Related idea: semi-computerized instruction.
To the best of my (limited) knowledge, while there are currently various computerized exercises available, they aren't that good at offering instruction of the "I don't understand why this step works" kind, and are often pretty limited (e.g. Khan Academy has exercises which are just multiple choice questions, which isn't a very good bad format). One could try to offer a more sophisticated system - first, present experienced teachers/tutors with a collection of the problems you'll be giving to the students, and ask them to list the most common problems and misunderstandings that the students tend to have with such problems. Then attempt to build a system which will recognize the symptoms of the most common misunderstandings and attempt to provide advice on them, also offering the student the opportunity to ask it themselves using some menu system or natural language parser. (I know some existing academic work along these lines exists, I think applying Bayes nets to build up a model of the students' skills and understanding, but I couldn't find the reference in the place where I thought that I had read it.)
Of course, there will frequently be situations where your existing database fails to understand the student's need. So you combine this with the chance to ask help online, either on a forum with other students, or one-on-one with a paid tutor in an interactive chat session. As the students' problems are resolved, the maintainers follow the conversations and figure out a way for the system to recognize the new problems in the future, either automatically or via the "ask a question" menus.
In particular, the system would be built so that having e.g. forgotten some of the prerequisites in a previous course wouldn't be a problem - if that happened, the system would just automatically lead you to partially rehearse those concepts enough that you could apply them to solve the current problem. At the same time, it could be designed that all of the previous knowledge was being constantly drawn upon, thus providing a natural method for spaced repetition.
This method is naturally most suited for math-like subjects with clear right/wrong answers. But if one wanted to get really ambitious, they could eventually expand the system so as to create a single unified school course that taught everything that's usually taught in high school, abandoning the artificial limits between subjects. E.g. a lesson during which you traveled back in time to witness an important battle (history), helped calculate the cannon ball trajectories for one of the sides (physics), stopped to study a wounded soldier and the effects of the wounds on his body (human biology), and then finally helped the army band play the victory song (music)... or something along those lines. Ideally, there'd be little difference between taking a school lesson and playing a good computer game.
This method is naturally most suited for math-like subjects with clear right/wrong answers.
Having worked with online homework systems in mathematics for the past three years, let me say a thing -- even in mathematics, there are only clear right/wrong answers in trivial cases. It may be mostly anecdotal, but there is weak evidence that the written correspondence between professor and student that manually-graded homework provides is important to the learning process in mathematics.
In general I'm heavily skeptical of gamification.
SUMMARY: Let's collect people who want to work on for-profit companies that have significant positive impacts on many people's lives.
Google provides a huge service to the world - efficient search of a vast amount of data. I would really like to see more for-profit businesses like Google, especially in underserved areas like those explored by non-profits GiveWell, Singularity Institute and CFAR. GiveWell is a nonprofit that is both working toward making humanity better, and thinking about leverage. Instead of hacking away at one branch of the problem of effective charity by working on one avenue for helping people, they've taken it meta. They're providing a huge service by helping people choose non-profits to donate to that give the most bang for your buck, and they're giving the non-profits feedback on how they can improve. I would love to see more problems taken meta like that, where people invest in high leverage things.
Beyond these non-profits, I think there is a huge amount of low-hanging fruit for creating businesses that create a lot of good for humanity and make money. For-profit businesses that pay their employees and investors well have the advantage that they can entice very successful and comfortable people away from other jobs that are less beneficial to humanity. Unlike non-profits where people are often trying to scrape by, doing the good of their hearts, people doing for-profits can live easy lives with luxurious self care while improving the world at the same time.
It's all well and good to appeal to altruistic motives, but a lot more people can be mobilzed if they don't have to sacrifice their own comfort. I have learned a great deal about this from Jesse and Sharla at Rejuvenate. They train coaches and holistic practitioners in sales and marketing - enabling thousands of people to start businesses who are doing the sorts of things that advance their mission. They do this while also being multi-millionaires themselves, and maintaining a very comfortable lifestyle, taking the time for self-care and relaxation to recharge from long workdays.
Less Wrong is read by thousands of people, many of whom are brilliant and talented. In addition, Less Wrong readers include people who are interested in the future of the world and think about the big picture. They think about things like AI and the vast positive and negative consequences it could have. In general, they consider possibilities that are outside of their immediate sensory experience.
I've run into a lot of people in this community with some really cool, unique, and interesting ideas, for high-impact ways to improve the world. I've also run into a lot of talent in this community, and I have concluded that we have the resources to implement a lot of these same ideas.
Thus, I am opening up this post as a discussion for these possibilities. I believe that we can share and refine them on this blog, and that there are talented people who will execute them if we come up with something good. For instance, I have run into countless programmers who would love to be working on something more inspiring than what they're doing now. I've also personally talked to several smart organizational leader types, such as Jolly and Evelyn, who are interested in helping with and/or leading inspiring projects And that's only the people I've met personally; I know there are a lot more folks like that, and people with talents and resources that haven't even occurred to me, who are going to be reading this.
Topics to consider when examining an idea:
An example idea from Reichart Von Wolfsheild:
A project to document the best advice we can muster into a single tome. It would inherently be something dynamic, that would grow and cover the topics important to humans that they normally seek refuge and comfort for in religion. A "bible" of sorts for the critical mind.
Before things like wikis, this was a difficult problem to take on. But, that has changed, and the best information we have available can in fact be filtered for, and simplified. The trick now, is to organize it in a way that helps humans. which is not how most information is organized.
Collaboration
Finally: If this works right, there will be lots of information flying around. Check out the organization thread and the wiki.