lambdaloop comments on Cognito Mentoring: An advising service for intellectually curious students - LessWrong

57 Post author: JonahSinick 31 December 2013 10:03PM

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Comment author: lambdaloop 03 January 2014 08:29:16PM *  8 points [-]

I agree that at first glance, it may seem like advertising, but it is different in quite a few ways:

  • The service Jonah and Vipul offer is free. They are doing this for the benefit of the community, not for themselves.
  • Jonah and Vipul seem well qualified to actually advise people.
  • This is in the spirit of self-study and improvement that perpetuates Less Wrong.

Really, I see nothing wrong with offering rational advising on a site that aims to improve human rationality.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 03 January 2014 11:13:37PM 3 points [-]

Ah, I completely missed the "free" part and assumed this was extremely expensive for some reason.

Comment author: JonahSinick 05 January 2014 09:47:04PM 0 points [-]

See my response to lambdaloop.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 06 January 2014 01:35:36AM -1 points [-]

So it is just random advertising that doesn't belong here?

Comment author: JonahSinick 06 January 2014 02:05:36AM 2 points [-]

We posted here because we're working to provide a service to a niche market that many Less Wrongers belong to.

Comment author: VipulNaik 06 January 2014 02:14:29AM 1 point [-]

To add to Jonah's point, we believe that our advice will use and promote ideals of applied rationality. We often refer to LessWrong blog posts and ideas in our advice, and we've pointed some of our advisees (who came from other sources) to the LessWrong site. So, both ex post and ex ante, our advising work is of potential interest to LessWrong.

Comment author: JonahSinick 05 January 2014 09:46:41PM 2 points [-]

Regarding:

The service Jonah and Vipul offer is free. They are doing this for the benefit of the community, not for themselves.

Our offer of free personal advising is for a limited time only. We would like to work on the advising service full time, and so will be charging for our services at some point in the future. Before doing so, we're offering free advising to gain feedback on our service in order to ensure that it's worth the money. We do plan on producing free, openly accessible information: we're writing up our research findings on a wiki which we'll be making public.

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