Probably better to send me private messages via the LW interface then rather than communicating by email them—do you know how?
JonahS
Karma: 3,508
Thanks for the suggestion.
The actual situation is that over the past 3 months I’ve had a cluster of insights that’s extended far beyond math education as typically conceived, and I think that I’ve finally uncovered a road forward for people in our reference class to (as a group) increase our productivity by ~100x+. (As a point of reference, Bill Gates makes ~$10 billion a year: that should make the factor of 100x less far fetched.)
There are so many things to say that it’s difficult to know where to start. I have ~500 unpublished pages on the subject, but a lot of it is in the form of correspondence and so not easily shared in its current form.
May I asks what your own situation is, so that I can better address it? Feel free to email me at jsinick@gmail.com.
I know that the content itself is clear. The main thing that I need to work on is making my writing more engaging to a broader audience. If the writing isn’t appealing enough to motivate people to read carefully, I’m not going to get through to them :D. I think that Scott Alexander / Yvain would do a better job than I can. I don’t expect to be able to get up to his level, but I hope to move in that direction.
Thanks.
I know that I’m actually far above average after controlling for the complexity of the material that I’m trying to convey, but nature doesn’t grade on a curve: it’s not enough to be at the 99th percentile of academic mathematicians to actually successfully convey ideas to a broad audience of people without technical backgrounds :D.
I’m glad that you’re understanding what I’m writing, but as a practical matter it seems as though I’ve been failing with > 50% of those who I’ve been trying to reach.
I was speaking figuratively / poetically. If I can disseminate what i know to 100 people I’ll be happy, though I hope for more, and it might prove to be unrealistic.
Oh, sure, I know that, I have a very long ways to go. What I meant to convey was that I already have a lot to work on with written communication alone :D. But I am in fact spending more time talking with people in person as well, just only have so much time in the near term...
Thanks.
There are meta-principles that are relevant to learning how to communicate with any group of people, that I’m just starting to learn. Reaching the LW community would be a great starting point, but only makes a small dent in the general problem of knowledge of how to think about the world mathematically in general being very rare, in juxtaposition with the fact that far more people are capable of learning than are currently learning.
Thanks. The issues come across in writing just as much as orally – you’ve already seen them.
By “impact” I meant “efficacy of donating.”
I’m not up to date, but as of 2013 where was an issue of lack of room for more funding.
I’m puzzled, is there a way to read his comment
People described him to me as resembling a young Bill Gates. His estimated expected future wealth based on that data if pursuing entrepreneurship, and informed by the data about the relationship of all of the characteristics I could track with it, was in the 9-figure range. Then add in that facebook was a very promising startup (I did some market sizing estimates for it, and people who looked at it and its early results were reliably impressed).
other than as him doing it at the time?
Great, thanks for letting me know.
A bit more intuition:
In pure math, it’s not uncommon for the statement of a theorem, when unpackaged (with all of the definitions spelled out, relative to what the reader already knows), to span several pages. It’s often the case that if a mere word or two in the statement of a theorem were changed, the statement would be false. So you need to read every word carefully – it’s a sink or swim situation.
Programming has the same character too, but it contrasts with pure math in that it’s easy to place it in a different category from verbal communication in general. Some mathematical proof consists of symbolic manipulation, but the more theoretical areas involve a huge amount of verbal-type reasoning. So you would expect people with background in pure math to have this skill, even if they didn’t before they started learning.
It could be that they were smarter already, or that similar effects are apparent for people with shared non quantitative backgrounds as well.
Yes, there are multiple possible causes. I’m just expressing my intuition (based on a huge amount of evidence that I can’t easily share) and I’m saying that there’s reason to make a Bayesian update in the direction of what I’m saying. Naturally, the size of the update depends on how compelling my perspective seems.
See my comment here. I’ve vetted my ideas in the course of conversations with many good thinkers. By now you’ve seen enough instances in which I’ve appeared to be saying something different from what I was intending to communicate so that you should give substantial weight to that possibility when I say something that seems obviously wrong.
What I meant was in part that what I appeared to be saying to you is not what I believe. There are semantic issued involved (what do the words “universal love and compassion mean?”). I was in fact talking specifically about being able to overcome knee jerk negative reactions to apparent hostility.
I agree with many of your points. Note that we’ve moved some distance afield from the question of whether my post and comments were initially misread.
A large part of my thinking here is that if something that I write seems obviously wrong, there’s probably been a miscommunication—if it were so obvious that a commenter could notice a major flaw in ~30 minutes when I’ve thought about it for hundreds of hours, I would have caught it already! :-)
I don’t understand what that means.
I mean, e.g. that your brain doesn’t have a numerical answer to the question “What’s the probability that I’ll get into a car crash if I drive to work tomorrow morning?”—it has information that can be used to derive a numerical answer, but the number itself isn’t there.
Yes, I need to make the considerations more coherent and explicit. Thanks for the feedback.
I’m a bit confused about the point that you are trying to make here.
I’m not making a point. I do have responses to some of what you say, which I’ll be writing about later.
Thanks, this is great advice.