Most of my time is focused on finishing a dissertation in mathematics education (read: psychology with a focus on mathematical cognition). I have my data collected and large chunks of it analyzed, and my results are pretty clear right now. My next step is to put together a presentation on this material for an informal dissertation committee meeting so I can get their feedback on my methodology and progress. I started working on this dissertation in part because I wanted to fix the way math is taught, although in retrospect this was probably not the most efficient way to do it. That said, at this stage it’s definitely worth my time to finish it, and with it I’ll have some resources (both the Ph.D. and a professorship) with which to work on fixing education in general, not just math.
I’m digging into locations for regular LW meetups in San Diego, CA. I don’t know if there’s enough interest this far south; there might just be two of us. But I know a number of people down here who would be quite interested in rationality training, I’m sure. Right now I have a few promising places available and just need to follow up on a few emails to get the ball rolling. (One of those is to Anna, so I’m posting this in part to undermine my inclination to get to this in the vague land of “later”.)
I’m training my intuitions for physics with the book Thinking Physics. After this I intent to read Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, and from there I might start looking through junior-level textbooks. This emerged due to it being pointed out at a recent LW meetup that my understanding for why certain Aikido moves work is actually utter balderdash, which means that I’ve been terribly overconfident in my intuitions about physics for many years. Also, I’ve always loved physics, so it’s just a pleasure to work on this. Finally, Epstein’s book is helping me to work on developing the habit of sticking with a difficult problem until I come up with a good answer and have beaten on that answer against all the weak points I can find; this is making me go through the book pretty slowly, but I’m gaining much more from doing this than I would by zipping through. (As an aside, if someone knows of a book that’s comparable to Epstein’s but for chemistry, please let me know! And if there’s one for math, I’d like to take a look at it to see how they do it.)
I’m working on mastering lucid dreaming. There are a wide number of reasons for this and I’d rather not dig into all of them at the moment. The short version is that dreams seem to be a major gateway for accessing parts of the mind that are very difficult to safely access otherwise. Furthermore, the process of developing lucid dreaming skills helps with day-to-day skills like concentration. Finally, lucid dreaming is just a tremendous amount of fun!
I’m working my way through the Sequences. I’m somewhere past the halfway point, I think. I’ve read the four core ones and am around halfway through the quantum physics sequence.
I’ve a question, by the way. You mention:
Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you’re thinking about doing but haven’t started, those are for a different thread.
It sounds like you have a more efficient way in mind. If so, could you
summarize it?
lucid dreaming
Fun stuff. I started doing this sometime between 8 and 12 years old after
reading about it in a book. On two or three occasions I’ve remained conscious
all the way through a nap.
It sounds like you have a more efficient way in mind. If so, could you summarize it?
Sure. As I pull together details I actually plan on posing them to the LW community here so get feedback and poll for interest.
I suspect that a semi-grassroots approach is more likely to affect education in a positive way than any educational research is at this point. I’m inclined to start a school of sorts that will freely throw out outdated assumptions about education and actually apply what we know from research, updating its practices as new findings come out.
If everything goes perfectly (!), this would have three effects:
It would create a tiny group of graduates who would be very competent in practical ways (basic rationality, knowing how to learn effectively, having economic savvy, knowing how to have rich and well-managed relationships with others, etc.). I have a fair amount of personal anecdotal evidence that suggests that one key component of this, mindfulness, can be made to be infectious at will at least in part. If that turns out to be as reliable as I’ve personally found it to be and have seen in those I’ve taught so far, then this generation of graduates would have pretty impressive leadership skills despite there being relatively few of them. So, in terms of raising the sanity waterline, this seems to me to have a promising payoff despite being assuredly pretty small.
If this works even half as well as the research and my personal experience suggest, the idea of this educational method might spread, at least in part. Should interest build, I’d do what I could at that point to make the exact methods by which the school does what it does available along with the reasons why it works so that others can emulate it. (I plan on being open about it from the beginning, but I know that openness and accessibility are very different things so some work would have to go into creating manuals spelling out the core principles and examples of implementation for people who aren’t me.) This stands a chance of affecting already-extant schools, or it might spread more like Montessori schools have.
Finally, as per a suggestion Carl Shulman kindly offered me, this could also be a hub for training teachers. There’s a learning curve to get over with applying effective educational measures because munchkin-like hacks on learning are often very counterintuitive at first and look almost nothing like the examples of teaching and learning that most of us grew up with. So, in addition to being a school for young students (I’m currently thinking high school), it would be a college for teachers to get a kind of certification in proven educational methods.
None of this actually requires the Ph.D. It’s typical in my field for Ph.D.s to do a bunch of research and engage in political jockeying to try to get some bureaucrat to listen to the results of research. I don’t think that’s ever going to have a relevant impact. However, since I’m going to get my doctorate anyway, I’ll also use this as an opportunity to run ongoing experiments to continually improve our educational methods and our teacher training methods.
lucid dreaming
Fun stuff. I started doing this sometime between 8 and 12 years old after reading about it in a book. On two or three occasions I’ve remained conscious all the way through a nap.
That’s pretty impressive! I’ve done that just once. Most of my lucid dreams are during my last sleep cycle before I wake up.
Most of my time is focused on finishing a dissertation in mathematics education (read: psychology with a focus on mathematical cognition). I have my data collected and large chunks of it analyzed, and my results are pretty clear right now. My next step is to put together a presentation on this material for an informal dissertation committee meeting so I can get their feedback on my methodology and progress. I started working on this dissertation in part because I wanted to fix the way math is taught, although in retrospect this was probably not the most efficient way to do it. That said, at this stage it’s definitely worth my time to finish it, and with it I’ll have some resources (both the Ph.D. and a professorship) with which to work on fixing education in general, not just math.
I’m digging into locations for regular LW meetups in San Diego, CA. I don’t know if there’s enough interest this far south; there might just be two of us. But I know a number of people down here who would be quite interested in rationality training, I’m sure. Right now I have a few promising places available and just need to follow up on a few emails to get the ball rolling. (One of those is to Anna, so I’m posting this in part to undermine my inclination to get to this in the vague land of “later”.)
I’m training my intuitions for physics with the book Thinking Physics. After this I intent to read Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, and from there I might start looking through junior-level textbooks. This emerged due to it being pointed out at a recent LW meetup that my understanding for why certain Aikido moves work is actually utter balderdash, which means that I’ve been terribly overconfident in my intuitions about physics for many years. Also, I’ve always loved physics, so it’s just a pleasure to work on this. Finally, Epstein’s book is helping me to work on developing the habit of sticking with a difficult problem until I come up with a good answer and have beaten on that answer against all the weak points I can find; this is making me go through the book pretty slowly, but I’m gaining much more from doing this than I would by zipping through. (As an aside, if someone knows of a book that’s comparable to Epstein’s but for chemistry, please let me know! And if there’s one for math, I’d like to take a look at it to see how they do it.)
I’m working on mastering lucid dreaming. There are a wide number of reasons for this and I’d rather not dig into all of them at the moment. The short version is that dreams seem to be a major gateway for accessing parts of the mind that are very difficult to safely access otherwise. Furthermore, the process of developing lucid dreaming skills helps with day-to-day skills like concentration. Finally, lucid dreaming is just a tremendous amount of fun!
I’m working my way through the Sequences. I’m somewhere past the halfway point, I think. I’ve read the four core ones and am around halfway through the quantum physics sequence.
I’ve a question, by the way. You mention:
Which thread is that?
It sounds like you have a more efficient way in mind. If so, could you summarize it?
Fun stuff. I started doing this sometime between 8 and 12 years old after reading about it in a book. On two or three occasions I’ve remained conscious all the way through a nap.
Sure. As I pull together details I actually plan on posing them to the LW community here so get feedback and poll for interest.
I suspect that a semi-grassroots approach is more likely to affect education in a positive way than any educational research is at this point. I’m inclined to start a school of sorts that will freely throw out outdated assumptions about education and actually apply what we know from research, updating its practices as new findings come out.
If everything goes perfectly (!), this would have three effects:
It would create a tiny group of graduates who would be very competent in practical ways (basic rationality, knowing how to learn effectively, having economic savvy, knowing how to have rich and well-managed relationships with others, etc.). I have a fair amount of personal anecdotal evidence that suggests that one key component of this, mindfulness, can be made to be infectious at will at least in part. If that turns out to be as reliable as I’ve personally found it to be and have seen in those I’ve taught so far, then this generation of graduates would have pretty impressive leadership skills despite there being relatively few of them. So, in terms of raising the sanity waterline, this seems to me to have a promising payoff despite being assuredly pretty small.
If this works even half as well as the research and my personal experience suggest, the idea of this educational method might spread, at least in part. Should interest build, I’d do what I could at that point to make the exact methods by which the school does what it does available along with the reasons why it works so that others can emulate it. (I plan on being open about it from the beginning, but I know that openness and accessibility are very different things so some work would have to go into creating manuals spelling out the core principles and examples of implementation for people who aren’t me.) This stands a chance of affecting already-extant schools, or it might spread more like Montessori schools have.
Finally, as per a suggestion Carl Shulman kindly offered me, this could also be a hub for training teachers. There’s a learning curve to get over with applying effective educational measures because munchkin-like hacks on learning are often very counterintuitive at first and look almost nothing like the examples of teaching and learning that most of us grew up with. So, in addition to being a school for young students (I’m currently thinking high school), it would be a college for teachers to get a kind of certification in proven educational methods.
None of this actually requires the Ph.D. It’s typical in my field for Ph.D.s to do a bunch of research and engage in political jockeying to try to get some bureaucrat to listen to the results of research. I don’t think that’s ever going to have a relevant impact. However, since I’m going to get my doctorate anyway, I’ll also use this as an opportunity to run ongoing experiments to continually improve our educational methods and our teacher training methods.
That’s pretty impressive! I’ve done that just once. Most of my lucid dreams are during my last sleep cycle before I wake up.
heh, I don’t think it exists. If you want it, make it!