Thanks. I've edited the comment to reflect this better.
Since I wanted a lot of things to be weighted when determining the search order, I considered just hiding all the complexity 'under the hood'.
The way I view it, search rankings are a tool like any other. In my own experience in academic research I've always found that clearly defined search rankings are more useful to me than generic rankings; if you know how the tool works, it's easier to use correctly. That said, there's probably still a place for a complex algorithm alongside other search tools, it just shouldn't be the only search tool.
... (read more)But if people don't know what they are voting on they might be less inclined to vote at
In case it helps, here's a rough list of the thoughts that have come to mind:
Simplicity is usually best with voting systems. It may be worth looking at a reddit style up/down system for popularity. With importance you probably want high/mid/low. If you track the 'importance profile' of a user, you could use that to promote projects to their attention that other users with similar profiles find important. Also, in all these rankings it should be clear to the user exactly what metric is being used.
Make use of the wisdom of crowds by getting users to evaluate projects/tasks/comments for things like difficulty, relevance, utility, marginal utility - along the lines of
I'm struck with Dumbledore's ruthlessness
Actually I think he was just following his own advice:
While survives any remnant of our kind, that piece is yet in play, though the stars should die in heaven. [...] Know the value of all your other pieces, and play to win.
All things considered I think it was the most compassionate choice he could have made.
No problem, some other things that come to mind are:
(As a rule, using non-standard formatting when posting to LessWrong is a bad idea.)
There are some improvements you can make to increase cognitive ease, such as lowering your long-word count, avoiding jargon, and using fewer sentences per paragraph. I'd recommend running parts of your post (one paragraph at a time is best) through a clarity calculator to get a better idea of where you can improve.
You may also want to look into the concept of inferential distance.
Nice article, have a karma!
There's a lot of information there, I'd suggest perhaps using this article as the basis for a four part series one each area. The content is non-obvious, so having the extra space to really break down the inferential distance into small steps so that the conclusions are intuitive to non-rationalists would be useful.
(As an aside I suspect that writing for the CFAR blog is right now reasonably high impact for the time investment. Personally I found CFAR's apparent radio-silence since September unnerving and it's possible that it was part of the reason the matching fundraiser struggled. Despite Anna's excellent post on CFAR's progress the lack of activity may have caused people to feel as though CFAR was stagnating and thus be less inclined to part with their money on a System 1 level.)
Donated $180.
I was planning on donating this money, my yearly 'charity donation' budget (it's meager - I'm an undergraduate), to a typical EA charity such as the Against Malaria Foundation; a cash transaction for the utlilons, warm fuzzies and general EA cred. However the above has forced me to reconsider this course of action in light of the following:
The possibility CFAR may not receive sufficient future funding. CFAR expenditure last year was $510k (ignoring non-staff workshop costs that are offset by workshop revenue) and their current balance is something around $130k. Without knowing the details, a similarly sized operation this year might therefore require something like $380k in donations (a ballpark guesstimate,
As far as I understand it, CFAR's current focus is research and developing their rationality curriculum. The workshops exist to facilitate their research, they're a good way to test which bits of rationality work and determine the best way to teach them.
In this model, broad improvements in very fundamental, schoolchild-level rationality education and the alleviation of poverty and time poverty are much stronger prospects for improving the world
In response to the question "Are you trying to make rationality part of primary and secondary school curricula?" the CFAR FAQ notes that:
... (read more)We’d love to include decisionmaking training in early school curricula. It would be more high-impact than most other core pieces of the
EDIT: Reworked and moved to Main following Gunnar_Zarncke's advice.
Related to: Book Review: How Learning Works, Build Small Skills in the Right Order, What are useful skills to learn at university?
This article is organized into three sections focusing on attention, processing and recall respectively. The advice in each section is roughly organised in order of usefulness, although your mileage may vary. It's best to view this as a menu of study techniques rather than an in depth guide.
Just follow at the links provided if you wish to learn more about any point. Links with a lettered superscript[a] generally link to a part of a YouTube video while those with a numbered superscript[1] link to an... (read 1079 more words →)
Spot on. This is a big problem is mathematics education; prior to university a lot of teaching is done without paying heed to the fundamental concepts. For example - here in the UK - calculus is taught well before limits (in fact limits aren't taught until students get to university).
Teaching is all about crossing the inferential distance between the student's current knowledge and the idea being taught. It's my impression... (read more)