LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I still don't get why you are even considering finishing the degree, even though you clearly tried to explain it to me. Taking eight college classes is a lot of work actually? "Why not" doesn't really seem to cover it. How is doing a "terrible" commute several times per week for two semesters and spending many hours per week a low cost?

You sort of imply that someone is judging you for not having the degree but you didn't give any examples of actually being judged.

If you really really want to prove to yourself that you can do it, or if you really want to learn more math (I agree that taking college courses seems like a fine way to learn more math) then I understand, but based on your post it's not clear to me.

Note that number of scholars is a much more important metric than number of mentors when it comes to evaluating MATS resources, as scholar per mentors varies a bunch (eg over winter I had 10 scholars, which is much more than most mentors). Harder to evaluate from the outside though!

I agree with this overall point, although I think "trade secrets" in the domain of AI can be relevant for people having surprising timelines views that they can't talk about.

School degree may not be a strong signal, but it is legible. If I don't know math, I have no idea whether your math articles make sense, or you're a crackpot. If I don't know programming, I have no idea whether your commits are good. But everyone knows what "I have a degree" means. So basically, school degree is better for "impressing a lot of people a little bit", while the things you did are better for "impressing a few people a lot". Neither is strictly superior to the other.

School typically tries to teach you a lot of things. You could learn any of them much better on your own, but it is unlikely that you would learn all of them, because there is too much knowledge out there. University-educated people will probably judge the knowledge they learned at university as elementary, so from their perspective, you have many gaps in elementary knowledge, which seems bad, even if you have deep knowledge in something else.

And there will always be the question: "if you are smart enough to succeed at school, why didn't you?"

So... if getting the degree is cheap, obviously go for it.

Feeding on conflict and being in fights is something you can learn. It’s a great source of energy if you’re feeling low.

Cool. If you go with it, I'd be super interested to know how it went, and lmk if you need any help or elaboration on the idea.

Fellow not-at-all-a-data-scientist-but-wait-actually-that-sounds-fun here! I don’t know more about it than you do, but I’m glad you asked, since I hope to also benefit from the answers you’ll get :-)

Ah yeah, that actually seems like maybe a good format given that the event-in-question I'm preparing for is "a blogging festival". There is trouble with (one of my goals) being "make something that makes for an interesting in-person-event" (we sorta made our jobs hard by framing an in-person-event around blogging, although I think something like "get two attendees to do this sort of debate framework beforehand, and then maybe have an interviewer/facilitator have a "takeaways discussion panel" might be good)

Copying the text here for convenience:

Here's a debate protocol that I'd like to try. Both participants independently write statements of up to 10K words and send them to each other at the same time. (This can be done through an intermediary, to make sure both statements are sent before either is received.) Then they take a day to revise their statements, fixing the uncovered weak points and preemptively attacking the other's weak points, and send them to each other again. This continues for multiple rounds, until both participants feel they have expressed their position well and don't need to revise more, reaching a kind of Nash equilibrium. Then the final revisions of both statements are released to the public, side by side.

Note that in this kind of debate the participants don't try to change each other's mind. They just try to write something that will eventually sway the public. But they know that if they write wrong stuff that the other side can easily disprove, they won't sway the public. So only the best arguments remain, within the size limit.

I went back to finish college as an adult, and my main surprise was how much fun it was. It probably depends on what classes you have left, but I took every AI class offered and learned a ton that is still relevant to my work today, 20 years later. Even the general classes were fun -- it turns out it's easy to be an excellent student if you're used to working a full work week, and being a good student is way more pleasant and less stressful than being a bad one, or at least it was for me.

I'm not sure what you should do necessarily, but given that you're thinking about this less as useful for anyone in particular and more for other reasons, fun might be a good goal.

As it happened I think the credential ended up useful too, but it was a top school so more valuable than many.

It is worth noting that Mathpix only allows 10 free snips per month. Of course, they do not tell you this until you have installed the program and created an account.