Have you considered becoming an actuary? You need math, but it's a high grossing job (up there with finance, IT, and engineering) with long term prospects.

The precise analysis of risk and uncertainty is also directly relevant to concerns in the LW/MIRI/GiveWell area.

On the other hand, the quip is that actuaries are people who found accountancy too exciting.

This is because most new applications are web applications

Or smartphone/tablet apps? Many of which are just web apps reskinned for a phone, but there's a lot that aren't. But I don't know the industry enough to say which is bigger these days, in terms of either developer jobs, or new ideas waiting to be plucked from the tree of knowledge.

At some point you should also learn Prolog and Haskell to have a well-rounded education.

I'm not sure knowing Prolog is actually useful, and I speak as someone who has been teaching Prolog as part of an undergraduate AI course for the last few years, and who learned it way back when Marseilles Prolog didn't even support negative numbers and I had to write my own code just to do proper arithmetic. (I'm not responsible for the course design, I'm just one of the few people in the department who knows Prolog.)

Functional languages, imperative languages, object-oriented languages, compiled languages, interpreted languages: yes. Even some acquaintance with assembler and the techniques that are used to execute all the other languages, just so you know what the machine is really doing. But Prolog remains a tiny, specialised niche, and I'm inclined to agree with what Paul Graham says of it: it's a great language for writing append, but after that it's all downhill.

I just saw this:

Persistent Autonomy means going beyond what has been done before. PANDORA is creating a new class of AUVs that keep going under extreme uncertainty. AUVs that respond to system faults by doing what they can. AUVs that generate their own missions when idle. AUVs that act appropriately under unexpected environmental challenges.

Humankind needs a new class of underwater vehicle to address the new challenges that deep sea exploration and mechanization create. A PANDORA AUV constantly replans, continuously questions its assumptions, and adjusts its skills to fit its immediate environment.

AUV here means Autonomous Underwater Vehicle.

No, I'm not expecting this to FOOM, but I found the language striking, especially with that name. Machines that generate their own missions when you leave them unattended! Machines that continually question their assumptions! Machines that keep going, autonomously, no matter what! Underwater, where it's hard to find anything that wants to stay hidden!

I don't know, do most people enjoy their jobs? (Where "job" = "whatever people are paying you a living to do".) Do most people of an LW-ish sort enjoy their jobs? Do you? Or is it a grind that you do for no reason but to pay the bills?

There is already a word for "don't think about, don't care about, don't act based on, don't know how many there were". That word is "disregarding", which is used in the original quote. It then adds, a fortiori, "and in many cases outright denying the existence of victims of drone strikes". In that context, it cannot mean anything but "explicitly say that there are no victims", and in addition, that this has actually happened in "many" cases.

I can see that this guy is crazy, but based on the sheer volume of stuff he says, at least some of it is probably true.

A stopped clock is right twice a day. But to know when it is right, you need a better clock. If you have a better clock, the stopped clock is of no use to you.

I don't have a pithy parallel quote from Korzybski to put alongside this (pithiness was not his style), but the ideas here are exactly in accordance with Korzybski on "elementalism" (treating as separate and distinct entities things that are not, including body vs. mind), over/under defined terms (verbal definitions lacking extensionality), reification of categories, and the rejection of the is of identity.

(I just realized I missed the linked Cult of Bayes Theorem post. Perhaps someone can summarize since it appears even more relevant than this article.)

It's RationalWiki on steroids and amphetamines. As is the rest of his blog. I do not mean this as a compliment.

The standard p-zombie argument still has a problem explaining why p-zombies claim to be conscious. It leaves no role for consciousness in explaining why conscious humans talk of being conscious. It's a short road (for a philosopher) to then argue that consciousness plays no role, and we're back with consciousness as either an epiphenomenon or non-existent, and the problem of why -- especially when consciousness is conceded to exist, but cause nothing -- the non-conscious system claims to be conscious.