# Principles and Generators of a Rationality Dojo

*Since 2023 I've been directing WARP, the Wandering Applied Rationality Program, with the help of ESPR and SPARC staff, which are summer camps I've taught at since 2017. For those that don't know, these ~10 day programs are hard to summarize well, but are generally meant to create an environment that helps participants better understand the world, themselves, and each other by offering a variety of classes ranging from information theory and statistics, to* [*Double Crux*](https://www.lesswrong.com/w/double-crux) *and* [*Focusing*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PXqQhYEdbdAYCp88m/focusing-for-skeptics)*, to classes like mine,* [*Emotions Make Sense*](https://daystareld.com/blog/emotions-make-sense/) *and* [*Philosophy of Therapy*](https://daystareld.com/blog/philosophy-of-therapy/)*.*

*The camps are a lot more than just the classes, however, which only make up the mornings of each day. The afternoons are unscheduled time for participants and staff to run more ad hoc activities like improv or puzzle hunts, and the evenings include everything from organized Fermithons to impromptu karaoke sessions. Rationality is the "theme" of the camps insofar as it helps creates a common sense of purpose among the otherwise relatively diverse interests and focus among staff and participants: that ideas matter, problems can be solved, and the process of learning and trying new and difficult things can be fun, especially if you find the right people to do them with.*

*Besides the 20+ camps I've taught or directed, I've also run or helped run about a dozen smaller workshops, including a couple 4-5 day "rationality dojos" in 2024. When it was time to start planning for WARP 2025, I decided to run a longer version of those dojos instead of reiterating on the usual camp format.*

*What follows is an expanded adaptation of an email I sent out to help applicants understand how it would be different from our usual programs, or things like CFAR or CFAR-inspired workshops. I plan at some point to write a separate article for these principles and generators, as there's no way to do any of them credit in just a few paragraphs, but for the start of this Sequence, I think it's worth giving an overview of my overarching vision for what a "next stage" of the rationalist pedagogy can look like.*

Dojo Principles
===============

Rationality, as I use the word, refers to an epistemology that minimizes false beliefs and a system of actions that maximally fulfills someone's goals. When I think of what makes an ideal rationality "dojo," I envision a space that best helps teach people those two things, and just those two things, for their own sake and not tied to any particular outcome or goal.

Creating the good environment for that can be difficult, so when I've organized and run these, I focused on three interconnected aspects: the space we create, the approach we take, and the purpose we work toward. These aspects are made up of a set of 9 principles that I paraphrased each morning of the program (or prompted participants to paraphrase) to ensure that none were forgotten or taken for granted from one day to the next.

The Space We Create
-------------------

**1\. A dojo is a space to learn by doing.** We don't just discuss rationality, we practice it through concrete exercises and earnest attempts to solve meaningful problems in our lives.

**2\. A dojo is a space without judgment.** Struggle and mistakes are not failures, but inevitable outcomes of trying to do hard things. We honor the courage it takes to fail publicly, and are grateful to learn something new through others' attempts.

**3\. A dojo is a space for full presence.** We show up committed and engaged, giving sincere effort and candid feedback. Half-hearted practice cheats both ourselves and our peers.

The Approach We Take
--------------------

**4\. In our dojo, there are no masters.** Everyone is at a different point on their path. The novice who started yesterday might notice something the veteran missed.

**5\. In our dojo, there is no single perfect form.** We help each other find the techniques and mental moves that work best for each particular mind and situation.

**6\. In our dojo, all questions are welcome.** No question is too basic, no challenge too bold. Admitting ignorance isn't just the first step toward knowledge, but a recurring part of the cycle to refine our understanding of the world.

The Purpose We Share
--------------------

**7\. We're here to think more clearly, feel more fully, and act more effectively.** Each is valuable for its own sake, and can offer its own path toward self-improvement.

**8\. We're here to develop the art, not just practice it.** We're participants in an evolving craft, refining ideas through experimentation to find what proves most useful to us.

**9\. We're here to find joy in the practice.** Growth doesn't require suffering. Some insights only emerge through play, and genuine enjoyment encourages sustained effort.

It's probably impossible to embody all these principles all the time. *I* certainly didn't manage to during every moment of WARP 25's ten days (or even eight, excluding arrival day and the mid-program break).

But I think they're principles that, the closer we manage to get to them, the more we create a space that helps everyone involved focus on finding truth and producing real, positive changes in their lives. I think it's only once that space is created that the content matters enough to be properly engaged with.

Generators of Rationality
=========================

When I think of the people I've met who actually seem to *be* rationalists, rather than just people who like the ideas or the community, there are specific things that stand out to me. Traits and behaviors, yes, but deeper than that. Values, philosophies, and knowledge that's embodied and evident across a variety of actions.

I call these “generators,” and I think they’re more important than any specific beliefs or techniques. If there's a "spark" that makes someone a rationalist, or proto-rationalist, or aspiring rationalist, or whatever, I think these generators (or ones very much like them) are the bits that make up that spark. Maybe I'm wrong, and they're not the spark itself but things that feed it tinder. I don't understand that spark as well as I'd like to, and a big part of what I get from teaching is the fervent desire to try, both for my own sake and so I can help it spread further, more cleanly, and with better outcomes.

Think of the difference between memorizing rules of grammar versus having a genuine passion for communication. The former requires conscious application, and can be valuable, but the latter will likely lead to mostly consistent grammar naturally over time, while also leading to new artistic expressions that bend the rules for some purpose.

In my view, even learning entirely new ways of thinking and orienting to ideas are not as important as these generators, though definitely a step up from memorizing a list of cognitive biases or techniques. The generators seem upstream of *all* the good stuff, and much more valuable, particularly for people who have access to hundreds of blog posts they can read to learn new frameworks or techniques from, or even those who've already been to workshops that provided them space and guidance to practice in.[^la5peya37hg]

And so unlike what people can get from reading articles or attending rationality camps and workshops, what I wanted my rationality dojos to do is give participants an entire day (or two, in the case of WARP'25) to focus on one specific generator that:

1) Is hard to apply in their lives just from reading blog posts, or even a dedicated couple hours of effort at a workshop.

2) Can be practiced throughout the dojo in a variety of ways that demonstrate value in day-to-day life.

3) Naturally develops skills and processes that help participants accomplish their specific, personal goals.

I'm sure there are more that other people could come up with or add to the list, but the generators I currently believe provide the strongest "base" for epistemic and applied rationality are:  
  
*Deep Empiricism*

*Implicit Knowledge*

*Aliveness*

*Responsibility*

Each has a variety of specific techniques or "atomic motions" that demonstrate immediate value and provide a specific set of things to practice in a dojo environment.

### Atomic Motions

In martial arts, a *kata *is a series of movements linked together in drilled practice to perfect form and develop muscle memory. I use the phrase atomic motions as the most fundamental, concrete actions, like a single punch or block, that are useful to learn on their own but can be built into more complex actions as well.

I believe each generator of rationality should be made evident through concrete, useful actions. Trying to teach epistemic or instrumental rationality through complex technique can be valuable, but I think it’s also important to distinguish specific steps that strengthen our ability to minimize error or better achieve our goals. I also think it's also important for a dojo environment to be a place where people learn through practice, and get a deep sense of what a “good punch” looks and feels like, and more complex actions are harder to drill and get feedback on.

Atomic motions are difficult to find, but here are a mix of atomic and "molecular" motions for the generators:

Deep Empiricism:

*   Paraphrasing others’ ideas to test your understanding
*   Running A/B tests on your preferences
*   Logging predictions vs actual completion times for projects
*   Testing advice or suggestions in low-stakes ways, even if they seem wrong

Implicit Knowledge:

*   Practicing [Gendlin Focusing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PXqQhYEdbdAYCp88m/focusing-for-skeptics)
*   Taste-testing a variety of chocolate or tea to develop flavor intuition
*   Noticing confusion or frustration and verbalizing it for follow-up
*   Noticing what credence feels like when asserting or doubting something

Aliveness:

*   Boggling
*   Breaking out of autopilot
*   Noticing what desires feel most prominent
*   Expanding awareness of your environment

Responsibility

*   Betting on beliefs
*   Publicly claiming responsibility for mistakes
*   Asking for feedback
*   Pre/postmortems

These lists are far from comprehensive, but each is a specific, repeatable action or mental motion that builds a person's capacity to minimize errors and self-improve.

And for creating a dojo experience that results in real, lasting changes, I believe it's important to experiencing that, specifically: the way these things can *actually solve* problems on people's "bug lists" and make their life better. I think that's much more important than just understanding the abstract ideas of how they're supposed to help, in theory, if applied at some point later once the participants go home.

Now, finally, we can examine the generators themselves, and why I think they're so important to the art of rationality.

Deep Empiricism
---------------

The “deep” is important, I think.

Most smart, educated people I’ve met would say they’re empiricists to some degree. “Science is good, evidence matters.” What that means for their life, in practice, is that they trust the expert consensus in most fields, maybe read published science journals now and then (or more likely, reads articles and watches videos that cite them), and maybe believe that observable phenomena are the only evidence that should matter for finding truth.

And that’s pretty good? Like, that puts their epistemics solidly ahead of most people who don’t believe those things.

But a truly rational epistemology knows that, while expert consensus is a good starting point for understanding reality, it’s also often wrong. True rationality is about caring more about things like methodology and replicability in science papers than how often they’re cited. It knows that general trends don't always apply to individual situations.

And what I call Deep Empiricism is about going beyond even that, and viewing ourselves as active participants in the scientific process .

It's true that we can’t test *everything *by ourselves. We don’t have enough time or resources or knowledge; at some point we *have* to trust others to figure out things for us.

But there are many things we *can’t *reliably trust to others. Things related to your tastes and preferences. Things related to productivity and habits. Things related to your personal health, both mental and physical.

Deep Empiricism is about the feeling of *personal agency* in testing our beliefs against reality, and updating based on new observations or evidence. In the worldwide endeavors of knowledge-generation and falsification, we can realize that, if no one seems to know something, or if the evidence for it seems mixed, or if there are different groups arguing over what's true... it might be up to us to figure it out ourselves.

What rugs would be the most comfortable ones for your house? Is investing in an expensive pillow or mattress actually going to help you sleep better? Do you need to stop typing for a few days to heal your RSI, or would coconut water help through its magnesium or Vitamin B?

LessWrong style Rationality differs from the historical philosophy of that name in part by valuing rather than dismissing empirical knowledge, but it’s not enough to just believe in abstract that knowledge should be tested: it’s more important to understand on a deep level that **no one can give us knowledge we can be more confident in than the knowledge we’ve tested against reality ourselves. **This contrasts with the way most people "cargo cult” empiricism, which is mostly by citing studies or deferring uncritically to signals of academic status.

Fallibilism, the understanding that our knowledge will always be incomplete in some way but can still be useful, is a good starting point, but true rationality also requires the sometimes-uncomfortable work of noticing that smart people disagree with us on something, and deliberately looking for evidence against our beliefs. It requires maintaining epistemic humility through practice with being wrong about our beliefs, experimentally and directly.

There are many atomic and molecular motions that are valuable for this generator, and many ways it shows up in my life, and the lives other others I admire. Among all of them, the atomic motion I decided on to get people to practice during the dojos was one that most people don't even realize *is* an act of empiricism: paraphrasing.

### Paraphrasing

Pause reading now. Try paraphrasing out loud or in writing what you remember this article being about so far, or even just the last section.

It’s okay if you missed something. No rational teacher who actually cares about their students understanding a lecture takes for granted that their students have retained everything they say on the first pass. Same goes for written posts like this; if you want to understand it, you should try pausing on occasion to write a summary of what you think the last section was about, then go back and check.

At my dojos, throughout the day, I’d randomly call upon people to paraphrase back what I or someone else said. I'd also make sure it’s clear that it’s *expected* that they won’t be able to remember it all. Some people can, but for the most part, brains just aren’t able to keep their attention on a speaker for 10 minutes straight and absorb all the things they said, let alone 30 or more.

Minds wander. You might read or hear something that triggers a memory, and minutes can pass before you catch yourself and realize you zoned out. You could be tired from not getting enough sleep last night, or stressed about something going on in your life.

Paraphrasing is an atomic motion of Deep Empiricism because it’s a simple action that you can take at any point in a conversation to actively test your beliefs against reality. It helps you avoid pattern-matching or nodding along, and then continuing the conversation or lecture with a false model of what the other person said.

The paraphrase loop is:

1.  Do your best to recall the speaker's points
2.  Express them in your own words
3.  Get feedback on whether you captured them accurately

It’s simple, but this basic process creates a tight empirical feedback loop about the quality of your understanding. When you fail to paraphrase well, it immediately reveals the ways your model of reality was false or incomplete, and helps you correct it.

It also has the benefit of demonstrating humility and careful attention to others. You're acknowledging that you might not have grasped their point, and creating space to be corrected. This helps people avoid the common failure mode of immediately pattern-matching someone's statement to something familiar and responding to that instead of what they actually meant.

If both people are willing to do this, it’s even more valuable for clearing up disagreements or confusions that result from people talking past each other without even realizing it… and that’s a pretty big source of conflicts in day to day life, whether with loved ones, at work, or even in arguments on the internet.

The mental motion of “notice I have a probably-inaccurate model of reality, check if it’s true” can generalize from here to other things in your life. What's something you think you know, and why do you think you know it? What’s the cheapest, simplest test you can run to check? When I eventually write a post dedicated to Deep Empiricism I'll go over some of the other ways to practice it, but in the meantime, paraphrasing is a low hanging fruit that far too few people practice plucking.

Implicit Knowledge
------------------

A common straw-rationalist mistake is to assume that all knowledge is explicit and able to be verbally understood and communicated, and that any knowledge that can’t be isn’t real or meaningful. Those that hold this belief (and there are people that do, whether they call themselves rationalist or not) do so because it's a useful heuristic against woo and all sorts of con artistry. It's easy to look at the problems of the world and, by and large, conclude they come from people undervaluing explicit knowledge and clear communication.

The problem comes if this makes someone *undervalue* the implicit, and by doing so lose vast and wide sources of knowledge, both from others and their own body and mind.

There’s a great discussion to be had around the ways [knowledge can be legible or illegible, explicit or implicit](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jbE85wCkRr9z7tqmD/epistemic-legibility#Why_is_this_Important_), as well as situations where putting too much weight on legibility can lead to [ignoring or discounting implicit knowledge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4gDbqL3Tods8kHDqs/limits-to-legibility). Personally, I suspect all knowledge could *eventually *be made legible, with lots of time and effort and skill. Maybe some of it is so complex it would need a superintelligence capable of figuring out exactly what thousand, or ten thousand, or million words are required to transmit a particular qualia from one mind into another.

But even then, there would be some things such as muscle memory for which even a perfect description of an experience would not help someone else learn it as much as experiencing it themselves would. There are some qualia that contain within them knowledge from the subconscious, accumulated and compressed memories too numerous and indistinct to be reconstituted more legibly than the experiential feeling of "the muscles in my neck tighten when I look at this pattern of colors and shapes."

The generator of valuing "implicit knowledge" goes beyond just recognizing that some accumulated experiences result in unconscious beliefs, instinctual skills, or muscle memory. It’s a perspective that allows people to be open to *all* sources of information, even non-verbal or intangible bits, to better avoid the blind spots that would warp their maps of reality if unattended to.

Noticing confusion is a core skill of any aspiring rationalist; the *feeling* of confusion is implicit knowledge, a clear signal that some observation does not line up with your expectations of reality.

Aesthetic taste is implicit knowledge, a vague sense that varies from person to person but often encodes assumptions and heuristics about people, places, and things.

"Vibes" from meeting new people or walking into a social scene contain rules for how to act socially, expectations of what sorts of behavior will be rewarded or punished, and even feelings that amount to whether you're safe to stay or should go somewhere else.

None of these things are easy to transmit from one person to another. The impressions themselves are often wrong or misleading or overconfident in some ways. And relying too much on implicit knowledge is particularly fraught if you need to coordinate with others.

But ignoring them entirely would result in a lot fewer bits of information to process and incorporate into your predictions and decisions, not to mention make it harder to coordinate with others who take them more seriously. You cannot be a fully rational agent if you're either incapable of noticing, or choose to regularly ignore, entire swathes of information from your subconscious, your environment, or other people.

### Focusing

[Focusing (in the Gendlin sense)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PXqQhYEdbdAYCp88m/focusing-for-skeptics) is the single most powerful tool I’ve encountered for making implicit knowledge legible, and while it’s more of a "molecular" motion than atomic, even the first step of it is important enough that it’s worth emphasizing as a core technique worth practicing.

Focusing is about attending to our "felt-senses," the pre-verbal, bodily sensations that often accompany our thoughts and feelings. It’s a systematic way to access information we have but haven't explicitly processed yet.

When you have a nagging sense that something doesn't add up in an argument, or a vague feeling that a plan will fail, or a diffuse "sparklyness" when thinking about a particular person, Focusing helps you better understand what you're really feeling and why through a number of atomic motions:

1.  Noticing felt-senses and emotions in real time.
2.  Finding "handles" to interface with the non-verbal, "implicit knowledge" beneath the felt-sense or emotion
3.  Checking whether explicit, verbal guesses match the felt-sense's "knowledge" 
4.  Contextualize the explicit guess into insights about what we feel and why

People seem to vary by how strongly or frequently they have felt-senses, but I have helped many people notice that they had a lot more than they thought they did, and even some who claimed not to have any eventually start to independently notice or recognize them. Even just that first step can be valuable, but the whole process is where Focusing really shines as a tool for rational action.

For example, you might be in a meeting where everyone is excited about a plan, but something feels off in your stomach as you listen to them talk; a sort of uneasy fluttering, maybe. Rather than either dismissing this feeling, or interrupting with half-formed objections, you can Focus on it, run through some guesses for why you're feeling uneasy or pessimistic, and eventually realize "ah, this plan assumes our suppliers will be flexible in a way that doesn't match my experience working with them." You might then hesitate to voice your worry, wonder why, and notice a tension in your shoulders. Focusing on that might help you realize “ah, I’m afraid of of making my coworker look bad by objecting to his plan," then decide whether this is a reasonable fear or not, and how to navigate that.

It’s hard to count all the ways these skills help improve someone's ability to seek truth and achieve their goals. As a starter, they help prevent dismissing valid concerns or preferences just because they aren't immediately verbal. They also help distinguish between different types of uncertainty that might feel similar at first, but point to subtly different things. They can let you access knowledge from past experience that might contradict models you can't explicitly find flaws in, or help you understand what you actually want or like better, or help you resolve inner conflicts between different wants, and on and on.

On top of all that, it’s a skill that supercharges many other therapeutic or "rationalist" techniques. When you get good enough at it, the ability to engage with and extract knowledge from subtle sensations in your body, or even more obvious feelings like surprise, confusion, frustration, and all the non-verbal signals that they manifest through, is a kind of superpower. They’re the sorts of things that come up all the time when trying to notice errors in our maps, navigate emotional triggers, and avoid blind spots when making plans or predictions.

Aliveness
---------

[What are you doing right now, and why are you doing it?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=284_dY3_u6w)

For some of you, reading that may have caused a sudden shift in your consciousness, or your "awareness." A similar thing can be triggered by asking you to notice how your tongue feels in your mouth, or notice the feeling of the clothes you’re wearing against your skin. By default, our minds filter a lot of sensory input, and it takes some particular prompt or new stimulus to drop those filters enough for our conscious mind to notice what was behind them.

Similarly, our awareness tends to shrink and focus down to a limited set of things while we go about our day to day life. The general term for this is “autopilot,” and it’s both completely natural and useful in some situations (especially if you learn to train it well!) while also being a major source of habitual "irrationality" and reflexive mistakes. Duncan has written about the moment of "summoning sapience" that allows you to make a different choice than the one you'd make by default, and it's again hard to overstate how important this is for any sort of rational decision-making.

What are you doing, and why are you doing it?

Reading this post, sure. I’m glad, but take a moment. Notice your posture. Are you comfortable? Sink into your body. Are you thirsty? Do you need a stretch? What is the thing that would make reading this document feel even better to you right now? Look around. Think of what’s outside your immediate vision. Is there anything in your broader action space (places you can go in a reasonable amount of time, things or people in those places) that might help you better do the thing you want to be doing?

Aliveness is hard to fully summarize without seeming contradictory sometimes. It’s about maintaining genuine, present engagement with whatever you’re doing in the moment, without tunnel-visioning. It’s about getting out of your head, without reducing your capacity to think clearly. It's about “embodiment,” if you’ve heard that word tossed around, but it’s also about passion, interest, curiosity, such that entering a “flow state,” which normally might be considered disembodying if it’s related to mental work, doesn’t necessarily makes you less "alive." It’s about staying open to all parts of ourselves, and open to all available information around us and within us, without being overwhelmed or operating purely by reflex or habit.

People who struggle with motivation, people who feel directionless in life, people who are stuck repeating the same mistakes again and again… to me, the root cause that needs to be addressed for all of these is the thing I consider a lack of Aliveness*. *It’s the thing that allows you to actually feel your emotions and notice if you’re unhappy or frustrated or bored by something, because if you can’t notice those things, how are you going to correct whatever is causing them? How are you going to be able to even make the conscious choice to do something different, let alone figure out what that something is?

Aliveness is fundamentally tied to *awareness.* If you're on autopilot or tunnel visioned, there are whole swathes of reality that won't be included in your model of a problem you face, or the solutions available to you. Maybe this is valuable for you in some situations, but by definition you can't interact with something you didn't think of. To solve a novel problem, what occurs to you as a potential solution  *has* to pass through your awareness first, unless you get really lucky with the set of reactions and instincts that naturally occur without conscious choice.

Sometimes this just means having the awareness that a category of action is even "allowed," like cold-emailing some author to ask for an interview, but other times it's as literal as "do you remember that your house has a utility closet, and that closet has a toolbox, and in that box is a screwdriver?" Or "do you remember that you have a friend who has probably solved this problem before, and that they would be happy for you to reach out and ask them for help?" When you know how to expand your awareness on command, a surprising amount of problems get solved by just *noticing or remembering* how wide your option space really is.

But awareness is just half of the generator. A connected sense of *presence* and *desire* are also invaluable to avoiding mistakes and finding solutions for your problems.

This is the experience that we try to evoke at the camps in a hundred subtle ways, and a few not-so-subtle ones. Everything is optional, and people are encouraged to follow what feels alive to them in the moment. This tends to makes them do what feels naturally motivated and engaging, rather than peer pressured into what they "should" do. At the same time, we bring people's awareness to the richness of their option space, both by highlighting their agency in creating the camp experience that's best for them, and also literally just reminding them what's in and around the physical space of the camp venues (or even beyond).

When we're in the state of Aliveness, we don't have to force ourselves to do things through willpower, because we're following natural motivations like curiosity or excitement. There's no comparison between mechanically applying some formula or series of steps because we "should," versus being genuinely present and conscious of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

I ran WARP'25 at Lighthaven, which was an amazing venue for having a wide variety of things to do. At one point I asked the venue if they had any rugs that needed cleaning and a powerwasher: they did, and so we set some up and I told the participants to try it. Notice how it felt to use the powerwasher, if they never had before. Notice when it went from a fun and empowering feeling (assuming it does) to an autopilot task that's lost its magic. This can be fine! A lot of people even find cleaning a meditative experience. But it's important to practice noticing how it feels to do the thing, and if it's closing you off from other, better experiences or options.

What are you doing, and why are you doing it?

(And while I have your attention again, when's the last time you paused to try paraphrasing what you've read so far?)

Aliveness is another generator where the early sub-steps of Focusing can be valuable—a lot of people have trouble noticing when they’ve gone into autopilot, or have trouble noticing what they really care about and want, or why they feel bored or frustrated by things they’re supposed to care about. The felt senses often contain important information about what genuinely engages us versus what we're doing out of habit or perceived obligation.

And there's a whole lot more I can say about the importance of being able to get in touch with your desires and wants and find motivation for things you care about, but the main atomic motion I think is worth highlighting in this post is "Boggling."

### Boggling

Boggling is the ability to drop your preconceived assumptions that you understand anything around you, and look at the world with fresh eyes. Children don’t (usually) pretend they know why grass grows or the sky is blue until they encounter something that seems like an explanation, and as they get older they often need to learn that the original explanations they were given don't actually give them full knowledge of the more complex reality that they slowly become more aware of as they age. The chemical and physiological complexity of even something as basic as a blade of grass should inspire many people to re-consider how much think they they know and why.

The search for deeper understanding and better models is nearly endless, but *seeing clearly* and *avoiding reflexive thoughts* is what Boggling excels at. Practicing boggling helps us avoid autopilot when we want to, and maintain genuine curiosity, both of which are necessary parts of Aliveness.

But perhaps the most important aspect of Boggling is that it's not just for realizing how little we know about physical reality. It also generates better rationality by keeping us humble about what we assume of other people, the relationship between our models of reality and our values, and our desires.

We have to know what we want and care about to actually do the things that matter to us, and we have to know what we don't know to figure out what's actually true, and examining that, really examining it, really looking at it for a sustained period and not just taking the first answers that come to mind, is hard, but life changing if you learn how to do it well. 

Worse, if we don't know what we really want, or how to tell if our beliefs are false, we can easily end up being manipulated into fulfilling someone else’s values, or pushed into believing we’re supposed to do something we’re not interested in or doesn't help achieve our goals.

Ultimately, I think Aliveness is important for rationality because it helps *maintain direct contact with reality* rather than operate through familiar expectations or patterns, and that makes Boggling a vitally important mental mode to be able to switch into. The same way a skilled [naturalist](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/evLkoqsbi79AnM5sz) develops understanding by actually watching animals in their habitat rather than just reading about them, the direct engagement with our own confusion about reality keeps us from stopping too soon in our inquisitiveness. 

What are you doing, right now, and why are you doing it? It’s fine to get into flow while you deeply engage with something, but feel free to check in with your body, take stock of your surroundings, and maybe boggle a little over what it even means to be able to "expand your awareness" or notice new things by just looking around, either mentally or with your physical eyes. Maybe take a break before you read on, if that’s something you’d enjoy.

Responsibility
--------------

There’s something subtle but vital to rationality that may seem unrelated to it, but shows up again and again in my understanding of what makes instrumental rationality *actually work* in practice. I had a hard time naming it during the rationality dojos, but while re-examining the generators for WARP'25, I started calling it “Responsibility.”

There's an alternate world very close to ours where the rationality community deserves most of its critiques and dismissal by detractors. In that world, rationalists pull random numbers out of their gut to say things like "There's a 70% chance that AI are capable of fully generated, coherent, movie length films by the end of the year."

And in that alternate world, no one around them says "Wanna bet?"

Betting is not just a random quirk of rationalists. Betting *keeps us truth oriented*. It's the cultural antibody against bullshitting, and a powerful signal to take someone's words seriously. Even if no money changes hands, just the *possibility* that someone will ask you what odds you're willing to put on your beliefs is a social technology that transforms stating your probability estimates from intellectual signaling into something with *substance* behind it.

This single norm does more to promote good epistemics, both individually and as a community, than a hundred blog posts about Bayes' theorem or game theory.

But responsibility is about more than just betting culture. Rational epistemology requires error correction, and the process of error correction requires internalizing the belief in a legible, predictable universe where, if something goes wrong, there's *something we can learn to make things go better next time*. 

A lot of people will *say* they believe the world is legible and predictable, and would of course say they care about having true beliefs and achieving their goals. But they don't do the obvious next steps that emerge from internalizing those things. They'll fail to do a premortem for things they care about going well, or fail to socially own up to something they regretted, letting the part of their mind that wants to avoid consequences fool the rest of them into thinking they'll avoid the mistake next time anyway. 

Responsibility as a generator of rationality emerges from taking seriously that our actions and beliefs have real consequences, and that we can learn from these consequences if we're willing to own them. The better our feedback loops are between our models and reality, such as when we make concrete predictions with real stakes, the harder it is to hide from being wrong.

Same goes for social situations. When we take ownership of mistakes, whether in public or private apologies, we're not just signaling a commitment to improve or be held accountable, we're also making it harder for *ourselves* to shy away from the mistakes we made and hope no one notices. 

People from outside the culture, or who find losing money particularly aversive, often trip up on the idea that you're expected to give people money for things. But it's not a necessary component for everyone: social credibility is just as much "skin in the game" as cash, if it's something you put real effort into publicly signaling, and if it's something we as a community care about and track.

I want to be extra clear here: this generator is not a vague desire to "try to be more responsible."

It’s about keeping [*nihil supernum*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i3TjwwuEwkrXb9Ts6/heroic-responsibility)in mind not just for big, Heroic Responsibility things, but also little things like this. There’s nothing above us to catch us if we fail. If we want an outcome in the world, we need to do our best to create it, and that involves *really caring* about getting the feedback we need to check our false beliefs and change behaviors we regret.

We cannot just hope that reality will naturally give us that feedback on its own; we have to look for it, sometimes. We have to set up systems that encourage it, and support each other in getting it too, and quickly enough to avoid the next mistake.

It also creates better coordination, because when people take real responsibility—backed by concrete stakes—it becomes much clearer who actually believes what and who can be counted on for what. This cuts through cheap talk or status games, and reveals the best ways to allocate leadership and decisioning toward capability or specialized knowledge, rather than arbitrary metrics like seniority or charisma (unless charisma is instrumentally useful for the job).

Focusing on responsibility, without focusing too much on blame or chasing social credit, often requires some emotional work and introspection as well. It can be deeply uncomfortable to face our mistakes, let alone reveal them to others. Most people have narratives and frames that compel them to avoid acknowledging flaws as much as possible, or make others or themselves feel bad or be "punished" beyond the natural outcomes of the mistake.

But when we engage deeply with responsibility as a generator, rationality emerges as a natural consequence of having to "own" the consequences of our thoughts and actions. When we create systems where people regularly act to reinforce this, we create the incentive pressures and environments where rational thinking and coordination emerge more easily.

As mentioned at the start, there are numerous atomic motions, such as betting on beliefs, publicly apologizing for mistakes, asking for feedback, and doing [premortems](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Htjbj8ystqc2zLtMX/murphyjitsu-an-inner-simulator-algorithm). Most related to responsibility are about setting up stronger and more direct feedback loops between our actions and the outcomes of them, or doing something to try for better future results, but the simplest one by far is Betting.

### Betting

In normal culture, I think it makes sense to be skeptical of people who try to verbalize predictions about things. In media, such examples are usually ridiculous—such as C-3PO or Spock putting absurdly low odds on survival that then goes in their favor—and in reality most people, both laymen and mathematician, see anything similar as an attempted boast, and just as ridiculous in audacity.

And in normal culture, again, I think it would be. It's not the willingness to talk about probabilities that makes rationalist culture uniquely good for minimizing errors, but the awareness that, at any point, someone may then ask you what you would *bet *on those probabilities, and that this is *good* and you should take that question seriously*.*

Prediction and betting work as powerful atomic motions because they force several key aspects of rationality to happen simultaneously:

1.  They make you check your conifidence. When real stakes are involved, you have to distinguish between what you think you believe, what you want to believe, and what you actually believe enough to risk some money or reputation on. This naturally generates more reflective introspection and better epistemics.
2.  They create unmistakable feedback. You can't explain away losing a bet like you can gloss over whether you predicted something would happen before it did or not: the reality check is built into the structure of the activity.
3.  They force you to be precise. To make a bet work, you need clear resolution criteria and a sense of credence that you can compare and contrast to other levels of confidence. This naturally generates better operationalization of vague beliefs into testable predictions.
4.  They create motivation to learn. When you lose money or reputation on a bet, you're much more motivated to figure out where your thinking went wrong than when you're just proven wrong in conversation. This naturally develops calibration over time.
5.  They help coordinate knowledge and beliefs across people. When people are willing to bet on their beliefs, it quickly becomes clear who actually knows what they're talking about versus who just talks like they do.

If the betting culture was lost or faded away, and people just put numbers on predictions without it, rationality as a culture would be dead, no matter how much its corpse walked around and spoke like it. It wouldn’t matter if those numbers were carefully thought about and calculated, or if they were completely made up on the spot: the culture of checking and putting stakes on it is the spark that starts the engine.

As an atomic motion, betting is incredibly powerful habit to develop, so long as you bet something that matters to you. If the thought of being wrong about something in a bet doesn't at least make you hesitate a little, the bet may not be for something that matters enough for you. 

Again, it doesn't matter if it's money or something else, so long as whatever it is it makes you actually pause to check internally, pay attention to your implicit knowledge, and adjust your conscious belief with your emotional expectations so that you maximize your chances of being right… or at least, less wrong.

Looking Ahead
=============

This overview is meant to give a sense of the vision, not serve as a comprehensive manual. Each generator—Deep Empiricism, Implicit Knowledge, Aliveness, and Responsibility—deserves its own dedicated exploration, as do the many atomic motions I've only briefly mentioned or left out entirely. Future posts will dive deeper into them all, including more concrete examples and exercises, common failure modes, as well as the ways these generators interact and reinforce each other.

For now, my hope is that this framework offers something useful: a way of thinking about rationality that goes beyond specific frames or beliefs or techniques, and toward cultivating the underlying orientations that make those techniques actually work in practice. The generators aren't meant to be exhaustive or final—there's at least one other important one that helps people build a coherent sense of self and coordinate with themselves (and others) across time, something like CEV+TDT, or maybe just "Lawfulness."

But comprehensive or not, they're my current best attempt at naming the things I've seen matter most in people who don't just call themselves rationalists, but actually think more clearly, incorporate all the information available to them, and act more effectively as a result than anyone else I've met. They're the things that help *me* become my best self, and live a life that feels good and achieves the things I care about, while providing tools to self-improve when I fall short of the person I want to be.

If any of this resonates, I'd encourage you to try practicing even one atomic motion deliberately over the next week. Paraphrase someone in conversation and ask if you got it right. Notice a felt-sense and sit with it for a moment. Check in with yourself to occasionally ask what you're doing and why. Prompt yourself to bet on something you predict, or at least make a public post about it so you have some public accountability. 

See what happens. The generators reveal themselves through practice, not just understanding—and that's ultimately what a dojo is for. I hope to run another one soon.

[^la5peya37hg]: As an aside, I believe camps like SPARC and ESPR are pretty good at transmitting a lot of the upstream and downstream stuff. I also think they, and CFAR, are okay at teaching powerful techniques and mental models that formalize what the generators "care" about. All those things are, in fact, important and valuable in their own right, but I say only "okay at" because for the most part, people don't leave the workshops or camps able to remember most of the techniques, let alone apply them to the problems in their lives.My hypothesis for why is that the camps spend little time explicitly transmitting the top level generators, and CFAR even less so (which makes sense, since the camps are 3x as long). Instead the camps do our best to create environments where the outputs are on display, and people can interact with them in a way that feels fun and exciting, such that they hopefully resonate enough to be absorbed along with the battery of specific techniques, introspection prompts, mental models, and other unique experiences that make up the days. Both CFAR and the camps and even random afternoon rationality workshops can instill something of what makes rationality work. I have seen people's behavior, ways of thinking, and even whole lives set on a new, better course from all of them.But not as many as any organizers would hope, because each format still leaves gaps. Even if we just think of a particular concept or technique, an hour isn’t enough to really grok it, let alone get sufficient practice in understanding what about it works for you and what doesn’t. There isn't space in a camp, let alone much shorter workshops like CFAR or afternoon rationality meetups, to deeply explore both the driving principles and the fundamental skills. And I suspect the driving principles, the "generators," matter quite a bit.