Comment author: Persol 01 April 2015 01:17:22AM *  28 points [-]

Perhaps this is already discussed elsewhere and I'm failing at search. I'd be amazed if the below wasn't already pointed out.

On rereading this material it strikes me that this text is effectively inaccessible to large portions of the population. When I binged on these posts several years ago, I was just focused on the content for myself. This time, I had the thought to purchase for some others who would benefit from this material. I realized relatively quickly that the purchase of this book would likely fail to accomplish anything for these people, and may make a future attempt more difficult.

I think many of my specific concerns apply to a large percentage of the population.

  • The preface and introductions appear aimed at return readers. The preface is largely a description of 'oops', which means little to a new reader and is likely to trigger a negative halo effect in people who don't yet know what that means. - "I don't know what he's talking about, and he seems to make lots of writing mistakes."
  • There isn't a 'hook'. Talking about balls in urns in the intro seems too abstract for people. The rest of the sequences have more accessible examples, which most people would never reach.
  • Much of the original rhetoric is still in place. Admittedly that's part of what I liked about the original posts, but I think it limits the audience. As a specific example, a family member is starting high school, likes science, and I think would benefit from this material. However her immediate family is very religious, to the point of 'disowning' a sister when they found out about an abortion ~25 years ago. The existing material uses religion as an example of 'this is bad' frequently enough that my family member would likely be physically isolated from the material and socially isolated from myself. 87% of America (86% global) have some level of belief in religion. The current examples are likely to trigger defensive mechanisms, before they're education about them. (Side-note: 'Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion – by Sam Harris' is a good book, but has this same exact issue.)
  • Terminology is not sufficiently explained for people seeing this material with fresh eyes. As an example, ~15% of the way through 'New Improved Lottery' talks about probability distributions. There was no previous mention of this. Words with specific meanings, that are now often used, are unexplained. 'Quantitative' is used and means something to us, but not to most people. The Kindle provided dictionary and Wikipedia definitions are not very useful. This applies to the chapter titles as well, such as 'Bayesian Judo'.
  • The level of hyperlinks, while useful for us, is not optimal for someone reading a subject for the first time. A new reader would have to switch topics in many cases to understand the reference.
  • References to LessWrong and Overcoming Bias and only make sense to us.

Eliezer and Robb have done a lot to get the material into book state... but it's preaching to the choir.

Specifically what I think would make this more accessible:

  • A more immediate hook along the lines of 'Practicing rationality will help you make more winning decisions and be less wrong.' (IE: keep reading because this=good and doable) Eliezer was prolific enough that I think good paragraphs likely already exist; but need connectors.
  • Where negative examples are likely to dissuade large numbers of people, find better examples. In general avoid mentions of specific politics or religion in general. It's better to boil the frog.
  • Move or remove all early references to Bayes. 'Beliefs that are rational are call Bayesian' means nothing to most people. Later references might as well be technobabble.
  • Make sure other terminology is actually explained/understandable before it's used in the middle of an otherwise straightforward chapter. I'd try 1n & 2n-gramming the contents against Google Ngrams to identify terminology we need to make sure is actually explained/understood before casual use.
  • Get this closer to a 7th grade reading level. This sets a low bar at potential readers who can understand 'blockbuster' books in English. (This might be accomplished purely with the terminology concern/change above)
  • Change all hyperlinks to footnotes.
  • Discuss LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, Eliezer, Hanson in the preface as 'these cool places/people where much of this comes from' but limit the references within the content.

Is there any ongoing attempt or desire to do a group edit of this into an 'Accessible Rationality'?

Comment author: Mister 22 August 2012 12:58:42PM *  3 points [-]

A web community where users gather relevant information/media about recent news

Problem The internet is huge now. Information or media about stories in the news is all around but not always easy to find, especially in one focused area. That video this article mentioned. Those photos that were reported on. That relevant information only people with expertise sits on, that the journalists hasn't found because they have a tight schedule. It's out there, you just don't know it.

Solution A dedicated website where users gather this information from all the corners of the web. A community where everyone focus on finding that photo and enlighten each other.

Progress I've actually created that website.

As an example of how the site works, a user saw an article about french tourists who got suspended jail in Sri Lanka for taking demeaning photos next to a buddha statue. The user then created a "subject" about it, found here: http://upnorthtimes.com/index.php?option=com_categories&view=popularsubjects&layout=subjectdetails&subjectid=248

Later, that user set out to find those photos. After finding them, he created a discussion thread within the subject where he posted the website where they can be found: http://upnorthtimes.com/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=239&id=146&Itemid=267

Now users can see the photos for themselves and lay to rest the question of "wonder how bad those photos were?".

Obstacles We still have a few bugs to sort out. If you visit the site and the page loads everything to the left, just reload it until it loads correctly. There is also the matter of promoting the site correctly. If any of you have a good idea or want to help contribute/spread the site I would be thankful!

Comment author: Persol 22 August 2012 02:57:49PM *  1 point [-]

This is a very good idea. Generally Google or Reddit works for this sort of thing, but focusing on aggregating news only is useful.

Few things:

  • How would you consider monetizing this? The online advertising bubble appears to be shrinking, as people realize minimal returns. For a similar website I've been considering an iP*/Android app, but the return still looks low.

  • Much of this information can be gathered automatically. The website I mentioned above is for an automated new summary generating site... which only works 90% of the time. For what you're doing, simply gathering and listing the information automatically is relatively easy.

  • Is moderation required to scale? I wonder if the topic resolution may not be agreed on for busy topics. Using the example above, one person may find the photos with Buddha. Another may find video of it. You may end up with a video thread, a photo thread and a thread with both. Using another example, at what point is a new Curiosity rover discussion a new 'subject'. If they find little green men I'd expect a new subject... but what if the rover gets flipped upside down? You can let users decide this, but you'll likely end up with users making multiple versions of the same article/subject/thread.

Comment author: supermemofan 21 August 2012 01:10:47AM 6 points [-]

Supermemo has been working on this problem since 1982, and they struggle to make Supermemo popular because it is not "sticky" enough. Basically it involves hard work for future benefit. This is the mental equivalent of "earning an honest living," or "getting rich slowly." We do not live in a world that portrays honest, slow but meaningful progress. We live in a world that is obsessed with instant gratification, and SRS methods go contrary to the river-like "current" of this system. See: http://wiki.supermemo.org/index.php?title=Why_isn'tSuperMemomore_popular%3F Also, the only way I could see SRS hitting massive appeal is if it were designed from the ground up to be a game of some sort where doing flashcard repetitions resulted in progress. I have an idea of how it would work, but I doubt we will see anything like that for the time being.

Comment author: Persol 21 August 2012 06:54:46PM *  2 points [-]

That link (fixed version ) is very accurate. I wish I'd considered the first few points BEFORE programming/advertising the site.

Comment author: thetimpotter 19 August 2012 02:13:44PM 5 points [-]

What if facial recognition technology became food recognition technology? More simple than chipping all food items.

Comment author: Persol 19 August 2012 03:08:49PM 3 points [-]

I was thinking of this same sort of thing for a diet site. Rather than count calories, just photograph your plate with your hand next to it, and have the computer calculate for you.

The main issues I see with doing this in a fridge would be viewing angles and telling the difference between an old carton of OJ and a new carton of OJ.

Comment author: lsparrish 18 August 2012 09:15:41PM *  1 point [-]

Here are some more details as to what I am imagining this would be like:

  • There's a base "currency" (actually, like bitcoin it is not likely to be legally recognized as a recognized currency but a digital commodity that stores value). For demonstration purposes I will refer to it as "bricks" since it is like a gold brick that serves as backing, not as something to buy and sell things with directly (at least at first).
  • There's a mechanism similar to bitcoin where peers (each of which has their own public/private key pair) validate transactions and create hashes of their set of validated transactions. When a hash of a certain minimum difficulty (adjusted to make it take a certain amount of average time) is solved, that is declared as the latest block. To make a long story short, this difficulty is what keeps the peers all playing by the same rules.
  • The rules the peers go by include rules for converting to different "currencies". Again these are just digital commodities on a network that can't be easily spoofed, not legal tender in any particular country. Unlike the bricks, they don't exist in a fixed supply, they can be generated and destroyed in potentially unlimited supply -- however, you have to use bricks to make them, and they can be recycled back into bricks.
  • What exact rules to use is the tricky part. If it is too easy to create more of a currency, you get inflation relative to the real currency's value, whereas if it is too difficult you can't reflect actual inflation. For the system to be useful, the currencies need to track the value of what they represent.

One idea for setting the value would be to implement a trading system where bids and asks are published to the network (just like the transactions are), and currency generation rates are based on successful trades.

To give an idea of how this would work I'll use "bananas" as an example currency. Basically there are two ways to go from brick to banana -- either trade, or convert directly.

If there are a lot of successful trades of bricks to bananas at a relatively higher cost (in bricks), the rule would be to increase the value of bananas by making it cost more bricks to create new bananas. On the other hand if a lot of people are dumping their bananas for lower amounts of bricks that means bananas should cost less in bricks to generate.

The quantity of bricks is conserved, so by recycling bananas you can reclaim the cost of creating them. The amount of bricks you get from recycling is based on how much was expended in creating them, with the most expensive bananas always recycled first. Thus if the price ever drops to generate them, there is likely to be a profit from recycling them. For example, say someone generates 1 banana from 1 brick. That event sits in a queue waiting for someone with a banana to recycle it. Even if the rate changes to 2 bananas per brick and someone else generates 1 banana for .5 brick, the next person to recycle bananas will get back 1 brick. (It doesn't care which banana -- they are fungible with each other.)

This gets interesting when you add other currencies. Suppose we introduce coconuts, which are a worth a lot more than bananas. The system doesn't automatically know this, but the traders do. If people tend to generate and buy coconuts with their bricks at higher rates, this tells the peers and thus the system to increase the cost in bricks to generate coconuts. The result is that bricks become worth more, and people will dump at least some of their bananas -- the entire economy is thus connected.

There may be better ways to do this, but this is just what I have so far. I'd love to hear other ideas of a better way to do it. Can we do away with bids/asks as a rate-setting feature of the system and just base the rate on what people choose to create/recycle over time? I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around it because of inferrential distance issues, but it seems like there is room for simplification there. Also, there is the question of whether we would want to add more bricks to the system over time as a reward for solving blocks (like bitcoin does with their currency), or perhaps reward block-solving in some other way (make it a requirement for generating and recycling currency, for example).

Comment author: Persol 19 August 2012 12:51:38AM 3 points [-]

It seems that the entire idea of currency is to act as a trusted means of recording exchange and debt. Of all the functions of money, which one is being improved by this proposal?

What's actually different between this and Bitcoin? I don't understand what the benefit of having two non-legal currencies instead of just one. The idea of wasting electricity to generate unbacked currency doesn't make sense to me.

Comment author: Shak 18 August 2012 05:35:48AM 1 point [-]

Persol, what traffic generating methods did you use to get those kind of figures?

Comment author: Persol 18 August 2012 12:13:26PM *  2 points [-]

About 75% of the hits came from Google adWords, which was on for about 8 months. Maybe about 10% from search results. I also had a few links from subject specific websites. Average CTR was about 0.25%. Best CTR were ads that mentioned 'flashcards' and 'online'. The best conversion rate (answered a study session question) was 17% with the ad below:

  • Remember Facts
  • Spend less time studying.
  • Remember more material.
  • www.superbrain.me

Graphic/animated ads were a waste of money, but at least I learned how to make animated GIFs.

Comment author: sinak 18 August 2012 02:11:56AM 1 point [-]

Persol, that list of competitors is massively helpful, thank you.

I'd love to hear more about your experiences, and to get a better of idea of exactly what you had built. I think what I have in mind is a more mass-audience version of SRS (see my response to Micaiah above) rather than a more traditional Anki-type system.

I'd love to know how you were monetizing the service, and if there are any screenshots of what the site looked like. Did you offer a mobile application? Did you try to push people to engage via push notifications at all? I think this is definitely a core part of a strategy that I'd push for. I think "gamifying" is also an interesting route, need to think about this angle a little more carefully though.

Comment author: Persol 18 August 2012 03:22:22AM *  3 points [-]

Here's the actual PHP code, weighing in at 18Mb. It's probably the best way to get a feel for what it was, and it might help you decide what to do.

It includes:

  • most of the site code - This code is from about a month before I moved onto a more rewarding project, but it's the last full set I have.
  • automatic stylesheets/icons for iPhone and Android (not an application, but did create an icon on the home screen)
  • a bunch of draft banner ads - the animated GIFs summarize how the site worked
  • a research folder with information on SRS publications
  • screenshots of other SRS engines

* This version may not have the correct repetition calculation. Due to the inherent time factor, it was a hassle to test, so I didn't fix that part of the code until later. *

It was admittedly an ugly (but fast loading) site. After a few weeks of cheap banner ads and seeing the minimal reuse, I just set it to coast until the year ran out.

I did do some A/B testing with email notifications about a month in. It didn't have a measurable effect of return use.

Monetization was via banner ads. Via A/B testing, the best location for the ad was under the card's question. Once flipping the card, the ad was hidden. I also deactivated the ads for awhile too see if they were too intrusive; return visitors didn't improve.

I also incorporated graphics and audio, since the most successful SRS systems seem to revolve around vocabulary. I personally used it to help learn basic Mandarin for use with my in-laws... but it is a boring way of learning a language. While it is much more effective than Rosetta Stone, it is very difficult to stay engaged.

"Remember what you read" If you take a look at a newer version of SuperMemo, it has this feature.

Comment author: gwern 18 August 2012 01:33:21AM 3 points [-]

As guessed, the problem is that I couldn't get people to start forming it as a habit. There is no immediate payback. Less than 20 people out of 2000 did more than one session.

Wow. You did a spaced repetition site which had 4000 people try, 2000 finish a session, and <20 return for a second review session?

Comment author: Persol 18 August 2012 02:43:42AM *  3 points [-]

Sorry, typo. ~4000 people finished a session. Many more 'tried' than 4000... I just couldn't determine which users were bots that registered randomly vs users that didn't finish the first session.

  • Tried: lots (but unknown)
  • Finished 1 session: ~4000
  • Finished >1 session: ~20
Comment author: Micaiah_Chang 17 August 2012 12:56:05AM 6 points [-]

I imagine this would be very hard to monetize and get customers as-is. The below is merely a brief list of problems that I've thought about

The average user needs to be sold on the effectiveness of a product very fast, on the first usage (or perhaps even sooner!) in order for them to continue using. However, SRS software in general are almost by definition antithetical to that goal: Their benefits do not come until far into the future, worse still it's an undefined time in the future. Sure you can use arguments about the benefits of SRS and the psychology of memory and <insert gwern.net FAQ here>, but it would appear to be an uphill battle to make the benefits immediately relevant and immediately relevant to the people who wouldn't already be using Anki and other free equivalents.

In addition, before you can even start using the product as advertised, you have to learn how to make cards that are easy to memorize or download a deck which is already well made. The first is "Wait so you want me to learn all these tiny rules before I can even start learning? <browser back button>". The second presents a chicken-and-egg problem. How are you going to have high quality decks that teach things? By having users! How are you going to get users? By having high qual- oh, darn.

It would appear that your general idea is going in the right direction; to make the best SRS program as painless as possible and to extend it to be more powerful. Your emphasis though, would appear to be more oriented toward existing power users of SRS. So there's the matter of getting them to switch which... I have no idea how hard that would be. (Sample size of two; you'd obviously build something you'd want to use; I'd jump on board instantly if I could transfer my existing Anki decks).

One possible solution to the adoption is to piggyback it on an existing service; if users get to use it as an additional option on something they already use habitually then getting consistent usage wouldn't be as much of a problem. I believe Khan Academy has expressed interest in including SRS in there. Another is to try and "gamify" it (argh I hate that word) by either making the entire application a sort of game or incorporating cow clicker like features in there to get the user hooked (IT'S NOT EVIL IF THE ADDICTION IS GOOD).

The making your own decks feature can be mostly hidden from the normal user, with a gradual introduction to it as they use the product more (paid feature?). As for having high quality decks; you can try porting the entire Anki library of downloadable decks, filter them in some way and use that to bootstrap up to a much higher standard of quality.

Of course, any and all advice here means absolutely jack compared to the behavior of actual users; release a minimal version, see who bites and check to see what the users complain about before even thinking about what I said here. Making money is and should probably be a distant 4th or 5th consideration behind making a product that you would use and making it easily extensible.

Comment author: Persol 17 August 2012 01:29:20PM *  7 points [-]

I think Micaiah_Chang mostly nailed this. I actually wrote a site that did this a few months ago. I had about 4000 users who had actually gone through a complete session.

it would appear to be an uphill battle to make the benefits immediately relevant

As guessed, the problem is that I couldn't get people to start forming it as a habit. There is no immediate payback. Less than 20 people out of 4000 did more than one session.

you have to learn how to make cards that are easy to memorize or download a deck which is already well made

This one is easily solved. The Anki decks have a (weak) rating system, and allowing people to import anki decks was easy.

Additionally, there are at least 18 competitors. Here's the list I made at the time. Very few seem to be successful.

I shut the site down about a month ago. There are numerous free competitors which don't have any great annoyances. I wouldn't suggest starting another of these sites unless you figured out an effective way to "gamify" it.

Comment author: Persol 16 August 2011 07:54:03PM 1 point [-]

In an effort to learn Mandarin, I started to use Anki. At the time the android app kept crashing. (Reviews seem to say it's better now.) I also had a doubt that the current two variable algorithm is actually optimal.

So I set up a webpage with a mobile interface that lets you import decks and study using a variation of SuperMemo's SM-2 algorithm. It has a small Gaussian randomness built into the easiness factor (decay constant). This might help determine if the algorithm should change.

I'm also worked on a way of sorting a language corpus. If you have sentences translated into another language, it's not useful to have a long sentence presented, when you don't know ANY of the vocabulary. Effectively, the algorithm runs through the items and sorts the items so that the challenge/novelty is fairly constant; the number of new words is distributed evenly over the entire set. As you might guess, this is iterative and still processor intensive... so I need to optimize it some more before letting web users run that function.

The other function still in the pipeline is a 'remember on but not after' deadline. I think this would only be useful for students, who need to remember something for testing, but can then forget it and use the internet if it ever comes up again.

Anyway, if interested: http://www.superbrain.me

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