Appendix: How to run a successful Hamming circle — LessWrong
A Hamming circle is a tool/process for making some kind of progress on some large, significant bottleneck. This is slightly vague, because Hamming circles are versatile. Participants at CFAR workshops have brought, into their Hamming circles, all sorts of problems and questions and goals. A sampling: What happens in a Hamming circle is fairly similar to what happens in a pair debug, or even when you're just working through your problems in your own mind. However, the problems tend to be larger or deeper or more confusing or intractable, with the hope being that people will bring their most pressing bottleneck. (Though bringing something smaller is fine; there shouldn't be moral pressure to shoulder a heavier problem than one feels ready to handle.) The idea is that, for the duration of the circle, instead of having access to just one brain's power, each participant will instead have 3-5x their usual working memory, 3-5x their usual wisdom and life experiences, 3-5x their usual persp