A few weeks ago a somewhat similar idea came into my mind while thinking through resources I’d have liked to have and ways to improve education (I think what started me off was the way that many concepts taught in early parts of school turn out to be incorrect simplifications?). I dumped some extremely rough notes into my ideas file (at the end of this post), and mostly concluded that it was an immense project which would require many years of focus to become really useful, and unless it got a lot of momentum would easily stall. On the other hand, this kind of resource could if built properly be amazing. On the other other hand, Khan Academy has many of the elements of the resource I imagined, and building from scratch is very likely more effort than encouraging them to add features or just helping build on the existing project.
Some comments on your suggested implementation:
Human knowledge is really really big. Even just the bits taught in schools. Trying to rewrite each part in curriculum form before it becomes useful seems like it would cause a project like this to lose steam quickly. One way around this would be to collect existing high quality educational material online and link to it/include it directly from sources which you have arrangements with, allowing contributors to focus on building the dependency tree. If and when it becomes beneficial, switching to producing content may be better.
If I understand correctly (from the talk of deadlines, tutors, qualifications, social atmosphere, essays, classes), you would like to change the way formal education works? Building an educational resource external to the schooling system seems vastly more realistic than enacting radical change on large institutions without extremely strong evidence of the new methods of teaching working. It could possibly work to start a new school (in the UK there’s a lot of attention on “free schools” these days, which, so long as enough parents support an idea, can teach in much less orthodox ways and still get funding), but that’s also a massive project, and one which requires plenty of interest from parents otherwise you don’t have students.
Concretely, how could you get people to invest the effort required to build this? At minimum, if you’re trimming it down to just a web app and dependency tree which primarily links out to existing resources, you need a significant amount of programmer and web dev effort plus a good number of active, reliable people with good understanding of each domain covered building the web of knowledge. Paying the non-technical users to write/collect is not going to work unless you have immense funding, and even then there are many pitfalls (see Knol and Encarta). Not paying users means you’ve got to have something which is very user friendly, stands out in a big way to important volunteers, has a good base of existing example content, and ideally offers something back to them like StackOverflow does with their jobs program. And even if you have those features, mainly volunteer can flop easily.
And my extremely rough notes from the file with all my ideas which seem interesting but I’ll probably never do much with. If someone’s interested in any of the lines I can write up my actual thoughts on it, these were mostly to help me remember not actually explain my thoughts:
natural curriculum without stupid simplifications
nested knowledge
-starting from extremely basic statements a 5 year old can understand, building toward higher understanding with dependencies/inferential gaps filled.
crowdsourced, wikilike?
handling original research
degrees of acceptance in chunks of information (e.g. almost certain, very likely, useful approximation for x, )
handling conflicting possible knowledge, conflict warnings,
integrated QA system
-ask questions about each chunk of knowledge, these are organized/merged into a FAQ, or answered/redirected
domain-based reputation system
-based on useful edits and ratings from related knowledge
-general showed publicly, higher definition information to those who refine the system and people with higher rating
-fully recalculated on each change to system, arranged so this is socially okay
-gamification!
-general reputation includes typo fixes, organizational stuff, as well as directly building knowledge, but this is only minimally counted towards specific domain knowledge.
and mostly concluded that it was an immense project which would require many years of focus to become really useful, and unless it got a lot of momentum would easily stall.
Absolutely. I think that it’ll take hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And lots of money. So I’m starting a startup in order to make enough money to get this going.
One way around this would be to collect existing high quality educational material online and link to it/include it directly from sources which you have arrangements with, allowing contributors to focus on building the dependency tree.
I thought about this, and I agree that it’d make more sense if there were only a few people working on the project. But I think that there’d be too much overlap in content, and it’d be too tough to create the system from what is currently available. So I think that execution would require producing content to avoid all of the bottlenecks.
If I understand correctly (from the talk of deadlines, tutors, qualifications, social atmosphere, essays, classes), you would like to change the way formal education works?
Yes, but that’s separate from the web app (sorry, I should have made that more clear). Yes, bureaucracy sucks, but I think that if this web app was made, it’d be so clear that it’s better that schools would have to adopt. I could start off by providing it to people to use for free, and showing results. It might be tougher to get things like rationality, social atmosphere, tutoring etc. implemented. I think that they’re really important, so I’ll have to brainstorm hard about how I could make that happen.
I think that it’ll take hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And lots of money. So I’m starting a startup in order to make enough money to get this going.
You plan to earn enough money to pay hundreds of people? It’s not possible to do with high probability, and you have to be good enough to have even the small chance. A normal career may give better expected outcome, even though it won’t give that rather small chance of getting rich. (Read Graham’s essays, for example thesetwo.)
1) I don’t necessarily have to make enough money to pay for the whole thing. Just enough to do enough to get other people interested enough to do the same.
2) I think I’ve got a solid chance at getting rich. This is my specific argument, and this is the general one.
I think I’ve got a solid chance at getting rich. This is my specific argument, and this is the general one.
This is not particularly convincing. You should take into account the a priori improbability of this event, so that getting to a “solid chance” would require much more than evidence that merely improves the estimate. See also base rate fallacy and attribute substitution (e.g. the question you need to answer is “What is the probability of success?”, but the question you end up answering might be “How good is my startup’s pitch?”).
A few weeks ago a somewhat similar idea came into my mind while thinking through resources I’d have liked to have and ways to improve education (I think what started me off was the way that many concepts taught in early parts of school turn out to be incorrect simplifications?). I dumped some extremely rough notes into my ideas file (at the end of this post), and mostly concluded that it was an immense project which would require many years of focus to become really useful, and unless it got a lot of momentum would easily stall. On the other hand, this kind of resource could if built properly be amazing. On the other other hand, Khan Academy has many of the elements of the resource I imagined, and building from scratch is very likely more effort than encouraging them to add features or just helping build on the existing project.
Some comments on your suggested implementation: Human knowledge is really really big. Even just the bits taught in schools. Trying to rewrite each part in curriculum form before it becomes useful seems like it would cause a project like this to lose steam quickly. One way around this would be to collect existing high quality educational material online and link to it/include it directly from sources which you have arrangements with, allowing contributors to focus on building the dependency tree. If and when it becomes beneficial, switching to producing content may be better.
If I understand correctly (from the talk of deadlines, tutors, qualifications, social atmosphere, essays, classes), you would like to change the way formal education works? Building an educational resource external to the schooling system seems vastly more realistic than enacting radical change on large institutions without extremely strong evidence of the new methods of teaching working. It could possibly work to start a new school (in the UK there’s a lot of attention on “free schools” these days, which, so long as enough parents support an idea, can teach in much less orthodox ways and still get funding), but that’s also a massive project, and one which requires plenty of interest from parents otherwise you don’t have students.
Concretely, how could you get people to invest the effort required to build this? At minimum, if you’re trimming it down to just a web app and dependency tree which primarily links out to existing resources, you need a significant amount of programmer and web dev effort plus a good number of active, reliable people with good understanding of each domain covered building the web of knowledge. Paying the non-technical users to write/collect is not going to work unless you have immense funding, and even then there are many pitfalls (see Knol and Encarta). Not paying users means you’ve got to have something which is very user friendly, stands out in a big way to important volunteers, has a good base of existing example content, and ideally offers something back to them like StackOverflow does with their jobs program. And even if you have those features, mainly volunteer can flop easily.
And my extremely rough notes from the file with all my ideas which seem interesting but I’ll probably never do much with. If someone’s interested in any of the lines I can write up my actual thoughts on it, these were mostly to help me remember not actually explain my thoughts:
natural curriculum without stupid simplifications
nested knowledge
-starting from extremely basic statements a 5 year old can understand, building toward higher understanding with dependencies/inferential gaps filled.
crowdsourced, wikilike?
handling original research
degrees of acceptance in chunks of information (e.g. almost certain, very likely, useful approximation for x, )
handling conflicting possible knowledge, conflict warnings,
integrated QA system
-ask questions about each chunk of knowledge, these are organized/merged into a FAQ, or answered/redirected
domain-based reputation system
-based on useful edits and ratings from related knowledge
-general showed publicly, higher definition information to those who refine the system and people with higher rating
-fully recalculated on each change to system, arranged so this is socially okay
-gamification!
-general reputation includes typo fixes, organizational stuff, as well as directly building knowledge, but this is only minimally counted towards specific domain knowledge.
Absolutely. I think that it’ll take hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And lots of money. So I’m starting a startup in order to make enough money to get this going.
I thought about this, and I agree that it’d make more sense if there were only a few people working on the project. But I think that there’d be too much overlap in content, and it’d be too tough to create the system from what is currently available. So I think that execution would require producing content to avoid all of the bottlenecks.
Yes, but that’s separate from the web app (sorry, I should have made that more clear). Yes, bureaucracy sucks, but I think that if this web app was made, it’d be so clear that it’s better that schools would have to adopt. I could start off by providing it to people to use for free, and showing results. It might be tougher to get things like rationality, social atmosphere, tutoring etc. implemented. I think that they’re really important, so I’ll have to brainstorm hard about how I could make that happen.
You plan to earn enough money to pay hundreds of people? It’s not possible to do with high probability, and you have to be good enough to have even the small chance. A normal career may give better expected outcome, even though it won’t give that rather small chance of getting rich. (Read Graham’s essays, for example these two.)
1) I don’t necessarily have to make enough money to pay for the whole thing. Just enough to do enough to get other people interested enough to do the same.
2) I think I’ve got a solid chance at getting rich. This is my specific argument, and this is the general one.
This is not particularly convincing. You should take into account the a priori improbability of this event, so that getting to a “solid chance” would require much more than evidence that merely improves the estimate. See also base rate fallacy and attribute substitution (e.g. the question you need to answer is “What is the probability of success?”, but the question you end up answering might be “How good is my startup’s pitch?”).