TLDR: I had idea to apply some tools I learned on coursera to our community in order to grow it better. I wanted to start some organized thinking about goals our community has, and offer some materials for people who are eager to work on it, but are maybe lost or need ideas.

Yesterday I did a course on coursera.org. It's called "Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Businesses, Part I". (I play lectures often at x2.5 so I can do 5 weeks course in one day)

Though this course seems obvious, it'd say pretty worth 3 hours, so look it up. (It's hard to say how much is hindsight and how much is actually too easy and basic) I got some ideas sorted, and I saw the tools. I'm not an expert now, obviously, but at least i can see when things are done in unprofessional manner, and it can help you understand what follows.

When growing anything (company, community, ...) you have different options. You should not opt for everything, because you will be spread thin. You should grow with measure, so that people can follow, and so that you can do it right. This is the essence of the course. Rest is focused on ways of growing.

This was informative part of this article. Rest is some thoughts that just came to my mind that I would like to share. Hopefully I inspire some of you, and start some organized thinking about this community.

This community is some kind of organization, and it has a goal. To be precise, it probably has two goals, as I see it:

1. to make existing members more rational
2. to get more members.

Note that second focus is to grow.

I will just plainly write down some claims this course made:

In order to grow:

1. your people need to grow (as persons, to get more skills, to learn).
2. you need to create more processes regarding customers, in order to preserve good service
3. you often need better organization (to regulate processes inside the company)
4. you need to focus
5. you need a plan
6. if you need to stop the fire, stop the fire which has the greatest impact, and make a process out of it, so that people can do it on their own afterwards

1. I guess no-one is against this. After all, we are all here to grow.

2. My guess is that our customers could be defined as new members. So, first steps someone makes here are responsibility of this organization. After, when they get into rationality more, when they start working on themselves, they become employees. That's at least how it works in my head. Book on sequences is a good step here since it helps to have it all organized in one pdf.

3. this is actually where it all started. We are just a bunch of people with common drive to be more rational. There are meetups, but that's it. I guess some people see EY as some kind of leader, but even if he were one, that's not an organization. My first idea is to create some kind of separation of topics, reddit-like. (With or without moderators, we can change that at any point if one option does not work.)

For example, I'm fed with AI topics. When i see AI, I literally stop reading. I don't even think it's rational to force that idea so much. I understand the core of this community is in that business, but:

1. One of the first lessons in finance is "don't put all the eggs in one basket". If there is something more important than AI we are fucked if no-one sees it. I guess "non-rational" people will see it (since they were not active on this forum, therefore not focused on AI) but then people of this forum lose attribute "rational" since "non-rationals" outperformed them simply by doing random stuff.
2. It may stop people from visiting the forum. They may disagree, they may feel "it's not right", but be unable to formulate it in "dont put all the eggs in one basket" (my example, kind of). The remaining choice is to stop visiting the site.

So, I would STRONGLY encourage new topics, and I would like to see some kind of classification. If I want to find out about AI, I want to know where to look, and if I don't want to read about it, I want to know how to avoid it. If I want to read about self-improvement, I want to know where to find it. Who knows, after some rough classification people start to do finer ones, and discuss how to increase memory without being spammed with procrastination. I think this could help the first goal (to make existing members more rational) since it would give them some overview.

I also think this would reduce cult-ism, since it would add diversity, and loose the "meta".

4. Understatement. Anyone who worked, or read anything about work knows how important plan is. It is OBLIGATORY. Essential. (See course https://www.coursera.org/learn/work-smarter-not-harder/outline )

5. I think this is not very important to us. There are lots of people here. Many enthusiasts. However, this should be some kind of guideline to make a good plan, and to tell us how much resources to devote to each problem.

In conclusion, I understand these things are big. But growth means change. (There is some EY quote on this, I think:not every change is improvement, but every improvement is a change, correct me if I'm wrong.) Humans did not evolve this far by being better, but by socializing and cooperating. So I think we should move from herd to organization.

Introduction to Neuroeconomics: how the brain makes decisions

Info from the link:

About the Course

Economics, psychology, and neuroscience are converging today into a unified discipline of Neuroeconomics with the ultimate aim of providing a single, general theory of human behaviour.

Neuroeconomics can provide economists and social scientists with a deeper understanding of how they make their own decisions, and how others decide. Are we hard-wired to be risk-adverse or risk-takers? How is a “fair decision” evaluated by the brain? Is it possible today to predict the purchasing intentions of a consumer? Can we modulate economic behaviour affecting the brain?

Neuroscience allied to psychology and economics have powerful models and evidence to explain why we make a decision… and whether it is rational or not. Decision-making in financial markets, trust and cooperation in teams, consumer persuasion, will be central issues in this course in neuroeconomics. You will be provided with the most recent evidence from brain-imaging techniques (PET, fMRI and TMS), and you will be introduced to the explanatory models behind them.

The course will start by discussing the foundations of neuroeconomics and the neuroanatomy of the brain (Module I: “How the brain works”).

Module II (“How the brain decides”) then focuses on the core building block of neuroeconomics: decision theory. In a simple way, you will be presented with the main theories accounting for how individuals decide, supported by key empirical studies.

The next module will study the balance between rationality and emotions (Module III: “How the brain feels”): how our emotions interfere with our so-called rational judgments.

Module IV (“Society of brains”) focuses on society: how groups and the social environment interact with individual decision-making. This module will have strong implications for marketing, public policy and public education.

Course Syllabus

Module I: “How the Brain works”

Week 1. Introduction.  Introduction to the course, historical overview of the field.

Week 2. Brain anatomy and functions. Introduction to neuroscience, brain anatomy and brain functions. Measuring brain activity:  Brain-imaging (EEG, MEG, fMRI), brain stimulation (TMS), cell recording, data visualization, interpretation of the results.

Module II: “How the Brain decides”

Week 3. Introducing brain models of decision making and choice. Neuro-cognitive models of the choice: comparison with formal models of decision making.

Week 4. Neural representation of the subjective value, basal ganglia and choice value.

Week  5. Brain mechanisms of risky choice and ambiguity.

Module III: “How the Brain feels”

Week 6. Economic rationality and emotions. How emotions can prevent or actually promote rational decision making, according to evolutionary psychology.

Week 7. Dual processing. Two systems in the brain: Fast, automatic, emotional processes versus slower, controlled, cognitive processes.

Module IV: “Society of Brains”

Week 8. The social brain. Social perception, empathy, social preferences; theory of mind, inequity, persuasion, conformity.

Week 9. Taking an evolutionary perspective: the ‘economic animal.’ Primate studies of economic behaviour. Animals’ economy - a model of human economy. 

Recommended Background

The course introduces an interdisciplinary perspective on economic choice behaviour. We are looking for students who want to go the extra mile in understanding decision making from a biological perspective; eager to learn more about how neuroscience can revolutionize economics. The course is relevant for students from economics, business administration,  neuroscience, psychology and the social sciences in general.

Suggested Readings

Although the lectures are designed to be self-contained, we recommend (but do not require) that students refer to the books:

•         selected chapters from the Handbook of “Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain”  by Paul Glimcher et al. (2008 or 2013).

•         selected chapters from handbooks on anatomy and brain imaging methods

•         journal articles in neuroeconomics, selected for their clarity and accessibility

Course Format

This is a 9-week course. Every week we will release 4 to 6 video lectures, about 10 minutes each, lecture notes and after lecture quizzes. All after lecture quizzes are to be submitted through the courese web site and will be graded automatically. During the course, you will be asked to participate in discussions.

FAQ

1. Will I get a Statement of Accomplishment after completing this class?

Yes. Students who successfully complete the class will receive a Statement of Accomplishment signed by the instructor.

2. What is the coolest thing I'll learn if I take this class?

You will get an opportunity to dramatically change your view on mechanisms of human choices. Furthermore, you will join a new provocative society of leading scientists combining neuroscience, economics and psychology to build a revolutionary theory of human behavior.

Massive open online courses seem to be marching towards total world domination like some kind of educational singularity (at least in the case of Coursera). At the same time, there are still relatively few courses available, and each new added course is a small happening in the growing MOOC community.

Needless to say, this seems like a perfect opportunity for SI and CFAR to advance their goals via this new education medium. Some people seem to have already seen the potential and taken advantage of it:

One interesting trend that can be seen is companies offering MOOCs to increase the adoption of their tools/technologies. We have seem this with 10gen offering Mongo courses and to a lesser extent with Coursera’s ‘Functional Programming in Scala’ taught by Martin Odersky

(from the above link to the Class Central Blog)

So the question is, are there any online courses already planned by CFAR and/or SI? And if not, when will it happen?

Edit: This is not a "yes or no" question, albeit formulated as one. I've searched the archives and did not find any mention of MOOCs as a potentially crucial device for spreading our views. If any such courses are already being developed or at least planned, I'll be happy to move this post to the open thread, as some have requested, or delete it entirely. If not, please view this as a request for discussion and brainstorming.

P.S.: Sorry, I don't have the time to write a good article on this topic.

Coursera has an upcoming course on critical thinking called "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue". A bunch of the locals here in Columbus will be taking it, and I thought some other LWers might also be interested. If you decide to sign up, let us know, and we might get a discussion group going, or something.

Linky: https://www.coursera.org/course/thinkagain 

Some info from the website:

About the Course: 

Reasoning is important.  This course will teach you how to do it well.  You will learn some simple but vital rules to follow in thinking about any topic at all and some common and tempting mistakes to avoid in reasoning.  We will discuss how to identify, analyze, and evaluate arguments by other people (including politicians, used car salesmen, and teachers) and how to construct arguments of your own in order to help you decide what to believe or what to do. These skills will be useful in dealing with whatever matters most to you.

Course Syllabus

Week One: How to Spot an Argument (and separate it from surrounding verbiage)

Week Two: How to Untangle an Argument (or break it into parts and tell what different parts are doing)

Week Three: How to Reconstruct an Argument (or arrange its parts to show how they are connected in a structure) 

Week Four: How to Evaluate an Argument Deductively (or determine whether its conclusion follows validly from its premises) – Part 1: Propositional Logic

Week Five:  How to Evaluate an Argument Deductively (or determine whether its conclusion follows validly from its premises) – Part 2: Quantificational Logic

Week Six: How to Evaluate an Argument Inductively (or assess whether its premises provide enough reason to believe its conclusion) – Part 1: Statistical Generalization and Application

Week Seven: How to Evaluate an Argument Inductively (or assess whether its premises provide enough reason to believe its conclusion) – Part 2: Causal Reasoning

Week Eight:  How to Evaluate an Argument Inductively (or assess whether its premises provide enough reason to believe its conclusion) – Part 3: Probability 

Week Nine:  How to Evaluate an Argument Inductively (or assess whether its premises provide enough reason to believe its conclusion) – Part 4: Decisions

Week Ten: How to Mess Up an Argument (or commit common but tempting fallacies) – Part 1: Vagueness and Ambiguity

Week Eleven: How to Mess Up an Argument (or commit common but tempting fallacies) – Part 2: Irrelevance

Week Twelve: How to Mess Up an Argument (or commit common but tempting fallacies) – Part 3: Vacuity

Maybe it would be worth to have a single summary thread for Coursera (and also other source like Udacity etc.) material. At some future point when the courses are on-line and enough people seen them we could work out a "LW curiculum". Here is my subjective list of particularly intersting courses for LW audience:

A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior
Artificial Intelligence Planning
Automata
Basic Behavioral Neurology
Computer Science 101
Clinical Problem Solving
Critical Thinking in Global Challenges
Data Analysis
Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World
Game Theory
Human-Computer Interaction
Introduction to Genetics and Evolution
Introduction to Genome Science
Introduction to Mathematical Thinking
Machine Learning
Microeconomics Principles
Model Thinking
Nanotechnology: The Basics
Networked Life
Networks: Friends, Money, and Bytes
Neural Networks for Machine Learning
Neuroethics
Principles of Economics for Scientists
Probabilistic Graphical Models
Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation
Rationing and Allocating Scarce Medical Resources
Statistics One
Think Again: How to Reason and Argue

Please note I haven't picked any programming/algorithm courses - there seem to be quite a lot of nice ones. Subscribe here. Plain text list (111 courses):

A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior
A History of the World since 1300
Aboriginal Worldviews and Education
Algorithms, Part I
Algorithms, Part II
Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 1
Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 2
An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python
An Introduction to Operations Management
An Introduction to the U.S. Food System: Perspectives from Public Health
Analytic Combinatorics, Part I
Analytic Combinatorics, Part II
Analytical Chemistry
Artificial Intelligence Planning
Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Automata
Basic Behavioral Neurology
Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach
Calculus: Single Variable
Cardiac Arrest, Hypothermia, and Resuscitation Science
Chemistry: Concept Development and Application
Clinical Problem Solving
Community Change in Public Health
Compilers
Computational Investing, Part I
Computational Photography
Computer Architecture
Computer Science 101
Computer Vision: From 3D Reconstruction to Visual Recognition
Computer Vision: The Fundamentals
Computing for Data Analysis
Contraception: Choices, Culture and Consequences
Control of Mobile Robots
Creative, Serious and Playful Science of Android Apps
Critical Thinking in Global Challenges
Cryptography
Cryptography II
Data Analysis
Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society
Digital Signal Processing
Drugs and the Brain
E-learning and Digital Cultures
Energy 101
Equine Nutrition
Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World
Functional Programming Principles in Scala
Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering
Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application
Fundamentals of Pharmacology
Galaxies and Cosmology
Game Theory
Gamification
Greek and Roman Mythology
Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Businesses, Part I
Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act
Health for All Through Primary Care
Healthcare Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Heterogeneous Parallel Programming
How Things Work 1
Human-Computer Interaction
Information Security and Risk Management in Context
Intermediate Organic Chemistry - Part 1
Intermediate Organic Chemistry - Part 2
Internet History, Technology, and Security
Introduction to Astronomy
Introduction to Finance
Introduction to Genetics and Evolution
Introduction to Genome Science
Introduction to Logic
Introduction to Mathematical Thinking
Introduction to Philosophy
Introduction to Sociology
Introduction to Sustainability
Introduction à la Programmation Objet (in French)
Introductory Human Physiology
Introductory Organic Chemistry - Part 1
Introductory Organic Chemistry - Part 2
Know Thyself
Learn to Program: Crafting Quality Code
Learn to Program: The Fundamentals
Listening to World Music
Machine Learning
Mathematical Biostatistics Bootcamp
Medical Neuroscience
Microeconomics Principles
Model Thinking
Modern & Contemporary American Poetry
Nanotechnology: The Basics
Natural Language Processing
Networked Life
Networks: Friends, Money, and Bytes
Neural Networks for Machine Learning
Neuroethics
Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
Planet Earth
Principles of Economics for Scientists
Principles of Obesity Economics
Probabilistic Graphical Models
Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation
Rationing and Allocating Scarce Medical Resources
Scientific Computing
Securing Digital Democracy
Social Network Analysis
Software Engineering for SaaS
Statistics One
The Modern World: Global History since 1760
The Social Context of Mental Health and Illness
Think Again: How to Reason and Argue
VLSI CAD: Logic to Layout
Vaccine Trials: Methods and Best Practices
Vaccines

"learn about some of the many ways in which people behave in less than rational ways, and how we might overcome these problems."

starts 25 March 2013

cf https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon

see also http://lesswrong.com/lw/d3w/coursera_behavioural_neurology_course/

"develop and enhance your ability to think critically, assess information and develop reasoned arguments in the context of the global challenges facing society today."

starts 28 January 2013

cf https://www.coursera.org/course/criticalthinking

see also http://lesswrong.com/lw/dni/a_beginners_guide_to_irrational_behavior_free/
and http://lesswrong.com/lw/d3w/coursera_behavioural_neurology_course/

Coursera is running a course on behavioural neurology here: https://www.coursera.org/course/neurobehavior

Any LWers that to want the associated study group should visit ##patrickclass on irc.freenode.net or email patrick.robotham2@gmail.com .