ege_erdogan

If you are getting a PhD without a stipend (~3k usd/month) and even paying tuition on top of that, you are doing something egregiously wrong. The financial opportunity cost is very high though especially in CS.

I see online synchronous 1-2 hour exams as a mistaken result of the "let's emulate in-person teaching in a remote setting" mindset.

You don't succeed in remote teaching and learning by trying to make it as close as possible to the in-person setup. You have to treat it as an entirely different problem.

Consider the synchronous exam. It is a perfect method of grading in-person. It is hard to cheat and all people take the same test in the same place. It is as fair as it can get.

In an online setting however, people can face all sort of troubles in a few hour window in their home. Your internet might stop working, neighbor might be making too much noise etc. Everyone takes the exam in a different setting and it is as unequal as it can get. It is also practically impossible to prevent cheating.

I always appreciate when someone leaves the well-defined path and does something different, such as you self-studying Math and getting enrolled in a Masters program.

I am just curious about your process of actually joining the masters program. They usually require 2-3 letters of recommendation etc. How did you handle such requirements?

> Second, classroom lectures mainly act as a structured table-of-contents for working through various textbooks.

On a side note, actually studying math as an undergrad, I can't stress enough how much I agree with this, especially in a remote setup.

I think the textbook vs. Pinker/Taleb/Dawkins books can be coarsely classified as "fact books" and "idea books".

Pretty much every textbook (especially introductory ones) is a fact book. They are structured summaries of a field of knowledge, and the goal is to convey as much information as possible. There is no room for extended personal commentary.

An idea book on the other hand does not simply present facts, but fits them in a narrative designed by the author. You don't necessarily obtain the overview of a body of knowledge. It is more like having a long chat with the author, who is preferably an expert in said body of knowledge.

For the learning part, idea books are more effective at getting the "big picture" across, while textbooks require more effort by the reader to either memorize the concepts or see how they fit together at a higher level.

In the end I don't think one can be classifies as more effective than the other since they correspond to different needs.

Consider two AI books, the "Modern Approach" textbook by Norvig and Russell, and "Human Compatible" by the same Russell. A student who wants to do AI research should read the textbook, and spend a lot of time studying it. A layperson who wants to get an overview of the AI field as it stands today, and see what are the possible problems that interest a layperson like himself, should read the latter book, spending much less time than the student.

There will be many people migrating to other services once Roam stops being free. This seems like a promising alternative.

For the theoretical part of computer science, Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser is the best there is.

It covers three main topics: - Automata theory - Computability - Computational Complexity

What I especially liked about the book was how he approached proofs. When introducing a proof, there is first a short "proof idea" paragraph that emphasizes the main approach behind the proof informally. He then gives out the full, formal proof. For self-study, those proofs can sometimes be intimidating, and not strictly necessary depending on your goals, but understanding the ideas was important to understand the topic.