Created: April 02, 2021
Modified: April 02, 2021
Modified: April 02, 2021
high leverage projects
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- What are some things that people are doing now that are just clearly valuable?
- 3blue1brown: So much of math is hidden behind notation. Seeing through the notation, to the objects and mechanisms it describes, is difficult and a major barrier to learning math. A good math lecturer can draw pictures and give you a sense of what's going on inside the Fourier transform, or a differential equation, or a neural network. But most lecturers don't have the time or skill to do this well, and chalkboards are a limited medium. 3Blue1Brown makes explanatory videos that are better than the best lectures ever given. They make it so much easier to see what's really going on. If I'd had these in high school and college, I would understand math better than I do now, and the next generations of students are going to be tangibly smarter and more engaged because of these videos.
- Note the winner-takes-all nature of the internet. There are tons of math videos out there. It might seem insane to put so much effort into producing a new one, when what's out there is already pretty good. But the effort put into a really good explanation can pay off a billion times over.
- probabilistic programming: I'm not energized about this right now, and I don't see it as the most important thing to work on. But tools like Stan are revolutionizing how statistics is done, and how people are taught to think about statistical modeling.
- Psychedelic therapy: depression, PTSD, and related illnesses are probably the single worst thing in the world, and a big reason why I see the world as negative utility. There's evidence that psychedelics can provide breakthrough treatments for these conditions. This could be the single greatest improvement in human wellbeing ever.
- AI research: obviously there's a lot to be said here. But intelligence is the source of everything good that humanity has. Improvements to intelligence will eventually pay off in literally every single other domain. General problem-solving is clearly possible, and if you believe that, it's still clearly one of the highest-leverage things to pursue.