Risto_Saarelma comments on Less Wrong Book Club and Study Group - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Morendil 09 June 2010 05:00PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (148)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 10 June 2010 09:33:01AM 3 points [-]

Some attention to the mathematical prerequisites needed to properly get through Jaynes might be nice. I've basically got some poorly learned undergraduate math, practically no calculus above high-school level and a pretty hand-wavy understanding of probability theory. I think the undergrad probability course I took said that proper treatment of probability axioms requires measure theoretic calculus, so it will be dealt with in a later course. I know pretty much nothing about measure theory beyond it having something to do with both calculus and probability theory. So stuff that assumes good calculus literacy might be anything from hard going to impossible to understand properly without further study.

Comment author: Morendil 10 June 2010 10:19:27AM 0 points [-]

Good point, I'll try and see what I can tell of the prerequisites. I've made it through to Chapter 6 with extremely rusty high-school math and found it accessible if demanding. But it's possible I've missed out deeper nuances due to lacking some background.