lifelonglearner

• lifelonglearner 12 May 2019 5:47 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: quanticle's comment on: Why books don’t work

  I don’t think the au­thor dis­agrees all that much with you. I’m read­ing his claim as some­thing more like “the de­fault at­ti­tude (some) peo­ple have to­wards read­ing does not set them up for good learn­ing”.

  In the es­say, he ac­knowl­edges the role that effort and metacog­ni­tion play in mak­ing the ac­tual learn­ing hap­pen. The ac­tion­able parts I found use­ful were at the end where he was hy­poth­e­siz­ing about im­proved mediums, e.g. an on­line text­book with spaced rep­e­ti­tion built in to fa­cil­i­tate re­call.

• lifelonglearner 12 May 2019 5:45 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Why books don’t work

  I think I agree that the gen­er­al­iza­tions you cited were hasty, es­pe­cially as there is no for­mal re­view on those mat­ters. I, too, find that I can get value out of books and can prob­a­bly do a bet­ter job than just giv­ing a brief sum­mary.

  Let me try to pick out the parts that I liked and see if you dis­agree with those:

  The main part of the the­sis that I found in­ter­est­ing was the anal­ogy be­tween books and lec­tures. In both cases, there is the po­ten­tial of trans­mis­sion­ism as one naive way of think­ing about how in­for­ma­tion gets ab­sorbed.

  It’s clearer, how­ever, that lec­tures in an ed­u­ca­tional set­ting aren’t enough. Without prob­lem sets, ex­am­ples, and other ap­pli­ca­tions, most of the “real learn­ing” doesn’t hap­pen. (i.e. “math­e­mat­ics is not a spec­ta­tor sport”) Good pro­fes­sors seem to rec­og­nize this and sup­ple­ment their teach­ings ac­cord­ingly.

  Then, the au­thor points out that a similar ac­knowl­edg­ment for books is not the norm. There is still room for im­prov­ing the medium, and one ex­am­ple he gave was the spaced rep­e­ti­tion en­hanced on­line book. There is an un­der­cur­rent of “you as the reader need to put in effort to get value out of your read­ing”, which I agree with. It’s a differ­ent state of mind when I’m read­ing for in­sight vs read­ing for fun. In the first case, I might re-read pas­sages, skip around, stop for a bit, take some notes, etc. etc. whereas in the sec­ond case, I’m prob­a­bly just read­ing rather quickly from cover to cover.

Why books don’t work

• lifelonglearner 8 May 2019 20:20 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Alexei's comment on: Crypto quant trad­ing: Naive Bayes

  I see. Thanks for pro­vid­ing the ad­di­tional info!

• lifelonglearner 8 May 2019 4:50 UTC

  6 points

  on: Crypto quant trad­ing: Naive Bayes

  I’ve read over briefly both this ar­ti­cle and the pre­vi­ous one in the se­ries. Thank you for putting these to­gether!

  What I’m cu­ri­ous about in quant trad­ing is the ac­tual im­ple­men­ta­tion. Once you, say, have a model which you think works, how im­por­tant is la­tency? How do you make de­ci­sions about when to buy /​ sell? (Par­tially echo­ing Romeo’s sen­ti­ment about cu­ri­os­ity around stop losses and the ac­tual nitty-gritty of ex­tract­ing value af­ter you think you’ve figured some­thing out.)

345M ver­sion GPT-2 released

• lifelonglearner 2 May 2019 4:53 UTC

  3 points

  on: Neu­ral net­works for games

  Heads-up: nowa­days, when peo­ple talk about neu­ral net­works for games, they re­ally mean deep learn­ing com­bined with re­in­force­ment learn­ing.

  Back to your ques­tion: When you don’t have a log of games, you typ­i­cally have some other way of as­sess­ing perfor­mance, e.g. as­sign­ing a “score” to the state of the game, which you can quan­tify and op­ti­mize.

  For a spe­cific well-known ex­am­ple, I think this pa­per on train­ing to play Atari games with deep re­in­force­ment learn­ing goes over a lot of the ac­tual math /​ im­ple­men­ta­tion de­tails.

Mov­ing to a World Beyond “p < 0.05”

• lifelonglearner 14 Mar 2019 17:06 UTC

  9 points

  on: AI Safety Pr­ereq­ui­sites Course: Ba­sic ab­stract rep­re­sen­ta­tions of computation

  I’ve looked a lit­tle bit at the RAISE web­site, and I’ve looked at the overview of cur­ricu­lum top­ics, and I’m find­ing it a lit­tle...sparse, maybe? (I haven’t ac­tu­ally looked at the class ma­te­ri­als on gras­ple though, so maybe there’s more stuff there.) I’m won­der­ing how re­al­is­tic it would be for some­one to start en­gag­ing with MIRI-es­que top­ics af­ter learn­ing just the courses RAISE has out­lined.

  At least for the pre­req­ui­sites course, these are all top­ics cov­ered through­out the first two years of a typ­i­cal un­der­grad­u­ate com­puter sci­ence de­gree. And that doesn’t seem like quite enough.

  EX: TurnTrout’s se­quence of es­says on their jour­ney to be­come able to con­tribute to­wards MIRI-es­que top­ics seems to span a much greater gamut of top­ics (lin­ear alge­bra, anal­y­sis, etc.) at greater depth, closer to what one might cover in grad­u­ate school.

  I guess, to op­er­a­tional­ize, I’m cu­ri­ous about:

  1. What tar­get au­di­ence RAISE has in mind (tech­ni­cal peo­ple look­ing for a re­fresher, peo­ple who have had zero real ex­po­sure to tech­ni­cal sub­jects be­fore, etc. etc.) for their ma­te­ri­als.

  2. What de­gree of com­pe­tence RAISE ex­pects peo­ple to come out of the cur­ricu­lum with, ei­ther best-case or av­er­age-case.

  3. In the best case, how many units of ma­te­rial do you think RAISE can product? In other words, is it enough for stu­dents to study RAISE’s ma­te­rial for a 6-month long cur­ricu­lum? 1 year long?

  ****

  (Of course, it’s also much eas­ier from my po­si­tion to be en­gag­ing/​cri­tiquing ex­ist­ing works, than to ac­tu­ally put in the effort to make all of this hap­pen. I don’t mean any of the above as an in­dict­ment. It’s ad­mirable and im­pres­sive that y’all have co­or­di­nated to make this hap­pen at all!)

Ped­a­gogy as Struggle

Do­ing De­spite Dis­lik­ing: Self‐reg­u­la­tory Strate­gies in Every­day Aver­sive Activities

mindlevelup 3 Year Review

• lifelonglearner 1 Jan 2019 22:17 UTC

  15 points

  on: What ex­er­cises go best with 3 blue 1 brown’s Lin­ear Alge­bra videos?

  If you want a proof-based ap­proach, Lin­ear Alge­bra Done Right is the typ­i­cal go-to that’s also on the MIRI page. I went through maybe the first 3/​4ths of it, and I thought it was pretty good, in terms of num­ber of ex­er­cises and helping you think about ma­nipu­lat­ing vec­tor spaces, etc. in a more ab­stract sense.

  Other­wise, I’ve heard good things about Gilbert Strang’s MIT OCW course here: https://​​ocw.mit.edu/​​courses/​​math­e­mat­ics/​​18-06-lin­ear-alge­bra-spring-2010/​​.

  In gen­eral, I think that 3B1B’s videos are re­ally good for build­ing in­tu­ition about a con­cept, but try­ing to do ex­er­cises off of the ped­a­gogy in his videos alone can be quite challeng­ing, es­pe­cially as he of­ten as­sumes some mas­tery with the sub­ject already. (EX: In the eigen-stuffs video, he doesn’t ac­tu­ally ex­plain how to find the eigen­val­ues of a ma­trix.)

  Thus, I think it makes more sense to stick to a tra­di­tional text­book /​ course for learn­ing lin­ear alge­bra and us­ing 3B1B as sup­ple­men­tary stuff for when you want a vi­sual /​ differ­ent way of look­ing at a con­cept.

  Also, it might be worth check­ing in to see what you want to learn lin­ear alge­bra for. I sus­pect there are more do­main spe­cific re­sources if, for ex­am­ple, you cared about just the use­ful parts of lin­ear alge­bra used in ma­chine learn­ing (di­men­sion­al­ity re­duc­tion, etc.).

• lifelonglearner 1 Jan 2019 17:20 UTC

  8 points

  on: How can I most effec­tively im­prove my writ­ing abil­ities?

  I think the over­ar­ch­ing thing to do is to sim­ply write more. To that end, there are a lot of ways to make this hap­pen. For ex­am­ple: par­ti­ci­pat­ing in NaNoWriMo, com­mit­ting to writ­ing a se­quence of ar­ti­cles about topic X, en­gag­ing in dis­course on­line, sum­ma­riz­ing re­search pa­pers for a larger au­di­ence, writ­ing guest ar­ti­cles for a blog, or jour­nal­ing.

  As for im­prov­ing your ac­tual work­flow, I think that the Typ­i­cal Writ­ing Class you take in school largely gets it right. For ex­am­ple, writ­ing out­lines /​ sum­maries be­fore start­ing the ac­tual writ­ing, ask­ing peo­ple to proofread, have sev­eral drafts /​ edit, and try to imag­ine read­ing it from the reader’s per­spec­tive w/​o the ex­tra con­text you have as a writer.

  (I think most of the dis­satis­fac­tion I had with the skills taught to me dur­ing class had a lot more to do with the con­text of “Oh man, I have to write this thing us­ing this tech­nique for school and not of my own vo­li­tion?” rather than the skills them­selves not be­ing very good.)

• lifelonglearner 27 Dec 2018 17:18 UTC

  2 points

  on: Card Col­lec­tion and Ownership

  Do you have any thoughts writ­ten up any­where on what a game you’d de­sign would look like? I’ve been fol­low­ing all of your MTG /​ digi­tal CCG ar­ti­cles with a lot of in­ter­est; I’d be re­ally cu­ri­ous which as­pects of game de­sign you’d like to in­cor­po­rate.

• lifelonglearner 21 Dec 2018 16:31 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: What self-help has helped you?

  I am won­der­ing if there are com­mon­al­ities be­tween what differ­ent self-help things are do­ing. For ex­am­ple, it seems that a lot of self-help is fo­cused on chang­ing our de­fault ac­tions, ala de­bi­as­ing, so there is a train of thought that starts with cog­ni­tive bi­ases and goes from there.

• lifelonglearner 21 Dec 2018 2:47 UTC

  4 points

  on: What self-help has helped you?

  A re­lated ques­tion I’m won­der­ing about, which seems re­lated to this is “Why does self-help work? What is it do­ing?”

  Not 100% re­lated to the ques­tion, but maybe the dis­cus­sion here in the com­ments could spark more (or an­other ques­tion).

• lifelonglearner 21 Nov 2018 17:17 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: Let­ting Others Be Vulnerable

  Oh, right, yes, I didn’t think about that.

  That is a good ex­am­ple where the above ad­vice I listed, as well as the fol­low­ing mod­els, break.

• lifelonglearner 21 Nov 2018 4:44 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Dagon's comment on: Let­ting Others Be Vulnerable

  Oh, right. I think an im­plicit thing here is “for peo­ple you want to be close to, this makes sense to do”.

  In other cases, as I sorta skimmed over, hav­ing sim­plified mod­els, rely­ing on norms/​roles, etc. etc. is usu­ally enough to get by.

Let­ting Others Be Vulnerable