If I were in London, or even within an hour or two of it, I would try to go to this.

"May your plans come to fruition"

I used to say that more when leaving megameetups or going on a trip or something. It has the disadvantage that you can't say it very fast.

I also want a word/phrase that expresses sympathy but isn't "sorry".

Entirely agreed. Even if you more often than not get the same answers from fMRI and surveys, the fMRI externalizes the judgment of whether or not someone is empathizing/emotional/cognitive stating with regards to something else.

One might argue that we probably have a decent understanding of how well people's verbal statements line up with different facts, but where this diverges from the neurological reality is interesting enough to be spending money on the chance of finding the discrepancies. If we don't find them, that's also fascinating, and is worth knowing about.

Taking for granted that what people say about themselves is accurate, but externalized measurement is also worthwhile for it's own sake.

I think it would probably be worth going into a bit more about what delineates tacit rationality from tacit knowledge. Rationality seems to me to apply to things that you can reflect about, and so the concept of things that you can reflect about but can't necessarily articulate seems weird.

For instance, at first it wasn't clear to me that working at a startup would give you any rationality-related skills except insofar as it gives you instrumental rationality skills, which could possibly just be explained as better tacit knowledge -- you know a bajillion more things about the actual details necessary to run a business and make things happening.

There's actually a ton of non-tacit knowledge potential powerups from running a startup though! That probably even engage reflection!

For instance, a person could learn what it feels like when they're about to be too tired to work for the rest of the day, and learn to stop before then so that they could avoid burnout. This would be a reflective skill (noticing a particular sensation of tiredness), and yet it would be nigh impossible to articulate (can you describe what it feels like to almost be unable to work well enough that I can detect it in myself?).

When evaluating the relationship between success and rationality it seems worth keeping in mind survivorship bias.

An interesting case is that Will Smith seems likely to be explicitly rational in a way that other people in entertainment don't talk about -- he'll plan and reflect on various movie-related strategies so that he can get progressively better roles and box office receipts.

For instance, before he started acting in movies, he and his agent thought about what top-grossing movies all had in common, and then he focused on getting roles in those kinds of movies.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1689234,00.html

Marginal effort within the bounds of a consulting agency offering a service "tailored" to each school district.

I think the hard part of refitting the model would probably just be getting access to the data -- beyond that it seems like a statistician or programmer would be able to just tell a computer how to minimize some appropriate cost function.

Something like most of the marginal effort is devoted to gathering the data, which presumably doesn't require that much expertise relative to understanding the model in the first place.

Maybe slightly vary the parameters to make the model "new"? Like, fit it to data from that district, and it will probably be slightly different from "other" models.

Has anyone published data on the effectiveness of Bayesian prediction models as an educational intervention? It seems like that would be very helpful in terms of being able to convince school districts to give them a shot.

We've relocated to Sever 105.