Hmm, could be useful. My biggest concern is that my degree is in geology, so it is obviously not directly applicable. How much opportunity is there to get involved given that my training is fairly irrelevant? I have something of a philosophy background, and math through calculus II, but my formal education isn’t going to help.
How you spent your time in formal education isn’t that relevant if you have done really awesome things outside of formal training.
Most of skills that are most important for CFAR don’t get taught in formal education.
Let’s take the first question in the CFAR article:
What traditions (e.g., self-experimentation) do you have to draw on, in helping us invent an art of rationality?
We aim to invent a new art of rationality—something that incorporates Bayesian reasoning, the heuristics and biases literature, etc., but that is more usable, more thorough, and just generally better. Please tell us anything you can about why you are well-positioned to help us. (Do you have background with quantified self? Meditation? Practice changing your own or others’ habits? Tell us about anything like that—erring on the side of inclusion.)
What’s your answer?
For me those answer to that question doesn’t have anything to do with what I learned in university.
I have answer it briefly with simply checking their boxes of “Do you have background with quantified self? Meditation? Practice changing your own or others’ habits?” it’s:
1) I was first person to speak about Quantified Self as a practitioner to the German media, and at the beginning I was one of the leading person to build the German QS community. 2) I first meditated 10 years ago and since roughly three and a half years I meditate in group settings. I also led well received meditations at two LW events. 3) As far as habit change goes, I’m trained in NLP, Hypnosis and been to other coach training programs, I was one of the moderators of a big personal development forum for 4 years
I could also expand and add other things that they don’t directly query but which are related to building the art of rationality.
For my impression the easiest way into working with CFAR is likely to do one of their workshops and then apply everything of it in your life and teach the material to other people.
When Valentine was at EU-LWCW he said that only one person who took CFAR workshops really went and hold his own workshops outside of CFAR. If you would show yourself capable of that feat that would demonstrate relevant capacity.
Math tutoring is also building useful skills for CFAR, so the time you spend on it is useful.
As far as CFAR goes read http://rationality.org/hiring/.
For MIRI there’s https://intelligence.org/careers/
Hmm, could be useful. My biggest concern is that my degree is in geology, so it is obviously not directly applicable. How much opportunity is there to get involved given that my training is fairly irrelevant? I have something of a philosophy background, and math through calculus II, but my formal education isn’t going to help.
How you spent your time in formal education isn’t that relevant if you have done really awesome things outside of formal training.
Most of skills that are most important for CFAR don’t get taught in formal education.
Let’s take the first question in the CFAR article:
What’s your answer?
For me those answer to that question doesn’t have anything to do with what I learned in university. I have answer it briefly with simply checking their boxes of “Do you have background with quantified self? Meditation? Practice changing your own or others’ habits?” it’s:
1) I was first person to speak about Quantified Self as a practitioner to the German media, and at the beginning I was one of the leading person to build the German QS community.
2) I first meditated 10 years ago and since roughly three and a half years I meditate in group settings. I also led well received meditations at two LW events.
3) As far as habit change goes, I’m trained in NLP, Hypnosis and been to other coach training programs, I was one of the moderators of a big personal development forum for 4 years
I could also expand and add other things that they don’t directly query but which are related to building the art of rationality.
For my impression the easiest way into working with CFAR is likely to do one of their workshops and then apply everything of it in your life and teach the material to other people.
When Valentine was at EU-LWCW he said that only one person who took CFAR workshops really went and hold his own workshops outside of CFAR. If you would show yourself capable of that feat that would demonstrate relevant capacity.
Math tutoring is also building useful skills for CFAR, so the time you spend on it is useful.