their work with CFAR seems to me to have been a solid bet at the time

Can you point me to the work they did with CFAR?

Hello everyone,

This is a reminder that we will be meeting coming Sunday, 11th Sept,2022 for the ACX Meetups Everywhere. Here is a rough agenda for the meetup:

• Greetings and Introductions.
• For potential newcomers, we will try to provide a bird’s eye view of the “rationality landscape”.
• Brief background of the fledgling rationality meetup in Hyderabad that meets almost every week.
• Share your favorite SSC/ACX/Lesswrong post (optional).
• Optional reading for discussion (it’s totally ok if you don’t find time to read it, I will summarise the post) : A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures
• If time permits, we might also do an “applied rationality” activity (source: https://www.rationality.org/files/CFAR_Handbook_2021-01.pdf).

Note #1: Food and beverages will be on the house (feel free to bring a friend who might be interested in learning about the rationality landscape).

Note #2:  Signal Link for the existing rationality meetup where we share useful links and chat about rationality stuff.

I look forward to meeting everyone! 

Vatsal

>so I settled on about 5 weeks, this experiment ran from: 27 December 2021 through 02 January 2022

I am assuming you meant 2nd Feb. 

>The final part there is key - if the student leaves with a good understanding of the ideas in the abstract, but no idea when to think about the ideas again, it’s no better than if they’d learned nothing at all. 

Hard disagree.  As you will agree, learning about the world is also supposed to bring excitement and pure joy. That enjoyment doesn't have to always translate into a conscious idea about revisiting the topic again. I have taken a few lectures where my small audience was fully engaged, asking questions and definitely enjoyed their time. But I doubt the subject matter was of direct relevance to most of them in their regular working life. They may occasionally think about it but doubt it's much.  Does that mean those lectures were a complete waste of time for them? I don't think so. Just because those lectures didn't fundamentally change their thinking doesn't mean they were useless.  And I assure you that these people were "people who genuinely want to learn and be there". 

Thank you for writing this, lots of useful advice and ideas to think about. 

You are probably right about that. But I wanted to start with something and with the first cohort, decided to simply follow the format that most clubs/courses follow on hyperlink (I should say though that I do have some feedback mechanisms in mind).  And it is planned as just an "introduction" to some of these ideas. 

You already mentioned spending more time on fewer topics. Do you have any other ideas in mind in terms of formats that would have the potential to work online? 

 What's the goal of your course why do you think your course will have that effect?

I am less interested in experiments in courses that copy CFAR material and more into experiments that discuss, co-learn and tinker with the ideas that CFAR teaches in their workshop. So initially the "goals" of such experiments will be unclear other than learning if there are ways to extract something useful (online and at a larger scale) out of applied rationality"ideas discussed/authored at CFAR and lesswrong. 

That's the 2019 one, latest is here.

CFAR has put in so much thought/work into creating those workshops in Berkeley for Applied Rationality. Why aren't there any experiments in doing online workshops/discussions/co-learning spaces for the content available in CFAR handbooks? 

Is there any interest among lesswrong members to do online meetups or clubs centered around the content (including other similar ideas posted on lesswrong) in the CFAR handbook?  I am curious about the mediums that will allow teaching/learning of such ideas on a larger scale.  

I started one such experiment on hyperlink academy (new platform for testing rare course/club ideas) but not sure yet if it is the right way to go.  Very interested in finding out what fellow lesswrongers think about this. 

Were you able to finish Part2? Is there a draft somewhere? Curious and unable to find.