I think it is a very good question. Forget ideas you may have had about UX 10 or 20 years ago. Google is a user interface to the rest of the internet. "Unfriendly" might not be the word for it, but the impression that it is there to serve me is an illusion. It is becoming too much like the "friendly" used car salesman.

Whatever we want to access on the internet is increasingly mediated by highly intelligent interfaces that have their own agendas, and I doubt we have thought enough about what constraints it would take to keep these agendas from getting out of hand. In a worst case scenario, these agents might systematically mislead people so as to hide some uncontrollable super-agent being put into place. It is the old agency problem. The attempt to impose ethics and good behavior on those we take to be our agents (doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, finance advisers) raises different questions from those aimed at most fellow beings. "Professional ethics" is a name for one sometimes effective approach to the problem, and it imposes a whole other set of constraints than those we put on peoples treatment of one another generally, so I think it is worth looking at from a special angle which might well be neglected by FAI generally.

I'm introducing the term Friendly User Interface to complement Friendly AI as a possible area of interest for the LessWrong community.

Speaking only to this. Every new piece of jargon comes with -100 points. Does the usefulness of this term overcome -100 points?

What do you mean with friendly in this context? What's the added value above simple speaking about UX design or information architecture?

I'm introducing the term Friendly User Interface to complement Friendly AI as a possible area of interest for the LessWrong community.

Speaking only to this. Every new piece of jargon comes with -100 points. Does the usefulness of this term overcome -100 points?

I started getting programming gigs.

I've been writing programs and bug fixing for my other work and personal environment for twelve years, always loved programming more than the other work, but...

(Similar to Fluttershy) Culturally, there's a belief that college years are our formative years, and we should be learning to be good, well-rounded (in the liberal arts sense) people. But college is a huge time and money commitment, and the job market is competitive, so I think college ought to be used strategically for advancement in academic or well-paved professional tracks (doctor, lawyer). My college, Harvey Mudd, had a noticeable emphasis on ethics in science and technology and humanities as a hearty side heaping to technical topics. Ideally, ethics would be strategic for career advancement, but in the real world (software engineering), it's never seem to come up in my job placement. Harvey Mudd should be a pretty good model though since they manage to make it work anyway. Alan Kay also suggested a technical and humanities double major (somewhere in that interview...).

The politics of college aside, here's my list of things to learn as soon as and by any means possible:

• Rationality. Goes without saying here. In particular: using reasoning and empirical data for important questions. I just came across this today that decries the complete lack of empirical basis for programming language design (a topic that's collectively consumed hundreds of thousands of hours of debate, not to mention time developing mediocre solutions). You'll see the same thing in any field (at least fields that are mature enough to even ask the question).
• Career & finance. Understanding that there's a game to both and having knowledge about those games can get you opportunities and money that you wouldn't otherwise. I recommend Ramit Sethi's material and Tony Robbin's new book.
• Body & brain. You can often get away with research + rationality for a particular question, but it's good to have prior exposure to solutions to common problems: nutrition/fitness, body language, learning, mental health. For example: thinking "I'm depressed" leads you to: it could be due to a nutritional or neurochemical imbalance, or fixed with changing some thinking habits; instead of "I'm depressed because I'm a failure at life."
• Technical topics. If you want to make a contribution you really need to focus. Math is generally useful, but that's mostly as a symbolic and visual language rather than any particular deep math topic until you need it. Programming is often useful for automating technical tasks. I've observed people who study physics excelling in different topics. (Perhaps exposure to model building and data-driving theory testing. Perhaps selection bias.)
• Philosophical and spiritual things. I've only started to respect this recently, but I've found value in Taoist, Buddhist, Catholic, and Stoic teachings. Here's someone else exploring a variety of areas.
• Microeconomics and game theory come up a lot in the world and knowledge thereof may prevent you from making dumb "If I were in charge..." statements.

Lots of things I wish I knew more about still, like sociology/anthropology, politics, and history, where there's a lot of "why should I learn about this particular thing or another?" that are hard to answer on my own.

Related idea: semi-computerized instruction.

To the best of my (limited) knowledge, while there are currently various computerized exercises available, they aren't that good at offering instruction of the "I don't understand why this step works" kind, and are often pretty limited (e.g. Khan Academy has exercises which are just multiple choice questions, which isn't a very good bad format). One could try to offer a more sophisticated system - first, present experienced teachers/tutors with a collection of the problems you'll be giving to the students, and ask them to list the most common problems and misunderstandings that the students tend to have with such problems. Then attempt to build a system which will recognize the symptoms of the most common misunderstandings and attempt to provide advice on them, also offering the student the opportunity to ask it themselves using some menu system or natural language parser. (I know some existing academic work along these lines exists, I think applying Bayes nets to build up a model of the students' skills and understanding, but I couldn't find the reference in the place where I thought that I had read it.)

Of course, there will frequently be situations where your existing database fails to understand the student's need. So you combine this with the chance to ask help online, either on a forum with other students, or one-on-one with a paid tutor in an interactive chat session. As the students' problems are resolved, the maintainers follow the conversations and figure out a way for the system to recognize the new problems in the future, either automatically or via the "ask a question" menus.

In particular, the system would be built so that having e.g. forgotten some of the prerequisites in a previous course wouldn't be a problem - if that happened, the system would just automatically lead you to partially rehearse those concepts enough that you could apply them to solve the current problem. At the same time, it could be designed that all of the previous knowledge was being constantly drawn upon, thus providing a natural method for spaced repetition.

This method is naturally most suited for math-like subjects with clear right/wrong answers. But if one wanted to get really ambitious, they could eventually expand the system so as to create a single unified school course that taught everything that's usually taught in high school, abandoning the artificial limits between subjects. E.g. a lesson during which you traveled back in time to witness an important battle (history), helped calculate the cannon ball trajectories for one of the sides (physics), stopped to study a wounded soldier and the effects of the wounds on his body (human biology), and then finally helped the army band play the victory song (music)... or something along those lines. Ideally, there'd be little difference between taking a school lesson and playing a good computer game.

Tagline: Coursera for high school

Mission: The economist Eric Hanushek has shown that if the USA could replace the worst 7% of K-12 teachers with merely average teachers, it would have the best education system in the world. What if we instead replaced the bottom 90% of teachers in every country with great instruction?

The Company: Online learning startups like Coursera and Udacity are in the process of showing how technology can scale great teaching to large numbers of university students (I've written about the mechanics of this elsewhere). Let's bring a similar model to high school.

This Company starts in the United States and ties into existing home school regulations with a self-driven web learning program that requires minimum parental involvement and results in a high school degree. It cloaks itself as merely a tool to aid homeschool parents, similar to existing mail-order tutoring materials, hiding its radical mission to end high school as we know it.

The result is high-quality education for every student. In addition to the high quality, it gives the student schedule flexibility to pursue other interests outside of high school. Many exceptional young people I know dodge the traditional schools early in life. This product gives everyone that opportunity.

By lowering the cost of going home-school, this product will enlargen the home school market and threaten traditional educrats while producing more exceptional minds.

With direct access to millions of students, the website will be able to monetize through one-on-one tutoring markets, college prep services, and other means.

Course material can be bootstrapped by constructing a curriculum out of free videos provided through sources like the Khan Academy. The value-add of the Company will be to tailor the curriculum to the home-school requirements of the particular state of the student.

My background: I cofounded a company that's had reasonable success. I'm not much of a Less Wrong fan - I find the community to be an intellectual monoculture, dogmatic, and full of blind spots to flaws in the philosophy it preaches. BUT this is an idea that needs to happen, as it will provide much value to the world. Contact me at firstname lastname gmail if you have lots of money or can hack. Or hell, steal the idea and do it yourself. Just make it happen.

I'm really excited about software similar to Anki, but with task-specialized user interfaces (vs. self-graded tasks) and better task-selection models (incorporating something like item response theory), ideally to be used for both training and credentialing.

This seems to contradict the very powerful effect of learning from failure and corrective feedback. See http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/why-do-some-people-learn-faster-2/ for an accessible overview.

I'd conjecture this works better when someone can already perform the desired behavior and wants to form a habit, whereas learning from failure comes in when new information needs to be stored and reorganized.