12
A better front page for LessWrong (prize?)
Developing exercises and tests that help understand or improve rationality
A large set of good calibration questions
A good website for taking calibration tests
thanks for the query. My first impression was that the ones that first
jumped out as particularly high value were all the subsections of 11a.
Particularly students with university subscriptions (like me!) have
access to a vast amount of scientific research, but it's far from
obvious how to use it best, and this isn't taught as well as it should
be. I'm not sure of the cost, though - if one already has a lot of
experience in academia, then it could be straightforward, while
somebody else might need to spend a lot of time figuring out what to
say.
A lot of the other things in the list are hard to evaluate, as I think
they're in the category of "high-value if done well, less so if not".
Also I'm not sure of e.g. what the total impact of improving the
Wikipedia pages on cognitive biases would actually be, even if done
well. Book reviews are good if done for good books: I don't know
whether either of the two mentioned are worth it, but then I haven't
read Selfish Reasons and have only read part of Consciousness
Explained.
No particular low-cost, high-value things come to mind off the top of my head.
Those are my first impressions: I'll try to think of it and get back
to you if I come up with something more useful to say about the rest
of the things on the list. (A bit under time pressure right now.)
- Kaj
On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 7:08 PM, John Salvatier
<jsal...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
> Dear Kaj,
>
> I hope I find you well!
> Many projects would benefit people interested in living rationally but no
> individuals are motivated enough to execute them (more). The Public
> Goods Team is trying to encourage and facilitate systematic and organized
> work on such projects. One of our first steps is to identify the projects
> that are the lowest hanging fruit: those projects which are high value, and
> inexpensive (in terms of time, motivation, money etc.). We have come up with
> a preliminary list of such projects.
>
> We are especially interested in your judgment of which projects are most
> attractive, because we think the judgments of smart people who have thought
> about this sort of thing are especially informative. Thus we are conducting
> a small survey of the LessWrong top 10 contributors list and others who seem
> relevant. We will use the results of the survey to help us focus our efforts
> on the most valuable projects. We will also write up our results and post
> them to LessWrong.
>
> We have two questions:
>
> What projects not on the list seem low cost and high value?
> What projects seem like they are especially high value and low cost?
>
> If you would like to reply publicly (very much appreciated), please send
> your reply to lw-public-...@googlegroups.com
>
> Cheers,
> John Salvatier
That should have been "low-cost, high-value things that are not on the
list already".