Failure seems like the default outcome. How do we avoid that? Have there been other similar LessWrong projects like this that worked or didn’t? Maybe we can learn from them.
Group projects can work without financial incentives. Most contributors to wikis and open-source software, and web forums like this one, aren’t paid for that.
Assume we’ve made it work well, hypothetically. How did we do it?
It reminds me a lot of the “mastermind group” thing, where we had weekly hangouts to talk about our goals etc. The America/Europe group eventually petered out (see here for retrospective by regex), the Eurasia/Australia group appears to be ongoing albeit with only two (?) participants.
There have also been online reading groups for the sequences, iirc. I don’t know how those went though.
forums, wikis, open source software
I see a few relevant differences:
number of participants: If there are very many people, most of which are only sporadically active, you still get nice progress/activity. The main advantage of this video tutoring idea is personalization, which would not work with many participants.
small barrier to entry, small incremental improvements: somewhat related to the last point, people can post a single comment, fix a single bug, or only correct a few spelling mistakes on a wiki, and then never come back, but it will still have helped.
independence/asynchronicity: also kind of related to small barrier to entry. For video tutoring you need at least two people agreeing on a time and keeping that time free. In all the other cases everyone can pretty much “come and go” whenever they want. In principle it would be possible to do everything with asynchronous communication. In practice you will also have some real-time communication e.g. via IRC channels.
Pareto contribution: I don’t actually have data on this, but especially on small open source projects and wikis the bulk of the work is probably done by a single contributor, who is really passionate about it and keeps it running.
We might be able to apply these “differences” to our attempt. A lot of the value we’re talking about here is just some basic direction to get started and help when you get stuck. That’s a pretty “small barrier to entry”, and then “small incremental improvements”.
Could we dedicate a Slack channel to video tutoring? My experience with small IRC groups is that there is a small number of experts who check in frequently, or at least daily. Then the beginners will occasionally pop in and ask questions. If they’re patient enough to stay on, an expert usually answers within the day, and often it starts a real-time chat when the expert mentions the beginner’s handle. We could use the Slack channel to ask questions to get started or when we get stuck. If an appropriate teacher is on, then they can start a video chat/screen share on another site. There would be no obligation for a certain time limit.
Failure seems like the default outcome. How do we avoid that? Have there been other similar LessWrong projects like this that worked or didn’t? Maybe we can learn from them.
Group projects can work without financial incentives. Most contributors to wikis and open-source software, and web forums like this one, aren’t paid for that.
Assume we’ve made it work well, hypothetically. How did we do it?
It reminds me a lot of the “mastermind group” thing, where we had weekly hangouts to talk about our goals etc. The America/Europe group eventually petered out (see here for retrospective by regex), the Eurasia/Australia group appears to be ongoing albeit with only two (?) participants.
There have also been online reading groups for the sequences, iirc. I don’t know how those went though.
I see a few relevant differences:
number of participants: If there are very many people, most of which are only sporadically active, you still get nice progress/activity. The main advantage of this video tutoring idea is personalization, which would not work with many participants.
small barrier to entry, small incremental improvements: somewhat related to the last point, people can post a single comment, fix a single bug, or only correct a few spelling mistakes on a wiki, and then never come back, but it will still have helped.
independence/asynchronicity: also kind of related to small barrier to entry. For video tutoring you need at least two people agreeing on a time and keeping that time free. In all the other cases everyone can pretty much “come and go” whenever they want. In principle it would be possible to do everything with asynchronous communication. In practice you will also have some real-time communication e.g. via IRC channels.
Pareto contribution: I don’t actually have data on this, but especially on small open source projects and wikis the bulk of the work is probably done by a single contributor, who is really passionate about it and keeps it running.
We might be able to apply these “differences” to our attempt. A lot of the value we’re talking about here is just some basic direction to get started and help when you get stuck. That’s a pretty “small barrier to entry”, and then “small incremental improvements”.
Could we dedicate a Slack channel to video tutoring? My experience with small IRC groups is that there is a small number of experts who check in frequently, or at least daily. Then the beginners will occasionally pop in and ask questions. If they’re patient enough to stay on, an expert usually answers within the day, and often it starts a real-time chat when the expert mentions the beginner’s handle. We could use the Slack channel to ask questions to get started or when we get stuck. If an appropriate teacher is on, then they can start a video chat/screen share on another site. There would be no obligation for a certain time limit.