LESSWRONG
LW

All of mpr's Comments + Replies

[Letter] Advice for High School #1
mpr30

Apparently OP is recommending the vim keybindings system, not so much the application. They mention writing this post in Spacemacs.

I am also a convert to this philosophy: vim is the best language for editing, emacs is the best environment for editing.

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Making intentions concrete - Trigger-Action Planning
mpr150

Posting here to give empirical evidence to this statement

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Making intentions concrete - Trigger-Action Planning
mpr40

Any progress on the custom todo app?

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Open Thread June 2018
mpr50

I am moving to the Bay Area from the east coast, and have been looking for a job out there for some time. I signed an offer letter last week from a company I am excited to start working with.

Yesterday I published an app that will send you to a random slatestarcodex article. You can find it as a subdomain of my blog: http://random-ssc.pulsarcoffee.com.

I am reading The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons, and Programming in Scala by Martin Odersky.

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You Are Being Underpaid
mpr20

Thanks for the post! I'm currently in the process of looking for a programming job in the Bay Area. I'm less than a year out of school w/ a B.S. in CS, but I went to a school that does co-ops so I have a little over two years experience if you count that. And I have a bunch of public code on github from interesting projects I've hacked on in my own time.

So far I've mostly been cruising angel.co for job openings, and just recently started looking at listings on StackOverflow. I've gotten ~5 initial phone conversations, but nobody has moved on past that.

I will take the advice in this post into consideration, and make a reminder to come back and post some details about my job when I do get hired.

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The Case Against Education
mpr30

I strongly agree w/ Zvi's post, but also think there is some good pushback in the comments so far. Particularly from Said about his experience at the same school Zvi went to. I know a few people who recently graduated from that school, and what I hear from them suggests it is better in several important ways than even the very good high school I went to.

I'm interested in a discussion about what to do. What are better designs for institutions of primary education? How do we instill an essential curiosity early on?

I think this discussion can go in ... (read more)

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1Kenny
Yes, some people have wonderfully enjoyable experiences at school and some of them even learn things. Caplan doesn't dispute that. There's nothing wrong with, e.g. lectures, for teaching people. The main problem with education, as a 'system', is that *most* of its function is signalling, e.g. providing credentials, by which people can be sorted and ranked by employers. This seems kinda perverse. Are you trying to brainstorms ways to instill curiosity in people that don't have any real control over what they get to learn? How would that work? There are forms of 'schooling' that aren't structured in really any similar ways to the common versions of the U.S. education system, e.g. unschooling, but they're fundamentally opposed to the idea of *instilling* curiosity. Why instill something in someone when you can just *protect* what already exists? Caplan, and myself, and I suspect Zvi too, would claim that the idea of teaching anyone that doesn't want to learn is (almost always) just bad. The worst part of our current system is that it's compulsory. People already care, tho maybe not about the same things you'd choose for them. Why shouldn't they learn about whatever it is they already care about? You should read Caplan's book. He's *very* thorough and considers every point mentioned here in the comments.
2ChristianKl
The US does have schools like the Sudbury Valley School in the current political constraints. There's a lot of room for alternative schools inside the US provided the school can fund itself and doesn't rely on government grants. If you have a billionaire who wants a great school for his kids and there's a clear proposal about how to build such a school the school could be build without much political problems.
AI Alignment Prize: Round 2 due March 31, 2018
mpr40

I think the first sentence in paragraph four should have the words "is doomed" appended to the end. I did not understand what Paul is offering his specific prize for until I read his post at https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/SqcPWvvJJwwgZb6aH/prize-for-probable-problems.

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3Zvi
Agreed, fixed.