(Reply written after the paragraph was added above)
Thanks for the elaboration! Some quick thoughts:
qualitatively describe what you’re trying to teach, and why you think this is a good idea; monitor and publish data such as number of workshops run, attendance etc., without narrowly optimizing for any of these
I think CFAR has done at least everything on this list of examples. Which you might already be aware of, but wanted to make sure is common knowledge. There are a significantnumberof posts trying to explain CFAR at a high-level, and the example workshop schedule summarizes all the classes at a high-level. CFAR has also published the number of workshops they’ve run and their total attendance in their impact reports and on their homepage (currently listing 1045 alumni). Obviously I don’t think that alone is sufficient, but it seemed plausible that a reader might walk away thinking that CFAR hadn’t done any of the things you list.
disagree with your implied criterion of using something like “quality-weighted sum of generated research” is an appropriate main criterion for assessing the education system, and thus by extension disagree with the emphasis on right-tail outcomes when evaluating the public education system as a whole
I think there is some truth to this interpretation, but I think it’s overall still wrong enough that I would want to correct it. I think the education system has many goals, and I don’t think I would summarize it’s primary output as “quality-weighted sum of generated research”. I don’t think going into my models of the education system here is going to be super valuable, though happy to do that at some other point if anyone is interested in them. My primary point was that optimizing for legibility clearly has had large effects on educational institutions, in ways that would at least be harmful to CFAR if affected in the same way (another good example here might be top universities and the competition for getting into all the top 10 ranking, though I am less confident of the dynamics of that effects).
(Reply written after the paragraph was added above)
Thanks for the elaboration! Some quick thoughts:
I think CFAR has done at least everything on this list of examples. Which you might already be aware of, but wanted to make sure is common knowledge. There are a significant number of posts trying to explain CFAR at a high-level, and the example workshop schedule summarizes all the classes at a high-level. CFAR has also published the number of workshops they’ve run and their total attendance in their impact reports and on their homepage (currently listing 1045 alumni). Obviously I don’t think that alone is sufficient, but it seemed plausible that a reader might walk away thinking that CFAR hadn’t done any of the things you list.
I think there is some truth to this interpretation, but I think it’s overall still wrong enough that I would want to correct it. I think the education system has many goals, and I don’t think I would summarize it’s primary output as “quality-weighted sum of generated research”. I don’t think going into my models of the education system here is going to be super valuable, though happy to do that at some other point if anyone is interested in them. My primary point was that optimizing for legibility clearly has had large effects on educational institutions, in ways that would at least be harmful to CFAR if affected in the same way (another good example here might be top universities and the competition for getting into all the top 10 ranking, though I am less confident of the dynamics of that effects).