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Wei_Dai comments on Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers - Less Wrong Discussion

62 Post author: Louie 09 January 2013 02:33PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 18 January 2013 11:54:25PM 8 points [-]

I was a CS major but I haven't taken most of the CS courses listed here, including Numerical Analysis, Parallel Computing, Quantum Computing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Functional Programming, and Automated Program Verification. I think it's probably not necessary to have more than a cursory understanding of most these topics at the current stage of Friendliness research.

I would suggest swapping one or more of these courses out for a course in cryptography. Cryptography, besides possibly having direct applications, is good for giving a sense of the limits of human intelligence and mathematical reasoning. You can see how far "provable security" (which seems like the closest analogue we have to "provable Friendliness") as well as "heuristical security" got after thousands of mathematician-years worth of effort.