I’m curious, why you guys didn’t post the testimonials or surveys you gathered at the end of the camp? Obviously these should be accompanied with appropriate caveats, but I think this would help explain to people why you are pleased with the results and think ‘we’re on to something’.
Here are excerpts from the Minicamp testimonials (which were written to be shown to the public), with a link to the full list at the end:
“The week I spent in minicamp had by far the highest density of fun and learning I have ever experienced. It’s like taking two years of college and condensing it to a week: you learn just as much and you have just as much fun. The skills I’ve learned will help me set and achieve my own life goal, and the friends I’ve made will help me get there.”
—Alexei
“This was an intensely positive experience. This was easily the most powerful change self-modification I’ve ever made, in all of the social, intellectual, and emotional spheres. I’m now a more powerful person than I was a week ago—and I can explain exactly how and why this is true.
At mini-camp, I’ve learned techniques for effective self-modification—that is, I have a much deeper understanding of how to change my desires, gather my willpower, channel my time and cognitive resources, and model and handle previously confusing situations. What’s more, I have a fairly clear map of how to build these skills henceforth, and how to inculcate them in others. And all this was presented in such a way that any sufficiently analytical folk -- anyone who has understood a few of the LW sequences, say—can gain in extreme measures.”
—Matt Elder / Fiddlemath
“I expected a week of interesting things and some useful tools to take away. What I got was 8 days of constant, deep learning, challenges to my limits that helped me grow. I finally grokked that I can and should optimize myself on every dimension I care about, that practice and reinforcement can make me a better thinker, and that I can change very quickly when I’m not constrained by artificial barriers or stress.
I would not recommend doing something like this right before another super-busy week, because I was learning at 100% of capacity and will need a lot of time to unpack all the things I learned and apply them to my life, but I came away with a clear plan for becoming better. It is now a normal and easy thing for me to try things out, test my beliefs, and self-improve. And I’m likely to be much more effective at making the world a better place as well, by prioritizing without fear.
The material was all soundly-researched and effectively taught, with extremely helpful supplemental exercises and activities. The instructors were very helpful in and out of session. The other participants were excited, engaged, challenging, and supportive.
I look forward to sharing what I’ve learned with my local Lesswrong meetup and others in the area. If that’s even 1⁄4 as awesome as my time at the Mini-Camp, it will make our lives much better.”
—Ben Hoffman / Benquo
“I really can’t recommend this camp enough! This workshop broke down a complex and intertwined set of skills labelled in my brain as “common sense” and distinguished each part so that I could work on them separately. Sessions on motivation, cognition, and what habits to build to not fool yourself were particularly helpful. This camp was also the first example that I’ve seen of people taking current cognitive science and other research, decoding it, and showing people what’s been documented to work so that they can use it too. It feels to me now as though the coolest parts of the sequences have been given specific exercises and habits to build off of. This camp, and the people in it, have changed my path for the better.”
—David Jones / TheDave
I’m genuinely interested in seeing this data published, because I think it’s something that a lot of people can build off of. If the only obstacle is really hours, I am happy to contribute.
I would be happy to show up in person while I’m in the area, pick up any paper notes you have available, transcribe them, and mail the originals back once finished. I have professional experience with data entry (including specifically product surveys) and market research in general. I’ll be in San Francisco the afternoon of Monday, September 5th, hopefully around noon. I leave early Tuesday morning.
Great! Much of the minicamp data is private and anonymous, so I can’t share that with you, but I definitely have tasks for volunteers to do that will free uo time for me to write up a minicamp report—some of those tasks are even directly relevant to minicamp. Please email me at lukeprog at gmail if you’d like to help.
Sure, I’d love to! (I thought I didn’t qualify to volunteer for SIAI?) Hand over whatever you have and I’ll make sure they do it right! (I thought this administration has to be done by someone in the loop on this, but whatever.)
Oh, you were just hoping I’d drop it, and the issue of actual substantiation of the mini-camp’s success (which lies at the top of your reasons for wanting to fund Luke) would die off? Can’t help there.
I need to write up the results myself because I personally ran the minicamp with Anna Salamon and Andrew Critch. But I have tons of stuff I could have you do that would free up more of my time to get around to writing up results of minicamp data. If you’re interested in helping, that would be awesome. You can contact me at lukeprog [at] gmail.
I actually have no interest in supporting your research. Every time I ask a clarifying question of any of your claims, you get extremely defensive and fail to answer it, which suggests a poor understaning of what you’re trying to present results on. Also, every piece of advice I’ve followed falls woefully short of what you claim it does, and I don’t seem to be alone here (on either point). I think your contributions are overrated.
(This is a large part of why I put such a low prior on claims of the minicamp’s phenomenal success and was so skeptical of the report.)
I don’t claim to have contributed more research, to LW, of course, but when I do present research I make sure to understand it.
In fairness, your more recent work doesn’t seem to be subject to any of this, so I could very well change my opinion on this.
The comment you linked to doesn’t seem like a clarifying question at all. I think that conversation might be another instance where your belligerent tone hurt communication even though your point was a valid one. Luke’s answer didn’t seem particularly defensive, either (although I have seen other conversations where his tone was defensive, so I won’t challenge that point.)
I actually agree with you on this point (and upvoted all your questions about it), but the longer you argue the less sympathetic I’m getting. You asked when results would be published, and the answer was that it requires a lot of processing time. You asked if volunteers can help, and Luke answered that while volunteers can’t help on that specifically, they can contribute to other things which will speed up the process. To which you answered:
I actually have no interest in supporting your research....I think your contributions are overrated.
Which just doesn’t show a whole lot of interest in actually resolving the problem you’re concerned about.
Every time I ask a clarifying question of any of your claims, you get extremely defensive and fail to answer it, which suggests a poor understaning of what you’re trying to present results on.
Regarding the comment thread you linked to, I agree that the initial response you received was defensive and uninformative. I am not surprised to see it sitting at zero upvotes.
When you prodded further, you got a good response, so while I think you didn’t come out badly in that exchange at all, I am surprised that you are citing it as evidence of lukeprog understanding poorly. It instead suggests that he responds defensively even when he does understand and has a cogent answer, and that defensiveness from him implies shallow understanding far less than it would from others.
I think your contributions are overrated.
I have little problem with bluntly telling people that they suck, and by extension don’t mind less offending forthright communication, but I am leery of discussing people’s work by evaluating how people’s work compares to the popular perception of their work. It introduces an unnecessary factual dispute—how people are perceived.
E.g. “Loui Eriksson is the most underrated player in the NHL, just ask anyone! Wait a second...if everyone agrees, then...”
“Loui Eriksson is the most underrated player in the NHL, just ask anyone! Wait a second...if everyone agrees, then...”
A new player poll asking who the most underrated NHL player is just came out, and guess who got more than twice as many votes as the second most voted for player? Hint: he was named to the All-Star roster last year...yes, it’s Loui Eriksson, again. This makes little sense. How many years in a row and in how many polls can a single guy be perceived by so many as “most underrated?”
New Year’s resolution: avoid discussing whether or not something is overrated or underrated and simply evaluate its actual worth.
When you prodded further, you got a good response, so while I think you didn’t come out badly in that exchange at all, I am surprised that you are citing it as evidence of lukeprog understanding poorly.
I disagree. The final response was just as unhelpful; it’s just that I didn’t bother pushing the point. Luke tried to imply that the research he cited showed how to “dress fashionably based on magazines” yet not be consumerist, which is completely false.
I have little problem with bluntly telling people that they suck, and by extension don’t mind less offending forthright communication, but I am leery of discussing people’s work by evaluating how people’s work compares to the popular perception of their work.
Well, there is a tendency among forums for people to automatically vote up anything that looks well researched, so it’s important to know when that facade isn’t holding up. And considering the number of times Luke gets corrected on his use of a source or otherwise crumples on any follow-up question, I’m worried this is one of those cases, and so I can’t avoid implicating people for hasty upvoting.
But again, some of his more recent work looks to be more careful.
In the interest of optimizing our rationality I think that we need to continue to call out instances “community distancing” such as the one exhibited by Silas above.
The reason for doing so? It lets the dissenters know that a community can tolerate and appreciate criticism but not the creation of a lone wolf character. Lone wolves do not contribute to a community and instead impede our advances in rationality by drawing conversations back to their status. As such, their status seeking should be pointed out and skepticism should be attached to their future postings.
Passive-aggressive comments in particular are troublesome because these types eventually find ways to disrupt substantive threads by reminding others of their loner status and their unacknowledged genius. Their resentment then leads to them mocking key figures in a community (note Silas’ comments to both Eliezer and Luke).
Perhaps LW needs a mini-sequence on acceptable and non-acceptable signaling within a rational community.
As such, their status seeking should be pointed out and skepticism should be attached to their future postings.
I object. “Lone wolves”, and Silas in particular, are not more status seeking than average. Luke’s contributions are far more status seeking than Silas’s are. Luke is good at status seeking while Silas’s biggest weakness is that he fails to status seek when it would clearly be in his interests to do so.
About my experience...with LW’s is that silence is many times golden. There are those whom are rather old fashioned and follow Marine Law. In therapy you isolate the problem and separate what doesn’t belong like a sculptor does when observing the stone it is about to chisel out.
If a drifter would come into any mention I always heard that many dislike drifters because you don’t know too much about those, and if you do learn something desperately trying to find out where they went suddenly they have vanished leaving behind some interesting questions. So to say, a lone wolf has nothing to contribute I would say conservatively one ought to be careful to discern a wolf; one could have an Angel or a Devil ready to gobble you up hehehe
It lets the dissenters know that a community can tolerate and appreciate criticism but not the creation of a lone wolf character. Lone wolves do not contribute to a community and instead impede our advances in rationality by drawing conversations back to their status.
Let’s taboo “lone wolf” and see what you actually mean by it, because I don’t see Silas as a lone wolf figure in this debacle. For example, most of his comments have positive karma—what I would consider a lone wolf wouldn’t have such support.
I’m curious, why you guys didn’t post the testimonials or surveys you gathered at the end of the camp? Obviously these should be accompanied with appropriate caveats, but I think this would help explain to people why you are pleased with the results and think ‘we’re on to something’.
Largely, lack of available staff hours.
Here are excerpts from the Minicamp testimonials (which were written to be shown to the public), with a link to the full list at the end:
“The week I spent in minicamp had by far the highest density of fun and learning I have ever experienced. It’s like taking two years of college and condensing it to a week: you learn just as much and you have just as much fun. The skills I’ve learned will help me set and achieve my own life goal, and the friends I’ve made will help me get there.” —Alexei
“This was an intensely positive experience. This was easily the most powerful change self-modification I’ve ever made, in all of the social, intellectual, and emotional spheres. I’m now a more powerful person than I was a week ago—and I can explain exactly how and why this is true.
At mini-camp, I’ve learned techniques for effective self-modification—that is, I have a much deeper understanding of how to change my desires, gather my willpower, channel my time and cognitive resources, and model and handle previously confusing situations. What’s more, I have a fairly clear map of how to build these skills henceforth, and how to inculcate them in others. And all this was presented in such a way that any sufficiently analytical folk -- anyone who has understood a few of the LW sequences, say—can gain in extreme measures.” —Matt Elder / Fiddlemath
“I expected a week of interesting things and some useful tools to take away. What I got was 8 days of constant, deep learning, challenges to my limits that helped me grow. I finally grokked that I can and should optimize myself on every dimension I care about, that practice and reinforcement can make me a better thinker, and that I can change very quickly when I’m not constrained by artificial barriers or stress.
I would not recommend doing something like this right before another super-busy week, because I was learning at 100% of capacity and will need a lot of time to unpack all the things I learned and apply them to my life, but I came away with a clear plan for becoming better. It is now a normal and easy thing for me to try things out, test my beliefs, and self-improve. And I’m likely to be much more effective at making the world a better place as well, by prioritizing without fear.
The material was all soundly-researched and effectively taught, with extremely helpful supplemental exercises and activities. The instructors were very helpful in and out of session. The other participants were excited, engaged, challenging, and supportive.
I look forward to sharing what I’ve learned with my local Lesswrong meetup and others in the area. If that’s even 1⁄4 as awesome as my time at the Mini-Camp, it will make our lives much better.” —Ben Hoffman / Benquo
“I really can’t recommend this camp enough! This workshop broke down a complex and intertwined set of skills labelled in my brain as “common sense” and distinguished each part so that I could work on them separately. Sessions on motivation, cognition, and what habits to build to not fool yourself were particularly helpful. This camp was also the first example that I’ve seen of people taking current cognitive science and other research, decoding it, and showing people what’s been documented to work so that they can use it too. It feels to me now as though the coolest parts of the sequences have been given specific exercises and habits to build off of. This camp, and the people in it, have changed my path for the better.” —David Jones / TheDave
You can now also read the full testimonials, from everyone who chose to give one.
Is this something one of the minicampers might be willing and able to do?
No, they don’t have the time to save time.
I’m genuinely interested in seeing this data published, because I think it’s something that a lot of people can build off of. If the only obstacle is really hours, I am happy to contribute.
I would be happy to show up in person while I’m in the area, pick up any paper notes you have available, transcribe them, and mail the originals back once finished. I have professional experience with data entry (including specifically product surveys) and market research in general. I’ll be in San Francisco the afternoon of Monday, September 5th, hopefully around noon. I leave early Tuesday morning.
Great! Much of the minicamp data is private and anonymous, so I can’t share that with you, but I definitely have tasks for volunteers to do that will free uo time for me to write up a minicamp report—some of those tasks are even directly relevant to minicamp. Please email me at lukeprog at gmail if you’d like to help.
Is there a post requesting volunteer help with this administrative task?
Administrating volunteers also requires staff hours. Sometimes more than the original task. Why, are you volunteering to administrate them?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/78s/help_fund_lukeprog_at_siai/4oxp I can administer myself when it comes to basic data transcription.
Sure, I’d love to! (I thought I didn’t qualify to volunteer for SIAI?) Hand over whatever you have and I’ll make sure they do it right! (I thought this administration has to be done by someone in the loop on this, but whatever.)
Oh, you were just hoping I’d drop it, and the issue of actual substantiation of the mini-camp’s success (which lies at the top of your reasons for wanting to fund Luke) would die off? Can’t help there.
SilasBarta,
I need to write up the results myself because I personally ran the minicamp with Anna Salamon and Andrew Critch. But I have tons of stuff I could have you do that would free up more of my time to get around to writing up results of minicamp data. If you’re interested in helping, that would be awesome. You can contact me at lukeprog [at] gmail.
I actually have no interest in supporting your research. Every time I ask a clarifying question of any of your claims, you get extremely defensive and fail to answer it, which suggests a poor understaning of what you’re trying to present results on. Also, every piece of advice I’ve followed falls woefully short of what you claim it does, and I don’t seem to be alone here (on either point). I think your contributions are overrated.
(This is a large part of why I put such a low prior on claims of the minicamp’s phenomenal success and was so skeptical of the report.)
I don’t claim to have contributed more research, to LW, of course, but when I do present research I make sure to understand it.
In fairness, your more recent work doesn’t seem to be subject to any of this, so I could very well change my opinion on this.
I wish you’d be a bit more Columbo about this. You know, unfailingly polite, generous, but dogged to the end.
The comment you linked to doesn’t seem like a clarifying question at all. I think that conversation might be another instance where your belligerent tone hurt communication even though your point was a valid one. Luke’s answer didn’t seem particularly defensive, either (although I have seen other conversations where his tone was defensive, so I won’t challenge that point.)
I actually agree with you on this point (and upvoted all your questions about it), but the longer you argue the less sympathetic I’m getting. You asked when results would be published, and the answer was that it requires a lot of processing time. You asked if volunteers can help, and Luke answered that while volunteers can’t help on that specifically, they can contribute to other things which will speed up the process. To which you answered:
Which just doesn’t show a whole lot of interest in actually resolving the problem you’re concerned about.
Regarding the comment thread you linked to, I agree that the initial response you received was defensive and uninformative. I am not surprised to see it sitting at zero upvotes.
When you prodded further, you got a good response, so while I think you didn’t come out badly in that exchange at all, I am surprised that you are citing it as evidence of lukeprog understanding poorly. It instead suggests that he responds defensively even when he does understand and has a cogent answer, and that defensiveness from him implies shallow understanding far less than it would from others.
I have little problem with bluntly telling people that they suck, and by extension don’t mind less offending forthright communication, but I am leery of discussing people’s work by evaluating how people’s work compares to the popular perception of their work. It introduces an unnecessary factual dispute—how people are perceived.
E.g. “Loui Eriksson is the most underrated player in the NHL, just ask anyone! Wait a second...if everyone agrees, then...”
A new player poll asking who the most underrated NHL player is just came out, and guess who got more than twice as many votes as the second most voted for player? Hint: he was named to the All-Star roster last year...yes, it’s Loui Eriksson, again. This makes little sense. How many years in a row and in how many polls can a single guy be perceived by so many as “most underrated?”
New Year’s resolution: avoid discussing whether or not something is overrated or underrated and simply evaluate its actual worth.
I disagree. The final response was just as unhelpful; it’s just that I didn’t bother pushing the point. Luke tried to imply that the research he cited showed how to “dress fashionably based on magazines” yet not be consumerist, which is completely false.
Well, there is a tendency among forums for people to automatically vote up anything that looks well researched, so it’s important to know when that facade isn’t holding up. And considering the number of times Luke gets corrected on his use of a source or otherwise crumples on any follow-up question, I’m worried this is one of those cases, and so I can’t avoid implicating people for hasty upvoting.
But again, some of his more recent work looks to be more careful.
It may be OK in poker to try calling someone’s bluff with a bluff of your own, but it’s pretty rude in real life.
It should come as no surprise that I broadly support Silas’ skepticism.
“I actually have no interest in supporting your research. ”
Eliezer might have to defend the Golden Boy here. This takes issue with Eliezer’s promotion of Luke.
“I think your contributions are overrated.”
Ouch! Silas is bringing the bitch slap.
“Sure, I’d love to! (I thought I didn’t qualify to volunteer for SIAI?)”
LOL. Way to play up the role of the passive-aggressive outsider.
Very true.
In the interest of optimizing our rationality I think that we need to continue to call out instances “community distancing” such as the one exhibited by Silas above.
The reason for doing so? It lets the dissenters know that a community can tolerate and appreciate criticism but not the creation of a lone wolf character. Lone wolves do not contribute to a community and instead impede our advances in rationality by drawing conversations back to their status. As such, their status seeking should be pointed out and skepticism should be attached to their future postings.
Passive-aggressive comments in particular are troublesome because these types eventually find ways to disrupt substantive threads by reminding others of their loner status and their unacknowledged genius. Their resentment then leads to them mocking key figures in a community (note Silas’ comments to both Eliezer and Luke).
Perhaps LW needs a mini-sequence on acceptable and non-acceptable signaling within a rational community.
I object. “Lone wolves”, and Silas in particular, are not more status seeking than average. Luke’s contributions are far more status seeking than Silas’s are. Luke is good at status seeking while Silas’s biggest weakness is that he fails to status seek when it would clearly be in his interests to do so.
You think they don’t contribute at all?
I think all 3 of these accounts are spoofs: they have odd names, and no other activity.
About my experience...with LW’s is that silence is many times golden. There are those whom are rather old fashioned and follow Marine Law. In therapy you isolate the problem and separate what doesn’t belong like a sculptor does when observing the stone it is about to chisel out.
If a drifter would come into any mention I always heard that many dislike drifters because you don’t know too much about those, and if you do learn something desperately trying to find out where they went suddenly they have vanished leaving behind some interesting questions. So to say, a lone wolf has nothing to contribute I would say conservatively one ought to be careful to discern a wolf; one could have an Angel or a Devil ready to gobble you up hehehe
Let’s taboo “lone wolf” and see what you actually mean by it, because I don’t see Silas as a lone wolf figure in this debacle. For example, most of his comments have positive karma—what I would consider a lone wolf wouldn’t have such support.