Epistemics-Improving Activities for Groups and Friends
A list I’ve accumulated from multiple places, so can’t vouch for all of them, and definitely there’s no empirical evidence I know of for these improving epistemics, but I wanted to collect the list anyway.
The obvious place to do these is in student groups, but I think limiting them there is a mistake. I think we all can benefit from honing our skills, plus a bunch of these are just fun. If you play board games or do Puzzled Pint with your friends or coworkers, then these can just be part of that part of your life.
Will be editing and adding to this over time—what would you recommend?
Activities
Fermi estimates / Estimathons
Rules for estimathons from Berkeley, which probably came from Jane Street
Calibration training
I have more if you DM, don’t want everyone to know all the good questions ahead of time :)
Team Forecasting—really excited about this, watch this space, but in the meantime, nothing stopping you from just picking a question from Metaculus or Manifold and discussing together
I had a great time recently pastcasting a question with a friend, which had the added benefits of getting both of us smoe knowledge about the current conflict in Ethiopia
Resolve the Abilene paradox (A type of groupthink)
Games
Wits and Wagers (Someone else’s experience of using it in EA contexts)
Poker
It’s basically a competitive gamification of calibration training. You are rewarded for having the smallest confidence window of all the players, and penalised if your answer is outside of your confidence window.
Talking
Explain or draw how something works, notice where you falter, let someone pick up the slack from there
This is a great list! Thanks for making it, I will definitely be sending this to a few people.
Some things to consder adding
* Poker
* Fermi estimate poker (although I haven’t played this before)
* Estimathon (requires some setup and I don’t know of a good public explainer)
I think that having a decent database of fermi estimate questions would be pretty great, maybe you could make a bounty for this? I have also found it pretty difficult to come up with enough ‘good’ questions to do for events/personal training. I really like that you made your list of lists public!
Estimathon was really fun! I’m glad I attended.
Thanks! Not sure what fermi estimate poker is, though.
Added a link to some instruction in original comment
https://www.simongrimm.com/fermi-poker-instructions/
Someone brought a game called “Confident?” into the Cambridge office. It’s basically a competitive gamification of callibration training.
You are rewarded for having the smallest confidence window of all the players, and penalised if your answer is outside of your confidence window.
Super fun!
Ooo nice!
Thanks!
The link to Fermi Poker does not seem to be working for me.