Effective Altruism - EA Global 2018 CFAR Workshop

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# Center for Applied Rationality Workshop (2018)

_“Do you know what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it?” According to Duncan Sabien of the Center for Applied Rationality, this is a key question to ask yourself throughout life. In this workshop from Effective Altruism Global 2018: San Francisco, he describes a few different techniques, including managing your personal autopilot and mimicking useful skills, that all rely on this core reflection. A transcript of Duncan's workshop is below, including input from the audience, which we have lightly edited for clarity._

My name is Duncan Sabien. I'm the curriculum director and COO at The Center for Applied Rationality in Berkeley. We put on four and a half day rationality workshops, and also some targeted programs for groups like AI researchers, mathematicians, so on and so forth. Our goal is to improve human rationality. In this talk, I'm going to try to give you a little taste of what we do at workshops, and what we've been figuring out, and what we're all about.

I'm sad to say that it's not going to work. There's an effect that we've noticed where when we give an hour long talk, people leave super excited about rationality, and about the potential to be better at achieving their goals and figuring things out. And what happens is, it's sort of like if you had just found out about the concept of pushups. You're like, "Man, pushups, that sounds so cool. I can be so strong, and my arms would look so good."

But there's a very big difference between learning about pushups and actually doing pushups. So to frame this talk, most of this talk will be me telling you guys about pushups, and how cool pushups are. But on base rates, very few of us will leave this talk and then go do pushups. So make it be you. You're going to be the one that breaks the frame, and goes out and actually does stuff. Make sense?

Cool. Occasionally there might be spots for people to ask questions and make comments. If so, we'll have a mic that we'll send around, because they're recording, and it makes it a lot easier for the recording to be sensible. Please talk into the mic. But otherwise, we're just going to dive right in.

My first question is, do you know what you are doing and why you are doing it? I'm actually going to repeat this question a whole bunch over the course of the hour. So get prepared to get bored by it. But right now you're in this room. I'd like you to take 20 seconds and check, do you actually know why you're in this room? What brought you here? Is there a reason? Are you just on autopilot? Take 20 seconds to check.

Every time I say take 20 seconds to check, you're also certainly welcome to just sit there not doing anything. I won't know. But from nope to yep, raise your hands

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