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. I don't know

"What surprised you most during your time at CFAR?

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 [...]

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Outline:

(00:27) What surprised you most during your time at CFAR?

(03:36) What do other people seem surprised or confused about, which are important if theyre gonna do something rationality-training-ish

(06:20) You once told me that there were ~20 things a person needed to be generally competent. What were they?

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First published:
February 14th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jash4Gbi2wpThzZ4k/cfar-takeaways-andrew-critch

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“CFAR Takeaways: Andrew Critch” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma)