Thanks for the feedback.

A wordpress page that doesn't have an RSS feed but points me to a list of blog post written on another forum and a link to a Quora blog doesn't give the impression of a highly reputable venue.

We'll be putting a blog on our website soon.

Given that you already have a strategy of writing high value posts have you thought about asking a place like Business Insider or Forbes whether they would pay you to write posts on a blog on their platform?

We've been looking into platforms that would be interested in publishing articles. We hadn't considered Business Insider or Forbes. Why do you mention them specifically?

In the effective altruistic community there are people thinking about spending money where it has the highest impact, what's your exact case, that they should give you that money instead of giving it to malaria prevention?

We're not necessarily seeking funding from effective altruist types: we are concerned about the possibility of diverting EA funding, and would prefer to secure funding from other sources. We can engage in detailed discussion with people who are interested in the possibility of donating to Cognito Mentoring and want to hear our thoughts on its relative relative cost-effectiveness. I don't necessarily think that donating to Cognito Mentoring is more cost-effective than donating to other EA organizations. All else being equal, there's an a priori reason for donating to a smaller organization than a larger organization (diminishing marginal returns), but I would want to talk with other EA organizations about their room for more funding before giving too much weight to this point.

Thanks.

If you tailor your enterprise towards providing a YouTube channel, building a subscriber base and living off of ads, that is substantially different to creating a website, to providing 1-on-1 personal services.

I don't quite follow this – are you suggesting that we pursue the former strategy?

It's not only hindsight bias that your original financing plans seemed doom to fail, when I first read of your project I very nearly made a public comment predicting as much

I wouldn't have minded.

It's not only hindsight bias that your original financing plans seemed doom to fail, when I first read of your project I very nearly made a public comment predicting as much

I'd advise a "back to the drawing board" to come up with a highly tailored approach that you can sell in a 2 minute elevator speech.

Tailored to whom?

You, Sir, are [un]fortunately not a bullshitter, but interested in actually providing high-quality advice.

Do you think the two are mutually exclusive?

Good question.

• To a large degree we're aggregating and synthesizing the best existing advice, rather than generating our own wholecloth. This lowers the bar that we have to clear.

• Vipul and I both have experience doing research and analysis for MIRI.

• I worked at MathPath for 3 summers, taught college students throughout graduate school at University of Illinois, taught high school at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and technology (an academic magnet high school) and teach high performing math students at Art of Problem Solving. Vipul taught throughout graduate school at University of Chicago.

• We're learning about our target population through personalized advising.

But the ultimate test is whether people find our advice useful.

You can see some reviews here.

Some points:

• This would work if both the parents and the students wanted advising for the students.
• Teenagers and young adults are often rebellious and don't want to do what their parents tell them to.
• If the students don't want advising, they won't benefit much from it.
• A large fraction of parents are willing to pay for SAT prep and such, but that's very different from what we're offering.
• If the children are sufficiently young, there's less of an issue of teenage rebelliousness, and parents are more directly involved in their children's education.
• The only parents who have made contact with us are parents of young children. (Edit: I misremembered – there were a few parents of older children who contacted us, but their children weren't interested.)
• The parents of young children who contacted us expressed willingness to pay much more often than the students who contacted us.
• Our expertise is much more relevant to high school and college students than to elementary and middle school students, except for the ones who are precocious to the point of being cognitively similar to high performing high school and college students. We haven't worked with other elementary and middle school students and have no background in early childhood development.
• As in my post, there's an issue of needing a large flow of clients (because the number of hours per client is small).

It could be that we haven't pursued this option in sufficient depth. We could to focus on elementary and middle school students, or see whether the parent-child correlation of interest in advising for older students is sufficiently high. We would guess that the correlation isn't high enough, though we only have a few relevant data points (examples or parents being interested when their children aren't - there are many examples in the other direction) and further testing could reveal otherwise.

Any thoughts?

Thanks ruthie!

This is a path that we haven't explored, so it's helpful that you point it out.

Thanks for the suggestion! We've been thinking about this. See also my post Can an online peer group substitute? at the Davidson Institute forum for parents. It seems as though it would take a long time to get enough users for it to pay for itself, but maybe it could eventually become self-sustaining.

Thanks very much for your thoughts.

Out of curiosity, how have you been funding yourselves thus far?

We've been self-funded.

Regarding promotion, there seem to be smart high schoolers on Quora. Even if you don't link to your site directly in your answers, if you write good questions, answers, and comments on answers in categories you're interested in, then people will probably visit your profile, right?

Yes. The time cost associated with writing high quality answers from scratch is high. But there's probably some low hanging fruit to be plucked in the direction of looking for questions asking about things that our articles address. Thanks for reminding us.

Quora celebrity Alex K Chen is one of our advisors, is a coauthor at our Quora blog, and has been compiling material useful to Cognito Mentoring.

Here's a list I made a while ago, can't vouch for quality.

Thanks, this is great, it's the sort of thing I was hoping for when I posted.

Have you thought about creating such a forum? How many of your 70 advisees would appreciate a forum/chat room/etc.? Could be self-sustaining/growing.

James Miller made a suggestion along similar lines. We're investigating this.

Thanks for the thoughts!

I'm curious - what do you think of UnCollege and how it manages to advertise/fund itself? Would you be interested in following a similar model?

I've visited UnCollege once. The participants there seemed very curious and open to experience. I don't know enough about the program itself to make an assessment, though my superficial impressions were favorable. I tend to think that going to college is a good idea for almost everyone who's capable of doing well there, and to that extent there's tension between my views and theirs, but in many cases the participants seemed to be delaying college by a single year rather than not attending altogether.

I don't know what their funding model is – do you? I assumed that the participants pay.

Also - what about advertising on sites like College Confidential and reddit? It probably wouldn't run well with the mods there if you advertised too much, but doing it once might work.

Yeah, I've been hesitant to post to College Confidential because of their strict no-advertising policy. I made a few of our posts to Reddit, but didn't get any upvotes.

I think getting in touch with the homeschooling community might also provide some ideas. People in those communities can be incredibly motivated and resourceful.

We've done some of this (e.g. Gifted Homeschoolers Forum links an article that I wrote about college admissions for home schoolers, but we can probably do more. Thanks.

If you charged a $200/hour "consulting fee," people would see you as professionals, and value your advice highly.

Conditional on those people first deciding that these two guys are worth $200/hour.

Funding would go toward our salaries. We've been self-funded thus far, and are running out of short-term savings, so the continuation of the project hinges on us getting funding.

As for what we would do with more time:

We're still in an exploratory phase where we're experimenting, so our plans are subject to change, but here is what we have in mind.

Personalized advising and networking of advisees

• In the process of doing personalized advising, we would learn more about the questions that people have in practice and do research to answer them, which would feed into content creation.

• We're in the process of introducing our advisees to one another when they have common interests, and are exploring the possibility of creating a discussion group for them. What we learn from their discussion (e.g. resources that they recommend to one another) would feed into our content creation, too.

Content creation.

As above, the particular topics that we end up covering will depend on part on the sorts of questions that arise in the course of our personalized advising. However, some subjects that we'd like to cover are:

• Careers. We have a detailed page on academia as a career option. We want to create similarly detailed pages for other career options (we plan to add law and consulting). We want to give information on academia as a career option by field of research for common fields of research. We would also like to cover entrepreneurship as a career option in much greater depth than we do now, covering both entrepreneurship in the tech sector and entrepreneurship in other contexts.

• Majors. There are two things to cover here: (a) how valuable it is to major in a given subject and (b) the best learning resources for a given major. On point (a), there's research to be done on which majors qualify one for which types of jobs / graduate programs. On point (b), in most cases we don't have deep subject matter knowledge, but we can interview subject matter experts to get their thoughts, and scour discussion forums for relevant information.

• Benefits of learning different subjects. We've made pages for 11 subjects, and would like to flesh these out and cover dozens more subjects. As far as we know, there's no website that does this, so there's room for becoming a canonical reference.

• Mapping connections between different subjects. We want to be able to present our advisees with information of the type "If you like learning X, you might also like learning Y."

• College admissions and obtaining financial aid. These things have large zero-sum component, but we want to cover them so as to offer students a complete package of advice. We'll satisfice rather than optimize here.

• How to learn on your own. Because we advise that gifted students rely on self-learning and not school, it's important that we offer good advice on maintaining motivation and assessing progress while learning on one's own.

• Socio-emotional issues. This is not our comparative advantage, but we can at least compile existing information, as I did in my post on methods for treating depression.

• Side projects. We want to research the different kinds of side projects that young people have pursued, with a view toward getting a feel for the range of possibilities of extracurricular activities for our advisees.

Outreach.

Disseminating our content is high priority for us. As I mention in the main post, we're still searching for good ways to do this. One possibility that we're pursuing is getting our content published on other websites such as About.com (hypothetically). So we would spend time looking for such opportunities, in addition to other types of opportunities as they arose.

They are called "twice exceptional" children.