I'm interested in heuristics for assembling or specific suggestions for a ruthless course aimed for giving a well-rounded math education (that doesn't trade thorough understanding of a diverse set of tools for better expertise in any particular area).

For example, I find the following techniques useful:

• Focus on the simplest texts I don't yet understand well, not on the hardest texts I can follow
• Assemble a list of leading US and UK schools and make sure that I've considered topics and textbooks mentioned in their curricula
• Given a text, find related texts with Amazon's "Customers also bought these" lists, in Amazon reviews, with web search
• Don't miss the "gems", which are often not mentioned in standard courses, but can be found on blogs and forums
• Look for lists of recommended books (there are surprisingly few of such lists that are of any value)

What makes specific recommendations valuable for me:

• Particularly good texts that may be absent from standard curricula, such as Pierce's "Introduction to Information Theory", Courant & Robbins's "What Is Mathematics?", Stillwell's texts, Needham's "Visual Complex Analysis", Hilbert's "Geometry and the imagination", Arnol'd's "Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics", etc. (More so for the texts that are not as well-known.)
• Texts that are placed in context of other texts that are indicated as being at similar/lower/higher level
• Texts with a discussion of prerequisites that names specific other texts and not just topics
• Lists of prerequisites that go down a couple of levels without missing lots of intermediate steps, at least within the same topic

And these features make recommendations far less useful:

• Assertions of which texts are "better", where the disapproval turns out to be aimed at books with a different intended audience (what's "better", Pinter's "Book of Abstract Algebra" or Aluffi's "Algebra"?)
• Many alternative suggests, even worse if the "alternatives" are at vastly different levels
• Misrepresentation of levels of texts or of order in which the texts should naturally go
• Isolated "standard" texts with no context or motivation (a whole list of recommendations can consist of such items)

Why reinvent the wheel? There are plenty of decent textbooks out there already, and no apparent reason why "pure mathematics for rationalists" is any different from "pure mathematics."

The obvious starting point would be to email somebody. I don't know who would be most appropriate, so for the sake of having a concrete recommendation, Luke?

Unfortunately, the code base takes a fair bit of time to learn. It is cheaper to pay for LW development from its current developers than to take risks with volunteer developers learning the code base and implementing changes.

A better destination for volunteer developers, I think, is CFAR app development, e.g. improving their calibration app, developing new apps for training particular rationality skills, etc. The contact person for this should be Anna Salamon.

Coming up with your own volunteer projects is hard, because people outside the organization can't possibly know the details of what's going on — e.g. the many past failed attempts at volunteer development for LW. Thus, volunteer projects are better generated by MIRI staff, and those are listed here.

I attempted to volunteer (I'm a web developer) but that didn't go anywhere. First, I wanted to help LW grow (in my "LessWrong could grow a lot" thread). Then I realized that LW was at serious risk for eternal September and growing it would risk hastening progress toward cultural collapse. So, I did several more threads on that to see if anyone had good arguments about us not being at risk, or good suggestions on how to stop it. I compiled a list of suggestions and held a vote asking people whether they think there is a significant risk and which solution, if any, they wanted. The result was that the majority of respondents think there is a significant risk, and this was presented to Luke, but he said he doesn't want to do anything at this time.

That was, to put it mildly, a bit of a buzz kill in regards to my volunteering energy level.

My advice to you is to make sure of the following things:

1. That you and Luke (yes, Luke seems to be the contact person) both agree on a project that is to be done. Luke liked the idea of growing LW, but he didn't like the idea of preventing cultural collapse. I can't, in good conscience, grow LW if there is a significant risk of it contributing to cultural collapse, and the group thinks that there is a significant risk. So, we unfortunately appear to be at a stalemate.

2. That Luke is cool with you specifically making changes. (Luke will need to go to some trouble to verify that you're a good developer. This will take time, and he may or may not be willing to invest it.)

There are multiple people who are interested in doing volunteer work. Myself, you, and at least one other have expressed interest, and I could have swore there were more. Considering that, and the fact that this website is basically full of programmers up to the eyebrows, and the fact that they could ask for volunteers at any time, I really think lack of development resources is not an obstacle. If you attempt to explore and/or tackle the following obstacles you may get somewhere:

Obstacle 1: Luke and Eliezer may be unaware of how many potential developer volunteers they have.

Solution 1: Survey the group asking how many people would be willing to volunteer their web development skills, and which specific skills they can offer. Ask them to describe what type of time commitment they're willing to provide in the comments. (I don't think there's an easy way to organize a bunch of responses that will range from "an hour a week" to "I'll commit, but on a per project basis, depending on the project." I know that one of the research volunteers does the former, and that there is a potential volunteer web development manager who is interested in the latter arrangement.)

Obstacle 2: Managing volunteers has a cost - overhead. Luke and EY are busy, and they're "pivoting away from" community building (see the recent fundraiser post). Although Luke and EY still want to lead the LessWrong community, they must be very short on time. Luke and EY probably do not realistically have the time to manage web development volunteers.

Solution 2: When surveying the group to get an idea of the development resources potential, be sure to ask whether the respondents have experience managing web developers and would be willing to provide this service. Obviously Luke will have to decide whether to trust the volunteer manager, but making a decision about that one person is easier than managing a whole bunch of them, and double-checking the projects when they're finished is a heck of a lot faster than doing all the hand-holding that may otherwise be anticipated without such a manager in place.

If enough people volunteer, this will wake everybody (including them) up to the developer resources that they already have. If their true rejection has not been uncovered, broaching the subject of having a volunteer manager might be the hammer that hits that nail on the head.

Luke explains here

Would this be of interest as a discussion post? I assume anyone interested just pops over chez moi to read up.

Wow, this is amazing! Both, the idea and your presentation of it.

Very insightful and though-provoking. And, my mind was completely blown by the fact that you have converted. It so doesn't fit into my models that I am quite confused. I would be very curious what's behind it and what would you answer to your own questions (before and after). But, I guess you wrote about it a lot, so I'll just go and read it.

And yes, this definitely deserves a discussion post!

(1) I am hesitant to describe this community as having collective opinions, and (2) do the Amanda Knox posts count?

The annual prediction threads, and the website PredictionBook (built by Trike Apps and heavily used by LWers), showcase a lot of arguments about empirical predictions that have been resolved.

I think this is more about Schelling points than the bystander effect. "Everyone agrees to have Shakespeare parties at time X of the year" is a Nash equilibrium for every X, so in practice the easiest way to decide on an X is if some particular X stands out in some way. This is why Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. are nice; otherwise an entire family (not to mention their employers!) would have to agree on what time of year is a good time to meet, etc. There may also be a scarcity effect involved in only one X standing out and the feeling that it would be a waste to let it pass.

Corollary: if you want to start having more interesting themed parties, look for more interesting dates to put them on. History-themed parties pegged to the dates of important historical events seems like a good place to start. (Followed by fictional-history-themed parties pegged to the dates of fictional important historical events?)

Might work, depends on how inconspicuous and patient your were. Certainly not the first time people have been trying to recruit from/take over another organisation. Writing about it on the internet however will make what you're doing so much more obvious if someone started noticing.

If many people have similar experience like me (tried to find rationality in Mensa, became disappointed, and eventually left), perhaps we could try to gain these people for rationality. Don't search among long-term Mensans; look at the fresh ones. They are preselected for IQ, and also for wanting some new experience -- we could offer them an alternative to Mensa, while outsourcing most of the costs of finding them.

It would probably work better if you do not present it as an alternative to Mensa, and do not think of LessWrong and CFAR as rivals to Mensa. Just start a special interest group within Mensa on the subject of practical rationality. To avoid the taint of entryism it would be best if it were started by people already in Mensa, if there are any such LWers.

Within Mensa, "if we're so smart, why aren't we rich?" is a FAQ. If the Rationality SIG could be started by people who actually are rich (or otherwise successful), so much the better.

The general impression that I get is that smart and effective people are too busy doing awesome things to join Mensa. If I wanted to recruit rationalists I think I would do better by looking for effective people and picking the smartest ones instead of looking for smart people and picking the most effective ones, especially if the process I'm using to look for smart people actively puts selection pressure against effectiveness. (CFAR running workshops directed at entrepreneurs seems to be a strategy in this vein.)

This is great, thanks. I'll implement a rudimentary spam filter with this sometime next week.

What is the maximum F1 score you can obtain?

Its pretty common to do the first option, usually with a note and link letting people know upfront that its a cross-post.

If it's appropriate for LW then it's appropriate for LW, no matter where else it has been posted.

Ask Shannon Friedman for a free consultation?

The software world could probably scratch your itch pretty well. Have you tried/do you like programming?

1 billion dollars earmarked for whole brain simulation makes it seem a lot more likely that we'll brute force a naive version of AI well before we have the ability to prove any kind of friendliness. If that AI is seeded by the simulated brain of an actual human though... who knows. I'd like to think that if it were my brain and at some point I became singularity-scale intelligent that I wouldn't create a horrible future for humanity (by our present day perspective) but it's pretty hard to claim that with any confidence.

They are very careful to not mention certain things in their video: nothing involving the computational nature of the human identity / "consciousness". Nothing we would call "whole brain emulation".

I have little doubt that what they choose to mention, and what they choose not to mention, in their video is driven more by signalling considerations than by what they consider to be technologically (in)feasible. Can they do what they claim? Create a model of the human brain detailed enough to obtain non-trivial information about brain diseases and computational processes used in the brain, but coarse enough to not have moral implications? Of course I do not know the answer to this question.

Kurzweil, who is widely agreed to be rather optimistic in his predictions, predicts

By the mid 2020s, it is conservative to conclude that we will have effective models of the whole brain

Well. Good thing these hypothesis make different predictions :P

"problem"? Friendship is Optimal was excellent, and I miss Myou've.

Vaniver still hasn't done anything with his

Well, done anything visible. I went from ~50% ready to start posting it to 95% ready to start posting it. I'll commit to publishing the first chapter, at least, by the next episode's airdate (which is Feb 9th).

(While writing this comment, I was reluctant to commit: but what if I discover deep structural problems with the fic before I start posting it? Well, then I should change it from its current threaded state to something without macrostructure, post the threads separately, and then reweave them later once I fix the structural problems. Contingency planning ftw!)

Why did LW originally make a difference to your suicidality?

Hi. I'm a psychology enthusiast (not a licensed psychologist) and I have a few bits of information that I think might be useful to you. I've read all of the replies to this, and your replies to those, to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious about your situation. Additionally, I defended your decision to post here. Three bits of information that may help you:

1.) If you haven't found psychologists useful, this might be an explanation

If you haven't found psychologists helpful, it might be because you are gifted. Here's my reasoning for why I think you might be gifted, why this matters to your psychological health, and some ideas for getting services and doing further reading:

• A large proportion of people at LessWrong are probably gifted. If you feel a sense of understanding here, that may be a sign that you are gifted, too.
• About 50% of the (American) gifted population doesn't know they are gifted.
• Gifted people can need a psychologist who has experience with gifted clients. Taking a gifted mind to a psychologist who is trained to work with normal minds can be like taking a space ship to a car mechanic. It can be frustrating or unhelpful.
• About 25% of gifted people are misdiagnosed by psychologists. If you were diagnosed with any mental or learning disorders, do consult a book called Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults (I got the 25% figure from that book as well.). You are obviously upset, but there's a good chance that there's far less wrong than they think there is.

• If you're depressed and gifted, you aught to know about something called "existential depression". The misdiagnosis book above does have a blurb on that in the depression section. I am not sure what to recommend for more extensive reading on existential depression, as it's not an officially recognized form of depression. (There isn't nearly enough research on gifted adults.) However, now that you have the term "existential depression" this may enable you to find services or books that are more helpful.

  Consider phone counseling, especially if you're seeking a psychologist who has experience with gifted people. Psychologists who have experience with gifted people are not very common. You may or may not find one in your area. If you increase the range you're looking in to the size of your country, you're likely to have much better luck.

2.) My method for finding useful health professionals:

When I was sick with a medical condition, I discovered that a lot of doctors did not have any idea what to do with me. They'd spend lots of money on tests and come up with nothing, or they'd treat symptoms without getting at the root cause. The only reason I got better was because I found someone who had the same problems that I was having, who had gotten better and she referred me to a doctor that:

A.) Understood my specific problem (There are wayyyyy too many problems out there for any doctor to produce quality results in diagnosing or solving them all. Better to locate someone more specialized.)

B.) Is focused on getting to the root cause. A lot of doctors who are focused on actually finding the cause call themselves "naturopathic" (the Wikipedia entry on naturopathy has this frou-frou introduction about "energy" which I find quite annoying because the most important connection between the different definitions of naturopathy I've seen on professional organization's websites is the focus on getting to the root cause).

I recommend a similar approach when seeking a psychologist. Find someone with similar problems who got better and ask for their doctor (may not be as useful for psychological problems if, as my memory is regurgitating right now, studies show that 1/3 of psychology patients get better without treatment). Barring that, find someone who has tons of experience with your specific problem(s) as opposed to somebody who hasn't specialized very much. Prioritize professionals that are focused on getting to root causes. Also, do your own research (or ask someone with research skills to assist, if you're not feeling up to it.). Some psychologists don't use the most effective methods according to scientific evidence. If you know which methods are the most well-supported, you can find the professionals with the most experience using those.

There are lots of pitfalls when seeking good health professionals. The approach I just described will help you sidestep many of the common ones.

3.) It might be a doctor you need, not a psychologist.

Also, a lot of psychological symptoms are caused by medical problems - and I'm not talking about the vague and ominous "chemical imbalance" (often just used as a semantic stop sign). For instance, if you look at the correlation between irritable bowel syndrome, depression and anxiety, the overlap is incredible. As it turns out, these can be related in more than one way. Getting at the root medical cause of some diseases can stop the mental symptom of depression.

Invitation

If you would like to elaborate on your medical, emotional or life problems, you are invited to do so either here or in PM. I will let you know if I have information that is relevant to them. If you respond publicly there is, of course, a better chance that other people will have additional useful things to say.

I don't think that I would be the best person for you to talk things out with, but I wanted to give you an internet hug and let you know that I hope things improve for you. hug

ETA: I think this would be fine to post in Discussion, and more people would see it there.

It is ok and not at all inappropriate to seek help here. I myself suffer from depression, so I do know the kind of pain you`re in- right now, as I write this post, I nearly weep tears of sorrow for the fact that you hurt so much right now, and my heart flies out to you.

Please do not kill yourself!

Although it may seem very far away right now, the pain can go away, and you can be happy again. As for an immediate plan of action I would recommend the following things:

• first, numb the pain so you do not get worse. Thats not a longterm-solution, its just until this cry of help does help you. What worked for me was watching old TV-Series and Starcraft-2 casts.

• second: I certainly do not know your reasons why you do not wish to seek seek professional assistance, but I do understand this reluctance of yours. I myself needed over a year to make the call; a time which I now wish to be much shorter. So i ask you to reconsider: professional help is the fastest form of sustainable relief you can get and is probably the best method to minimize the total amount of suffering. For this, I would find it fantastical if you would not only talk about the reasons why you hurt, but also about the reasons why you do not wish to seek this form of help.

• third: Should these feelings suddenly intensify and you really really need someone to talk to at, say, 02 00 am, it is helpful to have saved the number of a suicide hotline into your phone (or some other immediate form of communication, where you do not have to wait for long, thoughtful answers. Set up a IRC-chat.)

hug is essentially what I can do as well. I have some experience with this (age 19, depression for the last 2,5 years), and the professionals I've talked with have been very understanding and adaptable to how I think (cognitive behavorial therapy for the win), so I think you should at least talk to one if you find yourself on the verge again. For what it's worth, what I use when I feel really terrible is the internet for reasons life is still awesome enough. Cracked has something like this, though this might only work for me. And I support moving this to Discussion if you want a better chance of help. But if you just want to talk, I'm up for that, too. Just drop me a message.

Anyway, I don't think I can do more for you except say that every life lost is a tragedy, and you're the kind of person the world would definitely be worse without.

A couple years ago I deliberately used that strategy of reading an article again and again on successive days to grasp some hard sigfpe posts and decision theory posts here on LW. For some of them, it took several days, and some of them I never understood, but on the whole it worked very well. I always thought the reason it works is because of sleeping between sessions. (I still think this is a very useful technique but haven't used it much due to general akrasia.)

I'd guess it's a less systematic variant of the process described here, where the initial impression is sufficient to grasp enough of the problem statement to develop auxiliary ideas helpful for understanding the material on the second reading.

Whats your opinion on Cursera overall as a system?

Compare http://lesswrong.com/lw/ds4/article_about_lw_faith_hope_and_singularity/73m3?context=3 with http://web.archive.org/web/20120802190229/http://lesswrong.com/lw/ds4/article_about_lw_faith_hope_and_singularity/73m3?context=3

How ironic.

That might be a bit drastic, but I too am worried about the deletion of perfectly legitimate (IMO) discussion.

Do keep in mind that screenshots are not always reliable, though.

Attempted solution:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/gkv/official_lw_uncensored_thread_on_reddit/

I keep being told that there are no resources for my ideas for automatically fighting trolls, so after a user admits to being a troll I've been going through manually and deleting comments that strike me as trollish - in the sense of intended to provoke. I also suspect we have fake accounts upvoting and hence do not refrain from deleting upvoted comments.

I'm not particularly happy with the way things are, but don't see an obvious way to make them better without somebody being willing to devote an awful lot of full-time-equivalent work to modifying the LW codebase.

And yes, this forum practices (gasp!) censorship. It always has since the day I started deleting Caledonian's comments on Overcoming Bias because he was successfully making posting no-longer-fun for me. Before that, the SL4 mailing list was subject to threads frequently being terminated. We have always been up-front about pruning the tree, and nowadays there's an official Deletion Policy page. Please stop acting like this is some sort of shocking surreptitious secret.

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Deletion_policy

Note that this includes deletion of replies to trolls, although I often just downvote those instead.

It would be helpful if people could see that many deleted comments are (in some cases, not all) from the same small set of trolls, but the basic rule is that we have no resources for developing anything so we can't show the author of deleted comments.

This is an online forum that practices gardening. There are lots of other online forums where you can speak freely. Oh, but you'd rather speak here, to the people who gather here to listen? Well - maybe they're gathering here in this garden because they don't want to be in those other ungardened forums, and so no, you can't speak freely.

EDIT: Attempted solution: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/gkv/official_lw_uncensored_thread_on_reddit/

If your concern is public relations, systematically deleting critique is amongst the stupidest things I can think of you doing.

On the gripping hand, systematically refraining from deleting (or better, shadowbanning) trolls is one of the stupidest things you can do if you want to maintain a community.

I'm relatively certain (>95%) that Dymitry/Private_messaging gets special treatment (ie. deletion) because the admins consider him a troll. The point of deleting even his reasonable comments would be to get him to stop commenting at all. I'm not aware of any other LessWrong users who are considered trolls by the site admins.

This is really concerning to me. Also, what is the rationale behind obfuscating basilisks? From what I understand, it could lead to thoughts of, "There's no point to all this after all," but there exists many other avenues to arrive at that same thought; why attempt to bury LW's avenue? It signals quite disturbingly, "We do not wish to risk disillusionment of our followers." Would those particularly vulnerable to such thoughts not benefit from being taught how to build mental fortitude without sacrificing open-mindedness?

I don't specifically know how the above might be accomplished, but surely deleting critiques and other signals considered unsavoury will only increase the probability of a mental breakdown. What is the argument for helping each other tackle basilisks in a safe environment? Hiding the cause does not deal with the underlying susceptibility. I understand deletion of annoying noise, but how can anything reasoned that does not utilise Dark Arts be considered noise when presenting a sound argument?

A separate point:
Harry advocates for scientific secrecy in HP:MoR, as an analogue to how powerful wizards keep their most powerful tricks secret. However, the latter is widely known to be an agreed cultural convention of the magical world, as is the rationale for doing so understood. Hiding active secrecy without sharing a reason for same only inspires revulsion to that secrecy. The analogue is intriguing and not without merit, but only insofar as it stays an analogue and not a permutation.

Edit: Perhaps I should clarify that I truly am asking questions - they are not rhetorical by any means. If I am wrong, please tell me how; that is the point of the site, yes?

None of the comments in this thread is at “100% positive” except the most recent few, which makes me suspect someone is systematically downvoting all of them.

Isn't this a bit melodramatic?

Throwing out this accusation without links/explanations/examples is, in fact, trolling.

Lukeprog put marketing before intellectual honesty before.

One reason that people believe Hanson's claim that half of US money spent on medicine is wasted is that other First World Nations spend half as much per person. You seem to imply that Hanson claims that France wastes half of its spending and the US 3/4. He certainly does not do that explicitly.

The link "Gregory Cochran on Education" is actually by Henry Harpending (the other really is Cochran). As Harpending concedes in the comments, he really is missing something and this is not at all evidence of waste.

I'm not particularly interested in staying in academics.

Join the club. Over the past couple months I more or less decided that the guy I've been seeing for a year is the guy I want to spend my life with, which makes jaunting cross-country for six to ten years on post-docs much less appealing.

What sorts of other career options are there, coming from pure mathematics?

IIRC, you're American. There's a good amount of government work available: DoD, DoE, national labs, and so on. I'm aware of some people who parlayed their math PhD into the equivalent of an engineering MS, with all the job opportunities that opens up.

Programming is the obvious choice, but I'm told one would want a paper trail (a git account, a blog, etc.) of contributions to various projects.

It also sounds like you're still young enough to pivot a bit in your choice of field -- do you have an advisor yet?

Quant Hedge Fund.