Congratulations on joining the group! What Renaissance Philanthropy is doing sounds awesome, and I wish your team the best of luck (I’m definitely going to apply someday:) ).
I’ve been doing a bit of reading on the general state of scientific research, and have been listening to things like the Macroscience Podcast which talk about similar issues. Do you have any advice on learning more about these science-development problems? I’d love to pick your brain on this.
CS: Thanks! Although I’ve done a lot of CS over the past four years—ML, apps, published papers, worked in labs at MIT, etc.- I’ve never formally immersed myself in theory by watching lectures or reading CS books. Since MIT OCW approximates a flexible and structured curriculum, I thought it best (the fact that the MIT Challenge exists and that I have friends taking the actual classes at MIT were no small factors either).
Sleep: My sleep schedules have been messy for the past two years, but I’m trying to make it a habit to sleep by 9 (10, latest) to ensure I get a steady 8 hours.
Writing: I hope to be able to write blog posts (such as this one) better. I struggled to sketch out what I wanted to say and found putting it on paper to be Herculean. It’s a bit hard for me to illustrate what exactly I mean by “better,” but writing closer to what William Zinnser and Paul Graham is what I’m targeting right now. I’m going about this as Ben Franklin did. I’ll modify my approach as I go. The currently-set goal for writing is to be able to become able to write something like Not Boring for protein design.
“One such exercise he documents was taking a favorite magazine of his, The Spectator, and taking notes on articles that appeared there. He would then leave the notes for a few days and come back to them, trying to reconstruct the original argument from memory. After finishing, he “compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.” Realizing that his vocabulary was limited, he developed another strategy. By turning the prose into verse, he could replace words with synonyms that matched in meter or rhyme. To improve his sense of the rhetorical flow of an essay, he tried his imitation approach again, but this time he jumbled up the hints so he would have to determine the correct order of the sequence of ideas as he wrote again.Once he had established some of the mechanics of writing, he moved on to the more difficult task of writing in a style that would persuade. When reading an English grammar book, he was exposed to the idea of the Socratic method, of challenging another’s ideas through probing questions rather than direct contradiction. He then went to work, carefully avoiding “abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation,” instead focusing[…]”—Ultralearning
Practice: I’m working through the CFAR handbook right now. (I understand it isn’t a substitute for the actual camp, but the Atlas Fellowship’s gone). I’m picking one concept from it, committing it to memory (SRS), executing it every chance I get during the day, and journalling the results at night. I review them in the morning and make notes on improvement. I’m going to apply for ESPR when it opens up again. [Edit: Found Hammertime]
And me!