Well... I'm an engineering student who intends to graduate in electronics. I became interested in AI when I started learning programming at the age of 12. I became fascinated with what I could make the computer do. And rather naively I tried for months and months to program something that was "intelligent" (and failed horribly of course). I set that project aside temporarily but never stopped thinking about it. Years later I discovered HPMoR and through it LessWrong and suddenly found a whole community of people interested in AI and similar thing...
Oh Whoops! I mean protons and electrons! Silly mistake!
Well, in the case of answers to questions like that in the humanities what does the word 'right' actually mean? If we say a particular author is 'post utopian' what does it actually mean for the answer to that question to be 'yes' or 'no'? It's just a classification that we invented. And like all classification groups there is a set of rules characteristics that mean that the author is either post utopian or not. I imagine it as a checklist of features which gets ticked off as a person reads the book. If all the items in the checklist are ticked then the a...
I sort of unintentionally had this happen to me. When I was 13 I moved to a new school which was a little less competent than my previous school. In my previous school all the information was packaged and delivered to us to memorize. In this new school the teachers would just roughly go over the topic and it required a lot of independent effort on my part to understand the subject matter.
This led to this mini explosion of clarity in my head. While in my previous school I was bored of learning and depended almost exclusively on rote memorization, this new s... (read more)