1) I have translated 100 articles from LessWrong to Slovak language. The number is cool, but I am afraid I am already too deep in the diminishing returns territory; possibly the translation becoming a lost purpose. I get almost no feedback, except that when I once in a while put a list of new translations on Facebook, some of my friends “like” them. But Facebook “likes” are cheap and don’t necessarily mean anything beyond “you have amused me for a millisecond”.
I guess I should ask explicitly about feedback, possibly announcing that if I don’t get any, I will stop making more translations.
2) I made a flyer about LessWrong: 1 paper A4 folded to three parts. The inner sides introduce the topics of Intelligence Explosion, Rationality, and Effective Altruism (with hyperlinks to Slovak translation of Facing the Singularity, and English pages of CFAR, GiveWell, and 80000 Hours). On the outside the front page is a short introduction about LessWrong, the back page is list of recommended books (Thinking Fast and Slow, Good and Real) and websites (LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, HP MoR), and the remaining part will be customized for the intended audience.
Then I made a version for new members of Mensa, because the Mensa testing was a week before our LW meetup. The customized part was something about how intelligence should be joined with rationality to achieve best results, and an invitation to the local LW meetup. I gave the flyer to 25 people who participated in the Mensa tests (right after the test, when the results were not known yet), and the result was… zero.
I guess I will try it one or two more times (the flyer is already made, the only work is going to the tests and giving it away), and if the result is still zero, I will give up my hopes of Mensa members as potential rationalists. I should also try the flyer with some other target group, specifically students of informatics and students of psychology (each group will have its own customized part of the flyer).
3) I started again doing my Udacity lessons. Not sure about the value of doing so; it’s more like I am sometimes too tired in the evening to do anything more complicated than this, so I would prefer to have a habit of doing a few Udacity lessons than just browsing random web pages.
EDIT: I completed my first Udacity course. This serves mostly as a proof that I can finish the course I started. The information in the course was less important, because it was Computer Science 101 and I already knew programming; but I had to write dozen exercises in Python which I never used before.
So… when I published 6 new translated articles on September 25th and published a list of links on my Facebook page, google analytics shows that the typical noise of cca 30 “visits” on my website per day increased to 56, 94, 84 during the next three days, and then dropped to the usual noise level again. The values for “unique visitors” are almost the same, and the values for “pageviews” are cca 30% higher.
I am not sure I interpret this correctly, but seems to me that this suggests over 140 people, most of them reading only one of the articles. Assuming it’s not the same person each three days, which would make the worst case of 64 people, reading two and half articles on average. So, let’s just round it to 100 people.
Actually, that doesn’t seem so bad...
(Note: My complaint about “no feedback” meant that when I started publishing the first translations, some people spontaneously sent me messages on facebook, asked questions, and two of them came to the local meetup. That was when I started doing this. During the following half of the year, there was no other activity of this kind. I kind of hoped that doing this would translate to at least one new person per month coming to a meetup.)
1) I have translated 100 articles from LessWrong to Slovak language. The number is cool, but I am afraid I am already too deep in the diminishing returns territory; possibly the translation becoming a lost purpose. I get almost no feedback, except that when I once in a while put a list of new translations on Facebook, some of my friends “like” them. But Facebook “likes” are cheap and don’t necessarily mean anything beyond “you have amused me for a millisecond”.
I guess I should ask explicitly about feedback, possibly announcing that if I don’t get any, I will stop making more translations.
2) I made a flyer about LessWrong: 1 paper A4 folded to three parts. The inner sides introduce the topics of Intelligence Explosion, Rationality, and Effective Altruism (with hyperlinks to Slovak translation of Facing the Singularity, and English pages of CFAR, GiveWell, and 80000 Hours). On the outside the front page is a short introduction about LessWrong, the back page is list of recommended books (Thinking Fast and Slow, Good and Real) and websites (LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, HP MoR), and the remaining part will be customized for the intended audience.
Then I made a version for new members of Mensa, because the Mensa testing was a week before our LW meetup. The customized part was something about how intelligence should be joined with rationality to achieve best results, and an invitation to the local LW meetup. I gave the flyer to 25 people who participated in the Mensa tests (right after the test, when the results were not known yet), and the result was… zero.
I guess I will try it one or two more times (the flyer is already made, the only work is going to the tests and giving it away), and if the result is still zero, I will give up my hopes of Mensa members as potential rationalists. I should also try the flyer with some other target group, specifically students of informatics and students of psychology (each group will have its own customized part of the flyer).
3) I started again doing my Udacity lessons. Not sure about the value of doing so; it’s more like I am sometimes too tired in the evening to do anything more complicated than this, so I would prefer to have a habit of doing a few Udacity lessons than just browsing random web pages.
EDIT: I completed my first Udacity course. This serves mostly as a proof that I can finish the course I started. The information in the course was less important, because it was Computer Science 101 and I already knew programming; but I had to write dozen exercises in Python which I never used before.
You don’t have any analytics set up to tell you how much traffic you’re getting?
Hah, I completely forgot about that! Thanks!
So… when I published 6 new translated articles on September 25th and published a list of links on my Facebook page, google analytics shows that the typical noise of cca 30 “visits” on my website per day increased to 56, 94, 84 during the next three days, and then dropped to the usual noise level again. The values for “unique visitors” are almost the same, and the values for “pageviews” are cca 30% higher.
I am not sure I interpret this correctly, but seems to me that this suggests over 140 people, most of them reading only one of the articles. Assuming it’s not the same person each three days, which would make the worst case of 64 people, reading two and half articles on average. So, let’s just round it to 100 people.
Actually, that doesn’t seem so bad...
(Note: My complaint about “no feedback” meant that when I started publishing the first translations, some people spontaneously sent me messages on facebook, asked questions, and two of them came to the local meetup. That was when I started doing this. During the following half of the year, there was no other activity of this kind. I kind of hoped that doing this would translate to at least one new person per month coming to a meetup.)