You are a tenured professor at a medium-sized public university. The Interdisciplinary Gods have smiled upon you, and you have been handed an operating grant, office space, and broad design powers to create an advanced interdisciplinary degree1 in "Rationality" (you suspect your department head reads LessWrong). Your students will come from a broad range of disciplines, and you cannot assume that they will posses any particular prior knowledge.
Candidates in your program could take courses in any department, as long as you have personally approved a course as eligible for credits. [ETA] All admitted students will be awarded tuition wavers and living wages. A compelling ROI calculation was a requirement for admission, and all students have demonstrated some impressive real-world accomplishments.
You thumb through your University's course register2, seeing a long list of courses in a variety of disciplines: Anthropology to Writing and Humanistic Studies. Without some constraints, you think, this degree will be incoherent.
Which do you include?
[1] To avoid tangential conversation, don't worry about what sort of degree. This could be the course load for a PhD/MBA/MA/etc.
[2] If it helps you think this through, use the MIT OCW listings to make suggestions. HT: nerzhin
I like how you think!
The task was to pick options that would constitute the set of eligible courses. The student would pick their course load from within that set. A "Directed Reading in X" course would be a fine answer, IMHO.
I don't - this is a brainstorming exercise!
I'm not sure I'm getting the point of the exercise qua exercise. If this were a real-life opportunity my first inclination would be to explore how far I could stray from conventions and normal habits of thought. E.g. give the students themselves the task of designing the program for optimal results (which is why it'd help to define the results sought). So maybe the first thing they'd study would be the psychology of learning; math and probability theory would take a back seat to that, or would be taken as tools to understand the research on learning.
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