scrambled reflections after warp '25

i spent 10 days at a rationality dojo/camp. this is roughly what i did & learned!

day 1

• a dojo is a space where you try to run experiments, improve ourselves, and be unafraid if this means failing along the way. at dojo, we support and encourage and lift each other up

• there are two flavors of rationality. first is epistemic rationality. this is all about asking the questions of how do i be less wrong over time? how do i discern what is truth? how can we actively seek ways our beliefs could be wrong? how do we identify and correct errors in our thinking? the second is instrumental rationality. this moreso focuses on achievement and effectiveness in the real world. using what we know to accomplish our goals, translating our beliefs into effective actions, setting up systems that help us achieve our goals, and identify and address true bottlenecks in our ability to make progress

• so basically, rationality = believe true things & use that knowledge to achieve your goals

• !!!deep empiricism!!! is this idea that you should build the habit of testing things in reality for yourself, instead of always deferring to the experts

  • reality has too many degrees of freedom + most advice is too general to apply to every situation or person

  • law of equal & opposite advice— some say the early bird catches the worm. others claim good things come to those who wait

  • regularly testing your beliefs against reality instills a mindset in you to not just accept everything as absolute truth and imbues you with a sense of agency to come to your own conclusions

• atomic motions are the actual techniques we can use to practice deep empiricism

  • during conversations, paraphrasing others' ideas to test your understanding & also asking others to paraphrase back your ideas to check if they understood what you intended to say

  • noticing & expressing your confusion

    • “sorry, i just zoned out. could you repeat that?”

  • running a/b testing on your preferences

  • testing advice in low-stakes ways, even if they seem wrong initially

  • writing down predictions with confidence levels before events occur & reviewing predictions afterward to identify patterns of over/under-confidence

• created a feature requests list. this is basically is a list that enumerates all the "bugs" in your life, the things that bother you about your life, things that could be improved on, or things that are not a part of your current routine that you would like to be a part of your current routine

• went to uc berkeley to rizz people as a part of deeply empirically testing our ability to rizz people. basically, we stood in a busy part of campus with signs that asked people to come up to us for free compliments. i was pleasantly surprised at the amount of people who walked up to us allowed me to test my cheesy pickup lines on them. i think i’ve now offered three people a marriage w/ a greencard attached

• after dinner, the evening is filled with activities that are proposed by the camp participants & staff the day of. i decided to run a singing/live music jam sesh with an insanely talented saxophonist & guitarist that i knew. music is so good for the soul.

• started a social media bet with KI (wow i’m such a substack influencer, using all these FirstnameLastname acronyms). agreed to post 1 tiktok per day while at camp or pay her $50 for each day i miss. apparently social accountability & fear of losing money works, although i will say most of these videos were filmed within 1 hour of midnight & the quality and effort deteriorated overtime. still, this was a good bet to run as it made me get over my natural aversion to posting stuff online

• had one of those insane small world moments. when i came home at night, two dudes that we had rizzed as a part of our experiment were in my living room. apparently, a suitemate knew them from a previous math camp and were having them over for a hangout but holy what are the odds of that, especially since i estimate that ~1% of the people who walked past us actually stopped to talk to us

day 2

• today’s focus was an idea called implicit knowledge. this refers to knowledge that you possess but may not be fully able to articulate or verbalize, as contrasted with explicit knowledge, which is knowledge that can be easily communicated and documented. implicit knowledge can be thought of as system 1 thinking in the khaneman sense, gut feelings, or anytime you think to yourself “this is based off of vibes”

• if you ask a ballerina what her performance meant, she might respond “if i could say it, i wouldn't have to dance it”

• focusing (specifically Gendlin focusing) is a technique for accessing and drawing information from implicit knowledge. helps us make illegible knowledge legible.

• the way you do focusing is that you close eyes and pay attention to your felt bodily senses. is there a tightness in your chest? a knot in your stomach? try to think of a word, phrase, or image that captures what that felt sense is about

• i feel like i am generally well emotionally attuned, so i’m not sure how much focusing helped me personally, but i can see how this technique could be useful for the type of person who by default represses their emotions

• say to yourself “my life is perfect and i'm happy with every aspect of it”. it is the fastest way to get information about what you're unhappy with, just like how the fastest way to get information on the internet is to say a blatantly incorrect thing and wait for people to flock to you so they can correct you

• i’ve realized that maybe one of my favorite pasttimes so far has been walking with people. i decided that i want to hit ~20k steps a day and this is actually quite easy to reach since here since i've built the habit of taking a walk after every meal + also doing all my 1-1s on walks. it also leads to way more energy throughout my day which then lets me be more present and alive at dojo. also a big fan of walking in silence to allow ourselves to process and think about all gbs of information coming at us at camp

• had 1-1 with AW. talked about breakups & how perhaps the most painful breakups are the ones where there's nothing wrong with the relationship or the other person, but things just don’t logistically because of distance or something else that makes the relationship hard to maintain. in some way i’m lucky to only have experienced breakups that ended since something was definitely wrong

• also chatted talked about how different people experience the world on different levels of abstraction. for instance, AW studies molecular sciences, which involves looking at the world on a cellular level, whereas a economist might view the world on a more macro scale. then talked about what level of abstraction each of us wanted to exist on. i think i naturally tend towards higher level of abstractions, but feel some intellectual insecurities/fomo that i don't understand the world at a lower level. when AW tells me about quantum physics or protein folding, i can somewhat follow, but i realize that there are pieces of the world that i am not aware of because they're invisible to me due to a lack of knowledge and understanding

• also chatted about how spending effort on "self improvement" can go too far and how it feels even a bit narcissistic to spend too much time thinking about bettering just the self, and how after a certain point, i’d rather spend my cognitive efforts thinking about improving the world or working on problems outside of just me. lately i feel i've had too much time to think about me. me. me.

• hosted a watch party for all the sad people who could not attend socratica symposium in person. always so so so blown away with the amount of creativity, effort, and craft put forth by this community :)

day 3

• since lighthaven has a full spread of gym-bro supplements, i have been taking full advantage & starting my days with 5 mg creatine + AGIs. i’ve been tasting the AGI. AGI tastes like shit. it’s incredibly american to blend all your vegetables into a powder and drink it. god bless this country.

• today’s theme was ALIVENESS. aliveness is a state of genuine, present engagement with whatever you’re doing in the moment

• we live so much of our lives on autopilot! this is good sometimes since brains need to save calories and it’d be exhausting to constantly have to max compute every single second of the day, but sometimes, we can live too much of our waking hours in autopilot

• throughout the day, check in with yourself by asking “what are you doing right now & why are you doing it?”

• the goal is to not feel alive all the time. it's to be able to notice when you're in autopilot and do not want to be

• for me, aliveness is when i have an "out of body" or very exteroceptive experience. i feel it when i dance, or when i connect deeply with another human being, or when i am awe-struck by a beautiful mountain

• aliveness is particularly helpful for people who feel directionless in life or keep repeating the same habitual mistakes

• “boggling” is a technique to practice aliveness. it’s about stripping the way all the familiarity we feel towards common ideas, objects, or situations & try to see them anew for the first time, rather than defaulting to our cached understanding of things. it’s about asking fundamental questions about things we typically take for granted

• for instance, you might embark on a boggle walk, where you walk around the world with childlike wonder, notice the details of your environment and how everyday things have layers upon layers of complexity under the hood

  • examine a tree and ask yourself "where is the oldest bark on a tree?"

  • look at a cloud and asking "what is a cloud? how do these things actually form? what makes rain clouds look darker than normal clouds?"

day 4

• today’s theme is RESPONSIBILITY. this is all about learning how to form beliefs + take responsibility for those beliefs

• some people should question the scope of their responsibility. it can be a lot more wide & fluid than you’d think

• other people should probably chill if they feel too much heroic responsibility or grandeur beliefs of saving the world (lots of camps ppl feel pressure to actually save the world from xyz existential risk)

• heroic responsibility = belief that no higher power, government, society, person is coming to save you/fix the problem" and that you must take initiative yourself & do it yourself

• there is a relationship between power and responsibility. it is unwise to take on more responsibility than you have power over changing. if you have some feeling of taking on the task of saving the world, this is probably an example of taking on more responsibility than you have power over

• notice what’s going to happen in the world where i do thing versus the world that i do something

• bet on your beliefs! put some skin into the game, set bets and put your money/reputation on the line, since it will encourage you to make more accurate predictions

• thought experiment: imagine one thing that you can do today to make today a success. now, imagine you have failed to accomplish that task. how surprised are you?

• the above thought experiment helps you avoid overly optimistic planning & gives you information about your own commitment levels to doing the thing

• murphyjitsu/pre-mortems: thinking about all the different ways a plan might fail and building in reinforcements to handle those potential failure modes