What can you teach us?

I always wanted to write a book about "snake oil". I.E. Profitable practices based on misinformation, or in general profitable practices which only benefit one party without crossing a certain threshold of parasitism through force (i.e slavery)

Although the dangerous thought now occurs to me that perhaps people selling weight loss cures have their own form of enslavement in play...

I can help out with things in the math/statistics vein. I can go over stuff commonly taught in schools but in a more fun way (maybe probability theory but I take requests), stuff that's particularly relevant to LessWrong (an intuitive explanation behind Occam's Razor), or ideas I'm interested in that are more current and rarely found in textbooks (sparse approximation, dictionary learning, diffusion maps).

I've thought about compiling a post or a few about "The Math They Didn't Teach You," as I've found that linear algebra courses don't teach the most useful linear algebra techniques & algorithms, probability classes don't teach the most useful theorems, etc. for very standard computational purposes.

ETA: I can take care of compression.

• statistical machine learning
• robotics
• convex optimization
• computer vision

I consider myself to have a decent understand of art that might be helpful.

I actually asked myself this question a while ago and started writing a post about it but I don't have the writing skill or focus to actually write something myself.

In descending order of expertise:

• Cryptography (from a theoretical perspective)
• Computational Complexity theory (particularly, proof systems)
• Algorithms / Data Structures
• Quantum computing (particularly quantum cryptography and quantum complexity)
• Mathematical logic (including recursion theory)
• Mechanism design (and the required notions of game theory / economics)
• Compressed sensing / sketching

Psychology!

I've been considering writing an article about game design and learning; possible topics:

• Relationship between fun (in games) and learning

• The psychology of learning (reward, punishment, boredom, challenge)

• Analysis of these aspect in existing games (in genre evolution, "casual" vs. "hardcore" games, learnable game mechanics vs. story)

• Game development (importance of iteration, playtesting, willingness to throw bad ideas away)

... though I feel the last two may be a bit off-topic for LessWrong, except maybe in the context of developing a game aimed at teaching specific rationality skills -- I'm not convinced myself that a game is the best approach to teach skills, it's just the one I know the best. Note that the lines are blurry between games and exercises such as Anki and Dual-n-back.

Could people say more about what they hope to get out of learning more about cryptography?

I would like to see introductory posts covering the following fields:

• Decision theory
• Computation
• Encryption
• Compression
• Complexity theory

Additionally I would like to see a post discussing possible conclusions that can be drawn from the Fermi paradox (e.g. how to update on the probability of a Paperclip maximizer given that we are unable to observe any paper-clippers burning the cosmic commons).

Can you do that? Thanks :-)