Mar 252011
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(-Death)rant.net
Personal Thoughts and Development of a Radically Visionary Thinker
You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “University drop out”.
The current educational system is broken. It needs to go away and be completely replaced.
I so totally agree. Do you have any good ideas how to create a better one?
I would suggest decoupling learning from testing. Outsource all testing to separate testing institutions, so that you can learn undisturbed by the requirement to get tested. If you really need some official validation of your skills or a degree, you can go to a testing center whenever you want.
Other suggestion: Introduce high didactics standards! Establish a certification system for good teaching, good textbooks, good videos and so on. And pay people for providing extra good teaching and materials!
Finally Use THIS: http://campuslife.asus.com/news/index/117 , improve the hardware and software and everything will be cool.
Oh, and make learning SOCIAL and GAMIFY it!
Edit: Watch this: The Future of Education: Online and Quantified! It’s awesome³!
Writing about your ideas, eh? How convenient that the best philantropic project out of all the philantropic projects you thought of happens to be the one with the one with the potential for the greatest personal prestige and fame.
Yeah, that’s a pretty clever and justified remark! Thanks for pointing out this issue!
This shows that I haven’t been clear enough why I prefer working on my own projects. And it’s really a non-trivial problem to justify my position. I had to ponder about this issue for a while to think about a good answer.
First of all, as a utilitarian it would be the best to work for the project with the highest utility (assuming we could measure that in some way and consider all probabilities and so on). But here comes the biggest problem: It’s extremely difficult to estimate which project really has the highest utility. There’s just too much uncertainty even to make an educated guess. It’s even difficult to make an educated guess about which kind of project has the highest utility. Nearly all projects with a potential high positive impact qualify for that position. Some examples:
1. Imagine a scientist discovered some kind of cheap neuro-enhancer which raises the IQ by 10-30 points. That might be the critical component that helps us to solve all remaining problems.
2. What about a politician which becomes leader of an influential industrial nation and lets it invest billions into the most effective projects which could have tremendous positive effects.
3. Or think about a project which raises the ethical competence of billions of people (at least indirectly). That might create peace, end poverty, reduce global warming, stop the worst kinds of suffering, and make people aware about the most important remaining problems.
4. Some project which solves the friendly AI problem “correctly” and effectively could finally lead us into a great future.
Which of these projects would have the highest utility? Projects 1, 2 and 3 can have huge positive influence on the other projects. Project 4 might have the highest direct impact, but if projects 1, 2 or 3 have a very strong positive influence on the probability of the success of project 4, then the previous projects can have higher utility in fact.
I have to admit that I have no clue which real projects might have the highest utility, and the more I think about that problem, the less certain I get about my intuitions. In that situation of uncertainty I just assume that my project is on par with other projects with potential high impact. That might be an unjustified assumption, but it’s my default position until I have evidence that it’s clearly inferior to others. Until I have strong evidence that one of the projects with high potential impact is clearly superior or inferior it seems to be reasonable that all of them have roughly equal utility.
But what’s actually important in this discussion is not the utility of a project per se, but how much I can increase the utility of a project. There are two important factors, which have to considered here:
A. Diminishing returns: It might be the case that the utility per person of a project decreases with the number of participating persons. I’m not too sure about this point, so let’s consider the next one.
B. I am more motivated to work on my own project, so it is reasonable to expect that working on my project would create more utility than on any other project. However, if I found a project that could motivate me even more than my own, then it would be more reasonable for me to work on that alternative project.
And finally, I do not feel that I am very motivated by personal prestige or fame. I rather prefer working on my project in spite of the risk of attaining prestige and fame. I just believe in the quality and importance of my ideas. That is, until others can really convince me that my ideas are wrong.
Thoughts of the old:
But why?
So, why don’t I use these skills to finish my studies quickly? There are some important reasons why I decided to quit:
1.I’ve attained real clarity about my career preferences. Staying in academia or getting a regular job as mathematician isn’t really that what I want to do. There are too many restrictions that come with these kinds of careers. Only a life as freelancer or entrepreneur allows me to do exactly what I want to do.
>I see that in your writings.
2.The stuff I have to learn at university isn’t that what I am really interested in. And it’s not really useful for my purposes.
>I agree with that.
3.Learning all the crazy stuff which is asked in the exams would be a big source of frustration, and a great waste of time, as there are more important things I need to learn. I don’t need to know all that special knowledge in order to write good books. And even if I did, I could learn it on my own anyway.
> I agree with that.
4.I’ve finally learned the basic skills required to have a realistic chance of success in a career as freelancer or entrepreneur.
> I disagree with this….and this is why my preference would be if you are able to face down the wall of knowledge……the first bit of creditablity is proving that one knows and understands the “old” postulates.
Thanks for your opinions, Arch!
What do you suggest that I should learn first? Do you think it would be a better idea to get a degree in philosophy or psychology first? I rather believe in autodidactic learning, as I have learned how to do that effectively by now. In any case, I think real visible skills, rather than a paper that might possibly indicate that you have some amount of them, are much more important for my purposes.