Schedule | Center for Applied Rationality

Schedule of the Nov 2012 workshop below. Click HERE for an overview of our retreats.

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Friday, November 16: Know the World

8:00 am	Breakfast
8:45 am	Opening Session. Rationality doesn’t mean Spock – the common themes that will bind the workshop together – building accurate models of the world, figuring out which actions lead to preferred outcomes, and managing our brain’s internal resources and algorithms. Plus all the practical stuff; how to get the most out of the workshop; and betting games we’ll be playing throughout. (Also, this will be the only time in the program where an instructor speaks for more than 5 sequential minutes – the rest is all activities, exercises, and interactions.)
10:10 am	Epistemic Spring Cleaning. People collect a wide range of beliefs over their lives. Sometimes it’s helpful to make a concerted effort to sort through them – you may find some beliefs that you haven’t reflected on in a while are playing a large role in your life.
11:10 am	Break.
12:00 pm	Lunch
1:00 pm	Bayes’ Rule: How much to change your mind 3-person workshops (so you can choose your own technical level), as we examine the powerful and simple rules for weighing the strength of evidence, and the qualitative takeaways for deciding when to change your mind in everyday life.
3:00 pm	Break
3:40 pm	Professed belief and anticipated experience What we say loudly that we believe isn’t always what our brain expects to see. Learn how to routinely notice the difference between claiming that your political candidate will win the election, and being willing to bet money on their winning. How to motivate yourself without trying to deny what your brain already knows.
4:50 pm	Quantified trust and advice-taking Are you updating on others’ advice too much or too little? Surprising theorems show that rational agents shouldn’t be able to predict when they’ll disagree. We’ll play a game that will show you whether you’re updating too much or too little on other people’s opinions, with plenty of fast feedback for practice. (Don’t worry – it’s still possible to disagree with the majority if you know something they don’t.)
6:00 pm	Dinner
7:30 pm	Beeminder, a Tool for Installing New Behaviors When you’re trying to turn plans for change (including plans you form this weekend) into things you actually do, it helps to have the right tool to keep your attention on your goal and your progress towards it. Many of us have found Beeminder to be a convenient, intuitive, motivating software tool for establishing new behaviors, so we have invited Daniel Reeves, co-founder of Beeminder, to explain how to use it most effectively.
7:50 pm	Overcoming Procrastination Guest speaker Geoff Anders presents techniques his organization has used to overcome procrastination and maintain 75 hours/week of productive work time per person.
Nighttime	Informal discussion Past participants have reported that some of their most valuable hours were the evenings chatting with instructors and other participants about places where their lives and businesses are stuck, and which techniques might apply to them. We’ve ensured there’s an instructor for every three participants, and kept nighttimes free for open discussion.

Saturday, November 17: Know Your Self

8:00 am	Breakfast
9:00 am	Goal-factoring: Fungible goods in everyday life Figure out all of the goals being achieved by your daily behaviors and brainstorm how they can be achieved least expensively. Are you incurring large costs to buy a friend’s goodwill on one occasion, while declining to purchase it much more cheaply the next day?
10:10 am	Expected value of information Quantify and guess the expected value of new information you can easily gather, and new policies you can try out to see what happens. Find the $20 investments that might return $2,000 of value, and learn to try the affordable experiments that ‘probably won’t work’.
11:10 am	Break
12:00 pm	Lunch
1:00 pm	Panic Physiological techniques for noticing and controlling your body’s instinctive fight-or-flight response so that you can remain calm, clear-minded, and open to new information in stressful situations.
2:10 pm	Overcoming aversions: Comfort Zone Expansion In a staggeringly huge universe of possible actions, we usually limit ourselves to choosing from among a tiny subset that are known and comfortable. What are some simple things you’ve somehow “never gotten around” to doing? Would it be all that painful to try doing some of them? Sometimes the most useful actions are those we’ve never tried before.
3:10 pm	Break
3:40 pm	Expanding social comfort zones Our social ranges are often constricted to what we feel comfortable doing – and startups need to be comfortable asking venture capitalists for 10 million dollars. Figure out what your brain is afraid will happen, and do simple experiments to find out what actually happens.
4:50 pm	Heuristics and Biases Saving $30 on a $600 television may feel less impressive than saving $30 on a $50 microwave, but either $30 is worth the same amount. Cognitive scientists have identified a number of systematic ways in which our intuitions about what’s valuable, true, or worth doing do not match our considered judgments. Being aware of these cognitive biases can help you avoid falling into these common traps.
6:00 pm	Dinner
7:00 pm	Comfort Zone Expansion: In the Field Hone your new appreciation for slightly uncomfortable social actions by testing them with total strangers. Surprises and entertainment guaranteed! (No, really, this unit is always popular afterward.)
Nighttime	Informal discussion Past participants have reported that some of their most valuable hours were the evenings chatting with instructors and other participants about places where their lives and businesses are stuck, and which techniques might apply to them. We’ve ensured there’s an instructor for every three participants, and kept nighttimes free for open discussion.

Sunday, November 18: The Big Picture

8:00 am	Breakfast
9:00 am	From lifehacking to life-programming Guest speaker Yan Zhang explains how to use the principles of deliberate performance and the behavioral psychology of games to restructure your life for maximum fun and skill acquisition.
10:10 am	Productive arguments Frames of mind for noticing valuable information even when it feels like bad news, and even when it’s presented by someone who isn’t going out of their way to make you like them. A family of practical techniques for keeping debates collaborative and truthfinding (or deciding when to give up).
11:10 am	Break
12:00 pm	Lunch
1:00 pm	Expected value of thinking styles You spend thousands of hours running various default thought processes, some that are curious and accumulate knowledge, some of which are making up more and more reasons why you don’t need to worry about that project coming up tomorrow. Try some simple value calculations for which thought processes are most helpful, and learn to spend more background time in those.
2:10 pm	Social Awareness Guest speaker Liron Shapira shows how you can make an unexpectedly large number of observations and inductions about people from various types of evidence. You’ll gain a better-informed perception of others, and a better understanding of how other people’s perceptions of you can be informed.
3:10 pm	Break
3:40 pm	Installing Habits Use some of the simplest and best-tested principles in experimental psychology to reinforce the behaviors you want to want, and avoid punishing yourself for doing things you want to do again. Operant conditioning advises us to pay attention to immediate rewards and punishments (like thinking of everything that could go wrong, the moment after you press ‘Send’ on an email). Learn to train your “inner pigeon”.
4:50 pm	Closing session Bringing it all together – the tools to carry skills, ideas, habits, and mindsets back into daily life.
6:00 pm	Dinner
Nighttime	Party Fun, decompression, and further discussion.

Ordering shown is typical rather than actual. To allow each session to have only 6 participants, each session is held at multiple times during the day. (Session groups are frequently remixed; everyone gets a chance to meet everyone else.)

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