Consider this a study guide for newbies who want to measure how much of LW they understand.
Curiouskid
Karma: 659
http://www.bmj.com/content/331/7514/433 (“I heard you like publication bias”)
“We restricted the search to publications that primarily investigated publication bias and whose acceptance therefore might have depended on whether they had found publication bias or not.”
Probably people have seen this before, but I really like it:
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing, that’s why we recommend it daily.
This seems to be what Gwern has done.
Jokes. Common sense (and evolutionary psychology) show that people like funny people.
How many people are always trying to remember a joke they heard? This seems like an easy solution.
17- Junior/Senior (third year of school. Have enough credits to graduate this year) (Trying to decide if I want to graduate early)
I’ve been going to the library and maxing out the number of books I can check out. More recently, I’ve joined LW.
Family = none. School = some people who are semi-philosophical but not very LW rational.
I’ve always thought it was more important to know what I want to do rather than where I want to go. That said, I’m either going to try to directly contribute bringing about the singularity by research or help by donating (and maybe trying to reform education).
You betcha! I can apply for three years and that’s what I’ll do until I get in.
Small world!
I was just looking at this wonderful blog which had a nice collection of advice for young students. I didn’t know who wrote it, but I just figured out based on Vipul’s bio that it was his blog.
A good link that didn’t appear in Vipul’s list is Michael Nielsen’s “principles of effective research” which I put into workflowy.
Jonah also has a lot of really excellent posts
I’ll also mention that there’s a “Less Wrong for High Schoolers” facebook group that I set up when I was in high school. I’ve found it to be fun to talk to other LWers my own age. Just search for it on facebook.
So, it seems like lots of people advise buying index funds, but how do I figure out which specific ones I should choose?
I feel like this applies to programming as well. I’m rewriting a Rails project in Node. So, none of the higher-level aspects of re-writing it are difficult—it’s just learning all the idiosyncrasies of Node that takes time.
I have almost no sense of smell and was a competitive athlete when I was younger so, “food is fuel” has been a pretty easy philosophy to follow. I forget about this sometimes. Mind projection fallacy ftw.
EDIT: Also, you can change your tastebuds if you just don’t eat something for a while. I know that skim milk tasted a lot worse when I tried it again after switching to whole milk. Also, the easiest will power hack is to not need to use your will power. Don’t leave snacks within your line of vision. Hide them at the very least. Better yet, don’t buy them.
What specifically do you want researched?
I recently found out that Feynmann only had an IQ of 125.
This is very surprising to me. How should I/you update?
Perhaps the IQ test was administered poorly.
I think that high g/IQ is still really important to success in various fields. (Stephen Hsu points out that more physicists have IQs of 150 than 140, etc. In other words, that marginal IQ matters even past 140.).
IBM’s Watson is being used to do medicine better than doctors. I remember reading that it takes $3 million and a few years for Watson to learn a subject. I have a few questions about this:
Could you raise $3 million to create a Watson for intelligence amplification. Would people pay to have custom made nootropics stacks for them?
Will somebody do it eventually? Is it worth researching nootropics right now?
Stephen Hsu estimates that we’ll be able to have genetically enhanced children with IQs ~15 points higher in the next 10 years.
Bostrom and Carl Schulman’s paper on iterated embryo selection roughly agrees.
It seems almost too good to be true. The arguments/facts that lead us to believe that it will happen soon are:
we do pre-screening for other traits. The reason we can’t do it for intelligence at the moment is that we don’t know what genes to select for.
We will get that data soon, as the cost of genetic sequencing falls faster than Moore’s law.
I still “alieve” that it’s too good to be true. Does anybody have any reason to doubt the claims made above?
Also, the ~15 point estimate is based on the assumption that we don’t do iterated embryo selection (which can’t be done in humans yet).
Bayesianism and Causality, or, Why I am only a Half-Bayesian (Judea Pearl)
“The bulk of human knowledge is organized around causal, not probabilistic relationships, and the grammar of probability calculus is insufficient for capturing those relationships.”
I like to use use Gingko while I’m hard technical material. I basically just re-write a much more condensed version of the textbook as I read through it.
Here’s my Gingko map of Sivia’s Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial.
EDIT: fixed the link
Also, I should note that I think a lot of the benefit of using Gingko is the simple act of putting the notes into it (because it changes the reading experience from passive to active).
I’m not so sure it’s that reading the Gingko tree is useful.
I imagine the less technical the subject matter the more likely it is to be useful to listen to as a podcast. I only listen to podcasts when I’m out on errands and so I don’t want to or have to devote much mental energy to get something out of the podcast.
So, by this heuristic, I think the quantum physics sequence is probably out and Yudkowsky’s coming of age is probably in.
Don’t try to predict the future. Read Taleb’s “the Black Swan”. Instead, try to prepare for an uncertain future by learning generally useful skills that will be helpful in many possible futures. Along these lines, I’ve decided that I’m going to get a double major in statistics and computer science (particularly something related data mining).
Advantages:
Generally useful. Statistics is used in a lot of fields.
Impact- So many studies are poorly designed and so the results are useless.
Comparative advantage to people with a LW mentality- I think that few people will know about Judea Pearl’s “Causality” or Jaynes.
Cool Shit! Google’s driverless car. Machines that write jokes. Siri. the movie “moneyball”
Make DINERO!!! See Moneyball. See wall street algorithms that make most of the trades these days. See the gambling industry.
Understand the world. Intellectual stimulation.
I’m also self-studying psychology. If you can understand statistics, psychology, and philosophy, you will have a very solid understanding of the world around you.
Did you know that 50% of our teachers are below average? This is unacceptable. We need to improve our education system!
IIRC, Feynman once said “read until you can’t understand anything, and then start from the beginning”