Starting University Advice Repository

Bryan-san

I know quite a few (12+) rationalists and CFAR graduates who are entering University soon or have just recently started University.

There was a lot of advice I wish I had been given or heard before I entered University and I think having a good repository of rationalist-contributed knowledge/advice/suggestions/information/links/DireWarnings could be very helpful to people in that situation.

1. What advice do students starting University need to hear?

2. What advice did your past self need to hear or what advice would have benefited you at that point in time?

3. Many people fail to ask the right questions. What questions do students need to ask themselves and other people?

Any links or guides on any related topics would be helpful. I will be posting some of my own ideas and links in the comments.

Possibly Relevant Repositories

Life Advice Repository

Boring Advice Repository

Grad Student Advice Repository

Repository Repository

I know quite a few (12+) rationalists and CFAR graduates who are entering University soon or have just recently started University.

1. What advice do students starting University need to hear?

2. What advice did your past self need to hear or what advice would have benefited you at that point in time?

3. Many people fail to ask the right questions. What questions do students need to ask themselves and other people?

Any links or guides on any related topics would be helpful. I will be posting some of my own ideas and links in the comments.

Possibly Relevant Repositories

Life Advice Repository

Boring Advice Repository

Grad Student Advice Repository

Repository Repository

a finger pointing at the real thing.

I don't care much about causality.

???

To the extent that you view g as what it is, I have no problem. But people think g is (a) a real thing and (b) causal. It's not at all clear it is either. "Real things" involved in human intelligence are super complicated and have to do with brain architecture (stuff we really don't understand well). We are miles and miles and miles away from "real things" in this setting.

The game I was describing was how PCA works, not stuff in Pearl's book. The point was PCA is just relying on a model of a joint distribution, and you have to be super careful with assumptions to extract causality from that.

I think of g as, basically, a projection from the high-dimensional space of, let's say, mind capabilities into low dimensions, in this case just a single one. Of course it's an "artifact", and of course you lose information when you do that.

However what I mean by g pointing a finger at the real thing is that this high-dimensional cloud has some structure. Things are correlated (or, more generally, dependent on each other). One way -- a rough, simple way -- to get an estimate of one feature of this structure is to do IQ testing. Because it's so si... (read more)

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