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: Raemon's Deliberate ("Purposeful?") Practice Club, published by Raemon on November 15, 2023 on LessWrong.

Introduction

So. I have a theory of feedbackloop-first rationality.

It has a lot of parts. I think each part is promising on it's own, and I have a dream that they interconnect into something promising and powerful. I also have a standard, which is that you should be able to tell if it's helping.

One of those parts (I think/hope), is "the generalized skill of Deliberate Practice." That is, the meta skill of:

Noticing that your goals are bottlenecked on some kind of skill (or skills).

Figuring out what those specific skills are.

Figuring out who can teach you those skills, or, how to teach them to yourself.

Creating an explicit practice regime.

Actually putting in the work to practice.

Noticing when your practice isn't working, and figuring out how to troubleshoot your process.

I do not currently have this meta-skill. I am kind of betting that it exists, based on reading books like Peak, talking with Romeo Stevens, and reading stories like László Polgár who methodically taught his daughters chess.

I think I've made progress in the two months I've been working on it, but that progress hasn't translated into "I quickly gained multiple skills" yet, which is the standard I feel like I should set for "this is actually working well enough that other people should be paying attention."

I'm experimenting with using this my dialogue format for journaling my explorations here. I'm inviting a few people I know well to be top-level dialogue participants. Everyone else is welcome to follow along in the comments, and note down their own deliberate practice experiments.

This will include a mixture of high level theory, and day-to-day practice notes.

Okay, reviewing some of my goals here. Here are things that feel like valuable end-goals in and off themselves.

I want to get better at prioritizing projects at Lightcone. Right now I feel very "in the dark" about whether anything we do is even helping. I have some guesses for the subskills here.

I want to figure out whether/to-what-degree the Meta Deliberate Practice skill can meaningfully be applied to "research" (alignment research in particular, but also generally).

Get better at programming.

Get better at emotional regulation. Moderately often, I get somewhat annoyed about something and it makes a conversation go worse (or, builds up some small resentments over time)

Get better at sleeping, somehow.

Get better at Downwell, (a game that I have struggled with beating for a long time), quickly. (This one is mostly for fun)

The actual point of this project are the first two bullets. The thing I feel most excited about "rationality" for (compared to, like, learning specific skills, or other frameworks for dealing with problems), is to solve problems that are confusing, where having an accurate map of the world is likely to be your primary bottleneck.

The latter bullets are things I care about, but I'm mostly interested in them right now from a lens of "looking for things that seem genuinely worth doing that feel more tractable to practice."

Some particular subskills that I feel interested in practicing, but mostly because I believe they somehow help with the above:

Get better at making calibrated forecasts (related to decisions I care about).

Get better at Thinking Physics problems (I think of this as a testing ground for some subskills related to research)

Estimation (i.e. find concrete things to practice estimating, with an eye for getting better at estimating value of fuzzy projects)

I want to make a terminological note that may not be that helpful but it is at least related and might be interesting. I recently read "Peak", which is the pop-sci book by K. Anders Ericsson, the discoverer of deliberate practice. In it, he uses anoth...