Good decision.
..........… Okay, I have got to get out of this discussion. xD
Owen_Richardson
Karma: 188
… Yes, Rolf was awesome, and he is cool and I like him. That is entirely the point. The bit about him helping me to realize that I am “crazy” is a humorous way of giving mad props to his clear and incisive thinking.
I would respond with a mildly self-deprecatory comment that simultaneously ironically highlights the strange, unnecessary harshness and lack of humor one may find surprisingly commonly on LW, but I expect it would just get a bunch of downvotes and be a silly waste of time, amusing no one but myself.
What do you mean by “have access to”?
Hm, yeah, that’s a really weird way to phrase it unless you have certain… historical things in mind. Strictly speaking, everyone “has access” to all the books and other resources you need. It’s just really unlikely for anyone to notice that it’s something worth focusing on.
Okay, I wrote my response to Technoguyrob to double as a response to you. I’ll get back to you in a few days.
Yes.
Minimum Viable Products have been done, hence the excitement… just built mainly for markets where the ultimate “consumers” have pretty much no influence over “purchasing policy”… and stuff …
It’s not a theory of learning, but a theory of instruction...
As to “smarter than me”, I didn’t develop the theory, and it’s largely dumb luck I came across all the puzzle pieces in a way that made it perfectly obvious how much of a Big Deal the implications could be...
A year ago, I’d’ve talked your ear off at this point trying to explain how damn cool this is and how much you should care, but now I’m wondering if I should shut up and keep it to myself for a while longer...
I mean, you could extract the information from various crackpot rants that I’ve left around the web, but… I think I’m safe from you making the effort at this point. xD
Okay, so I didn’t really think about whether I wanted to get into this at all beforehand, and I need to talk to my partner.
I have a bunch of moving-to-another-country practical matters I should be focusing on right now anyway.
I’ll get back to you guys in a few days.
Oh, alright, allow me to adjust down to the objectively correct level of excitement...
=ಠnಠ=
Better?
Thank you very much! You are cool and I like you and I will look into those some time! :3
I don’t think I have to worry too much about “insight porn”. The closest I get is obsessively sampling the products of the nearest thing we have to “competition”, noting details of all the ways they screw up and how to avoid those problems (and making sure to hit the few points they ever get right!)...
I’m basically forcing myself to spend these next few weeks landing some cheap-or-free rent and other pre-move preparations.
The theoretical and engineering puzzles of building the figurative machinery are just so inherently fascinating, and the joy I anticipate at watching it all run is compelling. :3
… D’awww. :)
I love how, sometimes, Lesswrongers can be so sweet in this totally unique and awesome way. :3
However, I actually meant “insane” in the same way FAI and cryonics are insane.
However however… Inferential distance!
This is how I have come to feel:
Don’t try to explain people into caring about anything important.
If I really know the important things that I believe I know, then I should be able to use that knowledge to do amazing things. Things people can experience.
Then people will come to me begging for explanations.
I will say only that we have access to a Theory of Instruction that is to the field of education what Newton’s Principia was to the field of physics. If you’re really interested, then I could give you a fascinating reading list (and what is “libgen”?), but I aint gonna explain much. I’ve got engineering skills to teach myself, and there’s a lot of bootstrapping to be done! :D
“I don’t quite understand your point here” ….
Ohhh~~?
Try to think about it from this angle: What are the connotations of you saying that the phrase seems to carry “dismissive” connotations? ;)
… Yes, thank you for pointing out the exact conjunction used in the original meme that I was riffing on. Definitely the key point. xD
(“sarcastic only actually genuinely genial”)
The worse case scenario is that a year from now we end up having to work a couple days a week slinging coffee/janitoring etc! :3
Better case scenarios are like (quoting muflax) “3 months programming, 9 months living off savings”.
ours is the romance that shall shake down the very foundations of human civilization, and give birth to a new world in their place, yes
(… “ha ha but serious” xD )
Yeah, I actually just discovered that I’ve gone completely off the deep end, so your sane and measured advice is completely useless to me, sorry. xD
(
Nope
What is this “retire”?
Nope.
Ha ha ha what.
Well yeah, of course. )
I think I’d edit in a notice to the top of the post so other well-meaning folks like you don’t get tricked into wasting your time trying to talk sense into a total nutcase like me. :)
(I appreciate all y’all, though. ^^ )
… Yes, the winner is you.
Our answer to 2, from the depths of our souls, can only be: Hell. Fucking. Yes.
Now, Paul Graham is awesome (he has left me in a state of complete conviction that LISP is the One True Way, to which I must aspire), but that’s… alot of essays. (An entire herd of alots, majestically migrating across vast prairies of prose.)
And I think our “startup” is going to be a lot different from what is normally meant by the term, so… I’ma sketch said differences, and you can tell me what you think is relevant, if you want.
Our “startup” is never going to be a publicly traded company.
We’re actually not trying to become “rich”, but to win the freedom to focus on doing nothing but work on inherently awesome projects.
Once we’ve got our prototype, we’ll be able to easily start paying the bills through… basically tutoring celebrities and other rich people part time.
(That sounds bizarre, but we’ve got an outside view on this. The whole thing has basically been done before by people who had a clumsy grasp of the theory underlying the technology, and didn’t even take advantage of basic computer programming tools to assist in the analysis. Just… stipulate this point.)
Although we also have, like, web-app subscription models we expect to get some cash flowing through...
So we going for establishing a reputation that’ll allow us to maintain our frugal lifestyle easily off of a bit of consulting-y work, and some nice monthly cashflow for web-apps etc...
But essentially we’re doing a startup for… a non-profit?
We’re basically fantasizing not about giant IPO’s, but about massive Kickstarter popularity whenever we announce a new project. And eventually creating our own university. A school that actually is for learning.
So yes, we’re obviously insane. But let’s stipulate that trying to live a “sane” life would be worse than death for us, and that the only type of advice we could possibly make use of is tips on how to kick ass at pulling off crazy things.
What does Graham have that I should read?
...
Do you know who the voyageurs were?
They were men who had to work in a massive wilderness where the only “infrastructure” was a bunch of rivers.
So they would just build a goddamn boat right there in the middle of nowhere with some bark they ripped off a tree, and canoe across a fucking continent. And where they couldn’t paddle, they would get out and carry the damn thing, even when it was loaded down with a mountain of beaver skins.
Nobody “dismisses” these guys.
I’ll tell you who we do “dismiss”: The aristocratic assholes back in Europe who funded this whole phenomena with their insatiable hunger for ridiculous furry top-hats made out of giant pond rats (a fashion statement which they somehow failed to realize should do nothing but scream out to society at large in towering letters of fire, “I AM A BRAINLESS GIT”).
In short, you sound unpleasantly dismissive of jungle-donkeys. ;)
All that said… how would you respond to question 4?
You can kind of tell that it was the question I came to realize was key, through the process of writing the post...
Should I even bother with this “investment” stuff right now, or just move the whole 13k sum to a simple savings account and worry about reinvesting it in a year?
Hm.
Well, I just did a quick google search for
developing economiesand looked for graphs that seemed to deal with the comparison I’m interested in.For instance:
http://carnegieendowment.org/images/article_images/decoupleR1.gif
http://blogs.worldbank.org/files/prospects/charts/nl33cj23.sn0/chart-small.png
http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2011/9/4/saupload_trendr1.png
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4094/4771449749_7c63d01bdc.jpg
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2012/09/images/dervis2.jpg
And my dad put the majority of investments in “Canada” and “US”, which… are in the group of economies represented by the lower lines. (And the rest in “world”, which is the average of the low and the high lines.)
As far as I can tell, his decision was based on… a heuristic that developing countries are lower status, and lower status=poorer=not a good investment? (I say “decision”, but I don’t know if it even occurred to him as an option...)
Interestingly enough, the study with the highest effect size in the meta-analysis (2.44) involved non-basic skills. Actually I think I’ll just type up the summary:
This study analyzes the use of the Earth Science videodisc program with elementary education majors who traditionally have had negative attitudes towards science teaching. One group received the DI program and the other group received the traditional approach [random assignment, of course] during a one-semester science course. The DI group had significantly higher posttest knowledge scores (91%) and higher confidence in their understanding of science knowledge and ability to teach science.
Cited as:
“Vitale, M. & Romance, N. (1992). Using videodisc instruction in an elementary science methods course: Remediating science knowledge deficiencies and facilitating science teaching. Journal of Research in Science teaching, 29, 915-928.”
Not that I’ve dug up the original paper myself yet.
But one of my favorites was a study that didn’t use random assignment, but actually compared the performance of two groups of high school students: AP kids (doing whatever they normally do to study), and kids with performance previously in the lower two quartiles (taught through a videodisc course on “Chemistry and energy”). Both groups then took the same test.
Results as a researcher reported informally outside the study: “The experimentals whumped the AP students on all topics related to what was covered by the videodiscs of our course.”
(This one wasn’t included in the meta-analysis, so I’ll have to try to dig up the reference later.)
Thank you for your offer of help with feedback (I’ll def take you up on that) and papers (there are some papers referenced in “Research on Direct Instruction” I might like to get my hands on), and the sympathy on my ma.
I’m interning at a DI school in Baltimore (City Springs). Currently working with the kindergarteners on the language program (I’m supposed to move on to also doing math and reading soon, and teach older kids as well).
The National Institute For Direct Instruction (NIFDI) placed me here. It usually takes a minimum of two years for someone to get really good at presentation, but they figure I should be able to do it in one.
They’re just setting up a program for talented DI teachers to learn design by becoming coauthors on new programs, and that’s obviously where I’m aiming to go next year right after the annual summer DI conference.
Anyway, thing about the internship is that they’ve never had an unpaid foreign intern floating around before, so I end up as the third teacher in the room (the usual set-up at City Springs is a two teacher team. One of them is technically just a ‘paraprofessional’, but their instructional responsibilities are the same at a DI charter school). So I have to make sure I’m actually working on the things I need to be working on rather than getting side-tracked into some not really DI-relevant task.
Well?