Thanks.

Do you have a reference point for the magnitude of the impact? Would you expect someone to be able to do more good doing these things than as a software engineer? Is the effect on the same order?

1) Get involved in big, professional open-source projects with small bug-fixes, documentation, and bug reporting.

For a high school student it's not straightfoward to know the step by step process he has to go through to contrubute bug-fixes or even documentation.

If you want to edited an Wikipedia page that's a lot more straightforward than editing the documentation of an average open source project.

I personally have edited Wikipedia plenty of time and can't remember contributing to open source documentation because the complexity of figuring out how to go about contributing is too high to bother in particular cases where I see something that might be fixed.

A step by step guide about how to go about fixing a simple bug would be very helpful.

Programming libraries and making them freely available, as in a large number of open-source projects seems to me like a definite positive. For instance, the jquery javascript library is freely available, such that learning it is a transferrable skill between jobs, a foundation that other projects can build upon, and means the messy work of ensuring cross-platform javascript compatibility only has to be performed in one place, instead of again and again. There are many other examples of useful pieces of programming infrastructure provided for by volunteer work, from graphics frameworks, to programming languages and so on.

I'd also contend that there is a lot of room for volunteer work within open source, for those looking to contribute in these ways. The project that doesn't have more issues in their bug trackers than they have people can handle is rare, and often many of these bugs are simple enough that even a relatively new programmer could contribute.

Side point: Quora has the annoying popup that allows you to only read part of the top answer to a question if not logged in, so many people categorically ignore it. Also, there's no compelling reason to use it over reddit or other forums.

Do you take notes when you read non-fiction you want to analyse? If so, how much detail? On the first reading? Just points of disputation, or an effort at a summary?

If you want to gain personal skills, a good avenue for spending money is removing distractions that decrease the time you have to devote to these skills. For example, hire cleaners or gardeners to free up the time spent on necessary chores.

Good post. I was just talking to Luke the other day, and wondering why is it that the more senior a researcher becomes, the more (s)he resembles a manager.

Different professors earn roughly as much, have roughly the same social standing,

Probably true for salary, not necessarily true for social standing: superstars are much more highly regarded.

Fantastic post. Usually with posts along the lines of AI & epistemology I just quickly scan them as I expect them to go over my head, or descend straight into jargon, but this was extremely well explained, and a joy to follow.

Does it make you feel less cold in general? I'm considering doing cold showers, but I'd like to know if the discomfort is worth it.

Taken the survey. Thanks for doing this, Yvain.