This post gives off bad vibes to (my mental model of) outsiders.
I had the same impression; the post makes the minicamp sound like your average, run-of-the-mill, self-help seminar scam—complete with testimonials and everything.
I mean, it kind of is a standard workshop (like ones on public speaking, or italian cooking, or, yes, self-help)… except that the content is about Bayesian math, and microeconomics, and the cognitive science of standard human error patterns and so on. And the people you get to network with are other LW-ers who are interested in actually applying this content to practical problems, and coming to embed Bayesian patterns into the details of one’s day-to-day thoughts instead of just into the way you answer pen-and-paper questions.
But, yes, similar workshop format, different content. Maybe we should make the ad different too in some way. I wonder if my inclusion of the testimonials and survey data, in particular, may have been misleading—I was trying to say “look, past participants (who were smart LW-ers a lot like you) liked it, so maybe you will too”, but it may have come across as a stronger claim. I’d say come check it out if you’re interested, or else wait for a subsequent year if you want to have seen “proof that this will definitively change your life” first or something (which we may or may not ever manage, though we’re certainly working on it), and, meanwhile, whether you come or not, do keep contributing on LW, trying exercises yourself in your own life, and generally helping to figure out what rationality can be.
The difficulty stems from how much good stuff is mixed in with all the scams, making outside evaluation much harder. Most self help programs include a lot of the same basic items by necessity (fixing the big problems first). We also seem to understand implicitly that people’s self judgement of the effects of these types of things is terrible, especially when those judgements are very close time-wise to the event itself (rationalization of expense and effort, unwillingness to signal disloyalty to new ingroup, even internally).
I had the same impression; the post makes the minicamp sound like your average, run-of-the-mill, self-help seminar scam—complete with testimonials and everything.
That not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of people pay for those. And such people are in need of rationality help!
This plan is so crazy, it just might work ! :-)
Good to know.
I mean, it kind of is a standard workshop (like ones on public speaking, or italian cooking, or, yes, self-help)… except that the content is about Bayesian math, and microeconomics, and the cognitive science of standard human error patterns and so on. And the people you get to network with are other LW-ers who are interested in actually applying this content to practical problems, and coming to embed Bayesian patterns into the details of one’s day-to-day thoughts instead of just into the way you answer pen-and-paper questions.
But, yes, similar workshop format, different content. Maybe we should make the ad different too in some way. I wonder if my inclusion of the testimonials and survey data, in particular, may have been misleading—I was trying to say “look, past participants (who were smart LW-ers a lot like you) liked it, so maybe you will too”, but it may have come across as a stronger claim. I’d say come check it out if you’re interested, or else wait for a subsequent year if you want to have seen “proof that this will definitively change your life” first or something (which we may or may not ever manage, though we’re certainly working on it), and, meanwhile, whether you come or not, do keep contributing on LW, trying exercises yourself in your own life, and generally helping to figure out what rationality can be.
The difficulty stems from how much good stuff is mixed in with all the scams, making outside evaluation much harder. Most self help programs include a lot of the same basic items by necessity (fixing the big problems first). We also seem to understand implicitly that people’s self judgement of the effects of these types of things is terrible, especially when those judgements are very close time-wise to the event itself (rationalization of expense and effort, unwillingness to signal disloyalty to new ingroup, even internally).