Speedrunning Model Building
This is the workshop you get on model building when you crash lots of background thinking about the importance of knowing what you think you know and why you think you know it, knowing your inside views, a previous workshop, improvisation and a 30 minute time limit.
I’m a big believer in the value of just sitting down and thinking for five minutes with a timer, breaking through the logjam of stress and fear about something and just doing something, and explaining your thinking to understand it better, so even though I have lots of ideas at the end for a more extensive version of this, I’d guess that as a first pass at this kind of intellectual work, it’s valuable on its own. (Feedback at the workshop was informal but strongly positive).
Step 1: Pick a claim you believe (probably helps if it’s about how the world works or what’s important)
Step 2: Write down a logical chain of the reasons *you* believe it (not reasons someone would believe it). Bonus points if there are reasons someone else would believe it that you don't buy.
One helpful thing might be to reflect on what caused you to believe it in the first place, though that may be different from why you believe it now.
There might be separate lines of reasoning pointing to the same place. That's great, you can do them separately. At the moment we're telling a story.
Step 3: Under each step in the logical chain, write the reasons you think that thing is true (I read something about it, I spent two hours researching it, X person thinks so and I trust them on it, I saw it in the Journal of Twitter Headlines).
(All those reasons are valid to write down, it's important that you be honest here, not writing down what the virtuous reason would be to do it.)
Step 4: Circle the most cruxy claims, the ones that matter most to the argument going through.
Step 5: For those, generate a changed value of a relevant variable that, if true would change your mind on that piece being true.
Ex: At the related workshop, someone gave something like: If we can only expect <0.75 degrees of warming in 50 years, then I wouldn't think climate change was the most important thing to work on anymore
I was impressed by their ability to generate something like this, though given that it was on the spot, I wouldn’t suggest they hold themselves to that particular thing.
Step 6: Given those values, or otherwise, decide whether there's any stage of the argument you want to explore more / understand better / ground yourself more in the empirical research or conversation about. What do you want to know more about?
Remember that a surprising number of things are just a google search away (and that many things are hours of wading through papers and paper-reading training away)
Beliefs are sneaky things; they live diffusely and vaguely in your head, mold themselves around heuristics, seem to shift based on who you you’re arguing with or what you heard recently. Writing them down along with their pedigree - even a crude version like this - grounds them in a story and concrete numbers, keeps you accountable to yourself and doesn’t let the next clever-sounding thing you hear drag you around quite so much. Trains should have brakes, and beliefs about the world that don’t come with off-switches, reasons you would believe differently, are pretty suspect.
It also might illuminate gaps in what previously felt like a smooth surface, but then points the way towards better understanding, showing where the gears are for models made of more than abstractions and giving a to-do list for gaining object level knowledge or figuring out who to talk to next. It makes it easier to learn from other people by sharing models and not just conclusions. And I hope that just the act of writing empowers people who try it out, and that they find that they believe that it matters what they think, and how.
Possible changes or improvements:
More time for each section, undoubtedly
Support/explicit practice for operationalizing and putting numbers on beliefs; I didn’t plan for this, but I think being able to give it in the moment was helpful
Encouragement to put this in the form of a flowchart, a form I’m currently excited about (subject to change)
Encouragement to add the end creation to a list of beliefs, to come back to over time for comparison
Encouragement to publicize the results for more improvement, making them better, and keeping yourself accountable if the facts on the ground do change
