Eliezer, on number three: I give it a 5% chance that I'm talking about the same thing as you, and that's before applying my overconfidence factor of 0.6. You're talking about injecting instructions into your motor plan. I'm visualing doing the thing really hard. It seems to work? It's like I'm deliberately making a few predictions about the next few seconds, and just continuing to visualise those things rather than thinking about something else, then I just start moving. Is this the same thing you're talking about? Or am I just doing some form of "Yud said this would work, something, something, placebo effect"? Or is it kinda the same thing in this case because I'm deciding to believe?
This is not something I've done previously, I just read this article yesterday and tried it.
Thank you for the comment!
I agree that there are many relatively untested changes. I do not expect all of them to make it through to the end product (assuming there is one). I have no idea if it'll work, so I don't know how it will grow. Maybe 300? Certainly not 1000. Possibly 30. Coming up on my to-do list is to speak with a bunch of people in my country who have founded schools. I plan to start this in a month or so, as the school year starts here next week, so they're all pretty busy.
I want the thing to work. If the marketing goes well and 100 families want to enrol and I get some strong evidence that it's no better or worse than public school, then I wouldn't start it. I don't know how I would know for sure that it's no good without trying it, and even then I don't know how I would know, given that I'd be so invested at that point that I certainly wouldn't be seeing straight. Though if I thought (based on external sources) that it was working for the kids that attended, I'd happily keep it going with 20 kids.
Dan Carlin recently did a Hardcore History Addendum show about Truman called Atomic Accountability. It was an interview with Alex Wellerstein who brings into question how much Truman actually knew about the location of the first bomb being dropped. Truman (possibly) thought that rulling out Kyoto (which was number one on the list), meant he was ruling out cities as targets, and didn't know Hiroshima was a city. This seems wild, until you factor in how all the information is being fed to him, how long he'd known about the nuclear program and what the competing military interests were. Worth a listen if you're into the topic as it's a new perspective.