[NOTE: This was a discussion post asking if anyone would mind giving feedback on a very rough draft in progress.
If you are downvoting it because you do not want to see discussion posts asking for feedback like this, then by all means, that's a valid use of a downvote.
But if you are downvoting it in order to express your opinion of the quality of the draft, I urge you to reconsider]
This is another work in progress coming at the DI issue from a somewhat different direction. It's contained in the comments of the original, and I'm posting this to ask for more wonderful beta-reader critics to tell me if it's a step in the right direction. (It's still very informal writing, but it's the ideas I'm dealing with now.)
And about what I'm looking for in the LW audience, someone asked me in a private message:
... who is the audience, here? Are you hoping that LW readers are school administrators, who will introduce DI into their schools? Are you hoping that they are teachers, who will introduce DI into their classes? Are you hoping that they are students, who will be able to seek out instructors using DI? ...
I'm personally interested because I have an interest in alternate education methods; I think the method sounds promising and what I know matches up with what I know about solid epistemology. The people who are interested in epistemic rationality (another group you could tailor posts towards) would probably be interested in learning about epistemic methods that are quantitatively superior to others.
And I said:
Oh, I dunno about DI involving "epistemic methods that are quantitatively superior to others". The founder recently wrote a book about what John Stuart Mill could have done for education, so that's the epistemology that DI is applying.
So actually, another reason I keep using Newton's laws analogies is that I suspect there's an analogious 'general relativity' to be found.
So what I really want is for the people from the LW audience to learn DI theory themselves, because I think they could improve the theory.
Well, that's the major part of what I want that's important here. I also had to add:
you remember how I mentioned 'creative strategic twists' [for how we could help DI win, and how DI could help us win], and indicated that the inspiration for that came from comparing the Michel Thomas lessons with DI proper (the internal details of each and their separate histories)?
That's another long-inferential distance topic...
But that's not important here (except to disclose that is where I'm coming from). LWers would first have to understand DI to fully grasp that. And I am significantly less certain of my current beliefs about those 'strategic twists' (although still pretty certain), and LWers proficient in DI would be the best to evaluate the ideas.
Yeah, this analogy-laden meta-digression is getting a bit ridiculous, I agree. Forget the physics stuff, at least for now.
Yeah, I am just a student of DI theory myself, largely just reciting outlines of my own mental notes.
If you could possibly find the time to check the online catalogs of any university libraries near you to see if they have the book... because if you could easily get your hands on a copy, it wouldn't be too hard to just try skimming the section and chapter summaries.
Quite honestly, yes, that is how it started.
But I was actually explicitly aware of it at the time, that my emotional experience with the Michel Thomas lessons was almost surely biasing me in my initial tentative vague estimate that there was a somewhere more than 50% chance that the results from Project Follow-Through were pretty much representative of something true about DI's effectiveness in practice.
Although just because the experience with the Michel Thomas lessons was emotional doesn't mean it should have been discarded as evidence, does it? Especially considering that I also had some evidence that many other people had had similar experiences (my vague impression that the 'marketing anecdotes' surrounding them as a product were slightly more numerous and slightly more gushing than usual, especially given how the lessons were in surface appearance much less polished compared to their competitors)... so maybe the bias wasn't so bad, but I knew I had a general human bias to underestimate my biases, and might therefore overcompensate for it... which is a line of thought that just goes into insanity, so at the time the sanest thing I could do was accept my feelings of how good my experience with the audio lessons was as evidence as valid, right? As the best working level at the time?
Anyway, yeah, my estimate of the probability of there being something to DI theory, even though I found it just as mystifyingly vague as you did at first, was obviously bumped up a lot by my slightly stronger faith in the Project Follow-Through graphs as representing something true about DI's practical effectiveness.
And as I found that bits of DI theory that had just seemed like techno-babble at first started to actually become meaningful to me, in recursive layers, I started to get really quite sure.
At this point, I would be very surprised if any evidence I found that contradicted DI actually held up under scrutiny (and yes, give it a correspondingly greater weight if it did!)
...And from that story you could probably give me some great feedback on my current level of general strength as a rationalist. How's my epistemic driving? (Although I realize you're in a position where you should probably expect that if you keep looking into DI theory your probability estimate of it being valid will more than likely move from 'somewhere in the middle?'(?) to a position much closer to either 0 or 1, and that might complicate things... or not? I'd have to think about that.)
...This is me working on less than four hours of sleep a night for three days in a row, by the way. I'ma go to bed now.