I was one of the students in the first cohort of Signal Data Science. I had a very positive experience with the program--so much so that I decided to turn down looking for $100k+ data science jobs in the Bay Area to join Signal as an assistant instructor, because I believe in what Jonah and Robert are doing and want others to have the same extraordinary experience that I did. Now that I'm working for Signal, what I say about the program should be taken with a grain of salt, but I feel that it's important to share my experience.

To put my reflections in context: Coming into this program, I was very disillusioned with structured education, having had extremely negative experiences in university. (I found the coursework overly structured, onerous, and intellectually unstimulating.) However, prior to the beginning of Signal, I had positive opinions of both Jonah and Robert (they were both friends of friends), so I decided that it might be worth giving the program a try. Within the very first week of instruction, I was already amazed by the speed at which I was learning new material, the ease with which I was picking up R, and how effortless and enjoyable the whole experience was--in stark contrast to all of my previous experiences with structured education.

I was very impressed by both the breadth and the depth of the knowledge of the instructor and the TA (Jonah Sinick and Sam Eisenstat). Although I had done multiple research internships in college, all of which contained at least some tangential relation to data science and statistical techniques and three of which were highly quantitative in nature, they were able to offer me new insights even in areas where I had domain-specific knowledge and training (e.g. in the field of cognitive genomics). They were always available to help me when I got stuck and always acted congenially and professionally. Also, they were able to point me in a number of very fruitful directions for projects and further study, which I pursued to great benefit.

I also benefited greatly from the voluntary pair-programming structure of the program. At the beginning, I wasn't confident in my knowledge of R, but I was paired up with someone who had substantial past experience programming in R. In that single day, I learned more R than I did spending hours working through the R labs in Introduction to Statistical Learning. Afterward, I was similarly able to transmit my newfound expertise to other students, and finally, when I got started on my own projects and on days when I preferred to work independently, I was free to work by myself.

Lastly, there were interview and resume prep sessions every weekend with Robert, which helped me immensely. I still recall how, on the very first Saturday, we started out doing nontechnical interview prep: I stammered in my responses to the example questions and gave uncertain, incomplete responses. I was a total mess. And I still recall how, after an entire intense afternoon of practice (both with other students and with instructors), I was able to answer nontechnical interview questions confidently and fluently, as if I had been practicing these replies for years. I was astounded by the progress I had made in just five or six hours--and I can say the same about all of the Saturday interview prep sessions. It's very clear to me that Robert is an expert in interviewing and the complex dynamics of the job search.

As for the logistics of the program, I was generally happy with how Signal handled things. In particular, the bootcamp was willing to find housing to accommodate students, which is a service that no other bootcamp provides for its students--meaning that I didn't have to worry at all about trying to figure out where I would be living in Berkeley even though I was flying in from Seattle. To be sure, there were certain fixed costs that were unavoidable on account of the cohort being the first cohort, ever, of Signal Data Science, e.g. having to put together furniture for the house like beds and tables--but it was pretty clear to me going in that there was going to be stuff like that which just had to be taken care of. On balance, after considering the opportunity cost of finding and managing housing for students as well as the time saved on my own end, I definitely got an amazing deal on the rent. Of course, living in the same house with other motivated and intelligent students came with its own social and intellectual benefits as well. :-)

Overall, I would enthusiastically recommend the program to a friend. In fact, I have already been doing so to many people I know--because I want my friends to have the same amazing time here that I had!

[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.

I love you too! ❤ ❤ ❤

I mean, it's fun and all, but what do you think about:

• spreading niceness to all discussion on LW, not just a special separate thread,

• having an actual topic to discuss while being nice about it?

Edit: ah, right, you wanted to not go meta here. Sorry.

#LessWrongMoreNice

It's old news but I recently came across this article and found it quite cheerful.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/10/slow-but-steady/

I expect it will

It probably just computes it as a float and then prints the whole float.

(I do recognize the silliness of replying to a three-year old comment that itself is replying to a six-year old comment.)

Why haven't the good people at GiveWell written more about anti-aging research?

According to GiveWell, the AMF can save a life for $3.4e3. Let's say it's a young life with 5e1 years to live. A year is 3.1e7 seconds, so saving a life gives humanity 1.5e9 seconds, or about 5e5 sec/$.

Suppose you could invest $1e6 in medical research to buy a 50-second increase in global life expectancy. Approximating global population as 1e10, this buys humanity 5e11 seconds, or about the same value of 5e5 sec/$.

Buying a 50-second increase in life expectancy for a megabuck seems very doable. In practice, any particular medical innovation wouldn't give 50 seconds to everyone, but instead would give a larger chunk of time (say, a week) to a smaller number of people suffering from a specific condition. But the math could work out the same.

Of course, it could turn out that the cost of extending humanity's aggregate lifespan with medical research is much more than $5e5/sec. But it could also turn out to be much cheaper than that.

ETA: GiveWell has in fact done a lot of research on this theme, thanks to ChristianKl for pointing this out below.

Notable deaths

This is just depressing. Can we have a notable births section?

With Sam Altman (CEO of YCombinator) talking so much about AI safety and risk over the last 2-3 months, I was so sure that he was working out a deal to fund MIRI. I wonder why they decided to create their own non-profit instead.

Although on second thought, they're aiming for different goals. While MIRI is focused on safety once strong AI occurs, OpenAI is trying to actually speed up the research of strong AI.