I wouldn’t try to fill half your college credits with an informal major in rationality, if that’s what you are thinking. Things I would pick up:
how to prove things—I picked this up taking theory of computation, but a course on something like “introduction to proof” or something in a math department is just as good. The point is to be able to think with mathematical rigor and precision.
introductory statistics, if you don’t already have it. This could be AP statistics in high school, or any social science department will have its own course that covers basically the same content. It is good to have this basic level of fluency, to understand what a p-value is and isn’t, how a study is put together, what a regression model is, etc. More advanced statistics isn’t really necessary to be a good rationalist in general, but may or may not be useful for research you may want to do later.
Being able to read and write well is important. Despite majoring in technical things, I made a point of taking at least one course in a humanities or social science department every semester.
A lot of rationalist ideas draw on cognitive psychology, and to a lesser extent social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. I think you can pick up the important stuff just as well by reading popular books and blogs (psychology is a field where there isn’t much distance between the popular and technical understandings). But if you aren’t doing that and want to pay the big bucks for a formal class, go for it.
Ultimately, though, if you’ve got a lot of credits going in, the best use may be to graduate early and move on to whatever you want to do after college. Whatever you want to do after college, you’ll learn more of what you need faster by being out there doing it, and you won’t even have to pay ridiculously high tuition bills for the learning.
Being able to write well is important but it’s important to keep in mind that the goal of writting in a college course is very different from the goal of writing elsewhere.
I wouldn’t try to fill half your college credits with an informal major in rationality, if that’s what you are thinking. Things I would pick up:
how to prove things—I picked this up taking theory of computation, but a course on something like “introduction to proof” or something in a math department is just as good. The point is to be able to think with mathematical rigor and precision.
introductory statistics, if you don’t already have it. This could be AP statistics in high school, or any social science department will have its own course that covers basically the same content. It is good to have this basic level of fluency, to understand what a p-value is and isn’t, how a study is put together, what a regression model is, etc. More advanced statistics isn’t really necessary to be a good rationalist in general, but may or may not be useful for research you may want to do later.
Being able to read and write well is important. Despite majoring in technical things, I made a point of taking at least one course in a humanities or social science department every semester.
A lot of rationalist ideas draw on cognitive psychology, and to a lesser extent social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. I think you can pick up the important stuff just as well by reading popular books and blogs (psychology is a field where there isn’t much distance between the popular and technical understandings). But if you aren’t doing that and want to pay the big bucks for a formal class, go for it.
Ultimately, though, if you’ve got a lot of credits going in, the best use may be to graduate early and move on to whatever you want to do after college. Whatever you want to do after college, you’ll learn more of what you need faster by being out there doing it, and you won’t even have to pay ridiculously high tuition bills for the learning.
Being able to write well is important but it’s important to keep in mind that the goal of writting in a college course is very different from the goal of writing elsewhere.