Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: CFAR Takeaways: Andrew Critch, published by Raemon on February 14, 2024 on LessWrong.

I'm trying to build my own art of rationality training, and I've started talking to various CFAR instructors about their experiences - things that might be important for me to know but which hadn't been written up nicely before.

This is a quick write up of a conversation with Andrew Critch about his takeaways. (I took rough notes, and then roughly cleaned them up for this. Some of my phrasings might not exactly match his intended meaning, although I've tried to separate out places where I'm guessing what he meant from places where I'm repeating his words as best I can)

"What surprised you most during your time at CFAR?

Surprise 1: People are profoundly non-numerate.

And, people who are not profoundly non-numerate still fail to connect numbers to life.

I'm still trying to find a way to teach people to apply numbers for their life. For example: "This thing is annoying you. How many minutes is it annoying you today? how many days will it annoy you?". I compulsively do this. There aren't things lying around in my life that bother me because I always notice and deal with it.

People are very scale-insensitive. Common loci of scale-insensitivity include jobs, relationship, personal hygiene habits, eating habits, and private things people do in their private homes for thousands of hours.

I thought it'd be easy to use numbers to not suck.

Surprise 2: People don't realize they need to get over things.

There was a unit a CFAR called 'goal factoring'. Early in it's development, the instructor would say to their class: "if you're doing something continuously, fill out a 2x2 matrix", where you ask: 1) does this bother me? (yes or not), and 2) is it a problem? (yes or no).

Some things will bother you and not be a problem. This unit is not for that."

The thing that surprised me, was that I told the "C'mon instructor. It's not necessary to manually spell out that people just need to accept some things and get over them. People know that, it's not worth spending the minute on it."

At the next class, the instructor asked the class: "When something bothers you, do you ask if you need to get over it?". 10% of people raised their hand. People didn't know the "realize that some things bother you but it's not a problem and you can get over it."

Surprise 3: When I learned Inner Simulator from Kenzie, I was surprised that it helped with everything in life forever.

[I replied: "I'm surprised that you were surprised. I'd expect that to have already been part of your repertoire."]

The difference between Inner Simulator and the previous best tool I had was:

Previously, I thought of my system 1 as something that both "decided to make queries" and "returned the results of the queries." i.e. my fast intuitions would notice something and give me information about it. I previously thought of "inner sim" as a different intelligence that worked on it's own.

The difference with Kenzie's "Inner Sim" approach is that my System 2 could decide when to query System 1. And then System 1 would return the query with its anticipations (which System 2 wouldn't be able to generate on its own).

[What questions is System 1 good at asking that System 2 wouldn't necessarily ask?]

System 1 is good at asking "is this person screwing me over?" without my S2 having to realize that now's a good time to ask that question. (S2 also does sometimes ask this question, at complementary times)

Surprise 4: How much people didn't seem to want things

And, the degree to which people wanted things was even more incoherent than I thought. I thought people wanted things but didn't know how to pursue them.

[I think Critch trailed off here, but implication seemed to be "basically people just didn't want things in the first place"]

What do other people see...