blindfolded partner a picture or map and NOT let them see the one doing the actual task. Otherwise they'd just be able to say "okay, turn right now... turn left... turn left again..." and that would defeat the purpose.

Exercise - filing bug reports. Have attendees use software that sucks (that they provide, e.g. on their mobile device, or that you provide, e.g. over the Web), or recall occasions where they used software that sucked. Ask them to describe the problem they encountered in enough detail that someone else can reproduce it, or deduce something useful such as a workaround.

I, for one, am thrilled to see Eliezer writing another Sequence. :)

Also, in my quest to make these all relatable to improv games:

More Specific (it's not a very good video, sorry), is a game in which two people act out a scene, with the audience (or moderator) occasionally demanding that they be "More Specific"

Example-

B: Good job finishing your paper on time!
C: Yeah, I had the hardest time finding my references...
Audience: More specific!
C: My kid thought that my reference books would be better with all the pages ripped out, and I couldn't find the pages with my quotes
etc

I'm thinking that I actually might have seen this game mentioned on LW before, but I didn't a quick search and didn't see it.

Spitball (not a vid) is a game in which "Players take a mundane object suggested by the audience and elaborately detail it", generally using "Yes, and..." technique.

An improv-y style warm-up game that I just thought up, upon which I bestow the name "Something". In this game, everyone gets in a circle. The starting person (or moderator) comes up with a sentence that has a lot of "somethings" and "things" in it. Each person makes it more and more specific.

Example-
1: Did you something the thing with that thing that somethinged?
2: Did you see the thing with that, etc....
3: Did you see the bug with....
4: Did you see the ant with....
5: Did you examine the ant....
etc

As with all of these games, the "goal" is to keep it quick.

In beginner level, it goes around the circle clockwise, and the sentences are kept short.

In advanced level, after you go, you shoot it off (the clap-point motion) to a random person, and the sentences can be longer.

I have no clue how well this game actually works (having just thought of it), if anyone ever tries it out, let me know!

Unrelated to the post, but I'm not sure where else to suggest rationality exercises. So I'd like to revive an idea I saw here a while back called 'What Did You See?' (I can't take any prize if it's selected because it's not mine). I think it would be a wonderful game for developing curiosity and noticing specifics. But above all its purpose is learning that you can learn, which I think even in the rationality community is an important lesson that helps to reignite the inquisitive spark.

At home there was a game that all the parents played with their children. It was called, What Did You See? Mara was about Dann’s age when she was first called into her father’s room one evening, where he sat in his big carved and coloured chair. He said to her, ‘And now we are going to play a game. What was the thing you liked best today?’

At first she chattered: ‘I played with my cousin . . . I was out with Shera in the garden . . . I made a stone house.’ And then he had said, ‘Tell me about the house.’ And she said, ‘I made a house of the stones that come from the river bed.’ And he said, ‘Now tell me about the stones.’ And she said, ‘They were mostly smooth stones, but some were sharp and had different shapes.’ ‘Tell me what the stones looked like, what colour they were, what did they feel like.’

And by the time the game ended she knew why some stones were smooth and some sharp and why they were different colours, some cracked, some so small they were almost sand. She knew how rivers rolled stones along and how some of them came from far away. She knew that the river had once been twice as wide as it was now. There seemed no end to what she knew, and yet her father had not told her much, but kept asking questions so she found the answers in herself. Like, ‘Why do you think some stones are smooth and round and some still sharp?’ And she thought and replied, ‘Some have been in the water a long time, rubbing against other stones, and some have only just been broken off bigger stones.’ Every evening, either her father or her mother called her in for What Did You See? She loved it. During the day, playing outside or with her toys, alone or with other children, she found herself thinking, Now notice what you are doing, so you can tell them tonight what you saw.

She had thought that the game did not change; but then one evening she was there when her little brother was first asked, What Did You See? and she knew just how much the game had changed for her. Because now it was not just What Did You See? but: What were you thinking? What made you think that? Are you sure that thought is true?

When she became seven, not long ago, and it was time for school, she was in a room with about twenty children – all from her family or from the Big Family – and the teacher, her mother’s sister, said, ‘And now the game: What Did You See?’

Most of the children had played the game since they were tiny; but some had not, and they were pitied by the ones that had, for they did not notice much and were often silent when the others said, ‘I saw . . .’, whatever it was. Mara was at first upset that this game played with so many at once was simpler, more babyish, than when she was with her parents. It was like going right back to the earliest stages of the game: ‘What did you see?’ ‘I saw a bird.’ ‘What kind of a bird?’ ‘It was black and white and had a yellow beak.’ ‘What shape of beak? Why do you think the beak is shaped like that?’

Then she saw what she was supposed to be understanding: Why did one child see this and the other that? Why did it sometimes need several children to see everything about a stone or a bird or a person?

• Doris Lessing, "Mara and Dann"

- RichardKennaway, February 2011 Quotes Thread

Exercise: incentivize both teacher and student participants in Vaniver's "malicious idiot" exercise. Give the student points when she is successfully more specific, and give the teacher points when he finds a new way to misinterpret the student instructions.

Example: how to brush your teeth?

S: hold your toothbrush

T: (picks up toothbrush with teeth) (1 point)

S : hold your toothbrush between your thumb and fingers of your right hand (1 point)

T: (makes a fist, puts toothbrush on outside of fingers) (1 point)

S: argh. Like this! (picks it up as example) (2 points for being concrete)

T: (mimics perfectly)

S: great, now... Brush your teeth. (laughter)

I could go on, but hopefully you get the point.

Exercise - fetch something from the kitchen. This happens all the time at home and drives me crazy. "Get me the dentist's papers, they're in the drawer." What drawer, in what room, what do the papers look like, are they in some sort of container... Reproducing this in a residential training setting opens up interesting possibilities. For instance, while giving attendees a tour or taking them from place to place tell them (separately) to pay attention to a specific item ("this is your target for the exercise after lunch") in a non-central location. The next day, pair people up, have them describe the target to each other, fetch targets, debrief.

Several comments mention guessing games. Here's my variant:

One "communicator", one or many askers.

The communicator starts by describing something in the most general terms they can think of.

Each round, the asker(s) can either ask a question, or guess. The question has to be about an attribute of the thing, not its name, and they can't say "Is it X?" or "What is it?". The communicator answers, vaguely if the question is vague, getting specific if they're backed into a corner.

When they guess, the game is over. If they guess wrong, they lose. Then you try to figure out what your next question should have been.

If they guess right, they win and get congratulated.

"It's a way of moving things from place to place."

"What kinds of things?"

"Oh, things you want moved."

"How big can these things get?"

"No more than six feet high, a couple feet wide, less than a foot long."

"Are they inert and durable?"

"No."

"Are they fragile?"

"Depends on your standards."

"Would they break if you dropped them from a foot?"

"No."

"From ten feet?"

"Possibly."

"What materials are they made from?

[...]

Eventually the guesser figures out that you're moving people, one at a time, with no equipment except the person's own legs.

"I know! Walking"

"WRONG - you forgot to ask if the person's feet are ever both off the ground, and whether their posture is upright or at an angle. Could have been leaping or running."

Exercise: Stay in the entrepreneurship domain and channel PG. Pretty much everyone has startup ideas, right? Actually apply PG's algorithm to the participants' real startup ideas.

(I think his algorithm is something like: do I understand the core idea? Is it something people want? How do you know? Is it something people will pay for? How do you know? What are the obvious flaws? Why are you the team to do this? Why is now a good time for this? Is it working? How do you know? What insights/surprises?)

Example: I love Magic the Gathering and I want to have a place for people to talk about how awesome the decks are--

T: be specific!

A site to talk Magic strategy. (+1 conciseness)

T: how do you know people want this?

Well, people love magic and talk about it all the time.

T: I'm not convinced.

Well, I talked to a famous magic player (+1 specificity) and he told me this story about how he invented this deck back in the day on the starcity forums, and he couldn't have done it without the community [lincoln note: this is totally made up], so we want to enable that to happen more. (too general, but the teacher doesn't press yet, instead noting the obvious flaws for later discussion)

T: and people will pay for this?

Yes, magic is an xxx million dollar industry

T: (look of disapproval)

Tournament players care deeply about having & knowing about the best "tech", and the scene changes rapidly every 3 months as new cards are printed (+0.5 specificity)

For example, if I am trying to decide whether to play a mostly red deck, I want badly to know the field - if lots of people are packing pro-red hate, I might not want to play red. (+1)

T: (returning to obvious flaw) why will people post their secret tech? Isn't it advantageous to keep it hidden?

Ah, we will solve this with culture. It's very open environment. (-1)

T: huh?

We found that people are willing to post their decks.

T: how?

Well, we put the forums up and people posted decks! (+1 for specificity. But minus for this actually being a good idea.)

Cutting off my example now because it is getting long.

Company mission statements are notoriously abstract and might make a good starting place. If someone didn't know anything about a company and they went and read the mission statement, they probably wouldn't have a much better idea of what the company actually did.

For example, if (stereotypical) Grandpa asked you what Google was and you replied, "they organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" you probably wouldn't do much to help him understand what Google is (despite that being one of the best mission statements I can think of). Instead, if you gave a specific example such as: "If you're driving to a new store you can type in the store address and Google will print out a map of how to get there, along with detailed instructions. It's more convenient than a traditional printed map because if you don't know the address you can type in the store name and Google will tell you the address and show you pictures of the view from the street so you'll be able to recognize it when you're driving there." Grandpa would probably have a better idea of what Google does.

So the activity would be to take a company mission statement (abstract) and come up with several examples of specific things that the company did that you could use to describe the company to your grandparents if they'd never heard of it before. The reason to start with the mission statement would be so that participants would be able to mentally contrast abstract statements (that wouldn't help Grandma understand) with specific examples (that would help) and so hopefully learn to avoid making the abstract statements themselves. (For those participants who are Grandparents, they can use companies and products that no longer exist that younger people don't understand and pretend they're explaining it to their grand kids )

One way sub-skill of being specific is learning to focus on details, instead of big picture.

For example, if a manager is vague they focus on the big picture and tell their employee "You need to stop arriving late."
If a manager is specific, they focus on details and tell their employee: "In the past week, you have been more than 15 minutes late two times. If you are running more than 10 minutes late you have to call. If you are more than 15 minutes late 3 times in a month, you will get written up, etc."

I think a fun way to teach how to focus on details is to do a quick practice of cold reading.

First, you can look at the big picture (generalities), by looking at a persons general demographic, "middle aged female in a suit," and list what you can guess about them, and how certain you are of that.

Next, look at the details. Since everyone will be new to this, give them a list of specific things to look for. If you are using pictures of people to read, or are using the instructors as examples, you can make sure that the list is tailored for your examples.

Example list: Wedding band, frays on clothes (especially on heels of jeans), hair and nail style (how much they care about looks), footwear (how practical? how expensive? how comfortable?), phone (watches can work too, but it's harder to tell an expensive/cheap watch from an expensive/cheap phone), bearing/expression

Have them make a list of all the details that they can find about the subject. Next, have them update their guesses about that person, and their certainties. Discuss how the specific details can lead to either more specific conclusions, or more certainty.

"Well, at first I thought she was a business person, because she was wearing a suit. But then, when we looked at the specifics, I noticed that her phone and shoes were cheap, and she looked nervous. Now I think she is going to an interview or something.

I don't know much about cold reading, but I have a friend who is a magician/"psychic", and I can ask him for any interesting things to look for, if there's interest.

I think people will remember this because a) it is fun, and b) it is a useful skill in itself .

Edit: You can also pair them up or put them in groups and have them cold read each other, but people would likely be uncomfortable with that (both possibly stating negative implications about a person (i.e. "well your hair is greasy, so...") and being the subject of such scrutiny. But it could possibly work at a meetup where people already know each other, and are already a bit more rational. (People can declare Crocker's Rules if they want.)

Edit 2: If you don't want to look at people this way (ethical reasons, or just think it will make people uncomfortable), you can instead call the game "Be Sherlock", and examine a scene the same way. (i.e. "Oh, there's a lit cigarette, so someone was here recently. The TV is playing Sesame Street, so there was probably a kid here too. It's an educational show, so the adult probably cares about the kid(s), etc.)

Exercise - refining descriptions.

Get three or four people sitting together. Place a large group of different items (30-50 small cheap plastic toys of the sort readily available in bulk from Oriental Trading Company, for instance) in the center of the group.

The exercise is to narrow down to a single toy by adding one detail at a time to a description. The description begins with the word "thingy," "toy," or a similarly vague word. Players take turns adding a single detail to the description, repeating it each time. (A detail is usually a single word, but a short phrase such as "with wheels" or "with spots" counts as one detail. However, "with yellow spots" would be two details — spots and yellow.) As an additional restriction, superlatives such as "biggest" or "greenest" are not allowed, because these implicitly compare each item to each other item.

Example:

A: Give me the thingy.
B. Give me the red thingy.
C: Give me the red thingy with wheels.
A: Give me the red and yellow thingy with wheels.
B: Give me the big red and yellow thingy with wheels.

Exercise: What Was That All About?

Players get samples of writing from various internet sources - randomly chosen movie reviews from IMDB, news stories from Huffington Post, blog posts from Wordpress, Wikipedia articles, etc.

Player A gets to block out 5% of the words in the sample. Player B then tries to guess the topic the sample discusses.

For example, here's a semi-randomly chosen IMDB review - the first one I grabbed off the site. It got 137 "helpful" votes out of 161 voters, so it's perceived as a good review. It's of a famous movie. I've blocked 5% of the words. Try to guess what movie.

This film has become a --------- tradition in my family. We watch it every year and never tire of it. -------- is a master of creating films with a message that reinforce strong values. This is probably his greatest film in that regard. Both he and ------ have publicly stated that this is their favorite film.

The message in this film is one of courage and sacrifice for the greater good as ------, a man with big ideas about seeing the world, continually forsakes his own desires to do what is right for the ------. The second message is that each life important. No matter how insignificant we feel we are, we are all inextricably linked to each other and play an important part in the fabric of one another's lives.

------'s direction is brilliant. His genius is bringing human stories to life in a ways that not only make a point, but that totally involve the audience in the lives of the characters. He is always extremely optimistic about the human condition. He is known for testing his characters with overwhelming adversity to make them struggle to triumph in a way that causes the world to change and the character to grow. For this reason his films were always crowd pleasers and this film was the best of all in that regard.

Led by ------'s understanding hand, the actors all did a magnificent job. ------'s wide-eyed enthusiasm and boyish charm, coupled with an unbending strength of character made him the perfect folk hero. ------ was lovely and charming and attained the right balance between being supportive and inspirational. The romantic chemistry between her and ------ was subtle and charming. ------ was towering as the greedy old skinflint who was trying to take over the ------. ------ plays one of my favorite characters, as the bumbling ------ in probably his most memorable role.

This film is number ------ on AFI's list of best films of the century. It was nominated for ------ academy awards and won ------. It was swept in ------ by ------, a great film that won ------ Oscars that year but in my opinion was the lesser film. History has corrected that minor injustice by rendering ------ an enduring classic that is viewed and loved by generation after generation. Of course, I rated it a 10/10. I can't wait to see it again this ------.

Clearly, this review fails to be specific. I've pretty much just blocked all the proper nouns - names of actors, years, etc. Still, I am willing to guess that not many people will know what the movie is. (I also blocked the two words describing a plot element and the setting.)

By contrast, I went to Wikipedia and hit "random article" repeatedly until I got an article whose title was something I had heard of before. The entire article is a little long, so I took the first two segments from the beginning of the article. Try to guess the topic of the article.

------ is a ------ ------ ------ ------ that was an international success during the 1990s and early 2000s with shows being filmed in America, Finland, The United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Sweden, Nigeria and Denmark. Russia,Germany, The Bahamas and Japan would also compete in international shows during the series. After a lengthy break, ------ was revived in 2008 in the UK, the US, Australia and Saudi Arabia.

The concept of the show is that athletic members of the public ------ against the show's own ----- (often semi-professional or ex-athletes) to claim points in several events that require speed, strength and skill. In the final event of the show, ------ the contenders ------ against each other (with starting times based on previous events), with the ------ ------ ------ winning the episode and moving onto the next round.

A children's derivative of the concept was also made in the US, called ------ (1994–1996). A UK variant of this was aired starting in 1995, called ------.

History

[edit]1990s success

The initial concept for the show by Dan Carr and John C. Ferraro was held in Erie, Pennsylvania, in the USA before being sold to Samuel Goldwyn Productions/MGM where the format was adapted and televised as ------ with the first series airing over 1989-1990. As the show progressed, new events were introduced along with new ------, sometimes retiring previous ------.

Following the success of ------, other countries began to produce their own versions of the show with the UK and Finland starting production in 1992. ------ had already picked up a cult following in the UK after being shown on late night TV. The UK, most noticeably adapted the concept into a large arena (the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham), glamorizing the show, often adapting events from the American series as well as introducing many of their own, often more high-tech. Winners from the UK and Finnish series would then go over to America, to film a special show of ------ in which they competed against the current American champions along with selected athletes from other territories such as Japan and the Bahamas and South Korea.

In early 1995, the first full scale international competition was launched in which selected ------ from the American, Finnish and British series competed against contender champions from those three countries. A fourth country, Russia was added but as they did not have their own domestic series, the ------ and contenders were hand-picked by Russian TV producers. The Finnish series ceased production after ------.

In 1995, Australia began production of their own show, basing it on the UK series. After the first series, a three part 'Ashes' mini series was filmed in Australia, in which a selection of British and Australian ------ faced champions from the opposing countries. Australia then went on to compete in ------ along with the UK and America. Russia also returned, even though they still did not have a domestic series. Germany and South Africa also competed even though they too did not have their own domestic series.

This is definitely more specific, but it still could be significantly better. It's probably clear that it's a television show where people have some sort of athletic competition, but it's not really clear what sort of athletic competition it was, what the general mood of the show was like, etc. There is a bit more information on this later in the article, but not quite as much as one might expect. Still, you know a lot more about this show than you know about the movie. This is despite the blanks blocking significant material; I blocked out verbs like "compete" and "race". In the movie review, there wasn't even such material available to block.

The answers are It's a Wonderful Life and Gladiators television franchise).

Passages that aren't specific could describe many different things, so by blocking out a few words, the original topic is lost. Highly-specific passages don't have this problem. This exercises teaches how to be on the lookout for specific and non-specific writing, but also gives us some data on what sorts of writing tend to be specific and what sorts do not. That way you know when to be especially aware of the "Be Specific" skill. (I predicted ahead of time that artistic reviews would be very non-specific and Wikipedia articles would be very specific.)

Variants

A representative from team A writes a passage. Team B blocks 5% of the words. The rest of team A tries to fill the words back in. The number of words correctly filled in is the team's score.

Rewrite non-specific passages to be specific.

Write your own content in the same style, but with a list of taboo words. For example, an article about the Gladiators series that taboos "gladiator", "television series", "competition", etc.

All players use a particular source of content and search through to find the longest contiguous passage they can that doesn't reveal the topic. For example, one might through IMDB reviews until you find a passage that's 200 words long and doesn't let you identify the movie, even with no words blocked.

Why is "be specific" a hard skill to teach?

I think it is because being specific is not really the problem, and by labeling it as such we force ourselves into a dead-end which does not contain a solution to the real problem. The real problem is achieving communication. By 'achieving communication', I mean that concepts in one mind are reproduced with good fidelity in another. By good fidelity, I mean that 90% (arbitrary threshold) of assertions based on my model will be confirmed as true by yours.

There are many different ways that the fidelity can be low between my model and yours:

• specific vs abstract

• mismatched entity-relationship semantic models

• ambiguous words

• vague concepts

Surely there are many more.

Examples of what I mean by these few:

• specific vs abstract: dog vs toy chihuahua puppy

• model mismatch: A contract lawyer, a reservoir modeler, and a mud-logger are trying to share the concept "well". Their models of what a "well" is have some attributes with similar names, but different meanings and uses, like "name" or "location". To the mud-logger, a well is a stack of physical measurements of the drilling mud sampled at different drilling depths. To the lawyer, a well is a feature of land-use contracts, service contracts, etc.

Another kind of model mismatch: I think of two entities as having a "has-a" relationship. A house "has" 0 or 1 garages (detached). But you think of the same two entities using a mixin pattern: a house can have or not have garage attributes (not detached). "I put my car in the house" makes no sense to me, because a car goes in a garage but not in a house, but might make sense to you for a house with a built-in garage. We may go a long time before figuring out that my "house" isn't precisely the same as yours.

• ambiguity: I'm a cowboy, you're an artist. We are trying to share the concept "draw". We can't because the concept doesn't equate.

• vagueness: I say my decision theory "one-boxes". You have no idea what that means, but you create a place-holder for it in your model. So on some level you feel like you understand, but if you drill down, you can get to a point where something important is not defined well enough to use.

It is difficult to know when something that is transparent to you is being misrepresented in my head based on how you explain it to me. "I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you're aware that what I said was not what I meant."

I suggest an exercise/game to train someone to detect and avoid these pitfalls: combine malicious misunderstanding (you tell me to stick the pencil in the sharpener and I insert the eraser end) and fidelity checking.

1. You make an assertion about your model.

2. I generate a challenge that is in logical agreement with your assertionss, but which I expect will fail to match your actual model. If I succeed, I get a point.

Repeat, until I am unable to create a successful challenge.

The longer it takes you to create an airtight set of assertions, the more I get.

Then we switch roles.

So I am looking for all the ways your model might be ill-defined, and all the ways your description might be ambiguous or overly abstract. You are trying to cement all of those gaps as parsimoniously as possible.

I've left the hardest part for last: the players need to be supplied with a metaphoric tinkertoy set of model parts. The parts need to support all of the kinds of fidelity-failure we can think of. And the set should be exensible, for when we think of more.

For moderately tech-savvy people who are not programmers: Write pseudocode to sort a list of numbers. Have a human, perhaps the moderator, execute the steps on a blackboard with a particular list. Repeat until you get the expected results. For extra credit, drill down on steps such as "exchange two numbers".

Ask for ways in which 2012 laws are better than 1912 laws. (Year is arbitrary.) Drill down on abstractions; for example, if "unions have more power" is given as an answer, ask for specific ways in which this is an improvement. For added weirdness, ask for examples of how the laws are worse now.

"Why did the United States secede from Britain?" Again, drill down on abstractions. If someone responds "Taxation without representation", ask what was being taxed. Allow Googling.

"Where do forks come from?" Trace all the inputs.

Exercise: Interview (or "be Paul Graham")

Example: (participants A and B)
A: I am a gardener.
B: What is a gardener?
A: It's my job.
B: No, what does a gardener do?
A: I maintain gardens.
B: What is an example of a task that you have to do?
...

Description:

2 participants act in roles of the Interviewer and Interviewee. The Interviewer asks questions to be answered honestly, ideally that would tend towards abstract answers like "What do you do for a living?" and "What did you study in school?". The Interviewer repeatedly asks for more specificity, until the responses are at the level of describing particular objects and tasks.

This goes on for a while, then the participants switch roles.

Rationale: Some of the game exercise ideas are great, but they don't seem to demonstrate using the skill in non-contrived situations. So this exercise is intended to overcome that problem by exposing non-(specificity/concreteness) in our actual communication.

I believe that this exercise can be performed between 2 people who have the barest grasp of the concept. While the skill of being specific needs to be learned, the skill of noticing that the other person isn't being specific should be much easier. After observing the game once, anyone should be able to ask some of the right sorts of questions to get the other person to be more specific. And then by repeated iteration, participants should be able to give more specific/concrete descriptions at the outset.

Caveats:

This does depend on the assumption that the skill "Ask for the right level of specificity" is easily / automatically learned.

A list of questions should be developed that are actually answerable for people in different walks of life (unemployed, did not attend school, etc.).

It might be too easy to cheat by being way too specific. But then, if you can do that, you might not need to learn the skill. Example: starting with "I push keys on the computer keyboard with the tips of my fingers, and characters appear on the screen corresponding to what I typed."

Variation:

One person is the interviewee, several people are the interviewers. The interviewee needs to make themselves understood by each of the interviewers. This might help train new interviewers.

An idea of an exercise, which actually involves some popular culture - which may make it more interesting for those involved. Agree on a set of books/movies/series/etc that can be used before starting, which participants are reasonably familiar with. Postulate a broad category of characters, e.g. "Good politicians". Brainstorm a list of characters who fit this category and put the list onto a piece of paper or a whiteboard. Take turns in trying to narrow down the list by making the category more specific and crossing some characters off until only one remains who fits the very specific description, e.g. (crudely speaking) "Good and careful politicians" eliminates Viserys but keeps Varys, Tyrion, Littlefinger etc. (A Song of Ice and Fire) Variations may include trying to eliminate only one character in each turn etc. This method allows to use complex and nuanced specifications, which situation is closer to IRL applications of "Be Specific", but still to maintain some bounds in terms of the limits of the story. The disagreements arising in whether a character fits the classification immediately create scope for further specification, until a statement is made specific enough for both parties to agree.

In psychology, the term "high-level construal" or "abstract construal" means thinking in supercategories (mammals), and the term "low-level construal" or "concrete construal" means thinking in subcategories (poodles). Being in a high level construal helps you focus on goals, and being in a low level construal helps you focus on methods and specifics, IIRC.

When testing construal effects, one way psychologists induce low-level construals is to ask an iterative set of "How" questions.

For example:
Subject- I want to get fit!
Psychologist- How can you get fit?
S- I will eat healthy
P- How will you eat healthy?
S- I will stop eating unhealthy foods.
P-How will you stop eating unhealthy foods?
S- I won't buy them in the grocery store.

These questions do NOT have to relate to the subject you are trying to be specific about! (for example, you could run an "Eat healthy" set, like above, in order to focus on specifics of a programming problem.) The question set is designed to INDUCE a thought method that focuses on specifics, not to solve a problem itself. I don't know how long an induced construal level lasts, but I would say just run through this exercise immediately before a time when you are going to have to be specific about something.

To utilize this as an exercise, people can team up and take turns being the Psychologist and the Subject. To utilize it in real life, they will have to play both roles (i.e. Ask YOURSELF "How?")

This particular exercise probably isn't the most exciting, but there's a lot of research out there, if someone wants to mine it. Off the top of my head, Kentaro Fujita does a lot of work on construal levels. I'll go through the effort of linking papers, but only if people are interested.

Notice that the entrepreneur's failure to convey his idea to PG was not, evidently, a failure of Thought - as you footnote, his system was actually pretty well-thought-out. Instead it was a failure of Communication. This distinction is important and shouldn't be blurred. Communication requires two parties, and a failure of Communication can't always be definitely attributed to one side or the other; maybe PG just wasn't asking the right questions. Or maybe he didn't care about understanding the idea at all but just wanted to probe the entrepreneur's ability to remain steady under pressure, which ability is obviously advantageous to would-be-CEOs.

I'm not convinced enough that being specific IS a good thing to do, frankly. Maybe there's something else buried within the concept that we're called "specific" that really is valuable... but when I think about "being specific" and applying this to all the various cases, it very quickly leads me to doing things that are completely useless. It collapses, basically, into casuistry. At maximum specificity, I have a list of observed cases and no way of linking them together to make sense out of them.

"What is red?" becomes "Well, this thing I'm pointing at is red. Care to guess what I mean by that?" "How should an economy be run?" becomes "Well, Singapore's GDP growth in 2009 was such-and-such, while Switzerland's was such-and-such."

It seems to me that in many circumstances, we really aren't asking specific questions---we want to know the really general answer. If you're trying to derive a theory of gravitation, a long table of things that were observed to fall from various heights at various speeds may or may not help you in the process---but it certainly is NOT a theory of gravitation.

As Darwin put it: "About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!"

I think the mistake that the entrepreneurs were making was not a lack of specificity; it was a failure to convey information at all. "It will connect people" is the sort of trivial normal statement that you make when you're a political candidate who has no particular ideas. (It fails the reversal test: "My product will not in any way connect people ever.") And I guess there is a certain sort of "specificity" at work here: you have to be specific enough that your assertion has content.

So for instance this is a theory of gravitation (Newton's): "All objects attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them." This is not: "When I dropped a rock yesterday, it hit the ground in 0.6 seconds from a height of 1.7 meters." But nor is this: "All things fall toward each other."

One of these is not specific enough; but the other is TOO specific. Hence, "Be Specific" isn't really the right advice here.

A further exercise (maybe especially for children/beginners) — each student is to make up a new word. The made-up word must refer to something (real or imaginary) that does not have any specific name in the English language (or in whatever language is the working language of the group. (Examples of possible new words: "Flonk — that portion of the back of the human hand which does not contain any of the fingers" "Wedlaw — a term for the kinship relation between two people whose former spouses have married each other" "Spup — an imaginary creature with the head of a snake and the body of a puppy.") Each student then gets 30 to 60 seconds to teach the rest of the class his/her new word (and its meaning) without ever verbally defining the new word. (For example: you can draw a "spup" on the blackboard, you can outline/caress the "flonk" of one hand with the index-finger of your other hand, or you can state that two particular people in the group are "wedlaws.") After explaining the new word in this way, each student then asks the group /a/ to provide/state/draw examples of who/what would NOT be a "spup" (or a "wedlaw" or a "flonk" or whatever) and /b/ to state in each case "What indicates that this drawing is NOT of a spup?" (or "What shows that what you're pointing to isn't a flonk?" or "How do I know that my mother is NOT the wedlaw of any of her in-laws or other identifiable relatives?" After each such "vocabulary lesson," each student then gets 2 to 5 minutes to ask the rest of the class to define the word they have just learned. The "vocabulary teacher"-of-the-moment then grades each answer for accuracy and asks what could have been done to prevent error ŵithout ever actually giving a verbal definition of the word.

This exercise is not for being specific, but just a general rationality-skill exercise that I think is useful.

Trivial Deduction

In every conversation, we hear hundreds of statements. Each of these implies many others - some directly, through definitions and linguistic rules that border on the tautological, some in combination with background knowledge, and some indirectly through multi-step inferences. Because the implications of each statement are too numerous to handle, we apply a strong filter to what reaches our attention: a statement reached by inference must be interesting, surprising, or connected to another interesting statement that was previously isolated.

The goal of this game is to turn off that filter, temporarily, and to pay attention to available deductive steps that would normally be too trivial to mention. You will be given a simple statement of five words or less, such as "the door is open". For two minutes, write down single-step deductions, also five words or less. For example

There is a door. The door is passable. The door was opened. People can enter. People can exit. The door isn't closed. There is a doorway. There is a wall. Air can circulate. Temperature will equalize. The door can open.

In addition to being five words or less, and must either be 95% probable, or be 10 times as likely as given the statement's reverse. Next, cross off duplicates. Each person reads their answers; if anyone got the same answer, they say "got it" and everyone who had that answer crosses it off. People may also say "challenge", if they think the answer isn't likely enough, the answer is a duplicate, or the answer is longer than 5 words. Challenges are resolved by the moderator. Answers that use synonyms of (as opposed to expanding definitions) or trivially different word choice for the same meaning, will count as duplicates at the moderator's discretion. If someone finds a template that produces unlimited answers, award two points for the template but don't count the individual answers. After all duplicates have been crossed off, score one point for each remaining answer.

Some other prompts: Jill is a banker. Paul drove there. There is a rock.

A simple exercise, borrowed from giraffe language / non-violent commenucation. Describe what happened in a way, even your worst enemy would have to agree with. This means sticking to what you saw, heard etc., without lumping things together or including judgements.

So, if your friend and you were to meet at the cafe at 13.00, and he showed up at 13.05, there's not much else you can say about that situation. You can't deduce a motive for his being late, and it wouldn't be wise to lump this being-late together with other being-lates.

Exercise based on this: 4 people work in 2 groups. A will tell B about some incident or period of her/his life. C will talk to D. Then B talks to A and D talks to C. Then the 2 groups merge, and B gets to retell A's words. Unless B is specific, A will have reason to correct summaries and judgements. Then A, C and D retell their partners words.

It seems like a common situation where this skill would be useful and is often lacking is where one person is an expert or semi-expert on a subject, but lacks conscious awareness of their criteria for expert decision-making. A concrete example of this that I have experienced is trying to explain to someone how I know confidently and in an instant something like "that tree is a kind of maple" or "that bird is a robin". Asking me this forces me to step back and start pointing out all the information I'm taking into account, which usually turns out to be possible, but surprisingly challenging.

The trouble with constructing an exercise based on the expertise of the student is that everyone's knowledge is idiosyncratic. And, with wide-speared knowledge, somebody usually has to pretend to be ignorant. I've seen an exercise used at job interviews, where they have the applicant "describe to a blind person how to tie shoelaces" (someone below had seen "teach me to sharpen a pencil", which has the same problems); I think that requires too much role-playing to be valid, although you could use an unfamiliar knot. A good exercise should never require anyone to fake ignorance. What I would like to see tested is an exercise where participants have to collaborate to win a game, rather than play-act at it.

So I would pick some totally arbitrarily domain of knowledge. I've personally spent a lot of time using field guides, so I have an opinion about that, but you could conceivably use anything with a ready-made compendium of information.

So, two participants are separated by a wall, such that they can hear each other perfectly, but not see each other.

Person A is presented with an organism (or several photos thereof) they are unlikely to have spent much time looking closely at (which, trust me, is usually just as good as something they have never seen before). Better still, if you have time, person A is shown a group of similar organisms. Personally, I'd just use weeds you find outside of the office, because they are free and no one ever looks at them closely. Person A also gets a ruler and magnifying glass (and, if it were up to me, several completely useless items to keep them from fixating on any one in particular).

Person B gets all the reference materials. (I'd be curious to see how it worked with and without a dichotomous key, and with photos vs. field marks, if those are options.) Together, they have to work out what Person A is looking at, or get as close as they are able, and say specifically why they arrived at their conclusion.

In order to win the game, you can't just say "it has a thingy" or "it's red" -- you have to be able to explain how you know what you know, and you are forced to arrive at a mutually intelligible vocabulary. I will caution that this will be an insanely difficult exercise for some people, and they might need some incentive to not give up too easily. I think it has to be hard in order to not seem excessively contrived.

The potential failure mode here is that any skills gained wouldn't generalize, even if the game really does require communicating concretely in order to win. I would definitely not expect people to be immediately better at pitching a start-up afterwards, but the hope is that they would come away with the experience of what it feels like to communicate concretely about a domain of information they have access to.

I'd love to test this on my own friends, actually, but I think they'd kill me.

"Read through the comments, gather the LessWrong usernames of everyone who made a suggestion we tried or adopted, and email the list to Luke"

It's pretty easy to just let Luke do everything isn't it? (No snark meant; I noticed this tendency in myself when we were housemates and started actively trying to fight it.)

Exercise

It seems possible that when people take personality tests, they just write down their perceptions of themselves. A much better way would be to think of specific examples (of times when they were on time or late for an appointment, for instance). Maybe if you got people to tally up specific examples, they would get a result the genuinely surprised them. Instructing people to search for examples in a way that didn't favor their preconceptions could improve results even more.

Reasons this idea could be good: personality tests are inherently interesting, and they are a fairly emotionally neutral discussion topic that doesn't risk excluding anyone. (If you started asking folks to brainstorm reasons why they were or were not a diligent employee, you might run into some problems.) You could even brand it as being an unusually accurate way to administrate a personality test.

Phil Goetz on personality tests:

[The main advantage of Myers-Briggs] is that it manages to classify people without insulting them. (This is accomplished by confounding dimensions: Instead of measuring one property of personality along one dimension, which leads to some scores being considered better than others, you subtract a measurement along one desirable property of personality from a measurement along another desirable property of personality, and call the result one dimension.)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/14x/the_machine_learning_personality_test/

This is a point against my idea if all the scientifically validated classification systems, like the Big Five, run the risk of insulting people.

Exercise (preferably attempted by participants before the lesson):

Another variation on an old classic. Split the group into triads, and each group is given a bunch of words in a hat (a box may also be used, or a hollowed out rock of some sort). The words, preferably, are about half-way "up" the abstraction lattice; "red" is good, "Steve Irwin" and "Concepts" are not.

Each person in a triad rotates between three roles: guesser, hinter, or observer. The hinter has to get the guesser to say the word within a short time limit (30s? a minute?) without saying the word herself, without saying words that rhyme with the word, etc. The observer writes down all of the hints and guesses, in order, (the observer can be replaced by an audio recorder of some sort, if resources are available) and is instructed to try to figure out the pattern of what sorts of hints lead to the best guesses, and ultimately correct answers.

After each participant plays each role 3-6 times, have the groups meet and discuss what the best strategy was on the part of the hinter. Hopefully they will arrive at something like the lattice strategy without being hinted of it beforehand.

Note: There are bound to be plenty of tricksy ways of imparting the word without saying it but also without shooting up or down the lattice, like rhyming it. I cannot possibly list all of them, but playing this exercise out a few times should reveal enough of those clever work-arounds to ban them.

If CMR mini-camp participants learned the skill through exposure, then perhaps an incentivized game executed in organically occurring scenarios that rewards those who recognize and do not practice non-specificity, would do the trick.

I'm thinking of a point-based game. It would occur either during a specified block of time, or on a specified day; everyone playing would begin with an equal number of points. During this specified period players would earn points pointing out abstract, non-specific utterances of other players' (including utterances operating on an illusion of transparency) by acting upon that utterance in a literal way; the one who said the utterance would then concede a point to the one who first pointed this out (or first acted upon the non-specific utterance), as long as it was fairly won. I'm thinking that if, "Head over to Anna" is met with someone offering their skull to Anna as a gift, that'd be going a bit far. The winner, the person with the most points at the end of the day, would receive some gift all would be motivated by, or an individualized gift of their choosing (e.g. multiple prize options). The game would be in effect during other activities.

Some examples:
-"I think we should all come together. [intended meaning: gather]" is met with someone walking into the non-specifist, or many overtly gathering in simultaneous motion around the non-specifist.
-"Perhaps everything's like that, or we could try maybe helping or fixing whatever might be causing it." is met by a mock stern, affronted accusation that the non-specifist is 'like that', or is egregiously guilty of whatever 'that' is, immediately followed by a mock abashed realization that the pointer-outer is, too, like that, and so the pointer-outer exclaims "Woe is me!" and mock faints.
-"Can you help, with the, uh, you know, um, the thing?" is met with someone grabbing a leaf on the ground or a chair or some such object that is obviously not what the non-specifist is referring to, lifting it up high, and innocently querying, "This?"

Edit: ITakeBets' post on orders of specificity brought to mind the possibility this game might be improved (once some familiarity is established) by requiring pointer-outer's to state why the statement was non-specific after they're done acting upon the statement's non-specificity. To use his example, stating, "I can't play basketball; I'm five foot six," would yield, "It was vague in that it lacked relevancy," after the pointer-outer had in a tone of mock shock said, "Goodness, me! You must have the condition that severely limits prestidigitation, rendering you unable to delicately flick your second through fifth metacarpals in unison against any opposing force! 'Tis a shame the condition only affects those of the adult height of sixty-six inches; if only you were an inch taller!"

I have some qualms about the game's potential negative effects on productivity, yet perhaps the probability of that can be mitigated by clever scheduling. The basic idea is participants won't want to lose points, but will want to gain points, so they will become more attentive to, and precise in, their speech and thoughts.

I've been reading the answers and trying to put words into what I want to say. Ideally people will experience not just being more specific, but experience that when they're more specific, they immedaitely communicate more effectively.

For instance, think of three or four topics people probably have an opinion on, starting with innocuous (do you like movie X) and going on to controvertial (what do you think of abortion). Either have a list in advance, or ask people for examples. Perhaps have a shortlist and let people choose, or suggest something else if they really want?

I picked the movie example because it's something people usually feel happy to talk about, but can be very invested in their opinion of. Ideally it's something people will immediately disagree about. I don't think this is difficult -- in a group of 10, I'd expect to name only one or two movies before people disagreed, even though social pressure usually means they won't immediately say so.

Step 1 Establish that people disagree, and find it hard to come to an agreement. This should take about 30s. People will hopefully "agree to disagree" but not actually understand each other's position. Eg. "Starwars was great, it was so exciting." "Starwars was boring and sucked and didn't make any sense."

Step 2 Ask WHAT people like about it. Encourage people to give specific examples at first ("eg. I loved it when Luke did X") and then draw generalisations from it ("I really empathised with Luke and I was excited that he won" "I've read stories about farmboys who became heroes before, I already know what happens, bring me some intellecutal psychological fare instead"). Emphasise that everyone is on the same side, and they shouldn't worry about being embarrassed or being "wrong".

Step 3 Establish that (probably) they interpreted what the other person said in terms of what they were thinking (eg. "How can blowing up a spaceship be boring") when actually the other person was thinking about something they hadn't thought of (eg. "OK, I guess if you care about the physics, it would be annoying that they are completely and utterly made up, it just never occurred to me that anyone would worry about that.")

I may be hoping too much, but this is definitely the sort of process I've gone through to rapidly reach an understanding with someone when we previously differed a lot, and for some simple examples, it doesn't seem too much to hope we can do so that rapidly. Now, go through the process with two-four statements, ending with something fairly controvertial.

Hopefully (this is pure speculation, I've not tried it), giving specific examples will lead to people actually reaching understandings, imprinting the experience as a positive and successful one. Then encourage people to say "Can you give me an example of when [bad thing] would be as bad as you feel" as often as possible. Give examples where being specific is more persuasive (eg. "We value quality" vs "We aim for as few bugs as possible" vs "We triage bug reports as they come in. All bugs we decide to fix are fixed before the next version is released" or "we will close loopholes in the tax code" vs "we will remove the tax exempion on X"), and encourage people to shout out more.

Here's a possible exercise. It's about making a set of specifications that meet a pre-defined level of abstraction, not about moving between levels of abstraction.

Toy Designer

"When I was just a wee little lad full of hope and joy My father homeward came one night and gave to me a toy A wonder to behold it was with many colours bright And the moment I laid eyes on it it became my hearts delight It went zip when it moved and bop when it stopped and whirr when it stood still I never knew just what it was and I guess I never will."

You are a toy designer for a large educational products company. You need to come up with the latest offering in the 0-3-year-old range. Your team plans to release an new version of their Cube(TM), a six-sided shape with different bits on each side that do different things. For example, the previous Cube included a handle that when turned made a clown pop up, a button that made two other buttons appear and a squishy gel pad that changed colour when warmed by fingers. You need to specify what is on each side, what a child will need to do to that side to get a reaction, and what the reaction will be. You don't need to define the mechanism or how it will work. Firstly, you have engineers for that, who will make exactly what you want as long as you tell them exactly what you want. Secondly, it won't get your design chosen over those of the other designers (which is worth a substantial bonus). The choosing panel consists of your team's manager's manager, a couple of people from Marketing, and a small number of "typical" mums and housewives chosen for their combined decades of experience in childraising and their ability to "like" the company's updates on Facebook. Previous design runs have shown you that the panel typically tends to appreciate descriptions that are similar to the way a child of 0-3 years plays with an item - literal, clear, straight-forward, and without a lot of extra context or jargon. You also know that your manager's manager doesn't tolerate vague phrases such as "provides educational opportunities and sensory stimulation" because they don't tell him how the design is going to be more interesting than your major competitor's summer release special (or even just a stick), and that's what he wants to know.

Variation/extension 1 of this exercise is to redescribe the object to include the principle of interactivity: which is that when a child changes what they do, the Cube must also change how it responds. For instance, turning a handle faster makes a higher pitched sound and turning it slower makes the sound lower pitched. The new description needs to include how each use of the Cube can be varied and what the variable response will be.

Variation/extension 2 of this exercise is to describe a multiple-step series of operations that might include more than one face. For example, from the song: "Right on the bottom were two big buttons that looked like big black eyes / I first pushed one, and then the other / and then I lifted its lid / and when I put it down again this is what it did...".

A caveat - "specific" is not the same as "detailed". An exercise which teaches the latter may fail to hit the former.

"Detailed" is a listing of all your customers with a testimonial from each of them, many of which will be redundant, others irrelevant ("pretty home page design"). "Specific" picks out the particular thing that serves your customer better than the competition.

Being able to recognize that a given example is particularly illustrative - an examplar - is a subskill.

Exercise: Add as many qualifiers as you can that do not make your statement irrelevant or false.

For example:

My startup is better than MixPanel

My startup is better than MixPanel at making revenue on day zero

My startup is better than MixPanel at making revenue on day zero when the economy is down

Well, never mind, that didn't work.

The Center for Modern Rationality is now offering prizes for suggested exercises:

$50 for each exercise promising enough that we test it during a Saturday session. A $500 prize for any exercise which actually seems to work (as in, we decide to adopt it into the unit after testing).

Hmm. I'd understood that there was some pretty convincing evidence that offering cash incentives like this is counterproductive - it decreases creativity and effectiveness of troubleshooting. I don't have scholarly cites handy (I know there was a CMU/LSE study) but this is popularised in Dan Pink's "Drive". (There's a TED talk and a great RSAnimate video on this.)

Continuing with the "adapt a classic" suggestions:

Surely there's some way to adapt charades to this. You give someone an example of a complicated concept, and have them try to communicate that concept in as few examples as possible. We have similar problems with the twenty questions suggestion, though: a lot of specificity depends on deep knowledge of the subject matter. If you get a concept you or the guessers have never heard of, then you're dead in the water and that'll be frustrating.

The skill goals appear to be mostly "articulate the knowledge you have" and "model your interlocutor's knowledge." If I get a card that says "a startup that tracks viewing statistics and can combine them with parameters from the site to get detailed knowledge of how different classes of customers interact with the site", explaining that concept is going to be odd, and it may have been the communication failure between the Entrepreneur and Graham may have been that E didn't realize that G didn't know that they were about combining viewing statistics with user data. If the card only has one meaningful datapoint, things are too easy- the 'knowledge' and 'model' parts are done for you, and you just need to articulate- but if the card has lots of meaningful datapoints, things are too hard- now you need to figure out what the needle is in a haystack, probably in a field that's not relevant to you.

That suggests an alternative approach- give two people two different cards, with related but distinct concepts on them. Now, they have to figure out what the other person's concept is with as few examples as possible. Both players share whether an example fits their rule or not. If you score, consider including the number of examples the other person gives into the score, so that you have an incentive to ask questions with examples that both convey as much information about your concept as possible while also seeking to get as much information about their concept as possible.

For example, I might have the card that reads "A blue polygonal shape with less than five sides" while you might have the card that reads "a red polygonal shape with at least four sides."

I begin by saying "a blue pentagon fits my rule." You respond with "A blue pentagon does not fit my rule," and then follow up with "a red square fits my rule." I respond with "a red square does not fit my rule," then follow with "a red hexagon does not fit my rule." You respond with "A red hexagon does fit my rule," then follow with "A red triangle does not fit my rule." I respond that a red triangle does not fit my rule, and the game continues.

Once I think I have your rule, I write it down and stop providing examples. You can continue to provide as many examples as you like, until you also write down a rule. We then reveal rules, and then if scoring get points for guessing correctly, possibly with points taken away for every example provided.

This looks like it'll be obvious with rules based on geometric concepts, and similar mathematical objects so long as everyone is familiar with them. It should be extendable to fuzzier concepts as well (adding a "maybe fits my rule" or related answers will help).

Zach Weinersmith describes Professor Liar. One player gets a field of expertise randomly drawn from two lists of 100 elements (the professor); the other players (the examiners) ask the professor questions, trying to expose that the professor is not in fact an expert on Feminist Mustache Theory. It seems like it could be readily adapted to focus on the specificity aspect of things, rather than the "convincingly bullshit" aspect of things.

This has obviously been a fun thought-exercise for many of you, but I think what's at heart here, the "skill" we're eager to develop via exercise, is just plain old good communication. In the entrepreneur example, the failure is not his inability to BE more specific, when asked. The failure is that he doesn't already KNOW he hasn't been specific enough. So, the skill we need is not how to muster specificity when Paul Graham asks for it. What we want is simply to be able to communicate abstract ideas clearly in the first place.

All these conscious exercises of ever-increasing specificity miss the point entirely.

I don't have a developed exercise idea, but I was inspired by the following, which I happened to have been reading earlier today.

http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

That is the original proposal for the World Wide Web, written by Tim Berners Lee at CERN. To read that document in 2012 is, itself, an exercise both useful and relevant to these discussions. The document is chock full of descriptions of things that did not exist in 1989, but which have now become mundane and ubiquitous. Tim is in the role of the entrepreneur trying to explain what he wants to build and why. One can't help but be astounded by the ease with which Berners Lee renders clear enough description that we can recognize all the specific things that have arisen from his "sketch".

For example: "Meanwhile, several programs have been made exploring these ideas, both commercially and academically. Most of them use "hot spots" in documents, like icons, or highlighted phrases, as sensitive areas. touching a hot spot with a mouse brings up the relevant information, or expands the text on the screen to include it. Imagine, then, the references in this document, all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse."

This is exactly the kind of context where we want to help people to be as specific as possible, when they are trying to invent something.

Exercises in categorization or "lattice-travel" seem to miss the point entirely. What we want is simply for people to choose the best language for their audience. The only remedial program I can recommend for for that is trial and error.

Here’s a fairly simple one for thinking concretely about the abstraction lattice. Mine an encyclopedia article for topical words (i.e. omit “the” and “and” and their ilk – also omit duplicates, should be fairly easy to program for). Place each word on an index card and have the students arrange them on a large flat surface in order of abstraction – I’d have some large amusing goalposts at either end, but this is not strictly necessary. It should probably be acceptable for some words to be judged equally concrete.

Because this is a collaborative exercise, students will have to talk about what makes a word more or less abstract in order to justify their hypothesis that one word is more abstract than another word. If the concepts in this article had just been presented to them, particularly the section about superconcepts, I hope such discussions will help students become more adept at making those judgements. Using an encyclopedia article is only one of many ways to keep the words vaguely related to one another and hence more comparable – my instinct that this will help may not be accurate, in which case a random selection of X words from the dictionary will suffice. I expect that'd come out in testing.

(An alternate version splits the students into Team Abstract and Team Concrete, with the former responsible for seeing words that are more abstract than their current position and remedying this, and the latter with the inverse task. Then swap for a different lexicon. I’m not sure what effect that would have beyond or indeed specific to priming bias, and I’d be interested to see whether the alternate version consistently produces different results to the original version, and if so in what way, but that’s an entirely different rationality lesson, I think.)

I'd suggest a game - I Don't Wanna.

The two sides are shown an end state considered to be the goal. One side writes directions to accomplish the goal, including whatever constraints he wants. His opponent tries to fail to accomplish the task while still following the directions an fulfilling the requirements.

The second player should always be able to win in absolute terms. His real goal is to be minimally obtuse - find the minimal distance between our usual priors and the priors he has to assume so that the directions don't complete the task.

For any of the rationality skills, probably the most important meta skill is to have some reliable way to evaluate how well you are doing. Just as EY talked about use cases, you need your test cases as well. As the years have gone by, I've noticed how the methodologies in engineering/software development are generally applicable to life.

My game is close to one you can see everyday in contracting. Company A contracts on a fixed price bid to fulfill the requirements spec of Company B. Company A wants to minimize it's cost for fulfilling the contract, so it prefers defensible interpretations of the requirements that minimize their cost. On the other side of that pancake, Company A tries to find a defensible interpretation of the contract that maximizes their value.

Okay, so split into sets of 2 people (or, split into 2 teams, or even dynamic teams could work). Person A asks a simple personal question about person B (such as "do you have a girlfriend?" or "do you have a college degree?" or "do you prefer dogs or cats?"). Person B then tries to answer like the people in the video did, by telling an abstract related story, or by answering a different question contained within or related to the question (like "well, dolphins are really my favorite animal" or "college degrees aren't really an indication that someone is able to perform well in their field of expertise"). Person B tries to talk as much as possible in response to person A's question without actually answering person A's question. Person A then tries to redirect person B toward A's intended subject by asking different or more specific questions ("what about as a pet?"). In summary: Person B tries to avoid answering person A's question, and person A tries to force person B to be specific by asking the right questions.

And of course, things like the ladder of abstraction can (and should) be explained before starting the exercise so that the people have references to draw from to reach their goal (person A trying to get an answer, and person B trying to not give an answer while still answering)

The primary reason why skills can be transmissible from master to apprentice, but not replicable by exercises is because the skill in question has multiple difficulties associated with it which are disconnected at the level of the exercise. Most people are naturally (through karma/disposition or experience) capable of easily getting past a few of the difficulties, and have problems with a few of the others. These people have no idea that they were able to get past a few of the difficulties, because they weren't difficult.

The problem with exercises is that they tend to concentrate on certain difficulties. So, the people who lack the related experience, or have the karma where they find exceedingly difficult the difficulties not expressed in the exercise, are not going to be able to get anything immediately useful out of the exercise. And in addition, these people won't know why they weren't able to get anything out of the exercise, or even what could be done to help them.

You (Eliezer) addressed this subject in this post by providing examples of related concepts. The problem is that those related concepts are all true, and so are a few others you didn't mention, as well as a few others you aren't even aware of; and certain ones are true for certain people, and untrue for others.

Here are some difficulties you didn't mention:

• Common people are emotionally driven. Sensationalist methods attract their attention, and fool them into thinking positive thoughts about the subject. These people who were presenting start-ups were not simply being non-specific, they were trying to pander to an audience (which they were taught to do in school). They weren't even trying to express their ideas when they first started talking.

• Going deeper into concreteness, many of their ideas were still ideas: partially concrete in their minds, but not concrete for people who come from a different perspective. One skill here that is useful that isn't learning how to be concrete is instead learning how to interpret others' questions, to translate from one perspective to another.

• When emotionally charged (as in a presentation), many people have the tendency to both respond to emotional triggers and try to trigger emotions in the audience. Through this, these people tend to go up the ladder of abstraction. Sometimes these people can benefit by just being aware that the audience (Paul Graham) is not trying to trigger them.

• Many people are taught how to pander to an audience. Often, these people don't even know that they are pandering to an audience. Instead of teaching these people how to do the opposite, instead teach them both how to pander, and how to know when they are pandering to an audience, and follow up by teaching them how to know when to, and when not to, pander to an audience. For many people, after they learn this, the opposite side of learning how to be specific is easy.

• All of the people in that Paul Graham office hours YouTube video seemed to me to be trying too hard to answer the specific questions asked. They interpreted the question to refer to one concept, and tried to convey that concept. These people would benefit from learning how to interpret questions from multiple angles. rather than trying to find the concept the questions is truly asking, they should be trying to find all of the concepts the questions is addressing. From there, they can pick the concept that they DO have a specific answer for, or determine that they don't have an answer, or don't understand the question.

Many exercises designed to help people get through difficulties like this would work better if they addressed the opposite. Get people to experience the problem; so that they can recognize it and try to find a solution, and become aware that it is indeed a problem. Don't get people to try to find a solution; because they usually aren't even aware of the problem, much less have a concrete understanding of it. For example,... oh, I just thought of a good exercise: [Idea moved to top so that it is the first thing people see. Not going to edit post to make it coherent in that order because I'm too lazy.]

Exercise idea that may simultaneously teach this and help illustrate notion of Locating the Hypothesis: A prize/treasure hunt in which you make them make you be specific. ("you", of course, being understood to mean whoever's teaching them.)

ie, hide some prize (money, for example) somewhere in the building or such. Tell them you will answer their questions about where the prize is, but they might have to work a bit to ask the right questions.

You: "Ask me where the prize is." Them: "Where is the prize?" You: "Somewhere. You're going to have to do better than that."

Them: "Is the prize in this room?" You: "yes"/"no" (depending on whether the prize actually is in the room, of course.)

Them: "which room is it in?" etc etc etc...

I'm confused. Don't you already have your answer? Attendees picked it up by instructors asking attendees to be more specific about things they were discussing. Just turn that into an exercise: ask some questions about a subject that is suitably fuzzy in most people's heads (economics, philosophy, future prediction). Give feedback. Repeat until they get it.

And if you want something more specific:

Ask questions like, "Is a 'weak dollar' bad?" People will default to their cached thoughts. "Of course it's bad. It's weak, it should be strong." But nobody will actually say that out loud, because it's not very meaningful, so people will usually change to something vague that also sounds good: "It makes us more competitive." From there the specific path should be obvious. How, why? How are you judging "good"? Etc. Another good question from economics that trips people up: "The average child owes $X to the government at birth. Is this bad?" Or how about, "You find a clean harmonica lying on the ground with no way to find the owner. What is it worth to you?" A correct answer will not be in dollars, but in feelings. Students should consider what they can do with it, how those things would make them feel, and which option they would actually choose (which feelings they desire most).

Perhaps those questions are too technical, but I think they can be reasoned out from basic principles of how one thinks people will act under certain circumstances. The key point is that they trigger silly cached thoughts that people try to mask with vague language. They should at the very least learn to ask, "Good for whom?" and give some answers according to different groups of people.

(Eliezer, you should be able to generate more/better examples than I can, since you have apparently spent so much time telling people to be specific. But if the SIAI really wanted an outsider to design the whole lesson, I'm sure I or many other people could crank a lot more out.)

Unless you're asking for a way to replicate the skill without having a "master" who already has a sufficient idea of acceptable specific-ness, in which case I have no clue. Someone has to judge whether an answer is specific enough, and that someone has to have already mastered the skill.

This is related to the incredibly important skill, search for the historical causes of your thoughts, rather than their justifications.

Isn't this not recommended by CBT? Everything I've read has been present-focused or forward-focused, whereas Freudian therapy is typically past-focused ("ok, we've figured out what you should do next time" vs. "ok, we've figured out who you should blame").

Further notes on the Prize:

"Figure out a way to X" is advice, not a prize-eligible suggestion - if your comment is "Figure out a way to X..." and someone else replies with a suggested way to actually do X, they get a prize and you don't. (This may sound harsh, but we already have lots of goals - we don't need help coming up with goals - we need exercises that actually achieve those goals.)

Please don't overlook the value of including at least one sample problem or sample use-case! If it's clear how to implement your suggestion on our end, it's prize-eligible even without any sample cases - but we may not understand what you mean, and working out a single sample case is likely to help you think clearly about the problem. (See also: "Be Specific" and Illusion of Transparency.)

Or to take the example of sunk costs:

"Figure out a way to get people to think consequentialistically about sunk costs" is not prize-eligible.

"Have them transform sunk costs into purchased options" would be prize-eligible if we had any idea what you meant by that.

What we're looking for is more along the lines of:

"Give them sample scenarios like *Paul is 3 years into completing his 4-year PhD in Obscure Egyptian Poetry, and is wondering if the improved salary prospects are worth it' and have them list the exercise cost of the option ('One more year of work') on one line, and the purchased benefit in terms of future events ('3% chance of getting a low-paying teaching position') on another line."

This would definitely be eligible for the prize... but our feedback with respect to "Having people writing things on paper by themselves" is sufficiently discouraging that we probably wouldn't find the idea worth testing if there were any open suggestions for 2-person activities, or anything other than "write things on a piece of paper by yourself".

If someone at CMR took that essential idea of describing a sunk-cost scenario in terms of purchased options, and transformed it into a two-person activity, we would credit the original suggester with a successful suggestion.

Nonetheless, turning all these exercises into non-boring activities is the part of the problem we most need help with. If someone else transformed it into a two-person activity in a reply to your comment, and we kept their final form, we'd split the prize between the two of you. If any more complex discussions go on, we reserve the right to do percentage allocations of credit on an arbitrary basis.

The first thing that comes to mind is "write erotic fiction", but that has obvious social problems.

Exercise/Game: Elevator-Pitch Descriptions

For two players. (P1 and P2)
Each player tries to describe a specific image for the other player to identify out of a larger set of images in 30 seconds.

Needs:

• Two different sets of images, and clones of these sets.
• Something to stop P1 and P2 from seeing each other’s images. (e.g. a battle-ship style setup)
• Clock/stop-watch that can take the time in seconds

Constructing the image sets:

The sets of images need to be of a moderate size (say 20 images) and the images themselves need to depict similar things. For example a set could consist of pictures of different monkeys, or of different (but similar) buildings.

(I read somewhere that it’s much harder for humans to tell the difference between two monkeys than two humans.)

The idea is for the images to be similar enough for any sufficiently abstract statement to include all of them, while also being different enough for a sufficiently specific statement to single out just one. Based on this it should be possible to fine tune the image sets to different levels of capability in being specific.

The images in each set should be numbered on the back (and its clones should be numbered in the same way) in order to allow quick identification of which image is which.

Setting up:

After being screened off from one another, each player is given a different set of images. Then they’re given an image from the clone of the other players set (so P1 will have a single image from P2’s set).

How to play:

P1 (after being given as much time as needed to think) tries and describe the image (s)he has from P2’s set in 30 seconds. After this P2 will attempt to work out which image P1 has from her/his set based on P1’s description. The roles are then reversed, P2 describes the image (s)he has from P1’s set and P1 tries to work out which image P2 has. Rinse and repeat the process until both players have identified the image the other player has.

Scoring:

Scoring would be done in a similar way to golf; the lowest score wins and every time a player isn’t successful in getting the other player to pick out the right image they get a point.

Notes:

Not allowing the player to see the images they’re trying to differentiate the image they’re describing from forces them to say what makes their particular image different from all other images. What it is that makes their monkey different from all other monkeys, rather than just the rest of the monkeys in the set. Along those lines players could occasionally get an image that isn’t part of the other players set, meaning that they’ll have to cover the basics of “It’s a monkey” and so on just to be sure.

Hopefully this will help improve conscientiousness too. By giving the players as much time as they need to think before they give their 30 second description it should get them into the habit of thinking carefully about how they’re going to say something before they actually say it.

(I’ve noticed part of the reason people fail to be specific is because they’re trying to rush their description of things.)

Phew... that took way longer than I thought it would to write.

I did not understand the distinction being made between a ladder and a lattice. Is the idea that the lattice is multi-dimensional? If so why was Eliezer still talking about the top and the bottom rather than some point and the origin?

(These are not relevant to the skill of the week. I misinterpreted the instructions. I'll leave this comment up, though, because I enjoyed these games/exercises and others might as well.)

1) Play Wits and Wagers. This is an unoriginal suggestion and probably not eligible for a reward, but nevertheless it's a fun, socially rewarding, accessible, large collection of Fermi questions about which Bayesian updates based on vague real-world knowledge can be readily applied.

Variation 1 Add the additional step that every player must explain at least one reason that they think influences the odds on estimates of the answer.

Variation 2 To practice resistance to anchoring (assuming that's even possible), in each round one player is first told the question privately, then makes a public estimate. Then the other players hear the question and answer normally. After all estimates are revealed, the first player is allowed to "back out" and retrieve his or her ante.

2) In the Austin meetup, and later as a private game between my SO and I, we played my own variant of the 2-4-6 puzzle. I broadened the scope to "a sequence of any three words" in fairness to people who just don't like math, and renamed the game Trilogy. One player picks a rule simple enough that it can be applied fairly and consistently; this can be subjective, of course, so remind players that the goal is to make the game fun and somewhat challenging, not fiendish. That player then gives an example sequence of three words that pass (or fail) the test. Then the guessing player guesses sequences of three words and the rulemaker tells whether the sequences pass or fail the rule. It can be opened up to competitive group play by letting each player propose a test sequence, one at a time, in turn. The player may guess the rule instead of proposing a test sequence, and if correct he or she wins, and if incorrect he or she loses.

How about this:

People are divided into pairs. Say A and B are in one pair. A gets a map of something that's fairly complex but not too complex. For example, an apartment with a sufficiently large number of rooms. A's task is to describe this to B. Once A and B are both satisfied with the description, B is asked questions about the place the map represented. Here are examples of questions that could be asked:

How many left-turns do you need to make to go from the master bed room to the kitchen?

Which one is the washroom nearest to the game room?

You are sitting in room1 and you want to go to room2. You have some guests sitting in room3 and you want to avoid them. Can you still manage to reach room2?

You can also just simulate the story about Y Combinator and Paul Graham. Show a new web-service to person A and ask him to describe it to person B. Finally ask B questions about the web service.

In both cases, the accuracy with which B answers the questions is directly proportional to the quality of A's description.

I think two variants can be tried. In the first one, A does not know what questions will be given to B. In the second one, he does, but he is prohibited from directly including the answers as a part of his description.

Exercise - characterization. Form triads: one is the moderator, one the target, one the observer. Moderator asks observer "name one thing that struck you about 's character". Observer goes, for instance: "she's funny". Moderator asks for specifics: "what particular things have you observed about to make you say that?". Alternately, ask moderator to pick up on particular observations ("she has this way of pushing her glasses up her nose") and move in the other direction ("what does that tell you about her, if anything"). After a few minutes, switch roles.

This could be a good icebreaker, or a useful adjunct in a module on social skills.

It seems to me like there's a twenty-questions style rule-based game waiting to be developed here. That is, rather than asking twenty questions about an object ("is it an animal?") you ask them about a concept.

There are a few challenges- the first is that natural divisions about concepts are unfamiliar, they're probably fuzzy instead of binary, and you need fairly deep conceptual knowledge of the thing in question to find it. For example, if the concept is "Athenian direct democracy," and the first question is "does it relate to history?" the answer is yes but that could easily lead down the wrong trail.

So maybe use a guided search progress. Show the students pre-generated questions and answers, and have them come up with both a general rule that will fit the category and an example of that category, for both the section just ruled in and ruled out. For example, we start off with a blank slate, and see the question "Does it relate to history?" with the answer "Yes." I say that the "in" category is close to the rule "any concept associated with history", an example is "the movement of troops during the American Civil War," and the "out" category is "any concept not associated with history", an example is "the 3 by 3 identity matrix."

A second question is asked- "Does it relate to economics?" and the answer is "No." My "in" category is now "non-economic concepts associated with history," an example is "universal suffrage," and my "out" category is "economic history," and an example is "the exchange rates of private currencies in the United States in 1850."

Having both in and out categories seems like it helps develop imagination in multiple directions at once, and have the descriptions building on each other (with the attendant change in concepts and examples) seems like it will simulate an organic conversation better.

I don't know how reliant this method is on a good question-answer trajectory. It seems like it'll make a big difference, but it also seems like decent trajectories should be fairly easy to generate.

Within the domain of building-a-system, paper prototyping/wireframing teaches people to be specific with their ideas. It's only helpful when your ideas are "I want there to be this kind of thing" and then putting it on paper creates the specifics in your head.

I thought of a game for this called "Functionality Telephone"

So you divide people into pairs, and in each pair one person is the Manager, and the other person is the Designer. The Manager recieves a card with some sort of functionality pritned on it, like "Can hold a gram of water without leaking", or "Can have pebbles thrown at it and remain standing", or some other easily testable function. It will also have some taboo words, like (for the water example above) water, waterproof, spill, leak, etc. The Designer will have a bunch of legos or some such.

The game, as you may have guessed, is that the Manager has to give the Designer verbal instructions, without using any of the taboo words, to build something with the legos which will fulfill the functionality. Then the Manager will leave the room, and the Designer has to try to build something which follows the manager's instructions. When the Designers are done, the Managers return to the room and reveal their functionality cards, and then they and the Designer get to watch as their "product" is tested. Fun times are had by all.

The idea here is that the Manager is forced to describe their functionality further down the abstraction ladder than the form they recieve it in, in a lucid and detailed way.

Have you tried playing Corrupt a Wish? No one has mentioned it by name yet.

I once played a mage in a Live Action Role Playing adventure, and cast a spell to summon a water elemental, to fight on the side of the party against the monsters opposing us.

One of the GMs appeared, appropriately clothed, and proceeded to give the fastest lesson ever on being specific. Because, the way he played it, the water elemental would obey commands, but was malicious, and where possible would misinterpret the command, or do things I'd not yet specifically forbidden it to do.

elemental appears, moves to nearest party member and starts hitting her
Me: stop!
elemental stops walking, but carries on attacking with its arms
Me: stop attacking, don't do anything until I tell you to, then do only what I've told you to do
Me: those people over there points are the enemy - go attack them
elemental goes attacks a wall in the indicated area, then returns and stands on top of a party member, not doing anything but immobilising them
etc.

"Open with the concrete example, not the abstract explanation!"

Whether concrete-first or abstract-first works better may well be a cognitive style that varies quite a bit with culture.

Kamentz & Womser-Hacker, 2003, Defining Culture-Bound User Characteristics as a Starting-Point for the Design of Adaptive Learning Systems

Nitpick: "You can say more truths about apple2, like "apple2 is dark red", then you can say that is true of all apples."

The thirteenth word of this sentence should be 'than' rather than 'then'.

During our discussion about Be Specific, majus had a good point:

Be Specific seems like a subskill of a more generic skill: fixing ontology problems. Going down a level helps you discover that you're talking about very different things when you use the word "connection"- if one person is thinking "interpersonal relationships," and the other person is thinking "communication mediated by an online application," they're not going to understand each other very well. Specific examples don't fix the ontological models, though, although they make them easier to fix by bringing the problem to your attention.

Another idea is trying to come up with a game where the players have different mappings from features to words. There might be a blue triangle that I say is a "gleam board" but you say is a "dull spike"- but my shininess words (gleam, dull, etc.) map to colors (blue, red, etc.) whereas your shininess words map to shapes (gleam -> square, dull -> triangle). With several different features and different words, the mappings can be nontrivial, and the challenge would be to figure out the mappings in as few examples as possible.

This works if you have examples that you can point to, but is weird if you try to do it just by words- if I say "gleam board" and think I mean a blue triangle and you hear "gleam board" and think I mean a red square, then unless we draw them out we can't figure out what's going on.

I also learned that explaining a variant of this game was trickier than I thought it would be; I should have just come up with an example to give people, rather than explaining how it worked. Oops. (We split into groups, and so I couldn't generate my group's rule, but I should have explained what kinds of rules were permissible with examples. Yes, I noticed the irony.)

That game appeared to work well (but way better with two people), but we didn't feel it fit Be Specific all that well. The particular variant I used was that the rules fit A_B_C, where the rules varied on what operator fit in the _. At least one of them had to be an equality or inequality, and the other could be an inequality, equality, or one of the four basic operations (+, -, *, /). (That means there are 65 possible rules.)

We also tried out this game, but with the students both guessing the questions and coming up with examples, which I predicted would work poorly and did work poorly. I think that with the teacher generating questions it works better- it seems useful at concept concretization, but not at the "pick concepts which communicate the concept boundaries well" skill.

Given our present teaching technology, this skill seems transmissible from master to apprentice, but not yet replicable by exercises.

Transmission may be a lot of how specificity has to be taught, since it's about comparing what's in your mind that you're trying to communicate to what's actually being received by someone else's mind, and the lesson is clearer if it's something you actually want to communicate-- that is, not an exercise.

Action exercise:

Instructor provides a set of somewhat vague tasks to a few groups or individuals ("Draw me a tire swing" / "Write me a poem about fish" / "Tell me about [yourself | your selves]"). The instructor has a specific interpretation in mind, in advance ("An old tire from a dump truck, tied via blue-painted rope to hang horizontal to the ground, 3 feet from the ground, from a large branch of a willow tree" / "A haiku about salmon and how they are unpleasant when used as projectiles" / "Your favorite hobby, color, flavor of ice cream, but not physical characteristics or past job history"). These tasks are mixed among more specific tasks, whose initial description more precisely matches their intention ("Draw me a series of five overlapping lines that connect end-to-end, and form a five-pointed star").

The groups are set loose to perform their tasks, and are able to ask for further details. The results are scored on proximity to the intended result and perhaps on speed.

Performed in rounds, it would help to pick out when one is speaking too abstractly about something that, on the surface, sounds simple enough (How much detail do you really need to draw a tire swing?!).

Possible Trigger: After a few rounds to get a feel for how it should work, break groups up into sub-groups, where they take turns providing and performing these minor tasks. Have those providing write down their intention up front, and the performer record any questions they ask for clarification, so that it can be compared with results. The intention, clarifying questions, and results can be used to reinforce the desire to be specific up front by scoring based on proximity of result to intention and also based on the number of clarifying questions needed to create the result (with the ideal being having an intention specific enough that fewer clarifying questions are needed to create a result with close proximity).

A narrower set of tasks that would require less setup: Have two sets of colored sticks (straws from a dollar store would suffice) that match each other in color, length and quantity. Group A arranges one set in a particular arrangement, out of sight of group B. Group A provides an initial description of the arrangement in as much detail as they feel is necessary. Group B attempts to recreate the arrangement with their own set. Group A gets a score for the similarity of the result of B to their own arrangement.

Group B is then able to ask clarifying questions, and adjust their arrangement as they seem fit. Upon satisfaction, they are scored based on their result's similarity to group B's initial arrangement. Only after group B has been scored should they be able to see group A's initial arrangement. It would probably be handy to only allow a certain number of clarifying questions, perhaps X questions per round for N rounds of questioning with group B modifying their arrangement as needed between rounds.

Here's a game that might be a little more vivid, and easier to set up, than some of the games that are strictly verbal games. Call it "Tech Support."

There are two players, separated by a screen or barrier so they can't see each other, point, or gesture, only communicate by words.

One player is the Customer. They are trying to figure out how to use or perform some operation on a physical object. (Preferably one they actually don't know how to use!)

The other player is the Expert. They are trying to help the Customer use the object.

A simple musical instrument like a recorder would be a great thing to start with.

"I see two pieces."

"Oh, then you have to assemble it. One piece should have a socket that the other fits into."

"OK, so I put the other piece into the socket?"

"Exactly. Now, one end of the recorder should have a long and narrow slit, the other one should have a circular hole. Do you see that?"

"Yes."

"The part with the narrow slit is called a mouthpiece. Put it into your mouth just a little bit, no farther than the teeth, and close your lips around it."

"Mmm-hmm?"

"Now gently blow"

"Now, there will be a row of holes along the recorder, and on the other side a single hole. Do you see that?"

etc.

You could make the game easier by allowing the Expert to see the Customer but not vice-versa.

Or you could increase the challenge level by requiring the Customer to describe the object to the Expert in the first place. (Obviously some research would be required to find pairs of people, only one of whom knows how to use any given object, if the Expert is not to know what the object is.)

Hold up an image in front of the group, and ask "What do you see?"

Allow the participants to exhaust themselves trying to describe it. Then, start narrowing in. Ask them to describe specific parts of the image.Ask them to detail everything that is red. Everything that seems to be moving. Everything touching the ground. Everything smaller than a human. Ask them to clarify and detail descriptions. The more questions, and the more detailed the questions, the more information they'll be able to extract from the image.

Also, an improv game called Pointing At Things. To begin, the player points at something, anything, and says the object's name. The player then, without missing a beat, must point to another object, naming it as well. The next stage is to point at an object and say the name of thing thing you pointed at previously (Not particularly relevant to the exercise at hand, but still interesting). Finally, the player points at objects and says something completely unrelated. Most people find this extremely difficult, because there aren't any specific prompts from the environment, even ANYTHING could be a prompt.

Continuing with Improv, you could ask for two volunteers, and tell them to improv a scene, right now, without any discussion. Just go. When that fails, tell them to improv a scene about love. Let that go on a bit, and then ask them to make a scene about the love between a child and a parent. The love between a child and a parent becoming strained. The love of between a child and a parent becoming strained because the child is going to university and the parent can't let go. Keep on clarifying and refining the scene until the characters and situation are well defined. The same exercise could be done by asking an individual to tell a story, and then asking them to restart the story, bringing in the elements provided.

I agree with fubarobfusco's refinements — maybe as intermediate/advanced levels, to add after the basic exercise.

i'm involved with a startup. there's so much well-intentioned bullshit and it's the founders who harm themselves more than any user or any investor.

i watched the video, and felt something was wrong, and then i read your article, you dissected it mercilessly, and nailed it precisely.

Easy excercise on the 5-second level: ask the question "as opposed to what?" both loud, and when constructing what you'd like to tell. An easy trigger to remember is qualifiers -they're usually a mark of motivated abstraction-switch.

Medium-level excercise: take one of your life failures at any level, and dismantle it via root cause analysis:

"The business failed." "Why?"

"We failed to nail down the unit economics tightly before scaling up marketing" "why?"

"No one was dedicated to look over all the 6 pieces on the value chain" "why?"

...etc.

Also known as 5-whys, this practice basically drills down a single causality chain via "why" questions to 4-6 levels, untangling human, skill, intention, and other components that lead to the failure. You can verify, whether you were specific enough, by being able to come up with concrete solutions for each of these levels.

Suggested exercise: faced with a non-specific statement, like "our software makes connections between people" or "this person is a slob", come up with a specific story: say, about a particular customer using the software in a particular way, with the result that he gained two friends that he wouldn't have without the software. Adding extra details to the story, like character development, might help to hit the right level of specificity.

There are, of course, a near-infinite number of possible different stories, with different specific elements that aren't part of "making connections" or the "slob" concept. But you can underline the relevant part: "see, the day my boyfriend finished work at 5 pm and I came home from class at 11 pm and the whole kitchen was still full of dirty dishes, that's one instance of slobbishness."

The converse would be to come up with an almost-identical story that has nearly all the same elements, except that it's not an instance of insert-concept-here. You can then compare the two stories: "if my boyfriend came home at 10 pm completely exhausted after a three-day hockey tournament out of town, and I came home from class at 11 pm and the dishes weren't done, that's not an instance of slobbishness because it's understandable, hardly anyone would do the dishes in those circumstances."

This method might cause problems with generalizing from fictional evidence, because of the extraneous details in the stories. But it would probably cater to the way human brains learn best (in my experience), which is by seeing examples and then creating their own internal abstraction, which is much better understood than an abstraction learned top-down, and avoids the pitfalls of memorizing the teacher's password.

I am borrowing an old acting game for this one, and modifying it slightly. I am calling it "which word." The rules are very simple, and this is a fairly fun warm up exercise.

Base: The other person replies with a word that is either a superclass or a subclass of the given word. Using words in a different sense is encouraged.

Options for increased difficulty include

Forced:: Each person must go up twice and then down twice, repeating endlessly

Time Limit:: People must respond with a word of their own in a given number of seconds. Feel free to make it shorter or longer as the group or any individuals need. I recommend starting with three seconds and moving up or down as you have to.

This tends to be a better exercise for noticing how much can be lost in abstraction than for teaching practical application, the best method of which I still believe is people pestering you with questions about what exactly you mean by your statements, but I do think that it is useful.

April 4, edited for clarity.

Hi! I've been lurking for a bit.

It looks to me like one thing that would help would be to get the people you're teaching to get frustrated enough to spontaneously say "Be specific!" on their own. If you can get them to associate a feeling of frustration with certain situations, the emotional reaction could reinforce the cognitive skills they're developing.

Specific scenarios can be based off of actual conversations like the one Eliezer presented in his post. Here's an example, based on Eliezer's example:

Sample Exercise:

The student must decide whether to invest in Company X or MixPanel. They will be investing $1 million of their company's money in one (and only one) of them; their only choice is which. They must be prepared to justify this decision to their boss, or they will be fired (and possibly have to deal with a lawsuit? Try to ramp up consequences).

Have a "boss" be there to help steer the conversation if the student is too happy with something unspecific. For the most part, though, the boss will be silent, and perhaps look unhappy.

The "entrepreneur" (now a teacher, not a student) speaks as though s/he really wants the student to invest in Company X. However, s/he is never specific. The exact language is taken/adapted from the recording of the original exercise.

In order to make sure that this exercise isn't derailed by focusing on money than by the actual difference between the companies' products, the boss can point out that even if the funding and/or number of customers is good now, that is not guaranteed to continue, and that they need information on what exactly makes the two companies' products different, and Company X's product better.

I would provide some scripted language, but there isn't enough continuous dialogue in the post for me to do much more than copy and paste it here.

Exercises like this could be designed from scratch, but if there are enough recordings of actual situations like the one Eliezer used, that could be more efficient, and quite possibly more realistic. Ironically but usefully, this approach to designing specific exercises of this type is made easier by the apparent disconnect between what the student-entrepreneur said and what Paul and Harj were asking. If there's usually a disconnect, then that makes it easier for a script to fit a conversation being directed by a student-investor, and it won't sound much less natural than the original situation.

One issue with this is that you would need to make sure that the scenario in the exercise doesn't match up too closely with the student's own background. In the example that Eliezer posted, for instance, an example involving software solutions would be a bad choice for the entrepreneur-student, because he'd be too used to hearing unspecific explanations and solutions of that particular type, and might well not recognize them as a problem. This requirement would mean that a lot of scenarios would need to be written (in order to ensure enough variety), and that people would need to be matched up with the particular scenario they'd be put in.

What do you think? I could also try to come up with from-scratch scenarios, but my ideas had a tendency to be vague in a way that's different from how people would realistically be vague. This exercise is much more useful if people seem sincerely not-specific, rather than trying to be not-specific, both because it avoids the impression that this is just a game (and therefore possibly not something to be frustrated by), and because realistic scenarios make it easier to recognize these situations in real life.

The following exercise is inspired by the game Taboo.

Pair everyone off, giving one member of the pair a card that tells them something they must describe so that the other person will guess what it is. Include a list of taboo words that prevent them from going up the lattice, forcing them to be more specific in their descriptions.

e.g. New York Yankees Taboo words: “Yankees,” “New York,” “NYC,” “Baseball,” “Sport,” “National Pastime”

The description giver has to be more specific, saying something like “a collection of athletes, including Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez, which strives to beat the opponent by hitting a ball with a bat to score more runs.”

Repeat this as many times as possible, switching roles regularly. A competitive element can be added to the game by offering a prize to the pair that performs best in the exercise. Measuring by the time between the start of the description and a correct guess, with lowest cumulative total over all the rounds winning, encourages an efficient description. Allowing only one guess per clue and measuring by number of guesses encourages thoroughness, though perhaps at the cost of efficiency.

Have you thought about making one of the skills of the week "think with system two instead of system one"?

Empirically, reading anything related to rationality seems to level up some global "rationality skill" parameter in my brain, and I suspect this is because I'm learning to think using system two more and more.

But you can see the basis for the hope that - after a fair amount more work - we'll be able to offer a 2-day course for YCombinator entrepreneurs that eliminates 50% of the overhead from their conversations with Paul Graham.

That sounds like an awesome idea!

They aren't the only incubator in the Valley either.

Can I submit this to Hacker News with an inflammatory headline based on this quote, or is it too soon?

Genie's Folly

A near omnipotent being is offering you a single wish. It is known that the Genie will attempt to implement the wish in a way the results in a net decrease of utility for the wisher, but is bound by any constraints explicitly written into the wish. Write your wish in such a way that the Genie can only implement it in such a way that you have a net increase in utility. Bonus points if you wish for something related to a current problem you are solving; ie, I wish I ran a successful startup with x following properties, which avoids y pitfalls in z ways.

Assuming that you want to keep the exercise somewhat entertaining, modifying a game like balderdash to start with dilbert-esque executive speak and move towards ever more specific levels could provide a fun, easy to understand method to practice moving up and down in levels of specificity.

As to how this would work in practice, have everyone present get into groups of 5-10 (or however many are sitting at a table) and give everyone a key phrase of execu-speak, such as "Energize the end-user experience." Then, everyone writes down a short, but more specific description of what the phrase really means. All of the player-generated statements are read aloud to the table (which will also display how vague the initial phrase was, since everyone should have vastly different answers), and the table votes on which is the best written response, and authors get a point for each vote they receive. Then, the exercise is repeated with the phrase the group selected as the best, for several rounds, or until everyone's responses are approximately the same, showing that a undisputable level of specificity has been reached.

For fun, you could run the exercise in reverse as well, giving a very concrete example and challenging people to go the opposite way, and give a less specific example phrase.

Imagine someone really really hyper and shortsighted is answering the question:

Why is your product better than mix-panel?

OH MY GOD it has BUNNIES on THE FRONT PAGE.

... or tone it down a bit...

Because I can like, put totally awesome stuff like BUNNIES on my version of the app!

... and then maybe take that statement and generalize it a little bit...

Because users can customize their version of the app.

(Replying to old post)

Now read this post and all the comments, and apply them to the idea that it is impossible to explain something well enough to an AI that the AI will do what you meant.

I suspect that making people more rational would be one of the most efficient ways of saving the world. Things like AI might be better, but I really think it's pretty high up there as far as saving the world goes.

My reason for thinking that it'd make the world a much better place, is because making people more rational would lead to lots of better decisions and actions, which when aggregated, consist of a huge change. I've never really been able to articulate this well, but I think that this article illustrates part of what I mean: if people were more specific, they'd make better business decisions. Can't you imagine how all of these better business decisions would have a huge impact on the world? And can't you imagine how all of the other types of better decisions would also have a huge impact on the world?

I have 2 ideas about how to make people more rational. I'd love to get some feedback on them!
1) Popularize a medium for rational discussion. I'm not sure how I'd popularize it, but I suspect that it's doable.
2) Create a better system of education and make rationality a major part of the curriculum. 2a) I think that I could make this better system, prove that it's better by letting people use it for free and showing results, and that this will draw interest to it. 2b) I don't think there would be too much opposition to teaching rationality as part of the curriculum. 2c) I think learning about rationality can be fun. I think the material on Less Wrong could be made more accessible to the general population too.

(I recognize that 2) is a huge claim, and I suspect that I didn't think everything out properly, but I still think it has lots of promise.)

Mark Cuban asking Skip Bayless to Be Specific

it seems that in addition to being terrible forecasters of winning teams, many sports commentators don't even understand the game they are talking about (or it might just be skip, but mark seems to think it's a general problem)

Thought of another possibility - recipes. Person A tells Person B how to make something (possibly prompted by some pictures?), Person B follows the instructions, asks for clarification as needed, and the result is something that Person A will end up eating so they have a vested interest in some of the details of getting it right. I'm thinking about this because right now I'm making one of my personal recipes - cashew-wasabi chocolate truffles. They're vegan, gluten free, peanut free, mouth-melty, rich rather than over-sweet, and the wasabi is not hot so much as a nice flavour with a subtle feel. I've never made them from a written down recipe, I just know how to make them. But as you can imagine, if I were to try and tell someone how to do it there would be a lot of rather crucial detail I'd need to impart if they were to be edible. Not just for the wasabi, though that's rather important - chocolate itself has a complicated crystalline structure with several polymorphs and the combinations of stirring and heating that you use make a verifiable difference to the look, mouthfeel and flavour of chocolate. You want the right one, or at least one of the good ones. Not sure how good an exercise this could be made into for workshops, but recipes make for a good test of whether your instructions are specific in the right way.

exercise for specificness

Get people to, as crudely as they like, draw/represent something's definition (not sure if that is the right word) e.g. for "I ate" {I food-->mouth. Swallow} The arrow might have a fork and knife drawn next to it and/or a hand or just the word "transport" or "put in." Food could just be the word food, or it could be a drawing of a specific food, or a few specific foods, or a a few properties of (your) food (concept) e.g. "will not choke you or can be chewed (without damage to teeth) so as to not choke you" "non poisonous" "can be digested for energy/nutrition or whatever food does."

The idea is that for each part of the definition you do the whole thing again but in less detail, down to the level of detail of just using a word. It might also be a good idea as part of an exercise on recognising that other people organise things differently in their heads to have people look at each others' ones, or make people do another definition with a different structure. e.g. instead of food-->mouth. PUT food IN mouth, or experiment with different definitions that fit the same word.

One possible exercise:

Have an instructor ask the students to direct the instructor in a certain task (tie a shoe, open a wine bottle, anything). Instructor does what the students say in a very literal manner, perhaps intentionally misunderstanding vague terms.

The idea, of course, that the students will get told, by instructors or each other, again and again to be specific, but they'll get rapid feedback about what works and what doesn't.

This is adaptable to other scenarios: Students in pairs write directions for each other for some task, swap papers and then get to play the intentionally obtuse role (which can be fun). This brings out a competitive aspect, where students can win by being the most clear.

search for the historical causes of your thoughts, rather than their justifications.

Is there a standard name or LW article on the subject? I first stumbled upon the importance of that skill here, on this site, and I wish I knew more about it than just that one personal anecdote.

Exercise I:

Let the students introduce their favorite novel (or movie) to the group and let them explain why this novel is so great and what sets it apart from similar books.

Exercise II:

Give the students examples of texts that fail to be specific, from different Areas ( Science Articles, Wikipedia entries, amazon customer reviews, interviews with experts or politicians , LW discussions, user manuals, textbooks, ... ). Let the students analyse what exactly the problem of the given example is and let them write down an improved version.

Is the 'be specific' even valid advice for those businessmen? They are just trying to raise some quick start capital, without having any well defined idea what so ever; that is why they are not being specific. Perhaps 'don't fool yourself' would be a good advice if they don't themselves realize that this is what they are doing and chances of business success are near zero.

Over from HPMOR, and have been thinking about teaching exercises. Disclaimer: I haven't read all the comments, and apologize for any redundancy.

The two sources for exercises that I thought of first were CBT treatment for depression--as you mention briefly in the post, it turns out that overgeneralization about oneself is a big component of the disorder--and writing classes. Looking up the relevant CBT training suggests that it's actually quite similar to many writing exercises, which suggests that it also ought to generalize to your training. Unless that's overgeneralization. (Sorry.)

From Watkins, Baeyens, & Read (2009):

"In the initial training session, participants first worked through a 10-min guided relaxation procedure in which they practiced tensing and relaxing various parts of their body while focusing on their breathing and bodily sensations, designed to focus attention down to direct sensory experience and to improve concentration for the later exercises. Next, for the remaining 60–80 min of the training session, participants practiced the key elements of concrete processing via direct instructions, guiding questions, and using mental imagery: (a) focusing on sensory details in the moment (e.g., questions asking participants to focus on and describe what they could see, hear, feel); (b) noticing what is specific and distinctive about the context of the event; (c) noticing the process of how events and behaviors unfold (e.g., “imagine a movie of how events unfolded”); (d) generating detailed step-by-step plans of how to proceed from here. Guided by the experimenter, each participant practiced all these elements of concrete processing for six standardized scenarios (three negative, e.g., not being invited to socialize after work by colleagues; three positive, e.g., making new friends at a party) and for three personally relevant, self-generated, specific autobiographic memories (defined as memories that took place at a particular place and time and lasted less than 1 day; one negative, one positive, and one memory of an occasion when the participant was highly immersed and absorbed in the process of an activity because such “flow” experiences are characterized by concrete processing focused on the specific details of the task; Csikszentmihalyi, 2002).

...Thus, CNT included multiple elements all designed to encourage more concrete processing: sensory focus, mental imagery, recall of specific autobiographical memories, and explicit instructions to focus attention on experience, on distinctive details, on how events unfold, and on how to proceed (focus on “how” is a key element in theoretical conceptualizations of concrete processing; Trope & Liberman, 2003; Vallacher & Wegner, 1987)"

If I were adapting this for entrepreneurs with healthy egos, I would worry less about the valence of the scenarios and memories, and more about the content. For the standardized scenarios, I might tailor user cases based on the purpose of their start-up ("a single 43-year old man is sitting at his computer and has just encountered an ad for your matchmaking service; what does he do next?"). For the memories, I might ask for episodes related to the development of the business--tell me about the conversation in which you came up with this idea, tell me about a problem that almost derailed the whole thing... I would keep the flow memory--that seems like a great and still relevant idea. Focus on getting them to come up with clear sensory details--once you're imagining something that vividly, it's very difficult to describe a social network at a level where it could be both Facebook and Twitter.

An exercise could be: one person thinks of a task that the class has to do, and in order to do the task the students need specific information. The person who made up the task starts by giving information as general as possible. Each time someone asks him to be more specific for a specific detail, he does that, until the things he says are specific enough to give the students the details they need to know in order to complete the task. ETA: i'll Be Specific later :D

After sleeping on this and thinking about it all day at work, I made a game. I'd like to make the wording more ritualistic and provide descriptive play examples eventually, but here's a good untested first draft: (Note: I did not read any comments before posting this.)

ETA: I will be editing the rules to remove/redirect perverse incentives and add classroom/tournament formats and examples, but may not always have this post completely up to date. The most recent version can always be found here.

The Un-Naming for 2-6 players

Materials: A deck of words. (stack of notecards, dictionary/internet, pen) Tokens (poker chips, m&m’s, pennies, etc.) A timer (egg-timer, mini-hourglass, mobile phone app., etc.) A lighter and ashtray (see optional rules)

Rule 1: Unless stated otherwise within the rules, players must never read any of The Un-Naming’s cards aloud, sign their translation or interpretation via gesture, or reveal them face up to each other (cards should be embossed with braille when used with visually handicapped players).

Rule 2: Choose a player to go first by any arbitrary means available. This person will henceforth be referred to as the Describer.

Rule 3: Choose a method of passing the Describer position from one player to the next, such that all players hold the position an equal number of times during this session of the game.

Rule 4: The Un-Naming has at least four phases: Description, Abstraction, Concretization, and Passing The Torch. A single repetition of each phase will henceforth be referred to as a Cycle.

Rule 5: Choose a maximum time for each Cycle to last. At the beginning of each Cycle the Describer will set a timer for this amount.

Rule 6: If the timer goes off before a Cycle is complete, the players must finish the phase they’re on and then move directly to Passing The Torch.

Rule 7: The Describer may tell a player to “Stop,” move on to another player, then return immediately to the previous player if that player hesitates too long before providing a description.

Rule 8: Choose a maximum number of Cycles to complete this session, after which tokens will be counted and the game will end. This number must be a multiple of the number of players.

Rule 9: Play starts with the Description phase. Follow all phase instructions until the game ends.

Optional Rule 10: The players with the fewest tokens after all cycles have completed lose their names for the next hour (or the rest of the social event) and cannot be referred to by them.

Description:

1. The Describer starts the Cycle timer, draws a word from the deck, then describes one usage of the word without uttering it or any direct synonyms (see Rationalist Taboo), in that order.
2. Proceed to Abstraction or Concretization.
3. This phase may only occur once per Cycle.

Abstraction:

1. The Describer points to another player and utters the word “Abstract.”
2. The designated player describes a category of which e believes the previously described usage to be an example without uttering the words for, or any direct synonyms of, either.
3. If the Describer believes the described category matches the usage e described, e hands the designated player a Token.
4. Repeat 1-3 until all players other than the Describer have abstracted.
5. Proceed to Concretization or Ascension.
6. This phase may only occur once per Cycle.

Concretization:

1. The Describer points to another player and utters the word “Concretize.”
2. The designated player describes what e believes to be an example of the previously described usage without uttering the words for, or any direct synonyms of, either.
3. If the Describer believes the described example matches the usage e described, e hands the designated player a Token.
4. Repeat 1-3 until all players other than the Describer have concretized.
5. Proceed to Abstraction or Descension.
6. This phase may only occur once per Cycle.

Passing the Torch

1. Once Description, Abstraction and Concretization have occurred, the Describer hands the Cycle timer to the next player in line for the position, but keeps the Word card on his person for tallying purposes.
2. The new Describer starts the next Cycle. Optional: The Describer burns his Word in effigy before passing the lighter, ashtray and Cycle timer along.

Ascension: Optional Phase (replaces Passing The Torch and Description)

1. If all other players are handed tokens during the Abstraction phase, the Describer may declare “Ascension!”
2. The Describer chooses another player’s category description to be a description of the next Word and that player becomes the Describer as though Passing The Torch.
3. The new Describer writes the new Word on a notecard, re-starts the Cycle timer and repeats the category description. This counts as a new Cycle.
4. Proceed to Abstraction.

Descension: Optional Phase (replaces Passing The Torch and Description)

1. If all other players are handed tokens during the Concretization phase, the Describer may declare “Descension!”
2. The Describer chooses another player’s example description to be a description of the next Word and that player becomes the Describer as though Passing The Torch.
3. The new Describer writes the new Word on a notecard, re-starts the Cycle timer and repeats the Example description. This counts as a new Cycle
4. Proceed to Concretization.

I think the most difficult part of implementing this will be finding words that will place the group near the middle of the abstraction-concreteness lattice. Primary colors and emotional states should work well as a starting point.

A simple exercise would be a guessing game. Give each member a concept to describe to the rest (without using equivalent words). The rest of the group must try and guess what it could be. But! They must try to break any consensus that starts to form with different ideas that fits the provided description. When the provided concept and only the provided concept remains the exercise is passed.

Success is measured by how succinct and short the successful description of the concept is.

Edit to add an example and a little explanation:

Someone must describe the concept "Red" as in the original post. He tells the others it's a color, they say Green, Brown, Yellow, Red, so he must find more or better ways to describe it. So he says forget what I said, it's what painted on a firetruck, so they say acrylic color, firefighters symbol, the color red, so again, he must redefine his concept. So he says it's the predominant color of firetrucks or he says it's the color of the uppermost light of a traffic light, or he can say it's the color we see when exposed to light in the 700nm length. The faster he reaches a definition that everyone understands and can't find counterexamples for the better his definition is.

This exercise focuses on the core issue here: good communication and concise definition.

I think there is an area where the information typically given is vague or confusing, and the ability to be specific can come in handy: for presenting personal information and preferences. The provider of the information is of course considerably familiar with the subject, so it often happens that ve doesn’t realizes that what ve actually says is unclear or easily misunderstood ( For example, saying that you are a mathematician evokes, in a surprisingly high number of people, images of large numbers and complex but mechanical calculations ) or overly general ( “I enjoy reading speculative fiction” ).

So I think it may be instructive and enjoyable to do the following simple activity:

1)

• Participants are grouped in pairs.

• One person in each pair is designated as the initial questioner, and is given a list of personal questions to ask (for example, a list could include: studies, current projects/occupation, favourite musical genre, hobbies, etc.). Or perhaps the list is only a suggestion and the participants can choose the questions they want as they go.

2)

• The questioner asks the first question to vis partner.

• The interviewee tries to answer the question in a precise way. The aim here is not excruciating detail; the aim is that the mental representation that the answer evokes doesn´t differ too much from reality.

• The questioner asks for clarifications until ve deems the answer satisfactory, either sincerely or pretending not to be knowledgeable in a certain area/certain terminology that would have made the answering easy (also, see "comments", below).

• The sub-steps in 2 are repeated, selecting a new question until the list is exhausted.

3) Step 2 is repeated, exchanging the roles of the two persons in each pair.

Examples:

X and Y are paired together. X is the questioner.

…

X- What kind of music do you like?

Y- I think I prefer classical music.

X- Could you be more specific? I think that term encompasses music from over ten centuries.

Y- Well, the composers whose works I enjoy are…

…

X- Could you explain me what your current occupation is?

Y- I am an university instructor for basic linear algebra. In front of a class of between 30 and 90 students, I write in the blackboard most of the new concepts, definitions theorems, examples, and so forth, while also expounding orally and answering questions that may come up to the students. At the beginning of each semester, I receive a schedule which explains which topics should be presented on which days; I have certain liberty in determining the exact structure of each class, but the general shape is already given.

X- What do you mean with “basic linear algebra”?

Y- The class is directed to starting students of Economics, so the contents we see are not of too high abstraction. I mainly teach about the intersection of lines and planes in 3 dimensions, generalizations of this to higher dimensions, systems of linear inequalities, and some operation on matrices.

…

Comments: I think the main benefit of this exercise is that the questions don´t assume any specific knowledge, so whatever difficulty appears in the precise answering (save for poor introspection capabilities) probably relates to the skill being trained.

If the level of difficulty of these exercises were too easy, it could be increased by pretending something particular about the knowledge base of the questioner: for example, let’s say that ve is a typical (but yes, somehow English-speaking) citizen of the Roman Empire.

What about "Guess Who?" game? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_Who%3F

I play it with my son and it seems like a perfect exercise in being specific. You need to be very observant and ask very precise questions. The competitive element increases its attractiveness. The set of cartoons/data to guess from is typically structured as lattice - there are many differently overlapping categories with subtly different frequencies - you quickly learn to exploit those to your advantage.

And of course you may experiment with game data. Replace cartoons with concepts. Or use artificially generated graphical shapes with different properties, e.g. number of vertexes, color, convex/concave etc. Or just spend few bucks and find/buy one of the replacement sheets on the web.

Another proposed exercise: Split up the group into pairs, and give each pair two minutes to identify some issue or premise on which they disagree (it could be "is there a God?" or "is banning cigarettes a good idea?" or "are kittens cute?" or "should people be vegetarians?"— it could be anything.) Once the issue is identified, each participant gets five minutes to prove (to his/her partner) the OPPOSITE of his/her own actual belief (e.g., if you think there is a God, and your partner doesn't, you have to make a case for atheism, and then your partner has to make a case for theism) — after which, each person has to rate his/her partner on the following: "How close did my partner come to representing, in detail, MY OWN actual views?" (For instance: if you were the theist arguing atheism, you have to rate how accurately/specifically your partner — the atheism arguing theism — represented your own actual position as a theist.)

Exercise/technique: Ask Jeeves v. 2000.0 (adapted from the "Clairvoyant" exercise in "An Elementary Approach to Thinking Under Uncertainty")

Imagine that you have on your smartphone a nearly perfect version of the now-defunct Ask Jeeves program. This program can answer literally any question you might ask of it. In fact, it is so advanced that it can answer questions about things that have not happened yet! However, the program has one flaw, which is that it has no ability whatsoever to interpret or infer the meaning behind what you are asking.

Thus, if you ask Jeeves "Will product X be a success?" it will be unable to answer. If, on the other hand, you ask it "How many people will buy product X?" it will return a swift and precise response."

Similarly, "Will my trip to Bali be safe?" is insufficiently precise, while "Will I avoid all of the following:

• suffering any injury or sickness requiring medical expenses greater than 20 dollars
• being threatened by death or severe bodily injury
• being detained for more than six hours
• being killed

on my trip to Bali, and if not which of the above will be violated?" is much better-specified, though it might not line up precisely with your personal definition of what is and isn't safe!

A good rule of thumb is that most questions that could not be asked to this advanced version of the Jeeves program are insufficiently specific. Before asking a question, ask yourself whether you could ask Jeeves the same thing; if you can't, consider being more specific.

(Fun bonus exercise-- "How many people will buy product X" may be insufficiently specific. Can you guess why? Answer is rot13d below:

"Ubj znal crbcyr jvyy ohl cebqhpg K" unf guerr xrl synjf:

Svefg, gurer vfa'g n gvzrsenzr fcrpvsvrq, juvpu jbhyq boivbhfyl or snveyl eryrinag gb gur fvghngvba.

Frpbaq, vg jbhyq yvxryl or zber hfrshy gb xabj ubj znal gbgny pbcvrf ner fbyq engure guna ubj znal crbcyr ohl gur cebqhpg-- vs bayl bar crefba ohlf gur cebqhpg, ohg gung crefba vf n pbecbengr ohlre jub chepunfrf 10,000 pbcvrf, gung ercerfragf na beqre bs zntavghqr zber fnyrf guna n gubhfnaq crbcyr rnpu ohlvat bar pbcl rnpu.

Svanyyl, gur cevpr urer vf yvxryl irel eryrinag gb ubj znal crbcyr chepunfr gur cebqhpg.

Gurersber, n zber hfrshy irefvba bs gur dhrfgvba jbhyq or "Ubj znal pbcvrf bs cebqhpg K jvyy jr fryy ng cevpr L qhevat gvzr vagreiny M?".)

Hacker News discussion about this

It seems natural to evaluate existential quantifiers using model-checking and any universally quantified statement can be transformed into an existentially quantified statement by applying double-negation and moving the inner negation through the quantifier.

Example:

forall x. p(x)

not (not (forall x. p(x)))

not (exists x. (not p(x)))

But I can't think of how to apply this to Yudkowsky's example so it's probably useless for teaching :P

I imagine an exercise with paper which contains for example many shapes (triangles, squares, circles) of different sizes and colors. There is a statement, for example "All circles are red." The task is to say whether the sentence is true or false, and in case it is false, it should be improved. For example "All small circles are red." There should be always some rule, but it should be usually a little more specific than the original statement.

I am not sure if this is a good idea, but this could also be done as a computer program with some expression building tool. User would see a set of items on the top of the screen, and in the bottom part they would construct an expression to achieve some goal. For example the goal is to write an expression that specifies all red objects, and it must be built from predicates "triangle", "square", "circle", "big", "small" and operators "and", "or", "not". When user writes for example "red and small", all red and small objects are underlined, so the user interactively sees the difference between their result and the required solution.

"Hire an author to write a novel that..."

Enh, depending on what comes after the "that"...

I strongly suggest you use switch side debating as an advanced game or lesson or whatever. It's incredibly helpful. Choose a topic that there won't be prior opinions on, like the actions of a fictional dictator from history against an external threat, or something. Putting people into small teams as opposed to making them debate individually would be best, I think.

So you make them debate the topic on one day. Then the next day, you make them debate it again. Except on that day, they argue for the other side of the topic. I suggest using multiple small teams and having a series of short debates so that all teams face each other round robin style. Give a small reward to whatever team gets the best overall record.

You'll need judges for this.

This is a great way to make people rethink positions that they've grown close to.

Charades! If Paul Graham's entrepreneur had to explain the website in charades, I bet he'd be acting out a use case (at least, that's the first thing I'd think of). Outlaw all that "first word, 2 syllables..." junk and have people play charades. It's really hard to be abstract without words.