One of the core ideas of CFAR is to develop tools to teach rationality. For that purpose it’s useful to avoid making the course material completely open at this point in time. CFAR wants to publish scientific papers that validate their ideas about teaching rationality.
Doing things in person helps with running experiments and those experiments might be less clear when some people already viewed the lectures online.
I guess I don’t see why the two are mutually exclusive, I doubt everyone would stop attending workshops if the material was freely available, and I don’t understand why something can’t be published if it’s open sourced first?
I’m guessing that the goal here is to gather information on how to teach rationality to the ‘average’ person? As in, the person off of the street who’s never asked themselves “what do I think I know and how do I think I know it?”. But as far as I can tell, LWers make up a large portion of the workshop attendees. Many of us will have already spent enough time reading articles/sequences about related topics that it’s as if we’ve “already viewed the lectures online”.
Also, it’s not as if the entire internet is going to flock to the content the second that it gets posted. There will still be an endless pool of people to use in the experiments. And wouldn’t the experiments be more informative if the data points weren’t all paying participants with rationality as a high priority? Shouldn’t the experiments involve trying to teach a random class of high-schoolers or something?
And wouldn’t the experiments be more informative if the data points weren’t all paying participants with rationality as a high priority?
As far as I understand that isn’t the case. They do give out scholarship, so not everyone pays. I also thinks that they do testing of the techniques outside of the workshops.
Shouldn’t the experiments involve trying to teach a random class of high-schoolers or something?
Doing research costs money and CFAR seems to want to fund itself through workshop fees. If they would focus on high school classes they would need a different source of funding.
One of the core ideas of CFAR is to develop tools to teach rationality. For that purpose it’s useful to avoid making the course material completely open at this point in time. CFAR wants to publish scientific papers that validate their ideas about teaching rationality.
Doing things in person helps with running experiments and those experiments might be less clear when some people already viewed the lectures online.
I guess I don’t see why the two are mutually exclusive, I doubt everyone would stop attending workshops if the material was freely available, and I don’t understand why something can’t be published if it’s open sourced first?
I’m guessing that the goal here is to gather information on how to teach rationality to the ‘average’ person? As in, the person off of the street who’s never asked themselves “what do I think I know and how do I think I know it?”. But as far as I can tell, LWers make up a large portion of the workshop attendees. Many of us will have already spent enough time reading articles/sequences about related topics that it’s as if we’ve “already viewed the lectures online”.
Also, it’s not as if the entire internet is going to flock to the content the second that it gets posted. There will still be an endless pool of people to use in the experiments. And wouldn’t the experiments be more informative if the data points weren’t all paying participants with rationality as a high priority? Shouldn’t the experiments involve trying to teach a random class of high-schoolers or something?
What am I missing?
As far as I understand that isn’t the case. They do give out scholarship, so not everyone pays. I also thinks that they do testing of the techniques outside of the workshops.
Doing research costs money and CFAR seems to want to fund itself through workshop fees. If they would focus on high school classes they would need a different source of funding.