ETA: Note that I work for App Academy. So take all I say with a grain of salt. I'd love it if one of my classmates would confirm this for me.

Further edit: I retract the claim that this is strong evidence of rationalists winning. So it doesn't count as an example of this.

I just finished App Academy. App Academy is a 9 week intensive course in web development. Almost everyone who goes through the program gets a job, with an average salary above $90k. You only pay if you get a job. As such, it seems to be a fantastic opportunity with very little risk, apart from the nine weeks of your life. (EDIT: They let you live at the office on an air mattress if you want, so living expenses aren't much of an issue.)

There are a bunch of bad reasons to not do the program. To start with, there's the sunk cost fallacy: many people here have philosophy degrees or whatever, and won't get any advantage from that. More importantly, it's a pretty unusual life move at this point to move to San Francisco and learn programming from a non-university institution.

LWers are massively overrepresented at AA. There were 4/40 at my session, and two of those had higher karma than me. I know other LWers from other sessions of AA.

This seems like a decent example of rationalists winning.

EDIT:

My particular point is that for a lot of people, this seems like a really good idea: if there's a 50% chance of it being a scam, and you're making $50k doing whatever else you were doing with your life, then if job search takes 3 months, you're almost better off in expectation over the course of one year.

And most of the people I know who disparaged this kind of course didn't do so because they disagreed with my calculation, but because it "didn't offer real accreditation" or whatever. So I feel that this was a good gamble, which seemed weird, which rationalists were more likely to take.