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: "Fractal Strategy" workshop report, published by Raemon on April 7, 2024 on LessWrong.

I just ran a workshop teaching the rationality concepts I've developed this year.

If you're interested in paying money for a similar workshop, please fill out this form.

Six months ago, I started thinking about improving rationality.

Originally my frame was "deliberate practice for confusing problems". For the past two months, I've been iterating on which skills seemed useful to me personally, and which I might convey to others in a short period of time.

I settled into the frame "what skills are necessary for finding and pivoting to 10x better plans?". It's the area I most needed rationality for, myself, and it seemed generalizable to a lot of people I know.

I ended up with 5-10 skills I used on a regular basis, and I put together a workshop aiming to teach those skills in an immersive bootcamp environment. The skills wove together into a framework I'm tentatively called "Fractal Strategy", although I'm not thrilled with that name.

Basically, whenever I spend a bunch of resources on something, I...

Explicitly ask "what are my goals?"

Generate 2-5 plans at 3 different strategic levels

Identify my cruxes for choosing between plans

Fluently operationalize fatebook predictions about those cruxes

Check if I can cheaply reduce uncertainty on my cruxes

The framework applies to multiple timescales. I invest more in this meta-process when making expensive, longterm plans. But I often find it useful to do a quick version of it even on the ~30-60 minute timescale.

I put together a workshop, aiming to:

help people improve their current, object level plan

help people improve their overall planmaking/OODA-loop process

tl;dr on results

I didn't obviously succeed at #1 (I think people made some reasonable plan updates, but not enough to immediately say an equivalent of "Hot Damn, look at that graph". See the Feedback section for more detail).

I think many people made conceptual and practical updates to their planning process, but it's too early to tell if it'll stick, or help.

Nonetheless, everyone at the workshop said it seemed like at least a good use of their time as what they'd normally have been doing. I asked "how much would you have paid for this?" and the average answer was $800 (range from $300 to $1,500).

When I was applying these techniques to myself, it took me more like ~3 weeks to update my plans in a significant way. My guess is that the mature version of the workshop comes with more explicit followup-coaching.

Workshop Outline

First, here's a quick overview of what happened.

Beforehand:

People sent me a short writeup of their current plans for the next 1-2 weeks, and broader plans for the next 1-6 months.

Day 1: Practice skills on quick-feedback exercises

Everyone installs the fatebook chrome/firefox extension

Solve a puzzle with Dots and a Grid with an unspecified goal

Solve a GPQA question with 95% confidence

Try to one-shot a Baba is You puzzle

For both of those puzzles (Baba and GPQA), ask "How could I have thought that faster?"

Play a videogame like Luck Be a Landlord, and make fermi-calculations about your choices within the game.

For all exercises, make lots of fatebook predictions about how the exercise will go.

Day 2: Big picture strategic thinking

Work through a series of prompts about your big picture plans.

Write up at least two different big-picture plans that seem compelling

Think about short-feedback exercises you could do on Day 3

Day 3: Choose your own short exercises, and object-level work

Morning: Do concrete exercises/games/puzzles that require some kind of meta-planning skill, that feels useful to you.

Afternoon: Do object-level work on your best alternative big picture plan,

You get to practice "applying the method" on the ~hour timescale

You flesh out your se...