Interlude: Retrospective on Teaching Rationality Workshops

Back in late 2019, I went to a Centre for Applied Rationality (CFAR) workshop (highly recommended!), and in early 2020 I adapted some of my favourite classes into some rationality workshops for the Effective Altruism group in Cambridge. I taught workshops on:

• Having productive disagreements

• Making effective plans

• Building good habits (Trigger-Action Patterns)

• Building useful systems

Based on following up with people a few months later, these went way better than I expected, and I’d be excited to see other people running them! So I’ve made a write-up where I try to share my resources and lesson plans, my thoughts on teaching applied rationality well, my pitch for running these workshops, and my attempts to distill the concepts out into key ideas and mental habits.

I expect this to be strongly of interest to anyone who wants to teach rationality ideas to people. If you’re just interested in learning the ideas yourself, I expect you’ll find the parts on the content of the workshops useful (Content & Appendix A), and you might enjoy trying to work through the lesson plans directly (If you do this, I highly recommend actually doing the exercises! I think that’s >50% of the value)

The write-up is long (even by my standards), so for a better reading/navigation experience, I’ve put it on the EA Forum and LessWrong.