I propose that we talk here and agree on a definition of Level 1 that would be achievable by most of us within a week or two (just to get the foot in the door), then start working toward it and discussing what Level 2 should be.
The ExRx table of strength standards has a level called “untrained,” defined as “the minimum level of strength required to maintain a reasonable quality of life.” Of course, when I started exercising, I was below this “minimum,” but it took only a little bit of dedicated effort to get there. That’s what I think “Level 1″ should be like.
Social: be able to initiate a conversation with someone you’ve met and make plans to meet again.
Programming: be able to write a program with a for loop in some language (i.e. multiply the numbers from one to N.)
Discipline: be able to work for two hours without stopping.
Math: I’m not sure, because I’m so wrapped up in it that I don’t have a good gauge of “minimum necessary,” but perhaps, be able to prove Bayes’ Theorem, or understand differentiation and integration on a more than mechanical level.
Endurance: be able to run for a mile without stopping or walking.
Memory: learn a short poem or passage by heart. (Maybe the Gettysburg Address, to be U.S.-centric but standard.)
Empiricism: find a question you REALLY don’t know the answer to (and can’t instantly google) and either design an experiment or read experimental studies until you have convincing evidence for one side or the other.
I think that for the reference class of humanity, the minimum amount of math that you need is the ability to consistently not get cheated out of money, and to be able to count without your fingers.
How consistently do we have to be able to do these?
Good start, thanks a lot for the work you put into your comment! Harsh critique follows.
1, 6 and 7 are precise enough to be part of a formal leveling scale. (But we’d need to i18n-ize them a little because all three use the American cultural assumption. I don’t know offhand the weight of a pound, the length of a mile, or the number of words in the Gettysburg address :-))
3 could be made more precise with a little work. I’d prefer it to say “write and run a program”, to make the winning condition clearer. Also I’d rather use one of the classic examples, e.g. Hello World, 99 bottles of beer on the wall, or any of the first ten Project Euler problems. IMO we shouldn’t be in the business of inventing new exercises that teach programming!
2 is not very informative: if you were able to initiate a conversation with a stranger once, that doesn’t mean you can do it again. Same for 4: can Bob qualify for level 1 if he’s pretty sure he worked for two hours straight at least once in the last month? I’d like to have criteria that are about as informative and insensitive to flukes as #1.
5 and 8 are too vague and need to be completely rethought, IMO. A level 0 person doesn’t know what a proper mathematical proof or a proper piece of evidence feels like.
Agreed on substituting Project Euler problems. (God, I should really be doing those at some point...)
Maybe 2 and 4 need to add a frequency requirement? Let’s say, in a month, 4 invites and 2 days a week that involve a 2-hour sprint of work. (BTW, I think meeting strangers is less important than initiating conversations with people you’ve already met; my “social” criterion was about the latter. Can you ask that guy you know from class if he wants to meet up and study? People who can’t arrange to meet are at a disadvantage, and I’ve struggled with that for a long time.)
5 and 8 are too vague. The trouble with LessWrong is that there’s a very wide range of math abilities. I think calculus is conceptually important, though; maybe it should be something like “complete a Khan academy course,” “complete a Schaums Outlines calculus book,” or “Pass the AP calculus test.”
Great idea about frequency for 2 and 4! It adds an element of grind (leveling is now guaranteed to take time), but that sounds like an okay tradeoff to me if we can’t think of anything better. Also I agree that talking to people you know is a better idea for level 1 than talking to strangers.
I have set up a wiki page with our current draft. I think you should be able to edit it :-) And let’s commit to finalizing the requirements for level 1 within the next couple days—do you agree?
Awesome job starting us off! Sorry I forgot to mention that earlier.
I honestly don’t know what to do for empiricism.
Maybe a minimum level is realizing that you don’t know something, and being willing to update on information related to the fact that you’re curious about?
First, let me explain what I’d want out of the “leveling” process—a way to “become more awesome” by holding ourselves to rather high competitive standards in a bunch of different, but not too obscure, areas of human achievement. I don’t think a person needs to get to ExRx’s “untrained” level of strength to have a “reasonable quality of life”—I know lots of people who seem to be doing fine without being that strong, or without being able to run a mile. However, an elite athlete would think “Oh my god, how do you live if you can’t even run a little?” That’s what I was getting at. What the elite levels of a skill consider “minimal” is, of course, way above the actual minimum that ordinary people practice. That kind of “minimal” is a good, challenging goal for an ordinary person. (For example: I am really not a finance expert. I am also a terrible cook. I would want to know what a professional in finance, or a professional chef, thinks is the “bare minimum” of financial understanding or culinary skill, and see if I can get there.)
While I see the intuitive appeal of this from a status standpoint, I don’t understand why one would want to be other-optimized by someone who, by definition, doesn’t understand enough about one’s situation to know whether the given advice matches the stated criteria for applicability or not.
I will admit that my reaction could easily be the result of an ugh field, though. Ugh, people who think they know how I should be living my life.
Some people—I’m one of them—do want to be “other-optimized” in the sense that we want to know “how we’re doing,” generally, by the standards of other people, and we’re willing to try meeting an external set of challenge goals. Maybe it’s an age thing; I am not old enough that I think I have my life figured out and that I know what “works for me.” A lot of things are still in flux, so I’d be willing to learn entirely new skills and add new identities. That seems to be common for people in their teens and twenties. I wish somebody had shaken me and told me “No, seriously, learn to program NOW” when I was a lot younger. I expect there will be other things that I don’t yet know I will want to be good at. This “leveling” business seems like a way to facilitate the process.
I’m pretty much behind the idea of leveling, actually. Coming up with a coherent, stepwise map of how to get from a layperson’s ability level to mastery of a certain topic seems like it will have all sorts of benefits. I just think we can do a lot better than asking an authority on a given topic what they think everyone should know about it, to figure out which steps should go first or what should be considered a very basic level of competence—I think we’ll end up optimizing for the wrong things, if we do it that way.
This is exactly what I want from the leveling process as well. Thanks for expressing it so clearly, and for the suggestions of cooking and money management. These sound really nice to have!
Some of these don’t seem very well calibrated for ‘minimum necessary to maintain a reasonable quality of life’.
Programming: Most people don’t program at all, and do fine, so this might not be a useful category in the first place. ‘Computer interaction’ would be better, and level 1 might be something like the ability to use reasonably-user-friendly web-based email or the ability to write, save, and retrieve an essay in a word processing program. If we want to talk about actual programming, though, level 1 might be something like understanding what variables are, or that computers ‘think’ in a purely procedural way (that there is no ghost in the machine).
Math: I agree with atucker that basic arithmetic is appropriate for level 1, though I’d add ‘ability to parse simple word problems’ to it.
Endurance: I don’t run. At all. This has approximately never been an issue, and doesn’t affect my quality of life in any way that I can detect. Level 1 for endurance should probably be something more along the lines of being able to walk a few miles (2, maybe 3) on flat ground without becoming winded—this seems about in keeping with what someone would need to do in the course of shopping at a large store.
Empiricism: Again your suggestion seems too advanced for a ‘minimum necessary’ level. I’d suggest something more along the lines of being able to notice intrinsically flawed arguments or arguments where the arguer is obviously biased.
Perhaps we should refine “minimum necessary to maintain reasonable quality of life” to something like “minimum necessary to maintain reasonable quality of life, given that the area is relevant”.
By way of analogy, I don’t own a car. The minimum necessary skill in driving to maintain reasonable quality of life is absolutely nothing for me. But for many, driving a car is necessary; for them, the minimum necessary skill is being able to remain within the lines, use indicators, park and three point turn, etc. Pass the driving test, in other words. There’s no point standardising levels of driving skill to include my lifestyle! Given that driving is relevant to your quality of life, you need pass-driving-test levels as an absolute minimum. So that has to be Level 1.
Being able to get by without a skill isn’t the same as having the minimum amount of skill necessary. Being Level 0 in driving and still having a reasonable quality of life is a fact about me, and maybe about the public transport system where I live, and maybe also about the willingness of my friends to give me lifts—not a fact about how much skill is required in driving.
(When I crossclass into Professional, though, and Driving becomes a class skill, I’ll have to get to at least Level 1)
I see, and basically agree with, your point, but that benchmark seems to still have some problems: Specifically, I’m having trouble coming up with a scenario where programming would be a relevant skill but level-1 ability (equivalent in difficulty to other level-1 benchmarks) at it would be sufficient.
I had a data entry job in the summer of 2002 when staying with family between years of college. After a day or two meeting people and finding out where the bathrooms were and getting started with the nominal data entry task I installed a macro recorder so I could factor out some of the human tedium by writing scripts to speed things up.
By the time I left the job 8 weeks later to go back to school I was teaching the “real employees” how to automate the boring parts of their own jobs and had them hire a friend who lived in the area to continue their macro lessons and to write the really “tricky” macros on the side (he’d upgraded the job to writing perl scripts within a few weeks).
Basically, if someone thinks they can be a “white collar worker” without any “algoracy” (cognate to literacy and numeracy), I suspect they are in the process of becoming economic road kill. The space of AI-hard jobs is steadily shrinking. Maybe some people can switch to “blue collar work” and learn to drive a tractor or pick strawberries instead? At least for a while? See, there’s this thing called the singularity… but if you’re here reading and commenting on this site you’re probably already something like an expert in the “far mode” theory of the singularity :-P
The implications of the singularity to things like politics and job skill acquisition are the “near mode” applications that are still being worked out by basically everyone… but I suspect the importance of algoracy is one of the obvious practical implications.
(I’m progressing towards level 1 in programming currently, and programming so far has allowed me to write a script that eats a .txt combat log from an MMO and spits out information I care about, it allows me to use a Python console as my daily planner (from collections import deque → create a stack+queue of tasks), and it allows me to solve Project Euler-type problems. So not a whole lot.)
However, I am treating levels of programming much like I treat levels of wizard—low level spells suck, high level spells are game-breaking-ly awesome.
Those sound like what’s needed. Thanks for making awesome concrete suggestions!
I wonder whether the Math category should be broken down a bit. There’s calculation—which is sometimes easier to start with e.g. things like basic arithmetic operations, representing real quantities with mathematical numbers and shapes), then there’s algebra/geometry and the things which follow, and probability starts with a new set of axioms and applies to a different sort of problem, so it may deserve a separate skill hierarchy. I might also separate out “proving” as a standalone skill, though with not very many levels. (You learn to prove advanced math by learning the math, but initially you still have to learn how to follow and then how to generate a proof). Or maybe as part of a” logic” skill hierarchy?
I worry that the system will get way too complicated if we’re splitting things up at that level. But maybe with many worker bees, it will thrive, like Wikipedia or MathWorld. In my leveling references (various games I’ve played), you could get to level 4 in Math, but put a note that said “strong on probability theory, average on the rest”.
I think we need to determine if we want a Level system as found in various games, or a Badge system, that quantifies/commemorates particular tasks (your breakdown reminds me more of Badges, not Levels).
Maybe both? Generic human levels for the things most of us agree are important for everyone to work on, plus badges for the specializations, like algebraic geometry or the computational astrophysics of stellar dust? Maybe “numeracy” for the generic human version of math, cf. John Allen Paulos’ “Innumeracy” book.
Right now I’m most interested in “generic human levels”, but several people here in the comments have independently expressed interest in the idea of “badges” for specialists. Perhaps you could make something out of it? :-)
It seems to me that badges are what you get when your levels become too specific.
Like, if we can’t agree on math badges and split it up by subfield (say, calculus, statistics, graph theory, topography, cryptology, etc.) and then can’t agree on levels (what comes first, optimizing multivariable functions, or Taylor series?) then you essentially just collect badges in a bunch of fields.
Endurance: run a mile is much greater than level 1 endurance for anyone over the age of 30. I’d suggest a brisk-walk for 30min without stopping to catch your breath is level 1 (trust me, there are many people that can’t do this).
Middle-aged people are not worse than young people at long distance running. The current male world record for the 24-hour run was set by Yannis Kouros at age 41, and the current female world record was set by Mami Kudo at age 45 (Wikipedia).
I really want to revert the endurance requirement to what it said before you changed it, because I’d like the tasks to come with a sense of challenge and accomplishment if at all possible. Making some pancakes for the first time will certainly feel to me like “wow, I made some pancakes!” Running a mile for the first time feels like “wow, I ran a mile!” (That should’ve been in all caps, the feeling is so intense!) Walking 30 minutes for the first time… feels nothing like that...
YMMV, definitely, but I think walking for a distance rather than a time preserves some of that ‘wow’. I know I was fairly impressed with myself the first time I walked a mile and a half to a convenience store, walked around to shop, and walked a mile and a half home without stopping. It might be less of a ‘wow’ than running some distance, but for level one I think attainability outweighs that.
Here is an calculator enabling equalizing for fitness among distances and times. For example. the fitness level required to do two miles in 30 minutes is approximately the same as that required to do one mile in 14 minutes and a few seconds.
Ok so we need a better understanding of what level 1 means then.
I was comparing it to the “strength” level-1 which is given as “untrained”… ie what you could possibly reasonably do without needed any time training—even though it might feel like an achievement to do it for the first time… and the particularly unskilled in an area may have to do some training to get there.
Walking 30 minutes for the first time… feels nothing like that...
Not to you it might not… but I’m guessing you’re probably fitter than average, though you might not realise it—average is lower than you think...
As to age and running… it’s not to do with the actual age.. but the fact that most people over 30 have slacked off for a while and are unfit—especially those of us that have been working a sedentary job now for ten years (ie most of us) . It’s not related to age… but to what constitutes the “standard” level 0.
I know a hella lot of people that could not walk for thirty minutes without getting winded… and universally these would be over thirty. Those under twenty can still coast on the endurance equivalent of “natural talent”. Those over 30… have to actually work.
Still, I like the other commenter’s example of using distance. How about “walking 5k in under 40 minutes”?
I certainly felt “wow” the first time I did that.
For me.. running a mile feels more than level 1… I would get a “WOW” instead of just a “wow”…
We can have lots of levels, you know.
Running 5k can be level 3, running 10 can be 4 etc etc… all wow’s of varying amounts of awesome… :)
Actually the ExRx tables that SarahC linked to are pretty hardcore, I’ve seen people on the internet say that it took them months (up to a year) of lifting weights 2-3 times a week to reach the level described as “untrained” =) Unfortunately I was unable to find any other table of strength standards, so this one will have to do, I guess!
My current best idea for endurance is to keep the 1 mile run requirement, but add an option of achieving “Level 1 No Physical” for people who won’t qualify for the strength and endurance parts at this time. (In all other respects the levels should be indivisible, i.e. you don’t get moral whuffie points for achieving half a level.) Sorry and please don’t consider me an ageist or something. Even if you do choose to take your time and do the physical part, I’ll be having my trouble with the social part and you can still beat me to the finish line! =)
So to reiterate your point (and make sure I’ve got it). Level 1 for any particular skill will likely be unchallenging for anybody that already has skill in that level… but will in fact be challenging (possibly quite challenging) for people that have never attempted it before.
I didn’t realise we were working on making the whole set to be indivisible! That actually makes it more interesting! :)
However… optionally taking out the physical I think would be very important.
For instance people that have a herniated disc would never be able to do the weight-lifting training… ever. Similarly with running and people that have destroyed their knees. It’d be a shame if somebody could never get level 1 because of an injury even if they’d be level 5 in all the other skills…
Anyways—otherwise I think it’s a pretty cool idea.
Can I also suggest that those of us working on a level record the time/effort it takes to reach each level (and whether we think we were starting from scratch). That can possibly help us to calibrate the different “areas” a bit better.
It’s also humiliating, but in a motivating way, that I can’t do part 2 of the social skil level 1, or discipline or empiricism (maybe not endurance either, I haven’t checked). These are concrete things I need to work on, and it’s encouraging to “know” (even though this “knowledge” doesn’t involve real evidence) that they’re no more than 1 level away from where I am now!
As “Finance” (and in particular personal finance) has been suggested as a category, I’ve added a level 1 proposal to the wiki page:
You should understand and be able to calculate compound interest.
You should be able to explain what present value, future value, and discount rate mean, how they relate to each other, and given any two you should be able to calculate the third.
“Being able to calculate” is fine (though I’d like a more clear test that doesn’t require the user to generate random numbers), but “being able to explain” is not nearly crisp enough. It’s almost as bad as using “being able to explain why politics is the mind-killer” as part of a test for rationality. Could you rethink that part?
You should be able to figure out how much money you will pay in compound interest on a loan, or how much you will earn on an interest bearing account, in a fixed amount of time.
You should be able to compare the monetary values of different financial decisions (e.g. borrowing money, paying off a loan, purchasing an investment) by comparing their present value.
Suppose you can have $100 today or $100 in a year. Since you could do things with the $100 in between, but you could also choose to hold onto it for a year if that turns out to be a better idea, you’re likely to prefer $100 today. But most people would take $1,000,000 in a year over $100 today, so the value of getting money a year earlier is finite.
If you are indifferent between $105 in a year and $100 today—i.e. if a 5% return on the money would exactly compensate for a year’s delay—then we say your annual “discount rate” is 5%, and the “present value” of $105 next year is $105 / (100%+5%) = $100. Finance generally assumes that discount rates are constant, and compound just like interest.
To give a simplified example of where this is useful, suppose you are deciding whether to buy a home for $100,000 (in cash) or rent a home for $10,000 per year, payable at the end of the year. Your discount rate is 5%. As simplifying assumptions, suppose no transaction costs, you know you will live there for exactly 10 years, and neither the home’s value nor the rent would change after that time period.
The present value of $-100,000 now is obviously $-100,000. But you could sell the house in 10 years for a present value of $100,000 / (1.05^10) = $61,391.33, so the net present value of buying is the revenue minus the cost, $61,391.33 - $100,000 = $-38,608.67
The present value of the rent over 10 years is the sum from i = 1 to 10 of $-10,000 / (1.05^i) = $-77,217.35. So in this example buying is much cheaper than renting.
In a real life buy-vs-rent calculation, you have to deal with complicating factors like the amortization of mortgages, but you can deal with most complications by calculating the present value of each component separately. That’s what I did in my own buy-vs-rent calculation.
Thanks! For what it’s worth, I was missing the part where everyone has a personal discount rate. If I’m allowed to assume that, then everything becomes obvious, of course.
If you don’t mind, I have edited the finance part to say “make a buy vs rent calculation, using prices appropriate for your area and your current standard of living”. That sounds more crisp to me than “be able to do something”.
So what’s the next actionable thing people want to do to move this forward?
I propose that we talk here and agree on a definition of Level 1 that would be achievable by most of us within a week or two (just to get the foot in the door), then start working toward it and discussing what Level 2 should be.
The ExRx table of strength standards has a level called “untrained,” defined as “the minimum level of strength required to maintain a reasonable quality of life.” Of course, when I started exercising, I was below this “minimum,” but it took only a little bit of dedicated effort to get there. That’s what I think “Level 1″ should be like.
Social: be able to initiate a conversation with someone you’ve met and make plans to meet again.
Programming: be able to write a program with a for loop in some language (i.e. multiply the numbers from one to N.)
Discipline: be able to work for two hours without stopping.
Math: I’m not sure, because I’m so wrapped up in it that I don’t have a good gauge of “minimum necessary,” but perhaps, be able to prove Bayes’ Theorem, or understand differentiation and integration on a more than mechanical level.
Endurance: be able to run for a mile without stopping or walking.
Memory: learn a short poem or passage by heart. (Maybe the Gettysburg Address, to be U.S.-centric but standard.)
Empiricism: find a question you REALLY don’t know the answer to (and can’t instantly google) and either design an experiment or read experimental studies until you have convincing evidence for one side or the other.
I think that for the reference class of humanity, the minimum amount of math that you need is the ability to consistently not get cheated out of money, and to be able to count without your fingers.
How consistently do we have to be able to do these?
Discipline*: Wake up on time at least 3 days a week.
Good start, thanks a lot for the work you put into your comment! Harsh critique follows.
1, 6 and 7 are precise enough to be part of a formal leveling scale. (But we’d need to i18n-ize them a little because all three use the American cultural assumption. I don’t know offhand the weight of a pound, the length of a mile, or the number of words in the Gettysburg address :-))
3 could be made more precise with a little work. I’d prefer it to say “write and run a program”, to make the winning condition clearer. Also I’d rather use one of the classic examples, e.g. Hello World, 99 bottles of beer on the wall, or any of the first ten Project Euler problems. IMO we shouldn’t be in the business of inventing new exercises that teach programming!
2 is not very informative: if you were able to initiate a conversation with a stranger once, that doesn’t mean you can do it again. Same for 4: can Bob qualify for level 1 if he’s pretty sure he worked for two hours straight at least once in the last month? I’d like to have criteria that are about as informative and insensitive to flukes as #1.
5 and 8 are too vague and need to be completely rethought, IMO. A level 0 person doesn’t know what a proper mathematical proof or a proper piece of evidence feels like.
Agreed on substituting Project Euler problems. (God, I should really be doing those at some point...)
Maybe 2 and 4 need to add a frequency requirement? Let’s say, in a month, 4 invites and 2 days a week that involve a 2-hour sprint of work. (BTW, I think meeting strangers is less important than initiating conversations with people you’ve already met; my “social” criterion was about the latter. Can you ask that guy you know from class if he wants to meet up and study? People who can’t arrange to meet are at a disadvantage, and I’ve struggled with that for a long time.)
5 and 8 are too vague. The trouble with LessWrong is that there’s a very wide range of math abilities. I think calculus is conceptually important, though; maybe it should be something like “complete a Khan academy course,” “complete a Schaums Outlines calculus book,” or “Pass the AP calculus test.”
I honestly don’t know what to do for empiricism.
Great idea about frequency for 2 and 4! It adds an element of grind (leveling is now guaranteed to take time), but that sounds like an okay tradeoff to me if we can’t think of anything better. Also I agree that talking to people you know is a better idea for level 1 than talking to strangers.
I have set up a wiki page with our current draft. I think you should be able to edit it :-) And let’s commit to finalizing the requirements for level 1 within the next couple days—do you agree?
Could this link be edited into the article? I missed it before.
Awesome job starting us off! Sorry I forgot to mention that earlier.
Maybe a minimum level is realizing that you don’t know something, and being willing to update on information related to the fact that you’re curious about?
First, let me explain what I’d want out of the “leveling” process—a way to “become more awesome” by holding ourselves to rather high competitive standards in a bunch of different, but not too obscure, areas of human achievement. I don’t think a person needs to get to ExRx’s “untrained” level of strength to have a “reasonable quality of life”—I know lots of people who seem to be doing fine without being that strong, or without being able to run a mile. However, an elite athlete would think “Oh my god, how do you live if you can’t even run a little?” That’s what I was getting at. What the elite levels of a skill consider “minimal” is, of course, way above the actual minimum that ordinary people practice. That kind of “minimal” is a good, challenging goal for an ordinary person. (For example: I am really not a finance expert. I am also a terrible cook. I would want to know what a professional in finance, or a professional chef, thinks is the “bare minimum” of financial understanding or culinary skill, and see if I can get there.)
While I see the intuitive appeal of this from a status standpoint, I don’t understand why one would want to be other-optimized by someone who, by definition, doesn’t understand enough about one’s situation to know whether the given advice matches the stated criteria for applicability or not.
I will admit that my reaction could easily be the result of an ugh field, though. Ugh, people who think they know how I should be living my life.
It really may not be for everybody.
Some people—I’m one of them—do want to be “other-optimized” in the sense that we want to know “how we’re doing,” generally, by the standards of other people, and we’re willing to try meeting an external set of challenge goals. Maybe it’s an age thing; I am not old enough that I think I have my life figured out and that I know what “works for me.” A lot of things are still in flux, so I’d be willing to learn entirely new skills and add new identities. That seems to be common for people in their teens and twenties. I wish somebody had shaken me and told me “No, seriously, learn to program NOW” when I was a lot younger. I expect there will be other things that I don’t yet know I will want to be good at. This “leveling” business seems like a way to facilitate the process.
I’m pretty much behind the idea of leveling, actually. Coming up with a coherent, stepwise map of how to get from a layperson’s ability level to mastery of a certain topic seems like it will have all sorts of benefits. I just think we can do a lot better than asking an authority on a given topic what they think everyone should know about it, to figure out which steps should go first or what should be considered a very basic level of competence—I think we’ll end up optimizing for the wrong things, if we do it that way.
This is exactly what I want from the leveling process as well. Thanks for expressing it so clearly, and for the suggestions of cooking and money management. These sound really nice to have!
Some of these don’t seem very well calibrated for ‘minimum necessary to maintain a reasonable quality of life’.
Programming: Most people don’t program at all, and do fine, so this might not be a useful category in the first place. ‘Computer interaction’ would be better, and level 1 might be something like the ability to use reasonably-user-friendly web-based email or the ability to write, save, and retrieve an essay in a word processing program. If we want to talk about actual programming, though, level 1 might be something like understanding what variables are, or that computers ‘think’ in a purely procedural way (that there is no ghost in the machine).
Math: I agree with atucker that basic arithmetic is appropriate for level 1, though I’d add ‘ability to parse simple word problems’ to it.
Endurance: I don’t run. At all. This has approximately never been an issue, and doesn’t affect my quality of life in any way that I can detect. Level 1 for endurance should probably be something more along the lines of being able to walk a few miles (2, maybe 3) on flat ground without becoming winded—this seems about in keeping with what someone would need to do in the course of shopping at a large store.
Empiricism: Again your suggestion seems too advanced for a ‘minimum necessary’ level. I’d suggest something more along the lines of being able to notice intrinsically flawed arguments or arguments where the arguer is obviously biased.
Perhaps we should refine “minimum necessary to maintain reasonable quality of life” to something like “minimum necessary to maintain reasonable quality of life, given that the area is relevant”.
By way of analogy, I don’t own a car. The minimum necessary skill in driving to maintain reasonable quality of life is absolutely nothing for me. But for many, driving a car is necessary; for them, the minimum necessary skill is being able to remain within the lines, use indicators, park and three point turn, etc. Pass the driving test, in other words. There’s no point standardising levels of driving skill to include my lifestyle! Given that driving is relevant to your quality of life, you need pass-driving-test levels as an absolute minimum. So that has to be Level 1.
Being able to get by without a skill isn’t the same as having the minimum amount of skill necessary. Being Level 0 in driving and still having a reasonable quality of life is a fact about me, and maybe about the public transport system where I live, and maybe also about the willingness of my friends to give me lifts—not a fact about how much skill is required in driving.
(When I crossclass into Professional, though, and Driving becomes a class skill, I’ll have to get to at least Level 1)
I see, and basically agree with, your point, but that benchmark seems to still have some problems: Specifically, I’m having trouble coming up with a scenario where programming would be a relevant skill but level-1 ability (equivalent in difficulty to other level-1 benchmarks) at it would be sufficient.
I had a data entry job in the summer of 2002 when staying with family between years of college. After a day or two meeting people and finding out where the bathrooms were and getting started with the nominal data entry task I installed a macro recorder so I could factor out some of the human tedium by writing scripts to speed things up.
By the time I left the job 8 weeks later to go back to school I was teaching the “real employees” how to automate the boring parts of their own jobs and had them hire a friend who lived in the area to continue their macro lessons and to write the really “tricky” macros on the side (he’d upgraded the job to writing perl scripts within a few weeks).
Basically, if someone thinks they can be a “white collar worker” without any “algoracy” (cognate to literacy and numeracy), I suspect they are in the process of becoming economic road kill. The space of AI-hard jobs is steadily shrinking. Maybe some people can switch to “blue collar work” and learn to drive a tractor or pick strawberries instead? At least for a while? See, there’s this thing called the singularity… but if you’re here reading and commenting on this site you’re probably already something like an expert in the “far mode” theory of the singularity :-P
The implications of the singularity to things like politics and job skill acquisition are the “near mode” applications that are still being worked out by basically everyone… but I suspect the importance of algoracy is one of the obvious practical implications.
I agree on programming.
(I’m progressing towards level 1 in programming currently, and programming so far has allowed me to write a script that eats a .txt combat log from an MMO and spits out information I care about, it allows me to use a Python console as my daily planner (from collections import deque → create a stack+queue of tasks), and it allows me to solve Project Euler-type problems. So not a whole lot.)
However, I am treating levels of programming much like I treat levels of wizard—low level spells suck, high level spells are game-breaking-ly awesome.
Writing simple, convenient shell scripts. Solving low-level Project Euler problems.
Those sound like what’s needed. Thanks for making awesome concrete suggestions!
I wonder whether the Math category should be broken down a bit. There’s calculation—which is sometimes easier to start with e.g. things like basic arithmetic operations, representing real quantities with mathematical numbers and shapes), then there’s algebra/geometry and the things which follow, and probability starts with a new set of axioms and applies to a different sort of problem, so it may deserve a separate skill hierarchy. I might also separate out “proving” as a standalone skill, though with not very many levels. (You learn to prove advanced math by learning the math, but initially you still have to learn how to follow and then how to generate a proof). Or maybe as part of a” logic” skill hierarchy?
I worry that the system will get way too complicated if we’re splitting things up at that level. But maybe with many worker bees, it will thrive, like Wikipedia or MathWorld. In my leveling references (various games I’ve played), you could get to level 4 in Math, but put a note that said “strong on probability theory, average on the rest”.
I think we need to determine if we want a Level system as found in various games, or a Badge system, that quantifies/commemorates particular tasks (your breakdown reminds me more of Badges, not Levels).
Maybe both? Generic human levels for the things most of us agree are important for everyone to work on, plus badges for the specializations, like algebraic geometry or the computational astrophysics of stellar dust? Maybe “numeracy” for the generic human version of math, cf. John Allen Paulos’ “Innumeracy” book.
Right now I’m most interested in “generic human levels”, but several people here in the comments have independently expressed interest in the idea of “badges” for specialists. Perhaps you could make something out of it? :-)
It seems to me that badges are what you get when your levels become too specific.
Like, if we can’t agree on math badges and split it up by subfield (say, calculus, statistics, graph theory, topography, cryptology, etc.) and then can’t agree on levels (what comes first, optimizing multivariable functions, or Taylor series?) then you essentially just collect badges in a bunch of fields.
Endurance: run a mile is much greater than level 1 endurance for anyone over the age of 30. I’d suggest a brisk-walk for 30min without stopping to catch your breath is level 1 (trust me, there are many people that can’t do this).
Middle-aged people are not worse than young people at long distance running. The current male world record for the 24-hour run was set by Yannis Kouros at age 41, and the current female world record was set by Mami Kudo at age 45 (Wikipedia).
I really want to revert the endurance requirement to what it said before you changed it, because I’d like the tasks to come with a sense of challenge and accomplishment if at all possible. Making some pancakes for the first time will certainly feel to me like “wow, I made some pancakes!” Running a mile for the first time feels like “wow, I ran a mile!” (That should’ve been in all caps, the feeling is so intense!) Walking 30 minutes for the first time… feels nothing like that...
YMMV, definitely, but I think walking for a distance rather than a time preserves some of that ‘wow’. I know I was fairly impressed with myself the first time I walked a mile and a half to a convenience store, walked around to shop, and walked a mile and a half home without stopping. It might be less of a ‘wow’ than running some distance, but for level one I think attainability outweighs that.
Here is an calculator enabling equalizing for fitness among distances and times. For example. the fitness level required to do two miles in 30 minutes is approximately the same as that required to do one mile in 14 minutes and a few seconds.
Ok so we need a better understanding of what level 1 means then.
I was comparing it to the “strength” level-1 which is given as “untrained”… ie what you could possibly reasonably do without needed any time training—even though it might feel like an achievement to do it for the first time… and the particularly unskilled in an area may have to do some training to get there.
Not to you it might not… but I’m guessing you’re probably fitter than average, though you might not realise it—average is lower than you think...
As to age and running… it’s not to do with the actual age.. but the fact that most people over 30 have slacked off for a while and are unfit—especially those of us that have been working a sedentary job now for ten years (ie most of us) . It’s not related to age… but to what constitutes the “standard” level 0.
I know a hella lot of people that could not walk for thirty minutes without getting winded… and universally these would be over thirty. Those under twenty can still coast on the endurance equivalent of “natural talent”. Those over 30… have to actually work.
Still, I like the other commenter’s example of using distance. How about “walking 5k in under 40 minutes”?
I certainly felt “wow” the first time I did that.
For me.. running a mile feels more than level 1… I would get a “WOW” instead of just a “wow”… We can have lots of levels, you know.
Running 5k can be level 3, running 10 can be 4 etc etc… all wow’s of varying amounts of awesome… :)
Actually the ExRx tables that SarahC linked to are pretty hardcore, I’ve seen people on the internet say that it took them months (up to a year) of lifting weights 2-3 times a week to reach the level described as “untrained” =) Unfortunately I was unable to find any other table of strength standards, so this one will have to do, I guess!
My current best idea for endurance is to keep the 1 mile run requirement, but add an option of achieving “Level 1 No Physical” for people who won’t qualify for the strength and endurance parts at this time. (In all other respects the levels should be indivisible, i.e. you don’t get moral whuffie points for achieving half a level.) Sorry and please don’t consider me an ageist or something. Even if you do choose to take your time and do the physical part, I’ll be having my trouble with the social part and you can still beat me to the finish line! =)
Ok, that all makes sense then.
So to reiterate your point (and make sure I’ve got it). Level 1 for any particular skill will likely be unchallenging for anybody that already has skill in that level… but will in fact be challenging (possibly quite challenging) for people that have never attempted it before.
I didn’t realise we were working on making the whole set to be indivisible! That actually makes it more interesting! :)
However… optionally taking out the physical I think would be very important.
For instance people that have a herniated disc would never be able to do the weight-lifting training… ever. Similarly with running and people that have destroyed their knees. It’d be a shame if somebody could never get level 1 because of an injury even if they’d be level 5 in all the other skills… Anyways—otherwise I think it’s a pretty cool idea.
Yeah that’s about it. Guess it’s time for me to freeze the thing in its current state and write a post. Thanks a lot!
Can I also suggest that those of us working on a level record the time/effort it takes to reach each level (and whether we think we were starting from scratch). That can possibly help us to calibrate the different “areas” a bit better.
Good idea! I’ll write about that.
It’s also humiliating, but in a motivating way, that I can’t do part 2 of the social skil level 1, or discipline or empiricism (maybe not endurance either, I haven’t checked). These are concrete things I need to work on, and it’s encouraging to “know” (even though this “knowledge” doesn’t involve real evidence) that they’re no more than 1 level away from where I am now!
As “Finance” (and in particular personal finance) has been suggested as a category, I’ve added a level 1 proposal to the wiki page:
You should understand and be able to calculate compound interest. You should be able to explain what present value, future value, and discount rate mean, how they relate to each other, and given any two you should be able to calculate the third.
“Being able to calculate” is fine (though I’d like a more clear test that doesn’t require the user to generate random numbers), but “being able to explain” is not nearly crisp enough. It’s almost as bad as using “being able to explain why politics is the mind-killer” as part of a test for rationality. Could you rethink that part?
OK, here’s my revised version for finance:
You should be able to figure out how much money you will pay in compound interest on a loan, or how much you will earn on an interest bearing account, in a fixed amount of time.
You should be able to compare the monetary values of different financial decisions (e.g. borrowing money, paying off a loan, purchasing an investment) by comparing their present value.
It must be telling of my financial ignorance that I don’t understand the second part :-( Could you give an example?
Suppose you can have $100 today or $100 in a year. Since you could do things with the $100 in between, but you could also choose to hold onto it for a year if that turns out to be a better idea, you’re likely to prefer $100 today. But most people would take $1,000,000 in a year over $100 today, so the value of getting money a year earlier is finite.
If you are indifferent between $105 in a year and $100 today—i.e. if a 5% return on the money would exactly compensate for a year’s delay—then we say your annual “discount rate” is 5%, and the “present value” of $105 next year is $105 / (100%+5%) = $100. Finance generally assumes that discount rates are constant, and compound just like interest.
To give a simplified example of where this is useful, suppose you are deciding whether to buy a home for $100,000 (in cash) or rent a home for $10,000 per year, payable at the end of the year. Your discount rate is 5%. As simplifying assumptions, suppose no transaction costs, you know you will live there for exactly 10 years, and neither the home’s value nor the rent would change after that time period.
The present value of $-100,000 now is obviously $-100,000. But you could sell the house in 10 years for a present value of $100,000 / (1.05^10) = $61,391.33, so the net present value of buying is the revenue minus the cost, $61,391.33 - $100,000 = $-38,608.67
The present value of the rent over 10 years is the sum from i = 1 to 10 of $-10,000 / (1.05^i) = $-77,217.35. So in this example buying is much cheaper than renting.
In a real life buy-vs-rent calculation, you have to deal with complicating factors like the amortization of mortgages, but you can deal with most complications by calculating the present value of each component separately. That’s what I did in my own buy-vs-rent calculation.
Thanks! For what it’s worth, I was missing the part where everyone has a personal discount rate. If I’m allowed to assume that, then everything becomes obvious, of course.
If you don’t mind, I have edited the finance part to say “make a buy vs rent calculation, using prices appropriate for your area and your current standard of living”. That sounds more crisp to me than “be able to do something”.
Thanks, that probably made it much clearer.
Who’s “most of us”?
Are young adults supposed to be level one? Teenagers? Precocious children?
What does level 2 look like? 3?
By “most of us” I meant most of the people who will be participating, whatever age they turn out to be.