For personal finance, I have found and recommend reddit’s /r/personalfinance to be a great boon. Their flowchart is essentially “correct”.
aa.oswald
I like the note that titles are a “nominally-infinite resource” because there is a limit to them. Namely, they’re sticky. With Zuckerberg’s org, if he really, really, really needs to inflate a person’s title, he can do it. He has the option to pull an Andreessen if he needs to, but the opposite isn’t true.
Destiny Disrupted was critical history reading for me, and helped break me out of a Eurocentric viewing of the world before college. I’ve tried very, very hard to find a history book from Chinese, Russian, or Indian authors that has the same insider’s point of view but written in accessible, plain English.
Aside from wanting to read similar books about other cultures/civilizations, I am reminded that it seemed a bit steeped in “post-9/11ism”.
I just want to say that any good mechanical engineer designing a new system with some tolerances and known limitations but making use of novel gears, like on a rocket engine, will probably be running those gears through finite element analysis.
That indicates to me that the “lowest-level component in a model” question is not just “what makes a good model” but “what is the lowest-level component I can get away with”.
Another strategy which I have tried is this: get a cat. I’m not kidding. They act as a forcing function for many of the things you describe, Alex. They are a regular social commitment (they must be fed!), and they offer an incentive to go to sleep early (because you will not be allowed to sleep late). They also maintain control through time changes, at least with daylight savings, because the time does not change for them. The sun in the sky and their own cat circadian rhythm moves them.
They externalize the human-animal in the brain into something manageable (and managing).
Jason does have a post where he briefly tackles the low-hanging fruit hypothesis [here]. It isn’t 100% compelling, but the idea is that there are “multiple orchards” and we go through one after another. The conceit doesn’t include the possibility of “barren earth orchards” though.
One of the heuristics you see in the business world that attempt to get at this is the “5 Whys?” It’s very easy to look at some graph- stock value, sales, whatever- and create a just-so answer for why something is the way it is. It’s a lot harder but more useful to go ahead and interrogate the just-so answer again.
Of course, the hardness of doing a “5 Whys?” exercise is also the reason that nobody does it unless they’re getting paid to or they’ve joined an online cult of critical thinking.
One thing to consider is not just the effect that lighting has on you, but what it has on others. For example, when I think of the quality of different friends and family members’ houses, one of the defining components is how and how well they are lit. My aunt with giant windows and balanced, bright lights easily beats out my friend who has two reading lamps and a kitchen light that get turned on during game nights.
One thing I would ask, Richard, is how do you manage your lights? My current set up has me turn on four different pairs of lights across my room (plus a giant window which I leave always open). Turning the lights off at night is easy- I just go down in temperature because otherwise it makes the TV/monitors annoying to look at- but actually turning on four different lights when I wake up is hard to do. I’m tired.
Buying is easy! Managing is hard!
I would encourage Katja to try to flip some of these negatives of advertising on their head. After all, the growth of advertising is directly related to the greatest of human prosperity ever. The two are connected. For me, personally, the farthest I have ever been from public, corporate advertising was when I toured Havana, Cuba.
The UK still has vaccination rates just around 50%, and we can assume that they focused on the elderly first. The control system is first and foremost about preventing hospitals from being swamped and causing politicians to have a bad press day, so with most of the most likely to die off the table, case counts and hospitalization counts will have to be much higher.
Since May, the UK has seen its cases go up ~7x, its hospitalizations go up ~2x, and deaths hover around the same level (maybe they’ve gone 2x? hard to tell). To have US 2020 Summer Surge levels of death, their death rate would have to go up 13x, and their case rate would presumably have to go up 26x.
Given that Delta looks like it is going exponential in the UK, and it is doubling between 1-2 weeks, it would be at that high case count by August. However, that rate would be multiple times higher than the UK’s existing peak.
Is that worrying?
My initial reaction to this comment was that tungsten rods are science fiction and that we don’t have the capabilities or willingness to put the rods in space… but it now occurs to me that Starship makes the possibility of tungsten rods much more believable.
I would say that Sneer Culture is a subset of “scornporn”. Sneer Culture is generally about “X licensing” whereas scornporn is about “Contempt generating content that makes you feel higher on the social hierarchy.”
I wonder if that is because /r/TTC couldn’t figured out how to differentiate cringe from irony and post-irony, or if it just got big enough that /r/all converted it ?
Ferris is probably coming from a place of the LINDY Effect- why read new books, when books that are older definitively are more useful because if they hadn’t been useful they wouldn’t have lasted as long.
New content and timely content is more of a bet than a sure thing.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Ads are, at the very most basic, just broadcasts of information with the intention of changing some behavior. Prosperity requires different actors in the economy to do what is most efficient, but often it isn’t efficient for actors to actually go and track down their own suppliers. Instead, suppliers go and track down their buyers by broadcasting ads.
The Internet has certainly changed that: my search history and browsing history effectively broadcast to suppliers, “I need a new car”, and then the algorithms present me with information concerning that need (ads on instagram for Jeeps). Yet, the vast majority of people live in a pre-Internet situation for their most basic needs, where broadcasting from the supplier is still important.
Without this mechanism of “supplier broadcast”, a lot of buyers would simply not be able to meet their needs because they don’t have the bandwidth to go and fulfill their needs. The problem that Katja really should be getting at is when the supplier broadcast goes wrong- generating need when there isn’t any, or broadcasting so much that it swamps out more important signals, etc.
This reminds me of the new Foundation television series, where the show-makers are required to show us supersmart people- Hari Seldon and his protege can literally predict the grand movements of society- and they do it by waving around CGI dots. I think its Type-2 geniusing.
Good call out. I don’t know how contagious Covid/Delta is with children, but my intuition is that it is less contagious, which means your clarification is good news.
Are there examples of Kaj’s writing that you find particularly salient/useful?
Why new year’s predictions? Why not new day’s predictions, or new week’s predictions?
In general, it is easier to make a list of predictions and gauge uncertainty at one time. It takes a lot of effort, and so is generally done sparingly. The beginning of the calendar year makes a good Schelling point to do that work, especially given that there are lots of other “new year” rituals it folds into.
Couldn’t you do better? Should you carry notebooks with you everywhere all the time, prepared to write predictions? Should you use an interval timer to force you to make a prediction whenever it rings?
There is probably a market outside of Less Wrong (definitely within Less Wrong and the ratcom) for some sort of app or service that reminds people to make predictions, gauge uncertainty, and then update those predictions at time intervals. Think “Anki cards” but for predictions. The biggest hinderance is mental effort and the fact that the rewards are so nebulous (“oh wow, I’ve become good at gauging uncertainty thats [socially] useful for… what exactly?”)
I definitely agree that the idea of unconstrained “invention” is not well supported in society, but the hypothesis makes me go “huh?”
Is the place you use the word “invention” not engineering? For most types of engineering, undergrad students are taught science for two years (it is new knowledge to them), they’re taught how to usefully apply that knowledge for a year and a half, and then they have a final semester or two explaining how that knowledge can be used to achieve some business goals.
In other words, “career that applies scientific knowledge to make up stuff” seems to be engineers.
When I ctrl+f-replace “inventors” with “engineers” in my head, I personally see your career path theory making more sense given that engineers do have a career path, which is mostly to become well-degreed technicians, financiers, or tenture-track-warriors. They ought to becoming inventors, but the existing paths divert them.
A large part of this may be that there is increasing pressure on CEOs to focus on short-term earnings at the expense of long term earnings.