Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

So that he can work full time on OurBigBook.com and revolutionize advanced university-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics eduction for all ages.

Donating to Ciro is the most effective donation per dollar that you can make to:

Ciro's goal in life is to help kids as young as possible to reach, and the push, the frontiers of natural sciences human knowledge, linking it to applications that might be the the next big thing as early as possible. Because nothing is more motivating to students than that feeling of:rather than repeating the same crap that everyone is already learning.

To do this, Ciro wants to work in parallel both on:

Ciro believes that this rare combination of both:produces a virtuous circle, because Ciro:

As explained at OurBigBook.com and high flying bird scientist, Ciro is most excited to make contributions at the "missing middle level of specialization" that lies around later undergrad and lower grad education:But on that middle sweet spot, Ciro believes that something can be done, in such as way that delivers:in a way that is:

Ciro believes that today's society just keep saying over and over: "STEM is good", "STEM is good", "STEM is good" as a religious mantra, but fails miserably at providing free learning material and interaction opportunities for people to actually learn it at a deep enough level to truly appreciate why "STEM is good". This is what he wants to fix.

The following quote is ripped from Gwern Branwen's Patreon page, and it perfectly synthesizes how Ciro feels as well:

In addition to all of this, financial support also helps Ciro continue his general community support activities:

Haven't found the one yet:

Optional but really ideal:

The state of messaging is ridiculous as of 2020.

Ciro Santilli's Linux distro of choice as of 2019.

It ain't perfect, but it's decent enough.

The greatest advantage of it being that it has the likely largest desktop user base, and therefore the highest likelihood that your problems are solved on Ask Ubuntu, and goes together with Ciro's philosophy that "people should do everything in the same way to factor stuff out", especially the open source losers.

Ciro considers that the killer flaw of Ubuntu, and most desktop distros of 2020, is that no one under the Sun knows how to build them fully from source: Linux distribution buildable from source. This is why Ciro based the Linux Kernel Module Cheat on Buildroot, see also: Linux distribution buildable from source.

Ciro Santilli is against affirmative action university entry quotas that reserve spaces e.g. for students from discriminated races or poor families. Instead, he believes that affirmative action should take place on earlier stages of education as described at: free gifted education.

Notably, Brazil has implemented a very heavy university entry quota system after Ciro had left university there: www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23862676

This is of course easy for a white male from a privileged background to say, and infinite debate has already been had on this matter, but here goes again.

First, in defense to the personal attack, Ciro raises the fact that he has dedicated large chunks (all?) of his life to open source software and knowledge in general, which Ciro believes is the only way to actually make the world fairer to poor countries. His money (time) is where his mouth is.

One good argument in favor of the Brazilian quota system, is that the kids who enter university because of quotas do just as well as those who don't.

Ciro has actually believes that this is possible, and offers the following possible explanation: most of pre-university knowledge is useless, and university selection system is crap, and Ciro wants to destroy it with a system in which anyone can learn university stuff from home.

Both the top end of the quota and non-quota kids are basically equally capable of doing useful stuff therefore.

Only a tiny fraction of what you learn in high school is useful for university or your career.

And possibly more importantly than knowledge, Ciro saw many of his colleagues (basically all of which were from relatively privileged backgrounds) "do badly" in university, because of lack of motivation, because they had chosen a course only to find that they were not interested in it because the existing high school educational system is crap and does not help them find what they love and because it costs you several years of your life to change your choice in most universities (long live École Polytechnique).

Maybe the fact that poor kids know that they are fucked if they fail, and so they have to succeed at any cost, might also help with motivation. Which is a terrible terrible thing, because only those who have to leeway to take risks end up taking them and making the the next big thing.

Ciro believes instead that only once kids have learnt university level stuff in their area of interest for free on the Internet should they go through selection based on that specific and much more concentrated useful knowledge.

And this competition must only be used to distribute resources which you can't learn from fucking computers:

Once this point knowledge is reached however, it starts to become unclear if a single "everyone takes the same test to avoid discrimination" test is feasible anymore, and we start entering the much more relevant (and potentially discriminatory) "I am a teacher trying to advance the state of the art, and I need a person mildly skilled in the art to do some slave labor for me", which is PhDs selection work.

If quota are in place, what will happen is that parents of the rich kids will start investing less in education, and possibly just put their kids in high schools, and do home schooling instead. This would therefore reduce the total investments the country makes in education!

Outside of the obvious technical evolution proposed, Ciro is a huge proponent of free gifted education. Or closely related, creating scholarships that focus on poor students. The entry requirements should be the same, but once you qualify, everyone should have enough money to lead a decent life during their studies.

Then let those kids pass exactly the same university entry exams, and watch them crush the average privileged kids.

This advice is similar to what is mentioned at: what poor countries have to do to get richer. When you don't have money to do everything, you must select a few good bets and focus on them. You can't pay a lot to every public school teacher, so you must select a few select places that need it the most. As those smart bets pay off, you start to have more and more money to expand the system further.