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There's probably a lot of variance in EV here & a lot of it comes down to the strategic decisions of the organizers & whether or not they can really scale.

Agree that at $100/student it would not be ideal. I suppose one must do this calc with the likelihood of future scaling in mind, where whatever the number is (my impression is they are asking for more than 100k), could plausibly decrease by an order of magnitude or more. Conditional on a certain level of competent leadership, there is a poker champion as chair of the board, so ... maybe.

I suppose perhaps it might be wise to pay the diversity tax. But I know for the UK at least if one wanted to build a national tournament in something, you would probs just target Eton & equivalents (there are some helpful “allies” in staff I believe). Then the next year you “open it up” to state schools etc and they would jump at it, instead of it being a slog to convince them. Besides, if it fails to take off, EV is higher for the schools with high likelihood of future leaders.
There are of course benefits of a diverse range of schools (value of info on engagement of students at various types of school to target in future, finding “hidden gem” forecasters etc).

Application keeps mentioning a successful pilot, doesn’t say why it was successful. Main risk identified, student engagement.
Was student engagement high in these pilots? was it a full-sized class with average-enthusiasm teacher?

Scaling to a national tournament would seem to me like where most of EV would be realized.

Tho I’m not sure that scaling is their main focus with this, there seems to be a big educational focus that I'm more skeptical of. The fantasy football stuff they did in the past might have been decent at engaging a subsection of them so maybe it would yield some educational results idk

Scaling gets you some decent talent identification, a whole generation knowing what prediction markets are & why they might be useful. Hence, when pursuing use in government etc in the future, friction is way lower. It’s not something super weird etc.

Given no one else seems to be attempting rn, it could be worth a shot.

@GeorgeVii “The Alliance will conduct extensive marketing and recruitment efforts to maximize student and school participation.”
Do you really have what it takes to do tiktok guerilla market tho :p

@GeorgeVii Also sounds kinda expensive. Maybe making it an elite school thing first makes the states schools "come to you" and you save a bunch of capital, idk just thinking out loud

Considerations:

• This is a game of telephone, which can result in lossy or poor instruction: The forecasting state of the art -> the project's educators -> online course -> teachers -> kids

• High schoolers are one thing, but I'm really skeptical about the ability of 11-13 year olds to have their decision-making skills meaningfully improved by this.

• The project aims to cover 1000 students total, and those are not selected from America's brightest, nor by allowing the most interested students to enter, but by whichever teachers happen to want to do a cool activity.

• Cultivating a few gifted outliers into highly strong and consistent forecasters seems considerably more efficient. The 1000 students are also far more expensive - you need to do a lot of marketing and incentivization just to corral them in the first place.

• Taking a step back, raising the average predictive ability of 1000 students by a few percentage points (not a guarantee, hard to measure how well it worked) seems of pretty dubious value to the longterm future. A marginal improvement but not an efficient one.

I take the concern of 'we don't know how much funded is requested' but at the same time, we're predicting on 'will they get any funding' which I think they should. I'm optimistic about this one particularly given the very relevant previous experience (e.g. two pilots, GM Genius), the advisory board, as well as the overall the level of detail in the app (e.g. indicators in pre- and post- survey, concrete dates, numbers etc.) And the project fits the funding call neatly.

I would have liked more info in two places: on the content of the teachers' 2 hours course (at the same time, with the advisory board and previous panels, this isn't a big concern), as well as more details on the recruitment. I'm convinced they have different considered how to do this in potentially different ways so they can recruit sufficient numbers ("comprehensive communications and media plan.... leverage current and former Decision Education Fellows"), though I do still wonder how they are specifically ensuring fairly good representation from each state or school. What's the sampling strategy? What are the key target schools if any?

On their potential questions design, they state "The Alliance will work with forecasting experts to shape each question" and I wish it was more directly stated who the experts are and what their credentials are. I assume some of the advisory board which would be great.

I see two somewhat low-hanging fruit to improve this app, involving maybe just a smidge more on the logistics side. If I were a funder I'd be requesting a little more for these.

First, if I read this correctly, there is only training for the teachers but this seems a little bit like a lost opportunity for this age group. If students are motivated enough to participate, I wonder if there might be e.g. an optional webinar for them. I imagine teachers and schools will vary a lot, so students will have varied background in research skills etc. So it sounds to me that having a webinar they can access at any time or even a one-pager with definitions and resources (probably less work, a lot of this already exists but needs to be collated) for e.g. what cognitive biases are could be good. The 'working in teams' aspect is a little underappreciated in the applicaiton, but getting a few bulletpoints about e.g. groupthink could be good. Quite frankly, even just linking them to Clearer Thinking's resources would be good here: https://www.clearerthinking.org/tools-and-mini-courses

Second, looking at one of the project-specific qs, " In what ways would the questions asked during the tournaments intersect with the concepts of effective altruism?"... this almost makes me wonder how feasible is it give all/more students prizes such as one of the Will MacAskill books or Superforecasting. Throw in a card with a QR code for some EA links or links about where they can take their forecasting next, e.g. point them right here to Manifold Markets.

Finally, I should say the proposal doesn't state this (and so might underestimate the impact) but it seems plausible to me that students will develop team work and research skills more broadly.

@RinaRazh So for me a concern is something like: will this course teach the actual skill, or will it teach some mediocre, overpriced simulacra?

I don't know if you guys remember when you were in highschool, but the "mediocre overpriced simulacra" does correspond to my & many others' experience with highschool education.

So when I think about the pathway to impact of this grant, something like "empowering students to have better models of the world" seems pretty powerful. But "have students sit through a bad lecture and do a pretty forgettable activity" seems close to worthless, to a first degree. To a second degree, maybe it gets some students to google forecasting afterwards. But then the question is for what price point per interested student.

Around 140,000 students take the National Latin Exam each year which is a niche exam, obviously, covering about 6 years of different Latin levels. My napkin math says about 50k students participate in the National Personal Finance Challenge each year. The CLT an alternative to the SAT took about 3 years to reach 4k students. These 8 years later, I think around 10k students take it per year.

A project like this could feasibly reach its goal of 10k students of it pulled on the right levers. But I would expect it to take around 3 years to get there.

To me that is worth it!

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This is the most synonymous with the entire mission of Clear Thinking.

As always, projects that have actually started and are showing results (this and Stanford) are the best places to put money—while paying “salaries” to one that haven’t been started and just want the money personally to “work” on something they weren’t excited about enough to have made any progress on yet is…questionable.

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The linked document doesn't include how much funding they are applying for. If they can do this for $10k (or $10 per participant), this seems like a clear yes. If they want to do this for $100k (or $100 per participant), this seems like a probable no.

Betting on no for now.

Terrible logic.

They are scaling up to a national competition, ideally to millions of students.

Whether or not their fixed costs are high at this point, or taking some ratio to an early cohort, is nonsensical.

Presumably there are benefits to a wide enough cohort to fine-tune the process, but just large enough to do so.

Expecting them to develop the whole thing for $10k (or to scale more than 2-5x at a time before ready, because ratio) is just bizarre or inapposite.

Another example of Gigacasting’s law of actually useful and in-progress projects

Everyone comes out of the woodwork to say “why X dollars per unit” while no one has anything bad to say about “please send me $200k for salary to 🤔”

@Gigacasting I disagree. Nuño is a clever guy, he understands up front and marginal costs. But he's right to want to see some numbers for what milestones they are gong to go for.