Back in December 2013, Jonah Sinick and I launched Cognito Mentoring, an advising service for intellectually curious students. Our goal was to improve the quality of learning, productivity, and life choices of the student population at large, and we chose to focus on intellectually curious students because of their greater potential as well as our greater ability to relate with that population. We began by offering free personalized advising. Jonah announced the launch in a LessWrong post, hoping to attract the attention of LessWrong’s intellectually curious readership.

Since then, we feel we’ve done a fair amount, with a lot of help from LessWrong. We’ve published a few dozen blog posts and have an information wiki. Slightly under a hundred people contacted us asking us for advice (many from LessWrong), and we had substantive interactions with over 50 of them. As our reviews from students and parents suggest, we’ve made a good impression and have had a positive impact on many of the people we’ve advised. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished and grateful for the support and constructive criticism we’ve received on LessWrong.

However, what we’ve learned in the last few months has led us to the conclusion that Cognito Mentoring is not ripe for being a full-time work opportunity for the two of us.

For the last few months, we’ve eschewed regular jobs and instead done contract work that provides us the flexibility to work on Cognito Mentoring, eating into our savings somewhat to cover the cost of living differences. This is a temporary arrangement and is not sustainable. We therefore intend to scale back our work on Cognito Mentoring to “maintenance mode” so that people can continue to benefit from the resources we’ve already collected, with minimal additional effort on our part, freeing us up to take regular jobs with more demanding time requirements.

We might revive Cognito Mentoring as a part-time or full-time endeavor in the future if there are significant changes to our beliefs about the traction, impact, and long-run financial viability of Cognito Mentoring. Part of the purpose of “maintenance mode” will be to leave open the possibility of such a revival if the idea does indeed have potential.

In this post, I discuss some of the factors that led us to change our view, the conditions under which we might revive Cognito Mentoring, and more details about how “maintenance mode” for Cognito Mentoring will look.

Reason #1: Downward update on social value

We do think that the work we’ve done on Cognito Mentoring so far has generated social value, and the continued presence of the website will add more value over time. However, our view has shifted in the direction of lower marginal social value from working on Cognito Mentoring full-time, relative to simply keeping the website live and doing occasional work to improve it. Specifically:

• It’s quite possible that the lowest-hanging fruit with respect to the advisees who would be most receptive to our advice has already been plucked. We received the bulk of our advisees through LessWrong within the month after our initial posting. Other places where we’ve posted about our service have led to fewer advisees (more here).
• Of our website content, only a small fraction of the content gets significant traction (see our list of popular pages), so honing and promoting our best content might be a better strategy for improving social value than trying to create a comprehensive resource. This can be done while in maintenance mode, and does not require full-time effort on our part.

What might lead us to change our minds: If we continue to be contacted by large numbers of potentially high-impact people, or we get evidence that the advising we’ve already done has had significantly greater impact than we think it did, we’ll update our social value upward.

Reason #2: Downward update on long-run financial viability

We have enough cash to go on for a few more months. But for Cognito Mentoring to be something that we work full time on, we need an eventual steady source of income from it. Around mid-March 2014, we came to the realization that charging advisees is not a viable revenue source, as Jonah described at the end of his post about how Cognito Mentoring can do the most good (see also this comment by Luke Muehlhauser and Jonah’s response to it below the comment). At that point, we decided to focus more on our informational content and on looking for philanthropic funding.

Our effort at looking into philanthropic funding did give us a few leads, and some of them could plausibly result in us getting small grants. However, none of the leads we got pointed to potential steady long-term income sources. In other words, we don’t think philanthropic funding is a viable long-term revenue model for Cognito Mentoring.

Our (anticipated) difficulty in getting philanthropic funding arises from two somewhat different reasons.

1. What we’re doing is somewhat new and does not fit the standard mold of educational grants. Educational foundations tend to give grants for fairly specific activities, and what we’re doing does not seem to fit those.
2. We haven’t demonstrated significant traction or impact yet (even though we’ve had a reasonable amount of per capita impact, the total number of people we’ve influenced so far is relatively small). This circles back to Reason #1: funders’ reluctance to fund us may in part stem from their belief that we won’t have much social value, given our lack of traction so far. Insofar as funders’ judgment carries some information value, this should also strengthen Reason #1.

What might lead us to change our minds: If we are contacted by a funder who is willing to bankroll us for over a year and also offer a convincing reason for why he/she thinks bankrolling us is a good idea (so that we’re convinced that our funding can be sustained beyond a year) we’ll change our minds.

Reason #3: Acquisition of knowledge and skills

One of the reasons we’ve been able to have an impact through Cognito Mentoring so far is that both Jonah and I have knowledge of many diverse topics related to the questions that our advisees have posed to us. But our knowledge is still woefully inadequate in a number of areas. In particular, many advisees have asked us questions in the realms of technology, entrepreneurship, and the job environment, and while we have pointed them to resources on these, firsthand experience, or close secondhand experience, would help us more effectively guide advisees. We intend to take jobs related to computer technology (in fields such as programming or data science), and these jobs might be at startups or put us in close contact with startups. This will better position us to return to mentoring later if we choose to resume it part-time or full-time.

Knowledge and skills we acquire working in the technology sector could also help us design better interfaces or websites that can more directly address the needs of our audience. So far, we’ve thought of ourselves as content-oriented people, so we’ve used standard off-the-shelf software such as WordPress (for our main website and blog) and MediaWiki (for our information wiki). Part of the reason is that we wanted to focus on content creation rather than interface design, but part of the reason we’ve stuck to these is that we didn’t think we could design interfaces. Once we’ve acquired more programming and design experience, we might be more open to the idea of designing interfaces and software that can meet particular needs of our target audience. We might design an interface that helps people study more effectively, make better life decisions, or share reviews of courses and colleges, in a manner similar to softwares or websites such as Anki or Beeminder or Goodreads. There might also be potential for a more effective online resource that teaches programming than those in existence (e.g. Codecademy). It’s not clear right now whether there exists a useful opportunity of this sort that we are particularly well-suited to, but with more coding experience, we’ll at least be able to implement an idea of this sort if we decide it has promise.

Reason #4: Letting it brew in the background can give us a better idea of the potential

If we continue to gradually add content to the wiki, and continue to get links and traffic to it from other sources, it’s likely that the traffic will grow slowly and steadily. The extent of organic growth will help us figure out how much promise Cognito Mentoring has. If our wiki gets to the point of steadily receiving thousands of pageviews a day, we will reconsider reviving Cognito Mentoring as a part-time or full-time endeavor. If, on the other hand, traffic remains at approximately the current level (about a hundred pageviews a day, once we exclude spikes arising from links from LessWrong and Marginal Revolution) then the idea is probably not worth revisiting, and we’ll leave it in maintenance mode.

In addition, by maintaining contact with the people we’ve advised, we can get more insight into the sort of impact we’ve had, whether it is significant over the long term, and how it can be improved. This again can tell us whether our impact is sufficiently large as to make Cognito Mentoring worth reviving.

What “maintenance mode” entails

1. We’ll continue to have contact information available, but will scale back on personalized advising: People are welcome to contact us with questions and suggestions about content, but we will not generally offer detailed personalized responses or do research specific to individuals who contact us. We’ll attempt to point people to relevant content we’ve already written, or to other resources we’re already aware of that can address their concerns.
2. The information wiki will remain live, and we will continue to make occasional improvements, but we won’t have a time schedule of when particular improvements have to be implemented by.
3. Existing blog posts will remain, but we probably won’t be making many new blog posts. New blog posts will happen only if one of us has an idea that really seems worth sharing and for which the Cognito Mentoring blog is an ideal forum.
4. We’ll continue our administrative roles in the communities of existing Cognito Mentoring advisees
5. We’ll continue periodically reviewing the progress of people we’ve advised so far: This will help us get a better sense of how valuable our work has been, and can be useful should we choose to revive Cognito Mentoring.
6. We’ll continue to correspond with advisees we have so far (time permitting), though we’ll give more priority to advisees who continue to maintain contact of their own accord and those whose activities seem to have higher impact potential.
7. We’ll try to get our best content linked from other sources, such as about.com: Sources like about.com are targeted at the general population. We can try to get linked to from there as an additional resource for the more intellectually curious population that’s outside the core focus of about.com.
8. We’ll link more extensively to other sources that people can use: For instance, we can more emphatically point to 80,000 Hours for people who are interested in career advising in relation to effective altruist pursuits. We can point to about.com and College Confidential for more general information about mainstream institutions. We already make a number of recommendations on our website, but as we stop working actively, it becomes all the more important that people who come to us are appropriately redirected to other sources that can help them.

Conclusion and summary (TL;DR)

We (qua Cognito Mentoring) are grateful to LessWrong for being welcoming of our posts, offering constructive criticism, and providing us with some advisees we’ve enjoyed working with. We think that the work we’ve done has value, but don’t think that there’s enough marginal value from full-time work on Cognito Mentoring. We think we can do more good for ourselves and the world by switching Cognito Mentoring to maintenance mode and freeing our time currently spent on Cognito Mentoring for other pursuits. The material that we have already produced will continue to remain in the public domain and we hope that people will benefit from it. We may revisit our “maintenance mode” decision if new evidence changes our view regarding traction, impact, and long-run financial viability.

There’s a huge debate among economists of education on whether the positive relationship between educational attainment and income is due to human capital, signaling, or ability bias. But what do the students themselves believe? Bryan Caplan has argued that students’ actions (for instance, their not sitting in for free on classes and their rejoicing at class cancellation) suggest a belief in the signaling model of education. At the same time, he notes that students may not fully believe the signaling model, and that shifting in the direction of that belief might improve individual educational attainment.

Still, something seems wrong about the view that most people believe in the signaling model of education. While their actions are consistent with that view, I don’t think they frame it quite that way. I don’t think they usually think of it as “education is useless, but I’ll go through it anyway because that allows me to signal to potential employers that I have the necessary intelligence and personality traits to succeed on the job.” Instead, I believe that people’s model of school education is linked to the idea of karma: they do what the System wants them to do, because that’s their duty and the Right Thing to do. Many of them also expect that if they do the Right Thing, and fulfill their duties well, then the System shall reward them with financial security and a rewarding life. Others may take a more fateful stance, saying that it’s not up to them to judge what the System has in store for them, but they still need to do the Right Thing.

The case of the devout Christian

Consider a reasonably devout Christian who goes to church regularly. For such a person, going to church, and living a life in accordance with (his understanding of) Christian ethics is part of what he’s supposed to do. God will take care of him as long as he does his job well. In the long run, God will reward good behavior and doing the Right Thing, but it’s not for him to question God’s actions.

Such a person might look bemused if you asked him, “Are you a practicing Christian because you believe in the prudential value of Christian teachings (the “human capital” theory) or because you want to give God the impression that you are worthy of being rewarded (the “signaling” theory”)?” Why? Partly, because the person attributes omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence to God, so that the very idea of having a conceptual distinction between what’s right and how to impress God seems wrong. Yes, he does expect that God will take care of him and reward him for his goodness (the “signaling” theory). Yes, he also believes that the Christian teachings are prudent (the “human capital” theory). But to him, these are not separate theories but just parts of the general belief in doing right and letting God take care of the rest.

Surely not all Christians are like this. Some might be extreme signalers: they may be deliberately trying to optimize for (what they believe to be) God’s favor and maximizing the probability of making the cut to Heaven. Others might believe truly in the prudence of God’s teachings and think that any rewards that flow are because the advice makes sense at the worldly level (in terms of the non-divine consequences of actions) rather than because God is impressed by the signals they’re sending him through those actions. There are also a number of devout Christians I personally know who, regardless of their views on the matter, would be happy to entertain, examine, and discuss such hypotheses without feeling bemused. Still, I suspect the majority of Christians don’t separate the issue, and many might even be offended at second-guessing God.

Note: I selected Christianity and a male sex just for ease of description; similar ideas apply to other religions and the female sex. Also note that in theory, some religious sects emphasize free will and others emphasize determinism more, but it’s not clear to me how much effect this has on people’s mental models on the ground.

The schoolhouse as church: why human capital and signaling sound ridiculous

Just as many people believe in following God’s path and letting Him take care of the rewards, many people believe that by doing the Right Thing educationally (being a Good Student and jumping through the appropriate hoops through correctly applied sincere effort) they’re doing their bit for the System. These people might be bemused at the cynicism involved in separating out “human capital” and “signaling” theories of education.

Again, not everybody is like this. Some people are extreme signalers: they openly claim that school builds no useful skills, but grades are necessary to impress future employers, mates, and society at large. Some are human capital extremists: they openly claim that the main purpose is to acquire a strong foundation of knowledge, and they continue to do so even when the incentive from the perspective of grades is low. Some are consumption extremists: they believe in learning because it’s fun and intellectually stimulating. And some strategically combine these approaches. Yet, none of these categories describe most people.

I’ve had students who worked considerably harder on courses than the bare minimum effort needed to get an A. This is despite the fact that they aren’t deeply interested in the subject, don’t believe it will be useful in later life, and aren’t likely to remember it for too long anyway. I think that the karma explanation fits best: people develop an image of themselves as Good Students who do their duty and fulfill their role in the system. They strive hard to fulfill that image, often going somewhat overboard beyond the bare minimum needed for signaling purposes, while still not trying to learn in ways that optimize for human capital acquisition. There are of course many other people who claim to aspire to the label of Good Student because it’s the Right Thing, and consider it a failing of virtue that they don’t currently qualify as Good Students. Of course, that’s what they say, and social desirability bias might play a role in individuals’ statements,  but the very fact that people consider such views socially desirable indicates the strong societal belief in being a Good Student and doing one’s academic duty.

If you presented the signaling hypothesis to self-identified Good Students they’d probably be insulted. It’s like telling a devout Christian that he’s in it only to curry favor with God. At the same time, the human capital hypothesis might also seem ridiculous to them in light of their actual actions and experiences: they know they don’t remember or understand the material too well. Thinking of it as doing their bit for the System because it’s the Right Thing to do seems both noble and realistic.

The impressive success of this approach

At the individual level, this works! Regardless of the relative roles of human capital, signaling, and ability bias, people who go through higher levels of education and get better grades tend to earn better and get more high-status jobs than others. People who transform themselves from being bad students to good students often see rewards both academically and in later life in the form of better jobs. This could again be human capital, signaling, or ability bias. The ability bias explanation is plausible because it requires a lot of ability to turn from a bad student into a good student, about the same as it does to be a good student from the get-go or perhaps even more because transforming oneself is a difficult task.

Can one do better?

Doing what the System commands can be reasonably satisfying, and even rewarding. But for many people, and particularly for the people who do the most impressive things, it’s not necessarily the optimal path. This is because the System isn’t designed to maximize every individual’s success or life satisfaction, or even to optimize things for society as a whole. It’s based on a series of adjustments driven by squabbling between competing interests. It could be a lot worse, but a motivated person could do better.

Also note that being a Good Student is fundamentally different from being a Good Worker. A worker, whether directly serving customers or reporting to a boss, is producing stuff that other people value. So, at least in principle, being a better worker translates to more gains for the customers. This means that a Good Worker is contributing to the System in a literal sense, and by doing a better job, directly adds more value. But this sort of reasoning doesn’t apply to Good Students, because the actions of students qua students aren’t producing direct value. Their value is largely their consumption value to the students themselves and their instrumental value to the students’ current and later life choices.

Many of the qualities that define a Good Student are qualities that are desirable in other contexts as well. In particular, good study habits are valuable not just in school but in any form of research that relies on intellectual comprehension and synthesis (this may be an example of the human capital gains from education, except that I don’t think most students acquire good study habits). So, one thing to learn from the Good Student model is good study habits. General traits of conscientiousness, hardwork, and willingness to work beyond the bare minimum needed for signaling purposes are also valuable to learn and practice.

But the Good Student model breaks down when it comes to acquiring perspective about how to prioritize between different subjects, and how to actually learn and do things of direct value. A common example is perfectionism. The Good Student may spend hours practicing calculus to get a perfect score in the test, far beyond what’s necessary to get an A in the class or an AP BC 5, and yet not acquire a conceptual understanding of calculus or learn calculus in a way that would stick. Such a student has acquired a lot of karma, but has failed from both the human capital perspective (in not acquiring durable human capital) and the signaling perspective (in spending more effort than is needed for the signal). In an ideal world, material would be taught in a way that one can score highly on tests if and only if it serves useful human capital or signaling functions, but this is often not the case.

Thus, I believe it makes sense to critically examine the activities one is pursuing as a student, and ask: “does this serve a useful purpose for me?” The purpose could be human capital. signaling, pure consumption, or something else (such as networking). Consider the following four extreme answers a student may give to why a particular high school or college matters:

• Pure signaling: A follow-up might be: “how much effort would I need to put in to get a good return on investment as far as the signaling benefits go?” And then one has to stop at that level, rather than overshoot or undershoot.
• Pure human capital: A follow-up might be: “how do I learn to maximize the long-term human capital acquired and retained?” In this world, test performance matters only as feedback rather than as the ultimate goal of one’s actions. Rather than trying to practice for hours on end to get a perfect score on a test, more effort will go into learning in ways that increase the probability of long-term retention in ways that are likely to prove useful later on. (As mentioned above, in an ideal world, these goals would converge).
• Pure consumption: A follow-up might be: “how much effort should I put in in order to get the maximum enjoyment and stimulation (or other forms of consumptive experience), without feeling stressed or burdened by the material?”
• Pure networking: A follow-up might be: “how do I optimize my course experience to maximize the extent to which I’m able to network with fellow students and instructors?”

One might also believe that some combination of these explanations applies. For instance, a mixed human capital-cum-signaling explanation might recommend that one study all topics well enough to get an A, and then concentrate on acquiring a durable understanding of the few subtopics that one believes are needed for long-term knowledge and skills. For instance, a mastery of fractions matters a lot more than a mastery of quadratic equations, so a student preparing for a middle school or high school algebra course might choose to learn both at a basic level but get a really deep understanding of fractions. Similarly, in calculus, having a clear idea of what a function and derivative means matters a lot more than knowing how to differentiate trigonometric functions, so a student may superficially understand all aspects (to get the signaling benefits of a good grade) but dig deep into the concept of functions and the conceptual definition of derivatives (to acquire useful human capital). By thinking clearly about this, one may realize that perfecting one’s ability to differentiate complicated trigonometric function expressions or integrate complicated rational functions may not be valuable from either a human capital perspective or a signaling perspective for students not intending to go into a mathematically intensive discipline.

Ultimately, the changes wrought by consciously thinking about these issues are not too dramatic. Even though the System is suboptimal, it’s locally optimal in small ways and one is constrained in one’s actions in any case. But the changes can nevertheless add up to lead one to be more strategic and less stressed, do better on all fronts (human capital, signaling, and consumption), and discover opportunities one might otherwise have missed.

By Vipul Naik

Cross-posted from Quora

In general, young people are pretty happy taking cues from others their own age. In her book The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris argues that the main environmental influence on young people is their group of similarly aged peers, rather than their parents or other adults in their life. Youngsters do seem to be influenced by celebrities, but that influence may be mediated more by the fact that their peers find the celebrity cool.

At the same time, one thing Jonah and I repeatedly noticed in our research for Cognito Mentoring is that young people are often very pleased at having substantive interactions with older people. The “older people” here aren’t necessarily people of their parents’ generation. It often means a high school student being pleased at interacting with a college student or graduate student or somebody who’s just started working. Some possible explanations:

• Young people do like attention from adults when that attention comes through spontaneous voluntary interaction rather than in a coercive, authoritative context. Such spontaneous interaction signals to the young person that he/she is being treated on (approximately) equal footing with the adult, rather than a child to be bossed around.
• We’ve been concentrating on smart, curious people, who often don’t find good intellectual companionship in their same-age peers. These people in particular benefit from adult attention. In particular, a very smart young person may be intellectually equal to a not-so-smart older person, and can have a productive conversation that’s stimulating to both parties.

Whether one of the above reasons holds or something else is at play, I think it’s worth considering methods to encourage more interaction between young people and older people in context that aren’t authoritative. Since one-on-one discussion is often infeasible, the best approach might be to encourage young people to participate more in forums where many adults have high-quality discussion but where the barrier to entry isn’t high. Possible examples are Quora, Less Wrong, Stack Exchange – Free, Community-Powered Q&A, perhaps even Reddit (albeit the quality at Reddit is quite uneven). Similarly, adults who participate on these forums may benefit from keeping an eye out for promising young people and offering special encouragement to them, perhaps offering to connect one-on-one with them (though they need to make sure not to creep out the young people, who may be unused to being contacted by strangers).

Related Cognito Mentoring content: Maintaining your online presence (intended as advice for people starting out with building their online presence).

By Vipul Naik

Cross-posted from Less Wrong. Related information wiki page: managing your time.