I’ve been thinking about how I came to learn the concepts around here, and I realized that the most helpful thing was probably the seminars at Open Phil. I think MOOCs which people work through together (like on some sort of schedule, maybe in groups coordinated through LW) would replicate that experience fairly well. I was specifically thinking of an intro to AI risk course—because even though I’d been in the community for years at that point and had read all of the standard intros (including Superintelligence), I didn’t really internalize the arguments or have an understanding of what the field of AI safety looked like until that seminar.
Making a MOOC seems like a lot of work, but there’s already a lot of good content out there—obviously there’s tons of writing on the topic, and for ‘lectures’ some of Rob Miles’ stuff could probably work (with his consent). So the major remaining hurdle after corralling all of that material into a manageable syllabus would be developing discussion questions and/or setting up small discussion groups that would meet regularly over Zoom.
In any case, I think a lot of people have noticed this problem—one of the main things I hear when I ask people what they’d like to see from LW is some sort of more structured learning thing—and there have already been lots of attempts to solve it, e.g. by developing teaching modules for local groups, writing stuff on the LW wiki, inventing Arbital, etc. etc. etc. (Notably all of these projects have basically been abandoned.) Maybe it’s just fine to have a lot of people throwing themselves at the problem from different angles, I’m not sure. I’d love a bigger discussion on this topic.
This isn’t a direct answer, but seems related.
I’ve been thinking about how I came to learn the concepts around here, and I realized that the most helpful thing was probably the seminars at Open Phil. I think MOOCs which people work through together (like on some sort of schedule, maybe in groups coordinated through LW) would replicate that experience fairly well. I was specifically thinking of an intro to AI risk course—because even though I’d been in the community for years at that point and had read all of the standard intros (including Superintelligence), I didn’t really internalize the arguments or have an understanding of what the field of AI safety looked like until that seminar.
Making a MOOC seems like a lot of work, but there’s already a lot of good content out there—obviously there’s tons of writing on the topic, and for ‘lectures’ some of Rob Miles’ stuff could probably work (with his consent). So the major remaining hurdle after corralling all of that material into a manageable syllabus would be developing discussion questions and/or setting up small discussion groups that would meet regularly over Zoom.
In any case, I think a lot of people have noticed this problem—one of the main things I hear when I ask people what they’d like to see from LW is some sort of more structured learning thing—and there have already been lots of attempts to solve it, e.g. by developing teaching modules for local groups, writing stuff on the LW wiki, inventing Arbital, etc. etc. etc. (Notably all of these projects have basically been abandoned.) Maybe it’s just fine to have a lot of people throwing themselves at the problem from different angles, I’m not sure. I’d love a bigger discussion on this topic.
What’s a MOOC? (And do you have any good/representative examples?)
Massive Open Online Course.