# CFAR Takeaways: Andrew Critch

I'm trying to build my own art of rationality training, and I've started talking to various CFAR instructors about their experiences – things that might be important for me to know but which hadn't been written up nicely before.

This is a quick write up of a conversation with Andrew Critch about his takeaways. (I took rough notes, and then roughly cleaned them up for this. Some of my phrasings might not exactly match his intended meaning, although I've tried to separate out places where I'm guessing what he meant from places where I'm repeating his words as best I can)

Note that Andrew Critch is one particular member of the early CFAR team. My sense is each CFAR founder had their own taste on "what's most important". Treat this as one stone in a mosaic of takeaways.

"What surprised you most during your time at CFAR?
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**Surprise 1: People are profoundly non-numerate. **

And, people who are *not* profoundly non-numerate still fail to connect numbers to life. 

I'm still trying to find a way to teach people to apply numbers for their life. For example: "This thing is annoying you. How many minutes is it annoying you today? how many days will it annoy you?". I compulsively do this. There aren't things lying around in my life that bother me because I always notice and deal with it.

People are very scale-insensitive. Common loci of scale-insensitivity include jobs, relationship, personal hygiene habits, eating habits, and private things people do in their private homes for thousands of hours.

I thought it'd be easy to use numbers to not suck.

**Surprise 2: People don't realize they need to get over things.**

There was a unit a CFAR called '[goal factoring](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZHWiCM4QmX8WwYajH/goal-factoring-1)'. Early in it's development, the instructor would say to their class: "if you're doing something continuously, fill out a 2x2 matrix", where you ask: 1) does this bother me? (yes or not), and 2) is it a problem? (yes or no).

"Some things will bother you and not be a problem. This unit is not for that."

The thing that surprised me, was telling the instructor: "C'mon instructor. It's not necessary to spell out that people just need to accept some things and get over them. People know that, it's not worth spending the minute on it." 

At the next class, the instructor asked the class: "When something bothers you, do you ask if you need to get over it?". 10% of people raised their hand. People didn't know the "realize that some things bother you but it's not a problem and you can get over it."

**Surprise 3: When I learned Inner Simulator from Kenzie, I was surprised that it helped with everything in life forever.**

*\[I replied: "I'm surprised that you were surprised. I'd expect that to have already been part of your repertoire."\]*

The difference between Inner Simulator and the previous best tool I had was:

Previously, I thought of my system 1 as something that both "decided to make queries" and "returned the results of the queries." i.e. my fast intuitions would notice something and give me information about it. I previously thought of "inner sim" as a different intelligence that worked on it's own.

The difference with Kenzie's "Inner Sim" approach is that my *System 2 could decide when to query System 1*. And then System 1 would return the query with its anticipations (which System 2 wouldn't be able to generate on its own). 

*\[What questions is System 1 good at asking that System 2 wouldn't necessarily ask?\]*

System 1 is good at asking "is this person screwing me over?" without my S2 having to realize that now's a good time to ask that question. (S2 also does sometimes ask this question, at complementary times)

**Surprise 4: How much people didn't seem to want things**

And, the degree to which people wanted things was even more incoherent than I thought. I thought people wanted things but didn't know how to pursue them. 

*\[I think Critch trailed off here, but implication seemed to be "basically people just didn't want things in the first place"\]*

What do other people seem surprised or confused about, which are important if they're gonna do something rationality-training-ish
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Rationality is pretty hopeless without scope sensitivity, which is pretty hopeless without numeracy.

*Me: What are some ways you've tried/failed to teach numeracy? Were there any glimmers of success that maybe point the way?*

One glimmer of hope was "visualizations" and comparisons to things people know. If there's a 1/50 chance of something working, that's kinda like shuffling a deck of cards.

Ten minutes a day is 60 hours a year. If something eats 10 minutes each day, you'd break even in a year if you spent a whole work week getting rid of it forever.

*Me: What are some surprising things that didn't work?*

I kept hoping there'd be little blockers I could remove, like getting people to use a piece of paper to deal with numbers, or telling people to round things to a power of 1, 10, 30, 100.

**Internal Family Systems (IFS) is basically true for most people**

Everyone seems to have parts of themselves they don't respect, who start to behave better when they respect those parts.

Observation: I'd see a person say something like "there's nothing I can do about blah, because \[reason\]." 

I'd ask them "Could I talk to that part like it's a person?" 

They say: "Okay..." 

I say: "Hey part, what are you worried about?" 

"X" 

"Let's talk about X"

And they kinda have this feeling of surprise, like they didn't realize this part of them had any kind of valuable thing to say. And often that part-of-them comes up with the reason.

*Me: How many people did you try IFS with, and how many did it help?*

I tried this with about 100 people, and I think maybe with two people it didn't work.

**External memory is essential to intelligence augmentation. **

If your personality type is "writing doesn't work for me", one of your biggest bottlenecks is to make writing work for you. You can also try diagramming.

My update as an instructor is "if a person is not open to learning to use external visual media to help them think, give up on helping them until they've become open to that." The gains per unit time will probably be very low. Focus your energy on helping them fix that, or give up on helping that person. 

**People like concocting narratives where their problems are insolvable.**

If "they already tried it and it didn't work" they're real into that *\[Ray interpretation: as an excuse not to try more\].*

People's needs change a lot, so you can try teaching them Goal Factoring in February and it didn't help, but then in August maybe they need it, but they (and you) already learned "Goal factoring didn't work for them." So, watch out for that.

You once told me that there were ~20 things a person needed to be generally competent. What were they?
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I'm not sure I had an exact list, but I'll try to generate one now and see how many things are on it:

1.  Numeracy
2.  Reading 
3.  Writing
4.  Logic
5.  Introspection (such as focusing)
6.  Affective Memory
    1.  ability to remember how you feel awhile later
7.  Episodic Memory
8.  Procedural Memory
    1.  ability to retain procedures for taking actions
9.  Causal Diagramming
    1.  or, some kind of external media, other than writing
10.  Ability to use Bayes' rule. The "odds ratio" form of Bayes Theorem.
    1.  Bayes rule specifically has fewer mental operations than most other forms of probability. It fits in fewer working memory slots.
11.  Ability to clear your mind
    1.  or, return your mind to some base state
12.  Executive Function and Impulse control
    1.  Executive function: ability to generate an impulse that's not there,
    2.  Impulse control: ability to override an impulse
13.  Sustaining attention on a thing
14.  Empathy
    1.  sense of boundaries
    2.  sense of people's cognitive boundary, physical boundaries
        1.  "I don't want to get into that"
15.  Sense of your own boundaries
    1.  willingness to have boundaries
16.  Curiosity
    1.  You'll play your cards better if you know what game you're playing
    2.  i.e. if I don't know stuff I'll perform worse, so it's good for me to find stuff out
    3.  "the truth is relevant."
17.  Ability to go sleep
    1.  Sleep deprivation is one of the greatest effect sizes for IQ 
18.  Social skills?
    1.  track common knowledge, and interface smoothly with it
        1.  people who need to say "common knowledge" a lot are *not* doing it
    2.  social metacognition
        1.  the thing that the "unrolling social metacognition"
19.  Ability to express oneself verbally
    1.  (if we're talking "ability to impact the world", not so much 

*Phrasing is Ray's, reconstructed a few months later:*

I don't feel optimistic about training that gets people from 0 of these skills to all 19. But I feel hope about finding people who have like 17 of these skills, and getting them the last missing 2 that they need.

*\[What's a good way to filter for people who already have 17 of these skills?\]*

People who are already pretty high functioning probably have most of the skills. Filtering for "people who can afford to pay for a workshop" works pretty well. CFAR workshops were $4k. People for whom that seemed like a good deal are probably people who already have most of the skills on this list.