What you need is a real business model. If you tailor your enterprise towards providing a YouTube channel, building a subscriber base and living off of ads, that is substantially different to creating a website, to providing 1-on-1 personal services. It’s not only hindsight bias that your original financing plans seemed doom to fail, when I first read of your project I very nearly made a public comment predicting as much (but didn’t want to be a Debbie Downer, also my head was dizzy from all the shaking).
“Ideas as to how to secure philanthropic funding” is so far removed from an actual business model, philanthrophy-financed or otherwise, it’s hard where to start. I’d advise a “back to the drawing board” to come up with a highly tailored approach that you can sell in a 2 minute elevator speech. (Non-serious aside: One to investors and one to ignorant parents in Greenwich, Conn., who will pay whatever to support their precious super-high-IQ (all of them) sunflowers (and because the neighbors do it).)
ETA: It’s true, life coaches (and homeopathy peddlers) often do just fine with their 1-on-1 or 1-to-many coaching. For the most part, they’re just talented bullshitters. You, Sir, are [un]fortunately not a bullshitter, but interested in actually providing high-quality advice. Alas, it turns out that bullshitting is a better proxy for “providing valuable services” than, you know, actually providing a valuable service.
ETA: It’s true, life coaches (and homeopathy peddlers) often do just fine with their 1-on-1 or 1-to-many coaching.
Coaching is not primarily about giving advice. Some of them even have a ethical codex against pushing their solution onto clients.
It is basically about asking people: “What do you think you have to do? Don’t tell me bullshit, what do you really think would be best for you? When will you do it?”
Then next week: “Did you do last week what you said at the last meeting?”
A coach helps you to go where you have ugh fields. There are plenty of people who get value from it.
If you tailor your enterprise towards providing a YouTube channel, building a subscriber base and living off of ads, that is substantially different to creating a website, to providing 1-on-1 personal services.
I don’t quite follow this – are you suggesting that we pursue the former strategy?
It’s not only hindsight bias that your original financing plans seemed doom to fail, when I first read of your project I very nearly made a public comment predicting as much
I wouldn’t have minded.
It’s not only hindsight bias that your original financing plans seemed doom to fail, when I first read of your project I very nearly made a public comment predicting as much
I’d advise a “back to the drawing board” to come up with a highly tailored approach that you can sell in a 2 minute elevator speech.
Tailored to whom?
You, Sir, are [un]fortunately not a bullshitter, but interested in actually providing high-quality advice.
Well, I suppose that I’d be suggesting that you tailor your speech to the powers-that-be at LW: Make Cognito Mentoring part of their (and CFAR’s) outreach effort, Cognito Mentoring mentions on every new chapter of HPMOR. The perfect audience! When you find a synergy, exploit it to the max: In exchange for being able to thoroughly tap into the HPMOR community, the Cognito Mentoring YouTube channel you create will also regularly feature CFAR content*. Quite the glaring omission for the LW-CFAR-cloud not to have an active and promoted YouTube channel, you can solve that**. You require very little manpower from them, you can take care of nearly everything yourselves. You provide a new gateway into the rationality community (academic-accomplishment centered, another demonstration of how rationality training can be applied to more than picking the door with the goat) with new participants for the workshops, and you get not to start from scratch with your community building efforts (and a community is what is required, even if only a loose one). Along the lines of “Think of an incentive the other person hasn’t even thought of—and then meet it”.There’s no reason the hours you’re putting in can’t “double-count” for both CFAR and Cognito Mentoring, considering the large overlap in ‘ideology’. Whether you’d label such a partnership as an affiliation or as Cognito Mentoring being a sister organisation would be up to the negotiatin’.
* It may also drop the Bayes.
** If there is such a channel, I’m not aware of it, case in point.
What you need is a real business model. If you tailor your enterprise towards providing a YouTube channel, building a subscriber base and living off of ads, that is substantially different to creating a website, to providing 1-on-1 personal services. It’s not only hindsight bias that your original financing plans seemed doom to fail, when I first read of your project I very nearly made a public comment predicting as much (but didn’t want to be a Debbie Downer, also my head was dizzy from all the shaking).
“Ideas as to how to secure philanthropic funding” is so far removed from an actual business model, philanthrophy-financed or otherwise, it’s hard where to start. I’d advise a “back to the drawing board” to come up with a highly tailored approach that you can sell in a 2 minute elevator speech. (Non-serious aside: One to investors and one to ignorant parents in Greenwich, Conn., who will pay whatever to support their precious super-high-IQ (all of them) sunflowers (and because the neighbors do it).)
ETA: It’s true, life coaches (and homeopathy peddlers) often do just fine with their 1-on-1 or 1-to-many coaching. For the most part, they’re just talented bullshitters. You, Sir, are [un]fortunately not a bullshitter, but interested in actually providing high-quality advice. Alas, it turns out that bullshitting is a better proxy for “providing valuable services” than, you know, actually providing a valuable service.
Coaching is not primarily about giving advice. Some of them even have a ethical codex against pushing their solution onto clients.
It is basically about asking people: “What do you think you have to do? Don’t tell me bullshit, what do you really think would be best for you? When will you do it?” Then next week: “Did you do last week what you said at the last meeting?”
A coach helps you to go where you have ugh fields. There are plenty of people who get value from it.
Thanks.
I don’t quite follow this – are you suggesting that we pursue the former strategy?
I wouldn’t have minded.
Tailored to whom?
Do you think the two are mutually exclusive?
Well, I suppose that I’d be suggesting that you tailor your speech to the powers-that-be at LW: Make Cognito Mentoring part of their (and CFAR’s) outreach effort, Cognito Mentoring mentions on every new chapter of HPMOR. The perfect audience! When you find a synergy, exploit it to the max: In exchange for being able to thoroughly tap into the HPMOR community, the Cognito Mentoring YouTube channel you create will also regularly feature CFAR content*. Quite the glaring omission for the LW-CFAR-cloud not to have an active and promoted YouTube channel, you can solve that**. You require very little manpower from them, you can take care of nearly everything yourselves. You provide a new gateway into the rationality community (academic-accomplishment centered, another demonstration of how rationality training can be applied to more than picking the door with the goat) with new participants for the workshops, and you get not to start from scratch with your community building efforts (and a community is what is required, even if only a loose one). Along the lines of “Think of an incentive the other person hasn’t even thought of—and then meet it”.There’s no reason the hours you’re putting in can’t “double-count” for both CFAR and Cognito Mentoring, considering the large overlap in ‘ideology’. Whether you’d label such a partnership as an affiliation or as Cognito Mentoring being a sister organisation would be up to the negotiatin’.
* It may also drop the Bayes.
** If there is such a channel, I’m not aware of it, case in point.
Thanks for the suggestion :-) We’d have to see whether people at CFAR would be interested.