Comment on How about testing our ideas?

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 14:55:54 GMT

To Lead You Must Stand Up

A little over a week ago me and two other LWers started doing research on the possibilities of an online rationality class. The goal the project is to have an official proposal as well as a beta version ready in a few months. Besides this hopefully helping spread friendly memes and giving publicity, we aim to figure out if this can be used as a tool to make progress on the difficult problems of teaching and measuring rationality. Best way to figure it out is to try and use it that way as we iterate.

I name dropped the proposal in the OP but since we started so recently it felt odd writing an article about that first.

Third, why try to train citizen scientists when we could make better use of specialist scientists? Gary Drescher posted here, but hasn't in over a year. What would make LW valuable enough to him for him to post here? XiXiDu managed to attract the attention of some experts in AI. What would make LW valuable enough to them for them to post here?

I kind of meant this under "attracting the right crowd" but I should have made it explicit.

But I don't see you addressing the engineering problems with moving from one culture to the other, instead of just signalling that you would prefer the other culture.

The reason for this is that I'm unsure how to do this and didn't want to get people locked into my plan to change it. Also I hoped "come up with stuff that needs testing!" would show me if I was wrong or not on the insufficient emphasis on empiricism in the community.

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