Harry could disassemble the world and the stars into computronium - in fact star-lifting crossed his mind when he heard the first part of the prophecy. EY stated that there would be no AI analogy, and magical intelligence amplification seems more plausible anyway.

A different route to a mini-foom is that one can make luck potions. Then gamble, get money, recruit people who know how to make potions. Now you have huge amounts of luck potion, and provided your thought process is fairly random, you will always find the right answer (e.g. opening a random book at a random page happens to provide exactly the right insight). Routes to magical IA:

Luck potions.

A thinking hat - like the sorting hat, only it uses your brainpower to help you solve problems.

Efficient use of memory charms to spread insights rapidly through a group of researchers.

Use of telepathy to create a group mind.

Potion of thinking, made of e.g. ground-up crossword puzzles.

A nice touch when Harry is fighting the troll: When he engages his killer instinct, from then on the troll is only referred to as the "enemy", in one case even with a capital E.

Interestingly, while Harry explicitly mentions "censors off" (concerning no more screening off of potential killing methods), that mode of thinking also engages other filters, dehumanizing (de-troll-izing) the creature he's fighting and only seeing it as "the Enemy".

This poll needs a third option: "I don't care, just show me the results".

How important are scholarly credentials vs just having that knowledge without a diploma?

I think in almost every field and occupation, having the scholarly credentials is extremely important. Knowledge without the credentials is pretty worthless (unless its worthwhile in itself, but even then you can't eat it): using that knowledge will generally require that people put trust in your having it, often when they're not in a position to evaluate how much you know (either because they're not experts, or they don't have the time). Credentials are generally therefore the basis of that trust. Since freelance work either requires more trust, or pays very badly and inconsistently, credentials are worth getting.

And that was the point of my previous post: some way or other, you have to earn people's trust that you can do a job worth paying you for. One way to earn that trust is to perform well despite lacking credentials. This will take an enormous amount of time and effort (during which you will not be paid, or at least not well) compared to doing whatever it takes to get as close to a 4.0 as you can. The faster you get people to trust you, the faster you can stop fighting to feed and shelter yourself and start fighting for the future of humanity.

Getting a degree sucks because it's expensive and time consuming. But if you work harder than everyone else around you, you'll get through it faster, and scholarships will make it closer to free. The whole point is just to get to a job where you're doing some real good as soon as you can. Getting solid credentials is without a doubt the fastest way to do this for almost everyone.

The exceptions are people who are either very smart or very lucky. Obviously you can't count on luck, but you shouldn't count on being a super-genius either. First, you're still in high school at 17. People smart enough to skip the normal system of credentials (which is really, really, really smart) are not in high school at 17. And the credential system is and has been tightening for decades, because higher education is so packed with people. You're going to be competing with people who have degrees at almost every level, and not just BA/S's. Empirically there's no question that they out-compete people without degrees.

Not every degree is worth getting, of course, but the 'autodidact' thing is almost certainly just going to be the longest and hardest path to getting where you want to be.

ETA: I don't remember the specifics, but EY once said that very probably every person-hour spent working toward FAI saves [insert shockingly large number] lives. Think about it this way: those people are all looking at you from the future, watching you to see what you do. You're looking back at them, and watching [insert shockingly large number] of them vanish with every hour wasted. Time is a factor.

Nope, that's all I got. Wait, one more thing. I learned in a painful way that scholarly credentials are most cheaply won (time and effort wise) in high school, and then it gets exponentially more difficult as you age. Every hour you spend making sure you get perfect grades now is worth ten or a hundred hours in your early-mid twenties. Looking back, getting anything less than perfect grades, given how easy that is in high school, seems utterly foolish. Maybe you already know that. Good luck!

I hope you will forgive the impertinance of offering unsolicited advice: if you havn't already, you might consider teaching yourself several programming languages in your free time. It's a very marketable skill, important to MIRI's work, and in many ways suffices for a basic education in logic. The mathy stuff is probably not optional given your ambitions, and much of the same discipline and attention to detail necessary cor programming can be applied to learning serious math. Arrogance will be a terrible burden if unaccompanied by usefulness and skill.

My pseudonym is DiscyD3rp

Given your ambition I suggest changing your name to something respectable before you have spent time establishing a name for yourself. DiscyD3rp will make establishing credibility more difficult for you.

Hello LW. My pseudonym is DiscyD3rp, and this introduction is long overdo. I am 17, male, and currently enrolled in high school. I discovered this site over a year ago, via HPMoR, and have read a good percentage of the main sequences in a kinda correct order. However, i was experiencing significant angst from what I call Dungeon Crawl Anxiety (The same reason that when exploring RPG dungeons i double back and explore even AFTER discovering the correct path). I am now (re-)reading the entirety of Eliezer's posts in the ebook version of the sequences. I have found the re-read articles still useful after having gotten a basic handle on bayesian thought, and look forward to completing my enlightenment

As far as personality, I was (am) incredibly arrogant, and future goals involve MIRI and/or rationality teaching myself (one time involves an email to Eliezer claiming the ability to save the world, and subsequently learning that decision theory is HARD). I am not particularly talented in quickly absorbing technical fields of knowledge, but plan on on developing that skill. My existing talent seems to be manipulating idea and concepts easily and creatively once well understood. Im great at reading the map, but suffer difficulty in writing it. (In very mathy fields)

Im a born Christian, with a moderate upbringing, but likely saved from extremism by the internet just in time. Now a skeptic and an atheist.

Hello LessWrong community, my name is Andrew. I'm beginning my first year of university at UofT this September, despite my relatively old age (21). This is mostly due to the resistance I faced when upgrading my courses, due to my learning disability diagnosis and lack of prereqs. I am currently enrolled in a BA cognitive science program, although I hope to upgrade my math credits to a U level so I can pursue the science branch instead.

I found this site through common sense atheism a while ago, although I have sparsely visited it until recently. I admittedly know little about rationality, and thus have little to contribute. However, I hope that my time here will be a learning experience, in order to better determine the direction my studies should take.

If I had to state my professional (-ish) interest, it would be the psychology of belief- like how people evaluate evidence, how they are biased, etc. I also find perception and consciousness neat- although I am kinda ignorant on those topics.