Sample Workshop Schedule

Arrival and Registration Unwind, settle in, and start getting to know the instructors and your fellow participants through casual conversation and games.

Opening Session What does it mean to be rational? Popular culture shows us a Spock-like figure – a narrow powerhouse, unable to deal with nuance or emotion. At CFAR, we disagree with this “straw Vulcan” archetype, and instead train whole-mind thinkers who work well across many domains, using quick and dirty heuristics as readily as careful, deliberate reasoning. Our opening session introduces the theme, style, and logistics of the workshop, as well as providing space for “unconference” style lightning talks from both instructors and participants alike.

Building a Bugs List CFAR is the Center for Applied Rationality, and we like our classes to be very applied! In this session, we’ll build lists of real-life problems we want solved, things we’d like to start doing, and other goals; later sessions will draw on these lists to ensure we get practice applying techniques to solve real problems, not just think about abstract scenarios.

Breakfast

Inner Simulator Each of us carries a rich, vibrant model of the universe in our heads, giving us access to quick, gut-level predictions ranging from where a flying ball will land to how a peer will react to a given sentence or tone of voice. Our first lesson outlines the strengths and weaknesses of participants’ inner simulators, and provides models for when and how to use them (versus when to be suspicious of them).

Trigger-Action Planning If you could make only one change to your planning habits, what would you expect would have the largest effect? Our “TAPs” class reveals the underlying structure of habitual behavior, making it easier to both see and change one’s “automatic” response patterns.

Goal Factoring Life often requires us to take long and complex paths toward our goals. Sometimes, the link between our next action and our true intention is hard to see, leading us to feel reluctant, stressed, or torn. Goal Factoring teaches participants a straightforward method for systematically breaking down a given course of action into its constituent parts, so that each may be evaluated on the merits of what it’s actually intended to achieve.

Lunch

Reference Class Forecasting By default, people often make poor predictions about how future events are going to go. Reference class forecasting is a technique developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky to counteract this – it is remarkably easy to learn and allows one to make more accurate plans and predictions across a wide range of scenarios.

Multiple Hypothesis Testing and Beach Trip This class combines a lesson on testing multiple hypotheses with a practical exercise that takes place on a trip to the nearby beach! Learn about rationality and enjoy a nice walk outside the venue as well.

Pair Debugging Pair debugging is a simple framework allowing people to help one another solve their problems more effectively. After a brief introduction to these techniques and concepts, much of this session will be spent actually putting it into practice!

Dinner

Pair Projects and Taking Things Apart In this evening session, participants will have the opportunity to work together on projects – personal projects are fine, but if you don’t have anything especially in mind we’ll also have some broken things for people to disassemble, learn about, and repair.

Breakfast

Focusing Eugene Gendlin describes an advanced introspection technique in his book “Focusing”. The core of the technique revolves around noticing a difficult-to-articulate felt sense about what is going on, and attempting to find a verbal description of that feeling.

Question Substitution Question substitution is the engine of your mind – when you can’t immediately answer the question you actually face, it swaps in an easier one and answers that instead. You’ll pair up with a fellow participant and get to know them through a series of icebreaker questions — while watching your own mind substitute questions in real time.

Systemization By the end of the workshop, you probably will have a lot of ideas in mind for habits to install, practices to begin, and/or material to review. This is likely to consume a fair amount of attention in the weeks following the workshop. In this class, we’ll focus on developing and refining systems for getting the most out of the workshop without overdoing it or spending a lot of ongoing attention.

Lunch

Finding Cruxes When we ask ourselves “Why do I believe that?” we instinctively turn to the question, “What are some good reasons in favor of that?” Whereas a better approach is to ask “What would get me to change my mind?” This leads to the idea of a crux, which is a reason for belief such that, if it were false, you would change your mind. Finding cruxes is the key to having conversations that reveal truth and change your mind, instead of always just trying to persuade others that you’re right.

Build Your Own CFAR Unit Ever wonder how we come up with these classes and how you might go about composing your own? This class explains more – you may already have a strong “rationality class” of your own waiting to be put into practice!

Pride For someone to be prideful can be a serious character flaw, but there are also healthier ways that one can engage with pride in one’s work. This class explores some of those situations and interactions and moves towards a positive relationship with (a good kind of!) pride.

Dinner

Comfort Zone Expansion (CoZE) Lab In this evening activity, participants who choose to take part in the CoZE lab design and execute cheap experiments to replace their anticipations and expectations with actual data. What really happens when you make requests of a stranger, sing in public, or reveal your inner weirdness? Only one way to find out. Surprises and entertainment guaranteed!

Breakfast

Pattern Work Typically, one’s life involves many different recurring patterns of one kind or another. In the Pattern Work class, you’ll learn some methods for noticing, evaluating, and improving those patterns to better suit your goals.

I Just Work Here When someone asks you, “why did you choose this career,” or “why do you live here and not somewhere else,” or “why do you like this song” we feel social pressure to formulate a little explanation that makes sense of ourselves and our choices. But how much can you really analyze of yourself in this way? Are you able to fully explain why you are the way you are, or do you “just work here”?

Negative Visualization The Stoic philosophers didn’t get everything right, but their focus on reason and self-discipline led them to develop useful methods. Negative visualization is a technique that originates with the Stoics and can help you weather difficult and uncertain circumstances with equanimity.

Lunch

Resolve Cycles Can you remember a time when you avoided starting on a hard task, only to find that it was easier than you expected once you began? Many of us avoid getting started on our problems because we find the very idea daunting—even if there might be an easy solution within reach. Resolve Cycles are a simple but powerful technique for focusing your mind on achieving what’s important to you even when it seems hard.

OODA US Air Force Colonel John Boyd developed the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) framework, a model describing how one makes decisions – and while he originally thought of it in the context of jet fighter combat, the same principles can be used to evaluate and optimize your decision-making process in much more everyday situations as well!

Cliffs Walk In this session, we’ll take a walk around the beautifuly nearby hills and chat about rationality, life, and the world around us.

Hamming Questions What are the most important problems in your areas of interest? What are the key bottlenecks between you and your goals? The Hamming story (named after mathematician Richard Hamming) provides participants with a concise process for zeroing in on the critical issue, and small-group discussion circles spend time building an understanding of, and a plan for overcoming, each individual’s relevant obstacles.

Dinner

Hamming Circles Building on the Hamming Questions session from before dinner, this optional activity gives the opportunity to have a small circle of other participants and staff help you consider and address the most important questions in your life.

Breakfast

Looking Forward We’ve learned a lot of rationality over the last few days – what comes next? This class helps participants integrate the lessons and concepts from the workshop into their everyday lives.

Questing In this session, participants do focused work (with others or on one’s own) on problems of one’s choice, applying the methods that we’ve learned from the workshop and putting them into direct practice.

Lunch

The Caring that Tends its Own Sources Insights on human motivation and what causes bottlenecks in the energy we have for personal projects. Participants are invited to take a free book from a curated selection.

Questing This second questing block gives another opportunity to apply the methods from the workshop on whatever seems most alive to you.

Closing Session Participants, volunteers, mentors, and instructors gather to share their reflections on how it all fits together and what they plan to do when they get home to start making use of these tools.

Dinner, Lightning Talks, and Party While the main workshop content has ended, we close out the final evening with an opportunity for people to give their own lightning talks on whatever they find interesting and a party where we celebrate and share our thoughts on rationality and lives worth living!