I have a high opinion of the minicamp (after observing fiddlemath before and after the camp, anecdotally I’d say he “leveled up” in notable ways that would be worthwhile for me), and I’ll probably apply. That being said:
This post gives off bad vibes to (my mental model of) outsiders- I wouldn’t be comfortable showing it to a non-LessWrong person and saying “This is what I’ll be doing”. I’m holding the post to a pretty high standard, because signaling matters a lot for an event where you’re asking money from people and putting them through an intensive program (it pattern-matches things that people are wary of, from “multilevel marketing seminar” to “Christian retreat”).
Some suggestions:
Providing an estimated cost breakdown (from last year) rather than a vague statement (“most of it is meals and lodging”) would go a long way toward showing that whatever this is, it’s not an SIAI fundraiser.
A specific example of an exercise from last summer’s minicamps would be much better than a description of how awesome the exercises are in general, both for reassuring people that there’s content to it and making people excited (as I was when I heard some of the things you did).
A (partial) “program of proposed topics” would make it look substantially more serious: which instructors have which particular focuses?
Like I said, I’m already interested, and I already know that this info exists; but explicitly showing it will vastly improve the signaling value, and remove the inconvenience of having to convince one’s friends and family that this isn’t an obviously cultish thing.
When I read product or movie reviews, I tend to look for the negatives as much as (if not more than) the positives; I also pay attention to the rating distribution (especially if it’s bimodal). If I can’t find any negatives, I tend to assume that the product has been astroturfed, and move on.
So, did the SIAI ever receive any negative comments about the rationality minicamp ? If so, where can I read them ?
I posted earlier that the surveys were confidential, but actually, I just reread them, and there doesn’t seem to be anything personal in the “Which parts of the camp didn’t work particularly well for you, and what do you think we could do to improve?” column, which was basically the “what negative comments do you have?” column. So I pasted those answers into a new spreadsheet and posted them to the web; you can read participants’ collected complaints here.
This is very useful, thanks! These don’t look too challenging to address—would be good to know more about what you’ve changed in response to some of the common themes there.
If you or anyone wants to do a survey, I can give you the email addresses of the minicampers, and you can email them and see what you get and post it online (assuming you write in your email that you are looking for publishable comments, etc.). Let me know if you/anyone seriously wish to do this.
Many of the minicampers are on LW, also; the folks with testimonials above have linked LW accounts; but there is of course selection bias there.
Someone else above asked for the negatives as well. Didn’t we all submit suggestions for improvement and criticisms last year? Are those publishable? If you don’t have permission, you could just email people for permission to publish their criticisms. You can definitely publish any of my comments.
The survey was anonymous, so this is hard to ask permission to share individual comments, since I don’t know who wrote them (and folks were assured that their submissions were confidential). You (since you’re on the minicamps google group) could email that google group and collect criticisms, and publish them.
Someone else could ask me for folks’ email addresses and then do the same.
Anna says we’re still looking at locations but it’s looking at around $115/person/night just for lodging + meals, and that the 3-day camps actually include 4 nights the way everyone counts things and we have to purchase it. Anna also notes that she and Julia and Michael get $3k/month and this takes way more of their time than just the actual days. So definitely not a Singinst fundraiser. That data is available very easily so I’m posting it right now.
A specific example of an exercise from last year’s minicamp that a lot of people liked was “Value of Information” which included the technical details of how to calculate VoI and exercises in being sensitive to particular forms of scope (how much does it cost, how long does it last, how often does it happen).
We’re still working out the program which is why it’s not posted even tentatively (we were just in the middle of some agonizing about priorities).
Can I just stay in a hostel and eat from the gorcery store?
To make a rational decision, more information is necessary, such as: How much does the hostel cost? Does it have decent beds? Distance from hostel to the place of workshop. Local food costs. Etc. (Don’t forget to include facts like if you sleep in a different place than majority, you deprive yourself of opportunity of some morning/evening informal chat.)
Generally: how much would I really save by “hostel & grocery store” and how much would it reduce my gains from the workshop?
Speaking for myself, I would like to cut some costs (together with the cost of flying it makes my salary for 2 months), but there is always a risk. Once I slept in a hostel with beds so bad that I really did not sleep much that night. Now if I imagine 9 such nights plus jet lag, and the resulting effect on my concentration and memory, I would get much less benefit per dollar spent.
I have friends and relatives who live in the area. How central to the camp is the communal living aspect? What would you charge to commute to it, if that is possible?
I guess we’d charge about 1⁄2 of the total (noting that you’d still be having meals with the rest of us)… but I suspect commuting is harder than you think, given how intensively scheduled it is. Err on the side of applying, and we can discuss.
Also, if anyone’s unable to afford camp for whatever reason, apply anyhow and check the “needs scholarship” box and we can see what can be worked out.
The Bay Area is rather sprawling. It can take 1.5 hours to go from Berkeley to San Jose during rush hour. If they don’t live near where the camp is held, I expect you would regret the commute and find the experience more taxing and less relaxing than the participants staying on site.
It’s still being nailed down and it looks like it will be different locations for different camps, but for now it looks like the one week long one is at a retreat center in the deep East Bay between Walnut Creek and Danville, with one weekend camp in Berkeley and one in the South Bay. Still subject to change until we officially announce.
This post gives off bad vibes to (my mental model of) outsiders.
I had the same impression; the post makes the minicamp sound like your average, run-of-the-mill, self-help seminar scam—complete with testimonials and everything.
I mean, it kind of is a standard workshop (like ones on public speaking, or italian cooking, or, yes, self-help)… except that the content is about Bayesian math, and microeconomics, and the cognitive science of standard human error patterns and so on. And the people you get to network with are other LW-ers who are interested in actually applying this content to practical problems, and coming to embed Bayesian patterns into the details of one’s day-to-day thoughts instead of just into the way you answer pen-and-paper questions.
But, yes, similar workshop format, different content. Maybe we should make the ad different too in some way. I wonder if my inclusion of the testimonials and survey data, in particular, may have been misleading—I was trying to say “look, past participants (who were smart LW-ers a lot like you) liked it, so maybe you will too”, but it may have come across as a stronger claim. I’d say come check it out if you’re interested, or else wait for a subsequent year if you want to have seen “proof that this will definitively change your life” first or something (which we may or may not ever manage, though we’re certainly working on it), and, meanwhile, whether you come or not, do keep contributing on LW, trying exercises yourself in your own life, and generally helping to figure out what rationality can be.
The difficulty stems from how much good stuff is mixed in with all the scams, making outside evaluation much harder. Most self help programs include a lot of the same basic items by necessity (fixing the big problems first). We also seem to understand implicitly that people’s self judgement of the effects of these types of things is terrible, especially when those judgements are very close time-wise to the event itself (rationalization of expense and effort, unwillingness to signal disloyalty to new ingroup, even internally).
I have a high opinion of the minicamp (after observing fiddlemath before and after the camp, anecdotally I’d say he “leveled up” in notable ways that would be worthwhile for me), and I’ll probably apply. That being said:
This post gives off bad vibes to (my mental model of) outsiders- I wouldn’t be comfortable showing it to a non-LessWrong person and saying “This is what I’ll be doing”. I’m holding the post to a pretty high standard, because signaling matters a lot for an event where you’re asking money from people and putting them through an intensive program (it pattern-matches things that people are wary of, from “multilevel marketing seminar” to “Christian retreat”).
Some suggestions:
Providing an estimated cost breakdown (from last year) rather than a vague statement (“most of it is meals and lodging”) would go a long way toward showing that whatever this is, it’s not an SIAI fundraiser.
A specific example of an exercise from last summer’s minicamps would be much better than a description of how awesome the exercises are in general, both for reassuring people that there’s content to it and making people excited (as I was when I heard some of the things you did).
A (partial) “program of proposed topics” would make it look substantially more serious: which instructors have which particular focuses?
Like I said, I’m already interested, and I already know that this info exists; but explicitly showing it will vastly improve the signaling value, and remove the inconvenience of having to convince one’s friends and family that this isn’t an obviously cultish thing.
Here’s another random idea:
When I read product or movie reviews, I tend to look for the negatives as much as (if not more than) the positives; I also pay attention to the rating distribution (especially if it’s bimodal). If I can’t find any negatives, I tend to assume that the product has been astroturfed, and move on.
So, did the SIAI ever receive any negative comments about the rationality minicamp ? If so, where can I read them ?
I posted earlier that the surveys were confidential, but actually, I just reread them, and there doesn’t seem to be anything personal in the “Which parts of the camp didn’t work particularly well for you, and what do you think we could do to improve?” column, which was basically the “what negative comments do you have?” column. So I pasted those answers into a new spreadsheet and posted them to the web; you can read participants’ collected complaints here.
This is very useful, thanks! These don’t look too challenging to address—would be good to know more about what you’ve changed in response to some of the common themes there.
These are great, thanks !
If you or anyone wants to do a survey, I can give you the email addresses of the minicampers, and you can email them and see what you get and post it online (assuming you write in your email that you are looking for publishable comments, etc.). Let me know if you/anyone seriously wish to do this.
Many of the minicampers are on LW, also; the folks with testimonials above have linked LW accounts; but there is of course selection bias there.
Someone else above asked for the negatives as well. Didn’t we all submit suggestions for improvement and criticisms last year? Are those publishable? If you don’t have permission, you could just email people for permission to publish their criticisms. You can definitely publish any of my comments.
The survey was anonymous, so this is hard to ask permission to share individual comments, since I don’t know who wrote them (and folks were assured that their submissions were confidential). You (since you’re on the minicamps google group) could email that google group and collect criticisms, and publish them.
Someone else could ask me for folks’ email addresses and then do the same.
Anna says we’re still looking at locations but it’s looking at around $115/person/night just for lodging + meals, and that the 3-day camps actually include 4 nights the way everyone counts things and we have to purchase it. Anna also notes that she and Julia and Michael get $3k/month and this takes way more of their time than just the actual days. So definitely not a Singinst fundraiser. That data is available very easily so I’m posting it right now.
A specific example of an exercise from last year’s minicamp that a lot of people liked was “Value of Information” which included the technical details of how to calculate VoI and exercises in being sensitive to particular forms of scope (how much does it cost, how long does it last, how often does it happen).
We’re still working out the program which is why it’s not posted even tentatively (we were just in the middle of some agonizing about priorities).
Wait, what? Can I just stay in a hostel and eat from the gorcery store?
To make a rational decision, more information is necessary, such as: How much does the hostel cost? Does it have decent beds? Distance from hostel to the place of workshop. Local food costs. Etc. (Don’t forget to include facts like if you sleep in a different place than majority, you deprive yourself of opportunity of some morning/evening informal chat.)
Generally: how much would I really save by “hostel & grocery store” and how much would it reduce my gains from the workshop?
Speaking for myself, I would like to cut some costs (together with the cost of flying it makes my salary for 2 months), but there is always a risk. Once I slept in a hostel with beds so bad that I really did not sleep much that night. Now if I imagine 9 such nights plus jet lag, and the resulting effect on my concentration and memory, I would get much less benefit per dollar spent.
Couldn’t the SIAI at least provide this option ? Then, people could decide for themselves whether they want cold cereal or gourmet meals.
I went to an Esperanto thing that was set up like this once.
I have friends and relatives who live in the area. How central to the camp is the communal living aspect? What would you charge to commute to it, if that is possible?
I guess we’d charge about 1⁄2 of the total (noting that you’d still be having meals with the rest of us)… but I suspect commuting is harder than you think, given how intensively scheduled it is. Err on the side of applying, and we can discuss.
Also, if anyone’s unable to afford camp for whatever reason, apply anyhow and check the “needs scholarship” box and we can see what can be worked out.
The Bay Area is rather sprawling. It can take 1.5 hours to go from Berkeley to San Jose during rush hour. If they don’t live near where the camp is held, I expect you would regret the commute and find the experience more taxing and less relaxing than the participants staying on site.
Agree but… if I knew where in the bay area it’s being held I could tell whether it’s just around the corner, or a 1.5 hour commute.
It’s still being nailed down and it looks like it will be different locations for different camps, but for now it looks like the one week long one is at a retreat center in the deep East Bay between Walnut Creek and Danville, with one weekend camp in Berkeley and one in the South Bay. Still subject to change until we officially announce.
I had the same impression; the post makes the minicamp sound like your average, run-of-the-mill, self-help seminar scam—complete with testimonials and everything.
That not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of people pay for those. And such people are in need of rationality help!
This plan is so crazy, it just might work ! :-)
Good to know.
I mean, it kind of is a standard workshop (like ones on public speaking, or italian cooking, or, yes, self-help)… except that the content is about Bayesian math, and microeconomics, and the cognitive science of standard human error patterns and so on. And the people you get to network with are other LW-ers who are interested in actually applying this content to practical problems, and coming to embed Bayesian patterns into the details of one’s day-to-day thoughts instead of just into the way you answer pen-and-paper questions.
But, yes, similar workshop format, different content. Maybe we should make the ad different too in some way. I wonder if my inclusion of the testimonials and survey data, in particular, may have been misleading—I was trying to say “look, past participants (who were smart LW-ers a lot like you) liked it, so maybe you will too”, but it may have come across as a stronger claim. I’d say come check it out if you’re interested, or else wait for a subsequent year if you want to have seen “proof that this will definitively change your life” first or something (which we may or may not ever manage, though we’re certainly working on it), and, meanwhile, whether you come or not, do keep contributing on LW, trying exercises yourself in your own life, and generally helping to figure out what rationality can be.
The difficulty stems from how much good stuff is mixed in with all the scams, making outside evaluation much harder. Most self help programs include a lot of the same basic items by necessity (fixing the big problems first). We also seem to understand implicitly that people’s self judgement of the effects of these types of things is terrible, especially when those judgements are very close time-wise to the event itself (rationalization of expense and effort, unwillingness to signal disloyalty to new ingroup, even internally).
Thanks; this is helpful.