Rationality Boot Camp

Postscript first: I'm interested, and I would like to see you succeed. At my present level of information, I am pessimistic about your chances of success and my desire to attend.

10 weeks is a massive time commitment. That's as long as actual basic. Do you have a plan for all that time, or or is that just why you picked that number?

Because at 6 days a week at 11 hours a day (presuming you use the same time as basic) for 10 weeks, you're looking at 660 hours of training. I can see how you can fill 660 hours with exercise and drills; it's not clear to me mental or group exercises scale similarly.

The comparison to what colleges would do if they tried to teach you how to think seems off. The standard college course represents 42 hours of in-class time; summer courses do that at 14 hours a week for 3 weeks. You're proposing a college course and a half's worth of class time per week, for 10 weeks. Now, that's possibly doable- especially if what you're doing is more like pushups and less like absorbing lectures- but a proof of concept seems like a good plan.

I'm also curious about the "next level of awesome" line. What's your current level of awesome? Do any of the instructors have experience as drill sergeants or instructors? Have you done similar programs? You mention the visiting fellows but the only obvious carryover is "we know how to pay for travel/accommodations." When you say "speedbumps," what sort of things are you talking about? I'm imagining: running out of material three weeks in, the instructor resigning because of burnout, being unable to actually admit international students because of immigration concerns, critical staff becoming ill, having trouble securing a location, students withdrawing, and that's probably enough for now. How do our imaginations differ?

I'm also curious about how you select the curriculum. I can see how learning to draw is useful, but it's not clear to me that it's useful enough for everyone to learn it as part of basic. Is it rationality training or life-enjoyment training? How will you deal with people who are uninterested or unwilling to engage in some of the training?

My suggestion: any complex system that works derives from a simple system that works. A 1-week training program will help you figure out many of the speed bumps that could derail a 10-week training program. A 2-week program will be feasible for people who need to take vacation time to be able to attend, while still allowing you enough time to develop several skills. It also makes it easier to experiment with structure: do people learn to draw better when they do it for an hour a day for 2 weeks, or 4 3 hour blocks spread over 2 days? Instead of changing midway through, you run two separate camps and can compare the results.

Also, it's not boot camp unless a man in uniform is shouting at me. :3

I am curious about the curriculum you come up with. Will it get published?

Wow! I saw this and got all excited and read the application, then my brain calmed down and asked, "Do you really think you can get away for two months this summer? What about work?"

Then, "Also, you're getting married in July."

So that's out.

Would you consider "franchising" (i.e. sending around the curriculum, syllabus, and maybe a "lessons-learned" document to interested chapters in other cities)?

Someday I'd like to teach an undergraduate course on rationality at Smith college. It would be helpful to me if you kept track of exercises you think could work well for undergraduates.

Also, I'll be teaching an undergraduate course in game theory in the fall and am very open to having the class engage in rationality games.

To what degree will opting out of specific exercises/events be accepted or tolerated?

(Mostly asking out of curiosity, but if I were seriously considering going this would be a significant issue; I have a rather firm policy of not considering myself obligated to do things unless I've actively agreed to the specific thing, including reserving the right to decline to do things based on the tone or context of the request or demand, as an anti-foot-in-the-door measure, and your description of the nature of the event leads me to be unsure of whether this policy would get me sent home or otherwise cause problems.)

My first thought was a slightly more sophisticated version of "OMG, WANT!". This seems like a brilliant idea, and I'd absolutely love to see it come to fruition. I can taste the sweet hintings of a future rationality dojos, already envision the unfolding of a greater future where more is possible. Ten weeks dedicated strictly to the Art, with other people who will actually CARE DEEPLY about being sane. How could I NOT want to be there? I'm a little iffy on whether or not all of these ideas are really the best, but hey--it's a work in progress.

I open up an application and start typing. But I'm finding myself intimidated by vastly open-ended form questions, and the mention that they're looking for "people who've demonstrated high productivity" and "who already seem like good epistemic rationalists". I have no such qualifications; I'm inexperienced, lazy, and honestly, I've internalized frustratingly little of what I've 'learned' on LessWrong. So I close the window.

But, the only way I can possible be sure that I won't get in is if I don't apply. And I do want to go, I really want this experience. So I open it and start again.

Then close it once more a few seconds later. Open. Close. Open. Close.

I think I may have a problem.

I think I also understand why rejection therapy is part of the curriculum. Unwillingness to put yourself out there is a severe handicap to winning.

Shinji:         What should I do?
Gendou:         I give you a constraint.
Asuka:          Now you have a top and a bottom.
Rei:            Now you have lost one degree of freedom.
Misato:         Now you have to stand on the ground.
Ryouji:         But you obtain a comfort.
Makoto:         Your mind becomes slightly easier.
Shigeru:        And you walk.

What's the expected time load -- "full-time" or "all-consuming"? I can probably keep my freelance work down to about 20 hours a week, but would have to break the lease on my apartment to cut it down to nothing.

Does this cost money?

Minor request: Could you let those of us that have been rejected without an interview know?

(ie, I just want to know if I was/will "potentially will be interviewed and/or accepted" or "already was rejected", thanks.)

I'm currently learning to draw on my own using the book "Drawing on the right side of the brain" by Betty Edwards, and it has really felt like using a cheat code to gain a mysterious superpower in a couple weeks of not-very-stressful work. (I'm 28 and never learned to draw before.) In fact I'm pretty sure that your bootcamp will use something like her technique, right?

When is the application deadline?

Looking over the application now. Sadly many of the "list your accomplishments" sections in my case are going to be quite sparse... But hey, the only real cost to me re applying is fear of social embarrassment and a bit of time, so will just apply anyways, regardless. (At least I've read all the sequences...)

This would be great next year, when I take my gap year between high-school and uni. Although I must say, just seeing the results will be amazing in itself - I can't wait until you release the details of the games and such you used, and how well they worked. (I'm taking from your previous replies to comments that you intend on this, for now at least.)

Are there age limits? I saw on the application it asks about degrees, employment etc... which, as a 16-year-old, I don't have yet. But I think I could really benefit from this if it's still running in 2012.

I'm not going to say this is a brilliant idea, because I'm sure it's not original at all - but actually doing something about it, bringing this to life - that's brilliant. I'm sure it takes a hell of a lot of planning, effort and money: so thank you.

I'm really hoping this is the start of something that will grow, because the sense of pure awesome that filled me when I read it is something I don't want to have to fall down.

Oh, side note, I had to go and look up 'rejection therapy' - it sounded iffy. After researching, it sounds scary and iffy. Has anyone here tried it before?

I am curious as well as envious.

To what degree and in what manner do you expect participants to be affected?

What will be the criteria of evaluation?

Sounds awesome. I don't think I can swing 10 continuous weeks off from work, but if in the future you all develop shorter segments - say, 4 weeks - I'd jump at the opportunity.

Or, alternately, something straddling two calendar years (i.e. midpoint on January 1st).

And a pony, as long as I'm wishing.

This essentially sounds like a more organized (and therefore probably better) version of what I was intending to try and teach myself this summer, so I am extremely, extremely interested. However, I'm currently a student and won't be on break for the beginning of June. Should I still apply? Airfare won't be an issue, and I'm willing to self-study and self-test (or get others to test me on) anything that I would otherwise miss in the first few days.

It's an interesting idea but I feel very skeptical about the generic plan. Personally, a revulsion for organized/standardized education is what drove me to look at things like Less Wrong in the first place. I think this is fairly common in the community, with many people interested in discussion of akrasia and self-work habits.

Also, considering the informality of ideas like "I want to be a good rationalist", I would expect this sort of thing to be much more open-ended and unstructured anyways. It doesn't seem to fit with the idea of a rigid system or a "boot-camp". It just seems contrary to the idea of rationality and free thinking.

I am also somewhat bemused by the character of the "application", where apparently qualification relates to reading of the sequences and SIAI in-house literature. I mean the level of self-masturbation is quite remarkable, not to be too cynical, but it seems to be setting the bar fairly low when you're treating a subject that has been actively discussed for thousands of years.

On the other hand I'm sure this is well intentioned and you have to start somewhere, so I apologize if my remarks seem overly caustic.

I am infinitely jealous.

So does this have anything to do with the Visiting Fellows Program? It isn't a replacement, is it?

How will the A/B testing be overseen? Considering the limits to trying different combinations due to a lack of students you probably want to go at it most effectively. I am curious how that will be done. Including de:biasing the overseers.

Might be overthinking on my side. It sounds really exiting already.

I think that making the effort for something like this is just marvelous! This kind of intensity is really critical for meaningfully changing how someone thinks in the long run, and ten weeks of intense socializing with others concerned about existential risk with subsequent intermittent reinforcement is more than enough to create long-term loyalty to the cause, so to speak.

I echo Vaniver's concerns, though I imagine many of these issues will get hammered out in the course of just doing it once. I'm commenting because I want to raise awareness of a problem that is usually harder to notice in most educational contexts (and I notice only because I've been explicitly trained to notice it):

We're going to run A/B tests on you, and track the results to find out which training activities work best, and begin the tradition of evidence-based rationality training.

I think this is wonderful! I also think this is extremely dangerous.

I'll preface my explanation with a warning that I'm going to touch on some politically charged topics. It has generally been my experience that most people have many of the same strongly held opinions about education, like that teachers will teach better if they know more about the subject they're teaching. If I say something you strongly disagree with, do let me know; I like to discover when I'm wrong and appreciate such opportunities when provided to me. But let me know after pausing a moment to reflect on how you know that I'm wrong. I know that it can be really challenging for me not to just rehearse arguments on topics that I feel really emotionally charged by, and I imagine others often feel the same way.

The reason I say this evidence-based education is dangerous is because it's one of those things that has a rational interpretation but is usually an applause light in disguise. The most blatant example in the USA I know of is No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB was based on the idea that we need objective measures for education, and that once we have those objective measures we can enforce a kind of accountability. The model came from corporations in which the bottom line - profit - could be used as a hard-and-fast measure of success, and individual modules (e.g. stores) could be rewarded or punished based on profit in order to motivate them to generate more profit.

There have been scores of arguments about whether this analogy is appropriate for education, but for the present case I don't think that matters in the slightest. The point I'd like to draw your attention to is the "objective measures" part. This is done through standardized testing in reading and mathematics. The huge, overwhelmingly crippling problem with this approach is that these tests are never, ever calibrated for what we actually care about.

I think one of the main reasons for this is that it's actually quite difficult to go past one's initial impression of what's important in order to actually define what one cares about. For instance, it's usually assumed that problem-solving ability is a standard measure of mathematical skill. However, there are other tremendously important aspects of math proficiency that problem-solving never touches, like problem-identification (i.e. recognizing how to convert an actual real-world problem you're facing into a mathematical model that looks more like a word problem) and complex-pattern-recognition (e.g. realizing that all that knowledge about the Law of Large Numbers and variance can generate very helpful investing insights). And that's ignoring the artifact that multiple-choice tests aren't necessarily even testing students' ability to solve previously-well-defined-and-tidy problems.

I think rationality is, in many ways, a lot more complicated than math. I also suspect that it modularizes in some ways, so that skill with question-dissolving might not bear at all on the ability to change one's behavior, or perhaps even on the ability to notice confusion in real-time. This makes me worried about how SIAI is defining the goals of rationality training. Giving someone a confusing problem with tempting easy-but-wrong answers and seeing how they do would be a great test for potential FAI researchers, but that probably wouldn't test what you're looking for if you're trying to train people to be excellent at swaying public opinion through social skills. And furthermore, do the tests actually test rationality, even in modularized form?

Bear in mind that A/B-style testing is based on a hard-scientific model of checking options such as when determining to what degree new drug X affects physiological property Y. But notice that "being and staying healthy" is a vastly more complicated challenge than, say, reducing mucus production from a cold because the former is understood much better in terms of messy human experience than it is in terms of specific, measurable parameters; hence the existence of people who are healthy by current medical measures but who just don't feel well. In the same way, I suspect that rationality is complicated enough that someone who's able to pass a battery of rationality tests might still turn out to be missing something you care about.

Of course, I don't advocate skipping tests altogether due to a lack of certainty that the tests will always capture what you're looking for. But I do think that there's plenty of precedent to be worried that one's tests might have very little if anything to do with what one cares about simply because the tests seem like they really should measure what you care about. The failure to check against this possibility is one of the reasons that math education is so abysmally horrid in the United States.

Has SIAI guarded against this concern? If so, might I ask how?

I looked up rejection therapy. It has a strong similarity to Stoicism, except that Stoicism requires not being attached to outcomes both in the social context and when interacting with inanimate objects. My confusion is with the implications of Rejection therapy. In Stoicism you do not become distressed because it is according to your nature as a human being to aim at certain things (friends, a warm house, a cow.). Aiming at those things in accordance with your nature is virtuous. Acquiring these things does not make you more or less virtuous. But with rejection therapy real rewards are offered which will not necessarily appear to those who have learned to deal with rejection.

I'm curious about this program. My main concern would be the dogmatic aspect, which I suppose is present in every 'boot camp' style program. I think that the strength of a university program over this sort of program is that university teaches you independent thinking whereas this could lead to dependence in those who did not have a strong sense of individuality. The difficulty would be accommodating those people.

We're going to run A/B tests on you, and track the results to find out which training activities work best, and begin the tradition of evidence-based rationality training.

Can you expand on this? I often have the problem of attempting multiple cool new things at once that aim at the same goals and not knowing which ones worked and which didn't.

Hrm... you may get two copies of mine. I thought something may have gone odd when I submitted... all it did was take me to the wufoo signup page, so I went back and resubmitted. I guess that's just what it does, but just in case you get two copies of mine, that's why.

(on the other hand, if you got zero copies of mine, please tell me!)

I had time to do this five or six years ago. You should go back in time and invite the old me.

Is there going to be one for the summer of 2012?

Two sites blogging their way through the rationality boot camp:

Rationality Boot Camp
Lincoln's blog

Recording here that I've submitted my application (just in case something goes wrong). Evidently other people here find writing a lot easier than I do...

Request for clarification - what exaclty is meant by "changing a policy"?

Hey, got a question about the application: I've read the ye olde Coherent Extrapolated Volition stuff way back when on the SL4 Wiki. ie, the 2004 thing. Is that equivalent to the publication referred to, or is there a more recent CEV paper that it's asking if I read?

Around how many people are you looking to accept?

Covering room, board, and airfare? That is very generous. I will check my schedule for the summer, this sounds like it could be interesting.

Also, I stand to gain enough from this that I will be applying anyway, but how selective are you planning to be? I guess this is still a work in progress, but if there are any age restrictions, limits on how many people can attend, or application costs I would like to know.

Dear Organizers,

Could you tell, please, when do you plan to finish the assignment of interviews, to send refusal letters and letters of acceptance?

I am worried a little, because it takes about 1-2 monthes for foreigners to obtain a visa.

Thanks, in advance, for your help.

Hello, world!

I just sent in my application. I'm really curious, and it looks like nothing I've ever seen before. I'm still a college student, so I doubt I'll be accepted (the first few questions make Rationality Boot Camp look as though it's targeted towards professors and established scientists), but this is something I'm really excited about, and it couldn't hurt to apply. I'm hoping for the best.

Peace and happiness, wobster109

It appears that the majority of the activities and the primary focus of this boot camp is on rationality when interacting with others... social rationality training. While some of this may apply across domains, my interest is strictly in "selfish" rationality... the kind of rationality that one uses internally and entirely on your own. So I don't really know if this would be worth the grandiose expense of 10 "all-consuming" weeks. Maybe it would help if I had more information on the exact curriculum you are proposing.

On the application, you ask

What are your top three ideas for projects to make the world a better place?

Do you only want original ideas?

This sounds like an amazing experience, and would make me more like the person I want to be. If this keeps happening from year to year, I'll figure out a way to make the time.

I wish I could take that much time to do this

This sounds awesome. I can't attend this year due to other commitments but I hope you continue running it so I can do so later.

Application filed. :)

This sounds brilliant, and I will absolutely definitely sign up for future workshops if I can get the scheduling to work out. I second the other commentors who noted that shorter timeframes are more possible for many of us. But all that aside, I'm extremely happy just to see that something like this exists in the world.

Here is a proposed exercise for the boot camp:

Imagine that the year is 1898. Now design a safe nuclear power plant using only knowledge which was available in 1898.

I would really like to do this, but ten weeks is really very long.

Here's another proposed exercise:

You are a brilliant young Jewish mathematician living in Haifa, British Mandatory Palestine. The year is 1932. You are a member of the Irgun and your organization is concerned about an eventual Persian attack on the Jews using atomic energy. The Irgun has given you the assignment of figuring out a way to prevent this attack with minimal loss of life. Ideally you would sabotage the Persian machinery for creating atomic weapons.

In short, you are in charge of Operation Stuxnet. You must devise your strategy, tactics, and mechanisms using only knowledge and information which was available in 1932.

I'd like to make another request for clarification. One of the question asks for our "top three ideas for projects to make the world a better place". What's not clear to me is, are these supposed to be projects that don't already exist? I would assume not, as that wouldn't make a lot of sense ISTM, but that sort of implicit requirement is common enough I have to ask. Similarly there's the question of "just what make the world a better place" means; now given who's asking this I'd assume this is asking for highest EV overall and not making distinctions between introducing positive things and preventing negative things, but again that sort of thing is so common I feel I should ask.

I just sent in an application. I hope you'll at least consider it (I won't need special accomodations because I'll be sending my humanoid robot) rather than just be a racist evil human.

Yes, advance the craft. This appeals to my sense that more is possible, and I am pleased.

This is a test (will delete soon).

Attention: Anyone still interested in attending the course must get their application in by midnight on Friday the 8th of April. I would like to make the final decision about who to accept by mid April and need to finish interviewing applicants before then.

Sudden thought: Could I submit a second application if it occurs to me that I left out something obvious the first time around? :) (I mean, obviously I can, but would it be considered?) (Also, is there any bound on how long before we get some sort of response?)

I also resubmitted, having realized I signed up a year ago. Please use my new app!

I thought 'PERFECT' then I remembered I live half a world away.

Chances of a course by correspondence?

I've always thought going through a course with some of my friends would be a really good exercise.