I don’t know if this is what you meant, but here goes:
This is less a single piece of advice from someone than an attitude I’ve tried to adopt from places like LessWrong and CollegeInfoGeek.
Everything in your life is optimizable.
Doing better is less a matter of changing yourself than it is of implementing systems to help yourself overcome your failings.
Being able to “feel” electric/magnetic fields with your hands would be great. Not dissimilar to wifi sensing, but enough to be able to intuit what a circuit is doing just by observing/feeling it.
I also don’t think that anyone’s mentioned having a true internal clock. Some people can already wake up at a specific time of day just by wanting to—that’d be useful. Also for the ability to time things.
Lastly, while being able to detect neurotransmitter levels in your own brain would be great, being able to detect them in the brains of others would be even better. Kind of a toned-down empathic ability—you could tell who was stressed, who was happy, and so on by the amount of cortisol or dopamine in their brain.
Hello, my name is Daniel.
I’ve wanted to join the rationality community for a little while now, and I finally worked up the courage after a brief but informative discussion with Anna Salamon, CFAR’s executive director (who was as kind as I was nervous).
I’m working on finishing up a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, and I plan on continuing to a doctorate in some branch of decision or control theory. I also study philosophy, fiction writing, and computer science.
Since becoming aware of rationality in general, and Eliezer Yudkowsky’s way of making everything make sense, I’ve gotten pretty heavily into cognitive psychology and metacognition.
To be frank, I understand that I’m a rank amateur in the field of rationality in general, but I’m looking forward to trying to get better. So if you’re downvoting me, or even upvoting me, explaining why in a comment or message would be extremely helpful, so I can take the time to reinforce my positive cognitive pathways, and prune my negative ones.
See you in the threads!
My two cents as someone who burned out with a full depressive episode in their junior year of an electrical engineering degree and managed to limp all the way to graduation:
Don’t underestimate the magnitude of what can go wrong in your head. I’ve got some genetic factors and some childhood stuff that likely contributed, but anxiety and depression can and will cripple you for years if you let them.
Get a blood test at your earliest convenience; make sure that you’re not low on vitamin B12 or D, or have anything else obviously wrong. I’ve heard enough stories about things like this (and had deficiencies myself) that indicate this is high-value. It’s also not hard to do or expensive (just ask your family doctor or the University Health Center; make sure to specify that you’re curious about those deficiencies in particular).
Don’t fall for false dichotomies. You’re clearly smart enough to get creative.
One suggestion I’ve seen in this thread is taking a semester/year off to go work, which your University should be fine with.
Another suggestion, if you believe there is inherent value in a degree, is to Goodhart the degree itself. Read this—you can consciously engage in half-assing your degree with everything you’ve got. In other words, diplomas don’t include grades. In other other words, Cs get degrees. Feel free to put in the absolute minimum that has you passing, take the easiest electives, etc., and spend the time you get back on other things.
Once you’ve had your first job, no one cares where you got your degree from. Spending 55k per year is absurd—transfer to a cheaper college, or take a look at your local community college. Most community colleges will have an agreement with four-year colleges for credits to transfer. Drop out and enroll there, get the freshman/sophomore/core credits over with, then transition to a cheaper/online college for the degree. You can also take this slowly—one community college class a semester can be done simultaneously with a full-time job, if you’re so inclined, and most four-year colleges will have something for people with jobs.
Reframe the question: if you’ve got three years left, each costing 55k, then would you willingly take 165k right now to walk away? Would that 165k be worth more to you than an additional three years of education at college?
I honestly don’t believe that student loan debt is ever worth it, especially not for programmers. Doctors maybe, but that’s about it. Whatever you do, plan out how you’re going to wind up debt-free at the end. Scholarships are great. So is working. Debt isn’t.
Isn’t MIT’s entire curriculum online? Is there anything you can realistically gain from your current university that you can’t get yourself in other ways? Is the alumni network super valuable? Is there an incubator you could take advantage of?
And a couple of general decision-helpers I like to use:
It’s twenty years later, and you’re looking back on your life. What will you regret not having done more, finishing your degree or striking out on your own?
Take out a fair coin. Heads you get the degree, tails you walk away. Flip the coin, and pay attention to how you feel. Are you hoping for a specific result? Will you be disappointed with a different result? The face the coin lands on is irrelevant. In the moment it was in the air, spinning, what did you want it to land on?
You are considering Deviating from The Path. Deviating from The Path invites risk, not only of failure, but of scorn. Look at the dropout, they’ll whisper as you pass. I guess he didn’t know better than us after all. Too bad, really. He had a good thing and lost it. Can you endure that? Do you care? Does it matter to you, if that’s what people think? Remember that dissent feels like wearing a clown suit.
Humans are loss-averse. Tip the scales slightly in favor of the riskier option, knowing that you’re in a profession where the worst you’ll do is still better than most of the people who have ever lived.
Do a pre-mortem: you drop out, do your startup, and fail. You apply to the company you mentioned and are rejected. You’ve left college and you’ve got no job, no startup, no hope. What went wrong? What can you do now to lower the probability that it will go wrong, or to soften the blow when it does?
Sleep on it.
Sleep on it again.
Read better advice than mine.
Good luck.
Addressing 1) “Learning when you’re wrong” (in a more general sense):
Absolutely a good thing to do, but the problem is that you’re still losing time making the mistakes. We’re rationalists; we can do better.
I can’t remember what book I read it in, but I read about a practice used in projects called a “pre-mortem.” In contrast to a post-mortem, in which the cause of death is found after the death, a pre-mortem assumes that the project/effort/whatever has already failed, and forces the people involved to think about why.
Taking it as a given that the project has failed forces people to be realistic about the possible causes of failures. I think.
In any case, this struck me as a really good idea.
Overwatch example: If you know the enemy team is running a Mcree, stay away from him to begin with. That flashbang is dangerous.
Real life example: Assume that you haven’t met your goal of writing x pages or amassing y wealth or reaching z people with your message. Why didn’t you?