Aha, mastery is the question, isn’t it? I have no full answer for that.
Does the OP really mean mastery or setting one on the path to mastery? Perhaps a series of MOOC-like college courses would be more appropriate to gradually introduce and incrementally advance one’s demonstrated understanding of LW content over time (and multiple courses).
Perhaps a parallel for the syllabus and starting point of a MOOC style would be Coursera’s Critical Thinking or How To Argue courses.
Other professional goals, skills, or structure-based needs might be satisfied by college,
As you pointed out earlier in your response, Internet learning (and LW in particular) could have been particularly useful before attending college. I would go one step further and suggest that attending college and learning from the internet should not be mutually exclusive for those who are interesting in learning and making a potential college social life trade-off.
I currently believe that most students attending college realize that the degree itself is of primary signalling importance, even if they’re not able to explicitly articulate why.
Sorry this is a small nitpick. The main searchlores author is Fravia, not Favia. He was instrumental in providing a community and rallying point for various reversing groups. He was anonymous for quite some time, until he passed away in 2009.
There are lots of open source research programs for graphical model stuff.
@jamesf—which one of the programs will you be picking?
What type of work in software would you like to do? The rest of my comment will assume that you mean the software technology industry, and not programming specifically.
There are many individual contributor roles in technology companies. Being a developer is one of them. Others may include field deployment specialists, system administrator, pre-sales engineers, sales or the now popular “data scientist”.
I agree that credentials help with hiring and promotions. When I evaluate staff with little work experience graduate credentials play a role in my evaluation.
They say that getting a graduate degree will be worthwhile even if I could have learned equally valuable skills by other means.
If you could have learned equally valuable skills by other means, then the graduate degree almost always comes out on top due to signalling/credentialing factor. However, usually this isn’t the case. Usually the graduate degree is framed as a trade-off between the actual signalling factor, coursework, research and graduate institution vs. work experience directly relevant to your particular domain of expertise. There are newer alternative graduate degrees programs that may be more useful to you with your strong undergraduate mathematics base such as Masters of Financial Engineering*, Masters in Data Science that offer a different route to obtaining an interesting job in the software industry without necessarily going through a more “traditional” CS graduate program.
I think I would enjoy and do well in graduate school, but if it makes little career difference, I don’t think I would go. I think much will depend on the pedigree of the graduate school and the work that you can showcase (a portfolio of sorts) upon completion that will determine magnitude of career impact.
If you are dead set on being a programmer for the next 10 years, please consider why. The reason I bring this up is because some college seniors I’ve talked to can clearly visualize working as a developer, but find it harder to visualize what it’s like doing other jobs in the technology industry, or worse have uninformed and incorrect stereotypes of the types of work involved with different roles (canonical example are technology sales roles, where anybody technical seems to have a distaste for salespeople).
It you are still firmly aiming to be a developer, it may help to narrow down what type of programming you like to do, such as web, embedded, systems, tooling, etc., and also spend a bit of time at least trying to imagine companies you’d like to work for evaluated on different dimensions (e.g. industry, departmental function, Fortune 500, billing/security/telco infrastructure/mobile, etc.).
One additional point to consider is why not do both by working full-time and immediately embarking on a part-time graduate degree? Granted, some graduate degrees (e.g. certain institutions or program structure) don’t allow for part-time enrollment, but it’s at least something to consider. That way you cover both bases.
* Google MFE or “Masters Financial Engineering”—many US programs have sprung up over the past several years
EDIT: I apologize in advance for the US-centric links in case you are outside of N. America.
I did not understand the math. I have more to learn. Thanks.
What about ARthUrpHilIpDenu? It stands to gain the resources of a galaxy. The difference between default (a leaf) and utopia (all the resources of a galaxy dedicated to making leaves) is unimaginably humongous. And yet that huge difference will get normalised to one: the ARthUrpHilIpDenu’s utility function will get divided by a huge amount. It will weigh very little in any sum.
[Emphasis added]
Why is the difference normalized to one instead of zero when considering ARthUrpHilIpDenu?
I wish the paper was available to read. Do you have a copy available?
Trading would imply that Swimmer963 is giving up some of her attractiveness in exchange for attention, by treating ‘beauty’ as a resource that can be depleted. However, her attractiveness in your example of the trade (beauty attention) isn’t depleted significantly.
Perhaps you meant something like trading her spatio-temporal presence (in which the subject gets to admire her visage in a non-awkward social situation for a prolonged period of time) in exchange for the subject’s attention; or more succinctly, trading face time with attention?
I agree with you that some advantages can indeed be comparative advantages, but beauty (in this context) is simply an advantage.
You have three conflicting goals that only you can weight accordingly:
Work at a successful startup (fame, fortune, culture or vision)
Find a mate / companionship
Employment market desirability hedge (what-if...)
What I would really like to do is build my own startup, or join a startup that I think has good prospects.
Winner: London.
The pool of women I am interested in dating is much bigger there. Dating prospects are probably less good [...]
Winner: London.
[...] and also the long-term effect of accepting a pay cut—if I worked in London again later, would I be able to negotiate my salary back up?
Winner: London.
Everything else sounds like noise, or sounds like they should be assigned lower weightings than the three concerns above. Another factor that you only can answer is how much extra time you’ll carve out to keep up desirable startup skills (designer? developer? business?) while in London, as you mentioned that the London job will only allow you to specialize in an unattractive skill. This statement alone makes me wonder exactly what your previous two startup roles were—if your skillset was good enough to join two prior startups, why would 18months of another skill diminish your existing desirability, both to startups and larger organizations in general?
Until you can provide weightings on the above, London sounds like the better choice due to the flexibility it offers you in the future, provided you have enough motivation and discipline to (a) stay actively engaged in the (presumably) larger London startup/tech scene; (b) spend (some) spare time on side projects to remain desirable to both future large employers and startups; (c) find a mate.
One counterpoint that you already mentioned was that Glasgow would give you more money after-tax. If the Glasgow vs. London after-tax income delta is large, and if your true primary 18mo goal is to “[...] get a financial cushion under myself before trying again”, then clearly Glasgow is the way to go. Also, quick Google searches show that there seems to be more interest in boosting the Scottish tech scene in Glasgow and Edinburough. Depends on how serious you are about jumping back into the startup scene after 18 months.
We cooperate to compete, and a high level of fellow feeling makes us better able to unite to destroy outsiders.
--Robert Bigelow
How about starting in a supportive domain that you happen to be interested in where existing taxonomies and skill progressions seem to exist?
Tech/skill trees help with the visualization process, and that goes a long way to motivation. Much of my struggle battling akrasia and learning math & beginner rationality is to try to stop imagining forbidding mountains of concepts, nomenclature and future practice, and instead focus on images of cartoonish/animated tech trees that are more appealing, tractable and familiar (for those of us with gaming backgrounds); ultimately, anything less intimidating than an impassible mountain to climb.
Added bonus: You will probably not find a more willing group of participants to enthusiastically input, rate and measure themselves on their cognitive and rationalist skills.
Added bonus 2: I speculate that CFAR may be able to integrate this type of system as additional value-add for post-workshop alumni.
edit: “Data Scientist” seems to be a buzz word used to trigger competence and desirability in job candidates. Here’s an example of a visual roadmap: http://nirvacana.com/thoughts/becoming-a-data-scientist/. I think other people are willing to create skill trees, but the missing ingredient is the ability to animate and infuse them with meaning over time (i.e. referring back to your ideas of tests for each node/module with clear achievement and progress indicators).
Now you’re at the point where the career center tries to usher you into a job at megacorp or lure you into formal graduate school.
Depending on which region of the world you’re in, the term “Engineer” may have certain regulatory obligations, meaning that you may feel the (sometimes debatable) allure of attempting to work enough years (usually 3) under an accredited engineer to earn your own designation; at least, so it seems in some countries.
Enthusiastically pursue some different avenue of research, persuading others to follow you
I am reading Kaj Sotala’s latest paper “Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk: A Survey” and I was struck by this thread regarding ethically concerned scientists. MIRI is following this option by enthusiastically pursuing FAI (slightly different avenue of research) and trying to persuade and convince others to do the same.
EDIT: My apologies—I removed the second part of my comment proactively because it dealt with hypothetical violence of radical ethically motivated scientists.
Canonical software development examples emphasizing “proving safety/usefulness before running” over the “tool” software development approach are cryptographic libraries and NASA space shuttle navigation.
At the time of writing this comment, there was recent furor over software called CryptoCat that didn’t provide enough warnings that it was not properly vetted by cryptographers and thus should have been assumed to be inherently insecure. Conventional wisdom and repeated warnings from the security community state that cryptography is extremely difficult to do properly and attempting to create your own may result in catastrophic results. A similar thought and development process goes into space shuttle code.
It seems that the FAI approach to “proving safety/usefulness” is more similar to the way cryptographic algorithms are developed than the (seemingly) much faster “tool” approach, which is more akin to web development where the stakes aren’t quite as high.
EDIT: I believe the “prove” approach still allows one to run snippets of code in isolation, but tends to shy away from running everything end-to-end until significant effort has gone into individual component testing.
The link is broken. Seems that MIT has an e-book storefront and understandably wants to charge for the electronic version.
This will teach me to skim next time. Thanks.
Maybe you need better machines.
This should be one of the LW Rationality Quotes for next month.
Your math education link is incorrectly specified and leads to a 404 on the LW website instead of directing to your http://mathisbeauty.org site.
Plugging your terms into Google turned up some immediate links. This one seems to have behaviorism references to the underlying studies.