! You're Arvind? I had no idea. Gosh, the past few days have been interesting for me - first Piotr Wozniak tells me he's incrementally reading 8 articles mentioning or by me, then Danny Hillis replies to a comment of mine over at the Technium, and now here's Arvind Narayanan.
I'd say that any post that's good enough to get voted up to the main page is worth tens of thousands of dollars to mankind. Easily.
On one hand, I agree - if a main page post improves one high-value person's time, that alone is probably a few tens of thousands' worth. The other part of me is cynically remarking that Wozniak and psychologists in general have been advocating spaced repetition for the last >2 decades / centuries (respectively), the research is unassailable, and yet... So what's the marginal return on another literature survey?
A few comments:
Thanks for the information! That does look pretty damning for dual n-back. As for creatine, I'm not vegetarian but my meat consumption is lower than average, especially when I'm not weight training. At any rate, I stopped taking it after a couple of months because I decided the unknown long-term health risk from increased renal stress wasn't worth it.
EDIT: I am canceling this contest because I feel that the structure of the incentives were poorly thought out (see gwern's comments). I will be posting a new better structured contest in the near future (now posted). If you feel this is unfair or otherwise feel slighted, please contact me at my username at gmail.com.
I'm interested in making projects happen on Less Wrong. In order to find out what works and to inspire others to try things too, I'm sponsoring the following small project:
I hereby offer a prize to the first person to submit a good summary of the evidence on Spaced Repetition to the main page. The winner will get the prize, currently: $265 + 40 to charity (see comments)
The summary should address at least the following questions: