Hi all,
I'm a recently graduated aerospace engineer. First came upon LW via HPMOR a couple years ago, been through the Sequences once since then, currently going through Rationality: A to Z mostly as a refresher.
Gravitated toward aerospace as a sort of proto existential risk mitigation effort, but having spoken with Nick Beckstead via 80,000 hours and comparing the potential of various fields to mitigate X-Risk within the next ~100 years which resulted in my discounting space development relative to other fields, currently more open to other avenues.
Very in...
Can you be more explicit about what it was in your study of data science that led you to notice your blindspots, or more generally what the "very powerful" ways of thinking about the world you found were? You mention the Wisdom of the Crowds, but it sounds like there was something in particular that made you realize the opportunity for growth.
This is a very long conversation – communicating it is my highest priority right now, but it's a huge undertaking. For now I'll just say that the most important part to my mind is learning to think in terms of dimensionality reduction. See Chris Olah's post Visualizing MNIST: An Exploration of Dimensionality Reduction if you're unfamiliar with the subject.
tl;dr: Claiming your information is really hard to communicate doesn't make me think it's actually inherently difficult (Mind Projection Fallacy) - it makes me think you either don't understand it well enough to communicate it but were motivated to post this as a status grab, or you're intentionally being deceptive. My recommendation from a social perspective, if you're actually interested in communicating the info is to claim not that it's really hard, but that you haven't figured out a way to communicate it effectively. Lay out the key principles as best... (read more)