Yeah, universities don’t reliably teach a lot of things that I’d want people to learn to be Friendliness researchers. Heuristics and Biases is about the closest most universities get to the kind of course you recommend… and most barely have a course on even that.
I’d obviously be recommending lots of Philosophy and Psychology courses as well if most of those courses weren’t so horribly wrong. I looked through the course handbooks and scoured them for courses I could recommend in this area that wouldn’t steer people too wrong. As Luke has mentioned (partially from being part of this search with me), you can still profitably take a minority of philosophy courses at CMU without destroying your mind, a few at MIT, and maybe two or three at Oxford. And there are no respectable, mainstream textbooks to recommend yet.
Believe me, Luke and I are sad beyond words every day of our lives that we have to continue recommending people read a blog to learn philosophy and a ton of other things that colleges don’t know how to teach yet. We don’t particularly enjoy looking crazy to everyone outside of the LW bubble.
Believe me, Luke and I are sad beyond words every day of our lives that we have to continue recommending people read a blog to learn philosophy and a ton of other things that colleges don’t know how to teach yet. We don’t particularly enjoy looking crazy to everyone outside of the LW bubble.
This doesn’t look as bad as it looks like it looks. Among younger mathematicians, I think it’s reasonably well-known that the mathematical blogosphere is of surprisingly high quality and contains many insights that are not easily found in books (see, for example, Fields medalist Terence Tao’s blog). So I would expect that younger mathematicians would not care so much about the difference between a good blog recommendation and a good book recommendation. I, for one, have been learning math from blog posts for years, but I might be an outlier in this regard.
Believe me, Luke and I are sad beyond words every day of our lives that we have to continue recommending people read a blog to learn philosophy and a ton of other things that colleges don’t know how to teach yet. We don’t particularly enjoy looking crazy to everyone outside of the LW bubble.
One hack for this would be to roll the blogposts into an ebook. A small change in title and presentation can make a big difference in terms of perception.
Yeah, universities don’t reliably teach a lot of things that I’d want people to learn to be Friendliness researchers. Heuristics and Biases is about the closest most universities get to the kind of course you recommend… and most barely have a course on even that.
I’d obviously be recommending lots of Philosophy and Psychology courses as well if most of those courses weren’t so horribly wrong. I looked through the course handbooks and scoured them for courses I could recommend in this area that wouldn’t steer people too wrong. As Luke has mentioned (partially from being part of this search with me), you can still profitably take a minority of philosophy courses at CMU without destroying your mind, a few at MIT, and maybe two or three at Oxford. And there are no respectable, mainstream textbooks to recommend yet.
Believe me, Luke and I are sad beyond words every day of our lives that we have to continue recommending people read a blog to learn philosophy and a ton of other things that colleges don’t know how to teach yet. We don’t particularly enjoy looking crazy to everyone outside of the LW bubble.
This doesn’t look as bad as it looks like it looks. Among younger mathematicians, I think it’s reasonably well-known that the mathematical blogosphere is of surprisingly high quality and contains many insights that are not easily found in books (see, for example, Fields medalist Terence Tao’s blog). So I would expect that younger mathematicians would not care so much about the difference between a good blog recommendation and a good book recommendation. I, for one, have been learning math from blog posts for years, but I might be an outlier in this regard.
One hack for this would be to roll the blogposts into an ebook. A small change in title and presentation can make a big difference in terms of perception.
Good idea, and people at MIRI already thought of it.