What advice does the Lesswrong community have in general for high school students who stumbled on this community?
Looking for all types of responses, it’s fine whether your response is focused on achieving something in the AI/effective altruism/rationality community, or whether it is focused on a more general audience.
[Question] High school advice
The question is too broad to give a non-boring answer without knowing a bit more about you and your circumstances.
(Trying to map the landscape of possible advice.)
It is possible to provide advice:
useful for everyone
useful for students
useful for specific person
Advice useful for everyone might contain:
thinking in general (science, mindkillers, probabilistic thinking)
thinking as an agenty person (heroic responsibility, spend 5 minutes actually thinking, 80:20 rule)
thinking as a rationalist (map vs territory, valley of bad rationality, it all adds up to normality)
take care of your health (sleep, food, exercise)
take care of your money (index funds, learn to code)
take care of your relations (nonviolent communication)
take care of your mind (internal rewards and punishments, trivial inconvenience, meditation)
Advice useful for students:
how to navigate school
choosing your career
sources to learn from
Advice useful for specific person:
fixing the specific problems you have now (need more info) -- depends, potentially very valuable
career advice for your field
Perhaps someone should write a book, using this as an outline.
I got into LW in high school, and looking back, the most useful thing I got out of LW was “just do stuff”.
Humans are pretty bad at predicting, in advance, what is going to work well and what they’re going to enjoy or excel at. We need empirical evidence. So just go take that internship, do that volunteering, found that student society, email that academic to ask to discuss their paper, enter that competition, sign up for those extra classes, etc. Have a sense that more is possible, and that you will genuinely be an awesomer person if you are Doing Stuff rather than being on Twitter or Tiktok all evening, and that you might learn new things about yourself if you Just Try Stuff. Don’t dismiss yourself as underqualified or undeserving.
The point of rationality is to win at life. Reading blogs is useful if it’s helping you win at life, and if you realise it’s not helping you win at life, then you can and should read less blogs. If the blogs are helping, read more of them. But don’t lose sight of the idea that this is supposed to be making you Win At Life.
You don’t need permission from anyone to Just Do Useful Stuff. You can come up with an idea for a useful project—like, I don’t know, starting a student society or lunchtime club about EA at your high school, or making a film documentary about some area of psychology or charity, or doing a review of some scientific literature and writing up your results to publish on LW, or whatever. And if you don’t have the skills yet, then you can go learn them—by signing up for classes, or finding video tutorials on youtube, or just getting started and learning-by-doing. And maybe someone will find your research/work/project genuinely helpful. The point is that you don’t wait for a wise old wizard to appear and hand you a Quest before you save the world; just spot an area of the world that needs improving, and go improve it. You have a lot more time in high school for this sort of proactivity than you’ll have as an adult, and it is a really really really insanely good habit to build while you’re young.
I’m in high school myself and am quite invested in AI safety. I’m not sure whether you’re requesting advice for high school as someone interested in LW, or for LW and associated topics as someone attending high school. I will try to assemble a response to accommodate both possibilities.
Absorbing yourself in topics like x-risk can make school feel like a waste of time. This seems to me to be because school is mostly a waste of time (which is a position I held before becoming interested in AI safety,) but disengaging with the practice entirely also feels incorrect. I use school mostly as a place to relax. Those eight hours are time I usually have to write off as wasted in terms of producing a technical product, but value immensely as a source of enjoyment, socializing and relaxation. It’s hard for me to overstate just how pleasurable attending school can be when you optimize for enjoyment, and if permitted by your school’s environment; a suitable place for intellectual progress in an autodidactic sense also, presuming you aren’t being provided that in the classroom. If you do feel that the classroom is an optimal learning environment for you, I don’t see why you shouldn’t just maximize knowledge extraction.
For many of my peers, school is practically their life. I think that this is a shame, but social pressures don’t let them see otherwise, even when their actions are clearly value negative. Making school just one part of your life instead of having it consume you is probably the most critical thing to extract from this response. The next is to use its resources to your advantage. If you can network with driven friends or find staff willing to push you/find you interesting opportunities, you absolutely should. I would be shocked if there wasn’t at least one staff member at your school passionate about something you were too. Just asking can get you a long way, and shutting yourself off from that is another mistake I made in my first few years of high school, falsely assuming that school simply had nothing to offer me.
In terms of getting involved with LW/AI safety, the biggest mistake I made was being insular, assuming my age would get in the way of networking. There are hundreds of people available at any given time who probably share your interests but possess an entirely different perspective. Most people do not care about my age, and I find that phenomena especially prevalent in the rationality community. Just talk to people. Discord and Slack are the two biggest clusters for online spaces, and if you’re interested I can message you invites.
Another important point, particularly as a high school student is not falling victim to group think. It’s easy to be vulnerable to the failing in your formative years, but it can massively skew your perspective, even when your thinking seems unaffected. Don’t let LessWrong memetics propagate throughout your brain too strongly without good reason.
Meta: I’d recommend this to any newcomer. But I also think it is particularly important for younger newcomers like high school aged people to hear.
Understand the concept of Reason as memetic immune disorder and the related concept of Valleys of bad rationality.
Here’s how I’d explain the former:
Our biological immune system tries to filter out bad things while letting in good things.
With a biological immune disorder, your immune system is weakened, and this filter is lowered.
Memetic ~ memes ~ ideas. So a memetic immune system can be thought of as something that filters out bad ideas while trying to allow in the good ones. And a memetic immune disorder would be something that lowers this filter.
The post claims, and I think it is pretty widely agreed upon, that reason functions as a memetic immune disorder. It lowers the filters. This allows in good ideas like EA and cyronics that otherwise get filtered out by other peoples memetic immune system. But it can also allow in bad ideas that otherwise would get filtered out by other peoples memetic immune system. Be aware of and careful about this.
As for the latter, the idea is that, as you make progress as a rationalist, it doesn’t always make you better off. Sometimes it makes you worse off. In the long run it should… hopefully… make you better off (although this isn’t widely agreed upon). But the journey is more of a roller coaster than a straight line.
Step away from this place for a time and read Scott Alexander first. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwqLfDfsHmiavFAGP/the-library-of-scott-alexandria is a good start, then continue on his blogs directly. He links back to this site where appropriate. You might get inured to some of the common pitfalls newbies here are prone to.
I think your advice is pretty fine but does not seem to be related to high school advice in general. I prefer advice that is directed to a potential high school student, not really looking for advice directed to newcomers on LessWrong.
I recommend reading the articles without comments, because the comments are 10x as much text (without being 10x as much value).
Selections of rationalist texts:
The Library of Scott Alexandria
Rationality: From AI to Zombies (price: write “0”), or here
Best of LessWrong
I strongly disagree, and I’m curious why you think this? I have known a number of rationalists who got into SSC/ACX more than LessWrong or rather than LessWrong, and I’ve found them to generally be extremely sidetracked into constantly debating social justice issues / nerdsniped by interesting politics—often to the point where I would strongly prefer not to attend meetups that are marketed as “Lesswrong + ACX” rather than just “LessWrong”, because I don’t want to be exposed to that.
That’s a fair point, different directions have different landmines. Culture war issues are tempting and most people seem to have strong yet poorly informed opinions that are not obviously poorly informed. I think that the original collection by Rob Bensinger The Library of Scott Alexandria is really good to start with, it is very light on political and culture war topics and grasps the essence of rational thinking, without going into the esoteric and irrelevant topics like quantum mechanics.
When I think back on my time in high school, here’s the things I wish I had done:
taken the GED to graduate early (probably at 15 or 16)
slogging through high school was not clearly worth it for me; I likely could have gotten an earlier jump on my life if I had skipped 2-3 years of it
gotten a job so I could buy a car
not having a car really restricted what I could do with my life, and getting one earlier would have given me greater autonomy and thus ability to control more of how I spent my time
socialized more
I was very focused on my studies and getting into college; I should have spent more time hanging with friends and going on dates
gotten a job
perhaps unique to my time and situation, I could have easily gotten a job programming or IT
skipped college?
this one is tough; I would likely be financially better off if I hadn’t gone to college, but maybe I wouldn’t have had access to the same job opportunities and wouldn’t have learned all the things that have enabled to me to really engage with this community
One of the tough things about advice is it’s extremely context dependent, and for every bit of good advice you hear, someone needs to hear the opposite advice. So you’ll have to think about this and if it applies to you, and probably get it wrong. But that’s okay, have no regrets, because you can always only do the best you could at the time.
I’m surprised no one seems to have mentioned this yet but the sequences are a good place to start on lesswrong generally (this isn’t high school specific).
Also one piece of advice for high school, which is only distantly connected to rationality: If you want to go to a good university, jump through some hoops while you’re in high school. I spent a lot of time reading textbooks and gave my classes like 15% effort because they seemed trivial and uninteresting, but 25% effort would have probably been enough to get me a 4.0 which would have been useful later.
I’m probably the least qualified person imaginable to represent “the Lesswrong community” given that I literally made my first post this weekend, but I did get into EA between high school and college and I have some thoughts on the topic.
My gut reaction is that it depends a lot on the kind of person this high schooler is. I was very interested in math and theoretical physics when I started thinking about EA. I don’t think I’m ever going to be satisfied with my life unless I’m doing work that’s math-heavy. I applied to schools with good AI programs with the intent of upskilling on AI/ML during college and then going into AI Safety. When I started college I waved away the honors math classes with the intent of getting into theoretical machine learning research as fast as possible. Before the end of freshman year, I realized that I was miserable and the courses felt dumb and that I was finding it very hard to relate to any of the other people in the AI program—most of them were practically-minded and non-math-y. I begged to be let back into the honors math courses and thankfully the department allowed me to do so. I proceeded to co-found the AI Safety club at my college and have been thinking somewhat independently on questions adjacent to AI Safety that interest me. In retrospect, I think that I was too gung-ho about upskilling on ML to stop and pay attention to where my skills and my passion were. This nearly resulted in me having no friend group in college and not being productive at anything.
So yeah, I don’t know what exactly I would recommend. If I had been a more practically-minded person then my actions would probably have been pretty perfect. I guess the only advice I can give is cliches: think independently, explore, talk to people, listen to yourself. Sorry I can’t say anything more concrete!
Early in college I wanted to jump into “doing A.I.” and ended up doing robotics research/clubs that I mostly hated in practice, and worse for whatever reason (probably too much obsession with discipline) didn’t even notice I hated, and I wasted a lot of time that way. It’s true that a lot of A.I. related fields attract people with less of a mathematical focus and it’s important to develop your mind working on problems you actually like.
Though the above shouldn’t be used as justification for doing nothing. Reading textbooks and taking classes becomes doing nothing if there is no output.
There are the [Letter] Advice for High School #1 and [Letter] Advice for High School #2 by lsusr.