AspiringRationalist 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: AspiringRationalist 30 March 2012 03:18:48PM 6 points [-]

There are a lot of glowing recommendations from past participants here. In fact, I have not noticed a single criticism from a past participant. This reeks of self-censorship, because even if rationality mini-camp was overall an awesome experience, it is very unlikely that it was perfect.

In order to do my small part to counteract the social pressure not to criticize those with high status, I hereby pre-commit to upvoting any comment from a past participant that contains criticism of the mini-camp. This includes comments that are generally positive but include criticism of specific aspects.

Comment author: JGWeissman 30 March 2012 04:44:15PM 11 points [-]

In this comment, GuySrinivasan reports The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Comment author: thejash 31 March 2012 05:13:22PM 3 points [-]

I can definitely understand your perspective. I pretty much ONLY read the negative parts of reviews--if there is NOTHING bad, that is a bad sign in itself.

I also commented positively below, but since you asked, here are my complaints about the last minicamp:

  • A little disorganized. Apparently knowing about the planning fallacy does not make you immune to it ;) I suspect this will be fixed for this year.
  • Large number of college students (graduate and undergraduate). I would have liked to see a wider range of attendees. Again, this was probably partly due to the short notice for last year.
  • Some sessions were not valuable to me. However, most of those were valuable to others, so I think this is due more to the fact that brains are different than that the sessions were poorly done.

Actually, I'm pretty sure we all gave detailed feedback afterward (including lots of suggestions for improvements). Could Anna or someone post links to those too? Perhaps seeing the minor details that were negative will help people get a better sense for how useful it was overall.

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