Prerequisite: Hamming questions

Purpose

What is a Hamming circle for? What does it do?

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:

How to find a spouse
What to do about my deteriorating relationship with my teenage child
Is it possible for me, specifically, to have a meaningful impact on existential risk
Something just isn't right about my life
I need to secure $250,000 in seed funding for my startup
My partner and I keep having the same fight
Even though I know I need to exercise, I just keep not exercising
What if everything I'm doing is "fake" and I'm only doing it because I feel like I'm "supposed" to
I want to go on a trip. It feels important to go on a trip. But I don't know why, and I don't know where, and I don't know what this trip should be
I think I want to quit grad school
I'm expected to speak at my father's funeral and I have nothing but scathing, bitter, angry things to say

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 perspective or field-of-view, 3-5x idea generators or problem solving strategies, etc.

Summary description

Okay, but what is it?

In short: you and 2-4 other people will sit down together, and spend approximately 20 minutes focusing on a single person and their Hamming problem. Then you'll take a short break, and reconvene to do it again with the next person, and the next, and the next.

Logistics

You don't need much for a Hamming circle, but the things you do need are fairly non-negotiable.

Time. It's important for each person's "turn" in the circle to be at least 20 minutes (so that they have sufficient time and space to properly inhabit their problem, and aren't rushing or skimming). It's also important for those turns to last no more than 40-50 minutes (because a too-open-ended atmosphere leads to meander and empirically results in less actual progress). It's also good to have flex time for people to take snack breaks or bathroom breaks, and to have the opportunity to give someone five or ten extra minutes if they need it.

Thus, a three-person Hamming circle should allot about 90 minutes, and a four-person one about 130 minutes. If you go up to five people, it's best to make turns shorter rather than adding another 20-40 minutes (so a five-person Hamming circle should still only be maybe 140 minutes long).
People. The ideal Hamming circle contains four people; stretching to three or five works okay but having two or six people changes the dynamic a lot. It's important that those people all have some degree of mutual trust and mutual fellow-feeling; at CFAR workshops, Hamming circles were on the next-to-last evening in part so that participants would have time to get to know one another a little bit.

(In principle, the simple trade of "I'll give you my time and attention, in exchange for you giving me yours" should work even with strangers, but in practice it's impossible for most people to be sufficiently open and vulnerable if they do not at least a little bit know and trust the other people in the circle.)
Atmosphere. The atmosphere of a good Hamming circle is like a long, warm embrace. It's important to be physically comfortable, in a place with non-horrible lighting and non-horrible sound. It helps a lot if everyone is low to the ground, and it helps a lot if people are physically close. Pillows and blankets are strongly recommended, and it's not a good idea to have a table in between the participants, or to have two Hamming circles taking place within earshot. Bring coffee, hot chocolate, water, snacks, maybe a little bit of alcohol. The feel you're shooting for is a late-night conversation among friends around the campfire.
Problems. People do not have to have an absolutely clear sense of their problem, or to have made a final call about which problem, but they must absolutely have a reason to be there, something that they themselves want the circle's help with. Spectating, or one-way Hamming where you only help and do not yourself get helped, is worse than it seems at first blush; it does something negative and somewhat corrodes the (for lack of a better word) "spell." It creates distance, where what the circle needs is intimacy.

(This is not to say that you shouldn't be flexible; sometimes crises arise and for various reasons it may be that one person ends up forsaking their turn to make space for someone else, or something. That's okay. It's just not good to plan on not taking your turn, and to show up with the intention of ... wearing clothes while everyone else is naked?)

The flow

It's usually best to begin a Hamming circle with some sort of easing-into-the-mood; at CFAR workshops this was accomplished by having the whole group gather to intro the activity before breaking off into smaller groups. Having someone who's in charge, who knows what's going to happen and can speak calmly and softly and sort of bring the speed and temperature down is helpful.

Once your group of (ideally) four has found a place that's quiet and isolated and physically comfortable, it's a good idea to take 1-3 minutes of quiet contemplation, where people can take a dozen deep breaths or close their eyes or do some brief Focusing or similar.

Then (even if everyone present has already been in a Hamming circle before!) it helps to have someone explicitly set context, and to remind the group okay, we're here to try to make progress on our most pressing bottlenecks; this can be scary and difficult; we're here for each other; the trade we're making is showing up for others in exchange for them showing up for us.

After that, the group should organically choose who goes first, based on who feels most ready or most called or similar.

Each turn should have an official time-tracker; someone who can e.g. give a five-minute warning and then gently check in the last minute whether the group needs more time. That time-tracker should make sure, if they set a phone alarm, that the sound the alarm makes when it goes off is gentle and non-jarring, because it could easily come at an emotionally intense moment.

Participants should try to spend no more than five minutes setting context and explaining the problem and getting the group up to speed; it's very easy to accidentally spend 75% of your time on explaining, and end up getting very little in the way of reflection or help.

(There is an exception to this general principle; more on that in the next section.)

After twenty-ish minutes have passed, and the person's turn ends, it's usually good to check in whether they need any aftercare, and for the group to do a (brief) moment of gratitude or hug it out or similar. Then it's best to take a 5-10min break, to stretch legs and catch breath and grab food or use the bathroom, before returning for the next turn.

OODA Loops

(See the writeup of OODA loops for more detail)

You could model human behavior as looping repeatedly through four steps: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

(Another framing of these same steps is notice, orient, choose, execute.)

In generic applied rationality activities like pair debugging, people often find themselves distributed roughly evenly across these four steps. Some bugs are about execution, others about making decisions, others about orienting, etc.

In Hamming circles, however, there is a strong bias toward the first two. The largest, stickiest, and most pressing problems often have their roots in unexpected places, or are entangled with all sorts of other habits or relationships or what-have-you that do not seem immediately connected. It's often more helpful, in the Hamming circle context, to focus on understanding what's even going on than to try to leap aggressively toward solutions.

Thus, the "only spend five minutes getting the group up to speed" might not make sense, if the whole theme of your Hamming circle is "I don't even know what's going on, precisely? I just know that something isn't working."

Sometimes, the value of the Hamming circle is in laying out all of your observations on the table, having space to finally say what you've never quite managed to say, having other people (gently) poke and prod and make connections and draw out your reactions, etc. etc.

For instance, in the last of the examples given above (an individual who's expected to speak at a funeral but has nothing kind to say), it would be easy to snap into a particular frame ("oh, okay, let's help you brainstorm nice things!" or "oh, okay, let's get you out of this obligation!"). More likely, though, what this person needs is help orienting to the problem—figuring out what the problem even is. If the group presupposes "ah, this is an issue of your family members not respecting your boundaries," then the circle is likely to be unhelpful or possibly even counterproductive.

Miscellaneous wisdom

Give yourself permission to not go in too deeply/wade out into treacherous waters/really drive yourself into a hole. Hamming circles can be an excellent place to find support and lean on your friends and colleagues, but there is still a limit, and it is not virtuous to drive yourself into crisis.
As best you can, try not to worry about the other participants' experience, when it is your turn to be the focus of the circle. Do not try to entertain them, do not try to make sure they're having a good time, do not sacrifice your own goals for the sake of everyday social niceties. The Hamming circle is a special context, deliberately constructed such that you can set aside some of the social duties that you need to do in ordinary interaction. Feel free to interrupt, or to redirect, or to make blunt requests of people; try to use the time in whatever way feels actually useful to you. Remember that, when it's their turn, they will do the same, and you will return the favor.
Try to avoid thinking in terms of solving problems with finality. Be open to that possibility, if it arises, but don't shoot for it, as a target. The goal of a Hamming circle is usually more about finding threads to pull, or increasing the surface area/grabbable parts of the problem. Success is measured more in terms of clarity and understanding than in an ordinary pair debug or similar.
In general, don't do Hamming circles super frequently; they tend to lose their power/have a half-life of a couple of months. Most CFAR staff and participants found that the value of a Hamming circle every 6-18 months was quite high, and the value of doing three in a six month period dropped off fairly steeply.

Call for crowdsourcing

By this point, there have easily been a thousand participants in official, by-that-name Hamming circles, and probably many many others who have taken part in other activities that either evolved from Hamming circles or are convergent evolution from elsewhere.

Please leave your own tips, suggestions, wisdom, and anecdotes below—anything that you think would help others avoid important pitfalls, or achieve particularly good outcomes.