I’m not sure I expect hiring people solely based on their educational expertise to work out well.
Yes, there needs to be some screening other than pedagogy, but money to find the best people can fix lots of problems. And yes, typical teaching at good universities sucks, but that’s largely because it optimizes for research. (You’d likely have had better professors as an undergrad if you went to a worse university—or at least that was my experience.)
...they can only (do something like) streamline the existing product.
My thought was that streamlining the existing product and turning it into useable and testably effective modules would be a really huge thing.
Also: I think you’re implying that AI is a really huge deal problem and rationality is less.
If that was the implication, I apologize—I view safe AI as only near-impossible, while making actual humans rational is a problem that is fundamentally impossible. But raising the sanity water-line has some low-hanging fruits—not to get most people to CFAR-expert-levels, but to get high schools to teach some of the basics in ways that potentially has significant leverage in improving social decision-making in general. (And if the top 1% of people in High Schools also take those classes, there might be indirect benefits leading to increasing the number of CFAR-expert-level people in a decade.)
Yes, there needs to be some screening other than pedagogy, but money to find the best people can fix lots of problems. And yes, typical teaching at good universities sucks, but that’s largely because it optimizes for research. (You’d likely have had better professors as an undergrad if you went to a worse university—or at least that was my experience.)
My thought was that streamlining the existing product and turning it into useable and testably effective modules would be a really huge thing.
If that was the implication, I apologize—I view safe AI as only near-impossible, while making actual humans rational is a problem that is fundamentally impossible. But raising the sanity water-line has some low-hanging fruits—not to get most people to CFAR-expert-levels, but to get high schools to teach some of the basics in ways that potentially has significant leverage in improving social decision-making in general. (And if the top 1% of people in High Schools also take those classes, there might be indirect benefits leading to increasing the number of CFAR-expert-level people in a decade.)