Assuming this is true, do you have a good model for why this was the case?
It is certainly the case that those at RBC were exposed to more of the “rationality teaching” material than those at Minicamp, so if this is true then it should probably be worrying.
I think it was a selection effect: at Mini-Camp, the people who went were chosen from a broad pool, of anyone who could take a week off at the beginning of summer. But the only people who went to Mega-Camp were the types of people who could afford to take a whole summer off. So the Mega-Camp attendees were younger, more likely to be a student, less likely to have other things going on in their lives.
(I was a Mega-Camp attendee.)
Other potential reasons: it started to suck living & eating together in a tight, crowded space. It’s tolerable (and even fun!) for a week, but after a few weeks, privacy & space become an issue.
These are all good reasons why RBC would seem less awesome than Mini-Camp, but they aren’t actually good reasons why it should have been less effective at teaching people rationality. If anything, surely one would expect people who were younger and had less going on in their lives to benefit more from rationality training.
Basically, I agree with you that these are the reasons that Eliezer describes RBC as “less of a success”, but this just means that Silas is right, and the measure of “success” being used is “how awesome did everyone think it was”, not “how much rationality did we manage to teach”.
Yes, we have a good model for why this is the case, and it involves specific managers performing worse than others so the social cost of explaining our model is not zero.
We tried two experiments. The first one worked better, so we’re repeating that one instead of the second one.
Assuming this is true, do you have a good model for why this was the case?
It is certainly the case that those at RBC were exposed to more of the “rationality teaching” material than those at Minicamp, so if this is true then it should probably be worrying.
I think it was a selection effect: at Mini-Camp, the people who went were chosen from a broad pool, of anyone who could take a week off at the beginning of summer. But the only people who went to Mega-Camp were the types of people who could afford to take a whole summer off. So the Mega-Camp attendees were younger, more likely to be a student, less likely to have other things going on in their lives.
(I was a Mega-Camp attendee.)
Other potential reasons: it started to suck living & eating together in a tight, crowded space. It’s tolerable (and even fun!) for a week, but after a few weeks, privacy & space become an issue.
These are all good reasons why RBC would seem less awesome than Mini-Camp, but they aren’t actually good reasons why it should have been less effective at teaching people rationality. If anything, surely one would expect people who were younger and had less going on in their lives to benefit more from rationality training.
Basically, I agree with you that these are the reasons that Eliezer describes RBC as “less of a success”, but this just means that Silas is right, and the measure of “success” being used is “how awesome did everyone think it was”, not “how much rationality did we manage to teach”.
Agreed.
Yes, we have a good model for why this is the case, and it involves specific managers performing worse than others so the social cost of explaining our model is not zero.
We tried two experiments. The first one worked better, so we’re repeating that one instead of the second one.