Bugmaster comments on Minicamps on Rationality and Awesomeness: May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28 - Less Wrong
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Comments (239)
I have a high opinion of the minicamp (after observing fiddlemath before and after the camp, anecdotally I'd say he "leveled up" in notable ways that would be worthwhile for me), and I'll probably apply. That being said:
This post gives off bad vibes to (my mental model of) outsiders- I wouldn't be comfortable showing it to a non-LessWrong person and saying "This is what I'll be doing". I'm holding the post to a pretty high standard, because signaling matters a lot for an event where you're asking money from people and putting them through an intensive program (it pattern-matches things that people are wary of, from "multilevel marketing seminar" to "Christian retreat").
Some suggestions:
Like I said, I'm already interested, and I already know that this info exists; but explicitly showing it will vastly improve the signaling value, and remove the inconvenience of having to convince one's friends and family that this isn't an obviously cultish thing.
Here's another random idea:
When I read product or movie reviews, I tend to look for the negatives as much as (if not more than) the positives; I also pay attention to the rating distribution (especially if it's bimodal). If I can't find any negatives, I tend to assume that the product has been astroturfed, and move on.
So, did the SIAI ever receive any negative comments about the rationality minicamp ? If so, where can I read them ?
I posted earlier that the surveys were confidential, but actually, I just reread them, and there doesn't seem to be anything personal in the "Which parts of the camp didn't work particularly well for you, and what do you think we could do to improve?" column, which was basically the "what negative comments do you have?" column. So I pasted those answers into a new spreadsheet and posted them to the web; you can read participants' collected complaints here.
This is very useful, thanks! These don't look too challenging to address - would be good to know more about what you've changed in response to some of the common themes there.
These are great, thanks !
If you or anyone wants to do a survey, I can give you the email addresses of the minicampers, and you can email them and see what you get and post it online (assuming you write in your email that you are looking for publishable comments, etc.). Let me know if you/anyone seriously wish to do this.
Many of the minicampers are on LW, also; the folks with testimonials above have linked LW accounts; but there is of course selection bias there.
Someone else above asked for the negatives as well. Didn't we all submit suggestions for improvement and criticisms last year? Are those publishable? If you don't have permission, you could just email people for permission to publish their criticisms. You can definitely publish any of my comments.
The survey was anonymous, so this is hard to ask permission to share individual comments, since I don't know who wrote them (and folks were assured that their submissions were confidential). You (since you're on the minicamps google group) could email that google group and collect criticisms, and publish them.
Someone else could ask me for folks' email addresses and then do the same.