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iconreforged comments on Open thread, January 25- February 1 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (316)
Even if you know that signaling is stupid, it doesn't escape the cost of not signaling.
It's a longstanding trope that Eliezer gets a lot of flack for having no formal education. Formal education is not the only way to gain knowledge, but it is a way of signaling knowledge, and it's not very easy to fake (Not so easy to fake that it falls apart as a credential on its own). Has anyone toyed around with the idea of sending him off to get a math degree somewhere? He might learn something, and if not it's a breezy recap of what he already knows. He comes out the other side without the eternal "has no formal education" tagline, and a whole new slew of acquaintances.
Now, I understand that there may be good reasons not to, and I'd very much appreciate someone pointing me to any previous discussion in which this has been ruled out. Otherwise, how feasible does it sound to crowdfund a "Here's your tuition and an extra sum of money to cover the opportunity cost of your time, I don't care how unfair it is that people won't take you seriously without credentials, go study something useful, make friends with your professors, and get out with the minimum number of credits possible" scholarship?
I think the bigger issue w/ people not taking EY seriously is he does not communicate (e.g. publish peer reviewed papers). Facebook stream of consciousness does not count. Conditional on great papers, credentials don't mean that much (otherwise people would never move up the academic status chain).
Yes it is too bad that writing things down clearly takes a long time.
Somehow I doubt I will ever persuade Eliezer to write in a style fit for a journal, but even still, I'll briefly mention that Eliezer is currently meeting with a "mathematical exposition aimed at math researchers" tutor. I don't know yet what the effects will be, but it seemed (to Eliezer and I) a worthwhile experiment.
Presumably if MIRI were awash with funding you'd pay experts to make papers out of Eliezer's work, freeing Eliezer up for other things?
That's basically what another of our ongoing experiments is.
True. It seems like the great-papers avenue is being pursued full-steam these days with MIRI, but I wonder if they're going to run out of low-hanging fruit to publish, or if mainstream academia is going to drag their heels replying to them.
4 years (or even 1 year if you are super hard-core) of time is a pretty non-trivial investment. I was 2 classes away from a second degree and declined to take them, because the ~100 hours of work it would have taken wasn't worth the additional letters after my name. I also just really don't know anyone relevant who thinks that a college degree or lack thereof particularly matters (although the knowledge and skills acquired in the course of pursuing said degree may matter a lot). Good people will judge you by what you've done to demonstrate skill, not based on a college diploma.
I think IlyaShpitser's comment pretty much nails it.
I came to the same conclusion, and in general a lack of degree has not impacted me as I get employment based on demonstrated skill. The main limitation is that any formal Postgrad study is impossible without a degree and this was a regret for me, prior to getting access to the coursera type courses.
If you buy into the “crunch time” narrative, that's a lot of opportunity cost.
I don't think you understand signaling well.
Eliezer managed signaling well enough to get a billionaire to fund him on his project. A billionaire who fund people who drop out of college systematically in projects like his 20 Under 20 program.
Trying to go the traditional route wouldn't fit into the highly effective image that he already signals.
Put another way, the purpose of signaling isn't so nobody will give you crap. It's so somebody will help you accomplish your goals.
People will give you crap, especially if they can get paid to do so. See gossip journalists, for instance. They are not paid to give boring and unsuccessful people crap; they are paid to give interesting and successful people crap.
Your last para would imply that not getting crap from gossip journalists means you are not interesting or successful. Eliezer/MIRI gets almost no press. Are you sure that's what you meant?
Eliezer gets a lot more press than I do, which is just fine with me.
Well, yes, there is going to be some inevitable crap, but the purpose of signalling is so that you could impress a much larger pool of people. So it might not be much help for gossip journalists, but it might help with the marginal professional ethicist, mathematician, or public figure. In that area, you might get some additional "Anybody who can do that must be damn impressive.". Does the additional damn-impressive outweigh the cost? I don't know, that's why I'm asking.
The discussion about mean vs variance in this post may be relevant.
Yes, the autodidact signal can be tremendously effective, particularly in tech/libertarian company.
In addition "getting flak" isn't necessarily a bad thing.
It can be counter-signaling if you can get flak and stay standing.
It can also polarize people and separate those who can evaluate the inside arguments to realize that you're good from those who can't and have to just write you off for having no formal education.
Impressing Thiel is independent of a future degree or not, because he's already impressed. Where's the next billionaire going to come from, and will they coincidentally also be as contrarian as Thiel? Maybe MIRI doesn't need another billionaire, but I don't think they'd turn one away.
I think the deal that Eliezer has with Thiel is that Eliezer does MIRI full time. Switching focus to getting a degree might violate the deal. Gives that Thiel has a lot of money impressing Thiel more might also be very useful if they want more money from him.
Do you really think that someone who isn't contrarian will put his money into MIRI? The present set up is quite okay. Those who want people with academic credentials can give their money to FHI. Those who want more contrarian people can give their money to MIRI.
Whether or not Eliezer has a degree doesn't change that he's the kind of person who has a public Okcupid profile detailing his sexual habits and the fact that he's polyamorous.
When Steve Job was alive and run around in a sweater, he didn't cause people to disregard him because he wasn't wearing a suit.
People respect the person who's a contrarian who's okay with not everyone liking him. The contrarian who tries to get every to like them on the other hand get's no respect.
On the other hand if he decides to get a degree and pulls it off in a year or something impressive like that it could just feed into the contrarian genius image.
Yes, but that would prokbably either mean paying someone else to do your homework with means that you are vunerable to attack or making studying the sole focus for a year.
Peter Thiel (the billionaire) has the proven ability to spot talent, which is why he is a billionaire. Eliezer has traits that Thiel values, and this is probably much more important than any signal Eliezer sent.
Eddie has some math talent. He can invest some time, money, and effort C to get a degree, which allows other people to discern that he has a higher probability of having that math talent. This higher probability confers some benefit in that other people will more readily take his advice in mathematical matters, or talk with him about his math.
The fun twist is that Eddie lives in a society with many other individuals with varying degrees of math talent, each of whom can expend C to get a degree and the associated benefits. People with almost no mathematical talent have a prohibitively high C, because even if they can pony up the time and money, they have to work very hard to fake their way through. But people with high math ability often choose to stand out by getting the degree, because their C is relatively lower, and a very high proportion of them get degrees. This creates a high association between degrees and mathematical ability, and makes it unlikely to see high mathematical ability in the absence of a degree.
That's the basic idea, plus degrees signal other things which may be completely unrelated to math, but are still nice. Even in the case where the degree has no causal effect no math ability, there are benefits to having one, in that the other math people can judge very quickly that they're interested in talking to you.
Hopefully that demonstrates that I understand signalling. My question is about the costs and benefits of a particular signal.
It demonstrate that you don't. Humans make decisions via something called the availability heuristic.
If you bring into the awareness of the person that you are talking that you are a mathematician that only has a bachleor, no master, no PHD and no professorship that you aren't bringing expertise into his mind.
If you are however a self taught person who managed to published multiple papers among them a paper titled "Complex Value Systems in Friendly AI" in Artificial General Intelligence Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume and who has his own research institute that's a better picture.
If you have published papers that a lot more relevant for relevant experts than whether you have a degree that verifies basic understanding. If a person really cares whether Eliezer has a math degree he already lost that person.
I'm not certain that getting a degree now counts as the traditional route. Also, I don't think that an additional degree is particularly damaging to his image. People aren't going to lose interest in FAI if he sells out and gets a traditional degree. Or they are and I have no idea what kind of people are involved.
This might have been a good call 10 years ago but nowadays Eliezer is participating in regular face to face meetings with skilled mathematicians and scientists in the context of constructing and analyzing theorems and decision strategies. This means that for a large amount of the people who are most important to convince, he gets to screen out all the "evidence" of not having a degree. And to a large extent, someone having the respect of a bunch of math phds is more important a qualifier of talent than having that phd themselves.
There's theoretically still the problem of selling Eliezer to the muggles but I don't think that's anywhere near as important as getting serious thinkers on board.
Different target groups may use different signals.
For example, for a scientist the citations may be more important than formal education. For an ordinary person with a university diploma who never published anything anywhere, formal education will probably remain the most important signal, because that's what they use. A smart sponsor may instead consider the ability of getting things done. And the New Age fans will debate about how much Eliezer fits the definitions of an "indigo child".
If the goal is to impress people for whom having an university diploma is the most important signal (they are a majority of the population), the best way would be to find an university which gives the diploma for minimum time and energy spent. Perhaps one where you just pay some money (hopefully not too much), take a few easy exams, and that's it; you don't have to spend time at the lessons. After this, no one can technically say that Eliezer has "no formal education". (And if they start discussing the quality of the university, then Eliezer can point to his citations.) The idea is to do this as easily as possible... assuming it's even worth doing.
There are also other things to consider, such as the fact that other people working with Eliezer do have formal education... so why exactly is it a problem if Eliezer doesn't? Does MIRI seem from outside like one man show? Maybe that should be fixed.
A diploma mill degree like you describe is not going to get any respect from the (large) population that went to a real university.
Would getting more citations partly nullify the lack of formal education?