I think I may have a valuable point or two to contribute because of some of my life experience, e.g.:
I had a business as a Life Coach (in California in the 90's).
I used to be a fairly avid consumer of various flavors of coaching, motivational programs, self help etc. (I still am, I've just gotten MUCH more discriminating -- that's why I'm here.)
My primary reactions to your post are:
There is almost certainly a market for the service you describe. Your big problem, especially at first, is going to be sales and marketing. I'm sure this much is obvious, but you probably ought to ask yourself if you have an appetite for doing full-time sales and marketing, because that is your future for the next 5+ years if you start this business and want it to be successful. This leads me to the next point:
Be careful what you wish for. I often think about going back into some kind of coaching business, but when I do, I remember what it was like, and that gives me pause. I didn't like having to constantly market myself as a coach. There were a number of things that felt unsavory about it, including the fact that all my friends were now prospective clients. Surprisingly, I also really dreaded my coaching calls, even though there was frequently a nice feeling I had helped someone AFTER the call. My point is that it's hard to predict whether you are going to enjoy being a practicing coach or not, and I judge that it probably takes a very specific kind of personality type -- an aggressively extroverted sales-oriented type -- to really enjoy that business. This should be an important element of your consideration IMO.
Another judgment I have is that coaching is hard, and it's hard in subtle ways. People are not very amenable to change, even if they THINK they are amenable. The behaviors that would make an actual difference to our lives are not as accessible to conscious tinkering as we expect them to be. As you contemplate starting this business, you may also want to ponder if you will be frustrated when you observe people not changing as much as you'd like them to change, in response to your coaching. Letting go of the results is a subtle and important skill IMO.
All of this is not meant to discourage you -- I think you have an interesting idea for a business, and I encourage you to pursue it IF none of the above puts you off. Just pay close attention and try to determine how much fun, or not, this is actually going to be. I think you should only do it if it is actually fun. It was not fun for me.
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As I've been reading through various articles and their comments on Less Wrong, I've noticed a theme that has appeared repeatedly: a frustration that we are not seeing more practical benefits from studying rationality. For example, Eliezer writes in A Sense that More Is Possible,
Yvain writes in Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great,
patrissimo wrote in a comment on another article,
These writers have also offered some suggestions for improving the situation. Eliezer writes,
patrissimo describes what he thinks an effective rationality practice would look like.
Dan Nuffer and I have decided that it's time to stop talking and start doing. We are in the very early stages of creating a business to help people improve their lives by training them in instrumental rationality. We've done some preliminary market research to get an idea of where the opportunities might lie. In fact, this venture got started when, on a whim, I ran a poll on ask500people.com asking,
I got 299 responses in total. These are the numbers that responded with "likely" or "very likely":
These numbers were much higher than I expected, especially the numbers from India, which still puzzle me. Googling around a bit, though, I found an instructor-led online decision-making course for $130, and a one-day decision-making workshop offered in the UK for £200 (over $350)... and the Google keyword tool returns a large number of search terms (800) related to "decision-making", many of them with a high number of monthly searches.
So it appears that there may be a market for training in effective decision-making -- something that could be the first step towards a more comprehensive training program in instrumental rationality. Some obvious market segments to consider are business decision makers, small business owners, and intelligent people of an analytical bent (e.g., the kind of people who find Less Wrong interesting). An important subset of this last group are INTJ personality types; I don't know if there is an effective way to find and market to specific Meyers-Briggs personality types, but I'm looking into it.
"Life coaching" is a proven business, and its growing popularity suggests the potential for a "decision coaching" service; in fact, helping people with big decisions is one of the things a life coach does. One life coach of 12 years described a typical client as age 35 to 55, who is "at a crossroads, must make a decision and is sick of choosing out of safety and fear." Life coaches working with individuals typically charge around $100 to $300 per hour. As far as I can tell, training in decision analysis / instrumental rationality is not commonly found among life coaches. Surely we can do better.
Can we do effective training online? patrissimo thinks that gathering in person is necessary, but I'm not so sure. His evidence is that "all the people who have replied to me so far saying they get useful rationality practice out of the LW community said the growth came through attending local meetups." To me this is weak evidence -- it seems to say more about the effectiveness of local meetups vs. just reading about rationality. In any event, it's worth testing whether online training can work, since
To conclude, one of the things an entrepreneur needs to do is "get out of the building" and talk to members of the target market. We're interested in hearing what you think. What ideas do you think would be most effective in training for instrumental rationality, and why? What would you personally want from a rationality training program? What kinds of products / services related to rationality training would you be interesting in buying?