I agree that these are pretty valuable concepts to learn. At the same time, I also believe that these concepts can be learned easily by studying the corresponding written materials. At least, that’s how I learned them, and I don’t think I’m different from the average EA in this respect.
But I also think we shouldn’t be speculating about this issue, given its centrality to CFAR’s approach. Why not give CFAR a few tens of thousands of dollars to (1) create engaging online content that explains the concepts taught at their workshops and (2) run a subsequent RCT to test whether people learn these concepts better by attending a workshop than by exposing themselves to that content?
I would be open to helping run such an RCT, and by default would expect the written material without further assistance to have relatively little impact.
I also think that for many people asking them to read the related online material will have a much lower completion rate than going to a workshop, and figuring out how to deal with that would be a major uncertainty in the design of the RCT. I have many friends that I tried to get to desperately read the material that explains the above core concepts, sadly without success, who finally got interested enough into all of the above after attending a CFAR workshop.
In my last 5 years of working in EA and the rationality community, I have repeatedly been surprised by the degree to which even very established EAs have not read almost any introductions to the material I outlined above, and where the CFAR workshop was their first introduction into the material. This includes large parts of the staff at CEA, as well as many core group organizers I’ve met.
I don’t expect CFAR putting out online material to help much with this, since roughly the same holds true for 80k material, and a lot of the concepts above actually already have good written explanations to them.
You seem to be very optimistic about getting people to read written content, whereas my experience has been that people are very reluctant to read content of any type that is not fiction or is of very high relevance to some particular niche interest of theirs. Inviting people to a workshop seems to work a lot more reliably to me, though obviously with written material you get a much broader reach, which can compensate for the lower conversion rate (and which medium makes sense to optimize I think hinges a lot on whether you care about getting a small specific set of people to learn something, vs. trying to get as many people as possible to learn something).
Thank you. Your comment has caused me to change my mind somewhat. In particular, I am now inclined to believe that getting people to actually read the material is, for a significant fraction of these people, a more serious challenge than I previously assumed. And if CFAR’s goal is to selectively target folks concerned with x-risk, the benefits of insuring that this small, select group learn the material well may justify the workshop format, with its associated costs.
I would still like to see more empirical research conducted on this, so that decisions that involve the allocation of hundreds of thousands of EA dollars per year rest on firmer ground than speculative reasoning. At the current margin, I’d be surprised if a dollar given to CFAR to do object-level work achieves more than a dollar spent in uncovering “organizational crucial considerations”—that is, information with the potential to induce a major shift in the organization’s direction or priority. (Note that I think this is true of some other EA orgs, too. For example, I believe that 80k should be using randomization to test the impact of their coaching sessions.)
Hi Oliver, Is there a sequence out there explaining these terms? A quick Google/LW/CFAR search didn’t throw anything up which covered all the concepts you mention above (there’s a sequence called Hammertime, but it didn’t cover all the concepts you mention). I think one of the benfits of a centralized source of information is that it’s accessible and intuitive to find. In the current state, it seems that you would have to go out of your way to find these kinds of writeups, and possibly not even know they exist.
I don’t think there is a single link, though most of the concepts have a pretty good canonical resource. I do think it usually takes quite a bit of text to convey each of those concepts, so I don’t think creating a single written reference is easily feasible, unless someone wants to produce multiple books worth of content (I’ve historically been impressed with how much content you can convey in a 1.5 hour long class, often 10 blog posts worth, or about half of a book).
I don’t think I have the time to compile a full list of resources for each of these concepts, but I will share the top things that come to mind.
Units of Exchange: I think microeconomics classes do a pretty good job of this, though are usually a bit abstract. A lot of writing of Scott Alexander gets at this, with the best introduction probably being his “Efficient Charity: Do unto others...”
Inner Simulator: Covered pretty well by Thinking: Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Trigger-Action Planning: Also covered pretty well by Thinking Fast and Slow, though, with some Getting Things Done thrown into it
Goal Factoring: I don’t actually know a good introduction to this, alas.
I agree that these are pretty valuable concepts to learn. At the same time, I also believe that these concepts can be learned easily by studying the corresponding written materials. At least, that’s how I learned them, and I don’t think I’m different from the average EA in this respect.
But I also think we shouldn’t be speculating about this issue, given its centrality to CFAR’s approach. Why not give CFAR a few tens of thousands of dollars to (1) create engaging online content that explains the concepts taught at their workshops and (2) run a subsequent RCT to test whether people learn these concepts better by attending a workshop than by exposing themselves to that content?
I would be open to helping run such an RCT, and by default would expect the written material without further assistance to have relatively little impact.
I also think that for many people asking them to read the related online material will have a much lower completion rate than going to a workshop, and figuring out how to deal with that would be a major uncertainty in the design of the RCT. I have many friends that I tried to get to desperately read the material that explains the above core concepts, sadly without success, who finally got interested enough into all of the above after attending a CFAR workshop.
In my last 5 years of working in EA and the rationality community, I have repeatedly been surprised by the degree to which even very established EAs have not read almost any introductions to the material I outlined above, and where the CFAR workshop was their first introduction into the material. This includes large parts of the staff at CEA, as well as many core group organizers I’ve met.
I don’t expect CFAR putting out online material to help much with this, since roughly the same holds true for 80k material, and a lot of the concepts above actually already have good written explanations to them.
You seem to be very optimistic about getting people to read written content, whereas my experience has been that people are very reluctant to read content of any type that is not fiction or is of very high relevance to some particular niche interest of theirs. Inviting people to a workshop seems to work a lot more reliably to me, though obviously with written material you get a much broader reach, which can compensate for the lower conversion rate (and which medium makes sense to optimize I think hinges a lot on whether you care about getting a small specific set of people to learn something, vs. trying to get as many people as possible to learn something).
Thank you. Your comment has caused me to change my mind somewhat. In particular, I am now inclined to believe that getting people to actually read the material is, for a significant fraction of these people, a more serious challenge than I previously assumed. And if CFAR’s goal is to selectively target folks concerned with x-risk, the benefits of insuring that this small, select group learn the material well may justify the workshop format, with its associated costs.
I would still like to see more empirical research conducted on this, so that decisions that involve the allocation of hundreds of thousands of EA dollars per year rest on firmer ground than speculative reasoning. At the current margin, I’d be surprised if a dollar given to CFAR to do object-level work achieves more than a dollar spent in uncovering “organizational crucial considerations”—that is, information with the potential to induce a major shift in the organization’s direction or priority. (Note that I think this is true of some other EA orgs, too. For example, I believe that 80k should be using randomization to test the impact of their coaching sessions.)
Hi Oliver, Is there a sequence out there explaining these terms? A quick Google/LW/CFAR search didn’t throw anything up which covered all the concepts you mention above (there’s a sequence called Hammertime, but it didn’t cover all the concepts you mention). I think one of the benfits of a centralized source of information is that it’s accessible and intuitive to find. In the current state, it seems that you would have to go out of your way to find these kinds of writeups, and possibly not even know they exist.
I don’t think there is a single link, though most of the concepts have a pretty good canonical resource. I do think it usually takes quite a bit of text to convey each of those concepts, so I don’t think creating a single written reference is easily feasible, unless someone wants to produce multiple books worth of content (I’ve historically been impressed with how much content you can convey in a 1.5 hour long class, often 10 blog posts worth, or about half of a book).
I don’t think I have the time to compile a full list of resources for each of these concepts, but I will share the top things that come to mind.
Units of Exchange: I think microeconomics classes do a pretty good job of this, though are usually a bit abstract. A lot of writing of Scott Alexander gets at this, with the best introduction probably being his “Efficient Charity: Do unto others...”
Inner Simulator: Covered pretty well by Thinking: Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Trigger-Action Planning: Also covered pretty well by Thinking Fast and Slow, though, with some Getting Things Done thrown into it
Goal Factoring: I don’t actually know a good introduction to this, alas.
Understanding Shoulds: Mindingourway.com’s “Replacing Guilt” series
Focusing: The best introduction into this is Gendlin’s audiobook, which I highly recommend and is relatively short
Systemization: As mentioned, Getting Things Done is the best introduction into this topic
Double Crux: I think Duncan Sabien’s introduction for this is probably the best one