I’d been tossing around the idea of a popular “How to Improve Your Life” sort of site. The user answers questions regarding what they are disappointed in, some ‘dance around the bush’ type questions to work around people’s self-bias and questions to judge education level on various necessary topics.
The system would then weight the answers and calculate what improvements would have the highest cost/benefit. My assumption was that most people would suffer from too little time, irrational beliefs or health issues. A site is then suggested to support improvement.
There are tons of free sites for too little time (GTD), improving health (mostly calorie counters) and knowledge (spaced repetition sites, Khan Academy, etc). There is nothing I know of to step people through rationality. When I say ‘step through’, think an expert system similar to software ‘wizards’.
I’ve been leaning, and this post helped shove me over, that helping address the lack of a rationality site is the more immediate good. (A rational/informed person wouldn’t need a site to point out what areas need improvement, and then google it)
Anyhow....
I plan on starting to outline a rationality specific version of the above and code it for a LAMP stack. Anyone else interested, or have a better suggestion? If no better suggestions, I’ll start a sourceforge project.
Very interesting idea—it would be great if some would help you with the questions and I agree that you may need some tricky ones to pull out the biases and actually target the most immediate areas for improvement. I like the idea!
I’d been tossing around the idea of a popular “How to Improve Your Life” sort of site. The user answers questions regarding what they are disappointed in, some ‘dance around the bush’ type questions to work around people’s self-bias and questions to judge education level on various necessary topics.
The system would then weight the answers and calculate what improvements would have the highest cost/benefit. My assumption was that most people would suffer from too little time, irrational beliefs or health issues. A site is then suggested to support improvement.
There are tons of free sites for too little time (GTD), improving health (mostly calorie counters) and knowledge (spaced repetition sites, Khan Academy, etc). There is nothing I know of to step people through rationality. When I say ‘step through’, think an expert system similar to software ‘wizards’.
I’ve been leaning, and this post helped shove me over, that helping address the lack of a rationality site is the more immediate good. (A rational/informed person wouldn’t need a site to point out what areas need improvement, and then google it)
Anyhow....
I plan on starting to outline a rationality specific version of the above and code it for a LAMP stack. Anyone else interested, or have a better suggestion? If no better suggestions, I’ll start a sourceforge project.
Very interesting idea—it would be great if some would help you with the questions and I agree that you may need some tricky ones to pull out the biases and actually target the most immediate areas for improvement. I like the idea!