Opinion

“Thinkhaven”

​Inkhaven has people writing a blogpost a day for 30 days. I think this is a pretty great, straightforward exercise, that I’d definitely want in a hypothetical Rationality Undergraduate Program. But, it’s not the only such exercise I’d want to include. It’s gotten me excited for a different (superficially similar) program, which I might call “Thinkhaven.”In Thinkhaven, the goal is to learn the skill of “relentlessly think new, useful thoughts you haven’t thought before.” Inkhaven had a basic “Goodhart-able” goal of “publish 500+ words every day.” For Thinkhaven, I would imagine the Goodhart-y goal being something like:Every day, you must publish 500 words of “research journal.” They should be cogent enough for third parties to follow along with your thought process, but, they don’t need to end with nice discrete conclusions. Every two weeks, you must also publish a 2500 word effortpost.And, somewhat more opinionatedly:Each journal entry should include at least one new question that you’re thinking about. (Often, these will be subquestions within a broader Big Question that you’re exploring that week, or a reframing of that big question that feels like a better pointer)The spirit of the Goodhart is “are you finding new questions, and making some kind of progress on them?”. Along the way, each day, you’re thinking at least one new thought you haven’t thought before.One way of “thinking new thoughts” and “asking new questions” is to research stuff that already exists out there (i.e. learn some cool new facts about math/history/science/etc, and then write up good explainers for it, or connect it to other domains).Another way is by thinking original thoughts, plumbing somehow through your confusions about the world and developing new concepts to help deal with them.Presumably there are other approaches too, but I list those two to convey that that there’s more than one way to go about this. The main thing we’d be trying to not do at Thinkhaven, is to “explain ideas that you’ve already thought about and just wish everyone else understood.” That’s also important, it’s just not what Thinkhaven is for.The daily journal is for accountability, to make sure you’re making any kind of progress at all. The daily “new question”, is to help ensure that progress has some kind of forward momentum, and is exploring new ideas.The fortnightly 2500 word published writing is to close the loop on “get a new idea all the way from a vague musing, to something written up in a way that other people can critique.” (Ideally, this explains some new ideas to the internet. If you didn’t really get any new good ideas, you can write “well, I didn’t come up with anything, but, here’s a cleaned up version of my daily research notes.”)My primary inspiration for this is not actually Inkhaven, it’s a period in 2022 where the Lightcone team focused on thinking/research/etc to try to get in touch with what it’s like to be an original thinker on LessWrong. We set a goal of writing up a blogpost-worth-of-content per day, which the team would then read over each morning. Even without publishing externally, it was a useful forcing function to keep generating new thoughts and forcing them into a clearer shape. I personally found it helpful for transitioning from “a guy who mostly defers to other people” to “a guy thinking his own strategic and intellectual thoughts.”Mentors, and Different Styles of ThinkingThis is intended to be a fairly openended container. I’d expect to get value out of the pure container listed above, but, I’d ideally want a few different styles of mentors and coaches around, who embody different ways of thinking. There are a few ways to operationalize that. You could model the thing more similar to MATS where everyone has a mentor they meet with on some cadence. If I were modeling it more on Inkhaven, I think some mentors would give classes, others might be more like mysterious old wizards you just go talk to.All participants need to have at least one mentor who is enthusiastic about them (as part of the admissions process), but, they could sample from different styles of mentorship over the course of the month.Possible examples of mentors: Note: these are examples, not people who agreed to participate or even looked at this post. But they are some archetypes that I’m imagining. I’d be hoping for Thinkhaven to include a mix of mentors or “resident thinkers” with similar range.John Wentworth-style, focused on tackling some confusing problems we don’t understand, asking “what’s the hard part?” / “what’s the bottleneck?”, and systematically making progress, while keeping an eye on Principles Which Will Carry Over To The Next Paradigm.Logan Strohl-style, focused on openended, patient observation (with a kind of “open curiosity” as opposed to “active curiosity”). Trying to keep as close-to-the-metal on your observations. (See Intro to Naturalism: Orientation for a deep meditation on the sentence “Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation.”)Elizabeth Van Nostrand-style, with some focus on open-ended “lit review”-ish research. Pick a new field you are curious about, read over lots of existing papers and books. See if you can synthesize some new takeaways that weren’t obvious. Be ready to follow threads of information wherever they lead. Scott Garrabrant-style, go live where the important math problems are, but then marry-for-love. Mull over interesting problems and then get nerdsniped on whatever feels alive.Chris Olah-style, where… okay honestly I’m not actually sure how Chris Olah does his thinking and he seems particularly unlikely to come. But, reading over his older blogposts I get a sense of both a guy who likes studying lots of little fiddly patterns in the world and making sense of them, in a way that (vaguely) reminds me of an old timey biologist. And, a guy who likes experimenting with new ways of explaining things. Thinking Assistants / Research ManagersThe mentors above are selected for “I respect their thinking and writing.” They’re not particularly selected for it being the right-use-of-their-time to help people through daily stumbling blocks, executive dysfunction, etc.I would want some staff that are more like the research coaches at MATS, who meet with the people on some cadence to check on how things are going and help them resolve obstacles. And, I’d like to try out having dedicated Thinking Assistants available, who can sit with you for a chunk of time as you write or talk out loud through your problem, and notice little microhabits that might be worth paying more attention to. “FAQ”Everything above is the core idea. I’m not that confident in that particular format, and expect I’d change my mind about stuff after one iteration. But, here’s some explanations of why I picked this structure instead of others, structured as an FAQ.[1]Why require “a new question each day?”I’m not sure this will work as well as I hope. But, my reasons are:It forces you to cultivate a cluster of skills. It frames attention, in a way I think will help cultivate a healthy “curious vibe.”It is a mini-feedback loop that hopefully pumps against some kinds of masturbatory thinking.Sometimes, when you’re exploring and stewing on a set of ideas, you’re not really making progress, you’re sort of going in circles, or building up some superficial understandings that don’t really translate into a clear takeaway. Asking yourself new questions forces you to take your vague musings and confusions and turn them into questions with a meaningful return type. It also pumps against “explaining ideas you’ve already thought about.” (which again, is totally a useful way to write. It’s just not what this program is for). By forcing yourself not to do something, you create space to practice new skills.And, while it’s opinionated on format, I think the “question” framing is still pretty openended as structures go.What would asking new questions look like, in practice?One person read the above and was like “okay I kinda get it, but I think I need to see an example of what this looks like to have a clearer sense of what this’d mean.” Here’s an example. (Note: this is just one example. As I just said, the program should be pretty unopinionated. Hopefully, if my line of questioning feels weird to you, it helps you imagine a version that would fit your thought process better). I might start with a vague frustration/confusion:”Geeze, alignment seems to have shitty feedback loops. wat do?”I find it fruitful to ask more explicitly:”Okay, what would it mean to have good feedback loops?””If there were definitely no good feedback loops, what else might good progress look like?”. Which in turn prompt more specific questions like:”What are some domains that solved the ‘poor feedbackloop’ problem before? How did they do that?”.”What are some domains where ‘feedbackloop’ just wasn’t even the right ontology?””What problem are ‘feedback loops’ solving? What other ways could you solve those?””What properties would ‘solving alignment’ have? What do I actually mean by that?”As well as meta/tactical questions like:”Who are some people who’ve thought about this already? Do they have writing I could read? Could I literally go talk to them?””Why is it hard to think about this, and what can I do about that?”And then I might learn about domains where progress clearly accumulates, but a lot of it is driven by “taste.” I might then spend a day digging into historical example of how people acquired or transmitted taste. What should a “Daily Journal” look like?The first answer is “whatever you want.” But, I did find, while beta testing this for myself this month, that it worked better when I gave myself a set of daily prompts to fill out, which looked like:What questions did I think about yesterday?What did I learn yesterday?What questions or confusions am I interested in now?What seems difficult about this? How can I fix that?The “what did I learn?” section is the bit that ends up most shaped like a 500 word blogpost. Rather than think of this as “the thing I scramble to write before the end of the day”, it’s more like a thing I write when I first get started in the morning. (I don’t really like the “publish by midnight” thing that Inkhaven does, and I think I might want to actually set the deadline at lunchtime).Another friend who beta-tested the format experimented with changing up the prompts, so that it worked better as an orienting process for them. (By default it felt a bit like a tacked-on-assignment they were doing out of obligation, but, slightly tweaked, it felt more naturally like a useful thing for them to do each day)Are the daily journals public? Why?I think so, but, not 100% sure.(But, my default recommendation would be to put them on an out-of-the-way secondary blog, so you feel more free to think dumb thoughts along the way).The reason to make them public is to help them function more as an accountability mechanism. You don’t need to make a nice polished essay with a conclusion. But, you do need to get your thoughts to a point where they’re structured enough someone else can make sense of them. I considered just requiring them to be published internally to the Thinkhaven cohort. Habryka argued with me that this’d make people feel more like they were writing for the cohort-in-particular, having to care what those people thought, instead of getting to follow their own thought process.The most important thing is you expect someone to be reading them.Do we even need the 2500 word effortpost? Why can’t it just be research journals all the way down?Because the point of intellectual progress is to actually contribute to the sum of human knowledge. It’s an important part of the process to package it up in a way that other people can understand and build on.And, it’s an important forcing-function that eventually your meandering question needs to turn into something that someone else would want to read.Why “2500 words every 2 weeks” in particular?Both of these are numbers I can imagine fine-tuning.Why not “once a week?” I thought “once a week” might be a better cadence, but, when I tried it out I found it too short. During Inkhaven, where I was mostly focused on writing up existing ideas, I was able to write ~2000+ words a day and usually write one full post and make partial progress on an effortpost. Thinking new meaningful/useful thoughts takes awhile, and sometimes it’s important to get lost in the woods for awhile without knowing quite how everything will tie together. Or, just go off and gather a lot of information and digest it.Why not longer?I think “real work in the field” often does take more than 2 weeks at a time to output a blogpost worth of content. But, I think that’s too slow a feedback loop for people learning. This is still supposed to be a class. I think it’d be hard for people to stay for longer than a month, and seems like people should get at least two reps in of “go from ideation -> publishing.”If this ended up being like a 3-month fellowship, I can imagine once-a-month being a reasonable cadence. But, I think it’s just not that hard to turn 2 weeks of thinking into one substantial writeup.If this were a 3-month fellowship, my current guess is I’d keep the 2-week effortpost but add in a Final Project that’s aiming for the level of “significant contribution to whatever field you’re exploring.” All of this is only one possible structure for the underlying goal of “learn to relentlessly find new, useful thoughts every day.” But, it’s a pretty simple structure I’d expect to do pretty well even in its minimal form.Anyways, happy thinking.^These questions have all been asked at most “once” and sometimes “zero”, so “frequently asked questions” is not exactly correct.Discuss ​Read More

​Inkhaven has people writing a blogpost a day for 30 days. I think this is a pretty great, straightforward exercise, that I’d definitely want in a hypothetical Rationality Undergraduate Program. But, it’s not the only such exercise I’d want to include. It’s gotten me excited for a different (superficially similar) program, which I might call “Thinkhaven.”In Thinkhaven, the goal is to learn the skill of “relentlessly think new, useful thoughts you haven’t thought before.” Inkhaven had a basic “Goodhart-able” goal of “publish 500+ words every day.” For Thinkhaven, I would imagine the Goodhart-y goal being something like:Every day, you must publish 500 words of “research journal.” They should be cogent enough for third parties to follow along with your thought process, but, they don’t need to end with nice discrete conclusions. Every two weeks, you must also publish a 2500 word effortpost.And, somewhat more opinionatedly:Each journal entry should include at least one new question that you’re thinking about. (Often, these will be subquestions within a broader Big Question that you’re exploring that week, or a reframing of that big question that feels like a better pointer)The spirit of the Goodhart is “are you finding new questions, and making some kind of progress on them?”. Along the way, each day, you’re thinking at least one new thought you haven’t thought before.One way of “thinking new thoughts” and “asking new questions” is to research stuff that already exists out there (i.e. learn some cool new facts about math/history/science/etc, and then write up good explainers for it, or connect it to other domains).Another way is by thinking original thoughts, plumbing somehow through your confusions about the world and developing new concepts to help deal with them.Presumably there are other approaches too, but I list those two to convey that that there’s more than one way to go about this. The main thing we’d be trying to not do at Thinkhaven, is to “explain ideas that you’ve already thought about and just wish everyone else understood.” That’s also important, it’s just not what Thinkhaven is for.The daily journal is for accountability, to make sure you’re making any kind of progress at all. The daily “new question”, is to help ensure that progress has some kind of forward momentum, and is exploring new ideas.The fortnightly 2500 word published writing is to close the loop on “get a new idea all the way from a vague musing, to something written up in a way that other people can critique.” (Ideally, this explains some new ideas to the internet. If you didn’t really get any new good ideas, you can write “well, I didn’t come up with anything, but, here’s a cleaned up version of my daily research notes.”)My primary inspiration for this is not actually Inkhaven, it’s a period in 2022 where the Lightcone team focused on thinking/research/etc to try to get in touch with what it’s like to be an original thinker on LessWrong. We set a goal of writing up a blogpost-worth-of-content per day, which the team would then read over each morning. Even without publishing externally, it was a useful forcing function to keep generating new thoughts and forcing them into a clearer shape. I personally found it helpful for transitioning from “a guy who mostly defers to other people” to “a guy thinking his own strategic and intellectual thoughts.”Mentors, and Different Styles of ThinkingThis is intended to be a fairly openended container. I’d expect to get value out of the pure container listed above, but, I’d ideally want a few different styles of mentors and coaches around, who embody different ways of thinking. There are a few ways to operationalize that. You could model the thing more similar to MATS where everyone has a mentor they meet with on some cadence. If I were modeling it more on Inkhaven, I think some mentors would give classes, others might be more like mysterious old wizards you just go talk to.All participants need to have at least one mentor who is enthusiastic about them (as part of the admissions process), but, they could sample from different styles of mentorship over the course of the month.Possible examples of mentors: Note: these are examples, not people who agreed to participate or even looked at this post. But they are some archetypes that I’m imagining. I’d be hoping for Thinkhaven to include a mix of mentors or “resident thinkers” with similar range.John Wentworth-style, focused on tackling some confusing problems we don’t understand, asking “what’s the hard part?” / “what’s the bottleneck?”, and systematically making progress, while keeping an eye on Principles Which Will Carry Over To The Next Paradigm.Logan Strohl-style, focused on openended, patient observation (with a kind of “open curiosity” as opposed to “active curiosity”). Trying to keep as close-to-the-metal on your observations. (See Intro to Naturalism: Orientation for a deep meditation on the sentence “Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation.”)Elizabeth Van Nostrand-style, with some focus on open-ended “lit review”-ish research. Pick a new field you are curious about, read over lots of existing papers and books. See if you can synthesize some new takeaways that weren’t obvious. Be ready to follow threads of information wherever they lead. Scott Garrabrant-style, go live where the important math problems are, but then marry-for-love. Mull over interesting problems and then get nerdsniped on whatever feels alive.Chris Olah-style, where… okay honestly I’m not actually sure how Chris Olah does his thinking and he seems particularly unlikely to come. But, reading over his older blogposts I get a sense of both a guy who likes studying lots of little fiddly patterns in the world and making sense of them, in a way that (vaguely) reminds me of an old timey biologist. And, a guy who likes experimenting with new ways of explaining things. Thinking Assistants / Research ManagersThe mentors above are selected for “I respect their thinking and writing.” They’re not particularly selected for it being the right-use-of-their-time to help people through daily stumbling blocks, executive dysfunction, etc.I would want some staff that are more like the research coaches at MATS, who meet with the people on some cadence to check on how things are going and help them resolve obstacles. And, I’d like to try out having dedicated Thinking Assistants available, who can sit with you for a chunk of time as you write or talk out loud through your problem, and notice little microhabits that might be worth paying more attention to. “FAQ”Everything above is the core idea. I’m not that confident in that particular format, and expect I’d change my mind about stuff after one iteration. But, here’s some explanations of why I picked this structure instead of others, structured as an FAQ.[1]Why require “a new question each day?”I’m not sure this will work as well as I hope. But, my reasons are:It forces you to cultivate a cluster of skills. It frames attention, in a way I think will help cultivate a healthy “curious vibe.”It is a mini-feedback loop that hopefully pumps against some kinds of masturbatory thinking.Sometimes, when you’re exploring and stewing on a set of ideas, you’re not really making progress, you’re sort of going in circles, or building up some superficial understandings that don’t really translate into a clear takeaway. Asking yourself new questions forces you to take your vague musings and confusions and turn them into questions with a meaningful return type. It also pumps against “explaining ideas you’ve already thought about.” (which again, is totally a useful way to write. It’s just not what this program is for). By forcing yourself not to do something, you create space to practice new skills.And, while it’s opinionated on format, I think the “question” framing is still pretty openended as structures go.What would asking new questions look like, in practice?One person read the above and was like “okay I kinda get it, but I think I need to see an example of what this looks like to have a clearer sense of what this’d mean.” Here’s an example. (Note: this is just one example. As I just said, the program should be pretty unopinionated. Hopefully, if my line of questioning feels weird to you, it helps you imagine a version that would fit your thought process better). I might start with a vague frustration/confusion:”Geeze, alignment seems to have shitty feedback loops. wat do?”I find it fruitful to ask more explicitly:”Okay, what would it mean to have good feedback loops?””If there were definitely no good feedback loops, what else might good progress look like?”. Which in turn prompt more specific questions like:”What are some domains that solved the ‘poor feedbackloop’ problem before? How did they do that?”.”What are some domains where ‘feedbackloop’ just wasn’t even the right ontology?””What problem are ‘feedback loops’ solving? What other ways could you solve those?””What properties would ‘solving alignment’ have? What do I actually mean by that?”As well as meta/tactical questions like:”Who are some people who’ve thought about this already? Do they have writing I could read? Could I literally go talk to them?””Why is it hard to think about this, and what can I do about that?”And then I might learn about domains where progress clearly accumulates, but a lot of it is driven by “taste.” I might then spend a day digging into historical example of how people acquired or transmitted taste. What should a “Daily Journal” look like?The first answer is “whatever you want.” But, I did find, while beta testing this for myself this month, that it worked better when I gave myself a set of daily prompts to fill out, which looked like:What questions did I think about yesterday?What did I learn yesterday?What questions or confusions am I interested in now?What seems difficult about this? How can I fix that?The “what did I learn?” section is the bit that ends up most shaped like a 500 word blogpost. Rather than think of this as “the thing I scramble to write before the end of the day”, it’s more like a thing I write when I first get started in the morning. (I don’t really like the “publish by midnight” thing that Inkhaven does, and I think I might want to actually set the deadline at lunchtime).Another friend who beta-tested the format experimented with changing up the prompts, so that it worked better as an orienting process for them. (By default it felt a bit like a tacked-on-assignment they were doing out of obligation, but, slightly tweaked, it felt more naturally like a useful thing for them to do each day)Are the daily journals public? Why?I think so, but, not 100% sure.(But, my default recommendation would be to put them on an out-of-the-way secondary blog, so you feel more free to think dumb thoughts along the way).The reason to make them public is to help them function more as an accountability mechanism. You don’t need to make a nice polished essay with a conclusion. But, you do need to get your thoughts to a point where they’re structured enough someone else can make sense of them. I considered just requiring them to be published internally to the Thinkhaven cohort. Habryka argued with me that this’d make people feel more like they were writing for the cohort-in-particular, having to care what those people thought, instead of getting to follow their own thought process.The most important thing is you expect someone to be reading them.Do we even need the 2500 word effortpost? Why can’t it just be research journals all the way down?Because the point of intellectual progress is to actually contribute to the sum of human knowledge. It’s an important part of the process to package it up in a way that other people can understand and build on.And, it’s an important forcing-function that eventually your meandering question needs to turn into something that someone else would want to read.Why “2500 words every 2 weeks” in particular?Both of these are numbers I can imagine fine-tuning.Why not “once a week?” I thought “once a week” might be a better cadence, but, when I tried it out I found it too short. During Inkhaven, where I was mostly focused on writing up existing ideas, I was able to write ~2000+ words a day and usually write one full post and make partial progress on an effortpost. Thinking new meaningful/useful thoughts takes awhile, and sometimes it’s important to get lost in the woods for awhile without knowing quite how everything will tie together. Or, just go off and gather a lot of information and digest it.Why not longer?I think “real work in the field” often does take more than 2 weeks at a time to output a blogpost worth of content. But, I think that’s too slow a feedback loop for people learning. This is still supposed to be a class. I think it’d be hard for people to stay for longer than a month, and seems like people should get at least two reps in of “go from ideation -> publishing.”If this ended up being like a 3-month fellowship, I can imagine once-a-month being a reasonable cadence. But, I think it’s just not that hard to turn 2 weeks of thinking into one substantial writeup.If this were a 3-month fellowship, my current guess is I’d keep the 2-week effortpost but add in a Final Project that’s aiming for the level of “significant contribution to whatever field you’re exploring.” All of this is only one possible structure for the underlying goal of “learn to relentlessly find new, useful thoughts every day.” But, it’s a pretty simple structure I’d expect to do pretty well even in its minimal form.Anyways, happy thinking.^These questions have all been asked at most “once” and sometimes “zero”, so “frequently asked questions” is not exactly correct.Discuss ​Read More

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