What are the costs? How much time would instructors have to put into preparing the materials for the class, teaching the class, and learning the system? Who would host it, and how much would that cost? Who would analyze the data from the course?
What are the benefits? How many people would take the class? What percentage would become LW, CFAR, or SI contributors? How much would the course improve their lives?
What are the alternatives? Even if we knew how many CFAR-hours it would take to put on the class, and how many dollars would be donated to CFAR as a result (simplifying the problem to one cost and one benefit), we need to compare that ratio to marginal CFAR-hour to decide if it’s worth doing.
One big issue for CFAR in particular is it seems like this could compete with the educational offering of their camps; indeed, a potential first course would just be to tape the minicamp materials and expect people to watch an hour a week. The trouble is that the educational value of the camp is not its sole value, and CFAR might end up cannibalizing the market for its camps by offering free videos.
There’s also a question of how much advertising is worth. Supposing there are, say, three courses worth of rationality material, and that camps and courses teach a comparable amount of material, then one could imagine putting the first course online and having the second course taught at camp. This would drastically increase the demand for the camps- but I get the impression that they already have years worth of demand lined up, and so investing in supply improvements will have far higher returns on their end.
I get the impression that they already have years worth of demand lined up, and so investing in supply improvements will have far higher returns on their end.
I’d hate for this to be the reason why CFAR decides not to pursue putting out an online course on rationality. Even if demand really is as high as you say, doing an online course would dramatically increase the number of people able to go through the curriculum at all, which I assume would be good progress toward CFAR’s mission. Even if CFAR couldn’t fully take advantage of the extra demand for camps that this would drive, I still think Konkvistador & Wrongnesslessness’ idea is worthwhile for the organization.
Konkvistador brought up the idea about two months ago, but to the best of my knowledge the idea is still being researched.
There are a few primary issues to consider:
What are the costs? How much time would instructors have to put into preparing the materials for the class, teaching the class, and learning the system? Who would host it, and how much would that cost? Who would analyze the data from the course?
What are the benefits? How many people would take the class? What percentage would become LW, CFAR, or SI contributors? How much would the course improve their lives?
What are the alternatives? Even if we knew how many CFAR-hours it would take to put on the class, and how many dollars would be donated to CFAR as a result (simplifying the problem to one cost and one benefit), we need to compare that ratio to marginal CFAR-hour to decide if it’s worth doing.
One big issue for CFAR in particular is it seems like this could compete with the educational offering of their camps; indeed, a potential first course would just be to tape the minicamp materials and expect people to watch an hour a week. The trouble is that the educational value of the camp is not its sole value, and CFAR might end up cannibalizing the market for its camps by offering free videos.
There’s also a question of how much advertising is worth. Supposing there are, say, three courses worth of rationality material, and that camps and courses teach a comparable amount of material, then one could imagine putting the first course online and having the second course taught at camp. This would drastically increase the demand for the camps- but I get the impression that they already have years worth of demand lined up, and so investing in supply improvements will have far higher returns on their end.
I’d hate for this to be the reason why CFAR decides not to pursue putting out an online course on rationality. Even if demand really is as high as you say, doing an online course would dramatically increase the number of people able to go through the curriculum at all, which I assume would be good progress toward CFAR’s mission. Even if CFAR couldn’t fully take advantage of the extra demand for camps that this would drive, I still think Konkvistador & Wrongnesslessness’ idea is worthwhile for the organization.