For-Profit Rationality Training

"Life coaching" is a proven business, and its growing popularity suggests the potential for a "decision coaching" service; in fact, helping people with big decisions is one of the things a life coach does.

I was going to call bullshit on this statement, but then I looked it up. Apparently the life/business coaching industry makes $2.4 billion/yr., For comparison, the porn industry makes $2.6-3.9 billion/yr.

Yesterday, I started playing around with the idea of doing rationality business consulting.

My basic idea is as follows. Use my contacts to get in touch with a number of suitable companies and offer to hold them a free presentation on rationality ideas. If they agree, hold a lecture maybe an hour long, packed full of interesting and obviously valuable concepts thrown at the audience at a rapid pace. At the end, thank them for their time, take any questions they might have, and mention that I also have an extended lecture series prepared that covers these topics in more detail, and many others besides. Offer to hold those lectures in exchange for a sizable sum, or if they're not interested, ask them if they could at least recommend me to somebody who might be.

If I just have a good enough presentation, act confident enough and price myself appropriately, it seems to me like this should result in sales pretty quickly. And presentations are one of the few areas where I don't have issues with confidence - if I've practiced a lecture enough and know the content, I get more excited than nervous.

I've scribbled down some random ideas on content to be included in my opening lecture: this is still a very rough draft, with ideas chosen more or less at random as they came to mind, but feedback is more than welcome.

How to act and decide better

• Inside/outside views
• Checklists
• The conjunction fallacy

How to communicate better

• Take inferential distances into account
• The illusion of transparency

• Explainers shoot high, aim low

• Be specific

• Hold off proposing solutions
• If a debate is becoming confrontational, adopt a rule saying that each debate partner must start their comment by briefly recapping what the other person just said. This helps to both make sure that they understood correctly, and to convince the other that their point was heard and understood. Studies show that this reduces the amount of time debates on average take.

How to improve company atmosphere: status games and offense

• Humans constantly play various status games with each other, often more or less unconsciously. Becoming more aware of the status games helps take them less seriously. Impro has a lot of status game exercises that can be used to make people more aware of them.
• A major reason for people taking offense is that they think their status is being lowered. If everyone understands this, it can help defuse conflicts as it becomes easier to make explicit the reasons for being offended. "I experienced X as offensive because I felt that it implied I wasn't good at Y, and that I therefore wasn't of much value." "Oh, I didn't mean that."
• The ABC of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Activating Event, Belief, Consequence. A boss asks "have you done the task I gave you, the deadline is approaching?", the subordinate believes this to mean that the boss doesn't trust his ability to get things done without micromanagement, gets depressed. CBT attacks the "Belief" stage and encourages one to ask whether the beliefs are reasonable.
• Verbal self-defense: ways to deflect hostile statements so that they don't escalate into conflict.
• Various cultural differences that may lead to conflict, e.g. askers versus guessers.

Other

• Signaling and the damage done by excess signaling; The Curse of Identity

Other, completely unorganized

(This section was written when I just started coming up with ideas one after another and stopped trying to sort them or make them very comprehensible to outsiders, so don't worry if you don't understand all of the points.)

• 59 seconds
• Robbins: coloring memories, other things
• Radical Honesty? Perhaps something a bit less radical...
• commitment effects
• • beware identity
• • Goertzel's quote on identity
• • self-signaling
• • success spirals
• • Mindset
• PJ Eby on Akrasia, lukeprog on procrastination, procrastination book
• sick relationships
• life hacker?
• “think of the opposite”; bayes' theorem in everyday life
• what intelligence tests miss
• what data generated that thought
• that one paper on an ideal working environment
• flow
• psychology of happiness and well-being; the 3-1 rule
• pjeby: instant motivation
• prediction markets?
• humans are not automatically strategic
• relating to the curse of identity: analyzing the concrete consequences of decisions, the effect of social norms on decision-making (school example), charity examples, scope neglect, political ignorance
• • expected utility
• value of information? decision analysis sequence?
• bureaucracies and avoiding responsibility
• status quo bias; groupthink; review meetings; devil's advocates
• fundamental attribution error & benefit of doubt
• taboo your words
• the content hilighted in the comments for the various "what's been the most useful LW insight to you" posts

You'll notice that I also have a lot of content that's not strictly rationality-related. That's intentional: I figure that having useful insights on a wide variety of topics will seem more impressive and increase the likelihood that at least something in there does catch one's interest. (Also, I wrote in more detail about the non-rationality stuff because for the rationality stuff I could just link to the LW posts.)

I think I may have a valuable point or two to contribute because of some of my life experience, e.g.:

• I had a business as a Life Coach (in California in the 90's).

• I used to be a fairly avid consumer of various flavors of coaching, motivational programs, self help etc. (I still am, I've just gotten MUCH more discriminating -- that's why I'm here.)

My primary reactions to your post are:

• There is almost certainly a market for the service you describe. Your big problem, especially at first, is going to be sales and marketing. I'm sure this much is obvious, but you probably ought to ask yourself if you have an appetite for doing full-time sales and marketing, because that is your future for the next 5+ years if you start this business and want it to be successful. This leads me to the next point:

• Be careful what you wish for. I often think about going back into some kind of coaching business, but when I do, I remember what it was like, and that gives me pause. I didn't like having to constantly market myself as a coach. There were a number of things that felt unsavory about it, including the fact that all my friends were now prospective clients. Surprisingly, I also really dreaded my coaching calls, even though there was frequently a nice feeling I had helped someone AFTER the call. My point is that it's hard to predict whether you are going to enjoy being a practicing coach or not, and I judge that it probably takes a very specific kind of personality type -- an aggressively extroverted sales-oriented type -- to really enjoy that business. This should be an important element of your consideration IMO.

• Another judgment I have is that coaching is hard, and it's hard in subtle ways. People are not very amenable to change, even if they THINK they are amenable. The behaviors that would make an actual difference to our lives are not as accessible to conscious tinkering as we expect them to be. As you contemplate starting this business, you may also want to ponder if you will be frustrated when you observe people not changing as much as you'd like them to change, in response to your coaching. Letting go of the results is a subtle and important skill IMO.

All of this is not meant to discourage you -- I think you have an interesting idea for a business, and I encourage you to pursue it IF none of the above puts you off. Just pay close attention and try to determine how much fun, or not, this is actually going to be. I think you should only do it if it is actually fun. It was not fun for me.

Glad you're trying this. You may even beat SI's spin-off "Rationality Org" out the door. Inevitably, we'll be trying different things, so I'm sure we'll have lessons to share with each other about what does and doesn't work.

it seems to say more about the effectiveness of local meetups vs. just reading about rationality.

Or the importance of interaction, especially live interaction, when it comes to changing your thought processes.

In particular, there's quite a bit of value to getting real-time feedback about the thought processes you're actually using at a given moment of time. By default, we tend to respond to descriptions of dysfunctional thought patterns by projecting them onto other people, and are not necessarily able to recognize the same pattern in ourselves... particularly if it's an intuitive, system 1 type of process.

Sometimes, I think that of the services I provide as a mind hacking instructor, the most critical one is providing real-time distinctions between a student's observations and confabulations. (Critical in the sense that without that basic distinction, the student will not be able to develop enough internal observation to be able to reliably apply any other change techniques on their own.)

Rationality is a lot like grammar: it's good to have for any job, everybody learns most of what they'll ever learn as kids, and you lose it when you drink. The main difference is that people don't think of it as something to be learned.

As money-making operations go, there are quite a few that teach rationality without calling it that. QA and troubleshooting are both huge IT sectors that are entirely about applied rationality, and if you can prove that your rationality program benefits those organizations, you will get work from IT managers.

I think one of the worries I would have is - is this a cult, feel-good motivational-speaker sort of thing, a self-propagating meme predator attacking me?

Possibly an attempt to align your financial incentives with the students would help - for example, by offering some sort of money back if not satisfied after such-and-so period of time, or accepting student labor as payment (while still paying them at their current rate - that is, hiring them out at a higher, post-training rate).

I also think that because this is an information good (videos, software, text), you might not be able to charge what you initially might expect to be able to charge. Possibly generating content continuously, giving away a fraction of it (the oldest fraction) and charging for the cutting-edge updates could work.

If I knew precisely what I wanted from rationality training, I wouldn’t need to buy the knowledge, would I?

What would I want from it? Immediate results that aren't tied to an incredibly specific problem. I want procedures to define the problem clearly, to map the potential answer space, and then to organise that answer space with evidence. And I want to be able to go home and do at least one of those three things better than I could when I got there.

What do I think would be effective? Games. Why? It lets you test what you’re doing. You’re talking about making good decisions, and those decisions should make you win in a game that works with the rules that the heuristic concerns just as they would anywhere else. Even more helpfully, you can compare the results of your game to those of people who play differently.

Gambling? Probability and evidence. Role-playing? Planning. You’d probably want role-playing games based on the real world with a high rate of iteration that restart every time one side loses. Switch up the roles whenever one side starts to win consistently. Get people used to generating a load of options, losing them and chucking them away in favour of another set. Pick a general task - i.e. don’t invest too much in the background waffle or constrain the options too much....

Besides, games are fun and people learn better when they’re having fun than when they’re bored senseless.

Point out at the end how you can tie the same heuristics you’re teaching to win in the games can be applied to make money, or to achieve some other concrete goal that people are likely to want. Which should be a fairly easy step, if you actually have something to sell.

What would I pay for it? At the moment, nothing. I've seen no evidence you're better at winning than me. Ideally you should have something you can show being used for a task, even if I can’t see precisely how it works, before you try and sell it to me. Otherwise I’ll be very suspicious that you’re just trying to sell a fashionable style of thought that gives people The Right Answer.

49% (99 of 100) of the respondents from India.

Typo?

I wouldn't necessarily pay for an online course, partly because I'm "cheap" and more reluctant to pay for a lot of things than most people, and partly because my life is going rather smoothly right now and I'm not sure how much added benefit I could get out of a $75 course. That being said, I pay significantly more than $75 to learn martial arts, for the main reason that it's fun and thus makes my life better. So if I had good evidence that your rationality course was fun, that might sway me. And when I translate $75 into my current hourly wage, it does seem that the good (and fun) obtained from such a course is worth as much as a shortish day at work.

Anyway best of luck!

I'd be extremely skeptical about the results, so I'd probably not pay. I don't even see how exactly such course could generate evidence of it working.

I think the most important thing about a rationality training service is operationalizing what is meant by rationality.

What exact services would the rationality training service provide? Would students have beliefs that match reality better? Be less prone to cognitive biases? Tend to make decisions that promote greater utility (for themselves or others)? How would you test this? Martial arts dojos tend to (putting it crudely) make their students better at hitting things than they were before; that's a lot easier to objectively measure than making students better at thinking than they were before.

I personally would not pay for a rationality training service unless it provided clear, non-anecdotal evidence that the average person received some benefit. I'd be particularly concerned about whether the service actually taught people to think more clearly, or simply inculcated them with the views of the people running the service.

Please forgive me if this post doesn't belong here. I want to start a non-profit teaching rationality to a broad audience, starting off as one-day workshops on the weekends. Initially as a hobby, and then see where it goes from there. Can anyone give me practical advice, insofar as market research (nonprofits don't tend to post their annual reports), advertising (how do I make this look good to the average guy who says, "There's nothing wrong with the way I think/I'm not stupid/My life is fine the way it is") and how to present Bayes' Theorem to people who are allergic to anything resembling math? I really want to help do something about the state of intellect of humanity. Again, I apologize if this post doesn't belong here/is redundant.

I think it's a great idea, and I would pay for a live course but probably not pay for online training.

Are you in touch with anyone involved in planning the SIAI spinoff "Rationality Org"? There might be some opportunities for cross-fertilization.

So, I presented a five-minute speech to my community college class on the base rate fallacy. Unfortunately, it went over their heads at about the same apparent distance as airplanes usually pass over my own. Here is the text of the speech, if anyone would be so kind as to offer criticism.

"I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass...and I'm all out of bubblegum". You might remember this line from the 80s sci fi movie They Live. In the movie, society is controlled by aliens who are using up Earth's natural resources. They're in politics, they're in law enforcement, and they look just like humans. Then the protagonist finds a box of sunglasses that let him see who's an alien and who isn't. For some reason they also make everything black and white. It's a crappy movie, but the point is, there are similar situations in real life, where we're trying to figure out who has a certain disease, or who the criminal is, or whatever the case may be. Let's consider a situation where we're trying to figure out who has breast cancer.

Let's pretend you have a friend who's going to the doctor to get a breast cancer screening. The doctor tells your friend that in her age group, 40-50, about 1% of women have breast cancer. He tells her that mammograms are 80% accurate, with a 10% false positive rate. After the screening, your friend is told that she tested positive. Now, how likely do you think it is that your friend has breast cancer? Congratulations, you just committed the base rate fallacy. Let's take another look at this question, which was originally published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Think about 1000 women just like your friend, visiting a clinic to get screened for breast cancer. We already know that on average 1% of those women will have cancer. So 10 women will actually have cancer. This means that 990 women will not have cancer. Since the test is 80% accurate, 8 of the women with cancer will test positive. But since there is a 10% false positive rate, 99 women without cancer will also test positive. So out of 107 women who test positive, only 8 actually have breast cancer. That's about a 7.5% probability that she has cancer. Would it change the way you view your test results, or the advice you might give to a loved one, if you knew how base rates affected the accuracy of the test?

When it comes to reducing uncertainty, one thing we can do is to get a second, and even a third test, independently conducted. Sometimes, however, that's simply not possible. Let's consider another situation. Imagine someone installed a camera in your city to catch terrorists. Just for the sake of the argument, let's say that we know that there are 100 terrorists among the 1 million inhabitants of your city. If the camera sees a terrorist, it will ring a bell 99% of the time. Its false positive rate is only 1%. Sounds great, right? Suppose the city's entire 1 million inhabitants pass before the camera. It will ring the bell 99 times for the 100 terrorists – and 9,999 times for the rest of the citizens. Now what? Do you stick upwards of 10,000 people in a holding cell and keep running them past the camera? Do you spend the time and money to criminally investigate 10,000 people? Is imprisoning 10,000 people to catch 100 acceptable in terms of human rights and security? What does this problem sound like?

If you said it sounds a lot like the TSA, you're right. Bruce Schneier, a security technologist, estimates we can expect to find about 1 terrorist among 8 million people passing through airports. This low base rate already makes it clear that the TSA will be relegated to screening false positives nearly all the time. It's hard to be certain. But, as one online journalist pointed out, the TSA's success rate – far from being 99% as in our example above – is close enough to 0 to be negligible. They've found lots of contraband, including weapons and even explosives. But I wasn't able to find a single instance that was linked to a terrorist or terrorist group. We do know that terrorists are still flying. They are occasionally caught – by other agencies – prior to flying. Setting aside the questionable competency or practicality of TSA procedures, and based purely on numbers alone, do you think the TSA is worth a reported 8 billion dollars and 90 million hours of waiting in line per year?

Keep in mind that base rates tend to have little to no effect if they are very high. Since about 50% of women who take pregnancy tests are already pregnant, pregnancy tests are accurate enough to be generally reliable. Of course, everyone knows that they are also not 100% accurate. A good way to think about probabilities and percentages is to use natural frequencies. Just as I did in the situations I talked about tonight, think about a group of people in terms of tens or hundreds out of thousands or millions. That will help you understand what all the numbers really mean.

I hope that you leave tonight with a good understanding of what base rates are and how they affect how we think about problems. Both problems that affect us personally, and societal issues that affect all of us.