Oslo, Norway

Certainly this seems like a (meta-)low-hanging fruit.

There seem to be fairly effective interest / aptitude tests, that I remember taking in middle school. The level of detail is insufficient to identify low-hanging fruits ("you should go work in this particular research group") but is still narrow enough to be useful ("these are the jobs that the 0.1% of the population most like you finds most satisfying"). This can raise to attention jobs or fields that are high impact or high paying that someone might not be consciously aware of, or realize that it suits them well. (The canonical example here is MRI sales; someone has to sell them, but a person with strong ability to remember facts and figures and understand technical things, and also to deal with people, may not have that come to mind as an intersection of their interests and aptitudes.)

I don't know if it's low-hanging. In my experience finding what you are REALLY interested in involves a lot of trial and error, while aptitude tests are worthless beyond the pretty obvious division into techies and humanities people.

Which resources would you recommend for enhancing discipline?

(You have recommended a few things in particular to me before, but I'm writing this to see what other recommendations you would have, and for others' benefit.)

Thank you for organizing this. Oslo is my hometown, and I will definitely be there if it coincides with a trip home. I'll find you on freenode later and send you some information about possible attendees from a previous attempt at organizing an Oslo meetup

Thanks to everyone who turned up, and for those who couldn't make it, I look forward to seeing you next time, I certainly had a fun time, and I believe i was not alone :)

Here is the google group (mailing list) for LessWrong Oslo.

GMT+1? Isn't it a GMT (ahem, UTC) +2 in Norway now?

I had a pleasant and intellectually enticing time tonight.

I look forward to further meetups and invite anyone who couldn't make it tonight to join us in the future.

I am not sure for how many people it is true, but my own bad-at-mathness is largely about being bad at reading really terse, dense, succint text, because my mind is used to verbose text and thus filtering out half of it or not really paying close attention.

I hate the living guts out of notation, Greek variables or single-letter variables. Even the Bayes theorem is too terse, succint, too information-dense for me. I find it painful that in something like P(B|A) all three bloody letters mean a different thing. It is just too zipped. I would far more prefer something more natural langauge like Probability( If-True (Event1), Event2) (this looks like a software code - and for a reason).

This is actually a virtue when writing programs, I am never the guy who uses single letter variables, my programs are always like MarginPercentage = DivideWODivZeroError((SalesAmount-CostAmount), SalesAmount) * 100. So never too succint, clearly readable.

Let's stick to the Bayer Theorem. My brain is screaming don't give me P, A, B. Give me "proper words" like Probability, Event1, and Event2. So that my mind can read "Pro...", then zone out and rest while reading "bability" and turn back on again with the next word.

This is basically the inability to focus really 100%, needing the "fillers", the low information density of natural language text for allowing my brain to zone out and rest for fractions of a second, of finding too dense, too terse notation, where losing a single letter means not understanding the problem.

This is largely a redudancy problem. Natural language is redundant, you can say "probably" as "prolly" and people still understand it - so your mind can zone out during reading half of a text and you still get its meaning. Math notation is highly not redundant, miss one single tiny itty bitty letter and you don't understand a proof.

So I guess I could be better at math if there was an inflated, more redudant, not single-letter-variables, more natural language like version of it.

I guess programming fills that gap well.

I figure Scott does not like terse, dense notation either, however he seems to be good at doing the work of inflating it to something more readable for himself.

I guess I am not reinventing warm water here. There is probably a reason why a programmer would more likely write Probability(If-True(Event1), Event2) than P(A|B) - this is more understandable for many people. I guess it should be part of math education to learn to cope with the denser, terser, less redundant second notation. I guess my teachers did not really manage to impart that to me.

Yep, it was probably the first rationalist joke ever that made me laugh.