Effective Rationality Training Online
post by Brendon_Wong · 2013-08-10T01:58:14.667Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 23 commentsContents
Introduction How to create a useful website for self improvement Problems None 23 comments
Article Prerequisite: Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality
Introduction
The goal of this post is to explore the idea of rationality training, feedback and ideas are greatly appreciated.
Less Wrong’s stated mission is to help people become more rational, and it has made progress toward that goal. Members read and discuss useful ideas on the internet, get instant feedback because of the voting system, and schedule meetups with other members. Less Wrong also helps attract more people to rationality.
Less Wrong helps with sharing ideas, but it fails to help people put elements of epistemic and instrumental rationality into practice. This is a serious problem, but it would be hard to fix without altering the core functionality of Less Wrong.
Having separate websites for reading and discussing ideas and then actually using those ideas would improve the real world performance of the Less Wrong community while maintaining the idea discussion, “marketing”, and other benefits of the Less Wrong website.
How to create a useful website for self improvement
1. Knowledge Management
When reading blogs, people only see recent posts and those posts are not significantly revised. A wiki would allow for the creation of a large body of organized knowledge that is frequently revised. Each wiki post would have a description, benefits of the topic described, resources to learn the topic, user submitted resources to learn the topic, and reviews of each resource. Posts would be organized hierarchically and voted on for usefulness to help readers effectively improve what they are looking for. Users could share self-improvement plans to help others improve effectiveness in general or in a specific topic as quickly as possible.
2. Effective Learning
Resources to learn topics should be arranged or written for effective skill acquisition, and there may be different resource categories like exercises for deliberate practice or active recall questions for spaced repetition.
3. Quality Contributors
Contributors would, at the very least, need to be familiar with how to write articles that supported the skill acquisition process agreed upon by the entire community. Required writing and research skills would produce higher quality work. I am not sure if being a rationalist would improve the quality of articles.
Problems
1. Difficult requirements
The number of prerequisites necessary to contribute to and use the wiki would really lower the amount of people who will be able to benefit from the wiki. It's a trade off between effectiveness and popularity. What elements should be included to maximize the effectiveness of the website?
2. Interest
There has to be enough interest in the website, or else a different project should be started instead. How many people in the Less Wrong community, and the world at large, would be interested in self improvement and rationality?
3. Increasing the effectiveness of non altruistic people
How much of the target audience wants to improve the world? If most do not, then the wiki would essentially be a net negative on the world. What should the criteria be to view and contribute to the wiki? Perhaps only Less Wrong members should be able to view and edit the wiki, and contributors must read a quick start guide and pass a quick test before being allowed to post.
23 comments
Comments sorted by top scores.
comment by Viliam_Bur · 2013-08-10T14:08:31.653Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Uhm, how about making a LW discussion: "Submit your self-improvement materials, discuss them and vote for them" and then maybe posting the results on LW wiki?
Almost zero overhead and the community is already here.
Replies from: Brendon_Wong, Brendon_Wong↑ comment by Brendon_Wong · 2013-08-10T18:04:49.635Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It seems like people find discussions more rewarding than posting to a wiki. There could be weekly discussions on the many aspects of self improvement, and then those ideas could be posted on a wiki for organization and further updates.
Do you think using a separate wiki is a good idea? It seems like the LW wiki is not being used for collecting self-improvement articles, and a new wiki with a separate purpose, community, and article format might be better. After all, the current wiki is organized only for rationality articles, and changing the layout and article format might cause some conflict and confusion.
↑ comment by Brendon_Wong · 2013-08-10T16:54:55.849Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think the most difficult part is sorting and collecting the texts. Even if you choose a wrong software - if you make a good choice of the material, you can switch to another software later.
Generally, I would recommend using MediaWiki, the software used by Wikipedia. You don't get other software tested by so many users. I have repeated experience with people suggesting using other kinds of wiki, because they have this or that additional feature, only to find out that the main feature - editing pages - is full of bugs. I prefer if the software does one thing and does it well. -- I don't know what those "social networking features" are specifically, but I would guess they don't really add much value to the project. The wiki has talk pages, and you can always install a forum or chat as a separate software.
As a first iteration I would probably do a main page with a list of topics, a page per topic (such as "programming"), and a separate page for each significant material where the main ideas could be summarized.
The difficult part will be collecting the material, describing the material, and protecting the site against vandals or mindkilled people (as self-improvement is often dangerously close to self-delusion).
I may be missing something, how come you did not oppose the idea of a separate website in Instrumental rationality/self help resources?
That LW discussion was basically exactly what you were just suggesting except nothing was posted on the wiki.
I think the issue with those discussions is that there is too much knowledge out there. That discussion had 99 comments, and that was not even a drop in the bucket. Also, there are articles and comments written everyday on self-improvement, and those will all slowly be lost and outdated.
It does not look like the wiki is being used for organizing self-improvement articles. Should I make an announcement telling everyone to do that, or just make a separate wiki? It seems like a separate site with its own purpose, community, rules, organization, and article format would be better than using the LW wiki.
Replies from: ChristianKl↑ comment by ChristianKl · 2013-08-10T18:03:25.822Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
To me it seems that Viliam_Bur is saying roughly the same thing in both examples. You try to do something that's very hard.
In the first case he gave suggestions about how to go about doing it.
In the second case he proposed that you do something more simple instead.
The thing is that you are a newcomer on LessWrong and don't have much cloud in this community to get people to follow you to another website. Given the way you write about the problem you also seem to be naive and don't really know what you are doing.
I wrote the above before going through your posts and finding out that you are 15. Having ambitions at the age of 15 is good. For the time being I think you will probably have more success by doing something within LessWrong than by starting your own instrumental rationality website outside of LessWrong.
I would also suggest to build relationships and do personal development projects together with other people. If you have build those relationships it will be easier to say to people that you know: "Hey, please write an article on X".
Replies from: Viliam_Bur↑ comment by Viliam_Bur · 2013-08-10T20:22:03.022Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It was two weeks ago, so I don't remember my previous reasoning exactly, but your interpretation seems correct, or at least I agree with it now.
My previous reaction was probably based on: "Brendon is spending too much time thinking about the right wiki software, and before people start suggesting exotic solutions, I should quickly jump in and say that in my experience wikis other than MediaWiki are full of bugs." That was the main idea; and the other idea was: "Getting data is the hard part; switching from one wiki to another wiki is trivial compared with that. Get the hard part started as soon as possible."
And today, there is a bit of: "So, two weeks later and Brendon is still talking about the idea... and here is something he could have done instead." -- Sorry for being harsh here; I am actually happy that someone wants to do this. It's just... anything that ever gets done, is started by someone doing it first and hoping that other people will join later. If you wait until you gather people, you will never start. People gather around projects already in motion.
Honestly, I am not sure if LW wiki is a good place for collecting self-improvement materials. Probably not, because they will not have enough evidence behind them, so it will just be: "X thinks this works, Y thinks it doesn't (and here are the results of the LW opinion poll)". But still... if you collect the data on the LW wiki and someone says loudly enough "this doesn't belong here", you just move the data elsewhere. That's the easy problem. The difficult problem is you don't have the data yet, and not even a realistic way to collect it.
So probably a coherent advice would be:
Start a discussion on LW to collect the data; now. In the discussion, create a meta thread with a poll about whether it is a good idea to post results on LW wiki. (Worst case: You will put the results on some other wiki, or on your own blog.)
(Or do something else. But do it. Worst case: you learn from your mistakes, and move to a better plan, but you are not wasting time.)
Replies from: Brendon_Wong, ChristianKl↑ comment by Brendon_Wong · 2013-08-11T06:14:55.836Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thanks for suggesting concrete actions, I'll go ahead and post it ASAP.
Questions before I start (thanks in advance)!
What's better, recommending a resource to improve something or recommending a specific topic to improve with resource suggestions as reply's? Ex. Watch The Blueprint Decoded to learn PUA vs improve PUA and add resources as replies.
What do you mean by collecting data? Do you mean collecting the self-improvement resource suggestions themselves, or opinions/ratings/votes on the suggestions?
What if there are too many comments on the discussion for people to navigate through it? Should I have separate discussions on separate areas of life? Ex. Health, Mind, Finance...
Just to verify, in the comments area of the first discussion asking for self-improvement recommendations, write a comment polling people where to put the data, right?
↑ comment by Viliam_Bur · 2013-08-11T08:31:58.870Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
What's better, recommending a resource to improve something or recommending a specific topic to improve with resource suggestions as reply's?
Not really sure here, but I would probably focus on resources. At least they are more obviously structured (this is one resource, this is another resource) than topics (is this topic a part of that topic? are these two topics related?). Also easier to vote on -- there can be two books on topic, one good and one bad. Voting on topics wouldn't make sense; different people in different situations want to improve on different things. Even the resource-topic relationship is not clear; some resources say: "doing this improves your life in many aspects".
by collecting data? Do you mean collecting the self-improvement resource suggestions themselves, or opinions/ratings/votes on the suggestions?
Collecting the resources which get positive votes. Maximizing the number of resources would be a lost purpose. We can't read them all; the time is precious. We should only read the best ones (and the community vote is a heuristic to find them). But because different people want different things, it would be nice to have a little for everyone.
What if there are too many comments on the discussion for people to navigate through it?
I'd call it success. Really, I am more afraid of the opposite situation: too few people caring enough to comment; because then I wouldn't know what to do. If there are too many comments, you could for example collect the resources and make a poll. Or just start another discussion a month later, where the first comment would contain the poll about the resources recommended in the previous discussion. Or anything else. The big problem is IMHO if people generally endorse the idea, but the discussion is followed by... silence.
Just to verify, in the comments area of the first discussion asking for self-improvement recommendations, write a comment polling people where to put the data, right?
Yeah. I am not sure about the options in the poll; perhaps: "put them in LW wiki", "put them in LW article", "create a new wiki" and "other (explain in a comment)"?
Replies from: Brendon_Wong↑ comment by Brendon_Wong · 2013-08-11T19:48:54.365Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thanks for the clarification.
I'll focus on resources rather than topics, and collect crowd opinion on resources.
I'd call it success. Really, I am more afraid of the opposite situation: too few people caring enough to comment; because then I wouldn't know what to do. If there are too many comments, you could for example collect the resources and make a poll. Or just start another discussion a month later, where the first comment would contain the poll about the resources recommended in the previous discussion. Or anything else. The big problem is IMHO if people generally endorse the idea, but the discussion is followed by... silence.
Remember Instrumental rationality/self help resources, and more recently Proposal: periodic repost of the Best Learning resources? I think the success of those discussions means the idea is already a success. I saw that the post asking for resources became hard to navigate because all the different life categories listed generated too many recommendations. To avoid that, should I start discussions with different life categories every time? Other people have already tested the idea and it is popular, making an effective instrumental rationality resource collection program is the hard part.
How come you suggested a poll to overcome too any comments, and then reposting the discussion? I don't think a poll would solve the too many comments problem because there are simply too many useful things to recommend improving. Many things would be useful. Look at all of lukeprog's social skill resouces! Ask just for social skill resources, dump that in, then throw in another 20 recommendations and even more low impact suggestion and the discussion would be swamped. A poll with so many different resources will just exacerbate the problem.
The only solution I can think of is having many different discussions, each on a separate area of life or even separate categories in one area of life. Whether or not to space it out or just post ~7 discussions at once is the question.
Replies from: Viliam_Bur↑ comment by Viliam_Bur · 2013-08-11T21:48:02.801Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Obviously you put more thoughts to it than I did. Yes, self-help can be a very wide category, a superset of all learning. I was thinking about something more narrow, like changing one's habits or developing social skills.
So... uhm, I don't know. Probably would try to split it to some categories, one per article, and put some time (a few days?) between them, if one category is enough to make a big discussion. Also, giving the specific category may help people remember some material that wouldn't come to mind when thinking about "self-help" in general.
I'd say try the first topic, and you'll see how it goes. Good luck!
↑ comment by ChristianKl · 2013-08-11T02:30:19.566Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's just... anything that ever gets done, is started by someone doing it first and hoping that other people will join later. If you wait until you gather people, you will never start.
Actually no. A lot of communities get started by a person who already gathered enough people to provide an initial seed to get the community rolling. At least that was the general idea of how things work at a community building barcamp I attended.
But we do I believe this task is hard? Look at other projects at general purpose personal development community building:
lifehack.org didn't succeed in creating an active forum despite two attempts to do so. I wasn't directly involved here but someone asked me for recommendation about how to make the second attempt successful a while back.
The productivity stackexchange has relatively low traffic despite being started with people who committed to the project and now existing for quite some time. On area51 there were two personal development proposals. One written by me titled "Lifehack" and the "Productivity" one.
The official quantified self forum where I'm one on the moderators did never got much steam.
Replies from: Viliam_Bur↑ comment by Viliam_Bur · 2013-08-11T08:34:35.636Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The interesting question would be whether in a parallel universe, where these people started by asking people to create a community, they have better results.
Maybe some ideas are unlikely to succeed even if one chooses a good strategy. (Like, a good strategy could increase the probability of success from 1% to 20%, but there is still a big chance to fail.)
Replies from: ChristianKl↑ comment by ChristianKl · 2013-08-11T12:18:18.417Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I don't think that gathering support before starting a community project is the only thing that important.
For a lot of websites split testing reveals that small changes of the website can have a substantial effect on the success of a website.
On Amazon a 100ms delay in the speed in which websites display causes them 1% of their sales. I think it's pretty clear that execution of ideas on the web matters a great deal.
I don't think that questions like the of the rules of the community are straightforward. Does Brendon Wong want to lead it as a benevolent dictator?
By going through his posts I didn't found anything written about personal development expect the fact that he mentioned that he learned speed reading. Learning speed reading is certainly a good sign because that takes deliberate practice but doesn't demostrate that he has the necessary experience to lead such a project. Especially when it comes to excluding people for perusing personal development from a spiritual angle and excluding people who are just there to add links to commerical projects.
Doing something under the header of LessWrong has the advantage of not having to discuss the issue of control of the website.
comment by Vaniver · 2013-08-10T06:44:16.958Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You might be interested in CFAR, which is focused explicitly on the project of rationality skill acquisition.
When reading blogs, people only see recent posts and those posts are not significantly revised.
LW seems to be particularly focused on people reading through old posts, and there are significant link trails, and so on. It's not clear to me that LW has the problem that people only see recent posts.
LW might have the problem that old posts are not significantly revised. This doesn't seem to be the case with collection threads, or example threads; my 4 examples of VoI spawned gwern's 8 examples of VoI, and a similar post with more examples would be likely to get upvotes now. In cases where an explanation of something could be better, it seems more likely that there should be two versions of something, to capture two audiences with systematic differences between them, rather than that one version should be improved to please everyone. If there's a sequence or a post that you think could be rewritten to reach another audience more effectively, try rewriting that post, and be explicit about it. I suspect that would get upvoted.
A wiki would allow for the creation of a large body of organized knowledge that is frequently revised.
We do have a wiki, linked on the sidebar. At present, the wiki mostly has summaries of sequences and posts, rather than separate full explanations of those ideas. I think that if the wiki were fleshed out a bit, it might see more use- but it's not clear to me that the wiki is actually a better system than the community blog structure of LW.
Replies from: Brendon_Wong↑ comment by Brendon_Wong · 2013-08-10T17:26:44.594Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Should I have titled the post Instrumental Rationality Wiki that also has a Page on Rationality? Perhaps the name "Effective Rationality Training Online" does not lead people to think about self-improvement, just making good decisions type rationality.
The problem with CFAR is that there is just so much knowledge out there it cannot be shared in several days. It's an excellent starting point, but there is just so much more material out there and so many individual circumstances that it would be impossible to provide consistent high impact knowledge without a community knowledge base like the one I am proposing. The training could be in person though. Also, CFAR costs thousands of dollars and is hard to access if you do not have the time or are not living close to a workshop.
Regarding reading old posts, some of them are organized in sequences, but most of the articles out there would be very hard to find and use in daily life. I'm sure there are many bits of knowledge that would be useful to me right now, but I cannot find them because they are not organized.
It does not seem like the wiki is currently being used for organizing self-improvement articles. Should I make an announcement telling everyone to do that, or just make a separate wiki? It seems like a separate site with its own purpose, community, rules, organization, and article format would be better than using the LW wiki.
Replies from: Vaniver↑ comment by Vaniver · 2013-08-10T21:07:37.670Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Also, CFAR costs thousands of dollars and is hard to access if you do not have the time or are not living close to a workshop.
I get the impression that non-workshop methods of education, including online classes, are under development, but I don't have a good sense of what they've done already / want to do.
One example that I just thought of, which you may be interested in but not have seen yet, is the (not very accurately named) skill of the week posts.
Should I make an announcement telling everyone to do that, or just make a separate wiki?
No. You personally should make a page about self-improvement articles, and add links to it. In general, and on the internet in particular, implementations are far more valuable than ideas.
Replies from: pinyakacomment by Voltairina · 2013-08-10T20:18:20.414Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I might suggest as possible models khanacademy.org and lumosity.com. Lumosity is a collection of games which claim to provide brain training which can improve mental capacities. Khanacademy is a site for people to learn mathematics and other subjects. The useful features each contains are in lumosity's case games arranged around topic areas that can help people develop skills, and in khanacademy's case short, ten-minute videos with small easily digested pieces of information and a skill tree with links to materials where you can master skills topic by topic before moving on to more complicated skills.
comment by ChristianKl · 2013-08-10T12:53:29.909Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
When reading blogs, people only see recent posts and those posts are not significantly revised.
You underrate the amount of people who read blog posts to which they arrive through search engines.
Perhaps only Less Wrong members should be able to view and edit the wiki, and contributors must read a quick start guide and pass a quick test before being allowed to post.
I think something similar is the main reason why Citizendium failed to be an effective competitor to Wikipedia. Barriers to entry.
How much of the target audience wants to improve the world? If most do not, then the wiki would essentially be a net negative on the world.
This assumes that your project won't have a significant effect on the people who participate in it. That's a very bad assumption to make if you want to start a community around self-improvement.
Replies from: Brendon_Wong↑ comment by Brendon_Wong · 2013-08-10T17:12:06.488Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thanks for your feedback, leaving the wiki open seems like the best choice.
It's true, people do arrive at past posts, but if I wanted to find really high impact knowledge for improving myself shared on Less Wrong I could not do it. I don't know what I would find before I arrived there.
comment by Ben_LandauTaylor · 2013-08-10T04:58:45.968Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
How many people interested in self improvement are effective altruists? If many are not, then the wiki would essentially be a net negative on the world.
I don't understand this claim. Most of the good things in the world were not built by effective altruists.
Replies from: Brendon_Wong↑ comment by Brendon_Wong · 2013-08-10T05:55:55.552Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thanks, meaning to improve the world is closer to what I meant to say.
comment by anon (ExaminedThought) · 2013-08-10T05:48:37.843Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
removed Replies from: Brendon_Wong↑ comment by Brendon_Wong · 2013-08-10T05:56:48.692Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thank you, I meant the process for acquiring skills. Post edited.