Former tech entrepreneur (co-creator of the music software Sibelius). Among other things I now play the stock market, write software to predict it, and occasionally advise tech startups. I have degrees in philosophy.
bfinn
Third Time: a better way to work
Urgent & important: How (not) to do your to-do list
162 benefits of coronavirus
Coronavirus crash vs history
Rationality of demonstrating & voting
Post-crash market efficiency 1696-2020
Stock market hints for 2021 from past crashes
Congratulations!
On a side issue, as you probably know but other readers may not, Dominic Cummings was central to another case of social reality. For he was subsequently turned into public enemy no. 1 by the British media, when he broke lockdown rules to drive his family across the country to his parents’ home. Most of the public had never heard of Cummings, but he had apparently made enemies in the media (as well as government) by treating them with disdain, and this was their chance for payback.
And so, in a trial by media over several days, it was amazing to see how easily almost everyone in the UK was persuaded that Cummings was the devil incarnate, which continues to this day. (I broke ranks to post a defence of Cummings, or rather a criticism of the public’s ill-founded view of him, on Facebook, which got a lively response.)
Just as amazing was the opposite attitude to the BLM protests in the UK soon after; I don’t think it even occurred to 99% of the public that those were just as illegal as Cummings’ trip. And a politician (Stephen Kinnock) who made a similar cross-country drive to Cummings on the very same day, to visit his famous father, former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, attracted almost no media coverage or criticism. This all showing that the law was quite beside the point—merely providing a pretext for demonizing Cummings.
Anyway, in the face of all this media and public pressure, Boris Johnson spent much political capital refusing to fire Cummings, as he was said to be ‘Boris’s brain’ and by far the smartest person in Downing St. Boris even extraordinarily granted Cummings (a mere adviser) his own press conference in the Downing St garden, in which Cummings presented an implausible account of events exonerating himself, to general derision.*
The whole incident provided a pretext (that phrase again) for many Britons subsequently to break lockdown rules. The public mood changed immediately from a wartime spirit of doggedly following government advice to half-disregarding it—often explicitly saying “If Dominic Cummings can drive to Barnard Castle, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t do XYZ”. Regrettably it’s likely this has significantly increased COVID cases ever since.
(*I reckon it should have been played like this: Cummings should have admitted breaking the rules (perhaps inadvertently), and offered his resignation. But Boris should have reluctantly refused the resignation, on the grounds of not rocking the boat in a national emergency, and maybe accepted a fine as punishment.)
Write a business plan already
One possibly relevant difference between London and Denmark is that fully one-third of Londoners are completely unvaccinated. No jabs at all.
(Something that most of the media here didn’t seem to notice until yesterday.)
An extreme example is high-frequency trading, in which responding to a market change milliseconds ahead of others can be crucial to making money. A decade ago, Spread Networks spent $300 million laying a fibre optic cable in a straight line between Chicago and New Jersey, cutting through mountains, purely to shave 3 milliseconds off the transit time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys
What’s wrong with Pomodoro
How & when to write a business plan
I had sleep problems all my adult life, which I eventually found were due to sleeping too much (or more accurately, thinking I should get 8 hours’ sleep, and thus allowing too much time to sleep in).
I conducted an experiment on myself over several months using 21 different factors claimed by the literature to affect sleep. None of them helped. (Though a few of the factors I was doing anyway, e.g. having a comfortable mattress & pillow, so weren’t worth varying; and several made sleep worse for obvious reasons, e.g. stress & illness, but weren’t things I could actively improve.)
However, I then tried a (very good) online sleep course at www.sleepio.com, which among other things got me to try various adjustments to my sleep hours. This revealed something I hadn’t considered—viz. I’d always assumed I should ideally be getting 8 hours’ sleep. So I was allowing too much time to sleep in, producing shallow sleep, and waking up often in the night. The web site made me gradually shrink my sleep time so I slept shorter but deeper, until I stopped waking up in the night. It also helped by making me establish a regular wake time.
As a result, I went from getting a full night’s sleep just once a year, to almost every night. And also wasted less time in bed, either lying awake or snoozing.
I did a talk about all this, which is here. E.g. it goes through the 21 factors, which people may find useful.
[EDITED] I recommend tea (black, green, oolong or white—i.e. white leaves, not with milk). As well as being rather lower in caffeine than coffee, tea includes L-theanine, which (a) increases the benefits of caffeine (viz. attention, accuracy, energy) and (b) counteracts jitters and headaches from caffeine.
Oolong tea usually has a bit more caffeine than the others, though green & white teas have a somewhat better ratio of L-theanine to caffeine. But caffeine and L-theanine contents are very variable anyway.
https://examine.com/supplements/theanine/research/#nutrient-nutrient-interactions_caffeine
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4787341/
Having created a number of articles and made numerous edits on Wikipedia over the last 15 years, I’ve pretty much given up now. Because these days any edit I make is likely to be reverted by a self-appointed gatekeeper of the article in question, regardless of merit. And even articles I create with citations are marked for deletion because the citations are deemed not good enough. (Eg I recently created articles on the WELLBY and WALY, units of subjective well-being used in happiness economics. Both were swiftly removed by someone who obviously knows nothing about the topic. Citing the UN’s annual report on world happiness, written by the leading academics in the field, was not considered adequate! And unlike other articles mentioned by other commenters, there is nothing remotely controversial about this.)
Once upon a time the assumption was that new articles were probably worthwhile and would be improved in due course by you or other people. Now it seems to be that any new article is assumed wrong and bad unless you jump through a load of hoops to persuade some anonymous ignoramus otherwise.
This is so off-putting to anyone who wishes to improve Wikipedia; you are treated with passive-aggressive contempt. And the reverse of the original idea, viz. to encourage anyone to write & edit articles. The powers that be should really change this.
Very interesting work indeed. A bunch of different observations:
The invention of the shipping container seems a likely candidate for a discontinuity in shipping speed, shipping costs and global trade. Though economic data on it is patchy, the go-to book on the subject is The Box by Marc Levinson.
Re invention of the telegraph, the book A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark accounts (pp. 305-7) via a series of clever inferences how from Roman times to 1800 the speed of long-distance travel of important information, regardless of method, was constant at 1 mph. This increased slightly in the first half of the 19th century, until the discontinuity from the telegraph. The book has lots of other data on historical innovation that may well be useful to you.
Re product features, and this recent LessWrong article (which no doubt you’ve seen) about the crucial difference between a prototype and a practical invention, I repeat my comment there that a high-quality implementation, e.g. usability & user-friendliness, rather than specific features often seems to be the crucial breakthrough. As shown by Apple: various inventions of theirs—the Apple Mac, iPod, smartphone, iPad—had little innovation as such. Desktop computers, GUIs, mice; digital music players; mobile phones, personal digital assistants; touch screens, tablet computers—these all already existed. But in each case Apple’s breakthrough was to take them from being commercial but mediocre implementations, to very good implementations. And only when that happened did mass adoption occur, which is a crucial step in the impact of the invention.
Finally, I should make the obvious remark that though looking at the history of past inventions is very interesting, applying this to the future, particularly to AI, would be an extrapolation, which may or may not be valid at all, particularly if superhuman AGI is a quite different phenomenon from any previous invention (which it may well be).
I think many people would find this method useful, though it lacks a good name. So any improvements on Rational Breaks are welcome (and $100 if I use it!) The key concepts are:
Break—synonyms include rest, relax, stop, pause, chill
Fraction—synonyms include part, divide, scale, balance (kinda)
Flexible, though probably less important.
A good name would capture most of that in a memorable/catchy way—e.g. a pun, rhyme, alliteration or metaphor, and not too abstract/mathematical or long. It could be for the whole method, or for the breaks themselves.
Examples of other not-good-enough names include:
Fraction Breaks—explicit but mathematical
ClockWise, Breakout, TimeOut, BreakTime, Breakthrough, TimeScale etc. - semi-puns but vague & abstract
Breakaholic—negative connotations
Bonus Breaks—metaphor, but not that catchy
Just possibly it could be called Finn Breaks, after the inventor (as things often are!)
PS I just realized, one of the main reasons the general public fell in with demonizing Cummings was the very one you identified that delayed reaction to COVID: he seems weird, and reacting to a faroff disease which everyone else is ignoring would seem weird. And seeming weird is the worst thing in the world.
It’s mainly because it’s a pun on ‘ratio’. But I agree, it’s not a great name (despite much brainstorming) - more of a placeholder. Any better suggestions very welcome—see my more detailed comment just posted.