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Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
SUMMARY: Let's collect people who want to work on for-profit companies that have significant positive impacts on many people's lives.
Google provides a huge service to the world - efficient search of a vast amount of data. I would really like to see more for-profit businesses like Google, especially in underserved areas like those explored by non-profits GiveWell, Singularity Institute and CFAR. GiveWell is a nonprofit that is both working toward making humanity better, and thinking about leverage. Instead of hacking away at one branch of the problem of effective charity by working on one avenue for helping people, they've taken it meta. They're providing a huge service by helping people choose non-profits to donate to that give the most bang for your buck, and they're giving the non-profits feedback on how they can improve. I would love to see more problems taken meta like that, where people invest in high leverage things.
Beyond these non-profits, I think there is a huge amount of low-hanging fruit for creating businesses that create a lot of good for humanity and make money. For-profit businesses that pay their employees and investors well have the advantage that they can entice very successful and comfortable people away from other jobs that are less beneficial to humanity. Unlike non-profits where people are often trying to scrape by, doing the good of their hearts, people doing for-profits can live easy lives with luxurious self care while improving the world at the same time.
It's all well and good to appeal to altruistic motives, but a lot more people can be mobilzed if they don't have to sacrifice their own comfort. I have learned a great deal about this from Jesse and Sharla at Rejuvenate. They train coaches and holistic practitioners in sales and marketing - enabling thousands of people to start businesses who are doing the sorts of things that advance their mission. They do this while also being multi-millionaires themselves, and maintaining a very comfortable lifestyle, taking the time for self-care and relaxation to recharge from long workdays.
Less Wrong is read by thousands of people, many of whom are brilliant and talented. In addition, Less Wrong readers include people who are interested in the future of the world and think about the big picture. They think about things like AI and the vast positive and negative consequences it could have. In general, they consider possibilities that are outside of their immediate sensory experience.
I've run into a lot of people in this community with some really cool, unique, and interesting ideas, for high-impact ways to improve the world. I've also run into a lot of talent in this community, and I have concluded that we have the resources to implement a lot of these same ideas.
Thus, I am opening up this post as a discussion for these possibilities. I believe that we can share and refine them on this blog, and that there are talented people who will execute them if we come up with something good. For instance, I have run into countless programmers who would love to be working on something more inspiring than what they're doing now. I've also personally talked to several smart organizational leader types, such as Jolly and Evelyn, who are interested in helping with and/or leading inspiring projects And that's only the people I've met personally; I know there are a lot more folks like that, and people with talents and resources that haven't even occurred to me, who are going to be reading this.
Topics to consider when examining an idea:
- Tradeoffs between optimizing for good effects on the world v. making a profit.
- Ways to improve both profitability and good effects on the world.
- Timespan - projects for 3 months, 1 year, 5 years, 10+ years
- Using resources efficiently (e.g. creating betting markets where a lot of people give opinions that they have enough confidence in to back with money, instead of having one individual trying to figure out probabilities)
- Opportunities for uber-programmers who can do anything quickly (they are reading and you just might interest and inspire them)
- Opportunities for newbies trying to get a foot in the door who will work for cheap
- What people/resources do we have at our disposal now, and what can we do with that?
- What people/resources are still needed?
- If you think of something else, make a comment about it in the thread for that, and it might get added to this list.
An example idea from Reichart Von Wolfsheild:
A project to document the best advice we can muster into a single tome. It would inherently be something dynamic, that would grow and cover the topics important to humans that they normally seek refuge and comfort for in religion. A "bible" of sorts for the critical mind.
Before things like wikis, this was a difficult problem to take on. But, that has changed, and the best information we have available can in fact be filtered for, and simplified. The trick now, is to organize it in a way that helps humans. which is not how most information is organized.
Collaboration
- Please keep the mission in mind (let's have more for-profit companies working on goals that benefit people too!) when giving feedback. When you write a comment, consider whether it is contributing to that goal, or if it's counterproductive to motivation or idea-generation, and edit accordingly.
- Give feedback, the more specific the better. Negative feedback is valuable because it tells us where to concentrate further work. It can also be a motivation-killer; it feels like punishment, and not just for the specific item criticized, so be charitable about the motives and intelligence of others, and stay mindful of how much and how aggressively you dole critiques out. (Do give critiques, they're essential - just be gentle!) Also, distribute positive feedback for the opposite effect. More detail on giving the best possible feedback in this comment.
- Please point other people with resources such as business experience, intelligence, implementation skills, and funding capacity at this post. The more people with these resources who look at this and collaborate in the comments, the more likely it is for these ideas to get implemented. In addition to posting this to Less Wrong, I will be sending the link to a lot of friends with shrewd business skills, resources and talent, who might be interested in helping make projects happen, or possibly in finding people to work on their own projects since many of them are already working on projects to make the world better.
- Please provide feedback. If anything good happens in your life as a result of this post or discussion, please comment about it and/or give me feedback. It inspires people, and I have bets going that I'd like to win. Consider making bets of your own! It is also important to let me know if you are going to use the ideas, so that we don't end up with needless duplication and competition.
Finally: If this works right, there will be lots of information flying around. Check out the organization thread and the wiki.
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Comments (407)
Feedback
Negative: Negative feedback is valuable. If you think an idea is terrible, don't just downvote, also explain. The trick to giving good negative feedback is doing so with productive goals in mind, which means, rather than saying “this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard”, think about what specifically it is that you think makes the idea infeasible in its current form, and what would turn it into a good, or at least a better, idea.
Keep in mind that negative feedback is a double edged sword. It helps people refine their ideas, and can create success in place of failure. Unfortunately, even in its best forms, it also can easily sap a person’s motivation. It tends to do this on the monkey mind level, not on the analytic level, which is frustrating since negative feedback is such a beautiful tool for the analytic mind. I’ve seen how even the slightest negative feedback can have a huge impact, even stopping people from working on projects that are pretty decent on the whole. There is a minority of people who are relatively unfazed by negative commentary, but most of us can’t help but internalize it somewhat. Agentiness is rare, and something that can be cultivated or trampled with feedback. Being specific is the one of the most helpful things you can do to deliver the most constructive criticism, because the information tends to be more helpful toward solving the problems and less personal.
Another thing that helps avoid killing someone’s motivation is speaking with the assumption that the person you're talking to is an intelligent human being whose idea could be good if worked out a little further. This is often the case, especially here. When people sense that you anticipate that they'll come back with an intelligent answer, they often do.
Here's an example for making negative feedback more specific: Perhaps you think that a person is vastly underestimating the difficulty of raising funds for their idea. I would suggest phrasing it as a question: “How do you propose to get funding for this idea?” You don’t need to convey your doubt in the question, but if you do feel the need to bring it up, do it as specifically as possible: “When I’ve tried fundraising in the past, I found it extremely hard, and extrapolating that, I have a hard time imagining it working for this project. Can you please explain how you see this happening?”
In summary, I think that it is very much worth giving negative feedback, even though it does often harm motivation. Ideas need to be good if they’re going to work, and by giving negative feedback, you are helping people improve their ideas. Even if the person with the idea doesn’t get it or update, it might help bystanders. And there’s a decent chance that the person who you talk to will understand, and you might be able to help a project happen that wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without your well framed remark.
Positive: Validation for good ideas is really helpful. You may think that people who have a good idea know that it's a good idea already. I know a lot of people, though, who feel a little better and more encouraged - and who are more likely to follow through when given validation. So if you see someone mention something great, be sure to give them a thumbs up. It will be even more powerful if you respond with a comment saying specifically why it's a good idea, with as much detail as you can manage. Not only will the person feel validated, but other people reading are also more likely to see the value that you see, so the idea is more likely to get funding, refinement, and resources. If this thread goes as I hope, any comment or up/down vote that you make might well have a impact on whether or not a world-improving project gets implemented.
Clarification: Sometimes someone will make a good point that is obvious to you, but not obvious to other people. If you understand a good point that someone has made and you think it's not likely to get across to others, it's super helpful if you can restate it clearly and succinctly so that the concept gets conveyed to everyone.
I think the biggest problem with your proposal is that it's hard to do a startup with founders who don't know each other well. The founders and early employees will face long hours, stress, and possibly financial woes. Some background history and an interview aren't enough to ensure that someone won't flake. The best co-founders are friends who have worked together previously. As Paul Graham says:
Yeah, that's definitely tricky and a downside.
I think having the common philosophies of Less Wrong would go a long way. It would also be an upside if all people are passionate about the cause and have thought it through in a lot of detail before committing to work together. There is also nothing to say that people can't get to know each other well before embarking on a project together, even if they do hook up on this blog. Things like Skype and even planes are easy to use in this day and age - if people are truly motivated and taking initiative, they can overcome that sort of obstacle.
The Less Wrong blog already has a very strong filtering effect, plus the other filters just mentioned, so I think that if/when people get to the point of deciding they want to work together, they'll likely be decent matches. For example, ideas will get chewed on much more thoroughly in this context than most, so I think there is likely to be more consistency of vision between different founding members.
Obviously I'm quite biased having written this post, so I discount my enthusiasm, and am curious about what other issues are that people see.
Looking at other comments, I want to be a little more specific about why I have more hope for this particular forum than an average group of people reading a blog post who could potentially be cofounders together.
As someone who is part of the culture, I find people who are hardcore Less Wrong types to be much easier to get along with than most people when it comes to conversations that might upset people. Having the common values of truth-even-when-it-hurts and clarity go such a long way toward making communication work and progress happen, among many other great memes. I've met a lot of the crowd in person at this point, living in the Bay Area, and find that even with someone I don't know at all, if they're coming through that filter, I can talk more freely and openly with them than I can with most people, without worry about offending them or other undesirable consequences.
It is my guess that a lot of the interpersonal conflict that kills start-ups comes down to lack of clarity and poor communication. Friends getting along better fits with this notion, because they would probably communicate better and have more shared values and ways of perceiving the world than strangers.
I believe there are results (linked by Hanson recently?) showing that cofounders do better when they're selected for merit reasons (i.e. this guy was the best coder we found) rather than identity reasons (i.e. we both went to the same university). It's also relatively easy to get to know people quickly.
Flakes as cofounders, however, is a critical error that must be consciously avoided. I like your mention of previous projects- whenever someone tells me they think we'd make a good founding pair, I try to look for a small project that we can ship in a few months that will give us a taste of how we work together. I've avoided a few mistakes that way.
Something I learned from watching a nearby train wreck: The emotionally dominant person in a partnership should not be a compulsive spender.
Indeed.
More general lesson: look at emotional factors about the founders, not just the abstract question of whether the business would be likely to succeed if it's run by sensible people.
When the idea of that business was first floated, the thing that made me edgiest was actually that the person the storefront was bought from and who had a similar business seemed awfully eager to sell.
This have to be dome implicit or explicit? Creating a startup with someone who just met is I assume, is made primarily for technical reasons, and after that, for emotional ones. Someone will say to a person they are technically prepared but not emotionally?
That's an interesting question. I might have been reasonably blunt about the situation to the less dominant person if I'd seen the problems coming. On the other hand, she was the less dominant person, and I don't know whether I could have said anything general that would have helped. If I'd known the outcome of that business in clairvoyant detail (lost money, lost friendship), I think it might have registered, but there was no reason to think I would have known that much.
After it all fell apart, I read in The Millionaire Woman Next Door that it was a sort of business (gift shop) which is especially likely to go under. That might have been useful information. As I recall, the book has bankruptcy rates for different sorts of businesses.
In retrospect, I don't think they were technically prepared, either-- but I didn't know enough to evaluate that.
In general, it's hard to get good advice.
Anecdotally, Dropbox was founded by two guys who had just met each other.
But yeah, this is probably true in general. Maybe the best we can do is start making friends with people who we might like to start startups with later, as a preliminary step?
I'd like to make friends with a web designer, myself.
"Anecdotally, Dropbox was founded by two guys who had just met each other."
No, not anecdotal. While I appreciate Paul Graham's cherry picked examples just like the next person, having looked at the history of hundreds of companies, it is all over the map. In general, you can't "create" success, you can simple try to avoid or mitigate failure. "People" make great companies, by being great about making it work.
But, sadly, and I really mean, sadly, monetarily successful companies (which may not be great companies) are for the most part simply created by having a product people want to buy. You can have a staff of imbeciles selling sugar to children.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/06/good-friends-can-make-bad-business-partners.html
That study was about VCs choosing investments, not startup founders working long, stressful hours side-by-side. I realize there are disadvantages to working with friends, but I'm pretty sure the advantages outweigh them. Paul Graham seems to agree, and he makes a living picking founders.
I agree and add my own personal experience as an anecdote. Business gives different incentives and prompts different applications of power. I no longer have several friends, for most part due to business related problems.
I'd be interested in meeting a co-founder on Less Wrong. I'd want to work on some smaller project first - some trivial website or web app, or a browser extension, that could be finished in a relatively short time. That would give me an idea of the prospective co-founder's skills and work habits. Of course it's not as much information as I'd like to have, but it'd be a good start.
Imagine that Hacker News beat us to the punch and had a "let's found important startups" thread. Would you be as positive and enthusiastic? HN is geared toward people who know about startup culture. People who have read PG's essays and spent significant fractions of their lives improving their ability to win at startups.
Compare the HN group to the people who will reply to your post. You're selecting against people who already have experience doing startups. (Those people already have the experience and social connections necessary to start another company. There's no reason for them to take a chance on people in this thread.) Also, fluid intelligence is great, but domain experience is much more useful in the case of startups. Finally, it's important to note that LW posters seem to suffer from akrasia. When the rubber hits the road, LW users seem to flee.
Of course, I have little experience in any of these domains. The LW akrasia correlation is simply my impression, not something based in empericism.
They linked the article today! You can see their comments here.
Betting
I’d like to encourage betting under this post. Zvi has agreed to advise someone on how to set up the market if a volunteer wants to take this on! Zvi is an expert on betting markets, and having him as an advisor is an awesome opportunity. If you think this sounds like something that you would like to capitalize on, and you are willing to commit to putting in the effort to do the project justice if you are chosen, please fill out the the form.
Bets could be on things like:
Basically, whatever measurable aspects of success or failure people are interested in.
For bets, I encourage people to keep in mind the mission:
Let's collect people who want to work on for-profit companies that have significant positive impacts on many people's lives.
Thus, my request is that you only bet against a project if you think you can prevent yourself from sabotaging people’s efforts as a result. Negative bets are quite valuable, they help give people more realistic expectations and give people something to bet positively against!
The rules for bets that projects will succeed are different in this context than in a lot of standard games. Because the mission is to win the game of making humanity awesome, as opposed to a more restricted game, everything that is ethical and legal is fair game for influencing the outcome of your bets. You can offer resources to increase your odds of winning, such as personal time/money investment in the projects, counseling, connections, office space, or any other resources that seem like they might be useful.
I contacted Shannon about this yesterday and am told Zvi will be contacting me shortly.
I've heard a lot of LWers talk about a desire for more concrete ways to handle disagreement, and will be focusing on building a good way to have people to put their karma where their mouth is... not just for this thread, but for all threads.
Like so many 26 hour old projects, the code is very rough. I am not sure when it will be ready. If you are interested in being one of the first people to use the system, please shoot an email to info-market@empirestatemachine.com :)
Finally got the password but have no idea what to do with it. I unwrapped the enigma only to find the mystery.
Organization
If this post succeeds, it will create a lot of data that will be much more useful if it is organized. I’d like to follow it up with posts in the discussion section, or possibly main for big things, that are focused on more specific niches within the broad topic of businesses that make the world better.
It would be great if more people want to join me with optimizing the organizational end of this. I think the ideal would be to start a discussion thread for this once we see what sorts of responses come in. Perhaps a simple rule to start might be that if you feel inspired to start a new top level thread, post to the organizational thread first, and wait at least 24hrs for feedback before implementing. I think good, well-thought-out high level organization will go quite a ways toward productive discussion and ideas actually getting implemented.
It would also be nice to start a wiki, volunteers for this would be great, but I’d like some discussion about this for at least a couple of days on the organization thread before it happens, since the quality and implementation of the wiki will have a big impact on how useful it is, and it would be best to do it right the first time and not end up with multiple wikis.
For this post, I encourage people to start threads for things such as:
In addition to posting publicly if you are interested in working on a project, you can also fill out this form to be sent to me personally and not published on the web. I’ll do what matchmaking I can with the forms personally and only send them to people who I think have potential to be good matches. ) to be sent to me personally and not published on the web. I’ll do what matchmaking I can with the forms personally and only send them to people who I think have potential to be good matches.
x-posting comment from over here in case anyone else is willing to take this on:
Would creating a wiki for this page be the sort of thing that you'd be interested in?
Things that I think could be sped up with some a program would be to translate all of the comments over wiki format, and organizing the ideas - it would be really cool if posts for business ideas to be tagged and then organized ranked by upvotes, and updated with the upvote updates on the website.
What I'm visualizing is a page with a list of links of ideas that are ranked (people can manually title the idea summaries after the wiki is created), that links back to the LW site. I'd say that's the most important aspect and I'd love to see it done soon, although there's plenty of other organization that would be nice as well.
An existing example of what Reichart is talking about (I think) http://examine.com/
Topics to consider when examining an idea thread
There are a few relevant posts over at The Rationalist Conspiracy. My take-away: sell something, to avoid falling for the online advertising fallacy.
I notice you chose the word "important" rather than "altruistic" or making some reference to social entrepreneurship. Of course I want to start an important startup- but it turns out that importance is much easier to determine looking back than looking forward.
For a while the working title of the post was "Profitable Altruism".
Feedback on Reichart's idea given as an example:
The best advice is like the best shoe: it doesn't matter how much I like it if it doesn't fit your foot. Related.
And expressed a third way: the best answer to a question depends on both the context and content of the question. Who is asking, and why? What answers will be useful to them, and which ones useless? When someone asks me what computer they should buy, I respond with questions, not statements.
As for the bible functionality- there are few resources for atheists undergoing serious stress, compared to the resources available to Christians. I think that is something that will be fixed by a growing community of atheist writers, poets, and musicians, not a bereavement wiki.
But perhaps there is a gem buried there- wiki software is designed for a growing web of knowledge. What he wants is a single, sequential work which can be edited and adjusted by many people at once: the combination of version control and the tradition of oral epics. Open source community works are already common in music, I think, but the closest thing for text seems like fanfiction, which is far from the idea I'm discussing.
(Feel free to give feedback on this as an example of feedback, as well as the actual content.)
Hmm. I had not been thinking about this in a for-profit context (with possible exception of ad revenue when it becomes appropriate), but my current personal project is HumanistCulture.com, a site that will act as a community and curator for secular inspirational art.
For the most part, I'm doing it because I want the community and service for my own ends, and because it is fun. However, there are two extremely important functions it may serve. One is to create art and culture specifically tailored for atheist bereavement. The other is to create stories and songs dealing with the problem Peter Hurford recently addressed, which is that our intuitions about how and when to help people are horribly miscalibrated when it comes to worldscale problems.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality made a rational-approach-to-worldsaving a cool, approachable and salient idea. A better variety of stuff like that may be very valuable.
I'm developing the website alongside a real-world community of secular artists, who hopefully will end up providing content beyond my own work and what's currently available under creative commons licenses.
This is an interesting thought. I have limited skill when it comes to the nuts and bolts of web-development. If anyone had thoughts on how to make this work and would like to contribute, let me know. I'm not optimizing for profit but if the content is good enough I think ad-revenue may eventually be non-trivial.
I'm really excited about software similar to Anki, but with task-specialized user interfaces (vs. self-graded tasks) and better task-selection models (incorporating something like item response theory), ideally to be used for both training and credentialing.
If you're looking for an institution around which to organize people and projects, I recently created Kilometa Labs for that kinda thing. Will start promoting it in a week or so after we think more about strategy &c. We have a few cool projects in the pipeline as well, so you'd be associating with cool people and cool stuff.
I think you should talk to muflax and Zak Vance about the Anki-like ideas. Will email you with more info, I've already mentioned your ideas to them.
I would seriously consider deleting that link until you fix your website. It looks extremely bad and will likely divert people away from your organization.
I've just posted a couple of ideas that involve Anki-like systems, it'd be great to get your feedback. In general I think that anything that promotes wider use of spaced repetition and optimized learning techniques has massive societal.
I've explored using spaced repetition in various web-based learning interfaces, which are described at http://cicatriz.github.com I'd love to talk more with anyone who's interested. Based on my experiences, I have reservations about when and how exactly spaced repetition should be used and don't believe there's a general solution using current techniques to quickly go from content to SRS cards. But with a number of dedicated individuals working on different domains, there's certainly potential for better learning. I've been working on writing up a series of articles about this. Again, contact me if you want to be notified when that is released.
First off-the-top-of-my-head idea:
An organization that would fulfill a role similar to GiveWell, but for people looking to invest money ethically in businesses. Ethical Investment could evaluate companies on how much their business reduces x-risk, improves the human condition, as well as other factors like environmental impact. What would save this from outright hippiedom is that it's actually encouraging investment in worthwhile companies, not saying "boo capitalism".
Potential problems
I'm sure there are others.
The job of this hypothetical business is to find these things out, and publish them. Answering this question yourself is therefore part of the work required to create such a business, but the short answer is that it's available if you can find it, and by and large, if it's true it's legal to publish (but beware of Swiss laws on business secrets).
Ethical investment.
Are you serious?
Of course he isn't. Nobody makes money in assassination these days, the market is oversold.
He was listing assassination as a potential concern for people pursuing this particular business idea, not as a potential business idea itself.
Thank you for the response!
That makes a lot of sense, it would be hard to have a service that clarifies and presents already available material be illegal somehow. Defamation laws in Ireland are pretty stupid though.
Well beyond my (current) knowledge and abilities, but seems a solid plan.
Will investigate this further when I have more time.
Not really. Only a tiny bit at most. I would not like to publish damning material on a very powerful corporation, but I guess one could focus on publishing positive material on good companies instead, if that was a concern.
I have a resource that could help someone's project: my time. I'm a novice programmer looking to gain some practical experience, and I'd be willing to work, say, 20 hours a week for free, at least for a month or two. PM me if you think I might be able to help out.
Do you grant random programming wishes or are you only interested in longer term stuff?
Probably. No promises, but I'll seriously consider any request.
I use Cyberduck for FTP-ing. It's open source. I want it to have a global hotkey that will upload the file I'm working on, or have selected in the Finder, to the current directory so I don't have to drag every time.
You'll be better off learning something like AutoHotkey, which will allow you to do that and a lot more to automate your tasks, without the need to modify every program you use.
Is there anything like it for Mac? AutoHotkey says Windows.
alternativeto.net suggests IronAHK, which apparently works on Mono and has source available.
Only what Google can find.
I don't know anything about programming Macs, but here are some thoughts for anyone who wants to try this:
(Another option for step #3 would be to programmatically drag-drop the active file to the Cyberduck window, but I couldn't figure out how to do that)
I'm not sure how comfortable you are working with Terminal, but this works:
curl -T MyFileToUpload.txt ftp://myusername:mypassword@ftp.myhost.com/directory/
(and can be repeated with two keystrokes: "Up, Enter")
What would be your ideal subject matter to be programming?
The clearer and more detailed you answer that, the more likely you are to get it or something similar. Also perhaps information about what languages you use and/or specialties and/or link to a Linkedin page or something like that.
Thanks for making this offer!
Would creating a wiki for this page be the sort of thing that you'd be interested in?
Things that I think could be sped up with some a program would be to translate all of the comments over wiki format, and organizing the ideas - it would be really cool if posts for business ideas to be tagged and then organized ranked by upvotes, and updated with the upvote updates on the website.
What I'm visualizing is a page with a list of links of ideas that are ranked (people can manually title the idea summaries after the wiki is created), that links back to the LW site. I'd say that's the most important aspect and I'd love to see it done soon, although there's plenty of other organization that would be nice as well.
I started MyPersonalDev a year ago to develop a data-driven personal development web application. The minimum viable product I envision is a task manager for people who like to think about utility functions (give your tasks utility functions!) My long-range vision is to use machine learning and collective intelligence to automate things like next-action determinations, value-of-information calculations, and probability estimates. I've written most of the minimum viable product already and use it extensively to manage my own tasks, but I haven't released anything publicly because it's easier to develop the software without having an existing user base.
The downside of having no user base is that there's no revenue, which is a real issue for me as a cash-strapped college student. I'll graduate in May with a degree in computer science, and I've been thinking hard about what to do after that. My impression is that working for my startup post-graduation would likely involve a period of extreme financial difficulty that I'd like to avoid. Consequently, I've been considering shutting it down and trying to get the best existing job I can get, using salary as the base metric and making adjustments for things like quality-of-life and is-the-company-doing-something-worthwhile. While ideologically frustrating (I like the idea of working for my startup full-time post-graduation), that has seemed to be the most instrumentally rational thing for me to do.
Here are some options I'll throw out there:
Look at my history of posts for more information about me. Like I said in a recent post:
I want to work on something important. I want to work on a team. And I want to make enough money to live comfortably. When I graduate in May, I'm very interested in moving towards a more optimal living and working situation. Could we be a fit? Get in touch!
Colby (at the Berkeley LW meetup) is wondering about what your market is - people interested in utility functions are economics professors and Less Wrong readers. How do you envision reaching out to more people and who would you reach out to?
Group consensus: Advertise it to somewhere like Less Wrong, then if people say its cool and email you, go with it, if you don't get good feedback, let it go.
Idea related to peer-to-peer lending, and to increase returns on investment and decrease borrowing costs
Streamline the process of lending between users heavily invested in an internet community
One problem with P2P lending is the problem of scammers, dishonest people, and general "Parfit's Hitchhiker non-payers". However, if you have been involved in a forum or internet community, then you've built up considerable "community capital". That investment helps to establish credit among the community members, but not with formal banks. So if you could put up your community reputation/karma as collateral for the loan, you could provide stronger evidence of willingness to repay the loan, and of costs you would suffer from not doing so.
The role of the entrepreneur here would be to make it easy for intra-forum lending to happen, in exchange for some kind of fee. Services would include:
If you can provide a way to ensure payment through these community mechanisms, you would allow borrowers to pay a much lower rate than credit cards would charge, and lenders to get much higher returns than the market allows. (Incidentally, I recently just made such a loan to someone I had known for ten years only through internet forums, and I just got his final repayment.)
Edit: tl;dr: Basically, an internet karma pawn shop (although it's crucial that people not see it as simply a way of cashing in karma)
This sounds a lot like a credit union.
You mean in terms of it being a member-restricted lending institution, in terms of existing CUs using group social pressure to encourage loan repayment (which, if true, I didn't know), or in some other respect(s)?
Group social pressure is a commonly used tool in microfinance efforts. Might be worth reading about them.
I'm not sure if this is implied by your bullet list, but security is going to be a challenge,and it's going to be worse if internet reputation becomes more valuable.
You mean in terms of keeping people's information private, or exposure of financial access codes, or something else?
I'm not sure what a financial access code is.
There have been cases of scammers impersonating ebay sellers with good reputations. If a good online reputation makes it easier to borrow money, I expect there will be attempts at impersonation.
I just meant anything that would allow someone access to the target's online bank money.
Good point. Fortunately, since this relies on the people being connected through the community, they can verify themselves through separate channels, which makes impersonation harder.
If you actually start this sort of a business, I strongly recommend involving someone who's good at thinking about security. (Sorry, I don't know how to recognize such a person.)
If there's substantial money involved (not to mention opportunities for malice), there are going to be some very motivated people trying to steal reputations.
The marketplace doesn't say "oh, you have a forum account with eight thousand posts somewhere? Here's some money," it allows someone on the forum with eight thousand posts to lend money to someone on the forum with six thousand posts, because the two have some shared social capital.
It seems very similar to Virgin Money, but with the emphasis on internet social capital rather than meatspace social capital.
I would like to redeem my karma for USD.
Edit: or a loan or whatever the term is.
Jedd (at Berkeley LW meetup) says that prosper.com you can get 16% lending, its unsecured. Before the defaults its 37% - the 16% is after defaults.
Shannon suggests having a company that arranges loans for you based on whatever information you give them to evaluate. Silas says this already exists.
Jedd asks what size of loans? He thinks smaller loans are more likely to happen.
Scott points out you can aggregate lenders.
Kaitlin asks about Linkedin networks of loans - chains of connections to establish trust through social networking.
Jedd suggests making an AI to optimize loans on Prosper.
There's a lot of similarity between the statistical tests that a scientist does and the statistical tests that auditors do. The scientist is interested in testing that the effect is real, and the auditor is testing that the company really is making that much money, that all its operations are getting aggregated up into the summary documents correctly.
Charlie Stross has a character in his 'Rule 34', Dorothy Straight, who is an organization-auditor, auditing organizations for signs of antisocial behavior. As I understood it, she was asking whether the organizations as a whole are likely to behave badly - though one way that the organization as a whole might behave badly is by sifting out or creating leaders who are likely to individually behave badly.
What I'm trying to say is that there will be a field of auditing an organization's 'safety case' - examining why it believes that it is a Friendly organization, what its internal controls entangling it with the truth are and so on, something like GiveWell for for-profits.
Sounds like internal audit
Yes, I (and Stross) am taking auditors, internal and external, as a model. Why do you comment specifically on internal auditors?
I'm an entrepreneur looking to found or join my next project, so I'm particularly in interesting what people are thinking about and working on.
An Improved Platform for Reading
Problem: We forget almost everything that we read. Current reading platforms (e.g. Kindle, Instapaper, Nook, web browsers) are very crude at helping us make the most of the time we spend reading.
Solution: A platform that uses the latest in efficient learning techniques to improve the quality of recall from reading. By adding interactivity and enhancing the reading experiencing using techniques like active recall and spaced repetition, I think we can build a considerably better interface for reading articles, books, and papers.
Real-world implementation: I think that this sort of platform could be very easily built as a browser plugin and/or mobile app for tablets. As users read a document, they would be able to highlight, add notes, and share these annotations. If users want to memorize a sentence-long summary of a particular document or a particular quote, word, or note, they can select to do so. Summaries of the notes made during reading would then be emailed at the each of day, and push notifications would be used to aid users in memorizing selected text using spaced repetition.
Current development: At present this is very much at the idea stage. I'm an entrepreneur, developer and UI designer myself, and looking for people who'd be interested in helping me build this. I'm also very interested to know whether people would be interested in using such a solution, and any suggestions for improving the idea.
I talked to someone building the browser plugin version of this a year ago. Sorry, I don't remember what it was called.
I think this is a great idea, especially in regards to modulization. I can see such a service being used in conjunction with existing interactive book platforms as well as standing on its own.
I am very open to contributing my ideas and experience (software development and pedagogical technologies) to further this project.
In addition to my last idea, here's another thing I've been kicking around:
* Anki-as-a-Service *
Problem: Anki is great, but the user interface is mediocre and it acts as a standalone application on the platform of your choice (desktop, mobile, etc).
Solution: A hosted version of Anki accompanied by a mobile application that allows users to enter items manually, capture items from the browser via a javascript bookmarklet, or allows third parties to submit information for users via an API. In essence this would amount to "learning as a service" and could eventually be extended beyond the feature set currently offered by Anki by including customized tests for different content types.
Current development: Very much in the idea stage. Interested in hearing what ideas people have around this.
I imagine this would be very hard to monetize and get customers as-is. The below is merely a brief list of problems that I've thought about
The average user needs to be sold on the effectiveness of a product very fast, on the first usage (or perhaps even sooner!) in order for them to continue using. However, SRS software in general are almost by definition antithetical to that goal: Their benefits do not come until far into the future, worse still it's an undefined time in the future. Sure you can use arguments about the benefits of SRS and the psychology of memory and <insert gwern.net FAQ here>, but it would appear to be an uphill battle to make the benefits immediately relevant and immediately relevant to the people who wouldn't already be using Anki and other free equivalents.
In addition, before you can even start using the product as advertised, you have to learn how to make cards that are easy to memorize or download a deck which is already well made. The first is "Wait so you want me to learn all these tiny rules before I can even start learning? <browser back button>". The second presents a chicken-and-egg problem. How are you going to have high quality decks that teach things? By having users! How are you going to get users? By having high qual- oh, darn.
It would appear that your general idea is going in the right direction; to make the best SRS program as painless as possible and to extend it to be more powerful. Your emphasis though, would appear to be more oriented toward existing power users of SRS. So there's the matter of getting them to switch which... I have no idea how hard that would be. (Sample size of two; you'd obviously build something you'd want to use; I'd jump on board instantly if I could transfer my existing Anki decks).
One possible solution to the adoption is to piggyback it on an existing service; if users get to use it as an additional option on something they already use habitually then getting consistent usage wouldn't be as much of a problem. I believe Khan Academy has expressed interest in including SRS in there. Another is to try and "gamify" it (argh I hate that word) by either making the entire application a sort of game or incorporating cow clicker like features in there to get the user hooked (IT'S NOT EVIL IF THE ADDICTION IS GOOD).
The making your own decks feature can be mostly hidden from the normal user, with a gradual introduction to it as they use the product more (paid feature?). As for having high quality decks; you can try porting the entire Anki library of downloadable decks, filter them in some way and use that to bootstrap up to a much higher standard of quality.
Of course, any and all advice here means absolutely jack compared to the behavior of actual users; release a minimal version, see who bites and check to see what the users complain about before even thinking about what I said here. Making money is and should probably be a distant 4th or 5th consideration behind making a product that you would use and making it easily extensible.
I think Micaiah_Chang mostly nailed this. I actually wrote a site that did this a few months ago. I had about 4000 users who had actually gone through a complete session.
As guessed, the problem is that I couldn't get people to start forming it as a habit. There is no immediate payback. Less than 20 people out of 4000 did more than one session.
This one is easily solved. The Anki decks have a (weak) rating system, and allowing people to import anki decks was easy.
Additionally, there are at least 18 competitors. Here's the list I made at the time. Very few seem to be successful.
I shut the site down about a month ago. There are numerous free competitors which don't have any great annoyances. I wouldn't suggest starting another of these sites unless you figured out an effective way to "gamify" it.
Wow. You did a spaced repetition site which had 4000 people try, 2000 finish a session, and <20 return for a second review session?
Sorry, typo. ~4000 people finished a session. Many more 'tried' than 4000... I just couldn't determine which users were bots that registered randomly vs users that didn't finish the first session.
Persol, what traffic generating methods did you use to get those kind of figures?
About 75% of the hits came from Google adWords, which was on for about 8 months. Maybe about 10% from search results. I also had a few links from subject specific websites. Average CTR was about 0.25%. Best CTR were ads that mentioned 'flashcards' and 'online'. The best conversion rate (answered a study session question) was 17% with the ad below:
Graphic/animated ads were a waste of money, but at least I learned how to make animated GIFs.
Persol, that list of competitors is massively helpful, thank you.
I'd love to hear more about your experiences, and to get a better of idea of exactly what you had built. I think what I have in mind is a more mass-audience version of SRS (see my response to Micaiah above) rather than a more traditional Anki-type system.
I'd love to know how you were monetizing the service, and if there are any screenshots of what the site looked like. Did you offer a mobile application? Did you try to push people to engage via push notifications at all? I think this is definitely a core part of a strategy that I'd push for. I think "gamifying" is also an interesting route, need to think about this angle a little more carefully though.
Here's the actual PHP code, weighing in at 18Mb. It's probably the best way to get a feel for what it was, and it might help you decide what to do.
It includes:
* This version may not have the correct repetition calculation. Due to the inherent time factor, it was a hassle to test, so I didn't fix that part of the code until later. *
It was admittedly an ugly (but fast loading) site. After a few weeks of cheap banner ads and seeing the minimal reuse, I just set it to coast until the year ran out.
I did do some A/B testing with email notifications about a month in. It didn't have a measurable effect of return use.
Monetization was via banner ads. Via A/B testing, the best location for the ad was under the card's question. Once flipping the card, the ad was hidden. I also deactivated the ads for awhile too see if they were too intrusive; return visitors didn't improve.
I also incorporated graphics and audio, since the most successful SRS systems seem to revolve around vocabulary. I personally used it to help learn basic Mandarin for use with my in-laws... but it is a boring way of learning a language. While it is much more effective than Rosetta Stone, it is very difficult to stay engaged.
For anyone who doesn't know it, here's the (really interesting) story of Ian Bogost's "Cow Clicker".
MIcaiah, thanks for the detailed and well thought-out response. I'll try and respond to some of your thoughts:
As far as monetization goes, I think the best route would be to charge online education providers on per-API-call basis. The end goal would be to become something akin to the "Twilio of online learning." With a sufficiently developed system, I think it'll be possible to convince companies in the online learning space that this is a worthwhile value proposition for their users. End users who have committed to a particular online learning program are much more likely to be willing to use a spaced-repetition learning system to aid in their progress in a particular course.
I think I gave the wrong impression here, I think I'd much rather target non-users of SRS. Building something simpler but more accessible seems like a more viable alternative. Gaining traction with average, non-SRSing users, and then later adding best-of-breed features to tempt online learning providers seems like a more reasonable approach.
I've thought of a couple of simple use cases for this sort of platform that I think seem easy to build and quite compelling for an average non-SRS user:
Beginning with a simple, self-curated deck like the ones described above would also help to avoid the problem of not having good content for first-time users.
Very interested to hear feedback on the above.
Business/website idea: OKCupid for jobs, or possibly just for co-founders.
Different workplaces have different cultures. There are probably a wide variety of cultures that work, but mixing different cultures in a workplace leads to conflict. For example:
An OKCupid-like system of asking questions about one's preferred work culture might lead to good matches between co-founders and possibly between workplaces and employees. (Though, of course, there are many non-culture-related considerations that this kind of system doesn't evaluate. While that's true for dating too, it might be even more true for work, making this system less effective.)
Path.to is a startup that appears to be doing a lot of this already.
Patrick, thanks so much for mentioning us.
How much of what Michael talks about are you doing, and/or interested in implementing? Any interesting thoughts about what he says and how it relates to you guys? What are your next steps and needs?
Sorry I was too fast - reading your response below now :)
Quite a bit (I'd say all to some degree) though we may not be executing it exactly how Michael specified. We launched the service in April and it's evolving quite rapidly as we continue to learn and grow with our customers/users.
This is what we're working for: http://twitter.com/thejameskyle/status/234105524277346304
Very cool :)
What is next for you, and what/who do you need?
Hi Michael,
Great suggestion! Like Patrick mentioned, this is really our focus, though I typically refer to it as 'eHarmony for hiring'. :)
We pair a more intimate understanding of a professionals education, experience, personality and interests with a deeper understanding of a company, their culture and what it takes to be successful in a particular role. We use this data to come up with the "Path.To Score" which is a 0-99 measure of how compatible a particular individual is with a specific role at a specific company, which we use to market positions to the right candidates and provide introductions between businesses and potential employees.
Without getting into too much detail we use a number of signals to inform and evolve the scoring. These range from basic Q&A to semantic analysis and natural language processing of local and external data sources likes Facebook, Twitter, GitHub and Dribbble.
It's been fascinating thus far and I'm really excited with the road ahead.
Some non-nitwit (actual-economic-value-generating) startups I've heard proposed lately by people in this or related communities:
Colby asks - can you elaborate more about meletonin? What is he thinking should be made? How can this be turned profitable?
Is he saying that we should look into melatonin's effects more? What are you getting at? Can you explain in more detail about how this could be a business idea?
This non-nitwit, I'll grant, but this seems like a very capital-intensive idea which won't work unless you can get a lot of investment. It has to solve two subproblems:
If they have the backers, great, but do they?
About Zvi's business, what would constitute evidence that the medical practice should follow? -Asked by KatelynS at the Berkeley Less Wrong Meetup
Shannon - can you explain a little more about how the company works?
People at the Berkeley LW meet-up are very interested in Schloendorn's work at the meetup. It sounds too good to be true, is there a good summary link someone can send?
I don't know if this is Zvi's balliwick, but I've seen people go through a lot of doctors until they find one who will listen and think.
To sound a note of caution... I spent a number of years acquiring various kinds of non-monetary capital that are useful for startups. Looking back with my current state of theoretical knowledge and memories, I suspect I may come to see this period as involving too little caution. The key concept acquired between then and now is Kelly Betting.
I still haven't worked through the applications of this concept to startups in a way that I feel is "settled", but depending on the precise nature of the risks and rewards and the bankroll of the typical person accepting startup equity in place of cash, the Kelly Criterion may indicate that startups should usually not be more than hobbies for "normal" (non-rich, non-certainly-immortal, declining-utility-in-dollars) humans. Note that if startups are roughly as risky as a simple Kelly calculation says they should be, this might still be cause for concern because most people who raise theory/practice issues with Kelly say that it over invests in risks.
I'm still exploring ways that the theory might line up with reality, but even my limited state of knowledge has caused me to scale back my startup enthusiasm in the last year or so. The math might come out more positive if you value the knowledge capital gained through startup work in the correct way, for example, but that's particularly tricky to calculate. If anyone else has thoughts on this subject I would love to read or hear them.
For reference, Robin already wrote about Kelly betting to claim that the present era is visibly unstable because most investment firms, and the economy in general, seems not to be engaged in a Kelly strategy at the present time. In some sense, Robin claimed, a financial system not dominated by Kelly-following-financial-entities would probably be a system that has no significantly old Kelly-following-financial-entities, because in the long run they "win" at finance.
Another source on Kelly betting that is directly applicable to startups flows with the "invest in the team, not the idea" dictum. The post "Optimal startup burn rate and the Kelly criterion" is no longer available in the wild but is retained on archive.org and discussed the optimal team size and experimental product cycle given a starting bankroll. (The blog is LaserLike and is not itself down.)
For what its worth, I'm not totally bearish on startups, and sort of have one cooking... I'm just trying to pursue startup stuff with an eye on keeping a bird or 6 in the hand while pursuing startup stuff in parallel. In this vein, if anyone is or knows a solid hardware hacker with RFID experience/interest, especially if they are ethical, planful, world-savey, "rational", and/or live in (southern?) California, I'd appreciate hearing from you. No particular startup interest or equity tolerance is important -- just hardware skills, character, and an interest in educational conversation :-)
This is beautiful, I really appreciate your giving it a shot to ask for what you want on here even though you're dubious about getting it. There are a lot of awesome people, some of whom I know about personally, who are browsing through this, and I think seeing these sorts of comments and requests that show someone who is really thinking and realizes how hard start-ups are and is very selective, is likely to bring forth more such people and quality.
My request is that if you do get emails from someone promising and anything good comes out of it, that you please respond back with at least a quick line saying so on this thread - whether or not I do more things like this in the future will depend highly on that sort of feedback, and other people will be much more likely to try what you're trying if it works for you. Thanks for trying it! :)
Thanks for the support! I put the URL and a note in my calendar, so I will probably comment again here with an update on how it worked.
I'm not too clear how we would apply KC to startups (as opposed to specific contracts in prediction markets).
Let's see... Somewhere Paul Graham says that >90% of startups will fail, so our Kelly odds are 9:1. What's the return on a won bet? Well, the recent Kaufmann Foundation report on VC funds puts the single best VC funds at an overall return of ~8x but that's not enough because that implies that we may not even break even if we lost ~9 investments for every 1 investment returning 8! (receiving 8 back on a 9:1 bet)
If startups are negative expected value, the KC is not useful: it presumes bets are positive expected value and the question is what fraction to bet at any time to avoid ruin. I suppose that treating them as lottery tickets and assuming you are risk-seeking might make it useful, but I don't know how to do that.
Maybe time-value will help. Thinking of a LWer I know, he received the rough equivalent of a year's salary when the startup 'won'. But the startup itself took years and naturally wasn't paying the salary a big competitor might, so it's not obvious that he was better off in the end, which brings us back to the expected value question.
Yeah, I dunno.
I don't understand your calculation. Even the best VC funds probably make some losing investments, so to achieve an overall return of 8x, the winning startups must yield more than that.
I did say it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
On the contrary, in some sense, that's when the KC is most useful. The correct amount of money to gamble on losing propositions is 0!
My estimation of startups in general is that startups are a good way for exceptional individuals to capture much of the value they create. The problem is that it's difficult to tell who is exceptional beforehand, especially if one can only measure sparkle and not grit, and also especially if one has not determined their own level yet.
In that vein, I am cautious about finding cofounders in ways like this.
KC does apply to negative EV bets. The formula emits a negative allocation (ie "take the other side").
Yeah, but I don't think that really applies to startups! (What is 'the other side'? Are there people who offer shorts on arbitrary startups for less than millions?)
I have extensive experience in this realm, including both independently re-deriving Kelly before learning about it and then working extensively with variations of it, in nominally Kelly-optimal conditions. Kelly is only optimal under a very strict set of criteria, and those criteria de facto do not occur in practice. It's a great guide to the landscape, but a terrible perscription in most situations. Common errors include misunderstanding what counts as a bankroll, inability to access large portions of the real bankroll, changing returns to investment size, the existence of limiting factors, having almost any real utility function, unknown unknowns and edge uncertainty which is almost always correlated, psychological impact and inability to precommit credibly to Kelly, outside perceptions and their impact on your bankroll or utility, not accounting for calculation errors, odds or outcomes that are impacted by bet size, and more.
I may write a top-level post going into more detail (feedback on this idea is appreciated), but here I will deal only with this particular case.
In a start-up, the bankroll definition and potential is one key. Your bankroll includes more than you think, and that's especially true in a start-up world where you can, even in failure, get more investment and start again, or join someone else's start-up, or just go back to a day job. Kelly assigns infinite disutility to going broke, and going broke is standard procedure in the startup world. Also, how you take your compensation is largely for motivation and signaling and to keep control of the company, all of which impact the result. In bankroll terms my investing in my own company, and taking $0 other than expenses from my start-up work was madness, but it was clearly the correct play and has paid off handsomely in numerous non-bankroll ways even if no money results!
Going full speed at a startup, even in failure, is often a winning play as you develop connections, reputation, experience, skills and other neat stuff like that, laying the groundwork for future success.
I'd be interested in reading that post! If you do, could you explain more about the grounds on which you'd be applying Kelly to this problem at all, though? I'm somewhat unclear on that -- see my other comment in this thread for detail.
In this problem, you're starting a business, and you can consider that business as a bet, out of which you hope to gain a job, income, investment money from your equity, reputation, experience, and so on, all of which can be abstracted. Alternatively, you can look purely at the equity vs. salary trade-off in the context of Kelly, which as I explained above is deeply flawed. It's not a great scenario for such calculations, but they can still provide insightful context.
That's kind of reassuring. I'm just starting to read about Kelly, and my first reaction was "and your knowledge of the final outcome comes from where?".
It also occurs to me that "Invest in real estate, they aren't making any more land" is an effort at Kelly prediction, and we all know how well that worked out.
It is a classic mistake to treat your estimates as known expected outcomes when calculating how much to bet. This is one reason why real world gamblers almost always use half Kelly or even quarter Kelly rather than full Kelly.
"Invest in real estate, they aren't making any more of it" is, in effect, a prediction of the expected returns to investment and/or the reliability of investment. Kelly would advise you on how to take advantage of the expected returns from real estate, once you nailed down your beliefs more carefully. For real estate, Kelly is rather horrified, as it finds many people investing far more money than they have into a single house. That sounds insane when you say it like that! However, a richer understanding of all a person's assets together with the tax advantages of mortgage interest, and the inability to cheaply adjust the size of that investment, can make that reasonable under Kelly if you think the bet is stable (e.g. that the house can't go to zero if it's insured, at least not in any scenario where you care much about that).
I think part of the situation is that naive investors don't quantify-- if real estate is a good investment, they don't think about how good it might be.
It's interesting to watch "Kelly" drift in and out of being personified.
Your comment rings my "math applied incorrectly" alarm -- I may just be misunderstanding, e.g. you might be motivated by a logarithmic utility function in amount of money made, but that's a very different thing from the reason we would expect the financial system to be dominated by Kelly-following-financial-entities -- so just in case, let me try to explain my understanding of why Kelly is so important, and why it doesn't obviously seem to be related to the question of whether to start a startup. Any corrections very much appreciated!
Kelly and financial markets
Suppose three investment funds are created in the same year. Let's say the first fund is badly managed and loses 5% of its capital each year; the second fund gains 5% each year; and the third fund gains 10% each year. After 100 years of this, which of the three will be the most important force in the market? I didn't specify that they had the same starting capital, but the first fund is down to 0.6% of its start capital, the second fund has increased its capital 130-fold, and the third fund has increased its by a factor of 13,800, so if they didn't differ by too many orders of magnitude when they started out, the third one beats the others hands-down.
Of course, the growth isn't really constant in each year. Let's suppose your capital grows by a factor of r(i) in year i. Then after 100 years it's grown by a factor of r(1) * r(2) * ... * r(100), obviously, and we're interested in the fund whose strategy maximizes this number, because after a long enough time, that fund will be the only one left standing. We can write this as
r(1) * r(2) * ... * r(100) = exp(log(r(1)) + log(r(2)) + ... + log(r(100)))
and maximizing this number happens to be equivalent to maximizing
(1/100)(log(r(1)) + log(r(2)) + ... + log(r(100))),
i.e., maximizing the mean of the log growth factor.
Now, imagine that the growth your strategy achieves in a particular year doesn't depend on the amount of money you have available in that year: if you have $1 million, you'll buy N shares of ACME Corp, if you have $10 million, you'll just buy 10*N shares instead. Also assume (much less plausibly -- but I'm pretty sure this can be generalized with more difficult math) that the same bets are offered each year, and what happens in one year is statistically independent of what happens in any other year. Then the log growth factors log(r(i)) are independent random variables with the same distribution, so the Law of Large Numbers says that
(1/100)(log(r(1)) + log(r(2)) + ... + log(r(100)))
is approximately equal to the expected value of log(r(i)). Thus, after a long time, we expect those funds to dominate the market whose strategy maximizes the expectation of the log of the factor by which they increase their capital in a given year.
From this, you can derive the Kelly criterion by calculus. You can also see that it's the same criterion as if you only play for a single year, and value the money you have after that year with a logarithmic utility function.
So what about startups?
An important assumption above was that the same bets are available to you each year no matter how much money you happen to have that year. If each year there's a chance that you'll lose all your money, that would be terrible, of course, because it'll happen eventually, and then you are out of the game forever; but barring that, your strategy looks pretty much the same, whether you have $1M or $100M. But if you invest $100K-equivalent in sweat equity in a startup and cash out $10M, you do not tend to re-invest that return by creating a hundred similar startups the next year.
Conversely, suppose your startup fails, and according to some sort of accounting you can be said to have lost 30% of your bankroll in the process. For the above reasoning to apply, not only would you have to start another startup after this (reasonable assumption), but the returns of this next startup, if it succeeds, should be only 70% of the returns your first startup would have yielded -- because see, our assumption was that the return on a successful bet is a constant times the amount of money you've bet (dividends on 10*N shares vs. dividends on N shares), and you've lost 30% of your bankroll, so now you can only be betting 70% of the resources you were betting before.
It seems to me that this makes basically no sense. If you start another startup right after the first one, you've gained experience, you've gained contacts, and it seems that if anything, you should be able to build a better startup this time. Even if not, it seems strange to say that if in some sense you bet 30% of your personal resources in your first startup, then this should imply that your next startup will be exactly 30% worse than the one before, and the one after that will be worse by exactly 30% again. (And that's not even taking into account that you probably won't start enough startups for the Law of Large Numbers to become relevant.)
In conclusion, it seems to me that if the Kelly criterion applies to startups, it must be for a very different reason than why we'd expect to see Kelly-following-financial entities. (Zvi, who has clearly thought about this more than I have, seems to agree with you that it applies in some way, though.) Did that make sense, or did I misunderstand you somehow?
That was a very good explanation; I found it significantly more illuminating than Wikipedia's.
I have unusual abilities that I would like to share for a cause.
My terms:
For short-term projects and consultations that I accept, I will consider a "pay only if I make you money" or "we have no money, tip you later if possible" agreement, basically "volunteering with the risk of getting paid". I do not have the ability to leap off the cliff and go full-time into the start-up world at this point. I do not have part-time hours available.
Abilities:
I'm a psychology enthusiast with a special interest in gifted adults. This specific focus is relatively rare and may be very useful at answering questions for people who are trying to find, motivate and organize multiple gifted people and to create a good environment for them to actualize their potential in.
Communication. Have no idea how to explain your amazing idea? Don't know how to get through to everyday people? Can't get people to get along? I'm good at figuring these out. Note: I am not saying I will instantly know how to communicate things, I'm saying I can figure it out.
Give me "impossible" problems - I love challenging my creativity and seeing whether I can solve them. Sometimes I seek it out just for the sense of challenge. Not everybody is even willing to try doing a challenge that hard. Give me a paperclip and some duct tape, ask me to do something impossible and see what happens - I relish that. (No, I will not attempt just anything. I have my own way of determining whether a challenge is worth attempting, but you can throw it at me and see whether I will attempt it.)
Inventing stuff. I love inventing! I'm especially good with visual-spatial tasks and systems. I program all day, and then to relax, I make 3-D models with the goal of challenging myself to build something that is practical in ten ways at once AND beautiful (read: visual synthesis tasks). That is a favorite kind of challenge of mine. I am excellent at fine art and design. Yes, the "3-D models" I'm talking about are Minecraft structures.
Graphic design - if I get to have enough fun, I may do your project just to have done it.
Marketing ideas. I come up with tons of them. (Example) They tend to be clever "purple cows" (a term from Seth Godin's marketing books). Aside from some amusing success, my purple cow abilities are untested but a "pay only if it makes you money" arrangement is especially useful here. I can just give you purple cow ideas, you thin the herd and only pay me if the cows pay you.
Hi Epiphany,
Thanks for making these offers! I think you might get more interest if you give more information. For example, you don't want to share your current ideas regarding marketing, but perhaps you could share a past brilliant idea or two that you've had and implemented?
For reference, I've gotten a lot of backlash from friends in the community about even posting this post - it went through a lot of editing before I published it, because people are extremely skeptical about the values of business ideas in and of themselves at all. So for your purposes even with a promise to only request compensation if it works, potential interested parties will usually need a lot of convincing just to think its worth investing their time in talking with you.
Likewise, examples and data regarding other offers & claims would also be great. The feedback I've gotten that people, especially in this community want, is specific with concrete examples. You are better off being overly specific and potentially causing someone to think they're not part of your target market than under specific and having everyone just read past.
Best wishes! And please respond in this thread with any results you get from anything in this post, including if this advice helps you in another context :)
I agree with "potential interested parties will usually need a lot of convincing just to think its worth investing their time in talking with you" but I'm unwilling to put significant effort into trying to convince them in this post. Here's why: Nothing that I say even matters at all. They need to see it for themselves.
The way I see my post working is this: As people get to know me from my posts on LessWrong, some of them will see evidence of ability and start getting an idea of what kinds of things I'm good at. THEN they'll think it's worth investing the time to explain their problem to me and see what happens.
I'm not interested in working hard to convince people that don't want to believe me, who may be too risk averse to think big -- all for the prospect of not getting paid! My personality is like oil to that water. It's the people who are thinking big and can guess at what I have to offer based on our interactions that I'd like to work with.
I'm just not known in this community yet.
And, just in case it wasn't clear, most of my marketing ideas are untested. I've had some amusing successes, but I'm not a professional marketer. I'm a person who has enough of the right kinds of ideas that potential is there, but has not yet had the opportunity to make use of it. If you want to pay people like they're interns, you tend to hire entry level people, no? If you want to do new kinds of work, you tend to accept that it might not pay well at first, right? For marketing ideas, I've essentially got an intern-like attitude, though I am offering only a small time investment.
Look what I did:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/up/shut_up_and_do_the_impossible/77vu
BS detector going off like crazy... To start, have you learned to not get into quagmires in the first place?
As the saying goes, intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
I just realized, this might actually have been intended as being in support to me, not a continuation of shminux's line of thought. I don't know why I interpreted it that way in hindsight. Maybe it was that I had a 6 hour night of sleep the night before. Sorry if I misinterpreted.
If you're playing the biggest game you can, you should keep getting into quagmires by continually putting your limits to the test. A favorite quote of mine from the cofounder of the coaching school and leadership program I attended:
"If you're not failing half the time, you're not trying hard enough."
I agree. However, I would question the wisdom of such actions. Depends on your risk tolerance, of course.
And I would add that "if you keep running into unexpected failure modes, you are not doing your homework."
Yes, I have a pretty high risk tolerance. I have a strong desire to have as large of an impact in the world as I can. I am also quite optimistic that I will succeed in doing interesting and impressive things if I keep trying, because I think I'm in a position of having a lot of the right resources and the correct mindset for success.
I try to assess what I actually need to stay safe, and make sure I have that, and then play big beyond that. Living in a 1st world country at this point in time, I don't think my life is in danger nearly as much as the lizard aspects of my mind like to tell me. I try to evaluate as logically as I can about risk, with the knowledge that people are much more motivated to avoid pain than pursue pleasure, and making conscious corrections for this - I aim to maximize utility as accurately as I can.
Agreed about running into unexpected failure modes repeatedly being a red flag. I like strategies with high payoff potentials, which often have high likelihood of failure in expected ways. However, there are often a lot of positive externalities to trying and failing, so the likelihood of getting positive utility is much higher than that of success of what I am specifically attempting.
For example, I have already gotten a very interesting email from someone who is considering offering me an opportunity that I am excited about as a result of this article, although it is yet to be seen if any businesses will actually be created or improved.
Oooh. That's a more direct assumption. Let's scrutinize this:
Do you agree with any of the following, if so, which ones:
If you disagree with even one of those statements, why do you assume that if a person is presented with multiple quagmires, they didn't do their homework? This is reality and reality doesn't care about you. Life may give you problems more complex than you can figure out, other people's problems will create problems for you, sometimes life gives you more problems than you can process at once, nobody sees everything coming, and even when you do see something coming, nothing guarantees you'll have the resources to stop it.
If you know all of this, why do you say such things?
If you've never been arrested, you're too law-abiding.
If you've never never been arrested, you're too law-breaking. #umeshumeshisms
Failure doesn't imply risk. You can fail at challenging your friends to seemingly impossible debates or thinking of solutions to seemingly impossible problems. If you fail at those, you've lost nothing - the time is a valid investment in intellectual development. Have you never tried to solve a problem that seems impossible, Eliezer?
Try it. It's a blast.
Now that you mention it.
Ooh. I like it. Thanks. Say, do you know if Eliezer has posed any impossible challenges to the group? It would be REALLY fun to solve them as a team. (:
Edit: I made one.
If you've never been slowly and publicly tortured to death and then resurrected in order to experience it again, due to having pissed off Mexican drug lords, the Pope, the International Red Cross, the Chinese Communist Party, 4chan, the CIA, Clippy, an FAI, Lord Voldemort, the goddess Takhisis, and whoever it is that's running our simulation, all at once, you're too risk averse.
http://abstrusegoose.com/47
http://abstrusegoose.com/312
Or law enforcement in your country is too crappy.
(Crappy may not be the best word, though, because it's not always a bad thing: a country where whoever shares copyrighted material (e.g. on a P2P) without the consent of the copyright holder ends up in prison with probability 1 minus epsilon would be a helluva dystopia IMO.)
If you think of "crappy" in terms of "bad", and bad in terms of "not instrumentally rational", then an anti-crappy law enforcement seems like it wouldn't do something this twisted and society-disrupting.
Well, let's say that in the great-grandparent by crappy I meant “not instrumentally rational for its own (stated) goals (i.e. enforcing the law)”, and then I replied to myself pointing out that what's not instrumentally rational for its own stated goals can still be instrumentally rational for the goals of humanity.
Then you should be even less law-abiding.
Thank you for understanding. (:
Do you ever play at trying to do things that appear to be impossible?
I certainly am much more optimistic about odds than a lot of people on certain topics. For example, the odds I give of at least one successful business happening because of something in this post are quite divergent from the person who placed odds the other direction, who is someone whose intelligence I respect a lot.
Given the divergent opinions, I asked him to make predictions for several different specific/measurable outcomes for various scenarios, and we discussed what updates that he'd make to his belief system if the results are as I predict.
I highly recommend doing this - if people commit to updates based on probability they assign before hindsight bias, the updates are much more extreme than they otherwise would be; the updates might not happen much at all without the person really getting clear about how much they disagree ahead of time.
I like this comment enough that I've decided to make it into an article. So that there aren't multiple copies of the same information, I have removed it.
Downvoted for unwarranted presumptions and incoherent ranting.
I'll try another approach. You said:
"BS detector going off like crazy... To start, have you learned to not get into quagmires in the first place?"
Challenge me directly. Don't imply that you're assuming that I got myself into those quagmires and then down-vote me for my completely warranted presumption that you're assuming that the quagmires were my own fault. You want to tell me you think I probably brought all the quagmires onto myself? Do it. And support your point.
This article is a little old (July 2008), but Paul Graham has a list of 30 startup ideas he'd like to fund. With Craigslist turning evil recently, the 25th item about a better Craigslist seems timely.
I love #23, about replacing Wikipedia. That's something I've been considering doing for a while; I would much rather have a comprehensive knowledge site than a mere encyclopedia.
active browser history
I've noticed that more than a few people will have 20+ tabs open in their browser, for weeks at a time, while actively using only two or three tabs. These websites will occupy significant portions of the flash memory, using several gigabytes.
I call it active history because this is a management tool for tabs that you're not yet ready to search through your history for.
The browser plug-in would allow ' x ' recent tabs (or a memory limit), and kill the page for any older tabs. The url would be saved, the tab would still be there, and when the user opens the tab again the page reloads.
The point is that only the URL must be saved, and the system memory could be used for better tasks.
bits not gigabytes
The barrier seems to be psychological rather than technical.
Firefox already does this. Options> General> Only load tabs when selected. It's just as good as you suggest it would be, particularly on slower computers.
Does the function perform as imagined, or does it lead to new issues?
Romeo brought up a great point, that it may have been a psychological barrier.
It doesn't reduce the number of tabs I have open - in fact, it probably increases it by removing th technical barrier. Everyone once in a while I go though my open tabs and either read them, bookmark them, or close them. I believe there's an extension that will actually automatically close your oldest tab when you open a new one if you have more than n tabs open, but I don't much see the point of it - if I need a fresh, uncluttered tab bar for some project I use tab groups. Comittment devices are cool and all, but sometimes the technical issue is the real issue, not tht psychological one.
I have an idea for a sort of digital currency. It's hard to describe in a few words, but I'm pretty sure it can be implemented. It would be way better than bitcoin because it could be converted fluidly to other currencies and back again. It could also be fluidly converted into party-specific loans and contracts.
Cool. What is your next step for the idea?
If you are interested in seeing the idea get implemented, I highly recommend elaborating in as much detail as possible.
If you are looking for someone to work on it with you and want to be secretive because you plan on implementing the idea in a company you're in and believe that you have what it takes to do this, I recommend thinking about the sort of person you want to work with, and presenting what it is about you that you think would make this person want to work with you.
On how to realise it: What about LW-crowd sourcing? For a "month" ideas for for-profit start-ups are gathered. For a "month" the LW crowd ranks them (by for example committing real money) , for a "month" people interested in the 10 most funded ideas can apply for a job, the LW crowd has a month to choose which people will be "hired". Solves part of the funding problem and the team-makeing.
Here's an incredibly brilliant idea for a rationalist startup! You know how it is when you've got too much food, like a cheesecake or something, that your guests didn't finish or whatever, and your brain refuses to throw it out because you don't want it to be wasted, but you don't want to have to eat it all either? This startup would have a registry of polite, well-dressed, grateful, hungry people in your vicinity, who'll come over and eat it for you - there in ten minutes or your money back! SunkMunch.com - "We eat your food, now!" YC '13, here we come!
One case of food poisoning and you'd be sued to Kingdom Come.
Apparently it's even an issue for City Harvest, which distributes leftovers to the poor.
Truly is it said that all real innovation is illegal.
In this case not illegal, just not terribly well incentivized.
Dress for success! (Or at least dress for food. Right. "Undress for food" has been done before.)
A simpler solution: contrive to get on the mailing list for graduate students at a local university.
Or you could have a 45-minute class on throwing away food. Doesn't seem like a difficult skill to train.
fun idea. alternatives: workplace, or, depending on your courage and environment, neighbors.
Hi folks - long-time reader, first-time poster here. I'd like to share my new startup, formed over the past few months. In short, we use human computation to create employment opportunities in the developing world while enabling new types of data analysis for solving complex problems.
Some background and justification: extreme poverty is bad. I won't say too much to justify this point, other than that human suffering and the lost potential for individuals to do great things are two of the big things that make it bad. And just to be clear, by "extreme poverty" I am referring to the "living on $1 per day" kind (though that's a not a very good definition, it's at least in the ballpark). One way to combat extreme poverty is by creating employment opportunities so that people can help themselves, rather than giving them free shoes, or corn, or wells, all of which are suboptimal for meeting their varied pressing needs. So our approach is to hire them to do human computation work.
Human computation is when people do things that are easy for people but hard for computers. A good example is image processing/recognition (this is why reCAPTCHA works). By combining the things people do well with the things computers (i.e. software we currently able to write) do well, we can enable new kinds of data analysis. For example, we can mine figures from the medical literature for depictions of biochemical pathways, recreate many of them together (molecules = nodes, interactions = edges), and create a more complete picture of our biology.
So that's our approach: find an interesting, complex problem (so far they have been in the academic research world), collaborate with the domain experts to design human computation processes to enable the necessary data analysis and synthesis, and using our web platform, pay people in developing countries to do the work. Interesting problems get solved, we get paid, and people in Kenya get paid. Win, win, win.
Interested? We are looking for:
People with problems to solve using human computation. We are especially looking for domain experts here. Not sure if your problem is amenable to human computation? Let's talk.
Programmers. We've got a platform now but are continually improving it. Python/django. There's also a fair amount of cobbling together datasets for input and output that presents ever-changing challenges in many different languages.
Marketing/sales. Our concept is a hard thing to explain to people. People don't seem to be used to thinking about solving problems in this manner, so it's difficult to get people to think, "Oh yes! I have problem X and this will help me solve it!". We need to figure out some way to communicate this better in order to expand the problems to work on and increase revenue.
Funding. We need to pay programmers, marketing people, and us.
Other! Think this is a cool idea but don't fit into one of the above areas? Let's talk!
How are you planning to reach out to the poorest of the poor in developing countries? Will you be tying up with some agencies back there? Because you will not be able to find them over the internet.
You will also need strong mechanisms in place for quality control of the process so that the output is usable. I'm guessing a lot of the problems you will face will be similar to other crowdsourcing ventures like Mechanical Turk.
If you would like to help make these ideas happen, I highly recommend asking questions to the people who presented them.
Most ideas will get glossed over because they are not specific enough.
The easiest way to help people get specific enough that I know of is to ask yourself the question "What could this person say that would catch my attention and cause me to want to work with or invest in them if I were in their target demographic?"
If you use that for your compass of what questions to ask them to be more specific about, and they answer well, then much better odds of a match happening, if someone in their target demographic passes through. And if they end up getting more clarity through your questions and realizing that the idea isn't actually something they want to pursue, then that's not a bad outcome either - they can stop worrying about it and move onto something better suited to them.
In addition to helping them get clear about things you think you would want as an investor, also questions that clarify what they would be looking for in general, and especially as a next step, for the project would help. Have they answered the question "What/who does this project need?" very concretely and specifically?
If you ask the right questions, you just might be able to make the difference between someone getting their project funded or not. We can make bets about specifics of this assertion with David's market ;)
Also worth noting that even though I phrased the question about "what cause me to want to work with or invest in them" in the positive, often what needs to be addressed are peoples concerns to show that the project is actually realistic - so asking the hard questions, that could prove that the idea is not good if the person can't answer well, is actually quite important. Its much better to risk genuinely disqualifying a project than to not give it a chance to be noticed.
Tagline: Coursera for high school
Mission: The economist Eric Hanushek has shown that if the USA could replace the worst 7% of K-12 teachers with merely average teachers, it would have the best education system in the world. What if we instead replaced the bottom 90% of teachers in every country with great instruction?
The Company: Online learning startups like Coursera and Udacity are in the process of showing how technology can scale great teaching to large numbers of university students (I've written about the mechanics of this elsewhere). Let's bring a similar model to high school.
This Company starts in the United States and ties into existing home school regulations with a self-driven web learning program that requires minimum parental involvement and results in a high school degree. It cloaks itself as merely a tool to aid homeschool parents, similar to existing mail-order tutoring materials, hiding its radical mission to end high school as we know it.
The result is high-quality education for every student. In addition to the high quality, it gives the student schedule flexibility to pursue other interests outside of high school. Many exceptional young people I know dodge the traditional schools early in life. This product gives everyone that opportunity.
By lowering the cost of going home-school, this product will enlargen the home school market and threaten traditional educrats while producing more exceptional minds.
With direct access to millions of students, the website will be able to monetize through one-on-one tutoring markets, college prep services, and other means.
Course material can be bootstrapped by constructing a curriculum out of free videos provided through sources like the Khan Academy. The value-add of the Company will be to tailor the curriculum to the home-school requirements of the particular state of the student.
My background: I cofounded a company that's had reasonable success. I'm not much of a Less Wrong fan - I find the community to be an intellectual monoculture, dogmatic, and full of blind spots to flaws in the philosophy it preaches. BUT this is an idea that needs to happen, as it will provide much value to the world. Contact me at firstname lastname gmail if you have lots of money or can hack. Or hell, steal the idea and do it yourself. Just make it happen.
Your approach -- targeting home-schoolers who are "nonconsumers" of public K-12 education -- is exactly the approach advocated by disruption theory and specifically the book Disrupting Class. Using public education as analogous to established leaders in other industries, disruption always comes from the outside because the leaders aren't structurally able to do anything other than serve their consumers with marginal improvements.
ArtofProblemSolving.com is one successful example that's targeted gifted home-schoolers (and others looking for extracurricular learning) in math. I'm sure there are others. EdSurge.com is a good place to look for existing services, which you can sort by criteria including common core/state-standards aligned (you do have to register for free to get the list of resources). I also have thought about services that build on top of Khan Academy, but I wouldn't underestimate their ability to improve in that area. They just released a fantastic computer science platform. But they are a non-profit, so their growth depends, I suppose, on Bill Gates' mood and other philanthropy. To get to full disruption, it might take a for-profit with, as you suggest, monetization through tutoring and other valuable services.
The nice thing about this is that it works on an existing market, while leveraging the successful tactics discovered through hard work by Coursera & the like to bring advances to the domain.
Of course, techniques designed for university courses may not precisely transfer.
I'm skeptical about 'leveraging' videos from Khan Academy for a for-profit education system. Makes it sound half-baked.
This idea may fit with the general spaced-repetition enthusiasm I am seeing in other proposals.
...And you just blew your cover. :)
Nobody of any importance reads Less Wrong :)
...you just jinxed it! Now congress is going to pass a new bill forbidding online aids to count towards compulsory education requirements for home schooling, and otherwise hamper the idea by whatever means necessary.
After all, what better propaganda system is there than a bunch of gullible "teachers" who regurgitate everything you tell them to and whom children look up to as absolute authorities?
Fortunately, the United States has a strong evangelical Christian lobby that fights for and protects home schooling freedom.
Good point. I have a tendency to forget about them. Mind projection and all that.
Some selected public or private schools are already doing this, with great results from what little data I've seen. The feedback from the children themselves, at the very least, is impressive - the vast majority of them allegedly report (in less sciencey words) a vast improvement in their reasoning skills and their enthusiasm, motivation and enjoyment of mathematics, sciences, and studying in general.
Unfortunately, this is still on an extremely insignificantly small scale, with only a handful of teachers spread out over 4-6 schools doing this, some of them with direct collaboration from Khan Academy IIRC.
Related idea: semi-computerized instruction.
To the best of my (limited) knowledge, while there are currently various computerized exercises available, they aren't that good at offering instruction of the "I don't understand why this step works" kind, and are often pretty limited (e.g. Khan Academy has exercises which are just multiple choice questions, which isn't a very good bad format). One could try to offer a more sophisticated system - first, present experienced teachers/tutors with a collection of the problems you'll be giving to the students, and ask them to list the most common problems and misunderstandings that the students tend to have with such problems. Then attempt to build a system which will recognize the symptoms of the most common misunderstandings and attempt to provide advice on them, also offering the student the opportunity to ask it themselves using some menu system or natural language parser. (I know some existing academic work along these lines exists, I think applying Bayes nets to build up a model of the students' skills and understanding, but I couldn't find the reference in the place where I thought that I had read it.)
Of course, there will frequently be situations where your existing database fails to understand the student's need. So you combine this with the chance to ask help online, either on a forum with other students, or one-on-one with a paid tutor in an interactive chat session. As the students' problems are resolved, the maintainers follow the conversations and figure out a way for the system to recognize the new problems in the future, either automatically or via the "ask a question" menus.
In particular, the system would be built so that having e.g. forgotten some of the prerequisites in a previous course wouldn't be a problem - if that happened, the system would just automatically lead you to partially rehearse those concepts enough that you could apply them to solve the current problem. At the same time, it could be designed that all of the previous knowledge was being constantly drawn upon, thus providing a natural method for spaced repetition.
This method is naturally most suited for math-like subjects with clear right/wrong answers. But if one wanted to get really ambitious, they could eventually expand the system so as to create a single unified school course that taught everything that's usually taught in high school, abandoning the artificial limits between subjects. E.g. a lesson during which you traveled back in time to witness an important battle (history), helped calculate the cannon ball trajectories for one of the sides (physics), stopped to study a wounded soldier and the effects of the wounds on his body (human biology), and then finally helped the army band play the victory song (music)... or something along those lines. Ideally, there'd be little difference between taking a school lesson and playing a good computer game.
There is an academic field around this called intelligent tutoring systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system). The biggest company with an ITS, as far as I know, is Carnegie Learning, which provides entire K-12 curricula for it: books, teacher training, software. CL has had mixed evaluations in the past, but I think a fair conclusion at this point is that ITS significantly improves learning outcomes when implemented in an environment where they are able to use software as it's intended to be used (follow the training, spend enough time, etc).
As far as I know there isn't anything quite like this in a widely deployed online system with community discussion as you suggest. Grockit (http://grockit.com) is a social test prep site that is familiar with the ITS community and uses some principles. Khan Academy is continuing to improve, but I can't say whether they will reach the state of the art as far as intelligent tutors go. I'd say there's definitely an opportunity for more ITS in online learning now, but it isn't easy to build.
The Wikipedia article is OK. One example of a recent paper is http://users.wpi.edu/~zpardos/papers/zpardos-its-final22.pdf which also shows some of the human work that goes into modeling the knowledge domain for an ITS.
Having worked with online homework systems in mathematics for the past three years, let me say a thing -- even in mathematics, there are only clear right/wrong answers in trivial cases. It may be mostly anecdotal, but there is weak evidence that the written correspondence between professor and student that manually-graded homework provides is important to the learning process in mathematics.
In general I'm heavily skeptical of gamification.
Peer pressure and the desire to surpass your heroes seem like a large part of why teachers and other students are so important however. If at some point a teaching simulator of this caliber is created, we could integrate a ranking system where you are automatically connected with people at a similar level to compete, and you can level up by helping people with problems as well (To continue the idea of gamification to its logical extreme...) The systems which let people learn in competetive games like starcraft are amazing, and if they were properly applied to useful education at least some people would benefit tremendously.
Modern compulsory schooling seems to have at least three major sociological effects: socializing its students, offloading enough caregiver burden for both parents to efficiently participate in the workforce, and finally education. For a widespread homeschooling system to be attractive, it's either going to need to fulfill all three, or to be so spectacularly good at one or two that the shortcomings in the others are overwhelmed. Current homeschooling, for comparison, does an acceptable job of education but fails at the other two; consequently it's used mainly by people with very strong objections to the curriculum or other aspects of the school system. That's a small and inelastic market, and you aren't going to enlarge it much without some significant incentives.
Socialization could be addressed by integrating access to hobby groups, sports teams, Scouting-like services and what have you into the program's structure; you'd probably have to push this hard to overcome the perception gap, but it ought to be doable. Some facility for students to self-organize into study groups might also help at the high school level, but it's unlikely to be practical at younger ages.
Offloading caregiver burden is a trickier problem. There seems to be a time/money tradeoff here: you can reduce or eliminate parental involvement during working hours if they're willing to pay for tutoring services and similar resources, but those aren't cheap, and both routes make homeschooling less attractive relative to traditional schooling. Study groups again would help here, but I don't think they can substitute for an expert human without some exceptional cleverness.
Relative to what? Do you think kids are better socialized at school than at work, staying with grandparents, or whatever else they would be doing if they weren't in school? It seems implausible that kids are going to be socialized efficiently by hanging out with a bunch of other non-socialized persons, rather than persons that are already socialized.
I don't think schools are likely to do a much better job of socializing their students than the various mechanisms in place before compulsory schooling; they probably do do a better job of conditioning students to accept a certain type of authority figure, but that's an argument that doesn't have any place in a business plan.
Those aren't the alternative here, though. The alternative is homeschooling or whatever improvement on contemporary homeschooling we can produce. And having known a few homeschooled kids in my time, I'd have to say that no, they aren't socialized as well on average as conventionally educated students. I'd speculate that this is due mainly to missing out on a large set of potential social contacts -- many themselves poorly socialized, of course, but also including quite a few adults involved with the school system or with schoolfriends. That's all anecdotal, but I don't think I've ever seen a controlled study and am not sure how you'd design one.
That way they only socialize with adults (unless they have siblings), not with other children (with ages similar enough to consider them their peers).
The market is most likely still larger than sufficient for the enterprise to be worth it. I only have personal WAG estimates to rely on, but it's pretty hard to get market data on a currently-counterfactual service that people have never even seen.
Anecdotally, out of a sample size of over 60 high school students, at least 8 (including myself) had confirmed to me they would definitely jump right on any alternative form of education that would still be officially recognized, since here homeschooling is very, very difficult to get approved and recognized as equivalent to a standard education. A single institution that you just sign up, and work through the material, and perhaps attend meetings to socialize, but that isn't bogged down by all the problems of shitty teachers and teacher-politics and crappy coursework? That would have (and still does) sounded like an utopian dream by comparison to the dreary and painful system we were stuck in.
Of course, that's just the students themselves, and parents are a different problem to solve too. However, 10-15% of high school students is not a small market. I'm quite certain (.98) that there are at least twice as many people with strong objections to the curriculum or other aspects as there are who actually do use current alternatives, simply by factoring in the amount of people held back by legal / institutional restrictions that require the child to go through regular compulsory education. From what I understand, bypassing this hurdle is exactly the primary service of this hypothetical company.
Also, as long as you can keep the total cost of the company's services for one child equal or under the current standard costs of compulsory education without sacrificing superior education quality, the inherent scalability of the proposed teaching techniques will mean that as your clientbase grows, your ability to provide workspaces, study groups and competent staff increases, which would further expand the market and clientbase, and then...
Yeah, lots of optimistic and positive thinking there. However, I'd really like to do what I can to save other people from the depressive ugh field that I got stuck into throughout high school - an ugh field that eventually killed my hopes of "things getting better" by the time I got to cégep and realized that even there, perfect answers with clear, written reasoning on a math test was still only worth 75% if you didn't have the right passwords (though I didn't think of it in these particular terms at the time, but that's what it was).
A good solution to those problems would have meant less time wasted in high school, and not dropping out of cégep, for this particular individual. Which, incidentally, also means I wouldn't have gotten this job with a ton of free time to read LessWrong, but that's another story.
Product Distribution in Rural Africa ("Amazon.com for the developing world")
Manufactured goods can improve the lives of poor people drastically at very little cost. Some low-cost frequent buys are already well-distributed, like soap and prepaid phones. But bigger-ticket items are not -- for example, hand carts and solar powered lanterns. Existing microfinance structures and NGOs can help farmers obtain these items, and the items' high utility quickly allows the farmer to repay any loan. However, the gap is distribution: the farmers don't know that the items exist, and if they found out about the item, they would still have trouble getting it.
The idea is to develop a distribution network. This is not an easy task. To help farmers learn about the goods, you could distribute brochures via NGOs and the microfinance system. To transport the goods, use group buys to lower the costs, and the bus network seems potentially viable for small deliveries. In a few years, the internet and smartphones will be widely distributed in the developing world, so the possibilities for a technology-based platform will start to come into play. This is a slow, long-term idea; there will not be any cashing out anytime soon, and it's going to be a painful grind. That said, I think it's an enormous business with a huge positive impact on the world.
Note: I'm working on another startup right now and don't intend to switch ideas until this one is done, so this is a long-term play. But I figured I'd post the idea anyway, see if people have interest or special insight. I know someone who's started an NGO to produce hand carts (http://anzacart.org) as well as some people in the optimal philanthropy community, who presumably have connections via NGOs to Africa.
I'm working for a mid-size startup and have been gathering insight into successful startups for a couple of years. Here is what I think is important.
Create value. Make sure your idea actually creates value in the world. Lots of value. It should conceivably be useful to many of people, and it should conceivably be of significant value to them. Value means your product would be important enough that, if forced to, they would give up other things in exchange for it.
Don't focus on monetization. Startups are subject to all sorts of counter-intuitive economics; it's unrealistic to plan exactly how you will make money. Make sure you're creating value, and check that there's nothing that would prevent you from ever collecting any of that value. Then go back to creating value.
Iteration beats brilliance. The speed at which you iterate is more important that the brilliance of the initial idea. Trying out a product in the real market is an experiment: the feedback your receive entangles your startup with other players in the market. Each experiment steers you towards a local optimum. To win you need (1) to start in the general vicinity of a good local optima and (2) rapid convergence to that optima.
The quality of the team is key. Early stage investors invest largely in the perceived quality of a team, and so should you invest your time alongside great people. An early stage startup should never hire consultants (wrong incentives), should never live in different cities (bad communication). Entering into a startup is like a marriage: it's very hard to get out.
Choose investors cautiously. You're also "married" to your investors on the day you sign a term sheet. Pick ones that you trust, that share your goals, and that can help you in ways other than by providing capital.
Tacit Political Map
The condensation of informal community rules and customs in to a wiki. The urban dictionary of legal systems.
~
Cartography
I am developing a decision making app.
The user is prompted with the phrase "I want."
The user's request is matched against a database of peer-generated responses. But the search does not end there. The search results are a front end to the content which is also peer-generated. The content payload could potentially be any function of the smartphone, though it is usually screen output such a set of instructions or a link to a website. Request parsing and wild-carding is integral to reduce the number of database entries.
Should the user not be satisfied with the results presented, then the request will be broadcast through the network to peers with a favorable history. In the first pass, peer's database will be searched. If this is not sufficient the request will appear as an unanswered question to be answered by other users if they choose to respond. I shouldn't need to tell the LW audience that Bayes' Rule is used to evaluate the responses by peer. An optional milieu field helps to narrow down areas of expertise for individual contributors.
The program is integrated with phone's calendar function, allowing delayed and repeating execution of requests.
The application incorporates a screensaver which builds upon the individualized database arrangement to deliver peer-created scenes to a fixed storyline, which showcases emerging technologies. These stories display links for users to access speculative technologies, then the users are directed to open source projects (if they follow my links).
On top of all this, add the usual slew of social media options: upvoting, banning, groups, multiple user profiles, anonymous searches, recruiting incentives, et cetera.
My intention is to leave the code open source and offer free and paid versions of the app. The consumer version I am calling 'Hope' and the developer's edition I am calling 'Plan A.' Working on my own I hope to get this project to a working demo in December of this year. Currently the code is hosted at BitBucket. I plan on moving over to GoogleCode when I iron out some connectivity issues.
As a closing note, let me mention that this project was originally inspired by the question: "Why aren't more people putting 3D printers to practical use?"
Also see http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/khosla-the-silicon-valley-vision/
Short version: Make an Eckman-style micro-expression reader in a wearable computer.
Fleshed out version: You have a wearable computer (perhaps something like Google glass) which sends video from its camera (or perhaps two cameras if one camera is not enough) over to a high-powered CPU which processes the images, locates the faces, and then identifies micro expressions by matching and comparing the current image (or 3D model) to previous frames to infer which bits of the face have moved in which directions. If a strong enough micro-expression happens, the user is informed by a tone or other notification. Alternatively, one could go the more pedagogical route by showing then a still frame of the person doing the micro-expression some milliseconds prior with the relevant bits of the face highlighted.
Feasibility: We already can make computers are good at finding faces in images and creating 3D models from multiple camera perspectives. I'm pretty sure small cameras are good enough by now. We need the beefy CPU and/or GPU as a separate device for now because it's going to be a while before wearables are good enough to do this kind of heavy-duty processing on their own, but wifi is good enough to transmit very high resolution video. The foggiest bit in my model would be whether current image processing techniques are up to the challenge. Would anyone with expertise in machine vision care to comment on this?
Possible positive consequences: Group collaboration easily succumbs to politics and scheming unless a certain (large) level of trust and empathy has been established. (For example, I've seen plenty of hacker news comments confirm that having a strong friendship with one's startup cofounder is important.) A technology such as this would allow for much more rapid (and justified) trust-building between potential collaborators. This might also allow for the creation of larger groups of smart people who all trust each other. (Which would be invaluable for any project which produces information which shouldn't be leaked because it would allow such projects to be larger.) Relatedly, this might also allow one to train really excellent therapist-empaths.
Possible negative consequence: Police states where the police are now better at reading people's minds.
Version 0.1 can be for Skype conversations. Imagine the heightened 'super power' ability to discreetly (or not so discreetly) pick up on this during your personal and business Skype chats.
I wear a GoPro camera around my neck for a life-logging project, and have tried it with a wifi (EyeFi) card. If you want live video or pics, the battery lasts around 1 hr for 1picture per 5 seconds. If you want video at 30fps at 960p, the interchangeable batteries last about 1.5 hours and records about 5.5 hrs on a 32gb card (max size supported)
The files are huge, cumbersome, and do little for me.
I have been entertaining the idea of a version that recognizes your mood throughout the day with your webcam, and plots it over time based on what type of tasks you were performing. Over time, your laptop could suggest transitioning from certain tasks to others based on your expressions to optimize for personalized productivity and mood.
Affectiva's Affdex is a company to look to for this, and has a great demo that plots your expressions over time while watching commercials: http://www.affectiva.com/affdex/#pane_overview
Another idea is to make lending out laptops free if the user agrees to having essentially no privacy - you'd sell the information and user expressions as they experience certain sites back to the companies that would pay for this program and reap a healthy profit along the way! (A part of which you'd totally send to me.)
This could be a sustainable way to get more internet enabled laptops into more hands and push people to become more contributing, creating members of society rather than the majority passive consumers that we experience today.
Version .1 of this laptop program could be lending out old/donated/extra laptops under the condition that the lendees who use the laptops create 1 thing a day of notable worth to themselves (or one project per every x hours). So everyone is held together by incrementally improving themselves and creating projects of value that are auto uploaded from a certain folder into a community of people who give each other feedback, etc.
Look forward to talking about this next time I see you in person Marcello. Also typing about this here for anyone else that happens to be reading, feel free to find me on Facebook.com/AltonSun to further the conversation.
Reinvent the Refrigerator. Since its debut in the 1940s, it hasn't changed much in design. Put a bunch of food in a large cooled box and hope you remember to eat its contents before it rots. There has been some lame attempts by slapping a LCD panel on the front with an RFID scanner, but you still have to remember where you store the food. I think automation and inventory management via mobile device is key. There is a lively discussion on quora right now, but I'd like to also invite people to poke holes and/or add value to my idea.
Basically it's an automated parking garage that is shrunk down to the size of a fridge. You can learn more here I apologize in advance that I'm linking to FB, it's just were the idea currently lives.
The benefit of the company is providing a greener fridge that helps people not waste food, which is a big problem right now. Americans waste 34 million tons of food waste each year. The amount of green house gases, labor, and transportation costs to produce food just to throw away food is maddening.
Obviously the first fridge will cost the same as a luxury car, since you're basically cramming a robot into a fridge, but so was the first computer. I can see this fridge being the next big opportunity where everyone throws out the dumb fridge just like everyone did with their CRT for an LCD.
That being said, I welcome your comments and questions.
How about repopularizing chest freezers? Inherently much more energy efficient, and freezing can help save food waste.
The trouble with chest freezers is they are a pain to get things from the bottom of. What I've seen happen is stuff remaining at the bottom of the freezer for years on end, eventually becoming freezer-burnt. But if you can automate the stacking and unstacking of things, this could be a good idea. You wouldn't even need the entire top to be openable (or at least, you wouldn't typically open the entire top), there could just be a smaller port for pulling things out of.
Another idea for encouraging more energy-efficient freezing would be a garage-sized (or bigger) freezer designed for community use. The bigger the better from an energy efficiency standpoint because that means less surface area per unit volume. I'm thinking fully automated storage and retrieval would make this work better as a community good (compared to a walk-in freezer), since there would be no need to employ a person to retrieve and keep track of things manually. You could basically just walk up to it, swipe your card, and tell it which items you want to retrieve, at which point they are deposited on a shelf for you to grab.
Like ice cream vending machines only giant and with peas and raspberries in. Neat!
It would be sort of like a vending machine, but stocked by the user and with basically whatever you want. However, suppliers probably wouldn't charge too much to do deliveries, especially if there is high volume. Also, if you have an entire neighborhood eating out of the same freezer, there could be significant discounts from making group orders.
I can't see how a new fridge is a solution to that problem. If every time you go to the supermarket you buy more food than you'll be able to eat before the next time you go there, eventually you'll have to throw away some food, unless it lasts eternally. The standard solution to that is not going to the supermarket when you're hungry, and it works for me -- actually, if I go to the supermarket when I'm stuffed, it works too much.
I don't remember ever having trouble locating stuff in a fridge.
Tagline: Cheap Transportation with Unmanned Aerial Drones
Mission: Replace oil and roads with electric aviation. Move small packages initially, and scale up to large freight and eventually people.
Technology: Electric aircraft are cheap and GPS enabled autopilots using Arduino are less than $500.
What is next for this idea?
Is there a certain company profile that you are looking for to take it up? Is this something you intend on implementing yourself?
If you want someone else to do it, and are open to anyone doing it, I recommend giving more detail about the idea. Who/what is needed?
If its something that you only want to explain in more detail to a a person of your choice, either because of wanting to partner with them business wise or for another reason, I recommend imagining who it is that you want to be implementing this idea or partnering with you, and writing something that you think would catch this person's attention that you are a good person for them to invest their time and energy working with.
If electric aircraft are cheap, electric cars are much cheaper; flight takes a lot of energy! In a country with existing roads, is this difference really smaller than the cost of building and maintaining roads over time, thus "replacing roads"?
Cars use less energy, but aircraft are faster. Also, roads take up valuable ground-space which could be used for buildings or walkways. Roads can only take up the same area of the ground very expensively with underpasses and so forth, whereas air lanes can be layered without costing extra.
I think he meant less energy per unit distance, not per unit time.
Would a fleet of lighter-than-air drones be less costly for this application than the currently popular drone models?