Why must you ruin my self-conscious countersignalling with good epistemology?!
But seriously… Ack! Jennifer, you’re brilliant. I dunno what they put in the water at that CCS place. Would you accept me as your apprentice? I hear tell you have a startup idea. I can’t code, but I live very cheaply and can cheerfully do lots of menial tasks and errands of all kind, from in-the-field market research to buying donuts to washing dishes to answering customer questions and everything else. I’m versatile, energetic and a wicked good rationalist. And I feel that working for you even for a short while would significantly build my understanding of social epistemology and epistemology generally, helping me in my quest to Save the World. Doesn’t that sound like a totally awesome idea? :D
Your compliments are appreciated but, I suspect, unwarranted :-P
I’m not saying “definitely no” and I think it would be cool to work with you. But also you should probably reconsider the offer because I think the right question (tragically?) is not so much “Can I work with you to somehow learn your wisdom by osmosis?” but “Where are the practice grounds for the insight just displayed?” My working theory of “intellectual efficacy” is that it mostly comes from practice.
Following this theory, if you’re simply aiming for educational efficiency of the sort that was applied here, you could do much worse than getting some practice at competitive inter-collegiate policy debate (sometimes called CEDA or NDT depending on the region of the US).
I would attribute my insight here not to “something in the water” at the CCS (the College of Creative Studies at UCSB, which for the record, I just hung out at because that’s where my friends were), but to experiences before that on a college debate team in a two year program that included a debate tournament approximately every third weekend and about 10 hours per week in a college library doing research in preparation for said tournaments.
Here is a partial list of four year colleges that have policy debate teams.
If you were going to go for the best possible debate experience in the U.S. I’d estimate that the best thing to do would be to find a school that was valuable for other reasons and where (1) the head coach’s favorite event is CEDA/NDT (2) the ((debate program budget)/debater) value is high. The funding is important because practical things like a room just for the debate team, travel/food/hotel subsidies are important for filling out a debate team and giving them a sense of community and the size and quality of the team will be a large source of the value of the experience. You might also try to maximize the “tournaments per team member per year” which might vary from school to school based on the costs of travel given the school’s location.
The only major warning with this suggestion, is that a lot of the value of learning to debate rigorously is just that you’ll pick up library skills, policy debate theory, the ability to notice (and produce) debating tricks on the fly, and confidence speaking in front of an audience. Learning debate to practice rationality is kind of like learning to knife fight in order to practice saving people. The skill might have uses in the target domain, but they are definitely not the same thing.
(Though now that I spell out the warning, it might work as a vote for being paid to work in a startup where calculating semi-autonomy is encouraged rather than paying for school in pursuit of theoretically useful ideas? Hmmm...)
Why must you ruin my self-conscious countersignalling with good epistemology?!
But seriously… Ack! Jennifer, you’re brilliant. I dunno what they put in the water at that CCS place. Would you accept me as your apprentice? I hear tell you have a startup idea. I can’t code, but I live very cheaply and can cheerfully do lots of menial tasks and errands of all kind, from in-the-field market research to buying donuts to washing dishes to answering customer questions and everything else. I’m versatile, energetic and a wicked good rationalist. And I feel that working for you even for a short while would significantly build my understanding of social epistemology and epistemology generally, helping me in my quest to Save the World. Doesn’t that sound like a totally awesome idea? :D
Your compliments are appreciated but, I suspect, unwarranted :-P
I’m not saying “definitely no” and I think it would be cool to work with you. But also you should probably reconsider the offer because I think the right question (tragically?) is not so much “Can I work with you to somehow learn your wisdom by osmosis?” but “Where are the practice grounds for the insight just displayed?” My working theory of “intellectual efficacy” is that it mostly comes from practice.
Following this theory, if you’re simply aiming for educational efficiency of the sort that was applied here, you could do much worse than getting some practice at competitive inter-collegiate policy debate (sometimes called CEDA or NDT depending on the region of the US).
I would attribute my insight here not to “something in the water” at the CCS (the College of Creative Studies at UCSB, which for the record, I just hung out at because that’s where my friends were), but to experiences before that on a college debate team in a two year program that included a debate tournament approximately every third weekend and about 10 hours per week in a college library doing research in preparation for said tournaments.
Here is a partial list of four year colleges that have policy debate teams.
If you were going to go for the best possible debate experience in the U.S. I’d estimate that the best thing to do would be to find a school that was valuable for other reasons and where (1) the head coach’s favorite event is CEDA/NDT (2) the ((debate program budget)/debater) value is high. The funding is important because practical things like a room just for the debate team, travel/food/hotel subsidies are important for filling out a debate team and giving them a sense of community and the size and quality of the team will be a large source of the value of the experience. You might also try to maximize the “tournaments per team member per year” which might vary from school to school based on the costs of travel given the school’s location.
The only major warning with this suggestion, is that a lot of the value of learning to debate rigorously is just that you’ll pick up library skills, policy debate theory, the ability to notice (and produce) debating tricks on the fly, and confidence speaking in front of an audience. Learning debate to practice rationality is kind of like learning to knife fight in order to practice saving people. The skill might have uses in the target domain, but they are definitely not the same thing.
(Though now that I spell out the warning, it might work as a vote for being paid to work in a startup where calculating semi-autonomy is encouraged rather than paying for school in pursuit of theoretically useful ideas? Hmmm...)
It’s less the insight just displayed and more a general tendency to see Pareto improvements in group rationality. But debate’s an interesting idea.