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Can you unpack "approximation of Solomonoff induction"? Approximation in what sense?
One piece of information you can use to determine what is most important is the number of other skills which require a certain skill as a prerequisite. Prerequisites should obviously be learned first, and it makes sense to learn them in order of how many doors they open. This is how I prioritize at the moment if I'm not considering subjective measures of "usefulness".
For my learning goals, I've started making concept maps, partly as it helps me understand a subject by understanding how concepts are related, and partly to identify what to learn next as described above. It becomes fairly obvious that I should learn X if I want to learn Y and Z and X is a prerequisite for both.
In my experience, in math/science prerequisites often can (and should) be ignored, and learned as you actually need them. People who thoroughly follow all the prerequisites often end up bogged down in numerous science fields which have actually weak connection to what they wanted to learn initially, and then get demotivated and drop out of their endeavor. This is a common failure mode.
Like, you need probability theory to do machine learning, but some you are unlikely to encounter some parts of it, and also there are parts of ML which require very little of it. It totally makes sense to start with them.
In response to
Ideas to Improve LessWrong
One simple UI improvement for the site: add a link from comments in inbox to that comment in the context of its post; now I have to click twice to get to the post and then scroll down to the comment.
I'll give a more in depth breakdown soon but for now, I'd probably take a similar approach that I took to learning to read Japanese : learn basic sentence structure, learn top 150ish vocabulary words, avoid books written in non-romaji. Practice hearing spoken word by listening to speeches and following their transcriptions. My exception protocol for unrecognized words was to look them up. And for irregular sentence structure, to guess based on context. It worked for watching movies and reading, mostly but as you can tell, yoi kakikomu koto ga dekimasen*. I'd have to do some thinking on the writing part, it would most likely involve sticking to simple sentences.
*thats terrible Japanese for "I cannot write well". I think. I hope.
But these are the things pretty much everybody does while learning languages.
I took your advice as well as estimator's into account and added two paragraphs at the beginning to offer 1. Some research showing that many systems follow a distribution where a small portion of work accounts for a large portion of results, and 2. and explanation as to why it's generalizable.
Also, I'd like to compare your system against common sense reasoning baseline. What do you think are the main differences between your approach and usual approaches to skill learning? What will be the difference in actions?
I'm asking that because that your guide contains quite long a list of recommendations/actions, while many of them are used (probably intuitively/implicitly) by almost any sensible person. Also, some of the recommendations clearly have more impact than others. So, what happens if we apply the Pareto principle to your learning system? Which 20% are the most important? What is at the core of your approach?
Also, when you say "intermediate level language knowledge", what exactly do you mean? One of the key steps is defining exactly what you want to accomplish and why. I don't want to create a whole write-up, only to realize that you and I have two different definitions of "intermediate level language knowledge".
So if you'd tell me the "what" and the "why", I'll do the rest.
There are many differences between brains and computers; they have different structure, different purpose, different properties; I'm pretty confident (>90%) that my computer isn't conscious now, and the consciousness phenomenon may have specific qualities which are absent in its image in your analogy. My objection to using such analogies is that you can miss important details. However, they are often useful to illustrate one's beliefs.
Do you have any of these qualities in mind? It seems strange to reject something because "maybe" it has a quality that distinguishes it from another case. Can you point to any of these details that's relevant?
I don't think it's strange. Firstly, it does have distinguishing qualities, the question is whether they are relevant or not. So, you choose an analogy which shares the qualities you currently think are relevant; then you do some analysis of your analogy, and come to certain conclusions, but it is easy to overlook a step in the analysis which happens to sufficiently depend on a property that you previously thought was insufficient in the original model, and you can fail to see it, because it is absent in the analogy. So I think that double-checking results provided by analogy thinking is a necessary safety measure.
As for specific examples: something like quantum consciousness by Penrose (although I don't actually believe it it). Or any other reason why consciousness (not intelligence!) can't be reproduced in our computer devices (I don't actually believe it either).
Now imagine that I alter your entire brain. Now, the answer seems to be no.
Alter how? Do I still have memories of this argument? Do I share any memories with my past self? If I share all memories, then probably it's still me. If all have gone, then most likely not. (Identifying self with memories has its own problems, but let's gloss over them for now.) So I'm going to interpret your "remove a neuron" as "remove a memory", and then your question becomes "how many memories can I lose and still be me"? That's a difficult question to answer, so I'll give you the first thing I can think of. It's still me, just a lower percentage of me. I'm not that confident that it can be put to a linear scale, though.
Therefore, there must be some minimal change to your brain to ensure that a different person will wake up (i.e. with different consciousness/qualia). This seems strange.
This is a bit like the Sorites paradox. The answer is clearly to switch to a non-binary same-consciousness dichotomy. That doesn't mean I can't point to an exact clone and say it's me.
You don't assume that the person who wakes up always has different consciousness with the person who fell asleep, do you?
Not sure what you mean. Some things change, so it won't be exactly the same. It's still close enough that I'd consider it "me".
It would be the same computer, but different working session. Anyway, I doubt such analogies are precise and allow for reliable reasoning.
Such analogies can help if they force you to explain the difference between computer and brain in this regard. You seem to have an identical model to my brain model by computers; why isn't it illogical there?
That's a difficult question to answer, so I'll give you the first thing I can think of. It's still me, just a lower percentage of me. I'm not that confident that it can be put to a linear scale, though.
That is one of the reasons why I think binary-consciousness models are likely to be wrong.
There are many differences between brains and computers; they have different structure, different purpose, different properties; I'm pretty confident (>90%) that my computer isn't conscious now, and the consciousness phenomenon may have specific qualities which are absent in its image in your analogy. My objection to using such analogies is that you can miss important details. However, they are often useful to illustrate one's beliefs.
I took your advice as well as estimator's into account and added two paragraphs at the beginning to offer 1. Some research showing that many systems follow a distribution where a small portion of work accounts for a large portion of results, and 2. and explanation as to why it's generalizable.
Nice, but beware reasoning after you've written the bottom line.
As for the actual content, I basically fail to see its area of applicability. For sufficiently complex skills, like say, math, languages or football decision-trees & howto-guides approach will likely fail as too shallow; for isolated skills like changing a tire complex learning approaches are an overkill -- just google it and follow the instructions. Can you elaborate languages example further? Because, you know, learning a bunch of phrases from phrasebook to be able to say a few words in a foreign country is a non-issue. Actually learning language is. How would you apply your system to achieve intermediate-level language knowledge? Any other non-trivial skills learning example would also suffice. What skills have you trained by using your learning system, and how?
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Can I give a counterexample? I think that way of learning things might help if you only need to apply the higher-level skills as you learned them, but if you need to develop or research those fields yourself, I've found you really do need the background.
As in, I have been bitten on the ass by my own choice not to double-major in mathematics in undergrad, thus resulting in my having to start climbing the towers of continuous probability and statistics/ML, abstract algebra, logic, real analysis, category theory, and topology in and after my MSc.
You're right; you have to learn solid background for research. But still, it often makes sense to learn in the reversed order.