If I were this professor I would make every effort to design it only as a minor. Even better if I were allowed, I would just make it two one-semester courses. This is for two reasons—the first is that rationality should be used for things, and so planning for someone to major in rationality would be silly. The second is that the core content of rationality really isn’t that big—it’s just a bit hard.
So what courses would I list as prerequisites for my rationality courses? A statistics class, and that’s it. Philosophy, neuroscience etc. are icing on the cake and can be applied with short readings.
Any sort—as long as it teaches you the standard notation and basic identities (including Bayes’ theorem, so in that sense Bayesian :P ). My reasoning is that I’d have to spend two or three weeks covering the basics of probability if I didn’t require it, and statistics is a useful life skill so requiring it wouldn’t waste very many peoples’ time.
Of course at some point I could mention that probabilities usually come from reasoning from incomplete information, which is a property of you and not the world. That really only takes a paragraph if you’re already covering map and territory.
If I were this professor I would make every effort to design it only as a minor. Even better if I were allowed, I would just make it two one-semester courses. This is for two reasons—the first is that rationality should be used for things, and so planning for someone to major in rationality would be silly. The second is that the core content of rationality really isn’t that big—it’s just a bit hard.
So what courses would I list as prerequisites for my rationality courses? A statistics class, and that’s it. Philosophy, neuroscience etc. are icing on the cake and can be applied with short readings.
Bayesian statistics, right?
Any sort—as long as it teaches you the standard notation and basic identities (including Bayes’ theorem, so in that sense Bayesian :P ). My reasoning is that I’d have to spend two or three weeks covering the basics of probability if I didn’t require it, and statistics is a useful life skill so requiring it wouldn’t waste very many peoples’ time.
Of course at some point I could mention that probabilities usually come from reasoning from incomplete information, which is a property of you and not the world. That really only takes a paragraph if you’re already covering map and territory.