A great way to reduce the cost of college is to take summer courses at a cheap college near home and use the credits to graduate early.

Smarthinking pays about $12/hr for online tutoring work, done from home. For English, this implies reading essays of high school and college students and sending feedback according to highly standardized procedures that they train you in. ("Your essay should open with a thesis statement", etc.) They also do math, science and computer tutoring, but I know less about how they work. You choose how many hours a week you want to work and which hours (e.g., Monday 10-4) but they have to be the same each week (you are allowed skip some occasionally and just not get paid from them).

With 20 hrs/week it would only give about half of your targeted income, which might be too far. But if you think you'd find tutoring easy/fun and have problems finding customers out on your own (which would obviously pay more), you might give it or another company like it a try. (ETA: I think the company keeps for itself half of what the students pay, and certainly hiring a personal tutor must be more expensive than paying for anonymous, standardized online feedback. So getting a few students to hire you for personal lessons might give you enough to get close to your target. You would have to save for the summer though.)

Not to mention that certain people might be good at teaching but bad at shooting. (Wild-ass speculation here -- I've never fired a real gun and I have no idea if it's something almost everyone could learn to do decently.)

easier to maintain discipline (to keep the class quiet and make sure everyone is really doing the exercises)? I think both these effects are helpful

I realize and confess that my sentiments are unusual, that my thinking on this subject is grossly distorted by ideology and therefore not to be trusted, and that I don't myself know how to set up a learning environment that will actually work for actual children, but I must beg the community's forgiveness, because I want to say this anyway: I think this ideal of "discipline" causes tremendous harm (which of course I understand is not to say that it doesn't also have benefits, but those benefits are not the subject of this comment). I consider it a monstrous tragedy that so many millions of people grow up (as I grew up) without any conceptual distinction between learning important things and being enrolled in a school and obeying the commands of the designated "teacher", with no idea of there being a difference between morality and obedience.

Personally, I've mostly recovered from this phenomenon to my satisfaction. I now have an explicit notion that it is morally righteous to learn great ideas and train useful skills, and some experience of the pleasures and satisfactions to be had from these endeavors---which is not to boast that I'm doing well; I would never be so delusionally arrogant as to think that I'm doing well---but I think I'm doing far better than I was before I learned these ideas. It certainly seems so when I contrast myself to my fellow undergraduate students. Last semester at community college, I witnessed a student passionately arguing with an instructor that surely his paper deserved an A- rather than a B+. (I'm given to understand this is not an uncommon occurrence.) I imagine there are many who would take such incidents as evidence that there's not nearly enough discipline in "our" schools: how insolent of a mere student to argue with an instructor! I, however, draw a different moral. I wanted to cry out to the student: Don't you see how silly this is? Your work, your creation is already good or already bad, no matter what letter the instructor writes on it afterwards! But perhaps it was I who was being silly. The student, of course, didn't care about good writing; he just wanted to get into the University of California at Berkeley. That was the highest goal he had been trained to aspire to, from the days when his elementary-school caretakers rewarded him for being quiet and doing what all the other children were doing. Again, I do not claim that I know how society should be organized; any particular reform or revolution I might propose could very well just make things worse. But can I at least say that it's sad to see entire generations of human minds systematically crippled in this way?---because it's sad.

[Slightly edited from original version]

The original post mentions some techniques for getting people to avoid rationalizing once they've realized they're doing it, but an earlier step is to get them to realize that they're doing it.

The key to this may be that a person who is rationalizing without realizing it is arguing with him/herself without realizing it, since it's easier to recognize (and to accept) that you're arguing than that you're rationalizing. Accordingly, getting people to realize that they're rationalizing would involve getting them to realize that they're the one that they're arguing with.

The 5-second-level goal would be simply to get them to realize that they're arguing, if that itself is an issue. The next step, getting them to recognize that they're arguing with themselves, would take longer for some people.

(Rationalizing can be distinguished from people who are arguing honestly with themselves in that a rationalizer cares which "one of them" wins, and the non-rationalizer doesn't.)

Step one: recognizing that you're arguing:

If this is an issue, the question to ask is whether the potential rationalizer is thinking about reasons. If you're thinking of reasons, you're mentally arguing with someone. When you want to get a glass of water, you generally don't think about any reasons why you should or shouldn't. When you want to get a soda or a cup of coffee, though, you might about reasons relating to the cost and/or health of the beverage. If so, you're arguing, whether with yourself, or with a mental representation of a friend who suggested drinking less soda/coffee, or whoever.

Step two: determining who you're arguing with:

This step would work best as a series of questions. First, who do you think you're arguing with? Is it a specific person? Is it a hypothetical person?

Why does this person disagree with you? What alternative position do they take, and why that one? What kind of person is it that you're arguing with?

What exactly are this person's arguments, that you're arguing against?

How much do you want to win the argument with this person? Why?

Any suggestions on other questions it would be good to ask in Step two? Personally, I tend to notice it if I'm rationalizing, so I'm not entirely sure how someone who doesn't notice would respond to these questions.

The original post mentions some techniques for getting people to avoid rationalizing once they've realized they're doing it, but an earlier step is to get them to realize that they're doing it.

The key to this may be that a person who is rationalizing without realizing it is arguing with him/herself without realizing it, since it's easier to recognize (and to accept) that you're arguing than that you're rationalizing. Accordingly, getting people to realize that they're rationalizing would involve getting them to realize that they're the one that they're arguing with.

The 5-second-level goal would be simply to get them to realize that they're arguing, if that itself is an issue. The next step, getting them to recognize that they're arguing with themselves, would take longer for some people.

(Rationalizing can be distinguished from people who are arguing honestly with themselves in that a rationalizer cares which "one of them" wins, and the non-rationalizer doesn't.)

Step one: recognizing that you're arguing:

If this is an issue, the question to ask is whether the potential rationalizer is thinking about reasons. If you're thinking of reasons, you're mentally arguing with someone. When you want to get a glass of water, you generally don't think about any reasons why you should or shouldn't. When you want to get a soda or a cup of coffee, though, you might about reasons relating to the cost and/or health of the beverage. If so, you're arguing, whether with yourself, or with a mental representation of a friend who suggested drinking less soda/coffee, or whoever.

Step two: determining who you're arguing with:

This step would work best as a series of questions. First, who do you think you're arguing with? Is it a specific person? Is it a hypothetical person?

Why does this person disagree with you? What alternative position do they take, and why that one? What kind of person is it that you're arguing with?

What exactly are this person's arguments, that you're arguing against?

How much do you want to win the argument with this person? Why?

Any suggestions on other questions it would be good to ask in Step two? Personally, I tend to notice it if I'm rationalizing, so I'm not entirely sure how someone who doesn't notice would respond to these questions.

Another thing worth mentioning: a carpet (depending on what the floor currently looks like). I have no particular thoughts on throw rugs, but if your floor is ugly and/or doesn't match what you're doing with the room, it'll make a huge difference to cover it with an as-close-to-wall-to-wall carpet as you can.

My last apartment had ugly tiles of the kind I associate with basements, and the rooms basically looked like rooms of some kind that had furniture in them. My current apartment is carpeted, and -- with the same furniture and mostly the same artwork -- it looks like a home.

Beating compartmentalization is almost an impossible mandate. My exercise already calls for people to think of specific things they did recently in their lives. I doubt many exercises can do better than that.

In terms of application, I think people are already massively curious about who they are and how they fit in (and this might apply especially strongly to people who aren't the sort to read LW). Just improving folks' self-evaluations could be seen as a pretty big benefit.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/8gv/the_curse_of_identity/

Giving participants two different Big Five tests, and only telling them to think of specific examples on the second one, could work well. But it also opens the door to an underwhelming conclusion if people's abstract self-evaluations actually do tend to be fairly accurate.

Beating compartmentalization is almost an impossible mandate. My exercise already calls for people to think of specific things they did recently in their lives. I doubt many exercises can do better than that.

In terms of application, I think people are already massively curious about who they are and how they fit in (and this might apply especially strongly to people who aren't the sort to read LW). Just improving folks' self-evaluations could be seen as a pretty big benefit.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/8gv/the_curse_of_identity/

Giving participants two different Big Five tests, and only telling them to think of specific examples on the second one, could work well. But it also opens the door to an underwhelming conclusion if people's abstract self-evaluations actually do tend to be fairly accurate.

"Read through the comments, gather the LessWrong usernames of everyone who made a suggestion we tried or adopted, and email the list to Luke"

It's pretty easy to just let Luke do everything isn't it? (No snark meant; I noticed this tendency in myself when we were housemates and started actively trying to fight it.)

Exercise

It seems possible that when people take personality tests, they just write down their perceptions of themselves. A much better way would be to think of specific examples (of times when they were on time or late for an appointment, for instance). Maybe if you got people to tally up specific examples, they would get a result the genuinely surprised them. Instructing people to search for examples in a way that didn't favor their preconceptions could improve results even more.

Reasons this idea could be good: personality tests are inherently interesting, and they are a fairly emotionally neutral discussion topic that doesn't risk excluding anyone. (If you started asking folks to brainstorm reasons why they were or were not a diligent employee, you might run into some problems.) You could even brand it as being an unusually accurate way to administrate a personality test.

Phil Goetz on personality tests:

[The main advantage of Myers-Briggs] is that it manages to classify people without insulting them. (This is accomplished by confounding dimensions: Instead of measuring one property of personality along one dimension, which leads to some scores being considered better than others, you subtract a measurement along one desirable property of personality from a measurement along another desirable property of personality, and call the result one dimension.)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/14x/the_machine_learning_personality_test/

This is a point against my idea if all the scientifically validated classification systems, like the Big Five, run the risk of insulting people.