UPDATE: This review is old. My revised take is here.

I'm writing this on the train on my way back from the Center for Applied Rationality's workshop in Ossining, NY, a little less than an hour north of the city. Because I was wondering what to do and my brain wanted to do this instead of just reading. So that's a good sign.

Please bear in mind that this is just a first impression and that I am likely to change my mind about both both the good and the bad over the next few months. If you read this and a lot of time has passed, feel free to contact me directly to find out what I think then.

I went to the equivalent workshop back in 2011, when the institution was still part of the Singularity Institute (now called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI), and was excited to see what had changed and improved as a result of CFAR's extensive testing and iteration. I was hoping the training would resemble the Jeffreyssai stories much more than it did then.

My literal first and last impressions were actually pretty bad. I found out only a few weeks before the event that it wouldn't actually be in NYC like I'd thought but in much harder to get to Ossining, 45 minutes north of the city. (By contrast the site in Berkeley was within walking distance of a BART station.) Then about a week before the workshop I finally got the promised email with logistic information, which said there would be pickups provided at the Ossining train station. Amtrak only goes to the nearby Croton-Harmon station, and I didn't want to go all the way across Manhattan to transfer to the Metro-North commuter train that does go to Ossining, so I asked if they could pick me up from there. It's a lot closer than the airports they promised pickup from, so I figured this would be a reasonable request. No response. A few days later I got an email asking me to fill out a survey, which also asked what my transportation situation was. Again I asked about pickup from Croton-Harmon. Again no response, though I did get another email asking me to fill out the survey. Finally, the day before the workshop, I sent another email asking what was going on, and got a response that they had gotten my survey answer and also could pick me up from the Croton-Harmon station, and to send a text message when I arrived.

When I got to the station, I sent the text message, and got a response saying wait 30-45 minutes and they'd be able to pick me up. Half an hour later I got a text that said "Here now. In parking lot. Where are you?" I was looking at the parking lot. After a few confused texts back and forth, I called and it turned out that they were at Ossining, not Croton-Harmon where I was, the shuttle was full, and they wouldn't be able to pick me up. They said they had lost a driver and might not be able to come back soon. They suggested I try to get a cab. ... At least they reimbursed me for that one, and at the end of the workshop they told me with a bit more warning that I had no ride (but no reimbursement). But you'd really hope people running a workshop on cognitive bias would know to make sure the first and last parts of the experience are extra good.

Whining aside, things were better once I finally got there. We were busy pretty much all day for four days straight and in nearly every session I got either a technique I'm excited about applying to my life, or a major insight about a skill I need to develop. I really want to do some goal factoring to figure out if my current behavior is well suited to the goals it is trying to satisfy or whether there's a more efficient or effective solution is be happy with, aversion modeling to figure out why I'm not doing things I think I want to do, offline habit training to"practice" a new habit with the power of imagination,, urge propagation to build positive urges to do things that accomplish outcomes I like, value of information calculations to learn when I should spend resources on gaining information to optimize my life, build an emotional library to gain control over my emotions, and practice moving between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system modes.

I also learned that I don't have a good memory for the bodily sensations associated with my emotions, so I'll need to practice that. And I dissolved some confusion around long term planning, when I realized that my goals were actually a bunch of different things: urges/desires, behaviors, plans, and preferences about future world states.

Now for the bad stuff, especially by comparison to the Singularity Institute minicamp in 2011 - these core epistemic rationality issues were not covered much if at all:

• Noticing confusion
• Noticing rationalization or motivated cognition
• Doing literature research effectively in order to use existing scientific knowledge
• Becoming curious and noticing curiosity, and what to do when you're curious about a factual question (gather data, ask an expert, review the literature, etc)
• How to change your mind
• Why and how to "stick your neck out" and make testable predictions (though there were prediction markets, which was great).
• The relationship between beliefs and anticipation - making beliefs pay rent (though there was a related instrumental rationality segment called "internal simulator")

This felt like a rational self-improvement workshop, not a rationality workshop. To be fair, the epistemic rationality segments in 2011 were the worst segments - I agreed with the content but didn't learn any skills. But the thing to do in make it better, not drop it entirely!

A lesser disappointment was that nearly everything was in a "class" format, except for Comfort Zone Expansion, or CoZE, where we went out separately to practice with little accountability or real-time feedback. Some of the units made sense this way, but for example there should have been drills in Being Specific, and sticking your neck out, exposing yourself to the possibility of being wrong, since many participants seemed to lack that skill on the 5-second level. And in a lot of other areas I would have benefited from paired practice out something else that would have put me on the spot and forced me to execute one step from a technique.

Most of the classes focused on a single technique, and were specific about what situations the techniques were for. I loved this level of specificity and it made the knowledge feel more genuinely procedural and usable. But for a few of the classes, it took a while to figure out exactly which techniques were applicable to which problems, because the techniques' intended results were often described vaguely. For example, a class on how to develop habits turned out to be a class on how to develop a tendency to remember to do something, when there wasn't an aversion stopping you. (Whereas I'd figured at first, not unreasonably I think, that a habit is just a regularly repeated behavior.) In one case there was the opposite problem - the technique was so universal and high-level that it seemed difficult to translate it into specific actions.

All in all, it was a very fun experience, and I think it will turn out to have been well worth my time. The instructors were great, the missing pieces were mostly things I already had, and I think what I learned we'll make me much more effective.

The workshop also comes with 6 follow-up sessions via Skype, which is a great idea; one of the best things about the minicamp in 2011 was the follow-ups the participants did with each other. I'm really looking forward to that too.

I’ve been seeing two articles pop up on social media a lot lately. One is this article via Huffington Post from Wait but Why about the Millennials and how they’re unhappy because they expect too much out of life. The article is pretty tightly written so I won’t excerpt it, only try to summarize it:

Their parents lived in an unusually good time, and they basically expect everything to be handed to them on a platter – a fulfulling job that they are uniquely good at, that pays them enough to live a pleasant life outside of work. Not only is life not usually like that (they see the end result but not what life was like for their parents – or grandparents – starting out), but they also compare their life outcomes not to their peers’ actual lives, but to the carefully curated social media images of their friends’ lives, which naturally emphasize the successes. So even though the truth that most people aren’t unusually special is a disappointment, in fact their perception is even worse, because it seems like their friends actually are special, and each person thinks they’re the only one in their peer group who isn’t.

The other is this rebuttal by Adam Weinstein saying that it’s not that the Millennials have unusual expectations – it’s just that things are actually worse. Students have more debt than ever before, and it’s really hard to find a good job, and even “good” jobs have long hours and don’t pay enough to live a decent life:

You have no idea about student debt, underemployment, life-long renting. “Stop feeling special” is some shitty advice. I don’t feel special or entitled, just poor. The only thing that makes me special is I have more ballooning debt than you. I’ve tempered the hell out of my expectations of work, and I’ve exceeded those expectations crazily to have one interesting, exciting damned career that’s culminated in some leadership roles for national publications. And I’m still poor and in debt and worked beyond the point where it can be managed with my health and my desire to actually see the son I’m helping to raise.

What’s interesting about this is the hidden assumptions – and these hidden assumptions are very stereotypically millennial. Adam Weinstein is a journalist. In case you hadn’t noticed, people have been talking about the decline of journalism as a business for more than a decade. They’ve been talking about how the major publications don’t make the kind of profits they used to, because there’s more competition. Because of the internet.

At no point in the article does Weinstein talk about the choice to pursue a career in journalism. It seems like it is unthinkable to him that he would choose any other career than his passion. It is thinkable that the job he loves would not pay very much, require nearly unbearable hours, or be very difficult to advance in. Because these are the things he talks about. But who said he had to be in journalism? If the pay and hours are so bad that they make your life miserable, why not pick a different career?

If the suggestion that you might abandon your “dream job” to do something less fulfilling that supports a better lifestyle otherwise offends you, that is a very millennial attitude.

Adam Weinstein seems like a smart guy. He knows how to make a cogent argument (within the limits of his personal blind spots and biases). He could probably be a good technical writer, or a mediocre project manager, mediocre computer programmer, or system administrator. The hours would be much lighter, and the pay would be higher too.

If the prospect of a career where you are only “mediocre” offends you, that is also a very millenial attitude.

But ask yourself – what would you do if you’d been born into (or found yourself teleported into) a world where your dream job didn’t exist at all. What would Adam Weinstein do if he were born in the Roman empire, before the invention of journalism? He wouldn’t write an article complaining that there are no jobs for journalists. He would never have gotten the idea to be a journalist. There’s nothing in his genes that makes him uniquely suited for this one and only one job. And even if there were, most people at most times haven’t been able to do their “dream job” – if in fact their dream is to have a job at all.

Or what would you do if you were born in a place or time where your “dream job” was not just on the decline, but had ceased to exist at all? Someone today who wants to be a blacksmith could maybe find a factory metalworking job, or make swords or shears as special curio pieces at Ren Faires or for ARMA hobbyists or the few remaining bespoke tailors - but most of them will just not have that particular dream job, and find some other outlet for their skills and interests.

It is not unreasonable to expect a lifestyle on the order of what your parents enjoyed – or better (because of economic progress). Separately, it is not unreasonable to expect a job that is fulfilling. But what is an unreasonable expectation is to assume that there is no tradeoff; to assume that you will enjoy your parents’ level of affluence (or even a comfortable middle class life), and then separately and independently pick a job based solely on what you want to do during your workday.

I don’t know why some people do and others don’t, but I have never really had a firm idea of a “dream job.” So when I graduated college I picked something that seemed moderately interesting, would teach me some useful skills I could use later in other interesting jobs, and paid well. I love my friends and want them to do well, so of course I sympathize when the jobs they would love to do are unavailable, hard to get, or available on an unpaid or low-paid internship basis only. But the world changes, people have always been doing jobs they didn’t love, and there’s always been a tradeoff between the agreeableness of the job and the amount you get paid for it.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t real problems with the economy of course. Unemployment is high. Lots of people are going onto SSI or SSDI, who in a different economy might have found remunerative work. And that’s not because people suddenly became greedy, unreasonable, or spoiled in 2007 or 2008. But a journalist with college debt is not a typical exemplar of that. Most people in America don’t go to college, and most of those that do get a degree to qualify them for some particular field, and seek out a secure decent-paying job. The fact that those people can’t find work as often is a problem we ought to do something about – and the fact that the same degrees require more and more debt relative to lifetime earnings, but are still the only way to buy into a certain type of professional-class job. But the fact that someone who chose to work in a dying industry (or at least, an industry suffering from oversupply) has trouble finding a job where they can make ends meet – that’s sad for them, but it is and has always been the cost of economic growth through “creative destruction” – and the good jobs they heard about growing up would never have existed were it not for the same process.

Have you ever had one of those dreams where you had an idea, and it seemed so profound that losing it to forgetfulness seemed unbearable, so you wrote it down, and in the morning it seemed somewhere between banal and incomprehensible?

Well, last night I had one of those dreams – I had an idea for an event in a story – but even in the cold light of day I think it still has pathos.

It’s set in the middle of a story in a scavenger world. It’s maybe a hundred or two hundred years after the collapse of the high culture, and the characters – including a very old man, who grew up in the high culture, so he doesn’t age much at all – are exploring a tower suspended in the air. One of the characters falls through some rotten floorboards into the open air, and the old man drops a rope with a lead weight on the end, which catches up to her, so she’s able to catch it and climb back up. Meanwhile another member of the party has gone to an outer room, closer to the outer wall, where the winds blow faster and the structure is less reliable. The elder comments on how he’s a little worried about her off on her own, and she, on her way back (having endured an unexpected ordeal) says something to the effect of, “We don’t need your sympathy. It’s not like you put yourself at any risk – you don’t know loss the way we do.”

They continue, as he leads them over the structural beams of durasteel, which lasts longer than the common floor.

“I had a wife, once,”

“Good for you.”

“Before the fall. And after.

“We lived near one of the floating towers. It was over Paris. In those days there were still things to salvage, and still beautiful things to see. From the heights, the great cities looked almost as they had when they were still alive.

“On the day before the third anniversary of the fall, we had talked about going up one last time for supplies that would help us in our new life, and then going to ground forever, starting anew, to rebuild what we’d lost.

“Then that night, I was awoken by a thunderbolt. She was gone.

“I turned on our 2-way radio. We had one left over, we didn’t have to worry about interference, so we could boost the signal and talk over a long distance. I heard:

“‘Don’t be afraid. It will all be done soon. Oh!’

“I heard the wind rush past her. I told myself the wind had just picked up a bit, that she was still holding the tether connecting the ground with the tower, the tether we’d climbed together hundreds of times before in clear weather.

“‘It’s beautiful. Paris, oui.’

“There was no room in her last words for me. I told myself later that she’d lost her grip. Or that the wind had blown her off. I lied.

“She knew what would happen that night. Our new life was too much for her – no, too little. Too little compared with what came before. I was insufficient company for the many hundreds of years that must pass between our old world and the new one we would patiently build.

“So don’t tell me that you alone know how to survive. Or that you know what it is to lose the ones you love. The ones you love are mortal, you meet them knowing that some day they must die. I didn’t.

“You know that each moment might be your last together. I didn’t.

“Your death is inevitable. Hers wasn’t.

“But I lost her anyway.

“So don’t tell me I don’t know what it is to survive against all hope.”

I've been thinking about two different dramatic approaches to leveling up, and how to apply them to real life. (This post came out of a conversation with a friend, a lot of it was copied from my comments, but I wanted to give myself "credit" for doing the writing, since it is in fact actual writing.)

Last night I dreamt I lost a tooth. The fourth from the left on the top row, right behind the canine (i.e. right behind the pointy one). There was no pain, just "oops - something broke off! Oh, crap, that was a tooth." It crumbled like dried-out grout.

So naturally I went to the dentist to have it looked at.

Not my current dentist, whom I love, because he and his team of hygienists actually focus on preventive care. The first time I came in for a visit, he asked me how often I flossed, I said daily, and then he said, either you're lying or you're doing it wrong. And then he actually performed an experiment to distinguish between the two hypotheses, and asked me to show him how I floss! I was doing it wrong. He showed me how to do it right. The next time, the hygienist told me which mouthwash to use. The time after that, which toothbrush. Etc. I like that they are always thinking about how to reduce my need for future dental work, but parceling it out into bite-sized (sorry) advice that I'm likely to actually follow, instead of an overwhelming torrent of advice. And since I haven't had cavities yet, they let me go longer that usual between x-rays, which I like because who needs more cancer?

So, not my current dentist. Nor the previous one, whom I found through an anonymous tip posted on the wall of my office pantry. His office was in the building across the street from my office, so I figured I had to give it a shot. I visited once, but decided not to visit again after he "joked" that I should eat more candy so he can make money filling cavities.

Instead, my brain decided that I had had a dentist in between - one with a personality and appearance clearly modeled on one of my favorite math professors in grad school. He taught computational math. This professor was the kind who gives you assignments that keep you up and working the whole weekend, but absolutely no busywork. He assigned problems he didn't already know how to solve, just to give us practice doing something really hard. He took points off not only for code that wouldn't work correctly, but code that worked, inefficiently. At first I thought this was terrible and I'd get a B or something just because of stupid nitpicky code errors, but then it turned out that my code just got better in response instead. He was also the kind of lecturer who watched the students closely, and reacted immediately if someone's eyes glazed over - by reteaching us in 15 minutes a semester's worth of background material we needed a refresher in. I didn't really understand linear algebra until he explained it. In each course I took from him, I learned as much as in any other two courses in the program.

So this professor was my dream-dentist, with a dentist's chair in his living room in his home. It turned out that to operate on the tooth, he had to open up my skull (okay...) and stick a few pins into me just above my right eyebrow (Nooooo! Not near my eye!). I really don't like things stuck near my eye. But I figured, okay, whatever, as long as I'm out for the surgery, I don't care.

Tthe really awful part was next. According to dream-dentist, because I'm signed up for the DMO option (like an HMO for dental) through work, rather than the PPO option (pay per service, no referrals), general anaesthetic is not covered, only local anaesthetic. While dream-Ben is totally unconcerned with potentially extremely dangerous and unnecessary surgical procedures, he is still relatively frugal. So I seriously considered asking the dentist to do some kind of stopgap operation now, signing up for the PPO for the next benefit year, and then having the surgery done with general anaesthetic.

But dream-Ben also understands that dental problems can get really bad really quickly if they're not dealt with, and that there's a serious possibility that I could have the stopgap procedure, wait a couple of months, wake up one day in blinding pain, and still end up needing the surgery (after a few more days of extreme pain) before the next benefit year. So I decided to tough it out and go ahead with the surgery, under local anaesthetic only.

Then I woke up and checked my tooth. It was still there. Whew!

The whole ordeal reminded me of this SMBC comic:

Over at Slate Star Codex, YVain has a post about being bad at math. Being YVain, he keeps coming up with gems like this one:

It’s not that I don’t recognize that math is awesome. If there were “Pray the lack-of-interest-in-math away” camps, I would totally go to one.

It's things like this that make me glad I went to St. John's, which basically is "Pray the lack-of-interest-in-math away" camp (among other things).

Read the whole thing of course, but I'd like to respond directly to Deiseach's comment:

Several friends have had computers that declined in performance with age, and assumed they would need to buy a new one. Not all computer performance problems can be fixed by a patient amateur, but many common ones can.

Problems #1 and #2 are laptop specific, but #3 and #4 apply to any computer.

Many of these fixes involve taking the computer apart. Ifixit.com has a lot of good manuals and guides, especially for Apple products, and you can look up the manual for the model of computer you have, which may include instructions for some simple repairs. You can also pay someone to do some of these things for you, though then you might not be saving much money relative to just buying a new computer.

1) A laptop that runs hot and makes noises, and slows down once it heats up.

Sometimes this just means the laptop's internal fans are clogged up with dust. If you can open up the laptop and find the fan units, then get a canister of compressed air and blow away the dust.

Or you can do what I did to my girlfriend's MacBook fans, and take them apart and actually wash them. (If you do this, dry them off before you put them back!) I also oiled the fans with some WD-40.

2) A laptop battery that runs out real fast

Sometimes this means you need to replace the battery - which is itself an easy repair, you can usually order the battery separately - but sometimes it's even simpler than that, it's just a weird software issue. Before you even order a new battery, take the old one out, and then hold down the power button for 30 seconds while the battery is out. Then put the battery back in.

3) When you open certain programs, or too many programs, or browse the web, your computer starts to run slow and take a long time to do things.

There are three major reasons this could be happening. Either your programs are asking the computer to calculate too many things at a time (i.e. your processor is too slow) or they are asking it to keep too many things in short-term memory (i.e. you don't have enough RAM), or you are asking it to read and write too much to its long term memory (a lot of hard disk usage). So the first step is to figure out which one is the problem, since fixing the wrong problem is a waste of both time and money.

Most computers both have utilities that tell you how much of your computer's capacity you're using. I'm going to call this the usage utility in the next paragraph. If you're running Windows this is called "Task Manager". Press Control+Alt+Delete and click on "Task Manager. If you're on a Mac, it's called Activity Monitor, you can get to it through the little Spotlight tool on the top right of your screen. If you're on another OS I don't know what it's called but it almost certainly exists. Whatever machine you're on, 

There will be multiple tabs in the usage utility. You should be able to see how much RAM is being used, and how intensively your processor is being used, and how fast your computer is reading from and writing to the hard disk. When your computer is running slow, open up the utility and see whether your RAM is near capacity, or your processor is near capacity, or whether your hard disk is being used a lot.

If your processor is running at 100% capacity, you're out of luck. (If you have multiple processors, you should only be worried if they're ALL running at capacity - otherwise the processors are not what's slowing you down.) You may as well buy a new computer, since replacing a processor is not for amateurs, and if you are reading this, you are probably an amateur.

If your RAM is at capacity, then one of two things could be going on.

a) One program could be a memory hog. Look at your list of active programs in the usage utility. If one is taking up a tremendously disproportionate amount of RAM, and it is not a web browser, then decide whether it is needed. In my case, I noticed that the HP printer utility was taking up all the spare RAM on my computer, and the solution was to force-quit that program whenever I noticed my computer freezing up.

b) You could just need more RAM. Look up what kind of RAM your computer will accept - you can do a web search for this or it should say in the manual (which you can also do a web search for) - and buy the memory cards with the most memory per card that your computer can handle. (Some sellers of RAM have tools that can pick out the optimal combo for you on their websites.) Installing RAM is really easy as far as computer enhancements go - you open up your computer, pull out the old memory card, and stick in the new one.

If your problem is just reading from and writing to the hard disk a lot, then you may want to upgrade to a 7200RPM hard drive, or a Solid State Drive. First check to see if you already have one of these - there should be a way to see some "about my computer" stats. If you don't then you need to figure out whether you're comfortable doing this upgrade.

Depending on your computer, upgrading the hard drive could be easy or it could be hard. The laptop upgrade I did was easy, but I'm not even going to try upgrading my iMac's hard drive - it's just too much trouble to get at. See if there's an online manual or guide that tells you how to replace your computer's hard drive.

If you don't already have a fast hard drive, and you think you can do the upgrade, you need to know which kind you want - a fast hard disk, or an SSD. Basically, the SSD will usually be faster, but you don't get as much storage space. That's never been a problem for me, and you can always get an external hard drive for storage, but if you're using hundreds of gigabytes then that might be an issue for you.

4) A specific component seems like it's not working

This might seem too obvious to list, but I figured I'd say it anyway. If it seems like some specific hardware-related computer function is failing - for example, your optical drive (e.g. CD-RW or DVD reader or Blu-Ray drive) stops working, it might not be a hardware problem. Look up whether there are known software issues with your computer, but if there aren't, then it's probably just a hardware problem, and the repair might be easy. You can often order the exact same component you're replacing.