billswift, that's a really good point. This explains why newspapers can be bad--they arouse your curiosity, but on many different subjects, many of which are completely unproductive (such as the status of the US presidential election. For some reason, extensive coverage of voter opinion trends is within the realm of prestigious reporting.)

Kaj Sotala:

Your story is written decently, but it sounds like a parody of pretty much *any* traditional exam. If you remove the write-in answers requirement, you can have much more colorful examination scenarios.

Eliezer:

This seems like a cool motivation tactic. At the same time, I'm a little afraid that thinking my knowledge makes me special and unique will cause me to be arrogant.

Any commited autodidacts want to share how their autodidactism makes them feel compared to traditional schooled learners? I'm beginning to suspect that maybe it takes a certain element of belief in the superiority of one's methods to make autodidactism work. Otherwise you'd be running on pure curiosity, and in my experience that doesn't always hold out for long, especially when you're trying to tackle something more advanced.

In Nick Bostrom's paper on the survival of humanity, several potential catastrophe scenarios are technological ones. That makes me think that it might actually be a bad idea to popularize science.

The irony here is that information about how to create a catastrophe - how to make a nuke, how to construct viruses in a laboratory, how to make a nanobot - is just about the only scientific information that people are hiding. (Fortunatetly, though, they don't make a big deal about the fact they're hiding it.)

Re: the Harris quote

The quote may be true. But if you passed up the opportunity to save a drowning child, then the ratio at which you value the happiness of yourself to the happiness of others is probably pretty damn high. So you're still an asshole.

BillK said:

"It really is the hardest thing in life for people to decide when to cut their losses."

No it's not. All you have to do is to periodically pretend that you were magically teleported into your current situation. Anything else is the sunk cost fallacy.