There are a few factors which I imagine influence the optimal strategy criteria:
How much time do you have? If there’s not a lot of time, more direct intervention methods (lower levels) seem to work better. If you have a lot of time, then it’s probably okay to let people meander more as long as they eventually reach the low entropy. (Low entropy = behaving well consistently.)
How sticky is the low entropy? If the child notices that when it’s behaving well things are going much greater for them, then probably they’ll continue to stick with that behavior. But if the rewards are random, then they might be well behaved but then switch their behavior.
How much do you value the individuals? I.e. what’s your utility for one well behaving kid vs one misbehaving one? I think in the rationalist community there’s a tendency to value few very well behaving kids as being much better than a lot of somewhat well behaving kids. In that case, individual attention does seem more warranted / effective.
Your overall resources and expertise. If you had it all, why not do all of the levels at once? There’s obviously something good to be said for all levels. But if you’re not experienced in one of them, then you have to weigh the cost of getting better + making mistakes vs ignoring that level + focusing on others. And if your resources are limited, but expertise is even, you probably want to spread the resources around and focus on 80⁄20′ing each level.
The expertise brings up the point of: do you even know what “well behaving” is? To the extent you’re not sure, you should probably focus on reducing uncertainty around that for yourself first. (Level 0)
At the end of the day, you either need to build robust gear level models that will help you make these decisions or have enough kids in your study that you could collect and analyze it statistically.
There are a few factors which I imagine influence the optimal strategy criteria:
How much time do you have? If there’s not a lot of time, more direct intervention methods (lower levels) seem to work better. If you have a lot of time, then it’s probably okay to let people meander more as long as they eventually reach the low entropy. (Low entropy = behaving well consistently.)
How sticky is the low entropy? If the child notices that when it’s behaving well things are going much greater for them, then probably they’ll continue to stick with that behavior. But if the rewards are random, then they might be well behaved but then switch their behavior.
How much do you value the individuals? I.e. what’s your utility for one well behaving kid vs one misbehaving one? I think in the rationalist community there’s a tendency to value few very well behaving kids as being much better than a lot of somewhat well behaving kids. In that case, individual attention does seem more warranted / effective.
Your overall resources and expertise. If you had it all, why not do all of the levels at once? There’s obviously something good to be said for all levels. But if you’re not experienced in one of them, then you have to weigh the cost of getting better + making mistakes vs ignoring that level + focusing on others. And if your resources are limited, but expertise is even, you probably want to spread the resources around and focus on 80⁄20′ing each level.
The expertise brings up the point of: do you even know what “well behaving” is? To the extent you’re not sure, you should probably focus on reducing uncertainty around that for yourself first. (Level 0)
At the end of the day, you either need to build robust gear level models that will help you make these decisions or have enough kids in your study that you could collect and analyze it statistically.