What are your thoughts about virtual courses? I can see something like PDFs being freely available to download and an IRC channel for communication between students/teachers.
Makes it harder to go to a bar and grab some beers but it saves you the whole financial trouble and various other troubles.
These sorts of media are pretty good for learning simple course content but quite hard for teaching habits of thought. It's kind of like how it's hard to learn breakdancing from a textbook: the textbook doesn't know how to breakdance, and you can't watch it breakdance.
In order to really get the new habits, you need to practice them with good feedback (and ideally, watch them in action) and it's hard to do this through virtual courses. Not entirely impossible, just very hard! The sequences, for instance, have changed peoples' mental habits.
The other challenge is that this sort of approach gives way slower feedback to the instructors who are trying to iterate rapidly on their explanations. I expect that as CFAR begins converging on "this is a really effective way to teach skill X" we'll start seeing more of their content posted online. But it might be several years before that seems more worthwhile than the workshops, given their benefits in social ties and in increased information value regarding how to teach things.
I'm still waiting for the result of my interview for the Summer Fellows program. Is there still a backlog of candidates you're working through, or should I assume I didn't make it?
It was unfortunate that the CFAR for ML Researchers workshop collides with the European LW yearly meetup. I am a ML researcher, and I would love to go to San Francisco, but I don't want to miss the European meetup either. :)
By the way, when do we get acceptance/rejection notifications? (And do we? :))
I have applied to the Fellows program. But I would need to know the answer to my application, in order to buy not terribly expensive flights, and to book holidays for that period. It's really useful for those of us who live in the other side of the planet to know. :) (I am not complaining, I appreciate the enormous work you guys are putting out there, including this free workshop, but it would be cool to know something about the application process. It is fine if I was rejected (well, I will be sad :)), but please let us know.)
I signed up for a CFAR workshop, and got a scholarship, but couldn't travel for financial reasons. Is there a way to get travel assistance for either WAISS or the MIRI Fellowship program? I'll just apply for both.
WAISS, MSFP, CfML, and (for high-school-aged folk) EuroSPARC all have some ability to apply for travel assistance.