The ability to have these conversations would have increased my velocity pretty significantly. There doesn't even need to be real-time communication: the ability to email someone with heavily contextualized questions, knowing that they've been working on the same content recently, would be incredibly valuable.
This is especially important IMO. Used to be when I studied more actively, whenever I'd get stuck and someone I knew happened to be online and also studying the subject (or had mastered it), I'd just ping them up on chat.
Inspired by: On learning difficult things
In his recent post, user So8res says his number one piece of advice for learning something difficult is to have study partner to learn with you.
Since there is a decent amount of interest here in going through the MIRI course list, it might be worth finding other people here to learn and study this with, and to form pairs or groups.
So here is a space for finding and organizing such partnerships!
Of course, part of the reason I wrote this is because I am interested in learning these books with people. My background: I'm currently a second year Ph.D. student in mathematics (number theory). I'm still pretty new to the type of math emphasized here. I have Probabilistic Graphical Models, Category Theory for Computer Scientists and The Logic of Provability (by George Boolos -- not on the course list, but good to get background for the Robust Cooperation paper and for understanding Loeb's theorem) all lying around. I'm also taking a class on numerical analysis. Part of my problem is that I start lots of projects and then end up fizzling out on them, and I hope having a partner will help with this.
I've already been going through MIRI's publications with a friend from the local LW community, which has been really nice. I'm still interested in finding more partners <insert poly joke here> for going through books on the course list specifically. I'm also willing to explain things I understand, or let someone explain things to me (I've found that explaining things to someone else is a very good way of solidifying your understanding of something) when I have time.
Some things to consider: