kpsychwave

As a philosophy major, I would advise you to pay attention to the order in which you expose yourself to materials. The earlier stronger impressions in your journey will naturally have a weight on your opinions of later materials. In addition, academic departments usually have an -ism bias so that will also influence their content recommendations.

A neutral starter would be: Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking

Once you have some formal thinking tools, I would approach philosophy building organically by writing down your beliefs and identifying questions and gaps, and then researching those ad-hoc. You may also discover that your current existing informal / intuitive model is mostly sufficient for a 21st century life.

At least 3 reasons: stereotype threat (related to race), financial aid and socio-economic pragmatics.

Stereotype threat makes people less likely to engage in psychologically risky feedback loops (bad grades, seeking feedback,...), and many higher STEM courses are riskier in this regard.

Many students are forced to engage in work-study programs or work part-time to get through college. STEM curricula (especially engineering) require dedication and ample time.

Pragmatics, higher education is the most expedient path to escaping poverty for the underserved. So pursuing more vocational fields like nursing, professional stuff over a risky long career in academia seems more fruitful.

If my anecdote adds any value: I went to a somewhat rigorous college where most of my STEM classes were mostly Asian or White and I was the usually the only black student. I experienced the stressors mentioned above, the financial one was especially painful.

12 years later, I wish I had chosen a less time consuming field like liberal arts instead of CS/Eng and had a somewhat enjoyable experience.

One of my close Asian friends (with comparable ability) is now a Math professor. His upper middle class background enabled him to pay for his college, and living expenses in grad school. It’s inconceivable that I could have taken a similar track given the reality constraints of my particular situation.

1. Could you please explain the connection between economic growth and the population problem a little more?

I would expect economic development to gradually cause a decline in birth rates? Is there a GDP marker where delta GDP > delta population?

As far as overpopulation, the entire continent of Africa has roughly the same population (1.3b) as India with ~9x the land area so the absolute population density is not dire.

2. If you look at carbon emissions per capita, African countries are relatively carbon neutral. Ethiopia relies mostly on renewable energy and they are also building the largest hydroelectric power plant on the continent. I would expect younger economies to “leap frog” to cleaner and greener tech, having polluted less in total (than countries before them) by the time they attain middle income status.

VPN users are an exception. I would think it would be best to use a proximate node to reduce latency.

For corporation, there is another form of targeting (account based targeting) that relies on IP ranges. I believe DemandBase covers this specific use case.