I think this comment suggests there’s a wide inferential gap here. Let me see if I can help bridge it a little.
If the goal is to teach Math Olympiad winners important reasoning skills, then I question this goal. They just won the Math Olympiad. If any group of people already had well developed logic and reasoning skills, it would be them. I don’t doubt that they already have a strong grasp of Bayes’ rule.
I feel fairly strongly that this goal is still important. I think that the most valuable resource that the EA/rationality/LTF community has is the ability to think clearly about important questions. Nick Bostrom advises politicians, tech billionaires, and the founders of the leading AI companies, and it’s not because he has the reasoning skills of a typical math olympiad. There are many levels of skill, and Nick Bostrom’s is much higher[1].
It seems to me that these higher level skills are not easily taught, even to the brightest minds. Notice how society’s massive increase in the number of scientists has failed to produce anything like linearly more deep insights. I have seen this for myself at Oxford University, where many of my fellow students could compute very effectively but could not then go on to use that math in a practical application, or even understand precisely what it was they’d done. The author, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is a renowned explainer of scientific reasoning, and HPMOR is one of his best works for this. See the OP for more models of what HPMOR does especially right here.
In general I think someone’s ability to think clearly, in spite of the incentives around them, is one of the main skills required for improving the world, much more so than whether they have a community affiliation with EA [2]. I don’t think that any of the EA materials you mention helps people gain this skill. But I think for some people, HPMOR does.
I’m focusing here on the claim that the intent of this grant is unfounded. To help communicate my perspective here, when I look over the grants this feels to me like one of the ‘safest bets’. I am interested to know whether this perspective makes the grant’s intent feel more reasonable to anyone reading who initially felt pretty blindsided by it.
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[1] I am not sure exactly how widespread this knowledge is. Let me just say that it’s not Bostrom’s political skills that got him where he is. When the future-head-of-IARPA decided to work at FHI, Bostrom’s main publication was a book on anthropics. I think Bostrom did excellent work on important problems, and this is the primary thing that has drawn people to work with and listen to him.
[2] Although I think being in these circles changes your incentives, which is another way to get someone to do useful work. Though again I think the first part is more important to get people to do the useful work you’ve not already figured out how to incentivise—I don’t think we’ve figured it all out yet.
I think this comment suggests there’s a wide inferential gap here. Let me see if I can help bridge it a little.
I feel fairly strongly that this goal is still important. I think that the most valuable resource that the EA/rationality/LTF community has is the ability to think clearly about important questions. Nick Bostrom advises politicians, tech billionaires, and the founders of the leading AI companies, and it’s not because he has the reasoning skills of a typical math olympiad. There are many levels of skill, and Nick Bostrom’s is much higher[1].
It seems to me that these higher level skills are not easily taught, even to the brightest minds. Notice how society’s massive increase in the number of scientists has failed to produce anything like linearly more deep insights. I have seen this for myself at Oxford University, where many of my fellow students could compute very effectively but could not then go on to use that math in a practical application, or even understand precisely what it was they’d done. The author, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is a renowned explainer of scientific reasoning, and HPMOR is one of his best works for this. See the OP for more models of what HPMOR does especially right here.
In general I think someone’s ability to think clearly, in spite of the incentives around them, is one of the main skills required for improving the world, much more so than whether they have a community affiliation with EA [2]. I don’t think that any of the EA materials you mention helps people gain this skill. But I think for some people, HPMOR does.
I’m focusing here on the claim that the intent of this grant is unfounded. To help communicate my perspective here, when I look over the grants this feels to me like one of the ‘safest bets’. I am interested to know whether this perspective makes the grant’s intent feel more reasonable to anyone reading who initially felt pretty blindsided by it.
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[1] I am not sure exactly how widespread this knowledge is. Let me just say that it’s not Bostrom’s political skills that got him where he is. When the future-head-of-IARPA decided to work at FHI, Bostrom’s main publication was a book on anthropics. I think Bostrom did excellent work on important problems, and this is the primary thing that has drawn people to work with and listen to him.
[2] Although I think being in these circles changes your incentives, which is another way to get someone to do useful work. Though again I think the first part is more important to get people to do the useful work you’ve not already figured out how to incentivise—I don’t think we’ve figured it all out yet.