MPHD: Math, Productivity, Happiness & Decision-making

This page will relocate to http://www.acritch.com/mphd/ after I graduate.

Organizers: Andrew Critch and Nisan Stiennon Time: Wednesdays, 5:00 - 6:00pm Location: 740 Evans Hall Contact / join the mailing list: critch at math dot berkeley dot edu On every second week, we go out for dinner after the seminar.

about the seminar | schedule and abstracts | how it started | usual format

[this page is being updated regularly]

About the Seminar

Most of us want to be happier, get things done, help other people, have a sense of purpose, and achieve other such deeply human goals. In this seminar, we hope to take advantage of our analytic minds — our comparative advantage as mathematical thinkers — to address these goals. Some of our guiding principles are:

• Improving on purpose:  Life skills like time-management, belief-updating, emotional stability, motivation, and communication will affect all of our goals for the rest of our lives, so they're probably worth improving on purpose instead of by random walk.

• Learning from science:  Fields like psychology, neuroscience, education, and economics can tell us a lot about what a good strategy looks like and how to implement one on an organic human brain.

• Reasoning under uncertainty:  Hating uncertainty won't make it go away. We still have to make decisions constantly, so refining our mental and emotional probabilistic reasoning skills is likely to be worth a non-zero allocation of time and awareness. The skill of belief updating — noticing and internalizing evidence — is especially worth upgrading from decent to awesome, and heuristics from probability, statistics, and artificial intelligence can help us quantify what me mean by that.

• Working together:  We can learn more about life if we work together than on our own. For that it helps to have a common language to understand each other, and to consciously formulate our beliefs and values in a way that can be communicated and analyzed.

Schedule and Abstracts

How did this get started?

Last year, Nisan and I attended a week-long workshop on "Rationality and Social Effectiveness" with 24 other people, mostly grad students and tech professionals, who all seemed to really like it. Now we want to recreate something similar in a seminar format, and the first step to getting good at something is to practice it once, so here we go!

Usual format

10-15 mins:	kick-off	A speaker presents a quick topic introduction, setting an intuitive focal point for the rest of the seminar. To keep this part short, audience members ask few or no questions, and instead jot down self-reminders of questions and thoughts they want to pursue later.
0-5 mins:	audience contributions	The audience can contribute quick facts or comments they think will be concrete and useful for the whole room, but not yet questions. Please contribute experience and expert knowledge here!
5-10 mins:	small group discussions	Small groups form, and people with relevant experience or knowledge are asked to distribute among the groups. Participants ask each other their stored questions from the kick-off, and try to clarify things for each other. In this way, people intuitively settle on what their most important remaining ideas and questions are. Some ideas to start conversation: Questions, reservations, or criticisms Related personal experiences How we can use the kick-off ideas in our own lives How we can test the kick-off ideas in our own lives
10-15 mins:	unified Q&A discussion	The room again engages in a single conversation, much like the "any questions" part of other seminars, but with a moderator summarizing the discussion on the board as it progresses, both as a record and a subtle social signal to stay on topic. Audience members should feel free to answer each other's questions instead of channeling all communication through the speaker when it seems inefficient to do so. The kick-off speaker is not expected to help moderate the conversation, but should feel welcome to.

Sometimes, in place of the small group conversations, there will be specific exercises to stimulate (hopefully) interesting thoughts, and/or to intuitively clarify the "spirit" of that day's topic.