= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
pan comments on Open thread, August 19-25, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (325)
Why doesn't CFAR just tape record one of the workshops and throw it on youtube? Or at least put the notes online and update them each time they change for the next workshop? It seems like these two things would take very little effort, and while not perfect, would be a good middle ground for those unable to attend a workshop.
I can definitely appreciate the idea that person to person learning can't be matched with these, but it seems to me if the goal is to help the world through rationality, and not to make money by forcing people to attend workshops, then something like tape recording would make sense. (not an attack on CFAR, just a question from someone not overly familiar with it).
I'm a keen swing dancer. Over the past year or so, a pair of internationally reputable swing dance teachers have been running something called "Swing 90X", (riffing off P90X). The idea is that you establish a local practice group, film your progress, submit your recordings to them, and they give you exercises and feedback over the course of 90 days. By the end of it, you're a significantly more badass dancer.
It would obviously be better if everything happened in person, (and a lot does happen in person; there's a massive international swing dance scene), but time, money and travel constraints make this prohibitively difficult for a lot of people, and the whole Swing 90X thing is a response to this, which is significantly better than the next best thing.
It's worth considering if a similar sort of model could work for CFAR training.
One of the core ideas of CFAR is to develop tools to teach rationality. For that purpose it's useful to avoid making the course material completely open at this point in time. CFAR wants to publish scientific papers that validate their ideas about teaching rationality.
Doing things in person helps with running experiments and those experiments might be less clear when some people already viewed the lectures online.
I guess I don't see why the two are mutually exclusive, I doubt everyone would stop attending workshops if the material was freely available, and I don't understand why something can't be published if it's open sourced first?
I'm guessing that the goal here is to gather information on how to teach rationality to the 'average' person? As in, the person off of the street who's never asked themselves "what do I think I know and how do I think I know it?". But as far as I can tell, LWers make up a large portion of the workshop attendees. Many of us will have already spent enough time reading articles/sequences about related topics that it's as if we've "already viewed the lectures online".
Also, it's not as if the entire internet is going to flock to the content the second that it gets posted. There will still be an endless pool of people to use in the experiments. And wouldn't the experiments be more informative if the data points weren't all paying participants with rationality as a high priority? Shouldn't the experiments involve trying to teach a random class of high-schoolers or something?
What am I missing?
As far as I understand that isn't the case. They do give out scholarship, so not everyone pays. I also thinks that they do testing of the techniques outside of the workshops.
Doing research costs money and CFAR seems to want to fund itself through workshop fees. If they would focus on high school classes they would need a different source of funding.
Is a CFAR workshop like a lecture? I thought it would be closer to a group discussion, and perhaps subgroups within. This would make a recording highly unfocused and difficult to follow.
Any one unit in the workshop is probably something in between a lecture, a practice session and a discussion between the instructor and the attendees. Each unit is different in this respect. For most of the units, a recording of a session would probably not be very useful on its own.
(April 2013 Workshop Attendee)
(The argument is that) A lot of the CFAR workshop material is very context dependent, and would lose significant value if distilled into text or video. Personally speaking, a lot of what I got out of the workshop was only achievable in the intensive environment - the casual discussion about the material, the reasons behind why you might want to do something, etc - a lot of it can't be conveyed in a one hour video. Now, maybe CFAR could go ahead and try to get at least some of the content value into videos, etc, but that has two concerns. One is the reputational problem with 'publishing' lesser-quality material, and the other is sorta-almost akin to the 'valley of bad rationality'. If you teach someone, say, the mechanics of aversion therapy, but not when to use it, or they learn a superficial version of the principle, that can be worse than never having learned it at all, and it seems plausible that this is true of some of the CFAR material also.
I agree that there are concerns, and you would lose a lot of the depth, but my real concern is with how this makes me perceive CFAR. When I am told that there are things I can't see/hear until I pay money, it makes me feel like it's all some sort of money making scheme, and question whether the goal is actually just to teach as many people as much as possible, or just to maximize revenue. Again, let me clarify that I'm not trying to attack CFAR, I believe that they probably are an honest and good thing, but I'm trying to convey how I initially feel when I'm told that I can't get certain material until I pay money.
It's akin to my personal heuristic of never taking advice from anyone who stands to gain from my decision. Being told by people at CFAR that I can't see this material until I pay the money is the opposite of how I want to decide to attend a workshop, I instead want to see the tapes or read the raw material and decide on my own that I would benefit from being in person.
Yeah, I feel these objections, and I don't think your heuristic is bad. I would say, though, and I hold no brief for CFAR, never having donated or attended a workshop, that there is another heuristic possibly worth considering: generally more valuable products are not free. There are many exceptions to this, and it is possible for sellers to counterhack this common heuristic by using higher prices to falsely signal higher quality to consumers. But the heuristic is not worthless, it just has to be applied carefully.
While you have good points, I would like to say that making money is not unaligned with the goal of teaching as many people as possible. It seems like a good strategy is to develop high-quality material by starting off teaching only those able to pay. This lets some subsidize the development of more open course material. If they haven't gotten to the point where they have released the subsidized material, then I'd give them some more time and judge them again in some years. It's a young organization trying to create material from scratch in many areas.
We do offer some free classes in the Bay Area. As we beta-test tweaks or work on developing new material, we invite people in to give us feedback on classes in development. We don't charge for these test sessions, and, if you're local, you can sign up here. Obviously, this is unfortunately geographically limited. We do have a sample workshop schedule up, so you can get a sense of what we teach.
If the written material online isn't enough, you can try to chat with one of us if we're in town (I dropped in on a NYC group at the beginning of August). Or you can drop in an application, and you'll automatically be chatting with one of us and can ask as many questions as you like in a one-on-one interview. Applying doesn't create any obligation to buy; the skype interview is meant to help both parties learn more about each other.
I feel your concerns, but tbh I think the main disconnect is the research/development vs teaching dichotomy, not (primarily) the considerations I mentioned. The volunteers at the workshop (who were previous attendees) were really quite emphatic about how much they had improved, including content and coherency as well as organization.
(Relevant)