Learnings from running five 1.5-hour ice-breakers
From plant sentience to Normal People
I am a Teaching Fellow for BlueDot's AI Alignment course, which means I will facilitate weekly discussions on AI safety for the next three months. I am responsible for four cohorts, each consisting of 6 to 10 people. In Week 0, we run ice-breakers, with three main goals:
Get to know each other
Iron out any logistic issues before main discussions start
Establish norms to maximise odds of useful and enjoyable discussions
In this post, I will share several things I learnt by doing this facilitation.
People are interesting
Sounds silly when you write it down like that, but to highlight what I mean, here are the less common skills/interests I encountered:
Ceramics
Entropy
Meaning of travel
Self-referential RL systems
Constructing conspiracy theories
Alternative proteins and food tech
Environmentally responsible investing. “ESG is bullshit”
Reading people. Based only on the two or three things I had written on Slack, somebody said they had conviction I would be an excellent facilitator.
Psychedelics. They co-founded a start-up for designing new psychedelics using AI
Magician + attention expert. They shared this post on how illusionists got rich making addictive videos on Facebook.
Normal People by Sally Rooney (“try for 20 minutes and you will know if you like it or not”) and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clark (“an immersive story set in a world which is a cross of Harry Potter and Jane Austin”)
Alternative education (homeschooling / unschooling / world schooling / Montessori / … )
Olympic weightlifting coach, life coach, dating coach. All the same person!
Games by Paradox Interactive, e.g. Hearts of Iron IV
The person’s six chickens
Different groups have wildly different dynamics
Unfortunately, my memory of the groups have coalesced so I cannot remember precisely, but some differences I do remember:
In some groups, I will have to close off discussions to keep things moving forward, and in others I will need to encourage people more to share their thoughts and ideas.
Two of my groups have people with technical backgrounds and two of my groups have people with non-technical backgrounds. The content of the BlueDot AI Alignment course is on the technical side, so this will naturally lead to different dynamics.
Single individuals can change dynamics of group considerably. One big example is that I asked for highlights after the 1-1s, and one person said “I was told I am old and stupid!”. Ice truly broken at this point. I do not think I helped by saying you should take the ‘old’ part as a compliment. (I was sincere. The AI safety community is filled with people in their 20s straight out of university, so anybody with any kind of life or work experience is golden.)
Most groups on average put little weight on time-management as a potential issue that requires explicit planning to do well. However, everybody in the final group listed it as one of their potential blockers, before reaching the final section of the session on time management tips! I am not sure if this just a coincidence or if there is a pattern for why this happened.
AI safety requires wide backgrounds and skillsets
Nothing new as such, but seeing people with such a wide range of backgrounds really drills home how many holes and gaps there are in existing community.
The sentiment is nicely expressed in this LinkedIn post. Key quote:
Halfway through an AI safety course, I'm realising something surprising: backgrounds we might not typically associate with tech can be incredibly valuable in this field.
Daylight saving time sucks
I already believed this because of CGP Grey’s excellent video, but this feeling was re-ignited!
Long story short: BlueDot asks everybody for their time availabilities, creates groups based on this, and then books weekly slots with a constant time **according to UTC**. Because most people are normal and do not think about daylight savings time (this includes me), this has resulted in time slots which will become inconvenient when the clocks change. E.g. one of my cohorts is from 9am to 10:30am (UK time) now, but will become 8am to 9:30am next week…
I am opinionated
And often about things that are not too important. I spent 4-5 hours tweaking and re-writing BlueDot’s suggested structure for the session. Some of the changes I am happy with (e.g. moving the ‘What does success look like for you?’ question before the 1-1s so people have more potential things to talk about, or, just using the best ice-breaker question “What is something you could talk about for hours outside your work?”), but many were minor aesthetic changes, e.g. removing what I consider to be redundant horizontal lines that separate sections (just use whitespace people!). I need to work on this as I often spend too much time on such unimportant things.
(Credit to Spencer Greenberg for that ice-breaker question. Via his interview of Nick Gray about why everyone - including you! - should host more events.)
I agree that daylight savings time sucks, but the problem you encountered is entirely on BlueDot. Software that schedules according to UTC is, essentially, broken(*). It may be convenient or seem necessary if you are dealing with scheduling across-jurisdictions, where the jurisdictions involved schedule their DST transitions on different dates. (You did not say this was the case. Are these groups on-line, or face-to-face?) But it's still basically wrong - once all jurisdictions involved have transitioned, the schedule should return to the original nominal times. And the transition period should be handled individually, by humans, not clue-free software.
(*) Unless of course you are scheduling e.g. times to view astronomical events, or other phenomena not affected by official clock time.