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Viliam_Bur comments on The Centre for Applied Rationality: a year later from a (somewhat) outside perspective - Less Wrong
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Comments (102)
That was my first plan back when things were getting started, but it turned out to be hard to develop instructional materials that worked without a developed professional instructor.
Moving the weight from instructor to material is always a lot of work. A lot of tacit knowledge needs to be made explicit.
These days I am having (as a student) an online lecture about some Java technology. It's 3 days, 8 hours each, we received in total 600 pages of PDF. That is 12 pages per 30 minutes; minus covers and TOC it's 9 pages of useful text.
Years ago I tried to make a non-interactive lesson for high-school students where I just gave them a PDF file with explanations and exercises, and then they worked everyone at their own speed. I needed 8-10 pages for a lesson, and I spent the whole evening just writing what I already perfectly knew. Students liked it, but I gave up doing this because it was too much work for one-time use. However if I had to teach the same thing to many classes (or just the same thing for many years), then it would be less work doing it this way. And the materials can be updated when necessary.
With the rationality exercises it will be even more complicated because we are not even 100% sure about the topic, and there can be more unexpected questions and reactions during the lesson. But I still think it is possible, and that given enough students it may be even more efficient. -- I guess the detailed material needs at least 10 repetitions to be more efficient. So if you design a lesson at CFAR, do it 2 or 3 times and then redesign it, it is not worth making detailed materials. But if we want to use the lessons at meetups, then it could be worth doing.
Yes, this is what we first tried before finding out that it was way below the level of working with late-2011-level knowledge and ability to produce lessons. Might be worth retrying once the lessons have been highly polished at the CFAR level.
I wonder if a Kumon-style approach, with lots and lots of small steps and exercises done at one's own pace would be resistant to redesign.
If so, that would be evidence that it is not the best way to implement. The ability to improve a class by redesigning it is a feature of the organization.