CFAR - Turning cognitive science into cognitive practice. Andrew Critch - Curriculum Developer and Cofounder @ CFAR : Andrew, who usually goes by "Critch", just finished his PhD in mathematics at UC Berkeley, researching algebro-geometric properties of machine learning models. He completed his B.Sc. with Honors in pure mathematics in just 20 months, and earned the Governor General's Medal as the top undergraduate student at the Memorial University of Newfoundland that year. At the age of 19 he began his PhD in analytic geometry at the University of Toronto, and switched to studying algebraic geometry at Berkeley in 2008. Critch's interest in rationality began as a teenager growing up in a small fishing village of only 250 people in Newfoundland, Canada, where he says he "just had a lot of time to think about it." When he was 14, he made his first attempt to extrapolate his instinctive preferences into a function whose expected integral he wanted to maximize. (In college he found out this was often called a utility function, and that some economists had been crazy enough to think humans worked this way automatically.) Around the same time, he made a serious hobby of finding and resolving philosophical paradoxes, as he saw each paradox as an opportunity to find something wrong with his mind and then improve on it. He also won numerous national awards in mathematics and public-speaking competitions. It was in May of 2011 that he began working on what would become CFAR, when he taught the first rationality "mini-camp" workshop with Anna Salamon, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Luke Muehlhauser. In spring 2012 he created the Math, Productivity, Happiness and Decision-making seminar ("MPHD") at Berkeley with Nisan Stiennon, which was the most attended seminar in the mathematics department that year. That May, he spent one week in Hawaii discussing applications of rationality with partners of Founders Fund venture capital firm, and joined Anna, Julia, and Michael to teach 5 more CFAR workshops that summer and fall, including SPARC. Also that fall, he began working with Nobel Laureate Saul Perlmutter on the development of the UC Berkeley course Sense, Sensibility, and Science, and in 2013, joined the course teaching staff along with Paul and Dan. Besides his interest in math and rationality, he is a former member of the Royal Canadian Air Cadets, composer, tree-climber, and claims that if you've ever seen a Newfoundland dog playing on the beach, you've seen into the limbic system of Andrew Critch. http://rationality.org/critch/ http://acritch.com/ Subscribe to this Channel: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=TheRationalFuture Science, Technology & the Future: http://scifuture.org Humanity+: http://humanityplus.org

• published: 26 May 2014
• views: 194