Nitpick/question: The 'rationality camps' seem to have been renamed to 'retreats'. Why is this? A 'retreat' brings to mind religious connotations (and OED confirms this), and seems to augment phygish impressions.
Agree. Retreats is a terrible name.
This was my main association. And "camp" has a sort of kidd-ish association for me. I feel like kids go to camp and adults go to retreats. Not sure how representative this is.
How about "workshop"?
I agree about the kiddish vibe of "camp" and I also agree that "retreat" has a sort of religious hue to it as well. Some guy died on a "mysterious Buddhist retreat" recently.
Initial impressions:
There are really a lot of instances where the same photo was used for multiple images. That should probably be fixed.
There are a lot of requests for js and css files. If they're coming from your server, you should bundle them up into one file. Better yet, sources like jQuery should be coming from a CDN like Google for these reasons. Your webdev should check out Yahoo's website about performance if they haven't already.
The carousel on the front page is something that IMO should be expunged from the web. Replace the "slide left" behavior with the "fade in/out" used on the "What we do" page, for a good start.
The URL should be appliedrationality.org, not www.appliedrationality.org. http:// already tells you that you're looking for the web server. The redirect should go from www.appliedrationality.org to appliedrationality.org, not the other way around. Obviously, links such as the logo should be changed to match.
The pages look pretty terrible on my phone (Motorola backflip running Android using built-in browser). A lot of the text disappears off the right side of the screen. The header links should probably be formatted differ...
Very nice! ETA: I'll be specific: the look-n-feel of the website is generally professional and polished. The text is short, to the point, basically ideal in tone and content.
Minor nitpick: on the What is rationality? page, the line
For example, a Perfect Reasoner wouldn’t be more confident that Linda is a feminist bank teller than that she is a bank teller, because in all cases where Linda is a feminist bank teller she is also a bank teller.
occurs without introducing Linda or discussing why one might expect her to be a feminist. We're all steeped in the heuristics and biases literature here, but this could be rather baffling to anyone not already familiar with the Linda story/experiment.
In short: possible inferential distance detected. Illogical! Illogical! Illogical!... sorry.
The site's front page looks broken on my cell phone (Opera on Android).
Also, some of the quotes on the front page (and elsewhere) seem ridiculously over the top in a way that's suggestive of some lowbrow scam. ("It's hard to see how it could be anything short of life-changing"? Come on.)
I recommend that you change Eliezer's profile to first mention that he is a Research Fellow at the SI, as writing fan fiction and a blog are not high-status
Thinking about it a little more I would recommend something like
Eliezer is a AI theorist and popular science writer, known for both his non-fiction and educational fiction explorations of rationality. Including the highly popular Harry Potter and the Methods of rationality.
I love the site, but I have two minor nitpicks. It isn't a big deal, but it seems weird that the image/quote on the main page only cycles between two sets, especially with the small arrows facing in either direction. Also, the quotation used on the "retreats" page is also used on the main page. This, to me, gives the sense that you don't have many such quotations, which I don't think is a positive signal to send.
That's a beautiful site! And looks like all the links work.
I have very few criticisms. First there is a tiny use of jargon words like 'win' in a context they're not normally used in, but I think it's probably ok, the context is fairly self-explanatory. Though I might be getting used to the jargon words by now, so I'll inevitably be biased.
Second I think the causal model graphic on the front page can be improved: I think you need to change 'perfect reasoning' and 'perfect decisionmaking' to 'improved reasoning' and 'improved decision-making'. No reasoning or decision-making can be perfect, but they can be improved greatly. 'Perfect' seems like overstating the case. (That's even reinforced in the 'winning' section on the What Is Rationality?' page.) Also decision-making requires a hyphen.
Third and most obviously for my perspective I would like to see citations for some of the scientific claims, but since I'm personally working on that right now for CFAR I can wait until I've finished. ;)
Hedons generated.
These apps are news to me. Are these being developed to also serve as fund-raising tools, or are they going to be free? If free, FOSS? If FOSS, where is yonder git repo?
On my settings (some automatic zooming because I have bad eyesight), the photo takes up the entire front page and I didn't realize there was anything else beneath it to scroll down to until I saw it mentioned here.
Also, I get that you're all social and popular and people-oriented, but it just seems weird to have so many random pictures of attractive people enjoying themselves but not obviously doing anything related to rationality. Maybe removing the duplicate photos would help.
A quotation on the home page is attributed only to "Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2010". It is odd to cite only the name of the journal in which it was published, and not the author(s).
The 'donation' page for CFAR redirects to singularity.org after completing a donation.
ETA:
Also, the donation details (in both the confirmation e-mail from Paypal and the thank you from SIAI) all reference SIAI and not CFAR.
Seeing this come together and implemented gives me hope that the sanity waterline actually can be raised. I can imagine future history books saying, "The early 21st century was the time of the Rationalist Movement, the greatest cultural rebirth in history. " I am lucky to bear witness to what you people are going to accomplish.
The logo seems to be being loaded from cfar.katiehartman.com; this should instead be hosted locally.
I think the designer of the website needs to make a comment here claiming her work so we can all give her massive karma. hint hint :)
Excellent!
The color scheme, design, and pictures are all appropriate and portray the organization well. I do have to point out that you need more than two photos on the home page, but other than that, well done!
I like it a whole lot. The design is beautiful, the layout is good, the prose is well crafted and concise. I feel a little bad for saying this but ... I like this website almost, but not quite as much as I dislike the new Singularity Institute website. I don't know what went wrong there, but the Singularity Institute website somehow seems / feels unprofessional and just badly done compared to this one.
The layout of the introductory text blurb below the pictures could be improved. Readers (secret meaning: me) are in danger of skipping to the clear heading-text of "We Can Do Better" and totally missing the introduction. My first thing I'd try would be to move the "What if?" box up a little (aligning text with text, rather than with the top of the box), and then take the following text from below it and put it all in the right-hand column, making sure that "We Can Do Better" is still clearly visible on the bottom of most mon...
What will be CFAR's relationship to LessWrong? Since a lot of its activities seem closely related to this site, to give an example of this, pretty much anything cited with a social component, like the Meet Up groups and the rationality camps.
Can we soon expect a cool link to CFAR's site from LW like we have for SingInst and FHI?
The "FAR" keeps pushing me into far mode and then the red color keeps pulling me back into near mode. It's like a Stroop task!
Where did the picture of an Intel processor come from? Tineye isn't helping very much.
As someone who was pretty critical of the new Singinst site, I have to say this new one looks gorgeous and motivates me to participate, donate time and potentially donate money. (I've actually had to check myself and note that I my decision-making for donation should not be this influenced by how good or bad a website is. At least not to the extent that it apparently is.)
Quite a good website, though I expect that when one first glances at it, it looks suspicious how much there is talk of "perfect reasoning", "knowing exactly how to weigh the relevant evidence" etc.
Gives the impression that you think your methods produce perfection. One might have to delve surprisingly deep into the website before one realizes that that's not actually among the claims made.
There's a pretty huge white space between the header and "Using decision science to help yourself and the world." It looks like a picture should go here, and I think there was one before. Apologies if this has already been mentioned.
Overall, I'm impressed.
Most "glaring" flaw so far: it is difficult to resize fonts. Some text can hide when I do, for instance in the "What We Do" page.
Curiously, I noticed when looking at this that my brain associates the style of the website with phyg-ish organisations. Upon reflection, most websites of organisations I trust don't look like this, because they are either not very slick and professional (often a side effect of being run by academic institutions), or actually have a lot more content (which causes everything to look less slick). I'm sure this will be fixed when more content comes along. I'm interested to see whether anyone else makes the association though, or if I'm just particularly sensitive when filtering information sources with visual cues?
It really is a very minor quibble. On the basic level, a clean slick and professional website is a great thing!
The new Center for Applied Rationality website has launched! We'll be adding content as time goes by. Let us know if you find broken links, etc.