Kick-off meeting: Doing Things Better - A course in the art of applied rationality

Being a human in the 21st century is hard: We get overwhelmed by abundant choices and copious information - and even when we know what we want, it is all too easy to get sidetracked by distractions, bad habits, or ineffective strategies. “Doing Things Better” is a study group to help us achieve any kind of goal more effectively. For that, we will learn a set of well-tested rationality tools developed by the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) and others.
 

Format

Our core material is Duncan Sabien’s recent upload of the CFAR handbook. Each session will consist of two parts: A discussion of the relevant theory, and a practice section to actually make progress on our challenges.

Expectation-setting

These tools might be very beneficial if you integrate them into your daily lives - and studying them is a waste of time if you don’t. You will get the most out of this course if you reliably do the reading for every session. Additionally, I ask you to put in 10-30 minutes of daily practice in the time between workshops. If you only find time for one of these tasks, rather just do the practice; we’ll have one person from the group summarize the reading at the start of each session.
 

Expected time investment:

• 2hrs of workshop every other week
• 2-5 hours of reading and practice in-between any two sessions

How to apply

To apply, please RSVP and fill your mail address and 2-3 lines on your motivation and background in this signup form.
 

How to prepare for the first meeting

For our first meeting, we will dive in with some foundations for the course, and with learning pair debugging: How to effectively help each other solve key bottlenecks in our lives. In preparation, please

• read the first three sections of the CFAR Handbook: Introduction, Opening Session Tips & Advice, and Building a Bugs List prompts, and
• go through the above prompts to create a bugs list.

Looking forward to study with you,

Severin