This post culminates years of thinking which formed a dramatic shift in my worldview. It is now a big part of my life and business philosophy, and I’ve showed it to friends many times when explaining my thinking. It’s influenced me to attempt my own bike repair, patch my own clothes, and write web-crawlers to avoid paying for expensive API access. (The latter was a bust.)
I think this post highlights using rationality to analyze daily life in a manner much deeper than you can find outside of LessWrong. It’s in the spirit of the 2012 post “Rational Toothpaste: A Case Study,” except targeting a much more significant domain. It counters a productivity meme (outsource everything!) common in this community. It showcases economic concepts such as the value of information.
One thing that’s shifted since I wrote this: When I went full-time on my business, I had thought that I would spend significant time learning how to run a server out of my closet to power my business, just like startups did 20 years ago. But it turned out that I had too many other things to study around that time, and I discovered that serverless can run most websites for dollars a month. Still a fan of self-hosting; Dan Luu has written that the inability to run servers is a sign of a disorganized company.
I think some of the specific examples are slightly inaccurate. There was some discussion in the comments about the real reason for the difference between canned and homemade tomato sauce. An attorney tells me my understanding of products liability is too simplistic. I’m less confident that a cleaner would have a high probability of cleaning an area you want them to ignore if you told them and they understood; the problem is that they usually have little communication with the host, and many don’t speak English. (Also, I wish they’d stop “organizing” my desk and bathroom counter.) I think I shoehorned in that “avocado toast” analogy too hard. Outside of that, I can’t identify any other examples that I have questions about. Both the overall analysis and the scores of individuals examples are in good shape.
Rationalists are known to get their hands dirty with knowledge . I remember when I saw two friends posting on Facebook their opinions of the California ballot: the rationalist tried to reason through their effects and looked at primary sources and concrete predictions, while the non-rationalist just looked at who endorsed what. I’d like to see us become known for getting our hands dirty quite literally as well.
This post culminates years of thinking which formed a dramatic shift in my worldview. It is now a big part of my life and business philosophy, and I’ve showed it to friends many times when explaining my thinking. It’s influenced me to attempt my own bike repair, patch my own clothes, and write web-crawlers to avoid paying for expensive API access. (The latter was a bust.)
I think this post highlights using rationality to analyze daily life in a manner much deeper than you can find outside of LessWrong. It’s in the spirit of the 2012 post “Rational Toothpaste: A Case Study,” except targeting a much more significant domain. It counters a productivity meme (outsource everything!) common in this community. It showcases economic concepts such as the value of information.
One thing that’s shifted since I wrote this: When I went full-time on my business, I had thought that I would spend significant time learning how to run a server out of my closet to power my business, just like startups did 20 years ago. But it turned out that I had too many other things to study around that time, and I discovered that serverless can run most websites for dollars a month. Still a fan of self-hosting; Dan Luu has written that the inability to run servers is a sign of a disorganized company.
I think some of the specific examples are slightly inaccurate. There was some discussion in the comments about the real reason for the difference between canned and homemade tomato sauce. An attorney tells me my understanding of products liability is too simplistic. I’m less confident that a cleaner would have a high probability of cleaning an area you want them to ignore if you told them and they understood; the problem is that they usually have little communication with the host, and many don’t speak English. (Also, I wish they’d stop “organizing” my desk and bathroom counter.) I think I shoehorned in that “avocado toast” analogy too hard. Outside of that, I can’t identify any other examples that I have questions about. Both the overall analysis and the scores of individuals examples are in good shape.
Rationalists are known to get their hands dirty with knowledge . I remember when I saw two friends posting on Facebook their opinions of the California ballot: the rationalist tried to reason through their effects and looked at primary sources and concrete predictions, while the non-rationalist just looked at who endorsed what. I’d like to see us become known for getting our hands dirty quite literally as well.