= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Wei_Dai comments on A Rational Education - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (149)
I kept having nightmares for about a decade after completing my last university course, so I find it hard to understand anyone wanting to go back to school. Ok, now that I've gotten that off my chest...
When I visited SIAI a few months ago, I participated in drafting a list of study topics for visiting fellows. I think it's now being used by SIAI internally, but perhaps eventually a version will be produced for public consumption. For now I'll just try to answer 2 and 4.
It seems to me that an important but easily overlooked step to fulfilling one's EV is to figure out what it is. Philosophers haven't found the answer yet, but studying philosophy at least gives you some idea of what kinds of answers people have already considered and found unsatisfactory. I would prefer to do this by reading/skimming books, but if you must take a course...
My favorite university courses were:
My favorite self-taught topics are:
By "favorite" I mean courses/topics that I had the most fun learning, but these also turned out to be quite useful for my purposes. I might just have been lucky, but you should perhaps consider the possibility that your "impulsive unconscious preference satisfaction" knows what it's doing, and put some thought into what courses would be fun for you.
That would be a handy document to have access to. I wonder who I would need to bribe to acquire a copy.
I also find algorithmic information theory (and especially algorithmic probability) to be a really fun and rewarding topic. Hutter has an excellent article on Scholarpedia here, and Hutter, Legg, and Vitanyi have another good article here.
I haven't looked at cryptography much, is there anything in particular in the field that is useful for thinking about e.g. decision theory or game theory for AGI?
To think about AGI, study mathematics.