I create effective, scalable educational programs. I want them to help people make better decisions, become more empathic, and more effective in their work (esp. their research). I’m an awarded educator, receiving national awards, international senior fellowships, and the highest honour from my university. I also have a strong academic research background: I’m Chief Investigator on $3.7m of competitive, industry-partnered research grants; have published in the Scimago #1 journals for psychology, applied psychology, ageing, paediatrics, education (three times, see #1, #2, #3), and sport science (twice, see #1 & #2); and my work is cited almost 4x the world average (according to InCites; all data as of June 2021).
Michael Noetel
Just wanted to +1 the appreciation for all your work over the years JJ
Could Nonlinear Library or Perrin Walker do audio versions of these articles? 🙏
As a social scientist, these lists are very helpful, thank you team. It’s useful to be able to point students and colleagues to open questions that are immediately decision-relevant.
Hanania gives some interesting arguments for why here: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/effective-altruism-thinks-youre-hitler
3 months on, and this has become one of the most valuable EA/Alignment/Rationality dissemination innovations I’ve seen. Has replaced almost all my more vapid listening. Would get through an extra 10-20 hours of content a week. Thank you Nonlinear/Kat/Emerson
I really like this framing Gideon. It seems aligned with CEA’s Core EA principles. I’d love EA to be better at helping people learn skills. One of our working drafts for an EA MOOC focuses more on the those core principles and skills. Is something like this work-in-progress closer to what you had in mind?
People new to EA might not know they can get the book for free by signing up to the 80,000 hours mailing list, and it’s also available on Audible
Great initiative @MichaelA. I’m not sure what a ‘sequence’ does, but I assume this means there’ll be a series of related posts to follow, is that right?
Thanks Seb. I’m not that surprised—public surveys in the Existential Risk Persuasion tournament were pretty high (5% for AI). I don’t think most people are good at calibrating probabilities between 0.001% and 10% (myself included).
I don’t have strong hypotheses why people ‘mostly support’ something they also want treated with such care. My weak ones would be ‘people like technology but when asked about what the government should do, want them to keep them safe (remove biggest threats).’ For example, Australians support getting nuclear submarines but also support the ban on nuclear weapons. I don’t necessarily see this as a contradiction—”keep me safe” priorities would lead to both. I don’t know if our answers would have changed if we made the trade-offs more salient (e.g., here’s what you’d lose if we took this policy action prioritising risks). Interested in suggestions for how we could do that better.
It’d be easy for us to run in other countries. We’ll put the data and code online soon. If someone’s keen to run the ‘get it in the hands of people who want to use it’ piece, we could also do the ‘run the survey and make a technical report one’. It’s all in R so the marginal cost of another country is low. We’d need access to census data to do the statistical adjustment to estimate population agreement (but that should be easy to see if possible).
Done
Yeah these are interesting questions Eli. I’ve worked on a few big RCTs and they’re really hard and expensive to do. It’s also really hard to adequately power experiments for small effect sizes in noisy environments (e.g., productivity of remote/in-person work). Your suggestions to massively scale up those interventions and to do things online would make things easier. As Ozzie mentioned, the health ones require such long and slow feedback loops that I think they might not be better than well (statistically) controlled alternatives. I used to think RCTs were the only way to get definitive causal data. The problem is, because of biases that can be almost impossible to eliminate (https://sites.google.com/site/riskofbiastool/welcome/rob-2-0-tool) RCTs are seldom perfect causal data. Conversely, with good adjustment for confounding, observational data can provide very strong causal evidence (think smoking; I recommend my PhD students do this course for this reason https://www.coursera.org/learn/crash-course-in-causality). For the ones with fast feedback loops, I think some combination of “priors + best available evidence + lightweight tests in my own life” works pretty well to see if I should adopt something.
At a meta-level, in an ideal world, the NSF and NIH (and global equivalents) are probably designed to fund people to address questions that are most important and with the highest potential. There are probably dietetics/sleep/organisational psychology experts who have dedicated their careers to questions #1-4 above, and you’d hope that those people are getting funded if those questions are indeed critical to answer. In reality, science funding probably does not get distributed based on criteria that maximises impartial welfare, so maybe that’s why #1-4 would get missed. As mentioned in a recent forum post, I think the mega-org could be better focused nudging scientific incentives to focus on those questions rather than working on those questions ourselves https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JbddnNZHgySgj8qxj/improving-science-influencing-the-direction-of-research-and
Ahhh! Yes, thanks. Fixed.
So in education ‘agency’ is often defined as ‘agentic engagement’—basically taking ownership over your own learning. I couldn’t find any good systematic reviews on interventions that increase agentic engagement. This is pretty weak evidence and might have a healthy dose of motivated reasoning (my end, and theirs), but people who have thought about agency for longer than I have seem to think...
In conclusion, the answer as to how teachers can support students’ agentic engagement is to adopt a significantly more autonomy-supportive classroom motivating style.
… so I don’t have any better ideas than those described above.
Good video Peter. Agree it’s a good introduction for a wide audience. Thanks for signal boosting.
Thank you for sharing this project. It looks great. A few minor comments and ideas. Wordpress is very flexible but requires lots of plugins to interface with each other for many functions to work. Consider chatting to Aqeel or JJ Hepburn from Sangro/AI Safety Support who recently used wordpress for a learning management system to see how they found it. Consider also using an existing platform with more pre-built features (e.g., Thinkific) where cross-compatibility might be less painful (see our uni EA fellowship site). At least at the start, these help projects like this get off the ground more easily. Most projects add their bells and whistles later.
My PhD student is doing a thesis very close to this project. She’s trying to accelerate knowledge translation in developing countries. Our hypothesis, like yours, is that online learning will rapidly and cost-effectively close the research-practice gap.
The first study in her thesis is a systematic review of randomised trials using online learning in healthcare. We want to know how well online learning teaches professionals, and how well the training helps people translate it into practice. She’s aiming to find what features help the interventions work better. If you’re interested in the review, she’s looking for team members. Being a team member means you learn the results much more quickly and become an author on the paper, which can be good for credibility. If you want to find out more, email me at noetel [at] gmail.com or send me a message on the forum.
Her second study is a cost-effectiveness analysis of an online nursing intervention. Her third study is a series of interviews in LMICs to see how professionals from those countries feel about online learning. It sounds pretty well aligned with the kind of scoping your team is doing. If you’d be interested in the findings of a study like that, and possibly have some contacts from healthcare in LMICs, then again we’d be interested in collaborating (email me). She could run the interviews but you might find the results valuable.
Classic Aird: great collection of links to useful resources. Thanks mate. Looking forward to meta-Aird: a collection of links to the best of Aird’s collection of links.
Richard I really love your writing, but as a parent I find it so hard to just sit and read stuff. 95% of the forum’s content I get via the podcast feeds. Now, I don’t expect everyone to go full Experimental History or Joe Carlsmith and audio narrate each post, but unless you’re wanting to keep things on Substack turf, you might consider cross-posting the full thing here (like Bentham’s Bulldog did for the critique of the wired article). I don’t ask this of everyone, so please consider this a compliment: I love your work and want it in my ears.[1]
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That sounded weirder than I meant it to
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I’m interested in the authors’ take on this question: Change my mind: EA national organisations should be ‘professional associations’ not ‘communities’
This is a useful list of interventions, some of which are mentioned in the post (e.g., quizzes; we’ve summarised the meta-analyses for these here). I think steps 1, 2 and 3 from the summary of the above post are the ‘teacher focused’ versions of how to promote deliberate practice (have a focus, get feedback, fix problems). Deliberate practice literature often tells learners how they should structure their own practice (e.g., how musicians should train). Teaching to others is a useful way to frame collaboration in a way that makes it safe to not know all the answers. Thanks for the nudges.
Whatever happens with the discussions about copyright, I really hope this continues to exist. I listened to six forum posts at 5am today while walking a baby around to sleep… very good for parental mental health