Don’t have one great idea - have them all!
One of my biggest problems since I awoke from my dogmatic slumber has been focusing on what I want to learn. First, it was Riemann spheres (even though I had no idea what they were and only knew that Mark told me you could divide by zero with them). Then it was differential geometry. Then it was complex analysis, topology, and differential geometry. Then it was those things and neural networks. Then I had to find a job, so it involved all that previous stuff plus programming skills. Then hacking. Now AI and machine learning. And so it goes.
I’m not sure if this is a problem - on one hand, 99% of people I know don’t care about learning once they get out of school. On the other hand, I spend so much time worrying about which things to learn when that I don’t actually end up spending any time learning anything (usually beyond the cover matter and a few chapters of a text, that is, and I don’t even read books like singly linked lists). Don’t blame me for it! I am simultaneously faced with something as interesting as magic AND with a need to self-sustain.
I’m not sure if this is a problem - on one hand, 99% of people I know don’t care about learning once they get out of school. On the other hand, I spend so much time worrying about which things to learn when that I don’t actually end up spending any time learning anything (usually beyond the cover matter and a few chapters of a text, that is, and I don’t even read books like singly linked lists). Don’t blame me for it! I am simultaneously faced with something as interesting as magic AND with a need to self-sustain.
What was the worst about all of this was that as I began to focus, I frequently encountered a sort of decision problem: “Either I can learn semi-boring stuff that is going to be outdated in the next 15 years depending on how close we are to the Singularity, or I can learn stuff that interests me but probably won’t make me any money or help me bring about the singularity,” the former being hacking and development related stuff and the latter being machine learning or physics related stuff.
So tonight, I decide to nail the problem down as optimally as I could by deprecating sections from my library about development and about physics, leaving just hacking and FAI (:= “friendly AI”). I don’t see this as a huge loss for the physics part, as I managed to re-factor all of the math books about manifolds, algebra, and topology into a newly created subsection of my FAI folder for information geometry. And I’m glad to be done trying to force myself to learn development - it’s less work on my shoulders and allows me to focus on a professional subset that I can stick on my resume instead of trying to do everything.
So tonight, I decide to nail the problem down as optimally as I could by deprecating sections from my library about development and about physics, leaving just hacking and FAI (:= “friendly AI”). I don’t see this as a huge loss for the physics part, as I managed to re-factor all of the math books about manifolds, algebra, and topology into a newly created subsection of my FAI folder for information geometry. And I’m glad to be done trying to force myself to learn development - it’s less work on my shoulders and allows me to focus on a professional subset that I can stick on my resume instead of trying to do everything.
Trying to do everything is a really bad idea if you don’t have the time to do everything (or the computing power to do everything in the time you have).
Also, this is the last time I listen to Mark telling me I need to read fiction. A whole weekend and 16 chapters of The Methods of Rationality later……
(note: I realize there are spacing errors in this post - for some reason, my browser [or worse, Tumblr’s servers] aren’t recognizing </br> tags in parts of my text)
Also, this is the last time I listen to Mark telling me I need to read fiction. A whole weekend and 16 chapters of The Methods of Rationality later……
(note: I realize there are spacing errors in this post - for some reason, my browser [or worse, Tumblr’s servers] aren’t recognizing </br> tags in parts of my text)
