The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don't want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don't want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can't, someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end.

Most often, these days, medicine seems to supply neither Custers nor Lees. We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, "You let me know when you want to stop." All-out treatment, we tell the incurably ill, is a train you can get off at any time--just say when. But for most patients and their families we are asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People only die once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come--and escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.

“I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.”

Stanley Kubrick

At root, our work suggests that creativity in science appears to be a nearly universal phenomenon of two extremes. At one extreme is conventionality and at the other is novelty. Curiously, notable advances in science appear most closely linked not with efforts along one boundary or the other but with efforts that reach toward both frontiers.

Mukherjee et. al, Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact.

I'm really really liking the everything correlates with everything observation.

I think this depends almost entirely on how often you expect the busybodies to be wrong when they override people's judgement.

"Always" is a good place to start.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

C.S. Lewis, "God in the Dock"

The world of to-day attaches a large importance to mental independence, or thinking for oneself; yet the manner in which these things are cultivated is very partial. In some matters we are, perhaps too independent (for we need to think socially as well as to act socially); but in other matters we are not independent enough; we are hardly independent at all. For we always interpret mental independence as being independence of old things. But if the mind is to stand in a real loneliness and liberty, and judge mere time and mere circumstances, and all the wasting things of this world, if the mind is really a strong and emancipated judge of things unbribed and unbrowbeaten, it must assert its superiority, not merely to old things, but to new things.

It must forsee the old age of things still in a strenuous infancy. It must stand by the tombstone of the babe unborn. It must treat the twentieth century as it treats the twelfth, as something which by its own nature has already had an end. A free man must not only be free from the past; a free man must be free from the future. He must be ready to face the rising and increasing thing, and to judge it by immortal tests. It is a very poor mark of courage, in comparison, that we are ready to strike at ancient wrongs. Our courage shall be tested by whether we are ready to strike at youthful and full-blooded wrongs; wrongs that have all their life before them, wrongs that are as sanguine as the sunrise, and as fresh as the flowers.

G.K. Chesterton, http://platitudesundone.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-world-of-to-day-attaches-large.html

Is there any way to do these things without paying a large pricetag? Could you just lurk around campus or something? Only half-joking here.

be sure to first consider the most useful version of grad that you could reliably make for yourself... and then decide whether or not to do it.

Planning fallacy is going to eat you alive if you use this technique.

Your writing is good, much better than mine, even though I came up with the same idea before. Please continue writing.

There is one thing I disliked, the mentioning of “liberals” and “conservatives” as the only 2 possible political positions, 2 “sides”. You already understand the package-deal fallacy, that one who identifies as a “liberal” and supports most stereotypically “liberal” policies, might still not support all of them, or support some of the “conservative” policies.

But there are policies that you can't pigeonhole into “liberal” and “conservative”. Many policies and ideas are not even binary: there are not 2 contradictory positions, but 10 contradictory positions. Therefore even the idea of a 1-dimensional continuum of left-centre-right is fallacious.

It's also important to note that not all English-speaking Internet users are from the US. There are well-educated people who live in countries you don't even know exist. So mentioning US political trends or personalities without brief explanation is an additional obstacle to understanding. If you want your texts to be widely read by non-Americans, you should make them more general, so that they don't require local American intuitions and background knowledge.

Finally, there is a point that is rarely brought up on LW, but is very important. The reason Luke Muehlhauser is so cool, is that he raised attention to the neglected virtue of scholarship, the fact that, in some sense, there is no “royal road to science”. Strictly speaking, this is not true, some roads are definitely more effective than the others. A good textbook or study methods might accelerate your learning tenfold, hundredfold.

But at the end of they day, once you have your rationality, your effective study methods, your time-management system, your Pomodoro, your Bayesian epistemology and what not, the only way you can actually understand something on a deep level is to sit your ass on the chair and read a freaking book. Sometimes more than once, with exercises, whiteboard and discussions.

You can optimize learning and thinking, for sure, but you can't skip the dumb “hard work” part. And this leads us to the fact that we have 24 hours a day. Most people have stupid jobs, little money, kids, commitments, social status to maintain. The little free time they have they can't spend efficiently on self-education, because they are tired after work, they are stressed and anxious and have lots of psychological barriers that make them think “nah, I'm too stupid to ever learn physics on my own”. And I'm not even talking about billions of people living in complete squalor, I'm talking about people with access to the Internet and books.

A middle-aged US conservative has enough time to read one book a month. Not because he's a “stupid redneck”, but because all other time is spent raising kids, fixing his car, going to the job, inviting friends for a meal etc. So when he goes to the bookstore, he sees a nice-seeming book by Ann Coulter. He has no training in political science, so how would he ever know that the book is the waste of time? He has no point of reference, no background knowledge. One might say he buys this book to assuage his tribal evo-psych desires or because he's biased. I say he simply can't make huge inferential jumps that would make him conclude reading Ann Coulter is a waste of time.

You see, saying that someone is biased, or a product of evolution in the ancestral environment, or prone to signaling and status-oriented behavior, and so on, is just a very elaborate way of saying someone is stupid. And stupid is a grave insult. People near-universally hate stupid people, and treat them with either condescension or hostility by default. It's like we constantly trying to prove that their stupidity is their “fault”. You'd think, if somebody is stupid, that is, has not enough knowledge or mental skills to come to a right conclusion, definitely the results of their stupidity are not their fault? But that's not how people think automatically, and it takes conscious effort to rewrite this default attitude towards stupid people.

Suppose the above-mentioned US conservative somehow magically decides to buy Bill Maher's book instead. He read somewhere that it's no harm to sometimes read what your political enemies write, that even in the worst propaganda might be a grain of truth, that it's virtuous to try to learn the position you dislike and evaluate it on your own. Somehow, his cognitive, social, evo-psych forces didn't stop him from buying that book. Would he now be able to support views that are closer to the truth? Most likely not, except if slightly or by epistemic luck.

Some political positions, like gay marriage, might be a “no-brainer”. But open borders is not a “no-brainer”, and so aren't negative income tax, raising minimum wage, military interventions, increasing inflation, decreasing inflation. You need to read books for that, and think with concentration for hours, and consult various sources, and maybe write down equations, and maybe even use statistical methods. Most people literally don't have time for that.

Teaching the dangers of death spirals and how politics can be a mind-killer to everyone would make the world a much better place. But I don't even think a next-door fundamentalist Christian, trained in LW rationality, would necessarily accept evolution. Because accepting evolution is not about rational thinking, it's about actually understanding how it works. Yeah, you can also accept it without understanding, and that's what happens most of the times. I'm pretty sure most /r/atheism subscribers don't actually understand evolution's mechanism and thus aren't justified in their belief.

Randomness is maximally complex.

I am not sure this is a useful way to look at things. Randomness can be very different. All random variables are random in some way, but calling all of them "maximally complex" isn't going to get you anywhere.

Outside of quantum physics, I don't know what is "a true random output". Let's take a common example: stock prices. Are they truly random? According to which definition of true randomness? Are they random to a superhuman AI?

it's not randomness if it is predictable

Let's take a random variable ~N(0,1), that, normally distributed with the mean of zero and the standard deviation of 1. Is it predictable? Sure. Predictability is not binary, anyway.

we should favor simple explanations over complex explanations

That's just Occam's Razor, isn't it?

Simplicity's advantage is that it minimizes our vulnerability to random noise.

How do you know what is random before trying to model it? Usually simplicity doesn't minimize your vulnerability, it just accepts it. It is quite possible for the explanation to be too simple in which case you treat as noise (as so are vulnerable to it) things which you could have modeled by adding some complexity.

complexity ... is more flexible and sensitive to random changes in input

I don't know about that. This is more a function of your modeling structure and the whole modeling process. To give a trivial example, specifying additional limits and boundary conditions adds complexity to a model, but reduces its flexibility and sensitivity to noise.

general superiority of simple explanations

That's a meaningless expression until you specify how simple. As I mentioned, it's clearly possible for explanations and models to be too simple.