WARP 2023: Quest Day Reflections

Stories, takeaways, toilet bowls, variance, more

The Winter Applied Rationality Program (WARP) and some other associated programs have a day called “Quest Day.” The premise: to spend the day doing a valuable and memorable project — a “quest” of sorts. 

I spent ESPR 2022’s Quest Day on a group excursion to Oxford, and then London. We gave rubber ducks to strangers, and asked them to take pictures of the ducks in various places around the world. (See duck.global for more details.) It’d been fun and funny to hand out rubber ducks, but it didn’t feel meaningful to me.

So for WARP 2023’s Quest Day, I called people on my contacts list, and asked them to tell me a story about their life. One story, any story — it can be short, long, emotional, funny, anything works. 

I could give a pretty good post-hoc justification for my project, but I’ll be honest: once the idea popped in my head, I thought it would be fun. That’s why I did it.

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Various stories from my calls, along with some takeaways in italics. (Important: these are my takeaways, specific to my own flaws and things I needed reminding of; these may not be yours.) Initials are not people’s actual initials, for privacy reasons:

• LB remembered in middle school a teacher praising her for cleaning up a piece of cake she’d dropped, and being confused about said praise — it was her cake, after all. “Is it not a thought process that most people have that ‘I can do this thing that makes someone else’s life slightly easier’?”

• BX talked about a museum staff member who was really enthusiastic about mummies. Weirdly so.
  
  People have really esoteric interests. They’re often super happy to talk about them. This is useful for having good conversations! Ask someone what do you care about and you’ll get some good responses.
  

• DR ran away from home — it began with reading the Sequences (shoot me), which drew him away from Christian fundamentalism. Then: budgeting, figuring out that he had agency, and doing the damn thing after a certain incident.
  
  Even if I dislike capital-R Rationality, think it’s rooted in various dangerous notions, and maintain that Rationalists dress up simple concepts in complicated verbiage, it’s empirically true that the Sequences has helped a very good friend of mine in a very tough situation. The takeaway: be less judgmental — these things are useful and helpful for a lot of people, even if they’re also possibly damaging and incorrect.
  

• BK went through the quant recruiting process, which involved learning just how much math, statistics, and probability he didn’t know.
  
  I’ve decided I don’t want to do math anymore, despite having majored in math and having done competition math for much of my life. It’s because I want to “touch grass” — more literally speaking, my learning abstract math is unlikely to help the world very much, and I also don’t enjoy it much nowadays. But speaking with BK reminded me that there’s so much out there to learn, and that I always have the option to return to math.
  

• KL got into a tubing accident with friends, suffered a concussion, and went in and out of consciousness at the hospital — and during his moments of consciousness, worried that he’d accidentally out himself to his parents.

• FM had a middle-school math teacher who’d run an event called the “toilet bowl tournament” each year. It involved throwing things into a trash can. It was really wholesome — she had a come-from-behind victory where she felt like she was representing the girls in the class and everyone was cheering for her. She keeps the trophy by her bedside (an actual toilet bowl: see the picture below!)
  
  Silliness is a virtue. See Gravity Falls, season 1 episode 8. Having a trophy be a toilet bowl is great (even if you’re not a middle-schooler.) People should incorporate more silliness into their daily lives.

• NM’s mom was a cello teacher. She’d watch people come in and out of her house for lessons — and at the ripe old age of two, she felt that she wasn’t being included. So she screamed and threw tantrums until her parents caved and got her a cello. She then refused to touch it for more than three minutes at a time. (For what it’s worth, NM is now a grad student in cello performance.)
  
  Babies are simultaneously the least and most predictable people on earth.
  

• QN talked to me for almost an hour about growing up as a neurodivergent, multiracial musician in a very white town.

• XH is a Chinese immigrant, and she’d often dream of her family’s old house, and of not seeing her grandmother there. She realized that she desperately wanted her grandmother to visit her — but her grandmother was in her eighties, and had chronic asthma. XH felt guilty about not being present in the last few years of her life.
  
  Perhaps I should pay closer attention to my dreams and how they make me feel? I’ve had dreams of old friends and dreams of crazy adventures and dreams that make me feel sad beyond belief. I know I’ve had them and don’t remember any of the details. The next time I have a particularly vivid dream, I’ll write it down.
  

• IN loved orange juice as a kid, but her parents would never let her have it. They’d give her milk instead. But once they compromised, and she came to school with an (unfortunately) opaque container of orange juice. Her teacher, assuming it was milk, heated it in a microwave, and as IN was nonconfrontational, she didn’t say anything. She was horrified at the warm orange juice.

• KN had a friendly relationship with a local unhoused person outside his apartment. She was apparently always on drugs, incredibly fit and muscular, and wore very random clothes (scarves and kids’ jackets.) When he was moving out (hurriedly, due to lack of planning), she showed up, offered to help carry furniture, and … ended up bringing it to a nearby park instead, where kids started playing with it? He ended up giving up on finding it after she moved it again.

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I have a few meta-takeaways and a few rationality-camp-specific takeaways. These aren’t new — to me or anyone — but it’s always nice to have some internalized concepts revisited and reinforced.

Meta-takeaways

Calling people is good. Really, really good.

I like the format I ended up with — “tell me a story about your life” gives a lot of (valuable) variance. I got to hear some stories about what people were doing that day and some childhood stories; some meaningful, personal stories and some really wacky stories.

In terms of concrete things that happened: I caught up with a very close friend whom I hadn’t talked to in a few months, for almost an hour; a high school friend scheduled lunch with me and I tried directed babbling with them; I actually learned some things about my parents (who’ve remained very hard to understand, for the most part.) 

As a rule of thumb, people like being reached out to. I wasn’t nervous about any of these calls: sure, some people didn’t pick up, and some people initially seemed confused, but everyone I talked to eventually told me a story — because people like talking about themselves, and people like when someone else cares what they have to say. I think everyone involved gains value from a project like this: the caller and the callees.

Obvious conclusion: I strongly recommend that everyone consider taking a few hours — whenever they have the time — and calling people in their contacts list. It’s fun, you’ll learn a lot, people will be happy you’re reaching out to them, and there are concretely valuable outcomes (reconnecting with old friends!) I’m probably going to do it again within a few months.

Rationality-camp-specific takeaways

Rationality programs¹ like WARP and ESPR are high-trust environments, and there are expectations that people have “deep”, “intimate” conversations from the get-go. These expectations aren’t often concretely mentioned by the staff — they’re built into the culture, with the traditional zero-th night Hot Seat game, the framing of what normal people call “conversations” as “one-on-ones”, and more.

It’s dangerous to have too many interactions that have a certain “flavor” to them — whether that flavor is the wholly bland “what’s the weather like?” or the intimately spicy “what is your greatest regret?” For the former, the reasoning is obvious — it’s boring — but it can be less clear why the latter is bad. I think there are a few non-obvious reasons:

• It can be very emotionally draining to constantly have “deep”, “meaningful” conversations — unnoticeably so.

• These conversations by default make you more vulnerable, perhaps in ways you’ll look back on and dislike. Stability is important; becoming close to people you’ve literally just met introduces a lot of variance² into your life.

• You should be more skeptical, by default, of people (your fellow campers) you’ve known for only a few days (or even hours!)

As a result, I think it’s actively good for certain people at these camps to have “normal” interactions more often. It’s a reminder that “normal” people have a lot of interesting things to say, that their lives are just as interesting as yours (if not more!), that there’s plenty you can learn from people outside any specific community. It’s a reminder that I think certain campers might need after many days of immersion into a specific subculture with weird and complicated norms.

1. To be absolutely clear: this generalizes to any “short intense social burst” program. Think pre-freshman year weeklong camping retreats with your future college classmates, for example. But I expect a lot of attendees of these specific types of programs to read this, and I expect most people to be more careful by default.

2. Expanding on the variance point, because I like this framing: many interactions we have are pretty low-variance. Discussing homework; complaining about bad dining hall food; awkwardly mentioning the weather (ironically or not). 

Certain interactions can be higher-variance, based on the people involved. For example, for some people, depending on their upbringing, talking to their parents can be quite high-variance. A single compliment can make your week; a single pointed barb can break it. Talking with a mentor can be high-variance — you might end up choosing a completely different approach to something you’re learning, or even a completely different career path.

Often we accept these higher-variance interactions because we’ve known these people for a while, or because we have no choice. Many of us have known our parents for our entire life. We choose our mentors based on credentials and recommendations, and choose to keep working with them because we decide to trust them. And yes — it’s possible to trust people intensely after just a week, but do you want to give them that much power over you?

I’m not recommending readers to be closed-off and inaccessible during conversations with new people. In fact, I think most people should be more open than they currently are! I’m also not saying there aren’t high-variance interactions in “normal” life too. I’m just advising caution in specific environments.