EDIT: I am canceling this contest because I feel that the structure of the incentives were poorly thought out (see gwern's comments). I will be posting a new better structured contest in the near future (now posted). If you feel this is unfair or otherwise feel slighted, please contact me at my username at gmail.com.
I'm interested in making projects happen on Less Wrong. In order to find out what works and to inspire others to try things too, I'm sponsoring the following small project:
Spaced Repetition is often mentioned on on Less Wrong as a technique for remembering things. I've started using Anki and it certainly seems to be useful. However, I haven't seen a good summary of evidence on Spaced Repetition.
I hereby offer a prize to the first person to submit a good summary of the evidence on Spaced Repetition to the main page. The winner will get the prize, currently: $265 + 40 to charity (see comments)
The summary should address at least the following questions:
What spacing is best?
How much does spaced repetition actually help memory?
Does spaced repetition have hidden benefits or costs?
Does the effectiveness vary across domains? How much?
Is there research on the kinds of questions that work best?
What questions do researchers think are most important?
Is there any interesting ongoing research? If so, what is it on?
What, if any, questions do researchers think it is important to answer? Are there other unanswered questions that would jump out at a smart person?
What does spaced repetition not do that people might expect it to?
The post should summarize the state of current evidence and provide citations to back up the claims in the article.
If you think you would benefit from the result of this project, please add to the prize! You can contribute to the prize on the ChipIn page.
Whether the summary is 'good' will be judged by me. If there is a serious dispute, I'll agree to dispute resolution by any uninvolved party with more than 5k karma.
If you have suggestions, questions or comments, please leave them in the comments.
If you would like to work on this project, please say so in the comments below. Collaboration is encouraged.
This project is tagged with the 'project' tag and listed on the Projects wiki page.
I'd like to work on this (be paid to substantially improve my http://www.gwern.net/Mnemosyne ? Where's the downside?), but you ask hard questions which would require a lot of research to be done to my satisfaction and during which I could be scooped. I'm not sure a race is the best way to run this.
Why do you care if it is done to your satisfaction when the prize is awarded based on other's satisfaction with it?
This is an expected value problem. Decide how much a unit of your time is worth, how much time you are willing to invest and then (the hard part) estimate your likelihood for success.
So, if you value your time at $10/hr, are willing to invest 10 hours and estimate you will win the $155 X% of the time then we get this equation:
P(winning)$amount won - P(losing)$amount not won = initial investment
Could you specify the drawbacks you see to a race? Does something else seem like it would work better? Does a dated prize (where the best entry is selected on a specific date) or a work contract seem like it would work significantly better? I'm Just Trying Things right now, and I'm not especially attached to this format.
Which are the especially hard questions? What is the primary source of difficulty?
EDIT: I am canceling this contest because I feel that the structure of the incentives were poorly thought out (see gwern's comments). I will be posting a new better structured contest in the near future (now posted). If you feel this is unfair or otherwise feel slighted, please contact me at my username at gmail.com.
I'm interested in making projects happen on Less Wrong. In order to find out what works and to inspire others to try things too, I'm sponsoring the following small project:
I hereby offer a prize to the first person to submit a good summary of the evidence on Spaced Repetition to the main page. The winner will get the prize, currently: $265 + 40 to charity (see comments)
The summary should address at least the following questions: