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Perfectly Normal: What to study - a fourth option

perfectlynormal.co.uk · 551 words · saved by 1 readers

This is a short post I thought I'd share, inspired by a conversation I had with someone recently about choosing courses to study during university. The three main reasons I usually saw people (including myself) choosing courses were (in some order): When I looked back at which courses I found had been most helpful for me, I didn't see much correlation with any of those three courses (except for possibly the first one). The common thread among courses that I remember today is that the overall flavour of the course (i.e. the kinds of problems it offered, and the kinds of reasoning it made me practice) was much more predictive of how useful I'd eventually find it. I currently work in mechanistic interpretability, and a lot of the kinds of reasoning I find myself practicing on a daily basis came from some of these courses. To give a few examples: There are two obvious difficulties here - that of knowing which courses are relevant for which kinds of thinking, and knowing which kinds of thin

Perfectly Normal --> --> PERFECTLY NORMAL CALLUM MCDOUGALL This image was created using a variant of my thread art algorithm - read more here . What to study - a fourth option This is a short post I thought I'd share, inspired by a conversation I had with someone recently about choosing courses to study during university. The three main reasons I usually saw people (including myself) choosing courses were (in some order): How much they enjoyed the course How good they were at the course How directly useful the course would be (for future courses / university paths, or for careers) When I looke

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