The LW Public Goods Team wants to encourage useful research projects (as well other kinds of projects) for the LW community. If you're interested in doing this kind of work, you might run into a problem that is best solved by good outside assistance. Without assistance you might get discouraged and stop working on the project or never even start it. We want to help you avoid that. Do you
Not know how to interpret a finding and want help figuring it out?
Need access to a particular paper and need someone with a library subscription to download it for you?
Need someone to edit your writing?
Not even know what you're having trouble with, but you know is that you're stuck and need someone to troubleshoot you?
Then, we want to help!
How do you request such help? For now, I think the best way is to post to the discussion section about your problem. That way other interested people can also provide help and be interested in your research. If you feel uncomfortable doing this, you may post to the public goods team mailing list (lw-public-goods-team@googlegroups.com) or if it's not too long after this was posted, post in the comments.
I personally commit to doing at least 3 hours a week of tasks like these for people doing LessWrong related projects (assuming demand for it; I'll be keeping a log) for at least the next month. Morendil has committed to doing at least an hour of this and atucker has promised to some as well.
Our goal is to find out whether this kind of help is effective and encourages people. If this kind of assistance turns out to be valuable, we'll continue to offer it.
If you would like to volunteer some time (a little or a lot), say so in the comments!
This sounds like a good idea, thanks for committing the time for it! On reading I had two thoughts:
While I'm assuming that you're willing to try helping with anything, people with more technical problems will appreciate a summary of what skills you can provide in particular.
I'm also wondering if there is demand for this in a format more like HN office hours.
1 - Good idea!
* I pride myself in giving actually useful editing, not just trivial things. I will,
* tell you when things don't make sense
* tell you you have to rewrite or add sections
* cross out chunks with abandon
* give you organizational advice.
* I have access to the University of Washington's library system, so I can download most papers.
* I know quite a bit of Bayesian stats
* I have an engineering background.
* I have Lots of programming experience.
* I like having something explained to me and then repeating back my understanding
I'll have to ask the others to post what they think their strong points are.
2 - I'm not actually familiar with HN office hours, so I will have to take a look. Thanks for the link!
Update: Please use the most recent thread.
The LW Public Goods Team wants to encourage useful research projects (as well other kinds of projects) for the LW community. If you're interested in doing this kind of work, you might run into a problem that is best solved by good outside assistance. Without assistance you might get discouraged and stop working on the project or never even start it. We want to help you avoid that. Do you
Then, we want to help!
How do you request such help? For now, I think the best way is to post to the discussion section about your problem. That way other interested people can also provide help and be interested in your research. If you feel uncomfortable doing this, you may post to the public goods team mailing list (lw-public-goods-team@googlegroups.com) or if it's not too long after this was posted, post in the comments.
I personally commit to doing at least 3 hours a week of tasks like these for people doing LessWrong related projects (assuming demand for it; I'll be keeping a log) for at least the next month. Morendil has committed to doing at least an hour of this and atucker has promised to some as well.
Our goal is to find out whether this kind of help is effective and encourages people. If this kind of assistance turns out to be valuable, we'll continue to offer it.
If you would like to volunteer some time (a little or a lot), say so in the comments!