Don’t get me wrong being with awesome people in of itself will work … for a while, until you leave that group.
I’m not that sceptical of the claims, but from the outside its hard to tell the difference between this scenario and the rationality camps working as intended.
Indeed. SIAI is conducting a year-later follow up which should provide the information needed to differentiate. Answering that question now is probably not possible to the degree of certainty required.
Yes; what I meant by “success” was more like a successful party or conference; Luke pulled off an event that nearly all the attendees were extremely glad they came to, gave presentations that held interest and influenced behavior for at least the upcoming weeks, etc. It was successful enough that, when combined with Luke’s other accomplishments, I know we want Luke, for his project-completion, social effectiveness, strategicness, fast learning curves, and ability to fit all these qualities into SingInst in a manner that boosts our overall effectiveness. I don’t mean “Minicamp definitely successfully created new uber-rationalists”; that would be a weird call from this data, given priors.
Sure, but Konkvistador’s post is about how the survey might be contaminated by awesome-people-halo-effect, not that we shouldn’t be calling it a success. That’s a separate concern addressed elsewhere. My post was addressing how we would tell the difference between “working” and “near awesome people”.
Indeed. SIAI is conducting a year-later follow up which should provide the information needed to differentiate. Answering that question now is probably not possible to the degree of certainty required.
That’s exactly the complaint though—many people have described it as a success, before the data is available.
I think people are seeing drastically different things in the word ‘success’.
Yes; what I meant by “success” was more like a successful party or conference; Luke pulled off an event that nearly all the attendees were extremely glad they came to, gave presentations that held interest and influenced behavior for at least the upcoming weeks, etc. It was successful enough that, when combined with Luke’s other accomplishments, I know we want Luke, for his project-completion, social effectiveness, strategicness, fast learning curves, and ability to fit all these qualities into SingInst in a manner that boosts our overall effectiveness. I don’t mean “Minicamp definitely successfully created new uber-rationalists”; that would be a weird call from this data, given priors.
Sure, but Konkvistador’s post is about how the survey might be contaminated by awesome-people-halo-effect, not that we shouldn’t be calling it a success. That’s a separate concern addressed elsewhere. My post was addressing how we would tell the difference between “working” and “near awesome people”.