Demarcate houses, build ourselves a sorting hat(possibly in the form of a quiz although asking meaningful questions in these things is much harder than you might imagine), send people on to their respective common rooms and tell them to make friends with everyone.
I actually think this is an excellent idea, especially if it could be written in time for the end of HPMOR. Additionally, it could combine with the yearly census Yvain does. Pre-existing questionnaires could be used partially as well.
One possibility would be to do the questionnaire first, and then run a clustering algorithm over it to determine the groupings.
The biggest problem I can see is that this might make LW look even sillier then it already does.
As much as importing themes from the HP universe sounds fun, I don’t think anything as fanciful as that would work for us. If the system works, it’s unlikely that the splits we end up with would seem silly.
I think it’d be interesting to make a system that tries to cluster people into small, somewhat arbitrary groups of 8-10 people, under the expectation that everyone will get to know everyone else and nobody will slip between the cracks. A group any larger than that can have little in the way of intimacy.
I think a lot of this is a technological issue. Build the right system of sorting hats and virtual common rooms, and it’ll just happen. Until you do, it can’t happen.
it’s unlikely that the splits we end up with would seem silly.
I was rather meaning that the whole sorting-hat thing is pretty silly.
I think a lot of this is a technological issue.
I’m never run an online questionnaire, but I imagine there are simple out of the box ways to do it. Similerley, I believe that LW’s code is adapted from reddit, and so I would guess it would be easy enough to add the code for subreddits. The clustering algorithms are simple too and have many open-source implmentations.
In fact, just splitting discussion into, say ‘technical maths’, ‘rationality’, ‘singularity stuff’, ‘lifehacks’, ‘fun stuff’ could be an improvement maybe?
I actually think this is an excellent idea, especially if it could be written in time for the end of HPMOR. Additionally, it could combine with the yearly census Yvain does. Pre-existing questionnaires could be used partially as well.
One possibility would be to do the questionnaire first, and then run a clustering algorithm over it to determine the groupings.
The biggest problem I can see is that this might make LW look even sillier then it already does.
As much as importing themes from the HP universe sounds fun, I don’t think anything as fanciful as that would work for us. If the system works, it’s unlikely that the splits we end up with would seem silly.
I think it’d be interesting to make a system that tries to cluster people into small, somewhat arbitrary groups of 8-10 people, under the expectation that everyone will get to know everyone else and nobody will slip between the cracks. A group any larger than that can have little in the way of intimacy.
I think a lot of this is a technological issue. Build the right system of sorting hats and virtual common rooms, and it’ll just happen. Until you do, it can’t happen.
I was rather meaning that the whole sorting-hat thing is pretty silly.
I’m never run an online questionnaire, but I imagine there are simple out of the box ways to do it. Similerley, I believe that LW’s code is adapted from reddit, and so I would guess it would be easy enough to add the code for subreddits. The clustering algorithms are simple too and have many open-source implmentations.
In fact, just splitting discussion into, say ‘technical maths’, ‘rationality’, ‘singularity stuff’, ‘lifehacks’, ‘fun stuff’ could be an improvement maybe?