Bugmaster comments on Minicamps on Rationality and Awesomeness: May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28 - Less Wrong

24 Post author: AnnaSalamon 29 March 2012 08:48PM

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Comment author: orthonormal 29 March 2012 10:07:01PM *  38 points [-]

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:

  • Providing an estimated cost breakdown (from last year) rather than a vague statement ("most of it is meals and lodging") would go a long way toward showing that whatever this is, it's not an SIAI fundraiser.
  • A specific example of an exercise from last summer's minicamps would be much better than a description of how awesome the exercises are in general, both for reassuring people that there's content to it and making people excited (as I was when I heard some of the things you did).
  • A (partial) "program of proposed topics" would make it look substantially more serious: which instructors have which particular focuses?

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.

Comment author: Bugmaster 29 March 2012 11:24:41PM 15 points [-]

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 ?

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 01 April 2012 03:00:20AM 10 points [-]

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.

Comment author: ciphergoth 01 April 2012 09:44:55AM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Bugmaster 01 April 2012 05:45:47PM 0 points [-]

These are great, thanks !

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 30 March 2012 01:28:05AM 8 points [-]

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.

Comment author: thejash 31 March 2012 05:18:22PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 31 March 2012 11:45:21PM 0 points [-]

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.