You might be interested in CFAR, which is focused explicitly on the project of rationality skill acquisition.
When reading blogs, people only see recent posts and those posts are not significantly revised.
LW seems to be particularly focused on people reading through old posts, and there are significant link trails, and so on. It’s not clear to me that LW has the problem that people only see recent posts.
LW might have the problem that old posts are not significantly revised. This doesn’t seem to be the case with collection threads, or example threads; my 4 examples of VoI spawned gwern’s 8 examples of VoI, and a similar post with more examples would be likely to get upvotes now. In cases where an explanation of something could be better, it seems more likely that there should be two versions of something, to capture two audiences with systematic differences between them, rather than that one version should be improved to please everyone. If there’s a sequence or a post that you think could be rewritten to reach another audience more effectively, try rewriting that post, and be explicit about it. I suspect that would get upvoted.
A wiki would allow for the creation of a large body of organized knowledge that is frequently revised.
We do have a wiki, linked on the sidebar. At present, the wiki mostly has summaries of sequences and posts, rather than separate full explanations of those ideas. I think that if the wiki were fleshed out a bit, it might see more use- but it’s not clear to me that the wiki is actually a better system than the community blog structure of LW.
Should I have titled the post Instrumental Rationality Wiki that also has a Page on Rationality? Perhaps the name “Effective Rationality Training Online” does not lead people to think about self-improvement, just making good decisions type rationality.
The problem with CFAR is that there is just so much knowledge out there it cannot be shared in several days. It’s an excellent starting point, but there is just so much more material out there and so many individual circumstances that it would be impossible to provide consistent high impact knowledge without a community knowledge base like the one I am proposing. The training could be in person though. Also, CFAR costs thousands of dollars and is hard to access if you do not have the time or are not living close to a workshop.
Regarding reading old posts, some of them are organized in sequences, but most of the articles out there would be very hard to find and use in daily life. I’m sure there are many bits of knowledge that would be useful to me right now, but I cannot find them because they are not organized.
It does not seem like the wiki is currently being used for organizing self-improvement articles. Should I make an announcement telling everyone to do that, or just make a separate wiki? It seems like a separate site with its own purpose, community, rules, organization, and article format would be better than using the LW wiki.
Also, CFAR costs thousands of dollars and is hard to access if you do not have the time or are not living close to a workshop.
I get the impression that non-workshop methods of education, including online classes, are under development, but I don’t have a good sense of what they’ve done already / want to do.
One example that I just thought of, which you may be interested in but not have seen yet, is the (not very accurately named) skill of the week posts.
Should I make an announcement telling everyone to do that, or just make a separate wiki?
No. You personally should make a page about self-improvement articles, and add links to it. In general, and on the internet in particular, implementations are far more valuable than ideas.
I expect there’s quite a pool people on this site who’d volunteer to beta test such online classes, but I’ll go ahead and offer my services in this regard.
You might be interested in CFAR, which is focused explicitly on the project of rationality skill acquisition.
LW seems to be particularly focused on people reading through old posts, and there are significant link trails, and so on. It’s not clear to me that LW has the problem that people only see recent posts.
LW might have the problem that old posts are not significantly revised. This doesn’t seem to be the case with collection threads, or example threads; my 4 examples of VoI spawned gwern’s 8 examples of VoI, and a similar post with more examples would be likely to get upvotes now. In cases where an explanation of something could be better, it seems more likely that there should be two versions of something, to capture two audiences with systematic differences between them, rather than that one version should be improved to please everyone. If there’s a sequence or a post that you think could be rewritten to reach another audience more effectively, try rewriting that post, and be explicit about it. I suspect that would get upvoted.
We do have a wiki, linked on the sidebar. At present, the wiki mostly has summaries of sequences and posts, rather than separate full explanations of those ideas. I think that if the wiki were fleshed out a bit, it might see more use- but it’s not clear to me that the wiki is actually a better system than the community blog structure of LW.
Should I have titled the post Instrumental Rationality Wiki that also has a Page on Rationality? Perhaps the name “Effective Rationality Training Online” does not lead people to think about self-improvement, just making good decisions type rationality.
The problem with CFAR is that there is just so much knowledge out there it cannot be shared in several days. It’s an excellent starting point, but there is just so much more material out there and so many individual circumstances that it would be impossible to provide consistent high impact knowledge without a community knowledge base like the one I am proposing. The training could be in person though. Also, CFAR costs thousands of dollars and is hard to access if you do not have the time or are not living close to a workshop.
Regarding reading old posts, some of them are organized in sequences, but most of the articles out there would be very hard to find and use in daily life. I’m sure there are many bits of knowledge that would be useful to me right now, but I cannot find them because they are not organized.
It does not seem like the wiki is currently being used for organizing self-improvement articles. Should I make an announcement telling everyone to do that, or just make a separate wiki? It seems like a separate site with its own purpose, community, rules, organization, and article format would be better than using the LW wiki.
I get the impression that non-workshop methods of education, including online classes, are under development, but I don’t have a good sense of what they’ve done already / want to do.
One example that I just thought of, which you may be interested in but not have seen yet, is the (not very accurately named) skill of the week posts.
No. You personally should make a page about self-improvement articles, and add links to it. In general, and on the internet in particular, implementations are far more valuable than ideas.
I expect there’s quite a pool people on this site who’d volunteer to beta test such online classes, but I’ll go ahead and offer my services in this regard.