Hi,
I first found this a while back site after googling something like “how to not procrastinate” and finding one of Eliezer’s articles. I’ve been slowly working may way through the sequences ever since, and i think they are significantly changing my life.
I’m very interested in self improvement/ instrumental rationality type stuff. I’ve been using this summer to experiment with various projects: learning mediation, learning about different types of therapy to systematically overcome fears, learning about biases and some other stuff.. I’m currently messing around with a productivity/ organisation system whereby I allocate point to myself for good behaviours and deduct points for bad behaviours, and either give myself a reward or pay a penalty as part of a commitment contract depending on how many points I’ve scored (sometimes my self-improvement ideas get a bit obsessive..)
I’ve just finished secondary education, which was a mess, and so i’m now quite excited to have more control over my own learning. I’ve been very interested in rationality since I was young, and have been passionate about philosophy because of this. Though, after getting into this site i’ve been reading some pretty damaging criticisms of the study of philosophy (at least traditional philosophy and the content that seems to be taught in most universities), and now i’m beginning to question whether i’m really interested in philosophy, and if it is valuable to study, or whether what i’m really after is something more like cognitive science.
This leads me to a problem: I’ve been offered a place at Oxford University for a course of Philosophy and Psychology and I’m considering trying to change to just study psychology or psychology and linguistics. I’m in the process of familiarizing myself with the basics of all of these fields, and i’m writing letters to my old philosophy teachers with this articlehttp://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html attached to see how well the criticism can be answered. My problem is though that i’m at best a knowledgeable amateur in these subjects, and i’m finding it hard to make a decision about which subjects to study—I don’t know what I haven’t studied yet so I don’t know how important it is for me to know. Any advice on this or generally how to make the decision would be much appreciated, especially if you are familiar with the UK univeristy system, especially if you have studied philosophy. My overall aim for my education is pretty well expressed by parts of less wrong—i want to become more rational, in both my beliefs and my actions (although i find the parts of less wrong about epistemology, self-improvement and anti-akrasia more relevant to this than the parts about AI, maths and physics).
Also, i found solved questions repository, but is there a standard place for problems which people need help solving—as if it exists it may be a better place for parts of this post...?
Cheers
Hi, I first found this a while back site after googling something like “how to not procrastinate” and finding one of Eliezer’s articles. I’ve been slowly working may way through the sequences ever since, and i think they are significantly changing my life.
I’m very interested in self improvement/ instrumental rationality type stuff. I’ve been using this summer to experiment with various projects: learning mediation, learning about different types of therapy to systematically overcome fears, learning about biases and some other stuff.. I’m currently messing around with a productivity/ organisation system whereby I allocate point to myself for good behaviours and deduct points for bad behaviours, and either give myself a reward or pay a penalty as part of a commitment contract depending on how many points I’ve scored (sometimes my self-improvement ideas get a bit obsessive..)
I’ve just finished secondary education, which was a mess, and so i’m now quite excited to have more control over my own learning. I’ve been very interested in rationality since I was young, and have been passionate about philosophy because of this. Though, after getting into this site i’ve been reading some pretty damaging criticisms of the study of philosophy (at least traditional philosophy and the content that seems to be taught in most universities), and now i’m beginning to question whether i’m really interested in philosophy, and if it is valuable to study, or whether what i’m really after is something more like cognitive science.
This leads me to a problem: I’ve been offered a place at Oxford University for a course of Philosophy and Psychology and I’m considering trying to change to just study psychology or psychology and linguistics. I’m in the process of familiarizing myself with the basics of all of these fields, and i’m writing letters to my old philosophy teachers with this articlehttp://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html attached to see how well the criticism can be answered. My problem is though that i’m at best a knowledgeable amateur in these subjects, and i’m finding it hard to make a decision about which subjects to study—I don’t know what I haven’t studied yet so I don’t know how important it is for me to know. Any advice on this or generally how to make the decision would be much appreciated, especially if you are familiar with the UK univeristy system, especially if you have studied philosophy. My overall aim for my education is pretty well expressed by parts of less wrong—i want to become more rational, in both my beliefs and my actions (although i find the parts of less wrong about epistemology, self-improvement and anti-akrasia more relevant to this than the parts about AI, maths and physics).
Also, i found solved questions repository, but is there a standard place for problems which people need help solving—as if it exists it may be a better place for parts of this post...? Cheers