adamzerner comments on Rethinking Education - Less Wrong

2 Post author: adamzerner 15 February 2014 05:22AM

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Comment author: adamzerner 15 February 2014 05:49:09PM 0 points [-]

and mostly concluded that it was an immense project which would require many years of focus to become really useful, and unless it got a lot of momentum would easily stall.

Absolutely. I think that it'll take hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And lots of money. So I'm starting a startup in order to make enough money to get this going.

One way around this would be to collect existing high quality educational material online and link to it/include it directly from sources which you have arrangements with, allowing contributors to focus on building the dependency tree.

I thought about this, and I agree that it'd make more sense if there were only a few people working on the project. But I think that there'd be too much overlap in content, and it'd be too tough to create the system from what is currently available. So I think that execution would require producing content to avoid all of the bottlenecks.

If I understand correctly (from the talk of deadlines, tutors, qualifications, social atmosphere, essays, classes), you would like to change the way formal education works?

Yes, but that's separate from the web app (sorry, I should have made that more clear). Yes, bureaucracy sucks, but I think that if this web app was made, it'd be so clear that it's better that schools would have to adopt. I could start off by providing it to people to use for free, and showing results. It might be tougher to get things like rationality, social atmosphere, tutoring etc. implemented. I think that they're really important, so I'll have to brainstorm hard about how I could make that happen.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 15 February 2014 06:13:47PM 2 points [-]

I think that it'll take hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And lots of money. So I'm starting a startup in order to make enough money to get this going.

You plan to earn enough money to pay hundreds of people? It's not possible to do with high probability, and you have to be good enough to have even the small chance. A normal career may give better expected outcome, even though it won't give that rather small chance of getting rich. (Read Graham's essays, for example these two.)

Comment author: adamzerner 15 February 2014 07:14:39PM 0 points [-]

1) I don't necessarily have to make enough money to pay for the whole thing. Just enough to do enough to get other people interested enough to do the same.

2) I think I've got a solid chance at getting rich. This is my specific argument, and this is the general one.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 15 February 2014 07:28:19PM *  3 points [-]

I think I've got a solid chance at getting rich. This is my specific argument, and this is the general one.

This is not particularly convincing. You should take into account the a priori improbability of this event, so that getting to a "solid chance" would require much more than evidence that merely improves the estimate. See also base rate fallacy and attribute substitution (e.g. the question you need to answer is "What is the probability of success?", but the question you end up answering might be "How good is my startup's pitch?").

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